2018: December 13th

I am LOVING this new Boy Harsher! Can't wait for the album.

Off to Wisconsin this morning, to visit a place integral to American Gods. If it's as cool as it sounds, I may post pictures here tomorrow or Saturday, we'll see. And still hoping K gets to see some snow.

Playlist from yesterday:

Reverend Horton Heat - Whole New Life
Corrosion of Conformity - No Cross No Crown

No card today.

2018: December 12th: New John Garcia and the Band of Gold

New music from John Garcia and the Band of Gold. I'm a big fan of Kyuss, especially ...And the Circus Leaves Town and Blues for the Red Sun. I never really kept up with Mr. Garcia afterward though. This sounds great to me. Looking forward to the record, pre-order it HERE.

It's amazing how much great music came out of the California Deserts in the late 90s/early 00s. Having played a bit there myself, I can attest to the fact that there's a beautifully haunting undercurrent of inspiration that people tap into. Has a bit to do with Gram Parsons and his death, a little bit more to do with the alien landscape. That said, the sound on this track reeks of 'desert', but Nate Klein's gorgeous cinematography play with a mostly urban landscape, so there's almost a disconnect, but one that disappears when we get that shot at about 00:54 of what looks to me like the highway leading into Twenty-Nine Palms - you just don't have those kinds of hills in LA - and then the pedigree becomes visible once again. It's a similar vibe to the first Queens of the Stone Age album, which also played with a low-income urban vibe juxtaposed against the desert. Works well, and it really puts you there. That's the lifeblood of California, not the money and fame. We're an artificial human paradigm forced into a desert. And in the end, Mother Nature always wins, sometimes you just need a longer timeline to see it.

Spent a nice six hours or so working on The Legend of Parish Fenn with Jonathan Grimm last night. Seeing this thing laid out in the flesh blows my mind - John's art has come such a long way, same with my words, and laying out mock word bubbles over the art thrilled me to no end. Here's a sneak peak:

Playlist from 12/12:

Moderat - II
Zeal & Ardor - Stranger Fruit
Ghost -Meliora
Various - Twin Peaks (Music from the Limited Event Series)
Secret Premiere Album for Friend's Band
Type O Negative - Dead Again

Card of the day:

Victory and arrogance. Check. These are two sides of the same coin for some; I myself have never relied on arrogance to get me through the day, I just don't have the self-importance. I know when I do something that sucks, and I know when I do something that's good. The card warns about keeping on the fine line of living with - and more importantly talking about - these. Parish Fenn? Good. The final scene in ShadowPlay, Book 1? So far, not good. It's driving me fucking crazy. Literally. I can feel myself carrying all kinds of neurosis at this point, all voices screaming "Finish the fucking thing." But I can't quite get it where I want it. Seven years I've been working on this (with a year off to do the shorts in Collection of Desires, which in turn led to me having a different outlook on ShadowPlay, which I'd mistakenly thought was finished). End result? It will be awesome when it's done, I just have everything else on hold and a whole lotta self confidence issues until that happens. But seeing Fenn and then this card together now? It helps.

2018: December 11th

After a conversation with a friend, I'm really re-assessing this year's return of the band Daughters. Here's some live footage I watched in the middle of the night last night (that's now! I'm all messed up on time this trip).

The weather in Chicago is COLD, and I've taken a bit of a hit. Or, my day of feeling like shit was reaction to another fairly heavy drinking late night, the after-show for the Drinking with Comics On the Road Special: Chicago, which just went up on Apple, Spotify, and Google Play.

Read the first two trades of Warren Ellis and Jon Davis-Hunt's Wildstorm reboot last night in between editing the audio for the new episode. THEY ARE INCREDIBLE, and have surely set me off an an Ellis-jag as soon as I return home and get to my bookshelves. First up? Planetary, the last issue or trade or whatever was delayed for years back in the day, I have still never read.

Playlist from 12/10 was non-existent.

Playlist from 12/09:

Black Sabbath - Children of the Grave (Vol. 4 import)
Arab Strap - The Red Thread
Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

Card of the day:

"Analytical approach to problems of the mind."

Nail on the head.

2018: December 9th

Let's start the day with some Sabbath, shall we?

When I first moved to LaLaLand in 2006, I'd come home every October with a small cache of CDs. Eventually, of course, technology prevailed and my travel bag got lighter with the iPod; I bought one of those handy cassette to 1/8th jacks and music could follow me even in my Dad's truck, which only had CD and cassette capabilities. So far this trip I can't find that damned device, and in a search for something to listen to yesterday on my way to see Jonathan Grimm hock his wares at the Miskatonic Brewery's most recent art show, I found this in my dad's glove box, no doubt left by me several years before:

The find dovetailed nicely with waking up this morning and finding Mr. Brown had texted me that Pitchfork's Sunday Album this week is Sabbath's Paranoid, written by Grayson Haver Currin. I pretty much hate pitchfork except for this weekly column, and if you're a Sabbath fan, this is a great read. You can find the article HERE.

All this fits, because I can't come home and not become immersed in Sabbath, so the cassette was more a spiritual omen or reminder than it was a coincidence. My parent's place breathes Sabbath to me; some of my favorite and most vivid memories of the heavily wooded property where I grew up are of my friend Jake and I getting stoned and listening to Sabbath. Not just listening; this was clinical. We reveled in it, picking lyrics apart and building the exo-skeletons of our own philosophy around some of the words in the songs - especially the ones on Sabotage - the riffs and rhythms serving as mnemonic anchors, activation triggers for me later in life (sadly, Jake did not make it to 'later in life'; that's shit I work through in my writing, if you know where to look), so that the simple act of sitting in a car behind the house at 42 years of age and hearing the opening riff of Wheels of Confusion reactivates the assuredness Jake and I had at twenty-years old that the overall pull of the Universe was a positive, loving one, and no matter what I was struggling with it was transitory because that is the nature of our reality, transition.

**

Drinking with Comics tapes and (hopefully) streams live tonight on the DwC Facebook page, somewhere around 6:00 PM CST (that's 4:00 PM on the West Coast) at the Amazing Fantasy Books and Comics Frankfort store.

Playlist from 12/08:

Black Sabbath - Children of the Grave (Import version of Vol. 4)
Perturbator - B-Sides and Remixes, Vol. 1

No card today because I'm running out of time. Heading out to see this on the big screen:

2018: December 8th

Always a pleasure to get a new video from Tennis System. L I E is the final track on this year's Pain EP, and it was one of my favorite EPs of the year. This band is awesome! Support them HERE.

Short post today, as I'm chasing down a new idea for a short story.

Long night of hanging with the old school gang. And it got Old School, believe me. The playlist was out of my control and largely nostalgic, with Mr. Brown handling most of the duties, and everyone else popping in a disc here or there for a song or two. Fantastic time, Fantastic friends, and Fantastic music. Here's what I can piece together from the fragments of memory floating on a rocky sea of Goose Island 312 and Italian Beef:

Playlist from 12/07:

Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings - It's a Holiday Soul Party
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Reverend Horton Heat - We Three Kings
Iron Maiden - Piece of Mind
Anthrax - Sound of White Noise
Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Now I Got Worry

Card of the day:

Definitely the appropriate feeling for being home among all my loved ones, so I'll leave it at that.

2018: December 7th - RIP Pete Shelley

Rest in Peace, Peter Shelley.

The first time I heard The Buzzcocks it was their single What Do I Get, circa 1998, and I was floored. After coming up in the early 90s and absolutely HATING the pop punk movement (do I hate green day more than I hate crappy 70s bands like Ace, Styxx, and Kansas? Yes. Yes I do), I was shocked to find there was pop punk that didn't turn everything I loved about the original 'punks' - a social movement more than a sound, per se - into a marketing ploy. Then, to find that as that as they evolved, the Buzzcocks melded more with the Post-Punk movement, I've often felt this band were way more important in the annals of rock history than they are generally given credit for. Even I haven't listened to the Buzzcocks as much as I feel I should, my familiarity starting and stopping with songs on an old mixtape back in the day, and an career-spanning anthology Mr. Brown gave me years ago.

I began working on my Top Ten Favorite Albums of 2018 list the other day. Did Beak>'s L.A. Playback make the cut? Honestly, I'm not even sure yet. It's always a favorite year-end activity of mine, to comb back through all the music that came out over the past year and boil down my ten favorites, but it's never easy. There's A LOT of good music out there. I also always look forward to reading other people's lists, chief among them the ones published by Heaven Is An Incubator and Joup's Daniel Fiorio. I'll definitely be posting links to those here when they drop.

In the meantime, here's some Live Beak> I found on youtube. Love KEXP! So many awesome bands - reminds me of the old Peel Sessions, or in a more contemporary, LA way, Part Time Punks.



Playlist from my travel day yesterday was primarily six sustained hours of Burial's Untrue, with a few other things thrown into the mix. That's how I travel: I put on an album, almost always electronic in nature, and drill it on repeat. This helps me reach a strange, liminal state, a kind of hypnogogic trance, and that helps me ride the day out in a strange but beautifully peaceful fugue, where none of the inconveniences or discomforts of traveling bother me, and I end up with a creative re-charge. Previous albums I've done this with are Boards of Canada's Geogaddi, Music Has the Right to Children, and Tomorrow's Harvest, and Moderat's II and III.

12/06:

Burial - Untrue
Burial - Kindred EP
Bohren & der Club of Gore - Gore Motel

Card of the day is super special today, because my good friend Missi surprised me with a present last night - a Mini Thoth deck. No disrespect to that Hansen Roberts deck I've been using as a back-up over the last year, but I have absolutely NO connection with it. Actually, while I can admire the beauty of many decks out there (chief among them that mind blowing Vertigo Comics deck), Lady Frieda Harris/Aleister Crowley's Thoth deck is the only Tarot deck I have a working connection with, so it's the only one I use. Maybe someday that will change, but I kind of doubt it.

I broke the deck in reading for Missi last night, and as usual, her understanding and interpretation of Tarot always inspires me, so the cards are charged and ready to go, and to celebrate I'm doing a spread today instead of just one card:

Full disclosure: I never factor in reversals. That said, while making this giff, I wanted to portray the cards exactly as they were drawn, so I kept that intact. Also, the fact that all three cards are reversed either totally negates the idea that a reversal in this case would matter, or testifies to it. Either way, I read them as the card, not their positioning.

This is interesting because it slightly mirrors the drawing I did for Missi last night, with two Cups divided by a Sword card. My overall reading is simple - I'm having trouble with the setting for the final scene in the book, because it's not enough of a 'set piece.' to change it, I must be cruel or kill one of my darlings - something about the scene that I've been adamant not to change. This will lead to a breakthrough.

2018: December 6th

I'm doing Thursday's post on Wednesday night because I'm up and off to LAX early in the morning to fly to Chicago! Yay!

A couple months ago I posted about Perturbator's side project, L'Enfant De La Fôret. Well, that record fell right the heck off my radar, and it wasn't until I saw Heaven Is An Incubator post this GORGEOUS track that I remembered how much I'd been looking forward to it. And Tommy hit the nail right on the head - this track reeks of Lynch/Badalamenti, which, of course, immediately endears it to me. I can't wait to ingest this entire record during my trip. Name your price and buy it HERE.



Playlist from 12/05:

The Veils - Total Depravity
Grimes - Art Angels
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Hallelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
The Body - I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer.
Gil Scott Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Single)
Scroobious Pip vs. Dan Le Sac - Thou Shalt Always Kill (Single)
Algiers - Eponymous
Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy OST
David Lynch & Alan Splatt - Eraserhead OST

Card of the day:

"Insatiable hunger for life and endless, powerful energies." Well, that definitely is the standard definition for how I roll in Chicago. It'll be interesting to see if this year is any different? Well, I've hit a point where I just don't have the energy I previously had. I knock out during movies at home ALL the time now on weekends. I feel a general, low-grade exhaustion on a daily basis. Part of it is I'm 42, and part of it is my first alarm rings at 4:07 AM, five days a week. Normally, I hit Chicago and hook up with my lifelong friends and I can hang out all night, drinking beer and talking music, movies, comics, whatever. Will that be the case with this trip? Well, the card seems to imply it will, so we'll see.