New Noise

 

Besides just being an awesome track, if you're watching FX's The Bear, you're probably picking up what I'm putting down.

From 1998's The Shape of Punk to Come, a veritable classic of that era.
 

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Watch:

Easily my favorite show at the moment, FX's The Bear returned recently and K and I just caught up by rewatching season one. 

This is the most "Chicago" anything I've ever seen. I know these people - Richie Jerimovich is one of my best friends, Cicero (Oliver fucking Platt!) is every other middle-aged man I met through friends and family in the 80s - I mean, it's freaking uncanny. It's also one of the most honest narratives about loss, drive and passion I've ever seen. 

           

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Read:

I'm about 100 pages into my re-read of Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart is a Chainsaw. If you're a Horror fan and you haven't read this, you're missing out on your new favorite novel:

Chainsaw's protagonist, Jade Daniels, is one of the most relatable and magnetic final girls of all time. Also, what a wonderful experience, reading a book that puts you so deep inside the mind of a High School kid who is obsessed with Horror, specifically Slashers, so much so that she interprets the arrival of a new girl at her high school in Proofrock, ID as the arrival of a Final Girl and the beginning of her town's own Slasher Cycle. There are reasons historic to the town that prompt this theory, but as SGJ is so damn good at, we're so awash in Jade's inner thoughts that we're never quite sure if she's just a bored and obsessed teenager or if there's actually something to what she's saying to anyone who will listen. 

Can't wait to finish this and go directly into the sequel, this year's Don't Fear the Reaper!

 

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Playlist:

Ruby the Hatchet - Fear Is a Cruel Master

Various - Twin Peaks (Music from the Limited Event Series)

Ruby the Hatchet - Planetary Space Child

Screaming Females - Desire Pathway

God is LSD - Spirit of Suicide

Jim Williams - Possessor OST

Radiohead - OK Computer

The Body - No One Deserves Happiness

A001 - Necro (single)

Flying Lotus - Los Angeles

Flying Lotus - Yasuke

Ariel - Molten Young Lovers

Witchfinder - Hazy Rites

Perturbator - Dangerous Days

Forhist - Eponymous

The Body - I Shall Die Here/Earth Triumphant

Secret Chiefs 3 & Traditionalists - Le mani destre recise degli ultimi uomini

Fear Factory - Demanufacture

Rein - Reincarnated

Grimes - Art Angels

Gram Rabbit - Music to Start a Cult To

Wilco - Sky Blue Sky

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - PetroDragonic Apocalypse

Sylvaine - Nova

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Card:

• Ace of Disks - Breakthrough in Earthly concerns

• Seven of Disks - Failure - A difficult period in modern life

• Princess of Disks - Fortification; Frugal

All Disks? Well, this really splits the difference between warning and encouragement, but I get the overall gist, just hope it's not too late - STOP SPENDING MONEY!!!

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Duration:

I've come up with a better way to post my 'time card' here. Check this out:

Didn't take me much time either, which is good, because when I instituted this a few weeks back, it quickly became apparent I was spending time on reporting that I could have been spending on actually writing. I've known people who do things like this instead of write - it can have a pretty negative impact on the process overall.

As for the time, it's still not where I want it. I took yesterday off completely so I could edit the new episode of The Horror Vision - up in the widget to the right at the top of the page - and hang with K. Another important thing to remember in all this, is to maintain a life/work balance. Considering I worked 40 hours last week at the day job and recorded and edited a podcast, 15 hours isn't bad.

But I need more. 

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The Last Temptation of Read

From Lard's 1990 album The Last Temptation of Reid. Pretty sure the titular Reid - the co-owner of Chicago Trax who recorded the band's first EP - came into the pizza place where Mr. Brown and I worked in High School. Weird anecdote, but one I can't help but think of whenever I throw this record on.

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NCBD:

Speaking of Temptations to Read, this is my biggest NCBD Pull in some time. Let's get into what I'm bringing home:

I'm going to be dropping off Ghost Rider fairly soon. I don't know, this one just isn't doing for me what it did about half the time at the onset. I can really feel Marvel building up their Midnight Sons line, introducing a lot of new characters, bringing back older iterations, and building out the world of monsters that lurks in its underbelly. You'd think that as a Horror fan, that would work for me, but I just feel like it's a sanitized Horror, and that's disappointing. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'll read to the end of this current storyline and realize they're building something great, but all the books over the last year that have contributed to that - Moon Knight, that Crypt of Shadows one shot, the crap they did with Man-Thing a few years ago, none of it feels substantive.

I'm definitely digging this deeper dive into the Last Ronin world. 

So, after reading the first 'season' of Red Room, not reading the second, and then picking up the first issue of the third, I'm still digging this book. My pass on that second installment had more to do with trimming the Pull List and diverging from the fairly disturbing subject matter - which, as I've pointed out here previously, is very much offset by Piskor's Ed Crumb-like art style - and not due to any perceived failure on the book's part. Quite the contrary - each issue continues to seduce me with the social mystery that surrounds this strange, underground world of dark web murder rooms, cryptocurrency, and psychopaths. Of particular note this week, this homage cover to Charles Burns's Black Hole comic just blows me away.

I feel like it's been months since I read the first two issues of The Seasons Have Teeth, even though it's only been a few weeks. Can't wait to see where this is going. The anthropomorphizing of the actual seasons into monsters is just too damn cool to miss, especially when those monsters are rendered as visually strange and beautiful as series artist Sebastián Cabrol has made them.

The third and final one shot to welcome in the Fall of X era, the first two books - Sons of X and First Strike both constituted a huge letdown. We're talking Trial of Magneto level bad. Being that those books were not written by current X-scribes and this one is, I'm holding out hope this one justifies reading.

 

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Playlist:

Blut Aus Nord - The Work Which Transforms God

Rein - Reincarnated

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction

Lard - The Last Temptation of Reid

The Jesus Lizard - Liar

Cocksure - Be Rich

Lustmord - Dark Matter

Godflesh - Post Self

God is LSD - Spirit of Suicide

Anthrax - Persistence of Time

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Damn the Torpedoes

        

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Card:

• 9 of Disks: Gain - Yesod again, so imagination and reflection, and enjoying the satisfaction that comes with that. Worded in the grimoire as "Self Satisfaction," which automatically puts me in mind of hubris, the obvious point of the Pull when you take the following two cards in.

• 3 of Swords: Sorrow - Directly from the Grimoire, "Paired with Disks can point to problems w/ work;" "Let thing develop before making another one;" "Intense passion to create but doing so is problematic."

• 7 of Disks: Failure - A difficult period in Earthy life

Well, what a cheery Pull for today! Seriously, this obviously warns against a sneaky inclination I've experienced to try to deviate one or two days a week to work on another languishing project. I'm so close to a final first draft on the current one, best not to deviate. Head on to the finish line!

 

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Duration:

Better.

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God is a Maggot Brain

 

I went to the movies last night to see God Is A Bullet. My viewing experience was uneven - I'll be trying to unpack that below - but one scene about halfway through won me over, and a large part of the reason why was its use of Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain." 

The first time I heard this, I was on LSD in high school. Hanging out at a friend's. When this came on, everything just kind of stopped. The entire album is fantastic, but it's one where there is such a hard line between the eponymous opener and everything that comes after it; one is dark and meditative, the other is uproarious and celebratory and sometimes just completely insane in that crazy, George Clinton way. But it works. Boy does it work.

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Watch:

As I mentioned above, last night I went to a 9:35 PM showing of Nick Cassavettes new film God Is A Bullet. I posted this a while back, but for the sake of the current conversation, here's the trailer and below I've basically pasted my Letterbxd review verbatim:

 

What I wrote last night directly after seeing the film:

I'm still unpacking how I feel about this one. First, some of the ugliest subject matter and subjects I've seen in a long time. Almost to the point of contrivance. This is a well-made film, and the performances are intense. However, I'm just not sure about the script. This is an adaptation of a novel by Boston Teran. There are quite a few things in the film I am fairly certain work better in the novel, but also, I (maybe mistakenly) get a "Bob Sagat" vibe from the film. What I mean by that is, if you've ever had the unfortunate experience of seeing Sagat's stand-up, he goes so over the top vulgar in an obvious effort to distance himself from being 'The full house guy,' it ruins any chance of him being anything but that person he tries so hard to unmake. In that same way, I feel like maybe the director's motive was to make the starkest, most horribly disgusting film he could just to blot out being known as 'the guy who directed 'the notebook.'

After sleeping on the film:

I'm not sure how much of my opinion has changed, but the way I'm processing this definitely has. Which is the mark of a good film. But it's not quite that simple...

In combing through this in my subconscious, I think I've discovered something about myself. That sheer ugliness on display in God is a Bullet, both content and characters, actually scares the living sh*t out of me. The subject matter is disgusting - the scariest, most disgusting idea at play in the world of humans. And the costuming and make-up likewise scare me. There's something about people with heavily tattooed faces that produces fear from an almost atavistic place in my brain. I remember having a conversation about this once as a bartender, and the person speaking with me about it summed it up as such:

"You see someone with ink on their face, I mean, like a lot of ink, like spiderwebs and shit, that person gives absolutely zero fucks, and probably has nothing in this life to lose. To tattoo your face like that, it sends a very clear message."

Obviously, I'm paraphrasing a bit here, but not by much. Also, I don't mean to say that anyone who has facial tattoos is a sicko, but the practice definitely sends that message, so at some point they were thinking they wanted the world to fear them on sight...

That element of contrivance I mentioned when thinking about it last night? Now I'm wondering if Cassavettes - in what I would call a pretty deft maneuver - wasn't trying to make a more 'Earthly' version of the Cenobites, because suddenly, there's something very Clive Barker about a lot of this film to me. It's long, though, and that gets lost in the experience. There's a grittiness here that, although Barker's stuff is grotesque and Horrific, has a fantasy underlining that softens the blow. God is a Bullet is real all the way through, so there's nothing fantastical to soften its blow.

Anyway, I've debunked a similar prejudice before with other Horror movies I slighted or ignored. Specifically, Catholic Devil Possession flicks. Reflecting on my snobbery toward a recent flick like Prey For the Devil was what catalyzed the epiphany. Prey looked 'dumb' to me in the way I remember thinking 2012's The Devil Inside looked dumb. But did they really look stupid, or is that a defense mechanism? I'm not religious, wasn't raised Catholic, and the textures of that stuff are as far away from my daily life/belief system as possible. Yet, William Friedkin's The Exorcist is the scariest film I know. I always say, after I watch that film, I believe in the devil for three days. So maybe that Catholic Possession stuff really gets under my skin, so I turn up my nose and walk by with an air of superiority - without watching what I'm criticizing - previously oblivious to the fact that what I'm really doing is cowering at the prospect of another flick that might terrify me the way Friedkin's does. Same too, then, for God is a Bullet, because elements of this film frighten me to my core, even if I still do have some issues with the film's overall execution. And for clarity, it's not the Satanic Cult that frightens me, but the trafficking side of their operations.

Overall? Three stars and a heart, even if the heart may flicker on and off like a bad fluorescent bulb in a dingy motel on the border.

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Playlist:

Forhist - Eponymous

Fear Factory - Demanufacture

Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen

Holy Serpent - Endless

Ruby the Hatchet - Fear is a Cruel Master

Silent - Modern Hate

Uniform & The Body - Mental Wounds Not Healing

The Body - I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer

Ghost - Infestissumam

Drug Chuch - Hygiene

Funkadelic - Maggot Brain

 

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Card:

• Six of Swords: Science

• II: The High Priestess

• Queen of Cups

Harmonious thinking/interpretation comes from a co-mingling of influences opposite to my own today. In other words - and as usual, I take the insight here to be a direct commentary on my current writing project - I'm trying to write female characters and probably need to ask for a female's perspective on some things. That's something I would have done down the road anyway, however, I'm a little bit stuck and could probably do with an outside perspective. 

 

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Fear Factory - God Eater

 

From the new album Re-Industrialized. My good friend and cohost on The Horror Vision Butcher mentioned the new Fear Factory was getting pretty favorable reviews. 

Honestly, I've never had a huge attachment to this band, however, two things about them stand out to me: back in 1993, Mr. Brown and I went to Chicago's Riviera Theatre to see Sepultura on the Chaos A.D. tour. Openers were Fudge Tunnel - who we were familiar with through their debut Hate Songs in E Minor - and two bands we'd never heard of, Clutch and Fear Factory. Fear Factory would have been touring for their first major label album, Soul of a New Machine. I remember seeing their name and laughing. We joked a lot that night in the lead-up to the show: "Ooh, Fear Factory. Is that where they make the fear?" 

After Fear Factory took the stage, we stopped making fun. 

These guys blew the fucking doors off the Riv. Demanufacture came out two years later, and at first listen, you could tell it was a seminal album. It sounded so unique, the industrial beats, the chanting vocals laid atop BCB's vitriolic snarl. The overly compressed and gated guitar sound (fresh at the time, but would quickly overstay its welcome once it became a standard across the genre and birthed the metal hybrid that distinguished itself with an umlaut. 

Butcher's fervor for the new record intrigued me. What would this sound like to someone with no real connection outside of one album, tenuous at best over time?

Listening again the other night at two-something in the morning, I remembered Demanufacture for what it is - a game changer in metal production, one that inspired some great new bands and a lot of shitty ones. The same can be said for Faith No More, Helmet, and probably a few other bands I love. I wouldn't say I love FF, but I dig them enough to give the new album a chance. \

First impression was good, but weird hearing a different voice - Milo Silvestro apparently replaced Burton C. Bell after 2021's Aggression Continuum. This is a milieu and the associated drama that never found my ears. But segueing into Re-Industrialized, some tracks definitely caught my fancy. Two days later, the same tracks persist, but more of the album has opened up to me as well. The one above, but also of note is a really kick-ass track that shares a name with William Gibson's Difference Engine novel and the atmospheric dithering of "Human Augmentation," my favorite track so far simply because it's less a song and more the sonic habitation of a melting Cyber Punk city somewhere in the distant future, or forgotten past.

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Watch:

Since we had a stamped concrete patio put in as an extension of our back porch, it's become difficult for me to want to do anything with my nights other than sit outside with K and the cats and just enjoy the summer. Last night we were treated to a lightning storm that was out of this world. Saturday, we just sat outside, listened to music and soaked up the night. That went late, and when we finally came in, I was pretty tired. I fired up Shudder on habit, always curious as to what's playing on Shudder TV, and when I saw Cold Hell was only two minutes and some change in, I cracked another Sierra Nevada Summer Fest and settled in for what has become my second favorite Neo Giallo after Knife + Heart. I know I've talked about Cold Hell here before, like I know I've posted the trailer, but here we go again:

 

Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, with fantastic performances by everyone involved, Cold Hell is a relentless game of Cat-and-Mouse that always keeps my pulse jacked and my brain totally engaged, even though I've seen it enough in the last five years to know it by heart. Violetta Schurawlow's Özge is the most badass female protagonist I know, easily sailing over Sharni Vinson's Erin from You're Next - who is by no means not awesome, she just doesn't have the kickboxing prowess and surging fury that Schurawlow brings to the table while she fights for her life against a killer she accidentally witnessed murder her neighbor. The "Car Scene" in this flick is a straight redline of adrenaline, and it fires me up every time.

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Playlist:

Forhist - Eponymous

Fear Factory - Demanufacture

Witchskull - The Serpent Tide

Perturbator - The Uncanny Valley

Ministry - The Land of Rape and Honey

Baroness - Last Word (pre-release single)

QOTSA - In Times New Roman

Fear Factory - Re-Industrialized

Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins - Rabbit Fur Coat

Led Zeppelin - In Through the Out Door

Ween - The Mollusk

Drug Church - Hygiene

The Watson Twins - Holler

Alice in Chains - Sap EP

Tom Waits - Raindogs

Angelo Badalamenti - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me OST

Soul Coughing - Ruby Vroom

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Card:

• VI - The Lovers

• Prince of Wands - Here, I'm reading this very pointedly as applying Intellect to the Creative Process

• Princess of Wands - Likewise, applying Earthly Understanding to the Creative Process

Normally I might be tempted to read that Princess in a very different way, however, I spent a large chunk of my writing time yesterday working up a timeline and a family history for some of the major characters in the new novel - which I missed completing the first draft by last Tuesday, however, which I entered the final "act" on yesterday. Add in The Lovers, and we get this in the Grimoire:

"Finally - Man!!! As Amoeba he splits his opposite and humanity is born!"

I'm assuming I culled that from either Crowley or Moore, but I compiled the bulk of this tome a long time ago, so I'm not really sure. I know some came from contemplation of the cards, the above-mentioned sources - as well as others - and more than a few Mugwort or Mushroom experiences, so who knows?

The point, of course, is that while that sentence is not the only thing on the page for Trump VI, it is what spoke to me in this moment, because through all of the Intellect and Earthly application to Will, I feel as though I have further honed and developed the characters - who happen to be familial and are, in fact, quite purposely opposites of one another.

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New Music from Baroness!!!

 

The first single from Baroness's upcoming album Stone, out September 15th. Pre-order HERE. Love this track - listen to Gina SHRED - you can hear the Randy Rhoads influence for sure!

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Watch:

I interviewed writer/artist/filmmaker Pat O'Malley yesterday about his comic Popscars, his short films, future projects and our shared love of cinema. Going into it, I hadn't realized Pat made short films, so I checked out his youtube channel HERE. I dug everything on there, but Pool Shark was, by far, my favorite. Check it out:

I was kinda blown away by the camera work on this. The first few times we see the Shark, they filmed it in a way that, at first, I thought it must be stock footage of a real shark. Talk about movie magic. My discussion with Pat should go up this weekend; Popscars issue #4 comes out this coming Wednesday, and if you're lucky, there might be copies of 1-3 still lurking on your shop's shelves. Published by the new Sumerian Comics - a rebranding of the company formerly known as Behemoth - this one is wide and, only the first chapter in a bigger story.

 

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Read:

I was so blown away by Laird Barron's The Wind Began to Howl that I'm still unpacking/reveling in it. Because of that, I've found it difficult to start my planned reread of Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart is a Chainsaw. This will be a quick brush-up before diving into the recently published sequel Don't Fear the Reaper. Meanwhile, over on his Twitter, SGJ revealed the cover to the third and final installment in the trilogy, The Angel of Indian Lake. 

Jones also linked the website Crimereads.com, who broke the cover image and have an excerpt from the novel up. Obviously, I'm not reading that until I get current, but it's cool that this is out there in the world. Talk about inspiration! You can read the excerpt at the Crimereads link above. 

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Playlist:

Witchskull - The Serpent Tide

Blut Aus Nord - What Once Was... Liber III EP

Spelljammer - Abyssal Trip

Jeff Buckley - Grace

Rina Mushonga - In a Galaxy

Godflesh - Purge

Mars Red Sky - Eponymous

Baroness - Last Word (pre-release single)

Bria - Cuntry Covers Vol. 1

Jawbox - For Your Own Special Sweetheart

Forhist - Eponynous

Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta II: Dialogue with the Stars

Chamber of Secrets, Clement Panchout & Mxxn - Murder House (Puppet Combo OST)

Pegboy - Strong Reaction

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - PetroDragonic Apocalypse

            

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Card:

Two days of Pulls to put up here, as I was too busy with work yesterday to do a post:

• Nine of Swords again? My dreams have actually been fairly unremarkable or unrememberable the last few days.

• Ten of Disks - Wealth - The highest manifestation of the Earthly realms, which juxtaposed with Nine of Swords may explain why my dreams dried up all of a sudden. Earthly, material issues/items dampen the inner realms

• Prince of Wands - Airy aspect of Fire, or the intellectual thrust applied to conflict. In other words, Strategy.

Okay, so let's use today's Pull to try and make sense of that:

Today:

• Prince of Wands, sir, you have my attention. Something is amiss in my head, and I may find the answer if I can figure out (the aforementioned Strategy) how to 'unblock' my dream channel.

• Nine of Disks - Gain - Let's look past other interpretations of this card and go straight to its correlations to the Sephiroth. 

Yesod - Imagination and reflection, the first stop when one leaves the bottom, earthly manifestation of the tenth plane (Sephiroth) and into the higher planes. 

• VII: The Chariot - Control and Balance, but also the origin of ideas.

My overall read here is there's an idea locked inside me that I will need to access to finish something (my current project?), and I'm going to have to figure out how to get it. That probably doesn't mean I have to figure out how to get it out of my head, but how to recognize it when I 'see' it.

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Duration:

The irony is it's taking time away from writing to do these recent posts, so I'll probably reconfigure the duration portion to once a week. It'll show a better snapshot to. I'm definitely doing better, though, and the transparency posting here helps immensely. 

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Rina Mushonga - Narcisc0

I'd never heard Rina Mushonga's music before two nights ago when I watched Carter Smith's new film Swallowed. More on that in a minute, first I want to open today with the track used in that film. Taken from the 2019 album In a Galaxy, this entire record is fantastic. My elevator pitch would be Tracy Chapman meets Tune-Yards, but that's just meant to whet the appetite; comparisons really do Rina's music no justice, as it is extremely unique and wonderful.

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NCBD:

Another light NCBD this week, which is fine since Night Fever dropped last week and that was a $25 cost I hadn't figured into my initial budget. Light maybe, be it's quality that counts, right? Yeah, and it's a good week:

Saga #65. Lying Cat on his back begging for belly rubs! Looks great, until you remember this is Saga and that means there's probably more horrible stuff for the people I love who live this book. 

The first issue of the newest series in Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino's Bone Orchard Mythos, I'm pretty psyched for this one. I loved Ten Thousand Black Feathers but felt it ended just as it began to build into something revelatory. I guess that was intentional, as Lemire has said Tenement is the book where all the disparate pieces begin to connect. There are only three issues solicited so far that I see, but whether it's three or thirty, I'm on board. 

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Read:

I'd had Carter Smith's new film Swallowed on my viewing list since hearing him interviewed on the Colours of the Dark podcast a few months back. MAN did this blow my expectations away, which, incidentally, were fairly high. 

 

Not for everyone, but if you're willing to take the ride promised by the trailer, this is a super solid flick, with great performances from everyone involved. Like, really great performances. Also, great to see Mark Patton kicking ass and taking names in a flick. Very cool. 

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Playlist:

Godflesh - Purge

Fen - Dustwalker

Sinoa Caves - Beyond the Black Rainbow OST

Carpenter Brut - Blood Machines OST

Rina Mushonga - In a Galaxy

Tune-Yards - WHOKILL

Pastor T.L. Barret and the Youth for Christ Choir - Like a Ship Without a Sail

Isaac Hayes - Truck Turner OST

Ghost - Impera     

   

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Theory/Practice:

• Eight of Swords - Interruption

• XV The Devil

• XI Lust

This one's all about distraction. I've found that writing for long stints over successive days equals an eroding lack of attention that actually manifests physically as an almost obsessive/compulsive awareness. This "distraction radar" widens my attention to include anything and everything, which in turn gets me out of my chair and away from my work for things that a moment later, either seem unimportant or I forget completely. This is all compounded by a generally erratic nature when in this state, which is the very definition of counterproductive.

All this just means I'm on the correct path.

I haven't had this in a long time, and it means I'm expanding my writing stamina. At my peak performance, I remember sitting down and writing a script for someone in a little over a day. That happened two times, I think, and in doing it, I remember the process that helped me build the 'muscles' to get there. It wasn't easy, because it was a lot of fighting the exact behavior I mentioned above. Which is actually a lot like Yoga, Meditation, or any aspect of Magick in general.

Years ago, when I went through a period of reading works by Aleister Crowley's works on Magick, I began trying Raja Yoga. I believe Crowley talks about this in The Book of Lies, (or it might be Aha! - been a minute). Crowley introduces the idea of Raja Yoga, then talks about how to start practicing Yoga, one must first learn to sit completely still for long periods of time. The idea is, Stillness is a first strike at the crazed torrent of Horror the modern body feels at being asked to sit still. 

Think about that for a minute.

No matter how old you are, or how educated, or successful, if you have no practice in keeping still, your body will act like a child and find a way to make you move. A tiny itch on your nose, a cramp; in more extreme cases, you'll hear things like a knock on the wall, or the snap of a twig. These aren't necessarily auditory hallucinations - although sometimes they might be. This is what happens to our brains in Stillness: we begin to hone in on our surroundings and seek beyond the filters that usually buffer our consciousness, so we can concentrate on the 'important' stuff. Once we can successfully apply the Will to keep Still for a considerable amount of time, we can then focus on controlling our Body in other ways, ie Raja Yoga. To paraphrase the most important morsel Crowley offers on this, "How can you hope to affect change on the Universe with your Will if you can't use it to keep still for five minutes?"

The joke at the time I implemented this was, I had no experience with any Yoga, so beginning with a considerably more severe form like Raja was doomed to fail. That said, man - I could almost perform and hold the Thunderbolt. That shit ain't easy.

All this Theory/Practice I'm talking about above is what led to me being able to sit at a desk for an entire day and write a script from scratch. One of my favorite writing memories, even if that project went nowhere. This is a great example of why I'm reformatting this section of the page to dip back into these ideas. If I am to look at my Practice as having built the life I have, then it makes sense that some of the systems I've put in place would need a tune-up now and again. Although I have maintained a ritualized practice of writing every day for close to a decade now, the duration of the sessions has dwindled. Time to rebuild this engine. In that, I've also added a Duration section to end the page with. This section (below) will be my personal journal of how long I wrote the day before. No hiding my failures now.

 

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Duration

I have long used an app called ATracker PRO to 'punch in and punch out' for writing sessions. I get sloppy about using it sometimes, and when I'm as distracted as I was yesterday, I have to turn it off and on as I flit away and back again. In that, I have to get better. I want truthful accounts of solid writing time. I have never used the export function, so I'll probably tweak this as I go. Looks like dedicated time yesterday was roughly two hours and twenty-four minutes.

2:24 Hours

I use another app called Focus Keeper concurrently with ATracker for sessions within the overall session. This allows me five-minute breaks - which I often skip if things are rolling - after 25 minutes of dedicated writing. 

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Howling for Babel

I'll get to why I'm leading with this today in a minute. First, let me just give praise to schlampeOFdeath for not only posting the club mix of this track by the band Babel but also for having a bunch of great videos on his channel. Subscribe like I did HERE.

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Watch:

Or perhaps more appropriately, WTF did I just Watch because two nights ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep, so I fired up Shudder and thought, "You know, I've still never seen any of the The Howling sequels. Why not watch the one they added recently, Howling II. This is how I came to find Howling II apparently has two subtitles: Your Sister is a Werewolf and/or Stirba - Werewolf Bitch.

My god is this movie nuts. First, and I'm sorry, but I'm just not a Christopher Lee fan after, let's say, 1960. All goodwill was dashed when I watched Hammer's Scars of Dracula a few years ago. You can throw as many of his roles at me as you want in an attempt to evoke the proper respect - I'm not saying he does a bad job, I'm just saying he does nothing for me. Well, nothing except let me know I will probably not like the movie I'm about to watch if he is in it. 

Howling II puts Lee front and center first thing, having him read biblical hokum against a cosmic backdrop. It's a ridiculous scene that segues into a ridiculous flick. Even the werewolves are weak, as apparently, when production began, the filmmakers realized they had been sent the wrong costumes and were then told to make do. Thus, all the close-up shots of Werewolf teeth instead of actual werewolves, and why any long shots of full werewolves either stick to Bark at the Moon style fur coverings or look like monkey suits. Because they actually were monkey suits.

To quote the Dreadnoks, "Har!"

Don't even get me started about the Wolf orgy.

There's a moment directly after that opening scene where the music plays over an ancient stone statue, and for a moment, it seems like this could have gone the other way; the thing I love most about the original Howling is how it feels more like a Cronenberg Body Horror flick than it does a paint by numbers Horror film (nothing against those). The entire opening of that film defies what you think it's going to be, then uses those broken expectations in the second and third acts to do something really unique. Here, something about the shot of that statue juxtaposed with the New Wave club that follows it made me think I was in for a treat, but alas, this movie is just nuts, not good. Still, there's definitely a place for that, and I happened to line it up perfectly with my mood on this particular occasion, so everybody wins.

Well, except Stirba. What a bitch.

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Playlist:

Naked Raygun - Over the Overlords

Godflesh - Purge

Genghis Tron - Board Up the House

Genghis Tron - Dream Weapon

Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy OST

High on Fire - De Vermis Mysteriis

Mad Love - White With Foam

Ghost - Impera

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Theory/Practice:

• Nine of Swords: Cruelty - So as a Nine we read accomplishment or completion, as Swords Pure Intellect. How does that relate? One sec...

• VII The Chariot - Origin of Ideas - A deep well. Also, a possibly pertinent read is "Thinking things through."

• Six of Cups - Pleasure - As a Six we read for Tiphareth, the Yellow House, a place of Balance & Hope, especially when applied to Cups, the Emotional Suit.

In a quick take - Pure means uncut. To experience Pure intellect can mean getting stuck in your own head - it's not 'cut' with reality. The Chariot is there to guide, to remind me to think things through, literally applying the circumstances of the world to your thoughts, so as not to get trapped in them. That will lead to balance.

Now, a considerably longer take:

There's a note in my Grimoire for the Nine of Swords that mentions "Bad Dreams," and since I've been thinking/writing about and having lots of dreams of late, that must play in somewhere. I'm particularly interested in this dream I had at some point last week (I think). Flying solo (K returns today, thankfully) I've been sleeping upstairs in my office/nerd dungeon. The couch folds out and I can lay with my head on a pillow about three feet from a tv, so my nightly viewing has shifted to up there, as has my sleeping. In this way, I fall asleep to a flick every night. One day last week, I fell asleep watching Gary Sherman's Dead and Buried. Something about this flick infiltrated my brain and I dreamt we were in a dark, sparsely populated seaside town. Spent a lot of time in some bar there - I can still see the fucking thing when I think about it now; I mean, it is vivid in my mind. As are some of the denizens, snippets of conversations, a steer-the-claw prize machine. It's a mashup of the textures I remember from restaurants in my early childhood (late 70s/early 80s) and the movie, and I want to inhabit it. I've tried falling asleep to D&B again in an attempt to re-trigger the dream, but of course, no dice. There's obviously a mania to how I'm currently revering this dream, and I think that has something to do with Nine of Swords showing up in today's Pull, although I'm not entirely certain what this all means. 

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