Isolation: Day 154 Darling 666

 Holy cow! Dorthia from Windhand has a new band with Gina Gleason from Baroness? Count me in!

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I was pleasantly surprised by not one but two movies yesterday. First up, We Summon the Darkness, which I'd originally blogged about my plans to rent a few months back when it first premiered on VOD. That never ended up happening, and the flick fell off my radar until Jonathan Grimm alerted me to the fact that it hit Netflix recently.

 

 This flick is 100% worth your time. I loved it; yes I saw a big WTF moment coming a mile away, but I think the filmmakers knew most folks would and added an extra little twist that I did not. Plus, who cares about twists when the characters, setting, mood, and overall layout of the film is this fun. We Summon the Darkness is a really good time that doesn't take itself too serious and knows how to get down and dirty in the mud and blood with Satan!

Next up, Host on Shudder. This is a 56 minute flick that was filmed during COVID shelter-in-place on Zoom. 

Yes, that's right. On Zoom. I know what you're thinking; stop thinking it. This one's scary as hell and quite a good time.

Granted, I watched Host in my ideal setting: alone, stoned, with all the lights off and totally focused on the film. It's 56 minute runtime helped in that, because these days an uninterrupted movie is almost an impossibility. 

**

Playlist:

Santogold - Eponymous

Perturbator - Dangerous Days

JK Flesh - Depersonalization

X- Under the Big Black Sun

X - Los Angeles

Dead Swords - Enders

Iress - Prey

Iress - Flaw (pre-release singles)

Card:

Back to the Raven Deck for this morning's Pull:

Old rules reassessed and rewritten? Or get off your lazy ass? I did a fair amount of work getting back into the sequels for Shadow Play over this past weekend. Not a lot of writing; mostly digging in and re-reading the bible for the series, plus the copious amount of notes I have on it. Feels good. That said, the Tower pops up to remind me that although I told myself I would send a query letter a day, it's been at least three days since I actually have, so I need to get back on that ASAP.

Sunday Bandcamp: Iress

This one takes me places. Far off places, that sift and swirl with dark but life-affirming energies. I have a feeling I will be hanging out with this band for a large part of the week while writing. Fabulous stuff. Pre-order upcoming album Flaw HERE.

Isolation: Day 152

 

I never realized this song is an homage to Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero. It's obvious, really, but somehow I missed it. 

**

Let's talk about Comics. In fact, let's talk specifically about one comic: Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples' Saga.

 

I had honestly not realized that issue 54 of Saga came out two bloody years ago! I mean, like every other die hard fan, I am very aware that the cliffhanger lingers, but two years? Wow. All I can say is, I am absolutely fine with the hiatus, knowing that when Saga does return, the tracks will be greased for month-after-month, on-time issues. My gut tells me before the end of this year, but we'll see.

**

Something occurred to me earlier today as I sat finishing my re-read of Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero. The idea that the narrator Clay may be responsible for some of the atrocities that occur 'off-screen.' His sister's dead cat; the girl tied up and murdered at the Palm Springs party a year before. There's a number of horrible events he can't be responsible for in the book, thus is Clay and his peers soulless, vapid world, but Clay's disassociation from the people and world around him - a disassociation we revisit in the 2010 sequel Imperial Bedrooms only to find Clay may well have grown into a psychopath over the intervening thirty years between books - feels like it might just hide a burgeoning killer. My theory then is this is not a concrete interpretation, but definitely an element of the character that planted the seeds for Patrick Bateman in Ellis' second novel, American Psycho. Bateman himself then evolves in Ellis' 2005 masterpiece Lunar Park. 

In finishing Zero, I took to the internet to see if anyone else has ever discussed these possibilities, and though I didn't find that, I did find a fantastic article about Zero, which you can read HERE and is absolutely worth your time if you're an Ellis fan.

After finishing Zero, I am now on to Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. As I mentioned here recently, although I have read almost all of Palahniuk's work up to and including Pygmy, this is my first time reading Fight Club, being that I've been away from his work long enough now that I find myself at a place where I don't feel like my love of the movie will work against my reading of the work it is based on. I'm very much looking forward to comparing and contrasting the novel with the film, something I would have possibly had trouble doing previously.

**

Playlist:

Protomartyr - Agent Intellect

Run the Jewels - RTJ4

X - Los Angeles

Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey

Otis Redding - Otis Blue

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower

**

Card:

Back to my original Thoth deck for today's Pull:

 

I have a complicated relationship with the Wands suit. Where wands are Will and a more logic-based interpretation, ten is Malkuth, and therefore wholly of the material world. This basically tells me I'm spending too much time distracted by shit like movie and tv, and that I need to spend more time working. It was a good feeling yesterday when I passed the final version of Murder Virus - now 100% the title of the new book regardless of whether I end up publishing it through THV Press or not - off to my first beta reader. For the first time since mid-March, I closed all Scrivener documents pertaining to MV and re-opened those for Shadow Play Book Two. Now, the real work begins.

Isolation: Day 151

It's official! October 30th, Mr. Bungle's The Raging Wraith of the Easter Bunny is out via Patton's Ipecac Recordings. Thanks to Mr. Brown for the heads up, because I've been slammed all week and would have completely missed the chance to snag a copy of that Ruby Red 2 LP vinyl! Pre-order HERE.
While I've been a Bungle fan since Brown turned me on to their self-titled debut back in High School, and I spent a good deal of my time on Napster in the late 90s downloading bootlegs of their older, demo stuff, I never really got into the original, thrash version of the band. That said, seeing these songs a few months ago, played by musicians who are older and wiser, I became convinced if they recorded it, Easter Bunny had the potential to be one of the greatest thrash records to come out in decades. If Raping Your Mind is any intimation of what is on the rest of the record, I'm pretty sure I was correct.
Sure, I'd love another weirdo Bungle album eventually, but in the meantime, I'm welcoming this one with open arms.
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NCBD this week was another no-go for my pull, which is fine, because I haven't picked up my books in two weeks now. One of the companies I always look forward to checking is Vault, and this week, I notice a collection for a series I'd not noticed previously. This looks pretty damn interesting, and I've ear-marked it for a little research.

This collection just came out, however, I'm going to look for the individual issues first, as I love the art and design of the originals' covers. Here's an example:

There's such a throw-back feel to this, but not like a comic, more like the old paperback books I used to read as a kid. LOVE this.

**
Playlist:
Concrete Blonde - Eponymous
Concrete Blonde - Free
X - Wild Gift
X - Los Angeles
Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once
Contours - Essential 
Carpenter Brut - Blood Machines OST
X - Under the Big Black Sun
The Birthday Party - Hee Haw
Tom Waits - Rain Dogs
Hank III - Straight to Hell
Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey
Francesco Zampaglione and Andrea Moscianese - Tulpa OST
Brainiac - Smack Bunny Baby
Vitalic - OK Cowboy
Aerosmith - Pump
Airiel - Molten Young Lovers
Moderat - II
Reverend Horton Heat - Liquor in the Front
Brainiac - Hissing Prigs in Static Couture
Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen
The Bangles - All Over the Place

**
Card:

Let's do another multi-deck spread:

For this one, I used one card from the Raven Deck, and two from my mini Thoth - both decks gifts to me from my good friend Missi, who now has my new book Murder Virus - that's the name I'm sticking with - as my first beta reader. Missi Birthday was yesterday, so there's a lot of her energy in this spread. The Tower is a toppling of old conventions, though here I don't take it as pointing to the 'Old Guard' publishing industry, but my perceptions of it. Work is the hard work and determination I need to maintain (another query sent a few days ago), and Lust is a warning about the lust of result. Those of you who know anything about Magick know lust of result is one of the major blockades to achieving one's Will.

Isolation: Day 147

Last Thursday at work I had a hankering to see what Bret Easton Ellis has been up to on his podcast, and realized that the reason I hadn't seen any new episodes in my queue on Apple Podcasts was because my tier on his Patreon had been replaced. I changed my subscription up and was rewarded with a HUGE list of episodes I'd not even realized were available. Settling in to listen, I began with one from late last year where for nearly three hours, Ellis interviews author Chuck Palahniuk. This set off a full-on Palaniuk/Ellis binge over the coming days.

Ellis and Palahniuk were probably the two authors that motivated me the most to actually sit down and start writing fiction seriously. The book I'm finishing now was absolutely inspired by Ellis's American Psycho and Lunar Park, and Palaniuk's, well, pretty much his first five or six books, all of which I read in rapid succession in the early 00s. 

It's been some time since I'd gone back to these guys. Ellis is always just around the corner in my head - Lunar Park is my second favorite book ever, so it's just in my blood. But by the time Palahniuk's Pygmy came out - the most recent of his books that I've read - I had pretty much lost touch with his work. (NOTE: Not because Pygmy is bad by any means, however, this is a story for another day, if I haven't told it here already). 

Saturday morning K and I watched Fight Club, which is actually the only of those initial books by Palahniuk that I haven't read, simply because the movie always occupied such a large amount of real estate in my head, I assumed any reading of the book would be colored by it too much. I no longer subscribe to that trepidation, so after the film, I ordered both Fight Club and Choke, which I've always thought as companion pieces.

Although I'm still having trouble finding time to read for pleasure while I plod through another final edit of my own book, I started Ellis' Less Than Zero. It's an easy one to burn through, and works well with a start/stop regiment. Technically, I'm still about thirty pages from finishing Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, so all these books I'm mentioning now are 'on deck,' if you will, and their accumulated presence has shifted my musical palette, so that I found myself compelled to stay up late writing on Saturday, falling down an audio hole with X, The Plimsouls, and Concrete Blonde.

There's never a moment that I'm aware of where Bret Easton Ellis specifically mentions Concrete Blonde, but they are definitely a band that fits the headspace I associate with his fiction. As such, I've been a bit obsessed. I tweeted out my love for the album version of Still in Hollywood later at some point during that late night, however, this live version of the alternate take that serves as a bonus track on the CD version of their 1989 Eponymous debut was just too good to pass up posting here today.

**

Playlist:

Concrete Blonde - Eponymous

Psychetect - Extremism

X - Wild Gift

Algiers - Eponymous

Black Pumas - Eponymous

Beth Gibbons, The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and Krzysztof Penderecki - Henryk Górecki: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

The Birthday Party - Mutiny/The Bad Seed 

The Birthday Party - Hee Haw

JK Flesh - Depersonalization

Vitalic - OK Cowboy

Carpenter Brut - Blood Machines OST

Spotlights - Love and Decay

**

Card: 

Interesting. Two days in a row. I'm sticking with the same interpretation, because my discomfort at penning query letters hasn't magically abated after writing about them. However...

I have to wonder if there's something more in here, as well. Destabilization of established processes and mores comes to mind, something 2020 has been all about. Any coincidence I have a voting ballot sitting next to me on my desk as I type this? I think not.

Isolation: Day 146

I kept seeing the thumbnail for this, but didn't realize it had ties to Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which I haven't seen since I was in High School. The trailer had me immediately.

 **

I find it interesting that, after just watching a film about a viral idea that makes people think/know they are going to die tomorrow, I crack out the Concrete Blonde and fixate on the song Tomorrow, Wendy, which contains the following lyric:

"Tomorrow Wendy is going to die."

   

Weird, huh?

A fantastic song, Tomorrow Wendy also features this unrelated by no-less poignant line:

"I told the priest, don't count on any second coming, God got his ass kicked the first time he came down here slumming, He had the balls to come, the gall to die and then forgive us."

**

Playlist:

Pixies - Surfer Rosa

Calexico - The Black Light

X- Los Angeles

X - Wild Gift

The Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once

Concrete Blonde - Eponymous

Concrete Blonde - Bloodletting

Don Shirley - Don Shirley's Best

Pat Benatar - Essentials

Frank Sinatra - Best of 

 **

Card:

Five of Disks, also known as Worry. This one fits right into my current state of anxiety over sending query letters. I'm not certain why I'm so terrified of this process, but worry definitely sums up the low-level, background radiation of my brain at the moment.

 

Sunday Bandcamp: Psychetect

It's been a minute since I revisited Psychetct's Extremism. I bought this back around 2015 or 2016. I haven't been the headspace for this kind of thing for a while, but stumbling across it again on my old iPod earlier today, I couldn't help but be transported into a landscape of digital madness. The focus and restraint showed in Extremism's creation and continuity is a bit baffling to me, in all the best ways.