Red Flags Of Nowhere

 

One of the records that's going to just miss hitting my top ten of the year is Marilyn Manson's One Assassination Under God Chapter 1. Yeah, he's probably a reprehensible human being. I'm not sure why I'm making allowances for him when I don't for so many others, especially considering I didn't actually come around to being a Manson fan until sometime around 2000. I actually attended the first Ozzfest when MM toured for Antichrist Superstar and ignored him the entire time. And when I say I ignored him, I'm not just talking about his performance because apparently, he and Rose McGowan stood right next to me while watching Neurosis on the second stage, and I didn't even realize it until my buddy Jake told me later. I just side-eyed the goofy-looking couple, thinking, "Try a little harder, Gothy McGotherson." 

Anyway, I came around after reading two things Manson wrote in the late 90s. The first was his open letter rebuttal to the people blaming him for the Columbine massacre, published in Rolling Stone as an op-ed titled, "Columbine: Whose Fault is it?" His eloquence and vitriol made a deep impact on me because it was abundantly clear that this was a very intelligent human being. The second reading was Manson's Autobiography. 

Up until those two pieces, every interview I'd heard with the guy - none sought out, mind you - made him sound like a complete moron. Years later I would realize it all depends on who he wants to present on any given day. Anyway, I'm by no means a card-carrying fan. By this point, I haven't even heard most of his records. That said, AntiChrist and Mechanical Animals are fantastic records. In fact, while my life was disintegrating circa 2014-2015, Antichrist Superstar was one of the albums that helped me keep my head above water, to the point that the person who was ruining said life at the time actually began to get annoyed whenever she heard me listening to it. Maybe that's why I'm able to grant Manson's art the kind of separation I can't with other people. Despite the fairly ridiculous album title, every song on One Assassination is great, and this, the single... the lyrics just floor me, as his lyrics often do.

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Watch:

I finally saw Greg Araki's Nowhere and I fucking LOVED IT!

I'd previously seen Doom Generation way back when I rented the VHS from Blockbuster sometime in the late 90s and... yeah, I just didn't get it at the time. And Araki's films have been notoriously absent from streaming and disc for years, so now that Strand Releasing has remastered his "Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy," I'm finally getting a chance to take these in. And if Nowhere is any indication, I'm already blown away. 

There's so much of the 90s Zeitgeist in here; not just 90s pop culture aesthetic, but the angst of the era, because the 90s was a particular brand of angst, indeed. Centered around sexuality and aliens and the burgeoning tech world that, little did we know, would consume all other aspects of our society once we embraced it. That's all here. This is a very analog movie, but with the edges of tech creeping in slowly around the edges; whether it's snow-filled TVs stacked high like altars or playing across entire walls, kids nodding off on drugs enmeshed in the scaffolding of massive neon signs, or space aliens and their abduction rays, the flickering neon anxiety of Nowhere reminds me how the world was thirty years ago and how it felt to come of age at that time, while still being artistic and strange enough to make an impact on visual and dramatic aesthetics merits. If you ever wondered what it would have looked like if David Lynch and David Cronenberg collaborated on making Repo Man, here's the answer.

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Read:

I finished Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger last week. Excellent novella, and not what I would have expected from Mark Twain based on my previous experiences with his fiction, which occurred back in Grade School.

In my previous entry about this one, I used the cover image from an older edition simply to illustrate the tone of the story. The Wizard-looking bloke on that cover is one of the story's antagonists, the Astrologer, who goes to great lengths to put paid to several decent townsfolk who become embroiled in the seemingly innocent machinations of Satan, who is the titular Mysterious Stranger and assures the narrator that he's not that Satan, but another angel with good intentions.

Yeah. Haha. Right. 

The book has some very subtle, very disturbing moments of pure Horror, most of which revolve around Witch panic and burnings, and the overall commentary Twain uses Satan to deliver about the human race is chilling in its unflattering accurateness. This is definitely not what most people think of when they think of Mark Twain's fiction.

Next, I circled back to finish James Joyce's Dubliners - a book I've had on the shelf since probably sixth grade. 

I'd left off at about the halfway point back in June and, upon returning, blew through several stories on Saturday, depositing me on the banks of the final entry, The Dead for my Sunday reading. This is arguably the most famous story in the collection and the only piece I remember having previously read in this volume.  These slice-of-life vignettes are beautiful for the elegant prose Joyce is known for, and I very much enjoyed them. Reading this one is a a bit of work-up to see if I'm finally going to undertake reading Ulysses this year, a daunting work I've been wanting to read for two decades. The author's prose in Dubliners fascinates me, so I'm thinking yes, I am going to try and take that leap this year. When I do, believe me, I'll be chronicling the experience here. But that's not happening just yet. I'm closing the year out by reading through the three issues of Hellebore I recently ordered online and thinking about fitting in one last novel, although what that is, I cannot yet say.

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Playlist:

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre

Metallica - Master of Puppets

Shellac - To All Trains

Exhalants - Atonement

Ministry - HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES

Fvnerals - Let the Earth Be Silent

Mrs. Piss - Self-Surgery

Blood Incantation - Absolute Everywhere

Faith No More - Album of the Year

Pitch Black Manor - Halloween Scene 

Marilyn Manson - One Assassination Under God Chapter 1

Turnstile - GLOW ON

Urge Overkill - Saturation

Saigon Blue Rain - Oko

Fen - Epoch

Steve More - Christmas Bloody Christmas OST

Willie Nelson - Pretty Paper

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Reconciling My Love of Siamese Dream w/ My Hatred for Mr. Corgan

I have to preface the following piece by saying up front, there is no way to properly quantify how much I revile The Smashing Pumpkins and, specifically, the man at the heart of the group. I don't want to be unnecessarily mean to anyone, not even some "rock star" I don't personally know, but if I'm going to discuss them in any kind of positive light, my "hate disclaimer" needs to come first. My feelings are strong enough that I would never want to be mistaken for a fan. Why? Because everything the band has done since Siamese Dream is literal anathema to me. So much so that I stopped paying any kind of attention to them over a decade ago but their continued existence still pisses me right the fuck off!

Over the weekend, K and I drove to Dayton, Ohio to visit her Grandmother. As has become our habit on road trips, we fired up Yacy Salek's Podcast Bandsplain. Scrolling the list of episodes, we eventually chose the two-part Smashing Pumpkins deep-dive. 

I know very little about the Pumpkins post-Meloncollie (sorry billy, not spelling it your way), and what little I gleaned about that magnum stain upon release has long since been recorded over in my memory banks. Because of this, I figured the episode would be equally enlightening, justifying and, of course, hysterical. Salek has already demonstrated her own penchant for taking corgan with a grain of salt on the Soundgarden deep-dive we listened to last month, so I figured, let's hear what someone who likes the music but not necessarily the artist thinks. 

Upon finishing the first installment, K and I drove around Dayton listening to Siamese Dream, and something clicked. I realized that, for all intents and purposes, the corgan who wrote Siamese Dream (and Gish) left this existence in 1994 and was replaced by some kind of doppelgänger cooked up in a corporate lab. This idea felt like a new approach to settle the cognitive dissonance I've had about embracing this record again after all this time.

When Siamese Dream hit record stores in 1993, it immediately became one of my favorite albums of all time. I cannot stress how much this album colored my final year in High School. The music was perfect for a burgeoning stoner and his high school stoner sweetheart; my black-clad girlfriend and I listened to it obsessively, interwoven betwixt all the Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer we thrived on at the time. It's big, fuzzy sonic boom and soft, lilting aquatic passages marked our days and nights and quickly became interwoven in my memories. The song "Disarm," in particular, hit at a time when a friend was arrested and eventually convicted of murdering a younger girl in our group. While "Disarm" has since become emotionally ubiquitous for the general population, its effect will likely always remain strong for me. I have such a strong emotional association between it and the horror and frustration I felt at that time. Hearing it now conjures a balm from thirty years ago. At a time when my life and understanding of the world was crumbling around me, this band seemed to have some kind of parallel. That felt like everything. 

That said, I'm choosing to post the track "Hummer" today because, as Salek points out during her episode, this track is often overlooked. In fact, listening to this masterpiece again with fresh ears, I'd say it might just be the best - or at least my favorite - song on the record. 

Playing this record several times over the weekend - and in fact, even now while I type this - I'm shocked at how much I love it. A lot of my life as a music fan has involved figuring out ways to continue relationships with music made by artists who eventually reveal themselves to be cunts. There is no better example than The Smashing Pumpkins. There is zero chance I'll ever connect with anything after this album (see what I did there?), but I'm taking this one back (However, I have said that before).

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Watch:

Let's lighten the mood. You know, there was a lot of talk about the Netflix Menendez Brothers movie this year. Tabloid true crime isn't my jam, but for my money, there's only one movie about that particular case:

I laughed so hard I cried. This Letterman YouTube channel is one of my favorite finds of the year. I'm not very YouTube savvy, so every time I see a video like this, I try to remind myself that, at this point the streaming giant is essentially our social memory of the last forty or fifty years. Everything is on it. 

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Read:

Over the extended weekend, I had my first chance to really sit down and read in a while, so I was finally able to finish IvyTholen's Mother Dear. The fact that this is the second novel Ivy has published this year makes me think she's something of a superhero, as Mother Dear is just as tightly paced and joyously readable as her other novels. The characters were extremely well designed, but by their nature, anathema to me; however, that didn't keep me from rocketing through this one once I got a few hours to actually focus on it again. 

Next up is Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger:

This is not the edition I'm reading. However, this is one of the illustrations from inside the book, and I LOVE it so much that I couldn't pass up using it to represent this nefarious novella. The Mysterious Stranger begins in Austria during the winter of 1590 and is narrated by one of three boys who begin a casual friendship with an Angel named Satan. Now, never mind that the Angel tells them he is not THE Satan, the boys find themselves swooning for this charming being who hands out money and favors like it's nothing at all. Satan also talks down about the Human Race every chance he gets (can't really blame him, even all these years later). At the heart of the boys' education and the Stranger's criticisms is The Moral Sense, Humanity's inbourne conceit that they can determine what is right and what is wrong (not between what is right and what is wrong). The way Twain writes the characters and scenarios is subtle enough to completely belie the fact that there are some absolutely horrifying ideas here. At one point, the narrator touches on the recent spate of Witch burnings, including an incident where eleven children were burned. It's bafflingly scary and definitely deserves way more recognition as a work of Literate Horror Fiction than it gets.

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Playlist:

Spoon - They Want My Soul

Marilyn Manson - One Assassination Under God, Chapter 1

Ministry - HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES

Bandspain Podcast - The Smashing Pumpkins Part 1

My Chemical Romance - The Black Parade

The Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream

The Smashing Pumpkins - Zero (single; for shit-talking purposes only. I hate this song)

Bandsplain Podcast - The Smashing Pumpkins Part 2

Best Coast - Boyfriend (single)

Radiohead - Kid A

The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead

NIN - Not the Actual Events

NIN - Add Violence

NIN - Bad Witch

NIN - Year Zero

The Knife - Shaking the Habitual

Crystal Castles - II

Entropy - Dharmak​ā​ya 

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Page of Wands

• Six of Wands

• Seven of Wands

That's a lot of Wands. So what is this trying to tell me as I come off a long weekend and a small road trip? Wands are all about WILL, so I instantly read this as an instruction to knuckle back down, apply the will and finish the book. I am SO close now; on the final Grammarly edit, but only about 40% of the way through reading it out loud to K. After that, I'll send it to my trusted Beta Reader, wait to hear back and make any changes she suggests that will help the overall book. But I am extremely happy so far, and have considered shopping this around to publishers. We'll see.