Isolation: Day 147

Last Thursday at work I had a hankering to see what Bret Easton Ellis has been up to on his podcast, and realized that the reason I hadn't seen any new episodes in my queue on Apple Podcasts was because my tier on his Patreon had been replaced. I changed my subscription up and was rewarded with a HUGE list of episodes I'd not even realized were available. Settling in to listen, I began with one from late last year where for nearly three hours, Ellis interviews author Chuck Palahniuk. This set off a full-on Palaniuk/Ellis binge over the coming days.

Ellis and Palahniuk were probably the two authors that motivated me the most to actually sit down and start writing fiction seriously. The book I'm finishing now was absolutely inspired by Ellis's American Psycho and Lunar Park, and Palaniuk's, well, pretty much his first five or six books, all of which I read in rapid succession in the early 00s. 

It's been some time since I'd gone back to these guys. Ellis is always just around the corner in my head - Lunar Park is my second favorite book ever, so it's just in my blood. But by the time Palahniuk's Pygmy came out - the most recent of his books that I've read - I had pretty much lost touch with his work. (NOTE: Not because Pygmy is bad by any means, however, this is a story for another day, if I haven't told it here already). 

Saturday morning K and I watched Fight Club, which is actually the only of those initial books by Palahniuk that I haven't read, simply because the movie always occupied such a large amount of real estate in my head, I assumed any reading of the book would be colored by it too much. I no longer subscribe to that trepidation, so after the film, I ordered both Fight Club and Choke, which I've always thought as companion pieces.

Although I'm still having trouble finding time to read for pleasure while I plod through another final edit of my own book, I started Ellis' Less Than Zero. It's an easy one to burn through, and works well with a start/stop regiment. Technically, I'm still about thirty pages from finishing Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, so all these books I'm mentioning now are 'on deck,' if you will, and their accumulated presence has shifted my musical palette, so that I found myself compelled to stay up late writing on Saturday, falling down an audio hole with X, The Plimsouls, and Concrete Blonde.

There's never a moment that I'm aware of where Bret Easton Ellis specifically mentions Concrete Blonde, but they are definitely a band that fits the headspace I associate with his fiction. As such, I've been a bit obsessed. I tweeted out my love for the album version of Still in Hollywood later at some point during that late night, however, this live version of the alternate take that serves as a bonus track on the CD version of their 1989 Eponymous debut was just too good to pass up posting here today.

**

Playlist:

Concrete Blonde - Eponymous

Psychetect - Extremism

X - Wild Gift

Algiers - Eponymous

Black Pumas - Eponymous

Beth Gibbons, The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and Krzysztof Penderecki - Henryk Górecki: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

The Birthday Party - Mutiny/The Bad Seed 

The Birthday Party - Hee Haw

JK Flesh - Depersonalization

Vitalic - OK Cowboy

Carpenter Brut - Blood Machines OST

Spotlights - Love and Decay

**

Card: 

Interesting. Two days in a row. I'm sticking with the same interpretation, because my discomfort at penning query letters hasn't magically abated after writing about them. However...

I have to wonder if there's something more in here, as well. Destabilization of established processes and mores comes to mind, something 2020 has been all about. Any coincidence I have a voting ballot sitting next to me on my desk as I type this? I think not.

Isolation: Day 146

I kept seeing the thumbnail for this, but didn't realize it had ties to Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which I haven't seen since I was in High School. The trailer had me immediately.

 **

I find it interesting that, after just watching a film about a viral idea that makes people think/know they are going to die tomorrow, I crack out the Concrete Blonde and fixate on the song Tomorrow, Wendy, which contains the following lyric:

"Tomorrow Wendy is going to die."

   

Weird, huh?

A fantastic song, Tomorrow Wendy also features this unrelated by no-less poignant line:

"I told the priest, don't count on any second coming, God got his ass kicked the first time he came down here slumming, He had the balls to come, the gall to die and then forgive us."

**

Playlist:

Pixies - Surfer Rosa

Calexico - The Black Light

X- Los Angeles

X - Wild Gift

The Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once

Concrete Blonde - Eponymous

Concrete Blonde - Bloodletting

Don Shirley - Don Shirley's Best

Pat Benatar - Essentials

Frank Sinatra - Best of 

 **

Card:

Five of Disks, also known as Worry. This one fits right into my current state of anxiety over sending query letters. I'm not certain why I'm so terrified of this process, but worry definitely sums up the low-level, background radiation of my brain at the moment.

 

2019: June 28th - Oh Oblivion. Sweet, Sweet Oblivion

Very much in a Visions headspace this morning. I'm starting this post at... almost 2:00 AM, but probably won't post it until I wake up in the daylight. Running on fumes, as I've been up since 5AM, but I just returned from a night of catching up with a friend in Hollywood and now I want to get a rough idea for a story I had while driving home listening to Secret Chiefs 3 down on paper. I'm off today (Friday), so I'm having a few late night Sierra Nevadas, trying to suss out the skeleton to this thing I probably won't actually work on for some time. But I like to have a bunch of gestating concepts, so at some lull in the future (lull? When?), I can scroll through a list and pick something to hash out.

There's something magnificent about driving La Cienga between Stockard and Centinela late at night. It's as close to a secluded spot as you can get in LA proper, which is to say it's not very secluded at all, but it has a certain Between quality to it. Always inspires me.

**

Next day now. Woke up and read another story in the Robert S. Wilson-edited Ashes and Entropy Anthology, this time Nate Southard's Ain't Much Pride. Wow. My favorite story so far, and that's saying something. This is turning out to be a fantastic collection. If you're interested, you can order it directly from Nightscape Press HERE.

I enjoyed Southard's Ain't Much Pride so much that I looked into his other work, and I'm really interested in his 2018 novel Porcelain:

"Comedian Jason Hawkes carries with him a mountain of emotional issues and an impressive drug habit. When he learns his high school sweetheart went on a shooting spree before turning the gun on herself, he returns home to confront a past that includes a drunken orgy in an abandoned factory and six close friends who never spoke to each other again. Something more sinister is at work than teenage hormones, however, and what Jason learns as he reconnects with his past will either fix him or shatter him further. And it could send an entire city into an abyss of lust-fueled horror.

SOLD! You can buy this one directly from Lethe Press HERE. I intend to.

**

Playlist from 6/27:

Swans - To Be Kind
High on Fire - Electric Messiah
The Jesus Lizard - Lash EP
The Dillinger Escape Plan - One of Us is the Killer
Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource Vol. I: △△
Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource Vol. 2: Philosophy of Beyond pre-release singles
Primus - Frizzle Fry
Secret Chiefs 3 Traditionalists - Le mani destre recise degli ultimi uomini
John Carpenter and Alan Howarth - Prince of Darkness OST
Grimes - Visions

**

Card of the day:

Fives are always unstable. It's not really a bad thing, just a phase to move beyond. Fours are stable, but to avoid stagnation, you have to add something. This is good, but affects the balance of things. The goal is to keep adding, and that's kind of my thing right now. After a discussion with a friend, I'm thinking about postponing the release of Shadow Play until the first week in September. This is tough, because it's done, however, there's a lot of really good reasons to consider this. I just have to research them. So yeah, the stability of being finished and releasing it into the world - if you can call that stable - is thwarted by adding a new facet, which is essentially a very small, grassroots marketing initiative. Something I'm terrible at. But we're terrible at things until we do them enough to become good, or at least proficient at them. So yeah, I guess there's some instability/worry right now. It will pass.

2018: December 15th

Friday, December 14th:



Deer Valley Lodge, Wisconsin. Woke up at roughly 8:00 AM and was moved to put this song on. I've posted Synchroncity II here before, and I'm sure I'll post it here again. Not just my favorite song by the Police, but one of my favorite songs of all time.

I'm playing this off my old iPod, the one that's not linked to my Apple Music account. Playing this device is always interesting, because it's kind of a time capsule. Since subscribing to Apple Music, I keep this iPod separate and synched to my original library, so I only have access to music I manually ripped myself or acquired through iTunes/Bandcamp/Amazon. And after deleting a bunch of tunes from the library on that Mac, I'm actually afraid to even sync this again, so the last sync is kind of a permanent thing at this point, thus, it's like looking into my head a year and a half ago.

Playlist from 12/13:

Black Sabbath - Vol. 4
Grimes - Oblivion
Foster the People - Torches

Saturday, December 15th:



Black Sabbath, Vol. 4 has not only been a constant companion throughout most of my life, it's also been a constant companion on this trip, being that it's the only cassette I could find to play in my Dad's truck when I borrow it. And really, Vol. 4 is probably a 'desert island' album for me, anyway, so no complaints here.

I am exhausted. My trips home always end up being hectic, because I try so hard to see everyone as much as I can. And there's always a lot of people I want to see, and some people that I don't see or fail to spend as much time with as I would like. Today is going to be mellow. I think.

House on the Rock in Wisconsin is an unbelievable adventure, a veritable sensual smorgasbord of tchotchke insanity spread out and displayed over an architectural mind-fuck that might even trump the Winchester house, which I visited circa 2007, the Hearst Castle - also 2007- or the Barnum home in Florida, which I saw in 2012. I guess I've been collecting these kinds of experiences for years and didn't even notice it. House on the Rock? Probably my favorite, and it's led me to want to re-read and watch Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which I read back when it was first published and so, hardly remember.

Issue #1 of my comic collaboration with artist Jonathan Grimm is fully mocked up and ready for the final touches. We used scissors, tape, and plastic page protectors to figure out the exact placing of the word bubbles, now John can finish the gray washing, digitally add the words, and wha-lah! We start issue #2, which is written (1st draft), sketched and somewhat laid out. While working last night, John provided the tunes to set the mood. He's a big swamp/southern/doom rock guy, so we used his selections to provide the appropriate soundtrack. He may have made me a Down fan, which I did not expect to ever type, considering my disdain for Phil Anselmo.

Playlist from 12/14:

Lots of 1st Wave on XM radio during our road trip. I'm going to assemble a playlist and post it here at some point.
CCR - Green River
COC - No Cross No Crown
Down - NOLA
Black Label Society - Sonic Brew

Card for the day:

That I'm not seeing everyone I want to? On. The. Nose.