It's a Mitch Cohen kind of day.

Funny how just the mention of someone's name, completely out of context, and in such a way that ensures I'll never have to lay eyes on her again, is still sufficient to smear my day with a greasy gray pall. The weather doesn't help, either. I like temperatures low...but lately, the world hasn't been comfortable, just cold. Yay fuckin' yay.

At least I have work to distract me--I'm just about to sit down and read 26 papers. Then I'm going to finish a new Nyarlathotep track, "Mother Hydra," that will be on the next Cait Kiernan soundtrack EP, and probably post it to the IUMA site tonight or something. And then I'm going to play with Christy until she starts biting me or her own tail, and then just go to bed.

Oh, BTW: The new Front Line Assembly album, Civilization, is extremely good. Like Jim said, it's quite mellow, but...man, FLA really suffered without Rhys Fulber in the group, and now that he's back the new album has a great almost-Delerium-esque sound again, what with the strings, and lavish ambience, the surprisingly-creative use of arpeggiated strings every now and again, the big-ass bass, and the occasional female vocals--which give this album a sort of Karma-gone-insane sound that I'm really diggin' tha most. Bill Leeb still hasn't learned to write lyrics, though.

And eolh, I picked up the Starsailor album at the Record Exchange the other day. It is muy bien, too. Good counterpoint to FLA.

From the Desk of Mr. d'Eth:

This, from T. S. Eliot's wonderful appreciation of Charles Baudelaire's life and work:

"[T]he possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress reform, that damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation...because it at last gives some significance to living."

That said, it looks like the whole trilogy of derek.cf.PEGRITZ EPs is yet another step closer to completion. Not much longer now.... and A special place prepared for you in Hell are both done, and the inserts and whatnot are at the printer's even as we speak (I should be getting them back in a few days), and I've more or less started work on the third one now. I was kind of struggling with a concept to work with--I mean, where do you go after you have 1) symbolically killed yourself in the first one; and 2) built a furnace of hatred to last a trillion years in the second? Don't ask me! I was originally going to do something based on Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night, but never really felt that right about doing so because, well, how does Thomson really relate to the subject at hand other than as an obvious source of depressing inspiration? So I just figured, ahhhhh, hell with it--

I'm going to call the third one Please notify next of kin. It's basically just going to be a mishmash of sounds left over from the previous two. Not that that won't be cool and creepy as the first two, but hey....