Batman and the Dead Boys

 

From the Dead Boys 1978 album, We Have Come For Your Children. Classic album, classic song. Also, talk about close to the bone - this was released less than a year after Berkowitz was arrested in August of 1978, and the fact that by '77 the Dead Boys had moved from Ohio to New York, this is a New York punk band singing about Son of Sam pretty much while it was happening.

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Watch:

Saturday night, K and I were invited to what will probably be our last screening with the crew from the Comic Bug. Owner Jun rents out a theatre for all the major comic book movies and invites a small cadre of family, friends and favorite customers. I have always felt deeply honored to be among the latter. What did we see? Why, Matt Reeves' The Batman, of course.

I would almost definitely not have seen this if not for this invite. I just feel so burned out on Batman in general. When I saw the trailer on the big screen a few months back, I had to admit the movie looked fantastic, but the thought of actually watching it held exactly zero joy for me, so I wrote it off. Was I wrong?

Well, there was more about The Batman that I liked than I disliked, so I'm glad I saw it. The film is visually arresting; it has a strong tone reinforced by a somewhat defining color palette that just works. Everything is dark AF, with lots of fluorescent red lighting thrown in to beautiful effect. There are also patches of neon throughout, and a certain embedded opulence that really serves to define the more upscale elements of Reeves' Gotham. Oh yeah, and I can honestly say this is the first Batmobile I didn't roll my eyes at (despite my adoration of Christopher Nolan's franchise, that one was pretty ridiculous).

Robert Pattison also turns in a fantastic performance. His is a perfected Batman and Bruce Wayne - despite the too-perfect bangs - that clearly had the benefit of observing and correcting what didn't work from Christian Bale's version, which I'm not knocking at all. But the newest version should learn from the previous, and Pattinson definitely owes at least a passing thanks to Bale. John Turturro was an absolutely inspired choice for Carmine Falcone, and it wasn't until after the movie when someone mentioned Colin Farrell had played the Penguin that I realized it. As tired as I find all of Batman's classic rogue's gallery, these reinventions are all great. Paul Dano went a bit overboard in some of his screen time as the Riddler - mostly in the declaration videos he baits the police with - but overall he's great, and I'm happy to report that there's not a "?" to be seen on his costume.

So what didn't I like? Well, it's just shy of three hours long, and absolutely shouldn't be. Oh, the story they ran with needs all of that time to work itself out (well, not ALL of it), but that's the thing. The story's not very good. Sure, parts of it are great, but it's written in a way that incorporated all kinds of elements it just didn't need. The script has some issues as well. There are three scenes with two people talking that go on way too long and border on irrelevant or not needed, as does some of the delivery of the lines in those scenes. Chewing the scenery, as they say.

My biggest problem? The third act. Well, felt more like the fucking tenth act by the time we got to it, and it takes the movie off the rails. What I LOVE about Reeves' The Batman is he gave us what he promised - a stripped-down, Detective story. Awesome, let's leave the semi-flips and city-wide destruction aside and see the detective side of Bats. Except - when you get to the final set-piece, it goes so big with its swathe of destruction that at times, it became laughable. 

Overall, if you brace yourself for a long three hours, this one is worth seeing on the big screen. And if you get the chance, do like I did and re-watch David Fincher's Se7en beforehand. There's a massive influence Fincher's seminal serial killer film had on Reeves' film, for the best.

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Playlist:

Firebreather - Dwell in the Fog

sElf - Breakfast with Girls

The Afghan Whigs - I'll Make You See God (single)

Sade - Apple Music Essentials

Allegaeon - Apoptosis

Beliefs - Habitat

Drab Majesty - Careless

The Ronettes - Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Now I Got Worry

The Ocean - Anthropocentric

Mark Lanegan - Bubblegum

Ghost - Impera (pre-release singles)

The Ocean - Mesoarchaean (single)

The Ocean - Heliocentric

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre

Blanck Mass - In Ferneaux

Dead Boys - We Have Come For Your Children

Deafheaven - Infinite Granite

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Card:

Listening to inner dialogue, harmonizing renewal, which is funny consider "renewal" is a word used A LOT in The Batman. Anyway, I have felt pretty good of late, and my ideas are flowing again. 

Spizm - B4uDie

It's another Bandcamp Friday, and it's also the release date of Spizm's B4uDie record. I pre-ordered this a while back and posted the lead, titular single, and now that I've heard the whole thing, I strongly recommend you throw these guys some $$. Remember, artists keep ALL the money from sales on Bandcamp Friday, so what better way to support independent creators!

Here's a direct link to the Spizm Bandcamp.

 

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There are some pretty Bold Horror Statements being used in the marketing for the new film You Won't Be Alone, which makes me skeptical. However...

Yeah, after watching about a quarter of this trailer, I knew I was in and turned it off lest I learn too much. Directed by Goran Stolevski - who I am completely unfamiliar with despite the fact that his name rings a bell - I think Focus Features is banking on the "Folk Horror Explosion" with this one. That's okay. I find despite the buzz, I'm rarely disappointed by films marketed under that banner. 

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Playlist:

Mark Lanegan - Bubblegum

Converge and Chelsea Wolfe - Bloodmoon: I

Judas Priest - British Steel

Ghost - Impera (pre-release singles)

Ghost - Infestissumam

Neil Young - Greatest Hits

Greg Puciato - Lowered (single)

Greg Puciato - Child Soldier: Creator of God

Hall and Oats - Greatest Hits

Mutterlein - Orphans of the Black Sun

Jim Willaims - Possessor OST

Killing Joke - Night Time

Motley Crue - Shout at the Devil

Ministry - Filth Pig

Tom Vek - Luck

Grinderman - Eponymous

Spizm - B4uDie

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre

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Card:

I'm really having trouble digging past the surface and listening to the inner voice that tells me how to write. I've kind of pushed myself into a frustration corner and can't see past it.

Mark Lanegan and Chelsea Wolfe - Flatlands

 

I had to get one more Lanegan track in, because I don't think I'd ever realized he had a collaborattion with Chelsea Wolfe before.  

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NCBD:

Here's my haul for another NCBD:

Again with the fantastic cover for Moon Knight. 

I might have missed picking up issue #3 of Newburn, so I'll have to remedy that as well.

James Tynion IV's The Nice House On The Lake returns after a small hiatus. This one has a lot that feels like it's being lost to me reading it as it drops, but I may make 

Hands down, the best cover of any X-Book since Powers/House. This is currently the only of the X-titles that I'm reading that still feels like Hickman's run, and this cover proves that 100%. 

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Playlist:

The Gutter Twins - Adorata

Wham! - Everything She Wants (single)

George Michael - Faith

The Veils - Total Depravity

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Murder Ballads

Zombi - Digitalis

Author & Punisher - Women & Children

Yeruselem - The Sublime

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Card:

Sevens are Netzach, and thus related to Strength. Which I feel like I've been pretty keen on exhibiting of late. Also, in Thoth, I tend to see this card as an indication that one idea will stand out among others, and prove itself useful if followed. Which helps with the current state of my writing, which is a big mess of peaks and valleys at the moment. Too many ideas, is kind of what I was thinking an hour or so before I pulled this one, so I'll take the advice.

Mark Lanegan's Strange Religion (Anthony Bourdain Outro)

 

And thanks to my good friend Seth for the link to this one. What a beautiful way to end Mark Lanegan week.   

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Watch:

I know it's waaaay early, but I'm going on record: So far, Hellbender - or stylized as H6llb6nd6r - is the movie to beat for my favorite movie of the year:

 

This is another film by the Adams family - Tobey Poser, her husband John Adams and their two daughters Lulu and Zelda - who released The Deeper You Dig in 2019 and have been gaining an increasing amount of notoriety as a family of ridiculously talented individuals. Even the music they did for the movie is fantastic and begs for a proper release. 

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Playlist:

The Afghan Whigs - In Spades

The Cure - Faith

The Cure - Carnage Visors

QOTSA - Lullabies to Paralyze

Mark Lanegan Band - Blues Funeral 

Walking Papers - The Light Below

Black Road - Witch of the Future

Black Sabbath - Master of Reality

Silent - Modern Hate

Ritual Howls - Into the Water

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Card:

Again? I need some time to process this. Or maybe that's the point. While I keep trying to figure certain things out, the Wheel keeps spinning, and the situation changes. 

Screaming Trees - Dollar Bill

 

Regardless of the fact that Lanegan himself was pretty vocal about a certain degree of embarrassment at some of the music he made as a part of Screaming Trees, I'll always love certain songs by the band. It's the project with Lanegan I care the least about, but they definitely have their moments. "Nearly Lost You" is a perfect rock single, and my original plan was to post that. However, the day he died I was at work, and at some point, a couple hours after hearing the news I walked out of the office and heard "Dollar Bill" on the 88.9 KXLU. I haven't heard this song since 2009, and it really just smacked me upside the head.   

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Watch:

Sunday was a full-on relaxing, restorative day. I needed it. I slept in, dozed often, read quite a bit, and managed to watch several movies. First up, 1944's House of Frankenstein:

 

I'm pretty sure I had never heard of this one before, and boy did it deliver on the Universal Monster goodness. Such an awesome set-up. From the Wikipedia entry for the movie:

 "After escaping from prison, the evil Dr. Niemann (Boris Karloff) and his hunchbacked assistant, Daniel (J. Carrol Naish), plot their revenge against those who imprisoned them. For this, they recruit the powerful Wolf Man (Lon Chaney), Frankenstein's monster (Glenn Strange) and even Dracula himself (John Carradine). Niemann pursues those who wrong him, sending each monster out to do his dirty work. But his control on the monsters is weak at best and may prove to be his downfall." 

In particular, the scene where Karloff's Dr. Niemann revives Dracula is fantastic, as is the way their relationship progresses and finally ends. Saying anything more would be giving away a nice little surprise, of which, this movie has several. Also, really cool to see Karloff in a movie with the Frankenstein monster where he doesn't play the titular being. 

Next, 1939's Son of Frankenstein. 

 

Pretty standard, but cool to see Basil Rathbone in a flick with these Horror Icons.

Both of these were leaving Shudder, and after starting House of Frankenstein out of curiosity a few days ago, but ultimately falling asleep for most of it, my early childhood love of Frank came back with a vengeance. I enjoyed both of these quite a bit, but preferred House because of its truly unique set-up.

 

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Read:

So I decided I'm going to re-read all of H.P. Lovecraft's work. I started reading Lovecraft in High School - maybe Junior year. I've been reading him ever since but with my exposure to his work being subdivided between various Dell Paperbacks, I never had a "Complete Works" set until fairly recently. Because of that, I'm not entirely certain which of his works I missed (see my post about Charles Dexter Ward from last week).

So far, here's what I've read:

    

    • The Festival

    • The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

    • The Statement of Randolph Carter

    • The Strange House High in the Mist

    • The Terrible Old Man

    • Azathoth

    • Beyond the Wall of Sleep

    • Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn & His Family

Of particularly great pleasure was reading The Strange House High in the Mist. It'd been a loooong time, and this is one of those stories I realize now that defines what I love about HPL.

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Playlist:

Walking Papers - The Light Below

Federale - No Justice

QOTSA - Lullabies to Paralyze

The Cure - Carnage Visors

Christopher Young and Lustmord - the Empty Man OST

Myrkur - Folkesange

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Card:

I don't collect Tarot decks. I've had my full-size Thoth since around 2003. My only other decks are the "pocket" Thoth Missi gave me a few years back, and her own Raven Tarot (Major Arcana only) which she made for me two years ago. However, as I performed my pull this evening I was thinking about the fact that my friend Jonathan Grimm is beginning to take pre-orders for his "Bound Tarot" deck and there's no way I'm not buying this. Pulling The Hierophant only serves to reinforce my thinking that this will now be a third deck I actually use for daily readings.

There's not an actual link to pre-order the Bound deck yet, but I'll definitely be posting that here when it's up. In the meantime, you can peruse the designs over on Grimm's Etsy HERE.

The Twilight Singers - Live with Me/Where Did You Sleep Last Night

 

A wonder live rendition of the opening track from the Twilight Singers' 2006 EP A Stitch in Time, which as a bonus, flawlessly morphs into a cover of Lead Belly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night." 

I got chills at the end when Dulli yells, "Mark Lanegan ladies and gentlemen!"

It's been quite some time since I doubled down on any Twilight Singers. This EP and the corresponding album Powder Burns also released in 2006, along with Lanegan's 2004 Bubblegum were intricate daily rituals for much of my life during the mid-to-late 00s. They're also slightly synonymous with drugs - no surprise there. To me, these records so perfectly capture the fabric of my mental life at that time, it brings back a huge rush of thoughts, feelings and ideas that are otherwise haphazardly placed in a closet at the back of my psyche. It's good to take that stuff out and brush it off every once in a while.

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Read:

I'd been trying to read the works of T.E.D. Klein for the better part of a decade, but until very recently, everything was out of print. I eventually found the story "The Events at Poroth Farm" in a Kindle-only "Megapack" of the Cthulhu Mythos. The story has fuck all to do with Lovecraft, but hell, forty stories for $0.99, I'll take it.

This is the kind of thing that flits in and out of my radar, so months go by where I get busy obsessing over other things, then something puts the enigmatic Klein back in my thoughts and I look around on Kindle and eBay again. The holy grail of his work would appear to be the 1985 novel Dark Gods, which goes for upwards of $40 for a Mass Market Paperback on eBay. It's only a matter of time until someone puts Klein's stuff back in print...

And now that is exactly what is happening. Two recent purchases I've made:

This first volume is a novel. A reprint of Klein's 1984 novel The Ceremonies, also long out of print. I snatched up a paperback copy of this the second I saw it hit Amazon, however, I will say, the binding looks like it will split and fall apart before I'm finished reading this one. Maybe I'm wrong, but when you have a 400+ pages book and its binding is barely an eight of an inch thick, well, that's usually a pretty crappy edition. 

And here's one from Pickman's Press I just saw this morning on Kindle. I grabbed the digital right away for this collection of short stories, poems and an interview. "Poroth Farm" is included here, which is nice, as are what looks like an essay on Arthur Machen's "The House of Souls", a story I recently short-listed when I picked up a Complete Works volume of Machen's work. So far, I'm three stories in, and can already tell you, "Well-Connected" is already worth the $5.99 I paid for this one. Fantastic story.

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Playlist:

Mark Lanegan Band - Bubblegum

Mark Lanegan Band - Blues Funeral

Post Stardom Depression - Prime Time Looks A Lot Like Amateur Night

QOTSA - Lullabies to Paralyze

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Card:

Looking for answers, but something remains obscured.

Mark Lanegan and Isobel Campbell - The Raven

 

I originally posted a track from this Lanegan/Isobel Campbell collaboration album back when it was released in 2010. That's over a decade ago. Trite "Time Flies" sentiments aside, I'm beginning to feel like we're lucky any of us are still here with the way the world has changed since then. Anyway, I love "The Raven" because it's just so damn cinematic. Also, there's a definite air of homage to Nick Cave here. That track from 2010 - "Who Built the Road" has more than a passing similarity to Cave's duet witih Kylie Minogue, "Where the While Roses Grow." Gentle bell chimes, hushed, breathy vocals, and an overall somber and reflective atmosphere to the album as a whole make this a late-night, dim-light album, and the juxtaposition of Isobel Campbell's voice with Lanegan's is just beautiful, especially when the strings swell beneath them.

You can still grab the complete record on digital over its Bandcamp page HERE.  The entire thing is fantastic, with styles ranging from this quasi Italian Western cinema to sultry Motown-esque soul, to quiet, contemplative ballads that meander through your mind and emotions like a slow-moving snake. SO good.

Also, file this in "Made my Day" -  how about this cover by Two Minutes To Late Night's Gwarsenio Hall? 

Super cool. 

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Watch:

This one looks like it's going to be one helluva fun ride:

I love the Cheap Thrills-meets-You're Next vibes here.

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Playlist:

Greg Puciato - Child Soldier: Creator of God

Greg Puciato - Lowered (pre-release)

Allegaeon - DAMNUM

Curtis Harding - If Words Were Flowers

Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan - Sunday at Devil Dirt

The Twilight Singers - A Stitch in Time EP

Warren G - Regulators (single)

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower

Silent - Modern Hate

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Card:

I've been jumping back and forth between my two decks - The Raven and Thoth - in an effort to see if any of my recent pulls line up. So far, not really, but they definitely tell an over-arching story:

Change - don't struggle against it. I can't help but wonder if this is intentionally a dovetail with what I see as the beginning of a very tumultuous five years for the world as we know it.