Of course I’m obsessed with next week’s Presidential election; of course I’m obsessed with the new Chopin song; also, a city that does not totally regret life

I’m All Lost In …

The 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week …

#55

But first, this week’s Recommended Listening: Scientist, the early 1980s King Tubby protégé whose own slow-electronics dub swept me up at Analog Coffee this past Saturday morning; the shop’s music nerd baristas were playing it over the sound system. I subsequently made a playlist of Scientist’s three defining albums: Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires; Scientist Meets the Space Invaders; and Scientist Meets the Roots Radics.

Second, this week’s Recommended Viewing: my great pal Glenn’s slow-media reel, a quiet video novella about autumn in Seattle.

Now, onto this week’s obsessions:

1) A new Chopin waltz, circa 1830

According to last year’s Spotify Wrapped, coming in ahead of Blondie, the Clash, and DJ Spooky, my No. 1 2023 Artist was Romantic composer Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849).

My Spotify Wrapped, 11/29/23

Having all my adolescent punk and new wave favorites from the early 1980s on a contemporary list was embarrassing, but …

19th Century salon composer Frédéric Chopin? Tres chic.

(Having DJ Spooky on my list was pretty cool as well, though, he too is an old favorite.)

It turns out, there’s even more Chopin to like now. This spring, a curator at Manhattan’s Morgan Library & Museum discovered a signed manuscript in their vault of a previously unknown Chopin waltz. And last week, the New York Times ran a dramatic story about this awesome find. The article also includes video of piano star Lang Lang in a state of utter delight playing the piece exclusively for the NYT web page.

I’ve been basking in the flow of shimmering new Chopin phrases all week. Additionally, the story itself is a joy to read. It’s not only the riveting tale of the museum’s detective work (determining the authenticity of the score) that hooked me. Nearly every paragraph in the article ends with a hyper eloquent crescendo about Chopin.

NYT music writer Javier C. Hernández was apparently just as moved to write about the new Chopin waltz as pianist Lang was to play it.

From Hernández’s bewitching article:

The jarring opening, he said, evokes the harsh winters of the Polish countryside. …

He settled in Paris, quickly establishing himself as a poet at the keyboard whose music conjured new realms of emotion. …

In the early 1830s, Poland was in armed rebellion against the Russian Empire, which had occupied parts of the country. Chopin never returned to his homeland. …

..he wrote in a diary while traveling in Germany in 1831. “And here I stand by idly — and here I stand with empty hands. I only moan, expressing my pain from time to time at the piano.” …

Chopin invoked the Polish word “zal,” meaning nostalgia or regret. …

Waltzes had been a cheery staple of ballrooms. But Chopin’s were never meant for dancing. …

Still others are morose meditation, like the Waltz in B Minor. …

Chopin detested what he called the “flying trapeze school” of pianism.

2) The Historic 2024 Presidential Election

With less than a week to go before Election Day, the word “obsession” doesn’t begin to capture my state of mind. There’s also anxiety, fear, frustration, and hopelessness.

[Note, if you can’t abide by my gloomy outlook, scroll down to some of my hopeful thoughts at the end.]

It seems Trump is more likely to win than Harris. The polls are just too close in the supposed “Blue Wall” states.

There’s also high prices and the pathological mass appeal of Trump’s scapegoat rhetoric.

And despite A) the initial Kamalanomenon, B) August’s grand-finale Chicago convention, and C) her winning debate, Harris’ star power appears to have subsided.

It was there. But we needed more of it.

10/24/24, Clarkston, GA

I believe that beyond her pro-choice stump speech, Harris has not articulated any other clear-cut reason for Americans to vote for her. Choice is a paramount and historic issue, and she’s eloquent AF on it; it certainly made for her best moment at the September 10 debate. But that issue—and the pro-choice ballot initiatives in key states like Arizona—is not enough. As I’ve been saying all year, and as the NYT and the Washington Post are now finally figuring out, MAGA voters are pro-choice too and will simply vote yay on choice and yay on Trump.

I’m scared there’s a true realignment taking place and that Trump is forging an actual populist party (call it Right Wing Marxism, a sort of reactionary redistribution of power for working class white men only), which logically includes some progressive overlap. For example, while Trump’s America First isolationism is toxic, it’s also openly anti-war. A conversation I had with a cranky lefty at a Brooklyn bar last winter still haunts me: They glibly said they liked Trump’s anti-establishment messaging.

Ultimately, it’s not a good sign that Harris’ closing argument has focused on Trump and has not gone full bore on her own vision. Believe me, I agree with her that Trump is an authoritarian and a neo-Nazi, as we saw on display at his Madison Square Garden hate rally this week. But voters need to feel a sense of excitement about a candidate, not just fear of her opponent.

Yes, I did like Harris’ mic-drop line Tuesday at the Ellipse about her “To Do List” (versus his “Enemies List”), including her top agenda item to build affordable housing. But it still feels like her narrative is about him; the site of her closing argument rally itself was literally framed by Trump’s infamous Jan. 6 speech. That’s not a winning script. She needs to be the star of the story.

Maybe…hopefully… by November 5, she will be?

To stay hopeful, I hold on to these things:

• Perhaps this summer’s excitement about Harris reflected deep sentiment (there were, after all, 75,000 people at her Ellipse rally this week, and there is a surge in female voting right now, plus there’s a big, early exit poll lead for Harris as well);

• The media hype about the supposedly ascendant U.K. and French ultra-nationalists this past July, subsequently belied by actual election day failures (tears of joy), may presage a similar MAGA loss out in our own election;

• And most important, there are our own previous elections, particularly 2022’s phony “Red Wave,” which seem like convincing polls in and of themselves. That is to say: the succession of Democratic victories and Trump losses in 2018, 2020, and 2022 seem to indicate that MAGA is not as popular as the media continues to say it is.

10/30/24

On Wednesday night, I voted for Kamala Harris. Obviously.

3) Vlogger Yzabel Nievanne’s Instagram account.

Last June, I came across an Instagram reel posted by Yzabel Nievanne, a Seattle transplant from San Francisco (Yes, please, and welcome!) who was rightly complaining that everything closes too early here.

“Is it just in my area?” she asked hopefully…

Sensing I’d found a Frank O’Hara comrade in my campaign to constantly nudge Seattle (into a city “that does not totally regret life,”) I hearted her reel and of course left a link to my first book of poems: Shops Close Too Early.

Rather than making a book sale, though, I’m the one who became her fan; I now religiously follow Nievanne’s account (project.fulltimetraveler, née project.lovingme) as one of her 80,000 fans.

It turns out, she’s not a city policy crank. This square young woman and her understated sidekick husband provide a daily dose of uncomplicated glee—hers—that offers a different kind of urbanism.

Uncomplicated urbanist Yzabel Nievanne checks out Pioneer Square’s coffee shops.

Unlike scripted TED-talk YIMBYs or upzone activists, Nievanne’s energized pro-city POV just means she’s constantly out and about, unfettered and living her best city life as she discovers Seattle. Usually taking light rail, she’s off to: Pioneer Square and Chinatown/International District coffee shops (Umbria, Saigon Drip, Hood Famous, Zeitgeist); Seattle’s farmers markets; the Rem Koolhaas Central Library; the pretty walk around Green Lake; the Seattle Opera; and the U. District … “we found the quirkiest vintage trinket store” …

Her consistently upbeat posts also give her license to be critical, which she often is. “I’m processing…” she’ll note playfully and then…

She reports: the coffee at Umbria needed lots of extra milk and brown sugar; Pioneer Square was “kinda quiet, there’s not a lot of things going on in the Square;” and Zeitgeist’s blueberry muffin “wasn’t as moist as I would like it to be … maybe, it’s the cornmeal that I don’t like.”

I have to admit, it’s fun to watch an incorrigibly effusive newcomer—and an unapologetic normie, at that—quietly puzzle over Seattle’s strangely lackluster city life. It makes me feel like less of a demanding jerk.

She also inspired me to document some city action myself this week, such as the line around the block at Monday night’s Artemas show. It’s always a public policy win when the youth line up at the club.

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A hip hop exegesis; a glossy tennis magazine; spooning with Prince and Donna Summer

I’m All Lost In

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#54

L-R, Mr. Mudede, DJ Vitamin D, Dr. Daudi Abe

1) “Rapper’s Delight” Annotated @ Clock-Out Lounge, 10/18/24

No revisionist history. I was not into hip hop when I was young, or rap, as we used to call it. However, nor did I actively dislike it. Mostly, I was just hyper aware of its existence after “Rapper’s Delight” came out in 1979, a year otherwise nudged by the sudden sounds of new wave, both the power-pop-punk-guitar-driven new wave and also, fascinated with the retro future, the robots-in-mascara-playing-synthesizers new wave. Hip hop evolved on a parallel track and my teen head ceded it to Black teens.

Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,“ hip hop’s opening spin, was released about three weeks after my 13th birthday (and less than 2 weeks after my bar mitzvah) in September ‘79. It was a massive hit and an even bigger curiosity. Its lyrics about gross-food-at-your-friend’s-house were instantly relatable and entertaining. That was my main association with the song. That, and I connected it to disco, thinking of it as “Black” music; I literally thought, listening to “Rapper’s Delight,” that I was peeking into Black kid’s bedroom.

I first heard “Rappers’ Delight” shortly after it was released at my friend George Miller’s apartment (he was not Black) while we played Atari Pong on his TV. I liked 1960s rock and increasingly, new wave; I bought my first new wave record, Blondie’s Eat to the Beat, that year. (Blondie’s NYC allegiance to hip hop was unknown to me at that time.)

While I subsequently defined myself throughout high school with post-punk music (which was primarily performed by white artists), it’s true that Black music, mostly pop R & B and bubble gum funk—those bass lines!—was a cultural force (along with break dancing) for my classmates. My suburban Maryland high school was 95% white, but Black pop music was ubiquitous on the D.C. radio stations.

By spring of senior year, well before they teamed up with Aerosmith, I did recognize how great Run-DMC was. And despite my snobbish affinity for underground white music (“alternative” and “indie” were not terms yet), I spent some of my $3.35 minimum-wage paycheck on their first record. And later, in college, on Public Enemy’s. I still felt separate from rap, though, and mostly bought these records with the impulse of a completist going for a record collection that reflected my times.

I still don’t like rap much, but I have come to deify the through-line that puts Rap’s progenitor, Afro-Caribbean music—starting with Jamaica’s 1950s sound system scene—at the center of contemporary music history. This is the Kingston-based DJ Coxsone Dodd-to-Bronx-based DJ Kool Herc narrative that has come to define the artistic strains of today’s popular music: A blend of hip hop, R & B, electronica, jazz, Afro beat, and outré white music (Steve Reich, Eno, and DEVO have everything to do with all this). I call this layered concoction Abstract R & B.

This self-conscious intro is all to say: My wonderful old friend Charles Mudede—who agrees with me that the one-part disco/one-part electronica Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder track, 1977’s “I Feel Love”, is the greatest song of all time—gave a free-flowing talk about “Rapper’s Delight” on stage at Beacon Hill’s Clock-Out Lounge last Saturday night with Seattle Central College Prof. Dr. Daudi Abe, and Seattle hip hop DJ Vitamin D. It was a delight.

Charles is the closest thing Seattle has to a public intellectual, a charming, contrarian, and playful bibliophile. (He giggles with, well, delight, that hip hop’s founding document, “Rapper’s Delight,” was recorded by second-rate musicians in a cheap Englewood, New Jersey studio as opposed to in NYC.)

I don’t know Dr. Abe nor Vitamin D., but with Dr. Abe, who wrote Emerald Street: A History of Hip-Hop in Seattle, playing facilitator, and Vitamin D. bringing the populist wisdom and beats, Charles was glowing with knowing (thank you for mentioning Blondie’s “Rapture”) as the trio expanded on a recent article Charles and Dr. Abe wrote for the Stranger, a literal annotation of the 3-minute radio rendition of “Rapper’s Delight.”

Vitamin D. played samples from “Rapper’s Delight” and other relevant tracks, such as “Jam-Master Jay” by Run DMC.

My iPhone video from Clock-Out Lounge, 5/18/24

Appropriately, Vitamin D DJ’d a dance party after their talk too.

I had my quibbles with some points from the talk. Vitamin D.’s insistence on the priority that rap places on “originality” seemed like a banal claim, one that every macho advocate makes about their chosen art form. And unfortunately, in this instance, the emphasis undermines one of hip hop’s main revolutionary aesthetics: Sampling other people’s music (an elaboration on Caribbean music’s tradition of dubbing.) Heck, 1970’s disco group Chic sued the Sugar Hill Gang over “Rapper’s Delight” itself because, it turns out, the founding hip hop jam lifted its defining bass line from Chic’s earlier 1979 Disco hit “Good Times.”

Vitamin D also claimed that hip hop—as opposed to disco—is the genre that lives on.

Absurd! While hip hop culture (sampling in particular) is a central intellectual force in contemporary music, the incessant dance pulse of EDM and electronic pop is clearly descended from disco; check out my 1970s disco playlist “LaBelle’s Boots.”

I don’t mean to pick on DJ Vitamin D. He held his own with our insanely well-read Marxist Charles, reminiscing about cassette culture and explaining how the words to “Rapper’s Delight” were the DNA of his school playground’s lingua franca before he’d ever heard the song.

This was an A+ lecture that should be sampled far and wide, particularly Charles’ deconstruction of the line

“A-skiddlee bebop, we rock a scooby-doo/
And guess what, America, we love you,”

putting the focus on the Sugar Hill Gang’s framing overture: “Guess what…”

2) RACQUET , Issue No. 25

Tennis legend Andre Agassi on the cover of the latest Racquet magazine.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a magazine cover to cover.

To my surprise, this 120-page bound and glossy coffee-table magazine is not glossy; it’s printed on stock paper instead of slick pages, and, more surprising, it’s light on ads and heavy on actual articles.

The latest issue (Racquet debuted in 2016), Issue No. 25, includes features on Andre Agassi, Monica Seles, and Dominic Thiem (my tennis obsession is new, so reading recaps on these important veterans was fruitful). Also in this issue: a poetically sappy series of recurring short essays throughout titled “The Greatest Thing I’ve Ever Seen on a Tennis Court;” a negative review of the U.S. Open’s signature “Honey Deuce” (by longtime Esquire cocktail columnist, David Wondrich, who suggests an alternative, the gin-based “Flushing Meadow," with a recipe of his own); a precocious history of modern tennis, dating back to the “remarkably unremarkable” 2002 Wimbledon final, written by a curiously profound 13-year-old; some fast-paced interviews with WTA players Danielle Collins (World No. 11) and doubles star Taylor Townsend; a smart aleck guide to improving your game, written by two bratty pro coaches; and, prompted by the overrated tennis movie Challengers, (panned by me here last summer), a flirtatious essay on the standard tennis-as-sex metaphor.

To be honest, this is not a super well-reported magazine. The chatty, and oddly addicting articles, which make no pretense of interviewing their subjects, read as if they were written from a hotel room by cocky, high-paid freelancers on assignment, reliving their student days jamming out English papers the night before. And the Atlantic Monthly-aspirations—like the Agassi article’s clunky thesis on the Sisyphean nature of returning life’s infinite incoming tennis balls—add to the magazine’s glorious sophomoric embellishment.

Me and my Honey Deuce at the this year’s U.S. Open, 9/5/24

Aside from the wise 13-year-old historian’s well-argued article (his inflection-point point being there wasn’t a single serve & volley during the entire Wimbledon 2002 final), the issue’s best article is a touching piece of memoir called “Goth Tennis.” This 17-page, page-turner (lots of goth-doodle illustrations) about the writer’s doomed late-1990s stint as a high school tennis star while living a pasty, pimple-plagued, stoner teen’s life, dressed perpetually in black, plays to the magazine’s dubious and delightful strength: Reveling in first-person, quasi philosophical musings about tennis.

Racquet, which I picked up from the elaborate magazine shelf at Elliott Bay Books, has been in the news lately: A) the magazine’s original co-founders had a dramatic split over editorial direction which led one of them—who accused Racquet of becoming a lifestyle brand rather than a tennis magazine—to start his own competitor after getting unceremonioiusly ousted, and B) after going deep on the Alexander Zverev sexual assault story, good job!, Racquet subsequently bailed on the freelance reporter’s legal fees. (Here’s the reporter’s account of getting ghosted by the magazine.)

The new competitor, the confusingly branded The Second Serve/Open Tennis, actually seems far more fixated on lifestyle.

I’m planning to read a copy of that next!

Cal Anderson Park

In other tennis news: On Saturday morning, I lost 4-6 to my new tennis rival, Ian; we played at the graffiti-happy Cal Anderson Park tennis court. I mounted a comeback from 2-5 down, but, in the end, I didn’t pull it off.

And then there’s this: My favorite player, Daffy Saby (my household’s nickname for the often-befuddled Aryna Sabalenka), ascended to the World No. 1 spot this week, replacing officious Iga Swiatek at the top of the class; the once-invincible Swiatek has otherwise held the spot all year. Saby, who had actually slipped to No. 3 mid year, falling behind Coco Gauff, has definitely been playing convincing tennis lately; I noticed her turnaround in the run-up to the U.S. Open. So, credit where credit’s due to the hilarious and mighty Sabalenka.

But Swiatek’s fall, technically on account of losing points for not meeting the tour rule of playing six 500-level matches per year (the math is confusing), seems indicative of a larger weirdness with Swiatek:

Up through France’s Roland Garros grand slam, which she won for the third year in a row this past June (right after she also won the 1000-level Spanish and Italian Opens back to back in April and May, beating Sabalenka in both finals), Swiatek had seemed god-level to all her competitors’ mere hero-level play.

But then came an improbable string of losses over the summer: Losing in the early rounds (to No. 29, Yulia Putintseva) at Wimbledon; losing to No. 7 Qinwen Zheng in the summer Olympic semifinals; losing to Daffy Saby in the WTA 1000-level Cincinnati semifinals; and then losing to No. 4 Jessica Pegula in the U.S. Open quarterfinal. (Saby herself would go on to beat Pegula in the U.S. Open final.)

I first noticed it during Swiatek’s loss to Zheng:

Swiatek’s been reminding me of the Franny character in J.D. Salinger’s Franny & Zooey novella. Franny, of course, in a fit of Bohemian Zen Buddhism, chants herself into a catatonic nervous breakdown. It’s been hard to miss Swiatek’s lengthy, on-court conversations with herself prior to each point. There’s a spooky liturgical rhythm to them as she davens on the baseline like an ancient rabbi.

C-to-C octave

3) Piano Octaves: “I Feel Love,” “Kiss,” “Little Darlin’”

Speaking of “I Feel Love,” it’s one of three jams I’ve been savoring playing on piano this week. The other two are “Kiss” by Prince, and the 1950s doo-wop air “Little Darlin’” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, née Gladiolas.

What do these three bangers have in common? Octaves. Or more specifically, splayed chords, built on octaves.

The verse to Prince’s “Kiss” (1986) rides an A-to-A octave chord, A-E-A in the left hand (the song is in the key of A Major, so that’s the tonic 1 note at the root of the octave with the key’s dominant 5 note, E, locking it in.) During the mid-verse turnaround—”you don’t need experience”— Prince drops to the key’s subdominant 4th, swapping the E out for a D, two Ds actually—played as an octave while keeping the tonic, the A, in the mix as the middle note this time. This sets up the traditional 1-4-5 sweep to the chorus:

“You don’t have to be rich…” jumps to the Dominant 5, with an E-to-E octave chord, an E-B-E. Then, in response, there’s some palindrome 5… 4… 1 blues tension along the way back down to the verse: The second and fourth lines of the chorus feature a D-A-D octave chord on “you don’t have to be cool to rule my world” and again on “your extra time and your…

“Kiss!” …

back to the 1 as the root with the A-E-A octave guiding the vibrating verse again.

Maurice Williams’ 1957 “Little Darlin’” (which I was obsessing over back in late August too) strolls through the well-known “50s” chord progression, 1-6-2-5 (more commonly played as 1-6-4-5, but the propulsive 2 works just as well, if not better. Williams chose the forlorn minor instead of an upbeat major).

It’s the stately octaves that give the song its unabashed groove. I’m playing it in B flat, so the octave chords, with the 5 tone to each chord’s root-1 filling out the middle position, are: B flat-F-B flat; G-D-G; C-G-C; F-C-F.

I like playing these chords as up-and-back-down-again arpeggios, which lets the middle note create see-saw momentum. I never want to get off this ride.

“I Feel Love” (1977), the Summer/Moroder early sci-fi pop masterpiece that I’ve certainly obsessed about before, is the biggest octave-fest of all.

Its avalanche of octaves comes in the dynamite chorus, which cycles through 4 separate octave-based chords. And, as opposed to the octave-based three-tone chords in “Kiss” and “Little Darlin’,” these chords are stocking-stuffed with 4 tones a piece.

The song is in F Major, so the immediately ascendant chorus blasts off by starting with the Dominant 5—a C-to-C octave: C-E-G-C. We’re off. The 4 is next. A B flat-to-B flat octave: B flat-E flat-G-B flat. Then to the 3, an A-to-A octave: A-C-F-A. And then, oddly, the cascade ends with a chord rooted in the key’s sharped 4, a B-to-B octave: B-D-G-B.

These four-finger chords are tricky to play; I found the secret is in letting your ring finger, which is responsible for playing the third tone in each of these bold stretch chords, lead your brain on the changes, instead of setting out with your pointer finger, which is responsible for striking the root note of each chord.

The verse to “I Feel Love” foreshadows the chorus’ orgy of octaves; as you take a momentary break from the energetic right-hand melody line—”heaven knows, heaven knows, heaven knows, heaven knows"— you fill out the rushing, staccato left hand bass part by leaning on a C-to-C octave chord in the right hand with an F in the middle. And similarly, just before the chorus, you play a G-to-G octave with a B flat (and then slyly, that sharped 4 B again) as the middle note.

Spooning with Donna Summer

What makes playing these octave-rich jams such a pleasing experience?

Certainly, there’s something physically satisfying afoot as the two notes swaddle the overall group of three or four tones in perfectly matched bedding.

An octave is defined by two pitches where the higher pitch vibrates exactly twice as fast as the lower pitch, so when you play the two pitches together they spoon.

I’ve been spooning with Prince, Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, and Maurice Williams all week.

————

Lastly,

this week’s recommended reading: the NYT on a topic I’ve been obsessing over for a decade, getting rid of parking minimums!

(Here I am 8-and-half-years ago: My Guerrilla Shared Parking Pilot Project.)

Currently, and thankfully, Seattle doesn’t have parking minimums for housing near transit, but it does still require constructing parking everywhere else, and sadly, in the new comp plan, which, per state law requires fourplexes in traditional single family zones, it tacked on a .5 stalls per unit rule, which will surely stall (heh) new housing development.

This week’s recommended listening: I’m liking the juxtaposition of sing-song ‘60s girl group vocals and sophisticated Afro-centric sounds of SAULT.

@ TaylorSwift, LeBronJames, AdamKinzinger et al.; Thank You, BAP; Hello, sun dried tomato basil tortilla quesadillas. (And RIP Ka).

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#53

1) In the tragic event that Trump, who’s now campaigning as an actual Nazi, wins the election, and there’s no question that he might (the Electoral College— Michigan in particular— is a real problem for Kamala Harris), I’m obsessing over this little personal fantasy:

@ CaitlinClark, BillieEilish, LeBronJames, RetiredUSArmyGeneralMarkMilley,, TaylorSwift, FormerUSRepAdamKinzinger, BarackObama, LizCheney, I hope there's a plan in the works to announce immediately prior to the start of any possible second Trump term, the formation of a new, high-profile bipartisan group called The National Association for the Preservation of Democracy and Truth.

Stacked with a venerable board of political leaders, hard-working journalists, business leaders, labor leaders, civil rights leaders, women's rights leaders, military leaders, and celebrities, backed by huge institutional money with a giant staff of smart attorneys, the group will be dedicated to fighting Trump’s 1933-slide.

The N-A-P-D-T, Protecting democracy since 2025.

This singular group should subsume the National Immigration Law Center, the ACLU, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, NARAL, LGBTQ rights groups et al. because if Trump does get back into the White House, those of us who are worried about MAGA America will need a dramatic show of new strength and organization.

In the mean time, go Kamala Harris.

2) Thank you, Best American Poetry 2024.

Every October for six years now, when Simon & Schuster imprint Scribner Poetry publishes BAP —an annual, curated selection of poems from America’s top-tier literary journals—I lovingly rush out and buy a copy. They’ve been publishing it since 1988, but I’ve only been hip to it since October 2018. This yearly autumn purchase marks a somewhat new, and newly defining, chapter of my current life, reading and writing poems.

This year, however, I wasn’t feeling BAP. I have been disappointed in the poetry I’ve seen published over the course of 2024 — in the New Yorker, in the American Poetry Review, Poetry, Kenyon Review (I subscribe to all of these), and in the bevy of chapbooks that arrive in my mailbox all year. My general, perhaps curmudgeonly, criticism is that too many contemporary poems read like a DEI training rather than like luminescent nebulae in print. Don’t get me wrong, I think the-personal-as-political can make for great poems; Jane Wong, who’s poetry I wrote about earlier this year—is one outstanding current example.

Fortuitously, despite my misgivings, I decided to go ahead and extend my BAP buying tradition. Last Saturday, while visiting Valium Tom at his Phinney Ridge bookstore, I bought the newest edition.

Things start off with a solid poem by Kim Addonizio (BAP is organized alphabetically by poet); Addonizio is a marvelously cynical, acerbic, funny, and thoughtful writer I’ve liked for a while. BAP 2024 selected “Existential Elegy,” her breezy diary outtake that, though drowsy with some later-in-life ennui, simultaneously bottles youth’s goofy lightning from a loving distance.

The collection really takes off, though, around “H.”

Starting with Richie Hofmann’s “Lamb,” a poignant reminiscence about a one-eyed stuffed animal, BAP goes on a tear.

There’s Marie Howe’s “Chainsaw,” a masterful poem that contemplates the basic human impulse to build and create, to work. After overlaying the “whine of a drill,” “the fastening metal to metal,” the “someone nailed to a cross,” and the “tearing it down” with varied vantage points from within and without the labor process, Howe settles in on the intimate and startling vantage point that humans at work have in relation to one another.

Then there’s Omotara James’ “Closure,” an elegant rumination on being the legal witness to the judicial proceedings of her parents’ divorce: “what’s louder: the pluck of the arrow, or the bang of the gavel,/or the everlasting gaze of the firstborn daughter.”

And also George Kalogeris’ “Byzantine Chanting,” a gorgeous account of a childhood memory starring the cantor at a working class Greek Orthodox church: “Like Arion, our master singer had crossed an ocean—/But not on the back of a dolphin (my favorite myth).”

Howe’s poem is the one that made good on the real reason I buy BAP: to discover poets I’d never read before—and then dig into more of their work.

The former poet laureate of New York (2012-2014) with four critically acclaimed books to her name, Howe, whose tidy poems are built up from short stanzas, is evidently a star player in the poetry world.

She has a new book out which, perfectly for my purposes, includes a large sample of poems from her four previous books—The Good Thief (1987); What the Living Do (1997); The Kingdom of the Ordinary (2008); Magdalene (2017), plus 20 new poems. Her set of new poems, which come at the start of this collection, includes “Chainsaw,” though here it’s titled “The Saw, The Drill.”

Like that omniscient poem, Howe’s poetry in general—which lingers in quiet, matter-of-fact observations—has an effortless way of deconstructing the disparate rhythms of daily life, much like the way a high school English teacher might diagram a sentence or a chess master might game out a chess board in play.

Howe’s talent lies in describing all those discrete POVs and then putting them back together again in a new way that seems to connote God.

Howe’s latest collection, ©2024

For example, a 2023 poem, “The Willows,” which begins, “As we are made by what moves us,/willows pull the water up into their farthest reach/,” concludes a few lines later this way:

So, under travels up, and down and up again,/

and the wind makes music of what the water was.

Hokey? Mary Oliver-y? Maybe? But Howe has a darker, sadder, even violent edge (see “The Split” from 1987’s The Good Thief) that renders her conclusions nervously unsure as opposed to coyly ambiguous.

Here are the closing lines to “The Saw, The Drill” (or is it “Chainsaw”?)

And who or what made us that we should make/such things as we do and did? We grow smaller. We break things./ Then turn to each other and beg for what no human can give.

3) I’m onto the perfect weeknight dinner: Healthy quesadillas.

Only “onto” because my kitchen was bachelor-devoid of provisions this week, so the last-minute quesadillas I fried up in avocado spray oil on Tuesday night were minimalist by default, but so tasty in their own right that I can only imagine how good they may ultimately be with the works. That is, with fresh greens, diced tomatoes, grilled onions, sauteed mushrooms, and maybe blanched cauliflower piled on as well.

As it was, I had a bag of Mission brand tortillas, a can of Siete brand refried beans, Bragg’s nutritional yeast, and some Cholula brand hot sauce to work with.

Thanks to the fact that this particular make of Mission tortillas—Mission® Zero Net Carbs Sundried Tomato Basil Tortillas—were as fluffy and weighty as beautiful rain clouds, and that Seite’s vegan, organic-bean black beans were light and rich all at once, my ad-hoc quesadilla dinner ended up being supremely satisfying: Garden-flavor heft topped with smoky and smooth bean paste.

10/15/24, Vegan Refried Black Beans

Grocery Outlet on East Union & MLK Jr. Way is well-stocked with all the Mission brand selections, so, I headed over there later in the evening with XDX (who had come over to sample my dinner surprise) so I could get a new package of tortillas, along with all the fixings and veggies necessary to plate some intentional quesadilla perfection next time. …

Finally, and speaking of the poet laureate of New York, while this doesn’t count as an obsession, there’s a sad note this week:

RIP Ka, the lo-fi, yeoman Brooklyn rap artist (and recently retired firefighter and captain with the FDNY).

Ka, birth name Kaseem Ryan, died Saturday at the young age of 52. His wife posted the sad news on Ka’s Instagram account; she didn’t specify the cause of death.

Minimalist, DIY rap artist, Ka, RIP, 1972-2024

One of my favorite all-time songs is Ka’s “Decisions,” an inspirational jam from his 2012 LP, Grief Pedigree (the second record from 11 self-produced, self-distributed, underground albums he released over nearly two decades).

Ka’s stripped-down music was insistently downcast, but “Decisions” buoyed me time and time again during many bouts with the blues.

Over a trembling carousel organ and a slow two-note bass and piano groove that channels Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” (which Ka alludes to with the quick line “Hustle here/or pick a better town”), the song’s lyrics catalog a series of everyday philosophical “Either-Ors.”

His basketball court reflection always lifts me up:

“Chuck like a motherfucker/or try to assist?”

We’ll keep trying, Ka.

1920s feminism; 2020s city council budget hypocrisy; 2024 antisemitism

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#52

1) I’m half way through a novel called Ex-Wife, written and initially published anonymously in 1929 by a real-life ex-wife, Ursula Parrott.

As documented in the recent biography, Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, Parrot has been unjustly omitted from the literary canon of female authors who first established the Sex and the City template, a genre that puts women’s POVs, particularly the metropolitan woman’s perspective, front and center.

A 1920 Radcliffe grad-turned city newspaper reporter, turned successful novelist (Ex-Wife sold 100,000 copies in its first year), turned lucrative-Hollywood screenwriter, Parrott was eventually (and sadly) demoted to the role of a scandal-sheet-plagued anti-heroine. She died of cancer, penniless at the age of 58 in 1957.

Like the contemporaneous pre-Code Hollywood flicks I’ve obsessed about before—Young Desire, Kept Husbands, Discarded Lovers, Borrowed Wives, Tangled Destinies, etc.—Parrot’s novel Ex-Wife is a risqué and radical romp. (It was, in fact, made into a pre-Code movie itself, Norma Shearer’s 1930 Best-Actress, Academy-Award-winner, The Divorcee). Parrott writes in strikingly modern prose (“cabs, hot nightclubs, parties…They were not real…Neither was the office…”) while dramatizing both the one-night-stand liberation and the morning-after loneliness of “the new freedom” as a tricky one-step-forward-two-steps-back moment in the bid for female equality.

Indeed, her contemporaneous account of Flapper-era Manhattan seems to predict (40 years prior) “the Pill” ennui of 1960s sexual revolution feminism: “Chastity, really, went out when birth control came in. If there is no ‘consequence’—it just isn’t important,” Parrott writes early on.

There’s a candid abortion scene in the novel’s patient exposition as well.

A scandalous best seller, 1929

All of this is not so much a lament in Parrott’s telling. The novel is narrated (often comically) in first person by Parrott’s witty author-avatar, a 25-year-old department store ad copy-copywriter, the “ineffably slim” working-girl Flapper, Patricia (Pat), who drinks boozy Clover Club Sodas at Uptown Harlem dance halls in the evening and does calisthenics before work in the morning.

The freedom and joy are palpable in Pat’s dizzying day-to-day account of frenetic, jargon-heavy workdays, rooftop waltzes, choice frocks, suede gloves, “silly gay jewelry,” and private parties where a hostess—in one instance, “the world’s greatest authority on Arab love songs”—serenades tipsy guests.

“In three weeks we had been to six parties, three first nights, five speakeasies, four nightclubs, two operas, and a concert where a negro [sic] sang spirituals.”

Pat’s “We” is not a reference to a beau (they come and go), but rather it’s a reference to Lucia, her older (29-year-old) Greenwich Village roommate, an ex-wife herself, who serves as a cynical patron sage to Pat’s “calflove”-stricken-life. Lucia is quick with jaded aphorisms that foresee doom in Flapper feminism, often pointing out how the larger patriarchy remains, with its crushing double standards, fully intact.

This downcast air doesn’t detract from the acid eloquence of Ex-Wife’s liberating Jazz-Age consciousness, though:

“If a woman has been asked into twenty beds, and managed to stay out of 19 of them, on the purely percentage basis she is a good deal more virtuous than a woman who has only been asked into one, and went,” Pat notes to herself.

My dip into Parrott’s Prohibition-era Gotham parable was amplified by two other 1920s artifacts this week: First, on Sunday night, I used the rhythms of a static-heavy pre-Code crime drama, Alias Mary Smith, as a default books-on-tape lullaby; and second, I’ve been learning the piano part to 100-years-ago crooner Russ Columbo’s signature jam, “You Call It Madness, but I Call It Love,” with its ghostly vocals and odd jazz chords.

My heart is beating/it keeps repeating/for you/constantly

2) It’s city budget season in Seattle which means you can’t miss Erica C. Barnett’s invaluable city hall reporting at PubliCola.

Going deep into the math this week, Erica extracted the defining story of Seattle’s current conservative city council: Clownish hypocrisy.

It’s not just that last year’s backlash slate of candidates-turned-current-council members ridiculed the previous council as tax-and-spend liberals, only to turn around this year and support massive, unsustainable spending on new programs themselves, such as cops and surveillance cameras.

It’s also that the biggest symbol of the previous council's leftist politics, progressive former council member Teresa Mosqueda’s JumpStart tax on wealthy corporations, has become this conservative council’s go-to source of funding for their law-and-order priorities.

In 2020, then Seattle city council member Mosqueda (who sadly left last year for the supposedly more important King County Council), proposed and passed what amounts to a tax on tech bros: A payroll tax on the largest Seattle companies with employees who make more than $150,000.

Revenues from that tax, which have been robust—$315 million in 2023 (way more than the $223 million originally projected)—were specifically earmarked by Mosqueda and her communard colleagues to exclusively fund affordable housing and related programs that would help insulate working people from the impacts that our current tech boom is having on Seattle, namely the city’s out-of-whack housing costs .

However, as Erica notes in her coverage, the current city budget proposes “using $287 million in [JumpStart] payroll tax revenues next year, and more every year after that.”

Here’s Erica:

The JumpStart tax, paid by companies that employ highly compensated workers, was designed to offset the impacts that companies like Amazon have had on Seattle’s housing market and economy by providing access to housing, jobs, and small-business development opportunities for people who haven’t benefited from the city’s tech boom. Now, it’s being used as a funding source for programs that arguably run counter to its original purpose, like jails, surveillance of low-income neighborhoods, and police.

I actually have a quibble with the tax: I think it obscures the real culprit of Seattle’s affordable housing crisis, our NIMBY land use code; I spelled this out in a PubliCola column back in 2022.

But as I also wrote in that same column, Mosqueda’s tax is not casuistry; there is a good deal of logic and justice in it: "The Jump Start tax teases out the nexus between surging tech job growth and housing prices by capturing nouveau corporate Seattle’s impact on the market. That is: As the hyper growth of tech companies like Amazon inflate local housing prices, the city is taxing them to help fund affordable housing. It’s a good look, and it seems like a logical offset for the influx of high-earning tech employees. And, let’s be honest: It also feels good.” 

For all the venom the current council directs at the previous council for being too woke, they sure have woken up to Mosqueda’s progressive JumpStart tax.

While I’m busy singing Erica’s praises for her budget analysis, a quick and loving anecdote: Erica rushed into PubliCola’s Pioneer Square offices last week after a city council budget committee meeting keen to tell me all bout endless blowhard council member Rob Saka’s inane speechifying on potential cuts to the SPD’s mounted horse patrol. As if the SPD’s stable of horses were being sent to the glue factory, Saka proceeded to anthropomorphize them, dramatically reading each horse’s name from the dais.

Hardly to Erica’s surprise, the Seattle Time’s fell for Saka’s drama and ran a sappy, bloated story the very next day on the horses.

Fortuitously, Erica had a long-scheduled interview with the police chief that same day and found herself waiting in the chief’s anteroom before the interview with the cops' media guy. As Erica was making small talk, she noticed, to her devious glee, an SPD horse calendar (like those fireman calendars) laid out on the coffee table. She started taking pictures.

Imagining the utter disconnect between the police spokesperson’s belief that Erica was (like the Seattle Times) evidently enamored with the SPD’s horse brigade and the actual mischievous expertise that was exploding in Erica’s brain when she spied this ridiculous gem, has repeatedly sent me into peals of laughter all week.

3) In my lifetime, antisemitism has never been as glaring, ubiquitous, and menacingly out in the open as it is right now. Like always, though—and Jews just have it super lucky this way: the hate comes from both the right (no, Jews are not behind Hurricane Helene) and the left (those Jewish capitalists).

And yes, I know criticism of Israel is not default antisemitic; and there are plenty of reasons to condemn Israel. I for one, have been doing it since I was 12. On the flip side, criticism of Israel is not a default get-out-jail-free card for voicing antisemitism. It’s easy to smell when the two things are intertwined. For Jews, it can also just be confusing and intimidating whether you have a sense of what’s behind it or not, like when I was 16 and one of the grown ups at the table where I was out to dinner with the high school theater club turned their attention to me during a political discussion. I hadn’t said much of anything during the conversation—this adult was holding court—yet he told me in knowingly provocative terms that “Israel is an Apartheid state.” This was in 1982, which is mostly to let you know that today’s heated debate is by no means a new one, particularly for Jews.

It’s just taking place in a new context. In 2024, despite centuries of consistent antisemitism, Jews are no longer seen as a historically marginalized and maligned group. This creepy amnesia is (no surprise) happening just as the age-old Jewish stereotypes are becoming fashionable, both flippantly and intensely, once again.

This Sunday night, I was reading a book at the pizza restaurant bar across the street from my apartment and the group next to me—a couple of 20-somethings and a 40-something—were talking about the Sean Diddy Combs sexual assault case. The conversation shifted, with topical logic, to talking about the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault case. But then, racist logic, this came out: “or is it Goldstein, or Weingold or Silverman or whatever? All those rich guys are the ones.”

If this had happened in the 1980s, ‘90s, 2000s, or during most of the 2010s, even in someplace like Iowa, I could have confidently called them out; that kind of hate chatter was once, universally understood to be un-American. And even if people harbored odious prejudices, which they certainly did, they likely recognized, as I did, that the the room would not abide by their ignorance.

Ominously, those days are past.

I’m mad at myself for not jumping in and challenging them—I definitely understand the implications of not saying anything, and I’ve certainly spoken up many times before (including at another bar in my neighborhood just a few months ago).

I don’t know why I didn’t say something this time. I’m fretting about that decision. And so now, in addition to obsessing about today’s rising antisemitism itself, I’m obsessing about my own faltering response this weekend.

Sadly, and subconsciously, I think there may be a relationship between the escalating and the faltering.

A hyperpop artist; a MacArthur genius; a dub pioneer

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#51

1) Oh no, I’m becoming one of those old people who gets their contemporary music tips from the New Yorker.

The September 30 issue had an intriguing and beautifully written review of a new release from a news-to-me, but evidently widely known “Hyperpop” star named Sophie.

It’s a posthumous album. Sophie, a processed-beats production trickster, died in 2021 at 34. “Sophie fell to her death from a balcony in Athens,” New Yorker staffer Jia Tolentino writes, adding with alluring prose: “Her representatives said she’d gone out to look at the moon.”

Tolentino also waxes elegant about Sophie’s experimental bent:

In 2013, a mysterious producer named Sophie released “Bipp,” a minimalist club track that sounded like it had been formed on another planet and squeezed through hyperdrive before arriving on ours. “Bipp” was black space latticed with radically strange objects: a rubbery squelch of a bass beat, a melodic line like a laser coated in latex, percussive punctuation marks that seemed to morph from plasma into steel.

Nothing else sounded like Sophie, because she made her sounds from scratch. She didn’t sample; she built each hiss and smack and boom by manipulating raw waveforms. She wanted to get to the “molecular level of a particular sound,” to understand why that sound “behaves a certain way when processed or cooked.”

The trajectory of academic 1960s experimental-music-lab composers, to 1980s new wave and hip hop singles, to modern EDM is one of my favorite musical through lines. Fascinated by Tolentino’s evocative description, I promptly listened to Sophie’s “new” self-titled album, a collection of tracks that Sophie had been working on as a follow-up to her successful 2018 debut LP, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides.

The slick new album doesn’t quite live up to Tolentino’s purple prose—”Sophie’s sonic plasticity pointed to interrelational reinvention, toward a truth that had to be formed in the primordial tide pool of a dark, pulsing room.”

But the set’s constant rhythmic shifts, trance breaks, dirty robot come-ons—and, my favorite, the reverberating kettle drum waves on the downbeat track “RAWWWWWW”—do regularly conjure the abstract R&B sounds that make modern dance floor music rightly classified, like Tolentino describes it, as “underground-adjacent.”

Luckily, in addition to the New Yorker, I have my younger friend XDX as a resource, and she—a longtime Sophie fan—pointed me to a 2021 Sophie set that’s available on YouTube, SOPHIE LIVESTREAM HEAV3N SUSPENDED.

This shape-shifting, 20-minute collection is dreamier, sexier, and more exploratory than the new record, leaning into the trance, liquid, and bent signals side of Sophie’s skittering soundscape. It also includes a great middle movement weighted by a slow-motion sample that sounds as if the source material is both a dissonant music-theory piano chord and the accompanying piano wires rattling.

“Watch me touch myself/inside out/do turn on/upside down,” Sophie, whose trans identity is central to both her fluid music and her body positive lyrics, sings against a shimmering fantasia of tones, blips, and burning static. “I can see you like my name/let me rest it in your mouth/open wide/let me finger fuck myself,” she continues, upping the transgressive challenge as the music accelerates both its BPMs and its gender queer politics.

Lifting off like an ‘80s Madonna classic, the set concludes with an anthemic plea: “Everybody’s got to own their body/Everybody wants to be somebody/Everybody’s got to own their story…” eventually scrolling out into tape-in-reversed vocals chanted over the soft pulse of a minimalist keyboard part.

With this Lysergic mix putting Sophie’s slick new album in context, I feel better about my plans to listen to the record on repeat all weekend.

2) Last April, a dear old college friend emailed to say she was coming to town for a conference, and we should get dinner, which we did. For several days afterward, I couldn’t stop talking about her to anyone who would listen. Or more specifically, I couldn’t stop talking about the exciting research she was doing.

Jennifer is a longtime history prof at NYU and the author of several books, including Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004, University of Pennsylvania Press) and the award-winning Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (2020, Duke University Press).

She’s currently working on a new book about an early American slave named Elizabeth Key. Key won a landmark case in the Virginia courts in 1655 after suing for her freedom on the grounds that her father was a white Christian; common law at the time held that social status was determined by one’s father, who had an obligation to support both legitimate and illegitimate children.

Jennifer explained that her forthcoming book, titled The Eve of Slavery, was seizing on the subsequent tragedy that Key’s legal victory prompted: The Virginia legislature quickly enacted new laws encoding emergent political ideas (or more accurately, racialist ideas) about blackness. The reactionary legal backlash to Key’s court-mandated freedom stated that a person’s mother, not her father, was the metric that would now be used to determine if one was free or enslaved. This pernicious new legal framework, both a tangible building block of capitalist society and a searing metaphor for capitalism itself, cast black women as not only labor widgets in the slave trade economy, but additionally, and more horrifically, as sexual widgets.

To quote Jennifer:

Slave owners understood enslaved women to be delivering two forms of wealth, the wealth that those women produce in the fields, and the wealth those women produce in their bodies. The slave owner was reaching into that women’s future and saying whoever you give birth to belongs to me and my children. It starts with that assumption that one person can own not just your body, but all that your body can produce, the work of your hands and the work of your womb.

That’s not a quote from last April’s dinner with Jennifer. It’s a quote from a video she just recorded this week for the MacArthur Foundation—you know, the foundation that announces its prestigious “Genius Grants” every fall.

That is to say, this week, the MacArthur Foundation chose Jennifer as one of its revered geniuses, formalizing what friends from her long-ago days as a (self-designed) Third World Studies (!) major at Oberlin College in the mid 1980s have known all along. (To quote another old college friend, who texted me a link to the exciting, breaking news on Tuesday morning: “The inevitable…!!”)

Speaking of Oberlin: Here’s the great article they immediately published about Jennifer and her well-earned award in our proudly woke alma mater’s newsletter.

3) “[It’s] not exactly dub, but there’s a lot of dub elements in it,” former Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore told Pitchfork for an Instagram series where cool musicians name their “Perfect 10” record.

“It’s just really minimal reggae.”

Moore picked reggae artist Tapper Zukie’s 1973 album (not 1977 as Moore says) Man Ah Warrior. It’ not an LP I knew, though now that I’ve been listening to it all week, I can say it’s not a surprising choice for the legendary art-rock guitarist. Sonic Youth’s spooky early records took inspiration from original 1970s dub; the band’s eponymous 1982 EP even had a song called “The Burning Spear,” presumably an homage to the great reggae dub artist. In fact, Sonic Youth’s band name itself was prompted by cutting-edge 70s reggae DJ, Big Youth.

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Zukie’s spaced out swagger, emcee banter, and scattered sound effects certainly point toward the full-fledged elastic rhythms and studio trickery that would transform pop reggae into esoteric dub in the mid-70s when reggae artists like Junior Murvin spliced reggae jams with the avant-garde, and when even more adventurous artists like King Tubby completely rewired the genre into all-out hypnotic spells. But keenly, Man Ah Warrior’s party-up sensibility never fully abandons Jimmy Cliff-era reggae’s sense of bounce and melody.

I do hear what Moore means about Man Ah Warrior being idly lost between reggae and dub, though. The intimate LP rides its stripped-down guitar clanks, slinking bass lines, far-away piano chords, phased proto-loops, and drum-kit tinkering to the outer edges of traditional reggae’s pop song structures, leaning into meditative improv and echo. This is weird reggae for 1973.

Fittingly, the LP’s most pop-centered track, “Liberation Struggle,” (as opposed to one of its more overtly experimental tacks, “Hills of Zion-Dub”), captures Man Ah Warrior’s interstitial moment best, quietly slipping the furthest into the future as Zukie overlays the tune’s catchy I-vi see-saw chord progression with wandering vocals and intermittent sci-fi sine waves.

I wouldn’t give this record a pure 10; there’s too much throw-away pop here. But it certainly gets the highest score as a historical document of new music in the making.

*Footnote: As I approach a full year of doing these weekly posts, I’m feeling alert to larger themes, persistent obsessions (the WTA!), and secret story lines. Using a spreadsheet I’ve been keeping, I’m hoping to do a write up soon that draws a few conclusions about my year of mini-obsessions.

But quickly, Sonic Youth was my favorite band a million years ago back in college, and I’m pleasantly surprised to realize that today’s prompted-by-Thurston Moore-item marks the second time they’ve resurfaced on one of these weekly lists. Back in early February, I wrote about Sonic Youth’s other star, Kim Gordon, and her new video , though, more in earnest really, about Sonic Youth themselves.

The Laotian restaurant at the end of the universe; the macro problem with Project 2025; the Spanish restaurant at the end of the Rapid Ride G Line

I’m All Lost in …

The 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#50

Islands of mixed-use in a sea of single-family housing

1) On Saturday night, my longtime pal Amy, visiting from Portland and crashing at my place, suddenly got a second wind. She was pooped after Day Three of her writing conference, and I was still coming down from my recent trip to D.C./ NYC./ and Mississippi. And so, here we were about to call time, when at Amy’s suggestion, we leapt up from our respective lackadaisical spots on the beanbag and floor and headed out in search of a night cap.

Where to go? My apartment building is located on a short stretch of street zoned Neighborhood Commercial (NC-1), making my block a brief oasis of multi-story housing, the-three-restaurants-I’ve-been-to-a-hundred-times, and some retail in an otherwise dormant neighborhood. Street after street, most of my neighborhood is zoned nearly exclusively for single family homes.

There is, however, one kindred-spirit corner just two blocks north of my building, a fleeting island of last-ditch NC-1, awkwardly separated from my aspirational block by more of Seattle’s ubiquitous single-family zoning.

The listless streetscape between my building and said lit outpost is enough of an existential barrier that I rarely venture that way; my district’s main commercial hub—”The Drag”—is a 15-minute walk in the other direction to the south, so despite the propinquity of the commercial zoning satellite directly to my north, I hardly ever walk past it, even by default. This, it turns out, has been a consequential miscalculation.

For here lies Taurus Ox , an exciting and casually fancy Laotian restaurant. Their ginger, chile, and lemongrass expertise emphasizes burgers and pork dishes, but there are two vegan entree options as well (including a yellow curry with squash, eggplant, and mushrooms).

There was a boisterous crowd of well-to-do 20-somethings hovering on the sidewalk outside (exactly what the neighborhood fears!) and lively groups of friends crowded around the 10 tables inside when Amy and I arrived at 9 o’clock; all this alluring commotion in a neighborhood where the surrounding zoning mandates early bedtimes. To my surprise, the friendly staff invited us right in, ushered us to a small bar in back by the bustling, flaming kitchen, and warmly catered to our evening hunger for drinks, snacks, and tentacular conversation.

An hour later, the energetic young staff was still tending to us with open arms and our bellies were happy from the stacked-with-mushrooms, blanched greens, and garlic veggie fresh rolls (Soop Pak) and light NA cocktails (limey No-jitos).

After No-jitos, 9/21/24

2) The Democrats’ Project 2025 fixation, certainly a politically and (uncharacteristically for Democrats) savvy bit of campaign messaging, has always been a kind of cheap shot. It’s reminiscent of MAGA’s “hordes at the border” or “she’s a Marxist!” battle cry. Look, I’m not a both sides-er, and the extent to which Trump’s lies and name-calling are pathological and pernicious is hardly comparable to the Democrats’ reasonable alarm bells about Project 2025, a tangible policy document that outlines a deeply un-American, authoritarian agenda of civil rights roll backs, deregulation, corporatism, weird anti-sex nanny-state moralism, and even an explicit endorsement of NIMBYism (do control F for “single-family zoning” on page 511.)

But as much as Democrats want to pin a Heritage Foundation caricature on Trump, it’s pretty obvious that his secular Libertarianism, wily political shape-shifting, and naked self-serving cronyism cannot be corralled and indexed into a standard Republican manifesto. In turn, Trump's anti-establishment, KKK ideology cannot be met with standard Democratic attacks.

While there’s certainly overlap between many of Trump’s extremist positions and those spelled out in Project 2025 (mass deportation, rolling back environmental regulations), I appreciate how this week’s NYT opinion piece by Ezra Klein  both pointed out the fundamental flaw with the Democrats’ Project-2025-as-Trumpist-White-Paper narrative, and then re-framed the crazed document to identify the larger danger it poses.

First the reality check:

When [Trump] said, during his debate with Kamala Harris, that he hadn’t read Project 2025 and has no intention of doing so, I believed him.

It has more views on more issues than he does. It has absorbed more specific and unusual ideologies than he has. It is more hostile to abortion than he is (or more than he wants to appear to be). It is more committed to deregulating health insurance than he is (or more than he wants to appear to be). There is a great gap between the MAGA leader who slept with a porn star and the factions in the MAGA movement that want to outlaw pornography, as Roberts proposed on Project 2025’s first page…

Trumpism is whatever Trump says it is

Bam. It’s that observation from Klein—“Trumpism is whatever Trump says it is”—that convincingly ties Project 2025 and Trumpism together to reveal the larger, corrosive effects this radical document could have for American democracy.

Explaining Project 2025’s prescription for replacing standard government bureaucrats with right-wing foot soldiers, Klein continues:

Project 2025…. is more than a compendium of policy proposals: It is an effort to build a deep state of Trump’s own. …

Veterans of Trump’s administration believe personnel was their biggest problem. They could not act ambitiously or swiftly enough because they were at constant war with the government they, in theory, controlled. …

To do that, the next Trump administration must first clear out or conquer the federal government that currently exists. Project 2025 is obsessed with this task, and many of its 900-some pages are dedicated to plans and theories for how this might be done…

This, I would say, is the unifying theory of a second Trump term. Purge or break the federal bureaucracy. Fill it with vetted loyalists. Then use its power to pass policy, yes, but also to break or conquer the other institutions in American life that so vex Trump and his supporters. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which oversaw Project 2025, said in July.

Harvest Vine on the Rapid Ride Line, 9/26/24

3) To celebrate Tuesday’s good news, XDX’s promotion, we promptly made Thursday night reservations at one of her Seattle-dinner-out wish-list spots: Harvest Vine, a casual, bourgeois (Boomer/Xer) Spanish restaurant in Madison Valley.

First of all, Harvest Vine is located next to the last stop on Seattle’s brand new Rapid Ride G bus line (quasi BRT with dedicated lanes, synchronized traffic lights, center island stops, curb bulb in-lane stops, and doors on both sides for seamless boarding). So, along with the evening’s promotion celebration, I got to test out Metro’s new “buses-every-6-minutes” claim.

Without considering the bus schedule, I arrived at the in-lane stop on 17th & Madison just 15 minutes before XDX and I were scheduled to meet a mile east at the restaurant. I queued up at 5:16 and voila: The bus swung by promptly at 5:22 and then ferried me right to Harvest Vine’s doorstep in the heart of Madison’s froufrou commercial strip.

Set inside a two-story house, there’s table seating clustered around a lively open kitchen on the first floor and a secluded batch of tables downstairs in a sedate, wine-cellar-turned-dining room. That’s where we were seated, feeling definitely that we were in Seville or Lisbon.

I was able to go vegan (sort of) by piling up on starters: Roasted summer squash with cozy almond romesco; a sizzling eggplant dish; and a mushroom appetizer (sauteed button mushrooms with garlic and delicious sherry cream sauce—ah, well). For her part, XDX went all in on the restaurant’s meat and fish agenda. She got the grilled acorn-fed black foot pig with potatoes and cider sauce, and the pan-seared Mediterranean sea bass with piperade and aioli. I happily pilfered several helpings of the sautéd onions, green peppers, and tomatoes that were stewing underneath the (both flaky and buttery, reports XDX) sea bass.

Succulent pan-seared bass with irresistible veggies, 9/26/24

Roasted squash with divine almond romescu, 9/26/24

The repeat plates of chewy baguette and rich olive oil (chivalrously slid our way on request) delivered the perfect taste-bud match with the sherry sauce and, triumphantly, with the nutty romesco paste.

Our utter kook of a waiter, whose disassociated service was strangely charming, offered us three different wine samples and then, per our ensuing picks—the manure-friendly cab and the light floral pinot—gave us lavish pours, mirroring his eccentric persona.

Dessert was lightly burnt cheesecake with wine poached cherries.

Postres, 9/26/24

There are plenty of other enticing items for veggies like me on Harvest Vine’s lengthy menu: the marinated olives, the sauteed green beans with onion confit and tomato frito, the fried padron peppers tossed in sea salt, and (yes) the octopus with chickpea puree. I will return for all of these.

With an entire section of the menu titled “Quesos,” non-vegans should hop on the G Line bus to check out this charmed bourgeoisie hang out as well.

———

For the record, my drop last week into 1920s Ghost Pop classic “Ten Cents A Dance” has not subsided. This week, I continued to savor the song’s remote and lovely piano chords.

Nor has has my yearlong obsession with tennis (both watching and playing) slowed down. On Tuesday night, I binged all three episodes of Gods of Tennis, PBS’ documentary about the first epoch (1968-1990) of professional tennis’ Open Era . This tennis triptych tracks the heroic tales of Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe, tennis’ own civil rights trail blazers; relives the drama of defining men’s-circuit rivals, vogue Bjorn Borg and uncouth John McEnroe; and, through the lens of Czech Martina Navratilova’s touching expatriate and queer-coming-of-age story, highlights the women’s-circuit’s own two legendary rivals, Navratilova and her constant competition, Americana poster girl Chris Evert.

On Sunday, I played a set of tennis myself. I beat a guy from work 6-4 in a see-sawing contest that featured plenty of extended volleys. I was pleased when after the match, noting he didn’t hit enough winners, my potential new rival said: “You’re always in position.”

I don’t have a sense of my game, so this was excellent information to learn.

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.