YES! I have been waiting for this for about five years now. Not sure how long it usually takes between records - it was The Veils' performance on David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017 that introduced them to me (despite Mr. Brown attempting to previous to that), so this will be my first new Veils' record since becoming a fan.
Wow. Right when I start my Twin Peaks re-watch, too. The Stars, they are aligning!
The new double album, "...AndOut of the Void Came Love" drops March 3rd; you can pre-order it now HERE.
Playlist:
Angelo Badalamenti - Twin Peaks Season Two and More
Angelo Badalamenti - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me OST
Card:
Continuing my three pulls for the new year, here's my card from Crowley and Harris' Thoth:
Typically, I read Aces in this deck as Breakthroughs and the fact that we're looking at a breakthrough in Disks reflects the fact that I received a completely unexpected 'extra' paycheck this year and was able to all but pay off the credit card that I used to help us move. This is a HUGE breakthrough, because now, as long as I'm diligent for a bit, I can finish these and then help K whittle down the big box hardware store card she got when we first moved. I can only imagine this Breakthrough should echo good things into the new year.
It's been a while since I've fallen headlong into The Veils. With Twin Perfect putting all this glorious Twin Peaks stuff into my head, this feels like the perfect time.
NCBD:
The slimmest NCBD in quite some time. I'll try not to complain, and instead allow my wallet to catch its breath.
There's nothing amazing about this book prequel to the new MOTU series on Netflix - which I enjoyed quite a bit - but it's fun. Also, with a four-issue runtime, I don't feel like it's a very big commitment. Also, that's a Bill Sienkiewicz variant cover right there. Pure Magick.
So glad The Silver Coin got picked up for more than the initially solicited four issues. This is easily in my top five comics of the year.
Listen:
Super excited to finally post this new episode of The Horror Vision, as we had Seattle University Professor of Film Studies John Trafton on to deep-dive Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck's criminally underseen 1973 Messiah of Evil. I learned a lot on this one, and from this film in general, and John is a veritable wellspring of film knowledge. Can't wait to have him back! Listen to the episode, and check out his website, which is chock full of fantastic information!
I've been on something of a kick with The Veils lately. This song... so good. Finn Andrews is, in my opinion, the heir to Nick Cave's throne. Not that Cave is going anywhere anytime soon, I hope. But there's an artistic comparison to be made, for sure.
**
Saturday night, K and I went to the theatre and saw Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark. It's not good.
I know, I know... what could go wrong? Well, for one, the framing device the filmmakers construct - a story about preteens that ride around on bikes and use walkie talkies to communicate during dangerous situations (sound familiar?; I can practically see the studio executives writing that in), situations that arise from the kids finding a mysterious book in a mysterious house and setting off strange events? It sucks. It's trite, completely unoriginal, and largely boring. Watching a movie that's this bad, I always go through about thirty to forty minutes of the, "Maybe it's just me..." phase, followed immediately by the, "Okay, if it's not me, what's wrong with it?" phase.
I really try. I do.
Finally, we get the "Well, how could they have done this better" phase. For this one, I think the better option would have been to invent a Cryptkeeper-like character or device and use that to introduce and/or narrate the 'Scary Stories' culled from the book. As it stands with this film, the framing device story involving the kids is about 90% of the screen time, and the Scary Stories are maybe 10%.
It is, however, visually and sonically really well made. And if you have younger children and want to get them on Horror, I'd definitely recommend this for them. And admittedly, the brief moments that bring the original stories from the books to life are pretty awesome, there just isn't nearly enough of them to make up for the rest.
**
Playlist from the last few days:
Waxwork Records - House of Waxwork Issue #1
Revolting Cocks Playlist
Drab Majesty - Careless
Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars
Beak> - L.A. Playback
Opeth - Still Life
Sunn O))) - Life Metal
High on Fire - The Art of Self Defense
The Veils - Nux Vomica
The Veils - Time Stays, We Go
The Veils - Total Depravity
Sleep - Dopesmoker
Ritual Howls - Rendered Armor
Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love
**
Today's spread:
Continuing the theme of larger ideas affecting everyday life. I'm really only feeling the barest beginnings of this, but it's there.
New Finn Andrews track! I love everything about this man's music. In the past two years, I've gone to so many concerts, that I've made a little oath to lay off in 2019, in an attempt to start saving some of the money I spend at shows. The two exceptions to this are The Veils, who I've only been into since David Lynch introduced them to me on Twin Peaks, and Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats. Well, I procured Uncle Acid tickets this past Wednesday, so that only leaves The Veils. Would Finn Andrews solo suffice? Of course.
31 Days of Horror was supposed to continue last night with Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, however between decorating for Halloween and baking Zombie cookies, K and I didn't think a 2+ hour film was realistic, so we went with John Carpenter's The Fog, a film I love but hadn't watched since Mr. Brown and I viewed it back in, oh, probably 2003. Jesus, time flies.
Tonight's film is already set in stone - Suspiria, at the Arclight in Hollywood. Excited does not even begin to describe my mindset. I believe this film will not be a remake at all, but a totally new and different film that will sit alongside the original as another fantastic piece of horror cinema.
31 Days of Horror
10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly
10/06) Re-animator
10/07) Night of the Demons
10/08) Species
10/09) The Roost
10/10) The Convent
10/11) Killer Klowns from Outer Space
10/12) George A. Romero's Day of the Dead
10/13) George A. Romero's Land of the Dead
10/14) The Apostle
10/15) Phantom of the Paradise
10/16) Candyman
10/17) Ghoulies
10/18) John Carpenter's Halloween
10/24) Halloween III: Season of the Witch
10/25) Ghost Stories
10/26) John Carpenter's The Fog
On a bit of a paperback kick right now, and finding that August Derleth's Cthulhu cycle stuff is not nearly as bad as I remembered it being (I say I remembered them being bad, but regardless I've always loved what I've read, just wondered about going back to it, which has been rewarding thus far).
Playlist from 10/26:
Type O Negative - Bloody Kisses (Digipak)
The Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro
The Knife - Silent Shout
Fantômas - Director's Cut
Jóhann Jóhannson - Mandy OST
Card of the day:
From the Grimoire, "Culmination." Good, lots of spinning plates and I believe I just implemented something to streamline their results. Ten is also Malkuth, the world, and I guess, in a way, I'm announcing myself to the world today.
From the Grimoire: "Indicates you are in charge of the way your life is unfolding. Striking the harmonic resonance that sees events occur as we would like them to. Planning - Thoughtfullness - Mojo." - Spot on, as I've been giddy all morning thinking about the fact that I just finished writing a 75k novel (it's expanding a bit as I edit each chapter once more in Grammarly) in 7 months (6 when you figure I had about 1 month off for our move). I feel like everything is going exactly according to the plan I have set up. And that's a damn good feeling.
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?
Another song by The Veils greets me as I break the waters on this side of consciousness:
Playlist from Sunday, 2/18:
Windhand/Satan's Satyrs - Split
Windhand/Cough - Reflection of the Negative
The Body - No One Deserves Happiness
The Body - I Shall Die Here
Chrysta Bell - We Dissolve
Card of the day:
Overindulgence as a way to mask or meditate pain or problems. Too much booze or smoke, too much imagination not enough reality. Hmmm... doesn't sound like my current state, unless we count the fact that I was so irritated yesterday morning that I smoked at like 10 AM. Rare, but not unheard of on a Sunday. It was absolutely a tactic to attempt to squash the open loop in my head keeping me grumpy, and it worked to a degree, but it also did not interfere with anything that I can think of, as I do not smoke often and the reason for this is typically that I know pot yields a state of mind that is not conducive to writing (much to the contrary of what I thought back when I first began to seriously concentrate on writing). Yesterday however, I partook early enough that by 6:00 PM I was able to have a pretty successful writing session, although I had some trouble keeping my tenses straight in two chapters where I had bafflingly switched to present tense.
I'll just take this pull as a bit of a comment on yesterday and be done with it.
Continuing this somewhat - to me anyway - fascinating record of the music I wake up with in my head, because there's always music there when I open my eyes to a new day, today it was one of the more nuanced tracks from 2016's Total Depravity by The Veils:
I say nuanced and I do not mean it in a negative way; every track off Total Depravity is marvelous, and what's more, The Veils are very good at doing that that thing that I love: all the tracks add up to make an outstanding full album, one that resonates on multiple harmonic levels when listened to as a whole. We're talking sonically, thematically, and overall aesthetically, this record shines. In fact, I'd call it one of the best 'albums' I've heard in years.
Playlist yesterday was sparse. I finally found my CD copy of Shellac's most recent record Dude Incredible so that may be going into regular commute rotation for a while:
The Soft Moon - Criminal
Shellac - Dude Incredible
Deftones - Gore
The Doors - LA Woman (original vinyl pressing - used to be my Dad's and has THIS little nasty on the back of the bright yellow record sleeve).
I pre-ordered Dude Incredible on vinyl back when it was released and Mr. Albini and crew included as something of, I think, a philosophical statement on their preference for analog over digital, a totally unlabeled copy of the album on disc. Lately I've had the strongest hankerings for Shellac while in the car, so although it's been a while since I've pulled the vinyl out at night, during the day I'd several times been frustrated to discover I had no idea where the disc was. I even feared, due to its unmarked facade, its possible loss in the great divorce tally/purge of 2015. Then a couple days ago I pull out 1000 Hurts on disc and there's the unlabelled missing album on top. I very much count this as a win.
Last night K and I tried to watch both Good Time and It Comes at Night but failed at both. Part of this may have been due to a certain persnickety fatigue six long days of work surrounded by LA commutes had left me with by the time I'd prepared dinner and had a few Smithwicks, but I definitely feel it this lack of connection was not entirely on me. Both films are distributed byA24,whose films I normally fall right in line with, but with my shortage of time to appropriate for watching movies these days, I feel fairly certain I won't be giving either of these another chance. Instead, we're seeing The Philadelphia Story on the big screen this afternoon, thanks to Turner Movie Classics and Fathom Events, and steering tonight's Sunday Night Feature to Dark Song, a film several good friends have given near rave reviews of, and which I'd waited on since first reading about on the Horror Amino community, where there's a wealth of awesome horror information updated on pretty much an hourly basis.
Card of the day:
A lot in my Grimoire about this one, however most of it presupposes the card's value in a spread, in relation to other cards, especially Disks and its representation of Earthly matters. Specifically I see one relating to gambling. I'll keep this in mind, however the one point of primary interest here is the note that the Three of Swords can indicate, "... a current period of unhappiness, not necessarily one to come."
Two reasons for this note's perceived poignancy at the moment with regards to my existence:
I'm not in the best of moods today due to a certain lackadaisical approach to property management by the cunts that run the building that I will soon be moving out of, and two, the "... not necessarily..." part really helps when looking back at the last few days' cards and tracking their ongoing juxtaposition with my moving situation: knowing the Futility of the current situation with finding a new place forces a decision to be made; accepting the Change that will come with that decision, and now the suggestion that unhappiness will not necessarily follow on the tide of that Change, well, the pieces are in motion and I'm helping to keep them that way. My contributions pail in comparison to K's near constant attempts to stay in contact with the other parties involved.
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
The Veils - Total Depravity
The Veils - Nux Vomica
The Veils - Time Stays, We Go
The Bronx - The Bronx (I) AKA White Drugs
Grand Duchy - Let the People Speak (aborted listen*)
New York Dolls - Dancing Backward in High Heels
Broken Social Scene - You Forgot it in People
The Soft Moon - Criminal
Windhand/Satan's Satyrs - Split
Soundgarden - SOMMS (Record Store Day vinyl)
The Animals - Retrospective
....................
* I've tried, and despite absolutely LOVING the first album by Grand Duchy, and despite being an enormous Frank Black/Black Francis fan, I just can't get into this record at all. I keep waiting for the day that it catches me, but thus far, it has not.
......................
We watched Logan Lucky last night. Everything about the flick was solid except except except... I don't really know that it pulls off what it intends to pull off. Still, solid performances all the way around, very well written, likable characters, David Holmes does the music (of course), they use a Monks song in the soundtrack and it left me feeling good and like I want to move to West Virginia.
Ain't that something?
Bought tickets to go see this and I am PSYCHED.
Thursday, April 12th. One night only in the cinema. So I've got that on the 12th and The Soft Moon on Friday, April 13th. There's ALL kinds of synchronicities with my current writing project, but that aside, what an awesome two days of music!
