Better Than Friday - 87 (Patreon)

Hi there ya'll, hope this finds you well, my response time has slowed due to the volume of stuff going on over here at the moment what with moving and so on, so thank you for your patience. 

I'm currently reading and enjoying Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse'. 

What have you got going? Please let us know in the comments below. 

1. A Recent Gift from Archipelago Books - Everything like Before by Kjell Askildsen 

I've never heard of Askildsen but this is a beautiful book that is soon to be published. 

From one of the greatest Norwegian authors of the twentieth century, comes a collection of spare, biting stories of people caught between reality and expectation, hope and despair, love and longing.A man and a woman in a quiet, remote house, an old man on a park bench, an estranged brother in a railway café -- Kjell Askildsen's characters are surrounded by absence. Filled with disquiet, and longing, they walk to a fjord, they smoke, they drink on a veranda, they listen to conversations that drift through open windows. Small flashes like the promise of a sunhat, a nail in a cherry tree, or a raised flag, reveal the interminable space between desire and reality in which Askildsen's characters are forever suspended. Widely recognized as one of the greatest modern short-story writers, with unadorned prose and a dark humor, Askildsen captures life as it really is, the worlds of his characters uncanny mirrors of our own. 

2. I fucking love The Beach Boys 

Seriously - That band, that sound, unbeatable. Amazing. 

I've never heard a sound that perfectly walks the line between melancholy and sublime. 

3. A Rad looking book on Yukio Mishima 

I've been rereading Sun & Steel.

Although Mishima's main literary ambition was to write philosophical novels in the tradition of Goethe and Thomas Mann, Deadly Dialectics is the first critical study to take this objective seriously: it also provides the first adequate account of Mishima's intellectual background and characteristic modes of thought and it is the first book to show the intimate and integral relation between his thought and his psychology and militant politics - or, more specifically, between his nihilism, his sexuality and his propensity to violence.

- Amazon

4. Il Sorpasso - A Brilliant film, one of my favorites.  

Vittorio Gassmann is just brilliant in this one. One of the greatest films ever made in my opinion. The road movie. 

5. I Hate to admit, I've never been a fan of Prince...Then I heard 'Bambi'.  

And that changed real quick. 

I'd only heard the Purple Rain stuff, and to be fair When Doves Cry is dope, but this was the one where I was like - "Oh. He's amazing."

Joshua Tree, awhile back. 

Photo by Lynn Sargent