Afterlife Guaranteed

The surrealist poets were really onto something. Especially Nanos Valaoritis who was born back in 1921 in my mother’s town, Lausanne. He lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for a while and that is where I became acquainted with him. He’s one of Greece’s most...

Anime Spirit

Chihiro is my favorite hero. In preparation for all-day-anime at WonderCon, I’m recommending that anyone who hasn’t seen Spirited Away (in English), Hayao Miyazaki’s fantastic film (in Japanese), watch it. Chihiro, a crabby ten-year-old girl, manages to save humans and...

What’s in a Zombi...

“On her tray was a single tall blue drink. I peered through the crowd in the direction that she’d pointed a skeletal thumb and saw the guy she was talking about looking back over his shoulder at me with a big grin on his face. One of his front teeth was missing, a little black door...

White Zombie: The Movie

Ah, Béla, Béla from Lugos—the Hungarian actor from a little town outside the western border of Transylvania, who made a big splash in Hollywood as Count Dracula in the 1931 movie, starred as Murder Legendre, the Haitian voodoo master in control of a crew of zombies, in White Zombie the...

4. Pachinko Palace (3)

It was a dance, a tango over ice in a midnight-blue sea. In this, as in many things, Ryu was an artist, his satisfaction apparent in the performance of the act. Ryu used various methods to take his partners to the very brink of annihilation and drown them in sweltering salvation. “Ryu,...