Mascara - Half Light Aftermath

Hailing from France, Mascara is a band I know very little about. I picked this up after hearing the guys at Cinematic Void talk about the latest single, which this song is on. I really dig this and recommend checking out their Bandcamp HERE.

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Watch:

Let's talk about David Lynch's Inland Empire.

 

I have to laugh at the idea that a trailer was cut for this film. I mean, this tells you nothing except Laura Dern is in the movie. I plan on writing a bit more extensively at some point, possibly on my Letterbxd, but for now, suffice it to say that while I love this film as an example of how David Lynch's mind works, I find it nearly inscrutable and a bit of a chore to watch in its entirety. I always think back to seeing this in Hollywood when it premiered. What I experienced that night was what I have always described as an absolute free fall - the film swallowed me whole, and I did not become lucid until the moment when Beck's "Black Tamborine" kicked in. Resurfacing, I had absolutely no idea how long I had been sitting in that theatre; it could have as easily been four hours as forty-five minutes. That's one of the best theatrical experiences of my life, the experience of being so taken over by a film. Translating that to at-home viewing, however, has been unbelievably difficult. I must have attempted to watch the Inland Empire DVD a half dozen times since it was released in '07 0r '08, and every time I failed. Until yesterday, when I watched it with headphones on. 

Yes. Headphones.

You would not believe the sound design in this, and while I still felt the burden of sitting through the entire three hours, I made it and am glad I did.  While I can't see myself ever frequenting this film like I do most of Lynch's other works, I'm glad I own it and look forward to whenever the next time I watch it - as long as the tv I watch it on has blue tooth.

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Support:

Jonathan Grimm has his new Kickstarter up, and I'm blown away by the artwork he's produced for this.

 

I've known Grimm for a long time, and he has come a long way with his art. In the last year, however, his talent has grown exponentially, as has his business plan. Having all the risk removed from these campaigns before even launching them should instill a confidence in his fans and supporters that is equal to the awe his work inspires. Solid Dude, Incredible Artist. Honored to call him a friend.

 

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Playlist:

Thou - Rhea Sylvia

Alice in Chains - Eponymous

Oh Baby - The Art of Sleeping Alone

Anthrax - Persistence of Time 

Mascara - Hla-11Tf (single)

Deafheaven - Sunbather

Mascara - Cameo Blue Estate EP

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Card:

Back to the Thoth deck for today's single card pull:

The Airy aspect of Water, so Will applied to Emotion. Sounds like this is still pointing to that same Emotional Breakthrough I keep missing on my recent daily spreads - and I believe I just figured it out. In jogging back through the other posts, I realized I've been reading these in a completely distracted state. On Friday, 1/20/23 my Pull had an Ace of Cups at its center, however, the two days this week I mistakenly read as a reiteration of that were actually Ace of Wands, thus Intellectual Breakthrough. Or an achievement of Will. This, I believe is a reference to a slight incoming lifestyle adjustment in terms of finally being removed from my salaried Associate Manager position I stepped down from in August when I moved and shifted to a work-from-home position. Not a huge change, but you'll be seeing a lot fewer picks for NCBD for starters. Hence, Will Power Adjustment.

The Doom That's Coming to Gotham...

 

I stumbled across this pre-release track from the new Industrial band Insolent yesterday while writing, and really dug it. The album is titled Drain - which I love - and comes out February 24th via Sentient Ruin. You can pre-order on Insolent's Bandcamp HERE.

 

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Support:

I've been talking about this on recent episodes of The Horror Vision, but Author Laird Barron is in the midst of some pretty serious health problems at the moment. Being a professional writer - and a great one at that - it should come as no surprise to anyone that the man does not have health insurance. Thanks to John Langan (author of The Fisherman) and Mike Davis (from the Lovecraft Ezine Podcast), a GoFundMe went up for Laird. Here's the information; kick in if you can:

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NCBD:

Here are my picks for this week's NCBD:

Dark Web still? Okay, let's hope this is better than issue #17. I feel like, if this had wrapped up faster, I wouldn't be losing interest.

The mini-series end! Creepshow has been an uneven ride, but overall I dug it. Will I return if it does? Not sure...

I hadn't even heard about this one until last week. With the success of last year's The Last Ronin - success the book 100% deserves - this was inevitable. I'm totally down with going back into this world and seeing how we got to where that story took place.

It's always a good Wednesday when there's a new issue of Saga waiting for me.

I've been kind of excited for this one. Full disclosure: The 'twist' at the end of Immortal X-Men #10 seems like too big a swing that is just going to bring this whole carefully balanced house of cards down around Gillen's ears, but I hope not. 

The end to a fantastic mini-series that, I thought, harkened back to the way Chris Claremont did X-book miniseries back in the day. 

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Watch:

It's been quite a few years since I last read Mike Mignola's The Doom That Came To Gotham mini-series.  A prestige-format, 3-issue mashup of H.P. Lovecraft's The Doom That Came To Sarnath and Mignola's Gotham By Gaslight timeline (I think), I loved this series when it first came out back in 2000-2001. 

Now, it appears there will be an animated adaptation:

I've seen a few of the other Batman animated adaptations. Well, I've seen The Dark Knight Returns and didn't necessarily love it. But I think I'll definitely give this one a chance whenever it hits HOBO MAX. 

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Playlist:

Calderum - Mystical Fortress of Iberian Lands

Off! - Free LSD

Bonny Doon - Longwave

Cocteau Twins - Heaven Or Las Vegas

Cocteau Twins - Garlands

Realize - Machine Violence 

Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full

Ghost Bath - Moonlover

Insolent - Inner Tomb (pre-release single)

Godflesh - Post Self

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Card:

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

Man, that emotional breakthrough is really insistent, isn't it? What aren't I doing? Or is is something I am doing that shouldn't be? Looking at Old Scratch and then Justic, I find myself wondering if I'm mistakenly waiting for something I am not due to receive? 

Department of Neon Truth

 

I rewatched Nicolas Winding Refn's 2016 The Neon Demon yesterday and was once again completely blown away by it. The visual textures are sleek and beautiful while remaining as soulless as the industry they house in the story. This is perfect for Julian Winding's throbbing, minimalist techno (not calling it EDM, sorry).

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Watch:

Interestingly enough, not a day after I read an article about Huesera: The Bone Woman in the latest issue of Fangoria, the trailer dropped: 

 

The first feature from writer/director Michelle Garza Cervera and distributed by the delightful XYZ Films; I'm kind of chomping at the bit to see this one. Something about the mythology at play here really fascinates me.

 

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Read:

Last week I doubled down on my James Tynion reading and picked up the first four trades of Department of Truth. This is research for an upcoming deep-dive Butcher and I are doing for The Horror Vision; the project began as a lay-everything-out for Tynion's Something is Killing the Children mythology; only before we could get going, The Book of Slaughter dropped and kind of answered everything we were going to attempt to draw conclusions on. However, knowing the overall premise of Dept. of Truth, I began to realize the real deep-dive is seeing how these two connect because I am almost certain that they do. 

We'll obviously get more into it on the show, which will hopefully drop in about two weeks, but for now let me just point out that in SIKTC, the thing that manifests the monsters is belief, and the titular Department in DOT's entire job is managing belief in conspiracies because the big secret of the world is that if enough people believe in something, it becomes reality.

There's a layer to my enjoyment of DOT I hadn't anticipated, and that's that it looks and reads almost exactly like a late 80s/early 90s Vertigo title. I'm still picking away at the first couple trades of Peter Milligan and Chris Bacchalo's Shade The Changing Man from 1990-1991, and there are so many similarities, it's unreal. Add to that the Bill Sienkiewicz-like art from Martin Simmonds, and I've realized this is a book I should have been reading from the beginning. Better late than never, though.

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Playlist:

David Lynch - Crazy Clown Time

Metallica - Hardwired... To Self-Destruct

Various Artists - Twin Peaks (Limited Event Series Soundtrack)

Metallica - 72 Seasons (pre-release singles)

The Police - Synchronicity

David Bowie - Scary Monsters (and Super Freaks)

Off! - Free LSD

Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments

Katatonia - Sky Void of Stars

Cliff Martinez - The Neon Demon OST

Final Light - Eponymous

Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch - An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil

Special Interest - Endure

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction

Godflesh - A World Lit Only By Fire

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Card:

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

A strenuous emotional sacrifice to achieve a goal. (that's a crappy reading, but I'm short on time)

Metallica - Screaming Suicide

 

I'll say this: while I'm not favoring this track nearly as much as I did "Lux Aeterna," I can't help being fascinated by my out-of-the-blue turnaround interest in Metallica of late. Nothing will ever make me care about anything they released after the Eponymous and up to Hard Wired, but I have to say, these guys seem to have found themselves again. Maybe we're both going through some nostalgia trip together and reconnecting at the right time. I don't know. For now, I'm along for the ride again.

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Watch:

I think Twin Peaks has me in the mood for late 80s/early 90s thrillers because last night K and I watched Nicholas Kazon's 1994 Dream Lover. Here's the trailer:

 

Another obvious Peaks connection here is Mädchen Amick as the female lead. This is the kind of specific-to-the-era, early 90s thriller that Spader excelled at, and his chemistry with Amick really propels the movie to its clever and almost hysterically dark final moments. All in all, a solid three-star if you allow for the inflation of aesthetics. 

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Playlist:

Angelo Badalamenti - Twin 

Bonny Doon - Longwave

Karl Casey - White Bat XVIII EP

LCD Soundsystem - New Body Rhumba (single)

Special Interest - Endure

Fleshwater - Baldplate Driver (single)

Botch - One Twenty Two (single)

Mascara - HLA-11Tf (single)

Metallica - Hardwired... To Self-Destruct

Metallica - 72 Seasons (pre-release singles)

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Slow 30s Room

My first re-watch of the original Twin Peaks since 2016 is digging up all kinds of deep memory and psychological stuff that has 1990/1991 fresh in my head again. I will never be able to overstate my gratitude that I found this show when I did, as a 15/16-year-old stoner; it changed me for all time, for all the better. This morning, while I sat on my porch drinking coffee and reading from Lynch's Room to Dream, I played several of the soundtracks on my turntable - I still have all the CDs, and I put up the $77 back in 2011 for the digital music archive Lynch released through his website - ALL the music from the series. Everything. Then Mondo put out Twin Peaks Season One, FWWM, and the two soundtracks from the 2017 series on vinyl a few years ago, and I grabbed them all. 

So I get around to The Return's score and hit "Slow 30s Room," and immediately remember that, at some time in the not-so-distant past, I found this hour-long loop of the track on youtube. 

Presto - here you go.

Also, Happy Birthday David Lynch!!!

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Watch:

Since moving, I have fallen a bit behind on all the podcasts I listen to; my primary podcast time was in LaLaLand traffic, and being that I work from home now and pretty much listen to music all day, there's no equivalent time. So I have to make that time. To accomplish this, I've begun making a concentrated effort to set aside time, usually on Friday afternoons, specifically for podcats. In this way, I've knocked out a few of the Bret Easton Ellis show but not much else.

One podcast I am currently behind on is the brilliant Cinematic Void. Cinematic Void is a monthly cult film screening series in Los Angeles at L.A.'s American Cinematique Theatres, as well as a pretty damn great Podcast with online Cinemadness Screenings that showcase some of the best in Horror and Exploitation Cinema. For some time now, The Void has been hosting January Giallo screenings in L.A., and now it appears they have locations in both Massachuttes and Chicago, as well.        

I don't think I've been to Chicago's Music Box since I saw Don Coscarelli's Bubba Ho-Tep premiere there back in 2002. I am heading into town next week, but unfortunately, I probably won't make a screening. I wanted to put the word out there, though, for all my Chicago folks. I can vouch for The Void's programming, so next year I will be all over this!

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Read:

David Lynch and Kristine McKenna's Room to Dream is currently having an indelible effect on my mornings. This book puts me in such a good mood; it's remarkable. The book has led me back to my recent inclinations to begin meditating again, and this time, I think I'm going to attempt Transcendental Meditation, something I've always been intrigued with but felt self-conscious about.

When I began serious meditation back in my former life, circa 2014, I used an hour-long tone I constructed using fundamental principles of the Binaural Approach - something I'd learned about and messed around with long before it became a hokey product called binaural beats that populated the 'new age' section of music shops. Using a tone generator, I built a multi-layered mediation track in Pro-Tools and would take periods out of every day in totally random places to use it. For one regular spot I favored, I'd walk up to Olympic Blvd, just North of Bundy in L.A. There's a CBTL there, so I'd grab an Americano, then walk down Olympic to a bench-like ledge in front of an office building there, and with my headphones in, I would sit and meditate for 9 minutes. This is directly across from a bloodbath and beyond store and a block or so down from a Trader Joe's, so it's a high-traffic area. I always got an extra charge out of creating a little bit of novelty in the middle of this area where all these L.A. People tended to be so L.A.

Anyway, because I'd meditate anywhere back then, I avoided trying TM because making audible noise just seemed as though I'd be really calling attention to myself, which in turn would make me self-conscious, which would make it impossible for me to actually achieve any kind of meditative state. I no longer have any of those problems, and after things went a bit batty in 2015 (a story for another day), I have been reticent to use that old Pro Tools track. Thus, my impending return to Meditation will require something new. Reading Room to Dream, I think TM might be just the thing. First, though, I want to re-read Lynch's book on the subject, Catching The Big Fish.

 

Hearing the first-hand accounts of the people in Lynch's life talk about the change that TM produced in him when he first began practicing, I think this could be a very good tool to rid myself of some of the residual anger and frustration that I've fallen prey to lately, living with and helping to take care of an elderly person who just epitomizes a lot of the ignorance and blind consumer mindset I have such a hard time with in the human race. 

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Playlist:

The Police - Synchronicity

David Bowie - Outside

Talking Heads - Fear of Music

Talking Heads - Remain in Light

Iggy Pop - The Idiot

Iggy Pop - Every Loser

Iggy Pop - Lust for Life

Final Light - Eponymous

Godflesh - Pure Live

Low Cut Connie - Get Out the Lotion

NIN - Hesitation Marks

David Bowie - The Buddha of Suburbia

U2 - War

G Love & Special Sauce - Yeah, It's That Easy

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Card:

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

I love an easy Pull! An emotional breakthrough that will provide a solid foundation for moving forward with a sustainable degree of patience and cohesion.

They Might Be Giants - Minimum Wage

It's been quite some time since I listened to 90s alternative stalwarts They Might Be Giants, but I cracked out a few discs over this past weekend and put them in the car (It's also been a while since I listened to a CD in the car). 

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NCBD:

Here's what's on tap for NCBD this week:

Love that cover. This book is a mixed bag - I dig it, but I don't know that I feel enough momentum to continue after this arc. We'll see. 

I'm reading House of Slaughter monthly for the duration of this arc. In catching up a few weeks ago, I have to say the consistency isn't great. The first arc that concentrated on Aaron and Boucher, who returns this issue, was pretty good. The second one - I just didn't get it. 

Okay, Cates is gone. Let's see how this series continues on to its conclusion in April. 

The final issue before Immoral X-Men starts. Great cover- can't wait to see where this goes.

This one's on the chopping block. I love Shalvey's writing and art, and maybe it's just the book seems to be so sporadic that it doesn't actually feel like a series to me. 

The penultimate issue of Phantasmagoria. I've been keeping up with reading monthly, but I can't wait to read it all in one straight shot after next month's final issue.

Not gonna lie; I'm not feeling this series. That being said, being that DeMatteis penning a sequel to his original story, I'm in for the long haul, which is only another two issues anyway, so no biggie. 

The final issue of Strange, before Doctor Strange relaunches in a few months. I'll miss this book; what a fun ride McKay and Company have brought us on. And to think, I picked up the first issue entirely on a lark!

Still not reading the "Event" this ties into, and definitely not feeling that I need to. 

I'm waiting for Boss to take over the art again before I go back and re-read everything. Despite reading the entire series up to the hiatus in July, a lot disappeared during that break, and the fill-in artists - by no fault of their own - really made re-entry upon the book's return two months ago rough. I need to sit down and go through it all again. 

After all the love I gushed on Dark Web last week for ASM 17, I ended up fairly disappointed in that issue. Hoping this doesn't fizzle out now that we're in the climactic moments. That is what Events and Crossovers tend to do, though, so we'll see. 

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Playlist:

They Might Be Giants - Flood

David Bowie - Black Star

David Lynch and John Neff - BLUEBOB

LABRY'S - Eponymous

Blvck Hippie - If You Feel Alone At Parties

Mastodon - Once More 'Round the Sun

A001 - Nyctophobia EP

Lustmord - Hobart

Thou - Rhea Sylvia

Various - Dirt Redux

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full

Meathook Seed - Embedded

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Card:

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

These four cards flew out of the deck while I shuffled this morning, so I figured it would be important for the day's Pull to log them all. I'm not in a place at the moment where I can interpret this - I'm fried from a nearly 11-hour work day yesterday and looking down the barrel of a similar situation today.

Seven Days of Bowie: Day 7 - Cracked Actor (Live 1974)

 

I thought I'd end with something older since, this time, I focused so singularly on the later period of Bowie's work for most of the entries. That was, of course, intentional: I personally have always been drawn to the latter years more than the early ones, and it was through my appreciation of some of those later albums that I worked backward. Not to say I didn't dig Ziggy Stardust or Diamond Dogs when I was initially exposed, but I didn't get them as complete albums until later. The singles always wowed me, but I often didn't understand how they 'fit' into the context of the larger album they arrived on. 

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Watch:

The trailer for Season Three of The Mandalorian dropped last night:

Mando season three doesn't look like much based on the trailer, but it goes without saying that, as someone who grew up with but has disowned Star Wars but created a complicated caveat for my love of this show (and the Boba Fett show), I'm all-in until proven otherwise, which I doubt will ever happen.

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Playlist:

They Might Be Giants - Miscellaneous T

K's 70s Playlist

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Card:

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

Taping into the power of something bigger than myself will lead to a solid foundation from which to proceed. I can't help but read this as alluding to my current writing projects, but... oh, wait. I think I just got it. Now let me put this out of my mind so as not to taint the result. I'll confirm here later on if this means what I think it means.