Music Week

Expanded blog post, February archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 38 albums, 2 A-list

Music: Current count 45603 [45565] rated (+38), 11 [27] unrated (-16).

I'm writing this introduction on March 2, but it seems fair to backdate this one. Not that I'm not happy to be done with February, but the shortfall of days messed up my schedule (or would have, if I had followed a normal schedule in February). Besides, the cutoff is honest. All of these reviews were logged by Feb. 28, and I haven't written any more since. Saturday was disrupted by having someone come over to trim the giant elm tree in the backyard. Then I picked up some kind of stomach bug, and I spent most of Sunday in bed. I'm feeling somewhat better today, but remain in a bad mood, and I don't expect that to alleviate any time soon.

I published a rather massive Loose Tabs on Friday, where I obviously didn't pay enough attention to the likelihood that Trump would be so befuddled as to launch a war against Iran. I did a minor update last night, where I noted that Franklin Roosevelt's designation of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor as "a day in infamy" applies equally well to Trump's attack on Iran and to Bush's 2003 attack on Iraq. I also wrote:

That Trump and Netanyahu have blindly thrust us into a new state of the world is undeniable. The things we should be absolutely clear on are: the "crisis" that precipitated this action was totally fabricated, the result of Israel hyping Iran as some kind of supreme existential enemy, for no reason beyond their desire to provide cover for their ongoing displacement of the Palestinian people; that the US has gone along with demonizing Iran because the CIA installation of the Shah in 1953 and the subsequent support of the Shah's terror campaign against his people is something Americans have never acknowledged and made any sort of amends for; and that several generations of American politicians, including Biden and Trump, have allowed themselves to be manipulated and dictated to by Israelis, Netanyahu in particular. There was never any need to go to war with Iran, and even a week ago an agreement could have been negotiated, at least had the US shown any decent respect for the Iranian regime and people.

I wasn't able to follow the news as the attack unfolded, and thus far I've barely skimmed a couple of reports. As far as I've been able to glean, Trump wants to continue bombing for several more weeks. As such, he's wasting the opportunity caused by killing Khamenei: a pause would allow cooler heads to regroup, while keeping up the attack will only increase Iran's resolve to fight back — as they are doing, but thus far to limited effect. I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that Iran could make their attackers feel real (if not commensurate) pain, but what worries me more at the moment is the extraordinary exhilaration and hubris Trump and Netanyahu are feeling in flexing their power to destroy and wreak havoc, especially given how unpopular their warmaking is. I doubt either of them will meet the justice they deserve. I just fear that they're on a path that will only get worse until someone finally stops them (as if anyone could or would).

In old age, I often reflect back on maxims I learned when I was a child. One of the most enduring is: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Sure, Trump was pretty corrupt long before he had the absolute power to kill thousands or millions of people. I don't know how people couldn't have seen through Trump, but for all of my lifetime, we've been brought up to adore and trust American power, despite constant reminders that we cannot and should not.

I finally cracked into the 2026 promo queue last week (or two), so that's much of what you'll find below. I have more that I haven't unpacked yet. Main thing that's slowed me down is that my office space has descended into a horrible mess. I'll try to straighten that out next week. Meanwhile, my main source for new non-jazz picks this week is RiotRiot. I also looked up some Neil Sedaka after his death — I've been playing The Brill Building Box, where Stairway to Heaven is a favorite (here's a live take, in a medley) — and I also sampled a couple of this year's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominees that I had nothing rated by (still missing for me are Inxs and Iron Maiden).

I'm not invited to vote, and almost certainly never will be, but Chuck Eddy is, so I followed his link as a checklist, then I compiled a table of the 17 nominees' graded albums: only 4 had A/A- graded albums (Joy Division/New Order, Pink, Shakira, Wu-Tang Clan), so I would have been very hard-pressed to meet their minimum of 7 votes: I wouldn't begrudge Vandross, and admit that lots of (almost exclusively British?) people like Oasis to a HOF degree, and I'm somewhat into the post-New Edition solo/trio albums. But it feels to me like in their rush to induct everyone they've started scraping the bottom of the barrel — although I'm pretty sure that if I did a bit of research I could find many much better individuals and/or bands they've overlooked (e.g., Pere Ubu, Pet Shop Boys, Kid Creole & the Coconuts, Pavement).

New records reviewed this week:

• Michael Aadal: Aggressive Hymns, Energetic Ballads (2025 [2026], Losen): [cd]: B+(***)
• Joshua Achiron: Climbing (2026, Calligram): [cd]: B+(**)
• Naseem Alatrash: Bright Colors on a Dark Canvas (2025 [2026], Levantine Music): [cd]: B+(***)
• Eddie Allen's Push: Rhythm People (2023 [2026], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Courtney Marie Andrews: Valentine (2026, Loose Future): [sp]: B+(*)
• Kris Davis and the Lutoslawski Quartet: The Solastalgia Suite (2024 [2026], Pyroclastic): [cd]: B+(***)
• Hilary Duff: Luck . . . or Something (2026, Atlantic): [sp]: B+(**)
• Gaudi: Jazz Gone Dub (2025, Dubmission): [sp]: B+(**)
• Gogol Bordello: We Mean It, Man! (2026, Gogol): [sp]: B+(***)
• Andy Haas: In Praise of Insomnia (2025 [2026], Resonant Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• Hemlocke Springs: The Apple Tree Under the Sea (2026, AWAL): [sp]: B+(***)
• Chris Madsen/Dana Hall/Clark Sommers: Threefold (2025 [2026], Calligram): [cd]: B+(***) [03-06]
• Joyce Manor: I Used to Go to This Bar (2026, Epitaph, EP): [sp]: B+(*)
• Gil Livni: All In (2024-25 [2026], OA2): [cd]: B+(**)
• Luke Marantz/Simon Jermyn: Echoes (2025 [2026], Chill Tone): [cd]: B+(**)
• Bruno Mars: The Romantic (2026, Atlantic): [sp]: B+(*)
• Megan Moroney: Cloud 9 (2026, Columbia Nashville): [sp]: B+(***)
• Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon: As of Now (2026, Lex): [sp]: A-
• Kate Olson: So It Goes (2025 [2026], OA2): [cd]: B+(***)
• The Paranoid Style: Known Associates (2026, Bar/None): [sp]: A-
• Pony: Clearly Cursed (2026, Take This to Heart): [sp]: B+(**)
• Brad Schrader: Late Nights With Brad Schrader (2025, self-released): [cd]: B
• Noé Sécula/Jorge Rossy: A Sphere Between Other Obsessions (2023 [2026], Fresh Sound New Talent): [bc]: B+(*)
• Dave Stryker: Blue Fire: The Van Gelder Session (2025 [2026], Strikezone): [cd]: B+(**)
• Mattias Svensson: Embrace (2022 [2026], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Craig Taborn: Dream Archives (2024 [2026], ECM): [sp]: B+(*)
• Vance Thompson: Lost and Found (2024 [2026], Moondo): [cd]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• John Vanore & Abstract Truth: Easter Island Suite (1989-2024 [2026], Acoustical Concepts): [cd]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Phil Collins: Face Value (1981, Atlantic): [sp]: B
• The Damned: Damned Damned Damned (1977, Stiff): [yt]: B+(**)
• New Edition (New Edition (1984, MCA): [sp]: B+(**)
• The OKeh Rhythm & Blues Story: 1949-1957 (1949-57 [1993], Epic/Legacy, 3CD): [sp]: B+(***)
• Rosé: Rosie (2024, The Black Label/Atlantic): [sp]: B+(*)
• Neil Sedaka: Sings His Greatest Hits (1958-62 [1963], RCA): [yt]: B+(***)
• Neil Sedaka: Neil Sedaka and the Tokens (1956-57 [1963], Guest Star): [sp]: B
• Neil Sedaka: Sedaka's Back (1972-73 [1974], Rocket): [sp]: B+(*)

Unpacking: I have stuff but haven't logged it yet.

Daily Log

Had to get up early, as the tree guy agreed to come over around 9. I woke up around 7. Tried going back to sleep, but didn't get much until 8:30. He showed up a couple minutes early, and wanted the car moved. By then, Laura had informed me that Trump had started WWIII. Nominally, it's just him bombing Iran, but that's how these things start. Another "day of infamy." Clearly, we can't say this enough, but this war was totally avoidable — even as late as yesterday, but more critically had the US had the good sense to get over their support for the Shah in 1953 and 1979. Also to realize that Israel had been secured with the 1979 peace agreement with Egypt (which could have been had 10 years earlier, and which Begin negotiated in bad faith, as was shown by his Lebanon wars). Also if Clinton hadn't sided with Barak in scuttling Oslo, while Bush gave Sharon a green light to expand the settlements, and cover by launching insane wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. (Still, even Bush demurred the "real men go to Tehran" taunts.)

Loose Tabs went up last night. I need to update it with the correct date, and to add the table of contents. I will, of course, need to add more on Iran, but I haven't started yet, and might as well tend to my tree work first. Started the day playing Elmore James, then Louis Jordan, both of which helped.

Email (21 messages, some leftover from Friday):

• New NOEL subscriber.

Daily Log

Sleep uninteresting. Read some, about the "1776 Project," then came down after 11. Spotify suggested the new Bruno Mars album, so I gave it a spin. Another nice day. One thing I would like to do is to reassemble my gas grill. I can't figure out what the problem is. It's possible the piezoelectric starter has a broken wire. I haven't been able to take it apart, or get a good look. Otherwise, I have everything pretty clean, except perhaps the manifold, which is pretty well sealed. I have some long, thin wire brushes I can use to make sure the gas flows are open. I have a freshly-filled tank. At this point, my feeling is that all I can do is to put it back together and try to fire it up. If that fails, I'll trash it. It wouldn't be a problem to buy a new one, but I'm not sure I want to go with gas again, and I don't often feel the need for an outside grill. I still have a smoker, but haven't used it in decades. I've thought about getting an electric smoker, but haven't felt compelled. At this point it's more important to just clean up the excess clutter, so I might just see how much I can live without, before reinvesting.

I didn't get Loose Tabs posted yesterday, but it's looking pretty good. I'm thinking as I go back over it today, I'll write up a companion Substack post, with a few excerpts and meta notes. I'm way overdue to send something out, and it's a readymade. I heard back from the tree guy, who's agreed to Saturday. Started a new jigsaw puzzle, but I'm not into it yet.

Email (44 messages):

• Chuck Eddy on voting (or not) for Mariah Carey for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I've never given any serious thought to RRHOF, although I have thought a lot about Baseball and Jazz, and I even took a shot once at the original everything HOF, so it might be an amusing diversion. I had to look this up, but I have 3 Carey albums rated (B, B-, B; the low grade is for #1's). Sure, she's sold a ton of records, but none to me.
• Chuck Eddy also wrote "What You Get is No Tomorrow," which has more RRHOF

Eddy said that the 17 RRHOF nominees are "easy to lookup," then offered a link that didn't make it easy enough. As best I can figure out, the nominees are:

Daily Log

Slept a little over six hours, with low pressures, 0.0 AHI, very little leak. Got up after 11, and came down just before noon. Laura has hearing test this afternoon, so we'll go out for that. Probably get sushi for dinner. Weather is nice, forecasting 65F high today, 74 on Friday and Sunday, but then a cold front blows through, with high dropping to 53 and rain possible. Tree guy is scheduled for Sunday, so I'm wondering whether he might want to move it up to Saturday. (I sent Wolf a text.)

Hoping to get Loose Tabs posted today. I think it's close, but these things never wrap up perfectly.

Email (35 messages):

• TomDispatch: Robert Lipsyte Is Waiting for ICE.

Main computer crashed again, with the window manager hanging, then going berserk. I restarted it, without much loss. In the meantime, I tried figuring out why the other computer isn't working. Looks like no keyboard input. I tried swapping the cable, which has proven to be flaky before I moved the keyboard off my main computer. I got nothing. I brought a crappy old keyboard up from downstairs, and plugging it in did nothing. I rebooted, and it came up ok. I should probably retest with the expensive keyboard before I trash it.

I ordered Air Bear filters for the house, and 4 large Sterlite baskets to help move things around. Last time I was able to order a box of six, but best I could do this time was 2 boxes of 2. I have quite a few of them now, but most are filled up with crap, and it's very helpful to have an empty one. One project I hope to do soon is to go through the saved manuals, register them, and throw most of them out (especially as most are available online). This will go into my memoir pile, which is a project I need to finally get off the ground next week.

Loose Tabs

Pick up text from here.

Daily Log

Woke up around 7, but went right back to bed, and slept until 11. Read some. Weighed myself at 217.8. Came down around noon. Dentist appointment (routine cleaning) today at 2. Laura wants me to go to grocery store after. Then we'll pick up Ram and go out for belated birthday dinner somewhere. Her initial suggestion was PF Chang's, but she seems undecided at the moment. Lots of Loose Tabs written, so it shouldn't be too hard to wrap it up. Weather is fairly mild, but I'll probably spend most of the day on the computer.

Email (29 messages): doesn't look like much.

• Eliane Radiague died (1932-2026).
• Mike Konczal: Sending in the TANKs Against Citrini's AI Doomerism.

Dentist decided I need a crown, to replace some failing fillings. Appointment is for next Thursday, March 5. We went to dinner with Ram at PF Chang's.

Daily Log

Woke up several time, but ultimately logged a fair night's sleep. I did make a deal with Donald Wolf (Quality Tree Services) to work on the tree. He drives a truck during the week, but has weekends free, so will come over Sunday morning. I figure this gives me license not to think about the roof until next week, so that's one mental burden postponed. Also postponed will be posting Loose Tabs, at least until Thursday. That will give tonight's State of the Union speech a couple days to sink in, which should be sinking enough. First thought was Wednesday, but I have dentist in the afternoon, and we have dinner with Ram after that.

Meanwhile, I've started to think a bit about music for the car, a portable MP3 player, and some sort of online jukebox. I've long wanted the latter, but none of the available software packages have much appeal. I know that Christgau keeps all of his recently reviewed albums in a big iTunes database. That seems like a good idea, except for Apple. I had a little iPad at one point, but gave it away after I lost the ability to sync it with my computer. I never did much with it anyway, but I should be able to connect a MP3 player in the car (either using the USB port or Bluetooth), which might give me an audio source comparable to my old travel cases. Not sure what else is on the agenda this week. It does seem likely to warm up a bit, but for now Loose Tabs is keeping me busy.

Email (24 messages):

• TomDispatch: Nick Turse, Donald Trump's Death Cards
• RiotRiot: Takes by the Ocean: lots of new stuff here.

Daily Log

Woke up around 9:30. Read some, and came down about 10:30. Noise as the house next door is having its ducts vacuumed. Had a package on the porch, and a bundle of promo CDs. For a long time, weekends were just like any other days, in that I did the same work — if anything, my Sunday Speaking of Which posts intensified it. But lately, weekends have become a respite from having to deal with the world, especially the business world. Mondays, on the other hand, appear as obligations to get things done. I need to get the tree trimmed. I need to decide about roof treatments. I need to take the car in for "service." I need to figure out what to do about music in the car. Laura wants to take the dog for a nail trim. I have dentist on Wednesday. We also have dinner with Ram on Wednesday. And there's always "death and taxes." Well, taxes, anyway.

Main project today will be working on Loose Tabs. I should also open up the Weird Book file, if only for note-taking. The Field book is generating lots of thoughts.

Email (light so far, 11 messages):

• Dental appointment, Wednesday, 2PM.

I want to set up a Linux jukebox program. I'd like to be able to store hundreds or thousands of CDs, and use them as a jukebox over my local network. I also want to be able to manage a portable MP3 player for my car and travel, and to be able to burn CDs on demand. The main options appear to be:

1. Rhythmbox: GNOME-based
2. Clementine
3. Amarok: KDE-based
4. Brasero: best for burning
5. Strawberry: branch of Clementine

Daily Log

Woke up around 10:30, but didn't come downstairs until noon. Reading about Michael Anton and the "Journal of American Greatness" in Furious Minds. There's a quote (p. 67, actually about a JAG piece by Jason Krein) there that I could imagine building a Substack piece around:

Krein's language throughout his post is fervent, revolutionary, and conspiratorial. The thrust of the argument is that the global managerial elite is exploitative, actively seeks to dominate, and so is ruthlessly destroying the American way of life and must be stopped. As Krein acknowledges, [Sam] Francis's approach contains a strong element of Neo-Marxism. "The managerial class," he writes, "is inevitably impelled by its internal logic to seek the destruction of any intermediating institutions, ultimately and especially the family, the homogenization, delegitimization, and eradication of culture, and the levelling, regimentation, and dehumanizing of all society." The true task of Trumpism, according to Krein, is the "destruction of the soulless managerial class, a task inseparable from the assertion of a healthier culture and a stronger elite in its place." His programmatic recommendation reads: "The political project of supreme importance is therefore the transformation of passive Middle Americans into a new ruling elite, while the ideological project of supreme significance is the formulation of a new nationalism which will justify that political project."

Couple points here:

1. The reactionary revolt of owners against managers kicked off in the 1970s, and had turned into a complete rout by 1990, so intellectuals like Krein were drafting a trend rather than leading it.
2. The rise of the "managerial class," which largely took place after the New Deal — capitalism has largely been discredited during the Great Depression, but business made a strong recovery during WWII and its aftermath, in a new context with a much larger government and more regulatory oversight (plus high marginal taxes) — was never a threat to traditional American culture (except to the limited extent that racism and nativism was seen as bad for increasingly globalized business).
3. Whatever was driving the cultural trends they so fear, it wasn't their hallucinated conspiracies. I'd ascribe those cultural shifts to a broad-based bottom-up movement based on an increasing sense of equality, abundance, and freedom, which led lots of different people, especially from the lower- and middle-classes, to assert their own individuality.
4. No right-winger ever has wanted to "transform passive Middle Americans into a new ruling elite." Like the Bolsheviks, they only imagined themselves as the vanguard seizing power in the name of people they otherwise had no regard for.
5. But they were certainly right that nationalism was the hook for rallying the broad base of voters needed to win any sort of election. Nationalism works by offering a false sense of community and solidarity, tied to a few jingoistic symbols that the elites can easily manipulate.

We went to Vora Restaurant European for dinner today, ostensibly for Laura's birthday. Our first time there, a fairly upscale bistro. We had the calimari and saganaki for appetizers, shrimp bisque and French onion soup, osso bucco and beef stroganoff, a chocolate creme brulee and a pistacchio cream cake. It was all exceptionally good, although the saganaki missed the mark (they wrapped feta in phyllo before frying it, then coated it with a honey sauce and served it with a kalamata tapenade), and the creme brulee came off closer to chocolate mousse. Laura's "official" birthday dinner will be later this week, when Ram is available.

Starting the cutover to turn the Loose Tabs draft file into a blog post. I'm picking Feb. 24 as the target posting date, which will be one month after the previous Loose Tabs.

Email (15 messages):

• Christian Iszchak: An Acute Case: two unheard albums, only one from 2026.
• Semipop Life: Comic songs
• TomDispatch: Alfred McCoy, Accelerating American (and Planetary) Decline

Daily Log

Woke up around 10:30. Read about Strauss and Jaffa in Furious Minds. I spent most of yesterday writing my answers to two recent questions. The Christgau taste comparison one is probably done, good enough for now (although at the moment I'm still thinking about my 1990s decision not to review African music). The other question could still use more work on the uses of disgruntlement for redirection. The net result was that I didn't even start with the introduction, so all that remains for today. The other major consideration is that today's is Laura's 81st birthday. She attempted to schedule a dinner with Ram, but that won't happen until later this week. Meanwhile, we probably will go out for dinner tonight.

Still cold. Laura wanted to go to Immediate Care yesterday, and we saw some snow on the way out. Car thermo read 41°F, but it was surely colder than that. No accumulation, and it's sunny today.

Email (6 messages):

• Robert Wright: "Winning the AI race" could be bad for the world. As far as I'm concerned, the notion that there even is a race is bad.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, February archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 42 albums, 11 A-list

Music: Current count 45565 [45523] rated (+42), 27 [29] unrated (-2).

The usual plan is to publish Music Week on Mondays (often late). It shouldn't matter how many records I have reviewed. Most weeks I come up with about 30 albums. Last time I came up short with 5. I had been hobbled by a cold, and was way down in mid-winter dumps. A week later (Monday, Feb. 16) I felt even less like publishing, but had started to write up some albums. My main boost was from Robert Christgau's February 2026 Consumer Guide, which came out on the 11th. I also, for the first time this year, started to play new albums from my demo queue. I was running thin on 2025 albums, and it was just easier to go with what I had sitting around. By mid-week, I was starting to feel like I had enough to go with. I did the cut over Friday morning, but didn't start writing this introduction until today.

The reason for the delay is that I wanted to answer a couple of questions. One was about my relationship to Christgau, and how we differ in taste. The other was about all my bitching since . . . well, there's no clear cut starting date (unless you want to blame the world, in which case 2024-11-08 is an obvious candidate, and 2023-09-07 another). But as an engineer, I know that catastrophic ruptures are always preceded by stress fractures, and I've been attuned to those particular ones for a long time now. My disappointment and dismay isn't just because they happened, but because they had seemed so totally foreordained, and because the people we trusted to solve our problems have been so clueless for so long.

I don't have much in the way of future plans. I do have enough Loose Tabs for a post, so that will be next, Music Week will be pushed back until I have that squared away. I haven't found any time to work on Notes on Everyday Life letters. I have several ideas, but just haven't been able to concentrate. I organized some book outline materials for a dinner a week or two ago, but haven't followed up on that. The best I can say is that I keep reading, thinking.

After several lean weeks, a lot of good records this time around. Thomas Anderson, Grant Peeples, and Tommy Womack were my initial finds from the Christgau Consumer Guide, and I wound up looking into Peeples' back catalog. The extra day gave me a chance to reevaluate Zach Bryan and Nandipha808, so I nudged them over the line as well. Phil Overeem suggested Mark Lomax II and Ren, as well as several others. I've done a bit of extra work on the EOY Aggregate, which pointed me at a couple more albums (most notably Gasper Nali). Tomeka Reid came from my demo queue (also in Overeem). I noticed that Spotify has most of the old Yazoo blues compilations, so I started looking for a few I had noted but missed.

Not clear how much effort I'm going to put into finding new stuff going forward, but I do expect to continue reviewing whatever comes my way. (By the way, I have a couple recent shipments not yet logged in "Unpacking.") Still, old habits are hard to break, so my guess is that future Music Weeks will be more like this one than than the last one. But they probably won't sync up to Mondays for a while. And I'm way behind on bookkeeping work, which will continue to lag.

New records reviewed this week:

• Idris Ackamoor Ankhestra/Rhodessa Jones/Danny Glover: Artistic Being (2024 [2025], Strut): [sp]: B+(*)
• Thomas Anderson: Letters From the Hermit Kingdom (2026, Out There): [sp]: A-
• Eric Bibb: One Mississippi (2026, Repute): [sp]: B+(**)
• Zach Bryan: With Heaven on Top (2026, Belting Bronco/Warner): [sp]: A-
• Buck 65: Do Not Bend (2026, Handsmade): [bc]: B+(***)
• Cat Clyde: Live at Rare Bird Farm: A Benefit Album for Western North Carolina (2024 [2025], Socan Canada): [bc]: B+(**)
• Michael Dease With the MSU Jazz Trombones: Spartan Strong (2024 [2026], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Dry Cleaning: Secret Love (2026, 4AD): [sp]: B+(***)
• EsDeeKid: Rebel (2025, Lizzy/XV, EP): [sp]: B+(*)
• Michael Hampton: Into the Public Domain (2025, Sound Mind): [sp]: B+(**)
• Haley Heynderickx/Max García Conover: What of Our Nature (2025, Fat Possum): [sp]: B+(***)
• Jackzebra: Hunched Jack Mixtape (2025, Surf Gang): [sp]: B
• Liquid Mike: Hell Is an Airport (2025, AWAL): [sp]: B+(*)
• Mark Lomax II & the Urban Art Ensemble: The Unity Suite (2025 [2026], CFG Multimedia): [os]: A-
• Michael Moody: The Ecstasy of Love (2025 [2026], self-released): [cd]: B-
• Gasper Nali: Chule Chule Iwe (2025, Spare Dog): [sp]: A-
• Nandipha808: No Vocal Album (2025, Stena Academy): [sp]: A-
• Grant Peeples: Code to Live By (2025, Ping): [sp]: A-
• Kojey Radical: Don't Look Down (2025, Warner/Asylum/Bellyempty): [sp]: B+(**)
• The Tomeka Reid Quartet: Dance! Skip! Hop! (2025 [2026], Out of Your Head): [cd]: A-
• Ren: Vincent's Tale (2026, Freckled Angels/Rebel Creator Services): [sp]: A-
• Ben Rosenblum: The Longest Way Round (2025 [2026], One Trick Dog): [cd]: B+(***) [02-27]
• Sault: Chapter 1 (2026, Forever Living Originals): [bc]: B+(**)
• Slut Intent: Slutworld (2026, self-released, EP): [bc]: B+(*)
• Time Cow: Scaring 1100 Chickens to Death (2025, Kullijhan): [sp]: B+(*)
• Eri Yamamoto/Matthew Shipp: Horizon (2025, Mahakala Music): [bc]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Dub Syndicate: Obscured by Version (1989-96 [2025], On-U Sound): [sp]: B+(***)
• Doug MacDonald Trio: Live in Beverly Hills (2012 [2026], DMAC Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• Paul Ricci: The Path (1996-2021 [2026], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Bo Carter: Banana in Your Fruit Basket: Red Hot Blues, 1931-1936 (1931-36 [1991], Yazoo): [sp]: B+(**)
• Bo Carter: Twist It Babe 1931-1940 (1931-40 [1992], Yazoo): [sp]: B+(**)
• Nanook: Ilutsinniit Apuussilluta (2022, Atlantic Music): [sp]: B+(*)
• Grant Peeples: It's Later Than You Think (2008, self-released): [sp]: A-
• Grant Peeples: Pawnshop (2009, GatorBone): [sp]: B+(***)
• Grant Peeples: Okra and Ecclesiastes (2011, GatorBone): [sp]: B+(**)
• Grant Peeples: Prior Convictions (2012, GatorBone): [bc]: B+(**)
• Grant Peeples and the Peeples Republik: Punishing the Myth (2014, GatorBone): [sp]: B+(***)
• Sarah Mac and Grant Peeples: Live at Mockingbird (2013, self-releasd): [bc]: A-
• Grant Peeples: A Congress of Treasons (2016, GatorBone): [sp]: B+(*)
• The Roots of Rap: Classic Recordings From the 1920's and 30's (1926-36 [1996], Yazoo): [sp]: B+(***)
• Charlie Spand: Dreaming the Blues: The Best of Charlie Spand (1929-31 [2002], Yazoo): [sp]: B+(**)
• St. Louis Town 1929-1932 (1929-32 [1992], Yazoo): [sp]: B+(**)

Grade (or other) changes:

• Tommy Womack: Live a Little (2025, Schoolkids): [sp]: [was: B+(***)] A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Joshua Achiron: Climbing (Calligram) [03-06]
• Daggerboard: The Skipper and Mike Clark (Wide Hive) [03-06]
• Andy Haas: In Praise of Insomnia (Resonant Music) []
• Peter Furlan: The Peter Furlan Project Live at Maureen's Jazz Cellar (Beany Bops) [01-26]
• Chris Madsen/Dana Hall/Clark Sommers: Threefold (Calligram) [03-06]
• Karen Stachel, Norbert Stachel & LehCats: Live @ the Breakroom With Giovanni Hidalgo (Purple Room Productions, 2CD): [03-20]

Daily Log

Woke up around 10:20. Fairly decent night's sleep. Started reading Laura Field's Furious Minds, where she tries to categorize the various flavors of right-wing intellectualism. I find myself arguing with much of her terminology, which should eventually feed into me writing up my own. It's really just a struggle for power, where power is much more important to the right than to the left, because power is the only way they can sustain inequality. "States rights" wasn't ever a principle; it was only a tactic, useful when you controlled states but not the federal government. Right now, the "unitary presidency" is paramount, because they control that. Give us another president, and their focus will shift to the Supreme Court, and back to the states.

I should probably knock out Music Week today. I have sufficient data. (I just ran make, and have +40 rated.) Then I can move Loose Tabs into a blog file, and wrap it up before next Music Week.

Email (35 messages):

• Chuck Eddy: They're Gonna Put Me in the Movies. He's talking about Matty Wishnow's Christgau documentary, The Last Critic, which he was interviewed for. As he lives in Austin, he'll be on hand for the SWSX showing, and a "short Q&A." A year ago, Wishnow approached me about an interview, but he didn't seem to be serious, and we never settled on a date for a Zoom session. Maybe he was warned I'd be a bad interview? Presumably at some point Christgau will want to do some promotion, but I haven't heard anything yet from him, or Wishnow.

Daily Log

Woke up around 7. Had some problems with CPAP machine, including one involving the tank coming loose, which shut it down. I never really got back to sleep again. Finally got up a little after 9, and finished reading the 7 Cheap Things book. Mixed feelings about it. The drive to cheapness is certainly true and profound, but depends on an inability or unwillingness to accept any motives other than profit. The notion of a "capitalist ecology" also seems profound, but how much does it really say? The conclusion on the "five R's" (Recognition, Reparation, Redistribution, Reimagination, Recreation) doesn't offer much. I find it difficult to seriously credit any discussion of Reparations, either on practical political grounds or as philosophy.

Balked yesterday about hiring out the tree work. I may put it off until next week. Laura has hearing test today, so we'll probably take the afternoon off for that. I've started to play 2026 new jazz albums, for lack of anything better to play. Music Week is piling up, as is Loose Tabs, and I've been adding things to the EOY Aggregate, so lots of busy work. I'm writing a q&a comparing my taste to Christgau's, which I want to get done before posting Music Week. No one seems to have noticed the latter's absence, so I'm feeling very little incentive to deliver anything.

Email (29 messages):

• Semipop Life: 20 years, 20 K-pop songs.
• Hillside Medical: Your Visit Summary (but where is it?).
• Mike Konczal: Three Ways Terminal AI Has Changed How I Work (And Whether It's Coming for My Job): How terminal AI compresses setup, robustness checks, and iteration without replacing judgment, and whether Olivia Rodrigo caused the inflation wave.
• Farmers Insurance "final payment reminder." I figured Laura would take care of that, but evidently I'm going to have to do something. I never got a reply back from the guy I wrote about roof coatings.
• American Dental appointment reminder: Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2 PM.
• Senator Marshall sent information on passport renewal, with an offer to help. A reminder of something we should do.
• Robert Wright has started "Nonzero Network," which is a discounted bundling of Substack newsletters.

Daily Log

Got up around 9. Had to come downstairs to find a bathroom. Read some, then went back up, and tried to sleep again. Woke up at noon, with 453 minutes, good readings on everything else. I meant to call the tree guy yesterday, but didn't, so maybe today. I'm not looking forward to it, but it should be done, and I don't feel like shopping around. Skipped Music Week again, although I spent much of the day adding lists to the EOY Aggregate, and I played a few things. I'm thinking about writing an answer to the Christgau friendship query. My idea about writing "missing" CG columns still has some appeal. When I was looking up the Wichita Rabbis quotes, I ran across a Dean Martin review that I thought was pretty good. Also did scattered Loose Tabs. Jesse Jackson died.

Email (25 messages):

• Xgau Sez: Health note ("completely recovered from prostate aquablation, a notoriously slow-healing procedure for old men"); asked about new Davis and Coltrane reissues, he's pushing Charlie Parker; questioning The Damned; old Okeh compilations; all-time favorite album? Monk's Misterioso, The Beatles Second Album, The Rolling Stones Now, some Louis Armstrong, maybe Manfred Mann's Earth Band.
• Substack is pushing "Polymarket embeds." File under enshittification.

Daily Log

Slept past noon today, over 500 minutes. I woke up several times, my mouth very dry, but didn't get up, and able to go back to sleep after resetting the mask. Overcast outside, looking gloomy, but 62F, so not cold. I didn't work on Music Week yesterday. We went out for Laura'a dentist appointment. I went on to the doctor's office for my anemia panel. We picked up some groceries at Dillons, then went to the eye doctor's office to adjust Laura's glasses, and to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. Killed the afternoon. I heated up leftovers for dinner. I missed a phone call from Thelma, but called her back, and we talked a long time. Turns out she's moved to Murfeesboro, Tennessee, near Nashville. I continued adding items to Loose Tabs. I should move on to the Weird Book.

Email (30 messages):

• Mike Konczal: Where I've been lately.
• Hillside Medical: Looks like anemia panel didn't find anything untoward.
• Farmers Insurance payment approved.

Daily Log

Woke up at 9:30. Tried going back to bed, but couldn't sleep, so wound up logging just under six hours, a 95. Read about "cheap work." Came down at 11, and started the day off with yesterday's R&B Box disc (starts with Ray Charles). Yesterday we went to a GLC dinner and speech by Moti Rieber, a reconstructionist rabbi who had lived in Wichita during the early 2000s. He has since moved to the Kansas City area, and has been active in "interfaith" left-leaning political lobbying. Laura has followed his evolution from classical Israel loyalist to genocide critic. This was his topic last night, and he did a pretty good job of outlining the history of Judaism, Anti-Semitism, and Zionism starting with the Roman era. I might have quibbled with a few of the details, or wished for some further elaboration and clarification, but his accounting made sense, as did his eventual moral reasoning.

Rieber was one of three Wichita rabbis who organized an "interfaith" trip to Israel in the mid-2000s. They organized and chaperoned a tour of the Holy Land, with local representatives of the Christian and Muslim faiths: the former was represented by the Rev. Sam Muyskens (who led a prominent "interfaith" group at the time) and his wife; the latter was represented by three lay members (not theologians or clerics), who happened to be civil servants (two Arab-Americans worked for the police; the third, from Iran, worked for the water department). On their return, they organized a confab to rhapsodize about their "interfaith" experiences. Everyone tried to be positive, until a question was raised about checkpoints, where the police took exception to the harsh and abusive treatment by young IDF recruits. Thus the secrets of apartheid and repression were let out of the bag, spoiling the hasbara spectacle.

Of the three rabbis, Davis was the main one (Temple Em-anuel), a classic pro-Israel liberal, with Rieber slightly to his left, and Wernick staunchly to his right. I thought I had written about this event at the time, but was unable to find mention of Rieber in my notebook. I did, however, find the following:

• June 2, 2004: A fairly long disquisition drawing on a letter from "a Wichita rabbi [who] protested the demonstration, and especially some of the terminology used in the postings." As I noted at the time, "One of the signatures of debate over how to achieve peace in the Israel/Palestine conflict is how little semantic difference it takes to render communication impossible between sides." There is much in this note that is still worth pondering today. For example:

  Israel's apologists are unable or unwilling to distinguish between the past and the present, because they are stuck in their past. They still feel haunted by centuries of persecution. They still insist that Israel is facing a struggle to exist. They are able to persist in those convictions because they can more or less plausibly point to opponents who mirror their views; indeed, the Israelis' ability to project their story seems to have such an impression on the Palestinians that the Palestinian story comes back as an echo: most obviously, substitute Nakba for Holocaust. Israel has provided the Palestinians with the concept of a people hated and tormented by the whole world, Israel has given them a taste of what such an implaccable foe feels like, and Israel has given them a model of the need to stand and fight, even to the point of martyrdom (or Masada-dom). And any time the Palestinians do fight back, that just reinforces Israel's story.

  My reference to "Masada-dom" looks close to prescient 19 years before the mass suicide attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Rieber took the usual pains to condemn that uprising as a criminal act, and I don't disagree, but he was also clear that the conflict didn't start then, and that Israel had other options than the genocide its political organization launched.

• January 27, 2005: When Wichita State University's Ulrich Museum arranged for a presentation of the work of Palestinian-American artist Emily Jacir, the pro-Israeli came out en masse to protest. I wrote about these events at some length, including a letter from Rabbi Nissim Wernick, who "found it outrageously inflammatory and blatantly false." (Much of the focus of the art was on Palestinian villages that had been erased after 1948, with further attention to the checkpoints installed since the 1968 war. I describe the art in some details herein, which has much more subtlety and nuance than Wernick can dare acknowledge, or possibly even conceive of.) I followed this up with reports on July 28 and July 29. By then Iraq had turned into a major fiasco, so that weighs into my thinking. Much of interest here. Consider this paragraph where I look for larger patterns (which, by definition, disregard the conceit that Jews and Israelis are singularly perpetual victims, and therefore entitled to defenses that trample on the rights of everyone else):

  If we were to make a comparative study of colonial settler movements, we would find many failures and a few successes. One major success was the United States, where the native population was reduced over 90% and crowded into tiny patches of relatively undesirable (especially for agricultural purposes) land. There are many reasons why the Zionists face a much more difficult task, but two are likely to be their undoing: the immigrant Americans figured when to stop pressuring the natives, and the national identity of the U.S. was flexible and inclusive enough to permit Indians to leave their reservations and circulate in the larger society. These points provided a way to break out of the struggle, saving the Native Americans from extermination and/or saving immigrant Americans from perpetual war. Israel's identity as a Jewish/Democratic state makes this very difficult. The non-Jewish population under Israeli control is close to 50%, and trending against the Jews. On the other hand, Israel's military dominance is so complete that they can enforce the status quo indefinitely, so why should they let up? Who's going to make them? Any local revolt can be met with withering force. No external power can or would challenge them. And political logic, the almost automatic resort to force against fear, makes it virtually impossible for them to reform themselves.

  In recent years, it's become common to view Israel as a "white settler colony." This is often taken as a moral rebuke, not all that unjustly, but the interesting point is to use this as a prism for making comparisons: which colonies succeeded or failed; what made the difference between success and failure; and how did both natives and settlers adjust to success and failure?

• August 20, 2006: I copied a letter from Rabbi Michael Davis, published in the Wichita Eagle, and followed it with a response I wrote (framed as a letter to the Eagle, but too long for their attention span). This was dated a week into Israel's war against Lebanon, where I noted that Hezbollah rockets had killed 44 Israelis, while Israel's bombing had killed over 1,100 Lebanese. If you scroll down in the file, you'll see that I posted notes on Israel's warmaking, going back well into July. For instance, on July 25, I cited a report that "IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz had ordered the military to destroy 10 buildings in Beirut in retaliation to every Katyusha rocket strike on Haifa," and referred to a Billmon piece on "War by Tantrum":

  As Billmon notes, the Romans had rules like that. As he doesn't note, so did the Nazis. All three reflect blind faith in absolute violence, the belief that any problem can be solved by beating it to death. There are lots of problems with this. It shows the world that you have no scruples, but perhaps more importantly it shows that you don't know who your enemy is, so you're blindly flailing. The result is that you almost never actually hit anything that might do you some good, even if the theory worked, which mostly it doesn't. For example, in 2001-02, Israel blamed all suicide bombers on Yasser Arafat. Hamas would blow something up, so Israel would take it out on Arafat. That hardly discouraged Hamas, at least until they saw that every time Israel kicked Arafat his popularity went up.

  We keep reading about behaviorism -- the idea that you can train a dog or a child to behave by hitting him when he misbehaves. Well, sometimes that works, but sometimes it just makes him scared or skittish or plain mean, and sometimes if he's big and clever enough he'll learn to hit you back, maybe even when you're not looking. But it never works if all you do is hit someone else. And the fact that you can't tell the difference or don't care isn't something he's going to compensate for.

Email (20 messages at 4:47PM):

• New Irreversible Entanglements album coming March 27.
• Wichita Public Library renewed two books, both now due March 5. Little chance I'm going to read anything significant in either (although I can surely think of some automation tasks for Python; I have pulled out my old copy of Python in a Nutshell, 2nd edition, so 2006).
• Gene Seymour on Robert Duvall.
• Phone call from Hillside Medical, wanting me to come back in for lab work, to run some kind of anemia screen. I went in this afternoon, and they took some blood. Earlier test results put hemoglobin below range, evidently not for the first time.
• Scrounging around Facebook, I saw a "people you may know" and send friend requests to Anita Bigelow and Michael Leiderman. I haven't done that for a while. Nor have I accepted many friend requests — I'm sitting on a few, mostly from people I don't know at all.

Daily Log

Woke up about 10:30, again. Read about "cheap things," then came down around 11:30. Discovered I hadn't written anything in yesterday's entry, so jotted down a couple lines. Replayed a disc from The R&B Box, worked in the jigsaw, and ate breakfast.

Email (8 messges):

• Current Affairs: Interview with Jamelle Bouie seems spot on: "the central danger facing American democracy is not mass apathy or popular authoritarianism, but a crisis of elite legitimacy and institutional misalignment with a public that has already changed more than its leaders realize."
• Project Syndicate: Some promising articles, including: Stephen Holmes: "Rubio's Silk-Stocking Diplomacy" ("the sugar-coated racism" delivered to the Munich Security Conference); Jonathan Levy: "The Future of American Hegemony" ("why episodes of social breakdown can preserve and even reinforce the existing order"); Erin Lockwood: "Will 'Sell America' End the Dollar's Hegemony"; Dani Rodrik: "The World Needs Europe to Get Its Act Together — Fast"; Yanis Varoufakis: "Elon Musk's $1.25 Trillion Mirage" ("the spectacularly specious valuation of the recent SpaceX-xAI merger"); Slavoj Zizek: "Trump the Rebel King" (his "dual status as both the top enforcer of US law and a de facto criminal gang leader").
• Hillside Medical: looked at lab results, read summary. Nothing very surprising: several measurements slightly under range, but all close to mark (except for always low HDL). Possible anemia? Blood sugar 111, A1C 5.7; former was flagged (reference range to 106), latter not.

I wrote up the Friday dinner in Facebook:

I went to the grocery store mid-week, with no real dinner plans, but I saw some cheap lamb that looked like a 2-inch cross section of leg, bone in the middle, and thought about making rogan josh. Last time I had it in a restaurant was severely lacking, leaving me wanting to make my own. I went back to the produce section, and picked up ginger, garlic, an eggplant, a cucumber, and tomatoes, and bought some extra yogurt and cream. I had a head of cabbage already, and some potatoes to use up. The plate below is what I came up with: the lamb up top, some paratha (which I had frozen), chick peas (canned, cooked in the lamb stock with tamarind), bharta (eggplant), cucumber raita, cabbage, and roast potatoes (which I thought would be more interesting than rice). Strawberry shortcake for dessert.

Got 10 likes, a couple comments (from Jan & Josi).

Daily Log

Woke up about 10:30. Didn't write anything here (which allowed me to copy the template forward). Spent most of the day tacking things onto Loose Tabs. Got the interior started in a new jigsaw puzzle. It rained early. I was surprised the night before to hear thunder.

Email (7 messges):

• I put up a Bluesky notice for Dan Ex Machina's anti-ICE song Açaï/a>.
• GoDaddy: Domain name for tomhull.com needs to be renewed by 03-15.

Daily Log

Slept until noon. AHI was up to 3.5, and leaks were up, but I logged enough time for a 100 score. Lots of work to do today. I'm making rogan josh for Mike & Gretchen. I cut up the lamb and marinated it last night. Also made a bit of stock from the bones, but I'm not sure what I can/will do with that yet. I also made the cabbage side, and roasted an eggplant for bharta. I cut up strawberries and macerated them for strawberry shortcake. I'll need to bake the shortcakes this afternoon. First need to start the lamb cooking, then the eggplant (not a rush, as from this point it's mostly onions and tomatoes). I have a bag of small yellow potatoes, so I thought I'd skin them, dress them up with olive oil and spices, and roast them. I also need to mix up some raita. I figure I'll heat up some frozen paratha, and we'll have the usual condiments on hand. One idea for the lamb stock would be to cook dal or chick peas in it. I recently threw out a lot of old lentils, so I'm not sure what I have available, but I certainly have a can of chick peas. With whipped cream on the shortcake, that should work as a dinner.

Opened a planning document for the "weird" book. Nothing much in it yet. I figure the book proper will be in a LibreWriter file (draft file opened up back on September 6). That looks good enough to work from. I sent the file to the dinner guests, on the off chance that they might take a look at it.

Email (41 messages, but I probably won't get to most until tonight):

• GoDaddy auto renewal for tomhull.com ($21.99).
• Robert Wright: Trump + AI = ?: The case for hope.

Daily Log

Got up before 10. More than half way through Shivani's thin book. It's not very good, especially on Trump's appeal, which mostly boils down to Hillary's lack of appeal. Main takeaway so far is not to use "neoliberal" too much (which is to say, hardly at all). I have an appointment to see Dr. Tibbe at 2, so I'm pacing myself for that. Sneezing a bit, some sore throat, cough, none exceptionally bad. I think it makes sense to get a check up. I doubt anything is seriously wrong, but one should go through the motions (I think).

So nothing else need be done until then. Mike & Gretchen are coming over for dinner tomorrow night. I bought lamb, so will make shahi korma. I also have an eggplant and a head of cabbage, so that should be good for two sides. Dum aloo is also possible. For raita, I'd need a cucumber, or spinach, maybe a tomato. I could stop by the grocery store on the way back from doctor. When Gretchen offered to bring something, Laura suggested chocolate ice cream. I was planning on strawberry short cake. I may cook something tonight, just to get a step up on the side dishes. I'm undecided about rice.

Occurs to me that maybe I could do an Indian variation on roasted potatoes, like this one. The lamb will have its own gravy, so no need to cook potatoes in more gravy (as with dum aloo). I was looking at this when the computer went haywire. I rebooted, which took an alarmingly long time, but came up ok. I did a software update, which didn't require a reboot.

Email (33 messages):

• Ben A. Wajdi has been pestering us about writing a Wikipedia page for Robert Christgau's Book Reports. He has a company called Buland Enterprises, based in Austin. I finally wrote back to ask for rates. What the hell? I could do something like that. (I had a Wikipedia account long ago, and made a couple minor edits. I've long wanted to set up my own Mediawiki, which seems like a good tool for a couple of contemplated projects.)
• Intakt Records for March.
• TomDispatch: John Feffer, Trump Goes Rogue as a Globocop.
• I got a 2:45PM appointment confirmation from Hillside. I showed up for what I thought was a 2:00 appointment, but they had no record of it, so they worked me in. Nothing much to the session. Tibbe listened to my lungs, and thought they were pretty clear. He wrote a prescription for antibiotics, so I picked them up on the way home. I got a pneumonia vaccination, and they did the annual checkup labs. I walked off without my book, so had to circle back. Meanwhile, I went to Dillons to get a cucumber, onion, and tomatoes for tomorrow night's dinner. Stopped at Gyro Express on the way home.
• Laura sent me Allen Sepinwall's review of Dark Winds (Season 4). We haven't started it yet, but it's in the wings. We watched the first episode of Season 4 of The Lincoln Lawyer last night, and we're two episodes into Riot Women, and there are probably a couple more unfinished (like Astrid).
• Nice encouragment letter from a 25-year-old French reader.

Daily Log

Got up a bit after 10. Finished Ganz, and moved into Anis Shivani: Why Did Trump Win? Chronicling the Stages of Neoliberal Reactionism During America's Most Turbulent Election Cycle, a collection of political rants from the 2016 campaign. I don't expect to spend much time with this, but I'm increasingly tending to view 2016 not as a Trump gain but as a Democratic loss. Indeed, I expect further research to reveal that Clinton wanted Trump as her opponent, figuring that the ogre would simplify her campaign, freeze a terrified left behind her, and consolidate her case for representing enlightened business. This was just one of many miscalculations Democrats have been making since the 1970s. Indeed, I keep flashing back to anti-Trump protests during the Republican primary (there was one in Wichita), which could only have had the effect of driving Republicans toward Trump. Whose bright idea was that? (No one I know of in Wichita was involved.)

Big projec yesterday was to go buy capers. I had run out, and the only store I know that carries the big Mezzetta jars is World Market, a long schlep past Greenwich and K-96. They only had two jars, and not much else I wanted. After that, I went to Whole Foods, then to the Dillons at Webb and Harry — a recent find, which seems exceptionally well stocked. On the way out, I stopped at the Radio Shop, and got some info on adding a CD player to the car. It's a pretty ugly setup. Best place for the new unit would be strapped to the right side of the center column. It would then plug into the car's only USB port. We're looking at $400-500 installed. There are a half-dozen similar places in town, so I could shop around, or try it myself.

Email (21 messages):

• Robert Christgau: Consumer Guide: February, 2026. I posted the notice, and started working through the records.

Daily Log

Slept ok: over 6 hours, AHI ≤ 2.5, sleep score 100. That much seems to be back to normal. I'm still coughing a lot. Thinking about setting up a doctor appointment, as I'm overdue for a checkup anyway. Wrote but didn't post Music Week yesterday. After TV, I started to add a note on the Super Bowl, but didn't finish, and in the end I decided I was better off waiting until today. I'll wrap that up relatively early. Then my plan is to go out and do some shopping. Specifically, I want to go to World Market to buy capers, in the big Mezzetta jar. I ran out a couple days ago, and I use them all the time. (They go well with pickled herring, which has become a favorite snack.)

Weighed in at 214.8 again, so no worse than last week, before I cooked pad thai for Janice & Tim, and my Super Bowl dinner of baked cod with olives & capers, zucchini gratin, and rosemary fries (a frozen Alexa bag that I added some truffle oil to). The gratin was an internet recipe: slice up one large zucchini, make a cheese sauce (butter, roasted garlic, cream, cream cheese, parmesan), top with extra cheese (no mozzarella on hand, so I used gruyere, and more parmesan). Cooked 35 minutes in the same 400F oven as the fish. The fries took 425F, so I made them first, then reheated them so they all came out at the same time.

I'll probably stop at Whole Foods and Dillons as well. Not sure if I'm up for anything else. At some point I need to look into car stereo, and roofing coatings. I'm also curious about replacing the car seats, mostly because the passenger-side seat doesn't have a vertical adjust, so is too low for Laura. (Driver-side does have a power adjust, which makes it more usable.) I did find this from Katzkin, which is expensive and not clear whether it solves the immediate problem. I'm also seeing various racing seats options.

Another project for this week is to get the tree guy going. I can safely wait until tomorrow for that. Cooled off overnight, so it's close to 50F today, as opposed to 70F yesterday. I thought I should work on the grill yesterday, but didn't get around to it. Another opportunity sooner or later.

Email (25 messages):

• Per Tom James, our carport roofing product is Polyflex G APP (Plasteromeric) Granulated Cap Sheet.
• Spotify is raising their monthly bill from $11.99 to $12.99.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, February archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 5 albums, 0 A-list

Music: Current count 45523 [45518] rated (+5), 29 [27] unrated (+2).

It was tempting to simply declare "No Music Week" this week, but just as easy to show you what I have. It's virtually nothing, which is about the only point I have to make. I've had a very rough January. While the weather has gotten markedly better the last couple days, I'm still struggling. I've been hobbled by a cold, which is showing no signs of clearing up. But on top of all the other disappointments, I've felt like doing nothing, constructive or otherwise. I've been logging incoming music, but I've only been playing old music, moving beyond the well-worn travel cases to pick out oldies I haven't heard in years. I could see doing that for years to come. I'm not seeing much reason for doing anything else. I still plan to listen to, and write about, everything that actually comes in, but I'm in no hurry.

I do feel bad about never properly wrapping up the 20th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. I had every intention of adding a dozen or more comments to the published essays. I also knew that I had a fair amount of website work to do, especially at top level. I update the website piecemeal, which makes it harder to keep everything in sync. I have, for instance, made some local changes in the annual sections that haven't been propagated. I was still shocked to look at it today and find the top almost totally devoid of mention of the 2025 poll. I made some quick repairs today, and updated. I also killed off the forwarders for "25votes" and "25comments": the idea behind them was to be able to shut them down as they get spammed. I've been getting troubling reports about the latter, it what is pretty clearly some kind of scam.

I have no concrete plans about the poll moving forward. While most of the participants this year were pleased to see it still active, and many were quite flattering in their thanks for my work, I have serious doubts about my ability to keep it going. Still, at present the big problem is my almost total lack of energy or enthusiasm, which applies to pretty much every other aspect of my life. I finished January with only one Substack post. I have 90 subscribers, which is +9 since 2025-11-13. I have 134 followers on Bluesky. Sure, my bad for not posting more often. (And maybe for not using their apps? I've never gotten the point — aside from the obvious one that they want to own your phone.)

The only plan I do have this week is to re-open the "weird" book file. I've been reading books on the growing madness on the right, most recently Paul Heideman's Rogue Elephant and John Ganz's When the Clock Broke, and I've ordered Laura K Field's Furious Minds and Paul Starr's American Contradiction. Field's book is about the so-called "MAGA intellectuals," who are trying to derive a coherent political philosophy out of the movement's mass of irritable mental gestures. Starr is offering a broader history which goes back to the 1950s, which aligns it perfectly with my memories.

I've read much more along these lines. The one book I was most impressed by was Kurt Andersen's Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America. In the introduction to the latter book (2020), Andersen wrote:

I'd noticed that in so many ways, as Stephen Colbert joked on the first episode of his old nightly show, America had become increasingly "divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart." From the 1960s and '70s on, I realized, America had really changed in this regard. Belief in every sort of make-believe had spun out of control — in religion, science, politics, and lifestyle, all of them merging with entertainment in what I called the fantasy-industrial complex. In that book, I explained the deep, centuries-long history of this American knack for creating and believing the excitingly untrue. As soon as I finished writing Fantasyland, we elected a president who was the single most florid and consequential expression ever, a poster boy embodying all its themes.

While this broad outline has long been obvious — back in the 1980s, I liked to tell people that the only boom industry in America was fraud, but I don't recall ever trying to explain how it came about, why it was so seductive, and how defenseless ordinary people had become to its pervasive rot. Recognizing the evil geniuses is only one part of the battle. The other part is understanding how the Democrats had detached themselves from the left and its principles, and how the left had disconnected from the majority of the people. I hope to make some small contribution to better understanding the democratic fumbles. I could add some suggestions on how to fix it, but doesn't everyone claim that?

It's not even midnight, and I'm too tired to write any more. So I might as well let it be. Writing about music is so much a part of my routine I doubt I'll stop anytime soon. I suppose I should note that lacking any new A- records this week, I picked up covers of two better compilations I reviewed way back: Kokomo Arnold: Original Kokomo Blues 1934-1938 ([1998], EPM/Blues Collection); and Shave 'Em Dry: The Best of Lucille Bogan (1933-35 [2004], Columbia/Legacy).

PS: I watched the Super Bowl, for the first time in probably 30 years. (Laura usually tunes in for the hyped half-time shows, but never learned to follow the game. I watched the first dozen Super Bowls, and was an AFL fan back when that made a difference, but it's been decades since I had any interest in the sport, the business, or the spectacle.) The game itself was easy enough to follow. Both offenses seemed inept compared by my memories, but I learned early on (thanks to Alex Karras) to focus on the line play, and both sides put on tremendous pass rush pressure. The secondaries also seemed exceptional, with New England's Christian Gonzalez singled out for praise, but that was largely because Seattle's quarterback was the more accurate passer. New England's Drake Maye struggled all game long. Nothing here is likely to bring me back to watch more, but I felt like doing nothing for the day, and the game was good for that. But I'm left with the sense that football is sinking into pure gladiatorialism.

Aside from the game, the big points were the half-time show, and the commercials. I have nothing to say about Bad Bunny, but I'll look into the political reaction and see if I can make any sense of that. For what little it's worth, I've heard six of his albums, enjoying them enough for various shades of B+, but nothing higher. I don't doubt that he's earned his stardom, but much of it (and not just the language) sails right past me. I didn't get the symbolism or iconography. As for the commercials, I found them rather disturbing, but there was so much happening so fast that I never got a handle on it. Again, a subject for further research. If I understand the AI pitches correctly, they say we'll be able to get all of our work done instantly, spending the rest of our (still employed?) time at the beach. I doubt it's going to work out like that.

New records reviewed this week:

• Al Green: To Love Somebody (2026, Fat Possum, EP): [sp]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Old music:

• Lucille Bogan/Walter Roland: (1927-1935) (1927-35 [1992], Yazoo): [sp]: B+(**)
• CeDell Davis: Feel Like Doin' Something Wrong (1993 [1994], Fat Possum): [sp]: B+(***)
• CeDell Davis: The Best of CeDell Davis (1994, Fat Possum): [sp]: B+(**)
• Casey Bill Weldon/Kokomo Arnold: Bottleneck Guitar Trendsetters of the 1930's (1927-38 [1992], Yazoo): [sp]: B+(***)

Daily Log

Woke up around 7. Read some (about NYC in the 1989-92: John Gotti, Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, police riots and corruption, race strife) before I went back to sleep. Woke up at noon, and read some more. I logged 423 minutes, AHI up to 2.7. Weather is pretty nice. Laura has a nursing appointment. I have no plans. I'm still coughing, which makes me wonder whether I shouldn't schedule a doctor visit. Contemplating whether to write a "No Music Week," or simply a very short one. Would be good to update the website, although I don't have much (if anything) to say.

PS: Decided to go ahead with a Music Week. Just 5 albums, 4 of them old music.

Email (39 messages at 3:48, which gives you an idea of how slow I'm moving today):

• Semipop Life: The Bullpen 011.
• TomDispatch: Eric Ross, Living on Borrowed Time.
• Mike Konczal: Why affordability and the vibecession are real economic problems: "There are many ways inflation makes people worse off even when real incomes recover, especially for essentials." I'm struck first by how many things in the "essential CPI items that beat overall inflation" aren't tangible items; e.g., insurance, maintenance and repair, rent. Also note: "another issue is that we largely excludle borrowing costs from how we talk about inflation."
• GLC dinner on Feb. 15 with a presentation by Moti Rieber.

Back in the 1970s, Yazoo became a very useful label for discovering old blues records. They mostly assembled 14-cut LPs, the single-artist sets providing introductions to most of the significant artists of the 1920s-30s period. Around 1990, they reissued those albums on CD, rarely (if ever?) adding extra tracks, and they've added various artist comps.

Yazoo A/A- albums:

• Big Bill Broonzy: The Young Big Bill Broonzy 1928-1935 [A]
• Big Bill Broonzy: Do That Guitar Rag 1928-1935
• Reverend Gary Davis: The Complete Early Recordings of Rev. Gary Davis (1935-49)
• Thomas A. Dorsey: Come on Mama Do That Dance 1928-1932
• Sleepy John Estes: I Ain't Gonna Be Worried No More: 1929-1940
• Blind Lemon Jefferson: King of the Country Blues (1926-29) [A]
• Blind Willie Johnson: Sweeter as the Years Go By (1927-30)
• Blind Willie McTell: The Best of Blind Willie McTell (1927-35)
• Memphis Jug Band: The Best of the Memphis Jug Band (1927-34)
• Charley Patton: King of the Delta Blues (1929-34)
• Charley Patton: Founder of the Delta Blues (1929-34)
• Ma Rainey: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1924-28)
• Henry Thomas: Texas Worried Blues: Complete Recorded Works 1927-1929
• Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson (1926-36) [A]
• The Best There Ever Was: The Legendary Early Blues Performers (1927-35) [A]
• Hard Times Come Again No More, Vol. 1: Early American Rural Songs of Hard Times and Hardships (1924-37)
• Hard Times Come Again No More, Vol. 2: Early American Rural Songs of Hard Times and Hardships (1924-37)
• I Can't Be Satisfied: Early American Women Blues Singers, Vol. 2: Town (1920-25)
• Ruckus Juice and Chittlins: The Great Jug Bands Vol. 2 (1927-35)
• The Rose Grew Round the Briar: Early American Rural Love Songs, Vol. 2 (1920s)

Yazoo unheard albums:

• Leroy Carr: Naptown Blues (1929-1934) -
• Sam Collins: Jail House Blues -
• Blind Boy Fuller: Truckin' My Blues Away (1935-38)
• Papa Charlie Jackson: Fat Mouth (1924-27) -
• Blind Lemon Jefferson: The Best of Blind Lemon Jefferson (1926-29)
• Eddie Lang: Jazz Guitar Virtuoso (1927-32)
• Dennis McGee: Complete Recordings 1929-1930
• Memphis Jug Band: Memphis Jug Band (1927-34)
• King Bennie Nawahi: Hawaiian String Virtuoso: Acoustic Steel Guitar Classics from the 1920's
• Funny Papa Smith: The Original Howling Wolf (1930-31) -
• Frank Stokes: The Memphis Blues (1927-30) -
• Tampa Red: Bottleneck Guitar 1928-1937
• Dave Tarras: Yiddish-American Klezmer Music (1925-56)
• Alabama Blues, 1927-1931
• Barrelhouse Piano 1927-1938
• Before the Blues, Vol. 2: The Early American Black Music Scene
• Before the Blues, Vol. 3: The Early American Black Music Scene
• Country Blues Bottleneck Guitar Classics 1926-1937
• Don't Leave Me Here: The Blues of Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana 1927-1932
• East Coast Blues 1926-1935
• The Georgia Blues 1927-1933
• Going Away Blues 1926-1935
• Guitar Wizards 1926-1935
• Harmonica Blues: Great Harmonica Performances of the 1920s and 1930s
• Memphis Masters: Early American Blues Classics (1927-34)
• Mississippi Masters: Early American Blues Classics 1927-1935
• The Roots of Rap: Classic Recordings from the 1920's and 30's
• Tex-Arkana-Louisiana Country 1929-1933
• Times Ain't Like They Used to Be: Early American Rural Music, Vol. 1
• Times Ain't Like They Used to Be: Early American Rural Music, Vol. 2
• When I Was a Cowboy, Vol. 1
• When I Was a Cowboy, Vol. 2
• Jazz the World Forgot: Volume 1 (1925-31)
• Jazz the World Forgot: Volume 2 (1923-30)
• Kings of the Ragtime Banjo (1900-23)
• The Secret Museum of Mankind, Vol. 1 (1925-48)
• The Secret Museum of Mankind, Vol. 2 (1925-48)
• The Secret Museum of Mankind, Vol. 3 (1925-48)
• The Secret Museum of Mankind, Vol. 4 (1925-48)
• The Secret Museum of Mankind, Vol. 5 (1925-48)
• The Secret Museum of Mankind: Music of East Africa (1925-48)
• The Secret Museum of Mankind: Music of North Africa (1925-48)

Daily Log

Sleep score up to 100, as I topped 360 minutes (373?), with an AHI of 1.0 (or less). Woke up once during the night. Still miserable when I got up. Finished the chapter in Ganz that wrapped up with the 1992 Buchanan speech at the RNC, with the Perot campaign floundering. Next chapter starts with Ruby Ridge. This is all pretty familiar, but the detail helps bring it back.

Email (8 messages, nothing important). I'm expecting delivery of Furious Minds and American Contradiction today, so I'm backlogged on reading.

As I'm just playing oldies, I thought I might log music today:

1. The Delmore Brothers: Sand Mountain Blues (1944-49 [1986], County): I was struck enough by one song to post a YouTube: You Can't Do Wrong and Get By.
2. Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup: That's All Right Mama (1941-54 [1994], RCA)
3. Butterbeans and Susie: Complete Recorded Works 1924-1927 in Chronological Order: Volume 1 1924-1925 ([1997], Document)
4. Hard Times Come Again No More Vol. 2: Early American Rural Songs of Hard Times and Hardships (1920, Yazoo)

I played traveling case favorites while cooking and entertaining yesterday, including a request for The Wild Tchoupitoulas (our guest had just discovered the Meters). After they left, I played Sleepy Joe Estes, which took a bit before it connected.

Laura will probably watch Super Bowl today, mostly for the half time show. (She's been reading up on Bad Bunny.) I haven't had any desire — for the game, the half-time show, or the perverse fascination some people have with the advertisements — for many years. I did watch the early years: as an AFL fan, I rued the Green Bay Packers dominance of the first two years, and reveled in Joe Namath's win in the third bowl, and especially the Chiefs in the fourth, as well as the AFC's dominance in the 1970s (Dolphins, Steelers, Raiders).

The game day I remember most was in 1978. I had become a Denver Broncos fan, and they were crushed by Dallas. That was the same day I moved from East 9th Street to Rebecca's small one-bedroom apartment on 32nd Street. We hired someone with a small truck to pick up my paltry belongings (mostly cabinets full of LPs; my stereo and typewriter; some clothes and kitchen gear; I'm not sure I had any furniture to speak of; no bed, just a mattress on the floor). Rebecca had just bought a TV, which I think she got at EJ Korvettes, but it was too heavy to carry home, so we squeezed it into a cab for two blocks.

Daily Log

Only slept 353 minutes, broken up in four stretches, for a score of 95 (or was it 85?). AHI was 0.8; CAI 0.2; virtually no leaks, and light pressure, so aside from waking up, not bad. I weighed myself, and have lost 5 pounds in the last week, from 220.6 to 215.2. I'm still spitballing the calorie counts, but doing frozen dinners, even with extra nuts and chutney, and a post-dinner snack, I'm unlikely to be topping 1600. I've had no shortage of appetite with the cold. Just a lot of aggravation. We should finish the jigsaw puzzle today. It's all funny-shaped black pieces, but fewer than 100 of them.

No plans for the weekend. No need to start anything. I've been adding small bits to Loose Tabs and Books, and will continue. I'm planing old music, sometimes thinking about doing Missing CG reviews, but I'm not limiting myself to candidates. Playing Flamin' Groovies at the moment. I ordered two books yesterday: Paul Starr: American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now, and Anis Shivani: Why Did Trump Win?: Chronicling the Stages of Neoliberal Reactionism During America's Most Turbulent Election Cycle. They should be delivered before my previos order of Laura K Field: Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. These books all relate to the weird book project. I shouldn't bother with research at this point, but need something to get me going. Any day now I could open up a new book file. I also need to open up the memoir pile directory, which at least will require a modicum of design thought.

Email (11 messages):

• Gene Seymour: History as an Inalienable Right: Why Every Month Should Be Black History Month.

Laura wanted to invite Janice and Tim over for an evening. She originally suggested take-out for dinner, but I allowed as I could make a one-dish pad thai without shopping, and suggested that they bring something for dessert. They agreed about 2PM, and I promised dinner by 6PM. I continued my experimentation with a recipe which originated in Sodsook. They brought a cake with multiple layers of chocolate cake and fillings, which was quite satisfactory when served with some ice cream. I should write the pad thai up at some point.

We watched The Fallen Idol afterwards, a 1948 British movie based on a Graham Greene story. It was an assignment for Laura's film group. I didn't care for it, but wasn't feeling up to anything else, either. After a break, we watched the first episode of a new season of Father Brown, which was more agreeable, although the Catholocism remains incredible to me. The season introduces a new villain (or elevates an old one?): Canon Fox, Bishop-Elect, vowing to halt Brown's investigations.

Daily Log

Slept better last night. Made it through in one shot, 423 minutes, with AHI down to 0.9 — the first time in nearly a week it hasn't been above the dreaded 5.0. Resulting score was 100, again a recent first. I do feel more rested, but the other symptoms persist: sore throat, sniffles, temperature uneasy if not fevered. Meanwhile, the world has warmed up a bit: 55F outside at 1:00 PM, yesterday got over 60. I suppose I could start considering a return to normal life. But I'm still depressed, and ill-disposed to return to my previous life. The most obvious metric is the music I've been playing, which is 100% oldies. Meanwhile, I'm deleting virtually all of the new jazz hype coming my way. Unlikely at this point that I'll post Music Week come Monday (only 1 album in the February file so far, and it's an EP).

Email (52 messages at 2:40 PM):

Daily Log

Seems like nights are getting worse. I wound up with 330 minutes last night, 85 score. This was broken up into at least four stretches, broken up with breathing under CPAP became too uncomfortable not to take a break. Mouth is very dry. Whole house is actually pretty dry (20% yesterday). I've turned the humidifier up, to little avail. One positive note is that AHI is down to 5.1: still too high, but an improvement over most of the last week. Got up and read much of the chapter on LAPD. Not sure how that fits in with the general pattern of right-wing craziness, but it probably does.

Ran a software update, so I'm going to have to reboot. Playing old records from the blues/country shelf. I was originally thinking about doing a "missing in Christgau CG" column, possibly as a guest column, with a copy going out on my own Substack. My first thought was to pick off a dozen A+ records, but I've been playing lesser records by Al Dexter, Harlem Fats, and (right now) Don Tosti that could be good candidates.

Email (35 messages):

• Giuseppe Colli to webmaster at robertchristgau.com: "Website has not been updated since 2025-12-19, is Robert OK?"

Daily Log

Another lousy night, following a lousy day, and no doubt leading into another. The machine logged 423 minutes of sleep, which broke up into three chunks. That undercounted somewhat, as I woke up once with the machine off. AHI was 7.2, which knocked the sleep score down to 90. I woke up from the second slice around 9, and read some. I doubted I could go back to sleep, and it took a while, but I did, and woke up around 12:40.

I had made fairly good progress on the jigsaw puzzle yesterday, filling out the big clumps of white (cat faces), connecting them to the frame, and patching in the last bits of frame. Not quite down to one tray of pieces, but close. They're mostly black, with occasional bits of white or gray, but hard to place them. I didn't feel like doing anything else yesterday. I'm not sure I even feel like doing this today. After an hour, I went back to my book, then had my yogurt and raisins at the computer, writing this. I suppose I'll do some Loose Tabs, but I'm mostly just looking for ways to kill time. Laura went to doctor's alone, and will go to grocery store afterwards, and pick up Chinese. Not super cold. I haven't walked the dog in over a week. Maybe I'll try that. No fever, which suggests that this is just one of those colds you can only wait out.

Email (47 messages):

• Library items renewed: Python Automation for Dummies; Juliet Schor: Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter. I read a tiny bit of Schor, before moving on to John Ganz, which was thematically closer to Hiedeman's Rogue Elephant, and is proving a nice complement to it. I'm tempted to follow Ganz with Laura Field's Furious Minds, about the so-called MAGA Intellectuals. Looks like Amazon's delivery promise is 10-14 days out. I went ahead and ordered Fields' book, the long delivery time probably enticing me to order it earlier than I would have otherwise. I also noticed a "Workbook" version, which Amazon reviewers described as "AI slop."
• I also thumbed through the Python book, which left me ambivalent. I'm a big fan of scripting languages, but having invented my own (ftwalk), I've been oddly reticent to learning alternatives like perl, python, and ruby (although I have old books on them, and many others). I do use PHP, but I've never put any serious effort into JavaScript (although I have several books). My own automation tools are mostly coded in sh/awk and/or invoked from make. Where they fall short is in not having libraries for parsing inputs like HTML, XML, JSON, etc. Of the big three, Python has long seemed to be the best investment: it's less annoying than perl, and more popular than ruby. Some of the "automations" in the book could be useful (scraping web pages, hooking up with social media APIs, connecting with AI chatbots). I doubt the language will be that hard to learn. The bigger part will be thinking up applications that I'll find useful.
• Four new albums of old music from Elemental Music: Michel Petrucciani, Bill Evans, Cecil Taylor, Freddie King.

Daily Log

Another day and night from hell. I did manage to log over 500 minutes, getting up around noon, but the sleep score was stuck at 90, probably because AHI was back up to 8.0 (after 10.2 and 5.1). The 1/31 stats finally showed up on my phone app: 92 total score, 9:07 usage time, average leak 1.4, AHI 10.2, pressure 10.5, P95 13.5, CAI 3.8. The 2/1 stats: 96 total score, 8:57 usage time, AHI 5.1, pressure 9.0, P95 11.5, CAI 1.8. Nothing yet for 2/2. While the adjustments for 2/1 helped, the problems persist. Still, the dominant feeling with CPAP on is a dry mouth. Temperature this morning 98.8.

Playing The R&B Box, thinking about adding it to the CG project. Stayed up late last night working on jigsaw puzzle. I figure I'll spend most of today on it. Maybe get the white done? I have no other ambitions. Just surviving this, as painlessly as possible. Laura has doctor appointment tomorrow, and is talking about grocery store. I weighed myself yesterday, and hit 220.6, so I'm up quite a bit. I've been feeling especially blasé about it with the cold, but that's followed on the cookies/brownies for Max and my "comfort food" binge. I ate the last of the meatloaf last night, and threw out the leftover roots, so I'll be going back to a fairly minimal diet for a while. Still not logging calories, which I should probably resume, if nothing else as a sign of seriousness.

Email (34 messages):

• Substack January stats: 89 subscribers (+1), 123 post reads (-3). Message pushes "install the Substack app." I haven't done that, and don't particularly want to.
• Patrick Brown found a Christgau typo: Ricky Skopelitis. Fixed that locally (just database).

Daily Log

I made some CPAP adjustments yesterday: replaced the mask and filters, turn on tube heat, bumped the humidifier up a level, from 3 to 4. None of those really solved the problem, but they helped. I logged 523 minutes, but it was broken up into at least four chunks. Each time I woke up with a very dry mouth. AHI dropped from 12.3 to 5.1, which was still over the limit, so I wound up with a sleep score of 90, whereas most days anything over 360 minutes gets me 100. Fever was 99.3 when I went to bed. It was 98.9 when I got up. Cold symptoms persist: sore throat, dry cough, runny nose, congestion. Reasonable expectation is that I'm recovering, but it will be several days before I feel like doing much.

I posted a Music Week yesterday. I had piled up 34 reviews since the previous week, so that clears the board, and clears January. I haven't listened to anything new since my cutoff. Nor do I feel like having at it again. I watched a bit of TV yesterday: the 2nd season finale of The Night Manager, followed by two NCIS episodes (one, involving a cold case, was pretty good; the second was awful, with near-record levels of corniness, the team as hallucinated from McGee's novels, and the fanatical reaction to those novels; both had one thing in common: sympathetic relatives driven to crime due to frustration with police failures).

The Night Manager ended disappointingly, mostly in that it didn't end at all, but merely served to set up a third season. But even before they killed off nearly everyone but Roper and Pine, they put Pine into ridiculously extreme danger, which he was miraculously extricated from by sacrificing nearly everyone around him. The UK end of the operation remained underdeveloped, so the sequence of events where Burr confronts Langbourne and Cavendish with ultimatums then is killed just rolls past making no sense. Perhaps Olivia Colman has better things to do than stick around for season 3? Meanwhile, Colombia gets its civil war, and Roper returns to the UK, picking up his "one true son."

I'm planning on doing near-nothing today, and possibly well into the future. Playing travel case music. I do have a notion of writing up a dozen albums Christgau has never Consumer Guided. His Substack is suspended at the moment: nothing in January, but he's promised a new CG in the near future. He has sufficient contacts to run a series of similar columns, so it might be good for him. One reason I'm thinking of this is that I got a question I've been thinking about replying to:

How would you say your taste differs from fellow critic Robert Christgau? Are you guys friends in person? Have you met for coffee, dinner? Sorry if that's too personal. I enjoy both of your writings though my taste aligns more with Mr. 'Gau. Anyway, appreciate your extensive critique, it's a joy :)).

Possible lineup for guest CG (albums from my 1k list, no CG, in most cases no CG by artist, not too much jazz):

• Billy Bang, Vietnam: The Aftermath (2001, Justin Time)
• Blues Masters Volume 5: Jump Blues Classics ([1988], Rhino)
• Cedric Im Brooks and the Light of Saba (1974-76 [2003], Honest Jons)
• Cab Calloway, Are You Hep to the Jive? (1939-47 [1994], Columbia)
• Heroes Are Gang Leaders, The Amiri Baraka Sessions (2014-15 [2019], Flat Langston's Arkeyes)
• Jan and Dean, Gotta Take That One Last Ride ([1974], United Artists)
• Billy Jenkins, True Love Collection (1998, Babel)
• Rahsaan Roland Kirk/Al Hibbler, A Meeting of the Times (1966-72, Warner Jazz)
• Maddox Brothers and Rose, That'll Learn Ya Durn Ya: A Proper Introduction (1948-53 [2004], Proper)
• Dudu Pukwana, In the Townships (1973 [1988], Earthworks)
• Roswell Rudd, Flexible Flyer (1974 [1995], Black Lion)
• Jimmy Rushing, The You and Me That Used to Be (1971 [1988], RCA)
• Scratchin' The Wild Jimmy Spruill Story 1956-63 [2014], GVC)
• Art Tatum, The Tatum Group Masterpieces, Vol. 8 (1956, Pablo)