Tom Baker

The Wild West was painted, for me, in old-time Technicolor strips of

Against the fallen snow, an incarnation of beauty stands tall. The hissing of death, and the muted rounds of music make to ascend, like a risen ghost, the trembling, the cherished form. Wounds of scarlet and black erupt across the surface of the superb skin. All the proper colors of life darken and deepen, clear and break free, circling about as the vision is constructed.

Urban legends circulate at work, on bulletin boards, and across the internet, in our modern age, via "creepy pasta" postings. ALL of them, some argue, are horror stories, whether or not they make us laugh, cringe, shriek, giggle or shudder in fright. After all, their timeless, anonymous "It Could Happen to You" quality makes us feel, indeed, "It Could Happen to ME!" And so it could, Dear Reader, IF, indeed, any of these stories had a basis in fact. (Some might, but that is another topic.)

At the Smithsonian, for some reason, the Joseph Carey Merrick display, which is a huge, fuzzy, coconut globe at the end of a pole, is draped in a cloak, and a HUGE yachting cap.--NONE of which is... "Original Elephant Man Wear."

The film Poison (1991) by Todd Haynes has been a personal favorite for over a decade. Based loosely on writings by Jean Genet, the French criminal championed by the Parisian literati until his release (from a barbarously long sentence handed to him for being an incorrigible thief) saw him catapulted into the world of belles lettres (an extraordinarily gifted outsider, a reprobate that Jean-Paul Sartre referred to as being "rotten with genius"); the film is considered a landmark in "queer cinema." It is, indeed, a remarkable, if somewhat puzzling at times, piece of art.

(There is a place in New York City,