Still working on my piano version of “Police & Thieves;” still checking the scores at Roland Garros; and Biden still doesn’t get it on Israel.

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

Week #34

1) Like time-lapsed footage of the sun moving east to west across the sky, I’ve watched my piano rendition of Junior Murvin’s reggae classic Police & Thieves transition from honoring Mervin’s mellow-mood arrangement to now mimicking the Clash’s cranked up cover version.

The shift from insouciant Kingston to insistent London started late last year when I realized the song’s hook was certainly Clash bassist Paul Simonon’s syncopated line. Before incorporating his bass-line-as-dance-number into my left hand, I’d been nonchalantly tapping the root G and A notes under the right hand melody; or in a slight nod to the Clash, I’d been playing G to A as if they were heavy barre chords on the off beat in the left hand (mimicking Clash guitarist Joe Strummer).

However, once I started bringing Simonon’s bass line—a melody in its own right— into the mix, the song went in a new direction. I started playing the slashing electric Joe Strummer chords in the right hand as accompaniment to the lyrical bass.

The Clash, 1976, L-R: Paul Simonon, Joe Strummer, and Mick Jones.

Simonon’s stop-and-start line is tricky to coordinate with the right hand—even against a rock steady reggae beat. This week, I was obsessed with embedding the groovy action into my muscle memory, gleefully practicing Joe Strummer with one hand and Simonon with the other.

2) As I was last week, I’m still obsessed with the French Open at Roland Garros. I’m sad to say, however, that my favorite player, WTA World No. 2 Aryna Sabalenka, lost her quarterfinal match against Russian teen upstart Mirra Andreeva, who then lost her semifinal match to No. 12 Jasmine Paolini. And no one’s going to beat No. 1 Iga Swiatek anyway, who beat No. 3 Coco Gauff in their semifinal.

Count me as now hopelessly rooting for Paolini against Swiatek in the finals match.

Paris is 9 hours ahead of Seattle, so all week, I could just wake up to the results on the WTA website without having to suffer through the anxiety of watching the score ticker (and bouncing tennis ball icon) in real time. I don’t have the tennis channel, and Roland Garros is not available on Hulu or ESPN, so I haven’t been able to actually watch any of the matches.

Sabelenka wins big in the 4th Round, but she was still doomed.

Unfortunately, after a week of good news mornings (Sabalenka was sailing through the tournament, including totaling media favorite Emma Navarro 6-2, 6-3 in the sweet 16 round), her quarterfinal match on Wednesday turned out to be later in the day and suffer I did as the troubling numbers showed her eking out the first set 7-6 (7-5) and then steadily falling behind, losing the next two sets 4-6, 4-6. (Apparently, she was sick…?)

And, classic Peter Parker syndrome: Sabalenka also lost her World No. 2 status, falling behind Gauff in points in the inexorable storyline that’s at the root of my Sabalenka partisanship. I’m drawn to doomed heroes whose actual nemesis is the stars. Ever since Sabalenka’s brief ascension to the No. 1 spot was besmirched by simultaneously losing the U.S. Open to Gauff in 2023, I knew she was my kind of jinxed hero.

I wanted to think Paolini’s upset quarterfinal win over No. 4 Elena Rybakina slightly normalized 17-year-old Andreeva’s surprise win over poor, crash-and-burn Sabalenka. A day of upsets! But it’s hard to diminish the fanfare that comes with a teenaged tennis prodigy story, which put Sabalenka’s downfall— as a toppled menace—front and center.

3) Ever since Hamas fully embraced its psychotic ideology on October 7, events have unfolded in Gaza as predictably as the plot to a sophomoric apocalypse movie: Israel matched the bloodshed with their own unhinged militarism—exactly what Hamas wanted—and here we are in a spiral of devastation and hopelessness.

Equally see-through was Biden’s attempt this week to hang on to his cloying pro-Israel narrative that frames Hamas as the exclusive bad actor. Blatantly trying to set up Hamas up for a news cycle fail he proposed a ceasefire saying:

“This is truly a decisive moment. Israel has made their proposal. Hamas says it wants a cease-fire. This deal is an opportunity to prove whether they really mean it.”

But less than 24 hours later, his framing was exposed as a delusion when Israel quickly shit on his initiative:

“Israel’s conditions for ending the war have not changed: the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in the statement released on Saturday morning.

I don’t know how much clearer Israel can make it to President Biden that they are no longer the peace-seeking nation of his imagination. * [I added this link to this line later because NYT writer Thomas Friedman wrote a column making a similar point.]

I doubt my emails get through, but I have been obsessively hitting reply to every Biden fundraising pitch I’ve gotten this week with the same response:

Josh Feit <josh@publicola.com>

Wed, Jun 5, 4:05 PM

to Biden

It is revealing that last week President Biden issued a demand on Hamas to accept a U.S./Israeli ceasefire offer, and then it was Israel who rejected it. How many times is the Netanyahu government going to embarrass President Biden before he gets the message that he needs to stop supporting Netanyahu's war? 

Disappointed.

I'm not contributing until Biden changes course.

a GEN X Jew

Biden’s boy-who-cried-wolf attempts to get tough with Israel are equally credulous. He made news this week by saying Netanyahu was prolonging the war to stay in power, referring to the weighty role Israel’s jingoistic far right plays in Netanyahu’s tenuous governing coalition. Okay. Sure. But this faux cynical analysis covers up Netanyahu’s actual (not very secret) position. He’s prolonging the war because he’s 100% aligned with the extremists in his coalition. Netanyahu is not cunningly appeasing the expansionist settler zealots in his government. He himself is a zealot, and has no interest in a two-state solution.

I want to see Hamas ousted, but this war is installing violence and bloodshed as the only language of the region. In the long run, that constitutes a victory for Hamas. If it hasn’t already.