Sunday Salon: Halloween Edition

These look spooky enough for Halloween.  This past Tuesday my 6th graders spent the afternoon covering each other's faces in plaster cloth.  We are making Egyptian face masks as part of our unit on ancient Egypt.  Tomorrow we begin making show box tombs for the stuffed toys we'll be mummifying on Wednesday.  None of this has any real educational value, I know, but it's too much fun to give up.  No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, be damned.

In spite of being very busy, I managed to read  two books this week.  I finished Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gas Mask by Jim Monroe.  I found it on a display of off-beat novels at my local library and was attracted to both the title and the cover.  I'm shallow that way.  It's about twenty-somethings, living in Toronto who don't quite know what to do with their lives yet.  The hero, who has the ability to turn himself into a fly, meets a girl who has the ability to make things vanish.  To where, she does not know.  The two decide to become superheros.  The novel is very like the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels, which I like more, but I did enjoy Flyboy.  It was kind of fun hanging out with college kids.  Took me back.

Yesterday, I read Michael Cunningham's new novel, By Nightfall, in one long sitting.  Mr. Cunningham writes very realistically about a certain strata of New York denizen.  I fear he's become a bit stuck in that particular ghetto, but he does it so well.  By Nightfall is about a New York art gallery owner who is at the point in his career when he either must make it to the next level and become one of the movers and shakers or be forever regulated to the successful but also ran.  So much of the novel is about his work that I began to see the book as a story of work, something we seldom get in fiction outside of detective fiction.  But the book takes, not a twist, a slow turn into unexpected passion.  It ends with a reveal almost worthy of Henry James-- a couple of lines that make the reader see the entire book in a new way.   Mr. Cunningham follows this twist with a second final twist that undercuts everything. 

I have been listening to The Chatterbox Audio Theatre company's production of  Pinocchio, and it is really creeping me out.  They have gone back to the original source material and re-interpreted it for an adult audience creating a genuinely disturbing story, something much closer to Frankenstein than to Disney.  It really is a Frankenstein story--a man tries to usurp God by creating life without divine intervention.  In the opening chapters Geppetto stabs the Blue Fairy when she arrives to take the newly carved Pinocchio away from him.  It gets scarier from there.  Modern radio theatre has taken the production of sound plays to new heights.  There's one point in Pinocchio when the background audio is a thumping noise that made my entire car vibrate.  Normally, I'd turn the speakers down, but it was really kind of fun in a skin-crawling movie matinee kind of way. 

If you want something really scary.....Radio Drama Revival has a production of  "The Cask of Amatillado" that will knock your socks off.  It's done by a group that uses binaural recordings.  These are microphones that fit inside the human ear so they record exactly what the ear hears producing a 3-D listening experience.  Their shows are meant to be heard via headphones.  "The Cask of Amatillado" was recorded on location to further heighten the realism.  When you hear the last brick put in place, you really hear the last brick put in place.  It's effective and lots of fun. Perfect Halloween listening.

Full Disclosure:  I took the photo of the face masks and the Pinocchio artworks comes from the Chatterbox Theatre's website. 

Boo!