Some music offerings for Halloween

What's Halloween without some suitable music?

Today we went to our first-grader's school costume party (some of you longtime readers may recall, with me, when this girl was first born.  In particular, I believe it was Michael Clemens who warned me that before I knew it, she would be telling me about her boyfriends in Kindergarten.  Alas, 'twas all too true.

I digress.  At the school they played The Monster Mash.  not just the well-known song, but the entire Bobby Pickett album.  I hadn't known there was a whole album.  I hadn't known that the guy who did the voice was named Bobby Pickett.(1)

In our family we usually listen to Midnight Syndicate around Halloween.  They're great fun as long as you don't take them seriously.  We have several of their spooky Halloween albums, bought over the years from trips to Halloween stores.  Our seven-year-old loves them - she's constructed mythologies around them involving characters of her own device.(2)

Then there are our Type O Negative CDs, kept in the Halloween box.  Heavy metal and Halloween: a match made in . . . don't say it.

I saw Type O Negative in 1994 when they opened for Queensrÿche, whose Rage for Order stands for me as the definitive statement of vampire-themed heavy metal.  I'll be forever grateful to my sister for buying it on vinyl and letting me inherit it.

But check this out:

I've been a fan of Einstürzende Neubauten for about 14 years now.  The song for the video above, "ZNS" comes from their 1985 masterpiece Halber Mensch.  So does this:

Trick or treat!



-----
(1)  I hadn't known there was a deluxe re-release of the thing on purple vinyl:

I love the internet.

(2)  Born of the Night was the first one we bought and probably still my favorite.  They now have a Halloween Music Collection on Amazon as an mp3 download.

Quillcast: calligraphy: Proverbs 9 excerpt in Spanish

Chapter 9 of Proverbs has been one of my favorite passages of scripture since the summer of 1996 when I was reading through the Old Testament during a course of intensive ministerial training.  I've lettered it in English, and I'll do so again, I expect.  But I've also been wanting to letter more quotes in Spanish.  So here is the first part of Proverbs 9 from the 1960 Reina-Valera version.

Yes, I did this with a quill pen, one that I made myself.  (If you're interested in learning how to do really old-fashioned calligraphy, you can buy a quill pen from me on eBay or Etsy.)  It has taken me about six years to get to my current level of skill in lettering, and I'm still looking to improve.

Quillcast: a piece of calligraphy from two years ago