Pasta made from broccoli; allowing corner shops in residential neighborhoods; Cafe Chill on C89.5 (for insomnia).
I’m All Lost In… what I’m obsessing over this week.
Week #17
Early February. Nothing is sticking right now.
On Friday evening, I bought a book of Saul Leiter photographs at Elliott Bay Books; a recent 4Columns review of the Leiter centennial show at Manhattan’s Howard Greenberg Gallery introduced me to Leiter and his acclaimed NYC street photography.
Unfortunately, the pricey photo book I got, The Unseen Saul Leiter, a collection of previously unpublished slides, didn’t live up to the genius vibes I was getting from the show review, which evidently included dynamo photos such as Shoes of the Shoeshine Man, ca. 1951. I imagine the fact that I wasn’t previously familiar with Leiter diminished the impact of the book. Nor am I a photography connoisseur.
Despite not being swept up in the book, one photo did grab me. Mainly because I could feel the year in the color of the sky. I immediately checked. Yep. 1966.
Something else from the week that I’m bummed didn’t quite take: Wordsworth’s epic memoir poem, the Prelude.
After lovingly devouring the first 200 pages of the Penguin Classics’ William Wordsworth collection I’ve been reading as part of my self-induced 19th Century Poets seminar, I was having trouble getting into his autobiographical grande finale this week. I think Book 6: Cambridge and the Alps is the famous section. I’m just starting Book 5: Books, so we’ll see.
As for this week’s list. Here’s what I’ve got:
1) Per this recipe from my favorite cult website site, Vegan Democracy, I blanched and smashed a cup-and-a-half of broccoli, added flour and rolled it into a firm gooey green ball, scissored it up over a waiting pot of boiling water, and suddenly had a colander full of healthy green pasta at my command.
I served it with fried, chopped garlic, roasted chickpeas, a can of heated pureed tomatoes and a can of cooked tomato paste, plus a sprinkle of oregano.
2) This NYT opinion piece, “When Did New York’s Streets Get So Hollow?,” resonated with my pro-city-life zealotry.
The piece comes out in favor of overhauling NYC’s outdated, 1961 zoning code, which bowed down to
the postwar planning ideology that New Yorkers would live in tranquil residential neighborhoods and commute by car to office jobs in Midtown or to factory jobs on the city’s periphery.
and reflected
an anachronistic, and at times elitist, view that limited where and how small businesses could operate. Businesses that might disrupt the peace were, in effect, banned in much of the city, to protect the “nicer” neighborhoods where wealthier New Yorkers were meant to reside.
That incriminating historical sketch not only captures the classist zoning agenda detailed in M. Nolan Gray’s must-read 2022 city planning treatise, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It (scroll down in this link for my review), but the article also goes on to match Gray’s mixed-use remedy.
NYC’s zoning overhaul would embrace “the serendipitous storefront activity that gives New York its soul” by allowing small businesses in residential zones and by allowing a broader mix of business types in commercial zones, such as “microbreweries, 3-D printing shops and pottery studios, which today are relegated to manufacturing areas.”
Supporters of these proposed changes calmly refute the predictable objections from naysayers who warn that new businesses might start trafficking in off-the-books marijuana or hosting loud dance nights. The grown-up rejoinder: Changing zoning to allow a broader mix of businesses doesn’t supersede existing drug laws and noise ordinances.
Meanwhile, I liked that the article provided some substitute language for the deadly urbanist phrase “Live, Work, and Play” with this more alliterative flow: “life, labor and leisure.”
I wrote a PubliCola column in December advocating the same sort of mixed-use direction for Seattle. Specifically, I was hot on allowing corner stores in Seattle’s historically single-family zones because I believe—like the reform advocates in New York—that new businesses won’t bring illegal activity as much as they’ll bring a dose of human activity.
And The Urbanist had the news earlier this month about a bill in Olympia that would legalize corner stores in residential areas.
3) For a suburban kid, it was left-of-the-radio-dial Shangri-La growing up just outside D.C.
From the (pre-indie-rock) underground radio station (102.3 WHFS), to the blues & jazz station (WDCU), to the the left-wing politics + experimental music station (WPFW), to Howard Univesrity’s WHUR, to public radio’s WAMU, housed at American University, I spent my teenage years floating in the spooky miracle of post-midnight’s enlightening wavelengths.
Sometime early in the pandemic, I realized radio hadn’t been part of my life since my D.C. Metro-area youth. And so, I made a 2021 New Year’s resolution to tune in Seattle radio. It was an admittedly retro resolution for the internet age, but as oblivious to radio as I’d been during adulthood, it was impossible not to know about Riz Rollins’ Expansions, KEXP’s experimental electronica show, which gave me a sense that something wonderful might be going on right above my head.
I combed the schedules of the local indie stations—88.5 Jazz 24, KEXP, C89.5— and created a personal listening calendar, cueing my Sonos system to automatically switch on when my curated shows aired. No matter if I wasn’t home when the shows came on; I’m fond of walking into an apartment where the walls have been bathed in sound because music is already playing.
KEXP’s new Overnight Afrobeats show with DJ Lace Cadence quickly became the centerpiece of my late Friday nights. I even dedicated an entire PubliCola Year-(2021)-in-review column to Lace’s African pop show.
Three years on, the show that remains a fixed part of my week is C89.5’s Cafe Chill with Seth, which airs every Sunday morning from 6am to 10am; C89.5 is the student-run station at North Seattle’s Nathan Hale High School. Seth isn’t a high school student. He’s a marble-mouthed down-tempo grown up who apparently understands the differences between chill- wave, trip hop, house, and dub house.
On Cafe Chill, he spins four hours of light instrumental ambient swells that lean pop instead of experimental. In short: It’s more catchy than drone-y (there are usually drums). Think contemporary descendants of Boards of Canada.
Emceeing in sentences that often end abruptly and land more like questions than statements, Seth speaks the language of a Pacific Northwest wellness hippie. The show’s only commercial sponsor seems to be Rubicon Float Studio, a zero-gravity floatation therapy center.
And Seth’s playlists—including artists such as Shigeto, il:lo, Firephly, Chemtrails, and house favorite Hello Meteor— match the groovy sensory-deprivation-tank mode.
I’m including Cafe Chill on my list this week because, fighting insomnia, I found myself (in this post-radio age) transporting Sunday mornings to a couple of my toss-and-turn weeknights.