Pistol

 

Pistols wise, I loved Danny Boyle's Pistol. I've watched every doc I know of, read and re-read Noel Monk's tour biography 12 Days on the Road (can't recommend that one enough), but none of that prevents me from adoring Boyle's spin. K and I even teared up at the end, and not for the reasons you'd think.

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Watch:

I had not even heard of this film, but it looks fantastic.

 

Charlotte Colbert's first full-length film comes to us as a "Dario Argento Presents," and from the visuals, I can see why he would be involved. A lush, Gothic aesthetic with a British sentiment. 

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NCBD:

A decidedly light NCBD. Thankfully.

I've decided I'm continuing with this new iteration of ASM at least until the legacy issue #900 hits in a month or two. After that, we'll see. So far though, this has been a pretty great title. 

That Texas Blood returns with the start of it's third story arc. If it's even half as good as the previous one, well, look at that cover. How could it not be?

The cover says it all - a Hulkified God of Thunder! Banner of War has proven a super fun, big-swings story and I'm hoping that as it comes in for a landing, it just gets crazier. 

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Playlist:

Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks...

Bauhaus - In the Flat Field

My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult - Confessions of a Knife

Tin Machine - Live at La Cigale, Paris, June 25th, 1989

Zeal and Ardor - Eponymous

Eldovar - A Story of Darkness and Light

H6LLB6ND6R - Side A

Jucifer - I Name You Destroyer

Horsegirl - Version of Modern Performance

Download - The Eyes of Stanley Pain

Cypress Hill - III: Temples of Boom

The Day That David Bowie Died

I'd be willing to wager there's another post on this page from about four years ago with the same title. I remember discovering David J's stunning tribute to David Bowie about as vividly as I remember receiving the text that told me of the Alien's passing. This is the perfect ode - sorrow at a passing lined the bittersweet memories of what that person meant.

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Watch:

With only one-and-a-half episodes of the six-episode run, I can honestly say that despite the conundrum of seeing thumbnail advertisements for Danny Boyle's Pistol with a Disney+  watermark - because I'm assuming since Disney owns HULU and Pistol is a HULU original their network will distribute it in some foreign territories - I'm having A LOT of fun with this one. 

 

This is very much Steve Jones' story, so I thought it only prudent to juxtapose my endorsement with John Lydon's rebuttal to the show. Because, you know, there is always creative license.

 

I'm always going to believe John over everyone else involved, however, the story is one that mesmerizes and recharges me enough that I'll listen to everyone's version of it.

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Playlist:

Blanck Mass - Animated Violence Mild

Oh Baby - The Art of Sleeping Alone EP

Kate Bush - The Dreaming

Kate Bush - Hounds of Love

Tori Amos - Cornflake Girl (single)

Revocation - The Outer Ones

Drug Church - Hygiene

Jim Williams - Possessor OST

Dreadstar

 

Sweden's Watain has a new album on the horizon and the new single features Farida Lemouchi from The Devil's Blood and Molasses on guest vocals for part of the song. "We Remain" strikes me as the kind of track you need to hear in the context of the entire album that surrounds it in order to fully appreciate it, but it's a spooky track, with elements of The Devil's Blood and even a hint of Type O in the keys near the end.

Always great to hear Farida's vocals. Also, really cool video, directed by Johan Bååth. You can pre-order the new album The Agony and Ecstasy of Watain from Nuclear Blast records HERE.   

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Dollar Bin:

After a rough couple days at work last week, I spent about a good half hour flipping through the dollar bins at my home away from home, Manhattan Beach's The Comic Bug. Here's one of the gems I walked away with:

Jim Starlin's Dreadstar, published by Marvel's Epic Comics - sort of their version of Vertigo before there was a Vertigo - was a book I saw on comic shop shelves back in the 80s when I first started going to Heroland Comics in Worth, Illinois (the location attached to the Post Office on the Southwest corner of 11th and Harlem), and All American comics in Orland Park, on the second floor of a long-gone strip mall somewhere around 151st and LaGrange. These were the first two shops I ever frequented, and I'd make my poor Mother wait in the car while I went in and looked around for probably over an hour somedays, soaking in all the books that intrigued me but I couldn't afford to spend my money on. Dreadstar registered as something I might be into but wasn't quite sure; I've always dug SciFi, but when I was younger I was quite discerning when it came to anything I thought might be second-tier compared to my (then) first love, Star Wars*. In the last few years, I've really begun to look at the various waves of SciFi that hit post-Lucas, seeing a lot of it as forming a sort of genre in and of itself. The smelting pool of comics, TSR role-playing games, arcade games and knock-off SciFi movies (Creature, I'm looking at you, albeit with something approximating love) have formed a kind of gestalt in my mind, a nostalgic feeling that there was something very special brewing with the more street-level, hobby/comic shop SciFi than I'd previously given credit. This gestalt has become something of an unachievable haunting; I try to think about it in defining, cohesive terms. I try to channel its atmosphere, tone and texture. I fail to do any of this with any degree of accuracy that allows me to completely possess it. So when I see a book like Dreadstar that I associate with being possibly instrumental to this nearly ineffable sub-genre I loosely refer to as simply Hobby Shop SciFi in my head, I grab it. 

Thus, I picked up issues three and four of Dreadstar and sat just flipping through the pages, enraptured by what I'd found for a mere dollar. These books feel like a piece of history. SciFi history. 80s history. My history. And maybe that's what all this comes down to, a nostalgic tickle I can't scratch; a deeply entrenched tapestry of memories and memory triggers that move further away the more I try to reach them. Because, you know, you can't reach the past, you can only catch occasional glimpses from our limited, human perspective. And isn't that what an awful lot of SciFi tries to undermine and eclipse? 

*Don't even get me started on how much condescension I reserve for pretty much every iteration of Star Trek.

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Destroy:

 

I. 

Can't. 

Fucking. 

Wait.

 

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Playlist:

M83 - Saturdays=Youth

Quicksand - Slip

sElf - Breakfast with Girls

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre

Drug Church - Hygiene EP

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Love's Refrain (single)

M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming

sElf - Gizmodgery

Prince - Sign O' The Times

David Bowie - Let's Dance

Dance with the Dead - Driven to Madness

Crowded House - Don't Dream it's Over (single)

Suicidal Tendencies - Lights... Camera... Revolution

Ghost - Impera

Revocation - The Outer Ones

Les Discrets - Prédateurs

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Card:

Balance is definitely something I struggle with these days. It's not just the ever-present, background hum of anxiety and existential horror the world of 2022 elicits, it's my reliance on caffeine and heavy metal to get me through the day, which works, but is also difficult to come down from even 15 hours after I wake up. Sleep is a luxury that I do not get enough of, and my ongoing deficit has been wreaking havoc with my cognitive skills and motor functions. I spend so much time during the day re-revving my engine that it's hard to 'chill' later on. I would resort to smoking ludicrous amounts of dope, except I'm trying not to smoke based on my lung condition, and the tincture I have has unpredictable onset times and effects. 

The Filth and the Fury

 

Last night, I showed K Julien Temple's Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury for the first time. This was my third time seeing it, first in probably ten years. It reminded me just how much I love the Pistols, a love that wasn't always there, but came on strong after readng Tour Manager Noel Monk's tour bio Twelve Days on the Road, which I have now slotted up for a re-read sometime in the new year. Love them or hate them, Never Mind the Bollocks still stands as possibly the most pivotal 12 songs ever recorded.

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Watch:

 

Along with The Filth and the Fury, this weekend we also watched Floria Sigismondi's film The Runaways, the 2010 biopic about the all-female rock band of the same name. I'd seen this one before, back when it first hit video. The Runaways was my first inclination that Kristen Stewart could act, and although the film still looks to me as though large chunks were edited out before release, it's a great story about an awesome band I don't listen to nearly enough. One of K's favorite groups, I've definitely picked them up more since we started dating, but I really need to dig in on my own.

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Playlist:

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Damn the Torpedoes

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

My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult - Confessions of a Knife

Death Valley Girls - Under the Spell of Joy

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicenter

Horseback  The Invisible Mountain

Curtis Harding - Face Your Fear

Cold Cave - Cherish the Light Years

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Card:

The cups runneth over. Let's hope so. 

Sex Pistols - The Filth and the Fury

Been a while since I've watched this, but it's essential viewing for Lydon/Pistols fans.

Sex Pistols 1/10/78 Longhorn Ballroom, Dallas TX - Bodies

Classic Rotten. Part of the 12 tour dates that changed the world.

Heartbreakers - Pirate Love

I'm relatively new to Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers. They'd been on my radar ever since first reading Noel Monk's 12 Days on the Road circa 1996/7 - an awesome book about the Sex Pistols only US tour (the half of it they played that is) written by the band's tour manager (Monk). Anyway, everybody in the first wave of British punk seemed to look up to Thunders and his band - for better or worse - but somehow their music always seemed strangely out of reach to me. Fast forward to about three months ago on a Saturday. I was home listening to Henry Rollins' weekly radio broadcast on NPR affiliate KCRW. Mr. Rollins played a Heartbreakers song - I forget which one it was but it really grabbed my attention. Then our gracious radio host went on to talk about how the good folks at White Trash Soul Blogspot had gone through the many different editions of the band's record L.A.M.F. that are available (French, Italian, German, etc) and compiled what they believed to be the best composite edition, culling from all those different sources for each song's individual best possible mix.

Talk about a labor of love!!!

The site then made this ultimate edition of L.A.M.F. available for free download - you can link to it right from that site linked above. When you go there you'll also see that the white trash soul folks break down everything about the different records and how/why they chose what they chose. It's fascinating. And the end is result is fantastic listening.