Two 1980s underground films; a new waterfront park; and ABC bows down to Trump; plus, let’s talk about Brooke Shields.

I’m All Lost In …

the three things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#62

1) Silence = Death and Positive by Rosa Von Praunheim

I went to Northwest Film Forum on Saturday night and watched a pair of long-lost, underground documentaries by German filmmaker Rosa Von Praunheim. They were companion pieces about the early years of the AIDS crisis. Embedded in New York City’s gay community in the late 1980s, Praunheim’s up-close films, Positive and Silence = Death (both 1990), chronicle, the the DIY artistic response to the tragic epidemic and the political evolution of the direct action gay rights group ACT UP (intellectual fount Larry Kramer is on camera and on point throughout).

Praunheim’s lively interviews, remixes of found news footage, stark set pieces, and concise voice-over script are shot in a grainy 1980s Berlin punk-art aesthetic that revives the lo-fi look of mid-60s avant-garde films (I’m thinking of Stan Brakhage), as both documentaries focus on anti-Reagan (and anti-NYC Mayor Koch) anger. Ultimately, these two films are time capsules of dissident 1980s eloquence more than perhaps the keen journalism they delivered at the time.

As for the artistic response to AIDS, Praunheim captures: first-wave slam poetry readings; earnest and dark theater pieces (the dark vein includes a graphic suicide monologue featuring a handgun and a butt hole); and the Satanic liturgies of punk opera diva Diamanda Galas.

Galas’ slithering sequences, sung in church chancels and in leather boots (over industrial beats), are, as they were in the late 1980s: Thoroughly stunning. Imagine Einstürzende Neubauten’s post-rock noise backing Maria Callas in drag.

Not Marilyn Manson. Praunheim films Diamanda Galas performing thundering pieces from her AIDS trilogy: The Divine Punishment (1986); Saint of the Pit (1986); and You Must Be Certain of the Devil (1988).

As for the political response, Praunheim zooms in on: DIY crisis hotlines (“If the phone rang, at least I knew someone was still alive”); Pride parades when the annual gay rights march was still incensed and came with a list of demands (“get vaccines into arms,” Kramer says); organizing bus loads to shut down international medical conferences; and notably (given today’s ham-fisted approach) graceful and judicious analogies to “the Holocaust.”

Bonus: Poet Allen Ginsburg, an elder gay statesman by then, is particularly compelling and well-spoken here. He likens the AIDS epidemic to the global environmental crisis that was (already) “a cancer” ravaging the planet.

2) Seattle’s Waterfront

Decades ago, when Erica and I were at the Stranger (me as news editor and ECB as star reporter), we editorialized in favor of civic activist Cary Moon’s compelling idea for the waterfront: Instead of accepting the state and city plan to replace Seattle’s Alaskan Way viaduct with a new 4-lane highway tunnel, we should replace it with a pedestrian concourse and a human-scale boulevard (just one north-bound lane of traffic, one south-bound lane, and a center turn lane. Nothing more, but trees, parks, and food trucks.)

I’ll never forget convincing my editor Dan Savage and publisher Tim Keck to put this radical (“Nothing Goes Here”) option on the cover of the paper; other than election endorsement issues, we didn’t put politics on the cover. For months, both Dan and Tim, a bit oblivious to the news section’s regular reporting on the viaduct issue, were fretting that we needed a new cause célèbre. (Our earlier hill-to-die on, turning the Seattle monorail into a citywide mass transit option, had finally flamed out.) So, I made the case that taking a stand against replacing the viaduct with yet another highway (albeit an underground highway), and supporting a pedestrian-centered promenade instead, could be the centerpiece of our fight for an eco-smart green metropolis.

They signed off on this new editorial campaign. But, as with our earlier monorail crusade, we would eventually lose this battle too.

Fast forward. In 2019, Seattle replaced the six-lane viaduct with a four-lane tunnel and a four-lane (and up to eight lanes at times) street-level arterial on Alaskan Way. Not only do we now have even more concrete for cars in total than we used to, but we squandered an opportunity to create a pedestrians ＞ cars waterfront mall.

With the Brutalist viaduct now long gone, the city did at least get creative around Pike Place Market. They seamlessly connected Seattle’s famous market bazaar to the waterfront at the doorstep of the aquarium and the nearby event-friendly, Pier 62. The “Overlook Walk,” as it’s called, opened two-and-a-half months ago in early October. I checked it out this weekend.

Instead of being forced to pad across the roaring street between the aquarium and the market, and scurrying underneath the groaning viaduct to access a steep set of dirty concrete stairs—or taking that infamous freight elevator, folks can now take the Overlook Walk. Just float from the sidewalk plaza in front of the aquarium onto a set of capacious steps that sweep up a casually tiered ascending pedestrian walkway from airy landing to airy landing. At the top, you come upon friendly plywood theater seating and an elevated park where you can gaze out at Elliott Bay and the Olympics before strolling on to Pike Place Market.

To be honest, I had my back to Elliott Bay during my visit to Overlook Walk this Sunday. I was too busy snapping pictures of the city.

12/15/24, “Overlook Walk,” Seattle waterfront

Book-ending this bit of reclaimed waterfront, there’s also a new hang out spot ten blocks south of Pike Place Market. Just west of Pioneer Square, between Pier 48 and Colman Dock, there’s the new Habitat Beach, an edible-friendly oasis of wild grass, pebbled sand banks, lanky driftwood, and Paleolithic seating where you can look at the bay.

You do have to push the “Wait! Wait! Wait!” pedestrian beg button and cross four lanes of traffic on your way over from Pioneer Square, though.

3) ABC TV Capitulates to Trump

Of all the foreboding recent news about Trump’s pending second term——robber baron Elon Musk’s ascension to Trump bro whisperer; anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist RFK, Jr. getting Trump’s nod to head DHHS (anti-polio vaccine, specifically); vindictive MAGA cultist Kash Patel getting tapped to head the FBI; and (is anyone surprised besides the anti-Kamala left?) a collection of Rapture evangelicals and West Bank annexation hawks coming on as Trump’s Middle East policy people——I think ABC’s decision to blink in the face of Trump’s weaksauce lawsuit is the most chilling development of all. (Trump sued ABC for defamation over their 100% accurate coverage of the E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse case.)

It isn’t so much Trump’s despotic impulse to go after the media that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand at attention—I got state media vibes from Trump all the way back in 2015 when he kicked Univison’s Jorges Ramos out of a campaing press conference. It’s more the Neville Chamberlain vibes I got from ABC this week.

Rather than total appeasement, ABC could have easily won this case by standing up to Trump’s bullying. After all, as they originally reported: Trump was, indeed, found guilty of rape and truth is a rock-solid defense against libel suits.

ABC’s acquiescence signals that the company—with its compromised corporate family tree—prefers (because of its compromised corporate family tree) to kowtow to Trump. This does not bode well for democracy.

***

This week’s Recommended Listening: Electronic music duo Frank & Tony’s 2024 LP, Ethos. Or more to the point: the moody and floating opening track, “Olympia” featuring vocals by Eliana Glass.

This week’s Recommended Viewing (and, I admit, also an obsession): Lana Wilson’s 2023 Brooke Shields documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.

I ended up watching this because, as you may remember, I’m reading her ex-husband Andre Agassi’s autobiography. I’m not liking him much (he comes across as a superficial dullard). And the fact that he thinks she is superficial (he condescends to her throughout his book) made me think Shields was probably way over his dim-witted head and probably far more interesting than he is.

It turns out, yup, with a personal story that puts her at the center of queasy 1970’s Hollywood/teen super model sexploitation, a Reagan-era goody-goody rewrite, and a late 1990s Friends-era slapstick sitcom renaissance (after some dark nowhere years), she is, in fact, totally interesting. Thoughtful, and down-to-earth, Shields also had an alcoholic manager-mother, who is shown in Wilson’s film through contemporaneous TV interviews, calmly and philosophically unapologetic about Shields’ starring roles in soft-core Hollywood films and those infamous “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins” jeans ads.

1980

1978

Shields is just a year older than me, and I remember most of her story line clearly; the titillating tween movies Blue Lagoon (1980) and Endless Love (1981), and of course, the controversial 1980 Calvin Klein adverts. At the time, though—and I now understand that this is central to the feminist critique that child porn was being normalized—I thought Shields was too mainstream and Wonder Bread-pretty to seem risqué or transgressive. In fact, for me, her Reagan-era makeover into a virgin ended up defining Shields more than the gross late ‘70s Lolita voyeurism. In contrast, I readily understood that other (and similar) zeitgeist players such as Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver or Linda Blair in the Exorcist represented (and were forced into) messed up moments. In my mind, they, rather than Shields, highlighted the greasy-haired, creeper 1970s.

I will say that Shields’ disassociation, which she talks about in the documentary, comes through in the Calvin Klein ads in a way that (problematically so) de-sexualized them when I first saw the commercials as a young teen. There was a meta quality to the ads that seemed to say this isn’t happening, I’m acting. And despite the obvious sexual crime being committed in these commercials by director and photographer Richard Avedon, when I re-watched them this week, Shields’ Twister-mat flexibility was reminiscent of the physical comedy to come circa 1997 in her successful slapstick sitcom, Suddenly Susan.

The documentary also includes Shields, with tears in her eyes, telling the horrifying story of being raped after a phony casting call meeting when her star briefly faded in the early 1990s. But perhaps the most powerful moment in the doc comes at the end when Wilson’s unobtrusive camera settles in on Shields’ easy-going, current family. The scene captures Shields and her clearly still-smitten and loving second husband, and her two college-age daughters in a free flowing dinner conversation about Shields’ early career—particularly the problematic 1978 Louis Malle movie, Pretty Baby. This sexploitation film was made when Shields was just 11-years-old, and featured her in nude scenes and a kiss scene with then 28-year-old actor Keith Carradine.

During their family dinner discussion, Shields, seemingly unfazed by her past, plays the role of a contrarian yet inquisitive researcher (into her own history). Sounding uncomfortably like she’s parroting her own mother’s measured defense of the movie somewhere back on the Phil Donahue Show, she challenges her daughters to articulate exactly what’s so wrong with her 1978 kiddie porn debut. One of her daughters makes a clear-eyed point that seems like news to Shields: “You weren’t the only young female actor this was happening to during that time,” her daughter says.

Lastly, the Best Holiday Season Gift of the Week:

After Dad’s funeral in Gaithersburg, Maryland back in March, I took the Amtrak up to New York to decompress. During the trip. I did a load of laundry at my friend Dave & Jen’s apt, and I loved how floral and fresh my clothes came out smelling. They use Mrs. Meyers Clean Day detergent.

My bestie ECB, an expert gift-giver, apparently made a note of it and surprised me this week with an early Hanukah present.

CBD sodas; a pesto veggie sandwich; waiting for Brooke Shields to show up.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#61

I’ll get to this week’s list momentarily, but first, here are a few quick updates on some recent obsessions I’ve written about before:

For starters: Psyched with how Alterations Plus Dry Cleaning transformed my slacks into crisp and plush sartorial options last week, I brought in another pair to be pressed. And once again, voila!

Second, in a city where most coffee shops close by 6 pm, Basecamp Cafe (at Harvard Ave. E and E Thomas on Capitol Hill) is serious about being an evening neighborhood hang out; they had a live piano, bass, and drums jazz trio in the house until 9 pm on Sunday night.

Third, the WTA announced their year-end awards this week, and my recent picks (as opposed to tennis expert Ben Rothenberg’s) swept the voting: “Player of the Year,” Daffy Saby; “Doubles Team of the Year,” Sara Errani & Jasmine Paolini; “Most Improved Player,” Emma Navarro (who, for the record, I don’t like, but I did pick); “Newcomer of the Year,” Lulu Sun; and “Comeback Player of the Year,” Paula Badosa.

Lastly, here’s the Disappointment of the Week: For the second time in a month, I find myself on the losing side of the popular vote. Interviewing the vox populi, the Washington Post reported results of a new poll showing 57% of Americans (versus 42% of Americans) prefer car-dependent, suburban sprawl over sustainable green metropolis living.

I’m proud to be part of the Petula Clark 42%, but, Sigh.

P.s. For my Millennial and Gen Z friends, Petula Clark is this:

Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city/Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty/How can you lose?/The light's so much brighter there/You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares/So go downtown/Things will be great when you're downtown.

Petula Clark’s urbanist showstopper: “Maybe you know some little places to go to/where they never close/Downtown.” —1964

Onto this week’s list.

1) CBD Sodas

Like THC, CBD comes from cannabis plants; it stands for Cannabidiol. Unlike THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol), which is the main psychoactive ingredient in pot, the science says CBD doesn’t make you loopy. There is some evidence, though, that it helps you relax, and it may work as an anti-inflammatory.

Well then, perhaps being anti-inflamed made me loopy. Because the Rogue Blackberry Cucumber 30 mg CBD Seltzer Water I had at the Lookout Bar & Grill on Saturday afternoon filled me with giggles.

Saturday afternoon, 12/7/24

Wednesday evening, 12/11/24

I had such a good time with my CBD-dosed blackberry cucumber soda, I attempted to replicate Saturday’s bliss mid-week. I tried another CBD drink on Wednesday night: a “Higher Potency” Wyld Blood Orange Real Fruit Infused Sparkling Water.

This seems like a road to ruin—I chose this one in part because it was a higher dosage. 50 mg. (Wyld is a cannabis edibles company.)

No giggles this time. But I did find myself taking an aimless, three-mile stroll through the neighborhood afterwards.

Both drinks are more acidic and spumy than, say, a La Croix seltzer; also they’re fruitier, though not too sweet. For an unscientific time, I highly recommend these abstract sodas.

2) Post Pike Bar & Cafe’s Vegan Pesto Sandwich

I can’t tell you the endless number of well-intentioned places in town that have debuted with a (doomed) vegan option on the menu; I stand by with the knowing heart of a dad watching his Kindergartner bound off to the bus aware that these days are numbered.

Thankfully, this is not the story at Post Pike Bar & Cafe, which opened four years ago and…

Still available alongside the Deluxe Ranch BLT, the smears and bagels, the tuna melt, the hot roast beef, buffalo chicken, prosciutto caprese, or breakfast sandwiches, Post Pike’s crowded, labor-of-love, comfort-food menu features several vegan go-to options.

There’s the hummus breakfast sandwich and the hummus wrap. But my pick is the Vegan Pesto Sandwich with its perfect piled-on medley of good-and-good-for-you veggies: cucumber, red onion, roasted red pepper, and avocado. It comes on toasted yet fluffy sourdough bread slathered in the magic pesto. And though the sandwich is on the smaller side (for $14), it’s always hardy and filling.

After a heads-down, busy day at work on Tuesday, where I had to draft answers to a series of questions from the citizen oversight committee, I was famished. So, I stopped in to Post-Pike and ordered this now-classic local sandwich. I savored every bite, and then I was on my sleepy way home, hunger pangs vanquished by the swirl of basil, garlic, and pine nuts still lingering in my head.

3) Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi

The first 100 pages are excellent; but the jury is still out on the rest…

“That’s the kid I was telling you about—the prodigy. It’s the prettiest word I’ve ever heard applied to me,” Andre Agassi remembers thinking as the hushed talk around the amateur circuit turned into a reverent buzz .

A short time later, after making the finals of a satellite masters tournament, he turned pro at 16, simply because, broke and living out of motels with his older brother, he wanted to take the $1,100 dollar check (amateurs aren’t allowed to take the money prizes). It was, of course, also a way to escape the “prison” that was his father’s homemade tennis camp and his official tennis boot camp boarding school. A bit nervous before taking the money (“If I take that check, I’m a professional tennis player, forever, there’s no turning back..”), he calls his dad for advice. His dad had forced little Andre into tennis (when he was still in the crib his dad “hung mobile tennis balls above my head and encouraged me to slap at them with a ping-pong paddle he’d taped to my hand”). Now, dad berates him on the phone: “You’ve dropped out of school. You have an eighth-grade education. What are your choices? What the hell else are you going to do? Be a doctor?”

Packed with harsh moments like this, the opening 100 pages of Agassi’s writerly and apparently atypical sports bio (published in 2009, it was ghost written by top-shelf-writer-for-hire J.R. Moehringer) chronicles Agassi’s tortured childhood and chaotic high school years with thoughtful strokes:

“It was my life, and though I hadn’t chosen it, my sole consolation was its certainty. At least fate has a structure.”

Open initially does seem more of a coming-of-age novel than non-fiction. It’s anecdote after anecdote. There’s Agassi’s tyrannical father, who made him hit 2,500 tennis balls a day when he was just seven, punching Agassi in the face when the boy mistakenly pounces on his father at the door thinking it’s his playful uncle coming home from work. Or there’s his (once again) tyrannical father … (his dad, an ex-Olympic boxer from Iran, now works as concierge at a Vegas casino) buying a run down house outside of town oblivious to anything but his obsessive tennis plans for young Agassi:

It would have been funny if it hadn’t been scary. At house after house, even before the [real estate] agent’s car came to a full stop my father would jump out and march up the front walk. The agent, close on my father’s heels, would be yakking about local schools, crime rates, interest rates, but my father wouldn’t be listening. Staring straight ahead, my father would storm through the house, through the living room, through the kitchen, into the backyard, where he’d whip out his tape measure and count off thirty-six feet, the dimensions of a tennis court. Time after time he’d yell, Doesn’t fit! Come on! Let’s go! My father would then march back through the kitchen, through the living room, down the front walk, the real estate agent struggling to keep pace.

We saw one house my older sister Tami desperately wanted. She begged my father to buy it, because it was shaped like a T, T for Tami. My father almost bought it, probably because T also stood for Tennis. I liked the house. So did my mother. The backyard, however, was inches too short.

Doesn’t fit! Let’s go!

Finally we saw this house, it’s backyard so big that my father didn’t need to measure. He just stood in the middle of the yard, turning slowly, gazing, grinning, seeing the future.

Sold, he said quietly.

Unfortunately, it’s nothing but faults and unforced errors for the subsequent 50 pages. And that’s where I’m now stalled, wondering if I should continue reading this book. In a dramatic shift, the writing has become inexplicably macho and cheesy as Agassi finds a surrogate father in his gruff new trainer, Gil (who “grew up fast on the hard streets.”)

The Hallmark Channel cheese continues: “Enough said. I’ll never ask again. Merry Christmas, son,” chapter 10 concludes after Gil presses 19-year-old Agassi on why he’s chosen to spend the holiday’s with Gil’s family—where there’s only a couch to sleep on—instead of with his own family and friends.

The book started so artfully that I’m hoping this current ham-fisted section is intentional? Maybe it’s setting us up for some actual revelations? Otherwise, I’m quickly growing to dislike Agassi’s he-man bravado about his Corvette and his banal epiphanies. (He reports on Gil’s guru wisdom: “You’re asking me to put you through a workout here that leaves no room for where you are, how you’re feeling, what you need to focus on. It doesn’t allow for change.” [Italics his].

I didn’t know much about Agassi (I’m a recent convert to tennis fandom). But I do know that at some point, he marries fascinating Gen X icon Brooke Shields. So, I’m trying to push through until he meets her to see if this book becomes special again.

***

I leave you with two contenders for The Quote of the Week.

First—and this is to be spoken with a British accent—because it comes to us from the very British Catherine Whitaker, the host of The Tennis Podcast.

I like all the animals, apart from the snakes.

The second potential quote of the week comes to us sarcastically in a text from my friend XDX, a legit student of Vipassana, as opposed to, say, a post-Steve Jobs Silicon Valley executive tripping on ayahuasca.

Gonna go meditate now. Maybe I’ll be a CEO.

The UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting; lots of online shopping; Alterations Plus Dry Cleaning.

I’m All Lost In…

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#60

Before I get into this week’s obsessions, I have some reading recommendations, a historic listening recommendation, and a You-must-watch-this-video recommendation.

Reading Recommendations:

* PubliCola’s report about progressive Seattle City Council member Tammy Morales’ disappointing resignation is mandatory reading for anyone trying to understand the dynamics of Seattle’s current reactionary political landscape. Erica documents how bully culture is the go-to M.O. for 2024’s conservative-backlash council. On Bluesky, I called them the Cancel-Culture City Council.

* For another dose of local politics (and more on Seattle’s conservative slide backward) check out this Urbanist article about how local spending on transformative transportation upgrades is becoming a thing of Seattle’s progressive past:

The Seattle Transportation Levy represents a step back, prioritizing the “basics” of the city’s transportation system over investments that set Seattle up to be able to reduce emissions, create more vibrant communities, and get ahead of expected population growth.

Robot hand

* More reading: An article in the December 2 print edition of the New Yorker (November 25th online), “A Revolution in How Robots Learn,“ is the latest tale from the dystopian frontier of A.I.

Featuring Google subsidiary DeepMind and its ALOHA project’s experiment in teaching robotic hands to tie shoes, fold laundry, and play ping pong, (and potentially, the reporter panics, “someday shoot somebody”), this article outlines competing approaches to teaching robots menial, yet surprisingly complex tasks. There’s “imitation learning,” which uses repetition of analog, human-controlled physical directives, and there’s “reinforcement learning,” where a robotic hand tries to figure out practical skills all by itself as it creates a datalog of stored wisdom through trial and error and “flywheeling” (a concept the writer didn’t do a great job explaining, but basically means building momentum through small wins.)

There’s also a third way.

Founded by an ex-ALOHA engineer, Stanford robotics professor Chelsea Finn, a company called Physical Intelligence combines both approaches:

The A.I. driving this remarkable display, called π₀, can reportedly control half a dozen different embodiments, and can with one [program] solve multiple tasks that might challenge an ALOHA: bagging groceries, assembling a box, clearing a dinner table. It works by combining a ChatGPT-esque model, which has broad knowledge of the world and can understand images, with imitation learning.

This article, (though, admittedly, not 100% clear … “If robotics models turn out to be embodiment-agnostic…” ??) reminded me of my favorite aperçu from fast-fashion revolutionary Mary Quant, an important city culture ideologue. Quant quipped (circa 1965): 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?

* And a related reading recommendation: The Washington Post published an article this week about personal companion App companies such as Chai and Replika that market addicting chatbots.

Listening Rec:

1957

I had never heard of late 1950s/early 1960s blues pianist, Ray Bryant. But now, thankfully, I have. His hard bop version of jazz standard “Angel Eyes” is a piece of nightclub perfection. It’s the second track on Bryant’s refined, dynamite piano, bass, and drums debut album, 1957’s The Ray Bryant Trio.

Watching Rec:

* Lest you think I’ve forgotten about the WTA, don’t worry, that’s not happening. I’m still crazed about professional women’s tennis.

My recommended viewing is this 26-minute year-end compilation of the winning match points of every non-Grand Slam final (there are 50) from the 2024 women’s tour. (As we know, World No. 1 Daffy Saby won two of 2024’s four Grand Slams, while World No. 2 Iga Swiatek won one, and World No. 10 Barbora Krejčíková won one.)

Watching this highlight reel of lower-level 500 and 250-point tournament winners gives you a sense of which players are poised to break into the top rankings next year. (The video also highlights 1,000-point level tournaments, but those were dominated by the big names like Saby, Swiatek, and World No. 3 Coco Gauff.)

20-year-old Russian Diana Shnaider, World No. 13, stands out on this 2024 winners medley; she won four of these lower-tier tournaments, the most of any player. China’s Qinwen Zheng and Kazakhstan’s Elena Rybakina, won three apiece, but both of them are already ranked in the Top 10 at 5 and 6 respectively. So, Shnaider didn’t only rack up more trophies, hers felt weightier.

Now, onto this week’s obsessions:

1) In addition to having unstoppable melodramatic appeal, this week’s UnitedHealthcare CEO assassination at 6th Ave & W. 54th St., right around the corner from MoMA in Midtown Manhattan, is a defining political moment in the otherwise confusing upheaval that is 2024.

In a year dominated by Trump’s chaotic, populist, and ugly disrespect for civic norms, the TikTok left now seems—analogously—to be rallying around populist violence in the name of corporate accountability.

What strikes me about the left’s glee (and I do understand their logic) over this “Eat the Rich” hit is that their clever snark (“The conservatives always said we needed more good guys with guns”) feels oblivious. Even if this good looking, instant-folk-hero vigilante turns out to be a Chomsky-reading Bernie bro) lefties are 100% misunderstanding the MAGA right. Yes, hypocritical Donald Trump practices corrupt crony capitalism, but he sells class war.

A reality check for inattentive liberals on MAGA ideology: please watch one of right wing U.S. Sen. Josh Hawely’s (R-Nebraska) recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings where he has verbally slaughtered cocky CEOs and execs from the credit card industry, the airline industry, and the health insurance industry for their greedy bottom line values.

I’m not trying to hype Trumpism. As a lefty myself who detests the MAGA cult, I’m issuing a “Be careful what you wish for” warning to my political compatriots, cautioning in part that a class war program will quickly be co-opted by Trumpers, who similarly prioritize gut anger over humanist analysis.

And just as the “First they came for the trans youth…” poem goes, so go hit lists.

There is a fun (sorry) side note about this assassination, though: Biking is obviously the quickest way to get around Manhattan. (The assassin, who fled on a bike, zipping through Central Park to the Upper West Side, was 30+ blocks away just 15 minutes after the shooting, where he ditched the bike on W. 86th St.)

12/4/24

2) It’s probably not the healthiest way to deal with the Holiday Season blues, but this week has been all about online shopping therapy:

Banana Republic slacks (an olive green pair and an umber pair), a troupe of colorful new dish towels, a book of Euripides fragments, a thick, fuzzy gray bath mat, yet another Dexys Midnight Runners t-shirt, another Joshua Tree baseball cap, a pack of new underwear, and a John McEnroe “You Cannot Be Serious” t-shirt (my now on-loop response to Trump) all arrived pronto in the mail room this week after I blissed out online with my credit card.

I also gave my dear old friend Gregor Samsa a gift subscription to Ben Rothenberg’s Tennis substack.

3) Speaking of Banana Republic slacks … I (despondently) noticed that my fantastic, chalk blue slim-fit pants had an incorrigible grease stain on the upper right thigh.

My washing machine was outmatched, so I brought the besmirched pair of pants to Alterations Plus Dry Cleaning, the reliable neighborhood dry cleaners four blocks from my house on 15th Ave. E.

Alterations Plus Dry Cleaning, my expert neighborhood dry cleaners.

I pointed out the maddening grease stain to the 60-something Chinese matriarch who runs the shop, and after she cast her eyes up and down the entire pant leg, she looked up, and corrected me: “Everywhere.”

Two days later, seemingly sandblasted, my favorite pants were immaculate top to bottom. And soft.

Making vegan jerk salmon; (finally) reading David Foster Wallace; defying a social trend.

I’m All All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#59

Before I get to this week’s three main subjects, there are several items from previous installments that need updates.

First, there’s Yzabel Nievanne, the San Francisco-to-Seattle transplant who was chronicling her new-to-Seattle life on Instagram Reels. You may recall, I wrote this: “It’s fun to watch an incorrigibly effusive newcomer quietly puzzle over Seattle’s strangely lackluster city life.” Well, Yzabel has left town. She and her beau packed up and moved to Vietnam.

11/22/24, NE 42nd & University Way

Second, last April, I wrote about the Aladdin Gyro-Cery, my favorite (Middle Eastern) fast sandwich shop in the U. District. Well, I landed there during my Friday night adventures in medias res this week and slipped in for their always-fantastic ful sandwich.

Third, per my post two weeks ago when I identified World No. 5 tennis star Qinwen Zheng as a poet: More of her fragments have emerged.

“Inside, there is a volcano,” she muses in the WTA’s year-end 2024 season supercut.

And here’s this week’s Recommended Listening: Tous Les Garçons et Les Filles, the 1962 debut LP from teen Yé-yé music icon Francoise Hardy. In particular, a recommended track: "C’est à l’amour auquel je pense."

“Tous Les Garçons et Les Filles,” 1962 on the Disques Vogue label.

Onto mes obsessions.

1) Vegan Jerk Salmon for Thanksgiving

A few weeks ago, anticipating the holiday blues, I wisely invited myself to Valium Tom’s family’s Thanksgiving dinner in Ballard. I also gave myself an assignment: make a vegan main course and dessert.

Tofu Salmon, 11/28/24

For the main, I took a second pass at a tofu salmon dish I made back in January 2023; I’ve always wanted to try my hand at this dish again because, while it seems like a clever masterpiece on paper, my initial middling results weren’t about to win the Great British Bake Off, or even Cutthroat Kitchen.

The basic idea, courtesy of Caribbean inspired Jensplantbase, is to marinate tofu in fish flavors (dark green nori paper) and complimentary spices (paprika, adobo rub, pimento pepper) plus add some beet root powder for the salmon pink hue and rice paper for the fishy skin verisimilitude.

I identified my 2023 failure thusly: I didn’t let the marinated tofu sit overnight in the fridge as instructed.

Whether that was the problem is now uncertain.

Because my mistake this time was overdoing the seasonings. I went ham with a prefab Jamaican Spice blend, plus adobo and my own unwieldy combo of peppers—Anaheim, red bell, and jalapeno.

Luckily, I rescued the meal by serving it on an impromptu bed of vegan-buttered mashed potatoes with Adzika spice and green peas. This comfort-food base blurred the granular heat of the faux salmon. I ended up with a somewhat successful smorgasbord of Thanksgiving dinner flavors.

For the dessert—which tasted like a chocolate-chip-cookie-dough cake—I made a Chickpea Peanut Butter Skillet Cookie from a recipe by That Vegan Babe. The only deviation I made from her recipe (which calls for combining chickpeas, peanut butter, and maple syrup in a food processor along with baking soda and baking powder) was happily going with three teaspoons of vanilla. She, mistakenly, only calls for one-and-a-half.

2) String Theory by David Foster Wallace

It took my current outsized preoccupation with tennis to get me to finally read (Infinite Jest-famous/infamous)-David Foster Wallace.

I’ve long been intimidated by Foster Wallace’s reputation for erudition and legendary footnotes (which themselves have footnotes, it turns out). But when I found out the Library of America collected his tennis essays, of which there were five (including articles in Esquire, Harper’s, and the New York Times magazine) in one handsome volume, I decided to receive serve.

It’s true. David Foster Wallace is a tremendous writer with a gigantic brain. His exegesis on the geometric motion of tennis courts, for example, where (in a footnote and using an economics metaphor), he writes that the “calculus of a shot in tennis…” breaks down to the fact that “the principle itself is variable,” is the kind of earnest wonder that makes his tennis explorations a revelation to read.

David Foster Wallace says he was “agog” over Tracy Austin in 1979

But first a number of complaints. I have an aversion to know-it-all bros with important theories about everything; from what they believe constitutes the proper ice cream bar, to Space-Time, to hair gel. In his tennis essays, David Foster Wallace, who has a T.J. Miller/Erlich Bachman Silicon Valley vibe, fills us in on all of the above—and, while he’s at it, adds his thoughts on consumer capitalism. And his wrote cynicism (gasp, the umpire’s chair is sponsored by “EVIAN”) gets tiresome fast: The way David Foster Wallace idles in 1990s Gen X irony is reminiscent of the indie rock band, Pavement, though he’s far less funny and far more conspiratorial than delightful Stephen Malkmus and crew. And though Foster Wallace is a master of small details—”[in response, his] coach will adjust the set of his sunglasses and say nothing” —he is not a great reporter. He tends to spin up his observations into fanciful narratives that lack receipts, like when he waxes about the uncouth crowds that he assumes occupy the nosebleed seats at the U.S. Open, or when he guesses at the secret life of a tournament concessions worker. Similarly, lines like “I do not know who a certain Ms. or Mr. Feron is, but s/he must be a fearsomely powerful figure in the New York sports-concession industry,” simply substitute self-consciously jaded fancy for actual meaning.

Lastly, and mostly: Foster Wallace’s sexism—misogyny, honestly—is palpable. “The women tend to be dressed in ways that let you know just what they’d look like without any clothes on” he writes in one of his typical and recurring asides about the women he notices on the tennis circuit (rarely players, and mostly female fans or wives and girlfriends of male players.) There’s famous Brooke Shields, who Foster Wallace refers to as Andre Agassi’s “taller and considerably less hairy S.O., highly visible in the player guest box … wearing big sunglasses and multiple hats.” Indeed, Wallace is not concerned with women themselves, but with what they’re wearing: “The way the girlfriends’ tight shorts seem designed to make anyone with a healthy endocrine system react…”

All of this said, David Foster Wallace was indisputably, as advertised, a big thinker and skilled wordsmith. Specifically, he wrote immaculate and evocative analogies: “Michael Joyce [a qualifying challenger] will detail all these asymmetries and stacked odds the same way a farmer will speak of poor weather, with an absence of emotion that seems deep instead of blank;” “to the west is the EKG skyline of downtown Montreal;” “both feet parallel to the baseline and his side so severely to the net that he looked like a figure on an Egyptian frieze;” “the loop in a pro’s backswing is kind of the trademark flourish of excellence and consciousness of same, not unlike the five-star chef’s kiss of his own fingertips … or the magician’s hand making a french curl in the air as he directs our attention to a vanished assistant;” “Philippoussis is like a great and terrible land army; Sampras is more naval, more of the drift-and-encircle school. Philippoussis is oligarchic: he has a will and seeks to impose it. Sampras is more democratic, i.e. more chaotic but also more human: his real job seems to be figuring out what his will exactly is.”

David Foster Wallace is also an expert at framing inquiries (“You have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or … try to define it in terms of what it is not…”). And he eventually renders quietly substantive conclusions. “A creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light” he writes lyrically about Roger Federer.

11/23/24, I got this slim, handsome volume at Elliott Bay (for just $2 with my frequent buyers card all filled up)

The essays here are: 1) Foster Wallace’s own mini-memoir about when he was a regionally ranked teenage competitor (and he parlayed his preternatural mathematical sense of Midwest wind conditions into a mode for outfoxing more talented players); 2) a harsh review of former pro-tennis teen phenom Tracy Austin’s 1992 memoir (Austin was supposedly his hero, though, I detect male frustration and resentment; they were the same age, both born in 1962); 3) a lengthy magazine feature on an unknown though “world-class,” player named Michael Joyce (No. 79 in the world when Foster Wallace published this 1996 peek into the drudgery of qualifier tournaments; 4) a critique of the U.S. Open’s commercial trappings; and 5) a philosophical dialogue on the transcendence of the aforementioned Roger Federer.

I’m glad I finally read David Foster Wallace because, while I don’t know from Federer, this time capsule of 1990s brain power (footnotes and all) does not transcend.

The tennis lessons in this book are great, particularly when narrated by a gifted writer who speaks in allusions to Greek mythology while maintaining an accessible Gen X cadence. But more important, I now know I don’t need to bother reading Infinite Jest.

3) Basecamp Cafe

This concluding item, per the intro to today’s report, is prompted by an update. Two months ago, I wrote about the new coffee shop I was digging—Seasmith, which is part of the Transit Oriented Development energy cluster next to the Capitol Hill light rail station. I still go to Seasmith regularly, and can report that despite closing at 5 o’clock, they have at least added a beer cooler which hints at the pending liquor-license and later-hours-cafe concept their manager told me was on the way.

Some hope for sleepy Seattle.

Which brings me to this: I’m currently sitting at a table just two blocks northwest of Seasmith, writing from another coffee shop (the subject of this update) where it’s presently 7:45 pm. This cafe is open until 8 pm on weeknights and 7 pm on weekends.

It’s called Basecamp. (There’s a ski gear rental counter in the back and the whole place is affiliated with a too-happy & positive-for-me social club for sporty Seattleites called Gearhouse. A sign on the front door reads: “An indoor place for outdoor people” and there are clipboards by the front counter so you can sign up for group activities like snowboarding, climbing, yoga, avalanche awareness, reading parties, and trivia nights.) None of this is relevant to me, but I take the coffee shops with after-work hours where I can find them.

What’s relevant is that Basecamp Cafe is a capacious industrial space with wood tables and sturdy Scandinavian chairs, plus purple velvety Sesame Street divans, where I can lock down and work after 5 pm. And yes, they sell beer and wine. Extra bonus: they play unobtrusive pop like “Moon” by Yoste instead of the ubiquitous ‘80s and ‘90s college rock rotation in most Seattle hipster coffee shops.

It’s also crowded (as is Seasmith!), which challenges recent news reports that America is turning into “A Nation of Homebodies.” I was already a bit skeptical of the alarming stories about the apparent 10 percent increase between 2003 and 2022 in time spent at home; while the Princeton study that prompted these reports seems to account for the rise of WFH by citing an increase in home-bound, non-work activities like eating and drinking (and was based on participants’ time-specific diaries), it doesn’t present the data by time of day. So, while the numbers are potentially concerning for urbanists like me, the data is murky on the question of folks’ whereabouts during traditional hours for being out and about socially.

Less murky is the situation here at Basecamp Cafe this week where I’ve gone just about every day to sip a cappuccino, eat a savory pinwheel, and get some writing done in the evening rather than going to a sad bar: It’s hard to find a seat.

Amphion on lyre; Bowie on piano; Catherine Whitaker on sexism; and 4 excellent recommendations.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week

#58

First, a batch of recommendations.

• This week’s Recommended Reading: The NYT 11/16/24 obituary on eco- architect Sim Van der Ryn. The NYT:

Sim Van der Ryn, a Dutch-born architect who emerged from the back-to-the-land movement in the early 1970s to become the California state architect, charged with designing sustainable buildings that earned him the sobriquet “father of green architecture,” died on Oct. 19 in Petaluma, Calif. in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was 89.

Mr. Van der Ryn pioneered the use of sustainable materials, solar energy and natural ventilation in government buildings. One example was the landmark Gregory Bateson Building, a 250,000-square-foot office complex in Sacramento … The Architectural Review called the project “the first large-scale building to embody what we now call sustainable architecture.”

Maybe it’s because all the hippie brilliance recounted in this obituary permeated the ether during my primeval kindergarten years in the early 1970s, but I believe Van der Ryn’s idea that “buildings are organisms and ecosystems” represents a special moment in history.

This is precisely the fleeting era when the idealism of the Gee-whiz-1950s-sci-fi-imagination merged with the idealism of the 1960s-counterculture-Fuck-the-establishment ethos to create a sort of sustainable Whole-Earth-Catalog-architecture movement.

It was a fruitful time, eloquently celebrated last December, by the way, in a MoMA exhibition called “Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism.”

• This week’s Recommended Tofu: Wildwood brand savory baked tofu. More than just a bland substitute for meat that you hope soaks up some of the soy sauce in your Wednesday night stir fry or bonds with the turmeric and nooch in your Sunday morning scramble, these handy, firm blocks come with a zesty punch of their own.

• This week’s Recommended Listening: George Gershwin’s “Prelude II” a.ka. “Blue Lullaby.”

You know how according to all the program notes, Bartok or Chopin or Copland or just about every composer seems to have had a populist period, mixing colloquial folk music into their scores? And yeah, you kind of hear it. But mostly it sounds strained, like say, J.D. Vance trying to connect with the counter staff at a donut shop in Georgia.

Well, Great Jewish-American composer George Gershwin (Jacob Gershwine) whose blend of pop, jazz, and classical music helped define Midnights in Manhattan in the 1920s, doesn’t need a music critic to point out his effortless Americana amalgam.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but 40 years later, jazz genius John Coltrane paid homage to the “Blue Lullaby” melody and its hypnotic bass line in one fell swoop with his own masterpiece, “A Love Supreme,” bringing America’s legacy of cross pollination full circle.

I started learning Gershwin’s “Prelude II” late this week only to discover that the very first chord is a blues flex—literally—a minor-10th finger stretch from a C# on your pinky up 15 half steps to an E with the thumb. I’ll report back.

• This week’s Recommended Bluesky Accounts: I joined Bluesky in August 2023 with the hope that I was taking part in a popular rejection of Elon Musk’s self-centered, crypto-fascist X. Sadly, Twitter didn’t totter. But Bluesky is having a moment right now, adding millions of users since election day. Here’s who I follow.

Now, onto this week’s obsessions.

1) The Myth of Amphion

Greek and Roman mythology describes Amphion as a great musician who built the city of Thebes by playing an enchanting tune on his magical lyre that animated the rocks and stones to assemble themselves into a great metropolis. What a wonderful metaphor for cities: They are built upon harmony.

Fixed on this myth, I’ve made Amphion’s story a recurring theme in my new still-in-progress poetry manuscript, City States. “Constructing a city without cranes,/on the strains of a golden lyre,” is a line from one City States poem called “Why is it so Difficult to Get a Good Photo on the Subway?”

The most famous telling of the Amphion myth comes to us in the fragments of the lost Euripides play Antiope (circa 420 B.C.) Otherwise, Amphion is just a side character—the husband of vain Queen Niobe—in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 C.E.)

Wanting more Amphion, I’m currently reading a book called Amphion: Lyre, Poetry, and Politics in Modernity by Leah Middlebrook.

In the opening pages, Middlebrook, a succinct, academic writer, compares Amphion to Orpheus—the central character in the Orpheus and Eurydice myth; also a musical superstar, Orpheus used his gorgeous singing voice to convince Hades, the king of the underworld, to allow his (Orpheus’) lover Eurydice to leave the world of the dead. It ends badly.

As dueling muse templates for the poetic arts, Middlebrook posits that Orpheus’ myth represents an illusory mode, whereas Amphion’s story represents a smart alternative that actually engages material reality. Orpheus, she writes, tries in vain to stop the universe by “creating lasting images through time,” while “Amphionic poiesis is a phenomenon of animation and motion” that honors the flow of the physical world.

Additionally, she points out that Orpheus’ creativity is a self-centered enterprise, whereas Amphion’s city building “inspires people to join into productive, collective action.”

2) Bowie on Piano

Bowie, a young dude in 1972

As I mentioned, I’ve started learning George Gershwin’s “Prelude II” on piano. This is the first new song I’ve set out to learn in a long time. For the past three years, my piano project has settled into solely trying to master the songs I’ve already taken up. I like to say: I can’t play piano, but I can play Prince’s “Kiss” on piano.

“All the Young Dudes,” an outtake from David Bowie’s 1972 Ziggy Stardust LP—and a song he gave to Mott the Hoople (they scored a hit with it late that year), is one of my recurring jams, and I lovingly worked on it all week.

It’s a twinkling song with an instantly memorable intro melody that gently descends an octave (from F# to F#) in the rejoiceful key of D Major before nestling into a demo-like, lo-fi mix of distorted electric guitar chords and strumm-y acoustic guitar. With this, the plaintive, chatty recitative begins: “Billy rapped all night/about his suicide/how he’d kick it in the head when he reached 25/that speed jive/don’t wanna stay alive/when you’re 25…”

There are four sections to the song, successive waves of earworm undertow that keep dragging you in: The joyous intro; the lilting verse; an ascending run-up to the chorus, which climbs an octave with the snide words: ”The television man is crazy/sayin’ we’re juvenile delinquent wrecks”; and finally, the anthemic chorus which descends chromatically step by step, before announcing: “Hey, mister ya guessed/I’m a dude, dad/hey/all the young dudes/carry the news.”

Bowie, 1972

At the time, Lou Reed called the song a gay anthem (“Now Lucy looks sweet/ cause he dresses like a queen…Got to race some cat to bed…”). Contemporaneous pop critics, forecasting punk, thought of it as a glam anthem for disaffected post-counterculture teens (“My brother’s back at home/with his Beatles and his Stones/we never got it off on that revolution stuff/what a drag”). And Bowie himself explained that the song was originally written as part of the Ziggy Stardust story line with the kids in the street recounting the Ziggy LP’s apocalyptic opening lyrics: “News had just come over/we had five years left to cry in/news guy wept and told us/earth was really dying.”

My favorite lyric from “All the Young Dude’s” is this bit of nadsat in the second half of the first verse: “Wendy’s stealing clothes from Marks & Sparks,” which is both a call back to Mary Quant’s fast-fashion prescription from the teen-aged 1960s, and a look ahead to Johnny Rotten’s urchin chic uprising from the mid 1970s.

Fittingly, this transcendent lyric comes with a surprising (and notable) musical touch.

Breaking up the droll, spoken-word melody that Bowie had established in the first half of the verse, he suddenly adds a harmony on the words “Marks & Sparks,” dramatically pairing the anticipated C# note with an F# (the Devil’s diminished 5th). This surprise splash of harmony (pairing the key of D’s only two sharped notes, by the way) alerts the listener that this is no mundane shoplifting excursion. By recasting Wendy’s loner teen crime as a joint effort, Bowie is signaling that Wendy actually isn’t alone—that her deviant deed is also an act of collaboration; the music transforms a thrilling yet shameful moment of individual desperation into an instance bursting with conspiratorial harmony (it takes two to have a conspiracy—and sing a harmony.) The fact that the listener is the only one privy to Wendy’s action suggests that we are her partners in crime. This harmony, this implied camaraderie, is what renders “All the Young Dudes” a generational anthem.

Bowie replaced “All the Young Dudes”—initially intended as the grand finale to the Ziggy Stardust LP—with a tune called “Rock and Roll Suicide,” which concludes as Bowie famously sings: “You’re not alone.”

3) Catherine Whitaker on Sexism at the Billie Jean King Finals

I’ll admit I’m a bit embarrassed to keep writing about the WTA—it’s clearly becoming an all-consuming preoccupation—but this is, after all, a weekly account of obsessions.

Perhaps more embarrassing is that just a week ago, I had, at best, a reserved reaction to one of the tennis podcasts I was checking out, Catherine Whitaker, Matt Roberts, and David Law’s The Tennis Podcast.

Well, now I listen every day (it’s their arch British accents, isn’t it). I hang on their every snide or wowed or thoughtful or passionate or wry or earnest or knowing insight. They take tennis, though barely themselves, as seriously as an eight year old takes Taylor Swift; this is life or death appreciation, which brings out a charming and often brutal honesty.

After tossing off a comment about American men’s tennis player Ben Shelton (“I didn’t have confidence in Ben Shelton at any stage during this match”), Whitaker will catch herself and quickly ask with an upward British lilt: “Is that harsh?” I also loved when she asked if zero-heart-rate Dutch spoiler Botic van de Zandschulp was “exceeding Markéta Vondroušová in the-most-inexplicable-tennis-player-ever category … I think he might be, you know.”

The Tennis Podcast: Whitaker, Roberts, and Law

In one breath they’ll be speaking with reverent awe about some little-known Czech doubles player’s consistent form, or begrudgingly giving props to a tyrannical Australian coach, or giggling in cahoots about someone’s baffling service game, before taking on a serious issue like sexism.

Props to Whitaker for her Second Wave, 1975 feminist take-down of the sexist situation in Málaga, Spain this week where the women’s tennis team championships are taking place in an impromptu side court outside the larger stadium that’s hosting the men’s tennis team finals. (Italy and their star player Jasmine Paolini for the women’s team win, by the way.)

I would urge you to go to the 41:48 mark here, starting with Whitaker’s non-committal, “Hmmm” to co-host Matt Roberts’ sanguine take on the issue of gender inequity, and hear her out through to the 45:00-minute mark as she lands with this:

It makes me sad for women’s sport. It deserves better. These competitors deserve equal treatment. They deserve to be on the same stage that the men are playing on. This is not an issue with the product. The product is sensational. This is an issue with how the world values women relative to men. And women’s sport relative to men’s sport.

And for my final obsessed-tennis-fan note this week: Lone-ranger-tennis-journalist Ben Rothenberg did a post on Thursday making the data-driven case for his picks on the WTA annual year-end survey.

Admittedly, I’m all heart over data, but I disagree with a couple of his picks; I’d choose Lulu Son for WTA Newcomer of the Year (Rothenberg picked Rebecca Sramkova). And despite not being much of a fan, I’d hold my tongue and pick Emma Navarro for WTA Most Improved Player of the Year (Rothenberg went with Anna Kalinskaya.)

Otherwise, Rothenberg and I are unanimous votes on Sara Errani & Jasmine Paolini for WTA Doubles Team of the Year; Karolina Muchova for WTA Comeback Player of the Year; and … for WTA Player of the Year … Daffy Saby, of course.

Tennis journalist Rothenberg’s year-end picks

“This year, there really shouldn’t be much room for debate about who the player of the year is,” Rothenberg writes…

Aryna Sabalenka wins the two top-line criteria for determining the best: she finished the year ranked No. 1, ranked more than 1,000 points ahead of second-place Iga Swiatek, and she also won the most major titles (two, at the Australian Open and U.S. Open). Sabalenka also leads in the unofficial Elo ratings. The only possible argument I could see for another candidate is that Swiatek won more overall titles (five to four) and more at the WTA 1000 level (four to one), but I expect Sabalenka to waltz to this win. This was her year, even if the rankings didn’t catch up to that until October.

Avant-garde music to the rescue; Qinwen Zheng the poet; and the truth about capitalism.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#57

1) Cellist Helen Gillet

An arts acquaintance from New Orleans or Detroit or Minneapolis (I’m not sure where my old friend Adam the Filmmaker lives these days), sent me a couple of messages earlier this month telling me not to miss cellist Helen Gillet’s upcoming Seattle show at the intimate Here-After theater in downtown’s Belltown neighborhood. When I saw that my favorite local pianist Marina Albero was also on the bill, I knew this was a promising tip; I’ve written about Albero’s Latin/blues/art school music here before (she even shows up in one of the poems in my chapbook).

In addition to Albero and her glowing electric keyboard auras and Gillet with her combo of percussive cello loops and orchestral drones, there was a third musician on the top-tier bill as well: Seattle saxophonist and woodwind player Jessica Lurie. She sat in on both Albero’s expert experimental opening set and Gillet’s showstopping closing set, providing earthbound jazz phrases as a connecting thread.

Helen Gillet at Seattle’s Here - After Theater, 11/13/24

Jessica Lurie & Helen Gillet at Seattle’s Here - After Theater, 11/13/24

Jessica Lurie & Marina Albero at Seattle’s Here -After Theater, 11/13/24

With synth keyboards and an array of effects boxes—as opposed to the traditional piano template—Albero leaned into an incantatory Laserdome-Radiohead sound that I’ve never heard in her swinging jazz performances. Whereas she often flaunts blues scales and Afro-Cuban modes, this time, with Lurie’s sax and flute accompaniment riffing on the hard bop, Albero explored Star Trek Starfleet flight deck oscillations.

Gillet’s set, meanwhile, was both meditative and raucous. She weaponized her battered cello as an electrical conduit for dirty chords, tricky echoing beats, hefty bass grooves, and titanic drones as she mixed art song, folk airs, and swaggering rock in an energized show that featured her bluesy and operatic voice. “Lord I want to strut,” she sang, 100% on brand, as caramel waves of electrified cello flowed from her patchwork of blinking gear.

Late in her performance, with a seamless shift from art hymn to a forboding and locked-in 1-3-7 (D, F, C) jam, I nudged my pal Byrne: “This sounds like a P.J. Harvey song.”. “It is a P.J. Harvey song,” he said as Gillet’s solo cello turned into a raging rock band.

75-plus people were on hand in this downtown theater space off the alley behind the popular Crocodile club. We were momentarily shaking off last week’s devastating election results on a rainy Wednesday night in November while embracing our inner Jazz-Age Berlin during these ominous days.

11/13/24

2) The Poetry of Qinwen Zheng

Somehow, the WTA’s two ascendant young stars, World No. 3, 20-year-old American Coco Gauff and World No. 5 , China’s 22-year-old Qinwen Zheng, hadn’t collided in any of the tournament brackets all year.

Until this week’s thriller at the 2024 WTA Finals final. What a profound match.

A showdown between Coco Gauff and Qinwen Zheng—who have similar styles as fleet-footed, court coverage demons—was long overdue. Or at least, I’ve been waiting for it all season. Mainly because watching Zheng destroy everyone she plays can get annoying. Zheng is scary good in that Martina Navratilova way that makes you root for her opponents. With her regal air (cue the post-match handshake police), Zheng is inexorably on track to becoming World No. 1 within the next 18 months, like it or not (mark my words).

Gauff, thanks to her own on-court superpowers, and despite a mid-season falter, seemed like one of the few players left who could conceivably stand up to Zheng. Digging in with aggressive wall-to-wall backhand and forehand returns, Gauff, in fact, did eventually win this grand finale last Saturday in a stunning, down-one-set and multiple match-points-behind, comeback tiebreaker, 3-6, 6-4, 7-6.

The sudden Coco vs. Qinwen rivalry will be something to watch in 2025.

The other player who can beat Zheng (and did in last week’s opening round robin phase before losing to Gauff herself) is the current World No. 1, my favorite player, Aryna Sabalenka. Daffy Saby (as we call Sabalenka in my household) won all four of her matches against Zheng this year, pretty handily too, except in the Wuhan final last month where Zheng managed to take one set, her first ever (foreshadowing?), from Sabalenka, before eventually losing 3-6, 7-5, 3-6.

Zheng’s dedicated Chinese fans refer to Sabalenka poetically as '“the mountain that Zheng is yet to overcome,” which is fitting because Zheng is something of a poet herself. In interviews, Zheng earnestly talks about her delicate heart and about how tennis hurts.

WTA stars Coco Gauff and Qinwen Zheng after the 2024 WTA Finals championship match, 11/9/24

Thanks to Zheng’s habit of drifting into poetry, reporters were prompting her with philosophical queries last week. At last Friday’s press conference after Zheng’s semifinal win over 2024 Wimbledon champion Barbora Krejčíková, a reporter asked: “Are there times on court when sometimes it doesn’t seem … real?” Unphased by the odd question, Qinwen wondered out loud for a moment, “Hmmmmm.” And then: “No, I feel everything is real…

because I know I have a big struggle.”

***

Two other notes from my ongoing WTA obsession. First, it needs to be said—and many did: Holding this year-end women’s tennis championship in a cruelly sexist country like Saudi Arabia is a dangerous bit of sportswashing; the Saudi regime lured the WTA to Riyadh with millions of dollars in over-the-top prize money.

Second, while I’ve never been a podcast fan (I squirm in frustration when Know-it-Alls talk at me…so, why opt for that in my spare time?), I am currently longing to meet people who share my preoccupation with the WTA. So, I started seeking out parasocial relationships this week by checking out a few tennis podcasts. Nothing is winning me over so far; the batch I’ve found seem too exuberant and literal, and sometimes stilted with occasional, cringe-worthy reaches to be cheeky.

I’m holding out hope, though. With some thoughtful, sociopolitical candor, Ben Rothenberg’s in-deep No Challenges Remaining has potential. And Catherine Whitaker’s The Tennis Podcast seems at least comprehensive, and occasionally insightful thanks to eager tennis reporter Matt Roberts. Unfortunately, he, and the other straight-laced co-host, David Law, seem unable to keep up with, or even recognize, Whitaker’s playful sarcasm.

3) The Psychological Wage

My bibliophile pal Charles turned to me at the bar this week and said: “I’m going to tell you the truth about capitalism.” Charles is a properly well-read Marxist, so I felt compelled to pay attention.

I can’t say I fully understood his thesis, but he was quoting W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of “the psychological wage” from Du Bois’ 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America.

TLDR: The basic concept is that the wealthy, white ruling class is able to cast African American workers as the nemesis of white workers despite the clear common interests these two superficially disparate groups of wage laborers share.

This isn’t merely a successful divide and conquer strategy. It goes a step further. The ruling class charms working whites with social advantages that hint enticingly at the possibilities of upward mobility. This ploy turns one faction of the system’s economic losers (white workers) into enthusiastic allies of their own oppressors.

Pretty basic stuff, but certainly relevant at the moment as Trump rises to power with his own version of “horizontal oppression” making, not only whites, but Latino men and young African American men feel empowered with his sinister degradation of “illegals.” (The notable Hispanic pro-Trump vote is hardly complicated; Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric psychologically elevates one group of marginalized people over another. And given the male common denominator here, machismo and misogyny are clearly also part of Trump’s successful pitch.)

Trump’s trick also demonizes haughty urbanites as a way to shift the political focus away from actual practitioners of corporate greed (like himself, for one example) onto supposedly dangerous elites. As I’ve written a few times now in the run-up to the election, Trump’s popularity with the working class comes with a dose of right wing Marxism , which is certainly ironic given his own facile tactic of commie baiting, i.e., “She’s a Marxist!”

Trump has stirred up an apparent working class rebellion based on conspiratorial appeals to cultural animus. There’s a historical name for this sort of reactionary class consciousness: Hitler’s National Socialism.

—————

This week’s recommended viewing: the Victoria Sambunaris photo exhibit at the Photographic Center Northwest.

11/14/24

At the Photographic Center NW through December 15, 2024

Trickle Down Bullying; the Clampdown; Acquiescence.

I’m All Lost In…

The 3 things I’m WORRYING about this week.

#56

Capitol Hill, Seattle, November, 2024

1) Trickle Down Bullying

Trump’s progenitor, Ronald Reagan, gave us trickle down economics. Donald Trump is going to give us trickle down bullying.

Trump’s recurring temper tantrums—often misogynistic or racist—but at their core, always about intimidation rather than discourse, have empowered his MAGA faithful. Aggrieved bros are now free to scoff at the longstanding civic norms that (until now) have helped ensure people can go about their daily lives with a sense of safety and belonging.

It’s already begun in the immediate wake of Trump’s election victory with an anonymous racist text message campaign aimed at African Americans. And soon enough, you’re going to see widespread, flippant and aggressive unchecked macho hysterics out in the open: At the grocery store; on the bus; at the bank; on airplanes; in the park; at restaurants; at the workplace; on college campuses; and in high school hallways (teen boys this week are already taunting: “your body, my choice.”)

This represents one of the true nightmares about Trump’s looming return to power, and also one of the glaring ironies: Under Trump, “Law and Order” will actually mean lawlessness. Trumpism will officially remove the legal guardrails against abusive social behavior.

In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, a civil rights and civil liberties agenda bloomed in America. After Congress enshrined a series of universal protections into law, this humanist expansion of rights defined late-20th-Century and early-21st-Century jurisprudence. (You can read about my own father’s Supreme Court-level contribution here.) The resulting civil rights infrastructure, such as workplace safety and consumer protection, is about to be ignored, gutted, and reversed.

From police brutality to your kid getting bullied at school; from gender discrimination in the workplace to corruption in the marketplace; from hate crimes to casual mistreatment during everyday interactions, there will be no avenue for recourse or accountability.

Now that Trumpism has made it socially acceptable to bully, gas light, and hate your neighbor, the courts will follow the zeitgeist. Longstanding legal protections will soon be cast aside by Trump-appointed judges. Right-wing legal firms are certainly already lining up cases aimed at officially striking down much of the mid-late 20th Century’s civil rights legacy. We’ve already witnessed the end of national abortion rights, affirmative action, and much of the 1965 voting rights act.

In the meantime, now that voters have signed off on an anti-democratic backlash against egalitarianism, the world of bullying with impunity is upon us.

A small personal example that certainly pales in comparison to what’s about to crash down on immigrants and trans people, but in the Summer of 2022, XDX and I stopped at a diner on Interstate 84 on our way back from a wedding in Boise, Idaho. We were an interracial couple; she’s Chinese, I’m white/look and am Jewish. Bad vibe in there, and we hustled out pretty quickly after lunch under some unfriendly glares. Again, hardly comparable to what’s in store for other targeted groups, but there is no telling how it would have played out in that Idaho diner today.

2) Military Rule Coming to a City Near You

Take no comfort in the fact that you live in a Blue state—or more specifically, in a city. America’s metro islands of pluralism are about to become the beachheads of our tragic future.

Trump’s mass deportation agenda will begin in cities. His raids and arrests will be the first chess move in a larger algorithm. Federal troops will sync with local police (and with Proud Boys vigilante “patriots” rushing in to help), immediately weakening local autonomy and setting the stage for stand offs between citizens and law enforcement. The ensuing civil unrest will give Trump the “Reichstag Fire” excuse he needs to cue general clampdowns and martial law in the “crime ridden” cities he already demonized on the campaign trail.

This is 1939 Nazi playbook stuff.

In 2025, Hitler’s Jews are Trump’s immigrants– “poisoning the blood of the nation.”

3) Acquiescence

I learned about the Holocaust in middle school in Ms. Clemmer’s class. Stunned to find out that Adolph Hitler came to power through legitimate means rather than through some violent takeover, we asked “How could this happen?” Ms. Clemmer told us about Germany’s staggering inflation and taught us about scapegoating (Jews and Berlin elites). Eighth-grade reading level and all, this was hardly difficult to comprehend.

The top reasons Trump won? Persistent inflation, scapegoating immigrants, and pointing at cultural elites. Yet, rather than continuing to ring alarm bells about the terrifying historic parallel at hand as they did during the election (calling out how Trump’s language directly sampled Hitler’s, for example), the news media are suddenly treating Tuesday’s results as a basic election postmortem story. They are pretending we still live in a normal electoral setting as they obliviously do traditional election analysis pieces. Worse, the analysis itself is playing into Trump’s hands by parroting the MAGA POV: The liberal media elite are now blaming the liberal elite for not listening to “real” Americans, and … Hey, stop condescending to MAGA voters, maybe their complaints about immigrants have merit. I mean, you know, immigrants may not actually have been eating dogs, but Trump was just joking, and hey, he was, you know, onto a larger point …

Never mind that MAGA voters consistently condescended to “libtards” too, liberals are now solicitously adopting a politicized version of the facile Hallmark Channel narrative of America (fancy city-girl returns to her small hometown/realizes she’s lost touch with what’s important in the world/falls in love with “regular”-guy). In short: People who choose to live in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle (as well as in Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta) are the bad guys. We aren’t real Americans, we’re Trump’s “enemy within.”

I’m not saying there isn’t (a lot of) truth in the notion that the establishment has hurt the working class. That’s 100% correct, though it’s GOP policies like tax cuts for the wealthy, anti-union laws, and eviscerating corporate regulations that have helped capitalism run amok.

And there’s a big difference between condescension and: calling out racism and bigotry; denouncing misogyny and transphobia; exposing corporate fraud; fact checking and correcting conspiracy theories; and defending science and the rule of law.

(I’d add that plenty of “regular” folks, not just liberal snobs, have called BS when their neighbors lean into bigotry—fighting against transphobia for one inspiring example, here.)

People who voted for Trump are grown ups. Treating people as grown ups means not giving them a pass on supporting a shoddy demagogue who has been found guilty of fraud and sexual abuse, who issues racist statement after racist statement, who shamelessly lies. Sorry New York Times, I’m not interested in putting the MAGA voter under a microscope as if they’re some magical species that I fail to understand.

I understood them in 2016 [“A Deplorable Night,” PubliCola, November 9, 2016] and, having listened to Trump’s grievances about pet-eating immigrants, I understand them in 2024.

Ceding the post-election narrative to the Trumpist talking point that liberals have somehow deeply offended “authentic” Americans is the first step of acquiescence that allows the winners (MAGA, in this case) to write the history.

When you write the history, you control the future. The notion of a MAGA future is a grim one.

Flash back to November 8, 2016: Late in the night after Trump won the election, angry and emotional crowds gathered for impromptu and noisy protests in Seattle’s urban epicenter, Capitol Hill.

Fast forward to this past Tuesday night in the same neighborhood. Acceptance and fatigue have apparently set in: After it was clear Trump was going to win the election, Capitol Hill was relatively empty and totally subdued. I left an election night event at 8:45 and sat at a bar drinking a whiskey in morose silence while a smattering of folks, including a couple who seemed to be on a successful first date, chatted amiably.

Capitol Hill, Seattle, November, 2024

This week’s recommended reading: The Penguin Gandhi Reader.
This week’s recommended listening: Tristan Arp, a pool, a portal

Of course I’m obsessed with next week’s Presidential election; of course I’m obsessed with the new Chopin song; also, a city that does not totally regret life

I’m All Lost In …

The 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week …

#55

But first, this week’s Recommended Listening: Scientist, the early 1980s King Tubby protégé whose own slow-electronics dub swept me up at Analog Coffee this past Saturday morning; the shop’s music nerd baristas were playing it over the sound system. I subsequently made a playlist of Scientist’s three defining albums: Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires; Scientist Meets the Space Invaders; and Scientist Meets the Roots Radics.

Second, this week’s Recommended Viewing: my great pal Glenn’s slow-media reel, a quiet video novella about autumn in Seattle.

Now, onto this week’s obsessions:

1) A new Chopin waltz, circa 1830

According to last year’s Spotify Wrapped, coming in ahead of Blondie, the Clash, and DJ Spooky, my No. 1 2023 Artist was Romantic composer Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849).

My Spotify Wrapped, 11/29/23

Having all my adolescent punk and new wave favorites from the early 1980s on a contemporary list was embarrassing, but …

19th Century salon composer Frédéric Chopin? Tres chic.

(Having DJ Spooky on my list was pretty cool as well, though, he too is an old favorite.)

It turns out, there’s even more Chopin to like now. This spring, a curator at Manhattan’s Morgan Library & Museum discovered a signed manuscript in their vault of a previously unknown Chopin waltz. And last week, the New York Times ran a dramatic story about this awesome find. The article also includes video of piano star Lang Lang in a state of utter delight playing the piece exclusively for the NYT web page.

I’ve been basking in the flow of shimmering new Chopin phrases all week. Additionally, the story itself is a joy to read. It’s not only the riveting tale of the museum’s detective work (determining the authenticity of the score) that hooked me. Nearly every paragraph in the article ends with a hyper eloquent crescendo about Chopin.

NYT music writer Javier C. Hernández was apparently just as moved to write about the new Chopin waltz as pianist Lang was to play it.

From Hernández’s bewitching article:

The jarring opening, he said, evokes the harsh winters of the Polish countryside. …

He settled in Paris, quickly establishing himself as a poet at the keyboard whose music conjured new realms of emotion. …

In the early 1830s, Poland was in armed rebellion against the Russian Empire, which had occupied parts of the country. Chopin never returned to his homeland. …

..he wrote in a diary while traveling in Germany in 1831. “And here I stand by idly — and here I stand with empty hands. I only moan, expressing my pain from time to time at the piano.” …

Chopin invoked the Polish word “zal,” meaning nostalgia or regret. …

Waltzes had been a cheery staple of ballrooms. But Chopin’s were never meant for dancing. …

Still others are morose meditation, like the Waltz in B Minor. …

Chopin detested what he called the “flying trapeze school” of pianism.

2) The Historic 2024 Presidential Election

With less than a week to go before Election Day, the word “obsession” doesn’t begin to capture my state of mind. There’s also anxiety, fear, frustration, and hopelessness.

[Note, if you can’t abide by my gloomy outlook, scroll down to some of my hopeful thoughts at the end.]

It seems Trump is more likely to win than Harris. The polls are just too close in the supposed “Blue Wall” states.

There’s also high prices and the pathological mass appeal of Trump’s scapegoat rhetoric.

And despite A) the initial Kamalanomenon, B) August’s grand-finale Chicago convention, and C) her winning debate, Harris’ star power appears to have subsided.

It was there. But we needed more of it.

10/24/24, Clarkston, GA

I believe that beyond her pro-choice stump speech, Harris has not articulated any other clear-cut reason for Americans to vote for her. Choice is a paramount and historic issue, and she’s eloquent AF on it; it certainly made for her best moment at the September 10 debate. But that issue—and the pro-choice ballot initiatives in key states like Arizona—is not enough. As I’ve been saying all year, and as the NYT and the Washington Post are now finally figuring out, MAGA voters are pro-choice too and will simply vote yay on choice and yay on Trump.

I’m scared there’s a true realignment taking place and that Trump is forging an actual populist party (call it Right Wing Marxism, a sort of reactionary redistribution of power for working class white men only), which logically includes some progressive overlap. For example, while Trump’s America First isolationism is toxic, it’s also openly anti-war. A conversation I had with a cranky lefty at a Brooklyn bar last winter still haunts me: They glibly said they liked Trump’s anti-establishment messaging.

Ultimately, it’s not a good sign that Harris’ closing argument has focused on Trump and has not gone full bore on her own vision. Believe me, I agree with her that Trump is an authoritarian and a neo-Nazi, as we saw on display at his Madison Square Garden hate rally this week. But voters need to feel a sense of excitement about a candidate, not just fear of her opponent.

Yes, I did like Harris’ mic-drop line Tuesday at the Ellipse about her “To Do List” (versus his “Enemies List”), including her top agenda item to build affordable housing. But it still feels like her narrative is about him; the site of her closing argument rally itself was literally framed by Trump’s infamous Jan. 6 speech. That’s not a winning script. She needs to be the star of the story.

Maybe…hopefully… by November 5, she will be?

To stay hopeful, I hold on to these things:

• Perhaps this summer’s excitement about Harris reflected deep sentiment (there were, after all, 75,000 people at her Ellipse rally this week, and there is a surge in female voting right now, plus there’s a big, early exit poll lead for Harris as well);

• The media hype about the supposedly ascendant U.K. and French ultra-nationalists this past July, subsequently belied by actual election day failures (tears of joy), may presage a similar MAGA loss out in our own election;

• And most important, there are our own previous elections, particularly 2022’s phony “Red Wave,” which seem like convincing polls in and of themselves. That is to say: the succession of Democratic victories and Trump losses in 2018, 2020, and 2022 seem to indicate that MAGA is not as popular as the media continues to say it is.

10/30/24

On Wednesday night, I voted for Kamala Harris. Obviously.

3) Vlogger Yzabel Nievanne’s Instagram account.

Last June, I came across an Instagram reel posted by Yzabel Nievanne, a Seattle transplant from San Francisco (Yes, please, and welcome!) who was rightly complaining that everything closes too early here.

“Is it just in my area?” she asked hopefully…

Sensing I’d found a Frank O’Hara comrade in my campaign to constantly nudge Seattle (into a city “that does not totally regret life,”) I hearted her reel and of course left a link to my first book of poems: Shops Close Too Early.

Rather than making a book sale, though, I’m the one who became her fan; I now religiously follow Nievanne’s account (project.fulltimetraveler, née project.lovingme) as one of her 80,000 fans.

It turns out, she’s not a city policy crank. This square young woman and her understated sidekick husband provide a daily dose of uncomplicated glee—hers—that offers a different kind of urbanism.

Uncomplicated urbanist Yzabel Nievanne checks out Pioneer Square’s coffee shops.

Unlike scripted TED-talk YIMBYs or upzone activists, Nievanne’s energized pro-city POV just means she’s constantly out and about, unfettered and living her best city life as she discovers Seattle. Usually taking light rail, she’s off to: Pioneer Square and Chinatown/International District coffee shops (Umbria, Saigon Drip, Hood Famous, Zeitgeist); Seattle’s farmers markets; the Rem Koolhaas Central Library; the pretty walk around Green Lake; the Seattle Opera; and the U. District … “we found the quirkiest vintage trinket store” …

Her consistently upbeat posts also give her license to be critical, which she often is. “I’m processing…” she’ll note playfully and then…

She reports: the coffee at Umbria needed lots of extra milk and brown sugar; Pioneer Square was “kinda quiet, there’s not a lot of things going on in the Square;” and Zeitgeist’s blueberry muffin “wasn’t as moist as I would like it to be … maybe, it’s the cornmeal that I don’t like.”

I have to admit, it’s fun to watch an incorrigibly effusive newcomer—and an unapologetic normie, at that—quietly puzzle over Seattle’s strangely lackluster city life. It makes me feel like less of a demanding jerk.

She also inspired me to document some city action myself this week, such as the line around the block at Monday night’s Artemas show. It’s always a public policy win when the youth line up at the club.

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A hip hop exegesis; a glossy tennis magazine; spooning with Prince and Donna Summer

I’m All Lost In

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#54

L-R, Mr. Mudede, DJ Vitamin D, Dr. Daudi Abe

1) “Rapper’s Delight” Annotated @ Clock-Out Lounge, 10/18/24

No revisionist history. I was not into hip hop when I was young, or rap, as we used to call it. However, nor did I actively dislike it. Mostly, I was just hyper aware of its existence after “Rapper’s Delight” came out in 1979, a year otherwise nudged by the sudden sounds of new wave, both the power-pop-punk-guitar-driven new wave and also, fascinated with the retro future, the robots-in-mascara-playing-synthesizers new wave. Hip hop evolved on a parallel track and my teen head ceded it to Black teens.

Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,“ hip hop’s opening spin, was released about three weeks after my 13th birthday (and less than 2 weeks after my bar mitzvah) in September ‘79. It was a massive hit and an even bigger curiosity. Its lyrics about gross-food-at-your-friend’s-house were instantly relatable and entertaining. That was my main association with the song. That, and I connected it to disco, thinking of it as “Black” music; I literally thought, listening to “Rapper’s Delight,” that I was peeking into Black kid’s bedroom.

I first heard “Rappers’ Delight” shortly after it was released at my friend George Miller’s apartment (he was not Black) while we played Atari Pong on his TV. I liked 1960s rock and increasingly, new wave; I bought my first new wave record, Blondie’s Eat to the Beat, that year. (Blondie’s NYC allegiance to hip hop was unknown to me at that time.)

While I subsequently defined myself throughout high school with post-punk music (which was primarily performed by white artists), it’s true that Black music, mostly pop R & B and bubble gum funk—those bass lines!—was a cultural force (along with break dancing) for my classmates. My suburban Maryland high school was 95% white, but Black pop music was ubiquitous on the D.C. radio stations.

By spring of senior year, well before they teamed up with Aerosmith, I did recognize how great Run-DMC was. And despite my snobbish affinity for underground white music (“alternative” and “indie” were not terms yet), I spent some of my $3.35 minimum-wage paycheck on their first record. And later, in college, on Public Enemy’s. I still felt separate from rap, though, and mostly bought these records with the impulse of a completist going for a record collection that reflected my times.

I still don’t like rap much, but I have come to deify the through-line that puts Rap’s progenitor, Afro-Caribbean music—starting with Jamaica’s 1950s sound system scene—at the center of contemporary music history. This is the Kingston-based DJ Coxsone Dodd-to-Bronx-based DJ Kool Herc narrative that has come to define the artistic strains of today’s popular music: A blend of hip hop, R & B, electronica, jazz, Afro beat, and outré white music (Steve Reich, Eno, and DEVO have everything to do with all this). I call this layered concoction Abstract R & B.

This self-conscious intro is all to say: My wonderful old friend Charles Mudede—who agrees with me that the one-part disco/one-part electronica Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder track, 1977’s “I Feel Love”, is the greatest song of all time—gave a free-flowing talk about “Rapper’s Delight” on stage at Beacon Hill’s Clock-Out Lounge last Saturday night with Seattle Central College Prof. Dr. Daudi Abe, and Seattle hip hop DJ Vitamin D. It was a delight.

Charles is the closest thing Seattle has to a public intellectual, a charming, contrarian, and playful bibliophile. (He giggles with, well, delight, that hip hop’s founding document, “Rapper’s Delight,” was recorded by second-rate musicians in a cheap Englewood, New Jersey studio as opposed to in NYC.)

I don’t know Dr. Abe nor Vitamin D., but with Dr. Abe, who wrote Emerald Street: A History of Hip-Hop in Seattle, playing facilitator, and Vitamin D. bringing the populist wisdom and beats, Charles was glowing with knowing (thank you for mentioning Blondie’s “Rapture”) as the trio expanded on a recent article Charles and Dr. Abe wrote for the Stranger, a literal annotation of the 3-minute radio rendition of “Rapper’s Delight.”

Vitamin D. played samples from “Rapper’s Delight” and other relevant tracks, such as “Jam-Master Jay” by Run DMC.

My iPhone video from Clock-Out Lounge, 5/18/24

Appropriately, Vitamin D DJ’d a dance party after their talk too.

I had my quibbles with some points from the talk. Vitamin D.’s insistence on the priority that rap places on “originality” seemed like a banal claim, one that every macho advocate makes about their chosen art form. And unfortunately, in this instance, the emphasis undermines one of hip hop’s main revolutionary aesthetics: Sampling other people’s music (an elaboration on Caribbean music’s tradition of dubbing.) Heck, 1970’s disco group Chic sued the Sugar Hill Gang over “Rapper’s Delight” itself because, it turns out, the founding hip hop jam lifted its defining bass line from Chic’s earlier 1979 Disco hit “Good Times.”

Vitamin D also claimed that hip hop—as opposed to disco—is the genre that lives on.

Absurd! While hip hop culture (sampling in particular) is a central intellectual force in contemporary music, the incessant dance pulse of EDM and electronic pop is clearly descended from disco; check out my 1970s disco playlist “LaBelle’s Boots.”

I don’t mean to pick on DJ Vitamin D. He held his own with our insanely well-read Marxist Charles, reminiscing about cassette culture and explaining how the words to “Rapper’s Delight” were the DNA of his school playground’s lingua franca before he’d ever heard the song.

This was an A+ lecture that should be sampled far and wide, particularly Charles’ deconstruction of the line

“A-skiddlee bebop, we rock a scooby-doo/
And guess what, America, we love you,”

putting the focus on the Sugar Hill Gang’s framing overture: “Guess what…”

2) RACQUET , Issue No. 25

Tennis legend Andre Agassi on the cover of the latest Racquet magazine.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a magazine cover to cover.

To my surprise, this 120-page bound and glossy coffee-table magazine is not glossy; it’s printed on stock paper instead of slick pages, and, more surprising, it’s light on ads and heavy on actual articles.

The latest issue (Racquet debuted in 2016), Issue No. 25, includes features on Andre Agassi, Monica Seles, and Dominic Thiem (my tennis obsession is new, so reading recaps on these important veterans was fruitful). Also in this issue: a poetically sappy series of recurring short essays throughout titled “The Greatest Thing I’ve Ever Seen on a Tennis Court;” a negative review of the U.S. Open’s signature “Honey Deuce” (by longtime Esquire cocktail columnist, David Wondrich, who suggests an alternative, the gin-based “Flushing Meadow," with a recipe of his own); a precocious history of modern tennis, dating back to the “remarkably unremarkable” 2002 Wimbledon final, written by a curiously profound 13-year-old; some fast-paced interviews with WTA players Danielle Collins (World No. 11) and doubles star Taylor Townsend; a smart aleck guide to improving your game, written by two bratty pro coaches; and, prompted by the overrated tennis movie Challengers, (panned by me here last summer), a flirtatious essay on the standard tennis-as-sex metaphor.

To be honest, this is not a super well-reported magazine. The chatty, and oddly addicting articles, which make no pretense of interviewing their subjects, read as if they were written from a hotel room by cocky, high-paid freelancers on assignment, reliving their student days jamming out English papers the night before. And the Atlantic Monthly-aspirations—like the Agassi article’s clunky thesis on the Sisyphean nature of returning life’s infinite incoming tennis balls—add to the magazine’s glorious sophomoric embellishment.

Me and my Honey Deuce at the this year’s U.S. Open, 9/5/24

Aside from the wise 13-year-old historian’s well-argued article (his inflection-point point being there wasn’t a single serve & volley during the entire Wimbledon 2002 final), the issue’s best article is a touching piece of memoir called “Goth Tennis.” This 17-page, page-turner (lots of goth-doodle illustrations) about the writer’s doomed late-1990s stint as a high school tennis star while living a pasty, pimple-plagued, stoner teen’s life, dressed perpetually in black, plays to the magazine’s dubious and delightful strength: Reveling in first-person, quasi philosophical musings about tennis.

Racquet, which I picked up from the elaborate magazine shelf at Elliott Bay Books, has been in the news lately: A) the magazine’s original co-founders had a dramatic split over editorial direction which led one of them—who accused Racquet of becoming a lifestyle brand rather than a tennis magazine—to start his own competitor after getting unceremonioiusly ousted, and B) after going deep on the Alexander Zverev sexual assault story, good job!, Racquet subsequently bailed on the freelance reporter’s legal fees. (Here’s the reporter’s account of getting ghosted by the magazine.)

The new competitor, the confusingly branded The Second Serve/Open Tennis, actually seems far more fixated on lifestyle.

I’m planning to read a copy of that next!

Cal Anderson Park

In other tennis news: On Saturday morning, I lost 4-6 to my new tennis rival, Ian; we played at the graffiti-happy Cal Anderson Park tennis court. I mounted a comeback from 2-5 down, but, in the end, I didn’t pull it off.

And then there’s this: My favorite player, Daffy Saby (my household’s nickname for the often-befuddled Aryna Sabalenka), ascended to the World No. 1 spot this week, replacing officious Iga Swiatek at the top of the class; the once-invincible Swiatek has otherwise held the spot all year. Saby, who had actually slipped to No. 3 mid year, falling behind Coco Gauff, has definitely been playing convincing tennis lately; I noticed her turnaround in the run-up to the U.S. Open. So, credit where credit’s due to the hilarious and mighty Sabalenka.

But Swiatek’s fall, technically on account of losing points for not meeting the tour rule of playing six 500-level matches per year (the math is confusing), seems indicative of a larger weirdness with Swiatek:

Up through France’s Roland Garros grand slam, which she won for the third year in a row this past June (right after she also won the 1000-level Spanish and Italian Opens back to back in April and May, beating Sabalenka in both finals), Swiatek had seemed god-level to all her competitors’ mere hero-level play.

But then came an improbable string of losses over the summer: Losing in the early rounds (to No. 29, Yulia Putintseva) at Wimbledon; losing to No. 7 Qinwen Zheng in the summer Olympic semifinals; losing to Daffy Saby in the WTA 1000-level Cincinnati semifinals; and then losing to No. 4 Jessica Pegula in the U.S. Open quarterfinal. (Saby herself would go on to beat Pegula in the U.S. Open final.)

I first noticed it during Swiatek’s loss to Zheng:

Swiatek’s been reminding me of the Franny character in J.D. Salinger’s Franny & Zooey novella. Franny, of course, in a fit of Bohemian Zen Buddhism, chants herself into a catatonic nervous breakdown. It’s been hard to miss Swiatek’s lengthy, on-court conversations with herself prior to each point. There’s a spooky liturgical rhythm to them as she davens on the baseline like an ancient rabbi.

C-to-C octave

3) Piano Octaves: “I Feel Love,” “Kiss,” “Little Darlin’”

Speaking of “I Feel Love,” it’s one of three jams I’ve been savoring playing on piano this week. The other two are “Kiss” by Prince, and the 1950s doo-wop air “Little Darlin’” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, née Gladiolas.

What do these three bangers have in common? Octaves. Or more specifically, splayed chords, built on octaves.

The verse to Prince’s “Kiss” (1986) rides an A-to-A octave chord, A-E-A in the left hand (the song is in the key of A Major, so that’s the tonic 1 note at the root of the octave with the key’s dominant 5 note, E, locking it in.) During the mid-verse turnaround—”you don’t need experience”— Prince drops to the key’s subdominant 4th, swapping the E out for a D, two Ds actually—played as an octave while keeping the tonic, the A, in the mix as the middle note this time. This sets up the traditional 1-4-5 sweep to the chorus:

“You don’t have to be rich…” jumps to the Dominant 5, with an E-to-E octave chord, an E-B-E. Then, in response, there’s some palindrome 5… 4… 1 blues tension along the way back down to the verse: The second and fourth lines of the chorus feature a D-A-D octave chord on “you don’t have to be cool to rule my world” and again on “your extra time and your…

“Kiss!” …

back to the 1 as the root with the A-E-A octave guiding the vibrating verse again.

Maurice Williams’ 1957 “Little Darlin’” (which I was obsessing over back in late August too) strolls through the well-known “50s” chord progression, 1-6-2-5 (more commonly played as 1-6-4-5, but the propulsive 2 works just as well, if not better. Williams chose the forlorn minor instead of an upbeat major).

It’s the stately octaves that give the song its unabashed groove. I’m playing it in B flat, so the octave chords, with the 5 tone to each chord’s root-1 filling out the middle position, are: B flat-F-B flat; G-D-G; C-G-C; F-C-F.

I like playing these chords as up-and-back-down-again arpeggios, which lets the middle note create see-saw momentum. I never want to get off this ride.

“I Feel Love” (1977), the Summer/Moroder early sci-fi pop masterpiece that I’ve certainly obsessed about before, is the biggest octave-fest of all.

Its avalanche of octaves comes in the dynamite chorus, which cycles through 4 separate octave-based chords. And, as opposed to the octave-based three-tone chords in “Kiss” and “Little Darlin’,” these chords are stocking-stuffed with 4 tones a piece.

The song is in F Major, so the immediately ascendant chorus blasts off by starting with the Dominant 5—a C-to-C octave: C-E-G-C. We’re off. The 4 is next. A B flat-to-B flat octave: B flat-E flat-G-B flat. Then to the 3, an A-to-A octave: A-C-F-A. And then, oddly, the cascade ends with a chord rooted in the key’s sharped 4, a B-to-B octave: B-D-G-B.

These four-finger chords are tricky to play; I found the secret is in letting your ring finger, which is responsible for playing the third tone in each of these bold stretch chords, lead your brain on the changes, instead of setting out with your pointer finger, which is responsible for striking the root note of each chord.

The verse to “I Feel Love” foreshadows the chorus’ orgy of octaves; as you take a momentary break from the energetic right-hand melody line—”heaven knows, heaven knows, heaven knows, heaven knows"— you fill out the rushing, staccato left hand bass part by leaning on a C-to-C octave chord in the right hand with an F in the middle. And similarly, just before the chorus, you play a G-to-G octave with a B flat (and then slyly, that sharped 4 B again) as the middle note.

Spooning with Donna Summer

What makes playing these octave-rich jams such a pleasing experience?

Certainly, there’s something physically satisfying afoot as the two notes swaddle the overall group of three or four tones in perfectly matched bedding.

An octave is defined by two pitches where the higher pitch vibrates exactly twice as fast as the lower pitch, so when you play the two pitches together they spoon.

I’ve been spooning with Prince, Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, and Maurice Williams all week.

————

Lastly,

this week’s recommended reading: the NYT on a topic I’ve been obsessing over for a decade, getting rid of parking minimums!

(Here I am 8-and-half-years ago: My Guerrilla Shared Parking Pilot Project.)

Currently, and thankfully, Seattle doesn’t have parking minimums for housing near transit, but it does still require constructing parking everywhere else, and sadly, in the new comp plan, which, per state law requires fourplexes in traditional single family zones, it tacked on a .5 stalls per unit rule, which will surely stall (heh) new housing development.

This week’s recommended listening: I’m liking the juxtaposition of sing-song ‘60s girl group vocals and sophisticated Afro-centric sounds of SAULT.

@ TaylorSwift, LeBronJames, AdamKinzinger et al.; Thank You, BAP; Hello, sun dried tomato basil tortilla quesadillas. (And RIP Ka).

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#53

1) In the tragic event that Trump, who’s now campaigning as an actual Nazi, wins the election, and there’s no question that he might (the Electoral College— Michigan in particular— is a real problem for Kamala Harris), I’m obsessing over this little personal fantasy:

@ CaitlinClark, BillieEilish, LeBronJames, RetiredUSArmyGeneralMarkMilley,, TaylorSwift, FormerUSRepAdamKinzinger, BarackObama, LizCheney, I hope there's a plan in the works to announce immediately prior to the start of any possible second Trump term, the formation of a new, high-profile bipartisan group called The National Association for the Preservation of Democracy and Truth.

Stacked with a venerable board of political leaders, hard-working journalists, business leaders, labor leaders, civil rights leaders, women's rights leaders, military leaders, and celebrities, backed by huge institutional money with a giant staff of smart attorneys, the group will be dedicated to fighting Trump’s 1933-slide.

The N-A-P-D-T, Protecting democracy since 2025.

This singular group should subsume the National Immigration Law Center, the ACLU, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, NARAL, LGBTQ rights groups et al. because if Trump does get back into the White House, those of us who are worried about MAGA America will need a dramatic show of new strength and organization.

In the mean time, go Kamala Harris.

2) Thank you, Best American Poetry 2024.

Every October for six years now, when Simon & Schuster imprint Scribner Poetry publishes BAP —an annual, curated selection of poems from America’s top-tier literary journals—I lovingly rush out and buy a copy. They’ve been publishing it since 1988, but I’ve only been hip to it since October 2018. This yearly autumn purchase marks a somewhat new, and newly defining, chapter of my current life, reading and writing poems.

This year, however, I wasn’t feeling BAP. I have been disappointed in the poetry I’ve seen published over the course of 2024 — in the New Yorker, in the American Poetry Review, Poetry, Kenyon Review (I subscribe to all of these), and in the bevy of chapbooks that arrive in my mailbox all year. My general, perhaps curmudgeonly, criticism is that too many contemporary poems read like a DEI training rather than like luminescent nebulae in print. Don’t get me wrong, I think the-personal-as-political can make for great poems; Jane Wong, who’s poetry I wrote about earlier this year—is one outstanding current example.

Fortuitously, despite my misgivings, I decided to go ahead and extend my BAP buying tradition. Last Saturday, while visiting Valium Tom at his Phinney Ridge bookstore, I bought the newest edition.

Things start off with a solid poem by Kim Addonizio (BAP is organized alphabetically by poet); Addonizio is a marvelously cynical, acerbic, funny, and thoughtful writer I’ve liked for a while. BAP 2024 selected “Existential Elegy,” her breezy diary outtake that, though drowsy with some later-in-life ennui, simultaneously bottles youth’s goofy lightning from a loving distance.

The collection really takes off, though, around “H.”

Starting with Richie Hofmann’s “Lamb,” a poignant reminiscence about a one-eyed stuffed animal, BAP goes on a tear.

There’s Marie Howe’s “Chainsaw,” a masterful poem that contemplates the basic human impulse to build and create, to work. After overlaying the “whine of a drill,” “the fastening metal to metal,” the “someone nailed to a cross,” and the “tearing it down” with varied vantage points from within and without the labor process, Howe settles in on the intimate and startling vantage point that humans at work have in relation to one another.

Then there’s Omotara James’ “Closure,” an elegant rumination on being the legal witness to the judicial proceedings of her parents’ divorce: “what’s louder: the pluck of the arrow, or the bang of the gavel,/or the everlasting gaze of the firstborn daughter.”

And also George Kalogeris’ “Byzantine Chanting,” a gorgeous account of a childhood memory starring the cantor at a working class Greek Orthodox church: “Like Arion, our master singer had crossed an ocean—/But not on the back of a dolphin (my favorite myth).”

Howe’s poem is the one that made good on the real reason I buy BAP: to discover poets I’d never read before—and then dig into more of their work.

The former poet laureate of New York (2012-2014) with four critically acclaimed books to her name, Howe, whose tidy poems are built up from short stanzas, is evidently a star player in the poetry world.

She has a new book out which, perfectly for my purposes, includes a large sample of poems from her four previous books—The Good Thief (1987); What the Living Do (1997); The Kingdom of the Ordinary (2008); Magdalene (2017), plus 20 new poems. Her set of new poems, which come at the start of this collection, includes “Chainsaw,” though here it’s titled “The Saw, The Drill.”

Like that omniscient poem, Howe’s poetry in general—which lingers in quiet, matter-of-fact observations—has an effortless way of deconstructing the disparate rhythms of daily life, much like the way a high school English teacher might diagram a sentence or a chess master might game out a chess board in play.

Howe’s talent lies in describing all those discrete POVs and then putting them back together again in a new way that seems to connote God.

Howe’s latest collection, ©2024

For example, a 2023 poem, “The Willows,” which begins, “As we are made by what moves us,/willows pull the water up into their farthest reach/,” concludes a few lines later this way:

So, under travels up, and down and up again,/

and the wind makes music of what the water was.

Hokey? Mary Oliver-y? Maybe? But Howe has a darker, sadder, even violent edge (see “The Split” from 1987’s The Good Thief) that renders her conclusions nervously unsure as opposed to coyly ambiguous.

Here are the closing lines to “The Saw, The Drill” (or is it “Chainsaw”?)

And who or what made us that we should make/such things as we do and did? We grow smaller. We break things./ Then turn to each other and beg for what no human can give.

3) I’m onto the perfect weeknight dinner: Healthy quesadillas.

Only “onto” because my kitchen was bachelor-devoid of provisions this week, so the last-minute quesadillas I fried up in avocado spray oil on Tuesday night were minimalist by default, but aslo so tasty in their own right that I can only imagine how good they may ultimately be with the works. That is, with fresh greens, diced tomatoes, grilled onions, sauteed mushrooms, and maybe blanched cauliflower piled on as well.

As it was, I had a bag of Mission brand tortillas, a can of Siete brand refried beans, Bragg’s nutritional yeast, and some Cholula brand hot sauce to work with.

Thanks to the fact that this particular make of Mission tortillas—Mission® Zero Net Carbs Sundried Tomato Basil Tortillas—were as fluffy and weighty as beautiful rain clouds, and that Seite’s vegan, organic-bean black beans were light and rich all at once, my ad-hoc quesadilla dinner ended up being supremely satisfying: Garden-flavor heft topped with smoky and smooth bean paste.

10/15/24, Vegan Refried Black Beans

Grocery Outlet on East Union & MLK Jr. Way is well-stocked with all the Mission brand selections, so, I headed over there later in the evening with XDX (who had come over to sample my dinner surprise) so I could get a new package of tortillas, along with all the fixings and veggies necessary to plate some intentional quesadilla perfection next time. …

Finally, and speaking of the poet laureate of New York, while this doesn’t count as an obsession, there’s a sad note this week:

RIP Ka, the lo-fi, yeoman Brooklyn rap artist (and recently retired firefighter and captain with the FDNY). Ka, birth name Kaseem Ryan, died Saturday at the young age of 52. His wife posted the sad news on Ka’s Instagram account; she didn’t specify the cause of death.

Minimalist, DIY rap artist, Ka, RIP, 1972-2024

One of my favorite all-time songs is Ka’s “Decisions,” an inspirational jam from his 2012 LP, Grief Pedigree (the second record from 11 self-produced, self-distributed, underground albums he released over nearly two decades).

Ka’s stripped-down music was insistently downcast, but “Decisions” buoyed me time and time again during many bouts with the blues.

Over a trembling carousel organ and a slow two-note bass and piano groove that channels Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” (which Ka alludes to with the quick line “Hustle here/or pick a better town”), the song’s lyrics catalog a series of everyday philosophical “Either-Ors.”

His basketball court reflection always lifts me up:

“Chuck like a motherfucker/or try to assist?”

We’ll keep trying, Ka.

1920s feminism; 2020s city council budget hypocrisy; 2024 antisemitism

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#52

1) I’m half way through a novel called Ex-Wife, written and initially published anonymously in 1929 by a real-life ex-wife, Ursula Parrott.

As documented in the recent biography, Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, Parrot has been unjustly omitted from the literary canon of female authors who first established the Sex and the City template, a genre that puts women’s POVs, particularly the metropolitan woman’s perspective, front and center.

A 1920 Radcliffe grad-turned city newspaper reporter, turned successful novelist (Ex-Wife sold 100,000 copies in its first year), turned lucrative-Hollywood screenwriter, Parrott was eventually (and sadly) demoted to the role of a scandal-sheet-plagued anti-heroine. She died of cancer, penniless at the age of 58 in 1957.

Like the contemporaneous pre-Code Hollywood flicks I’ve obsessed about before—Young Desire, Kept Husbands, Discarded Lovers, Borrowed Wives, Tangled Destinies, etc.—Parrot’s novel Ex-Wife is a risqué and radical romp. (It was, in fact, made into a pre-Code movie itself, Norma Shearer’s 1930 Best-Actress, Academy-Award-winner, The Divorcee). Parrott writes in strikingly modern prose (“cabs, hot nightclubs, parties…They were not real…Neither was the office…”) while dramatizing both the one-night-stand liberation and the morning-after loneliness of “the new freedom” as a tricky one-step-forward-two-steps-back moment in the bid for female equality.

Indeed, her contemporaneous account of Flapper-era Manhattan seems to predict (40 years prior) “the Pill” ennui of 1960s sexual revolution feminism: “Chastity, really, went out when birth control came in. If there is no ‘consequence’—it just isn’t important,” Parrott writes early on.

There’s a candid abortion scene in the novel’s patient exposition as well.

A scandalous best seller, 1929

All of this is not so much a lament in Parrott’s telling. The novel is narrated (often comically) in first person by Parrott’s witty author-avatar, a 25-year-old department store ad copy-copywriter, the “ineffably slim” working-girl Flapper, Patricia (Pat), who drinks boozy Clover Club Sodas at Uptown Harlem dance halls in the evening and does calisthenics before work in the morning.

The freedom and joy are palpable in Pat’s dizzying day-to-day account of frenetic, jargon-heavy workdays, rooftop waltzes, choice frocks, suede gloves, “silly gay jewelry,” and private parties where a hostess—in one instance, “the world’s greatest authority on Arab love songs”—serenades tipsy guests.

“In three weeks we had been to six parties, three first nights, five speakeasies, four nightclubs, two operas, and a concert where a negro [sic] sang spirituals.”

Pat’s “We” is not a reference to a beau (they come and go), but rather it’s a reference to Lucia, her older (29-year-old) Greenwich Village roommate, an ex-wife herself, who serves as a cynical patron sage to Pat’s “calflove”-stricken-life. Lucia is quick with jaded aphorisms that foresee doom in Flapper feminism, often pointing out how the larger patriarchy remains, with its crushing double standards, fully intact.

This downcast air doesn’t detract from the acid eloquence of Ex-Wife’s liberating Jazz-Age consciousness, though:

“If a woman has been asked into twenty beds, and managed to stay out of 19 of them, on the purely percentage basis she is a good deal more virtuous than a woman who has only been asked into one, and went,” Pat notes to herself.

My dip into Parrott’s Prohibition-era Gotham parable was amplified by two other 1920s artifacts this week: First, on Sunday night, I used the rhythms of a static-heavy pre-Code crime drama, Alias Mary Smith, as a default books-on-tape lullaby; and second, I’ve been learning the piano part to 100-years-ago crooner Russ Columbo’s signature jam, “You Call It Madness, but I Call It Love,” with its ghostly vocals and odd jazz chords.

My heart is beating/it keeps repeating/for you/constantly

2) It’s city budget season in Seattle which means you can’t miss Erica C. Barnett’s invaluable city hall reporting at PubliCola.

Going deep into the math this week, Erica extracted the defining story of Seattle’s current conservative city council: Clownish hypocrisy.

It’s not just that last year’s backlash slate of candidates-turned-current-council members ridiculed the previous council as tax-and-spend liberals, only to turn around this year and support massive, unsustainable spending on new programs themselves, such as cops and surveillance cameras.

It’s also that the biggest symbol of the previous council's leftist politics, progressive former council member Teresa Mosqueda’s JumpStart tax on wealthy corporations, has become this conservative council’s go-to source of funding for their law-and-order priorities.

In 2020, then Seattle city council member Mosqueda (who sadly left last year for the supposedly more important King County Council), proposed and passed what amounts to a tax on tech bros: A payroll tax on the largest Seattle companies with employees who make more than $150,000.

Revenues from that tax, which have been robust—$315 million in 2023 (way more than the $223 million originally projected)—were specifically earmarked by Mosqueda and her communard colleagues to exclusively fund affordable housing and related programs that would help insulate working people from the impacts that our current tech boom is having on Seattle, namely the city’s out-of-whack housing costs .

However, as Erica notes in her coverage, the current city budget proposes “using $287 million in [JumpStart] payroll tax revenues next year, and more every year after that.”

Here’s Erica:

The JumpStart tax, paid by companies that employ highly compensated workers, was designed to offset the impacts that companies like Amazon have had on Seattle’s housing market and economy by providing access to housing, jobs, and small-business development opportunities for people who haven’t benefited from the city’s tech boom. Now, it’s being used as a funding source for programs that arguably run counter to its original purpose, like jails, surveillance of low-income neighborhoods, and police.

I actually have a quibble with the tax: I think it obscures the real culprit of Seattle’s affordable housing crisis, our NIMBY land use code; I spelled this out in a PubliCola column back in 2022.

But as I also wrote in that same column, Mosqueda’s tax is not casuistry; there is a good deal of logic and justice in it: "The Jump Start tax teases out the nexus between surging tech job growth and housing prices by capturing nouveau corporate Seattle’s impact on the market. That is: As the hyper growth of tech companies like Amazon inflate local housing prices, the city is taxing them to help fund affordable housing. It’s a good look, and it seems like a logical offset for the influx of high-earning tech employees. And, let’s be honest: It also feels good.” 

For all the venom the current council directs at the previous council for being too woke, they sure have woken up to Mosqueda’s progressive JumpStart tax.

While I’m busy singing Erica’s praises for her budget analysis, a quick and loving anecdote: Erica rushed into PubliCola’s Pioneer Square offices last week after a city council budget committee meeting keen to tell me all bout endless blowhard council member Rob Saka’s inane speechifying on potential cuts to the SPD’s mounted horse patrol. As if the SPD’s stable of horses were being sent to the glue factory, Saka proceeded to anthropomorphize them, dramatically reading each horse’s name from the dais.

Hardly to Erica’s surprise, the Seattle Time’s fell for Saka’s drama and ran a sappy, bloated story the very next day on the horses.

Fortuitously, Erica had a long-scheduled interview with the police chief that same day and found herself waiting in the chief’s anteroom before the interview with the cops' media guy. As Erica was making small talk, she noticed, to her devious glee, an SPD horse calendar (like those fireman calendars) laid out on the coffee table. She started taking pictures.

Imagining the utter disconnect between the police spokesperson’s belief that Erica was (like the Seattle Times) evidently enamored with the SPD’s horse brigade and the actual mischievous expertise that was exploding in Erica’s brain when she spied this ridiculous gem, has repeatedly sent me into peals of laughter all week.

3) In my lifetime, antisemitism has never been as glaring, ubiquitous, and menacingly out in the open as it is right now. Like always, though—and Jews just have it super lucky this way: the hate comes from both the right (no, Jews are not behind Hurricane Helene) and the left (those Jewish capitalists).

And yes, I know criticism of Israel is not default antisemitic; and there are plenty of reasons to condemn Israel. I for one, have been doing it since I was 12. On the flip side, criticism of Israel is not a default get-out-jail-free card for voicing antisemitism. It’s easy to smell when the two things are intertwined. For Jews, it can also just be confusing and intimidating whether you have a sense of what’s behind it or not, like when I was 16 and one of the grown ups at the table where I was out to dinner with the high school theater club turned their attention to me during a political discussion. I hadn’t said much of anything during the conversation—this adult was holding court—yet he told me in knowingly provocative terms that “Israel is an Apartheid state.” This was in 1982, which is mostly to let you know that today’s heated debate is by no means a new one, particularly for Jews.

It’s just taking place in a new context. In 2024, despite centuries of consistent antisemitism, Jews are no longer seen as a historically marginalized and maligned group. This creepy amnesia is (no surprise) happening just as the age-old Jewish stereotypes are becoming fashionable, both flippantly and intensely, once again.

This Sunday night, I was reading a book at the pizza restaurant bar across the street from my apartment and the group next to me—a couple of 20-somethings and a 40-something—were talking about the Sean Diddy Combs sexual assault case. The conversation shifted, with topical logic, to talking about the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault case. But then, racist logic, this came out: “or is it Goldstein, or Weingold or Silverman or whatever? All those rich guys are the ones.”

If this had happened in the 1980s, ‘90s, 2000s, or during most of the 2010s, even in someplace like Iowa, I could have confidently called them out; that kind of hate chatter was once, universally understood to be un-American. And even if people harbored odious prejudices, which they certainly did, they likely recognized, as I did, that the the room would not abide by their ignorance.

Ominously, those days are past.

I’m mad at myself for not jumping in and challenging them—I definitely understand the implications of not saying anything, and I’ve certainly spoken up many times before (including at another bar in my neighborhood just a few months ago).

I don’t know why I didn’t say something this time. I’m fretting about that decision. And so now, in addition to obsessing about today’s rising antisemitism itself, I’m obsessing about my own faltering response this weekend.

Sadly, and subconsciously, I think there may be a relationship between the escalating and the faltering.

A hyperpop artist; a MacArthur genius; a dub pioneer

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#51

1) Oh no, I’m becoming one of those old people who gets their contemporary music tips from the New Yorker.

The September 30 issue had an intriguing and beautifully written review of a new release from a news-to-me, but evidently widely known “Hyperpop” star named Sophie.

It’s a posthumous album. Sophie, a processed-beats production trickster, died in 2021 at 34. “Sophie fell to her death from a balcony in Athens,” New Yorker staffer Jia Tolentino writes, adding with alluring prose: “Her representatives said she’d gone out to look at the moon.”

Tolentino also waxes elegant about Sophie’s experimental bent:

In 2013, a mysterious producer named Sophie released “Bipp,” a minimalist club track that sounded like it had been formed on another planet and squeezed through hyperdrive before arriving on ours. “Bipp” was black space latticed with radically strange objects: a rubbery squelch of a bass beat, a melodic line like a laser coated in latex, percussive punctuation marks that seemed to morph from plasma into steel.

Nothing else sounded like Sophie, because she made her sounds from scratch. She didn’t sample; she built each hiss and smack and boom by manipulating raw waveforms. She wanted to get to the “molecular level of a particular sound,” to understand why that sound “behaves a certain way when processed or cooked.”

The trajectory of academic 1960s experimental-music-lab composers, to 1980s new wave and hip hop singles, to modern EDM is one of my favorite musical through lines. Fascinated by Tolentino’s evocative description, I promptly listened to Sophie’s “new” self-titled album, a collection of tracks that Sophie had been working on as a follow-up to her successful 2018 debut LP, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides.

The slick new album doesn’t quite live up to Tolentino’s purple prose—”Sophie’s sonic plasticity pointed to interrelational reinvention, toward a truth that had to be formed in the primordial tide pool of a dark, pulsing room.”

But the set’s constant rhythmic shifts, trance breaks, dirty robot come-ons—and, my favorite, the reverberating kettle drum waves on the downbeat track “RAWWWWWW”—do regularly conjure the abstract R&B sounds that make modern dance floor music rightly classified, like Tolentino describes it, as “underground-adjacent.”

Luckily, in addition to the New Yorker, I have my younger friend XDX as a resource, and she—a longtime Sophie fan—pointed me to a 2021 Sophie set that’s available on YouTube, SOPHIE LIVESTREAM HEAV3N SUSPENDED.

This shape-shifting, 20-minute collection is dreamier, sexier, and more exploratory than the new record, leaning into the trance, liquid, and bent signals side of Sophie’s skittering soundscape. It also includes a great middle movement weighted by a slow-motion sample that sounds as if the source material is both a dissonant music-theory piano chord and the accompanying piano wires rattling.

“Watch me touch myself/inside out/do turn on/upside down,” Sophie, whose trans identity is central to both her fluid music and her body positive lyrics, sings against a shimmering fantasia of tones, blips, and burning static. “I can see you like my name/let me rest it in your mouth/open wide/let me finger fuck myself,” she continues, upping the transgressive challenge as the music accelerates both its BPMs and its gender queer politics.

Lifting off like an ‘80s Madonna classic, the set concludes with an anthemic plea: “Everybody’s got to own their body/Everybody wants to be somebody/Everybody’s got to own their story…” eventually scrolling out into tape-in-reversed vocals chanted over the soft pulse of a minimalist keyboard part.

With this Lysergic mix putting Sophie’s slick new album in context, I feel better about my plans to listen to the record on repeat all weekend.

2) Last April, a dear old college friend emailed to say she was coming to town for a conference, and we should get dinner, which we did. For several days afterward, I couldn’t stop talking about her to anyone who would listen. Or more specifically, I couldn’t stop talking about the exciting research she was doing.

Jennifer is a longtime history prof at NYU and the author of several books, including Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004, University of Pennsylvania Press) and the award-winning Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (2020, Duke University Press).

She’s currently working on a new book about an early American slave named Elizabeth Key. Key won a landmark case in the Virginia courts in 1655 after suing for her freedom on the grounds that her father was a white Christian; common law at the time held that social status was determined by one’s father, who had an obligation to support both legitimate and illegitimate children.

Jennifer explained that her forthcoming book, titled The Eve of Slavery, was seizing on the subsequent tragedy that Key’s legal victory prompted: The Virginia legislature quickly enacted new laws encoding emergent political ideas (or more accurately, racialist ideas) about blackness. The reactionary legal backlash to Key’s court-mandated freedom stated that a person’s mother, not her father, was the metric that would now be used to determine if one was free or enslaved. This pernicious new legal framework, both a tangible building block of capitalist society and a searing metaphor for capitalism itself, cast black women as not only labor widgets in the slave trade economy, but additionally, and more horrifically, as sexual widgets.

To quote Jennifer:

Slave owners understood enslaved women to be delivering two forms of wealth, the wealth that those women produce in the fields, and the wealth those women produce in their bodies. The slave owner was reaching into that women’s future and saying whoever you give birth to belongs to me and my children. It starts with that assumption that one person can own not just your body, but all that your body can produce, the work of your hands and the work of your womb.

That’s not a quote from last April’s dinner with Jennifer. It’s a quote from a video she just recorded this week for the MacArthur Foundation—you know, the foundation that announces its prestigious “Genius Grants” every fall.

That is to say, this week, the MacArthur Foundation chose Jennifer as one of its revered geniuses, formalizing what friends from her long-ago days as a (self-designed) Third World Studies (!) major at Oberlin College in the mid 1980s have known all along. (To quote another old college friend, who texted me a link to the exciting, breaking news on Tuesday morning: “The inevitable…!!”)

Speaking of Oberlin: Here’s the great article they immediately published about Jennifer and her well-earned award in our proudly woke alma mater’s newsletter.

3) “[It’s] not exactly dub, but there’s a lot of dub elements in it,” former Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore told Pitchfork for an Instagram series where cool musicians name their “Perfect 10” record.

“It’s just really minimal reggae.”

Moore picked reggae artist Tapper Zukie’s 1973 album (not 1977 as Moore says) Man Ah Warrior. It’ not an LP I knew, though now that I’ve been listening to it all week, I can say it’s not a surprising choice for the legendary art-rock guitarist. Sonic Youth’s spooky early records took inspiration from original 1970s dub; the band’s eponymous 1982 EP even had a song called “The Burning Spear,” presumably an homage to the great reggae dub artist. In fact, Sonic Youth’s band name itself was prompted by cutting-edge 70s reggae DJ, Big Youth.

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Zukie’s spaced out swagger, emcee banter, and scattered sound effects certainly point toward the full-fledged elastic rhythms and studio trickery that would transform pop reggae into esoteric dub in the mid-70s when reggae artists like Junior Murvin spliced reggae jams with the avant-garde, and when even more adventurous artists like King Tubby completely rewired the genre into all-out hypnotic spells. But keenly, Man Ah Warrior’s party-up sensibility never fully abandons Jimmy Cliff-era reggae’s sense of bounce and melody.

I do hear what Moore means about Man Ah Warrior being idly lost between reggae and dub, though. The intimate LP rides its stripped-down guitar clanks, slinking bass lines, far-away piano chords, phased proto-loops, and drum-kit tinkering to the outer edges of traditional reggae’s pop song structures, leaning into meditative improv and echo. This is weird reggae for 1973.

Fittingly, the LP’s most pop-centered track, “Liberation Struggle,” (as opposed to one of its more overtly experimental tacks, “Hills of Zion-Dub”), captures Man Ah Warrior’s interstitial moment best, quietly slipping the furthest into the future as Zukie overlays the tune’s catchy I-vi see-saw chord progression with wandering vocals and intermittent sci-fi sine waves.

I wouldn’t give this record a pure 10; there’s too much throw-away pop here. But it certainly gets the highest score as a historical document of new music in the making.

*Footnote: As I approach a full year of doing these weekly posts, I’m feeling alert to larger themes, persistent obsessions (the WTA!), and secret story lines. Using a spreadsheet I’ve been keeping, I’m hoping to do a write up soon that draws a few conclusions about my year of mini-obsessions.

But quickly, Sonic Youth was my favorite band a million years ago back in college, and I’m pleasantly surprised to realize that today’s prompted-by-Thurston Moore-item marks the second time they’ve resurfaced on one of these weekly lists. Back in early February, I wrote about Sonic Youth’s other star, Kim Gordon, and her new video , though, more in earnest really, about Sonic Youth themselves.

The Laotian restaurant at the end of the universe; the macro problem with Project 2025; the Spanish restaurant at the end of the Rapid Ride G Line

I’m All Lost in …

The 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#50

Islands of mixed-use in a sea of single-family housing

1) On Saturday night, my longtime pal Amy, visiting from Portland and crashing at my place, suddenly got a second wind. She was pooped after Day Three of her writing conference, and I was still coming down from my recent trip to D.C./ NYC./ and Mississippi. And so, here we were about to call time, when at Amy’s suggestion, we leapt up from our respective lackadaisical spots on the beanbag and floor and headed out in search of a night cap.

Where to go? My apartment building is located on a short stretch of street zoned Neighborhood Commercial (NC-1), making my block a brief oasis of multi-story housing, the-three-restaurants-I’ve-been-to-a-hundred-times, and some retail in an otherwise dormant neighborhood. Street after street, most of my neighborhood is zoned nearly exclusively for single family homes.

There is, however, one kindred-spirit corner just two blocks north of my building, a fleeting island of last-ditch NC-1, awkwardly separated from my aspirational block by more of Seattle’s ubiquitous single-family zoning.

The listless streetscape between my building and said lit outpost is enough of an existential barrier that I rarely venture that way; my district’s main commercial hub—”The Drag”—is a 15-minute walk in the other direction to the south, so despite the propinquity of the commercial zoning satellite directly to my north, I hardly ever walk past it, even by default. This, it turns out, has been a consequential miscalculation.

For here lies Taurus Ox , an exciting and casually fancy Laotian restaurant. Their ginger, chile, and lemongrass expertise emphasizes burgers and pork dishes, but there are two vegan entree options as well (including a yellow curry with squash, eggplant, and mushrooms).

There was a boisterous crowd of well-to-do 20-somethings hovering on the sidewalk outside (exactly what the neighborhood fears!) and lively groups of friends crowded around the 10 tables inside when Amy and I arrived at 9 o’clock; all this alluring commotion in a neighborhood where the surrounding zoning mandates early bedtimes. To my surprise, the friendly staff invited us right in, ushered us to a small bar in back by the bustling, flaming kitchen, and warmly catered to our evening hunger for drinks, snacks, and tentacular conversation.

An hour later, the energetic young staff was still tending to us with open arms and our bellies were happy from the stacked-with-mushrooms, blanched greens, and garlic veggie fresh rolls (Soop Pak) and light NA cocktails (limey No-jitos).

After No-jitos, 9/21/24

2) The Democrats’ Project 2025 fixation, certainly a politically and (uncharacteristically for Democrats) savvy bit of campaign messaging, has always been a kind of cheap shot. It’s reminiscent of MAGA’s “hordes at the border” or “she’s a Marxist!” battle cry. Look, I’m not a both sides-er, and the extent to which Trump’s lies and name-calling are pathological and pernicious is hardly comparable to the Democrats’ reasonable alarm bells about Project 2025, a tangible policy document that outlines a deeply un-American, authoritarian agenda of civil rights roll backs, deregulation, corporatism, weird anti-sex nanny-state moralism, and even an explicit endorsement of NIMBYism (do control F for “single-family zoning” on page 511.)

But as much as Democrats want to pin a Heritage Foundation caricature on Trump, it’s pretty obvious that his secular Libertarianism, wily political shape-shifting, and naked self-serving cronyism cannot be corralled and indexed into a standard Republican manifesto. In turn, Trump's anti-establishment, KKK ideology cannot be met with standard Democratic attacks.

While there’s certainly overlap between many of Trump’s extremist positions and those spelled out in Project 2025 (mass deportation, rolling back environmental regulations), I appreciate how this week’s NYT opinion piece by Ezra Klein  both pointed out the fundamental flaw with the Democrats’ Project-2025-as-Trumpist-White-Paper narrative, and then re-framed the crazed document to identify the larger danger it poses.

First the reality check:

When [Trump] said, during his debate with Kamala Harris, that he hadn’t read Project 2025 and has no intention of doing so, I believed him.

It has more views on more issues than he does. It has absorbed more specific and unusual ideologies than he has. It is more hostile to abortion than he is (or more than he wants to appear to be). It is more committed to deregulating health insurance than he is (or more than he wants to appear to be). There is a great gap between the MAGA leader who slept with a porn star and the factions in the MAGA movement that want to outlaw pornography, as Roberts proposed on Project 2025’s first page…

Trumpism is whatever Trump says it is

Bam. It’s that observation from Klein—“Trumpism is whatever Trump says it is”—that convincingly ties Project 2025 and Trumpism together to reveal the larger, corrosive effects this radical document could have for American democracy.

Explaining Project 2025’s prescription for replacing standard government bureaucrats with right-wing foot soldiers, Klein continues:

Project 2025…. is more than a compendium of policy proposals: It is an effort to build a deep state of Trump’s own. …

Veterans of Trump’s administration believe personnel was their biggest problem. They could not act ambitiously or swiftly enough because they were at constant war with the government they, in theory, controlled. …

To do that, the next Trump administration must first clear out or conquer the federal government that currently exists. Project 2025 is obsessed with this task, and many of its 900-some pages are dedicated to plans and theories for how this might be done…

This, I would say, is the unifying theory of a second Trump term. Purge or break the federal bureaucracy. Fill it with vetted loyalists. Then use its power to pass policy, yes, but also to break or conquer the other institutions in American life that so vex Trump and his supporters. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which oversaw Project 2025, said in July.

Harvest Vine on the Rapid Ride Line, 9/26/24

3) To celebrate Tuesday’s good news, XDX’s promotion, we promptly made Thursday night reservations at one of her Seattle-dinner-out wish-list spots: Harvest Vine, a casual, bourgeois (Boomer/Xer) Spanish restaurant in Madison Valley.

First of all, Harvest Vine is located next to the last stop on Seattle’s brand new Rapid Ride G bus line (quasi BRT with dedicated lanes, synchronized traffic lights, center island stops, curb bulb in-lane stops, and doors on both sides for seamless boarding). So, along with the evening’s promotion celebration, I got to test out Metro’s new “buses-every-6-minutes” claim.

Without considering the bus schedule, I arrived at the in-lane stop on 17th & Madison just 15 minutes before XDX and I were scheduled to meet a mile east at the restaurant. I queued up at 5:16 and voila: The bus swung by promptly at 5:22 and then ferried me right to Harvest Vine’s doorstep in the heart of Madison’s froufrou commercial strip.

Set inside a two-story house, there’s table seating clustered around a lively open kitchen on the first floor and a secluded batch of tables downstairs in a sedate, wine-cellar-turned-dining room. That’s where we were seated, feeling definitely that we were in Seville or Lisbon.

I was able to go vegan (sort of) by piling up on starters: Roasted summer squash with cozy almond romesco; a sizzling eggplant dish; and a mushroom appetizer (sauteed button mushrooms with garlic and delicious sherry cream sauce—ah, well). For her part, XDX went all in on the restaurant’s meat and fish agenda. She got the grilled acorn-fed black foot pig with potatoes and cider sauce, and the pan-seared Mediterranean sea bass with piperade and aioli. I happily pilfered several helpings of the sautéd onions, green peppers, and tomatoes that were stewing underneath the (both flaky and buttery, reports XDX) sea bass.

Succulent pan-seared bass with irresistible veggies, 9/26/24

Roasted squash with divine almond romescu, 9/26/24

The repeat plates of chewy baguette and rich olive oil (chivalrously slid our way on request) delivered the perfect taste-bud match with the sherry sauce and, triumphantly, with the nutty romesco paste.

Our utter kook of a waiter, whose disassociated service was strangely charming, offered us three different wine samples and then, per our ensuing picks—the manure-friendly cab and the light floral pinot—gave us lavish pours, mirroring his eccentric persona.

Dessert was lightly burnt cheesecake with wine poached cherries.

Postres, 9/26/24

There are plenty of other enticing items for veggies like me on Harvest Vine’s lengthy menu: the marinated olives, the sauteed green beans with onion confit and tomato frito, the fried padron peppers tossed in sea salt, and (yes) the octopus with chickpea puree. I will return for all of these.

With an entire section of the menu titled “Quesos,” non-vegans should hop on the G Line bus to check out this charmed bourgeoisie hang out as well.

———

For the record, my drop last week into 1920s Ghost Pop classic “Ten Cents A Dance” has not subsided. This week, I continued to savor the song’s remote and lovely piano chords.

Nor has has my yearlong obsession with tennis (both watching and playing) slowed down. On Tuesday night, I binged all three episodes of Gods of Tennis, PBS’ documentary about the first epoch (1968-1990) of professional tennis’ Open Era . This tennis triptych tracks the heroic tales of Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe, tennis’ own civil rights trail blazers; relives the drama of defining men’s-circuit rivals, vogue Bjorn Borg and uncouth John McEnroe; and, through the lens of Czech Martina Navratilova’s touching expatriate and queer-coming-of-age story, highlights the women’s-circuit’s own two legendary rivals, Navratilova and her constant competition, Americana poster girl Chris Evert.

On Sunday, I played a set of tennis myself. I beat a guy from work 6-4 in a see-sawing contest that featured plenty of extended volleys. I was pleased when after the match, noting he didn’t hit enough winners, my potential new rival said: “You’re always in position.”

I don’t have a sense of my game, so this was excellent information to learn.

Trump’s KKK ideology; ghost pop; and a new coffee shop.

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about this week.

#49

1) On January 29, 2016, I posted a prediction on my  blog that Donald Trump would win that year’s presidential election.

My prediction was based on a story from that day’s NYT: “Labor Leaders Fear Trump’s Appeal With Rank and File.” I was getting Reagan Democrat vibes.

This week’s Teamsters’ news— that the working class union is refusing to endorse Harris (a significant win for Trump)— is reminiscent of that portentous 2016 story, and it’s raising the hair on my neck.

I was slightly soothed, though, by this week’s Washington Post report that Teamster locals got up in Teamster Trumper union president Sean O’Brien’s face with subsequent Harris endorsements in swing states.

And it’s also nice to note that the Teamsters’ Black Caucus endorsed Harris in mid-August, praising…

the bipartisan infrastructure bill President Biden signed, as well as steps his administration has taken to lower prescription drug costs and increase wages. It also credited Ms. Harris with pushing to expand the child tax credit … and with helping to preserve union members’ pensions.

The Black Caucus’ pro-Harris endorsement was accompanied by full fledged disdain for Trump:

It said that former President Donald J. Trump’s administration “was one of the most antilabor in modern history,” citing among other things his loosening of workplace safety regulations and his opposition to raising the federal minimum wage.

This raises the question: Why are the national Teamsters default siding with Trump?

Like the Reagan Democrats (and Nixon’s “Lunch Pail” vote before that), it’s a culture war issue, and specifically, it’s Trump’s white identity politics that appeals to the non-POC Teamsters membership—and puts the Black Caucus on edge. The Teamsters’ Black Caucus Harris endorsement stated that Trumpism was “contributing to a hostile environment for Black Americans.”

As for their white Teamster comrades?

Earlier this year, when Mr. Biden was still in the race, Mr. O’Brien asked each Teamsters local to hold a straw poll. … Mr. Biden had won a plurality, 44 percent to Mr. Trump’s 36 percent. But … two other surveys … showed Mr. Trump crushing Ms. Harris, 60 percent to 34 percent…

Working-class voters, especially white men, have favored Mr. Trump, a point Ms. Harris conceded on Monday when she told Teamsters leaders that she understood the union’s rank-and-file was looking at issues beyond labor, such as immigration.

This all leads to what I’m actually obsessing over this week: The fact that Trump’s KKK ideology is now, by choice, the defining feature of his presidential campaign. Indeed, if the union story is reminiscent of Reaganism, Trump’s stump demagoguery about fictitious Haitians-eating-pets in Springfield, Ohio is reminiscent Southern lynch mob politics.

Jamelle Bouie’s NYT column this week, “Trump Knows What He’s Doing in Springfield. So Does Vance,” predicts how Trump’s bellicose race baiting will play out in a second Trump term.

The hair is standing up on the back of my neck again:

Where once Donald Trump attracted only the right-wing fringe of American politics, now he leads it. Where once he kept some distance from agitators and provocateurs like Laura Loomer, now they’re at the center of his campaign. And where once he merely inspired extremists to act, now he points them directly at the objects of his rage.

Take Springfield, Ohio, where schools, colleges and municipal buildings have been shut down and community events canceled owing to bomb threats targeting the city’s Haitian community. Those threats come as Trump — and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio — smear the Haitians of Springfield with the lie that they’re stealing and eating the pets of presumably native-born Americans.

…Today, if you were to place the rhetoric of Unite the Right side by side with that of Trump’s 2024 campaign, you would struggle to find a difference. Echoing the chants of “blood and soil” we heard in Charlottesville, the former president now tells audiences that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He calls his foes “vermin” and warns that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”

…For the Trump campaign to descend on Springfield would be to recapitulate the dynamic that led to the events in Charlottesville. The difference, of course, is that then Trump was several places removed from the extremists who led the effort to “Unite the Right.” Now he’s the standard-bearer.

It is important to say that if presidential campaigns are a glimpse into presidential governance, then the Trump campaign’s anti-Haitian agitation is a clear glimpse into how President Trump would behave and govern in a second term. One can imagine Trump spreading Springfield-esque lies from the Oval Office directly to the American public. One can imagine a Vice President Vance touring cities with new immigrant populations, attacking them with the same smears he’s used to target the Haitian community of Springfield, spreading hate so that the public will accept the mass deportation of millions of immigrants. Trump, in fact, has already promised to start mass deportations in Springfield. “We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” Trump said on Friday. “And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora.”

Republicans who are Republicans and not KKK fabulists—Springfield, Ohio’s mayor and Ohio’s governor, for example—have tried to counter Trump’s lies with the truth (as Republican officials once tried to do in Georgia in response to Trump’s “stolen” election lies). This is a lost cause for a party that’s been taken over by Trump’s authoritarian script of racist conspiracy theories.

2) Jazz Age and Great Depression pop music, the scratchy, maudlin strains that I refer to as Ghost Pop (because every pianist, violinist, and crooner on these slightly creepy late 1920s and early 1930s recordings is long dead), seems to have one foot in another dimension.

A cartoon I published in the Stranger, moons ago.

Though this soothing music uses standard Western scales and chords, there’s nonetheless something alien about it, as if it was written in an ancient Greek mode, such as Locrian, the mystery scale that has long fallen out of use because of its apparent instability.

I’m not sure why Ghost Pop—I point you to Russ Columbo, Rudy Vallée, Gene Austin, and Ruth Etting as the the form’s master performers—feels off-kilter, but listen to Columbo’s “Prisoner of Love” or Vallee’s “Deep Night” and tell me you don’t feel as if you’re suddenly flickering between Matrixes.

That’s definitely where I’ve been this week as I took up practicing Rodgers and Hart’s “Ten Cents A Dance,” perhaps my favorite Ghost Pop number (Ruth Etting’s 1930 version), on piano.

“Ten Cents A Dance”—a yearning tune sung from the lonely and bummed out POV of a taxi dancer—is in the the key of E flat major, not a particularly odd key. Elton John’s “Your Song,” Guns & Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle,” Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On,” The Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun” are among the parade of pop classics in E flat major.

I don’t know, though, if those rock-era tunes push chords such as E natural/B flat—a diminished fifth—which disassociates from the key by abandoning the E flat tonic in favor of an out-of-sequence sharped 1 note, E natural. In fact, in the opening 12 measures of “Ten Cents A Dance” alone, there are seven instances when the song abandons the rest of key’s vocabulary as well: There are A naturals instead of the key’s A flat, there are F sharps instead of the key’s F natural, there’s a G flat instead of the key’s G natural, and there are D flats instead of the key’s D natural.

What the hell? Was the key of E flat just the closest thing to the song’s suis generis logic. Significantly, it’s the E flat (the home base note) itself that the melody consistently kicks to the curb, such as on the lines “Customers [E natural-B flat] crush my toes [F-E natural].”

On the word “Toes,” the song also subs an A natural for the key’s important 4 tone, the A flat. Again, WTF? Why even bother pretending this song—with all its stray notes and crushed, dissonant chords—has a defining key at all?

Leaning into Rodgers and Hart’s “queer romance,” fitting words accompanied here by notes that ironically belong in the song’s key of E flat major—C and F with an A flat, and F and G with a D and C—has provided definition for me all week.

3) File this under Transit Oriented Development and/or an obvious business plan:

Open a coffee shop next to the 4th busiest light rail stop in the city (8,000 daily riders). That’s what the folks behind the quietly spiffy Seasmith did, setting up shop by the Capitol Hill station.

I worked out of Seasmith on both Thursday and Friday this week, fitting into the easy rhythm of the place—it fills up quickly right after the 7 am open; though folks come and go, so finding a seat, either at one of the many solid tables or at the roomy bar, is easy enough; as is everything here: the vegan-friendly lunch menu (there’s a blackbean, mushroom patty sandwich and a rolled oats chia seed coconut milk bowl with chopped nuts by request), the bounty of savory and sugary pastries (black sesame cookies), the standard or fancy coffee specials (Lavendar Blossom Latte), and, bonus, the plentiful carafes of water at the spic and span busing station.

Set flush against the light rail station plaza with a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows and plenty of house plants, this new spot (it opened in the Spring) opts for light industrial chic and open, bright feng shui (as opposed to cozy and bohemian).

The din of patrons busy at telework and earnest meetings, plus the sound system (they seem to play entire album sides—I noticed Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, Lorde’s Melodrama, Madonna’s Ray of Light, and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill) mix with the active, staffed-up staff to soften the corporate L.A. contours.

I’m rooting for this place to succeed, and there does seem to be a metaphor at play in their current posted hours:

Open-ended hours

One barista said closing time was 5, but I looked up and the place was still flowing onward toward 6.

Blissed out at Relax Station; Freaked out by [•Rec]; cleaned up well by wash & fold

I’m All Lost in …

the three things I’m obsessing about THIS week (NYC version)

#48

1) About five minutes into dinner at Spicy Moon Vegan Szechuan on Tuesday night, a bowed waveform passed through my head. At first, I thought it was the ghost pepper-level heat in the cumin tofu entree hitting me, but then I remembered I was also drinking mezcal, a booze I don’t drink often, and which always slams my mind with a slow motion gearshift.

But it wasn’t until the following evening that I felt truly drunk as I stumbled east on Hester St. from Chinatown to the Lower East Side looking for a coffee shop where I could dissolve into a chair.

I had just gotten a delerium-inducing chair massage at Relax Station.

Tucked away on Mulberry St., where the scent of Little Italy’s bread and bakery gems waft from the clustered shops and combine with Chinatown’s ammonia fish aroma to conjure NYC’s signature sidewalk smell, Relax Station is located up a suspicious looking flight of stairs.

Upstairs off Mulberry St., 9/11/24

When I walked into the nondescript front room just to the right at the top of the landing, the guy I spoke with on the phone earlier that morning was sitting in a plastic chair hunched over his cell. He nodded like we were in a Raymond Chandler novel, and a young woman stepped from behind the front desk to greet me. She briefly tried to talk me into a table massage, assuring me I could keep my clothes on. I made my case that chair massages—thanks to the way the ergonomics open your back and expose your shoulders, neck, head and arms—are ideal.

With light classical piano music floating in the background, she proceeded to give me a solid 45-minute massage, systematically kneading her way through the aches and knots in my upper body, manhandling my arms, digging her fingers into my neck and twisting the nervous tissue between her thumb and forefinger, pressing her knees into my back muscles, and massaging my scalp with a smooth stone. I flickered in and out of consciousness during this last delight as the endorphin, serotonin, and dopamine rush overpowered my body.

Afterward, I swayed down the staircase like a noodle, slipping back onto the street, and made my way over to a stylish coffee shop at the corner of Hester & Orchard.

2) I watched two movies this week. On Monday afternoon, ECB and I went to MoMA, where they were having a 1970s film fest; we saw a matinee of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1974 oddity, Daisy Miller, based on Henry James’ 1878 novella. Starring young Cybill Shepherd and a lost-to-time actor named Barry Brown, it was Bogdanovich’s given-a-blank-check-from-Hollywood follow-up to his parade of hits, The Last Picture Show (1971), What’s Up Doc (1972), and Paper Moon (1973). I texted my pal Valium Tom, who loves languid, eye-candy cinema, my take on the movie: “An utter bore, but somehow wonderful. It was extravagantly irrelevant.”

As a turn-of-the-century period piece, including the hotels and castles of France, and the parks, operas, and ruins of Rome, it was, indeed, lovely to look at, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Let me instead, recommend the other movie I watched this week (over at my friend Paco’s apartment, late Sunday night): [•REC], a 2007 horror movie written and directed by Spanish movie makers Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza.

Little girl turned zombie in  Paco Plaza's horror classic, [•REC]

Yikes, this “found footage,” handheld-camcorder zombie freak out, combines Blair Witch Project and Night of the Living Dead (including reviving Romero’s classic sick, little-girl character and her doomed and defensive mother) by stranding a TV crew, a couple of firefighters, and government scientist in a suddenly, quarantined apartment building where a zombie virus has broken out among the residents; the feds cordon off the building with troops and wrap it in plastic.

The footage—which gives the movie a psychedelic rhythm and arty touch as it stalls or goes black or overexposes in between the live-cam view—comes courtesy of the TV duo, a go-getter reporter named Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and her resolute cameraman, Pablo (who we never see, but grow to trust as our only protector).

[•REC], which stands for “record,” starts when the pair, on a shoot for their late night news show, accompany a couple of firefighters on a seemingly run-of-the-mill call to help an elderly woman. Things quickly get creepy when the old woman attacks one of the firemen, critically injuring him with bite wounds. The terror accelerates from there as the gore splatters the screen. The little girl, whose violent dog initially clued the authorities into the raging virus, is transformed into a vicious zombie midway through.

Eventually, Pablo, bites it (or, more accurately, gets bitten) in the penthouse apartment finale, where the Catholic-Demonic backstory is revealed in the guise of Patient Zero, a now-ghoulish girl named Tristana Medeiros who had been secretly imprisoned there by the Vatican. With the camera man down, the grim message becomes clear: this world is over.

3) There wasn’t a laundry room at the Bethesda Marriott on Pook’s Hill Rd. (where I stayed two weeks ago, during the seeing-my-mom portion of this trip) nor at the goofy boutique hotel in the Lower East Side this week. I had planned to wash my mounting pile of clothes at Gregory Samsa’s apartment in Brooklyn, where I stayed for a few days to save some money; there’s a washer and dryer in his building upstairs at his besties’ (and my old friends) Dave & Jen’s.

But then I discovered a fantastic service: Wash & Fold.

On Tuesday morning, I dropped off my suitcase, now stuffed with rumpled clothes, at a laundromat around the corner from Samsa’s on Hooper St called Pachamama Laundromat.

And then easy-peasy, on the way back to his apartment that evening to watch the big Harris-Trump debate, ECB and I took a slight detour to the laundromat where, for $12 less than they’d said that morning (so, $23 instead of $35) I retrieved my suitcase. I had been nervous because I hadn’t thought to leave them a laundry bag.

But when I got back to Samsa’s and unzipped the suitcase, a small black model I inherited from XDX, I found a tight cube of pressed, folded, and twinkling fresh laundry, set in a neatly tied plastic bag.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a few other things from this action-packed week in New York: First, despite all the terrible things you hear about the subway these days—late and stalled trains, crime—I rode it everywhere without any delays or problems, the F to the 7, the J to and from Brooklyn, the F to the Q70 bus, and my new discoveries, the 42nd St. shuttle train on the way from Queens to Brooklyn and the LIRR to visit Aunt Judy in Great Neck; second, per usual, I got a couple of my improvised, sloppy, veggie hoagies—this time, a banana pepper, chickpeas, corn, mushrooms, black olives, green peppers, oil, and mustard sandwich; and third, the standout exhibit of the trip was the Vivian Maier 1950s and 1960s street photography show at Fotographiska NYC.

Vivian Maier exhibit at Fotografiska NY, 9/8/24

Paul Weller at Kings Theater, Brooklyn, 9/7/24

Finally, I did see Paul Weller in concert, which was the initial prompt for this trip (at Kings Theater, a gloriously ornate, old-timey theater in Flatbush). Mr. Weller, the founder of my favorite band when I was a teenager, the first-wave punk pop band, the Jam (he also founded the men’s shop pop band the Style Council), now has decades of banal rock LPs on his resume. He mostly played that. But I did get my dose of kismet and cosmic connection: One of the two Jam songs he played was “Start!,” the 1980 U.K. hit I sang in the 9th grade talent show.

For the record, my Weller pilgrimage was superseded by the U.S. Open, where I saw Aryna Sabalenka win on Saturday in straight sets over American Jessica Pegula, 7-5, 7-5. It was slightly awkward rooting for Daffy Saby against hometown favorite Pegula, but not really.

Magical vibes at the U.S. Open; Neo-Nazi vibes on Tucker Carlson’s podcast; Edith Wharton in “a neighborhood of discreet hotels.”

I’m All Lost in …

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#47

1) It’s all true, I went to the U.S. Open on Thursday for the “evening session,” in this case: the Women’s Semifinals double header. The opening match starred my tennis hero, World No. 2 Aryna Sabalenka; in a promising sign, Sabalenka had destroyed the otherwise seemingly ascendant World No. 7 Qinwen Zheng in the quarterfinal on Tuesday night, 6-1, 6-4.

The minute I walked off the subway late Thursday afternoon (I took the F train from the Village to the 7 train toward Flushing), I was in a state: gliding along the boardwalk expanse onto the renowned tennis complex grounds (a mini-city, really), laughing out loud, amazed to have crossed the threshold into this bucket-list-item dreamland.

I arrived two-and-a-half hours early—at 4:30 for the 7:00 start—smiling without restraint, as I shambled through the buzzing crowd making my way from the chill-out park grounds and plazas with their abundant umbrella seating, past the regal fountains to the Grey Goose Vodka “Honey Deuce” drink stands (I certainly bought one of those); from the packed and wonderfully air-conditioned gift shops (I bought a shirt at the third shop I hit) to the walkway galleries memorializing historic players such as Molla Mallory, Althea Gibson, and Jimmy Connors.

At some point, I noticed the outdoor side courts that were clustered immediately west of majestic Arthur Ashe Stadium. My friend Gregory Samsa (he attends opening week every year) told me you can catch some background tournament action on these low-key courts. Fortuitously, I also remembered that a day earlier, one of the TV announcers noted that World No. 6 Jessica Pegula looked quite relaxed during her practice-court warmups in advance of her (big upset, it turned out) Wednesday match against World No. 1 Iga Swiatek.

At that, I decided to take a peek at the practice courts to see who I could find… imagining that… but knowing it probably wasn’t a possibility …. that there was no way I’d be so lucky… but…

First, I came across a Boys Wheel Chair match—both boys, in this instance, lacking the use of one ill-formed arm. It was a moving tableau. There weren’t many people watching, perhaps a few family members on the one row of silver benches. A young woman, was snapping away with a high-end camera.

I continued on to another court…and another… meandering through the labyrinth of fences, shallow stairwells, and white concrete landings, all the while feeling a bit sneaky. After a few minutes, I found myself walking alongside a pair of women, one in her late 20s, and another, my age, probably her mom, tentatively snooping around too. A bit disoriented in this maze of tennis courts, the three of us wound up in a skinny breezeway behind a court covered with a scrim. Suddenly, the young woman gasped: “It’s her!”

I knew who she meant and, all anticipation, I looked on as she pushed the netting aside for a view of the practice court at hand, leaning in as if she were a backstage Broadway tech in a head set, peering from behind the curtain. “Oh my god,” she said, “it is. It’s her.” She stepped aside and conspiratorially offered me a peek as well.

Aryna Sabalenka on Practice Court 3 at the U.S. Open complex, 9/5/24.

We realized there were some steps around the corner that led to a small set of bleachers. Our Nancy Drew excursion, it turned out, was completely legit: the practice session was for public viewing. We scrambled up and took our seats among a dozen or so other early birds to watch Sabalenka warm up on Practice Court 3.

She was hitting her famous sonic boom serve, and I got goosebumps in a moment of IRL recognition when I heard her racket crack down and swat the ball with such force that the echo took on a physical presence; it’s a weight you see, but don’t feel watching her on TV.

P.s. I didn’t even notice that Men’s World No. 1 Janik Sinner was hitting on the immediately adjacent court the whole time; I left after Sabalenka— who, I should note, looked quite relaxed—finished her warm up. By the way, Sabalenka’s average topspin forehand speed at the U.S. Open is 80 mph, faster than Sinner’s (78 mph), as well as faster than Men’s No. 2 Novak Djokovic’s (76) and men’s No. 3 Carlos Alacaraz’s (79).

Two hours after watching Sabalenka warm up on Practice Court 3, I watched her play in the Semifinals at Arthur Ashe Stadium, dismissing surging billionaire’s kid, World No. 13, American Emma Navarro, in a riveting, blistering, and athletic match, 6-3, 7-6 (7-2). Luckily, the friendly people sitting next to me in our Section 326 nosebleed seats were playful about my Sabalenka partisanship even as they cheered the American through what ended up being a losing cause.

I hope whoever I’m sitting next to later this afternoon for the 4pm final between Sabalenka and American Pegula, is cool about it too.

2) Another Trump election means another season when neo-Nazi rhetoric goes mainstream via the felonious, traitorous ex-president’s MAGA ecosystem: Trump acolyte Tucker Carlson brought a Holocaust “revisionist” onto his popular “Tucker on X Podcast” this week.

Thank you NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg for editorializing about this noxious development and for connecting the dots to expose how antisemitism goes hand in hand with Trumpism and Trump’s media operatives.

Like your favorite poem, every line of Goldberg’s piece is worth pausing over and taking in full—from her keen explanation of how “Hitler curious” posturing poses as anti-establishment righteousness, to her take down of faux historians’ facile conclusions (equating Nazism with a liberal “state religion”), to her warnings about where “discarding … guardrails,” leads, namely, “Trump’s … authoritarian plans, including imprisoning masses of undocumented immigrants in vast detention camps.”

Goldberg offers a terminal diagnosis on the effects of swallowing Trump’s poison.

The weakening of the intellectual quarantine around Nazism — and the MAGA right’s fetish for ideas their enemies see as dangerous — makes it easier for influential conservatives to surrender to fascist impulses. When they do, they pay no penalty in political relevance, because there’s no conservative establishment capable of disciplining its ideologues.

3) I’m still digging into the Edith Wharton short story collection that I favorited late last month. I read a few more of her expertly crafted stories this week, including “The Journey,” about an existential cross country train trip, “The Rembrandt,” a slightly comedic, yet sad tale about a diminished elderly woman’s desperate version of the past (until the trick ending), and the observant “A Cold Cup of Water,” a parable about the human soul and, honestly, about the meaning of life; Wharton achieves this powerful bit of soothsaying as much though mood as through plot.

Wharton sets the vibe—a depressed resignation during end-of-the (19th)century Manhattan—with “the icy solitude of 5th Avenue,” the superficial manners on parquet ballroom dance floors, the ultimate futility of whiskey cafes, the “neighborhoods of cheap hotels” where third-floor rooms are “lit only by the upward gleam of electric globes in the street below,” and as Wharton opens the story, by the wet sidewalks, reflecting back at its denizens:

It had rained hard during the earlier part of the night, and the carriages waiting in triple line before the Gildermeres' door were still domed by shining umbrellas, while the electric lamps extending down the avenue blinked Narcissus-like at their watery images in the hollows of the sidewalk.

Wharton’s moody Manhattan gently cradles the story of a striver named Woburn, a well-intentioned young bank employee whose failure to make rank among the wealthy, fashionable set of one Miss Talcott, leads him into a sloppy, witless embezzlement scheme at work. Woburn’s downward spiral is reflected back to him through the tragic backstory of Ruby Glenn, a suicidal woman (she’s got a revolver) who he meets deep into night at the aforementioned hotel; both are in the throes of insomnia.

In fact, Wharton uses the tactic of mirroring throughout the story, particularly in this early haunting passage that ties mood and plot together with some uncomfortable foreshadowing:

The people on the sidewalks looked like strangers: he wondered where they were going and tried to picture the lives they led; but his own relation to life had been so suddenly reversed that he found it impossible to recover his mental perspective.

At one corner he saw a shabby man lurking in the shadow of the side street; as the hansom passed, a policeman ordered him to move on. Farther on, Woburn noticed a woman crouching on the door-step of a handsome house. She had drawn a shawl over her head and was sunk in the apathy of despair or drink. A well-dressed couple paused to look at her. The electric globe at the corner lit up their faces, and Woburn saw the lady, who was young and pretty, turn away with a little grimace, drawing her companion after her.

In the end, Woburn, who has achieved a new preternatural vantage of moral clarity, talks Ruby down and gives her the money she needs to return home. She, in turn, prompt’s Woburn’s own redemption.

Woburn's eyes were fixed on the window; he hardly seemed to hear her. At length he walked across the room and pulled up the shade. The electric lights were dissolving in the gray alembic of the dawn. A milk-cart rattled down the street and, like a witch returning late from the Sabbath, a stray cat whisked into an area. So rose the appointed day.

Woburn turned back, drawing from his pocket the roll of bills which he had thrust there with so different a purpose. He counted them out, and handed her fifteen dollars.

"That will pay for your board, including your breakfast this morning," he said. "We'll breakfast together presently if you like; and meanwhile suppose we sit down and watch the sunrise. I haven't seen it for years."

Later that morning, rather than acting on his own plan to flee New York aboard a steam ship, he returns to work with stoic resolve.

This door he also opened, entering a large room with wainscotted subdivisions, behind which appeared the stooping shoulders of a row of clerks.

As Woburn crossed the threshold a gray-haired man emerged from an inner office at the opposite end of the room.

At sight of Woburn he stopped short.

"Mr. Woburn!" he exclaimed; then he stepped nearer and added in a low tone: "I was requested to tell you when you came that the members of the firm are waiting; will you step into the private office?"

Speeches about light rail; prose about subways; and late nights at the U.S. Open.

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week

#46

1) Sound Transit, the regional transportation agency where I work, opened the Lynnwood Link Extension on Friday. (Lynnwood is almost 20 miles north of Seattle, in another county.)

“Transit turns red districts blue,” former Seattle Mayor Ed Murray—a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic Democrat—used to quip when pressed about why Seattle would build transit out to the suburbs. It’s an incisive bit of strategic thinking, but there are certainly other reasons to expand mass transit beyond the city core. Most important, sharing density throughout the metro region matches growth with sustainability. According to “Sounds of the Suburbs,” chapter 13 from Ben Wilson’s outstanding 2020 survey of city development, Metropolis, building urban infrastructure beyond city limits wisely meets an inexorable demographic trend by bringing a regional approach to urbanism. Citing Los Angeles, a “contiguous urban region,” rather than a discrete city, as emblematic of a future defined by “cities across the globe…[that] have morphed into massive polycentric megalopolises,” Wilson makes the case for fighting the damaging effects of sprawl by expanding smart infrastructure, including mass transit.

Given that my 9-to-5 job is writing remarks for Sound Transit’s CEO and Board, my non-stop task this week was drafting the ribbon-cutting-day speeches for Lynnwood Link light rail, our suburban expansion. Accordingly, Lynnwood Link—an 8.5-mile, 4-station, county-crossing extension of Sound Transit’s current 1 Line—topped my list of this week’s personal obsessions.

Lynnwood Link is part of Sound Transit’s larger capital program over the next three years that will grow our now 43-station, 42.5-mile light rail system, into a 53-station, 62-mile regional system.

So, it was lots of this from me this week:

As of today, Link trains will arrive at Lynnwood City Center Station every 8 minutes during peak hours, and every 10 minutes during the rest of the day, giving 50,000 new riders reliable, traffic-free connections…

As we’ve said all along, investing in this kind of light rail expansion isn’t just an investment in trains, it’s an investment in our region’s economic resilience.

More light rail helps connect more people to more jobs.

More light rail helps spark new housing. As of today, more than 3,300 new homes have been built or are in development on Sound Transit property.

 At least 2,500 of those homes are affordable housing.

 More light rail helps spark environmental stewardship.

Sound Transit service helped offset more than 216,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023.  

Or to quote the Seattle Times quoting Snohomish County Executive and Sound Transit Board Vice Chair (ahem) :

The service will help commuters “leave one of the most congested corridors in the country behind,” declared Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers, vice chair of the Sound Transit governing board.

Or the Urbanist quoting Somers:

“The story of the day is regionalism,” Somers said. “By connecting all of our separate communities, with safe, reliable rapid mass transit, we are building one sustainable Puget Sound.”

I get pretty anxious at these events; it’s stressful to listen to other people read and/or try to read and/or mangle your words—while the cameras are rolling.

So, after taking the 512 bus to the new station (light rail wouldn’t have taken me there just yet because the new train service didn’t start running until after the 12:30 ribbon cutting), I arrived at the Lynnwood City Center Station to the strains of a jazz band playing on the mobbed plaza, quickly bought a coffee from one of the food trucks, washed down some anxiety meds, and sat at the picnic tables in back with security staff—the periodic sound of applause whooshing past my body like a light rail train.

Opening Day, Lynnwood Link, 8/30/24

Opening Day, Lynnwood Link, 8/30/24

Me, chilling in back at a picnic table on Lynnwood Link Opening Day, 8/30/34, after the meds kicked in.

2) I woke up on (this big) opening day to an email from my friend Dallas. His subject line read “NYT…,”

and his email simply stated, “has your number on a Friday morning.”

This was followed by a link to a wonderful NYT photo essay of mostly old, black & white subway pics (with the occasional late 1960s or early 1970s Kodak color photo.) Even better, or at least what Dallas meant was this: There was an accompanying survey of quotes from New York City novels where authors rhapsodize about the subway.

Titled 120 Years of New York’s Subterranean Literary Muse: The subway isn’t just buried in the bedrock of New York City— it’s embedded within its fiction, too, there are quotes from 20-plus novels in this mesmerizing feature, including: a quote from Another Country by James Baldwin, a formative novel for me (I read it on the sly in my spare time in high school); a quote from the famous first paragraph of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, who is one of my favorite poets (I actually didn’t remember the subway reference, just the startling opening line about the Rosenberg execution); and a 1913 line from The Custom of the Country by my new, recent interest, Edith Wharton.

This old photo is accompanied in the NYT feature by a quote from Harlem Renaissance novelist Jessie Redmon Fauset's 1928 novel, Plum Bun: "The girls were bright birds of paradise, the men, her artist's eye noted, were gay vital fauns. In the subway beside the laughing, happy groups, white faces showed pale and bloodless, other coloured faces loomed dull and hopeless."

My favorite quote, though, comes from a novelist I’ve never heard of, Daphne Palasi Andreades.

Quoting her 2022 debut, Brown Girls, the NYT went with a brief excerpt that reads like a couplet of poetry:

We are 15, and are learning to memorize the subway lines as

if they are the very veins that run through our bodies

Palasi Andreades’ near verse, included in a section of the feature labeled “People-Watching,” is matched with one of the few color pictures. It’s a close-up shot of a subway map displayed on board a train, its colorful snaking lines melding into a reflection from the seats opposite: two children in winter coats and snow caps gazing out their window at rail yard track and buildings.

Some of the other subway subsets in this collection are: “Crowds & Delays;” “Speed;” and “The Subway at Night.”

3) Speaking of night time: My favorite part about opening my laptop and watching the U.S. Open every evening this week (Pacific Time) is seeing those last fans of the day staying up late (East Coast Time) in the glowing stadium for the daily schedule’s final match, as the tennis goes far past Midnight. The long shots of the fans streaming out afterward along the lit grounds, heading to the nearby 7 train is particularly sweet.

Announcer Patrick McEnroe even did an impromptu PSA for the MTA during the Carlos Alcaraz vs. Botic van de Zandschulp match (whoa, by the way.) Cutting away from the match as ESPN put up a live shot of commuters on the train McEnroe said, "As you know John, the 7 train comes right here."

And then this: "Jessica Pegula [USA, No. 6 woman in the world] takes the subway to the tournament every day. She said she doesn't like being stuck in traffic." This was all very comforting as I got a vicarious NYC thrill imagining the deep 70-degree summer evenings in Queens, NYC well past bedtime.

I’ll be in New York next week; I have tickets to the women’s semifinal and final.

If you were to survey my weekly reports, you’d see that my obsession with women’s pro tennis rates as one of the top recurring categories here, ranking just after “Cities” with 11 post as I close in on a year of doing these regular write ups.

World No. 2, Aryna Sabalenka is my favorite player on the Women’s Tennis Association tour, and perfectly, given my weakness for the wee hours, her Round-3 match, scheduled for the Friday night session, actually started at 12:08 a.m on the Arthur Ashe Stadium main stage, making it the latest match start in U.S. Open history.

After losing the first set badly, 2-6, Sabalenka turned into Godzilla and overpowered her opponent, No. 31 Ekaterina Alexandrova, 6-1, 6-2. Sabalenka won 10 straight games at one point for a 5-0 lead in the third and final set. The match ended at 1:48 a.m., tying the record for the second-latest ending ever for a U.S. women’s match.

Afterward, Sabalenka told reporters she hoped to get to sleep by 4 a.m.

Daffy Saby heads to her post-Midnight match at the U.S. Open, 12/30-31/24

Poetry journal Unleash Lit publishes “Her Debut as a Public Singer” and “Hecate, My Fixer”

Online arts journal Unleash Lit published two of my poems today, “Hecate, My Fixer” and “Her Debut as a Public Singer.” They also posted a Q&A with me, which includes this:

Do you write to prompts? If so, what's your favorite? If not, why not?

JF: … the most productive prompts for me are the ones that happen more spur-of-the-moment, such as when I’m reading a news article and there’s a bit of incongruously poetic language that hints at a whole other world. For instance, I was reading an article about the post-pandemic, city center real estate crash, and a market analyst was quoted saying this: “We’re approaching the acceptance stage of the grieving process for office properties.” The idea of grieving for buildings struck me as a window into the human condition. 

I wrote both “Hecate, My Fixer” and “Her Debut as a Public Singer” earlier this year.

Specifically I wrote “Hecate, My Fixer” in March, in the aftermath of Dad’s death; it won a 2nd place poetry award in July from Common Ground Review, where it was first published.

I wrote “Her Debut as a Public Singer” in January under the influence of Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose writing, consistent with a lot of 19th Century European literature, explores two defining divides of the emergent industrial revolution: City versus country, and factory workers versus factory owners. Unlike most of the narratives from this era, though, which cast the city as being removed from God’s natural design, Gaskell’s Manchester, London, and Liverpool, are inspirational, (and at heart) kind places.

Along with being written under the influence of Gaskell, “Her Debut as a Public Singer,” mines other city sources that are meaningful to me, such as: Fagin’s pickpocket gang, The Beggar’s Opera, The Threepenny Opera, Billie Holiday, and my own youthful summer playing in a band in New York City. It’s also a reaction to William Wordsworth’s Romantic nature poetry, thus my opening line:

”Choosing to live in the city is not a retreat from the natural world.”

The line, which I repeat at the end of the poem (I was originally trying to write a pantoum), works as the mission statement for pretty much all my poems. I explain this in the Q&A when—asked who inspires me—I say “it always seems to come back to Pirate Jenny from the Threepenny Opera!”

If you scroll (way) down here, you can find my review of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel Mary Barton and of the Penguin Classics’ Wordsworth collection.

Edith Wharton and city zoning; Maurice Williams and piano palpitations; Aryna Sabalenka and the Cincinnati Open

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#45

1) I was all set to welcome Elizabeth Gaskell back to my weekly catalog of obsessions; I devoured her first novel, 1848’s Mary Barton, back in January (and even ended up writing a full-fledged review of the book for the oddball arts website Oblivioni).

This past week, I’ve been reading and enjoying Gaskell’s 1855 novel (and her most famous one), North and South, which, like Mary Barton, is committed to exposing the dire situation of England’s then-emergent laboring class.

But I’ve put Gaskell on pause to read The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, a collection of short stories by Pulitzer prize-winning (The Age of Innocence, 1920) American novelist, Edith Warton

Set in a turn-of-the-(20th)-century Manhattan of rarefied drawing rooms, horse-drawn hansoms, snowy 5th Ave., and witty cocktail banter, these stories, with Wharton’s insider info and topical currency, actually remind me more of Joyce’s Dubliners and his fast-paced urban verisimilitude than of Jane Austen’s subtle cotillion dramas. Also like Joyce’s (angst-ridden) Dubliners, Wharton’s stories turn on slightly cryptic climaxes that drift into unresolved personal crises.

The story that has captivated me most so far, though, Mrs. Manstey’s View (1891), is extra clear. Set in a cramped landscape of factory smoke and spires, this Wharton dispatch from the city canon is all about land use zoning.

It’s the first short story Wharton ever published . And yes, while the writing in this boarding house tale crackles with evocative Dubliners-level local color—”the yards beyond…were in a state of chronic untidiness and fluttering, on certain days of the week, with miscellaneous garments and frayed table-cloths”—it is a straight-forward, rather than obtuse story: A lonely, elderly woman, Mrs. Manstey, who lives in a sad flat “in a street where the ash-barrels lingered late on the sidewalk,” cherishes the slovenly, yet holy, view out her third floor window:

Some of the yards were, indeed, but stony wastes, with grass in the cracks of the pavement and no shade in spring save that afforded by the intermittent leafage of the clotheslines. These yards Mrs. Manstey disapproved of, but the others, the green ones, she loved. She had grown used to their disorder; the broken barrels, the empty bottles and paths unswept no longer annoyed her; hers was the happy faculty of dwelling on the pleasanter side of the prospect before her… the breath of a neglected syringa, which persisted in growing in spite of the countless obstacles opposed to its welfare.

However, Mrs. Manstey’s sacred views will soon be blocked: As she learns from her landlord Mrs. Sampson, the building next door has secured a zoning variance and is set to expand. Events proceed along standard, heroic anti-development lines, and Wharton gives us a NIMBY martyr—literally, as Mrs. Mantsey’s rebellion culminates in her death. Needless to say, I don’t sympathize with the dramatic politics of this tale which, following a popular arc in literature: celebrates reactionary utopianism.

But, politics aside, I’m certainly a glutton for any literary exercise that uses city development to explore the human condition.

2) Early rock and roller Maurice Williams, a precocious and eccentric teen prodigy from South Carolina, who, as a driven 18-year-old, fast talked his way into the Nashville music scene, died this week at 86.

Williams’ No. 1 Billboard hit “Stay” (1960) gets a little too much attention in his NYT obituary (probably because Jackson Browne, who syncs with the NYT’s white Baby Boomer demographic, had an ironic late 1970s hit with it). Without much fanfare, the obit also notes Williams’ other hit, “Little Darlin’” (1957), one of my favorite rock & roll era tunes.

I learned to play “Little Darlin’” on piano back in 2022, and upon seeing Williams’ obituary this week, I remembered careening though the song’s looping 1/6/2/5 left-hand chord progression and recklessly slurring the simple right-hand melodies as my keyboard bounced on its stand. *This chord progression slightly alters the famous (and more innocent) “Heart and Soul” "‘50s progression” by changing the major 4 to a minor 2, yet leaves the dominant-to-tonic resolution intact maintaining the tune’s satisfying turnaround.

This superior, earlier Williams’ jam—a loopy mix of free-form doo-wop, up-tempo calypso, and helter-skelter rock & roll—barely made the pop charts, but it did hit #11 on the R&B charts that year and, as the premiere record from Maurice’s group the Gladiolas (later renamed the Zodiacs), it made a bold and durable statement about his outsized and lulu creativity.

Prompted by Williams’ death, I re-learned the song this week, rollicking through it with my headphones on. What’s odd about “Little Darlin’” is how the traditionally calming four-chord loop is accompanied by a herky-jerky melody prompting palpitations rather than swoons.

P.s. You’re probably more familiar with the cover version of “Little Darlin’” by a white doo-wop group from Canada called the Diamonds; their, admittedly more fully-realized (though less nutty) version, which came out a month later, hit No. 3 on the Billboard charts, selling millions. Williams wasn’t too miffed about this though. Showing off more evidence of his headstrong self-awareness, he had obtained all the rights to the song and made serious money off the Diamonds’ hit.

The downside, perhaps, is that Williams, upon becoming a successful professional songwriter at the age of 17, turned down a scholarship to study classical music at Allen University in South Carolina. We can only wonder at the eccentric innovations he might have instigated as a classical composer.

3) After starting the 2024 season with a bang by A) winning her second career grand slam title at February’s Australian Open (she beat World No. 7 Qinwen Zheng in the final and avenged her 2023 U.S. Open finals loss along the way by beating then-World No. 3 Coco Gauff in the semifinal), and by B) reaching both the Spanish and Italian Open finals in April and May respectively, where she—no shame—lost both matches to peerless World No. 1 Iga Swiatek (including a 3-set epic in Madrid), my favorite WTA player, World No. 2, Aryna Sabalenka, started to slip earlier this summer.

She got a stomach flu and crashed in Paris at Roland Garros in June, losing in the quarterfinal to 17-year-old whiz Mira Andreeva (No. 21). The loss bumped Sabalenka from No. 2 to No. 3, as Gauff overtook her in the rankings race.

Next, also in June, Sabalenka bowed out of the Berlin Ladies Open, retiring with a sore shoulder in her quarterfinal match against No. 24 Anna Kalinskaya. Sabalenka’s shoulder didn’t heal in time for Wimbledon in July, and so, she had to withdraw from the  premier grand slam tournament. She also bailed on the Summer Olympics in Paris.

However, Sabalenka has built up some new momentum with a late- summer comeback. She made the semifinals at the Mubadala Citi DC Open in August, and she reached the quarterfinals in this year’s Canadian Open, also in August.

Then, this week: Sabalenak stormed through the Cincinnati Open, beating No. 1 Swiatek in two sets in the semifinal, and then winning the final in two sets against No. 6 Jessica Pegula.

Sabalenka, who looked happy and chill the whole tournament, sporting a goofball smile rather than her usual storm cloud frown, didn’t lose a single set in Cincinnati, capturing her fifth career WTA 1000 title while simultaneously regaining her World No. 2 spot; her main rival Gauff slipped behind her to No. 3.

It’s perfect timing for Daffy Sabby (that’s what I call her to honor her often befuddled off-court demeanor), because next up it’s the U.S. Open in New York City, the year’s final grand slam tournament. Here’s hoping Daffy Sabby’s confident on-court demeanor propels her—like one of her vicious forehand winners—deep into this year’s U.S. Open bracket.

Speaking of which, ahem:

A silent film; scary context; and a backyard tea party.

I’m All Lost in …

the three things I’m obsessing over THIS week

#44

1) Unlike most of the pre-code (1928-1934) Hollywood movies I watch, City Girl (1930) which I streamed on YouTube this week, is a silent film; silent films had mostly fallen out of fashion by the late 1920s. Also unlike most pre-code Hollywood movies in general—risqué and playfully radical flicks, but formulaic B-grade affairs at best—City Girl is a breathtaking piece of cinema. It was directed by high-art German filmmaker F.W. Murnau; Murnau is most famous for his Expressionist masterpiece, 1922’s Nosferatu, but his expert craft is certainly evident in City Girl as he gives Edward Hopper treatment to Chicago’s diners, studio apartments, and El trains alongside the film’s dreamy camera-work-ballet portraying Minnesotan wheat fields

Exactly like most pre-code movies, however, City Girl, the second of three films Murnau made after emigrating to the U.S. in 1926, tries, with its tidy Hollywood denouement, to recant its subversive message, namely that progressive urban values have a moral clarity one doesn’t find in American farm country .

Despite the movie’s canned ending though (in which the “City Girl,” Kate, played by charismatic Mary Duncan, happily embraces rural living), the vast majority of Murnau’s unflinching footage documents tyranny and sexism inside a supposedly ideal, but in reality, physically-abusive country household. In a pretty shocking scene, the movie’s patriarch, a stoic farmer played with simmering puritanical angst by Scottish actor David Torrence, strikes his doe-eyed son’s new wife, Duncan’s character, Kate, immediately upon the young couple’s arrival from Chicago. The son, Lem (played by man-child Charles Farrell ), had been sent to Chicago to sell the family’s latest crop at the stock exchange and has startled the family by returning with a forthright, sassy, modern woman by his side. (Lem’s kid sister Anne is thrilled.) Hitting Kate across the face and sending her stumbling backward across the room, the angry father, inherently suspicious of big city trickery, declares (via the silent film’s full-screen inner-title cards): “Women like you love for what they can get out of it… But you’ll get nothing from me… I’m the master here! My son does what I say…and so will you!”

I was holding out hope that rebel-smart Kate, who Murnau poignantly portrays in the film’s opening acts as a jaded yet longing striver working at a busy Chicago lunch counter, would ultimately reject the once-idealized farm life she’d fantasized about back in her cramped city apartment and get on the train back to the Windy City. This was certainly how the story was going by the time of the film’s finale when Kate outmaneuvers the two encroaching forces around her—the brutal patriarchy governing her new home and the group of sexually menacing farm hand predators—to expose their countryside hypocrisy.

Indeed, Murnau’s reverse-engineering of the standard Eden-versus-Babylon trope turns Kate—initially a street-wise waitress—into a feminist freedom fighter of the prairie who translates her front-of-the-house restaurant-battle smarts into farm-house survival skills.

Chicago transplant (Mary Duncan) stands up to her brutal father-in-law (David Torrence) in F.W. Murnau's expertly crafted silent film, City Girl (1930). 

But alas, even though we get one last nod to feminism (Kate rejects her husband’s assist to mount the horse-drawn carriage back to the train station and ascends the buggy herself), the story ultimately opts for young love (aka, traditional marriage) instead of political rebellion as the antidote to isolationist despotism. Kate and Lem turn the carriage around and return to the farm.

Had Kate and Lem followed through on Lem’s coming-of-age declaration that they will “live our own lives,” defiantly addressed to his father in the previous scene, and actually chosen a liberated yet unknown future after starting off in the carriage to the depot (a bit like Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross on the bus in the enigmatic final still of The Graduate), City Girl would have made good on Murnau’s indictment of conservatism.

Despite ignoring all the the rural heartland’s red flags and choosing to return to Lem’s family’s farm house, Kate’s class war and gender consciousness do in fact appear to be intact in the movie’s closing moments. After humbling the father and then benevolently embracing him in his repentance, Kate has positioned herself to transform farm life around her rather than reject it. In this sense, City Girl stands as a revolutionary sobriquet not a cautionary one.

2) I’m still obsessing over the election. And I do like the dramatic swing toward Harris in battleground state polling this week—a 12-point swing, for example, in Arizona from mid-July when Biden was still on the ticket.

But it’s two pieces of larger context that struck me this week.

The first was laid out in a concise Washington Post column.

Data for the win: Nope, nope, and nope on Trump’s main campaign issues—violent crime surge, porous borders, and devastating inflation.

Crime wave?

Noting how “data has repeatedly indicated that crime — and violent crime in particular — has declined over the past few years,” the Post rolls out the numbers: Homicide down 17% in 2024; robbery down 6%; aggravated assault down 5%; rape down 10%.

Border “invasion”?

The Post provides a reality check. “[Trump],” they write, “is fond of amplifying data about the number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border to suggest that the country is overrun with new arrivals, particularly those who entered the country illegally. … But Trump's assertions about an ‘open border’ are … hobbled by the striking decrease in apprehensions in recent months.”

Then, once again, they roll out the numbers: apprehensions dropped by half in January, dropped another 2% in February and March, dropped 6% in April, dropped 9% in May, 29% in June.

They conclude: “Another way to look at it: There were fewer apprehensions between border checkpoints in June 2024 than there were in June 2019 under Donald Trump.”

Runaway inflation?

Well, we all certainly saw Wednesday’s New York Times headline: “Inflation Cools to 2.9%” …

And as the Post article reports: “On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data on inflation showing that the annual increase last month was lower than at any point since March 2021.” And they add: “average wages have increased more rapidly since 2021 and… the increase in the rate of inflation has slowed. … The rate of increase in wages has in recent months consistently been larger than the rate of increase of inflation, in fact.”

Their conclusion offers a delicious metaphor for the new state of the race (namely, a warm welcome to Kamala Harris), which may reflect why—as the aforementioned polling shows— people are losing interest in Trump:

These shifts also are not likely to change Trump’s rhetoric. He is no more interested in presenting accurate information about crime, immigration and inflation than he ever was, so he highlights things like the unmeasured-and-exaggerated concept of “migrant crime” to stoke fears about the direction of the country.

Still, the current numbers are a reflection of how the ground under Trump’s feet has shifted. He’s running against the first half of Biden’s administration, when Biden was his opponent and crime, inflation and immigration were acute problems. But now, to his chagrin, it’s 2024. The landscape is very different.

The second bit of context I appreciated this week came in a New York Times Magazine piece that placed MAGA on a logical timeline, tying them to earlier incarnations of feral right-wing American populism such as the anti-New Deal right of the early FDR-era, the nativist “America First” movement of the 1940s, the paranoid anti-Communist McCarthy-era of the early 1950s, the virulent racism of the conspiracy-theory obsessed John Birch Society in the 1960s, and Pat Buchanan’s apoplectic culture war in the early 1990s.

That last example is the one my Spidey Senses tracked with horror back then; it was laid out in this prescient narrative research paper by Elinor Langer published under the title “The American Neo-Nazi Movement Today,” as an entire issue of the Nation in July 1990. Reading the original 1990 article—it’s included in the link as a PDF—will give you the chills as you recognize how Langer’s 35-year-old observations about the dark corners and far fringes of the American political psyche in the 1990s now define the core of MAGA’s mainstream ideology.

Prompted by that issue of the Nation, I started keeping a file folder on the underground right at the time—I labeled it “The Convolutes,” as in convoluted ideology—and I immediately recognized the creepy noise when the same themes emerged in Trump’s rhetoric, QAnon conspiracy theories, and at MAGA rallies.

The NYT Magazine piece does a good job unpacking the ”ragtag assortment of self-described neo-monarchists, techno-libertarians and right-wing Marxists” (that last seeming contradiction should grab your attention) and summarizes it all like this:

At the heart of the New Right is a belief that most of what ails America can be blamed on a liberal elite that has burrowed into the federal government, the news media, Hollywood, big business and higher education … To them, liberalism is actively hurting the country, funneling fortunes from hard-working Americans into Washington and Wall Street and then casting any criticism as racist or fascist.

In contrast, the New Right posits a nationalistic nostalgia for a small-town America of decentralized government — a “front porch republic,”

“The right-wing populism that’s gotten such a strong foothold in Trump’s Republican Party has a long lineage,” said David Greenberg, a professor of history at Rutgers University. “In the early 20th century, there was a similar rural backlash against the changes in society that were making America more centralized, urban, cosmopolitan and interconnected with the world.”

3) Realizing that this weekly catalog of things I’m devouring at the moment has become a default diary, I need to note that upon receiving an invite from my good friend Velma last week, I attended her daughter’s last annual Teenage Tea Party this past Sunday evening.

Velma’s daughter N—, who decided back when she was a precocious freshman that she should hold a proper backyard tea party for her gang, is off (out-of-state) to college later this month, and given my ongoing delight in early ‘70s Bowie, 19th Century fiction, sad poetry, and Lorde—I’ve been lucky enough to be considered a cool grown-up over the years. So, in addition to Velma and Velma’s partner Byrne (also a close friend), I was the only other adult in attendance for the epic final tea party.

(Velma objected to that description, texting back in response to my “Planning on it… last annual tea party seems epic”-RSVP note with this: “I don’t think it will be the last, just the last of the HS years.”

I “was gonna qualify it as such,” I texted back, “but the ones that continue sporadically as HS gang slowly scatters and morphs into college pals and other assorted versions will be New Order to Joy Division. I want to catch the last Joy Division gig.” )

Thanks to the fact that N— plays the electric bass (naturally), the tea party was, in fact, a gig. Her high school band, Tin Men March, set up in the idyllic backyard—bongos, guitars, and techno drums among the ivy.

The whole groovy scene reminded me of Jane Fonda’s seismic 1965 summer party where Sunset Strip proto-indie hipsters, the Byrds, played at young Jane’s Dad’s L.A. house, a historic counter cultural inflection point that defined the new generation gap.

Mind you, I didn’t feel like 60-year-old Henry Fonda (Jane’s old-guard, Hollywood royalty father, though I certainly should have), but more like a casual patron saint digging the Edith Wharton-meets-Velvet Underground-meets-Karen Dalton mash.