If you were like me in the late eighties/early nineties, Tori Amos was a huge influence on your life, both musically and emotionally. To this day, her music has been both inspiring and thought-provoking, from “Little Earthquakes” to her most recent CD, American Girl Posse”. Through the years she has gone through a number of transformations, and expressed herself and her music through a variety of different artistic media (books, artwork, etc.) Now she’s crossed into one more zone of fandom, with the upcoming anthology of comics based on her music, “A Comic Book Tattoo”.

Michael Cunningham: A Home at the End of the World (1990)

It would be easy to label A Home at the End of the World as a book about identities, since it contains negotiations on sexual ambiguities, untraditional family formations and a quest of finding your geographical place. Despite the temptation, I would not say so. This is not a story of individualistic search for identity, but more so a story about lives, choices and affections. Yes, most of these lives could be said to be unconventional, but pondering on their normality is not the point of this novel.
 
As is typical to Cunningham, this novel is told through the views of different persons. We have friends and teenage lovers Jonathan and Bobby; Alice, Jonathan’s mother who is unhappy with her life; and Clare who does not quite know what she wants. Actually most of them don’t know what they want. Bobby is the most focused and untroubled of them all. He knows he wants a house and life like the one teenage Jonathan had. What is the peak of dullness to one, can be dream come true for another. But we can not take another person’s place in life, not to the full. Try we can, but succeed – probably not.

A Home at the End of the World allows us to follow the paths of Jonathan, Bobby, Alice and Clare on their seeking for purpose and home. And what really is a home? A place, a state of mind, a feeling of belonging or another human being offering solace? Is it permanent or fleeing phenomena? At least it is fragile, nothing to take for granted and certainly nothing that would always be solely welcoming and comforting. Same goes for family. The formations of family change through out the book, but most of them are not composed of biologically related people. Maybe biologically connected in the sense of exchange of fluids – and viruses. A part of us stay with those we touch.

Cunningham depicts his characters with striking accuracy. Their feelings and flaws are so human you can almost feel their breath on the pages. Despite the sad notes in this book it is one very hard to put down. Where is home – will we ever know?

aka: Gamera tai daiakuju Giron, Directed by Noriaki Yuasa

There were a lot of drugs in the sixties. Particularly in 1969, when this gem of a monster/alien flick, Attack of the Monsters, was made. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

The story centers around three kids – a little boy named Akio (Nobuhiro Kajima), his little sister Tomoko (Miyuki Akiyama), and their American (or English?) friend Tommy (Christopher Murphy). The kids see a flying saucer through their telescope, and go running off into the woods to find it. Granted, the movie BEGAN not with this scene, but with a room full of scientists talking about strange waves from space, but since none of them can find what two seven year olds and a preschooler could, I’m assuming from this point on that they’re fairly useless to the overall story.

Of course Santa is a Geek Heartthrob. He brings millions of Geeks their cool gadgets every year so how could we not have a special longing in our hearts for him!

From Wikipedia:
Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle, or simply "Santa", is a mythical, historical and legendary figure in folklore who, in Western cultures, is described as bringing gifts on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day[1], or on his feast day, December 6.[2] The legend may have its basis in hagiographical tales concerning the historical figure of Saint Nicholas.