Today's movie is Oldboy.
Its a Korean film about a man who is kidnapped and taken from his family and the madness that ensues when he gets out. Sounds cheesy but there's an epic fight scene involving a hammer and sixty bad guys and just all around brilliance. Read some reviews online and give it a shot, its on Netflix for streaming and there are various other illicit sources where one might be able to watch it if they were so inclined.
The album of the day is Meddle by Pink Floyd.
An amazing composition by easily one of the greatest bands of all time, this album contains one of the Floyd's quintessential songs, and one of my personal favorite songs Echoes. If you haven't heard it yet, it is on several other Pink Floyd albums in shorter versions but the original 23 minute version on Meddle is a brilliant acoustic epitome of psychedelic rock. The haunting piano blips and spine-chilling screeches that fill in the gaps between the amazing smash out lyrical parts CANNOT go unnoticed. Also recommended is A Pillow of Winds on the same album. Gotta love the names these guys come up with. Anyway, not that I'm condoning the use of psychotropic substances like marijuana (jk I really am), people have found Echoes to be a devastatingly intense mind trip, in a good way. Kinda like Time, but we'll leave that for another week.
The Book of the Week is "Childhood's End" by Arthur C. Clarke. If you don't know who Clarke is, he essentially wrote our future. The author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and various other milestone science fiction books, he started off as a astrophysicist and invented the concept of the transmission satellite. So all that Dish and DirecTV shit that y'all enjoy, that wouldn't be around without this guy. The entire backup support system for the world governments can be attributed to Clarke's ideas about data-transmitting satellites in orbit around the earth. Now getting into his good stuff like 2001 takes a little bit of time, one needs to be quite the avid reader but doesn't need some sort of rocket-science background and it gets pretty deep pretty f'ing quick. So a good step in the right direction is "Childhood's End." Contrary to what the title suggests, the book is not for children, about children, or from the point of view of children. It is the future and humans have stopped reproducing a-la Children of Men but the kids aren't dying quite yet. There is still a full generation of children, but the adults from who's perspective the reader observes the world witness that the "benefactors" or "creators" of the human race decide that humanity so far has fucked up way too bad, and they come back and brainwash the generation of children in order to take them away and create a new, better human race on some other world. Now we're not talking about turning them into children of the corn shit, but it is much more directly subtle but quite horrifying once you attribute what's going on with reality and see the parallels of society in Clarke's fictional earth and those of our very own home planet. Check it out at your local library, go to a bookstore, you can read it in an hour or two, its not long at all, and its just a good damn book. It really makes you think.
Now that's all I got the time for right now, tune in tomorrow night or whenever for some more bizarre madness. Peace loves
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