The Lucid Night

 

My good friend and fellow cohost on The Horror Vision Horror Podcast sent me this track a couple days ago, and I just got around to listening to it. Outstanding! I'm working my way through the entire The Mystic Journey EP from 2020, which can be purchased directly from the band HERE.

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NCBD:

Here's the list for this week's NCBD picks:

The finale for Pat O'Malley's Popscars! I've been waiting for this one for some time, and issue five really just threw gas on that fire. Such a great book, and if you didn't read it monthly, I happen to know the TPB is being released from Sumerian next month!

After dropping off Ed Piskor's Red Room after the first four-issue series, I'm super happy I came back for this final four-issue run. Crypto Killaz has been a crazy ride; this book takes me back to the glory days of 80s indie comics, and despite its ultra-disturbing subject matter, Piskor's Harry Crumb-esque art style really makes for something new. I just booked a trip to LaLaLand in a few weeks, so while I'm there, I'll be stopping by The Comic Bug to pick up that second-season trade and complete the Red Room saga.

Due to my own misjudgment of interest in this series, I did not end up getting a copy of last week's penultimate Weapons of Vengeance chapter in Wolverine #36. Rick's Comic City ordered one for me, though, so hopefully, I'll be able to grab that as well as this final chapter there today.

I'm a bit confused why this Emma Stone/Tony Stark wedding is happening in the midst of the Mutants' darkest hour, but I'm sure Gerry Duggan and crew will make it work.

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Watch:

A few nights ago, I watched Riley Stearns's 2014 film Faults. Here's the trailer:

 

Leland Orser spent a lot of time owning the small, supporting roles he is known for - several of which I would argue are iconic - so it's great to see him in the lead, where he turns in one hell of a performance as Ansel Roth, Cult and Mindcontrol expert. Hired to deprogram an older couple's runaway daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who also turns in an outstanding performance), things are not quite what they seem, and Ansel ends up in a series of pretty rough situations. As hysterical as it is disturbing, Faults is a fantastic film. Currently streaming on Freevee, you can also pick up the Blu-Ray for a pretty good price over at Vinegar Syndrome.

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Playlist:

Rodney Crowell - Ain't Living Long Like This

Rodney Crowell - The Houston Kid

Extreme - Six

The Lucid Night - The Mystic Journey

16 Horsepower - Secret South

Low Cut Connie - Tough Cookies: The Best of the Quarantine Broadcasts

Metallica - ... And Justice For All

Blut Aus Nord - Disharmonium: Nahab

Blut Aus Nord - Triunity

Godflesh - Songs of Love and Hate

Captain Jack - Pure Electric

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Oracle:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE, and his Kickstarter for The Hand of Doom tarot is now live! Click HERE and be blown away!!!

• Ace of Wands

• King of Wands

• Page of Wands

It's all about Will today, eh? Okay, good to know. Now, let's go a little bit deeper...

I generally read all Aces as Breakthroughs, and the King of Wands as a firm hand. Page or (Princess in Thoth) is a pragmatic application, so this would appear to be outlining a course of action: Applying Will in the proper place and without judgment, but with the understanding of when to back off may lead to a break-through. 

RIP Dean Stockwell

I'm a couple days late with this but talk about shitty news. Here's to your fuck, Ben.

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Watch:

I'd never seen William Malone's 1985 Creature, but I grew up seeing the VHS box cover art on the wall at the local video story and been curious as a kid. 

Somewhere in the intervening years I completely forgot about this one, until Vinegar Syndrome announced a new, restored version they're releasing at the end of this month. Pre-orders are closed - I didn't act fast enough while I tried to figure out if it was worth spending the money on when I'm still really limiting my frivolous expenses in preparation for moving across the country - but I believe will go live again for VS's Black Friday sale. 

 

So is Creature worth it? Well, as I stated in my quickie Letterbxd review, this film isn't great and it's not even really good, however, I feel like there are echoes within echoes that lead me back to this one. Probably the best of those 80s Sci-Fi Monster-in-Space Horror flicks that ballooned overnight as a response to the success of Ridley Scott's Alien, Creature reeks of the B-Movie, down-n-dirty pulp atmosphere that a low budget required filmmakers excel at in order to make up for the otherwise lack of expensive sets/props/production value. And from this era, that's not a bad thing in my book. Well, not in this case, anyway. Creature is a pinnacle of the zeitgeist landslide of cheap and fast Sci-Fi that created a zeitgeist in the 80s, one that washed up on the shores of comics, role-playing, and all kinds of other geek-centric mediums. Watching it for the first time at 45, Creature felt like a well-spent hour and forty-odd minutes that triggered all kinds of peripheral genre memories, or as I've come to think of them, PGMs. So yeah, I'll probably plunk down the $$$ for this one. Would make a fantastic double feature with Richard Stanley's Hardware. 

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Playlist:

Pilot Priest and Electric Youth - Come True OST

Dream Division - Beyond the Mirror's Image

Mastodon - Hushed and Grim

Soviet Soviet - Fate

Motörhead - Ace of Spades

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Shake the Sheets

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Let Love In

The Who - Live at Leeds

Odonis Odonis - Spectrums

Odonis Odonis - Post Plague

Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments

The Fixx - Reach the Beach

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Card:

Keeping a keen eye out for portents and omens today.

New Sleaford Mods!

 

From the forthcoming album Spare Ribs, out January 15th on Rough Trade. Pre-order HERE. Thanks to Mr. Brown for reminding me about this, as the Mods are always one of those bands that slide right off my radar when I'm not actively listening to them. 

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'Cast

My perpetual co-host Chris Saunders and I recently started an all Horror comics and literature spin-off show under The Horror Vision umbrella. The first episode of A Most Horrible Library went up early Monday morning, with more to follow on a somewhat regular basis.

 

This show is kind of our way of going back to substituting a new show for where Drinking with Comics left off; I'm still hoping to resurrect that after things go "back to normal," as it is primarily a live show, however, I'm not really one who believes things will go back to normal anytime soon, so in the interim, we have this as an outlet to talk about all the great Horror-centric reading out there. A Most Horrible Library will release under the same stream as the regular Horror Vision show, so no need for a new subscription.

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Watch:

After working our way a little over halfway through the fourth, apparently final "part" of Netflix's The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina over the last two nights, K and I rounded out our Monday night with the first of two episodes HBO dropped yesterday of Alex de la Inglesia's 30 Coins.

Holy smokes - this episode had the best monster I've seen since The Ritual a few years back. Mind-boggling and totally terrifying. I'm really looking forward to watching this one weekly.

Currently watching 1993's Body Melt on Amazon Prime. I've been feeling run down and a back-ache/stomach pain combination's reduced my sleep to less than I need to function, so I took a re-set day from work and plan on doing pretty much nothing. I actually started trying to rewatch Adam Simon's Brain Dead, which is also on Prime, however, the transfer to digital looks like it came off a deteriorated, second-hand VHS, with that dreary old 4:3 aspect ratio that doesn't work on anything not filmed to specifically have that effect. In looking it up, I see that Shout/Scream Factory transferred Brain Dead a few years back, so I'm hoping that pops up somewhere; I've never seen Brain Dead in its entirety, and it's been on my list for a while.

So far, Body Melt's doing the trick, though, and while I'm rarely interested in what Vinegar Syndrome releases, there are exceptions, and this would be one of them, and they did a pretty good job cleaning this one up for the digital age.

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Playlist:

Massive Attack - Mezzanine

Orville Peck - Pony

Soundgarden - SOMMS

Them are Us Too - Remain

Thou - Rhea Sylvia

Mrs. Piss - Self Surgery

The Blues Brothers - Briefcase Full of Blues

Muddy Waters - Electric Mud

Turquoise Moon - The Sunset City

Goatsnake - Black Age Blues

Goatsnake - Trampled Under Hoof

MF Doom - Operation: Doomsday

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full

Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris

Van Halen - 1984

Iress - Prey

The Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once

Belong - October Language

David Bowie - Scary Monsters (And Super Freaks)

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Card:

First spread of 2021:

The Queen of Swords is definitely a defining force in my life, or at least has been over the last year or two. One of the reasons I do all this logging is so I can look back through the blog and track influences and the like, and when I search Queen of Swords, I see it came up five times in 2020. Thus, reading in the conventional Past-Present-Future positions, we see the Queen of Swords or the Airy Part of Intellect, ie sharpened perception as the Present and the Idea as a concise statement fortified by Knowledge (Past; 6 of Cups) and the balancing of the many tiers of that Intellect/Idea as a challenge to be overcome (Future; 10 of Wands) in the near future.