A Question of Hawkeyes

 

Hawkeye put this on my radar, and I could literally listen to it all day. Depeche Mode has always been one of those bands that confound me in a way. I've loved pretty much all of their singles since I was a kid and first heard People Are People, but whenever I try to get into an entire album, they always fall flat for me and I just go back to the singles. Because of this, I am completely unfamiliar with large swathes of their discography, and A Question of Lust falls into that category. 

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Speaking of Hawkeye, I finally caught up by binging all six episodes in 24 hours. I absolutely loved this one. 

I am SO excited for the street-level aspect of the MCU that we're seeing here and which, I believe, will now continue in the Spider-Man series. Plus, I WANT A NEW SERIES WITH CHARLIE COX'S DAREDEVIL!

Ahem. Apologies, but that's been building for quite some time. As excited as I was for the third season of the Netflix Daredevil show to do Bullseye, I never bothered watching it because the series had been canceled by the time it arrived. Now, I can go back and rewatch seasons one and two, then go right into three.

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NCBD:

A decidedly light NCBD, and I'm going to try to keep it that way.

I tried reading that Ram V Swamp Thing series that began at the beginning of the year, but I just couldn't hang with it. This, however, is Jeff Lemire and Doug Mahnke in prestige, Black Label format. Can't be missed. 

The fifth and final issue of the recent Kang The Conqueror series ended a bit ambiguously, but I guess that's what happens when your narrative twists in and out of time like Kang's does. Either way, there were moments of absolute, 70s Marvel brilliance in it (issue 4 especially), and I'm a card-carrying Kang fan, so there's no way I'm missing whatever this is.

Another new Stray Dogs comic! This is only a two-issue reexamination of the events of the first series from different angles (how do I know that? Listen to Chris Sanders, Adam Marcus and I interview the writer Tony Fleecs HERE), but any Stray Dogs is great Stray Dogs, so I'm in. Oh yeah, and here's another variant cover I'll never score.

While we're on the topic of comics, I realized I left off two HUGE entries to my favorite comics of 2021 list, so I've added them as addendums on the original post. 

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Playlist:

Fleet Foxes - A Very Lonely Solstice

Fleet Foxes - Eponymous

John Coltrane - Blue Trane

The Hacker - Rêves Mecaniques

Genghis Tron - Dream Weapon

Eldovar - A Story of Light and Darkness

Adam Egypt Mortimer - The Obelisk

Pilot Priest and Electric Youth - Come True OST

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Card:

A vital engagement with a project, new or old, head-on.

Perfectly describes my Tuesday, let's see if I can't carry that into today.

She Knows

As much as I dislike everything about this band from about 1994 on, I feel like I've reclaimed a bit of myself by finally being able to come to terms with the fact that the Billy Corgan who recorded the music for these first two Pumpkins albums was replaced by some lame doppelgänger from planet suck around the time the band started recording Melon Head and the Infinite Sandwich. 

Love this track, takes me back.

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Yeah, I'm back in the Marvel game. Feels good.

 

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Playlist:

The Blueflowers - Relapse EP

Cocteau Twins - Garlands

NIN - Broken EP

Dream Divison - Beyond the Mirror's Image

Smashing Pumpkins - Gish

Exhalants - Atonement

Nirvana - Bleach

Faith No More - The Real Thing

Blueflowers - Relapse E.P.

 I'm pretty sure I've confessed my love for Blueflowers' 2018 album Circus on Fire somewhere in these pages before, but recently, I've been falling deep into their 2019 Relapse E.P.

Blueflowers' sound drips with the kind of sultry, otherworldly space that Chris Issac's music does, or David Lynch's cinema. It's lush, spooky, and sensual, and I absolutely adore it.

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We had a bit of a marathon last night. Even on Fridays, it's not often I can stay awake long enough to watch multiple movies, so when I do get that kind of momentum, I exploit the hell out of it.  

We started with yesterday's episode 5 of Wandavision. I'm not going to post anything about it here, but needless to say, I am salivating at the things this show is setting up!

 

This one would have been in my 2020 top five at least if I'd seen it before year's end. It had me from start to finish, and was probably at least partially responsible for supercharging my motor enough to make it through another flick afterward. I'm posting the trailer here, but my suggestion is to not watch it - just go in blind. I did, and it made for an awesome ride!

 

I've avoided this one for years, but now that Wandavision has me flying high on the MCU again, I figured I'd go back and watch/re-watch all the movies to date in the chronological order they take place in the continuity of the MCU. Turns out, I really dug this one, and it was totally the right time for me to see it, as so much dovetails with the current storyline in Wandavision.

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Playlist:

Human Impact - Genetic (single)

20 Watt Tombstone - Wisco Disco

Led Zeppelin - Presence

NIN - Get Down Make Love (single)

NIN - Burn (single)

Various - Spawn OST (Manson and Sneaker Pimps & Butthole Surfers and Moby tracks only)

Deftones - Koi No Yokan

Dream Division -  Beyond the Mirror's Image

War Pimp Renaissance

I finally picked The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen back up earlier this week, and this time, I find I can't put it down. More about that below. For right now, reading the Biafra interview in the book and hearing Al talk about the origin of the band Lard, I felt motivated to dig out 1997's Pure Chewing Satisfaction. This is one of those records I had on cassette back in the day, and because I still have the actual cassette, I always put off listening to it on Apple Music under the guise that I should dig out that tape. Well, that never happens, so I haven't heard Pure Chewing in a loooong time. Guess what? I gave up on the tape and started playing it the other day, only to find out I miss the hell out of this record!

The Last Temptation of Reid has always been the go-to masterpiece in the Lard catalog as far as I was concerned; however, now I find Pure Chewing Satisfaction is every bit as awesome, starting with this, the opening song, which I could listen to over and over again ad nauseam.

 

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Watching the first two episodes of Marvel's Wandavision last night was quite the experience. I now very much understand what Elizabeth Olsen meant in the interviews she did during the run-up to this show when she repeatedly said, "I just can't believe they let us actually do this show." 

This is the evolution of Marvel's style. 

I'm speechless. Wandavision isn't the best thing I've ever seen or even my favorite of the Marvel stuff, but being that it breaks their fight-on-catwalk-stop-him-before-he-ends-the-world-and/or-destroys-the-entire-city mold and shows that they will begin to take chances, I'm excited. And as fans, that's all we can ask for. That's how the comics gave us things like Matt Faction's Hawkeye series, or Rick Remender's Uncanny Avengers, or any of the mold-breaking stuff Marvel occasionally does to draw in new readers who don't necessarily jive with fight-fight-fight and crossover-crossover-crossover paradigm they seem to still be stuck in.

I'm totally fine having (mostly) given up reading Marvel Comics if I can get stories like this from their MCU.

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Read:

Last year when Mr. Brown sent me his copy of Al Jourgensen's autobiography, I read about a fourth of it and had to walk away. This happens a lot with musician autobiographies. Soul Coughing's Mike Doughty's book really started to affect how I felt about one of my favorite bands of all time, so I stopped reading that, too. I thought that would be the case here, but when I picked Gospels up again recently to give it one more chance, I found I couldn't put the fucking thing down.

Al still comes off like a complete douche, which I guess really shouldn't be a surprise. However, the book is also laugh-out-loud hysterical at times. Really, once I got past the utter nonsense of him bragging about how many chicks he nailed as a teenager and moved into the origins of Ministry, well, the douchery didn't stop, but it became mixed with a lot of great information about a band I've loved for most of my life (thanks also to Brown, who lent me his copy of The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste when we were Juniors in High School).

Anyway, if you can get past those initial chapters, and deal with him being one of those "Been there, done that, did that first, fuck those guys I used to work with" tirades, and the endless drug stories that make him really look like an ass - the River Phoenix one is especially awful - then this is a pretty good read. 

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Playlist:

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction

Lard - The Last Temptation of Reid

The Veils - Total Depravity

The Replacements - Tim

Deafheaven - 10 Years Gone

Ministry - Dark Side of the Spoon

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Card:

This morning I thought I'd pull from the Raven Deck. Every time I bring these cards out, I marvel at the work and detail my good friend Missi put into them. The cards literally hum with the energy she put into them, and so they make reading an incredibly unique experience.

Change. From Peter J. Carroll's Liber Null: "The only clear view is from atop a mountain of your dead selves."

I have 100% agreed with this statement since I first began reading Carroll in the early 00s. And I find it funny that I pull this card now, as I try to understand how I've suddenly become able to reintegrate The Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream back into my life.

Tangent? No. Hear me out.

I loved this record upon its release the summer before my Senior Year in high school began, but I have been mostly unable to feel passionately about it since about two or three years later. Everything about this album and that band that I loved was, in my opinion, flipped on its head beginning with the release of the follow-up, and The Smashing Pumpkins became kind of an antithesis to me. However, for every reason I feel justified in distancing myself from their music and personas, I realize too, I was distancing myself from who I was when this album meant so much to me. Which is fine. That's the mountain of dead selves at work right there, and that's important. And there's a vulnerability to reconnecting with something that was so integral and intertwined with who you were when you were a teenager, and I began to make it a point to execute and deny most previous versions of myself somewhere about the time I graduated college and became a bartender (ha! what a sentence). 

Anyway, I guess the poignant part of all this is that while Siamese Dream was executed and thrown on the pile with that old version of Shawn, along with records by bands like Pantera, Sublime and the like, it's a new one for me that I can dig this one out of that mountain of corpses, dust it off, and reconnect with it in such a strong way.

Will it last? It feels like it will, however, I should probably avoid hearing anything billy corgan says in the media if I want that to last.

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou, Part Two!

And I thought I really liked the lead release off May Our Chambers Be Full! This is killer, and I can't wait for the EP, which can be pre-ordered from Sacred Bones Records HERE. 

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I'm really getting back into this Marvel thing: 

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Playlist:

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - Hollywood (pre-release single)

Michael Kiwanuka - KIWANUKA

Maxwell - Now

Les Discrets - Septembre et ses derniéres pensées

Loathe - I Let It In and It Took  Everything

Oh Baby - The Art of Sleeping Alone

David Bowie - The Next Day

David Bowie - The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust

Firewater - The Ponzi Scheme

Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

RIP Sean Malone

 

What the hell? Back in January, we lost former Cynic drummer Sean Reinert, now at the polar opposite end of the year, we lose bassist Sean Malone? Good lord. Here's the close-out track from Cynic's last full-length album, 2014's Kindly Bent to Free Us. It's fucking gorgeous. Rest in Peace Sean Malone. 

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All this awesome Spiderman news has me in the mood to, well, to finally watch the MCU Spiderman flicks, none of which I've seen! But it's also got me in the mood for some Marvel, and this show right here is numero uno on my, "I can't wait give it to me right damn now" list.

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Playlist:

Cynic - Kindly Bent to Free us

Curtis Harding - Face Your Fear

Jehnny Beth - To Love is to Live

David Bowie - Hunky Dory

David Bowie - Warsazawa (from Stage, disc 1)

Sir Neville Marriner and Academy of St. Martin in the Fields - Amadeus OST

David Bowie - Earthling

White Lung - Paradise

Loathe - I Let It In and It Took Everything

Michael Kiwanuka - KIWANUKA

Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - Hollywood (pre-release single)

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Card:

Ah, my old friend, the Queen of Swords. 

I keep getting this when I veer back on track. From my October 10th post, where I drew this card:

"...clear insights and the fresh perspective of adopting the perspective of another and cutting your own head off long enough to truly experience that other perspective..."

A violent reaffirmation of rulership over your emotions and intellect. I associate 'violence' in this respect, as my turning back on the deep dive function for writing. I pulled a major three hours yesterday, and made fantastic progress. 

2019: April 29th: New Music from Rammstein

I've never really kept up with Rammstein, but I would definitely consider myself a fan. Ever since David Lynch introduced the German metal icons to popular culture in Lost Highway I've had an on again off again fascination/appreciation of their sound. That said, the only album I own is 2005's Rosenrot, which I adore, but which never prompted me to purchase any others. Because, I think, Rammstein is a little bit like ACDC to me; one album is really all I need. That said, the keyboard that kicks in at 0:34 on Radio essentially guaranteed I'd get excited for their new eponymous album, which can be pre-ordered HERE, and has a release date of May 17th.

Interestingly enough, Radio bled directly into another track the band released at the end of March. I like Deutschland even more than the previous, and holy smokes - the video! If you read these pages on a regular basis, you know I'm not much of a music video fan - I'll post them for songs, but end up never actually watching many of them. These two Rammstein videos though, wow! Talk about production value!



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Jonathan Grimm and I trekked out to Hollyweird yesterday afternoon to catch Avengers: Endgame. Those who know me, know my relationship with the Marvel movies has been complicated. I began an enormous fan, but somewhere around Civil War I checked out, due primarily to fatigue, but also a host of other, slightly convoluted problems. My main issue began to take root following an interview with American Beauty screenwriter Alan Ball on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast, where Mr. Ball talked about how, in the studio system today (and this was at least four years ago), a movie like American Beauty would never be made at the level it was almost twenty years ago. I have long considered Mr. Ball's breakout opus to be one of the finest examples of filmmaking in decades, and the idea that a film of that calibre would be made on a considerably smaller scale to make room for more comic book movies terrifies me. I feel like, soon, there won't be any major movies that aren't comic book or pre-branded films (remember when this was only a concern for genre flicks? When there was still a corridor for studios to invest major funds on what we now collectively refer to as 'Prestige' films?)

Anyway, soapbox digression aside, I freakin' LOVED Endgame. Infinity War was a begrudging watch a few months ago on Netflix, just to make myself ready for this one, and I didn't love it. Maybe War suffered from home viewing - every time you pause it you see where you are in the egregious run time - but Endgame felt like such a better movie! And I had that feeling I did watching Age of Ultron four years ago, namely that I wasn't watching a movie so much as a comic book brought to life. I didn't know if I would dig Endgame or not, I was just rabid to know how this thirteen-year first phase ends, and let me tell you, it ends magnificently. I wept several times; not Logan sized tears, but sentimental, gooseflesh, 'This is my childhood right flashing before my eyes' tears, and it felt wonderful.

Now, I can't wait to see what they do next. And maybe I'll check out a few of those Marvel flicks I've passed over, starting with Spiderman: Homecoming, which Grimm considers his favorite Marvel movie.

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Playlists have been all over the place with Grimm in, but here's a smattering of the last two or three days:

Type O Negative - Origin of the Feces
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Wasteland
Zeal & Ardor - Stranger Fruit
Blackwater Holylight - Eponymous
John Carpenter & Alan Howarth - Prince of Darkness OST
Richard Einhorn - Shockwaves OST
Turning Teeth - Jesus & The Brides of Dracula (single)

Card of the day:

Okay, I pulled this card two days ago as well, but in spite of previously ascribing it value enough to log here, I skipped it an re-pulled. Getting this again today though, I'm going to log it and maybe spend some time reading randomly about the OTO. I'm not about to join, but it's been a while since I immersed myself in their lore, and maybe there's something there that can help one of my current projects.