Sunday, August 5, 2018

2018: August 5th



Time for some Shudder curation. I watched two movies last night. Well, one and a half. The first I LOVED. Above is the very Carpenter-esque theme from Sam Was Here, a really cool, very understated psyche-out in the California desert. Having spent a pretty good amount of time out there, I related. That wasn't the only reason I dug the film though. But to go into that, with this movie, would be venturing into spoiler territory. I'll leave it at, "Definitely recommended" and move on.


The second film I attempted to watch and gave up on was 1979's The Visitor, which is one of the 'evil child' movies that came in the wake of The Exorcist's success. This one was painstaking, despite the cast being STACKED with a young Lance Henrikson, Shelley Winters, Sam Peckinpah (yep), and John Huston. Yes, JOHN HUSTON. I have no idea if intermittent internet outages and a recent predilection for sleep at an early hour on Saturdays had anything to do with my impatience, but I could not make it through this one. I may try again at some point. Cool poster, though:


Finished The Deer Park by Norman Mailer. I ended up giving it a three-star rating based on what I interpreted was a failure of the narrative device the author uses. I've got a short review on Goodreads HERE. From there, I've moved back into a book I started earlier in July but put aside to press through the Mailer. Exploring Short Dark Fiction is a series published by Dark Moon Books, each one of the two currently available a contemplation on a highly regarded writer, with three's Primer to Nisi Shawl due out later this month and a fourth on the way before year's end. Number two is A Primer to Kaaron Warren, a highly regarded Australian author I would recommend to fans of Neil Gaimen, John Crowley and even Tim Burton. I'm a little over halfway through the stories and love them, and am looking forward to the wealth of supplemental material in the back of the book!


Playlist from Saturday, 8/03:

Justin Furstenfeld - Songs from Open Book
Windhand - Grey Garden (pre-release single)
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
The Body - I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer
True Widow - AVVOLGERE
Windhand/Satan's Satyrs - Split

And the playlist from 8/04 was all vinyl!

Black Sabbath Vol. 4
The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night
Nothing - Guilty of Everything
Joy Division - Closer

Card of the day:


From the Grimoire: "All troubles and disruptions have been necessary to grow. The growth is a Victory, as not everyone makes it out of the Strife and Chaos of the fives."

Very relevant, and the cards continue to illustrate that, as this is the second time in just over two weeks I've pulled this one. The last time was HERE, and you'll see I tie Victory's appearance into the strife of working on my latest short, Please Believe Me, which still is not finished, primarily because I've unfortunately only written twice in the last week. Never a good thing, the exhaustion inertia I've carried since last week's on-call shift has turned into regular old 'out-of-the-habit' inertia. I spent the day yesterday cleaning and reading instead of writing. NOT acceptable. The appearance of this card again creates a bit of a loop, so that I will use it to signal my return to beast mode, and today I will finish Please Believe Me, re-script the first half of the first issue of The Legend of Parish Fenn (I may post sample art soon - it's f*&king incredible!), and get a bit more done on the new idea artist extraordinaire John Grimm and I had recently.

Now that would be a Victory.


1 comment:

Tommy said...

The Visitor is batshit insane, one of those films that feels like it was made by Martians trying to emulate humankind. Totally bonkers. It can certainly be taxing, but is definitely worth a watch simply because of how fucking weird it is.