Friday the 13th and I'm going to see the Soft Moon!!! Here's some awesome F13 stuff to enjoy:
New Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying is up HERE.
Playlist from Thursday the 12th (a mention that will become ironic later this year):
Odonis Odonis - Hollandaze
Ozzy Osbourne - No More Tears
Ben Frost - By The Throat
Monolord - Rust
Pigface - A New High In Low
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Distant Sky (Concert Film)
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
Card of the day:
Always nice to see this one, especially when I just received the proof of my first book cover! Should I reveal it yet? Naw... not just yet.
New issue of Gideon Falls hit the stands yesterday. I have it with me in my bag, hopefully I'll get a chance to read it today.
Also, picked back up on Dark on Netflix. I had a lot of trouble with this show at first, mainly because the default was overdubs instead of the original German with subtitles. Now that I have that worked out (thanks Charles!) we're back in and it is captivating. I'm still having a bit of trouble keeping track of who is who, but overall the show is so fascinating and absolutely beautiful that I can't wait to have a few hours to just binge some of it.
Playlist from 4/11:
Ghost - Popestar E.P.
Man or Astro Man - Intravenous Television Continuum
Ghost - Infestissumam
Algiers - Underside of Power
Aerosmith - Eponymous
The Ocean - Pelagial
Card for the day:
Breakthrough! Always love seeing this card, especially close to the completion of a project that has been lingering.
Last night we went and saw A Quiet Place. I can't stress this enough: SEE IT IN THE THEATRE. A theatre with GOOD sound. Excellent film, and outstanding use of sound. The score is a bit overdone early on, but the juxtaposition between quiet, i.e. ambient sound, and quiet, i.e. NO sound (one character is deaf), and sound, like BIG sound, is just fantastic and makes for an awesome theatrical experience.
Playlist from yesterday:
Venue - 8 song demo (circa 2001)
Preoccupations - New Material
Soft Moon - Eponymous
Isaac Hayes - ... To Be Continued
The Who - Who's Next
Just finished Si Spencer and Sean Murphy's John Constantine Hellblazer trade City of Demons. Excellent late-era Constantine story, highly recommended. Has a marvelous climax and then a nice, cinematic outro.
Also, read what had to be my favorite story in the Ligotti Anthology, The Cocoons. Short, sweet and to the point. Body horror with a nightmare finish. Very atmospheric and creepy as all hell. If you've read it, or subsequently read it based on my recommendation, Ligotti himself comments on the story at the prompt of a question HERE.
Card for today (which, despite the late arrival of this entry, I pulled at 5 something this morning:
Professionally, this card can mean a willingness to scrap with others. This fits; I don't talk specific work stuff here, but there are people in other departments not living up to their responsibilities and I've taken to throwing down the gauntlet on them. Take care of your shit, right?
The Ocean - Heliocentric
The Red Chord - Clients
Myrkur - M
Butthole Surfers - Locust Abortion Technician
Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers of the Icy Age
Card of the day:
Change because something big has changed with my approach to Parish Fenn, and something bigger with our lead character. And now, I finally feel like I get her.
Yesterday was chock full of tension. Not bad tension, but the kind that accompanies just barely getting a bunch of stuff done that had to get done. Chief among these integral events was getting the Art ordered for my anthology's cover. This opened up a bunch of research I didn't realize I would have to do, like trim size and paper color. And ordering the art held up the day's bigger task, which was moving some of K's mom's stuff. That's going to be an ongoing thing over the next three weeks, and it's difficult. Still, it all went fairly smooth in the end. No time for a post though, so I'll try to miniaturize the day herein, beginning with the card I pulled yesterday, which was the Nine of Cups: Happiness.
Playlist from the 7th:
Grifteskymfning - Likpsalm
Myrkur - M
Blut Aus Nord - Deus Salutis Meae
The Ocean - Heliocentric
Lustmord - The Word as Power
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Bohren & Der Club of Gore - Sunset Mission
Playlist from the 8th:
Myrkur - M
Card of the day:
This I take as a direct nod to the deep dive I'm about to pull on the first issue of Parish Fen, which is in need of some tweaking before I pass if back off to Grimm for the art, which has been started and looks absolutely Amazing.
It’s been years since the groundbreaking debut of black metal band Angelus Mortis, and that first album, Henosis, has become a classic of the genre, a harrowing primal scream of rage and anger. With the next two albums, Fields of Punishment and Telos, Angelus Mortis cemented a reputation for uncompromising, aggressive music, impressing critics and fans alike. But the road to success is littered with temptation, and over the next decade, Angelus Mortis’s leader, Max, better known as Strigoi, became infamous for bad associations and worse behavior, burning through side-men and alienating fans.
Today, at the request of their record label, Max and new drummer Roland are traveling to Ukraine to record a comeback album with the famously reclusive cult act Wisdom of Silenus. What they discover when they get there will go far deeper than the aesthetics of the genre, and the music they create–antihuman, antilife–ultimately becomes a weapon unto itself.
Equally inspired by the fractured, nightmarish novels of John Hawkes, the blackened dreamscapes of cosmic-pessimist philosophy, and the music of second-wave black metal bands, author David Peak’s Corpsepaint is an exploration of creative people summoning destructive powers while struggling to express what it means to be human.
Cover Art by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Cover Design by Scott R Jones
Pub Date: April 30, 2018
New installment of Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying went up yesterday. Read it HERE on Joup.
Playlist for 4/05:
Cypress Hill - III: Temples of Boom
Alice in Chains - Dirt
Soundgarden - Down on the Upside
Black Sabbath - Sabotage
Preoccupations - New Material
Card for the day:
There is some extremely fascinating reading on this card HERE. I don't have time this morning to comb that particular text for correspondences to my daily life, so I'm going with the idea that The Magus reminds us of the creative Will that shapes all life. Self-manifestation, which fits because I intend to finish editing the last two stories in the anthology today or tomorrow, then it's just shoring up the cover art.
Happy Birthday Jake! Still miss you my friend. You've missed a lot... but then again, a lot of what you've missed isn't exactly great, so maybe you're better off. Still, I think about you damn near everyday. Here's one of our favorites:
I'm going to supersede the Divine Feminine thing I've been doing with my listening for a Jake day today, in honor of my one-time best friend who passed away when we were twenty-two. It would be his forty-second birthday today (let's be honest, there was no way he was making it this far). Jake and I had a lot of music in common; we'd spend hours smoking pot and just listening. Tried to do a few bands at certain points. One of those, Second Attention, was pretty damn good. Maybe one day I'll upload some of that stuff to youtube or, actually, I'll probably do a band camp. Regardless, Sabotage was one of those albums we analyzed endlessly, and Meglomania in particular, underwent heavy scrutiny to its lyrics, which are amazing.
New Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying going up later today.
Playlist from yesterday:
Jucifer - If Thine Enemy Hunger
Witchcryer - Cry Witch
Myrkur - M
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
Foster the People - Torches
Ministry - Psalm 69
Curtis Harding - Face Your Fear
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Cocksure - TVMALSV
Card for the day:
"Physical prosperity, abundance, and material success."
Nice to see with annual reviews just around the corner and me working my arse off constantly. Also, always good to remember this card represents the total of the spheres of the Quaballahistic Tree of Life: Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed, Geburah, Tipareth, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, and Malkuth - the last being the sphere of Disks as well as that of tens.
I've been clocking a lot of time with the first Zeppelin record recently, both on the original vinyl and the remastered version available in Apple Music, and it's never sounded so damn good. I love all Led Zeppelin, but my binges with the band's music usually reach obsession level only once every two years or so and almost always skew toward the back half of their career. But right now, Zeppelin One is constantly haunting me, and this song is one of the reasons. I've probably not listened to these songs on headphones since the old mix tapes I made off WCKG's Get the Led Out sessions, back when I was a Freshmen or Sophomore in High School, circa '91/'92, and in plugging in directly to my ear canals recently with the remastered version, I've noticed a few things I'm unsure if I was ever aware of before. Chief among these is a faint, eerie backing vocal Robert Plant does around 1:41 in, where he pre-sings the "I can hear it calling me," part of the end of the verse. It chills me, and I like that.
Playlist from yesterday:
Sarah Brighten - Eden
Garbage - Eponymous
Luscious Jackson - Fever In Fever Out
Preoccupations - New Material
L7 - Hungry for Stink
Based on my Tarot pull yesterday, I tried to stick to feminine music and avoid anything aggro. About halfway through the day, I realized the Prince of Cups card had another interesting juxtaposition to my immediate days when I remembered that I've been reading Becky Cloonan and Andy Belanger and Lee Louhridge. It's one of my favorite comics right now and it has a very feminine vibe, which makes its dark, creepy and sometimes downright terrifyingly sexy (yeah, that's a thing) vibe very unique and extremely compelling. It also opens me up to a different tone than I'm used to for my thoughts, letting a little of that feminine side in at angles I'm not used to experiencing them, and that makes the machine feel like its running pretty good.
Card for today:
Obviously another Feminine card, what with Egyptian Goddess Nuit pictured, dousing herself in the waters of the Universe, Stars at her feet.
I'd written these guys off a long time ago. When I first heard System of a Down, and it was this exact song, they made a good impression on me. Then I dove a little deeper and found the malaise of the down-tuned, trace elliot 00s guitar-driven metal storm left me cold enough where I wrote off most of the groups that 'made it' during that time. Eventually a few exceptions leaked through, some of them rather begrudgingly . A few days ago at work one of the newer guys on my shift and I were talking music and System came up. He's considerably younger, and had a completely different perspective. I decided to hit that first record back up on Apple Music and, wouldn't you know, I listened to it yesterday and really enjoyed it. Also, I've always dug their completely insane cover of Sabbath's Snowblind that appears on the Nativity in Black tribute anthology record, so I guess I never 100% discounted these guys.
Playlist from yesterday:
The Fall - Early Singles
System of a Down - Eponymous
Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin I
Peter Gabriel - Us
Bloc Party - Silent Alarm
Bell Witch - Mirror Reaper
Soundgarden - SOMMS
Card for the day:
Gallantry, gentleness and a male in touch with his feminine side. This is me, to a degree. Since early 20s, I've always understood and respected the feminine aspects of my psyche, and I often pay homage to them with the music I listen to and how I relate to it while its on. Maybe I'll follow this side of things today and see where it gets me (I've been rather male/aggressive at work lately, not in an alpha male way, but with a lot of things going pear-shaped at month's end, I got pretty aggro. Today I'll play it a bit different, with this card in mind.
Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin III
John Coltrane - Giant Steps
Card of the day:
Two, as one drifted from the pile while I shuffled and made itself known, so to speak:
Ace of Swords was the actual card I pulled. This card is BREAKTHROUGH and I feel that's a direct reference to the fact that in all the busyness yesterday, moving and cleaning and whatnot, I actually managed to get a final edit done on two more of the seven stories for the anthology.
This seems to be piggybacking off the last two pulls in some weird, reverse energy fluctuation. I had the Six of Wands and the Seven of Wands, a influx of energy and the expenditure of that energy, respectively. Now I have the beginning of that triumvirate, where the energy amasses. Fits, if I'm going to make a push this week to finish the editing and the first issue of Parish Fen, which is exactly what I'm going to do, all while hopefully only working about 45 hours between now and Friday and taking an actual weekend off.
Yesterday was a sacrifice - finished the latest Drinking with Comics and put it up, worked in the middle of the day, cleaned and unboxed. Never had a chance to do the blog until later at night and by then March 30th, it's playlist and the idea of pulling a card were loooong gone. I do know that I woke up with this in my head yesterday though:
Nearing the end of Thomas Ligotti's Grimscribe and just finished The Dreaming in Nortown, easily one of my favorite stories in this collection of the author's earliest two anthologies. The story builds a nice, palpable dread by plumbing the depths of consciousness; that nasty little place where waking life and the oneiric plane intermingle. And Ligotti does this in a way that feels reminiscent of Lovecraft's best philosophical terror, i.e. the opening paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu, so there's a nostalgic harmony to my enjoyment of it, as well. That said, the slightly ineffective abstractions meant to masquerade as profound raison d'être for the characters wax and wane a bit in a kind of 'nothing is happening' way; not to say I'm complaining there's no action or monsters, quite the opposite. Once again though, as I have with other stories in this collection, I feel the The Dreaming in Nortown's end doesn't exactly payoff what the rest of the story sets up.
Also recently began Si Spencer and Sean Murphy's older Hellblazer story, City of Demons. So far, really good.
Playlist from 3/31
Tennis System - Technicolour Blind
Cash Money - Black Hearts and Broken Wills
Red Lorry Yellow Lorry - The Very Best of
Childish Gambino - Because the Internet
System of a Down - Eponymous
The Verve - A Storm in Heaven
Pink Floyd - the Wall
The Used - Ocean of the Sky
Garbage - Eponymous
