2019: June 30th Orville Peck Live WFUV

For anyone doubting this man is the real deal. I get chills listening to this song, either studio or here, live in the WFUV studios. At this point, Pony is cresting Spotlights' Love and Decay for my album of the year spot. It's a tight race, and I'm bludgeoning my brain with both albums mercilessly, but Peck's sound holds infinite potential, and his spotlight falls on poetic obscurities the likes of which resonate with me in ways I do not even understand. I'm sure I can say the same about most of my favorite albums, but right now this feels infinitely more than that, if the sentiment makes any sense.

**

Currently reading a story in Robert S. Wilson's Ashes and Entropy anthology entitled Red Stars/White Snow/Black Metal by Fiona Maeve Geist. I can't quite tell if it's the most brilliant story in the collection yet - it might be - but it's got me. A disgraced and discarded journalist receives a second chance in the form of an assignment that quickly becomes a bloody immersion into pocket European Black Metal-inspired death cults - or at least that's what I think is happening. Geist's prose is as delicious as it is pretension, which is not necessarily a bad thing, if it lands. It's one of the longer stories in the book, and my reading keeps getting hammered into bite-sized chunks due to my schedule, but so far, Geist goes on my 'Watch' list as someone I would very much like to read more from.

**

K and I finished Dark Season 2 this morning. Brilliant. So complex, but not needlessly so, this season turned the Donnie Darko-meets-Twin Peaks analogy I've been using for the show on its ear. We're in an entirely new landscape by the end of the final episode, and knowing the next season is the last is a good feeling. I have no doubt that unlike previous shows with staggeringly complex storylines and character dynamics, Dark will stick this landing, because the creators already know how the story ends.

Very fucking important.

**

K and I bought our tickets to see Midsomar this coming Wednesday night. We'll be accompanying my Horror Vision co-host Anthony and his girlfriend, so the plan is to record a brief, spoiler-free reaction to the movie for the podcast and put it up that night. So along with last night's episode - which should go up tomorrow - that'll be three episodes of The Horror Vision in just over a week! Wow. I haven't watched anything but the initial teaser for Ari Aster's follow-up to last year's magnificent Hereditary, but I'll leave the latest trailer here, just in case someone reading this hasn't heard about the film, which I expect to be fantastic:




**

Playlist from 6/29:

Soul Coughing - Irresistible Bliss
Grimes - Visions
Thom Yorke - Anima
M83 - Saturdays = Youth
Beach House - 7
Curtis Harding - Fave Your Fear
The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre
Lovett - The Wind OST
L7 - Scatter the Rats.

**

No card today.

2019: June 29th David J and Chrysta Bell - Bela Lugosi's Dead

I was not expecting to come across this in my youtube feed this morning. How utterly fantastic.

**

Yesterday I watched Josh Lobo's film I Trapped the Devil. LOVED IT!!! Fantastic concept, fantastic execution, with outstanding performances by everyone involved. The film is available to rent on Amazon right now for $6.99. Absolutely worth it. Here's the trailer:



We're going to do another Horror Vision this evening and I've already slated this as the movie we'll be watching/reviewing, so that'll be up early next week. In the meantime, I will definitely be adding Mr. Lobo to my list of directors who I keep a close eye on. Also on the list, for reference, are Ti West, Joe Begos, Larry Fessenden, Paul Thomas Anderson, and, of course, David Lynch.

**

Playlist from 6/28:

Secret Chiefs 3 Traditionalists - Le mani destre recise degli ultimi uomini
Cocksure - Corporate_Sting
Windhand - Eternal Return
Various - A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
Lovett - The Wind OST
Bell Witch - Mirror Reaper
The Birthday Party - Mutiny/The Bad Seed

**

Card of the day:

Card of the day: Beware delusions. I think this is a warning on my part to sift back through the insanely complicated story I outlined yesterday. It might be too complicated to actually pull off. But it might not be...

2019: June 28th - Oh Oblivion. Sweet, Sweet Oblivion

Very much in a Visions headspace this morning. I'm starting this post at... almost 2:00 AM, but probably won't post it until I wake up in the daylight. Running on fumes, as I've been up since 5AM, but I just returned from a night of catching up with a friend in Hollywood and now I want to get a rough idea for a story I had while driving home listening to Secret Chiefs 3 down on paper. I'm off today (Friday), so I'm having a few late night Sierra Nevadas, trying to suss out the skeleton to this thing I probably won't actually work on for some time. But I like to have a bunch of gestating concepts, so at some lull in the future (lull? When?), I can scroll through a list and pick something to hash out.

There's something magnificent about driving La Cienga between Stockard and Centinela late at night. It's as close to a secluded spot as you can get in LA proper, which is to say it's not very secluded at all, but it has a certain Between quality to it. Always inspires me.

**

Next day now. Woke up and read another story in the Robert S. Wilson-edited Ashes and Entropy Anthology, this time Nate Southard's Ain't Much Pride. Wow. My favorite story so far, and that's saying something. This is turning out to be a fantastic collection. If you're interested, you can order it directly from Nightscape Press HERE.

I enjoyed Southard's Ain't Much Pride so much that I looked into his other work, and I'm really interested in his 2018 novel Porcelain:

"Comedian Jason Hawkes carries with him a mountain of emotional issues and an impressive drug habit. When he learns his high school sweetheart went on a shooting spree before turning the gun on herself, he returns home to confront a past that includes a drunken orgy in an abandoned factory and six close friends who never spoke to each other again. Something more sinister is at work than teenage hormones, however, and what Jason learns as he reconnects with his past will either fix him or shatter him further. And it could send an entire city into an abyss of lust-fueled horror.

SOLD! You can buy this one directly from Lethe Press HERE. I intend to.

**

Playlist from 6/27:

Swans - To Be Kind
High on Fire - Electric Messiah
The Jesus Lizard - Lash EP
The Dillinger Escape Plan - One of Us is the Killer
Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource Vol. I: △△
Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource Vol. 2: Philosophy of Beyond pre-release singles
Primus - Frizzle Fry
Secret Chiefs 3 Traditionalists - Le mani destre recise degli ultimi uomini
John Carpenter and Alan Howarth - Prince of Darkness OST
Grimes - Visions

**

Card of the day:

Fives are always unstable. It's not really a bad thing, just a phase to move beyond. Fours are stable, but to avoid stagnation, you have to add something. This is good, but affects the balance of things. The goal is to keep adding, and that's kind of my thing right now. After a discussion with a friend, I'm thinking about postponing the release of Shadow Play until the first week in September. This is tough, because it's done, however, there's a lot of really good reasons to consider this. I just have to research them. So yeah, the stability of being finished and releasing it into the world - if you can call that stable - is thwarted by adding a new facet, which is essentially a very small, grassroots marketing initiative. Something I'm terrible at. But we're terrible at things until we do them enough to become good, or at least proficient at them. So yeah, I guess there's some instability/worry right now. It will pass.

2019: June 27th - New Dean Hurley Track!

Frequent collaborator with David Lynch, Dean Hurley's 2017 Anthology Resource Vol. 1 △△ is an eerie walk into another world, and I realize in talking about it now that I do not listen to it nearly enough. And now, Sacred Bones Records will release Hurley's Anthology Resource Vol. II: Philosphy of Beyond on July 12th. You can pre-order the record HERE. I absolutely LOVE this track, and am looking forward to sitting down and listening to the entire album as a whole.

**

NCBD yesterday was sleight, but that's the way things are moving for me. Which is good; it's all by design. So what did I grab?

The final issue (?) of Punks Not Dead: London Calling. Haven't read it yet, but looks like this is the end of the story for the time being. Overall, really enjoyed this one.

I feel like I waited forever for this third and final issue of Damned. Gotta say, love the art in this book, but the story... not so much. Kinda feels a bit like Todd McFarlane's fourth Spiderman title waay back in the day - pretty to look at, but a story that really only supports the images. If it wasn't for my love of comics in Magazine Format, this would be going on eBay tonight. As it stands, it still might, somewhere down the road.

**

Playlist from the previous few days:

Swans - To Be Kind
Shellac - The End of Radio
Grinderman - Eponymous
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Joy (Tracing Back the Radiance pre-release single)
Felicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Limpid As the Solitudes
Black Sabbath - Master of Reality
Zen Guerilla - Positronic Raygun
Zen Guerilla - Shadows on the Sun
Spotlights - Love and Decay
Bloody Hammers - Under Satan's Sun
Sunn O))) - Life Metal
Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
M83 - Knife + Heart OST
Malaria - Compiled 1981-1984
Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource II: Philosophy of Beyond Pre-release Singles

**

Card of the day:

This one is beyond me at the moment, but I still wanted to record it here, for posterity and future analysis.

2019: June 25th - New Skating Polly!

Possibly my favorite track by this band yet! There's the 90s thing, but there's something more. I really think Skating Polly will be a force to reckon with out in the larger world at large in six months to a year. In the meantime, I'm glad I'm able to watch it happen for them.

**

New episode of The Horror Vision went up last night. If you saw it drop and had trouble downloading or streaming it, our apologies. I experienced a hard drive hiccup while mixing the track down in Premiere, which resulted in a track initially empty of audio save for the first few opening bars of the theme. I was able to troubleshoot and fix the problem inside of an hour, so all the horror goodness is now available.

You can find the episode on Apple, Spotify, and Google Play. Topics of discussion are Yann Gonzalez's gorgeous Knife + Heart, Vincente DiSanti's Studio-worthy F13 Fan Film Never Hike Alone, David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return, Robert S. Wilson's new horror anthology Ashes and Entropy 2. Oh yeah, and our movie reaction is to Greg McLean's Rogue, a gnarly giant crocodile flick from 2007.

**

Playlist from 6/24:

Swans - To be Kind
Motörhead - Ace of Spades
Ministry - The Land of Rape and Honey
Cold Cave - Cherish the Light Years
Trentmøller - In the Garden (Pre-release Single)
Shellac - The End of Radio

**

Card of the day:

In the zone. I made little progress on reading my copy of the Shadow Play proof yesterday, but I expect today will go much better.

2019: June 24th - New Trentemøller!

**

Finished Doom Patrol yesterday: absolutely outstanding! I really can't recommend this one enough. And last night, we began the long awaited second season of Netflix's Dark. This show is insanely complex, in a very good way. K and I just finished re-watching Season One a month or two ago in preparation for this season (I actually mistakenly thought it dropped in April, so we were well ahead of the curve), and I'm instantly feeling as though I need a brush-up on the cast. Luckily, there's a ton of character maps available online. I'm still saying there's just too many old, white guys with beards on this show, but that's a small criticism. Overall, I find the mental workout refreshing, and I'm so bitten by the mystery of it all, I'll gladly suffer some confusion.

**

Playlist from 6/23:

Ministry - The Land of Rape and Honey
Lovett - The Wind OST
Various - A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night OST
Perturbator - New Model
Ella Fitzgerald - The Best of Ella, Vol. 2

**

Card of the day:

Water in Air. The emotional aspect of Intellect. This comes in handy with my current approach to my writing.

2019: June 23rd Orville Peck - Hope to Die

Here's a video I've been meaning to post since Mr. Brown alerted me to its release late last week. Orville Peck's album Pony is neck and neck with Spotlights' Love and Decay for my favorite album of the year, and I have a feeling it will be that way all the way up until I post my annual year-end list at the end of December. Two amazing 2019 albums I found on the same day, that I have had to split my obsession with since. SUCH a great problem to have!

**

Speaking of 'year's favorites,' I watched Yann Gonzalez's Knife + Heart on Shudder again Friday night. I'm really at a loss. This film is amazing in so many ways. The final scene, set to Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's Love's Refrain, is possibly the most beautiful juxtaposition of visual and aural imagery I've ever experienced; I've been haunted by it for days. Here's the track, which can be found on Cantu-Ledesma's EP In Summer, available on Apple Music or HERE:



I've slowly begun making my way through more of Cantu-Ledesma's work, and it is incredible, running in a range from eerie field recordings to hazy, ethereal synth drone like Love's Refrain.

**

Playlist from the previous few days:

Motorhead - Eponymous
Motorhead - Ace of Spades
Public Image, Ltd - This is What You Want...
Felicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Limpid As the Solitudes
Alexis Georgopoulos and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Fragments of a Season
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Alone Together #6: Faceless Kiss/Blut Mood
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Love is a Stream
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Visiting This World
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - In Summer EP
M83 - Knife + Heart OST
Spotlights - Love and Decay
Canadian Rifle - Peaceful Death

**

Card of the day:

Always nice to see this multiple times in one week. And it fits: I received the Proofs for Shadow Play Book One yesterday (their gorgeous but need a wee bit of tweaking), and when I sat down to work on Ciazarn yesterday for an admittedly abbreviated session, I absolutely experienced a breakthrough. I expect today will be HUGE for that story.

2019: June 21st - Lightning Born!

Thanks to Jonathan Grimm for the heads up on this one - I'd not even heard of Lightning Born until I woke up at 4:00 AM this morning, rolled over and saw a text from Grimm:

... and that about says it all. The band's self-titled debut is out today on Ripple Music, so it's available everywhere music is can be acquired. Or, order the record from the band themselves HERE.

**

I watched two fantastic movies yesterday. First, Knife + Heart just dropped on Shudder and I stumbled into it without knowing much. LOVED it. A kind of software, gay Argento-homage, the flick stalls a bit at times as it goes to incredible lengths to soak the viewer in atmosphere and aesthetic of 1979 Paris' underground gay culture. It does an excellent job with this, but imagine those overly descriptive paragraphs that plague genre books at times? There's a correlation to that here. Still, the movie is gorgeous, and what I did not realize it until this morning is M83 scored it. Basically a gallo that follows an underground porn studio's actors as they are picked off one-by-one at the hands of a masked killer, Knift + Heart doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it's a great watch. Here's the trailer:



Next, 1990's Hardware. I'd never seen this until yesterday and I absolutely LOVED it. Kind of a third rate Terminator knock-off, I'll take this over Cameron's epic any day. I loved the colors, the sets, the tech - everything. And a very cool soundtrack that juxtaposed Simon Boswell's neo-futuristic, Vangelis-light score with tracks like Stigmata from Ministry and this epic from PIL:



**

Playlist from 6/20:

The Verve - Northern Soul
Zen Guerilla - Positronic Saygun
Spotlights - Love and Decay
Various - A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
David J and Federale - The Day David Bowie Died
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - In Summer EP
Public Image Ltd - This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get

**

Card of the day:

From the Grimoire: "The beginning of a new project or job." Well, that could not be more appropriate. I took a few days off writing after finishing Shadow Play Book One, tonight I plan on walking to my coffee spot and digging into Ciazarn!

2019: June 20th New Drab Majesty!

Still catching up on all the stuff that dropped while I was radio silent, finishing Shadow Play Book One: Kim & Jessie. If you come here often, you'll probably get sick of hearing the name of my new book, but I'm excited and relieved like you would not believe. The first book of Shadow Play - conceived as a non-traditional trilogy with ample room for spin-offs - took me seven years to complete. Sure, there was about eight months off at two separate intervals during that time, but during that time, I was kind of working on it, too. Letting something you've written sit in a proverbial 'drawer' for the better part of a year and then going back to it, doesn't necessarily mean you're not working on it. Is "Indirect Writing" a phrase? You know, letting the story stew in its own juices?

Anyway...

Drab Majesty's new record Modern Mirror is out July 12, just over three weeks from now, and I am very excited to get my copy of the vinyl in the mail. You can still pre-order this one from the wonderful Dais Records HERE.

**

Yesterday was NCBD, and it proved a fantastic leveler for me. I wrote earlier in the month about a sudden existential crisis pertaining to collecting monthly comics - part of it's space, part of it's longevity, part of it's douchey first-world anxiety - anyway you call it, the accumulation of such a large collection has begun to wear on me in a way I never would have anticipated (and I've downsized majorly on several occasions in my life). But to look at my pull list yesterday and know that I was leaving several titles behind and several others were close to finishing made me feel pretty good.

Garth Ennis' A Walk Through Hell is coming to a close next month, The Empty Man ended with this week's issue 8, and Black Science closes its doors in July. With the elimination of all the mini series, or the series on this list, as well as those most likely not coming back (*ahem* Southern Bastards, I'm looking at you), well, I'm edging my way out of collecting.

That's HUGE.

I'm probably going to end TMNT in seven months at issue 100, switching to digital trades instead, and I may do the same for Seven to Eternity as well. That doesn't leave much. Of course, I'll still buy anything Warren Ellis does, but I'll probably just wait for the trades, like I've been doing with The Wildstorm (still need to read that third volume!). The goal is to have the only periodical-format books I buy be The Walking Dead, Stray Bullets, Criminal, and Gunning for Hits, the last two because they have such a wealth of extra material in their monthly format, the first two because they're grandfathered in and I love them. Even Gideon Falls may fall off, as with this week's issue the story opens up considerably wider and I feel like it might be losing me. I'm getting a Lost vibe, and as much as I enjoyed watching that series as it aired, it's something I never need or want to be reminded of again.

We'll see.

**

Playlist from 6/19:

Blur - Eponymous
Blur - The Best Of
Arctic Monkeys - Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino
Arab Strap - The Red Thread
Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun
Blur - 13
Zen Guerilla - Positronic Raygun
Dead Kennedys - Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables

**

Card of the day:

From the Grimoire: "A positive result dependent on the actions of the Querent." I'm taking this and yesterday's Breakthrough as directly referencing the completion of the book. Next, I have a small 'marketing' plan I intend to follow through on, so hoping the good tidings will flow directly into that.

2019: June 19th - New Chelsea Wolfe!

Holy cow. I don't post in five days and everyone drops something new. What do I start with? Doesn't matter; what a great problem to have!

Chelsea Wolfe announced a new album and tour dates after dropping a new song. As always, Ms. Wolfe has kind of become the dark queen of my heart. I love the fluidity of her aesthetic, the fact that it meshes fine in shades of Desert acoustic, or lavish, droney Doom. Here's the album trailer:



**

Shadow Play Book One: Kim & Jessie is completed! I've ordered a few proofs of the paperback, and once I go through that and confirm everything is tip top, it will be available on Amazon, at The Comic Bug, and hopefully, shortly in Barnes & Noble and any other store that will carry me! Gotta start looking into getting into the Baker & Taylor system. It's all so exciting! What's even more exciting, though, is the cover art, courtesy of my good friend Jonathan Grimm:

Grimm is an amazing artist - he really hit the "Paperbacks from Hell" aesthetic without even being asked to. And folks, he is for hire! Contact him HERE for all your freelance needs. Seriously, he does it all.


**

South Park Season 19 is probably one of the most intelligent examples of social commentary ever. A joy, start to finish. I can't believe this show can continue to remain this relevant. Kudos the Parker and Stone.

**

Two episodes left on Doom Patrol Season One, which I'm now comfortable saying is my favorite comic book adaptation ever. Yep. Ever. I also began re-reading the Grant Morrison/Richard Case run from the late 80s/early 90s that a lot of this show is pulled from. I can't say I'd forgotten how brilliant the book is, but I had forgotten major arcs, so it's cool to revisit. And Branden Fraiser's Cliff Steele is awesome for many reason, but in particular, he reminds me SO MUCH of my good friend Mike Shin that it's uncanny. Speaking of Cliff, one of my favorite Cliff moments occurs at the tail end of the following clip:



Look at that gator jump!

**

Playlist from the last few days includes but probably wasn't limited to:

Henry Mancini - Charade OST
The Doors - Waiting for the Sun
Orville Peck - Pony
Spotlights - Love and Decay
Deftones - Gore
Alice in Chains - Eponymous
Cold Cave - Cherish the Light Years
Blur - 13
Blur - Eponymous
Blur - The Best of
Various - A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night OST
Marvin Gaye - What's Going On
The Temptations - Psychedelic Shack
The Knife - Silent Shout

**

Card of the day:

Breakthrough!

2019: June 14th - Dr. Sleep Teaser

Holy. F*&k. This, this I can't wait for. IT chapter 2 is exciting, but Doctor Sleep directed by Mike Flanagan... words can't describe my anticipation. Which is a little unnerving, because I had a lot of anticipation for Pet Sematary, too, and look how that turned out. That said, I'm still inclined to think the problem with PS was the studio not allowing Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer make the movie they wanted to make, while Flanagan has such a solid, lengthy track record at this point, I'm sure he will be able to do what he wants, just as I'm sure what he wants to do is make a great Stephen King adaptation from a great Stephen King novel.

If you haven't read Doctor Sleep, do so. Now, if you're able. It's fantastic.

And thanks to Mr. Brown, for lending me his copy back when it came out, ensuring I had a chance to read it early on.

**

Hey, hey! That new Baroness dropped today. I'll be listening to it all morning, but tell ya what - this opening track freakin' rules!



**

Playlist the last few days:

Soul Coughing - Irresistible Bliss
Deafheaven - New Bermuda
Ghost Cop - One Weird Trick
Marissa Nadler & Stephen Brodsky - Droneflower
Arthur Ahbez  Gold
King Woman - Doubt EP
Perturbator - The Uncanny Valley
Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple
My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult - Final Blindness 7"
Finitribe - Make It Internal
Orville Peck - Pony
Helmet - Aftertaste
Deftones - Koi No Yokan
Helmet - Size Matters
Helmet - Dead to the World
Odonis Odonis - Post Plague
Spotlights - Love and Decay

**

Card of the day:

Leaving behind the symmetry of the sixes and moving into uncharted - and possibly murky - waters. I'm reading this as caution going forward with the next project, as I have less than three hours of work remaining on Shadow Play before I order the proofs. It's been a hell of a battle to finalize this, and I'm still not convinced I won't be reading it again in full when the proof arrives. Either way, my time on Ciazarn is coming back around again, but where that should feel strong, I've got two shorts hanging on as loose ends. Should I begin with those, knock them out and then dive back into the Dust Bowl? Not sure.

2019: June 12th Marissa Nadler & Stephen Brodsky - For the Sun

Very cool video. That image at 1:15 is creepy as hell. I'd forgotten about this record, so thank you Sargent House for dropping this and reminding me!

**
Not a big day for NCBD today, but that's good. Fits with my existential crisis regarding stuff from earlier in the week. I am, however, really looking forward to the new issue of Gunning for Hits:

The back-matter in this book alone is worth the cost of the individual issues, as loaded into the music business both past and present as it is. Absolutely worth your time if you're a music fan.

**

Playlist from 6/11:

Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Jamiroquai - Return of the Space Cowboy
Orville Peck - Pony
St. Elsewhere - The Odd Couple
Spotlights - Love and Decay
Ghost Cop - One Weird Trick
Perturbator - The Uncanny Valley

**

Card of the day:

I will be on the look out, as something I have planned is going to fall flat on its face. Being that I woke up at 2:00 AM this morning, I'd say that's my plans to work on the final edit later this afternoon. Not a total loss, as I used that extra time between waking so early and leaving for work to fix a particularly perplexing chapter.

2019: June 11th Orville Peck - Dead of Night

It's been a few days since I posted about Spotlights' new album Love and Decay, and in that time, another album Mr. Brown recently recommended to me shot into my top tier of my year as well. Orville Peck's Pony probably won't bump Spotlights from number one, but it will definitely occupy a spot in my favorite albums of the year. Pony is rich in tone and texture; the production is cinematic and windswept, an allusion to the vastness of Peck's interior space, his voice ringing out across dusty plains. And while there are a plethora of influences that serve as way stations along the album's winding route, Peck's own unique persona leaves quite the mark on the outlaw country crooner tableau forged long ago by his predecessors.

**

Over the weekend, as I was finally catching up with the comics I seem to stay perpetually behind on, I experienced a weird existential moment. Since downsizing my digs last year, space has been a continuous issue in my life. A lot of this is due to my obsessive need to make space where there is none; to arrange everything just right. Feng Shui became a marketing term for something I actually believe in, something Ben Horne perfectly encapsulates in Twin Peaks' Season Two when he tells Hank Jennings he believes there is a perfect way to organize the objects in any given space, an arrangement the benefits of which could be untold for those who dwell within that space (I'm paraphrasing; I couldn't find a clip). So my reading and subsequent filing of a few months worth of Punk's Not Dead and TMNT incited an initiative to reorganize things. This in turn spawned a project to make space in my long boxes (which I'm slowly switching out with short boxes because, you know, moving those goddamn things is a pain in the arse!), which caused me to start a pile of books to get rid of. And it was in weighing the suspect books in this context that made me look at each title and think, "I'm forty-three. Will I ever read this again in my lifetime?"

After a few minutes of this line of thinking, the concept really gained weight, creating an inescapable portal through which to view my own mortality. What's more, I began thinking about the space required to house all my comics and I wonder: why do I even do this? Will I ever re-read 100 issues of TMNT? Probably not. Of course, I want to read this stuff as it comes out because there's an excitement to that, and a community. I've always believed in and valued supporting what I love. That said, at what point does having this stuff merely turn into a slowly decaying echo in an enormous empty space?

Thoughts along these lines haunted me much of Sunday, and what's more, I've no real answer. There are books like Criminal and Gunning for Hits that offer so much awesome backwater content exclusive to their monthly installments that I feel 100% warranted buying them as ongoing periodicals. Also, these series tend to be short enough and good enough that re-reads will most likely remain regular occurrences (been meaning to re-read The Fade Out again for months now). And then there's the titles I literally can't wait to read every month: The Walking Dead, Gideon Falls, and A Walk Through Hell. Everything else I read is great, but can I do without it? Could I switch to buying digital collections as they come out? If I do that, what do I do with all my physical copies?

The sad thing is, there are no answers. At least not at the moment. Stayed tuned: I believe this brand of Existential Crisis will, for me, be ongoing.

**
Watchlist:

The Craft
The Dark Backward (three times in two days; there's a bigger post coming about this one)
About a quarter of an old Video Nasty called Nightmare, which I may or may not return to

**

Playlist from the last few days went something like this:

Grand Duchy - Petite Fours
Spotlights - Love & Decay
The Raveonettes - Lust Lust Lust
Hall and Oats - Essentials
Sigur Rós - Takk...
Van Morrison - Essentials
James - The Best of James
James - Laid
The Foundations - Eponymous
Orville Peck - Pony
The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper
The Monkees - Headquarters
Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple
Marvin Gaye - What's Going On
Canadian Rifle - Peaceful Death
Sigur Rós - Variations on Darkness
Henry Mancini - Charade OST

**

As if in answer to my diatribe above, perhaps I do need to adjust some things...

2019: June 8th Spotlights - Mountains Are Forever

Well, thanks to Mr. Brown, I found my album of the year. It's early, so this could conceivably change, but I pretty much always know my album of the year the moment I first hear it, and brothers and sisters - this is it! And to think, I'd never even heard of Spotlights before, a husband/wife duo whose new album Love & Decay is out now on Ipecac Records and can be streamed or purchased HERE.

Love & Decay feels a lot like the MBV album I wanted to hear when I ordered their loooong-awaited follow-up to Loveless back in 2013, the self-titled and unfortunately underwhelming eponymous record. I also hear Soundgarden, Deftones, and a lot of other bands I like in the sound of Spotlights, but never in a way that feels trite or repetitive. This leads me to declare for myself and like-minded music lovers a new classic and a band to follow and be excited for from here out! Always a great day when I can say that!

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I've talked about Kristen Gorlitz's awesome horror comic The Empties in these pages before, and it's time to talk about it again because Kristen just launched the Kickstarter for issue #3! You can go to the Kickstarter page HERE to read more about it and support it; if you've read the first two issues of The Empties, you'll most likely be like me and not need any more convincing. So good!



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I finally had the chance to watch the new Criterion Edition of David Lynch's Blue Velvet last night. Wow. Gorgeous transfer. This film never gets old for me; I enjoyed this viewing as much as or more than the countless others I've had since discovering this film back in the mid-90s. What I didn't expect  last night was my reaction to the 53 minutes of deleted scenes included as extras on the disc. I watched a few and really had a sense of inspiration in editing. I mean, you look at all the extra stuff Lynch filmed and you can practically see how making Blue Velvet helped him grow as a filmmaker over the course of its creation; all the Jeffery-at-college and Jeffrey-comes-home stuff that got cut would have, if included, very much weakened the film. The elegance to the progression of events in the version that Lynch released and we all love is so much more apparent and enjoyable after seeing the scenes he cut. And after waiting 20+ years to see this stuff - scenes we never thought we'd see back in the Wrapped in Plastic days - I found I could only watch about twenty minutes of them before I grew exhausted and decided to save the rest for a later date.



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Playlist from 6/06:

Man or Astro-Man - Intravenous Television Continuum
Spotlights - Love & Decay

Playlist from 6/07:

Man or Astro-Man - Intravenous Television Continuum
Spotlights - Love & Decay
Los Amigos Invisibles - The New Sound of the Venezuelan Gozadera
Pelican - Nighttime Stoties
Bloody Hammers - Under Satan's Sun
Primus - Antipop

Card of the day:

Paradigm shift! Just in time for the next project.

2019: Blood Machines!

This morning I backed the Blood Machines Kickstarter, something I'd not heard of until two days ago. In a nutshell, Blood Machines is a soon-to-be film by French director Seth Ickerman that is based on a video he made for Carpenter Brut's song Turbo Killer back in 2016. You can read more about the evolution of this project and see some more nifty behind the scenes stuff HERE. Backing is officially over for this and the film is fully funded - and then some - so it looks as though this amazing project is going to see the light of day!

Here's the original video that sparked all this off:



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Watchlist from the last two days:

First episode of AMC's Adaptation of Joe Hill's wonderful lovel NOS4A2. Did not like this at all, but I'll give it a chance. AMC is definitely one of those networks that won't really go all into a show until it's proven to have an audience.

Also, Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, which I'm always shocked isn't discussed more as the obvious key influence to Dario Argento's Suspiria. Bava crafted a gorgeous Giallo with this film, and it very much satisfies every time I watch it. And the score! Why isn't this available on vinyl? Waxwork or Mondo - I'm looking at you guys. Someone give the music in this film a new great new edition!



Also, caught a bit of Dead Birds last night on Shudder.tv and now really want to go back and watch the entire thing.



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Playlist from

Stereophonics - Just Enough Education to Perform
Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible 20
Sigur Rós - 22° Lunar Halo
Sigur Rós - Variations on Darkness
Sigur Rós - Takk
Sigur Rós - ( )
Man or Astro-Man - Intravenous Television Continuum

Playlist from 6/06:

Man or Astro-Man - Intravenous Television Continuum
Spotlights - Love & Decay
Golden - Eponymous
Ennio Morricone - Black Belly of the Tarantula OST
John Coltrane - A Love Supreme

2019: June 5th Stereophonics - Mr. Writer

Wow. It has been a minute since I dug into Stereophonics. So long, in fact, that I'd forgotten how great this band is. And this particular track comes from a great album, too, although one that can be difficult for me to engage with, since it mentally and emotionally ties my thoughts back into The Yellow House, a band I was in that I loved, but that ended abruptly. That's tough; bands breaking up are a lot like couples breaking up. There becomes an entire subset of people and music and corridors of thought that you end up having to put to the side to avoid those messy little nerve triggers. With Stereophonics - and more specifically the album Just Enough Education to Perform, which I'm listening to for the first time in at least ten years as I type this - those triggers kick in on the second track, Lying in the Sun. I remember hearing this song for the first time after The Yellow House was already really up and running, playing shows and getting our name out there. I remember hearing this track and thinking, "Hey, that's a lot like what we're doing. Cool." It meant a lot at the time, to have a band that was successful in a way that we wanted to be, that had a similar aesthetic. Stereophonics weren't really all that big in this country, but at the time almost nothing worth hearing was. They had a solid fan base probably everywhere else in the world, and they were cool. That's what was largely missing from the 00s. Not many people were cool anymore; that aesthetic - which granted can go sideways real fast and make you look like a douche - was replaced mainly in the 00s with people yelling and screaming about their prozac, how messed up they were, and the like. Bands like Stereophonics and BRMC were cool.

My introduction to Stereophonics also dovetailed with my first trip abroad: I remember walking into the first hostel in Dublin in January 2002, and this video was playing on the tele. The track has always had the particular ability to spin me back in time to that exact moment, the way the air tasted, the electricity of being somewhere new. Which is always something to be experienced sparingly, so as not to wear out the Magick.

Hearing these tracks this morning, I'm blown away; the songs and my responses to them are a reminder that I am a completely different person today than I was during The Yellow House. Which is precisely how it should be, but it's interesting to step back every now again and remember.

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NCBD! Very excited for these, especially The Walking Dead. If you're reading it, you know why!

Found out recently this series ends with a double-sized issue #30 in July, so this is the penultimate chapter! Expect even more insanity than we've had, which is really going to be saying something when all is said and done:

Despite initial confusion, I ended up loving the Lapham's Lodger series for IDW's Black Crown. And now, I'm excited to be back with the old gang again in Stray Bullets:

The start of a new, and apparently longer, arc. This book is aces. Read it:

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About the time I posted yesterday's blog I realized I was sick as fuck and not going to work, so I spent June 4th confined to bed, where I finished Gemma Files' Experimental Film. A powerhouse; such a great novel. Creepy, well-written, and almost clinical in its plotting. I wondered if the climax would go as large as the plot teased, and if so how that would work. There's that moment where, depending on how supernatural or numinous a novel's plot has teased, Speculative or Weird Fiction has to make a decision to either go full-bore, bringing the 'monster' on camera or not. Ms. Files goes all the way with it, and she does such a fantastic job with it. Nothing seems ridiculous. That's the trick. You have to give the reader something they've never seen before and make them believe in it. And Experimental Film does that very well indeed.

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Watchlist yesterday was another episode and a half of Doom Patrol. SO fun watching Cliff Steele kick nazi ass while Dead Kennedy's blare on the soundtrack. I can't recommend this show enough.

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Playlist from 6/04:

Cat Rapes Dog - Maximum Overdrive
Tears for Fears - Songs From the Big Chair

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Card of the day:

Remain open to the influence of the Universe. Pretty sure unexpectedly digging into old Brit rock and staying home from work (and feeling guilty about it) for the second day in a row are the direct manifestation of this draw. I've been sick or not feeling well (read: exhausted) since the 19th of May, and the recurrences from what seems a tiny bug are due, I think, to a lack of rest. So yesterday I didn't leave bed, save for about an hour where I sat in the living room and listened to two records while reading. Also, I didn't allow myself to write at all. I put all the anxiety and expectations and frustrations of this final edit under the bed for a day and just did nothing but read Gemma Files. Today, while once again planning to stay in bed, perhaps I will work on reading the book.

2019: June 4th Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Trailer!

To say I have extremely high hopes for this one is an understatement. I know, I know; that's never a good idea. That said, when was the last time GDT let us down?

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Good news! Just to prove I'm not an anti-DC Comics curmudgeon, I watched the first two episodes of the DCU app's Doom Patrol last night and it is AWESOME! So happy for this. A fabulous cast, dark yet often hilarious vibe - thanks in large part to Alan Tudyk's narration - and stories ripped right from Grant Morrison and Richard Case's seminal early late 80s/early 90s run, but altered in a way that really keeps the spirit of the book's madness. Such a joy to have this. Also, watching this made me realize it's probably been 12 or 13 years since I originally read Morrison and Case's run, so I'm starting that today. More like this DCU, please!



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Talking Heads - Remain in Light
Protomartyr - Under Color of Official Right
My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult - In the House of Strange Affairs
My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult -  Confessions of a Knife
My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult - I See Good Spirits, I See Bad Spirits
Earth - Full Upon Her Burning Lips
Man or Astro-man? - 1000X
Man or Astro-man? - Intravenous Television Continuum
Deafheaven - New Bermuda
Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource Vol. 1: △△

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Card of the day:

Pure Will is what will be required from me to competently finish the novel; I've read this thing now multiple times, but it's been multiple versions as I've refined the plot. This was my first heavily plotted novel (my first novel that's going to see the light of day in a published capacity), and as such there's plot detritus hanging around my head from other versions. This final, post-Beta Reader go-through is to catch any last minute spelling or grammatical errors, neither of which should be possible at this point, as a human Beta Reader can miss something - though Missi didn't miss much - but Scrivener, Grammarly, and Vellum should not. I'm finding the first two have indeed missed a few small errors, and it's freaking me out. There's a predilection for reading absent-mindedly when you have had this much contact with something, and thus I'm requiring Pure Will to stay as focused as possible while reading. I'm roughly 40% of the way through, so I've adjusted my goal to end-of-week I order the first proof, so we'll see.

2019: June 3rd Chelsea Wolfe Covers Roky Erickson (RIP)

I've been so ensconced in my little final edit bubble, I only left the house this weekend to run errands on Saturday, and I've had the phone on Airplane Mode for the better part of the last three days. This means I did not know Roxy Erickson passed away on May 31st.

I wasn't as exposed to Roky's music as many, but I discovered the 13th Floor Elevators in my Ex's CD collection in the 00s and was immediately drawn to the sound, if only in a small way. The Elevators always seemed like a band I hadn't known I knew about, if that makes any sense. Their music - or what I knew of it through that one "Best of" disc - felt like an archetypal piece of Americana that informed a lot of the other, more top-level stuff I was into. And I believe that's exactly what it was. In 2014 I covered a Post-Elevators Erickson song in a band I was in (I Walked with a Zombie), and during that period, I did some subsequent digging into Erickson's music and found what I believed was one of the quintessential "Nuggets" artists. If you're unfamiliar with Nuggets, there's an entire subset of bands and artists that carved an archetypal niche in 60s Rock music, referred to mostly as Psychedelic. Many of these bands never made it beyond the status of Garage Band. Many of them became better known in the modern era through radio shows like Little Steven's, and subsequently a series of Anthology albums titled Nuggets. In this way, these bands and their aesthetic became an aspect of left-of-center popular cultural, and that's where the Elevators and later Roky's music lived until it began to inspire an entire new generation of artists in the 90s and, more so it seems to me, the 00s, when bands like The Black Angels brought them a little farther into the cultural vernacular of Rock Music.

Anyway, I'm dangerously close to talking about things I'm mostly unfamiliar with. Chelsea Wolfe's cover is gorgeous; a fantastic send-off. Roky Erickson, Rest in Peace.



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Watchlist report: Well, I made it through everything from Friday morning's list I am likely to, plus some. Here's the scorecard:

Godzilla - skipped it. Not a huge fan by any means, and despite the fact that the film looks beautiful and fun-as-hell, after deciding against it Friday night, we just couldn't find the time to go see it amidst my editing schedule.

Swamp Thing - Disliked this very much. The usual DC shenanigans of getting the look down and then putting only the most perfunctory work into building characters and story. Swampy's origin itself has been altered in a way that's so convoluted by the end of the pilot, it doesn't bode well for the future, imo.

Ozark - Season Two Finale - FUCKING BRILLIANT.

The Perfection - I'd purposely avoided reading anything about this film, but had been anticipating it for a few weeks, since I heard about it on the Shockwaves Podcast. Loved the first half, felt the second half became something that betrayed that first part. Not terrible, but uneven and thus, frustrating.

Deadwood - FUCKING BRILLIANT. A fitting, beautiful end to one of my all-time favorite series.

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Playlist from 6/01:

Zeal and Ardor - Stranger Fruit
Zeal and Ardor - Live in London
Zombi - Shape Shift
Zombi - Spirit Animal
Bloody Hammers - Lovely Sort of Death
Bloody Hammers - Under Satan's Sun

Playlist from 6/02:

Sunn O))) - Domkirke
Steve Moore - The Mind's Eye OST
Jóhann Jóhannson - Mandy OST

No card today.

2019: June 1st Bloody Hammers - From Beyond the Grave

Bloody Hammers is a band Jonathan Grimm just turned me onto. Really cool stuff. They've got a new album out June 28th from Napalm Records, you can pre-order it HERE.

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All that debating on what to watch last night, and we ended up getting through one episode of Ozark before K fell asleep; that's about the time I realized we actually went into yesterday with three episodes remaining, not two. Once she was out, I put on Swamp Thing and promptly fell asleep, too. So yeah, epic fail.

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Playlist from 5/31:

The National - High Violet
Deftones - Koi No Yokan
Faith No More - King For a Day
Type O Negative - Life is Killing Me
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Wasteland
The Cure - Pornography
Trust Obey - Fear and Bullets
My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - 13 Above the Night

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Card of the day:

"Unfailing determination toward your goal."

That shakes it. The two major adjustments on Shadow Play will be done by the end of the weekend and the book will be submitted for Proofs on Monday.