Sir Richard Bishop’s “Saginaw Racket” is a spiky, free-association chop up of the classic rock guitarists of his youth and it’s ecstatic, maybe my favourite of his apart from “Fingering the Devil”.

Requiscat Johnny Walker, a favourite of my parents and inspiration behind one of the best stretches of comic radio narrative I’ve ever heard:

youtu.be/5NTh22Bbwfg?...

During drop-off this morning, one
of my kid’s classmates offered me a plastic dinosaur, which I named: “cool pterodactyl!” This kind of object offering and naming is a common, happy occurrence.
“You know all the dinosaurs’ names!” said a teacher.
An intolerable pride swept over me.

Frank Auerbach was a master, a role model for the serious thinking an artist in any medium might aspire to. He traveled little, worked non-stop, and thought endlessly as his art attests.

Neil Kulkarni was a superb writer, novel, passionate, funny, eloquent and startling, one of the very best over the last gasp of the Brit music weeklies. His substack was pushing brilliance to the end and his loss is a terrible shock and shame. Soften the unfairness:

www.gofundme.com/f/neil-kulka...

T Swift’s Eras is tremendous. Screening ended up a real party - a couple of acceleratingly drunk gents to my left got louder and louder along with the young women, which irritated me until I realised this was a concert not a movie. By the end, a third the auditorium were front row dancing.

The galactic pop exhibition of T Swift’s Eras has me daydreaming concert film collisions: we may know/admire the Stones/Godard or Dylan/Scorcese, but what about Prince/Bergman, Madonna/Greenaway, Dexys/Varda, Duran Duran/Peckinpah? Big Black by Steven Spielberg? Lydia Lunch by Ridley Scott?

Very sad about job losses at Bandcamp, and its degradation from common good to a tech baron’s broken toy. We need an internet commons of some sort. An unlikely prospect.

Dislodging a stuck child seat from our bike, I chopped myself hard in the throat with its back, and up flashed the faces of loved ones trying not to laugh on hearing how I Van Damme'd myself out of the picture. Hurt a bit, but larynx still intact, can still swallow, nothing to see here.

I'll use my first post here to point out that Souled American now have made their records available on Bandcamp, and that they are one of the best bands. souledamerican.bandcamp.com Their page has a few articles and interviews linked to it, which have near squared the information I knew about them.