Great matches in Melbourne; anti-housing in Seattle; the vegan menu at 19th & Jackson
I’m All Lost In …
the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.
#66
I’ll get to this week’s list in a second, but first …
Live Music of the Week: The opening act on Wednesday night’s experimental electronica bill at Vermillion Gallery—two bearded guys in overalls—literally took the floor; the pair rolled on the ground in a drone duet as they beamed signals to one another through DIY walkie talkies. Their conversational sonics ended in a feedback crescendo when they crawled toward one another and pressed their Fisher-Price handhelds together in a musical kiss.
The digital meditations continued with another duet, Cecyl Ruehlen and Chelsey Lee Trejo, who took the stage loaded, by comparison, with an orchestra of gear: processors, synthesizers, an electric guitar, mallets, a clarinet, a cello bow, bells, and found instruments for a set of “hexachimeric” signals. I’m not sure what “hexachimeric” means, but like Terry Riley’s In C, this avant garde duo merged their electronic improvisations in a mutual key signature and then filled it up with lapping diatonic waves as the accompanying physical vibrations morphed into notes themselves, becoming rhythmic melody lines.
Cease Fire of the Week: The cease fire in Gaza announced Wednesday afternoon reminds me of the historic Islamist political flex in 1981 when the Iranians finally freed 52 American hostages after holding them for 444 days. It was an outgoing effu to then President Jimmy Carter timed perfectly to sync with incoming President Reagan's inauguration. The Hamas/Israeli cease fire and hostage exchange is set to start on Sunday, the day before Trump takes office.
The critical difference this time: The effu to outgoing President Biden isn’t only coming from radical Islamists (Hamas), but, as reactionary politics are now the norm, the effu to American diplomacy is also coming from the radical right wing Israeli government and from Trump and MAGA America as well.
The thing that will bite Trump in the ass, though: Per every “cease fire” between the radical right wing Israeli government and toxic Hamas, this one won’t hold either.
Quote of the Week: David Law, who plays the straight man to his co-hosts Catherine Whitaker and Matt Roberts’ hooting and hollering on (my favorite podcast) The Tennis Podcast, got poetic this week when he described the scene at the Australian Open where rain delays had forced the tournament to overload a slew of matches into one evening.
“They just put them on. All at the same time,” Law begins, “deep into the night.”
And then, he described his atmospheric walk, “roaming the grounds in the dark, with floodlit matches going on everywhere.”
…Which brings us to this week’s No. 1 obsession: The Australian Open.
1) The first Grand Slam tournament on this year’s WTA calendar: The Australian Open
Every night this week, I found myself with multiple tabs open on my lap top toggling between ESPN+ broadcasts of early-round matches from Melbourne Park.
Melbourne looks like a stunning city, by the way, judging from my computer-screen view; wow, the tree-lined Yarra River. During a break in the action, I texted my great friend Gregor Samsa, a tennis fangirl like me: We have to go one day.
For now, it was a week of streaming a parade of riveting matches: My 2025 secret favorite, Russia’s Daria Kasatkina (No. 10) dismissed Bulgaria’s Viktoriya Tomova (No. 53) in two sets, 6-1, 6-3; recent NCAA women’s stars, including one I don’t like much, Emma Navarro (No. 8) winning an admittedly three-hour twenty minute masterpiece over Payton Stearns (No. 46); and my tennis hero Aryna Sabalenka (No. 1) remaining calm as she delivered some chess board winners to fend off Spain’s Jéssica Bouzas Maneiro (No. 54).
There was also: the I’m-not-buying-it-yet comeback Version 2.0 from Naomi Osaka (No. 51); her first comeback attempt last year fell flat. Yes, she beat Czechia’s Karolina Muchova (No. 20) early in the week in an exciting match. But she went on to lose her next match, retiring after losing the first set in a tiebreak to Belinda Bencic (No. 294?).
And then there was this week’s stunning upset, Qinwen Zheng (No. 5), who is emerging as the tour’s forlorn and troubled poet falling to Germany’s maddening Laura Siegemund (No. 79). Zheng, looked stoic, sad, and pensive, as she lost in two sets, 6-7 [3-7], 3-6.
On my aforementioned favorite podcast, Catherine Whitaker re-enacted Zheng’s bewildered indignation at being called for a time violation: “Do you see what’s happening on the other side of the court?!” Whitaker cried in her regal British accent, noting Siegemund’s infamous reputation for slow-serve mind games.
This is my week defined: Staying up to listen to Whitaker and her zippy co-hosts do their daily wrap ups after I’d just finished watching the very matches they were recapping.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with one of their cold assessments: My favorite player Sabalenka is not thundering through the draw as she had during the 2024 season on her way to winning a batch of tournaments, including last year’s Australian Open. (The tennis reporters at the Athletic also took note of Saby’s tenuous form this week.)
To be fair, Saby hasn’t dropped a set yet. As I said ^, she beat Maneiro (6-3, 7-5). And then, in a nerve-wracking win later in the week (which I watched heart in throat on the couch from my Pioneer Square office after landing there Thursday evening to retrieve my phone charger), she beat fellow bruising-ball-striker, Denmark's Clara Tauson (No. 41) 7-6 [7-5], 6-4. So, yes, she’s through to the 4th Round (the Round of 16). But I think it might be American Coco Gauff’s (No. 3) year; Gauff, known in my household as Ka-Pow Ka-Gauff, is blazing through without any complicated score lines. And we shouldn’t forget about Iga Swiatek (No. 2); albeit quietly, she’s been posting scary scores, reminiscent of her dominance early last year when she was the seemingly unvanquishable No. 1.
Meanwhile, along with Kasatkina, who after beating Tomova, went on to beat Yafan Wang (No. 64) later in the week, 6-2, 6-0, a number of my 2025 players-to-watch are also still in the mix as Week 1 ended: Donna Vekic (No.19), Paula Badosa (No. 12), and Elena Rybakina (No. 7).
I’m not losing faith in Sabalenka, though. The thing about Daffy Saby these days is that she plays with a newfound confidence and calm.
Whereas, under a personal storm cloud, she used to botch close matches—like the near-disaster against Tauson on Thursday night—you get the feeling now, as she comes up with clutch, rocket fire winners, that she’s going to pull it out. She seems to know this too.
2) NIMBY Bingo
In Seattle, the N in NIMBY (traditionally, Not in My Backyard), stands for Never in My Backyard.
For fuck’s sake, we’ve been dealing with the anti-new housing privilege of local homeowners’ “neighborhood character” provincialism going back decades now. Here’s a feature article I wrote more than 20 years ago about Seattle’s intransigent single family housing zone protectionists. And here we are today, still stuck with zoning code that prohibits apartments in roughly 70% of the city.
As the city council started to take up the new, woefully inadequate 10-year zoning update (the Comp Plan) a few weeks ago, which once again infuriated touchy Seattle liberals, ECB came to the rescue on Blueksy hanging them by their own petard by quoting their unhinged council meeting comments about orcas and trees and shadows. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, cringing at the hypocrisy of Seattle liberals, re-posted Erica’s hilarious thread.
Thank you Erica for framing the pending Comp Plan debate.
And thank you for striking again this week, posting this NIMBY Bingo card as the council formally opened hearings on the issue with a public meeting.
All of these wrote objections drive me crazy. I once spoofed the “I’m a longtime resident of X local neighborhood,” by testifying at a city council meeting with the exact opposite intro: I wasn’t born here, I said, I’m not a lifelong resident of Ballard or Wallingford or Capitol Hill or Ravenna or Wedgwood or… at which point, then-council member and now mayor Bruce Harrell looked up from his computer utterly perplexed …. But I live here now, I continued, like the hundreds of thousands of people that have moved here in the last 20 years …
I also can’t stand the trees rap. Developing Seattle with single family homes is what slaughtered Seattle’s tree canopy in the first place. It’s a little too late—and hypocritical—to complain that building a six-story building that houses ten times the number of people living in a single family home will somehow eliminate the city’s tree canopy. And p.s., Capitol Hill, one of the rare apartment friendly neighborhoods in the city, has some of the highest tree canopy. Why? Because building up rather than out saves more trees.
The “concurrency” thing also defies logic; this is the argument that you can’t build more housing in quaint neighborhoods because the infrastructure and transit lines don’t exist to serve a bigger population. This is an obstructionist canard. Changing zoning isn’t going to bring thousands of new people overnight. Population growth happens over time. Asking Metro to run bus lines to a currently sparse street as a prerequisite for future density is a comically inefficient use of Metro dollars. Smarter policy: When a neighborhood reaches the point at which buses make sense, Metro should meet the need.
But the trope that irks me most these days is the cloyingly self righteous go-to for every curiously embittered pseudo civic-minded crank: “I’m a taxpayer!”
News flash: Paying taxes is not a solo project akin to your personal transaction at a restaurant. Everyone pays taxes. It’s a communal endeavor designed to meet collective needs. So, when someone rolls out the “I pay taxes” line of attack vis-à-vis their personal interest, they’re unwittingly reminding us (or whichever civil servant they’re berating) about the actual project of democratic governance: Balancing the needs of all taxpayers for across-the-board equity. In the context of the Comp Plan debate, that means building more units citywide in the taxpayers’ collective interest.
3) The vegan menu at Moonlight Cafe
A Seattle treasure that I’d forgotten about and rediscovered this week: The Central District’s happily humble (and crowded) Moonlight Cafe at 19th & Jackson.
A decade-plus ago, My ex ex ex, a well-versed Seattle cool kid, turned me on to this vegan treasure where they have two menus: page upon page of traditional Vietnamese dishes and, with plant-based or chemistry-lab alternatives, a The-Upside-Down vegan version as well.
My sense is that nobody comes here for the traditional dishes. I didn’t on Saturday anyway when I walked the 20 blocks over in the balmy evening to meet a friend for dinner. I ordered the vegan cashew veggie & tofu entree and a side of the addictive crispy veggie rolls. I ended up getting a second order of those.
With its gluten-heavy faux versions of five-spice salmon, ginger fish, sesame beef, and sweet & sour chicken, this is Vietnamese comfort food for the noshy masses and hipster vegans.