It's been interesting to keep track of what music I wake up with in my head:
Playlist from the 5th:
Deftones - Koi No Yokan
Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I Am
Black Sabbath - Eponymous
Childish Gambino - Because the Internet
The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicenter
Godflesh - Streetcleaner Live at Roadburn 1989
Twin Peaks Playlist: Ssn 3 and Beyond ST
Bells into Machines - Your Crime Scene E.P.
Opeth - Still Life
Interesting to note that all of these except Arctic Monkeys, Sabbath and Devil's Blood were truncated listens; I had a distracting day yesterday and couldn't find music that quite fit my mindset, so I jumped around a lot.
The Twin Peaks playlist is of my own devising, something I assembled only a couple weeks into the airing of last years third season, before the OSTs came out. There's Chromatics, a Lynch/John Neff track from Blue Bob that wasn't used in the show but fits aesthetically, and - among other things - a fan's slowed down version of Muddy Magnolia's American Woman that I actually prefer to the one on the score:
Card of the day:
Blocked/thwarted Will. Can save time and energy by knowing what not to pursue.
Woke up repeatedly with this little ditty in my head:
So a new Cloverfield hit Netflix last night - awesome! I didn't have time to watch it before bed but I'll remedy that this week. Trailer makes it look as though it may tie into at least one of the others, which I'd love.
There's a video I watched last year I'll have to post on here at some point, explains how the other two are tied together by an online ARG. Really interesting.
Playlist yesterday:
Sam Cooke: One Night Stand! Live at the Harlem Square Club (thanks Sonny!)
A Place to Bury Strangers - Never Coming Back single (pre-release track for upcoming album)
ttt (Crosses) - Eponymous
Soul Coughing - Ruby Vroom
ZZ Top - Tres Hombres (about five times in a row)
U2 - War
Worm is Green - Automagic
Joy Division - Closer
Card of the day:
The fiery aspect of Fire; purest manifestation of Fire in the deck - strength but unchecked can be imbalanced and disastrous. This tells me that either my passion, intuition or creative energy (I'm limiting interpretations based on my current situations/temperament) may be flustered and threaten to boil over today. Coincidence I'm heading back to work after three days off? Maybe, maybe not. My gig is fairly low maintenance, when you adjust to a certain, background-radiation level of stress that is probably common to many jobs, so I also wonder if this is a nod toward later in the day when I write; there are currently two projects fighting for space in my head and that can sometimes lead to an over exuberance that can grind productivity to a confused halt.
The final of our three beautiful mornings sleeping late. It's been much-needed and glorious. Now that I'm up and moving - after spending the last two hours resuming my original issue-by-issue re-read of Preacher I left hanging back in late August - I'm starting our musical day with Sam Cooke's One Night Stand! Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, which Sonny chose for this past week's edition of The Joup Friday Album.
Playlist from yesterday looks like this:
Lacey Sturm - Life Screams
Shellac - 1000 Hurts
A Place to Bury Strangers - Exploding Head
Faith No More - Angel Dust
Deafheaven - New Bermuda
Glass Animals - How to be a Human Being
Card of the day:
In my mind, one of the most beautiful cards in Lady Freida Harris's deck stacked with nothing but beautiful cards, its mere appearance a good 'omen'.
"Create unto and within yourself a Universe, shaped of your strengths and built on your accomplishments as foundation."
I'll take that as a nod that I have earned my day of total rest. It's movies, a living room fort with my Love and relaxation, because tomorrow it's back to the grind.
Another late morning spent laying in bed. SO nice. K is kicking off our musical day with Lacey Sturm's solo record from 2016:
Playlist yesterday looked like this:
Viet Cong - Eponymous
Etta James - Eponymous
The Doors - LA Woman
Frank Sinatra - In the Wee Small Hours
Steve Morse - The Mind's Eye OST
Swans - The Glowing Man (disc 2)
Viet Cong - Eponymous
The Knife - Shaking the Habitual
Huey Lewis and the News - Sports
I heeded the Prince of Wands and absolutely killed it on my daily words. Almost done.
Card of the day:
The Penetrating Wand; the Spark of Essence.Skill and Wisdom. Can point to the essence or involvement of Magick.
Beginning the first of three days off with some Etta:
It's nice to wake up leisurely, lay in bed with the one you Love and read. I finished Han King's The Vegetarian - ranked it with four out of five stars on Goodreads. The prose itself was outstanding, especially in the third section of the book, which is sort of three short stories with characters that thread them together into a novel. I would be curious to read more by Han King, and perhaps I will do so, however, my to-read pile is currently out of control. For now I'm going to duck back into Thomas Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer/Grimscribe, which I started at the beginning of the year while I was in Chicago and, truthfully, am finding a little difficult to stick through. My one book from last year that still lingers at 25 % read is, similarly, Ramsey Campbell's Alone with the Horrors. It's not short story anthologies I have an issue sticking with per say, but instead the tone of both Ligotti and Campbell's work. No, they're not "Too Dark", there's just something in each that leaves me a bit flat. Perhaps my expectations for Ligotti were a tad high - this is the first of his works I've read, and knowing he was a major influence on True Detective Ssn 1 excited the hell out of me. I loved that season and - despite hating the ending - its tone is one of my favorites ever, and it's not that I expected or even wanted Ligotti's work to be similar, but I wasn't expecting the slightly truncated manner in which he sometimes works. I'm half way through Songs of a Dead Dreamer and although the first few stories hit me very hard, as I go deeper I feel a certain unfinished or rushed quality to some of them, the best example of which is The Lost Art of Twilight, which felt extremely rushed, as if the author had no idea how to pay-off what he had so carefully set up. Maybe I'm simply missing something, or maybe not, this is merely my perception at this point.
So if I'm going to pick at Ligotti's short stories over the course of the next few months, using one or two as palate cleansers between longer works, I need something as my next main read. Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel is on deck, however K gifted me a copy of this little gem last night for our two-year anniversary and I'm already chomping at the bit to go through it, even though it will inevitably lead to that to-read pile growing exponentially.
"There are simply too many books to read, whatever shall I do?" This, ladies and germs, is the definition of First World Problems. We live amazing lives folks, don't take them for granted.
Play list from yesterday:
Swans - Glowing Man
ttt (Crosses) - Eponymous
Mastodon - Emperor of Sand
Godflesh - A World Lit Only by Fire
The Kills - Midnight Boom
Drove up to Hollywood last night and attended a limited screening of Robert Mockler's Like Me. I posted the trailer a few days ago but here it is again; I loved this flick. The characters are hard to like but the journey they take is one big dig on social media culture - or lack thereof - and the method by which the film is assembled is gorgeous, reminding me of Harmony Korine for sure. To me that's a good thing. And of course Larry Fessenden is in it, and I generally like everything he is associated with.
Card of the day:
This one shows up inverted; I've never placed a lot of weight on card inversion, especially in single card draws. There's something to be said for their interpretation when they're juxtaposed with other cards in a spread, but alone, it's kind of just the card to me.
There's nothing in my Grimoire about this one so what do we know? Well, this is the Airy-aspect of Fire; look at the movement in the card - rushing forward, so we're talking motivation, movement, doing. Interesting then that I'm intent on doing nothing but relaxing for the next three days. Well, that's not entirely true, we have some social events planned, and I had wanted to write each day, even if just to do these posts and get in my daily words, which could totally be the aspect of the weekend that I brush off. So I'll interpret drawing this card as sound advice not to do that.
Last night I absolutely killed the penultimate scene in my current writing project. It felt great. Today - if I have a chance - I'll move into the climax. This is all still just first pass, rough draft but it's still major progress. Once I write the climax and finale, I'll go back and add in a few chapters that I've come up with to flesh certain characters or ideas out - stuff I didn't know we were going to need until construction of the ongoing continuity revealed their necessity to me. One is probably a scene with Truby's "Half-man", although we intend to turn that on its ear a bit. After that I'll run everything through Grammarly, then tidy up and send it to Keller, who will read and add concepts/scenes/edits accordingly. Our deadline is in April - Thursday the 12th to be exact. Which is serendipitous indeed...
Started my musical day with Track #3 on Swans' 2016 release The Glowing Man. This is the title track and it's just fantastic. There's a real sense that Michael Gira's sound lodge has been influenced by the doors on this one, and after all the spacey effulgence that comprises the roughly the first half of the track, listen for the sheer awesomeness that Gira and company pull out at around the 15 minute mark. Mmmm-mmm!
Playlist for yesterday looks like this:
Zen Guerilla - Positronic Raygun
Nevermen - Eponymous
Faith No More - Angel Dust
Glass Animals - How to be a Human Being
Tuneyards - I Can Feel You Creep into my Private Life
Zen Guerilla - Positron Raygun
The Horrors - Primary Colours
Deafheaven - Sunbather
ttt (Crosses) Eponymous
Card of the day is The Priestess:
"The Will (Womb) that takes the Magus' spark (seed) and gives it form."
Can denote change/fluctuation; governed by gracious or pure influences.
The active difference between this and the preceding card in the deck's Major Arcana, The Magus, is that the Magus generates their own power, the Priestess taps into the power of the Universe.
Note the grid - I liken the difference outlined in that last sentence as the difference between so-called High Magick and Chaos Magick, the school I have always identified the most with. Chaos Magick is hacking the operating system or grid of reality. And there's that grid...
Looking forward to Sonny's Joup Friday Album tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll be posting the second installment of my "Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying later today. This week's song topic? Fighting.
