Well, just like that. Finished my second pass through on the project and passed the Scrivener session off to Keller. We meet tonight to discuss moving forward with it, then celebrate. I had my own little party with K to celebrate one stressor lifted, ended my musical day with Anthrax - State of Euphoria on vinyl and, fittingly, woke up with the final track off the album, Finale, blaring in my head. Growing up, as a Freshman or so in High School, Anthrax was my band (before Alice in Chains Dirt came along and knocked them off their throne). I had all their albums except their first two, Fistful of Metal and Armed and Dangerous, on cassette. Still have and listen to some of those cassettes. State of Euphoria was always my least favorite, and now I am just not sure why. I mean, it's nowhere near Persistence of Time - still my favorite - but it's really good and features songs about Blue Velvet and Stephen King's Misery, and just generally rocks.
Yesterday's Playlist:
OOIOO - Gold and Green
Preoccupations - Eponymous
Mastodon - Once More Around the Sun
Prince - Sign O' The Times
Prince - Paisley Park
Prince - Purple Rain
Madlove - White With Foam
Sinoia Caves - Beyond the Black Rainbow OST
Anthrax - State of Euphoria
Card of the day:
"Appears after trauma. Period of rest invested with planning."
My notes in the Grimoire don't seem to fit so I'll have to look deeper into this one, which is good, because part of why I'm doing this, other than to reconnect with Tarot after almost two years away from it, is the Grimoire is largely unfinished.
I don't listen to very many bands' lyrics. That is not the case with Touche Amore.
.......
Just did the 7 Minute Workout App for the first time. Not bad. After several health issues last year, I'm no longer near as physically fit as I was. Not that I was a bastion of fitness, but I could hold my own. Hopefully this will put me back there and maybe even beyond. Also, although I'm currently in an 'anti-exercise' inertia period, any exercise definitely makes you feel better during the day (after that initial soreness/adjustment period that is). My favorite piece of writing on that is HERE.
The Tuesday the 13th's playlist:
Fen - Epoch
Lantlos - .neon
Touche Amore - Eponymous
Blut Aus Nord - Cosmosophy
Blut Aus Nord - Memorial Vetusta III (Saturnian Poetry)
Sunn O))) - Domkirke
Lustre - Night Spirit
"Mutha fucka must'a thought it was black metal day. It ain't black metal day, is it Marty?"
"Naw man. It ain't black metal day."
Daily words have been rough, as I'm not plowing on ahead now but editing and filling in, tweaking and expanding. Thus, project goal word-counts are near impossible on a week night due to the fact that whenever I cut from the document - which I'm doing plenty of as I snazzy it up - I counterbalance whatever I have written. My addiction to that little "You've met your daily goal" bell is in withdrawal. I pass the doc to Keller this week and then I can focus on my upcoming 3-issue comic collaboration with my good friend John: "The Legend of Parish Fen."
Card of the day:
Two again. This is interesting, and I have to go back and really think about this. I'm curious if this run of two-day pulls might link up to the day last week when a friend asked me for some spiritual help. If so, I need to organize the second pull in each of these into an ad hoc spread and relay the message to her. As for The Star again for me, well, I can only hope life is about to become easier and a path to enlightenment - a vague and wonderfully applicable concept if you throw out the biblical sense of it - doth appear on said horizon after a helpful conversation with a friend and the closing of a loop in my own head, all pertaining to my constant battle with my living situation.
Woke up with this one in my head today, probably because I listened to the album it's on - Teenage Wrist's Dazed EP about a half a half dozen times last night. At least.
Such a big, fuzzy neon dream of an album. Thanks to Jacob again for introducing me to this great band that has an album coming out in March. You can pre-order it HERE.
Playlist from yesterday:
The Fixx - Reach the Beach
ZZ Top - Tres Hombres
Nektar - A Tab in the Ocean
Odonis Odonis - Post Plague
The Jesus Lizard - Down
Teenage Wrist - Dazed E.P.
Card of the day:
Emotional deluge, use intellect and Will to prevent being drowned. Interesting... a few words on these daily draws. Events yesterday, Wednesday the 7th lined-up directly with two repetitive pulls that culminated the Wednesday before, on January 31st. What's the grid system at work here, or is there one? Well, we'll see. That's why I've shifted this blog into this 'journaling' paradigm - looking for patterns in the grid of chaos that, even though we do all we can to refute the fact, defines our existences. Hopefully I will find some and learn a way to 'hack' the graphs and grids I make from those patterns.
Yesterday I indeed stopped to buy my comics. TWD did not disappoint, but I haven't read Papergirls yet. Why? Well, I had an abortive attempt at my daily words, and after that I didn't have much time for reading, and this was unexpected but I ended up buying my first current Batman comic since Grant Morrison's run ended in 2013 and I was super excited to dive in. Why? What could make me jump into a Batman comic? Three words:
Sean. Gordon. Murphy. Look at this cover:
It's ultra rare to impossible for art to convince me to read a book, in Murphy's case it's a combination of his art and the fact that he can spin one hell of a yarn. Punk Rock Jesus is still one of my all-time favorites. One issue into White Knight and I don't quite have the lay of the land yet, but A) it's stand alone continuity and B) it's NOT the tired iterations of Batman and Joker we're used to being regurgitated every few years, although it starts there and moves out in what I believe is virgin territory for the characters from there. Either way, I'm in for all eight issues (five are out so far).
It's been interesting to keep track of what music I wake up with in my head:
Playlist from the 5th:
Deftones - Koi No Yokan
Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I Am
Black Sabbath - Eponymous
Childish Gambino - Because the Internet
The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicenter
Godflesh - Streetcleaner Live at Roadburn 1989
Twin Peaks Playlist: Ssn 3 and Beyond ST
Bells into Machines - Your Crime Scene E.P.
Opeth - Still Life
Interesting to note that all of these except Arctic Monkeys, Sabbath and Devil's Blood were truncated listens; I had a distracting day yesterday and couldn't find music that quite fit my mindset, so I jumped around a lot.
The Twin Peaks playlist is of my own devising, something I assembled only a couple weeks into the airing of last years third season, before the OSTs came out. There's Chromatics, a Lynch/John Neff track from Blue Bob that wasn't used in the show but fits aesthetically, and - among other things - a fan's slowed down version of Muddy Magnolia's American Woman that I actually prefer to the one on the score:
Card of the day:
Blocked/thwarted Will. Can save time and energy by knowing what not to pursue.
Woke up repeatedly with this little ditty in my head:
So a new Cloverfield hit Netflix last night - awesome! I didn't have time to watch it before bed but I'll remedy that this week. Trailer makes it look as though it may tie into at least one of the others, which I'd love.
There's a video I watched last year I'll have to post on here at some point, explains how the other two are tied together by an online ARG. Really interesting.
Playlist yesterday:
Sam Cooke: One Night Stand! Live at the Harlem Square Club (thanks Sonny!)
A Place to Bury Strangers - Never Coming Back single (pre-release track for upcoming album)
ttt (Crosses) - Eponymous
Soul Coughing - Ruby Vroom
ZZ Top - Tres Hombres (about five times in a row)
U2 - War
Worm is Green - Automagic
Joy Division - Closer
Card of the day:
The fiery aspect of Fire; purest manifestation of Fire in the deck - strength but unchecked can be imbalanced and disastrous. This tells me that either my passion, intuition or creative energy (I'm limiting interpretations based on my current situations/temperament) may be flustered and threaten to boil over today. Coincidence I'm heading back to work after three days off? Maybe, maybe not. My gig is fairly low maintenance, when you adjust to a certain, background-radiation level of stress that is probably common to many jobs, so I also wonder if this is a nod toward later in the day when I write; there are currently two projects fighting for space in my head and that can sometimes lead to an over exuberance that can grind productivity to a confused halt.
Another late morning spent laying in bed. SO nice. K is kicking off our musical day with Lacey Sturm's solo record from 2016:
Playlist yesterday looked like this:
Viet Cong - Eponymous
Etta James - Eponymous
The Doors - LA Woman
Frank Sinatra - In the Wee Small Hours
Steve Morse - The Mind's Eye OST
Swans - The Glowing Man (disc 2)
Viet Cong - Eponymous
The Knife - Shaking the Habitual
Huey Lewis and the News - Sports
I heeded the Prince of Wands and absolutely killed it on my daily words. Almost done.
Card of the day:
The Penetrating Wand; the Spark of Essence.Skill and Wisdom. Can point to the essence or involvement of Magick.
Beginning the first of three days off with some Etta:
It's nice to wake up leisurely, lay in bed with the one you Love and read. I finished Han King's The Vegetarian - ranked it with four out of five stars on Goodreads. The prose itself was outstanding, especially in the third section of the book, which is sort of three short stories with characters that thread them together into a novel. I would be curious to read more by Han King, and perhaps I will do so, however, my to-read pile is currently out of control. For now I'm going to duck back into Thomas Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer/Grimscribe, which I started at the beginning of the year while I was in Chicago and, truthfully, am finding a little difficult to stick through. My one book from last year that still lingers at 25 % read is, similarly, Ramsey Campbell's Alone with the Horrors. It's not short story anthologies I have an issue sticking with per say, but instead the tone of both Ligotti and Campbell's work. No, they're not "Too Dark", there's just something in each that leaves me a bit flat. Perhaps my expectations for Ligotti were a tad high - this is the first of his works I've read, and knowing he was a major influence on True Detective Ssn 1 excited the hell out of me. I loved that season and - despite hating the ending - its tone is one of my favorites ever, and it's not that I expected or even wanted Ligotti's work to be similar, but I wasn't expecting the slightly truncated manner in which he sometimes works. I'm half way through Songs of a Dead Dreamer and although the first few stories hit me very hard, as I go deeper I feel a certain unfinished or rushed quality to some of them, the best example of which is The Lost Art of Twilight, which felt extremely rushed, as if the author had no idea how to pay-off what he had so carefully set up. Maybe I'm simply missing something, or maybe not, this is merely my perception at this point.
So if I'm going to pick at Ligotti's short stories over the course of the next few months, using one or two as palate cleansers between longer works, I need something as my next main read. Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel is on deck, however K gifted me a copy of this little gem last night for our two-year anniversary and I'm already chomping at the bit to go through it, even though it will inevitably lead to that to-read pile growing exponentially.
"There are simply too many books to read, whatever shall I do?" This, ladies and germs, is the definition of First World Problems. We live amazing lives folks, don't take them for granted.
Play list from yesterday:
Swans - Glowing Man
ttt (Crosses) - Eponymous
Mastodon - Emperor of Sand
Godflesh - A World Lit Only by Fire
The Kills - Midnight Boom
Drove up to Hollywood last night and attended a limited screening of Robert Mockler's Like Me. I posted the trailer a few days ago but here it is again; I loved this flick. The characters are hard to like but the journey they take is one big dig on social media culture - or lack thereof - and the method by which the film is assembled is gorgeous, reminding me of Harmony Korine for sure. To me that's a good thing. And of course Larry Fessenden is in it, and I generally like everything he is associated with.
Card of the day:
This one shows up inverted; I've never placed a lot of weight on card inversion, especially in single card draws. There's something to be said for their interpretation when they're juxtaposed with other cards in a spread, but alone, it's kind of just the card to me.
There's nothing in my Grimoire about this one so what do we know? Well, this is the Airy-aspect of Fire; look at the movement in the card - rushing forward, so we're talking motivation, movement, doing. Interesting then that I'm intent on doing nothing but relaxing for the next three days. Well, that's not entirely true, we have some social events planned, and I had wanted to write each day, even if just to do these posts and get in my daily words, which could totally be the aspect of the weekend that I brush off. So I'll interpret drawing this card as sound advice not to do that.
Last night I absolutely killed the penultimate scene in my current writing project. It felt great. Today - if I have a chance - I'll move into the climax. This is all still just first pass, rough draft but it's still major progress. Once I write the climax and finale, I'll go back and add in a few chapters that I've come up with to flesh certain characters or ideas out - stuff I didn't know we were going to need until construction of the ongoing continuity revealed their necessity to me. One is probably a scene with Truby's "Half-man", although we intend to turn that on its ear a bit. After that I'll run everything through Grammarly, then tidy up and send it to Keller, who will read and add concepts/scenes/edits accordingly. Our deadline is in April - Thursday the 12th to be exact. Which is serendipitous indeed...
Started my musical day with Track #3 on Swans' 2016 release The Glowing Man. This is the title track and it's just fantastic. There's a real sense that Michael Gira's sound lodge has been influenced by the doors on this one, and after all the spacey effulgence that comprises the roughly the first half of the track, listen for the sheer awesomeness that Gira and company pull out at around the 15 minute mark. Mmmm-mmm!
Playlist for yesterday looks like this:
Zen Guerilla - Positronic Raygun
Nevermen - Eponymous
Faith No More - Angel Dust
Glass Animals - How to be a Human Being
Tuneyards - I Can Feel You Creep into my Private Life
Zen Guerilla - Positron Raygun
The Horrors - Primary Colours
Deafheaven - Sunbather
ttt (Crosses) Eponymous
Card of the day is The Priestess:
"The Will (Womb) that takes the Magus' spark (seed) and gives it form."
Can denote change/fluctuation; governed by gracious or pure influences.
The active difference between this and the preceding card in the deck's Major Arcana, The Magus, is that the Magus generates their own power, the Priestess taps into the power of the Universe.
Note the grid - I liken the difference outlined in that last sentence as the difference between so-called High Magick and Chaos Magick, the school I have always identified the most with. Chaos Magick is hacking the operating system or grid of reality. And there's that grid...
Looking forward to Sonny's Joup Friday Album tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll be posting the second installment of my "Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying later today. This week's song topic? Fighting.
Walked up to do my words today. About a nice mile hike uphill. Trying to regain some of what I lost with my health issues last year.
I finished Patrick Kindlon and Maria Lovet's There's Nothing There last night. Really cool book. The part that sealed the deal for me was when Oscar Zeta Acosta showed up. I mean - holy shite! He appears as something of a spirit, although maybe not exactly, and he drops the names of the other spirits that had previously appeared to the main character, Reno. Oscar's presence spurred me to do some research and sure enough, all of Reno's visitors were real people from history who disappeared.
Awesome!
Kindlon's afterwards are worth the read alone - they're all fantastic snapshots of the comic industry from someone immersed in it, and in the back of the final issue he teases that there's more to tell, that maybe he and Maria will get back to it some day.
Please do.
Fell head over heels in love with Viet Cong and their current incarnation as Preoccupations. I remember when all of the hullabaloo with their name was going on two or so years ago, but I never read up on it. Also never had the chance to check out the band, despite the fact that over on Heaven is an Incubator Tommy swore/swears by them up and down. Another great thing about Apple Music - everything I think of is at the touch of a button. These are good enough to own on tactile though, so I'm sure I'll grab the vinyls eventually. As I keep saying, Apple Music is great, but so is giving the artists your hard earned money for their art - not just the royalties they get from streaming services.
I'll be switching gears from the standard Deafheaven for those daily words today:
