Your complete HorrorgirlProblems October 2017 Calendar
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October 2017 – Guide To A Month Long Halloween Celebration
Strategy: Maximum Halloween-age with minimum spend-age. Ok, October is expensive for us, it’s just a given. But I try my best to not kill my friends’ wallets by choosing the cheaper dates for haunts, etc. Here’s a list of pro-haunts, home haunts, live theater and screenings going on this month.
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Knott’s Scary Farm 2017 – Dark Ride + Pumpkin Eater Killin’ It
The season of haunts is upon us! Got to check out Knott’s Scary Farm last night to kick things off. Here are my top must-do’s:
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New Orleans – Day 2: Lafayette Cemetery No 1 + Pralines + Cafe Du Monde
Our second full day in this town began with a tour of the Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. It was late back at our Air BnB the night before, and we decided to go ahead and book our cemetery tour, because guides are now required thanks to excessive vandalism within the cemetery. We took an Uber from Lakeview to the cemetery and saw people wandering freely in and out of the cemetery gates. Since we were early, starving and un-caffeinated, we walked up a block to Magazine Street and found a Starbucks. Because you know, we like to visit the various Starbucks of the world. It wasn’t exciting but it was much needed breakfast sandwiches and coffee. We headed back to the cemetery gates and waited for our tour to assemble. The famous Commander’s Palace sat silently across the street, in the shade, the sidewalk in front was being hosed down. It looked even more like a scene from a movie with an empty wet sidewalk encasing it. People still wandered in and out of the cemetery freely, unaccompanied. I began to wonder if we had been had. As I later realized, we had not been had, I was just so tired when I did the booking that I booked the wrong cemetery. We had planned to visit Lafayette No 1, but no guide was required. St Louis No 1 is the only cemetery which now requires a guide. Just a heads up for any of you planning a visit. But at least the money for our non-required tour is going towards the preservation of the cemetery. And we did learn some interesting things.
Our tour guide was a sweet little man, he made no qualms about the fact that there would be nothing “spooky” about this tour, just pure historical fact. He volunteers with Save Our Cemeteries and at the National WW II museum. He had a distinctly science teacher vibe – lanky, bespectacled, white New Balances, and a giant khaki safari style hat. He was retired from the medical field which I guess is kind of sort of still in the vein.
The cemetery itself was gorgeous, although it’s hard to not impress us with tombs dating back to the 1800’s. The architecture and the care spent designing the tombs and the statues that accompany them has always been beautiful to me. It’s no Pere Lachaise, but it is absolutely worth a visit. Tons of things have been filmed here, including scenes from Interview with the Vampire. Apparently New Kids on the Block filmed their “Right Stuff” video in the cemetery, which our tour guide neglected to mention. Come on, sir. This is an important historical event! Maybe NKOTB fans were getting too crazy and they had to remove that tidbit from the tour. I’m sure we would have been escorted out after recreating the slow-mo cemetery chase and doing the sweet Right Stuff scissor kick slide dance. And as we were being dragged out, I would have yelled “worth itttt!”
After the tour we wandered out to Magazine Street. It didn’t really seem like our scene, so we hopped a streetcar back to the French Quarter. As we wandered around the streets we came across Vacherie. American Horror Story fans may recognize the restaurant from season 3 during the Witches’ Walk. We recreated it as best we could, without Jessica Lange or a Coven. #Covenofone
Now this is important. Commit this to memory. We inadvertently wandered into the New Orleans School of Cooking. Apparently pralines are the thing here. Apparently pralines are prevalent in New Orleans as a whole. Neither of us had ever had a praline. We snagged a couple as a snack and they were amaze-balls. Granted we had nothing to compare them to, but good is good. Throughout the rest of the trip we tried pralines from all over the city. NONE OF THEM COMPARED. Go. Try them all. Please write and tell me if you disagree or if maybe we managed to miss one. Judging from what we ate, I will say with confidence the New Orleans School of Cooking has the best dang pralines in New Orleans. Maybe in the world, I dunno. They make ’em fresh and bag ’em up just quick enough to keep up with the steady stream of orders. You’ll find this little gem tucked in among some shops next to Jackson Square. They’re sold pre-packaged throughout the city, but nothing beats the warm fresh ones.
Pralines in hand, (and in mouth), we made our way to Cafe du Monde. The place was packed, but the wait was short and the patio was bustling. As we made our way to our table, I noticed the complete abandon with which everyone was enjoying their beignets. Adults and kids alike absolutely covered in what I would later find out, an inescapable dusting of powdered sugar. Their faces, their hands, their pants, their feet. The floor reminded me of one of those BBQ places that throws sawdust and peanut shells on the ground, except for this was all snowy white sugar. There are really only two things on the menu here – beignets and coffee. We ordered both, and a sax man on the street serenaded us as we snacked. As we dug into the beignets, I understood why everyone was covered in powdered sugar. Resistance was futile and getting doused was part of the fun. It was best to just surrender entirely to the pastry and dust off afterwards. A lesson I learned pretty quickly after attempting to wipe a mound of sugar off my lap with a damp napkin. Essentially I succeeded in making a sort of sugar/napkin paste and proudly donned that on my black pants for the rest of the day.
The sax man started up “When The Saints Go Marching In” and sitting in the middle of this beautiful historic city, trying new foods and living out a portion of my bucket list, I welled up with tears because I was reminded so intensely of my Grandmother and overwhelmed by the beauty, the strangeness and the temporary nature of life. Each and every moment is once in a lifetime. Even if I make my way back to this city, and visit this same cafe, it will not be the same moment as it was right then and there. It was a nice reminder to soak it all in and appreciated every single last bit. Thank you, Sax Man for unexpectedly bringing her back to me that afternoon.
Binge This: 13 Reasons Why – Trust Me, It’s Important
Warning: Mildly spoiler-ish
It would be easy to dismiss Netflix’s latest hit as nothing more than fare for the Young Adult Fiction crowd. But it would also be a lie. This show was unexpectedly profound, dark, and yes… even important. Watch and discover your own reasons why this show is important. In the meantime, here are just a few of my top reasons why this is more than popular YA fluff:
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Holy Wars – Prepare to be Slayed
Holy Wars’ front woman Kat Leon looks like she’ll break your heart. And she will. But she’ll also resurrect it before the night is through. Touted as “Dark orphan rock”, the subject matter is brutal and the pain shines through. But not in a deeply depressing crying in a circle sort of way. It’s more of an empowering weirdly healing ritualistic type of way. As a whole, the band is strong and hard hitting. The guitarist shreds, the drummer is an animal and the bass line brings it. They function as a unit to open up your chest cavity, rip your heart out and carefully replace/dance it back to life by the end of their set.
“Creepers ” (dancers dressed in full bodysuits) incorporate on stage choreography with creeping and crawling their way through the audience and incidentally scared the crap out of me at least a dozen times. The Creeper element couple with the fact that Kat is charismatic and engaging, gives the show a cool interactive feel. Keep an eye on this new LA band, they’re going to hit the scene hard.
New Orleans: Day 1 – Street Cars, First Taste of Bourbon Street, + the Music of the City
Day 1:
Our first full day in New Orleans started with a short walk to District Donuts. Sliders. Brew for some fuel (Read the full District review here). The Lakeview neighborhood we were staying in was lined with trees and beautiful old homes that towered over the streets. From District we took an Uber ride to City Park to catch a street car. Our Uber driver was everything last night’s was not. He drove a pickup truck (first Uber truck ride we’ve ever had), and basically embodied the term “jovial”. His laugh was deep, pointed and resonated. It filled the cab of the truck in an infectious sort of way. He laughed at our bad jokes like an old friend, he loved food and provided us with a list of places to visit.
Driving into City Park was like a dream. The trees dripped with Spanish moss, hanging from the branches like the leftover Mardi Gras beads that were strung along trees and light poles. A tiny body of water in the park was wildly exciting, it’s not a swamp but surrounded by the low hanging Spanish moss it was a beautiful little pseudo-swamp for a couple of tourists to take in. We didn’t spend much time here. Just enough to wander the crooked path and duck under a couple of tree branches. From here we crossed a tiny street to await the Streetcar. We waited with an older couple from the UK, and as the streetcar pulled up, it was like a scene right out of a romantic technicolor dream. Red and shiny, the driver was gruff and spoke only out of absolute necessity. The seats were wooden slatted and polished. The sun came in the windows, accentuating the richness of the interior. The car was relatively empty as we boarded, and we easily grabbed a seat near the front.
The city whirred by as the car became more and more packed with each stop. Eventually we were sitting next to a man ranting about how much he hates Los Angeles (After asking us where we were from), how much he hates “Spanish people” and how he has never seen so many white people in New Orleans (taking over the city). A young man making his way to the back stopped to remind him, “People is people, man”.
We disembarked at Bourbon Street. Everything around us looked like we could be in almost any major city. Buildings loomed over us, but as we crossed the major street and made our way towards Bourbon we began to come into the city’s specific flavor. The buildings grew older, the street was narrow and eventually we were surrounded by bars and strip clubs housed in Spanish architecture. The beauty of these ancient buildings housing modern vices seemed strange at first until I realized modern vices and ancient vices aren’t so different. As far as vices go, only thing that’s changed much is the addition of electricity and neon signs advertising what lay inside.
We wandered, we drank Hurricanes out of gigantic receptacles longer than our arms because that’s what you do, we wandered some more, we got hustled for $20 by a couple of shoe-shiners who engulfed us like a tornado, or rather I should say Jill felt compelled to gift the $20, but we got some beads out of it without having to show any body parts and our shoes did gleam a little brighter, and hopefully those shoe-shiners at least ate well that night. We ducked into tiny shops and stared up at the roofs cutting through the sky in various shapes, colors and sizes. We stared down at the street markers tiled on the corner of every street, and up at the black street signs sharing the same corners. High or low, you knew where you were. Although it didn’t mean much to us on our first day because we didn’t know where anything was in relation to anything else. Today, it was all Bourbon Street and the streets that led off of it to parallel streets.
It was on this afternoon that we met Blind Boy. We were strolling leisurely down Bourbon Street, already well past the thick of it, sipping our drinks and admiring the architecture around us. Off in the distance we heard a voice so raw and so gritty, singing out to no one in particular, that we both stopped dead in our tracks. This was the kind of voice that demands you do nothing but stop and listen. We saw the owner of this commanding sound making his way towards us. A young man with a guitar slung on his back, black frame glasses and a Newsboy cap. As we gaped he walked past us and inquired about the Captain hat I was wearing. Then he asked if he could sing us a song. And right there on a nondescript stretch of Bourbon Street, the guitar was released from its case, a tiny sitting stool was unfolded and Blind Boy opened his mouth to grace us with his gritty God-given gift. Our private New Orleans concert was underway and we marveled at the show of it. It felt like meeting the soul of the city, and it all came rushing in to welcome us.
We wandered down Royal, and as the sun receded marveled at the gaslit lamps that illuminated the quarter. The flames danced, encased in iron and glass, and the sounds of hooves on the narrow roads as the many mule-drawn carriages made their way past us made it easy to imagine another time. We of course checked out Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo. It’s not at all affiliated with the actual Marie Laveau, but it is still an interesting stop should you ever find yourself strolling along Bourbon Street. We bought some rings and presents to take home and continued to wander.
We wandered into what is probably our favorite bar of the trip, Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop. Touted as the oldest building in the United States housing a bar, we sipped whiskey by candlelight, befriended a couple from Little Rock, and got some more recommendations from our very cool waitress.
We ended up at Acme for dinner. From the outside it looked like a touristy place you’d find at Fisherman’s Wharf that I would typically avoid, but it had the seal of approval from our jovial Uber driver extraordinaire so we jumped in line. The wait wasn’t long since there were only two of us and we were fine with sitting at the bar. Pam, our server, greeted us and she was all kinds of wonderful. Sampler platter with jambalaya, red beans and rice, gumbo, sausage and we ordered the beef po’ boy for good measure. I’d never had jambalaya and I didn’t expect to like it much. This is the night I discovered my freakish obsession with jambalaya. The meal was so good my eyes literally rolled back in my head as I took my first bite of each wonderful dish. The po’ boy was flavorful and tender. The jambalaya is something I know I will lust after for the rest of my days.
We went to bed with incredible food in our bellies and the music of the city dancing its way into our souls.
Binge This: Dimension 404 on Hulu
Two episodes into Hulu’s new anthology series Dimension 404, and the best description I can give is that it feels like a more adult/bigger budget version of the Goosebumps tv series. And I mean that in the most complimentary way, because I love the shit out of some Goosebumps, Are You Aftaid of the Dark and Eerie Indiana. Continue reading “Binge This: Dimension 404 on Hulu”
Dreamcar: More Than You Could Dream
What do you get when you take Davey Havok, Tony Kanal, Tom Dumont, Adrian Young and put them in a recording studio? Freakin’ M-A-G-I-C. This is the dream machine that is Dreamcar. These guys have been teasing us with new music from their new supergroup for quite some time now, and they do not disappoint. Wednesday night they played their second of two sold-out shows at The Roxy, and the best thing about the whole damn night was how much FUN they were having up there. It was electric, addictive, and even more than you would expect from the AFI and No Doubt veterans. It also wasn’t lost on me that this will probably be the first and last time I’ll ever be able to see any of these guys in such an amazingly intimate setting. Davey’s voice sounds better than ever, it resonates through the crowd drenched in all the possible electric 80’s, dare-you-not-to-dance goodness. Tom’s catchy surf-vibe reverb riffs are catchy as hell, and Tony and Adrian hold down the rhythm with gut-punch heart-thump beats.The guys deliver a sound reminiscent of dark wave, new wave, synth pop, with their own twist. Badass female musicians and vocalists round out the band, complete with sleek white suits and a face-melting saxophone solo.
Literally cried when they started the opening verse of Bowie’s Moonage Daydream, and proceeded to totally nail it.
Guys, this album is going to blow. Your. Minds.
Singles Kill for Candy and Born to Lie are out now, All of the Dead Girls was released today, (probably my favorite so far) rounding out the trio of head bopping, two-stepping singles. In a single word – Fun.
Full debut album is set for a May 12, 2017 release. Pre-order on itunes
The Void (2017)
With an early nod to Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead this movie starts off promising with killer cults and creatures. Police officer Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole) encounters a raving and blood soaked man by the side of the road, but the real fun begins when they arrive at the hospital. It’s not safe outside, as the hospital becomes surrounded by an ominously still cloaked cult-like crowd, and it’s not safe inside either when members of the hospital staff become inexplicably violent and Thing like creatures begin popping out of bodies. This slimy creation goes deep through the eye sockets and deep into the gross out factor. Lots of exploding creature blood and guts mixed with a healthy dose of oozing pussing creature goop. Eventually the gorefest takes a turn into Hellraiser-ish territory, and I half expected the main villain (no spoilers here) to beckon to Carter with promises of “such sights to show you”.
The beginning really did it for me with some great imagery of the cloaked figures, the middle not quite as much though it was still a fun gore fest, and the ending not nearly so.
If you grew up on Carpenter, Barker and the like, you’ll probably love this in spite of its shortcomings.
Angel Melanson 