Well, the man was 78, so it's not super unexpected. That said, Suicide is very much the mega-influential American band that 98% of people don't know about. I'm not saying that to be pompous, it's just a shame that they achieved a broader spectrum of exposure. Then again, it's a shame, but not a surprise, because there is next to nothing overtly approachable about Suicide's music.
For some of us however, that in and of itself is an attribute. Henry Rollins had a statement earlier, and I'm sure his radio show this evening was dedicated to Mr. Vega. Rollins wrote an amazing column that talked about Suicide sometime last year in his weekly LA weekly column. If I can eventually find it online I'll post a link here. Needless to say, he had the perfect summation of how Suicide's music generally goes from confrontational and alienating to impactful and mesmerizing.
Mr. Vega did a lot of other music as well. This song, a collaboration with A.R.E. Weapons, is one of my favorites.
Safe passage to the other side Mr. Vega. You earned it.
Back in the early episodes of Drinking with Comics we had an episode that overlapped with one of the many local creator meetings that take place at Manhattan Beach's The Comic Bug and brought one Cassidy James up to speak on behalf of a comic he was kickstarting, Gun Up Paintball. I hadn't seen Cassidy in a while and ran into him a month or so ago during an event at the shop. He told me about a new comic he had waiting in the wings called Food For Thought and it sounded like a lot of fun to me; I'm so disgusted by the entire election but can't seem to stop following it (for the record I don't consider myself a liberal or a conservative - I don't want any of 'em in office, btw) and a book that poked fun at any of the candidates sounded right like it might be just what a lot of us need to blow off some steam at the seemingly endless campaign trail shenanigans that we've been choking on for months now. If this sounds good to you too give the video above a watch and contribute to the Kickstarter HERE if you can. I'd really like to see this book get up off the ground. With Cassidy's words and Livan Ivan Cornejo's art I think this could be a truly entertaining and timely book.
Almost every year without fail I stumble across a record that immediately announces itself as my favorite of the year. This certainty usually arises within the first song, which always makes the record feel that much more powerful. Yesterday I sought out Canada's Odonis Odonis and was immediately struck with the certainty that, while I have and will no doubt hear a lot of other amazing new music this year, Post Plague is going to be my #1 come year's end.
In his weekly column for LA Weekly sometime early last year Henry Rollins discussed how much fun he had shooting a new movie called The Last Heist. Now, I am a Rollins fan, but even moreso the director of this film turned out to be Mike Mendez, who is responsible for one of my all time favorite flicks The Convent back in the very early aughts. Mr. Mendez has not done a whole heck of a lot since then (not a criticism), so this news made me very excited. I waited for sometime, confused He Never Died* with the forthcoming film, and then dropped my guard.
And of course, then it hits. Played here in LA last weekend. Damn!
Fuck yeah! I really have to give Sunbather another chance, because ever since Mr. Brown sent me New Bermuda for my Birthday back in March, I have become increasingly infatuated with it.
Aside from the obvious fact that Gaimen named Morpheus's realm after the title of the album, doesn't this record - especially this song - sound exactly like Sandman reads?
The second Eagulls record caught me by a bit of a surprise; the band's 2014 eponymous debut is a frenetic celebration/re-appropriation of late 70s/early 80s Post-Punk sounds, most especially The Cure's Pornography. New record Ullages is considerably more down-tempo and depressing. In a GOOD way. Where the debut is still a bit more accessible Ullages is growing on me - not that I didn't like it to begin with, but it tends to usher in a bit of a Pall over my mood. Well, today was a completely rainy, overcast day in LA and as such this record fit perfect. Which reminded me they released a video recently that I hadn't gotten around to seeing.
Based on my historical music video preferences I should hate this.
I do not. I LOVE it.
I feel like Grimes just made a better version of Sucker Punch than ZS did.
I'm on the Debemur Mortimailing list and I found a link to this in my inbox today. The Blut Aus Nord circa The Work Which Transforms God influence is obvious but not overplayed. I need to hear more, but thus far I dig this.
@macafro first told me about Uncle Acid and the Dead Beats a couple of years ago. And they promptly fell off my radar. Well, a couple of months ago they popped back on my radar and became a a steady rotation in my daily life. Especially 2015's The Night Creeper album, and this song in particular!
...Is my choice for this week's edition of the Joup Friday Album. You can hear the album and read what I have to say about it on that link above, and you can watch the video for Oblivion below.
Simply put, I Love Fede Alvarez's 2013 continuation of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead SO MUCH that I would follow him to hell and back (Love Panic Attack!too). So when I heard about his new film Don't Breathe - although I'm bummed it's not another chapter in Mia's corner of the Evil Deadverse - I was stoked for another movie from him, especially one with such an awesome concept.
I heard this on Part Time Punks radio show on KXLU this afternoon while I was stuck in traffic - it was sandwiched between old Cocteau Twins and Isolation Ward. This is the only song on the bandcamp so far, with the album proper to be released in early June on Manifesto Records.
New Kills. 'Nuff said. Not a huge fan of these types of videos, but here I really like how and where they utilized their backgrounds.
June 3rd is the new record (pre-order here), which I've rabidly been waiting for since seeing them live for the first time last year at Pomona's Glass House. They're not playing LA on their current tour - San Francisco is the closest they're coming and as much as I'd LOVE to road trip up, that is not in the cards at the moment. But if they come near you go. Trust me.
Okay, can we agree that 2016 is a little bit out of control with the musician deaths? The legendary musician deaths?
Richard Lyons - I didn't actively know his name until last night. I was stranded in W. LA due to nightmare-level traffic, sitting at a Coffee Bean writing about Prince's death when the following text came through:
Much like a lot of Prince's later work I hadn't kept up with Negativeland in a while. The last piece I saw/heard was the Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak and that was in 2002 while recording at the wonderful Apocalypse Cowrecording studio in Montgomery, Illinois where proprietors the Brooks Brothers brought me up to speed on the then-latest NL project. But Negativeland's work takes time to appreciate and that's something I've had considerably less of over the fifteen years since. Even with a record store like the pretty much all-encompassing Amoeba relatively nearby I just haven't kept up. That however, does not change the fact that Negativeland - the group Mr. Lyons helped co-found, released a handful of albums that I did encounter in the past and that had enormous impact on my life, mind and art.
The first of these was Helter Stupid, which I seriously cannot recommend enough. That said, what Negativeland does isn't exactly music so you have to reasonably curate how and when you engage with it. Think of this more as media-splicing/sound collage with the intent of deprogramming some of the more residual and insidious modern day marketing shrapnel that gets lodged in our circuit boxes just by driving past billboards, catching a few moments of television while sitting in the dentist's waiting room or suffering through even a few small moments of terrestrial radio while in the office. Helter Stupid, in true NL fashion, samples the group's "breakout" track - I'd imagine they'd laugh at that - Christianity is Stupid. This made a HUGE impact on me at the time, and it's confrontational yet hilarious delivery very much influenced a project Mr. Brown and I did in the early 00s - C-Building Kids.
Brown took to the group even more than I did, and scooped up the group's descertation on the 'cola wars' and advertising in general, Dispepsi pretty much the day it came out. This one was in heavy rotation in our rehearsal space; at the time we were in a band called Schlitz Family Robinson that actively tried to incorporate strange recording techniques/samples/sonic detritus into our sound and Dispepsi opened up all kinds of new doors for us in that regard.
Richard Lyons and Negativeland helped further introduce me to new and left-of-center ideas for what 'music' can be, or maybe more appropriately what a band can be. Hearing about his death - and holy cow two other members of the band having also passed on since 2015 - has left me feeling a little bit older than even the Prince exodus did.
Read all about Richard Lyons in a great article on Consequence of Sound here and enjoy Christianity is Stupid below.
I almost posted something when I heard the news of Prince's death this morning but I stopped myself. I was at work, entering long strings of data into a spreadsheet and trying to jar myself awake by listening to Iron Maiden on my headphones. During the resultant trance-like state two things happened simultaneously: first, just as one song ended and another was about to begin I overhead two of my co-workers talking in a vague way about what sounded like a celebrity death. Second, a text bubble popped up on my phone. It was from my friend Ray. Without stopping my typing I looked down and saw this:
The two disparate streams of information collided in my mind and in total shock I said the following sentence very loudly, "What? Prince can't be dead!" I said this so loud that one of the girls who works in another department came over to see if I needed help. A few minutes later she left and another person from a department even farther away came over and gave me a hug. He was wearing purple, of all colors.
Now, I am not a the biggest Prince fan. But I am a Prince fan. Especially the Prince who helmed the Revolution for the iconic record/movie Purple Rain. As for his other music, there's lots I like and some I could never hear again and not care. As Tommy from Heaven Is An Incubator laments in his own post pertaining to this momentous loss for the music community, because of our age Prince's music was something of a backdrop to our generation's entire childhood. Growing up in the 80s Prince was EVERYWHERE, literally. And it wasn't just the songs he performed, it was also the material that he wrote for other performers: Sheila E., Sheena Easton, The Bangels, Morris Day, Stevie Nicks. As I got older the extremely unique sounds Prince made with his music followed me, often in sneaky or almost subconscious ways. The first song on Public Enemy's masterpiece Fear of A Black Planet, "Brothers Gonna Work It Out" is loaded with samples of Prince's guitar. Skinny Puppy's bleak and brilliant Last Rites has snippets of Prince's weird, over-flanged percussion laced throughout. Later still, one of my all-time favorite bands - Ween - covered Prince, lovingly lampooned him and downright homaged him on many, many occasions. But the older I became the more Prince's influence on my musical life remained peripheral; the cassette copy of Purple Rain that my cool, older cousin Jim gave me for Christmas the year it came out was worn out long ago and the only Prince I'd had in the collection through my thirties was a beat-up copy of Sign O' The Times on vinyl and a double-disc greatest hits my ex-wife had brought with her to our twelve year sharing of a music collection. When she moved out all that went away. Luckily though...
Every year from Memorial Day to Labor Day Hollywood Forever Cemetery hosts something called Cinespia - an organization that projects movies on the side of a mausoleum in the cemetery's enormous - and beautiful - grounds. Ray and I, along with several of our other friends, go to as many of these Saturday night screenings every year as possible. Two summers ago Cinespia showed Purple Rain. I hadn't seen it since the 80s and Ray's a fan so we went and it completely re-inspired me to love Prince. Again, not all his music, but for that album in particular. I've long said that when he's gone Prince would be remembered as probably the single greatest driving force in the Pop music of the 80s. After watching Purple Rain and then re-buying and binging on it hardcore for a few weeks I had an even deeper realization about this record:
As far as records go, Purple Rain is the Philosopher's Stone of the 80s.
Now, when I say Philosopher's Stone I need to quantify what I'm talking about. I've approached this concept previously but in less specific terms. Obviously in every decade or 'era' of music there are movements, fashions, trends and scenes. And somewhere within all those dark and incestuous nooks and crannies I believe there is one album that perfectly sums everything else up. For the 80s I would argue that album was Purple Rain. Prince's 1984 masterpiece is a microcosm of nearly everything musical that surrounds it; there's elements of Funk, Soul, New Wave, Metal (that serpentine guitar lick in Computer Blue? Those blast beats in the last third of Darling Nikki that I never noticed before I reengaged with it? Metal baby); Purple Rain has it all and what's more all of those seemingly disparate elements are perfectly synthesized into a coherent whole. That's the key. For perspective I've argued elsewhere that the 90's Philosopher Stone album was the Beastie Boys' Check Your Head, another synthesis of the musical world around it.
(Incidentally, I don't think we have enough distance from the 00s yet to determine what might be that era's Philosopher's Stone, but I'd also argue in a few years we might look back and say that because of the democratization and decentralization of music that particular era ushered in there actually might not be one).
With all of this said I need to end this diatribe before I become any more grandiose. Not possible you say? Believe me, it is. So to finish I will leave you with a video a friend showed me a couple years ago. This thing just blew me away. No matter how you feel about the musicians that are on stage to begin with, watch this all the way through because at approximately 3:28 this rendition of what might just be my favorite Beatles song becomes god-like. And Prince? Rest in Purple sir. Rest in Purple.
....is a new rotating column Grez started on Joup back in January. I picked up the thread this morning amidst reports of G-n-R's Las Vegas show by remembering the time in 1992 when Axl Rose cheated me out of 15 free concert tickets to see his band. Read about it here.
Luke Cage all the rage? Can't wait for Danny Rand? Well, watch Mike and I talk to the man writing 'em in Marvel's Power Man and Iron Fist. And check out Mr. Walker's website for a whole boatload of goodies!
While I've been secluded trying to finish the novel that does not want to be finished I've almost missed out on a bunch of great music. Luckily while writing this afternoon I threw on an old favorite and was inspired to check up on what Perturbator has been up to.
Good thing I did because the new record, The Uncanny Valley, drops in just about two weeks!
I cannot wait to get this, as it feels like I've been listening to Dangerous Days for years at this point (probably because, like Heavenisanincubator, I haven't been able to stop listening to it in voracious aural jags since Dangerous Days was released!). The Uncanny Valley is a sequel to DD, taking place 40 years down the road and set in Neo Tokyo. What a fantastic description for such visual music.
Check out She Moves Like a Knife and then high tail it over to the aforementioned best got-damned music blog in the megaverse for the official, 8-bit animated music video to yet another new track from The Uncanny Valley, this one titled Sentient. And go pre-order the album from Blood Music, the hardest working indie record label in the business!
Jonathan Barkandropped this in an article he recently wrote abut Ms. Wolfe over on Bloody Disgusting. He is not wrong about Chelsea Wolfe - she and her music are magnificent and deserve to be heard by fans of dark, mesmerizing music.
Two nights ago my cat Tom died. I've been wanting to post something here as a tribute but it is really hard to accomplish this without breaking down into complete woe. No other word for it but old school, quasi-biblical woe.
Tom was my guy. He was my best friend and he had my back in ways that absolutely amazed me and solidified the idea that he had a very human emotional intelligence, and that he felt about me exactly how I felt about him. No offense to Lily, who also died recently, or Baby who is happy living in Ohio now, but Tom was my favorite.
Tom died in my arms, on my living room floor. I had my cheek against his abdomen and actually felt his life leave his body. It was haunting and terrible and magnificent, to know that my best friend died in my arms, knowing that I loved him.
My girlfriend Kirsten is new to our life, but just as I have fallen so completely for her so too did Tom; he made it known from the moment they met that not only did he approve of her but that he loved her. And she loved him. She was there with Tom and I when he passed, and the connection I saw between them - especially at the end - was beautiful beyond most of what I have seen in this life.
I will miss Tom for the rest of my life. The following were the three things I played shortly after his passing to try and honor him. The first because it is the saddest song I know, the second because Tom is short for Thompson, as in Hunter S., and the third because, well, it should be obvious.
I've really only just begun reading the first volume of Whispers From the Abyss from 01 Publishing but I'll stay straight off it's fantastic. Two of the stories in it - Nation of Disease: The Rise and Fall of a Canadian Legend by Jonathan Sharp and Death Wore Greasepaint by Josh Finney are probably among my top five Lovecraft-inspired stories ever. And now 01 has the second volume out digitally and are kickstartingthe print edition. If you're a Lovecraft fan, a fan of dark or Weird fiction, or just a fan of great writing this is a well-worthy cause. AND might I add that 01 has procured none other than Laird Barron for an entry into this second volume.
Mr. Brown sent this to me on Twin Peaks day and I'm late getting around to watching the entire thing (yeah, at a whopping 6 minutes and some change this would'a kept me up all night, right?). I am SO going to make this. And I absolutely love the idea of a horror-themed cooking show, so I just did what I'm going to suggest you do - if you dig this subscribe to the Homicidal Homemaker's youtube channel!
There is A LOT to love about the new album from The Callas, a band whose previous record Am I Vertical? made my best of list in 2013. Returning to produce is Bad Seeds/Grinderman member Jim Sclavunos on a record that totally threw me for a loop at first listen. Not that there's not some sonic threads that pull Half Kiss Half Pain and Am I Vertical? together, but this is definitely not a case of a band sticking with a producer and adhering to a 'sound' that they created together. Half Kiss Half Pain still has those gloriously jagged garage rock leanings, but they're tempered with a nuance and sophistication that gives the record an incredible sense of dynamism.
I get the impression from juxtaposing these two most recent records (I am completely unfamiliar with the four previous LPs the band has - going to remedy that real soon) that The Callas are very much about moving forward, in the way that a band like, say Liars is also. Which is going to be a very good thing for those of us that follow their career.
So if you dig this, you know, buy Half Kiss Half Pain and follow their career.
Screen shot courtesy of Tara Cushing's youtube channel
Mr. Brown sent me a sampling of what some of the fine folks who attended these reunion shows have put up on youtube. This user, Tara Cushing, has an wonderfully extensive documentation of all three nights so check out her youtube page here. They make me smile. Again, I simply cannot describe how happy I am to see one of my all-time favorite bands back together again - I'm literally tearing up just writing this.
SUPER happy to be able to promote this. I've gone two other times and both were fantastic - really looking forward to this year! If you're unfamiliar with the H.P. Lovecraft Film Fest and are a Lovecraft fan you can read my review of the first one I attended hereto get an idea of the level that this fest takes it to. And as good as that initial experience was, my subsequent one was about ten times better, so that's really saying something. This fest improves exponentially with every passing year. And honestly, it's just a great round-up of Weird and Horror culture, as well as being a great time to boot, whether you're an HPL fan or not.
Among the vendors this year I happen to know that Josh Finney and Kat Rocha will be representing the wonderful 01 Publishing. Josh and Kat were our guests on the live stream of Drinking w/ Comics#31 last night and they were awesome! 01's line-up is kind of a dream come true for Lovecraft/Weird/Cyberpunk fans and if that sounds great or even the littlest bit titillating, I suggest you make an intro to their world with Josh and Patrick McEvoy's Casefile: Arkham "Nightmare on the Canvas", which made it into my top comics of 2015 and is an exhaustively researched mash-up of Lovecraft mythos and Noir. Another great entry to the 01 world would be the Lovecraft-inspired prose anthologies Whispers From the Abyss, volume 2 of which is available in digital right now here or can be pre-ordered in print here. I only just got my hands on Vol. 1 and it looks fantastic and features stories by Josh, Kat, Silvia Moreno-Garcia as well as many others. And Vol. 2 features a story by one of my favorite writers ever, the inimitable Mr. Laird Barron.
The woman interviewing them clearly has no prior knowledge of them. I'm sure that was the case with most of the people at/watching the grammy's. That makes this all the better.
Thanks to my friend John the Viking - if he hadn't shared this clip with me I would have never seen it.
Papa kind of reminds me a bit of a less hostile Mike Patton circa Angel Dust era as he subtly makes fun of the interviewer's questions. Favorite quote: "You want to win to win prizes for what you do."
YES! I'll admit, I have a fondness for Punisher: War Zone. But this... this is PERFECT. He should have always been intro'd as a supporting character, and the dynamic this will add to Matt Murdock, as he attempts to discern where the line is and if he can cross it... man I cannot wait! And I'll be damned if he doesn't look exactly like an amalgam of all my favorite iterations of Frank Castle in the picture above!
...and although I wasn't there and won't be at the next two nights, Jambase has the entire thing mapped out, photographed and even some video! Check it out!
Here's one of my favorites that I was happy to see that they played last night.
You can read my thoughts and subsequently listen to Reality here. This is actually, I think, considerably more than just me talking about my favorite Bowie record. This piece is the product of four long weeks of contemplating what the icon meant to me and why I have previously always gravitated more toward his later works.
Yesterday I woke up and found that my cat Lily had died during the night. I found her at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to the bedrooms. She was laying in front of the outside door like she and my other cat Tom like to do when it's hot - like it is this week - in order to catch a breeze from the gap between door and frame.
I loved Lily. She was the first cat to ever really accept me and she made me a cat person, 100%. Her acceptance of me seemed to make other cats okay with me, whereas before they kinda knew I'd grown up a dog person and held it against me (at least the two or three cats that had been in my life before that seemed to).
Also, she had incredible toe fur.
Later, in Lily's honor I jammed Wild Horses by The Rolling Stones. That influenced my pick for this week's Joup Friday Album, so instead of reiterating it here I thought I'd play the song that Pete Townsend wrote for Lily, many years before she was born, anticipating her legacy of drool, off-key yeowling and, well, an awful lot of intolerance. As she got older Lily's ability to interact diminished and she just kind of seemed as though she dislike EVERYONE most of the time. Except those quiet moments where she would come to me and want to be petted rigorously for a few moments before growing tired of my company and running off in a huff. I loved Lily's hate - it was adorable and I think helped keep her alive and well these last few years of her pretty incredible 16 year run.
Godspeed Lily; wherever you go from here I leave you with Hunter S. Thompson's words that seem to fit you so well, "Take no guff from these swine!"
I'd thought I had already posted this, but apparently not. A friend shared the trailer with me several weeks ago on social media and I was immediately taken with it. The shrill, dissonant suspense the trailer cultivates makes me think that, regardless of the fact that The Witch is now getting some major hype - mostly because news outlets have latched onto the fact that the Satanic Temple are touting this as a big deal - it will still outreach my expectations.
"The Witch is not only a powerful cinematic experience, but also an impressive presentation of Satanic insight that will inform contemporary discussion of religious experience. Yet, The Witch is more than a film; it is a transformative Satanic experience that, in its call to arms, becomes an act of spiritual sabotage and liberation from the oppressive traditions of our forefathers."
Wow. One can only hope. I'm not a, ahem, Satanist, though as far as religions go I'd choose that over most others - believe in and worship yourself? Better than a flying spaghetti monster - but I definitely think our world would benefit from anything that undermines the current global war between two extreme and downright dangerous religions (in their most frenzied forms that is): Christianity and Islam.
I JUST found out that the new Deftones album, Gore, drops April 8th.
Fuck yes!!!
Also found out they released the first single today. Went to look for it and it had been taken down almost everywhere I looked. But here it is and it is, as usual, awesome!
The new Drinking w/ Comics is up! King Harbor Brewing from Redondo Beach very generously sponsored this episode where we welcome Jenny Wenger, Curtis Fortier and Chris Saunders to talk about their recent performances in The Comic Bug's Development Hell performance of Joss Whedon's abandoned Wonder Woman script!
Listening to The Self-Titled Show on KXLU while driving home from work tonight I heard this song and it just sank straight through my center mass. Wow. Reminds me of the first time I heard The Vanishing Kids, back at Chicago's now defunct long-time club Neo (sad face). The entire record by Drab Majesty - who I am going to try like hell to go and see on March 5th at The Smell ( this Saturday's gig opening for Black Queen is, of course, sold out) - is just fantastic and is available on the band's bandcamp here. Digital copies are limited to 300 copies so if you dig this, grab it NOW!
In the forthcoming Drinking w/ Comics #30 one of our guests was/is Curtis Fortier, stand-up comedian, writer, actor... jack of all entertaining trades on infinite Earths. He dropped a mention of this web series he wrote and starred in and I finally got around to watching it this evening. I love it and can't wait for more.
I forgot to post this here when it went up. Ruben Gerard, creator of the wonderful Penny Strikes is the guest, Monkish, Anchor and Inland Empire beer is consumed and a good time talking about an artist's process, comics and caricatures is had by all!
I had a Bowie party this past Saturday night. Good friends, a bunch of alcohol and nothing but Bowie. It was wonderful.
The highlight of the night was my good friend Grez picking up my now long-neglected acoustic parlor guitar and leading a sing-along of Space Oddity, Ziggy Stardust, and - of course - Heroes. It was wonderful that Grez was able to time his trip to land smack dab in the middle of this (I picked him up from LAX at 8:15 and the party began pretty much as soon as we got back to my crib.)
It has now been a week since David Bowie passed and I'm still in a funk. I'm not the super-fan that has every record, knows every lyric, every everything about Bowie. His importance to me has evolved over the course of my life, from the guy on the classic rock radio station in the car whose songs I dug, to the enigma that surfaced in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (that's when I became really interested) to the man who made one of my all-time favorite records in 2003 - Reality. That led to the full-on, "Now I start buying a bunch of his music" phase and, well, here we are. Still hard to believe the Starman is gone.
My good friend John hit me with this last night but I was stuck in the editing suite finishing Dw/C #30. Watched this first thing this morning and well, I can honestly say I CANNOT WAIT!!!
It's hard to look at Bowie at times during this video. Upon the release of the Black Starvideo/short film last month I found myself slightly unsettled at how he looked as though he had aged 30 years in the three years since we'd last since him in the videos released for The Next Day. After news of his death first thing this morning I learned of the release of another video after Black Star just a few days ago on the 7th of this month. Lazarus is, as this AV Club article so succinctly posits, a farewell.
The wherewithal and sheer force of will to complete make an album as a final statement, knowing you are dying, is unbelievable. I'm reminded of author Jay Lake, how he blogged his own death realtime, narrating his battle with cancer. As horrible as this is it is also amazing, as death is most inevitably a part of life, and a part that we know little about- emotionally, mentally - because it is private, and hard, and difficult to discuss, even with ourselves. Finally David Bowie died as he lived - bold, up front and totally owning his situation, converting it to Art.
If that's not one of the best ways to go I've ever heard I don't know what is. We often look to musicians and artists as inspiration, role models for how to live. Knowing that I will one day die I hope I can do so with at least a modicum of the dignity and creative force that Bowie died with. It's truly magnificent.
This particular arrangement is, in my opinion at least, the perfected version of this song.
Sad day. The Man Who Feel to Earth has returned to where he came from. As is often the case when we lose an artist we love we binge their music, scrambling suddenly to acquire some of the albums we may have put off buying. In Bowie's case there are SO MANY I don't have them all, you probably don't either (although some of you most certainly do). If you're looking to celebrate the life of this wonderful, wonderful artist by adding to your Bowie collection I strongly recommend purchasing his 2003 album Reality and the accompanying double live disc from that tour.
Reality is BY FAR my favorite Bowie album - and that's saying something because I really like Bowie. It is the most original and unique of his work, in my opinion. The live disc is 33 career-spanning tracks, many of which have been re-worked, re-arranged and re-vitalized. Loving the Alien is a great example of that, but there's also an unbelievable arrangement on Earthling's I'm Afraid of Americans and Outside's Motel.
...at 7:30 PM, streaming Live from Manhattan Beach's The Comic Bug, the best damn comic shop in So Cal! Our guests will be several of the cast of the Bug's recent live table read of Joss Whedon's Wonder Woman script. D w/C is excited to welcome Jennifer Wenger - to you that's Wonder Woman! - Curtis Fortier - aka Steve Trevor - and sound designer extraordinaire Chris Saunders (also upright bass player for the inimitable Thirsty Crows and the man who designed this beee-ooo-tiful flyer!)
If you haven't watched/heard the read you can watch it on youtube here or on iTunes. Steaming of Dw/C issue #30 will be available on the Dw/C youtube channel here, or like us on Facebook and watch for the live link to magically appear around 7:30 PM on Monday, January 18th.
...is one of the best damn horror stories I've read in some time that doesn't have the name "Laird Barron" on it somewhere. Mr. Ballingrud is the real deal and what he does in 60 something pages is worth 500 of a lot of other horror writers. What's he do you ask?
Gives me the heebie goddamn jeebies, that's what! The Visible Filth plays with that special place horror doesn't always know how to get to, the modern world; it is a story that makes small incisions in our technological awareness of ourselves, and once inside lays eggs of paranoia and revulsion. To borrow the name of Mr. Ballingrud's publisher and use it as an exclamation, This is Horror.
Also, many thanks to Justin Steele for the indirect recommendation.
