Never Hike Alone 2!

 

New music from Drug Church. Mr. Brown recommended these guys to me a few weeks back but they quickly fell off my radar before I ever got the chance to listen to them. When I sat down earlier today to start this post, something just clicked. There's a distinct 90s indie rock underpinning here - I hear a lot of Bob Mould, especially Sugar-era, only with a huge drum sound that really changes the dynamic of that comparison. Turns out, exactly as Mr. Brown had promised, the entire record is Fantastic; you can order it from Pure Noise Records HERE.

 

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Watch:

The new episode of The Horror Vision Horror Podcast went up yesterday. We gathered this past Saturday to watch Mickey Keating's new movie Offseason, and in my book, it did not disappoint. You can hear our spoiler-free review if you click the little widget at the top right hand of this page, or on your favorite podcast streaming service.

Also, the IndieGoGo campaign for Friday the 13th Fan Film Never Hike Alone 2 is now live! While I'm not a very big fan of the actual Friday flicks, I quite like Vincent DiSanti's films and will definitely be throwing down on this one that brings the Thom Matthews back as Tommy Jarvis for an ultimate showdown with Mr. Voorhees.

Can't wait to get this one in my hands and then watch all three of DiSanti's F13 films in one sitting! Back the campaign HERE. 

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Dollar Bin:

Last Tuesday, I introduced a new weekly feature called Dollar Bin. This is a place where I can talk about all the cool, nostalgic, or just plain awesome items I find while flipping through the dollar bins in the comic shops I frequent. That said, while this week's featured score was indeed found in a dollar bin,  it is most definitely not a comic. 

I'd never heard of Nyctalops magazine until I brought this one home last week. Nyctalops was a literary Horror magazine dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries published independently in the 70s and 80s. It featured reviews and editorial pieces of contemporary and historic Horror and Weird Fiction and often included short stories by contributors that included Ramsey Campbell, Robert Bloch, and Thomas Ligotti, and many, many more. 

This issue is #18, published in 1983, and it features two essays on themes found in the works of Robert Aickman, as well as an essay by famed Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, to name but a few of its treasures. Also, I found it particularly thrilling to note that in the forward to this issue, Editor Howard O. Morris excitedly mentions that the Magazine's printer, Silver Scarab Press, has plans to publish, "... tentatively, a collection of horror stories by Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer."

Today, Horror literature fans know ..Dead Dreamer to be one of Ligotti's most influential works, and I found it super cool to stumble across a reference to it before the polarizing author made his mark.

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Playlist:

Ghost - Impera

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre

Mark Lanegan - Bubblegum

Tones on Tail - Everything!

Ghost - Opus Eponymous

Danzig - Thrall- Demonsweat Live

The Twilight Singers - Powder Burns

Orville Peck - Bronco (Chapter 1)

David Bowie - A Reality Tour

Motörhead - Ace of Spades

Pike Vs. The Automaton - Eponymous

Mad Season - Above

Mutterlein - Orphans of the Black Sun

Jim Williams - Possessor OST

Young Widows - Settle Down City

Revocation - The Outer Ones

Code Orange - Underneath

Deafheaven - Sunbather

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Card:

Past = 7 of Cups: Debauch - taken here to mean I'm poisoning 

Present = 5 of Wands: Strife

Future = 0: The Fool

I'm not entirely certain how to read this one. I'm tempted to interpret the 7 of Cups as an inverted victory; a good thing that goes too long and turns sour, but I'm not entirely sure how that... wait. Maybe. I'll have to report back on this one. Sometimes it's best to follow flashes of inspiration without thinking about them too much.

The Haunter in the Dark

I finally picked up The Devil's Blood's 2012 MASTERPIECE The Thousandfold Epicentre on vinyl. Ever since my friend Tori turned me on to this album later that same year, it has occupied a pretty prominent place in my inner jukebox. I can't go very long without cranking this album, so it's nice to be able to do so on vinyl now.

 

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Watch:

With Mickey Keating's new film Offseason dropping this week and some of my cohorts from The Horror Vision and I planning to get together for a viewing/reaction episode, I figured it was time I finally watched the Keating flicks I'd had on my list for some time now. Two nights ago I began with 2016's Carnage Park.

 

Great flick. This feels like Keating doing his own take on Rob Zombie-like material, and it works. A lot of that is the casting - Ashely Bell is a fantastic final girl. Her wardrobe in the film plays up her petite size and creates a glorious misnomer for a character that ends up a staunch survivor without the film ever having to go over the top and take her full-on Ripley. This helps keep the film's realistic tone, and makes the final sequences of the movie breathtaking in the tension they create. Rarely does a film use lack of light this well. Also, Pat Healy is really just one of my favorite actors. The guy never disappoints in his performances.

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Read:

I checked a few more Lovecraft stories off the list:

    • Celephais

    • The Unnamable

    • The Haunter in the Dark

I will tell you, there is a HUGE advantage to reading Lovecraft's works on Kindle. You won't get an awesome, old-school paperback cover like the one I've posted above, however, the Kindle's X-Ray feature allows you to axis all kinds of information you would not otherwise have at your disposal. For instance, reading The Haunter in the Dark was especially enjoyable due to the information I learned by highlighting elements of the text and either reading the X-Ray or built-in links to Wikipedia. I'm certain I'd read this one before, however, I never would have known that the story is essentially a sequel to a young Robert Bloch's story The Shambler from the Stars, or that the main character, Robert Blake (not that Robert Blake), was Bloch's creation. There are also elements in the story drawn from Clarke Ashton Smith, and it's this element of Lovecraft's work - that it has always essentially been an 'open source' material, that I find so fascinating.  

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Playlist:

Deftones - Ohms

Deftones - Gore

Godflesh - Pure

Iress - Prey

My Bloody Valentine - MBV

Poni Hoax - Eponymous

Dillinger Escape Plan - One of Us is the Killer

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Card:

Note: I generally don't recognize inverted cards.

Past = Knight of Discs. The Fire Element of Earth. Will applied to Malkuth, the Earthly concerns. This was my idea before yesterday that I was going to force my doctor to see things my way, to open me up and take the 1cmm 'shadow' my last CT scan showed out.

Present = 3 of Disks: Work. Staying in the Earthly realm. This is the reality of the situation.

Future = 7 of Swords: Futility. This is turning out to be a pretty poignant pull because as it turns out, the doctor 100% convinced me I was overreacting. 

It's pretty easy to have someone in the medical field you trust say to you, "It's probably nothing but we'd like to do a biopsy just to be sure" and then assume this is a half measure - especially when it doesn't work and your lung collapses - and that the actual the best possible way to proceed is to have them cut you open. I'm past that. I can't keep my life on hold for this. The new plan is a CT every four months (or so) to make sure the shadow isn't growing. I should state what my doc reminded me of yesterday: the fact that because of being stabbed in the lung when I was in High School, and because of the inflammation - which they originally mistook for lymphoma back in 2017 - my lungs are filled with shadows when it comes to CT scans. The tricky bit with my physiology as it is, lies in determining if new aberrations are just the inflammation growing/changing, or something more nefarious. For now, I'm content waiting this out because the odds are it is inflammation. And really, I want to move ASAP, not just because I'm sick of LA, but because I want to be far away in case we get in over our heads and Putin decides to turn LaLaLand into a smoking crater. 

Paranoia. It's what's for dinner in 2022. Deal with it.

2019: January 15th

I discovered The Blueflowers yesterday on KXLU. Wow. Love this band. They have several albums available through their bandcamp HERE, and most if not all of those are on Apple Music. I'm digging into 2018's Circus on Fire this morning, and it's taking me places both familiar and strange.

I forgot to mention that last Friday I watched Pod, a film from 2015 directed by Mickey Keating. I'd seen the thumbnail for this one for years. I've also started to see discussion among a fairly rabid Keating fanbase I never realized existed, and after just this one flick I can see why some would rabidly endorse his movies. Pod is fantastic; Larry Fessenden's in it, and that's almost always a great sign; based on the simple, no-nonsense execution of a straight forward horror/sci fi concept, I'm guessing Mickey Keating's work will fit in nicely alongside Ti West and Joe Begos. In fact, Pod and Begos' The Mind's Eye would make an Excellent double feature.



Playlist from 1/14:

Dillinger Escape Plan - Option Paralysis
Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch - Concerning the White Horse (pre-release single)
Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch - Concerning the Entrance into Eternity
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada
David Zinman, Dawn Upshaw & London Sinfonietta - Gorecki: Symphony No. 3

Card of the day:

Second day in a row for this one. And that's probably because my interpretation yesterday was correct; I came SO close to finishing the book. So this card reappears today, because Today is the day.