RIP Ennio Morricone

A legend has left us. Here's one of my many favorites from possibly the greatest cinema composer to ever walk the planet.

RIP Genesis P. Orridge

You timed it juuuuust right, sir.

RIP David Roback

As a teenager, I must have gotten stoned and tranced on this song hundreds of times. Thank you and godspeed to one of the artists who made it possible.

Cynic - Textures: RIP Sean Reinert

Man, this was a blow. I don't know Sean Reinert's catalogue like some of my friends do, but from the moment I first heard this track on Cynic's 1993's debut Focus, I was floored. This was one of the first 'death metal' bands whose vocals didn't put me off, and also, whereas I normally didn't 'listen' to the drums on records like this, with Reinhert, at times that was all I could listen to.

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Holy smokes! Over at Brooklyn Vegan, Andrew Sacher made my day by posting the news that 90s MetalCore group Deadguy appear to be reuniting. This is one show I will not miss live if they come through LaLa Land! Waaaay back in 1995, when Deadguy's first and only album Fixation On a Coworker came out on Victory Records, I happened to be a writer for southside Chicago music mag Subculture, and this album was sent to me for review. I loved it, and have loved it ever since, and now can't wait to see what more Deadly might have in store for us.

Read Sacher's full article HERE, and below is my favorite song off the album:




**

Playlist:

M83 - Knight + Heart OST
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - In Summer EP
Me and That Man - Songs of
Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta II: Dialogue with the Stars

**

Card:

Motion, movement. Flow. Getting back into a stable, regular writing routine has worked wonders. Sometimes things stop your momentum cold, that's life. You just have to start back up again. It's all a Wheel.

RIP Sid Haig

Moments after I posted yesterday's page here I learned that Sid Haig passed away. This seemed inescapable after all the reading I'd done late last week about why he had such a small role in Rob Zombie's 3 From Hell, and sure enough, one week to the day after the film's release, we lost Captain Spaulding. I can think of no great tribute than the scene I've posted above; other than the intro to Way of the Gun, this is possibly my favorite to any movie ever.

**



This record is absolutely fantastic!

After stumbling across it's premature release late last week and posting about it here, I ended up truncating my first listen; last week was my on-call shift at work, and during those weeks I always refrain from smoking, which I knew I wanted to do for my first go-through on this one. So yesterday, after turning the phone over to the next person in the rotation, I returned home after work and hit the ol' dugout, then put on my headphones and lay on the bed listening - and I mean full-attention, not doing anything else listening - to the album all the way through.

It's epic. My favorite Blut Aus Nord record since Memoria Vetusta II, probably because this feels like a direct sequel to that record, even more than Memoria Vetusta III does. Epic, cosmic, and majestic,  Hallucinogen takes me straight to the stars, and I love it.

**

NCBD: This will be the first week in number of weeks that anything I read comes out, so I'm pretty excited:

After mis-reporting it last month, here it is, just in time to coincide with my re-read of the series: Black Science ends with issue forty-three!

Two Remender books in the same week - always a great thing!

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Playlist from 9/23:

Air - Talkie Walkie
Carpenter Brut - Leather Teeth
Rob Zombie - Hellbilly Deluxe 2
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen

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Card of the day:

Despite not having a formal writing session yesterday, I did a pretty good deal of research and I had a massive breakthrough on a major aspect of the overall Shadow Play story. It would seem the suggestion for today is to do a little housekeeping and translate some of those notes into actual story Bible material.

2019: July 3rd Uniform and The Body - In My Skin

Yesterday's drop of a new Uniform and The Body track, a track that heralds a new collaborative album by the bands, sent me scurrying back to 2018's Mental Wounds Not Healing. It'd been a minute since I listened to this one, and in the course of several rotations in my headphones, I definitely gravitated toward track 5, In My Skin, as my favorite on the album. I spent the morning listening to this, and a sizable portion of my evening listening to that new track Penance, which I absolutely love.

**

BIG spoiler news in the world of comics hit me pretty hard yesterday. I won't go into it here, but suffice it to say this Friday night, Mike Wellman and I are planning, "A very special episode" of Drinking with Comics as a kind of memorial to something I love very much.

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NCBD:

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Playlist from 7/02:

Uniform and The Body - Mental Wounds Not Healing
The Body - I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer
Bob Mould - Sunshine Rock
Black Polygons - Lobélia
Motorhead - Ace of Spades
Minsk - The Crash and the Draw
Uniform and The Body - Penance (Pre-release Single)
Uniform - Wake in Fright

**

No Card today.

2018: December 7th - RIP Pete Shelley

Rest in Peace, Peter Shelley.

The first time I heard The Buzzcocks it was their single What Do I Get, circa 1998, and I was floored. After coming up in the early 90s and absolutely HATING the pop punk movement (do I hate green day more than I hate crappy 70s bands like Ace, Styxx, and Kansas? Yes. Yes I do), I was shocked to find there was pop punk that didn't turn everything I loved about the original 'punks' - a social movement more than a sound, per se - into a marketing ploy. Then, to find that as that as they evolved, the Buzzcocks melded more with the Post-Punk movement, I've often felt this band were way more important in the annals of rock history than they are generally given credit for. Even I haven't listened to the Buzzcocks as much as I feel I should, my familiarity starting and stopping with songs on an old mixtape back in the day, and an career-spanning anthology Mr. Brown gave me years ago.

I began working on my Top Ten Favorite Albums of 2018 list the other day. Did Beak>'s L.A. Playback make the cut? Honestly, I'm not even sure yet. It's always a favorite year-end activity of mine, to comb back through all the music that came out over the past year and boil down my ten favorites, but it's never easy. There's A LOT of good music out there. I also always look forward to reading other people's lists, chief among them the ones published by Heaven Is An Incubator and Joup's Daniel Fiorio. I'll definitely be posting links to those here when they drop.

In the meantime, here's some Live Beak> I found on youtube. Love KEXP! So many awesome bands - reminds me of the old Peel Sessions, or in a more contemporary, LA way, Part Time Punks.



Playlist from my travel day yesterday was primarily six sustained hours of Burial's Untrue, with a few other things thrown into the mix. That's how I travel: I put on an album, almost always electronic in nature, and drill it on repeat. This helps me reach a strange, liminal state, a kind of hypnogogic trance, and that helps me ride the day out in a strange but beautifully peaceful fugue, where none of the inconveniences or discomforts of traveling bother me, and I end up with a creative re-charge. Previous albums I've done this with are Boards of Canada's Geogaddi, Music Has the Right to Children, and Tomorrow's Harvest, and Moderat's II and III.

12/06:

Burial - Untrue
Burial - Kindred EP
Bohren & der Club of Gore - Gore Motel

Card of the day is super special today, because my good friend Missi surprised me with a present last night - a Mini Thoth deck. No disrespect to that Hansen Roberts deck I've been using as a back-up over the last year, but I have absolutely NO connection with it. Actually, while I can admire the beauty of many decks out there (chief among them that mind blowing Vertigo Comics deck), Lady Frieda Harris/Aleister Crowley's Thoth deck is the only Tarot deck I have a working connection with, so it's the only one I use. Maybe someday that will change, but I kind of doubt it.

I broke the deck in reading for Missi last night, and as usual, her understanding and interpretation of Tarot always inspires me, so the cards are charged and ready to go, and to celebrate I'm doing a spread today instead of just one card:

Full disclosure: I never factor in reversals. That said, while making this giff, I wanted to portray the cards exactly as they were drawn, so I kept that intact. Also, the fact that all three cards are reversed either totally negates the idea that a reversal in this case would matter, or testifies to it. Either way, I read them as the card, not their positioning.

This is interesting because it slightly mirrors the drawing I did for Missi last night, with two Cups divided by a Sword card. My overall reading is simple - I'm having trouble with the setting for the final scene in the book, because it's not enough of a 'set piece.' to change it, I must be cruel or kill one of my darlings - something about the scene that I've been adamant not to change. This will lead to a breakthrough.

2018: August 16th RIP Aretha Franklin

RIP Aretha Franklin, a Soul/R&B legend.

Playlist from 8/15:

Secret Chiefs 3 Traditionalists - Le Mani Destre Recise Degli Ultimi Uomini
Fugazi - End Hits
High On Fire - Surrounded by Thieves
Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love
Mstislav Rostropovich - Various selections from The 1967 Carnegie Hall Marathon

Card of the day:

The Thoth equivalent of which, is:

I LOVE this run of sixes!

RIP Walter Becker

My favorite song off Aja, a perfect record. RIP Mr. Becker.

He Knows You're...

... fucking someone else. From the intro to the Scottish deviation on the second chorus, the only problem with this version and the entire live Origin of the Feces is it kind of makes it hard to listen to Slow, Deep and Hard. So good.

Oh yeah, the best thing about this record? It's not actually live. Here's the story; it makes me laugh every time. I think I read somewhere else that after the studio fees, the band used the money the label gave them for the 'live' production on vodka.

Seven Years Ago Today Peter Steele Left Us

Amazing image/lyric pairing by nervennahrung

As I sit at my computer typing this morning I'm listening to Swans's The Glowing Man, disc one. It's very zen and flows perfectly from my half hour of mediation and ongoing efforts to put proverbial pen-to-paper. But in the background there's a growing sense of unease, as if I've remembered something but not fully realized it yet. Then it hits me: April. April 14th.

Interestingly enough, upon waking this morning I spent an hour or so finally reading the first trade of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's The Wicked and The Divine, which centers around the death and rebirth of gods as rock stars.

Peter Steele, I miss your music. I love what you gave us and will want more until I follow you out to the next big Halloween Party. To commemorate your passing here's an absolutely shattering live version of one of the songs I always go back to. Love You to Death illustrates how Steele - and by extension Type O as a whole - could pen beautiful, emotionally resonant epics and place them beside their pitch black satire without ever breaking the overall tone they perfected over the course of almost, but not quite, twenty years.

Rest in Peace. Now time to break out the Type O.

RIP Sharon Jones

Well 2016, I hope you're fucking happy. Jesus, can we just fast forward to 2017 already? Oh wait, that might not be the best solution...

Damn. This sucks. Here's one'a my favorites:

RIP Alan Vega

Wow 2016. Umm... stop?

Well, the man was 78, so it's not super unexpected. That said, Suicide is very much the mega-influential American band that 98% of people don't know about. I'm not saying that to be pompous, it's just a shame that they achieved a broader spectrum of exposure. Then again, it's a shame, but not a surprise, because there is next to nothing overtly approachable about Suicide's music.

For some of us however, that in and of itself is an attribute. Henry Rollins had a statement earlier, and I'm sure his radio show this evening was dedicated to Mr. Vega. Rollins wrote an amazing column that talked about Suicide sometime last year in his weekly LA weekly column. If I can eventually find it online I'll post a link here. Needless to say, he had the perfect summation of how Suicide's music generally goes from confrontational and alienating to impactful and mesmerizing.




Mr. Vega did a lot of other music as well. This song, a collaboration with A.R.E. Weapons, is one of my favorites.



Safe passage to the other side Mr. Vega. You earned it.

RIP Catherine Coulson

My log is sad. We will miss you Catherine Coulson, you and your Log...

RIP Dennis Farina

More bad news earlier today: Dennis Farina died. Today sucks!

I was first introduced to the man in Crime Story, a show I LOVED when it aired back when I was a wee lad in the 80's. I haven't seen it since, but I have such strong memories of certain things from the show, like when two of the characters (Ray Deluca? without looking it up I think that's right or at least close) and someone else hiding out in a nuclear testing area made to look like a subdivision? And Farina, always awesome. Then of course who could forget Mr. Farina in Guy Ritchie's Snatch, one of my all time favorite performances in one of my all time favorite movies.