Wednesday, May 31, 2023

New Queens of the Stone Age - Carnavoyeur

 

More new music from next month's new Queens of the Stone Age record, Times New Roman, available for pre-order HERE.

My friend Josh alerted me to this one, and I have to say, his "I hear Bowie" observation is spot-on. Not necessarily in how the song sounds (although there's that), but more in the type of experimentation the band's doing. Really cool stuff.




NCBD:

Nothing in my pull this week, however, issue #3 of Pat O'Malley's Popscars drops, and I'll definitely be picking that up and adding the book to my Pull.


Now published by Sumerian Comics - formerly Behemoth Comics, the fine folks who published Andy Leavy and Hugo Araujo's Osaka Mime, not to mention the Turbo Kid and Spare Parts tie-in books. I met Pat back in 2022 at The Comic Bug when he was in signing issues 1 and 2 of Popscars, then completely independently published. I bought those issues, LOVED them and was supposed to have him on A Most Horrible Library, but then, well, I don't think we've done an episode since. He reached out recently and I need to get back to him and extend an invite to come on my functioning show, The Horror Vision, so he can talk about the book.

Here's the solicitation description:

"Popscars is a gritty Hollywood revenge story about a vigilante badass in a pink ski mask and the famous Hollywood movie producer she is out to kill, who also happens to be her estranged father. In Hollywood revenge is best served in front of an audience. As our pink ski masked killer pushes her way through a Hollywood crowd, prepared to take her shot at her movie producer father, she's quickly swept into a brand new revenge plot orchestrated by her own unsuspecting target."
 
I love the imagery in the book, and the seedy nature of, well, all of it. An exploitation book about exploitation flicks is, by its very nature, a fantastic story.
 


Read:

I surprised myself by putting off my re-read of Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart is a Chainsaw after I noticed that my copy of Laird Barron's The Wind Began to Howl is due to land any day, and that technically, this book is labeled as "Isaiah Coleridge Novel #3.5." 

Interesting... and also probably a shorter read than clocking through Chainsaw and its follow-up, Don't Fear the Reaper, both of which I'm dying to read. But I've also been chomping at the bit for more Coleridge, and more Laird Barron in general, so I started re-reading Isaiah #3, 2020's Worse Angels.


I've read Coleridge books 1 and 2 twice each, or actually three times on book one, Blood Standard, but Worse Angels just the once, so this is a welcome return to a book that kinda blew me away (like they all do). Also, I'm eager to read it without reading book 2 Black Mountain, in close proximity. I love the entire series, however, Black Mountain was just something else, and because of this, I feel like it warped my only experience with Angels so far. Not this time...
 


Playlist:

QOTSA - Era Vulgaris
High On Fire - Snakes for the Divine
Decima Victima - Los Que Faltan
The Mysterines - Begin Again (single)
Killing Joke - Fire Dances
Tangerine Dream - Sorceror OST
            


Card:

Had an inkling to pick the Raven Tarot Deck back up and pull a single card. Here we go:


Temperance, or "Art" in Crowley and Harris's Thoth deck. Another small goad to get my ass back in gear, as my lethargy has crept through the weekend and into the middle of the damn week now. We've had a steady stream of vendors out to the house for various reasons over the last few days, and that continues today. Also, I am once again completely enraptured by Laird Barron's Worse Angels. That said, I need to develop a curriculum. One thing I was pretty taken by in Ivy Tholen's Tastes Like Candy - I mean, besides the awesome Slasher story - was main character Violet's practice routine with her violin. It reminded me of the benefit of commitment to the craft. I've been wanting to work up a schedule that includes not only writing - and of course reading has to be in there - but also guitar, as I've felt a pull back to that after nearly a decade ignoring what used to be my muse. 




Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Tastes Like Candy


For reasons that will be obvious to anyone who watched the Yellowjackets season two finale this past Friday. I've already posted The Horror Vision's discussion on youtube and all streaming platforms. Crazy good and this song was a perfect choice to end the episode and season. 


Watch:

I finally watched Huesera: The Bone Woman the other day. Pretty solid flick. I ended up wanting a bit more in the story department, however, filmmakers rarely go wrong giving us less instead of more. This is the slowest of the slow burns but is peppered with some genuinely freaky moments and images, chief among them the giant Mary statue at the start of the film (you see a bit of it in the teaser below, but that doesn't quite do the scene justice).

 
Directed by Michelle Garza Cervera, Huesera: The Bone Woman is streaming on Shudder and well worth your time, when you're in the mood for a film that settles in and slowly turns up the heat. 



Read:

Last week, I finished Chuck Palahniuk's The Invention of Sound. I would recommend this one to any old-school Palahniuk fan or new reader interested in his work. This is classic form Palahniuk - The Invention of Sound reads exactly the way I remember Choke, Lullaby, Diary reading when I first started seeking the author's work out in the late 90s/early 00s. That might be a bad thing if you've just recently read a bunch of his work, however, if you're like me and haven't read anything he's written in a while, this will remind you of what you loved about his older books. 

I've always thought the key to Palahniuk is not reading a bunch of his books in a row. Not an easy thing to do when they move so quick and have such propulsive style and ideas. However, there seems to be a law of diminishing returns if you binge his stuff, or at least there is for me and quite a few other fans I've spoken to about this over the years. Anyway, none of that should be taken as criticism; I love the man's work and I love this book.

After finishing that, I was set to go into a re-read of Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart is a Chainsaw as prep to then read the recently released sequel, Don't Fear the Reaper, however, something drew me to a novel my good friend Jesus had sent me quite some time ago, Ivy Tholen's Tastes Like Candy.


This book is fantastic! A slasher novel that revolves around a group of incoming Senior girls at a Texas High School who get picked off one-by-one in an closed carnival. I blew through Tastes Like Candy in four days, and it really only took me that long because I had friends in from out of town for the holiday weekend. My Goodreads review is HERE, however, suffice it to say here that this fit right in with all the other well-known authors I've been reading this year. Great stuff! The author's website is HERE if you want to check out her work.
         


Playlist:

The Hives - Tyrannosaurus Hives
Dir En Grey - The Marrow of a Bone
Queens of the Stone Age - Emotion Sickness (pre-release single)
Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris
The Effigies - Remains Unknowable
David Bowie - Scary Monsters (and Super Freaks)
Ozzy Osbourne - Patient No. 9
X - Los Angeles
Blut Aud Nord - Disharmonium: Undreamable Abysses
Druids - Shadow Work
Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers of the Icy Age
Trombone Shorty - For True
            


Card:

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

 

• Knight of Cups - Controlling Emotion with Will
• Two of Pentacles - Earthly Partnership
• Three of Swords - Growth of conflict or complex relationship

As always, keep in mind the interpretations I lay down for individual cards are a combination of grimoire research strained through personal circumstance. That said, I'm fairly certain this is reminding me of my current project (again), which has been on the backburner over the long weekend while friends were in. I have a fairly complex legal/business relationship in the novel, and I really need to work that out before proceeding.




Friday, May 26, 2023

New Music from Swans

 
More new music from the upcoming album The Beggar, out June 23rd on Young God Records/Mute. Pre-order HERE.



Watch:


RIP Tina Turner. Here's a fun little clip of her on Letterman back in the day. The song is one from the era where she kind of followed Bowie and a lot of other aging 70s icons into a brief dalliance with what I'd call new age adult contemporary - not really my thing, but I'm not really posting it for that reason. Stick around to the end and watch Letterman go absolutely Ga-Ga for her before asking her to demonstrate how she taught Mick Jagger to dance.


There's a joy to Lettermen when he's in the presence of performers he really admires, and it shines here. Also, very cool to hear Tina Turner talk about her relationship with the Stones.            


Read:

Kind of a NCBD addendum picked up a book I'd not expected to this past Wednesday, Damian Connelly's Blood, Love, Ghosts, and a Deadly Spell:


A very cool softcover collection of B&W Horror that puts me in mind of old Vertigo and Negative Burn comics. The first story in this, Helena, was my favorite, and it definitely has me interested in picking up Connelly's other books, You Promised Me Darkness and Follow Me Into Darkness

Blood, Love, Ghosts, and a Deadly Spell is published by Fairsquare Comics and Alien Books. If you can't find it in a shop, you can order from Fairsquare HERE
          


Playlist:

Forhist - Eponymous
Yeruselem - The Sublime
The Sword - Warp Riders
The Ocean - Heliocentric
Ganser - Odd Talk
The Ravenonettes - Raven in the Grave
Blackbraid - Blackbraid I
High on Fire - Snakes of the Divine
The Dead Milkmen - The King in Yellow
Beach House - Become EP
Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars
CCR - Eponymous
Sleep - The Sciences
Ghost - Phantomime EP
The Hives - Tyrannosaurus Hives
Druids - Shadow Work
Soft Play - Sockets (single)



Card:

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


• Page of Cups - Princess in Thoth, this is the physical aspect of emotion
• Seven of Swords - Completion of Will, or perhaps more commonly, of conflict
• Six of Swords - Here, I think, Balance of conflict

This is one of the more difficult Pulls to read in quite some time. I definitely think this has to do with my current project, but I'm unclear how, exactly, so I'll do what I always do in situations such as this: leave the cards up on my desk where I can see them all day. Sometimes that's enough to trigger understanding.



Tuesday, May 23, 2023

Druids - Shadow Work

 

 From Druids' 2022 Shadow Work, an album I just discovered and which is blowing me away. Released via The Ocean's Pelagic Records, these guys fit that aesthetic like a glove, although I'd say they're a bit closer in sound to super stoner group Shrinebuilder than the Post-Metal of The Ocean. Either way, this entire record is fabulous, so it was tough to choose a track to post. Luckily, Pelagic has a full stream up. You can order this one direct from the label's website HERE.




NCBD:

Another short but sweet NCBD. Here are my picks:


Black Tape
's fourth and final issue! I still haven't read three, so sometime soon I'll sit down and burn through the entire arc. Love that Shout At the Devil homage cover!


Still one of my favorite reads every month now that the status quo has resumed, Boss and Rosenberg's What's the Furthest Place From Here has to be the single most intriguing 'world' I've come across in a comic in a long time. 



Play:

Here's a hilarious little commercial Puppet Combo made for their summer sale, which began yesterday!

 

I can't play any of this stuff on my computer, otherwise, the "Buy All" for $25 would be a total no-brainer! The direct link to the sale on Puppet Combo/Torture Star's website is HERE.




Playlist:

The Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro
Spotlights - Alchemy for the Dead
Druids - Spirit Compass (single)
Druids - Shadow Work
Final Light - Eponymous
Nun Gun - Mondo Decay
Ganser - Just Look At That Sky
          


Card:

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


• Eight of Pentacles (Disks) - Transformation of Earthly materials/goals
• 14 Temperance - Art in Thoth, this often denotes a mixing of two or more different ethos to create the desired result. In this case, I'd read it as branching out from a safe routine/style.
• 17 The Star - Totality and fulfillment. 

I think this is a direct reference to something I just started working on. I'm taking an old collaborative project from 2018 and stripping it of the ideas that were created jointly with someone else, trying to extract the prose and rework it into a High School Giallo I've been thinking about for at least as long. There's a lot of good prose that I wrote in this - the other party was involved conceptually and with story, but not with any of the actual writing. There's a good 100k words - a lot of it was the product of what I since learned was overzealous 'word stuffing,' but a lot of it is good. So why waste it? Why not transform that Art into a lucrative project?

 


RIP Andy Rourke & Ray Stevenson

 

Almost let it slip by me that former bassist for The Smiths passed away last Friday. I love the entirety of The Smiths' catalog, and all of Andy's basslines, but this is one of my favorites.



Watch:

Ray Stevenson passed away yesterday. Wow. I know he's come to the forefront of cultural discussion in the last two years with the success of RRR - a movie I have no interest in ever sitting through after my friend Shailesh 'streamlined' it for me months before it took the world by storm - but here's the trailer to possibly my favorite version of the Punisher to hit the screen (Bernthal is awesome, so it's a bit of a draw):

 
Punisher: Warzone is just a crazy fucking movie - from the opening with Stevenson using a broken pencil to fix his broken nose to the exploding gymnastic villains, this one took a moment upon first viewing to grasp its tone, but once I got there, I never looked back. 



Playlist:

Brand New - Daisy
Ghost - Phantomime EP
The Ocean - Holocene
VOLA - Witness
The Ravenonettes - In and Out of Control
Peter Gabriel - So



Card:


Fortunes change as the cosmic Wheel turns unrelenting, What will this bring me today? No idea, but I'll embrace it. 
 

 


Monday, May 22, 2023

Deftones - Bloody Cape

 
Deftones's self-titled turn 20 this year. Not my favorite of theirs by any means. In fact, with its predecessor White Pony being my introduction to the band, the self-titled caused me to ascribe them a one-and-done status until friends sat me down and played me Saturday Night Wrist. From there, every album has only gotten better - well, nothing beat Koi No Yokan, but Gore and Ohms are fantastic in their own right - and I always thought I'd eventually go back and discover I'd misjudged the Eponymous, but that's never really happened. Anyway, even my least favorite Deftones records are standing on the shoulders of giants, so it's not as though I don't like them. I will be skipping the anniversary colored vinyl, however, if you go HERE you can order it!




Watch:

Saturday night I showed K Brian De Palma's 1993 masterpiece Carlito's Way for the first time. I've loved this movie since I first saw it circa 1995, however, it's been at least a decade since the last time I revisited it. Surprise - it's even better than I remembered!   

Normally, I'd post a trailer, but the trailers I find give too much away. Here's a scene that I'm reticent to take out of context because, at first glance, it might invite the viewer to dismiss this film as another Gangster film. While it is that, on one level, my take has always been this is a love story first, and a tragic one at that. 

  
 When this flick comes up, I always mention how it leaves me teary-eyed. Saturday, though, it fucking leveled me emotionally. I'm talking full-on sobs. There are elements at play I'd never noticed before, most specifically that De Palma shot a lot of this film to look like classic Hollywood. There's Bogie and Bacall and a whole host of other visual references I'm not versed enough in 30s and 40s Hollywood to be able to accurately put a name to. But they're there: the scene with Charlie and Gail in the coffee shop, when she stands to leave and he hugs her in the middle of the room - the camera briefly encircles them and you get a taste of a love that surrounds every aspect of these two people's lives. All the alleyway scenes, the sets and the way they're created and shot - especially when in the rain. We've seen these before in other, legendary films even if we haven't seen those films. This stuff informs the business - or at least it did before technology changed the overall look of the industry (probably starting with The Matrix). 

Anyway, if you've never seen Carlito's Way, I can't recommend a film more. I have pretty low mileage for the Gangster genre, and like I said, this transcends it. If hard-pressed though, it's this and Goodfellas - I can leave everything else on the shelf.



Read:

I finished Alan Campbell's God of Clocks and thus his Deepgate Codex series. I would be lying if I didn't say I felt the ending was a bit rushed, but I don't care - I loved it anyway. I've already revisited Book One Scar Night at least four times since it came out in 2007, and Book Two Iron Angel Twice now. I'll definitely come back to this series again at some point further down the tracks.

Next up - Chuck Palahniuk's newest novel, The Invention of Sound, which I have a nice signed hardcover copy of thanks to my friend and A Most Horrible Library cohost Chris Saunders!

I know nothing about this novel, and I'm only about thirty-five pages in so far, so there's not much I have to report about the plot except that it already feels very Palahniuk (not all his novels do), and I'm excited to take that 'ride' again - it's been quite some time since I read anything new by the man, with 2009's Pygmy probably being the last novel by him I read upon the time of release. Everything between that and this I've missed. 

One thing I noticed right off the bat about The Invention of Sound, though, is Palahniuk seems to be writing in a purposely strange, almost 'wrong' way when it comes to the actual syntax of some of his sentences. Here's an example:

"As if she a prizefighter was, and she'd pasted him a roundhouse punch to his glass jaw."

What the hell? I mean, that sentence is all kinds of awkward. That, of course, is no doubt the point - there have already been quite a few moments like this in the prose, and I'm curious if his earlier books have elements of this, too, and I just wasn't a practiced enough writer to notice them before. Or, I imagine it is extremely possible, he's trying to use a similar and considerably less overt method as he did in Pygmy, which is written in such a strange, Pidgeon English that it was near impossible to acclimate to for the first couple tries, then, once my brain rewired itself, became increasingly disorienting in the best possible way.




Playlist:

Witchfinder - Forgotten Mansion
Boris & Merzbow - 2R0I2P0
The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre
Etta James - Second Time Around
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings - Give the People What They Want
Deafheaven - 10 Years Gone
Ghost - Phantomime
Windhand - Eponymous
Steely Dan - Aja
Paul J. Zaza - My Blood Valentine OST



Card:

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

• Eight Pentacles - Transformation of Earthly Resources
• Ace of Pentacles - Breakthrough
• Seven of Cups - Completion 

To transform my situation, I need to finish what I'm working on. A bit of a no-brainer, but then Tarot readings usually are. The cards can't really tell you anything you don't already know, they just clarify and bring to the forefront what you otherwise might be ignoring/unable to see. I'm foggy on the specifics of this Pull, but I'll figure it out. 
 


Friday, May 19, 2023

Spelljammer - Bellwether

 
Thursday morning and I happened to stumble upon this video for Spelljammer's "Bellwether." I'd not heard of these guys before, however, Riding Easy Records has a pretty gnarly track record when it comes to Doom/Stoner metal. So of course, it comes as no surprise that this track instantly put the band on my radar. From the album Abyssal Trip, available to order HERE.



Watch:

Ted Geoghegan's We Are Still Here is one of my favorite flicks of the 10s. As such, I was pretty excited to see all the news surrounding the release of his new film, Brooklyn 45, June 9th on Shudder. Here's the trailer:
 
In keeping with my recent philosophy of avoiding trailers, I watched about 30 seconds of this and turned it off. I mean, Larry Fessenden's in it, what more do I need to know? 

Nothing. 100% sold on this. 



Playlist:

Spotlights - Seance EP
Blut Aus Nord - The Work Which Transforms God
Blut Aus Nord - Thematic Emanations of Archetypal Multiplicity EP
Estrasphere - It's Understood
R.I.P. - Street Reaper
The Sword - Warp Riders
Lustmord - Berlin
Ghost - Phantomime EP (pre-release singles)



Card:

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

 


Still sick and I just do not have the energy for anything, hence why this is posting so late. Anyway, let's see if I have it in me to do a quick breakdown:

• Ace of Swords - Breakthough. I read this as Will honed to the point of perfection, obliterating an obstacle. Not sure what that applies to here, but maybe that will become clear as I go.
• Nine of Swords - Accomplishment
• Judgement - "Aeon" in Crowley and Harris's Thoth, this card indicates a pivotal point in the sequence. 

All this seems to add up to say a touch-up on my application of Willpower should provide a breakthrough in a project. I think the Will is going to come into play getting back into writing daily - I haven't been doing much more than working and watching movies while I've been sick.