November 3rd as Portal to the Future

Poignant words from an album I fell in love with in High School. This day will change things going forward. Unfortunately - and I hope to hell I'm wrong here - I'm preparing for either outcome at the polls today to bring domestic terrorism on a scale we've not seen before. Obviously, the preferred outcome is achieved and we step into a new chapter, but I believe the "Stand back, stand by" was meant to put orange's cronies on watch for this very day. Expect militarized action if he is tossed out on his ass, as he should be. Of course, if the opposite happens, well, I guess we'll really know what kind of cuntry (and other cunt like tendencies) we live in, and how many bigots, xenophobes, and downright misguided people surround us. In that case, well, it's going to be a very long four years.

 

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Watch:

This is more of a listen than a watch, but here's a great episode of Henry Rollin's KCRW radio show where Mike Patton is his guest. They get into some great stuff in this one: 

 

In the actual category of 'Watch' however, my first non-US region Blu Ray arrived yesterday. If you listen to The Horror Vision, you'll know my cohost and good friend King Butcher swears by his region-free player, and I finally decided to listen to him. I jumped the gun and ordered several things from Arrow's Shocktober sale - the Hellraiser Trilogy Blu Ray Boxset and Bride of Renanimator - and then doubled down and picked up a copy of the Swedish release of Fede Alvarez's 2013 Evil Dead on ebay. I'd been planning to hunker down and pick up a region-free modified player this week, but LUCKILY, I did some reading first and found out that, joy of joys, the two Sony Blu Ray players I've had for the last several years already are region-free!!! Evil Dead arrived last night, I pulled it from the mailbox this morning upon seeing the notification, and popped it in. Happy to report - it works! 

I LOVE Alvarez's Evil Dead - I count it as my second favorite among all the films - adamantly battle the idea that it's a remake (Tappert, Raimi and Campbell have all said all along it's not), and am psyched to finally own the extended cut.

I'm thinking I may leave work a little early to try and avoid any madness, come home and watch this one while encased in a 'womb of refer.'

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Playlist:

Opeth - Deliverance 

Opeth - My Arms, Your Hearse 

Meg Myers - Sorry 

Foster the People - Torches 

Earth - Full Upon Her Burning Lips 

Apple Music Blackgaze Pioneers Playlist 

Amesoeurs - Eponymous 

Yob - Cleraing the Path to Ascend 

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Card:

I really read around on the Pull this morning, because here's the first card I drew:

From (source) "In a more personal view the Emperor might stand for a time of stability and structure, linear thinking and discipline. Yet we can't live without it, too many of those attributes will only lead to rational despotism and mental poverty."

Wow. On the nose for current situation. However, nothing to indicate which way things might go. (NOTE: I did not set out to direct my morning Pull at the election, that just happened.)

Next, in a classic Past - Present - Future Draw, I pulled:

For Past: Baggage - the Lust of Earthly result leads to a great weight that makes it impossible to get out from under. Yeah, the last four years I've increasingly felt that weight. Finally, for Future:

Hmm. From the Grimoire: "The Airy aspect of Earth. Pragmatism. Can be a bit of a cunt for matters pertaining to money and stability."

The Prince of Disks can be stubborn and ignorant when ill-dignified, which is something I only take into account when I'm having trouble deciphering how the cards in a Pull relate to one another, never in a one-card Draw. The Airy aspect of Earth, so strength in practical matters. This also implies a certain degree of trust-worthiness and inventiveness. Often, a good listener.

Definitely not our current problem's cup of tea, being a good listener.

Is this Biden? It fits some of what I know about him, but the 'stubborn and ignorant' are almost our current problem's calling cards, especially the 'ignorant' aspect. The card was not ill-dignified, so I have to hope that's not the case and we have a change in Guard (I was really hoping to draw XVI The Tower as the future card, but no so luck). 

All this does is remind me that the cards are merely reflections of our inner psychology and how it rubs up against the collective unconscious and, perhaps, more 'cosmic' elements we don't really have a chance in hell of understanding in any literal sense, because they are not literal in nature. So what's the outcome? We'll have to see. Go Vote people. 

Isolation: Day 74 New Jaye Jayle!

From the forthcoming new album Prisyn, out August 7th on Sargent House. This is exciting, as I didn't discover Jaye Jaye until early last year, so this will be the first record released I can experience anticipation for.

Pre-order it HERE.

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Two weeks ago, my cohost on The Horror Vision and Drinking with Comics, Chris Saunders turned me on to The Magnus Archives Podcast.

Told from the perspective of the newly appointed Archivist for an organization known as The Maguns Archives, essentially an archive for people to log any experiences with potentially supernatural or paranormal phenomena. The idea is, after the person records their experience, the organization then sets out to either prove or disprove the event. The main strength here lies in creator/narrator Jonathan Sims' writing and voice performance. Also, the fifth and final season began at the beginning of April, so if you're like me and you're just discovering this, we won't have to wait between seasons, which, while I think would be a cool experience, is nice to know I'm jumping onto something tangibly finite. Below is the first episode, which I place here as something of a taste:




The Magnus Archives is distributed through the Rusty Quill Podcast Network, and is available on all current podcast platforms, as well as on the website and youtube.

Also, Sims' debut novel Thirteen Storeys is being released this August via UK publisher Gollancz. No pre-order is up yet, but you can read a bit about it HERE.

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Excited beyond words to have Laird Barron's newest novel Worse Angels arriving this week. I've been waiting for this one alllll year, since the author began talking about it on Twitter shortly after last year's Black Mountain. Worse Angels is the third entry into Barron's Isaiah Coleridge series, and while these have been more straight-ahead, pulp-bred Crime/Noir novels, each book has become increasingly more in-line with Barron's other, "Weird Fiction" work. Worse Angels, sounds as though it moves further into this territory, with a 'stalled super collider' at the heart of a murder mystery.

While I'm waiting for Worse Angels to arrive, I've finished Clive Barker's Damnation Game and moved onto a re-read of the first volume of his Books Of Blood.

This is another I read back in high school, early 90s. Unlike Damnation Game, I remember most of these stories extremely vividly, and am very much enjoying retracing their steps.

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Playlist:

Revocation - Teratogenesis
Mastodon - Crack the Skye
Ghost - Meliora
Drab Majesty - Careless
Deftones - Gore
Melvins - Houdini
Prince - Sign O' The Times
Pixies - Surfer Rosa
Perturbator - Dangerous Days
Bella Morte - Where Shadows Lie
The Darts - I Like You But Not Like That
Lustmord - Hobart
Various - A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night OST

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Linear thinking and discipline have, indeed, taken up a fairly large portion of my brain of late, and likely will continue to do so.

Isolation: Day 1 - Human Impact This Dead Sea

The debut album by Human Impact dropped on Ipecac Records today. This one brings me back - there's a little Helmet, a little Quicksand, and an undercurrent of Industrial vibes that makes their sound mildly nostalgic while also cutting edge. Haven't heard anything like this in some time, and Chris Spencer's sweat-and-vitriol laced vocals feel pretty damn timely, while the world seems to curl in from around the edges, like an old photograph in a winter hearth.

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Nightmare fuel right here. Jesus, this looks insane, and the "bastard child of Ground Hog's Day and The Babadook" quote just seals the freakin' deal.


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Playlist:

Balthazar - Fever
Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars
The Birthday Party - Mutiny/The Bad Seed
Beth Gibbons/Henry Gorecki - Symphony No. 3
Drab Majesty - Modern Mirror
Eagulls - Eponymous
Emma Ruth Rundle - Marked for Death
Jaye Jayle - No Trail and Other Unholy Paths

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Card:

On this, the second time in three days I've pulled The Emperor, I'm reading on a more Macroscopic level. The Emperor is establishment, social order, social contract. Namely, all the things that feel like they are in jeopardy at the moment. I'm inclined to read this as a nod to the unwavering persistence of these systems we have set up - even though many of them are fucked up or in jeopardy in other ways - and that the current scare will subside without decimating our society. There's a host of conspiracy theories the Mulder in my brain keeps throwing at the back of my eyes, but I'm trying to acclimate to just believing everything will be, relatively, okay. Even if a lot is probably going to change by the end of the year.

Sunday, September 29th

Two albums after this song made its way into the world on Black Gives Way to Blue it gets a video, and I'm reminded how much this band continues to steal my heart, against all possible odds. Jerry Cantrell - I love you. All you guys. Thank you for a lifetime of amazing, touching music.

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Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson's Paperbacks From Hell does an amazing job recontextualizing horror literature over the last forty or so years, and Errickson's blog Too Much Horror Fiction has been chronicling lost corners of the genre for years. We know this, and while a large part of the charm of reading PfH is seeing all those wonderful paperback covers in one place, there's also decades worth of pulp Sci-Fi/Fantasy cover art lining the shelves of history. In the interest of celebrating and cataloging some of those covers time forgot, I'm starting a new segment here on the blog: Sunday Sci-Fi Cover Art. This should be fun.



I'll kick it off with this gem, Daniel Galouye's Dark Universe, which I know nothing about, but after reading a short synopsis I definitely intend on tracking down and reading:

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Playlist 9/28:

Black Sabbath - Sabotage
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Halloween Playlist

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A call to arms - I need to organize and devise new systems of routine, as last week's illness has completely thrown my systems out of whack and it's proving difficult to get them back online. See all that red? Martial - tough love is needed.

2018: December 12th: New John Garcia and the Band of Gold

New music from John Garcia and the Band of Gold. I'm a big fan of Kyuss, especially ...And the Circus Leaves Town and Blues for the Red Sun. I never really kept up with Mr. Garcia afterward though. This sounds great to me. Looking forward to the record, pre-order it HERE.

It's amazing how much great music came out of the California Deserts in the late 90s/early 00s. Having played a bit there myself, I can attest to the fact that there's a beautifully haunting undercurrent of inspiration that people tap into. Has a bit to do with Gram Parsons and his death, a little bit more to do with the alien landscape. That said, the sound on this track reeks of 'desert', but Nate Klein's gorgeous cinematography play with a mostly urban landscape, so there's almost a disconnect, but one that disappears when we get that shot at about 00:54 of what looks to me like the highway leading into Twenty-Nine Palms - you just don't have those kinds of hills in LA - and then the pedigree becomes visible once again. It's a similar vibe to the first Queens of the Stone Age album, which also played with a low-income urban vibe juxtaposed against the desert. Works well, and it really puts you there. That's the lifeblood of California, not the money and fame. We're an artificial human paradigm forced into a desert. And in the end, Mother Nature always wins, sometimes you just need a longer timeline to see it.

Spent a nice six hours or so working on The Legend of Parish Fenn with Jonathan Grimm last night. Seeing this thing laid out in the flesh blows my mind - John's art has come such a long way, same with my words, and laying out mock word bubbles over the art thrilled me to no end. Here's a sneak peak:

Playlist from 12/12:

Moderat - II
Zeal & Ardor - Stranger Fruit
Ghost -Meliora
Various - Twin Peaks (Music from the Limited Event Series)
Secret Premiere Album for Friend's Band
Type O Negative - Dead Again

Card of the day:

Victory and arrogance. Check. These are two sides of the same coin for some; I myself have never relied on arrogance to get me through the day, I just don't have the self-importance. I know when I do something that sucks, and I know when I do something that's good. The card warns about keeping on the fine line of living with - and more importantly talking about - these. Parish Fenn? Good. The final scene in ShadowPlay, Book 1? So far, not good. It's driving me fucking crazy. Literally. I can feel myself carrying all kinds of neurosis at this point, all voices screaming "Finish the fucking thing." But I can't quite get it where I want it. Seven years I've been working on this (with a year off to do the shorts in Collection of Desires, which in turn led to me having a different outlook on ShadowPlay, which I'd mistakenly thought was finished). End result? It will be awesome when it's done, I just have everything else on hold and a whole lotta self confidence issues until that happens. But seeing Fenn and then this card together now? It helps.