RIP Selim Lemouchi - Eleven Years Gone

Since there was never any exact day of death released, March 1st denotes the beginning of the month when one of the most talented artists to grace the metal genre in decades left the planet for the "endless ever after," to quote the song.

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Watch:

My good friend and Horror Vision Cohost Anthony "Butcher" Guerrera tipped me off to this one, which I had heard about but ignored under the auspices that no spider Horror film could do to me what Arachnophobia does. Yeah, I know the big "A" isn't that scary, but when you feel about spiders the way I do, it does a good job exacerbating that fear. On Anthony's recommendation, however, I watched about half of Sting's trailer and yes, I see it now. This is a completely different kind of spider movie.

Written and directed by Kiah Roache-Turner, who also gave us a bunch of movies that I've yet to see (Wyrmwood was on Netflix forever but suffered from bad thumbnail disease, so I passed over it for years before anyone recommended it to me). Sting hits theatres on May 31st. I'll definitely be in a seat if Sting plays near me. 

What the hell is it about spiders that terrify me? I'm not sure. Of course, there are folks who have to live with a greater arachnophobia than I do; little spiders don't bother me. It's not the size, it's the girth. Any spider with a meaty body, regardless of the size, is going to creep me out. Now take that girth and scale it up and... no. Let's just stop there. 

A friend once told me a story about growing up with a kid named Spider who also had a paralyzing fear of arachnids. Apparently, Spider achieved his moniker when, as a child, Spider's parents built him a treehouse. One night, when he was older, he snuck up there in the middle of the night to smoke a joint. As the high settled over him in the dark, Spider glimpsed movement from the corner of his eye. He flicked his lighter and realized the walls of the treehouse were covered in spiders. Like, hundreds upon hundreds of them. 

Spider fell out of the treehouse and broke some bones. It was, in his words, a welcome price to pay for the expedient extraction.

The treehouse was torn down a few days later.

I relate this story, which I openly admit I may have fudged a few specifics on but not the gist (the walls of spiders I could never forget or amend; I see this in a way that terrifies me, even all this time and space away from the event, only knowing it as folklore) because it speaks to the power available to a Horror movie that uses this innate terror the Arachnida instills in a certain percent of the population. The insect kingdom in general is so goddamn alien it can give me the chills, but spiders... there's just something about their shape, their textures, their limbs... I've often said that the cinematic Xenomorph is my favorite movie monster because its design is absolute nightmare fuel in my eyes. In the real world, that honor goes to spiders. The girthy ones. The hairy ones.

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Read:

I finished Mary Roach's journalistic endeavor to hold a scientific lens up to the afterlife and would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who is even remotely interested in a seriously skeptical but fair discussion of the many facets of spiritualism that have arisen over the course of the last two hundred years or so. Mary travels to India to talk to doctors, believers and naysayers about reincarnation, she travels to England to attend a Medium Workshop, and she travels to rural America to investigate a court case from one hundred years ago where a spirit's intervention helped decide a legal hearing. Spook is a fantastic romp through the detritus of the spirtualism movement and the scientists that have attempted to take that torch and run it through calibrated methods without bias - which she always seems to find is still present. Mary's snarky sense of humor peppers her conversational tone, so I found myself smiling a lot, and laughing quite a bit as well. Great book - Thanks Mr. Brown!

Now, I've moved on to another book Mr. Brown lent me: Jason Heller's Taft 2012. This one's been sitting on my shelf or in various packing boxes for years, so that I had forgot about it. 

About halfway through, the premise here is the book is set in a slightly alternate timeline where William Howard Taft disappeared the day his successor Woodrow Wilson was to take the presidential torch from him, then wakes up in 2011 as if not a day has gone by. The novel's charm so far really comes from reflecting on the fact that, for someone who was considered almost a presidential albatross in his day, in ours Taft appears almost Christ-like in his earnestness, strength of character, and honesty. As you can imagine, this gives author Heller room to play with how our world of today (well, of 13 years ago) to someone from one hundred years prior. And his characterization of Taft's interpretation of our social ills and foibles is both hysterical and cutting. We don't see the depth of the bullshit we wade through on a daily basis, because as the level rises, we acclimate to it as the norm.

I don't need to finish this one to recommend it. And yeah, I'd kind of like Will Taft to reappear and steer for a while. 

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Playlist:

Julee Cruise - Floating into the Night

David Lynch & Alan R. Splet - Eraserhead OST

Calderum - Mystical Fortress of Iberian Lands

Genghis Tron - Dream Weapon

Ministry - HopiumfortheMasses

Mannequin Pussy - I Got Heaven

Oranssi Pazuzu - Live at Roadburn 2017

Sisters of Mercy - Floodland

Blackbraid - Blackbraid II

Stephen Sanchez - Angel Face

Prince - Purple Rain

The Fixx - Reach the Beach

Raspberry Bulbs - Before the Age of Mirrors

Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine - White People and the Damage Done

Tangerine Dream - Sorcerer OST

Ministry - Psalm 69

Double Life - Indifferent Stars

The Damned - Evil Spirits

Ozzy Osbourne - Diary of a Madman

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Card:

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

• Queen of Cups

• Nine of Wands

• Five of Pentacles

Emotional connection reachds a climax, leads to conflict. Pretty sure this is a nod toward two characters' relationship in the novel I'm working on. Things have stalled a bit of late, as I recently began starting work two hours later and this cuts into my evening writing time. I'd been meaning to phase out my mindset of having to drive to a coffee shop to write anyway, so this was a boon. However, it's taken me some time to integrate a new writing schedule that I can actually adhere to. I spent a nice chunk of time this past Saturday afternoon, and during that session, the relationship between my main character and a love interest really began to blossom, so this is a welcome sign post on the the route forward. 

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 Haunter in the Dark

I finally picked up The Devil's Blood's 2012 MASTERPIECE The Thousandfold Epicentre on vinyl. Ever since my friend Tori turned me on to this album later that same year, it has occupied a pretty prominent place in my inner jukebox. I can't go very long without cranking this album, so it's nice to be able to do so on vinyl now.

 

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Watch:

With Mickey Keating's new film Offseason dropping this week and some of my cohorts from The Horror Vision and I planning to get together for a viewing/reaction episode, I figured it was time I finally watched the Keating flicks I'd had on my list for some time now. Two nights ago I began with 2016's Carnage Park.

 

Great flick. This feels like Keating doing his own take on Rob Zombie-like material, and it works. A lot of that is the casting - Ashely Bell is a fantastic final girl. Her wardrobe in the film plays up her petite size and creates a glorious misnomer for a character that ends up a staunch survivor without the film ever having to go over the top and take her full-on Ripley. This helps keep the film's realistic tone, and makes the final sequences of the movie breathtaking in the tension they create. Rarely does a film use lack of light this well. Also, Pat Healy is really just one of my favorite actors. The guy never disappoints in his performances.

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Read:

I checked a few more Lovecraft stories off the list:

    • Celephais

    • The Unnamable

    • The Haunter in the Dark

I will tell you, there is a HUGE advantage to reading Lovecraft's works on Kindle. You won't get an awesome, old-school paperback cover like the one I've posted above, however, the Kindle's X-Ray feature allows you to axis all kinds of information you would not otherwise have at your disposal. For instance, reading The Haunter in the Dark was especially enjoyable due to the information I learned by highlighting elements of the text and either reading the X-Ray or built-in links to Wikipedia. I'm certain I'd read this one before, however, I never would have known that the story is essentially a sequel to a young Robert Bloch's story The Shambler from the Stars, or that the main character, Robert Blake (not that Robert Blake), was Bloch's creation. There are also elements in the story drawn from Clarke Ashton Smith, and it's this element of Lovecraft's work - that it has always essentially been an 'open source' material, that I find so fascinating.  

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Playlist:

Deftones - Ohms

Deftones - Gore

Godflesh - Pure

Iress - Prey

My Bloody Valentine - MBV

Poni Hoax - Eponymous

Dillinger Escape Plan - One of Us is the Killer

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Card:

Note: I generally don't recognize inverted cards.

Past = Knight of Discs. The Fire Element of Earth. Will applied to Malkuth, the Earthly concerns. This was my idea before yesterday that I was going to force my doctor to see things my way, to open me up and take the 1cmm 'shadow' my last CT scan showed out.

Present = 3 of Disks: Work. Staying in the Earthly realm. This is the reality of the situation.

Future = 7 of Swords: Futility. This is turning out to be a pretty poignant pull because as it turns out, the doctor 100% convinced me I was overreacting. 

It's pretty easy to have someone in the medical field you trust say to you, "It's probably nothing but we'd like to do a biopsy just to be sure" and then assume this is a half measure - especially when it doesn't work and your lung collapses - and that the actual the best possible way to proceed is to have them cut you open. I'm past that. I can't keep my life on hold for this. The new plan is a CT every four months (or so) to make sure the shadow isn't growing. I should state what my doc reminded me of yesterday: the fact that because of being stabbed in the lung when I was in High School, and because of the inflammation - which they originally mistook for lymphoma back in 2017 - my lungs are filled with shadows when it comes to CT scans. The tricky bit with my physiology as it is, lies in determining if new aberrations are just the inflammation growing/changing, or something more nefarious. For now, I'm content waiting this out because the odds are it is inflammation. And really, I want to move ASAP, not just because I'm sick of LA, but because I want to be far away in case we get in over our heads and Putin decides to turn LaLaLand into a smoking crater. 

Paranoia. It's what's for dinner in 2022. Deal with it.

NEW music from The Devil's Blood is here!!! White Storm of Teeth

Yes, The Devil's Blood is broken up, however if you recall the link I posted upon learning this contained an interview with chief songwriter/guitarist Selim Lemouchi where he stated that the album they had been working on, along with a bunch of other demo stuff, would indeed be released. Well, here's the first track from the forthcoming third and final album, III: Tabula Rasa, or Death And The Seven Pillars. This is apparently a "demo" version but it doesn't sound too much like a demo - it's not super polished, but it's polished. Really dig this - reminds me a bit of a cross between Feverdance and Everlasting Saturnalia from the band's previous record The Thousandfold Epicenter. You can pre-order III here.

All this comes via a website I just discovered earlier today, a great metal site called Metal Sucks and their Senior Editor Anso DF. Really great site and they have quite a bit more info on what's coming from the The Devil's Blood here and here.

The Devil's Blood is No More

I've actually known about this for about a month. I wanted to write about it, however it really, really bummed me out. I started a post and never finished. When my friend Tori turned me on to this band it was late 2011, just after she'd seen them live opening for Ghost (now Ghost BC). I was supposed to go to that show but backed out at the last minute due to the ridiculously early waking time I have during the week (not sure why, but literally EVERY show I've wanted to see for the last two or three years has been during the week). Anyway, Tori said Ghost was great but she was really impressed with The Devil's Blood. She went out and found a copy of their most recent record The Thousandfold Epicentre and I made a copy. Within about a day I was hooked and listened to nothing but for about a month. The more I listened the more I became intrigued by the band. However, looking around online at the time there really wasn't much to go by. The only wikipedia article at the time was this one that I had to have google translate from German. Anyway, it's been a while since I've been on The Devil's Blood so hardcore, though it's not really ever left my musical vernacular for very long. Then a couple of weeks ago I fell back into their music pretty for a couple of days and during some down time at work googled them for the first time in probably over a year. This is what I found:

 The Devil’s Blood is no more. As of the 22nd of January 2013 The Devil´s Blood has returned into nothingness.It has been a while since the announcement of our disbanding was made and we feel now is the right time to convey our plans for the legacy that TDB will leave.Our music and artwork will remain available through both our own website and that of Ván Records as well as any other medium that will prove suitable.At the time of the group’s disbanding there were several projects ongoing, each in different evolutionary stages. These were the following: 


I'll stop there, but if you click on any of the text above - which I appropriated from the main page of the band's website - you can go there and read about the posthumous releases to follow. While I am most definitely excited about those, I'm really just still super bummed. I'm hoping guitarist/found SL or his sister, vocalist F. The Mouth of Satan will go on to do another project, but in the meantime I'm still in mourning.

Links from a better time:
 



And of course, one of the outstanding tracks from The Thousandfold Epicenter: