Listmania!
Books and music I love
Tender is the Night (Penguin Popular Classics)Tender is the Night (Penguin Popular Classics) by F Scott Fitzgerald
Buy new: £2.16 / Used from: £0.01
A melancholy but cutting lament for consumer America and the myths it built (and still builds) for itself.
EurekaEureka by Jim O'Rourke
Buy new: £7.98 / Used from: £6.00
Excellent, As good a Jim o Rourke cd as you'll find on amazon. Go to www.mego.at and buy I'm happy and I'm singing and a 1,2,3,4 which is his best work to my mind
NYC Ghosts & FlowersNYC Ghosts & Flowers by Sonic Youth
Buy new: £14.19 / Used from: £3.69
Swirling intertwined guitar figures envelop deconstructed pop structures creating a claustrophobic tension shattered by occasional breaks of light.
SoSo by So
Buy used from: £3.41
Gorgeous organic electronica, this and Jim o Rourke's I'm Happy... are as close to developing the original spirit of electroacoustic composition as contemporary electronica gets
Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of ModernismFarewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism by TJ Clark
Buy new: £17.31 / Used from: £14.58
Excellent reading; often too rigidly opinionated and often completely wrong, but one of the best arts writers I've come accross; the writing on Pollock and the Abstract expressionists particularly is
Julien Donkey Boy [1999] [DVD]Julien Donkey Boy [1999] [DVD]
Buy new: £6.98 / Used from: £6.84
A dazzlingly innovative and emotionally charged portrait of schizophrenia painted against the banal violence of the american suburbs.
O.K ComputerO.K Computer by Radiohead
Buy new: £3.98 / Used from: £0.90
A near perfect pop album, a summation of white commercial teen music from the 60s to present with all the childish arrogance, angst and vulgarity left in. Somewhere between cerebral+ teenybop-savant.
Love, God, MurderLove, God, Murder by Johnny Cash
Buy used from: £23.00
A great Johnny Cash collection expressing all that's great and/or appaling about this monolith of White American Masculinity; honesty, mysogyny, simplicity, violence and a great voice.
Madame Bovary: A Story of Provincial Life (Penguin Popular Classics)Madame Bovary: A Story of Provincial Life (Penguin Popular Classics) by Gustave Flaubert
Buy new: £2.00 / Used from: £0.01
My favourite book. Comic, tragic and written with devastating irony
AusterlitzAusterlitz by W. G. Sebald
Buy new: £6.96 / Used from: £4.45
An amazing book. To my mind a one of the most important books of the last half of C20. Beautiful.
IlluminationsIlluminations by Walter Benjamin
Buy new: £8.08 / Used from: £6.11
The only philosopher whose writing I read with the pleasure of reading fiction. Profound, elegant and still amazingly relevant.
Horatiu Radulescu: Piano Concerto "The Quest"Horatiu Radulescu: Piano Concerto "The Quest"
Buy used from: £29.99
My favorite modern composer. Ridiculously overblown in concept and exhilarating to listen to.