Matcha Oreos and divinity; the 2024 presidential race and tears of joy; Charles Dickens and urchin chic.

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#43

I had quite the list of obsessions to choose from for this week’s report; I keep a running account in my notes app and here’s what it looked like by Wednesday night:

1. Dickens Ch 8

2. Prince’s Kiss on piano

3. Olympics women’s tennis

4. Shapiro (kill myself)

5. Matcha Oreos

6. Esperanza Spalding at Benaroya Hall

7. Fugazi doc at Grand Illusion

So…

1) My friend XDX left on her trip to China a couple of weeks ago with one suitcase. She returned this week with two.

The second suitcase was filled with gifts for friends and family, including a triptych of treats for me: Black sesame chews; Sesame fig balls; and Matcha-flavored Oreos. (She also got me a cool woodblock facsimile print of the Beijing street grid.)

While I certainly expected the matcha Oreos, with their light-green filling, to be tasty, I did not expect such divinity.

The matcha spread, flecked with cocoa, presented the perfect median between matcha tea’s grassy earthiness and Nabisco’s malted sweetness. Couple that with the signature dark chocolate snap of the bookend wafers, and I ended up eating the entire first sleeve of six Oreos in one voracious rush.

Unfortunately, the box came with just two sleeves total. And, it turns out, they don’t sell matcha Oreos in U.S. stores; believe me, after quickly devouring the second sleeve, I went online to check where I could get more.

I found some on e-bay, but that seems risky.

I did drift over to H Mart’s M2M store on Broadway, hoping for some cosmic tear in the supply chain continuum. But nope, no matcha Oreos.

This is probably a good thing.

2) I was hyperventilating with relief and crying tears of joy in my kitchen early Tuesday morning after my Democratic pal Annie texted at 6:15 with word that Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and not Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as the Democrats’ VP candidate.

I had woken up at 3:15 with my heart in my throat convinced—as I’ve been for weeks—that Harris would pick Shapiro, thus condemning me to two months of yet more antisemitism and yet more condescending, tone-deaf editorials (or Tiktok hot takes) about antisemitism.

Worse, if Harris had picked Shapiro, it would have tanked the Democrats’ sudden momentum. Should I tell you about the concert I went to on Sunday night at Benaroya Hall where jazz bassist and art song diva Esperanza Spalding unfurled a Palestinian flag to the breathless glee of the white, NPR Democratic base in the audience?

The fact that I was having paroxysms of relief in my kitchen Tuesday morning clued me in to just how wound up I’d been for weeks. So, I took the day off to chill; though what I really did was revel (and obsess) over every NYT dispatch from the campaign trail where the Democratic energy (that I’d been certain was about to go poof with Shapiro) went into the stratosphere instead with America’s high school teacher/dad/football coach/GSA sponsor/vet/goofasaurus, Tim Walz.

Fittingly (and coincidentally), I had been practicing the song “Kiss” by Minneapolis legend Prince all week on piano. So, in honor of Gov. Walz I also spent some of my PTO day bashing out a few celebratory versions of that.

I ended up hanging out with my Dem pal Annie that evening. We light railed to the Grand Illusion in the U. District to watch a documentary featuring found concert footage of cerebral punk band Fugazi called We Are Fugazi From Washington, DC. I saw Fugazi play live (in Minneapolis actually) back in 1990. The movie showed lots of gigs from that heyday era and, euphoric with nostalgia, I could smell the patchouli wafting off the camcorder footage.

In conclusion: To any GOPers saying the Democrats are antisemitic for not picking Shapiro, I say this, I don’t see any Jews on your god damn ticket. Nor did I see any Jews on Trump’s shortlist or longlist. Not very surprising from a party that’s debased itself at the foot of Trump’s Archie Bunker-ideology.

This NYT update from Tuesday does a good job outlining my mess of existential feelings.

3) Speaking of antisemitism, I did a close reading this past weekend of Chapter 8 from Charles Dickens’ 1838 novel Oliver Twist.

George Cruikshank’s original illustration for Dickens’ novel of Fagin’s den showing Fagin with a devilish “toasting fork in hand,” and his motley gang of pickpockets, including the Artful Dodger, center, and “four or five boys, none older than the Dodger, smoking long clay pipes, and drinking spirits with the air of middle-aged men.”

Obviously, it doesn’t take anything close to a close reading to find the antisemitism here. After all, this is the chapter where Dickens introduces, in Satanic terms, the miserly conman Fagin, “the old shriveled Jew,” who exploits children as an OG QAnon fantasy villain.

But it’s not Fagin that drew me to Chapter 8 of Oliver Twist. It’s one of the exploited kids, Jack Dawson, aka, the Artful Dodger, who Dickens also first introduces in this monumental chapter.

From the trickster god of thieves in Greek mythology, Hermes, to the cast of prostitutes and pickpockets (Betty Doxy, Jemmy Twitcher, Suky Tawdry, Crook Finger’d Jack) in poet John Gay’s 1728 Beggar’s Opera, up through Candy and Ronnie in Elton John’s “Benny & the Jets,” to hacker-for-hire Henry Case and his switchblade sidekick Molly Millions in William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, the idea of the fleet-footed, noble city urchin is a governing prompt for my poetry.

It seems to me that the young Artful Dodger, “one of the queerest looking boys Oliver had ever seen” in his oversized “man’s coat, which reached nearly to his heels…,” is the defining figure of this archetype.

Spying Oliver Twist, an innocent runaway fleeing his destitute lot en route to London, “that great large place!” where “nobody … could ever find him…” and where he’d heard “no lad of spirit need want”—the Artful Dodger makes his beautiful debut:

“Hullo, my covey! What’s the row?”

The boy who addressed this inquiry to the young wayfarer, was about his own age: but one of the queerest looking boys that Oliver had even seen. He was a snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy enough; and as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but he had about him all the airs and manners of a man. He was short of his age: with rather bow-legs, and little, sharp, ugly eyes. His hat was stuck on the top of his head so lightly, that it threatened to fall off every moment—and would have done so, very often, if the wearer had not had a knack of every now and then giving his head a sudden twitch, which brought it back to its old place again. He wore a man’s coat, which reached nearly to his heels. He had turned the cuffs back, half-way up his arm, to get his hands out of the sleeves: apparently with the ultimate view of thrusting them into the pockets of his corduroy trousers; for there he kept them. He was, altogether, as roystering and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six, or something less, in the bluchers.

“Hullo, my covey! What’s the row?” said this strange young gentleman to Oliver.

As the Artful Dodger takes Oliver under his wing—and by chapter’s end sets him up in Fagin’s secret lair atop “dark and broken stairs” in a “wretched place” above a “narrow and muddy street” where “ill-looking fellows were cautiously emerging, bound to all appearances, on no very well-disposed or harmless errands”—Dickens spells out another defining theme in literature: Urban settings as the prompt for coming-of-age allegories.

(I seconded this notion in my poem “Athena Dethroned,” which I included in both my collections: “Coming-of-age stories are inevitably/stories about teenagers coming to the city.”)

Chapter 8 of Oliver Twist—which begins with Dickens’ literal description of a wayfinding milestone that marks the mileage of Oliver’s pending journey from the suburbs to London—establishes two standard and often intertwined elements from literature’s city canon: 1) the hero’s transition from the anemic suburbs to the vital city, and 2) the hero’s flawed patron. In this case, the Artful Dodger as Hermes.

I’m now obsessed with Chapter 8—which Dickens subtitled “Oliver walks to London. He encounters on the Road a strange sort of young Gentleman”— as the template of my ongoing poetry writing binge and its inquiry into the magical power of cities.

QAnon super villain Fagin may be another template worth exploring as an act of urbanist reclamation!

Footnote: Oddly, it’s my recent obsession with pro tennis and the WTA (I was up at 5 am on Saturday morning watching the ladies tennis Olympic final between Qinwen Zheng and Donna Vekic) that led me to Dickens and his descent into London’s filthy Saffron Hill neighborhood. I’m currently working on a sequence of poems that imagines the ball kids from tennis’ grand slam tournaments—Wimbledon in London, Roland Garros in Paris, or the U.S. Open, off the #7, in Queens NYC—as the protagonists of a mythical, urchin city gang: The Ball Kids as the Strangest Teens of All.

The first poem I’ve written in this sequence takes its title from the password to Fagin’s lair:

“Now, then!” cried a voice from below, in reply to a whistle from the Dodger.

“Plummy and slam!” was the reply.

You will feel Harris’ momentum fizzle the moment she announces Shapiro as her VP pick; iambic pentameter in Olympics tennis; jazz in Volunteer Park.

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#42

1) Who could have imagined this two weeks ago. The Democrats’ presidential campaign energy is hitting Obama levels. I’m sure you’ve seen the electric clips from the “Say-it-to-My-Face,” 10,000-strong rally in Atlanta and the encouraging swing toward Harris in swing states

But have you seen this? Republican mayors in Arizona are endorsing her. And you must see the hilarious Kamala Harris impersonator who has turned the laugh into a bonus. Ha. Everything seems to be going our way. (To paraphrase my friend Charles: Is that all Trump has? “She’s not black?”)

So, how will Harris—like Democrats always do—shut down her own party’s sudden momentum? By picking Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro to be her running mate.

I’ve been worried about this all week, and now I’m downright despondent. My anxiety level went off the charts Tuesday night when she announced that her first campaign stop with her soon-to-be running mate will be in Philadelphia.

A Shapiro announcement will land with a thud.

This isn’t a fear about antisemitism on the right, though there’s that too!; this is about antisemitism on the left.

Here’s what I wrote on Facebook on Saturday night:

Harris better not pick Shapiro. Sadly, innate antisemitism is omnipresent today on the left and among youth. The split second Harris announces a Shapiro pick, there will be a palpable drop in enthusiasm on the Democratic side.

Unfortunately, late Baby Boomers and early Xers like Harris still live in the second half of the 20th Century when Jews were viewed by lefties (condescendingly in my experience, but so be it) as compelling, cool underdogs. I don't think Harris, Obama, Pelosi and the Democratic establishment understand how that has shifted and how antisemitism has become a gut impulse among the younger generation.

It pains me to say all this, but if Harris picks Shapiro, it will chill the current love fest on the Democratic side. (Is this a case of internalized antisemitism on my part? Perhaps.)

And if you think Shapiro gets us PA, I counter with this: He loses us Michigan by diminishing Democratic turnout there.

P.s. You might ask, well then why are you a Democrat, Josh? Answer: Because Donald Trump and his MAGA movement are obviously neo-Nazis who traffic in updated versions of conspiracy theories from the infamous, antisemitic Protocols of Zion.

After Harris picks Shapiro, cue the inevitable stories about how he’s not going over well with the base. Hmmm. (And P.s. Yes, I know being critical of Israel isn’t the same as being antisemitic, but please believe me when I tell you I can smell it when they overlap. Additionally, when I refer to antisemitism on the left, I’m not only talking about Israel.)

Harris is obviously picking Shapiro not only with must-win Pennsylvania in mind, but to woo centrists and conservatives nationally. Unfortunately, by enervating the Democratic surge with a Shapiro pick, Harris will have pulled off a classic case of cutting your nose to spite your face.

Oh, and then watch for stories about how the pick is making Jews anxious. Whichever NYT reporter gets that assignment should please call me for a quote.

2) Thank god there is women’s tennis at the Olympics to take my mind off the pending Shapiro fiasco.

Watching the Olympics women’s tennis quarterfinals, 7/31/24

I subscribed to Peacock so I could watch. I’m rooting for World No. 7, China’s Qinwen Zheng; my actual favorite player, Aryna Sabalenka, opted out of the Olympics (she’s playing in D.C.’s annual summer tournament after recovering from a shoulder injury.)

I signed up for Peacock a little late, though, so I missed a lot of key early matches—like the apparently toxic three-hour Round of 16 match between Zheng and Emma Navarro (15, USA). There was also the (not without its own controversy) Round of 16 match between Coco Gauff (2, USA) and Donna Vekic (21, Croatia). Vekic won as Gauff struggles with Peter Parker syndrome these days.

I did subscribe in time to wake up early on Wednesday morning and watch the Zheng vs Germany’s Angelique Kerber (former No. 1, but. now 212) quarterfinal nail biter . Zheng came from behind to win a three-hour tibreaker over the veteran star, 6-7[4], 6-4, 7-6[6]

And later in the day, I watched the surprisingly tight (momentarily anyway) Iga Swiatek (1, Poland) vs Danielle Collins (9, USA) quarterfinal match. Swiatek, who’s impossible to beat at Roland Garros, eventually won. (My plan is to wake up at 3 am on Thursday and watch the Zheng vs Swiatek semifinal as the Olympic medal rounds begin.) I also watched the finale-of-forehands match: a tiebreaker showdown between Vekic and Marta Kostyuk (19, Ukraine). I’m liking Vekic these days after her impressive run at Wimbledon, where she made it to the semifinals before losing an epic to then No. 7 Jasmine Paolini (Italy). It was hard not to root for Ukrainian Kostyuk at the Olympics, but Vekic eventually beat her 6-4, 2-6, 7-6 [8].

In addition to all the excellent matches, I do love the quietly earnest TV announcers who speak in refined British accents. And in perfect iambic pentameter:

“A game of chess at times this one has been.”

The non-stop tennis is also inspiring me on the court.

With Qinwen Zheng’s swift ground strokes in mind, I fared better than usual against my Olympics opponent Tom when we squared off Saturday morning on Lower Court 3 at Volunteer Park.

I eventually lost 4-6 in the first set (more games than I’ve ever won against him) and not until after forcing a standstill at deuce for several points, nearly sending the set to a tiebreaker. He killed me in the next set, though, 6-0.

3) Speaking of Volunteer Park: One of my favorite local jazz artists, pianist Marina Albero, lit it up there Thursday night as part of this summer’s music-in-the-park series. Volunteer Park, Capitol Hill’s respectable family park, as opposed to groovy Cal Anderson Park, is in my bourgeois part of Capitol Hill.

Albero plays classic art jazz with a blues and Latin music bent. You can hear her skilled mix of academic chords and Spanish lines on her 2021 release “A Life Soundtrack.”

Jazz pianist Marina Albero, 7/25/24

Albero is one of the few Seattle musicians I named and wrote about in The Night of Electric Bikes.

From my poem: "In the Course of Life's Events" :

Instead of saying piano, I will say rain. As in: the weather forecast didn't/call for rain inside her body and pouring out her fingers. But that's what/happened.

After Thursday evening’s show, I slipped around the back of the band shell with a copy of my book in hand, showed her the poem, and handed it off. She seemed genuinely delighted and even asked me to sign it.

I WROTE ALL THAT WEDNESDAY NIGHT (7/31/24); HERE’S A THURSDAY MORNING (8/1/24) UPDATE:

Whoa, Zheng beat Swiatek. https://www.wtatennis.com/news/4073042/zheng-shocks-no-1-swiatek-to-reach-olympic-gold-medal-final .

And, the articles about the anti-Shapiro push back have officially begun.

Electronic music for the mind & body; 1930s movies for falling asleep; Kamala Harris for president.

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#41

1) As I told Seattle electronica musician Rob Joynes after his (no-cover-charge, alternative-to-the-Capitol-Hill-Block-Party) gig at Vermillion Art Gallery this past Sunday night: I’ve wanted to hear music like this since my long-ago violinist band mate Pekio V. and I tried to find a synths-and-tape-loops guy in 1992.

7/21/24, Rob Joynes at Vermillion Art Gallery

Rob and I met sometime during the past two years; he’s the bartender at the Cha-Cha Lounge where I’m a regular. One night, I noticed that the music playing on the juke wasn’t the usual death metal, classic punk, indie rock, or ironic 1970s jams. It was early 1950s jump blues. This was Rob’s doing.

I revere early ‘50s, precursor rock & roll; years ago, under the influence of music critic Charlie Gillett’s monumental rock & roll history book, The Sound of the City (1970), I curated a jump blues/early rock and roll playlist of my own.

Rob and I started talking about music that night, and it quickly became clear our tastes matched. It also turned out Rob was a serious working musician, and I subsequently asked him to do an opening set of transit pop song covers arranged for beats, drones, and vocals at my May 2023 book release reading. He killed it. (Urbanist side note: the serendipity of connecting with kindred bohemian spirits is one of the profound delights about city living.)

So, I was excited when earlier this month, Rob told me he was scheduled to do a set of ambient computer songs at Vermillion on the Sunday of Capitol-Hill-Block-Party weekend. (His rock band Fell Off had an official Block Party gig lined up too, for Saturday; I  saw Fell Off play in May 2023 and dug their mix of doom metal and power pop.)

Rob was able to light rail it to the Sunday gig at Vermillion because all he needed was a laptop, groovy gadgets, some cords, and his dolorous lyrics. No band gear necessary. The crowd was mesmerized.

The best way to describe Rob’s music is this: It’s as if someone spliced plaintive vocal melodies over DJ Spooky’s 1996 paranormal ambient masterpiece, Songs of a Dead Dreamer.

Rob would tinker with some dials, settle his layered digital drones into key, wait for the generative sequencing to swell into a rhythm, and then, as if singing opera recitative, he’d croon his vulnerable diary lyrics in a sweet, searching melody.

7/21/24, Rob Joynes at Vermillion Art Gallery

After the set, I asked him where one could find these jams. He said he’s still working on the record (due out next year). Meanwhile, you can listen to some of his pop music here and here.

Thankfully, Vermillion Gallery posted a snippet of the gig which is otherwise reverberating somewhere out in the ether.

2) I doubt the filmmakers would be happy about it, so it’s lucky they’re all long dead: I’ve been watching pre-code Hollywood movies on YouTube all week as a way to fall asleep at night.

Don’t get me wrong, Hollywood’s pre-code days—between the start of the talkie era (1928) and the advent of the conservative Hays' guidelines (mid-1934)—were a rich time for delicately radical, risqué movie making. And despite the normalized (and crazed) groping and pawing endured by the female characters (one kiss evidently signaled a yes to marriage), pre-code’s melodramatic, gritty fairy tales tend toward incisive feminist themes and lefty class consciousness—with a post-stock-market-crash lens on white collar corruption. The stories typically take place in the glittering and hypocritical world of the wealthy and political classes as attendant working class strivers make waves and seek truth.

These films are good for bedtime because of the comforting dusty sound quality—they’re all 90-plus years old—and because of the specifics of the soundtracks themselves: Often set in Gotham, pre-code movies feature soundscapes of bustling street scenes, jazz nightclub chatter, tit-for-tat weisenheimer banter, conspiratorial drawing room and corporate suite plotting, and theatrical dialogue that eventually escalates to a kiss, a slap in the face, or a gun shot. The predictable meter is perfect for closing your eyes just for a second…

Hilda Vaughn plays Jean Harlow’s maid in Dinner at Eight (1933)

My sleepy nighttime ritual this week aside, there are plenty of good pre-code films. One in particular I’d recommend staying awake for is Dinner at Eight, a powerhouse epic about time and death with five-star acting from an elite cast, including John Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Marie Dressler, and one of my favorite actors, stock plebeian Hilda Vaughn. Similarly top-notch: 1934’s Of Human Bondage starring Bette Davis in her blow-up role. And yes, she has serious eyes.

Mostly though, the pre-code movies I’ve seen this week—the ones that work as comforting sleep aids—are short, B-grade flicks, barely an hour long in their telegraphed rhythms, like one I dozed off to Friday night called Brief Moment starring Carole Lombard.

Like most pre-code movies, though, it did come with heavy doses of class war consciousness!

“That’s what it means to be a Dean,” one harried office switchboard operator quips to another when the boss’ son (rich playboy Rodney Dean played by Gene Raymond) tells her to fend off any calls from his wife because he’s sneaking off to the horse races for the afternoon. “And this is what it means to be a Callahan.”

Brief Moment (1933) starring Carole Lombard and David Burton.

You can find these movies in droves for free on YouTube. Here’s a list to get you started (I went on a pre-code binge in late 2021 and early 2022). The scandalous titles are not entirely misleading:

Animal Kingdom; Dinner at Eight; Party Girls; The Road to Ruin; Sing, Sinner, Sing; Murder on Campus; Uptown New York; Strange Marriage; Asphalt; Of Human Bondage; Skyscraper Souls; Ten Cents a Dance; Love Me Tonight; One More Hour with You; Discarded Lovers; Brief Moment.

3) My giddy obsession this week about Joe Biden out-Kamala Harris in, with Kamala now having the delegates to lock the nomination, has gotten to the point where I’m telling Kamala jokes in the grocery check out.

On Tuesday night, I was standing in line when the person working the cash register said she was closing, and that her co-worker, who suddenly appeared next to her, would ring people up at the next register over. As all of us in line started to head to the next register, the new checker said, no, I’ll check you here. This caused some confusion: Everyone in line was caught turning toward the other check out lane; the original checker was trying to close her register; and the new checker was trying to open it. “I’m just swapping in at this register,” the new checker said.

“So,” I asked, trying to confirm the situation as I stayed put, “you’re like Kamala Harris and we’re like Donald Trump?” Not the funniest joke, but everyone laughed.

Mostly it just goes to show all I can think about is the great news: Kamala Harris’ has replaced Joe Biden as the Democrats’ candidate for president.

For example, I’m fantasizing about her debate zingers. Like when Trump accuses her of covering up for Biden, she can turn the tables and say: The public has been calling for a new generation of candidates. Joe listened. He did the patriotic thing and passed the torch. It’s embarrassing that instead of calling for their own new candidate, the Republican party stuck with a convicted felon like you. (I also hope Harris mines this handy bullshit detector-fact check on Trump’s stream of lies.)

Back on July 6, Shortly after Biden’s disastrous June 27th debate performance sent the Democrats into a tailspin of anxiety, I noticed a silver lining in the Democratic implosion. I wrote this on Facebook:

A silver lining (?) ... For the first time I can remember since 2015, Trump is not dominating, or even, in the headlines. Suddenly, the Democrats are the riveting drama. There is energy around their underdog story line that's creating a strange momentum for them. Trump doesn't quite know what to do.

Obviously, Trump dominated the news once again after surviving the July 13th assassination attempt in hyper dramatic fashion. But just a week after that wild news, Trump has been relegated to the background yet again. I’m starting to think this isn’t purely circumstantial anymore, but more a sign that at a larger level people might be done with him. Perhaps the country has moved on with the Democrats.

Of course, I’m being too optimistic. Trump has proven that his superpower is defining the narrative and getting attention. But the sea change—key change even, with Trump suddenly slotted as the sub-dominant note in the scale versus Kamala’s dominant note—has Trump falling flat. The New York Times reported on Trump’s sudden media struggles late this week.

I do believe something fundamental has changed. And I tried to capture my sense of it 24 hours into Harris’ emergence. On Monday, July 22, thinking out loud on Facebook, I wrote:

Three weeks ago, in the throes of the post-Biden debate disaster, and the frantic calls for him to step aside, I (like a lot of freaked-out Democrats) was in a panicked email thread with friends trying to figure out how this goes. One worry I had at that time was: We can’t anoint her because Trump will flip the script and turn the whole democracy argument against us; he’ll say we’re the ones who are subverting the system. Lo and behold, Trump took up that line today.

However, here’s what I didn’t envision three weeks ago: Trump’s lines of attack suddenly don’t seem as commanding or threatening. In fact, they feel small; he feels small. The ground has shifted, and it’s left him (in his MAGA bubble) behind. As Trump doubled-down on his nativist, deportation platform at the Republican convention last week (does anyone even remember the Republicans just had a convention?), the Democrats have moved on with an electrifying script change. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t be judicious about moving forward with Harris, nor that we don’t have work to do, but this is an entirely different race now, and it feels like it’s the GOP that needs a new candidate. Trump is stale.

I’m not naive enough to misinterpret the current Democratic momentum as a harbinger of a Harris victory—this is going to be a bruising fist fight where Trump is certain to land heavy, perhaps crippling blows. And I’m already getting some cocky Hillary bubble vibes from the Democrats. But Kamala’s history-making fundraising ($250 million in 3 days…I gave $100 myself on Sunday after Biden dropped out and endorsed her) makes it plain she’s gonna deliver some devastating left hooks herself.

I like this opening shot for starters:

@dailymail 'I approve this message.' Kamala Harris quickly turned Donald Trump's own words back on him in the simplest way possible, clipping his speech for a campaign ad. #kamalaharris #kamalaharris2024 #kamala #kamala2024 #vicepresident #harris2024 #democrats #politics #democrat #trump #vote2024 #harris2024 #donaldtrump ♬ original sound - Daily Mail

In short, whereas just last week, our country seemed destined for a neo-Nazi Trump win and the end of American democracy as we know it, Kamala Harris has given us a fighting chance.

P.s. I left one bona fide obsession off my official list this week because I’m embarrassed that I’m still deep in my Blondie craze. But it’s true. I’ve been practicing my piano version of the group’s 1979 hit “Dreaming” every chance I get.

“Hecate, My Fixer” wins 2nd Place Prize from Common Ground Review

I’m excited to report that my poem “Hecate, My Fixer,” which I wrote in March after going East for my Dad’s funeral, won 2nd Place in Common Ground Review’s 2024 annual poetry contest. They published it in their Spring/Summer 2024 issue today.

I’m pinching myself about Common Ground contest judge, poet Rebecca Hart Olander’s, comments. … “The language in this poem is gorgeous.” …

And she taught me something about myself when she wrote: “The displacement felt here aptly conveys that state we live in after loss, that time of crossing over into new realms of being and of magical thinking.”

Here are her comments in full:

“Hecate, My Fixer” —Josh Feit

The language in this poem is gorgeous with its mythical allusions, “transit timetables,” and “radial spring.” The blending of mundane details (the fact of a Tuesday, cheap wine, a bed, a pair of shoes) is wonderfully mingled with torches, the performance of a quartet, and that beautiful last line. I love all this poem holds – its Brooklyn and its train platform, its funeral and mourner’s Kaddish, its Hecate and Persephone. And especially the heart of the poem – the grown child visiting their original city after moving away, returning after the death of a father, and the accompanying confusion that loss adds to understanding the world as it is now (for both the adult child, and the mother). There’s a confusion one might feel when returning home as an adult anyway, and to do so on the occasion of loss is to plunge one back into childhood again (given yet another layer in the poem when the mother – from dementia, grief, or both – mistakes the child for the father). The displacement felt here aptly conveys that state we live in after loss, that time of crossing over into new realms of being and of magical thinking. Hecate, goddess of ghosts and crossroads and magic, is the perfect guide. --Rebecca Hart Olander

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

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#40

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

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

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

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

Quasi at Seattle’s Crocodile club, July 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The unbearable boredom of the Bear; the Biden bummer; and a bad bro movie (Challengers).

I’m All Lost In…

the three things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#39

For posterity, I must report that I’m still obsessing over my fanciful Blondie exercise, the one I revealed last week: Combining and shuffling the songs on the new wave band’s back-to-back 1978 and 1979 LPs, Parallel Lines and Eat to the Beat to conjure an imaginary classic double album which I’ve taken to calling Parallel Beat.

There are 24 songs on the two albums altogether, so, conveniently, I divvy up the randomly generated set lists into four sides of six songs in a search for a perfectly curated album.

Hey Blondie fans, just look at this blockbuster Side One I got from one of my random play prompts:

Side 1 Hanging on the Telephone Accidents Never Happen The Hardest Part Fade Away and Radiate Will Anything Happen 11:59

This particular run through also generated the perfect finale, closing the album with “Picture This.”

Get a pocket computer/Try to do what you used to do, yeah.

Picture this, indeed:

Side 4 I’m Gonna Love You Too Heart of Glass Atomic Pretty Baby Shayla Picture This

Amplifying my Blondie obsession, a Blondie piano sheet music book I ordered last week arrived in the mail on Monday. I immediately started learning to play Eat to the Beat’s big beat single “Dreaming,” which turned out to be the opening track in another iteration of my junior high reverie.

A couple of other obsessions from last week persisted this week as well—such as wishing Biden would bow out,

I also got caught up in a past delight: Practicing Lorde’s ballad “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” which, in addition to possessing my brain this week, was on Week #2 of this regular round-up back in October . Not only was I digging the mournful melody, but this turned out to be a piano playing breakthrough for me. Rather than just concentrating on getting the jam right, which is how my (stuck-at-beginners-level) piano playing typically dictates things, I was able to lean into the emotion of this sad song (“We'd go dancin' all over the landmines under our town”), feel out some dynamics, and arrange my own finale—around an inverted D chord.

Okay. Here’s this week’s official obsessions:

1) I binged on seasons 1 and 2 of restaurant melodrama The Bear (with my X Diana X) when the series aired back in 2022 and 2023, and I liked it: Sharp dialogue, mini-art-film camera work, and patient, prestige-era TV story telling with the requisite character development; there’s a deep roster of rich characters to develop too, including Richie, Tina, Marcus, and Jamie Lee Curtis as the Mom.

If you were a fan of that compelling run (irritating, indie-rock-song girlfriend Claire, Molly Gordon, aside) let me warn you off Season 3.

Not only is the new season a bit of a mess— the repetitive use of heavy-handed supercut montages are more like A.I. diarrhea than actual storytelling—but basically Season Three is a bore.

Here’s some typical dialogue that we hear again and again from one of the (too-many) scenes featuring close ups of Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) fretting about problems that have obvious solutions, like his pretentious restaurant’s fantastical budget, his aforementioned, now ex-girlfriend Claire, and his reticent, despotic approach to running a restaurant:

Sydney, Carmy’s No. 2: You good?

Carmy: Yeah. … You?

Sydney: I’m good … I guess.

The most engaging conundrum is not Carmy’s overwrought stasis, but Sydney’s (Ayo Edebiri), dilemma: She’s quietly been offered a dream gig to head up her own local restaurant. Hard to say if she’ll jump ship and leave Carmy’s restaurant next season—she has a panic attack on the stairs outside of her new apartment in the final episode—but I, for one, am definitely leaving.

X Diana X sent me this week’s Culture Gabfest where host Stephen Metcalf trashes Season 3 for all these reasons and more.

2) Call me an “Elite,” but I’m one of the millions of people who believe that after President Biden unambiguously (and predictably) crumpled in the presidential debate, he’s incapable of beating Trump.

Unfortunately, after Democratic dissatisfaction with Biden’s candidacy was gaining some momentum, the anemic president seemed, by mid-week, to have stanched the party’s push to change nominees.

This is dispiriting. First of all, Biden’s going to continue to be a dud, and worse, a liability on the campaign trail; he will inevitably have another disastrous senior moment that will convince voters he can’t serve as president. By then—during the second debate, perhaps—it will be too late.

There’s a gotcha rejoinder coming from bitter Democrats who are asking why there aren’t calls for Trump, a convicted felon, to withdraw from the race as well. My sense is that the question voices a grander, general frustration about Trump’s ability to get away with bullying and lying and ultimately turning the Republican party into his very own cult. But the question seems more rhetorical than practical. What would calls for Trump to drop out of the race (and calls from whom, exactly) really accomplish?

If the point is to bring attention to the fact that Democrats have an earnest moral value system that reflects an interest in good governance, while Trumpist Republicans don’t—sure. But the same voices who have been making that exact point—presumably the only ones who would also call on Trump to drop out—would only add to Trump’s momentum by doing so.

People who are complaining about the apparent double standard and the supposed self-destructive impulse of liberals, Democrats, and the New York Times, are being too willfully oblivious to what the calls for Biden to step aside are actually about: Biden’s (unforgivable) pathetic debate performance has given Democrats a legitimate opportunity to address their mounting anxiety about Biden (who has been an unpopular president since early in his term) by calling for a new standard bearer.

If calls to replace Biden are successful, it won’t only address the party’s Biden problem, but it will create an opportunity to capitalize on Trump’s bad reputation with a candidate who can prosecute his record, while also energizing Democrats in their own right by having a solid candidate at the top of the ticket.

If the calls fail, well, we’re back where we’ve been for 3-and-a-half years, stuck with a leader who doesn’t seem capable of defeating Trump.

3) I’m not sure where I got the idea that Luca Guadagnino’s new movie Challengers was a smart, cutting edge drama, but for some reason, I thought it was going to be a tennis version of Succession.

I stayed up one night this week to watch it, and nope.

Zendaya at the center of a retrograde love triangle.

The movie certainly has a fun premise. Tracking three characters from late high school idealism to their defeated early 30s through flashbacks and clever jump cuts, Challengers is a tennis court love triangle featuring an apathetic, fading star, Art (Mike Faist), his Type A wife/coach Tashi (Zendaya) (who was en route to being a tennis superstar herself before suffering a devastating knee injury in college), and a braggadocio, meddling goblin, Peter (Josh O’Connor), a scamp and a cad who fell off the pro-rankings into the B-League qualifying circuit. His malevolent presence casts an existential threat to Art and Tashi individually, and to their marriage in general.

Nice set up, but despite the (still) tabboo-breaking (I guess) scenes that put male nudity front and center, plus some heavy homoerotic relationship vibes, Challengers is downright retrograde. Tashi, who’s bitterly living through Art’s (now disintegrating) tennis career, is a controlling, conniving wife whose relevance, the film decides, comes from between her legs. The script plays to this trope in a banal, male-constructed “she was asking for it” fantasy scene that leads the movie to its silly pro-bro finale.

… Speaking of tennis…

Even though my tennis hero, WTA World No. 3 Aryna Sabalenka, dropped out with an injury on the first day, I was still mesmerized by Wimbledon this week.

Go Jasmine Paolini; however, New Zealand’s Lulu Sun, No. 123, was the story of the tournament this week. Handing out upset after upset, she made it to the quarterfinals where No. 37, Croatia’s Donna Vekic, ultimately stopped her surprising run. Paolini then beat Vekic in the semifinal. No. 1, 2, and 4—Iga Swiatek, Coco Gauff, and Elena Rybakina, were all knocked out thankfully, so Sabalenka won’t fall as far behind in points for missing the tournament.

World No. 7, Italy’s Jasmine Paolini, made the Roland Garros final last month and now she’s in the Wimbledon final after beating No. 37 Donna Vekic in an epic nearly-three hour match.

Replacing Biden; Watching Wimbledon; Adding Za’atar.

I’m All Lost in …

what I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#38

Partly because I’m eager to share a few updates, and partly to prove I’m no dilettante when it comes to my madness, let me quickly revisit the status of a few obsessions that have made this list in the past. I’ll get to this week’s immediate passions momentarily, but:

First, I’m still enthralled with the book I posted about two weeks ago, Henri Murger’s hilarious 1851 novel Scenes of Bohemian Life. In the most recent chapter I read, Ch. 17, “The Toilette of the Graces,” Murger confirmed that these action-packed tales from the student arrondissements (the 5th and 6th arrondissements) are pro-city manifestos. After three of our discombobulated heroes (the Poet Rodolphe, the artist Mercel, and the composer Schaunard) save up enough money from their absurd commissions, including Schaunard’s gig playing the same piano scale over and over at the behest of a regal British lodger who’s at war with his upstairs neighbor over her noisy parrot, Murger’s bohemian artistes buy their respective lovers, Mimi, Musette, and Phemie, some fashionable clothes. Merger writes this:

As to Phemie, one thing vexed her.

"I am very fond of green grass and the little birds," said she, "but in the country one never meets anyone, and there will be no one to see my pretty bonnet and my nice dress. Suppose we went into the country on the Boulevards?"

At eight in the morning the whole street was in commotion, due to the blasts from Schaunard's horn giving the signal to start. All the neighbors were at their windows to see the Bohemians go by.

Second, going back to the very first installment of this weekly roundup (October 18, 2023), I’m still a Joanna Garcia fanboy. Garcia is the possessed piano teacher/TikTok persona who patiently yet passionately distills piano scores. In her most recent series of videos, she’s been doing a musical exegesis of Debussy’s Clair de Lune—”Are you ready? Listen for the depths…”—reverently explaining the mysterious thirds that shape the piece.

Lastly, I have not yet returned from my Blondie bender. Feeling the exact opposite impulse of that common urge to pare down a good double album into a great single-disc, I made a Spotify playlist combining Blondie’s 1978 release, Parallel Lines, with her follow-up, 1979’s Eat to the Beat (the album I blissed out about last week), and conjured an incredible double album out of these two separate ones. Call it Parallel Beat.

I also ordered the sheet music for Blondie’s first four studio albums, a set that includes both Parallel Lines and Eat to the Beat.

Per a poem from my current manuscript:

The Thing About Getting a Decent Paycheck After 30 Years of Not

The thing about getting a decent paycheck after 30 years of not/

is you don’t have to worry about the $5 it costs to print sheet music./

We may not be the ones getting bar/

or bat mitzvahed anymore,/

but there is so much sheet music./ 

The curves of the capital.

Additionally, I also must say this: I’m alarmed and preoccupied with the nativist right’s creepy victory in France this week (though, I do agree with Paul Krugman’s observant opinion piece that MAGA is even worse than National Rally), which brings me to the first item on this week’s official list of obsessions: Biden needs to drop out.

1) Curiously, and grating to my Dem friends, I was giddy following Biden’s predictable debate implosion last week; in the run up to the debate, I decided there was no way I could bring myself to watch it (I have the texts to prove it) because it was obvious Biden would be tragically incapable of handling Trump’s wily cynicism.

In fact, Biden, who exists in some bygone moral universe scripted by Norman Lear circa 1978, has never been up to squaring off against Trump; I still believe Trump trounced Biden in 2020’s infamous can-someone-please-shut-off-his-mic? debate. I know no one agrees with me about that, but I believe the real reason Biden won four years ago was because of Trump’s tangibly inept response to COVID, not because of those maddening debate antics.

The NYT’s Michelle Goldberg kind of captured my giddy Thursday night feelings in her (among many columnists’ and ed boards’) convincing call later in the week for Biden to step aside.

The Democratic Party’s predicament is an awful one, but there was a cold, flinty relief in being forced to reckon with it.

I say “kind of” because there was nothing “cold” or “flinty” characterizing my reaction. For me, it was pure, euphoric relief.

And in addition to the relief, the Biden fiasco also created hope; something I don’t think Democrats have felt in well over a year. As replacing Biden became an increasing possibility over the course of the week—a possibility that Democrats have been secretly fantasizing about since shortly after Bruce Springsteen performed at the 2021 Biden inauguration—the idea that Democrats could suddenly have a fighting chance against Trump buoyed my spirits. (It’s no wonder Trump has been uncharacteristically quiet about his yuge debate win; he’s terrified the Democrats will go with someone different than Biden.)

Biden’s post-debate tumble, according to NYT polling.

Yes, an open Democratic party intramural per 1968 or 1980 can be a death knell for incumbents (Pat Buchanan’s insurrection similarly upended the Republican incumbent, George H.W. Bush I in 1992), but I’d offer this: If Biden eloquently steps aside and releases his delegates to a convention process (he can’t clumsily anoint Harris because Trump will flip the script and cry dictatorship), the Democrats’ ensuing and possibly messy selection process will offer a refreshing juxtaposition to Trump’s cult-like Triumph-of-the-Will coronation. An eventful Democratic convention (anti-Israel protesters included…which would play out even worse at a Biden convention) could offer an inspiring and instructive metaphor for the democratic form of American governance that’s on the ballot in 2024. (This week’s King George III Supreme Court ruling declaring presidential immunity certainly brought that point home and left me with the sinking feeling that if the Democrats lose the White House in November, January 6 may ultimately go down as America’s Beer Hall Putsch.)

But if Democrats bring town hall energy to the narrative, versus Republicans’ debasement at the Trump throne, I believe voters will get the American feels.

I’d also say this: If Biden does the right thing and withdraws and V.P. Harris emerges as the candidate, she'll bring Trump's sputtering racism and sexism to the fore in an apoplectic way that will be even more shocking than his routine “why-don’t-you-go-back-to-where-you-came-from” tropes to date; his stewing anger at being challenged by a prosecutorial , energetic Harris could turn off America’s mainstream voters.

Harris, obviously, comes with the plus of being a woman too at a moment when abortion rights finally seem to have electoral sway.

Will America really vote for a Black woman—evidently more problematic and toxic than a convicted felon? It’s certainly a legitimate question in the racist and sexist U.S.

Indeed, I’m not oblivious to the fact that Harris isn’t popular, but thank god Democrats are no longer playing oblivious to Biden’s electoral dead-end.

Trump sent a mob to hang his VP; Biden should step aside and nominate his VP for POTUS.

2) Speaking of bowing out, though, in this instance, not to my liking:

I was looking forward to watching Wimbledon this week. But then came Day 1’s Monday morning news that my favorite tennis star, World #3 Aryna Sabalenka (Belarus), had withdrawn at the last minute due to a recondite shoulder injury.

Of course, this speaks to the reason I’m drawn to Sabalenka in the first place: She was born under a bad sign; despite her jolly goofiness, she has a Charlie Brown/Peter Parker cloud over her head. Needless to say, I wasn’t surprised by the glum news. Here’s a text I sent to my friend Dallas on Sunday night:

Wimbledon starts tomorrow! Sabalenka has been struggling w/ injuries, so I’m not hopeful.

The Wimbledon disappointments continued. My second favorite tennis player, World #8 Qinwen Zheng (China), lost in the first round only a few hours later on the first day of the tournament to #123 Lulu Sun (New Zealand), 6-4, 2-6, 4-6.

With the year’s premier Grand Slam tournament now heading toward a predictable finals match between unbeatable World #1 Iga Swiatek and World #2 Coco Gauff (ascendant Gauff knocked Sabalenka from the #2 spot after the French Open at Roland Garros last month), I’m now committed to finding an exciting underdog to root for during Wimbledon. This prompted me to wake up at 3am all week, inevitably squealing with glee at the British-accent color commentary (“that’s a clever backhand, isn’t it”), and watch every WTA match possible: #11 Danielle Collins (USA) versus #127 Dalma Galfi, (Hungary); #4 Elena Rybakina (Kazakhstan) versus #72 Laura Siegemund (Germany); #10 Ons Jabeur (Tunisia) versus #161 Robin Montgomery (USA); #17 Emma Navarro (USA) versus former #1, now #113 Naomi Osaka (Japan).

Unfortunately, no one has netted my fandom like utter goofball Sablalenka (who has a hurricane serve by the way). I did find myself cheering for Montgomery, but she lost 1-6, 5-7.

I managed to take the court myself this week—not at Wimbledon, but at Volunteer Park in Seattle. Perfectly planned a week in advance, I reserved a court for this Wednesday after work (a great way to start to the July 4 holiday). I played a much younger! opponent who I originally met when I was hitting solo at the practice wall last winter. He was practicing his serve on the court next to me that afternoon and asked me if I wanted to volley. We seemed pretty well matched, and we’d been trying to set up a time to play ever since.

We took Court 3 at 5:30 under a lustrous sun this week and played a set-and-a-half before some other folks with reservations showed up at 6:45; it was busy out there with people who’d made reservations or were just hopeful walk-ons, all clamoring for courts. Feeling confident with my serve and successfully mimicking the passing shots I’d been seeing on TV at Wimbledon, I was winning 6-1, 3-1 (ad-in) when we had to give way to the next crew.

7/3/24, Lower Court #3, Volunteer Park, Seattle

A fantastic footnote, and another example of expert planning: I had a chilled chocolate stout in the fridge, and a Benzodiazepine (Lorazepam), waiting for me when I got home to my apartment. Appropriately, the Lorazepam was left over from my (recently RIP) Dad’s scrip, and so, I framed my good-drug evening as a celebration of Dad’s famous, and illicit, July 4 neighborhood fireworks shows of yore.

Chilled chocolate stout

3) Completely bored with oregano, I’ve started sprinkling the warm and grassy Middle Eastern herb Za’atar on all my meals: salads, black-bean burgers, spinach salad sandwiches, tofu scrambles, and (per this post’s previous-obsessions theme) my Soley’s green banana black pasta dinners.

A jar of Za’atar has been tucked away in my kitchen cupboard for 10-years; I think my serious (living-together) girlfriend from the 2010s, Hester, bought it in bulk in the aftermath of our 2013 Turkish expedition. The jar, labeled both Za’atar and thyme in faded handwriting (thyme is the American substitute for the Levantine herb), was more than 3/4 full a few weeks ago when I first noticed it and decided to sprinkle some on a scramble. This turned out to be a kitchen revelation.

Za’atar, which tastes as if black pepper came from a leaf, has now 100% replaced nooch as my go-to seasoning. And my supply is suddenly running low.

Lucky me, modern medicine confirms the beliefs of Jewish and Islamic philosophers from the Middle Ages: brimming with antioxidants and iron, Za’atar has magical health properties.

And Lucky you, the Za’atar options are not limited to the choices from my communard, vegetarian meal plan:  Bon Appétit boasts 25 Za’atar-based recipes, including: Za’atar Roast Chicken with Tahini Green Salad; Lemony Chicken and Spiced Chickpeas; Fancy and Beautiful Tomato Salad; and Cabbage and Carrot Slaw with Walnut-Za’atar Pesto.

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.