The intro to Blondie’s “Picture This;” an impulse online-shopping orgy; affordable housing data.

I’m All Lost In… what I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#18

I finally took up William Wordsworth’s epic memoir poem, The Prelude, again. It’s the final section of the Penguin Classics’ Wordsworth collection I’ve been reading since the beginning of the new year. Thankfully, it has hooked me once more.

“W is on fire” I scrawled in the margin after finishing Book Seven, Residence in London, which came with phrases such as “This Parliament of Monsters;” and narratives such as “soon I bade/Farewell for ever to the private bowers/Of gowned students, quitted these, no more/To enter them, and pitched my vagrant tent,/A casual dweller and at large, among/ The unfenced regions of society./”

So, yeah, “W is on fire.” But my Wordsworth brain surge only struck, accompanied by some sharp whiskey, late in the week; too soon to tell if I’m as yet, all lost in it. I also got some tennis in at the hitting wall on Saturday morning among the crowded courts; I wisely reserved a court in advance.

But altogether, for the second week in a row, I’m disappointed to report that my usually busy inner-life is at a bit of a standstill.

Despite the brain blahs, though, I have manged to pull together this week’s list.

1) Back in Week #6 of this regular roundup, I was deep into practicing my 2023 piano set.

Here’s what I wrote, in part, last November:

The Blondie encore is a personal favorite from my 2022 set that I knew I’d be able to re-learn quickly. I added it to this current set as a cool-down after rollicking through [the first four songs].

The Blondie song I’m referring to is the band’s 1978 meta-teeny-bopper single “Picture This,” from their buoyant, sci-fi, third LP, Parallel Lines. I’ve been sitting down at my piano keyboard first thing every morning before work this week (as opposed to sitting down at my work computer keyboard), settling into this song’s dynamite-verse-and-chorus-induced piano flow state.

However, it’s the loop-worthy intro—a see-saw between the 1 and the 4 chords (a C Major and an F Major)—that captured my attention this week, as these opening measures float through a cascade of inversions within the perfect 4th frequency.

In addition to the hypnotic bubble gum motif, another reason I’m stuck on the “Picture This” intro: The final descending F chord, played with the A as the root (A/C/F) is tricky in context and has forced me back into practice mode. Practice mode means slowing down. And slowing down means lingering in the notes and shapes, which come with a slew of lovely left-right combinations, such as: G with E; E with C; F with F, followed by F with an octave-jump-F; A with C/F/A; C with A/C/F; C with G/C/E. Plus there are a couple of passing D notes along the way; while belonging to neither the C nor F triad, the D, the 2 in the C scale, draws you back to the C (the 1) with lulling electricity.

Blondie’s Parallel Lines LP (1978)

My current pop foray into 101 music theory also means I’m savoring the curious finale to the intro, which is anchored by an A♭ Major chord; this A♭ triad includes two notes, A♭ and E♭, that are nowhere to be found in the C scale. While the black-note-heavy chord certainly stands out in bright C Major, it sounds joyous here (and poignant) rather than jarring.

“Picture This” was written by Blondie electric guitarist Chris Stein, front-woman Debbie Harry, and Farfisa, new wave pop keyboardist Jimmy Destri. Their songwriting sleight is premised on a flat 6 chord, in this case (in the key of C) the A♭ Major.

This magic trick involves switching to what’s known as the parallel scale; parallel scales share the same root note, but roll out a different sequence of subsequet notes. The C minor scale (C, D, E♭, F, G, A♭, and B♭) as opposed to the C Major (C, D, E, F, G, A, B), for example.

According to The Roadie Blog (my bolds explain why flatting the 6, a minor chord a Major scale, is played as a Major chord; in short, the 6 chord is a Major in the minor scale, and we’re simply transporting that chord into the C Major.)

You can borrow several different kinds of chords from parallel scales, including the flat-three, the minor fourth, and the flat-six. The flat-six… is a major chord from a parallel scale. So if you’re playing in C major, it will be an A flat major. Using a flat-six chord will add a bit of flavor to your … playing.

Shifting to the C minor scale via the A♭ chord (it’s an inversion with C at the root) puts two black notes inside the all-white key of C Major.

Sublime wavelengths ensue, lingering and shimmering from these parallel lines.

2) My blahs this week led to some unprecedented profligate behavior.

To whit—and some of these were birthday presents for someone else— I went on an impulsive online shopping spree:

On Sunday, I bought tickets to a play that’s being staged in New York City, comedian Cole Escola’s off-Broadway First Lady farce about Mary Todd Lincoln, Oh, Mary! It’s playing at the Lucille Lortel Theater in Greenwich Village. I bought tickets for a March performance.

Then, on Monday, I bought this Sesame Street lamp, the Wally Table Lamp, from Urban Outfitters.

Also on Monday, I bought a subscription to a feminist and top-tier food industry magazine Cherry Bombe. Apparently, each issue is like a book.

Then on Tuesday, I bought tickets to an upcoming Seattle Arts & Lectures event—a Q&A with Victoria Chang, contemporary poetry royalty.

I’ve been a Chang fan since I read her 2020 book Obit. I’m on record goofing out about this great collection in the mini-Q&A that literary journal Vallum did with me in early 2021, when I said:

Favorite Book of Poetry Discovered this Year
Victoria Chang’s “Obit.“ Ruminating on loss, Chang presents a series of philosophical thought experiments in plainspoken metaphors.

Mostly, she uses the traditional newspaper obituary format (both in form and tone) to write breathtaking poems about the death of optimism, logic, home, and other things that suddenly vanish when a loved one dies. She accents the obituary poems with tankas (my new favorite form), tiny five-line poems that loom large.

And bonus—which I didn’t even realize until after buying the tickets—Chang is being interviewed on stage by Jane Wong. Wong wrote another one of my favorite contemporary poetry collections, Overpour (2016).

P.s. Thanks to this crazy spending orgy, I have to buy airplane tickets to NYC now. Some say you have to spend to earn. But it seems to me, you have to spend more when you spend.

3) And lastly, let’s go with “‘All Bogged Down In” as opposed to All Lost In.

Reporting a PubliCola column this week, where I made the counterintuitive argument (counterintuitive to NIMBYs and Progressives alike) that we should give evil developers a tax break to support affordable housing production, I ended up getting a migraine from the Seattle Office of Housing’s unruly summary of their Mandatory Housing Affordability program (MHA); here are all their reports to date.

Their attempt to track the number of affordable housing units the program has created year to year and to show how much money the program has generated for the city’s affordable housing fund is a hot mess of buried data and convoluted prose.

Just try squaring these two corresponding sections from the 2022 report and 2021 report:

Affordable housing contributions through MHA were made for 260 projects with issued building permits in 2022. This is a decrease from the 290 projects making housing contributions in 2021. Comparing the last two calendar years, MHA payments decreased by 1.5% ($75.9 million in 2021 and $74.7 million in 2022) and MHA units committed to be provided through the performance option decreased by over one-third (107 MHA units in 2021 and 66 MHA units in 2022).

alongside:

MHA Units Placed in Service

MHA Units are complete (i.e. “placed in service”) upon issuance of a certificate of occupancy for the building.

MHA Units Committed

The performance option requires commitment of MHA Units as a condition of issuance of the first building permit that includes the structural frame for the structure. Commitments are finalized with execution and recording of an Office of Housing-approved MHA performance agreement. In 2021, property owners entered into agreements with the City to include 95 MHA Units in 13 projects totalin 1,286 units. As noted above, this is a sharp increase from year 2020 when owners of five projects totaling 208 units committed to set-aside 20 as MHA units. MHA performance agreements are executed for an additional five projects with building permit issuance still pending. Assuming those projects move forward, another 589 units would include a set-aside of 39 MHA units. The following table lists the 20 projects with committed MHA Units and under construction as of December 31, 2021.

I sent a polite email to the Office of Housing asking for help, which mostly just ended with them acknowledging a “discrepancy” in one of their charts.

My PubliCola colleague ECB, who has taken a data journalism class, saved the day by force fitting all the scattered and incongruent data into our own intelligible categories, making a spreadsheet to conjure apples to apples information. The bottom line seems to be that taxing affordable housing creates less of it.

I was happy to see I’m not the only one who thinks knee-jerk anti-development politics is a pathology. The same day my piece came out, the New York Times published a story about two NYC borough politicians who are teaming up to start a pro-development league.

Here’s the lead:

A housing crisis threatens New York City? A pair of politicians believe they have an answer: a new “league” of officials like themselves who want to welcome development, including development of market-rate apartments.

The two officials, Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, and City Councilman Erik Bottcher of Manhattan, started the group to counter the long-held theory that opposing development is a political win. That idea, many housing experts agree, has helped create a shortage of hundreds of thousands of homes in and around the city, driving rents and home prices ever higher as residents compete for the limited supply.

On Monday, the duo sent an invitation to all 160 state and city politicians who represent some piece of New York City to come to an inaugural meeting next month. Mr. Reynoso said he wanted officials to come even if they are skeptical, but not if they only want to resist housing.

“We do not want you if you’re just a straight NIMBY,” Mr. Reynoso said, referring to the phrase “not in my back yard,” often used as a label for people who oppose development.

And here’s the mic drop:

“Historically, what lawmakers have said to constituents is, ‘If you elect me, I will help stop new housing from being built in our community,’” Mr. Bottcher said. “We need to turn that on its head.”

Pasta made from broccoli; allowing corner shops in residential neighborhoods; Cafe Chill on C89.5 (for insomnia).

I’m All Lost In… what I’m obsessing over this week.

Week #17

Early February. Nothing is sticking right now.

On Friday evening, I bought a book of Saul Leiter photographs at Elliott Bay Books; a recent 4Columns review of the Leiter centennial show at Manhattan’s Howard Greenberg Gallery introduced me to Leiter and his acclaimed NYC street photography.

Unfortunately, the pricey photo book I got, The Unseen Saul Leiter, a collection of previously unpublished slides, didn’t live up to the genius vibes I was getting from the show review, which evidently included dynamo photos such as Shoes of the Shoeshine Man, ca. 1951. I imagine the fact that I wasn’t previously familiar with Leiter diminished the impact of the book. Nor am I a photography connoisseur.

Despite not being swept up in the book, one photo did grab me. Mainly because I could feel the year in the color of the sky. I immediately checked. Yep. 1966.

Something else from the week that I’m bummed didn’t quite take: Wordsworth’s epic memoir poem, the Prelude.

After lovingly devouring the first 200 pages of the Penguin Classics’ William Wordsworth collection I’ve been reading as part of my self-induced 19th Century Poets seminar, I was having trouble getting into his autobiographical grande finale this week. I think Book 6: Cambridge and the Alps is the famous section. I’m just starting Book 5: Books, so we’ll see.

As for this week’s list. Here’s what I’ve got:

1) Per this recipe from my favorite cult website site, Vegan Democracy, I blanched and smashed a cup-and-a-half of broccoli, added flour and rolled it into a firm gooey green ball, scissored it up over a waiting pot of boiling water, and suddenly had a colander full of healthy green pasta at my command.

I served it with fried, chopped garlic, roasted chickpeas, a can of heated pureed tomatoes and a can of cooked tomato paste, plus a sprinkle of oregano.

2) This NYT opinion piece, “When Did New York’s Streets Get So Hollow?,” resonated with my pro-city-life zealotry.

The piece comes out in favor of overhauling NYC’s outdated, 1961 zoning code, which bowed down to

the postwar planning ideology that New Yorkers would live in tranquil residential neighborhoods and commute by car to office jobs in Midtown or to factory jobs on the city’s periphery.

and reflected

an anachronistic, and at times elitist, view that limited where and how small businesses could operate. Businesses that might disrupt the peace were, in effect, banned in much of the city, to protect the “nicer” neighborhoods where wealthier New Yorkers were meant to reside.

That incriminating historical sketch not only captures the classist zoning agenda detailed in M. Nolan Gray’s must-read 2022 city planning treatise, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It (scroll down in this link for my review), but the article also goes on to match Gray’s mixed-use remedy.

NYC’s zoning overhaul would embrace “the serendipitous storefront activity that gives New York its soul” by allowing small businesses in residential zones and by allowing a broader mix of business types in commercial zones, such as “microbreweries, 3-D printing shops and pottery studios, which today are relegated to manufacturing areas.”

Supporters of these proposed changes calmly refute the predictable objections from naysayers who warn that new businesses might start trafficking in off-the-books marijuana or hosting loud dance nights. The grown-up rejoinder: Changing zoning to allow a broader mix of businesses doesn’t supersede existing drug laws and noise ordinances.

Meanwhile, I liked that the article provided some substitute language for the deadly urbanist phrase “Live, Work, and Play” with this more alliterative flow: “life, labor and leisure.”

I wrote a PubliCola column in December advocating the same sort of mixed-use direction for Seattle. Specifically, I was hot on allowing corner stores in Seattle’s historically single-family zones because I believe—like the reform advocates in New York—that new businesses won’t bring illegal activity as much as they’ll bring a dose of human activity.

And The Urbanist had the news earlier this month about a bill in Olympia that would legalize corner stores in residential areas.

3) For a suburban kid, it was left-of-the-radio-dial Shangri-La growing up just outside D.C.

From the (pre-indie-rock) underground radio station (102.3 WHFS), to the blues & jazz station (WDCU), to the the left-wing politics + experimental music station (WPFW), to Howard Univesrity’s WHUR, to public radio’s WAMU, housed at American University, I spent my teenage years floating in the spooky miracle of post-midnight’s enlightening wavelengths.

Sometime early in the pandemic, I realized radio hadn’t been part of my life since my D.C. Metro-area youth. And so, I made a 2021 New Year’s resolution to tune in Seattle radio. It was an admittedly retro resolution for the internet age, but as oblivious to radio as I’d been during adulthood, it was impossible not to know about Riz Rollins’ Expansions, KEXP’s experimental electronica show, which gave me a sense that something wonderful might be going on right above my head.

I combed the schedules of the local indie stations—88.5 Jazz 24, KEXP, C89.5— and created a personal listening calendar, cueing my Sonos system to automatically switch on when my curated shows aired. No matter if I wasn’t home when the shows came on; I’m fond of walking into an apartment where the walls have been bathed in sound because music is already playing.

KEXP’s new Overnight Afrobeats show with DJ Lace Cadence quickly became the centerpiece of my late Friday nights. I even dedicated an entire PubliCola Year-(2021)-in-review column to Lace’s African pop show.

Three years on, the show that remains a fixed part of my week is C89.5’s Cafe Chill with Seth, which airs every Sunday morning from 6am to 10am; C89.5 is the student-run station at North Seattle’s Nathan Hale High School. Seth isn’t a high school student. He’s a marble-mouthed down-tempo grown up who apparently understands the differences between chill- wave, trip hop, house, and dub house.

On Cafe Chill, he spins four hours of light instrumental ambient swells that lean pop instead of experimental. In short: It’s more catchy than drone-y (there are usually drums). Think contemporary descendants of Boards of Canada.

Emceeing in sentences that often end abruptly and land more like questions than statements, Seth speaks the language of a Pacific Northwest wellness hippie. The show’s only commercial sponsor seems to be Rubicon Float Studio, a zero-gravity floatation therapy center.

And Seth’s playlists—including artists such as Shigeto, il:lo, Firephly, Chemtrails, and house favorite Hello Meteor— match the groovy sensory-deprivation-tank mode.

I’m including Cafe Chill on my list this week because, fighting insomnia, I found myself (in this post-radio age) transporting Sunday mornings to a couple of my toss-and-turn weeknights.

At the tennis practice wall again; bailing on TikTok; more Wordsworth poems.

I’m All Lost in … what I’m obsessing over THIS week.

Week #16.

1) I stayed up into the wee hours both nights this past weekend to watch live broadcasts of the women’s and men’s Australian Open finals—until 2:30 am on Saturday morning, and 5:00 am on Sunday morning, respectively. The exciting matches prompted me, despite this week’s wet weather, to get back onto the tennis court, just as I’d been doing last November.

I even ordered four cans of brand new tennis balls—a bargain at just $11; pretty cheap for one of life’s ASMR delights.

The jumping-bean-bounce of the new Penn 2s sped up the tempo of my private rallies with the practice wall and increased the meters-per-second rate of my serves.

In fact, leaning into the extra action, I started experimenting with my historically irresolute service game, which has remained unchanged and safe since junior high school. With the Australian Open women’s winner Aryna Sabalenka in mind—I started testing out a high toss; a revelation of aces and torque.

2) When I debuted this weekly chronicle a few months ago, I inadvertently revealed my TikTok habit; two of the obsessions on my premiere list last October were TikTok influencers: piano teacher Joanna Garcia and comedian Andrea Jin. TikTok is also where I first heard about Hamas’ attack on Israel.

Well, file this under “internal feelings”*: I’m happy to report that sometime in early January, I noticed I hadn’t been on TikTok in weeks.

It wasn’t a conscious decision, but clearly my brain was demanding I abandon the toxic river of Marjorie Taylor Green, sophomoric memes (“Kiss or Slap?”), classic rock guitars, soft core 20-somethings, and time travel conspiracies.

Certainly, there’s some worthy stuff on TikTok, like the Bowie impersonators and the aforementioned piano teacher posts, but I’ve seized on the change, and I’m now gleefully committed to my TikTok detox.

* “Not seldom did we stop to watch some tuft/
Of dandelion seed or thistle's beard,/Which, seeming lifeless half, and half impelled/By some internal feelings, skimmed along/” is from William Wordsworth’s poem A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags (1800).

3) Speaking of Wordsworth (1770-1850), I’m more than two thirds into Penguin Classics’ William Wordsworth Selected Poems—a collection that has already made this weekly roundup twice.

I remain captivated. It’s not that I’m swayed by Wordsworth’s back-to-nature philosophy; I’m still in the Frank O'Hara “unless I know there’s a subway handy” camp. Nor am I particularly intrigued by any of Wordsworth’s other philosophical topics here: the sublime status of unmediated reality; the humble acceptance of the human condition; romanticized parables of mendicancy; and the dialectic flow of time (“The Child is Father of the Man”).

Rather, it’s Wordsworth’s flowing poetics coupled with his light touch and casual tone that’ve hooked me. For a poet that’s writing about such grandiose topics, Wordsworth’s verse comes with a curiosity and calm that leave me contemplating alongside him rather than quibbling with him or second guessing.

What else to do with lovely lines such as: “Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room” or “Destined, whate’er their earthly doom,/For mercy and immortal bloom!” or “Surprised by joy — impatient as the wind/I wished to share the transport — Oh! with whom.”

Moreover, in an era (the early 19th century) when poems were still often written as fables and dramas (novels hadn’t been established yet as the main format for relaying epic tales), Wordsworth is an expert narrator with his stories about leech collectors, vanished sailors returned, beggars, ghosts, and inanimate (or perhaps not!) vales and ruins.

Subject of Wordsworth’s ekphrasis poem, Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont (1806); Beaumont’s painting is from 1805.

___

The line “The Child is Father of the Man” is form Wordsworth’s poem My heart leaps up when I behold (1807); the line “Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room” is from Wordsworth’s poem Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room (1802); the lines “Destined, whate’er their earthly doom,/For mercy and immortal bloom!” are from Wordsworth’s poem Sequel to the Foregoing (1817); the lines “Surprised by joy — impatient as the wind/I wished to share the transport — Oh! with whom” are from Wordsworth’s poem Surprised by joy — impatient as the wind (1815).

Speaking of repeat obsessions, an honorable mention goes to Solely’s Green banana black pasta, which was on my home menu again this week alongside a broccoli and sesame seed nooch sauce.

RIP Mary Weiss; Black green-banana- pasta follow-up; the Australian Open and Aryna Sabalenka

I’m All Lost in The… what I’m obsessing over THIS week.

Week #15.

1) I’ve long dreamed of writing a book called From Shangri-La to Nirvana: The History of Punk. The “Shangri-La” reference is a nod to the early-mid-1960s “Girl Group,” the Shangri-Las, whose street-wise, working class Queens sensibility (and thick accents) added a juvy-hall edge to their teen-aged operetta pop hits while also distinguishing them from the more curlicue cursive love songs of their bouffant hairdo and evening gown contemporaries like the Angels, Shirelles, Supremes, Cookies, Ronettes, and Marvelettes.

“Ms. Weiss [the Shangri-Las’ 15-year-old lead singer Mary Weiss, who died this week at 75] was once asked about the evening gowns worn by some other singers onstage,” the Washington Post wrote in Weiss’ obituary this week , “‘Old people’s clothes,’ she scoffed.”

Reclaimed with a sense of sordid 1970s ennui and irony less than a decade later by the proto-punk New York Dolls (also from working class Queens), the Shangri-Las quickly became a template for the CBGB set as bands like Blondie, Suicide, and the Ramones (also from working class Queens) leaned into their own trashy pleas of adolescent angst.

On the louche intro to their 1973 urchin love song “Looking for a Kiss,” the Dolls’ lead singer David Johansen steals Mary Weiss’ spellbinding intro line from the Shangri-Las’ 1965 top-20 hit “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” —When I say I’m in love/you best believe I’m in love/L-U-V!

(I should say, as the span of time between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, that once seemed so epic, recedes further into the past, the Shangri-Las’ earnest woe and the punks’ witty camp become harder to distinguish from one another, nearly blurring the Shangri-Las and the New York Dolls into figures from the very same artistic scene.)

I started embracing the meta remove of pop-punk myself as a teenage songwriter in the early 1980s by mimicking David Bowie’s own precursor punk snide, the dystopian Doo-wop on his early 1970s records; I was born a decade late.

Subsequently, in the early 1990s, I went full Shangri-Las, writing a series of intentional and default odes to Mary Weiss: “Radio Halo,” “Nitro City,” and “Black Sabbath Boots.”

A line from "Radio Halo":

1965/she's got a record on the radio/I've got a demo/I really think she oughta know.

... And from "Nitro City":

Oh, Mary/when you say you mean L-U-V/don't you know we're only human beings/in history/we are everything.

I still think she oughta know. Here are my demos: “Back Sabbath Boots,” 1993 (note the “great big kiss” at the end); “Nitro City,” 1994; “Radio Halo,” 1994 (note the Shangri-Las’ piano).

RIP Mary Weiss. She died on Friday, January 19th.

2) I’ve included Solely’s green banana black pasta in this weekly roundup before, having had a plate of the tasty corkscrew pasta and veggies for dinner over at my friend D—X.’s place two weeks ago.

After that savory dinner, I promptly ordered four boxes—“The only PASTA that comes straight FROM A TREE.” The new pasta provisions arrived this week. And Solely’s fruit pasta has made my list again.

On Monday night, I cooked up a cup of the handsome fusilli with tomato sauce, crushed garlic, chickpeas, peas, pan fried onions, and nooch. It was a delicious success.

And healthy too. As the packaging says: “This box contains 5 organic green bananas & nothing else.”

3) Another fawning NYT’s profile on tennis hero Coco Gauff this week alerted me to the fact that the 2024 Australian Open is well under way; during last September’s U.S. Open coverage, I rediscovered that I love watching (and playing) tennis. So, I quickly upgraded my Hulu subscription this week to tune in the remaining matches from Melbourne.

The Gauff profile used her quarterfinal win earlier in the week as a news peg to hype her potential path to another Grand Slam title; just 19, Gauff, currently ranked 4th in the world, won the U.S. Open last year for her first Grand Slam crown. The NYT article didn’t say who Gauff was playing next on her march to potentially winning the Australian. But I had an inkling.

I quickly googled the tournament to check up on my favorite player; that would 25-year-old Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka, the person Gauff beat in last year’s U.S. Open final.

It turns out, just like Gauff, Sabalenka, who’s ranked 2nd in the world, was now storming through the Australian Open herself. Sabalenka, in fact, with her signature crushing serve and her guided missile backhand, was now Gauff’s upcoming Australian Open semifinal opponent; all of this went unmentioned in the NYT’s Gauff hagiography.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Gauff (I gleefully call her “Ka-Pow Ka-Gauff!”). But Sabalenka’s sad sack Peter Parker vibe—she’s kind of a discombobulated fuck up whose unawares comedic confusion during interviews invariably short circuits the pre-fab media narratives—has completely won me over. I’m rooting for her to win the Australian Open, just as she did for her first Grand Slam crown last year.

That’s Sabalenka pictured in the background below (after losing to telegenic Gauff at the 2023 U.S. Open) in a NYT puff think piece titled “Coco Gauff Has Grabbed Our Attention: She won the U.S. Open and seized the spotlight as a symbol of her generation.”

With my Hulu upgrade set, I’ve now watched a couple of Men’s matches so far, including kooky Russian Danil Medvedev (ranked 3) in a five-set quarterfinal thriller over Poland’s Hubert Hurkacz (ranked 9), and German Alexander Zverev (ranked 6) in four sets over Spanish phenom Carlos Alcaraz (ranked 2), setting up more to come: a Medvedev v Zverev early Friday morning (my time) semifinal, and oy, Serbian Novak Djokovic (still ranked 1) up against Italian Jannik Sinner (4) in the other Men’s semifinal.

More important, I watched the Thursday morning wee-hours (re)match between Gauff and Sabalenka. After Sabalenka, a la Peter Parker, blew a 5-2 lead, going down 6-5 in the first set, she evened it at 6-6 and then cleaned up in the tie breaker going on to win the match in two sets 7-6 (7-2), 6-4.

In Saturday’s upcoming Women’s final (I’m writing this on Thursday evening), Sabalenka is facing off against an evident rising star, China’s Zheng Qinwen (ranked 12), who has also blazed through the tournament, only dropping 3 sets out of 15; she hasn’t faced any top-ranked players, though.

As for Sabalenka, she’s yet to lose a set, and she’s beaten three top-ranked players on her way to the final, including Gauff.

Wordsworth poems; The Thief of Bagdad (1924); Evergreens’ build-your-own salad.

I’m All Lost in The…

What I’m obsessing over THIS week.

Week #14.

1) Last week, I tagged the intro essay to Penguin’s William Wordsworth collection as one of my obsessions. This week I’m off into the poetry.

The reverent Pastoralism and the early 19th Century Dr. Suess rhyming (And Johnny’s in a merry tune,/the owlets hoot, the owlets curr,/And Johnny’s lips they burr, burr, burr,/And on he goes beneath the moon) are not my thing. But as an academic exercise—I’m reading Wordsworth as part of my self-induced 19th-Century-Poets-Seminar—these poems are delicious.

They’re also revelatory. The collection is arranged chronologically, and I’m still in the first third of the book, but so far, Wordsworth’s attraction to ghosts and ghost stories (“We are Seven,” “The Thorn”); his belief in the cosmic connection between human beings and nature (“The Tables Turned,” “Lines Written in Early Spring,” “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”); and most of all, his joy in synthesizing the past, present, and future (“Old Man Travelling,” “The Ruined Cottage”) are giving me a newfound philosophical sense of holistic calm. The past isn’t defined, the present isn’t defining, and the future doesn’t bring verdicts. Per this collection’s intro essay by Wordsworth scholar Stephen Gill, I’m calling this realization the “Wordsworth Continuum!”

“When these wild ecstasies shall be matured/Into sober pleasure, when thy mind/Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,/Thy memory be as a dwelling-place/For all sweet sounds and harmonies..” Wordsworth writes in Tinern Abbey (1798).

2) Released in 1924, Douglas Fairbanks’ The Thief of Bagdad is a 100-year-old Hollywood film.

A special effects marvel in its own time (flying carpets, winged steeds, crystal-ball visions, demonic monsters that would make Sigourney Weaver shiver) and an acrobatic spectacle of athletic stunts (shirtless Fairbanks leaping over walls and off balconies with his trusty magical rope), The Thief of Bagdad remains eye-catching and entertaining in Twenty Twenty-Four.

The movie’s arresting visual charm has plenty to do with the $20-million-in-today’s-dollars sets too: lush palace interiors, bustling street scenes, fiery mountain crags, and swaying underwater sequences.

It must be said: The layers of racism in this 1920’s Hollywood movie are evident. Why for example is the princess of Baghdad white? And the dastardly Mongol prince and his nefarious informant—played by his scheming Asian ally Anna May Wong (who, by the way, steals the show in this, her breakout role as “the Mongol Slave”)—feed off white tropes of eyebrow-arched Asian villainy. To make it even grosser, all these racist clichés take place within a condescending Western narrative of magical Baghdad. As modern reviewer, Darragh O’Donoghue pointedly quipped in a Senses of Cinema review, Fairbanks’ adventures settle into “orientalist drag.”

O’Donoghue correctly calls The Thief of Bagdad “a great, but flawed film.” The “great” part is definitely wrapped up in the artistic set design and action-packed plot.

But for me the beauty here is in how the movie conjures a rhapsody of city energy: The magnificent replicas of city infrastructure and architecture featuring sweeping palace garden plazas above, and thriving noisy street bazaars below; the nod-and-wink urban diversity (one of the princess’ royal suitors is played by a woman, Mathilde Comont, disguised in a mustache); and the playful homo-eroticism (there are lots of close ups of Fairbanks’ tush and the guardsman’s, Sam Baker’s, buff torso and giant sword).

And I’m always sucker for an urchin-chic plot about a fancy-free pickpocket; in one Charlie Chaplin-worthy move, balletic and incorrigible Ahmed (Fairbanks) robs unsuspecting worshippers during afternoon prayers.

This city medley turns The Thief of Bagdad into a boisterous silent film that captures the urban energy of its source material, One Thousand and One Nights. (The screenplay was written by Afghani-American pulp fiction writer Achmed Abdulla.)

Historian Ben Wilson’s must-read 2020 history of cities, Metropolis, identifies Medieval Baghdad as the world’s first great international city. And The Thief of Bagdad makes the glamorous cinematic case for this theory as Baghdad’s princess (played by fainting flapper waif Julanne Johnston) draws regal suitors from India, Persia, Mongolia, and Baghdad itself (in the guise of Fairbanks’ own Little Tramp character). All against a backdrop of geopolitics, high culture, and thrilling street life.

I watched it on Amazon Prime.

3) Other obsessions are brewing this week, including Fremont Coffee Company, a cozy bohemian maze-of-nooks-coffee-shop built into a fixer-upper cottage on Fremont’s main drag; I’ve found myself tucked away there twice in the past week. I’m also enamored with Shibuya HiFi, a new Ballard nightclub I went to on Tuesday evening. They curate vinyl LP audiophile parties in an acoustically smart, private backroom (shoes off) for the first 25 people who reserve spots; I’ve now bought tickets for this upcoming Saturday night’s session, a revue of 1960s and 1970s Ska/Reggae/Dub tracks recorded by the influential Kingston label, Studio One. I’m guessing Shibuya HiFi will make my list next week. Additionally, I’m stuck on Christian-Marxist Elizabeth Gaskell’s Victorian novel, Mary Barton, which I’ve been reading and savoring for a month now; it made this list two weeks ago when I was deep in the throes of the pensive drama. Well, I finished it last night. It turned into a bit of a TV show in the last batch of heavy-handed chapters, but it remained, on balance, a literary and gripping deliberation on industrial era capitalism.

Having noted all these contenders, I feel compelled to give the third slot on this week’s list to something I left off last week’s rundown: local salad chain, Evergreens .

Sure, Evergreens has all the charm of a Starbucks, complete with: a plastic seat setting; assembly-line service, scooped from cafeteria style bins (complimentary, corporate laboratory bread added); a high school employee feng shui; and a loud logo that looks suspiciously like, well, the Starbucks logo.

But unlike all these fast food trappings, Evergreens, with its vast assortment of fresh veggies and greens, gives an often-frustrated vegan the unmatched eating-out opportunity to take control.

I gleefully graze down the production line improvising a different version of the “build-your-own” every time. You pay by item, so, with vegan eyes like mine, it can get pricey choosing from a long list of tasty options: black beans, celery, cucumbers, fire roasted corn, grape tomatoes, green onions, house pickles, jalapeños, mirin shiitake mushrooms, pickled red onion, red bell pepper, roasted brussel sprouts, roasted cauliflower, roasted sweet potato, shredded carrots, and zucchini.

I usually top my horde of veggies with sunflower seeds (they’ve also got cashews, garlic croutons, crispy onions, tortilla chips, BBQ sauce, black pepper, chermoula, hot sauce, fresh lemon, and tajin) plus I ask for a “heavy” serving of dressing; you can choose from cilantro lime, dijon balsamic, caesar, Greek yogurt, peppercorn ranch, and red wine vini.

I put it all on a base of spinach, romaine lettuce, and warmed quinoa. Also available: argula, kale, mixed greens, and jasmine rice. There’s cheese, fruit, and protein (such as tofu) choices too.

Sealed in a big plastic bowl, I shake it up, and then sit down to my masterpiece.

Banana pasta; William Wordsworth essay; my cookie jar

I’m all Lost in…

Three things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#13

1) While on vacation in Manhattan last summer, I bought a box of black squid ink pasta at Eately; I never got around to cooking it. So, I left it as a house gift for the friend who’d graciously let me crash at their Columbus Circle apartment for the week while they were out of town.

I’ve been daydreaming about black pasta ever since!

This week, I tried out Solely’s Green Banana Fusilli Pasta; Solely’s is a San Diego-based organic food company that started out making healthy fruit snacks for kids. No processed sugars nor additives.

Evidently, Solely branched out, and they’re now upgrading their fruit compost into pasta. In addition to the green banana pasta, they’ve also got Spaghetti Squash Pasta.

Despite the green banana moniker, this pasta is deep black; I’m assuming it’s made from over-ripened bananas.

I tired it out as the elegant base to an otherwise smorgasbord hippie dinner this week. Bouncy and chewy, it was a tasty corkscrew centerpiece for a string beans, black beans, red peppers, carrots, peas, tofu, and miso sauce concoction.

I have since ordered four boxes.

For the record, this is the first food entry on my weekly roundup of obsessions. I hope there are more; currently seeking recipes that include black pasta.

2) I’ve landed on my first project of the year: My own Poets-of-the-19th-Century seminar. My inquiry grew out of last year’s (and likely ongoing in 2024) private City Studies seminar. My city lit crash course led me to a batch of 19th century British books: Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater; Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, and currently Ms. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. (I also dug into Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England; Communist Engels was German, but, per “the Working Class in England,” his famous Manchester expose fit right onto my Victorian England reading list.)

Loving the 19th Century mood, and feeling like I needed a new infusion of poetry, I started drawing up a list of 1800’s poets. Conveniently, I had bought Penguin’s William Wordsworth collection last September (I suppose my subconscious inquiry was two steps ahead) and so this week, I started my 19th century poetry studies with Wordsworth.

Along with the first couple of poems in the book, Old Man Travelling (1798) and the mini-epic, The Ruined Cottage (1797), I devoured Wordsworth scholar Stephen Gill’s introduction to the collection

First, Gill suggests a helpful frame for reading Wordsworth, who, he posits, wrote poetry as an exercise in “impassioned seeing,” and next, “impassioned contemplation.” With an apparently passionate eye on “the common things” and everyday “goings-on,” Wordsworth’s “wild poesy” seeks to surface the transcendent beauty therein. Gill writes: “Wordsworth’s poetry celebrates life’s mystery incarnate in the commonplace.”

Gill goes on to explain that Wordsworth’s quest for the everyday sublime is built on making “connections” and “conjunctions” and “ties,” merging seemingly different states of being, particularly bridging different time periods. Gill argues that Wordsworth was ultimately focused on consciously establishing “continuums” over the disparate phases of his own life. Gill writes: “Wordsworth’s profoundest need was to know that nothing had ever given him joy was lost.”

Gill’s thesis about Wordsworth’s pursuit to establish an overarching personal narrative exploded my brain with this related explanation of Wordsworth’s penchant of supposed pastoral escapism:

To Wordsworth the return to the mountain was emphatically not retreat. Collapse of faith in the French Revolution did not entail loss of faith in man, but rather a renewed exploration of what it might mean to say that one still had ‘faith in man.’

As a city zealot who tends to quietly recoil at the Romantic poets and their haughty pastoral moralism, Gill’s construction gave me the non-ideological segue I needed.

My Poets-of-the-19th Century syllabus currently includes other dreamers such as: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and, taking up the urban space in the Wordsworthian “continuum,” Parisian flaneur, Charles Baudelaire.

3) I’m not filing this entry under eats, but rather, under apartment therapy & care.

Cleaning my studio apartment this weekend, I ended up washing and refashioning my sad sugar jar—blasting out the hardened, graying granules coagulating at the bottom—into a vibrant glass cookie jar.

With a slight minimalist lean inherited from my 1970s Scan Furniture mom, I’d describe my apartment aesthetic as a cross between teen beanbag and Sesame Street. And I want to believe that loading up my newly refurbished jar with a pile of plant-based fudge striped treats is more a fashion statement than a Cookie Monster descent.

So far, so good: Giving me a source of quiet glee every time I come home, the pleasant cookie display remains, while not untouched, largely intact.

Mary Barton on Librivox audiobook; New Warby Parker glasses, Newman in Shoreline; Up-zone data.

I’m All Lost in…

What I’m obsessing over this week.

Week #12:

1. I’m upping the ante on one of last week’s obsessions, Elizabeth Gaskell’s debut novel, 1848’s Mary Barton.

I’ve read another 100 pages, and it just keeps getting better: The poetic language (“speaking out about the distress they say is nought”); the plot twists (John Barton’s creeping opium addiction); Gaskell’s classic craft (the protagonist’s best friend is going blind, and her wisened ally is going deaf, as fateful decisions loom); and Gaskell’s clever craft (using a pronoun malaprop during a subtle feminist moment)

This obsession has led me to a Librivox audio version of the novel; Librivox is an ad-hoc world of amateur actors reading public domain classics and posting them for free online. This one features an ace actor (not always the case) reading in a delightful British accent that shifts between a Manchester working class brogue and a proper drawing room lilt.

Currently: I read a chapter after dinner and then listen back to the same chapter on audiobook as I go to bed. I usually fall asleep to the dulcet tones before the chapter’s out, though not before, happily re-living one of the great sentences I’d read earlier in the evening—or even having it expand.

“Margaret had said he was not a fortune-teller, but she did not know whether to believe her.”

2. I lost my glasses last November during a discombobulated, rush-hour bike ride. This was the night before I left on my trip to New York. My eyesight isn’t terrible, but it proved impossible to read on the airplane without my glasses. And I got sleepy-tired trying to read at coffee shops for the rest of the trip. This was all very eye opening.

I’ve been reading without my glasses for the past month back home now, but I’ve needed perfect lighting to do so. I’m sure it’s been hell on my eyes.

My new glasses —which I ordered after perusing the Warby Parker store at University Village when I got back from my trip, and then narrowing it down at the Capitol Hill store over the holiday—arrived this week.

I’ve been wearing Warby Parker brand since my trend-alert Ex steered me to their Soho store a decade ago.

I got a quieter version of the “Rose Water”-clear pair that I lost (the medium frame as opposed to wide frame), plus I went for the buy-two discount and got an art sexy blue pair.

Specifically, in addition to the Durand Rose Water frames, I got the “Newman frame in Shoreline.”

“Shoreline,” a sort of Toys R Us beach-pail blue, has stamped a necessary mark of modernity on my fashion this new year.

3. As I made clear in my New Year’s punditry on PubliCola last week—weighing in alongside Erica and Sandeep, the founding Cola class—I’m convinced the newly-elected, provincial city council is going to recommit Seattle to its single-family zone status quo.

Accordingly, I’m all in on last week’s Planetizen article by Todd Litman (Litman is the executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute). Litman presents a set of recent studies showing that up-zones lead to more housing choices across the economic spectrum.

It’s, yet again, the necessary rejoinder to the ubiquitous and conventional populist rhetoric that nefarious developers—they’re building housing, by the way—are corrupting neighborhoods.

Recent studies support the conclusion that broadly-applied upzoning that allows more compact housing types (townhouses, multiplexes, and multi-family) in multimodal neighborhoods, with complementary policies such as reducing parking minimums, can increase housing supply, drive down prices, and increase overall affordability.

I’m happy to report that the New York Times ran two Yes-in-My-Backyard opinion pieces this week as well. Both pieces had data and headlines— I Want a City, Not a Museum and How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers—highlighting how and why up-zones are essential to meeting affordable and middle-class housing needs. The second article, How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers, had excellent graphics too.

There’s also this bit of specific analysis in the I Want a City, Not a Museum article that makes a point I keep coming back to whenever I write about the situation in Seattle: gentrification is happening under the existing, anti-development zoning status quo, not under the dystopian pro-development free-for-all that exists in critics’ minds.

Why? Because current NIMBY restrictions create a housing shortage and accompanying sky-high rents.

From the NYT:

Roughly 15 percent of the land in America’s largest city is reserved for single-family homes. Even in central neighborhoods, it is often illegal to build new buildings on the same scale as existing buildings: Forty percent of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built today. …

The result is an increasingly frantic competition for the available housing. In recent decades, rents have climbed much faster than incomes. In 1991, the median monthly rent in New York City was $900. By 2021, the median renter was paying $1,500 a month for housing.

And by the way, while preserving 15% for single-family homes might sound bad to a writer in New York, it’s 75% in Seattle! (with a slight caveat allowing mother-in-law cottages.)

Learning the “Police & Thieves” bass line; Savoring 4Columns; Reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton

I’m All Lost in the... the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

Week #11.

1) The 1976 dub reggae tune “Police & Thieves” is the finale of my 2023 five-song piano set. I learned to play the song earlier this year from the sheet music to Junior Murvin’s original version. But because I grew up listening to the Clash’s cover rendition (one of my all-time favorite records since hearing it in junior high school), my take has turned into a hybrid between Murvin’s classic and the Clash’s cover. While largely sticking to Murvin’s softer vibes, I have replicated the Clash’s heavy back-beat chords in the left hand and incorporated their sweeping intro throughout.

But then, about a week ago—with just 10 days left in the year—I realized I was leaving out Clash bassist Paul Simonon’s signature pop-reggae riff. Junior Murvin’s lovely inversions and Joe Strummer’s whisper-spittle aside, Simonon’s syncopated bass is obviously the crowd-pleasing hook in this song.

I’m now committed to working his catchy bass into my arrangement before the year is up. With the bright, active melody line going in the right hand at the same time, it’s a tricky, but addicting, assignment.

2) I’ve been getting arts journal 4Columns’ Friday email every week since their 2016 debut. But sadly, I must say, I’d only read a handful of their articles over the years. Until recently.

If you don’t know the New York City-based journal, they have a great conceit: Every Friday, they publish four 1,000-word art reviews. Each column—published on their minimalist, yet elegant and user-friendly site, and written by a regular contributor from their impressive and erudite roster—reviews a separate, new work, be it a new exhibit at a gallery or museum, a recently-released record, a performance art opening, or a just-out book or movie.

For example, last week they cued up reviews of the following: a visual art show at Manhattan’s White Cube gallery; the new Nicki Minaj record; Michael Mann’s biopic on Enzo Ferrari; and An-My Lê’s conceptual photo exhibit at MoMA, which sounds like it’s a quantum-physics-level foray into the depressing persistence of war. Timely.

Le’s show, titled Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières, includes a sub-set series of photos titled Small Wars (1999–2002). Incongruent with those dates, the photos appear to be taken during America’s war in Vietnam; they’re actually pictures of recent re-enactments shot in the U.S. 4Columns writer Aruna D’Souza explains:

To make them, Lê sought out enthusiasts—all white men—who gather in Virginia and North Carolina on weekends to game out skirmishes. Lê convinced them to let her take pictures; they said yes, as long as she agreed to participate in the role of Viet Cong guerilla.

[One] photo is an act of displacement—spatially, but also (given the dissonance between the date the photo was taken and what it seems to represent) temporally. Indeed, the artist, who was born in Vietnam in 1960 and came to the US after the fall of Saigon, has long been interested in displacement—especially how colonialism and its violence create diasporas, dislocate cultures, and trigger unsettling aftereffects that tend to go unnoticed.

The rendering of the exhibition’s title in Vietnamese, (American) English, and French points to the intersection of forces that have shaped the modern history of Southeast Asia, while the two rivers to which it refers—the Mekong and the Mississippi—collapse the distance between Lê’s birth country, a projection screen for so many American fantasies of power, domination, and defeat, and the United States itself.

I eagerly read this fast-paced review, along with two others in last week’s set, devouring three of the four columns. (It turns out, I guess, I have no interest in Enzo Ferrari nor Michael Mann.) As for the column on Nicki Minaj and the column on the art show at the White Cube gallery: Even though 4Columns reviews are written by academics and intellectuals, the prose is consistently straight forward, crisp, and accessible.

Here’s another excerpt, this one from Johanna Fateman’s review of the White Cube exhibit:

In Tracey Emin’s new show, gracefully or crudely outlined bodies are beached on islands of bleeding brushwork ...

Upon closer look at the canvas, the dark clot of gestures at its center seems to be a lover’s head, the crooked pose of the central figure a contortion of ecstasy…

Both artists [David Bowie and Edvard Munch] have long loomed large in her work, their influence reflected in her confident line and theme of desolation—though, in her treatment of the transhistorical subject of the nude, she evokes other things as well, such as cave painting and the pictographic porn of the bathroom-stall vandal.

It’s a treat to pick and choose from 4Column’s curated set. The week before this, they had a review of the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit on zines.

The week before that, they had a review the Guggenheim’s exhibit on 1960s and ‘70s experimental Korean art.

And the week before that? A review of MoMA’s exhibit on the 1960s and ‘70s American counterculture’s eco-architecture movement; that exhibit was a highlight of my recent trip to New York City.

This is all to say, I now find myself looking forward to their Friday email so I can read, and savor, 4Columns’ columns.

3) Readers of this regular round-up know I’ve been enjoying 19th Century accounts of industrial capitalism, the emergent and defining force of that time. Friedrich Engels’ The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845) and Charles’ Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) have both shown up on on my lists.

This week I’m onto an acclaimed text of the genre: Elizabeth Gaskell’s debut novel from the “Hungry ‘40s,” Mary Barton (1848); please note the zeitgeist date, the year when reformist revolutions spread across Europe and the year Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto.

I’m only 60 pages in, but so far, set in the flickering candle-lit working class rooms clustered above Manchester’s alleyways and chronicling the family woes of a young dressmaker’s apprentice, Gaskell, in her languid prose (as opposed to Dickens’ frantic prose), has already lingered on a deadly mill fire, the untimely death of a child struck with scarlet fever, the trauma of sex work, and the faltering eye sight—symbolism!—of the apprentice’s best friend.

Gaskell also reports on the internal life of sudden Chartist, mill worker John Barton:

Barton tried credit; but it was worn out at the little provision shops, which were now suffering in their turn. He thought it would be no sin to steal, and would have stolen; but he could not get the opportunity in the few days the child lingered. Hungry himself, almost to an animal pitch of ravenousness, but with the bodily pain swallowed up in anxiety for his little sinking lad, he stood at one of the shop windows where all edible luxuries are displayed; haunches of venison, Stilton cheeses, moulds of jelly—all appetising sights to the common passer by. And out of this shop came Mrs. Hunter! [the mill owner’s wife] She crossed to her carriage, followed by the shopman loaded with purchases for a party. The door was quickly slammed to, and she drove away; and Barton returned home with a bitter spirit of wrath in his heart, to see his only boy a corpse!

What do any of my city planning poems have to do with coyotes, you ask?

I'm excited that Bainbridge Island Press' published my poem Obit for a Pickpocket in the premier edition of their journal, Poetics.

The theme of the issue is the coyote. What do any of my city planning poems have to do with coyotes, you ask? Well, in Native American culture (I learned), the coyote, like Hermes in Greek mythology, symbolizes the clever trickster. From my city POV, this translates into Dickens' Artful Dodger-up-through-today's-DIY hackers (Hermes was the patron saint of thieves.) As I've assembled a cosmology of city all-stars, one trickster I've been taken with is Mary Quant, an avant la lettre hacker and/or punk who helped define modern youth culture as the key figure in London's mid-60s Youthquake fashion revolution. Youth culture, obviously, is a central feature of cities.

Quant died earlier this year (see the NYT's annual Notable Deaths in 2023 feature and scroll to April for her obituary; even better, definitely read the 1967 NYT Magazine feature about her.)

Riffing off feminist poet of antiquity Sappho's famed fragments, I stole a bunch of Quant's witticisms (she was like Warhol with the incisive quips, but giddy rather than Warhol's bitchy), and I hacked together a poem in her honor.

Here's the poem:

Obit for a Pickpocket

 to Mary Quant, 1930-2023, with fragments from her NYT obituary

These are the aperçus of the modes of production:  —It’s ridiculous, in this age of machines, to continue to make clothes by hand. —Why can’t people see what a machine is capable of doing itself, instead of making it copy what the hand does?

Spoken like a pickpocket of the Gods! Amateurs at accounting emerging from post-war privation. Her Siamese cat in the habit of eating patterns she purloined from Harrod’s. She delighted

 in pranks. Turned her back on the corseted shapes. Horror upon her, she made the window displays a performance. Upside down atelier. Spray-painted lives, mannequins dyed or bald or clad in hurried synthetics. Couldn’t stand one dress hanging in the closet listless as estates. These were the bedsit quantum mechanics of Dame Gamine. Prodigy.

Can we stop for a second and talk about how beautiful Evelyn Waugh’s electric guitar was?    

 She and Mr. Waugh became inseparable.  Wore mother’s pajamas to class, ran their fears and wash & wears like a coffee bar. She cried on her 13th birthday because she knew horror was getting closer.

 —The young should look like the young. —The most extreme fashion should be very cheap.

 Passers-by sneered: “God, look at this Modern Youth!” Shall we be Modern Youth tonight? These are the aperçus in obituaries.  

—First, because only the young are daring enough to wear it. And second, because it will not last.

A lovely side note: Bainbridge Island Press has nominated this poem for the Pushcart Prize. This is far more impressive to say out loud than it is in fact. Every small press in the country—and there are thousands?—is allowed to nominate up to 6 poems they've published over the course of the year for the prize. I'm holy moly thrilled that Bainbridge Island Press chose my poem as one of their nominations (thank you Bainbridge Island Press), but there's that context for you.

Obit for a Pickpocket is a personal favorite. At a glance it doesn't
overtly fit into the sequence of my Green Metropolis poetry, but in my mind it’s central to the city story line.

Quoting my own intro to the review I wrote of her 1966 memoir Quant on Quant, which I read earlier this year, I said:

In my ongoing list of Urbanism all-stars, I add Mary Quant to Billie Holiday, Jane Jacobs, and Frank O'Hara.

In my firmament of city gods, I’m trying to make sure all the tenets of Urbanism get a patron—or that is to say, that each patron represents a city tenet: Currently, I’ve got 1950s Trinidadian-UK calypso star Lord Kitchener representing local music scenes, city planning theory sage Jane Jacobs representing pedestrian street life, and I recently added pastoral cityscape artist Edward Hopper to represent infrastructure. There are many more slots to fill: mass transit, diversity, counterculture, density, innovation, commerce. Of course, I’ve slated Billie Holiday as the supreme Goddess of Cities overall.

Today, I’m adding London’s Mary Quant to represent one of the most electric tenets of Urbanism: Youth.

Articles about A.I. and meta-prompts; a Bed of Nails; goodbye to the black hole on my block.

I’m All Lost in…

What I’m obsessing over this week. Week #10:

1) I finally got around to reading the pair of New Yorker feature stories about A.I. that I had dog-eared as must reads a few weeks ago. Specifically, these stories were about: 1) Microsoft’s partnership with (and $13 billion investment in/49% ownership of) 2023’s breakout A.I. tech start-up, ChatGPT maker, OpenAI, and 2) Nvidia, the company that makes the unique and powerful processors that run ChatGPT.

I had been riveted last month during Thanksgiving week by big deal headlines when OpenAI’s board fired OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman—and then when Microsoft turned around and hired Altman as OpenAI’s 700 employees clamored to join his exit.

What drama! Involving our century’s (soon-to-be) apparently defining technology. I also liked that a Microsoft return to glamour could be excellent news for Sound Transit and our 2 Line opening next Spring; the line goes right to the company’s Redmond HQ.

The article about Nvidia, How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution, was written by Stephen Witt, a reporter who wrote one of my favorite non-fiction books, How Music Got Free, about the history of MP3s. With his knack for getting super anecdotes (“Sometimes, when Huang was crossing the bridge, the local boys would grab the ropes and try to dislodge him”) and perfect quotes (“There’s a war going on out there in A.I., and Nvidia is the only arms dealer,”) Witt tells the story of Nvidia’s game-changing G.P.U. technology (Graphics Processing Unit), which the company initially sold in video game cards marketed to gamers who simply wanted to improve the on-screen graphic experience. It blew up when A.I. academics got hold of them.

In 2012, Krizhevsky and his research partner, Ilya Sutskever, working on a tight budget, bought two GeForce cards from Amazon. Krizhevsky then began training a visual-recognition neural network on Nvidia’s parallel-computing platform, feeding it millions of images in a single week. “He had the two G.P.U. boards whirring in his bedroom,” Hinton said. “Actually, it was his parents who paid for the quite considerable electricity costs.”

Sutskever and Krizhevsky were astonished by the cards’ capabilities. Earlier that year, researchers at Google had trained a neural net that identified videos of cats, an effort that required some sixteen thousand C.P.U.s. Sutskever and Krizhevsky had produced world-class results with just two Nvidia circuit boards. “G.P.U.s showed up and it felt like a miracle,” Sutskever told me.

Witt, who also has a gift for making technology intelligible with clear analogies, goes on to explain: “Unlike general-purpose C.P.U.s (Central Processing Units) the G.P.U. breaks complex mathematical tasks apart into small calculations, then processes them all at once, in a method known as parallel computing. A C.P.U. functions like a delivery truck, dropping off one package at a time; a G.P.U. is more like a fleet of motorcycles spreading across a city.”

In its very next issue, the New Yorker ran what felt like Pt. 2, an article about Microsoft and OpenAI, The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI. The story used the Thanksgiving week drama as a news peg to tell the history of Microsoft’s pivotal and emergent relationship with OpenAI.

The article revolves around Microsoft’s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, an idealist populist with a formative rags to riches biography. Scott convinces Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella that the company’s A.I. division must be driven by serving the masses not stealing their jobs. It’s Scott who forged Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI.

He began looking at various startups, and one of them stood out: OpenAI. Its mission statement vowed to insure that “artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.” … In March, 2018, Scott arranged a meeting with some employees at the startup, which is based in San Francisco. He was delighted to meet dozens of young people who’d turned down millions of dollars from big tech firms in order to work eighteen-hour days for an organization that promised its creations would not “harm humanity or unduly concentrate power.”

Before making its $13 billion commitment to OpenAI, Microsoft started out with a $1 billion investment in the young company. It paid off thanks to GitHub, a promising indie start-up like OpenAI, but one that Microsoft had actually acquired outright and brought onto campus. This Microsoft flex, however, didn’t signal the same old enervating death knell for this cult favorite company of software engineers. In a change of thinking, Microsoft left GitHub, now an independent division on the Redmond campus, alone to flourish as is under its own CEO.

GitHub was working on a product called Copilot that intended to help techies finish code. Fortuitously, OpenA.I. had an earlier, separate and stunning success testing A.I. to do just that. Shazam! Microsoft paired GitHub’s product with OpenAI’s technology. It worked. Copilot, released in 2021 on a limited trial to other tech companies, was a smash: “When the GitHub Copilot was released, it was an immediate success. ‘Copilot literally blew my mind,’ one user tweeted hours after it was released. ‘it’s witchcraft!!!’ another posted. Microsoft began charging ten dollars per month for the app; within a year, annual revenue had topped a hundred million dollars.”

Looking for a mass market angle, Microsoft then coupled Copilot, now powered by OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT upgrade, with Microsoft Office to help general users.

The release of the Copilots—a process that began this past spring with select corporate clients and expanded more broadly in November—was a crowning moment for the companies, and a demonstration that Microsoft and OpenAI would be linchpins in bringing artificial intelligence to the wider public. ChatGPT, launched in late 2022, had been a smash hit, but it had only about fourteen million daily users. Microsoft had more than a billion.

The Copilots let users pose questions to software as easily as they might to a colleague—“Tell me the pros and cons of each plan described on that video call,” or “What’s the most profitable product in these twenty spreadsheets?”—and get instant answers, in fluid English. The Copilots could write entire documents based on a simple instruction. (“Look at our past ten executive summaries and create a financial narrative of the past decade.”) They could turn a memo into a PowerPoint. They could listen in on a Teams video conference, then summarize what was said, in multiple languages, and compile to-do lists for attendees.

Earlier this fall, the company gave me a demonstration of the Word Copilot. You can ask it to reduce a five-page document to ten bullet points. (Or, if you want to impress your boss, it can take ten bullet points and transform them into a five-page document.) You can “ground” a request in specific files and tell the Copilot to, say, “use my recent e-mails with Jim to write a memo on next steps.” Via a dialogue box, you can ask the Copilot to check a fact, or recast an awkward sentence, or confirm that the report you’re writing doesn’t contradict your previous one. You can ask, “Did I forget to include anything that usually appears in a contract like this?,” and the Copilot will review your previous contracts. None of the interface icons look even vaguely human. The system works hard to emphasize its fallibility by announcing that it may provide the wrong answer.

The Office Copilots seem simultaneously impressive and banal. They make mundane tasks easier, but they’re a long way from replacing human workers. They feel like a far cry from what was foretold by sci-fi novels. But they also feel like something that people might use every day.

This story on Microsoft and OpenAI also explains one of the key concepts that makes A.I. work in the first place, meta-prompts. Meta-prompts are a series of hyper discrete behind-the-curtain nudges that guide users’ often unwieldy prompts, giving them the most germane and fine-tuned results. Originally, meta-prompts were intended to steer users away from illegal or nefarious paths.

A series of commands—known as meta-prompts— would be invisibly appended to every user query. The meta-prompts were written in plain English. Some were specific: “If a user asks about explicit sexual activity, stop responding.” Others were more general: “Giving advice is O.K., but instructions on how to manipulate people should be avoided.” Anytime someone submitted a prompt, Microsoft’s version of GPT-4 attached a long, hidden string of meta-prompts and other safeguards—a paragraph long enough to impress Henry James.

Crafting meta-prompts, which seems like something a computer whisperer from a 1990s William Gibson novel would specialize in, does appear to be the super power one needs to master to become an A.I. pioneer. Take '“promptographer” Boris Eldagsen, for example, who was profiled by tech website TheVerge.com earlier this month. Their recent video story on Eldagsen began:

He inputs highly specific and deliberate text prompts into generative AI programs like DALL-E or Midjourney, and tweaks their outputs repeatedly to create thought-provoking photographs…or at least, what look like photographs. Senior video producer, Becca Farsace flies to Berlin to investigate how exactly Boris process works, how he’s fooled award shows, and what her final thoughts are on this new age of generative AI art.

Ultimately, the parallel stories about Nvidia’s niche video game sundries (G.P.U.-powered gaming cards) morphing into AI’s secret ingredient, and GitHub’s niche coding tool (Copilot) morphing into the starring feature of Microsoft Office, are larger stories about the way re-configuring intended uses and hacking preordained narratives creates the path to game-changing technologies.

Similarly, the way Microsoft’s relationship with GitHub foreshadows its relationship with OpenAI sets up a telling parallel story. These adjacent threads about a notable change in Microsoft strategy—the willingness to give its young partners autonomy— reflect a defining aspect of technological breakthroughs: Important shifts in thinking don’t seem meaningful until the Eureka! finale gives us the lens to look back and identify all those necessary precursor moments.

Coupled with Neuromancer details like meta-prompting and promptography these New Yorker features captured the future mid-stream.

2) Happy Hannukah to me. My bestie ECB got me a magical Hannukah present: Bed of Nails’ BON Mat, a soft mat covered with 8,820 plastic nails that mimics the soothing effects of acupuncture, or, according to the woo-woo brochure: “the mystical bed of nails originated over 1,000 years ago… used by gurus in the practice of meditation and healing.”

In my case this means releasing an ocean of DOSE inside my body (dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins) as I lay down on it every night.

“Use your Bed of Nails when needed, preferably daily for 10 to 20 minutes, or as long as you desire … even to fall asleep.”

That’s me.

3) Capitol Hill Seattle blog has the news: Bounty Kitchen, the black hole that’s devouring the centerpiece ground-floor space below the modern-age apartment building on my block’s (otherwise lively) corner intersection, is finally disappearing.

With lights ablaze at the other corner businesses—the crowded Vietnamese restaurant, the noisy taco place, and the pizza joint—this energy vacuum (I’d taken to calling it Empty Kitchen shortly after it opened three-and-a-half years ago) was always pitch black by dinner time and on into the evening. You might see some random customers there during the weekdays, inevitably looking a bit confused and lunching alone in the capacious dining room; and apparently, they never came back.

With its rigid flow-chart vibe and the staff’s utter bewilderment at the idea that customers might want to linger and chill at a restaurant, their awkward and forced business plan was a mismatch for the neighborhood from Day 1. Despite the large mod space, high ceiling, and leafy patio all inherited from the previous groovy tenant, Tallulah’s restaurant, Bounty Kitchen was not a place that ever made you feel welcome to chat with a friend or telecommute solo over a long lunch.

They were also oblivious to the fact that Tallulah’s, which had live jazz on Thursday nights, had actually seated people at the long and gorgeous mahogany bar while the warm staff catered to the lively tables with a flirty expectation that patrons wanted more food and second rounds.

Bounty Kitchen’s last day—inevitable for its entire uninspired tenure on the block—is this Saturday.

Zoned Neighborhood Commercial (NC)-1—meaning multi-story, mixed-use apartment buildings and convenient retail—my aspirational block, which also has a community health clinic, a boisterous kindergarten, a coffee shop, affordable housing, an ice cream place, a yuppie grocery mart, a yoga studio, and an art gallery, can finally get on with our city planning.

No news about what’s moving in yet, but hopefully at the new place, they’ll ask if you’d like another coffee at lunch or a glass of wine after dinner.

Robert Glasper’s Abstract R&B; Bryan Washington’s short stories; and dispatches from the cities of the 21st century.

Week #9 of I’m All Lost in…, a round up of what I’m obsessing over this week.

1) Jazz pianist Robert Glasper —or more specifically, hard bop jazz pianist Robert Glasper—has cracked the code when it comes to the musical quest of our times: creating an unburdened mix of jazz, hip hop, neo-soul, and funk. Stealing a term I think music critic Will Hermes coined in his 2011 Little Dragon review, I call this perfect musical fantasia “Abstract R&B.” And Glasper, whose style is as insouciant as it is well-read, is the King of Abstract R&B.

I saw him perform two live sets Tuesday night at Nectar Lounge, a small club in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, a white neighborhood with a hippie history. Both shows were sold out—a good look for Seattle; and even better, it was a notably diverse crowd. There were plenty of white know-it-alls like me in the audience, but also plenty of African American music heads, women in particular, who, I must say, were dressed for the occasion.

Glasper’s flawless set spotlighted his own Thelonious Monk-infused assortment of beat-driven jazz chord piano clusters, while his accomplished and chilled backing band—a loop smart hip hop computer DJ, a Spyro Gyra electric bassist, a falsetto soul vocalist, and sturdy, in-the-pocket drums—messed with, among other source material, Outkast, Tears for Fears, and hand-made-for-Seattle Nirvana samples along the way, working up casual music theory jams drenched in dub echo and sci-fi white noise.

Tellingly, you could hear a pin drop—in this concrete rock club of all places—as Glasper played a patient solo early in the set during the quartet’s stripped down vamp of his own tune “Black Superhero.” His expert solo called the audience’s attention to detail with an on-the-fly piano sample of Monk’s 1958 “Let’s Cool One,” foreshadowing the grooves to come, which included Glasper’s bluesy yet outre piano motifs versus the drummer’s call-and-response beats as well as a spacey and minimalist version of FM Doom’s “Meat Grinder” rap.

Showstopper after showstopper ensued, crecendo-ing with a jaw-droppig Jaco Pastorious-style fusion bass solo.

As talented as Glasper is, he creates capacious settings for his top-tier band mates to shine and for his adoring audience to linger in the weightless vibes.

2) I’m only halfway through Bryan Washington’s 2019 Lambda award winner, Lot, a collection of intertwined short stories about a family struggling to keep the restaurant on the ground floor of their apartment open for business, and I’m already convinced these poignant coming-of-age dispatches from Houston’s immigrant, African American, and Latino neighborhoods, are going to stick.

Washington’s micro asides—”I tore a can from the plastic,” “we were always out of everything on the menu”—work as slow motion metaphors for families in the throes of disintegration and redefinition alike.

Jive Lau, one of only a few neon masters still working, says he knows neon is dying in Hong Kong, but he wants to keep it alive somehow. Anthony Kwan for The New York Times

3) Speaking of dispatches, I’m loving the recent run of New York Time’s reports from cities worldwide—including from Hong Kong, Pittsburgh, London, and Singapore among others—deep in data, but also rich in storytelling that are distilling the state of city life today.

Be it the poignant poetics of Hong Kong’s transition away from its neon nightlife heyday to an analysis of how model city planning policies like bus rapid transit or congestion pricing are working, the iterative journalism that’s setting out to define 21st century cities is enthralling as we move further and further away from the bygone cities of the previous century.

And though it wasn’t necessarily about city life, the NYT’s adjacent investigation into the dramatic increase in the number of drivers hitting and killing pedestrians on American streets (as opposed to European and Canadian streets) offered a related assessment of our disorienting contemporary landscape.

Pianist Jenny Lin; Emerging Ecologies; Excising the Beatles.

Here’s week #8 of All Lost in… my regular round up the things I’m currently obsessing over. (I stole the idea from the New Yorker’s Take Three column.)

1. I was in Manhattan last weekend, and I saw a piano recital matinee at Carnegie Hall’s intimate chamber music venue, Weill Recital Hall. It’s a jewel box of a theater up four flights of winding late-19th century stairs.

I cannot seem to let go of this performance.

Pianist Jenny Lin played a 75-minute program of nine pensive and extroverted pieces, including works by Philip Glass, Dmitri Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Schubert, Liszt, and Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. The common denominator of these pieces seemed to be: Adventurous composers leaning into a kind of lyrical, nostalgic Romanticism that they’d originally rejected. When the crowd brought her back for an encore with a devoted standing ovation, which I gleefully took part in, Lin added a soft, minimalist tone poem, “the best piano piece of all time,” she said, by Spanish composer Federico Mompou, Impresiones initmas: IV: Secreto.

Lin’s fluent, athletic style, particularly on the raucous Listz piece, Apres une Lecture de Dante, struck me as unique because of its simultaneous force and delicacy.

I stepped out onto W. 57th St. afterward feeling giddy, and upon returning to my hotel room, I immediately made a Spotify playlist replicating her set; I tacked on Lin’s entire album of dreamy Mompou pieces as well.

Still wanting to hang onto her performance, the next day I Iooked online for any reviews; I only found this one, and I’ve been googling for more ever since.

She did show up on a new release by an art jazz accordion composer named Guy Klucevsek, and she steals the show with the same masterful style that captivated the audience at Weill Hall.

2. More from my (obviously excellent) New York trip: The Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism exhibit at MoMa .

The exhibition showcases the wave of eco-conscious architecture that blossomed under the influence of Rachel Carson during the green awakening that took place in the brainy optimistic heyday of 1960s and ‘70s American counterculture—and presents it as modern art.

Many of the radical concepts of sustainable building on display here, such as solar panels, have long since become mainstream design practices and LEED Standard basics. However, much of the work—such as the Olgyay brothers’ bioclimatic Thermoheliodon, Joseph Murphy and Eugene Mackey’s computer-driven Climatron, Glen Small’s Biomorphic Biosphere, and the Ant Farm Collective’s Dolphin Embassy of “inter-species dialogue”—feels eccentric and more adjacent to contemporaneous psychedelic science fiction and Back-to-the-Land movements of the time than to architecture degrees.

I will say, as a Gen X 50-something, it’s wonderful to see the ecology zeitgeist (that I readily recognize as the backdrop from my groovy, liberal elementary school upbringing) showing up so proud, prescient, and germane at a MoMa exhibit.

My favorite piece was James Wines’ Highrise of Homes rendering which places detached suburban single family houses inside the steel-framed floors of a single building.

I also dug Phyllis Birkby’s Women’s Environmental Fantasies project, a feminist response to our male-designed built environment. Inspired by female consciousness raising sessions, this 1973 (obviously) piece features the un-scrolled sheets of butcher paper that Birkby rolled out, asking women to “imagine and draw their ideal living spaces, free of pragmatic constraints.”

My great, lifelong friend, Noah, who teaches the history and theory of urban design at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, recommended the exhibit to me; he wrote a comprehensive review of the show that’s as clear, thoughtful, and thorough as it is keenly critical.

3. I am obsessed with excising the Beatles from my social media feeds.

The algorithm keeps putting the Beatles in the mix, and I keep clicking remove. Then, prompted to pick a reason, I click: not relevant.

Just How many iterations of Beatles nostalgia sites can there possibly be? I’ve whittled it down to notifications from groups such as “GeorgeHarrisonLegacy.com,” “The Beatles Club 921” and “Abbey Road Tribute” who surface clips of things like middle-aged Paul McCartney jamming with an elderly Carl Perkins. And again: Remove! But they just keep coming.

Saving a Dragon Tree Plant; Sissy Jupe; Rosalynn Carter

In which I continue to steal the New Yorker column idea where a staffer summarizes three things they’re currently obsessing over. The New Yorker calls the column Take Three. I call my version I’m All Lost In... Here’s Week 7:

1. I’m 100% intent on saving the Dragon Tree plant that landed in my apartment this week. My friend D— X. handed over the drooping plant and its browning fronds in the hopes that my sun-lit apartment and my surprising, but at this point, convincing house plant skills, can revive it. Given the success I’ve already had A) turning my kitchen countertop into a lush terrarium, B) coaxing a stubborn philodendron into a happy swirl of brisk leaves, and C) tending to the oversized jazz hands floor plant in my bedroom, I’m now doting over this orphaned outcast with my spray jar, my plastic blue Sesame St. watering can, and a top-priority corner window situation.

2. A few weeks ago, when I first started reading it, I included Charles Dickens’ quiet, biblical parable, his 1854 novel Hard Times, on this list. In those early chapters, I was taken with the story line about circus urchin, Sissy Jupe. When I finished the book this week, my thoughts were stuck on the way Sissy Jupe merged with her counterpart, the distant and rational Louisa Gradgrind, or Loo.

As the drama comes to a close, Sissy—who, in Dickens’ coloring-book-style, represents the humanist, emotional, and fanciful side of human nature—blurs into Loo, who represents the stifled side of hyper rationalism and its contorted allegiance with industrial capitalism. Or more accurately: Loo blurs into Sissy Jupe, as the circus side wins the dialectic.

The question becomes: Is this William-Adolphe Bougereau 1874 painting on the cover, The Fair Spinner—supposed to be Sissy or Loo?

3. Who would have thought Rosalynn Carter could bring the country together.

I was tearing up at the memorial service coverage—there’s my childhood crush, Amy Carter— and I ended up marveling at Rosalynn’s story. I had never fully grasped how cool, biting, sexy, and smart she was.

I recently found myself mischievously giggling at a bar with a friend as we conspiratorially agreed that David Byrne was not as clever as all that!

I have spent the last three decades (so, well after high school's absolute reverence) proudly standing by Talking Heads. I briefly abandoned them for all their post Speaking in Tongues LPs; that excellent album came out right before my senior year of HS (the earlier Remain in Light, of course, is their masterpiece). But I enthusiastically returned to the 1977-1984 set sometime in the late 1990s as a zealous advocate, counting them as one of the very few artists from my era that actually mattered anymore; Prince seems like another? (It's funny, in high school, I wrote and recorded a song with the lines: "I dig the Talking Heads/they might not stand the test of time/But remember, remember, remember." I'll suffer the cringe factor and link it. )

I've even affectionately nicknamed one of my Seattle bestys "David Byrne"—not only is he a quirky, urbanist planner who bikes everywhere, but he looks like Byrne! Handsome fellow. (He also has the same initials.)

However, over the past year, with the real David Byrne's crafted & gleeful socially awkward personality taking center stage as he continues to produce and produce and produce THE SAME THING (and with all the Stop Making Sense anniversary hoopla), I'm finding I'm finally tiring of his 1980s comedic cynicism (Stephen Colbert is the modern apotheosis of the Byrne shtick).

And so, I recently found myself mischievously giggling at a bar with another cherished Seattle friend, Charles Mudede, as we conspiratorially agreed that David Byrne was maybe not as clever as all that!

How wonderful to see my incorrigible pal go public with his contrarian take in which he topples Byrne (“the soundtrack of gentrification” !) while simultaneously honoring his affinity for him. "If David Byrne had been on our City Council, he would have lost last week," Mudede writes, lamenting this month's conservative backlash.

My Piano Set; “Love Potion No. 9;” COGNOSCENTI Potion No. 44.

Here’s the 6th installment of ripping-off the New Yorker’s weekly Take Three column where one of their staff writers summarizes three things currently preoccupying their brain.

Here’s my brain this week:

1) Playing my piano set.

You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me (1962) Smokey Robinson & the Miracles Stoned at the Nail Salon (2021) Lorde Carry Go Bring Come (1963) Justin Hinds & the Dominoes Police & Thieves (1976) Junior Murvin

And for the encore:

Picture This (1978) Blondie

I can’t play the piano, but I can play these songs on piano. Ever since 2021, I’ve set out to learn a batch of songs over the course of the year, one per month. That’s how I approached the assignment in 2021 and 2022; here’s a 10,000-word essay I wrote called “Absolute Beginner Blues” about the 2021 set.

Unfortunately, my ability to play each song evaporates as soon as I start learning the next one. This year, I realized it was time to change my approach: quality over quantity, as they say.

So, I’ve I made sure to have each song fully imprinted before moving on. As 2023 comes to a close, I’ve got the four songs I listed above well in hand. The Blondie encore is a personal favorite from my 2022 set that I knew I’d be able to re-learn quickly. I added it to this current set as a cool-down after rollicking through Police & Thieves.

Police & Thieves , which I originally knew because of the marvelous Clash cover version (1977), is the apotheosis of the set for me (I get lovingly lost in the reggae rock punctuation). I learned Police & Thieves from the sheet music to Junior Murvin’s original version, but I’ve combined it with the Clash’s arrangement and come up with a version that’s both melancholy and exuberant.

There’s an excellent jazz vocal version of Police & Thieves by Jamaican-London soul singer Zara McFarlane from her 2013 album If You Knew Her.

2. I am setting out to learn one more song on piano this year—the Clover’s 1959 doo-wop rock & roll hit Love Potion No. 9 written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

I started learning it this week, and after some confusion about the jarring opening D#-F#-G# chord, I asked my music genius friend Eliza (also my boss at work) what she made of it. She noted that this triple black key triad was a perfect half-step below the more cogent e minor chord, E-G-B, that starts the action a micro beat later; the song is in e minor. Eliza theorized: Maybe it’s a guitar thing, like you’re supposed to slide into the e minor, adding, But I’d leave that out on piano, it’s suited for guitar not piano.

But wait! The odd D# chord shows up again right away at the top of the very next measure. Ah ha! It’s not a guitar thing, it’s a doo-wop vocal swoop thing right into the e minor. This slurred batch of notes at the top of the song—and at the top of every verse—provides a Get-Set-Go jolt every time.

This discovery attuned my music theory antennae, and as I work through the rest of the song, the revelations are pouring in. For example, there’s an A# slide into a B that announces the chorus. This trick echoes the earlier slide, making the refrain all the more exciting.

3. Speaking of potions, I have to tout San Francisco-based perfume sorcerer COGNOSCENTI for their Fire & Rain scent. A few years back, as part of a New Year’s Resolution to pay more attention to vanity, I ended up ordering some perfumes from this small company. If I remember correctly, I was looking for a fancier version of the hippie scent I liked from my rock & roll youth—carrot oil. Carrot, it turned out, wasn’t popular with the grown-up market. The search led me to COGNOSCENTI, one company that still seemed to understand. They had a magical scent: No. 19, warm carrot.

I’m back on the vanity kick right now, and I returned to my trusted carrot-friendly small business. This time I chose No. 30, Hay Incense.

But the winner has turned out to be the complimentary sample they sent along with it, No. 44, Fire and Rain. I find myself going with a splash of Fire and Rain more often than No. 30. It’s not because I’m disappointed in the birch leaf-leather-oakwood musk of the Hay Incense, it’s because the surprising pine and charcoal combo of the award-winning Fire and Rain—it just won an honorable mention in the Artisan category from IAO (the Institute for Art and Olfaction!)—is swoon-inducing. My complimentary ampule has just about run out.

Charles Dickens’ Hard Times; Trumping the pro-choice vote; a 1963 Ska hit, “Carry Go Bring Come.”

Prompted by the New Yorker’s weekly “Take Three” column, where one of their staff writers summarizes three things they’re into this week, here’s Week #5 of my own version.

1) In last week’s installment, when I was obsessing over Friedrich Engels’ Manchester exposé, The Condition of the Working Classes in England, I noted that Engels’ poetic writing was giving me everything I could ever hope to get from a Dickens’ novel—and without the Byzantine plot lines.

Well, burn on me. Or at least a dose of irony: It turns out, I was clearly craving the excitement you get from fictional dramas and characters. This week, I can’t get enough of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), a class-conscious novel set in a fictionalized Manchester, Coketown. I was initially drawn in by the novel’s circus outcast Sissy Jupe, but as I read on and the book introduced: 1) a House of Commons sub-plot, 2) a mysterious old lady who’s spying on capitalist cheiftan Josiah Bounderby, and most of all, 3) a downcast Coketown factory “Hand,” laborer Steven Blackpool (whose Dickensian name ties right back to Engels’ purple prose about Manchester’s beshitten streets), I’m hooked.

2) Doubt and pessimism. I can’t help turning last week’s pro-choice wins in Red states (Ohio, Virginia, and Kentucky), and this week’s equally excellent news about a trans rights win in rural, Republican Texas (!), into an ominous realization: What I think we have learned from pro-choice wins in Red state's is not the Democrats have a winning issue with abortion, but that MAGA is pro-choice. They are more libertarian and libertine than evangelical.

What we’re witnessing in these Red states is a libertarian lean that may actually align them with pro-choice—and even pro-trans voters. Sure, they’re apparently willing and ready to throw women and queers under the bus in a Presidential election year (because, again, they don’t care about women and queers), but big reveal: Trump districts do not toe the Christian conservative line. This means, while Democrats are banking on pro-choice voters to help carry the day for Biden and the Ds in 2024, it’s not going to work because plenty of them will vote for Trump.

Trump voters are drawn to something else. As opposed to “family values,” what’s actually motivating the populist right is an angry mix of racism, Nativism, and the lawless bravado of Trumpist ideology that conjures a laissez-faire fantasy of (white) American liberty. I’m scared, and obsessing that this line of resentment politics will trump any pro-choice vote next year.

*UPDATE, 12/5/23: Having had more time to sit with this unwieldy theory, I’ve gotten slightly more articulate about it:

This recent NYT headline: "Talk About Abortion, Don’t Talk About Trump: Governors Give Biden Advice" gives me an opportunity to make a scary prediction about 2024. I think what we've actually learned from the recent string of pro-choice wins in Red states isn't that Democrats have a winning issue with abortion, but that lots of MAGA voters are pro-choice. Certainly, the evangelical wing is anti-abortion, but the basic MAGA voter is more libertarian and libertine, and they don't want the government butting into their private lives. I predict that 2024 exit polling in swing states like AZ (where Democrats are planning to run pro-choice initiatives) will show that tons of pro-choice voters overlap with pro-Trump voters. Sure, Democrats will come out to vote pro-choice, but the measures will not siphon Trump voters. Meanwhile, the measures will also bring out more evangelicals, and they'll tip the balance. This will be the stunned pundit class analysis on the morning that Trump wins it. : ( P.s. I think the recent, surprise pro-trans win in a Red, small town outside Dallas, TX reflected a similar MAGA voter sensibility.

3) Another dispatch from piano practice: I’m not reveling in Justin Hinds & the Dominoes 1963 Ska hit “Carry Go Bring Come” as much as I was recently reveling in Lorde’s “Stoned at the Nail Salon” and Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” (two earlier obsessions to make this list). But I am obsessing over this Jamaican pop number, nonetheless.

Here’s what’s going on: The sheet music arrangement I’ve got for “Carry Go Bring Come” doesn’t match the record so well. As a result, I’m spending a lot of time lovingly experimenting with the score to make it align with the jumping recorded version that first drew me to this early Ska tune.

The Tennis Practice Wall at Volunteer Park; The Condition of the Working Class in England; Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall, 1938

I still haven’t settled on a title for this weekly summary of current obsessions; nor to be honest, do my weekly preoccupations often qualify as full-blown “obsessions.” But, in copying the New Yorker’s weekly “Take Three” column where a different New Yorker staff writer sums up three things they’re currently into, I’m starting to think it’s a surprisingly accurate way to chronicle one’s life.

I’m still sick from the stink of anti-Semitism that’s closing in right now, and which commandeered my thoughts in last week’s installment, but my head did get caught up in some revitalizing stuff this week.

#4

1) Hitting at the Volunteer Park tennis court practice wall.

I was breaking a salubrious sweat within five minutes of volleying against the DIY, wood slat wall affixed (years ago?) to the fence at this secluded city tennis court. I was gleefully sore the next day knowing I’d gotten a gratifying work out slide-stepping between my forehand and backhand, leaning into swatting the ball with a grunt as if I were my favorite WTA star (and this week’s sub-obsession) Aryna Sabalenka. Speaking of, I finished up by practicing my serve, smashing the balls with abandon, hitting some obvious Wimbledon aces.

I biked over to the courts Friday afternoon (singing “Sabalenka Friday” as I went) and again on Wednesday morning, (singing “Sabalenka Morning”); I would have gone Monday morning too if it hadn’t been raining.

2) Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Engels’ materialist poetry is everything I want from a Charles Dickens novel without the labyrinthine plots; he writes with literary flair: “The streets uneven, fallen into ruts; masses of refuse, offal, and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys.”

He’s also a thorough reporter, documenting his tale of two cities—the wealthy and the poor living side by side as a revealing function of industrial capitalism—with columns of stats and excerpts from government reports.

I’m only a third of the way through this urban prole manifesto, but so far, it’s all sumptuous and serious prose: “The more elegant commercial and residential quarters hide the grimy working-men’s dwellings; they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth.”

3) Benny Goodman’s 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall

Benny Goodman on Klezmer-induced clarinet motifs. Gene Krupa on horse-hoove drum rolls. And Jess Stacy on sly piano.

My old dad turned me onto this moody yet rowdy live set of big band swing when I was a teenager. I’ve lovingly returned to it on occasion, but this time, its pop shapes, Mahler-esque arrangements, slight blues bent, and Gotham city beats have me cheering along with the sold out crowd.

The Ugly Rise in Anti-Semitism

Week #3

Unfortunately, my weekly “Current Obsessions” re-cap is getting choked by one anxious, overriding obsession this week: the ugly rise in anti-Semitism.

Just like African Americans told whites like me when we were appalled in 2016 at the overt racism of the Trump campaign and his subsequent election: This antisemitism is nothing new.

I’ve felt its heat my whole life, particularly in lefty circles, and yes, at my woke college decades ago.

Of course harsh criticism of Israel is warranted—and has been for a long time—nor is it inherently anti-Semitic to criticize Israel. But it’s not hard to detect the sickness of anti-Semitism when its embedded in those critiques, as it often is.

What makes this week so troubling is that anti-Semitism is out in the open now (even popular) , seething and loud.

Open Anti-Semitism had already been elevated by the right wing Trump era, which makes sense given that Trump’s Nativist America First rhetoric —called out and denounced during its original incarnation in the 1940s by Woody Guthrie !—is steeped in the historic tropes of anti-Semitism. QAnon’s focus on saving the children, for example, is just an updated version of age old conspiracy theories about Jews killing Christian babies.

I wish I could be obsessed this week with the tune I’m currently polishing on piano, “Carry Go Bring Come,” by Justin Hinds & the Dominoes; or with the book I just finished, Tomorrow Will Be Better by Betty Smith (or the one I just started, The Condition of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels); or by Benny Goodman’s famous 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall, which I’ve been listening to all day (loving the Jewish Klezmer vibes);

or even by my new vintage 1966 Mod sweater.

But the pathology of anti-Semitism is too heavy today. I’m having a hard time thinking about anything else right now or thinking that the world is a safe place for me to be.

Herbarium, botanical art print black Comforter, Microfiber Polyester Queen; “Stoned at the Nail Salon;” Up-zoning.

Here’s Week 2 of my own private version of the new New Yorker’s “Take Three” column where one of their writers summarizes three current personal obsessions. These are my current obsessions:

1) Despite the global horror show and the national shit show, it’s been a slow week for me personally; one that never seems to have actually started. I blame that on Obsession No. 1: My new 88” by 88” (queen) Black Herbarium vintage inspired botanical art print Comforter / Microfiber Polyester.

I bought it from Society 6, the online market where independent artists sell their goods on demand. It’s where I also got my Creature of the Black Lagoon shower curtain a few years ago. For months, I’ve had my hopes set on a new duvet (or comforter? or quilt? or bed cover?); I couldn’t quite get the search term right. I’ve always just called the cozy, thick top blanket a “pizza sheet.”

Specifically, I wanted a masculine pattern—dark colors? stripes?—but simultaneously, I didn’t want it to be glum nor American Psycho macho. I wasn’t finding anything on sites like Nordstrom, so I ventured over to Society 6, and they had the exact type of pattern I was looking for. Now I know what I meant by a “masculine” pattern: I meant a night forest, like a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story. This one was desinged by an artist named Iz Ptica.

Bonus: They were serious about the “microfiber polyester” technology; this comforter seems to combine low-grade electric blanket warmth with feathery ease. And even though my previous comforter was queen size, this one means it, providing endless cover for your feet. It arrived last Saturday, and I’ve been staying in ever since, forgoing my usual evenings out, and just chilling in bed instead. And going to sleep early.

2) It took practicing Lorde’s melancholy ballad “Stoned at the Nail Salon” on the piano to knock Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me” from the No. 1 spot on my personal music chart.

For weeks, I couldn’t get enough of practicing the 1962 Smokey Robinson hit; it was on last week’s obsession list. I’d been rehearsing it day after day throughout September and October until I decided this week it was time to hone another tune, lest I drive my neighbors crazy. I picked this aching Lorde ode to wistful self indulgence, which I first learned to play this Spring. It’s the second single off her remote (in a late-period Prince kind of way) 2021 LP, Solar Power. I’m stoned on this song.

My favorite lyric the first time around was her teenagers-in love-during-dystopia line: “We'd go dancin' all over the landmines under our town.” But this time, I’m swept up in this: “Spend all the evenings you can with the people who raised you/‘cause all the times they will change, it'll all come around.” These lines cap the song’s shift from the key of D to its relative minor, b—a move that cycles things down, almost impossibly, to an even more dolorous vibe—before rescuing it with a strain of hope.

3) My up-zone zealotry is at peak YIMBY this week. It’s because I’m currently reading M. Nolan Gray’s zoning abolition treatise Arbitrary Lines—from which I learned that up-zone doesn’t just mean more height, but means liberalizing the whole building envelope for more apartments.

My up-zone fervor was matched by two encouraging recent New York Times articles— ”California Slams San Francisco for ‘Egregious’ Barriers to Housing Construction” and “New York City Has a Bold Plan to Fix Its Housing Crisis. Will It Work?” — that seem to indicate up-zones are the zeitgeist coast to coast.

I will say: I wish the NYC plan didn't restrict the big buildup to areas that are already dense. But this note was a pleasant surprise: "One component would also make it easier to build smaller apartments, like for single-room occupancy, that could be relatively cheap to rent."

Joanna Garcia; Andrea Jin; “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me.”

@joannagarciapiano

I’m stealing the conceit of this new? New Yorker column on obsessions. It’s called “Pick Three.” Here’s the idea: a staffer writes quick summaries of three things they’re currently devouring. For example, this week’s installment features: an Instagram account called @lastnightatthemet which “documents peacocking at Lincoln Center;” a “jasmine and orange blossom” Dior “scent” called J’adore L’or, “an elegant, full-fat perfume” that “smells like pulling yourself together;” and the new album from Laufey, Bewitched, which is supposedly “a cross between Snow White and Astrud Gilberto—ideal background music for lingering into the night.”

Well, here are my three obsessions for the week 10/16/23:

1) I kill a lot of time on TikTok.

And though I unfortunately still get a lot of Boomer-centric guitar players and ladies in bikinis, I have been able to nudge my algorithm toward pretty adagio piano clips.

My favorite Tik-Tokker is piano teacher Joanna Garcia. Playing piano with wild eyes and revelations, she shares her unabashed passion for things like “the supernatural darkness of d minor” and the “exploratory reverie and painful depths” of Mozart’s The Fantasia, explaining the chords and melodies as she has at the keyboard.

She’ll often play a short phrase from a piece, rising from the piano bench in slight ecstasy as she does, before pausing to ask, “where do you imagine it might go next?” She’ll plunk out a few notes  (“maybe here?”) and then, wagging her finger, “no, it doesn’t do that. Listen to what it does do.” She then proceeds to close her eyes, lean into the music and sway to the “crazed chords” as she narrates music theory and communes with the spirit.     

(I also love going to sleep to this piano guy’s YouTube videos: Complete Piano Theory Course: Chords, Intervals, Scales & More! )

2) Speaking of TikTok, which is maybe the larger obsession here, I’m currently riveted by comedian Andrea Jin. I can’t get enough of her droll disbelief at the dumb world around her.

 3) Still, after a month of practicing this song, I remain obsessed with playing Smokey Robinson’s 1962 hit ”You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” on piano. I’m still smoothing out the second “you’ve really got a ho-old on  me” in the call & response chorus, making sure I land the combination G# (in the left hand) with the F# in (in the right hand) before segueing into the climactic 3rd “you really got a Ho-oh-old on me.”