Better Than Friday - 119 (Patreon)

Happy Friday ya'll, hope you have a great weekend. 

And Happy Thanksgiving - Cooking anything good? 

1. Book in the Pipeline - Threshold by Rob Doyle 

A kind patron, Chris C., recently sent this my way along with some other beautiful titles. 

I'm being spoiled rotten. Thanks man! Looks compelling. 

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The narrator of Rob Doyle’s Threshold has spent the last two decades traveling, writing, and imbibing drugs and literature in equal measure, funded by brief periods of employment or “on the dole” in Dublin. Now, stranded between reckless youth and middle age, his travels to far-flung places have acquired a de facto purpose: to aid the contemporary artist’s search for universal truth.Following Doyle from Buddhism to the brink of madness, Threshold immerses us in the club-drug communalism of the Berlin underworld, the graves of myth-chasing artists in Paris, and the shattering and world-rebuilding revelations brought on by the psychedelic DMT, the so-called “spirit molecule.”Exulting in the rootlessness of the wanderer, Doyle exists in a lineage of writer-characters―W. G. Sebald, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, and Rachel Cusk―deftly and subversively exploring forms between theory and autobiography. Insightful and provocative, Threshold is a darkly funny, genuinely optimistic, compulsively readable celebration of perception and desire, of what is here and what is beyond our comprehension.

- Amazon

2. Ella Fitzgerald singing Mack the Knife in Stockholm Sweden 

Legendlegendlegendary stuff here. 

Originally a tune by Kurt Weill from Bertolt Brecht's Three Penny Opera which I'm ashamed I have yet to read or see.

3. James Ellroy 

I was recently sent some James Ellroy by a kind fan, I've never read him, but after watching these interviews, he's a walking hard-boiled film noir character. Can't wait. Ironically Chris from Leaf by Leaf just posted a piece on Ellroy's 'The Black Dahlia'. 

4. "Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane...ain't got time to take a fast train..." 

So I'm working my way into the discography of Alex Chilton and finding it quite rewarding. 

16 years old when he recorded that song. Ain't that some shit? 

5. Not an Anime guy, but Perfect Blue was terrific. Very eerie. 

Trailer doesn't do it justice. I highly recommend watching it.  

End of an era.