Drinking A Cocktail, Waiting For Enlightment

Moderately Successful. Generally Likeable. Usually Helpful. Vinyl. Books. Cocktails.

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After my adventurous, chaotic, and exhausting yesterday, I’m hanging out close to home with black coffee and a record collection that loves me.

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Polidori wrote The Vampyre at the same retreat where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.

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These guys were barred from entering Canada in person, but they have arrived in vinyl form.

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Steve Wilson’s Intrigue, a four CD set of “progressive sounds in UK alternative music 1979-1989”

If you walked the earth in alt-music circles in the 1980s, I can’t imagine you not enjoying this.

Marketed by Edsel.

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This Karen Dalton album was released in 1971 (reissued in 2021). Dalton was stomping around NY cafés and folk clubs before Bob Dylan, Pete Lafarge, and those others. Dylan said she sang like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed.

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So, anyone have plans this evening? I think, under cover of darkness and with a few torches, we can correct this timeline.

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When I was eleven I had a celebrity crush on Diane Dufresne (I think I watched her on Les Beaux Dimanche).

I picked this album up recently.

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The liner notes on this reissue are wonderful. They end with a paragraph that reads, “It was inspired by *Mr Benn*, an animated kids’ TV show I adored as a child.” Then he describes the premise of the show and how it inspired him. I’ll be damned if Hannon’s artistic trajectory doesn’t make complete sense.

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I’ve spent the day dancing with chores, and I pulled out this album that I haven’t listened to years.

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“He was, and is yet, most likely, the wearisomest, self-righteous pharisee that ever ransacked the Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses on his neighbors.”

Emily Bontë, Wuthering Heights

I know that guy!

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Birthday celebrants of the world, unite!

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2025 was a tough year for me, and it seems like it was a bit of a downer for The Divine Comedy as well. Rainy Sunday Afternoon is a nice chill musical reminder that whatever doesn’t kill you will try again later.

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Got home from a weekend in Boundary Country where I cooked for friends. Now I’m back to cooking for one.

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I got up to feed the cat and see the Blood Moon. Unfortunately, there are clouds and the moon isn’t visible.

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A steak in my belly, a few ounces of Polish vodka, the Rolling Stones on the turntable. I think I’m good.

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Someone posted about Mitski’s I Bet on Losing Dogs and it’s now coming home with me.

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This is what META AI thinks I look like.