Because I'm spending the day with my phone in airplane mode so I can finally finish another of these short stories that have been haunting me for months, I'm revisiting a lot of the stuff that's trapped on my old iPod. Which, as it turns out, is extremely inspiring. Telephone Tel Aviv's album Immolate Yourself was an album I came to unexpectedly: sometime in the mid-00s a friend had given me a bunch of albums in MP3 form, so many in fact that it took me quite some time to work my way around to all of them. One day after work at the bookstore, I came home and hit "Shuffle" on the desktop computer before lying down for a nap. I woke up at some point with this album on, but the wake-up was half-hearted, and as I lie there drifting in and out of sleep, this record slowly endeared itself to me. It has, since then, been a portal back to the weird, twilight mindset of that experience.
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Along with the old iPod selections, I'm playing a couple movies on silent in the background while I write. Today's choices:
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With Tasmyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth winding down (it's SO freakin' good), I purchased and loaded Autumn Christian's Girl Like A Bomb in my 'on-deck' reading circle. I don't know much about the book or the author, but I LOVED Shadowmachine, Christian's entry into Robert S. Wilson's Ashes and Entropy anthology earlier in the year, and am excited to read more of her work.
What a cover. The font alone sells it.
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Playlist:
Blackstar - David Bowie
A Storm in Heaven - The Verve
David Bowie - Diamond Dogs
Oh Baby - The Art of Sleeping Alone
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
Ministry - Psalm 69
Bohren and der Club of Gore - Sunset Mission
Bohren and der Club of Gore - Gore Motel
First album in something like five years drops on Warp Records, January 31st. Before that, however, and advance 12" titled Vortrack drops. Pre-order HERE.
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After a slow start, Tasmyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth has me hooked. With only a little over the one hundred pages left, the story is developing into a spooky hybrid of Fantasy and Horror, although not in any way we normally associate with either genre. Sure, there's world-building, and some of that is what got in my way at the start, and I will confess I'm having trouble keeping track of who is who (although in the course of this particular story's The Old Dark House-style whodunnit? that doesn't trip up the story itself, just elements of comprehension).
Gideon the Ninth is apparently the first book in the three-book The Locked Tomb series, with the next book, Harrow the Ninth, up for pre-order on Amazon HERE.
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Playlist:
David Bowie - Black Star
Belbury Poly - Mind How You Go
Burial - Untrue
Ennio Morricone - Black Belly of the Tarantula
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Card:
Not going to comment on this at the moment, but I will if what I'm thinking pans out.
I've been swimming in David Bowie's final album again; it's perfect for my headspace at the moment, which I can only describe as 'weird.'
Something kickstarted a full-blown, days-upon-days reverie for the 00s, which is the definition of the word weird because it largely feels like a decade of my life that didn't really end up belonging to me. Not that it belonged to anyone else, but... well, can ten years be a corridor? I've ruminated on the philosophical context/ramifications of Soundgarden's Room a Thousand Years Wide, now we're readjusting that concept to a more micro version. Whether a decade can be a hallway or not, I've stepped back into that - triggered, I think, by a huge Warren Ellis reading binge - and it's very interesting, this mix of my ongoing current headspace, reinforced daily by the world I've built, and these elements of my previous operating system. What will be the outcome? Not quite sure yet, but it's pleasurable to walk around in two personal eras at once (again, a micro version of Philip K. Dick's experience, but without the out of body stuff).
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There's a couple new Horror Visions up, and one more to come this weekend. Topics of discussion range from Doctor Sleep to The Lighthouse to True Blood to Jennifer Kent's The Nightengale to, ah, turtle sex? The second oldest is a very tangental 'after dark' episode where we start out as a four-piece and become a three-piece whose conversation runs all the fuck over the place, but it's pretty cool to have captured and edited it to be, you know, coherent.
Yes, I too signed up for Disney +. I will be unsubscribing when The Mandalorian is finished for the season, but in the meantime, holy smokes do I LOVE this show. Now THIS is Star Wars; I actually consider this an apology to old school fans for that crap that's been in the theatre the last few years. And yes, I know this show was very specifically engineered to appease people like me: 40+ year olds who grew up with it and love the old, Sergio Leone approach. They've utilized so many characters that are based on my favorite action figures as a kid that there was no way this wasn't going to work for me. Contrived? Sure. Do I mind? Nope.
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Weird Walk is a wonderful little 'zine published by some fascinating people over in Great Britain. I received my copy of issue number two after reading about it in Warren Ellis' newsletter a few weeks, and have so far had the pleasure of reading an interview with author Benjamin Myers about how the rural English landscape has influenced and inspired his writing. This seems like it fits right in with that 'Haunted', Hypnogogic aesthetic that, you guessed it, fits in with my current re-assessment of the 00s.
You can order Weird Walk and peruse their sight HERE.
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Playlist:
David Bowie - Black Star
Clavicvla - Sepulchral Blessing
Greet Death - New Hell
Burial - Eponymous
Burial - Untrue
Federale - No Justice
Mastodon - Once More 'Round the Sun
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen
Oh Baby - The Art of Sleeping Alone
The Cure - Carnage Visors
The Cure - Pornography
Black Pumas - Eponymous
Mayhem - Daemon
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No card today, however, I wanted to note how exact my last two pulls were. Exact like in a creepy, "Tarot is never this on the nose" way.
Friday I pulled the Ten of Disks Wealth and received an unexpected Royalty check in the mail for my books. Three days later I pulled the Five of Cups Disappointment and received a notification that the submission I sent via FedEx to an anthology I adore failed to deliver and that I'd have to re-send it through the post office to get it there.
We now have a release date for the long-awaited next Grimes album. Miss Anthropocene will be out February 21st, and you can pre-order it HERE.
Being that I'm relatively new to her music - having really only been converted about four or five years ago - this will be the first new record Grimes has released that I've waited for. And I feel as though it has been a long wait.
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Joe Begos' new film Bliss came out on Blu Ray/DVD this past Tuesday and I highly recommend you go out and pick this one up. I saw this at Beyondfest back in September and loved it, and upon re-watching it last night on Blu Ray, I found I enjoyed it, even more, a second time. Easily in my top top if not top five of the year:
And here's the awesome Spotify Soundtrack Mr. Begos put up to coincide with the release of the film.
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Lo and behold, NCBD this week turned out to be a pretty big deal for me. It's been a while, but I left the shop with a couple new titles that I'm excited about supporting. I'm not thinking of backpaddling on easing off monthlies, but there were a few that were small press, so I'm paying it forward, in a manner of speaking.
And I'd completely forgotten there was a new Terry Moore series on the stands!
I don't really know anything about Five Years, but I'm fairly certain there are a couple of familiar faces on the cover to Issue #1.
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This week's playlist:
Flying Lotus - You're Dead
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
Timber Timbre - Eponymous
Snatch OST (playlist)
James Browns's Funky People Vol. 1
The Edgar Winter Group - Shock Treatment
Return of the Mack - Mark Morrison (single)
Revocation - The Outer Ones
Revocation - Teratogenesis EP
Final - Solaris
Arthur Ahbez - Gold
Barry Adamson - Stranger on the Sofa
Me and That Man - Songs of Love and Death
Flipper - Album
Hall and Oats - Greatest Hits
The Knife - Silent Shout
Billy Idol - Greatest Hits
Megadeth - Rust in Peace
Tyler Childers - Purgatory
Oh Baby - The Art of Sleeping Alone
The Nukes - Why Things Burn
Fields of the Nephilim - The Nephilim
Barry Adamson - As Above So Below
Tamaryn - The Waves
The Sword - Age of Winters
Sunn O))) - Life Metal
Spotlights - Love and Decay
Kode9 - Nothing
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Card of the day:
Hoping this is good news pertaining to the submission I sent out yesterday afternoon.
Holy cow. A good friend sent me a link to this 2017 album Songs of Love and Death by Me and That Man. Dark, fuzzy, gothic country, this entire album is fantastic. I know nothing about this band, but this album hits a perfect harmonic with the new Federale and a few other albums I've had on heavy rotation lately, most of which I'll get to posting from in the next few days.
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Last night K and I went to the theatre to see Mike Flanagan's adaptation of Stephen King's Doctor Sleep.
The best cinematic sequel ever.
Honestly, I miss spoke above, because Flanagan - who I now think might be the greatest living modern horror director - has made a film that is a sequel to both King's book and Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining, which are two very different entities. There's an article in the most recent Fangoria Magazine where Flanagan talks about how he approached this, and all I can say is, he hit it out of the park. Doctor Sleep is also a very tight adaptation of the novel, so it has the dual quality of feeling like a novel first, and a movie second. In other words, the three-act structure moviegoers have unconsciously come to expect is there, but in an over-arching way. The way the individual scenes are woven together, moving back and forth seamlessly between characters, events, and places, feels literary, as though you're plowing through sections or chapters in a book.
I loved Doctor Sleep when I read the novel back around the time it came out - many thanks to Mr. Brown for mailing me his copy just to be sure I read it, as our love for both King's book and Kubrick's film goes back a looooong way. And now I love the film. Win-win.
Playlist from 11/08:
Federale - No Justice
Billy Idol - Greatest Hits
Black Pumas - Eponymous
TVOTR - Return to Cookie Mountain
Revocation - Teratogenesis EP
Sunn O))) - Life Metal
John Coltrane - Coltrane's Sound
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Card of the day:
Balance and harmony; coherence and the intuition of a guiding light. I think so. Tonight we're doing a Horror Vision taping and I'll be premiering the finished version of this story I've been working off-and-on for over a year now to five people by reading it out loud. As Cap'm says, Proof is in the Pudding.
No Justice, the new album by Federale dropped today, and it's every bit of cinematic, desert-washed goodness you'd expect. I'm relatively new to the band, having first been exposed this past spring when I saw A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night on Joe Bob Briggs' The Last Drive In. If you know that film, then you know what an awesome soundtrack it has; Federale has several of the key tracks on it.
I'm definitely in a tailspin through the 00s right now, and one of the band's that acted as a tent pole for my musical obsessions during those dark years was TV On The Radio.
It's funny that I never really got to know their last album, Seeds, so in keeping with my MO, I kinda saved one for later. I know they never officially broke up, and I'm sure we are bound to see a new album from them at some point, but it's been going on six years, and I've been away from them as long as they've been away from the world at large, so right now, things feel a little final.
This song really makes me want to start the Breaking Bad re-watch I have planned in the near future.
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Playlist from 11/07:
Final - Solaris
Revocation - Teratogenesis
Revocation - The Outer Ones
dan le sac Vs Scroobious Pip - Angles
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
Me and that Man - Songs of Love and Death
Arthur Ahbez - Gold
Atrium Carceri - Kapnobatai
Jogger - Nephicide (single)
Oh Baby - The Art of Sleeping Alone
TVOTR Playlist
Sunn O))) - Life Metal
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Always a good card to see, this reads to me as success coming TODAY on a short I've been hammering for well over a year (off and on). I recently set aside everything else to focus on this one because I have a very cool submission opportunity, so hopefully, the appearance of this card bodes well.
I saw this at Beyondfest back in September. It's awesome. There are a few issues I had with Richard Stanley's Adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space - for one the change in the title's spelling - but overall, I loved this film. The third act is like acid kicking in at the top of a very tall roller coaster, and it makes up for any other issues I had with the film.
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I've found it difficult to find the time to do these pages lately, but I'm not going anywhere. Since I've last checked in, there's a lot I've been into.
I finished my re-read of Rick Remender and Matteo Scalera's Black Science, which ended last month with issue forty-three. I'd been buying this one monthly since it began, but I'd fallen off actually reading it about five issues before the series finale, knowing full well I'd be doing a series re-read once the story was complete. I can't stress enough what a different experience that was, and what an altogether affecting series this is on me. The story - which is loaded with pulp Sci-Fi awesomeness that reminds me a bit of Clark Ashton Smith, a bit of Arthur C. Clark, and a lot of all those nameless pulp paperbacks I checked out of the library or acquired at the school book fair as a kid - is really just a mask for Remender to expound on everything from Life, Relationships, Philosophy, Science, Meaning. The man is wise; if you got a hint of that from his more widely known Deadly Class, give this a try.
Fell back hard into Bill Hader and Alec Berg's Barry. K and I had started this near the end of September, only to shelve it for 31 Days of Horror. Well, three episodes away from the second season finale, and I haven't been this blown away by a show in quite some. Hader's tone nails life - it's funny, awkward, tragic, brutal... Barry will give you 'all the feels.'
The fifth episode of the second season is very close to the best episode of serialized, half-hour television I have ever seen, and it had me laughing so hard I literally almost choked. A good thing.
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This past Tuesday, the fourth and final volume of Warren Ellis and Jon Davis-Hunt's The Wild Storm. I picked up and plowed through the first two trades in Chicago last December, and since I acquired volume three but held out until I could read the entire series in a short burst. Following Black Science, that time is now.
The Wild Storm is, simply put, one of the greatest comics I've ever read. I'm sure when it's over I'm going to want to follow the spin-offs out into their own little orbits; that may or may not happen. This core title, however, is breathtaking.
Reading this in trade is the definitive reminder I needed to wait for the collections of Ellis and Hitch's Batman's Grave, which is on issue two right now, I believe. Seemingly contrarian to this, I've opted to tag back into Ellis and Jason Howard's Trees - which just started up again. The difference is, with Image titles, there are no internal ads disrupting the flow of the book, so the story is intact.
It's moving back into Winter (yeah, those of you in actual cold-climates can laugh at me), and I'm reading a lot of Warren Ellis, so I'm kind of being pulled into a cool re-contextualization with a lot of the music I listened to in the mid-to-late 00s, because a lot of what I did after moving to LA in 2006 was read Warren Ellis and listen to music. You'll see this begin to be reflected in the list below, near the end, as I try to assemble a playlist from the last week that shows my transition out of Halloween-mode and into Winter mode.
Playlist from the previous week or so:
The Obsessed - Lunar Womb
Type O Negative - Life is Killing Me
High on Fire - Blessed Black Wings
Brand New - God and the Devil Are Raging Inside Me...
David J, Federale, and Tim Newman - The Day That David Bowie Died
Chasms - On The Legs Of Love Purified...
Federale - Trouble (Pre-release single)
Duende and David J - Oracle of the Horizontal
Sunn O))) - Pyroclasts
Sunn O))) - Life Metal
Barry Adamson - As Above So Below
Jozef Van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch - An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil
Isis - In the Absence of Truth
Opeth - Orchid
Opeth - Blackwater Park
Flatline - Pave the Way
Tyler Childers - Purgatory
Paolo Nutini - Caustic Love
Tyler Childers - Country Squire
Hank III - Straight to Hell
Timber Timbre - Eponymous
Canadian Rifle - Peaceful Death
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen
Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta III Satur
Revocation - The Outer Ones
Revocation - Teratogenesis EP
Megadeth - Rust in Peace
Oh Baby - The Art of Sleeping
TV on the Radio - Nine Types of Light
Thievery Corporation - The Mirror Conspiracy
