I’m All Lost In, #72: Seattle City Council sock puppets; cashew cheese, black bean, kale, and butternut squash tortilla casserole; and city scenes.
I’m All Lost In …
the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.
#72
If I was being honest about this week’s obsessions—obsession—I’d write about Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. I just finished Chapter 12. This is when Lily and Selden leave the party to kiss in the “hush of a garden” where “there was no sound but the plash of water on the lily-pads, and a distant drift of music that might have been blown across a sleeping lake“ after a “tableaux vivants” where Lily “without ceasing to be herself…had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace.” And that’s only the half of it as Wharton continued dishing in this melodramatic dissertation about Manhattan’s country-house class.
However, having gone on about Wharton’s dynamite prose here, here, here and (yet again, last week) here, I’m going to dedicate this week’s list to some recommendations instead.
1) Seattle City Council Sock Puppets
Maybe you need to be familiar with today’s bush league Seattle City Council to belly laugh (as I did, falling on the floor) like you’ve just smoked some pot? But The Seattle Channel, a YouTube account spoofing the council, is MacArthur-grant-award brilliant. (It’s also crafty, “The Seattle Channel,” also happens to be the name of the city’s official TV channel, which among other things, broadcasts city council meetings.)
Certainly, for a crash course on the pompous buffoonery of the historically underwhelming council—Council Member Rob Saka being the main oaf—just spot-check some of Erica’s regular council coverage at PubliCola (or catch the council shit show on her Bluesky feed).
But honestly, this sock puppet sendup—subtitled: “The Seattle City Council is really not OK. 🤡”—is so self-evidently sidesplitting, a backgrounder isn’t really necessary.
MacArthur grant-worthy comedy at the expense of the inept Seattle City Council
Whoever the puppet—and cheapo effects—master is behind all the satirical merriment, which uses actual audio from Seattle City Council meetings as its sit-com soundtrack, they are certainly providing a public service. Thank you mystery genius for clarifying just how out of touch, oblivious (to their own disproportionate sense of self), and bewildered Seattle’s sketch council actually is.
Whether it’s aggrieved council member Cathy Moore talking about “Armageddon,” or windbag council member Rob Saka talking…and well, talking and talking, or addled council president Sara Nelson losing the plot, https://www.youtube.com/@theseattlechannel/shorts is required viewing for anyone who needs a break from the unmatched gas(lighting) coming from the council dais these days.
2) Vegan Tortilla Casserole + Cashew Cheese Sauce
I binged on this tomato and garlic-friendly, healthy, casserole comfort food for dinner, late-night dinner (the same night), breakfast and lunch the next day…and possibly dinner one more time.
This beginner’s-level recipe—black kidney beans, a can of puréed butternut squash, and lots of shredded kale are the main ingredients—is both un-botchable and delish.
In addition to the aforementioned main provisions, the cheesy mix of cashews and nooch with paprika, lemon juice, and more garlic, is also key. And I’d make more than the three quarter cups it calls for—don’t be restrained to a 1/2 cup of cashews, for example— because it’s worth slathering on the cashew cream layer after layer.
Saturday night, 2/22/25
3) Pascal Campion’s City Scenes
Sonder—the feeling one has when they realize other people, every other person, in fact, has a life as full and real as one’s own—could conceivably come as a humbling realization. But more so, it’s inspiring in a Walt “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” Whitman way.
File artist Pascal Campion’s urban renderings, particularly his apartment house tableaus, under the inspiring sort of sonder.
Campion’s illustrations don’t only capture a city Transcendentalism that’s typically reserved for pastorals, but his idyllic urbansim focuses on the energized moments of city dwellers, signaling action the way Edward Hopper’s paintings signaled loneliness. Behind the lighted windows in Campion’s buildings one imagines hope rather than despair.
Don’t get me wrong, his work isn’t anodyne; there are glimpses of the human condition blues.
But the emphasis on city propinquity captures exactly why humans find strength beneath the city lights.
Appropriately enough, Campion, a regular illustrator for the New Yorker, it turns out, came to my attention by way of city planning think tank wiz M. Nolan Gray, a pro-density champion.
Gray, who wrote an invaluable book on the classist warfare encoded in U.S. zoning laws (scroll down for my review here), posted a series of Campion’s renderings on Bluesky earlier this month, writing: “His work is really great for stressing the humanity of scenes that I think people inappropriately find alienating: apartments, crowds, etc.”
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It’s impossible to ignore how far America fell this week under Trumpism as his Napoleon meltdown put us on the side of derelict Russian aggression over democratic ideals. Perhaps overlooked as Trump’s crass foreign policy in central Europe and Ukraine took center stage, though: A NYT editorial that looked at another dimension of Trump’s effort to smash American ideals. Titled “The MAGA War on Speech,” the lengthy editorial described and enumerated Trump’s direct assault on Americans’ First Amendment right to free speech and a free press. Unsurprisingly—first they came for the trans community—Trump’s effort to impose state-sanctioned speech on Americans tried to expunge the LGBTQ community from our country’s narrative.
The National Park Service erased the letters T and Q: from L.G.B.T.Q. references on its website describing the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. More than 8,000 federal websites, in fact, have been taken down or altered to remove concepts derided by the MAGA movement. These include thousands of pages about vaccine research and S.T.D. prevention guidelines, efforts to prevent hate crimes, prevention of racial discrimination in drug trials and disbursement of federal grants and details of environmental policies to slow climate change.