Better Than Friday - 110 (Patreon)

Howdy ya'll, traveling back to the PNW. 

Content has been slow this month due to the travel, but 'The Trial' is currently being edited. 

Chattanooga is one of the friendliest spots in the country I've ever had the pleasure of spending time in. Seriously considering a move. 

Thanks for your support and hope you're reading something terrific. 

1. Book I'd like to Read - Moderan by David Bunch 

Someone recommended this to me not long ago, a hell of a cover, no? 

A collection of chilling and prescient stories about ecological apocalypse and the merging of human and machine.Welcome to Moderan, world of the future. Here perpetual war is waged by furious masters fighting from Strongholds well stocked with “arsenals of fear” and everyone is enamored with hate. The devastated earth is coated by vast sheets of gray plastic, while humans vie to replace more and more of their own “soft parts” with steel. What need is there for nature when trees and flowers can be pushed up through holes in the plastic? Who requires human companionship when new-metal mistresses are waiting? But even a Stronghold master can doubt the catechism of Moderan. Wanderers, poets, and his own children pay visits, proving that another world is possible.“As if Whitman and Nietzsche had collaborated,” wrote Brian Aldiss of David R. Bunch’s work. Originally published in science-fiction magazines in the 1960s and ’70s, these mordant stories, though passionately sought by collectors, have been unavailable in a single volume for close to half a century. Like Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, Bunch coined a mind-bending new vocabulary. He sought not to divert readers from the horror of modernity but to make us face it squarely.

- Amazon

2. Pere Ubu 

You really get to a point as a listener of experimental music like an addict, where you've built up such a tolerance you're just sprinkling fentanyl on your cereal and main-lining 8 balls like it's a casual pastime. 

I feel like when you reach the point where Pere Ubu is your main jam, that's the musical equivalent of the hardest junkie. 

You're just never going to be able to bond with someone over music who isn't a complete weirdo (I certainly fall into this category). 

I love this song. 

3. Mose Alison - Back Country Suite 

In the introduction from Thomas Pynchon to 'Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me' (which, btw is one of the funniest things I've ever read, I can barely read it in public), he mentions this was an album Richard Fariña loved. 

Really enjoying it. Very classic "cool".

4. RIP Robert Calasso 

I never knew about him until today but a patron got in touch mentioning his work and recent passing, thanks Chris! 

New York Times article 

A Paris Review Interview with him.

Fascinating guy. 

And since I'm in the region...

5. Glenn Miller Orchestra - The Chattanooga Choo-Choo featuring some of the best dancing I've ever seen by the Nicholas Brothers 

Knowing nothing about tap-dancing history, I was going to say the Nicholas Brothers must've given Fred Astaire a run for his money until I learned that, in fact, they were his heroes. 

And it's clear why. That is nothing short of astounding. I mean, how??

The singer Dorothy Dandridge was the first African American woman to be nominated for an Academy Award later for a performance in 1954 in the film Carmen Jones. 

Source for that: the top-rated comment on another upload of the performance

And there it is.