On The Appeal Of Tu Cáscara 02: “The Roman”

And that is the beginning of the silent movie masterpiece Tu Cáscara; written, directed and edited by Roman Isaacs, and based on the eighteenth-century novel of perhaps the same name by CS SaintMors. The time of my writing, here in 2024, marks the film’s centenary. It has lately been an interesting phenomenon, that so many...

On The Appeal Of Tu Cáscara 01: “La Madrugada”

We are all in the dark, and we may very well be all alone. And then our view of the darkness is obscured by the imposing view of a vast apartment living room – the dawning of a huge chamber dominated on the farthest side from us by a glass wall, which glowers down over...

“Tu Cáscara” – postcards from the heart of the surface…

Immediately after Tu Cáscara was released in 1924, and then again briefly in the nineteen-nineties, when writer/director/editor Roman Isaacs was momentarily back in vogue, there was a huge demand for information on how to visit the beautiful city at the heart of the film. The fact that the city of Tu Cáscara was clearly fictional...

“Tu Cáscara” – the word in nature is aposematism…

Evil and elation, murder and memorialising. As Van Gogh argued, to understand blue, you must first understand yellow and orange. The word in nature is aposematism – an organism making itself obvious to predators as a way of signalling that it is poisonous and should not be eaten. You’ve seen it on mushrooms, most notably...

“Tu Cáscara” – the lost masterpiece of Roman Isaacs…

And wonderfully, this is work… I first heard of Roman Isaacs when he cropped up in a filthy anecdote told by Saoirse Camns in her horrifying memoir. There they are in the Greenwich Village bookstore, Découpé…It is the early seventies and they are discussing the morality of defacing those books of philosophy with which they...

Patti Smith: “it is not mere envy but a delusional quickening of the blood…”

What a drug this little book is; to inbibe it is to find oneself presuming his process. I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself. It is not mere envy but a delusional quickening of the blood… Patti Smith...

Yes! Always!

A man reaches the ripe old age of too-old, and he has the right to look at himself in the mirror and recognise that he finally looks like himself, he has become, he has reached his advent. And yet I just looked in the mirror… And I looked like Orson Welles! And not blazing young...

Trueloves Hide: “the Circus is in town…”

Ms Araceli Nath comes to Trueloves Hall...Trueloves Hide - Chapter Five: "The Prodigal Butcher" Araceli Nath shuddered up the shriven high street towards the gates to Trueloves Hall, coat pulled tight against both the evening’s storm and the sudden mad passage of time. As Araceli passed the bric-a-brac store, Penny Fledge’s words came back to...

Glasgow’s Crocodile…

The Strange Story of Sir Tristan Farquhar and the Kelvinside Kelpie… My friend and I were walking down the river, threading through Glasgow on our way to TARDIS’s, book fairs, murder mansions and rugby games, when she stopped and scampered over to a plaque… I think it’s worth quoting in full… In June 1821, rumours...

“The Terror” by Arthur Machen

I just read this passage, from Machen’s story “The Terror” - written around 1916 and grafting the modern dreadful ravages of World War I to the ancient awful horrors of the unseen world - and it struck me as transcending both those mighty nightmares to confront us in our comfortably numb 21st Century butcher shops...