The Bookhouse Boys

From the hallucinatory reverberations of the sax that opens this track, to the seething keyboards that close it, here's an entry from the original Twin Peaks series first OST that often gets taken for granted. Plus, the Bookhouse Boys!

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Watch:

A few nights back, K and I finally got around to watching the copy of Criterion's 40th Anniversary, 4K restoration of David Lynch's The Elephant Man. This proved to be a deeply emotional experience, not just because of the movie itself, which is an emotional juggernaut, but also because of Criterion's loving restoration of the film and DP Freddie Francis' realization of Lynch's glorious Black and White vision.

This is one of Lynch's films I had only seen twice before: once just after High School, a few years after I got into Twin Peaks' original airing, and once when I bought the DVD released in the early 00s. Neither viewing proved super memorable to me at the time, and now, I can't imagine why that would be. 

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Playlist:

ACDC - Highway to Hell

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis - Carnage

Alan Vega - Saturn Strip

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Push the Sky Away

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Skeleton Tree

David Lynch and Marek Zebrowski - Polish Night Music

Aphex Twin - Syro

John Carpenter - Lost Themes III: Alive After Death

Ilsa - Preyer

Angelo Badalamenti - Twin Peaks OST

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Card:

 

As the Firey aspect of Fire, we're doubling down on activity, aka actually getting some shit done. The pre-sale for Murder Virus is underway (I officially announced it on social media last night), and I'm taking a bit of a breather by editing a friend's first novel. Meanwhile, I'm reading up on Hassan I Sabbah and the Assassins, as well as the Tetragrammaton, both subjects that will inform the next two books of the Shadow Play series.

As a side note, if you're reading this and you pre-ordered Murder Virus back when I originally announced it here, please allow me to ask a favor of you. Go back in, cancel that order, and then re-order the book. Due to a printing error with the proofs I was sent, the early pre-orders will be getting an inferior edit of the book, thus I'm trying to catch the few that may have gotten through and get those folks squared away with the definitive version.

Blanck Mass

 It's strange to me that, for all the time I spend listening to the artists on Sacred Bones, I somehow never heard Blanck Mass before yesterday. I'd seen the name, but somehow I just never clicked a link or happened upon anything organically. That changed yesterday when I somehow realized that Blanck Mass is the solo project/primary focus of Benjamin John Power, or as I knew him, one half of Fuck Buttons. I'd lost track of Fuck Buttons these last few years, and it's hard to believe it was a decade ago that I saw them at LA's Troubadour, where they blew my mind and ears in a volatile set of insane noise/techno/edm/soundscapery. Upon learning of Blanck Mass's pedigree, I started with this, the first single from In Ferneaux, out tomorrow on Sacred Bones. I then went to 2019's Animated Violence Mild and proceeded to absolutely fall in love with it. I mean, I listened to this fucker at least five times in a row over the course of my workday.

Order In Ferneaux or any of the other Blanck Mass records - all of which I plan on getting around to sooner rather than later - from Sacred Bones HERE of the Blanck Mass Bandcamp HERE.

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Watch:

 

I haven't been in much of a Horror mood of late, however, yesterday I came home and took my near-customary Thursday nap on the couch with Shudder TV's Slashics channel on. When I woke up, I did so in time to catch Preston DeFrancis' 2018 Slasher-esque Ruin Me. I quite liked this one and; Ruin Me definitely plays with tropes we've seen before - maybe too much of late, hence why it took this long and happenstance to get me to watch it - but it's really good at what it does, and it has enough of a fresh spin on the Slasher/Extreme Haunted House set-up to make it unique and interesting. And no, it's not actually a 'haunted house,' but you'll see what I mean when you watch it. Which I'm recommending you do.

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Playlist:

Blanck Mass - Starstuff (Single)

Blanck Mass - Animated Violence Mild

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis - Carnage

Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf

How to Destroy Angels - Welcome Oblivion

Jim Williams - Possessor OST

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Perseverance in the face of frustration and or routine. This final final final edit on Murder Virus is killing me, but it will pay off HUGE in the end, making the book that much tighter, and thus I hope, compelling and enjoyable, with a healthy dose of "WTF?!?" thrown in for good measure come the fourth part. Still, reading the same book four times in as many months can be pretty fucking difficult, even if it is something you consider quite possibly your best work to date.

Genghis Tron - Ritual Circle

 

More new Genghis Tron. Very much looking forward to this record when it drops! Pre-order Dream Weapon - out March 26th - from Relapse Records HERE.

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READ:

I wanted to plant this HERE. really for myself, so I can find it again easily later. In going through old Orbital Operations emails for inspiration, I found this link to Sean Bonner's website. I am wholly unfamiliar with Mr. Bonner, or at least I was before reading this - but it's interesting that I read this now. There would appear to be a lot of synchronicities with me reading this post at the moment, not the least of which is that I'm about to turn 45. Anyway, since Orbital Operations went on hiatus last year, I've sorely lacked intermittent missives that at least in some regard pertain to the process of writing or creating or just structuring time (hence re-read old OOs), and Mr. Bonner's newsletter looks as though it may help fill that void.

 

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NCBD:

This is obviously a big one. I'm curious if, after the reveal at the end of issue #1, The Last Ronin will remain so highly sought after. My guess is no, but who knows? Also, who cares - the book is bad ass and I'm super excited for the next chapter.

One of my favorite series in years, issue #4 of We Live kind of set the whole series on its ear, and if I'm not mistaken, this is the final issue of the series. 

Another final issue. Hopefully, both We Live and Miskatonic will be back with second seasons. If not, it's been a hell of a ride for both in a very short time.

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Playlist:

Nothing - The Great Dismal

Dance with the Dead - B-Sides, Vol. 1

Teenage Wrist - Earth is a Black Hole

Ozzy Osbourne - The Ultimate Sin

Ozzy Osbourne - No More Tears

Mr. Bungle - Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny

Primitive Man - Immersion

Ceremony - In the Spirit World Now (Synthetic Remixes)

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Balance and synthesis, two things I'm a skosh hung up on at the moment. I received the proofs of Murder Virus and am a bit underwhelmed at how the art looks in person. Also, I found a fucking typo on the first page! WTF!!! I've gone over this so much, I'm no longer seeing what's in front of my face. Ultimately, all this is easy to fix before the on-sale date of 3/23/21, but it's the point. 

Pre-orders for Murder Virus are Live!

 

Off the top of my head, you know what'd be cool? Some new music from King Woman in 2021. I'll keep checking their Bandcamp and hope for the best.

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Pre-order:

The culmination of eleven months of work is finally official! Murder Virus releases everywhere on March 23rd - one day before my 45th birthday and exactly 374 days after the early morning trip to a barren Trader Joes to wait in line for scraps that convinced me I'd be crazy not to dig out the manuscript for the first successful piece of long-form fiction I ever wrote, dust it off, and re-write it.

2007 - in order to cope with the constant insanity of working retail for the first time in my life - as a manager to boot - I wrote The Secret Life of Murder, a novel about a murder virus that moves through the population, causing people to kill one another in epic scale. The idea was to create a harmless microcosm where I could vent my frustrations with fictionalized violence. It was my first attempt at writing a novel that I actually thought worked, and I always kept it in the back of my mind that I would dust it off one day and re-write it. Well, what better time than during an actual viral pandemic? So that's why the second Shadow Play book was delayed - I literally shifted gears in the middle of writing it to focus on this. 

The title Murder Virus, which I hated at first, worked its way into my brain stem and eventually convinced me to love it, especially after a friend compared it in simplicity and 'high concept' to Fight Club, which also sounds pretty generic until you actually read it. That's my feeling with this one, too. Murder Virus is a lot darker and stranger than I realized while writing it, and the story does not end up anywhere I could have predicted. This makes it my favorite thing I've written to date. I'm extremely proud of this one, and obviously, because of the infusion of mental, physical, and historical elements of the past year, it's special to me and will no doubt always remain so; a time capsule of 2020 and where my head and emotions were while navigating the most difficult year (so far) of my life.

You can pre-order Murder Virus from Barnes and Noble HERE.

You can pre-order Murder Virus from Amazon HERE.

And the pre-order for Murder Virus from Indiebound isn't up yet but should be in a day or two (same with the Barnes and Noble paperback - right now they only have the ebook added to their site).

If you have a brick-n-mortar book store and really want to do me a solid, ask them to order a few copies from Ingram. They'll know how to do it. Oh, and thanks for reading!

Also, as always, that beautiful cover design was my concept executed well above my expectations by Jonathan Grimm. His website is HERE - check it out!

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Playlist:

White Lung - Eponymous

Beth Gibbons, The Polish National Radio Sympony Orchestra & Krzysztof Pernderecki - Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3

Danzig - Danzig III: How the Gods Kill

The Besnard Lakes - A Coliseum Complex

Ozzy Osbourne - The Ultimate Sin

The Maine - You Are OK

Windhand - Eternal Return

White Ward - Live Exchange Failure

Nirvana - Bleach

Guns N' Roses - Appetite for Destruction

P.M. Dawn - Set Adrift on Memory Bliss

King Woman - Doubt EP

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Applying this card to the announcement above.

Crash into Eternity

 

I was super happy to finally get a copy of Criterion's recently released Blu Ray for David Cronenberg's Crash. Not only has the film become my second favorite Cronenberg just in the two years since I first saw it at 2018's Beyondfest Cronenberg retrospective, but Howard Shore's score is probably my favorite of his music for Cronenberg's films. Here's the title theme, some of the sickest guitar I have ever heard. 

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I guess I won't be getting rid of my Disney + sub any time soon... Wow. Just wow. The mind reels at what we could get from a What If? series down the road. Some of my favorites from the comic series - which I didn't buy regularly but always picked up if one of the 'What If' scenarios spoke to my particular Marvel series proclivities:

We're not really in a position with the MCU to see this kind of stuff happen, but then again, who is to say that the What If? show will only stick to variations of what the MCU has done so far?

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Read:

In preparation of the upcoming final issue of Rick Remender and Jerome Opena's Seven to Eternity, I've just completed a re-read of the series to date. Next? The final issue of Gideon Falls lands this Wednesday, and as such, I have begun to work my way back through that series. 

Creepy AF, and featuring some of my favorite art EVER, I'm super psyched to be taking this trip again just in time for the end of the story.

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Playlist:

Joseph Deluca - Evil Dead 2

Deafheaven - New Bermuda

Michael Kiwanuka - KIWANUKA

Mrs. Piss - Self-Surgery

Radiohead - Kid A

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full

Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher

Meg Myers - Sorry

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

La Hell Gang - Thru Me Again

Howard Shore - Crash OST

Cynic - Kindly Bent to Free us

The Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once

Greg Puciato - Child Soldier: Creator of God

Michael Kiwanuka - KIWANUKA

Zeal and Ardor - Wake of a Nation EP

Allegaeon - Apoptosis

Loathe - I Let It in and It Took Everything

Deafheaven - 10 Years Gone

 

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Card:

8 of Wands - Swiftness. Eights always move on from the stoic, sturdy Netzach (7s) to a transient moment of swift action and/or decisiveness.

Time to switch gears again. My beta reader has finished Murder Virus, I have all her suggestions and edits logged and, mostly, completed. Now I need to pursue the cover art I want and get this fucker ready to publish by the end of January.

Isolation: Day 152

 

I never realized this song is an homage to Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero. It's obvious, really, but somehow I missed it. 

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Let's talk about Comics. In fact, let's talk specifically about one comic: Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples' Saga.

 

I had honestly not realized that issue 54 of Saga came out two bloody years ago! I mean, like every other die hard fan, I am very aware that the cliffhanger lingers, but two years? Wow. All I can say is, I am absolutely fine with the hiatus, knowing that when Saga does return, the tracks will be greased for month-after-month, on-time issues. My gut tells me before the end of this year, but we'll see.

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Something occurred to me earlier today as I sat finishing my re-read of Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero. The idea that the narrator Clay may be responsible for some of the atrocities that occur 'off-screen.' His sister's dead cat; the girl tied up and murdered at the Palm Springs party a year before. There's a number of horrible events he can't be responsible for in the book, thus is Clay and his peers soulless, vapid world, but Clay's disassociation from the people and world around him - a disassociation we revisit in the 2010 sequel Imperial Bedrooms only to find Clay may well have grown into a psychopath over the intervening thirty years between books - feels like it might just hide a burgeoning killer. My theory then is this is not a concrete interpretation, but definitely an element of the character that planted the seeds for Patrick Bateman in Ellis' second novel, American Psycho. Bateman himself then evolves in Ellis' 2005 masterpiece Lunar Park. 

In finishing Zero, I took to the internet to see if anyone else has ever discussed these possibilities, and though I didn't find that, I did find a fantastic article about Zero, which you can read HERE and is absolutely worth your time if you're an Ellis fan.

After finishing Zero, I am now on to Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. As I mentioned here recently, although I have read almost all of Palahniuk's work up to and including Pygmy, this is my first time reading Fight Club, being that I've been away from his work long enough now that I find myself at a place where I don't feel like my love of the movie will work against my reading of the work it is based on. I'm very much looking forward to comparing and contrasting the novel with the film, something I would have possibly had trouble doing previously.

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Playlist:

Protomartyr - Agent Intellect

Run the Jewels - RTJ4

X - Los Angeles

Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey

Otis Redding - Otis Blue

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower

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Back to my original Thoth deck for today's Pull:

 

I have a complicated relationship with the Wands suit. Where wands are Will and a more logic-based interpretation, ten is Malkuth, and therefore wholly of the material world. This basically tells me I'm spending too much time distracted by shit like movie and tv, and that I need to spend more time working. It was a good feeling yesterday when I passed the final version of Murder Virus - now 100% the title of the new book regardless of whether I end up publishing it through THV Press or not - off to my first beta reader. For the first time since mid-March, I closed all Scrivener documents pertaining to MV and re-opened those for Shadow Play Book Two. Now, the real work begins.