Apparat just released a new track from his forthcoming album Lp5, which drops via MUTE on 3/22. And get a gander at this gorgeous album cover:
One year ago I began treating this page as a more-or-less everyday ritual. It's been a very helpful tool this past year, so I intend to continue. In order to create a nice little harmonic loop, I thought I'd post the same Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' track that I did last year, because, from Her(e) to Eternity:
Playlist from 1/21:
Morphine - The Night
Gary Numan - Savage (Songs from a Broken World)
Windhand - Split
Pastor T.L. Barret and the Youth For Christ Choir - Like a Ship (Without a Sail)
Pastor T.L. Barret and the Youth For Christ Choir - Do Not Pass Me Pass Me By Vol. II
Bad Luck - Four
Cold Cave - Cherish The Light Years
Cold Cave - You & Me & Infinity
Soviet Soviet - Endless
Card of the day:
Happy at the fact that the book is done - minus what is looking like a pass of light editing - and I have finally begun to think about the next project. Also happy to have made these chronicles a successful ritual over the previous year. Here's to an infinite number of years continuing with it!
And then this! This is so close! I only just found out about this forthcoming documentary on the band Brainiac last month, but it feels like I've now been waiting for it forever.
Playlist from 1/19:
Plague Bringer - As the Ghosts Collect, the Corpses Rest
Plague Bringer - Life Songs in a Land of Death
Thou - Summit
Playlist from 1/20:
Calexico - Even My Sure Things Fall Through
Gordon Lightfoot - Gord's Gold
Card of the day:
The Airy aspect of Air, so the intellect of intellect, in a manner of speaking. Not sure how to apply this. The book is finished, and I've already read the first act to K. It feels GOOD. Little rough spots here and there, but nothing that can't be shored up as we go through it. I'll have to figure out if this card pertains to that, or the new project I've begun to brainstorm.
When I saw the title of this movie, I thought it was going to be a flick in the realm of Hobo with a Shotgun. But no. This, this looks Epic. LOVE this movie poster:
K and I finished Channel Zero: The Dream Door last night. Wow. Fantastic. I don't know that I've even mentioned the show in these pages yet; we watched the first season about a month ago - Seasons 1-3 are streaming exclusively on Shudder - and I was blown away by that, too. Harley Peyton is one of the Producers, and if you are a Twin Peaks fan from back in the day, you'll know his name as a major creative force on that show's original run, especially during Season 2. And Mr. Peyton's Peaks experience is definitely felt in Channel Zero. The first Season's finale so resembled the Season 2 finale of Twin Peaks that I was floored. This was homage, not an egregious repeating. And again, in The Dream Door's finale, we get some crazy Lynchian imagery. SO good. Can't wait to watch Seasons 2 and 3 - it's an anthology, hence our out of order viewing - but I'm now tempted to save those seasons because also yesterday, on this week's episode of the Shock Waves podcast, I learned Channel Zero has been cancelled.
The Cure - Seventeen Seconds
The Black Queen - Infinite Games
David Lynch - The Big Dream
Plaguebringer - As the Ghosts Collect, the Corpses Rest
Television - Marquee Moon
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Hallelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
Eights are Hod. Splendor. Eights are tricky. Splendor can be interpreted as spectacle, and spectacle can be distracting. Literally, an Interference. This is a beautiful card, but its beauty is wrought with images of death and destruction, an unstable background, Chaos is close. I'm not entirely certain how to interpret this today. I have a large writing session coming up to snap a few last bits into place and then continue editing the book in Grammarly, chapter by chapter. After that, it's reading the full text aloud to K. Perhaps the interference I'm being warned about here is because for days I have just barely dodged the urge to start reading it now. I can't do that; even though I have a small checklist of images and bits to pepper back through the chapters, changing one thing, no matter how minutely, may cause ripples backward or forward through the story that then also have to be smoothed. Most of my focus is in the second act, but I do not yet know if that focus will end up requiring a smoothing out in the first act. So reading now would be counterproductive. Even though I want to.
Yep. That sounds like my Interference and as is often the case, it's from myself.
Another KXLU discovery. Goddamn that radio station is just killing' it! I don't know much about the band, I'm starting here, with the album Furnishing the Void. It's great, and I'm planning on digging deeper soon enough.
Hey LA, teachers are striking. Support them. THEY make the difference we need made.
Two nights ago, K and I finished True Detective Season 1. I've thought a lot about those Jeremy Saulnier-directed first two episodes of Season 3; I have ideas, and I still may do a recap show. Maybe. It's hard to know if the things I observed are going to pan out or just go nowhere; Season 2 definitely shook my faith in the show, and I'm not really convinced some of what I see is go-nowhere red herring fodder. But maybe Crooked Spiral refers to:
It makes sense that, same as the show has gone back to a lot of the story mechanics that made Season One so iconic, they would attempt to tie in that season's continuity. Or, this might all end up a big, "Fuck You," from the show's creator for those of us expecting more of a 'Weird Fiction' angle. We'll see.
After rewatching the Season One finale, I still don't like it very much. But, I've said that before and completely acknowledge that no matter how much I don't like that final episode, Season One is one of my all-time favorite pieces of small-screen cinema.
K and I also watched the pilot for SyFy's Deadly Class, based on the Rick Remender/Wes Craig comic that I have loved since it launched in 2014. I am so ecstatically happy for these guys; this book deserves the world and is now poised to receive it. I'll never forget the month, several years ago, when Remender's "Transmissions from a Basement" back matter announced his departure from Marvel, where he'd just finished helming a massive cross-over, and his somewhat joyously nervous announcement that the coming year would be a, 'year of creator owned comics.' That was a big step for the man, and as I knew he would, he has succeeded ten-fold, the successes only growing. I can't wait to see what happens next!
Oh yeah, the show is fantastic! And Henry Rollins is the Poison 101 teacher! How awesome is that!
Speaking of Deadly Class, a new storyline began in issue 36, which was most definitely part of my haul yesterday at the Comic Bug for NCBD. LOVE this cover.
What else? I'll tell you what else:
An absolutely haunting ending to this epic series, Days of Hate.
Gideon Falls remains my favorite book each month, and this issue has a couple of pages that might just rank as my favorite comic panels EVER.
And last but most certainly not least:
I probably should have just subscribed to Fangoria's relaunch. I missed the first issue, but with Joe Bob on the cover, number two was a must. I'll be honest - when I worked for Borders during the 00s, I learned to turn my back on Fangoria. I straight up thought they kowtowed to a lot of garbage, giving high marks to big studio horror flicks I personally thought sucked. Meanwhile, I'll always be a Rue Morgue/Horror Hound guy. But now that Fango is back, well, I wanted to give them a chance. After all, there would be no Rue Morgue/Horror Hound if not for this icon. A couple of articles in thus far, and I'm digging it, especially Preston Fassel's Corrupt Signals column, which explores rare 80s horror like this one that I couldn't find a trailer for, but the whole thing is on youtube:
I haven't watched The Black Room, but Mr. Fassel's column has definitely put it on my immediate radar.
Playlist from 1/15:
Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children
The Blueflowers - Circus on Fire
The Handsome Family - Singing Bones
Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch - Concerning the White Horse
Secret Boyfriend - Furnishing the Void
Playlist from 1/16:
Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children
Belong - October Language
Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport
Fuck Buttons - Olympians EP
Corrosion of Conformity - No Cross No Crown
Tool - Aenima
The Blue Flowers - Circus on Fire
Card of the day:
2 cards popped out as I shuffled:
Earthly concerns, eh? And perhaps big, emotional ones. If I'm reading this correctly, it's referring to a peripheral investment situation. Money coming in would be nice...
I discovered The Blueflowers yesterday on KXLU. Wow. Love this band. They have several albums available through their bandcamp HERE, and most if not all of those are on Apple Music. I'm digging into 2018's Circus on Fire this morning, and it's taking me places both familiar and strange.
I forgot to mention that last Friday I watched Pod, a film from 2015 directed by Mickey Keating. I'd seen the thumbnail for this one for years. I've also started to see discussion among a fairly rabid Keating fanbase I never realized existed, and after just this one flick I can see why some would rabidly endorse his movies. Pod is fantastic; Larry Fessenden's in it, and that's almost always a great sign; based on the simple, no-nonsense execution of a straight forward horror/sci fi concept, I'm guessing Mickey Keating's work will fit in nicely alongside Ti West and Joe Begos. In fact, Pod and Begos' The Mind's Eye would make an Excellent double feature.
Playlist from 1/14:
Dillinger Escape Plan - Option Paralysis
Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch - Concerning the White Horse (pre-release single)
Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch - Concerning the Entrance into Eternity
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada
David Zinman, Dawn Upshaw & London Sinfonietta - Gorecki: Symphony No. 3
Card of the day:
Second day in a row for this one. And that's probably because my interpretation yesterday was correct; I came SO close to finishing the book. So this card reappears today, because Today is the day.
There's a new Jozef Van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch album set to drop on February 8th via Sacred Bones Records, and so far it has my favorite album title in quite some time. You can pre-order An Attempt to Draw Aside the VeilHERE.
Rounding the final lap on Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel, which I absolutely love. And interestingly enough, Cave's take on a gorgeous baroque, inbred Southern Gothic aesthetic hit a nice harmonic node with my impromptu re-watch of True Detective Season 1, as well as last night's True Detective Season 3, which takes place in Arkansas in 1980, 1990, and 2015 and has a similar tone.
Thus far, Season 3 follows Detectives Wayne Hays as played by Mahershala Ali, as he tries to solve an unsolvable case over the course of three decades. Two episodes in and I'm digging it; I find it a little bit of a lack of confidence that the show went back to the 'deposition and interview' mechanism that worked so well in Season 1, but hey, to climb out of the swamp of Season 2, do what works. With Jeremy Saulnier's episodes now under the belt and his leave approaching, next week's episode is helmed by Daniel Sackheim and then I guess HBO will announce directors as the episodes come up? I'm struggling not to take that as a bad sign, but for right now, doubts or not, the cinematography, acting, and atmosphere are so fucking tight and thick, I'm sticking.
I had actually planned at the last minute to do a new weekly wrap up show, a la my Evolution of the Arm series I did for Twin Peaks: The Return, however there really isn't a lot of 'mystery' to discuss yet. The one thing I'm wondering is, if this season drifts at all into Weird Fiction territory like the first season did, maybe the book we see in missing boy Will Purcell's bedroom while Hays is searching it for clues might come into play. The book is The Forests of Long, and anyone who knows Lovecraft mythos knows Leng as location of the infamous Plateau of Leng. I did a perfunctory search for the book online and couldn't find anything, making me think it was a prop deliberately constructed for the show, which means it is potentially important in some way. I doubt this is where the show is going, but you never know. If David Milch convinced Nick Pizzalato to stick with what made Season One iconic, we may brush up against some Weird after all.
