Tag Archives: the nightmare before christmas

Remember Chumbawamba? No reason

04 Thursday Dec 2008

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I was arrested on charges of journal neglect.

And conspiracy to commit journal neglect.

And general slothdom.

And polygamy. But those charges were dropped as authorities discovered that my wives were all well over the legal age, and all in my head. Too soon?

I agreed to a plea bargain. This includes regular use of this blog as well as other stipulations, like riding a bike from Chicago to New York next September (more on that in a future post).

In the time between posts, we’ve gone all the way from pumpkin patch season to It’s-colder-than-a-witch’s-mamary-gland season.

Some highlights:

A Parrot-Head Looks at Fifty
My Dad had his 50th birthday bash in October. It was quite the revel. Drinks and family and friends and a live band, and various forms of tropical dress. You could read the happy and the celebration written on his face (he deserves more good-spiritted debauchery more often). I got to wear my pirate hat which makes me happy (this sentence might imply that I get to wear it rarely…but that’s not true…I’m wearing it right now…ask me what else I’m wearing…).

By the bye, if you happen to be reading this and you have pictures of that night, and you emailed them to me, then I would be in your debt. If you’re reading this and you do not have those photos, then no worries. If you have the photos but are not reading this, then I guess you won’t get the message. If you are reading this and you have the photos, but suddenly stopped reading, then


Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book, and Ghost Stories by Fire Light
On October 2nd, I was able to go see Neil Gaiman do a reading from a chapter of his latest book, The Graveyard Book. T’was a good reading. T’was a good book (sweet and macabre…like me). And t’was just the right time of year.

Hungry for more, my brother (Nick) and I began holding audio fiction sessions in the backyard, on the deck, by the woods. We’d ignite the fire pit, drink Dunk n’ Donuts coffee and/or hot cider laced with rum, puff a cigarillo or two, and listen October themed fiction and audio performances from my iPod’s growing library (it’s a hungry little bugger).

Our friend, Dori, joined us one night and, to our surprise, really liked it. He had never listened to a single, solitary bit of audio fiction…and he was hooked after one session, practically begging us to continue after we were ready to quit. I mean he’s really Jonesing for this sh!%. It’s refreshing, actually, in this age of multi-multi-multi-mind numbing media—crack for the ears, heroin for the eyes—how excited he was to discover this new form of entertainment, noting how vivid the visuals came to his mind while he stared at the fire, how rejuvenated he felt after listening to a story, how meditative the experience was.

So he made it a pretty regular habit—stories by the fire—occasionally pausing the pod to hear the coyotes going nuts, likely over some kill, in the not too distant distance.

Score one for literacy.

Being read to is a very special ritual. Too many give it up after childhood.

Got Spandex?
For Halloween, a dozen friends and I hit the bars dressed as the heroes in the Justice League of America. As luck would have it, the first bar had Batman’s entire rogues gallery of villains. We got to threaten and shit-talk each other for hours. Awesome.

More photos to come, but here’s a peek:


Pre-Nativity Night Terrors
My article about The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D found a home over at Killer-Works. It’s a great site and email newsletter on all things frightening and strange. Go check it out.

Trading My Pirate Hat For a Viking Helmet?
I’m applying like crazy for writing jobs. If my debt is the Nothing—then I am Atreyu, holding on to a tree, feet off the ground, trying not to get sucked in. Still, I’m holding out on hope for a job that actually interests me and uses some of the skills I spent all that money to get he documentation that says I have them. The latest job submission was to a video game company in Norway. They liked my resume and writing samples enough to send me a little writing test. I sent that off to them on Friday. We’ll see what happens.

Bookmarks, bookmarks, bookmarks
Some internet bookmarks of interest:

Kick-ass interview with Alan Moore.

Custom keyboards for the eccentric typist.

The best coffee in the world comes from cat skat.

Novelist strike!?!?!?

Coffin shelves (consider this on my Christmas list).

Nightmare Before Halloween

21 Tuesday Oct 2008

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I wrote this movie review last year, for a potential movie review gig. It’s about that time of the year again…so I thought I’d share:

“Attics are awful and lovely.
You Know what I mean?
Basements are low, dank, and darksome,
Halloween’s buried there . . .”

“. . . There the terror is pure.
There an All Hallows grave
Can save souls that might smother
From calm dad or sweet mother.”
—Ray Bradbury, “In-Between: A Halloween Poem”

Ray Bradbury is a storyteller who knows why Halloween, spooks, and frights are important—so is Tim Burton, and he beautifully illustrates the point in his mismatched holiday classic, The Nightmare Before Christmas, now re-released in theaters, for the second year, in 3D. Certainly, the denizens of Halloweentown know, singing, “Life’s no fun without a good scare.”

The story is simplistic, but the best fairytales are. Jack Skellington, the monarch of Halloween, grows bored with scares and screams and seeing the new challenges and excitement of Christmas, commands his subjects to help him take over the execution of that holiday. Not plot driven, Nightmare is a heady visual draught, a Halloween dream woven in images and moods. Roger Ebert praised the original release of the film, saying its creators “made a world here that is as completely new as the worlds we saw for the first time in such films as Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Star Wars.” And indeed, the visuals are so unique that “Burtonesque” is now in the cinema lexicon. The new 3D element makes this phantasmal world even more immersive.

Burton has stated that inspiration came to him at a store changing out the Halloween merchandise for Christmas displays: the juxtaposition of ghouls and Santa—and the best images of the film are the ones mixing Christmas and Halloween, the delightful and the ghastly: a coffin shaped sleigh led by skeletal reindeer, Christmas lights strung about an electric chair, and in no other movie have I seen a character try and discover the true meaning of Christmas by dissecting a teddy bear.

This is what Burton does; he mixes horror and humor and somehow makes it innocent through his favorite medium, the misfit. These elements come together in one of my favorite scenes: Sally, an animated rag doll and secret admirer of Jack, prepares a gift basket for the Pumpkin King and makes ready to escape her abusive creator. Opening the window, she looks wistfully towards Jack’s house, then jumps, crashing several stories below, her body breaking into pieces. Then, just as wistfully, the way a lovesick teenager might pick petals off a lily, she sews herself back together and heads for Jack’s. It’s a neat bit of dialogue-free storytelling. In any other movie, this would have been a tragic scene—a teen suicide for unrequited love. Instead, Burton makes the scene sweet and he does so using the very element that makes it macabre: the fact that Sally is an undead doll that can put herself back together.

Forgiving the simple plot, I have only one complaint: at 76 minutes, I would have liked a little longer to further develop Jack and Sally’s relationship or maybe better develop the villain, Oogie Boogie. I would attribute the short runtime to the extensive and tedious process used to create the stop motion animation (a week’s worth of work reaped only a minute’s worth of film).

After 14 years, the film has aged well, looking dated neither technically nor in style. Actually, pop culture has caught up to its sardonic and subversive tones. For proof, note that the film was originally released under Touchstone Pictures (a division of Disney) for fear that it was too dark for children. In the 2006 3D release (as well as this year), The Nightmare Before Christmas was shown under the Disney banner. For further proof, walk into a Spencer’s or Hot Topic store—there is more Nightmare merchandise circulating than ever and a whole new generation of teenagers have made its cast of monsters into a misfit pantheon (with Jack Skellington at the head).

The media is faster and more fickle than ever. However we also live in a time when canceled TV shows and sleeper films can find a second life, resurrected by the necromancy of cult fans and DVD sales. People walk around with T-shirts featuring their favorite characters from 80s video games. Media fades, but iconic images endure, and Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas is teeming with them.