The Rockville dump; Dad’s Mid-century modern desk; two reggae songs on an early hardcore album.

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

#25

I didn’t feel like posting this week because, to be candid, I’m all lost in nothing at the moment.

I thought about doing an anti list instead: stalled in H.D.’s book-length 1961 poem Helen in Egypt; bumped from my American Airlines flight back home on Sunday after moving Mom into a smaller apartment; and lastly, disappointed in Jane Wong’s Seattle Arts & Lectures interview with one of my favorite poets, Victoria Chang. (I like Wong’s poetry a lot, but as an interviewer, she was unprepared and disrespectful of Gen X-genius Chang);

Local poet Jane Wong (r) interviews poetry star Victoria Chang (l) at Rainier Arts Center in Columbia City, 4/2/24

And an addendum to my complaint about American Airlines’ rude but evidently legal “involuntary bumping” policy: Airports are not the “Aerotropolis” bazaars they’re all-dreamed-up-to-be in urbanist white papers and science fiction novels, at least not National Airport in D.C., where I had to spend the night, and where the shops and bars close around 10pm.

Stuck at National Airport, 3/31/24.

But I do want to keep the momentum going on this chronicle of weekly-obsessions project, so here are three things that gave me a little buzz this week:

1) The satisfying Shady Grove Transfer Station, aka the Montgomery County Dump in north Rockville, MD.

This is a landfill, so not an environmentally friendly scene—as opposed, to say, taking Dad’s stuff (and much of Mom’s as well) to Goodwill, as we moved Mom into her assisted living apartment over the weekend.

(We actually did make some Goodwill runs. And we also hit Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore, plus a little bookstore called Wonder Books to get a price on Dad’s dad’s 1925 12-volume Funk and Wagnalls Jewish Encyclopedia set.)

But mostly, downsizing for Mom’s new apartment involved several energizing trips to the accessible and friendly dump. Hoisting and heaving old stuff over the ledge and listening to it slide away and fall and crash—similar, I imagine, to the cathartic sensation of dropping evidence down a dark well and hearing it splash—is kind of a kick.

2) Sad footnote from the weekend move: I wanted to keep Dad’s amazing Mid-century modern desk. Along with his packed and mesmerizing bookshelves, this desk defined Dad’s signature den throughout my childhood. But it cost $3,000 to ship cross country to my Seattle apartment. So, we’re selling it.

Dad’s cool, clean-lines desk accompanied the majority of his days: 12 years in Rockville, 21 years in Bethesda, 22 years in North Rockville, and finally, as seen here, in Mom & Dad’s most recent apartment in Gaithersburg during the last year and a half of his life.

While growing up in Rockville and Bethesda, I often camped out in Dad’s den perusing the Raymond Chandler novels on the book shelves as he sat at his desk drafting legal briefs by hand in black pen on yellow legal pad. But more often I spent time lying on the floor there, and mostly lying underneath the desk. Despite this cozy ritual, I didn’t remember the “1966” stamp on the underside. It leapt out at me this weekend. The spring of 1966 (when I was on the way), is when my parents and my older brother moved out of their Takoma Park apartment and into our family’s first house in Rockville. I had no idea Dad’s desk and I formed parallel lines in history.

Despite the frugal decision to sell the desk, I did pilfer the left top drawer (and smuggle it home in my carry on.) I’m now using it as an in-box on my own desk, a knock-off of Dad’s that my parents bought me as birthday present 25 years ago.

3) Last week’s list included a prized LP cover tee shirt find: Bad Brain’s first record. As I noted in that post, while I was a Bad Brain’s adjacent teen at the time (1982), this landmark D.C. hardcore record is not encoded in my DNA. So I’ve been listening to it all week.

In addition to the catchy opening banger, Sailin’ On (“woooh, oooh, oooh”), the album’s two dub-inflected reggae jams—the off-handed Jah Calling , which sounds like an over-inspired outtake, and the more composed (and nearly twice as long) Leaving Babylon, with its thoughtful drum attack, no-frills vocal, and the perfect bass line—are the story here, on this record of precursor speed metal.

Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Flavored Syrup; Bad Brains tee-shirt; Spirited Away NA bottle shop.

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

#24. I’m posting a few days late; this covers March 22nd —March 28.

1) Here’s a dispatch from the cosmic realm:

Just a week after writing about Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Syrup in my dad’s obituary. I came across the famed Yiddish secret ingredient at Kalustyan’s, a midtown Manhattan specialty Indian spice and grocery market. I was tagging along with Erica, who makes a pilgrimage to this shop, at Lexington and 23rd, every time she’s in NYC.

As Erica diligently set out to load her basket with gourmet provisions, I wandered off on my own, randomly perusing the aisles and aisles of salts, seasonings, sweeteners, extracts, grains, sugars, herbs, beans, and flour meals.

Rounding a corner into the the second or third room (there are four, plus an upstairs), I was startled to come across a 22 oz. squeeze bottle of the sweet Brooklyn shtetl staple.

I immediately grabbed the cartoon red, yellow, and brown bottle, found Erica in the rice aisle, and tossed the chocolate syrup into her basket.

A few evenings later, back in Seattle on March 26 (what would have been Dad’s 94th birthday), and my first March 26th without him, I stowed a glass in the freezer and headed to Trader Joe’s to get some whole milk and soda water. These are the other two ingredients in Dad’s all-time favorite treat: the New York Chocolate Egg Cream soda.

I followed the classic recipe: No egg! Slather the bottom of the chilled glass with an inch of U-Bet chocolate syrup, add a quarter cup of cold milk, and then, marveling as they form separate black & white-cookie striations, fill the rest of the glass with icy seltzer as you stir and watch the soda-shop concoction fizz and froth over.

Tuesday @ 8:33pm, 3/26/24.

I tested a hippie version too, subbing in oat milk, but it didn’t taste nearly as good.

I’ll be lighting the traditional Yahrzeit candle every March 10 to mark Dad’s death, but I’ll also be drinking a delicious New York Egg Cream to celebrate his life every March 26th.

2) At some point during my trip East (3/14/24—3/25/24), I realized I’d only packed one tee shirt. Erica suggested we go to Uniqlo to buy some more, but as we were strolling through the Lower East Side, I told her there was no need for such formality; we were bound to come across a goofy gift shop with an assortment of teenage tees. On cue, we happened upon City Fun NYC Band Tee Heaven at 1st Ave between 3rd St. and 2nd St.

I got a lovely Hunky Dory-era David Bowie shirt, with appropriate 1972, hippie Sesame Street lettering, and a punk aesthetic Blondie shirt featuring one of the band’s 1977 gig posters (for a show in L.A.)

I also bought a ‘90s indie rock shirt for Erica: Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain album cover.

But the fantastic find was an explosive Bad Brains tee emblazoned with the legendary D.C. punk band’s eponymous and iconic first (1982) album cover: a sketch drawing of a lone lightning bolt striking the U.S. Capitol dome, set in blaring reggae colors.

I’m not trying to rewrite my own history of growing up in D.C.; I was no punk rock teen. I wore tennis shirts! However, I was a political (anti-Reagan) new wave kid channeling the Flying Lizards, Blondie, the first two B-52s albums, the Sex Pistols, the Jam, and the Clash as I wrote my own weirdo pop songs and tuned in D.C.’s left-of-the dial underground radio station, WHFS. Accordingly, I felt an affinity to D.C.’s notorious punk circuit, which was otherwise a bit too juvenile delinquent for my self-consciously quirky-kid interests.

However, I can make this fantastic claim: I went to a now storied May 1981 YMCA show (that got shut down by the police) featuring D.C.’s early harDCore trailblazers Minor Threat, Youth Brigade, SOA, and also, the reason I went to the gig in the first place, Assault & Battery (playing their great song—and soon to be new band name—Artificial Peace). This was around the same time I had scrawled “the Clash” on one of my white shirts.

So, while Bad Brains wasn’t actually my jam back in 1982, I do have a proud stake in the nostalgia for those creatively rambunctious days.

1982, the debut record for Bad Brains, D.C.’s African American punk rock legends.

My friend Lee has a great line: The best and worst thing about our parents’ generation is that the First Lady of the United States was named Lady Bird and nobody batted an eye. Bad Brains gives my generation a similar and kind of sadder oxymoron:

The best and worst thing about our generation is that Paul Hudson, the front-man for Bad Brains, the defining early 1980s youth-in-action punk band, felt compelled to rename himself H.R., which stood for Human Rights.

3) Via Erica again: Here’s another Manhattan find . Tacking to her NA expertise, we traipsed through the Lower East Side to the bountiful shelves at Spirited Away, the first non-alcholic bottle shop in the U.S. It’s located at 177 Mott St. (just north of Broome St.) and just a few blocks away from the hipster hotel we were staying at on Freeman Alley.

The easy going, well-informed, hippie-lady shopkeeper gave us graciously liberal samples and steered us toward all sorts of intriguing NA brands. Admittedly, I was thrown for a loop by her psychedelic dress.

Erica got a bottle of Wilfred’s rhubarb heavy spritz bitter orange & rosemary apertif.

I returned a few days later and the hippie proprietor threw herself into my search (D— X’s actually, texted from Seattle for “things that are licorice-forward or warming spice…and in the other spectrum, garden/grass/green fresh herbs”).

Invested in finding the perfect elixir, Spirited Away’s charismatic tout (scroll down to Alex) talked up Zero Zero’s Amarno (on the sweeter, licorice side), warned me off of one overrated pick (Seed Lip Garden 108), suggested the chicory, coriander, clove-forward Namari (matching the call for a grassy glass), and

Non-Alcholic potions on the stacked shelves at Spirited Away.

eventually nudged me toward a floral and spicy bottle of Melati, where cranberry-sour Chinese Goji berries meet hibiscus. I happily went with that, and she slipped it in a netted gift bag.

To put this in full-circle context, Erica and I went to the first NA bar in NYC/Brooklyn—the Getaway— back in October 2019. Five years on now, strolling into the latest zeitgeist development—a full-fledged bottle shop with a dizzying array of non-alcoholic choices stacked on the shelves—it was a buzz to revel in Spirited Away’s announcment that the 21st Century has begun.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey; Lorazepam; Ross Dress for Less black dress shoes, $29.95.

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

#23

1) The Story of Film: An Odyssey is (an hour-long-each) 15-episode documentary series made in 2011 about the history of movies, or “cinema” as the earnest and eloquent narrator/writer Mark Cousins prefers to call it—with starry eyed reverence.

Jean Cocteau’s Blood of Poet, 1931

Perhaps I’m beguiled by Cousins’ Irish accent, but following his seamless brain-synapse segues, which he narrates with lines like “a film with its eyes lowered,” is a delight as he connects movies such as Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) to French avant-gardist Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet (1931); or Italian neorealist masterpiece Bicycle Thieves (1948) to Hollywood film noir classic Double Indemnity (1944); or iconic American teenage alienation movie Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to Egyptian art film Cairo Station (1958).

I admit, I’ve only been watching the series as a way to fall asleep while crashing on my friend Gregor Samsa’s couch this week (he’s the one who turned me on to this sweeping series.) And so far, I’ve only watched “Episode 4, the 1930s - The Arrival of Sound;” “Episode 5, 1939-1952 - Post-War Cinema;” and “Episode 6, 1953-1957 - Sex & Melodrama.” So, I’m not 100% clear on Cousins’ grand thesis. But generally, his surprising pivots, such as the one I noted from Hollywood classic Rebel Without a Cause to Egyptian director Youssef Chahine’s Cairo Station, should give you a sense that Cousins is an inclusive film docent who is interested in nudging the history of cinema away from Hollywood movies, which he reveres regardless, and into a global context.

Ultimately, Cousins keeps coming back to the word “innovation” as the controlling theme of film studies. Accordingly, Cousins turns his attention to moments like Enrique Riveros’ splashdown into Jean Cocteau’s mirror (in the aforementioned and experimental Blood of a Poet); or the superimposed film screens behind the music club dances in Love Me Tonight (1932); or the Bauhaus shadows in Frankenstein (1931); or Joan Blondell and Etta Moten’s feminist subversion in the musical grand finale to Busby Berkley’s Gold Diggers, 1933 (1933).

2) Lulling myself to sleep might be the larger theme this week.

After sitting shiva with Mom in the living room until 11:30 pm most nights, I would suddenly find myself anxious and wide awake on the hard couch in the guest room—a little anxious too about the mouse sightings; I heard one scurrying in the hallway outside my door at night as well. Luckily, Dad’s personal effects came with a bottle of calming, elysian inducing Lorazepam.

Benzos, Bennys, electric music, and solid walls of sound.

It’s probably not wise to make a habit of plugging into the faithless (with electric boots and a mohair suit) by sprinkling your nervous system with Benzodiazepines. Suspiciously, in addition to feeling drained and melancholy this week, I’m also feeling chemically downtempo as well.

But I was grateful for the deep sleep.

3) Fed up with the holes in all my dress shoes (living in soggy Seattle), I finally tossed out my entire threadbare collection last November. I only remembered this otherwise excellent decision as I was packing for Dad’s funeral on Tuesday night.

My backup plan, which I thought could actually turn into a fitting in memoriam, was to find a pair of shoes in Dad’s closet when I got to D.C. But when I looked, it turned out (I had forgotten) that we’d handed off all his dress shoes to a thrift shop last year when we moved my parents out of their condo into a senior living apartment.

So, the day before the funeral, the chatty health care worker who’s helping my 89-year-old mom offered me a ride to the nearby shopping center. I quickly ended up at the Ross Dress for Less where I found the perfect pair—and a comfy bargain at $29.95.

3/15/24

After tucking in my grey, heavy cotton dress shirt and putting on my classiest tie (feeling my Dad’s warm hands and breath first teaching me how), I slipped on my brand new Perry Ellis Portfolio Ultra Foam black dress shoes.

I am now committed to putting these regal bargain shoes to the test.

3/21/24

James Baldwin remembers the Civil Rights movement; “I Feel Love” on piano; U.S. v. Dege (364 US 51,1960.)

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

#22

Nearly half a year into writing these weekly posts, I suddenly realize that while some of the entries have legitimately been about bona fide (tho perhaps, minor) obsessions—William Wordsworth in January, for example, or Week #1’s account of practicing Smokey Robinson’s You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me on piano—I’m more often actually writing about exciting finds such as last week’s item on John McPhee’s Arthur Ashe book, Week 13’s Solely’s Green Banana Black Fusilli Pasta, or Week 10’s bed of nails acupuncture mat.

This week’s list includes one minor obsession and two excellent finds, though not necessarily in that order.

1) I saw an obscure, quiet, and remarkable film on Friday night: 1980’s I Heard it Through the Grapevine directed by experimental British filmmaker Dick Fontaine and his wife, African-American filmmaker and actor Pat Hartley.

Limited to a brief run at NYC’s Film Forum at the time and a PBS broadcast, this patiently and beautifully shot film tags along novelist, Civil Rights leader, intellectual, and default spokesperson for the human race, serene genius, James Baldwin.

Here’s what I texted my friend Tom about the movie:

It was basically the mischievously reserved and twinkling James Baldwin traveling through the South, revisiting Civil Rights movement sites (Birmingham, Selma) interspersed with the 1960s footage (fire hoses, dogs, electric stun batons, Bull Connor, MLK, Malcolm X, plus Birmingham ‘63 leader Fred Shuttlesworth and Freedom Summer ‘64 organizer Dave Dennis.) Those last two figures also appear here as talking heads, 20 years on. Additionally, there’s footage of Baldwin chatting with lesser known ‘60s activists and leaders (mostly women), still very much active in 1980, at contemporary conferences, churches, picnics, and community centers. There’s also footage of Baldwin trading theories with poets and friends in his apartment. Towards the end of the movie, Baldwin drives around the ruins of Newark, juxtaposed against chilling footage of the 1967 riots, with Amiri Baraka. Funny, when he first greets Baraka at a literary conference, cameras rolling at a backstage klatsch, Baldwin announces, “This is LeRoi Jones, who now goes by Amiri Baraka,” which seemed—because Baldwin appears to idle in convivially suspicious judgement of his colleagues—as a slight dig. For the grand finale, Baldwin strolls with Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, visiting the former slave market in Augustine, Florida noting, and far removed from any snark as he’s clearly awed by Achebe: “This is where you and I meet.” Towards the end of the movie, there’s a shot of President-Elect Reagan on a TV in the background, putting a heavy stamp on the dispirited thesis of the film: the Civil Rights movement is dead and voting is useless.

This searching, early 1980s leftist narrative (and the pot-luck community centers) are very familiar to me. So while Baldwin was reconnecting with the hopes and strife of the ‘60s, I was reconnecting with the lost-at-sea, Reagan-era activism of my youth.

The Harvard Film Archive, which helped restore and re-release the movie, writes:

Whereas in the 1980s the film represented a revisitation and reassessment of the civil rights movement, today audiences look back at the longer, more convoluted arc of the movement’s ongoing path, which has changed but never ended.

The last shot of the movie shows Baldwin and Achebe standing on the beach in front of a stormy Atlantic ocean—a visualization of Baldwin’s earlier observation about slave trade history and about the foreboding currents ahead.

I saw this gem at the new(ish) and well-run, art house theater in Columbia City, Beacon Cinema, which kind of counts as find in itself. It struck me as a happy place for bohemians, oddballs, leftists, and independent cinema intellectuals.

And a follow-up text to Tom: Bonus. The camera work capturing a lot of the live music (bar and/or church bands) was crisp and intimate in a way I’d never seen before: Accessible close ups of guitar fret boards and piano keyboards as the musicians’ fingers did the singing.

2) Two weeks ago, when I wrote about what has since become my main source of music—internet station thelotradio.com—I noted that during one of the DJ sets:

the beat sequence from the Giorgio Moroder/Pete Bellotte/Donna Summer EDM earthquake I Feel Love is still reverberating 47 years later; I learned this android diva masterpiece on piano in 2022 and, swaying to this week’s jams from Brooklyn, I quickly put the Moroder sheet music back on my keyboard stand.

This week, I’m in the throes of re-learning this landmark piece of 1977 electronic pop.

Certainly, the piano is no match for the dance club rhythm track nor, more to the point, the synthesized drone of the original (though, even as a lone piano note, that magical e flat still swims through your body like mulled wine.)

So, I’m fixed on re-fabbing Morodor’s electronic mechanics and Summer’s melody into a ballad. It helps that the the chorus is already a slow burn.

Mom & Dad on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court after one of his later arguments on 3/26/84, his 54th birthday, coincidentally; teenage me took the photo.

3) My dad, the Great Jerry Feit, died this week, 16 days shy of his 94th birthday.

Research for his obituary (with an assist from my federal lawyer pal Annie) turned up not only an early women’s rights case he argued and won in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. v. Dege (1960), but also audio of the oral arguments.

My dad was 29 at the time, three years into his new job as an attorney for the Department of Justice. Over the course of his long career as a government attorney, he would argue 13 cases in front of the Supreme Court.

In Dege, he argued that a wife could be party to a conspiracy with her husband, shooting down the idea—promulgated by the defendant and upheld by the lower courts—that in marriage, a woman is subsumed by her husband and therefore cannot be charged with conspiracy because a conspiracy takes two people. (Fun fact, the conspiracy here was an exotic bird smuggling scheme.)

Here’s my dad addressing the Warren Court:

The court below relying upon the ancient notion of marital unity found that husband and wife were not two persons but one and on this basis, dismissed the indictment.

We think that ruling was incorrect.

In present day terms it is clear, we think, that husband and wife are legally separate individuals.

As my lawyer friend said: “Bad for criminal defense, good for feminism.”

So good for feminism, in fact, that a 38-year-old attorney named Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited Dege in Reed vs. Reed, her landmark 1971 Supreme Court victory—the first time the Court used the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to rule that a law discriminating against women was unconstitutional.

In the Reed brief, which specifically found that “Discrimination based on gender is not constitutional when naming the administrator of an estate,” Ginsberg and her legal colleagues (including NOW co-founder Pauli Murray) cite Dege repeatedly:

Fortunately, the Court already has acknowledged a new direction, see United States v. Dege, 364 U.S. 51 (1960), and the case at bar provides the opportunity clearly and affirmatively to inaugurate judicial recognition of the constitutionally imperative claim made by women for the equal rights before the law guaranteed to all persons. …

in 1960, he [Justice Frankfurter] refused to rely on "ancient doctrine" concerning the status of women. In United States v. Dege, 364 U.S. 51 (1960), he buried the historic common law notion that husband and wife are legally one person. …

it harks back to the stereotyped view of women rejected in United States v. Dege, 364 U.S. 51 (1960)

It’s no wonder that when my dad won the prestigious Tom C. Clark award for best federal attorney in 1983, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a United States Court of Appeals Judge for the District of Columbia, was chair of the selection panel.

A serendipitous city of detours; John McPhee’s Levels of the Game; Jonathan Glazer’s Birth

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

#21

1) There’s nothing like an action-packed weekend, particularly if it’s unplanned, to signal that spring in the city is icumen in.

With rushes of serendipitous socializing and spur-of-the-moment detours, these are the kind of adventures that turn dinners, retail discoveries, and surprise characters into coordinates for drafting a city map.

The action, starting Friday after work when I took the #5 bus to Valium Tom’s Phinney Ridge book shop to pick up an order and settle in for a gab session, rolled out unscripted from there:

An impromptu, late dinner (latticed roti with coconut curry, and buckwheat noodles with button and shiitake mushrooms) at Kedai Makan, which, fortuitously, didn’t have its usual line out the door as we were strolling by, so we seized the opportunity; a chance consignment-shop-find (a sweater) after stopping in on a whim while walking back from Walgreens; a tentacular 30-minute catch up with my brilliant, dear old friend William Carlos Album upon running into her Saturday afternoon at my neighborhood coffee shop; and, after offhandedly going to Otherworld wine bar early Saturday evening thinking I’m just going to sip one glass of wine while I finish this chapter, running into lovely G & H and their smart pal Amy instead, and locking down over two bottles of dark fruit wine until midnight. (We continued the night with a visit to Dave’s Hot Chicken where we traipsed for a late-night dinner. I had the breaded cauliflower slider.)

Latticed Roti Jala @ Kedai Makan

A Languedoc blend—Mourvèdre is the main grape—at Otherworld Wine Bar.

Breaded cauliflower sliders at Dave’s Hot Chicken.

The weekend of improvisation continued on Sudnay. After A) the one scheduled outing on the calendar, a morning sandwich shop brunch with some new friends Data X and I made earlier this year after randomly sharing a booth at a music show, and then B) driving to Interbay to drop ECB’s contact lenses at her house (where DX had never been before and was mesmerized by ECB’s apartment therapy), there were two, sudden city field trips. First, it was off to Ballard’s well-stocked and impressive Town & Country Market to buy Pomelo hybrids and pilfer Yuzu white chocolate beans. Next, it was over to Kanom Sai in the Central District for whatever looked good. I got two vegan mushroom pastry puffs.

It was a very The-Death-and-Life-of-Great-American-Cities weekend—and an instructive one at that, where the human agency to take detours and follow diversions emerged as the governing principle for city living, “replete with new improvisations.”

2) I devoured 70 pages of Levels of the Game, John McPhee’s literary dispatch from the 1968 U.S. Open, in one sitting on Monday night.

Originally published serially in the New Yorker in 1969, Levels of the Game is a minutely and lovingly detailed account of the semifinal match between tennis legend Arthur Ashe, (“his body tilts forward far beyond the point of balance”), who, that year, goes on to become the first African American to win the Men’s U.S. Open, and Clark Graebner, Ashe’s bruising, top-ranked, opponent.

McPhee approaches sports writing as if he’s Sherlock Holmes, seamlessly combining a meticulous tennis-match narrative—”He takes his usual position, about a foot behind the baseline, until Graebner lifts the ball. Then he moves quickly about a yard forward and stops, motionless, as if he were participating in a game of kick-the-can and Graebner were It…”—with the slow motion backstories that inform each volley: “‘It’s very tough to tell a young black kid that the Christian religion is for him,’ he says. ‘He just doesn’t believe it. When you start going to church and you look up at this picture of Christ with blond hair and blue eyes, you wonder if he’s on your side.’”

For me, McPhee’s crack reporting skills—he knows exactly how Graebner places his feet when he brushes his teeth in the morning—confirmed McPhee’s revered status as a progenitor of creative non-fiction.

Those reporter’s chops are certainly on display as McPhee conjures Ashe’s childhood with evocative quotes from Ashe (“The pool was so full of kids in the summer you couldn’t see the water”), to his research into Ashe’s junior games (“he read books beside the tennis courts when he wasn’t playing,”) plus a wonderful anecdote from a high school date about Ashe’s “antique father.” He does all this right alongside the immediate tennis play-by-play (“a difficult, brilliant stroke, and Ashe hit it with such nonchalance that he appeared to be thinking of something else”), while adding his transcripts of the rivals’ internal monologues: ”Graebner dives for it, catches it with a volley, then springs up, ready, at the net. Ashe lobs into the sun, thinking, ‘That was a good get on that volley. I didn’t think he’d get that.’”

And he serves quiet axioms along the way: “Confidence goes back and forth across a tennis net like the ball itself, and only somewhat less frequently.”

One disappointing oddity: For a book about such a turbulent era, McPhee writes with a square, AM radio voice; as a result, a time that is decidedly connected to our own is rendered strangely remote here.

That said, it’s a pleasure to disappear into a lost world drawn so vividly.

3) A friend, the aforementioned Valium Tom, who knows just how much I like Rosemary’s Baby (1968)—which does, unnervingly, mirror those turbulent times— recommended I watch iconoclastic filmmaker Jonathan Glazer’s Birth (2004), a spooky and stoic drawing room thriller about reincarnation on Central Park East starring Nicole Kidman wearing a brittle version of Mia Farrow’s Vidal Sassoon bob.

In addition to reincarnation, Birth is also about eternal love. The reincarnation in question: Anna’s (Nicole Kidman’s) dead husband seems to have returned in the guise of a knowing 10-year-old boy (Cameron Bright), whose sinister presence is reminiscent of the possessed boy in Henry James’ gothic 1898 novella Turn of the Screw. Sharing Anna’s dead husband’s name (Sean), the haunted boy also shares the dead man’s memories, including intimate ones. Original Sean died ten years ago, and the opening scene let’s us know Sean’s psychic doppelganger was born that very day. Now, 10-year-old Sean, who has evidently been lingering in the lobby of Anna’s Upper East Side apartment building for some time, emerges upstairs at a small dinner party to announce that she is not to marry her new fiancé, Joseph (Danny Huston).

Kidman, who immerses herself in the role with thespian intensity, portrays Anna’s pensive and quiet mental break radiating both chilling energy and contentment as she falls under the spell of the boy’s mysterious reality.

The movie also stars 80-year-old Lauren Bacall (!) (as Anna’s patrician mother) and, in a small, but giant role, Anne Heche as dead Sean’s sister-in-law (and ex-lover). Despite Kidman’s showstopping performance and Bright’s magnetic, disquieting ubiquity, Heche steals the stage as a kind of unhinged deus ex machina.

I’ve only seen one other Glazer movie, 2013’s cryptic science fiction film, Under the Skin, starring a silver liquid void and Scarlett Johansson. I’m now a Glazer fan. He also made Sexy Beast (2000) and Zone of Interest (2023).

Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries; thelotradio.com; Jay Caspian Kang’s Michael Chang documentary.

I’m All Lost In… the three things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

Week #20.

Let the record show that while this week’s official list doesn’t include any 19th century poets, I did—per my recent realization that I needed a crash course on the Romantics—start reading William Blake on Thursday night as part my own private Poets-of-the-1800s seminar.

I’ll report back on whether or not Blake (1757 –1827) takes.

I imagine I’ll also report back one of these days on Dave’s Hot Chicken, where DX nudged us for a detour on Tuesday night.

I only pilfered some of her fries, reluctantly passing on the hot chicken tender sandwich. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the spicy euphoria that’s available here. I must try the vegan cauliflower version of these heat-wave sandwiches. Evidently, it’s all about the multi-level seasoning, anyway.

Open until Midnight during the week and until 1 am on Fridays and Saturdays, this populist spot is where tipsy and hungry memories are made.

https://www.instagram.com/daveshotchicken/

Okay, on to this week’s official list of obsessions.

1) I still remember reading an excerpt from Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti’s innovative memoir two years ago when the NYT ran a preview — and how it struck me that her writing should be filed under poetry rather than memoir.

When I saw that the book finally came out this month, I had to buy a copy.

Innovative how? Heti downloaded a decade-worth of journal entries into an Excel spreadsheet and re-sorted it alphabetically by the first letter of each sentence.

From Chapter 9, for example:

I have never been so screwed for money, and I am angry at Lemons for not returning my emails. I have never known what a relationship is for. I have never worn such dark lipstick before. I have no money. I have no one. I have spent the whole night in my hotel room, eating chocolate cereal. I have started playing Tetris, which feels halfway between writing and drinking.

While the effect can be a bit like refrigerator magnet poetry—with entire sentences instead of single words—Heti’s idea that “untethering” her lines from their original chronological narrative “would help me identify patterns and repetitions…How many times had I written, ‘I hate him,’ for example?” works as exegesis for the reader as well. By scrambling the traditional notion of a diary, often comically so, Heti’s non-stop and remarkable juxtapositions reveal how life’s epic and mundane moments intertwine—indistinguishably at times—to create a super-narrative distinct from specific plot twists.

It’s a useful, and ironic directive (from a diary!), to get out of one’s own head and notice the larger stories that define us.

I’m only on Chapter 14, N, which begins, “Neglect my friends and family. Never having felt so sad. New sheets for the bed. New York, I think, made me depressed…” but I will have surely finished the whole book by the time you read this. I’m addicted to the clipped rhythm that’s transforming Heti’s non-sequitur flow into a logical story. It’s as if each sentence is commenting on the preceding one. Glued to her “untethered” account, I’m dying to see what happens next.

Heads up—not that this going to ward anyone off—these diaries are salacious.

2) On the internet airwaves since its 2016 debut, The Lot Radio is a-DJ-booth-as-a-wizards-academy, housed in an abandoned shipping container and attached to a coffee cart on a parcel at the Northwest edge of Brooklyn’s McCarren Park.

Featuring a roster of DJs with expertise in transnational urban archipelago dance grooves, oscillating splices, and reconfigured wavelengths, the station broadcasts live sets every day from 7am to 9pm, overflowing into 24 hours with archived programming.

During a set by Juan MacLean or Takaya Nagase, I noticed that the beat sequence from the Giorgio Moroder/Pete Bellotte/Donna Summer EDM earthquake I Feel Love is still reverberating 47 years later; I learned this android diva masterpiece on piano in 2022 and, swaying to this week’s jams from Brooklyn, I quickly put the Moroder sheet music back on my keyboard stand.

I highly recommend adding a serving of the station’s rhythmic ambient tracks to your daily mix: In addition to the flawless morning and late night downtempo sets, it’s a delight to tune in Lot Radio’s dedicated beat makers—or watch them work the dials on live cam—while you cook dinner.

3) I saw a remarkable documentary at Northwest Film Forum on Saturday afternoon.

On the schedule as part of the 2024 Seattle Asian American Film Festival, American Son was about former U.S. tennis star Michael Chang, who, on his dazzling tear through the 1989 French Open, improbably beat invincible world No. 1 Ivan Lendl. Chang, ranked No. 19 at the time and just 17 years old (still the youngest person to ever win a Men's Grand Slam title), went on to beat No. 3, Stefan Edburg for the title.

17-year-old Michael Chang defeats No. 1-ranked Ivan Lendl in the 1989 French Open.

This was not merely a sports doc. Magically and tragically, the historic student pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square were happening at the exact same time, and the movie, with an eloquent touch, synthesized these dual narratives, while also exploring Chang's Chinese identity in the U.S.

I don’t believe in fate or kismet, but the space-time continuum clearly flexed its omnipotence when this diligent Chinese-American teenager became an international champion just as students in Beijing were simultaneously challenging and transfixing the world.

After his evidently inexorable victory, the otherwise apolitical Chang took the stage for his trophy ceremony speech and landed—almost as if the dialectic of the universe chose him—with a mic-drop shout out: “God bless everybody, especially those in China… China.” (Go to the 3:23:00 mark here and cry your eyes out.)

Other tear-jerking and revelatory scenes: Tennis legend and Civil Rights hero Arthur Ashe’s intimate, 5-page, typed letter to 15-year-old Chang, thoughtfully urging the youth to consider the politics of his decision to turn pro; a maimed Tiananmen square protest veteran capping his narrative of the heartbreaking June uprising with his memories of Chang’s germane words; and the filmmaker’s poetic overlay of Chang’s climactic winning move against Lendl (4-6, 4-6, 6-3, 6-3, 6-3, by the way) with earlier footage of Chang’s identical brainy sleight only a few years before, during one of his convincing USTA Junior Hard Court championship wins.

This was a premiere (and sold-out) screening. The director, the super thoughtful Jay Caspian Kang, plus Chang himself, and his elderly mom, did a substantive Q&A after the film with NWFF’s former Executive Director. There were plenty of tears and laughs throughout.

I particularly liked Kang’s origin story about the film. A former contrarian sports blogger and editor at ESPN’s Grantland, Kang, currently a writer at the NYT, remembered the “Linsanity” craze during the NBA’s 2011/2012 season when everyone was saying, Wow, there’s never been an Asian sports phenomenon before. With his reporter’s bullshit detector buzzing, Kang thought, Not true! He decided to make the Michael Chang movie right then and there.

Jane Wong’s poems; Kim Gordon’s video; and reactionary utopianism on the Left.

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

Week 19.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that William Wordsworth nearly appeared on this list once again. It would have been Wordsworth’s record-making, 4th time showing up as a weekly obsession here.

I finished his comprehensive Penguin Classics collection on Saturday morning (scroll for my glowing review here), and I just can’t seem to leave him behind. On Saturday afternoon, to celebrate finishing this excellent set, I went and bought another book of his poems; a slim, hardcover volume. I set it out on my living room table.

Now I reach for it every morning and start my day by picking a Wordsworth poem and reading it aloud.

But phooey on dead white guys. Here’s this week’s list.

Three women: Chinese-American poet, Jane Wong; underground rock musician/legend, 70-year-old, Kim Gordon; and Ethiopian-American journalist, Lydia Polgreen.

1) As I reported last week, I bought tickets to an upcoming, live Q&A with one of my favorite contemporary poets, Victoria Chang. And, fortuitously, it turns out that Chang is going to be interviewed by Jane Wong, a Puget Sound poet whose own first collection, Overpour, was a highlight for me in 2019.

Reminded of how much I had liked Wong’s debut, I bought her 2021 follow-up, the immaculately titled, How To Not Be Afraid of Everything.

Wong’s poetry splices her outcast biography—mostly her formative experience in white America/”the Frontier” (growing up poor with a Chinese immigrant mom and derelict, alcoholic father)—into the harrowing history of her grandparents’ crushed lives under Mao.

She still speaks to them: “Was I a pigeon in this city in your dream? Were you/ hungry when dreaming?” And they still speak to her: “…I can only hear the vowels of your questions,/your fists curling and uncurling in sleep, the low rush of wind along ferns so tall—they must be pulled up by the sky.”

Wong is a master of the fine detail (”a butterfly crawls into a chip bag;” “fruit flies fluttering about like snow;” “my father’s ruined jaw/misshapen like a novice ceramist’s bowl”); the liberating revelation (”let all your hexes seep into your pores;” “beware of light you cannot see;” “leave any country that has a name”); and sumptuous mic drops (“Serenade a snake and slither its tongue/into yours and bite. Love! What is love/ if not knotted garlic”).

Her evident talent effortlessly lifts her verse beyond politics into poetry. An uncommon skill!

Poet Jane Wong

Marking my favorite poems in this collection with stars became redundant, but there’s definitely this one:

I Put on My Fur Coat

And leave a bit of ankle to show. 

I take off my shoes and make myself

comfortable. I defrost a chicken

and chew on the bone. In public, 

I smile as wide as I can and everyone

shields their eyes from my light. 

At night, I knock down nests off

telephone poles and feel no regret.

I greet spiders rising from underneath

the floorboards, one by one. Hello, 

hello. Outside, the garden roars

with ice. I want to shine as bright 

as a miner's cap in the dirt dark, 

to glimmer as if washed in fish scales. 

Instead, I become a balm and salve 

my daughter, my son, the cold mice

in the garage. Instead, I take the garbage

out at midnight. I move furniture away

from the wall to find what we hide. 

I stand in the center of every room

and ask: am I the only animal here?   

2) Earlier this year, Sonic Youth formally and posthumously released Walls Have Ears, a renowned, unofficial compilation of three live shows they played in the UK in 1985. That was the year of Bad Moon Rising, their perfect teenage witchcraft, art rock LP.

The songs on Walls Have Ears are clanging and de-tuned, threatening and careening, perfectly capturing my college-days’ favorite band in all their early ramshackle experimentation. This version of Sonic Youth, which I remember so fondly, provided the soundtrack to my magic-markered Converse and magic-markered jeans, early 20-something depression.

(4Columns ran Sasha Frere-Jones’ beautifully-written review of this “new” Sonic Youth record earlier this month.)

But this rediscovered set hardly prepared me for founding Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon’s new release: a jaw-dropping single that came out this week called I’m a Man from her forthcoming album, due on March 8, The Collective. (What an album title, by the way; so perfectly evocative of the 1970s—and it reminds me of Louise Glück’s similarly titled final poetry collection, Winter Recipes from the Collective.)

Co-founded in 1981 by Gordon with her now-ex husband Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth mined 1960s and early 1970s counterculture detritus, turning that recently past era’s madness into a contemporary celebration—rather than rejection—that connected the revolutionary lights of “The ‘60s” to the angry yearning of mid-1980s post-punk/pre-alt-rock, cultural misanthropy and art.

Kim Gordon getting down in the video to her new jam, I’m a Man.

Kim Gordon’s daughter Coco Gordon-Moore in Gordon’s new video, I’m a Man

Gordon does exactly that in I’m a Man with a video that channels Midnight Cowboy’s (1969) acid-trip scene, both as a way to revive the movie’s original deconstruction of the American Cowboy myth, while also updating it with a garish meditation on today’s politics of non-binary identity. Gordon, with her signature Gen-X-era detached irony, delivers the lyrics from an angry male point of view, which is sure to rattle casual listeners.

Don't call me toxic
Just 'cause I like your butt

It's not my fault I was born a man
Come on, Zeus
Take my hand
Jump on my back
'Cause I'm the man

The gender-bending (both Gordon’s male persona and the clothes swapping that ensues) gets overlaid with time-warping as well: Gordon cast her doppelganger daughter Coco Gordon-Moore in the video (alongside dreamboat actor/model, Conor Fay).

Meanwhile, Gordon’s Black-Sabbath-heavy guitars and beat poetry recitative, synced to a herky-jerky anti-rhythm, push the off-kilter ambience through the walls.

3) I hesitate to write anything about the war in Gaza. The seething antisemitism, both creeping and blatant on the left, and the unhinged settler Zionism, defining the racist right, make it a poisonous topic (understatment of the year).

However, this excellent NYT opinion piece on Gaza by staff colulmnist Lydia Polgreen (the paper’s former international correspondent for West Africa, South Asia and South Africa) captured a larger subject I’ve been trying to wrap my head around for years. In challengeing the political essentialism that guides some pro-Palestinian activists, Polgreen identified and called out the reactionary utopianism that has long plagued the left at large.

Defined, in its anti-establishent trappings, by a kind of idyllic machismo, this brand of politics can show up as casually as knee-jerk anti-development campaings to preserve neighborhood “character;” as bufoonishly and man-splainy as the primordial Burning Man festival; or as pathologically as ascetic quests for purity.

That later version can warp into psychotic extremes such as Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s more tellingly named “Year Zero.”

This leftist fetish for authenticity is twins with the right’s own nostalgia and fear-based bogeyman politics that specialize in branding chosen scapegoats as “outsiders” while fostering dangerous sentiments about who and what count as real. Remember Sarah Palin’s “real Virginia” soundbite, a populilst philosophical framing that has since come to define MAGA’s anti-city pathology. (Northern Virginia’s metropolitan suburbs, of course, were the phonies while Southern Virginia’s voters were salt of the earth.)

The self righteous overaching originalist and nativist narratives from the left and right respectively have their roots (for the Western world anyway) in Bible stories about wicked cities such as Babylon, and Sodom and Gamorrah, where idolotry of the material world leads humanity astray. God must, and does, destroy them.

To my mind, the left mastered this religio-poltical narrative in the late 19th Century when progressive William Jennings Bryan famously demonized cities in his Cross of Gold speech. (It’s hardly surprising that Bryan’s career ended with an ignomious reactonary asterisk: He was the lead prosecutor in the Scopes trial against teaching evolution.)

Liberals and progressives still channel these reactionary impulses; it’s not an overtly religious wrath, but it is a puritan mindset. I’ve certainly noticed strains of it on the local level. From the “Seattle is Dying” storyline that equates people experiencing homelessness with criminals, to the gatekeeping neighborhood groups who fight against housing development, Seattleites tend toward a provincial politics similar to the “Keep Austin Weird” mentality, a hipster NIMBYism that writer Max Holleran exposed in his pro-development book Yes to the City. The hilarious title of his chapter on Austin’s no-growth movement: “Exclusionary Weirdness.”

Ethiopian-American and NYT opinion writer Polgreen, who notes her formative affinity to iconic 20th Century anti-imperialists such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, India’s Nehru, and the intellectual power house of Algeria’s resistance movement, Wretched of the Earth author Frantz Fanon, is, of course, talking about a far graver topic than zoning politics. That is to say, it’s not my intent to reduce her piece to a treatise about my own pro-city obsessions.

I’m simply thankful she has identified a persistent chauvinism in left politics that has always made me uncomfortable, and pointed it out in this cause celebre.

I’m compelled to quote Polgreen at length:

A good deal of the antipathy toward Israeli Jews today is undergirded and enabled, I believe, by something that to some ears sounds progressive: the idea that people and lands that have been colonized must be returned to their indigenous peoples and original state. But that belief, when taken literally, is, at best, a kind of left-wing originalism, a utopian politics that believes the past answers all the questions of the present. At worst, it is a left-wing echo to the ancestral fantasies of the far right, in which who is allowed to live in which places is a question of the connection of one’s blood to a particular patch of soil.

Implicit in the emphasis on indigeneity is a promised restoration, albeit one of a very different sort from the imperial fantasies of Vladimir Putin or the gender obsessions of Ron DeSantis. Decolonization “is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes,” as the scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write in an influential academic paper published in 2012, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”

“The broad umbrella of social justice may have room underneath for all of these efforts,” Tuck and Yang write. “By contrast, decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life.”

There is perhaps no more vexed question in the world than how this might play out in Israel and Palestine. There is no doubt that Palestinians long lived in the land that became Israel. Jews have deep historical roots in that land, but a vast majority of the people who established the state of Israel came from elsewhere, fleeing genocide and persecution in Europe and forced into exile by Middle Eastern and North African nations. It is impossible to separate Israel’s birth from the dying gasps of the old colonial order. It was, in the indelible phrase of Arthur Koestler, “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.”

In theory, decolonization includes the disestablishment of the very idea of land as property, of modern notions like nationhood and citizenship. In theory, it is a chance to do it all over and replay history with the benefit of indigenous ideas and traditions to guide us.

But history doesn’t work that way. People do bad things. Other people resist those bad things. Humans invent and discover; they create and destroy. There is no going backward to some mythic state. There is no restoration. The events that unfold over time shape the land and the people who live on it, and those people shape one another in manifold ways, some brutal and destructive, some generative and loving. But time and experience ensure that nothing can ever be the same as it was before the last thing that happened.

As I was thinking through these issues, I came across a series of social media posts about settler colonialism by Iyad el-Baghdadi, a Palestinian writer and activist whose work has been an indispensable guide for me in the present crisis. I sent him an email, and he agreed to speak with me to expand on his ideas. I explained my unease with the reliance on concepts like indigeneity to decide who has a just claim to live in a place.

“Don’t take these people seriously,” he told me, though he made clear that he has some sympathy for those who espouse such views. “They’re not really motivated by some kind of ideology. They’re really motivated by emotion, and they kind of slap together an ideology to satisfy their emotion, but then emotions, by their very nature, cannot be satisfied that way.” He told me that sometimes when he hears people talk about Palestinian liberation, it is almost as though they are expecting a literal reversal of 1948, what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, of their expulsion upon the founding of the state of Israel.

“It is as if there will be this magical moment and all our villages are going to appear out of the earth. And then 75 years of settler colonialism is going to disappear,” he said. “But this romantic idea is really unmourned trauma.”

Questions of indigeneity are simply a distraction, he said, from the real challenge of building Palestinian political power. “I don’t care if they’re settlers or not,” he said. “The solution is not to constantly try to moralize. The solution is to fix the power imbalance. The future needs to be rooted in the truth that all human beings are equal and that Jewish life is equivalent to Palestinian life and that we can together work on a future in which nobody is oppressed and we can address the inequities of the past.”

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 in that title 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 Shanri-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 as the poetic language (“I keep speaking out about the distress they say is nought”), 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) mark nearly every sentence as one to savor.

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... in which I report on what 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.