01/28/2026

A brief hiatus, Gentle Reader(s), for Goth Night (every third Thursday) and a winter storm and Your Humble Narrator is back in the saddle at Ye Olde Matador Bar & Lounge for another inimitable evening of signature DJ Inky toonage. The second winter storm of the season—this one of intimidating strength and size—is bearing down on our little mountain town and Katia and I are hoping that the fevered anticipation of being snowed in for the weekend is inspiring folks to come out and lift a warming beverage before the fluffy stuff flies.
01/07/2026

A New Year. A new beginning. A moment for reflection, a moment for change, a moment for—dare I say it?—optimism? Optimism—imagine that! A commodity in dangerously short supply in cynical times such as these in which we live. Be that as it may, DJ Inky returned to the Matador to kick off 2026 and—Praise Be On Most High—beloved Katia has returned as well! If that ain't a good thang then I don't know what is.
11/23/2025

It was a relatively quiet evening at Ye Olde Matador Bar & Lounge this Thursday—a distinct contrast to the wild bacchanalia of  last week when the roof done got torn off the sucka. It just goes to show—you never know what you’re going to find when you walk in the door of a Thursday night. You might find it already chock-a-block with punters, the tequila shots and PBRs sloshing with abandon, or alternatively, there may be but one or two mopers, snoots deep in their phones over warm draft IPA pints. When Katia is behind the bar the Motörhead is usually cranking and I have to leap in there and keep the high energy vibe going right from the git go. For the moment, however, dearest Katia remains on injured reserve, recovering from surgery to repair a lingering ankle malady that went critical about two months ago. Word is she’s on the mend, but not quite fully bipedal just yet. All of us send out our best wishes to the dear girl for a speedy recovery and a timely return to the Mat. Get Well Soon, Katia!!
08/05/2025

It's Matador Playlist time once again, Gentle Reader(s), and I'm afraid I'm coming in a day late and a dollar short. It doesn't happen often but every once in a while it does indeed happen—we get a dud evening. Well, this past Thursday was one of those rare occasions. Perhaps it had to do with the mojo being off kilter because the lovely Katia had taken the evening off. The lovely Carla was there to fill in, which she does most capably, but there's something about the DJ Inky/Katia vibe that just has that special magic. The other factor was that a massive, slow moving storm parked itself over Santa Fe and everyone's cell phone went apeshit with emergency flooding alerts. It was indeed quite the biblical deluge and more than sufficient to discourage most folks from venturing out into the dark, rainy streets of a Thursday evening. Can't say as that I blame them. When it got around to midnight and the crowd was still decidedly sparse I decided to let discretion be the better part of valor and pack it in early. My abbreviated playlist appears below.
04/24/2025

At long last, Gentle Reader(s), it’s Matador Playlist time once again: The one, the only, the original, ask for it by name, accept no substitutes! Your Humble Narrator is back in the friendly confines of Ye Olde Matador Bar & Lounge and speaking of Friendly Confines, it is also opening day for Our National Pastime—the other beautiful game—so an auspicious occasion on multiple counts. Thanks to the mystical machinations and manipulations of the various entities involved, tonight’s game (Cubs vs. Diamondbacks) is blacked out here in New Mexico—a state with exactly ZERO teams in ANY major league sport—even though the game is being played 500 miles away in Phoenix, AZ. Go figure. The regular season got off to a rather irregular start for Your Humble Narrator, as the first two official games of the 2025 season (Cubs vs. Dodgers) were played in Tokyo. That’s Tokyo, Japan, not Tokyo, Indiana, so the fixtures took place in the approximate middle of the night on this side of the Pacific. My beloved Cubs dropped both games to the reigning Champs, but it’s a long season and they’ve got 160 games to try and bounce back. Fingers crossed.
01/06/2025

Happy New Year, Gentle Reader(s), and welcome to the first Matador Playlist of 2025. Rather extraordinary to consider that I have now been manning the DJ booth at Ye Olde Matador Bar & Lounge off and on for 18—count ‘em, EIGHTEEN—years! Boggles the old brainpan a bit, does it not? Of course that hasn’t been 18 continuous years as there has been a couple of flies in the ointment along the way (that global pandemic thing, which you might recall, and a significant health glitch or two), but Cesar and Francisco and myself have never strayed far from one another and we remain committed as amigos, compatriots in business, music and even in film. Amazing.
11/01/2024

I know, I know. I said that the more frequently I do these playlists the easier and faster it becomes to get the YouTube videos all lined up and posted, etc etc, and now it’s been weeks—several weeks—since my last Matador set list went online! That’s, like, the equivalent of at least a year in intrawebby/election year/news cycle time! Shameful, I admit, but there are reasons for that. Let’s call them excuses.
09/17/2024

With Santa Fe Fiestas and its attendant mayhem now safely in the rear view mirror, it was back to bidness at Ye Olde Matador Bar & Lounge. Bartender Katia was back from the DL, none the worse for her unfortunate close encounter of the arachnid kind, and Big Dom kept his steady eye on everything from the door. This is the traditional Matador format—a tight three-person crew running the show, keeping a positive vibe in effect, backing one another up. Case in point: Around mid-evening a diminutive young lady entered the bar decked out in notably unseasonable attire. Though it was still 70-ish outside she wore a heavy winter coat, a knit hat, dark glasses and a black turtle neck sweater pulled up to completely cover the lower part of her face. She ordered a draft beer from Katia and then began to wander around in the nether regions of the bar, eventually disappearing into one of the bathrooms. Noting this from my DJ post, I began to get a bit curious when, after 15 minutes, she was still in there. I alerted Katia that something odd was afoot, she alerted Dom, Dom went to investigate and, after cueing up several songs, I went to cover the door. Dom got everything sorted and the mysterious diminutive individual emerged from the bathroom, finished her beer and disappeared into the streets of a Thursday night. Interesting.  No harm/no foul.
06/15/2020

What a couple of weeks it has been, Gentle Reader(s), since the last DJ Inky playlist. In Santa Fe and in cities and towns all over the world the people—and I mean EVERY kind of people we got—have taken to the streets and they continue to do so on a daily basis, keeping the momentum going and the outrage over the killing of George Floyd alive. There has been a lot of speculation in the press regarding the extraordinary energy of this movement, about what has made the response to this tragedy different from the many that have preceded it. It's hard to know with certainty, but my take is that we have arrived at a crossroads of a sort, precipitated by a unique combination of circumstances. The pressure built up from months of coronavirus quarantine (and the Orange Goblin's disastrously bungled response to the pandemic), the heightened political environment of a momentously significant election year, the cumulative rage from yet another brutal video of a black man dying senselessly on the street, and the Orange Goblin administration's relentless assault on democracy and decency have all come together at this moment. Maybe, just maybe, enough is finally enough.
06/03/2020

Gentle Reader(s), I greet you once again from Lockdown atop Chango Hill in La Ciudad Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis. Greetings & peace.   It's a bit hard to comprehend the degree to which an already fraught and anxious situation has become exponentially more so over the course of just one week. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis has once again pushed the inequities and violence of America against people of color to the forefront of the national conversation (if there actually is anything resembling a 'national conversation' these days) and protestors have once again taken to the streets to exercise their civic right—their civic duty—to stand up and speak out. In the unprecedented context of a global pandemic, months of quarantine, a starkly divided country, and an election year the murder of yet another unarmed black man in plain view of the world might just prove to be the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. The murder of George Floyd comes hard on the heels of the revelations regarding the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbrey in Brunswick, Georgia, back in February and it seems that across the country, and across the world, people in ever greater numbers are turning out to make it clear that enough is enough is enough. Again.