I ordered Marjorie some fancy-schmancy shoes from England a few weeks ago, and they're a bit late getting here, so when we received a note in our mailbox telling us we had a package to pick up at La Poste, she was delighted!

Man is she ever going to be a lot less delighted when she gets home from work and finds out it's just a bunch of Halloween stuff from Calamity Jon (calamityjon) and Kate (superdaintykate)! Haha! No, hey, she's going to flip over this stuff too.


Since I was expecting to receive the shoes, imagine my confusion at the post office when the guy handed me a box adorned with Calamity Jon artwork! Those footnotes read "Belated" and "Sucker." The nerve of those shoe people!

( What's in the baaaahx... )

I was Googling for something last night about legends of monsters in France and accidentally ran across these beautifully designed monster stamps! (Hey, that rhymed!)

Man, I can't stop looking at these things. I had the same reaction that the guy who wrote the blog entry asked: Who the heck is that mustachioed gentleman representing Brittany? (Edit: Turns out it's Bluebeard! Check out the picture in that Wikipedia link and there's no doubt. I didn't know Bluebeard was inspired by Gilles de Raies and other real-life jerks in Brittany! Neat!)

Oh man, it's getting cool and breezy and I'm in a serious Halloween kind of mood. I've been watching horror movies non-stop for the last few days and freaking myself out with lots of Googled ghost stories. Which leads me to a question...

Do you have any good urban legends or ghost stories from the area where you live? I mean stuff that's really just local, that most other folks wouldn't hear about on a national or international level. Like, I'm from New Jersey, so of course we have the Jersey Devil, but I think just about anyone in America who's interested in urban legends and/or monsters has heard of the Jersey Devil. I'd love to hear about your urban legends and ghost stories that come from just your neck of the woods; your state, or your town, or even just your school or your group of friends.

I grew up in a small town called Sicklerville, New Jersey, and the neighboring town of Atco has the Atco Ghost, who's pretty well known among young folks in the area. When I was a kid I was totally spooked by the story of the Acto Ghost, and the legend seemed so tiny and obscure, but nowadays the ghost is so popular it's got its own website, for pete's sake. You can read lots about it there; when I was a kid, the idea was basically that you had to drive out to this dark, spooky road at midnight, pull over and kill the engine and headlights, and the ghost of a little kid would chase his ghostly ball out into the road in front of you! I went to look for the ghost with friends twice back in the day, but we never saw anything.

What's great is, along with the legend of the Atco Ghost, kids in my school also had other stories about other strange things that happened along that same stretch of rural road. A lot of kids said, "Of course the Atco Ghost is bullshit, but what you really have to be careful of is..." either A) the evil inbred redneck families who live along that stretch of road, who hate the kids who come out to see the ghost, so they shoot them with shotguns, or B) the huge secret group of Satan worshippers who hold their rituals in the woods out there, who capture kids who're looking for the ghost and burn them on their big bonfire out in the woods, surrounded by dozens of hooded cultists chanting. Kids said you could find all kinds of weird stuff in that area, even during the daytime; beheaded goats, blood splatters, chickens nailed to trees, a giant pentagram scratched into the ground around the remnants of a fire, et cetera.

One girl also told me that a different road nearby has a different ghost; an old man who hangs himself every night at midnight from a big branch right over the road; you have to drive under the branch at just the right instant to see him swing down over your car.

My girlfriend Marjorie told me about a few fantastic legends on La Reunion, the French island in the Indian Ocean where she grew up. My absolute favorite is L'Homme Coq — the Rooster Man! He's half-man, half rooster, but rather than looking like some sort of anthropomorphic rooster-human hybrid as you might expect, he's actually split down the middle; all rooster on one side of his body and all human on the other! His deal is that he hides in the school bathroom and, like, kills you! Holy shit!

Another more generic one she told me was about from La Reunion was the story of a guy who picked up a young lady who was hitchhiking, and they ended up going dancing at a club together (as one typically does with hitchhikers). The guy noticed that the other people on the dancefloor were staring at his companion pretty strangely, looking down near the floor. He looked down and saw that there were no feet coming out from the bottom of her dress; she was floating! She then disappeared, and the club had to close down permanently because everyone was too scared to go there anymore. The Creole folks who live on La Reunion are said to be really superstitious, and I was surprised to learn later that this story is allegedly about a real, specific club! Neat! But I also suspect this same story probably exists in a lot of different places all over the world; there are certainly a million different variations of the Phantom Hitchhiker, although I'd never heard this exact one before. Oh yeah, that reminds me, while I was on La Reunion, Marjorie's dad also told me about La Dame Blanche, the White Lady, a ghostly woman who'd been spotted in the middle of the road by several different people.

I can't get enough of this stuff, and oddly it seems like France doesn't have much along these lines. Not in Paris anyway; maybe I have to try out in the countryside. You'd think in a country as old as this, there'd be a lot of ghost stories all over the place, especially in the cities, with all the executions, wars, assassinations, etc. over the years. Like in England, for example, there are zillions of ghost stories there! But I've never heard a single one while living in France. I'll keep looking. In the meantime, tell me yours!

TOP 10 UGLY FISHES:

AND THOSE WERE THE TOP 10 UGLY FISHES.

(Also perhaps the top 1 ugly musics.)

I was rewarded for getting up early to vote yesterday morning by finding this awesome jack o'lantern right down the street from the polls.


Pennsylvania kicked more ass for Obama than I'd had the audacity to hope. Which means... my trip was a waste of time! I could've just not voted! Ha. Okay, I'm going back to Paris this evening. See you folks next time.

October has got me thinking about Halloween, and Halloween has got me thinking about monsters, and monsters have got me thinking about werewolves, who've been my favorite monster since I was a little kid. I was just rereading the Wikipedia entry on the Beast of Gévaudan (which I'm sure you already know all about if you care about werewolves and wolf-type monsters like I do, and/or if you've seen Brotherhood of the Wolf), thinking about taking a Halloween trip to the area, nowadays known as Lozère, to chase the legend a little bit. And then something else caught my eye at the end of the article, in the See Also section:

Wolves of Paris
The Wolves of Paris were a man-eating wolf pack that entered Paris during the winter of 1450 through breaches in the city walls, killing forty people. A wolf named Courtaud, or "Bobtail", was the leader of the pack. Eventually the wolves were destroyed when Parisians, furious at the depredations, lured Courtaud and his pack into the heart of the city, where they were stoned and speared to death before the gates of Notre Dame Cathedral.

Man! Incredible. I really picked the wrong century to move to Paris.

I'll get the Belgium photos out of the way quickly here because A) I didn't take many, as we were only in Belgium for a couple short days with lots of uneventful driving from town to town, and B) I'm very excited to get to the Berlin photos afterward!

( Pitchers... )

GOD IN HEAVEN, THOSE EYES, THOSE EYES



Thanks(?), okaree.

Wow! I almost never watch French television (other than VH1, which doesn't count because it's mostly American videos), so I'm not familiar with hardly any French programs at all. Early this morning I happened to catch the beginning of a kids' show called Chasseurs de Dragons (Dragon Hunters). The beautiful art/animation style caught my eye immediately, and then two seconds later my ears said GOODNESS GRACIOUS IS THAT THE CURE????

And it was!

I have no explanation! It's best not to question these things.

If I had a time machine and a date, I'd take it and her to le Café de L'Enfer.



I first heard of this place a few years ago when I was living in Philadelphia with Ben and he knocked on my bedroom door one evening to show me the below photo in the latest National Geographic. (I just found the writeup in their website archives here.) It's good to have friends who know what you like.


Why, just look at those old-timey fools enjoying a drink in Hell. What I wouldn't give to hang out there. The café was in Montmartre and I had no idea at the time I'd end up living here just a few years later; I'm 99% sure the place was right on the Boulevard de Clichy (edit: it was), which is about fifty paces from my front door. I certainly wish it were still there (and everyone still dressed like that).

Here are some other images I've found from the around the web...





Some joker apparently got the idea to open up another café called Le Ciel (heaven) nextdoor. Tell me, which one looks like more fun to you?



Lastly, here's an amazing photo a friend of mine gave me that I still need to get a frame for. It's beautiful; about 8.5" x 11".

When my friend Maura visited a few months ago, she and Alexis got into a spectacularly bizarre conversation about reanimating the deer head in our bathroom and attaching it to this small bench with a leopard-print cover that lives in our living room, and using the deer's three severed hooves (which are towel hooks in the bathroom; no one knows where the fourth one is) for feet. A few weeks later I was very ill and running an insane fever and felt the need to draw the thing...



Alexis went on and on about how angry the creature would be after being brought back to life in such a hideous and undignified form, and he acted it out for us at length. Imagine Bambi here with a gravelly French accent, yelling, "What have you done to me?! Why did you do ziss?! I hate you! I hate you!" Yeah.

When I'm staying at Steve and Trish's place in Collingswood and working in Philly, every day I've gotta take the PATCO High-Speedline, which is basically a small commuter train. (Is it a small train for commuters, or a train for small commuters? It is both of these things.) Sometime while I was over in France, the Collingswood station inexplicably got decorated with these horrifying giant plastic microorganisms, with no sign anywhere (that I could find) explaining what they are or why they're there. Now, I've always been a little bit germ-phobic, and while these images themselves don't freak me out at all, they do remind me every single day that every surface in the universe is teeming with hideous microscopic abominations that want to wriggle their way inside me and kill me slowly and agonizingly. I've concluded that these sculptures-or-what-have-you represent the various types of bacteria and viruses and parasites that live on every filthy, plague-ridden surface of the train station:  

Handrail germ, payphone germ

Door handle germ

 

Escalator railing germ

Bench germ, floor germ

Change machine germ, turnstile germ

 

Person-sitting-next-to-you germ

Unidentified germ, troubled commuter

One fine summer evening in Philadelphia, probably around July of 2007, Steve and I were walking down Broad Street and talking about monsters, which is seriously just about the only thing we ever talk about. We were talking specifically about zombies this time, and the main topic of the conversation was how most zombie movies start out normal and quiet, and then when the zombie menace first becomes apparent to the audience, it's not yet apparent to the extras in the movie, so you've invariably got some poor slob who sees a guy limping/staggering and says, "Gee, mister, are you okay?" and approaches him to help him, and of course the zombie turns and reveals his rotting face and proceeds to eat the guy's brains out. Steve and I were talking about how, as jaded horror film fans, we would never be so foolish, and when the zombie apocalypse finally happens, we'd be ready; we'd be able to recognize that first zombie for what it was, from a distance, well before all hell breaks loose, and immediately formulate a plan to get to safety in plenty of time. There's no way we'd be those suckers in the beginning of the movie.

The next part of the story is almost too good to be true. We'd moved over to 15th Street so Steve could go to this little mini-mart near Spruce Street in order to use the ATM. As we walked and talked (we'd moved on from zombies to some other topic by this point, probably werewolves), we were suddenly slowed down considerably, stuck behind a tall, old, shabbily-dressed man who was walking at a snail's pace and somehow taking up the whole sidewalk. He was trudging along with some difficulty, with a sort of twitching motion to his gait, and holding his shoulders at odd angles, all of this probably due to some malady, or maybe just due to being really, really old. We weren't in a hurry, so we slowed down and strolled along behind the guy for a minute, continuing our conversation about whatever. But then Steve suddenly interrupted himself and very quietly said to me, trying to sound casual, "Uh, is this, err, do you think this is that situation we were talking about a minute ago?" And then we were both like HOLY SHIT. We continued to pace the guy, but backed off a little and watched him very carefully as we walked. Finally we were nearing the mini-mart and I figured we'd part ways with the guy there, but no! He turned and went into the mini-mart ahead of us! I asked Steve if he was still going to go in to use the ATM. He said yes, but his trepidation was tangible. I told him he was insane and that there was no way in hell I was going in there. So I waited out front and kept an eye on the big glass panes of the storefront, but the store was crowded with people and cluttered with big displays of merchandise, and I lost sight of both Steve and the maybe-zombie. I watched and waited, expecting to see huge splatters of blood appear on the glass and panicked people smashing their faces and bodies against the windows, trying to flee like wild animals. I hated the idea of having to kill Steve once he was infected, but I knew he'd want me to.

A very, very long minute passed, and I was startled by my phone vibrating in my pocket. It was a text message from Steve, from inside the store! I anxiously flipped open the clamshell and read the message:

"do they like oreos?"

I just whipped up a new illustration for the monstermanual community; calamityjon pitched the swell idea of everyone drawing Krampusse for Christmas! I drew Père Fouettard (sort of St. Nicholas' evil counterpart in France) on his trusty Krampusaurus Rex.


Click for more bigger!

The lines are pretty rough and the coloring is all willy-nilly, but I only gave myself two and half hours for the thing and I wanted it to look fun and ridiculous rather than look like I was going for any kind of serious illustration. The original is about 13"x10", and I drew it with a Pigma Graphic Pen 1 (thanks, those of you who helped me restock!) and a Pigma Micron 08.

HA HA HA OH MAN, calamityjon just posted this incredible drawing of yours truly as a terrible monster over in the monstermanual community. Beautiful.



This all started with an e-mail from Jon yesterday asking, "Hey man, you got any good closeup photos of your tattoo handy? (Y'want any? No, wait, I don't think that works here ...)"

Saturday night: dinner with the director and the puppet maker. Sunday night: dinner with the illustrator and the composer. I could spend all my time in Philadelphia hobnobbing with the beautiful artistocracy and never tire of it. It's good to have a thousand reminders that I should be making art instead of reminiscing about making art. Yesterday I got my favorite guitar (a beautiful jumbo-body blonde acoustic) out of storage after two and a half years away from it, and I'm now enjoying typing with newly-bruised fingertips; I hereby vow I'll have my chops back in two weeks, tops. I also bought a little sketchbook and some pens, and there's a virtual army of monsters that's been amassing in my brain for the past several months now, heretofore trapped in there with no means by which to march forth into the world. They're coming for you...

I haven't done a stuff-I-did-over-the-weekend post in years. Because in France, I didn't really have weekends; most of my friends and I were on irregular schedules and we just did stuff whenever. So this last weekend was sort of my first actual weekend in a long time.

Friday morning I took the Chinatown bus down to Philly. Five minutes after my arrival, I heard somebody behind me say, "Hey, it's Manning Krull!" I turned around and saw a lady I'd never met before, but whom I vaguely recognized as a 100x100-pixel LiveJournal usericon. It was phedrang! What a great way to start my visit to Philly.

I went to my old job for the afternoon to say hi to everybody and try to solicit some freelance projects, then spent the evening with Ben. We got bored and drove to Ocean City, and we walked up and down the quiet, empty, gloomy boardwalk. It was awesome. We saw some sort of big animal running along the darkened beach at an alarming speed, and it must have been a big dog, but it sure didn't look like it. Too fast to be a dog, too small to be Cthulhu.

I slept over Ben's place, I forget what I did Saturday afternoon, and then Saturday night Steve and I went to Exhumed Films and watched two horrible old movies: Grizzly and Day of the Animals. In the former, a giant grizzly bear (represented onscreen by only its giant fake paw most of the time, due to budget restraints) knocks a horse's head clean off with one swat. When the filmmakers wanted to show more than just the bear's paw, they had to film a real bear and just pretend it was giant-sized. When they just showed the bears paws walking along the ground, it was a black bear, and when they showed the bear standing up, it was a light brown grizzly bear.

Day of the Animals should have been called Day of Leslie Nielsen, because he eventually succumbs to the same "mutant virus" that's making all the animals kill people, and he subsequently goes crazy and murders some kid by stabbing him with a stick, and then he tries to bang the kid's girlfriend. He also hollers a lot. Then he wrestles a grizzly bear and loses.

Afterwards, I crashed at Steve and Trish's house in Jersey, and then Sunday afternoon Steve took me to a Shao-Lin kung fu show in Philly as a belated birthday present. It was insane. Besides all the crazy weapons demonstrations and choreographed fighting, there were all sorts of preposterous feats of endurance, like one guy who, no lie, took these little cables with hooks on the end, stuck the non-hook ends into his eyes (like, under his eyelids, I presume) and then attached the hooks to two buckets of water and picked them up. By his eyes. Another dude, you're not even going to believe this, took off his belt, stuck his hands down his pants and tied his belt around his junk (they actually brought up some poor guy from the audience to look down the dude's pants and confirm that, yes, the belt is tied securely around his junk) and then he picked up a giant bucket of water using just his junk. How any of this helps defend the temple from invaders is beyond me.

Steve and I were two of maybe ten non-Chinese people in a sold-out auditorium of about 400 seats. Steve actually got called up to help with another stunt where the youngest member of the troupe, a kid of about twelve, laid down and had a plastic bowl smooshed onto his stomach like a big suction cup, and then Steve and one or two other monks picked up the kid by the bowl. Oh yeah, and another guy threw a needle through a pane of glass to pop a balloon on the other side. And then some guy stood on his head and jumped up a little set of stairs, with just his head. Man.

So, monsters on the beach on a cold November night, bad late night horror movies festivals, and kung fu guys picking shit up by their eyes and/or cocks. Help me remember here — is this what America is like every weekend?

The second part of my Vienna photo gallery is up: The Austrian Folklore Museum. This is some really good stuff.



I've also created a trip index that will show all of the updates for photo galleries of this particular big trip.

I don't usually post trip photos out of order, but I've been dying to post my photos from Dracula's real-ass Castle near Arefu, in the Transylvania region of Romania. So they're up now! Go look!

The castle was just one part in the middle of a big trip through Switzerland, Austria, Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia. (Not to mention I still haven't posted my photos from the Bosnia/Croatia/Montenegro trip last summer). But I've been dying to get these castle photos online asap; I was hoping to have them up before Halloween, but there just hasn't been time, with moving and everything.

Perhaps coincidentally, my LiveJournal userpic that I'd been using as my default for over a year (a picture of me at Buda Castle in Budapest) suddenly just broke on LJ's server a couple days ago, and it hasn't come back; it just turned into a red X while my other userpics stayed fine. If that's not a sure sign of being cursed, I don't know what is. Is that like the information age version of not appearing in a mirror? Not appearing in a jpg? For now, I've replaced it with a picture of me in a tunnel underneath Sarajevo that was used during the war in the 90s to sneak food and supplies into the city while the Serbs had the valley surrounded. Boy do I have a lot of stories I haven't told yet. I really look forward to catching up on all that stuff. But first thing's first. Go look at Dracula's Castle!

I have a huge new project to unveil! It's the demo of an online action/horror game I'm making with zombiepatrick, called Curses!



( Lots more info... )