Isolation: Day 7 - Type O Negative - Open Air Festival 1995

As usual, Brooklyn Vegan has been killing it on curation and content during these trying times. THIS article, posted Wednesday, 3/18, runs down a list of several fantastic live shows currently available in-full on youtube. Of course, I went directly to the Type O one. I saw them twice on the October Rust tour - the shows are among my fondest concert memories - and this footage takes me back in a way I did not quite expect. With the tenth anniversary of Peter Steele's death on the horizon (April 14th), and with rain falling intermittently more than usual in LaLa Land, this landed at the perfect moment for me. Thanks Brooklyn Vegan, for all that you do!

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Two nights ago, K and I finished the second season of Netflix's Castlevania, which means we finally get to move on to Season Three, which I keep seeing referred to as "Psychedelic Horror." Can't wait for that, especially considering the way events played out at the end of Season Two. Written by legendary comics scribe Warren Ellis, Castlevania is pure joy for Horror/Comics/Video Game fans alike. Ellis' writing is top notch; think of when the mostly creator-owned writer steps into high level IP's like X-Books, Batman, or, if you're like me and fondly remember Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., and you'll get a ballpark sense of what a joy it is seeing this man play with super well-known toys. For a peak inside his process, go to Orbital Operations and sign up for his weekly newsletter. It is seriously one of the things in life I most look forward to reading every week, both for the process insights, and his unmatched aptitude as a curator of all things awesome! In the meantime, for only those who have finished Season Two, here's a clip of the penultimate battle that just blows my f*&king mind!



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Playlist:

The Mars Volta - Deloused in the Comatorium
Antemasque - Eponymous
The Black Angels - Eponymous EP
SOD - Speak Spanish or Die
Chris Isaak - Heart Shaped World
Slayer - Decade of Aggression
Type O Negative - Origin of the Feces
Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars

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Card:

I'm not sure how to read the common interpretation of "Seed to a Tree." In light of world events, I'm not sure if that's positive for us now, on this side of what this thing will eventually become, or if it's referring to the growth of COVID-19, or if we're talking about the mass culling of our population and eventual rebuilding phase. Another common interpretation here is that something will begin, but that's pretty much as eerily ambiguous as the other.

Let's hope future generations aren't as irresponsible as we (collectively) have been.

As more and more cities go into Shelter-in-Place, I'm having moments throughout my day where Science Fiction interlopes my daily routines and shows me where we very well may be going. Remember, the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy is Science Fiction is - in its purest form - fiction based on the extrapolation of current Scientific Knowledge/Method. In other words, the Orwells, RAW's, and Huxley's of the world - not to mention the Gilliams -  have been warning us for decades. My company announced today they are drafting official documents for us in the event of checkpoints being erected to control non-quarantine compliance. I heard this and couldn't help envision a scene cobbled together from various fictional sources I've consumed in my life: I pull up to a police or military checkpoint, lower my window, and hand a gas-mask wearing official my papers, which they check over and hand back.

Wow. Yeah, that is most likely where we are going.

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Mindful Habitation:

It has never been my intention to make this blog political, primarily because there is no answer when it comes to politics. I detest both sides and long for the day when I can remove my support from either tired old institution we continue to placate. I thought that would be this year. Now - assuming we still have an election in November - I not only want Captain Hairdo out of office, I want to see him tried for Crimes Against Humanity. Because all the other shit was bad, but not that different from what the other side does. Now though, we have a 'leader' who is very much responsible for not only the loss of human life on a grand scale, but what is looking like it will be the end of 'this great nation.' No, I'm blaming him for the existence of COVID-19. But when you follow his words and sentiment, you see where the irresponsibility sets in, and why I make such strong accusations.

Some things to think about are HERE and HERE. Don't dwell in there too long, and don't fall down the Twitter-hole, but these are the things to remember when/if we have an election in November. I would like to see these people Tried in a Court of Law for Crimes Against Humanity. The difference here is, if you compare to, for instance, when Nixon fell from grace, his supporters believed he wasn't guilty until his crimes were proven. In this day and age, people can see proven facts and simply refuse they are facts. This goes back to what I have been saying since the "Alternative Facts" bullshit that began post inauguration. There is no such thing as Alternative Facts. THIS is Orwell's 1984, where the state decides reality, and it's fucking terrifying.

Type O Negative, Creepshow, and Tales from the Crypt!

I've been in full October mode, and of course, that means lots of Type O Negative. This song, the final track on their final album before Peter Steele's death, really hit me this morning. Released in 2007, I've always really liked Dead Again, but I never quite warmed up to it as much as Life Is Killing Me, their previous and my favorite of their albums (I just take Bloody Kisses out of the running for that - it's perfect and stands on its own in a timeless continuum of awesome). Last year at this time, however, I felt myself coming around a bit more, and this year, well, I may now consider it the band's best album (again, eschewing BK). The song structures and arrangements are fascinating and far from obvious; listen to the soft countermelody Josh plays on the climax of this track -  I feel like one in a million rock keyboardists would write something like that there.

That said, this increased infatuation with Dead Again is what makes hearing Steele sing "All Hail and Farewell to me..." at the end of the song so emotional - I'm willing to bet the reason Dead Again took me so long to fall completely in love with is I'm a bit of a saver. In other words, living with the knowledge that this was their final album (I had a hunch even before Steele passed), I believe I saved this album to have one last record to fall in love with over the years. Now that this love has come to pass, I'm sad. But only so sad, because none of Type O's record ever get old.

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The second episode of Shudder's Creepshow aired last night. Fantastic! There's a ton of schlock here, but that's how it's supposed to be. I especially liked "The Finger," with DJ Qualls. Breaking the fourth wall doesn't often work, but it did here. As a complementary flavor, K and I followed Creepshow with the first episode of the first season of HBO's Tales from the Crypt. Unlike many of my contemporaries, I didn't see much of this show back in the late 80s/early 90s when it aired. This episode, The Man Who Was Death, proved relevant in several ways. First, William Sadler is one of the stars of Joe Begos' VFW, which we'll be seeing tomorrow night at Beyondfest, and two, Sadler's out-of-work executioner narrates this episode by continuously breaking the fourth wall. A great double-feature in a weekend that will be filled with double and triple features!


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31 Days of Horror:

10/01: House of 1000 Corpses/31
10/02: Lords of Chaos
10/03: Creepshow Ep 2/Tales from the Crypt Ssn 1, Ep 1

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Playlist from 10/03:

Type O Negative - Dead Again
Various - Lords of Chaos Soundtrack (Playlist)
Sisters of Mercy - Floodland
Miranda Sex Garden - Suspiria
Neon Kross - Darkness Falls
Claudio Simonetti and Fabio Pignatelli - Phenomena OST

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Card of the day:

Taking this as a nod that spending yesterday after work catching up on sleep instead of working was the correct plan of action. I feel revived, refreshed, and ready to continue outlining Shadow Play Book Two!

2018: October 10th

Thought I'd start today off with another under-appreciated Type O track. I know, I know... wrong holiday. Still, it fits the season.

The first episode of The Horror Vision is now available on Apple Podcasts HERE. Also available on The Horror Vision website HERE. The audio is good but not great; tweaks coming for the next episode, which we recorded last night and will land next week. #2 is a discussion of our Halloween go-to watches, from the standards to the more individualized, left-of-center picks we watch every year.

31 Days of Horror continued yesterday. Since I was out doing the podcast last night, K and I opted to continue to push back Mike Mendez's The Convent back, and instead I treated myself to an afternoon viewing of Ti West's first feature film, The Roost. LOVE this one, and it'd been a while. Holds up and then some. K watched The Haunting of Molly Hartley, liked it but said it kinda resembled a Lifetime movie if they did horror.

10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly
10/06) Re-animator
10/07) Night of the Demons
10/08) Species
10/09) The Roost

Playlist from 10/09:

High On Fire - Electric Messiah
Nothing - Guilty Of Everything
The Skull - For Those Which Are Asleep
Type O Negative - October Rust
Type O Negative - Dead Again

No card today.

2018: October 6th

Woke up with this one in my head this morning. As I've probably said a million times here, Life is Killing Me is my favorite Type O album, so I love every song. There are, however, certain foundation stones of the album for me - I Don't Wanna Be Me, How Could She?, Iydkmigthtky (Gimme That), and Anesthesia. The mortar in between those stones, so to speak, but all of them exceptional if commonly unsung.

31 Days of Horror continued last night with yet another Cronenberg film that I had, incredibly, not seen before. Loved it as an outré filmmakers working inside the studio formula and doing very much his own, unconventional thing with it.

10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly

Playlist from Friday, October 5th:

Drab Majesty - Careless
Windhand - Eternal Return
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Rolling Blackout CF - Hope Downs
The Jesus and Mary Chain - Automatic

Card of the day:

Always good to see a Seven. While one step out from the harmony of the Six, I feel as though this is an exact analogy for where I am in the final pass at constructing my book. See those six perfectly matched and balanced Wands beneath the Seventh? I'm adding the final pieces gleaned from the breakthrough of many months away from it, respectful not to damage what's already there.

2018: October 3rd

Love this song! I love all tracks by Type O, especially from this album, but this is one of the standouts. Also a great example of why they were so great: interesting, non-traditional song structure,  those group vocal accents that give everything a lush sense of good-natured hostility, fantastic two-person vocal melodies, and a sense of bloody humor for Christ's sake, just to name a few elements on display here that I love. No October would be complete without Type O Negative.

I decided to do the 31 Days of Horror movie thing. Not really a challenge, but a commitment for sure. Last night we opened Shudder only to find they'd added a bunch of Hitchcock! Super cool. First up from these was Rope, the adaptation of the play, starring Farley Granger, John Dall, and of course, the inimitable James Stewart. It had been quite some time since I'd watched this one, and while I remembered the big picture, a lot of the nuance - which is where all the fun lies - played for me like a first viewing.

10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope

What will tonight's movie be? Not sure yet. I set a few DVDs out though, fodder for the coming evenings:

And there's a hell of a lot more than that. October is just getting started!


Playlist from October 2nd:

Sisters of Mercy - Floodland
Fields of Nephilim - Dawnrazor
Zombi - Spirit Animal
Zombi - Shape Shift
Sleep - The Science
Type O Negative - Life is Killing Me
Ennio Morricone - Black Belly of the Tarantula OST

Card of the day:

Seeking completion and fulfillment: And I continue to work on finishing my book!

He Knows You're...

... fucking someone else. From the intro to the Scottish deviation on the second chorus, the only problem with this version and the entire live Origin of the Feces is it kind of makes it hard to listen to Slow, Deep and Hard. So good.

Oh yeah, the best thing about this record? It's not actually live. Here's the story; it makes me laugh every time. I think I read somewhere else that after the studio fees, the band used the money the label gave them for the 'live' production on vodka.

Seven Years Ago Today Peter Steele Left Us

Amazing image/lyric pairing by nervennahrung

As I sit at my computer typing this morning I'm listening to Swans's The Glowing Man, disc one. It's very zen and flows perfectly from my half hour of mediation and ongoing efforts to put proverbial pen-to-paper. But in the background there's a growing sense of unease, as if I've remembered something but not fully realized it yet. Then it hits me: April. April 14th.

Interestingly enough, upon waking this morning I spent an hour or so finally reading the first trade of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's The Wicked and The Divine, which centers around the death and rebirth of gods as rock stars.

Peter Steele, I miss your music. I love what you gave us and will want more until I follow you out to the next big Halloween Party. To commemorate your passing here's an absolutely shattering live version of one of the songs I always go back to. Love You to Death illustrates how Steele - and by extension Type O as a whole - could pen beautiful, emotionally resonant epics and place them beside their pitch black satire without ever breaking the overall tone they perfected over the course of almost, but not quite, twenty years.

Rest in Peace. Now time to break out the Type O.

Wolf Moon

Type O Negative. One of my favorite bands of all time. Lead singer/bassist Peter Steele's death is one of only two rock n roll deaths from my era that actually affected me - the other being Layne Stayley's. I don't listen to Type O all the time - favorite or not their music affects me so strongly that I have to be in a very particular state of mind to fully revel in it. And that state of mind really only comes around two or three times a year - Spring and Autumn definitely and maybe once at some other point. And when it hits me, I go into that headspace and their music super hard.

I've been in that headspace recently, and ironically my friend Tommy has too because he posted about it in his awesome Joup column Endless Loop.

I've posted this track before - I have TONS of baggage associated with it. I'm posting it again but wanted to do a different version, namely something live that does it justice, like this version from the band's Symphony for the Devil video does.

Things I Didn't Say: Wolf Moon

The previous entry is fairly simplified – I desperately long to find a way to eek this Autumn tone out of my soul and onto paper where others can possibly feel it as much as I do. For lack of a word and I suppose feeling melodramatic enough to accentuate said mood I'll say that I commune with this time of year possibly stronger than any other. When I was younger and there were actual seasons in the Midwest other than six months of winter/six months of summer with a few sporadic portals of the transitories thrown in here and there, never fully making a 'Season' per se, I remember what a switch music was in this time. I'd go from my summer, hang-out tunes like John Spencer Blues Xplosion, Beastie Boys and Cibo Matto to NIN, The Cure and Type O Negative like that (*snap*). Over the last several years I spent in Chicago I saw that change as the seasons waned, and here in LALA land, well, it's a fairly even keel all the time. I'm not really complaining – I didn't ever want to have to live through a winter again unless A) we live in the UK (ultimate life goal in the category of positioning for both of us) or, B) have a Thompson-esque compound in Colorado. But while I don't miss the winter I miss the rain, and I miss the Autumns of my younger days.

I remember shortly after my friend Jake died. This was like 1997 and he'd been pretty much the only person that connected to this aspect of my brain. We were both HUGE Type O fans and would often spend entire nights just laying around baked out of our minds listening to their albums (only up to October Rust at that point – Jake, you don't know what you missed in subsequent years man). They were the sonic embodiment of Autumn (still are) and something about the combination of the buzz, the music and that sharp, chill Autumn air that grants such clarity morphed. This is about the time I realized I had what is commonly referred to in the psychological community as 'Synesthesia' and man – pinning my senses together with those disparate elements really took me to another place. A place I can still achieve sometimes if the air is right and the music appropriate.

I went there after Jake died. I drove my old wood-paneled dodge mini-van West into the last, dying strains of sunlight one evening, parked at a random forest preserve and listened to this song. I don't know how long I sat there in the diminishing light, or how many times I listened the song, but finally something snapped and I suddenly found myself walking into the woods, disappearing into the slow, thick fog rolling out from beneath the trees, a inspirational carpet that beckoned me along a path into the thicket, amidst strange, night-time animal noises and the reverberations of Peter Steele's haunting vocals and then all at once, I began to run.
I ran for an undecipherable amount of time and distance; I ran because I couldn't stand still, walk or sit any more. My best friend was dead, my world was shattered after a not-so long ago mending (but that's a story for a different time, like when my first novel eventually gets picked up and published) and my eyes were alive with tears. But there I was, running like a madman, like a wild animal beneath the rising moon, shaking with the raw intoxication that that Autumn air can bestow upon those who can surrender to it. Running with nowhere to go but back to my car (eventually), back to my home, back to my life which, though I didn't believe it then, got better.

Thank You Peter, Kenny, Johnny Josh (and Sal in the early days). Thank you for the a soundtrack to a night I will never forget and that will always grant me strength and passion in a world seemingly derived to extinguish them.

Type O Negative - Burnt Flowers Fallen

It's possibly as close as I'll get to Autumn this year, as our yearly October excursion home to the Midwest isn't happening due to my new gig. It's been overcast, dreary and even a little misty in LALA and I'm running with it as best I can. Type O has been in FULL EFFECT in the CD player as I drift into the darker realms of my subconscious.
Oh, and the 2nd annual Los Angeles edition of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival* this past weekend helped set the mood quite a bit as well.
To the trees...

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* My review of said Fest