First, I had to set the tone with some music. Last night, K and I rolled into North Bend. I love this town. Seriously. With Mount Rainier looming beautifully in the mist, we checked into our amazing Airbnb and set out for the Salish Lodge. In the cool, wet spring evening, the falls were more amazing than I've ever seen them. To say K had a religious experience is something of an understatement.
Afterward, we ate at Fall City Roadhouse, the exterior for the infamous Twin Peaks Roadhouse. Second time I've dined here and the food is just ridiculous! I had the Meatloaf Dinner, and, well, this must be where meatloaves go when they die. Washed it down with two of these, Nitro, on tap:
Breakfast this morning will be at Twede's, which my fellow Peaks People will know as Norma's Double R Diner. From there will probably cruise a few filming spots so she can see them (Hap's old location, Ronette's bridge, maybe the Mill/Sheriff Station), then on to Seattle, where we'll leave the Peaks nostalgia behind and dig into an Underground tour and some museum tours. Special thanks to Mr. Brown who is way more familiar with Seattle than I, and his offering to serve as my 'Alex,' by phone if I have any questions.
Playlist:
True Widow - AVVOLGERE
Melvins - Houdini
Slayer - Reign in Blood
Dum Dum Girls - Too True
Twin Peaks Limited Event Series Soundtrack
Card of the day:
Having a hard time squaring this with my present state. 7s traditionally represent the unbalance that leaving the harmony of the 6s behind causes. I don't feel unbalanced, but I suppose we often don't. I'll take this as a reminder to keep my wits about me and stay emotionally even.
You know there's more to this than there seems. But even if season 9 is only a simple 80s slasher story, I'd be 100% happy with that. Now, I just have to watch Cult and Apocalypse...
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I'm posting this late/early. Haven't been to bed yet. K's plane was delayed and it's almost 1:00 AM. I'm groggy, just opened another beer, and am watching the credits to Robert Rodriguez's The Faculty scroll across my screen. Ray has been telling for years to watch this, and it's currently in Shudder's Last Chance bin (see a pattern?), so I figured I'd go for it. Not blown away - didn't expect to be - but I dug it. I especially dug realizing how goddamn hot Frazier's ex-wife is. WOW BOB WOW.
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This past Tuesday, Nathan Ballingrud's Wounds: Six Stories From the Border of Hell dropped. If you don't remember,I've postedabout Mr. Ballingrud's The Visible Filth a few times since I first discovered it a couple years ago. The original version of that novella, published by the marvelous This is Horror imprint, went out of print recently, to make way for this collection, which contains Visible Filth, as well as five other stories. Wounds is also the name of the movie adaptation of Visible Filth that I can NOT wait to see, directed by Babak Anvari, and starring Armie Hammer and Dakota Johnson. I can't say how happy I am for Mr. Ballingrud. There are super positive reviews rolling in for both the book and the movie, and I really think this is the launch of a massive presence in horror fiction. You can order the book HERE from Amazon, or, if you are lucky enough to have a brick-and-mortar bookstore in your area, I'm sure they will have it. I guarantee you won't be disappointed.
Gold & Grey out June 14th. Pre-order HERE. Really interesting video. I like seeing behind the scenes with bands of this caliber. I'm increasingly interested in work spaces.
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Last night I ate at a local place called Steam Plant for the second night in a row. The building used to be Spokane's power plant, and the restaurant owners designed their environment utilizing a lot of the textures of the previous facility as decor. They also do not shy away from using all the space, which means the place is cavernous; I caught a buzz and went exploring, found little rooms all over the place. Here's some pictures; the timing is not great on my .giff, but you get the idea.
I've kind of made the lower level, pub area of Steam Plant my Nighttime office; I sequester myself in a booth with my laptop, a few beers and, so far, something off their incredible sandwich menu and work on this new short story that Spokane has inspired. Beer wise, to my surprise, Steam Plant still had their Octoberfest on draft, and friends, it is glorious! Also, their Steam Bock is no slouch either. K comes in tonight and after what will hopefully be an abbreviated work day tomorrow, we head out for North Bend. Can't wait to eat at Twede's (The Double R) with her!
Playlist from 4/10:
Mevlins - Houdini
Helms Alee - Night Terrors
Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch - An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil
Young Widows - Settle Down City
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Wasteland
It was only a matter of time until I sunk into my favorite Melvins album while walking around Spokane. There's an insane aural/visual connection I make exploring the various textures of this city - a lot of brick, stone and Earth - with heavy slabs grinding in my ears. It just works. I'm probably waiting until the last day to take pictures - the streets are a bit sketch in a lot of parts, overrun with homeless, many of whom I've seen bother random folks walking around on the street. This makes a lot of people nervous, I know, but I do my best to avoid standing out, and part of that is not pulling out my iPhone every few minutes and snapping pictures. Also, with my worn combat boots, fingerless glove, dark clothing, and fully engaged hoodie, I blend in with the homeless. Which works well for me.
Last night I took a deviation from Ciazarn and followed inspiration for a new short story. The inspiration came from a simple, everyday office scenario that my mind twisted into what is becoming a really fun direction. I wrote for hours yesterday, causally pecking away at an online that, at some point shifted to a full-on narrative. No working title, no nothing yet. Just 15K words and an escalating desire to see where this one goes.
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Later, back in my hotel room, I watched GhostWatch, currently on Shudder's "Last Chance" list. I'd heard the Shockwaves crew speak on this one a few weeks back, and earmarked it based on whatever that discussion entailed. I have to tell you, it had me all the way through. And genuinely scary, which you all know I consider rare. What's crazy is apparently, many of the British BBC ONE news folks in the movie are indeed real television news folks, and GhostWatch originally aired in Britain on Halloween, 1992 under the auspices of being an actual news program, Orson Welles style. Man! I wish I could have seen it in that capacity. Still, really cool flick. Here's a video that explains the occurrence in more detail than I can:
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Playlist from 4/09:
Young Widows - Old Wounds
Helms Alee - Night Terror
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Wasteland
Melvins - Houdini
Card of the day:
This resonates. My writing yesterday feels like it's put my power levels through the freakin' roof. More today.
I walked 5 miles around Spokane yesterday, partially in the rain. It was fucking glorious. This city feels to me like the image of Seattle told through Everybody Loves Our Town, and all stories my mind made from the images put there by Nevermind and Houdini and Superfuzz BigMuff, back when listening to music was my only means of exploring a larger world (i.e. High School). Gentrification encroaches, slowly pushes out the artists and the addled, so that you see people in suits checking into hotels next door to which are convenience stores overrun by homeless criminals with backpacks full of poison for sale. The rain looks like it's falling even when it doesn't, and the damp is almost a caress. Stone and brick buildings everywhere, shuttered shops a genuine lack of strip malls and plazas (god I hate that word), and the city seems besieged by either trees or mountains, depending on which direction you look. All in all, it is an amazing place to fall in love with a new album, and this Sleepwalking Sailors record by Helms Alee is just doing it for me right now.
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Apparently, Young Widows are at Roadburn Festival this year, performing Old Wounds in its entirety. Wow. There are no festivals I would like to attend on Earth except Roadburn. Check out this year's art. Love it like I do? Maarten Donders is your man! I can't wait until Jonathan Grimm does one of these. It's so going to happen.
Playlist from 4/08:
Young Widows - Old Wounds
Helm Alee - Sleepwalking Sailors
Card of the day:
Two big changes taking place at the moment - handing the book of to Missi and starting on Ciazarn, and spending a week working in Spokane, so I'll read this at a general, face value.
I've been listening to Tricky's Maxinquaye a lot of late. An amazingly album built around uncomfortable atmosphere, Maxinquaye remains timeless. Those aberrant sonic elements that comprise many of the tracks will, I think, always feel fresh and groundbreaking. No one does shit like this except Tom Waits, and that's just a different thing.
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I had a long flight yesterday. An hour and fifteen to San Jose, where I arrived at 5:00 PM and had until 7:55 PM before my connecting flight to Spokane. No problem. Seriously, some people would hate this, but I looked at it as time to write. Hot to trot on Ciazarn, I found an unbelievable business room in the San Jose Airport - with desks and everything - and I put up shop, adding bullet points to my outline and trying to figure this story out. In this regard, I ended up researching everything from the Dustbowl of the 1930s and what States it affected most, to the evolution of the Railroads up until and including the landmark Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad Company court decision of 1886 where the U.S. Supreme Court first ruled a corporation has the rights of personhood. This is, by the way, one of the most detrimental moments in Earth's history, if you ask me, because it makes corporations the dominant species on the planet. But I digress. A lot of these events and ideas may not explicitly occur in Ciazarn, but all of them most definitely inform its world. I think I have bigger plans for this project than I first thought, which is cool.
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Well, FINALLY. Can't wait for June 14th:
Being that this is not only Nicolas Winding Refn, but Ed Brubaker also worked on it - and John Hawkes - I am so in.
Playlist from 4/07:
Boards of Canada - Campfire Headphase
Boards of Canada - Geogaddi
Boards of Canada -
Black Queen - Infinite Games
Ben Frost - By the Throat
Belong - October Language
Barrie - Canyons (single)
Tricky - Maxinquaye
No card today. Running late walking to this week's gig.
Well, I did not expect to be posting this track today. I didn't expect to even think of one of my favorite Guns and Roses songs any time soon. And 'favorite G&R song' is a somewhat exclusive label, as the band long ago irritated me to the point that I have little ability left to engage with their music in any meaningful way. It's all nostalgia, with only brief glimpses of the feelings their music - especially the epics on the two Illusions records - used to inspire in me back when I was in high school and G&R was a force to be reckoned with. It's not that the material is lacking, because songs like Estranged, Coma, and yes, even November Rain still feel epic and genuine to me. But for a band I once thought would be the 'next Rolling Stones,' G&R couldn't keep it together and ended up traveling through this timeline as a not much more than a bad joke. Nadler's upcoming collaborative album with Stephen Brodsky, out April 26th on Sacred Bones, however, is not a joke:
I can't place where I know Marrisa Nadler's name from; it doesn't matter. Between her, Chelsea Wolfe, Emma Ruth Rundle, and Myrkur, there is an amazing cabal of female artists exploring the dark and beautiful intersection of folk and black metal. It's not about sound, it's about tone and aesthetic. And Brodsky's discography is loaded with impressive projects, so I think I'll pre-order this one, which can be done HERE.
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The Horror Vision had a group outing last Thursday and caught the first pre-screening of Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer's new iteration of the classic Stephen King novel Pet Sematary. I'm sorry to say I hated it. With a passion. And I think I have some pretty good reasons for that hate. Did my Castmates agree with me? Check out our reaction on any of the following platforms below to find out, but only if you've seen the flick; we go heavy spoilers on this one:
I leave for Spokane in a few hours, and in preparing for this trip, my main goal over the last few days has been to finish the First Reader copy of the Shadow Play Book One, so I could pass it off to Missi and NOT THINK ABOUT IT for a few weeks. I'm happy to say I accomplished my goal, even though by the end of the work - last minute touch-ups to the prose and a ton of formatting tweaks that resulted from taking the finished document out of Scrivener and into Vellum, I was spent. I raced through three hours last night and came out the other side feeling as though I'd been immersed in hard physical labor. Now? On to Ciazarn!
Ciazarn: also known as carny, is a private language employed by those who live and work in Carnival culture, meant to keep anyone outside that culture from knowing what is being said.
This is the new collaboration with Jonathan Grimm, who I'm also doing The Legend of Parish Fenn with. Fenn is a comic. Ciazarn is a short story - or perhaps eventually a series of short stories - with illustrations by Grimm. At some point I'll post an elevator pitch and sample art and I think you'll agree with me that Ciazarn is going to be awesome.
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Playlist 4/05:
Brand New - God and the Devil are Raging Inside Me
Canadian Rifle - Peaceful Death
Canadian Rifle - Deep Ends
King Khan and the Shrines - What Is?!
Windhand - Live Elsewhere
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Playlist 4/06:
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Wasteland
Lustmord - Songs of Gods and Demons
Faith No More - Angel Dust
Card of the day:
Breakthrough. Exactly. One immediately behind me, hopefully one directly in front of me.
