The Subways - Black Wax

Ask and ye shall freakin' receive. New music from The Subways. "Black Wax" is taken from the forthcoming album Uncertain Joys, which drops January 13th, 2023. You can pre-order HERE. Very cool song; feels good to reconnect with a band like I have with The Subways.

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Read:

Over the weekend, I finished up a couple of books I'd had lingering over the last few months. First, I knocked out all the remaining stories in my re-read of Irvine Welsh's seminal short story collection The Acid House. Fantastic stuff. 

Second, I went back and read the last three (of a paltry four total) tales in Emily Carrol's Through the Woods. Somewhere between a book of short stories, a comic book, and a story book, Through The Woods is a joy to immerse yourself in, and proves to be too short an experience. 

Ms. Carroll's style pushes and pulls the heart between youth and adulthood, joy and terror, naughty and nice. There's a similar appreciation for the Fairytales and Nursery Rhymes of the old world that you see in the work of Neil Gaiman, and there's just as sharp a'teeth here and there. 

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Playlist:

Rowland S. Howard - Pop Crimes

Poni Hoax - Eponymous

Orville Peck - Pony

The Final Cut - Consumed

Primus - Pork Soda

Sausage - Riddles Are Abound Tonight

Nun Gun - Mondo Decay

Joy Division - Still

Belong - October Language

Sylvaine - Nova

Beach House - Once Twice Melody

Preoccupations - Arrangements

Jackie Wilson - Higher and Higher

Ozzy Osbourne - Diary of a Madman

Jerry Cantrell - Atone

Fleet Foxes - Shore

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Allowing Change to occur for the purposes of growth even when that change necessitates difficulty in material life. 

Well, our Thermostat went down yesterday and we're waiting for a technician to come out, so that definitely fits. I'll take this as the cards reminding me to ask questions and pay attention when the tech is here, so I can learn something. I'm pretty bad about paying attention to homeowner things, and I suppose that needs to abate.

World Coming Down

 

Yesterday marked the 22nd anniversary of Type O Negative's World Coming Down. I can still remember driving to Threshold Music in Tinley Park to pick it up that first day, smoking up before driving home with it blasting in my minivan. It still haunts me today, as it did then, that my friend Jake did not live to hear the follow-up to October Rust.

The title track will always be my favorite among WCD's 13 tracks (if you count Skip it, and we are); this one is an emotional jackhammer.

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Watch:

Current obsession:

This show just gets Chicago perfectly. 

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Read:

Currently splitting my time between two short story collections that couldn't be more different:

First, Irvine Welsh's The Acid House. I started this with my third-ever reading of "A Smart Cunt", the novella that rounds out this collection. This was the first story by Welsh I ever read, back in the 90s. It made an enormous impression on me then, and still does now. From there I cherry picked a few other stories: "Snuff," "Snowman Building Parts for Rico the Squirrel,""Sport For All," "The Granton Star Cause," and the Eponymous story, "The Acid House." I am very much enjoying this return to Welsh's writing, and can't wait to dip back into this for more.

Then this morning, inspired by the encroaching Halloween season, I went looking for my Ramsey Campbell Alone With the Horrors trade paperback I have, but couldn't find it. I haven't bought bookshelves for the new house yet, so a lot of my books are still in boxes. I gave a perfunctory search, but when I stumbled across Nathan Ballingrud's Wounds:

As I've related here previously, although I have the original, softcover novella The Visible Filth - the novella Babak Anvari's film Wounds is based on,  I picked this new volume up as soon as it hit the shelves in tandem with the release of the film. I've read The Visible Filth at least three times, but the other stories packaged with it in this particular volume have all only received one go-through. Until now, that is. So yesterday I started my day with The Atlas of Hell, a story that feels so much like Clive Barker to me, yet still stands tall on its own thanks to the clean and precise ton of Mr. Ballingrud's prose. I plan on picking through this one a story at a time over the coming month, and maybe going back and re-reading the stories in Ballingrud's first collection, North American Lake Monsters as well, if I can get around to finally watching the rest of the series based on that book HULU did a few years ago. Previously, I'd only watched two episodes of Monsterland (produced by Anvari), not because they weren't great, but maybe because the two I saw were ultra disturbing. In a good way, but also in a real way. Which is the goal, however, sometimes you have to work up to that sort of thing. 

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Playlist:

Ozzy Osbourne - Patient Number 9

The Cramps - Stay Sick

The Dead Milkmen - Beelzebubba

Misfits - Static Age

Type O Negative - World Coming Down

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

The center and left card go along with  the rejection notice I received this morning for a short story I submitted to a Horror Anthology last week. I'm having trouble figuring out the Queen though... or maybe I'm not.

Arab Strap - I Still Miss You

 

As we come upon the end of the year and I prepare to commit my ten favorite albums to print, I realized that I completely forgot Arab Strap put out a record earlier in the year. This is, I think because when the album came out I was simply not in the headspace for the band. Yesterday, however, I fell headlong into an Arab Strap Vortex that lasted the entire day. 

The song above was originally published on the OST for the cinematic adaptation to Irvine Welsh's The Acid House, which, if memory serves, was the first Welsh book I ever read. I'm way overdue on a Welsh catch-up jag, but that's a post for a different time (I used to buy every book he published the day it came out, however, being that his writing influences my own, and the projects I've been working on for the last few years are not necessarily compatible with that particular voice, I've eschewed the last four novels the man has published). Anyway, "I Still Miss You" is available on all streaming platforms via the 2016 eponymous compilation put out by record label Chemikal Underground. I own the Acid House flick on DVD, and this prompts me to dig it out and put it at the top of the pile for rewatching after I mop up the rest of my year-end viewing for 2021. 

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Watch:

Thanks to my friend Jun and The Comic Bug, I attended a private screening of Spider-Man: No Way Home over the weekend and was BLOWN AWAY.

 

This is everything a Spider-man fan could want and more.

 

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Playlist:

Dance with the Dead - Into the Abyss

Arab Strap - As Days Get Dark

Arab Strap - The Red Thread

Arab Strap - Mondays at the Hug and Pint

Arab Strap - Arab Strap

Arab Strap - The Week Never Starts Round Here

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Card:

Directly referencing my experiments in the world of NFTs.