Paradox is Truth

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Music

Pre 1960

Odetta

Ravi Shankar

1960 - 1980

David Bowie

Bob Dylan

After getting familiar with all these, dig into the Bootleg series.

The Beatles

Pink Floyd

Nick Drake

1980 - 2000

The Smiths

Patti Smith

Radiohead

Elliott Smith

2000 Onwards

Loyle Carner

Wu Tang

Aphex Twin

Hardfloor

Oasis

Nils Frahm

Jon Hopkins

Watching

Film

  1. Children of Men,
  2. Apocalypse Now,
  3. Midnight in Paris,
  4. Almost Famous,
  5. Garden State,
  6. Apocalypse Now,
  7. Human Traffic

More Film

TV

The Sopranos

The best ever TV - the mix of Italian mafia gangster culture with a microscope over the lives of a 2000’s American family (complete with a broken, narcissistic mother) is timeless, classic and true genius.

Favourite moment - the transition from Adriana’s successful escape to her doom.

The Wire

… a set of intricately connected stories about the people we now call the “left behind”, and whom Simon then called the “excess Americans”: steelworkers and longshoremen, street dealers and heroin addicts, the unemployed and the barely employed, all chewed up by a system that cared only to preserve itself.

People crushed by a police force more interested in order than in the law, a city hall that sipped corruption with the morning coffee, unions more decayed than the industries they once dominated, an education system that taught despair, a media that missed the real stories.

“World going one way,” as Poot, a low-level dealer in one of the drug gangs, puts it, “people going another.”

The Guardian

…the larger message of the show: that there is no institutional or even individual difference between the two recurring groups in the show (Baltimore’s police and drug dealers).

In the show, both groups of individuals are subject to their institutions: power figures come and go (and bring changes that superficially alter the state of affairs), but the game fundamentally remains the same. This repeats itself in every explored institution: industry, schools, news, &c.

There is no avoiding “corruption,” only moving it around. The show’s few “good” characters are characterized primarily by the ways in which their personal corruption does or does not affect the corruption of the larger institution they belong to (Daniels’ FBI investigation, for example, or Kima’s personal descent.)

[Be critical or be corrupted Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32953111)

Favourite moment - 40 degree day.

More TV

Documentaries

Adam Curtis:

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

Music:

Iraq:

The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.