21 Chainsaw Salute: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Cemetery

[In John Larroquette’s voice] The post which you are about to read is an account of an hour in the life of J.W. Ocker of OddThingsIveSeen. It is all the more tragic in that it was short. But, had it been very, very long, he could not have expected nor would he have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as he was to see that day. For him an idyllic spring afternoon drive became a dream come true. The events of that day were to honor one of the most bizarre movies in the annals of American cinema, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

May 28, 2014 — God damn I love Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Every bit of it is vile, deranged, nauseating, but it’s so, so…right? I don’t know how else to say it. Few movies seem as organic or as unified in their effect as the 1974 TXCM. It’s neither slick nor amateurish, contrived nor subtle. It just exists. Like Venus exists. Like flesh-eating bacteria exist. This is THE horror movie, and every other horror movie fails in comparison.

It’s hard to even talk about it in the usual terms of horror movies. You can’t discuss it in terms of good vs. bad or ask questions about the existence of evil. I mean, you can ask the questions, but you won’t be able to hear the answers over the roar of the chainsaw cutting your philosophical guts into shreds.

I don’t know. The thing just kind of transcends movies for me. I don’t come out of it poking holes in the plot or critiquing the acting performances. I don’t talk about special effects or cinematography or pace. I don’t think of it as being a made thing. You find it. You experience it. Then you take a shower and go shakily to bed.

So when I found myself for the first time in my life in the state whose name is part of the movie’s title and an integral part of its milieu, I crossed my fingers and hoped I was near a shooting location, despite the state being the largest in the lower 48. Turns out I was near a shooting location, within minutes somehow. And even though I was only in Texas for a mere 24 hours, I was able to dedicate time to visit it.

Now, the filming site isn’t a central one. It only shows up at the beginning of the movie. However, it is the setting of the very important first shot: the corpse sculpture.

Oh, you know that shot.

After John Larroquette does his dulcet thing, the screen goes black and we hear the unmistakable sounds of sweaty effort and a shovel biting dirt. Next, the darkness is interspersed with the brief, disconcerting images of a rotting corpse timed to the trademark sound of that mosquito flash bulb. Finally, the harsh orange dawn of a Texas sky lights an object that a voice-over newscast reveals as a “grisly work of art: The remains of a badly decomposed body to a large monument.”

It’s a drippy, fetid corpse perched jauntily atop a gravestone and holding another rancid skull in its hands. I believe the art world calls this kind of piece found art…in this case found six feet below the sod and given a resurrection that Jesus didn’t promise.

“Grave robbing in Texas is this hour’s top news story” the newscaster informs us and, a few minutes later, our group of victims-in-a-van stop by the cemetery to make sure their grandfather’s plot wasn’t part of that story.

The cemetery is called Bagdad Cemetery, and it’s in the city of Leander. It was created in 1857 with the burial of a three-year-old boy named John Babcock, and it gets its name from a previous name of the town. Back when Tobe Hooper desecrated it, the graveyard was surrounded by nowhere.

Today, it’s across the street from a strip mall, which goes a long way to stripping the cemetery of any of its Texas Chain Saw atmosphere. Going the rest of the way for me were the rain showers and cool, dark clouds that shaded our visit. Normally, that’s perfect weather for a cemetery jaunt, but for this cemetery, it would have been better had the experience been sweaty and dirty and grimy, like the movie itself.

Where they set up the corpse sculpture is easy to find, on the path near the cemetery’s only building. The big tell-tale is the tall, fluted pillar grave marker with the angled top. We stood there and watched the first five minutes of the movie on a phone, 40 years after it was made on that grave dirt. I’ve done that a few times at filming locations, and it never fails to excite me. I always imagine some interdimensional, omnipresent being looking at that spot in the universe and seeing some dude watching on a phone what some other dude is making right beside him, separating by time but not space.

The headstone on which the corpse perched wasn’t there. I don’t know if it has been removed in the past four decades or if the crew had created a fake one to avoid sacrilege. I assume the latter, but when you create a work like TXCM, respect for the dead ain’t a high priority. The brief, follow-up scene in the graveyard was filmed all around that same part of the graveyard and just outside it.

This visit was up there for me. Exorcist Stairs up there. Night of the Living Dead Cemetery up there. Granted, there are more interesting and more important locations for TXCM—most notably the house where much of the movie takes place. It’s been transplanted to a different town and turned into a restaurant. Hopefully I’ll get there some day. There’s a dinner scene I want to re-create.

If not, well, we don’t all get what we want. Sometimes we’re like Leatherface in the last scene, wearing human flesh and eye shadow, impotently waving a chainsaw in the air in a petulant dance over the one that got away.

If you want to call what happened to Sally Hardesty “getting away.”

Lions and Tigers and Fairs: York’s Wild Kingdom

May 25, 2014 — York’s Wild Kingdom in York, Maine, has been around since the early 1960s in one form or another. That’s half a century of weathering every other form of family entertainment: TV, video games, malls, laser tag. I assume they pulled that impressive feat off by 1) being in Maine and 2) diversifying.

The place is half exotic animal zoo, half amusement park. The former is surprisingly varied for such a tiny zoo, and they have some legitimate headliners: lions, tigers, alligators, zebras. The amusement park is more of a carnival, and completely aimed at young kids. I know this because I visited the place yesterday.

Feeling slightly ripped off is part of the charm of most family-oriented entertainment and carnivals specifically, but I can’t say I felt that way after a few hours there. I don’t have much of a story for those few hours, though. I just wanted to post this for future reference. In my bleary nostalgic moments, I’ll flip through OTIS just as often as I flip through my private pictures. Of course, I’ll only do either of those when I can’t find a movie from 1984 playing.

I mean, I'm going to feel ripped off after seeing a wonder of the world like this?
His legs form a tunnel and he moves back and forth.

But here are six reasons why I lived Saturday pretty well and some photos that don't always correlate with those reasons.

1) Getting within feet of lions and tigers. Been to tons of zoos, but I don’t think I’ve ever been that close to these types of predators. The only thing stopping them from being my predators, I guess, was a tall chain link fence and an apparent ambivalence to their condition as African lords in a snow state.

Not a photo of a lion or tiger. Most of the animals were behind chain-link fences,
so it was difficult to get a good shot that wasn't covered in wire-metal diamonds.

2) Watching my family ride a camel. I was sadly over the 200-pound weight limit for doing so myself (it’s all muscle, some bone).

3) Saw my first cane toad, which looks like a regular toad, but is larger than a softball/easier to hit home runs with. No wonder the entire country-continent of Australia is terrified of these things.

Not a cane toad. It was impossible to tell the scale of the beast in my photo,
so instead here's a couple of emperor scorpions in obvious embarrassment over how their tank is decorated.

4) Took my four-year-old through her first haunted house. Granted, it was only a winding, pitch-black hallway with a strobe light and some Halloween decorations. But you won’t see me ever criticizing anything with a creepy façade.

My first clue that taking a four-year-old into this wouldn't get me
ostracized at bring-your-parent-to-school day.

5) Getting fallow deer and African pygmy goat slobber all over my hands.

6) This picture:

Take These Broken Wings: Starship Pegasus

May 14, 2014 — The flight to Texas got bumpy toward the end, so I consoled my turbulence-averse friend with, “Of all the places we’re extremely likely to die, there’s no way it’s going to be Texas.” Later, as we stood beneath an ominously clouded sky under a pair of lightning-rod-like nacelles during a hurricane threat that would mere moments later incarnate into flash floods and lightning storms, I had to think about retracting that brazen prediction.

But I really wanted to see the Starship Pegasus.

Its name conjures romantic images of the exploration of galaxies full of colorful nebulae and bright pulsing stars in a noble spaceship hull-emblazoned with a magnificent winged creature out of oil-chested Greek mythology. The reality is that the Starship Pegasus is the derelict carcass of a science-fiction themed eatery drydocked in a parking lot beside a gas station.

At least, that’s what it is now. But I didn’t have to be a forensic archeologist to see that even through all the decay and abandonment, the place had once been pretty cool. After all, it still was in its own way.

The structure is about the size of a double-wide trailer, and its central feature is a low dome, out the back of which juts a rectangular caboose topped by two parallel nacelles that extend horizontally behind it, the tips of which were at one time lighted red to great effect. The whole thing looks like a home-made starship prop from a low-budget Star Trek fan film.

The Starship Pegasus was created in 2004 by a man named Andy Gee around a ready-made dome shell produced by a company called Monolithic, the headquarters of which is just across a field from the Pegasus. You can tell it’s their headquarters because one of the buildings on the property was a series of similar interconnected domes painted to look like a giant friendly caterpillar.

According to an article on the Monolithic company website, even though the shape was all Stark Trek, the name Gee chose for his grounded space oddity was a multifaceted reference to both science and science fiction: The USS Pegasus from the Star Trek universe, the constellation Pegasus, NASA’s Pegasus rockets, the famous Barney and Betty Hill alien abduction story (whose extraterrestrial captors supposedly came from somewhere in the Pegasus constellation).

But the place closed down less than three years later. I’m assuming MIB involvement. Today, as it has been since that time, it’s for sale, although every year the interstellar Blue Book value drops. Today, it looks less like a parked space ship than it does a crash-landed one. Peeking through the scrims that covered the glass doors, I only saw vacant space, although a large, UFO-shaped lighting fixture was still attached to the interior of the dome. I guess I expected to see the dusty bones of its crew inside.

The building is located in the town of Italy, right off I-35 and is part of a rest stop that includes a non-alien themed BBQ restaurant and gas station.

As we stood there under those nacelles and a sky much broader than we’re used to in New England, the wind whipping at our hair and the storm clouds assuming surreal, dark gray shapes like they were practicing for the Rapture, I thought it would be a great way to go, caught up in a hurricane in a space-shaped building. Instead, we got a terrifying drive back to the airport that felt more like being caught out on a rough sea.

In fact, our airplane trip back ended up being delayed interminably, so I contented myself with fantasies of stepping into the Starship Pegasus, giving a big middle finger to the entire state of terrestrial transportation, and flying off into space.

And I’m now even more confident that I’m not going to die in Texas.

Apocalypse Wet: The “Light Dispelling Darkness” Fountain

May 4, 2014 — I don’t know if good will win in the end or if it’s more like Dark Helmet predicted, “Evil will always triumph because good is dumb.” But I do know sculptor Waylande Gregory’s take on it, because I’ve seen his fountain, where he explains his position with copulating octopi, multi-headed stockbrokers, and skinny naked chicks.

We pulled into Roosevelt Park in Edison, New Jersey, a park named for a president in a city named for an inventor in a stated named for a piece of sports apparel, and parked in the small lot on Pine Drive. Across the road we could see the large war veterans memorial.

That memorial is august and civic, all bronze reliefs and stone slabs and flags and landscaping. Bland as the word itself. We passed it without so much as a blurry pic on our phones. But what the memorial hid behind it was a revelation…in the Biblical sense.

Waylande Gregory was Kansas-born New Jersey transplant and an innovator of ceramic sculpture. He figured out a technique for making large forms in the medium. His Light Dispelling Darkness, which he created in 1938, is an example of the results of that technique. It’s comprised of terra cotta and concrete, and it’s easy to see which is which as the terra cotta is glazed in three rainbows’ worth of colors like the fountain was meant for a children’s playground…except for the fact that it depicts horsebacked skeletons and polka-dotted personifications of disease.

I feel like when Gregory laid the blueprint for the fountain on the table to show the governing board to get its approval, he surreptitiously leaned his arm on it to cover the bottom of the fountain so that they’d just see the top.

Up there is a conceptually straightforward 9,000-pound terra cotta globe of the planet perched atop a tall concreted pedestal carved with images of people doing good things…cutting-edge science and sweaty, bare-chested labor and wise and measured peace discussions. The “light” in the fountain’s name.

But at the base of the fountain, at the end of buttresses arcing out of the 40-foot-diamter pool like they are being kicked out of the sculpture (the “dispelling” part of the name) are the Six Horsemen of the Apocalypse, all in crayon-box Technicolor….the “dark” part of the name.

Stop it. I know there are only Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I’m all caught up on Sleepy Hollow Season 1. But Gregory wasn’t satisfied with a quartet of devastation. He wanted a herd of apocalyptic horseman. So in addition to the first string players of War, Death, Pestilence, and Famine, he created terra cotta statues of Greed and Materialism. He didn’t put them on horses, though. Greed is represented by wrestling purple and pink octopi. Materialism, by a five headed day trader beast with a stock ticker tape dorsal fin.

While these six sculptures might technically be getting bottom billing, they’re definitely the stars of the show, with their myriad colors and eye-level placement and large size…but mostly it’s because they’re horrifying enough to entrance. From Famine’s sunken eyes and bony buttocks to War’s skull shield and gas-mask helm, they’re not the most pleasant guardians for your picnic in the park.

The fountain has seen some deterioration over the years that adds to the horror, but not as much wear as you might think. That’s because it underwent a big restoration in 2005. If you’re entrusted with something as bizarre as this, you owe it to humanity to care of it.

On our visit, the fountain wasn’t fountaining, although the plumbing was leaking small pools of water at the base. That gave me the opportunity to jump in and see the figures up close in all their playful ghastliness. You can find pics online of the fountain when it’s turned on, and, while it’s not that impressive a show, it continues the theme of light dispelling darkness, with all its Thomas-Edison-and-his-bulb-of-light undercurrents that the name of the fountain and its location near the Menlo Park headquarters of the famed inventor implies.

So I don’t know if these things are more terrifying wet or dry. But I do know I’ve never written a statement like that before.

Pano Test