Tastes Like Candy

For reasons that will be obvious to anyone who watched the Yellowjackets season two finale this past Friday. I've already posted The Horror Vision's discussion on youtube and all streaming platforms. Crazy good and this song was a perfect choice to end the episode and season. 

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Watch:

I finally watched Huesera: The Bone Woman the other day. Pretty solid flick. I ended up wanting a bit more in the story department, however, filmmakers rarely go wrong giving us less instead of more. This is the slowest of the slow burns but is peppered with some genuinely freaky moments and images, chief among them the giant Mary statue at the start of the film (you see a bit of it in the teaser below, but that doesn't quite do the scene justice).

 

Directed by Michelle Garza Cervera, Huesera: The Bone Woman is streaming on Shudder and well worth your time, when you're in the mood for a film that settles in and slowly turns up the heat. 

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Read:

Last week, I finished Chuck Palahniuk's The Invention of Sound. I would recommend this one to any old-school Palahniuk fan or new reader interested in his work. This is classic form Palahniuk - The Invention of Sound reads exactly the way I remember Choke, Lullaby, Diary reading when I first started seeking the author's work out in the late 90s/early 00s. That might be a bad thing if you've just recently read a bunch of his work, however, if you're like me and haven't read anything he's written in a while, this will remind you of what you loved about his older books. 

I've always thought the key to Palahniuk is not reading a bunch of his books in a row. Not an easy thing to do when they move so quick and have such propulsive style and ideas. However, there seems to be a law of diminishing returns if you binge his stuff, or at least there is for me and quite a few other fans I've spoken to about this over the years. Anyway, none of that should be taken as criticism; I love the man's work and I love this book.

After finishing that, I was set to go into a re-read of Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart is a Chainsaw as prep to then read the recently released sequel, Don't Fear the Reaper, however, something drew me to a novel my good friend Jesus had sent me quite some time ago, Ivy Tholen's Tastes Like Candy.

This book is fantastic! A slasher novel that revolves around a group of incoming Senior girls at a Texas High School who get picked off one-by-one in an closed carnival. I blew through Tastes Like Candy in four days, and it really only took me that long because I had friends in from out of town for the holiday weekend. My Goodreads review is HERE, however, suffice it to say here that this fit right in with all the other well-known authors I've been reading this year. Great stuff! The author's website is HERE if you want to check out her work.

         

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Playlist:

The Hives - Tyrannosaurus Hives

Dir En Grey - The Marrow of a Bone

Queens of the Stone Age - Emotion Sickness (pre-release single)

Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris

The Effigies - Remains Unknowable

David Bowie - Scary Monsters (and Super Freaks)

Ozzy Osbourne - Patient No. 9

X - Los Angeles

Blut Aud Nord - Disharmonium: Undreamable Abysses

Druids - Shadow Work

Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers of the Icy Age

Trombone Shorty - For True

            

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Card:

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

 

• Knight of Cups - Controlling Emotion with Will

• Two of Pentacles - Earthly Partnership

• Three of Swords - Growth of conflict or complex relationship

As always, keep in mind the interpretations I lay down for individual cards are a combination of grimoire research strained through personal circumstance. That said, I'm fairly certain this is reminding me of my current project (again), which has been on the backburner over the long weekend while friends were in. I have a fairly complex legal/business relationship in the novel, and I really need to work that out before proceeding.

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Deftones - Bloody Cape

 

Deftones's self-titled turn 20 this year. Not my favorite of theirs by any means. In fact, with its predecessor White Pony being my introduction to the band, the self-titled caused me to ascribe them a one-and-done status until friends sat me down and played me Saturday Night Wrist. From there, every album has only gotten better - well, nothing beat Koi No Yokan, but Gore and Ohms are fantastic in their own right - and I always thought I'd eventually go back and discover I'd misjudged the Eponymous, but that's never really happened. Anyway, even my least favorite Deftones records are standing on the shoulders of giants, so it's not as though I don't like them. I will be skipping the anniversary colored vinyl, however, if you go HERE you can order it!

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Watch:

Saturday night I showed K Brian De Palma's 1993 masterpiece Carlito's Way for the first time. I've loved this movie since I first saw it circa 1995, however, it's been at least a decade since the last time I revisited it. Surprise - it's even better than I remembered!   

Normally, I'd post a trailer, but the trailers I find give too much away. Here's a scene that I'm reticent to take out of context because, at first glance, it might invite the viewer to dismiss this film as another Gangster film. While it is that, on one level, my take has always been this is a love story first, and a tragic one at that. 

  

 When this flick comes up, I always mention how it leaves me teary-eyed. Saturday, though, it fucking leveled me emotionally. I'm talking full-on sobs. There are elements at play I'd never noticed before, most specifically that De Palma shot a lot of this film to look like classic Hollywood. There's Bogie and Bacall and a whole host of other visual references I'm not versed enough in 30s and 40s Hollywood to be able to accurately put a name to. But they're there: the scene with Charlie and Gail in the coffee shop, when she stands to leave and he hugs her in the middle of the room - the camera briefly encircles them and you get a taste of a love that surrounds every aspect of these two people's lives. All the alleyway scenes, the sets and the way they're created and shot - especially when in the rain. We've seen these before in other, legendary films even if we haven't seen those films. This stuff informs the business - or at least it did before technology changed the overall look of the industry (probably starting with The Matrix). 

Anyway, if you've never seen Carlito's Way, I can't recommend a film more. I have pretty low mileage for the Gangster genre, and like I said, this transcends it. If hard-pressed though, it's this and Goodfellas - I can leave everything else on the shelf.

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Read:

I finished Alan Campbell's God of Clocks and thus his Deepgate Codex series. I would be lying if I didn't say I felt the ending was a bit rushed, but I don't care - I loved it anyway. I've already revisited Book One Scar Night at least four times since it came out in 2007, and Book Two Iron Angel Twice now. I'll definitely come back to this series again at some point further down the tracks.

Next up - Chuck Palahniuk's newest novel, The Invention of Sound, which I have a nice signed hardcover copy of thanks to my friend and A Most Horrible Library cohost Chris Saunders!

I know nothing about this novel, and I'm only about thirty-five pages in so far, so there's not much I have to report about the plot except that it already feels very Palahniuk (not all his novels do), and I'm excited to take that 'ride' again - it's been quite some time since I read anything new by the man, with 2009's Pygmy probably being the last novel by him I read upon the time of release. Everything between that and this I've missed. 

One thing I noticed right off the bat about The Invention of Sound, though, is Palahniuk seems to be writing in a purposely strange, almost 'wrong' way when it comes to the actual syntax of some of his sentences. Here's an example:

"As if she a prizefighter was, and she'd pasted him a roundhouse punch to his glass jaw."

What the hell? I mean, that sentence is all kinds of awkward. That, of course, is no doubt the point - there have already been quite a few moments like this in the prose, and I'm curious if his earlier books have elements of this, too, and I just wasn't a practiced enough writer to notice them before. Or, I imagine it is extremely possible, he's trying to use a similar and considerably less overt method as he did in Pygmy, which is written in such a strange, Pidgeon English that it was near impossible to acclimate to for the first couple tries, then, once my brain rewired itself, became increasingly disorienting in the best possible way.

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Playlist:

Witchfinder - Forgotten Mansion

Boris & Merzbow - 2R0I2P0

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre

Etta James - Second Time Around

Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings - Give the People What They Want

Deafheaven - 10 Years Gone

Ghost - Phantomime

Windhand - Eponymous

Steely Dan - Aja

Paul J. Zaza - My Blood Valentine OST

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Card:

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

 

• Eight Pentacles - Transformation of Earthly Resources

• Ace of Pentacles - Breakthrough

• Seven of Cups - Completion 

To transform my situation, I need to finish what I'm working on. A bit of a no-brainer, but then Tarot readings usually are. The cards can't really tell you anything you don't already know, they just clarify and bring to the forefront what you otherwise might be ignoring/unable to see. I'm foggy on the specifics of this Pull, but I'll figure it out. 
 

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