Pale Dian's Feral Birth

 

Somehow, I totally missed that Austin's Pale Dian released a new record last year. I've had Feral Birth on rotation since discovering it a few days ago, and I really dig it. If you missed out on 2016's Narrow Birth, it is well worth your time, as is all of Pale Dian's music. You can order a digital copy of Feral Birth directly from the band on their Bandcamp HERE, or you can hope their label, Green Witch Recordings, does a re-press of the vinyl. If they do, it should be available at the Green Witch Shop HERE.

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Watch:

Yesterday, HBO dropped a new trailer for the upcoming second season of Álex de la Iglesia's 30 Coins, and it looks fantastic!

I love this show so much, I'm not only excited for the second season to drop in October, but to rewatch Season One beforehand. I can't wait to relive this one. Igelsia's take Horror is unlike anything else I've ever seen, with its often-comedic underpinnings offset brilliantly by the creepiest take on Catholicism I've maybe ever seen. 

 

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Playlist:

Cristobal Tapia De Veer - Smile OST

Cristobal Tapia De Veer - Black Mirror: Black Museum OST

Agnes Obel - Aventine

Pale Dian - Feral Birth

Flying Lotus - Yasuke

Mannequin Pussy - Patience

Sandrider - Godhead

Flying Lotus - Los Angeles

Sepultura - Schizoprenia 

Christopher Young & Lustmord - The Empty Man OST

Beth Gibbons, Polish National Radio Symphony Orch & Krzysztof Penderecki - Henryk- Górecki's Symphony #3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs)

Explode Into Colors - Quilts EP

Pale Dian - Feral Birth

Perturbator - Dangerous Days

Exhalants - 

Slayer - Decade of Aggression

            

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Card:

• Queen of Swords - Watery aspect of Air, or the Emotional application of the Intellect

• Prince of Cups - Airy aspect of Water, or the reverse of above, Emotions honed by Intellect

• Princess of Wands - Earthen aspect of Fire, or the physical world as manipulated through the Will

I'm looking at this as a direct commentary on my creative week, which, despite some fairly major breakthroughs plot-wise, has been weak. My Emotions undermine my understanding of what I need to do to achieve my goal, I then turn around and overrule my emotions with logic, but only for a short time before the material world around me sidetracks my work and drains my Will.

I'm trying to sell this week to myself as a "recharge." Let's see if that's true.

 

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Duration:

See what I mean? This is... embarrassing. I knew I didn't clock that many hours this week, but this is insane. Granted, my folks were here for five days and I worked, but still. Inexcusable. 

This is 7/14/23 through 7/20/23. Starting today I need to re-engage.

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New Noise

 

Besides just being an awesome track, if you're watching FX's The Bear, you're probably picking up what I'm putting down.

From 1998's The Shape of Punk to Come, a veritable classic of that era.
 

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Watch:

Easily my favorite show at the moment, FX's The Bear returned recently and K and I just caught up by rewatching season one. 

This is the most "Chicago" anything I've ever seen. I know these people - Richie Jerimovich is one of my best friends, Cicero (Oliver fucking Platt!) is every other middle-aged man I met through friends and family in the 80s - I mean, it's freaking uncanny. It's also one of the most honest narratives about loss, drive and passion I've ever seen. 

           

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Read:

I'm about 100 pages into my re-read of Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart is a Chainsaw. If you're a Horror fan and you haven't read this, you're missing out on your new favorite novel:

Chainsaw's protagonist, Jade Daniels, is one of the most relatable and magnetic final girls of all time. Also, what a wonderful experience, reading a book that puts you so deep inside the mind of a High School kid who is obsessed with Horror, specifically Slashers, so much so that she interprets the arrival of a new girl at her high school in Proofrock, ID as the arrival of a Final Girl and the beginning of her town's own Slasher Cycle. There are reasons historic to the town that prompt this theory, but as SGJ is so damn good at, we're so awash in Jade's inner thoughts that we're never quite sure if she's just a bored and obsessed teenager or if there's actually something to what she's saying to anyone who will listen. 

Can't wait to finish this and go directly into the sequel, this year's Don't Fear the Reaper!

 

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Playlist:

Ruby the Hatchet - Fear Is a Cruel Master

Various - Twin Peaks (Music from the Limited Event Series)

Ruby the Hatchet - Planetary Space Child

Screaming Females - Desire Pathway

God is LSD - Spirit of Suicide

Jim Williams - Possessor OST

Radiohead - OK Computer

The Body - No One Deserves Happiness

A001 - Necro (single)

Flying Lotus - Los Angeles

Flying Lotus - Yasuke

Ariel - Molten Young Lovers

Witchfinder - Hazy Rites

Perturbator - Dangerous Days

Forhist - Eponymous

The Body - I Shall Die Here/Earth Triumphant

Secret Chiefs 3 & Traditionalists - Le mani destre recise degli ultimi uomini

Fear Factory - Demanufacture

Rein - Reincarnated

Grimes - Art Angels

Gram Rabbit - Music to Start a Cult To

Wilco - Sky Blue Sky

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - PetroDragonic Apocalypse

Sylvaine - Nova

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Card:

• Ace of Disks - Breakthrough in Earthly concerns

• Seven of Disks - Failure - A difficult period in modern life

• Princess of Disks - Fortification; Frugal

All Disks? Well, this really splits the difference between warning and encouragement, but I get the overall gist, just hope it's not too late - STOP SPENDING MONEY!!!

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Duration:

I've come up with a better way to post my 'time card' here. Check this out:

Didn't take me much time either, which is good, because when I instituted this a few weeks back, it quickly became apparent I was spending time on reporting that I could have been spending on actually writing. I've known people who do things like this instead of write - it can have a pretty negative impact on the process overall.

As for the time, it's still not where I want it. I took yesterday off completely so I could edit the new episode of The Horror Vision - up in the widget to the right at the top of the page - and hang with K. Another important thing to remember in all this, is to maintain a life/work balance. Considering I worked 40 hours last week at the day job and recorded and edited a podcast, 15 hours isn't bad.

But I need more. 

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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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