2018: April 11th 7:12 PM

Last night we went and saw A Quiet Place. I can't stress this enough: SEE IT IN THE THEATRE. A theatre with GOOD sound. Excellent film, and outstanding use of sound. The score is a bit overdone early on, but the juxtaposition between quiet, i.e. ambient sound, and quiet, i.e. NO sound (one character is deaf), and sound, like BIG sound, is just fantastic and makes for an awesome theatrical experience.



Playlist from yesterday:

Venue - 8 song demo (circa 2001)
Preoccupations - New Material
Soft Moon - Eponymous
Isaac Hayes - ... To Be Continued
The Who - Who's Next

Just finished Si Spencer and Sean Murphy's John Constantine Hellblazer trade City of Demons. Excellent late-era Constantine story, highly recommended. Has a marvelous climax and then a nice, cinematic outro.

Also, read what had to be my favorite story in the Ligotti Anthology, The Cocoons. Short, sweet and to the point. Body horror with a nightmare finish. Very atmospheric and creepy as all hell. If you've read it, or subsequently read it based on my recommendation, Ligotti himself comments on the story at the prompt of a question HERE.

Card for today (which, despite the late arrival of this entry, I pulled at 5 something this morning:

Professionally, this card can mean a willingness to scrap with others. This fits; I don't talk specific work stuff here, but there are people in other departments not living up to their responsibilities and I've taken to throwing down the gauntlet on them. Take care of your shit, right?

2018: April 1st 10:21 AM

Yesterday was a sacrifice - finished the latest Drinking with Comics and put it up, worked in the middle of the day, cleaned and unboxed. Never had a chance to do the blog until later at night and by then March 30th, it's playlist and the idea of pulling a card were loooong gone. I do know that I woke up with this in my head yesterday though:



Nearing the end of Thomas Ligotti's Grimscribe and just finished The Dreaming in Nortown, easily one of my favorite stories in this collection of the author's earliest two anthologies. The story builds a nice, palpable dread by plumbing the depths of consciousness; that nasty little place where waking life and the oneiric plane intermingle. And Ligotti does this in a way that feels reminiscent of Lovecraft's best philosophical terror, i.e. the opening paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu, so there's a nostalgic harmony to my enjoyment of it, as well. That said, the slightly ineffective abstractions meant to masquerade as profound raison d'être for the characters wax and wane a bit in a kind of 'nothing is happening' way; not to say I'm complaining there's no action or monsters, quite the opposite. Once again though, as I have with other stories in this collection, I feel the The Dreaming in Nortown's end doesn't exactly payoff what the rest of the story sets up.

Also recently began Si Spencer and Sean Murphy's older Hellblazer story, City of Demons. So far, really good.

Playlist from 3/31

Tennis System - Technicolour Blind
Cash Money - Black Hearts and Broken Wills
Red Lorry Yellow Lorry - The Very Best of
Childish Gambino - Because the Internet
System of a Down - Eponymous
The Verve - A Storm in Heaven
Pink Floyd - the Wall
The Used - Ocean of the Sky
Garbage - Eponymous

New Issue of Drinking with Comics is up!

And I'll be damned, we talk about comics THE ENTIRE TIME!!!

2018: February 8th 5:45 AM

Woke up with this one in my head today, probably because I listened to the album it's on - Teenage Wrist's Dazed EP about a half a half dozen times last night. At least.



Such a big, fuzzy neon dream of an album. Thanks to Jacob again for introducing me to this great band that has an album coming out in March. You can pre-order it HERE.

Playlist from yesterday:

The Fixx - Reach the Beach
ZZ Top - Tres Hombres
Nektar - A Tab in the Ocean
Odonis Odonis - Post Plague
The Jesus Lizard - Down
Teenage Wrist - Dazed E.P.

Card of the day:

Emotional deluge, use intellect and Will to prevent being drowned. Interesting... a few words on these daily draws. Events yesterday, Wednesday the 7th lined-up directly with two repetitive pulls that culminated the Wednesday before, on January 31st. What's the grid system at work here, or is there one? Well, we'll see. That's why I've shifted this blog into this 'journaling' paradigm - looking for patterns in the grid of chaos that, even though we do all we can to refute the fact, defines our existences. Hopefully I will find some and learn a way to 'hack' the graphs and grids I make from those patterns.

Yesterday I indeed stopped to buy my comics. TWD did not disappoint, but I haven't read Papergirls yet. Why? Well, I had an abortive attempt at my daily words, and after that I didn't have much time for reading, and this was unexpected but I ended up buying my first current Batman comic since Grant Morrison's run ended in 2013 and I was super excited to dive in. Why? What could make me jump into a Batman comic? Three words:

Sean. Gordon. Murphy. Look at this cover:

It's ultra rare to impossible for art to convince me to read a book, in Murphy's case it's a combination of his art and the fact that he can spin one hell of a yarn. Punk Rock Jesus is still one of my all-time favorites. One issue into White Knight and I don't quite have the lay of the land yet, but A) it's stand alone continuity and B) it's NOT the tired iterations of Batman and Joker we're used to being regurgitated every few years, although it starts there and moves out in what I believe is virgin territory for the characters from there. Either way, I'm in for all eight issues (five are out so far).

Sean Murphy & Scott Snyder's The Wake

image courtesy of weeklycomicbookreview.com

The new series from Vertigo comics is excellent! Read about it in Thee Comic Book Column #43 on Joup!