Month: July 2019

In a Dream of Strange Cities, Part 3: “Parabolica”

We all stood just inside the door of the long-closed sanctum. Lady Domine took a few steps forward from us. She wore a charcoal floral-print tunic, pale red leggings and stylish hiking shoes; she stood with a regally erect posture. But the way her hands cupped her sides with fingers spread, and the manner in which her right foot was set forward, suggested she was better prepared for a spirited game of hide-and-seek than the more serious matter at hand.

I remembered Crutch’s comment when he first told me about our company’s top benefactor. “She’s sort of stuck somewhere between a duchess and a tomboy.

“Well, one thing is for certain,” she said after a pause of a half-minute, “For this sort of undertaking, the old meeting room of a secret society really fits the bill.”

“Didn’t I tell you, it’s perfect!” Crutch spoke with an eagerness that was a bit out of character.

“Oh, don’t you worry, Charlie Crutchfield. At $90,000 we’re definitely going to buy it.”

I nudged Hannah with my left elbow and nodded. She replied with a discreet thumbs-up.

Domine turned to look at me. “Asbestos?”

“Well, there is some, mostly in the basement. But it’s not a very large building.”

Crutch piped in. “The Parabolic Society was never a large fraternity. More like a watering hole for utopian sky-watchers. Have you heard of them?”

She lifted a little crooked smile that lit up her still largely-unlined face. “Not at all. I always rely on you guys in the Ministry of Dark Tourism for my esoteric learning.”

“I doubt that, but thanks” Crutch said and they walked over towards the apse, with its formal arrangement of three chairs.

Hannah turned to me confidentially. “When she says ‘we’re’ going to buy it, should I take it literally to mean all of us? I don’t exactly have twenty-two grand lying around.”

“Don’t worry, that’s her way of being inclusive. She’ll probably take the $90,000 out of her petty cash drawer.”

Lady Domine approached the chairs and lightly patted the larger one in the middle. A light puff of dust rose up, but she took a seat anyway. Then it occurred to me: who would sit on either side, if anyone? The rough idea was a political rally under the guise of a MODT event featuring a re-creation of a 19th century mesmeric performance. I hoped that my late career switch didn’t turn out to be more than I had bargained for.

She leaned forward in the big chair. “Oh, Crutch, I don’t know. What are we supposed to be doing here? Advocating for the partition by having me do parlor tricks? This town is probably crawling with red-caps. It could even get dangerous.”

Crutch turned to look at us and nodded towards the back area. We stepped on bits of shattered tiles, past the apse and into a hallway. I peeked back and Domine had moved off the chair and was peering thru a cracked Palladian window down at the street. I paused with Hannah to look at some parabolic diagrams that remained on the wall. After a moment I suggested she should check out the old member’s lounge and kitchen. When she did, I lingered in the hall.

“the hopheads won’t bother us,” Crutch was saying. “We’ll put up a sign saying ‘Private Event’ and get Ike’s friend Jason to work the door. You remember Jason—about six-foot eight and two fifty, with fists like pile drivers?”

“That must be the gentleman who checked tickets at our ‘Satan’s Skyline’ fiasco last October,” Domine replied. “Let’s limit alcohol sales for this event.”

“Anyway, let’s have a soft opening. We’ll invite maybe 25 of our best customers for free and maybe a few college kids from the town. See how it goes.”

“Do you want to hear a bit of what I’ve been working on”

Hannah had just poked her head out of the kitchen, probably to show me the double dumbwaiter. Rookie enthusiasm. Instead, I motioned her towards me. Once Lady Domine sat back down in the big chair and started speaking, Crutch waved us back into the main room.

“Now let’s spin back down the years to the autumn of our discontent in 2016. When PFF came to power, it was like a little piece of me died. I’m sure many of you felt the same. And when he met his maker, that piece of me was not re-born, it stayed dead. I can only hope to replace it with a new inspirational spirit derived from a wholly new source…”

Her eyes were wide open and stared straight ahead as if into nothing and everything. The effect reminded of the “Glass-Eyed Goddess of Union Mills” whose visage had recently become the MODT emblem.

The good Lady continued. “There is a new righteous power that is forming behind the scenes of everyday life. Anyone with a good heart can tap into it. But we must be careful with it. The retrogressions of this century have been shocking—the vile and needless hatreds, the bloated ignorance, the flagrant racism and the emptiness of forfeited souls that have led to countless brutalities.

“I know the desire for retribution is great with some in this current political vacuum. But we should never resort to violence in any of its forms: physical, economic, mental or whatever else. Instead, we should smite our enemies with the three Ls: Logic, Learning and Love. And the smite shall feel like a kiss.”

Lady Domine leaned back in the chair and rolled her eyes as if to say “who me?” I realized I had just snapped out of a little trance of my own.

“Well, that’s sort of the end of it. I’ll build up to it.”

After a brief silence, Hannah practically slapped her cheek with her right hand. “Omigod, that was amazing! You’ve got to do it. I know I’m new and have no clout… but if we don’t do this event I’m going to die!”

Domine smiled at her, then turned back to Crutch. “I’m still not sure. Why wouldn’t I just start a pro-partition action fund?”

“Because that’s boring and would fizzle out quickly. We’ve already talked about this—sensational gambits and star power is the only thing that’s works now. We’ll hash out the details at the next staff meeting.”

“I’m not really a mesmerist, you know, but I could wing it and see what happens. Soft opening, yes. Or else I won’t do it. Don’t be putting me down for a definite “yes” just yet. No, I have to do it, just look at this country. Can we have drinks later?”

Hannah gave me a side look. “Huh?”
“Don’t worry. You get used to it after a while.”

Crutch took Lady Domine to see the other rooms, Hannah tagged along. I looked out the front window into the town center, where the light was failing. Down below was a stonework mass of once-proud mercantile buildings, their civic ideals mostly forgotten. Beyond that was the triangular common, with its’ patchy lawn and statue of a Union soldier, standing prematurely at ease. A few guys were gathered around a bench at its far side, next to an old pick-up truck with a flag mounted behind the cab. They had bagged drinks and a couple of them were shin-kicking a third, playfully at first but then not so much.

I exhaled uncomfortably. The place with the drinks was only three doors down so I kept quiet and let it pass. But I knew it couldn’t stay that way forever.

This is an excerpt from an in-progress illustrated or graphic novel called The Ministry of Dark Tourism. If interested, follow this blog to get updated or friend me in Facebook, Rick Ouellette.

“Summer Interlude” (1951): Ingmar Bergman’s Silver Cloud with a Black Lining

It’s no big revelation that summertime, that most celebrated of seasons, can often be a contradictory advantage. Sometimes the reasons can be simple: the weather turns stifling, the beaches get too crowded, the traffic backs up for miles and it always seems a little too fleeting. “Summer’s lease has all too short a date,” as Willie Shakespeare put it. And then there is the more existential angst that can come into play. That nagging feeling that there is something missing despite all the fun that was had—a bittersweet feeling stemming from a sense of lost innocence, of elongated school vacations and the promise, even fulfillment, of first love.


Ingmar Bergman’s background in live theater is evident in the “Swan Lake” excerpts and scenes of backstage life.

Early in his film-making career, Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman captured this rueful essence in “Summer Interlude” (translated from “Sommarlek”). This movie centers on a beautiful but detached ballet dancer named Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson). While preparing for a “Swan Lake” dress rehearsal, she receives a package containing the diary of an old flame, sent to her anonymously. When a power failure delays the rehearsal until that evening, Marie, now bundled up against the autumn chill, leaves Stockholm on a ferry to the island of her family’s summer place. This was the scene of the summer romance with the boy in question. In the numerous flashbacks that follow, Nilsson transforms Marie (already world-weary at 28) into a vivacious teenager. A dance prodigy, she has a practice room upstairs in the family manor (her aunt and uncle are the only relations we see) and personal use of a one-room cabin down by the rocky shoreline.


Birger Malmsten as Henrik and Maj-Britt Nilsson as Marie.

It’s on that same ferry some twelve years before that she meets Henrik, a pensive and handsome boy slightly older than herself. Bergman was in his early thirties at the time and young enough to recall the peculiar rapture of young love, as the world soon boils down to Marie and Henrik and his tag-along poodle. The director’s lustrous B&W cinematography aches with a universal nostalgia but with a keen eye to locations well known to him personally. From the glimmering of the water when the sun peeks from behind a cloud, to the dense pine-filled forests looming in the background, to the long-lingering twilights of a far-north summer spent at the 60th parallel, this film is a marvel to behold.

Just as deftly captured is the couple’s fledgling romance (“We’re inside the same bubble,” Marie tells her new beau). Bergman shows the giddy recognition of mutual attraction, the teasing byplay, the long afternoons spent in a bathing suit, and drying out on the rocks while devising the grand declarations of self-serious late adolescence. (Just as easily as Marie states “I’m never going to die,” Henrik confesses to visions of falling into an abyss). These relatable feelings are so finely honed by the two lead actors that when the tragedy we sense coming actually happens, it hits extra hard.

It’s here that the film starts hinting at themes that would later come to dominate Bergman’s work in such arthouse favorites as “Wild Strawberries” and “The Seventh Seal.” These would include the inescapability of the past and questioning the existence of God in an impersonal universe. Back in the present, Marie chances upon her debonair but creepy uncle whose revelation about the diary helps her to leave the island feeling a bit less shackled by her memories and ready to move forward with what is now in front of her.

Although it featured no nudity and only inferences of sex, the sensuous “Summer Interlude” was originally titled “Illicit Interlude in America, playing in slightly shady downtown cinemas before the days of straight-up porn. Otherwise, it became recognized as one of the first major works of a great global director and the first of an informal trilogy with “Summer with Monika” (1953) and “Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). For Bergman himself, it marked the true beginning of of the mastery of his craft. “I suddenly felt that I knew my profession,” he later remarked also noting that it was fun to make it. Like he shows with his two young lovers, there will always be a little magical something in the season where “the days are like pearls and the nights like waking dreams.”
–Rick Ouellette