I’ve got vahmpeers on the brain right now due to recapping AMC’s AMC+’s Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampirefor Queerty—and also fun—so obviously, I had to revisit 2002’s Queen of the Damned and inflict it upon you all! Happy Halloween, treasured subscribing friends! This movie is full of howling weens! I wish I could tell you what happened in Hollyweird between Neil Jordan’s macabre-gorgeous Interview With the Vampire and…this. But I imagine it went something like: “AAAAACCKKKK!

I wrote this on a retreat in September of 2011. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” An idiom that symbolizes the idea that one and one’s offspring may not be all that different from one another. The nuclear family is the central piece of this idiom and so it’s fair to say that it’s probably rooted in Western tradition. If it were Eastern, it may not focus on the individual apple and the individual tree – because villages, and extended families raise children in Africa and Asia.

Happy Thursday! In this issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, we’re looking at three animated music videos from Japan — each one intensely unique. In Japan, music videos are a longstanding haven for left-field styles of animation. They’re small projects, meaning that tiny teams (even solo artists) can make them, and do so outside the standardized pipeline of anime. Animating a music video may be a work-for-hire job, but it can offer a certain freedom.

With Valentine’s Day mere weeks away, I’ve been getting a lot of requests for date night spots in NYC. Which begs the question: what’s in a date night? Last night I was wandering the East Village with my friend Belle Bakst and we found ourselves talking about Valentine’s Day plans. She and her husband are over-the-top, all things red and pink, cheese and wine and duck a l’orange kind of people on Valentine’s Day.

Sometimes you don’t have the time to read all the pages in a book. This list is mostly non-fiction book reviews and summaries. I read through these sites when I want to know about a book before I buy it. There are quite a few overlapping reviews and summaries. Everybody wants to read the James Clear book, “Atomic Habits”. Or Stephen King’s “On Writing“. Chances are the gist of a non-fiction book may be enough to read to either persuade you to read the whole book, be content with the summary, or pass it up all together.