Isolation: Day 66 - Keep Rolling

Last night Joe Bob Briggs finally got me to watch One Cut of the Dead. Despite near universal acclaim from all my gatekeepers and curators, I had already tried this film and given up. After finally sticking it through, well I loved it. Also, I love this song, which I listened to about ten times in a row today while making a new version of my chili that turned out remarkably well.

I wrote a super short Letterbxd review HERE.

After the film, Joe Bob had one of the most heartfelt and beautiful monologues I've seen from the man. The combined effect of the entire 2+ hours of his presentation of the film coming to a head with this brought me to tears:



Life is truly wonderful, even amidst rampant stupidity and a perilous existence of total uncertainty.

**

Playlist:

Barry Adamson - As Above So Below
Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Void King - Barren Dominion
Various - A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
Irma Thomas - Straight from the Soul
Neil Young and Crazy Horse - Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
Bohren and Der Club of Gore - Sunset Mission
Blut Aus Nord - The Mystical Beast of Rebellion
Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers of the Icy Age
Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta II: Dialogue With the Stars
Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta III: Saturnian Poetry
Man Man - Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-between
Burzum - Filosofem
They Might Be Giants - Flood
Urge Overkill - Saturation
The Neighbourhood - I Love You.
Burzum - Hvis Lyset Tar Oss
Bibio - Vignetting the Compost
Tony Joe White - The Best of
Revocation - Teratogenesis EP
Megadeth - Rust in Peace
Cafe Racer - Shadow Talk
Go Gos - Vacation
Cocksure - TVMALSV

Isolation: Day 59 - Chelsea Wolfe Covers Crazy Train

Two Minutes to Late Night has been around a while, but it's just popped up in my youtube feed. A heavy metal late night talk show? Sign me up. This is the video that filtered into my feed, and from there I'm hooked. Subscribe and sample the metallic hilarity HERE.

**

Taking another small break from Breaking Bad, I had K pick out a show she'd already watched but thought I would like.



I really like this show. Blew through six of the ten episodes of Season One last night, and Two just dropped, so that will serve as a nice pallet cleanser before we enter the last leg of Walter White's saga of blood, money, and meth.

**

Playlist:

Ennio Morricone - Black Belly of the Tarantula OST
Goblin/Giorgio Gaslini - Profondo Rosso OST
Bob Wils and His Texas Playboys - The Tiffany Transcriptions, Vol. 1
The Babies - Eponymous
X - Under the Big Black Sun
Various - A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night OST

**

Card:

I've had this overwhelming urge to start slowly playing music again. After two decades of considering myself a musician, I took a hard, sharp turn against that and have probably only picked a guitar or bass maybe ten times in the last four and a half years. Recently, with some undo work stress piled on top of the stress of COVID living, I pulled out my electric - which needs some TLC from a professional - and my Takamine acoustic and have started to play a bit. At this point, guitar-wise, I pretty much have to re-learn the fucking instrument, so there's frustration a plenty there. But the acoustic has proven a balm for overly stressful days, and strumming here and there have me thinking about, well, playing. So, the question is, does The Fool tell me it's time to undertake this new journey, or that I'd be foolish to do so?

I think I'm going to have to pull a full-on spread for this one. No time for that today, though.

Isolation - Day 58 Death Dies

Friday nights have been a thing of beauty and comfort ever since Shudder brought Joe Bob Briggs' The Last Drive-In back. This week, JBB did Frank Henelotter's bat-shit crazy Brain Dead and Dario Argento's Profundo Rosso (Deep Red). What a line up!

Watching Deep Red, I'd forgotten how much I love this score, and I'm kicking myself for not buying it when Waxwork Records put it out a few years ago. That said, finding the original version on Apple Music this morning, I realized that there's so much music on this one overall, I find myself wondering if the WW edition only has the Goblin stuff, which while iconic and amazing, would miss what might be my favorite track on the soundtrack altogether.

Originally, I'd mistaken this track for Goblin, however, Italian Jazz musician Giorgio Gaslini is the actual author. I love all the music in Deep Red, but this one... this gives the iconic theme from the film a run for it's money.

**

TKO Studios is creating major waves with an amazing business model. This is a new comic publisher, with exclusive, new titles by established creators, who sell online AND give 50% of the price to any comic book store you choose. I just placed an order for Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Walta's Sentient and sent half of the $19.99 for the trade paperback to Atomic Basement Comics in the LBC. Next up, probably Joshua Dysart and Alberto Ponticelli's Murder Mystery Goodnight Paradise, so I can send half to The Comic Bug.

This is the kind of business ingenuity that will see our beloved Comics Industry through the current crisis, and I'm proud to help out. I've been trying to patronize both my shops when I can, but with their limited, by appointment hours, it's been tough to balance it with my schedule. TKO is definitely going to help with that.

**

Playlist:

Blut Aus Nord - Memorial Vista III (Saturnian Poetry)
X- Under the Big Black Sun
Blut Aus Nord - MoRT
Blut Aus Nord - Deus Salutis Meae
Blut Aus Nord - What Once Was... Liver III EP
White Ward - Love Exchange Failure
Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun
Blut Aus Nord - Odinist: Destruction of Reason By Illumination
Crystal Castles - (II)
Ministry - The Mind is a Terrible Thing To Taste
Barry Adamson - Oedipus Schmoedipus
Hall and Oats - Essentials
M83 - Saturdays = Youth
Roachpowder - Atomic Church
Ministry - From Beer to Eternity
Ministry - Alert Level (Quarantine Mix) Single
White Lung - Paradise
The Neighbourhood - Wiped Out
The Neighbourhood - I Love You.
X- Alphabetland
Lead Into Gold - The Sun Behind the Sun
Revocation - Teratogenesis EP
Revocation - Deathless
Various - A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
Goblin/Giorgio Gaslini - Profundo Rosso

Card:

Time to saddle up and finish this fucking book!

Isolation: Day 57 - Alphabetland!

Last Friday, seminal LA punk rock group X released their first album with the all-original line-up in, well, I don't really know how long, but a pretty damn long time! Especially good news is the fact that founding guitarist Billy Zoom has conquered his health problems and returned to the fold. I saw X live (with Dwight Yokam!) five or six years ago and Billy was not present. They were great, but it's just not the same without that man.

You can pick this one up on X's Bandcamp HERE.

**

A couple of days ago I finally watched V/H/S/2 and V/H/S: Viral. Part 2 is more or less fantastic, the Indonesian segment being one of the scariest things I've seen in a while. Viral is, as several friends warned me, not all that great. The one segment I absolutely loved though was "Bonestorm," and turned out to have been done by Benson and Moorhead, the guys responsible for Resolution and The Endless, which I talked about recently in these pages.

**



Heaven is an Incubator posted this a few days ago. Awesome. Find it on Bandcamp HERE.

**

I finished Preston Fassel's fantastic novel Our Lady of the Inferno and have moved on to Clive Barker's Damnation Game and Al Jourgensen's autobiography Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen, the latter of which Mr. Brown lent me months ago and I've been chomping at the bit to read since.. I'm not huge on reading multiple books at a time, but I'm stumbling through the last three chapters of the novel I'm editing/re-tooling, and when I write, I tend to need to be reading fiction at the same time. I actually consider this part of the writing process. I don't punch-in and out for it, like I do with actual writing writing (I use two apps, ATracker PRO and Focus Keeper), but I recognize that it's most definitely an integral part of my process. That said, Jourgensen's biography is conversational, not prosaic like Juan F. Thompson's Stories I Tell Myself, thus it's not fitting the bill. So I'm splitting my time, treating Uncle Al's book like having a beer, and Barker's like sharpening my craft.

The Damnation Game is actually one I read long ago, back when I first discovered Barker's work in the early 90s. I believe I was a Sophomore or Junior in High School when I checked The Great and Secret Show out of the library. That one blew my mind - still meaning to re-read it and hit the sequel Eversville - and I went straight into The Books of Blood and subsequently The Damnation Game afterward. Funny thing, although I remember quite a bit of Great and Secret and Books of Blood, but I remember next to nothing about Damnation. Which is cool, because already, only a handful of pages in, and Barker's sumptuous prose has already had a massive effect on me.


**

Cocksure - Operation C.O.C.K.S.U.R.E.
X - Alphabetland
X - Under the Big Black Sun
The Neighbourhood - I Love You.
The Neighbourhood - Wiped Out
Blut Aus Nord - The Mystical Beast of Rebellion
Void King - There Is Nothing

**

No card.

Isolation: Day 54 Nice Cave TeeVee

A couple weeks ago, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds announced their youtube channel would be going 24/7 with streaming content. This morning when I checked my subscription page (have I mentioned how much I hate the layout of the most recent youtube overhaul? It happened a few months ago, but I used to meticulously curate the landing page, which displayed a single, horizontal row of each channel subscribed to, history, recommendations, and trending, the category I couldn't give less of a toss about) I noticed the little "Live" icon in the bottom left-hand corner, clicked over and caught part of an in-studio segment from Henry's Dream. Not sure about you, but the idea of 24 Hour Bad Seeds makes my heart swell.

**

Last weekend, I made serious progress in a project that I've been putting off for some time, transferring all of my comics out of long boxes and into short boxes. Oh, the humanity!

I'm about 80% finished. To be brutally honest, I've divested myself of quite a bit of my collection, and when all is said and done, I will still end up with 24 short boxes of comics! Madness! I've talked about this here before, the existential crisis that has held me in its grip since last September, this idea that all this stuff that I've accumulated ends up being the major "WTF was I thinking?" regret of my life. Maybe regret is a harsh word, but seriously, if I'd only adjusted to the digital thing sooner, I'd probably have at least double in my 'buy a house' fund. Add to this the idea that, as I go through a lot of these comics, even series and runs that I love, some of them I look at and know, "I'll most likely never have the urge/chance to read this again in my life." It makes me think about subscriptions, the current zeitgeist, and as such something I may eventually turn around on, too, but surely a better way to consume media. It's one of the reasons I hardly ever buy movies anymore (still some exceptions, of course). It's also one of the reasons I've started to dig digital comics, because they're generally cheaper, take up no space, can travel with you at all times, and thus, don't leave nearly the footprint, if at all.

Anyway, in spite and contrary to all this, boy am I ready for Diamond to get NCBD up and running again. I stopped in at the Comic Bug this past Saturday to pick up more short boxes - the store isn't open, but you can call on Wednesdays from 12-4 and Saturdays from 12-2 and make an appointment to stop in - and picked up the last remaining book in my pull, one I hadn't gotten to yet. TMNT 104. The issue served as a beautiful coda on everything that has come before, and felt especially poignant reading now, in the midst of such an unprecedented industry stall. The final pages actually managed to bring a joyful tear to my eye, and closed and resealed it in bag and board remembering why, in spite of everything I just said above, I still read some comics monthly, in physical form.

**

Playlist:

Cocksure: Operation C.O.C.K.S.U.R.E
The Juan Maclean - Happy House (Matthew Dear Remix)
X- Under the Big Black Sun
Chris Isaak - Heart Shaped World

**

Card:

Art!

Isolation: Day 52 Surprise You're Dead

I've been digging into Revocation's back catalogue on my writing sessions, and this FNM cover popped up at the end of 2011's Chaos of Forms. Great album, great cover!  My writing music has been an example of the pendulum effect I complain about everywhere else in life; if I told you to consider Revocation and Lustmord as two nodes on the graph, you'd get the idea, yeah? It makes for some interesting ideas, one of which pretty much just changed the entire course of the third act for the better! Now I'm chasing that down and preparing for the final edit, which seems a bit like the ghost house that I relentless walk toward but never achieve. I have faith, though. Faith, and a killer work ethic. And music like this to keep me properly motivated (That and gallons and gallons of coffee, which I think is starting to fuck with my nervous system).

**

Bandcamp did another Artist Relief day this past Friday. I snagged the new, Digital Cocksure EP and a vinyl copy of their 2014 debut T.V.M.A.L.S.V., along with a copy of a single the Living Nudes released a while ago. I paid more for all three than asked for, because, while I didn't have a lot of money to throw at all the independent artists I love, I had some, and wanted to make it go as far as possible for the artists, not my collection.

So much new music this past week because of the Bandcamp relief, it was hard to narrow things down. I think I did pretty good, though.

**

After missing it at last year's Beyondfest, I finally got around to watching Travis Stevens' Girl on the Third Floor. I dug this one quite a bit; reminded me a lot of a kind of cross between American Horror Story and The Shining.



Dark Sky films can pretty much do no wrong in my eyes.

**

Playlist:

Revocation: Chaos of Forms
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Wasteland
Cocksure - T.V.M.A.L.S.V.
Blut Aus Nord - The Mystical Beast of Rebellion
Void King - Barren Dominion
Man Man - Dream Hunting in the In-Between
Perturbator - Dangerous Days
Lustmord - Hobart
Klangkarussell & GIVVEN - Ghostkeeper

IsIolaton: Day 48 Cracked Actor

Woke up with this one in my head yesterday morning. Originally appearing on 1973's Aladdin Sane, the version I'm specifically referring to here is the live version from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars - The Motion Picture Soundtrack. I picked the double album up in a cool CD package at a Fop store in London, circa 2004. To date, this is my favorite version of this song.

**

Blew through Breaking Bad Seasons 1-3 and K asked to take a breather. It definitely has that effect, and while I'm loving revisiting this world, dark as it is, I also like the idea of spacing it out a bit, to further the effect I had watching it as it aired, broadcast gaps and all. We're not going to come anywhere close to building that kind of expectation-tension for K's first viewing, but a week off might help. With that in mind then, over the last few days we watched James Franco/JJ Abrams' 11.22.63. This adaptation of a novel by Stephen King is an 8-part mini-series on HULU, and although I had some small issues, overall it's great. 11.22.63 is also a rare bird, in that many times, I'll be enthralled by a show and then let down by its ending. In this case, my minor issues were along the way, and the finale was outstanding. Very much worth your time if you're in the mood for something finite.



**

I finished both William Gibson's The Peripheral and Juan F. Thompson's Stories I Tell Myself. Both incredible books for totally different reasons (obviously). Gibson's terse prose and refusal to set an initial lay-of-the-land are both facets one must acclimate to, however, that happens fairly quickly because he really pulls you in with the story. And Thompson's autobiography on growing up with Hunter S. Thompson as a father can get a bit hard to read at certain points - most definitely not due to his writing, which is simple but profound - due rather to the veil his stories lift on an icon who many of us hold dear. The end of this one brought me to tears, and the involvement of Johnny Depp in memorializing HST should prove once and for all how awesome that man is, even if his filmography has pretty much fallen by the wayside.

As of writing this, I am ~75 page into Preston Fassel's Our Lady of the Inferno, which I have been wanting to read since I first heard of it, circa a year-and-a-half ago. I was hooked as of page one, and now I'm thinking this has the potential to really soar into a ranking in my favorite books of all time list.

If you're unfamiliar with Mr. Fassel, he writes the Corrupt Signals for Fangoria, easily my favorite column in the revamped mag (which is saying something, because each issue is a veritable treasure). So far, his debut novel is no less spectacular.

**

Speaking of reading, as a sort of 'Quarantine Special', I've made the Kindle editions of my first two books $0.99 for the foreseeable future. If you've not read them, please consider giving one or both a chance. One is literary horror, the other the first book in a YA Horror/Suburban Fantasy series. I'm quite proud of both - I'm the first to know when something I write is shite. Also, I've been told both are good and, perhaps more importantly, fun:

 Link to buy A Collection of Desires

Link to buy Shadow Play Book One: Kim and Jessie

If you do take this chance to read them, please take a moment to give a star rating or review on Amazon, or really, anywhere books are sold or discussed. Thank you in advance!

**

Playlist:

Revocation - Great is Our Sin
Revocation - Teratogenesis EP
Old Tower - The Last Eidolon
Alastor - Black Magic
The National - High Violet
The National - The Boxer
Various - The History of Northwest Rock Vol. 2 (The Garage Years)
Perturbator - Dangerous Days
Allegaeon - Apoptosis
Burzum - Filosofem
Burzum - Thulêan Mysteries
Perturbator - I Am the Night
Pascal Rogé - Satie: 3 Gymnopédies
White Ward - Love Exchange Failure
Perturbator - The Uncanny Valley
Code Orange - Underneath
Perturbator - Excess (Pre-release single)
Balthazar - Fever
Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars
My Morning Jacket - Z
Perturbator - Night Driving Avenger EP
Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit, Vol. 1
Alio Die and Lorenzo Montaná - The Threshold of Beauty
Misfits - Collection Two

**

Card:

From the Grimoire: The Spark of Essence. I'm aligning this with the mammoth writing session I am about to embark on as soon as I post this. I took the day off to finish the second pass on this year's book, which is currently on track to be released in late Summer/early Autumn.