I woke up the morning of the Eclipse with the B-Side of Soundgarden's final album Down on the Upside. Giving this one a spin always takes me back.
Watch:
Ti West's Maxxxine finally gets a trailer! Yeah, I know I always bitch about trailers, but I am so excited for this one there was no way I wasn't watching it at least once.
I don't need any press to get me pumped for this one, as to say I've been waiting for it since that first after-credits tease at the end of Pearl's credits would be an understatement. I've been a West fan since I first saw The Roost back in 2005; I remember waiting what seemed an eternity for House of the Devil, and seeing him get a huge boost in the Horror community from that movie. That boost was nothing compared to the one he's had with this X trilogy, and I fully expect Maxxxine to further that.
July 5th cannot come fast enough.
NCBD:
Fairly big week and I'm pretty psyched for some of these, especially
This issue will round out the second volume of Jeff Lemire & Gabriel H. Walta's Phantom Road. This book is getting weirder and weirder.
The Penultimate issue of Al Ewing & Luciano Vecchio's Resurrection of Magneto. I've LOVED this one, and I'm super curious to see how it resolves, even if I most likely won't be sticking around afterward. There's such an interesting 'metaphysical' aspect to this book, and where that can often go wrong and incur a big eyeroll, Ewing always does that kind of thing correctly.
Starscream verses Soundwave? F**k yeah!
Christopher Yost and Val Rodrigues's Unnatural Order ends its first arc with this fourth issue. Great series so far; I'm digging the blend of Pre-history and future space, Vikings and Picts and Tech. Kind of a throwback, in some ways, to a lot of 80s SciFi Fantasy comics.
Despite my initial misgivings, I really dug the first issue of What if... Carter Burke had lived. Looking forward to where this is going.
Also, I thought I'd try a new book that technically came out last week:
I don't know anything about this one, but the title grabbed me right away.
Playlist:
Soundgarden - Down on the Upside
Bauhaus - The Sky's Gone Out
Red Lorry Yellow Lorry - Talk About the Weather
Drug Church - Hygiene
Jim Williams - Possessor OST
Thee More Shallows - More Deep Cuts
Final - Solaris
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
Some friends drove down from Chicago this past weekend and, after hanging out for the weekend, we drove out to Paducah, KY for the Eclipse on Monday, April 8th. From that location, we experienced totality, which was crazy awesome. Totality lasted for about two minutes; during that time, I made sure to pull one card.
Six of Swords. In the Thoth deck, this card is "Science;" it can indicate objectivity and clarity, a healthy balance of emotions and intellect. Also, this card may indicate a good time to make a decision.
In my grimoire, I also have this added, "I can see clearly now the rain is gone." I find that last bit particularly interesting, in that it's been raining all week, and literally just seems to have stopped.
Other attributes for this card include Innovation and experimentation.
I have been nothing but impressed with Two Minutes to Late Night, both as an example of the Late Night TV format I grew up loving with David Letterman (that's where it ends for me), and a vehicle for outstanding cover songs. How do they handle one of my favorite Soundgarden songs?
Perfectly.
They're Patreon is HERE. I've been meaning to sign up. Seems like today is the day.
**
Last night I FINALLY watched Ti West's In A Valley of Violence. As a huge fan of Mr. West's work, my natural inclination to watch this one back when it became available on VOD in 2017. That said, the film proved a source of massive cognitive dissonance for me, as one of the stars is travolta, and I have a 'no travolta' rule when it comes to cinema. There's really no exception to this rule, and while I'll agree he did fine in Pulp Fiction, that film is one I pretty much have no interest in ever watching again, so it works out. At any rate, Valley is currently on HBO, and K was interested in seeing it, thus I had an impartial third party to help me over my hump. Turns out, as I suspected, the film is magnificent. Also turns out, JT does a pretty decent job in it.
Is this a learning experience for me? Should I break down and challenge my No-ben stiller and No jim carey rules?
Nope. Those will stay staunchly in place. I can make an argument that the JT rule was made broken already, as my boycott mainly applies to the post Pulp Fiction work of the actor. His earlier work is spotty, but definitely contains some gems, Brian De Palma's Blow Out being the example that immediately springs to mind.
**
Playlist:
Mastodon - Emperor of Sand
John Carpenter - Skeleton/Unclean Spirit
War on Women - Capture the Flag
The Chameleons UK - Strange Times
True Widow - AVVOLGERE
Prince - Sign O' The Times
The Obsessed - Lunar Womb
Megadeth - Rust in Peace
**
Card:
From the grimoire: "Big Influences and the creation of a new project."
Yes. I'm sitting down to that new project after I post this, so spot on.
I've been swimming in David Bowie's final album again; it's perfect for my headspace at the moment, which I can only describe as 'weird.'
Something kickstarted a full-blown, days-upon-days reverie for the 00s, which is the definition of the word weird because it largely feels like a decade of my life that didn't really end up belonging to me. Not that it belonged to anyone else, but... well, can ten years be a corridor? I've ruminated on the philosophical context/ramifications of Soundgarden's Room a Thousand Years Wide, now we're readjusting that concept to a more micro version. Whether a decade can be a hallway or not, I've stepped back into that - triggered, I think, by a huge Warren Ellis reading binge - and it's very interesting, this mix of my ongoing current headspace, reinforced daily by the world I've built, and these elements of my previous operating system. What will be the outcome? Not quite sure yet, but it's pleasurable to walk around in two personal eras at once (again, a micro version of Philip K. Dick's experience, but without the out of body stuff).
**
There's a couple new Horror Visions up, and one more to come this weekend. Topics of discussion range from Doctor Sleep to The Lighthouse to True Blood to Jennifer Kent's The Nightengale to, ah, turtle sex? The second oldest is a very tangental 'after dark' episode where we start out as a four-piece and become a three-piece whose conversation runs all the fuck over the place, but it's pretty cool to have captured and edited it to be, you know, coherent.
Yes, I too signed up for Disney +. I will be unsubscribing when The Mandalorian is finished for the season, but in the meantime, holy smokes do I LOVE this show. Now THIS is Star Wars; I actually consider this an apology to old school fans for that crap that's been in the theatre the last few years. And yes, I know this show was very specifically engineered to appease people like me: 40+ year olds who grew up with it and love the old, Sergio Leone approach. They've utilized so many characters that are based on my favorite action figures as a kid that there was no way this wasn't going to work for me. Contrived? Sure. Do I mind? Nope.
**
Weird Walk is a wonderful little 'zine published by some fascinating people over in Great Britain. I received my copy of issue number two after reading about it in Warren Ellis' newsletter a few weeks, and have so far had the pleasure of reading an interview with author Benjamin Myers about how the rural English landscape has influenced and inspired his writing. This seems like it fits right in with that 'Haunted', Hypnogogic aesthetic that, you guessed it, fits in with my current re-assessment of the 00s.
You can order Weird Walk and peruse their sight HERE.
**
Playlist:
David Bowie - Black Star
Clavicvla - Sepulchral Blessing
Greet Death - New Hell
Burial - Eponymous
Burial - Untrue
Federale - No Justice
Mastodon - Once More 'Round the Sun
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen
Oh Baby - The Art of Sleeping Alone
The Cure - Carnage Visors
The Cure - Pornography
Black Pumas - Eponymous
Mayhem - Daemon
**
No card today, however, I wanted to note how exact my last two pulls were. Exact like in a creepy, "Tarot is never this on the nose" way.
Friday I pulled the Ten of Disks Wealth and received an unexpected Royalty check in the mail for my books. Three days later I pulled the Five of Cups Disappointment and received a notification that the submission I sent via FedEx to an anthology I adore failed to deliver and that I'd have to re-send it through the post office to get it there.
3:20 AM Thursday, May 18, 2017: I wake up sweating as the last of this damnable sickness that has stopped up K and my lives for the last week or so eeks its way from my pores. Unsure if it's near my alarm time I check my phone and see a message from Seth. I click it and read:
I find it hard to fall asleep again after this but eventually I do. This isn't world shattering like Bowie, but it's deeply terrible. And despite the sleep interruption I'm glad this is how I find out; just like when my friend Tori messaged me "David Bowie Died" early in the morning almost a year and a half ago now, seeing news of this magnitude while my brain is still halfway stuck in The Dreaming is a shock that helps cement the event as historical, i.e. I'll always remember where I was. All that said, the way in which I process this news is far more complex than I would have anticipated.
During their initial run Soundgarden was one of my favorite bands. This favor carried on well after their dissolution and although the feelings aren't quite as strong these days I wouldn't say they've waned so much as learned to share. They were one of four bands that Jake - my best friend in my late teens/early twenties - and I shared passionate attachment to the way late teens/early twenties friends often do. And there were layers to our love of these bands, Soundgarden in particular as it wasn't just Cornell as a frontman. They - along with these other bands* - were of the few where I learned to see how ever member of a group could bring something to the table to help construct such a staggering whole (for an example of this play the album version of Fourth of July really loud or on headphones). But Chris Cornell's voice - it defied description. I always 'got' why some people hated it, the sometimes grating, shrill ferocity of his attack. I loved it. Jesus Christ Pose remains a favorite and it's not annoyance I feel when Cornell hits those blistering high notes, it's a sense of joy as reality shreds around me.
I loved Badmotorfinger from the jump, managed to scoop it up in the original, limited release as a double disc with SOMMS, the re-release of which I was thrilled to pick up on vinyl during last November's Record Store Day. Their cover of Sabbath's Into the Void was arguably what also kickstarted my love of Sabbath, and as Jake and I fell into both bands we had a theory between us that SG was somehow the reincarnation of Sabbath in its perfect, original era. Sure other bands imitated the progenitors of metal, but SG didn't. They were of like-minds, the influence not so much blatant as inferred. And there were moments when Kim Thayil seemed to bleed Sabbath Volume 4 and Master of Reality through the pores on his fingertips...
I was a bit hesitant on Super Unknown at first. I still don't really care too much for Spoon Man, and Black Hole Sun took me years for me to come around to recognizing it for the odd, unsettling single that it is. But for years after its release I avoided the album; at the time I was young and probably just upset that all the jocks were suddenly into the same obscure band that I was. Ah youth and it's folly. Jake turned me around though, and he did so by drilling the rest of the album into my head, specifically Mailman, Limo Wreck, Fourth of July, Fresh Tendrils and Like Suicide. From there I really fell into the songs and production on Super Unknown hard; it was the first record I wanted to grab off my shelf this morning when I heard the news and goddamn the one of two people who stole it from me - it was Jake's copy that he gave to me shortly before he died on September 22nd, 1998. I've been hesitant to rebuy it since; Tommy wrote an excellent piece on the record last year for a Joup Friday Album and that almost sent it to my amazon cart but I hesitated, as if there was any chance in hell I'd be able to drive out to Joshua Tree and find my copy in a thrift store, where it most likely ended up after all the dust settled. Ravenous for it this morning I arrived at work and begrudgingly bought it from the iTunes store, 15 tracks of ones and zeros instead of a beautiful tactile fossil I'd touched and played and, honestly, snorted coke off of once or twice. Memories...
When Down on the Upside came out Jake and I had already been anticipating it for some time. He bought it first, on cassette, and I remember we smoked up and put it on and had a weird, 'umm, huh.' reaction to it. This nonplussed, sinking feeling lasted for a week or two, mostly because that first listen freaked us out so much we avoided the record. Then Jake took it on a fishing trip with his estranged father and returned a weekend later exclaiming its brilliance. He'd spent each night of the trip digesting the album through his headphones. This was the first time I figured out that sometimes you had to work for something great; sometimes passive listening lead to breakthroughs and sometimes it's one song that is the key to opening the rest of an album, like a flower. Again we smoked and sat down and he started the album at the beginning of the second side, with Apple Bite transitioning directly into the cyberpunk insanity of Never the Machine Forever. And from there I got it. I consumed the second side of Down on the Upside repeatedly and that eventually opened the first, more polished and 'accessible' side. For years it was my favorite SG album, might still be. Jake had a thing about lyrics; he would often latch onto the most bizarre and literary, or read interpretations into phrases that I would never have seen. Down's penultimate track, An Unkind has one I still think about on a regular basis.
"We lack the Moses, to look a Saint in the eyes."
And then Soundgarden broke up. I tried to like Chris Cornell's post-SG work but I just could not get into most of it. I loved "Seasons", his solo track on the Singles Soundtrack, but each of his subsequent three solo albums left me cold, as did his work in audioslave. That one's definitely not his fault; I'm not a RATM fan and the idea that those three meatheads basically just did exactly what they did with Dela Rocha at the helm behind a voice as amazing as Chris Cornell's... fucking travesty mate. The track used in Michael Mann's brilliant film Collateral is an exception, but otherwise I can't turn to any of this stuff to celebrate Cornell's life now because in my opinion it is indicative of the terribly sad fact that as an artist Cornell always seemed to shoot himself in the foot. A tragedy when he was as talented as he was and when he had already had such a great vehicle for that talent in his life. Soundgarden's break-up felt like they were frustrated and upset with their fans, with the industry and with themselves. They didn't see the forest for the trees. I once read Cornell refer to them as "Just a metal band" in a way that suggested it was Soundgarden holding him back. I've never understood that - from a fan's perspective they had continually evolved over the course of their career. That was what that whole A side of Down on the Upside was about, an evolution from a Sabbath to a Zeppelin, while the B side was darker and stranger than almost anything they'd done before (except maybe No Wrong No Right or 665). They could have done and been anything, could have made whatever music they wanted as they continued to evolve. But they felt expectations held them back. Maybe they were right; were their album sales tanking? Was A & M unhappy and manipulating them? As a band they were big enough that it didn't matter, they could have been the first Zeppelin of the new age of post-industry. Instead they all kind of disappeared and Cornell went on to search for himself publicly - NEVER a good thing. By the time that Timbaland produced monstrosity hit the shelves I was done. My ex-wife loved that record, but within an instant of hearing it my only reaction was, "Well, if this fails we'll have a Soundgarden reunion in short order."
And we did. And they gave us King Animal, which is okay, but in my opinion not worthy of their legacy. Who knows, maybe I just haven't given it the time to 'blossom' like I did with Down, but I don't think so. And their exorbitant pricing of live shows since reuniting has driven a 'Fuck You' wedge between the band and I so that I don't really want to give it a chance and I never got to see them live and honestly, do not regret NOT remedying that with the reunion at all.
All that said, here's footage of their last song, the last song of Cornell's life, last night at the Fox Theater in Detroit, MI. When I heard it was Zeppelin's In My Time of Dying I got chills.
Finally, whatever the reason for his death, this was the song that I wanted to hear immediately upon learning of Chris Cornell's death. May he rest in peace and know that he changed many, many peoples lives with his music. He certainly changed mine and Jake's.
............
* The others were Ozzy-era Sabbath, Type O Negative and Cypress Hill.
Mr. Brown recently sent me the Soundgarden rarities Echo of Miles. Honestly, Soundgarden was one of my favorite bands back in the day and those albums, Badmotorfinger, Super Unknown and Down on the Upside will always be among my favorites of the 90s. When I get in the mood I usually tear into them for days. When King Animal came out two years ago I was resistant, mostly due to that awful song that wound up on The Avengers ST. Eventually I came around - I dig King Animal for what it is but I don't think I'll ever stop believing that the only real reason Soundgarden are back together is money. Anyway, regardless of all of that, Echo of Miles, a 50-song set spread over three discs, is fantastic! All truly rarities and mostly from back in the time when they were a fully functioning band, and an awesome one at that. This track, previously the B-Side to my all-time favorite SG track Room A Thousand Years Wide, is one standout on a fifty song set of, honestly, a lot of standouts.
And is it me, or did an awful lot of bands have songs about HIV or crack babies in the 90s? Perhaps someone needs to update this concept with "Bath salts baby" for the youth of today, hm?
Have had this song in my head all night. Great cover of an old Devo song, included on the looooong out-of-print version of Badmotorfinger that included SOMMS as a second disc. Oh, SOMMS is Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas.
I've been meaning to post this for days, but it's been hard to find time to do anything other than work on my writing, which is something I am definitely not complaining about. I've already talked in these pages about how unexpectedly pleased I was with King Animal after expecting it to suck based on that awful audio-slave-ish song Soundgarden had in the Avengers. Halfway There's definitely not my favorite song on the record, but it's good and it's very reminiscent of the tone the singles on Down on the Upside - which I love - had.
First track off Baron Robber, Soundgarden bass player Ben Shepherd's first solo record. Reminds me a bit of Down on the Upside-era SG, which is a very good thing. The record comes out 8/27. Oh, and it's under the handle HBS.
Directed by Dave Grohl. I wanted sooo much to dislike King Animal based on two facts: the ticket prices when they first reunited and the song they had in The Avengers, which basically sounded like audio slave. However, King Animal pretty much sounds to me like the next logical step after Down on the Upside, which I always thought was quite the high note for the band to go out on.
