What I'm Up To, January '24

I want to do a monthly update post filling you in on where I am with various personal projects, including the ones you signed up to help me complete(!) This will hopefully be a regular check-in. Also, I vaguely mentioned ill health in various places and wanted to let people know that aside from a few recurring ailments - weird leg pains and so on - which I'm getting checked out, I'm considerably better than I was in December or early January.

Onto the projects!

POPULAR: The current hiatus isn't because the next song is by the Stereophonics, but that... isn't helping. In an extraordinary display of duty though I did dig into the Stereophonics' pre-"Dakota" career and you'll read my conclusions (such as they are) in the entry itself. 

You've also seen the first fruits of my "write about current No 1s" idea - obviously this can only be updated when the Great British Record Buying Sorry Streaming Public see fit to knock Noah Kahan off his perch, and he seems to be settling in a bit.

THE POLLS: Lots more activity here. The 2023 poll is coming to an end - I'm hoping to do a post on the last 8 or 16, depending when I have time for it. The playlists for the Black Pop History Month poll are up and I'll be promoting them again when I've got them in order. I think they're good, and I really hope I can find a way to keep this series of playlists going somehow even once the polls finish. And after that the end really is nigh. I'll also be doing the "Pollrunner's Parade", a list of the 100 or so discoveries I've personally made via the polls which have enriched my life the most these last 4 years.

OTHER MUSIC THINGS: I'm going to be joining in with Arron Wright's new project on Bluesky, #Let5D0It, which is very much along the same lines as #FearOfMu21c last year - everyone individually counts down 50 favourite singles and he adds all the votes up. If you want to join in the actual countdown doesn't start until March. This time we're doing the years 1954-1976, and I've been having a terrific time slaying sacred cows on my preparatory playlist (while stroking the flanks of others and garlanding them with wreaths). Might share that when I get it down to the last 100 or so (not easy).

OTHER OTHER THINGS: I have completed something I've been wanting to do for 36 years and actively putting off for 20, namely reading all 300 issues of Cerebus The Aardvark. The good news about this is that I've now read one of the genuine landmarks of the comics medium by the most technically gifted North American cartoonist of his era. (Not the "best") The bad news is that I feel like I need several showers, the back third of Cerebus being an extended series of morality plays and screeds on the theme of vampiric women leeching male creativity, an idea the comic's creator elevates to a cosmic principle. I'll be writing this stuff up on Freaky Trigger, though half the reviews are up as drafts on Goodreads now.

Once the Cerebus reviews are up I'm vaguely thinking of doing something about the Narnia books, if I can make it coalesce into a form I'm happy with.

In the real world I'm preparing my annual trip to New York and Boston for the Super Bowl - not to watch it, though I will be watching it, but to do advertising analysis for my main client.

This Patreon remains free, incidentally. But I am probably going to charge if I can get Popular going again. 

Have a lovely month,

Tom