Snake Eyes

This came on in the car last night as K and I were driving back from our time at the track, and despite hearing the song in its entirety, I immediately came home and threw Zeppelin IV on the old record player just to hear the song the way it was meant to be heard. 

Glorious!

Is When the Levy Breaks the greatest rock song of all time? Well, a claim like that is an impossibility anyway. There is no 'greatest rock song.' Also, it would be hard to back up that claim when you think about all the other great songs just from the era of this album, alone, let alone before or after. That said, it's also a claim I would not contest if made in my presence. Because if Levy isn't the greatest, it's certainly one of them.

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Watch:

The fact that Parmount dropped a GI JOE trailer this week is serendipitous because last week I actually bought a digital copy of GIJOE: Retaliation. I had not seen it since the theatre, and to quote a tweet I dropped during my re-watch:

#gijoeretaliation is a hot mess that has just enough fan service to make me not hate it, but enough contrivance to make me want to.

— Shawn C. Baker (@OpiniontdBastrd) May 9, 2021

This was K's first GIJOE anything, and she liked it about as much as I do. Anyway, the fact that Retaliation came closer to making me happy than Cobra Rises did felt like a good sign at the time the film came out, and I held out hope that a part three might continue that trend. However, cinematic tie-in properties and shared universes have come a long way since then, and here we are with a reboot.

 

I suppose I should explain that GI JOE is hallowed ground to me. Or at least Larry Hama's 80s comic continuity is. Despite the usual dalliance with comics in my very earliest days - from which all I remember is Thor and Uncle Scrooge - Hama's GI JOE was the book that made me a comics kid. I still remember issue 49, published July 1986. 

I wrote about this somewhere before, but I bought a tattered copy of this issue on the schoolyard from a total dick who actually charged me $0.25 over the cover price (!) while taking a summer school algebra class between 4th and 5th grade. I still have that copy. I must have read that comic 100 times, and when #50 came out, I began having my parents take me to the local comic shop every month so I could buy keep up. Then I began raiding back issue bins. My collection of what I'd consider Hama's essential run of Joe (issues 1-126, although by then the title was waning under the stress of Hasbro's demands that Hama help them save a sinking property) has never been complete, and I don't revisit them often. That said, because of all this, yeah, I want someone to adapt the book into a movie as good as Marvel has done with theirs. 

Hopeless? Maybe, but despite my love of Hama's work, the version of Joe I think would adapt the best to the big screen is the understated reboot that Mike Costa and Christopher N. Gage did in the 00s for IDW, specifically the Cobra book. There has been talk of that series getting the TV show treatment, but in the meantime, we're left with what you see above. Which looks like it might be a better big-budget take on Joe than what we got with the previous two films. I mean, I'm not sure how you kick off a franchise with a single-character origin film, but regardless, this will put my ass in a seat.

Yo Joe!

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Playlist:

The Jesus Lizard - Down

Balthazar - Fever

David Bowie - The Next Day

Dance with the Dead - B-Sides: Vol. 1

Christopher Young and Lustmord - The Empty Man OST

Zeal and Ardor - Stranger Fruit

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower

Led Zeppelin - IV

2019: August 10th

Starting the day like I ended last night, with some vintage High On Fire. My copy of the band's first album, The Art of Self Defense, is the old Man's Ruin version, and a few years ago I discovered that when I put the disc into my computer and open iTunes, it reads it as Sleep - The Art of Self Defense. I've wondered since if when Matt Pike split ways with Cisneros and Hakius, his original plan was to record a new Sleep album with new members, and it ended up just becoming High On Fire. Either way, The Art of Self Defense is a fantastic album that features a little bit more Doom/Sabbath influence on HoF's songwriting than later albums, and that always makes it fun to go back to.

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I keep forgetting to plug the latest episode of The Horror Vision here. For this episode, Chris, Anthony, Ray, and I discuss Genre Icon Rutger Hauer's passing, our favorite movies/moments from his career, and we give you our reaction to 1992's Split Second, a kind of schizophrenic action/horror/sci fi flick that Hauer chews through the scenery on. Other topics of discussion include but are not limited to, What We Do In The Shadows the show, Slaughterhouse Rulez, Holy Mountain, and my painstaking attempt to watch my way through the Friday the 13th movies in chronological order!

The Horror Vision on Apple

The Horror Vision on Spotify

The Horror Vision on Google Play

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There's news on the web about the about-to-be-in-production third GIJOE movie. Said news, forwarded to me by Mr. Brown, is that the character known as Chuckles will be featured. Now, that might seem funny to some, but as several of THIS article's commenters point out, Chuckles figured prominently in the Mike Costa's GIJOE series Cobra from about ten years ago. This is by far the best Joe Story I have ever read. No disrespect meant to those classic Larry Hama issues at Marvel, but this is another level altogether. The entire storyline is collected in an omnibus titled The Last Laugh and is absolutely worth checking out. If this third flick is based on Costa's run, we are in for a treat indeed.

And now I'm excited for another Joe movie!

Interesting also that my two main 80s toy obsessions made it into these pages with current news this week, even if I mis-reported the release date of Simon Furman and Guido Guidi's Transformers 84 issue 0 - which I learned is stand alone at this point - by a week or two.

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I caught Michael O'Shea's indie Vampire flick The Transfiguration yesterday. Loved it. Highly recommended, especially if you like a more psychological approach to your horror. Reminded me a lot of Larry Fessenden's movies, and knowing nothing about this film going in, I was overjoyed to see Fessenden make a cameo about half way through!

The Transfiguration is streaming right now on Shudder!



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Playlist from 8/09:

Sleep - Sleep's Holy Mountain
Sleep - Dopesmoker
Sleep - The Sciences

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Spread of the day:

All big ideas and macrocosmic influences. Paradigms are shifting. The idea of turning The Horror Vision into a Publishing Imprint is still intimidating, as dealing with massive ideas like The Universe, The Star, or something as volatile as Lust is, but intimidation is a not insurmountable. Lust is also known as Strength in the original Tarot, and while Crowley changed the name, it retains many of the qualities/attributions originally associated with it. Also, Sephirothically, we're looking at a path that traces the Tree of Life's spheres from Wisdom, to Strength, to Foundation and eventually The Kingdom, by way of Beauty. I can't help but read this confluence of Major Arcana influences as further confirmation that my venture will transform my world.

Larry Hama, Marc Silvestri and Dan Green's Wolverine

image courtesy of marvel.wikia.com

is the topic in this week's Thee Comic Column over on Joup. To me, there are several issues of this creative team's run that really forms the backbone of a great character that, unfortunately, has subsequently been done to death. I still dig the ol' Canucklehead, but there are very few writers who still write the character well - probably mostly because of editorial intervention, which I think tends to play way to big a part in monthly, serialized comics by the big two and often has things beside the story or characters' best interests in mind.

Just sayin'.