We bring Seven Days Celebrating Steve Albini's career with a track from what is, in my opinion, one of the greatest production statements in Independent Rock history. Really, The Jesus Lizard's Goat, Liar and Down are all neck and neck for that honor, all produced by Albini.
NCBD:
Pretty robust week, considering how I've downsized. Here we go:
I could have sworn this book ended with issue five, but here we are at #6, and the end isn't for another month yet.
Love this cover. Feels like this book was on a little hiatus, glad to have it back.
This Untold Destiny of the Foot Clan book is proving to be considerably better than I originally anticipated. LOVING the art by Mateus Santolouco, so I'm here for that, at the very least. But I'm really interested in seeing where this Casey-Jones-with-the-bad-guys subplot goes, and overall, I dig seeing a continuation of The Foot's story without Shredder.
I'll just eat my words and say this now: so far, I love this book. I'm still not hip to ANYTHING Marvel has done with Aliens in comic form, but this? This is a really cool "What If" continuation of Cameron's Aliens.
So checked out on these. Last issue of this series, which means it should just be two issues to go before I can get out of the X-books altogether.
Watch:
The first teaser trailer for Francis Ford Coppola's upcoming Megalopolis dropped earlier in the week.
This is as far as I'll be going with trailers on this one. This film is slowly creeping into the role of one of my most anticipated films of the year. To read some of what FFC has said about this, I think this could be one of his greatest films (after Dracula and Apocalypse Now, of course).
Playlist:
Various - The Void OST
Graveyard - Lights Out
Yerusalem - The Sublime
Lustmord - Much Unseen Is Also Here
Ian Lynch - All You Need Is Death OST
Adam Egypt Mortimer - The Obelisk
Chelsea Wolfe - She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She
Amigo the Devil - Everything is Fine
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
• IV: The Emperor
• Knight of Pentacles
• Ace of Cups
Action; approach Earthly concerns with Intelligence, and an emotional breakthrough will follow. That's a bit fortune cookie vague for a reading, but I'm spent.
For these final two days of Steve Albini celebration, I wanted to highlight a few of the albums that his production made him sort of an extension of the band. So we start with Pigface's debut album, Gub, released thirty-three years ago next Tuesday. If I remember my history correctly, that's Albini tweaking knobs and creating those whirling synthesizer tones on the track.
Watch:
A short teaser for David Cronenberg's upcoming film The Shrouds recently dropped. It tells us nothing, and I'm fine with that.
This ends up being superfluous, as there's nothing that can make me more excited to see David Cronenberg's new film more than the fact that it's David Cronenberg's new film. Still, I like to post stuff like this here for posterity's sake. Here's a synopsis:
"The Shrouds” centers on Karsh, 50, a prominent businessman. Inconsolable since the death of his wife, he invents GraveTech, a revolutionary and controversial technology that enables the living to monitor their dear departed in their shrouds. One night, multiple graves, including that of Karsh’s wife, are desecrated. Karsh sets out to track down the perpetrators."
Cronenberg's previous film, Crimes of the Future, turned a lot of long-time fans off, but I found it thrilling. One of the only truly transgressive feeling Cinema viewings I've had in a long, long time.
Playlist:
Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats - Nell' ora blu
Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats - The Night Creeper
Bossk - .4
Pigface - Gub
Big Black - Songs About Fucking
Robot God - Portal Within
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
• Five of Swords
• Queen of Swords
• Seven of Swords
What's with the three-card suits the last two days? Weird. Not the best picture I've taken, but I find the white of this Bound deck makes it a bit tougher for me to photograph. Anyway...
Swords are all about Air, Intellect and, in a practical sense, relationships. Fives are Conflict, Queen Emotion and Seven's completion (Netzach - Victory!). In other words let passion guide the argument to a solution, or, perhaps more pragmatically, if they won't listen, scream at them.
Big Black's Songs About Fucking stands with early Ministry as one of the stalwarts of the Chicago Indie Sound of the 80s. While it's easy to draw comparisons to Industrial music because of the drum machine, Albini's vocals help it remain not so committed to any one genre. It's some important DNA, though, and a perfect record from start to finish.
Watch:
It had easily been 25 years since my first and only viewing of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13. The film popped up on Prime recently,* and Saturday night, I fired it up and remained rivetted throughout the entire run time.
When I first watched this back in my 20s, I know I dug it, but this was one I never really sought out to add to the collection, and now I just can't understand why. Despite immediate tendencies to embellish and decry this as my new favorite Carpenter film, Assault on Precinct 13 definitely jumps up into that upper echelon on his work, along with Halloween, The Thing and Prince of Darkness.
This one is raw! There's a scene that dropped my jaw (you know the one). Not that JC can't be brutal, but holy smoke muffins! And through the entire siege portion of the film, there is definitely that 'the calm before the storm' eeriness that percolates through Halloween, as well. The scene where the station receives the "Cholo" is just creepy A.F.
*I feel like amazon has been listening to me through the apps on my phone and actually sought to rectify my major gripe, namely that along with commercials in all their original programming now, most movies have migrated over to freevee. FUCK freevee.
Read:
Took some time this weekend to re-read James Tynion IV and Joshua Hixson's The Deviant before diving into the newest issue that came out this past Wednesday.
Reading this again, I have to say that The Deviant strikes me as possibly one of the creepiest psychological nightmare mind-fuck series ever published in comics. Five out of Nine issues notched and if this is going where I think it's going (but not necessarily how it's going to get there), Michael and Randall's stories are becoming more and more entwined, not just with each other, but with the Horrors of loneliness and social isolation that seem to have created a world of sad, deadly men.
Michael is telling us everything point blank; we're just not listening. It feels like this is exactly what it would be like to know a killer. I can say this because I knew one in my teens, and while looking back on his behavior with adult eyes after the fact, it becomes clear the signs were there all along; he wasn't steeped in killing the way a serial killer like the killer in The Deviant is.
You don't need to have had that experience, though. Tynion and Hixon's tale unfolds in such a character-driven way that we're drawn into their world and their lives. You can imagine being in Michael's boyfriend's shoes, the signs that are literally all over the place, but how do you put that together? How do you learn to distrust and fear people you love enough to properly interpret these silently telegraphed confessions?
We'll see.
Playlist:
Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats - Nell' ora blu
Big Black - Songs About Fucking
Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats - Blood Lust
Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats - The Night Creeper
The Jesus Lizard - Down
Steven Sanchez - Angel Face
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
Ian Lynch - All You Need Is Death OST
Tim Hecker - Infinity Pool OST
Black Sabbath - Paranoid
Moon Wizard - Sirens
Alice in Chains - Sap
Alice in Chains - Jar of Flies
Gold Class - Drum
Etta James -
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings - Give the People What They Want
Chuck Berry - Berry on Top
Various - Romantic Night in Playlist
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot Deck, which you can buy HERE.
I had a hankering for Grimm's Bound Tarot, so I broke that out for today's Pull.
• Page (Princess) of Pentacles
• Two of Pentacles
• Seven of Pentacles
Interesting. The first day back with this deck in months, and my entire Pull is Pentacles? Money has been on my mind - for both good and hesitant reasons. It's good right now, but I feel as though there is a shoe hanging above a drop of about 1000 feet. The Page/Princess indicates security, the Two partnership and the Seven Completion. That bodes pretty well, but I'm still feeling things out as I go along.
1000 Hurts was the first Shellac album I bought, and the one-two of "Prayer to God" and "Squirrel Song" really explains the band's style: light and dark, baby.
I keep feeling like I want to write more about Albini's passing, but I just don't have it in me to say anything that doesn't sound trite other than this sucks.
Deep, murky dreams last night, the kind that follow you right up to the door that leads back across the wall of sleep. I woke up before my 6:00 AM alarm feeling the need to begin the day with Sunn O)))'s new album Life Metal, which I'd yet to spin since its release (was holding out for the vinyl). So far, these tracks actually scare me a little bit, which is awesome. There's something to the sound this time, something Steve Albini no doubt helped add to the thick, rolling fog metal of this behemoth. Sunn O))) actually sound more massive, if that is possible. Life Metal would make a perfect soundtrack to a re-read I'm planning for John Langan's The Fisherman, a book I had some issues with as far as execution, but which still stands as probably the scariest novel I've ever read, and has stayed with me on an almost daily basis for two years now.
Speaking of great Weird/Horror fiction, I was unbelievably happy to see Nathan Ballingrud announce on Twitter yesterday that his first collection of short stories, North American Lake Monsters, was just picked up by Hulu as an anthology series. Mr. Ballingrud's continued success is well-earned, and it's nice to see that happen.
**
The Watchlist from 5/24 was the final episode of Joe Bob Briggs' The Last Drive-In on Shudder. Joe Bob played Blood Harvest and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, and while Hello Mary Lou is definitely better than the first Prom Night (its affiliation with the franchise apparently decided after the fact), I didn't much care for either film. However, that is totally not the point here. I watched these movies for Joe Bob's interruptions, and as always, he delivered. The Last Drive-In prom at the end of the episode was especially sweet and funny; can't wait for season 2, and I definitely find myself hoping there's a holiday marathon in the interim.
**
Playlist from 5/24:
Muggs - Dust
Pelican - Cold Hope (Pre-release single)
Pelican - Midnight and Mescaline (Pre-release single)
Faith No More - Angel Dust
The Raveonettes - Raven in the Grave
Melvins - Houdini
The Veils - Total Depravity
Card of the day:
Probably my favorite card in the Sword suite, this tells me I need to be very methodical today. I work, need very desperately to write again (still sick, still exhausted), and have plans to tape a new episode of The Horror Vision tonight. That's a lot to fit in feeling like I do. I'll need to be resourceful and above all focused.
Continuing this somewhat - to me anyway - fascinating record of the music I wake up with in my head, because there's always music there when I open my eyes to a new day, today it was one of the more nuanced tracks from 2016's Total Depravity by The Veils:
I say nuanced and I do not mean it in a negative way; every track off Total Depravity is marvelous, and what's more, The Veils are very good at doing that that thing that I love: all the tracks add up to make an outstanding full album, one that resonates on multiple harmonic levels when listened to as a whole. We're talking sonically, thematically, and overall aesthetically, this record shines. In fact, I'd call it one of the best 'albums' I've heard in years.
Playlist yesterday was sparse. I finally found my CD copy of Shellac's most recent record Dude Incredible so that may be going into regular commute rotation for a while:
The Soft Moon - Criminal
Shellac - Dude Incredible
Deftones - Gore
The Doors - LA Woman (original vinyl pressing - used to be my Dad's and has THIS little nasty on the back of the bright yellow record sleeve).
I pre-ordered Dude Incredible on vinyl back when it was released and Mr. Albini and crew included as something of, I think, a philosophical statement on their preference for analog over digital, a totally unlabeled copy of the album on disc. Lately I've had the strongest hankerings for Shellac while in the car, so although it's been a while since I've pulled the vinyl out at night, during the day I'd several times been frustrated to discover I had no idea where the disc was. I even feared, due to its unmarked facade, its possible loss in the great divorce tally/purge of 2015. Then a couple days ago I pull out 1000 Hurts on disc and there's the unlabelled missing album on top. I very much count this as a win.
Last night K and I tried to watch both Good Time and It Comes at Night but failed at both. Part of this may have been due to a certain persnickety fatigue six long days of work surrounded by LA commutes had left me with by the time I'd prepared dinner and had a few Smithwicks, but I definitely feel it this lack of connection was not entirely on me. Both films are distributed byA24,whose films I normally fall right in line with, but with my shortage of time to appropriate for watching movies these days, I feel fairly certain I won't be giving either of these another chance. Instead, we're seeing The Philadelphia Story on the big screen this afternoon, thanks to Turner Movie Classics and Fathom Events, and steering tonight's Sunday Night Feature to Dark Song, a film several good friends have given near rave reviews of, and which I'd waited on since first reading about on the Horror Amino community, where there's a wealth of awesome horror information updated on pretty much an hourly basis.
Card of the day:
A lot in my Grimoire about this one, however most of it presupposes the card's value in a spread, in relation to other cards, especially Disks and its representation of Earthly matters. Specifically I see one relating to gambling. I'll keep this in mind, however the one point of primary interest here is the note that the Three of Swords can indicate, "... a current period of unhappiness, not necessarily one to come."
Two reasons for this note's perceived poignancy at the moment with regards to my existence:
I'm not in the best of moods today due to a certain lackadaisical approach to property management by the cunts that run the building that I will soon be moving out of, and two, the "... not necessarily..." part really helps when looking back at the last few days' cards and tracking their ongoing juxtaposition with my moving situation: knowing the Futility of the current situation with finding a new place forces a decision to be made; accepting the Change that will come with that decision, and now the suggestion that unhappiness will not necessarily follow on the tide of that Change, well, the pieces are in motion and I'm helping to keep them that way. My contributions pail in comparison to K's near constant attempts to stay in contact with the other parties involved.
