I’m All Lost In, #75: Boozy matcha; Houston stories; Speakspeak

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#75

First, a music recommendation of the week, some data points of the week, and a quote of the week.

Music Recommendation: I once—nearly 20 years ago—mumbled, famously to myself that there were two genres of music that could never be replicated with any legitimacy nor seriousness: Early ‘60s Girl Group pop, such as the Ronettes or the Angels, nor late ‘70s/early ‘80s New Wave. I stand by the Girl Group exhortation, but have you heard of this contemporary band Nation of Language, early 30-somethings who claim Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark as a main influence? The Brooklyn-based guitar, synthesizer, bass, and percussion trio make good on their unlikely 1980 synth pop dream with cold and shiny verisimilitude rocking their tracks such as “The Wall & I,” “This Fractured Mind,” “Weak in Your Light,” and “On Division Street.” I’d say classic New Order more than OMD, but I stand corrected on my earlier wayward assertion.

Data: Given that an extra super majority of people who come into Manhattan’s central business district take transit, the new list of  compelling stats upending Trump’s faux populist attack on New York’s congestion pricing program not only serve as a grown-up fact check on his infantile rhetoric, but also make it plain how well the policy is working for the public.

Since congestion pricing took effect, 13% fewer vehicles are coming into Manhattan, yet retail sales in the tolling zone are up 1.5 percent compared to last year. And there was a 6.7 % increase in the number of people who traveled to work in the area.

… Pedestrian traffic is up around 4% and economic activity appears to be up with Broadway theater attendance, restaurant reservations and retail sales in the tolling zone seeing increases over a similar period in 2024.

Quote: This overdue A.O. Scott piece maps the paranoid strain in modern America by pinpointing JFK assassination conspiracy theories as the starting line for a daft route that runs from left-leaning 1970s anti-corporate, deep state imaginings, to left(ish)-leaning 9/11 inside-job delusions, to right wing Sandy Hook deniers, eventually landing in the brain stem of Pizzagate’s MAGA Trump cult through the lens of 2020’s right wing “Stop the Steal” pathology. Like a good conspiracy theory itself, Scott’s well-versed piece explains everything!

It also aligns with my long held belief that lefty reactionaries such as Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, and Bernie Bro voters share much more with “Make America Great Again” voters than they may want to admit.

More importantly, in addition to name checking Alan J. Pakula’s Parallax View (1974)!, the political paranoia freakout film that bests the over-referenced and overrated Network (1976), Scott’s thorough article quotes a brilliant Richard Hofstadter line: “there is a great difference between locating conspiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy.”

I found an original copy of this Parallax View paperback last year at Capitol Hill’s Twice Sold Tales and promptly sent it to my 1970s co-conspirator, Eel-head, aka, Gregor Samsa, aka, Lee.

Hofstadter’s bit of wisdom succinctly lays out why I’ve always bristled at those neat theories some of my left wing comrades subscribe to—have you heard about how the Trilateral Commission controls your life.

I’m always left wondering … And?

Meaning: these kinds of theories are a way of abandoning a focus on material reality (like regressive tax policy) while positing the Romantic and irrelevant idea instead that we are helplessly living in the Matrix (another overrated movie, by the way)

Onto this week’s official obsessions…

1) Can I have some Shōchū with that Matcha Latte?

I opted for a matcha latte as my nightcap last Saturday night, a rainy late-winter Seattle evening. The crowded nightspot I ended up at, the trendy Gemini Room, serves such a thing; they also serve $16-dollar cocktails and have Pink Pickled Deviled Eggs and Broccolini & Garlic Ricotta Toast on their night eats menu, along with the Panko Chicken Sandwich, Shoestring Fries & Aioli, and Fried Ravioli.

They are living on borrowed time. But I am living my best My-Chemical-Romance-life. “Could I have a little booze in that?” I amended from my seat at the bar, feeling soggy in my wet shoes and damp jacket. The surprisingly friendly bartenders at this otherwise childish place leaped into action, suggesting I add a bit of shōchū, the vodka-ish barley-based Japanese spirit. They had a bottle of luxe brand iichiko shōchū which blended into the foamy green draught like a cube of sugar idly dissolving into warm tea.

I too dissolved. Into the impressionist streetlights on my languid electric bike ride home, pledging to incorporate this magic trick into my life.

2) Family Meal by Bryan Washington

I loved Bryan Washington’s 2019 debut, a collection of intertwined short stories called Lot, which I reviewed here and which made my obsession’s list one week in late 2023.

Washington is a 31-year-old, Black, queer writer with an effortless ability to turn working class workplaces into mournful yet hopeful fables. Lot, his self conscious collection about striving POC, LGBTQ, and immigrant Houston, was part of my City Syllabus crash course that year; some of the other books in my autoseminar were M. Nolan Gray’s nonfiction book about land use zoning, Arbitrary Lines (coincidentally, also a lot about Houston, thanks to that city’s model slack code), Teju Cole’s Lagos vignettes, Everyday is for the Thief, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 Industrial Revolution Manchester novel, Mary Barton, and Ben Wilson’s sweeping history of cities, Metropolis.

In its review of Washington’s most recent Houston novel, Family Meal (2023), the NYT called Washington “phenomenally precocious.”

Bryan Washington

I’m only about 70 pages in, so perhaps I’ll see what they mean by that phenomenally ambitious description, but when pastries—in a paper bag in the backseat, fresh from the bakery “flaky in my hands, warm to the touch, delicious as I remember,” entered the narrative as a metaphor for the comfort of old friends in the closing paragraphs of an otherwise terse opening chapter, I suddenly felt, as I did with Lot, that I was in the hands of a loquacious prodigy.

3) Speakspeak

Following up my recent bitchy aside on the Gen Z verb “decenter,” I’ve since—after some work meetings this week— came up with a George Orwell-induced neologism, “Speakspeak,” to describe the hesitant yet self-righteous activist wordiness of phrases like “I’m going to go ahead and name that,” pseudo lively yet lifeless jargon such as “hold space,” or “form to norm,” (which apparently means introduce and normalize), and corporate culture gibberish such as “ideate” “iterate,” or “let’s socialize that.”

The list of lexical offenses on today’s Teams calls or in today’s earnest coffee shop meetups —”architect” as a verb, “impact” as a verb, or “impactful” as an adjective are other grating blunders—goes on and on.

The closest thing to a common denominator I can detect in all this banal chatter is that it’s an attempt to narrate rather than say, or even more, an attempt to explain rather than say. A basic rule of writing is to show rather than tell. It’s time to reverse all the explaining and apply the same tenet to speaking.