Better Than Friday - 83
Good afternoon everyone, hope you're well and have a nice weekend.
Please enjoy my friend and patron Jeff's Awesome Rendition of Chopin's Nocturne No. 1
1. A Recent Recommendation from Chris at Leaf By Leaf
Looks compelling, anyone read this one?
Part visceral dream-memoir, part fictive journey through a hallucinatory Bucharest, Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding was one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a bestseller from the day of its release. Riddled with hidden passageways, mesmerizing tapestries, and whispering butterflies, Blinding takes us on a mystical trip into the protagonist’s childhood, his memories of hospitalization as a teenager, the prehistory of his family, a traveling circus, Secret police, zombie armies, American fighter pilots, the underground jazz scene of New Orleans, and the installation of the communist regime. This kaleidoscopic world is both eerily familiar and profoundly new. Readers of Blinding will emerge from this strange pilgrimage shaken, and entirely transformed.
2. Nick Cave on Censorship and Cancel Culture
Some discussion of Nabokov's Lolita as well, which apparently had a large influence on Cave.
3. I always thought DEVO were silly...But as I grow older I realize they were actually incredibly Punk.
The algorithm recently clued me into this obscure Japanese band who played a kind of Velvet Underground-ish noise/rock.
Their bass player took part in the hijacking of a plane by the communist/terrorist group the Japanese Red Army.
Pretty dope live version here.
Kudos to Dirty Beaches for sampling that track on A Hundred Miles.
And that bassline I've loved ever since I was a kid, when I heard the original, from Peggy March.
5. The Tibetan Book of the Dead Narrated by Leonard Cohen
WHAT. Amazing.
A documentary about the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Comments (6)
the interview with Nick Cave is absolutely fantastic! I did read Lolita in a portuguese translation, but I just HAVE TO read this book in English too. Thank you for sharing this!
That Leonard Cohen video is priceless. He was actually a real Zen Monk, literally not figuratively, so it’s a great match. He was also a close friend of a meditation teacher called Shinzen Young, since both of them studied under the same Roshi. Cohen even wrote a blurb for Shinzen’s book (the book is called “The Science of Enlightenment” in case you want to check it out.)
Nick Cave, as golden as ever.
Oh wow, haven't heard the name DEVO in years! What a throwback.
https://savagethrills.com/music/les-rallizes-denudes-the-untold-story-of-a-legendary-japanese-rock-band/ Pretty in depth bio of Les Rallizes Dénudés. They’re rad!
Hi Clifford, I also highly recommend Blinding. It is a totally absorbing piece of literature. I have never read a novel so full of colour. Even more fascinating is the way it was constructed, chopped together from real-life memoir and dreams. If anyone is interested in dipping their toes into Cărtărescu’s phantasmagorical worlds, he has a collection of stories in English called Nostalgia which is receiving the Penguin Modern Classics treatment in May.