New Music from FEN!

In 2011, my good friend and Horror-Vision co-host Tori gifted me Fen's album Epoch. This, maybe more than any other album, propelled me headlong into Black Metal. I'll never forget the first time I hit play on Epoch; it was pouring rain - uncharacteristic for Southern California - as I drove home to San Pedro from Borders Books in Torrance where both Tori and I worked at the time. 

The rain was perfect; I've maintained ever since that this record sounds like it was recorded in the rain (whatever that means, exactly, I can't really explain). At the time I was also falling in love with John Crowley's Little Big, and that book, the weather and Epoch combined to invoke a nearly hallucinatory couple of days off. I kept up with Fen through the follow-up, 2012's Dustwalker, then kind of dropped off for no reason that had anything to do with the band. Seeing the release of Monuments of Absence last week, I was blown away by the opening track, which is considerably more severe than anything I've heard Fen do, though as I say, I'm behind a few albums. Looking forward to catching up, though.

Monuments to Absence dropped this past Friday, 7/07/23, so you can head over to the Prophecy Productions website and order a copy HERE.

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Watch:

Bloody Disgusting did an exclusive premiere of the trailer for the new company Neon Noir's first film, That's A Wrap:

Beautiful colors abound, so they definitely nailed that element of the classic Giallo aesthetic. I watched enough of this trailer to know I will be checking it out when it releases August 25. You can read Bloody Disgusting's full article about That's A Wrap HERE.

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Playlist:

Ghost - Stay (single)

Blackbraid - Blackbraid II

QOTSA - In Times New Roman

Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh

Godflesh - Pure

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - PetroDragonic Apocalypse

Fen - Monuments to Absence

Fen - Epoch

Drab Majesty - Careless

Drab Majesty - The Demonstration

Final Light - Eponymous

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre

Forhist - Eponymous

Type O Negative - October Rust

Type O Negative - World Coming Down

Cocksure - Be Rich

INXS - Kick

Tennis System - Technicolor Blind

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

It's been a minute since I handled the Bound deck, so I tapped into it for this morning's Pull:

• Knight of Pentacles - The Will as applied to Matter; Fire/Earth

• Knight of Wands - The Will as applied to Will; Fire/Fire 

• Page or Princess of Wands - Matter applied to Will; Earth/Fire

That's a lot of wink-wink about my Will, eh? I read this as a reminder to be present and apply patience, lest my Will, pulled taut, snap and leave me rudderless for a while. Long story short, I need a reset in order to carry on.

 

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Blackbraid II is Out!

 

From Blackbraid II, out today. You can order your copy from Blackbraid's Bandcamp HERE. I woke up this morning and I'm already on my second run-through on the album. Absolutely fantastic. 

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Watch:

I'm not really a huge Blumhouse Horror guy. I mean, some of their stuff lands pretty well, but even those that do often feel at least partially flat. So, I've never watched The Nun, despite some interest generated when I heard the Colors of the Dark podcast say, "There's kind of a little Fulci movie buried in The Nun." Whether the overall film fails, hearing something like that makes it seem like watching the film would have to be worthwhile. Yet, it's been almost five years since its release, and I continue to abstain. Now there's a sequel, and I wonder if maybe that will finally prompt me to check that first one out.

 

I'm not trying to sound too cool for school here; there's nothing 'wrong' with Bllumhouse Horror. In fact, hell, they're pretty much singlehandedly responsible for keeping the genre afloat in big-box theatres in the early 10s. The first Insidious was a HUGE buoy for the post-torture porn theatrical Horror release, and through subsequent flicks like The Conjuring, Sinister, et al, Blumhouse has proven Horror to be a viable genre for theatres to continue to invest in, which is a good thing no matter how you cut it. Sometimes I feel like we're thIS close to Marvel being the only game in town - now that scares me. Anyway, as usual, I'm really overthinking whether or not I should watch The Nun, which is currently streaming on Max.

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Sky:

It's been difficult for me to keep up with a lot of stuff I want to watch, and I've barely logged more than a couple hours on Puppet Combo's Stay Out of the House, because all I really want to do right now is sit in my backyard at night, drink beer and stare at the sky. So, I thought I'd try and share some of that here. 

This shot comes courtesy of K, who is even more enraptured by the phenomenon of having personalized access to such grandeur. As a native and life-long Angeleno until last August, it's easy to see how this would blow her away; in LaLaLand, there is no 'big sky;' your view is polluted by nothing but buildings, lights, billboards, etc. I don't want to take that away from L.A. - it is a city, and you go there for city things. Given the choice of staring at the Egyptian Theatre or the sky it occupies, I'll take the theatre. L.A.'s problem, like all problems, is that the ratio is out of whack.

But staring at the sky here at night, it's amazing to see the wonder that shines in K's eyes while we lay on our recently acquired gravity chairs (best investment!), sip our nightly poisons and just drink it all in with our eyes. This has given me a completely new perspective on a lot of things, and it's definitely helped mellow me a bit more of late. Hard to be high-strung when you're staring at the night sky.

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Playlist:

Forhist - Eponymous

Testament - The New Order

Reel Vile Podcast - Queer Horror Week 3: Knight + Heart

Chamber of Screams, Clement Panchout & Mxxn - Murder House (Original Puppet Combo Soundtrack)

Drug Church - Hygiene

Mammon XV - Bleeding in Excess (single)

Pharmakon - Bestial Burden

Code Orange - Underneath

The Raveonettes - Raven in the Grave

Cash Money - Who Killed the Blues (single)

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Card:

• Ten of Swords: Ruin

• XIII: Death

• XX: The Aeon

Lots of big ideas today, and they're breaking down the rational in the face of actually implementing them. 

Regarding Ten of Swords, I wanted to throw in something from Crowley's Book of Thoth: "The number Ten, Malkuth, as always, represents the culmination of the unmitigated energy of the idea. It shows reason run mad, ramshackle riot of soulless mechanism; it represents the logic of lunatics and (for the most part) of philosophers. It is reason divorced from reality."

I see bad information and dreams of grandeur that tempt away from the one path forward. This is all writing stuff, and I'm really picking up what the Cards are putting down today, as I draw in closer to writing the finale to the new novel. 

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Floating into the Night Reissued!

 

I'm sure I've posted this here at some point in the past, but it felt like the right thing to do this morning. From The Ravenonettes PERFECT 2011 album Raven in the Grave, this has long been one of my favorite songs by the band. That guitar just breaks my heart in the best way possible!!!

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Watch:

Sacred Bones just announced a new edition of Julee Cruise's 1989 album Floating Into the Night, her collaboration album with Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch. If you know the record, you know it's HUGE for Twin Peaks fans, as several of the tracks here went on to populate the soundtrack to the original two seasons of Twin Peaks. To promote the re-release, Sacred Bones produced this charming little video:

 

You can order a copy HERE; I was able to snag the Pink and Black Galaxy Vinyl, although I am uncertain if I qualified for the poster. Either way, I'm happy as hell to finally have this on wax without having to pay for an original pressing on eBay.

 

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NCBD Addendum:

On a lark, I picked up the first issue of Bliss on Tap Publishing's new series Killing Hope. I was not disappointed.

Written by Josh Barbee and Maloney, with art by Alex Cormack, who I was familiar with from 2020's Aquatic Horror mini-series Sea of Sorrow, Killing Hope starts out as a thriller then veers into what I'm guessing is going to be full-on Horror territory. It's a woman on the run from seemingly unstoppable forces, and I can't wait to read more!

Bliss on Tap is new to me, but a quick gander at their website shows they've got quite a few titles under their belt, with seemingly something for everybody.

 

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Playlist:

Blut Aus Nord - 777: Cosmosophy

Principles of Geometry - Lazare

Roxy Music - Eponymous

Colors of the Dark Podcast - Episode 61: The Boogeyman

Chamber of Screams, Clement Panchout & Mxxn - Murder House (Original Puppet Combo Soundtrack)

The Sword - Warp Riders

Faetooth - Remnants of the Vessel

M83 - Saturdays = Youth

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Card:

• Ace of Disks 

• Two of Swords: Peace

• Prince of Swords - The airy aspect of Air, or conflict with intellect

Resolving issues with spending money leads to further resolution of internal conflict. I think this is a tit-for-tat response to my current state of continual distraction. The internet is both a powerful tool and a siren that calls me away from my work on a regular basis. Fighting this over the last couple days has led to a huge breakthrough in my work. I was stuck on a final act, but I believe I now have it well underway and it's better than I first imagined!

 

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The Cramps Live Performance!!!

MAJOR thanks to Simon G for posting this on his youtube channel, which you can check out and subscribe to HERE. If you dig the Cramps, it's a win-win. And with a set list and attire that, while pretty spot-on for The Cramps, seems especially strategic to alarm a television broadcast company, this is one for the ages. 

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NCBD:

Really looking forward to today's NCBD. Here's why:

I'm loving Jeff Lemire and  Gabriel Hernandez Walta's Phantom Road so far. Stories that include a slip into any kind of 'between place' always hit a certain harmonic with me, and this one's taking that idea and really doing something different with it. 

Pat O'Malley's Popscars is in Comic Stores and you're missing out if you're not reading it. Why? Check out my interview with Pat HERE to find out. 

Another "Before the Fall" one shot, however, like last week's Heralds of Apocalypse, this one is written by one of the main X-architects, so I'm in. 

 

This book just continues to delight me. 

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Watch:

I rewatched Moorhead and Benson's 2014 film Spring this past Monday evening. Wow. I hadn't seen this one since before I knew who Moorhead and Benson were, and looking back on it after watching and rewatching their other movies, I couldn't remember very much about Spring other than the basic set-up, the location, and that both K and I really liked it when we watched it back in, probably 2016.

 

All the performances are fantastic, and just seeing Vinny Curran and Jeremy Gardner in the opening ten minutes or so was a treat, as was hearing talk about "Shitty Carl." I need to track this one down on Blu-Ray, as I'm hoping there will be a making of or commentary track, as I find myself really wanting to know how they made this. I'm kind of assuming they did a lot of the filming guerilla style, but who knows? Moorhead and Benson continue to prove they are two of the best filmmakers working today, regardless of whether they have a budget or not.

 

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Playlist:

Flying Lotus - Yasuke

Blut Aus Nord - Disharmonium - Undreamble Abysses

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - PetroDragonic Apocalypse

Blackbraid - Blackbraid I

Spotlights - Seance EP

Greg Puicato - Child Soldier: Creator of God

Secret Chiefs 3 - Le mani destre recise degli ultimi uomini

Secret Chiefs 3 - Book of Horizons

Sepultura - Chaos A.D.

Sepultura - Schizophrenia

Sepultura - Arise

Godflesh - Purge

QOTSA - In Times New Roman

Ike & Tina Turner - Live! The World of Ike & Tina

Pastor T.L. Barrett & the Youth for Christ Choir - Like a Ship (Without a Sail)

Christopher Cross - Ride Like the Wind (single)

Bria - Cuntry Covers Vol. 2

Orville Peck - Pony

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Card:

• IV The Emperor 

• Ace of Wands

• Two of Disks: Change

Draw on strong, established resources (practices?) to enact a breakthrough with Will, but don't expect it to last just because it happens once. Will, as with everything else in the Universe, is fluid, coming and going depending on millions of variables. Those variables are actually what rule us, The Emperors of all life, but especially those humans who try and find a window into their own internal operating systems.

 

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New Noise

 

Besides just being an awesome track, if you're watching FX's The Bear, you're probably picking up what I'm putting down.

From 1998's The Shape of Punk to Come, a veritable classic of that era.
 

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Watch:

Easily my favorite show at the moment, FX's The Bear returned recently and K and I just caught up by rewatching season one. 

This is the most "Chicago" anything I've ever seen. I know these people - Richie Jerimovich is one of my best friends, Cicero (Oliver fucking Platt!) is every other middle-aged man I met through friends and family in the 80s - I mean, it's freaking uncanny. It's also one of the most honest narratives about loss, drive and passion I've ever seen. 

           

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Read:

I'm about 100 pages into my re-read of Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart is a Chainsaw. If you're a Horror fan and you haven't read this, you're missing out on your new favorite novel:

Chainsaw's protagonist, Jade Daniels, is one of the most relatable and magnetic final girls of all time. Also, what a wonderful experience, reading a book that puts you so deep inside the mind of a High School kid who is obsessed with Horror, specifically Slashers, so much so that she interprets the arrival of a new girl at her high school in Proofrock, ID as the arrival of a Final Girl and the beginning of her town's own Slasher Cycle. There are reasons historic to the town that prompt this theory, but as SGJ is so damn good at, we're so awash in Jade's inner thoughts that we're never quite sure if she's just a bored and obsessed teenager or if there's actually something to what she's saying to anyone who will listen. 

Can't wait to finish this and go directly into the sequel, this year's Don't Fear the Reaper!

 

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Playlist:

Ruby the Hatchet - Fear Is a Cruel Master

Various - Twin Peaks (Music from the Limited Event Series)

Ruby the Hatchet - Planetary Space Child

Screaming Females - Desire Pathway

God is LSD - Spirit of Suicide

Jim Williams - Possessor OST

Radiohead - OK Computer

The Body - No One Deserves Happiness

A001 - Necro (single)

Flying Lotus - Los Angeles

Flying Lotus - Yasuke

Ariel - Molten Young Lovers

Witchfinder - Hazy Rites

Perturbator - Dangerous Days

Forhist - Eponymous

The Body - I Shall Die Here/Earth Triumphant

Secret Chiefs 3 & Traditionalists - Le mani destre recise degli ultimi uomini

Fear Factory - Demanufacture

Rein - Reincarnated

Grimes - Art Angels

Gram Rabbit - Music to Start a Cult To

Wilco - Sky Blue Sky

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - PetroDragonic Apocalypse

Sylvaine - Nova

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Card:

• Ace of Disks - Breakthrough in Earthly concerns

• Seven of Disks - Failure - A difficult period in modern life

• Princess of Disks - Fortification; Frugal

All Disks? Well, this really splits the difference between warning and encouragement, but I get the overall gist, just hope it's not too late - STOP SPENDING MONEY!!!

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Duration:

I've come up with a better way to post my 'time card' here. Check this out:

Didn't take me much time either, which is good, because when I instituted this a few weeks back, it quickly became apparent I was spending time on reporting that I could have been spending on actually writing. I've known people who do things like this instead of write - it can have a pretty negative impact on the process overall.

As for the time, it's still not where I want it. I took yesterday off completely so I could edit the new episode of The Horror Vision - up in the widget to the right at the top of the page - and hang with K. Another important thing to remember in all this, is to maintain a life/work balance. Considering I worked 40 hours last week at the day job and recorded and edited a podcast, 15 hours isn't bad.

But I need more. 

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The Last Temptation of Read

From Lard's 1990 album The Last Temptation of Reid. Pretty sure the titular Reid - the co-owner of Chicago Trax who recorded the band's first EP - came into the pizza place where Mr. Brown and I worked in High School. Weird anecdote, but one I can't help but think of whenever I throw this record on.

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NCBD:

Speaking of Temptations to Read, this is my biggest NCBD Pull in some time. Let's get into what I'm bringing home:

I'm going to be dropping off Ghost Rider fairly soon. I don't know, this one just isn't doing for me what it did about half the time at the onset. I can really feel Marvel building up their Midnight Sons line, introducing a lot of new characters, bringing back older iterations, and building out the world of monsters that lurks in its underbelly. You'd think that as a Horror fan, that would work for me, but I just feel like it's a sanitized Horror, and that's disappointing. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'll read to the end of this current storyline and realize they're building something great, but all the books over the last year that have contributed to that - Moon Knight, that Crypt of Shadows one shot, the crap they did with Man-Thing a few years ago, none of it feels substantive.

I'm definitely digging this deeper dive into the Last Ronin world. 

So, after reading the first 'season' of Red Room, not reading the second, and then picking up the first issue of the third, I'm still digging this book. My pass on that second installment had more to do with trimming the Pull List and diverging from the fairly disturbing subject matter - which, as I've pointed out here previously, is very much offset by Piskor's Ed Crumb-like art style - and not due to any perceived failure on the book's part. Quite the contrary - each issue continues to seduce me with the social mystery that surrounds this strange, underground world of dark web murder rooms, cryptocurrency, and psychopaths. Of particular note this week, this homage cover to Charles Burns's Black Hole comic just blows me away.

I feel like it's been months since I read the first two issues of The Seasons Have Teeth, even though it's only been a few weeks. Can't wait to see where this is going. The anthropomorphizing of the actual seasons into monsters is just too damn cool to miss, especially when those monsters are rendered as visually strange and beautiful as series artist Sebastián Cabrol has made them.

The third and final one shot to welcome in the Fall of X era, the first two books - Sons of X and First Strike both constituted a huge letdown. We're talking Trial of Magneto level bad. Being that those books were not written by current X-scribes and this one is, I'm holding out hope this one justifies reading.

 

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Playlist:

Blut Aus Nord - The Work Which Transforms God

Rein - Reincarnated

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction

Lard - The Last Temptation of Reid

The Jesus Lizard - Liar

Cocksure - Be Rich

Lustmord - Dark Matter

Godflesh - Post Self

God is LSD - Spirit of Suicide

Anthrax - Persistence of Time

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Damn the Torpedoes

        

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Card:

• 9 of Disks: Gain - Yesod again, so imagination and reflection, and enjoying the satisfaction that comes with that. Worded in the grimoire as "Self Satisfaction," which automatically puts me in mind of hubris, the obvious point of the Pull when you take the following two cards in.

• 3 of Swords: Sorrow - Directly from the Grimoire, "Paired with Disks can point to problems w/ work;" "Let thing develop before making another one;" "Intense passion to create but doing so is problematic."

• 7 of Disks: Failure - A difficult period in Earthy life

Well, what a cheery Pull for today! Seriously, this obviously warns against a sneaky inclination I've experienced to try to deviate one or two days a week to work on another languishing project. I'm so close to a final first draft on the current one, best not to deviate. Head on to the finish line!

 

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Duration:

Better.

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God is a Maggot Brain

 

I went to the movies last night to see God Is A Bullet. My viewing experience was uneven - I'll be trying to unpack that below - but one scene about halfway through won me over, and a large part of the reason why was its use of Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain." 

The first time I heard this, I was on LSD in high school. Hanging out at a friend's. When this came on, everything just kind of stopped. The entire album is fantastic, but it's one where there is such a hard line between the eponymous opener and everything that comes after it; one is dark and meditative, the other is uproarious and celebratory and sometimes just completely insane in that crazy, George Clinton way. But it works. Boy does it work.

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Watch:

As I mentioned above, last night I went to a 9:35 PM showing of Nick Cassavettes new film God Is A Bullet. I posted this a while back, but for the sake of the current conversation, here's the trailer and below I've basically pasted my Letterbxd review verbatim:

 

What I wrote last night directly after seeing the film:

I'm still unpacking how I feel about this one. First, some of the ugliest subject matter and subjects I've seen in a long time. Almost to the point of contrivance. This is a well-made film, and the performances are intense. However, I'm just not sure about the script. This is an adaptation of a novel by Boston Teran. There are quite a few things in the film I am fairly certain work better in the novel, but also, I (maybe mistakenly) get a "Bob Sagat" vibe from the film. What I mean by that is, if you've ever had the unfortunate experience of seeing Sagat's stand-up, he goes so over the top vulgar in an obvious effort to distance himself from being 'The full house guy,' it ruins any chance of him being anything but that person he tries so hard to unmake. In that same way, I feel like maybe the director's motive was to make the starkest, most horribly disgusting film he could just to blot out being known as 'the guy who directed 'the notebook.'

After sleeping on the film:

I'm not sure how much of my opinion has changed, but the way I'm processing this definitely has. Which is the mark of a good film. But it's not quite that simple...

In combing through this in my subconscious, I think I've discovered something about myself. That sheer ugliness on display in God is a Bullet, both content and characters, actually scares the living sh*t out of me. The subject matter is disgusting - the scariest, most disgusting idea at play in the world of humans. And the costuming and make-up likewise scare me. There's something about people with heavily tattooed faces that produces fear from an almost atavistic place in my brain. I remember having a conversation about this once as a bartender, and the person speaking with me about it summed it up as such:

"You see someone with ink on their face, I mean, like a lot of ink, like spiderwebs and shit, that person gives absolutely zero fucks, and probably has nothing in this life to lose. To tattoo your face like that, it sends a very clear message."

Obviously, I'm paraphrasing a bit here, but not by much. Also, I don't mean to say that anyone who has facial tattoos is a sicko, but the practice definitely sends that message, so at some point they were thinking they wanted the world to fear them on sight...

That element of contrivance I mentioned when thinking about it last night? Now I'm wondering if Cassavettes - in what I would call a pretty deft maneuver - wasn't trying to make a more 'Earthly' version of the Cenobites, because suddenly, there's something very Clive Barker about a lot of this film to me. It's long, though, and that gets lost in the experience. There's a grittiness here that, although Barker's stuff is grotesque and Horrific, has a fantasy underlining that softens the blow. God is a Bullet is real all the way through, so there's nothing fantastical to soften its blow.

Anyway, I've debunked a similar prejudice before with other Horror movies I slighted or ignored. Specifically, Catholic Devil Possession flicks. Reflecting on my snobbery toward a recent flick like Prey For the Devil was what catalyzed the epiphany. Prey looked 'dumb' to me in the way I remember thinking 2012's The Devil Inside looked dumb. But did they really look stupid, or is that a defense mechanism? I'm not religious, wasn't raised Catholic, and the textures of that stuff are as far away from my daily life/belief system as possible. Yet, William Friedkin's The Exorcist is the scariest film I know. I always say, after I watch that film, I believe in the devil for three days. So maybe that Catholic Possession stuff really gets under my skin, so I turn up my nose and walk by with an air of superiority - without watching what I'm criticizing - previously oblivious to the fact that what I'm really doing is cowering at the prospect of another flick that might terrify me the way Friedkin's does. Same too, then, for God is a Bullet, because elements of this film frighten me to my core, even if I still do have some issues with the film's overall execution. And for clarity, it's not the Satanic Cult that frightens me, but the trafficking side of their operations.

Overall? Three stars and a heart, even if the heart may flicker on and off like a bad fluorescent bulb in a dingy motel on the border.

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Playlist:

Forhist - Eponymous

Fear Factory - Demanufacture

Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen

Holy Serpent - Endless

Ruby the Hatchet - Fear is a Cruel Master

Silent - Modern Hate

Uniform & The Body - Mental Wounds Not Healing

The Body - I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer

Ghost - Infestissumam

Drug Chuch - Hygiene

Funkadelic - Maggot Brain

 

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Card:

• Six of Swords: Science

• II: The High Priestess

• Queen of Cups

Harmonious thinking/interpretation comes from a co-mingling of influences opposite to my own today. In other words - and as usual, I take the insight here to be a direct commentary on my current writing project - I'm trying to write female characters and probably need to ask for a female's perspective on some things. That's something I would have done down the road anyway, however, I'm a little bit stuck and could probably do with an outside perspective. 

 

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