2018: December 24th

Continuing to hang out in the 80s music of my childhood, I've added a Talking Heads binge to my Police one (still listening to Synchronicity on an almost daily basis).

In 2008 Pascal Laugier ripped my soul open with his film Martyrs. The one film of the 'torture porn' generation to transcend the genre, Martyrs - the original, French version - is a milestone in horror cinema that made me feel something no other film has. Four years later his follow-up, The Tall Man, played like an ABC, movie of the week and left me flabbergasted that the same man had made it. Now, six years later, Mr. Laugier has once again made a film that affected me so deeply, I am still thinking about it four days after viewing it. I'm not posting a trailer here because I watched Incident in a Ghostland with no knowledge what it was about and think you should do the same - I sampled the trailer a few minutes ago and it gives WAAAAY too much away. Just watch it blind; it's $3.99 to rent on Prime right now and is very much worth the money. But do me a favor: watch it alone, in the dark, and if you smoke, maybe have a hit or two beforehand. And then, well, prepare yourself.

Another film I watched recently is The Witch in The Window, streaming on Shudder and nested in their "Best of 2018" category. Very good film; it has a moment that chilled me to the marrow. Very understated horror, with the main focus on a splintered family. This trailer I have vetted and have no qualms posting because it does what a trailer should do - gives you a feel without spoiling anything about the film.



Playlist from 12/23:

Tool - Undertow
The Police - Synchronicity
Talking Heads - Sand in the Vaseline (disc 2)
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black

Card of the day:

Macrocosmic emotional event? Perhaps a commentary on my re-finding my Christmas spirit last year and it really filling me with an all-pervading joy this year during the season?

2018: December 22nd

It's hard for me to choose a favorite Prince song, and it's equally as hard for me to even choose a favorite Prince song off any given Prince album. Sign O' The Times Definitely ranks among my favorite of the man's work, partially because it is so of its time that when I listen to it the very cells in my body and brain move back to how they operated, circa 1987. I can see the ugly orange carpet we had in the living room, the weird 70s plaid sofa and loveseat; I can hear my dog Frisky barking over the sound of B96 low on the radio in my sister's bedroom. I can picture the chill of sneaking out of bed late on a cold Friday night in March to watch Friday Night Videos (we never had cable), and the strain of the title track from the album coming from the Magnavox tv. And for some reason, even though I didn't know or hear The Ballad of Dorothy Parker until later in life, listening to it now instantly evokes these sense-memories, in such a strong way that, if I close my eyes, I am right back there. Time Travel - I've sometimes wondered if it's just our sense of sight that prevents us from this feat, as though the things we build our world from specifically operate/exist within certain visual spectrum parameters, to prevent the layman from actually traveling into the past. Were this so, are there secret places where this is not the case? And who, if anyone, holds the keys to those places?

This weird psychonaut talk may be the result of watching most of the Joe Bob Briggs Christmas Phantasm Marathon last night on Shudder. The series gets pretty trippy as it goes on, so maybe it affected me in ways I did not anticipate...



The newest episode of The Horror Vision went up late last night. This past Thursday night Ray, Anthony, Chris, and myself were fortunate enough to have three of the main minds from Skeleton Crew on to discuss their new feature Secret Santa. Adam Marcus, Debra Sullivan, and Bryan Sexton steer the boat for a nice, meaty discussion on their movie, the horrors of holiday family dinners, independent filmmaking, the state of horror, plus, a lot of in-depth facets of the movie business as seen through a creator's eyes. Here's a trailer for Secret Santa, which I've seen twice now and which gets better every time. Links to our episode on all the usual platforms follow:



The Horror Vision: Secret Santa Interview Apple Podcasts
The Horror Vision: Secret Santa Interview Spotify
The Horror Vision: Secret Santa Interview Google Play
The Horror Vision: Secret Santa Interview 

Playlist from 12/21:

Ministry - The Last Sucker
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black

Card of the day:

Calm exterior, tempest inside. This is me at the moment. Nothing bad happening, just unable to find the time to work on everything I want to work on, let alone finish the goddamn book!

However, patience is virtue, and I sometimes feel as though I might have inexhaustible reserves of this precious commodity.

2018: December 20th

I've never been a very big MC5 fan. I've always labored under the idea that the right time/place just never hit me with them, despite several of my best friends being huge fans well back into the 90s. Mr. Brown saw them live recently, and alerted me to the fact that the new band is, for me, something I simply can NOT ignore. Original guitarist Wayne Kramer is joined on this current tour by:

Billy Gould - Faith No More
Kim Thayil - Soundgarden
Brandon Canty - Fugazi
And one of the best live vocalists I've ever seen, still to this day probably fifteen years after last time seeing him with one of my favorite bands, from Zen Guerrilla, Marcus Durant. I missed the show in LaLaLand, and I'll have to live with that, but thanks to KEXP and their wonderful Live on KEXP series, I at least have this.

Tangent: REJOICE - Heaven is an Incubator has released his albums of the year; read all about them HERE. Mine's coming eventually...

I really intended on posting the new Hellboy trailer that dropped yesterday. I love the two Hellboy flicks GDT did, especially Hellboy: The Golden Army, which I always thought felt like the first movie if someone gave it a Mandy-sized dose of LSD. I was sad to see that run of Hellboy end, but with Harbour as the red-skinned pulp hero, Ian McShane as Bruttenholm, and Neil "Dog Soldiers" Marshall directing, I'm all in. Even though I HATE the first trailer. After having a momentary panic, I did some digging and my encroaching suspicion seems to be confirmed: this trailer was edited in a slightly dishonest way, so as to push a bunch of humor to the front and give the film a more "Guardians of the Galaxy" type vibe. This of course makes perfect marketing sense marketing wise, so I'm willing to forgive that, especially when a Deadline interview with creator Mike Mignola includes this quote: "Neil is a horror director so the idea then was to make a darker film." Read the full interview HERE. Yeah, the interview is three months old, but I feel like Mignola's words are more poignant now that we have a trailer that, hopefully, is at least a touch misleading.

Playlist from 12/19:

Cash Money (Audio) - The Green Bullet
Kevin Morby - Singing Saw
The Police - Synchronicity
Billie Ellish - Party Favor (Single)
Billie Ellish - When the Party's Over
Kavinsky - Night Call (Single)
Corrosion of Conformity - No Cross No Crown
The Atlas Moth - Coma Noir
The Damage Manual - >1 Remix EP
The Damage Manual - Eponymous
NIN - Bad Witch

Card of the day:

The Earthy aspect of Air. My initial impetus is to translate this as herald of a possible external or internal conflict today, however in looking at the nifty little reference book that came with the beautiful mini Thoth deck my good friend Missi gifted me while I was in Chicago, I read this: "A young woman, stern and revengeful, with destructive logic, firm and aggressive, skilled in practical affairs," and I realize this is EXACTLY one of the characters I am writing in the book at the moment, one of the ones that brings everything around to the book's conclusion. Cassandra Tenorio is very skilled, motivated solely by vengeance, and maybe should act a little more like it. Gloves = off!

Thanks again Missi!

2018: December 19th

Continuing my recent relapse into my life-long obsession with The Police - I can remember checking Synchronicity on vinyl out of the library in Worth, Il back in the early 80s. One of the first bands to make an impact on me, somewhere around the age of seven. Every Breath You Take is one of those songs that never became played out to me, despite its exponential ubiquity in the years since its release. I LOVE the bridge - the bridge still hits me just as hard now as it did then. And like Vertigo is to cinema, what a creepy contemplation of obsession in audio form, masquerading as a love song. Well, not really masquerading at all. The Police play this one as it lays, it just seems to be the world at large misinterpreted it as 'sweet'.

Playlist from 12/18:

Cash Money (Audio) - Green Bullet
The Police - Synchronicity
The Police - Outlandos d'Amour
Daughters - You Won't Get What You Want
Various Artists - Personal Playlist: Wisconsin Mix
Interpol - Marauder
Ennio Morricone - Black Belly of the Tarantula OST

I'll take this as a warning about the ease/speed with which I succumb to new ideas, because they are distractions at this point.

2018: Tuesday, December 18th

Aaaannnddd... the dream is over. Back to work today.

I'd never heard of Demdike Stare before last Thursday night. We were sitting around in the hotel room in Wisconsin after spending the day at House on the Rock, and I happened across this, which led me to the group's 2018 album Passion, which is fantastic. Reminds me a bit of the first time I heard Adult, way back on the Erase Errata remix EP that has since disappeared from this reality completely.

I think.

Playlist from 12/17:

Kevin Morby - Singing Saw
Calexico - Even Sure Things Fall Through
Calexico - The Black Light
Exhalants - Eponymous
Pastor T.L. Barrett & The Youth for Christ Choir - Do Not Pass Me By, Vol. II
The Knife - Silent Shout
Cash Money (Audio) - Green Bullet

Card of the day:

Right now, I'm reading this as successfully reintegrating back into my routine, which I have seem to done fine.

2018: Monday, December 17th

Saturday night my cousin Charles introduced me to Kevin Morby. It was late, there were a handful of people, all of us speaking passionately about this and that, so I couldn't really hear the music as it dwindled out of my small blu tooth speaker placed behind my parents' basement bar, but Charles' recommendations are always fantastic, even if I'm not always in the right headspace to completely sync with them.

No problem in the 'sync' department this time.

Sunday at Midway Airport I put on Morby's 2016 album Singing Saw and it became my travel album for the day, the 5 1/2 hour musical loop that got me through take off, flight, and departure in a beautifully fleeting hypnogogic trance. Needless to say the album is not only fantastic, but endeared to me now for all time.

Re-acclimating to LaLaLand and what we refer to as 'normal life' because here I don't eat terribly, drink full throttle every night, or dabble in anything beyond the occasional vape. Part of that re-acclimation process was as simple as putting some vinyl the turntable and just chilling the f*&k out. I led the way with a wonderful gift I received from Mr. Brown while I was in:

That's right! The 20th anniversary vinyl edition of Calexico's seminal The Black Light album. I'll be honest - back in the day Mr. Brown was always more into these guys than I was; Even Sure Things Fall Through was the album that hit me the most, with the very Badalamenti opener Sonic Wind virtually assuring my allegiance, and Feast of Wire played a pretty big role in my initial soundtrack upon moving to Los Angeles, but I've often had a hard time finding the right headspace to fit Calexico in on a semi-regular basis. And something about that seems to have changed, as my moods and headspace grow and expand. For almost ten years now I've experienced an increasingly strong connection to Metal in most of its forms (especially the newer, stranger mutations like Blut Aus Nord and The Body) because it's music that helps me write. Often even if I'm in the mood for slower, quieter tunes to listen to while writing it I have to jack the headphone volume because I primarily do the big work in a public place that pipes in music. Also, if I'm lagging, metal kicks my ass in gear. That said, my walk to said writing place is mellow and peaceful, and sometimes of late my morning music leans away from metal, as does my evening, at-home-on-the-record-player listening, so this is perfect. And, The Black Light is a beautiful record, as are the re-issue's linear notes, which are partially (or maybe entirely - they're long and I haven't had a chance to finish them yet) written by Calexico co-founder Joey Burns, so it's a wonderful window into the band and the situations/thoughts/experiences that led to the record's creation.

Playlist from Sunday, 12/16:

Kevin Morby - Singing Saw
Daughters - You Won't Get What You Want
Calexico - The Black Light

Card of the day:

The journey home is over, the journey back to a productive reality begins today.

2018: December 15th

Friday, December 14th:



Deer Valley Lodge, Wisconsin. Woke up at roughly 8:00 AM and was moved to put this song on. I've posted Synchroncity II here before, and I'm sure I'll post it here again. Not just my favorite song by the Police, but one of my favorite songs of all time.

I'm playing this off my old iPod, the one that's not linked to my Apple Music account. Playing this device is always interesting, because it's kind of a time capsule. Since subscribing to Apple Music, I keep this iPod separate and synched to my original library, so I only have access to music I manually ripped myself or acquired through iTunes/Bandcamp/Amazon. And after deleting a bunch of tunes from the library on that Mac, I'm actually afraid to even sync this again, so the last sync is kind of a permanent thing at this point, thus, it's like looking into my head a year and a half ago.

Playlist from 12/13:

Black Sabbath - Vol. 4
Grimes - Oblivion
Foster the People - Torches

Saturday, December 15th:



Black Sabbath, Vol. 4 has not only been a constant companion throughout most of my life, it's also been a constant companion on this trip, being that it's the only cassette I could find to play in my Dad's truck when I borrow it. And really, Vol. 4 is probably a 'desert island' album for me, anyway, so no complaints here.

I am exhausted. My trips home always end up being hectic, because I try so hard to see everyone as much as I can. And there's always a lot of people I want to see, and some people that I don't see or fail to spend as much time with as I would like. Today is going to be mellow. I think.

House on the Rock in Wisconsin is an unbelievable adventure, a veritable sensual smorgasbord of tchotchke insanity spread out and displayed over an architectural mind-fuck that might even trump the Winchester house, which I visited circa 2007, the Hearst Castle - also 2007- or the Barnum home in Florida, which I saw in 2012. I guess I've been collecting these kinds of experiences for years and didn't even notice it. House on the Rock? Probably my favorite, and it's led me to want to re-read and watch Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which I read back when it was first published and so, hardly remember.

Issue #1 of my comic collaboration with artist Jonathan Grimm is fully mocked up and ready for the final touches. We used scissors, tape, and plastic page protectors to figure out the exact placing of the word bubbles, now John can finish the gray washing, digitally add the words, and wha-lah! We start issue #2, which is written (1st draft), sketched and somewhat laid out. While working last night, John provided the tunes to set the mood. He's a big swamp/southern/doom rock guy, so we used his selections to provide the appropriate soundtrack. He may have made me a Down fan, which I did not expect to ever type, considering my disdain for Phil Anselmo.

Playlist from 12/14:

Lots of 1st Wave on XM radio during our road trip. I'm going to assemble a playlist and post it here at some point.
CCR - Green River
COC - No Cross No Crown
Down - NOLA
Black Label Society - Sonic Brew

Card for the day:

That I'm not seeing everyone I want to? On. The. Nose.