Easily one of my favorite videos to come out in years. I'm hot and cold on the band - I love when they release stuff like this and it gets me excited, but the excitement usually dissipates pretty quickly. Still, this is pretty freakin' awesome, regardless of the album's ultimate longevity with me. That new album, by the way, is Zeit, and you can order it HERE.
Watch:
I had the unusual thrill of seeing this at, of all places, my local AMC theatre this past Saturday:
Hanna Bergholm and Ilja Rautsi's dissection of Finish Suburban perfection was equal parts Todd Solondz/David Cronenberg, and I loved it. For the new episode of The Horror Vision Horror Podcast, we begin with a spoiler-free reaction and then roll into an all-out discussion.
Playlist:
Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love
Prince and the Revolution - Purple Rain
Lead Into Gold - The Sun Behind the Sun
Odonis Odonis - Post Plague
The Cure - Pornography
Calexico - El Mirador
Second Still - Equals
Card:
I'm definitely feeling an abundance or wealth of ideas of late, and I'm attempting to hold back the desire to switch gears from what I'm currently working on.
Mr. Brown sent me this link a few days ago, but I've only just got around to watching it. This went up six years ago, which is probably around the last time I saw Astroman live, at the Echo in LaLaLand. It'd been years before that since I'd seen them play live. Astroman was one of the staples of artists I saw on what feels like a regular basis in the late 90s, thanks to Mr. Brown's excellent taste in curating live shows. I guess that era has been on my mind, because two nights ago I broke out some Reverend Horton Heat - who I don't listen to nearly enough these days, and who was also a staple live show back when we'd frequent Chicago's Double Door, Empty Bottle, Lounge Axe, Metro, etc. Anyway, great set from a great band. KEXP: You fight the greatest fight! Thank you for all these wonderful live sessions; you are the John Peel of the PACNW.
**
Reading:
I blew through Charles Stross' Atrocity Archives in a matter of days. Now I'm tucked into Juan F. Thompson's memoir Stories I Tell Myself, about growing up with Hunter S. Thompson as his father. Great book, but much like Will Bingley and Anthony Hope Smith's Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thomspon, or rather Alan Rinzler's forward to that book, Juan Thompson's book doesn't always paint his father in the best light.
Not that it's trash-talking. No, JFT very obviously loved and looked up to his father. And to be clear: Obviously we are all multi-faceted organisms, with ups and downs, lights and darks, successes and failures. But seeing the first-hand ugliness of someone I consider a literary inspiration is tough. This is especially true as, after my recent viewing of Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas film adaptation, I am further possessed of an idea that first began setting in back about fifteen years ago - the fact that maybe Hunter S. Thompson wasn't a very good person at all. Does that matter? Was Burroughs a 'good' person? Martin Amis? DOES IT MATTER?
Well, yes. A bit.
The first time I had this sense that maybe Hunter S. Thompson was kind of a fucked up person who did things that weren't very cool was the opening chapter of the Literary Greatest Hits Songs of the Doomed. 'Let the Trails Begin' tells the story of Thompson's late night arrival at a library, and his manipulations of the poor sod working there border on the actions of a narcissistic sociopath. Even if that poor sod was a criminal and a plagiarist. Then again, in re-reading Let the Trials... this morning while penning this, it occurs to me, is any of this supposed to be taken at face value? That's the the thing with Gonzo as an aesthetic/mission statement/lifestyle choice: to what extent are we supposed to take what's written at face value? There's metaphor, prose, fact, all manner of lingual possibilities, but truly, all of this may have happened and none of it may have happened. The entire scenario is so outlandish it seems impossible. Then again, a lot of what HST is known for exists in a fringe-state of mutated factoid observation. What do we do with that? I've always taken the man's work in at the gut - kind of an amalgam of the heart and the brain - but that leaves the rational, box-checking part of me hesitant in discussing the actualities of all this.
Certainly JFT's memoir of the late night, intoxicated fights and psychological bullying sessions his mother and father put on during his childhood and early adolescence are harrowing to insert into my understanding of someone whose writing makes me infinitely happy, so there's a bit of cognitive dissonance that needs sorting out as I read this. That said, as I'm sure the man himself would appreciate, the truth is the truth, but ultimately the truth may not need interfere with the work.
Or is that also the problem with our current moment? Alternative facts? No, Thompson didn't traffic in that. Neither does his son. Both are worth reading.
Dipping back into the world of HST is long overdue and absolutely wonderful. Like Irvine Welsh, HST is one of my all-time favorite writers, one I purposely do not read much of anymore, as both author's tones influence my own writing in a way that doesn't quit gel with what I have been working on for the last seven years or so (genre). That said, what I am working on at the moment, during the COVID ordeal and this long moment of isolation is actually something I originally penned in 2007/8, back when I was still reading both Thompson and Welsh on a daily basis, so picking up JFT's book might have seemed a tangent at first, but now stands revealed as, well, perfect.
**
Playlist:
TV On the Radio - Dear Science
Code Orange - Underneath
Drab Majesty - Careless
White Lung - Paradise
Paramore - Riot
Paramore - All We Know Is Falling
Brand New - God and the Devil Are Raging Inside Me
Arthur Albes - Gold
NIN - Ghosts V: Together
Soundgarden - Badmotorfinger
Disclosure - Ecstasy EP
Sofi Tukker - Treehouse
Card:
Opening up good things and finding more good things inside of them.
Yesterday I gushed for Emma Tammi's The Wind, today I'll gush for the score. I didn't know anything about Lovett, AKA Ben Lovett, but he's done quite a few scores, especially of late. You might know his music from The Ritual, The Wind, or I Trapped the Devil (which is one of the next movies on my to-watch list). The cool thing with this score though, is I've been working on this Ciazarn book with Jonathan Grimm, and I have a ton of research hours put in, an outline for the first issue/chapter, but I've been unable to find the voice for the actual prose. And a large part of the reason for that is I didn't have the right musical soundtrack to write it to. Music is essential to my writing process, and most of what I listen to evokes my usual tone, where let's say the stuff in A Collection of Desires is a nine on the darkness meter and Shadow Play is a four, and all of it is modern. Ciazarn is a completely different animal. It's 1930s Dustbowl, and it's dark, but it's told through the eyes of a ten-year-old, so that makes it less dark at times than most of my characters, and more dark other times, the hard part being able to tell where each is appropriate for the sake of the story. Anyway, with Lovett's OST for The Wind, I knocked out and polished a pretty fantastic opening paragraph yesterday, so I am excited!
**
Playlist from 5/10:
Black Sabbath - Master of Reality
Black Sabbath - Eponymous
The Black Queen - Infinite Games
Lovett - The Wind OST
Thought Gang - Eponymous
Vanessa Williams - Dreaming' (Single)
**
Card of the day:
Feels good, the sturdy symmetry of the Threes. Feels like where I'm standing right now. Of course, from Three you inevitably have to move to Four, which is a little less stable, but I'll enjoy the feeling of having both feet firmly on the ground for the moment.
It's been quite some time since I went on an honest-to-goodness Tom Waits kick. Probably the last time was about four years ago when Mr. Brown lent me the 33 1/3 book David Smay penned on Swordfish Trombones. Anyway, I feel a full-on Waits jag coming on, so here's first salvo.
Over the weekend K and I watched the newest Jane Mansfield documentary, Mansfield 66/67. Fantastic! Along with the legendary actress, the film also serves as an exploratory dispatch into Anton Lavey and the Church of Satan, so it's fascinating. I've always bristled at Satanism, which of course has nothing to do with the devil and everything to do with worshipping yourself, which I feel leads to rampant Narcissism. That said, I've also always had a soft spot for Lavey as a public figure. The hilarity that the man instills to those that 'get it' is epic. This is especially apparent in the documentary, as the film spends a lot of time talking about and interviewing people from Mansfield's life about the supposed 'curse' Lavey is said to have put on Jane and her husband at the time (both of whom died in that nasty, Chihuahua-killing cash), all the while showing him dressed in his devil suit, little more than stylized PJs. Lavey was laughing at everyone that took the 'evil' aspect of his publicity push seriously, because he's telling you up front it's a joke by dressing like that.
Not a lot of folks got it though.
Playlist from yesterday:
The Veils - Total Depravity
The Ocean - Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic
Deafheaven - New Bermuda
Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love
Roni Size - New Forms (disc #1)
Darkness Brings the Cold - Devil Swank, Vol. 1
Card of the day:
Threes are solid numbers, and it takes a foundation to acquire abundance. This is the path I've set myself on; there are SO many distractions vying for our money, my job for the next year is to minimize what I allow myself to purchase because I'm starting to think about the need for a foundation in the physical plane, ie a domicile.
