10 Days 'til Halloween - New Kill or Be Killed

 Holy smokes! New Kill or Be Killed dropped last week and I had no idea! I've still yet to break into Greg's solo record Child Soldier, which dropped a few weeks ago, but I think as soon as All Hallows passes and November settles in, I'll start really digging into this stuff. 

New KoBK Reluctant Hero is out November 20th on Nuclear Blast, pre-order HERE.

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31 Days of Halloween:

1) Tales of Halloween: Sweet Tooth/The Wolf Man (1941)

2) From Beyond/Monsterland: "Port Fourchon, Louisiana"/Tales of Halloween: "The Night Billy Raised Hell" & "Trick"

3) Mulholland Drive/Creepshow (1982): "The Crate"

4) Waxwork

5) Synchronic/Bad Hair

6) Dolls

7) Lovecraft Country Ep. 8/Tales of Halloween: "The Weak and the Wicked" & "The Grim Grinning Ghost"

8) 976-Evil

9) Repo! The Genetic Opera

10) Firestarter/George A. Romero's Bruiser

11) The Haunting of Bly Manor episodes 1 & 2/Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

12) The Haunting of Bly Manor episodes 3, 4, and 5/House of 1000 Corpses

13) Masque of the Red Death/Creepshow (2019) Episode 7/Creepshow (1982)

14) The Haunting of Bly Manor episodes 6 and 7

15) The Haunting of Bly Manor episodes 8 and 9/Roseanne (88) season 2 and 3 Halloween Episodes

16) The Mortuary Collection/Roseanne (88) season 4 Halloween Episode

17) Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning

18) Lovecraft Country episode 9/The Haunting/Roseanne (88) season 5 Halloween Episode

19) Lovecraft Country episode 10/Tales From the Crypt season 1 ep. 5 "Lover Come Hack to Me"

20) George A. Romero's Season of the Witch

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NCBD

Some great stuff this week.

This book really has been fantastic. Such an interesting, original take on the Zombie genre, and a large part of the story really plays more with mashing that up with a kind of neo-noir crime story. Very cool.

Bebop and Rocksteady? Can't wait to see these two make their return to the book. 

The penultimate issue of Gideon Falls! I'll be sorry to see this one go, but I can't wait to see what Andrea Sorrentino does next!

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Playlist:

Type O Negative - Dead Again

Joy Division - Still

PLaNETS - The Dark Woods

John Carpenter - Lost Themes

Also, new installment of Bret Easton Ellis' new, serialized novel/memoir dropped this week. SO GOOD. Sign up for his Patreon HERE to get in on this.

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Card:

I feel like this week is all about fortitude, so this card makes perfect sense. Between being short at work, my back acting a bit weird again, starting in on writing again, and being on call, my hands are full and two days into the work week, I'm already feeling as though I'm running on empty. That said, I always manage to rise to the occasion.

Isolation: Day 147

Last Thursday at work I had a hankering to see what Bret Easton Ellis has been up to on his podcast, and realized that the reason I hadn't seen any new episodes in my queue on Apple Podcasts was because my tier on his Patreon had been replaced. I changed my subscription up and was rewarded with a HUGE list of episodes I'd not even realized were available. Settling in to listen, I began with one from late last year where for nearly three hours, Ellis interviews author Chuck Palahniuk. This set off a full-on Palaniuk/Ellis binge over the coming days.

Ellis and Palahniuk were probably the two authors that motivated me the most to actually sit down and start writing fiction seriously. The book I'm finishing now was absolutely inspired by Ellis's American Psycho and Lunar Park, and Palaniuk's, well, pretty much his first five or six books, all of which I read in rapid succession in the early 00s. 

It's been some time since I'd gone back to these guys. Ellis is always just around the corner in my head - Lunar Park is my second favorite book ever, so it's just in my blood. But by the time Palahniuk's Pygmy came out - the most recent of his books that I've read - I had pretty much lost touch with his work. (NOTE: Not because Pygmy is bad by any means, however, this is a story for another day, if I haven't told it here already). 

Saturday morning K and I watched Fight Club, which is actually the only of those initial books by Palahniuk that I haven't read, simply because the movie always occupied such a large amount of real estate in my head, I assumed any reading of the book would be colored by it too much. I no longer subscribe to that trepidation, so after the film, I ordered both Fight Club and Choke, which I've always thought as companion pieces.

Although I'm still having trouble finding time to read for pleasure while I plod through another final edit of my own book, I started Ellis' Less Than Zero. It's an easy one to burn through, and works well with a start/stop regiment. Technically, I'm still about thirty pages from finishing Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, so all these books I'm mentioning now are 'on deck,' if you will, and their accumulated presence has shifted my musical palette, so that I found myself compelled to stay up late writing on Saturday, falling down an audio hole with X, The Plimsouls, and Concrete Blonde.

There's never a moment that I'm aware of where Bret Easton Ellis specifically mentions Concrete Blonde, but they are definitely a band that fits the headspace I associate with his fiction. As such, I've been a bit obsessed. I tweeted out my love for the album version of Still in Hollywood later at some point during that late night, however, this live version of the alternate take that serves as a bonus track on the CD version of their 1989 Eponymous debut was just too good to pass up posting here today.

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Playlist:

Concrete Blonde - Eponymous

Psychetect - Extremism

X - Wild Gift

Algiers - Eponymous

Black Pumas - Eponymous

Beth Gibbons, The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and Krzysztof Penderecki - Henryk Górecki: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

The Birthday Party - Mutiny/The Bad Seed 

The Birthday Party - Hee Haw

JK Flesh - Depersonalization

Vitalic - OK Cowboy

Carpenter Brut - Blood Machines OST

Spotlights - Love and Decay

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Card: 

Interesting. Two days in a row. I'm sticking with the same interpretation, because my discomfort at penning query letters hasn't magically abated after writing about them. However...

I have to wonder if there's something more in here, as well. Destabilization of established processes and mores comes to mind, something 2020 has been all about. Any coincidence I have a voting ballot sitting next to me on my desk as I type this? I think not.

2018: June 30th

I know this track from the OST for a movie called The Devil's Business. This is a soundtrack I love from a film I have never seen (need to change that). Because of this slightly obscure relationship with the material, I forget about this one for long stretches, something triggers my memory (usually an early, gray morning - the somber tone of this track always fits with an early, gray morning) and I pull it out for a few days. I don't think I need to explain that that is exactly what happened this morning as I woke up tired, and dragged myself through the preparatory hygiene required for me to go into work.

While listening in the car, I knew that since my drive would only take me ~20 minutes, I'd want to continue with the album once I got inside, punched in and began the tasks of the day. When I went to Apple Music, however, I was bummed to find the soundtrack was not there. As a work-around I googled the first track and for the first time in memory realized it was not a composer, but a band. After another quick search I found the track I wanted to post (above) AND I found an awesome band I had previously never heard of, Crippled Black Phoenix.

Playlist from 6/29:

Best Coast - Crazy For You
Zeal and Ardor - Stranger Fruit
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Windhand - Soma

I also subscribed to Bret Easton Elli's Podcast on Patreon and listened to two fantastic episodes:

B.E.E. Podcast - 6/15/18 James Van Deer Beek - wherein they discuss a lot of things, including but not limited to the 2001 70mm redux, Roseanne, Me Too and the usual woes of the business.

B.E.E. Podcast - 6/28/18 Ben Fritz - really great discussion about the death of Sony and the state of the movie business.

No card today.