A bookstore; a ballad; and Blondie’s masterpiece, Eat to the Beat.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#37

1) My great friend Valium Tom, aka Tom Nissley, celebrated the 10th anniversary of his easy going, literary bookstore, Phinney Books, this week. He marked the occasion by inviting the community to the store after business hours for wine, beer, crudités, and sliders (tofu versions available for the vegans, which seemed to be me and Tom’s wife Laura).

There was no book selling allowed, which drew out Tom’s delightfully-chatty- on-this-evening, longtime staff—Kim, Liz, Haley, Anika, Doree, and Nancy—from behind the counter and into the cozy, throne-sized leather chairs usually reserved for customers.

Tom, center, thanking his adoring customers.

It’s no surprise that a warm soul like Tom has assembled and fostered such an exceptional cast of dedicated squares. (Tom noted, in his neighborly remarks that, turning job applicants away on the daily, he hasn’t had to hire any new staff in six years.) But what a gas to watch them let their hair down and debate book recs over wine; Miranda July’s All Fours was the current staff favorite, although contrarian Liz, obviously revered by her colleagues (and Tom) as Phinney’s quirky conductor (to Tom’s composer), was not convinced.

The place was overflowing with customers-turned-summer-evening-cavorters, all of them talking books as well per the flurry of list making going on: there were cards to fill out. List the Top 10 Books You’ve Read over the last 10 years.

My 2014 -2024 list.

Phinney Books, which has an exhaustive, yet engaging weekly news newsletter (a secret-gem resource for serious book lovers), has gotten its outsized share of glowing press coverage over the years; 100% earned, thanks to Tom’s bookworm curating.

This 2022 Seattle Times article by Paul Constant is my favorite, largely because Tom’s signature personality sneaks into the headline: At Phinney Books, a neighborhood bookstore has patiently assembled one of Seattle’s best browsing experiences.

It’s always a joy to head to Phinney Books around 6:30—the #5 from downtown stops right there (74th & Phinney)—as Tom quietly wraps up the day. I savor floating around the store’s bursting shelves, which lean into contemporary fiction and current events, while one of Tom’s personal, yet zeitgeist playlists spins the Feelies or Jackie Mittoo or early Fleetwood Mac. Tom, entering the day’s numbers on computer while stationed at his disheveled absent-minded-professor-nook behind the counter, inevitably looks up and makes the perfect, customized recommendation, such as his inspired pick for my City Canon syllabus: 1933’s Business as Usual, Jane Oliver and Ann Safford’s young-woman-moves-to-London send up of sexism in the city.

Though Tom’s store is relatively small, 1,200 square feet, Phinney Books’ browsing path—”True” on the north wall, “Made Up” on the south (“Cities,” “Poetry” tucked in along the way)—manages to feel akin to the 20,000 square foot circuit at Elliott Bay, a magic trick that reflects Tom’s deceptively sleepy brain waves.*

* I guess not too deceptive; he did have a star turn as a Jeopardy champion.

If you don’t live in Seattle, may I point you to Phinney Books’ Bookshop.org link.

An appropriately delightful footnote: As the event wound down, I didn’t want to call it a night. Stuck far afield in Ballard, I wasn’t sure what to do, so I started strolling into the fine evening weather south on Phinney Ridge. After walking about a mile, I landed at The Tin Hat Bar and Grill, a cozy dive in the small commercial cluster on NW 65th and 5th. Despite evidence to the contrary—lively conversations at all the tables, a line at the bar, food orders in play—I assumed last call was at hand. “How late are you open?” I asked. “Til 2 am,” the slammed, yet friendly young woman behind the bar said to my pleasant surprise.

I took the last seat at the bar, ordered a whiskey, and settled in to write. I also texted my pal Dan B., aka David Byrne; he lives a few blocks away, and since he’s always trekking to Capitol Hill to hang out with me on the Drag, I let him know I was in his neighborhood this time. He showed up about an hour later for a night cap.

2) I was reading at the spot across the street from my apartment (Monsoon) a few weeks ago when a gorgeous, lo-fi pop piano ballad came on the sound system.

The playlist at Monsoon usually goes with abstract R&B, World Music, and Jazz, so this heart wrenching bit of indie pop rock leaped out. I shazamed it, and it came up as art-hardcore rockers Fugazi. I thought, No Shazam, you are mistaken, and I shazamed it again, as did the (my age) bartender. We were both bewildered: What the hell? This is Fugazi?

I’m not a big Fugazi fan; too preachy and aggro for me, though I was appropriately awed when their first LP, 1989’s 13 Songs, came out because: 1) While I was never into hardcore, it was comforting to know that punk still had lots of battery left; 2) the athletic musicianship is startling and the catchy songwriting seems gifted from the punk rock gods above; and 3) as I’ve written before, despite having zero history as a punk rocker, I was a beatnik suburban D.C. teen during the Flex Your Head/Minor Threat/Dischord Records/anti-Reagan salad days, and I felt an affinity with all the commotion on local radio, in the City Paper, and blaring from posters around town.

Decades later, Fugazi has stunned me again: This otherworldly piano ballad is a track called “I’m So Tired” from a demos and instrumentals album they put out in 1999 called Instrument Soundtrack; it’s the soundtrack to a Jem Cohen documentary about the band. (Who knew, on all counts?)

“I’m So Tired” stars Fugazi front man (and straight edge patron saint) Ian MacKaye channeling his inner Ian Curtis in adagio gloom (think Joy Division’s “The Eternal.”)

Looking for a new song to learn on piano this week, it occurred to me that “I’m So Tired” would be a lovely tune to have in my set. I found a straight-forward youtube lesson (it’s a straight forward, four-chord song to begin with), and I’ve been lovingly settling into it all week. Along with its elementary melody, it reminds me of 1950’s “Earth Angel” doo-wop.

I have to admit, part of this minor obsession has to do with the youtube tutorial; the woman teaching the song, who has the inspiring words “create” "art” written in pen on her left and right hands, respectively, has a delightful marble-mouth lisp. When she says “two, three, four, …, C, B, G, …., A, B” it fits right in with the sedative magic of the piano ballad itself.

3) Blondie’s Eat to the Beat was the first New Wave album I ever bought; it was such a momentous occasion that I started a separate row of LPs by my K-Mart stereo, setting the New Wave records apart from the rest of my albums. (I did a similar thing with my poetry books decades later in 2017 when I flew off into my current poetry expedition.)

I came to Eat to the Beat like this: Down in the basement rec room (where my older brother’s stereo system was), the two of us disliked New Wave; we even wrote a derisive anti-New Wave song flaunting my brother’s Funk #49 ripoff electric guitar riff and my 8th grade lyrics about how the “Knack, Devo, Blondie, and Talking Heads/ were dead/ got no soul/ New Wave Music/’aint rock and roll.”

This was 1979, I was 12. And evidently, I doth protest too much, because one week later, I was all in on the new vibrations. “Accidents Never Happen,” a song by New Wave’s premiere messengers, Blondie, came on the car radio (Mom was driving). I was mesmerized by the cool clipped electric guitar and the aloof vocals. Only remembering the lyric “in a perfect world," a few weeks later at the record store (at the mall), I looked for the song on the track listings of all the Blondie albums. Eat to the Beat, their latest record, had a song called “Living in the Real World,” which I figured must be the track. I bought the record, rushed home, and eagerly dropped the needle on “Living in the Real World” (the last song on Side 2.) It didn’t sound familiar, but I convinced myself it was the song I’d heard on the radio because, in fact, it was a taut electric guitar driven New Wave banger with a soaring melody.

I can do anything at all
I'm invisible and I'm twenty feet tall
Pull the plug on your digital clock
And it all goes dark and the bodies stop

Hey, I'm living in a magazine
Page to page in my teenage dream
Hey, now, Mary, you can't follow me
Without a satellite, I'm on a power flight
'Cause I'm not living, I'm not living

Then, I lifted the needle and started properly at the beginning of the side.

First up, “Die Young Stay Pretty” knocked me out with it shrapnel reggae disco rhythm, a melody line in its own right playing counterpoint to the perfectly vain lead vocal.

Next up, “Slow Motion,” an upbeat cascade of catchy pop hooks.

And then “Atomic,” an obvious strobe light hit wherein Debbie Harry intones "Atomic/Your hair is beautiful/tonight,” against the radiating space age orchestration of pulsing polka bass, warbling keyboards, and alien guitars.

Song after song—the minimalist and lush twinkle of “Sound-A-Sleep,” the monster-mash punk attack of “Victor”—I couldn’t believe how good this record was turning out to be. And then the showstopping teen drama of “Living in the Real World,” again.

I flipped the LP over and listened to Side 1.

First up… Oh. I know this unstoppable pop song, “Dreaming.” It had been on the radio too. Those big beat Buddy Holly drums. Those jet plane guitar hook contrails. And, the booming plaintive melody, sung as if 21-year-old Katherine Deneuve had been transported from 1964’s teen movie musical Les Parapluies de Cherbourg to the stage at CBGB circa 1975.

Vite vite, walking a two-mile. Meet me, meet me at the turnstile
I never met him, I'll never forget him
Dream, dream, even for a little while. Dream, dream, filling up an idle hour
Fade away (woo), radiate

I sit by and watch the river flow
I sit by and watch the traffic go

Next. “The Hardest Part.” More shape shifting discotheque rhythm section melodies intertwined with siren guitars. And swoon, Debbie Harry’s nitro come ons were making me woozy.

Then tracks 3 and 4, the melodramatic whoa-whoa retro ‘60s pop of “Union City Blue” and “Shayla.'“

As a kid who preferred mid-60s power pop like the Kinks and the Who and the Troggs, along with late 1960s psychedelic lyrics (much more than the contemporary hits that my junior high peers liked), I suddenly felt seen thanks to Blondie’s meta teen mag beat club jams and sci-fi poetry. (Hearing the B-52s cover Petula Clark’s 1965 hit “Downtown” later that year, I officially confirmed I was in on New Wave’s secret handshake, although I certainly had unofficial confirmation when Debbie Harry channeled the Supremes on the aforementioned “Slow Motion,” calling out “Stop!” drenched in echo to emphasize the allusion.)

Next, the joy ride rock & roll title track, “Eat to the Beat,” a nod to the band’s punk days, pizza, and masturbation.

Now it was on to the last song.

That portentous, dampened guitar intro? Wait. Those detached vocals?

So I won't believe in luck
I saw you walking in the dark
So I slipped behind your footsteps for a while

Caught you turning 'round the block
Fancy meeting in a smaller world

After all accidents never happen

Could have planned it all
Precognition in my ears
Accidents never happen in a perfect world

This was the song I’d heard on the radio! I was giddy. Yes, “Living in the Real World” was exciting , but “Accidents Never Happen” (written by Blondie’s keyboard player Jimmy Destri) was transcendent.

I’m currently reading the new memoir by Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, Debbie Harry’s then boyfriend, and it prompted me to revisit Eat to the Beat this week; I’ve never stopped listening to the tracks on their own over the years, but it’s been decades since I cued up the whole album.

Besides the absurd blues (?) harmonica solo (yikes) on Side 1’s otherwise wonderfully raucous title track—”Hey, you got a tummy ache and I remember/Sitting in the bathroom drinking Alka-Seltzer/Eat to the beat”—there isn’t a less-than heroic moment on this record. Combining mod mid-‘60s guitar power, disco and reggae rhythms, Giorgio Moroder synth programs, in-the-style-of Philip K. Dick lyrics, and a girl group doo-wop sensibility, Eat to the Beat is a meteor shower of music.

Cocky songwriting swagger aside, there are three common denominators to this set’s seemingly disparate CBGB versus Studio 54 impulses.

FIRST, there’s the production.

Made in 1979 with it’s eyes on the future, Eat to the Beat leaves the ‘70s behind. This is not a stoned LP. No swampy guitar distortion. No groovy funk jam session. There’s not even the transistor burn of Sex Pistols or Clash late ‘70s punk here. Nor, thankfully, does Eat to the Beat lean toward the boxy, gated production aesthetic of the 1980s when all records would sound constipated.

Each instrument on Eat to the Beat—the punchy bass, the Bay City Rollers guitars, the Mersey Beat drums, the outer space synths, and the Greta Garbo vocals—is delineated in bright relief, while collectively casting a halo.

Mike Chapman was at the control board for Eat to the Beat; he also produced 1979’s equally fine-tuned New Wave masterpiece Get the Knack by one-hit-wonder sensations, the Knack.

SECOND, the star of the this expert mix is Blondie’s drummer Clem Burke.

Every track on Eat to the Beat, from pop dynamos like “Dreaming,” to sexy disco rock like “The Hardest Part,” to insouciant pop like “Union City Blue” is driven by Burke’s rolling tympani fills and non-stop trap kit assault.

THIRD, and most important: Debbie Harry’s vocals.

Standoffish, aloof, dispassionate. All true. Whatever motivated Debbie Harry’s artistic drive, even after her 2019 tell-all memoir, remains a mystery. However, the juxtaposition of her blasé vocal style with her radiant, note-perfect arias elevate Eat to the Beat’s well-crafted pop strains into late 20th Century classics. The vocals on Blondie songs are not simply a medium for the musicianship of the band. Harry’s singing is expert musicianship in its own right. You can hear this on all Blondie records, including on the earlier ones when the production was slapdash, and the later ones when the songwriting was diminished. On Eat to the Beat, their 4th album out of 6 total from their original 1970s/80s heyday, both the production and the songwriting were blazing. Alongside Harry’s effortlessly golden voice, the meteor showers aligned.

A 1972 Bowie single; 2024 medication; and an 1851 French novel.

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#36

1) Shortly after David Bowie released his 1972 glitter rock masterpiece The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, he recorded and released the devastating, barely three-minute retro rockabilly single, “John, I’m Only Dancing.”

With flip, bisexual rock god swagger backed by a triplet shuffle on Eddie Cochran acoustic guitar, and heavily distorted, snarling melodies from his spaceman cohort Mick Ronson’s electric guitar, Bowie recites his come-on lyrics in Lou Reed cant:

“I saw you watching from the stairs/you’re everyone that ever cared/oh lordy/oh lordy/ you know I/ need some loving/I’m moving/touch me.”

As summer starts this week, I’ve set out to replicate this sweltering jam on piano.

The trick lies in nailing both the long-short swing of the opening 1950s rock figure in the left hand and the corresponding, precise, yet coy sing-song melody in the right. If I can get that groove down, the rest of the song, loaded with lyrical melodies, flows from there.

The last of these melodic lines hints at the pop avant-garde by first hitting the 7th in the top of the phrase, an F# here in the key of G major, and then, playfully, a flat 7th, a plain F, in the second half of the phrase. This provides a sly set up (and noteworthy juxtaposition) as the song comes back around to the traditional rock and roll shuffle intro again.

The combo of 1970s art glam and 1950s rock and roll innocence captures the sardonic and ambivalent futurism of the waning youth counterculture of the time. It also echoes the exuberant dualities of Bowie’s lyrics.

We’ll see what I can do on solo piano.

2) After living through a batch of panic attacks—a lovely new phenomenon in my life, including waking up to paramedics one Saturday afternoon last November because I fainted in a Capitol Hill restaurant—my doctor prescribed Propranolol. “Just take one whenever you need to,” he said, writing out a prescription for automatic refills. I swallow the light green pills whenever I feel the weight of my heart welling up in my throat.

Propranolol is a beta blocker, a miracle class of meds that address the physical symptoms of panic, like a pounding heart and speeding blood pressure.

By calming your system, beta blockers simultaneously perform a magic trick on the mind: as the physical symptoms subside, your brain takes note, and your mental state of panic subsides as well. As opposed to literal anti-anxiety medications such as Alprazolam (Xanax), and Lorazepam (Ativan, the subject of an earlier I’m All Lost in… obsession), beta blockers don’t affect your mood by regulating neurotransmitters, but rather, by slowing your heart rate.

Propranolol’s irrefutable physiologic logic talked me down once again this week. I was feeling that familiar high pitch in my chest—a foreboding that turned my heart both alarm-red and depressed-blue all at once. Unable to get any work done, I took the medication and less than 15 minutes later, the miraculous effect was tangible. The beach ball in my throat was gone, and the existential blues had disappeared.

Don’t let my devoted five-star drug review scare you. I’m not turning into a fiend. I can count on one hand the number of times in the last six months I’ve turned to my scrip; in fact, at my most recent checkup last month, my doctor told me I didn’t have to be so “precious” with the prescription. (In addition to telling him how effective the drug had been, I had also reported that I use them judiciously because I don’t want the effects to diminish with frequent use; he assured me I wasn’t making any sense.)

Propranolol, however, makes perfect sense.

3) My own private city studies seminar (which last year, focused on mid-19th Century Industrial Revolution Manchester novels such as Elizbeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, and this year seems to be focusing on 21st Century Lagos novels such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Damilare Kuku’s Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad), has suddenly returned to the 1850s, though not to Manchester.

It’s Paris this time.

I’m reading Henri Murger’s 1851 Scenes of Bohemian Life. Murger’s novel (more a collection of short stories starring a recurring crew of Latin Quarter young souls in their charming, starving-artist garrets) was the source material for Puccini’s famous 1896 opera La bohème.

I’m only 10 stories in, there are 23 in the collection, and to my surprise, as opposed to more bittersweet urchin chic literature like Bertol Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, or my favorite urbanist novel, Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners, this seems to be an all-out madcap comedy.

It’s as if the Marx Brothers were the main characters in 1001 Arabian Nights. The Marx Brothers in this instance being Rodolphe the poet, Marcel the painter, Schaunard the musician, and Colline the philosopher, gallivanting and stumbling their way through offhanded urban parables, constantly in need of rent (or date) money while pursuing their Quixotic masterworks, such as Marcel’s grand painting “The Passage of the Red Sea.”

A perfect example of Murger’s sit-com chaos plays out in the story “The Billows of Pactolus.” In this installment of Rodolphe, Marcel, Schaunard, and Colline’s merry poverty, named after a river from Greek mythology laced with gold ore sediment (presumably making its riches hard to grasp), Rodolphe suddenly comes into some money (500 francs!) and sets out to “practice economy” with the convoluted logic of a dreamer: the first thing he buys with his windfall is “a Turkish pipe which he had long coveted.”

""This is my design. No longer embarrassed about the material wants of life, I am going seriously to work. First of all, I renounce my vagabond existence: I shall dress like other people, set up a black coat, and go to evening parties. If you are willing to follow in my footsteps, we will continue to live together but you must adopt my program. The strictest economy will preside over our life. By proper management we have before us three months' work without any preoccupation. But we must be economical."

"My dear fellow," said Marcel, "economy is a science only practicable for rich people. You and I, therefore, are ignorant of its first elements. However, by making an outlay of six francs we can have the works of Monsieur Jean-Baptiste Say, a very distinguished economist, who will perhaps teach us how to practice the art. Hallo! You have a Turkish pipe there!"

"Yes, I bought it for twenty-five francs."

"How is that! You talk of economy, and give twenty-five francs for a pipe!"

"And this is an economy. I used to break a two-sous pipe every day, and at the end of the year that came to a great deal more."

"True, I should never have thought of that."

They heard a neighboring clock strike six.

"Let us have dinner at once," said Rodolphe. "I mean to begin from tonight. Talking of dinner, it occurs to me that we lose much valuable time every day in cooking ours; now time is money, so we must economize it. From this day we will dine out."

"Yes," said Marcel, "there is a capital restaurant twenty steps off. It's rather dear, but not far to go, so we shall gain in time what we lose in money."

"We will go there today," said Rodolphe, "but tomorrow or next day we will adopt a still more economical plan. Instead of going to the restaurant, we will hire a cook."

"No, no," put in Marcel, "we will hire a servant to be cook and everything. Just see the immense advantages which will result from it. First of all, our rooms will be always in order; he will clean our boots, go on errands, wash my brushes; I will even try and give him a taste of the fine arts, and make him grind colors. In this way, we shall save at least six hours a day."

Five minutes after, the two friends were installed in one of the little rooms of the restaurant, and continuing their schemes of economy.

"We must get an intelligent lad," said Rodolphe, "if he has a sprinkling of spelling, I will teach him to write articles, and make an editor of him."

"That will be his resource for his old age," said Marcel, adding up the bill. "Well, this is dear, rather! Fifteen francs! We used both to dine for a franc and a half."

"Yes," replied Rodolphe, "but then we dined so badly that we were obliged to sup at night. So, on the whole, it is an economy."

Needless to say, abiding by their delusional budgeting scheme, they promptly go broke. As the story concludes (and after firing their costly servant), Rodolphe muses: “Where shall we dine today?'“ and Marcel replies, “We shall know tomorrow.”

On a related note, I’m also reading (Blondie guitarist) Chris Stein’s memoir. With his glitter makeup and long hair tales of living off welfare in abandoned lofts, playing bit parts in art film flops, and doing drugs with his band scene pal, precursor punk faerie rocker Eric Emerson, Stein’s stories from early 1970s Lower East Side Manhattan overlap with Murger’s 1840s fables from the Left Bank.

With his first person account of the endlessly fascinating era when hippies were transforming into punks in NYC’s downtown art scene, Stein, who has a charming, humble and earnest online presence today, by the way, is working with rich source material (like the day in 1973 when his girlfriend Debbie Harry comes back to her Little Italy apartment from her job at a New Jersey salon with her hair dyed blond.)

Unfortunately, despite the perfect bohemian trappings, Stein writes with zero craft or reflection and the book reads as if he simply hit record and proceeded to reminisce without purpose. I have no idea, for example, why Stein loves, or even plays music in the first place. Or, for that matter, how his high school band ended up opening for the Velvet Underground.

Alas, I’m reading every word.

From 1975: “We went to some guy’s basement recording studio in Queens. Nobody had a clue where we were… It was miserably hot in the basement but we managed to get five tracks done, including a version of what would later evolve into ‘Heart of Glass.’”

Emma Cline’s short stories; Yusef Lateef’s “Eastern Sounds;” Governor Hochul’s awful decision. And a note on NBA great Jerry West, RIP.

I’m All Lost in …

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#35

1) I turned to one of my favorite contemporary novelists, Emma Cline—The Girls (2016), The Guest (2023)—to jar me out of my recent reading slump. And it worked. In this instance it was short stories, her riveting 2020 collection, Daddy.

Given that most of the 10 dark stories here play out in proximity to male violence—or the ubiquitous possibility of male violence—the title, as my book store bestie Valium Tom suggested, seems to be a Sylvia Plath reference. Otherwise, the only explicit reference to “Daddy” comes in the final story “A/S/L” (sex hookup slang for “Age, Sex, Location”) as the online handle—”DaddyXO”— of Thora, a woman who spends all her time catfishing oafish men. The listless wife of a non-descript, “not a bad person”-husband named James, Thora lies awake texting “furtively on her phone…while James slept, his back turned to her” posing as an 18-year-old high school cheerleader. The story is set, presumably after Thora crashes and burns from her phone sex addiction, in a high-end rehab facility where she then contemplates seducing a famous Me-Too’d TV chef, “G”—who has landed at the facility as well. Thora is exactly the kind of damaged soul who inhabits Cline’s fiction.

However, the majority of the stories, the best of them set in Cline’s flawless simulacrums of ennui-laden, Slouching Toward Bethlehem Southern California, feature men as the despondent central characters: a diminished abusive 60-something father who is bemused by his distant and aimless adult children during their annual holiday season visit home; a Me-Too-disgraced magazine editor now groping through a pity assignment working on a book by a wealthy tech/lifestyle guru, and then botching the rare career opportunity by aimlessly hitting on the guru’s assistant; a divorced, fading movie producer suffering through his surfer-bro son’s banal directorial debut during a tacky theater rental screening; a simmering and distant father (with an alcohol and opioid addiction) called in to rescue his troubled, violent son after the boy gets expelled from an elite private school.

And, in the collection’s showstopping story, “Arcadia” (originally published in Granta and which I actually first read in The Best American Short Stories 2017), one of the few characters here who appears to have a moral center: an earnest boyfriend/live-in farmhand navigating the fraught household of his pregnant girlfriend and her erratic and frightening older brother, who owns and runs the farm.

Like much of today’s short fiction, Cline’s stories remain mum on specifics, only hinting at the crux of the conflict at hand while preferring to linger in deceptively casual dialogue, quietly startling observations, and the minimalist realism of daily lives. The understated stories usually include a dramatic scene too, well-placed land mines that offer some sort of allegory when their explosive glare sheds light on the otherwise repressed narratives.

Cline is a master of this form, particularly pivoting to violent scenes—the impromptu dentistry in “Marion” (which struck me as an early draft of Cline’s Manson Family novel The Girls), or most notably, a terrifying porn-inspired night, drunkenly orchestrated by the dangerous aforementioned older brother in “Arcadia.”

It’s the quality of Cline’s keen observations, with their crisp verisimilitude, that make her stand out from the pack of writers working in this style of enigmatic storytelling. Whereas most writers—I’m thinking of Sally Rooney—tend to tack on observations that fall outside of the scene (I jest, but something akin to, “a crash of thunder sounded in the distance…”), Cline’s breadcrumb asides—"We sat in the back of Bobby’s pickup as he drove the gridded vineyards and released wrappers from our clenched fists like birds” … “‘Home around five,’ she said… [loosening] her hood, pulling it back to expose her hair, the tracks from her comb still visible….”—feel intrinsic to the action at hand while simultaneously commenting on it.

What also makes Cline stand out from the pack, is this: While feminist at their core, her stories are deeply sympathetic to both women and men (who she seems to have a surprisingly uncanny inside track on) as she portrays both genders as trapped in the manufactured doubts scripted by societal roles, but also born of the stultifying human condition.

(I wrote a review of Cline’s second novel, The Guest, last year, which also includes a lot of thoughts about her first book The Girls. Scroll down down down to find that review here.)

2) An Instagram account I evidently follow (or does it follow me?) posted a picture of 1950s/1960s jazz polymath Yusef Lateef’s 1962 masterpiece LP Eastern Sounds, quipping: “Long before André 3000.”

There’s no connection between New Blue Son, André 3000’s surprise 2023 experimental flute-forward art album and Lateef’s tuneful hard bop/modal jazz set except maybe the array of obscure instruments both records roll out in concert with the flutes: Sintir, mycelial electronics, and plants on 3000’s new age reverie ("The Slang Word P*ssy Rolls Off the Tongue with Far Better Ease Than the Proper Word Vagina. Do You Agree?" is my favorite track on the Outkast star’s better-than-you-think-it’s-going-to-be record) and Xun and Rubab on Lateef’s stately mix of blues, Middle Eastern, and Asian studies. (Lateef also counted the biblical-era, Jewish shofar in his musical repertoire.)

Ultimately, the funny Instagram post led me back to Lateef’s great record, which I likely haven’t listened to since I had a jazz radio show (1960s free jazz, specifically) at WOBC 37 years ago.

It turned out one listen wasn’t enough. Nor two. Nor three. I had Eastern Sounds’ refined kaleidoscope of walking blues, easy ballads, rhapsodic love themes, Asian sketches, playful melodies, and delicately crushed piano (pianist Barry Harris’ soft colors quietly define this album) playing on repeat all week.

A meticulously arranged, almost self conscious, 40-minute set of nine jams that sway between elegant, elementary, bluesy (track 2, “Blues for the Orient,” would be the single if jazz records did that), modal, cinematic, and occasional hints of John Coltrane’s free-saxophones-to-come-later-in-the-decade, Eastern Sounds distinguishes itself—even during this era of perfect jazz records—with a loving dedication to melody.

Unlike André 3000’s drone-driven experimenting, this is mysticism with shapes.

You can hear Lateef taking in breaths between the precise xun phrases on the opening tune, “The Plum Blossom,” a nursery-school-melody-meets-music-theory-seminar jam. I initially found this intimacy distracting. But like the Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, and Bill Evans records from the same era, this is a rambunctious workout, despite—or perhaps because of—its meditative mission.

3) I would certainly love to join a lawsuit against New York Governor Kathy Hochul over her decision to “pause” congestion pricing; starting on June 30th, New York City was set to be the first American city to follow London, Stockholm, Milan, and Singapore where congestion pricing, a surcharge on cars entering the downtown core to help fund transit, is key to supporting sustainability. On the books for two decades, for example, London’s program has decreased greenhouse gases, increased transit use, and reduced congestion. Hochul’s bail on the program is dispiriting.

I snapped this photo on my July 2017 trip to London

I’ve been obsessed with congestion pricing for years; I even wrote an early poem about congestion pricing in 2017.

More recently, arguing that Seattle should enact a more progressive program than the Manhattan proposal, I wrote a PubliCola column calling for “sustainability pricing,” charging car commuters who drive into any of Seattle’s dense neighborhoods—not just the downtown core. Moreover, the money, I argued, wouldn’t go for transit, but for new, affordable, dense housing, and it would flow to the very neighborhoods and suburbs where the commuters were driving in from—to build density there. (The fee would go away after enough housing is built.)

The data—lower carbon emissions, decreased traffic congestion, increased funding for public transit infrastructure—doesn’t merely support implementing congestion pricing, the numbers also show that the supposed populist argument against congestion pricing (it hurts regular New Jersey folks) is inaccurate: A meager fraction, 1.5 percent, of commuters would’ve had to pay the toll. (And hey, New Jersey, as NYC’s MTA director has argued, what about those New Jersey Turnpike tolls?)

Meanwhile, about 85% of the people who come into Manhattan’s central business district—where congestion project would be implemented—take public transit anyway.

Consider this populist data: 1) While poor people (those earning less than $13,000 a year) represent only 13% of the U.S. population, they represent a disproportionate 21% of transit riders in America. 2) Lower income people ($25,000 to $49,000 a year) make up the biggest segment of transit ridership (24%). And 3) People of color, who make up about 40% of the U.S. population, make up 60% of transit ridership. Of that group, African Americans, who make up about 12% of the population, have far away the most outsized transit ridership numbers at 24%; the median Black income is about $53,000, 32% lower than whites.

Only in the Trump era could something as fundamentally populist as public mass transit be considered elitist; when I was fretting about this to ECB, she said matter-of-factly, “Well, we live in backlash times.” Governor Hochul’s retreat on congestion pricing was reportedly a cave to swing district Democrats who are scared of Trump’s anti-urban, anti-congestion pricing rhetoric.

Anti-congestion pricing populism is not a fact based position. It amounts to baseless, anti-city virtue signaling. A perfect reflection of this disingenuous posturing comes from the most outspoken critic of congestion pricing, New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ, 5): Only 1 percent of the constituents in his district even commute into Manhattan’s central business district, the part of Manhattan that would have been subject to congestion pricing; and by the way, the median household income in Bergen County, Gottheimer’s district, is $125,000.

In a series of editorials published the week since Gov. Hocul torpedoed congestion pricing, the New York Times has certainly laid out the benefits of congestion pricing and exposed the tortured arguments against it. Here’s a particularly compelling passage:

In her announcement, Hochul emphasized the precarious state of the city’s recovery from the Covid pandemic, but car traffic into Manhattan has returned to prepandemic levels, as has New York City employment, which is now higher than ever before; New York City tourism metrics are barely behind prepandemic records and are expected to surpass them in 2025. Tax coffers have rebounded, too, to the extent that the city canceled a raft of planned budget cuts. The one obvious measure by which the city has not mounted a full pandemic comeback is subway ridership — a measure that congestion pricing would have helped and pausing it is likely to hurt.

In announcing the pause, she also expressed concern for the financial burden the $15 surcharge would impose on working New Yorkers, though the city’s working class was functionally exempted from the toll by a rebate system for those with an annual income of $60,000 or less. In a follow-up news conference, she emphasized a few conversations she’d had with diner owners, who she said expressed anxiety that their business would suffer when commuters wouldn’t drive to their establishments. But each of them was within spitting distance of Grand Central, where an overwhelming share of foot traffic — and commercial value — comes from commuters using mass transit.

My pro-congestion pricing position takes a different angle: I think dense city districts work as offsets for the environmentally unsustainable suburbs and low-slung, low-density neighborhoods, allowing most Americans to live ecologically dangerous lives without burning down the planet. By hosting job centers, entertainment districts, and dense housing, city centers balance out environmentally cavalier suburban settings where large lots and single family zones strain utility infrastructure, promote inefficient use of resources, and wed people to GHG-heavy cars; electric cars are hardly any better because they induce sprawl, which is at the root of our environmental crisis.

Suburbanites want to eat their cake and have it too; otherwise they wouldn’t care about congestion pricing. But they want to live in GHG hot zones while flocking to cities—where, thanks to the underlying zoning for mixed-use and dense housing that’s forbidden in the suburbs, there’s a concentration of businesses, Bop Streets, services, restaurants, and exciting entertainment options. City cores should be compensated for maintaining and managing density. And more importantly, for making capacious (and voracious) suburban life possible.

____

Jerry West versus Bill Russell

While it didn’t rate as an obsession this week, I do feel compelled to note NBA great Jerry West’s death. West’s all-star career from 1960 to 1974 was before my time, but when my pro-basketball fandom started in earnest as a little boy in the mid 1970s, I did quickly ID West as my favorite player thanks to his famous last-second half-court shot in the 1970 NBA finals against the New York Knicks, which I read about in the mesmerizing NBA history book I constantly checked out of the library; the book, Championship NBA by Leonard Koppett, started with George Mikan and the 1949 Minneapolis Lakers and ran up through Willis Reed, Walt Frazier and the early 1970s Knicks.

Assigned to write a biography for what may have been my first elementary school report in the third grade, I chose West as my subject. In all honesty, I was originally drawn to him because he had the same first name as my dad, but after choosing him as my favorite, I became enamored in earnest with his role as a defining point guard (he’s literally the NBA’s dribbling figure logo) , with his raw hustle (as opposed to the supernatural skills of his more famous Lakers comrade Elgin Baylor or the outright dominance his other world famous teammate, Wilt Chamberlain), and most of all with his ultimately hopeless heroics, as he led his L.A. Lakers in repeated, tragic losses to Bill Russell’s unbeatable Boston Celtics in the 1962, ‘63, ‘65, ‘66, ‘68, and 1969 NBA finals. West actually won the MVP award in those ‘69 finals despite the Lakers’ loss, the only time a player on the losing squad has done so; he averaged 37.9 points a game over the course the 7-game series.

During West’s last few seasons, it was the New York Knicks who repeatedly beat his Lakers in the finals (in 1970 and 1973), though West finally won his only championship, out of 9 tries, in L.A.’s 1972 initial re-match with New York, the same year his Lakers won a then-record 69 games during the regular season. (Micheal Jordan’s 1996 Chicago Bulls and Steph Curry’s 2016 Golden State Warriors won 72 and 73 regular season games, respectively). The 1972 Lakers’ record 33 straight regular season wins still stands.

Oddly, while I often tear up about basketball heroes from childhood—including players from Jerry West’s era like Russell, Reed, and Milwaukee Bucks-era Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, that I’d read about in that important book, or players from my own years as contemporary fan such as the Big E or Doctor J—I didn’t mist up about West’s death.

My own great Jerry, my dad, died earlier this year, and I cried my eyes out; it was enough tears for the two of them combined, I suppose.

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

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

Week #34

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Josh Feit <josh@publicola.com>

Wed, Jun 5, 4:05 PM

to Biden

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

Disappointed.

I'm not contributing until Biden changes course.

a GEN X Jew

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

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

The Penguins’ “Earth Angel;” Sylvia Plath’s violent poetry; Roland Garros

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#33

1) Practicing “Earth Angel” on piano.

The Penguins’ single Earth Angel defines 1950s doo-wop, a genre that itself defines early rock and roll. With its melancholy time signatures, heavenly vocals, sparse arrangements, and lovesick angst front and center, doo-wop’s teen-aged arias are pitch perfect artifacts of mid-20th century America.

Earth Angel was recorded and released in 1954 during doo-wop’s showstopping initial wave when its aching pop cadences suddenly turned young vocalists into street corner composers across American cities nationwide. The result: a rush of low-budget, unbridled lo-fi singles from local DIY ecosystems made up of aspiring high school acts, rhythm-and-blues record shops, radio stations, and hustling post-War indie labels.

In the case of Earth Angel, L.A.-based gospel label Dootone (an African American-owned label) hastily put out the acetate demo featuring just vocals, piano, and bass that a crew of Fremont High students calling themselves the Penguins (after the Kool cigarettes logo) recorded in a garage.

In addition to L.A.’s Penguins, the 1953/54 class of doo-wop pioneers included (my favorite doo-wop act) NYC’s the Crows, whose 1954 smash Gee (the first doo-wop song to break the million-seller milestone) is often cited as the first rock & roll hit. What’s indisputable is that it was the first R&B chart topping record to “crossover” to the upper echelons of the Pop (read, “white”) chart.

(I wrote about doo-wop and Earth Angel at length in my 2021 essay, “Absolute Beginner Blues.”)

The Penguins’ reel-to-reel garage demo of Earth Angel (pressed straight to single and eventually climbing six notches higher than the Crows’ crossover hit) is forever marked by its DIY trappings: the opening bars were inadvertently lopped off. As a result, the song begins mid-piano intro. This historic accident may explain Earth Angel’s mysterious rhythm, which I can only describe as having an undertow. Rather than prompting a sense of resolve and ascension that pop chord patterns create by landing on the root 1 note of the key (as Earth Angel does with its standard I vi ii V/ I vi ii V/ I … “50s progression”), it nonetheless feels as if its always faltering toward resolve, rather than ascending toward resolve. Earth Angel is constantly making an attempt to begin; appropriate, perhaps, given how the recording SNAFU creates the sensation that Earth Angel never actually starts in the first place.

The only other bit of music I can think of that naturally flows-in-reverse like this, as if it’s actually moving backwards, is the beautiful spooky climax of Claude Debussy’s 1893 String Quartet in G Minor.

My attempt to replicate Earth Angel’s counterclock throughline has been the task of the week, a frustrating and euphoric one.

Fittingly, I tired reverse logic by playing the progression with a propulsive one-TWO rock back-beat. That approach, among other tricks (such as locking in doo-wop’s standard left-hand arpeggios in the style of another doo-wop masterpiece, In the Still of the Nite) did not work. The backbeat ploy, for example, simply turned the Penguins’ dreamy prayer into a polka.

Guess I’ll just have to go back to the drawing board on this song and start over.

2) Close reading Sylvia Plath’s Ariel

Trying to sharpen the life or death skill of interpreting poetry, I took my copy of Sylvia Plath’s posthumous (and Pulitzer Prize winning) collection, 1965’s Ariel, off the shelf and started reading it this week as if it was a homework exercise: I studied her verse line by line, consulted secondary sources, and then re-read the poems as if I was memorizing them.

My Friday-Saturday-Sunday night Memorial Day weekend plans? Hanging out at the bar with a whiskey and a pen marking up Sylvia Plath.

What did I find in Plath’s poems? Violence.

It’s an odd match, poetry and violence. But that’s what’s happening on the pages of Ariel.

Kamikazes, knives, vengeance, homicide, armies, poison, the Holocaust, animal traps, drowning cats (and I’m only 20 poems into this 40-poem collection.) There’s even a poem titled “Thalidomide” about the infamous drug that doctors widely prescribed to pregnant women during the late 1950s and early 1960s that caused birth deformities. Another poem here, “Cut,” turns a mundane kitchen scene into a bloody, chopping board incident. This is violence against women in particular—in natal care, in the kitchen—as Plath crafts allegories publicizing the urgent themes of the oppressive domestic scene. Plath’s Ariel reads like verse to the prose of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique.

The excellent title poem—named, in part, after Shakespeare’s Ariel, the Tempest’s magical sky spirit trapped in servitude under magician Prospero—contemplates the ultimate act of violence, suicide. Specifically, “Ariel” is about the self-destruction inherent in the pursuit of liberation. It ends:

“And I/Am the arrow,/The dew that flies/Suicidal, at one with the drive/Into the red/Eye, the cauldron of morning.”

But apparently there is a joy in being “Suicidal, at one with the drive,”—a least when the destination is a “cauldron,” witchcraft’s means of rebirth. Along this “drive” (a horse ride through the English countryside), the narrator unites with her passions. Casting off “dead stringencies,” she is the women’s rights Paul Revere, Lady “White Godiva” on her rebel ride. Eating “sweet” berries, she savors the natural world around her. And then, Becoming one with nature itself, she transforms herself into basic physiological and geo functions: “And now I/Foam to wheat/ a glitter of seas.”

At one point she even becomes the horse. Using the Hebrew definition of Ariel, God’s Lion—though, with Plath at the reins, it’s “Lioness”—she writes:

God’s Lioness,/How one we grow./ Pivot of heels and knees!”

All this joy galloping on the way to corporeal evaporation, like the “dew that flies,” evaporating as the morning sun rises in the sky.

Plath strikes a similar ecstatic pose in “Cut.” It begins: “What a thrill—/My thumb instead of an onion/The top quite gone…” Three stanzas later, Plath is openly giddy about her own dismemberment: “Straight from the heart./I step on it,/ Clutching my bottle of pink fizz/ A celebration, this is.”

Plath’s poetry, inventive, erudite, and elegantly unruly as it is, has always struck me as a finite heirloom of the early 1960s Feminine Mystique-era. But as Donald Trump runs for president on a platform of mob violence, and as Israeli and Russian bombs devastate Gaza and Ukraine, respectively (with bloodshed looming in Haiti), reading Plath’s grisly poetry at a bar on Saturday night in 2024 felt—as great poetry always should—like a zeitgeist move.

3) The French Open at Roland Garros
I’d never heard the tennis metonym Roland Garros before until earlier this year when I watched Jay Caspian Kang’s documentary about Michael Chang’s historic win at the 1989 French Open, aka, “Roland Garros.”

This week, as the 2024 French Open got underway with headlines about former star, Japan’s Naomi Osaka’s surprise three-set near-win against current Women’s No. 1, Poland’s Iga Swiatek, and veteran Rafael Nadal’s poignant first round farewell(?) loss, “Roland Garros!” has been my favorite phrase. I exclaim it whenever the mood strikes.

Once again, for me, it’s all about following the chaotic travails of my favorite tennis player, the WTA’s No. 2, Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka, as she angles for a re-match of her Italian Open finals loss in mid May to Swiatek (and her Madrid Open finals loss to Swiatek two weeks before that.)

While it may sound like Sabalenka is in some sort of Federer–Nadal-level rivalry with Swiatek, that’s not the case. Swiatek, who easily beat Sabalenka 6-2, 6-3 in the Italian Open, holds an 8-3 advantage over Sabalenka overall (Sabalenka’s three wins over Swiatek have all taken three sets, while only two of Swiatek’s eight wins over Sabalenka have taken a three-set effort.)

While Swiatek hovers above the women’s circuit, Sabalenka is battling it out at the top of the rankings a notch below the Polish star, against peers like No. 3, American Coco Gauff (who has a more comprehensive game than slugger Sabalenka and is quietly making quick work of the competition this week) and No. 4, Kazakhstan’s Elena Rybakina, who has cruised through this week so far onto the current 4th round where she’s on a collision course with Sabalenka before either can make it to the Roland Garros finals. Rybakina won her 3rd round match against the No. 25 in two quick sets, 6-4, 6-3.

Sabalenka, who, I’ll admit, is doing better than usual (and who has, surprising us all, added a new drop shot to her game) had a more nerve racking third round showdown. Her tour circuit best friend, the former No. 3, Paula Badosa, now un-ranked, pushed Sabalenka to 7-5, 6-1.

Devil Ivy clipping start; Cape Floral NA cocktail; Impossible “chicken” sandwich.

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#32

1) Late last year, I made some clippings from a Devil Ivy plant—snip the stem on an angle just below a node—and I put them in a small jar of water (make sure the water line is above the nodes).

Six months later, the ivy leaves were flourishing, and tails of curling white roots were crushing up against the glass. Seizing the day, I freed up a planting pot for the burgeoning Devil Ivy start by re-potting a surprisingly successful Trader Joe’s Philodendron into a bigger pot, and then, with a fresh helping of damp soil, I transferred the Devil Ivy start to the pot the Philodendron had outgrown.

This game of musical plants has embedded me in my own private Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants" or whatever hippie Stevie Wonder world I’m in as I lovingly put my newly-potted start on the poetry bookcase by the window.

I used a Delroy Wilson, the Cool Operator LP as a trellis for the two leafy stems to bless this Devil Ivy dub project.

Newly potted Devil Ivy start (center).

On a related note, last December, my weekly list of obsessions included “Saving the Dragon Tree Plant” that my friend/ex Diana handed off.

I’m happy to report, it’s back from the dead.

2) I haven’t had any alcohol in more than a week.

Who knows how long this mini-health kick will last, but it’s been an easy pleasure thanks to the Abstinence brand bottle of Cape Floral “premium distilled non-alcoholic spirit” I bought; $50 at the overpriced bodega on my block, but $35 if you order it online from the company.

I keep checking the ingredients for cannabis because after mixing a pour of Cape Floral with soda water and lime every evening, I’ve been turning pleasantly invisible and falling right asleep.

No drugs involved, evidently. The ingredients listed are: Cape Rose geranium, juniper berries, angelica root, and coriander. Maybe it’s the angelica root, which is used in traditional European medicine to help ease anxiety.

The South African-based company claims their NA spirits are “inspired by the diverse botanicals of South Africa's Cape Floral Kingdom - the world's smallest yet most diverse floral kingdom.” Other Abstinence Brand choices include: Cape Citrus, Cape Spice, Epilogue X (“dark toasted malt … with spice botanicals and South African Honeybush, perfect for a non-alcoholic old-fashioned”), and lemon or blood orange spritz mixers.

According to one happy online review from “Laurie H. in Baltimore,” Cape Floral tastes lovely with some cranberry simple syrup, lavender bitters and sparkling hibiscus water.

I will test that soon enough, but for now I can already say highly and drowsily recommended with just soda water and lime.

3) Another recommendation from the (new) world (order) of witchcraft food and drink: Impossible brand’s “chicken” patties.

Definitely better for the environment (thanks to the softer carbon footprint than corporate chicken farming) and debatably better for you (more nutrients, such as fiber, than a chicken patty), these golden-browned patties are a tasty vegan/veggie option.

I fry them up in a pan with some virgin olive oil and plate them as the protein centerpiece in a salad sandwich—a pile of greens, fried onions, and sliced tomato, with a heavy dose of nutritional yeast.

I added red cabbage and Trader Joe’s sesame salad dressing to the mix one day this week to mimic a more classic fried chicken slider.

Pussy Riot retrospective at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver; a sourdough sandwich shop on Commercial Drive in Vancouver proper; and Sabalenka vs Swiatek at the WTA Italian Open in Rome.

I’m All Lost in…

The 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week (Vancouver, B.C. edition)

Week #31

1) I visited Vancouver, B.C. this past weekend. My friend Wendy’s Stealing Clothes, aka, Annie, had tickets to a nostalgic (for her) rock show and a groovy Airbnb. She invited me along; not for her rock show, but for the opportunity to recline in Vancouver: lazy, grand & sparkling Stanley Park; the four-minute-headways SkyTrain (with doner kebab shops built into station platforms); the majority-minority diversity (versus Seattle’s near-70% white), and the people’s SeaBus.

On Sunday morning, we took the SkyStrain five stops to the Waterfront Station and transferred to the SeaBus (the ferry), taking it 10+ minutes across the Vancouver Harbor to the Polygon Gallery (free admission, but $15 recommended) where we saw a remarkable exhibit: Velvet Terrorism—Pussy Riot’s Russia. This was a chronological, hedge-maze-walk-through retrospective of the anti-Putin, anti-war, anti-police state, feminist collective’s obstinate catalog of punk agitprop. Appropriately, their Riot Grrrl-inspired jams blare from video monitors as you take in the show; the person at the front desk warns you about this: “It’s loud,” she said.

Pussy Riot grabbed the world’s attention when they grabbed Russia by the balls in February 2012 after staging a guerilla gig at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savoir dressed in simple frocks, colored tights, combat boots, and knit stocking caps pulled over their heads (circle cut outs for the eyes and mouth), performing a manic song called “Punk Prayer”

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin
Banish Putin, Banish Putin!
Congregations genuflect
Black robes brag, golden epaulettes
Freedom's phantom's gone to heaven
Gay Pride's chained and in detention
The head of the KGB, their chief saint
Leads protesters to prison under escort
Don't upset His Saintship, ladies
Stick to making love and babies
Shit, shit, holy shit!
Shit, shit, holy shit!
Virgin Mary, Mother of God
Become a feminist, we pray thee
Become a feminist, we pray thee

Bless our festering bastard-boss
Let black cars parade the Cross
The Missionary's in class for cash
Meet him there, and pay his stash

Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin
Better believe in God, you vermin!
Fight for rights, forget the rite –
Join our protest, Holy Virgin
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, we pray thee, banish him!

Two of the members, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina got two-year prison terms after being charged with "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”

Pussy Riot’s aesthetic is located somewhere between the spat-out punk of Bikini Kill (though, late-50s-something-me hears the Slits), Charlie Chaplin slapstick, and Alexander Dubček’s popular 1968 Prague Spring revolution, Czechoslovakia’s original Velvet Revolution.

No disrespect to Western punk, but Antifa is real in Russia; when Pussy Riot uses the word “Gulag,” as they did in a series of theatrical protest actions in 2018 and 2019, it’s not a metaphor.

Pussy Riot—originally 11 women, including 22-year-old founder Tolokonnikova—frames things in the 1968 context from the start: their first action, in November 2011, featured their song “Free the Cobblestones,” an echo of the Paris ‘68 student protests slogan: “Sous les pavés, la plage!” Under the cobblestones, the beach!

This electric guitar banger, which also samples a 1977 U.K. punk song by the Angelic Upstarts called “Police Oppression,” urges citizens to throw cobblestones at police during election day protests; the cobblestones represented a crooked, election-year public works project kickback, and Pussy Riot performed the song atop a scaffold in a Moscow subway station while tearing pillows and raining feathers in analogy down (as opposed to actual cobblestones) on the crowd below.

Although my ‘68 comparison casts Pussy Riot as more praxis than punk, it’s hard not to conclude, after walking through this exhaustive (and exhausting) exhibit of high-brow-pranksterism, that Pussy Riot’s real jam is ultimately artistic.

Pussy Riot exhibit at North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery, 5/12/24

Pussy Riot exhibit at North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery, 5/12/24

This is meant as high praise. Pussy Riot, now a lose cohort of about 25 woman, most living in exile, is made up of art geniuses—irrepressible creative souls who found themselves trapped in Putin-land. The inexorable result: their oozing creativity manifests as politics.

Constantly facing house arrest and arrest arrest, they persist at a level Elizabeth Warren couldn’t comprehend. But viewed as a whole body of work here, particularly as they focus on high-production videos (shot in forests and sampling Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake), theatrical costumes (such as reclaimed Kokoshniks and comedic police uniforms), colorful paper airplanes (in a protest that seemed prompted by Yoko Ono’s instruction poetry), elaborate hi-jinks escapes (using food delivery guy outfits and decoy suitcases), and songs that re-contextualize fragments of disillusioned letters from the Ukrainian front (“Mom, there are no Nazis here, don’t watch TV”), it’s plain Pussy Riot is a voltaic arts movement.

In 2018, when they plastered the federal penitentiary building with oversized stickers saying: “gulag,” “murders,” “torture,” “slave labour,” a government employee came out and told them they needed to submit all complaints in writing. Alyokhina replied: “that’s exactly what we’re doing, we just enlarged the words so that they would be readable.”

This is a mission statement. Communicating is their mission.

Also in 2018, when the government shut down Telegram, the messenger service that anti-Putin activists used to communicate, members of Pussy Riot showed up at the FSB building (today’s KGB building) and attacked it with paper airplanes; Telegram’s logo is an airplane.

Pussy Riot exhibit at North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery, 5/12/24

Pussy Riot exhibit at North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery, 5/12/24, Masha Alyokhina pictured with blue paper airplane.

Pussy Riot exhibit at North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery, 5/12/24

The text that narrates the exhibit was written by one of the collective’s original members, the poetic Alyokhina, which makes it hard to miss the fact that artistic genius governs Pussy Riot’s overt politics. Juxtaposed against the kidnap letter sloganeering splayed on the gallery walls in green, orange, and yellow masking tape (“Fuck you, SEXisTs, PuTiNists,”), Alyokhina writes the exhibit’s narrative in effortless metaphors

“You can be imprisoned for talking to friends about politics at McDonald’s. For two years I have seen [the prison system] from the inside. It is a meat grinder…”

and default prose poems.

Riot is always a thing of beauty. That is how I got interested. At school, I had this dream of becoming a graffiti artist, and I practiced graffiti in my school notepad. If you start your schoolwork on the first page and do your sketches in the back, sooner or later the two will meet in the middle.

Next to your history notes, graffiti appears. Which turns history into a different story.

If Alyokhina’s magical verse isn’t enough to signal Pussy Riot’s status as high art, her report on Pussy Riot’s 2012 Red Square performance of “Putin Peed his Pants” from atop the historic Lobnoye Mesto altar explicitly spells out the nature of their project:

“The cops got us afterwards for trespassing. We told them we were drama students.”

Doner kebab shop built into the SkyTrain platform, Vancouver, B.C., 5/11/24.

2) Another dispatch from Vancouver—specifically from Commercial Drive, the main drag east of downtown that stretches through the lively yet insouciant Grandview-Woodland neighborhood where the closely packed detached houses lining the side streets translate into a density rate (17,000 people/per square mile) that tops the city average by 3,000 people per square mile.

Trout Lake Park, Vancouver, B.C.

Vegan pizza on the drag, Vancouver, B.C., 5/13/24

Commercial Drive is a two-miles-of-action strip (and notably multi-generational as opposed to teeny bopper heavy) defined by: lefty, used bookstores; secondhand clothing and consignment shops; cafes; an abundance of pizza slice joints (including the Pizza Castle for plant based vegan slices); tattoo parlors; coffee shops; Caribbean, Asian, Mexican, and Roti restaurants (vegan options everywhere); and (too many) sports bars.

It’s bordered on the south by a major SkyTrain stop (the third busiest station in the three-line SkyTrain system, the Broadway/Commercial Station, with roughly 15,000 daily boardings); bordered on the southeast by a gorgeous wooded lake beach (Trout Lake Park); and bordered on the north by a hippie park (Grandview Park).

Out of all the action, the coziest spot to sit down for a glass of red wine or a cocktail is located directly across the street from Grandview Park, a slow-paced hang out called Mum’s the Word. We landed there twice.

First for drinks. I got—per the “or just ask for what you like!” drink-menu option, a custom made NA cocktail. Annie got a “Them Apples”— butter washed Pere Magloire V.S., Merridale apple liqueur, maple syrup, egg white, black walnut bitters, and lemon.

The next night, for dinner. I got the “Hippie Mum”—fried eggplant, tomato sauce, herbs, vegan shredded cheese, served on sourdough.

I don’t know what Annie got, but the comfort food menu includes a long list of grilled sourdough sandwiches: Melted Swiss cheese with onion jam; a field roast vegan sandwich with spicy vegannaise and caramelized onions; a beef patty melt; a BLT; a meatball sub; a smoked turkey with chimichurri; a Gruyere cheese and country ham sandwich; and a “Korean Mum”—Bulgogi marinated smoked beef, kimchi, mozzarella, and mayo.

We sat on the back deck for both visits (for the view of the park), but there’s also low-key indoor lounge that may as well be in Portland with a DJ spinning casual beats and a struggling artist bartender chatting with the regulars.

The New York Times’ “36 Hours in Vancouver,” also highlighted Mum’s the Word, writing: “equal parts cafe and cocktail bar—locals slip into retro easy chairs for drinks like Mum’s Cold Brew Manhattan (14.75 dollars), a potent mix of cold brew, whisky and kahlua.”

The next time I visit Vancouver, I will go straight back to Mum’s the Word.

I’ll also go back to Prado Cafe—one of the 20 coffee shops on Commercial Drive—and the other place I hit twice during this weekend trip, both times for their whopping quinoa and arugula bowl.

Final note: There’s a Kitchener St. in the heart of the Commercial Drive drag; given that there are at least two world music record shops and a Jamaican restaurant called Riddim & Spice nearby, one couldn’t be blamed for thinking this street was named after Windrush Generation Trinidadian London transplant, 1950s Calypso icon Lord Kitchener.

“Isn’t that your guy?” Annie said. (She said the same thing about the President Gamal Nasser LP of speeches we saw!) Kitchener street was established in 1911, so I guess not, but it seems to me that just as Calypsonian, Aldwyn Roberts, aka, Lord Kitch, was sampling and reclaiming the early 20th Century British mustachioed military leader, the pro-immigrant Commercial Drive neighborhood has transformed meanings as well.

SkyTrain, Expo Line, Vancouver, B.C., 5/13/24

3) And now we leave Vancouver, B.C. for Rome. Or at least, for my current obsession with what’s been happening in Rome: Pro tennis’ Italian Open.

To be honest, I’m only paying attention to the women’s side, the WTA, and my favorite player, Aryna Sabalenka, who, in her inimitable, discombobulated style (including faux pas-ing and laughing her way through a sit down interview, and nearly botching her Round-16, 3-set epic by barely fending off three match points) now finds herself in the finals.

Sabalenka (ranked No. 2 in the world) will be facing Iga Swiatek (No. 1 in the world) for the championship on Saturday.

Per usual, Swiatek blazed her way into the finals, handily dispatching all her opponents, including world No. 3 Coco Gauff in the semifinal in two sets. Swiatek also beat Sabalenka last month in the Madrid Open final, 7-5, 4-6, 7-6 (7). And Swiatek holds a 7-3 advantage overall against Sabalenka.

The WTA’s Aryna Sabalenka, ranked No. 2 in the world.

I’m not being 100% fair to Sabalenka; to my glee and amazement, she seems to be in a bad rhythm of her own now. After her close call in Round 16, she went on to win her quarterfinal match against Jelena Ostepenko (the No. 9) in two sets, 6-2, 6-4, and win her semifinal against the streaking Danielle Collins (No. 13), 7-5, 6-2.

Obsessively checking the scores all week has also nudged me back onto the tennis court myself where I pretend I’m Sabalenka as I bash and volley with the practice wall—and when there’s no one else around—cry out: “Sabalenka Afternoon!”

Whatever Became of Mahmoud Hassan Pasha?

One of my poems, “Evelyn McHale Chooses the Tallest Building in the City,” an epic at five pages, includes a brief section about Mahmoud Hassan Pasha, the Egyptian delegate to the U.N. during 1947’s now hyper-topical special session on the Partition of Palestine.

To date, working on that poem is the closest I’ve come to writing poetry in a febrile Coleridge dream state. I lovingly immersed myself in it at every waking moment, for eight straight weeks in February and March of 2021; it’s one of the few poems that appears in both my collections.  

I admit the section on Pasha is a curious interlude; the poem is made up of 74 couplets, and 68 of those couplets are about Evelyn McHale, a 23-year-old bookkeeper who committed suicide in spectacular fashion by jumping from the observation deck of the Empire State Building on May 1, 1947. Known in inimitable mid-20th century U.S.-tabloid-poetry as “the Beautiful Suicide,” McHale was the subject of a famous and arresting LIFE magazine photograph, lying in elegant repose in her pearls and white gloves; she’s seemingly asleep or unscathed from her dramatic leap (if it wasn’t for the demolished limousine serving as her funeral bier, and her shoeless feet.)

Originating as an ekphrasis of that photo, “Evelyn McHale Chooses the Tallest Building in the City” blossomed into an attempt at writing a Shirley Jackson short story along the lines of her 1957 story “The Missing Girl” or her 1951 novel Hangsaman, both prompted by Jackson’s obsession with the true story of Bennington college student Paula Jean Weldon, who mysteriously disappeared in 1946.

Hassan Pasha made it into my poem at the last minute. After weeks of researching McHale (tracking down family trees and contemporaneous records), writing her story in couplets (a speedy storytelling conceit I copied from poet Ross Gay’s flowing book-length poem about watching video of Dr. J Julius Erving’s famous NBA-finals-baseline-reverse layup), and then revising and revising, I decided it was time to cut off the obsession and finish the poem. My then-girlfriend, who I was quarantined with at the time, was tired of hearing about McHale; I was triangulating train timetables at 3 am, trying to track McHale’s exact movements on the day of her suicide. But I knew the poem wasn’t finished. Or more accurately, even though I decided I was done, I was still obsessing.

It was then that an easy research trope led me to Pasha.

One of the characters in my poem was the limousine driver who was fortuitously at a nearby drug store when McHale, like a Poseidon bolt, totaled his parked limo on W. 34th St. I had been captivated by the mention he got in the May 2 New York Times page 23 brief on McHale’s death, particularly liking the rhyme/slant rhyme rhythm of near-by/thereby/injury. “The driver was/ in a near-by drug store, thereby/ escaping death or serious injury,” which I turned into this couplet: “The chauffeur knew a drug store coffee counter/nearby, thereby he was free.” I figured he was probably reading a paper at that drug store counter, so, I looked up the May 1, 1947 New York Times to see if I could add some color to his cameo. Maybe some President Truman news would give the poem a dash of late 1940s verisimilitude.  

Of course: What I found blaring at me from the PDF was a triple decker headline about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: “Arabs Defeated, 8-1, In U.N./After Long Wrangle on Bid/For Independence Debate.” By of course, I mean God dammit. Obviously, my situation isn’t akin to being on the ground in Palestine or Israel, but as a progressive American Jew, this conflict has dogged me my whole life. P.s. High school history class and college campuses were unnerving for Jews back in the 1980s too, thanks to Israel.

God dammit because: Here I was experiencing my first euphoric, out-of-body, creative experience as a beginning poet, and once again, there’s no escaping Palestine for Josh. There was nothing to do but embrace it. And to be honest, it immediately felt right to do so. If I had to wrestle with this mindfuck tragedy my whole life, well then so did my epic poem. (I also took it as a good sign when it turned out the limo was a U.N. limo.)

With all the SDOT and YIMBY prompts that seem to score my poems, it’s actually idyllic 1940s Gotham, not 21st century bike lanes, that animate my poetry. This is how I justified dedicating five pages of my chapbook Night of Electric Bikes to an account from sepia-toned Manhattan. For me, 1947—with its rattling subways, industrial waterfronts, and Billie Holiday gigs in 52nd St. basement nightclubs—defines the cities of my imagination. Similarly, the Third World/First World politics of the 75-year-old Israeli/Palestinian conflict still defines our current political setting, where students champion the “intersectional” causes of the oppressed against corporate capitalism, structural racism, and gentrification or its doppelganger, “colonialism.” I must say, while I’m committed to the fight for equity and the fight against social injustice, I find echoes of the right’s dangerous nostalgia for “real” America in the left’s fetish for authenticity; Lydia Polgreen wrote an insightful essay about this in February. However, that doesn’t diminish my sense that 1947 is closer than it appears in the rearview mirror.

The pg. 2 jump, New York Times, Thursday, May 1, 1947. Mahmoud Hassan Pasha in striped jacket.

The Thursday, May 1st, 1947 New York Times account of the now-historic U.N. session casts Pasha, who saw where partition was headed, as the main character; he’s pictured in a striped suit jacket—alongside his non-aligned Indian delegate ally—on the page 2 jump. As the only Arab delegate on the special General Committee that drew up the agenda for the coming full assembly session, Pasha is trying to head off partition with an alternative measure for Palestinian independence; in his frustrated mission, he seems like someone trying to find a vegetarian option on the menu at a steakhouse. His direct quotes (along with the NYT’s paraphrasing) are accordingly tongue-tied. “Mahmoud Hassan Pasha, Egyptian Ambassador, announced however, that he had no authority to withdraw the proposal. He explained that he could only say he would not ‘insist on a vote here.’”

The somewhat confusing front-page article, which catches the week’s action midstream, led me to the U.N. session’s parliamentary notes; they are clearer, though also poetically awkward. “The Egyptian representative stated that he was prepared not to insist on a vote at that time, though, in reply to a question from the Chairman, he stated that he had no authority to withdraw the proposal.” 

Soon, I was as obsessed with Pasha’s story as I was with McHale’s.

Adding to my obsession: Despite Pasha’s front-page NYT role at the beginning of the deliberations, by the time the partition comes to a final vote in November, 1947, he is nowhere to be found. When the Arab delegation walks out in protest, the NYT story mentions neither Egypt nor Pasha, though Egypt is on record voting No.

Again, under the influence of Ross Gay’s Dr. J poem—it shifts dramatically away from Dr. J into verse about other images, such as black and white photo of a boy wearing an aviator cap during the sharecropping era of the 1930s—I found permission to point my poem’s lens elsewhere.

Here’s the Mahmoud Hassan Pasha section, starting with a segue at couplet #21: 

Which gives us an opportunity to cross the East River,/ and go to Queens to the UN at Flushing Meadows,/

where the Egyptian ambassador/ has been speaking in riddles./

—“I am prepared not to insist on a vote at this time,” Mahmoud Hassan/ Pasha said, but “I will not withdraw my proposal.”/

The General Committee remained/ bewildered, adjourning/

at 12:03 in the morning, May 1, 1947/  Hassan Pasha was becoming non-aligned./

The UN reconvened at 10 am. With just cause, Hassan Pasha/ reintroduced his proposal./

The termination of the mandate over Palestine. The declaration of/ independence./

The UN President said it couldn’t be voted on/ because it no longer existed.—

Mahmoud Hassan Pasha, who, as far as I can tell, also “no longer existed” after 1947, has remained an intriguing character for me; I find myself looking for him in the pages of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy novels, which take place against the backdrop of political Cairo in the early 20th century. Or: I daydream that he slipped out of the U.N. building in defeat and walked into Manhattan, where he has been freewheeling in his dashing striped suit jacket ever since, going to bookstores, and art galleries, and seeing lectures at the 92nd St. Y. 

 A recent poem I wrote begins:

Manhattan. Missing. Last seen/ on the front page, May 1, 1947,  the Egyptian ambassador who voted no on partition./ The actress speaking to the gales in pre-Code./ Skyscraper Souls.                                                                                                    Skyscraper Souls is a 1932 pre-code movie where the tragic heroine leaps to her death from the ledge of the (fictitious) newest tallest Manhattan skyscraper; the Empire State Building opened in the spring of 1931.

Hollywood star Verree Teasdale as Sarah Dennis leaps to her death in the 1932 MGM movie Skyscraper Souls.

In my idealism, I think the Jews were wrong to advocate for partition and the Arabs were wrong to vote against it. Both sides were wrong for the same reason: nativist tribalism. Although, it looked impossible at the time, I believe in a one state solution for two indigenous peoples. The argument against that idea was that divvying up the land would prevent bloodshed. I’ll just let that hang there.  

An innovative Brian Eno documentary; a tasty vegan sandwich; a helpful column on Gaza (and No, not that “50 Things” list.)

I’m All Lost in…

The three things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#30

1) First an anecdote: In the spring of my senior year of high school, the photography teacher, Ms. Collier, stopped me in the hall, said she’d heard I was a music guy, and could I put together a playlist for the senior slide show. A few days later, I handed her a cassette I’d made of Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient record, Music for Films.

I never heard from her again, and at graduation, a batch of 1984 hits—rather than Eno’s “M386,” “Patrolling Wireborders,” or “There is Nobody”—ended up as the senior slideshow accompaniment.

Last Sunday, I volunteered at the Seattle premiere of Gary Hustwit’s Brian Eno documentary. Hustwit makes low-key, cerebral films—you may know Helvetica (2007) or Urbanized (2011). (I missed Urbanized at the time, but I watched it this week, and it’s an easy going tour de force that captures an early rendering of today’s full-blown YIMBY movement for more density and mass transit.)

Hustwit’s new movie, simply called Eno, uses today’s A.I.-era software as a way to create a “generative” film in the spirit of Eno’s own generative prompt-driven avant-garde minimalism. Hustwit shot hours of casual interviews with the amiable, intellectual, 78-year-old Brian Eno, while also digitizing Eno’s massive personal archives—behind the scenes studio footage, decades of TV interviews, Roxy Music performances. Then, using a proprietary film software he developed, he mixes it all together, gives it some prompts (be sure to play the Bowie “Heroes” scene) and conjures a different 80-plus-minute film for every screening. It’s like putting your entire music library on shuffle, with two or three rules, to produce a different playlist every night.

Sunday, 5/5/24: I snapped this picture of SIFF Downtown’s packed lobby from my volunteer perch on the steps up to the theater. And no, that’s not Eno himself in the the front row, though two-thirds of the crowd did look a lot like the Boomer/Xer icon. Myself included.

What we got at the packed, 500-seat downtown SIFF theater on Sunday night was lots of Bowie, early Roxy Music performances, key snippets of Lee Scratch Perry looping, and sweet footage of a young Bono coming up with U2’s Pride (in the Name of Love) as Eno gently conducts from the engineer’s booth.

I wouldn’t have minded a little more DEVO, the new wave oddity whose first LP Eno produced in late 1977/early 1978; they came on screen several times according to a friend who saw the New York City premiere four days earlier. But no matter the mix, Hustwit’s Eno gives us lots of the hyper eloquent, surprisingly unpretentious Eno playfully discussing the experimental aesthetics he’s lived by for decades. With doctrines like his “oblique strategies,” Eno emphasized lateral directives within otherwise fixed patterns. Looking back now, however, Eno also says, he sees “feelings” (odd, given his famously academic atmospherics) as the DNA of his work—as opposed to doctrine.

True or not, his approach has blessed us with everything from pioneering ambient music, like his 1975 Discreet Music LP, to the Talking Heads’ Fela Kuti-inspired masterpeice Remain in Light, to the Microsoft Windows 95 boot-up sound, to his raucous dials and hot tubes solo in Roxy Music’s Virginia Plain.

Eno, 1972

We also got—and apparently this segment plays at every showing—my new favorite thing about Brian Eno: a contemporary interview of him explaining his coming-of-age revelation as a young teenager in idyllic Suffolk England when he heard the Silhouettes’ 1957 doo-wop hit Get a Job. You wouldn’t associate Eno’s technology-based art music with 1950s rock (his contribution to Roxy’s campy rock & roll seems like a sci-fi ray gun aimed at obliterating rock not venerating it). But here’s Eno, giddy and gray, dancing away at his workstation to footage of the Silhouettes bopping out.

This info expanded the Eno narrative, which has been more about his place in the avant-garde trajectory from Steve Reich to King Tubbys to Adrian Belew to DJ Spooky. Get a Job also happens to be one of my favorite early rock & roll tunes; do a “control F” for Get a Job in this 10,000-word essay I wrote in 2021 about my piano set, and you’ll catch me raving on about the great Silhouettes’ song.

2) Perhaps it’s the spring weather.

Even though I can grab a hippie sandwich in the shop right next door to my building, I’ve been walking a mile south instead all week (and the mile back) to the 23rd & Union PCC Market where they sell Higher Taste brand vegan sandwiches.

Based in Cornelius, Oregon about a half-hour car ride east of Portland (where they started out in 1987 as a vegan and vegetarian catering service), Higher Taste has a groovy homespun, indie backstory (which you can read here.)

I’m partial to their tangy plant-based BBQ sandwich (the “Portland’s Best BBQ”), but they’ve also got a delicious mashed tofu salad sandwich (the “Veggie Chick”) and a marinated Teriyaki seitan crumbles sandwich (the “Big Kahuna.”) These hefty hoagie roll sandwiches are packed with fresh purple cabbage and carrots and just a touch of Vegenaise.

At $9, it’s definitely not a low-cost lunch, but these salubrious sandwiches, with big bite after big bite of plant-based dopamine, hit the spot without hitting your gut.

And unlike most of the plant-based competition in the ready-made, refrigerated sandwich aisles, including the disappointing aforementioned option at the place downstairs from my apartment, Higher Taste’s bread is never soggy or stale. And Veganaise, usually congealed and gross on the other brands, isn’t the presumptuous, main ingredient here.

3) With applause and comments like “This is great!” “kind of nails it,” I’ve noticed many fellow progressive Jews re-posting this Medium article, 50 Completely True Things. It’s a list of often flippant, though passionate and reasoned, statements by a Palestinian American aimed at torpedoing the deafening bombast from both sides in the debate about the war in Gaza.

A sampling:

FACT No. 1.

Some Jews are shitty and awful people.

FACT No. 2.

Some Muslims are shitty and awful people.

…

FACT No. 32.

What happened to the Israeli civilians on 10/7 is fucking awful, and Hamas has earned every fucking thing that the Israeli military throws at them.

FACT No. 33.

What is happening in Gaza to civilians is fucking awful, and not the smartest thing for Israel to do, and some aspects of Israeli military activity may be war crimes, and it doesn’t have to be genocide for it to be tragic.

FACT No. 34.

You can advocate for Palestine without being a racist, antisemitic piece of shit.

FACT No. 35.

You can advocate for Israel without being a racist, anti-Arab piece of shit.

I haven’t re-posted it because, even though, yes, it spoofs the demagogues and offers some helpful points, it strikes me as a yearning-to-be-edgy call for everyone to “shut the fuck up” (satisfying, but…) as opposed to a serious material account that fosters discussion or offers any practical recommendation for a solution.

What I did like this week—which surprised me because he’s one of the NYT’s overdue-for-retirement columnists—was Thomas Friedman’s opinion piece, “Why the Campus Protests Are So Troubling.”

In addition to A) providing a fact check for student protesters about Hamas’ detestable agenda (while also reporting on Palestinians on the ground who oppose Hamas), and B) casting the Netanyahu regime as equally criminal, Friedman highlights forces that are working toward a fair and practical solution.

Friedman starts by focusing his criticism on the student protesters (who, though just kids, are framing the debate). But he pivots meaningfully into a full-blown condemnation of Israel’s belligerent policies as well, using that comprehensive critique to advocate for a renewed focus on a two-state solution.

I am intensely both anti-Hamas and anti-Netanyahu. And if you oppose just one and not also the other, you should reflect a little more on what you are shouting at your protest or your anti-protest. Because no one has done more to harm the prospects of a two-state solution than the codependent Hamas and Netanyahu factions.

Hamas is not against the post-1967 occupation. It is against the existence of a Jewish state and believes there should be an Islamic state between the river and the sea. When protests on college campuses ignore that, they are part of the problem. Just as much as Israel supporters who ignore the fact that the far-right members in Netanyahu’s own coalition government are for a Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. How do I know? Because Netanyahu wrote it into the coalition agreement between himself and his far-right partners.

…

What Palestinians and Israelis need most now are not performative gestures of disinvestment but real gestures of impactful investment, not the threat of a deeper war in Rafah but a way to build more partners for peace. Invest in groups that promote Arab-Jewish understanding, like the Abraham Initiatives or the New Israel Fund. Invest in management skills capacity-building for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, like the wonderful Education for Employment network or Anera, that will help a new generation to take over the Palestinian Authority and build strong, non-corrupt institutions to run a Palestinian state.

This is not a time for exclusionary thinking. It is a time for complexity thinking and pragmatic thinking: How do we get to two nation-states for two indigenous peoples? If you want to make a difference and not just make a point, stand for that, work for that, reject anyone who rejects it

I will say, the Medium piece and the Friedman piece do agree on one thing: They’re both for a two-state solution, or, in the case of the Medium piece, explicitly against a one-state-solution. On that, I disagree with both. I may be dreamy on this point, but partition is the ongoing and animating problem. So, while I like that Friedman’s piece is specific and prescriptive, and I agree that two-states is a legitimate and just goal—as opposed to the psychotics of obliteration coming from Netanyahu and Hamas—I believe it’s time to embrace the pluralism that both sides rejected in 1947.

75-plus years of taking the opposite approach has only led to endless bloodshed.

The Redmond Technology Station’s magnificent pedestrian & bike bridge; the chord progression to Desmond Dekker’s “007 (Shanty Town)”; the Sightline Institute on Seattle’s housing plan fail.

I’m All Lost in…

The 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#29

1) Seattle’s regional transit agency (where I work) opened the first installment of its second light rail line on Saturday: a 6.6-mile, eight-station, trains-every-10-minutes service expansion.

More fantastical: We opened it in the suburbs across Lake Washington; the line will eventually cross the I-90 floating bridge and connect to our existing 1 Line in Seattle late next year.

My job at Sound Transit is speech writer, so I got to script a lot of exciting stuff for Saturday’s ribbon cutting:

It’s hard not to use the word historic today as we open service that will mark a before-and-after moment for residents here on the Eastside of Lake Washington. 

Starting today, if you don’t want to deal with traffic and parking or spending your paycheck on more and more gas just to get from one neighborhood to another… to get to work, to get to your doctor’s appointment… you now have an easy, reliable, inexpensive option: Link light rail’s new 2 Line. 

Starting today, Bellevue and Redmond are connected in ways they’ve never been before: to jobs and services, and all our magnificent regional trails. 

To be honest though, I was more excited about writing the remarks for the ribbon cutting we did earlier in the week, on Monday, for the Redmond Technology Station’s elegant pedestrian/bike bridge that we also opened as part of the new Line.

I look forward to joining you this Saturday when 2 Line light rail trains officially begin to roll.

But debuting the Redmond Technology Station bridge today only heightens my excitement.

It puts Saturday in context: New trains cannot transform this region without the critical, accompanying investments that make it easy and safe for more people to get on board.

This capacious 1,100-foot bridge spans the coagulated SR 520 highway, integrating the Microsoft campus, the surrounding neighborhoods, bike parking stalls, regional bike paths, and plenty of bus connections (King County Metro’s Rapid Ride B Line, the Microsoft Connector Shuttle, and Sound Transit’s own 542, 545, 550, and 554 buses) all with the new train Station.

Featuring flowing bike lanes of its own (you can see those in the fifth picture below), garden starts, multiple pedestrian access points, bioswale rain features, wooden benches you’d more likely find in a cozy cabin, and a roof that looks like a giant kite in flight, this magnificent bridge is an urbanist rendering come to life.

The better pictures here, like this one, were taken by my pro photographer pal Glenn.

As much as our light rail trains are going to transform Seattle’s Microsoft suburbs (as much as one can transform a region of upscale french-fry breweries and Tesla dealerships), the ped bridge may be the bigger game changer.

It’s already a good scene: the setting for an airy stroll over 520’s hushed traffic that links Microsoft’s east and west campuses and funnels workers, pedestrians, and bikers to the light the rail station and convenient bus bays.

It also leads to the plazas, stores, and theater seating that are tucked up against Microsoft HQ—all open to the public. And this leads me to consider the bigger potential: Add a Saturday farmers’ market, daily pop-ups, food trucks, painters at their easels, buskers, info booths for local non-profits and suddenly we’re talking about a Highline of our own.

Microsoft should inaugurate it’s new status as a public destination spot by booking Taylor Swift to play a free outdoor concert on the bridge (and Sound Transit could run free trains to the show.)

2) Regular readers of this weekly roundup will have noticed that I’ve been brushing up my piano set lately, and that many of my recent aesthetic highs have come from going back to these tunes.

That’s definitely the case this week as I re-learned a tune from my 1960s ska subset: Desmond Dekker & the Aces’ two-minute—thirty-second burst of Highlife-adjacent pop, “007 (Shanty Town).”

It’s the chord progression sliding from the 4 chord to the 7 chord to the 1 chord underneath the lyrics And now rude boys a go wail/cause them out of jail/ rude boys cannot fail/ cause them must get bail that moves me so.

Dekker has an Elysian Fields voice, and the way he leans into each long-L rhyme catches your ear. But it’s the mix of inverted left hand chords with the sweet-spot notes in the right hand melody that tug at your heartstrings.

The 4 (tension and anticipation)/ 7 (leading back home)/ 1 (home) chord progression is certainly a standard bit of human condition magic. However, it’s Dekker’s melodic sleight—holding the same note, a D flat, above the 4 and the 7 chords (a D flat major chord and a G diminished chord here) that makes the passage so poignant.

More magic: that D flat note in Dekker’s longing melody line matches the top note in both chords he’s singing over—the 4 is an inverted D flat Major chord (F/A flat/ D flat) while the 7, the G diminished chord, keeps the notes in their standard order (G / B flat/ the D flat again). Meanwhile, that Major scale diminished chord adds more gorgeous tension because it includes the Devil’s flatted fifth, in this instance the G six semitones up to that same D flat.

Making the D flat ring out by having the melody echo it an octave up adds brightness to the Satanic tension foreshadowing the blissful resolution that’s next when Dekker drops back to the 1 chord, an A flat Major chord (the song is in A flat major.) And Dekker inverts this chord too: E flat/ A flat/ C. Perfect, because this is when he finally lets go of the D flat in the melody line, dropping a half step to that C. This move not only echoes the half-step drop from the 7 chord back home to the 1, but it replays the repeated D flat conceit by capping the C at the top of the inverted A flat chord with a C note an octave above in the melody.

And a final bit of magic. Some dance theory:

3) Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell is a single-family zone protectionist. As Erica and I reported on PubliCola in mid-March when he released his proposed Comp Plan—the document that governs city housing and city zoning—his reluctant interpretation of a state density mandate to allow apartments in the 75% of Seattle where they’ve traditionally been proscribed was a predictable reflection of his provincial politics.

(Back in January, I literally predicted the specifics of his obstructionist approach; and then, after the plan was released, Erica had the receipts, showing how Harrell took a red pen to his planning department’s original pro-density draft.)

However, the sharpest report on Harrell’s defining and embarrassing planning document comes to us from Seattle’s pro-city think tank, the Sightline Institute.

Last week, in their trademark straight forward prose, Sightline published a piece titled “Seattle Deserves a Better Comp Plan” calling for “abundant housing.” Written by Sightline’s urbanist smarty Dan Bertolet, the 3,500-word piece walks through the specific reasons why the mayor’s proposal is a fail (anemic targets for new housing, prohibitive building envelope regulations that squash the ability to actually build multi-family housing, and gross parking requirements. )

Wonderfully, Bertolet couples his critique with a series of detailed recommendations for Yes-in-My-Backyard fixes, such as adjusting zoning rules to allow six-unit stacked flats. Bertolet also seconds an idea I proposed in February—funded inclusionary zoning, FIZ (!)

Seattle’s zoning for larger apartments is confined to a small fraction (about 13 percent, not including lowrise zones) of its residential land, located almost entirely in designated urban centers and villages and along arterial streets. Seattle’s booming growth and robust job creation has rendered that 30-year-old strategy of confinement insufficient for meeting the city’s housing needs. Furthermore, the city’s own study concluded this “urban village” strategy has exacerbated racial segregation and inequity.

Seattle’s plan can expand opportunities for apartments and condos in multiple contexts and scales by allowing: Highrise towers throughout all regional centers and within a quarter-mile of all light rail stations outside regional centers; Eight stories throughout all urban centers; and Six stories within a quarter-mile of all frequent transit stops, schools, parks, libraries, and community centers.

The city can further expand apartment choices by designating more neighborhood centers and making them larger. The draft plan states that in these centers, “residential and mixed-use buildings of four to six stories would be appropriate.”

These two changes would be especially beneficial for creating opportunities for apartments located away from dangerous, polluted, and noisy arterial roads, where current apartment zoning is concentrated. Plentiful apartment zoning also supports the development of subsidized affordable housing, because its most common form is midrise apartment buildings.

An earlier proposal identified some 48 potential  neighborhood centers, but only 24 made their way into the draft plan officially released last month after Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office scaled back changes. Also, the proposed size for neighborhood centers is only an 800-foot radius, which is just a few blocks. A quarter-mile radius would allow the critical mass for a functional center.

Playing “Come on Eileen” on piano; Reading Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; the War on Theater.

I’m All Lost in…

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#28

1) Widely considered a hokey song—maybe Generation X’s equivalent of the Baby Boomers’ (Bye-bye Miss) American Pie, Dexys Midnight Runners’ Come on Eileen, originally a smart piece of pop from the soul side of the U.K.’s New Wave epoch, has been reduced over the years to a singalong cliché.

However, hearing it on the car radio a few years ago corrected the record for me. (I heard it while driving in suburban D.C., which was perfect because that’s where I grew up and originally heard the song as a kid.) At first I was simply besotted with nostalgia (the song came out when I was 15), but soon enough, the crafty songwriting captivated me.

It also struck me that it might be the perfect song to play on piano. This was back in 2021 when, frustrated with my slow progress learning keyboard, I committed myself to figuring out a song a month as a way to force the issue. Come on Eileen, with its steady, pulsing bass line and it’s shifting, bouncy melody lines, seemed like it would push my beginner’s skills while also being doable, thanks to its pop clarity.

If you’re at all interested: I did write a 10,000-word essay about my 2021 piano set where I expatiate about Come on Eileen and its position as the neo-soul manifesto of the anti-Thatcher early 1980s.

This week, worried that two-and-a-half years later, I had forgotten Come on Eileen, I set out to see if could still play this sweet song. After a day of tentatively feeling my way through, starting with the memorable sequence of lovely chords in the catchy intro, I locked it down again. I’ve been lovingly frolicking away at it ever since, all week, first thing when I walk into my apartment.

I must say, the concoction of A/B/F# triplets that modulate the song from the chorus back to the verse (D major back to C major) defines early ‘80s New Wave phrasing. I’ve made that line—repeated as an addicting loop—into an extended grand finale.

On a separate musical adventure from this week: I’ve been thinking a lot about the Aeolian mode, which gave us the signature mid-1960s garage rock riff; think (I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone. My obsession over this teenaged electric guitar progression found its way into a poem I’m working on right now:

I hope Leonard Bernstein’s older daughter said to her condescending dad:/ This is clever music, better than yours, nearly as good as Ravi Shankar’s.

2) After reading Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (and his Open City) and also Damlare Kuku’s Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad, my search for the great Lagos novel continues.

Both my longtime friend Dallas, a bookworm and high school English professor, and the young autodidact barista at the coffee shop on my block (who reports she read it in high school) recommended Americanah by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’m now 150 pages into this near-600-page book.

It’s a page-turner so far as the main character, Nigerian ex-pat Princeton college student, Ifemelu, settles into a salon to get her hair braided (a train ride away in immigrant-friendly, working class Trenton) and passes her time in the chair daydreaming back on her life story.

So far, her coming-of-age story is defined by her mom’s spooky religious fervor (a vision appearing on a stove burner tells her to change churches because her current priest attends “nightly demonic meetings under the sea”), her father’s disappointments and failures, her besty aunt’s friendly chaos, her first romantic love (she calls her boyfriend, “Ceiling” because the first time she lets him take off her bra and they have a heated make out session, she told him, “my eyes were open, but I did not see the ceiling…”), and most of all her attentiveness to class and caste. Having to get her hair braided in Trenton—”It was unreasonable to expect a braiding salon in Princeton—the few black locals she had seen were so light-skinned and lank-haired she could not imagine them wearing braids—and yet as she was waiting at Princeton Junction station for the train, on an afternoon ablaze with heat, she wondered why there was no place where she could braid her hair…”—establishes Ifemelu’s, and the novel’s class conscious narrative right away.

Adichie is a patient, earnest writer who can make you feel the dust storms and the air conditioning, make you smell the vanilla baking in the oven in her boyfriend’s mom’s fancy kitchen (while “her own mother did not bake, their oven housed cockroaches”), and revel along with the ingenuous high school boys: “After Kayode came back from a trip to Switzerland with his parents, Emenike had bent down to caress Kayode’s shoes saying ‘I want to touch them because they have touched snow.’”

It’s a gentle story so far, but with foreboding currents stirring below the surface:

There was something different about her. Ifemelu had noticed it right away at the airport, her roughly braided hair, her ears bereft of earrings, her quick casual hug, as if it had been weeks rather than years since they had last seen each other.

“I’m supposed to be with my books now,” Aunty Uju said, eyes focused on the road. “You know my exam is coming.”

Ifemelu had not known that there was yet another exam; she had thought Aunty Uju was waiting for a result. But she said, “Yes, I know.”

Their silence was full of stones. Ifemelu felt like apologizing, although she was not quite sure what she would be apologizing for. Perhaps Aunty Uju regretted her presence, now that she was here, in Aunty Uju’s wheezing car.

Aunty Uju’s cell phone rang. “Yes, this is Uju.” She pronounced it you-joo instead of oo-joo.

“Is that how you pronounce your name now?" Ifemelu asked afterwards.

“It’s what they call me.”

3) With all the ominous news this week (the police versus the anti-Israel campus protests, the billions of dollars pouring into AI, the naked antisemitism, and Trump looming despite his current 34-felony-count hush money/falsifying records/campaign finance criminal trial), the article that actually distills our apparent and inexorable descent into brute fascism was an essay in Saturday’s New York Times called “What Began as a War on Theater Won’t End There.”

Documenting several instances of recent censorship, here’s the news-driven lead:

Productions of plays in America’s high schools have been increasingly under attack. In 2023, Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” was rejected in Tennessee (since it deals with adultery); “August: Osage County,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Tracy Letts, was canceled in Iowa after rehearsals had begun (the community was deemed not ready for it); and in Kansas, students were not even allowed to study, let alone stage, “The Laramie Project,” a play by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project about the murder of a gay student, Matthew Shepard.

It should come as no surprise, then, that in the Educational Theater Association’s most recent survey, 85 percent of American theater teachers expressed concern about censorship. Even Shakespeare is at risk: In Florida, new laws led to the restriction of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to grades 10 through 12 and “Romeo and Juliet” could not be taught in full to avoid falling afoul of legislation targeting “sexual conduct.”

The essay, written by Columbia Shakespeare professor James Shapiro, positions this current press of censorship in the context of the right’s historic aversion to theater and arts.

First, Shapiro’s history lesson recounts the populist success of the Federal Theater Project (funded by Congress as part of F.D.R.’s Works Progress Administration legislation in the mid-1930s). Up through 1939, with an enthusiastic reception, the project brought theater to the masses. Most notably, the program staged a version of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here in 18 U.S. cities, ultimately playing to 370,000 people. Lewis’ novel depicts the rise of a fascist U.S. president, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrup; I told you this essay was on point.

Shapiro goes on to detail Congress’ reactionary backlash to the Federal Theater Project. A nascent version of the House Un-American Activities Committee, smelling a communist agenda, shut the program down.

The program’s popularity contributed to its undoing. Many of those in Congress who had voted to fund the Federal Theater became frightened by its reach and impact, its interracial casting, its challenge to the status quo — frightened, too, perhaps, by the prospect of Americans across racial, economic and political divides sitting cheek by jowl in packed playhouses.

Three years after the creation of the Federal Theater, Congress authorized the establishment of what would become the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Martin Dies of Texas. It was to supposed to spend seven months investigating the rise of Nazism, fascism and communism in America and submit a report. The ambitious Mr. Dies, desperate to have his committee’s life extended, instead focused much of his attention on a more vulnerable target: the Federal Theater, accusing it of disseminating offensive and communistic and therefore un-American values. In the course of waging and winning this battle, he assembled a right-wing playbook so pervasive that it now seems timeless. He succeeded wildly: All Federal Theater productions were abruptly terminated in 1939

Shapiro concludes by turning this history into a parable about today’s repressive right, arguing that HUAC and McCarthy-era paranoia begat Trumpism.

It’s hard to disagree with his conclusion, particularly as a former high school theater kid who blossomed in the drama set. I played the rebellious deacon in my high school’s production of Mass Appeal —I wore a Greenpeace t-shirt as my costume. This was around the same time Come on Eileen was on the pop charts.

Practicing “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me” on piano again; Damilare Kuku’s short stories; Dubstation at the Substation.

I’m All Lost in…

The 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#27

1) Back in October, when I wrote the first installment of this now-regular roundup, one of the obsessions on the list was practicing Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ late-1962 hit “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me.” I say “late“ 1962 because the song (as Robinson has openly acknowledged) was lifted from Sam Cooke’s early-1962 hit “Bring It on Home to Me,” which explains my path back to this original obsession.

Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me” came up on one of my playlists this week and, for a minute, I thought I was listening to “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me.” Do I still know how to play that on piano? I thought in a panic, remembering how much time I’d spent working it out last Fall when I fell in love with playing every crushed cluster.

It took about a day to piece it back together from the sheet music. Particularly, I had to re-learn the ascending phrase that sets the chorus in motion after “you treat me badly” (in the first verse), “you do me wrong now” (in the second verse), and “I want to split now” (in the third verse); the four slightly different “You’ve really got a hold on me” melody lines in the chorus itself; and the cascading heavy-on-the-black-keys chords during the dramatic break before rolling out the words “tighter” on the piano keys.

Once I got the song back, I couldn’t stop playing it.

Smokey Robinson & the Miracles perform “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” live at the Apollo Theater in 1963 (and segue into “Bring It on Home to Me.”)

All week, first thing, every morning, I’d run through “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” several times, still loving the crushed clusters, but also with a new appreciation for: the descending bass line under the sad-sack intro; the low C# in the left hand with (three-octaves up on the right hand) an A/C#/F# blues chord that calls out “Baby!;” and the cool-kid syncopation on the words “and all I want you to do.”

2) I have been searching for the great Lagos novel;Teju Cole’s thoughtful Every Day is for Thief (my review is here) wasn’t grand enough.

I’d hoped Nigerian Nollywood movie maker, actress (that’s how she describes herself) and creative artist, Damilare Kuku was en route to it with her 2021 short story collection, Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad, which is just now being published in the U.S.

And while it is an addicting collection of reverse-rom-com tales (the affairs do not work out here), the stories felt more like binge-era-TV pilot episodes than literature.

This might not be the classic I’m looking for, but indeed, I did binge. This is a flip, fast-paced book; I read all 12, neatly crafted, 20-page stories (which often experiment with narrative POV, including rotating narrators and even some Bright Lights, Big City second person) in a few delightful sittings this week.

Certainly, Kuku’s candid, mostly female narrators—no-nonsense entrepreneurial strivers who fall for good looking lover boys with rizz and fatal flaws—convey the tragicomic condition of life in Lagos for women caught up (along with their guardian angel, best girlfriends) in the go-go capitalist patriarchy that fetishizes them as both subservient wives and party girls.

Set against Lagos’ backdrop of first-time apartments and lush compounds, clubs, scandalous texts, social media melodrama, ubers and public transit, nepotism, hustles, corruption, starter jobs and start ups, Kuku’s city stories focus on wary, posturing characters whose inner monologues ruminate about class, raunchy sex, tragic pasts, toxic family dynamics, love, and lousy men (even the sensitive ones.)

The breezy, pop culture tone and rushed, tidy finales interrupt Kuku’s frequent literary and philosophical turns, so I’m hesitant to recommend it. But, admittedly, I’m recommending it.

3) It might just be that I like the clarity of the bus route: Catch the #8 at the northeast corner of Miller park in my canopied, mixed-use commercial/multifamily Capitol Hill neighborhood; head downhill on Denny Way and transfer at the bus top on the southern cusp of the South Lake Union tech district; take the #40 north across the water, through Fremont’s jumble of shops and bars, and then west into lower Ballard along nondescript Leary Way.

Or it might just be that it was the good-mood hour early on Saturday evening. Either way, this route (and the I’m-in-London-circa-1898-illusion-that-I-live-in-a-city every time I transfer at that South Lake Union bus stop among the tall buildings and twilight crowds) takes me straight to my new go-to music venue, the Ballard Substation.

The Substation’s 4/13/24 “dubstation” show, featuring distorted bass, distorted time, and echoing computer beats.

Located across an absent-minded street from actual electric utility infrastructure—the Substation is a converted industrial space around the corner from a small cluster of bars that’s otherwise a mile from any other nightlife.

As roomy (and as spare) as an airplane hangar, the Substation hosts DJs who take the stage with their laptops, patch cords, turntables, digital EQ boards, and analog mixers to loop beats and distort bass lines and time. At a recent show, a video camera projected live footage of the DJs’ magic-trick hands onto a big screen stage left.

Also expect a friendly food truck-guy selling beef and veggie hotdogs on the worn sidewalk out front, a chatty doorman reading a fat sci-fi novel, a low pressure merch table (mostly with an array of free stickers), and Lord of the Rings and Dune 20-somethings digging the electronic sounds.

There’s a slightly hipper, though equally ragtag crowd for live looping DJs on Capitol Hill at Vermillion’s Soulelectro on the second Friday of every month. Annie and Charles and I often dance our rear ends off there; it was Annie and I this past Friday.

But I still found myself hopping on the #8 to the #40 to Ballard’s Substation the very next night.

The Aladdin Gyro-Cery; the Jam’s 4th album; Corvus & Co.’s vegan stir fry

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

#26 (half a year of minor obsessions)

1. Aladdin Gyro-Cery, the late night kebab, shawarma, rice-platter, mezze-appetizer, and Mediterranean-salad gyro shop—open until 2 am, and 2:30 on the weekends— is always crowded with cohorts of students bunched around one of the many booths and tables spread across the capacious, bright white linoleum layout. I keep landing here to get their delicious and sloppy vegan foule and olive oil pita pocket sandwich.

I take it as a good sign (in this student strip plentiful with other tasty cheap-eats options) that there’s invariably a long line at the hectic front counter where the alert staff takes orders as kitchen workers yell out numbers and place your food on red plastic trays. Rest assured, the line moves quickly and lends itself to late night conversations, struck up among hungry, Existential strangers.

The one time they were out of the foule (a traditional Ethiopian comfort food made from mashed fava beans, Berbere spice, garlic, and cumin), I happily went with their Fried Veggie Sandwich, a warm, fluffy pita pocket jammed with tahini-doused roasted cauliflower and fresh lettuce falling out the sides.

I headed straight for my latest gyro-cery fix last Friday night after I watched pop star Fatoumata Diawara, dressed up like Osiris, shred her electric guitar on stage at the nearby Neptune Theater.

Also nearby, the witchcraft bookstore and the light rail station.

2) This week, I’ve been revisiting a 1979 album on repeat: Setting Sons, an ambitious power pop melodrama by the London-centric Mod revivalist band, the Jam. It’s built on tunesmith songwriting, overlapping electric guitar figures, and jet plane bass lines.

The Jam were the socialists and the lesser known band in the Sex Pistols (anarchist) Clash (Marxist), 1976 class of first-wave U.K. punk acts. But of the three, all of whom helped define my teenage years, the Jam were my pop patron. Their full, power-pop melodies, throwback Industrial Revolution Chartist politics, and youth urbansim provided a timely segue (and necessary nudge), transitioning my 1960s infatutions into the 1980s.

Setting Sons (the band’s 4th LP)—more Beatles than their Pistols inflected earlier records In the City (1977) and (the inexplicably underrated) This is the Modern World (1977)—was the first Jam album I bought; it was the summer after 8th grade, 1980. I had no idea who they were. I ended up with the LP simply because, wandering into the indie record shop in old downtown Bethesda, I told the record store guy (announced, really) that “I like New Wave.” In hindsight, his Jam recommendation was a bit off point; 1980 was the epicenter of proper New Wave with releases from Devo, the B-52s (I already had that one), the Vapors, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, the English Beat, the Police, Martha & the Muffins, and Human Sexual Response among many others.

Maybe I also said something about liking Punk? Nonetheless, he slid the guitar-driven, much more-rock-than-New Wave, Jam record into my hands.

From the (American version) album’s opening track, the anti-capitalist parable ”Burning Sky,” I was stuck on Jam songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist Paul Weller’s Margaret Thatcher-era council bloc consciousness and sneer.

With the crisp barre chord progressions (reminiscent of John Lennon’s svelte Revolver tracks and Pete Townshend’s Big Beat A-side singles, like 1965’s “My Generation” and 1967’s Pictures of Lily”) driving Weller’s instant-nostalgia melodies, Setting Sons was as stunning as it was comforting. A teenage bedroom apotheosis.

I’ll always remember first hearing Side Two’s “Private Hell.” When Weller sang “the morning slips away/in a Valium haze/and catalogues/and numerous cups of coffee,” my eyes widened. I was certain 14-year-old me had met my cynical and sophisticated soul mate.

Weller’s songwriting and lyrics are unabashedly literal and sickly earnest, even ham-fisted. But, so was I. The fact that Weller’s ingenuous Percy Bysshe Shelley ideals hit my brain at such a formative time works out to mean, for better or worse, the Jam is my jam.

They released six albums between 1977 and 1982, and as a Romantic high schooler, I cherished them all. Over the course of the Jam’s career, they evolved from an aggressive 2-minute-pop-punk singles band into pop-art rockers and, more so, into Motown bass line revivalists. In 1983, the quite cocky and good-looking Weller tried his hand at metrosexual espresso shop songwriting with his new band The Style Council, releasing the LP Café Bleu in 1984. I bought it out of loyalty and, though I was a bit confused by the jazz chords, I quietly liked it. Along with their 1985 follow-up, Our Favourite Shop, the obviously cloying Style Council remain underrated practitioners—along the lines of the Smiths, Haircut 100, the Pet Shop Boys, Spandau Ballet, and later Belle and Sebastian—of Fashion Shop Pop.

I don’t know why I suddenly felt like listening to the warm tube amp drive of Setting Sons while riding the light rail on Friday night, but, headphones on, I cued up the whole record and tried listening for the first time ever, all over again.

Weller’s angular guitar polyphony overdubs (definitely New Wave) stand out more than I remember. And the anti-war epic “Little Boy Soldiers” (“they send you home in a pine overcoat/with a letter to your mum/saying find enclosed one son/one medal/and a note to say he won”) still gives me the chills. Meanwhile, the masterclass songwriting—the defiant rocker “Saturday’s Kids,” the exuberant single “Strange Town” (“rush your money to the record shops”), and the wistful finale, “Wasteland” (“Meet me on the wastelands later this day/we'll sit and talk and hold hands maybe”)—remain sweet knock outs all.

A bit of kismet: A few days into my lovely Setting Sons reunion, social media tracked me down and alerted me: Paul Weller has suddenly announced a 2024 tour (his first in 7 years) to support his new album. Weller’s solo albums (16 of them between 1992 and 2021, repeatedly confirm my disparaging assessment about his overwrought aesthetic. But he did me right when I was a yearning teen. So, once again, I took the recommendation. See you live (for the first time) in September, Mr. Weller.

3) Even though it opened relatively recently (2016), Corvus & Co., billed as an Asian street food and dumplings place, reclines into the cozy ease of a grunge-era, 1990s Seattle neighborhood hang out.

With bountiful scoop after bountiful scoop of tofu, corn, broccolini, bell pepper, spicy & sour sauce, rice noodles and water chestnut garnish, Corvus & Co’s vegan stir fry (listed as “Uncle J’s Vegan Stir Fry”) is just one of the vegan delights on the lengthy menu at this oddly elegant dive bar. There’s also the “Mushroom Gravy Noods” (chinese-style noodles with carrot, cucumber, green onion, and cilantro, topped with mushroom gravy) and their signature vegan dumplings, filled with tofu, mushrooms, and assorted veggies. There are—and mostly— plenty of enticing dishes for carnivores too; my pal got the Pork Rib Stew, or maybe the lamb dumplings.

With its roomy dark-wood booths, chill staff, alcohol-free cocktail options on the otherwise boozy drink menu, Corvus & Co is a perfect spot to catch up with a close friend or go solo for some productive reading and writing time while you dig into some healthy-ish comfort food.

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.”