Author's Ridge

In Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is an area called Author's Ridge. Here, the graves of four American literary and philosophical giants are to be found.

		Louisa May Alcott is best known as the author of Little Women. Very little of this woman remains here.
		Ralph Waldo Emerson's marker is a huge rose quartz boulder with a bronze plaque. At the Concord Museum one can see a great number of his artifacts, including his entire study. A naturalist, author and world traveler, I have a great deal of respect for the man. He has long since rejoined the local ecology in the most intimate manner possible.
		Henry David Thoreau's marker is among the simplest in the cemetery. Another naturalist and philosopher with a wicked sense of humor, one of my favorite quotes of his is: Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk. Surely words to live by.
		The grave of Nathaniel Hawthorne, an author who holds a special place in my heart. Without him, we probably would have had no Poe, no Lovecraft, and modern horror literature would be very different. There might not be any cheesy horror flicks without him, and then what would I do when I wanted to put a stop to the spinning of the creaky wheels in my head? Thank you, Nathaniel Hawthorne, for being the intellectual ancestor of Night of the Living Dead and I Bury the Living

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Flying Heads

The flying heads that were carved into slate tombstones during the 18^sup century are a great example of naive art with just a hint of morbidity that renders them "still cool" even in the 21^st century. Here are a few that I photographed at the last week Old Burying Ground in Concord. Click the thumbnails for larger images.

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Settings from Quella villa accanto al cimitero

All of the following photos are of settings in Concord, MA used in Lucio Fulci's 1981 horror film, Quella villa accanto al cimitero. I tried to capture the exact angles as seen in the movie, though it wasn't always possible. Unlike a permitted film crew, I wasn't allowed to stop traffic to get my shots. As a lifelong horror fan, I admit to getting a little thrill from knowing that I was standing exactly on the spots where Fulci himself stood over 25 years ago.

Clicking the thumbnails will open a larger image in a separate window.

	The Concord Free Public Library (129 Main Street) from a distance. There is a brick walkway that leads up to the building. About halfway up the walkway, there is a wider circular part that I feel fairly certain is where Fulci set up at least one camera.
	This exact shot appears about 20 minutes into the film. The scene is the one in which the female lead is talking with her husband as they walk to a real estate office. Fulci appears to have set up the shot so that the pillar would block the name of the town, so we see only the last four letters in "Concord."
	We see the building again briefly later in the film when the female lead is walking home from a trip to a supermarket carrying two paper sacks from a Stop and Shop. There is no such store in the vicinity and Concord doesn't allow chains of any kind in the historic district. In this shot, LL stands in for actress Catriona MacColl.
	In the next shot in the film, McColl sees her husband driving by and attempts to attract his attention in order to get a ride home. His car would be going from left to right on the street with the camera behind McColl, so the scene was set up pretty much as you see here.
	While his parents are talking to their realtor, child actor Giovanni Frezza looks into the window of a clothes store and watches as the head of a mannequin drops off. The mannequin then falls over, slides slowly down the window and bleeds. The store window to the left in this shot is where that happens.
	Soon after, Frezza hears a voice and meets ghostly Mae Freudstein (child actress Silvia Collatina) who is standing in front of a cemetery gate, which is shown in this photo. I couldn't get the exact shot because of traffic, but it should be recognizable if you've seen the film. The cemetery is called simply the Old Burying Ground; the graves therein date mainly to the mid- to late- 18th century, and I'll have shots of the artwork from some of the headstones here at some later point.

I think I've covered Fulci's shots from Concord here. I'd love to know where the "house by the cemetery" itself is located. I know it's in the town of Scituate, but I can't figure out exactly where. If anyone happens to know, though, please tell me!

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Just Two Photos

LL and I had a great day in Concord today, and I've got tons of photos. Right now, though, I'm far too tired to deal with them all. Since I'm going to be teaching a lab until 9:00 PM tomorrow night, I probably won't get around to posting much about our trip until Tuesday or even later. You'll just have to take my word for our having enjoyed the place a great deal.

What photos I have edited are online at my photo archive, but there are two that I want to share right away.

Firstly, there's one of LL speaking with her mother in Lebanon in Arabic while sitting next to the North Bridge, the site of the first battle of the Revolutionary War:

I like the way it came out, plus the subject matter is just the slightest bit perverse.

Second, a little humor:



A wee bit on the cynical side, no?

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