Lit City Blues

I woke up the day after Election Day last November and realized that I was in a country that I no longer understood. I mean, I did understand it-- I had a sinking feeling that whatever they did with Biden, the price of gas and groceries would be the undoing of whoever was in office and ultimately, that turned out to be right. I said then that I honestly didn't want to write about politics for a while, maybe ever again, and I stuck to that for as long as I could but then I woke up and found out that the Legislature in Des Moines was at it again. What is this new devilry you ask? Well, it's delightful let me tell you. The Legislature, in its wisdom, in a state that is grappling (as it always does) with brain drain and a workforce crisis, decided that it wanted to make it easier for people to discriminate against transgender individuals. As if transfolks don't have enough on their plate to begin, the state, in its wisdom, wants to make it easier for people to be shitty to them...

The real question that I am afraid to ask is this: does Garden State still hold up after all these years? Natalie Portman puts the headphones on Zach Braff and says "This song will change your life" and honestly, it does and you can't listen to this album and not think about Garden State . But at the same time, it's more than just Garden State . The Shins to me are like a time machine, an instant slice of life that was college.  Technically, this album is a new entry in the Albums2010 canon.  I went back and checked the archives - it turns out that while the Garden State Soundtrack did make the cut , I didn't go back and find this album at all. (There's a chance it made the cut of the lost entries between #68-#80. but those are lost forever in the wilds of cyberspace thanks to the Unfortunate Wordpress Experiment.) I think this is a great album, but what I found myself struggling with is how to describe this band. It sort of fits into a variety of genres and ...

I heard good things about Slow Horses on Apple TV, so started it was hooked by the end of the first episode and promptly devoured it. (I even finished up the latest season thanks to Apple TV's free weekend over New Year's.) The show is incredible. Gary Oldman will, at some point, add to his already large collection of awards for his portrayal of Jackson Lamb and if she hasn't been nominated for anything for her role as Diana Tavener, Kristin Scott Thomas is overdue and will get there eventually. All of that being said: I had never read any of the books, so I decided to change that. I picked up the latest in the series, not because I am opposed to starting at the beginning, but because I figured Apple TV was going to do an excellent job of adapting these things and I wanted to see what a book in the series that had yet to be adapted was like and Slough House fit the bill. (So far the show has adapted Slow Horses , Dead Lions , Real Tigers , and Spook Street .) Slough House ...