David Bowie

6 fucking years. Wow.

I'll never forget it. I had just staged an intervention with my eventually-to-be ex-wife. Her parents flew out from the Midwest and the three of them were staying with me, in what used to be our home (and thankfully was now just mine). Her stuff was stacked all over my living room, and I'd graciously given up my bed so everyone else could have a good night's sleep after their long ordeal and drive out of the high desert. In other words, my life appeared to be in a shambles, but in reality, the shambles was well and truly behind me. She was probably at her lowest point, but I was on an upswing. I'd had a fabulous weekend. I had prospects for a social life. I had friends. I sat on the chaise lounge watching Chef starring John Favreau with my outgoing father-in-law (nice guy), trading texts and emails with prospective new love interests, friends, laughing and drinking beer well into the night, even though I had to be up at 4:30 AM for work.

Cut to when my first alarm went off. I was sleeping on the couch, my phone was beside me on the floor. I snatched it up as soon as I heard that tell-tale wake-up chime and silenced it. This would have been before I switched to an iPhone, so I was in Android country. Not sure how that factors, other than it's a detail I remember, so it fills the scene in. A moment later the phone buzzed again - too soon to have out-distanced my snooze - and when I picked it up, I saw a text from my friend Tori. It said, simply:

Dude. David Bowie died. 

I felt at that moment that all the progress I'd made, everything, was for naught. David Bowie taught me how to age - how to grow older with grace. How to navigate life's unending menagerie of madness with tact. I'd just exhibited this lesson in the two-and-a-half years it took my marriage to end, to get to the point where I was, about to send my ex and her family off into the negative zone outside my own peripheral existence. And now, my teacher was dead.

Fuck.

Six years later, we return to the same stage - it's Sunday night while I'm typing this, the long-delayed love of my life curled up on the sofa by my side, Black Star playing on the stereo. I lost three cats, gained one, started a bunch of podcasts, ended one big one, gained friends, lost some, turned my back on others. Life continues to throw its curve balls at my head, and I duck and pop back up and smile.

Just like David Bowie taught me.

 

---

---

---

Watch:

---

---

---

Playlist:

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - F# A# ∞

Huey Lewis and the News - Sports

Tennis System - Technicolor Blind

Tennis System - Lovesick

Tennis System  - Bitter (Single)

PJ Harvey - To Bring You My Love

Talking Heads - Fear of Music

Depeche Mode - A Question of Lust EP

Boy Harsher - Careful

Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars

Ministry - Moral Hygiene

Fleetwood Mac - Tusk

Beach House - Once Twice Melody (Disc 1)

Felicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Un Hiver En Plein Été

Fleet Foxes - A Very Lonely Solstice

Chet Baker - Baker's Holiday

The Yellow House - Refurbished

David Bowie - Black Star

---

---

---

Card:

Transformation. 

Greg Puciato's Fucking Content

 

As if I'm not completely overtaken by my love of Greg Puciato's debut solo album Child Soldier: Creator of God, the former lead singer of Dillinger Escape Plan has put out a new, multi-media package. Available from his own Federal Prisoner label HERE, Fuck Content is a video/audio release featuring a ten-song live set and five new studio tracks. I love Puciato's music, but I've also become quite a fan of his aesthetic. All the glitchy, seizuring graphics, the black and white digital abstractions that almost resemble some cyberpunk version of newsprint. It's all very fitting for the noisy/melodic mash-up that defines this first album's sound, so the idea that his follow-up release is an audio/visual thing really just makes sense. Also, not nearly enough musicians do this.

---

---

---

Read:

I finished my re-read of Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn. It'd been over ten years since I read this the first time and inspired by the film, I decided to revisit, not remembering a lot of specifics, except that the movie is very different. Still, I really enjoyed both. After that, I picked up that new Brubaker/Phillips Hardcover Graphic Novel Reckless, expecting to read it in several sittings. Nope. I blew through Reckless non-stop, and even though I just got done telling everyone Pulp is their best, Reckless comes in ahead of that one by about 100 miles. 

This book is the perfect iteration of these gentlemen's ongoing collaboration, and if this is the case, we have nowhere to go but up. Hot damn, go buy this and read it now; Reckless is FANTASTIC!

---

---

---

Watch:

The Mandalorian's second season ended last night and I am going to feel every day between now and season three. I am absolutely floored, not only at how fantastic this show is, but how John Favreau has completely undone my hatred of star wars - a hatred rooted in a betrayal, the complete undermining and convolution of something that should have been so simple, namely, making new star wars movies. This veritable disgust that I feel for the franchise began to sink deep into my blood three years ago, when I sat in a movie theatre in LaGrange, Illinois and watched the trainwreck that is The Last Jedi.

Disney + has really been a gamechanger for the fan-driven content previously only associated at such a high level with movies released in megaplexes. If you watch The Mando show, you're missing something great if you skip the end credits (especially on this last episode. Whewww! and on that, I will say no more). When you watch all those names and roles scroll up your screen and realize that these television shows Disney is producing are every bit as accomplished as major motion pictures. That in itself just blows me away, the fact that Disney is so big they can change the game this much (also, I secretly hope all the Marvel/Star Wars stuff will go this route and we can go back to having non-blockbuster movies in theatres in a year or four).

Anyway, Favreau really should be crowned king Geek for what he did for starting the MCU with Iron Man and now reinventing and, frankly, saving Star Wars from itself by taking it back to its roots. This final episode brought me to tears. Not just because of the story, but because finally, after twenty years of new star wars material, SOMEBODY GOT IT FUCKING RIGHT.

---

---

---

Playlist:

Four Stroke Baron - Planet Silver Screen

Opeth - Deliverance

Allegaeon - Apoptosis

The Plimsouls - Everywhere At Once

Preoccupations - Eponymous

XTC - Drums and Wires

Kevin Morby - Singing Saw

Calexico - Seasonal Shift

Squeeze - Argybargy

Slayer - Live Undead

Mrs. Piss - Self-Surgery

Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun

Devo - Going Down (single)

Fleet Foxes - Shore

Greg Puciato - Child Soldier: Creator of God

Various Artists - Joe Begos's Bliss Spotify Playlist

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full

Loathe - I Let It In and It Took Everything

Code Orange - Beneath 

---

---

---

Card:

 

A solid foundation for a solid trilogy. That's what I've been thinking about as I approach a stopping point in Shadow Play Book Two. I have to wind this plot down just right by the end of this section of three sections, so after I do one last post-Beta Reader edit on Murder Virus and release it, I can hop back into Shadow Play and really make that third act SPRING.