Just before I sat down to write my annual Halloween post, I stupidly slipped on some indoor insecticide I sprayed to treat a small infestation of drugstore beetles. I fell hard and my left ankle is severely swollen.
Hopefully I’ll have my usual post up today. Yours portly can’t catch a break lately.
Happy Halloween!
—TPP
It’s almost Halloween! Yours portly couldn’t be more excited for this fun holiday.
Unfortunately, yours portly has been extremely busy lately, and I simply haven’t had the time to write proper posts over the weekend. I was planning on reviewing the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock classic The Birds today (I saw it on the big screen the weekend before this past one), but I’m holding off on that for another week.
Instead, here are some films I’d recommend to get you into the Halloween mood:
No post today, dear readers. I’m taking the day off to recuperate from the 2023 Spooktacular and to spend time with family.
God Bless!
—TPP
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Yours portly is knee-deep in preparations for the annual Spooktacular, which kicks off tonight at 6 PM. The Spooktacular has become a hotly anticipated event, and while I’ve failed at a number of enterprises lately, the Spooktacular is a marquee event that my students and their families enjoy.
As a longtime dilettante and fulltime slob, I’m not the best housekeeper. My energies are expended on other endeavors, like this blog, my teaching, and my private lessons. The last thing I want to do after a long day of mind-molding is clean the toilet or vacuum the carpet.
My parents’ and grandparents’ generations were neat freaks. They’d scrub the baseboards with toothbrushes and risk their lives to second-story windows. I scrub so poorly, my dentist regularly warns me about gingivitis.
But even I succumb to the overwhelming sense of shame that comes from having company over in an unkempt house, and as I want these people to keep giving me money to touch their kids—and as I hope to avoid my father’s dismayed disapproval at my dirty baseboards—the Spooktacular forces me to deep clean.
I’ve been doing a lot of it lately.
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My school’s chaplain—a truly amazing man of God—is struggling in the hospital as I write these words. Please lift Father Jason Hamshaw up in your prayers, dear readers. I do not know the nature of his affliction, but the last I heard, he was in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), which never bodes well. He is a relatively young man, and a loving husband and father. One of his sons is a student here at my school. Pray, and pray hard.
Because he is in the hospital, I was asked to deliver the chapel lesson/devotional/homily the morning of Thursday, 26 October 2023. Here is the devotional I wrote, with a huge debt of gratitude to The Daily Encouraging Word, which I substantially adapted and modified for this lesson:
‘Tis the season for monsters and ghoulies! Having just returned from the South Carolina Bigfoot Festival—and with the annual Spooktacular just two days away!—yours portly is in a monstrous mood. Indeed, I wrote an entire album about them, which is available on streaming platforms for you cheapskates.
What is it that makes monsters so fascinating? In old monster movies, the monster was always the last thing the audience saw, because saving the featured creature for last guaranteed you stay hooked (and because most of those old films had shoestring budgets and bad makeup/costumes/props, so they had one or two good shots with the monster before the whole contraption broke down). Even now, when movies tell us everything that happens—even if we just saw it happen—we still want to see the monster—the more the better.
All I can figure is that we want to see how wild our own imaginations can be—and how well we can scare ourselves with monsters that are both alien and familiar.
With that, here is 27 October 2022’s “TBT^2: Monsters“:
Senior correspondent and cryptid expert Audre Myers sends me a lot of Bigfoot footage, almost all of which I can find some hole to poke my skeptic’s waggling finger through with good-natured vigor. I suspect that as eagle-eyed as she is, Audre sees with the eyes of a true believer, and sometimes sees what she wants to see. Thus it is for all of us, for different things.
But this time, I think she might be onto something. I think she vastly underestimates how good (and cheap) practical effects work is these days, and how a truly committed hoaxster could put together a pretty convincing Bigfoot outfit if he wanted to do so.
But, again, something about this video really is compelling. Naturally, it has all the shortcomings of the typical Bigfoot footage—blurry, for example—but it makes sense in this context.
I’ll let you decide for yourself. With that, here’s Audre, encouraging you to “Open Your Eyes”:
I’m diving back into Péchés d’âge moyen with the track “Andante in D major“; it’s a sweet little lo-fi tune that I enjoy, with some vaguely Impressionistic shades.
What would happen if a multiethnic, multiracial apartment tower in the Parisian projects found itself blocked off from the outside world, surrounded by a total blackness that consumes anything that attempts to pass through it? That’s the premise to the 2022 French film Lockdown Tower, and the answer to that question isn’t pretty.
Fortunately, it makes for a riveting film, and while the world it paints is pretty bleak, it’s also unsettlingly realistic.
The Portly Politico 