David Bowie - Blackout at the Monolith!!!

 

Yeah, I'm a little hung up on Heroes lately. Love this track; there's something about it that nods toward Scary Monsters (and Super Freaks), even with the inherent Enoisms present. What a truly strange record, Heroes. Comprised of a single that can reduce me to tears or move me to shake my fists at the heavens, three increasingly odd instrumentals that feel a bit like Blade Runner-meets-John Zorn on quaaludes, a lushly arranged funk track, and then all kinds of Eno weirdness strained through David's pop sensibilities, it all works amazingly well together for a sound that you can only really compare to, well, the rest of the Berlin Trilogy.

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Watch:

I am getting major Warren Ellis/Jason Howard Trees vibes from the thirty seconds of this trailer I watched. 

 

Also, despite my issues with Evil Dead Rise, I'm very much looking forward to seeing more Lilly Sullivan! 

Monolith is Directed by Matt Vesely and Written by Lucy Campbell. In looking through their discographies, I noticed Ms. Campbell is also a Writer and Co-Director of a 2021 Science Fiction miniseries titled The Big Nothing. Here's the summary:

 

"When the captain of an isolated mining station near Saturn is murdered, Detective Lennox is sent to investigate the three remaining crew members. Centered around a series of interrogations and flashback, Lennox discovers that everyone has a motive to kill. With otherworldly threats approaching and the killer amongst them, will everybody make it off the station?"

Intriguing, right? I went looking for this and found you can watch the entire five-episode series on an official YouTube channel HERE.

Very hopeful that Monolith will get a wide enough release to hit Clarksville!!!

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Playlist:

The Damned - Evil Spirits

Killing Joke - Eponymous

The Sound - From the Lion's Mouth

Run the Jewels - RTJ4

David Bowie - Earthling

David Bowie - Heroes

Marilyn Manson - We Are Chaos

David Bowie - Low

Negative Blast - Echo Planet

The Afghan Whigs - Do The Beast

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

The Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Page of Swords

• Ten of Swords

• Four of Swords

Okay, not only all Swords this morning but also, this is the second day in a row the Four of Swords has reared its head. 

Writing this about eight hours after penning the original post. I was too tired to really deep dive into this Pull last night, but after reading a bit about it, I'm reminded of the "Truce" interpretation. A.K.A. rest. I actually drew these cards last night, while on the verge of what felt, rather dramatically, like exhaustion. It's taking me longer than usual to acclimate to walking as much as I am. Shin Splints set in Tuesday, tore me up yesterday. After scheduling this post last night at about 6:30 PM, I ended up writing for an hour and a half, then turning it in, and I think the "rest" recommendations worked. 

• Page of Swords - Pay attention (intellect) to your body, dickhead!

• Ten of Swords - Get your kingdom in order (when I travel, I very much set up a "Kingdom."

• Four of Swords - Truce between Intellect and Body - REST!!

David Bowie - Where Are We Now?

 

Eight years gone. I picked this song as it was Bowie's first song back after the eight-year hiatus that followed 2005's Reality. I vividly remember seeing the video pop up somewhere online at work that morning, and when I watched it, I felt such an amazing melancholy. It was almost as if Bowie had channeled all the uncertainty that had begun to bubble up in our society, and looking back on it now, I'm fairly certain he already knew he was sick. That makes Where Are We Now? something of a prequel to Black Star's Lazarus, the song I'm pretty sure everyone associates the most with his passing just three short years after this one's release.

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NCBD:

I'm not at home to pick up my Pull at Rick's Comic City, however, here's what will be waiting for me:

Issue three of Syzmon Kurdranski's Blood Commandment. More people need to read this one. Beautiful and, although so far fairly straightforward, this book owns its tropes. This one's actually not on my Pull yet (I don't think), so I'll probably grab a copy at the Comic Bug next time I'm in the South Bay.

I loved the first issue of Andrew Krahnke's Bloodrik so very much, and have been dying to get my hands on this second issue. I might actually drop into the Bug and pick up a copy along with Blood Commandment.

Last week's first issue of The Fall of the House of X was pretty good, so here's to hoping its counterpart will also swing big and connect. I like that this is essentially a sequel to Hickman's "Dominion Future" arc from House and Powers and am curious to see how these two books work together to bring us into whatever the "Post Krakoa" era will be, even if I'm not necessarily planning to stick around for it.

Daniel Warren Johnson. 'Nuff said.

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Watch:

My good friend and Horror Vision co-conspirator John sent me this trailer last night. 

 

Despite my recently cultivated disgust with trailers, I watched this one. I figured Quentin Depieux's films are so f*#king out there, a teaser probably couldn't give anything away. 

I'm new to Dupieux's films. In fact, I've only seen Deerskin so far. However, I love that film in ways I can barely explain (although John, Missi, Anthony, and I try on THIS episode of The Horror Vision Presents: Elements of Horror) and am looking forward to burning through the rest of his filmography. 

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Playlist:

Marilyn Manson - We Are Chaos

NIN - With Teeth

Danzig - 777: I Luciferi

Ganser - Odd Talk

Finom - Ghost (single)

FACS - Still Life in Decay

Colter Wall - Sleeping On Blacktop

Moving Histories Podcast - Episode 1: Ridley Scott's Napoleon

The Damage Manual - Eponymous

Turnstile - Glow On

Rein - Reincarnated

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Seven of Swords

• Four of Swords

* XII - Hanged Man

David Bowie/Brian Eno - Neuköln Remastered

 

Being that David Bowie was not only born but also took his exit from our Planet on this week, I'm doing another edition of David Bowie Week! For today's post, I pulled the remastered version of "Neuköln," originally published on 1977's collaboration with Brian Eno, Heroes. I LOVE the arranging on this one, especially Bowie's Sax. Some interesting tonal ideas.

Heroes is a great album, but it could almost be pragmatically divided into two different playlists, one for the 'songs' and the other for the instrumental suites like "Neuköln." Such a haunting atmosphere to these passages, while the songs draw on a lot of the musical ideas/subsequent tropes being formed in the late 70s. Likewise, the Eastern influence of the instrumentals and overall world themes (

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Watch:

A few days ago I fired up Shudder.TV to see what was playing and caught Writer/Director Liam Gavin's 2017 film A Dark Song. Here's a trailer:

I caught this once before, maybe three or four years ago. I really dug it at the time, and it totally holds up upon second viewing. Mr. Gavin clearly knows his way around the Occult, or at least he researched the hell out of this film. Also, I may be off base, but feel like I detect some Warren Ellis influence here. Maybe I'm just running an unconscious parallel to Ellis and Mike Wolfer's Gravel series from the 00's - also kind of a Mercenary Magician, although in Gravel's case, Combat Magician would be a better description.

Wow. I just realized how much I miss Gravel.

How has it already been almost twenty years since this and Doktor Sleepless? 

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Playlist:

Screaming Females - Desire Pathway

Fever Ray - Radical Romantics

David Bowie - Heroes

Marilyn Manson - We Are Chaos

Run the Jewels - RTJ4

Wayfarer - American Gothic

The Afghan Whigs - How Do You Burn?

The Afghan Whigs - In Spades

The Afghan Whigs - Do The Beast

Damone - Out of the Attic

Yawning Balch - Volume I

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• VI - The Lovers - Influence or inspiration

• Ace of Wands - Essence inception

• III - The Empress - Fruitfulness

The big pinion in the interpretation for today is choosing to read The Empress as Fruitfulness, an association I often forget or disregard altogether. It fits in with all the other ideas attached to this card, though, and it shows here that I need a little something new to get back on track writing. Being away from home for so long, it would be damn easy to fall out of the habit of writing. Not gonna happen, however, I think I need to lean into a new idea briefly in order to get my momentum back up. I haven't written since Friday. I brought a nice microphone with me so I could record myself reading the current version of Black Gloves and Broken Hearts, a part of the process that can be cumbersome, but that is also one of the most beneficial elements of my edit strategy. So while I'll be doing that at night, I think I'll take some time this afternoon to start up a new Nosleep story I've had percolating in the back of my brain. My first, fairly successful three-part serial on Nosleep, I Got a Deal On My New House Because Someone Committed Suicide in the Garage really inspired me, as I feel like it's some of the best short-form writing I've done to date, and I've been wanting to kind of re-create that. Sure, the Nosleep Community is fantastic, and provides instant validation to writers if they take to your story, which might sound lame at first, but that validation can be used as fuel for stepping up projects.

Happy Birthday David Bowie!!!

Earth misses You, Starman.

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Watch:

Thanks to some friends, I finally saw David Ayer's 2012 End of Watch.

This one had been on my list for a long time. I remember not really caring about it when it hit theatres, but over the intervening years, several people have told me End of Watch is fantastic. They are correct. I'm still thinking about this flick two days later. Great performances from Peña and Gyllenhaal, and a very realistic portrayal of L.A. 

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Play:

I finally beat Torture Star's Night At the Gates of Hell! I'd been stuck on the final series of stages, an awesome jungle last stand totally inspired by Lucio Fulci's Zombie, but haven't had a heck of a lot of time to play. Fixed that on my flight into L.A. on Friday. I actually beat the game as the plane was landing - that was pretty weird. 

The super cool thing about this game was, upon beating it, two more games opened up in the main menu. The first I moved on to is Evil in the House of Dr. Fleshenstein. Thanks to Mild Goth Daddy you can see some of this one here:

Really digging this game to, even if once again, I'm a bit stumped. I love the environments of Puppet Combo/Torture Star games so much, though, that I don't mind just being immersed in the game, even if I am repeating the same levels over a multitude of times. 

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Playlist:

Drive Like Yehu - Yank Crime

Twin Tribes - Ceremony

Your Black Star - Sound From the Ground

Chris Brokaw - Puritan

Baroness - Stone

Deftones - Saturday Night Wrist

Burial - Untrue

Boards of Canada - Music Has The Right to Children

Fear - Live For the Record

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

No time to actually interpret this today. I have a feeling it will be like that for a while, but I'm going to try and go back later and look at this. 

Abby Sage - Obstruction

 

Abby Sage dropped a new single earlier in the week, and as usual, it's pure bliss. I really don't know much about Ms. Sage, other than the handful of singles she's released over the last couple years have all been excellent. "Obstruction" is the latest and an advance from her first long player, The Rot, due out March 1 on Nettwork - which looks to be a very different label than it was back when I was familiar with it. Pre-order the digital album HERE. As far as I could find, there is no physical copy pre-order at the moment. Either way, I am very much looking forward to this one.

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Watch:

Two nights ago I "rewatched" Christopher Ganz's 2006 cinematic adaptation of Silent Hill. Here's the trailer Scream Factory used when they released their edition:

I say "rewatched" because, although I know I watched this back circa 2017/2018, I found that other than the beginning and end, I remembered very little of this one. I'm wondering if this was one of those times I had a "forty-minute blink." Very possible. I remember liking the film, but not much else, so this was an especially crisp viewing, and I very much dug the experience in a way I know was lost to me on that previous attempt. 

I am unfamiliar with the games, so take that into account as I say that visually, I feel like Silent Hill is the culmination of many of the mid-to-late 90s aesthetics that were introduced into popular culture with the NIN "Happiness in Slavery" video and that accompanying video 'album' it was released on. The twisted, barbed wire, industrial rot of the 90s, the fallout from the posh-n-clean dream of the 80s. All of it really works quite wonderfully in this film, and although some of the CG doesn’t quite hold up, I would argue most of it fairs considerably better than a lot of computer FX we saw in Horror at the time.

 

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Read:

New Drinking with Comics went up last night.

I really can't recommend Where the Body Was enough. Another fine fantastic original HC GN from Brubaker & Phillips.

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Playlist:

Turnstile - GLOW ON

Black Flag - Everything Went Black

Tamaryn - The Waves

Justin Hamline - A New Age of Ruin

Feuerbahn - The Fire Dance EP

Fvnerals - Let the Earth Be Silent

Sleaford Mods - Nudge It (single)

Various - January 2024 Playlist

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Seven of Cups 

• King of Cups 

• Eight of Cups

First, yes, I have shuffled these cards quite a bit. It's weird how this is a new deck to me, and it continues to behave that way. I feel like it's not so much that the cards aren't shuffled, but that it feels like it needs to yell in order to get my attention. Inherent in its DNA, being that it's all about, well, turning the amp up to eleven?

I'm reading this in a different chronology today. Starting in the center but moving directly to the right, we have a path through the Sephiroth - Victory to Splendor. This is a viable path for working through the states of the mental architecture inside ourselves. The King of Cups then tells me to come ready to hone emotion with Intellect, that will be the method by which I reach those states.

Is this a nod to heading back to work? A lot of the issues there are resolved, as most of the problems are no longer with the company. There is one conflict I anticipate, however, I don't see it being quite so difficult. Maybe. Or, this is a strategy. I've said I want to be a bit less social with my time there; I want to see my friends, but I don't want to go out every night for the next three weeks. I'd really like to spend some time working on the book, using the change in environment to my advantage. Perhaps if I combat the emotional need to be social with the intellectual need to write - well, saying it like that, it all kind of makes sense, doesn't it?

Jumping the Turnstile for January Giallo!

 

It's been a couple years since I checked in on Turnstile. About two and a half years, according to a quick metadata search on my posts here. At the time, a friend was photographing their L.A. shows regularly, and I hadn't really ventured past their 2016 album Nonstop Feeling, and I guess I kind of unfairly judged them on that record. Then, a few weeks ago while hanging out with my good friend Jacob, he mentioned their most recent album - from 2021, so just about when I was listening - GLOW ON was a recent favorite of his listening rotation. I made a note and only got around to actually listening a few days ago. All I can say is, I'm floored. Turnstile is so much more than I thought they were. Honestly, I'm not sure why I would have made such a dismissive assumption, but Jacob, thank you for setting me straight. This is one that is sure to be a mainstay while I'm walking the streets of L.A. for the next three weeks. 

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NCBD:

My Pull at Rick's Comic City was somewhat light this week. This is good, as I'll be in L.A. for the next three NCBDs. 

The new X books kick off this week with Fall of the House of X. I have the utmost faith in Gerry Duggan as a writer, but I was still not sure how I felt about the X-Books. This was a pretty solid first issue into whatever this "End of the Krakoan Era" will be. 

Issue one of Christopher Yost and Val Rodrigues' Unnatural Order was a book Chris introduced me to on last month's episode of A Most Horrible Library. Totally blew me away, and the second issue only strengthened that response. I am totally on board for wherever this one goes. 

 

Brubaker & Phillips' new graphic novel Where the Body Was hit last week and I picked up my copy yesterday.  As usual, I knew absolutely nothing about this one going in, and it proved to be fantastic.

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Watch:

Cinematic Void is doing January Giallo all across the U.S. this year, with screenings in L.A., NY, Chicago, Nashville and Salem, MA! Knowing I would be back in L.A for January, I snagged tickets for some friends and me to see a fantastic Michele Soavi double feature: 1978's Stage Fright and a film I've still not seen, 1994's Cemetery Man.

 

And the Chicago announcement, screenings at the historic Music Box:

 

SO happy that January Giallo is now a "thing" in multiple states. Long live The Void!!!

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Playlist:

Fugazi - Red Medicine

Drive Like Jehu - Yank Crime

Fugazi - End Hits

Spore - Eponymous

Turnstile - GLOW ON

Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun

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

Boy Harsher - Careful

Boy Harsher - Country Girl Uncut

U2 - War

The Cure - The Head on the Door

Various - The Crow OST

The Juan Maclean - Happy House Matthew Dear Vs Audion Remix

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Fugazi - Do You Like Me

 

From Fugazi's 1995 Red Medicine. I'm going through a bit of a Fugazi bender, only I've started at the end of their career. Arguably, this has always felt a bit like two bands to me, with this record being the crux. Fugazi had always harbored an experimental side, but I'll never forget Mr. Brown playing me this record upon its release and thinking, "They sound almost as much like Sonic Youth as they do Fugazi." Not to say anyone in the band's vocal approach ever changed, but the music become considerably more dissonant, distorted and, well, weird (see track 9 Version for the best example of that on this record). Anyway, it's going on 22 years since Fugazi went on hiatus. Wow.

 

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Watch:

Watched a couple of flicks over the long weekend. Here's a breakdown:

 

Letterboxd review HERE.

Letterboxd review HERE.

Letterboxd review HERE.

 

Letterboxd review HERE.

Letterbxd review HERE.

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Read:

Had a lazy New Year's Day with K. I ended up blowing through the last 150 pages or so of Jeff Vandermeer's Authority and beginning Acceptance, the third and final book in his Southern Reach Trilogy.

If you follow my Letterboxd link above for Alex Garland's adaptation of book one, Annihilation, you'll see that I mention watching the Blu-Ray extras for the film and seeing Garland talk about having to wrap his head around adapting that novel because it is so internal (those aren't Garland's words, I'm paraphrasing for simplicity's sake). Authority is even more an 'interior' novel, introducing the idea that the Psychologist character from the first novel was actually the Director of the Southern Reach Program, and after losing her during the events of Annihilation, Authority introduces and follows her replacement, the appropriately named Control, aka John Rodriguez, who is brought in under false pretenses to shore up the project, only to encounter hostile subordinates and a deepening mystery as to just why the Director went in on what she essentially had to know would be an ill-fated expedition.

Both these first two books in the series have been more intellectual than guttural, which incidentally makes for a great example of how Garland made his film, switching out the deepening paranoia and madness inherently easier to exhibit in a first-person novel than a film to extremely horrific body horror imagery (the 'snakes' in Mayer's stomach). Authority reads to me like a Horror/Espionage mashup; in fact, Authority reminded me a lot of Charles Stross' Laundry Files series.

On to the third and final book in the series now, and I really do not have any idea what to expect. Which is a fantastic way to go into the last volume of a series. One thing I did expect and thus far can confirm, Acceptance fills in some of the gaps left by previous volumes and is every bit as intellectually riveting as its predecessors. 

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Playlist:

Fugazi - Red Medicine

Fugazi - The Argument

Fugazi - End Hits

Fugazi - In On the Killtaker

Earthless - Rhythms From A Cosmic Sky

Wayfarer - American Gothic

The Bronx - IV

Best of 2023 Playlist

Julee Cruise - Floating Into the Night

Henry Mancini - Charade OST

U2 - War

Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch - Censor OST

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Card:

One card from Missi's Raven Deck to set the tone of the new year:

Knowledge is key for the coming year.

This feels like a huge affirmation to a concern that has been growing in me for some time. I feel as though my learning has stagnated, and might have taken with it some of my general 'knowledge base.' I've been left thinking I'm in too good a position, and perhaps need to find way to challenge myself a bit beyond thinking/writing on film/music/comics and literature.