Emma Cline’s short stories; Yusef Lateef’s “Eastern Sounds;” Governor Hochul’s awful decision. And a note on NBA great Jerry West, RIP.
I’m All Lost in …
the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.
#35
1) I turned to one of my favorite contemporary novelists, Emma Cline—The Girls (2016), The Guest (2023)—to jar me out of my recent reading slump. And it worked. In this instance it was short stories, her riveting 2020 collection, Daddy.
Given that most of the 10 dark stories here play out in proximity to male violence—or the ubiquitous possibility of male violence—the title, as my book store bestie Valium Tom suggested, seems to be a Sylvia Plath reference. Otherwise, the only explicit reference to “Daddy” comes in the final story “A/S/L” (sex hookup slang for “Age, Sex, Location”) as the online handle—”DaddyXO”— of Thora, a woman who spends all her time catfishing oafish men. The listless wife of a non-descript, “not a bad person”-husband named James, Thora lies awake texting “furtively on her phone…while James slept, his back turned to her” posing as an 18-year-old high school cheerleader. The story is set, presumably after Thora crashes and burns from her phone sex addiction, in a high-end rehab facility where she then contemplates seducing a famous Me-Too’d TV chef, “G”—who has landed at the facility as well. Thora is exactly the kind of damaged soul who inhabits Cline’s fiction.
However, the majority of the stories, the best of them set in Cline’s flawless simulacrums of ennui-laden, Slouching Toward Bethlehem Southern California, feature men as the despondent central characters: a diminished abusive 60-something father who is bemused by his distant and aimless adult children during their annual holiday season visit home; a Me-Too-disgraced magazine editor now groping through a pity assignment working on a book by a wealthy tech/lifestyle guru, and then botching the rare career opportunity by aimlessly hitting on the guru’s assistant; a divorced, fading movie producer suffering through his surfer-bro son’s banal directorial debut during a tacky theater rental screening; a simmering and distant father (with an alcohol and opioid addiction) called in to rescue his troubled, violent son after the boy gets expelled from an elite private school.
And, in the collection’s showstopping story, “Arcadia” (originally published in Granta and which I actually first read in The Best American Short Stories 2017), one of the few characters here who appears to have a moral center: an earnest boyfriend/live-in farmhand navigating the fraught household of his pregnant girlfriend and her erratic and frightening older brother, who owns and runs the farm.
Like much of today’s short fiction, Cline’s stories remain mum on specifics, only hinting at the crux of the conflict at hand while preferring to linger in deceptively casual dialogue, quietly startling observations, and the minimalist realism of daily lives. The understated stories usually include a dramatic scene too, well-placed land mines that offer some sort of allegory when their explosive glare sheds light on the otherwise repressed narratives.
Cline is a master of this form, particularly pivoting to violent scenes—the impromptu dentistry in “Marion” (which struck me as an early draft of Cline’s Manson Family novel The Girls), or most notably, a terrifying porn-inspired night, drunkenly orchestrated by the dangerous aforementioned older brother in “Arcadia.”
It’s the quality of Cline’s keen observations, with their crisp verisimilitude, that make her stand out from the pack of writers working in this style of enigmatic storytelling. Whereas most writers—I’m thinking of Sally Rooney—tend to tack on observations that fall outside of the scene (I jest, but something akin to, “a crash of thunder sounded in the distance…”), Cline’s breadcrumb asides—"We sat in the back of Bobby’s pickup as he drove the gridded vineyards and released wrappers from our clenched fists like birds” … “‘Home around five,’ she said… [loosening] her hood, pulling it back to expose her hair, the tracks from her comb still visible….”—feel intrinsic to the action at hand while simultaneously commenting on it.
What also makes Cline stand out from the pack, is this: While feminist at their core, her stories are deeply sympathetic to both women and men (who she seems to have a surprisingly uncanny inside track on) as she portrays both genders as trapped in the manufactured doubts scripted by societal roles, but also born of the stultifying human condition.
(I wrote a review of Cline’s second novel, The Guest, last year, which also includes a lot of thoughts about her first book The Girls. Scroll down down down to find that review here.)
2) An Instagram account I evidently follow (or does it follow me?) posted a picture of 1950s/1960s jazz polymath Yusef Lateef’s 1962 masterpiece LP Eastern Sounds, quipping: “Long before André 3000.”
There’s no connection between New Blue Son, André 3000’s surprise 2023 experimental flute-forward art album and Lateef’s tuneful hard bop/modal jazz set except maybe the array of obscure instruments both records roll out in concert with the flutes: Sintir, mycelial electronics, and plants on 3000’s new age reverie ("The Slang Word P*ssy Rolls Off the Tongue with Far Better Ease Than the Proper Word Vagina. Do You Agree?" is my favorite track on the Outkast star’s better-than-you-think-it’s-going-to-be record) and Xun and Rubab on Lateef’s stately mix of blues, Middle Eastern, and Asian studies. (Lateef also counted the Jewish biblical-era shofar in his musical repertoire.)
Ultimately, the funny Instagram post led me back to Lateef’s great record, which I likely haven’t listened to since I had a jazz radio show (1960s free jazz, specifically) at WOBC 37 years ago.
It turned out one listen wasn’t enough. Nor two. Nor three. I had Eastern Sounds’ refined kaleidoscope of walking blues, easy ballads, rhapsodic love themes, Asian sketches, playful melodies, and delicately crushed piano (pianist Barry Harris’ soft colors quietly define this album) playing on repeat all week.
A meticulously arranged, almost self conscious, 40-minute set of nine jams that sway between elegant, elementary, bluesy (track 2, “Blues for the Orient,” would be the single if jazz records did that), modal, cinematic, and occasional hints of John Coltrane’s free-saxophones-to-come-later-in-the-decade, Eastern Sounds distinguishes itself—even during this era of perfect jazz records—with a loving dedication to melody.
Unlike André 3000’s drone-driven experimenting, this is mysticism with shapes.
You can hear Lateef taking in breaths between the precise xun phrases on the opening tune, “The Plum Blossom,” a nursery-school-melody-meets-music-theory-seminar jam. I initially found this intimacy distracting. But like the Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, and Bill Evans records from the same era, this is a rambunctious workout, despite—or perhaps because of—its meditative mission.
3) I would certainly love to join a lawsuit against New York Governor Kathy Hochul over her decision to “pause” congestion pricing; starting on June 30th, New York City was set to be the first American city to follow London, Stockholm, Milan, and Singapore where congestion pricing, a surcharge on cars entering the downtown core to help fund transit, is key to supporting sustainability. On the books for two decades, for example, London’s program has decreased greenhouse gases, increased transit use, and reduced congestion. Hochul’s bail on the program is dispiriting.
I snapped this photo on my July 2017 trip to London
I’ve been obsessed with congestion pricing for years; I even wrote an early poem about congestion pricing in 2017.
More recently, arguing that Seattle should enact a more progressive program than the Manhattan proposal, I wrote a PubliCola column calling for “sustainability pricing,” charging car commuters who drive into any of Seattle’s dense neighborhoods—not just the downtown core. Moreover, the money, I argued, wouldn’t go for transit, but for new, affordable, dense housing, and it would flow to the very neighborhoods and suburbs where the commuters were driving in from—to build density there. (The fee would go away after enough housing is built.)
The data—lower carbon emissions, decreased traffic congestion, increased funding for public transit infrastructure—doesn’t merely support implementing congestion pricing, the numbers also show that the supposed populist argument against congestion pricing (it hurts regular New Jersey folks) is inaccurate: A meager fraction, 1.5 percent, of commuters would’ve had to pay the toll. (And hey, New Jersey, as NYC’s MTA director has argued, what about those New Jersey Turnpike tolls?)
Meanwhile, about 85% of the people who come into Manhattan’s central business district—where congestion project would be implemented—take public transit anyway.
Consider this populist data: 1) While poor people (those earning less than $13,000 a year) represent only 13% of the U.S. population, they represent a disproportionate 21% of transit riders in America. 2) Lower income people ($25,000 to $49,000 a year) make up the biggest segment of transit ridership (24%). And 3) People of color, who make up about 40% of the U.S. population, make up 60% of transit ridership. Of that group, African Americans, who make up about 12% of the population, have far away the most outsized transit ridership numbers at 24%; the median Black income is about $53,000, 32% lower than whites.
Only in the Trump era could something as fundamentally populist as public mass transit be considered elitist; when I was fretting about this to ECB, she said matter-of-factly, “Well, we live in backlash times.” Governor Hochul’s retreat on congestion pricing was reportedly a cave to swing district Democrats who are scared of Trump’s anti-urban, anti-congestion pricing rhetoric.
Anti-congestion pricing populism is not a fact based position. It amounts to baseless, anti-city virtue signaling. A perfect reflection of this disingenuous posturing comes from the most outspoken critic of congestion pricing, New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ, 5): Only 1 percent of the constituents in his district even commute into Manhattan’s central business district, the part of Manhattan that would have been subject to congestion pricing; and by the way, the median household income in Bergen County, Gottheimer’s district, is $125,000.
In a series of editorials published the week since Gov. Hocul torpedoed congestion pricing, the New York Times has certainly laid out the benefits of congestion pricing and exposed the tortured arguments against it. Here’s a particularly compelling passage:
In her announcement, Hochul emphasized the precarious state of the city’s recovery from the Covid pandemic, but car traffic into Manhattan has returned to prepandemic levels, as has New York City employment, which is now higher than ever before; New York City tourism metrics are barely behind prepandemic records and are expected to surpass them in 2025. Tax coffers have rebounded, too, to the extent that the city canceled a raft of planned budget cuts. The one obvious measure by which the city has not mounted a full pandemic comeback is subway ridership — a measure that congestion pricing would have helped and pausing it is likely to hurt.
In announcing the pause, she also expressed concern for the financial burden the $15 surcharge would impose on working New Yorkers, though the city’s working class was functionally exempted from the toll by a rebate system for those with an annual income of $60,000 or less. In a follow-up news conference, she emphasized a few conversations she’d had with diner owners, who she said expressed anxiety that their business would suffer when commuters wouldn’t drive to their establishments. But each of them was within spitting distance of Grand Central, where an overwhelming share of foot traffic — and commercial value — comes from commuters using mass transit.
My pro-congestion pricing position takes a different angle: I think dense city districts work as offsets for the environmentally unsustainable suburbs and low-slung, low-density neighborhoods, allowing most Americans to live ecologically dangerous lives without burning down the planet. By hosting job centers, entertainment districts, and dense housing, city centers balance out environmentally cavalier suburban settings where large lots and single family zones strain utility infrastructure, promote inefficient use of resources, and wed people to GHG-heavy cars; electric cars are hardly any better because they induce sprawl, which is at the root of our environmental crisis.
Suburbanites want to eat their cake and have it too; otherwise they wouldn’t care about congestion pricing. But they want to live in GHG hot zones while flocking to cities—where, thanks to the underlying zoning for mixed-use and dense housing that’s forbidden in the suburbs, there’s a concentration of businesses, Bop Streets, services, restaurants, and exciting entertainment options. City cores should be compensated for maintaining and managing density. And more importantly, for making capacious (and voracious) suburban life possible.
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Jerry West versus Bill Russell
While it didn’t rate as an obsession this week, I do feel compelled to note NBA great Jerry West’s death. West’s all-star career from 1960 to 1974 was before my time, but when my pro-basketball fandom started in earnest as a little boy in the mid 1970s, I did quickly ID West as my favorite player thanks to his famous last-second half-court shot in the 1970 NBA finals against the New York Knicks, which I read about in the mesmerizing NBA history book I constantly checked out of the library; the book, Championship NBA by Leonard Koppett, started with George Mikan and the 1949 Minneapolis Lakers and ran up through Willis Reed, Walt Frazier and the early 1970s Knicks.
Assigned to write a biography for what may have been my first elementary school report in the third grade, I chose West as my subject. In all honesty, I was originally drawn to him because he had the same first name as my dad, but after choosing him as my favorite, I became enamored in earnest with his role as a defining point guard (he’s literally the NBA’s dribbling figure logo) , with his raw hustle (as opposed to the supernatural skills of his more famous Lakers comrade Elgin Baylor or the outright dominance his other world famous teammate, Wilt Chamberlain), and most of all with his ultimately hopeless heroics, as he led his L.A. Lakers in repeated, tragic losses to Bill Russell’s unbeatable Boston Celtics in the 1962, ‘63, ‘65, ‘66, ‘68, and 1969 NBA finals. West actually won the MVP award in those ‘69 finals despite the Lakers’ loss, the only time a player on the losing squad has done so; he averaged 37.9 points a game over the course the 7-game series.
During West’s last few seasons, it was the New York Knicks who repeatedly beat his Lakers in the finals (in 1970 and 1973), though West finally won his only championship, out of 9 tries, in L.A.’s 1972 initial re-match with New York, the same year his Lakers won a then-record 69 games during the regular season. (Micheal Jordan’s 1996 Chicago Bulls and Steph Curry’s 2016 Golden State Warriors won 72 and 73 regular season games, respectively). The 1972 Lakers’ record 33 straight regular season wins still stands.
Oddly, while I often tear up about basketball heroes from childhood—including players from Jerry West’s era like Russell, Reed, and Milwaukee Bucks-era Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, that I’d read about in that important book, or players from my own years as contemporary fan such as the Big E or Doctor J—I didn’t mist up about West’s death.
My own great Jerry, my dad, died earlier this year, and I cried my eyes out; it was enough tears for the two of them combined, I suppose.