Karate - This Day Next Year

Many years ago now, my good friend Grez turned me onto the band Karate, specifically, their 2000 album Unsolved. Remember that old iPod I mentioned last week? Yeah, this is on there, too. The entire album is fantastic, but final track "This Day Next Year" has to be one of the greatest closing album songs ever recorded.

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NCBD:

My pull Thanksgiving pull-list for NCBD:

Still digging the new Alien book, where a squad of synthetics who have been dicked over by the Military and just want to be left alone are now stuck in a hotbed of Alien activity. Time to fight their way out - good news for us.

I'm on the fence with this "Dark Web" event, but I'm curious enough to give it a shot. It's not like I'm not already reading several X-Books and Amazing Spider-Man, so hopefully, I'll get the gist of it in those pages without having to buy anything extra (not bloody likely, mate)

In the previous issue of Creepshow, we were treated to a story by David and Maria Lapham; I can't wait to see what we get this time. 

I was originally under the impression that, like Creepshow, Stuff of Nightmares was an issue-by-issue anthology. Not the case, and I'm glad because the Brothers Cameron are creating quite the crazy little arc. Part Reanimator, part Mystery-Thriller, this one is quickly becoming one of my favorites.

What's the Furthest Place From Here returns, and I could not be happier. I did a full reread of this back in late July, and I'm ready to get back in and learn some more about this truly bizarre world Rosenberg and Boss have created.

After last week's Immortal X-Men, I am chomping at the bit for more! I recently read something about an upcoming event - a smaller one this time - called Sins of Sinister, and being that the big "S" is one of the most fascinating characters in the X-Books at the moment, I'm getting pretty excited.

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Watch:

Really? Really Olivia Wilde?

 

I have to say, this film is infuriating because, for most of its runtime, Don't Worry Darling is outstanding. And overall, it is a very well-made movie. That said, the 'reveal' in the third act is insulting. I mean, this is what happens when you have everything to make a fantastic film except a good idea. 

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Playlist:

Mastodon - Hushed and Grim

Karate - Unsolved

Wipers - Youth of America

Zola Jesus - Conatus

Zeni Geva & Steve Albini - All Right! You Little Bastards!

Zola Jesus - Stridulum

Deafheaven - Infinite Granite

Deafheaven - Sunbather

Uniform and The Body - Mental Wounds Not Healing

Orville Peck - Bronco

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Retaining the ability to shift gears when working on something and realizing I'm not quite there yet. Yeah, that's on the nose. The free Kindle Exclusive Book has to wait. I realized this yesterday, as I've submitted one of the stories for publication elsewhere, and two of them are not quite up to the standard I am comfortable with.

Poni Hoax

 

A couple years ago, while watching the extras on my then-newly received copy of Severin Video's edition of Alex De La Iglesia's Day of the Beast, I noticed one of the film's crew members wearing a Poni Hoax t-shirt. I'd never heard of the band, so I looked them up on Apple Music and then promptly forgot all about them. Until recently. I still don't know much about the band or their discography, but I will soon remedy that. I do know that the entire self-titled record from 2006 is fantastic, combining Post Punk DNA with throbbing synths and moody keyboards. 

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Watch:

Last Friday, K and I made it out to see The Menu. 

I'm posting the trailer here, but I will say, this one was over-marketed in my opinion. You may have noticed that since moving, I go to the theatre more than ever before, and I must have seen this trailer before every movie since August. If you're as sick of it as I am, no need to watch it again, as I'm merely posting it here for posterity's sake.

I dug the film, although I had my issues. 

The plot of The Menu is exactly what the trailer hints at, which I found to be a little bit of a disappointment. You get what you pay for, sure, and maybe in this day and age I've become wrongfully indoctrinated to expect a 'twist' or some sleight of hand in the narrative. Not so here. I accept this and move on, except that doesn't gel for me in regards to the end of the film. I think anyone that goes to see this film will expect Anya Taylor-Joy's charater to live, but being that the plot is what it looks like and Fiennes character has assembled all of these folks to end their lives makes me feel like the movie doesn't earn the right to let Margo live. I totally get the mechanics behind "The Cheeseburger," however, it just kinda feels like cheating, or maybe better put that the film doesn't have the heart to live up to its convictions. It's funny, because I was certainly rooting for ATJ to live, but when I got what I wanted, it felt hollow.

 

Oh well. All in all, a good film and a nice night out at the movies. 

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Read:

Last week, I mentioned finally receiving my copy of Brubaker and Phillips' new Reckless book, Follow Me Down. I have to say, this series is fantastic, containing now five of the best graphic novels I've ever read.

I adore everything about this series. The format is a massive win for comic fans: the fact that Brubaker and Phillips have proven the concept of releasing Hardcovers every six months instead of serializing floppies for eventual collection just proves that there are a lot of people willing to pay for this kind of thing. 

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Playlist:

The Thirsty Crows - Hangman's Noose

Rezurex - Skeletons

Scratch Acid - The Greatest Gift

Team Sleep - Eponymous

Gang of Four - Return the Gift, Part 1

The Juan Maclean - Happy House (Matthew Dear Remix)

Rein - Reincarnated

Poni Hoax - Eponymous

Mastodon - Hushed and Grim

Eldovar - A Story of Darkness and Light

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Seven of Pentacles/Disks again, eh? Hmm... Well, the card I started with here, the Three of Wands, popped out of the deck while I shuffled, so that seems the point to which the others refer. Three of Wands often asks the question for you, a sort of, "How true to your ambitions/inner map are you at the moment? Seven of Pentacles denotes difficulty in material or "Earthly" matters, and in this case, the wheel tells me I may need to make an adjustment and wait out the ramifications before things realign with how I want them to be.

The Subways - Black Wax

Ask and ye shall freakin' receive. New music from The Subways. "Black Wax" is taken from the forthcoming album Uncertain Joys, which drops January 13th, 2023. You can pre-order HERE. Very cool song; feels good to reconnect with a band like I have with The Subways.

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Read:

Over the weekend, I finished up a couple of books I'd had lingering over the last few months. First, I knocked out all the remaining stories in my re-read of Irvine Welsh's seminal short story collection The Acid House. Fantastic stuff. 

Second, I went back and read the last three (of a paltry four total) tales in Emily Carrol's Through the Woods. Somewhere between a book of short stories, a comic book, and a story book, Through The Woods is a joy to immerse yourself in, and proves to be too short an experience. 

Ms. Carroll's style pushes and pulls the heart between youth and adulthood, joy and terror, naughty and nice. There's a similar appreciation for the Fairytales and Nursery Rhymes of the old world that you see in the work of Neil Gaiman, and there's just as sharp a'teeth here and there. 

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Playlist:

Rowland S. Howard - Pop Crimes

Poni Hoax - Eponymous

Orville Peck - Pony

The Final Cut - Consumed

Primus - Pork Soda

Sausage - Riddles Are Abound Tonight

Nun Gun - Mondo Decay

Joy Division - Still

Belong - October Language

Sylvaine - Nova

Beach House - Once Twice Melody

Preoccupations - Arrangements

Jackie Wilson - Higher and Higher

Ozzy Osbourne - Diary of a Madman

Jerry Cantrell - Atone

Fleet Foxes - Shore

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Allowing Change to occur for the purposes of growth even when that change necessitates difficulty in material life. 

Well, our Thermostat went down yesterday and we're waiting for a technician to come out, so that definitely fits. I'll take this as the cards reminding me to ask questions and pay attention when the tech is here, so I can learn something. I'm pretty bad about paying attention to homeowner things, and I suppose that needs to abate.

This Patrol of Ours is Doomed

 

After loving the first season, I never really got around the second or third of Doom Patrol. K and I did have a false start where we watched a handful of episodes, but honestly, I barely remember anything about it. So I started up from the beginning of Season 2 this week, and I'm once again in love with this fantastically mad adaptation/distillation of (mostly) Grant Morrison's six-volume run on the C-Building X-Men. 

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Read:

After savoring it for over ten years, I finally finished Ramsey Campbell's definitive collection Alone With the Horrors.

This collection was curated by the author himself, so it represents the stories from his early career that he feels are his finest. It's dense, perhaps because a lot of the oldest stories in here, hailing from as far back as the early 60s when Campbell first began to write, read verbose in a way that often feels unnecessary. That said, all the imagery and all the concepts here are fantastic. As the collection goes on, however, you begin to discover some absolute short fiction gems among these pages. Of particular note for me were 

Man in the underpass

The Depths

Down There

The Hands

Again

Seeing the World

The Other Side

Boiled Alive

End of the Line

That last one is nothing like it sounds like it would be. Campbell actually wrote the forward to this edition and talks briefly about how Boiled Alive is his attempt at Science Fiction. All of these are extremely British and characterized by solitude, rain, and a general social malignancy that fits with the Britain I've gotten to know through the New Wave British Comic writers of the late 70s-mid 80s. Likewise, the final story in this volume, End of the Line, feels about as close as a writer ever got to demonstrating literal madness in prose. A freaky and fantastic journey into a mind seriously deluded by knowing nothing of the world except the religion foisted upon him by a father that never let him leave the house and taught him everything in the world outside the window is evil. Now imagine that person having to go outside for the first time by themselves.

Chilling.

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Playlist:

Steve Moore - The Mind's Eye OST

The Thirsty Crows - Hangman's Noose

Revocation - Teratogenesis

Plague Bringer - Life Songs in a Land of Death

Bret Easton Ellis Podcast - S6E21: Platinum Patreon Q&A

Clint Mansell & Kevin Kiner - Doom Patrol: Season 1 OST

Deafheaven - Sunbather

Ghost Bath - Moonlover

Deafheaven - Infinite Granite

Deafheaven - From the Kettle Onto the Coil (Single)

Deafheaven - Black Brick (Single)

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Card:

A quick Pull from Missi's Raven deck to bring me into the weekend:

A reminder to remember my equilibrium. 

Young For Eternity!

Hot Damn has it been a long time since I listened to The Subways!

Here's what happened two days ago: I charged my old iPod and linked it up to the speaker in my office, found a bunch of stuff that I know is stored in my backup drive, but that I don't really have access to for listening purposes. You'll see a bunch of it listed below, from Living Nudes to my own Darkness Brings the Cold back catalog, to a bunch of stuff I'm sure is readily available on Apple or Spotify, but that I just don't think about. Hence, Young For Eternity, The Subways' 2005 debut record that rips from start to finish! I could have posted any song on this one, but I went with "Oh Yeah" because I literally got chills when the first chorus kicked in.

I never followed this group after their second album, which, at the time, I don't think I ever gave a fair shake. I'll have to remedy that. A quick internet search shows they are still kicking, and that kinda makes my day!

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Read:

What a fantastic NCBD yesterday! Not only did my copy of Reckless: Follow Me Down finally come in (I forgot to ask them to order me one before the cut-off, and they sold out. I'm so not used to frequenting a smaller shop where the clientele dictates they order less of the non-Superhero stuff), but after reading the newest issue of Kieron Gillen's Immortal X-Men, I have to once again state that this book is the top of what the X-books can be.

Mystique was Sherlock Holmes? Sinister and Nathaniel Essex were basically Jekyl and Hyde? The mind reels at how those cloning vats on the final page with the four playing card suits might explain what the hell is going on with Sinister. I'm fascinated beyond belief and want more!

While initially, the one weak link I had with Hickman's refashioning of the X-Books was his treatment of Sinister as a bit of a dandy; a gossipy, oft-comedic buffoon, I get it now. Between recent revelations in Duggan's X-men book and now here, I can't wait to see where this is going.

Also, yesterday Geof Darrow's most recent chapter of Shaolin Cowboy wrapped with issue 7, and once again, after reading it I am just blown away by the absolute insanity of it. Imagine Post Apocalyptic Western set amidst a pretty accurate extrapolation of the end result of our country's current obsession with nationalism, and throw in some B-movie Grindhouse violence and a healthy dose of ToHo Kaiju madness, and you're maybe in the ballpark, but still not going to be able to anticipate how bat-shit crazy this book is.

I can't wait for another iteration of this story, though I realize at the level of detail Darrow puts into every single panel of every page, 

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Playlist:

Calderum - Mystical Fortress of Iberian Lands

The Trapezoid & Six Ex - Cannibal Children of the West (single)

Moderat - II

Living Nudes - My World Exploded

The Subways - Young For Eternity

Godflesh - Post Self

Godflesh - A World Lit Only By Fire

Ghost - Impera

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Card:

When the desired result interferes with the rational mind, stability is threatened.

I'm walking a thin line working on the second Shadow Play again. One day I'm super psyched about my progress, the next, I hate everything I've written so far. Because of this, I have to constantly remind myself of the capricious nature of writing fiction, especially something that, for me, is well beyond the scope of anything in my short fiction 'comfort zone.' I'll take today's pull as a kindly reminder to watch my step and remember that, no matter what, I did this once before and I can do it again.

Sing for Joy

 

Man, I listened to Frank Black's Honeycomb record for the first time in a long time yesterday and was deeply moved. I've always identified more with the other iterations of his solo work that occur under variations of his moniker. Frank Black and the Catholics are my favorite, followed of course by Pixies, Black Francis and, um, whatever other derivations might be currently escaping me. Honeycomb occupies a weird place in my awareness because I always confuse it as being a Catholics album, and my least favorite of the bunch. But in being reminded of its place in Mr. Black's catalog, I was also reminded of a lot of good times listening to this, and it was nice to go back and give it my full attention, even if I might not do so again for some time. 

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Watch:

Last night, K and I made it out to see Martin McDonagh's new film,  The Banshees of Inisherin, which floored me when I saw it landed in our local Regal. 

Like the rest of McDonagh's oeuvre, Banshees is a feast for the eyes, brain and heart. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson turn in outstanding performances that are bolstered by a supporting cast that knows no weakness, especially Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan. The chemistry between all of them is riveting, but of special note for me was seeing Keoghan and Farrell together again; echoes of their performances in Killing of a Sacred Deer still resound in my head.

I know many will be tempted to wait for streaming on this one, being a quiet drama and all. I would, however, advise seeing it on the big screen. Not only will you be supporting films like this continuing to receive wide theatrical release - David O'Russell's Amsterdamn and its epic failure at the BO has greatly corrupted the chances of adult dramas rolling wide from here out - but you'll be able to feel the breathless majesty of the Emerald Isle on the big screen, the way cinematographer Ben Davis intended.

Also of note, Carter Burwell's score is, as always, wonderful; inspiring as it is in its "less is more" aesthetic.

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NCBD:

Here's what I'm pulling off the shelves later today:

Mystique and Destiny in Victorian England? Been waiting for this, as I really want follow-up on that opening sequence in Immortal X-Men #1 that saw the two of them and Sinister  - or perhaps the man who would be Sinister - discussing the future from the vantage point of citizens of Victoriana. 

Speaking of Victoriana, the first two issues of Phantasmagoria blew me away. Possession, secret high society societies, and a bevy of literary allusions have made this one of my most anticipated monthlies at the moment.

Will the finale of this current Shaolin Cowboy series be as insane as the first six issues? I'd bet my talking, smoking lizards on it.

I'm still in awe of what Lemire and Sorrentino have given us so far from the Bone Orchard Mythos, so I've been kind of chomping at the bit to read more. 

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Playlist:

Ifernach - Capitulation of All Life

Grand Duchy - Petite Fours

Frank Black - Honeycomb

Revolting Cocks - Big Sexy Land

Godflesh - Streetcleaner

Barry Adamson - Back to the Cat

Calderum - Mystical Fortress of Iberian Lands

Underworld - Barbara Barbara, We Face A Shining Future

Underworld - RiverRun Project

Darkness Brings the Cold - House of Sin

Darkness Brings the Cold - Eponymous

Darkness Brings the Cold - Human Me

Deafheaven - Sunbather

Fvunerals - For the Horrors Eat the Light (pre-release single, thanks Tommy)

Godflesh - PURE Live

Godflesh - Messiah

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

The stability achieved through ritual and routine will be disrupted briefly. Instead of allowing this to cause frustration, I'm pretty sure the message here is to look at it as a pattern interrupt that will help me see things from a different perspective and, thus, gain new insight.

For Absent Friends

I don't think I ever noticed how much this track from 2002's Deliverance resembles Alice in Chains. It's the guitar, 100%. Has that woodsy, almost campfire sound Jerry Cantrell gets to his playing when it veers forlorn and reflective. Absolutely stunning, regardless of the comparison. I always teeter back and forth between Deliverance and Blackwater Park as the crowning jewel of Opeth's "mid" period.

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Watch:

Over the course of two nights last week, I watched and rewatched Panos Cosmatos' entry in Guillermo del Torro's Cabinet of Curiosities. 

 

To say The Viewing is my favorite installment of Cabinet would be an understatement. I liked all of them to one degree or another, and even the ones I connected with least - unexpectedly, both H.P. Lovecraft adaptations - rank as extremely well-made genre films. But The Viewing is something else entirely.

 

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Read:

Seeing the announcements for Stephen Graham Jones' Don't Fear the Reaper, I finally ordered a signed Hardcover edition of last year's My Heart is a Chainsaw from the wonderful folks at Jones' home store, Boulder Books in Bolder Colorado. Chainsaw was the first volume in what Jones has dubbed his Indian Lake Trilogy, and Reaper continues the story. Here's the solicitation from Jone's publisher, Simon and Schuster:

December 12th, 2019, Jade returns to the rural lake town of Proofrock the same day as convicted Indigenous serial killer Dark Mill South escapes into town to complete his revenge killings, in this riveting sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw from New York Times bestselling author, Stephen Graham Jones.

Don't Fear the Reaper is out February 7th, and you can pre-order it anywhere. I'm sure I'll be ordering a signed one from Boulder Books, and I'll probably ask for the personalized option this time. To good to pass up.

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Playlist:

Barry Adamson - Back To The Cat

Opeth - Deliverance

Raveonettes - Chain Gang of Love

Opeth - My Arms, Your Hearse

With Strangers - A Love That's Gone (single)

Preoccupations - Arrangements

The Ocean - Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic

The Ocean - Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic/Cenozoic

Zeal and Ardor - Eponymous

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Card:

Returning once more to the Raven Deck for a quick pull to establish the week:

Reading this as a reminder to keep things fluid this week. I had a great writing session this past Saturday where I dug heavily back into Shadow Play Book Two, and then a massive, three-plus hour one again Sunday to further that. Raven's telling me to enjoy this, but be open to other projects that might need attention this week.