Hey y’all,

Here’s some ear and eye candy I’ve enjoyed in the first half of this year: 

1. Movies I actually went out of my way to see in the theater (good calls): Black Panther and Phantom Thread.
    
2. TV: Parts Unknown, The Good Place, Detectorists, Atlanta, Grand Designs, and Billions.
    
3. Everything directed by Taika Waititi: What We Do In the Shadows, Hunt for The Wilderpeople, Boy, and heck, I don’t even like comic book movies and I enjoyed Thor: Ragnarok.
    
4. Other movies I liked: Faces Places, Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, The Zen Diaries of Gary Shandling, and Coco.
    
5. Comedy: Ali Wong’s Netflix specials Baby Cobra and Hard Knock Wife, Nacho Libre (I know I know), and the first hour of Girls Trip.
    
6. My record of the year so far: Parquet Courts’ Wide Awake! Can’t stop listening.
    
7. Favorite morning/writing music: harpist Mary Lattimore’s dreamy album, Hundreds of Days.
    
8. Classical: KMFA, Jonny Greenwood’s score for Phantom Thread, the string quartets of Debussy and Ravel, and the Balanescu Quartet’s Possessed.
    
9. Reissues: the 50th anniversary remix of Sgt. Pepper’s and the deluxe edition of Purple Rain. (The B-sides are better than most singles from other artists.)
    
10. Favorite songs: my 2018 playlist on Spotify.