From the Chat Pile/Hayden Pedigo 2025 collaboration album, In the Earth Again. I spun this a few times when it first came out, but my head was in a different place then. Yesterday, still suffering from back pain, I took a little bit an a gummy and drew a bath so hot I couldn't even sit down in it at first. When I was finally able to relax, I listened to the entire album and it HIT me. Fantastic record - would have been in my top three had I been in the right headspace at the time. This, the final track, brought me to tears. You can pick this up from The Flenser or either artist's Bandcamp, either HERE or HERE.
Watch:
It's been too long since I sat down and enjoyed The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension, but I remedied that last night.
A singular movie experience if ever there was one. There's a reason this film has a cult following. The premise and character are amazing - A brain surgeon, physicist rock star samurai who breaks the 8th dimension and sets free a cabal of aliens trapped inside negative space in New Jersey since 1938! It sounds ridiculous and it is, but the cast is amazing and really make this something you just have to see. Peter Weller, Jeff Goldblum, Clancy Brown, Ellen Barkin, Vincent Schiavelli, Christopher Lloyd, Dan Hedaya, John Lithgow and Jonathan Banks... the list goes on. Truly one of the most unique and baffling films of the 80s.
Playlist:
Windhand - Eternal Return
Sumerlands - Dreamkiller
Zombi - Direct Inject
Blut Aus Nord - Ethereal Horizons
Black Braid - Celestial Womb EP
High on Fire - Electric Messiah
Dance with the Dead - Malombra
John Carpenter & Alan Howarth - Big Trouble in Little China OST
Boards of Canada - Inferno
Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter & Daniel Davies - Cathedral
Arab Strap - Half-Told Tales
Marilyn Manson - One Assassination Under God Chapter 2
Chat Pile - Who Loves the Sun
Chat Pile & Hayden Pedigo - In the Earth Again
Chat Pile - God's Country
Card:
One from the Thoth deck:
This week, some of the usual strategies may need to be moved around a bit.
Mr. Brown sent this track to me at some point in the last week or two, and I'm just getting around to it now. Holy smokes! With a video directed by Writer/Director of 2014's Faults - fabulous film - Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo have instantly captured my attention.
It's been a minute since I've talked about my growing fascination with Chat Pile here; I got into their 2022 debut full-length, God's Country, late, and their 2024 album Cool World just narrowly missed being incorporated into my best of list last year. Hayden Pedigo, on the other hand, I am not nearly as familiar with, despite a dalliance with their 2021 album, Letting Go, last year, courtesy of a recommendation from my cousin Charles.
The album, In the Earth Again, is due out October 31st and can be pre-ordered from Computer Students HERE.
NCBD:
As always, a lot of great stuff this week, so let's talk about what I'm bringing home for NCBD September 3rd, 2025:
Jason Aaron's TMNT continues to drop at a bi-monthly pace and I love him for it! A great relaunch of the 2012 IDW reboot that I'm so fond of that really shines as we follow the four brothers into the trials and tribulations of adulthood (Janika has her own book).
Look at that Mignola cover! This tenth issue of the anthological Savage Sword of Conan apparently begins a new mini-series that will run through all three tales in this issue, all penned by Jim Zub. While dipping into The Black Stone spin-off mini taught me to stick to what's in this main title, I'm here for whatever they have to say inside this bi-monthly mag.
Third story arc, "The Horror Men," comes to a close and Jeff Lemire and Gabriel H. Walta's Phantom Road goes back on hiatus, much to my chagrin. I love this book, and I'm always a bit blue during its off-seasons.
Revisiting Larry Hama's ongoing, now 43-year-long run on this G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero has been loads of fun and does not appear to be slowing down any time soon. Luckily, despite my card-carrying status as a completionist with comics, I feel zero urge to fill in the 150+ issues I missed that would connect the last time I picked up the Marvel iteration in 1994 and the first Image issue going on two years ago. That said, I have begun looking into filling in a few of the gaps for the central part of Hama's original Marvel run, eyeing connecting the dots that would give me a solid run from issue 26 through to issue 126. It's only seven issues, so I figured, why not?
And finally, a new re-start of the flagship Batman book being written by Matt Fraction? Definitely going to give this one a shot, as Hayden Sherman and Dan Watters' "Dark Patterns" is closing out in a few months and it's been so good, it's given me a taste for a regular Bat-book.
Watch:
Monday night K took control of the remote and picked a film I'd never heard of before, Phillip Kaufman's 1979 film The Wanderers.
First, check out this cast: Ken Wahl, Karen Allen, Dolph Sweet (!), Ken Foree, Linda Manz. The list goes on with a lot of people I recognized, but those are the heavy hitters to me. Ostensibly another "The American Teenagers of early 60s" story a la American Graffiti, The Outsiders, etc. The Wanderers does a pretty good job of adding to that pot with likeable characters and an intricate hierarchy of Street Gangs and the characters' allegiances/associations with them. Where this film really stuck in my head, though, is in three key scenes that introduce a definite Horror element. It dawned on me while watching the second of these scenes - a scene where a character stumbles into the Ducky Boys' territory - that this film may have been meant as a metaphor for the changes Hollywood underwent between the 1960s and 1970s.
First, the Elements of Horror.
The Ducky Boys appear in three scenes in this film. The first is while the main characters are driving and accidentally encroach on the Ducky Boys' side of town. The film takes place in the Bronx in 1963, and up until this key moment, it's a representation of NY in the 60s that's right in line with most of the other movies like this have painted. This, however... there's something so intentionally nightmarish and surreal about this scene that I was immediately taken aback. While watching, I assumed Kaufman had chosen this route to convey the 'we're out of our territory' fears of a teenager in the 60s whose entire world revolved around their block. Taking into account the next two scenes that feature the Ducky Boys—the one where a protagonist is killed while in their neighborhood, and the other, the climactic gang battle at the end of the film, which the film does a great job of subverting until the Ducky Boys arrive. It was a combination of these two scenes that led me to my second point. Is The Wanderers a cinematic metaphor for the changing American Film Zeitgeist in the 1970s?
The film goes from the streets-of-New-York, day-in-the-life Golden Age of Hollywood storytelling trope to the more epic, artistic weirdness of the New Hollywood era.
If this was intentional and not just me reading into things, The Wanderers is a piece of genius cinema that is content to masquerade as 'just another 60s West Side Story throwback.'
