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, he 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.