New Music from Mogwai!

The legendary Mary Anne Hobbs premiered a new track by Mogwai a couple of days ago, and now here's the video! No word on a new album yet, but smart money says it's coming, as the band also announcned a 2025 world tour, details of which are HERE.

 

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Watch:

K and I went to see Coralie Fargeat's new film The Substance last night. Pretty sure I will not see a better film for the remainder of the year; Robert Eggers has Nosferatu coming, but The Substance is just... see it on a big screen, that's all I can say.

 

The term "Batshit crazy" gets thrown around a lot - hell, I do a fair share of the throwing myself - but once in a great while, a film comes along that reminds me I really had forgotten what Batshit Crazy is. This is that film. I cannot believe I saw this in a big box theatre in Middle America. The Substance is absolutely INSANE. It almost wears out its welcome, then doubles down on the crazy and just... it feels like the most Body Horror movie I may have ever seen. And I don't offer that lightly.

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Read:

Sweet little comic shop pickup I wasn't expecting the other day; shout out to Ryan and Rick's Comic City for pulling this aside when they got it in, presumably from someone selling some old comics:

Published by Arrow Comics in 1986, this was a fascinating read. Not nearly as intricate as Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead, this is totally outsider art from before Zombies had become mainstream. A group of survivors make their way through a world not only overrun with Zombies but intelligent zombies. There appears to be a classification here, with the intelligent Dead few and far between but able to manipulate or control the hordes of shambling dead. Very cool concept and execution, a nice piece of the 80s Black and White Explosion's history I'd missed until now. 

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Playlist:

The Jesus Lizard - Rack

Kaiser Chiefs - Employment

Ritual Howls - Rendered Armor

Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh

Bauhaus - Volume One: 1979 - 1983

Type O Negative - Life Is Killing Me

Type O Negative - October Rust

The Damned - A Night of a Thousand Vampires

White Hex - Gold Nights

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Rina Mushonga - Narcisc0

I'd never heard Rina Mushonga's music before two nights ago when I watched Carter Smith's new film Swallowed. More on that in a minute, first I want to open today with the track used in that film. Taken from the 2019 album In a Galaxy, this entire record is fantastic. My elevator pitch would be Tracy Chapman meets Tune-Yards, but that's just meant to whet the appetite; comparisons really do Rina's music no justice, as it is extremely unique and wonderful.

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NCBD:

Another light NCBD this week, which is fine since Night Fever dropped last week and that was a $25 cost I hadn't figured into my initial budget. Light maybe, be it's quality that counts, right? Yeah, and it's a good week:

Saga #65. Lying Cat on his back begging for belly rubs! Looks great, until you remember this is Saga and that means there's probably more horrible stuff for the people I love who live this book. 

The first issue of the newest series in Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino's Bone Orchard Mythos, I'm pretty psyched for this one. I loved Ten Thousand Black Feathers but felt it ended just as it began to build into something revelatory. I guess that was intentional, as Lemire has said Tenement is the book where all the disparate pieces begin to connect. There are only three issues solicited so far that I see, but whether it's three or thirty, I'm on board. 

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Read:

I'd had Carter Smith's new film Swallowed on my viewing list since hearing him interviewed on the Colours of the Dark podcast a few months back. MAN did this blow my expectations away, which, incidentally, were fairly high. 

 

Not for everyone, but if you're willing to take the ride promised by the trailer, this is a super solid flick, with great performances from everyone involved. Like, really great performances. Also, great to see Mark Patton kicking ass and taking names in a flick. Very cool. 

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Playlist:

Godflesh - Purge

Fen - Dustwalker

Sinoa Caves - Beyond the Black Rainbow OST

Carpenter Brut - Blood Machines OST

Rina Mushonga - In a Galaxy

Tune-Yards - WHOKILL

Pastor T.L. Barret and the Youth for Christ Choir - Like a Ship Without a Sail

Isaac Hayes - Truck Turner OST

Ghost - Impera     

   

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Theory/Practice:

• Eight of Swords - Interruption

• XV The Devil

• XI Lust

This one's all about distraction. I've found that writing for long stints over successive days equals an eroding lack of attention that actually manifests physically as an almost obsessive/compulsive awareness. This "distraction radar" widens my attention to include anything and everything, which in turn gets me out of my chair and away from my work for things that a moment later, either seem unimportant or I forget completely. This is all compounded by a generally erratic nature when in this state, which is the very definition of counterproductive.

All this just means I'm on the correct path.

I haven't had this in a long time, and it means I'm expanding my writing stamina. At my peak performance, I remember sitting down and writing a script for someone in a little over a day. That happened two times, I think, and in doing it, I remember the process that helped me build the 'muscles' to get there. It wasn't easy, because it was a lot of fighting the exact behavior I mentioned above. Which is actually a lot like Yoga, Meditation, or any aspect of Magick in general.

Years ago, when I went through a period of reading works by Aleister Crowley's works on Magick, I began trying Raja Yoga. I believe Crowley talks about this in The Book of Lies, (or it might be Aha! - been a minute). Crowley introduces the idea of Raja Yoga, then talks about how to start practicing Yoga, one must first learn to sit completely still for long periods of time. The idea is, Stillness is a first strike at the crazed torrent of Horror the modern body feels at being asked to sit still. 

Think about that for a minute.

No matter how old you are, or how educated, or successful, if you have no practice in keeping still, your body will act like a child and find a way to make you move. A tiny itch on your nose, a cramp; in more extreme cases, you'll hear things like a knock on the wall, or the snap of a twig. These aren't necessarily auditory hallucinations - although sometimes they might be. This is what happens to our brains in Stillness: we begin to hone in on our surroundings and seek beyond the filters that usually buffer our consciousness, so we can concentrate on the 'important' stuff. Once we can successfully apply the Will to keep Still for a considerable amount of time, we can then focus on controlling our Body in other ways, ie Raja Yoga. To paraphrase the most important morsel Crowley offers on this, "How can you hope to affect change on the Universe with your Will if you can't use it to keep still for five minutes?"

The joke at the time I implemented this was, I had no experience with any Yoga, so beginning with a considerably more severe form like Raja was doomed to fail. That said, man - I could almost perform and hold the Thunderbolt. That shit ain't easy.

All this Theory/Practice I'm talking about above is what led to me being able to sit at a desk for an entire day and write a script from scratch. One of my favorite writing memories, even if that project went nowhere. This is a great example of why I'm reformatting this section of the page to dip back into these ideas. If I am to look at my Practice as having built the life I have, then it makes sense that some of the systems I've put in place would need a tune-up now and again. Although I have maintained a ritualized practice of writing every day for close to a decade now, the duration of the sessions has dwindled. Time to rebuild this engine. In that, I've also added a Duration section to end the page with. This section (below) will be my personal journal of how long I wrote the day before. No hiding my failures now.

 

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Duration

I have long used an app called ATracker PRO to 'punch in and punch out' for writing sessions. I get sloppy about using it sometimes, and when I'm as distracted as I was yesterday, I have to turn it off and on as I flit away and back again. In that, I have to get better. I want truthful accounts of solid writing time. I have never used the export function, so I'll probably tweak this as I go. Looks like dedicated time yesterday was roughly two hours and twenty-four minutes.

2:24 Hours

I use another app called Focus Keeper concurrently with ATracker for sessions within the overall session. This allows me five-minute breaks - which I often skip if things are rolling - after 25 minutes of dedicated writing. 

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Isolation: Day 109 The Beach House Trailer

You had me at "Cosmic Body Horror." The Beach House one drops on Shudder July 9th. That means I'll have two days of anticipated premieres, as on the 10th, Relic hits VOD. These last few years have been such an amazing time to be a Horror fan, and despite a segue into real-life Horror, 2020 appears to continue the trend.


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Via Brooklyn Vegan (article HERE), the Sacramento Music Archive has made a Slayer concert from 1986 available on youtube. This is HUGE in my opinion; I saw Slayer a handful of time, but not before 1994's Divine Intervention, an album I pretty much despise based on what I feel are some pretty lackluster vocals. That said, my love of Slayer is primarily based on their two live albums - Live Undead and Decade of Aggression - both of which I consider among the finest live albums ever released. It's nice to hear something that kind of splits the span of those two records in half, as Live Undead was released in 1984 and DoA 1991. Admittedly not a huge temporal stretch, but in the evolution of arguably the greatest Thrash band of all time, an entire epoch of change spans the divide.



Thank you to the Sacramento Music Archive, whose website you can visit HERE.


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Playlist:

Andy Fosberry - Death Ship 2047
Van Halen - Eponymous
Phil Collins - Hello, I Must Be Going
Soundgarden - Down on the Upside
Soundgarden - Super Unknown
Queens of the Stone Age - Rated R
Cocksure - Operation C.O.C.K.S.U.R.E.


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Card:

A solid foundation is what I'm working with on this current short story. That's not the issue. Pulling all the elements together into a cohesive whole is.

New Music From SQÜRl

From the album Some Music For Robby Müller, out January 31st on Sacred Bones Records. Pre-Order HERE.

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I'm nearly finished with David Cronenberg's novel Consumed. It is fantastic. Seriously, so interesting and unnerving. Conceptually, it's another "How did he even think of that?" which is pretty common for Cronenberg. The idea that he's adapting this for a Netflix series makes me super happy, and here's a short I found online that looks like a dry run at the idea for translating this novel to the screen. Starring Evelyne Brochu, from Orphan Black.



Yeah. The story is creepy AF and a return to the body horror genre Cronenberg defined in the 70s/80s.

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Playlist:
David Bowie - Heathen
David Bowie - Outside
Damage Manual - Limited Edition
Zonal - Wrecked
Zonal - Eponymous Single
Godflesh - Love and Hate in Dub
Zombi - Shape Shift
Preoccupations - Eponymous
King Krule - The OOZ
Carpenter Brut - Trilogy
David Bowie - Low
Tomahawk - Mit Gas

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No card today.

Orville Peck - Nothing Fades Like the Light

From the album Pony, which is most definitely in my top ten favorite albums of 2019. Where's it rank? I'll be posting my list within the next week or so, and you'll find out.

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Happy Friday the 13th, folks! I'll be celebrating tonight with a croc pot full of Chili, copious amounts of beer, and Joe Bob Brigg's Red Christmas Special on Shudder. Can't wait!

What three movies is Joe Bob going to play? I'm guessing Black Christmas, Deadly Games, and Silent Night, Deadly Night 2, the first of which I dig, the other two I have never seen.



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And now, ladies and gentlemen, it's time once again for...

Last night was Season 1, Episode 3, "Squeeze." I'd seen this one before as well, but it's been quite a while. While I can't say there was anything spectacular about the episode - which, of course, wasn't the point at all - the first of two episodes with "Twentieth Century Mutation" Eugene Victor Tooms is a freaky-ass exercise in creature-of-the-week tone. The idea of a human being able to stretch, squash, and elongate on command is a nice, subtle play on the 'body horror' ethos, and makes me wonder what would have happened if David Cronenberg directed an episode or two of this show.

I especially dug the opening kill of this episode, as it really felt like the beginning of a horror movie or, perhaps better equated, an episode of Tales From the Crypt.



Oh yeah. And the Bile Cave. That was pretty gnarly as well. Now that I'm thinking about comparisons and the X-Files influence down through the years, I'm also feeling a kinship to some of the Body Horror/Nightmare Logic of Channel Zero (RIP).

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Playlist:

Young Widows - Settle Down City
Kaiser Chiefs - Duck
Me and That Man - Songs of Life and Death
Shining - X Varg utan flock
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
The Body - I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer
Godflesh - A World Lit Only By Fire
The Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen

Card:

I'd imagine then that I should be careful about befouling my plans for the weekend.