The Boogeyman

A few weeks ago, Mr. Brown asked me if I'd ever heard the Chicago band Ganser. I had not. I added a few records in Apple Music but didn't actually hit play on one until last week.

Instant adoration.

The album I'm currently obsessed with is 2018's Odd Talk, and the song on that album that gets the most play is also the first song on this live Audiotree session the band did in 2020, "Satsuma." Watching them play live is literally thrilling, especially guitarist Charlie Landsman. I love everything about this band, but I love Charlie's guitar the most, as it conjures White Lung, US Maple, Assembly Line People Program, and Erase Errata, to name a few bands I've carried on love affairs with in the past. 

Ganser is on the always fantastic Felte Records, and you can check them out on the label's site HERE or the band's Bandcamp HERE.

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Watch:

Last night K and I caught the first screening of Rob Savage's new film The Boogeyman. This is based on an adaptation of Stephen King's short story, "The Boogeyman," from his Night Shift collection. I've read the story, although I had no memory of it at the time of the screening, so I was free to judge the film simply as the film. In that context, and ultimately in any other, The Boogeyman is a damn solid monster movie. Here's the trailer:

          

What goes right with this flick? Pretty much everything. In many respects, this is a by-the-numbers Horror flick, but Savage - whose breakthrough was 2020's Host (the Zoom movie, which I love) - is showing himself to be an auteur at heart, so there are enough personal touches and 'aberrations' from the formula that while The Boogeyman feels familiar, it also feels different enough that you won't be bored. The third act really sealed the deal - it's fantastic.

Also, and this is the smallest of spoilers, if at all, but I found it very cool that actress Seylan Baxter, who played the Medium in Host appears in this film in a youtube video on Seances one of the characters watches. It's little touches like that I always appreciate in a filmmaker's work.

  

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Read:

After seeing the film The Boogeyman, I woke up this morning and re-read the story in Stephen King's Night Shift.

The story strictly follows Billings's visit to Dr. Harper's office, where he avails himself of his guilt. That's it. So the film is an adaptation and expansion of the story, and in that, it's pretty fantastic in what it accomplishes, using King's story as the seed for a larger world that's really only hinted at between the lines of the story.

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Playlist:

Radiohead - The Bends

Ganser - Odd Talk

Lustmord - Berlin

Boy Harsher - Burn it Down (single)

Boy Harsher - Careful

Code Orange - Grooming My Replacement/The Game (single)

Code Orange - Underneath

            

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Card:

From Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris's Thoth deck:

• Prince of Swords - The "Air" of Air, or doubling down on conflict

• 2 Change - The Ebb and Flow.

• Princess of Wands - Physical act or manifestation of Will

Cut and dry, once again. Of course, that's because it's all in the interpretation, and the interpretation is steeped in what's on your mind. I know exactly what's on my mind, and it's writing. Hence, why all of this week's Pulls have concerned my Art. 

I've had two decent days getting back in the saddle; nothing stellar, but that's the ebb and flow mentioned above - I have to take the good with the bad, especially when overcoming the inertia of having not written in a bit. It's easy to get discouraged, but you just have to apply your Will and fight that part of yourself that wants to be lazy, or is looking to be discouraged. Frustrations be damned, a breakthrough will come!!!

 

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The Boogeyman's Milk Leg

 

Man, this track takes me places. Some of those places are imaginary, and some are memory-laden ephemera from the early 2000s. Despite being released in 2013 - the year Mr. Brown sent me this record that's taken ten years to fully gestate an appreciation for - something here really reminds me of the particular era of my life circa 2000-2004. I think it's because my first real exposure to jazz-tinted metal came during that time when my friend Hammerstock turned me onto Cynic's brilliant 1993 album Focus. Whatever the case, I played Habitual Levitations a lot in the year or two surrounding my exposure to it, but haven't really visited since. Turns out, it fits like a warm glove.

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Watch:

I didn't watch the first trailer for Rob Savage's upcoming Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman, and I'm not watching this one, but as usual, I'm posting it here for posterity's sake:

 

Nothing but good feedback surrounding this one, so I'll definitely be catching it in the theatre. I'm still searching for a new film to really scare the hell out of me; I know Evil Dead Rise is going to be an ordeal, or at least I hope it's going to be, but if this can accompany follow that as a genuine bone-shaking scary movie, then 2023 will be looking pretty good at the halfway point when The Boogeyman arrives on June 2nd!

 

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Read:

Although I won't be watching the trailer for The Boogeyman, I'm digging out the first edition copy of Stephen King's Night Shift I found at a Las Vegas thrift store ten years ago or so and re-read the story it's based on - also called The Boogeyman - for the first time in quite a few years. 

This was a FIND for sure, and the first time I'd read really early King. Although I discovered him in High School with The Gunslinger, then read a handful of his other novels, I never dug into his early short stories until I found this. I'm less than 100 pages from the end of King's newest novel, Fairy Tale, but I should be able to slip this quick re-read in just to prime my excitement for Savage's new adaptation.

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Playlist:

Black Sabbath - Eponymous

Black Sabbath - Master of Reality

Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy

The Sword - Warp Riders

Kyuss - ... And the Circus Leaves Town

Huey Lewis and the News - Sports

Intronaut - Habitual Levitations (Instilling Words with Tones)

Godflesh - Nero EP

Mars Red Sky - Eponymous

            

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Card:

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

To arrive at the best decision, and truly be fair and uncompromised by emotion, you have to be honest about your emotions toward the situation. I have no idea what this is in reference to at the moment, so I will do what I always do in situations like these - leave the spread on my desk today, so it's always in front of me. Sometimes that's the best way to unlock something you're stumped on.

 

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AHS 1984 Ep 2...

... is going to serve as the episode that marked my fervor for this season. Without treading into spoiler territory, the scene with a certain female character and Richard Ramirez having a heart-to-heart, and the darkness it hints at in said character, blew me away. From this point, I'm in, and what's more, I'm rabidly awaiting the next episode!

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I dug out my first edition of Stephen King's Night Shift - which I found in a Las Vegas thrift store years ago - and re-read Gray Matter, the basis for the first episode of Shudder's new Creepshow series' inaugural story. The reading confirms it - Creepshow's version is a fantastic adaptation of a lesser-known King story, both versions being creepy as all hell.

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Playlist from 9/27:

Opeth - In Cauda Venenum
Emilie Autumn - Opheliac
Heaven and Hell - The Devil You Know

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No card today.

Al Jarreau's Working on the Night Shift

I'm rounding out the night watching Night Shift for the first time in about... oh, twenty-something years. Not even twenty, had to be twenty-something. Night Shift was originally released in 1982 - I would have been 6 at the time - I don't remember what year I saw this flick on late night WGN Chicago's channel 9 but a lot of it stuck with me. That's how 80's movies were. Part of that is probably just the nostalgia - you know, the first time you see Michael Keaton jump off a second floor balcony in a cave man toga and land flat on his face it stays with you, right? Yeah, but of course there's the fact that my brain was still gathering mad information and formulating future experiences based on what I was perceiving at the time - a lot of deep-seated psychological growth going on that explains the attachment as well. Either way, my boss and I have talked about this movie a couple times and I've been surprised how much I remembered for having seen it once. Surprised despite the fact that I held it in a slightly unexplainable regard ever since...

Alas, I fear that this post has become incoherent because I've now been up for almost 24 hours and have a handful of Sierra Nevada's in me, so why don't I just let my sudden predilection for jabber-jawing take the proverbial dive off the second floor balcony of an $8k a year strip club and let Mr. Jarreau attempt to pull my ass out of the recycler?

What?