Better Than Friday - 136 (Patreon)

Good evening everyone, Happy Friday.

As you can see we’ve been experimenting with iPhone camera filters. 

Creepy right? 

Hope you’re having a good one, just a heads up, we posted Michael Gira’s “The Consumer” for sale in the bookstore. Not sure how long it’ll last. 

Very rare, very intense.

1. A Book I've been meaning to read: Charles Mingus - Beneath the Underdog 

I've loved Mingus for years, and I've always been fascinated by the video interviews I'd seen with him on Youtube. I was reminded of this one by Roberto Bentivegna in the Mark Lanegan review. 

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Bass player extraordinaire Charles Mingus, who died in 1979, is one of the essential composers in the history of jazz, and Beneath the Underdog, his celebrated, wild, funny, demonic, anguished, shocking, and profoundly moving memoir, is the greatest autobiography ever written by a jazz musician. It tells of his God-haunted childhood in Watts during the 1920s and 1930s; his outcast adolescent years; his apprenticeship, not only with jazzmen but also with pimps, hookers, junkies, and hoodlums; and his golden years in New York City with such legendary figures as Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie.  Here is Mingus in his own words, from shabby roadhouses to fabulous estates, from the psychiatric wards of Bellevue to worlds of mysticism and solitude, but for all his travels never straying too far, always returning to music.“This book is the purest of dynamite.  Like the autobiographies of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and like A. B. Spellman's Four Lives in the Bebop Business, it says more about the American psyche in general and black survival in particular than the sociologists and psychologists ever can in their stiff, soulless vocabularies.... Somber, comic, disturbing, boastful, confessional, sentimental, contradictory, poetic, irascible, impish...lyrical, nasty, angelic, reflective...expressionistic, picaresque, jive...this is a powerful book.”— Rolling Stone

- Amazon

2. Agustín Lara - Flaco de Oro

An interesting video I came across recently about the Mexican musician 

Agustín Lara, aka Flaco de Oro. Here's his great version of Aquellos Ojos Verdes.

3. The Raveonettes 

Some good lo-fi rock I listened to years ago. 

4. How a kick in the head on the rugby field made me a psychopath…and turned me into a brilliant surgeon: Top heart doctor reveals how incident ‘cured’ his anxiety and made him ‘ruthlessly competitive’ 

So crazy I just had to share. Wild story.

5. Woah. This monkey looks like David Bowie.

But really.