https://briburks.wordpress.com/2023/01/08/a-year-of-affliction/?fbclid=IwAR1-_wvU4GQ5fD3XoreWi7eUiOycRC8QqrrHVUvNeKJricD_X2V9AAJwVzI
More upbeat, here's my Flickr account of photos from happier days. There are over 1,000 from just the past couple of years. Maybe I'll get around to adding descriptions to some of the pictures but that would be quite a chore with so many: https://www.flickr.com/photos/8586095@N07/albums
More to be added eventually, I've got hundreds more.
NP: listened to a few curated playlists on Spotify. First, Bob Dylan's Philosophy of Modern Song. I have no intention of reading the book - the excerpts I've read come across as second-rate Greil Marcus, never one of my favorite critics - but this was a fun listen, if surprisingly heavy on cornball folk and cheesy light pop. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1K7b4OMmlm7vFEtfVutt7m
In honor of Thom Bell's recent death, I decided to do a deep dive into Philly Soul. A few greatest hits comps from some classic artists and a handful of regular albums, the best of which was Jerry Butler's The Iceman Cometh (paired as two-fer with the somewhat inferior Ice On Ice followup), as unlike most classic R&B LPs it's not just hits + filler but good all the way through. Then I plunged headfirst into this 222-track behemoth: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4M8mvcbdllacP0IpLW9B6f There's a lot of good stuff and a lot of dross, especially as it gets into the late 70s disco and early 80s synth pop dreck. The early 70s material is gold, though.
Now reading: I'm in the middle of Escape Velocity, a collection of miscellany (short stories, essays, newspaper articles, and memoirs) that finishes off my readings from Charles Portis. Billdude, if you ever want to do a complete discography, Portis is a worthy project - his novels are all short (average length 200 pages), highly entertaining and easily readable and dryly funny, and there are only 5. Here's how I rank them in order of preference, but they're all worth reading:
1) True Grit
2) Masters of Atlantis
3) Dog of the South
4) Gringos
5) Norwood
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