Belgium - Gothic Festival

For the particulars please visit HERE

The Girl In Hitchcock's Shower

From the author of Zodiac comes The Girl in Hitchcock's Shower, a shockingly true chronicle of the life and times of Marli Renfro, (best known for her role in Psycho as Janet Leigh's nude body double) and a dweeby serial killer named Sonny, whose resemblance to Norman Bates was eerie, to say the least. Set in the seedy Hollywood of the 60s, Marli and Sonny's odd lives would end up crossing in the strangest and most unexpected of ways.

Wonderland In Spring- New York 3/19/2010

Lucifer's Masquerade

The Lucifer's Masquerade is coming on Saturday, October 30th, 2010 to New Orleans!

This special weekend will be held in conjunction with the Memnoch Ressurection Ball on Friday, 

October 29thby the Anne Rice Vampire Lestat Fan Club. 

Discount VIP tickets are only $75 (limited number) and special hotel rates 

available until April 1st, 2010. These prices will go up to $99 after and hotel rates 

will drastically increase. For more info click HERE

Top Halloween Tunes to Freak out Your Eardrums

As you all know, my mom's favorite holiday is halloween. Growing up we had halloween decorations around the house year round. We had a Skeleton that sat on a bench in the front yard and stayed up until after christmas. For christmas, he wore a santa hat. Even today my mom has a skull on top of one of her curio cabinets that is currently wearing pink bunny ears for easter. So all that being said - its never too early to plan for halloween. Here are 9 songs that are good year round, but will serve you well at your next halloween party. I say 9 because the last one is some sort of rap song...

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/10/top-halloween-tunes/

My favorite is I Was a Teenage Warewolf by the Cramps...what's yours?

Emo and goth music to be made illegal in russia

The Russian government is in the process of drafting a law to make emo and goth music illegal.

Last month a parliamentary committee was convened to discuss a draft proposal of the Russian government's Government Strategy In The Sphere Of Spiritual And Ethical Education bill, the details of which were leaked to The Moscow Times. The newspaper subsequently reported that, among other things, the draft bill dubbed the musical movements a "dangerous teen trend" and called for emo and goth websites to be regulated and young people dressing like emos or goths to be banned from entering schools and government buildings.

The newspaper interviewed one of the bill's authors, Igor Ponkin from the Russian Interior Ministry's Public Oversight Council. Ponkin called emo a "social danger" and "a threat to national stability" and said the bill is a reaction to teen suicides such as the tragic death of British teenager Hannah Bond.

"This type of behaviour is a crucial part of emo ideology," said Ponkin. "Of course there are emo teens who just listen to their music. But our actions are not directed at them but rather at those who also hurt themselves, commit suicide and promote those acts."

The Moscow Times also interviewed psychologist Inna Cherkova who said:

"Suicide is not a symptom of emo culture. I work with other teens too, and every group has emotionally troubled kids."

However, the bill is expected to become law in Russia before the end of the year.

Vau De Vire Event!- San Francisco

Friday, March 26, 2010 at 9:00pm

    Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 2:00am

CELLspace 2050 Bryant St, San Francisco


For Tickets click HERE 

Steampunk Rabbit

Steampunk Rabbit ring! I want this!

Woman comes to life during autopsy

Funeral workers in Colombia got a bit of a surprise when a supposedly dead woman they were preparing for burial started breathing and moving.

Surgeons surgery doctors Doctors repeatedly failed to resuscitate the woman before she started breathing again in the funeral home

The woman had been pronounced dead hours earlier at a hospital in Cali, in western Colombia, after she suffered multiple organ failure due to complications related to multiple sclerosis.

After multiple resuscitation attempts had apparently failed, the doctors pronounced the woman dead and sent her to the funeral home.

But as the workers began to apply formaldehyde to her body, she started breathing again and began making movements.

Doctors identified it as a case of 'Lazarus syndrome', an extremely rare phenomenon in which the circulation spontaneously restarts after failed resuscitations.

The woman was returned to the hospital, where she remains in a coma.

* This is a re- post due to html issues

The Gloaming

Directed by Andrew Huang

New Book! The Addams Family- America's Favorite Gothic Family

Addams Family fans! There is a wonderful new book out about America's Favorite Gothic family from Pomegranate Communications entitled The Addams Family: An Evilution.

 If you are anything like me, you watched the T.V. Show The Addams Family faithfully. But did you ever wonder where the Addams Family started?  I did, and  I really enjoyed learning more about this creepy, kooky family, how each character came to be, and the man behind the pencil! There are 10 chapters, one for each main character- including the house, which is a character unto itself! 

“Why can’t you just spank us like the other mommies?”

 If you are expecting to already know all about Morticia, Gomez, Wednesday, Pugsley, Uncle Fester, Thing, Lurch and the extended family because you watched the T.V. show, you will be in for a few surprises. They are even more delightfully morbid than you imagined! And if you were fortunate enough to be familiar with the cartoon series then this book will be an extra treat for you since there are 50 images in this book that are in print for the first time!

A few of the Addams Family cartoon characters had their debut in a 1938 issue of the New Yorker magazine,  but they were not know as the Addams Family at the time.  Their creepy, spooky humor caught on, later moving to television and even the silver screen.

This is a nice book, beautifully printed, interesting and full of pictures (over 200 of Charles Addams illustrations) I have included a few of my favorites here- used with permission. This book would make a great gift as well, so pick one up for yourself and for the darkling in your life. I highly enjoyed it and will covet it for years to come. 

“Just the kind of day that makes you feel good to be alive!”

Here is a little wikihistory on Charles Addams:

Charles Samuel Addams ( January 7, 1912 – September 29, 1988) was an American cartoonist known for his particularly black humor and macabre characters. Some of the recurring characters, who became known as The Addams Family, became the basis for two live-action television series, two cartoon series, three motion pictures, and a play.

His cartoons regularly appeared in The New Yorker, and he also created a syndicated comic strip, Out of This World, which ran in 1956. There are many collections of his work, including Drawn and Quartered(1942) and Monster Rally (1950), the latter with a foreword by John O'Hara. Typical of Addams's work, one cartoon shows two men standing in a room labeled "Patent Attorney." One is pointing a bizarre gun out the window toward the street and saying, "Death ray, fiddlesticks! Why, it doesn't even slow them up!"

“The little dears! They still believe in Santa Claus.”

Dear Dead Days (1959), one of the rarest Addams books, is not a collection of his cartoons (although it reprints a few from previous collections); it is a bizarre scrapbook-like compendium of vintage images (and occasional pieces of text) that appealed to Addams's sense of the grotesque, including Victorian woodcuts, vintage medicine-show advertisements, and a boyhood photograph of Francesco Lentini, who had three legs.

Addams kept a collection of crossbows on the wall of his study and used a little girl's tombstone for a coffee table, but Janet Maslin, in a review of an Addams biography for The New York Times, wrote, "Addams's persona sounds cooked up for the benefit of feature writers ... was at least partly a character contrived for the public eye," noting that one outré publicity photo showed the humorist wearing a suit of armor at home, "but the shelves behind him hold books about painting and antiques, as well as a novel by John Updike."

Addams's popularity is reflected in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest; Cary Grant references Charles Addams in the auction scene. Discovering Eve with Mr. Vandamm and Leonard, he says, "The three of you together. Now that's a picture only Charles Addams could draw." He is also mentioned as "Chas Addams" (how he usually signed his cartoons) in Edward Eager's fantasy novel Knight's Castle.

After his death a cartoon ran depicting his Addams Family standing vigil before his grave while Addams crawled out the other side. A Charles Addams Art Scholarship was founded in 1991.

Addams died September 29, 1988, at St. Clare's Hospital and Health Center in New York City, having suffered a heart attack while parked in his car. An ambulance brought him from his apartment to the hospital, where he died in the emergency room. As he had requested, a wake was held; he had wished to be remembered as a "good cartoonist."

All images © Tee and Charles Addams Foundation / Courtesy Pomegranate Communications.

10 Songs about Alice in Wonderland

The most well known one is White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane. This article has 9 more that you may or may not have known. !

Find the rest here.

US Dept of Zombie Removal

Just a funny pic i found online and thought i'd share...

'Zombies' have free speech rights too, US court rules

WASHINGTON (AFP) – They're said to utter little more than an occasional groan, but zombies -- the blood-drenched monsters of Hollywood "B" movies -- still have a right to free speech, a US court ruled this week.

An appeals court in the northern US city of Minneapolis, Minnesota on Wednesday allowed a group of zombies -- or rather, several protesters costumed as such -- to press ahead with their lawsuit against police who arrested them for disorderly conduct.

The appeals court overturned a lower court in finding that the group of seven "zombies" had been wrongfully detained during a 2006 shopping mall protest against consumerism.

The three-judge panel, by a two-to-one vote, ruled that Minneapolis police lacked probable cause to arrest the demonstrators for disorderly conduct.

At the time of the protest, the plaintiffs were wearing makeup that gave them a "living dead" look: white face powder, fake blood and black circles around their eyes.

They lurched stiff-legged through the halls of the mall urging shoppers to "get your brains here" and "brain cleanup in aisle five."

In various bags, the protesters carried audio equipment including loudspeakers and wireless phone handsets, which police had described as "simulated weapons of mass destruction."

The judicial panel upheld the lower court in dismissing the plaintiffs' claims of "false imprisonment" and "First Amendment retaliation" by Minneapolis police after being put in jail for two nights.

But the appeals court sided with the protesters in ruling that police had no reason to imprison them simply for "dressing as zombies, and walking erratically in downtown Minneapolis," the court decision said.

"An objectively reasonable person would not think probable cause exists under the Minnesota disorderly conduct statue to arrest a group of peaceful people for engaging in an artistic protest by playing music, broadcasting statements (and) dressing as zombies," the appeals court ruled.

The decision allows the protesters to revive their lawsuit against Minneapolis and its police, which according to the Star Tribune newspaper seeks damages of at least 50,000 dollars per person arrested.

Steampunk Orchestral Bugs!

Alice

You're late for Tea!

More about Alice

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (commonly shortened to "Alice in Wonderland") is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.[1] It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures. The tale is filled with allusions to Dodgson's friends. The tale plays with logic in ways that have given the story lasting popularity with adults as well as children. It is considered to be one of the most characteristic examples of the "literary nonsense" genre, and its narrative course and structure have been enormously influential, especially in the fantasy genre.

Lorina Charlotte Liddell (aged 13, born 1849) ("Prima" in the book's prefatory verse)

Alice Pleasance Liddell (aged 10, born 1852) ("Secunda" in the prefatory verse)

Edith Mary Liddell (aged 8, born 1853) ("Tertia" in the prefatory verse).

The three girls were the daughters of Henry George Liddell, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and Dean of Christ Church as well as headmaster of Westminster School. Most of the book's adventures were based on and influenced by people, situations and buildings in Oxford and at Christ Church, e.g., the "Rabbit Hole" which symbolized the actual stairs in the back of the main hall in Christ Church. It is believed that a carving of a griffon and rabbit, as seen in Ripon Cathedral, where Carroll's father was a canon, provided inspiration for the tale.

The journey had started at Folly Bridge near Oxford and ended five miles away in the village of Godstow. To while away time the Reverend Dodgson told the girls a story that, not so coincidentally, featured a bored little girl named Alice who goes looking for an adventure.

The girls loved it, and Alice Liddell asked Dodgson to write it down for her. After a lengthy delay — over two years — he eventually did so and on 26 November 1864 gave Alice the handwritten manuscript ofAlice's Adventures Under Ground, with illustrations by Dodgson himself. Some, including Martin Gardner, speculate there was an earlier version that was destroyed later by Dodgson himself when he printed a more elaborate copy by hand (Gardner, 1965), but there is no known prima facie evidence to support this.

But before Alice received her copy, Dodgson was already preparing it for publication and expanding the 15,500-word original to 27,500 words, most notably adding the episodes about the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Tea-Party.

The Mad Hatter

Goofy, Charming and oh yes. .  quite Mad! The Mad Hatter!

What else about The Mad Hatter?

The Hatter is a fictional character initially encountered at a tea party in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and later again as "Hatta" in the story's sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. He is popularly referred to as the "Mad Hatter", but is never called by this name in Carroll's book—although the Cheshire Cat does warn Alice that he is mad, and the Hatter's eccentric behaviour supports this. Likewise, the chapter in which he first appears, "A Mad Tea-Party", is often called "The Mad Hatter's Tea Party" (despite the fact that it is actually being held at the March Hare's house).

Although the name "Mad Hatter" was undoubtedly inspired by the phrase "as mad as a hatter", there is some uncertainty as to the origins of this phrase. As mercury was used in the process of curing pelts used in some hats, it was impossible for hatters to avoid inhaling the mercury fumes given off during the hatmaking process. Hatters and mill workers often suffered mercury poisoning as residual mercury vapor caused neurological damage including confused speech and distorted vision; hatmaking was the main trade in Stockport, near where Carroll grew up.

The Hatter explains to Alice that he and the March Hare are always having tea because, when he tried to sing for the Queen of Hearts at a celebration of hers, she sentenced him to death for "murdering the time," but he escapes decapitation. Out of anger at this attempted "murder", Time (referred to as a "Him") halts himself in respect to the Hatter, keeping him and the March Hare stuck at 6:00 forever. The tea party, when Alice arrives, is characterized by switching places on the table at any given time, making (along with the March Hare) somewhat short, personal remarks, asking unanswerable riddles and reciting nonsensical poetry, all of which eventually drive Alice away. He appears again as a witness at the Knave of Hearts' trial, where the Queen appears to recognize him as the singer she sentenced to death, and the King also cautions him not to be nervous "or I'll have you executed on the spot."

The Queen of Hearts

"OFF WITH HER HEAD!"

Whom among us has not heard this phrase as bellowed by the Queen of Hearts in the Disney animated version of Alice in Wonderland? Like her, Hate her, the story just would not be the same without her.

A little more about the Queen.

The Queen of Hearts is a character from the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by the writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll. She is a foul-tempered monarch, that Carroll himself pictured as "a blind fury", and who is quick to decree death sentences at the slightest offense. Her most famous line, one which she repeats often, is "Off with their heads!"

The Queen is referred to as a card from a pack of playing cards by Alice, yet somehow she is able to talk and is the ruler of the lands in the story, alongside the King of Hearts. She is often confused with theRed Queen from the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, although the two are very different.

Alice is recommended, by three gardening playing cards (who are painting roses so that they are the right color for the Queen), to drop down on the ground to avoid being confronted by her. She is confused, and having never met the Queen, ignores this advice. When the Queen arrives and asks Alice who is lying on the ground (since the backs of all playing cards look alike), Alice tells her that she does not know. The Queen then becomes frustrated and commands that her head be severed. She is deterred by her comparatively moderate husband by being reminded that Alice is only a child.

Generally, however, as we are told by Carroll:The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said, without even looking round.

One of the Queen's hobbies - besides ordering executions - is croquet, however it is Wonderland croquet, where the balls are live hedgehogs and the mallets are flamingoes. This is presumably with the aim that the birds' blunt beaks should strike, but, as Alice observes, it is complicated by the fact that they keep looking back up at the players- as well as the hedgehogs' tendency to scuttle away without waiting to be hit. The Queen's soldiers act as the arches (or hoops) on the croquet grounds, but have to leave off being arches every time the Queen has an executioner drag away the victim, so that, by the end of the game in the story, the only players that remain are the Queen herself, the King, and Alice.

Despite the frequency of death sentences, it would appear few people are actually beheaded. The King of Hearts quietly pardons many of his subjects when the Queen is not looking (although this did not seem to be the case with The Duchess), and her soldiers humor her but do not carry out her orders. The Gryphon tells Alice that "It's all her fancy: she never executes nobody, you know." Nevertheless, all creatures in Wonderland fear the Queen. In the final chapters, the Queen sentences Alice again (for defending the Knave of Hearts) and she offers an interesting approach towards justice: sentence before verdict.

The White Rabbit

The herald of 'Don't be late' is well known to most of us who grew up on the tale of Alice in Wonderland.  He is after all the catalyst for the story, as it is his rabbit hole that Alice falls into, beginning her adventures.

More on the White Rabbit from Wiki:

The White Rabbit is a fictional character in Lewis Carroll's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. He appears at the very beginning of the book, in chapter one, wearing a waistcoat, and muttering "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" Alice follows him down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Alice encounters him again when he mistakes her for his housemaid Mary Ann and she becomes trapped in his house after growing too large. The Rabbit shows up again in the last few chapters, as a herald-like servant of the King and Queen of Hearts.

In the Disney version of the book, the Rabbit seems to have the most logic out of all the Wonderland characters. Thus, he is often the straight man for their zany antics; when he asks the Dodo for help on getting the "monster" (Alice) out of his house, Dodo's ultimate solution is to burn the house down, to which the White Rabbit is greatly opposed. At the Mad Tea Party, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare try to "fix" his watch, proclaiming it "exactly two days slow". Through various food they put in the watch (butter, tea, jam, and lemon), the two cause it to go mad, and the Hare smashes it with his mallet. The Rabbit was perhaps most famous for the little ditty he sang at the beginning - "I'm late! I'm late! For a very important date! No time to say hello, goodbye! I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!". The Rabbit was voiced by Bill Thompson.

Some believe the rabbit was late for the announcement of the Queen to the royal garden. The panic the rabbit showed was his fear of losing his head. Upon her arrival (where Alice has been helping to paint the roses red) the cards finish their song and the rabbit blows his trumpet (which he had been carrying for most of his lines) royally introducing the king and queen.

Dr. Death

Dr. Jack Kevorkian has been known as "Dr. Death" since at least 1956, when he conducted a study photographing patients' eyes as they died. Results established that blood vessels in the cornea contract and become invisible as the heart stops beating. In a 1958 paper, he suggested that death row inmates be euthanized, and their bodily organs harvested. In 1960, he proposed using condemned prisoners for medical experiments.

In 1989, a quadriplegic, too handicapped to kill himself, publicly asked for assistance, and Dr. Kevorkian began tinkering on a suicide machine. But a different patient -- Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old with Alzheimer's -- was the first to test the device. It worked. Kevorkian then provided services to at least 45 and possibly more satisfied customers.

In 1997, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Americans who want to kill themselves -- but are physically unable to do so -- have no Constitutional right to end their lives. Kevorkian was sentenced to 10-25 years in prison, but was paroled in 2007, in failing health and nearing his own death.