Current Listening

01. The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times"

02. Zach Bryan f/ Kacey Musgraves, "I Remember Everything" 

03. Kacey Musgraves, "Heaven Is"

04. Taylor Swift, "Peter"

05. Steely Dan, "Any Major Dude Will Tell You"

06. The Kinks, "Do You Remember Walter?"

07. The Kinks, "People Take Pictures of Each Other"

08. The Rolling Stones, "Sweet Virginia"

09. The Rolling Stones, "Thru and Thru"

10. Lynyrd Skynyrd, "That Smell"

11. Simon & Garfunkel, "Hazy Shade of Winter"

12. The Bangles, "Hazy Shade of Winter"

13. Jan & Dean, "Surf City"

14. Fire Saga, "Double Trouble"

15. The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do Is Dream" 

16. Grateful Dead, "Box of Rain"

17. Elliott Smith, "Speed Trials"

18. Drive-by Truckers, "Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife"

19. Denez Prigent & Lisa Gerrard, "Gortoz A Ran"

20. Morrissey, "I Will See You in Far-off Places" 

Films, 2020s

Best of the decade, so far: an evolving list... 

You make me shiver, I feel so tender

Watching her do serious, insightful yet visibly perplexed analysis of the Stop Making Sense "Life during Wartime" performance is Must-See TV.  

At 18:03: "Like, that's awful, you shouldn't have to live on peanut butter for a couple days." 

At 21:30: "It feels like he's, like...laying down for death on stage right now." 

You Can Call Me Al or Betty or Deacon Blues

'Mid-life crises' are intrinsically optimistic insofar as they presume based on statistical averages that there's roughly another half still to come and intrinsically pessimistic insofar as they realistically recognize that it's probably, comparatively gonna mostly suck, as quantitative equality ('mid'/'half') is not at all the same thing as qualitative equality. 

We've seen the last of good King Richard. Raise up your glass to good King John. 

How Strange It Is to Be Anything at All 

When you go kinda deep but then your buddy goes way deep, and you're just like...'Yeah, nah. Not just now.' (Or vice versa.) 

Keep It Copacetic 

Listening nostalgically today (inspired in part by the spot-on song choices in the superb new 1997-set miniseries Under the Bridge) to a '90s playlist on Tidal, I came across this junior high-aged favourite of mine, which still sounds kinda great. It's a more-or-less-forgotten gem from the tail end, or last guttural gasp, of the grunge era, when solid if unspectacular bands far afield from the Pacific Northwest –– from, e.g., suburban Chicago and Australia and London –– tried, post-Kurt, to step up to the plate as the Next Nirvana, though ultimately the best any of them would do, really, was to have their lead singer go on to be Gwen Stefani's far less successful (first) husband. 

(Quirky quasi-boast [?]: I saw No Doubt open for Bush on the tour that set in motion said relationship. The Goo Goo Dolls were supposed to play as well, billed second after Bush, but were absent due to the filming of a guest spot for Beverly Hills 90210.) 

Yet the rabbit-hole I followed Local H down was not one of '90s alt-rock, but rather the origins of the word "copacetic," which I can always remember people using, and which I still use occasionally myself, with no sense of or educated guess as to its provenance. 

The entry in Merriam-Webster is both oddly fascinating and unexpectedly amusing: