Quasi at the Crocodile; Poets (Louise Glück and William Wordsworth) at the U.S. Open; and hope for the Democrats at the Republican Convention.

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#40

1) I'm not a big fan of '90s Indie Rock (with the exception of pranksters like Pavement!!). But I’ll never forget when I saw quintessential alt rockers Quasi play live in Portland back in 1996 (at Satyricon) and how I was smitten with electric-keyboard-front-man Sam Coomes and his 1966 Whiskey-a-Go-Go antics. My memory is that I rushed out the very next day and bought their CD R&B Transmogrification. However, the internet says that album, their first, came out the following year in 1997. Either way, I loved it.

So, I was thrilled at the chance to see Quasi nearly 30 years later this past Friday evening at the Crocodile. It was a tremendous show: They were playing their 1998 LP Featuring “Birds” start to finish. It’s not an album I know well, but I listened to it on Friday afternoon before the concert, and it sounded just like R & B Transmogrification (something I didn’t acknowledge when it was originally released for some reason)—catchy emo power pop filtered through brash electric keyboards, outre electric guitars, and crashing frenetic drums.

Quasi is Coomes on guitar plus his garage rock organ and lead vocals, Janet Weiss, his longtime collaborator (and ex-wife) on wild drums and backing vocals, and Joanna Bolme on bass.

There was a small, but respectable (and adoring) crowd at the Crocodile, and Quasi is still overflowing with energy: Weiss, famous for being in the classic Sleater-Kinney lineup, plays (obviously great) rambunctious and action-packed drums. And Coomes’ nonchalant eccentric command of the keyboard, which rocks precariously on its stand as he slams and slashes away, is an actual creative in a normy world where that word has lost meaning.

Quasi at Seattle’s Crocodile club, July 12

The show was also tender. Both Coomes and Weiss, though Weiss in particular, spoke with heartfelt emotion during a few of the breaks between songs as if sitting on the couch next to you. There was a sense of mortality as they tried to address the moment…how grateful they were for all of this.

I spent the rest of the weekend listening to R &B Transmogrification’s heated-transistor pop on repeat, including the nutty title track, which, along with the other tunes the band turned to for their thrilling encore, came from that first LP.

2) Oddly, an optimistic poem I’ve been writing this month led me back to two poems about death: “The Racer’s Widow,” by Louise Glück and “Beggars” by William Wordsworth. 2020 Nobel-Prize-in-Literature-winner Glück and early-19th Century-Romantic-poet Wordsworth are two of my favorite poets. Wordsworth is actually a new favorite; I first dug into his work earlier this year. Glück, who died at the age of 80 in 2023, was one of the first poets I fell hard for when I started reading poetry in earnest about seven years ago as part of my (still in play) poetry writing odyssey.

This optimistic poem I’m working on right now (draft title “Ball Kids”) was prompted by WTA tennis star, Aryna Sabalenka: I heard her on TV thanking “the ball kids” after she won the Australian Open earlier this year, and her reverent phrasing of those simple words stuck with me. Who are these ball kids?

In writing this new poem (as a means to finding an answer), I started by creating a Sabalenka character. Knowing that Glück had a poem about a sports figure, a race car driver, I turned to “The Racer’s Widow” for some guidance, even getting my great pal, high school English prof Dal, who teaches “The Racer’s Widow,” to give me his class lesson over the phone. He clued me in to some of the “facts of the poem,” like how the syntax changes over the course of the lines, getting more unruly as readers catch the widow breaking down. Dal and I disagreed over Glück’s key words, “I feel my legs like snow,” (Dal saw solid, frozen matter, I saw slush). Both of our interpretations worked to emphasize the poem’s overall meaning, that the widow, in writing an elegy for her dead husband, was also writing one for herself.

Next, turning to the ball kids, who I’d come to imagine as a cross between Fagin’s gang of urchin youth and a team of teen superheroes from some Netflix sci-fi series, I looked to Wordsworth’s spooky kids. Wordsworth has several poems, “Alice Fell,” or “We Are Seven,” for example, that cast kids, often paupers, in quietly supernatural stories. “Beggars” is one of these poems: Two little boys approach Wordsworth asking for money, and he declines, explaining that he just gave “alms” to their mother (the little boys look just like her); the mother, Wordsworth explains, approached him on the same road only a half hour earlier, an encounter the poem describes in majestic terms with its detailed opening stanzas (which, coincidentally, also mention snow)

She had a tall man's height or more;/
Her face from summer's noontide heat/
No bonnet shaded, but she wore/
A mantle, to her very feet/
Descending with a graceful flow,/
And on her head a cap as white as new-fallen snow./

Her skin was of Egyptian brown:/
Haughty, as if her eye had seen/
Its own light to a distance thrown,/
She towered, fit person for a Queen/
To lead those ancient Amazonian files;/
Or ruling Bandit's wife among the Grecian isles.

Well, the boys have some news for Mr. Wordsworth. With “the twinkling of the eye,” one of them says “that cannot be…She has been dead, Sir, many a day.” The boys then fly off in their makeshift laurel crowns to continue chasing butterflies.

It’s a stunner. And I believe the boys. (FYI, in Wordsworth’s poem “We Are Seven,” a spooky little girl relays the opposite narrative, telling Wordsworth that her dead siblings are alive.)

I ran my psychedelic interpretation past English prof Dal, and he agreed with my reading, the tall woman with “A mantle, to her very feet… ,“ a “ruling Bandit’s wife among the Grecian isles,” is dead.

As opposed to death—a dead race car driver, a dead mom—my ball kids’ patron is in the world of the living. I can’t publish my draft here because I’m planning to submit it to lit journals. But putting my poem in conversation with “The Racer’s Widow” through an updated rendering of Wordsworth’s magical kids as ball kids (I imagine them working at the U.S. Open during summer in Queens), my anti-elegy leads with this:

The tennis star thanks the ball kids,/assigned to courts without roofs.

3) I’m still obsessed with the need for Biden to drop out of the presidential race (as I have been for the last few weeks).

And as I write this (Thursday night, July 18), the possibility that Biden might step aside and hand off the campaign to his VP Kamala Harris has hit fever pitch momentum; I loved how the Democrats bread-crumbed the story all day— Raskin, Pelosi, Obama (dang!) and, whoa, this NYT afternoon headline, “People Close to Biden Say He Appears to Accept He May Have to Leave the Race” —trolling Trump on his big day; tonight is the final night of the Republican convention.

Before I get to a hopeful revelation I had about the presidential race, a quick recap is in order: This is the same week that a somewhat inscrutable 20-year-old tried to assassinate Trump at a rally in Butler, PA. We are clearly in the middle of a historic, chaotic, and confusing race—I’m embarrassed to say that for a good ten minutes immediately after news of the assassination attempt hit on Saturday afternoon, I was seriously entertaining the idea that it had all been stagecraft. That’s how disorienting everything is at the moment.

Trump’s campaign has been selling Trump as a martyr throughout the entire Biden era. Saturday’s assassination attempt electrified that narrative. And Trump’s heroic moment came after a string of setbacks for Democrats and wins for Trump: a Supreme Court ruling about Trump’s election interference, gave Trump (and presidents in general) immunity for their presidential actions; the Trump-appointed judge in the absconded files case, dismissed it, and oh yeah, there was Biden’s calamitous debate performance, and his tanking poll numbers.

It’s in this roiling and dispirited state, that I gleaned some hopeful news for Democrats at this week’s Republican convention: Trump’s VP pick, right wing populist Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. This is Republican diversity for you: An old white guy and a young white guy. (Trump is 78. Vance is 39,)

With the U.S.A. quickly trending toward a minority-majority population, Trump/Vance just doesn’t look like our country. MAGA’s demographic denialism is so out-of-step and tortured, they can barely keep brown people out of the stilted frame of their own ticket: Vance’s wife is the daughter of Indian immigrants.

I know racism and sexism are hard to overcome at the ballot box in the U.S., but I think Trump may have overplayed his commitment to identity politics with this VP pick. An all-white male ticket is a glaring misstep in a country where more than 40% of the population is not white and more than 50% are women.

If Biden actually bows out, I think Trump’s intransigent impulse to make America white again (he’s promised “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,”) gives Democrats an electoral opportunity: If Kamala Harris heads up the Democratic ticket—and depending on who she picks as a running mate—the Democrats have a chance to read as more all American than the GOP, the party that claims to represent “real” America.