This Patrol of Ours is Doomed

 

After loving the first season, I never really got around the second or third of Doom Patrol. K and I did have a false start where we watched a handful of episodes, but honestly, I barely remember anything about it. So I started up from the beginning of Season 2 this week, and I'm once again in love with this fantastically mad adaptation/distillation of (mostly) Grant Morrison's six-volume run on the C-Building X-Men. 

---

---

---

Read:

After savoring it for over ten years, I finally finished Ramsey Campbell's definitive collection Alone With the Horrors.

This collection was curated by the author himself, so it represents the stories from his early career that he feels are his finest. It's dense, perhaps because a lot of the oldest stories in here, hailing from as far back as the early 60s when Campbell first began to write, read verbose in a way that often feels unnecessary. That said, all the imagery and all the concepts here are fantastic. As the collection goes on, however, you begin to discover some absolute short fiction gems among these pages. Of particular note for me were 

Man in the underpass

The Depths

Down There

The Hands

Again

Seeing the World

The Other Side

Boiled Alive

End of the Line

That last one is nothing like it sounds like it would be. Campbell actually wrote the forward to this edition and talks briefly about how Boiled Alive is his attempt at Science Fiction. All of these are extremely British and characterized by solitude, rain, and a general social malignancy that fits with the Britain I've gotten to know through the New Wave British Comic writers of the late 70s-mid 80s. Likewise, the final story in this volume, End of the Line, feels about as close as a writer ever got to demonstrating literal madness in prose. A freaky and fantastic journey into a mind seriously deluded by knowing nothing of the world except the religion foisted upon him by a father that never let him leave the house and taught him everything in the world outside the window is evil. Now imagine that person having to go outside for the first time by themselves.

Chilling.

---

---

---

Playlist:

Steve Moore - The Mind's Eye OST

The Thirsty Crows - Hangman's Noose

Revocation - Teratogenesis

Plague Bringer - Life Songs in a Land of Death

Bret Easton Ellis Podcast - S6E21: Platinum Patreon Q&A

Clint Mansell & Kevin Kiner - Doom Patrol: Season 1 OST

Deafheaven - Sunbather

Ghost Bath - Moonlover

Deafheaven - Infinite Granite

Deafheaven - From the Kettle Onto the Coil (Single)

Deafheaven - Black Brick (Single)

---

---

---

Card:

A quick Pull from Missi's Raven deck to bring me into the weekend:

A reminder to remember my equilibrium. 

2019: February 3rd

I saw ATW's name on a movie I watched recently but I can't quite place what it was. I thought for sure it was Dead Wax, but I can't seem to find any acknowledgement of that online. Either way, these guys are pretty great and it's good to see them breaking through to a larger audience.

It's been a wicked weekend of hard rain in Southern California. We needed it. Wish it would continue, but there's the sun, already poking out from behind the clouds, drying up all the moisture. The rain always inspires new creative bursts in me, and the second story for my inevitable follow-up to A Collection of Desires is in the bank. Can't wait to see what comes next.

Earlier last week, I picked up Ramsey Campbell's Alone with the Horrors again. This is a collection of Campbell's short fiction from 1961-1991. I've had this for years, inspired to purchase it after a customer from back in my border's days recommended I read the short story Again. That story made quite the impression on me, but during my initial attempt at reading the entire volume, I've only ever made it through a handful of the other tales. Early last year I began again, re-reading those first few stories, but once again moved on. Now that I've returned to Alone with the Horrors a third time however, I am finding it hard to put down. The stories are fantastic; bleak and grey like the skies in the author's native Britain, with an often cold and terse style that matches the somewhat frumpy aesthetic Britain seemed bathed in during the 70s/80s. In particular, the story The Brood, from 1976, impressed me. My intention is to read a few tales from this one in between novels, the next of which will be Gemma Files' Experimental Film.

Playlist from 2/02:

Ozzy Osbourne - Blizzard of Ozz
Black Sabbath - Vol. 4
Black Sabbath - Eponymous
Ozzy Osbourne - Ultimate Sin
Skid Row - Slave to the Grind

Card of the day:

These pulls are all tied up in a personal drama with a friend. This will hopefully work itself out over the next week. Good to see the Six of Wands again, though.

Recent Acquisitions in the Arena of the Printed Page

Eddie Campbell is a certifiable comics genius. Possibly best known for his insanely well researched and rendered graphic depiction of Victorian London in From Hell (written by another comics Master Alan Moore) Campbell's graphic style can be deceptively off-putting at first glance, but I assure you the man is a visual tour de force and a born storyteller. Alec, a tome of over 600 pages, is an autobiographical epic that has had my eye on the book shelf for some time.






























Though first of course I have to finish:







































And Interspersed throughout, some light holiday short stories: