Lit City Blues

 So, I'm putting together a playlist on Spotify at the moment and I've been fiddling with it over the course of the past few days. In general, there's no overall theme, just- and I say this reluctantly because I'm old and don't want to seem overly cringe about this- real, solid bangers (as the youth say, or so I'm told.) I just wanted songs from all over my personal timeline of music that just rocked my face off and you could get a good groove onto. When it comes to playlist construction, I am criminally guilty of using some of the same songs multiple times over and over again- it's partially why I try, now and again, to do deep dives into random things on Spotify just to futz with my algorithm a bit. (Given this lengthy Stereogum article on Paul McCartney , I think a deep dive on Macca might be in order, but that's another post.) So this playlist (the current year playlist, helpfully titled 2022 Jams) features some songs I've been grooving to a lot

It's been hard lately.  I can't quite put my finger on why. Churchill liked to call such periods of melancholy and depression his 'black dog' but I'm not sure I'd call this melancholy or depression. Maybe some people can still stay in bed for days on end and do nothing and embrace the blackness for a while- Lord knows, that sounds tempting enough some days- just a day to sit and do nothing. Whether it's binge a television show that's not a cartoon or just staring at a blank wall for hours on end and being in your own head for a little bit, that sounds nice right now. It sounds very nice indeed. The world doesn't help. We're cracking down- I'm sure everyone is- belts are tightening, but the margins these days are fucking thin. One random Black Swan event and I don't know what we'd do. I'm sure we would do what people do in such times, which is 'figure it out and survive and scrape' somehow, but I feel like it should be jus

Like most bibliophiles, I am guilty of accumulating books that sit on my bookshelves for years before I actually get around to picking up and reading them. Sadly, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee was one of those books. I had taken a run at it once before but didn't get very far- whether because it was frankly too damn depressing (it is) or because I had gotten bored, I can't remember- but I sat down and actually read the thing cover to cover this time. For all the current shouting about CRT and things like the 1619 Project (which I haven't read), no one wants to talk about the inescapable fact of life in contemporary America: many of us (a lot of us white, yes, but many of us in general) are profoundly ignorant about our own history. Too many Americans found out about the Tulsa Race Massacre from a superhero show on HBO. Personally, I had no idea about the Great Sioux Uprising or the 38 Lakota, or the expulsion of the Lakota from Minnesota until I moved to Mankato. We do to