Hmmm?

https://harpers.org/archive/2026/06/getting-shilled-tony-price-music-industry/

Thankfully, once they’d gotten that bit of artiness out of their system, Simple Minds never returned to that style ever. Not that they got good or anything. I predict you’re not going to enjoy this discography run. I didn’t. The debut is the only one I really liked that much.

I gave up halfway through Delaney’s Stars in My Pocket… I found it tedious and dull, with the prose style bordering on unreadable.

5 hours? I would gladly watch the Joel biopic if it was half the length, but…

Now reading:

Audiobook - The Parable of the Talents - Octavia E. Butler - This book has surged in popularity in the past couple of years because it allegedly predicts the rise of Trump in 1998. Eh, not really. The President in this dystopian American 2032 is just a generic fundamentalist populist, more Ted Cruz than Trump. The novel is actually a sequel and concerns a the survival of a religious cult in a not quite post-apocalyptic, survivalist America that is being persecuted by the right-wing Christian government. The founder is supposed to have invented a new religion whole cloth based on the idea that “God is Change” and from the descriptions of the belief system, it seems she....uh, accidentally reinvented Taoism. How much of that Butler herself was aware or was borrowing second hand from her role model, Ursula Le Guinn (who was a literal Taoist), I don’t know.

Regular book - Rum Punch - Elmore Leonard - You probably know that Tarantino’s best film, Jackie Brown, was based on this (and so far it seems it was a faithful adaptation, aside from Jackie being Burke and white), but did you know that it’s a sequel? It was preceded by The Switch, in which Samuel Jackson & Robert De Niro kidnap a rich man’s wife, only they don’t realize that he’s planning on a divorce and doesn’t want her back. Which was also made into a movie, Ruthless People, but a ripped off one - the scriptwriter didn’t give Leonard any credit, but just stole the plot. The existence of Ruthless People killed the planned movie version of The Switch, which was to star Diane Keaton and Denis Farina. (Eventually they did do a version in 2013 entitled Life of Crime that no one paid attention to.) This tidbit does come up while the two crooks are watching the Bette Midler movie on TV. Anyway, this is typical Leonard, you know what to expect if you’ve read any one at random, but this one’s near the top of the heap in terms of quality. It’s not better or worse than the movie because the adaptation was so faithful to the source, which admittedly does spoil the surprise of one of the first chapters (you remember Chris Tucker in the trunk, yeah?). My only gripe (if it is one) is that I can’t read the dialogue without picturing the actors in the movie - I’m trying to read this book and keep getting Samuel Jackson’s voice in my head.