Friday, February 23, 2018

2018: February 23rd 4:35 AM

Well, just like that. Finished my second pass through on the project and passed the Scrivener session off to Keller. We meet tonight to discuss moving forward with it, then celebrate. I had my own little party with K to celebrate one stressor lifted, ended my musical day with Anthrax - State of Euphoria on vinyl and, fittingly, woke up with the final track off the album, Finale, blaring in my head. Growing up, as a Freshman or so in High School, Anthrax was my band (before Alice in Chains Dirt came along and knocked them off their throne). I had all their albums except their first two, Fistful of Metal and Armed and Dangerous, on cassette. Still have and listen to some of those cassettes. State of Euphoria was always my least favorite, and now I am just not sure why. I mean, it's nowhere near Persistence of Time - still my favorite - but it's really good and features songs about Blue Velvet and Stephen King's Misery, and just generally rocks.



Yesterday's Playlist:

OOIOO - Gold and Green
Preoccupations - Eponymous
Mastodon - Once More Around the Sun
Prince - Sign O' The Times
Prince - Paisley Park
Prince - Purple Rain
Madlove - White With Foam
Sinoia Caves - Beyond the Black Rainbow OST
Anthrax - State of Euphoria

Card of the day:


"Appears after trauma. Period of rest invested with planning."

My notes in the Grimoire don't seem to fit so I'll have to look deeper into this one, which is good, because part of why I'm doing this, other than to reconnect with Tarot after almost two years away from it, is the Grimoire is largely unfinished.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

2018: February 22nd,

Woke up with Coast to Coast, the second track on Tune-Yards new album, I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life in my head. I can't find a good version of it to embed here so instead here's the Melvins covering The Butthole Surfers in honor of the fact that the new Melvins album is out soon and features Jeff Pinkus on second bass for the entire album:



So good...


Playlist from 2/21:

Iron Maiden - Live After Death
Tune-Yards - I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life
Black Sabbath - Paranoid
Brookville - Life in the Shade
Somnium Nox - Apocrypha
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Windhand - Soma
House of Waxwork Vol. #2 OST
Sinoia Caves - Beyond the Black Rainbow OST

New installment of Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying is HERE.

Card of the day:



From the Grimoire:

Indicates greater objectivity/clarity
Healthy balance of emotions and intellect
Good time to make decisions
I can see clearly now the rain has gone

Hmm... Well, the convolutions thicken with the prospective move; the place we had settled on is out, a potentially better place has popped up and I suppose this is telling me to balance my approach inspire of exhaustion (which I haven't so much as half the right to claim as K does).

Oh! Check this out - Metallica Garage Days Re-Revisitied reissue; the CD comes in a limited edition long box like CDs used to come in back in the day. $10 bucks for the second of the only two albums by this band you need to own? Check!


Wednesday, February 21, 2018

2018: February 21st, 4:23 AM

More Bowie in my head upon waking. It's a wonderful way to open your eyes:



Playlist yesterday:

TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain
Darkness Brings the Cold - Devil Swank Vol. #1
Somnium Nox - Apocrypha
The Knife - Shaking the Habitual
Somnium Nox -
David Bowie - Dollar Days*
Deafheaven - Sunbather
Roy Ayers - Ubiquity
Playlist: K**

.............

* I had been thinking about listening to David Bowie's Blackstar to start off my writing session but was tired and a little out of sorts so I figured I should stick with the music I know works for these sessions, i.e. lately Deafheaven. However, before I could choose one of their albums, my iTunes jumped into random and picked Dollar Days. I treated this as something of a sonic Tarot pull and listened to the song. Lyrics for it are HERE - I'm not sure how these pertain to my life at the moment, rather hope they don't. It's a great song, one of the saddest deliveries on a final album filled with sad deliveries. I'm going to re-engage with the album today, as my original impetus for almost picking it yesterday was realizing it'd been quite a long time since I had, preferring for the last year or two to stick to Bowie's older material and also some of his more obscure, probably because as awesome as Black Star is, it's an emotional tour de force.

** The second or third CD I made for K after we started dating. The part of the playlist we made it through before dinner looks like this:




Card of the day:


Interesting interpretation when I juxtapose this card resurfacing with the 8 of Swords almost popping out of the deck as I shuffled (I always shuffle three times - unless I'm around a lot of people I know, like at work, and want to avoid being super ostentatious - and cut once). The 8 of Swords is, of course, Interference, and in keeping with that we are poised to move but have a sudden setback. The 2 of Disks coming up confirms putting our heads down and plowing through.

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

2018: February 20th 4:41 AM

Upon waking I was pleasantly greeted by David Bowie:




Playlist from 2/19:

Windhand - Soma
Electric Wizard - Dopethrone
Electric Wizard - Wizard Bloody Wizard
David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
David Lynch and John Neff - BLUEBOB
The Cramps - Psychedelic Jungle/Gravest Hits
Algiers - The Underside of Power
Grimes - Halfaxa
Tears for Fears - Songs From the Big Chair
Roy Ayers - Ubiquity
Funkdoobiest - Brothas Doobie
Tha Grimm Teachaz - There's a Situation on the Homefront


Card of the day:


Enlightenment; you're on the right path. Good things to come. A turning point for the positive - still interpreting this as juxtaposed to the last few pulls, all as an ongoing statement on our prospective move. K and her Mom saw the place yesterday and we have the applications. It is happening.

Monday, February 19, 2018

2018: February 19th 4:40 AM

Another song by The Veils greets me as I break the waters on this side of consciousness:



Playlist from Sunday, 2/18:

Windhand/Satan's Satyrs - Split
Windhand/Cough - Reflection of the Negative
The Body - No One Deserves Happiness
The Body - I Shall Die Here
Chrysta Bell - We Dissolve

Card of the day:


Overindulgence as a way to mask or meditate pain or problems. Too much booze or smoke, too much imagination not enough reality. Hmmm... doesn't sound like my current state, unless we count the fact that I was so irritated yesterday morning that I smoked at like 10 AM. Rare, but not unheard of on a Sunday. It was absolutely a tactic to attempt to squash the open loop in my head keeping me grumpy, and it worked to a degree, but it also did not interfere with anything that I can think of, as I do not smoke often and the reason for this is typically that I know pot yields a state of mind that is not conducive to writing (much to the contrary of what I thought back when I first began to seriously concentrate on writing). Yesterday however, I partook early enough that by 6:00 PM I was able to have a pretty successful writing session, although I had some trouble keeping my tenses straight in two chapters where I had bafflingly switched to present tense.

I'll just take this pull as a bit of a comment on yesterday and be done with it.

Sunday, February 18, 2018

2018: February 18th 11:33 AM

Continuing this somewhat - to me anyway - fascinating record of the music I wake up with in my head, because there's always music there when I open my eyes to a new day, today it was one of the more nuanced tracks from 2016's Total Depravity by The Veils:



I say nuanced and I do not mean it in a negative way; every track off Total Depravity is marvelous, and what's more, The Veils are very good at doing that that thing that I love: all the tracks add up to make an outstanding full album, one that resonates on multiple harmonic levels when listened to as a whole. We're talking sonically, thematically, and overall aesthetically, this record shines. In fact, I'd call it one of the best 'albums' I've heard in years.

Playlist yesterday was sparse. I finally found my CD copy of Shellac's most recent record Dude Incredible so that may be going into regular commute rotation for a while:

The Soft Moon - Criminal
Shellac - Dude Incredible
Deftones - Gore
The Doors - LA Woman (original vinyl pressing - used to be my Dad's and has THIS little nasty on the back of the bright yellow record sleeve).

I pre-ordered Dude Incredible on vinyl back when it was released and Mr. Albini and crew included as something of, I think, a philosophical statement on their preference for analog over digital, a totally unlabeled copy of the album on disc. Lately I've had the strongest hankerings for Shellac while in the car, so although it's been a while since I've pulled the vinyl out at night, during the day I'd several times been frustrated to discover I had no idea where the disc was. I even feared,  due to its unmarked facade, its possible loss in the great divorce tally/purge of 2015. Then a couple days ago I pull out 1000 Hurts on disc and there's the unlabelled missing album on top. I very much count this as a win.

Last night K and I tried to watch both Good Time and It Comes at Night but failed at both. Part of this may have been due to a certain persnickety fatigue six long days of work surrounded by LA commutes had left me with by the time I'd prepared dinner and had a few Smithwicks, but I definitely feel it this lack of connection was not entirely on me. Both films are distributed by A24, whose films I normally fall right in line with, but with my shortage of time to appropriate for watching movies these days, I feel fairly certain I won't be giving either of these another chance. Instead, we're seeing The Philadelphia Story on the big screen this afternoon, thanks to Turner Movie Classics and Fathom Events, and steering tonight's Sunday Night Feature to Dark Song, a film several good friends have given near rave reviews of, and which I'd waited on since first reading about on the Horror Amino community, where there's a wealth of awesome horror information updated on pretty much an hourly basis.

Card of the day:


A lot in my Grimoire about this one, however most of it presupposes the card's value in a spread, in relation to other cards, especially Disks and its representation of Earthly matters. Specifically I see one relating to gambling. I'll keep this in mind, however the one point of primary interest here is the note that the Three of Swords can indicate, "... a current period of unhappiness, not necessarily one to come."

Two reasons for this note's perceived poignancy at the moment with regards to my existence:

I'm not in the best of moods today due to a certain lackadaisical approach to property management by the cunts that run the building that I will soon be moving out of, and two, the "... not necessarily..." part really helps when looking back at the last few days' cards and tracking their ongoing juxtaposition with my moving situation: knowing the Futility of the current situation with finding a new place forces a decision to be made; accepting the Change that will come with that decision, and now the suggestion that unhappiness will not necessarily follow on the tide of that Change, well, the pieces are in motion and I'm helping to keep them that way. My contributions pail in comparison to K's near constant attempts to stay in contact with the other parties involved.


Saturday, February 17, 2018

2018: February 17th 3:10 PM

Woke up with this in my head this morning:



Playlist:

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
The Veils - Total Depravity
The Veils - Nux Vomica
The Veils - Time Stays, We Go
The Bronx - The Bronx (I) AKA White Drugs
Grand Duchy - Let the People Speak (aborted listen*)
New York Dolls - Dancing Backward in High Heels
Broken Social Scene - You Forgot it in People
The Soft Moon - Criminal
Windhand/Satan's Satyrs - Split
Soundgarden - SOMMS (Record Store Day vinyl)
The Animals - Retrospective
....................

* I've tried, and despite absolutely LOVING the first album by Grand Duchy, and despite being an enormous Frank Black/Black Francis fan, I just can't get into this record at all. I keep waiting for the day that it catches me, but thus far, it has not.
......................

We watched Logan Lucky last night. Everything about the flick was solid except except except... I don't really know that it pulls off what it intends to pull off. Still, solid performances all the way around, very well written, likable characters, David Holmes does the music (of course), they use a Monks song in the soundtrack and it left me feeling good and like I want to move to West Virginia.

Ain't that something?

Bought tickets to go see this and I am PSYCHED.


Thursday, April 12th. One night only in the cinema. So I've got that on the 12th and The Soft Moon on Friday, April 13th. There's ALL kinds of synchronicities with my current writing project, but that aside, what an awesome two days of music!

Card of the day:


Change... it's a coming.