Isolation: Day 57 - Alphabetland!

Last Friday, seminal LA punk rock group X released their first album with the all-original line-up in, well, I don't really know how long, but a pretty damn long time! Especially good news is the fact that founding guitarist Billy Zoom has conquered his health problems and returned to the fold. I saw X live (with Dwight Yokam!) five or six years ago and Billy was not present. They were great, but it's just not the same without that man.

You can pick this one up on X's Bandcamp HERE.

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A couple of days ago I finally watched V/H/S/2 and V/H/S: Viral. Part 2 is more or less fantastic, the Indonesian segment being one of the scariest things I've seen in a while. Viral is, as several friends warned me, not all that great. The one segment I absolutely loved though was "Bonestorm," and turned out to have been done by Benson and Moorhead, the guys responsible for Resolution and The Endless, which I talked about recently in these pages.

**



Heaven is an Incubator posted this a few days ago. Awesome. Find it on Bandcamp HERE.

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I finished Preston Fassel's fantastic novel Our Lady of the Inferno and have moved on to Clive Barker's Damnation Game and Al Jourgensen's autobiography Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen, the latter of which Mr. Brown lent me months ago and I've been chomping at the bit to read since.. I'm not huge on reading multiple books at a time, but I'm stumbling through the last three chapters of the novel I'm editing/re-tooling, and when I write, I tend to need to be reading fiction at the same time. I actually consider this part of the writing process. I don't punch-in and out for it, like I do with actual writing writing (I use two apps, ATracker PRO and Focus Keeper), but I recognize that it's most definitely an integral part of my process. That said, Jourgensen's biography is conversational, not prosaic like Juan F. Thompson's Stories I Tell Myself, thus it's not fitting the bill. So I'm splitting my time, treating Uncle Al's book like having a beer, and Barker's like sharpening my craft.

The Damnation Game is actually one I read long ago, back when I first discovered Barker's work in the early 90s. I believe I was a Sophomore or Junior in High School when I checked The Great and Secret Show out of the library. That one blew my mind - still meaning to re-read it and hit the sequel Eversville - and I went straight into The Books of Blood and subsequently The Damnation Game afterward. Funny thing, although I remember quite a bit of Great and Secret and Books of Blood, but I remember next to nothing about Damnation. Which is cool, because already, only a handful of pages in, and Barker's sumptuous prose has already had a massive effect on me.


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Cocksure - Operation C.O.C.K.S.U.R.E.
X - Alphabetland
X - Under the Big Black Sun
The Neighbourhood - I Love You.
The Neighbourhood - Wiped Out
Blut Aus Nord - The Mystical Beast of Rebellion
Void King - There Is Nothing

**

No card.

Isolation: Day 54 Nice Cave TeeVee

A couple weeks ago, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds announced their youtube channel would be going 24/7 with streaming content. This morning when I checked my subscription page (have I mentioned how much I hate the layout of the most recent youtube overhaul? It happened a few months ago, but I used to meticulously curate the landing page, which displayed a single, horizontal row of each channel subscribed to, history, recommendations, and trending, the category I couldn't give less of a toss about) I noticed the little "Live" icon in the bottom left-hand corner, clicked over and caught part of an in-studio segment from Henry's Dream. Not sure about you, but the idea of 24 Hour Bad Seeds makes my heart swell.

**

Last weekend, I made serious progress in a project that I've been putting off for some time, transferring all of my comics out of long boxes and into short boxes. Oh, the humanity!

I'm about 80% finished. To be brutally honest, I've divested myself of quite a bit of my collection, and when all is said and done, I will still end up with 24 short boxes of comics! Madness! I've talked about this here before, the existential crisis that has held me in its grip since last September, this idea that all this stuff that I've accumulated ends up being the major "WTF was I thinking?" regret of my life. Maybe regret is a harsh word, but seriously, if I'd only adjusted to the digital thing sooner, I'd probably have at least double in my 'buy a house' fund. Add to this the idea that, as I go through a lot of these comics, even series and runs that I love, some of them I look at and know, "I'll most likely never have the urge/chance to read this again in my life." It makes me think about subscriptions, the current zeitgeist, and as such something I may eventually turn around on, too, but surely a better way to consume media. It's one of the reasons I hardly ever buy movies anymore (still some exceptions, of course). It's also one of the reasons I've started to dig digital comics, because they're generally cheaper, take up no space, can travel with you at all times, and thus, don't leave nearly the footprint, if at all.

Anyway, in spite and contrary to all this, boy am I ready for Diamond to get NCBD up and running again. I stopped in at the Comic Bug this past Saturday to pick up more short boxes - the store isn't open, but you can call on Wednesdays from 12-4 and Saturdays from 12-2 and make an appointment to stop in - and picked up the last remaining book in my pull, one I hadn't gotten to yet. TMNT 104. The issue served as a beautiful coda on everything that has come before, and felt especially poignant reading now, in the midst of such an unprecedented industry stall. The final pages actually managed to bring a joyful tear to my eye, and closed and resealed it in bag and board remembering why, in spite of everything I just said above, I still read some comics monthly, in physical form.

**

Playlist:

Cocksure: Operation C.O.C.K.S.U.R.E
The Juan Maclean - Happy House (Matthew Dear Remix)
X- Under the Big Black Sun
Chris Isaak - Heart Shaped World

**

Card:

Art!

Isolation: Day 52 Surprise You're Dead

I've been digging into Revocation's back catalogue on my writing sessions, and this FNM cover popped up at the end of 2011's Chaos of Forms. Great album, great cover!  My writing music has been an example of the pendulum effect I complain about everywhere else in life; if I told you to consider Revocation and Lustmord as two nodes on the graph, you'd get the idea, yeah? It makes for some interesting ideas, one of which pretty much just changed the entire course of the third act for the better! Now I'm chasing that down and preparing for the final edit, which seems a bit like the ghost house that I relentless walk toward but never achieve. I have faith, though. Faith, and a killer work ethic. And music like this to keep me properly motivated (That and gallons and gallons of coffee, which I think is starting to fuck with my nervous system).

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Bandcamp did another Artist Relief day this past Friday. I snagged the new, Digital Cocksure EP and a vinyl copy of their 2014 debut T.V.M.A.L.S.V., along with a copy of a single the Living Nudes released a while ago. I paid more for all three than asked for, because, while I didn't have a lot of money to throw at all the independent artists I love, I had some, and wanted to make it go as far as possible for the artists, not my collection.

So much new music this past week because of the Bandcamp relief, it was hard to narrow things down. I think I did pretty good, though.

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After missing it at last year's Beyondfest, I finally got around to watching Travis Stevens' Girl on the Third Floor. I dug this one quite a bit; reminded me a lot of a kind of cross between American Horror Story and The Shining.



Dark Sky films can pretty much do no wrong in my eyes.

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Playlist:

Revocation: Chaos of Forms
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Wasteland
Cocksure - T.V.M.A.L.S.V.
Blut Aus Nord - The Mystical Beast of Rebellion
Void King - Barren Dominion
Man Man - Dream Hunting in the In-Between
Perturbator - Dangerous Days
Lustmord - Hobart
Klangkarussell & GIVVEN - Ghostkeeper

IsIolaton: Day 48 Cracked Actor

Woke up with this one in my head yesterday morning. Originally appearing on 1973's Aladdin Sane, the version I'm specifically referring to here is the live version from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars - The Motion Picture Soundtrack. I picked the double album up in a cool CD package at a Fop store in London, circa 2004. To date, this is my favorite version of this song.

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Blew through Breaking Bad Seasons 1-3 and K asked to take a breather. It definitely has that effect, and while I'm loving revisiting this world, dark as it is, I also like the idea of spacing it out a bit, to further the effect I had watching it as it aired, broadcast gaps and all. We're not going to come anywhere close to building that kind of expectation-tension for K's first viewing, but a week off might help. With that in mind then, over the last few days we watched James Franco/JJ Abrams' 11.22.63. This adaptation of a novel by Stephen King is an 8-part mini-series on HULU, and although I had some small issues, overall it's great. 11.22.63 is also a rare bird, in that many times, I'll be enthralled by a show and then let down by its ending. In this case, my minor issues were along the way, and the finale was outstanding. Very much worth your time if you're in the mood for something finite.



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I finished both William Gibson's The Peripheral and Juan F. Thompson's Stories I Tell Myself. Both incredible books for totally different reasons (obviously). Gibson's terse prose and refusal to set an initial lay-of-the-land are both facets one must acclimate to, however, that happens fairly quickly because he really pulls you in with the story. And Thompson's autobiography on growing up with Hunter S. Thompson as a father can get a bit hard to read at certain points - most definitely not due to his writing, which is simple but profound - due rather to the veil his stories lift on an icon who many of us hold dear. The end of this one brought me to tears, and the involvement of Johnny Depp in memorializing HST should prove once and for all how awesome that man is, even if his filmography has pretty much fallen by the wayside.

As of writing this, I am ~75 page into Preston Fassel's Our Lady of the Inferno, which I have been wanting to read since I first heard of it, circa a year-and-a-half ago. I was hooked as of page one, and now I'm thinking this has the potential to really soar into a ranking in my favorite books of all time list.

If you're unfamiliar with Mr. Fassel, he writes the Corrupt Signals for Fangoria, easily my favorite column in the revamped mag (which is saying something, because each issue is a veritable treasure). So far, his debut novel is no less spectacular.

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Speaking of reading, as a sort of 'Quarantine Special', I've made the Kindle editions of my first two books $0.99 for the foreseeable future. If you've not read them, please consider giving one or both a chance. One is literary horror, the other the first book in a YA Horror/Suburban Fantasy series. I'm quite proud of both - I'm the first to know when something I write is shite. Also, I've been told both are good and, perhaps more importantly, fun:

 Link to buy A Collection of Desires

Link to buy Shadow Play Book One: Kim and Jessie

If you do take this chance to read them, please take a moment to give a star rating or review on Amazon, or really, anywhere books are sold or discussed. Thank you in advance!

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Playlist:

Revocation - Great is Our Sin
Revocation - Teratogenesis EP
Old Tower - The Last Eidolon
Alastor - Black Magic
The National - High Violet
The National - The Boxer
Various - The History of Northwest Rock Vol. 2 (The Garage Years)
Perturbator - Dangerous Days
Allegaeon - Apoptosis
Burzum - Filosofem
Burzum - Thulêan Mysteries
Perturbator - I Am the Night
Pascal Rogé - Satie: 3 Gymnopédies
White Ward - Love Exchange Failure
Perturbator - The Uncanny Valley
Code Orange - Underneath
Perturbator - Excess (Pre-release single)
Balthazar - Fever
Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars
My Morning Jacket - Z
Perturbator - Night Driving Avenger EP
Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit, Vol. 1
Alio Die and Lorenzo Montaná - The Threshold of Beauty
Misfits - Collection Two

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Card:

From the Grimoire: The Spark of Essence. I'm aligning this with the mammoth writing session I am about to embark on as soon as I post this. I took the day off to finish the second pass on this year's book, which is currently on track to be released in late Summer/early Autumn.

Isolation: Day 43 - Perturbator Hard Wired

There's a bunch of new music I could post, but I've been re-infatuated with Dangerous Days as we - hopefully - edge closer to a new Perturbator record. One that, according to the man himself, will not sound like this. I'm cool with that. Can't wait.

**

I inadvertently began a Phantasm series rewatch yesterday. I've been working shortened hours, 6-12, so I get home and put a flick on the tube, something I've seen before so if I nod out during it won't be a big deal. I went with the 2018 Joe Bob Briggs Christmas presentation of Phantasm yesterday. This was a marathon of all the movies but Part Two, which JBB boycotts due to the destruction of a Hemi Cuda during the making of. I'm not a car guy, but fine. Anyway, I slept through some of Phantasm, which was actually pretty cool, as the film's creepy dream logic bored into my REM and made for an almost interactive napping experience. I woke for the end, immediately threw on my disc of Part Two, then made it most of the way through Three - which if I've ever seen I forgot most of - and intend on finishing the rest today. Before the return of Joe Bob tonight on Shudder! I'm not super psyched about the first movie or the co-host, but hopefully the second film he picks will be a winner, and hell, it's Joe Bob!

BTW - I absolutely ADORE Phantastm II and III.



**

Playlist:

Brand New - Daisy
Brand New - God and the Devil are Raging Inside Me
The Temptations - Cloud Nine
Various - Motown Deep Cuts (Apple Music Playlist)
Zombi - Shape Shift
Code Orange - Underneath
White Lung - Paradise
Steve Moore - VFW OST
Spotlights - We Are All Atomic EP
Doves - Lost Sides
Doves - Lost Souls
Lustmord - Things That Were 1980-1983
Pigface - Fook
My Morning Jacket - Z
Diana Ross and the Supremes - Love Child
Allegaeon - Apoptosis
Perturbator - Night Driving Avenger EP
Friendly Fires - Pala
Jawbox - For Your Own Special Sweetheart
Deftones - White Pony
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
Brand New - Science Fiction
John Zorn - Taboo and Exile
Perturbator - Dangerous Days

Card:

Last three days (because I pull every day, even if I don't post):

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Today:

I've had a lot of major influence over the last few weeks. A lot of Arcana and Court cards. Makes perfect sense, especially combined with the 7 of Swords Futility here, as being moved around by forces beyond our control can either make us feel manipulated and frustrated or empowered and ecstatic. And of late, we are all caught up in some pretty heavy, Macro shit that forces us to do or not do things based on variables we cannot control.

Mindful Habitation: Don't know what to believe anymore? The increasingly Orwellian nature of our Reality - where the State defines Reality - is the most frustrating and downright terrifying thing I have ever experienced. Don't know who or what to believe? Unplug the major News outlets and follow the impartial Science.

Isolation - Day 36 Jawbox: Breathe

One of the things I really dig about Apple Music is the fact that I can see what my friends who have it are listening to (as long as their setting allow it). My good friend Jacob, back in my second favorite State of Ohio, has amazing taste and has turned me onto quite a few unbelievable records. He also, sometimes, reminds me of music that has spun so far out of my orbit there was little to no way I was coming back to it any time soon. Jawbox is such a band. When I think of era-defining 90s music, Jawbox is one of the bands that comes immediately to mind. And yet, unlike other groups from that era, there is nothing about Jawbox that sounds dated in any way. Maybe that because they helped inspire pretty much every new generation of "Post Punk," or maybe it's just because they are transcendently fantastic. Whatever the case, it's been a very long time since I'd heard this record, and it feels oh so good to have it back in my ears.

Thanks, Jacob!

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My Blu Ray copy of Joe Begos' VFW arrived in the mail yesterday, and I'm hoping to get a chance to watch it this weekend. I caught this one at Beyondfest last year (talked about it on The Horror Vision HERE), and it's fantastic. If you haven't seen VFW and you dig old school Carpenter, Siege Horror, or bad ass old dude flicks, I would consider this one a must. Here's the trailer:



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Firmly entrenched in William Gibson's The Peripheral. I have only the very vaguest sense of what the hell is happening, but I'm hooked.

No one writes the future like Mr. Gibson, it's a proven fact.

**

Playlist:

Nirvana - Bleach
Dee Lite - Sampladelic Relics and Dancefloor Oddities
Willie Nelson and Leon Russell - One For the Road
White Lung - Paradise
Code Orange - Underneath
Steve Moore - VFW OST
Carpenter Brut - Blood Machines OST
Jawbox - For Your Own Special Sweetheart
FMLYBND - Letting Go (Single)
Flying Lotus - Los Angeles
Old Man Gloom - Seminar IX: Darkness of Being
White Lung - Eponymous
White Lung - Sorry
Tub Ring - Zoo Hypothesis
Doves - Lost Soul
Brand New - God and the Devil are Raging Inside Me

**

Card:

Emerging from cloudy skies about troubled waters. Clarity lies not too far in the distance.

Isolation: Day 34 Code Orange

Mr. Brown turned me on to Code Orange's new record Underneath a few days ago, and it's been quickly becoming a staple. The album is all over the place as far as textures; so many influences in these guys that, in a way, I feel like they're the bridge between reclaiming some of the cooler elements in late 90s/early 00s metal - most of which was ruined by near constant narcissism and ostentatious infusion of hip hop aesthetics - and bridging those elements with the groove-heavy pioneering of mid-period Sepultura, the speed of and precision of DEP, as well as the latter's occasional penchant for incorporating glitch-like electronic elements.

Underneath dropped on Roadrunner Records recently; if you're interested you can order it HERE.

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Speaking of metal, yesterday I re-watched the Joe Bob Briggs presentation of Jason Lei Howden's Deathgasm. Man, I love this movie.



Letterboxd

Also, I finally watched the John Carpenter/Tobe Hooper anthology Body Bags. Not sure why this one took me so long to get around to. Fantastic. The cast really surprised me, with a slew of B-Level actors whose chops were never more apparent than at the direction of two Masters of Horror.



Letterboxd

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Playlist:

Killing Joke - The Fall of Because
Killing Joke - Night Time
Code Orange - Underneath
White Lung - Paradise
The Rolling Stones - Goats Head Soup
The Babies - Our House On the Hill

**

Card:

From the Grimoire: "Saving Money." Fitting. Stimulus landed today and all but a tiny bit of it went directly into Savings. I'll stimulate the economy when we buy a house. In the meantime, a portion of the remainder of the government pay-off for ineptitude will be spent on Kindle editions of William Gibson's The Peripheral and it's recently released follow-up, Agency.

RIP Peter Steele - Ten Years Gone

Ten years. Unbelievable.

Isolation Day 33: Man or AstroMan?!

Mr. Brown sent me this link a few days ago, but I've only just got around to watching it. This went up six years ago, which is probably around the last time I saw Astroman live, at the Echo in LaLaLand. It'd been years before that since I'd seen them play live. Astroman was one of the staples of artists I saw on what feels like a regular basis in the late 90s, thanks to Mr. Brown's excellent taste in curating live shows. I guess that era has been on my mind, because two nights ago I broke out some Reverend Horton Heat - who I don't listen to nearly enough these days, and who was also a staple live show back when we'd frequent Chicago's Double Door, Empty Bottle, Lounge Axe, Metro, etc. Anyway, great set from a great band. KEXP: You fight the greatest fight! Thank you for all these wonderful live sessions; you are the John Peel of the PACNW.

**

Reading:

I blew through Charles Stross' Atrocity Archives in a matter of days. Now I'm tucked into Juan F. Thompson's memoir Stories I Tell Myself, about growing up with Hunter S. Thompson as his father. Great book, but much like Will Bingley and Anthony Hope Smith's Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thomspon, or rather Alan Rinzler's forward to that book, Juan Thompson's book doesn't always paint his father in the best light.

Not that it's trash-talking. No, JFT very obviously loved and looked up to his father. And to be clear: Obviously we are all multi-faceted organisms, with ups and downs, lights and darks, successes and failures. But seeing the first-hand ugliness of someone I consider a literary inspiration is tough. This is especially true as, after my recent viewing of Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas film adaptation, I am further possessed of an idea that first began setting in back about fifteen years ago - the fact that maybe Hunter S. Thompson wasn't a very good person at all. Does that matter? Was Burroughs a 'good' person? Martin Amis? DOES IT MATTER?

Well, yes. A bit.

The first time I had this sense that maybe Hunter S. Thompson was kind of a fucked up person who did things that weren't very cool was the opening chapter of the Literary Greatest Hits Songs of the Doomed. 'Let the Trails Begin' tells the story of Thompson's late night arrival at a library, and his manipulations of the poor sod working there border on the actions of a narcissistic sociopath. Even if that poor sod was a criminal and a plagiarist. Then again, in re-reading Let the Trials... this morning while penning this, it occurs to me, is any of this supposed to be taken at face value? That's the the thing with Gonzo as an aesthetic/mission statement/lifestyle choice: to what extent are we supposed to take what's written at face value? There's metaphor, prose, fact, all manner of lingual possibilities, but truly, all of this may have happened and none of it may have happened. The entire scenario is so outlandish it seems impossible. Then again, a lot of what HST is known for exists in a fringe-state of mutated factoid observation. What do we do with that? I've always taken the man's work in at the gut - kind of an amalgam of the heart and the brain - but that leaves the rational, box-checking part of me hesitant in discussing the actualities of all this.

Certainly JFT's memoir of the late night, intoxicated fights and psychological bullying sessions his mother and father put on during his childhood and early adolescence are harrowing to insert into my understanding of someone whose writing makes me infinitely happy, so there's a bit of cognitive dissonance that needs sorting out as I read this. That said, as I'm sure the man himself would appreciate, the truth is the truth, but ultimately the truth may not need interfere with the work.

Or is that also the problem with our current moment? Alternative facts? No, Thompson didn't traffic in that. Neither does his son. Both are worth reading.

Dipping back into the world of HST is long overdue and absolutely wonderful. Like Irvine Welsh, HST is one of my all-time favorite writers, one I purposely do not read much of anymore, as both author's tones influence my own writing in a way that doesn't quit gel with what I have been working on for the last seven years or so (genre). That said, what I am working on at the moment, during the COVID ordeal and this long moment of isolation is actually something I originally penned in 2007/8, back when I was still reading both Thompson and Welsh on a daily basis, so picking up JFT's book might have seemed a tangent at first, but now stands revealed as, well, perfect.

**

Playlist:

TV On the Radio - Dear Science
Code Orange - Underneath
Drab Majesty - Careless
White Lung - Paradise
Paramore - Riot
Paramore - All We Know Is Falling
Brand New - God and the Devil Are Raging Inside Me
Arthur Albes - Gold
NIN - Ghosts V: Together
Soundgarden - Badmotorfinger
Disclosure - Ecstasy EP
Sofi Tukker - Treehouse

Card:

Opening up good things and finding more good things inside of them.

Isolation: Day 30 - Kenny Hoopla

A friend shared this with me yesterday and I immediately fell in love. Mr. Hoopla has no proper albums as of now, however, there's a handful of singles I've turned into a playlist, and all of it's good.

**

Breaking Bad re-watch is now in full effect. We're just inside Season Two now, and although K - who'd never seen it before - had some trepidations, I'm happy to report that, like me back when it aired, the fulminated Mercury scene was the final straw in her falling in love with the show.

**

Director Marc Meyers' new film We Summon the Darkness hit VOD yesterday, and it's on my weekend agenda to watch it and hopefully get at least a few of The Horror Vision folks together on Zoom to do a review/reaction.



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Some old friends of mine are bringing back something they originally created about fourteen years ago. Every Friday night at 7:00 PM PST, The Top Floor goes live on Twitch and Youtube. If the webcam-interactive dance party was waaaay ahead of its time back in the middle 00s, it's absolutely perfect for the current moment we find ourselves in, and one hell of a good time. Drop in; you might be able to catch me and some friends making complete asses of ourselves!

**

Playlist:

Killing Joke - Night Time
Steve Moore - Bliss OST
Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy - OST
Childish Gambino - because the internet
Kenny Hoopla - Singles Playlist
White Lung - Paradise
Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Arab Strap - The Red Thread
King Khan and the Shrines - What Is?!
††† - Crosses
Sofi Tukker - Treehouse
Disclosure - Ecstasy EP

Card:

Diligence in dealing with practical matters.

Isolation: Day 27 - Second Still PTP Sessions

A track from their Part Time Punks Session Cassette floated to the top of my youtube channels this morning, and in listening to it, I realized glorious LA post punk band Second Still released a full-length record last year that I somehow totally missed! Time to remedy that - Violet Phase is available on the band's Bandcamp HERE, although as I write this I see all physical versions of the album are sold out. In the meantime, here's the track that started this morning's odyssey.

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I'm pretty damn happy to still have a job, so I'm helping out in any way I can. We've been rotating shorter hours, and as such, I ended up with yesterday off. Here's the watchlist:



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Playlist:

Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy - OST
Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource Vol. II: Philosophy of Beyond
Killing Joke - Night Time
David Lynch - Crazy Clown Time
Lustmord - The Dark Places of the Earth
Childish Gambino - because the internet
Second Still - Violet Phase
White Lung - Paradise
Dio - Lock Up the Wolves

**

No Card.

Isolation: Day 26 - Living Nudes

Living Nudes is the bedroom brainchild of the man who runs Heavenisanincubator. Yesterday, I saw a tweet that they'd released a new track titled - appropriately enough - Growing Global Pandemic Got Me Down. It's awesome. Go HERE to check it out, and if you dig, it's set up for a "name your price" purchase. Can't beat that.

**

The vocal harmonies that make up the center piece of this new Living Nudes track haunted me all day, and seemed to echo through my mind during the night, mixing with images from the second episode of HBO's Chernobyl, our perhaps foolishly chosen before-bed watch last night.



The resonance this show has with our own current moment is terrifying. World leaders telling people everything is fine when it certainly is not, sealing potentially millions of people's fates in a terrifying refusal to own up to a situation unlike any the planet has ever seen before. In watching this and now re-reading reports on the Chernobyl crisis, we're all lucky those officials in 1986 didn't destroy life on the entire planet.

Mindful Habitation:

Speaking of mass human destruction, you have to ask: will the slow-to-start response by certain world leaders during today's crisis finish what the Soviet's began? Only time will tell, but with the Orwellian nature of our world seemingly proved by captain hairdo's surge in approval ratings, well, maybe we fucking deserve it, eh? Not really, but an objective, non-human look at things definitely makes it easy to understand why this is happening. I mean, if you refuse to hold the lessons of the past in your head and your heart, how can your future be any different? Or is it the people making the decisions just don't care, because they have advantages most of us don't?

Yeah, I'm leaning toward door number two as well. But then, I'm also trying to stay positive. The peak is coming folks. Stay in your homes...

courtesy of https://brancastudio.bigcartel.com/

One of the funniest things I've seen in years. Thanks to Jonathan Grimm for sending it my way. If you need a pick-me-up, might I suggest after hitting Living Nudes' Bandcamp, you stop by his shop and browse all the damn awesome stuff he has for sale with his inimitable art adorning?


**

Playlist:

Wire - Pink Flag
David Bowie - The Man Who Sold The World
Foster the People - Torches
Chris Isaak - Heart Shaped World
Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit, Vol. 1
Pearl Jam - Gigaton
Childish Gambino - 3.15.20
Childish Gambino - because the internet
Living Nudes - Growing Global Pandemic Got Me Down
Wolves in the Throne Room - Two Hunters
Steve Lynch - Let Us Prey

**

Card:

From the Grimoire: "A new project or a sudden change in material fortune/status." Playing this one close to the chest so as not to tempt the Universe to smack me upside the back of the head.

Isolation: Day 23 - RIP Bill Withers

Bill Withers passed away a few days ago. I love this man's music; it echoes up from my childhood, one of my earliest exposures to Soul music. This song in particular has a lot of meaning for me, not only because I love it and it always makes me feel better, but because I put it on one of the early mix tapes I made for K when we first began dating. And yes, I used actual cassette tapes.


**

Finished Ozark Season Three. Good lord, it is going to be hard to wait for Season Four, especially not knowing when or if it might arrive after our current Global Crisis. In the meantime, I with Devs approaching the final episode (only two left), I think I may push to finally show K Breaking Bad, with the ulterior motive of finally being able to catch up on Better Call Saul afterward.



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Chris Saunders and I recently relauched a Quarantine-approved version of Drinking with Comics. Not a replacement for the regular, live video-show, this spin-off, aptly named Drinking w/ Comics: The Conversation, is meant to be a podcast-only discussion of, well, comics. This first episode finds Chris and I discussing comic shop innovations during Quarantine, as well as what we've been reading, which includes but is not limited to Joe Hill's Hill House books, Mirka Andolfo's Mercy, and Jonathan Hickman's Decorum. Check it out!



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Playlist:

Wire - Pink Flag
Prists - Nothing Feels Natural
Drudkh - Autumn Aurora
Apple Music Playlists - Blackgaze Pioneers
Helmet - Aftertaste
Slayer - Live Undead/Haunting the Chapel
BENNI - The Return
Steve Lynch - Let Us Prey OST
Anthrax - Among the Living
Wolves in the Throneroom - Two Hunters
Anthrax - Spreading the Disease
Carpathian Forest - Through Chasm, Caves and Titan Woods
Foster the People - Torches
Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit, Vol. 1 (Vinyl arrived!)

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The Six of Swords leads perfectly into today's Mindful Habitation: As the Orwellian nature of our world - a state derived primarily through the Internet's ease of access to both true and falsified information and humanity's increasingly rabid need for convenience over actual rational, logic-based thought - continues to provide baffling reports of what's happening, remember. Everything except Science is, at this point, extrapolatory at best and anecdotal or misleading at worst. We are still firmly in the forest, and thus, have no way of counting how many trees we will pass before we exit. Science, while not entirely accurate - nothing beyond the subatomic level is - is our best bet at survival.

And yes, I made the word extrapolatory up just now, but feel cheated that it doesn't already exist, at least officially.

Isolation Day 20: Priests!

During a pretty lucrative writing session yesterday I leaned on White Lung for momentum, and in doing so, inadvertently discovered Priests. Great band! The lyrics to 'Appropriate' - the lead song on 2017's Nothing Feels Natural are so insightful they hurt!

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I sat down and watched Stuart Gordon's Stuck, a film that had been on my list for years, and which until recently I had completely forgotten was Gordon's. Really dark, sometimes funny, overall great. Read my small Letterbxd review HERE.



I'd never noticed it before, and maybe it's not true of Gordon's more phantasmagorical works, but this one really reminded me of Larry Cohen's work. I might try to squeeze in one of his films today, you know, since we have all this bloody time on our hands.

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Beyondfest's Twitter account has been a bastion in this trying time. Earlier today they tweeted out the link to American Cinematheque Chief Projectionist Ben Tucker essentially giving a tour of the Egyptian's Projection Booth. I've been meaning to join the American Cinematheque for years, and I think now is when I will finally pull the trigger on that.



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Playlist:

Wire - Pink Flag
Spotlights - Love and Decay
Soundgarden - Bad Motorfinger
Seefeel - Fracture/Tied (Single)
Mazzy Star - So Tonight That I Might See
The Obsessed - Lunar Womb
Slayer -  Live Undead/Haunting the Chapel
White Lung - Eponymous
White Lung - Sorry
Priests - Nothing Feels Natural
Ennio Morricone - The Thing OST

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Again. From the Grimoire, "...skill and/or wisdom..." because I'm finally making real headway on what I'm working on. 

Isolation: Day 18 RIP Krzysztof Penderecki

I first heard Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima in the mid-to-late 90s. I was dating a classically trained violin player, and she was involved in a college performance of the piece. She talked about how different the piece was from a player's perspective. This is anecdotal, as I've only ever heard it from her, but apparently when Penderecki wrote the music for the piece, he had to devise an entirely new way to notate the passage where the players hit the bodies of their instruments. When she played me the piece, I was floored - I knew this! Of course, I didn't know it as a whole, but I'd heard passages of it for years as they were used in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, a film I have been obsessed with for most of my life (less now, much more at that time). I had her make me a copy of the piece, and although it never led me to seek out more of Penderecki's compositions, I've loved Threnody ever since. Sunday morning, Mr. Penderecki passed away. Interesting that, only a few hours before his death, I rewatched Twin Peaks: The Return episode 8, which also utilizes this piece - to great effect, might I add. I wanted to post something here, as a memorial, and because composition is often best expressed in the moment, I went with a performance of the piece instead of the standard, studio recording.

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Three of us at The Horror Vision did our first remote podcast session on Zoom this past Saturday, and it turned out pretty damn good, so there will be more episodes more often. That goes for Drinking with Comics as well, which I've decided to spin-off an audio-only version called Drinking w/ Comics: The Conversations. First episode of that will be up by the end of the week. In the meantime, check out The Horror Vision's first installment of Quarantine Guide:



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Five episodes into Season Three of Ozark and it is glorious. Between this and Outsider, I am now a card-carrying fan of Jason Bateman and his work.



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Playlist:

Slayer - Live Undead/Haunting the Chapel
NIN - Ghosts V: Together
Pale Sketcher - Jesu: Pale Sketches Demixed
Pearl Jam - Gigaton
Steve Moore - Frame Dragging

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Failure to achieve a goal. That feels like what I'm up against at the moment, as my new schedule and the overall aesthetic of Shelter-in-Place combine to make me a lazy bastard. I'm still writing, but it's been difficult to drag myself up into my chair and actually put in the time to write. You'd think I'd be all over this, and I was at first, but currently, everything is a chore.

Mindful Habitation:

Build a new routine out of the bones of your old routine. It can be done, it just takes an initial investment of energy to build-up the inertia that will keep the thing moving once you get it shambling along on its own two feet, so to speak.

Isolation: Day 16 - The Return of Joe Bob Briggs!

Man, this could not come at a better time! I cannot wait for weekly event viewing with Mr. Briggs.

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I've been on a reading tear. I finished my re-read of Inferno, the mini series that ran through all the X-books in 1989. I even through in the What If...? Issue that contemplated what would have happened had the X-Folks lost to S'ym and Madelyne Pryor. Mr. Sinister remains my favorite X-Villain, however, it's unfortunate that Mr. Claremont never had the opportunity to fully explore his backstory. I know subsequent X-writers did, however, I don't know that I'd ever be interested in reading beyond Claremont's X-Men again. Louise Simonson works well writing X-Factor inside Claremont's domain, and I don't want to belittle what she did, but really, she began as Claremont's editor on the books, so it makes sense that when he had to hand the reins of one book over to someone, it would be her. And Ms. Simonson's contributions are fantastic. I even like a bit of what Fabian Nicezia added closer to the end of Claremont's tenure, but most of what other creators did at that time grew organically out of the seeds Claremont had laid. Who knows? Maybe I'll find the one of those Sinister-related trades on sale for Kindle at some point and take a chance. I know they took him back to the Victorian era - an immediate 'Pro' for me, however, the subsequent convolution of all things X after Claremont and the editorial insistence on 'Status Quo' just makes me want to pretend the characters were part of a finite series. (Although Morrison's stands on its own as a three-volume masterpiece, and I suspect that may be just about up for re-read as well).

Possibly my favorite splash in the entire series

Next up was the complete Alien/Predator/Prometheus Fire and Stone saga, which was pretty awesome. 

One of my favorite elements of this was when the construct Elden - similar model to Bishop or David from the films - is injected with the Engineer's Life Accelerant "Black Goo" and begins an evolutionary journey that sees him become something almost as monstrous and distressing as the Xenomorphs themselves. Check this out:

More wonderful Nightmare fuel from the Alien Universe!

Next, the first installment of Warren Ellis' 2016 serial novel Normal, which I've had since its release and which I've just realized, is now only available as the collected novel. So, apparently in order to continue, I'll just have to pick that up, which is no problem, as it's readily available on Kindle:

Although I won't be doing the rest of Normal just yet, as reading the first part awakened in me a rabid desire to re-read Charles Stross' Atrocity Archives, which I believe I first read back in... 2007 or 2008, and which has perpetually been on my mind since setting up a Feedly account a few months ago and following Stross' blog (HERE).

If you're unfamiliar with Stross, his Laundry Files books follow an employee in the IT department of a company that deals with Necromantic Arts and Lovecraftian Elder Gods the way Silicon Valley companies deal with Technology. It's fascinating, and I'd been meaning to re-enter Stross world for sometime. I'm only a few pages into this re-read, but I may do more of the series afterward.

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Playlist:

The Birthday Party - Mutiny/The Bad Seed EP
Fenn - Epoch
Balthazar - Fever
Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars
Siouxsie and the Banshees - Tinderbox
Tennis System - Lovesick
Spotlights - Love and Decay
Various Artists - The Void OST
LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit, Vol. 1
NIN - Ghosts V: Together
Rammstein - Eponymous

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