Network

Mr. Brown and I have been doing vinyl swaps now that I live within a day's drive. This most recent one goes back to, I think, February. We pick out six albums we want to expose the other to, then hand them over until the next time we see one another. The albums in my most recent bag from Brown included Steve Earle's 2021 J.T. and it is exceptional.

Other than a few failed attempts at getting into Copperhead Road back around 2008, the only thing I really know about Steve Earle is he did a stint on HBO's brilliant Treme, where unlike most of the other Louisana musicians who appeared on the show as themselves, Earle played fictional local musician Harley Watt. 

The linear notes for J. T. tell the story of Justin Townes Earle, the first son and, by his own right, accomplished musician/songwriter who recorded and toured for nine studio albums before he passed away at the age of 38 in 2020. J.T. then, is Steve Earle and his band The Dukes recording a selection of his son's songs (one original closes out the album). Pretty powerful stuff. I'm not familiar with Justin Townes Earle's stuff outside of spinning this record half a dozen times now, but I can see why the term "genre agnosticism" keeps coming up when I read about him. The track I selected today has a very early 90s jangle pop sound hidden amidst its straight country leanings.

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Watch:

Sunday night K and I sat down to watch Sidney Lumet's 1975 film Network.

I'd seen half this movie back in the USPS Netflix days, when whatever DVD release they stocked needlessly split the 2-hour and 1-minute film onto two discs, apparently unknown to the service, who only sent me one disc. After that, well, Network faded to the back of my mind until I noticed it on HOBOMAX recently.

 

 

The prescience of this film - released in 1975 - is staggering today. This predicts EVERYTHING about our media-defined reality in 2023: The "Howard Beale Show" almost seems a template for every influencer, toktik "star" and social media celeb. The lengths the network will go, the manner in which everyone who doesn't agree falls quickly in line when they see the reactions of the masses (republican party 2015 anyone?) and the general disconnect Diana Christensen has from the world and the people around her - for anything other than the television - is so spot on with our world it's frightening. I really want to try and hit Cronenberg's Videodrome in the next day or two now, as I think these would be a perfect double feature.
 

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Playlist:

Alice in Chains - Jar of Flies

Fen - Epoch

A Perfect Circle - Mer De Noms

Sleep - The Sciences

The Sword - Warp Riders

Slayer - Decade of Aggression

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Card:

I felt compelled to stay with the Thoth Deck for this morning's Pull, so here we go:

• 4 of Cups Luxury - 4's traditionally denote stability, and when Crowley named his version of the 4 of Cups "Luxury" he did so as an intimation that, removed from the Earthen themes of Disks (pentacles), the luxury here is a stable, healthy emotional mind frame. This is the opposite of manic, which incidentally, is how I've felt the last two days.

• Prince of Swords - the Intellect when applied to the interconnectivity of relationships, whether they be personal or Earthly (ie legal and the like) - this is the road out of manic ville - thinking with purpose.

• 8 of Swords Interference - Pretty self-explanatory; it pains me to say that, when my mental gears are not processing something I've just read, watched or listened to, my thinking tends to be rather passive. I get carried away on flights of fancy very easily, resurface and often have nothing to show for it. THIS is what eats my productivity as a writer, but it also leaves my mind lazy. This then, is what I have to watch out for, as it produces a lethargy that then manifests (eventually) as a manic state. 

I definitely could see how Network ties into this; television in general. 

Cruising Near Dark

From the 1987 OST for Kathryn Bigelow's inimitable debut film, Near Dark, one of about three vampire movies I can't live without. 

Tangerine Dream was such a solid choice for scoring this film, and I'd say it just accentuates William Friedkin's obvious influence on Bigelow film. The early scene in the film this song scores is one of the most era-defining moments of 80s Horror for me. I didn't see Near Dark until well after its release, but the sights and sounds of this sequence somehow sum up a large part of the texture I remember from the mid-to-late 80s. 

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Watch:

Saturday night, K and I finally sat down and watched William Friedkin's 1980 thriller Cruising.

 

I remember some time back when Netflix was still by mail, I watched Friedkin's French Connection and To Live and Die in L.A. and realized, "Oh shit, this is the same guy who did The Exorcist. Wow."

I've never been one to get into an artist and just consume everything they've done immediately. There's still one Bret Baston Ellis book I haven't read; there are several Irvine Welsh novels I'm keeping on the back burner, and I've not heard more PJ Harvey than I've heard. This isn't to say there's any reason I'm avoiding these entries in the respective artist's canon except that I want to make sure there's something on deck. With Friedkin, I'm sure I looked up his filmography and made some long-forgotten notes, but I didn't exactly jump on anything else right away.

Sometime around 2013, titterings began for the restoration, release and revival house screenings of two "lost masterpieces" - 1977 Sorceror and Cruising. I remember mid-week screenings popping up at the New Beverly Cinema or the Silent Movie Theatre. I remember not having the money to go, or to buy the newly released DVD because my live was getting ready to explode. Ten years later, I finally sat down and watched Cruising and it absolutely blew me away, although not in the manner I expected. 

Friedkin is the best kind of sneaky when it comes to what he shows his audience. He manipulates his story via the medium of film by how he edits, what he puts in and what he leaves out of his script and its dialogue. Also, there's a level of casting manipulation here that I didn't understand at first, but after I read THIS ARTICLE. There is such mastery of film as a medium here, but not in the usual ways. Yes, the craft - the cinematography, writing, acting, all of it is superb, but the mastery I'm referencing here is the way Friedkin compresses his narrative into the actual physical act of showing it to us on screen. This isn't anything 'new,' however, I don't know anyone who has done it quite like this before. 

 

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Playlist:

Black Sabbath - Master of Reality

Black Sabbath - Technical Ecstasy

Bongripper - Satan Worshipping Doom

Atrium Carceri - Kapnobatai

High on Fire - Death is this Communion

High on Fire - Surrounded By Thieves

Sleep - The Sciences

SQÜRL - Silver Haze

Gaupa - Myriad

Mars Red Sky - Eponymous

Steve Earle - J.T.

Trombone Shorty - Too True

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicenter

Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

David Bowie - Diamond Dogs

        

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Card:

A single Thoth card for my Pull today:

When one path closes, the trick is sidestep the disappointment and watch for the next opening sure to arise in the wake. 

 

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Lighthouse Horror as a Subgenre

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First, some appropriate music to set the tone:

 

As I originally mentioned in an earlier post today, seeing the trailer for Torture Star/Marevo Collective's upcoming (May 18th!) new game No One Lives Under the Lighthouse, I felt compelled to talk a bit more about Lighthouse Horror as a burgeoning Subgenre. Yeah, I know it's pretty easy to get carried away with subgenres, but I feel like this is becoming as legitimate a 'thing' and there's a wealth of great entries that people interested should know about. 

First: What a spectacular setting, right?  I mean, an abandoned lighthouse island with rocky crags and descending spiral staircases lends itself so well to Horror that I just feel this is made to be. No or limited electricity, an ever-present "man vs. nature" throughline, pervading darkness and let's not forget the isolation - Oh! the isolation! Such tasty morsels for a Horror story to lean into. 

Lighthouse Horror is interesting because there's a fairly small and finite number of permutations to get the ball rolling. Either someone is being shipped out to a lighthouse because the operator has gone missing/mad/died, or the characters are rotating in for their shift and something horrific transpires. The isolation is a large part of the Horror, and keeping this in mind, the setting is perhaps optimum for slow-burn formulas, especially where the characters' psychological state becomes increasingly unmoored, slowly sinking them into madness. 

Being that the entire purpose of the lighthouse as a structure is to keep away the darkness and act as a beacon to those traveling through it, the subgenre is also ready-made for metaphors, and Lovecraftian sea monsters slot into these tales nicely as well, whether you consider them metaphors or not.

The argument for adding Lighthouse Horror as a subgenre begins, as far as I can tell, in 2017. That's the year Cold Skin by Xavier Gens came out. This takes a Lovecraftian route with its use of a lighthouse location to tell a Horror tale, and it fits like a glove! 

From there, of course, Robert Eggers's The Lighthouse came out just two years later in 2019. This takes the more psychological route with the location, although there are folks that argue there are some Lovecraftian moments sprinkled throughout, just in a decidedly more subtle. The "Can I Play With Madness" themes of this film prove pretty aggressive by the end, and as I've said on this page before, I can't think of a better example of the admittedly overused logline, "A slow descent into Madness."

More recently, Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino kicked off their Bone Orchard Mythos with The Passage, a graphic novel that takes place entirely on a lighthouse island and contains some genuinely haunting images. There are overarching monstrous themes in the Boneyard Mythos - which is still developing in subsequent series - and while I'd say the aspirations are Lovecraft-level, this is 100% Lemire and Sorrentino's own thing, which is refreshing. There are some images in The Passage that rank as the most effective I've seen in a Horror Graphic Novel since Pornsak Pichetshote's Infidel and some very smart uses of a drone to deliver them.

What route will No One Lives Under the Lighthouse take? With first-person games a perfect vehicle to elicit very real paranoic responses from their players, this might be the closest some get to a real lighthouse Horror experience ourselves (let's hope so!) 

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Ghost of Vroom!

New music from Mike Doughty's Ghost of Vroom! If you're a Soul Coughing fan like I am, this is the closest thing to that sound Doughty's done since their breakup back in, well, a loooong time ago. The new album, Ghost of Vroom 3 is out later this year, although no hard date has been announced.

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Watch:

Rewatched Kevin Phillips' Super Dark Times on Shudder last night. Man, this one is heavy.

I'm not going to post a trailer because I think it's best to go in cold on this one. Yes, that's my recommendation for every movie, however, we can't always control that. This one is from 2017, so if you haven't seen it you may already have an idea what it's about. If not, just watch it. Damn.

What I will say is A) Kevin Phillips NAILS high school. I mean, he just crushed it - so many little non-sequitur moments that surround the characters and mean nothing other than to reinforce where our minds are at this age. Anger, Angst and Rebellion. "No I don't need your fucking help, lady!" one background character screams at one point, and it's just spot fucking on. B) This deals with a trauma that an event in my life in high school shares some DNA with. Phillips nails the state of mind that followed it. Again, he CRUSHED it.

 

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Play:

Ask and ye shall receive: new Puppet Combo-like game No One Lives Under the Lighthouse by Torture Star and Marevo Collective hits a bunch of platforms - Switch included - this month!

 

Spooky AF! There are some images in this trailer that seared into my brain the moment they appeared on screen (@1:22 - WTF???). What a spectacular setting; an abandoned lighthouse island with rocky crags and descending spiral staircases lends itself so well to this aesthetic. I can't wait to play this game!

NOTE: if you read this post earlier and remembered it being longer, fret not! You are correct - I've expanded my "Lighthouse Horror as a burgeoning subgenre thoughts in a separate post HERE.

No One Lives Under the Lighthouse is out May 18th!

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Playlist:

Sleep - The Sciences

Windhand - Eternal Return

Earth - Live at Third Man Records

Dorthia Cottrell - Death Folk Country

The Sword - Warp Riders

Bongripper - Satan (single)

Crowbar - Planets Collide (single)

Gaupa - Myriad

Witchfinder - Hazy Rites

Witchfinder - Forgotten Mansion

            

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Card:

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

• 20 Judgement is Aeon in Crowley and Harris's Thoth deck. Regardless of which you go with, this is a card of Redemption. It also suggests a pivotal sequence and the holography of cause/effect.

• Seven of Pentacles is a card that denotes Victory/Completion of Earthly matters

• Queen of Pentacles, in this particular case, is offering the advice that I actually stop thinking with my emotions on Earthly matters and begin applying a more staunch lens of discernment.

In other words - I'm spending too much money on vinyl. 

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New Music from The Hives!

 

Yesterday the world got an absolutely KILLER new track from The Hives, whose last proper record, Lex Hives, was eleven years ago!!! What a comeback, though. This track rocks and the video is a glorious homage to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead.

The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons is out August 11th; pre-order HERE.

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Play:

Bloody Disgusting ran a short story about Armor Games Studio's announcement for their new first-person Horror/Mystery game The Tartarus Key. After watching the trailer, I am one hundred percent in on this one:

 

Being that I've only come back to playing video games in the last year with my purchase of a Switch, I don't know that much about what's out there. I'm sure there are more of these - Nun Massacre is my current obsession, and while I wait for more Puppet Combo games to eventually become available on Switch, I've been wanting to find more of these. 

I think my love for this type of game goes back to the original Shadow Gate, which I played on a friend's PC in the 80s, then on the original Nintendo system later in that same decade. That game always gave me such a wonderfully immersive effect, and Nun Massacre gives me the same effect, except amplified by about 1000.

 

The Tartarus Key is out May 31st on a bunch of platforms, and I'm just happy one of those is Switch.
 

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Playlist:

Witchfinder - Forgotten Mansion

The Sword - Age of Winters

Wolfpack - Lycanthro Punk

Karl Casey - XX EP

The Hives - Bogus Operandi

The Hives - Tyrannosaurus Hives

Sleep - The Sciences

Locrian - Return to Annihilation

Windhand - Eternal Return

Blackbraid - Blackbraid I

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Bright New Disease Renders Martyrs Livid

 

Boris and Uniform? Holy F*ck - talk about a shot in the arm first thing in the morning! From the forthcoming album Bright New Disease, out June 16th on the always stellar Sacred Bones Records. Pre-order HERE.

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NCBD:

A short and sweet NCBD this week. Here are my picks:

And we are back to our regular 616, Krakoa timeline. Thank You! I started re-reading Immortal X-Men from the beginning yesterday just to prepare.

My suspicion is I won't be reading Sons of X beyond the first issue,  I'm curious about the overall transition back into the regular, Krakoa continuity from the Sins of Sinister timeline. I will say that I reread Sins of Sinister: Dominion a few days ago and had a slightly better experience with it, and I'm curious how Mother Righteous's role might develop in the reinstated timeline.

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Watch:

Looks like Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's hard-to-find 2011 Masterpiece Livid is now on Shudder: 

 

I picked a region-free disc of this one up sometime in the last year or two and was completely blown away. There's such a Fairytale quality to this film - visually, Vivid reminds me a lot of the music from long-defunct band Miranda Sex Garden. Gossamer-thin realities that come across more like a fable out of time than a modern movie, except that's there too. 

 

Also, Livid isn't the only renowned but difficult-to-find Masterpiece that popped up on Shudder. It's not often that I dig a movie like Martyrs, but despite its unparalleled cruelty, Pascal Laugier's opus more than earns its place in the "must watch at least once column." Just be prepared - it's not easy.

When I watched Martyrs, it was back when Netflix still 'rented' movies through the mail. I wasn't certain what I was in for, but the film had come feverishly recommended to me by my good friend and Horror Vision Co-host Tori. I smoked up, sat down in the middle of the day, and for the first 45 minutes, felt like I was watching a movie that, well, before long, I realized I was not watching. Maybe that's a convoluted way of saying that from the onset, Martyrs seemed as though it was going to be the first great 'Haunting' film I'd seen in some time. Then something happens to a character and I suddenly had the prescience to see where the film was headed. I remember that feeling because my stomach literally dropped*. From there, my resolve was tested, until in the final moments of the film, Laugier blew my mind.

*****

*Incidentally, Laugier's 2018 Incident in a Ghost Land includes a moment that had a very similar effect on me. 

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Playlist:

Mastodon - One More 'Round the Sun

Beach House - Become EP

James - La Petite Mort

The Sword - Warp Riders

Slayer - Decade of Aggression

King Woman - Doubt EP

Windhand - Eponymous

 

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Card:

Since I utilized both my Thoth and Bound Tarot decks for yesterday's Pull, I specifically wanted to go to Missi's Raven Deck for today's Pull.

Buckle down. 

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RIP Jeff Hanneman, Ten Years Gone

 

Today is the ten-year anniversary of Slayer Guitarist Jeff Hanneman's death. Hanneman's work inspired a generation of guitarists; almost every solo and riff the guy wrote is a classic, so choosing a favorite is tough. That said, "Spirit In Black," from 1990's Seasons in the Abyss, is one that always makes me stop and listen. The sinewy, circuitous path Hanneman shreds up and down the neck just blows me away every time.

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Watch:

I finally had a chance to see Ari Aster's new film, Beau is Afraid last night:

 

Okay, so I went into this film knowing nothing about it other than a few references I've seen to it being a "Nightmare Comedy." While we probably all know enough about Nightmares and comedies to be able to marry the two theoretically, I had some trouble picturing what this term would mean, let alone in the hands of Ari Aster. After seeing it, I will say this: Nightmare Comedy is the perfect summation of this film. Beau is Afraid is Anxious, breathtaking and sometimes horrifying. Also, it's very, very funny; I laughed out loud quite a bit, with one scene in particular evoking what was probably my longest laugh since either Barry season 2 episode 5 or the South Park: Pandemic Special. 

I just couldn't stop. 

Granted, the scene in question would likely horrify others, but by saying that, I don't want to mislead anyone. This isn't a "Horror" film and there's nothing as severe as the most memorable events from Hereditary or Midsommar. Or, perhaps it's better said there are some fairly severe moments - some that evoke Midsommar especially - but in Beau, these elements are not presented with the same severity. So, while visually, or in concept a few scenes create similar violence, in Beau that violence is, remarkably, played for laughs. 

And it works. 

This feels like Aster's "Gilliam" piece, but I also detect notes of Gondry, the Cohen Bros, and Peter Weir. I'm typing this portion of this post about two hours after leaving the theatre on Monday night, and I'm honestly considering going back tomorrow and seeing it again. There's a thrill to the discovery of what this movie is that I won't be able to recreate now that I know its arc, but would still be damn fun to try.

 

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Playlist:

Witchfinder - Hazy Rites

Ruby the Hatchet - Fear is a Cruel Master

Slayer - Seasons in the Abyss

Slayer - Show No Mercy

The Darts - Snake Oil

Screaming Females - Desire Pathway

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Card:

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

I did something a bit different for today's Pull; I started with the Bound Tarot and then decided to see what a similar, three-card spread in Thoth would look like. Here's what I got:

Victory over unconscious motivations obscured by two elements fighting one another - Will and Money.

Approach emotional obstructions in an elegant fashion and Will should increase. 

Taken together, this is a hodge-podge of what I already know: I'm slipping on discipline in several areas and it's affecting my output. Victory (completion of a project) is obscured by a failure to place logic over emotion. In order to achieve the desired outcome, decisive action must be taken.