My obsession with the Arctic Monkey's 2013 album AM has been slowly growing over the last year or two. The radio at work - which I usually drown out with my headphones - bled lead single Do I Wanna Know? constantly from the time of its release until... well, I'm not sure when. In that time, when I would hear it I loved it, and I already loved the band's 2006 debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, but I'd lost track of the band after that and when I attempted to catch up, I can't say I took to Favorite Worst Nightmare or Humbug as much. Part of that may very well just have been me checking back in too late and finding they hadn't remade the first record - not that I would have consciously wanted that, but sometimes I hold exceptional albums against the rest of a band's career. At any rate, I grabbed A.M. two years ago or so and haven't let up since. The last few days though, it sealed the deal and it's been the record I most look forward to playing when I wake up. I don't always indulge that urge, but when I do, those 12 songs fill my blood with joy. Here's the one I woke up wanting to hear today:
No post yesterday in all my running around but I'm playing hooky today, my cousin and his wife are in and will be attending Drinking with Comics tonight, where one of the books I'll be talking about is most assuredly Ales Kot and Danijel Zezelj's Days of Hate, which I can't stop telling people about. 9 PM, streaming live on the Drinking with Comics' FB Page.
Playlist from Thursday, 4/26:
Afghan Whigs - In Spades
Arctic Monkeys - AM
Queens of the Stone Age - Villains
Dead Cross - Eponymous
Drab Majesty - The Demonstration
Afghan Whigs - Black Love
Card of the day:
More Hod; also, note the Hebrew letter Shin at the Child Horus' feet - in further Kabbahlistic terms, this connects the card to the Shin Path on the Tree of Life. Shin is the Left Hand Path, which is associated with imbalance, hence the stigma on 'The Left Hand Path', or dark magick. Can't say that totally hits home with me at the moment, but I've been known to express interest (see my Nameless annotations), so perhaps this is a warning to avoid the urge to explore these systems if the inclination recurs, which honestly, I guess since the move, it has - putting hands on my collection of odd and arcane books culled from various places and people over the years makes me want to open them again. Plus, Scrying keeps coming up again. That's not inherently bad, but it can lead to some bad things if you're not careful.
Took K to see one of her favorite singers, Emily Kinney, Saturday night at the Hotel Cafe. LOVE this venue. So far I've seen Barry Adamson there, Vintage Trouble, and now Miss Kinney, who - despite my ability to connect with her music lyrically - has to have one of the best female voices in the business sans the highly trained stuff, i.e. Opera. Her band was damn fantastic as well; her guitarist Adam Tressler opened the night with his own material and it was great. He apparently recently released an album where every song is about lesser known Presidents, and he played one track from that, '31', which was outstanding. Adam's material runs a wide gamut, but the cornerstone of it all is he is one awesome guitar player; most of the set was him playing alone with just his Fender and some pedals - which he did not overuse - and it was captivating. When Adam did slowly bring up more musicians near the end of the set, first adding keys, then bass and drums, then female vocals, the set culminated in a fantastic track reminiscent of late 70s Elton John and Traffic. I've yet to discern the name of that song while rooting around online for his music, however I did find this, and I really like it for multiple reasons, one of which is absolutely that it's inspired by Vonnegut:
I finally finished the Ligotti anthologies and moved on. What a difference it is reading something fluent and not quite so scholarly. Again, not that I didn't dig some of the Ligotti, or appreciate it in its entirety for its place in the evolution of Horror and Weird Fiction, but it's nice to jump back into something a little less self-important. Recently, my good friend Jesus gifted me a copy of a book I'd not heard of before, and although I've a couple on-deck that I'm chomping at the bit to get to (The Book of Joan and Experimental Film, to be exact, with soon-to-be-released Laird Barron and David Peak breathing down my neck), I picked up Jason Arnopp's The Last Days of Jack Sparks and simply could not put it down until I was about 200 pages into its 376 page length.
This book is great. It's not horror, but it has horror elements, and what's more, there have been several scenes thus far that are legitimately scary. Like, like over-your-shoulder-while-you're-reading-it-at- 3:00AM-on-the-couch scary. Which I LOVE, and which is quite rare even for the Horror genre.
Playlist from yesterday was virtually non-existent and let's not even start on Saturday - I guess until the move with K's Mom is done, Sunday remains a day I just cannot find the time to post (yeah, but I found time to read 200 pages of a novel, eh? Maybe there's something to this day of rest stuff, eh?).
Playlist from the past two days (kinda):
The Soft Moon - Criminal
Man or Astroman - Defcon 5...4...3...2...1
Windhand/Satan's Satyrs - Split
Twin Peaks Limited Event Series Soundtrack
Card for the day:
And Sunday's Card, which I drew in the morning but never had a chance to contextualize:
So... a lot of Cups. Heavy emotion? Not really. Indolence could point to the fact that I didn't post yesterday. It would be interesting if the same thing happens next Sunday, card and all, since I've been kind of flaking on Sunday posts. Other than that, there's not a lot of room for lethargy in my life (though I did call out from work today; still working though). 8's match up to Hod on the Tree of Life, and we know from Alan Moore's Promethea, which is essentially a Grimoire masquerading as a Comic Book (well, that's where I know it from; obviously the correspondences predate Mr. Moore) that Hod is the Sepheroth of Language, relating to Hermes, Intellect and Communication. Now, here it gets even more interesting - I called out today, so that's my indolence, but I did so because I couldn't sleep. After a couple of hours laying awake, I woke up and dug back into Jack Sparks - and came across something I'd never read, heard or thought of before. While locked in a mostly friendly philosophical debate, Combat Magician Sherilyn Chastain argues to Atheist Jack about Science being a closed door, as short-sighted a system of belief as religion. She invokes Robert Anton Wilson, which immediately makes me love her character even more, and his Multiple-Model Agnosticism. She also argues, to summarize it, that Modern Science is a generalization of the laws of Greek Grammar.
Huh?
I'm quoting directly from the book here, and there's no plagiarism or disrespect meant; I HIGHLY recommend Mr. Arnopp's novel.
"The entire Enlightenment project was about rediscovering stuff the ancient Greeks knew. And because it's coded so heavily on that Graeco-Roman knowledge, there's whole gaps of things they didn't have words for."
Holy Moly. Never thought of it like that before, but it's obvious, even if it takes a bit of a cognitive workout to fully work that into as large a context as modern science*. But so here we have my indolence leading me to an idea new to me that centers on Language. The 8 of Cups through and through.
Also, in the Cycle of Cups, the 8 is where emotion that in 7 Debauch has gone from positive to negative with hints of addiction, becomes altogether Broken. This is, of course, followed by The 9 of Cups - Happiness. Not sure how all of this equates to me, but it's been a while since I deep-dove into a pull, so this is more an exercise at this point.
The Knight of Cups is always interesting, the Fiery aspect of Water, so there's an energy from opposites. From the Grimoire:
"Threatened by emotional deluge, the answer is within reach (note the Knight on the card reaching for the crab of revelation). The deluge is not without its rewards. Act fast and be careful not to drown." Sephirothic Tree of Life association on this one is Chokman. Hod and Chokmah, eh?
