6 Souls/Shelter

"Oh, a storm is threat'ning
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away..."

The Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter - 1969

Last night, Christine Hadden and myself decided it was high time to dust off our morals, spit shine our values and re-dedicate ourselves to good old American values. On the night of Trumps' first address to the nation as our president, we knew we owed it to the Red, White & Blue to salute the brave and the free, keep a baked apple pie in our hearts at all times and wash our sins clean in the blood of Jesus.

I'm just kidding. 

Last night, Christine and I had nothing at all to do, and we both agreed that we would rather pull out all our pubic hairs one by one with a rusty pair of pliers and then apply a generous ghost pepper juice bikini to our raw parts than watch the Circus Peanut Colored Shit Sandwich flap the raw sewage dumpster lid that is his mouth for 90 minutes. 

Initially, I had chosen the film The Charnel House for us to watch and review. But ten minutes in, we both needed a pause to run and fetch our alcohol - wine for her, Jose Cuervo's Strawberry Lime Margarita ($10 in a big plastic bottle!) for me. We slammed some booze and gave it another ten or fifteen minutes, but ultimately we just couldn't take it. The characters were too stereotypical, the acting too wooden, the dialogue so rigidly structured that it wasn't so much backstory as it was steel girders for the architecturally challenged. Christ, what a shitshow. At the point where Victim #1 - a white slab of ugli fruit who looks like he should be running Noah's Arcade and sounds like he's aiming for the Gold Star in Olympic Level Enunciation - is meeting his doom in the basement with a ghost cow, we gave up and started scrolling again.

Also, the kid who played Steve in Stranger Things was in The Charnel House. I felt it merited mentioning because that was obviously the films only draw.

Christine: Have you seen 6 Souls?
Me: Nope.
Christine: Julianne Moore is in it...could be good, could go the other way.
Me: She was also in Freedomland. BARF! But it can't be as bad as Charnel House.

So we clicked it, and waited while the opening credits spooled, and suddenly came to a horrific realization. 

Me: EW! Weinstein Co!
Christine: Oh Jesus H. Christ. 

So the film opens with Julianne Moore - here playing Dr. Cara Harding (not to be confused with Dr. Sarah Harding, a role Moore played in Jurassic Park 3) - sitting in a room surrounded by a bunch of flabby guys in expensive suits, talking about another guy who raped a twelve year old girl. Yep, this is definitely a Weinstein film. 

After sucking back six shots of tequila and waking up in a hotel room bed (the metaphors just keep stacking up, don't they?) Cara gets a call from her daddy who wants her to check out a vagrant that the cops picked up back in their hometown of Pittsburgh. Yeah, just what I would want to do after an eight hour flight with a hangover, thanks dad. 

Some quick background: Cara is a widow. Her husband was killed three years earlier by a throat slashing mugger, her 8 to 10 year old daughter Sammi is standard issue adorable, her brother is a likable nerd who worships George Romero and Joy Division, her dad is played by Jeffrey DeMunn and they're both reputable psychologists seemingly specializing in proving that split personality disorder does not exist. There's your fucking back story, now lets get on with this mess.

The man that Cara's daddy wants her to interview is a homeless, wheelchair bound cracker named George, whose demeanor is calm, polite and unfailingly respectful. Unsure why she's wasting her time like this, Cara checks in with dad, who has been watching through the one way mirror. Dad (who is kind of creepy and not at all unwilling to apparently place his daughter in bodily danger if it means getting her to think outside the box) places a call into the interrogation room. When George answers, Dad asks to speak with Adam. One massive seizure later...

Christine: ...and now he's from Boston?

Adam emerges, a tough guy from Beantown who doesn't need a wheelchair and is colorblind in one eye. Or, in his own words: "Doesn't need ah wheel chah and is culuh bland in one ah." So great, so far these two personalities encompass both Christine's neighborhood and mine. Well, "mine" being about an hour's drive away but close enough as to make no discernible difference. Both accents are pretty damn good considering actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers is Irish. 

This film is very long and very convoluted...and very confusing when you've been buoying yourself with alcohol and the hour growth late, so I'm going to try and tighten this up as best I can. Like the editor should have done. 

Cara discovers that wheelchair bound southern boy George was a real person, so she drives into the Arkansas section of Pennsylvania to find out what she can about him. And she does so dressed like this. 

Which is something you should never ever do when you're involved in a psychological murder mystery that has Satanic undertones and overtures and weird astrological symbols and dead animals and people barfing up dirt and dolls hanging from telephone wires requires you to venture out into the countryside all alone to try and dig up some answers and the only thing you see is some morbidly beer-swollen biker bastard milking a rattlesnake at the side of the road and you're all like "Uh, maybe this wasn't such a good idea."

Ya think? I mean shit, have you never seen The Omen 2? 

Cara finds George's mama, who informs Cara that George has been dead for twenty five years. Apparently, after a freak fall paralyzed him and sent him to Wheelchair Central, George lost his faith and succumbed to a bunch of Satan Worshipping Mountain Witches, who murdered him in the woods late one snowy night. No really, she actually said "Satan Worshipping Mountain Witches." 


Christine: "Satan Worshipping Mountain Witches. My new band."
Me: "Oh let me guess...they were all listening to Ozzy Osbourne too."
Christine: "Of course!"

So Cara decides it would be a nifty idea to roll George on out to the scene of the real George's death and see what happens. Fucking brilliant. Hey, Imma take Jeffrey Dahmer on a field trip to a meat processing plant, just for funsies! A left behind newspaper helpfully informs us that this is the site of the George's Satanic ritualistic murder. Even better, the article is written by one Kevin Raper.

Me: "HAHAHA, Kevin RAPER?! This IS a Weinstein movie!"
(yes, I know that Kevin Raper is actually the name of one of the art directors on this film. I don't care. If my surname was Raper I'd be changing that shit faster than a stripper changes her thong panties.)

George freaks out, starts crying and wants to go home but stupid Cara can't shift his wheelchair out of the rut, so she turns her back, walks away and goes totally stone deaf, unable to hear the huge fucking racket George is making as yet another personality emerges. She's on her cell phone, calling the orderly who parked seven football field-lengths away for some reason, to come assist them. It's a 10 second call. By the time she hangs up, Adam/George has left his wheelchair behind, has somehow managed to circle around her without his feet making a single sound in the 6 inch thick carpet of crunchy fallen autumn leaves and now faces her angrily. His accent is now flat and he says his name is Wes, and he's sick and fucking tired of waking up in different places all the time and what the hell is going on, lady? 

Me: "She couldn't hear that shit? You could hear a mouse fart out here!"
Christine: "Presto-chango!"
Me: "Okay, so maybe this is like Angel Heart?"
Christine: I actually loved Angel Heart!"

Unfortunately, it's not Angel Heart at all. More like Identity meets Pumpkinhead, with some Silence of the Lambs thrown in. 

Anyway, fast forward about 20 clicks and we learn that Wes was a heavy metal singer who worshipped Satan and I totally fucking called it 20 minutes ago when I said that the Satan Worshipping Mountain Witches were listening to Ozzy Osbourne or some shit, I nailed it! So now throw in 1986's Trick Or Treat too because all Satan worshippers listen to heavy metal and vice versa and FUCK YOU, movie! Imma let you finish, but you couldn't redeem yourself now if you had a thousand Hail Mary's and a whole entire gallon of rattlesnake milk! 

So, anyone George/Adam/Wes comes into contact with breaks out in a rash and starts violently coughing, all sure signs that they're next. First it's a close family doctor friend of the family who shows up at Sammi's soccer practice in Adam's body. Then dad starts coughing. Soon, little Sammi is scratching at a rash on her back. Oooooh, the noose growth tighter and I giveth less shits. Cara is told that it might be in her best interest to visit the Holler Granny. Ugh, here we go. 

Christine: "She must have driven down to WVA...geez."
Me: "Do they even have hollers in Pittsburgh?"
Christine: "No they do not, Loretta."

So off to Butcher/Razorback/Hainted Holler we go. Cara drives onto the set of Pumpkinhead and finds Larry, Darryl and Darryl in their oversized outhouse, living alongside Granny Holler and Granny's frizzy-haired albino great, great, great, great, great, great granddaughter/witches familiar. Granny runs a pretty lucrative outpatient surgery facility, extracting gall bladders without all of that pesky hand-washing and anesthesia. Granny - who last brushed her teeth when Eisenhower was in office - simply sucks people's souls out of their bodies and stores them in jars while she cuts them open. I'm sure it's cheaper, but I'll stick with the backwards count from 100 and risk the post-op nausea if it's all the same ti you. At least they give you Dilaudid afterwards. 

Meanwhile, back at the babysitter's bachelor pad, Cara's brother has discovered that the shadowy entity seen hanging over Adam/George/Whoever in the hospital room from about an hour earlier in the film is not a figure but rather a sound wave which, when translated, turns out to be some mumbo jumbo ooga booga crapola (which my computer insisted upon translating into Yoga Boogie Crayon, which probably would have been a more interesting plot point) which reveals that Adam/Etc is a century old snakeoil charlatan who did some bad shit and ended up getting his soul sucked out and his mouth stuffed full of grave dirt by some other Holler Granny (or maybe the same one, who the fuck knows). The evil charlatan looked exactly like Jonathan Rhys Meyers and so Cara knows they're fucked. No modern science stuff can possibly save them now so it's back to the holler to save Sammi's soul and by this time it was almost 10pm and I was drunk and tired and just really badly wanted it to be over. 

Christine: "Too many storylines trying to merge. Too many arms on this octopus. I don't remember this being in theaters and I can see why."

Rhys Meyers spends his last five minutes of screen time fast-marching through the dark woods after Cara and Sammi like Jason Fucking Voorhees. Pretty much everybody dies except Cara and Sammi...or DOES SHE? And cue last significant spooky little Ring girl nod to the camera. And cue my fist itching to punch through the screen. 

Christine: "I'm laughing out loud at this point. This probably could have been a good film if it had been split into about 4 different movies."

I'm of the opinion that it already has been four different movies: Angel Heart, Identity, Pumpkinhead and Soultaker, the latter without benefit of MST3k. Ultimately, 6 Souls is so over plotted and meticulously constructed that it collapses under its own weight into a messy scatter of ridiculous. 
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Soft Focus

Sometimes I have to go away for a while. Not physically, of course. I'm too strapped for cash to hop a plane to Barbados or wherever the fuck it is that people associate with "escape." When I need to go away, I go inside. I pull the plug on social media, ignore the phone, draw the blinds and hide inside of my pajamas. When I go to work, I am Robo-Annie, here to help and willing to smile for as long as the Gabapentin/Imitrex lasts. But at home, I won't read the headlines or answer email. I watch reruns of old crime shows or British comedies. When I go to bed, I watch cartoons until the Ambien kicks in. And when the rub and scrape of static voices snarking at one another becomes too much, I shut everything off and grab a book.

I have a shitload of books. Of course I do. Most of them are of the horror variety, dark and hopeless and soaked in blood. A sizable chunk is nonfiction - media studies, sociology and history. And then there's the teeny tiny stack on the bottom shelf, barely more than a handful, which I think of as my "soft focus books." When the world gets too ugly and every mirror shows me a tired out cynic on the verge of tears, I reach for the soft focus, the slightly unreal but not too unbelievable. I'm not much for romance, or dragons and wizardry (unless it's Game Of Thrones, because that's different - it just is, okay?) but Urban Fantasy is just the right patch of shade in the literary meadow. And, for a while, I can pretend that the world still contains mushroom fairy rings, magical antique stores, people who dress in patchwork and serve tea cakes, and friends who actually help each other when things become dire.

Jack of Kinrowan

This was not the first book I ever read by Charles de Lint. That honor would go to Spiritwalk, a purple jacketed mass market whose cover art sported an intriguing little fox headed dude in jeans and flannel. I spotted it one day on a spinner rack and grabbed it on impulse. It was a purchase I never regretted, and one that led me deep into the world of the urban Fae, where the fairies of old have more or less adapted to the new machinery of the "civilized" world. Jack of Kinrowan struck a chord with me because the Jack of the title is a girl - Jackie - a misfit of sorts, pretty and smart but loathe to leave the comforts of home in exchange for garish neon, loud music and crowds. When her extroverted boyfriend finally dumps her - destroying her fragile self esteem in the process - Jackie does what a lot of us girls have done before. Cuts off all of her hair, smears on some make-up, then goes out and gets good and drunk just to prove that she can be a part of such an empty and vacuous existence. But the loud, mechanized world spits her right back out into a world of goblins, ogres, wizards and fairy folk, right where she truly belongs. And the moral of the story? Don't try and ram your square self into a round peg hole. The square shaped world needs you.



Yarrow

Here's another de Lint heroine who proves that you don't have to be a extroverted party girl to enjoy life. Actually, novelist Caitlin Midhir prefers the world of sleep and dreams, where bards weave tales on harps, antlered deities wander through ancient woods and a thousand stories can be brought back with her into the waking world where she transforms them into best selling novels. She lives a quiet life, alone in a big, cozy old house in Canada. Caitlin doesn't have a boyfriend and doesn't need one. She's not lonely. She's content to spend her days writing with occasional expeditions to the used bookstore, there to curl up on the couch with a coffee and talk books with her friend who owns the shop. But into this comfortable existence, a thief has come for her dreams, a vampire of sorts who drains the hopes and fantasies from his sleeping victims and leaves their empty, lifeless bodies behind. Caitlin can't dream anymore, and if she can't dream, she can't write. Even worse than writers block, Caitlin's dreamland is being laid to waste, it inhabitants murdered and its magic sucked dry by the ancient demon known only as Lysistratus. Caitlin doesn't have to crank up the badass soundtrack, don ninja gear, hop in a Ferrari and/or muscle up to defeat the dreaded dream eater - she just has to sleep and find a way to take back what is hers.

Dangerous Angels

The last time I saw Hollywood, it was hot and dirty, strewn with trash and garish with cheap souvenirs. But I wasn't looking at it through a hot pink kaleidoscope with a lace filter. Francesca Lia Block has the most incredible ability to turn petrol fumes into pink champagne. Set in the LA of the 1970s, Block's tale of a girl named Weetzie Bat is a totally normal slice of teen angst, but spun just a titch to the left and tilted just slightly into a dimension where every sequin is a diamond, every cottage in the hills contains a portal to Narnia and every article of clothing contains fairy dust. Weetzie's friends are gay punks, secret agent filmmakers, interracial lovers and heroin addicted ghosts. As Weetzie grows up and watches her own daughter emerge from her chrysalis, falling in love and making friends - including a gothic Witch Baby with bat wings and roller-skates - Block moves fluidly and deftly into the 90s, somehow sustaining the innocent magic from the old world and carrying it into the new on the backs of Generation X. For them, the magic will be slightly darker and perhaps heavier to bear, but it's up to them how to experience it, share it and transform it for the next wave.




Moonwise

I can't possibly tell you what this book is about. You tell me. Is it fantasy? Sci-Fi? An epic poem like Idylls of the King or Beowulf? Why does it remind me of The Worm Ouroboros? Sylvie lives in the woods, in a cabin I imagine being carved from the trunk of a massive living oak tree. She collects string and spools and scraps of lace in her pockets, gathers goose eggs and pots of honey and jam for her breakfast and simply must drape herself not in a mere dress but in many fluttering layers of material, calico and velvet and more lace under pilled and unraveling wool, heavy knee socks with mens shoes, her long hair ever wind tossed and secreting love letters and baby birds. When her lifelong friend Ariane comes to visit her in the dead of winter, a childhood game of their own creation swallows them whole, transporting them into a thick tangle of dark woods where the Nine Worlds dwell. Except the rules have changed and escaping is a riddle that is hopelessly tangled within the stars. This is such a strange and beautiful book, and even if the off-kilter Jacobean writing style doesn't suit you, it's also a book that can be opened anywhere and read, if just to enjoy the patchwork combination of nouns and adjectives that no hands not washed silver by moonlight can ever hope to weave.


Incubus

I know this one sounds like a horror story, and indeed it is a horror story, at its core. But with a demonic nugget at its center, the stuff surrounding Incubus is nothing short of homespun gorgeousness. Set in New England of 1974, Incubus is old world tradition and superstition mixed with modern day awakenings. It is summer in Dry Falls, Maine, where the gardens normally explode with color and swell heavy with fruit and vegetables. Most of the womenfolk are content to bake from scratch, attend church functions and accept mutually enjoyable sex from their spouses once or twice a week. But preacher's wife Cora is beginning to take notice of a strange series of events unfolding in her pleasantly dull community. As a killing heatwave descends, crushing the town beneath its oppressive weight, the women are complaining of nightly molestations by a greedy lover, one who takes pleasure but gives little in return. The husbands plead ignorance. Strange sounds are heard in the wee hours, and a huge black dog seems to be hanging around, observing the female population in eerie silence. When Cora's liberated and assertive (and bitchy) sister Hannah goes missing in the middle of a field of flowers, the alarm is raised in earnest. There is a demon among them, drawn by the scent of summer roses, the smell of fresh baked bread and the innocence of an untouched town blooming undisturbed. Incubus moves along quietly, sanely and without cheap scares or a-ha moments. It's a slow burn, both literally and figuratively.

Dark Fish

Pisces. The Twin Fish. 

We are the twelfth and final sign of the Zodiac, representing Death and Resurrection. Ruled by Neptune, we are the only true water sign of the Zodiac, never emerging from the water like our Cancer and Scorpio brethren. Pisces are the dreamers, the moody, reclusive poets, and the sad and troubled artists. There is always a palpable sorrow attached to the Pisces. You can see it in their eyes on the rare occasions that they look directly at you. More often it comes out in their art. Pisces don't simply make art, they bleed it. They vomit it out. Piscean souls are very delicate, you see - made out of glass and sea foam. They can't carry around such heavy burdens of empathic sorrow and tragedy for long. They can swim in the dark waters, but with such a heavy rusted anchor attached to them, they will sink in the blackness and drown in the despair. So they release it in furious bursts of music, writing, painting or acting. And when it's out, they don't try to reclaim it or declare ownership of it. It belongs to everyone now, and whether it's appreciated or damned, they simply smile and shrug and move along.

I've always found the months of February and March to be the bleakest and most sorrowful time of year, when everything is cold and silent and fast asleep. Winter is almost over, Spring is on the way, but here we are in the Held Breath season. 

I've always been very much aware of the darkness and sadness present in the world, even as a very young girl. I disliked adults who baby-talked me, called me "cute" or feigned enthusiasm for my presence. I sensed the dishonesty. I knew they were putting on an act and the insincerity made me sick. I shied away from attention. I was happier painting or writing stories in my bedroom on bright summer days. I hated school. I didn't care about clothes or boys or popularity. In the third grade, I made the mistake of using the word "mysterious" in front of my friends, who looked at me as though I had suddenly offered them a maggot sandwich for lunch. Another time, on the bus to Jr. High, I looked out of the window at a country lane which spooled off into the distant morning mist. I asked the girl next to me: "Have you ever looked down a road and wondered where it goes?" She looked at me, annoyed, and answered "No." in a tone that suggested I was not only a nerd, but that I would most certainly die a virgin with the word "UNCOOL" scrawled upon my headstone. I never voiced another observation like that again. I kept things to myself from that point forward. The people around me were content to dip their toes in the shallow end, but they could venture no deeper without drowning. I, however, had gills. I was a a dreamer. I was a freak.

So here is my birthday gift for you, fellow Fish People. A list of films, books and music that you can appreciate in a way that no other sign of the Zodiac can. They may not have been written by a Pisces, starred any Pisces or even been inspired by a Pisces, but they somehow caught the current that moves dark and mournfully through the Pisces soul at all times.

#1 - Ringu 

Sadako Yamamura, born to a psychic woman on a volcanic island in the middle of a fisherman's domain. Her father? Well, no one is sure. Her mother spent her days sitting on the beach, staring at the sea and whispering to the waves in a language that had never been uttered by any land-bound human. But local legend purported that if one dared to "frolic in brine" the goblins of the sea would either destroy you or claim you as one of their own. Sadako's mother was apparently chosen to be a vessel for the offspring of an ocean god as the result of her frolicking. Sadako, born from the sea and sent to an early watery grave, kills with a thought and leaves a trail of seawater behind her. It is revealed a few sequels later that Sadako was actually a dual entity - a dark fish and a light fish, a good twin and an evil twin - who ultimately combine and gives itself over to her destiny. For all that Sadako is a cold, murdering spirit bent on vengeance, she is also a young girl whose sorrow is apparent when her rotted corpse is pulled from the depths of the well that has become her tomb. Oozing tears, she allows herself to be comforted and mourned, but she cannot and will not change her scales.

#2 - The Drowning Girl
by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Caitlin Kiernan - herself a Gemini, the only other twin sign of the Zodiac - penned this semi-autobiographical narrative of a schizophrenic young woman who finds herself caught between a mermaid and a wolf girl. Imp, our protagonist, is a lost soul, working in an art store in Providence, Rhode Island and simply existing in the absence of her mother, who succumbed to her own mental torment. Imp, regardless of when her birthday occurs, is a true Pisces - unsure of herself, fragile, dreamy and kind, unwilling to inflict pain on anyone except herself. Torn between fantasy and reality, Imp is unsure whether or not to cling to the life preserver of love with her girlfriend, or drown in the sea of her hopes and fears. This Mortal Coil's Piscean ballad Song to the Siren is referenced throughout this sad tale. It is an absolute must-read for anyone who has ever felt out of place in this cold, stony world, but especially for the wounded Fish people, yanked by cruel hands from our soft waters and left to flop and gasp on the concrete.

 #3 - Annwyn, Beneath the Waves
Faith & The Muse

Faith & the Muse's second studio album might well have been recorded in the Sea King's caverns. It has a darkness in its depths, but sends pearls up to the surface, riding the siren song of Monica Richards gorgeous voice. If you listen to nothing else on this album, listen to the track The Sea Angler, based on a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It's sorrow incarnate, but also a beautifully baited hook, luring you in with a promise and drowning you with a grin.






#4 - Dagon

The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft is a classic tale of alienation, for anyone who has never felt comfortable in their own skin and questions their existence in a world which seems to know them not at all. Brought to the big screen as Dagon, the tale is pitch perfect - dark, waterlogged, soggy and moldy with squamous secrets and eerie inheritances. When you have spent your entire life thus far feeling as though you don't fit in, finding your home - no matter how horrible and monstrous that home may be, or how inbred and mutated your blood family - it's a relief to find the answers at last, even if they lie at the bottom of the ocean in the tentacles of an ancient beast called Dagon by those who fear him, and  "daddy" by those he has spawned. 


#5 - Disintegration
The Cure

The Cure's darkest, bleakest, loneliest album was released in 1989, and immediately went into repeat play mode on the turntable of the record store where I worked as a teenager. Standout tracks for Pisces include Prayers For Rain and The Same Deep Water As You. The entire album is a musical equivalent of standing knee deep in the surf on a stormy, overcast day, waiting for the tide to come in and allowing it to slowly suck you under. Not even Mozart could have penned such a majestic Death Mass as this album.








#6 - Ophelia
by Lisa Klein 

Pisces women and Shakespearean women have one unfortunate thing in common - they are perceived as weak by the majority of others. Nothing could be further from the truth. We do tend to avoid confrontation and dislike anger, but we are not weak by any means. On the contrary, we are probably better prepared to deal with the worst case scenario, because we have already imagined it. We've been expecting it. And when it arrives, it's no surprise to us. Shakespeare thought that Ophelia was a fragile willow frond who would break beneath the slightest weight. Lisa Klein knows better, redrawing Ophelia as a shrewd, fiercely independent young woman who knows that no man can ever save her, so she saves herself instead, relying on her knowledge rather than her beauty or social standing. Faking her own death by drowning, Ophelia escapes the chaos of the Danish kingdom and journeys to France, and begins a new adventure which makes Hamlet's drama seem like whiny teenage angst by comparison.

#7 - Pan's Labyrinth

Yet again, a girl named Ophelia (or, in this case, Ofelia) rises above the ugliness of her mortal existence and descends into paradise. Notice I said descends, not ascends. Because director del Toro knows that the true safe haven is below, in the dark, where only a certain kind of soul can find beauty and solace. In sacrificing herself to save her infant brother, Ofelia reclaims the throne of the underworld where she rules as Princess, safe in her daydreams of fairies and fauns and shiny new shoes.

#8 - It'll End In Tears 
 This Mortal Coil

Pure heartbreaking hope from start to finish. Piscean highlights would have to be the aforementioned and legendary Song To The Siren by Elizabeth Fraser and Waves Become Wings by Lisa Gerrard. A perfect soundtrack for those dreary, emotional days when a fish girl just has to hide out in her room with the curtains drawn and the only illumination provided by that dusty string of Christmas lights strung over the bed.







#9 - Something Rich & Strange
by Patricia McKillip

Lured by a siren song, a curmudgeonly young artist from a seaside tourist town is drawn beneath the waves by a sea fairy both enchanting and cruel. His girlfriend, half seduced by an ocean creature named Adam Finn, follows him down to an underwater realm of ship wrecks, iridescent shimmering scales and tears turned to pearls. Drawing inspiration from Shakespeare's The Tempest, Patricia McKillip goes the full fathom five and deeper, drawing up a sunken treasure of Piscean gold.








#10 - Valerie & Her Week of Wonders

Though there isn't an ocean or a single fish in sight (oh, except for the floppy, wriggly one that the buxom, bouncy barmaid tucks into her blousy bodice), Valerie captures the inside of a Piscean's head perfectly - draped in pearls, teeming with flowers, bursting with beauty and seeded with vampires. Valerie herself, a rather Piscean spirit, is making the transition from childhood to maturity and the way is fraught with difficulties. When faced with unpleasantness, Valerie escapes back into her fantasy world of lacy white dresses, velvet ribbons and soft feather beds. Eventually, evil is overcome and Valerie goes to sleep once more, knowing she will wake into a beautiful world of unlimited possibilities.

Gravity All Nonsense Now

This post is the result of a brief conversation on Facebook, which turned into an entire thread, and is now a blog post because fuck it, why the hell not?

My friend and I were discussing Marilyn Manson. I forget why - do we really need a reason? After comparing favorite songs (friend favors Lunchbox and Tourniquet, whereas I prefer Apple Of Sodom and Cryptorchid) we both simultaneously agreed that Antichrist Superstar was a perfect album, flawless from start to finish.

Then, of course, we had to start discussing what other albums - in our humble opinions - were also flawless. And, of course, because this is my blog, I will now list the albums that I personally consider to be flawless from start to finish.

Antichrist Superstar - Marilyn Manson 

We'll start with the album that initiated this discussion, Manson's second album Antichrist Superstar. Released in 1996, nothing like this had ever been heard before: blasphemous, sacrilegious, blatantly challenging the core morals of everything Good and Pure in America. People had been eagerly awaiting the rise of the Antichrist and the return of Jesus, so Manson gave them what they wanted. Of course, the backlash was immediate and vicious. Kids loved it, parents hated it, and the more it was condemned the more copies it sold. It's a fucking powerful operatic, intricately ugly and morbidly beautiful. It's exactly what everyone fears it might be, and so is Manson.

Operation Mindcrime - Queensryche

Say what you want about Geoff Tate's dubious hairstyles, he's got the pipes. Mindcrime, released in 1988, was revolutionary and ahead of its time, both musically and conceptually speaking. Also written as a rock opera, Mindcrime tells the story of a junkie turned political assassin and is punctuated throughout with Roman Catholic undertones. Best track - the ten plus minute long Suite Sister Mary. I wish I still owned this album, but alas - I wore my cassette out and the last time I went looking for it, it was out of print and available only at prices which bordered on ridiculous.





ZoSo (Untitled) - Led Zeppelin

Yeah, um...duh.














Sabotage - Black Sabbath

I came upon this album as a teenager when I was working in a record store. It had been special ordered and had been sitting, collecting dust, for weeks, so I gave the potential customer a reminder call...only to be told by his mother that it would not be picked up anytime soon because her son was currently serving a lengthy prison sentence. So rather than return it, I bought it for myself. It immediately became my all time favorite Sabbath album, every track a smoking gem of wrath and dementia. If this album had also contained the track War Pigs, I might have exploded from an overload of awesome.



Broken - Nine Inch Nails

Pure, crystalline hatred and destruction, boiling with self loathing, seething with disgust, compressed into a thirty minute long EP and jammed right the fuck into your carotid artery at mach fucking 5. Nothing surpasses this shrieking assault on your eardrums and nerve endings as this musical equivalent of a scud missile. Nothing. This album summed up an entire fucking generation: enraged, exhausted and determined to crash and burn with as much ferocity and twisted, molten metal as possible.





Paul's Boutique - Beastie Boys

Admittedly, the B-Boys first album - Licensed To Ill -  was fun, but it wasn't serious. Paul's Boutique, released three years later in 1989, was the leap from puberty to maturation. It was still fun, dirty minded and silly, but the music was multilayered now, an homage rather than a spoof this time around. Check Your Head, released in 1992, would cement the band as serious musicians with a powerful message and a genre-changing influence, but Paul's Boutique caught everyone's attention and held them for the long haul.





Within the Realm of a Dying Sun - Dead Can Dance

If you can listen to any track off of this album without getting a severe case of the chills, there's something wrong with you. Lisa Gerrard's haunting vocals rule this musical necropolis of an album, moving ghostlike from the heat of the Middle East to the ruins of ancient Greece. This has been a goth staple since 1987, when it was released, and has since become an icon of the genre, an example to which all other goth ambient artists look in awe and fail to reach.




Vegas - The Crystal Method

If it were possible to purchase kaleidoscope colored music in jimmy-frosted waffle cones at the summer carnival, it would definitely be Vegas by The Crystal Method, and it would taste like neon heaven angel lollipops spinning golden discs on unicorn horns. 








Astro-Creep 2000 - White Zombie

"White-trash-on-acid metal" is how this album was described when it was initially released. I bought it on a whim one night, having heard only a short snippet from the song More Human Than Human which had been featured on the pilot episode of the television series Millennium. I was fucking thrilled to see an actual girl was a group member - a bass playing, ass-kicking, real live sexy hardcore GIRL! - and I wore the tape out within a month, entranced by its wicked trailer trashy monster movie grooviness. 






Ænima - Tool

It seems somehow appropriate that the first copy of this album that I ever owned was taped from a dead man's disc. I held onto that tape until it unspooled, partially because it was a memento of a murdered boy whose CD copy had died with him, mostly because I played it constantly, every day, over and over, all the goddamned time. This blisteringly angry and achingly desolate album almost hurts to listen to. It's like watching someone who thinks they are all alone and unobserved masturbate and cry at the same time.





October Rust - Type O Negative

The unofficial soundtrack for Autumn/Halloween. When you're a goth you're a goth all the way, from your first black hair dye to your last...well, you get it. And when you're a goth, it's not truly October until you've put Type O Negative's least worst CD on the player and blasted it for the whole world to hear. 

And here I end, not because I've run out of albums but because I'm tired and my eyeballs are starting to feel like sandpaper. I've been writing for two solid hours now and I have to stop. So I'll leave you with the immortal words of Anthony Burgess:

Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.

You're welcome.