No, I'm not talking about where all this freaky weather is eventually going to lead us, I'm talking about new music from Iceage! Seek Shelter is out May 7th on Mexican Summer. Pre-order HERE.
Watch:
K and I finally got back around to finishing His Dark Materials season 2 on HBO. Damn. This show is fantastic. The scope! I'm chomping at the bit to re-read these books, and since the three-book set that was so ubiquitous in the early 00s that sat on my shelf for over a decade went with the ex, I snagged a copy of the Omnibus that came out a few years back. After I finish Frankenstein, I believe I'll be digging into that one.
While I wait for the third and final season, I took to youtube to see if I could find anything documenting the two-part stage play adaptation that I saw in London circa 2004. This was all I could find, but it gives at least a little bit of an idea of what this looked like:
Playlist:
Genghis Tron - Ritual Circle (pre-release single)
Tomahawk - Eponymous
Airiel - Molten Young Lovers
Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars
Beach Slang - The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City
Queensrÿche - Empire
Melvins - Working With God (pre-release tracks)
Melvins - Houdini
Melvins - (A) Senile Animal
White Lung - Wild Failure (Single)
White Lung - Paradise
Genghis Tron - Board Up the House
The Raveonettes - Raven in the Grave
The Raveonettes - Lust Lust Lust
Card:
Something important is obscured, or for some reason I am just not seeing what is right in front of my face.
More new Genghis Tron. Very much looking forward to this record when it drops! Pre-order Dream Weapon - out March 26th - from Relapse Records HERE.
READ:
I wanted to plant this HERE. really for myself, so I can find it again easily later. In going through old Orbital Operations emails for inspiration, I found this link to Sean Bonner's website. I am wholly unfamiliar with Mr. Bonner, or at least I was before reading this - but it's interesting that I read this now. There would appear to be a lot of synchronicities with me reading this post at the moment, not the least of which is that I'm about to turn 45. Anyway, since Orbital Operations went on hiatus last year, I've sorely lacked intermittent missives that at least in some regard pertain to the process of writing or creating or just structuring time (hence re-read old OOs), and Mr. Bonner's newsletter looks as though it may help fill that void.
NCBD:
This is obviously a big one. I'm curious if, after the reveal at the end of issue #1, The Last Ronin will remain so highly sought after. My guess is no, but who knows? Also, who cares - the book is bad ass and I'm super excited for the next chapter.
One of my favorite series in years, issue #4 of We Live kind of set the whole series on its ear, and if I'm not mistaken, this is the final issue of the series.
Another final issue. Hopefully, both We Live and Miskatonic will be back with second seasons. If not, it's been a hell of a ride for both in a very short time.
Playlist:
Nothing - The Great Dismal
Dance with the Dead - B-Sides, Vol. 1
Teenage Wrist - Earth is a Black Hole
Ozzy Osbourne - The Ultimate Sin
Ozzy Osbourne - No More Tears
Mr. Bungle - Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny
Primitive Man - Immersion
Ceremony - In the Spirit World Now (Synthetic Remixes)
Card:
Balance and synthesis, two things I'm a skosh hung up on at the moment. I received the proofs of Murder Virus and am a bit underwhelmed at how the art looks in person. Also, I found a fucking typo on the first page! WTF!!! I've gone over this so much, I'm no longer seeing what's in front of my face. Ultimately, all this is easy to fix before the on-sale date of 3/23/21, but it's the point.
I'm pretty late checking out Nothing's latest release, which came out last year on Relapse Records. The Great Dismal was included in my Golden Ticket haul from Relapse, and I'm still working through that.
A Fabricated Life begins the record, and I won't lie - its slow, soft, dreary sound hasn't been where my head is at. That said, listening to the record on headphones for the first time this morning, I'm able to grasp the nuance and vibe of the song, and it has stirred something within me. Something that harkens back to the first Nothing release, Downward Years to Come, which I discovered back in 2013. I love this band, and haven't spent nearly enough time with them these past two records, so I'll start correcting that today.
Watch:
I stumbled across this short film - really more of a Proof of Concept trailer for a movie I can only hope gets made. Very cool use of CGI, ingenious locations, and what looks like the set-up for an intriguing take on Cosmic Horror. Directed by Matt Sears and written by Ryan Grundy, Mr. Sears' youtube channel appears packed with interesting content. Sub HERE.
Playlist:
Cinderella - Long Cold Winter
Ghost - Opus Eponymous
Metallica - Kill 'Em All
The Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once
Perturbator - Dangerous Days
Metallica - Master of Puppets
Emilie Autumn - Opheliac
Keiichi Okabe - NieR: Automata OST
Card:
Spot on today, as I've definitely been preoccupied with a sort of drifting that has displaced a lot of my creative intent. I'm sure it's just a phase, but it makes me contemplate ideas like, "What if I lose all motivation to write?" which is ridiculous, but, you know, this is the way the mind works.
Wow, I am in a weird headspace this morning. Woke up earlier than needed and went right to looking this album up on Apple Music. I've had hair rock on the mind for the last few days. This goes back to that Recontextualizing the 80s idea I was posting about here a few years ago. Some of this stuff from the Sunset Strip sound of the 80s is definitely best left forgotten, but some of it has a place in history. Or at least in my history, I guess.
I never owned Cinderella's Long Cold Winter, but a friend in the neighborhood did, and I can remember hanging out at his house and popping it into the stereo more than a couple times. Other favorites at the time (off the top of my head) would have included Metallica's ...And Justice for All, ICE T's Power, GnR's Lies, and NWA's Straight Outta Compton. This was really at the start of my getting into music in a 'beyond the radio' way, and this neighbor was loaded and, in the way of a lot of rich folk a bit clueless, so he tended to buy tapes and CDs rather haphazardly (I didn't have a CD player yet, so he was my first exposure to the format).
I still have no idea why or how he chose to pick up a Cinderella album in the first place, this really wasn't his sound, but it was that anomaly factor that made me first pluck it from a pile of CDs and put it in the more than ample stereo. Over the course of a couple of weeks, Long Cold Winter became a go-to when hanging out at his house and listening to music, but that friendship dissolved shortly thereafter and he was lost to the waves of time. I haven't heard the album since.
Once you get past Tom Keifer's throat-singing, this record has a pretty cool sound. The title track still stands as a damn good example of that 80s rock/blues sound that, in my opinion, was perfected on Gary Moore's Still Got the Blues for You, and it's this quality, as well as the ripping slide guitar sprinkled here and there, that elevates Long Cold Winter above your standard 80s Hair Rock sound, although Cinderella does that to varying degrees of palatability throughout the rest of the record, as well.
Watch:
Joe Bob Briggs gave us the best of his Holiday specials he's done in some time last Friday with the Joe Bob Put a Spell on you, where he paired the Gore-cut of Tammy and the T-Rex with Anna Biller's The Love Witch.
I was fortunate enough to catch the premiere of Vinegar Syndrome's release of the long-lost Gore-cut of Tammy at Beyondfest 2019 - the film actually followed an in-person presentation of Joe Bob doing his How Rednecks Saved Hollywood lecture. Both were fantastic, and it was cool to see the two together again.
The Love Witch is one of the first movies K and I actively waited on the VOD premiere for back in the early phase of our relationship, due to a great LA Weekly article that talked about the absolute care and detail Ms. Biller put into making the film.
Playlist:
Deafheaven - Sunbather
Deafheaven - 10 Years Gone
Jim Jarmusch and Jozef Van Wissem - The Mystery of Heaven
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Damn the Torpedoes
Fleetwood Mac - Greatest Hits
Flying Lotus - Los Angeles
Daniel Pemberton - Motherless Brooklyn OST
Lard - The Last Temptation of Reid
Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction
Teenage Wrist - Earth is a Black Hole
Helmet - Meantime
John Carpenter - Lost Themes III Alive After Death
Zombi - 2020
The Bangles - Different Light
Card:
Coincidentally, as I draw from my Thoth Deck, I reflect on the fact that one of the things I most love about The Love Witch is there is a room in the film painted with the colors of the deck.
Hammering away with increased gusto but an edge of carelessness that can bring the whole damn thing down around your ears. Ease back and keep a keen eye. This is totally a nod that I'm overworking myself and need to take tonight to chill out. Science and Will must be strategic (to a degree), and still possessed of mindfullness.
I know I just posted the song, but there was no way I wasn't going to post what might just be my favorite music video in the last decade. It's the rare case where the visuals actually add to the meaning and impact of the song. These two artists are at the top of their game and cranking out material - all of it awesome! Again, I'll echo the sentiment I did the last time I posted this and hope there's an album or EP on the way.
Watch:
K and I did the Netflix Crime Scene: Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel over the last two nights. Wow- this should have been a two-hour documentary, but instead, the creators padded it out with A LOT of really infuriating conjecture and nonsense from the 'web sleuth' community. I would unilaterally detest this community, if not for the side of it on display in the HBO doc I'll Be Gone in the Dark. The difference appears to be one of talent and drive - Michelle McNamara and her immediate confidants within the community are clearly light-years beyond the people spouting obvious banalities in the Cecil doc. Either way, the doc starts pretty good, has a fascinating story at its heart, and ends up finishing a lot better than the middle would have suggested it would.
If nothing else, watching this has made me rabid to re-watch American Horror Story: Hotel, still my favorite season of the five I've seen. Based largely on the Cecil, it will be cool to go back and watch it with the real-world inspiration fresh in mind.
Playlist:
Tomahawk - Tonic Immobility (Single)
King Woman - Doubt EP
King Woman - Created in the Image of Suffering
The Blueflowers - Relapse EP
The Veils - Time Stays, We Go
Vel Indica - Turn Off Your Devices
Def Leppard - Pyromania
Small Black - Duplex (Single)
Guns N' Roses - Appetite for Destruction
Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction
Depeche Mode - Essentials
Genghis Tron - Deam Weapon (Single)
Genghis Tron - Cloak of Love EP
Genghis Tron - Board Up the House
Ghost - Infestissumam
Ghost - Opus Eponymous
John Carpenter - Lost Themes III: Alive After Death
Card:
Recognizing the powers in the Universe you cannot contest, and having the heart to allow them to move you. I'm sure that my fortune cookie-esque reading has something to do with the renewed approach I've taken to Shadow Play Book Two, and the fact that while I was away finishing Murder Virus, it has somewhat changed - for the better. Still, changing things at this stage is daunting, even if it means the story will be better. However, as the card says, recognize the powers that move you and listen to what they're telling you.
Off the top of my head, you know what'd be cool? Some new music from King Woman in 2021. I'll keep checking their Bandcamp and hope for the best.
Pre-order:
The culmination of eleven months of work is finally official! Murder Virus releases everywhere on March 23rd - one day before my 45th birthday and exactly 374 days after the early morning trip to a barren Trader Joes to wait in line for scraps that convinced me I'd be crazy not to dig out the manuscript for the first successful piece of long-form fiction I ever wrote, dust it off, and re-write it.
2007 - in order to cope with the constant insanity of working retail for the first time in my life - as a manager to boot - I wrote The Secret Life of Murder, a novel about a murder virus that moves through the population, causing people to kill one another in epic scale. The idea was to create a harmless microcosm where I could vent my frustrations with fictionalized violence. It was my first attempt at writing a novel that I actually thought worked, and I always kept it in the back of my mind that I would dust it off one day and re-write it. Well, what better time than during an actual viral pandemic? So that's why the second Shadow Play book was delayed - I literally shifted gears in the middle of writing it to focus on this.
The title Murder Virus, which I hated at first, worked its way into my brain stem and eventually convinced me to love it, especially after a friend compared it in simplicity and 'high concept' to Fight Club, which also sounds pretty generic until you actually read it. That's my feeling with this one, too. Murder Virus is a lot darker and stranger than I realized while writing it, and the story does not end up anywhere I could have predicted. This makes it my favorite thing I've written to date. I'm extremely proud of this one, and obviously, because of the infusion of mental, physical, and historical elements of the past year, it's special to me and will no doubt always remain so; a time capsule of 2020 and where my head and emotions were while navigating the most difficult year (so far) of my life.
You can pre-order Murder Virus from Barnes and Noble HERE.
And the pre-order for Murder Virus from Indiebound isn't up yet but should be in a day or two (same with the Barnes and Noble paperback - right now they only have the ebook added to their site).
If you have a brick-n-mortar book store and really want to do me a solid, ask them to order a few copies from Ingram. They'll know how to do it. Oh, and thanks for reading!
Also, as always, that beautiful cover design was my concept executed well above my expectations by Jonathan Grimm. His website is HERE - check it out!
Playlist:
White Lung - Eponymous
Beth Gibbons, The Polish National Radio Sympony Orchestra & Krzysztof Pernderecki - Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3
As I continue to work my way through that stack of records that Relapse Records put out in 2020 and that I won for their 20th Anniversary, one of the bands I had no experience with whatsoever is Inter Arma. Garbers Days Revisited is an all-covers record, and I have to say, my first listen was super fun. Opening with Ministry's "Scarecrow" - super relevant to my recent listening habits - the group move through versions of "Southern Man", "March of the Pigs", and "Running Down a Dream", to name a few. All these versions range from sludged-up to more or less straight forward, such as the above Prince track.
Very cool record with one of my favorite album covers in a while, so I'll definitely be digging deeper into the Inter Arma catalogue.
Read:
Not realizing that Bernie Wrightson's graphic novel adaptation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein is out of print, I ordered what I thought was a copy from Amazon a few days ago. What arrived instead was the illustrated novel that features 40 of Wrightson's drawings. Needless to say, I was a bit disappointed - I've read Wrightson's sequel, Frankenstein Alive, Alive, but never that original. What makes it worse - the book goes for a minimum of $150 used with the nice version garnering between $300-$500 - is Bernie Wrightson's Frankenstein adaptation was a book that routinely sat on the shelves at the borders I helped manage for years, and I just never got around to buying it.
Regardless of the letdown, looking at the illustrated novel, I realized it's been since Junior High since I actually read the original, and this new version has a bunch of cool supplemental material - a forward by Stephen King, a "historical context" essay and timeline, and the 1831 introduction by the author herself. Needless to say, this is my next read.
Looking through the illustrations, I realize what a shame it is I came to really appreciate Wrightson so late, as Mr. Wrightson's work is only describable as exquisite.
Playlist:
Bit of a 90s parade of late, but that doesn't happen all to often, so I'm going with it:
Death - Human
Faith No More - The Real Thing
Guns N' Roses - Appetite for Destruction (Deluxe)
Deafheaven - 10 Years Gone
Disappears - Pre Language
Garbage - Eponymous
The Maine - You Are OK
Inter Arma - Garbers Days Revisited
Card:
As I often view this card as a nod toward saving money or 'nesting,' I've taken recent interpretations to possibly reference avoiding tempting social situations. I've had about five social outings - all super small with only one or two other people outside my own household - in the last year (hence this blog's brief stint titled 'Quarantine Junkie'), but recently, I've felt the urge to see a friend or two. Nope. Time to batten back down that Will and get the course set straight ahead. I recently came across this article that should serve as enough of a reminder. The idea of our air quality being so adversely affected by a record number of cremations is baffling - we're living in the setting for a Sci-Fi Horror Film, and not even aware of it on a day-to-day level.
