No Love Lost on Grave Robbers

Traditionally, my love of Joy Division becomes particularly strong in Autumn. Or at least that's how it was before I moved to L.A. Well, order appears to have been restored because it's October and Substance is once again running in my veins. Here's "No Love Lost," which always sounded a lot more like Warsaw-era to me.

---

---

---

31 Days of Halloween:

I basically rode Shudder TV's Slashics for the majority of the evening. Here's what I saw:

 

This movie is nuts. I caught it from about ten minutes in, but you get it right away. Well, you don't 'get it' until the end, but that's what ended up turning this one into a positive viewing because otherwise, Joko Anwar's Ritual goes to some places I don't normally like to go. I'd definitely count this one as a "recommend," but you have to come with your game face on because there's some rough shit here.

Next, A rather passive rewatch of Andrew Davis's brilliant Backwoods Slasher/Survival flick The Final Terror: 

 

I posted the same trailer a few months ago, after the first time I caught this one. A really solid film that does what a lot of Backwoods Slashers try to do and fail (F13 - looking at most of your early works). Also, young Joe Pantoliano and Darryl Hannah, and some really beautiful photography by the Director, who doubled as Cinematographer. Susan Justin's score is pretty bitching as well, and all of this adds up to produce a flick I'd rank up there with Jeff Lieberman's Just Before Dawn and Peter Carter's Rituals with Hal Holbrook.

Finally, Slashics ended my night with Rubén Galindo Jr.'s 1989 clusterfuck Grave Robbers:

 

I'm sorry. Did I say the last movie was nuts? Nope. THIS flick is nuts. I think Rubén Galindo Jr. saw every 80s Slasher, Possession and Zombie flick and his brain just blendered them into a crazy, gory, Satan Smoothie, and I'm here for it. This is criminally underseen, but it's on Shudder, so seek it out. Just make sure your expectations don't stray above, "Get f*cked up and gawk at the ludicrous."

1) When Evil Lurks/VHS 85/Adam Chaplin

2) Tales From the Crypt Ssn 1, Ep 6 "Collection Complete"

3) VHS

4) All You Need is Death

5) Slashers (2001)

6) The Beyond/Phenomena

7) The Convent

8) Evil Dead 2

9) The Autopsy of Jane Doe

10) Totally Killer

11) Ritual (Joko Anwar)/The Final Terror/Grave Robbers

---

---

---

Read:

Oh man, it arrived:

After only reading one 'issue' of the Weird Walk zine, I was absolutely smitten. Paying for the shipping, though, was often daunting. When I saw the creators were compiling many (or maybe all? This one's thick!) of the floppies into a tome, I immediately pre-ordered it. And forgot it, which was cool, because when I opened the box yesterday, there was a moment where I felt like a kid receiving a fabulous Christmas gift. Can't wait to dig in.

---

---

---

Playlist:

Cristobal Tapia De Veer - Smile OST

Walter Rizzati - House By the Cemetery OST

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Blood

Joy Division - Substance: 1977-1980

NIN - Not The Actual Events

Halloween Spotify Playlist

---

---

---

Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Ten of Cups

• Queen of Cups

• Four of Pentacles

My parents are poised to sign a contract to sell their house, and that means A LOT of work and stress up ahead for the remainder of the year as we take the steps to move them and find them a house. No sweat, but there's the inevitable emotional deluge that will hit me at some point, the one people have asked me if I've felt yet. We moved into that house in 1986 when I was ten. That's a long time, and I love the house, the area, everything. The part of Palos I grew up in is essentially a tiny enclave in the middle of a forest preserve (if you reaed Shadow Play Book One, yep, that was the inspiration for Gallows Hill). Anyway, I read this as a warning that emotions are going to step in and gum stuff up for me; can't let that affect the work. 

Hell, now that I 'say' that out loud, this might also be a warning about interrupting my writing. I just finished the second draft of Black Gloves and Broken Hearts, my *ahem* Young Adult Giallo novel, and I'm hoping to have it out by Christmas or, at latest, January 1. I need to keep that in my sights regardless of what happens with the move.

Isolation: Day 78 Mark Lanegan and Cold Cave Cover Joy Division

Wow. Didn't expect to see this. Very cool to see two very different icons come together to perform the music of a third.

**

I fell down a youtube rabbit hole after clicking on this video of David Lynch directing the infamous "Gotta Light?" scene from Twin Peaks: The Return. There's some really great supplemental Lynch material that came up based on viewing this one. I'm not sure how the algorithm works, so I'm not sure if you'll get the same videos I did, but my trip was both wonderful and strange...



Speaking of Lynch, I realized recently that the Wrapped in Plastic fanzine I subscribed to throughout the 90s and into the early 00s now has every issue available in ebook format. Read about it and link to buy HERE. John Thorne and Craig Miller's studious magazine is one hundred percent worth your time if you're a fan.

**

I took a break from Clive Barker's Books of Blood to blow through Sarah Lotz's The White Road. HIGHLY recommended. I literally blew through this one in a day.

The novel deals with the Third Man Phenomenon in and around extreme caving and climbing scenarios. It's horror, but it's Earthy and believable while still coming across visceral and haunting. I loved it.

**

The Cure - Seventeen Seconds
David Bowie - Outside
David Bowie - Black Star
L7 - Bricks Are Heavy
Body Count - Carnivore
Body Count - Cop Killer (Anti-Single)
Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti
Revolting Cocks - Beers, Steers and Queers
Revocation - Teratogenesis EP
Anthrax - Spreading the Disease
NIN - Pretty Hate Machine
NIN - Bad Witch
Motörhead - Ace of Spades
Lustmord - Hobart
Soundgarden - Superunknown
Pixies - Surfer Rosa
Perturbator - The Uncanny Valley

**

Solid ground again after an anxiety-ridden couple days waiting for a COVID test result that, thankfully, came back negative. Sinus infection, I've never been so happy to see you!

Morrissey Biopic Trailer

Thanks be to Mr. Brown for forwarding this on because I had never heard of it before. Looks good and with the same producer as Control I'm in.

Bauhaus - Stigmata Martyr

This is still one of the most badass songs I've ever heard. In my quest to re-read/read Neil Gaiman's Sandman from the beginning through to the end Bauhaus just jumps off the music shelf. Along with Joy Division and The Cure, Tones on Tail and The Smiths (esp. Meat is Murder for Vol. 4 Seasons of Mist) Bauhaus is a perfect soundtrack for Neil Gaiman's lush dreamscape set on the outmost fringes of the old DCU.  I'm currently reading Vol. 5, A Game of You, one of the volumes I'd not read before (I started reading the book during it's initial run with The Kindly Ones, which I believe was either the second or third-to-last volume. Of course I went back and snagged Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll's House and Dream Country as they were published in trades and then left what was essentially the middle of the saga untouched on my "To buy and Read" list. However, I very much wait for the particular moods for music/film and comics/books to overtake me before I lock into them, i.e. I can't just pick up Sandman and start reading it anymore than I can just through on Bauhaus any old time. I have to be in that particular headspace. I've begun re-reading Sandman many times over the years, as those first three volumes are among my most read comics. However I can't always sustain the mood to go all the way through, not with all the bloody distractions of everyday life. I've also often hit the $$$ wall, starting it and making my way through the beginning volumes only to find I didn't quite have it in my budget to buy the three or four volumes I was missing. Recent bursday presents from my wife have solved that particular problem).

Whenever a comic or book strikes such a strong harmonic frequency with a particular band or album I always wonder if the author themselves - or in this case any of the awesome artists involved - listening to that same music at the time of creating. And if that is indeed the case, the fact that you can pick that up suggests to me that the author/artist's hands are literally transducing the energy in its audio wave form into energy in a visible form, like a microphone is a transducer that takes audio waves and changes them into the physical rearrangement of magnetic iron particles (on analog tape) or 1's and 0's in the digital domain?

Something to think about.

Joy Division Live

My god, what year do you think this footage is from? Youtube truly has EVERYTHING on it Watching/hearing this sends chills down my spine. Words simply cannot express just how important I feel that Joy Division was to music and, subsequently, on comics (80's*/early 90's Vertigo stuff has Joy Division just dripping from it, as if the authors/artists were listening to their music at the time and acted as transducers, turning the sound of Joy Division into their words pictures. I've always thought the same could be said of much of The Smiths' music).

..............

* I should clarify that what I am perhaps clumsily referring to here is the fact that although Vertigo did not come into being until 1993 there were precursors at DC that would later be "re-branded" as Vertigo books, ie Alan Moore's Swamp Thing or even V for Vendetta which although published under the Vertigo banner for some time now, originally began as a serial in the pages of Warrior circa the early 80's.

Playmobile Joy Division Perform Transmission (and...)

This is fantastic - if you watch, they even have the Playmobile Ian Curtis dance a bit like In Curtis did.

I've been having a very Anglophile year thus far, what with all the Pulp, Smiths, Eddie Campbell, Alan Moore, Gary Spencer Millidge, etc. A couple weeks ago it was a brief but rabid Joy Division jag that has come back around today. I've been dying to go out and buy a copy of Control, the brilliant 2007 biopic written by Matt Greenhalgh, directed by Anton Corbijn and based on Ian Curtis' widow Deborah Curtis's Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division. That film is available on Vimeo in segments, the first I posted below, however how do you watch this kind of beautiful B&W in segments? Control is brilliant and beautiful but very sad. There's a fabulous scene where they had the actor who played Curtis walk the actual walk rom home to work that Curtis did every day - detail such as this makes for greatness, and even though by the end of the film the tone is as dower as it gets, for Joy Division fans, Anglophiles and rock history buffs Control is a must-see. And the above, which I found accidentally on youtube, should help take the edge off the dark stuff.
Joy Division story (Control)-part 01 from jomenz on Vimeo.