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Reading some recent fiction: Russell Smith's Self Care and Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. After this, a swing through Southern literature: Faulkner's The Wild Palms and O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find.

Just saw Mike Murley with Reg Schwager & Neil Swainson at Hirut. Very nice trio work (guitar instead of piano). Will likely go tomorrow evening as well.

True, and Towner was 85.

What a rough week for guitarists! First Ralph Towner and now Ebo Taylor! https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/feb/09/ebo-taylor-ghanaian-highlife-pioneer-dies-age-90 I don't believe I heard either of these titans live, but they left so many great albums to listen to this week and next...

Chester Himes has a whole series of detective novels, starting with A Rage in Harlem.

It sounds like the Henderson will be a 2 CD release. This is certainly intriguing: This is part of Resonance's debut launch of releases from Joe Segal's Jazz Showcase archives, marking the beginning of what will hopefully be a long line of incredible releases from the club's archives. Here's hoping that the material from Jazz Showcase sells well enough to keep bringing out these releases!

Saw this again on the big screen a couple of months back. Great stuff. One of my very favorite Brooks's films.

I received as a present the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (on cassette no less!). The first box set I bought for myself was probably Thelonious Monk Complete Riverside Recordings.

Saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood last night. In 70 mm! I liked it quite a bit with a few reservations along the way, as is kind of par for the course with Q. I thought his portrayal of Bruce Lee was absurd and quite offensive, and it wasn't required to serve the storyline.

On Sat. I saw a late Naruse film called Daughters, Wives and a Mother, which I thought was very interesting. Today I managed to get out (between shifts of shovelling snow) and saw One Battle After Another. I didn't care for this at all, for multiple reasons, which I'd rather not get into now. Assuming the city is moving and not shut down, I'm planning on seeing Belle du Jour on Tues. TIFF is hosting a Bunuel retrospective, in Jan/Feb, though this screening isn't part of it. I'll see about getting to a few of them, but TIFF actually makes it quite hard for non-members to get tickets to the classics. And planning seeing Galaxy Quest on Wed, which will be fun!

About a foot or more of snow and the drifts are up to my knees. I've shovelled twice and you can barely tell. It's still coming down hard, so it's definitely going to be work from home tomorrow...

Just saw that the Bad Plus is doing a farewell tour where they are exploring the music of Keith Jarrett. They have one Toronto date in early March up in North York. I don't think there any other Canadian dates, though there is a Montreal gig with their current line-up (not the special guests). I'm not sure I would have gone but then I heard they were adding Chris Potter and Craig Taborn to the mix, and I thought that would be worth checking out. This super group is playing Oakland, Los Angeles and a lot of European dates, but not as many US dates as I would have expected.

Should be able to get out to see Mike Murley in a week or two at Hirut. I am excited to find out that Gary Smulyan is coming back to The Rex in mid Feb., so I'll try to catch one night for sure and possibly a second.

This looks like something I would order, though probably the digital version. It isn't clear if the liner notes would come with the digital download, though I would hope they would.

Just saw Lynch's Mulholland Drive for the first time. What a mind-bender that is. I'm still trying to get my head around what actually happened and what was a dream and/or some parallel universe formed when some event happened one way in one universe and the reverse happened in the other.