The Guardian has posted a lengthy extract from The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.
“Set more than 15 years after The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s Booker Prize-shortlisted sequel revisits her dystopian republic Gilead”
You can read it here.
The official release date for The Testaments is 10 September 2019, but Amazon “accidentally” broke the embargo by shipping 800 copies of the book early. Indy bookstore owners were not amused, and The Guardian has that story as well.
Writing about Gary and Martin Kemp yesterday got me thinking about Spandau Ballet. For People of a Certain Age, it’s impossible to hear the first few notes of this song without being mentally transported back to a smoky 1980s club with blue lighting and a mirror ball hanging from the ceiling:
My taste in music was much closer to Athens-Chapel Hill-Austin jangle and to the band Game Theory than to Spandau Ballet and the other New Romantics, but I liked their music, and it was part of the soundtrack of my life.
And now they’re back. Again. After temporarily reuniting about five years ago, the band was inactive until last Fall. Now they’re on another world tour—they’re on their way to New Zealand after finishing one leg of an American tour, but they’ll be back in the States in July.
Not co-incidentally, a biographical documentary called Soul Boys Of The Western World has just been released in the United States. You can watch it on Amazon.
The War on Drugs, an indie group out of Philadelphia, is my favourite band this week. Here are two reasons why.
“Red Eyes” is from the band’s 2014 album, Lost In the Dream.
“Brothers” is from Slave Ambient, which came out in 2012.
PS As I was preparing to post this, I discovered that both SPIN magazine and Amazon called Lost In the Dream the Best Album of 2014. I had no idea!
It always appeals to the anarchist in me when Amazon’s Customer Reviews section gets hijacked, as it did for the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer. Two samples below, and about 5000 more at the link.
More Songs about Buildings and Food 