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

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

#21

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

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

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

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

Latticed Roti Jala @ Kedai Makan

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

Breaded cauliflower sliders at Dave’s Hot Chicken.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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