Isolation: Day 165

Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine have a new record out this fall on Biafra's Alternative Tentacles label, and if We Created Putin is any indication, Tea Party Revenge Porn will be the musical reaction of the trump years I have been waiting for.

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NCBD: It is a very good thing I went in and picked up the three weeks worth of books in my Pull last week, because this week's NCBD has the biggest haul in a while. Let's start with the return of one of my all-time favorite books:

It's been a minute since Stray Bullets: Sunshine and Roses #41, but I do not begrudge David Lapham the time off. On the contrary, this is one of the hardest working men in comics, so I'm one hundred percent behind the occasional hiatuses he takes. That said, it's good to have Beth, Orson, and the crew back! 

New Locke and Key, you say? Yes, I only just read the entire original series at the end of last year/beginning of this one, but I'm definitely in on this two-issue series, especially because it leads to a Locke and Key/Sandman crossover later this year. Can't wait for that!

I'm still a bit on the fence with That Texas Blood, however, I plan on going back and re-reading issue one before plowing into two and now three. 

Bliss number one made a pretty big splash with me, and I'm anxious as hell to see how the story continues.

The Plot returns with issue six this week. I love this return to the Ancestral Horror genre, so much so that I penned the first installment of my new "A Most Horrible Library" column on TheHorrorVision.com. Read it HERE, and watch for future installments to go back to a video format similar to my 2017 Evolution of the Arm series. I don't really have the time to write a regular column at the moment, but with a Video Column, I get to work with K again - she shoots and helps design the look of the show - so that'll alleviate me putting another project solely on myself.

 The best thing about picking up all your books after they've been out for a few weeks is that, such as is the case with TMNT, I literally just read last month's issue a few days ago, so the story is still fresh in my mind. This series has been a consistent succession of awesome evolutionary moments for a lot of the characters in the TMNT universe that might have gone stagnant in a lesser series. Case in point, last month we got this:

I don't know if that makes anyone else out there as happy it does me, but I'm excited as hell to see more of "Leatherkrang!"

See what I mean? That's A LOT of books for one Wednesday! Feels good.

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Playlist:

Thou - Heathen

A Place to Bury Strangers - Exploding Head

Santogold - Eponymous

Drab Majesty - The Demonstration

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Card:

This one keeps coming up of late, and as I surmised on 8/20 when the Princess of Disks came up last, a signpost on the logic/emotion tug of war it's been reentering the Shadow Play world. Big breakthrough two days ago, not much since. But I've been a bit lost in my head, and reluctant to dig into the dirt and really start laying the foundation in prose. Time to pony up.

Isolation: Day 161

It's been some time since I broke out the Vitalic, but a few weeks ago this song floated to the surface of my mind and I spent an afternoon at work revisiting the French DJ's 2005 debut album, OK Cowboy. Good times. My Friend Dario is such a perfect little electro-pop song that I'd imagine would have been all over the radio in a sane world. If there's one thing the intervening years since this record's release have taught us, it's that this is most definitely, not a sane world. Sometimes, like Dario, don't you just feel like driving  too fast, taking your hands off the wheel and...

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Watch:

The second episode of HBO's adaptation of Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country aired last night and I have to say, this show is fantastic. HBO seems to know how to change story elements so that, while they are clearly trying to meet inclusive agendas, they do not sacrifice story elements. In fact, I'd say so far, between this and last year's Watchmen, the changes HBO makes improve the material. Again, as I said last week, in no way am I casting aspersions on Ruff's novel, because it's great. However, it does not feel like "pop" to me. This does, and the fact that anyone has made a Lovecraft-adajacent show "pop" blows my fucking mind. 

If you're unconvinced, HBO has the entire first episode up on their youtube channel, so maybe give it a whirl. The episode opens with a particularly crazy, CG dream sequence, so don't let that convince you. The graphics are good; not great. About on par with those from Ash Vs Evil Dead. There's a lot of shit going on in this dream sequence and none of it's in the book, but seeing Jackie Robinson fight Cthulhu proved to be one of those things I never knew I wanted until I saw it happen:

After Lovecraft Country, as K and her mother sequestered themselves in another room to watch a reality show they have a long-standing tradition of watching this time of year, I settled in for a weekend wrap-up flick. I'm getting better at circumnavigating the 'paradox of choice' that streaming has inspired in me, where I flip through Shudder, Prime, Netflix, HULU, HBO and never settle on anything. Last night, I went straight to Shudder, saw that Jay Baruchel's new slasher flick Random Acts of Violence had landed, and settled in for what turned out to be a pretty damn fantastic viewing. Here's the trailer:

 

I really liked this flick! First, it was so good to see Jesse Williams, who you may remember from Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard's Cabin in the Woods.  Second, I pretty much instantly fell in love with the way Baruchel and cinematographer Karim Hussain capture the locations and sets here. They really know how to convey the mood of traveling the interstates that lay at the heart of this country. There's what I call "truck stop paranoia" seeping from the darkened highways, crappy motels, rest stops and dank bars with only ancient beer logo lamps for lighting.

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Playlist:

Otis Redding - Otis Blue

Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey

A Place to Bury Strangers - Exploding Head

The Haxan Cloak - Eponymous

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - Ancestral Recall (pre-release single)

Deftones - Koi No Yokan

Iress - Prey 

Vitalic - OK Cowboy

Ritual Chair - Pain and Decay

Cult of Mary (Ritual Chair) - Praise 

Ritual Chair - Brock Turner

Thou - Heathen

Perturbator - New Model

Perturbator - The Uncanny Valley

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Card:

And before I even post this one, I've let something trivial at work influence an otherwise good mood. I'll need to fight my way back to a positive mindset, and the best way to do that is strap on my headphones and work.

Sunday Bandcamp: Ritual Chair

A happy accident that while looking up music by another band, I stumbled upon a Daily Bandcamp article by Jordan Reyes spotlighting Ritual Chair's music. The name caught my attention, but the music is what caught my breath. I started with 2017's Pain and Decay, and quickly found I could not work my way away from Ritual Chair's bandcamp. Each successive piece I listened to helped grow a seed of horror and anxiety inside me, which is a good thing when you see where Hailey Magdeleno's music comes from, what motivates it, and where the proceeds go. By the time I arrived at this piece, which incorporates what the artist describes as a "random tape called Africa Praise 1" - which appears to actually be released as a different project by the same creator - I feel like I should have been ready for the harrowing funnel of sound that enveloped me, but I was not. This made for a distinctly unique listening experience, one I will probably attempt to recreate down the line, but will most likely fail. 

Another thing that absolutely blew me away, and seemed like the best example of an artist giving a well-deserved 'Fuck you' to a deserving party who has thus far escaped the maximum desecration he deserves, is Ritual Chair has a release titled "Brock Turner."

 

The album art is his smug, cunt face, and the description is a terse indictment of his failed humanity. Mr. Turner deserves far worse than having an album named after him, but it's my long-held belief that sound and idea, when sculpted from outrage, anger, and frustration, can act as a kind of Sword of Will. Perhaps if enough of us listen to and talk about this recording, it will gain the power to steal his breath while he sleeps, leaving only a lifeless shell in his place.

One can hope. In the interim, all proceeds from this, and quite a few of Ritual Chair's other releases, go to The House of Ruth.

Isolation: Day 159

 

I have become a HUGE fan of the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire. K had watched it previously, and both her and Mr. Brown recommended it to me on more than one occasion. Two weeks ago we started the now-completed show - at four seasons, ten episodes a season, I had a sense going into it that the story had been crafted in a tight, no-BS manner, and so far that's exactly what I feel I've gotten out of the first two seasons, the second of which we completed a few nights ago. Following a small Texas tech company in the early 80s, Halt and Catch Fire uses an imaginary company called Cardiff electronics - based on Compaq computers, if what I've read is accurate - as they clone the IBM desktop BIOS and strike out to make the world's first portable computer. "At a feather-lite fifteen pounds, you can take the Giant anywhere," the sales pitch eventually goes. The interesting thing about the show is how, by the end of season one, we're done with Cardiff and personal computing and onto the proliferation of online games and chat. Interesting, too, is how the show keeps the core five characters growing in different directions yet still realistically intertwined; this show is no slouch - the writing is fantastic. As are the performances, set design (so much nostalgia), and the theme song! Created by Trentmøller, I had so hoped the theme was a shortened version of a longer song. Nope. Short and sweet and leaves me wanting more every damn time I hear it, this is another of those show intros that I would never dream of skipping, even in the height of a binge. 

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Read: 

I swam a bit after finishing Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country; there are so many damn books I want to read right now, that I became paralyzed by the prospect of actually choosing one. I ended up going with a short-story collection/novel combo. 

 First up, Nathan Ballingrud's debut short story collection, North American Lake Monsters. I've been wanting to read this since I first read The Visible Filth in 2015, but I'm often a 'saver' - that is to say, I purposefully hold out on reading books by favorite authors so I have something to look forward to. With Babak Anvari's adaptation of the stories as a new HULU original Horror Anthology show set to premiere in October, I figured I should probably get on this one, which was published in 2013 by Small Beer Press.

One story in, the majestic You Go Where It Takes You, I'm even further convinced that Ballingrud is one of the greatest living Horror authors the world has, and I find myself even more excited by the prospect of watching Anvari's interpretation of more of his world (2019's Wounds - which I wouldn't shut up about last year - was Anvari's first work with Ballingrud's material, adapting The Visible Filth, still one of my top five favorite books ever). 

 Next up, John Ajvide Lindqvist's Handling The Undead. 

 

This is a loaner from my Horror Vision co-host Anthony. Lindqvist is best known for his 2004 debut Vampire novel Let the Right One In - which I have not read - and I am going into Handling.. totally blind to his style or anything about the plot, other than, working backward from the title, this will most likely be Lindqvist's unique take on the Zombie genre, an area I don't normally care all that much for, but which lately I seem to keep finding really interesting derivations of. Hopefully this continues that course. 

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Playlist:

The Cure - Standing on the Beach

David Bowie - Lodger

Rezz - Mass Manipulation

Deftones - Ohms (pre-release single)

Santogold - Eponymous

Deftones - Diamond Eyes

Skywave - Killerrockandroll

A Place to Bury Strangers - Exploding Head

Thou - Heathen

Deftones - Gore

Midnight Danger - Chapter 2: Endless Nightmare

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Blood Sugar Sex Magik

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Card:

Back to my original, full-size Thoth deck for today's pull:

Keeping me on course. Reading You Go Where it Takes You this morning, I feel the urge to work on one of several short stories I have sitting around. Maybe late tonight; for today's writing session - which I've already budgeted out to be fairly lengthy - it's back to what I have to complete next, Shadow Play Book Two: The Absence of Light, which means I have to finish the outline for Book Three, the title of which I am not yet ready to reveal, but which fills me with unholy glee!

Isolation: Day 158 New Deftones!!!

Musically speaking, I can't imagine better news than the imminent arrival of a new Deftones record, in just barely a month, at that. Even the way the band announced Ohms - out September 25th - is a work of art. Apparently, the Deftones put coordinates on their twitter feed, and one fan drove to those coordinates and saw a roadside billboard add for the album. Pretty cool, no? Normally, I hold off on listening to single songs more than once before an album this important to me drops, but I just mainlined this one about five times in a row and it has me rabid for the entire album. Pre-order Ohms HERE.

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I ended up making it into the comic shop yesterday to pick up my books, and let me tell you, I had quite a haul. I've barely even cracked into the stack, however, of the two books I have read, one gave me ultimate happiness. This is going to be something only diehard fans of the old Marvel Comics Transformers series will be able to understand, but in Simon Furman and Guido Guidi's Transformers '84: Secrets and Lies issue 2 - which serves as a prequel to the Marvel series and thus, put events before the Ark's fateful crash landing into prehistoric Earth, we had a hell of a call back to the original series. Furman and Guidi show us Lord Straxus moving into Darkmount for the first time and discovering his newly appointed Decepticon outpost has its own Smelting Pool. This draws on one of my favorite comics EVER - the seminal Transformers #17, written by original Transformers scribe Bob Budiansky, with art by Don Perlin and Keith Willaims, published by Marvel Comics in 1986.

Issue 17 was such an eye-opener for me. I'd originally preferred the Transformers cartoon continuity to the Marvel comic, which I did not buy every month and which often seemed to run contrary to some of the big, cosmic ideas the show went for after the 1984 theatrical movie. That was until I read issues 17 and 18, which showed us what was going on back on Cybertron, and what was happening was Lord Straxus feeding Autobots to his smelting pool! These issues were populated with characters that were not in the cartoon or toy line, and this really fed my imagination, to the point that I tried to make a Lord Straxus and some of the other characters out of Legos so I could incorporate them into my own ongoing continuity which I had devised in my play sessions with the figures.

Transformers '84 has been full of nods to the original Marvel series, which Furman took over from Budiansky about halfway through the original run and really made his own up until it ended somewhat unexpectedly with issue 80 in 1991. Several years ago, Furman and Guidi came back for a new series that continued the original continuity, Transformers: Regeneration One, which was one of the books I could not stop talking about during its two-year run. '84 is definitely a worthy successor (or predecessor, being that it's a prequel).

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Playlist:

The Cure - Standing on the Beach

Thou - Summit

Thou - Heathen

Santogold - Eponymous

Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey

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Card:

More Disks, which makes perfect sense, as K and I have begun hatching a plan that involves a large sum of money.

Isolation: Day 157

I love EVERY song on Hangman's Noose, The Thirsty Crows' debut album on Batcave Records (order HERE). But after living with it almost two years now, I have to say, I think this is my favorite song on the album.

Although that may change again. The whole thing is just so damn great.

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I've been meaning to post this trailer for Netflix's upcoming The Devil All the Time. I never made it around to reading Donald Ray Pollock's 2011 novel of the same name, but it's been on my radar for a while (so I have no excuse other than the to-read list is large enough to put that island of plastic refuse in the Pacific look like it's no bigger than a bottle cap).

The movie adaptation, directed by Antonio Campos and starring, well, pretty much everybody, looks riveting and moody. The trailer oozes Southern Gothic suspense, and Robert Pattinson looks downright foreboding in his role as what appears to be a charlatan preacher. Mr. Pattinson really has turned out to be quite an actor.

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Playlist:

The Thirsty Crows - Hangman's Noose

Santogold - Eponymous

Portico - Living Fields

The Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once

Atrium Carceri - Kapnobatai

Le Butcherettes - A Raw Youth

The Cramps - RockinnReelinInAucklandNewZealandXXX

The Cure - Pornography

Converge - The Dusk in Us

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - Ancestral Recall (pre-release single)

Thou - Summit

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Card:

to my original Thoth deck, where I find the Princess of Disks waiting for me. My day may be a dragging, uphill trek through mundane, everyday tasks.

One aspect of this card that always strikes me is the way the rock outcropping the Princess stands behind resembles both an altar - for tribute and focus - as well as a goat turning to look behind it. Also, the branches from the trees in the immediate background look not just they belong to the forest, but also to the the Princess and her altar-goat, too. This populates the card with nothing but Earth-bound textures, a key tip-off that this is one of the purest cards in the suite of Disks, from which not a lot of emotion, logic, or Will creeps through, suggesting labor. Which is exactly where I'm at in my process of re-entering the world of Kim and Jessie.

Isolation: Day 156 Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou

 

Yes please! Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou have a collaborative album coming from Sacred Bones, dropping on - how perfect - October 30th. You can pre-order May Our Chambers Be Full HERE.

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NCBD today. It's been a few weeks since I've been in to collect my books, so I'm really going to try and make it in today.

First up is the second issue of Aftershock's Dead Day. It's been a minute since issue #1, so I'll no doubt re-read that first. As I'm sure I've said here a thousand times, I'm generally pretty exhausted with the Zombie genre, however, every once in a while something new comes along that gives it a fresh spin. This book appears to be doing just that.

Gideon Falls #24 - speaking of re-reading older issues, I really need to find the time to go back and start Gideon Falls over from the beginning. I'm keeping up with the story month to month just fine, however, I'd really like to experience everything thus far in a tight burst; this book is so freakin' out there, I really want to let its odd narrative wash over me and see what more I get out of it.

The second issue of Simon Furman and Guido Guidi's newest chapter in the Transformers original comic Universe that started in the 80s at Marvel hit the stands today, and already has me panting - look at that cover! Shockwave vs. Grimlock? I don't geek out over much that holds this beloved brand's name anymore, but these guys are definitely my window into that world.

Playlist:

The Thirsty Crows - Hangman's Noose

Iress - Prey

Mastodon - Fallen Torches (pre-release single)

Mastodon - Emperor of Sand

Lustmord - Hobart

Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey

Exhalants - Bang (pre-release single)

P I n K O/Exhalants - Eponymous Split 7"

The Birthday Party - Hee Haw

The Birthday Party - Mutiny/The Bad Seed

Nabihah Iqbal - Weighing of the Heart

Mötorhead - 1916

Me and That Man - Songs of Love and Death

Le Butcherettes - A Raw Youth

Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell

La Hell Gang - Thru Me Again

Second Still - Violet Phase

Cocksure - TVMALSV

Savages - Silence Yourself

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No card today.