I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PHISH-“Timber” (MGM Grand Garden Arena, Friday 10, 31, 2014).

In honor of Halloween, these Ghost Box stories will be attached to a recent Phish Halloween show [with quoted material from various reviews]. 

Known for dawning musical costumes to celebrate [Halloween], Phish broke with tradition last year to offer a set of original music.  The Phish Bill read that Phish’s musical costume would be a 1964 Disney album of sound effects – Chilling, Thrilling Sounds Of The Haunted House.  But it wasn’t a cover set. Phish played original music set amongst an incredibly psychedelic, theatrical graveyard stage accentuated by zombie dancers and a ghoulish MC.  At the start of the set, the stage was cleared before a graveyard came to the foreground.  Smoke filled the air, zombie dancers appeared, and music filled the venue. A haunted house was brought to the front of the stage, which eventually exploded, and all four-band members appeared, dressed in white like zombies. 

This song is not to be confused with “Timber Ho!” the wonderful cover of the Josh White and Sam Gary song.  That one is also known as “Timber (Jerry)” and “Timber (Jerry the Mule).”   This new song is a chilling thrilling track in which “you are an expert woodsman.”  You climb up the branches of a tree and you begin to saw

“Timber” was another guitar-heavy rocker.  It uses the back-and-forth of the saw to set the beat before stating a five note guitar/bass riff with echoes attached on the piano.   The shriek of the plummeting woodsman is added from time to time for dramatic effect.  There’s some good soloing from everybody here, especially when Page and Trey trade off on leads.

[READ: October 16, 2017] “The Pear-Shaped Man”

Just in time for Halloween, from the people who brought me The Short Story Advent Calendar comes The Ghost Box.

This is a nifty little box (with a magnetic opening) that contains 11 stories for Halloween.  It is lovingly described thusly:

A collection of chilly, spooky, hair-raising-y stories to get you in that Hallowe’en spirit, edited and introduced by comedian and horror aficionado Patton Oswalt.

There is no explicit “order” to these books; however, on the inside cover, one “window” of the 11 boxes is “folded.”  I am taking that as a suggested order.

I have not read anything by George R.R. Martin (surprisingly).  So I don’t know how this fits into his general oeuvre.

I actually thought it might be a recent story (I don’t know why I though that).  But there were two things that made it feel dated.  It had a casual sexism that made me bristle.  Nothing too over the top, but just a mild amount that I was surprised by (and which I don’t think I see too much recently) and the guy plays the “new Linda Ronstadt album” (that dated it even more to me).

So this story is long (unsurprisingly). The plot is actually quite simple and easy to encapsulate in a shorter story  But Martin does wonders with ambiance and tension.

He says that we all know a Pear-Shaped Man.  A man who looks like a pear in his body and (in this case, even his head–jowls that seem to make the bottom of his head bigger than the top).  There’s a faint odor from him and it looks like he hasn’t bathed in a long time.

This particular pear-shaped man happens to live in the basement apartment of the building that Jessie and her roommate Angela (and her roommate’s boyfriend Don who isn’t a roommate but might as well be) have just rented.

Jessie first saw the pear-shaped man at the market where he was buying only Coke and Cheez Doodles.  After a brief conversation, the market owner revealed that Coke an Cheez Doodles are all that the guy ever buys and this is the only marker even remotely close to here.  Weird.  She asked the guy’s named and he said that he has always just been known as the Pear-Shaped Man.

On the way out, the Pear-Shaped man offered Jessie a Cheez Doodle, but she politely refused.

Soon enough the Pear-Shaped Man started hanging around in front of their stoop.  And soon enough he starts seeping into Jessie’s everyday life.

She is an artist and she finds that she is subconsciously giving her subjects characteristics of the man (which is undeniably grotesque).  This is especially bad as she is a commercial artist (the scene where she submits her work is darkly unsettlingly comic .

And then she starts finding Cheez Doodles all over the place–places where the guy can’t have been

Don is studying psych and he tells her that she is doing all of this to herself.  He suggests confronting the man.  What could happen?  He is old and harmless, right?

This story could go in many different directions when she goes down there.  And I suppose each one would have been somewhat disappointing.

I didn’t love the one he chose, as it seemed obvious.  But as I thought about it more, any other direction might have seemed obvious as well.

I did rather like how neatly the resolution happened though and once I got past thinking it was obvious, the way things wrapped up was pretty neat.