Trump’s KKK ideology; ghost pop; and a new coffee shop.

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about this week.

#49

1) On January 29, 2016, I posted a prediction on my  blog that Donald Trump would win that year’s presidential election.

My prediction was based on a story from that day’s NYT: “Labor Leaders Fear Trump’s Appeal With Rank and File.” I was getting Reagan Democrat vibes.

This week’s Teamsters’ news— that the working class union is refusing to endorse Harris (a significant win for Trump)— is reminiscent of that portentous 2016 story, and it’s raising the hair on my neck.

I was slightly soothed, though, by this week’s Washington Post report that Teamster locals got up in Teamster Trumper union president Sean O’Brien’s face with subsequent Harris endorsements in swing states.

And it’s also nice to note that the Teamsters’ Black Caucus endorsed Harris in mid-August, praising…

the bipartisan infrastructure bill President Biden signed, as well as steps his administration has taken to lower prescription drug costs and increase wages. It also credited Ms. Harris with pushing to expand the child tax credit … and with helping to preserve union members’ pensions.

The Black Caucus’ pro-Harris endorsement was accompanied by full fledged disdain for Trump:

It said that former President Donald J. Trump’s administration “was one of the most antilabor in modern history,” citing among other things his loosening of workplace safety regulations and his opposition to raising the federal minimum wage.

This raises the question: Why are the national Teamsters default siding with Trump?

Like the Reagan Democrats (and Nixon’s “Lunch Pail” vote before that), it’s a culture war issue, and specifically, it’s Trump’s white identity politics that appeals to the non-POC Teamsters membership—and puts the Black Caucus on edge. The Teamsters’ Black Caucus Harris endorsement stated that Trumpism was “contributing to a hostile environment for Black Americans.”

As for their white Teamster comrades?

Earlier this year, when Mr. Biden was still in the race, Mr. O’Brien asked each Teamsters local to hold a straw poll. … Mr. Biden had won a plurality, 44 percent to Mr. Trump’s 36 percent. But … two other surveys … showed Mr. Trump crushing Ms. Harris, 60 percent to 34 percent…

Working-class voters, especially white men, have favored Mr. Trump, a point Ms. Harris conceded on Monday when she told Teamsters leaders that she understood the union’s rank-and-file was looking at issues beyond labor, such as immigration.

This all leads to what I’m actually obsessing over this week: The fact that Trump’s KKK ideology is now, by choice, the defining feature of his presidential campaign. Indeed, if the union story is reminiscent of Reaganism, Trump’s stump demagoguery about fictitious Haitians-eating-pets in Springfield, Ohio is reminiscent Southern lynch mob politics.

Jamelle Bouie’s NYT column this week, “Trump Knows What He’s Doing in Springfield. So Does Vance,” predicts how Trump’s bellicose race baiting will play out in a second Trump term.

The hair is standing up on the back of my neck again:

Where once Donald Trump attracted only the right-wing fringe of American politics, now he leads it. Where once he kept some distance from agitators and provocateurs like Laura Loomer, now they’re at the center of his campaign. And where once he merely inspired extremists to act, now he points them directly at the objects of his rage.

Take Springfield, Ohio, where schools, colleges and municipal buildings have been shut down and community events canceled owing to bomb threats targeting the city’s Haitian community. Those threats come as Trump — and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio — smear the Haitians of Springfield with the lie that they’re stealing and eating the pets of presumably native-born Americans.

…Today, if you were to place the rhetoric of Unite the Right side by side with that of Trump’s 2024 campaign, you would struggle to find a difference. Echoing the chants of “blood and soil” we heard in Charlottesville, the former president now tells audiences that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He calls his foes “vermin” and warns that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”

…For the Trump campaign to descend on Springfield would be to recapitulate the dynamic that led to the events in Charlottesville. The difference, of course, is that then Trump was several places removed from the extremists who led the effort to “Unite the Right.” Now he’s the standard-bearer.

It is important to say that if presidential campaigns are a glimpse into presidential governance, then the Trump campaign’s anti-Haitian agitation is a clear glimpse into how President Trump would behave and govern in a second term. One can imagine Trump spreading Springfield-esque lies from the Oval Office directly to the American public. One can imagine a Vice President Vance touring cities with new immigrant populations, attacking them with the same smears he’s used to target the Haitian community of Springfield, spreading hate so that the public will accept the mass deportation of millions of immigrants. Trump, in fact, has already promised to start mass deportations in Springfield. “We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” Trump said on Friday. “And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora.”

Republicans who are Republicans and not KKK fabulists—Springfield, Ohio’s mayor and Ohio’s governor, for example—have tried to counter Trump’s lies with the truth (as Republican officials once tried to do in Georgia in response to Trump’s “stolen” election lies). This is a lost cause for a party that’s been taken over by Trump’s authoritarian script of racist conspiracy theories.

2) Jazz Age and Great Depression pop music, the scratchy, maudlin strains that I refer to as Ghost Pop (because every pianist, violinist, and crooner on these slightly creepy late 1920s and early 1930s recordings is long dead), seems to have one foot in another dimension.

A cartoon I published in the Stranger, moons ago.

Though this soothing music uses standard Western scales and chords, there’s nonetheless something alien about it, as if it was written in an ancient Greek mode, such as Locrian, the mystery scale that has long fallen out of use because of its apparent instability.

I’m not sure why Ghost Pop—I point you to Russ Columbo, Rudy Vallée, Gene Austin, and Ruth Etting as the the form’s master performers—feels off-kilter, but listen to Columbo’s “Prisoner of Love” or Vallee’s “Deep Night” and tell me you don’t feel as if you’re suddenly flickering between Matrixes.

That’s definitely where I’ve been this week as I took up practicing Rodgers and Hart’s “Ten Cents A Dance,” perhaps my favorite Ghost Pop number (Ruth Etting’s 1930 version), on piano.

“Ten Cents A Dance”—a yearning tune sung from the lonely and bummed out POV of a taxi dancer—is in the the key of E flat major, not a particularly odd key. Elton John’s “Your Song,” Guns & Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle,” Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On,” The Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun” are among the parade of pop classics in E flat major.

I don’t know, though, if those rock-era tunes push chords such as E natural/B flat—a diminished fifth—which disassociates from the key by abandoning the E flat tonic in favor of an out-of-sequence sharped 1 note, E natural. In fact, in the opening 12 measures of “Ten Cents A Dance” alone, there are seven instances when the song abandons the rest of key’s vocabulary as well: There are A naturals instead of the key’s A flat, there are F sharps instead of the key’s F natural, there’s a G flat instead of the key’s G natural, and there are D flats instead of the key’s D natural.

What the hell? Was the key of E flat just the closest thing to the song’s suis generis logic. Significantly, it’s the E flat (the home base note) itself that the melody consistently kicks to the curb, such as on the lines “Customers [E natural-B flat] crush my toes [F-E natural].”

On the word “Toes,” the song also subs an A natural for the key’s important 4 tone, the A flat. Again, WTF? Why even bother pretending this song—with all its stray notes and crushed, dissonant chords—has a defining key at all?

Leaning into Rodgers and Hart’s “queer romance,” fitting words accompanied here by notes that ironically belong in the song’s key of E flat major—C and F with an A flat, and F and G with a D and C—has provided definition for me all week.

3) File this under Transit Oriented Development and/or an obvious business plan:

Open a coffee shop next to the 4th busiest light rail stop in the city (8,000 daily riders). That’s what the folks behind the quietly spiffy Seasmith did, setting up shop by the Capitol Hill station.

I worked out of Seasmith on both Thursday and Friday this week, fitting into the easy rhythm of the place—it fills up quickly right after the 7 am open; though folks come and go, so finding a seat, either at one of the many solid tables or at the roomy bar, is easy enough; as is everything here: the vegan-friendly lunch menu (there’s a blackbean, mushroom patty sandwich and a rolled oats chia seed coconut milk bowl with chopped nuts by request), the bounty of savory and sugary pastries (black sesame cookies), the standard or fancy coffee specials (Lavendar Blossom Latte), and, bonus, the plentiful carafes of water at the spic and span busing station.

Set flush against the light rail station plaza with a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows and plenty of house plants, this new spot (it opened in the Spring) opts for light industrial chic and open, bright feng shui (as opposed to cozy and bohemian).

The din of patrons busy at telework and earnest meetings, plus the sound system (they seem to play entire album sides—I noticed Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, Lorde’s Melodrama, Madonna’s Ray of Light, and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill) mix with the active, staffed-up staff to soften the corporate L.A. contours.

I’m rooting for this place to succeed, and there does seem to be a metaphor at play in their current posted hours:

Open-ended hours

One barista said closing time was 5, but I looked up and the place was still flowing onward toward 6.

Blissed out at Relax Station; Freaked out by [•Rec]; cleaned up well by wash & fold

I’m All Lost in …

the three things I’m obsessing about THIS week (NYC version)

#48

1) About five minutes into dinner at Spicy Moon Vegan Szechuan on Tuesday night, a bowed waveform passed through my head. At first, I thought it was the ghost pepper-level heat in the cumin tofu entree hitting me, but then I remembered I was also drinking mezcal, a booze I don’t drink often, and which always slams my mind with a slow motion gearshift.

But it wasn’t until the following evening that I felt truly drunk as I stumbled east on Hester St. from Chinatown to the Lower East Side looking for a coffee shop where I could dissolve into a chair.

I had just gotten a delerium-inducing chair massage at Relax Station.

Tucked away on Mulberry St., where the scent of Little Italy’s bread and bakery gems waft from the clustered shops and combine with Chinatown’s ammonia fish aroma to conjure NYC’s signature sidewalk smell, Relax Station is located up a suspicious looking flight of stairs.

Upstairs off Mulberry St., 9/11/24

When I walked into the nondescript front room just to the right at the top of the landing, the guy I spoke with on the phone earlier that morning was sitting in a plastic chair hunched over his cell. He nodded like we were in a Raymond Chandler novel, and a young woman stepped from behind the front desk to greet me. She briefly tried to talk me into a table massage, assuring me I could keep my clothes on. I made my case that chair massages—thanks to the way the ergonomics open your back and expose your shoulders, neck, head and arms—are ideal.

With light classical piano music floating in the background, she proceeded to give me a solid 45-minute massage, systematically kneading her way through the aches and knots in my upper body, manhandling my arms, digging her fingers into my neck and twisting the nervous tissue between her thumb and forefinger, pressing her knees into my back muscles, and massaging my scalp with a smooth stone. I flickered in and out of consciousness during this last delight as the endorphin, serotonin, and dopamine rush overpowered my body.

Afterward, I swayed down the staircase like a noodle, slipping back onto the street, and made my way over to a stylish coffee shop at the corner of Hester & Orchard.

2) I watched two movies this week. On Monday afternoon, ECB and I went to MoMA, where they were having a 1970s film fest; we saw a matinee of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1974 oddity, Daisy Miller, based on Henry James’ 1878 novella. Starring young Cybill Shepherd and a lost-to-time actor named Barry Brown, it was Bogdanovich’s given-a-blank-check-from-Hollywood follow-up to his parade of hits, The Last Picture Show (1971), What’s Up Doc (1972), and Paper Moon (1973). I texted my pal Valium Tom, who loves languid, eye-candy cinema, my take on the movie: “An utter bore, but somehow wonderful. It was extravagantly irrelevant.”

As a turn-of-the-century period piece, including the hotels and castles of France, and the parks, operas, and ruins of Rome, it was, indeed, lovely to look at, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Let me instead, recommend the other movie I watched this week (over at my friend Paco’s apartment, late Sunday night): [•REC], a 2007 horror movie written and directed by Spanish movie makers Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza.

Little girl turned zombie in  Paco Plaza's horror classic, [•REC]

Yikes, this “found footage,” handheld-camcorder zombie freak out, combines Blair Witch Project and Night of the Living Dead (including reviving Romero’s classic sick, little-girl character and her doomed and defensive mother) by stranding a TV crew, a couple of firefighters, and government scientist in a suddenly, quarantined apartment building where a zombie virus has broken out among the residents; the feds cordon off the building with troops and wrap it in plastic.

The footage—which gives the movie a psychedelic rhythm and arty touch as it stalls or goes black or overexposes in between the live-cam view—comes courtesy of the TV duo, a go-getter reporter named Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and her resolute cameraman, Pablo (who we never see, but grow to trust as our only protector).

[•REC], which stands for “record,” starts when the pair, on a shoot for their late night news show, accompany a couple of firefighters on a seemingly run-of-the-mill call to help an elderly woman. Things quickly get creepy when the old woman attacks one of the firemen, critically injuring him with bite wounds. The terror accelerates from there as the gore splatters the screen. The little girl, whose violent dog initially clued the authorities into the raging virus, is transformed into a vicious zombie midway through.

Eventually, Pablo, bites it (or, more accurately, gets bitten) in the penthouse apartment finale, where the Catholic-Demonic backstory is revealed in the guise of Patient Zero, a now-ghoulish girl named Tristana Medeiros who had been secretly imprisoned there by the Vatican. With the camera man down, the grim message becomes clear: this world is over.

3) There wasn’t a laundry room at the Bethesda Marriott on Pook’s Hill Rd. (where I stayed two weeks ago, during the seeing-my-mom portion of this trip) nor at the goofy boutique hotel in the Lower East Side this week. I had planned to wash my mounting pile of clothes at Gregory Samsa’s apartment in Brooklyn, where I stayed for a few days to save some money; there’s a washer and dryer in his building upstairs at his besties’ (and my old friends) Dave & Jen’s.

But then I discovered a fantastic service: Wash & Fold.

On Tuesday morning, I dropped off my suitcase, now stuffed with rumpled clothes, at a laundromat around the corner from Samsa’s on Hooper St called Pachamama Laundromat.

And then easy-peasy, on the way back to his apartment that evening to watch the big Harris-Trump debate, ECB and I took a slight detour to the laundromat where, for $12 less than they’d said that morning (so, $23 instead of $35) I retrieved my suitcase. I had been nervous because I hadn’t thought to leave them a laundry bag.

But when I got back to Samsa’s and unzipped the suitcase, a small black model I inherited from XDX, I found a tight cube of pressed, folded, and twinkling fresh laundry, set in a neatly tied plastic bag.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a few other things from this action-packed week in New York: First, despite all the terrible things you hear about the subway these days—late and stalled trains, crime—I rode it everywhere without any delays or problems, the F to the 7, the J to and from Brooklyn, the F to the Q70 bus, and my new discoveries, the 42nd St. shuttle train on the way from Queens to Brooklyn and the LIRR to visit Aunt Judy in Great Neck; second, per usual, I got a couple of my improvised, sloppy, veggie hoagies—this time, a banana pepper, chickpeas, corn, mushrooms, black olives, green peppers, oil, and mustard sandwich; and third, the standout exhibit of the trip was the Vivian Maier 1950s and 1960s street photography show at Fotographiska NYC.

Vivian Maier exhibit at Fotografiska NY, 9/8/24

Paul Weller at Kings Theater, Brooklyn, 9/7/24

Finally, I did see Paul Weller in concert, which was the initial prompt for this trip (at Kings Theater, a gloriously ornate, old-timey theater in Flatbush). Mr. Weller, the founder of my favorite band when I was a teenager, the first-wave punk pop band, the Jam (he also founded the men’s shop pop band the Style Council), now has decades of banal rock LPs on his resume. He mostly played that. But I did get my dose of kismet and cosmic connection: One of the two Jam songs he played was “Start!,” the 1980 U.K. hit I sang in the 9th grade talent show.

For the record, my Weller pilgrimage was superseded by the U.S. Open, where I saw Aryna Sabalenka win on Saturday in straight sets over American Jessica Pegula, 7-5, 7-5. It was slightly awkward rooting for Daffy Saby against hometown favorite Pegula, but not really.

Magical vibes at the U.S. Open; Neo-Nazi vibes on Tucker Carlson’s podcast; Edith Wharton in “a neighborhood of discreet hotels.”

I’m All Lost in …

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#47

1) It’s all true, I went to the U.S. Open on Thursday for the “evening session,” in this case: the Women’s Semifinals double header. The opening match starred my tennis hero, World No. 2 Aryna Sabalenka; in a promising sign, Sabalenka had destroyed the otherwise seemingly ascendant World No. 7 Qinwen Zheng in the quarterfinal on Tuesday night, 6-1, 6-4.

The minute I walked off the subway late Thursday afternoon (I took the F train from the Village to the 7 train toward Flushing), I was in a state: gliding along the boardwalk expanse onto the renowned tennis complex grounds (a mini-city, really), laughing out loud, amazed to have crossed the threshold into this bucket-list-item dreamland.

I arrived two-and-a-half hours early—at 4:30 for the 7:00 start—smiling without restraint, as I shambled through the buzzing crowd making my way from the chill-out park grounds and plazas with their abundant umbrella seating, past the regal fountains to the Grey Goose Vodka “Honey Deuce” drink stands (I certainly bought one of those); from the packed and wonderfully air-conditioned gift shops (I bought a shirt at the third shop I hit) to the walkway galleries memorializing historic players such as Molla Mallory, Althea Gibson, and Jimmy Connors.

At some point, I noticed the outdoor side courts that were clustered immediately west of majestic Arthur Ashe Stadium. My friend Gregory Samsa (he attends opening week every year) told me you can catch some background tournament action on these low-key courts. Fortuitously, I also remembered that a day earlier, one of the TV announcers noted that World No. 6 Jessica Pegula looked quite relaxed during her practice-court warmups in advance of her (big upset, it turned out) Wednesday match against World No. 1 Iga Swiatek.

At that, I decided to take a peek at the practice courts to see who I could find… imagining that… but knowing it probably wasn’t a possibility …. that there was no way I’d be so lucky… but…

First, I came across a Boys Wheel Chair match—both boys, in this instance, lacking the use of one ill-formed arm. It was a moving tableau. There weren’t many people watching, perhaps a few family members on the one row of silver benches. A young woman, was snapping away with a high-end camera.

I continued on to another court…and another… meandering through the labyrinth of fences, shallow stairwells, and white concrete landings, all the while feeling a bit sneaky. After a few minutes, I found myself walking alongside a pair of women, one in her late 20s, and another, my age, probably her mom, tentatively snooping around too. A bit disoriented in this maze of tennis courts, the three of us wound up in a skinny breezeway behind a court covered with a scrim. Suddenly, the young woman gasped: “It’s her!”

I knew who she meant and, all anticipation, I looked on as she pushed the netting aside for a view of the practice court at hand, leaning in as if she were a backstage Broadway tech in a head set, peering from behind the curtain. “Oh my god,” she said, “it is. It’s her.” She stepped aside and conspiratorially offered me a peek as well.

Aryna Sabalenka on Practice Court 3 at the U.S. Open complex, 9/5/24.

We realized there were some steps around the corner that led to a small set of bleachers. Our Nancy Drew excursion, it turned out, was completely legit: the practice session was for public viewing. We scrambled up and took our seats among a dozen or so other early birds to watch Sabalenka warm up on Practice Court 3.

She was hitting her famous sonic boom serve, and I got goosebumps in a moment of IRL recognition when I heard her racket crack down and swat the ball with such force that the echo took on a physical presence; it’s a weight you see, but don’t feel watching her on TV.

P.s. I didn’t even notice that Men’s World No. 1 Janik Sinner was hitting on the immediately adjacent court the whole time; I left after Sabalenka— who, I should note, looked quite relaxed—finished her warm up. By the way, Sabalenka’s average topspin forehand speed at the U.S. Open is 80 mph, faster than Sinner’s (78 mph), as well as faster than Men’s No. 2 Novak Djokovic’s (76) and men’s No. 3 Carlos Alacaraz’s (79).

Two hours after watching Sabalenka warm up on Practice Court 3, I watched her play in the Semifinals at Arthur Ashe Stadium, dismissing surging billionaire’s kid, World No. 13, American Emma Navarro, in a riveting, blistering, and athletic match, 6-3, 7-6 (7-2). Luckily, the friendly people sitting next to me in our Section 326 nosebleed seats were playful about my Sabalenka partisanship even as they cheered the American through what ended up being a losing cause.

I hope whoever I’m sitting next to later this afternoon for the 4pm final between Sabalenka and American Pegula, is cool about it too.

2) Another Trump election means another season when neo-Nazi rhetoric goes mainstream via the felonious, traitorous ex-president’s MAGA ecosystem: Trump acolyte Tucker Carlson brought a Holocaust “revisionist” onto his popular “Tucker on X Podcast” this week.

Thank you NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg for editorializing about this noxious development and for connecting the dots to expose how antisemitism goes hand in hand with Trumpism and Trump’s media operatives.

Like your favorite poem, every line of Goldberg’s piece is worth pausing over and taking in full—from her keen explanation of how “Hitler curious” posturing poses as anti-establishment righteousness, to her take down of faux historians’ facile conclusions (equating Nazism with a liberal “state religion”), to her warnings about where “discarding … guardrails,” leads, namely, “Trump’s … authoritarian plans, including imprisoning masses of undocumented immigrants in vast detention camps.”

Goldberg offers a terminal diagnosis on the effects of swallowing Trump’s poison.

The weakening of the intellectual quarantine around Nazism — and the MAGA right’s fetish for ideas their enemies see as dangerous — makes it easier for influential conservatives to surrender to fascist impulses. When they do, they pay no penalty in political relevance, because there’s no conservative establishment capable of disciplining its ideologues.

3) I’m still digging into the Edith Wharton short story collection that I favorited late last month. I read a few more of her expertly crafted stories this week, including “The Journey,” about an existential cross country train trip, “The Rembrandt,” a slightly comedic, yet sad tale about a diminished elderly woman’s desperate version of the past (until the trick ending), and the observant “A Cold Cup of Water,” a parable about the human soul and, honestly, about the meaning of life; Wharton achieves this powerful bit of soothsaying as much though mood as through plot.

Wharton sets the vibe—a depressed resignation during end-of-the (19th)century Manhattan—with “the icy solitude of 5th Avenue,” the superficial manners on parquet ballroom dance floors, the ultimate futility of whiskey cafes, the “neighborhoods of cheap hotels” where third-floor rooms are “lit only by the upward gleam of electric globes in the street below,” and as Wharton opens the story, by the wet sidewalks, reflecting back at its denizens:

It had rained hard during the earlier part of the night, and the carriages waiting in triple line before the Gildermeres' door were still domed by shining umbrellas, while the electric lamps extending down the avenue blinked Narcissus-like at their watery images in the hollows of the sidewalk.

Wharton’s moody Manhattan gently cradles the story of a striver named Woburn, a well-intentioned young bank employee whose failure to make rank among the wealthy, fashionable set of one Miss Talcott, leads him into a sloppy, witless embezzlement scheme at work. Woburn’s downward spiral is reflected back to him through the tragic backstory of Ruby Glenn, a suicidal woman (she’s got a revolver) who he meets deep into night at the aforementioned hotel; both are in the throes of insomnia.

In fact, Wharton uses the tactic of mirroring throughout the story, particularly in this early haunting passage that ties mood and plot together with some uncomfortable foreshadowing:

The people on the sidewalks looked like strangers: he wondered where they were going and tried to picture the lives they led; but his own relation to life had been so suddenly reversed that he found it impossible to recover his mental perspective.

At one corner he saw a shabby man lurking in the shadow of the side street; as the hansom passed, a policeman ordered him to move on. Farther on, Woburn noticed a woman crouching on the door-step of a handsome house. She had drawn a shawl over her head and was sunk in the apathy of despair or drink. A well-dressed couple paused to look at her. The electric globe at the corner lit up their faces, and Woburn saw the lady, who was young and pretty, turn away with a little grimace, drawing her companion after her.

In the end, Woburn, who has achieved a new preternatural vantage of moral clarity, talks Ruby down and gives her the money she needs to return home. She, in turn, prompt’s Woburn’s own redemption.

Woburn's eyes were fixed on the window; he hardly seemed to hear her. At length he walked across the room and pulled up the shade. The electric lights were dissolving in the gray alembic of the dawn. A milk-cart rattled down the street and, like a witch returning late from the Sabbath, a stray cat whisked into an area. So rose the appointed day.

Woburn turned back, drawing from his pocket the roll of bills which he had thrust there with so different a purpose. He counted them out, and handed her fifteen dollars.

"That will pay for your board, including your breakfast this morning," he said. "We'll breakfast together presently if you like; and meanwhile suppose we sit down and watch the sunrise. I haven't seen it for years."

Later that morning, rather than acting on his own plan to flee New York aboard a steam ship, he returns to work with stoic resolve.

This door he also opened, entering a large room with wainscotted subdivisions, behind which appeared the stooping shoulders of a row of clerks.

As Woburn crossed the threshold a gray-haired man emerged from an inner office at the opposite end of the room.

At sight of Woburn he stopped short.

"Mr. Woburn!" he exclaimed; then he stepped nearer and added in a low tone: "I was requested to tell you when you came that the members of the firm are waiting; will you step into the private office?"

Speeches about light rail; prose about subways; and late nights at the U.S. Open.

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week

#46

1) Sound Transit, the regional transportation agency where I work, opened the Lynnwood Link Extension on Friday. (Lynnwood is almost 20 miles north of Seattle, in another county.)

“Transit turns red districts blue,” former Seattle Mayor Ed Murray—a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic Democrat—used to quip when pressed about why Seattle would build transit out to the suburbs. It’s an incisive bit of strategic thinking, but there are certainly other reasons to expand mass transit beyond the city core. Most important, sharing density throughout the metro region matches growth with sustainability. According to “Sounds of the Suburbs,” chapter 13 from Ben Wilson’s outstanding 2020 survey of city development, Metropolis, building urban infrastructure beyond city limits wisely meets an inexorable demographic trend by bringing a regional approach to urbanism. Citing Los Angeles, a “contiguous urban region,” rather than a discrete city, as emblematic of a future defined by “cities across the globe…[that] have morphed into massive polycentric megalopolises,” Wilson makes the case for fighting the damaging effects of sprawl by expanding smart infrastructure, including mass transit.

Given that my 9-to-5 job is writing remarks for Sound Transit’s CEO and Board, my non-stop task this week was drafting the ribbon-cutting-day speeches for Lynnwood Link light rail, our suburban expansion. Accordingly, Lynnwood Link—an 8.5-mile, 4-station, county-crossing extension of Sound Transit’s current 1 Line—topped my list of this week’s personal obsessions.

Lynnwood Link is part of Sound Transit’s larger capital program over the next three years that will grow our now 43-station, 42.5-mile light rail system, into a 53-station, 62-mile regional system.

So, it was lots of this from me this week:

As of today, Link trains will arrive at Lynnwood City Center Station every 8 minutes during peak hours, and every 10 minutes during the rest of the day, giving 50,000 new riders reliable, traffic-free connections…

As we’ve said all along, investing in this kind of light rail expansion isn’t just an investment in trains, it’s an investment in our region’s economic resilience.

More light rail helps connect more people to more jobs.

More light rail helps spark new housing. As of today, more than 3,300 new homes have been built or are in development on Sound Transit property.

 At least 2,500 of those homes are affordable housing.

 More light rail helps spark environmental stewardship.

Sound Transit service helped offset more than 216,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023.  

Or to quote the Seattle Times quoting Snohomish County Executive and Sound Transit Board Vice Chair (ahem) :

The service will help commuters “leave one of the most congested corridors in the country behind,” declared Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers, vice chair of the Sound Transit governing board.

Or the Urbanist quoting Somers:

“The story of the day is regionalism,” Somers said. “By connecting all of our separate communities, with safe, reliable rapid mass transit, we are building one sustainable Puget Sound.”

I get pretty anxious at these events; it’s stressful to listen to other people read and/or try to read and/or mangle your words—while the cameras are rolling.

So, after taking the 512 bus to the new station (light rail wouldn’t have taken me there just yet because the new train service didn’t start running until after the 12:30 ribbon cutting), I arrived at the Lynnwood City Center Station to the strains of a jazz band playing on the mobbed plaza, quickly bought a coffee from one of the food trucks, washed down some anxiety meds, and sat at the picnic tables in back with security staff—the periodic sound of applause whooshing past my body like a light rail train.

Opening Day, Lynnwood Link, 8/30/24

Opening Day, Lynnwood Link, 8/30/24

Me, chilling in back at a picnic table on Lynnwood Link Opening Day, 8/30/34, after the meds kicked in.

2) I woke up on (this big) opening day to an email from my friend Dallas. His subject line read “NYT…,”

and his email simply stated, “has your number on a Friday morning.”

This was followed by a link to a wonderful NYT photo essay of mostly old, black & white subway pics (with the occasional late 1960s or early 1970s Kodak color photo.) Even better, or at least what Dallas meant was this: There was an accompanying survey of quotes from New York City novels where authors rhapsodize about the subway.

Titled 120 Years of New York’s Subterranean Literary Muse: The subway isn’t just buried in the bedrock of New York City— it’s embedded within its fiction, too, there are quotes from 20-plus novels in this mesmerizing feature, including: a quote from Another Country by James Baldwin, a formative novel for me (I read it on the sly in my spare time in high school); a quote from the famous first paragraph of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, who is one of my favorite poets (I actually didn’t remember the subway reference, just the startling opening line about the Rosenberg execution); and a 1913 line from The Custom of the Country by my new, recent interest, Edith Wharton.

This old photo is accompanied in the NYT feature by a quote from Harlem Renaissance novelist Jessie Redmon Fauset's 1928 novel, Plum Bun: "The girls were bright birds of paradise, the men, her artist's eye noted, were gay vital fauns. In the subway beside the laughing, happy groups, white faces showed pale and bloodless, other coloured faces loomed dull and hopeless."

My favorite quote, though, comes from a novelist I’ve never heard of, Daphne Palasi Andreades.

Quoting her 2022 debut, Brown Girls, the NYT went with a brief excerpt that reads like a couplet of poetry:

We are 15, and are learning to memorize the subway lines as

if they are the very veins that run through our bodies

Palasi Andreades’ near verse, included in a section of the feature labeled “People-Watching,” is matched with one of the few color pictures. It’s a close-up shot of a subway map displayed on board a train, its colorful snaking lines melding into a reflection from the seats opposite: two children in winter coats and snow caps gazing out their window at rail yard track and buildings.

Some of the other subway subsets in this collection are: “Crowds & Delays;” “Speed;” and “The Subway at Night.”

3) Speaking of night time: My favorite part about opening my laptop and watching the U.S. Open every evening this week (Pacific Time) is seeing those last fans of the day staying up late (East Coast Time) in the glowing stadium for the daily schedule’s final match, as the tennis goes far past Midnight. The long shots of the fans streaming out afterward along the lit grounds, heading to the nearby 7 train is particularly sweet.

Announcer Patrick McEnroe even did an impromptu PSA for the MTA during the Carlos Alcaraz vs. Botic van de Zandschulp match (whoa, by the way.) Cutting away from the match as ESPN put up a live shot of commuters on the train McEnroe said, "As you know John, the 7 train comes right here."

And then this: "Jessica Pegula [USA, No. 6 woman in the world] takes the subway to the tournament every day. She said she doesn't like being stuck in traffic." This was all very comforting as I got a vicarious NYC thrill imagining the deep 70-degree summer evenings in Queens, NYC well past bedtime.

I’ll be in New York next week; I have tickets to the women’s semifinal and final.

If you were to survey my weekly reports, you’d see that my obsession with women’s pro tennis rates as one of the top recurring categories here, ranking just after “Cities” with 11 post as I close in on a year of doing these regular write ups.

World No. 2, Aryna Sabalenka is my favorite player on the Women’s Tennis Association tour, and perfectly, given my weakness for the wee hours, her Round-3 match, scheduled for the Friday night session, actually started at 12:08 a.m on the Arthur Ashe Stadium main stage, making it the latest match start in U.S. Open history.

After losing the first set badly, 2-6, Sabalenka turned into Godzilla and overpowered her opponent, No. 31 Ekaterina Alexandrova, 6-1, 6-2. Sabalenka won 10 straight games at one point for a 5-0 lead in the third and final set. The match ended at 1:48 a.m., tying the record for the second-latest ending ever for a U.S. women’s match.

Afterward, Sabalenka told reporters she hoped to get to sleep by 4 a.m.

Daffy Saby heads to her post-Midnight match at the U.S. Open, 12/30-31/24

Poetry journal Unleash Lit publishes “Her Debut as a Public Singer” and “Hecate, My Fixer”

Online arts journal Unleash Lit published two of my poems today, “Hecate, My Fixer” and “Her Debut as a Public Singer.” They also posted a Q&A with me, which includes this:

Do you write to prompts? If so, what's your favorite? If not, why not?

JF: … the most productive prompts for me are the ones that happen more spur-of-the-moment, such as when I’m reading a news article and there’s a bit of incongruously poetic language that hints at a whole other world. For instance, I was reading an article about the post-pandemic, city center real estate crash, and a market analyst was quoted saying this: “We’re approaching the acceptance stage of the grieving process for office properties.” The idea of grieving for buildings struck me as a window into the human condition. 

I wrote both “Hecate, My Fixer” and “Her Debut as a Public Singer” earlier this year.

Specifically I wrote “Hecate, My Fixer” in March, in the aftermath of Dad’s death; it won a 2nd place poetry award in July from Common Ground Review, where it was first published.

I wrote “Her Debut as a Public Singer” in January under the influence of Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose writing, consistent with a lot of 19th Century European literature, explores two defining divides of the emergent industrial revolution: City versus country, and factory workers versus factory owners. Unlike most of the narratives from this era, though, which cast the city as being removed from God’s natural design, Gaskell’s Manchester, London, and Liverpool, are inspirational, (and at heart) kind places.

Along with being written under the influence of Gaskell, “Her Debut as a Public Singer,” mines other city sources that are meaningful to me, such as: Fagin’s pickpocket gang, The Beggar’s Opera, The Threepenny Opera, Billie Holiday, and my own youthful summer playing in a band in New York City. It’s also a reaction to William Wordsworth’s Romantic nature poetry, thus my opening line:

”Choosing to live in the city is not a retreat from the natural world.”

The line, which I repeat at the end of the poem (I was originally trying to write a pantoum), works as the mission statement for pretty much all my poems. I explain this in the Q&A when—asked who inspires me—I say “it always seems to come back to Pirate Jenny from the Threepenny Opera!”

If you scroll (way) down here, you can find my review of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel Mary Barton and of the Penguin Classics’ Wordsworth collection.

Edith Wharton and city zoning; Maurice Williams and piano palpitations; Aryna Sabalenka and the Cincinnati Open

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#45

1) I was all set to welcome Elizabeth Gaskell back to my weekly catalog of obsessions; I devoured her first novel, 1848’s Mary Barton, back in January (and even ended up writing a full-fledged review of the book for the oddball arts website Oblivioni).

This past week, I’ve been reading and enjoying Gaskell’s 1855 novel (and her most famous one), North and South, which, like Mary Barton, is committed to exposing the dire situation of England’s then-emergent laboring class.

But I’ve put Gaskell on pause to read The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, a collection of short stories by Pulitzer prize-winning (The Age of Innocence, 1920) American novelist, Edith Warton

Set in a turn-of-the-(20th)-century Manhattan of rarefied drawing rooms, horse-drawn hansoms, snowy 5th Ave., and witty cocktail banter, these stories, with Wharton’s insider info and topical currency, actually remind me more of Joyce’s Dubliners and his fast-paced urban verisimilitude than of Jane Austen’s subtle cotillion dramas. Also like Joyce’s (angst-ridden) Dubliners, Wharton’s stories turn on slightly cryptic climaxes that drift into unresolved personal crises.

The story that has captivated me most so far, though, Mrs. Manstey’s View (1891), is extra clear. Set in a cramped landscape of factory smoke and spires, this Wharton dispatch from the city canon is all about land use zoning.

It’s the first short story Wharton ever published . And yes, while the writing in this boarding house tale crackles with evocative Dubliners-level local color—”the yards beyond…were in a state of chronic untidiness and fluttering, on certain days of the week, with miscellaneous garments and frayed table-cloths”—it is a straight-forward, rather than obtuse story: A lonely, elderly woman, Mrs. Manstey, who lives in a sad flat “in a street where the ash-barrels lingered late on the sidewalk,” cherishes the slovenly, yet holy, view out her third floor window:

Some of the yards were, indeed, but stony wastes, with grass in the cracks of the pavement and no shade in spring save that afforded by the intermittent leafage of the clotheslines. These yards Mrs. Manstey disapproved of, but the others, the green ones, she loved. She had grown used to their disorder; the broken barrels, the empty bottles and paths unswept no longer annoyed her; hers was the happy faculty of dwelling on the pleasanter side of the prospect before her… the breath of a neglected syringa, which persisted in growing in spite of the countless obstacles opposed to its welfare.

However, Mrs. Manstey’s sacred views will soon be blocked: As she learns from her landlord Mrs. Sampson, the building next door has secured a zoning variance and is set to expand. Events proceed along standard, heroic anti-development lines, and Wharton gives us a NIMBY martyr—literally, as Mrs. Mantsey’s rebellion culminates in her death. Needless to say, I don’t sympathize with the dramatic politics of this tale which, following a popular arc in literature: celebrates reactionary utopianism.

But, politics aside, I’m certainly a glutton for any literary exercise that uses city development to explore the human condition.

2) Early rock and roller Maurice Williams, a precocious and eccentric teen prodigy from South Carolina, who, as a driven 18-year-old, fast talked his way into the Nashville music scene, died this week at 86.

Williams’ No. 1 Billboard hit “Stay” (1960) gets a little too much attention in his NYT obituary (probably because Jackson Browne, who syncs with the NYT’s white Baby Boomer demographic, had an ironic late 1970s hit with it). Without much fanfare, the obit also notes Williams’ other hit, “Little Darlin’” (1957), one of my favorite rock & roll era tunes.

I learned to play “Little Darlin’” on piano back in 2022, and upon seeing Williams’ obituary this week, I remembered careening though the song’s looping 1/6/2/5 left-hand chord progression and recklessly slurring the simple right-hand melodies as my keyboard bounced on its stand. *This chord progression slightly alters the famous (and more innocent) “Heart and Soul” "‘50s progression” by changing the major 4 to a minor 2, yet leaves the dominant-to-tonic resolution intact maintaining the tune’s satisfying turnaround.

This superior, earlier Williams’ jam—a loopy mix of free-form doo-wop, up-tempo calypso, and helter-skelter rock & roll—barely made the pop charts, but it did hit #11 on the R&B charts that year and, as the premiere record from Maurice’s group the Gladiolas (later renamed the Zodiacs), it made a bold and durable statement about his outsized and lulu creativity.

Prompted by Williams’ death, I re-learned the song this week, rollicking through it with my headphones on. What’s odd about “Little Darlin’” is how the traditionally calming four-chord loop is accompanied by a herky-jerky melody prompting palpitations rather than swoons.

P.s. You’re probably more familiar with the cover version of “Little Darlin’” by a white doo-wop group from Canada called the Diamonds; their, admittedly more fully-realized (though less nutty) version, which came out a month later, hit No. 3 on the Billboard charts, selling millions. Williams wasn’t too miffed about this though. Showing off more evidence of his headstrong self-awareness, he had obtained all the rights to the song and made serious money off the Diamonds’ hit.

The downside, perhaps, is that Williams, upon becoming a successful professional songwriter at the age of 17, turned down a scholarship to study classical music at Allen University in South Carolina. We can only wonder at the eccentric innovations he might have instigated as a classical composer.

3) After starting the 2024 season with a bang by A) winning her second career grand slam title at February’s Australian Open (she beat World No. 7 Qinwen Zheng in the final and avenged her 2023 U.S. Open finals loss along the way by beating then-World No. 3 Coco Gauff in the semifinal), and by B) reaching both the Spanish and Italian Open finals in April and May respectively, where she—no shame—lost both matches to peerless World No. 1 Iga Swiatek (including a 3-set epic in Madrid), my favorite WTA player, World No. 2, Aryna Sabalenka, started to slip earlier this summer.

She got a stomach flu and crashed in Paris at Roland Garros in June, losing in the quarterfinal to 17-year-old whiz Mira Andreeva (No. 21). The loss bumped Sabalenka from No. 2 to No. 3, as Gauff overtook her in the rankings race.

Next, also in June, Sabalenka bowed out of the Berlin Ladies Open, retiring with a sore shoulder in her quarterfinal match against No. 24 Anna Kalinskaya. Sabalenka’s shoulder didn’t heal in time for Wimbledon in July, and so, she had to withdraw from the  premier grand slam tournament. She also bailed on the Summer Olympics in Paris.

However, Sabalenka has built up some new momentum with a late- summer comeback. She made the semifinals at the Mubadala Citi DC Open in August, and she reached the quarterfinals in this year’s Canadian Open, also in August.

Then, this week: Sabalenak stormed through the Cincinnati Open, beating No. 1 Swiatek in two sets in the semifinal, and then winning the final in two sets against No. 6 Jessica Pegula.

Sabalenka, who looked happy and chill the whole tournament, sporting a goofball smile rather than her usual storm cloud frown, didn’t lose a single set in Cincinnati, capturing her fifth career WTA 1000 title while simultaneously regaining her World No. 2 spot; her main rival Gauff slipped behind her to No. 3.

It’s perfect timing for Daffy Sabby (that’s what I call her to honor her often befuddled off-court demeanor), because next up it’s the U.S. Open in New York City, the year’s final grand slam tournament. Here’s hoping Daffy Sabby’s confident on-court demeanor propels her—like one of her vicious forehand winners—deep into this year’s U.S. Open bracket.

Speaking of which, ahem:

A silent film; scary context; and a backyard tea party.

I’m All Lost in …

the three things I’m obsessing over THIS week

#44

1) Unlike most of the pre-code (1928-1934) Hollywood movies I watch, City Girl (1930) which I streamed on YouTube this week, is a silent film; silent films had mostly fallen out of fashion by the late 1920s. Also unlike most pre-code Hollywood movies in general—risqué and playfully radical flicks, but formulaic B-grade affairs at best—City Girl is a breathtaking piece of cinema. It was directed by high-art German filmmaker F.W. Murnau; Murnau is most famous for his Expressionist masterpiece, 1922’s Nosferatu, but his expert craft is certainly evident in City Girl as he gives Edward Hopper treatment to Chicago’s diners, studio apartments, and El trains alongside the film’s dreamy camera-work-ballet portraying Minnesotan wheat fields

Exactly like most pre-code movies, however, City Girl, the second of three films Murnau made after emigrating to the U.S. in 1926, tries, with its tidy Hollywood denouement, to recant its subversive message, namely that progressive urban values have a moral clarity one doesn’t find in American farm country .

Despite the movie’s canned ending though (in which the “City Girl,” Kate, played by charismatic Mary Duncan, happily embraces rural living), the vast majority of Murnau’s unflinching footage documents tyranny and sexism inside a supposedly ideal, but in reality, physically-abusive country household. In a pretty shocking scene, the movie’s patriarch, a stoic farmer played with simmering puritanical angst by Scottish actor David Torrence, strikes his doe-eyed son’s new wife, Duncan’s character, Kate, immediately upon the young couple’s arrival from Chicago. The son, Lem (played by man-child Charles Farrell ), had been sent to Chicago to sell the family’s latest crop at the stock exchange and has startled the family by returning with a forthright, sassy, modern woman by his side. (Lem’s kid sister Anne is thrilled.) Hitting Kate across the face and sending her stumbling backward across the room, the angry father, inherently suspicious of big city trickery, declares (via the silent film’s full-screen inner-title cards): “Women like you love for what they can get out of it… But you’ll get nothing from me… I’m the master here! My son does what I say…and so will you!”

I was holding out hope that rebel-smart Kate, who Murnau poignantly portrays in the film’s opening acts as a jaded yet longing striver working at a busy Chicago lunch counter, would ultimately reject the once-idealized farm life she’d fantasized about back in her cramped city apartment and get on the train back to the Windy City. This was certainly how the story was going by the time of the film’s finale when Kate outmaneuvers the two encroaching forces around her—the brutal patriarchy governing her new home and the group of sexually menacing farm hand predators—to expose their countryside hypocrisy.

Indeed, Murnau’s reverse-engineering of the standard Eden-versus-Babylon trope turns Kate—initially a street-wise waitress—into a feminist freedom fighter of the prairie who translates her front-of-the-house restaurant-battle smarts into farm-house survival skills.

Chicago transplant (Mary Duncan) stands up to her brutal father-in-law (David Torrence) in F.W. Murnau's expertly crafted silent film, City Girl (1930). 

But alas, even though we get one last nod to feminism (Kate rejects her husband’s assist to mount the horse-drawn carriage back to the train station and ascends the buggy herself), the story ultimately opts for young love (aka, traditional marriage) instead of political rebellion as the antidote to isolationist despotism. Kate and Lem turn the carriage around and return to the farm.

Had Kate and Lem followed through on Lem’s coming-of-age declaration that they will “live our own lives,” defiantly addressed to his father in the previous scene, and actually chosen a liberated yet unknown future after starting off in the carriage to the depot (a bit like Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross on the bus in the enigmatic final still of The Graduate), City Girl would have made good on Murnau’s indictment of conservatism.

Despite ignoring all the the rural heartland’s red flags and choosing to return to Lem’s family’s farm house, Kate’s class war and gender consciousness do in fact appear to be intact in the movie’s closing moments. After humbling the father and then benevolently embracing him in his repentance, Kate has positioned herself to transform farm life around her rather than reject it. In this sense, City Girl stands as a revolutionary sobriquet not a cautionary one.

2) I’m still obsessing over the election. And I do like the dramatic swing toward Harris in battleground state polling this week—a 12-point swing, for example, in Arizona from mid-July when Biden was still on the ticket.

But it’s two pieces of larger context that struck me this week.

The first was laid out in a concise Washington Post column.

Data for the win: Nope, nope, and nope on Trump’s main campaign issues—violent crime surge, porous borders, and devastating inflation.

Crime wave?

Noting how “data has repeatedly indicated that crime — and violent crime in particular — has declined over the past few years,” the Post rolls out the numbers: Homicide down 17% in 2024; robbery down 6%; aggravated assault down 5%; rape down 10%.

Border “invasion”?

The Post provides a reality check. “[Trump],” they write, “is fond of amplifying data about the number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border to suggest that the country is overrun with new arrivals, particularly those who entered the country illegally. … But Trump's assertions about an ‘open border’ are … hobbled by the striking decrease in apprehensions in recent months.”

Then, once again, they roll out the numbers: apprehensions dropped by half in January, dropped another 2% in February and March, dropped 6% in April, dropped 9% in May, 29% in June.

They conclude: “Another way to look at it: There were fewer apprehensions between border checkpoints in June 2024 than there were in June 2019 under Donald Trump.”

Runaway inflation?

Well, we all certainly saw Wednesday’s New York Times headline: “Inflation Cools to 2.9%” …

And as the Post article reports: “On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data on inflation showing that the annual increase last month was lower than at any point since March 2021.” And they add: “average wages have increased more rapidly since 2021 and… the increase in the rate of inflation has slowed. … The rate of increase in wages has in recent months consistently been larger than the rate of increase of inflation, in fact.”

Their conclusion offers a delicious metaphor for the new state of the race (namely, a warm welcome to Kamala Harris), which may reflect why—as the aforementioned polling shows— people are losing interest in Trump:

These shifts also are not likely to change Trump’s rhetoric. He is no more interested in presenting accurate information about crime, immigration and inflation than he ever was, so he highlights things like the unmeasured-and-exaggerated concept of “migrant crime” to stoke fears about the direction of the country.

Still, the current numbers are a reflection of how the ground under Trump’s feet has shifted. He’s running against the first half of Biden’s administration, when Biden was his opponent and crime, inflation and immigration were acute problems. But now, to his chagrin, it’s 2024. The landscape is very different.

The second bit of context I appreciated this week came in a New York Times Magazine piece that placed MAGA on a logical timeline, tying them to earlier incarnations of feral right-wing American populism such as the anti-New Deal right of the early FDR-era, the nativist “America First” movement of the 1940s, the paranoid anti-Communist McCarthy-era of the early 1950s, the virulent racism of the conspiracy-theory obsessed John Birch Society in the 1960s, and Pat Buchanan’s apoplectic culture war in the early 1990s.

That last example is the one my Spidey Senses tracked with horror back then; it was laid out in this prescient narrative research paper by Elinor Langer published under the title “The American Neo-Nazi Movement Today,” as an entire issue of the Nation in July 1990. Reading the original 1990 article—it’s included in the link as a PDF—will give you the chills as you recognize how Langer’s 35-year-old observations about the dark corners and far fringes of the American political psyche in the 1990s now define the core of MAGA’s mainstream ideology.

Prompted by that issue of the Nation, I started keeping a file folder on the underground right at the time—I labeled it “The Convolutes,” as in convoluted ideology—and I immediately recognized the creepy noise when the same themes emerged in Trump’s rhetoric, QAnon conspiracy theories, and at MAGA rallies.

The NYT Magazine piece does a good job unpacking the ”ragtag assortment of self-described neo-monarchists, techno-libertarians and right-wing Marxists” (that last seeming contradiction should grab your attention) and summarizes it all like this:

At the heart of the New Right is a belief that most of what ails America can be blamed on a liberal elite that has burrowed into the federal government, the news media, Hollywood, big business and higher education … To them, liberalism is actively hurting the country, funneling fortunes from hard-working Americans into Washington and Wall Street and then casting any criticism as racist or fascist.

In contrast, the New Right posits a nationalistic nostalgia for a small-town America of decentralized government — a “front porch republic,”

“The right-wing populism that’s gotten such a strong foothold in Trump’s Republican Party has a long lineage,” said David Greenberg, a professor of history at Rutgers University. “In the early 20th century, there was a similar rural backlash against the changes in society that were making America more centralized, urban, cosmopolitan and interconnected with the world.”

3) Realizing that this weekly catalog of things I’m devouring at the moment has become a default diary, I need to note that upon receiving an invite from my good friend Velma last week, I attended her daughter’s last annual Teenage Tea Party this past Sunday evening.

Velma’s daughter N—, who decided back when she was a precocious freshman that she should hold a proper backyard tea party for her gang, is off (out-of-state) to college later this month, and given my ongoing delight in early ‘70s Bowie, 19th Century fiction, sad poetry, and Lorde—I’ve been lucky enough to be considered a cool grown-up over the years. So, in addition to Velma and Velma’s partner Byrne (also a close friend), I was the only other adult in attendance for the epic final tea party.

(Velma objected to that description, texting back in response to my “Planning on it… last annual tea party seems epic”-RSVP note with this: “I don’t think it will be the last, just the last of the HS years.”

I “was gonna qualify it as such,” I texted back, “but the ones that continue sporadically as HS gang slowly scatters and morphs into college pals and other assorted versions will be New Order to Joy Division. I want to catch the last Joy Division gig.” )

Thanks to the fact that N— plays the electric bass (naturally), the tea party was, in fact, a gig. Her high school band, Tin Men March, set up in the idyllic backyard—bongos, guitars, and techno drums among the ivy.

The whole groovy scene reminded me of Jane Fonda’s seismic 1965 summer party where Sunset Strip proto-indie hipsters, the Byrds, played at young Jane’s Dad’s L.A. house, a historic counter cultural inflection point that defined the new generation gap.

Mind you, I didn’t feel like 60-year-old Henry Fonda (Jane’s old-guard, Hollywood royalty father, though I certainly should have), but more like a casual patron saint digging the Edith Wharton-meets-Velvet Underground-meets-Karen Dalton mash.

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.