Happy Halloween, now go listen to Nick Lutsko's spooky music, okay?
A few quick updates, plus a bunch of links to Nick Lutsko's great Halloween-related content.
Happy Halloween, everyone. May it meet the spooky standards you’ve set for yourselves.
Just a quick post today with a few updates (stick around for some fun links).
1. Last week, I was on Molly Jong-Fast’s Fast Politics podcast. You can check that out wherever you usually get your podcasts from (here’s a link).
I re-watched Sleepaway Camp (1983) over the weekend. I love that movie. I understand that some have argued that it’s transphobic (spoiler alert for a 39-year-old movie, I guess?) because the killer ends up being a trans girl. Yes, it’s a trope that’s been played out in the decades since. And yes, the idea that trans people are violent and/or deceptive is obviously bad and something that sucks to be associated with.
But still, it’s a pretty great movie, in my opinion, and seems to have accidentally satirized how anti-trans people believe trans people are in the world. Take, for instance, the character of Aunt Martha, played by Desiree Gould. She’s in two scenes in the film, and both are absolutely, wonderfully wild. Here’s the first one (it’s queued up for you if you click this link). Here’s the second one (again, queued up).
Aunt Martha seems to be who comes to mind whenever people on the right think of parents to trans kids. In the movie, a father and his two children (Peter and Angela) are in a lake when a speedboat driven by some irresponsible teens drives through the family, killing the father and one of the kids. The surviving child was sent to live with Martha and her son Ricky. Long story short: Peter survived the boat accident, Angela died, but Martha decided to raise Peter as Angela because she “always wanted a little girl.” It’s the type of deranged stuff that makes for a great horror movie (hence, why I love it), but really seems to match what conservatives seem to think goes through the minds of parents of actual trans children. I can assure you that this is not the case.
Harmony Colangelo had a good piece about this from a few years back that’s worth checking out. And here’s something I wrote back in 2015 for Vice about the various tropes that get used for trans people in TV/film (and while most of those tropes aren’t exactly flattering, most are all in good fun).
Halloween wouldn’t be complete without plugging the fantastic work of Nick Lutsko. You may remember Nick from his appearance on my podcast last year. Or, much more likely, if you’ve heard of him before, you probably know him from his “Spirit Halloween Theme” trilogy:
Or from the song he put out after Spirit Halloween made a movie without his involvement:
This year, Nick made a series of funny/spooky/scary songs for Halloween:
That’s it for today! What’s everyone doing for Halloween? Anything fun? Any cool costumes?
I'd love to say that we're going to have our traditional Halloween chilli and enjoying all the neighborhood kids coming to the door. But this year we took in a foster dog from the shelter and while we're loving her, she's still decompressing and very barrier reactive and unpredictable, so people coming to the door would not be good for her, for us, and certainly not for small children. We're leaving the candy out, hoping the squirrels don't get at it first and hiding out in the office with the door closed. We'll play some games, listen to tunes, watch some Netflix, and she's big enough that we could use her for a bolster pillow and she won't mind. Actually sounds kind of OK.
Went out with the kids, but when it started to lightly sprinkle in the neighborhood, Youngest (who has sensory issues) wanted to bail after like a dozen houses, and SmilnHer forged ahead with Middlest as Youngest and I went home. He wanted to watch a classic monster movie, so we put on Frankenstein and hung out whilst the others finished their rounds. Then when we sent them to bed, I watched an episode of Twin Peaks. Pretty relaxing, overall.