Deeply moved to hear that Blackie Onassis from Chicago's Urge Overkill passed away yesterday at the age of 57.
Ten years older than me. Damn.
This is THE Chicago band to me, as far as those who flirted with the big time. The Jesus Lizard will always occupy the throne, but while everyone screamed their way through Smashing Pumpkins songs in the mid-to-late 90s (I did until Melancholie) Urge represented the best Chicago's indie rock scene had to offer the mainstream. They didn't compromise, and they were honest-to-goodness Rock n' Roll, two capital R's and an apostrophe. Blackie, thank you for your service.
Watch:
It's 11:13 on Thursday, June 15. I just finished a nearly two-hour recording session with The Horror Vision for Elements of Horror: Cruising. Prior to doing the episode, I found this on youtube:
There are SO many reasons I love this film and I love William Friedkin as a filmmaker. A LOT of those reasons are discussed herein, but pay special attention to Friedkin's discussion of the impetus for making the film. Also to Randy Jurgensen, the undercover cop who lived a large part of what we see on screen. As usual with Friedkin, I'm stunned not only by his art, but all of the thinking that went into and around its creation.
Read:
Just a quick observation on this week's X-Men: Red #12. Man, when did this book start to resemble Rick Remender and Jerome Opena's fantasy epic Seven to Eternity? In retrospect, even the cover looks a bit like it could be a Seven for Eternity cover:
There's A LOT I'm missing here due to the fact that I've still not read a large swathe of Hickman's run after House/Powers, primarily X of Swords. I have so little background on the Arrako characters, The White Sword, Genesis and Orrako, etc. Going to have to remedy that eventually, but in the meantime, the landscape of this really reminds me of Seven to Eternity, and I wonder if Ewing is a fan of that series.
Pondering this, I stumbled on the following interview Marvel's Ryan Penagos did recently with Hickman and Grant Morrison, discussing how the two men changed so much of the status quo so successfully.
Good stuff; I haven't seen an interview with Morrison in a while, good to hear his voice.
Playlist:
The Native Howl - Thrash Grass EP
Mudvayne - Choices (single)
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Gila Monster/Dragon (pre-release singles)
The Bobby Lees - Bellevue
The Sword - Warp Riders
Spotlights - Seance EP
Locrian - Return to Annihilation
Zombi - Shape Shift
Urge Overkill - Saturation
Card:
Keeping on with the Crowly/Harris Thoth for today's Pull:
• 4 of Swords: Truce seems a direct connection to yesterday's 7 of Swords. The Pause becomes a truce.
• III The Empress - this card has come up a lot in conversation lately. In this instance, quoting from the Grimoire, "can point to dissipation when paired with unfortunate cards; Swords, Princes."
• 5 of Swords - The Truce will dissolve and lead to a new conflict, issue, or the like.
Not terribly encouraging, but also, isn't that life? One thing directly precedes the next. I pulled a final, clarifying card and found exactly that:
No matter what life throws at you, one journey ends, another begins.
Holy F*&k! New Blut Aus Nord and it's a doozy! Was it even a year ago that Disharmonium - Undreamable Abysses came out and blew my mind? How can every record these guys do be so unbelievably different? Listening to this, I feel like Laird Barron's Isaiah Coleridge, finding a secret and otherworldly recording while digging around online for one of his spooky AF cases. Disharmonium - Nahab drops on August 21 via Debemur Morti; you can pre-order it HERE for the EU and HERE for the US.
Watch:
This past Sunday, with my friend Alex visiting from LaLaLand, K, he and I held a mini Friedkin Fest - we watched William Friedkin's 1977 unsung masterpiece Sorcerer and his equally fantastic and insanely transgressive 1980 giallo Cruising.
I've seen this one several times in the ~ three years since I purchased Sorcerer on Blu-Ray and watched it for the first time. Every time I see this one, it gets better. Case in point - I'd had some ups and downs with the first half of the film on previous viewings, mainly because most of those viewings occurred at night. This time I sat riveted from start to finish and came away thinking the first half is, narratively speaking, as good as the second half. That was a nice feeling, both halves finally making a whole.
Cruising is one I just watched for the first time a few weeks ago, and from the moment that viewing ended, I've been chomping at the bit for a rewatch. The twisting and turning narrative, as unreliable as if Bret Easton Ellis penned the screenplay, just blows me away, and despite the fact that this time I took copious notes, I still don't have a solid answer as to who did what. A mystery that, after it's 'solved,' begets another, darker mystery. In other words, the best kind!
NCBD:
Here are my picks, and I'm excited for all three of them:
Nightmare Country: Glass House has been up and down as a month-by-month reading experience, but I retain faith it will all come together as an eventual whole.
First post-Armegeddon Game Turtles issue, a very good thing. I didn't read that event, however, from what I glimpsed in the pages of the regular series, I'm curious to see what the new landscape will be. This book often cools a bit for me, then immediately springs back to the top of my pile. We're about due for that. LOVE this cover, but it's a variant, so hopefully I'll manage to snag one.
Despite loathing last week's X-Men: First Strike or whatever the hell it was called (great cover though), my fervor for X-Men: Red, Immortal X-Men, and the monthly X-Men team book remain as high as ever.
Playlist:
Godflesh - Purge
Savages - Silence Yourself
Slowspin - Talisman
Deftones - Koi No Yokan
Deftones - Gore
Deftones - White Pony
The Flamingos - Playlist: Best of the Flamingos
Chamber of Screams, Clement Panchout & Mxxn - Murder House (Puppet Combo OST)
Blut Aus Nord - What Once Was
Blut Aus Nord - The Endless Multitude (pre-release single)
Card:
Pulling from Aleister Crowley and Lady Freida Harris' Thoth Deck today:
• Battles over money/earthly concerns - the struggle is within
• XVII The Star - opening up to new influences/ideas/concerns
• 10 fo Cups - The emotional cup runneth over
All this is just to say, "stop spending so much damn money and start saving again!"
From the 1987 OST for Kathryn Bigelow's inimitable debut film, Near Dark, one of about three vampire movies I can't live without.
Tangerine Dream was such a solid choice for scoring this film, and I'd say it just accentuates William Friedkin's obvious influence on Bigelow film. The early scene in the film this song scores is one of the most era-defining moments of 80s Horror for me. I didn't see Near Dark until well after its release, but the sights and sounds of this sequence somehow sum up a large part of the texture I remember from the mid-to-late 80s.
Watch:
Saturday night, K and I finally sat down and watched William Friedkin's 1980 thriller Cruising.
I remember some time back when Netflix was still by mail, I watched Friedkin's French Connection and To Live and Die in L.A. and realized, "Oh shit, this is the same guy who did The Exorcist. Wow."
I've never been one to get into an artist and just consume everything they've done immediately. There's still one Bret Baston Ellis book I haven't read; there are several Irvine Welsh novels I'm keeping on the back burner, and I've not heard more PJ Harvey than I've heard. This isn't to say there's any reason I'm avoiding these entries in the respective artist's canon except that I want to make sure there's something on deck. With Friedkin, I'm sure I looked up his filmography and made some long-forgotten notes, but I didn't exactly jump on anything else right away.
Sometime around 2013, titterings began for the restoration, release and revival house screenings of two "lost masterpieces" - 1977 Sorceror and Cruising. I remember mid-week screenings popping up at the New Beverly Cinema or the Silent Movie Theatre. I remember not having the money to go, or to buy the newly released DVD because my live was getting ready to explode. Ten years later, I finally sat down and watched Cruising and it absolutely blew me away, although not in the manner I expected.
Friedkin is the best kind of sneaky when it comes to what he shows his audience. He manipulates his story via the medium of film by how he edits, what he puts in and what he leaves out of his script and its dialogue. Also, there's a level of casting manipulation here that I didn't understand at first, but after I read THIS ARTICLE. There is such mastery of film as a medium here, but not in the usual ways. Yes, the craft - the cinematography, writing, acting, all of it is superb, but the mastery I'm referencing here is the way Friedkin compresses his narrative into the actual physical act of showing it to us on screen. This isn't anything 'new,' however, I don't know anyone who has done it quite like this before.
Playlist:
Black Sabbath - Master of Reality
Black Sabbath - Technical Ecstasy
Bongripper - Satan Worshipping Doom
Atrium Carceri - Kapnobatai
High on Fire - Death is this Communion
High on Fire - Surrounded By Thieves
Sleep - The Sciences
SQÜRL - Silver Haze
Gaupa - Myriad
Mars Red Sky - Eponymous
Steve Earle - J.T.
Trombone Shorty - Too True
The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicenter
Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
David Bowie - Diamond Dogs
Card:
A single Thoth card for my Pull today:
When one path closes, the trick is sidestep the disappointment and watch for the next opening sure to arise in the wake.
It's only been over the last ten years or so that I've begun to feel a growing obsession with the cinematic works of William Friedkin. The man whose name I once knew solely in conjunction with what I once considered the scariest movie ever made, The Exorcist, began to take on new connotations back somewhere in the murky recesses of the end of our previous decade. It was at that time I watched The French Connection for the first time since I was an un-interested child, a third-person voyeur's viewing via the method of early film ingestion many 80s children will relate to. During the dawn of the VHS and video store boom, Saturday nights were commonly VCR Nights; you'd trek to the Video Store with your parents early in the day, pick out something to watch during the afternoon or early evening, then after dinner, it was parents' movie time. Sometimes they rented stuff we could all watch, sometimes it was stuff you weren't interested in but you stayed in the front room and played with your toys while they watched, because the nuclear family was still mostly alive and well in the Suburban United States and the units of the family gravitated toward one another, teenage social rebellion having not yet set in. Then sometimes, there were movies like The Falcon and Snowman, or The Deer Hunter, where the folks waited until you were in bed to watch. It is in this second variation that I believe I originally was exposed to and absorbed elements of The French Connection, but what made it to adulthood was little more than the film's grimy tone.
When I did sit down in my thirties and watch Popeye Doyle and the entire spectacle of Friedkin's crime epic, I was floored. I'd just finished reading a book that Mr. Brown had lent me, Stephen Farber's Outrageous Conduct. Primarily a depiction of the events leading up to and the aftermath from the deaths of veteran actor Vic Morrow and two young children during the filming of John Landis' Twilight Zone: The Movie, Farber offered examples of other 'outrageous conduct' by 70s/80s era directors. The French Connection was included; Friedkin's filming of a car chase during actual New York City traffic resonated with me as outrageous, but just the right kind of outrageous. This is the commitment that made Cinema what it was in its heyday. It is also what led to corporate control and the eventual commoditization of Cinema, so that today, good or bad, all we really have with big budgets are franchise movies. The French Connection played out before me, eliciting moments of half-remembered ah-has, but ultimately as a brand new experience, making me realize the rest of Friedkin's work was something well worth engaging in.
Sorcerer was another movie that I believe Farber's book mentioned. Long elusive to digital transfer, I hunted for screenings of this one for a few years, until finally a BR was announced. I tried to order that disc several times; on every episode it eluded me, until early in 2019, when Friedkin's jungle-epic popped back up on Amazon. I ordered it, however, Amazon had trouble fulfilling that order. I received countless emails over the course of several weeks, all assurances the disc would ship soon. Until finally, the final email came and announced a refund had been issued. It seems I was to wait just a little while longer before I could see Sorcerer*.
Finally, last week, a happened to look at my Amazon wish list and noticed Sorcerer on Blu Ray had returned. I snapped that fucker up in a heartbeat and two days later, my disc arrived.
This past Saturday, I sat down to finally watch this much-anticipated film. However, my initial viewing was doomed from the start. It was late, and Sorcerer has, what my good friend and fellow Horror Vision co-host Ray calls '70s pacing.' Now, to be clear, I do not mind '70s pacing.' In many cases, I love it. However, I have to be ready for it. Last Saturday, I was not. After sleeping through most of this attempt, I called it quits around 2:30 AM and left the comfy confines of our new couch for the more appropriate quarters of our bed.
The following day was a frustrating one. This always happens when I fail to meet an anticipated film on its own terms. When a movie is as theoretically this amazing and I don't bond with it, my initial interpretation of that schism is that the problem originates with me, not the film. How many amazing pieces of art, whether song, prose, film, do we encounter in our lives and dismiss, only to reconnect with it years later and realize we were simply not tuned to that piece's specific wavelength upon first encounter? It so happens that, after moping about Sunday, Monday returned from work with the first strains of viral illness washing over me and dug in for another attempt.
This time, Sorcerer worked.
I still had a hard time with the first hour or so of the film, and I'm now leaning toward that being the Film's fault and not mine, but after making it all the way through, I intend to go back and see if completing the journey helps bolster what otherwise feels like pacing issues. Issues caused by a Director's insistence on adhering to a "European" tone that really doesn't do anything but, to reference an infamous scene later in the film, spin its tires in the mud. However, I'm still not sure I won't now see something in the arduous first act that I didn't see before. Regardless, Sorcerer is an achievement of a film, and one I will continue to engage with, analyze, and subject others to for the rest of my life. Because the imagery, the acting, and the cinema verite reality of that acting is of a caliber that's nearly unbelievable, and because, like another movie I wrote about here recently, from the perspective of 2020's Hollywood, it is almost unbelievable anyone allowed a director to be so indulgent as to make this movie. In keeping with this, you'll notice this title card during the film's opening:
That's because a second studio pitched in to help carry the cost of completing the film after money began to wash away in the storm Friedkin had created. You can read about this in length on the Wikipedia Entry for Sorcerer, however there's a wealth of other information out there, most of it coalescing in the Italian Documentary Friedkin Uncut, which has yet to have a release in the states. My own information from the documentary came second hand; gleaned from talking with someone who was lucky enough to see the film on an airplane in Europe.
Also, and there's no way to discuss this film and not mention this, the rope bridge scene is surely one of the greatest realizations of a Director's vision ever put to film. It's outstanding in its tension, almost a bullet hole that kills the rest of the film, if it wasn't for the narratives degeneration into complete, alien madness. For an in-depth discussion of where this film goes visually, HERE is a great article I found while putting this post together.
Another little time capsule that helps illustrate the cultural malaise toward this film upon its release, here's a clip I found online via the Eyes on Cinema youtube channel, which has a wealth of information on it:
Both men are mis-informed about the film's 'Special FX,' and I wonder if that's because during the initial release of Sorcerer, Friedkin had to downplay the dangerous conditions he'd created in order to make the film, possibly because the studio(s) already had displayed the intention to let it die a quick and costly death? Would revealing the methods of madness employed in the Rope Bridge Sequence, the real explosions captured during the Jerusalem Vignette, or the toll the film had taken on its cast helped bring people in to see Sorcerer? We'll never know.
Finally, just to bring everything around full circle, the track that leads off this post is from Tangerine Dreams phenomenal OST to the film, which Waxwork Records just released in their customary fantastic high-end format. You can peruse or purchase that record HERE.
.................
* During this time, several pop up screenings occurred at the likes of the more passionate, independent movie houses in LaLa Land. I could attend none of them.
Yes, I post this song every year. I will continue to do so for the rest of my time on Earth. Nothing sets the Autumnal mood for me like this song, and this album (digipak version). My, how I miss Peter Steele and the boys.
**
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
10/04: IT Chapter 2, AHS 1984 Ep. 3
10/05: Bliss/VFW
10/06: Halloween III: Season of the Witch/Night of the Creeps/The Fog
10/07: Halloween 2018
10/08: Hell House, LLC
10/09: Dance of the Dead (Tobe Hooper; Masters of Horror Ssn 1 Ep 3)
10/10: Creepshow Episode 3
10/11: Jenifer (Dario Argento; Masters of Horror Ssn 1 Ep 4)
10/12: Poltergeist/Phenomena
10/13: AHS 1984 Ep 4/In the Tall Grass
10/14: Invasion of the Body Snatchers ('78)
10/15: Rabid (2019)
10/16: Wounds
10/17: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
10/18: Creepshow Episode 4
10/19: Ed Wood/AHS 1984 Ep. 5
10/20: Sinister/Sinister 2
10/21: Uncanny Annie
10/22: Scream
10/23: Simpsons 666: Treehouse of Horror
10/24: Jennifer's Body
10/25: Belzebuth/The Lighthouse/Halloween
10/26: Murder Party
10/27: AHS 1984 Ep. 6/Arsenic and Old Lace/The Fair Haired Child (Masters of Horror Ssn 1 Ep 9)
10/28: May
10/29: The Exorcist (Theatrical Cut)
10/30: Nightmare Cinema
I felt considerably saddened two nights ago when, for the second time in the last ten years, I watched William Friedkin's The Exorcist and felt nothing in the way of the fear that the film used to evoke in me. If you chart my experiences with Friedkin's masterpiece, there was my awareness of it as a kid; I'm certain I saw parts of it as a child, but I don't think I saw the entire film until somewhere in the early to mid-90s. I don't really remember that viewing, other than as an introduction. My critical faculties for film, in general, were burgeoning at the time, but still largely unsophisticated. Then, in the early 00s, I watched it with a friend, stoned out of my mind in a darkened room, and felt a very real fear that bordered on dread. This feeling stayed with me for at least a day afterward and inspired my oft-repeated axiom, "I don't believe in the Devil, except for three days after I watch The Exorcist."
This used to be exactly true.
I watched the film again in 2004 with the same friend and a few other fellows, all stoned, lights out, in the living room of the house some friends and I used to rent in the Beverly neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. I remember that viewing best because I was so freaked out during it I didn't want to get up and go to the restroom, which was about three feet beyond the television.
Fast forward to somewhere around 2009-2010. Living in Los Angeles now, I invited a few friends over to watch the Director's Cut of The Exorcist, the version I had never seen that contained the freaky and much-hyped Spider-walk sequence. After having talked it up for quite some time to everyone present, this was the first viewing where the film really did not affect me almost at all, certainly not the way it had in the past. That brooding, sustained fear is what I look for in 'scary movies.' I chalked this up to the Director's Cut potentially having different pacing.
After my viewing of the Theatrical Cut again two nights ago, I now find that it's not the film, it's me.
Most Horror films use jump scares, because they're fun and easy. Some use gore or disturbing premises and images to achieve their desired effect. FEW can create the air of menace I'm talking about here. The Exorcist - which although it appears no longer affects me I still consider the scariest movie ever made - definitely does it the best. The original Blair Witch Project also does this and has the advantage of real human fear being captured on film in places (no, I am not suggesting the marketing that the film was real is true. But BWP was partially shot with the three actors operating under false pretenses, and long before the hype of that film began, I read an article that talked about how the directors followed the actors through the woods for several days, employing a magnet to disrupt their compass and actually preying on them by making the strange noises in the middle of the night and, at one point, actually running up and attacking the tent while the actors were inside freaking out). More recently, during its original theatrical run, I was surprised to find James Wan's Insidious had some genuinely scary scenes - the baby monitor and the ghost that walks through the wall, in particular. In fact, several of Wan's franchise films have great moments of sustained fear - think of the two sisters reacting to the dark corner or the handclaps in The Conjuring - but the films usually also take a misstep along the way that neutralizes the overall effect. This year, as part of 31 Days of Horror, I was pleasantly surprised to find Hell House, LLC has some very real fear-inducing moments, and nary a misstep afterward. But off the top of my head, that's all I can think of (always looking for suggestions). They say familiarity breeds contempt, but I've never agreed with that. However, perhaps at this point, I've had the maximum number of viewings one can have with a legitimately fear-producing film before it loses its power. Not to mention, if you add all the lampooning of key scenes from The Exorcist in comedy sketches and pop culture, I'm afraid I may lay this one to rest.
**
Playlist from the last few days:
Type O Negative - Dead Again
Type O Negative - Life is Killing Me
The Obsessed - Lunar Womb
Boy Harsher - Careful
Black Sabbath - Paranoid
Billy Idol - Greatest Hits
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
Deth Crux - Pears of Anguish EP
Fields of the Nephilim - The Nephilim
The Sisters of Mercy - Floodland
Ministry - Psalm 69
Black Pumas - Eponymous
The Dead Milkmen - The King in Yellow
The Misfits - American Psycho
Card of the Day:
Is this banging my head against the wall or the edict I should move beyond my frustrations and continue to work toward my goal? Number two, always.
Major props to the always awesome Bloody Disgusting for posting this. To me Friedkin's The Exorcist is still the scariest movie ever made. Interestingly enough though last year I purchased the "Version you've never seen before" DVD and it seemed like the editing was waaaaay different, to the point that the same palpable menace did not settle over the room as I watched it. Now, this could have been because I had several friends over for the viewing, although the viewing previous to that one saw myself and at least three friends sit in the dark and watch the film. That particular viewing I remember being too scared to even get up and answer the call of nature, for a time. I'll have to A and B the versions at some point.