Monday, January 11, 2016

Just a quickie... that ended up not a quickie...

January 10th.


Drowning not waving through  the holidays...

Hey! Am finally checking in. Have had my fair share of unfortunate luck which means I was offline on top of having some version of the dreaded lurgy which lingered and lingered like a most unwelcome guest while I waited for my laptop to be fixed. Things have stabilized and we're in the midst of the very last contraction on SAURIMONDE III. Some days it's felt like I've been pushing a very large boulder up an extremely steep hill, but I'm happy with the material, and it's really fucking bonkers while still retaining a large amount of esoteric wyrdness within all the sex, death and scenes of madness. Plus, we've finally gotten a chance to expand the mythology within the Saurimonde universe. If all goes to plan then it should be released at the beginning of February. Fingers crossed though, because the one thing I've come to learn is the closer you come to finishing a major project the more the real world will conspire to make it very fucking hard for you to do so. I've also decided after we finish SAURIMONDE III that I will go in and give DESIRED PYROTECHNICS one more rewrite. One final brush of the hair. One more coat of gloss. Everything can always be made prettier and tighter. After working on it so intensely I knew I needed to give the last draft some distance. Like with painting, or even cooking, sometimes you have to step back and let things stew on their own for a while before adding the next element or ingredient. But it will be worth the wait -- it always is.



Quite by chance a couple of weeks ago I found out that THE OTHERWORLD (L'AUTRE MONDE) (2013) a documentary that I had the pleasure to co-wrote and appear in is streaming on Netflix. It features cinematography by Karim Hussain, and a score by Simon Boswell, and touches upon some of the more supernatural mysteries in the South of  France. I'm absolutely chuffed and slightly flabbergasted that such a strange and psychedelic film would be on there. So for those of you who have been asking you can watch it there anytime you wish.

************

And at the tail end of having the dreaded lurgy, Melissa and I managed to get in another podcast. Admittedly, I'm a little scratchy and not really on my game at all, but it's still kind of fun even if it is the most PG version we've ever done. At that it's NSFW. You have been warned.



In our fifteenth episode we suffer through the holidays with: glitter beards and armpit hair, a naked artist in a glass box who masturbates, dinosaur erotica by Christie Sims, Ted Cruz holiday erotica, and remembering Lemmy.

*************

Fucking Angus Scrimm died today. First Holly, then Lemmy, and now Angus. I hope someone at Morningside Cemetary lights a candle for him. So strange and awful to have so many of one's formative influences and teenage heroes die at the same time. It's enough to make one feel old. The world will never see people like these again. They broke the mold with each and every one and in today's cookie cutter, prefab world it's a testament to what once was.

January 11th




Then the world stopped this morning. Bowie is gone. I'm sitting here blasting The Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars album. One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting in the back seat of my father's dark blue '67 Chevy Mustang and Lady Stardust is blaring from the car speakers. It's near twilight. Neon signs light up the distance. There's a cool wind blowing on my face and all the secret scents of the desert are blooming near nightfall. Bowie's voice breaks my heart and I'm crying for a Lady Stardust I never knew (only finding out later the song was written about Marc Bolan). It's a potent memory for me because it was the moment I realized music could make you feel things you couldn't put words to -- it could come and wrap itself around your soul -- it could find those secret spaces which ached inside of you so fiercely you thought no one else could ever understand. But in reading through my feed this morning that is what struck me the most -- how many of us had the same encounters and how much his music helped us and gave us hope that we were not alone, no matter how damaged we were. That is art, and that is transcendence. When I was transplanted from LA to the ultra-conservative Midwest while beginning high school it was Bowie who played on my walkman 24-7 in an attempt to blot out the ugliness surrounding me. Dropped into a world that loathed anyone who was different from themselves, sometimes it was only his music that saw me through being beaten up by jocks and cruelly harassed by preppies and cheerleaders alike. I had no friends. Music and that goddamned walkman were my only friends. How do you thank someone for such a thing? Do they even know on some level that whatever they are creating is helping some alienated and disenfranchised kid make it through another horrible day? For us overly creative weirdo types he was our role model; part of our yet-to-be-realized tribe, and his music was the touchstone that better days were to come. Art, hope, imagination and reimagination; Bowie was the magician when it came to these things. That is what us freaks, rubbing the starlight into our eyes, loved about him. He was our fucking hero and there will never be another like him. Thank you for being the blackstar, Sir David, in our fragile souls.

So much for this being a quickie... but before it gets any longer I have to get onto conjuring for the day.

Much love from where the worlds touch,

S - xx

P.S. 
January 12th.

A bright spot in the darkest of weeks. I saw this note on FB from Andy Paciorek of WYRD HARVEST PRESS the other day which cheered me up immensely.
"I received a nice note today from Chesire Wildlife Trusts thanking us for the donation raised by the sales of the FOLK HORROR REVIVAL: FIELD STUDIES book. Thought you might like to see one of the actual owls that the donation would benefit. Checking a nest at one of there reserves, they discovered four barn owl chicks, one of whom is pictured here. 

photo by Jenna Sproston


So thank you again to those who worked on / and or bought copies of the book. Folk Horror Revival will continue to donate 100% of sales profits to countryside, community and enviornmental projects run by The Wildlife Trusts."

This book is available at: FOLK HORROR REVIVAL: FIELD STUDIES

Melissa St. Hilaire and I were thrilled to have contributed to this fascinating book with a section about the mythology behind our popular dark fantasy series books, SAURIMONDE. I have an enormous love and fascination of owls (and bats, wolves, and foxes) and this picture makes me smile every time I look at it. 

And... Folk Horror Revival has a new website which is more than worth your time to check out. You can find it HERE 

No comments:

Post a Comment