Isolation: Day 27 - Second Still PTP Sessions

A track from their Part Time Punks Session Cassette floated to the top of my youtube channels this morning, and in listening to it, I realized glorious LA post punk band Second Still released a full-length record last year that I somehow totally missed! Time to remedy that - Violet Phase is available on the band's Bandcamp HERE, although as I write this I see all physical versions of the album are sold out. In the meantime, here's the track that started this morning's odyssey.

**

I'm pretty damn happy to still have a job, so I'm helping out in any way I can. We've been rotating shorter hours, and as such, I ended up with yesterday off. Here's the watchlist:



Letterboxd



Letterboxd



Letterboxd



Letterboxd

**

Playlist:

Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy - OST
Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource Vol. II: Philosophy of Beyond
Killing Joke - Night Time
David Lynch - Crazy Clown Time
Lustmord - The Dark Places of the Earth
Childish Gambino - because the internet
Second Still - Violet Phase
White Lung - Paradise
Dio - Lock Up the Wolves

**

No Card.

Isolation: Day 26 - Living Nudes

Living Nudes is the bedroom brainchild of the man who runs Heavenisanincubator. Yesterday, I saw a tweet that they'd released a new track titled - appropriately enough - Growing Global Pandemic Got Me Down. It's awesome. Go HERE to check it out, and if you dig, it's set up for a "name your price" purchase. Can't beat that.

**

The vocal harmonies that make up the center piece of this new Living Nudes track haunted me all day, and seemed to echo through my mind during the night, mixing with images from the second episode of HBO's Chernobyl, our perhaps foolishly chosen before-bed watch last night.



The resonance this show has with our own current moment is terrifying. World leaders telling people everything is fine when it certainly is not, sealing potentially millions of people's fates in a terrifying refusal to own up to a situation unlike any the planet has ever seen before. In watching this and now re-reading reports on the Chernobyl crisis, we're all lucky those officials in 1986 didn't destroy life on the entire planet.

Mindful Habitation:

Speaking of mass human destruction, you have to ask: will the slow-to-start response by certain world leaders during today's crisis finish what the Soviet's began? Only time will tell, but with the Orwellian nature of our world seemingly proved by captain hairdo's surge in approval ratings, well, maybe we fucking deserve it, eh? Not really, but an objective, non-human look at things definitely makes it easy to understand why this is happening. I mean, if you refuse to hold the lessons of the past in your head and your heart, how can your future be any different? Or is it the people making the decisions just don't care, because they have advantages most of us don't?

Yeah, I'm leaning toward door number two as well. But then, I'm also trying to stay positive. The peak is coming folks. Stay in your homes...

courtesy of https://brancastudio.bigcartel.com/

One of the funniest things I've seen in years. Thanks to Jonathan Grimm for sending it my way. If you need a pick-me-up, might I suggest after hitting Living Nudes' Bandcamp, you stop by his shop and browse all the damn awesome stuff he has for sale with his inimitable art adorning?


**

Playlist:

Wire - Pink Flag
David Bowie - The Man Who Sold The World
Foster the People - Torches
Chris Isaak - Heart Shaped World
Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit, Vol. 1
Pearl Jam - Gigaton
Childish Gambino - 3.15.20
Childish Gambino - because the internet
Living Nudes - Growing Global Pandemic Got Me Down
Wolves in the Throne Room - Two Hunters
Steve Lynch - Let Us Prey

**

Card:

From the Grimoire: "A new project or a sudden change in material fortune/status." Playing this one close to the chest so as not to tempt the Universe to smack me upside the back of the head.

Isolation: Day 23 - RIP Bill Withers

Bill Withers passed away a few days ago. I love this man's music; it echoes up from my childhood, one of my earliest exposures to Soul music. This song in particular has a lot of meaning for me, not only because I love it and it always makes me feel better, but because I put it on one of the early mix tapes I made for K when we first began dating. And yes, I used actual cassette tapes.


**

Finished Ozark Season Three. Good lord, it is going to be hard to wait for Season Four, especially not knowing when or if it might arrive after our current Global Crisis. In the meantime, I with Devs approaching the final episode (only two left), I think I may push to finally show K Breaking Bad, with the ulterior motive of finally being able to catch up on Better Call Saul afterward.



**

Chris Saunders and I recently relauched a Quarantine-approved version of Drinking with Comics. Not a replacement for the regular, live video-show, this spin-off, aptly named Drinking w/ Comics: The Conversation, is meant to be a podcast-only discussion of, well, comics. This first episode finds Chris and I discussing comic shop innovations during Quarantine, as well as what we've been reading, which includes but is not limited to Joe Hill's Hill House books, Mirka Andolfo's Mercy, and Jonathan Hickman's Decorum. Check it out!



**

Playlist:

Wire - Pink Flag
Prists - Nothing Feels Natural
Drudkh - Autumn Aurora
Apple Music Playlists - Blackgaze Pioneers
Helmet - Aftertaste
Slayer - Live Undead/Haunting the Chapel
BENNI - The Return
Steve Lynch - Let Us Prey OST
Anthrax - Among the Living
Wolves in the Throneroom - Two Hunters
Anthrax - Spreading the Disease
Carpathian Forest - Through Chasm, Caves and Titan Woods
Foster the People - Torches
Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit, Vol. 1 (Vinyl arrived!)

 **

Card:

The Six of Swords leads perfectly into today's Mindful Habitation: As the Orwellian nature of our world - a state derived primarily through the Internet's ease of access to both true and falsified information and humanity's increasingly rabid need for convenience over actual rational, logic-based thought - continues to provide baffling reports of what's happening, remember. Everything except Science is, at this point, extrapolatory at best and anecdotal or misleading at worst. We are still firmly in the forest, and thus, have no way of counting how many trees we will pass before we exit. Science, while not entirely accurate - nothing beyond the subatomic level is - is our best bet at survival.

And yes, I made the word extrapolatory up just now, but feel cheated that it doesn't already exist, at least officially.

Isolation Day 20: Priests!

During a pretty lucrative writing session yesterday I leaned on White Lung for momentum, and in doing so, inadvertently discovered Priests. Great band! The lyrics to 'Appropriate' - the lead song on 2017's Nothing Feels Natural are so insightful they hurt!

**

I sat down and watched Stuart Gordon's Stuck, a film that had been on my list for years, and which until recently I had completely forgotten was Gordon's. Really dark, sometimes funny, overall great. Read my small Letterbxd review HERE.



I'd never noticed it before, and maybe it's not true of Gordon's more phantasmagorical works, but this one really reminded me of Larry Cohen's work. I might try to squeeze in one of his films today, you know, since we have all this bloody time on our hands.

**

Beyondfest's Twitter account has been a bastion in this trying time. Earlier today they tweeted out the link to American Cinematheque Chief Projectionist Ben Tucker essentially giving a tour of the Egyptian's Projection Booth. I've been meaning to join the American Cinematheque for years, and I think now is when I will finally pull the trigger on that.



**

Playlist:

Wire - Pink Flag
Spotlights - Love and Decay
Soundgarden - Bad Motorfinger
Seefeel - Fracture/Tied (Single)
Mazzy Star - So Tonight That I Might See
The Obsessed - Lunar Womb
Slayer -  Live Undead/Haunting the Chapel
White Lung - Eponymous
White Lung - Sorry
Priests - Nothing Feels Natural
Ennio Morricone - The Thing OST

**

Card:

Again. From the Grimoire, "...skill and/or wisdom..." because I'm finally making real headway on what I'm working on. 

Isolation: Day 18 RIP Krzysztof Penderecki

I first heard Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima in the mid-to-late 90s. I was dating a classically trained violin player, and she was involved in a college performance of the piece. She talked about how different the piece was from a player's perspective. This is anecdotal, as I've only ever heard it from her, but apparently when Penderecki wrote the music for the piece, he had to devise an entirely new way to notate the passage where the players hit the bodies of their instruments. When she played me the piece, I was floored - I knew this! Of course, I didn't know it as a whole, but I'd heard passages of it for years as they were used in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, a film I have been obsessed with for most of my life (less now, much more at that time). I had her make me a copy of the piece, and although it never led me to seek out more of Penderecki's compositions, I've loved Threnody ever since. Sunday morning, Mr. Penderecki passed away. Interesting that, only a few hours before his death, I rewatched Twin Peaks: The Return episode 8, which also utilizes this piece - to great effect, might I add. I wanted to post something here, as a memorial, and because composition is often best expressed in the moment, I went with a performance of the piece instead of the standard, studio recording.

**

Three of us at The Horror Vision did our first remote podcast session on Zoom this past Saturday, and it turned out pretty damn good, so there will be more episodes more often. That goes for Drinking with Comics as well, which I've decided to spin-off an audio-only version called Drinking w/ Comics: The Conversations. First episode of that will be up by the end of the week. In the meantime, check out The Horror Vision's first installment of Quarantine Guide:



**

Five episodes into Season Three of Ozark and it is glorious. Between this and Outsider, I am now a card-carrying fan of Jason Bateman and his work.



**

Playlist:

Slayer - Live Undead/Haunting the Chapel
NIN - Ghosts V: Together
Pale Sketcher - Jesu: Pale Sketches Demixed
Pearl Jam - Gigaton
Steve Moore - Frame Dragging

**

Card:

Failure to achieve a goal. That feels like what I'm up against at the moment, as my new schedule and the overall aesthetic of Shelter-in-Place combine to make me a lazy bastard. I'm still writing, but it's been difficult to drag myself up into my chair and actually put in the time to write. You'd think I'd be all over this, and I was at first, but currently, everything is a chore.

Mindful Habitation:

Build a new routine out of the bones of your old routine. It can be done, it just takes an initial investment of energy to build-up the inertia that will keep the thing moving once you get it shambling along on its own two feet, so to speak.

Isolation: Day 16 - The Return of Joe Bob Briggs!

Man, this could not come at a better time! I cannot wait for weekly event viewing with Mr. Briggs.

**

I've been on a reading tear. I finished my re-read of Inferno, the mini series that ran through all the X-books in 1989. I even through in the What If...? Issue that contemplated what would have happened had the X-Folks lost to S'ym and Madelyne Pryor. Mr. Sinister remains my favorite X-Villain, however, it's unfortunate that Mr. Claremont never had the opportunity to fully explore his backstory. I know subsequent X-writers did, however, I don't know that I'd ever be interested in reading beyond Claremont's X-Men again. Louise Simonson works well writing X-Factor inside Claremont's domain, and I don't want to belittle what she did, but really, she began as Claremont's editor on the books, so it makes sense that when he had to hand the reins of one book over to someone, it would be her. And Ms. Simonson's contributions are fantastic. I even like a bit of what Fabian Nicezia added closer to the end of Claremont's tenure, but most of what other creators did at that time grew organically out of the seeds Claremont had laid. Who knows? Maybe I'll find the one of those Sinister-related trades on sale for Kindle at some point and take a chance. I know they took him back to the Victorian era - an immediate 'Pro' for me, however, the subsequent convolution of all things X after Claremont and the editorial insistence on 'Status Quo' just makes me want to pretend the characters were part of a finite series. (Although Morrison's stands on its own as a three-volume masterpiece, and I suspect that may be just about up for re-read as well).

Possibly my favorite splash in the entire series

Next up was the complete Alien/Predator/Prometheus Fire and Stone saga, which was pretty awesome. 

One of my favorite elements of this was when the construct Elden - similar model to Bishop or David from the films - is injected with the Engineer's Life Accelerant "Black Goo" and begins an evolutionary journey that sees him become something almost as monstrous and distressing as the Xenomorphs themselves. Check this out:

More wonderful Nightmare fuel from the Alien Universe!

Next, the first installment of Warren Ellis' 2016 serial novel Normal, which I've had since its release and which I've just realized, is now only available as the collected novel. So, apparently in order to continue, I'll just have to pick that up, which is no problem, as it's readily available on Kindle:

Although I won't be doing the rest of Normal just yet, as reading the first part awakened in me a rabid desire to re-read Charles Stross' Atrocity Archives, which I believe I first read back in... 2007 or 2008, and which has perpetually been on my mind since setting up a Feedly account a few months ago and following Stross' blog (HERE).

If you're unfamiliar with Stross, his Laundry Files books follow an employee in the IT department of a company that deals with Necromantic Arts and Lovecraftian Elder Gods the way Silicon Valley companies deal with Technology. It's fascinating, and I'd been meaning to re-enter Stross world for sometime. I'm only a few pages into this re-read, but I may do more of the series afterward.

**

Playlist:

The Birthday Party - Mutiny/The Bad Seed EP
Fenn - Epoch
Balthazar - Fever
Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars
Siouxsie and the Banshees - Tinderbox
Tennis System - Lovesick
Spotlights - Love and Decay
Various Artists - The Void OST
LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit, Vol. 1
NIN - Ghosts V: Together
Rammstein - Eponymous

**

No Card.

Isolation: Day 13 - RIP Bill Rieflin

I've never been clear if Rieflin actually played on this particular song - he was in the incarnation of the Cocks for this record - but his mention in this, the title track from the album Linger Ficken' Good, always makes me laugh.

**

Last night K and I watched David Lynch's Wild at Heart. It's been a while since I've seen this one, and for some reason, there are a lot of details that I always forget, but overall, while not my favorite Lynch film by any stretch of the imagination, I still love this flick.



Note: In choosing a trailer to post, I opted for the original, unrestored version over the remastered, Shout Factory. I did this simply because I remember this trailer so vividly from television the year of its release, a time when I was in the throws of my initial introduction to David Lynch and the then-airing second season of Twin Peaks. Something about the grain and vague picture really authenticates the memory for me, so while I'd rather watch a restored version of the film, this trailer 'lights my fire' more than the glossy one.

After Wild at Heart, we did indeed begin a rewatch of Twin Peaks: The Return. This will only be the second time I've watched the series, and I'm excited and trepidatious with going back to it. One thing that I feel is definitely going to enhance this go-through is the fact that I'm also re-reading Mark Frost's Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, and watching some of the editorial/theory programming that popped up on youtube during and after The Return's initial broadcast run. Having access to information we did not during that initial run, I feel, will make a hell of a difference in accepting and understanding certain elements of the series that otherwise left me feeling a bit... unresolved. The most important video I've found for this is Wow Lynch Wow's brilliant examination of the Cooper/Mr. C connection. If you haven't seen this, dig into it before you go back to the series (or even if you just want to think about it after the fact). I am in complete and total agreement with this man's assessment here:



**

Playlist:

Man Man - Future Peg (Pre-release single)
Steve Moore - Frame Dragging EP
Led Zeppelin - I

No Card.