25 Years of Darren Aronofsky's PI

Wow. Three for three on this new Metallica album. 

Going back to Hardwired, I've become a HUGE fan of this record, and I'm just kind of speechless that this is happening. You know, the idea that Metallica seems to no longer suck. They flirted with this back in '08 with the caricature Rick Rubin produced, but I have my own theories about that one, and it's better left alone. This new era that Hardwired kicked off, however, seems genuine (even if their album covers still blow). 

I think the thing that actually convinced me is, on the deluxe Hardwired, there's a live show from Rasputin's in San Francisco (great record store, glad to hear it still exists). During the show, the band play almost exclusively tracks from Kill 'Em All and a few from Ride the Lightning, and there's just this... ease at play. I mean, we all know these guys are tight as hell, that's never been in question. But the way they turned their back on what they helped create in SF in the 80s, and the frankly bizarre attempts at, I don't even know what to call their albums after the self-titled. Were they trying to market themselves? Were they confused by the music industry and how it was changing? Clearly, because Metallica didn't stop at incurring great swathes of ill-will from their former fans with bad music. Then there was that entire Napster thing. Ugh - talk about a bad look.

But let's forget all that embarrassing stuff. To me, the band I loved as a kid disappeared into an alternate dimension after Justice, but maybe that LHC did bring them back to our 616 and it just took another eight years for them to shake off the PTSD that would surely come from interdimensional displacement.

Now if they could just find Pushead and get the album covers straightened out (Don Brautigam passed away in 2008).

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Watch:

Two nights ago, we watched Moorhead and Benson's Someting in the Dirt. My second time seeing the film since it's West Coast Premiere at last year's Beyondfest, my first thought upon it ending was, "what an awesome double feature this would make with Darren Aronofsky's PI. I made a mental note to find my DVD, and then promptly forgot. Then, this morning I see this:

I will be in LaLaLand for the screening at TCL Chinese theatre, so I'm pretty sure this was 'meant to be.' Although I haven't watched PI in years, this is always going to be my favorite film by Aronofsky. The B&W is so saturated, it reminds me of James Whale's Frankenstein. PI's release also dovetailed with my then-burgeoning interest in the Occult, so this film imprinted on me hard. Now, I get to see it on the best Imax screen in the world.

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Playlist:

The Police - Outlandos D'Amour

Various - Wolfpack Fight Together Spotify Playlist (Thanks Missi!!!)

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Sidestepping preconceived notions lead to new opportunities that might bring about the culmination of older ideas/projects. Not sure what this is referencing, but that's not unusual of late, because I've been out of tune with the cards. I go through these periods where my id really pushes against anything spiritual, and I'm seeing that right now as excitement and anxiety build up around my two-week trip to LaLaLand. Pack it with as much goodness and friendship as I can, it still feels weird being away from K for that long, especially because this time, I'm in a hotel and without a car the entire time. I'll survive, and I'll thrive, but the expectations are completely frying my mental stability and that's affecting these daily reading, my yoga, my meditation - all of it. 

Something In the Dirt

 

From the forthcoming album The End, So Far available on September 30th. You can pre-order the album HERE. I like the video a lot more than I like the song, but I've always been hot/cold with these guys. Still, they've evolved over the years, and that definitely means something. 

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Watch:

The teaser trailer for Benson and Moorhead's new film Something In the Dirt dropped yesterday. Here'sn our first look:

 

I really can't wait for this one. These guys are Aces in my book.

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Playlist:

Various - Every Day (Is Halloween) Playlist: Small Cat, Big Yard

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

Slipknot - We Are Not Your Kind

Tangerine Dream - Ricochet (Live)

Corrosion of Conformity - No Cross No Crown

Forhist - Eponymous

Somnium Nox - Apocrypha

Fen - Epoch

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Card:

Lots of big ideas, but I have to narrow my focus for a bit to accomplish what I want. 

As usual, the cards are pretty spot on. I'm writing again - been going to local coffee shops after work. I have quite a few short stories on deck, and part of the "following the inner voice" here is figuring out which ones I want to allocate for the free Kindle book I'm aiming to publish shortly before Halloween, and which ones I want to submit. 

Blackened Metal Hero

My follow Horror Vision host Tori recently turned me on to Bölzer. This album is fantastic! A Black/Extreme Metal band, I was floored to discover Bölzer is a two-piece! This record is fantastic, and mixing/mastering/recording engineers Victor Santura, Michael Zech, and the enigmatic D.G. really knew how to steer the band into a sonic space that more than makes up for any 'missing' instrumentation. I'd say the sound of this album, which really knows how to use an ample but still tasteful amount of reverb, is one of the fullest metal band sounds I've heard in a while. There's a definite 'space' to this recording, and it's big and dark and bold.  

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Podcast

 

A new episode of The Horror Vision went up last week. I've recently moved beyond just the audio component of the show, and started making extremely rudimentary 'videos' for each episode. The plan is to eventually make a more involved video, or - gasp - do something similar to DwC, but with that show slowly creeping back toward reappearance, where I'll find the time remains to be seen. Until then, enjoy us talking about the genre we love, and if you dig it, leave a comment and let's talk Horror!

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Watch:

Tuesday after work I rented Jeremy Gardner's new film After Midnight. Produced by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead - Benson has a small supporting role in the film - Gardner wrote and co-directed this one, as well as starring in it. As it stands now, After Midnight will almost definitely finish 2020 as my favorite film of the year.

 

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Playlist:

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full

Lake Street Dive - Making Do (Single)

Bölzer - Hero

Zombi - Shape Shift

Zola Jesus - Stridulum

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Card:

Back on track, big time.

New Melvins!

 

New Melvins? Yes, please!

Pre-order the new album HERE, out February 26 on Ipecac Records!

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Watch:

Friday morning I woke up and rented Bryan Bertino's new film The Dark and The Wicked on Prime. Great flick. I didn't 100% connect with it the way I had hoped, however, I probably had some pretty unrealistic expectations. That said, it's a very well made film, even if I did kind of think all the atmosphere and tension didn't quite "pop" the way it tried to. Definitely worth supporting, though, and Bertino is one of the best modern filmmakers working in Horror, in my opinion. 

I also finally made it around to Benson and Moorhead's episode of this year's season of The Twilight Zone. "8" is great. I still don't dig the overall feel of the series, and as much as I dig Jordan Peele, he just doesn't have the same wry manner needed to fill Rod Serling's shoes, but I did like seeing an Octopus kill off a team of Arctic research scientists. 

Despite my misgivings on the series, I'm glad someone's doing it, because anthology shows like this help employ a lot of filmmakers, and whether I watch them or not, it makes me happy they exist.

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Playlist:

Opeth - Watershed 

Mr. Bungle - The Raging Wraith of the Easter Bunny 

Barry Adamson - As Above So Below 

Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope To the Sky 

Miserable - Uncontrollable 

Anna Von Hausswolff - All Thoughts Fly

Mrs. Piss - Self-Surgery

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower

Fen - The Dead Light

Hoseback - The Invisible Mountain

Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen

Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

Opeth - My Arms Your Hearse

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Card:

What I've been doing to myself again with writing. I did nail some important backstory in a scene yesterday, but I could have got a lot more done had I not kept flitting around, being distracted by menial tasks that totally could have waited. 

RIP Eddie Van Halen

 

I'm not really a Van Halen fan, and as revolutionary as Eddie Van Halen's guitar style was at the time Van Halen's eponymous debut hit the world, he really just played 'Eruption' over and over for the rest of his career. That's not exactly true, but it's not exactly wrong, either. Doesn't matter: first rock album I ever owned was 1984, and I've loved it ever since. The singles are all gold, but the deep cuts are infinitely better, imo. I almost posted Drop Dead Legs here, but instead I went with Top Jimmy just because I think the intro guitar is some of the most under-stated playing EVH ever did, and that makes it even more awesome. If there's a stage in Heaven, Eddie's gonna take a turn.

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31 Days of Halloween:

I've been flim-flamming between calling this segment "31 Days of Horror" and "31 Days of Halloween," but I think I'm going to finally settle on the latter, simply because my activities of the last few days have put me in situations where my entries for the day skew outside the realm of Horror. My definition Horror is definitely open to a lot of interpretation, but I feel like I'm really pushing the envelope including Mulholland Drive and Synchronic. So Halloween works a lot better this year.

Monday night, my Horror Vision co-host Ray and I hit our final night of Beyondfest 2020 programming at the Mission Tiki Drive-In with the West Coast Premiere of the looong-awaited new film from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. Synchronic is everything I thought it would be and more, but it also surprised me. These guys are great filmmakers who will no doubt become Nolan-level in time, and I feel privileged to have now seen the film that I believe will bridge the 'Independent' era of their career with what comes next.

 

 

Also, Monday night was a double-feature, and Ray and I were also lucky enough to catch the premiere of Justin Simien's new film Bad Hair:       

Bad Hair premieres on HULU on October 23rd, and it's a damn good time. If you look up in the right hand corner of this page, you'll see my little Spotify widget has updated with our quick-take, spoiler-free review of both these films.

Finally, last night K and I sat down to watch a flick she's been wanting me to see for a few months now, ever since it popped up on Prime. And what I realized once the film began is, even though I'd been seeing the VHS cover art since I was a little kid, I had completely missed or forgotten that Dolls is a Stuart Gordon film! This, of course, won me over immediately, as did the film, which is excellent in that 'the storm forced us to knock on the door of the creepy old mansion and now we're all being picked off one by one' way that keeps coming up lately, whether it be in Dolls, April Fool's Day, or Clue, all excellent films in my humble opinion. Also, I'm really making an attempt to watch some new stuff this year, instead of just filling the month with my standard October films. This and The Wolf Man were good starts in that direction.

1) The Wolf Man

2) From Beyond/Monsterland: Port Fourchon, Louisiana

3) Mulholland Drive/Creepshow (1982): The Crate

4) Waxwork

5) Synchronic/Bad Hair

6) Dolls

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Playlist:

Deftones - Ohms

The Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once

Mastodon - Leviathan

Ainoma - Necropolis

Type O Negative - Life is Killing Me

Van Halen - 1984

Mastodon - Medium Rarities

Fear Factory - Demanufacture

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Card:

Cause and Effect: I've been unable to right for about a week, and my self-esteem is in the toilet. Go figure.

Isolation: Day 205

Musick:

I'd never head of Night Club before when this track from their forthcoming album Die Die Lullaby showed up in my youtube feed. The aesthetic is obviously in my wheel house, so it caught my eye. After watching the video, I can say I dig the visuals but am unconvinced by the music. Still, might not be my thing exactly, but I was intrigued enough to google them, where I found Night Club did the music for a show I have never seen but K has been wanting to show me since we met, Moonbeam City. This put the band in my, "need to know more" category. In the meantime, if you're so inclined, pre-orders for the new album can be had HERE. 

Love the close-up of the zombie hand clap, and the appropriation of the Brady Bunch squares.

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31 Days of Horror:

Saturday night, K and I hit the Beyondfest David Lynch triple feature at the Mission Tiki Drive-in Movie Theatre. Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and Lost Highway, however, we only stayed for the first two, the second of which ended about 12:30 AM and precipitated us returning to our hotel - a freakish experience in COVID times, let me tell you - in time to catch the Hal Holbrook-starring segment "The Crate", from 1982's Creepshow on some cable network's month of Halloween flix. 

1) The Wolf Man

2) From Beyond/Monsterland: Port Fourchon, Louisiana

3) Mulholland Drive/Creepshow (1982): The Crate

4) Waxwork

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Playlist:

X - Los Angeles

Darkness Brings the Cold - Devil Swank, Vol. 1

Misfits - Collection II

Metallica - Master of Puppets

Styx - Pieces of Eight

The Runaways - Queens of Noise

Kevin Ayers - The Confessions of Dr. Dream and Other Stories 

Rupert Lally - Where the Dark Speaks

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Card:

This could be a reference to the weird cycle I find myself in with writing at the moment - a cycle preventing me from doing much of it - or to the film I'm headed out to see tonight at Beyondfest's Mission Tiki Drive-In screening of Benson and Moorhead's Synchronic, which I'm thinking is a continuation of the world they began in Resolution and The Endless, and involved loops, reiterations, and cosmic comeuppance. Maybe it's both.

Isolation: Day 188 - Synchronic Gets a Trailer

I feel like  I have been waiting for a long time for the new Benson and Moorhead. These guys look to be at the top of their game with Synchronic, they certainly have a lot more money behind them here. I see big things ahead for these two, can't wait.

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Watch:

Closing in on the end of Halt and Catch Fire's final season, this song - which I've always dug but kind of also always took for granted - now has special significance. Wow. I'm going to hate to see this show go.

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Playlist:

Alice in Chains - Dirt

Ghost - Prequelle

Electric Wizard - Dopethrone

Nirvana - Nevermind

Doves - The Universal Want

Tennis System - Technicolor Blind

Turquoise Moon - The Sunset City

Also, Apple Music does a weekly 'favorites' playlist based on what you're listening to. I normally ignore it, but this week's is pretty cool

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Card:

Interrupted energy and/or creative flow. Heat, back pain, and lack of sleep have all conspired to interrupt my writing sessions. 

Isolation: Day 57 - Alphabetland!

Last Friday, seminal LA punk rock group X released their first album with the all-original line-up in, well, I don't really know how long, but a pretty damn long time! Especially good news is the fact that founding guitarist Billy Zoom has conquered his health problems and returned to the fold. I saw X live (with Dwight Yokam!) five or six years ago and Billy was not present. They were great, but it's just not the same without that man.

You can pick this one up on X's Bandcamp HERE.

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A couple of days ago I finally watched V/H/S/2 and V/H/S: Viral. Part 2 is more or less fantastic, the Indonesian segment being one of the scariest things I've seen in a while. Viral is, as several friends warned me, not all that great. The one segment I absolutely loved though was "Bonestorm," and turned out to have been done by Benson and Moorhead, the guys responsible for Resolution and The Endless, which I talked about recently in these pages.

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Heaven is an Incubator posted this a few days ago. Awesome. Find it on Bandcamp HERE.

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I finished Preston Fassel's fantastic novel Our Lady of the Inferno and have moved on to Clive Barker's Damnation Game and Al Jourgensen's autobiography Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen, the latter of which Mr. Brown lent me months ago and I've been chomping at the bit to read since.. I'm not huge on reading multiple books at a time, but I'm stumbling through the last three chapters of the novel I'm editing/re-tooling, and when I write, I tend to need to be reading fiction at the same time. I actually consider this part of the writing process. I don't punch-in and out for it, like I do with actual writing writing (I use two apps, ATracker PRO and Focus Keeper), but I recognize that it's most definitely an integral part of my process. That said, Jourgensen's biography is conversational, not prosaic like Juan F. Thompson's Stories I Tell Myself, thus it's not fitting the bill. So I'm splitting my time, treating Uncle Al's book like having a beer, and Barker's like sharpening my craft.

The Damnation Game is actually one I read long ago, back when I first discovered Barker's work in the early 90s. I believe I was a Sophomore or Junior in High School when I checked The Great and Secret Show out of the library. That one blew my mind - still meaning to re-read it and hit the sequel Eversville - and I went straight into The Books of Blood and subsequently The Damnation Game afterward. Funny thing, although I remember quite a bit of Great and Secret and Books of Blood, but I remember next to nothing about Damnation. Which is cool, because already, only a handful of pages in, and Barker's sumptuous prose has already had a massive effect on me.


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Cocksure - Operation C.O.C.K.S.U.R.E.
X - Alphabetland
X - Under the Big Black Sun
The Neighbourhood - I Love You.
The Neighbourhood - Wiped Out
Blut Aus Nord - The Mystical Beast of Rebellion
Void King - There Is Nothing

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No card.