Morning all. All is nice and well in South City on this pleasant Friday.

From my window I can see a few low clouds lingering over the northern end of the Santa Cruz mountains and hovering over San Francisco ten miles north, but the rest of the sky is bright blue and distinctly flawless.

I highly recommend everyone to read “Interview with History” by Oriana Fallaci. I’m not particularly well read, but from what I am familiar with, I can think of few writers who can beat the late Italian giornalista in sheer force of personality and intellectual intensity.

The book’s first page, the dedication, reads: To my mother Tosca Fallaci, and to all those who do not like power.

In this book, she tries to understand why certain people become leaders over others, why a select few who do not appear to be any more intelligent or divine become elevated over the rest of us, dictate our lives, restrict our freedoms, and why is it that, in the words of Bertrand Russell, “if they say ‘Die’, we shall die, and if they say ‘Live’, then we shall live.”

In the book, the legendary interviewer grills a bunch of world leaders with “a thousand feelings of rage.” She begins with Henry Kissinger, who is truly a complete cock, and goes through Indira Gandhi, Yassir Arafat, Nguyen Van Thieu, and more. Her really famous interview with Deng Xiaoping, which was one of the most revealing interview ever done by a Westerner about the churning, unstable Chinese party politics right after the Cultural Revolution, unfortunately is not in this book. Neither are some of her other big ones: the classic when she made Ayatollah Khomeini laugh for possibly the only time in his life, one with the last Shah of Iran, the Dalai Lama, etc, but it’s still a great book.

Fallaci was a revolutionary and joined the Nazi resistance as a teenager. She went through Vietnam, was shot three times by Mexican armed forces and left for dead during the 1968 Olympics, and basically led a really cold life. If you’re interested in 1945- history, and world politics, this is a really insightful book. She went off the deep end towards the end of her life by hating all things Muslim, but throughout her life, until her death in 2006 I think, she wrote with the voice of a pissed off and rebellious youth.

Highly recommended.

A few quick music notes.
I would also recommend copping Lloyd’s Streetlove album. The production on it is just perfect. I also got a bootleg version of Tha Carter 3, and it’s really bad, so I’m deeply hoping the commercial version is better. Timbaland’s Shock Value is decent, not mind blowing.
I do, however, highly recommend Rosa Passos and Ron Carter: Entre Amigos.