Flies on Sandstone

 

Heaven Is An Incubator recently posted "Love Fade," from Tamaryn's 2010 album The Waves, long a personal favorite since one of my old-school Inventory team back at Borders Torrance turned me onto it. No other Tamaryn album has ever slipped so perfectly into my personal sonic cosmology, but I've laid beneath the stars in Joshua Tree and soaked this one in. It's special, so I had to break it out and post a track, too.

 
Thanks Tommy!!!

 

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Watch:

About three months ago, I kind of surprised myself by re-starting Drinking with Comics. This was something that had been on my mind off and on for a while; I LOVE the idea of the show, but it's hard to move beyond the previous iterations. For me, the pinnacle was when Mike, Chris, Jordan and myself were in front of the camera and Kirsten was running tech. Doing the whole thing at Atomic Basement never felt fully 'right,'  and whenever I look on YouTube for someone discussing comics that move me, I'm almost always disappointed. 

Other than Comic Book Herald's channel, pretty much every "discussion" video I've attempted to watch does that annoying YouTube thing of drawing out what you're there for as long as possible to increase their watch time. I fucking hate that! So, I finally decided I'd let the old Drinking with Comics be what they were and start a new iteration. It helped that I get to call it Vol. 4.

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Read:

My good friend Jesus surprised us with some Christmas presents in the post this past Friday. Jesus and I tend to ship books back and forth to one another, and he's introduced me to some incredible novels. Well, he outdid himself this time, because one of the books he sent was C.J. Leede's 2023 debut novel Maeve Fly. 

I read it in just over a day.

I can't recommend this one enough, the only caveat is, I'd say you should definitely read Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho first, as this book is very influenced by it, and even pinions some elements of the seminal volume of transgressive 80s literature. Despite this, however, Maeve Fly is definitely its own thing, and I couldn't be more in love with Leede's prose. Also, this book made me insanely homesick for L.A.

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Playlist:

Various - Learn to Relax: A Tribute to Jehu

Van Halen - 1984

Amigo the Devil - Everything is Fine

Godflesh - Purge

Godflesh - Hymns

Steve Moore - Bliss OST

Fever Ray - Radical Romantics

Deftones - Saturday Night Wrist

Rein - Reincarnated 

Tamaryn - The Waves

Calexico - Seasonal Shift

Christmas Bloody Christmas Spotify Playlist

Rodney Crowell - Christmas Everywhere

Thou - Rhea Sylvia

Frayle - Skin & Sorrow

James Last - Christmas Dancing with James Last

Willie Nelson - Pretty Paper

J. D. McPherson - Socks

Luciano Pavarotti - Christmas with Pavarotti

Iwan Rebroff - singt Weison von Wodka und Wein

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Queen of Disks

• Knight of Disks

• Two of Swords

Emotional aspects of Earthly matters, honed by Will, collaboration of intent. Not sure if this is telling me I'll find the 'honing' in collaboration or not - seems doubtful - but I'm definitely feeling like Earthly matter could use a shoring up. 

2019: February 23rd

There's a new album from Tamaryn on the way. This is a performer I know nothing about. Somewhere are 2010-2011, her debut album Waves ended up in my iTunes - no idea how it got there, which is a story/theory for another time - the point is when I listened to I fell for the album hard. That's it; I know none of her other music. When this came up in my youtube feed this morning I was interested. Sounds very Cure to me, so a departure from that first album, but pretty cool nonetheless. You can pre-order Dreaming the Dark, out on DERO Arcade March 22nd, from Tamaryn's bandcamp HERE.

K and I went to the movies for the first time in forever last night and saw Green Book. Wow. Here I've been down about the fact that there's pretty much no big Prestige films this year, a sad fact when last year was jam-packed: I, Tonya; Three Billboards; Phantom Thread; Shape of Water. I'm sure I'm forgetting some others as well. This year... not so much. But I'd heard Green Book was good, and Viggo Mortensen is always great, and Mahershala Ali has been blowing me away in True Detective, so we gave it a shot.

FANtastic film. Seriously, it won't be in theaters much longer, but if you can, go see Green Book. Some will say it has a touch of schmaltz, but don't believe them. Life-affirming, and it introduced me to the music of Dr. Don Shirley:



Okay, so I never do Favorite Film list anymore. Probably not in five years. Why? Well, A) I never see everything I want to before the end of the year. And B) at some point I went back and looked at my list for 2012 and basically no longer trusted myself to remove the viewing experience and all its facets from the quality of the film, because in 2012 I ranked Argo over both The Master and The Dark Knight Rises. Nope. I call bullshit on you, sir. The reason for this was a fantastic theatrical viewing experience, at home in Chicago with my parents - a family bonding moment - and although I haven't seen Argo since, there's just no way it's better than those other two I ranked below it. It's good. Great even. But not that great.

So I began to consider myself an 'unreliable narrator' when it came to ranking films.

My favorites of the last few years seem more solid choices: Three Billboards in 2017, a tie between LaLa Land and The Witch in 2016, Hateful Eight in 2015, and Whiplash in 2014, but I never get around to seeing everything I feel I need to in order to make an educated assessment. This year, however, since there haven't been many movies I felt I needed to see, I'm a little bit more assured that my opinions are accurate. So here then, is my 'best of' list for film in 2018:

Best film: a tie between Hereditary and Green Book, sort of both ends of the spectrum, but both affected me immensely.

Best Actress: Toni Collette - by a fucking landslide; the fact that she didn't get nominated for an oscar proves how pointless the award is now, and was the impetus for my never capitalizing the award's name again. Forever.

Best Actor: Mahershala Ali -  Viggo's up there as well for Green Book, but Mahershala also has his performance in True Detective factoring in, because like I said earlier, he has me in awe. Juxtaposing the two performances, I hadn't seen a cast list for Green Book before the credits rolled at the end of the film, and I questioned whether it was him or not for the entire movie. In fact, I had pretty much deduced it wasn't him, and was curious to see who played the part of Dr. Don Shirley. There's a physical difference between Ali in the two roles, some of which comes down to the aging make-up in TD, but some of which is Ali's ability to manipulate his mannerisms, stature, and poise.

Favorite movie: Mandy - the reverberations from my initial theatrical viewing the night of the film's release at the Egyptian Theatre still surround me, coloring my thoughts with excitement. This is the film I struggle not to watch every day, so as not to sap its power.


Playlist from 2/22:

Beck - Odelay
The Goat - Puppy
Jaye Jale - No Trail and Other Unholy Paths
C-Building Kids - Shitting in the Urinal
Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Mature Themes
True Widow - AVVOLGERE
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Windhand - Eternal Return
Don Shirley - Waterboy

No card today.