Better Than Friday - 93 (Patreon)

Good afternoon everyone, hope you're doing well! 

Heading out to Florida for a short trip next week, so Better Than Friday may be postponed. 

1. A book I was considering bringing to the beach -  The Beach by Alex Garland 

Never read anything by Alex Garland but I'd heard of this one awhile back...

 The Khao San Road, Bangkok -- first stop for the hordes of rootless young Westerners traveling in Southeast Asia. On Richard's first night there, in a low-budget guest house, a fellow traveler slashes his wrists, bequeathing to Richard a meticulously drawn map to "the Beach."The Beach, as Richard has come to learn, is the subject of a legend among young travelers in Asia: a lagoon hidden from the sea, with white sand and coral gardens, freshwater falls surrounded by jungle, plants untouched for a thousand years. There, it is rumored, a carefully selected international few have settled in a communal Eden.Haunted by the figure of Mr. Duck -- the name by which the Thai police have identified the dead man -- and his own obsession with Vietnam movies, Richard sets off with a young French couple to an island hidden away in an archipelago forbidden to tourists. They discover the Beach, and it is as beautiful and idyllic as it is reputed to be. Yet over time it becomes clear that Beach culture, as Richard calls it, has troubling, even deadly, undercurrents.Spellbinding and hallucinogenic, The Beach by Alex Garland -- both a national bestseller and his debut -- is a highly accomplished and suspenseful novel that fixates on a generation in their twenties, who, burdened with the legacy of the preceding generation and saturated by popular culture, long for an unruined landscape, but find it difficult to experience the world firsthand.

- Amazon

2. The Night of the Iguana 

A terrific kind of Tropical Gothic drama from 1964 set in Mexico with Richard Burton and Sue Lyon.

Burton stars as a preacher on the run after a small-town scandal.

The opening scene is excellent. 

Based on the play by Tennessee Williams, which I really ought to read...

3. Next review - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 

Finally getting to this. 

Interesting to note there actually was a drink called 

soma: an intoxicating juice from a plant of disputed identity that was used in ancient India as an offering to the gods and as a drink of immortality by worshippers in Vedic ritual and worshipped in personified form as a Vedic god - Merriam Webster 

4. Losing My Edge 

Classic stuff. 

"But I was there.

I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City.

I was working on the organ sounds with much patience."

- lyrics from Losing My Edge by LCD Soundsystem

5. Jeffrey Lee Pierce Documentary 

Saw this years ago, I love some of the tracks he plays on the resonator guitar.