SPECTRES ARE HAUNTING OUR FRONT YARDS and it is we who put them there and who shall continue to do so, forever, so long as it is the season, and the season is now, and have you noticed? If not, get your eyes off that screen for a minute and take a quick or better yet long lingering look at our efforts, and get ready to be terrorized! Or amused or enchanted or bewildered and confused, or maybe even offended here and there, as our intentions are always to invoke one of these reactions, or several, or even all of them at once if we’ve done our job right. Call it chagrin, if you must, or perhaps something else entirely; it all depends on you, as does everything when you think about it, if you dare to do that.
GAZE! GAZE DEEPLY! LEAVE NO DETAIL UNNOTICED! There is much to see here! If you are out walking your dog tell them they’ll have to wait a minute, or if you’re out just riding around get off your stupid bike or out of your stupid car and show a little respect for our efforts, even if you hate what you see, or perhaps unexpectedly feel a sudden need to flee, in terror or fiendish glee. We promise you will not regret spending a few moments here, but then again you might. Life is risky, always, and it ends at some point and the results ain’t pretty, which is also part of our message. “Alas, poor Yorick!” goes the line uttered by young Prince Hamlet in that play whose title and author shall go unnamed, for the usual reasons. If you are not familiar with the Bard of Avon or his scribblings, let’s just say the prince is talking about a skull and how he knew the fellow to whom it once belonged (and does it still? How does it work with such things, when it comes to eternity?).
HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED HOW SKULLS SEEM TO ALWAYS BE SMILING? like they’re in on some cosmic joke (which they probably are and which you are not). Human skulls and their attached skeletons are the stuff of graveyards and anatomy classrooms, and feature prominently of course in tales of the supernatural and the occult and are generally thought to exude creepiness, but then only if you find death to be something creepy (it is certainly mysterious). We of course have expanded exponentially on all the expressive possibilities and unbounded depths of meaning such a well-engineered calcified structure might contain, though engineering is probably the last thing on our minds, for our goals reach higher towards some unreachable aesthetic and shall never be mired in the mundanity of anything functional. Consider it our mission.
AND WE ARE HONEST ENOUGH AND (SOME OF US) HUMBLE ENOUGH to admit that much of our original inspiration goes back to our skull-and-bones loving neighbors to the south, with their Día de los Muertos and its longstanding tradition of total skeletal exuberance, an overwhelming presence in Latin American culture that celebrates this very same season, for very similar reasons.
REAMS OF ACADEMIC BALDERDASH HAVE BEEN WRITTEN about how the Day of the Dead and our own Halloween tradition are just so much cultural blowback to the niceties of the co-inciding Christian All Saint’s Day, but the astounding fact is that our celebration came first, not in specifics but absolutely in its secular pagan origins, a celebration which the power mad church could simply not allow the rabble and the masses – which is US, or maybe WE – to prevail, no sirree not for one minute. The holy institutionalized Christians pulled off their little coup back in 609, and we’ve been fighting to get our holiday back ever since, one Day of the Dead and Halloween at a time, and don’t think it’s ever been easy. But from the look of things, with so many downright spooky front yards one sees nowadays, we are by God (and note we do not specify which god, or gods) finally pulling it off, once and for all.
IF YOU DOUBT ALL THIS BECAUSE YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF A “PAGAN HOLIDAY” just look up Samhain, which by the way is pronounced “Saw-win” and don’t ask us why, ask the Gaels and the Celts. Of course those gentle farm people saw it as kind of a harvest festival, when the cows and sheep and whatever were brought down from their summer pastures and people lit fires and danced and ate while there was still an abundance of food, while asking themselves how long would it last? For they also figured it was in some ways the beginning of winter, and if there ever was a season of death (especially in those days) it was then, and they also figured that on this “new year’s eve” the souls of the dead returned to earth, which is how the ball got rolling, and it has not stopped since. By the way the Gaelic word for ghost is púca and if that sounds like something from that Jimmy Stewart movie about Elwood P. Dowd and his friend who was a giant invisible rabbit, so be it. If you’ve never seen “Harvey”, boy do we feel sorry for you! And please do something about that.
SAMHAIN IS ALSO HOW WE GOT ALL THESE GHOSTS which can now give the skeletons out there on the lawn some company, for being a skeleton can be downright lonely sometimes, as you might have guessed. And if skeletons are spooky, ghosts are certainly spookier (though maybe not the CIA kind but who knows?) and right now we need to say a few words about that other obscene and obscenely famous ghost, the one we all know as Casper. A greater travesty of all that is ghostly there never was! C’mon now, a friendly ghost? If not an oxymoron then certainly a contradiction in terms and a whole lot of destructive nonsense. For one thing, the story of Casper is rooted in pathos and capitalist exploitation, for did you know that one of Casper’s originators, Joe Oriolo, was hornswoggled into selling the rights to his cute children’s book idea to Paramount Pictures back in 1945 for the grand sum of $175? While his partner in Casper’s creation, Seymour Reit, was overseas somewhere serving his country? If you loved Casper as a kid we forgive you, for you knew not what Casper was all about, but we’ve long since moved on and if you ever see anything that resembles Casper in somebody’s front yard, you owe it to the rest of us to walk into that yard and tear the thing down or deflate it or whatever it takes, and thank you for your service. We also eschew all things topical like current politics, which has infinite venues at its disposal already so why pollute ours? We might draw an exception sometimes, like if it involves important athletes like Tom Brady the GOAT (Greatest Athlete of All Time, in case you didn’t know if you’re not from around here) and his cruel betrayal of us, his loyal fans, but come to think of it that act does have a kind of spooky quality, wouldn’t you say?
BUT OF COURSE OUR WORK IS ABOUT SO MUCH MUCH MORE THAN GHOSTS OR SKELETONS. It is also about witches and zombies and spiders and every conceivable aspect of Halloween as popular culture, and perhaps the greatest collection of visual memes the world has ever seen, though we’re still figuring out what a visual meme is, exactly. The dimensions of spooky are vast and incalculable, if not limitless, though the latter might be highly unlikely, come to think of it. For all its greatness, Halloween/Samhain/Día de los Muertos/ All Saints Day is just a night and a day. What we are really about is the transformation of front yards from places of the mundane into visions of the sacred or maybe sacrilegious, or some combination that in the end is best described as spooky, for spooky is truly the message we strive to deliver, and what could be more laudable and noble than that? Or so we tell ourselves, while having a great deal of fun in the meantime, and isn’t it obvious? Yard displays at any other time of the year pale in comparison, such is our fervent belief and hopefully yours as well.
AND YET TODAY DARK FORCES OF TRUE EVIL ARE AFOOT IN OUR LAND, nothing like the meaningful and sometimes fun and in its essence spooky evil we strive to express in our efforts, but something much more ominous and oppressive and no fun, at all, when it comes down to it. We speak of the truly dark dark spirits of censorship, of the mindless intrusion of the humorless and unimaginative, of the need for some to mess with and ultimately shut down all expression that might make them the least bit uncomfortable or unsettled or which questions their own constricted pathetic take on things. These spirits might start with mild objections and whiny complaints, but look out! They’re always ready to move on to information outlets, then books and movies, but they never stop there and if they ultimately get their way they and their goons will someday walk into our front yards and take down our skeletons and our spiders and ghouls and our Freddies and Jasons and Chuckies, just you wait and see. So we must remain vigilant, we must stay strong, and must never forget our mission.
SPOOKS, SPOOKSTERS AND SPOOKETTES OF THE WORLD, UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT THE CHAINS OF THOSE TRUE CREEPS THAT MIGHT OPPRESS YOU!
(with apologies to Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and Groucho too, because you never know)
