Let’s Talk About Voodoo…

A sentence you don’t often hear, unless you’re a Voodoo priestess, I suppose.

Or from New Orleans…

Entrance to the Voodoo Garden by the House of Blues. 📸 by me

So, as you may have seen in my last blog post, I spent seven fascinating days traipsing around the delectable, raunchy New Orleans.

When I visited, I hadn’t planned on learning a shit-ton about Voodoo. It just kinda happened, and I’m glad it did.

One of many tourist shops. Bourbon st. (📸 by me)

New Orleans, for those not yet acquainted with its charm, is famous for a lot of things (crawdaddy Ètouffèe, anyone?) and the city is arguably nothing without it’s strong relationship with Voodoo and Hoodoo culture. Now, what do Voodoo and Joan Jett have in common? They both have a bad reputation! *ba-dmm-dmm-tsk* (I’m not even sorry for that horrendous joke.)

But seriously though, voodoo isn’t all hexes, chicken sacrifices and sticking pins into a doll wrapped in the hair of your foe. I mean, it is that for a small minority who are a bit bonkers, but it’s also something much bigger and better. Let me be clear: Most of what you see in mainstream media is not an accurate representation of Voodoo. At best, it is misconstrued myths and clichès balled up into one big lump of skulduggery.

Also, another thing: Voodoo and Hoodoo – not the same thing.

(📸 by me)

The Origin of Louisiana Voodoo

Like most religions, Voodoo is both simple and complex at the same time. There is also more than one type. For example, Haitian Voodoo and Louisiana Voodoo, which aren’t the same.
No one really knows how old Voodoo is. Historians suggest it developed somewhere between the 16th century and the 19th century (vague flex, but okay.) What they do know about it is that it stemmed from either Central or West-Africa and made it’s way to America during the Colonial era.

But what is it? Well, simply put it’s a marriage between ancient African herb-based traditions and good ole-fashioned Catholicism. Anyone familiar with Louisiana will know it is a heavily Catholic state. Rosary beads and Hail Marys flung about all over the shop. It makes sense, considering New Orleans is a mass fusion of cultures that largely adhere to the Catholic faith.

Inside the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum. (📸 by me)

Louisiana Voodoo dates back to 1719. Louisiana state, at the time, was largely occupied by the Louisiana French and the Louisiana Creole (both still very much a part of what makes New Orleans culture what it is, and heavily influences of food the city is famous for) but the unpleasant truth of it is that Voodoo came to New Orleans by way of the slave trade. There’s no glamour and mystery behind that element. It is a bi-product of an ugly mark on history. The captives, who were big on worshipping deities and ancestors, were forced to forsake their own personal beliefs and take on Catholicism as their one and only faith. Understandably, their general reaction was a quiet ‘Sod That‘, but it was done so in a way that wouldn’t cause them or their families any trouble, and thus an immersion began of the two religions. It’s said that each had notable similarities, which is what allowed Voodoo, as we know it, to form and largely go undetected until the abolition of slavery.

Key Elements

While one of Voodoo’s many misconceptions is the invocation of black magic. Louisiana Voodoo is primarily the connection we have with nature. It requires the use of herbs, potions, charms and amulets (particularly protection amulets, which are better known as gris–gris.) Louisiana Voodoo paraphernalia include bones, roots, herbs, Holy water, crucifixes, incense, and even Holy bread, and a lot of rituals or ‘spells’ invoke protection from Jehovah, the saints, Mary, and Christ, himself. Another thing most folks don’t know about Voodoo is it involves a LOT of dancing. I’m talking conga lines for days.

Voodoo dolls

One of many dolls I encountered…

We’ve all heard of them. A few of us even have them (not mentioning any names… ahem.)

They are sometimes odd and rather creepy-looking, but here’s the thing about Voodoo dolls: they are not designed to cause harm. Quite the opposite. Unlike what popular culture will have you believe, the doll isn’t supposed to be an effigy of your ex/school bully/dickhead neighbour in which you stick pins into to inflict torture, or even kill. Nope. Not how it works. Or it can work like that, if they fall into the hands of those hell-bent on misuse or abuse. They are designed to represent someone wounded or ailed, diseased or dying, and are personalised by something like a strand of hair or a piece of their clothing/jewellery. The pins (usually saturated in healing herbs or balms) are then inserted into the offending area, or the entire body of the effigy, if said person is riddled with disease. As I’m sure you can imagine, you can get them all over New Orleans, in all different shapes, sizes or colours – but they ain’t cheap.

Or you could always make one yourself…

Sisters are Doing it for Themselves

The cool thing about the Voodoo movement is, even during it’s infancy in Louisiana back many, many moons ago, female practitioners (AKA priestesses) were very well regarded, and were powerful within their community. And these weren’t white women. They were women of African and Creole descent, and their presence was respected within both black and white communities alike, even during a time of great civil unrest. Go girls!

Marie Laveau

It’s not humanly possible to talk about Louisiana Voodoo without mentioning the legendary Marie Laveau. It’s just not possible. It’s also not possible to spend time in New Orleans without seeing and hearing her name pretty much everywhere you go. She is a huge part of the culture there. She wasn’t just a Voodoo priestess, she was known as The Voodoo Queen.

Born in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1801, of African, Native American and French descent, she was known as a community activist, as well as an established herbalist and healer. She was also a midwife, businesswoman, and something of a socialite. She owned a hair salon that catered to well-to-do white Southern ladies, and she used the gossip she heard to establish herself high in the ranks of respect within prominent white circles by various means necessary. A lot of folks came to her for advice on business or political ventures, or simply for medicinal or midwifery reasons – and she is said to have seen everyone, regardless of their wealth, status or origin. She is also rumoured to have had up to fifteen children in her lifetime, so she was a busy gal.

While many figures in history are shrouded with mystery and oftentimes, controversy, what makes Marie Laveau cool was that she was a pioneer during a time in history when women, and particularly women of colour, were largely expected to just stay at home and be quiet. Zero fucks were given on her part. A true bad-ass queen.

Marie’s tomb at the St. Louis no.1 Cemetery. (📸 by me)

She is buried in the St. Louis No.1 Cemetery, though there’s been a long-standing rumour that she is entombed in the famous Lafayette No.2 Cemetery, which is free to the public to venture into. Not true, and here is why: her grave is heavily protected by the archdiocese, in order to prevent ritual-based desecrations and graffiti shrines from her innumerable fans. If you want to pay your respects – which I did – you have to pay to go on a guided tour, which is where most of the information in this blog came from. You can also learn a boat-load about Marie/Voodoo in general at the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum, located on Dumaine Street, in the heart of the Quarter.

Annoyed a herd of tourists to snap this. Worth it. (📸 by me)

To Conclude

Anyone who thinks New Orleans voodoo is just for the tourists nowadays, guess again. Local voodoo practitioners are alive and well, and using their religion to ward off bad weather, violent crime, drug trafficking – you name it, they’re on it.

All words and 📸 are by me and are subject to copyright.

#neworleans #nola #nolalife #louisiana #thecityofthedead #lafayette #beignets #voodoo #hoodoo #marielaveau #houseofvoodoo #museumofvoodoo #frenchquarter #blog #blogging #blogger #writer #writing #writingcommunity #copywriter #copywriting #cityofnola #englishwriter #author #writerslife

I’ll Take a Beignet Any Day…

---

At approximately this moment last year, I was seated on a plane alone, sprawled out across three seats, (when does THAT happen?!) drinking hideous white wine out of a plastic cup and wondering to myself a little too late in the game if maybe I should have held off this trip for a year – give myself a bit of time to become more financially stable. Well, given how 2020 has panned out so far, I’m kinda glad I didn’t.

This was my first time travelling internationally on my onesie. My destination? The one and only New Orleans.
I can’t say exactly how or when my obsession with New Orleans came about, but I know it had been lurking in the back of my mind for a good few moons, and I knew it was a place I absolutely had to see before I die. And so one day in early February of last year, I finally said “Sod it. Let’s do this.” And I did it.

I’ve always been intrigued by the culture of the city. Everything appealed me from the voodoo vein that threads through the fabric of the city, to the infamous cemeteries, the jazz music, the Cajun and Creole food, the beautiful colourful houses with French shutters and balconies strewn in Mardi Gras beads, and the reputation of it being home to real-life vampires (the Brad Pitt/Ann Rice kind, not the twinkly Twilight kind) – a reputation the city has never quite been able to shake off. I had an inkling the city was one of a kind.
I wasn’t wrong.

I want to say this and get it out of the way: New Orleans smells! There is a stench of some kind that, well… it ain’t pleasant. As a country girl, born and bread, and fully accustomed to cow shit aromas, I’m certainly no stranger when it comes to a dodgy waft. But this was a piece of information I’d heard from numerous sources beforehand. Yep, cities often stink, and NOLA is no exception there.

Other than that though, New Orleans is fan-frockin’-tastic.

I kicked off my trip by pissing off a line of very tired travellers at Customs and Immigration at the Louis Armstrong International Airport at 2am, when the Customs officer – a lovely but terrifying fellow – fell in love with my accent. He asked me what I do for a living and when he found out I’m a chef (as well as a writer) I had me a friend for life. He then proceeded to ask me about every single dish I’d ever cooked, what I had planned on eating during my stay in New Orleans, where I had planned on eating it, and did I like spicy food? He rounded this all off with a very lengthy tale about his days as a chef in the army. There was a group of four exhausted Irish girls behind me, who moments before had loudly observed that I looked like Enya, and whose eyes I can still feel boring into the back of my skull to this day.

The next morning I woke up to an alert on my phone warning me of a tornado, which ordinarily would have sent me down a rabbit hole of ‘WTF do I do now?’ but because I was so jetlagged I just fell back to sleep. I later heard it had blown over a town called Kenner across the Mississippi and had dissolved somewhere in the river, and luckily hadn’t caused any serious damage.

First thing on my agenda was a traditional Louisiana breakfast, which anyone familiar will know means BEIGNETS. A French sweet pastry similar to doughnuts, but about 900 times more delicious.

Light and airy, and dusted generously with icing sugar, I bought three and devoured them in less than ten seconds, washing them down with an iced Cafè au Lait. I’d chosen to sit outside Cafè Beignet in their little courtyard, and as I shovelled beignets into my chops with all the elegance of a famished gorilla, I looked down and saw two pairs of eyes looking up at me. I’d made my second friend.

Another thing that is not only popular but encouraged in the wonderful world of New Orleans breakfasts is MIMOSAS. And well, who I am to rudely shun a tradition? I also tried the Southern staple better known as Grits, but I can’t say I was overly taken with them.

I’ll take a beignet any day… (and yes, that would make a great catchphrase!)

(above) Crab cakes benedict and a mimosa. HEAVEN.

On my first day I got lost looking for the French Quarter. In all my jetlagged touristy ignorance I had managed to wander past the (perfectly well-signposted) entrance to Bourbon Street three times before the penny dropped, and had by then pottered into Cafè Beignet completely oblivious to the fact that I was already in the French Quarter. But we’ll blow right over that…

I got lucky. My hotel was literally a stone’s throw away from the Quarter. I could step out on to Canal Street, nearly get mowed down by a streetcar, and I was there. And without paying infinitely more for the luxury of a hotel that was directly in the Quarter.

I did almost everything I had planned. I visited two of the infamous cemeteries, Lafayette No. 2 and St. Louis No. 1 (where the notorious voodoo queen Marie Laveau is buried.)

I tried shrimp Gumbo:

Visited the stunning Garden District, which is like something out of a movie.

I tried local beer, drank my first $11 Hurricane (worth every cent), got shouted at by a very angry girl (wasn’t on the agenda but certainly made for a memorable moment), I walked along the Mississippi River and saw the palm trees and the bridge.

I visited Audubon Park and saw traditional Southern hanging moss, magnolias and little snapping turtles in the lake (didn’t see any gators though, although they’re known to frequent that stretch of water.)

I listened to live jazz music in Jackson Square, visited the voodoo shops and the Vampyr Boutique, collected Mardi Gras beads, had a tarot reading on the corner of Bourbon, accidentally got caught up in a jazz parade, ate several Po’Boys (I recommend Mahoney’s for these, as well as their spicy Bloody Marys and fantastic service).

I rode a streetcar, sat in the Jazz Legends Cafè sipping a margarita and watching little lime-green lizards bomb up and down the wall. I then visited the House of Blues (which also involved a margarita).

I went on a tour where I learned that the city had been besieged by Yellow Fever in the 19th century, which wiped out so many people the council had to bury people more or less wherever there was space, which is how New Orleans earned itself the nickname The City of the Dead. Almost anywhere you walk you are stepping over graves. Fun fact: one of Yellow Fever’s effects is the incorrect assessment that afflicted is good and dead several days before they actually are. They look like they’re well on their way with decomposition, and show no signs of a pulse or heartbeat, so naturally the poor fool’s family would begin mourning and preparations for burial just for the supposed corpse to randomly spring to life and scare the crap out of everyone. Some say this is the origin of the zombie ideology.

I also learnt a shit-ton about Voodoo, but that would require another blog in itself.

Because I had gone in June, AKA Pride Month (New Orleans being famous for both its diversity and LBGTQ+ culture) the city was in full swing. The week I was there, not one but two New Orleans legends (Leah Chase the restaurant owner and pioneer, and Dr John the blues singer) had died within days of each other, so the city was in mourning. But even so, the party spirit was alive and kicking, and in the midst of it all I stepped out of Remoulade restaurant and almost walked smack into a naked bike ride. It looked like half of Louisiana had dropped trou and hopped on their bicycle. A lot of wangers, bangers, plums, foofs and derrières went whizzing past me that day. It was a lot to take in in such a short space of time! NOLA folk ain’t shy, that’s for sure.

I could actually ramble on and on about everything I saw/did/ate/drank but I think it wouldn’t do it justice, so my advice would be wait ‘til the dust of the ‘rona has settled and get your butt out there to see it for yourself. If you’re lucky you may even get the naked bike-ride! It really was a… er… feast for the eyes!

#neworleans #louisiana #blog #travel #writer

(all words and 📸 by me and subject to copyright)

SESSIONS: ‘Species’

San Francisco, December 1966.

“You mentioned in one of our sessions a while back that we, as a species, kill each other for purposes of pecking order, quote unquote. Do you want to go into more detail about that?” he asked.

Her breath caught in her throat for half a second, but in that half-second she felt trapped. Trapped, momentarily, between the sensation of swimming in the depths of a bad dream she can’t wake up from, desperately wanting to reach the surface of consciousness, and the physical feeling of being under a strong current of water.

Trapped.

But with the possibility of release.

She could easily pinpoint one or more incidents she had been made aware of, either through current affairs, historical research or simply ones a little bit too close to home. But it was more than that. More than the physical acts of violence; something neurological or subconscious. An almost feral instinct we all have but don’t talk about and haven’t paid enough attention to yet to find a name for it. The enjoyment of contempt, perhaps.

“People like to weed out the weaklings.” she said after a long time.

He blinked. “Can you elaborate?”

She gathered her words. “It’s starts with our primitive fear of anything different.” she said, slowly. “For some reason the human race often regards difference as a form of weakness. On the contrary, it takes a level of strength and resilience to be different in this world.”

“I agree.” he said.

“Everyone would agree. But they don’t necessarily act upon it. We are more animalistic than we think. If it’s different, we want it out. Look at history. Look at what’s going on now in Mississippi. Look at the way kids treat other kids in the schoolyard if their parents are poor and their rucksack has holes in it.”

He went to respond but she interrupted. “I think I am being slowly shunted out of my job.”

“Are you moving into a different topic?” he asked.

“No.”

SESSIONS: ‘Off-Limits’

December, 1966.

“No content is off-limits”, his robotic reassurance to proceed with this topic. Still, his initial assumption as to her motives had unsettled her and created fissures in her trust of him. Fissures that could easily heal depending on his conduct, or would grow in to great cracks and cavities that would eventually dismantle altogether and render the process useless.

In her mind, she was (not for the first time) debating his initial assumption and had to (again) remind herself that this was probably a standard reaction based on popular evidence, and nothing to do with outdated opinions she desperately hoped this chaotic decade would finally see the back of. She wanted to ask him this but hesitated. She put this hesitation down to their awkward introduction a month or so ago when she had casually asked him how he was doing, whilst settling herself on his sofa to begin the session, and he had responded with “we’re not here to talk about me”, and although said through a small smile, she took as a frosty, unnecessary reaction. She would go on to learn this was just his professional mask, but it took a few months to realise this and a growing unfurl of trust fissures to contend with, before she was able to proceed with ease. Until then, she couldn’t pinpoint exactly why this reaction had left her with a mistrust of him. It came in waves of bizarre, barely conscious sensations. A vague sense of a pupil-master relationship, which was so far removed from what she wanted from this experience, to an irrational threat of criminal-style interrogation, which would send her fleeing and mark the end of this process altogether.

No content is off-limits. She had repeated these words to move them over her tongue and see how they must have tasted to their original speaker. He watched her repeat them and then go mute for a long time; silently contemplating.

“You can speak as freely as you wish,” he tried to reassure, fully aware of her nature; that one simple ill-placed remark would keep her in a permanent state of withholding.

SESSIONS: ‘Establishing Roles’

SESSION 6:

Late December, 1966

“I wanted to discuss the controversial relationship stuff today,” she says with a small grin, as if the two of them share a private joke. He makes a note on a notepad before looking up and offering a nod of encouragement.

“Did I tell you I’m writing a book?” she continues.

“You have mentioned it, yes.”

He is not only learning to tolerate the role reversal in the form of her quizzical bombardments but has come to understand this as a sign that barriers are dropping. Most clients are passive; allow the therapist to control the conversation and are goaded easily away from asking questions. Not her. Questions asked on her part are an establishment of trust. During the early sessions when she was too frightened to ask questions, she was moody and withdrawn. Her body language tight and closed, her mind elsewhere. Very little progress was made in these sessions. He is youngish and fairly new, with a practice that has been open for just shy of eighteen months. Psychoanalysis is moving steadily out of fashion, particularly with female clients of a modern nature, and a standardised talking therapy was slowly being introduced; leaving plenty of room for learning curves for young, new-to-the-game therapists wishing to move away from dated Freudian approaches.

“Did I tell you what it was about?”

“You mentioned suicide. Something to do with coping with the loss of a loved one by their own hand,” he says in the usual monotone. A voice trained to have no highs or flats that could influence a client’s answer or thought process. Quite a skill to speak fluently in monotone and not appear disinterested.

“Yes,” she agrees. “Generally.”

“Is the relationship you wish to discuss connected to someone who has killed his or herself?”

“No.” She shifts in her seat and looks momentarily guilty. She drops her eyes away and to an untrained eye this might suggest dishonesty, but to a psychologist it often leads to a revelation, and often one all too sharp and jagged in its honesty. She carefully collects her words in her mind, no longer wary of the therapist’s eyes upon her, waiting for this painful birth, and no longer pressured to hurry an answer, thus dampening all the facts and clarity behind it.

Christ, where to begin?

SESSIONS: ‘Initial Assumptions’

December, 1966.

SESSION FOUR

“Why are you more nervous today?” the therapist asked. This isn’t an assumption, though it would be a fair one. Her body language is more closed than usual. She has given little to no direct eye contact and seems to be fascinated with the patterns her nails make whilst pressed tightly into her palm. One of the very few statements she has made during this session is that she is more nervous than usual.

After a considerable pause to which the therapist silently wondered whether she had even heard the question, she replied, “When you initially got back to me about setting up our first appointment your first question was to ask if the reason I was seeking therapy was because of a break-up.”

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t.”

“I know.”

Her words are distracted and slow, but her face has an archaeologist’s concentration on the little pink crescents forming on her palm.

“But it’s got me concerned that I can’t discuss past break-ups, which have played a role in why I am here.”

“No content is off-limits” is the way the therapist described the reassurance that proceeding with this and any topic is fine. Still, this initial assumption had irked her. There are other events in life that can create cavities in a person’s mental well-being. More going on behind the scenes. She wondered if that was the first thing they asked a man. Possibly, but she doubted it. It is the middle of the sixties and a woman’s biggest woe still seems to be regarded as anything that infringes on her primitive desire to be a mother and homemaker.

“No content is off-limits.” she murmured, with a small smile. Still no eye-contact.

Clowning About…

So, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past month, you must have either spotted (or at least heard about) the latest creepy phenomenon to sweep the nation: dressing up as a clown, lurking about on street corners and frightening the bejesus out of passers-by. This trend has taken both America and the UK by storm, with videos and headlines of clown-related incidents becoming a daily event. So popular is this trend, clowns could easily be considered the new hipster…

However, if you’re a sufferer of Coulrophobia (fear of clowns), there’s one phrase you don’t want to see trending on your Facebook page: killer clown craze.

The psychiatric reasoning behind the fear of clowns delves into childhood fears of lack of recognition within something that appears to be human, but also something other. Also, clownish behaviour can be considered ‘anti-social’ (especially in October 2016 it would seem), which is said to create waves of anxiety within children who are exposed to clowns. But the bottom line is, clowns are creepy no matter what your age. Coulrophobia is almost as common as regular-Joe phobias, such as acrophobia (fear of heights) and arachnophobia (fear of spiders). But with the clown thing, it could be suggested that popular culture has played a large role in this fear.

Quite where this ridiculous recent fad has come from, who knows. But these creepy (and often knife/baseball bat-wielding) idiots have been popping up like daisies on both sides of the pond. We’ve all seen the occasional and extremely satisfying videos of vigilante justice on a clown who picked on the wrong dude and winds up with his arse in a sling. Just in time for Halloween, we take a look into this terrifying (and frankly extremely unfunny) individual known as the clown, and the popular clowns of Western culture that have traumatised our childhoods…

PENNYWISE THE CLOWN

“You all taste so much better when you’re afraid”

The Don Corleone of clowns arguably has to be the creation from the master of horror better known as Stephen King. Again, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will be familiar with either the book or the TV mini-series adaptation of It. The 1986 novel that reached right for the jugular of the fear of clowns and gave it a good twist. For those not familiar though, the story follows a group of 1950s kids in the small, fictional town of Derry, Maine, who find themselves on the wrong side of a murderous entity (the kids call it “It” because no one knows just quite what “It” is) that terrorises their small town and plans to pick off all the children who inhabit Derry in various and sadistic ways. One of the guises It takes is that of Pennywise the Clown (sometimes known as Bob – you can’t make this stuff up), who was played in the TV adap beautifully by the sublime Tim Curry. Pennywise is a blood-lusting, yellow-toothed, limb-ripping maniac. Clowns are supposed to be funny. Unfortunately, for the kids of Derry (and every hapless King fan), Pennywise is not. Those familiar will remember the infamous “they all float down here, Georgie” scene, and may have spent considerable time afterwards taking pains not to look directly at street drains on rainy days. Seeing rogue balloons floating about may also provide some Vietnam-style flashbacks too. Coulrophobe or not; Pennywise was a creepy mofo. His one redeeming quality, however, is that he is fictional. Which brings us to our next candidate…

POGO THE CLOWN

“I should have never been convicted of anything more serious than running a cemetery without a licence…”

… Who, unfortunately was far from the product of the inner workings of a horror mastermind. Known to some as the harmless Pogo the Clown: children’s party entertainer, but known to many others as John Wayne Gacy: one of America’s most prolific and successful (in terms of body count) serial killers.

Known as the Killer Clown, Gacy raped and murdered up to thirty-three boys throughout the 1970s, turned his Illinois home into a makeshift tomb before being caught, convicted and executed in 1994, after a fourteen year stint on death row.

Hailing from an abusive home, Gacy was beaten and tormented by his father, often without any provocation, and also experienced bullying at school as a result of being overweight and unathletic. One of his first jobs was in a morgue, which he later confessed to frequenting after dark and climbing into the coffins of deceased teenager boys and ‘embracing and caressing’ the bodies. Not weird at all then.

Gacy then became an active member of the local Democratic Party, in which he dressed as a clown to occupy the children whilst at fundraiser events. He self-applied his own makeup, deliberately making the lips into a large smile, so as ‘not to scare the children’. I think it’s safe to say he probably failed in that department.

There seems to be a bit of a theme running here: clowns and children don’t mix. So in keeping with this theme….

THE GIT FROM POLTERGEIST

This probably isn’t his real name. I don’t know what his real name is. I don’t much care. He isn’t even a living, breathing entity, but a sinister and murderous one nonetheless. He’s only about two feet tall, so one would think all one would need to do is give him a good swift kick if he tried to pull any shenaniganery and that would be that, right? Wrong.

Before it all goes Pete Tong in Poltergeist, the shot of the smiling wooden clown sat on the chair in the little boy’s room supposedly minding his own business just spelled out trouble from day one. United was the feeling among movie-goers that this clown wasn’t just going to sit back and be a spectator during all the ghostly goings-ons soon to come. No. He wanted to be the star of the show! The camera is on me, baby. I somehow wound up watching the original Poltergeist when I was very young and from then on (and maybe still to this day…) was not a fan of beds with gaps underneath them. Who knows what could be lurking beneath? Even as a rational, bill-paying adult – not a fan. Those types of beds just have a sinister nostalgia attached to them, and this deranged toy clown has a lot to answer for that. And who knows, in October 2016 – there might just be a real one under there…

RONALD MCDONALD

“Fries with that?”

Ahhhh, the posterchild for obesity. Certainly not as sinister as his contemporaries, but deserves an honourable mention anyway. Clowns are creepy. Ronald McDonald is a clown. End of story.

THE JOKER, BATMAN

“Ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?”

Before Chris Nolan sunk his teeth into the Batman franchise, back in the eighties our good friend Tim Burton had a pretty good pop at it too. The brainchild villain of this gothic (if not slightly camp) attempt was of course Jack Nicholson. Jack Nicholson wreaking havoc through Gotham to a soundtrack made up entirely of Prince. Hard not to be a little tickled by that.

In the 1989 film, Jack Nicholson gave us Jack Napier: a local gangster who wound up getting pushed into a huge vat of chemicals, not killing him but leaving him with a deranged grin burned into his face. He sets about bringing down his nemesis (Batman, obvs) whilst trying to win the affections of Gotham journalist, Vicky Vale (who is, conveniently, Batman’s bae) as well as trying to massacre the entire populace of the city. Busy guy. Prone to dancing, wise cracking and bursts of gleeful cackling, Nicholson’s version of the Joker is more like someone’s slightly sociopathic uncle who has somehow managed to ingest vast quantities of methamphetamines and decides to go on the rampage one night. A different and much less cold and calculating version of this next guy…

THE JOKER, DARK KNIGHT

Slaughter is the best medicine….

The delectable and gone-too-soon Heath Ledger put an unforgettable spin on the famous Bob Kane clown with this unnamed version of the Joker. This version – possibly the darkest and cruellest of them yet – seemed to appear in Gotham with limited origin and background. Just some scarred maniac who shows up one day to rip the town a new one and sadistically kill any fool who stands in his way. Prone to telling porkie-pies (it’s never clear how he winds up with his scars – he tells everyone a different version), the general vibe is that somewhere along the way, something went horribly wrong in his life and he decided to make everyone in Gotham foot the bill for it. The first scene starts with him, almost ironically, wearing a clown mask to disguise himself during a bank robbery. A clown within a clown, if you will. If the rumour that this clown craze will climax on Halloween night with ‘killer clowns’ running rampant everywhere has any truth to it, this is one clown you don’t wanna meet. The Lad Bible post a lot of videos along the lines of ‘clown tries to scare this person and it backfires’. Yeah, that won’t be you if you try some vigilante justice on this fella.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS:

Bozo the Clown – fictitious character created in the 1940s in America. Recently immortalised by Robert De Niro as his idea of what Donald Trump is.

Krusty the Clown – Loveable regular on The Simpsons. Real name: Herschel Shmoikel Pinchas Yerucham Krustofsky. Not even joking.

Insane Clown Posse – Someone said the words “clowns that rap” to some music producer one day and he was absolutely all over that. The rest, as they say, was history.

Killjoy – Demonic clown from the film of the same name. Nasty bit of work. Lives up to his name.

©Clarice Taylor

‘I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings’ Book Review – Part One

                                                                                                                    

I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS 

MAYA ANGELOU, 1969.

By Clarice Taylor.

Introduction

The majority of us end up living lives barely worthy of one memoir, so when someone not only writes but publishes seven memoirs (feature-length), the author is either extremely pretentious or they have had a pretty damn interesting ride. Fortunately for Maya Angelou (and the reader), the latter is very much the case.

Biography

Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was born in St Louis, Missouri, and rose from near-poverty and very basic education in the racist deep-south during the Depression, to become one of the most important and respected writers and figures of the twentieth century.

With a list of friends, colleagues and peers that rivalled most American presidents, Angelou worked with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and a few years before her death received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, and has received over fifty honorary degrees in her lifetime.

Angelou notably worked as a poet, journalist, singer, actress, civil and women’s rights activist and screenwriter, but is perhaps most recognised for her career as an author and memoirist. In 1969, when Angelou was penning this first memoir, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing and had seen several important triumphs, including the success of the ‘Brown vs the Board of Education’ case (a long and drawn-out but no less successful court case which ended the black and white segregation in schools across America in 1954), the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 (the first globally-publicised Civil Rights incident started by a female, Rosa Parks), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which supposedly outlawed discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin, as well as several shocking landmark tragedies, including the Freedom Summer Murders of 1964, which sparked a national outrage and was the basis for the film Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker, 1988) and, of course, the assassination of Martin Luther King in the April of 1968.

Outline

In this groundbreaking and one-of-its-kind novel, we see Angelou from her earliest memory, at aged three, being shipped off from the comfort of their laid-back mother and father in Long Beach, California, to their God-fearing disciplinarian grandmother in the small town of Stamps in Arkansas, to then being pulled away again by her mother four years later, and suffering the sexual abuse and ultimate rape by her mother’s partner. This book is not an easy read. It deals with the cruelty and viciousness of early twentieth century southern American racism. A particular scene involves a lynched black man (whom we find out in the second memoir has had his genitals hacked off) who is pulled from a pond, bloated and decaying, and is ‘jokingly’ placed by the white sheriff and his posse in the local jail with the local black inmates, simply for the amusement of the distress at having the stinking body of one of their possible friend/family member’s thrown in with them.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is tactful yet honest, with Angelou’s memory being immaculate. The first chapter opens with an embarrassing incident in church as a small child, asserting the reader that the what’s to come will be a truthful, objective and in some ways, derogatory.

The book is a modest account of how an individual trapped in a period of oppression with two physical attributes (race and gender) that automatically exempt her as a worthy candidate for anything but being a mother and/or a maid, and with other obstacles (limited education, brutal trauma, financial and family insecurity…

To be continued.

The Bike Ride Disaster of ’93

As a born tomboy, I don’t know which I learnt to do first: walk or ride a bike, but I know they were pretty damn close as they seem to overlap in my mind. In my bike-riding endeavours; I was an early bloomer. L.? Not so much. I was about six years old and had been bombing about without stabilizers for as long as my little brain could remember. This would have made L. about seven or eight – long-overdue to learn how to ride a bike in our father’s mind’s eye.
L. was a timid pupil and Pa was rather… overzealous. A few impatient pootles around the garden on my old bike that usually resulted in tears, scuffed kneecaps and muttered swearing from our father constituted as enough schooling to attempt our first family bike ride… along a canal. You can see where I’m going with this.

Dad planned the big day for a sunny spring Saturday along the near-infamous cycling trail from Bradford-on-Avon to Bath. Slightly ambitious for a rookie, perhaps, but it was sure to be a dandy day out. Fate, of course, had other ideas.

I don’t know why, but vehicular contraptions have never been big or even necessary in L.’s opinion as I don’t believe I ever witnessed her on a bike ever again. But perhaps the pending extravaganza may have had something to do with that. There was a similar incident about a decade later when our apparently short-memoried father decided to give her an ill-advised driving lesson around a cricket field, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let me lead you down the valley of why my sister seems to have developed a phobia of all things wheeled…

It all started out so well. We drove to Bradford-on-Avon, found parking for the day, ate a pre-ride ice cream, hired out our bicycles and away we went. Spoiler alert: we didn’t make it to Bath. Hell, we didn’t make it out of Bradford-on-Avon. It became apparent that L.’s timidity in the transport world was amplified by the fact that this bike trail is very popular during the warmer months. I can only imagine that the horror of two-way traffic made her fraught, and she found it impossible to concentrate on both manoeuvre and obstacle. Let me give you an image: a high-speed train derailing. She’d banana in and out of fellow cyclists with a shaky, deranged momentum, as if she’d climbed on to the bike only to discover that it was, in fact, possessed by the Devil and its sole purpose was to escort her on a bumpy ride to Hell. Her cycling suggested it. Her facial expression confirmed it.
How it happened, Christ, I really don’t know. We had been cycling for perhaps fifteen minutes; my eyes solely on the carnage my sister could create in one simple ill-rearing of the handlebars. Our Dad, however, was absolutely soaking up his element. A keen cyclist as well as a fan of all things al fresco, he appeared to be lapping up the warm air, the bird-life, the narrowboats sailing to and fro and the endorphin rush of the exercise, and seemed to be completely oblivious of the torment of L.’s relationship with her bike. Or if he wasn’t, he didn’t anticipate the unlimited amount of doom that was looming on the horizon. He didn’t have to wait long though. L.’s first ‘incident’ happened as she attempted to open a gate whilst remaining in cycle-mode, perhaps fearing that if she dismounted, she’d never get back on again. A bold but foolish move. Just as the three of us had passed through the gate, her holding it open for us I think, she seemed to have become distracted by something, but sought to take off in her flight anyway. As she did so, she went sailing into the legs of a middle-aged pedestrian gentleman.
This man – a gem of a human being – couldn’t have been more graceful about it. My father mortified, my sister tear-stricken and my desperately trying not to laugh; apologies were mutters on my sister’s part, daggers were shot on my father’s part and giggles were stifled on my part.
Not letting this little incident deter him, our father carried on as he had started. In other words, not assuming that this mowing down of a man was a prophecy of what was to come.

I like to think I’ve already painted the picture: she went in the canal. Obviously, she went in the canal. It’s a bizarre mesh of comedy on my mind, though. Please understand this happened over twenty years ago and a lot of alcohol and various other substances that affect one’s memory have passed my lips. My memory is serving me a snapshot of her ploughing into a bush and then heading face-first into the canal, but I think that happened later. The bush in my mind was a good five foot by five, and I believe it would have taken some vigilant pedalling whilst in the clutches of thorn and bracken to make it into the canal, which just doesn’t seem at all plausible, even for a distressed eight year old. I think the bush came first. Hell, I’m certain of it as the only thing that came after the dip in the canal was a speedy journey home. So I think she went hurtling into the thicket of the bush and our father had to retrieve her, no doubt embarrassed, arsey and probably half-wondering if she’d sneakily necked some of his Bells Scotch before we’d left the house.
For the life of me, after both of those catastrophes, why our father seemed hellbent on continuing with this fiasco of an outing, I do not know, but he did and that was when the cherry on top of this bike-ride from hell revealed itself… in she went, narrowly avoiding being twatted by a passing barge, who kindly aided us in the retrieval of bicycle and child.

Naturally, a sopping, partially-drowned child is liable to put a damper on all activity, so to home we went; my father fretting the entire way about the arse-shaped water stain being imprinted on the back seat. It was a curious state of affairs, to say the least, and certainly a story that will be carried on through future generations of our family, much to L.’s mortification.

BettyRae Vintage

After a brief hiatus, I shall be resuming my post as a blogger for the vintage clothing company http://www.bettyraevintage.com, and will be conducting a weekly fixture called Sixties Saturday, so fans of the hippie-dippie-love decade – stay tuned!