Because this was the first song I listened to when I woke up this morning, and because it's such an awesome example of the marrying of Rock and Pop that was so flawless in the early 80s.
Watch:
Kind of stumbled into watching the first season of Evil on Netflix this weekend. I'd seen the minimalist billboards for this around town last year and was intrigued, but being that it's on CBS I dismissed it as network. However, this one's pretty cool for network (and it's not actually on regular, network CBS, but their All Access). There's some really interesting camera work and a decidedly bigger budget - or at least a bigger 'approach' - than a network show would take. And there are some genuinely scary moments so far, so I'm in.
Playlist:
Ministry - Houses of the Mole
Ministry - Amerikkkant
Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction
ISIS - In the Absence of Truth
Deafheaven - New Bermuda
ZZ Top - Rio Grande Mud
Ministry - The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste
Ministry - The Last Sucker
The Bangles - All Over the Place
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
Etta James - Third Album
Etta James - Second Time Around
Card:
Financial breakthrough, which I will gladly take on with a smile.
I finally picked The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen back up earlier this week, and this time, I find I can't put it down. More about that below. For right now, reading the Biafra interview in the book and hearing Al talk about the origin of the band Lard, I felt motivated to dig out 1997's Pure Chewing Satisfaction. This is one of those records I had on cassette back in the day, and because I still have the actual cassette, I always put off listening to it on Apple Music under the guise that I should dig out that tape. Well, that never happens, so I haven't heard Pure Chewing in a loooong time. Guess what? I gave up on the tape and started playing it the other day, only to find out I miss the hell out of this record!
The Last Temptation of Reid has always been the go-to masterpiece in the Lard catalog as far as I was concerned; however, now I find Pure Chewing Satisfaction is every bit as awesome, starting with this, the opening song, which I could listen to over and over again ad nauseam.
Watch:
Watching the first two episodes of Marvel's Wandavision last night was quite the experience. I now very much understand what Elizabeth Olsen meant in the interviews she did during the run-up to this show when she repeatedly said, "I just can't believe they let us actually do this show."
This is the evolution of Marvel's style.
I'm speechless. Wandavision isn't the best thing I've ever seen or even my favorite of the Marvel stuff, but being that it breaks their fight-on-catwalk-stop-him-before-he-ends-the-world-and/or-destroys-the-entire-city mold and shows that they will begin to take chances, I'm excited. And as fans, that's all we can ask for. That's how the comics gave us things like Matt Faction's Hawkeye series, or Rick Remender's Uncanny Avengers, or any of the mold-breaking stuff Marvel occasionally does to draw in new readers who don't necessarily jive with fight-fight-fight and crossover-crossover-crossover paradigm they seem to still be stuck in.
I'm totally fine having (mostly) given up reading Marvel Comics if I can get stories like this from their MCU.
Read:
Last year when Mr. Brown sent me his copy of Al Jourgensen's autobiography, I read about a fourth of it and had to walk away. This happens a lot with musician autobiographies. Soul Coughing's Mike Doughty's book really started to affect how I felt about one of my favorite bands of all time, so I stopped reading that, too. I thought that would be the case here, but when I picked Gospels up again recently to give it one more chance, I found I couldn't put the fucking thing down.
Al still comes off like a complete douche, which I guess really shouldn't be a surprise. However, the book is also laugh-out-loud hysterical at times. Really, once I got past the utter nonsense of him bragging about how many chicks he nailed as a teenager and moved into the origins of Ministry, well, the douchery didn't stop, but it became mixed with a lot of great information about a band I've loved for most of my life (thanks also to Brown, who lent me his copy of The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste when we were Juniors in High School).
Anyway, if you can get past those initial chapters, and deal with him being one of those "Been there, done that, did that first, fuck those guys I used to work with" tirades, and the endless drug stories that make him really look like an ass - the River Phoenix one is especially awful - then this is a pretty good read.
Playlist:
Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction
Lard - The Last Temptation of Reid
The Veils - Total Depravity
The Replacements - Tim
Deafheaven - 10 Years Gone
Ministry - Dark Side of the Spoon
Card:
This morning I thought I'd pull from the Raven Deck. Every time I bring these cards out, I marvel at the work and detail my good friend Missi put into them. The cards literally hum with the energy she put into them, and so they make reading an incredibly unique experience.
Change. From Peter J. Carroll's Liber Null: "The only clear view is from atop a mountain of your dead selves."
I have 100% agreed with this statement since I first began reading Carroll in the early 00s. And I find it funny that I pull this card now, as I try to understand how I've suddenly become able to reintegrate The Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream back into my life.
Tangent? No. Hear me out.
I loved this record upon its release the summer before my Senior Year in high school began, but I have been mostly unable to feel passionately about it since about two or three years later. Everything about this album and that band that I loved was, in my opinion, flipped on its head beginning with the release of the follow-up, and The Smashing Pumpkins became kind of an antithesis to me. However, for every reason I feel justified in distancing myself from their music and personas, I realize too, I was distancing myself from who I was when this album meant so much to me. Which is fine. That's the mountain of dead selves at work right there, and that's important. And there's a vulnerability to reconnecting with something that was so integral and intertwined with who you were when you were a teenager, and I began to make it a point to execute and deny most previous versions of myself somewhere about the time I graduated college and became a bartender (ha! what a sentence).
Anyway, I guess the poignant part of all this is that while Siamese Dream was executed and thrown on the pile with that old version of Shawn, along with records by bands like Pantera, Sublime and the like, it's a new one for me that I can dig this one out of that mountain of corpses, dust it off, and reconnect with it in such a strong way.
Will it last? It feels like it will, however, I should probably avoid hearing anything billy corgan says in the media if I want that to last.
New Mogwai! From the forthcoming album As The Love Continues, out February 13th. Pre-order HERE.
Watch:
Last night, K and I finished watching the Night Stalker documentary that dropped this week on Netflix. Serial killer stuff is normally outside of my comfort zone, however, after moving to LA in 2006 and hearing a good friend talk about what it was like to grow up here as Richard Ramirez held the city hostage for the better part of a year has proved motivation for a fascination that overcomes my squeamish nature when it comes to this type of thing. That, combined with the fact that once you start watching this series and see that director Tiller Russell places the two Police Detectives who hunted Ramirez as the main characters, this was a great documentary that didn't leave me feeling dirty.
As much as I love AHS 1984, I still have issues with the fact that they made Ramirez a character I ended up rooting for (to a degree).
While flipping around Bloody Disgusting earlier I saw they finally released a trailer for Christopher Smith's The Banishing. I'm very much looking forward to seeing this one on Shudder in March, just a couple of days after my forty-fifth birthday no less.
Playlist:
The Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream
Michael Kiwanuka - KIWANUKA
David Bowie - Reality
Mogwai - As the Love Continues (pre-release singles)
Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
Loathe - I Let It In and It Took Everything
Card:
Another signifier for the end of my current project, which will lead to the publication of my next book.
I received the cover art this week from Jonathan Grimm - it's BAD ASS! I can't wait to share it.
Sacred Bones is releasing a new DJ Muggs record of dark, Occult-inspired music? Sign me up! Pre-order this one HERE now, because the $30 Deluxe edition of Dies Occidendum with the illustrated book is limited to 500 copies and will most likely disappear.
NCBD:
Quite a bit coming out today.
Loving this series. Vault does horror comics the right way, 100%.
End of the arc. Jason Howard's Big Girls has been a great stand-in for Trees, his book with Warren Ellis (who I miss SO much).
I picked up the first issue of Homesick Pilots on a whim last month and loved it. A Grunge-era ghost story that has me baffled at some of the mechanics of the haunting and where, exactly, it's going.
The final issue of one of the most horrific books I've read in quite some time.
Playlist:
Howard Jones - Things Can Only Get Better (single)
Sleaford Mods - Spare Ribs (pre-released singles)
Sleaford Mods - Austerity Dogs
Alice in Chains - Facelift
Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf
Thou - Rhea Sylvia
Peter Gabriel - Us
Drab Majesty - Careless
Card:
The Beginning of the End.
I'm reading this as two things. First, I'm back on the book and will finish it within the next week. WILL. Second, watching the House vote on impeachment - which personally I feel is a great big waste of time because, well, let him become a private citizen and THEN arrest his ass - I'm realizing that something is ending. Whether or not this is for the better or worse when our country is concerned, I can't really say. However, I'm inclined to think it will not ultimately be for the best. Have I made my prediction on this page yet that within five years time the US will no longer be 50 states? Standing by it, regardless.
This is shaping up to be an early contender for album of the year just based on the strength of the three songs to drop so far! Pre-order HERE.
Watch:
Currently watching a Scandanavian show on Netflix called Equinox, another of what I've seen referred to as an 'Into the Woods' subgenre that originates with Twin Peaks and was perhaps defined/popularized most recently by Netflix's Dark. So far, Equinox is derivative, although it would appear to owe more to Black Spot than any other show. Maybe this genre is simply comfort food to me at this point, but K and I are hooked. Here's a trailer:
Playlist:
Black Sabbath - Paranoid
Faith No More - The Real Thing
Sleaford Mods - Spare Ribs (the pre-released stuff)
One of my favorite current bands covering one of my all-time favorite band's best songs. Magic. After this and that Flaming Lips cover on last year's Medium Rarities record, Mastodon is one of the few bands I like hearing do covers, basically because I can't wait to see what they'll pick to do next.
Watch:
I recently found this super cool, animated reading of H.P. Lovecraft's Dagon that Patronoid Magazine published recently. Lost of cool stuff from these folks, check out their site HERE.
I've had Stuart Gordon's Dagon in mind of late, and not being able to find my old DVD copy (I had two at some point, I love this one so much), is the perfect excuse to buy that gorgeous Blu Ray copy that the resurrected Vestron Video put out a few years back. Here's the trailer:
Playlist:
ISIS - In the Absence of Truth
Alice in Chains - Rainier Fog
Yellow Magic Orchestra - Solid State Survivor
Giraffe Tongue Orchestra - Broken Lines
The Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream
YOB - Our Raw Heart
Emma Ruth Rundle - Marked for Death
Jimi Hendrix - Electric Ladyland
Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey
Black Sabbath - Paranoid
The Beatles - The White Album
David Bowie - Heroes
Card:
Back to the wonderful Raven Deck my good friend Missi made for me:
Whereas this would normally read Completion, and despite the fact that I don't normally recognize ill-dignified (read: upside down), I can't help that dopple-definition fits, because it tends to hinge on 'interruptions' or 'hesitating.' I'm stalled again at the moment, and need to push myself back into 'On' mode.
