Three weeks ago news broke that a live-action Nightmare Before Christmas adaptation was sliding its sleigh of carrion baubles across the table. Now, if TNBC has taught me anything, it’s that a sleigh of carrion baubles is 1) “going to be a disaster” (thank you, Sally) and 2) a great way to get your year’s worth of work “blown to smithereens” (thank you, Mayor). So I won’t go into the details on why a live-action Nightmare Before Christmas has me forecasting showers of certified-rotten flotsam, but I will take the chance to point out how on-it this movie stays and how, 26 years later, its leeringest side-eye is slapping grab-handsy whiteness in the mouth harder than ever.
 
If you haven’t seen this movie yet, I’ll summarize: in TNBC, Jack Skellington—Pumpkin King and patron saint of making us mortals shit ourselves—has an existential crisis and goes roaming for something fulfilling to wrap his bones in (a premise several bits of Oscar fodder would call a whole movie and cut to credits). It turns out that the something in question is Christmas Town and, discovering Christmas Town, his gut impulse is to take it, make it his own and chuck deuces to anyone who calls him out on his festooned steamroller of narcissism. And just like _____ (insert name of headdressed/dreadlocked/kanji-inked white person of choice) going viral, it blows up in the Pumpkin King’s face. He and his host of skeletal coursers get shot out of the sky. And that’s what it takes for him to understand how severely unentitled he is when it comes to the culture and customs of Christmas Town. Fortunately, being undead and all, he’s able to piece himself back together and save his friends from the gogmagogical mouth his appropriation inadvertently served them up to. Jack learns a lesson about staying in his lane, and Christmas ultimately comes to Halloween Town anyway. Not by hijack or impersonation, but by Santa himself bringing it to them, inviting them into it as appreciants instead of pillagers.
 
Now, you could say I’m shoehorning a whole jack-o-lantern of ideas into a story that didn’t intend them. And to that I’d say...welcome to fandom, can I get you some more tea? But yeah, that is pretty much what’s going on here (the IRONY). Was The Nightmare Before Christmas conceived as an anti-cultural-appropriation PSA?  I think that’s an easy no. But does it shamble and shriek all the same takeaways as a movie that was? Does the Bone Daddy Christmassacre feel any different from Nicki Minaj’s fetishistic “Chun Li” performance on SNL or Justin Bieber wilin’ with his platinum, dingleberry-looking shits? If Halloween Town had social media, you can bet Sally’d be dragging Jack up and down Twitter the minute she warns him he’s slipping and he puts her on suit duty instead of listening.
 
And that’s the suckerpunch buried inside this movie. The thing’s a sleeper agent of social commentary. Cultural appropriation, while not a new problem, is certainly a more spotlit one today. And I don’t know if there’s another movie out there that dances over its fence posts as elegantly (and accidentally) as The Nightmare Before Christmas does.
 
 
Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in places like FIYAH and FreezeRay, Poets Reading the News and Words Dance, as well as his newest, nerd-themed collection, Stiltzkin’s Quill. He likes nachos, analogizing things to Pokémon, and getting lost in Oregonian forests with his co-meanderer, Brittany—the Sapphire to his Ruby. Find him on Instagram @thebardofhousewilder.

​As much love as I have for The Craft (see: being hexed gothstalgic by a Beverly Hills 90666 wonderland of blood oaths and pre-scenester Hot Topic), there’s a certain stance the movie took that never landed with me. And I feel like it’s this one line in the sand the film chose to draw that keeps it from being the fistful of kryptonite it could be.

The plot points in question: Rochelle and Sarah’s incantations gone awry.

In The Craft, Rochelle casts a revenge spell on her school’s Klan Darling Barbie™ and then finds her going full Brundlefly in the shower. Sarah casts a love spell, gets sexually assaulted because of it, and then villainizes Nancy for ragdolling her would-be rapist out a third-story window.

The fault in both of these scenarios is how the movie doesn’t even have to think twice about sympathizing with its abusers. Broaching the topics of racism and misogyny in this little coven-fable that could was an unexpected victory for black and femme viewers, but one that The Craft almost immediately recants as it shifts its loyalty from the victims of institutionalized abuse to the abusers finally catching the hands due them. Instead of dragging these societal sepses into daylight, the movie’s message becomes the same status-quo shill that prefers its injustices unchallenged and its suffering done in silence.

“Racists are bad, but shutting racists down is worse.”

“When sexual assault happens, look at what the victim did to provoke it.”

Any opportunity for social commentary dissolves when it’s decided that the witches bear more guilt in their insurgence than Laura and Chris do in their respective racism and male entitlement. When holding problematic people accountable for their venom becomes less important than letting that venom continue to course.

And, of course, there’s a monumental difference between social justice and revenge, between reforming ingrained injustices and pushing people out of windows. But within the realm of fiction that is The Craft, that was an unnecessary and unhelpful line to draw. Because if we were already on board for a horror movie about women with vicious, omnipotent godhood hailing their bloodstreams electric, then something tells me it wouldn’t have been much of a hang-up to have those same women justified in what peals of anti-victimizer violence they’d wage. I mean, it sure went in for The VVitch.

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Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in Poets Reading the News, FIYAH, HEArt Journal Online, ALTARWORK, Words Dance, FreezeRay, and others, as well as his newest, geek-themed collection, Stiltzkin’s Quill. He likes nachos, analogizing things to Pokémon, and getting lost in Oregonian forests with his co-meanderer, Brittany—the Sapphire to his Ruby. 

Valentine’s Day. Or the less cuffing-season-complicit Cacaolebration, if you dig. Regardless of how you feel about the antiquated, semi-pecked box of chocolates we call a holiday, there’s some good to be gleaned from its predatory cherubs and tsunami of you’ll-never-be-as-in-love-as-us selfies. And I’m calling The Crow the best of that good. Not the sequels, not the never-gonna-happen reboot, and definitely not the TV show. But the OG Crow? The gothic swansong whereby Brandon Lee gave love its most uninterrable champion, Eric Draven, poetic justice incarnate set on righting the life stolen from him and his bride? If you’re in need of a new Valentine’s Day tradition, let me redirect your attention to this monument of goth too bursting with sorrow and heart to stay buried in the ‘90s. Because damn, does it rap at the chamber door of these feels.

If for no other reason, the movie makes timely Valentine’s watching because Brandon Lee was born February 1 and revisiting this piece of tragic brilliance is a fine way to remember him. But The Crow is romantic to the core, a love-beyond-the-grave parable calling out to that ache so many of us either burn with or hunt for—a heart full enough to be broken. And heartbreak is this movie’s very marrow, from the bereavement and hope in its score to the slivers of joys past and joys to be, from the Burmecian gloom slicking almost every scene in rain to the anguished way Draven navigates his resurrection. He says “little things used to mean so much to Shelly,” and suddenly all of our tiny pastimes are holy ground. We see him remember every slight interaction he and Shelly had, crumpling under the weight of how much it hurts to have that all taken away, and a highlighter is ran across each of our relationships as if to say “These. Don’t miss these.” And it’s just so rare to have a movie implore something from us, to plead us into mindful love without compromising the strength and integrity of its story. The Crow swooped that brass ring before we even knew we needed it. No dead horses or ham-handed PSAs disguised as drama—just a deadboy given one more night to right the trauma barring him and his lover from paradise, but crafted in such a way that coming away from it unbettered just doesn’t happen. In seeing Draven’s love for life and the living, our own is deepened. When he collapses on Shelly’s grave a mess of cemetery flotsam, and she finally comes to him, finally meets that gaze that has torn through an underbelly looking only to hold and be held again and the score weeps them into their rest—there’s simultaneously no movie I’d rather be watching and no love I’d rather be taught by.

Because it may not be #couplegoals (what with the couple being brutally murdered and all), but it makes major stabs (heh) toward #devotiongoals, toward #lovegoals, toward #iwillcrawloutofthiscoffinandmurderyourmurderersgoals. And for a holiday mostly despised because of its superficiality, a little “real love is forever” could go a long way.


Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in Poets Reading the News, FIYAH, HEArt Journal Online, ALTARWORK, Words Dance, FreezeRay, and others, as well as his newest, geek-themed collection, Stiltzkin’s Quill. He likes nachos, analogizing things to Pokémon, and getting lost in Oregonian forests with his co-meanderer, Brittany—the Sapphire to his Ruby. Find him on Instagram @thebardofhousewilder.

Confessional time: I didn’t like The Lost Boys the first time I saw it. Now this could be because, as an ’80s-born ’90s kid, I hadn’t yet cultivated enough nostalgia as an early teenager to appreciate a platinum-mulleted Kiefer Sutherland, or a beach-bod sax solo, or any of the other things too soppingly ’80s for my nu-metal blerd to get a grip on. I grew up loving horror and worshiping the concept of vampires, but that aesthetic threw me. I couldn’t believe in the movie’s horror and menace because I was too distracted by all of the leopard print and fishnet. As an early, occasionally-shallow teenager, I didn’t really give horror the room to be about more than its monsters. I had a very straitlaced understanding of what was and wasn’t cool (a rarity among teenage traits, I’m sure!), and The Lost Boys was one of the worst casualties.

Because, revisiting it now, in my early 30s, I am staked to the core by what this movie was and still is doing. Maybe that’s because I’ve now got a couple decades of sipping that millennial brew of angst and existential vagrancy to root me into its narrative, but the concept of nocturnal horrors banding together and calling each other home is pretty much all I look for in pop culture now. To be reflected so sympathetically, to have my wounds illuminated by--not the torches of a mob looking for monsters to burn--but in pink neon instead. That’s a joy through and through.  And if there’s a better metaphor for the poetry community, and for FreezeRay specifically...I don’t know if it’ll ever be found.

Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in Poets Reading the News, FIYAH, HEArt Journal Online, ALTARWORK, Words Dance, FreezeRay, and others, as well as his newest, geek-themed collection, Stiltzkin’s Quill. He likes nachos, analogizing things to Pokémon, and getting lost in Oregonian forests. Find him on Instagram @thebardofhousewilder.

MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana and Baruch Porras-Hernandez, (writer, performer, gay Mexican comic book nerd) are putting out a call to creators for a new Latinx Super Hero project We Can Be Heroes!

We Can Be Heroes will spotlight 5 brand-new LGBTQ Latinx superheroes and YOU have a chance to be one of the creators! We are calling on all queer Latinx folks who identify as comic book nerds to enter!

We invite you to submit your original Latinx queer superhero creation for a chance to be a participating artist on this project. Winning artists get to create a brand-new queer Latinx superhero with us, become part of the We Can Be Heroes project, and receive an honorarium. Winning short stories get published with us and designed by a real comic book artist! All of this will culminate into a large comic book anthology/graphic novel with your character’s story, in which all new queer, Latinx superheroes meet at the end, and save the day!

To submit, simply write a 4-6 page, double-space, prose short story featuring your own superhero creation, along with a character description of that hero. The winning writers’ short stories will be published and be used as inspiration to introduce your character into a team comic book illustrated by a talented artist to be published by MACLA. We will check in with you twice and ask for your input: once with your character’s design and once with your character’s storyline in the graphic novel. Finally, excerpts from the final product will be read out loud, narrated to a live audience at MACLA in San José.

This new project at MACLA is made possible with support from the Creative Work Fund, the Fleishacker Foundation, and the Horizons Foundation and MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana.

Who is eligible?

In order for you to enter for this section you must identify as queer, this includes, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and genderqueer Latinos. You must be Latino, or Latinx, which includes people from Panama, Dominicanos, Mexicanos, PuertoRiquenos, Cubanos, Chicanos, Salvadorenos, Gutemalans, Chilenos, etc.

What we need from you:

YOUR BIO, or ORIGIN STORY: Who are you? Please tell us as much as you can about yourself as a writer, person, and as a superhero comic book nerd. Not a comic book nerd, but love super heroes? That’s fine! This contest is open for all queer Latinos, so hey, go read a comic book, challenge yourself, you might write a story with a Latinx character so good, we will have to choose you!

STATS: Your writer’s resume, or C.V., if you got it. Or just a list of publications with links will also work. Being previously published is not a requirement, but if you have been published, tell us about it! Please also include links to your website if you have one, or Instagram page, or blog if you happen to have a superhero blog, or a social media space where you nerd out with other fellow comic book super hero nerds.

CHARACTER DESCRIPTION: Describe your character as much as you can. Height, appearance, hair, attitude, costume, superpowers, how do their superpowers work, what they do, do they have a catchphrase? Do they fly? How do they identify in the queer spectrum? Bi, queer, lesbian, pansexual, trans, non-binary, etc.?

SHORT STORY: Submit a 4 to 6 page (double-spaced) short story about your brand new original queer Latinx superhero. The main focus of this contest is the writing (aside from the art, the colors, and the fancy and/or sexy costumes). Great writing/storytelling is what has carried comic books as far as they’ve come, into our souls, into the mainstream, and even onto the Broadway stage. Make this story as creative as you want. We want to push the boundaries, we want you to have fun, and we want a new hero to inspire us all. Show us the action shots, bring us right to the splash page of this new hero’s story, show us the queer Latinx superhero we need.


Rules:

Origin Story must be included somewhere in the narrative. Does not have to be the main part of the story. How did this character get their powers? Was it cool? Was it an accident? Okay to make your character just be born with their powers, but tell us about it.
Character must speak about their Latinindad at one point in the story, or throughout the whole story. Totally okay to make your character monolingual Spanish speaker, or a Latina American who does not speak Spanish, immigrant, undocumented immigrant, third or sixth generation, etc.

Character must have a super power. We challenge you to create something new! Or adapt/innovate an already existing superpower to make it more interesting. We just want a good story. If you write a character who can control the weather (That’s Storm, she’s African, already exists, already world famous) or a Latina who has metal claws and is short and grumpy (that’s Wolverine, he’s Canadian, and says he’s good at what he does and like most white men won’t shut up about it) it might not catch our eye.

Character’s queerness must be present in the story and their actions. Pero, like, they don’t have to fly around with the rainbow flag, but also we’re interested in out loud and proud queer characters. There are not enough queer superheroes out there, especially not Latinx ones, (go read America Chavez, it’s GREAT!). Help us bring a new Latinx queer superhero to the world. This is a sex positive project, though the comic book will not be able to be too sexual, or show naughty scenes, show us some queer love, how do two queer superheroes find the time to make out, hold hands while they are flying, or how does our hero hold sit next to her girlfriend or partner to watch “One Day at a Time” on Netflix after saving the world?

Winner must either live in the San José/San Francisco Bay Area or be able to travel to MACLA to work on the project throughout 2018/2019 and be present at all three performances Aug 16-18, 2019 at MACLA.

Winner understands that their short story is just the beginning part of the project and will work with Baruch Porras-Hernandez on edits and rewrites to come up with a finished story together before it is published and handed over to the artist.

Participating creators understand that we are not adapting your character from your short story into a comic book of their own, we are including your short story as inspiration to introduce your character to the other heroes when they meet in the final graphic novel. Participating artist will have input in how their character appears, is designed, and drawn, but the participating artist understands that the final decisions on the characters will be made by the lead writer Baruch Porras-Hernandez and MACLA.

Submission deadline is on FEB 11, 2019.

All submission must be entered via Google Form: https://goo.gl/forms/XBe65yQCDSNdiQ5b2


Check list:

YOUR ORIGIN STORY
YOUR WRITER STATS
YOUR CHARACTER’S CHARACTER DESCRIPTION
YOUR SHORT STORY.

Questions? Contact sharon@maclaarte.org

Artwork by Zip Alegria https://www.patreon.com/zipdraw
For more info, the MACLA page can be accessed RIGHT HERE!
The Facebook event page is RIGHT HERE!

FREEZERAY FIVE: Adrienne Novy

1. You've said this book is "a celebration of everything I have survived and the music that
helped me get here" and has a gorgeous endorsement from fellow musichead Hanif Abdurraqib.
Following one of Hanif's favorite questions: We wanna hear what your Top Five Albums are, right now.

!!! I’m still geeking out about getting a blurb from Hanif in the first place. None of this feels real to me at all. I’ve been listening to Composure by Real Friends a lot lately, but here are my top five albums as of now. I’ve been listening to music that is calm and soft yet has an edge to it sometimes, and I feel like some of these albums fit that:

Grandfathers by Tigers On Trains
Bury Me at Makeout Creek by Mitski
Harry Styles by Harry Styles
You by dodie
The Sunset Tree by The Mountain Goats


2. You've created a soundtrack for this collection called "this mixtape is for sinners" which is one of the miracles of creating ekphrastic art in the modern era; this ability to instantly link your readers to the music you're referencing. As a mixtape enthusiast, I know how painstaking it can be to construct these. Apologies, then, for this challenge: If you had to deconstruct the soundtrack to one artist/band, one album, what album would it be and why?

Oh, definitely The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance. It’s such a clever and intense concept album, and it sure had its influence on my book as a whole. I also have this memory from high school marching band where I tried to convince one of the band directors to have us play a My Chemical Romance halftime show. Our school’s band department didn’t have a lot of money, so he turned down the idea but I still dream it will happen one day.

3. Crowd Surfing with God becomes a major motion picture. Who stars in it?

CSWG: The Movie would really be a collection of old home videos where the people we love and miss are still alive in them, as well as phone recordings of the bands we love playing our favorite songs that we recorded so we could always have those good memories to play back to.


4. You've become part of the great FreezeRay tradition of contributing to the pop culture conversation as a poet before becoming part of the team, with poems about Deadpool and Jessica Jones in our archives
putting the meta in metaphor. Any other supers you'd like to cover in the future?

They’re not supers exactly, but I really want to write a poem about Barb from Stranger Things, the impression that it gives to see always see the queer character die on screen or have them be the one that gets killed off first, or the way that small towns sometimes view queerness as the real monster.

I also want to write a poem about Elise Wassermann just really about the crime drama The Tunnel in general. I’d love to write a poem in both French and English since the show is also bilingual in this way, and I took French from eighth grade through to my freshman year of college. I would love to get back into learning the language again. I don’t have the space in my schedule to keep taking French courses, and I honestly really miss it.

If I did have to pick a superhero to cover, however, I’d like to write a poem about Peter Parker showing my mom around the neighborhoods she lived in when she grew up in New York. My friend Adina and I also strongly believe that Peter Parker is Jewish, and I find a lot of comfort in that.

5. Your bio says you want to start a band with [us]. All-poet band! Who's in it, who plays what, and what is a must for the band to cover live?

Lip Manegio would be in the band for sure! I think they’d be playing bass, while my friend Ry Irene would be on rhythm guitar and K Lange would be on lead guitar. Myles Taylor would be on keyboard. Emma Bleker would be on vocals (she’s a singer in a really cool band called NAH., so this is a given in my brain at least), and I think Adina Burke would be too depending on what songs we do. Jess Rizkallah is in the band too, but would instead find a way to turn the moon into an instrument. I can also imagine Bianca Phipps coming in with an incredible tambourine solo, and I think Lyd Havens definitely would too. I’d play clarinet with them sometimes, but my role would also be being their number one fan.

I’ve also thought about what what would happen if there was an all-poet marching band made up of poets who did marching band in high school or college and just really miss it.

It’d be such a joyous disaster and I’d love every minute.

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall:

Crowd Surfing With God is available via Half Mystic Press:
​http://www.halfmystic.com/product/cswg/

Addy's playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/user/1264294069/playlist/3lEsUWP09IYKNlCHBtd41P?si=3S0tKVlKTWGBoNnGv0aNxA
​

1.  CONGRATS to Sam Bailey and Fatimah Asghar for making the FORBES 30 Under 30 List for their Emmy nominated series Brown Girls!  Check out the entire list here:

2. Isobel O' Hare is taking celebrity apology statements and making erasure poems of them, and we are happy to also applaud their remixes:  

Fast Company article here!

3.  FR Poetry Editor Malcolm Friend has a new chapbook, mxd kd mixtape, and mayhaps you should pick it up directly from Glass Poetry here!
​

We here at the Watchtower do like Magnolia, but beyond that, we stand with Wil Gibson as he counts the ways.  Video taken at Union Square Slam, NYC, NY and posted by Erin Anastasia.

If you watch the CW series The Flash or are just a comic nerd in general, you will know of the concept of a multiverse. Parallel Earths, vibrating at different frequencies, but all existing within one space.  I would like to submit to you that after reading Nicole Homer’s first full-length poetry collection Pecking Order, that Homer may be the newest multiverse in existence.  There are many Nicoles in this book but they are all one Nicole Homer.  

You may best know Nicole from her Walking Dead recaps and other pop culture goodness over at Black Nerd Problems (including the only movie review show you’ll ever need, “Nicole and Omar Hate Everything”) and to discover her poetry is to pull up a seat at the Real Talk Table and be blown away by the sheer force of her honesty.  What is it like to be a mother? A black mother?  A black mother affected by colorism inside and outside of her home?  Poems like “Things Only A Black Mother Can Prepare You For” and “The Colorist” shed insight via story and dialogue in a way that is both compelling and unflinchingly honest.

Pecking Order is peppered with dialogues and monologues from many perspectives in the motherhood universe, specifically existing in Black American motherhood (“The Children Speak”, “Portrait of My Grammama on her Grammama’s Lap, Neither of Them Smiling”, and the acerbically perfect “The Woman Who Is Not The Nanny Answers At The Grocery Store Concerning The Evidently Mismatched Children In and around Her Cart”) via many voices threaded through the same family.  In “Townies”, Homer states “No one lives in The Town of Motherhood/ but me/ says every mother/ including me” and through these poems, we are given a tour of this town (which is many towns, which is many mothers, but only one--the multiverse of motherhood).

This tour is not always and often very deliberately not pretty.  “The Paper Trail” begins with the narrative:

In the driveway, the soft and squeaking toys and jagged gravel press into each other. In the kitchen, the dishes, dirty and chipped, are piled in the sink. The dining room the table is almost imaginary, under the crayons, pencils, papers...

And this kind of earnestness in the face of owning her role as a mother and woman and human continues on in addressing depression and fatigue in poems like “Threshold” “Hunger” and the succinct power of “Motherhood”:

Motherhood is like
                                                    being pecked
                               to death
                                                                                 by my
              favorite birds
                                                                                made from my
                                                                                body, torn
                         by beaks sharpened
                                                                               on the woman
                                                              I was
                                                                                when I slept more
                                                              or sang the song I stole
                                                                              out of
                                                              my mother’s mouth
 

And in poems like “How I Became A Mother Contemplating Loss”, the strength that lies beneath in all mothers is summed up by these lines:

That is the scariest thing:

that we do it anyway.  The blood, the screams, the milk.

The dynamics of Homer both being raised in and raising a multiracial family are addressed throughout the book, from outside perspectives like “Casual Racist” to inner monologues like “The Lottery”; in “Things I Want To Say To Rae Dawn Chong”, the poet to the actress:
     
 But you and Arnold in Commando. Oh, Rae, you two were unlikely and perfect and snapshot one-liner. You were the first people on TV that I understood. You had nothing in common. My father hated grits. My mother is from the south, Rae. Do you understand? What do the Chinese and Scottish or the Africans and the Canadians have in common except you?

For every question asked and examined throughout Pecking Order, family inevitably answers back, as in “When I Had Children With A White Person”:   

...in our house / we say family in both of our mouths with every tongue we have

Homer ends this collection with the poem “I Wish I Was More Mothers (after Brenda Shaunessy}” and as we are left with this wishlist anthem, we realize that these words vibrate at such a necessary frequency that, even if Nicole Homer doesn’t realize it, she is more mothers.  One and all.

      --Rob Sturma
​
Pecking Order is available from Write Bloody Publishing and from the author’s website at nicolehomer.com.