The Comet Magazine - October 2021

EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE

EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE

everything will be fine

THIS

editor: Ron Evans publishing assistant: Sarah Sims contributors: Cory Calhoun, Dan McConnell Holly Thorpe, Bill Griffith, Lance Reese, Christopher F. Hart thecometmagazine@gmail.com

COMET HEADQUARTERS

October. She’s finally here. And while things are still wonky and confusing and inconsistent and stupid and weird, it’s hard to not get into that sweet early Autumn spooky season spirit. I had a whole plan to pack this issue with creepy things but... plans are like omelettes. They rarely work out the way you imagine. Incidentally, I have a distrust of people who nail omelettes on the first try. Or ever. Huge red flag!

However, the issue we got instead is an eclectic mixture of art shows, events and writings that we hope you find inspiring. The big news is that the MAC at Wenatchee Valley College has its first art opening planned in 18 months following the pandemic closures. One of my personal favorite local artists, Henry Stinson, will be gracing the walls with his large scale, colorful paintings. The spirit of Stinson’s work seems like a perfect choice to launch a new season (era?) of exhibits at the MAC and I highly recommend making the trip out to see it. The college is only a few minutes from downtown, and I think it makes a swell starting point for any of your First Friday doings in Wenatchee.

While I was unsuccessful in rounding up a bunch of spooky writings (writers, am I right?), we did get a few lovely dark (if not in the traditional sense) works by Zach Eddy and Mery N Smith that hit some of those deeper notes in the human experience. And how could I leave out a little dreariness from the master of dreary, Edgar Allan Poe? It’s tradition, after all. I chose the Masque of The Red Death mostly because it’s an incredibly popular work but it seems many people (even Poe fans) aren’t as familiar with it as some of the others. I also chose it because it has a few creepy parallels with these modern times...

As The Comet spreads across Central Washington, like a fine mold, we are reaching further into towns that we aren’t terribly plugged into so it’s been great to have folks who ARE - helping out with keeping our readers in the loop of their local events. The latest to join in are the owners of Bearded Monkey in Yakima, Lance and Cheryl Daly Reese. I’ve heard amazing things about this venue and the passionate folks who are running it. And as their first column (on page 28) will make clear...they fit right in with us weirdos.

Well, however you do Halloween this time around we hope you stay well. I always wonder what the most popular treats will be this year. Reeses? Snickers? M&Ms? The orange marshmallow peanut invented by people who simply hate joy? Maybe trial size hand sanitizer bottles and spooky-themed face masks?

Oh, how the times change. Trick or treat!

Happy Trails, Ron Evans Editor of The Comet

The things one does for theatre. Photo by Sarah Sims who was JUST getting started wrapping me in duct tape to make a dummy for an upcoming Radar Dames project..

BY TERRENCE MCNALLY

AUDITIONS

October 18–19 • 6:30 p.m.

PERFORMANCES

January 20–29 • 7:30 p.m.

January 22 & 29 • 2 p.m.

at RIVERSIDE PLAYHOUSE

Directed by Cynthia Brown “A

www.NumericaPAC.org www.MToW.org 2022 APPLE BLOSSOM MUSICAL BY

4 - 14, 2022 - AUDITIONSJANUARY 2 - 4 - MORE INFO -

L. FRANK BAUM

“ALL

Crosswords & more made exclusively for The Comet

12345678910111213

DEEPLY FELT"

ACROSS

1. With precision

6. Gives a hand

10. Blue stuff?

14. Guy who's on mushrooms a lot?

15. Mrs., in Munich

16. Languish

17. SeaWorld's orca mascot

18. Bambi, for one

19. Feedbag fill

20. Muppet backing into a spot in a lot?

23. Type of tribute

25. The E in EU: Abbr.

26. What Florida has 412 of, including 11-Down

27. Recollection of a Muppet?

31. Root beer treat

32. Leave in the dust

33. Org. featured in the documentary Sonicsgate

36. Juul, e.g.

37. Unpaid worker, often

39. Certain beneficiary

40. Embarrassed

41. Prefix meaning "alien"

42. Barbecue fuel

43. What a group that refuses to leave shouts at a Muppet?

46. Gum-arabic-yielding tree

49. One hundred million decades

50. Boggy lowland

51. Muppet scoring strikes and spares?

55. [(a+b)/2]*h, for 3-Down

56. Pastrami purveyor

57. Freeze

4. Stew bean

5. "Tag!"

6. Ratify

7. One of the UN's founding members

8. Washington Husky, affectionately

9. Unrecoverable expense, in economics

10. Like a Mazda Miata, say

11. See 26-Across

12. Set free

13. Lab work

60.

61. Hive-minded types?

Hydroxyl-carbon compound

62. Shadow swiftly

63. Invites

64. Like morning grass

65. Game piece

DOWN

1. Mornings, briefly

2. "Hogwash!"

3. Shape at the bottom of most McDonald's signs

DOUBLEANAGRAM CHALLENGE

> Instructions at tinyurl.com/coryanagrams <

anagrammed words:

__ __ __

_____ __ __

_________

21. What's found between pee and ar

22. Cork'splace

23. Submit

24 ___ & Gabbana

28. Veer suddenly

29. Macaroni shape

30. Jersey-based call?

33. Enthusiastic cleaner

34. Hogwash

35. Bad lighting?

37. Sent back to a lower court

38. Musician Yoko

39. Term like "Darlin'"

41. SuperBowl in which the Giantsspoiled the Patriots'chance ofan undefeated season

42 Inmate

43 Mercedes-Benz line

44. In a chilling way

45 Court

46. Palindromicrhyme scheme

47 Nuclei

48. Everyseven days

52. Tiny carrier?

53. Canceled '80s-set Netflix dramedy starring Alison Brie

54. Bounce back

58. Function

SOLUTIONS TO LAST EDITION'S META CROSSWORD PRIZE CONTEST

The meta answer is BINGE (Hint: Find a 5-letter verb).

141516 171819 202122 23242526 27282930 3132333435 36373839 404142 434445 4647484950 51525354 5556575859 606162 636465  

The puzzle's title, CrossoverEvents, refers to 2 things. One is the term for when characters from 2 or more TV shows appear in the same "special event" episode. The other is what's happening in the grid: 10 one-word TV shows are hidden inside answers, and 5 of them "cross over" the other 5. See them in red below, and in the grid at right. (For reference, I've listed when, and on what networks, each show aired.)

14ACHEERSUP (NBC, '82-'93) x3D.WEEDSOUT (SHO, '05-'12)

27A. ITGIRLS (HBO, '12-'17) x10D.FRINGECUTS (FOX, '08-'13)

37A. XWINGS (NBC, '90-'97) x26D.MONKFRUIT (USA, '02-'09)

61A. ARMBONES (FOX, '05-'17) x43D. NOSCRUBS (NBC/ABC, '01-'10)

77A. WETSUITS (USA, '11-'19) x51D. STMARTIN (FOX, '92-'97)

When rearranged, the 5 letters at which the 10 words intersect E, G, N, B, and I (highlighted in the grid, at right) spell the TV-related term BINGE No winner this month. Thanks and good luck next time!

ASWEOPTCAFOFA

CHEERSUPULTRAMAN

TOENAILSRABIDDOG

SODDELBRAND

STARDOMITGIRLS

CHOIROBOESETOOL

AQUAXWINGSCIARA

PSTNONKOAUVRAY

NOXIFSRTE

TACOSSPRHASSRI

APOSEPOURONITEM

TINCTADIEUPUMPS

INFRONTTOSTADA

UNITEEARRYE

ARMBONESSPRINTER

DRESSERSWETSUITS

OSHERSETSSNIT

QUOTE'SAUTHOR: JASON MOMOA (spelled out by the answers' first letters)

I CRAVE FEEDBACK! Thoughts? Suggestions? Lemme have it. CSCXWORDS@GMAIL.COM

FEATURING:@peachbeeart

by holly thorpe Writer profile: Lorna Rose-Hahn

This month, Write on the River spoke with local writer and board member Lorna Rose-Hahn.

Lorna is a Pacific Northwest writer and speaker. Her narrative nonfiction and poetry have been recognized by Pacific Northwest Writers Association and the Oregon Poetry Association, and have appeared in several magazines and anthologies. Lorna also speaks publicly on motherhood, finding resilience through writing, and her experience in AmeriCorps. You can check out her writing at www.lornarose.com.

You recently completed your term as Write on the River’s board president and accepted a new position with the Oregon Poets Association. How was your time with WOTR and what are your goals in your new board position?

WOTR is great. After returning to writing when my son was born, I found them and started volunteering. I was invited to join the board in 2014 and then became president in 2018. I learned a lot in that time, including about how the nonprofit world functions and also my leadership style. It was exciting to help steer WOTR, respond to what local writers said they wanted, and also develop partnerships within the community. I also got to look at workflow within the organization, a carryover of my life in Corporate America, which was cool.

A year ago I was invited to serve on the board of Oregon Poetry Association, or OPA, after presenting a workshop at their annual conference. I pursued them because more and more I find myself writing poetry, and I wanted to get involved in that community more. Washington does not have a statewide poetry organization. I’ve learned more about poetry and have gotten to see how another nonprofit functions.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m always working on poems and personal essays; themes in my writing in-

clude motherhood, raising two neurodiverse kids, and complicated relationships I’ve had in my life. My bigger work-inprogress is a memoir-in-essay, which I’ve been working on since my second child, my daughter, was born six years ago (why I chose that particular time to start a memoir, I don’t know. I guess I had a concern to preserve my writing life, and it was the way to find balance). The project is about going from LA party girl to trail worker in rural Alaska. It started as a straight memoir, but it wasn’t working. The narrative was uneven and just boring in places. Also, I didn’t have the voice I wanted. So I worked with an editor, and said “hey, I like writing essays, I’m good at it, and I’m thinking of changing my narrative memoir into a series of essays.” She was like “go for it.” So far I’m happy with how it’s developing. I really like my voice, and I like not being bound by the confines of traditional memoir, like writing scenes and characters all the time. With this current form, I’m able to reflect and also tease out what I want the reader to know. It’s good stuff.

You write both poetry and nonfiction –do the two go hand-in-hand? How do you know when something is a poem versus an essay or memoir chapter? You ask such good questions! I’ve found writing poetry has helped my narrative nonfiction – and vice versa. Narrative nonfiction reminds me to keep the reader moving forward, and poetry reminds me that words have a shape and a lyricism –and gives me more explicit permission to play with language. I don’t have a hard and fast rule of knowing the form a piece of writing will take. Usually it’s an intuition. I have found that if I want the reader to shape the words, they’ll come out as poetry. If I want more of a voice to shape the words, they’ll come out as prose. And it becomes apparent quickly what genre this piece is meant for. For instance, I wrote a poem about complications I had while pregnant with my daughter (which found a home in the journal Third Wednesday). I think at one point I tried writing it as prose, and it didn’t work. There is definitely something minimalistic about po-

Lorna Rose-Hahn - photo by Kara Meloy

etry that I enjoy.

You often write about motherhood and parenting – did you expect that to become a big part of your work? Do you have advice for those who might want to write about their experiences with parenthood?

Parenthood is what brought me back to writing after a ~15 year hiatus. I started writing about motherhood – staying home, pumping breastmilk, grieving my old life – and it took off from there. My writing has been enhanced tenfold by my life as a mother. I enjoy sharing the process of writing and motherhood with others. My advice would be to write about the good stuff – feeding in the nursery, the night time cuddles, the moments that will leave and not ever come back – and write about the messy stuff too, because that is just as valuable. Write about what surprised you about motherhood.

What advice do you have for writers just getting started, especially in your genres?

Call yourself a writer! That was one of the biggest things that improved my craft. The other big thing is to find a critique group or writing partner. Meet regularly, ideally in person. Set rules, because sharing your work is vulnerable, and you want rules that everyone understands and abides by. When you start thinking about sending your work out, do it! Submission to literary magazines and journals is a process in itself. Find your own rhythm. And know that everyone gets rejected. Learn to harness that energy to improve your piece, or submit elsewhere, or both. Above all, keep going, keep improving.

Specific to narrative nonfiction, there’s an adage that says to write what you know. I say write what you think you know. For the criticism I have of novelist and essayist Joan Didion, she did say something that has stuck with me. She said (and I’m paraphrasing) that she writes entirely to know what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling, what she’s looking at. Once your thoughts are on the page, you can claim them in a way that perhaps you couldn’t when they were just in your head, and you can start from there. It is freeing.

What is your biggest weakness or greatest struggle as a writer?

Social media is a huge distractor for me. It has stopped me from getting into the creative flow, especially when I have very finite time (which is all the time). I have interrupted myself so many times to check

IG or Facebook, and it’s no good. And it’s not just on a personal level, but from an author standpoint too. The amount of marketing authors are expected to do today compared to the past is significant. Especially if you are working on building a platform, like I am, it can really take away from pure writing time. To mitigate this, I sometimes turn off Wifi, or practice discipline to respect the flow and go with it, not sabotage myself by stopping to check social media. I know of writers who write in 20-minute spurts, and then will allow five minutes of social media or whatever.

Sometimes it’s hard to know when to put a project to bed - how do you know when you’ve finished something?

That is a question for the ages. I think every writer asks him/her/themselves that. I’ve been so guilty of submitting an unfinished piece to a literary magazine. My personal litmus test is when I think it’s finished, I put it away for at least a week. Then I take it out again, revise with fresh eyes, and then, if possible, workshop it –have another set of eyes look at it. Ideally this is a critique group, a fellow writer, or someone who reads a lot. Really consider that constructive feedback – a hole in the plot, a sentence that tripped the reader up – to make the piece better. The process of workshopping is often what helps the most in terms of getting the piece where it needs to be, where I feel good sending it out.

How does the revision process work for you? Love it? Dread it? What is most effective for you?

I really like revising. I get to hone my voice, deepen my language, and try different things within the context of my message. Usually it takes me at least a couple revisions to get there. It’s also the phase where I need to be the most patient with myself. Sometimes access to my best writing voice doesn’t come right away, and that’s ok.

What are you reading these days?

I’m just finishing “Leaving Isn’t The Hardest Thing,” an essay collection by Lauren Hough, and am about to start “Blow Your House Down,” a memoir by Gina Frangello.

Coming up next...

Oct. 20: WOTR and NCW Libraries

NCW Writers Group

Every third Wednesday, 4-5 p.m.

Join NCW Libraries and Write on the River for an inclusive writers’ club for writers of all ages, skill levels, genres and interests. The NCW Writers’ Club is

a virtual writing community created by local writers, for local writers. This club is designed to connect people and artists, discuss the craft, ask for advice and share resources. Meetings are every third Wednesday from 4-5 p.m., with an optional social hour afterward. Wenatchee librarian Nik Penny and Write on the River board member Holly Thorpe will host the club virtually on Zoom. In-person options may be added in the future. All NCW Li-

braries virtual events are free and open to the public. Meetings will be held through the zoom meeting platform. Find more information at ncwlibraries.org

To learn more about Write on the River, become a member, or register for events, visit writeontheriver.org. Membership is $35 per year, and offers free or discounted access to all WOTR events. Questions? Contact info@writeontheriver.org.

THREE POEMSBY ZACH EDDY

ALCOA GOTHIC

BEFORE THE CLOSURE, BEFORE I QUIT

Pulling “burn-offs,” Porkshit yelled “What a hell of a way to make a living,” his pants and gloves smoldering, neck goiter beating red as Bling’s bandanna and face. We looked like prisoners while we tonged carbon shards glowing over open molten. Our factory: a sucker fish in the swelling world operation. So they fed us cheaper ingredients, alumina ore cut thin as soup, which we processed with our red Sqwinchers, mined from our filling gutters, shook from thinning hairlines. Swept from our dirty sheets at night, before rising again for Graveyard. Toxins settled inside us like faded coins in a piggy bank.

Before the “Year of the Burn-off,” before Haystack printed SOPs and tallied the OSHA “Recordables,” before I hung upside down by my broken leg, trapped in the bus-work on Pot 22, long before the crustbreaker crushed the tractor and the train cars crushed a millwright, before Piglos crushed stolen pills from lunch pails and smoked his teeth––an open-cab crane operator by mistake crushed a hydraulic line while syphoning vital metal, dousing himself in oil and flames. Poor Vern’s legend extended the aluminum ladder, climbed down all thirty-five feet and years, muttering his final words to the crew, “What a hell of a way to go out.”

WITHOUT THE FACTORY

This year is longer than next year. The slag is bringing down the grade. We stare at indirection and Applebee’s memorabilia. Buff says the coil is all kinds of fucked. The baby robins are shitting all over themselves. We’re drowning in our own mouths. River’s been high all weekend. I forgot about a different ending. I’m a rattlesnake in the brush. You’re a bulldozer ill equipped for fire. When did we discover the water jug is filled with used oil? The shiftworking moon’s face huffing ether behind a cloud of smoke. Count the clock’s uneven tick.

The guard gates are closed tonight. Fresh snow on concrete.

Uncle Al calls us in, and I am waiting now, for a black phone to ring.

Muscles cramp from dehydration.

In the distance my mind travels, I listen for the speechmaker’s voice repeating, “Manual Kill. Manual Kill.”

Far beyond the grave, at a long-dead river smelter, a long-dead Potliner is lobbing snowballs of powdered asbestos at a Bricky’s rash-gnarled face.

I hear, “Tap Out. Pot Twenty-two Twenty-two.” Box cars being loaded with ingots. Croc chokes for air on the curtain wall carrying his tongs to the next pot.

Over a crew of skeletons, Poor Vern runs the air from the crane, charred, still smoking.

Hurricane Harold has no hands for fist fighting in the courtyard. “Twenty-two Twenty-three.” New hires rise from ore piles, alumina, silica, fluoride, coke pouring from their ears, mouth and eyes.

A supervisor with one arm repeats into the black radio’s static, “Roger that. The whole shift is getting forced,” while Alcoa Santa wishes you a “Merry Christmas,” and the Alcoa doctor says, “Nothing down here can kill you.”

Previously published at Terrain.org in 2020. A former aluminum worker, Zach Eddy received his MFA from the University of Idaho. He has been awarded the Wenatchee Valley College Earth Day Poetry Prize, a Centrum Writers’ Conference Fellowship from Central Washington University, and an honorable mention in the 2021 Academy of American Poets University and College Contest. His work has been published in High Desert Journal, The Comet Magazine, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. He currently teaches English composition at Wenatchee Valley College.

divining the witch of york

Said to be spawn of the devil himself and possessed with great powers of prophetic insight, Mother Shipton was Yorkshire’s answer to Nostradamus. Ed Simon looks into how, regardless of whether this prophetess witch actually existed or not, the legend of Mother Shipton has wielded great power for centuries — from the turmoil of Tudor courts, through the frictions of civil war, to the spectre of Victorian apocalypse.

By Ed Simon

In 1488 during the reign of Henry VII, one year after the Dominican Heinrich Kramer wrote his notorious witchfinding manual Malleus Maleficarum, an adolescent girl named Agatha Soothtell gave birth in a cave among the dales and moors of Yorkshire to her daughter Ursula, supposedly conceived by the Devil himself. Ironically it was there in “God’s Own Country” that young Agatha would raise her demonic charge, both of them forced to live in the cave where Ursula was born. The site that would be visited by pilgrims for centuries afterwards, making it arguably England’s first tourist attraction, was known as much for the strange calcifying waters of its subterranean whirlpool as for its medieval Satanic nativity.

Most sources claimed that Ursula died during the rule of Elizabeth I in 1561, but with eight decades separating her supposed death and the first appearance of her name in print, it’s fair to assume a degree of invention in her biography. Despite her legendary ugliness (Ursula’s seventeenthcentury biographer described her as “a thing so strange in an infant, that no age can parallel”), at the age of twenty-four she married a carpenter named Toby Shipton, and it is to posterity that she would come to be known as “Mother Shipton”. A less appropriate surname, because as “Smith” and “Taylor” indicate profession, so too did “Soothtell”. Mother Shipton would become the most famed of soothe tellers in English history, renowned for her prophecies and used as a symbolic familiar in the art of divination for generations, the very constructed personage of the seer, a work of poetry unto herself. As scholar Darren Oldridge writes, “Unlike other ‘ancient prophets’ who were known by their words alone, Shipton emerged as a personality in her own right”.

It is likely at least some of Mother Shipton’s predictions were invented long after she lived, her prophetic couplets revised and edited to conform to later events, whether Cardinal Wolsey’s death, the

Great Fire of London, or the Crimean War. Details of her biography, her writing, and her very countenance are uncertain. The prophetess herself may have been a later invention. Yet Mother Shipton, England’s Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century Sibyl, the Yorkshire prophetess, the Knaresborough witch whose crooked face has stared out from prints hanging on occultist’s walls and in the names of country pubs since the initial printing of her predictions in 1641, should serve as a potent point of reflection for what exactly we talk about when we talk about prophecies.

Most of the major events in British history found expression in some pamphlet or compendium of Mother Shipton’s predictions, albeit backdated retrospectively with great convenience. There is Elizabeth I’s reformation: “A maiden Queen shall reign anon. / The Papal power shall bear no sway, / Rome’s creed shall hence be swept away.” Mother Shipton supposedly saw those broken ships of the Spanish Armada off the English and Irish coast: “The Western monarch’s wooden horses / Shall be destroyed by Drake’s forces” (a rare case of a prediction specifically naming a historical figure, which a skeptic might use to question said prophecy’s authenticity). It was claimed that the witch had a vision of Mary, Queen of Scots’ execution: “a widowed Queen / In England shall be headless seen”, as well as the punishment of Essex for his rebellion: “An Earl without a head be found”, and the ascension of the Scottish King James VI to the throne in Westminster: “Soon after shall the English Rose / Unto a male her place dispose.” And then there’s the Great Fire of London in 1666, Mother Shipton having supposedly claimed that “it comes against London … what a good city this was, none in the world comparable to it, and now there’s scare a house left,” which apparently led the diarist, raconteur, and naval secretary Samuel Pepys to write “Mother Shipton’s word is out”.

As mentioned, some scholars have argued that she is a complete fiction. There are those, however, that argue she was in

Frontispiece, most likely by Robert Cruikshank, to The Life and Prophecies of Mother Shipton (1823)

NOTE: This article was written in Europe so different grammar rules apply. Probably. -The Comet

some way an actual person, embellished through local tradition into a folk legend. There is at least one clue earlier than the seventeenth century which indicates that the prophetess may be based in more than pure invention. In 1537, as Catholic rebels in Yorkshire rebelled against Henry VIII and his dissolution of the monasteries, the assailed king wrote a letter to the Duke of Norfolk in which he disdainfully refers to a “witch of York”. It is perhaps the earliest reference to what may be the real Mother Shipton. As the anonymous author in an 1868 edition of Notes and Queries concluded, “Although the fact of the existence of Mother Shipton rests wholly upon Yorkshire tradition, she can scarcely be regarded as a myth.”

The British Library’s earliest listed publication about Mother Shipton is the anonymously penned 1641 The Prophesie of Mother Shipton in the raigne of King Henry the Eighth, fortelling the death of Cardinall Wolsey, etc., with fifteen subsequent texts in the seventeenth century (including a play), and dozens more published in the intervening centuries. One particular title was crucial to the embellishment of her myth, her biography as written by the Irish novelist Richard Head in 1667. Notes and Queries described Head as “the notorious Richard Head, author of several works of loose description.” His oeuvre included the

erotic poetry of Venus Cabinet Unlock’d, the earliest slang dictionary The Canting Academy, a work of true crime about a notorious highwayman called Jackson’s Recantation, and, most significantly, a picaresque novel titled The English Rogue. That last title would become the first major fiction in English to be translated into a foreign tongue and would influence authors such as Daniel Defoe, who was inspired to write Moll Flanders based on Head’s example.

Head’s The Life and Death of Mother Shipton was responsible for the majority of invented biographical details, building upon the bare narrative scaffolding of dozens of popular pamphlets. From Head’s imagination came details such as Agatha’s demonic wedding feast with Satan, accounts of magical feats performed by Ursula in front of worthies such as Cardinal Wolsey, and, most enduringly, the graphic and purple description of Mother Shipton’s physical appearance, which occupies hundreds of words, describing her as “very morose and big-boned”, with “very great goggling, but sharp and firey eyes; her nose of an incredible and unproportionable length”. Head then goes on for several sentences describing said nose in magnificently baroque prose, its “many crooks and turnings,” and its adornment with “many strange pimples of divers colours,

as red and blue mixed, which, like vapours of brimstone, gave such a lustre to the affrighted spectators in the dead time of the night, that one of them confessed several times, that her nurse needed no other light” to assist her in the birth of the prophetess. Head offers similarly purple descriptions of Mother Shipton’s cheeks, her teeth, her mouth, her neck, her shoulders, her legs, and her toes, telling us that it was as if “her body had been screwed together piece after piece, and not rightly placed”. In short, Head rather cruelly makes clear what Mother Shipton looked like — a witch.8 Although not the origin of the Shipton myth, Head’s portrait is its most enduring instance, and it has almost single-handedly propelled Mother Shipton’s rise into fullon prophetic stardom.

“The prophet is, first and foremost, a media phenomenon”, writes historian Jonathan Green in Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change 14501550, and if Mother Shipton was anything, it was a veritable media phenomenon. A beneficiary of cheap print, her stock soared with the collapse of the licensing laws of the 1640s, which enabled a deluge of pamphlets ascribing to her any number of potentially contradictory predictions. Pamphleteers during the years of the English Civil War took ample opportunity to enlist Mother Shipton as a convenient authority

in propagandistic causes, both Parliamentarian and Royalist. Scholar Harry Rusche, in the English Historical Review, writes that

Virtually all prophecies possessed a potential propaganda value that could be exploited by clever interpretation or a slight revision, and no prophetic utterance, ancient or recent, was so innocent that it could not be ingeniously twisted to bear upon contemporary religious and political issues.

Such invoking of prophecies during times of crisis, writes historian Madeline Dodds, was “usually to demonstrate that some drastic change, either desired or already accomplished, had been foreseen by the sages of the past.” And this was often achieved by the retroactive backdating of prophecies, something certainly true for Head writing during the years of Restoration. Consider the explicitly Royalist gloss of the following, in which Mother Shipton “predicts” the regicide of Charles I, all via the pen of Head writing eighteen years after the actual event: “Then shall the Council great assemble, / Who shall make great and small to tremble, / The White King then (O grief to see!) / By wicked hands shall murdered be.” Head informs his readers that Shipton saw the rule of Charles’ son, “predicted” in this pamphlet

Illustration from Mother Shipton Investigated (1881) by William Henry HarrisonIllustration from Mother Shipton’s Wheel of Fortune; By Means of which you may Learn your Future Destiny (ca. 1838)

The Famous Mother Shipton, artist and date unknown.

published seven years into his rule, for “fate to England shall restore / A king to reign as heretofore.”

By contrast, the 1641 Mother Shipton pamphlet evidences Parliamentarian sympathies, presenting startlingly accurate predictions about the future rather than only backdating events that had already occurred. It is claimed that “Wars shall begin in the Spring, / Much war to England it shall bring: / Then shall the Ladies cry well-away, / That ever we liv’d to see this day.” Though written with a sense of melancholia, there is also a sentiment of inevitability and the accurate foresight of coming civil war (though written after the Bishop’s War had already seen Scotland and England at blows). Moving from verse to prose, Mother Shipton prophecies that despite the coming strife, ultimately “there shall never be warfare again, nor any more Kings or Queens,” a startlingly radical conclusion written some eight years before Charles I would place his neck on the block. Rusch notes, “Whether this was specifically meant as parliamentarian propaganda is difficult to say” and that 1641 “seems too early for this kind of speculation except in the most extreme factions.” Yet whether the pamphlet originated in those extreme factions (or was simply accurate divination!), Rusche does observe that the publication “came to be recognized as good material for the parliamentarians… [and] was subsequently published by those opposed to the principles of monarchy.”

If, during the politically tumultuous 1640s, the use of Mother Shipton’s prophecies centred on justifying or rebelling against rule, then later versions saw a different focus. Her most famous prophetic couplet, which claims that “The world to an end shall come, / In eighteen hundred and eighty one”, first appeared in an 1862 edition of her prophecies edited by

Charles Hindley, a Victorian writer who was known for his compilations of vulgar speech, such as his omnibus Curiosities of Street Literature. His edition of Mother Shipton’s predictions reinvigorated the legends about the Yorkshire oracle, and if Head’s biography is one node in her myth, then Hindley supplied the other. Clifford Musgrave writes in Life in Brighton, from the Earliest Times to the Present that Hindley’s ominous apocalyptic verse “had an extraordinary effect on the popular imagination, especially among the poor educated and more credulous people all over the countryside.” According to Musgrave, many of these people “deserted their homes and spent nights praying in the fields, churches and chapels.” So pervasive was the fear that the world would end in 1881 that the British Library employed William Henry Harrison (not to be confused with the US president) to write an exhaustive debunking of the legend titled Mother Shipton Investigated. Harrison quotes the editor of an 1873 edition of Notes and Queries who explained that “Mr. Charles Hindley, of Brighton, in a letter to us, has made a clean breast of having fabricated the Prophecy quoted”, thus demonstrating once and for all the complete fabrication that was the Sibyl’s most famous and frightening prediction.

It is not only fear that motivates allegiance to such prophecies; involved here also is a yearning for meaning and significance — the idea perhaps that our own lives could be of such importance that a Tudor oracle may have dreamt of us. As James Sharpe explains in Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England, prophecies “helped many people make sense of the world and cosmos in which they existed, and helped them deal with at least some of the problems they experienced”, even when such predictions were of apocalyptic bent. Consider not just the concluding apocalyptic couplet, but

the full prophecy presented by Hindley, where he has the Sibyl say that “Through hills man shall ride, / And no horse be at his side. / Under water men shall walk, / Shall ride, shall sleep, shall talk. / In the air men shall be seen, / … Iron in the water shall float, / As easily as a wooden boat.” It is difficult to read her couplets and not imagine these prophecies rendered in such pleasing anaphora, repetition, and tricolon, to be eerily aligned to our own present, evoking cars or scuba diving, airplanes, or cruise ships. Perhaps Hindley had the telegraph in mind, but it’s hard not to see a reflection of ourselves in the black mirror of our smartphones and laptops as you read that “Around the world thoughts shall fly / In the twinkling of an eye.”

Looking for such insight in ancient divinations betrays a poignant sentiment: that in past prophecies we hope not just for predictive power, but also for evidence of a connection with times long past — a sense that we are not so alone, cut-off and adrift in our particular age, but rather characters in a narrative penned long ago. More than being simple prediction, prophecy seems a strange literary tense that confuses past, present, and future, and inserts those not yet born into the writings of antiquity. Green explains that “prophecy involves; above all, the claim, made by the prophet and understood by his or her followers, to be the middle participant in a two-part conversation.” The scouring of prophecies, pamphlets, letters, marginalia, ephemera, and almanacs of those prophetic mages is driven by the desire for a radical, sweet empathy imparted to us by our long-dead ancestors. Reading Nostradamus, or those weird sisters the Sibylline oracles, or some other mystic, seer, or psychic is to wish that we could speak to the past, that our dialogues with the dead are not one-sided and that perhaps they cared about us.

While scholars have written extensively about more respectable (and verifiably real) astrologers and alchemists who mastered the necromantic arts, from John Dee in the sixteenth century to Simon Forman and William Lilly in the seventeenth (the latter an author of a pamphlet about Mother Shipton), the “cunning-woman” of Yorkshire has remained the province of psychics and tarot card readers, hazily remembered as just another antique prophetess. Distinctions between those gentlemen with their grimoires, scrying mirrors, and alchemical tables and the hag of Yorkshire might not be as historically clear as could be assumed. Sharpe explains that a “distinction between witchcraft on the one hand and magic and sorcery on the other proves impossible”, and that “medieval and early modern commentators tended to jumble the terms [of witchcraft and magic] together happily enough.” Certainly there has been a rich and full investigation of witchcraft by social historians over the past half-century, yet Mother Shipton herself awaits her full due -- a debt which may continue to be deferred so long as proof of her existence eludes us. Despite much (or even perhaps all) of her biography and her supposed fortunes being the result of hoax, invention, conjecture, and fiction, there is a cracked truth in her example. For even in her most famed, fake, and falsified predictions we are given the opportunity to contemplate this strange thing of prophecy, in both its propaganda and its poetry, while also perhaps encountering the witch of York on her own terms, seeing predictions for what they are: a weird type of participatory literature.

This article was originally published in The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. If you wish to reuse it please see: https://publicdomainreview.org/legal/ C

As the winner of NBC’s Phenomenon, and a top finalist on NBC’s America’s Got Talent, Mike Super has pioneered a new form of magic. Combining mind-blowing illusions with the hilarity of a headline comedian, Mike takes the performance of magic to new, mainstream levels for an emotional, family-friendly performance.

Audience members will be required to be vaccinated for all performances and public events held indoors. Numerica Performing Arts Center will require proof of COVID-19 vaccination (or proof of a negative COVID-19 test for exempted persons) for audience members at all events. People ages 12+ with a medical condition or closely held religious belief that prevents vaccination must provide proof of a negative COVID-19 PCR test taken within 72 hours of the performance start time, or a negative COVID-19 antigen test taken within 12 hours of the performance start time. “Fully vaccinated” means your 2nd dose vaccination was more than 14 days prior to the date of your performance. Self-reported vaccination records that are not verified by a health care provider cannot be accepted. Self-reported negative test results that are not from a test provider, a laboratory, or a health care provider cannot be accepted. Masks are required to be worn at all times while not actively eating or drinking. Go to www.NumericaPAC.org/covid-safety-protocols/ for more info on our Covid-19 protocols.

ellen picken at collapse

by ron evans

Spokane artist Ellen Picken brings her new collection of paintings to Collapse Gallery in Wenatchee this month. Picken has been painting large scale murals for the last seven years and co-directing art films with her partner, Rajah Bose, for FactoryTown. After nearly a decade of creating massive scale public works, she is very happy to share her more intimate side with this show opening Friday, October 1st. We chatted with Picken about her work and about this new collection of paintings premiering this week.

So first off the obvious question...let’s talk about shapes. Diamonds, triangles, blocky angles and pointy tips. These simple shapes and angles add up to some pretty complex arrangements in your art- some pieces almost seem like you are ‘drawing with shapes’ and some seem more random and freeform. Would you consider yourself an ab-

stract artist in any way?

I use abstraction to get to the substance of what we’re all made of. “Who am I?” turns into “What am I?”, into “What are we doing here?” The basic building blocks of existence become active when they are seen in relation to each other. I think abstraction allows the artist and viewer to start by feeling. Then they can question with the intellect, allow the subconscious to respond, then respond with the consciousness again. It can keep going deeper and deeper until the subconsciousness and consciousness have very little between them. That is a cool place to be.

The layout and contrast of your work (and your play on negative spaces) reminds me of high quality graphic design elements while still remaining firmly footed in the fine art world. Do you have any background or interest in graphic design?

My background is in printmaking, which requires the mind to consider the empty space around objects. Looking at the world this way I’ve found that emptiness is not empty at all. It is as active and important as the positive space. After a while, positive and negative become equally present and are necessary in shaping each other. Patterns become apparent everywhere. I also lived up North for about a decade. Some people might consider there to be so much empty space. That is just space without people in it. It is full of life and activity, only noticeable when your own mind is quiet. Long winters there too make the world look like a print: white snow and sky, black trees and rivers. It is really beautiful, the world stripped down to its essential forms.

I did earn a degree in graphic design about five years ago. I learned how to use some design programs and better understand typography. Typography carries half of the message of the words they represent. I put that skill to use in the show

at Collapse actually. But that is as far as my interest goes. I did a few commercial design jobs and found perfectionism and selling shit really go against my nature.

You have done a lot of mural pieces, in many cases this was commissioned work by some pretty high profile corporations (Google, Adobe, Facebook). How do you approach an extra large format like murals versus gallery work and talk about your career from a commercial/commissions standpoint.

Oh, I feel so lucky to have consistent work for the past few years. For the most part the clients I work with are pretty generous about the creative process. With murals I take into consideration all of the needs of the client first. I ask what the space will be used for, what kind of mood they want to evoke, will people be sitting in the room all day or moving through it? Then I imagine my body in the space. I stand, close my eyes, and imagine the wall covered in art from top to bottom

and feel the sensations in my body from the top of my head to my feet. The mind picks up all kinds of information at an automated/subconscious level. If the top is weighted it feels oppressive. If the bottom has a lot of horizontal lines, it feels like the ground is moving. Diagonals direct the eyes toward specific points. The artist needs to be aware of the space they are creating because the viewer will sense these things without really realizing it.

With my studio work, it is very different. My paintings are smaller, more intimate. It is like entering a door that leads to the ocean rather than being thrown into it. I start with dreams, conversations, ideas, meditations. Then I sketch very small thumbnail sketches, freeform and loose. Whichever of these sketches best describes the idea, I will develop into a page sized drawing. I’ll use a ruler or a more steady hand for this step. Then I either go directly to the canvas or refine it further on the computer, working with colors and fine tuning the balance of positive/negative space. Instead of the whole body approach I take with murals, for canvases, most of the sensations I respond to are in my shoulders and chest, the back of the neck and throat. This is that space where the deeper consciousness of feeling almost rises to intellect, can almost be spoken.

Do you work in reproductions of any sort?

Nope. My partner thinks I should create some NFTs. We’ll see!

Tell us about your upcoming exhibit at Collapse Gallery in Wenatchee.

I’d like to thank Chad for giving me the chance to show at Collapse. Sharing work is such a great motivator for creating it in the first place.

Maybe all paintings are attempts of the psyche to take a look at itself. It is one thing to be in the center of an event and another to analyse it from a distance. Like

watching our friends make mistakes, it is easier to see theirs than it is our own. These paintings originate from dreams and meditations. These are the symbols I needed to create in order to look at, interpret, and integrate into my consciousness the messages of the subconscious.

They seem deeply personal, but the deeper I go, the more I understand these experiences can be had by anyone. I’ve created little notes that go alongside the paintings to help the viewer absorb the meaning of the image. Of course, anyone can see more than what I presented, because they will see what is in their mind too. That is what I love about abstraction, it really engages the viewer (at least the ones who will give it time).

Most of the paintings have to do with the older people in my life, how they have shaped me, and how I get to become like them now that they are leaving.

Where can people follow you online?

My website: ellenpicken.com or instagram @ellenpicken

ARTIST STATS:

Favorite Bands: Casey Clayton, FKA twigs, Cass McCombs

Favorite Artists: Divine Jewels, Daniel Lopez, Harold Balazs

Favorite Authors: Karl Knausgaard, Tolstoy, Thomas Merton, Sharma Shields

Favorite Movies: El Topo, The Last Picture Show, The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, and Hot Rod

Dream Collaboration: I get to live it already! Making art with Rajah Bose for FactoryTown

Item you can’t live without: Water.

Favorite Destination: Here. C

DATURA’s halloween

Wenatchee goth trio Datura shares some of their preferred Halloween doin’s for The Comet.

Favorite Horror Movie:

Jake St. John (bass/backing vocals)

Anthologies are my current go-to when it comes to horror. I love movies like Cat’s Eye, Tales from the Crypt, and Creepshow, but I discovered Trick ‘r Treat a few years back, and it has become my favorite of them all. Each story is awesome, but the director cleverly ties them all together for a super fun Halloween flick that you can watch over and over again. If you haven’t seen it, you need to check it out this October.

David Betancourt (guitar/vocals)

I enjoy watching The Conjuring because it makes me feel good inside.

Tiffany Shafer (drums)

I grew up watching Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, and Hitchcock movies. I love old horror movies. Every year I watch Night of the Living Dead and Carnival of Souls. The great thing about these two movies is that they don’t have a big budget but they are so effective. I love the drama that’s created with the black and white film, camera angles, and minimalistic music. I also like super campy shit too so I scratch that itch with the Evil Dead movies and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. My partner has brought some of his favorites to my annual ritual with Trick ‘r Treat, Halloween, and The Conjuring

Halloween Rituals:

Betancourt: I enjoy smashing pumpkins on people’s driveways because I like seeing other people suffer and watching them

clean up my mess, just like everything else in my life.

St. John: For me, trick-or-treating is the best part of Halloween. When I was a kid, we’d dress up as “army men” pretty much every year and go terrorize our neighborhoods. As an adult, when my kids were little, taking them trick or treating was definitely a highlight of the year. Now that they’re grown, my favorite part of Halloween is when trick-or-treaters show up at our place. My wife KC and I generally adorn our yard with spooky Halloween decor to set the mood, then play scary music, and if we’re feeling extra inspired, we dress up too.

Shafer: Every year I make my front yard into a graveyard. I’ve got the spookiest yard on the block. I go to all the places that sell Halloween stuff and get more graves and bones to make it maximum creepy.

Now that I live in a place that actually gets trick-or-treaters, I’m stoked to hand out candy. I just want kids to love Halloween as much as I do. Another thing I always do is the Halloween show at Wally’s. It helps that I’m usually in a band playing that show but even when I wasn’t, I’d still go. It’s just another excuse to put on vampire fangs.

Favorite Halloween Music:

St. John: This is the toughest one to narrow down, and to select one or even a handful of “spooky’ albums is no easy task. First, John Carpenter’s Halloween III soundtrack is the absolute best. I love synthbased music in general, and I own tons of movie scores and ambient albums. I prefer this album over most of Carpenter’s other work. (I’m also lucky to have an original pressing on vinyl.) Swans Soundtrack for the Blind is another go-to October listen.

DATURA: Jake St. John, David Betancourt, Tiffany Shafer - photo by KC St. John.

It’s ambient, scary, yet comforting at the same time. Gira and Jarboe experimented with family interviews and field recordings to create some intensely beautiful and unsettling soundscapes. This album is a long and immersive sonic journey. Lastly, Neurosis’ Eye of Every Storm always resurfaces for me in October as well. This album is crushingly beautiful and sad, and it features their most Pink Floyd inspired moments from their entire discography. Scott Kelly’s closer I Can See You is one of my all-time favorites.

Betancourt: I enjoy the Misfits because they’re shitty individuals who formed a great band, so it gives me hope that Datura can pull off the same trick.

Shafer: I’ve been in the Misfits cover band, Children in Heat, going on 6 years so every year I listen to a mix with whatever Misfits songs are on our set list. I listen to the Misfits year round but I have

them on a steady rotation around this time of year. I am also a huge fan of Calabrese so I listen to them more than usual this time of year. The Traveling Vampire Show is one of my all time favorites. “Vampires Don’t Exist” and “Saturday Night of the Living Dead” are the best songs and at the end of the album is an invitation to join the Young American Mystic Cult of Horrors for just $13 dollars! These guys are into all the horror classics and they are the nicest dudes. Every day is Halloween with Calabrese.

Datura will be playing their last scheduled show of the year on October 16 at Hard Hat Winery and they plan to release their first full length LP in January on a couple different labels. Expect cassettes, CDs and a new shirt design as well as a new single release later in October. C

Trick ‘r Treat - Warner Bros Pictures.

The Misfits (not the Hot Topic skull) Plan 9/ Caroline

Calabrese - Traveling Vampire Show - Abstract Sounds

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark - New World Pictures

Halloween III Soundtrack - MCA

Bela Lugosi (der) as THE Dracula. Universal Pictures

The Conjuring - Warner Bros. Pictures

Originally published in May, 1842.

THE “RED DEATH” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and lighthearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.

It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven—an imperial suite. In many palaces, however, such suites form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different; as might have been expected from the duke’s love of the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite. These windows were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue—and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange—the fifth with white—the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet—a deep blood color. Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire that protected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But in the western or black chamber the effect of the fire-light that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all.

It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous

clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,) there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.

But, in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel. The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for colors and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was not.

He had directed, in great part, the moveable embellishments of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great fete; and it was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm—much of what has been since seen in “Hernani.” There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these—the dreams—writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away—they have endured but an instant—and a light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many-tinted windows through which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture; for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the bloodcolored panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appals; and to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulge in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.

But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus, too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumor of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise—then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust.

In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade license of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince’s indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.

When the eyes of Prince Prospero fell upon this spectral image (which with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers) he was seen to be convulsed, in the first moment with a strong shudder either of terror or distaste; but, in the next, his brow reddened with rage.

“Who dares?” he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him—“who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him—that we may know whom we have to hang at sunrise, from the battlements!”

It was in the eastern or blue chamber in which stood the Prince Prospero as he uttered these words. They rang throughout the seven rooms loudly and clearly—for the prince was a bold and robust man, and the music had become hushed at the waving of his hand.

It was in the blue room where stood the prince, with a group of pale courtiers by his side. At first, as he spoke, there was a slight rushing movement of this group in the direction of the intruder, who at the moment was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate and stately step, made closer approach to the speaker. But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole party, there were found none who put forth hand to seize him; so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the prince’s person; and, while the vast assembly, as if with one impulse, shrank from the centres of the rooms to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step which had distinguished him from the first, through the blue chamber to the purple—through the purple to the green—through the green to the orange—through this again to the white—and even thence to the violet, ere a decided movement had been made to arrest him. It was then, however, that the Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all. He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry—and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave-cerements and corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

and Loaded Cocked

their biggest show yet, opening a show at The Seasons Performance Hall in Yakima. The band has grown from two members to three, adding trombone player Chris Nobbs to the mix. “I now believe every band needs a horn,” Ray declares.

The addition of Chris has increased commitment and preparation. This isn’t a novelty side project, it’s a legitimate band, a rehearsed performance art piece. The more one listens, the more one realizes how intricate the music is. Every drum beat is choreographed to the timing of the piano. Ray changes signatures on the fly, dropping beats off the end of a measure. It’s a musical chairs game he’s playing, a three card monty on the ivories. Fortunately Dan is in on where the queens is.

At the Seasons, the Cockaphonics are taking the stage to a sold-out crowd who barely knows the headlining act, let alone this trio of vagabond miscreants. Dan sits behind his drums and pushes his hair back into a rooster comb. Chris takes center stage barefoot, his silver horn in hand and a bowler hat casting a shadow over his face. It’s a pressure position for him, the only guy standing on stage, bridging movement between the piano and drums.

By Lance Reese

“We’re going to start off with a little Chaos Rag – that’s a good term for it –CHAOS RAAAGGG,” Cockaphonics frontman Raymond Malstead, who goes by Rayko on stage, muses into the microphone.

Two hours earlier the clackety-clack of his diesel truck filled the air as he backed a horse trailer up to the front of Bearded Monkey Music. The trailer is filled with precious cargo, his 100-year-old upright grand piano. Drummer Dan Koenig emerged from the passenger seat holding a single mannequin arm, a Swisher Sweet held between its plastic fingers. He casually smoked the cigar, letting the arm swing down and rest at his side between puffs, and launched into a story. “I was driving home last week, and I see someone had just driven their car into the Yakima

River,” he said with both casualness and excitement. He could easily be talking about a really good sandwich he’d just had for lunch. “So anyway, I pulled over and jumped in, pulled them out of the car and to the shore.” Dan then went about his business smoking, talking and unloading gear.

“La-da da da la-da dada,” croons Rayko as he pounds the piano keys. Like a gypsy caravan pretending to be more drunk than they are, his fingers slide and stagger then quickly snap back to rhythm and precision as the drums slam in with a rat ta-ta – tat tat.

Chaos Rag, the Pirate Waltz, and the melodic Vaudeville take you on a journey; a drunken saloon nightmare. Ray rises from his bench, both hands hard onto the keys, his court jester black and white face encouraging the crowd to sing along, dance and make noise.

Eighteen months and one pandemic later, The Cockaphonics are preparing for

Meanwhile Ray is living his dream. No need for the trailer and the archaic upright tonight. The venue’s Steinway Grand is worthy of a gypsy heist, tonight more than content to bang the keys off the harp, letting them ring against the restored cathedral’s domed ceiling.

Then it begins. The audience isn’t sure at first. Where’s the groove? Where’s the singer? But then it hits them, they find that rhythm, that swoony sway in the chaos that feeds Ray’s soul. The tit – tit – rattatt tat on the drums, the horn over the top. Ray has leapt from the stage to distribute kazoos to the crowd, now blaring along to a tornado of piano, drums, and horn. Like moths drawn to a flame, they leave their seats and come down front to dance. The band picks up speed. The crowd is theirs, the music is theirs and on this stage the world could be theirs.

The Cockaphonics could be Greek mythologies’ lost creature, the drunken cousin to the phoenix rising from the ashes of Ray’s previous band, Jipsea Party. Instead of the phoenix rising in a majestic fiery

rebirth, The Cockaphonics is the brooding still birth of discord; the sound of Ray sulking alone on the piano. It was Dan’s idea to add drums, something Ray gave no chance of success. Dan proved him wrong. With the addition of drums, Cockaphonics was truly born. For a while the art of BEING Cockaphonics was as important as CREATING MUSIC as Cockaphonics. Both Ray and Dan possess an arthouse style. Enlisting top artists from the area to produce logos and merchandise took center stage. Buy a Cockaphonics shirt, take a picture wearing it, and Ray will put it online with a public shout out thanking you. Dan has a custom guitar strap he received as a gift. No guitars in Cockaphonics? No problem. He wears it during other gigs when he slings his axe.

With Chris on board the music and performance take center stage. Dan and Chris live in Yakima, Ray in Wenatchee. They take turns driving to practice every week, alternating each others’ home cities, and that effort shows.

For the longest time unless one experienced Cockaphonics live, it was hard to hear their music. This is rapidly changing as they are actively recording. They just released their first music video, Holiday Ska. Sung by Dan, it’s the one song they currently have with actual lyrics. It’s a fantastic video to watch, combining a day’s worth of footage featuring freak show stunt performers. The band smashes pianos, concrete blocks and even each other before playing a flaming piano bonfire as the sun sets.

So much music has become formulamatic, so predictable. The Cockaphonics are a refreshing respite, defining what live music should be; a gypsy party stumbled upon in the woods. With upcoming shows, including Yakima’s Beardfest on October 16th, there’s plenty of opportunities to see them soon, and with their dedication, many performances to look forward to in the future.

About Lance Reese ~ Although he looks like a disheveled homeless man, Lance owns and operates Bearded Monkey, a small music recording venue, guitar shop and bike shop in Yakima, Washington.

10/7 (THU) 5-9pm Ethan Starkey at The Old Barn Drinkery. Admission: FREE Doors open at 5pm music starts at 6pm

10/9 (SAT) 1-6pm Big Chill Cider and Harvestfest at Pybus Market. Celebrate the Harvest with this exciting tasting event.

10/15 (FRI) 3-9pm Wenatchee Valley Barrel & Keg Festival 2021 at Bianchi Vineyards. Local Wine, Cider, Beer, Food Trucks and Live Music. Featuring Bianchi Vineyards, Martin-Scott Winery and Union Hill Cider Co.

10/16 (SAT) 10am Fall Fest 2021 at Hard Hat Winery. Shop from Local Artisans and Women in Business while sipping on Warm Drinks and listening to Live Music.

11/1 (MON) 4-6pm Wenatchee Museum’s Day of the Dead DRIVE-THRU celebration! Take home fun family craft activities, enjoy food and drinks while watching local mariachi and folklorico groups perform.

Wanna plug your kickass event? Send it our way at thecometmagazine@gmail.com

Almost home: Nina Vichayapai & Natalie Dotzauer

This October Gallery One in Ellensburg welcomes two artists whose works explore the themes of domesticity and home. Nina Vichayapai uses fabric as a language to reveal how surroundings embody personal and social histories. From the intimate privacy of homes to the ambiguity of wild landscapes, she explores physical spaces as expressions of the people who have shaped them. Using textiles associated with domestic interiors, her work addresses the important role of homemaking in establishing belonging within the American landscape for the many underrepresented who have been part of it.

Natalie Dotzauer creates sculptural objects, or fragments of them, which trigger the senses and thoughts of nostalgia. A recipe, a smell, a sound, or a roof line can act as relics, or talismans of memories, triggering the senses and conjuring the delight of play. Some of the strongest moments in her life are not just pure joy or sadness; they are a wild combination of bliss and fear, sweetness, and sorrow. Her works aim to hold onto the places of these moments, visit them like monuments and hold them like relics.

Also featured in the Eveleth Green Gallery is Darwin Davis’ whismical sculptures. And in the Hallway Gallery Patty Bury’s “Waxing & Waning” will be on exhibit.

First Friday opening October 1 and the show runs through October.

Darwin Davis Patty Bury

Natalie Dotzauer

Nina Vichayapai

Featuring “Crumbs” by Mery Smith

many ghosts

When I see him again, I will be somewhere in between the relief of knowing he is safe and the inextricable desire to finish him once and for all.

He is a thousand deaths and many ghosts.

Eulogy

I couldn’t save you from their generosity. You were laid to rest at last in new boots and that cleaned-up look. Buried under all that kindness.

Henry Stinson: Toys in the attic, and other curiosities

BY RON EVANS

MAC at Wenatchee Valley College is opening its doors for the first time since the pandemic closures. And they are coming back with a vibrant exhibit by local painter Henry Stinson. Robots, pinups, and all things retro-future and spacey. Stinson’s work pairs the feel of Golden Era comic books and old pulp fiction magazines with a painterly, qualified fine art touch. His brush strokes are bold and purposeful, giving his paintings a curious blend of looseness, movement and realism. His canvases are often quite large which adds to their impact and the high-reaching walls at the MAC are perfectly suited for exhibiting Stinson’s work.

Stinson is currently represented by The Bonner David Galleries in Scottsdale, Arizona and New York and Pairings Fine Art in Colfax, Washington. He is now teaching figure drawing at WVC, and working on getting his studio up and running. “I’m living the dream.” Stinson says.

“The work in the show ranges from 2004 to present day. The show is comprised of paintings that I still like (if I don’t like them I destroy them) and have in my possession for a time. The subject matter ranges from space/science fiction, mythology, roller derby, spiritual, to objects I have a connection with.”

ARTIST STATS:

Favorite Movie: Tough to narrow it down to one, I’m terrible at following rules and directions. Blade Runner, Amelie, Seven Samurai, and Super 8.

Favorite Artist: Joaquin Sorolla and Filipp Malyavin for the dead artists. Suhas Bhujbal and William Wray for the living artists.

Favorite Bands: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Radiohead, Robert Johnson and Lead Belly.

Favorite book: The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, Dune, the Harry Potter series, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series.

Favorite quote: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end…with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality…” James Stockdale

Dream collaboration: Tough one, I’m an INFP. I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.

Item I can’t live without: My Hughes easel, I love it! I purchased it back in 1999-2000ish, it cost me two thousand then and to replace it now would be double that amount. I’ve added custom upgrades to it to set it above the rest.

Favorite destination: A coffee shop where I can work in my sketchbook.

Henry Stinson: Toys in the attic, and other curiosities October 1--December 15

First Friday Opening Reception: Friday, October 1, 5:00—7:00pm

October Horrorscopes: Hello Astro friends. It’s spooky season and what’s more spooky than owning your shadow aspects? This month I’ve put together some words you use to describe yourself vs what they actually mean... enjoy.

Aries - Passionate, motivated, confident...aka obsessive, unrelenting and full of yourself.

Taurus - Calm, patient, loyal... aka lazy, inflexible and jealous af.

Gemini - Inquisitive, clever, versatile... aka annoying, inconsistent and anxious.

Cancer - Highly sensitive, nurturing, deeply feeling...aka big ol’ temperamental cry babies.

Leo - Theatrical, natural born leaders...aka dramatic control freaks.

Virgo - Humble, practical, methodical...aka hyper-critical perfectionists who overthink everything.

Libra - Charming, beautiful, balanced...aka people pleasing, vain, indecisive messes.

Scorpio - Strong, intense, independent...aka abrasive, merciless jerks with trust issues.

Sagittarius - Optimistic, spontaneous, fun...aka blind faith driven, inconsiderate and irresponsible af.

Capricorn - Responsible, stable, hardworking...aka authoritative and controlling with unattainably high expectations.

Aquarius - Forward thinking, fearless, eccentric...aka scatter brained weirdos with no impulse control.

Pisces - Emotional, compassionate, creative...aka moody, co-dependent, melancholy artists.

THE FUNNY PAGES COMICS

AND NOVELTIES

DAD JOKES OF THE MONTH

What is in a ghost’s nose? Boo-gers. | What type of plants do well on all Hallow’s Eve? Bam-BOO!

1) Doctors are warning people about another dangerous fad diet that’s making its rounds on the Internet... A 39 year old American woman ended up with permanent brain damage after she followed this crash diet that requires you to consume large amounts of this:

A) Apple Cider Vinegar

B) Soy Sauce

C) Lawn Seed and Grass

D) Saltwater

2) Over 20 years ago, a movie was made that has some major tie-ins with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Howard The Duck. In fact, we may see a new rendition of the film in the MCU coming up soon based on teasers we’ve seen. While this movie was well known, what’s not well known is that THIS major actor was hired for the lead, and then quit after just three days working on it and had to be recast.

Who was this actor who could have been in the MCU?

A) Chuck Norris

B) Burt Reynolds

C) Robin Williams

D) Jerry Seinfeld

3) A rookie police officer in Scotland recently made the news when she called for help because she believed a DRONE was following her in her car while she drove home from the police station one night. She noticed a bright light in the sky that followed her every turn and seemed to match her speed. Turns out, what she believed to be a drone following her was simply:

A) A vision impairment caused by an oncoming migraine

B) A reflection of her dashboard on her glasses

C) Her antenna ball reflecting moonlight

D) The planet Jupiter, glowing bright in the night sky

4) Earlier this year, a man in Asia was arrested on the grounds of animal cruelty after it was discovered he had trained his dog to do THIS to anyone that knocked on his door:

A) Answer the door with a full length katana in his mouth

B) Poop on their legs

C) BODY slam into them at full speed

D) Drop a brick on them from above

5) Last weekend a teenage gamer that goes by the handle

“CakeAssault” won a huge E-sports video game tournament in Ohio. Moments after defeating his opponent, he gets up out of his chair and enthusiastically celebrates his win. Unfortunately for him, he also did this:

A) Knocked over his $10k gaming setup, effectively destroying it

B) Let out a LOUD fart that his microphone picked up for the crowd to enjoy

C) Punched a sound guy square in the face

D) Dislocated his own shoulder

6) This well known video game holds a world record for “WORST VIDEO GAME dialogue.” What game are we talking about?

A) Destiny

B) Resident Evil

C) The Elder Scrolls V: SKYRIM

D) 1991’s Zero Wing, better known as ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

1 - B) The attending physicians learned that the woman had consumed a liter of soy sauce earlier that day. A one-liter bottle contains approximately 66 grams of sodium. 2 - C) Robin Williams. 3 - D) It was actually just Jupiter. 4 - D) Drop a brick on them from above. 5 - D) Dislocated his own shoulder. 6 - B) Resident Evil.

1. The Omen (1976) 2. Paranormal Activity (2007) 3. Twins Of Evil (1971) 4. Hostel (2005) 5. Friday The 13th Part 3 (1982) 6. Audition (1999) 7. Evil Dead

(1987) 8. Scream (1996) 9. Sleepy Hollow (1999)

The Ring (2003)

(1983)

The Birds (1963)