I Watched Nowhere again last night, this time with K, and it turns out it was Director Greg Araki's birthday! Wow, I guess it's kind of kismet that I fall in love with this movie now. Such an amazing soundtrack - the CD for which hauls a cool $99 on eBay - and of the countless incredible songs and artists represented - minus hole and filter - "Vendetta" by Adorable really stands out. A bit of research shows that this band kind of got swallowed by time and the digitization of the music industry because aside from people posting this on YouTube, it is, ahem, Nowhere to be found.
Watch:
I followed Nowhere with Alex Cox's Repo Man. A classic, yes, but one I've only ever watched one other time, and that was in 2018!
I don't know how I missed out on Repo Man in the 80s, 90s, 00s, and most of the 10s - hell, I saw Cox's Straight to Hell more than a decade before I saw this - but Repo Man made a pretty deep impression on me upon first viewing and more than lived up to that watching it again. Perfect double feature with Nowhere.
NCBD:
This week's pull:
Every issue I've read of Epitaphs From the Abyss has been fantastic, so really looking forward to continuing the anthology vibes this month!
Si Spurrier's Hellblazer epic comes to a close, and yes, while we knew Morpheus would be appearing, I didn't expect to see the pre-Daniel version. Can't wait to see what this is about and how this tale concludes.
Not super jazzed about this book, but I'm still going to give it the benefit of the doubt. Seriously though - put Baroness back in the tight black leather already, will ya?
This cover instantly sells this issue. I think Jason Aaron's TMNT has now moved to monthly, but I knew that was coming. So far, I'm not going anywhere.
Playlist:
John Harrison - Day of the Dead OST
Pixies - Doolittle
Pixies - Come On Pilgrim
Pixies - Bossonova
Chat Pile - Cool World
The Los Angeles League of Musicians - LA LOM
Ozzy Osbourne - No More Tears
Justin Hamline - The House With Dead Leaves
The Soft Moon - Criminal
Today's card for study is the Prince of Cups:
"Emotional depths honed by intellect."
The airy aspect of water, or the intellectual side of emotion. What's that you say? "Intellectual side of emotion sounds like an oxymoron?"
Yes.
That said, this card should be taken as a reminder to strive to not let our emotions get the better of us, or a clue that our reason is clouded by emotion.
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.
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.
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.
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
