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World Voices, from Ghosts to Superheroes
| Friday, April 29, 2011 8:03AM | | | | Summoning Ghosts at the Standard | Posted By: Philip Turner
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| Tags: Standard, paranormal, haunted houses | A haunting atmosphere greeted visitors to the Standard Hotel's 3rd floor event space at 10:30 PM Wednesday night. A belching steam machine set the mood and complimentary vodka cocktails eased our path through the door. A scratchy, zithery soundtrack played for the audience of about 30 expectant listeners while a gauzy black & white image of an old woman on the porch of a frame house was projected on a screen up front. We quietly awaited the first artist's arrival on stage. That would prove to be a film, as the evening's writers waited in the wings.
In crisp black & white animation, a drawn man trudges across a snowy landscape, huffing & puffing in the cold. Spying a house, he bangs on the locked door before barging his way in with a gruff shoulder punch. Slamming the door behind him he calls out to a space void of other people. Kneeling before a cold hearth he begins stacking logs to build a fire, only to get stuck by a nasty splinter. Ingenious animating shows him removing the sliver from the stretchy skin on his palm as he, and we viewers, emit a gasp of pain. Soon, he finds an old photo album, filled with some missing family's portraits. These figures in turn come alive and soon the solitary visitor is being hounded and haunted by them. A series of bad choices leads him to a locked-in closet. Flailing in desperation, through a floorboard he sees children playing in the snow, and calls out to them for rescue. They run away in fear and the featurette ends with a rueful air as the man resigns himself to his fate.
At that, host Sunny Bates invited filmmaker Richard McGuire on stage for a much-deserved bow.
Next, anthropologist of haunted houses Corinne May Botz took us through a photo slide show with audio testimony of hauntings from Kentucky to Maine. Her devotion to the faithful rendering of her subjects' stories left the impression of wholly normal paranormal realm.
The third artist was Norway's Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold who read from a creative text about trolls, explaining that while her co-nationals don't put much credence in ghosts, the existence and persistence of trolls is hardly even questioned.
The last scheduled reader was Craig Taylor, who read and recounted a sad tale of a house he occupied in London soon after breaking up with a romantic partner. The house had a room with a sagging couch and a bloody corner redolent of long-ago violence that compelled him to try and learn the mystery behind the troubling aura.
When Craig finished, Sunny Bates introduced a surprise guest, the proprietor of the Standard Hotel, who began by describing himself as quite a "pragmatic man." With that proviso he then told us of a strange erotic half-waking vision he observed while staying at LA's legendary hotel, Chateau-Marmont.
This was an exciting night of film, fantasy, and performance inspiring me to ponder how the bizarre, the paranormal, and the unexplained are threaded through our everyday worlds. | | |
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1 Comment | Add a Comment |
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| 4-29-11 9:19AM: Michael Bell said...
Nice, Philip. I would have liked to be there. Never thought about "anthropologist of haunted houses" as an academic specialty, but it makes a lot of sense. That's the folklorist's approach anyway: don't judge, just record their experiences and take it from there.
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