Positive Bleeding: RIP Blackie Onassis

 

Deeply moved to hear that Blackie Onassis from Chicago's Urge Overkill passed away yesterday at the age of 57.

Ten years older than me. Damn. 

This is THE Chicago band to me, as far as those who flirted with the big time. The Jesus Lizard will always occupy the throne, but while everyone screamed their way through Smashing Pumpkins songs in the mid-to-late 90s (I did until Melancholie) Urge represented the best Chicago's indie rock scene had to offer the mainstream. They didn't compromise, and they were honest-to-goodness Rock n' Roll, two capital R's and an apostrophe. Blackie, thank you for your service.

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Watch:

It's 11:13 on Thursday, June 15. I just finished a nearly two-hour recording session with The Horror Vision for Elements of Horror: Cruising. Prior to doing the episode, I found this on youtube:

There are SO many reasons I love this film and I love William Friedkin as a filmmaker. A LOT of those reasons are discussed herein, but pay special attention to Friedkin's discussion of the impetus for making the film. Also to Randy Jurgensen, the undercover cop who lived a large part of what we see on screen. As usual with Friedkin, I'm stunned not only by his art, but all of the thinking that went into and around its creation.

 

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Read:

Just a quick observation on this week's X-Men: Red #12. Man, when did this book start to resemble Rick Remender and Jerome Opena's fantasy epic Seven to Eternity? In retrospect, even the cover looks a bit like it could be a Seven for Eternity cover:

There's A LOT I'm missing here due to the fact that I've still not read a large swathe of Hickman's run after House/Powers, primarily X of Swords. I have so little background on the Arrako characters, The White Sword, Genesis and Orrako, etc. Going to have to remedy that eventually, but in the meantime, the landscape of this really reminds me of Seven to Eternity, and I wonder if Ewing is a fan of that series.

Pondering this, I stumbled on the following interview Marvel's Ryan Penagos did recently with Hickman and Grant Morrison, discussing how the two men changed so much of the status quo so successfully.

            

Good stuff; I haven't seen an interview with Morrison in a while, good to hear his voice. 

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Playlist:

The Native Howl - Thrash Grass EP       

Mudvayne - Choices (single)

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Gila Monster/Dragon (pre-release singles)

The Bobby Lees - Bellevue

The Sword - Warp Riders

Spotlights - Seance EP

Locrian - Return to Annihilation

Zombi - Shape Shift     

Urge Overkill - Saturation

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Card:

Keeping on with the Crowly/Harris Thoth for today's Pull:

• 4 of Swords: Truce seems a direct connection to yesterday's 7 of Swords. The Pause becomes a truce. 

• III The Empress - this card has come up a lot in conversation lately. In this instance, quoting from the Grimoire, "can point to dissipation when paired with unfortunate cards; Swords, Princes."

• 5 of Swords - The Truce will dissolve and lead to a new conflict, issue, or the like.

Not terribly encouraging, but also, isn't that life? One thing directly precedes the next. I pulled a final, clarifying card and found exactly that:

No matter what life throws at you, one journey ends, another begins.

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Putting Out Fire

 

I've really been digging on David Bowie's 1983 album Let's Dance of late. This is one I never really deep-dived on due to the oversaturation of the hits - all of which I love - throughout most of my life. This one always felt a skosh... pedestrian to me previously. What a f*&kin' stupid thing to think. As if any David Bowie could be pedestrian. While there are definitely albums and eras of his career that appeal to me more than other ones, any Bowie is good Bowie, and my recent obsession with this album proves that. Here's my favorite non-single, "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", of which I definitely am one. A cat person, that is.

 

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Watch:

While the teaser for Jordan Peele's eagerly awaited Nope had a total of three images from the film in it and is mostly teased out by clips from his previous two films - which, although I can't wait for the movie, renders it meaningless for me to post here - the teaser for Dario Argento's new Giallo Dark Glasses is all I need to see to know I can't wait for this flick:

Looks like classic Argento to me, a flavor I haven't quite had enough of lately. No definitive release date yet, but "soon" is enough to get my heartbeat above 110.

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NCBD:

Another super light NCBD. Here's what's coming home with me this week:

Very curious about this new Fist of Khonshu that's shown up in the pages of Moon Knight, especially after seeing this cover. 

So, I gave up on the X Lives of Wolverine, and am moving forward with the Deaths because, so far, this one reads like a direct sequel to Jonathan Hickman's recent X-Swan Song Inferno. Deaths also, quite surprisingly, has thus far had very little to do with the titular, over-used mutant. Now, I'm not convinced this is a worthy sequel to Hickman's time on X-Men, but I'm willing to give it an issue or two more before I decide.

Is the tentative jive I throw down when talking about some of these books taxing? It might be. I'm just so suspicious of Mutant books, even after being so blown away by so many recent ones. The problem, of course, is that, to quote the Action Figure Insider, Daniel Pickett from one of his appearances on Drinking with Comics, "Comics has always been a strip-mining industry," and nowhere is that more true than with Wolverine and the X-Men. What you like one second will turn around and drastically disappoint you a minute later, so a savvy reader has to keep his guard up always while reading big-two series.

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Playlist:

Allegaeon - Apoptosis

AC/DC - Highway to Hell

Curtis Harding - Face Your Fear

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis - Carnage

Donny McCaslin - Beyond Now

Umberto - Prophecy of the Black Widow

Godflesh - A World Lit Only By Fire

Godflesh - Post Self

David Bowie - Let's Dance

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Card:

I raise a glass to he who inspires the grandest of stories, the oldest of tales, the inspiration for independent thought. Never forget - the snake was the enemy of the Old Testament's god because the snake offered enlightenment.

New Zeal and Ardor!

 

I was debating on even posting this, as I won't be watching/listening to anything else from the upcoming eponymous sophomore album from Zeal and Ardor, out February 11th (pre-order HERE). In the end, this is one of my favorite current bands, so there's no way I can't post it here for posterity's sake. Can't wait for this record!!!

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Read:

I'm really finding myself backlogged with stuff to read these past few months. A lot of this is due to a surge in great comics. And a lot of that is my being pulled kicking and screaming (at first) back into Marvel's X-Books. I'm not reading that many of them, but here's what I'm reading and what I think about them.

I guess I'm going to talk this one to death, but that's kinda what I do with comics/movies/books/music I love. This collection of Jonathan Hickman's TOTAL conversion of the X-Books into something so "All-New, All-Different" took me by complete surprise. In my worldview, there's Claremont, there's Morrison, and now there's Hickman. The House of X/Powers of X revamp eschews zero previous continuity but finds the most bafflingly fantastic ways to give all that tired old stuff an exciting new spin. Characters I've always hated like Xavier and Magneto I'm suddenly fascinated by, and the overall schematic at work here is unlike anything you've ever seen in an X title before. 

No, seriously.

If the cover of that collection I've posted above looks extremely Sci-Fi, that's because the X-Books left the superhero genre behind on this revamp, and have moved into full-blown, epic Science Fiction, with elements of Game of Thrones, Space Opera and pretty much anything else you can think of thrown into the mix. There are very few fisticuffs here - the storylines feel heightened and intriguing because they're all about different characters and their agendas. Plotting, treachery, secret plans and manipulations - seemingly from everybody. All those annoying X-Men altruisms? Pretty much gone.

I'm not going to go into all the plot details here, but if you follow THIS there's a ten-point list that will give you the idea. The list is in descending order, from ten to one. I recommend just scrolling down to number two and starting there. It gives you what you need to know.

Also in these books, there's this running idea of Mutant Technology - not technology as we think of it, but one that consists of multiple mutants using their powers in tandem to form 'Circuits' and garner results not possible as individuals. This is the kind of thing I always complained about in crossovers - the dire straights until the eleventh hour and then, "Quick, use your power with mine and PRESTO - the apocalypse is thwarted every time. Hickman is clearly aware of this trope - who isn't - and addresses it in the same manner he addresses the constant recapitulation of the dead (see number 3 on that list linked above). 

At some point, Wolvie and Colossus' famous Fastball Special is mentioned as the earliest example of this 'technology.'

The Grant Morrison-created Stepford Cuckoos being the first advancement of this in recent years, where five mutants harmonize as one. Five is apparently an important number in this technology, and I'm curious to see how many more examples of this develop in the issues to come.

S.W.O.R.D. is all about the space opera side of this new X-landscape, and although I'm not one for that particular subgenre in prose, in a comic like this, the flavor really hits the spot. As you'll see with all these books, this one is also centered around agendas and machinations, so much so that every issue so far has had pages of classified dossiers included, as we begin to see what an altruistic (maybe) viper Abigail Brand really is. If you don't know who that is, don't worry - I didn't either when I started this book. They catch you up quick.

Also, look at the cast here - there was no way I wasn't going to dig this book, as we have a couple forgotten characters from my favorite era of X-Books included, namely Gateway and Whiz Kid, or Takashi as I last knew him when he was running around with Artie and Leech in the original Inferno.

Spinning out of Hickman's sandbox comes Gerry Duggan's helming the 'Super Hero' genre book "X-Men" that launched at the end of this past summer. The idea is, while the event books deal with the agendas of what's going on with these characters, Mutantdom handpicks a classic "rescue and response" team to help safeguard the planet - you know, since most of the mutants' concerns have gone cosmic. This small team is given a headquarters in NYC from which they can respond to the kind of standard threats we're used to seeing populate all superhero books. Except, even here the book doesn't squander the premise of the larger picture with regular ol' super villains. And besides - all the mutants now coexist on Krakoa, they're no longer fighting one another. So, if Apocalypse, Magneto, Mr. Sinister, et al are all in the family now, who does this new team of X-Men fight? 

So far? A lot of monsters. 

The books have been great, giving us a pretty gnarly planetary threat in the first couple of issues, bringing in one of my favs, the High Evolutionary in another, and setting up someone called Dr. Stasis who is being slowly introduced in a very Chris Claremont plant-the-seeds-slowly-and-make-the-readers-wonder way. 

I started buying this book just for the #1, and five issues later I'm re-reading the issues multiple times. That's true of all these titles - there's so much woven into and between them, it takes a lot of attention to piece it all together. 

When I first saw these ads for the Inferno event, I hadn't read House of X/Powers of X yet. In fact, it was reading the first issue of Inferno 2021 that prompted me to go back and read Hickman's opening salvo. So looking at these ads initially, I was irritated - they used the title of my favorite X-Event from the 80s, and then even made the propaganda modeled after those old Inferno 88 ads. 

 

Well, I don't know that there's any thematic connection between the two series, but I have to say, my favorite X-Event will still always be Madeline, S'ym and N'astirh's attempts to sacrifice 12 babies and open the gates of Limbo for full-blown Hell-on-Earth, this new Inferno is quickly climbing up to sit at number two on that list. Admittedly, I don't even think there would be five entries on it, as most of the crossover events afterward are lackluster at best. Still, Inferno 2021 is fantastic because it's all about more and more revelations as to just what dirty little fuckers Charles and Magneto are. 

Now, sadly, the one weak link of what I've read in these books is the current "Trial of Magneto" series. Not nearly the same caliber, and hopefully an exception and not an indicator of what is to come once Hickman makes his exit after Inferno #4.

 

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Playlist:

Fleetwood Mac - Tusk

Fleetwood Mac - Tango in the Night

Mastodon - Once More 'Round The Sun

Odonis Odonis - Spectrums

Boy Harsher - Careful

Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta II: Dialogue with the Stars

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Jonathan Hickman & Nick Dragotta's East of West

image courtesy of behindthepanels.net

Read my take on Joup. Read Heavenisancubator's take here.