Hey, look, I made this!


( The saga of the huge-ass Nosferatu poster... )

Megan (abinka) sent me this great picture of an alleged 200-year-old vampire hunting kit, with the message, "You know my birthday is just around the corner..."


It was apparently auctioned in Missisippi recently with a winning bid of $14,850 (link). I don't believe for a second that the kit itself is 200 years old — no way someone would assemble these items before Dracula was published and before vampire fandom took root in American culture — but I wonder if someone recently put it together from various 200-year-old items they collected. It's neat in any case! I just hope the sucker who bought it didn't think this thing was brought along on any actual vampire hunting missions. I've always hated those corny vampire hunting kits they make nowadays for goth kids and Buffy fans, but this set here is something I'd love to have on display in my home to show off to guests, and also to have close at hand in case of emergency.

Happy Halloween! Here's my costume for Steve and Trish's party Saturday night. When people asked me what I was exactly, if I suspected they were a geek, I'd tell them I was Manning Belmont, least talented of the Belmonts (that's the Paris Belmonts, formerly Beaumont). I do have a whip on my belt but it's obscured in this picture. And if they weren't a geek, I'd just say I was a vampire hunter who really sucked at his job.

The stakes were expertly made by Ben, by the way, whom I realized later was basically Kris Kristofferson to my Wesley Snipes. He also suggested I put just a tiny drop of blood on the tip of one of the stakes to make it look like one time I'd just barely nicked a vampire, but I ended up not having time/forgetting. Also, man, Halloween really is the one time of year when redeye can actually enhance a picture. I'd thought about buying weird contact lenses again this year and it turns out I didn't have to!

I'll post more pics from the party when I have a better internet connection! One party down, two or three to go...

Speaking of killing monsters, if you haven't known me on LJ for very long it's possible you've never seen Curses!, the Castlevania-style video game I made with my friend Patrick a while back. We never got past building the one-level demo, unfortunately (although I'd love to pick up where we left off someday) but it's still a lot of fun to play if you're in the monster-hunting mood, which, if you're anything like me, when are you not?

An American Vampire in Paris. Photo by Eric Zino.
I wrote about this pic the other day, remember? I was excited to finally receive it from Eric today. I thought I looked kind of concerned here, like I'm looking around for the vampire, but in sending me this picture and some others this afternoon, Eric went on to say...

"By the way, in the photo where you are standing next to the vampire warning sign, it seems as if you are in fact the vampire and therefore there is something so triumphantly defiant about the way you're standing in the shadow at the very edge of the sun's reach."

And that's a lot cooler, so let's go with that. It's kind of insane that this scene happened a few days before — and completely unrelated to — the Drakulah Frantsooski incident. My life doesn't really revolve around vampires all that much, you guys, seriously. By the way, I think the Coca-Cola Corporation owes me like ten bucks for this sweet product placement. With the exchange rate as it is right now, that'll just about buy me another Coke.

Funny how I was just writing a comment earlier mentioning that I used to get clowned about my appearance all the time in the States but it never really happens in France, except occasionally by tourists. I was walking through the park today wearing a skinny black suit and a skinny black shirt and a skinny black tie and skinny black boots, and I passed by two tough-looking Eastern European guys (think: the assassins in the sauna in Eastern Promises), and I learned something. I learned that while I don't know much about Eastern European languages, I do know enough about Eastern European languages to figure out what "Drahkoolah Frantsooskee!" means. (I'll use Russian here but it definitely could've been anything else.)

Thanks, pal, I wish. But you're oh-for-two there.

Lada just returned to Paris after a week in Sarajevo bearing gifts for me! A Bosnian vampire/pulp/gore/sex comic and a Bosnian lollipop with Dracula on it! It's good to have friends who really understand you.

Eric and Bridget visited today! (Eric is my old comic book writing/drawing partner, as I mentioned yesterday). It was a wonderful afternoon; I gave them a long tour through Montmartre and Pigalle, and they bought me lunch at one of my favorite cafes near Place des Abbesses. As we wandered up a quiet street around the corner from Van Gogh's apartment, we noticed that someone had hung a handmade cardboard sign on a lamppost that said "Attention au vampire!" — "Beware of the vampire!" Eric took a picture of me standing next to the sign, and I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be the vampire or a guy looking out for the vampire. They'll send me the pic as soon as they get back to America, and I'll post it so you readers can be the judge. Anyhow, it was incredible to reconnect with these great friends after so many years, and I was very sad to see them go. But it turns out Eric's family here own a bookstore in the Marais, so maybe I should stop by and say hi and tell them I'm the American guy(/vampire) Eric told them about. I'm looking forward to exploring a new bookstore. If only I could read.

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!