@BoyHarsher I don’t know if you planned it this way, but driving to work at 5 this morning in thick-ass L.A. fog was the PERFECT scenario to hear #givemeareason from #therunnerost. Well played!
It was a perfect morning here in LaLaLand, thanks to Boy Harsher. Can't wait for the full OST, and really can't wait for the film The Runner!
NCBD (Addendum)
Jesus. I can't seem to walk into The Comic Bug these days without dropping double or triple what I was planning on spending. Yesterday, Gerald, Jeff and Eddie clued me in on a couple things I had forgotten about, had not heard of, and needed to have the moment I saw. Here's what's what:
If you had told me I would be buying a Wonder Woman-related book this week - or ever - I would have told you that you'd had too much to drink. But here we are. Why? I love Kelley Sue DeConnick, but not even Grant Morrison in his heyday could get me to read WW. Why now? Well, look at this fucking art, and that's your answer.
Next, and because I compared Phil Jimenez and Hi-Fi's art in WW Historia: The Amazons to JH Williams III's art in Alan Moore's Promethea, I had totally forgotten about JHWIII's new book Echolands. Again, look at what this man puts on the page:
Finally, readers of these pages may remember how I fell head over heels in love with Daniel Warren Johnson's writing and art on the five-issue Beta Ray Bill mini from Marvel that came out earlier this year. Because of this, DWJ's Murder Falcon was recommended to me, and today, the Bug happened to have it back in stock..
Other than just being awesome because this is DWJ, Murder Falcon is the most METAL book EVER! They even based the big bad off the cover art of Sepultura's Arise - a painting by Michael Whelan.
I may be stretching this here, but really - you can't tell me this isn't related! And I have always loved the Arise cover. It's... the image that flashes in my head when I first read HP Lovecraft talk about "Madness" and "Non-Euclidean Geometry."
Playlist:
CCR - Eponymous
Boy Harsher - The Runner (pre-release singles)
Boy Harsher - Careful
Boy Harsher - Country Girl
The Soft Moon - Burn (single)
Caveman - Smash
David Bowie - Scary Monsters (and Super Freaks)
FFS - Eponymous
Sparks - Kimono My House
Nirvana - Bleach
Windhand - Eternal Return
Things won't go exactly as I planned? Well, at least that's some consistency.
At this point, I'm not listening to any more of Me and That Man's new record until I have the full album in my hands (pre-order HERE), but I'm posting it here so I can go back to it, and so you, dear reader, can strike out into the territory I'm eschewing simply because I am such a fan of full album immersion.
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The best thing to come out of social media that I've seen since the Pandemic began? Right here:
Love these guys.
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Finished Black Stars Above this morning. Five Issues of creepy, nuanced cosmic horror. Here's one of my favorite images, from issue four:
This very much reminds me of Alan Moore and JH Williams III's Promethea. Jenna Cha's art, Brad Simpson's colors, and Lonnie Nadler's story work in such perfect synthesis. They have to, it's the only way to tell such a macro/micro story that delves into infinite cosmic territory. This page illustrates the beautiful way the creative team delivers the ineffable.
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Mindful Habitation:
As so many others are, Southern California is on Shelter-in-place. Weird, but really only in perception and big picture theory. Day-to-day won't be that different for many of us. I'm bummed to know this will halt a lot of businesses, the smaller ones especially. Many of those smaller ones are really using this to innovate and think outside the box. The Comic Bug remains purveyors of media via mail, delivery, or scheduled appointment (HERE for details). King Harbor Brewery is doing same-day local Growler delivery (HERE). These are examples local to me, however, I'm getting reports of this from friends all over the place, so if there's a business you love, reach out and see if they are working with similar innovations.
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Event Viewing:
Episode Four of Alex Garland's Devs landed last night, and it was quite the ride. The opening floored me with it's image/sound juxtaposition. Geoff Barrow and The Insects' score is overall fantastic, but in this particular scene, it was unearthly, layered, textured sounds arranged in a way that made the images bloom from the screen.
And Nick Offerman? Killing it.
Playlist:
Exhalants - Eponymous
Anthrax - Spreading the Disease
Slayer - Live Undead/Haunting the Chapel
The Bronx - The Bronx (I)
Seefeel - Fracture/Tied (Single)
David Bowie - Aladdin Sane
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
Metatron Omega - Evangelikon
Myrkur - Folkesange
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Card:
An agent of enlightenment. Reproductive force - not necessarily biologically speaking. I'm leaning more toward an interpretation that reinforces people are finally learning what needs to be done and doing it (even a certain douche celebrity decided to comply and close his shitty restaurant). Also, the gray skeins in the background speak to the illusory world losing its leverage as knowledge dawns. That's the Devil - the Morningstar, enlightener extraordinaire.
Took K to see one of her favorite singers, Emily Kinney, Saturday night at the Hotel Cafe. LOVE this venue. So far I've seen Barry Adamson there, Vintage Trouble, and now Miss Kinney, who - despite my ability to connect with her music lyrically - has to have one of the best female voices in the business sans the highly trained stuff, i.e. Opera. Her band was damn fantastic as well; her guitarist Adam Tressler opened the night with his own material and it was great. He apparently recently released an album where every song is about lesser known Presidents, and he played one track from that, '31', which was outstanding. Adam's material runs a wide gamut, but the cornerstone of it all is he is one awesome guitar player; most of the set was him playing alone with just his Fender and some pedals - which he did not overuse - and it was captivating. When Adam did slowly bring up more musicians near the end of the set, first adding keys, then bass and drums, then female vocals, the set culminated in a fantastic track reminiscent of late 70s Elton John and Traffic. I've yet to discern the name of that song while rooting around online for his music, however I did find this, and I really like it for multiple reasons, one of which is absolutely that it's inspired by Vonnegut:
I finally finished the Ligotti anthologies and moved on. What a difference it is reading something fluent and not quite so scholarly. Again, not that I didn't dig some of the Ligotti, or appreciate it in its entirety for its place in the evolution of Horror and Weird Fiction, but it's nice to jump back into something a little less self-important. Recently, my good friend Jesus gifted me a copy of a book I'd not heard of before, and although I've a couple on-deck that I'm chomping at the bit to get to (The Book of Joan and Experimental Film, to be exact, with soon-to-be-released Laird Barron and David Peak breathing down my neck), I picked up Jason Arnopp's The Last Days of Jack Sparks and simply could not put it down until I was about 200 pages into its 376 page length.
This book is great. It's not horror, but it has horror elements, and what's more, there have been several scenes thus far that are legitimately scary. Like, like over-your-shoulder-while-you're-reading-it-at- 3:00AM-on-the-couch scary. Which I LOVE, and which is quite rare even for the Horror genre.
Playlist from yesterday was virtually non-existent and let's not even start on Saturday - I guess until the move with K's Mom is done, Sunday remains a day I just cannot find the time to post (yeah, but I found time to read 200 pages of a novel, eh? Maybe there's something to this day of rest stuff, eh?).
Playlist from the past two days (kinda):
The Soft Moon - Criminal
Man or Astroman - Defcon 5...4...3...2...1
Windhand/Satan's Satyrs - Split
Twin Peaks Limited Event Series Soundtrack
Card for the day:
And Sunday's Card, which I drew in the morning but never had a chance to contextualize:
So... a lot of Cups. Heavy emotion? Not really. Indolence could point to the fact that I didn't post yesterday. It would be interesting if the same thing happens next Sunday, card and all, since I've been kind of flaking on Sunday posts. Other than that, there's not a lot of room for lethargy in my life (though I did call out from work today; still working though). 8's match up to Hod on the Tree of Life, and we know from Alan Moore's Promethea, which is essentially a Grimoire masquerading as a Comic Book (well, that's where I know it from; obviously the correspondences predate Mr. Moore) that Hod is the Sepheroth of Language, relating to Hermes, Intellect and Communication. Now, here it gets even more interesting - I called out today, so that's my indolence, but I did so because I couldn't sleep. After a couple of hours laying awake, I woke up and dug back into Jack Sparks - and came across something I'd never read, heard or thought of before. While locked in a mostly friendly philosophical debate, Combat Magician Sherilyn Chastain argues to Atheist Jack about Science being a closed door, as short-sighted a system of belief as religion. She invokes Robert Anton Wilson, which immediately makes me love her character even more, and his Multiple-Model Agnosticism. She also argues, to summarize it, that Modern Science is a generalization of the laws of Greek Grammar.
Huh?
I'm quoting directly from the book here, and there's no plagiarism or disrespect meant; I HIGHLY recommend Mr. Arnopp's novel.
"The entire Enlightenment project was about rediscovering stuff the ancient Greeks knew. And because it's coded so heavily on that Graeco-Roman knowledge, there's whole gaps of things they didn't have words for."
Holy Moly. Never thought of it like that before, but it's obvious, even if it takes a bit of a cognitive workout to fully work that into as large a context as modern science*. But so here we have my indolence leading me to an idea new to me that centers on Language. The 8 of Cups through and through.
Also, in the Cycle of Cups, the 8 is where emotion that in 7 Debauch has gone from positive to negative with hints of addiction, becomes altogether Broken. This is, of course, followed by The 9 of Cups - Happiness. Not sure how all of this equates to me, but it's been a while since I deep-dove into a pull, so this is more an exercise at this point.
The Knight of Cups is always interesting, the Fiery aspect of Water, so there's an energy from opposites. From the Grimoire:
"Threatened by emotional deluge, the answer is within reach (note the Knight on the card reaching for the crab of revelation). The deluge is not without its rewards. Act fast and be careful not to drown." Sephirothic Tree of Life association on this one is Chokman. Hod and Chokmah, eh?
...appears in five volumes at $14.99 a piece. You didn't know Moore had a course on Magick? Yep, it's a series of graphic novels entitled Promethea and it is wonderful.
Basically Moore disguises his teachings/theories as a slightly futurist superhero comic following protagonist Sophie Bangs as she comes to grips with being chosen to be the new incarnation of ancient god/force Promethea, essentially The Scarlet Women. The entire series is packed with Magick, however the real gem is from issue 12 to about 20 where Moore walks Sophie through the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the ancient map of the Universe that the Tarot of the Egyptians is based on. It is brilliantly rendered in word and in art, J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray really pulling out all the stops and bringing each Sephira to life with the different colors, images and other associations.
In keeping with this, more for my own benefit really, because writing stuff like this helps me consolidate and streamline my own understanding, I'm going to write out the Major Arcana and brief definitions according to Moore.
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0 The Fool - Nothing. The Void. Ain Soph. 1 The Magus - The Father, the initial spark of creation. 2 The High Priestess - The womb in which that spark gestates. 3 The Empress - The Motherly crafting/nurturing of life. 4 The Emperor - The governing body of rules for that life = DNA. 5 The Hierophant - Something... more that guides that life. Birth of the idea of God or Higher Consciousness. 6 The Lovers - Life splits, Adam and Eve, the Protozic Amoebas. The Brothers, Cane and Abel. This Life thing gets complicated as life proliferates and takes on many new forms. Survival becomes you either kill or get killed. 7 The Chariot - The Holy Graal the dawn of man's exploration of imagination and enlightenment 8 Adjustment (formerly Justice) - Ying and Yang; Laws, compromise & cooperation. The first faint lines of civilization 9 The Hermit - A dark period of withdrawal and gestation. Re-grouping. 10 Fortune (formerly The Wheel) - Civilization: Empires come and go. 11 Lust - an undying drive that propels life further in spite of itself 12 The Hanged Man - Four points over one*: the triumph of reason and matter over the Spiritual 13 Death - A change of states. 14 Art (formerly Temperance) - The flip of card 6; alchemical mixing of Will and Imagination (Silver and Gold). 15 The Devil - Materialization over Spirit 16 The Tower - What goes up must come down (the Industrial Revolution). 17 The Star - The Path to enlightenment. The dawn of Spiritualism in the late 19th century. 18 The Moon - Hidden meanings. The Unconscious Mind. 19 The Sun - True Enlightenment.; revelation. 20 The Aeon - N.O.W. - Information age; Aeons turnover quicker and quicker. Eschaton. 21 The Universe - The Dance of Life. The mirror of card 0 - Everything.
