This is what I looked like 2005/6 while making the third Painkiller record, The Quip Celebs (out now!). The whole record was made in the Fullerton apt on the other side of this wall, Brett’s drums in the living room, my amp in our dryer. Everywhere: artists.landr.com/PTPQuip

I finished Death In Her Hands (2020) by Ottessa Moshfegh, or, as I’d call it, Unreliable Narrator: The Novel, what a sad, haunted experience it is. A 72 year old widow finds a mysterious note suggesting a dead body, & begins to spiral out considering all the implications. Dark & hermetically sealed.

I’m so happy to have found a copy of Dreams With Sharp Teeth, the only one of a proposed series of annotated Harlan Ellison omnibuses that ever materialized (in 1991). He’s so criminally out of print right now, but I’ve got 30-ish stories that are brand new to me here.

Almost done with Ray Bradbury’s remix of his own debut story collection (originally Dark Carnival in 1947, revised into this in 1955), it’s fantastic. “The Next In Line” is as good a short story as I’ve ever read from anyone. “Skeleton,” “The Small Assassin,” “Jack-In-The-Box,” all wonderful.

Book haul from The Tattered Cover in Denver (I have recurring dreams about the original location); my dad gets an employee discount there, so I went ham, ten books for a nice price. I already have a chunk of novels in my To Read pile, so this time I went for a lot of short stories.

Just got my next three archival EPs scheduled for release in September! These are from 2006, 2007, & 2008, they contain my two most popular covers (Daniel Johnston’s My Life Is Starting Over Again, Billy Bragg’s Greetings To The New Brunette), plus many unheard songs!

Absolutely loving this collection of slightly lesser known creepy tales from the great Shirley Jackson, some of these were found in a box mailed anonymously 30 years after her death, which is very appropriate. “Louisa, Please Come Home” is one of the most unsettling things I’ve ever read.

A perfect 90s album, not by the big boys.

I thought I had no pictures with my Grandma Sue, who was one of my all-time favorite humans, but my mom found TWO of them. I feel a little bit more complete! First is from Sept 1993, the second is summer 1985.

Amusing my dad at the bookstore (I bought lots of goodies)

Flying to Denver to attend my mother’s latest wedding. I am listening to Grace Jones and will also have a window seat, so it’s going well.

I just turned in all the files for a little cassette release of my best early tunes, it’ll be a limited run on a lime green tape. All the A & B-sides from my first three records plus 5 C-sides from each one. I’ll go on some pods to promote it! Soon!

I finished Patricia Highsmith’s last book of short stories, kind of loved it. Nothing like the Ripleys, these are more Catch-22, strange black comedies about various apocalypses. Cancer growing wild in a graveyard, a 200 year old woman who won’t die, a whale bent on revenge, etc.

I have been thinking of these all day, and giggling. Quite a lot of giggling.

I read Malice by Keigo Higashino in a day, it’s very quick and very hooky, a murder mystery where you learn the how & the who before the halfway point, but then WHY becomes the whole game. Such a fun structure, quick & punchy!

I don’t even know what to say about finishing The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin other than to apologize for not having read it much sooner. What a titanic work of imagination, intelligence, empathy, realism, physics, and it’s not like it isn’t funny! Or romantic! Blown away.

Finished my next book, Keith Rosson’s Fever House, a propulsive, gory genre mash-up, it’s horror/crime/X-Files-y, with an alt rock twist, and very hard to put down! I’ll have to read his sequel, The Devil By Name, pretty much ASAP. Absolute banger.

Finished my next book, the recent Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits collection. I’ve always known his TV work, but not read tons of his prose; this is the most inspiring, imaginative, ill-behaved writing I’ve come across, & he’s currently deeply out of print! GH 2 coming next May, at least. INCREDIBLE.

Finished my next book, Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971). This rocked. Matheson I know as an ultra-prolific Twilight Zone writer, also I Am Legend, Stir Of Echoes, Duel, but I’ve never read him before. His horror prose is fantastic. “He felt the ropy form start oozing up his legs adhesively.” 🥰

Reading my next book, Death On Gokumon Island, another ghoulish 1940s murder mystery featuring scruffy detective Kosuke Kindaichi, my second of these, they’re really detailed and intricately plotted, I love them. Grinklin naps happily in the background.

Album cover, my primitive drawing from the lyric folder. Plus pictures of myself at the time this was made, still beardless! I may have played 100-150 shows in 2005 in three bands, that’s sort of all I did.

I read Patricia Highsmith’s Found In The Street, a hypnotic & cruel novel about 1980s New York & a dream girl who flits through, warping everyone around her. It’s only a suspense thriller by disposition, rather than plot, it’s too singular to play by any genre rules. Very vivid.

Just had a happy memory, I was about 24, the year before DW came back, I would take the train all over Chicago on my lunch break to different bookshops to raid their DW selection, I remember smoking a cig & reading System Shock at my temp transcription job on a hot summer day.

Stayed up late and read all of Soji Shimada’s Murder In The Crooked House in one day. This is a brilliantly intricate locked-room mystery complete with diagrams and angles and a really fun, manic Sherlock-type character who arrives halfway through. So much fun, have to read more by this writer.

Finally finished The Unlimited Dream Company by JG Ballard, a truly bizarre but exquisitely written book, a sort of evil Surrealist Jesus crashes his plane in Shepperton, starts to invert all moral & physical laws, & eventually to subsume the townsfolk into his body. Poetic & unhinged.

It’s even more intense in Little Murders!

The Avengers episode we watched last night had the wildest cast for 1967: Charlotte Rampling, Donald Sutherland, and a distressingly beardless Brian Blessed

Best thing isn’t that the record is called Big Ol’ Bag O’ Boogaloo, it’s that it’s actually Big Ol’ Bag O’ Boogaloo Volume 3 lolol

Coward deleted it after a very weak apology where he claimed he had been “inarticulate.” No no, you were quite clear, you knew exactly what you were implying with “everybody has a price,” so own it, clown.

Saw Obsession and Backrooms, ate a steak, listened to some GBV (August By Cake), now reading The Village Of Eight Graves, a 1940s murder mystery I grabbed at the Japanese comic book store by Alamo. Also listening to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3 in C Maj. Well decent Saturday.