DDD SUGGESTED READING ~ SEPT 6, 2015

1. I assume we're all Pink Floyd fans here, right? Well then, I'm going to have to assume that you guys are going to be as shocked, surprised and delighted as I was to discover that the boys created a multi-page comic book "program" to coincide with their Dark Side of the Moon tour in 1975. As Dangerous Minds explains:  "It has an appealing lack of polish that puts it somewhere halfway between 'professional promotional item' and 'schoolboy’s notebook scribbling.' ... The 'programme' is credited to Hipgnosis, Nick Mason, Gerald Scarfe, Paul Stubbs, Joe Petagno, Colin Elgie, Richard Evans, and Dave Gale." You can download the whole thing at the link, and find more vintage Pink Floyd ephemera at the Ultimate Pink Floyd Fan Site. Especially their Tour Book Project page.

2. I am currently working on a long essay about the Rise of the Conspiritards, in which I will be making use of some of the concepts first delineated by Richard Hofstadter in his ground-breaking essay for Harper's entitled The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It's a great history lesson, and a wonderfully argued bit of intellectual polemic. I urge you all to bone up on it so you'll be better able to grapple with the ideas that I plan to put forth in my own essay. If you're one of those particularly wooly sheeple who believes that nobody died at Sandy Hook, THIS MEANS YOU.

3. And finally for today's "curation" (see Saturday's Suggested Readings for why that's kinda funny), I bring you Italian pop/rock superstar Adriano Celentano's "Prisencolinensinainciusol", a song that topped the Italian pop charts in 1972. The lyrics consist of gibberish designed to sound like English. “Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did,” said Celentano during a 2012 interview with All Things Considered. “I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn’t mean anything.” Thanks to my writing partner Marc Roussel (and BoingBoing) for bringing this gem to my attention. Somebody needs to put this thing in a movie before Quentin Tarantino does.