Exclusive Daily Download: "Paw Paw Paw Paw Paw Paw Paw," Xiu Xiu Larsen
This is the opening track from "Ciautistico!" a rather unexpected collaboration between the famously, pretentiously enigmatic Italian avant-rock band Larsen and Xiu Xiu. The bands say that it's not just a one-time collaboration, but actually a new band that will continue to play together on and off. Let's hope they stick to that because this is an amazing album. In Xiu Xiu, Jamie Stewart's panicked, unsettling voice is consistently set atop equally unsettling music, and the combination can sometimes be unlistenable in its manic determination to disturb. Here the music is icy, unfolding slowly and methodically (although not without grandeur), never getting caught up in Stewart's panic, and the effect is staggering.
Great literary podcasts:
"In Walked Bud"
Amiri Baraka
"The Last Days of the Suicide Kid"
Charles Bukowski
"The House on Mango Street"
Sandra Cisneros
"A Reporter's Life,"
Walter Cronkite
"An Open Heart," by The Dalai Lama
Read by Nicholas Vreeman
"Robert Frost Reads"
Robert Frost
"In Harry's Bar in Venice"
Ernest Hemingway
"The War on Drugs"
Bill Hicks
"I Have a Dream"
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"King of Horror"
Read by Stephen King
"Motherless Brooklyn," by Jonathan Lethem
Read by Steve Buscemi
"Long Walk to Freedom," by Nelson Mandela
Read by Danny Glover
"Shopgirl"
Steve Martin
"All the Pretty Horses," by Cormac McCarthy
Read by Brad Pitt
"The Bluest Eye"
Toni Morrison
"Lolita," by Vladimir Nabokov
Read by Jeremy Irons
"The Bell Jar,"
Sylvia Plath
"The Raven," by Edgar Allen Poe
Read by Basil Rathbone
"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," by JK Rowling
Read by Jim Dale
"Everything"
Henry Rollins
"Fast Food Nation," By Eric Schlosser
Read by Rick Adamson
"Me Talk Pretty One Day"
David Sedaris
"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"
Dylan Thomas
"Slaughterhouse Five"
Kurt Vonnegut
"Hooking Up"
Tom Wolfe
Audiofile logo by: Aris Blevins
