Joy Orbison - Hyph Mngo

I'm not entirely certain how Joy Orbison came to mind this past Saturday morning as I sat in bed working on another new short story, but once I hit play on this track, I was immediately transported back to the dim evening light of 2009, when I spent a lot of time bumping the single that had "Hyph Mngo" on one side and "Wet Look" on the other*. I don't know exactly how long it's been since I listened to Joy Orbinson's music, let alone thought of it, but I'd wager a decade isn't too far off. A quick search of Apple Music revealed Joy's been consistently busy over the last thirteen years, and I had a wonderful morning tapping the keys and listening to everything I've missed. 

* That's a misnomer - I didn't actually have the physical single, but the digital tracks.

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Watch:

I watched quite a few flicks this weekend. Here's a rundown: 

Joe Bob Briggs and Darcy the Mailgirl brought in another stellar episode of The Last Drive-In this past Friday, which helped assuage my blues that Yellowjackets took the week off. First, a flick I'd never really cared for previously, Kevin Tenney's Witch Board:

 

I remember seeing the tv spots for this one during its original theatrical release in 1986. As a ten-year-old, those spots freaked me right the hell out, but the movie never made it onto my screen until 2011 when I bought a used copy at Amoeba Music. Needless to say, Witch Board fell extremely short of my heightened expectations, and I immediately gave that copy to a friend at work. I didn't think anything could make me enjoy this one after that, but I have to say, it's just a totally different experience watching a flick like this with the Drive-In crew. I still wouldn't profess to be a Witch Board fan, but I had a damn good time with it Friday.

The Last Drive-In's second flick was 1975's The Devil's Rain, which features Ernest Borgnine as a red-cowl-wearing Satanist. I love this flick, and it'd been a while, so even though I ended up falling asleep during it on Friday, I restarted and finished it yesterday. That ending!

Predating the Satanic Panic by just a couple years, this is the post-Hippie fallout in America in the 70s: It makes me laugh that so many people entertained the idea of large, active "Satanic Cults" operating all over the U S of A in the dark, psychic corridor following Peace, Love and Understanding. I feel like this movie spins directly out of that idea. 

Saturday I received a call from my Cousin Charles, who had just watched John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness for the first time. This made me realize I hadn't sat down with some Carpenter in a while, so I planned a double feature and kicked it off with Big Trouble in Little China:

 

I'm not sure there's a movie I know of that is more quintessentially 'Me.' I first saw Big Trouble in 86 or 87 -whenever it first hit VHS - and that put me at 10 or 11 years old and 100% in Double Dragon, Snakes Eyes and Storm Shadow, and any stories that included underground caverns and realms. BTiLC has ALL of that, and it shaped me in a way I'm still trying to tap into in my writing. 

I followed one Carpenter favorite with another, 1987's Prince of Darkness: In terms of John Carpenter's films, I always say Prince of the Darkness is my favorite, but the caveat I add is you have to just take Big Trouble out of the ranking - it's always going to win. The Thing and Halloween are both up near the top as well, but the mechanics of the story in Prince of Darkness always blow me away, as well as how effective the film is with such an obviously diminished budget from JC's better-known films.

Finally, Sunday afternoon I finally dug out my old DVD copy of Doug Limon's Go and showed it to K. Here's the trailer:

Maybe it was because I caught the tail end of K watching the Train Wreck: Woodstock 99 doc on Netflix Saturday afternoon, but I had the late 90s on the brain, as awful as they were. Anyway, this flick was introduced to me by friends after we got into a fight with a bunch of gangbangers at, where else, the Crazy Horse II in Vegas. I'm not a strip club kinda guy, but I've been to a few in my early 20s. This was by far the highlight, and not because it was a strip club, but because we literally had to run out of the club, jump a taxi line and steal someone's cab to get away in one piece. After all that, one of the friends with me remarked how much like a sequence in Go the whole thing was, and when I professed to not having seen the film, he showed me.

 

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Playlist:

Forhist - Eponymous

Joy Orbison - Apple Essentials

Spotlights - Seance EP

Spotlights - Alchemy for the Dead

Goatsnake - Black Age Blues

Windhand - Eponymous

Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen

Blut Aus Nord - 777 Cosmosophy

Dorthia Cottrell - Death Folk Country

Body Maintenance - Beside You

Intronaut - Habitual Levitations

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Featherweight

 

In the quiet moments of my day - which admittedly are fleeting - I am still entirely under the spell of Fleet Foxes' newest record Shore. While I've heard this band before - specifically, in 2009 my cousin Charles came out for a visit and introduced them to me with the previous year's Eponymous debut - I've never really listened to them in anything but a passive capacity. Why then, do I feel as though Robin Pecknold's voice hits me like that of an old friend? Someone I've really spent some time listening to, reflecting on, and being moved by? While my memory has absolutely proven to be complete shite the older I've got (who knew all those fears about constant and gratuitous pot use would actually yield these results?), and it's possible I spent more time in the late 00s listening to this band than I remember, it seems more likely that first trip Charles and I took around San Pedro's Portuguese Bend on a ridiculously peaceful and serene July day where he first played the band for me really cemented itself in my emotional epicentre. Although I'd moved from Chicago to LALALand three years prior at that point, when you consider how the momentum of daily life makes it pass in a blur, I remember I still felt like a relatively new transplant at that point, and the first visit from one of my favorite people on Earth no doubt combined with the music to make a photographic impression that is retriggered by the sound of Pecknold's voice here, over a decade down the road. 

Pretty cool.

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Watch:

I finally got around to watching Antonio Campos's cinematic adaptation of Donald Ray Pollock's novel The Devil All the Time. I really liked it. Instead of attempting to stuff Pollock's novel into a conventional three-act movie, Campos and his brother Paul, who wrote the screenplay, really allowed the film to go on a more literary journey. 

The Devil All the Time sprawls over the course of two generations, weaving together multiple people's stories and how they all coalesce around the death and depravity of the twisted impulses of humanity as reflected through the misleading light of religion when not tempered with intelligence and common decency.

Yeah. The more things change...

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Playlist:

Code Orange - Underneath

Willie Nelson and Leon Russell - One for the Road

Mr. Bungle - The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny

Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit Vol. 1

The Doves - The Universal Want

Anthrax - Spreading The Disease

Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars

Jehnny Beth - To Love is to Live

Michael Kiwanuka - KIWANUKA

Fleet Floxes - Shore

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Card:

 

In a fairly superficial way, I find it interesting that the card I draw for this post is the 8 of Wands Swiftness when I post Fleet Foxes as the music and the first words of the second song on that album are "For Richard Swift."