The Redmond Technology Station’s magnificent pedestrian & bike bridge; the chord progression to Desmond Dekker’s “007 (Shanty Town)”; the Sightline Institute on Seattle’s housing plan fail.

I’m All Lost in…

The 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#29

1) Seattle’s regional transit agency (where I work) opened the first installment of its second light rail line on Saturday: a 6.6-mile, eight-station, trains-every-10-minutes service expansion.

More fantastical: We opened it in the suburbs across Lake Washington; the line will eventually cross the I-90 floating bridge and connect to our existing 1 Line in Seattle late next year.

My job at Sound Transit is speech writer, so I got to script a lot of exciting stuff for Saturday’s ribbon cutting:

It’s hard not to use the word historic today as we open service that will mark a before-and-after moment for residents here on the Eastside of Lake Washington. 

Starting today, if you don’t want to deal with traffic and parking or spending your paycheck on more and more gas just to get from one neighborhood to another… to get to work, to get to your doctor’s appointment… you now have an easy, reliable, inexpensive option: Link light rail’s new 2 Line. 

Starting today, Bellevue and Redmond are connected in ways they’ve never been before: to jobs and services, and all our magnificent regional trails. 

To be honest though, I was more excited about writing the remarks for the ribbon cutting we did earlier in the week, on Monday, for the Redmond Technology Station’s elegant pedestrian/bike bridge that we also opened as part of the new Line.

I look forward to joining you this Saturday when 2 Line light rail trains officially begin to roll.

But debuting the Redmond Technology Station bridge today only heightens my excitement.

It puts Saturday in context: New trains cannot transform this region without the critical, accompanying investments that make it easy and safe for more people to get on board.

This capacious 1,100-foot bridge spans the coagulated SR 520 highway, integrating the Microsoft campus, the surrounding neighborhoods, bike parking stalls, regional bike paths, and plenty of bus connections (King County Metro’s Rapid Ride B Line, the Microsoft Connector Shuttle, and Sound Transit’s own 542, 545, 550, and 554 buses) all with the new train Station.

Featuring flowing bike lanes of its own (you can see those in the fifth picture below), garden starts, multiple pedestrian access points, bioswale rain features, wooden benches you’d more likely find in a cozy cabin, and a roof that looks like a giant kite in flight, this magnificent bridge is an urbanist rendering come to life.

The better pictures here, like this one, were taken by my pro photographer pal Glenn.

As much as our light rail trains are going to transform Seattle’s Microsoft suburbs (as much as one can transform a region of upscale french-fry breweries and Tesla dealerships), the ped bridge may be the bigger game changer.

It’s already a good scene: the setting for an airy stroll over 520’s hushed traffic that links Microsoft’s east and west campuses and funnels workers, pedestrians, and bikers to the light the rail station and convenient bus bays.

It also leads to the plazas, stores, and theater seating that are tucked up against Microsoft HQ—all open to the public. And this leads me to consider the bigger potential: Add a Saturday farmers’ market, daily pop-ups, food trucks, painters at their easels, buskers, info booths for local non-profits and suddenly we’re talking about a Highline of our own.

Microsoft should inaugurate it’s new status as a public destination spot by booking Taylor Swift to play a free outdoor concert on the bridge (and Sound Transit could run free trains to the show.)

2) Regular readers of this weekly roundup will have noticed that I’ve been brushing up my piano set lately, and that many of my recent aesthetic highs have come from going back to these tunes.

That’s definitely the case this week as I re-learned a tune from my 1960s ska subset: Desmond Dekker & the Aces’ two-minute—thirty-second burst of Highlife-adjacent pop, “007 (Shanty Town).”

It’s the chord progression sliding from the 4 chord to the 7 chord to the 1 chord underneath the lyrics And now rude boys a go wail/cause them out of jail/ rude boys cannot fail/ cause them must get bail that moves me so.

Dekker has an Elysian Fields voice, and the way he leans into each long-L rhyme catches your ear. But it’s the mix of inverted left hand chords with the sweet-spot notes in the right hand melody that tug at your heartstrings.

The 4 (tension and anticipation)/ 7 (leading back home)/ 1 (home) chord progression is certainly a standard bit of human condition magic. However, it’s Dekker’s melodic sleight—holding the same note, a D flat, above the 4 and the 7 chords (a D flat major chord and a G diminished chord here) that makes the passage so poignant.

More magic: that D flat note in Dekker’s longing melody line matches the top note in both chords he’s singing over—the 4 is an inverted D flat Major chord (F/A flat/ D flat) while the 7, the G diminished chord, keeps the notes in their standard order (G / B flat/ the D flat again). Meanwhile, that Major scale diminished chord adds more gorgeous tension because it includes the Devil’s flatted fifth, in this instance the G six semitones up to that same D flat.

Making the D flat ring out by having the melody echo it an octave up adds brightness to the Satanic tension foreshadowing the blissful resolution that’s next when Dekker drops back to the 1 chord, an A flat Major chord (the song is in A flat major.) And Dekker inverts this chord too: E flat/ A flat/ C. Perfect, because this is when he finally lets go of the D flat in the melody line, dropping a half step to that C. This move not only echoes the half-step drop from the 7 chord back home to the 1, but it replays the repeated D flat conceit by capping the C at the top of the inverted A flat chord with a C note an octave above in the melody.

And a final bit of magic. Some dance theory:

3) Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell is a single-family zone protectionist. As Erica and I reported on PubliCola in mid-March when he released his proposed Comp Plan—the document that governs city housing and city zoning—his reluctant interpretation of a state density mandate to allow apartments in the 75% of Seattle where they’ve traditionally been proscribed was a predictable reflection of his provincial politics.

(Back in January, I literally predicted the specifics of his obstructionist approach; and then, after the plan was released, Erica had the receipts, showing how Harrell took a red pen to his planning department’s original pro-density draft.)

However, the sharpest report on Harrell’s defining and embarrassing planning document comes to us from Seattle’s pro-city think tank, the Sightline Institute.

Last week, in their trademark straight forward prose, Sightline published a piece titled “Seattle Deserves a Better Comp Plan” calling for “abundant housing.” Written by Sightline’s urbanist smarty Dan Bertolet, the 3,500-word piece walks through the specific reasons why the mayor’s proposal is a fail (anemic targets for new housing, prohibitive building envelope regulations that squash the ability to actually build multi-family housing, and gross parking requirements. )

Wonderfully, Bertolet couples his critique with a series of detailed recommendations for Yes-in-My-Backyard fixes, such as adjusting zoning rules to allow six-unit stacked flats. Bertolet also seconds an idea I proposed in February—funded inclusionary zoning, FIZ (!)

There’s a lot of nerdy stuff here, including discussions about Floor Area Ratios—1.6 FAR versus 0.9. But stick with it: the best part of the report critiques Seattle’s longstanding “strategy of confinement,” as Sightline goes all in on exactly what Seattle’s boring neighborhoods need: more apartments.

Seattle’s apartment zoning is confined to a small fraction (about 13 percent) of its residential land, located almost entirely in designated urban centers and villages and along arterial streets. Seattle’s booming growth and robust job creation has rendered that 30-year-old strategy of confinement insufficient for meeting the city’s housing needs. Furthermore, the city’s own study concluded this “urban village” strategy has exacerbated racial segregation and inequity.

Seattle’s plan can expand opportunities for apartments and condos in multiple contexts and scales by allowing: Highrise towers throughout all regional centers and within a quarter-mile of all light rail stations outside regional centers; Eight stories throughout all urban centers; and Six stories within a quarter-mile of all frequent transit stops, schools, parks, libraries, and community centers.

The city can further expand apartment choices by designating more neighborhood centers and making them larger. The draft plan states that in these centers, “residential and mixed-use buildings of four to six stories would be appropriate.”

These two changes would be especially beneficial for creating opportunities for apartments located away from dangerous, polluted, and noisy arterial roads, where current apartment zoning is concentrated. Plentiful apartment zoning also supports the development of subsidized affordable housing, because its most common form is midrise apartment buildings.

An earlier proposal identified some 48 potential  neighborhood centers, but only 24 made their way into the draft plan officially released last month after Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office scaled back changes. Also, the proposed size for neighborhood centers is only an 800-foot radius, which is just a few blocks. A quarter-mile radius would allow the critical mass for a functional center.

Playing “Come on Eileen” on piano; Reading Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; the War on Theater.

I’m All Lost in…

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#28

1) Widely considered a hokey song—maybe Generation X’s equivalent of the Baby Boomers’ (Bye-bye Miss) American Pie, Dexys Midnight Runners’ Come on Eileen, originally a smart piece of pop from the soul side of the U.K.’s New Wave epoch, has been reduced over the years to a singalong cliché.

However, hearing it on the car radio a few years ago corrected the record for me. (I heard it while driving in suburban D.C., which was perfect because that’s where I grew up and originally heard the song as a kid.) At first I was simply besotted with nostalgia (the song came out when I was 15), but soon enough, the crafty songwriting captivated me.

It also struck me that it might be the perfect song to play on piano. This was back in 2021 when, frustrated with my slow progress learning keyboard, I committed myself to figuring out a song a month as a way to force the issue. Come on Eileen, with its steady, pulsing bass line and it’s shifting, bouncy melody lines, seemed like it would push my beginner’s skills while also being doable, thanks to its pop clarity.

If you’re at all interested: I did write a 10,000-word essay about my 2021 piano set where I expatiate about Come on Eileen and its position as the neo-soul manifesto of the anti-Thatcher early 1980s.

This week, worried that two-and-a-half years later, I had forgotten Come on Eileen, I set out to see if could still play this sweet song. After a day of tentatively feeling my way through, starting with the memorable sequence of lovely chords in the catchy intro, I locked it down again. I’ve been lovingly frolicking away at it ever since, all week, first thing when I walk into my apartment.

I must say, the concoction of A/B/F# triplets that modulate the song from the chorus back to the verse (D major back to C major) defines early ‘80s New Wave phrasing. I’ve made that line—repeated as an addicting loop—into an extended grand finale.

On a separate musical adventure from this week: I’ve been thinking a lot about the Aeolian mode, which gave us the signature mid-1960s garage rock riff; think (I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone. My obsession over this teenaged electric guitar progression found its way into a poem I’m working on right now:

I hope Leonard Bernstein’s older daughter said to her condescending dad:/ This is clever music, better than yours, nearly as good as Ravi Shankar’s.

2) After reading Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (and his Open City) and also Damlare Kuku’s Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad, my search for the great Lagos novel continues.

Both my longtime friend Dallas, a bookworm and high school English professor, and the young autodidact barista at the coffee shop on my block (who reports she read it in high school) recommended Americanah by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’m now 150 pages into this near-600-page book.

It’s a page-turner so far as the main character, Nigerian ex-pat Princeton college student, Ifemelu, settles in to a salon to get her hair braided (a train ride away in immigrant-friendly, working class Trenton) and passes her time in the chair daydreaming back on her life story.

So far, her coming-of-age story is defined by her mom’s spooky religious fervor (a vision appearing on a stove burner tells her to change churches because her current priest attends “nightly demonic meetings under the sea”), her father’s disappointments and failures, her besty aunt’s friendly chaos, her first romantic love (she calls her boyfriend, “Ceiling” because the first time she lets him take off her bra and they have a heated make out session, she told him, “my eyes were open, but I did not see the ceiling…”), and most of all her attentiveness to class and caste. Having to get her hair braided in Trenton—”It was unreasonable to expect a braiding salon in Princeton—the few black locals she had seen were so light-skinned and lank-haired she could not imagine them wearing braids—and yet as she was waiting at Princeton Junction station for the train, on an afternoon ablaze with heat, she wondered why there was no place where she could braid her hair…”—establishes Ifemelu’s, and the novel’s class conscious narrative right away.

Adichie is a patient, earnest writer who can make you feel the dust storms and the air conditioning, make you smell the vanilla baking in the oven in her boyfriend’s mom’s fancy kitchen (while “her own mother did not bake, their oven housed cockroaches”), and revel along with the ingenuous high school boys: “After Kayode came back from a trip to Switzerland with his parents, Emenike had bent down to caress Kayode’s shoes saying ‘I want to touch them because they have touched snow.’”

It’s a gentle story so far, but with foreboding currents stirring below the surface:

There was something different about her. Ifemelu had noticed it right away at the airport, her roughly braided hair, her ears bereft of earrings, her quick casual hug, as if it had been weeks rather than years since they had last seen each other.

“I’m supposed to be with my books now,” Aunty Uju said, eyes focused on the road. “You know my exam is coming.”

Ifemelu had not known that there was yet another exam; she had thought Aunty Uju was waiting for a result. But she said, “Yes, I know.”

Their silence was full of stones. Ifemelu felt like apologizing, although she was not quite sure what she would be apologizing for. Perhaps Aunty Uju regretted her presence, now that she was here, in Aunty Uju’s wheezing car.

Aunty Uju’s cell phone rang. “Yes, this is Uju.” She pronounced it you-joo instead of oo-joo.

“Is that how you pronounce your name now?" Ifemelu asked afterwards.

“It’s what they call me.”

3) With all the ominous news this week (the police versus the anti-Israel campus protests, the billions of dollars pouring into AI, the naked antisemitism, and Trump looming despite his current 34-felony-count hush money/falsifying records/campaign finance criminal trial), the article that actually distills our apparent and inexorable descent into brute fascism was an essay in Saturday’s New York Times called “What Began as a War on Theater Won’t End There.”

Documenting several instances of recent censorship, here’s the news-driven lead:

Productions of plays in America’s high schools have been increasingly under attack. In 2023, Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” was rejected in Tennessee (since it deals with adultery); “August: Osage County,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Tracy Letts, was canceled in Iowa after rehearsals had begun (the community was deemed not ready for it); and in Kansas, students were not even allowed to study, let alone stage, “The Laramie Project,” a play by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project about the murder of a gay student, Matthew Shepard.

It should come as no surprise, then, that in the Educational Theater Association’s most recent survey, 85 percent of American theater teachers expressed concern about censorship. Even Shakespeare is at risk: In Florida, new laws led to the restriction of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to grades 10 through 12 and “Romeo and Juliet” could not be taught in full to avoid falling afoul of legislation targeting “sexual conduct.”

The essay, written by Columbia Shakespeare professor James Shapiro, positions this current press of censorship in the context of the right’s historic aversion to theater and arts.

First, Shapiro’s history lesson recounts the populist success of the Federal Theater Project (funded by Congress as part of F.D.R.’s Works Progress Administration legislation in the mid-1930s). Up through 1939, with an enthusiastic reception, the project brought theater to the masses. Most notably, the program staged a version of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here in 18 U.S. cities, ultimately playing to 370,000 people. Lewis’ novel depicts the rise of a fascist U.S. president, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrup; I told you this essay was on point.

Shapiro goes on to detail Congress’ reactionary backlash to the Federal Theater Project. A nascent version of the House Un-American Activities Committee, smelling a communist agenda, shut the program down.

The program’s popularity contributed to its undoing. Many of those in Congress who had voted to fund the Federal Theater became frightened by its reach and impact, its interracial casting, its challenge to the status quo — frightened, too, perhaps, by the prospect of Americans across racial, economic and political divides sitting cheek by jowl in packed playhouses.

Three years after the creation of the Federal Theater, Congress authorized the establishment of what would become the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Martin Dies of Texas. It was to supposed to spend seven months investigating the rise of Nazism, fascism and communism in America and submit a report. The ambitious Mr. Dies, desperate to have his committee’s life extended, instead focused much of his attention on a more vulnerable target: the Federal Theater, accusing it of disseminating offensive and communistic and therefore un-American values. In the course of waging and winning this battle, he assembled a right-wing playbook so pervasive that it now seems timeless. He succeeded wildly: All Federal Theater productions were abruptly terminated in 1939

Shapiro concludes by turning this history into a parable about today’s repressive right, arguing that HUAC and McCarthy-era paranoia begat Trumpism.

It’s hard to disagree with his conclusion, particularly as a former high school theater kid who blossomed in the drama set. I played the rebellious deacon in my high school’s production of Mass Appeal —I wore a Greenpeace t-shirt as my costume. This was around the same time Come on Eileen was on the pop charts.

Practicing “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me” on piano again; Damilare Kuku’s short stories; Dubstation at the Substation.

I’m All Lost in…

The 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#27

1) Back in October, when I wrote the first installment of this now-regular roundup, one of the obsessions on the list was practicing Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ late-1962 hit “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me.” I say “late“ 1962 because the song (as Robinson has openly acknowledged) was lifted from Sam Cooke’s early-1962 hit “Bring It on Home to Me,” which explains my path back to this original obsession.

Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me” came up on one of my playlists this week and, for a minute, I thought I was listening to “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me.” Do I still know how to play that on piano? I thought in a panic, remembering how much time I’d spent working it out last Fall when I fell in love with playing every crushed cluster.

It took about a day to piece it back together from the sheet music. Particularly, I had to re-learn the ascending phrase that sets the chorus in motion after “you treat me badly” (in the first verse), “you do me wrong now” (in the second verse), and “I want to split now” (in the third verse); the four slightly different “You’ve really got a hold on me” melody lines in the chorus itself; and the cascading heavy-on-the-black-keys chords during the dramatic break before rolling out the words “tighter” on the piano keys.

Once I got the song back, I couldn’t stop playing it.

Smokey Robinson & the Miracles perform “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” live at the Apollo Theater in 1963 (and segue into “Bring It on Home to Me.”)

All week, first thing, every morning, I’d run through “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” several times, still loving the crushed clusters, but also with a new appreciation for: the descending bass line under the sad-sack intro; the low C# in the left hand with (three-octaves up on the right hand) an A/C#/F# blues chord that calls out “Baby!;” and the cool-kid syncopation on the words “and all I want you to do.”

2) I have been searching for the great Lagos novel;Teju Cole’s thoughtful Every Day is for Thief (my review is here) wasn’t grand enough.

I’d hoped Nigerian Nollywood movie maker, actress (that’s how she describes herself) and creative artist, Damilare Kuku was en route to it with her 2021 short story collection, Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad, which is just now being published in the U.S.

And while it is an addicting collection of reverse-rom-com tales (the affairs do not work out here), the stories felt more like binge-era-TV pilot episodes than literature.

This might not be the classic I’m looking for, but indeed, I did binge. This is a flip, fast-paced book; I read all 12, neatly crafted, 20-page stories (which often experiment with narrative POV, including rotating narrators and even some Bright Lights, Big City second person) in a few delightful sittings this week.

Certainly, Kuku’s candid, mostly female narrators—no-nonsense entrepreneurial strivers who fall for good looking lover boys with rizz and fatal flaws—convey the tragicomic condition of life in Lagos for women caught up (along with their guardian angel, best girlfriends) in the go-go capitalist patriarchy that fetishizes them as both subservient wives and party girls.

Set against Lagos’ backdrop of first-time apartments and lush compounds, clubs, scandalous texts, social media melodrama, ubers and public transit, nepotism, hustles, corruption, starter jobs and start ups, Kuku’s city stories focus on wary, posturing characters whose inner monologues ruminate about class, raunchy sex, tragic pasts, toxic family dynamics, love, and lousy men (even the sensitive ones.)

The breezy, pop culture tone and rushed, tidy finales interrupt Kuku’s frequent literary and philosophical turns, so I’m hesitant to recommend it. But, admittedly, I’m recommending it.

3) It might just be that I like the clarity of the bus route: Catch the #8 at the northeast corner of Miller park in my canopied, mixed-use commercial/multifamily Capitol Hill neighborhood; head downhill on Denny Way and transfer at the bus top on the southern cusp of the South Lake Union tech district; take the #40 north across the water, through Fremont’s jumble of shops and bars, and then west into lower Ballard along nondescript Leary Way.

Or it might just be that it was the good-mood hour early on Saturday evening. Either way, this route (and the I’m-in-London-circa-1898-illusion-that-I-live-in-a-city every time I transfer at that South Lake Union bus stop among the tall buildings and twilight crowds) takes me straight to my new go-to music venue, the Ballard Substation.

The Substation’s 4/13/24 “dubstation” show, featuring distorted bass, distorted time, and echoing computer beats.

Located across an absent-minded street from actual electric utility infrastructure—the Substation is a converted industrial space around the corner from a small cluster of bars that’s otherwise a mile from any other nightlife.

As roomy (and as spare) as an airplane hangar, the Substation hosts DJs who take the stage with their laptops, patch cords, turntables, digital EQ boards, and analog mixers to loop beats and distort bass lines and time. At a recent show, a video camera projected live footage of the DJs’ magic-trick hands onto a big screen stage left.

Also expect a friendly food truck-guy selling beef and veggie hotdogs on the worn sidewalk out front, a chatty doorman reading a fat sci-fi novel, a low pressure merch table (mostly with an array of free stickers), and Lord of the Rings and Dune 20-somethings digging the electronic sounds.

There’s a slightly hipper, though equally ragtag crowd for live looping DJs on Capitol Hill at Vermillion’s Soulelectro on the second Friday of every month. Annie and Charles and I often dance our rear ends off there; it was Annie and I this past Friday.

But I still found myself hopping on the #8 to the #40 to Ballard’s Substation the very next night.

The Aladdin Gyro-Cery; the Jam’s 4th album; Corvus & Co.’s vegan stir fry

I’m All Lost in… the three things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#26 (half a year of minor obsessions)

1. Aladdin Gyro-Cery, the late night kebab, shawarma, rice-platter, mezze-appetizer, and Mediterranean-salad gyro shop—open until 2 am, and 2:30 on the weekends— is always crowded with cohorts of students bunched around one of the many booths and tables spread across the capacious, bright white linoleum layout. I keep landing here to get their delicious and sloppy vegan foule and olive oil pita pocket sandwich.

I take it as a good sign (in this student strip plentiful with tasty cheap-eats options) that there’s invariably a long line at the hectic front counter where the alert staff takes orders as kitchen workers yell out numbers and place your food on red plastic trays. Rest assured, the line moves quickly and lends itself to late night conversations, struck up among hungry, Existential strangers.

The one time they were out of the foule (a traditional Ethiopian comfort food made from mashed fava beans, Berbere spice, garlic, and cumin), I happily went with their Fried Veggie Sandwich, a warm, fluffy pita pocket jammed with tahini-doused roasted cauliflower and fresh lettuce falling out the sides.

I headed straight for my latest gyro-cery fix last Friday night after I watched pop star Fatoumata Diawara, dressed up like Osiris, shred her electric guitar on stage at the nearby Neptune Theater.

Also nearby, the witchcraft bookstore and the light rail station.

2) This week, I’ve been revisiting a 1979 album on repeat: Setting Sons, an ambitious power pop melodrama by the London-centric Mod revivalist band, the Jam. It’s built on tunesmith songwriting, overlapping electric guitar figures, and jet plane bass lines.

The Jam were the socialists and the lesser known band in the Sex Pistols (anarchist) Clash (Marxist), 1976 class of first-wave U.K. punk acts. But of the three, all of whom helped define my teenage years, the Jam were my pop patron. Their full, power-pop melodies, throwback Industrial Revolution Chartist politics, and youth urbansim provided a timely segue (and necessary nudge), transitioning my 1960s infatutions into the 1980s.

Setting Sons (the band’s 4th LP)—more Beatles than their Pistols inflected earlier records In the City (1977) and (the inexplicably underrated) This is the Modern World (1977)—was the first Jam album I bought; it was the summer after 8th grade, 1980. I had no idea who they were. I ended up with the LP simply because, wandering into the indie record shop in old downtown Bethesda, I told the record store guy (announced, really) that “I like New Wave.” In hindsight, his Jam recommendation was a bit off point; 1980 was the epicenter of proper New Wave with releases from Devo, the B-52s (I already had that one), the Vapors, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, the English Beat, the Police, Martha & the Muffins, and Human Sexual Response among many others.

Maybe I also said something about liking Punk? Nonetheless, he slid the guitar-driven, much more-rock-than-New Wave, Jam record into my hands.

From the (American version) album’s opening track, the anti-capitalist parable ”Burning Sky,” I was stuck on Jam songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist Paul Weller’s Margaret Thatcher-era council bloc consciousness and sneer.

With the crisp barre chord progressions (reminiscent of John Lennon’s svelte Revolver tracks and Pete Townshend’s Big Beat A-side singles, like 1965’s “My Generation” and 1967’s Pictures of Lily”) driving Weller’s instant-nostalgia melodies, Setting Sons was as stunning as it was comforting. A teenage bedroom apotheosis.

I’ll always remember first hearing Side Two’s “Private Hell.” When Weller sang “the morning slips away/in a Valium haze/and catalogues/and numerous cups of coffee,” my eyes widened. I was certain 14-year-old me had met my cynical and sophisticated soul mate.

Weller’s songwriting and lyrics are unabashedly literal and sickly earnest, even ham-fisted. But, so was I. The fact that Weller’s ingenuous Percy Bysshe Shelley ideals hit my brain at such a formative time works out to mean, for better or worse, the Jam is my jam.

They released six albums between 1977 and 1982, and as a Romantic high schooler, I cherished them all. Over the course of the Jam’s career, they evolved from an aggressive 2-minute-pop-punk singles band into pop-art rockers and, more so, into Motown bass line revivalists. In 1983, the quite cocky and good-looking Weller tried his hand at metrosexual espresso shop songwriting with his new band The Style Council, releasing the LP Café Bleu in 1984. I bought it out of loyalty and, though I was a bit confused by the jazz chords, I quietly liked it. Along with their 1985 follow-up, Our Favourite Shop, the obviously cloying Style Council remain underrated practitioners—along the lines of the Smiths, Haircut 100, the Pet Shop Boys, Spandau Ballet, and later Belle and Sebastian—of Fashion Shop Pop.

I don’t know why I suddenly felt like listening to the warm tube amp drive of Setting Sons while riding the light rail on Friday night, but, headphones on, I cued up the whole record and tried listening for the first time ever, all over again.

Weller’s angular guitar polyphony overdubs (definitely New Wave) stand out more than I remember. And the anti-war epic “Little Boy Soldiers” (“they send you home in a pine overcoat/with a letter to your mum/saying find enclosed one son/one medal/and a note to say he won”) still gives me the chills. Meanwhile, the masterclass songwriting—the defiant rocker “Saturday’s Kids,” the exuberant single “Strange Town” (“rush your money to the record shops”), and the wistful finale, “Wasteland” (“Meet me on the wastelands later this day/we'll sit and talk and hold hands maybe”)—remain sweet knock outs all.

A bit of kismet: A few days into my lovely Setting Sons reunion, social media tracked me down and alerted me: Paul Weller has suddenly announced a 2024 tour (his first in 7 years) to support his new album. Weller’s solo albums (16 of them between 1992 and 2021, repeatedly confirm my disparaging assessment about his overwrought aesthetic. But he did me right when I was a yearning teen. So, once again, I took the recommendation. See you live (for the first time) in September, Mr. Weller.

3) Even though it opened relatively recently (2016), Corvus & Co., billed as an Asian street food and dumplings place, reclines into the cozy ease of a grunge-era, 1990s Seattle neighborhood hang out.

With bountiful scoop after bountiful scoop of tofu, corn, broccolini, bell pepper, spicy & sour sauce, rice noodles and water chestnut garnish, Corvus & Co’s vegan stir fry (listed as “Uncle J’s Vegan Stir Fry”) is just one of the vegan delights on the lengthy menu at this oddly elegant dive bar. There’s also the “Mushroom Gravy Noods” (chinese-style noodles with carrot, cucumber, green onion, and cilantro, topped with mushroom gravy) and their signature vegan dumplings, filled with tofu, mushrooms, and assorted veggies. There are—and mostly— plenty of enticing dishes for carnivores too; my pal got the Pork Rib Stew, or maybe the lamb dumplings.

With its roomy dark-wood booths, chill staff, alcohol-free cocktail options on the otherwise boozy drink menu, Corvus & Co is a perfect spot to catch up with a close friend or go solo for some productive reading and writing time while you dig into some healthy-ish comfort food.

The Rockville dump; Dad’s Mid-century modern desk; two reggae songs on an early hardcore album.

I’m All Lost in… 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#25

I didn’t feel like posting this week because, to be candid, I’m all lost in nothing at the moment.

I thought about doing an anti list instead: stalled in H.D.’s book-length 1961 poem Helen in Egypt; bumped from my American Airlines flight back home on Sunday after moving Mom into a smaller apartment; and lastly, disappointed in Jane Wong’s Seattle Arts & Lectures interview with one of my favorite poets, Victoria Chang. (I like Wong’s poetry a lot, but as an interviewer, she was unprepared and disrespectful of Gen X-genius Chang);

Local poet Jane Wong (r) interviews poetry star Victoria Chang (l) at Rainier Arts Center in Columbia City, 4/2/24

And an addendum to my complaint about American Airlines’ rude but evidently legal “involuntary bumping” policy: Airports are not the “Aerotropolis” bazaars they’re all-dreamed-up-to-be in urbanist white papers and science fiction novels, at least not National Airport in D.C., where I had to spend the night, and where the shops and bars close around 10pm.

Stuck at National Airport, 3/31/24.

But I do want to keep the momentum going on this chronicle of weekly-obsessions project, so here are three things that gave me a little buzz this week:

1) The satisfying Shady Grove Transfer Station, aka the Montgomery County Dump in north Rockville, MD.

This is a landfill, so not an environmentally friendly scene—as opposed, to say, taking Dad’s stuff (and much of Mom’s as well) to Goodwill, as we moved Mom into her assisted living apartment over the weekend.

(We actually did make some Goodwill runs. And we also hit Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore, plus a little bookstore called Wonder Books to get a price on Dad’s dad’s 1925 12-volume Funk and Wagnalls Jewish Encyclopedia set.)

But mostly, downsizing for Mom’s new apartment involved several energizing trips to the accessible and friendly dump. Hoisting and heaving old stuff over the ledge and listening to it slide away and fall and crash—similar, I imagine, to the cathartic sensation of dropping evidence down a dark well and hearing it splash—is kind of a kick.

2) Sad footnote from the weekend move: I wanted to keep Dad’s amazing Mid-century modern desk. Along with his packed and mesmerizing bookshelves, this desk defined Dad’s signature den throughout my childhood. But it cost $3,000 to ship cross country to my Seattle apartment. So, we’re selling it.

Dad’s cool, clean-lines desk accompanied the majority of his days: 12 years in Rockville, 21 years in Bethesda, 22 years in North Rockville, and finally, as seen here, in Mom & Dad’s most recent apartment in Gaithersburg during the last year and a half of his life.

While growing up in Rockville and Bethesda, I often camped out in Dad’s den perusing the Raymond Chandler novels on the book shelves as he sat at his desk drafting legal briefs by hand in black pen on yellow legal pad. But more often I spent time lying on the floor there, and mostly lying underneath the desk. Despite this cozy ritual, I didn’t remember the “1966” stamp on the underside. It leapt out at me this weekend. The spring of 1966 (when I was on the way), is when my parents and my older brother moved out of their Takoma Park apartment and into our family’s first house in Rockville. I had no idea Dad’s desk and I formed parallel lines in history.

Despite the frugal decision to sell the desk, I did pilfer the left top drawer (and smuggle it home in my carry on.) I’m now using it as an in-box on my own desk, a knock-off of Dad’s that my parents bought me as birthday present 25 years ago.

3) Last week’s list included a prized LP cover tee shirt find: Bad Brain’s first record. As I noted in that post, while I was a Bad Brain’s adjacent teen at the time (1982), this landmark D.C. hardcore record is not encoded in my DNA. So I’ve been listening to it all week.

In addition to the catchy opening banger, Sailin’ On (“woooh, oooh, oooh”), the album’s two dub-inflected reggae jams—the off-handed Jah Calling , which sounds like an over-inspired outtake, and the more composed (and nearly twice as long) Leaving Babylon, with its thoughtful drum attack, no-frills vocal, and the perfect bass line—are the story here, on this record of precursor speed metal.

Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Flavored Syrup; Bad Brains tee-shirt; Spirited Away NA bottle shop.

I’m All Lost in … the three things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#24. I’m posting a few days late; this covers March 22nd —March 28.

1) Here’s a dispatch from the cosmic realm:

Just a week after writing about Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Syrup in my dad’s obituary. I came across the famed Yiddish secret ingredient at Kalustyan’s, a midtown Manhattan specialty Indian spice and grocery market. I was tagging along with Erica, who makes a pilgrimage to this shop, at Lexington and 23rd, every time she’s in NYC.

As Erica diligently set out to load her basket with gourmet provisions, I wandered off on my own, randomly perusing the aisles and aisles of salts, seasonings, sweeteners, extracts, grains, sugars, herbs, beans, and flour meals.

Rounding a corner into the the second or third room (there are four, plus an upstairs), I was startled to come across a 22 oz. squeeze bottle of the sweet Brooklyn shtetl staple.

I immediately grabbed the cartoon red, yellow, and brown bottle, found Erica in the rice aisle, and tossed the chocolate syrup into her basket.

A few evenings later, back in Seattle on March 26 (what would have been Dad’s 94th birthday), and my first March 26th without him, I stowed a glass in the freezer and headed to Trader Joe’s to get some whole milk and soda water. These are the other two ingredients in Dad’s all-time favorite treat: the New York Chocolate Egg Cream soda.

I followed the classic recipe: No egg! Slather the bottom of the chilled glass with an inch of U-Bet chocolate syrup, add a quarter cup of cold milk, and then, marveling as they form separate black & white-cookie striations, fill the rest of the glass with icy seltzer as you stir and watch the soda-shop concoction fizz and froth over.

Tuesday @ 8:33pm, 3/26/24.

I tested a hippie version too, subbing in oat milk, but it didn’t taste nearly as good.

I’ll be lighting the traditional Yahrzeit candle every March 10 to mark Dad’s death, but I’ll also be drinking a delicious New York Egg Cream to celebrate his life every March 26th.

2) At some point during my trip East (3/14/24—3/25/24), I realized I’d only packed one tee shirt. Erica suggested we go to Uniqlo to buy some more, but as we were strolling through the Lower East Side, I told her there was no need for such formality; we were bound to come across a goofy gift shop with an assortment of teenage tees. On cue, we happened upon City Fun NYC Band Tee Heaven at 1st Ave between 3rd St. and 2nd St.

I got a lovely Hunky Dory-era David Bowie shirt, with appropriate 1972, hippie Sesame Street lettering, and a punk aesthetic Blondie shirt featuring one of the band’s 1977 gig posters (for a show in L.A.)

I also bought a ‘90s indie rock shirt for Erica: Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain album cover.

But the fantastic find was an explosive Bad Brains tee emblazoned with the legendary D.C. punk band’s eponymous and iconic first (1982) album cover: a sketch drawing of a lone lightning bolt striking the U.S. Capitol dome, set in blaring reggae colors.

I’m not trying to rewrite my own history of growing up in D.C.; I was no punk rock teen. I wore tennis shirts! However, I was a political (anti-Reagan) new wave kid channeling the Flying Lizards, Blondie, the first two B-52s albums, the Sex Pistols, the Jam, and the Clash as I wrote my own weirdo pop songs and tuned in D.C.’s left-of-the dial underground radio station, WHFS. Accordingly, I felt an affinity to D.C.’s notorious punk circuit, which was otherwise a bit too juvenile delinquent for my self-consciously quirky-kid interests.

However, I can make this fantastic claim: I went to a now storied May 1981 YMCA show (that got shut down by the police) featuring D.C.’s early harDCore trailblazers Minor Threat, Youth Brigade, SOA, and also, the reason I went to the gig in the first place, Assault & Battery (playing their great song—and soon to be new band name—Artificial Peace). This was around the same time I had scrawled “the Clash” on one of my white shirts.

So, while Bad Brains wasn’t actually my jam back in 1982, I do have a proud stake in the nostalgia for those creatively rambunctious days.

1982, the debut record for Bad Brains, D.C.’s African American punk rock legends.

My friend Lee has a great line: The best and worst thing about our parents’ generation is that the First Lady of the United States was named Lady Bird and nobody batted an eye. Bad Brains gives my generation a similar and kind of sadder oxymoron:

The best and worst thing about our generation is that Paul Hudson, the front-man for Bad Brains, the defining early 1980s youth-in-action punk band, felt compelled to rename himself H.R., which stood for Human Rights.

3) Via Erica again: Here’s another Manhattan find . Tacking to her NA expertise, we traipsed through the Lower East Side to the bountiful shelves at Spirited Away, the first non-alcholic bottle shop in the U.S. It’s located at 177 Mott St. (just north of Broome St.) and just a few blocks away from the hipster hotel we were staying at on Freeman Alley.

The easy going, well-informed, hippie-lady shopkeeper gave us graciously liberal samples and steered us toward all sorts of intriguing NA brands. Admittedly, I was thrown for a loop by her psychedelic dress.

Erica got a bottle of Wilfred’s rhubarb heavy spritz bitter orange & rosemary apertif.

I returned a few days later and the hippie proprietor threw herself into my search (D— X’s actually, texted from Seattle for “things that are licorice-forward or warming spice…and in the other spectrum, garden/grass/green fresh herbs”).

Invested in finding the perfect elixir, Spirited Away’s charismatic tout (scroll down to Alex) talked up Zero Zero’s Amarno (on the sweeter, licorice side), warned me off of one overrated pick (Seed Lip Garden 108), suggested the chicory, coriander, clove-forward Namari (matching the call for a grassy glass), and

Non-Alcholic potions on the stacked shelves at Spirited Away.

eventually nudged me toward a floral and spicy bottle of Melati, where cranberry-sour Chinese Goji berries meet hibiscus. I happily went with that, and she slipped it in a netted gift bag.

To put this in full-circle context, Erica and I went to the first NA bar in NYC/Brooklyn—the Getaway— back in October 2019. Five years on now, strolling into the latest zeitgeist development—a full-fledged bottle shop with a dizzying array of non-alcoholic choices stacked on the shelves—it was a buzz to revel in Spirited Away’s announcment that the 21st Century has begun.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey; Lorazepam; Ross Dress for Less black dress shoes, $29.95.

I’m All Lost in … the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#23

1) The Story of Film: An Odyssey is (an hour-long-each) 15-episode documentary series made in 2011 about the history of movies, or “cinema” as the earnest and eloquent narrator/writer Mark Cousins prefers to call it—with starry eyed reverence.

Jean Cocteau’s Blood of Poet, 1931

Perhaps I’m beguiled by Cousins’ Irish accent, but following his seamless brain-synapse segues, which he narrates with lines like “a film with its eyes lowered,” is a delight as he connects movies such as Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) to French avant-gardist Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet (1931); or Italian neorealist masterpiece Bicycle Thieves (1948) to Hollywood film noir classic Double Indemnity (1944); or iconic American teenage alienation movie Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to Egyptian art film Cairo Station (1958).

I admit, I’ve only been watching the series as a way to fall asleep while crashing on my friend Gregor Samsa’s couch this week (he’s the one who turned me on to this sweeping series.) And so far, I’ve only watched “Episode 4, the 1930s - The Arrival of Sound;” “Episode 5, 1939-1952 - Post-War Cinema;” and “Episode 6, 1953-1957 - Sex & Melodrama.” So, I’m not 100% clear on Cousins’ grand thesis. But generally, his surprising pivots, such as the one I noted from Hollywood classic Rebel Without a Cause to Egyptian director Youssef Chahine’s Cairo Station, should give you a sense that Cousins is an inclusive film docent who is interested in nudging the history of cinema away from Hollywood movies, which he reveres regardless, and into a global context.

Ultimately, Cousins keeps coming back to the word “innovation” as the controlling theme of film studies. Accordingly, Cousins turns his attention to moments like Enrique Riveros’ splashdown into Jean Cocteau’s mirror (in the aforementioned and experimental Blood of a Poet); or the superimposed film screens behind the music club dances in Love Me Tonight (1932); or the Bauhaus shadows in Frankenstein (1931); or Joan Blondell and Etta Moten’s feminist subversion in the musical grand finale to Busby Berkley’s Gold Diggers, 1933 (1933).

2) Lulling myself to sleep might be the larger theme this week.

After sitting shiva with Mom in the living room until 11:30 pm most nights, I would suddenly find myself anxious and wide awake on the hard couch in the guest room—a little anxious too about the mouse sightings; I heard one scurrying in the hallway outside my door at night as well. Luckily, Dad’s personal effects came with a bottle of calming, elysian inducing Lorazepam.

Benzos, Bennys, electric music, and solid walls of sound.

It’s probably not wise to make a habit of plugging into the faithless (with electric boots and a mohair suit) by sprinkling your nervous system with Benzodiazepines. Suspiciously, in addition to feeling drained and melancholy this week, I’m also feeling chemically downtempo as well.

But I was grateful for the deep sleep.

3) Fed up with the holes in all my dress shoes (living in soggy Seattle), I finally tossed out my entire threadbare collection last November. I only remembered this otherwise excellent decision as I was packing for Dad’s funeral on Tuesday night.

My backup plan, which I thought could actually turn into a fitting in memoriam, was to find a pair of shoes in Dad’s closet when I got to D.C. But when I looked, it turned out (I had forgotten) that we’d handed off all his dress shoes to a thrift shop last year when we moved my parents out of their condo into a senior living apartment.

So, the day before the funeral, the chatty health care worker who’s helping my 89-year-old mom offered me a ride to the nearby shopping center. I quickly ended up at the Ross Dress for Less where I found the perfect pair—and a comfy bargain at $29.95.

3/15/24

After tucking in my grey, heavy cotton dress shirt and putting on my classiest tie (feeling my Dad’s warm hands and breath first teaching me how), I slipped on my brand new Perry Ellis Portfolio Ultra Foam black dress shoes.

I am now committed to putting these regal bargain shoes to the test.

3/21/24

James Baldwin remembers the Civil Rights movement; “I Feel Love” on piano; U.S. v. Dege (364 US 51,1960.)

I’m All Lost In … three things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#22

Nearly half a year into writing these weekly posts, I now realize that while some of the entries have been about bona fide (minor) obsessions—William Wordsworth in January, for example, or Week #1’s account of practicing Smokey Robinson’s You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me—I more often write about riveting discoveries and exciting new finds such as last week’s item on John McPhee’s Arthur Ashe book, Week 13’s Solely’s Green Banana Black Fusilli Pasta, or Week 10’s bed of nails acupuncture mat.

This week’s list includes one minor obsession and two excellent finds.

1) I saw an obscure, quiet, and remarkable film on Friday night: 1980’s I Heard it Through the Grapevine directed by experimental British filmmaker Dick Fontaine and his wife, African-American filmmaker and actor Pat Hartley.

Limited to a brief run at NYC’s Film Forum at the time and a PBS broadcast, this patiently and beautifully shot film tags along novelist, Civil Rights leader, intellectual, and default spokesperson for the human race, serene genius, James Baldwin.

Here’s what I texted my friend Tom about the movie:

It was basically the mischievously reserved and twinkling James Baldwin traveling through the South, revisiting Civil Rights movement sites (Birmingham, Selma) interspersed with the 1960s footage (fire hoses, dogs, electric stun batons, Bull Connor, MLK, Malcolm X, plus Birmingham ‘63 leader Fred Shuttlesworth and Freedom Summer ‘64 organizer Dave Dennis.) Those last two figures also appear here as talking heads, 20 years on. Additionally, there’s footage of Baldwin chatting with lesser known ‘60s activists and leaders (mostly women), still very much active in 1980, at contemporary conferences, churches, picnics, and community centers. There’s also footage of Baldwin trading theories with poets and friends in his apartment. Towards the end of the movie, Baldwin drives around the ruins of Newark, juxtaposed against chilling footage of the 1967 riots, with Amiri Baraka. Funny, when he first greets Baraka at a literary conference, cameras rolling at a backstage klatsch, Baldwin announces, “This is LeRoi Jones, who now goes by Amiri Baraka,” which seemed—because Baldwin appears to idle in convivially suspicious judgement of his colleagues—as a slight dig. For the grand finale, Baldwin strolls with Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, visiting the former slave market in Augustine, Florida noting, and far removed from any snark as he’s clearly awed by Achebe: “This is where you and I meet.” Towards the end of the movie, there’s a shot of President-Elect Reagan on a TV in the background, putting a heavy stamp on the dispirited thesis of the film: the Civil Rights movement is dead and voting is useless.

This searching, early 1980s leftist narrative (and the pot-luck community centers) are very familiar to me. So while Baldwin was reconnecting with the hopes and strife of the ‘60s, I was reconnecting with the lost-at-sea, Reagan-era activism of my youth.

The Harvard Film Archive, which helped restore and re-release the movie, writes:

Whereas in the 1980s the film represented a revisitation and reassessment of the civil rights movement, today audiences look back at the longer, more convoluted arc of the movement’s ongoing path, which has changed but never ended.

The last shot of the movie shows Baldwin and Achebe standing on the beach in front of a stormy Atlantic ocean—a visualization of Baldwin’s earlier observation about slave trade history and about the foreboding currents ahead.

I saw this gem at the new(ish) and well-run, art house theater in Columbia City, Beacon Cinema, which kind of counts as find in itself. It struck me as a happy place for bohemians, oddballs, leftists, and independent cinema intellectuals.

And a follow-up text to Tom: Bonus. The camera work capturing a lot of the live music (bar and/or church bands) was crisp and intimate in a way I’d never seen before: Accessible close ups of guitar fret boards and piano keyboards as the musicians’ fingers did the singing.

2) Two weeks ago, when I wrote about what has since become my main source of music—internet station thelotradio.com—I noted that during one of the DJ sets:

the beat sequence from the Giorgio Moroder/Pete Bellotte/Donna Summer EDM earthquake I Feel Love is still reverberating 47 years later; I learned this android diva masterpiece on piano in 2022 and, swaying to this week’s jams from Brooklyn, I quickly put the Moroder sheet music back on my keyboard stand.

This week, I’m in the throes of re-learning this landmark piece of 1977 electronic pop.

Certainly, the piano is no match for the dance club rhythm track nor, more to the point, the synthesized drone of the original (though, even as a lone piano note, that magical e flat still swims through your body like mulled wine.)

So, I’m fixed on re-fabbing Morodor’s electronic mechanics and Summer’s melody into a ballad. It helps that the the chorus is already a slow burn.

Mom & Dad on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court after one of his later arguments on 3/26/84, his 54th birthday, coincidentally; teenage me took the photo.

3) My dad, the Great Jerry Feit, died this week, 16 days shy of his 94th birthday.

Research for his obituary (with an assist from my federal lawyer pal Annie) turned up not only an early women’s rights case he argued and won in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. v. Dege (1960), but also audio of the oral arguments.

My dad was 29 at the time, three years into his new job as an attorney for the Department of Justice. Over the course of his long career as a government attorney, he would argue 13 cases in front of the Supreme Court.

In Dege, he argued that a wife could be party to a conspiracy with her husband, shooting down the idea—promulgated by the defendant and upheld by the lower courts—that in marriage, a woman is subsumed by her husband and therefore cannot be charged with conspiracy because a conspiracy takes two people. (Fun fact, the conspiracy here was an exotic bird smuggling scheme.)

Here’s my dad addressing the Warren Court:

The court below relying upon the ancient notion of marital unity found that husband and wife were not two persons but one and on this basis, dismissed the indictment.

We think that ruling was incorrect.

In present day terms it is clear, we think, that husband and wife are legally separate individuals.

As my lawyer friend said: “Bad for criminal defense, good for feminism.”

So good for feminism, in fact, that a 38-year-old attorney named Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited Dege in Reed vs. Reed, her landmark 1971 Supreme Court victory—the first time the Court used the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to rule that a law discriminating against women was unconstitutional.

In the Reed brief, which specifically found that “Discrimination based on gender is not constitutional when naming the administrator of an estate,” Ginsberg and her legal colleagues (including NOW co-founder Pauli Murray) cite Dege repeatedly:

Fortunately, the Court already has acknowledged a new direction, see United States v. Dege, 364 U.S. 51 (1960), and the case at bar provides the opportunity clearly and affirmatively to inaugurate judicial recognition of the constitutionally imperative claim made by women for the equal rights before the law guaranteed to all persons. …

in 1960, he [Justice Frankfurter] refused to rely on "ancient doctrine" concerning the status of women. In United States v. Dege, 364 U.S. 51 (1960), he buried the historic common law notion that husband and wife are legally one person. …

it harks back to the stereotyped view of women rejected in United States v. Dege, 364 U.S. 51 (1960)

It’s no wonder that when my dad won the prestigious Tom C. Clark award for best federal attorney in 1983, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a United States Court of Appeals Judge for the District of Columbia, was chair of the selection panel.

A serendipitous city of detours; John McPhee’s Levels of the Game; Jonathan Glazer’s Birth

I’m All Lost In … the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#21

1) There’s nothing like an action-packed weekend, particularly if it’s unplanned, to signal that spring in the city is icumen in.

With rushes of serendipitous socializing and spur-of-the-moment detours, these are the kind of adventures that turn dinners, retail discoveries, and surprise characters into coordinates for drafting a city map.

The action, starting Friday after work when I took the #5 bus to Valium Tom’s Phinney Ridge book shop to pick up an order and settle in for a gab session, rolled out unscripted from there:

An impromptu, late dinner (latticed roti with coconut curry, and buckwheat noodles with button and shiitake mushrooms) at Kedai Makan, which, fortuitously, didn’t have its usual line out the door as we were strolling by, so we seized the opportunity; a chance consignment-shop-find (a sweater) after stopping in on a whim while walking back from Walgreens; a tentacular 30-minute catch up with my brilliant, dear old friend William Carlos Album upon running into her Saturday afternoon at my neighborhood coffee shop; and, after offhandedly going to Otherworld wine bar early Saturday evening thinking I’m just going to sip one glass of wine while I finish this chapter, running into lovely G & H and their smart pal Amy instead, and locking down over two bottles of dark fruit wine until midnight. (We continued the night with a visit to Dave’s Hot Chicken where we traipsed for a late-night dinner. I had the breaded cauliflower slider.)

Latticed Roti Jala @ Kedai Makan

A Languedoc blend—Mourvèdre is the main grape—at Otherworld Wine Bar.

Breaded cauliflower sliders at Dave’s Hot Chicken.

The weekend of improvisation continued on Sudnay. After A) the one scheduled outing on the calendar, a morning sandwich shop brunch with some new friends Data X and I made earlier this year after randomly sharing a booth at a music show, and then B) driving to Interbay to drop ECB’s contact lenses at her house (where DX had never been before and was mesmerized by ECB’s apartment therapy), there were two, sudden city field trips. First, it was off to Ballard’s well-stocked and impressive Town & Country Market to buy Pomelo hybrids and pilfer Yuzu white chocolate beans. Next, it was over to Kanom Sai in the Central District for whatever looked good. I got two vegan mushroom pastry puffs.

It was a very The-Death-and-Life-of-Great-American-Cities weekend—and an instructive one at that, where the human agency to take detours and follow diversions emerged as the governing principle for city living, “replete with new improvisations.”

2) I devoured 70 pages of Levels of the Game, John McPhee’s literary dispatch from the 1968 U.S. Open, in one sitting on Monday night.

Originally published serially in the New Yorker in 1969, Levels of the Game is a minutely and lovingly detailed account of the semifinal match between tennis legend Arthur Ashe, (“his body tilts forward far beyond the point of balance”), who, that year, goes on to become the first African American to win the Men’s U.S. Open, and Clark Graebner, Ashe’s bruising, top-ranked, opponent.

McPhee approaches sports writing as if he’s Sherlock Holmes, seamlessly combining a meticulous tennis-match narrative—”He takes his usual position, about a foot behind the baseline, until Graebner lifts the ball. Then he moves quickly about a yard forward and stops, motionless, as if he were participating in a game of kick-the-can and Graebner were It…”—with the slow motion backstories that inform each volley: “‘It’s very tough to tell a young black kid that the Christian religion is for him,’ he says. ‘He just doesn’t believe it. When you start going to church and you look up at this picture of Christ with blond hair and blue eyes, you wonder if he’s on your side.’”

For me, McPhee’s crack reporting skills—he knows exactly how Graebner places his feet when he brushes his teeth in the morning—confirmed McPhee’s revered status as a progenitor of creative non-fiction.

Those reporter’s chops are certainly on display as McPhee conjures Ashe’s childhood with evocative quotes from Ashe (“The pool was so full of kids in the summer you couldn’t see the water”), to his research into Ashe’s junior games (“he read books beside the tennis courts when he wasn’t playing,”) plus a wonderful anecdote from a high school date about Ashe’s “antique father.” He does all this right alongside the immediate tennis play-by-play (“a difficult, brilliant stroke, and Ashe hit it with such nonchalance that he appeared to be thinking of something else”), while adding his transcripts of the rivals’ internal monologues: ”Graebner dives for it, catches it with a volley, then springs up, ready, at the net. Ashe lobs into the sun, thinking, ‘That was a good get on that volley. I didn’t think he’d get that.’”

And he serves quiet axioms along the way: “Confidence goes back and forth across a tennis net like the ball itself, and only somewhat less frequently.”

One disappointing oddity: For a book about such a turbulent era, McPhee writes with a square, AM radio voice; as a result, a time that is decidedly connected to our own is rendered strangely remote here.

That said, it’s a pleasure to disappear into a lost world drawn so vividly.

3) A friend, the aforementioned Valium Tom, who knows just how much I like Rosemary’s Baby (1968)—which does, unnervingly, mirror those turbulent times— recommended I watch iconoclastic filmmaker Jonathan Glazer’s Birth (2004), a spooky and stoic drawing room thriller about reincarnation on Central Park East starring Nicole Kidman wearing a brittle version of Mia Farrow’s Vidal Sassoon bob.

In addition to reincarnation, Birth is also about eternal love. The reincarnation in question: Anna’s (Nicole Kidman’s) dead husband seems to have returned in the guise of a knowing 10-year-old boy (Cameron Bright), whose sinister presence is reminiscent of the possessed boy in Henry James’ gothic 1898 novella Turn of the Screw. Sharing Anna’s dead husband’s name (Sean), the haunted boy also shares the dead man’s memories, including intimate ones. Original Sean died ten years ago, and the opening scene let’s us know Sean’s psychic doppelganger was born that very day. Now, 10-year-old Sean, who has evidently been lingering in the lobby of Anna’s Upper East Side apartment building for some time, emerges upstairs at a small dinner party to announce that she is not to marry her new fiancé, Joseph (Danny Huston).

Kidman, who immerses herself in the role with thespian intensity, portrays Anna’s pensive and quiet mental break radiating both chilling energy and contentment as she falls under the spell of the boy’s mysterious reality.

The movie also stars 80-year-old Lauren Bacall (!) (as Anna’s patrician mother) and, in a small, but giant role, Anne Heche as dead Sean’s sister-in-law (and ex-lover). Despite Kidman’s showstopping performance and Bright’s magnetic, disquieting ubiquity, Heche steals the stage as a kind of unhinged deus ex machina.

I’ve only seen one other Glazer movie, 2013’s cryptic science fiction film, Under the Skin, starring a silver liquid void and Scarlett Johansson. I’m now a Glazer fan. He also made Sexy Beast (2000) and Zone of Interest (2023).

Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries; thelotradio.com; Jay Caspian Kang’s Michael Chang documentary.

I’m All Lost In… the three things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

Week #20.

Let the record show that while this week’s official list doesn’t include any 19th century poets, I did—per my recent realization that I needed a crash course on the Romantics—start reading William Blake on Thursday night as part my own private Poets-of-the-1800s seminar.

I’ll report back on whether or not Blake (1757 –1827) takes.

I imagine I’ll also report back one of these days on Dave’s Hot Chicken, where DX nudged us for a detour on Tuesday night.

I only pilfered some of her fries, reluctantly passing on the hot chicken tender sandwich. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the spicy euphoria that’s available here. I must try the vegan cauliflower version of these heat-wave sandwiches. Evidently, it’s all about the multi-level seasoning, anyway.

Open until Midnight during the week and until 1 am on Fridays and Saturdays, this populist spot is where tipsy and hungry memories are made.

https://www.instagram.com/daveshotchicken/

Okay, on to this week’s official list of obsessions.

1) I still remember reading an excerpt from Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti’s innovative memoir two years ago when the NYT ran a preview — and how it struck me that her writing should be filed under poetry rather than memoir.

When I saw that the book finally came out this month, I had to buy a copy.

Innovative how? Heti downloaded a decade-worth of journal entries into an Excel spreadsheet and re-sorted it alphabetically by the first letter of each sentence.

From Chapter 9, for example:

I have never been so screwed for money, and I am angry at Lemons for not returning my emails. I have never known what a relationship is for. I have never worn such dark lipstick before. I have no money. I have no one. I have spent the whole night in my hotel room, eating chocolate cereal. I have started playing Tetris, which feels halfway between writing and drinking.

While the effect can be a bit like refrigerator magnet poetry—with entire sentences instead of single words—Heti’s idea that “untethering” her lines from their original chronological narrative “would help me identify patterns and repetitions…How many times had I written, ‘I hate him,’ for example?” works as exegesis for the reader as well. By scrambling the traditional notion of a diary, often comically so, Heti’s non-stop and remarkable juxtapositions reveal how life’s epic and mundane moments intertwine—indistinguishably at times—to create a super-narrative distinct from specific plot twists.

It’s a useful, and ironic directive (from a diary!), to get out of one’s own head and notice the larger stories that define us.

I’m only on Chapter 14, N, which begins, “Neglect my friends and family. Never having felt so sad. New sheets for the bed. New York, I think, made me depressed…” but I will have surely finished the whole book by the time you read this. I’m addicted to the clipped rhythm that’s transforming Heti’s non-sequitur flow into a logical story. It’s as if each sentence is commenting on the preceding one. Glued to her “untethered” account, I’m dying to see what happens next.

Heads up—not that this going to ward anyone off—these diaries are salacious.

2) On the internet airwaves since its 2016 debut, The Lot Radio is a-DJ-booth-as-a-wizards-academy, housed in an abandoned shipping container and attached to a coffee cart on a parcel at the Northwest edge of Brooklyn’s McCarren Park.

Featuring a roster of DJs with expertise in transnational urban archipelago dance grooves, oscillating splices, and reconfigured wavelengths, the station broadcasts live sets every day from 7am to 9pm, overflowing into 24 hours with archived programming.

During a set by Juan MacLean or Takaya Nagase, I noticed that the beat sequence from the Giorgio Moroder/Pete Bellotte/Donna Summer EDM earthquake I Feel Love is still reverberating 47 years later; I learned this android diva masterpiece on piano in 2022 and, swaying to this week’s jams from Brooklyn, I quickly put the Moroder sheet music back on my keyboard stand.

I highly recommend adding a serving of the station’s rhythmic ambient tracks to your daily mix: In addition to the flawless morning and late night downtempo sets, it’s a delight to tune in Lot Radio’s dedicated beat makers—or watch them work the dials on live cam—while you cook dinner.

3) I saw a remarkable documentary at Northwest Film Forum on Saturday afternoon.

On the schedule as part of the 2024 Seattle Asian American Film Festival, American Son was about former U.S. tennis star Michael Chang, who, on his dazzling tear through the 1989 French Open, improbably beat invincible world No. 1 Ivan Lendl. Chang, ranked No. 19 at the time and just 17 years old (still the youngest person to ever win a Men's Grand Slam title), went on to beat No. 3, Stefan Edburg for the title.

17-year-old Michael Chang defeats No. 1-ranked Ivan Lendl in the 1989 French Open.

This was not merely a sports doc. Magically and tragically, the historic student pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square were happening at the exact same time, and the movie, with an eloquent touch, synthesized these dual narratives, while also exploring Chang's Chinese identity in the U.S.

I don’t believe in fate or kismet, but the space-time continuum clearly flexed its omnipotence when this diligent Chinese-American teenager became an international champion just as students in Beijing were simultaneously challenging and transfixing the world.

After his evidently inexorable victory, the otherwise apolitical Chang took the stage for his trophy ceremony speech and landed—almost as if the dialectic of the universe chose him—with a mic-drop shout out: “God bless everybody, especially those in China… China.” (Go to the 3:23:00 mark here and cry your eyes out.)

Other tear-jerking and revelatory scenes: Tennis legend and Civil Rights hero Arthur Ashe’s intimate, 5-page, typed letter to 15-year-old Chang, thoughtfully urging the youth to consider the politics of his decision to turn pro; a maimed Tiananmen square protest veteran capping his narrative of the heartbreaking June uprising with his memories of Chang’s germane words; and the filmmaker’s poetic overlay of Chang’s climactic winning move against Lendl (4-6, 4-6, 6-3, 6-3, 6-3, by the way) with earlier footage of Chang’s identical brainy sleight only a few years before, during one of his convincing USTA Junior Hard Court championship wins.

This was a premiere (and sold-out) screening. The director, the super thoughtful Jay Caspian Kang, plus Chang himself, and his elderly mom, did a substantive Q&A after the film with NWFF’s former Executive Director. There were plenty of tears and laughs throughout.

I particularly liked Kang’s origin story about the film. A former contrarian sports blogger and editor at ESPN’s Grantland, Kang, currently a writer at the NYT, remembered the “Linsanity” craze during the NBA’s 2011/2012 season when everyone was saying, Wow, there’s never been an Asian sports phenomenon before. With his reporter’s bullshit detector buzzing, Kang thought, Not true! He decided to make the Michael Chang movie right then and there.

Jane Wong’s poems; Kim Gordon’s video; and reactionary utopianism on the Left.

I’m All Lost In … what I’m obsessing over THIS week.

Week 19.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that William Wordsworth nearly appeared on this list once again. It would have been Wordsworth’s record-making, 4th time showing up as a weekly obsession here.

I finished his comprehensive Penguin Classics collection on Saturday morning (scroll for my glowing review here), and I just can’t seem to leave him behind. On Saturday afternoon, to celebrate finishing this excellent set, I went and bought another book of his poems; a slim, hardcover volume. I set it out on my living room table.

Now I reach for it every morning and start my day by picking a Wordsworth poem and reading it aloud.

But phooey on dead white guys. Here’s this week’s list.

Three women: Chinese-American poet, Jane Wong; underground rock musician/legend, 70-year-old, Kim Gordon; and Ethiopian-American journalist, Lydia Polgreen.

1) As I reported last week, I bought tickets to an upcoming, live Q&A with one of my favorite contemporary poets, Victoria Chang. And, fortuitously, it turns out that Chang is going to be interviewed by Jane Wong, a Puget Sound poet whose own first collection, Overpour, was a highlight for me in 2019.

Reminded of how much I had liked Wong’s debut, I bought her 2021 follow-up, the immaculately titled, How To Not Be Afraid of Everything.

Wong’s poetry splices her outcast biography—mostly her formative experience in white America/”the Frontier” (growing up poor with a Chinese immigrant mom and derelict, alcoholic father)—into the harrowing history of her grandparents’ crushed lives under Mao.

She still speaks to them: “Was I a pigeon in this city in your dream? Were you/ hungry when dreaming?” And they still speak to her: “…I can only hear the vowels of your questions,/your fists curling and uncurling in sleep, the low rush of wind along ferns so tall—they must be pulled up by the sky.”

Wong is a master of the fine detail (”a butterfly crawls into a chip bag;” “fruit flies fluttering about like snow;” “my father’s ruined jaw/misshapen like a novice ceramist’s bowl”); the liberating revelation (”let all your hexes seep into your pores;” “beware of light you cannot see;” “leave any country that has a name”); and sumptuous mic drops (“Serenade a snake and slither its tongue/into yours and bite. Love! What is love/ if not knotted garlic”).

Her evident talent effortlessly lifts her verse beyond politics into poetry. An uncommon skill!

Poet Jane Wong

Marking my favorite poems in this collection with stars became redundant, but there’s definitely this one:

I Put on My Fur Coat

And leave a bit of ankle to show. 

I take off my shoes and make myself

comfortable. I defrost a chicken

and chew on the bone. In public, 

I smile as wide as I can and everyone

shields their eyes from my light. 

At night, I knock down nests off

telephone poles and feel no regret.

I greet spiders rising from underneath

the floorboards, one by one. Hello, 

hello. Outside, the garden roars

with ice. I want to shine as bright 

as a miner's cap in the dirt dark, 

to glimmer as if washed in fish scales. 

Instead, I become a balm and salve 

my daughter, my son, the cold mice

in the garage. Instead, I take the garbage

out at midnight. I move furniture away

from the wall to find what we hide. 

I stand in the center of every room

and ask: am I the only animal here?   

2) Earlier this year, Sonic Youth formally and posthumously released Walls Have Ears, a renowned, unofficial compilation of three live shows they played in the UK in 1985. That was the year of Bad Moon Rising, their perfect teenage witchcraft, art rock LP.

The songs on Walls Have Ears are clanging and de-tuned, threatening and careening, perfectly capturing my college-days’ favorite band in all their early ramshackle experimentation. This version of Sonic Youth, which I remember so fondly, provided the soundtrack to my magic-markered Converse and magic-markered jeans, early 20-something depression.

(4Columns ran Sasha Frere-Jones’ beautifully-written review of this “new” Sonic Youth record earlier this month.)

But this rediscovered set hardly prepared me for founding Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon’s new release: a jaw-dropping single that came out this week called I’m a Man from her forthcoming album, due on March 8, The Collective. (What an album title, by the way; so perfectly evocative of the 1970s—and it reminds me of Louise Glück’s similarly titled final poetry collection, Winter Recipes from the Collective.)

Co-founded in 1981 by Gordon with her now-ex husband Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth mined 1960s and early 1970s counterculture detritus, turning that recently past era’s madness into a contemporary celebration—rather than rejection—that connected the revolutionary lights of “The ‘60s” to the angry yearning of mid-1980s post-punk/pre-alt-rock, cultural misanthropy and art.

Kim Gordon getting down in the video to her new jam, I’m a Man.

Kim Gordon’s daughter Coco Gordon-Moore in Gordon’s new video, I’m a Man

Gordon does exactly that in I’m a Man with a video that channels Midnight Cowboy’s (1969) acid-trip scene, both as a way to revive the movie’s original deconstruction of the American Cowboy myth, while also updating it with a garish meditation on today’s politics of non-binary identity. Gordon, with her signature Gen-X-era detached irony, delivers the lyrics from an angry male point of view, which is sure to rattle casual listeners.

Don't call me toxic
Just 'cause I like your butt

It's not my fault I was born a man
Come on, Zeus
Take my hand
Jump on my back
'Cause I'm the man

The gender-bending (both Gordon’s male persona and the clothes swapping that ensues) gets overlaid with time-warping as well: Gordon cast her doppelganger daughter Coco Gordon-Moore in the video (alongside dreamboat actor/model, Conor Fay).

Meanwhile, Gordon’s Black-Sabbath-heavy guitars and beat poetry recitative, synced to a herky-jerky anti-rhythm, push the off-kilter ambience through the walls.

3) I hesitate to write anything about the war in Gaza. The seething antisemitism, both creeping and blatant on the left, and the unhinged settler Zionism, defining the racist right, make it a poisonous topic (understatment of the year).

However, this excellent NYT opinion piece on Gaza by staff colulmnist Lydia Polgreen (the paper’s former international correspondent for West Africa, South Asia and South Africa) captured a larger subject I’ve been trying to wrap my head around for years. In challengeing the political essentialism that guides some pro-Palestinian activists, Polgreen identified and called out the reactionary utopianism that has long plagued the left at large.

Defined, in its anti-establishent trappings, by a kind of idyllic machismo, this brand of politics can show up as casually as knee-jerk anti-development campaings to preserve neighborhood “character;” as bufoonishly and man-splainy as the primordial Burning Man festival; or as pathologically as ascetic quests for purity.

That later version can warp into psychotic extremes such as Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s more tellingly named “Year Zero.”

This leftist fetish for authenticity is twins with the right’s own nostalgia and fear-based bogeyman politics that specialize in branding chosen scapegoats as “outsiders” while fostering dangerous sentiments about who and what count as real. Remember Sarah Palin’s “real Virginia” soundbite, a populilst philosophical framing that has since come to define MAGA’s anti-city pathology. (Northern Virginia’s metropolitan suburbs, of course, were the phonies while Southern Virginia’s voters were salt of the earth.)

The self righteous overaching originalist and nativist narratives from the left and right respectively have their roots (for the Western world anyway) in Bible stories about wicked cities such as Babylon, and Sodom and Gamorrah, where idolotry of the material world leads humanity astray. God must, and does, destroy them.

To my mind, the left mastered this religio-poltical narrative in the late 19th Century when progressive William Jennings Bryan famously demonized cities in his Cross of Gold speech. (It’s hardly surprising that Bryan’s career ended with an ignomious reactonary asterisk: He was the lead prosecutor in the Scopes trial against teaching evolution.)

Liberals and progressives still channel these reactionary impulses; it’s not an overtly religious wrath, but it is a puritan mindset. I’ve certainly noticed strains of it on the local level. From the “Seattle is Dying” storyline that equates people experiencing homelessness with criminals, to the gatekeeping neighborhood groups who fight against housing development, Seattleites tend toward a provincial politics similar to the “Keep Austin Weird” mentality, a hipster NIMBYism that writer Max Holleran exposed in his pro-development book Yes to the City. The hilarious title of his chapter on Austin’s no-growth movement: “Exclusionary Weirdness.”

Ethiopian-American and NYT opinion writer Polgreen, who notes her formative affinity to iconic 20th Century anti-imperialists such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, India’s Nehru, and the intellectual power house of Algeria’s resistance movement, Wretched of the Earth author Frantz Fanon, is, of course, talking about a far graver topic than zoning politics. That is to say, it’s not my intent to reduce her piece to a treatise about my own pro-city obsessions.

I’m simply thankful she has identified a persistent chauvinism in left politics that has always made me uncomfortable, and pointed it out in this cause celebre.

I’m compelled to quote Polgreen at length:

A good deal of the antipathy toward Israeli Jews today is undergirded and enabled, I believe, by something that to some ears sounds progressive: the idea that people and lands that have been colonized must be returned to their indigenous peoples and original state. But that belief, when taken literally, is, at best, a kind of left-wing originalism, a utopian politics that believes the past answers all the questions of the present. At worst, it is a left-wing echo to the ancestral fantasies of the far right, in which who is allowed to live in which places is a question of the connection of one’s blood to a particular patch of soil.

Implicit in the emphasis on indigeneity is a promised restoration, albeit one of a very different sort from the imperial fantasies of Vladimir Putin or the gender obsessions of Ron DeSantis. Decolonization “is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes,” as the scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write in an influential academic paper published in 2012, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”

“The broad umbrella of social justice may have room underneath for all of these efforts,” Tuck and Yang write. “By contrast, decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life.”

There is perhaps no more vexed question in the world than how this might play out in Israel and Palestine. There is no doubt that Palestinians long lived in the land that became Israel. Jews have deep historical roots in that land, but a vast majority of the people who established the state of Israel came from elsewhere, fleeing genocide and persecution in Europe and forced into exile by Middle Eastern and North African nations. It is impossible to separate Israel’s birth from the dying gasps of the old colonial order. It was, in the indelible phrase of Arthur Koestler, “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.”

In theory, decolonization includes the disestablishment of the very idea of land as property, of modern notions like nationhood and citizenship. In theory, it is a chance to do it all over and replay history with the benefit of indigenous ideas and traditions to guide us.

But history doesn’t work that way. People do bad things. Other people resist those bad things. Humans invent and discover; they create and destroy. There is no going backward to some mythic state. There is no restoration. The events that unfold over time shape the land and the people who live on it, and those people shape one another in manifold ways, some brutal and destructive, some generative and loving. But time and experience ensure that nothing can ever be the same as it was before the last thing that happened.

As I was thinking through these issues, I came across a series of social media posts about settler colonialism by Iyad el-Baghdadi, a Palestinian writer and activist whose work has been an indispensable guide for me in the present crisis. I sent him an email, and he agreed to speak with me to expand on his ideas. I explained my unease with the reliance on concepts like indigeneity to decide who has a just claim to live in a place.

“Don’t take these people seriously,” he told me, though he made clear that he has some sympathy for those who espouse such views. “They’re not really motivated by some kind of ideology. They’re really motivated by emotion, and they kind of slap together an ideology to satisfy their emotion, but then emotions, by their very nature, cannot be satisfied that way.” He told me that sometimes when he hears people talk about Palestinian liberation, it is almost as though they are expecting a literal reversal of 1948, what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, of their expulsion upon the founding of the state of Israel.

“It is as if there will be this magical moment and all our villages are going to appear out of the earth. And then 75 years of settler colonialism is going to disappear,” he said. “But this romantic idea is really unmourned trauma.”

Questions of indigeneity are simply a distraction, he said, from the real challenge of building Palestinian political power. “I don’t care if they’re settlers or not,” he said. “The solution is not to constantly try to moralize. The solution is to fix the power imbalance. The future needs to be rooted in the truth that all human beings are equal and that Jewish life is equivalent to Palestinian life and that we can together work on a future in which nobody is oppressed and we can address the inequities of the past.”

The intro to Blondie’s “Picture This;” an impulse online-shopping orgy; affordable housing data.

I’m All Lost In… what I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#18

I finally took up William Wordsworth’s epic memoir poem, The Prelude, again. It’s the final section of the Penguin Classics’ Wordsworth collection I’ve been reading since the beginning of the new year. Thankfully, it has hooked me once more.

“W is on fire” I scrawled in the margin after finishing Book Seven, Residence in London, which came with phrases such as “This Parliament of Monsters;” and narratives such as “soon I bade/Farewell for ever to the private bowers/Of gowned students, quitted these, no more/To enter them, and pitched my vagrant tent,/A casual dweller and at large, among/ The unfenced regions of society./”

So, yeah, “W is on fire.” But my Wordsworth brain surge only struck, accompanied by some sharp whiskey, late in the week; too soon to tell if I’m as yet, all lost in it. I also got some tennis in at the hitting wall on Saturday morning among the crowded courts; I wisely reserved a court in advance.

But altogether, for the second week in a row, I’m disappointed to report that my usually busy inner-life is at a bit of a standstill.

Despite the brain blahs, though, I have manged to pull together this week’s list.

1) Back in Week #6 of this regular roundup, I was deep into practicing my 2023 piano set.

Here’s what I wrote, in part, last November:

The Blondie encore is a personal favorite from my 2022 set that I knew I’d be able to re-learn quickly. I added it to this current set as a cool-down after rollicking through [the first four songs].

The Blondie song I’m referring to is the band’s 1978 meta-teeny-bopper single “Picture This,” from their buoyant, sci-fi, third LP, Parallel Lines. I’ve been sitting down at my piano keyboard first thing every morning before work this week (as opposed to sitting down at my work computer keyboard), settling into this song’s dynamite-verse-and-chorus-induced piano flow state.

However, it’s the loop-worthy intro—a see-saw between the 1 and the 4 chords (a C Major and an F Major)—that captured my attention this week, as these opening measures float through a cascade of inversions within the perfect 4th frequency.

In addition to the hypnotic bubble gum motif, another reason I’m stuck on the “Picture This” intro: The final descending F chord, played with the A as the root (A/C/F) is tricky in context and has forced me back into practice mode. Practice mode means slowing down. And slowing down means lingering in the notes and shapes, which come with a slew of lovely left-right combinations, such as: G with E; E with C; F with F, followed by F with an octave-jump-F; A with C/F/A; C with A/C/F; C with G/C/E. Plus there are a couple of passing D notes along the way; while belonging to neither the C nor F triad, the D, the 2 in the C scale, draws you back to the C (the 1) with lulling electricity.

Blondie’s Parallel Lines LP (1978)

My current pop foray into 101 music theory also means I’m savoring the curious finale to the intro, which is anchored by an A♭ Major chord; this A♭ triad includes two notes, A♭ and E♭, that are nowhere to be found in the C scale. While the black-note-heavy chord certainly stands out in bright C Major, it sounds joyous here (and poignant) rather than jarring.

“Picture This” was written by Blondie electric guitarist Chris Stein, front-woman Debbie Harry, and Farfisa, new wave pop keyboardist Jimmy Destri. Their songwriting sleight is premised on a flat 6 chord, in this case (in the key of C) the A♭ Major.

This magic trick involves switching to what’s known as the parallel scale; parallel scales share the same root note, but roll out a different sequence of subsequet notes. The C minor scale (C, D, E♭, F, G, A♭, and B♭) as opposed to the C Major (C, D, E, F, G, A, B), for example.

According to The Roadie Blog (my bolds explain why flatting the 6, a minor chord a Major scale, is played as a Major chord; in short, the 6 chord is a Major in the minor scale, and we’re simply transporting that chord into the C Major.)

You can borrow several different kinds of chords from parallel scales, including the flat-three, the minor fourth, and the flat-six. The flat-six… is a major chord from a parallel scale. So if you’re playing in C major, it will be an A flat major. Using a flat-six chord will add a bit of flavor to your … playing.

Shifting to the C minor scale via the A♭ chord (it’s an inversion with C at the root) puts two black notes inside the all-white key of C Major.

Sublime wavelengths ensue, lingering and shimmering from these parallel lines.

2) My blahs this week led to some unprecedented profligate behavior.

To whit—and some of these were birthday presents for someone else— I went on an impulsive online shopping spree:

On Sunday, I bought tickets to a play that’s being staged in New York City, comedian Cole Escola’s off-Broadway First Lady farce about Mary Todd Lincoln, Oh, Mary! It’s playing at the Lucille Lortel Theater in Greenwich Village. I bought tickets for a March performance.

Then, on Monday, I bought this Sesame Street lamp, the Wally Table Lamp, from Urban Outfitters.

Also on Monday, I bought a subscription to a feminist and top-tier food industry magazine Cherry Bombe. Apparently, each issue is like a book.

Then on Tuesday, I bought tickets to an upcoming Seattle Arts & Lectures event—a Q&A with Victoria Chang, contemporary poetry royalty.

I’ve been a Chang fan since I read her 2020 book Obit. I’m on record goofing out about this great collection in the mini-Q&A that literary journal Vallum did with me in early 2021, when I said:

Favorite Book of Poetry Discovered this Year
Victoria Chang’s “Obit.“ Ruminating on loss, Chang presents a series of philosophical thought experiments in plainspoken metaphors.

Mostly, she uses the traditional newspaper obituary format (both in form and tone) to write breathtaking poems about the death of optimism, logic, home, and other things that suddenly vanish when a loved one dies. She accents the obituary poems with tankas (my new favorite form), tiny five-line poems that loom large.

And bonus—which I didn’t even realize until after buying the tickets—Chang is being interviewed on stage by Jane Wong. Wong wrote another one of my favorite contemporary poetry collections, Overpour (2016).

P.s. Thanks to this crazy spending orgy, I have to buy airplane tickets to NYC now. Some say you have to spend to earn. But it seems to me, you have to spend more when you spend.

3) And lastly, let’s go with “‘All Bogged Down In” as opposed to All Lost In.

Reporting a PubliCola column this week, where I made the counterintuitive argument (counterintuitive to NIMBYs and Progressives alike) that we should give evil developers a tax break to support affordable housing production, I ended up getting a migraine from the Seattle Office of Housing’s unruly summary of their Mandatory Housing Affordability program (MHA); here are all their reports to date.

Their attempt to track the number of affordable housing units the program has created year to year and to show how much money the program has generated for the city’s affordable housing fund is a hot mess of buried data and convoluted prose.

Just try squaring these two corresponding sections from the 2022 report and 2021 report:

Affordable housing contributions through MHA were made for 260 projects with issued building permits in 2022. This is a decrease from the 290 projects making housing contributions in 2021. Comparing the last two calendar years, MHA payments decreased by 1.5% ($75.9 million in 2021 and $74.7 million in 2022) and MHA units committed to be provided through the performance option decreased by over one-third (107 MHA units in 2021 and 66 MHA units in 2022).

alongside:

MHA Units Placed in Service

MHA Units are complete (i.e. “placed in service”) upon issuance of a certificate of occupancy for the building.

MHA Units Committed

The performance option requires commitment of MHA Units as a condition of issuance of the first building permit that includes the structural frame for the structure. Commitments are finalized with execution and recording of an Office of Housing-approved MHA performance agreement. In 2021, property owners entered into agreements with the City to include 95 MHA Units in 13 projects totalin 1,286 units. As noted above, this is a sharp increase from year 2020 when owners of five projects totaling 208 units committed to set-aside 20 as MHA units. MHA performance agreements are executed for an additional five projects with building permit issuance still pending. Assuming those projects move forward, another 589 units would include a set-aside of 39 MHA units. The following table lists the 20 projects with committed MHA Units and under construction as of December 31, 2021.

I sent a polite email to the Office of Housing asking for help, which mostly just ended with them acknowledging a “discrepancy” in one of their charts.

My PubliCola colleague ECB, who has taken a data journalism class, saved the day by force fitting all the scattered and incongruent data into our own intelligible categories, making a spreadsheet to conjure apples to apples information. The bottom line seems to be that taxing affordable housing creates less of it.

I was happy to see I’m not the only one who thinks knee-jerk anti-development politics is a pathology. The same day my piece came out, the New York Times published a story about two NYC borough politicians who are teaming up to start a pro-development league.

Here’s the lead:

A housing crisis threatens New York City? A pair of politicians believe they have an answer: a new “league” of officials like themselves who want to welcome development, including development of market-rate apartments.

The two officials, Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, and City Councilman Erik Bottcher of Manhattan, started the group to counter the long-held theory that opposing development is a political win. That idea, many housing experts agree, has helped create a shortage of hundreds of thousands of homes in and around the city, driving rents and home prices ever higher as residents compete for the limited supply.

On Monday, the duo sent an invitation to all 160 state and city politicians who represent some piece of New York City to come to an inaugural meeting next month. Mr. Reynoso said he wanted officials to come even if they are skeptical, but not if they only want to resist housing.

“We do not want you if you’re just a straight NIMBY,” Mr. Reynoso said, referring to the phrase “not in my back yard,” often used as a label for people who oppose development.

And here’s the mic drop:

“Historically, what lawmakers have said to constituents is, ‘If you elect me, I will help stop new housing from being built in our community,’” Mr. Bottcher said. “We need to turn that on its head.”

Pasta made from broccoli; allowing corner shops in residential neighborhoods; Cafe Chill on C89.5 (for insomnia).

I’m All Lost In… what I’m obsessing over this week.

Week #17

Early February. Nothing is sticking right now.

On Friday evening, I bought a book of Saul Leiter photographs at Elliott Bay Books; a recent 4Columns review of the Leiter centennial show at Manhattan’s Howard Greenberg Gallery introduced me to Leiter and his acclaimed NYC street photography.

Unfortunately, the pricey photo book I got, The Unseen Saul Leiter, a collection of previously unpublished slides, didn’t live up to the genius vibes I was getting from the show review, which evidently included dynamo photos such as Shoes of the Shoeshine Man, ca. 1951. I imagine the fact that I wasn’t previously familiar with Leiter diminished the impact of the book. Nor am I a photography connoisseur.

Despite not being swept up in the book, one photo did grab me. Mainly because I could feel the year in the color of the sky. I immediately checked. Yep. 1966.

Something else from the week that I’m bummed didn’t quite take: Wordsworth’s epic memoir poem, the Prelude.

After lovingly devouring the first 200 pages of the Penguin Classics’ William Wordsworth collection I’ve been reading as part of my self-induced 19th Century Poets seminar, I was having trouble getting into his autobiographical grande finale this week. I think Book 6: Cambridge and the Alps is the famous section. I’m just starting Book 5: Books, so we’ll see.

As for this week’s list. Here’s what I’ve got:

1) Per this recipe from my favorite cult website site, Vegan Democracy, I blanched and smashed a cup-and-a-half of broccoli, added flour and rolled it into a firm gooey green ball, scissored it up over a waiting pot of boiling water, and suddenly had a colander full of healthy green pasta at my command.

I served it with fried, chopped garlic, roasted chickpeas, a can of heated pureed tomatoes and a can of cooked tomato paste, plus a sprinkle of oregano.

2) This NYT opinion piece, “When Did New York’s Streets Get So Hollow?,” resonated with my pro-city-life zealotry.

The piece comes out in favor of overhauling NYC’s outdated, 1961 zoning code, which bowed down to

the postwar planning ideology that New Yorkers would live in tranquil residential neighborhoods and commute by car to office jobs in Midtown or to factory jobs on the city’s periphery.

and reflected

an anachronistic, and at times elitist, view that limited where and how small businesses could operate. Businesses that might disrupt the peace were, in effect, banned in much of the city, to protect the “nicer” neighborhoods where wealthier New Yorkers were meant to reside.

That incriminating historical sketch not only captures the classist zoning agenda detailed in M. Nolan Gray’s must-read 2022 city planning treatise, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It (scroll down in this link for my review), but the article also goes on to match Gray’s mixed-use remedy.

NYC’s zoning overhaul would embrace “the serendipitous storefront activity that gives New York its soul” by allowing small businesses in residential zones and by allowing a broader mix of business types in commercial zones, such as “microbreweries, 3-D printing shops and pottery studios, which today are relegated to manufacturing areas.”

Supporters of these proposed changes calmly refute the predictable objections from naysayers who warn that new businesses might start trafficking in off-the-books marijuana or hosting loud dance nights. The grown-up rejoinder: Changing zoning to allow a broader mix of businesses doesn’t supersede existing drug laws and noise ordinances.

Meanwhile, I liked that the article provided some substitute language for the deadly urbanist phrase “Live, Work, and Play” with this more alliterative flow: “life, labor and leisure.”

I wrote a PubliCola column in December advocating the same sort of mixed-use direction for Seattle. Specifically, I was hot on allowing corner stores in Seattle’s historically single-family zones because I believe—like the reform advocates in New York—that new businesses won’t bring illegal activity as much as they’ll bring a dose of human activity.

And The Urbanist had the news earlier this month about a bill in Olympia that would legalize corner stores in residential areas.

3) For a suburban kid, it was left-of-the-radio-dial Shangri-La growing up just outside D.C.

From the (pre-indie-rock) underground radio station (102.3 WHFS), to the blues & jazz station (WDCU), to the the left-wing politics + experimental music station (WPFW), to Howard Univesrity’s WHUR, to public radio’s WAMU, housed at American University, I spent my teenage years floating in the spooky miracle of post-midnight’s enlightening wavelengths.

Sometime early in the pandemic, I realized radio hadn’t been part of my life since my D.C. Metro-area youth. And so, I made a 2021 New Year’s resolution to tune in Seattle radio. It was an admittedly retro resolution for the internet age, but as oblivious to radio as I’d been during adulthood, it was impossible not to know about Riz Rollins’ Expansions, KEXP’s experimental electronica show, which gave me a sense that something wonderful might be going on right above my head.

I combed the schedules of the local indie stations—88.5 Jazz 24, KEXP, C89.5— and created a personal listening calendar, cueing my Sonos system to automatically switch on when my curated shows aired. No matter if I wasn’t home when the shows came on; I’m fond of walking into an apartment where the walls have been bathed in sound because music is already playing.

KEXP’s new Overnight Afrobeats show with DJ Lace Cadence quickly became the centerpiece of my late Friday nights. I even dedicated an entire PubliCola Year-(2021)-in-review column to Lace’s African pop show.

Three years on, the show that remains a fixed part of my week is C89.5’s Cafe Chill with Seth, which airs every Sunday morning from 6am to 10am; C89.5 is the student-run station at North Seattle’s Nathan Hale High School. Seth isn’t a high school student. He’s a marble-mouthed down-tempo grown up who apparently understands the differences between chill- wave, trip hop, house, and dub house.

On Cafe Chill, he spins four hours of light instrumental ambient swells that lean pop instead of experimental. In short: It’s more catchy than drone-y (there are usually drums). Think contemporary descendants of Boards of Canada.

Emceeing in sentences that often end abruptly and land more like questions than statements, Seth speaks the language of a Pacific Northwest wellness hippie. The show’s only commercial sponsor seems to be Rubicon Float Studio, a zero-gravity floatation therapy center.

And Seth’s playlists—including artists such as Shigeto, il:lo, Firephly, Chemtrails, and house favorite Hello Meteor— match the groovy sensory-deprivation-tank mode.

I’m including Cafe Chill on my list this week because, fighting insomnia, I found myself (in this post-radio age) transporting Sunday mornings to a couple of my toss-and-turn weeknights.

At the tennis practice wall again; bailing on TikTok; more Wordsworth poems.

I’m All Lost in … what I’m obsessing over THIS week.

Week #16.

Along with one anti-obsession obsession, this week’s list also includes a pair of repeat obsessions; which makes sense. By definition, repetition is the nature of obsession.

1) I stayed up into the wee hours both nights this past weekend to watch live broadcasts of the women’s and men’s Australian Open finals—until 2:30 am on Saturday morning, and 5:00 am on Sunday morning, respectively. The exciting matches prompted me, despite this week’s wet weather, to get back onto the tennis court, just as I’d been doing last November.

I even ordered four cans of brand new tennis balls—a bargain at just $11; pretty cheap for one of life’s ASMR delights.

The jumping-bean-bounce of the new Penn 2s sped up the tempo of my private rallies with the practice wall and increased the meters-per-second rate of my serves.

In fact, leaning into the extra action, I started experimenting with my historically irresolute service game, which has remained unchanged and safe since junior high school. With the Australian Open women’s winner Aryna Sabalenka in mind—I started testing out a high toss; a revelation of aces and torque.

2) When I debuted this weekly chronicle a few months ago, I inadvertently revealed my TikTok habit; two of the obsessions on my premiere list last October were TikTok influencers: piano teacher Joanna Garcia and comedian Andrea Jin. TikTok is also where I first heard about Hamas’ attack on Israel.

Well, file this under “internal feelings”*: I’m happy to report that sometime in early January, I noticed I hadn’t been on TikTok in weeks.

It wasn’t a conscious decision, but clearly my brain was demanding I abandon the toxic river of Marjorie Taylor Green, sophomoric memes (“Kiss or Slap?”), classic rock guitars, soft core 20-somethings, and time travel conspiracies.

Certainly, there’s some worthy stuff on TikTok, like the Bowie impersonators and the aforementioned piano teacher posts, but I’ve seized on the change, and I’m now gleefully committed to my TikTok detox.

* “Not seldom did we stop to watch some tuft/
Of dandelion seed or thistle's beard,/Which, seeming lifeless half, and half impelled/By some internal feelings, skimmed along/” is from William Wordsworth’s poem A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags (1800).

3) Speaking of Wordsworth (1770-1850), I’m more than two thirds into Penguin Classics’ William Wordsworth Selected Poems—a collection that has already made this weekly roundup twice.

I remain captivated. It’s not that I’m swayed by Wordsworth’s back-to-nature philosophy; I’m still in the Frank O'Hara “unless I know there’s a subway handy” camp. Nor am I particularly intrigued by any of Wordsworth’s other philosophical topics here: the sublime status of unmediated reality; the humble acceptance of the human condition; romanticized parables of mendicancy; and the dialectic flow of time (“The Child is Father of the Man”).

Rather, it’s Wordsworth’s flowing poetics coupled with his light touch and casual tone that’ve hooked me. For a poet that’s writing about such grandiose topics, Wordsworth’s verse comes with a curiosity and calm that leave me contemplating alongside him rather than quibbling with him or second guessing.

What else to do with lovely lines such as: “Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room” or “Destined, whate’er their earthly doom,/For mercy and immortal bloom!” or “Surprised by joy — impatient as the wind/I wished to share the transport — Oh! with whom.”

Moreover, in an era (the early 19th century) when poems were still often written as fables and dramas (novels hadn’t been established yet as the main format for relaying epic tales), Wordsworth is an expert narrator with his stories about leech collectors, vanished sailors returned, beggars, ghosts, and inanimate (or perhaps not!) vales and ruins.

Subject of Wordsworth’s ekphrasis poem, Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont (1806); Beaumont’s painting is from 1805.

___

The line “The Child is Father of the Man” is form Wordsworth’s poem My heart leaps up when I behold (1807); the line “Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room” is from Wordsworth’s poem Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room (1802); the lines “Destined, whate’er their earthly doom,/For mercy and immortal bloom!” are from Wordsworth’s poem Sequel to the Foregoing (1817); the lines “Surprised by joy — impatient as the wind/I wished to share the transport — Oh! with whom” are from Wordsworth’s poem Surprised by joy — impatient as the wind (1815).

Speaking of repeat obsessions, an honorable mention goes to Solely’s Green banana black pasta, which was on my home menu again this week alongside a broccoli and sesame seed nooch sauce.

RIP Mary Weiss; Black green-banana- pasta follow-up; the Australian Open and Aryna Sabalenka

I’m All Lost in The… what I’m obsessing over THIS week.

Week #15.

1) I’ve long dreamed of writing a book called From Shangri-La to Nirvana: The History of Punk. The “Shangri-La” reference in that title is a nod to the early-mid-1960s “Girl Group,” the Shangri-Las, whose street-wise, working class Queens sensibility (and thick accents) added a juvy-hall edge to their teen-aged operetta pop hits while also distinguishing them from the more curlicue cursive love songs of their bouffant hairdo and evening gown contemporaries like the Angels, Shirelles, Supremes, Cookies, Ronettes, and Marvelettes.

“Ms. Weiss [the Shangri-Las’ 15-year-old lead singer Mary Weiss, who died this week at 75] was once asked about the evening gowns worn by some other singers onstage,” the Washington Post wrote in Weiss’ obituary this week , “‘Old people’s clothes,’ she scoffed.”

Reclaimed with a sense of sordid 1970s ennui and irony less than a decade later by the proto-punk New York Dolls (also from working class Queens), the Shangri-Las quickly became a template for the CBGB set as bands like Blondie, Suicide, and the Ramones (also from working class Queens) leaned into their own trashy pleas of adolescent angst.

On the louche intro to their 1973 urchin love song “Looking for a Kiss,” the Dolls’ lead singer David Johansen steals Mary Weiss’ spellbinding intro line from the Shangri-Las’ 1965 top-20 hit “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” —When I say I’m in love/you best believe I’m in love/L-U-V!

(I should say, as the span of time between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, that once seemed so epic, recedes further into the past, the Shanri-Las’ earnest woe and the punks’ witty camp become harder to distinguish from one another, nearly blurring the Shangri-Las and the New York Dolls into figures from the very same artistic scene.)

I started embracing the meta remove of pop-punk myself as a teenage songwriter in the early 1980s by mimicking David Bowie’s own precursor punk snide, the dystopian Doo-wop on his early 1970s records; I was born a decade late.

Subsequently, in the early 1990s, I went full Shangri-Las, writing a series of intentional and default odes to Mary Weiss: “Radio Halo,” “Nitro City,” and “Black Sabbath Boots.”

A line from "Radio Halo":

1965/she's got a record on the radio/I've got a demo/I really think she oughta know.

... And from "Nitro City":

Oh, Mary/when you say you mean L-U-V/don't you know we're only human beings/in history/we are everything.

I still think she oughta know. Here are my demos: “Back Sabbath Boots,” 1993 (note the “great big kiss” at the end); “Nitro City,” 1994; “Radio Halo,” 1994 (note the Shangri-Las’ piano).

RIP Mary Weiss. She died on Friday, January 19th.

2) I’ve included Solely’s green banana black pasta in this weekly roundup before, having had a plate of the tasty corkscrew pasta and veggies for dinner over at my friend D—X.’s place two weeks ago.

After that savory dinner, I promptly ordered four boxes—“The only PASTA that comes straight FROM A TREE.” The new pasta provisions arrived this week. And Solely’s fruit pasta has made my list again.

On Monday night, I cooked up a cup of the handsome fusilli with tomato sauce, crushed garlic, chickpeas, peas, pan fried onions, and nooch. It was a delicious success.

And healthy too. As the packaging says: “This box contains 5 organic green bananas & nothing else.”

3) Another fawning NYT’s profile on tennis hero Coco Gauff this week alerted me to the fact that the 2024 Australian Open is well under way; during last September’s U.S. Open coverage, I rediscovered that I love watching (and playing) tennis. So, I quickly upgraded my Hulu subscription this week to tune in the remaining matches from Melbourne.

The Gauff profile used her quarterfinal win earlier in the week as a news peg to hype her potential path to another Grand Slam title; just 19, Gauff, currently ranked 4th in the world, won the U.S. Open last year for her first Grand Slam crown. The NYT article didn’t say who Gauff was playing next on her march to potentially winning the Australian. But I had an inkling.

I quickly googled the tournament to check up on my favorite player; that would 25-year-old Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka, the person Gauff beat in last year’s U.S. Open final.

It turns out, just like Gauff, Sabalenka, who’s ranked 2nd in the world, was now storming through the Australian Open herself. Sabalenka, in fact, with her signature crushing serve and her guided missile backhand, was now Gauff’s upcoming Australian Open semifinal opponent; all of this went unmentioned in the NYT’s Gauff hagiography.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Gauff (I gleefully call her “Ka-Pow Ka-Gauff!”). But Sabalenka’s sad sack Peter Parker vibe—she’s kind of a discombobulated fuck up whose unawares comedic confusion during interviews invariably short circuits the pre-fab media narratives—has completely won me over. I’m rooting for her to win the Australian Open, just as she did for her first Grand Slam crown last year.

That’s Sabalenka pictured in the background below (after losing to telegenic Gauff at the 2023 U.S. Open) in a NYT puff think piece titled “Coco Gauff Has Grabbed Our Attention: She won the U.S. Open and seized the spotlight as a symbol of her generation.”

With my Hulu upgrade set, I’ve now watched a couple of Men’s matches so far, including kooky Russian Danil Medvedev (ranked 3) in a five-set quarterfinal thriller over Poland’s Hubert Hurkacz (ranked 9), and German Alexander Zverev (ranked 6) in four sets over Spanish phenom Carlos Alcaraz (ranked 2), setting up more to come: a Medvedev v Zverev early Friday morning (my time) semifinal, and oy, Serbian Novak Djokovic (still ranked 1) up against Italian Jannik Sinner (4) in the other Men’s semifinal.

More important, I watched the Thursday morning wee-hours (re)match between Gauff and Sabalenka. After Sabalenka, a la Peter Parker, blew a 5-2 lead, going down 6-5 in the first set, she evened it at 6-6 and then cleaned up in the tie breaker going on to win the match in two sets 7-6 (7-2), 6-4.

In Saturday’s upcoming Women’s final (I’m writing this on Thursday evening), Sabalenka is facing off against an evident rising star, China’s Zheng Qinwen (ranked 12), who has also blazed through the tournament, only dropping 3 sets out of 15; she hasn’t faced any top-ranked players, though.

As for Sabalenka, she’s yet to lose a set, and she’s beaten three top-ranked players on her way to the final, including Gauff.

Wordsworth poems; The Thief of Bagdad (1924); Evergreens’ build-your-own salad.

I’m All Lost in The…

What I’m obsessing over THIS week.

Week #14.

1) Last week, I tagged the intro essay to Penguin’s William Wordsworth collection as one of my obsessions. This week I’m off into the poetry.

The reverent Pastoralism and the early 19th Century Dr. Suess rhyming (And Johnny’s in a merry tune,/the owlets hoot, the owlets curr,/And Johnny’s lips they burr, burr, burr,/And on he goes beneath the moon) are not my thing. But as an academic exercise—I’m reading Wordsworth as part of my self-induced 19th-Century-Poets-Seminar—these poems are delicious.

They’re also revelatory. The collection is arranged chronologically, and I’m still in the first third of the book, but so far, Wordsworth’s attraction to ghosts and ghost stories (“We are Seven,” “The Thorn”); his belief in the cosmic connection between human beings and nature (“The Tables Turned,” “Lines Written in Early Spring,” “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”); and most of all, his joy in synthesizing the past, present, and future (“Old Man Travelling,” “The Ruined Cottage”) are giving me a newfound philosophical sense of holistic calm. The past isn’t defined, the present isn’t defining, and the future doesn’t bring verdicts. Per this collection’s intro essay by Wordsworth scholar Stephen Gill, I’m calling this realization the “Wordsworth Continuum!”

“When these wild ecstasies shall be matured/Into sober pleasure, when thy mind/Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,/Thy memory be as a dwelling-place/For all sweet sounds and harmonies..” Wordsworth writes in Tinern Abbey (1798).

2) Released in 1924, Douglas Fairbanks’ The Thief of Bagdad is a 100-year-old Hollywood film.

A special effects marvel in its own time (flying carpets, winged steeds, crystal-ball visions, demonic monsters that would make Sigourney Weaver shiver) and an acrobatic spectacle of athletic stunts (shirtless Fairbanks leaping over walls and off balconies with his trusty magical rope), The Thief of Bagdad remains eye-catching and entertaining in Twenty Twenty-Four.

The movie’s arresting visual charm has plenty to do with the $20-million-in-today’s-dollars sets too: lush palace interiors, bustling street scenes, fiery mountain crags, and swaying underwater sequences.

It must be said: The layers of racism in this 1920’s Hollywood movie are evident. Why for example is the princess of Baghdad white? And the dastardly Mongol prince and his nefarious informant—played by his scheming Asian ally Anna May Wong (who, by the way, steals the show in this, her breakout role as “the Mongol Slave”)—feed off white tropes of eyebrow-arched Asian villainy. To make it even grosser, all these racist clichés take place within a condescending Western narrative of magical Baghdad. As modern reviewer, Darragh O’Donoghue pointedly quipped in a Senses of Cinema review, Fairbanks’ adventures settle into “orientalist drag.”

O’Donoghue correctly calls The Thief of Bagdad “a great, but flawed film.” The “great” part is definitely wrapped up in the artistic set design and action-packed plot.

But for me the beauty here is in how the movie conjures a rhapsody of city energy: The magnificent replicas of city infrastructure and architecture featuring sweeping palace garden plazas above, and thriving noisy street bazaars below; the nod-and-wink urban diversity (one of the princess’ royal suitors is played by a woman, Mathilde Comont, disguised in a mustache); and the playful homo-eroticism (there are lots of close ups of Fairbanks’ tush and the guardsman’s, Sam Baker’s, buff torso and giant sword).

And I’m always sucker for an urchin-chic plot about a fancy-free pickpocket; in one Charlie Chaplin-worthy move, balletic and incorrigible Ahmed (Fairbanks) robs unsuspecting worshippers during afternoon prayers.

This city medley turns The Thief of Bagdad into a boisterous silent film that captures the urban energy of its source material, One Thousand and One Nights. (The screenplay was written by Afghani-American pulp fiction writer Achmed Abdulla.)

Historian Ben Wilson’s must-read 2020 history of cities, Metropolis, identifies Medieval Baghdad as the world’s first great international city. And The Thief of Bagdad makes the glamorous cinematic case for this theory as Baghdad’s princess (played by fainting flapper waif Julanne Johnston) draws regal suitors from India, Persia, Mongolia, and Baghdad itself (in the guise of Fairbanks’ own Little Tramp character). All against a backdrop of geopolitics, high culture, and thrilling street life.

I watched it on Amazon Prime.

3) Other obsessions are brewing this week, including Fremont Coffee Company, a cozy bohemian maze-of-nooks-coffee-shop built into a fixer-upper cottage on Fremont’s main drag; I’ve found myself tucked away there twice in the past week. I’m also enamored with Shibuya HiFi, a new Ballard nightclub I went to on Tuesday evening. They curate vinyl LP audiophile parties in an acoustically smart, private backroom (shoes off) for the first 25 people who reserve spots; I’ve now bought tickets for this upcoming Saturday night’s session, a revue of 1960s and 1970s Ska/Reggae/Dub tracks recorded by the influential Kingston label, Studio One. I’m guessing Shibuya HiFi will make my list next week. Additionally, I’m stuck on Christian-Marxist Elizabeth Gaskell’s Victorian novel, Mary Barton, which I’ve been reading and savoring for a month now; it made this list two weeks ago when I was deep in the throes of the pensive drama. Well, I finished it last night. It turned into a bit of a TV show in the last batch of heavy-handed chapters, but it remained, on balance, a literary and gripping deliberation on industrial era capitalism.

Having noted all these contenders, I feel compelled to give the third slot on this week’s list to something I left off last week’s rundown: local salad chain, Evergreens .

Sure, Evergreens has all the charm of a Starbucks, complete with: a plastic seat setting; assembly-line service, scooped from cafeteria style bins (complimentary, corporate laboratory bread added); a high school employee feng shui; and a loud logo that looks suspiciously like, well, the Starbucks logo.

But unlike all these fast food trappings, Evergreens, with its vast assortment of fresh veggies and greens, gives an often-frustrated vegan the unmatched eating-out opportunity to take control.

I gleefully graze down the production line improvising a different version of the “build-your-own” every time. You pay by item, so, with vegan eyes like mine, it can get pricey choosing from a long list of healthy and tasty options: black beans, celery, cucumbers, fire roasted corn, grape tomatoes, green onions, house pickles, jalapeños, mirin shiitake mushrooms, pickled red onion, red bell pepper, roasted brussels sprouts, roasted cauliflower, roasted sweet potato, shredded carrots, and zucchini.

I usually top my horde of veggies with sunflower seeds (they’ve also got cashews, garlic croutons, crispy onions, tortilla chips, BBQ sauce, black pepper, chermoula, hot sauce, fresh lemon, and tajin) plus I ask for a “heavy” serving of dressing; you can choose from cilantro lime, dijon balsamic, caesar, Greek yogurt, peppercorn ranch, and red wine vini.

I put it all on a base of spinach, romaine lettuce, and warmed quinoa. Also available: argula, kale, mixed greens, and jasmine rice. There’s cheese, fruit, and protein (such as tofu) choices too.

Sealed in a big plastic bowl, I shake it up, and then sit down to my masterpiece.

Banana pasta; William Wordsworth essay; my cookie jar

I’m all Lost in…

Three things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#13

1) While on vacation in Manhattan last summer, I bought a box of black squid ink pasta at Eately; I never got around to cooking it. So, I left it as a house gift for the friend who’d graciously let me crash at their Columbus Circle apartment for the week while they were out of town.

I’ve been daydreaming about black pasta ever since!

This week, I tried out Solely’s Green Banana Fusilli Pasta; Solely’s is a San Diego-based organic food company that started out making healthy fruit snacks for kids. No processed sugars nor additives.

Evidently, Solely branched out, and they’re now upgrading their fruit compost into pasta. In addition to the green banana pasta, they’ve also got Spaghetti Squash Pasta.

Despite the green banana moniker, this pasta is deep black; I’m assuming it’s made from over-ripened bananas.

I tired it out as the elegant base to an otherwise smorgasbord hippie dinner this week. Bouncy and chewy, it was a tasty corkscrew centerpiece for a string beans, black beans, red peppers, carrots, peas, tofu, and miso sauce concoction.

I have since ordered four boxes.

For the record, this is the first food entry on my weekly roundup of obsessions. I hope there are more; currently seeking recipes that include black pasta.

2) I’ve landed on my first project of the year: My own Poets-of-the-19th-Century seminar. My inquiry grew out of last year’s (and likely ongoing in 2024) private City Studies seminar. My city lit crash course led me to a batch of 19th century British books: Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater; Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, and currently Ms. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. (I also dug into Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England; Communist Engels was German, but, per “the Working Class in England,” his famous Manchester expose fit right onto my Victorian England reading list.)

Loving the 19th Century mood, and feeling like I needed a new infusion of poetry, I started drawing up a list of 1800’s poets. Conveniently, I had bought Penguin’s William Wordsworth collection last September (I suppose my subconscious inquiry was two steps ahead) and so this week, I started my 19th century poetry studies with Wordsworth.

Along with the first couple of poems in the book, Old Man Travelling (1798) and the mini-epic, The Ruined Cottage (1797), I devoured Wordsworth scholar Stephen Gill’s introduction to the collection

First, Gill suggests a helpful frame for reading Wordsworth, who, he posits, wrote poetry as an exercise in “impassioned seeing,” and next, “impassioned contemplation.” With an apparently passionate eye on “the common things” and everyday “goings-on,” Wordsworth’s “wild poesy” seeks to surface the transcendent beauty therein. Gill writes: “Wordsworth’s poetry celebrates life’s mystery incarnate in the commonplace.”

Gill goes on to explain that Wordsworth’s quest for the everyday sublime is built on making “connections” and “conjunctions” and “ties,” merging seemingly different states of being, particularly bridging different time periods. Gill argues that Wordsworth was ultimately focused on consciously establishing “continuums” over the disparate phases of his own life. Gill writes: “Wordsworth’s profoundest need was to know that nothing had ever given him joy was lost.”

Gill’s thesis about Wordsworth’s pursuit to establish an overarching personal narrative exploded my brain with this related explanation of Wordsworth’s penchant of supposed pastoral escapism:

To Wordsworth the return to the mountain was emphatically not retreat. Collapse of faith in the French Revolution did not entail loss of faith in man, but rather a renewed exploration of what it might mean to say that one still had ‘faith in man.’

As a city zealot who tends to quietly recoil at the Romantic poets and their haughty pastoral moralism, Gill’s construction gave me the non-ideological segue I needed.

My Poets-of-the-19th Century syllabus currently includes other dreamers such as: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and, taking up the urban space in the Wordsworthian “continuum,” Parisian flaneur, Charles Baudelaire.

3) I’m not filing this entry under eats, but rather, under apartment therapy & care.

Cleaning my studio apartment this weekend, I ended up washing and refashioning my sad sugar jar—blasting out the hardened, graying granules coagulating at the bottom—into a vibrant glass cookie jar.

With a slight minimalist lean inherited from my 1970s Scan Furniture mom, I’d describe my apartment aesthetic as a cross between teen beanbag and Sesame Street. And I want to believe that loading up my newly refurbished jar with a pile of plant-based fudge striped treats is more a fashion statement than a Cookie Monster descent.

So far, so good: Giving me a source of quiet glee every time I come home, the pleasant cookie display remains, while not untouched, largely intact.

Mary Barton on Librivox audiobook; New Warby Parker glasses, Newman in Shoreline; Up-zone data.

I’m All Lost in…

What I’m obsessing over this week.

Week #12:

1. I’m upping the ante on one of last week’s obsessions, Elizabeth Gaskell’s debut novel, 1848’s Mary Barton.

I’ve read another 100 pages, and it just keeps getting better as the poetic language (“I keep speaking out about the distress they say is nought”), plot twists (John Barton’s creeping opium addiction), Gaskell’s classic craft (the protagonist’s best friend is going blind, and her wisened ally is going deaf, as fateful decisions loom), and Gaskell’s clever craft (using a pronoun malaprop during a subtle feminist moment) mark nearly every sentence as one to savor.

This obsession has led me to a Librivox audio version of the novel; Librivox is an ad-hoc world of amateur actors reading public domain classics and posting them for free online. This one features an ace actor (not always the case) reading in a delightful British accent that shifts between a Manchester working class brogue and a proper drawing room lilt.

Currently: I read a chapter after dinner and then listen back to the same chapter on audiobook as I go to bed. I usually fall asleep to the dulcet tones before the chapter’s out, though not before, happily re-living one of the great sentences I’d read earlier in the evening—or even having it expand.

“Margaret had said he was not a fortune-teller, but she did not know whether to believe her.”

2. I lost my glasses last November during a discombobulated, rush-hour bike ride. This was the night before I left on my trip to New York. My eyesight isn’t terrible, but it proved impossible to read on the airplane without my glasses. And I got sleepy-tired trying to read at coffee shops for the rest of the trip. This was all very eye opening.

I’ve been reading without my glasses for the past month back home now, but I’ve needed perfect lighting to do so. I’m sure it’s been hell on my eyes.

My new glasses —which I ordered after perusing the Warby Parker store at University Village when I got back from my trip, and then narrowing it down at the Capitol Hill store over the holiday—arrived this week.

I’ve been wearing Warby Parker brand since my trend-alert Ex steered me to their Soho store a decade ago.

I got a quieter version of the “Rose Water”-clear pair I lost (the medium frame as opposed to wide frame), plus I went for the buy-two discount and got an art sexy blue pair.

Specifically, in addition to the Durand Rose Water frames, I got the Newman frame in Shoreline.

“Shoreline,” a sort of Toys R Us beach-pail blue, has stamped a necessary mark of modernity on my fashion this new year.

3. As I made clear in my New Year’s punditry on PubliCola last week—weighing in alongside Erica and Sandeep, the founding Cola class—I’m convinced the newly-elected, provincial city council is going to recommit Seattle to its single-family zone status quo.

Accordingly, I’m all in on last week’s Planetizen article by Todd Litman (Litman is the executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute). Litman presents a set of recent studies showing that up-zones lead to more housing choices across the economic spectrum.

It’s, yet again, the necessary rejoinder to the ubiquitous and conventional populist rhetoric that nefarious developers—they’re building housing, by the way—are corrupting neighborhoods.

Recent studies support the conclusion that broadly-applied upzoning that allows more compact housing types (townhouses, multiplexes, and multi-family) in multimodal neighborhoods, with complementary policies such as reducing parking minimums, can increase housing supply, drive down prices, and increase overall affordability.

I’m happy to report that the New York Times ran two Yes-in-My-Backyard opinion pieces this week as well. Both pieces had data and headlines— I Want a City, Not a Museum and How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers—highlighting how and why up-zones are essential to meeting affordable and middle-class housing needs. The second article, How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers, had excellent graphics too.

There’s also this bit of specific analysis in the I Want a City, Not a Museum article that makes a point I keep coming back to whenever I write about the situation in Seattle: gentrification is happening under the existing, anti-development zoning status quo, not under the dystopian pro-development free-for-all that exists in critics’ minds.

Why? Because current NIMBY restrictions create a housing shortage and accompanying sky-high rents.

From the NYT:

Roughly 15 percent of the land in America’s largest city is reserved for single-family homes. Even in central neighborhoods, it is often illegal to build new buildings on the same scale as existing buildings: Forty percent of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built today. …

The result is an increasingly frantic competition for the available housing. In recent decades, rents have climbed much faster than incomes. In 1991, the median monthly rent in New York City was $900. By 2021, the median renter was paying $1,500 a month for housing.

And by the way, while preserving 15% for single-family homes might sound bad to a writer in New York, it’s 75% in Seattle! (with a slight caveat allowing mother-in-law cottages.)

Learning the “Police & Thieves” bass line; Savoring 4Columns; Reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton

I’m All Lost in the... in which I report on what I’m obsessing over this week.

Week #11.

1) The 1976 dub reggae tune “Police & Thieves” is the finale of my 2023 five-song piano set. I learned to play the song earlier this year from the sheet music to Junior Murvin’s original version. But because I grew up listening to the Clash’s cover rendition (one of my all-time favorite records since hearing it in junior high school), my take has turned into a hybrid between Murvin’s classic and the Clash’s cover. While largely sticking to Murvin’s softer vibes, I have replicated the Clash’s heavy back-beat chords in the left hand and incorporated their sweeping intro throughout.

But then, about a week ago—with just 10 days left in the year—I realized I was leaving out Clash bassist Paul Simonon’s signature pop-reggae riff. Junior Murvin’s lovely inversions and Joe Strummer’s whisper-spittle aside, Simonon’s syncopated bass is obviously the crowd-pleasing hook in this song.

I’m now committed to working his catchy bass into my arrangement before the year is up. With the bright, active melody line going in the right hand at the same time, it’s a tricky, but addicting, assignment.

2) I’ve been getting arts journal 4Columns’ Friday email every week since their 2016 debut. But sadly, I must say, I’d only read a handful of their articles over the years. Until recently.

If you don’t know the New York City-based journal, they have a great conceit: Every Friday, they publish four 1,000-word art reviews. Each column—published on their minimalist, yet elegant and user-friendly site, and written by a regular contributor from their impressive and erudite roster—reviews a separate, new work, be it a new exhibit at a gallery or museum, a recently-released record, a performance art opening, or a just-out book or movie.

For example, last week they cued up reviews of the following: a visual art show at Manhattan’s White Cube gallery; the new Nicki Minaj record; Michael Mann’s biopic on Enzo Ferrari; and An-My Lê’s conceptual photo exhibit at MoMA, which sounds like it’s a quantum-physics-level foray into the depressing persistence of war. Timely.

Le’s show, titled Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières, includes a sub-set series of photos titled Small Wars (1999–2002). Incongruent with those dates, the photos appear to be taken during America’s war in Vietnam; they’re actually pictures of recent re-enactments shot in the U.S. 4Columns writer Aruna D’Souza explains:

To make them, Lê sought out enthusiasts—all white men—who gather in Virginia and North Carolina on weekends to game out skirmishes. Lê convinced them to let her take pictures; they said yes, as long as she agreed to participate in the role of Viet Cong guerilla.

[One] photo is an act of displacement—spatially, but also (given the dissonance between the date the photo was taken and what it seems to represent) temporally. Indeed, the artist, who was born in Vietnam in 1960 and came to the US after the fall of Saigon, has long been interested in displacement—especially how colonialism and its violence create diasporas, dislocate cultures, and trigger unsettling aftereffects that tend to go unnoticed.

The rendering of the exhibition’s title in Vietnamese, (American) English, and French points to the intersection of forces that have shaped the modern history of Southeast Asia, while the two rivers to which it refers—the Mekong and the Mississippi—collapse the distance between Lê’s birth country, a projection screen for so many American fantasies of power, domination, and defeat, and the United States itself.

I eagerly read this fast-paced review, along with two others in last week’s set, devouring three of the four columns. (It turns out, I guess, I have no interest in Enzo Ferrari nor Michael Mann.) As for the column on Nicki Minaj and the column on the art show at the White Cube gallery: Even though 4Columns reviews are written by academics and intellectuals, the prose is consistently straight forward, crisp, and accessible.

Here’s another excerpt, this one from Johanna Fateman’s review of the White Cube exhibit:

In Tracey Emin’s new show, gracefully or crudely outlined bodies are beached on islands of bleeding brushwork ...

Upon closer look at the canvas, the dark clot of gestures at its center seems to be a lover’s head, the crooked pose of the central figure a contortion of ecstasy…

Both artists [David Bowie and Edvard Munch] have long loomed large in her work, their influence reflected in her confident line and theme of desolation—though, in her treatment of the transhistorical subject of the nude, she evokes other things as well, such as cave painting and the pictographic porn of the bathroom-stall vandal.

It’s a treat to pick and choose from 4Column’s curated set. The week before this, they had a review of the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit on zines.

The week before that, they had a review the Guggenheim’s exhibit on 1960s and ‘70s experimental Korean art.

And the week before that? A review of MoMA’s exhibit on the 1960s and ‘70s American counterculture’s eco-architecture movement; that exhibit was a highlight of my recent trip to New York City.

This is all to say, I now find myself looking forward to their Friday email so I can read, and savor, 4Columns’ columns.

3) Readers of this regular round-up know I’ve been enjoying 19th Century accounts of industrial capitalism, the emergent and defining force of that time. Friedrich Engels’ The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845) and Charles’ Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) have both shown up on on my lists.

This week I’m onto an acclaimed text of the genre: Elizabeth Gaskell’s debut novel from the “Hungry ‘40s,” Mary Barton (1848); please note the zeitgeist date, the year when reformist revolutions spread across Europe and the year Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto.

I’m only 60 pages in, but so far, set in the flickering candle-lit working class rooms clustered above Manchester’s alleyways and chronicling the family woes of a young dressmaker’s apprentice, Gaskell, in her languid prose (as opposed to Dickens’ frantic prose), has already lingered on a deadly mill fire, the untimely death of a child struck with scarlet fever, the trauma of sex work, and the faltering eye sight—symbolism!—of the apprentice’s best friend.

Gaskell also reports on the internal life of sudden Chartist, mill worker John Barton:

Barton tried credit; but it was worn out at the little provision shops, which were now suffering in their turn. He thought it would be no sin to steal, and would have stolen; but he could not get the opportunity in the few days the child lingered. Hungry himself, almost to an animal pitch of ravenousness, but with the bodily pain swallowed up in anxiety for his little sinking lad, he stood at one of the shop windows where all edible luxuries are displayed; haunches of venison, Stilton cheeses, moulds of jelly—all appetising sights to the common passer by. And out of this shop came Mrs. Hunter! [the mill owner’s wife] She crossed to her carriage, followed by the shopman loaded with purchases for a party. The door was quickly slammed to, and she drove away; and Barton returned home with a bitter spirit of wrath in his heart, to see his only boy a corpse!

What do any of my city planning poems have to do with coyotes, you ask?

I'm excited that Bainbridge Island Press' published my poem Obit for a Pickpocket in the premier edition of their journal, Poetics.

The theme of the issue is the coyote. What do any of my city planning poems have to do with coyotes, you ask? Well, in Native American culture (I learned), the coyote, like Hermes in Greek mythology, symbolizes the clever trickster. From my city POV, this translates into Dickens' Artful Dodger-up-through-today's-DIY hackers (Hermes was the patron saint of thieves.) As I've assembled a cosmology of city all-stars, one trickster I've been taken with is Mary Quant, an avant la lettre hacker and/or punk who helped define modern youth culture as the key figure in London's mid-60s Youthquake fashion revolution. Youth culture, obviously, is a central feature of cities.

Quant died earlier this year (see the NYT's annual Notable Deaths in 2023 feature and scroll to April for her obituary; even better, definitely read the 1967 NYT Magazine feature about her.)

Riffing off feminist poet of antiquity Sappho's famed fragments, I stole a bunch of Quant's witticisms (she was like Warhol with the incisive quips, but giddy rather than Warhol's bitchy), and I hacked together a poem in her honor.

Here's the poem:

Obit for a Pickpocket

 to Mary Quant, 1930-2023, with fragments from her NYT obituary

These are the aperçus of the modes of production:  —It’s ridiculous, in this age of machines, to continue to make clothes by hand. —Why can’t people see what a machine is capable of doing itself, instead of making it copy what the hand does?

Spoken like a pickpocket of the Gods! Amateurs at accounting emerging from post-war privation. Her Siamese cat in the habit of eating patterns she purloined from Harrod’s. She delighted

 in pranks. Turned her back on the corseted shapes. Horror upon her, she made the window displays a performance. Upside down atelier. Spray-painted lives, mannequins dyed or bald or clad in hurried synthetics. Couldn’t stand one dress hanging in the closet listless as estates. These were the bedsit quantum mechanics of Dame Gamine. Prodigy.

Can we stop for a second and talk about how beautiful Evelyn Waugh’s electric guitar was?    

 She and Mr. Waugh became inseparable.  Wore mother’s pajamas to class, ran their fears and wash & wears like a coffee bar. She cried on her 13th birthday because she knew horror was getting closer.

 —The young should look like the young. —The most extreme fashion should be very cheap.

 Passers-by sneered: “God, look at this Modern Youth!” Shall we be Modern Youth tonight? These are the aperçus in obituaries.  

—First, because only the young are daring enough to wear it. And second, because it will not last.

A lovely side note: Bainbridge Island Press has nominated this poem for the Pushcart Prize. This is far more impressive to say out loud than it is in fact. Every small press in the country—and there are thousands?—is allowed to nominate up to 6 poems they've published over the course of the year for the prize. I'm holy moly thrilled that Bainbridge Island Press chose my poem as one of their nominations (thank you Bainbridge Island Press), but there's that context for you.

Obit for a Pickpocket is a personal favorite. At a glance it doesn't
overtly fit into the sequence of my Green Metropolis poetry, but in my mind it’s central to the city story line.

Quoting my own intro to the review I wrote of her 1966 memoir Quant on Quant, which I read earlier this year, I said:

In my ongoing list of Urbanism all-stars, I add Mary Quant to Billie Holiday, Jane Jacobs, and Frank O'Hara.

In my firmament of city gods, I’m trying to make sure all the tenets of Urbanism get a patron—or that is to say, that each patron represents a city tenet: Currently, I’ve got 1950s Trinidadian-UK calypso star Lord Kitchener representing local music scenes, city planning theory sage Jane Jacobs representing pedestrian street life, and I recently added pastoral cityscape artist Edward Hopper to represent infrastructure. There are many more slots to fill: mass transit, diversity, counterculture, density, innovation, commerce. Of course, I’ve slated Billie Holiday as the supreme Goddess of Cities overall.

Today, I’m adding London’s Mary Quant to represent one of the most electric tenets of Urbanism: Youth.