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Pretty Good Hat

Tag: Music

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Six years ago I saw Darlingside at the Music Instrument Museum. In the time since, many of their songs have become lifelong favorites, and last night I saw them again at this cozy neighborhood venue, captivated once again.1

Three men on a stage singing and playing guitars and mandolin.

Musicians near the back entrance of an auditorium, standing and preparing instruments

They played a couple of songs un-amplified from places in the audience. It was a fun and particularly human few minutes, part of a special and memorable night.

  1. And not just because of Don’s youthful vigor.2 ↩︎

  2. A little IYKYK humor from the show. ↩︎

Listening to this Josh Ritter album after dinner tonight as the sky gets darker. Released for just a few days in Dec of 2020, it’s a wonderful album of live performances of so many favorites. Wish I could tell you where to pick it up. Friends’ll have to come over and listen to it some summer night.

The album cover for Josh Ritter’s HELL YEAH!, in a music player app interface with a play button beneath it. It is subtitled ‘Live 2017-2019’ and features a black and white photo of Josh and the band on a sofa, smiling and laughing.

The back cover of HELL YEAH! The track listing is superimposed on a busy wall covered in graffiti. It looks like a dressing room wall, maybe.

Media diet this week. I’ve been reading:

  • I finished The Tainted Cup, and thought it was fun and interesting. I’ll definitely read more in the series.
  • Listening to Circe. It’s excellent and the audiobook reading is perfect.
  • Started reading Metal from Heaven

And some TV:

  • Season 2 of Severance is here. I re-watched Season 1 a couple of weeks ago and was struck by how tight it was, how specific and articulated its vision and its characters are. The first episode of Season 2 hit all the notes I would have wanted: It surprised me and promises so much.
  • We finished the final season of Loudermilk. It walks a fine line between jokey and sincere, and I think ends as a really moving story about found family and addiction, while managing to frequently be really, really funny.
  • American Primeval is very violent depiction of a violent era in the American West, and centers on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It’s well done; I don’t know if I’d recommend it.

And some music I’ve liked:

Family are out for an after dinner walk, so I’m listening to some music, sitting on the living room rug in the speakers’ sweet spot, with the volume at Slightly Unreasonable.

My little Shiny app to visualize my last.fm data continues to tick along. This graphic shows the top artists of my year not in my top all-time played list. My favorite new album of 2024 is at the top of this list: Nick Cave’s WILD GOD is a tremendous, moving record.

If you’re still scrobbling, you can see your own data at deardestiny.shinyapps.io/tuner.

A graphic list of my ‘new top artists’ in 2024. The background is bright yellow, and the list starts with Nick Cave’s new album WILD GOD. Also on the list are TV on the Radio, Jackie West, The Cure and feeble little horse. The list includes small thumbnails of each album cover.

I didn’t know that Lucinda Williams had a couple of rollicking cover albums, of The Beatles and Tom Petty. Man, I’m a cryer for Wildflowers.

Lucinda Williams poses like Tom Petty on his album cover for Full Moon Fever. She stands with a guitar over her shoulder, leaning forward like daring you to listen. Maybe a little smug? The photo of her is is monochrome and is shaded pink, yellow and green from top to bottom.

Making a big pot of soup and listening to John Prine on a Sunday night, things are alright.

I miss John Prine, though.

Weeknotes III

🍁 I expect I’ll keep mentioning autumn in these roundups for the foreseeable future. Today being the autumn equinox? One hundred percent, talking about fall. We haven’t dipped below about 50º F yet, but it’s consistently cool enough that some of the neighborhood trees are already showing quite a bit of red or orange. I’m excited to see what our own trees do; they’re all still quite green.

📺 We’ve been watching Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, at suggestion of kiddo. It has some monster fights, but it’s mostly a really gentle, thoughtful story about an ageless mage re-tracing the steps she took on a ten-year journey with her adventuring companions who are now aged or passed.

🦵🏻 I had a pretty good spike of ankle pain this week from an injury a couple of years ago. Having old joints sucks, sometimes. It’s improved after a day, but persistently wondering how it’s going to feel day to day is pretty fatiguing.

A messy chicken sandwich on a white paper wrapper. It has spilled red hot sauce on the paper and look absolutely delicious. In the background is a glass of medium-dark beer.

I got a pretty good chicken sandwich this weekend!

☕️ I’ve become incrementally more insufferable about my espresso preparation, having adopted the Weiss Distribution Technique using this little wire tool. Verdict? I think it’s improving my coffee! More sip research sip is needed.

📚 I’m reading and really enjoying The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. So far it’s fun, interesting, and really engaging.

🎧 Don’t do the math, but Blues Traveler’s Four was released in September, 1994. It’s been reissued on vinyl for the first time in many years, and it’s a treat. (I bought this album originally on CD, from Hot Poop on Walla Walla’s main street.)

A couple more good things to read this week:

  • I like this work in process from Hadley Wickham about R in Prod. The chapter outline suggests a lot of really good content to come.
  • Dead Internet Souls by Vicki Boykis. Generative LLMs are filling the internet with garbage, resulting in the poignant shutdown of wordfreq. Vicki encourages us to continue to be live people on the world wide web, and I appreciate that. (Vicki is a brilliant machine learning and data engineer and you should be reading her!)

Happy week, gang.