Better Than Friday - 83 (Patreon)

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.  

4. Les Rallizes Dénudés 

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.  

Here's a documentary on them.

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.