Reidsville's $30,000 monument to madness

So my hometown of Reidsville, North Carolina has decided to ultimately remove a nationally-recognized statue with more than a hundred years of history, and let it instead be replaced with a horror straight out of H.P. Lovecraft...

"We'll tear your soul apart!"

Brief recap: almost four years ago the Confederate monument in downtown Reidsville was toppled and smashed by an errant driver.  The statue of the Confederate soldier atop the monument fell and broke into pieces.  The damage wasn't irreversible however, and it was determined that the statue and the monument could be repaired and restored to normal.

Reidsville's Confederate Monument
at it's original location

That's how things should have worked in a sane world.

But former dictator mayor James Festerman would have none of that.  On his own, Festerman decreed that the monument would never go back up.  That, despite a huge outpouring of support from the community for the Confederate statue to be repaired and returned to its rightful place.  Hizzoner Festerman declared that the monument was "controversial", nevermind that it had occupied the location sine 1910 and there had been no opposition to it in all of that time.  Festerman was just pulling that out of his [REDACTED].

So the "leadership" of the City of Reidsville had its way, and though the Confederate monument was eventually repaired it was relocated to a nearby cemetery.  In its place at the roundabout on Scales Street the city installed a wretchedly ugly planter and then for the past two years or so it's been a Christmas tree.

And now in place of the Confederate monument, the City of Reidsville has decided it will erect the eldritch abomination that you see above.  Allegedly a water fountain, the creator of which has titled it "The Bud".

More often than not it's being called "The Thing".  Local writers are describing it as something out of the Alien movie franchise (it definitely has that open-egg look going for it).  Or like a prop from a Clive Barker "Hellraiser" film.  I can't print what one person told me it looked like (it's that obscene).  I should recite incantations around it when it goes up and try to summon Cthulhu with it.

Incidentally, this "work of art" which looks like third-rate H.R. Giger is going to cost at least $30,000.

Generations to come should remember it as "Festerman's Fountain": a monument to the most indolent, apathetic, indifferent and tyrannical city government in Reidsville history (and that's saying something).

Seriously: twenty years from now people will be looking at that eyesore and wondering "what the #&@$ were they thinking?!"

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Lovecraft the prophet

"That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return."

-- from The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft

It was 1928 when Howard Phillips Lovecraft published The Call of Cthulhu: his seminal classic which forever altered the nature of horror fiction.

That passage has stuck with me from the first time that I read this short story in the fall of 1996.  And I've thought about it countlessly in the years since.  It has been difficult not to see mankind through the vision of those cultists waiting for when the stars are right: when the incomprehensible horror that is Cthulhu will arise at last from the cyclopean city of R'yleh far below the waters of the Pacific and lay waste to the Earth.  Until then dead Cthulhu waits, dreaming...

Mankind, "free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside."  Men "shouting and killing and revelling in joy."

It has been eighty-five years since Lovecraft wrote those words.  And with each passing year it seems as if humanity... or at least the civilized realm of it... is descending further and further into the barbaric, unrestrained frenzy of pleasure and pain that he described in his tale.

Slaying the innocent for sake of money and convenience.  Government gone lawless.  Men and women descending beneath their nature.  Wars without reason or end.  Conscience and ethics spurned utterly.  Good proclaimed to be evil, and evil to be good.

Perhaps more than we have realized... maybe more than we would like to acknowledge... H.P. Lovecraft had a prescience of far greater clarity than any prophet or futurist of this age.

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Guillermo del Toro is directing a big-budget adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS!

But that's not all: in addition to being directed by del Toro, At The Mountains of Madness is also being produced by James Cameron!

And... wait for it (like anyone wouldn't be expecting it these days)... it's going to be shot in 3-D!

Mash down here to read more about the news that will send waves of joygasm across legions of geeks throughout the world.

Lovecraft's classic tale of ancient horror in the Antarctic, brought to the screen by the director of Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth, with the pioneer of the most groundbreaking 3-D filmmaking of the modern era on board as producer...

I am totally stoked about this. If it's going to be 3-D it might as well be done right and if it's going to be anything at all to do with H.P. Lovecraft well, I can think of nobody better to helm this than Guillermo del Toro.

And let's face it: there are some movies which should be made in 3-D.

And then there are some movies which should not be made in 3-D. And possibly even not made at all...

Truly, Yogi Bear in 3-D is this week's sign that the Apocalypse is upon us.

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