Now Playing: November 2023
Our November edition of Now Playing features radio stations, villains, castles, and campiness, all from our contributors!
Leslie Pietrzyk
In a curated world, I need to retain a bit of wilderness, so one of my favorite things to listen to is a radio station—sometimes actually on a real radio! One of my current faves is WQFS 90.9 FM. (Streamers can go here.) It’s out of Guilford College in Greensboro, NC, near where I live, and typical of college stations, there’s a loose and personal vibe, so that my morning of listening as I catch up on email brings a kaleidoscope of club music, honky-tonk country, Icelandic music, and about a dozen other genres. All the while, I sense humans picking songs to create a storyline, which makes me happy. WXRT/Chicago’s Finest Rock is another nostalgic favorite, going strong since my college days, and for classical, it’s hard to beat WQXR out of New York.
Kadazia Allen-Perry
I’ve recently been watching a show called House of Villains on E! and I’m having a great time with it! I watch an unhealthy amount of reality TV and this show brings together all the “villains” of reality TVs past. What I appreciate the most about the show is that it isn’t a redemption project. The cast is encouraged to lean into the reasons we, the audience, love to “hate” them. It’s BRILLIANT!
M. Ezra Zhang
The other day at a board game cafe, I discovered this game called Escape the Dark Castle. I fell in love! It’s a collaborative fantasy adventure game where players work together to escape wrongful incarceration in a castle, stealing potions from the kitchen, bribing drunken guards, and fighting various beasts and ghouls on their way out. What feels endlessly inspiring to me about this game is the gameplay mechanics: the “chapters” are formatted into the visual appearance of a storybook, and the plot points are randomized every game so that it feels simultaneously like a procedurally generated rogue-lite and like a choose-your-own-adventure story. As someone whose poetry is veering more narrative and hybrid these days, this game has been unexpectedly inspiring for my craft.
Michael Todd Cohen
This year, I bought a limited-run, foil-wrapped, commentary-rich edition of Showgirls on BluRay, with the express purpose of debuting it for visiting queerbies in need of culture. An elder did this for me, when I first moved to Manhattan in 2003, but it was a box of VHS tapes. The one on top was Power Tool.
I do not trust streaming media to give us the camp we need.