As though in total contrary to yesterday's post, here's Locust Abortion Technician at its grimiest. Is this my favorite track by the band? Might just be. I mean, this song is not only a total throwback to the earlier albums
Thursday, February 1, 2024
Butthole Surfers Week Day 5
Thursday, November 30, 2023
Eating the Flesh of Robots
One of the records Mr. Brown lent me in our recent record swap is The Flesh Eaters 2018 album I Used to Be Pretty. Holy cow, is this a burner of a record! If you dig the track above - my favorite at the moment - check out the entire record.
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Monday, November 27, 2023
The Dead Take the A Train Straight Through the Spider Labyrinth
November is nearly over, and I realized I have not posted any Opeth yet. For that matter, I hadn't even listened to them until whatever day last week I began this post. Back around 2006/2007, Opeth became a big winter band for me, with the time change and early night that directly follows Halloween a welcome signifier that it's time to crack out Deliverance, Blackwater Park and the Candlelight years.
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Finally, although this isn't a new title, it's one that's been on my radar for a while, and after watching Michael Venus' 2020 film Schlaf (Sleep), I forked over the dough for this gorgeous release from Arrow Video; for $20 how could I not?
Read:
"Julie is a coked-up, burnt-out thirty-year-old whose only retirement plan is dying early. She’s been trying to establish herself in the NYC magic scene, and she’ll work the most gruesome gigs, exorcize the nastiest demons, and make deals with the cruelest gods to claw her way to the top. But nothing can prepare her for the toughest job yet: when her best friend, Sarah, shows up at her door in need of help. Keeping Sarah safe becomes top priority. Julie is desperate for a quick fix to break the dead-end grind and save her friend. But her power grab sets off a deadly chain of events that puts Sarah – and the entire world - directly in the path of annihilation. The first explosive adventure in the Carrion City Duology, The Dead Take the A Train fuses Cassandra Khaw’s cosmic horror and Richard Kadrey’s gritty fantasy into a full-throttle thrill ride straight into New York’s magical underbelly."
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Tuesday, October 31, 2023
Hybrid Halloween Moments!!!
31 Days of Halloween:
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Tuesday, October 10, 2023
All I Ever Wanted Was A Totally Killer Autopsy
31 Days of Halloween:
Honestly, I'm being a bit of a prick here. I think my real issue is that, between my first and second viewing of this flick, I saw the Director's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and hated it so much it spoiled this. I need to give Troll Hunter another shot because that's one I've only seen once and long before either of those others. Interestingly enough, my prejudice wasn't strong enough to spoil this year's Last Voyage of the Demeter, so maybe my issues with Jane Doe are legit. I don't know.
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Friday, March 24, 2023
New Swans!!!
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One of the things that saved my sanity over the last few days of my recent two-week stint in LaLaLand was getting stoned at my hotel one night and discovering Bobby Fingers had released his new Diorama video. The subject of Mr. Fingers' machinations this time?Plastic:
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Thursday, June 10, 2021
New Deafheaven!!!
This hit yesterday, but I've been writing and scheduling these posts at least a day ahead to try and regain some sense of consistency. Wednesday was already a pretty good morning when Mr. Brown text me that Deafheaven dropped a new track and announced an album. As you can imagine, I FLEW to pre-order Infinite Granite HERE, then spent a good amount of time listening to "Great Mass of Color "over and over. So good. I guess all the black metal blow-hards can shut the fuck up, since the band has obviously now embraced integrating so many other elements. That's what the best of any genre does - refuses to be limited by the tropes of their chosen peers.
Infinite Granite lands August 20 on Sargent House.
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Deafheaven - Great Mass of Color (pre-release single)Saturday, January 16, 2021
War Pimp Renaissance
I finally picked The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen back up earlier this week, and this time, I find I can't put it down. More about that below. For right now, reading the Biafra interview in the book and hearing Al talk about the origin of the band Lard, I felt motivated to dig out 1997's Pure Chewing Satisfaction. This is one of those records I had on cassette back in the day, and because I still have the actual cassette, I always put off listening to it on Apple Music under the guise that I should dig out that tape. Well, that never happens, so I haven't heard Pure Chewing in a loooong time. Guess what? I gave up on the tape and started playing it the other day, only to find out I miss the hell out of this record!
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Watching the first two episodes of Marvel's Wandavision last night was quite the experience. I now very much understand what Elizabeth Olsen meant in the interviews she did during the run-up to this show when she repeatedly said, "I just can't believe they let us actually do this show."Read:
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Lard - Pure Chewing SatisfactionCard:
Wednesday, August 5, 2020
Isolation: Day 141
Mr. Brown sent me this last night, and after watching it, both K and I are immediate fans. I can't wait to dig into The Hu's catalogue, which you can peruse and purchase from HERE.
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A new trailer dropped for Season Two of The Boys.
The trailer is a bit overdone, but I'm still excited to see where this goes.
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NCBD:
Not a lot this week. I did notice this coming from Vault, and I'm curious. Back in the early/mid 90s, I wasn't a RPG'r, but I loved Vampires. I know the entire genre is cliched now, and maybe it was back then, too. I didn't know that. I discovered Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire when I was a senior in High School, and I LOVED it. This was shortly before the movie - which I'm not a huge fan of - and reading that first novel in Rice's Vampire Chronicles coinciding with my purchasing Type O Negative's Bloody Kisses (the digipak version, of course). I'd smoke out and lay around devouring the novel, while listening to Peter Steele's voice sing of Blood and Fire, and Suspended in Dusk, and Steele's voice became Louie's voice. I haven't gone back to those novels in since I read them; I'm not even sure I'd like them now. Back then though, Rice's fiction had me ravenous for more Blood Lore, and in this way I discovered White Wolf Publishing's Vampire: The Masquerade. My Chicago comic shop Amazing Fantasy carried a lot of books as well (thank you Garrett!), and I believe that is where I bought my first Masquerade novel. I wouldn't even be able to tell you which one it was, it left a bit of an impression on me. Enough that I'm curious to see a comic series reviving the line.
A few years back, when my friend Missi turned me on to Poppy Z. Brite's fiction from the 90s, it kind of scratched a long-standing itch for this kind of Goth-Pageantry fiction, and it's probably the hangover from reading her Lost Souls last year that has me tempted to pick this up.
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Playlist:
Young Widows - Settle Down City
Protomartyr - Under Color of Official Right
Rezz - The Silence is Deafening EP
The Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro
Urge Overkill - Saturation
Metallica - Master of Puppets
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Card:
Keep going despite fatigue. The wheel turns, so says Ka.
Friday, May 24, 2019
2019: May 24th - New Pelican Track!
On June 7th, Southern Lord is releasing the newest album from Chicago Post-Metal group Pelican, and from the two tracks we've heard so far, Nighttime Stories looks like it is a serious contender for my top ten this year. I love the texture of this track; thick, sludgy, but not without melody and a certain swing in its step. You can pre-order the album HERE.
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Two more episodes of Ozark season one down last night, so that means two to go, then I can finally begin Season Two. This show really holds up on second viewing, and I'm pretty sure its dark, foreboding tone, exceptionally well-written characters, and left-of-center plot twists will continue to impress me; Ozark is the kind of show that already feels destined for greatness.
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Final episode of The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder tonight, but, in case you haven't heard, it will be back. In my excitement, I looked up some old clips:
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Playlist from 5/23:
The Cure - Disintegration
The Raveonettes - Lust Lust Lust
Faith No More - King for a Day
Faith No More - Angel Dust
Card of the day:
I've never been a fan of this card. Frankly, it has always visually been intertwined with a former lover, and I'm one who usually shuts the door on the past pretty hard, so I'm never really enthused to receive anything in the way of reminders. But last year at some point, this card came up a couple times in close proximity, and in discussing it with my good friend Missi, she put something to me I'd never stopped to consider; basically, why? Why did the Queen of Wands have to be what I had come to think of it as? And this morning, free from any pull of the past, I uncover this card and think, "That's not what this is at all."
So then, the question remains, what is the Queen of Thoth to me?
Let's start basic. From the Grimoire: "Emotional Intelligence." Well, that in and of itself is sometimes as difficult to find as the Dodo; the waters of emotion run rapid when they run best, and sluiced through the right tributary, we may find it very difficult to apply any guidance to the rush toward conclusion. So then, when I pull this, especially today, where my day-to-day gig at the biorepository feels a bit out of control (mother business expanding exponentially constantly), I feel as though the eyes of this fiery lady are telling me to watch my mouth, which runs often, loud, and considerably unchecked at work.
Also, there's the related idea of the 'Consciousness in Spirit,' which I see pop up online when scouting around for other facets of this card. Consciousness in Spirit equates to Intensity of Purpose, which I have absolutely lacked for going on a week now, as work as been difficult and some passing bug has kept me feeling sick and run down for most of the week, even now when I'm through the worst of it. I read this as a need to get my ass back in gear; for the past two weeks, I've had a fantastic regiment of after-work writing and yoga going almost every day, then Sunday I woke up sick and ever since, I've haven't done either. The little bit of yoga I forced myself to do last night ended up making me feel amazing, and that's as good as any other reason to re-focus and re-acquire that Intensity of Purpose.
Sunday, April 7, 2019
2019: April 7th - Droneflower
Well, I did not expect to be posting this track today. I didn't expect to even think of one of my favorite Guns and Roses songs any time soon. And 'favorite G&R song' is a somewhat exclusive label, as the band long ago irritated me to the point that I have little ability left to engage with their music in any meaningful way. It's all nostalgia, with only brief glimpses of the feelings their music - especially the epics on the two Illusions records - used to inspire in me back when I was in high school and G&R was a force to be reckoned with. It's not that the material is lacking, because songs like Estranged, Coma, and yes, even November Rain still feel epic and genuine to me. But for a band I once thought would be the 'next Rolling Stones,' G&R couldn't keep it together and ended up traveling through this timeline as a not much more than a bad joke. Nadler's upcoming collaborative album with Stephen Brodsky, out April 26th on Sacred Bones, however, is not a joke:
I can't place where I know Marrisa Nadler's name from; it doesn't matter. Between her, Chelsea Wolfe, Emma Ruth Rundle, and Myrkur, there is an amazing cabal of female artists exploring the dark and beautiful intersection of folk and black metal. It's not about sound, it's about tone and aesthetic. And Brodsky's discography is loaded with impressive projects, so I think I'll pre-order this one, which can be done HERE.
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The Horror Vision had a group outing last Thursday and caught the first pre-screening of Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer's new iteration of the classic Stephen King novel Pet Sematary. I'm sorry to say I hated it. With a passion. And I think I have some pretty good reasons for that hate. Did my Castmates agree with me? Check out our reaction on any of the following platforms below to find out, but only if you've seen the flick; we go heavy spoilers on this one:
The Horror Vision on Apple
The Horror Vision on Spotify
The Horror Vision on Google Play
The Horror Vision Official Website
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I leave for Spokane in a few hours, and in preparing for this trip, my main goal over the last few days has been to finish the First Reader copy of the Shadow Play Book One, so I could pass it off to Missi and NOT THINK ABOUT IT for a few weeks. I'm happy to say I accomplished my goal, even though by the end of the work - last minute touch-ups to the prose and a ton of formatting tweaks that resulted from taking the finished document out of Scrivener and into Vellum, I was spent. I raced through three hours last night and came out the other side feeling as though I'd been immersed in hard physical labor. Now? On to Ciazarn!
Ciazarn: also known as carny, is a private language employed by those who live and work in Carnival culture, meant to keep anyone outside that culture from knowing what is being said.
This is the new collaboration with Jonathan Grimm, who I'm also doing The Legend of Parish Fenn with. Fenn is a comic. Ciazarn is a short story - or perhaps eventually a series of short stories - with illustrations by Grimm. At some point I'll post an elevator pitch and sample art and I think you'll agree with me that Ciazarn is going to be awesome.
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Playlist 4/05:
Brand New - God and the Devil are Raging Inside Me
Canadian Rifle - Peaceful Death
Canadian Rifle - Deep Ends
King Khan and the Shrines - What Is?!
Windhand - Live Elsewhere
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Playlist 4/06:
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Wasteland
Lustmord - Songs of Gods and Demons
Faith No More - Angel Dust
Card of the day:
Breakthrough. Exactly. One immediately behind me, hopefully one directly in front of me.
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
2019: April 3rd - Full Episode from Jordan Peele's New Twilight Zone
So good to have Paper Girls back in monthly form!
The description for this issue on Comics List ends with, "...dark times ahead." Oh man.
Monday, April 1, 2019
2019: April 1st - Talking Heads - Crosseyed and Painless
Because most days, Talking Heads' first Brian Eno collaboration Remain in Light continues to be the album in my head the moment I wake up. NOT a complaint.
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A long weekend of work set me back about a day on turning the book over to Missi - yeah, I'm remembering yesterday's Card of the Day, but there's still a few tweaks to be made. I spent about a good hour yesterday morning at 5:00 AM reworking the dialogue in a scene and it has resonated in my head since, so it's worth it.
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I was so tired last night when I skipped dinner and passed out, that I think I may have been speaking in tongues. Creepy, that kind of tired. Makes me feel like I'm not really here.
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Playlist from 3/31:
King Khan and the Shrines - The Supreme Genius Of...
Joe Mason - Music for Unrealized Cartoons
Plague Bringer - As the Ghosts Collect, the Corpses Rest
The Police - Outlandos D'Amour
Sleaford Mods - English Tapas
Television - Marquee Moon
Metallica - Ride the Lightning
Windhand/Satan Satrys - Split EP
John Carpenter - Lost Themes
No card today.
Friday, December 7, 2018
2018: December 7th - RIP Pete Shelley
Rest in Peace, Peter Shelley.
The first time I heard The Buzzcocks it was their single What Do I Get, circa 1998, and I was floored. After coming up in the early 90s and absolutely HATING the pop punk movement (do I hate green day more than I hate crappy 70s bands like Ace, Styxx, and Kansas? Yes. Yes I do), I was shocked to find there was pop punk that didn't turn everything I loved about the original 'punks' - a social movement more than a sound, per se - into a marketing ploy. Then, to find that as that as they evolved, the Buzzcocks melded more with the Post-Punk movement, I've often felt this band were way more important in the annals of rock history than they are generally given credit for. Even I haven't listened to the Buzzcocks as much as I feel I should, my familiarity starting and stopping with songs on an old mixtape back in the day, and an career-spanning anthology Mr. Brown gave me years ago.
I began working on my Top Ten Favorite Albums of 2018 list the other day. Did Beak>'s L.A. Playback make the cut? Honestly, I'm not even sure yet. It's always a favorite year-end activity of mine, to comb back through all the music that came out over the past year and boil down my ten favorites, but it's never easy. There's A LOT of good music out there. I also always look forward to reading other people's lists, chief among them the ones published by Heaven Is An Incubator and Joup's Daniel Fiorio. I'll definitely be posting links to those here when they drop.
In the meantime, here's some Live Beak> I found on youtube. Love KEXP! So many awesome bands - reminds me of the old Peel Sessions, or in a more contemporary, LA way, Part Time Punks.
Playlist from my travel day yesterday was primarily six sustained hours of Burial's Untrue, with a few other things thrown into the mix. That's how I travel: I put on an album, almost always electronic in nature, and drill it on repeat. This helps me reach a strange, liminal state, a kind of hypnogogic trance, and that helps me ride the day out in a strange but beautifully peaceful fugue, where none of the inconveniences or discomforts of traveling bother me, and I end up with a creative re-charge. Previous albums I've done this with are Boards of Canada's Geogaddi, Music Has the Right to Children, and Tomorrow's Harvest, and Moderat's II and III.
12/06:
Burial - Untrue
Burial - Kindred EP
Bohren & der Club of Gore - Gore Motel
Card of the day is super special today, because my good friend Missi surprised me with a present last night - a Mini Thoth deck. No disrespect to that Hansen Roberts deck I've been using as a back-up over the last year, but I have absolutely NO connection with it. Actually, while I can admire the beauty of many decks out there (chief among them that mind blowing Vertigo Comics deck), Lady Frieda Harris/Aleister Crowley's Thoth deck is the only Tarot deck I have a working connection with, so it's the only one I use. Maybe someday that will change, but I kind of doubt it.
I broke the deck in reading for Missi last night, and as usual, her understanding and interpretation of Tarot always inspires me, so the cards are charged and ready to go, and to celebrate I'm doing a spread today instead of just one card:
Full disclosure: I never factor in reversals. That said, while making this giff, I wanted to portray the cards exactly as they were drawn, so I kept that intact. Also, the fact that all three cards are reversed either totally negates the idea that a reversal in this case would matter, or testifies to it. Either way, I read them as the card, not their positioning.
This is interesting because it slightly mirrors the drawing I did for Missi last night, with two Cups divided by a Sword card. My overall reading is simple - I'm having trouble with the setting for the final scene in the book, because it's not enough of a 'set piece.' to change it, I must be cruel or kill one of my darlings - something about the scene that I've been adamant not to change. This will lead to a breakthrough.
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Pet Sematary Trailer!
Whoah. Thanks to my good friend Missi, I finally read Stephan King's Pet Sematary about five or six years ago. It immediately became my favorite non-Dark Tower King novel. It is chilling. End of story. And the scenes that brush up against the Wendigo - if that's what it is - SO spooky. So well done! The flick looks great - the directors previously did Starry Eyes, so that's a great sign in my book. Another upscale King Adaption on the heels of last year's IT. While I'll admit to a certain soft-spot for the original Pet Sematary, this looks to be a vast improvement.
Monday, August 13, 2018
2018: August 13th
Happy birthday to one of my best friends in the world! I hope You have an amazing day, Missi!
Been a few days. Leaving one project behind and starting the final stretch on another. Had to put Please Believe Me away for a few days in order to gain perspective on it, as I'm not sure it's 100% finished, even though I 'finished' it last Thursday. Something is telling me there's a coda, of sorts, that has to go in. We'll see.
Attended my second HWA meeting yesterday. What an absolute inspiration these folks are! So great to talk about the craft in such a wonderful environment.
Playlist from yesterday was short because I've been listening to that SC3T Giallo ST almost none stop; I've felt it building to inspiration on a project and this morning it was revealed to me what exactly that will be, and I am psyched!
Secret Chiefs 3 Traditionalists - Le Mani Destre Recise Degli Ultimi Uomini
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Card of the day:
Needed to see this today, and the fact that it comes up in my pulls so often is definitely a reassuring sign.
Thursday, June 21, 2018
2018: June 21st
There is a melancholic air to this song that absolutely floors me. I love it SO much. Corniglia is a band that I happened across on LA's music treasure, KXLU, one morning on the drive to work, and in the two or three weeks since I just cannot stop listening to them. The album, self-titled, is easily in my top of the year. One of the things I like so much about this is, in some strange way, it reminds me of the vibe I had in my head in the early 2000s - a kind of delicious airiness that translated to a gray hopelessness as I graduated College: the future loomed before me, I buried a friend, and I felt more alone than ever. The new Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying is up HERE and while it would seem to glorify a somewhat frightening moment in my life, it actually very much illustrates the loneliness I felt at that time. 2001-2002 was dark, and although I had an awesome band (The Yellow House) and awesome friends (particularly at that time Brown, Tim, Sonny, Grez, Dennis and Dave), I was somewhat adrift on a mindset so bleak that it spurred me into frequent drug use and several bouts of totally vapid sex, both very much unlike me. And some how, I hear elements of that hear.
I'm digressing, or maybe I'm not.
My point is that music is the same as all art in that, to modify a famous saying, the beholder gets out of it what they put in. That is to say, there is often baggage you bring with you when hearing a new band, new song, new album, and that baggage - snippets of color or image associations, emotions, whatever form it takes - shapes how you hear that music and, ultimately, what it will mean to you. What's even more interesting is your interpretation could be light years away from what was happening in the artist's head at the time - it doesn't matter. Having also made music and talked to people who got something out of it that I had never anticipated or intended, I can tell you that just the idea that something you made could have such a multi-textural effect on another soul is rewarding beyond description. So, while Corniglia may not have intended the melancholy associations I ascribe to their sound, I'm sure they won't mind if there music drives me to stay awake long past when I should have my head down, trying to capture in words something they have made me feel with their song.
Playlist from Odin's Day, 6/20/18:
Danzig 6: Satan's Child
David Bowie - Hunky Dory
David Bowie - Scary Monsters (and Super Freaks)
David Bowie - Reality
Nothing - Downward Years to Come
Various Artists - Reservoir Dogs OST
Corniglia - Eponymous
Card O' the day:
The Lovers again, and how it currently applies to my life is still escaping me. I need to make time to look further into this. Perhaps I will ask Missi.