Monday, June 2, 2025

Jesus Lizard LIVE!!!


Live from Birmingham, Alabama, courtesy of the Live from Birmingham YouTube channel. I have been meaning to head down to Birmingham since moving just over three hours from it. This would have been perfect! Drat! Oh well, 

Seeing a bearded Yow brings a smile to my face. Weird to have that opening drum hit on Seasick hit and not see him throw himself into the crowd. NOT a criticism - I stopped crowdsurfing a long time before he did. 

Live from Birmingham's mission statement (from their YouTube page):

"LIVE FROM BIRMINGHAM is the home of Subcarrier, an Alabama Public Television production filmed and recorded at SATURN in Birmingham, AL, featuring performers from across the musical spectrum. Subcarrier is the continuation of WE HAVE SIGNAL, a project active from 2008 until 2015 when the world-famous venue BottleTree closed."

I've added Saturn to my venues to watch list. 




Watch:

I've been sick and largely offline, so I completely forgot that GDT's Frankenstein received a trailer the other day. My good friend Chris Saunders messaged me a reminder, though, and after watching it, well, I am speechless:

 
I will be shocked if this doesn't claim my best-of-the-year spot. That said, is this going straight to Netflix? Because that would be a goddamn shame. This needs to be seen in a theatre!




Read:

I've been sick all weekend, and in that time I blew Preston Fassel's Beasts of 42nd Street.

After my recent re-read of Our Lady of the Inferno and now this, Fassel is easily in my top five favorite authors at the moment. These are so insanely compelling, even if dark A.F. Our Lady is dark, but not in the same way Beasts is. Man, this really took me some place not very nice, but it was a hell of a ride, and I'll definitely make the trip again. Here's the solicitation blurb from publisher Cemetary Dance's website. Important to note that while this is readily available to order from the bezos corp, Cemetary Dance lists it as Out of Print. So grab it now:

"In the kingdom of the damned that is 42nd Street, there’s no lowlier subject than Andy Lew. An unrepentant junkie, voyeur, and degenerate, he’s only tolerated by the more dangerous men around him because he keeps the projectors at the Colossus theater running on time, entertaining them with the most extreme horror cinema money can buy. 

"There’s something unique about Andy, though. He owns a movie. It’s the only one of its kind. No one knows who made it. Only he knows where it came from. The woman it stars is beautiful beyond imagination—and the images it depicts are more nightmarish than the darkest depths of Hell. The beasts of 42nd Street will do anything to possess it, but there’s something they don’t understand. Andy loves the woman in the movie—and he’ll go to any lengths to protect her… A savage love letter to 70s exploitation cinema and a biting satire of toxic fan culture, Beasts of 42nd Street makes horror dangerous again as it ventures into the mind of a psychopath like no other— one that will have readers recoiling even as they keep coming back for more."

I LOVED this novel. It plays with so many ideas from the 42nd street mythos - snuff, projection reel theft, Satanic Panic, Police conspiracy - bundles them all together in a brilliant, engaging story that takes you into the alleyways of late 70s Manhattan and plays with your sense of the world as we know it. Or think we know it. 



Playlist:

Calderum - Mystical Fortress of Iberian Lands 
White Rune - The Spell of Eternal Fire
Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers Of The Icy Ages
Federale - Reverb & Seduction
Genghis Tron - Dead Mountain Mouth
Emilie Leviensaise-Farrouch - Censor OST
Blut Aus Nord - Ultima Thulée
Ruin - Plague Transmissions, Vol. 1
Tangerine Dream - In Search of Hades: The Virgin Recordings 1973 - 1979
Pink Floyd - Ummagumma




Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.


• Ace of Swords
• IV: The Emperor
• Eight of Pentacles

A breakthrough of Will that successfully affects the "rules" of whatever the objective is will require intense concentration and dedication.

Another reminder for me to get back up on my horse and stop resting on my laurels. 

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