Positive Bleeding: RIP Blackie Onassis

 

Deeply moved to hear that Blackie Onassis from Chicago's Urge Overkill passed away yesterday at the age of 57.

Ten years older than me. Damn. 

This is THE Chicago band to me, as far as those who flirted with the big time. The Jesus Lizard will always occupy the throne, but while everyone screamed their way through Smashing Pumpkins songs in the mid-to-late 90s (I did until Melancholie) Urge represented the best Chicago's indie rock scene had to offer the mainstream. They didn't compromise, and they were honest-to-goodness Rock n' Roll, two capital R's and an apostrophe. Blackie, thank you for your service.

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Watch:

It's 11:13 on Thursday, June 15. I just finished a nearly two-hour recording session with The Horror Vision for Elements of Horror: Cruising. Prior to doing the episode, I found this on youtube:

There are SO many reasons I love this film and I love William Friedkin as a filmmaker. A LOT of those reasons are discussed herein, but pay special attention to Friedkin's discussion of the impetus for making the film. Also to Randy Jurgensen, the undercover cop who lived a large part of what we see on screen. As usual with Friedkin, I'm stunned not only by his art, but all of the thinking that went into and around its creation.

 

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Read:

Just a quick observation on this week's X-Men: Red #12. Man, when did this book start to resemble Rick Remender and Jerome Opena's fantasy epic Seven to Eternity? In retrospect, even the cover looks a bit like it could be a Seven for Eternity cover:

There's A LOT I'm missing here due to the fact that I've still not read a large swathe of Hickman's run after House/Powers, primarily X of Swords. I have so little background on the Arrako characters, The White Sword, Genesis and Orrako, etc. Going to have to remedy that eventually, but in the meantime, the landscape of this really reminds me of Seven to Eternity, and I wonder if Ewing is a fan of that series.

Pondering this, I stumbled on the following interview Marvel's Ryan Penagos did recently with Hickman and Grant Morrison, discussing how the two men changed so much of the status quo so successfully.

            

Good stuff; I haven't seen an interview with Morrison in a while, good to hear his voice. 

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Playlist:

The Native Howl - Thrash Grass EP       

Mudvayne - Choices (single)

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Gila Monster/Dragon (pre-release singles)

The Bobby Lees - Bellevue

The Sword - Warp Riders

Spotlights - Seance EP

Locrian - Return to Annihilation

Zombi - Shape Shift     

Urge Overkill - Saturation

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Card:

Keeping on with the Crowly/Harris Thoth for today's Pull:

• 4 of Swords: Truce seems a direct connection to yesterday's 7 of Swords. The Pause becomes a truce. 

• III The Empress - this card has come up a lot in conversation lately. In this instance, quoting from the Grimoire, "can point to dissipation when paired with unfortunate cards; Swords, Princes."

• 5 of Swords - The Truce will dissolve and lead to a new conflict, issue, or the like.

Not terribly encouraging, but also, isn't that life? One thing directly precedes the next. I pulled a final, clarifying card and found exactly that:

No matter what life throws at you, one journey ends, another begins.

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New Music from Blut Aus Nord!!!

 

Holy F*&k! New Blut Aus Nord and it's a doozy! Was it even a year ago that Disharmonium - Undreamable Abysses came out and blew my mind? How can every record these guys do be so unbelievably different? Listening to this, I feel like Laird Barron's Isaiah Coleridge, finding a secret and otherworldly recording while digging around online for one of his spooky AF cases. Disharmonium - Nahab drops on August 21 via Debemur Morti; you can pre-order it HERE for the EU and HERE for the US.

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Watch:

This past Sunday, with my friend Alex visiting from LaLaLand, K, he and I held a mini Friedkin Fest - we watched William Friedkin's 1977 unsung masterpiece Sorcerer and his equally fantastic and insanely transgressive 1980 giallo Cruising. 

 

I've seen this one several times in the ~ three years since I purchased Sorcerer on Blu-Ray and watched it for the first time. Every time I see this one, it gets better. Case in point - I'd had some ups and downs with the first half of the film on previous viewings, mainly because most of those viewings occurred at night. This time I sat riveted from start to finish and came away thinking the first half is, narratively speaking, as good as the second half. That was a nice feeling, both halves finally making a whole.

 

Cruising is one I just watched for the first time a few weeks ago, and from the moment that viewing ended, I've been chomping at the bit for a rewatch. The twisting and turning narrative, as unreliable as if Bret Easton Ellis penned the screenplay, just blows me away, and despite the fact that this time I took copious notes, I still don't have a solid answer as to who did what. A mystery that, after it's 'solved,' begets another, darker mystery. In other words, the best kind!

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NCBD:

Here are my picks, and I'm excited for all three of them:

Nightmare Country: Glass House has been up and down as a month-by-month reading experience, but I retain faith it will all come together as an eventual whole. 

First post-Armegeddon Game Turtles issue, a very good thing. I didn't read that event, however, from what I glimpsed in the pages of the regular series, I'm curious to see what the new landscape will be. This book often cools a bit for me, then immediately springs back to the top of my pile. We're about due for that. LOVE this cover, but it's a variant, so hopefully I'll manage to snag one.

Despite loathing last week's X-Men: First Strike or whatever the hell it was called (great cover though), my fervor for X-Men: Red, Immortal X-Men, and the monthly X-Men team book remain as high as ever. 

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Playlist:

Godflesh - Purge

Savages - Silence Yourself

Slowspin - Talisman

Deftones - Koi No Yokan

Deftones - Gore

Deftones - White Pony

The Flamingos - Playlist: Best of the Flamingos

Chamber of Screams, Clement Panchout & Mxxn - Murder House (Puppet Combo OST)

Blut Aus Nord - What Once Was

Blut Aus Nord - The Endless Multitude (pre-release single)

 

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Card:

Pulling from Aleister Crowley and Lady Freida Harris' Thoth Deck today:

• Battles over money/earthly concerns - the struggle is within

• XVII The Star - opening up to new influences/ideas/concerns

• 10 fo Cups - The emotional cup runneth over

All this is just to say, "stop spending so much damn money and start saving again!"

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Cruising Near Dark

From the 1987 OST for Kathryn Bigelow's inimitable debut film, Near Dark, one of about three vampire movies I can't live without. 

Tangerine Dream was such a solid choice for scoring this film, and I'd say it just accentuates William Friedkin's obvious influence on Bigelow film. The early scene in the film this song scores is one of the most era-defining moments of 80s Horror for me. I didn't see Near Dark until well after its release, but the sights and sounds of this sequence somehow sum up a large part of the texture I remember from the mid-to-late 80s. 

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Watch:

Saturday night, K and I finally sat down and watched William Friedkin's 1980 thriller Cruising.

 

I remember some time back when Netflix was still by mail, I watched Friedkin's French Connection and To Live and Die in L.A. and realized, "Oh shit, this is the same guy who did The Exorcist. Wow."

I've never been one to get into an artist and just consume everything they've done immediately. There's still one Bret Baston Ellis book I haven't read; there are several Irvine Welsh novels I'm keeping on the back burner, and I've not heard more PJ Harvey than I've heard. This isn't to say there's any reason I'm avoiding these entries in the respective artist's canon except that I want to make sure there's something on deck. With Friedkin, I'm sure I looked up his filmography and made some long-forgotten notes, but I didn't exactly jump on anything else right away.

Sometime around 2013, titterings began for the restoration, release and revival house screenings of two "lost masterpieces" - 1977 Sorceror and Cruising. I remember mid-week screenings popping up at the New Beverly Cinema or the Silent Movie Theatre. I remember not having the money to go, or to buy the newly released DVD because my live was getting ready to explode. Ten years later, I finally sat down and watched Cruising and it absolutely blew me away, although not in the manner I expected. 

Friedkin is the best kind of sneaky when it comes to what he shows his audience. He manipulates his story via the medium of film by how he edits, what he puts in and what he leaves out of his script and its dialogue. Also, there's a level of casting manipulation here that I didn't understand at first, but after I read THIS ARTICLE. There is such mastery of film as a medium here, but not in the usual ways. Yes, the craft - the cinematography, writing, acting, all of it is superb, but the mastery I'm referencing here is the way Friedkin compresses his narrative into the actual physical act of showing it to us on screen. This isn't anything 'new,' however, I don't know anyone who has done it quite like this before. 

 

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Playlist:

Black Sabbath - Master of Reality

Black Sabbath - Technical Ecstasy

Bongripper - Satan Worshipping Doom

Atrium Carceri - Kapnobatai

High on Fire - Death is this Communion

High on Fire - Surrounded By Thieves

Sleep - The Sciences

SQÜRL - Silver Haze

Gaupa - Myriad

Mars Red Sky - Eponymous

Steve Earle - J.T.

Trombone Shorty - Too True

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicenter

Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

David Bowie - Diamond Dogs

        

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Card:

A single Thoth card for my Pull today:

When one path closes, the trick is sidestep the disappointment and watch for the next opening sure to arise in the wake. 

 

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