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.