// Category Archive for: Issues

Holiday Horrors: They’ll SLEIGH You!

By Eric Weber

“Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, a creature was stirring. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, but it was hard to say that St. Nick would be there. A Christmas of another color brings a killer on the loose.”
Tagline for 1974’s classic chiller, Black Christmas
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Won’t Someone Please Think of the Children?: Tiny Tim’s Christmas Album

By Hanna

The first reaction most people have when confronted with the reality of Tiny Tim, in song and especially video form, is “That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.” Or simply speechless horror. Imagine my glee when I found out he’d made a Christmas album. Fun for traumatizing all the family!
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Kris Kringle Konfessions

By John Lane

I admit it: I’m old enough to remember (and can now say somewhat unashamedly with the distance of years) when I actually found myself praying—praying—for the complete Welcome Back, Kotter action figures. What did I know? Could I fathom that Travolta would one day be riding the hot rails toward Scientology? Or that Boom-Boom Washington would not pass gracefully into the eighties? Only TV could make a squalid, inner-city school look so attractive, to a Catholic-school kid like me wearing the obligatory monkey-suit every day.
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Reindeer Games

By Less Lee Moore

More fun than reindeer
should be allowed to have.

Fear not: this is no paean to the 2000 movie with Charlize Theron and Ben Affleck woefully miscast as two-timing criminal lovers. This is a tribute to a storied family tradition, one involving bizarre rituals and the relentless search for functioning batteries.

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Band Names Are A Con: The Flaming Lips

By Adam McIntyre

Grunge wasn’t weird enough for us. I mean, the awesome rock power of those hairy flannel people was a little hard to deny but really, they were making music for someone else. My friends and I had backwoods families, didn’t use drugs, and had absolutely nothing to do. We were fifteen. It was more likely that we’d break into someone’s house to use the phone than steal something.
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How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Robot

By Queen Spajina

From sci-fi novels to bartending to chic hotel bars, robots are made to wear many hats and cater to our every whim and desire, ideally without any regard for their own health or welfare.
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Q & A with Bedtime for Toys

Interviewed by Lisa Haviland (via email)

Close your eyes; beddy bye, tin soldier.
Mommy says that it’s time for sleep.
If my folks were wiser and older,
They’d know kids and toys don’t need sleep.

Don’t be bad little cotton dolly.
See how nice Mickey Mouse sleeps now?
Even my brass drummer boy has stopped all his noise,
‘Cause he knows it’s past bedtime for toys.
Stevie Wonder, “Bedtime for Toys”

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Mashup Ex-Voto: Fanvids as Devotional Objects

By Jessica Melusine

Being a student of religious practice, magick, and mysticism as well as an avid pop culture devotee means that certain things look very different in my eyes. Ever since a turn-of-this-century Vericon in Cambridge, MA, I have been fascinated with fanvids.
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Talk Derby to Me: Part One

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“DEVO SUCKS—DIE”

By Christian Lipski

Can you really cut someone in half with a shotgun? I mean, would the blast (assuming both barrels) really sever all the bone and muscle and those other bits all at once, or would it at best just put a wet, meaty hole in your midsection only big enough to push a lunchbox through?
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