I discovered this purely by chance and it's AWESOME.
NCBD:
March goes out with a BANG (and other such onomatopoeia). Gonna be a big haul today. Let's dig in:
All of the Rick Remender books I've been following since he left the Big Two behind and launched Giant Generator are either over or ending, and for a moment I was a little worried about where I'd get my fix. I've heard good things about The Scumbag, but honestly, when that book began, I'd had quite enough of scumbags in real life and wasn't really jazzed about reading a book with one as its main character. Maybe I'll go back and check it out at some point, but in the meantime, A Righteous Thirst For Vengeance has earned a place in my heart. This is like the best action/revenge/espionage/crime flick not on the big screen, with a bafflingly endearing main character we know next to nothing about and a bunch of walk-ons that pretty much get aced a few pages after their introductions. This is a fast-paced, widescreen example of the kind of synergy that happens when a writer finds the right artist, as RR did by enlisting André Lima Araüjo.
I love this book! It's a pretty out-there approach to Bruce Banner and Hulk, and it really shouldn't work at all, yet somehow 100% does, right down to this first story arc's title; Smashtronaut! How goddamn METAL is that?
Cautiously optimistic for Kieron Gillen's run to take Hickman's set-up and really do something special. Oh, and look at that, speaking of Jonathan Hickman, he's writing another X-book!
I've never been a huge fan of the vagueries of the "unlimited" books, but with Hickman at the helm AND Declan Shalvey on the pencils, well, I'm all in.
Let's go street level for a minute:
Another great indie crime book from the extended Brubaker/Phillips family. I'm really digging this one and feel pretty certain it's going to end up a streaming show sooner rather than later.
This is apparently a big deal, another female turtle named Venus? I'm unaware of the character but will follow this book wherever it goes.
Double the killer Eastman covers this month with the yearly annual, a tradition I largely eschew, except for with this book.
And I'm hanging around with this new Ghost Rider for at least this second issue. I feel like the tone of the art isn't quite dark enough for the character, however, that first issue may have presented itself that way based on the fact that Johnny Blaze was essentially being gaslit into thinking he was living the perfect suburban life, so let's see if things darken now that the cat's out of the bag and ol' flame head is back in control.
Playlist:
Opeth - Width of a Circle (single)
Nothing - Downward Years to Come
MadLove - White With Foam
Nothing - Guilty of Everything
Year of No Light - Consolamentum
Nurse with Wound - Soliloquy for Lilith
Newsletter Playlist (under construction)
Card:
Okay, this is beginning to feel like someone's set my house on fire and I'm too busy looking for the handle on the faucet to call 911. What the hell are you trying to tell me???
I'll admit - I was pretty disappointed to see this pop up in my youtube feed, click on it and find that it's NOT a cover of the David Bowie classic by the same name. That said, I don't take to very much of the music Opeth makes these days, but I dig this.
Dollar Bin:
Welcome back to the Dollar Bin, one of my favorite corners of any local comic shop to spend some time digging through. This week's find: 1985's Moonshadow!
Talk about a book that's been on my radar for decades - maybe as long as I've been seriously reading comics - yet one I haven't actually picked up until now. Originally published through Marvel's Epic comics - kind of their Vertigo a full eight years before Vertigo existed - Moonshadow's J.M. DeMatteis and Jon J. Muth's coming of age, modern fantasy. I remember leafing through this one when it was still on the stands, probably near the end of its 12-issue run, so circa 1986. I would have been ten. This and Stray Toasters were books that initially confused the hell out of me as a die-hard disciple of Larry Hama's G.I.Joe, however, those books also planted the seeds for me to eventually see the potential that lay in the comic format beyond superhero books. I recently scored issues 1-4 in the dollar bins at the Comic Bug, and am looking forward to reading them.
Watch:
I remember seeing the thumbnail for the first Wyrmwood movie on Netflix for years but never being motivated to watch it. I've had plenty of people whose opinions I trust recommend I do just that, but for whatever reason, I just haven't. Now there's a sequel on the way, and I'm still not certain how I feel about these flicks:
It's not that this looks bad, it just looks kind of repetitive. If anyone out there has seen these and vouch for them - because apparently like five of my good friends aren't enough - let me know.
Playlist:
Sugar - File Under: Easy Listening
Quicksand - Distant Populations
The Mysterines - Reeling
Ministry - Filth Pig
Blut Aus Nord - That Cannot Be Dreamed (pre-release)
Svarte Greiner - Devolving Trust
Drab Majesty - Modern Mirror
Lower Dens - Escape From Evil
Opeth - Deliverence
Code Orange - Underneath
Card:
Again with the damn Hierophant. What the hell am I missing? What am I so blindly adhering to that it's impairing me in some way?
Holy F$*k! My good friend Jacob sent me a link to the new album by The Mysterines yesterday and when I dug into it, I very quickly realized it's freaking fantastic! I hear a bit of Savages, some Polly Jean Harvey, and overall a band I immediately fell in love with. So much so, I just bought tickets to see the band on May 4th at the Peppermint Club, a LaLaLand venue I've yet to attend. This will be my first concert since, well, you know, and I guess it stands as a testament to how much I dig this group that I effortlessly decided to go.
I remind myself constantly that I won't have access to this kind of show soon, so I need to enjoy the things about L.A. that I love now, while I'm still here.
Read:
After burning through all those Lovecraft stories a few weeks back, I became seriously shanghaied by his The Unknown City. This is one I'd definitely read before - and enjoyed quite a bit, might I add. For whatever reason though, this time, it's just not doing it for me.
So, prompted by a conversation with a friend who had just read it for the first time, I decided to re-read The Colour Out of Space. For this, I'm switching back and forth between the Kindle version and the one I have in this old anthology I acquired somewhere long ago at what I'm assuming was a second-hand bookshop somewhere:
This nifty little volume was published by nyrb classics (that's New York Review of Books, not the name of a new Lovecraftian species) and contains stories by Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce and Arthur Machen, as well as several other iconic cosmic/folk/weird fictions writers. I've read most of what's in here - this is a shelf volume I pull here and there and read from, and it's a great example of the kind of anthology a publisher can pull together with a coherent theme and a little bit of backing when the contents are mostly - if not completely - in the realm of public domain.
Playlist:
Ghost - Impera
Hyperia - Silhouettes of Horror
Electric Youth & Pilotpriest - Come True OST
Steve Moore - VFW OST
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen
King Woman - Celestial Blues
Metallica - Kill 'Em All
The Mysterines - Reeling
Les Discrets - Prédateurs
Deftones - Gore
Card:
Standstill that requires a dose of either cash or luck or both to achieve a truly remarkable result. I'll keep this in mind throughout the week, as it seems to me there are several possible applications at the moment for this spread.
I'm doing a bit of mental restructuring and wanted this site to match. This is kind of my forward-facing mental pocket - a place I can tip out the contents of my head and sort it into something shareable with others, so it makes sense that it would grow and change the same as I do.
For S.E.S., I wanted to have one day a week where I could just put up a piece of music that, at that moment or in the moments leading up to it, has contributed to my current mental state. I also wanted to find a way to be more consistent posting without having to throw down the sometimes cumbersome regular format I employ. There was a time when not every post on these pages was as long as the current structure I've been working with for the last few years, and mixing and matching the two should keep my posting more consistent.
Pilotpriest and Electric Youth from the soundtrack of Anthony Scott Burns' (aka Pilotpriest himself) film Come True, which was on my top ten last year and which I am in desperate need of a rewatch.
The vinyl soundtrack is courtesy of Waxwork Records and can be purchased HERE. It's divided between both artists, with several tracks being collaborations or remixes. Here's my favorite credited to Pilotpriest:
A new video from Orville Peck's recently released Bronco, Chapter 1. I can't wait for the entire album to land and my vinyl to arrive. If you haven't already, you can scoot on over HERE to pick one up for yourself.
Watch:
Despite working slightly more than a full day yesterday, I had a pretty damn good 46th birthday. Nothing fancy. Homemade burgers and Demons 2 kicked things off, as I picked up that stunning Synapse Films double feature of Lamberto Bava's two Demons films back when it came out a year or two ago, and still hadn't set eyes on their transfer of the sequel.
Ironic that I could only find Arrow Video's trailer for their restoration of the film, but whatever. The Synapse transfer is gorgeous, and I'm quite happy with everything about it.
Later, to end my night, I threw on one of my recent favorites - Joe Begos' VFW. It'd been a minute since I'd seen this one, but I feel like all the beats are seared into my head thanks to that one magnificent Beyondfest double feature back in 2019.
I love this flick so damn much. Both this and Begos' Bliss are films I feel like I could watch every day. In lieu of that, I tend to just toss them on when I can, to re-experience not just the film, but that glorious final Beyondfest at the Egyptian, my favorite place in LaLaLand, now owned by Netflix.
Play:
Not only did my Nintendo Switch arrive yesterday, but I was able to pick up Puppet Combo's Nun Massacre from the online game store!
The game, like Glass Staircase before it - which I'd bought on my Mac a few years ago and quickly gave up on without a controller - is a bit difficult to get used to for someone who hasn't ever really played 360, immersive games, but very well worth the pangs of the learning curve. The atmosphere is stellar, and when the titular Nun takes to stabbing you to death, things get pretty intense. Definitely recommended for anyone who digs Horror and Games. Reminds me a bit of my all-time favorite Video Game, Shadow Gate, which still influences my personality endlessly, despite not having played it in decades at this point.
Despite all this love I'm heaping on Nun Massacre, however, it was another game I picked up at the same time that I spent the most time with. Thanks to a recommendation by my Horror Vision cohost King Butcher, I grabbed Game Kitchen's Blasphemous:
The image of that giant baby with its eyes stabbed out, held by a monster as it tears a person limb from limb sealed the deal. This is some insane shit, and I'm absolutely in love with this game, which was obviously designed by a bunch of Metal Head Stoners (my people) who were very much influenced by the Castlevania series, which, back when I played video games on the original NES system, was a favorite (especially part 2: Simon's Quest).
Playlist:
Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments
Blut Aus Nord - That Cannot Be Dreamed
Drug Church - Hygiene
Quicksand - Slip
White Lung - Paradise
Every Day (is Halloween) Playlist (Reveal in upcoming April 4th Edition of the newsletter)
Card:
Back to my Thoth mini. My intention was a three-card spread, however, this card literally jumped out of the deck at me:
A solid foundation to build from takes good, strong effort and clear thinking. Pertinent, as we just had another phone conversation with our Tennessee realtor. Things are moving forward, and I'll post more about it here when our machinations fully lock into place.
Today is my 46th birthday, and it looks like the four original members of one of my favorite bands saw fit to get me a little gift. That's right, a new track from Bauhaus, and one utilizing the ol' Exquisite Corpse technique we last saw them employ on my favorite Bauhaus album, The Sky is Falling.
Hopefully, this means we have a new album coming. I personally LOVED the band's most previous album Go Away White - the first post-break-up.
Play:
I surprised the hell out of myself yesterday by ordering a Nintendo Switch. Why?
I think I first got wind of Puppet Combo's low-fi indie games after reading a Bloody Disgusting article a couple years ago. Other than a love for DDR, I haven't played video games since the original Nintendo, so as much as I loved Glass Staircase when I bought it for my computer, I really didn't have the time or gumption to play it. But Puppet Combo's overall 70s/80s horror-inspired games are so damn cool to look at. Well, an article on BD yesterday announced his game Nun Massacre was hitting Nintendo Switch today, and I took it as a sign. Couple with that an interest King Butcher, my co-host on The Horror Vision, has stoked in me with the reviews of the newest Metroid game and Valfaris on previous episodes of our podcast, and I figured it was a win-win.
Plus, how the hell do I pass up a game called Nun Massacre?
Playlist:
Blut Aus Nord - That Cannot Be Dreamed (pre-release single)
Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments
Drug Church - Hygiene EP
Spotlights - The Age of Decay (single)
Deftones - Rosemary (single)
Peturbator - I Am the Night
Bauhaus - Drink the New Wine (single)
Card:
I felt like my Thoth mini deck (thank you, Missi!) hadn't been seeing any real action of late, so I decided to do my birthday pull using it. Here we go:
All good signs for prosperity. Which is a relief. Our plans to exit LaLaLand keep getting pushed around. First my medical shit, then the Nashville market - another reason to dislike Angelenos - now work stuff. The move is imminent, however, I also have a CRAZY idea for a short film project that the Universe seems to be telling me to reach for, so maybe I'll be here just long enough to try.
Many thanks to Heaven is an Incubator for posting about the new Blut Aus Nord album Disharmonium - Undreamable Abysses, out on May 20th 2022 from the always awesome Debemur Morti Productions. This sounds like a return to the 777 era of the band, so one track is really just a big freakin' tease.
What a weird coincidence this is. It's not all that often that I listen to Rammstein. They're definitely a band a dig, however, unless it's the two songs on the Lost Highway soundtrack, there's a pretty specific time and place for sure. Late last week I cracked out Rosenrot, and now look - new album Zeit out April 29th! Pre-order the album HERE.
Watch:
This past Saturday, before the return of my annual St. Paddy's celebration, I caught a mid-day showing of Ti West's new film X at the local AMC. I've posted the trailer here before, back when it first dropped, but here it is again:
X is fantastic. Don't read or listen to anything about it, other than me telling you right here to go see this one on the big screen. You won't regret it. In keeping with West's glorious style, this is a very loud quiet film. It's bloody and human and strangely sweet at times.
Dollar Bin:
Back for another Tuesday afternoon digging in the ol' dollar bin:
Despite my allegiance to Vertigo at the time of its release, I had never even looked through an issue of House of Secrets until two weeks ago when I found the first story arc from the 1995 reimagining of DC's House of Secrets. And yet, in spite of that, several of the covers in this arc loom in my comic book knowledge as extremely iconic images. Especially issue #2.
There's definitely an element to this series that makes me see Vertigo's mid-90s style storytelling as very brand specific, however, since nothing I know of looks or reads this way anymore, any problems I had with this first arc - this reinvention's arbitrary relocation of the titular House to Seattle, Washington in an obvious attempt to capitalize on the *ahem* grunge movement, the fact that every character in the book is in a band or fucking someone in a band, the then-current newsworthy societal plot points. Unfortunately, STDs and molestation have always been problems in our society, however, the ignorance and fear that limited allowed them to grow to epidemic proportions became a campaign slogan themselves, and a talking point for societal criticism. Not a bad thing, but also, the approach to a lot of the tv and literature that took a swing at incorporating such a hot button issue often feels trite and misguided. There's a bit of that here, or, I'm just out-of-phase with my residual 90s self.
Regardless of little gripes, this first arc was a good read and I was overjoyed to put all six issues into my short boxes for a mere $6.00.
Also, Teddy Kristiansen's art is most definitely iconic and hits the sweet spot created in my soul by similar artists such as Marc Hempel and Peter Gross. There's something so Grimm's Fairytales about this style, and as I intimated above, it's one we don't really see anywhere anymore (if you know of a place to find it, let me know!)
Playlist:
Chelsea Wolfe - Birth of Violence
The Pogues - If I Should Fall from Grace with God
The Pogues - Rum Sodomy & the Lash
U2 - The Joshua Tree
John Carpenter with Alan Howarth - Big Trouble in Little China OST
Judas Priest - You Got Another Thing Comin' (single)
Til Tuesday - Voices Carry (single)
Ghost - Impera
Card:
Past = XXI: The Universe
Present = I: The Magus
Future = 7 of Wands: Valour
Holding fast to a protocol - the word I'm using here in place of the more loaded 'belief' - I have established in a previous moment will put me in the position to successfully recreate something that has changed with time, never been completed, but remained a part of me.
Svarte Greiner's new record Devolving Trust was recorded in the "Once bombed-out Schneider Brewery, Berlin," and the acoustics are as much an instrument here as anything else. This is some serious atmosphere. Absolutely gorgeous in the darkest possible way, this brings me back to a headspace I lived in daily back around 2006. I found this one when comics scribe Warren Ellis mentioned it a few days ago on his Morning Computer, and within a few moments of checking it out, I was enraptured. However, this is not Wednesday-morning-at-work music, so I had to put a good solid listen on the back burner until later.
And later it was. Loooong day Wednesday. It wasn't until about 5:00 PM that I had the chance to really dig in, and as I said, it did not disappoint. Once I was in Greiner's sonic conjuring, I couldn't listen to anything else for the next several hours. Actually, for the rest of the night.
You can pick up Devolving TrustHERE from Miasmah Recordings.
Watch:
A trailer for Brendan Muldowney's new film Cellar dropped a few days ago and it looks fantastic:
I've said it here before, but we need more Ancestral Horror, and this looks like a good start!
Read:
I was completely blown away to walk into the Comic Bug this past Wednesday and meet Pat O'Malley, author of the new comic Pop Scars. I picked up the first two issues, and they're freakin' fantastic! A highly polished, super-bright grindhouse exploitation Hollywood Revenge flick delivered in the comic format, I love this book and can't wait for issue 3.
This book is nuts: violent, funny, pop, and bloody. Very much the kind of book I look for when I'm scouring the shelves of a shop for something new and independent. The plan is to have Pat on an upcoming episode of A Most Horrible Library, so I'll definitely update here when that happens. In the meantime, here's a LINK to his Frightening Tales on youtube.
Playlist:
Svarte Greiner - Devolving Trust
The Pogues - Red Roses for Me
The Pogues - If I Should Fall From Grace With God
The Pogues - Rum Sodomy and the Lash
The Tossers - The Valley of the Shadow of Death
Flogging Molly - Float
Exhalants - Atonement
Jim Williams - Possessor OST
New Radicals - Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too
Zeal & Ardor - Eponymous
Perturbator - Dangerous Days
Perturbator - I Am the Night
U2 - The Joshua Tree
U2 - War
Faith No More - Angel Dust
Ghost - Impera
Revocation - The Outer Ones
Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction
Card:
Roll with the punches - I had an incredibly unproductive writing session today. So what? I'm not going to let it keep me from trying again tomorrow.
I'm not going to be able to really celebrate until Saturday, but in the meantime, there's Pogues and Guinness.
Watch:
You can really tell I've drank all the Marvel kool-aid now, eh?
A friend at work showed me this trailer for the upcoming Event Book Judgment Day, and I will say, I'm curious. I'm not very hip to the Eternals, however, the idea that in their fervor to rid the Earth of "Deviants" they've determined that mutants are one and the same, well, it's a good idea for a story.
Judgment Day lands in July - I think - and although I'm not certain I'll be reading it, I will probably be at the very least staying peripherally abreast of the beats and outcome.
Playlist:
Tones on Tail - Everything!
Plague Bringer - As the Ghosts Collect, the Corpses Rest
Spizm - B4uDIE
Bryce Miller - City Depths
Def Leppard - Pyromania
Rammstein - Rosenrot
Mark Lanegan - Blues Funeral
New Radicals - Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too
The Pogues - Rum, Sodomy and the Lash
The Pogues - Red Roses for Me
Svarte Greiner - Devolving Trust
Card:
Dogmatic regimes - outdated thought that threatens to lock your mind in a box of its own making - the worst kind. Hmmm... No context for this at the moment, unless A) the pull is the cards being playful, as I just had a conversation yesterday about The Hierophant with the person who colored and gave me these cards, or B) it's commentary on how far up Marvel's arse I am at the moment that I'm posting a trailer for an event book. Either way, always good to have a playful reading.
It's been a minute since I listened to Dum Dum Girls' 2014 Too True. Such a fantastic record, which also served as the band's last before dissolving. I can vividly remember staring out the window on a Greyhound bus early on in my relationship with this record. None of the band's other releases ever hit me quite as hard as this one, possibly because of such a sustained period of isolation and reflection with it on that bus, headed from Chicago to Dayton, nearing the end of a particularly long era of my life. When I listen now, my head doesn't automatically go to the whys and wherefores of that bus ride, just the deliciously peaceful Midwest scenery
Watch:
There's something inherently creepy about the word "watcher."
I don't know much about director Chloe Okuna, except that her segment of last year's V/H/S '94 - apparently entitled Storm Drain - was the only segment in the film that I enjoyed. And I really enjoyed it, so I'm very curious to see her new full-length film Watcher.
NCBD:
A thankfully abbreviated NCBD this week, as I actually went back in last week and ended up grabbing the new trade paperback of the Jeff Lemire/Greg Smallwood 2016 run on Moon Knight that Marvel recently released.
Now, onto this week's pull, which starts with another issue of our 90s rock tactical military ghost war comic, Home Sick Pilots!
This book continues to be insane, and I realize now that I should take the opportunity to pass on the fact that if you're so inclined, you can go HERE to read the first issue of the series for free online. The only reason you should absolutely not do this is if you don't want to get sucked in and immediately shell out the dough for the first two trades ($10 and $17 respectively).
The changes that adapting author David M. Booher has been making to Joe Hill's Rain have made this limited series a nice companion for someone like me, who just finished reading the original novella a fw weeks before this series hit the stands. Rain is a different kind of apocalypse story - thankfully - and in spite of the changes, the massive heart that comprises its DNA are brought our wonderfully by Zoe Thorogood's art.
More Silver Coin, and this month, we get a sequel to a previous issue's story. Hot damn!
A new number one from Image that sounds like it has serious potential. From the solicitation copy on Image's site:
"Stetson is a nightmare hunter. A dream detective. She runs a shoddy back-alley business where she helps clients sleep at night by entering their dreams and killing their nightmares. But Stetson’s past comes back to haunt her when she tracks down a literal living nightmare—a serial killer that murders people in their sleep.SLUMBER is an ongoing series from the twisted minds of writer TYLER BURTON SMITH (Kung Fury, Child’s Play) and rising-star artist VANESSA CARDINALI."
I don't know about you, but that description buys it at least one issue with me.
Playlist:
Drug Church - Hygiene
Metallica - Kill 'Em All demos
Metallica - Ride The Lightning
The Cure - Three Imaginary Boys
Zeal and Ardor - Eponymous
Dum Dum Girls - Too True
The Dillinger Escape Plan - Ire Works
Revocation - The Outer Ones
Card:
Discretion when dealing with the Physical World is a commonly held interpretation. It's generally NOT mine. To me, the Fifteenth Trump Card of the Tarot is usually a nudge to pay attention to wisdom that comes from a possibly dodgy source.
UPDATE on yesterday's three-card spread: Exactly as I thought, I stopped what I was doing pretty much on the spot, broke out a short story I've been trying to finish since 2018, and finished it!
New music from Drug Church. Mr. Brown recommended these guys to me a few weeks back but they quickly fell off my radar before I ever got the chance to listen to them. When I sat down earlier today to start this post, something just clicked.
There's a distinct 90s indie rock underpinning here - I hear a lot of Bob Mould, especially Sugar-era, only with a huge drum sound that really changes the dynamic of that comparison. Turns out, exactly as Mr. Brown had promised, the entire record is Fantastic; you can order it from Pure Noise Records HERE.
Watch:
The new episode of The Horror Vision Horror Podcast went up yesterday. We gathered this past Saturday to watch Mickey Keating's new movie Offseason, and in my book, it did not disappoint. You can hear our spoiler-free review if you click the little widget at the top right hand of this page, or on your favorite podcast streaming service.
Also, the IndieGoGo campaign for Friday the 13th Fan Film Never Hike Alone 2 is now live! While I'm not a very big fan of the actual Friday flicks, I quite like Vincent DiSanti's films and will definitely be throwing down on this one that brings the Thom Matthews back as Tommy Jarvis for an ultimate showdown with Mr. Voorhees.
Can't wait to get this one in my hands and then watch all three of DiSanti's F13 films in one sitting! Back the campaign HERE.
Dollar Bin:
Last Tuesday, I introduced a new weekly feature called Dollar Bin. This is a place where I can talk about all the cool, nostalgic, or just plain awesome items I find while flipping through the dollar bins in the comic shops I frequent. That said, while this week's featured score was indeed found in a dollar bin, it is most definitely not a comic.
I'd never heard of Nyctalops magazine until I brought this one home last week. Nyctalops was a literary Horror magazine dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries published independently in the 70s and 80s. It featured reviews and editorial pieces of contemporary and historic Horror and Weird Fiction and often included short stories by contributors that included Ramsey Campbell, Robert Bloch, and Thomas Ligotti, and many, many more.
This issue is #18, published in 1983, and it features two essays on themes found in the works of Robert Aickman, as well as an essay by famed Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, to name but a few of its treasures. Also, I found it particularly thrilling to note that in the forward to this issue, Editor Howard O. Morris excitedly mentions that the Magazine's printer, Silver Scarab Press, has plans to publish, "... tentatively, a collection of horror stories by Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer."
Today, Horror literature fans know ..Dead Dreamer to be one of Ligotti's most influential works, and I found it super cool to stumble across a reference to it before the polarizing author made his mark.
Playlist:
Ghost - Impera
The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre
Mark Lanegan - Bubblegum
Tones on Tail - Everything!
Ghost - Opus Eponymous
Danzig - Thrall- Demonsweat Live
The Twilight Singers - Powder Burns
Orville Peck - Bronco (Chapter 1)
David Bowie - A Reality Tour
Motörhead - Ace of Spades
Pike Vs. The Automaton - Eponymous
Mad Season - Above
Mutterlein - Orphans of the Black Sun
Jim Williams - Possessor OST
Young Widows - Settle Down City
Revocation - The Outer Ones
Code Orange - Underneath
Deafheaven - Sunbather
Card:
Past = 7 of Cups: Debauch - taken here to mean I'm poisoning
Present = 5 of Wands: Strife
Future = 0: The Fool
I'm not entirely certain how to read this one. I'm tempted to interpret the 7 of Cups as an inverted victory; a good thing that goes too long and turns sour, but I'm not entirely sure how that... wait. Maybe. I'll have to report back on this one. Sometimes it's best to follow flashes of inspiration without thinking about them too much.
New video from Dance with the Dead, and it's really cool! I love the floating first-person perspective used to zoom along deserted, dilapidated forest roads and into old mine shafts. Very cool. Also, those shots are so alluring, I'd imagine it could be difficult to come up with something more narrative-like to compliment it, but a four-minute video of just that perspective stuff would definitely get old. Luckily, the creators knew exactly where to take this one. The "skeleton rave" is a bit goofy, but ultimately totally works for the song, and it gives us a destination for all those traveling shots.
Watch:
Since seeing it pop up on Shudder at the beginning of the month, I've really been wanting to rewatch Alexander Aja's 2003 High Tension. The problem with that particular film, however, is as much as I like everything about the first two acts, the twist or reveal at the onset of the third never worked for me.
Maybe I've just been looking for a reason to try the film again - I seem to watch it about every ten years, always hoping I feel different. That's never the case. However - I recently began listening to the Horror podcast The House That Screams, and I'll be damned if their most recent episode didn't change my view of the film's personality-warping twist.
The important thing is, I think, the idea one of the hosts expresses that the killer is not so much a secondary personality, as it is a personification of Marie's romantic (?) feelings for her friend Alex. Something about this just helped my acceptance of the film's outcome, I think probably because at the time of its release, there had already been so many films that imitated Fight Club's masterful maneuvering of character that any hint of it immediately killed a film for me. The only exception to that was Brad Anderson's The Machinist, and my acceptance of that one only came after a conversation with a friend where they explained their understanding of Ivan as a physical personification of Trevor's guilt. The House That Screams hosts (I'm new to the show and haven't heard enough to know exactly who is talking when) make a comparison to Leland Palmer/Bob. Now, while they don't suggest it's exactly the same scenario as Bob's "inhabiting spirit," I'd never thought of this angle before. That kind of surprises me, being what a huge Twin Peaks fan I am. But hearing it and making the earlier, perhaps more 1:1 comparison with The Machinist, I feel like I'm ready to watch the film again and see how it sits.
Read:
Re-reading Warren Ellis & Declan Shalvey's painfully short run on Moon Knight. Goddamn, I wish they'd stayed with it for at least twelve issues.
The good news, of course, was the relationship between Ellis and Shalvey that started here went on to give us three GLORIOUS volumes of Injection, and further went on to launch Shalvey as not only a top-tier artist but a pretty damn great writer as well. I'm still thinking about Bog Bodies after re-reading it middle of last year.
Playlist:
Ghost - Impera
Orville Peck - Bronco
The Cure - Faith
Greg Puciato - Lowered (single)
Tennis System - Technicolor Blind
Isobell Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Sunday at Devil Dirt.
Mad Season - Above
Revocation - The Outer Ones
Mark Lanegan - Bubblegum
Card:
Okay, I love this spread:
To see such a clear narrative offset by instructions that don't just make sense in the course of my current life, but in the course of the nature of the cards, is almost breathtaking.
Past = Princess of Swords: Confusion and chaos. This is my exact mindset of late. I'm fighting myself, my intuition, everything.
Present = Queen of Wands: Not a fan of this card, however, you look at that calming hand on top of the Lion and you get the picture. Reel it in, son. Tame your inner fires and FOCUS.
Future = Prince of Wands: Here's where the beauty emerges. These two cards are in sequence in the deck. One tells you to tame the Lion, the other shows it under your control, pulling you forward.
Ghost had a big ol' Release Ritual for their new album Impera, out today. You can still order the album HERE. As I write this, it's 11:00 PM PST, so the full album dropped two hours ago when the East Coast hit Midnight.
I'm definitely losing some of the "to hell and back" vibe I had with Ghost, but I still feel like their music is fantastic, even if not always what I want it to be. Oh, how I long for Infestissumam, and to a lesser extent, Meliora ("Circe" is probably my favorite song by the band, or at least a close second to "Year Zero"). Even more than their actual music, I have long been interested in the course Tobias Forge has plotted out for his music. Since Popestar in 2016, it has been my prediction that Forge will eventually do a big budget broadway musical - I really see so much of that theatrical DNA in their records and their live show. Only time will tell. In the meantime, I'm off Friday - when you're reading this - so I'm up late with my first go-through of Impera running through my headphones and it sounds great. Again, not always what I want, exactly, but still great.
Watch:
A new featurette for Marvel's Moon Knight dropped earlier in the week. I'm trying to avoid seeing too much, but I broke down and watched this, can vouch that there are no real spoilers included here. The show begins March 30th, and I find myself counting the days. I want to like this one so much - with MK a favorite character and Benson and Moorehead as showrunners, well, this seems like there is no way it could possibly disappoint me.
However...
I'm still not sold on the way the costume looks on screen. I'm really hoping I get over that, or the images we're seeing are early on in the costume's evolution. I refer back to Netflix's Daredevil here, where at the end of the first season when Matt Murdock transitioned from the Fran Miller-inspired black mask to the actual DD costume, I was totally taken aback, but by the second season the rough edges had been rounded down. Regardless, Moon Knight is really hanging on as a favorite at the moment, and it has A LOT to do with Jed Mackay's current run on the monthly book - issue #9 in particular - which just blew me away. Making the House of Shadows the new Midnight Mission was a stroke of genius...
And then there's this:
I'm a fan of Marvel's Black, White & Blood books, even though I've not actually picked up all that many of them. This, however. Holy shit. I never would have anticipated them doing a Moon Knight installment. I've always tried to be consistent with the character; I missed out on the 80s series completely, cherry-picked at the 90s one, and missed the Charlies Huston series altogether, but loved the entirety of the Brian Michael Bendis run that followed shortly after. Then the Warren Ellis/Declan Shalvey - well, let's just say that's holy in my eyes, and one of the things I've loved about the interpretation since - and what I expect to love about the Disney+ series - is the Mr. Knight persona. That's the kind of genius you expect from a collaboration between Ellis and Shalvey, and I've been continuously happy to see it garnering so much of the character's continued evolution.
Playlist:
The Dillinger Escape Plan - One of Us is the Killer
Ministry - Filth Pig
Ghost - Live From the Ministry (Impera Release Ritual)
Mötley Crüe - Shout at the Devil
The Twilight Singers - A Stitch in Time EP
Ghost - Impera
Card:
Taking a break from the Thoth deck and moving back to my beloved Raven Tarot:
A reminder to take knowledge from even the most obscure or upsetting places. This feels like it figures in to my current state of mind, which is about 30% paranoia. I'm looking for answers as to how to continue with my life, how to streamline the next series of large steps I have to take in order to get the hell out of my current paradigm and into what's next. Lot's of setbacks, lots of arrows. But there are always distractions and detractors. The point is to move beyond what we know and just make it happen. Lucifer certainly did.
I finally picked up The Devil's Blood's 2012 MASTERPIECE The Thousandfold Epicentre on vinyl. Ever since my friend Tori turned me on to this album later that same year, it has occupied a pretty prominent place in my inner jukebox. I can't go very long without cranking this album, so it's nice to be able to do so on vinyl now.
Watch:
With Mickey Keating's new film Offseason dropping this week and some of my cohorts from The Horror Vision and I planning to get together for a viewing/reaction episode, I figured it was time I finally watched the Keating flicks I'd had on my list for some time now. Two nights ago I began with 2016's Carnage Park.
Great flick. This feels like Keating doing his own take on Rob Zombie-like material, and it works. A lot of that is the casting - Ashely Bell is a fantastic final girl. Her wardrobe in the film plays up her petite size and creates a glorious misnomer for a character that ends up a staunch survivor without the film ever having to go over the top and take her full-on Ripley. This helps keep the film's realistic tone, and makes the final sequences of the movie breathtaking in the tension they create. Rarely does a film use lack of light this well. Also, Pat Healy is really just one of my favorite actors. The guy never disappoints in his performances.
Read:
I checked a few more Lovecraft stories off the list:
• Celephais
• The Unnamable
• The Haunter in the Dark
I will tell you, there is a HUGE advantage to reading Lovecraft's works on Kindle. You won't get an awesome, old-school paperback cover like the one I've posted above, however, the Kindle's X-Ray feature allows you to axis all kinds of information you would not otherwise have at your disposal. For instance, reading The Haunter in the Dark was especially enjoyable due to the information I learned by highlighting elements of the text and either reading the X-Ray or built-in links to Wikipedia. I'm certain I'd read this one before, however, I never would have known that the story is essentially a sequel to a young Robert Bloch's story The Shambler from the Stars, or that the main character, Robert Blake (not that Robert Blake), was Bloch's creation. There are also elements in the story drawn from Clarke Ashton Smith, and it's this element of Lovecraft's work - that it has always essentially been an 'open source' material, that I find so fascinating.
Playlist:
Deftones - Ohms
Deftones - Gore
Godflesh - Pure
Iress - Prey
My Bloody Valentine - MBV
Poni Hoax - Eponymous
Dillinger Escape Plan - One of Us is the Killer
Card:
Note: I generally don't recognize inverted cards.
Past = Knight of Discs. The Fire Element of Earth. Will applied to Malkuth, the Earthly concerns. This was my idea before yesterday that I was going to force my doctor to see things my way, to open me up and take the 1cmm 'shadow' my last CT scan showed out.
Present = 3 of Disks: Work. Staying in the Earthly realm. This is the reality of the situation.
Future = 7 of Swords: Futility. This is turning out to be a pretty poignant pull because as it turns out, the doctor 100% convinced me I was overreacting.
It's pretty easy to have someone in the medical field you trust say to you, "It's probably nothing but we'd like to do a biopsy just to be sure" and then assume this is a half measure - especially when it doesn't work and your lung collapses - and that the actual the best possible way to proceed is to have them cut you open. I'm past that. I can't keep my life on hold for this. The new plan is a CT every four months (or so) to make sure the shadow isn't growing. I should state what my doc reminded me of yesterday: the fact that because of being stabbed in the lung when I was in High School, and because of the inflammation - which they originally mistook for lymphoma back in 2017 - my lungs are filled with shadows when it comes to CT scans. The tricky bit with my physiology as it is, lies in determining if new aberrations are just the inflammation growing/changing, or something more nefarious. For now, I'm content waiting this out because the odds are it is inflammation. And really, I want to move ASAP, not just because I'm sick of LA, but because I want to be far away in case we get in over our heads and Putin decides to turn LaLaLand into a smoking crater.
Paranoia. It's what's for dinner in 2022. Deal with it.
Taking a cue from Heaven is an Incubator and posting some Morphine. Love this band, love this track. It's been a minute since I pulled any of their albums out, and doing so now makes me realize that in the four years or so now that I've been using Apple Music, I've not taken advantage of it insofar as finally filling in the gaps I have with this band, one of the most unique and listenable bands from a decade where both those attributes seemed abundant. Not every band with a unique sound from that era has aged well; maybe it will pass, but there's a lot of music I considered unique then that feels dated because of it now. Not Morphine. It's a tired metaphor, but Mark Sandman, Dana Colley, Jerome Deupree and Billy Conway's music truly is like a fine wine - it only gets better with age.
Watch:
Chalk this one up as another upcoming Horror flick I almost missed:
Amazon dropped the trailer for their upcoming University Horror flick Master last week, and it looks creepy A.F. This one lands next week on the 18th, in theatres and on Prime.
And as long as we're talking about upcoming Horror movies, This is the best f*&king news I've heard in quite some time.
NCBD:
Frank Castle in the Hand? Well, that's an original take. I'm cursing myself already for giving this one a shot, but I'm super curious so I'll at the very least be grabbing this first issue.
I'm not sure if I mentioned it here at some point recently or not, but when I heard Beta Ray Bill was in Thor 22, I had to pick it up. And seeing as how that issue is the third in the current God of Hammers storyline, I went back and tried to grab issues 19 and 20 as well, only they were long gone. Apparently, Mjölnir is now a sentient character - that's him/her/they on the cover of issue 21's second printing, which I'll be picking up tomorrow, along with the finale of the storyline, issue 23.
That's a long way to go for what seems to be a brief appearance by BRB, but the story's pretty good, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it all shakes out.
Advance word has it that the penultimate issue of X Deaths of Wolverine is bloody and nasty and crazy. We'll see.
Past = 5 of Wands: Strife. I have been extremely uneasy in my own skin, and part of that has been a reticence to commit to a short-term writing project. Lots of ideas, but I flit from one to another without any commitment.
Present = 0: The Fool. Fresh starts. In this case, over and over again. Usually The Fool is a welcome sight, an inclination that a new adventure or project is about to begin. Here, I believe it's akin to spinning my wheels.
Future = 8 of Cups: Indolence. The warning: What one and two have done so far is keep me in a kind of holding pattern that intermittently results in non-activity, or, in the classic definition of this card at face value, inactivity. I need to break this. So how about a final, clarifying card?
Again, my inclination is to take this literally - well, okay, as literal as "The Universe" can be, and read this as what comes next. In other words, the next project I work on, I stick to. I'm off tomorrow for a visit to the lung doctor, and other than hitting the Bug for NCBD, the plan is to write. I'm pretty sure I know what the winning project will be, but I guess you never know.
