So much music unfurled while I was doing David Lynch week and then in Chicago for three days. Shit, I haven't even mentioned the Frank Black Teenager of the Year 30th Anniversary I attended yet. I'll get to all that, but first - holy smokes! I'll tell you that, while I LOVE Infinite Granite, I was hoping that would prove a detour. I don't need the Deafheaven to only play brutal music, but to me, the mix they achieve on Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is perfect. Regardless of what we get on Lonely People With Power, out March 28th (pre-order HERE), "Magnolia" fills me with faith that, as my cousin Charles' friend Dave predicted, the band made Infinite Granite for them, and it had nothing to do with their overall ambitions/directions.
NCBD:
This is a new Rick Remender book. I've missed out on the last few he's released; hell, I've actually not read anything he's done since A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance, so I'm due. I tried the first issue of a few series since then and didn't really 'feel it,' so here's hoping The Seasons moves the needle.
Published through Remender's Giant Generator, I grabbed the first issue of Dust to Dust and dug it, so I'm coming back for more. Unfortunately, this Diamond bankruptcy is killing my shop, and I've already heard this is outstanding, much the same as the latest issue of What's the Furthest Place From Here has been for weeks now.
Also confirmed as delayed due to Diamond's BS. I'm still really on the fence with Mark Spears' Monsters, but I figure I'll round out the first four-issue arc and reassess after.
This is one I'll need a full re-read on once it's all out, but I've been enjoying the hell out of this second Last Ronin series. I've said it here before, but the dystopian Frank Miller-isms of this series really scratch an itch. An itch for when Frank Miller wasn't a douche bag.
This cover is the stuff from which dreams are made.
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I caught the trailer for Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk's Hell of a Summer on the big screen last week, and it kinda blew me away.
Yeah, it's more throwback, but I don't care. This looks fantastic.
Playlist:
Moon Wizard - Sirens
The Veils - Asphodels
Godflesh - A World Lit Only By Fire
Jim Williams - Possessor OST
Nothing - Guilty of Everything
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
Remember your Art (XIV in Thoth) when bogged down in Earthly matters. Enlightenment lies in balancing the two.
Full disclosure. While I am a NIN fan, I've never really been a fan of The Downward Spiral. That's unbelievable to some, and honestly, it's not for the best of reasons. Thanks to a friend's older brother, I found Pretty Hate Machine six months to a year before the Broken E.P. came out, and it was just such a different sound than anything I'd heard before that I was immediately obsessed. Broken's switch to guitar-driven industrial metal confused me, but the band still felt fresh and like it was "mine."
When "Closer" hit the radio two years later and suddenly every jock and cheerleader in school became a super fan, I got salty. Because of this, it took me years to ever give The Downward Spiral a fair listen. Cunty, but what can I say? Seeing a Geo Tracker full of football players ahead of me in a Taco Bell drive-through one Saturday night in 1994, "Closer" blaring while one 'round-the-waste flannelled Quarterback jumped up and down and screaming, "Nails, man! Nail!" just put me off.
After eventually going back later in life to try and reassess, I still found I didn't care too much about TDS. When David Lynch talked lovingly about the album in the March 6th, 1997 issue of Rolling Stone (dedicated to Lost Highway), I tried again.
Nothing (pun intended).
Eventually, I've come around to some of the record. However, both The Downward Spiral and its follow-up, The Fragile, are albums I never feel moved to listen to, and arguably the most famous song off TDS, "Hurt," has always been a particularly sore spot for me. "Hurt" sounds like a cheaper version of "Something I Can Never Have," still a masterpiece in my mind. "Hurt" has always struck me as egregiously sad, with the lyrics often evoking a one-upmanship technique. Sort of a proto-emo Madlib exercise, if you will. I'm not saying I'm right - I realize I am almost definitely wrong; that my bias stems from very much the wrong place; my high school, elitist "I liked that band first" mindset is bullshit. However, I feel how I feel. I continue to try, but nothing really moves the needle.
Until now.
Over the weekend in Chicago, I stopped in a record store and found this in the Bowie section.
I've had a hard time establishing what exactly this performance was. The cover says, "Live Radio Broadcast," however, from the little bit I've seen online, this appears to be a soundboard recording taken from a full live set of the '95 tour, where Bowie and NIN each do a set and overlap on several songs. The thing here is it sounds to me like, on "Hurt" for example, it's Bowie's band doing the song and Trent joining them (which seems to be backed up by the video I posted above). Maybe because of this, I LOVE this version of "Hurt." I mean LOVE. The track listing is spectacular, with the older Bowie songs being reworked with the Outside era's aesthetic; in particular, this makes "Look Back in Anger" and "The Man Who Sold the World" very interesting.
SIDE A:
Hello Spaceboy
Scary Monsters
Look Back in Anger
Wish (NIN)
AndyWarhol
SIDE B:
The Man Who Sold the World
Hurt
Terrible Lie
March of the Pigs
Closer
A word on the track order. Being a bootleg, I'm not sure if the compiler mixed in NIN's performance of "Wish" with an otherwise Bowie-centric side to further give the illusion of a completely unified performance; that was certainly my excited read upon first seeing this in the shop. Either way, I'm super psyched to have this and have already listened to it a number of times since returning home from my weekend in Chicago last night.
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Sasha Rainbow's Grafted is now on Shudder and, oh man, I cannot recommend this one enough!
I'm already thinking of this as 'this year's The Substance.' Although it's not quite as cinematically bombastic as Coralie Fargeat's film, Grafted is a super fun, super gorey Body Horror Film with a weirdo score by Lachlan Anderson and an outstanding visual aesthetic that visually works the film's metaphors into color palette, setting and design.
Playlist:
Talking Heads - Remain in Light
JD McPherson - Nite Owls
Miranda Sex Garden - Velvetine single
L.A. Witch - Eponymous
Crime Weekly - Rey Rivera (part 1)
Bandsplain - Talking Heads (part 1)
Nick Lowe & Los Straitjackets - Indoor Safari
Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings and Food
The Cactus Blossoms - Every Time I Think About You
Another new stand-alone track from The Jesus Lizard? Holy smokes - something's brewing.
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Yellowjackets season three is right around the corner, and we have a new trailer! One I almost didn't post because of their choice of music - come on folks, do we really want to bring back the 00s trailer trope of using *ahem* drowning pool's let the bodies hit the floor?
Very excited. Apparently, a lot of folks thought the second season dried the show out. I did not. Aside from the heartbreaking death I wish didn't happen (but 100% applaud the creators for having the stones to do so), I haven't a single complaint.
Playlist:
Angelo Badalamenti - Twin Peaks Season Two OST
Spoon - They Want My Soul
Oranssi Pazuzu - Muuntautuja
Bohren and der Club of Gore - Sunset Mission
Zeal & Ardor - GREIF
Black Sabbath - Vol. 4
Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
Black Sabbath - Sabotage
Nothing - The Great Dismal
The Cactus Blossoms - Every Time I Think About You
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
• Seven of Cups
• IV: The Emperor
• Page of Swords
Emotional stakes at the hands of perceived oppressors trigger impetuous reactions. Don't give in to the pull of chaos. Breathe.
Very fitting for multiple reasons, some having to do with work, others the point that the main character in Black Gloves & Broken Hearts actually uses a mantra I learned from my good friend Missi.
From David Lynch and John Neff's 2001 BLUEBOB album, technically titled ƎU⅃ᗺᗷOᗷ, but I don't know a good way of typing that stylization outside of the clunky cut-and-paste from other websites, and then, see, you get comic sans or whatever that is.
One of my favorite albums ever, and "Mountains Falling" is probably my favorite track. There's something so eerie and beautiful about the guitar, about the entire song. Very compelling and wonderfully utilized in Mulholland Drive.
Tomorrow will bring us full circle on David Lynch's passing, and although technically the week-long celebration would end today, I'm extending it to Thursday for symmetry. That said, I wanted to start to get back into regular posting.
NCBD:
This week's pull list from Rick's Comic City:
And then there's last week's books, which I completely forgot to post. How is that possible? More on that in a second.
Okay, so yeah, how did I forget to post last week's books? Well, besides being so busy at work that I didn't even make it into the shop until Thursday night, and that was only to give myself some normalcy after spending the day with the news of David Lynch's passing? There's something else at work here, though.
I recently realized I no longer have a tent pole book. I like everything I'm reading, but there's nothing that I absolutely cannot wait to read. This is always a rough patch because the older I get and the more media changes, the more I become concerned that one of these patches might stick. That seems unlikely, but even if an indie book really grabs me at some point in the near future, chances are it will either be a limited series or will be released in seasons, with gaps in between. I miss having something that really drives me. There was Preacher, Stray Bullets, and The Walking Dead. Most recently, it was the Krakoa-era X-Men, and after that, I thought for sure the Energon Universe would carry the torch, but that's just not happening. With the exception of DWJ's Transformers, my favorite books last year were all indie titles that were published sporadically or as mini-series. Of everything I read, SIKTC comes closest, but goddamn, these hiatus intervals! Hahaha. I know JTIV is busy working on a lot of books people love - myself included - but that just means there's only sporadic consistency with all of his stories.
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I really just found myself wanting to hear David talk today. About anything. How cool, then, that I found this:
From the Simple Tom YouTube Channel, which I recommend you check out. The full video for this is in the description.
Playlist:
Man Man - Rabbit Habits
Man Man - Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between
Circle Jerks - Group Sex
The Halloween Scene - Pitch Black Manor
The Cure - Songs Of A Lost World
The Cure - The Head On the Door
David Bowie - Station to Station
David Bowie - John I'm Only Dancing (Sax Version; Single)
David Bowie - Low
David Bowie - Tonight
Raven Chacon - Los Subliminados (single)
Drug Church - Prude
David Lynch & John Neff - BLUEBOB
David Lynch - Crazy Clown Time
David Lynch & Marek Zebrowski - Polish Night Music
David Bowie - Reality
David Lynch - The Big Dream
Various Artists - Twin Peaks The Return: Limited Event Series OST
Various Artists - Twin Peaks The Return: Music From the Limited Event Series
David Bowie - Stage
Type O Negative - Life Is Killing Me
Zeal & Ardor - GREIF
Godflesh - A World Lit Only By Fire
James Brown - Funky People Vol. 3
James Brown - Hell
Hemlocke Spings - going... going... Gone!
Rina Mushonga - Narcisc0 (single)
Jocelyn Montgomery & David Lynch - Lux Vixens: The Music of Hildegard von Bingen
Angelo Badalamenti - Twin Peaks Season Two OST
Angelo Badalamenti - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me OST
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
• Knight of Cups
• XIV: Temperance (ART in Thoth)
• Ace of Pentacles
Couldn't be clearer. Emotional despondency at the loss of an Artistic influence should inspire a breakthrough in Process (the alignment of time and resources, both the Earthly realm of Pentacles). I'm planning on ending my period of obsessive mourning tomorrow with a full-on bounce back into Creative Fire
From Julee Cruise's 1989 album Floating Into the Night, co-written and produced by David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti. Nothing can compare to how this and As The World Spins are used in the original Twin Peaks series.
I just finished my rewatch of the original Twin Peaks and will be moving on to The Return (saving FWWM a bit further down the road, maybe right before the final two episodes of The Return; I should do it now, but it's too dark for me at the moment). Really looking forward to this; I only rewatched The Return once in full, back in 2018.
Jocelyn Montgomery transcends two very particular elements I love - David Lynch and Miranda Sex Garden - a band that could easily be described as Lynchian.
Published in 1991, MSG's debut record Madra consisted of Katherine Blake, Kelly McKusker and Montgomery performing acapella. Shortly after this, Jocelyn left the group and began working on solo material. The single "And Still" was the single collaboration between Montgomery, Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti that preceded the full album Lux Vixens. Lynch produced the album. and John Neff engineered.
From the 2015 album Polish Night Music, written and performed by David Lynch and Marek Zebrowski. You can practically see the manhole covers belching voluminous, silent vapor.
Listening to this the other night with a head full of smoke, I felt like the very air before me might open to reveal a portal to the pitch-black winter streets of Łódź.
It's hard to accurately encapsulate in language what David Lynch means to me. I discovered his work through Twin Peaks in 1990 when the pilot aired on ABC channel 7 Chicago as a Sunday night movie. I was instantly hooked. The show would prove to be unlike anything I'd ever seen. When I think about what seeing that pilot and the subsequent episodes did to me at the age of 14/15, I am not exaggerating when I say David Lynch exploded my world. Narratively, musically, aesthetically, and spiritually.
At 14, I was a suburban Chicago 80s stoner kid. I'd just become enamored with Anthrax through their album The Persistence of Time, and this was a catalyst for me to let the tide of 80s Thrash carry me out onto its tumultuous sea, for better or worse. I loved the imagery that came along with Metal - all the dark, weird and cosmic stuff. I thought Metal, comic books and Horror films like John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness were the only way into that dark tone that inspired all my teenage art - copious amounts of drawings, song lyrics, etc. The same tone that still inspires my art to this day. David Lynch showed me another way.
The idea that the elements he employed could cut so deeply into horrific metaphysics blew me away. Jazz. Small Town America. Lonley traffic lights, shadows, Douglas Firs... the woods proved the ultimate draw - I lived surrounded by the 70K acres of forest preserves covering the Cook County area. Twin Peaks proved such a palpable experience because I could literally walk down the street from my house and get lost in the woods. The Black Lodge felt close. So did mystery and excitement.
From there, I went back and found Blue Velvet - a film I watched for the first time on LSD. This was video store days, so it took me a while to track down Eraserhead. I had to go to a video store 22 minutes away when I finally got my driver's license and could explore more than the Fuckbuster down the street. After that, I watched everything as it came out, mostly in the theatre, the way Mr. Lynch intended. Lost Highway was a revelation I saw multiple times during its initial theatrical run. Mulholland Drive baffled me upon first viewing, then shored itself up as my favorite of his feature films over the three subsequent visits to the theatre that same week. Inland Empire proved a vertical free-fall unlike any other cinematic experience (one I've never been able to recreate at home with the DVD).
The images and soundscapes David Lynch created have accumulated over the last thirty-five years, becoming integral aspects of my personality, driven in deep and strengthened by the patina of time and recycling. I watch David Lynch's work often. I listen to his music more. There's a place in my brain I access through Lynch's work, a shadowy corridor that lets out at my unconscious, my adolescence, my understanding of what it means to be a good human, an artist, and a fan.
I woke up with this in my head this morning and had to post. Such a gorgeous song!
From Man Man's 2008 album Rabbit Habits, now a certified classic in my book. Check out Man Man's website HERE.
Watch:
It feels like a long time since I cared about anything Marvel has done on the large or small screen. I recently tried to pick up Secret Invasion, where I left off before the strike and just found I couldn't care less. This, however, has my blood up:
I'd previously read the new Marvel Daredevil continuity would eschew any connection to the previous Netflix series, but that does not seem to be the case. Also, holy cow, is that the White Tiger we see? Also, fucking awesome to have Bernthal return as Frank Castle. March 4th I know what I'll be watching!
Playlist:
Primus - Frizzle Fry
Rollins Band - The End of Silence
Mudhoney - March to Fuzz: Best Of and Rarities
Oranssi Pazuzu - Muuntautuja
Carpenter Brut - Blood Machines OST
Drug Church - Hygiene
Aidan Baker & Dead Neanderthals - Cast Down And Hunted
Carpenter Brut - Leather Terror
Card:
Today's card is the Queen of Cups:
The emotional aspect of emotion, so this is a card that often needs a qualifying pull. Deals with deep, emotional realms of the personality. Associated with Binah, the Mother. Can indicate finding answers in dreams and/or imagination.
As an addendum to Bowie Week, I discovered this Danny Lohner remix of Bring Me the Disco King last night and wanted to post it here. I'll say right away it's interesting, and I dig it, but I love the original version of the song so much that there's really no room in my life for this. Still, I view this site as equal parts personal journal and information dump and part open-source information for whoever stumbles across it, so I felt I needed to record this for posterity's sake.
The addition of John Frusciante's fragile guitar is a nice touch, and the video is cool in a very 00s kind of way.
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I rewatched Jeremy Kasten's 2007 remake of Herschell Gordon Lewis' Wizard of Gore. People give this movie a lot of shit because it's a 00s remake, and it's also very of its time; the 00s were just not an appealing cultural time. Also, it has the dubious distinction of having been released under the "Dimension Extreme" label, arguably a driving force in ruining 00s Horror.
This flick eschews a lot of that, though, by building its own little pastiche of a world. As a kind of mash-up of a splatter flick and a Noir, Kasten and writer Zach Chassler (working off the original script by Lewis) create a kind of fetish-hipster-Nor L.A. that's all cool reclaimed spaces and lofts. As Danny! and Tim from the long-dormant Double Murder Podcast observed when they paired this film with the original, people like this - and I think they especially meant Kip Pardue's Edmund Bigelow, a trust-funder who completely dismisses modernity for the look and accouterment of the 40s - don't actually exist. True, and it becomes a bit of an affectation for the film. That said, watching the "making of" featurette after the film for the first time last night, Kasten talks about how Costume Designer Carrie Grace (who also worked on HBO's Doom Patrol) worked to ensure every single person on camera has their own specific, individual look. This just makes me think, in that sad, tired way I used to think when I had some hope and positivity in looking at the world, "Yeah, wouldn't it be amazing if that's the world we lived in? Everyone was an individual."
Is this film misogynistic? Hmmm.... maybe? One could argue the woman - naked, scantily dressed, or being butchered - are mere objects to the film; however, Kasten was forward-thinking enough to cast members of the Suicide Girls as Montag's fodder. Suicide Girls, as I understood it at the time anyway, was a movement by which the participants created their personas and online images based on personal empowerment - the then-exploding internet's first artistic or 'tasteful nudes' movement that took the exploitation out of pornographers' hands and gave it back to the subjects themselves. So just utilizing these particular girls kind of thwarts any sweeping generalization about the filmmaker's motives or misguided M.O.
The world and artistic design in this film are part of my big draw to it. Also, it has a very Lynch-like narrative that I honestly think is fascinating. The idea that "Nothing is as it seems" may be oft-overused, but here, it is most appropriate. Also, both Crispin Glover as the titular Wizard and Brad Douriff as the cantankerous Dr. Chong. Douriff's performance, in particular, hums with a barely restrained malevolence that conjures Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth, sublimated under secrets and agendas. That's the entire movie - secrets and agendas, and when it all comes out in the wash, I'm always kind of blown away.
Read:
A couple of years ago, my good friend Jesus gave me Karl Klockars' Beer Lover's Chicago:
Knowing that I A) Love Beer, B) Hail from Chicago, and C) Haven't lived there for 16+ years, Jesus's prescience took a while for me to fully understand. This has been a 'bathroom' book for a while now, but lately, I find myself deeply interested in the stories of the breweries and taprooms contained in this book - hundreds of them. Chances are, they're not all still operational seven years after publication. That's the harsh reality and also possibly the reason I've become so interested in these stories. Any beer fan can attest to the shrinking shelf space at grocery and specialty stores alike as the "pre-mixed cocktails" craze gains steam. I want all these breweries to thrive, whether or not I ever get to sample their beers or not. I love a great beer-based success story.
Mr. Klockar has a pretty informative website as well, which you can find HERE.
Bringing this year's Bowie Week to a close with possibly my favorite song by him, the closing track from 2005's Reality. I have a short story I wrote around the time this album came out that pertains to the mood and abstractions in this song, a time-traveling hitman stuck killing time in the 70s waiting for his target, the titular Disco King. I haven't even looked at it in probably twenty years; maybe one day soon.
I've probably posted this track here before. However, there is a very specific reason I'm posting it again now. Tune in tomorrow.
Watch:
Holy smokes - haven't been online all that much this weekend, so I just caught wind of this now, thanks to Bloody Disgusting:
I grabbed mine; I still hadn't upgraded my old DVD copy of Night of the Creeps, so this is fantastic news. Granted, I don't own nor have any plans to get a 4K tv or player, however, I believe this comes with a standard BR as well. If not, I'll find a home for it and grab the BR separately. I'm really just here for Mr. Atkins.
Continuing our David Bowie week-long celebration of his life and work, K and I watched Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth last night. I had not seen this in some time, and both of us sat captivated for the entire 2 hours and 19 minutes run time. Anthony B. Richmond's camera combines with Roeg's deliberate pacing to juxtapose Bowie's inherent renowned alien beauty with the beauty of the Earth. Such a great mission statement to approach source material about an alien on Earth. The supporting cast is extravagant - Candy Clark, Rip Torn and Buck Henry* all turn in fantastic performances, but it's Bowie's grace and reserved performance that really makes this film what it is. You literally could not have cast anyone else and had this work the way it does.
* Being that Buck Henry was also in Friday night's viewing of The Linguini Incident, I guess you could spin my weekend celebration as a Buck Henry double-feature as well.
