Your Top 5
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Whoever said Tool, fuck yeah. Never listened to them before, but they are so far up my alley, all you can see is the sols of their feet….
Enjoy
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They don't make better bands. Tool is a rabbit hole. Who else is writing the Fibonacci sequence into their songs?
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@Giles wow you have quite a daunting but amazing rabbit hole ahead of you, as others have mentioned. Their music is so dense and complex that you can listen to one of their songs for the hundredth time and still catch something new, but at the same time it’s very listenable and not overwhelming in its complexity. Such a great band.
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@jerkules yeah Danny’s an absolute monster
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I remember at a Tool show once Danny did a fill that made my friends and I just look at each other slack-jawed. Great skill, and his creativity is monumental too.
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Einstein's Dreams is great @SKT ; Alan Lightman fairly recently released another book, but I've not read it.
EDIT: And I think it's been discussed here, but Larry McMurtry's son James is an amazing singer-songwriter.
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@mclaincausey Einstein’s Dreams…I read it not long ago and was just blown away by the combination of prose/poetry/physics and the nature of time. I really loved it.
A lot of people know the movie “Winter’s Bone” based off Woodrell’s novel, which launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career. The book is fantastic and set pretty close to where I live now and where I grew up. There is a great Anthony Bourdain episode where he goes gigging for fish with Woodrell on some backwoods river in the Ozarks. And absolutely yes to James McMurtry…one of my songwriting heroes. His “Childish Things” record is a favorite
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Agreed 100% @SKT and what I also like about it is that it really captures the kinds of thought experiments (Gedankenexperiment, which he learned in primary school) that Einstein used to come up with the most monumental physical insight in human history (General Relativity ) among many other physical insights also ranking among the top. It feels like it puts you into his mind, which is pretty incredible.
Speaking of Einstein, Walter Isaacson's biography is also outstanding and well worth a read. Uncertainty by David Lindley is also an interesting account of Einstein and other players, though is more focused on quantum physics, Bohr, and Heisenberg.
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Thanks for the Einstein recommendations. The Lightman book really got me interested in learning more about his life and work. The concept of time became a focus for me as we experienced “Covid-time” during the pandemic. Erratic…speeding…crawling. I’ll find that Isaacson book and start there.
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And now I can’t stop thinking about how criminally under appreciated Daniel Woodrell is as an American writer. Here is a great article from esquire for whoever might be interested. Goes into detail about his painful No Reservations episode.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a24632/daniel-woodrell-outlaw/
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Favourite album ever:
Opeth - Blackwater Park (Totally blew my mind when I first heard it. Still does)Rounding out the top 5 in no particular order:
- Metallíca - Master of Puppets
- The Ocean Collective - Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic|Cenozoic
- Porcupine Tree - Fear of a blank planet
- Kraftwerk - Trans Europa Express
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From my younger days, (crazy days) which I still like.
Best of Mountain / which would contain, Nantucket Sleighride, Theme for an imaginary western, Mississippi Queen.
Best of Jefferson Airplane / which would contain Wooden Ships, White rabbit
Dave Mason / It's like you never left / song Maybe
Traffic which Dave Mason went to/ Mr. Fantasy
Cream / Wheels of fire White room
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I’m thinking Friday. Not sure if /where it will be streaming. I was with some friends,and we were coming out of the 42nd Street library(April 1970)and we weren’t paying attention to where we were going and we just about bumped into him. He had just spoken at the first ever Earth Day. He told us about a short story he had written which,at the time,was the first with an obscene title…Called The Great Space Fuck. I think the title was subsequently changed. Philip Jose Farrmer wrote a book,as a tribute, to Kurt,under the name Kilgore Trout,called Venus on The Half Shell. Highly recommend it.
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I’m thinking Friday. Not sure if /where it will be streaming. I was with some friends,and we were coming out of the 42nd Street library(April 1970)and we weren’t paying attention to where we were going and we just about bumped into him. He had just spoken at the first ever Earth Day. He told us about a short story he had written which,at the time,was the first with an obscene title…Called The Great Space Fuck. I think the title was subsequently changed. Philip Jose Farrmer wrote a book,as a tribute, to Kurt,under the name Kilgore Trout,called Venus on The Half Shell. Highly recommend it.
Man, what an awesome encounter! I'm bummed that I didn't really learn about him until after he passed. I would've written to him.
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@SKT:
And now I can’t stop thinking about how criminally under appreciated Daniel Woodrell is as an American writer. Here is a great article from esquire for whoever might be interested. Goes into detail about his painful No Reservations episode.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a24632/daniel-woodrell-outlaw/
wonderful writer and overlooked is right. I thought when Winters Bone was filmed he might take off and with writers like Donald Ray Pollock getting noticed it seemed Woodrells time had come
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My top 1 favorite artist is Jerry Garcia, and Scorsese is slated to direct and co-produce a biopic on the Dead with the surviving members, one of Jerry's daughters, and other people who give me hope this won't be a dumpster fire attached as executive producers. Jonah Hill gets the nod as Jerry (I like him. I can't picture anyone in the role, so I don't have an opinion on that yet).
The quality of Scorsese's work has declined with his age, but he did a good documentary about the Dead fairly recently and this is his first music biopic, so I really hope he crushes it.
My hope is that most of the focus is on the formation and early days of the band in the 60s and early 70s, and that crazy cast of characters including the Merry Pranksters.
