Street Trash, Baby!

 

You can grab this and a bunch of other Ten Athlone goodness directly from their site HERE. From the Street Trash E.P. by Ten Athlone.

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Watch:

Ryan Kruger's Street Trash is, indeed, fantastic. In fact, it's jumped the top ten line and landed somewhere in the center. It's goopy, gory, bombastic and a lot of fun. Also, the characters are fantastic!

I really can't say enough good things about this one. It's true to the 80s Exploitation roots, not over-done production-wise, walking a line between bare bones and full-bore, which is great. It leads to fantastic practical FX right in line with the original and a very DIY underbelly that endears the film and its characters to you even more. 

Ryan Kruger's Street Trash is a $4.99 rental on Prime at the moment. If you're a fan of Pschyo Goreman and/or Hobo with a Shotgun, definitely give it a try. If you don't know either of those films but you want to get your weird on, this will do nicely.

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Read:

My reading has been sporadic at best of late, but I've failed to post about it here. After blowing through Laird Barron's new collection, Not A Speck of Light (from Badhand Books HERE), I side-stepped directly back into his previous collection, 2016's Swift to Chase.

Barron's work brings out the obsessive in me, and I'm reading these stories with the Laird Barron Mapping Project never more than a click or swipe away. There are all kinds of weird connections I've felt the edges of previously but not fully grasped. Also, somehow I never really understood the concept that some of the stories take place in what is called Barron's Antiquity Universe, so I'm gearing up to read all of those in a row soon. But first...

As I finish the last few pages of Swift's final story Tomahawk Park Survivors Raffle, I'm also about halfway through Ivy Tholen's new Slasher novel Mother Dear:

Once again taking place in the town of Belldam, Texas, Mother Dear is rife with the kind of under-the-radar social commentary I've come to expect from Ivy's books. The characters - while unlikeable - are so perfectly engineered that they feel like archetypes and actual people I know all at the same time. The opening death is magnificent, and the insidious manner these spoiled, rich folks burrow into my brain via their "first world, 1% problems" reminds me a bit of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho in approach, if not actual execution. 

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Playlist:

John Carpenter - Lost Themes IV: Noir

Ghostland Observatory - Sad Sad City (single)

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Blood Lust

Sumerlands - Dreamkiller

Chelsea Wolfe - She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She

Godflesh - A World Lit Only By Fire

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Card:

Today's card is XII: The Hanged Man.

My big take away with this card has always been Four points over one, or reason triumphs over spirituality. Dark ages begin or dreams tripped up by rational thought. This doesn't have to be a bad thing, and I think this card is especially dependent on those around it in a pull. 

In his The Book of Thoth, Crowley writes extensively about this card. A lot of it is the usual impenetrable associations to Elemental forces, initiation, and Astrological forces. One idea that stands out is sacrifice, but not just standard sacrifice. Sacrifice as a form of Baptism or Death. This is, after all, the card of the "Dying God."