Picturesque town on the Gulf of Salerno / THU 10-28-21 / Behind nautically / Spanish equivalent of basta / Worshiper at the ancient Qorikancha / Old Apple Store offerings / Black-and-white movie effect / World capital with traditgional water puppet shows for tourists

Constructor: Alan Massengill

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: things a zombie might say... — ordinary phrases clued as if they related to zombies

Word of the Day: "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (34A: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" poet = KEATS) —

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

       Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

       A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape

       Of deities or mortals, or of both,

               In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

       What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

               What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

       Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

       Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

       Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

               Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

       She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

         Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

         For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

         For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

                For ever panting, and for ever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

         That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,

                A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

         To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

         And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

What little town by river or sea shore,

         Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

                Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

         Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

                Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

         Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

         Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

         When old age shall this generation waste,

                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

         "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." (1819)(poetryfoundation.org)

• • •

If this is your thing, fantastic. As you can probably guess, it isn't mine. Groany, corny, and not that funny, though as groany, corny, and not that funny wacky wordplay goes, these themers aren't bad. BE RIGHT BACK doesn't have a lot to recommend it—pretty tepid, kinda gotta think about it—but the others are much more vivid, as well as more zombie-specific. I assume this puzzle is runny because it's the Halloween season, which feels like a season that did not used to exist, but I feel like we need discernible festive seasons more than ever, with much of the country still COVID-hampered and all of the country awash in so many godawful things. Maybe that's always been true but you just see it / feel it more now. Whatever it is, bring on the month-long Halloween season ("spooky season," I think they call it) and the two-month-long Christmas season, I give in, let it roll, just make sure I get my week-long Thanksgiving/birthday celebration in late November and I Am Good. 

The fill is mainly short stuff, but it's noticeably cleaner than yesterday's, so I'm grateful for that. That bottom line, KIR NANOS STYES, definitely has a haunting "We Who Have Roamed the Grid Forever" feel, or, in the case of NANOS, I guess it's "We Who Have Roamed the Grid Since 2005," but overall there was not an excessive amount of tired fill making me wince as I solved. ABAFT and ICEES are shouting "What about us?" Yes yes I see you, you're harmless today. My only struggles today were around the first themer—this is true with what feels like a large majority of themed puzzles. You encounter the first themer early, when you don't have a ton of other answers in yet that can help you out; and if the theme involves trickiness, well then of course the *first* themer is going to be the one you (probably) struggle with most; you don't have the gimmick in hand yet. For me, today, the issue was parsing: I had BERIG- up front and could not make a word out of it. Then I got the BACK part and really Really wanted the answer to be a play on "Baby Got Back," only that would've give me "BERI GOT BACK," which left me wondering if maybe there was an archaic word for "zombie" that I just hadn't heard of before. Or maybe BERI is a famous zombie's name. Maybe he was named "Barry" when he was alive, but when he zombified, he decided to start writing it more sassily. Well, sadly, none of this fanciful stuff was relevant. It was just BE RIGHT BACK. 

Stuff and things:

• 7D: Classic clown name (BOBO) — it's BOZO. It will never not be BOZO.
• 40D: "Spare" item (RIB) — had the "R," wrote in ROD ... you get it.
• 11D: "I really appreciate it!" ("THANKS A TON!") — oof, this answer. Like you (maybe?), I wrote in the much more common "THANKS A LOT!" and then just stared and stared at SLAT, trying to make make it make sense for 42A: Tackles, say (STAT) (an American football STATistic)
• 29D: Something that may be pulled in college (ALL-NIGHTER) — I did this precisely once in college. The physical consequences were brutal. As someone who now goes to bed at 9 and gets up at 4, I think if I tried to do it today it would literally kill me. Then with my luck I would come back as a zombie. Well, at least maybe then I'd get to meet BERI. And BOBO, who I think we can all agree is just an undead BOZO.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]