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Animalia is novel by French author Jean-Baptiste Del Amo and it may be the best book i have ever read. It is set on a family pig farm around WWI and in the 1980s and is RIFE with disgusting beauty, shocking physicality, unusual astoundingly imaginative turns of events and both wonderful humanity and wonderful inhumanity. the writing is dense but never tedious as are the emotions and feral motivations it explores. i found myself laughing out loud not at how funny it is but at how incredible it is. i wish it were 3,000,000,000 pages long. it is his first work translated into english and my bandmate, who introduced me to it, is learning french just so she can read his other books.
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my favorite book. itâs long and wanders A LOT but itâs so beautiful and really changed how I thought about literature and life itself. highly rec
Mar 2, 2024
Absolutely the best book Iâve ever read but it took me, if Iâm remembering correctly, over a month to get through. Itâs so dense with material I had to reread things over and over to get everything being put together. It has an academic vibe, so if thatâs not your thing, you probably wouldnât enjoy. But god, I loved it.
Feb 7, 2025
I know I am technically late to this book but I just finished it and it has fundamentally changed me forever. Maybe its because I am an academic, or because I often introduce myself as the speaker of 2 and a half languages but it hit hard. It is vivid and spectacular and grief inducing and devastating. It has so much heart, so much love, yet so much despair. The attention to detail regarding history and conflicting philosophies, politics, religious beliefs and belief systems is so carefully and precisely constructed, it is in and of itself poetry. It's so vivid that I can taste it, I can feel the texture of the pages, different passages are rattling around my brain and I can remember where I read them, I am a different person from before I read this book. After the reading slump I was in, it feels like all along I was waiting to find this book, I didn't know I was missing it, or waiting for it and yet when I read it it is like all at once I suddenly knew that I had needed this book all along. Read it, if you are one of those people that gets skeptical of things that reach a certain level of popularity, just know that all the hype in the world has undersold this book. It is that good. And yes, I attached a low light photo of my copy because I have reread chapters of this so often that the pages are curling, fished it out of my backpack when I found random spots to sit or stand idly, accidentally smudged it when I immediately reached for it after writing sprawling pages in my notebooks. You see how my earphones aren't connected to anything because all I am thinking about is this book? Yeah exactly! This is a good fucking book I am so serious you guys if you have held off on reading it, bump it up your list.
Jan 9, 2025
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streaming music is fucking dumb. it sounds like ass, a person who doesn't know anything about music programs a robot to tell what you should like, it makes music extremely disposable and therefore meaningless and it is 99.99% theft from musicians. however things that are fucking dumb and the music business were made for each other-so if that is what it's going to be, you might as well use a GREAT streaming (steaming) platform. Radiooooo is a map of the world and timeline of decades. you pick a country and pick a decade and music from there and from then will play. 1990s Algeria BOOM! 1940s Brazil ZAP! 2010s Czech Republic BLAMO! 1960s South Korea ZORK! it is curated by music fans not an algorithm and you can set it at slow, fast or weird or all three. if you have to drink poison at least drink bitchin' poison.
Jun 25, 2024
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as a band we have a healthy collection of pedals, not as many as some but certainly an interesting selection. one of the most curious new ones we have is the Lossy by Chase Bliss. There are lots of degeneration pedals but this one specifically emulates shitty early digital/mp3/cdr/internet dying types of sounds. though based on past technology, it is an unsettling device as makes the sounds of our current, failing civilization's most recent problems: an over reliance on inherently bad communication methodologies and representations. it makes sounds that are bad for you but in a charming way. it reminds you that the end is high nigh but the pedal is bright pink so it will be a cutie pie, cartoonish kind of smashy smashy ending.
Jun 25, 2024
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vaginal davis is one of my art heros and a major, lifelong inspiration. she has an art exhibition in stockholm that spans 5!!!!!! museums called magnificent product. it is more than remarkable to see a body of work that spans more than 40 years be more exciting today than ever before. she has the ability to be politically astute, sexual, funny, heart breaking, bizarre, literate, crass, culturally cutting and culturally embracing. her work is magic in the truest and most literal sense of the word in that her work will change you. installations, film, painting, photos, collage and writing that is worth any effort to go but buy the catalog if you (not unreasonably) cannot important sections of the exhibitions are in collaboration with CHEAP and Jonathan Berger.
Jun 25, 2024