01/22/2017

Welcome back, Gentle Reader(s), from wherever you might be hiding. Perhaps you’ve just crawled out from under the bed, the hangover having finally worn off, or perhaps you’ve just finished booking that flight to Tierra del Fuego, or Iceland, or Montreal. As for myself, after an election night bout of absinthe-addled bewilderment and dimensional dislocation I have returned to the intrawebs to try and figure out how to reckon with the New World Odor that looms before us all. If I may be so bold to presume, I figger I'm trying to process all of this, much as you are. It's a tall order and I'm struggling, day by day, to comprehend what the future holds. (Please note: This post was composed over the course of a 2-plus month period.)   Since Orange Tuesday I have been swinging wildly back and forth between states of disbelief, dismay and despair interspersed with occasional twinges of irrational optimism ("Perhaps it won't be quite as horrifying as I thought!"). After nearly a month, utter despair ("It's going to be even more horrifying than I thought!") has emerged as the default. Yes folks, this has actually happened. This is my life, your life, our country, the planet, and together we will have to find some way through to a future that offers something other than despair.
11/09/2016

It is 9:13 PM Central Time. I am sitting at my desk in New Orleans, Louisiana, and if I am to believe what I am seeing unfold in front of my very eyes, the world that I have known and believed in all my life is about to slip away. I have just run the numbers based upon the most recent projections on the New York Times website and it appears most likely that by the time the final tallies are counted on the West Coast and in Hawaii that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States.   Somewhere, deep down in the most rational recesses of my brain, I guess I always knew that this was a possibility but I never allowed myself to believe that it would actually happen. Now I am faced—we are all faced—with the reality that the American Dream is over. Dead and gone.
11/07/2016

Today, Gentle Reader(s), is a truly beautiful day. It is a day the likes of which long-suffering fans of a certain Midwestern baseball club have not known for 108 years. It is with almost giddy incredulity that Your Humble Narrator reaffirms to himself that the Cubs have won the 2016 World Series. This is a day that I had longed hoped for but perhaps never quite allowed myself to fully believe would actually arrive. But last night, at exactly 10:47 PM Mountain Standard Time, in the bottom of a rain-delayed 10th inning, rookie Cleveland infielder Michael Martinez tapped a soft ground ball off of Cubs reliever Mike Montgomery to third baseman Kris Bryant who tossed the ball straight and true to Anthony Rizzo on first to seal the deal: Cubs win, 8-7. Just like that—over a century of angst, frustration, curses (imaginary or otherwise) and ‘woulda coulda shoulda’ second guessing, banished. This. Actually. Happened. It was a moment I’ll never forget.
10/27/2016

Gentle Reader(s), I have returned. No, I have not been languishing at Death's door (front or back), nor have I been abducted by Aliens, illegal or otherwise, or kidnapped by Bigfoot, Mr. or Mrs.. Nor have I fallen into an Arctic crevasse, Ant- or otherwise, or been afflicted by amnesia, appealing though that may, at times, seem. What can I say other than I just felt that I needed a break from pumping out Ye Olde Matador Playliste(s). The Inky travel has been coming fast and furious—nothing new there (the image above is from Your Humble Narrator's most recent trip to the Heartland to visit Inky Mum)—but throughout late summer YHN was suffering mightily from severe Election Season Fatigue. I was obsessing over the horror of Dumb Drumpf advancing in the polls while trying to maintain my increasingly fraying faith in the essential Common Sense and Decency of the American Body Politic. Now that the Drumpf seems to have offended mainstream American sensibilities sufficiently to start tanking I might be able to muster fortitude sufficient to the task of applying finger to keyboard and reestablishing the connection betwixt and between mind and matter.
08/18/2016

So it's come to this, Gentle Reader(s). After months of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, hate-mongering and flat-out shameless lying, Donald Trump has now taken to inciting violence against his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and insinuating that our duly elected (and re-elected) president, Barack Hussein Obama, deserves the same. Today this revolting bargain basement demagogue flat out accused Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama of being co-founders of ISIS and advanced the baffling claim that the terrorist death cult 'honors' them. But Hold on a second, one might say—he didn't intend these things to be taken literally. His deranged accusations were intended as metaphor by way of suggesting that the Obama administration's shortsighted foreign policy created a political vacuum which ISIS exploited. But no, Herr Drumpf is beyond any such subtlety—not that subtlety was ever a component of the Trump Trick Bag. Patently absurd though Trump's ISIS accusation may be (and despite Trump later claiming that his ISIS remarks were intended to be sarcastic) it would be foolish to assume that his followers are possessed of the discernment to distinguish between Dumb Donald's dark fantasy world and the one in which sane, reasonable people live.
07/14/2016

Lawdamighty, it's hot. It's hot here, it's hot there, it's hot everywhere it seems. Santa Fe has already been through a period of 90-plus temperatures last month—a week to ten days of that kind of heat is pretty typical in any given year—but now the heat is on once again. It's been 90-ish for the past week and it seems that it will remain as such for another week or so. This in itself is rather exceptional but in concert with this heat wave the summer monsoonal rains have thus far failed to materialize. Last year the afternoon rainstorms began cranking up right on schedule at the beginning of July but as I look out the windows of the blessedly cool Inky Aerie this blazing afternoon there is literally not a cloud in sight. The Weather.com app on my iPhone reports the current humidity at 5%. Impressively desiccative.
07/08/2016

  A thousand pardons are begged of you, Gentle Reader(s), for the regrettable paucity of postage as of late. The usual distractions of travel, beisbol, work, beisbol and more travel have been in play with the addition of summertime bicycular activities, the inevitable result being that time spent wracking of the brain and pounding of the keys has suffered. Back in early June I was getting ready to add my two centimes worth of sentiment regarding the passing of the great Muhammad Ali when events such as the horrific massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando and the mind boggling Brexit vote across the pond came crashing down. Next thing you know you're wallowing about in a bewildering swampy slosh of WTFs?? and OMGs!! for which there are no answers and no easy explanations. A bit overwhelming. I attended the Orlando vigil on the Santa Fe Plaza on Monday the 13th, presided over by our estimable Mayor Javier Gonzales and I felt that it did some good. It was a display of solidarity and community in the face of hate and intolerance—a display only, perhaps, but better than doing nothing at all.
06/08/2016

Welcome, Gentle Reader(s), to this latest installment of the standard-bearing blogization of all subterranean Galisteo Street DJ gigs, Matador Playlist. Ask for it by name, accept no substitute. As I apply digits to keyboard to document this latest subsurface scrum I am still recovering from the digital meltdown that I had long feared. Your Humble Narrator employs the use of a number of devices in his various capacities as DJ, art world flunky, frequent traveler, and general participant in 21st century intrawebby lifeways. These include an iPhone, an iPod Touch, an iPad, and three (!) MacBooks. A bit boggling, I know, but it seems to work—generally speaking. The 'generally' portion of that statement came into play when I cranked up MacBook #2—my Matador computer—to stitch together the outline of a playlist for last Thursday night. Upon crankup I was notified that software updates were available for MacBook #2 so I proceeded to install these before digging into my extensive music catalog. MacBook #2 has been showing its age for a while now (about 7 years old, approximately—aeons in computer years) but its workload consists of nothing more than downloading, storing and playing music files—not a lot to ask of any reasonably healthy computational device. Be that as it may...
05/31/2016

Your Humble Narrator has finally returned home to Santa Fe after an extended sojourn in the magical and misbegotten town of his birth, New Orleans of Louisiana. It was a productive trip for which the skyways were forsaken for the byways—specifically, an exhausting 17-hour drive, the primary feature of which was the state of Texas, which, through some woeful miscalculation or oversight, has been rudely placed betwixt and between the states of my procreation and primary residence. Be that as it may, one highlight of my time in New Orleans was a long-considered but oft-delayed pilgrimage to the gravesite of one of my primary musical heroes, Cecil Ingram Connor III, better known as Gram Parsons.
05/18/2016

Welcome back, Gentle Reader(s) to this humble compendium of verbal effluvia that flows, in fits and starts, from the thinky thing what resides betwixt and between the earholes of Your Humble Narrator. The Ides of May are nigh upon us and it has been a while since my last riposte, what with preparation for travel, travel, and recombobulation from travel taking up an exceptional portion of YHN’s time and attention. I have grabbed this brief moment to consider an opposing pair of epochal events that are marking 2016 as being a year of Exceptional Portent (in both the ominous and auspicious meanings of the term).   On the auspicious end of the spectrum, the Cubs of Chicago have begun the season with an epic tear that, at the time of this writing, finds them playing .806 beisbol, having emerged victorious from 25 of their initial 31 contests. It is a truly amazing situation the equivalent of which has had not been seen in Major League Beisbol since 1984 (the Detroit Tigers, 26 and 4 through their first 30 games), or in the National League since 1977 (the LA Dodgers, with 24 wins through their first 30 games). This is after the shock of the Cubs losing their power hitting left fielder Kyle Schwarber after a season-ending knee injury in game three and with hitting ace/first baseman Anthony Rizzo batting only .282 (respectable, but nothing amazing). How, pray tell, can this be?