Antibalas - NPR Tiny Desk Concert

 

During my recent jaunt to Chicago's Southside, Mr. Brown and I once again did a record swap, and one of the records he loaned me that I cannot stop playing is Antibalas' 2017 Where the Gods Are in Peace. Sounds like Fela Kuti reincarnated! So many parallels to my favorite Fela record, Opposite People/Sorrow, Tears and Blood (might actually be two albums, but I had them on a joint CD Sonny D burned for me ages ago). 

 

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Watch:

I did some homework last night for the next episode of The Horror Vision Presents: Elements of Horror. 1926's A Page of Madness

It's been a while since I watched a B & W silent film, so I figured the best course of action would be to isolate myself, turn off all the lights and get stoned. Check, check and check. Maybe too stoned, though. A large part of this played like I was back in High School at a friend's watching "Beyond the Mind's Eye" or something. You don't realize how much dialogue drives a film until you remove it. When I say there's no dialogue here, there aren't even subtitles. That's because the film does indeed share something with those stoner videos of the 90s. It's largely a succession of arresting images, so I just kind of sat back and let them wash over me. This was pleasurable; I can't say much about the 'story' other than it ends up, I think, having something of a twist. 

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NCBD:

This week's pull:

The inevitable "0" issue. I assume this rounds out the "Road Stories" arc that has taken us strolling through Erica's past. It also marks the start of another hiatus, which bums me out. Still, 

This is a new title for me, and I'm hoping to also grab issues 1-3 if they're still floating around the shop. Cruel Universe is the sister title to Epitaphs From the Abyss, which I professed my love for a few entries past. Both titles are part of Oni Press's revived EC Comics line, and I figured since I'm digging Epitaphs so much, I should give this a whirl as well. Plus, Oni Press is one of the oldest, most independent publishers I know of, so it's cool to support them here as well. 

Final issue! I've enjoyed this anthology quite a bit and will continue to be on the lookout for these B, W &B series. Or, for that matter, any Spider-Man mini-series I can get my hands on. I miss the ol' Webhead, but still not going to engage in the core books that come out like, every three days or whatever. 

Saga is heating up again! Didn't I just post something about how this book kinda lost something after the years-long hiatus? I might be eating my words real soon...

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Playlist:

Antibalas - Where the Gods Are in Peace

Spoon - They Want My Soul

John Carpenter - Lost Themes IV: Noir

John Carpenter - Lost Themes III: Life After Death

John Carpenter - Lost Themes II

John Carpenter - Lost Themes

16 - Dream Squasher

Melvins - Tarantula Heart

John Carpenter and Alan Howarth - Halloween III: Season of the Witch OST

Genghis Tron - Board Up the House

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Card:

Today's card for study is the 8 of Wands, Swiftness:

Yeah, I know I said I was going to stick with the sevens, but I need to go back and draw up a map of what I've already done for this 'tarot study' segment that I feel has become another daily pull. When I picked up my Thoth to flip to the next Seven, Valour came up again right away (and yes, I had already shuffled since yesterday's). When I put that aside, Swiftness came up. Seeing this, I figured, what the hell? 

This is a Hob card, and Hod immediately brings to mind Splendour, but in The Book of Thoth, Crowley reminds us that being of Hod, the Eights share the same difficulties as the Sevens. Quoting directly from page 182:

"The position is doubly unbalanced; off the middle pillar, and very low down on the Tree. It is taking a very great risk to descend so far into illusion, and, above all, to do it by frantic struggle. Netzach pertains to Venus; Netzach pertains to Earth; and the greatest catastrophe that can befall Venus is to lose her Heavenly origin. The four Sevens are not capable of bringing any comfort; each one represents the degeneration of the element. Its utmost weakness is exposed in every case."

I've begun to read these weaknesses in Splendour and Victory as the weakness of the material world. The Earth is beautiful, and we can build Earthly victories, but all of it is a distraction from returning upward into the non-physical realms. Tiphareth has always been, to me, the pinnacle of what we can achieve and still be a part of the world. Maybe it's just the news this morning, but I feel like, as a species, we've left that behind for victories of common treasures. Fame, money, power, etc.

RIP John Cassaday

 

The final track on the band's 1985 album The Head On the Door. Such a great outro to an album that goes through all kinds of emotional disturbances. As this sudden shift in the weather from nearly 100-degree days to cool and smokey 70s took me by surprise, it jump-started my internal Autumn. It's been a few years since I was into The Cure like I am at the moment, and I'm enjoying the hell out of it.

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RIP:

John Cassaday, Age 52. An absolute GIANT - his work with Warren Ellis on Planetary remains the zeitgeist of 00s comics - a book that redefined pretty much everything about the medium. I think the first time I heard the term "Wide Screen Comics" was in regard to Cassaday and Ellis' seminal series. 

Of course, he also worked with Joss Whedon on his beloved Astonishing X-Men, and while I'm not really a fan of that run, Casssaday's art is once again fantastic. 

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Playlist:

Television - Marquee Moon

Garland Jeffreys - Wild in the Streets (single)

The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers

Garland Jeffreys - American Boy & Girl

Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures

The Cure - The Head on the Door

The Jesus Lizard - Rack

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Wild God*

Grinderman - Eponymous

*I only made it two tracks into this one. I'll probably try again, but I'm eternally disappointed that Cave and crew just seem to make the same album over and over again ever since Skeleton Tree and, to a lesser extent, Push the Sky Away, both of which I like upon release, but now feel a lot like Al Pacino's performance in Scent of a Woman - they're just stuck in the same phase. I miss the days when one Bad Seeds record would sound like The Boatman's Call, the next Abbatoir Blues or Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

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Card:

Today's card for study is the Eight of Wands - Swiftness:

Clear communication. Anti Confusion. Be upfront. Be real. Decisiveness. 

Odonis Odonis - Shadow Play

 

It's been a minute since I've kept up with Odonis Odonis. Back in 2016, their album Post Plague was a constant in my ears and on my turntable, however, the band's subsequent releases, while good, didn't quite live up to the same high regard I'd assigned them after what I still feel not only sums up a small era of my life but is one of my favorite records of that decade. So I guess that disconnect explains why I totally missed the fact that they dropped a new record back in October, and what's more, it's FANTASTIC. Special thanks - as always - to Heaven Is An Incubator for posting a track from this and alerting me to it. If you dig, you can order one of the thirteen remaining copies (fourteen until I ordered mine) of Spectrums over on their Bandcamp or from the always marvelous Felte Records.

It goes without saying I'd developed an affinity for this particular song, as it shares a title with the series of novels I've been working on for several years now. 

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Time Machine GO!!! 1991:

In this past Wednesday's NCBD section, I casually mentioned an idea that kind of occurred to me on the spot but didn't really sink in as to what a profound self-insight I'd inadvertently made, the idea that my reversion to a fairly rabid Marvel Zombie/comic collector had more to do with a return to the things that had made the tumultuous task of navigating adolescent as an unconscious way to deal with the equally rocky navigation of Middle Age. This started with an out-of-the-blue interest in following the last year of Nick Spencer's run on Amazing Spider-Man but has pushed me not only back into following some of the modern X-titles (really, just one and a few mini-series), but a nearly inexplicable longing to rebuy and reread a bunch of the post-Claremont X-men stories, first with 1994's The Phalanx Covenant and now, of all things, the original Onslaught opus.

I want to point out here that these are books that I do not in any way shape or form consider 'good.' Conceptually, perhaps, but writing-wise, not at all. And while Fabien Nicieza had some pretty good chops, when we get into Scott Lobdell territory, well, I just consider that era of X-Men pretty mediocre-to-downright-awful stuff. And yet, here I am, combing the back issue bins at the Comic Bug and reading some of this stuff. And that off-the-cuff comment about reaching back into my past to reconnect with touchstones of my adolescence as a coping mechanism for the Horrors of aging in an era of little compassion and perhaps less tolerance really strikes me now as another instance of how our minds will do what they need to do to cope and survive, even if our personalities are completely unaware of those tragedies. So with that in mind, let me resurrect a moniker from my old Chud days to you about what I'm reading from the past, what I think of it now, and how it holds up.

Okay, granted this 1991's Muir Island Saga is still protected as awesome in my book because it's penned by Chris Claremont, however, it's Claremont's final entry and thus, the gateway to the end of his continuity, or rather the way he approached continuity, so I've always kind of held a grudge against both this series and it's villain, the Shadow King, who for whatever reason, I just could not care less about. That's my 'historical' perspective of this small, four-issue 'saga' that really doesn't feel like a saga at all. A bit short and to the point to be a saga. That said, in this instance, the brevity is good, and unlike the full-blown crossovers and X-Events that began to clog the continuity after the near-perfect triumph of Inferno, Uncanny X-Men 279-280 and X-Factor 69-70 feel like a pretty good story that lines 'em up and knocks 'em down, reworking all the allegiances Claremont had, up to this point, used to divvy up the characters and keep things interesting, paving the way for the 'Blue' and 'Gold' teams that would surface in Jim Lee's X-Men #1 and Uncanny 281, which realigned all the original X-characters like Scott and Jean with the Xavier camp and made X-Factor the new equivalent of Freedom Force, under Valerie Cooper - a character I had completely forgotten about.

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Playlist:

The Neverly Boys - The Dark Side of Everything

Lower Dens - Escape From Evil

TVOTR - Return to Cookie Mountain

The Bronx - The Bronx (IV)

Motörhead - Ace of Spades

Motörhead - Overkill

Converge and Chelsea Wolfe - Bloodmoon: I (pre-release singles)

High on Fire - Electric Messiah

High On Fire - Luminiferous

Odonis Odonis - Spectrums

Drab Majesty - Modern Mirror 

Mastodon - Hushed and Grim

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Card:

A reminder to strike while the iron is hot.