If you listened to Bret Easton Ellis' The Shards, you know that it ended this week. And if you listened to that ending, you'll know why I posted this song.
*The counterargument says Bret is referencing Blondie's "Dreaming", but I feel that one mindful comparison between these songs makes it pretty clear that he's referring to this one).
NCBD:
ASM #73: One left after this. I have NO idea what the hell is about to happen, but I sure as hell am enjoying the build-up.
Deadly Class #48: Each of the last two issues literally dropped my jaw at one point, so we'll see. My guess is the series will end at 50 and Rick Remender is just being very protective of that fact. There's also a part of me that thinks this might be the end. We'll see. The book definitely feels as though it's winding down, and with it being the last of the original Giant Generator books Remender launched back in 2014 (I think) when he announced his departure from Marvel and sole focus on creator-owned stuff, it definitely feels like we're in the home stretch.
Defenders #2: The first issue was pretty cool, and Javier Rodriguez's art very much reminded me of J.H. Williams III's art on Alan Moore Promethea, which is a HUGE compliment and HUGE pull for me on this one. Rodriguez creates a very interesting and unique visual world, and I can't wait to see more of it.
The Last Ronin #4: At this point, I'm definitely needing a reread of the entire series just to get the proper context for this new issue. I'll end up reading it anyway (I won't be that ill-prepared, as Last Ronin is, at its heart, a classic story archetype, which is why it's so damn fulfilling to begin with), and save the reread for after the next (final) issue hits.
The Me You Love in the Dark #2: I really loved the set up in issue one, so let's see where this one goes. Rooted in what feels like classic Haunted House tropes, I'm pretty sure this will do anything but hit the standard marks.
MOTU: Revelation #3: Super tight story so far, a perfect accent to that Netflix series, which I find it hysterical to watch all the MEN cry about its storyline following... gasp! - a girl! Gimmie a break. One of the best things about the new show is I only had to hear "By the Power of Grayskull!" Once. Well, twice, but if you watched it, you know what I mean.
The Nice House on the Lake #4: No idea where this one is going, but I'm really enjoying how it appears to be taking its time, developing the situation through the development of the characters
Star Wars: War of the Bounty Hunters #4: This one's been so-so story-wise, but it makes up for that by being the first comic I've read featuring the one group of SW characters I never get tired of: The Bounty Hunters! (obviously)
Although I'd been teasing it for a few days, yesterday I finally fell down the Type O Negative well. It felt GREAT. I swear, I'm not one to say that any one band is 'my favorite band,' but if there's a band that fits 'me' best, it's most likley Type O. I miss them intensely.
I'll take this opportunity to mention that I've dropped the 'Isolation' title from the blog because between two outings to the Drive-In with Ray, the hotel we stayed in after Saturday's Lynch Triple feature (terrifying - imagine 100+ weather and a courtyard with a pool thronged with people, roving packs of maskless children, etc. Fucking petri dish), and visiting Butcher and his family, the isolation phase has been broken and, even if I remain isolated again going forward, that particular spell is broken. I'm still undecided if I will change the name of the blog again. We'll see.
31 Days of Halloween:
1) Tales of Halloween: Sweet Tooth/The Wolf Man (1941)
2) From Beyond/Monsterland: Port Fourchon, Louisiana/Tales of Halloween: The Night Billy Raised Hell/Tales of Halloween: Trick
3) Mulholland Drive/Creepshow (1982): The Crate
4) Waxwork
5) Synchronic/Bad Hair
6) Dolls
7) Lovecraft Country Ep. 8/Tales of Halloween: The Weak and the Wicken/Tales of Halloween: The Grim Grinning Ghost
Soon:
Chalk this one up to something I just heard mentioned on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast but never actually thought would be made. Via the mighty Bloody Disgusting, Tim Hunter - who is listed here as "a director of Breaking Bad" and, while that is accurate, a Director I have loved since I saw his 1986 flick River's Edge, which, like Smiley Face Killers, stares Crispin Glover, another total draw for me. Hunter has mostly done TV through the years, but its been a lot of the stuff I like. Back in high school, when I first saw River's Edge, his name was already known to me by way of the three stellar episodes of Twin Peaks Season Two he directed. From there, the list includes a lot, but specific to my viewing, Deadwood, AHS, and yes, Breaking Bad. Anyway, this trailer isn't blowing me away, but I'll definitely be checking this one out on VOD come December 8th, just to support it.
Playlist:
Death Individual Thought Patterns
Type O Negative - Life is Killing Me
Deftones - Ohms
Type O Negative - World Coming Down
Type O Negative - October Rust
Type O Negative - The Origin of the Feces
Type O Negative - Dead Again
The Ocean - Phanerozoic II
Kevin Ayers - The Confessions of Dr. Dream and Other Stories
Card:
Perhaps a little bit of interior harmony as I (hopefully) head in to a mellower day at the Biorepository and have begun working on the book again, Writer's Block be damned. (It's not Writer's Block, it's exhaustion).
I never realized this song is an homage to Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero. It's obvious, really, but somehow I missed it.
**
Let's talk about Comics. In fact, let's talk specifically about one comic: Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples' Saga.
I had honestly not realized that issue 54 of Saga came out two bloody years ago! I mean, like every other die hard fan, I am very aware that the cliffhanger lingers, but two years? Wow. All I can say is, I am absolutely fine with the hiatus, knowing that when Saga does return, the tracks will be greased for month-after-month, on-time issues. My gut tells me before the end of this year, but we'll see.
**
Something occurred to me earlier today as I sat finishing my re-read of Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero. The idea that the narrator Clay may be responsible for some of the atrocities that occur 'off-screen.' His sister's dead cat; the girl tied up and murdered at the Palm Springs party a year before. There's a number of horrible events he can't be responsible for in the book, thus is Clay and his peers soulless, vapid world, but Clay's disassociation from the people and world around him - a disassociation we revisit in the 2010 sequel Imperial Bedrooms only to find Clay may well have grown into a psychopath over the intervening thirty years between books - feels like it might just hide a burgeoning killer. My theory then is this is not a concrete interpretation, but definitely an element of the character that planted the seeds for Patrick Bateman in Ellis' second novel, American Psycho. Bateman himself then evolves in Ellis' 2005 masterpiece Lunar Park.
In finishing Zero, I took to the internet to see if anyone else has ever discussed these possibilities, and though I didn't find that, I did find a fantastic article about Zero, which you can read HERE and is absolutely worth your time if you're an Ellis fan.
After finishing Zero, I am now on to Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. As I mentioned here recently, although I have read almost all of Palahniuk's work up to and including Pygmy, this is my first time reading Fight Club,
being that I've been away from his work long enough now that I find
myself at a place where I don't feel like my love of the movie will work
against my reading of the work it is based on. I'm very much looking forward to comparing and contrasting the novel with the film, something I would have possibly had trouble doing previously.
**
Playlist:
Protomartyr - Agent Intellect
Run the Jewels - RTJ4
X - Los Angeles
Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey
Otis Redding - Otis Blue
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
**
Card:
Back to my original Thoth deck for today's Pull:
I have a complicated relationship with the Wands suit. Where wands are Will and a more logic-based interpretation, ten is Malkuth, and therefore wholly of the material world. This basically tells me I'm spending too much time distracted by shit like movie and tv, and that I need to spend more time working. It was a good feeling yesterday when I passed the final version of Murder Virus - now 100% the title of the new book regardless of whether I end up publishing it through THV Press or not - off to my first beta reader. For the first time since mid-March, I closed all Scrivener documents pertaining to MV and re-opened those for Shadow Play Book Two. Now, the real work begins.
Last Thursday at work I had a hankering to see what Bret Easton Ellis has been up to on his podcast, and realized that the reason I hadn't seen any new episodes in my queue on Apple Podcasts was because my tier on his Patreon had been replaced. I changed my subscription up and was rewarded with a HUGE list of episodes I'd not even realized were available. Settling in to listen, I began with one from late last year where for nearly three hours, Ellis interviews author Chuck Palahniuk. This set off a full-on Palaniuk/Ellis binge over the coming days.
Ellis and Palahniuk were probably the two authors that motivated me the most to actually sit down and start writing fiction seriously. The book I'm finishing now was absolutely inspired by Ellis's American Psycho and Lunar Park, and Palaniuk's, well, pretty much his first five or six books, all of which I read in rapid succession in the early 00s.
It's been some time since I'd gone back to these guys. Ellis is always just around the corner in my head - Lunar Park is my second favorite book ever, so it's just in my blood. But by the time Palahniuk's Pygmy came out - the most recent of his books that I've read - I had pretty much lost touch with his work. (NOTE: Not because Pygmy is bad by any means, however, this is a story for another day, if I haven't told it here already).
Saturday morning K and I watched Fight Club, which is actually the only of those initial books by Palahniuk that I haven't read, simply because the movie always occupied such a large amount of real estate in my head, I assumed any reading of the book would be colored by it too much. I no longer subscribe to that trepidation, so after the film, I ordered both Fight Club and Choke, which I've always thought as companion pieces.
Although I'm still having trouble finding time to read for pleasure while I plod through another final edit of my own book, I started Ellis' Less Than Zero. It's an easy one to burn through, and works well with a start/stop regiment. Technically, I'm still about thirty pages from finishing Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, so all these books I'm mentioning now are 'on deck,' if you will, and their accumulated presence has shifted my musical palette, so that I found myself compelled to stay up late writing on Saturday, falling down an audio hole with X, The Plimsouls, and Concrete Blonde.
There's never a moment that I'm aware of where Bret Easton Ellis specifically mentions Concrete Blonde, but they are definitely a band that fits the headspace I associate with his fiction. As such, I've been a bit obsessed. I tweeted out my love for the album version of Still in Hollywood later at some point during that late night, however, this live version of the alternate take that serves as a bonus track on the CD version of their 1989 Eponymous debut was just too good to pass up posting here today.
**
Playlist:
Concrete Blonde - Eponymous
Psychetect - Extremism
X - Wild Gift
Algiers - Eponymous
Black Pumas - Eponymous
Beth Gibbons, The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and Krzysztof Penderecki - Henryk Górecki: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
The Birthday Party - Mutiny/The Bad Seed
The Birthday Party - Hee Haw
JK Flesh - Depersonalization
Vitalic - OK Cowboy
Carpenter Brut - Blood Machines OST
Spotlights - Love and Decay
**
Card:
Interesting. Two days in a row. I'm sticking with the same interpretation, because my discomfort at penning query letters hasn't magically abated after writing about them. However...
I have to wonder if there's something more in here, as well. Destabilization of established processes and mores comes to mind, something 2020 has been all about. Any coincidence I have a voting ballot sitting next to me on my desk as I type this? I think not.
I'm not much of a Steppenwolf guy; they had a time and place that wasn't really relevant to me, so I'm not distancing myself from them out of spite, just saying they never made an impact except as the band that wrote a song which A) I believe coined the term "heavy metal," though not necessarily for what it became synonymous with, and B) said song was picked up and beaten to death by the cheesy, "cool" marketing of the 80s, and subsequently kind of makes me hate the band.
All that aside, my friend John approached me at work yesterday, telling me he'd found a mixtape from when he was a kid - he's older than me, mid-to-late 50s - and heard Monster for the first time since he was a pre-teen, found it frighteningly prescient of the country today.
The music here is what I think of as 'proto-hard rock;' you'll hear it when the crunchy guitar kicks in, how just a few years later (Monster was released in '69) the fuzz would have been thicker and considerably higher in the mix. Here though, it's almost delicate. Anyway, the music isn't the reason I'm posting this; listen to the lyrics. Crazy. Did everything always seem broken and dire, or as I am more apt to suspect, is the evolution of the post WWII, military industrial complex merely bringing world events to a head? And perhaps more importantly, will that climax come in our lifetime?
I read today that Bret Easton Ellis has a new book coming out in 2019. The author's first book since Imperial Bedrooms in 2010, White - originally titled Privileged White Male - is, in the author's own words, a non-fiction 'rant' about the reputation economy that frenzies our culture. Lila Shapiro from Vulture has a marvelous interview with Ellis here. I'm a huge fan of his fiction and his podcast, though I'm considerably behind on the episodes these last few months. White lands April 16th.
Playlist from 1/02:
Secret Chiefs 3 Traditionalists - Le Mani Destre Recise Degli Ultimi Uomini
U2 - War
The Police - Regatta de Blanc
Airiel - Winks & Kisses: Melted EP
Alabama Shakes - Sound and Color
Barry Adamson - As Above, So Below
Barry Adamson - Oedipus Schmoedipus
Belong - Common Era
Playlist from 1/03:
David Bowie - Hunky Dory
Belong - October Language
Fantômas - Eponymous
Steppenwolf - Monster
Iggy Pop - Blah Blah Blah
The Body - I Have Fought Against It, But Can't Any Longer
I know this track from the OST for a movie called The Devil's Business. This is a soundtrack I love from a film I have never seen (need to change that). Because of this slightly obscure relationship with the material, I forget about this one for long stretches, something triggers my memory (usually an early, gray morning - the somber tone of this track always fits with an early, gray morning) and I pull it out for a few days. I don't think I need to explain that that is exactly what happened this morning as I woke up tired, and dragged myself through the preparatory hygiene required for me to go into work.
While listening in the car, I knew that since my drive would only take me ~20 minutes, I'd want to continue with the album once I got inside, punched in and began the tasks of the day. When I went to Apple Music, however, I was bummed to find the soundtrack was not there. As a work-around I googled the first track and for the first time in memory realized it was not a composer, but a band. After another quick search I found the track I wanted to post (above) AND I found an awesome band I had previously never heard of, Crippled Black Phoenix.
Playlist from 6/29:
Best Coast - Crazy For You
Zeal and Ardor - Stranger Fruit
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Windhand - Soma
I also subscribed to Bret Easton Elli's Podcast on Patreon and listened to two fantastic episodes:
B.E.E. Podcast - 6/15/18 James Van Deer Beek - wherein they discuss a lot of things, including but not limited to the 2001 70mm redux, Roseanne, Me Too and the usual woes of the business.
B.E.E. Podcast - 6/28/18 Ben Fritz - really great discussion about the death of Sony and the state of the movie business.
A good friend just rocked my world on Twitter when she through this article at me. Holy smokes!
Now, I'm a fan of Zombie's first two flicks for sure. Halloween I'd have to see again - it's no original and definitely overdid the 'cause and effect' of Michael Myers, which really was better left unexplained, but seeing it in the theatre I have to admit that both visually and sonically I was blown away with the film. The sequel however, despite being a beautifully shot film, really only works with the sound turned off, as every line of dialogue and plot point just frustrates the hell out of me.
Then came Lords of Salem, which I really wanted to like and just plain could not make it through. Again and even more so, visually the film was fantastic, but I could not get through it.
Ellis on the other hand has never let me down and the idea of Zombie visualizing his script fills me with absolute joy! Especially if the subject they are helming is based on Charles Manson. I'm not one of those Manson aficionados like Zombie is, but its an area of American history that very much interests me - the shadow cousin of the Peace and Love 60's that left its initials tattooed across the decade - and I think both auteurs will turn out an amazing project, especially as it is apparently NOT an adapted work but an original take.
The album High Violet by The National has been sitting in a pile for... hell, almost three years now I guess. I gave it a listen but never connected with it. I think my exact words after that previous listen was, "It's wine and cheese music". That's not a bad thing, it just doesn't come up much in my house.
Two weeks ago I discovered Bret Easton Ellis has a podcast. It's fantastic. I downloaded and listened to all the episodes (there's only a handful so far). During one of them - I think the episode where Chuck Klosterman is his guest - Ellis mentions that he has been listening to The National because, he supposed, he is white and over forty years of age.
I chuckled at this, thinking yeah, wine and cheese music.
Yesterday I listened to the newest of Ellis' podcasts where he interviews Matt Berninger, The National's singer. The podcast began with a snippet of music - it was the second verse of this song - and I was instantly haunted by it. I listened to the entire conversation Berninger and Ellis had, came home and dug out High Violet, hoping this song was on it (at the time I did not know the name of the song or what album it was on. For that matter I didn't know the name of the album I had as it was a burn someone gave me). Using Internet Music Database I found the name of the album and sat down to listen to it. I have not stopped since.
This is definitely not an all the time band for me but what I initially dismissed as a "wine and cheese" tone is actually a very sophisticated band big on sparsely appropriate arrangements and intelligent lyrics that are often much more fun than they appear to be given their delivery (this song is a perfect example of that by the way). High Violet has a very similar tone to some of Ellis' novels, a tone I refer to as "Haunted".
And now I find this. Imperial Triumphant's video for Crushing the Idol skirts a line that I become weary to cross, however it does so fairly tastefully, without ever actually crossing it. I'm still suffering my "violence in media" hangover so this is perfect. Kind of Bret Easton Ellis-ish too.
Here's another band I've only just discovered and basically know nothing about. Silian Rail is named after the business card Patrick Bateman uses to impress his "friends" - only to then be outdone by ah... it's been awhile, I forget. Paul Allen?
Anyway, you can imagine me googling Silian Rail and not only finding the bandcamp I was hoping for after hearing a song by the group on KXLU 88.9's Morning Cup of Tommy but that it's also a reference to one of my favorite books.
Silian Rail has a definite "post-rock" vibe. I hear shades of Daemien Frost - one of my all time favorite bands - but also a touch of the Mogwai, and a whole lot of their own personal touch. Really digging this band and if you like what you hear follow the link above to the bandcamp and the digital is $7, vinyl a meager $12. The entire record is great, might I suggest skipping directly to Shapes which is just likely to haunt me all day.
It's apparently the 30th Anniversary of "Sports" - not the pastime, the album. I love that album, just like I love Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. Not super crazy about the film, not because I think it's bad but I'm just so attached to what the book does to the reader - really, really puts them in Patrick Bateman's head (a fucked up place to be) and by nature a film has trouble doing that to the same degree a book - especially a book written by Bret Easton Ellis - can. But I always loved this scene and this is just fantastic.
And then there's Weird Al, who is all kinds of awesome, even if I really only listen from a distance. But the man's a comedy music institution.
