Yesterday marked the 22nd anniversary of Type O Negative's World Coming Down. I can still remember driving to Threshold Music in Tinley Park to pick it up that first day, smoking up before driving home with it blasting in my minivan. It still haunts me today, as it did then, that my friend Jake did not live to hear the follow-up to October Rust.
First, Irvine Welsh's The Acid House. I started this with my third-ever reading of "A Smart Cunt", the novella that rounds out this collection. This was the first story by Welsh I ever read, back in the 90s. It made an enormous impression on me then, and still does now. From there I cherry picked a few other stories: "Snuff," "Snowman Building Parts for Rico the Squirrel,""Sport For All," "The Granton Star Cause," and the Eponymous story, "The Acid House." I am very much enjoying this return to Welsh's writing, and can't wait to dip back into this for more.
The title track will always be my favorite among WCD's 13 tracks (if you count Skip it, and we are); this one is an emotional jackhammer.
Watch:
Current obsession:
This show just gets Chicago perfectly.
Read:
Currently splitting my time between two short story collections that couldn't be more different:
Then this morning, inspired by the encroaching Halloween season, I went looking for my Ramsey Campbell Alone With the Horrors trade paperback I have, but couldn't find it. I haven't bought bookshelves for the new house yet, so a lot of my books are still in boxes. I gave a perfunctory search, but when I stumbled across Nathan Ballingrud's Wounds:
As I've related here previously, although I have the original, softcover novella The Visible Filth - the novella Babak Anvari's film Wounds is based on, I picked this new volume up as soon as it hit the shelves in tandem with the release of the film. I've read The Visible Filth at least three times, but the other stories packaged with it in this particular volume have all only received one go-through. Until now, that is. So yesterday I started my day with The Atlas of Hell, a story that feels so much like Clive Barker to me, yet still stands tall on its own thanks to the clean and precise ton of Mr. Ballingrud's prose. I plan on picking through this one a story at a time over the coming month, and maybe going back and re-reading the stories in Ballingrud's first collection, North American Lake Monsters as well, if I can get around to finally watching the rest of the series based on that book HULU did a few years ago. Previously, I'd only watched two episodes of Monsterland (produced by Anvari), not because they weren't great, but maybe because the two I saw were ultra disturbing. In a good way, but also in a real way. Which is the goal, however, sometimes you have to work up to that sort of thing.
Playlist:
Ozzy Osbourne - Patient Number 9
The Cramps - Stay Sick
The Dead Milkmen - Beelzebubba
Misfits - Static Age
Type O Negative - World Coming Down
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
