I’m All Lost In, #77: Egyptian cotton sheets; Vegan Chips Ahoy version; Expatriate of the week.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#77

1) New Cotton Sheets

My pal Johnny Rotten Shoes, aka Erica, thinks I got duped—$85 seems suspiciously inexpensive for a “luxury” set of “800-thread-count” cotton sheets, she warned.

But judging from how comfy my bed has been now newly fitted in the sage-colored set of 100% cotton sheets I ordered from Luxury Egyptian Linens, I’m convinced I made the right move.

Switching to cotton sheets.

In particular: The move from the slippery bamboo set I’ve been using for the last couple of years (that always ends up in confusing and bunched disarray at the foot of the bed) to the soft cotton sleep-study experience I switched to this week has been the coziest of mid-life revelations.

Every night, I feel like Madonna expressing herself, or perhaps it’s Blondie’s Debbie Harry beseeching us to “call me,” crooning about designer sheets at bed time.

2) Plant Based Chocolate Chip Cookies

Back in I’m All Lost In #13 from January 2024, I identified my sparkling cookie jar as an apartment therapy achievement, claiming it was an aesthetic obsession rather than a sugary one.

The number of boxes of Back to Nature brand Chocolate Chunk Cookies I’ve gone through in the past few weeks belies this claim—and confirms I’m hooked on this hippie rendition of Nabisco’s Chips Ahoy, a beloved childhood confection—the crunchy ones, not the queasy chewy version.

Back to Nature is certainly the worst name for a chocolate chip cookie imaginable, but the plant based, no high-fructose, no hydrogynated oils, no saturated nor trans fats, no artificial colors nor flavor ingredients justify the Woodstock-era reverie and explain why they taste so malty and delectable rather than sickly sweet and industrial.

3) Daria Kasatkina Serves Putin

For regular readers who typically skim (and barely) my WTA entries, you may actually find this dispatch exciting:

Gay tennis star, World No. 12 Daria Kasatkina, announced on Saturday that she will no longer play as a Russian. Obtaining Australian residency, Kasatkina, who fled her native Russia two years ago because it’s impossible to live openly under the Putin regime as an out lesbian, says she will now compete under the Australian flag.

Notably, Kasatkina has also been an outspoken critic of Russian’s war in Ukraine. It’s easy to imagine that Kasatkina, 27, was something of a Pussy Riot fan when she was a teenager; the math works out perfectly: Young Kasatkina would have been 17 during the heyday of Pussy Riot’s revolutionary story line. With her bold anti-war and LGBTQ politics, Kasatkina is certainly practicing what original Russian riot grrrls Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina preached.

In an inspiring, and kind of urbanist Instagram post, this week Kasatkina said:

Australia is a place I love, is incredibly welcoming and a place where I feel totally at home. I love being in Melbourne and look forward to making my home there. As part of this, I am proud to announce that I will be representing my new homeland Australia, in my professional tennis career from this point onwards.

While this righteous news transcends my scoreboard fixation with the WTA, I will also say that last December when I made my predictions for the 2025 season, I picked Kasatkina as one to watch.

—————

I’ve kept this week’s three items short because I have quite a few follow-up items to get to.

First, regarding my recent boozy matcha latte discovery: I’m now swapping in whiskey for the vokda-like shōchū I initially experimented with two weeks ago. This “Botcha Latte”—Maker’s Mark bourbon, matcha tea, and hot oat milk—has become my happy hour go to at my other recent discovery, Peloton Cafe.

Second, while I understand the value of U.S. Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-NJ) anti-Trump performance on the Senate floor this week, my takeaway was a sad one. With the comparisons and juxtaposition to Dixiecrat Sen. Strom Thurmond's epic (and racist) 1957 speech, Booker’s stand ultimately highlighted a dispiriting fact: Thurmond’s defensive speech was delivered at a time in history—mid-20th Century America—when his segregationist movement was in its throes and the civil rights movement was ascendant. Along with Gov. Wallace’s school door stand, Thurmond’s filibuster represented a dying gasp for American racists. Nearly 70 years on, Booker's speech showed the roles are now reversed.

Third, you’ll remember I was painfully cynical about Rocket Taco’s current play to activate the underachieving corner spot on my block. I posited that unless they changed from their HOA-friendly model and instead took on the role of a warm neighborhood bar, their reboot would fail. Well, I dropped in this week to both give them a fair chance and to sit at the bar and send a message about the bartop demand. The good news is that there were more people in the place than I imagined there’d be (still not bumping, though) and the regal bar was stocked. The bad news: we were the last people there as they put up the chairs at 8:20. I did get some encouraging info about the business that’s taking over Rocket Taco’s old, smaller space across the street, though. It’s going to be a cafe and women’s sports bar. Maybe they’ll stay open late? I’ll be there on Day One anyway making sure they subscribe to the Tennis Channel.

Fourth, I’ve written plenty in this space about my young musician friend, yeoman artist Rob Joynes, including about his killed-the-assignment computer-music opening set at my book release reading in May 2023 and about his abstract beats solo show at Vermillion last summer. Well, I saw him perform once again this past Saturday night. It was an unconventional show for a Seattle rock club. Rob set up and hosted a folk night at downtown rocker oasis, the Belltown Yacht Club where he set out chairs in front of the stage. For an electric guitarist who leans My Bloody Valentine, Rob played a surprisingly stark and confessional acoustic set. But the night ultimately starred his songwriting idol, Kath Bloom, who he invited out for the show. Bloom is an obscure musician from Connecticut. She put out some odd folk albums in the 1970s and early 1980s, and Richard Linklater used one of her songs in 1995’s Before Sunrise. She’s now 70-something, and to a roomful of Rob’s adoring friends and to many of her own cult fans who showed up, Bloom, accompanied by her melodic, young sidekick guitarist David Shapiro, played a tender, frolicking, intimate performance of her own.

Kath Bloom and touring partner guitarist David Shapiro on stage at the Belltown Yacht Club, 3/29/25

Fifth, and with some exertion, I finished the Bryan Washington novel I started two weeks ago, Family Meal. There are lots of paragraph-ending mic-drop insights that would work in their own right as poetry (“The sirens behind us don’t sound any closer, but they don’t disappear either. It could just be the backdrop of the city. Houston’s natural state.”) But in the context of this forced novel about self care as philosophy, I found myself missing Washington’s superior, attention-to-detail driven short stories, one of which showed up in this week’s New Yorker.

Sixth, and sorry, but it’s tennis time. My favorite WTA player Aryna Sabalenka ended up winning the Miami Open this week, convincingly: 7-5, 6-2. She beat World No. 4, American Jessica Pegula, who she also beat in last year’s U.S. Open, which I saw live. More importantly (to a Daffy Saby fanboy like me), she finally got the props she deserves for her overlooked yet defiantly impressive 2025 stand to date; four months in with a tour-best four major finals appearances and a tour-best 23-4 record overall, she’s World No. 1, leading former invincible World No. 1, and current World No. 2, Iga Swiatek in the rankings by more than 3000 points. Go to the 30-minute mark here and listen to prodigy tennis podcaster Matt Roberts—the unencumbered boy-genius analyst on the tour—sing Sabalenka’s stats while conjecturing with his two cohorts that she could win Roland Garros and Wimbledon for a career grand slam. “I think I’d have said no to that in the past,” Roberts says, but noting her new and suddenly comprehensive game, Roberts concluded, “this is the year for Sabalenka, playing like this.” By the way, I played tennis myself on Saturday, facing a new opponent who had drop shot and slice expertise. He beat me 6-4, 6-4, but not before I responded in the second set from down 0-3 with a strong first-serve and passing-shot-heavy, 3-game winning streak to suddenly even things up.

I’m All Lost In, #76: a South Seattle classic; two biographies in one; and an iffy business plan.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#76

1) Billiard Hoang

Tofu Vermicelli at Seattle’s legendary Billiard Hoang, 3/23/25

After watching a ponderous and disappointing movie at south Seattle’s local art house theater The Beacon, XDX and I scrolled on our phones for a nearby place to get a cozy Sunday night dinner; I love procrastinating Monday. We quickly settled on an unremarkably remarkable Seattle gem, Billiard Hoang.

Located two blocks from the Columbia City light rail station at MLK Jr. Way S. and S. Hudson St., this is the kind of easygoing spot where the owners—hanging out at the bar when you mosey in, and maybe an old married couple—offhandedly direct customers to one of the tables in the vaguely raised seating area off to the right of the larger, pensive pool hall.

At first glimpse, Billiard Hoang’s lengthy menu seems to offer the standard Vietnamese fare—warm noodle soups, banh mi, vermicelli bowls, fresh or fried spring rolls, and rice plates (served with beef, duck, or veggies). But the energetic touch (scrambled eggs on the banh mi, congee, durian or avocado milk shakes) quickly brings the love afoot in the kitchen to your attention.

I had the vermicelli and tofu, served atop a spicy broth in a bowl filled to the max with fresh veggies, including, red bell peppers, shredded spinach and carrots, cooked onions, and cabbage. XDX got the sliced quarter leg of duck (very recommended by our amiable and proud waiter) with some gingery bamboo shoot rice vermicelli soup.

Vibe is an overused word, but this is that. Or per XDX, “an institution.”

2) The Goddess and the American Girl by Larry Engelmann

Like a gateway drug, Tom Cumberstone’s hardcover graphic novel (on my obsessions list two weeks ago) about 1920s French tennis star Suzanne Lenglen led me to a more traditional, 464-page biography of the six-time Wimbledon champion.

Larry Engelmann’s The Goddess and the American Girl begins with an engaging anecdote from his college days in the early 1960s at the University of Michigan: His class was reading Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises and trying to figure out who “Lenglen” was; this was Hemingway’s description of his Robert Cohn character: “He probably loved to win as much as Lenglen…” The prof had no idea who this Lenglen fellow may have been, so Engelmann “underlined that passage and put a question mark in the margin of the page.” His subsequent sleuthing didn’t turn up anybody named Lenglen, though. About a decade later when Engelmann was researching his first book, a history of 1920s Prohibition, he came across Lenglen again, a she—not a he, as presumed—who was getting constant notice in the newspapers of the time.

From Larry Engelmann’s comprehensive book: Suzanne Lenglen in action

To Engelmann’s satisfaction I imagine, the NYT called The Goddess and The American Girl “overdue” when it first came out in 1988

They also, lovingly called it “overlong.” No question this is a fat book—because it’s actually a joint bio, coupling Lenglen’s historic and seismic seven-year sweep of the international women’s tennis circuit in the early 1920s with that of her rival and successor, the slightly younger (and more staid) American player, Helen Wills.

Following Lenglen’s taboo-breaking, 1919-1925 run (Lenglen wore flapper friendly bandeau head scarves and hit down-the-line backhand smashes like a man), Wills—with lightning speed and uncanny anticipation (including on-court somersaults)—won Wimbledon eight times herself between 1927 and 1938, disassembling all comers with her “poker face” court demeanor and power hitting.

Another reason this book is hulking: Engelmann—who has written acclaimed history books about China, the fall of Saigon, and as noted above, prohibition America—is clearly a tireless researcher. I could picture him deep in the stacks (and hovering over the microfiche) as I read his prize quotes from Lenglen’s and Wills’ awed contemporaries, gasped at the stroke by stroke details from long-vanished Wimbledon matches, listened in on the up-close accounts of cross-country train rides, and delighted in the dish from late night dancing in Harlem (Lenglen, not pigtailed, Wills, a stoic presence who “acted like a Quaker” and who moved “like a West Point cadet,” wrote the sports columnists of the day).

Indeed, in the two chapters I’ve read so far—uptempo outlines of these athletes’ respective careers as they ascend toward to their 1926 “Match of the Century” (cued up for Chapter 3, “Ballyhoo”), Engelmann is big on the historical context. As much as Engelmann places Lenglen’s and Wills’ superpower tennis skills in direct competition, he more so pits cosmopolitan Lenglen as a cognac-sipping European versus Wills as the embodiment of public-park-system-America, where tennis was the “royal sport of the people.” Engelmann quotes legendary and contemporaneous sports writer Grantland Rice observing that Wills “represented the power of youth, but not the romance of youth.”

Speaking of dominant female tennis stars, I am once again riveted by WTA action this week: My favorite player, No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka, is currently tearing through the Miami Open, having beaten both No. 9 (and Olympic Gold medalist) Qinwen Zheng, 6-2, 7-5 and No. 7 Jasmine Paolini, 6-2, 6-2 (!) en route to her fourth finals match of the year. While Saby is 1-2 in 2025 finals to date, and isn’t getting the love that recent Cinderella-story winners like No. 5 Madison Keys and No. 6 Mirra Andreeva recently got, I’d say she’s the most consistent winner on the tour right now.

How consistent has Sabalenka been? She’s only the fourth player to reach the semifinals at the Australian Open, Indian Wells and Miami the same year as World No. 1, joining Steffi Graf (1994), Martina Hingis (1998, 2000 and 2001) and Serena Williams (2015). That’s some list.

3) Rocket Taco: New Space Same as the Old Space?

“No news about what’s moving in yet, but hopefully at the new place, they’ll ask if you’d like a coffee refill at lunch or another glass of wine after dinner.”

That’s me, back in a December 2023 obsession list, ruminating warily.

I was preparing myself for yet another misplayed business venture on my aspirational block, the brief human stretch on 19th Ave. E. where it’s zoned Neighborhood Commercial, or NC-1 (multi-story, mixed-use apartment buildings, convenient retail, and restaurants). After an awkward three-and-a-half year stint of totally misreading the room, December 2023 was when Bounty Kitchen (I called it Empty Kitchen) was finally closing its doors; the owners had been obstinate about their HOA feng shui as opposed to considering the renters living in the vibrant cluster of surrounding six-story buildings.

This week, a new business finally moved in. Well, not exactly new. Local Mexican restaurant chain Rocket Taco—hardly outstanding, but certainly respectable with their in-house handmade tortillas and tasty lentil, chickpea, and cauliflower vegan options—is simply moving across the street from its current 19th Ave. E. spot into the much bigger 3,000 square foot abandoned Bounty Kitchen space.

The move seems risky. Unless, owners Jill and Steve Rosen are plotting some changes to their current kids-friendly approach—and, according to Capitol Hill Seattle Blog it doesn’t sound like they are— the switch from the smaller spot where they’ve done steady, but not jumping business for seven years seems destined to be another flubbed opportunity.

My fears were not allayed when I peeked in on their soft opening Wednesday night. The tell? The shelves above the long, gorgeous bar that defines the new, posh space—and which made the long-ago Tallulah’s a hit here—was spare, with the smattering of liquor bottles looking like the two rolls of TP remaining on desolate pandemic-era Safeway shelves.

Until someone seizes the day by understanding the night, and turns this warm room into a neighborhood bar replete with: a 10 pm-or-later closing time (as opposed to the endlessly disappointing 9 pm closing times on my block); chatty waiters working tables (as opposed to the one-and-done fast food cash register counter service); plus an occasional DJ at a turntable , and yes, a full bar, Rocket Taco will remain, as it did the very next evening, their official first day, mostly empty.

My heart sank as I approached the relocated business on Thursday at 8:40 pm and saw the night’s ominous adumbration: A sole diner and two idle workers hovering.

3/27/25, A disappointing opening night at Rocket Taco

Very unrelated to all that, but lastly, two music recommendations, both to be used as playlist prompts. First, Khruangbin, a Houston-based world-music- meets-soft-soul-rock trio whose floating tunes are built around petty electric guitar musings; tunes like their lightly psychedelic 2024 track “Ada Jean” will nudge your head in a groovy direction that’s similar to the sound of fusion revivalist Thundercat, though less yacht rock jams and more Chicano-think-piece jams.

Second, try a droney track called “Ionosphere” by ambient musician Elias Mia when you want presence but not attention.

I’m All Lost In, #75: Boozy matcha; Houston stories; Speakspeak

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#75

First, a music recommendation of the week, some data points of the week, and a quote of the week.

Music Recommendation: I once—nearly 20 years ago—mumbled, famously to myself that there were two genres of music that could never be replicated with any legitimacy nor seriousness: Early ‘60s Girl Group pop, such as the Ronettes or the Angels, nor late ‘70s/early ‘80s New Wave. I stand by the Girl Group exhortation, but have you heard of this contemporary band Nation of Language, early 30-somethings who claim Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark as a main influence? The Brooklyn-based guitar, synthesizer, bass, and percussion trio make good on their unlikely 1980 synth pop dream with cold and shiny verisimilitude rocking their tracks such as “The Wall & I,” “This Fractured Mind,” “Weak in Your Light,” and “On Division Street.” I’d say classic New Order more than OMD, but I stand corrected on my earlier wayward assertion.

Data: Given that an extra super majority of people who come into Manhattan’s central business district take transit, the new list of  compelling stats upending Trump’s faux populist attack on New York’s congestion pricing program not only serve as a grown-up fact check on his infantile rhetoric, but also make it plain how well the policy is working for the public.

Since congestion pricing took effect, 13% fewer vehicles are coming into Manhattan, yet retail sales in the tolling zone are up 1.5 percent compared to last year. And there was a 6.7 % increase in the number of people who traveled to work in the area.

… Pedestrian traffic is up around 4% and economic activity appears to be up with Broadway theater attendance, restaurant reservations and retail sales in the tolling zone seeing increases over a similar period in 2024.

Quote: This overdue A.O. Scott piece maps the paranoid strain in modern America by pinpointing JFK assassination conspiracy theories as the starting line for a daft route that runs from left-leaning 1970s anti-corporate, deep state imaginings, to left(ish)-leaning 9/11 inside-job delusions, to right wing Sandy Hook deniers, eventually landing in the brain stem of Pizzagate’s MAGA Trump cult through the lens of 2020’s right wing “Stop the Steal” pathology. Like a good conspiracy theory itself, Scott’s well-versed piece explains everything!

It also aligns with my long held belief that lefty reactionaries such as Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, and Bernie Bro voters share much more with “Make America Great Again” voters than they may want to admit.

More importantly, in addition to name checking Alan J. Pakula’s Parallax View (1974)!, the political paranoia freakout film that bests the over-referenced and overrated Network (1976), Scott’s thorough article quotes a brilliant Richard Hofstadter line: “there is a great difference between locating conspiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy.”

I found an original copy of this Parallax View paperback last year at Capitol Hill’s Twice Sold Tales and promptly sent it to my 1970s co-conspirator, Eel-head, aka, Gregor Samsa, aka, Lee.

Hofstadter’s bit of wisdom succinctly lays out why I’ve always bristled at those neat theories some of my left wing comrades subscribe to—have you heard about how the Trilateral Commission controls your life.

I’m always left wondering … And?

Meaning: these kinds of theories are a way of abandoning a focus on material reality (like regressive tax policy) while positing the Romantic and irrelevant idea instead that we are helplessly living in the Matrix (another overrated movie, by the way)

Onto this week’s official obsessions…

1) Can I have some Shōchū with that Matcha Latte?

I opted for a matcha latte as my nightcap last Saturday night, a rainy late-winter Seattle evening. The crowded nightspot I ended up at, the trendy Gemini Room, serves such a thing; they also serve $16-dollar cocktails and have Pink Pickled Deviled Eggs and Broccolini & Garlic Ricotta Toast on their night eats menu, along with the Panko Chicken Sandwich, Shoestring Fries & Aioli, and Fried Ravioli.

They are living on borrowed time. But I am living my best My-Chemical-Romance-life. “Could I have a little booze in that?” I amended from my seat at the bar, feeling soggy in my wet shoes and damp jacket. The surprisingly friendly bartenders at this otherwise childish place leaped into action, suggesting I add a bit of shōchū, the vodka-ish barley-based Japanese spirit. They had a bottle of luxe brand iichiko shōchū which blended into the foamy green draught like a cube of sugar idly dissolving into warm tea.

I too dissolved. Into the impressionist streetlights on my languid electric bike ride home, pledging to incorporate this magic trick into my life.

2) Family Meal by Bryan Washington

I loved Bryan Washington’s 2019 debut, a collection of intertwined short stories called Lot, which I reviewed here and which made my obsession’s list one week in late 2023.

Washington is a 31-year-old, Black, queer writer with an effortless ability to turn working class workplaces into mournful yet hopeful fables. Lot, his self conscious collection about striving POC, LGBTQ, and immigrant Houston, was part of my City Syllabus crash course that year; some of the other books in my autoseminar were M. Nolan Gray’s nonfiction book about land use zoning, Arbitrary Lines (coincidentally, also a lot about Houston, thanks to that city’s model slack code), Teju Cole’s Lagos vignettes, Everyday is for the Thief, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 Industrial Revolution Manchester novel, Mary Barton, and Ben Wilson’s sweeping history of cities, Metropolis.

In its review of Washington’s most recent Houston novel, Family Meal (2023), the NYT called Washington “phenomenally precocious.”

Bryan Washington

I’m only about 70 pages in, so perhaps I’ll see what they mean by that phenomenally ambitious description, but when pastries—in a paper bag in the backseat, fresh from the bakery “flaky in my hands, warm to the touch, delicious as I remember,” entered the narrative as a metaphor for the comfort of old friends in the closing paragraphs of an otherwise terse opening chapter, I suddenly felt, as I did with Lot, that I was in the hands of a loquacious prodigy.

3) Speakspeak

Following up my recent bitchy aside on the Gen Z verb “decenter,” I’ve since—after some work meetings this week— came up with a George Orwell-induced neologism, “Speakspeak,” to describe the hesitant yet self-righteous activist wordiness of phrases like “I’m going to go ahead and name that,” pseudo lively yet lifeless jargon such as “hold space,” or “form to norm,” (which apparently means introduce and normalize), and corporate culture gibberish such as “ideate” “iterate,” or “let’s socialize that.”

The list of lexical offenses on today’s Teams calls or in today’s earnest coffee shop meetups —”architect” as a verb, “impact” as a verb, or “impactful” as an adjective are other grating blunders—goes on and on.

The closest thing to a common denominator I can detect in all this banal chatter is that it’s an attempt to narrate rather than say, or even more, an attempt to explain rather than say. A basic rule of writing is to show rather than tell. It’s time to reverse all the explaining and apply the same tenet to speaking.

I’m All Lost In, #74: Graphic tennis; late night coffee; and strong Neville Chamberlain vibes from Chuck Schumer

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#74

1) Suzanne: The Jazz Age Goddess of Tennis by Tom Humberstone

My ongoing obsession with today’s WTA led to me a comic-book novel about Suzanne Lenglen, the 100-years-ago female tennis phenomenon (she won Wimbledon six times between 1919 and 1925, plus throw in two—1925 and 1926—French Open titles, and a 1920 Olympic Gold). I’d never heard of Lenglen before; luckily, tennis reporter/writer/blogger Ben Rothenberg recommended Scottish comic artist Tom Humberstone’s graphic novel about Lenglen last December.

Humberstone imagines 1920s tennis legends Helen Wills (L) and Suzanne Lenglen (R) meeting on the night before their 1926 “Match of the Century” in Cannes.

Lenglen (L) and Wills (R) at their Match of the Century in 1926

Humberstone’s bold yet subdued panels tell the defiant French tennis star’s story in a series of chronological, though in medias res vignettes that weave an understated, slightly fraught tale as Lenglen’s trailblazing (“scandalous”) ascent mirrors the struggles of newfound post-suffragette freedoms alongside the same old limits that beleaguer women’s equality today. (For some more on the contradictions of Flapper feminism, check out Ursula Parrott’s 1929 novel Ex-Wife, which I reviewed last October.)

Humberstone’s research shows that the rhythms, rivalries, anxieties, glory, and celebrity of yesteryear’s tennis circuit, though draped in petticoat athletic gear circa 1922, are much like today’s (sans Lenglen’s sly cognac boosters between sets).

Rothenberg also interviewed Humberstone …

Humberstone: I started to write those things down. The intersection with the suffragette movement and women's changing role in society, how women's fashion was completely revolutionized, the invention of sport as an entertainment industry, the rise and fall of the Jazz Age, the shifting global hegemony from the old world to the new... I realized that I could almost one-to-one attach these themes to Suzanne's biggest matches. That gave me the framework that I used in the book where I generally focus each chapter around the conversations before and after a career-altering match that addresses the themes of that chapter.

As for my aforementioned obsession with the current WTA: After savoring a week of compelling matches at the Indian Wells tournament, it’s coming down to a back-in-form Aryna Sabalenka versus teen-prodigy Mirra Andreeva final this Sunday; in the Friday night semifinal, Saby avenged her recent Australian Open finals loss to red-hot Madison Keys with a 6-0, 6-1 shutdown this time.

2) I Stand By the Title of My First Poetry Collection *

* Available on Cathexis NW Press

The New York Time’s ran a story this week that should be an urban planning policy brief for Seattle’s mayor and city council. It was a business trend story about Qahwah House, a Yemeni coffee shop that stays open late.

With most coffee shops around here tucking in for the evening between 4 and 6pm, there are few places other than bars and restaurants to chat with friends, read a book, or scribble in your journal next to kindred Sylvia Plath mimes after dark. I’ve written this a couple of times in my city planning column at PubliCola: Seattle is an underwhelming proposition for night owls in general; shout out to Bait Shop on Broadway, by the way, one uncommon spot where, miraculously, I was able to get dinner after 10pm last Saturday night.

In fairness, I’ve recently discovered two coffee spots that aren’t afraid of the dark—Peloton Cafe and Basecamp—but both spots are hybrid models; Peloton is more hippie restaurant than coffee shop, and Basecamp doubles as a ski rental shop/outdoors sports club that I don’t feel affinity for, nor, do I feel at home with the bewildering array of clipboard signups at the front counter.

Enter the late-night coffeehouse trend coming to America courtesy of Yemeni immigrant Ibrahim Alhasbani’s Qahwah House, a chain with 16 shops nationwide; though not in Seattle, evidently. The AI results of my Google query said: “Qahwah House, a Yemeni coffee shop, does not have a location in Seattle, WA 98122, but it does have locations in Dearborn, MI and Sterling Heights.” (There are also shops in New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin.)

Reminding me of how Italian immigrants brought pizza shops to America in the mid-20th Century, and Japanese immigrants brought karaoke bars to America in the 1980s, the NYT article (though, please with the word “decenter”) explains:

Yemeni immigrants are making their mark on the U.S. coffee industry and shifting cafe culture late into the night. In the last decade, the number of Yemeni coffeehouses that stay open well after sundown has ballooned, beginning in Michigan and fanning out toward Texas, New York and California.

The expansion of these coffeehouses reflects increasing demand for late-night spaces that decenter alcohol.

Delah Coffee has opened four coffeehouses in the Bay Area since 2022. Haraz Coffee House, which first opened in Dearborn, Mich., in 2021, now counts 22 shops in its empire. And while Mokafé isn’t the largest of these growing chains — it has seven cafes in New York and New Jersey — but its Times Square location, which stays open until 2 a.m. on weekends, is impossible to miss.

If I presented this NYT article to local policymakers, here are some quotes that would light up my slide deck:

•“There is no location that closes on time,” Mr. Alhasbani said. “The customers keep coming. If we say 3, that means 4.”

• “If I wanted to hang out with my friends, where was I going to go?” said Mr. Alhasbani, who opened the Williamsburg location in 2020. “There was no place like that.”

• They opened Delah Coffee, one of the first Yemeni coffeehouses in San Francisco, the morning of the [Golden State Warriors’ NBA] championship parade. “I had a hundred customers in the shop,” said Mr. Jahamee, 21. When the festivities concluded, many customers returned to the cafe, surprised to find it was open until 10 p.m. “By closing late, we opened up a whole different world,” he said.

There’s also this quote, which serves as a reminder to Trump and his nativist MAGA movement that their isolationism is antithetical to innovation, revenues, and life:

At Arwa Yemeni Coffee, a cafe in Texas opening its fourth location this week, some of the busiest hours are right before closing time — as late as 1 a.m. on weekends. “In our culture, we drink coffee and tea late into the night,” said Faris Almatrahi, an owner. “It tends to be extremely packed and loud.”

When Mr. Almatrahi, 47, and his partners opened Arwa in 2022, their customers were still catching on. “We had a huge non-Muslim demographic during the day” that cleared out as the afternoon wore on, he said. At night, the customer base was predominantly Muslim. [But] as Yemeni cafes have expanded, the crowds have, too. “We’re starting to see other demographics socializing at night and sipping coffee,” Mr. Almatrahi said.

3) Strong Neville Chamberlain Vibes

Posted this placard on my Insta, Bluesky, and Facebook (sorry!) accounts, 3/14/25

As I write this column, the Democratic Senate Minority Leader in Congress, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) signed off on Republican budget legislation that gives congressional budgeting authority to Trump.

This shatters the Democrats last line of defense—going to court—to stop Trump from illegally forcing his pathological priorities on America by ending congressionally-directed government funding for: health and medical programs, K-12 education, veteran support, transit projects, federal law enforcement, clean energy programs, disaster relief, environmental protections, housing, weather satellites, and on and on.

Schumer chose appeasement.

________

Monday, March 10 was the one-year anniversary of Dad’s death. I lit the Yahrzeit candle, read the prayer in the memory of the deceased, and like Mom and Dad used to do for their dead parents, let the candle burn for 24 hours.

I’m All Lost In, #73: RIP David Johansen; the menu at Peloton Cafe; a playlist of one’s own.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#73

First, some goods of the order.

A thank you. Thank you, Zeitgeist Coffee. I always found it incongruous that this grunge-era Pioneer Square hippie-adjacent institution didn’t have a vegan option (nor barely a veggie one). For my part, I’d taken to finagling a DIY order—their green salad and some bread on the side—so I could concoct a salad sandwich of my own.

I’m happy to report that Zeitgeist’s new menu addresses this pressing issue. They’ve now got a tasty hummus sandwich; it’s lovingly laced with kalamata tapenade, cucumbers, red onion, and black pepper. Simply titled “Vegan Sandwich,” this noticeably hefty and healthy fare (served on slices of Macrina Bakery sourdough) has a utilitarian bent that matches Zeitgeist’s timeless Jimmy-Carter-for-President profile.

A couple of other Thank Yous this week go out to the Los Angeles Review of Books and Vox for their candid Anora take downs. As you likely know, at Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony, Sean Baker’s retrograde comedy about a prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold won the Oscar for best film. Having given Anora my own thumbs down after seeing it in early January, I was feeling gaslit by the film’s critical acclaim, so checking out LARB’s extended critique and Vox’s thorough pan helped restore my sanity. Vox’s reality check concludes:

Ultimately, Anora may fall into the category of Oscar-winning movies that seem like a cool, progressive choice on paper, but are ridden with problems and critiques from the communities they purport to represent.

There are other factors that have presumably lent to this win, too. Baker is one of the few modern auteurs who’s been unwavering in his commitment to making independent cinema for over 20 years now. Anora is also a monument to ’70s filmmaking canon, an era of cinema that Hollywood has heralded as an emblem of taste. With Anora, Baker puts himself in the conversation with celebrated auteurs like John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese, and Robert Altman. If only his work contained some of that era’s more radical politics and subversive representations.

Lastly: some reading recommendations.

First, a George Mason University think tank study titled “Urban Minimum Lot Sizes: Their Background, Effects, and Avenues to Reform.” Not only does this piece convincingly make the case that doing away with prevalent minimum lot size regulations will help increase affordable housing supply, it simultaneously clarifies a related, important point about the burning planet. Requiring capacious lot sizes is an alarming anachronism.

Second recommendation, Athletic tennis writers Matthew Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare posted their Indian Wells preview; the 1000-level tennis tournament got underway on Wednesday and Futterman and Eccleshare’s report focuses on the players they believe have urgent storylines at this annual Coachella Valley tennis showdown. Their list includes two of my favorite players. There’s “ropey” (the pejorative British definition) Aryna Sabalenka, who despite still being No. 1, is coming off two recent losses. “I’m all over the place in my thoughts …,” Saby ruminates. “The decisions I’m making on the court are a bit wrong and emotionally I’m not at my best.” And then there’s (slipped to) No. 9, Qinwen Zheng, whose “0-3 record this year tells a story.”

In other major tennis news: On Friday afternoon, under the influence of Seattle’s annual late February heat wave, I booked a Saturday morning reservation at the Volunteer Park courts. By the time Saturday arrived, the temperature had actually dropped into the 30s and a Transylvania fog had settled in. But nonetheless, it was a diaphoretic two sets—the hoodies came off—and in one play, in a tennis first for me, I knew exactly where I wanted to place my serve, successfully painting the deuce court corner. This was during a rare 40-Love win as I acted out for a spell before otherwise getting creamed by tennis natural, Valium Tom.

Volunteer Park, Lower Courts, 8 am, 3/1/25. Before Valium Tom arrived for our own Indian Wells qualies, I practiced my serve, calling out “Saby!” as I tossed the ball in the air and, riding a rush of endorphins, came down like the crack of a pool hall break.

Onto this week’s obsessions.

1) RIP New York Dolls Front Man, David Johansen, 1950-2025
I was a teenage anachronism. When I was in high school during the early 1980s, the New York Dolls’ 1973 debut LP was one of my favorite records. I came to it through my other retro teen crushes, early ‘70s Bowie, early ‘70s Lou Reed, early ‘70s Eno, and fellow contemporary meta teenagers, Blondie.

The ‘60s girl-group-revivalist, yet punk-futurist Dolls first captured my attention with their iconic album cover photo of the band in thrifted drag. But they officially and forever had me with the pitch-perfect teen manifesto song titles listed on the back: ”Lonely Planet Boy,” “Jet Boy,” “Private World,” “Subway Train,” “Looking for a Kiss,” “Personality Crisis,” “Bad Girl,” “Frankenstein,” “Pills,” and, of course, “Trash,” which successfully summed up the whole yearning sarcastic glamour in one word—and with a DIY panache that cued the blistering campy rock on the record itself. “Trash,” fyi, might be the best punk rock song ever recorded; from the rushing pop verses, to the half-time blues on the chorus, to the full-stop vocal recitative—”Uhn, how do you call your lover boy?”—to the “whoa-oh-whoa” rave up, it remains the signature song of the Lower East Side’s stagflation bohemian heyday.

The album’s lone overtly political track, “Vietnamese Baby”—which placed the band’s droll malaise unmistakably in the larger and unavoidable context of early 1970s gruesome American imperialism and impending decline—may be the album’s other signature moment. As Dolls’ singer David Johansen’s striptease-Queens’-accent vocals shift from preen to pain with the My Lai Massacre-conscious “talking ‘bout your overkill/ talking ‘bout your overkill/talking ‘bout your overkill/now that it’s over/now that it’s over/now that it’s over/whatcha gonna do?”, it becomes impossible to ignore the tragedy at the heart of a setlist that once led with comedy.

Johnny Thunders’ Chuck Berry-on-overdrive guitars (and on bourbon and barbiturates as well, if music itself can be sloshed), certainly propelled the record. But Johansen’s bratty yet searching vocals defined it, making good on the set list’s punk voguing.

Of course, you can’t write about Johansen without writing about his juvie hall meta crush, Mary Weiss, the frontwoman for the early 1960s bad girl-girl group, the Shangri-Las. (I’ve always thought “From Shangri-La to Nirvana” would be the perfect name for a history book about punk music.) When Weiss, best known for her 15-year-old vocals on the Shangri-Las’ 1964 hit “Leader of the Pack,” died last year at 75, I—symbiotically—couldn’t help writing about Johansen and the Dolls:

Reclaimed with a sense of sordid 1970s ennui and irony less than a decade later by the proto-punk New York Dolls (also from working class Queens), the Shangri-Las quickly became a template for the CBGB set as bands like Blondie, Suicide, and the Ramones leaned into their own trashy pleas of adolescent angst.

On the louche intro to their 1973 urchin love song “Looking for a Kiss,” the Dolls’ lead singer David Johansen steals Mary Weiss’ spellbinding intro line from the Shangri-Las’ 1965 hit “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” —”When I say I’m in love/you best believe I’m in love/ L-U-V!”

I will say, the mix on the New York Dolls landmark 1973 LP has always sounded a bit muffled; if Johnny Thunders’ heated tube amp riffs had been as clearly defined as the transistor-forward electric guitar sound on, oh say, every other early ‘70s hard rock record (Kiss comes to mind), the Dolls wouldn’t be considered merely punk progenitors; rather, we’d be talking about the Dolls instead of the Sex Pistols. Come the day when the record companies put album masters online where, for some exorbitant subscription fee, people can remix their favorites on a laptop, I’ve got first dibs on New York Dolls New York Dolls.

While I’m set on improving Thunders’ guitar sound, I’ll reverently leave Johansen’s diva performance as is. RIP David Johansen who died from brain cancer on February 28. He was 75.

I staged this Johansen homage at my Seattle apartment years ago with my then-GF, Hester.

2) Peloton Cafe

Located at 13th & Jefferson at the western edge of Seattle’s Central District, Peloton Cafe Bike Shop, a spacious and telework-friendly coffee spot that serves lovingly made sandwiches, is not billed as a vegan restaurant. But given the extensive list of vegan options, from veggie sausage and tofu breakfast burritos to piled-high roasted butternut squash, red onion, and arugula veggie sandwiches, Peloton, which kind of doubles as a not-very-busy bike repair shop, deserves prominent notice on any directory of Seattle’s (too few) vegan oases.

Contributing to Peloton’s oasis status: It’s also the rare Seattle cafe that stays open until 9 pm during the week; they serve wine and cocktails, plus booze-friendly sides like fries, tots, tacos, and sloppy joes (vegan version available.) Even more unique, despite the dive bar trappings, Peloton has a Mister Rogers' Neighborhood sensibility as opposed to Seattle’s standard flannels and fries vibe.

Civic bathrooms at Peloton Cafe: Abortion clinic info and free condoms. 3/5/25

This civic feng shui might have something to do with the tidy minimalist tables and booths, the shelves of board games, and the free condoms and Plan B in the sparkling bathroom. And, of course, the good-for-you veggie-heavy menu.

Peloton’s official 12-item vegan lunch menu is as long as its “meaty” menu. And they back up this earnest commitment by serving fresh, thoughtful vegan entrees—as opposed to the microwaved, “vegan” patty and plastic plant-based cheese afterthoughts you find all over our lazy-does-it city.

I’ve had two of Peloton’s elaborate sandwiches so far (both this week): a “Vegan Hot Pastrami,” which meant roasted broccoli florets with pickled red onions, shredded cabbage, herbs, and Dijon served on grilled ciabatta; and their “Vegan BLT,” which meant soft and seasoned tofu with tomatoes, red onion, greens, avocado, and vegan aioli on sourdough. These sandwiches come with chips or salad; I’ve gone with the salad option, which, like the sandwiches, come super sized.

Peloton’s “Vegan Hot Pastrami Sandwich” is a hardy roasted broccoli main course.

“Peloton” is a bike word that means a group of bikers. It’s a term that pops alongside the vernacular of an otherwise soloist sport; a bit of biker vocabulary that fits this neighborhood gathering spot. As I was leaving around 5 on Thursday, the place, which had been quiet during the afternoon, was filling up fast, buzzing with giddy food orders and conversation.

3) A Playlist of Their Own

“What a waste,” Seattle’s premier cultural critic (and fantastic old friend) Charles Mudede wrote in his recent article about bar owner dictates that their employees adhere to anodyne, preordained playlists that soothe rather than bring curious, new jams to regulars’ ears, brains, and bodies.

My experience of this DJ-as-AI phenomenon at Capitol Hill bars and coffee shops? Being stuck, per some High Fidelity algorithm, in a monotonous stream of 1979- 2000 indie rock classics plus some early ‘70s Bowie and ‘60s Velvet Underground thrown in. I first noticed this tiresome playlist 20 years ago when the Buzzcocks’ 1979 pop punk hit “What Do I Get?” held the No. 1 spot on the coffee shop/hipster bar circuit; this song is still in the mix today.

Charles, using a more (populist) universal example, notes the prevalence of Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac songs at local bars.

He continues:

Bartenders, particularly in this city, are often musicians or artists, and have very original tastes in music. Forcing them to play music that we keep hearing all over the place is like pouring way too much water into the pot of a plant. It soddens our imagination. We are bloated beyond boredom when we hear "Burning Down the House" for the gazillionth time. Growth is only possible with forgotten music, or music whose new " sounds... give delight .” Music we must Shazam, capture like an Ariel in the air, and add to a playlist. (For me, the playlist is called Bar Beats.)

To make his point, which is kind of profound when you consider how it taps, elevates, and expands the role, skills, and definition of bartenders (for both the bartender and the drinker), Charles goes on to detail a few specific bartenders around town who are given free rein to feed your Shazam queries with the likes of T. L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir from 1971, contemporary Japanese “soft hip hop,” and French Electro artist, Sumac Dub.

In addition to the potential musical discoveries at hand (freeing up bartenders to DJ is a bit like freeing up librarians to open indie bookstores), Charles’ concluding “plea to let bartenders DJ their drinkers,” can also lead to urban happenstance. Regular readers will remember my own story about connecting with my young artist friend Rob Joynes, who ended up doing a computer music set at my book release event back in May 2023 after he and I originally bonded over his Jump Blues playlist at the Cha Cha Lounge where he tends bar and I drink.

Our musical camaraderie continues; we are currently collaborating on a secret project, TBA this spring.

I’m All Lost In, #72: Seattle City Council sock puppets; cashew cheese, black bean, kale, and butternut squash tortilla casserole; and city scenes.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#72

If I was being honest about this week’s obsessions—obsession—I’d write about Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. I just finished Chapter 12. This is when Lily and Selden leave the party to kiss in the “hush of a garden” where “there was no sound but the plash of water on the lily-pads, and a distant drift of music that might have been blown across a sleeping lake“ after a “tableaux vivants” where Lily “without ceasing to be herself…had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace.” And that’s only the half of it as Wharton continued dishing in this melodramatic dissertation about Manhattan’s country-house class.

However, having gone on about Wharton’s dynamite prose here, here, here and (yet again, last week) here, I’m going to dedicate this week’s list to some recommendations instead.

1) Seattle City Council Sock Puppets

Maybe you need to be familiar with today’s bush league Seattle City Council to belly laugh (as I did, falling on the floor) like you’ve just smoked some pot? But The Seattle Channel, a YouTube account spoofing the council, is MacArthur-grant-award brilliant. (It’s also crafty, “The Seattle Channel,” also happens to be the name of the city’s official TV channel, which among other things, broadcasts city council meetings.)

Certainly, for a crash course on the pompous buffoonery of the historically underwhelming council—Council Member Rob Saka being the main oaf—just spot-check some of Erica’s regular council coverage at PubliCola (or catch the council shit show on her Bluesky feed).

But honestly, this sock puppet sendup—subtitled: “The Seattle City Council is really not OK. 🤡”—is so self-evidently sidesplitting, a backgrounder isn’t really necessary.

MacArthur grant-worthy comedy at the expense of the inept Seattle City Council

Whoever the puppet—and cheapo effects—master is behind all the satirical merriment, which uses actual audio from Seattle City Council meetings as its sit-com soundtrack, they are certainly providing a public service. Thank you mystery genius for clarifying just how out of touch, oblivious (to their own disproportionate sense of self), and bewildered Seattle’s sketch council actually is.

Whether it’s aggrieved council member Cathy Moore talking about “Armageddon,” or windbag council member Rob Saka talking…and well, talking and talking, or addled council president Sara Nelson losing the plot, https://www.youtube.com/@theseattlechannel/shorts is required viewing for anyone who needs a break from the unmatched gas(lighting) coming from the council dais these days.

2) Vegan Tortilla Casserole + Cashew Cheese Sauce

I binged on this tomato and garlic-friendly, healthy, casserole comfort food for dinner, late-night dinner (the same night), breakfast and lunch the next day…and possibly dinner one more time.

This beginner’s-level recipe—black kidney beans, a can of puréed butternut squash, and lots of shredded kale are the main ingredients—is both un-botchable and delish.

In addition to the aforementioned main provisions, the cheesy mix of cashews and nooch with paprika, lemon juice, and more garlic, is also key. And I’d make more than the three quarter cups it calls for—don’t be restrained to a 1/2 cup of cashews, for example— because it’s worth slathering on the cashew cream layer after layer.

Saturday night, 2/22/25

3) Pascal Campion’s City Scenes
Sonder—the feeling one has when they realize other people, every other person, in fact, has a life as full and real as one’s own—could conceivably come as a humbling realization. But more so, it’s inspiring in a Walt “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” Whitman way.

File artist Pascal Campion’s urban renderings, particularly his apartment house tableaus, under the inspiring sort of sonder.

Campion’s illustrations don’t only capture a city Transcendentalism that’s typically reserved for pastorals, but his idyllic urbansim focuses on the energized moments of city dwellers, signaling action the way Edward Hopper’s paintings signaled loneliness. Behind the lighted windows in Campion’s buildings one imagines hope rather than despair.

Don’t get me wrong, his work isn’t anodyne; there are glimpses of the human condition blues.

But the emphasis on city propinquity captures exactly why humans find strength beneath the city lights.

Appropriately enough, Campion, a regular illustrator for the New Yorker, it turns out, came to my attention by way of city planning think tank wiz M. Nolan Gray, a pro-density champion.

Gray, who wrote an invaluable book on the classist warfare encoded in U.S. zoning laws (scroll down for my review here), posted a series of Campion’s renderings on Bluesky earlier this month, writing: “His work is really great for stressing the humanity of scenes that I think people inappropriately find alienating: apartments, crowds, etc.”

————

It’s impossible to ignore how far America fell this week under Trumpism as his Napoleon meltdown put us on the side of derelict Russian aggression over democratic ideals. Perhaps overlooked as Trump’s crass foreign policy in central Europe and Ukraine took center stage, though: A NYT editorial that looked at another dimension of Trump’s effort to smash American ideals. Titled “The MAGA War on Speech,” the lengthy editorial described and enumerated Trump’s direct assault on Americans’ First Amendment right to free speech and a free press. Unsurprisingly—first they came for the trans community—Trump’s effort to impose state-sanctioned speech on Americans tried to expunge the LGBTQ community from our country’s narrative.

The National Park Service erased the letters T and Q: from L.G.B.T.Q. references on its website describing the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. More than 8,000 federal websites, in fact, have been taken down or altered to remove concepts derided by the MAGA movement. These include thousands of pages about vaccine research and S.T.D. prevention guidelines, efforts to prevent hate crimes, prevention of racial discrimination in drug trials and disbursement of federal grants and details of environmental policies to slow climate change.

I’m All Lost In, #71: Defending congestion pricing against Trump; reading Edith Wharton; funding affordable housing.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#71

First things first. Two follow-ups.

.Last week, after learning that legendary UCLA city planning professor Donald Shoup had died just a week earlier on February 6, I posited that he was my generation’s Jane Jacobs and linked his LA Times obituary.

The NYT followed the LA Times’ lead this week, publishing their own comprehensive Shoup obituary. They called him “an intellectual hero to urbanists.”

Last month, in an item here called “Worried about Elena,” I flagged the disturbing news accounts about pro tennis coach Stefano Vukov and the ongoing WTA investigation into his treatment of Kazakhstani women’s tennis star, and 2022 Wimbledon champion, Elena Rybakina.

The WTA has since concluded their investigation, which reportedly documents Vukov’s abusive behavior toward Rybakina; they’ve now banned Vukov from coaching for a year. The investigation and a three-page summary remain confidential, but tennis reporters Matthew Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare at the Athletic were able to get the summary. This week they wrote an important article about the troubling situation.

Onto this week’s obsessions.

1) Congestion Pricing

2025 has begun. Democrats have woken up. They’re finally fighting Trump.

It’s perfect that congestion pricing—the policy of charging people who drive their cars into the city—is the battle Democrats have chosen to strike back. Not only is congestion pricing my favorite urbanist cause, but the standoff (Trump declared that he’s shutting down NYC’s local program) exposes Trump’s ersatz populism by pitting it against an honest government effort to support the masses.

Oh, I know, mass transit is “elitist!” … Please. Be serious, people.

Filling your car with gas, and paying for parking, not to mention covering auto insurance and buying a car in the first place, is a much more expensive way of life than taking the bus and the subway.

The facts are: 1) Lower income people ($25,000 to $49,000 a year) make up the biggest segment by class of transit ridership (24%); 2) while the poorest, those earning less than $13,000 a year, only 13% of the U.S. population, represent a disproportionate 21% of transit riders; and 3) people of color, who make up about 40% of the U.S. population, make up 60% of transit ridership. Of that group, African Americans, who make up about 12% of the population, have far and away the most outsized transit ridership numbers at 24%; the median Black income is about $53,000, 32% lower than whites.

As a result of Trump’s authoritarian arrogance, the good guys are finally fed up and punching back. In rapid-response battle mode that I haven’t seen Democrats take up since candidate Bill Clinton’s Campaign-‘92 war room, the Governor of New York and the head of NYC’s MTA immediately countered Trump’s regal pronouncement that congestion pricing was dead with a patriotic middle finger and a lawsuit.

I was po’d at Hochul last July when she briefly bailed on NYC’s congestion pricing program, but she’s going to the mat (and court) to fight for it now.

The congestion pricing nerds’ fearless rejoinders have taken on a fierce tone of urban populism.

Congestion pricing detractors are usually the ones who corner the common-folk angle on the issue. Charging people to drive in from District 12 to The Capitol, they harangue, is elitist. But Trump, who’s openly playing Donald Sutherland’s Coriolanus Snow himself in this fight and literally IDing himself as the king, has given progressives a clear opening. Gov. Hochul, transit riders, and MTA head Janno Lieber (with the quote of the week: “This is not the first time a president has said ‘drop dead’ to New York”) have struck back as the actual commoners. Arguing for local control and citing stats about how the new policy is already helping burdened commuters by reducing traffic migraines, easing car commute times, increasing foot traffic for local small business, and spiking transit ridership (while simultaneously providing funding for basic transit system repairs), New York City, of all places, is now poised to humiliate Trump’s shallow populist posturing: About 85% of the people who come into Manhattan’s central business district—where congestion project would be implemented—take public transit to begin with.

According to the live traffic data, congestion pricing has improved travel times.*

NYC’s pro-city populism is the ultimate affront to MAGA, and as Trump tries to shut it down, I’d say the emperor has no clothes because at its core the anti-congestion pricing rhetoric from MAGA is comically flawed: If the city is such a god-forsaken place, why is it so important to suburbanites to be able to flock downtown? Given that the ability to live a suburban lifestyle is only feasible—and sustainable—thanks to the offset that dense housing and commercial centers provide, it seems more than fair to ask suburbanites to help cover the costs of running a popular destination city.

*Excellent footnote: the go-to data tracker for Manhattan’s new congestion pricing program—which compares travel times before and after congestion pricing went into effect on January 5th, is a tool built by a college econ student (and his brother) for a class project. Talk about Transit Oriented Teens.

The tracker uses real-time traffic data from Google Maps to calculate traffic times for chosen routes and days. The data is presented as a line graph of traffic times before and after congestion pricing went into effect on January 5th. Compare one line to the other to see whether traffic times have increased or decreased.

Unsurprisingly, depending on the route and time of day, the new tolling scheme seems to be working — perhaps even better than expected.

2) Edith Wharton

This is the fourth time the brilliant early 20th Century American writer Edith Wharton has taken a spot on my weekly obsessions list.

That’s because not only did I read another one of her slow-burn short stories this week that illuminates the shadows of the human condition, but I’m now six chapters into her 1905 novel, The House of Mirth.

The short story, “Autre Temps” (“Other Times, Other Customs,” as it was called when it was first published in Century magazine in 1911) is from “The New York Stories of Edith Wharton,” a special edition New York Review of Books collection I’ve been dipping into and reading since last August, i.e. savoring.

This story is about Mrs. Lidcote, a middle-aged woman who has been ostracized by her aristocratic set for her disreputable personal history—divorcing and remarrying (enough of a transgression in its own right) and then divorcing again. She’s surprised to learn that her daughter, following in the same transgressive divorcee footsteps, is, however, not being ousted from society. With a generational change in values, young Leila is actually blossoming in her second marriage as part of the nouveau riche set; this knavish tax bracket is Wharton’s area of expertise, and she uses her immersive tale to explore the cutting vagaries of human psychology.

The revelatory pain point for Mrs. Lidcote is that while she feels some sense of liberation in the new feminism, she’s not convinced it’s hers to have. Even more crushing, with no idea what this freedom could even bring her, Mrs. Lidcote chooses to retreat back into her comfortable isolation.

Early in the story, Wharton foreshadows: “New York was the sphinx whose riddle she must read or perish.”

Wharton’s second novel, published in 1905, and written when she was 43-years-old, is about 29-year-old jeune fille à marier, Lily Bart.

The novel The House of Mirth, recommended as a fix for my growing Wharton habit by bookstore genius Valium Tom—he says is the best novel ever written (and also a City Canon classic)—begins like a movie. The opening montage follows protagonist Lily Bart, a 29-year-old jeune fille à marier (so, not so jeune, anymore) around midtown Manhattan. We come upon her in the first paragraph in Grand Central Station through the eyes of the unencumbered, cool, and sardonic bachelor, Lawrence Selden, an acquaintance from her social circle. Lily, in “her desultory air,” has evidently missed her 3:30 train north. With time to kill until the late train, she decides to join him for tea, and they head through the throng, exit the station and walk west a block along 42nd St. to Madison Ave. and up to Selden’s top floor brick and limestone bachelor flat. After a flirtatious round of tea and conversation, Lily heads back down to the street where she runs into the plump, nosy, and unctuous Mr. Rosedale. After an unsettling conversation, she’s off in a hansom back to Grand Central to catch the late afternoon north-to-the-country train. Once she’s settled in, she meets two others from her crowd aboard the train, pretty and “serpentine” Bertha Dorset and sheltered and wealthy, Percy Gryce. The train is taking them all to Lily’s friend Judy Trenor’s country estate for a weekend getaway of late night bridge games, walks in the setting summer splendor, and ultimately, for ruminating about things that point to larger things: cheque-book calculations over a shrinking balance and age lines on her face. Even the candlelight blur (Lily hastily turns out the wall light in her room as a preventative measure) can’t obscure them.

“The collapse of a house party,” Wharton writes early in Ch. 7, in perhaps some more foreshadowing. (It’s also a great name for down-tempo set of dub.)

3) Funded Inclusionary Zoning, FIZ

Yes, I’m psyched that the Washington state legislature has a bill in play that would subsidize affordable housing along transit routes. And I wrote a PubliCola column this week urging Seattle to follow suit.

But what I’m really obsessed with here—and what I’m actually trying to expose in Seattle—is the prevalence of reactionary lefties; I credit Christopher Hitchens with coining the perfect derisive description for this set: “Reactionary Utopianists.”

This left leaning faction clings to “authenticity” and “back in the day” gatekeeping in the same way MAGA clings to “real” American gatekeeping. It’s a kind of purity pathology that shows up in “neighborhood character” housing battles in what I call the “Keep Austin Weird” crowd; which seems more like “Keep Austin White,” if you ask me. (Scroll scroll scroll down here for my write up on Max Holleran’s Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing, which outs this kind of NIMBYism in progressive clothing).

These are the Bernie Bros. who idle in a macho Romanticism where knee jerk anti-developer politics often rush to shut down opportunities for new housing as if developers were guilty of manufacturing and selling meth as opposed to apartments.

Likewise, in their own knee jerk anti-development politics, Social Justice lefties can exhibit a similar provincial and reactionary idealism; Lydia Polgreen wrote an insightful column about leftist nativism last year, which I quoted at length at the time when I took a shot at writing about this tricky topic.

So, in my otherwise straightforward column praising the legislation (the bill, which aims to increase density along transit lines, subsidizes mandates on developers to build affordable housing by helping it pencil out with a tax exemption), I also took the time to give a bit of background context so I could outline this disconcerting dimension of the left.

First, a little history. Known as transit-oriented development, or TOD, housing around transit stops is a longtime priority for pro-density urbanists. In Washington State, I trace its origin back to the 2009 (!) legislative session, when the housing advocates at Futurewise first took up the cause.

At that time, their nascent pro-housing movement unwittingly stirred up a hornets’ nest of anti-development opposition from both the homeowner right (who are touchy about “neighborhood character”) and the social justice left (who often equate new housing with developer “giveaways” and displacement).

Thankfully, a lot has changed since then. First of all, gentrification has escalated exponentially under Seattle’s low-density status quo, a trend that calls b.s. on the NIMBY thesis that denser zoning is the cause of gentrification. If anything, the last 10 years under single-family protectionist policies show that it’s the opposite: Sequestering multifamily housing into a minuscule slice of the city’s residential areas causes gentrification.

And, more importantly: The pro-density “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement of the past decade has re-framed the density debate in a way that has attracted social-justice lefties. YIMBYs now talk about municipal land use regulations in the context of historic redlining and current exclusionary zoning laws that wall off huge portions of cities like Seattle from lower-income families and renters. As a result, lefties no longer stand in lockstep with wealthier “neighborhood character” obstructionists like they used to.

I’m All Lost In, #70: Neo-Soul, new Urbanism, and new flowers.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#70

Before I get to this week’s obsessions, I’ve got a listening recommendation: Start a playlist using Ego Ella May as your prompt (and maybe in particular, her song with Hector Plimmer, “Sonnet 17.”). You’ll know you’re floating in the right space if another slow-jams artist, Gotts Street Park, shows up in the mix. These musicians are all part of South London’s current neo-soul (or more accurately, neo-Sade) movement, which also includes artists such as ELIZA, Cleo Soul, and the KTNA.

I’ve also got an important reading recommendation: the LA Times’ obituary on city planning genius Donald Shoup. Shoup, a longtime UCLA professor, earned his superstar status among new-urbanists by upending conventional wisdom about parking policy. Shoup, who was 86 when he died on February 6, long challenged the notion that abundant parking is a good thing. The obituary summarizes his iconoclastic POV:

Free street parking, Shoup wrote, makes parking and driving worse. The low cost creates a scarcity of spaces that leads people to spend time and fuel circling blocks in misery. And city planners’ efforts to solve this problem by mandating that homes and businesses provide more cheap parking only worsen the situation.

According to Shoup, this parking conundrum is foundational to many of the ills in modern urban life: congestion, sprawl, pollution and high housing costs.

From Shoup’s LA Times obituary; pictured in the 1970s when his iconoclastic ideas about parking first emerged. And pictured recently when those ideas guided the neo-urbanist movement.

1) Shoup’s insistent and influential hot take on parking leads me to this week’s first obsession, State Sen. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia)—or, more specifically, Bateman’s parking reform bill, which I wrote about on PubliCola last Friday. And thank you Erica for leaving in my goofball line about “car(bon)-centric lifestyles.”

Bateman’s latest bill, a longstanding urbanist wish-list item to get rid of mandatory parking minimums (they add hefty costs to building housing and perpetuate car(bon)-centric lifestyles), could once again force Seattle to up its game when it comes to enacting progressive planning policy.

My larger hope is that Bateman, who also chairs the state senate’s housing committee, steps in and altogether overrules Seattle’s touchy, anti-housing zoning code (and the blindly privileged rhetoric of Seattle’s provincial homeowner class who’ve been testifying ad nauseam at City Council this month against any inkling of density that’s proposed in Seattle’s new Comprehensive Plan). Bateman, who already nudged Seattle to build more housing with a starter upzone bill she passed in 2023, is well positioned to usher through the  long list of pro-housing legislation that’s cued up in the state legislature right now.

This list, chronicled and catalogued by Sightline Institute, of green metropolis legislative proposals includes reforms that could, among many Shoup-ista ideas, rein in obstructionist “historic landmark” campaigns, incentivize (rather than tangle up) eco housing innovations, and fund inclusionary zoning, or FIZ (something I editorialized for last February).

I followed up my parking news brief about Bateman’s bill with a full blown column about another one of the pro-housing bills in play in the state legislature right now, a transit oriented development mandate.

After this intro, “Calling Mayor Bateman, calling Mayor Bateman! We need your help. Again!,” I landed here:

What I love about the council’s high-pitched opposition to adding a small amount of tightly controlled density is that it exposes the mendacious reasoning behind a core NIMBY argument: “Concurrency.” Concurrency is the obstructionist idea that you can’t add density to neighborhoods until you first add bus routes and other infrastructure. It’s actually the reverse—and I’ll get to that in a second—but for starters: It’s disingenuous to claim, as the anti-housing (homeowning) contingent did at a January 29 public hearing, that you oppose density in your neighborhood because your neighborhood lacks transit—and then come out against a plan to target density along transit lines.

If the argument against adding density is that we don’t have the transit to support it, then why are council members like Moore intent on taking Maple Leaf off the list of new neighborhood centers?  The area of concern for Moore that’s slated for the upzone, between NE 85th and NE 91st, sits on a frequent bus line (the 67) between two light rail stops, Roosevelt and Northgate. (Moore called this workhorse route the “one little bus” that serves the neighborhood.)

2) Playing Scrabble

Similar to every item on last week’s list, here’s another dispatch from my Trump-era escapism.

Sunday night, 2/9/25

I’ve been hauling out my old Scrabble board this week, which had been tucked away on a shelf for a decade (… or maybe decades? There’s a faded anti-George W. Bush sticker on the box.)

Unlike, say, my old laptop, my Scrabble board still works. And not only did I still have nearly all the tiles, but there was a mysterious extra E tile that I doctored with a pen to fill in for a missing O.

I got in three games this week, even taking the board out of my apartment for one game at a cozy bar—the Pine Box (again), a new favorite spot on the downtown edge of Capitol Hill, “The Drag Beyond the Drag.” I like The Pine Box’s jackfruit sandwich.

My Scrabble scores aren’t quite up to form yet, lingering in the high 200s rather than the mid 300s, but a couple of 38-point plays (and my 2-1 record) have me feeling like my current sally away from doom scrolling will last a solid spell.

3) This week’s third item is also prompted by my revulsion to Trumpism. You’ve heard of the Iron Age? This is ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s and ancient Roman poet Ovid’s term for the grim final stage of humanity; the fifth stage (in Hesiod’s Works and Days) or the fourth stage (in Ovid’s Metamorphoses).

According to both poets, this bleak era in human history is characterized by a breakdown in the social contract when lies, war, greed, and borders are the norm. Wrongdoing prevails.

Enter the Greek goddess Astraea. I’m piecing together a few different stories, but Astraea, the goddess of justice, evidently paused to gaze up at the sky during her faltering sojourn on earth as justice gave way to abuse. Seeing no stars above—a reflection of the dark epoch—she started to cry. However, Astraea’s tears eventually enriched the ground and soon, bright star-shaped asters sprang up.

My takeaway? Even as President Trump and his creepy acolytes are busy abandoning justice, they are simultaneously sowing the seeds of their fascist movement’s own demise.

The district attorneys and lead prosecutors, including Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, who resigned in protest of Trump’s order to drop the corruption case against corrupt NYC mayor Eric Adams are this week’s flowers.

Hopefully there will soon be more.

I’m All Lost In, #69: Familiar Retreats

I’m All Lost In …

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#69

Like everyone else, I’m obsessing about the temper tantrum coup that’s taking place in D.C. right now; obsessing that I don’t know what I can do, obsessing about how the Democrats are not putting up a fight, and how the New York Times, with their appeasement coverage, is still…still!…pretending all this is normal.

Recommended headline, NYT:

Trump and Billionaire Ally Stage Lawless, Corrupt Coup.

As to the “What can I do?” question, Mario Savio’s 1960s exhortation to “Put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…” certainly feels right. That is: It’s time for bodies in the streets. Isn’t that what I’ve been imagining my whole life?

Unfortunately, I can’t help thinking that massive protests would be susceptible to violence of our own, or to Proud Boy (Brown Shirt) provocateurs, or to Trump’s twisted framing. And this is exactly what Trump wants. It will be the cover for his Reichstag Fire moment so he can officially declare an authoritarian state.

Perhaps, though, there’s a silver lining in that. Prompting Trump’s martial law clampdown may be the only thing that makes the majority of the country wake up.

It’s nuts that I’m even having to write this. But it’s also impossible to ignore the fact that the terrorists—i.e, Trump and MAGA—have won.

Trump’s oligarchy power grab is all I’m thinking about right now, so this week’s installment is not my usual list of obsessions, but rather an accounting of where I’ve been taking comfort, how I’ve been escaping. And mostly, it’s been to familiar retreats.

In turn, some of this week’s items are returns to favorites I’ve written about here before.

For starters, there’s Post Pike Bar & Cafe, which I wrote about in December when I mooned over their toasted sourdough vegan pesto sandwich. While I definitely got the pesto sandwich on one of this week’s frequent late afternoon visits to Post Pike (and where I’d inevitably run into my pal Charles), I’m now partial to their dripping Hummus Wrap with its sliced cucumber, tomato, spinach, and fresh banana peppers (the winning ingredient)—all rolled in a spinach tortilla.

Post Pike Bar & Cafe, 2/6/25

In addition to having good-for-you, cozy, and lovingly assembled sandwiches, Post Pike is an easygoing, small dive bar, where you can nestle into a booth and get work done unbeknownst to the playful regular crowd at the bar and the handful of other folks tucked into tables of their own while mellow jams (a lot of Quiet Storm R&B this week) lilting on the sound system.

Another magnetic spot I returned to this week to seek calm: Kajiken, the Japanese noodle place just off Cal Anderson Park. I first wrote about Kajiken when XDX and I went there over the winter holidays.

Once again, it was jam packed with chatty, eager diners on a random Monday night.

Once again, the staff was welcoming and warmly upbeat.

Once again, the city geography of this glowing spot, kitty-corner from the bustling city center park, makes you feel like you’re stepping out among hansoms and women in tea gowns.

And most of all, once again, I savored every bite of the Mushroom Aburasoba, a full bowl of shimeji and king trumpet mushrooms, rich spinach, soft tofu, and red onions piled over al dente soba noodles.

A bit more familiar with the Kajiken drill this time, I ordered two add-ons: bamboo shoots (game changer) and corn. And I doused the healthy noodle smorgasbord with all the table condiments, including chili paste, sesame seeds, vinegar, and oil.

I’ve also found myself gravitating over to the “Drag Beyond the Drag,” as I’ve taken to calling the boisterous and cramped southwestern edge of Capitol Hill that rubs against the freeway where my neighborhood segues into Downtown.

This is the late-night-eats and bar strip on Olive Way where I’d landed a few times earlier this month— getting a messy Middle Eastern gyro sandwich with XDX a couple of Friday nights ago, and then back again the next night, with Valium Tom for a substantive cheese pizza.

So it was that several times this week, I ended up walking the extra 10 minutes to find escape on this corner of the neighborhood. I was there for Thursday evening drinks (and a hot pretzel) with my pal Glenn as we settled in at the low-key, but electric Revolver Bar, where they spin vinyl (on this occasion, they had the Talking Heads’ 1978 LP More Songs About Buildings and Food playing as we talked the night away). And then on the following Tuesday night, I ended up just around the corner at The Pine Box for a savory jackfruit sandwich and more deep conversation.

This week also included a Sunday morning walk in a dreamscape snow shower to an old Central District favorite, Cafe Selam at 27th & Cherry for an Ethiopian Ful breakfast: berbere spiced fava beans covered in onions, tomatoes, serrano chilis, eggs, and feta cheese with an airy and crusty baguette. Apologies to my vegan self, but there’s no forgoing this delicious dish.

Back to cafe Selam for Ful medames, 2/2/25

Charles & ECB, 1/31/25

Charles & ECB, 1/31/25

Other comfort zone retreats this week included: madcap Friday night drinks with great longtime friends Charles and ECB at St. John’s Bar, and then promptly taking the light rail from Capitol Hill to Pioneer Square Station (and then walking through an alley off Yesler Way) to a new downstairs rock club called Baba Yaga to watch an earnest indie rock songwriter named Emma Danner and her band Red Ribbon.

Red Ribbon @ Baba Yaga in Pioneer Square, 1/31/25

Finally, and perhaps this explains my 19th Century disassociation (when I was pretending to be ambling among the gas lamps on Central Park East after dinner at Kajiken): I’ve returned to Edith Wharton.

You may remember last summer I was lightly obsessed with Wharton’s short story collection, The New York Stories of Edith Wharton. It turns out, I’d left off about 270 pages in with several stories to go.

I picked the book back up this week, starting with her 1909 story “Full Circle.” I was immediately drawn back in: “…those piercing notes of the American thoroughfare that seem to take a sharper vibration from the clearness of the medium through which they pass…;” “…they wanted his opinion on everything: on Christianity, Buddhism, tight lacing, the drug habit, democratic government, female suffrage and love.”

I’m not sure I want his (the tortured and defensive main character’s) opinions on that list, but some of those early 20th Century topics, like democratic government, do seem germane today.

Dino’s large cheese pizza; Sheila Heti’s short story; and a young YIMBY’s succinct pro-housing testimony.

I’m All Lost In

#68

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

1) The 18” Round Cheese Pizza at Dino’s

Setting aside veganism for a large cheese pizza with my pal Valium Tom has been a birthday tradition (on both our bdays) ever since I otherwise went vegan in 2018. Nowadays, I’ve extended this cheesy transgression to basically whenever we get together. While I rarely eat cheese, I’m no longer a Maoist when it comes to being vegan, and for my latest, overdue pizza hang out with Tom—which we’d scheduled for Saturday night—we lackadaisically decided on Big Mario’s.

Big Mario’s, I guess.

Though Big Mario’s hardly constitutes pizza nirvana, their slack, greasy slices do fit the bill for our semi-regular pizza get-togethers. For the record, in our bygone (and my pre-vegan) days, we’d hit the long-since-vanished Piecora’s where their slack crust was somehow also crisp and pillowy, making for the best pizza pies in town.

Last time at Seattle’s Piecora’s, April, 2014

Fortuitously, on Friday night, after I got a mushroom paste gyro at Yalla with XDX, she decided to get her post-whisky fix at the pizza spot next door, Dino’s, a red neon landmark I’d been aware of, but had never tried.

Upon entering Dino’s, a retro grunge place with a friendly sit-wherever-you- like-guys staff, I couldn’t help notice the full-moon-sized cheese pizzas basking in their oven racks. I promptly texted Tom to recommend a change in our pending plans. He texted right back with an exclamation mark noting that his Gen Z son was “a fan of that place.”

With smokier cheese and spicier red sauce than Big Mario’s slices, and—akin to Piecora’s—having a spongy density with a pinch of magical yeast, Dino’s pies mean Valium Tom and I no longer have to settle for pizza that merely fits the bill. Dino’s 18” classic—rich marinara sauce, plush mozzarella, fresh basil, and a fluffy oven-singed crust—tops the bill.

1/25/25

Evidently, I’m not the only one who’s keen on Dino’s. After telling my pal Glenn about Saturday night’s tasty outing, he reported that his crew did a pizza bracket a few years back and Dino’s, which also serves square, semi-deep-dish slices, carried the day in their citywide pizza pie taste test.

2) Sheila Heti’s Short Story in the 1/27/25 the New Yorker

Contemporary writer Sheila Heti has shown up on this obsessions list before; in February 2024, I was taken with her poetic and racy diary, which she creatively reshuffled—alphabetically, by the first word of every sentence.

This week, stuck for something to read before bed (the 800-page Hanya Yanagihara novel I started earlier this month just isn’t taking), I was happy to see Heti’s byline on the latest New Yorker fiction piece.

I don’t know if there’s a term for this genre of fiction where creepy and slightly off-kilter, near-future settings are draped over understated short stories. (Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin’s 2009 collection, Mouthful of Birds, translated in 2019, turned me on to this unsettling blend of casual and magical.

Heti’s The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea is seemingly set at an early-20th Century private girls school in an enigmatic late-21st century world war all at once. Even more disorienting, the students talk in the contemporary 2025 therapy speak of precocious tween girls who likely go on five-star vacations with their progressive moms.

The school is housed on a boat that’s sailing the world to avoid the war and it’s here we meet blunt and cynical Lorraine, extroverted and performatively mystical Dani, and naive and depressed Flora who play out a mild Lord of the Flies drama involving a dorm room oracle (a photo of a former-classmate-turned-child-star). This Delphic soothsayer dispenses divination about Dani’s epistolary crush on a boy named Sebastien.

There are several meaningful surprises as Heti’s teeny bopper myth moves toward its ennui-ridden conclusion, including Sebastien’s vulnerable eloquence, Flora’s class conscious denouement (daydreaming as she’s mopping the deck), and Lorraine’s alarmed apology.

The odd tonal and historical dualities in Heti’s story (which also reads like a quiet spoof of the witchy overtones you’d find in some Shirley Jackson short story about quasi supernatural girls at a boarding school) achieve comedic yet literary elegance as Dani—with the philosophical inner turmoil of a Queen’s English Jane Austen protagonist—ruminates over the idea of a hand job.

3) A YIMBY’s Succinct Testimony

After a parade of typical (and banal) testimony—”I support more housing, but…”— at this week’s city council hearing on the Comprehensive Plan’s slight upzone for more density in Seattle’s traditional single-family zones (“but developers…” “but neighborhood character…” “but renters…”), a young Asian guy who only gave his name as Rata challenged the selfish privilege of Seattle single-family housing preservationists.

Hello, my name is Rata. There’s a lot of fear going on. Seattle’s growing. And with growth comes a lot of that fear. We need to house 200,000 people in the next what 10 years. … We’re gonna put all that in a place that already has density? You need to do the brave thing. Open up more land on single family housing, so we can put more multi-generational, more multi-family housing on there. That’s the only way to do this. That’s the only way we’re going to meet our needs. …

His concise testimony, at the 17:46 minute mark here, was music to my pro-apartment ears.

His conclusion was perhaps the most powerful part, though.

As we see the climate crisis will bring more climate refugees to the Pacific Northwest. And we need to meet that need.

While this certainly strays into conjecture rather than tangible data, Rata’s dystopian visions of (likely) environmental catastrophe work regardless of their speculative nature. Much as the best science fiction calls attention to the implications of contemporary missteps, Rata gave the pro-housing position the weight it demands, especially over transitory issues like “neighborhood character.” By alerting people to the environmental hazards of our low-density status quo (where the housing equity, transit feasibility, and resource efficiency that’s needed to avert climate disaster isn’t possible) his dramatic touch put upzoning in its appropriately urgent context.

————

And lastly, this week’s recommended listening: Put on this chill playlist, “Healing Harp,” at bedtime.

Waxing & Waning publishes “Curb-Cut Effect” and “Not Exarcheia Sonnet.”

I'm happy to have two poems, "Curb-Cut Effect" & "Not Exarcheia Sonnet," published in the latest edition of Waxing & Waning.

Curb-Cut Effect

(when a targeted innovation benefits more people than it’s designed to assist.)

Design your city for ghosts. Make sure. there are plenty of places for them to sit; ethereal as they are, they get tired of floating around all day.

Design cities for ghosts. Walls don’t work anyway. The HVAC is philosophy.

Design cities for those who have died. They get tired of being lonely. It will also be a lithe city for the living, with inevitable segues to kitchen table oaths.

I noticed my hands were shaking. The paramedics tested my vital signs. Immobile, pale as a ghost.

Design your city for teenage pregnancy scares. Make sure there’s someone to lose hours with. Set an

empty chair by your bed.

Not Exarcheia Sonnet

(prompted by Megan Fernandes’ city sonnets)

Rooftops the color of ube in morning light; a trick I noticed at home not in Exarcheia. The places we visit with rats in the walls stay with us. So, here I am seeing

chimeras. Penumbras showing futures. Angels accompanying commuters. Houses surrounded by rubies.

I mistake where I’ve been for where I am;

the cities I’ve been to, for the city I’m in.

For example, am I eating honey-soaked baked goods across from the riot police or am I pushing people deeper into the carceral system?

This is the opposite of: We-are-now-as- distant-from-then-

than-then-was-from-then.

Because it’s still not as distant from when

I first listened to Me and the Devil on Vocalion records.

The ancient world is awake early this morning, mopping the paving stones in Exarcheia,

listening.

1/24/25

Why isn’t Musk’s Nazi salute a major story?; What do Catherine, Matt, and David have to say about the Australian Open?; How do you make a great tofu scramble?

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#67

Before I get into what I’m all lost in this week, a couple of quick notes.

1/24/25, Falafel and Fityr with XDX on the tipsy edge of Capitol Hill.

First: At Yalla, a Middle Eastern kitchen window for the tipsy nighttime crowd on Olive Way’s stretch of dive bars and greasy dinner spots located at the edge of Capitol Hill, the veggie and vegan menu is longer than the meat menu. They specialize in flatbread (or Saj) wraps. After XDX and I celebrated our last night as neighbors by walking downtown to check out the collection at the indie art space that’s taken over Pike Street’s vacant Banana Republic, and then heading around the corner to a hotel bar for some generous whiskeys, we cruised back up the hill. And there we were at Yalla. We got the Fityr, a gyro wrap swaddled tightly in tinfoil and jammed with roasted mushroom paste, green pepper, garlic, tomato, green olives, cucumber, and greens plus a side of fluffy falafel. Thanks to this delicious hot spot, I’ll be venturing over to the downtown edge of Capitol Hill more often.

Second: Back on October 25, I wrote this lone sentence about R&B revivalists SAULT: “This week’s recommended listening: I’m liking the juxtaposition of the sing-song ‘60s girl group vocals and the sophisticated Afro-centric sounds of SAULT.” It turns out, they were the perfect artist to tune in as I set out to find a prompt this week for a late night “Go to Artist Radio” of hazy soul sides. But I’d like to amend the description I wrote in October. I’m not sure why I said “sing-song.” SAULT’s music, and the other neo-Quiet Storm bass-centric tracks in the cue from related downtempo artists like Amber Mark and James Blake, bore no resemblance to nursery rhymes. Much more like bedroom jams.

Third: I felt validated and titillated (and not surprised) that the word “subway” came up in an article this week about a 2000-year-old goddess statuette that turned up in a trash bin in Greece.

The discovery of ancient artifacts in surprising places is not uncommon in a country as rich in history and archaeology as Greece. Relics are often unearthed during construction projects, such as subway system excavations.

…

"Here we are in the shadow of the Acropolis, digging five subway stations," said William G. Stead, the construction project's general manager, still awed by the thought after more than two years on the job. He referred to the stations being built within the confines of the ancient city, where the archeological finds are the richest.

In the Spring of 2023, during my sightseeing trip to the Acropolis and ancient Agora, I got giddy when I realized the poetic license I’d been taking to connect Greek mythology and mass transit—an animating theme in my poems—had come to life: It turned out that one of the exhibits, The Altar of the 12 Gods, was at the edge of the Agora right by the city Metro and was only re-discovered during construction of the city’s railway in 1891.

5/29/23, The Agora grounds, Athens, Greece

That is to say: the train and the 12 Gods share some sacred space. I captured the exciting overlap on iPhone video:

5/29/23, The Agora grounds, Athens, Greece, by the Monastiraki Metro station.

I have a poem about this moment in my current manuscript City States. [Omonia is the name of the metro station that was near our apartment.]

Head of a Youth

 Are the 12 Gods gaslighting me?

The You Are Here map

keeps saying “The Altar of the 12 Gods”

is too. But it’s nowhere to be found.

I ask a grounds attendant and she directs me

to the wrong ruin. Head of a youth. 

Elongated face, almond eyes,

flames for locks. 

Body gone.

“The Altar of the 12 Gods,”

built in 522 BC,

destroyed in the 3rd century AD;

rediscovered across the street

in the late 19th century by

tunneling crews working on the new electric railway.

It’s here. Walk down

the alley of myrtles today to Omonia, 

take the subway three stops.

Demeter, rediscovered by Rachel Carson, is my favorite. 

Hermes, played by Johnny Rotten, is my favorite.

Aphrodite, stains like tears below her eyes from the oxidation

of bronze lashes, is unknown.

Who knows

what other transport lies

beneath our sneakers to discover?

Okay. Onto this week’s obsessions.

1) Elon Musk’s Nazi Salute Should be Gettlng More National Attention

Why isn’t robber baron Elon Musk’s sieg heil a major news story? In case you missed it, and you may have if you rely on major outlets for your news: Trump’s $250 million campaign backer gave a Nazi salute from the stage at a Trump inauguration day event; Musk is the No. 1 Trump whisperer and is currently heading up Trump’s official White House effort to slash government. This man, the richest man in the world (net worth ~$430 billion), has amassed sweeping power in the United States. And there he was reveling in Nazi bravado in front of cheering Trump crowds. The New York Times “big story,” ‘What Elon Musk’s Salute Was All About,” isn’t a news account, but basically a muddied think piece talking about the history of “Roman” salutes while puzzling over Musk’s intentions.

January 20, 2025

Fear struck my DNA when I saw the video of Trump’s malevolent patron giving his Nazi salute, but the only hard-hitting assessments in the U.S. (Europe is appropriately aghast) were on social media. And, big surprise, the posts I saw there were largely about the ADL and how they are evil Zionists.

This follows a well-worn and predictable script. When it comes to talking about antisemitism, the Jews themselves are routinely cast as part of the problem.

In this instance, the ADL had become something of a fall guy for the left.

Certainly, the ADL’s response to Musk’s Brown Shirt politics, was unacceptable. The ADL said Musk “made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.” Um, no. This is the same Elon Musk who has a history of pushing antisemitic conspiracy theories on X, the ubiquitous social media site he owns. And just last month, he came out in support of Germany’s Nazi-adjacent party, Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Gratingly, the ADL went on with their inexcusable Musk apology to say he should be “given a bit of grace and even the benefit of the doubt.” Again, no; and for the record, Musk, who gave the Nazi salute twice, never apologized himself. In fact, he responded to the ADL’s brain dead response by saying ““Thanks guys,” punctuated with laughing emoji. Because yes, it was an intentional sieg hiel. As a friend said: Musk clearly practiced the gesture in the mirror that morning.

Should the ADL be reprimanded for gaslighting us about Musk. Of course. But it’s curious that the majority of condemnations I saw directed at the ADL didn’t work to re-focus on the poisonous reality of Musk’s antisemitism, but rather, very quickly blurred the focus, veering into condemning the ADL for supporting Israel.

On my feeds, anger at the “Apartheid Defense League” overtook anger at Musk. Not only is it typical for overt displays of antisemitism to turn away from the original toxic speech and turn to finger pointing at Jews, but, more telling is how quickly they turn into discussions about Israel and calls (these days) to “Free Palestine.” Pro-Palestine activists would have more credibility when they say their anti-Israel stance isn’t aligned with antisemitism if they didn’t simultaneously seize gross instances of antisemitism to condemn Israel.

For the record, 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.

2) The Tennis Podcast

I know I’ve been lauding my parasocial besties—Catherine Whitaker, David Law, and Matt Roberts, the insightful and playful co-hosts of The Tennis Podcast—since I first came across their thorough reports back in mid-November.

Well, I’ve been hanging out with them every day this week as they post daily Australian Open dispatches from Melbourne Park, so here I go again.

Roberts, Whitaker, and Law serve hot takes with charm.

Their daily wrap-ups for this week’s Grand Slam are a delight. And they’re usually recorded in the wee hours from some empty coffee lounge or conference room where you can hear a vacuum cleaner whirring in the background, or in one episode, dad figure Law—scaring off a few late night mice as he stomped around the room.

With emcee Whitaker’s hilarity and snark always puncutated by a conclusive and drawn out British “right;” Law’s thoughtful “isn’t it?” analysis colored by his veteran reporter’s deep knowledge, and, most thrilling, their former intern, young Matt Roberts’ wide-eyed yet incisive takes that regularly veer into the effortlessly philosophical, these maximum tennis nerds offer unvarnished reality checks on all the action. And players!

I’m scared to listent today (Saturday), though. Surging Madison Keys beat Saby in a three-set thriller, 6-2, 2-6, 7-5, to win the Melbourne trophy.

3) My Tofu Scramble

Heat up a frying pan. Add earth balance margarine and almond milk.

Rinse, slice, and dice yellow onions. Sauté. When they’re golden brown, scoop a tablespoon full from the pan and set aside.

Rinse and slice mushrooms. Add to pan with the remaining onions. Continue to sauté. Rinse and dice broccoli florets. Add. Rinse and dice green bell pepper. Add. Sauté and stir all the veggies.

Crumble a block of firm tofu in with the sizzling veggies. Add plenty of nooch. Liberally sprinkle in turmeric. Add three pinches of black salt for a sulfuric umami kick; I use a pink black salt from a brand called Deep; be careful not to use much more than that because it doubles as sleeping medicine. Add more earth balance. Use a spatula to mix and toss.

Scoop the set-aside grilled onions onto two toasted slices of bread.

Rinse and thinly slice tomato. Sprinkle with black pepper. Lay over the onions.

Scoop a satisfying serving of the tofu and veggies onto two other slices of toasted bread for a gorgeously sloppy open face “scrambled egg” sandwich.

1/20/25

Great matches in Melbourne; anti-housing in Seattle; the vegan menu at 19th & Jackson

I’m All Lost In … 

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week. 

#66

I’ll get to this week’s list in a second, but first … 

Live Music of the Week: The opening act on Wednesday night’s experimental electronica bill at Vermillion Gallery—two bearded guys in overalls—literally took the floor; the pair rolled on the ground in a drone duet as they beamed signals to one another through DIY walkie talkies. Their conversational sonics ended in a feedback crescendo when they crawled toward one another and pressed their Fisher-Price handhelds together in a musical kiss.

Electronic musicians take the floor at Vermillion Gallery, 1/15/25

An orchestra of gear, Vermillion Gallery, 1/15/25

The digital meditations continued with another duet, Cecyl Ruehlen and Chelsey Lee Trejo, who took the stage loaded, by comparison, with an orchestra of gear: processors, synthesizers, an electric guitar, mallets, a clarinet, a cello bow, bells, and found instruments for a set of “hexachimeric” signals. I’m not sure what “hexachimeric” means, but like Terry Riley’s In C, this avant garde duo merged their electronic improvisations in a mutual key signature and then filled it up with lapping diatonic waves as the accompanying physical vibrations morphed into notes themselves, becoming rhythmic melody lines.

Cecyl Ruehlen and Chelsey Lee Trejo, Vermillion Gallery, 1/15/25

Cease Fire of the Week: The cease fire in Gaza announced Wednesday afternoon reminds me of the historic Islamist political flex in 1981 when the Iranians finally freed 52 American hostages after holding them for 444 days. It was an outgoing effu to then President Jimmy Carter timed perfectly to sync with incoming President Reagan's inauguration. The Hamas/Israeli cease fire and hostage exchange is set to start on Sunday, the day before Trump takes office. 

The critical difference this time: The effu to outgoing President Biden isn’t only coming from radical Islamists (Hamas), but, as reactionary politics are now the norm, the effu to American diplomacy is also coming from the radical right wing Israeli government and from Trump and MAGA America as well. 

The thing that will bite Trump in the ass, though: Per every “cease fire” between the radical right wing Israeli government and toxic Hamas, this one won’t hold either. 

Quote of the Week: David Law, who plays the straight man to his co-hosts Catherine Whitaker and Matt Roberts’ hooting and hollering on (my favorite podcast) The Tennis Podcast, got poetic this week when he described the scene at the Australian Open where rain delays had forced the tournament to overload a slew of matches into one evening. 

“They just put them on. All at the same time,” Law begins, “deep into the night.” 

And then, he described his atmospheric walk, “roaming the grounds in the dark, with floodlit matches going on everywhere.” 

…Which brings us to this week’s No. 1 obsession: The Australian Open. 

1) The first Grand Slam tournament on this year’s WTA calendar: The Australian Open

Every night this week, I found myself with multiple tabs open on my lap top toggling between ESPN+ broadcasts of early-round matches from Melbourne Park. 

Melbourne looks like a stunning city, by the way, judging from my computer-screen view; wow, the tree-lined Yarra River. During a break in the action, I texted my great friend Gregor Samsa, a tennis fangirl like me: We have to go one day. 

For now, it was a week of streaming a parade of riveting matches: My 2025 secret favorite, Russia’s Daria Kasatkina (No. 10) dismissed Bulgaria’s Viktoriya Tomova (No. 53) in two sets, 6-1, 6-3; recent NCAA women’s stars, including one I don’t like much, Emma Navarro (No. 8) winning an admittedly three-hour twenty minute masterpiece over Payton Stearns (No. 46); and my tennis hero Aryna Sabalenka (No. 1) remaining calm as she delivered some chess board winners to fend off Spain’s Jéssica Bouzas Maneiro (No. 54). 

There was also: the I’m-not-buying-it-yet comeback Version 2.0 from Naomi Osaka (No. 51); her first comeback attempt last year fell flat. Yes, she beat Czechia’s Karolina Muchova (No. 20) early in the week in an exciting match. But she went on to lose her next match, retiring after losing the first set in a tiebreak to Belinda Bencic (No. 294?). 

And then there was this week’s stunning upset, Qinwen Zheng (No. 5), who is emerging as the tour’s forlorn and troubled poet falling to Germany’s maddening Laura Siegemund (No. 79). Zheng, looked stoic, sad, and pensive, as she lost in two sets, 6-7 [3-7], 3-6.

Qinwen Zheng; I’m a little worried about her.

On my aforementioned favorite podcast, Catherine Whitaker re-enacted Zheng’s bewildered indignation at being called for a time violation: “Do you see what’s happening on the other side of the court?!” Whitaker cried in her regal British accent, noting Siegemund’s infamous reputation for slow-serve mind games. 

This is my week defined: Staying up to listen to Whitaker and her zippy co-hosts do their daily wrap ups after I’d just finished watching the very matches they were recapping. 

Unfortunately, I have to agree with one of their cold assessments: My favorite player Sabalenka is not thundering through the draw as she had during the 2024 season on her way to winning a batch of tournaments, including last year’s Australian Open. (The tennis reporters at the Athletic also took note of Saby’s tenuous form this week.) 

To be fair, Saby hasn’t dropped a set yet. As I said ^, she beat Maneiro (6-3, 7-5). And then, in a nerve-wracking win later in the week (which I watched heart in throat on the couch from my Pioneer Square office after landing there Thursday evening to retrieve my phone charger), she beat fellow bruising-ball-striker, Denmark's Clara Tauson (No. 41) 7-6 [7-5], 6-4. So, yes, she’s through to the 4th Round (the Round of 16). But I think it might be American Coco Gauff’s (No. 3) year; Gauff, known in my household as Ka-Pow Ka-Gauff, is blazing through without any complicated score lines. And we shouldn’t forget about Iga Swiatek (No. 2); albeit quietly, she’s been posting scary scores, reminiscent of her dominance early last year when she was the seemingly unvanquishable No. 1. 

Meanwhile, along with Kasatkina, who after beating Tomova, went on to beat Yafan Wang (No. 64) later in the week, 6-2, 6-0, a number of my 2025 players-to-watch are also still in the mix as Week 1 ended: Donna Vekic (No.19), Paula Badosa (No. 12), and Elena Rybakina (No. 7).

Daria Kasatkina in Melbourne

I’m not losing faith in Sabalenka, though. The thing about Daffy Saby these days is that she plays with a newfound confidence and calm. 

Whereas, under a personal storm cloud, she used to botch close matches—like the near-disaster against Tauson on Thursday night—you get the feeling now, as she comes up with clutch, rocket fire winners, that she’s going to pull it out. She seems to know this too. 

2) NIMBY Bingo 

In Seattle, the N in NIMBY (traditionally, Not in My Backyard), stands for Never in My Backyard. 

For fuck’s sake, we’ve been dealing with the anti-new housing privilege of local homeowners’ “neighborhood character” provincialism going back decades. Here’s a feature article I wrote more than 20 years ago about Seattle’s intransigent single family housing zone protectionists. And here we are today, still stuck with zoning code that prohibits apartments in roughly 70% of the city. 

As the city council started to take up the new, woefully inadequate 10-year zoning update (the Comp Plan) a few weeks ago, which once again infuriated touchy Seattle liberals, ECB came to the rescue on Blueksy hanging them by their own petard by quoting their unhinged council meeting comments about orcas and trees and shadows. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, cringing at the hypocrisy of Seattle liberals, re-posted Erica’s hilarious thread.

Thank you Erica for framing the pending Comp Plan debate. 

And thank you for striking again this week, posting this NIMBY Bingo card as the council formally opened hearings on the issue with a public meeting. 

All of these wrote objections drive me crazy. I once spoofed the “I’m a longtime resident of X local neighborhood,” by testifying at a city council meeting with the exact opposite intro: I wasn’t born here, I said, I’m not a lifelong resident of Ballard or Wallingford or Capitol Hill or Ravenna or Wedgwood or… at which point, then-council member and now mayor Bruce Harrell looked up from his computer utterly perplexed …. But I live here now, I continued, like the hundreds of thousands of people that have moved here in the last 20 years … 

I also can’t stand the trees rap. Developing Seattle with single family homes is what slaughtered Seattle’s tree canopy in the first place. It’s a little too late—and hypocritical—to complain that building a six-story building that houses ten times the number of people living in a single family home will somehow eliminate the city’s tree canopy. And p.s., Capitol Hill, one of the rare apartment friendly neighborhoods in the city, has some of the highest tree canopy. Why? Because building up rather than out saves more trees. 

The “concurrency” thing also defies logic; this is the argument that you can’t build more housing in quaint neighborhoods because the infrastructure and transit lines don’t exist to serve a bigger population. This is an obstructionist canard. Changing zoning isn’t going to bring thousands of new people overnight. Population growth happens over time. Asking Metro to run bus lines to a currently sparse street as a prerequisite for future density is a comically inefficient use of Metro dollars. Smarter policy: When a neighborhood reaches the point at which buses make sense, Metro should meet the need. 

But the trope that irks me most these days is the cloyingly self righteous go-to for every curiously embittered pseudo civic-minded crank: “I’m a taxpayer!” 

News flash: Paying taxes is not a solo project akin to your personal transaction at a restaurant. Everyone pays taxes. It’s a communal endeavor designed to meet collective needs. So, when someone rolls out the “I pay taxes” line of attack vis-à-vis their personal interest, they’re unwittingly reminding us (or whichever civil servant they’re berating) about the actual project of democratic governance: Balancing the needs of all taxpayers for across-the-board equity. In the context of the Comp Plan debate, that means building more units citywide in the taxpayers’ collective interest. 

3) The vegan menu at Moonlight Cafe

A Seattle treasure that I’d forgotten about and rediscovered this week: The Central District’s happily humble (and crowded) Moonlight Cafe at 19th & Jackson.

Vegan Vietnamese, 1/10/25

A decade-plus ago, My ex ex ex, a well-versed Seattle cool kid, turned me on to this vegan treasure where they have two menus: page upon page of traditional Vietnamese dishes and, with plant-based or chemistry-lab alternatives, a The-Upside-Down vegan version as well. 

My sense is that nobody comes here for the traditional dishes. I didn’t on Saturday anyway when I walked the 20 blocks over in the balmy evening to meet a friend for dinner. I ordered the vegan cashew veggie & tofu entree and a side of the addictive crispy veggie rolls. I ended up getting a second order of those. 

With its gluten-heavy faux versions of five-spice salmon, ginger fish, sesame beef, and sweet & sour chicken, this is Vietnamese comfort food for the noshy masses and hipster vegans.

The wrong artist; the Dylan movie; and Elena Rybakina’s troubling situation.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#65

A word about Jimmy Carter, who was once an ongoing obsession of mine. This was mostly 30 years ago when he represented my handhold on the 1970s, a decade I cherished as an antidote to the reactionary Reagan 1980s and the confusing 1990s. In 1994, some friends and I had plans to start a magazine called 2 Magazine—the 2 would be a big Sesame Street 2. The conceit, as an excuse to have a forum for all of our bratty 20-something opinions, was that 2 would be a magazine of “second opinions,” shorthand for some contrarian hot takes. Well: We planned to put Jimmy Carter on the cover of the the debut issue, perhaps in his sweater during the eloquent “Crisis of Confidence” speech (the misnamed “malaise” speech), with the words, “America’s Best President” emblazoned next to his picture.

By the way, this was several months before the movie Pulp Fiction came out, and we had also planned some teaser cover text that said: “John Travolta, Most Underrated Actor.” Oh, and “Queen, World’s Second Best Band.”

Here’s another contrarian opinion—I felt it then, and believe it more today in the wake of Carter’s death and the predictable posthumous narrative: The whole “Carter-wasn’t-a-great-president, but-the-work-he-did-afterward-was-exceptional, and it-set-the-standard-for-post-presidential-careers” is a lazy backhanded compliment that vastly undersells his presidency. Certainly, the stagflation 1970s were a downcast drag and Carter was an elbow-y prick of a president who exuded some backhanded false modesty himself. But damn, his colloquial candor, emphasis on human rights, environmental consciousness (those solar panels!), and, of course, the Camp David Accords were an inspiring civic vibe that elevated the American experiment and American values.

RIP Jimmy Carter (and with him again now, Rosalyn Carter, who made this weekly list in December 2023).

And one more dispatch from this week’s headlines: Congestion Pricing, which is another ongoing obsession of mine. Attentive readers may remember that last June, I lamented NY Governor Hochul’s decision to torpedo Manhattan’s congestion pricing plan. And so, I’m encouraged, despite the lower charge, that the plan—the first in the U.S.—finally came online this week.

CG is a fair and legitimate offset fee for people who choose to live environmentally risky lifestyles. Here’s what I wrote in June:

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

But to make the charge actually address the problem at hand (and perhaps make it more popular), I’d recommend sending the money back to the people who are paying the fee. The catch (for them) is that the money would pay for transit upgrades and affordable housing in their neighborhoods, so they can achieve the density they seem to crave.

Rather than call it Congestion Pricing, I’d call this Sustainability Pricing. Share the density. I’d also levy the fee (in my Seattle version) on cars crossing into commercial hubs citywide, not just entering downtown. I explained all this in a 2023 PubliCola column where I pitched an Urban Discover Pass.

Okay. This week’s obsessions:

1) Actress the Rock Band, not Actress the U.K. Electronica Musician

My concert alert algorithm (mis)led me to the High Dive on Sunday night.

One of my favorite artists from my own Abstract R & B playlist is Actress, an Afro-British experimental electronic pop musician. And I thought I had tickets to see him conduct one of his atmospheric beats and computer seances at the High Dive, a small music club in Fremont, this week. My anticipation came with a lingering footnote, though: I was curious why he was opening for an unknown Sonic Youth adjacent rock act (who only seemed to have one song online). And why was the show scheduled for a lonely Sunday night in early January.

Upon entering the club, my nagging questions were quickly answered. There was a traditional guitars-and-drums rock band tuning up on stage. And they had a banner unfurled behind them that said in no uncertain terms, Actress. This was no avant-garde sine wave artist from the U.K. As I joked to my date (who I’d sold on a gummy-friendly ambient set): I think these are teenagers from Ballard High School. Their shaggy rock and roll haircuts certainly looked more teen set than computer scientist.

Thankfully, these glamorous vagabonds put on a wonderful show: A noisy, dual electric guitar attack over a parade of bangers that seemed playful and politically charged all at once. Their politics—at one point the front man, who wore his guitar hanging high on his chest over his heavy blue and white embroidered poncho, called on all the POC people to dance—seemed to be an exuberant mix of Chicano Power and queer identity.

Blazing a Chuck Berry/Ace Frehley electric guitar stance (or more accurately, a New York Dolls Johnny Thunders’ strut in plastic rain boots) the campy lead guitarist liked to blow kisses and wink at the small crowd as she played the role of a Tribeca starlet, leaning into meta rock god guitar solos and posing for a fan’s clicking camera at the lip of the stage.

Chicano Power and rock and roll, Fremont’s High Dive, 1/5/25

Actress’ retro glam rock set had the energy of a stadium concert and despite the misleading billing, I was the opposite of disappointed on this lit Sunday night.

2) The Dylan Movie

Enough Baby Boom stories. Enough regurgitating white male rock-god hagiography. And also, too on-the-nose for my I-was-a-Rolling-Stone-magazine-reading teenage life. The Dylan movie was definitely. not. on my list.

I saw it anyway, and I loved it. It’s certainly told in shorthand Hollywood strokes and lazy signifying images rather than through patient character development and nuanced story telling. But it’s an utter joy to hang out in Jane Jacobs-era Greenwich Village with its street vendors, basement clubs, poets, SNCC and CORE kids, and swirling precursor 1960s counterculture, i.e., thrift store bohemians as opposed to grungy hippies. There’s also a breathtaking quick trip to Joan Baez’s chic California lair. The mod sports car in the driveway perfectly matches the indigenous art and throw rugs of the rooms inside.

Timothée Chalamet has Dylan’s remote, acid-tongued contrarian shtick down to a shtick—kind of an easy assignment, to be honest. But it is a ton of fun to watch wry Dylan irk the righteous liberal folk set. And really, it’s Ed Norton as the increasingly wounded Pete Seeger, who steals the show. Norton’s ability to capture Seeger’s ricocheting DNA as a canned white liberal do-gooder and a quietly egotistical musician—gives the movie its arc and tension. The critique about Seeger’s in-real-life folk scene powerhouse wife, Toshi, being relegated here to a sideline character is definitely true. Having been given very few lines, Toshi, played by Eriko Hatsune, is stuck making faces—adoring, pensive, put upon. I do think, though, the skilled Hatsune transcends the racist scripting by actually upstaging Chalamet in the big scene when Dylan goes electric at Newport.

I think I know the answer, but it was curious that Chalamet—who also nails Dylan’s signature vocals and angry guitar playing—performs The Times They are a Changin’ in full while excising one important verse of the original five.

I imagine singing it would have awkwardly recast the Baby Boom target audience’s sense of their own progressive legacy. Chalamet skips right over the suddenly-problematic third verse:

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'

On the other hand, I do think the movie missed a chance to accurately show how folk-era lefties were on point. While Woody Guthrie’s So Long, It's Been Good to Know Yuh definitely worked as a theme for Scoot McNairy’s well played turn as Dylan’s folk singing idol, there’s a more germane (“This machine kills fascists”) Guthrie song for 2024: Guthrie’s anti-America First song, Lindbergh, which ends:

And I'm gonna tell you workers, 'fore you cash in your checks
They say "America First," but they mean "America Next!"
In Washington, Washington

3) Worried about Elena

This week’s final obsession comes with the Quote of the Week. Courtesy of current WTA coach Goran Ivanisevic, who was only recently hired by World No. 6 Elena Rybakina as her new coach, but suddenly found his status in limbo this week. When tennis journalist Ben Rothenberg asked Ivanisevic if he was still on Rybakina’s team after she made a startling announcement on social media that she was bringing back her former, controversial coach Stefan Vukov, the perhaps-ousted Ivanisevic said: “I am, for the moment, here. It's today, Tuesday. Let's stay in Tuesday.”

In my 2025 WTA predictions, I had forecast big things for Rybakina; I said the 25-year-old Kazakhstani star would rise a ranking notch to No. 5 and win Wimbledon. (If I could re-do that, I’d more likely go with red hot World No. 3 Coco Gauff today.) But more important, I’m now worried about Rybakina herself.

The dramatic news that she’s re-hiring Vukov, certainly shed some light on the mystery surrounding her somewhat erratic 2024 season (including withdrawals from several tournaments): Reporting on her 180 led to a revelation in the NYT this week: ”Vukov has been provisionally suspended by the WTA Tour while under a confidential and private investigation for a breach of the tour’s Code of Conduct” since last year.

When Rybakina announced last year that she was parting ways with Vukov, the tennis world reacted with a collective sigh of relief; many people on the tour had noted with alarm over the years that he was abusive toward her. Understandably, Rybakina’s new announcement, which “blindsided” her new coach, according to the explosive report in the NYT, is shaking up the tennis world, from serious tennis blogger and reporter Ben Rothenberg’s sensitive report laying out the details of the worrisome story, to former WTA star and current women’s tour coach Pam Shriver’s alarmed reaction on social media, who wrote: "It’s time for our entire sport to finally stand up to known abuse and cult like manipulations of players. This is a very sad situation and my prayers are with ER.”

Elena Rybakina has long denied that Vukov has mistreated her, and has now denounced Shriver’s comments and denounced the WTA investigation. And she says she plans to bring Vukov back for this week’s Australian Open, a defiant stance that’s complicated by the fact that Vukov isn’t allowed to attend matches as a coach. According to the NYT, Rybakina has threatened that she may acquire tickets so that he can watch matches inside the stadium and perhaps even boycott the Australian Open and other events on the WTA Tour.

In addition to doing an interview with Ivanisevic (the one that prompted the above quote of the week), Rothenberg co-wrote a second post on the news with fellow blogger Lindsay Biggs (who writes about sexism in sports). Their piece creatively pairs the troubling Rybakina/Vukov story with a review of tennis movie Julie Keeps Quiet, a Belgian film set to be released in the U.S. this year, that focuses on a female tennis player and her abusive male coach. Shy of the hard details of Rybakina’s relationship with Vukov, this conceit allowed Rothenberg and Biggs to think out loud more freely about abusive coaches. It also allows readers to understand how scary Rybankina’s situation might be.

———

Closing note. This week’s Recommended Listening: Abstract electronica artist, Actress, as opposed to the noisy Chicano power rock band, Actress. I’m currently all lost in the sparse piano and moody beats on his 2023 release LXXXVIII.

Midsummer Dream House publishes my poem “Wayfinding: Biking Home from the Metal Show.”

I’m psyched that Midsummer Dream House, a California-based journal, just published my poem “Wayfinding: Biking Home from the Metal Show.” It's about a late night Seattle bike ride.

It’s the first poem I’ve had published that uses a form I think I may have made up. It uses a file path or “wayfinding” formula, as in: X  > Y > Z

My current manuscript-in-progress, City States, sprinkles these wayfinding poems throughout. These poems outline directions in their own right while also working as guides and milestones to the collection itself.

As the collection unfolds, the instructions become less about geography and start to chart other paths: events that lead to other events, ideas that lead to other ideas, thoughts that lead to memories.

I’m encouraged that one of these poems got picked up as a stand-alone piece.

You can read it here.

Trash on Hulu TV; Tennis at Amy Yee; and a veggie pizza, hold the cheese.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#64

First, I’ve got an anti-recommendation to make: Sean Baker’s uninspired new film, Anora. While I highly recommend his 2015 film Tangerine, a sad, lo-fi, free-form movie about a transgender sex worker, this latest effort is a trite prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold story written as a homage to (could anyone care less?) video-store-pseudo-intellectual, Quentin Tarantino. Baker scripts his main character, Anora, aka, Annie (Mikey Madison of Better Things fame) as a sassy stripper/escort, which simply means he gives her a working class Queens accent.

Certainly: A+ to the charmed, comedic performance by Mark Eidelstein as Vanya, a super privileged 21-year-old (going-on-14) Russian ga-zillionaire’s son. Vanya is a reckless sprite who floats through expensive and indolent party-drug chaos. He also seems to skid across his father’s mansion’s chic floors as he leads Annie to his Xbox-bedroom. Unfortunately, his well-crafted, off-kilter character goes missing too early in the movie, and we’re left focusing on Annie as noble stripper, whose savage wisdom consists of cursing.

Baker does give Annie an impromptu workers’ rights lecture. I guess this is supposed to flesh out her diamond-in-the-rough street genius (and also make her sympathetic to the liberal art-house crowd who are otherwise stuck with Baker’s sophomoric parade of bare asses, homophobic punch lines, cat fights, and violence).

I do have a thumbs up rec this week: Oatly brand chocolate oat milk. This is a deep chocolate potion, perfect for heating up and mixing with vanilla, nutmeg, and whiskey or brandy on your solo Xmas Eve.

Mix with whiskey or brandy

I had plenty left over to pour cold and long over ice as a morning kick for the rest of the holidays.

And lastly, a The-Jury’s-Still-Out note: I started reading the 800-page novel A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara this week; “the kids love it,” Bookstore Valium Tom told me (by which he meant Millennials and Gen Zers) after I picked it up at the suggestion of my (Millennial) friend, Glenn.

Having worked my way through the first two chapters, I am not yet interested in the overtly tortured characters.

This week’s list:

1) Tell Me Lies, Seasons 1 & 2

I wasted away in bed over the holiday break watching all 18 episodes of this trashy Hulu series, which is a throwback to the salacious heyday of CW Network teen soap operas.

Normies and sociopath’s, a sign of the times.

The show’s reliance on gendered stereotypes to explain the character’s choices (with occasional feminist monologues that fail miserably as offsets to the onslaught of tropes) seem akin, as a model of this era’s selfish behavior, to reactionary Trumpism.

Zeitgeist stuff.

It’s all frat-party-as-proscenium drama for day-after fall out featuring an intertwined set of good looking college kids double crossing one another.

And fucking each other. There are two main characters: brooding Lucy (sexy sexy Grace Van Patten), who is scripted too normie and superficial to read as the aspiring young writer this plot calls for; and her on-again-off-again, usually shirtless, cut boyfriend, a conniving sociopath named Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White), who’s reminiscent of the pernicious husband on Apple TV’s far superior series, Bad Sisters. Stephen and Lucy, a duplicitous operator herself, certainly deserve one another as they engage in dining hall machinations to navigate the social dynamics of muddled youth and mostly circle the implications of a mysterious and fatal car crash that haunts the drama from Episode 1 onward.

Much like my reaction to Trump’s sick carnival, or perhaps because of Trump’s sick carnival, I couldn’t turn away from this titillating wreckage, staying up all night two nights in a row to binge watch this garbage. The numbing of thyself for 2025 begins.

2) The Amy Yee Indoor Tennis Center

On the other hand, I formally ended 2024 by playing tennis at the Amy Yee Indoor Tennis Center on New Year’s Eve afternoon. I had a 1:15 reservation. This was an appropriate finale to my year, not only as exercise and exorcism, but more so, because the preceding 364 days were dominated by my unabated tennis fandom (Daffy Saby is already tearing through the draw in Brisbane this week, by the way) and with my own semi regular tennis matches.

If any place on the planet needs an indoor tennis center, it’s soggy Seattle. I’ve been aware of this high-profile Dept. of Parks facility for decades. It prominently marks the start of south Seattle just a few blocks south of I-90. But I’ve never checked it out. Amy Yee was a regional and national tennis player from Seattle, who taught and preached tennis to local kids.

In 2002, two years after Yee’s death, Seattle  Parks and Recreation re-named the city’s popular South End Tennis Center in her honor.

For such a prominent Seattle landmark, it’s surprisingly (and wonderfully) understated inside; utilitarian in a 1970s Hot Shoppes-as-rec center way. At least at first.

There’s the makeshift locker rooms (bathrooms really, with one shower), the low-key front desk staff, and a pro-shop that probably used to be a kids’ lunch room. An then, behind a floor-to-ceiling wall of glass, there’s a set of ten bright blue, hard courts flowing in succession like a line of mirrors reflected in mirrors.

Each court is separated by hanging scrims, glorious with sky-high ceilings and spacious side areas that include changeover benches. Walking onto Court #9 (there are ten, and they were all occupied as well), it was easy to pretend I was making my entrance onto Arthur Ashe with thousands of fans cheering my every step. At $18 per person, it’s more than worth the price to cosplay U.S. Open for your allotted 75 minutes of fame.

(As opposed to going online to the the Parks Department’s website to book one of their citywide outdoor courts, you can only reserve Amy Yee’s indoor courts over the phone with a special reservation account—which I set up this week just to secure playing time for the 31st.)

There was camaraderie and optimism in the air this last afternoon of the year at the Amy Yee Indoor Tennis Center. Over on Court #10, two 40-something women dressed in classic tennis skirts were bashing flat and tricky two-handed backhand returns as they updated each other on the goss between points. And the middle aged athletic guy on Court #8 (also dressed in classic preppy tennis attire) cheered my plan for post match beers as me and my hitting partner, who, I must say, had a keen eye for the corners during our volleys, headed out spent and gleeful to ring in 2025.

3) Build-Your-Own Cheeseless Veggie Pizza at the Hop Vine

Eating plastic, i.e., vegan cheese, is gross.

Unless I’m baking a vegan pizza at home (cashew cheese is the ticket), I shy away from the melted plastic options available out and about.

Bored with my usual soup and salad choice at the Hop Vine (a flannel shirt, IPA, and board game-friendly hangout where I tend to meet my aforementioned young friend, Glenn, a bearded, former bike shop dude who provides cover when I venture this far off my radar), I experimented with a build-your-own pizza instead.

I’ve gone this route before at more algorithm-dependent pizza chains, and it quickly turns into a belabored affair. Not so at the alt-folk rock Hop Vine where the relaxed bartender happily turned my pizza craving into an exciting kitchen project.

We collaboratively re-mixed their house veggie pie, devising an extra marinara sauce, red onion, green pepper, mushroom, and black olive 12” pizza, while excising the artichoke hearts (too unwieldy) the tomatoes (hot tomatoes give me the gags ), and most of all, the high-blood-pressure mozzarella.

Sans the cheese, big on the veggies, and with Hop Vine’s deep baked crust, Friday night pizza went from delicious, but debilitating, to delicious, full stop.

Euripides’ fragments; bathroom accoutrements; and noodles next to the park

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#63

Before I get to this week’s list, I’ve got a Quote of the Week, a Podcast of the Week, and a delicious Sandwich of the Week.

The Quote comes from one of the tens of thousands of people on TikTok (or DroneTok, as it’s being called right now) who are posting, pictures and theories, about the mysterious drones, UFOs, UAPs, orbs, and plasmoids(?) they’ve been seeing in the night sky over New Jersey. And now, all along the east coast; it’s spreading.

One young woman, begins her post—about the relationship between outer space and the bottom of the sea—by miming the motion of the waves as she introduces her personal theory:

“The drones in New Jersey, the 50 drones that just came out of the ocean…!”

If you’re not tracking this madness, and most people aren’t because it only seems to be a big deal on TikTok: Every night for the past month, people have been seeing drones that look like the original Star Wars TIE fighters, synchronized flashing lights in the night sky, and glowing cellular blobs. Some of these blobs merge with each other and then, like some form of astro-mitosis, break apart to form a set of ten more atmospheric Will-o'-the-wisps in the shroud of night. It’s kooky stuff and the New York Times was, in fact, compelled to write up an account of the sightings. They did it as a trend story rather than a news story.

Here’s my theory: TikTok is being set up. The government is behind the whole drones, orbs, and plasmoids hoax, and they’re pushing it out on TikTok to create a hysterical, TikTok-based freak out, similar to the infamous 1938 War of the Worlds panic, which, by the way, also started with space ships in New Jersey. The government will use the TikTok-based scare as a false flag to help fuel the case for banning TikTok as a fake news site.

As with all good conspiracy theories, Trump’s pro-TikTok head fake (I wrote this before that news broke) merely confirms my explanation : )

——

No surprise, my Podcast of the week is a tennis podcast. But here is a surprise: It’s not an episode from my favorite, Catherine Whitaker’s The Tennis Podcast, .

It’s the 2025 WTA predictions on Game To Love, a wholly different show that features two tennis-obsessed British chaps, including a wildly combative bloke who goes by JG. “It’s not a mental thing, mate!” he challenges his serene cohost Ben for underrating Elena Rybakina. Mostly, though, JG seems pissy that Qinwen Zheng is everyone’s pick to rise high in next year’s rankings, including Ben’s.

“And here he goes,” JG bitches with disdainful sarcasm as the pair unveil their predictions. “He’s got Qinwen Zheng in fourth,” leaning on the word fourth with utter disbelief. “He absolutely loves her. You’ve gone too high, mate. You’ve gone too high with Qinwen Zheng.” (Bitterly, JG himself ranks Zheng 8th, saying, “she’s not as good as everyone makes her out…and my ranking is generous….”)

Speaking in British marble mouth, JG is intent on arguing tennis with his podcast co-host, Ben.

Ben responds calmly, “The Olympics was huge. [Qinwen Zheng won Gold in Paris this summer.] She finished No. 5 in the world in 2024, and I think she’s going to push on. No. 4. Natural progression.” You can watch JG and Ben bicker in a Youtube version of their podcast here, where JG also seems irked by Coco Gauff’s popularity. “Recent-cy bias,” JG scoffs when Ben picks Gauff to win January’s Australian Open on the heels of her November WTA finals win. “You’ve got the wrong approach,” JG says, “I think she’ll be lucky to make the quarter finals.”

As for Qinwen Zheng, I’m with Ben. I too think she’s going to rise to No. 4. And even more so: I’ve got her winning a slam.

Overall, bumping overrated players like Jasmine Paolini, Jessica Pegula, and even rising star Emma Navarro off the current, year-end Top 10, here are my 2025 predictions, with my slam picks included as well:

1. Iga Swiatek (will win Roland Garros)

2. Coco Gauff (will win the U.S. Open)

3. Aryna Sabalenka

4. Qinwen Zheng (will win the Australian Open)

5. Elena Rybakina (will win Wimbledon)

6. Karolina Muchova

7. Daria Kasatkina

8. (As I’ve flagged before, watch out for newcomer) Diana Shnaider

9. Donna Vekic

10. Paula Badosa*

*This could just as easily be Navarro, but I don’t like Navarro.

Also, for reference, here are the Top 10 as 2024 ends.

——

Lastly, keeping my December 25th tradition in play for the ninth year running, I made my annual Chickpea of the Sea (vegan tuna salad) sandwich.

Arriving back at my apartment after an 8.3-mile afternoon walk to the U. District and back, I threw the chickpeas into the Cuisinart along with improvised measurements of vegan mayo, button mushrooms, peanuts, Nori paper, nooch, and celery. Next, I spread it on some Jewish Rye (albeit, insubstantial Safeway Jewish Rye that I had to toast in order to conjure any heft) while adding some leafy green lettuce, a slice of tomato, white onion, and vegan Swiss, plus some yellow mustard. I swapped in actual Swiss for XDX, who joined me later to eat the vegan tuna sandwich I fixed for her and also to talk brain waves and fields of flower petals this Xmas evening .

5:00 pm, 12/25/24

9:15 pm, 12/25/24

Okay, onto this week’s actual obsessions:

1) Antiope, by Euripides, circa 407 B.C.

Euripides’ play Antiope is the source material for the Greek myth of Amphion, a story about music and cities that Euripides wrote toward the end of his life, circa 407 B.C. It only survives in fragments.

The Amphion myth runs through my new poetry manuscript, City States, so last month, I ordered (what turned out to be) a gorgeous hardcover edition with a green dust jacket from Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library series. Despite the fact that all we get here is (essentially) a found erasure poem, the crux of the myth remains intact in Euripides’ pretty verse: The Artful Dodger (or Johnny Rotten) of Mt. Olympus, the trickster messenger god of travelers, Hermes, instructs polar opposite twin brothers (artsy musician, Amphion, and he-man warrior, Zethus) to “enter Cadmus’ city [Cadmus was the original founder of Thebes] without pollution … and build a complete city with seven gated openings.”

Amphion leads this municipal renewal capital project by playing his magical lyre to charm the foundational stones, so that they float into place; the lyre was a gift from his sometimes lover, Hermes). Thus Amphion bests Zethus in the play’s central social and political debate question: What is the best means of success, “womanly” creativity or he-man brawn?

The play concludes with Hermes’ instructions:

I bid Amphion, hands armed with his lyre, to sing the gods’ praise; solid rocks charmed by the music will follow you, and trees leaving their seats in mother earth, so that you will make light work for builders’ hands.

We learn, from later sources, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, that Amphion, as city builder, ascends to the throne of Thebes, not only consolidating his bohemian triumph over his macho brother Zethus, but also displacing his great uncle Lycus, who ruled over Thebes at that time and, more to the point, had been threatening to kill Amphion’s and Zethus’ mother, Antiope.

Years earlier, Zeus raped young Antiope. In order to escape her father’s wrath over this “shaming violence,” Antiope fled her home in Thebes, the capital of Boeotia, where her aforementioned father, Nycteus, was the king. She quickly settled in Sicyon, a rival city on the Peloponnese isthmus to the southwest of Boeotia. There, she married the king of Sicyon, Epahpus.

On his deathbed, Nycteus instructed his brother and soon-to-be-successor, Lycus, to go after Antiope (“she should not go unscathed” and bring her home “in bonds.”) Lycus does this, killing Epaphus, and forcing Antiope back to Thebes. First, though, on the journey home from Sicyon, east via Attica, they stop in a town called Eleutherae on the border between Attica and Boeotia at Mt. Cithaeron, the site of a shrine to Dionysus, god of fertility, fruits, wine, festivity, and madness. Here, Antiope gives birth to Zeus’ children, the twins Amphion and Zethus. Antiope abandons them there. Once back in Thebes, Lycus, now King of Thebes, hands over Antiope to his wife Dirce, who makes Antiope her slave. “Antiope was given to Dirce the wife of Lycus to torture,” Euripides writes in the play’s intro, adding, “she got an opportunity to escape and committed herself to it. She reached her sons…”

Rival cities Thebes and Sicyon help define the myth of Amphion.

This is the point at which Euripides’ play starts.

As the action begins, Antiope has once again escaped Thebes, and this time, escaped her slave master Dirce as well. She has fled south to Eleutherae to find her sons, who, unaware of Antiope’s existence, have been raised there by a local shepherd. Dirce comes after Antiope (she has also come to worship Dionysus), but Amphion and Zethus, who have now learned the whole story from the shepherd, avenge their mother’s enslavement by killing Dirce; she’s dragged apart by a bull. Next Lycus arrives with his soldiers, going after runaway Antiope yet again.

Assisted by the shepherd, Amphion and Zethus overtake Lycus and his men. They are about to kill Lycus when Hermes arrives and commands the twins to spare Lycus. Instead, he makes Lycus relinquish Thebes to Amphion and Zethus, and then directs the pair to retrofit Thebes. This sets up the contrasting brothers as the city’s new leaders. Hermes also directs Lycus to retrieve Dirce’s remains and “throw her bones into Ares’ spring, that its outflow may be called Dirce to mark her name, the spring which goes through the city and continually soaks Thebes’ plain with its waters.”

There is plenty of rich symbolism in all this: Music as municipal building blocks, for example, or Dirce’s ashes as the enriching headwaters of Thebes, her son's revitalized and grand city. However, the literary turn that strikes me as most worthy of inquiry in Euripides’ dissertation on building city walls is Amphion’s birthplace, a nebulous boundary world on the border of great Thebes and its seven gated doors.

2) My new toilet paper holder & my fuzzy gray bathroom rugs

As the year ends and starts, I’m on a kick to retrofit my bathroom. Taking note of a fancy toilet paper holder I saw in the restroom of a coffee shop (though, it looked more like something you’d find in a boutique hotel), I immediately bought a lookalike dark bronze model online.

This led me to then scrub my tub, toss my old bathroom rug, and buy a bigger one, and then, a second matching one too. I went with two soft gray rugs, weaved akin to loopy sea flora where marine creatures linger at the bottom of the ocean.

3) Kajiken, the new noodle place in Capitol Hill

Seizing the early hour—Modnay afternoon at 4:45—XDX and I walked over to Kajiken, a new Japanese noodle spot on 11th Ave. just across the street and to the east of Cal Anderson Park; we wanted to get there right when they opened at 5 pm to make sure we got a table. Indeed, with ten shops in the U.S., including in Manhattan, the Bay Area, and Chicago, this Japanese-based chain has caused a buzz in Seattle (“soupless ramen!”) after setting up here in September.

It was lightly crowded when we arrived and the enthusiastic greeter ushered us to a table with a gloaming-hour view through the big glass windows of the city center park.

Kajiken specializes in a dish called Aburasoba, which is a ramen-style concoction. Rather than using spicy broth to grace the noodle dishes with kick, though, you add oils. Kajiken sets bottles of rich chili oil, homemade soy sauce, and vinegar on the table.

I had the vegan option, which came with shimeji and king trumpet mushrooms, luscious spinach, a plentiful serving of soft tofu, and red onions piled over languid and hardy soba noodles. (I’d say less tofu and more mushrooms, please, but that’s because the mix of fresh, flavorful shrooms doused in chili oil was hitting the spot.)

There’s plenty on this friendly menu for meat lovers too, and I certainly snuck a bite of the octopus-filled pancake balls topped with sweet sauce, mayonnaise, and toasted seaweed flakes.

12/23/24, Mushroom Aburasoba, the tasty vegan option at Kajiken

XDX got the 100%-not-vegan minced pork, which comes with green onions, bamboo shoots, seaweed, chives, and fish powder, topped with a 100% non-vegan egg.

12/23/24, Homura Arubasoba, not vegan.

Kajiken is a 2024, year-end discovery that’s making me look forward to 2025.

Two 1980s underground films; a new waterfront park; and ABC bows down to Trump; plus, let’s talk about Brooke Shields.

I’m All Lost In …

the three things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#62

1) Silence = Death and Positive by Rosa Von Praunheim

I went to Northwest Film Forum on Saturday night and watched a pair of long-lost, underground documentaries by German filmmaker Rosa Von Praunheim. They were companion pieces about the early years of the AIDS crisis. Embedded in New York City’s gay community in the late 1980s, Praunheim’s up-close films, Positive and Silence = Death (both 1990), chronicle, the the DIY artistic response to the tragic epidemic and the political evolution of the direct action gay rights group ACT UP (intellectual fount Larry Kramer is on camera and on point throughout).

Praunheim’s lively interviews, remixes of found news footage, stark set pieces, and concise voice-over script are shot in a grainy 1980s Berlin punk-art aesthetic that revives the lo-fi look of mid-60s avant-garde films (I’m thinking of Stan Brakhage), as both documentaries focus on anti-Reagan (and anti-NYC Mayor Koch) anger. Ultimately, these two films are time capsules of dissident 1980s eloquence more than perhaps the keen journalism they delivered at the time.

As for the artistic response to AIDS, Praunheim captures: first-wave slam poetry readings; earnest and dark theater pieces (the dark vein includes a graphic suicide monologue featuring a handgun and a butt hole); and the Satanic liturgies of punk opera diva Diamanda Galas.

Galas’ slithering sequences, sung in church chancels and in leather boots (over industrial beats), are, as they were in the late 1980s: Thoroughly stunning. Imagine Einstürzende Neubauten’s post-rock noise backing Maria Callas in drag.

Not Marilyn Manson. Praunheim films Diamanda Galas performing thundering pieces from her AIDS trilogy: The Divine Punishment (1986); Saint of the Pit (1986); and You Must Be Certain of the Devil (1988).

As for the political response, Praunheim zooms in on: DIY crisis hotlines (“If the phone rang, at least I knew someone was still alive”); Pride parades when the annual gay rights march was still incensed and came with a list of demands (“get vaccines into arms,” Kramer says); organizing bus loads to shut down international medical conferences; and notably (given today’s ham-fisted approach) graceful and judicious analogies to “the Holocaust.”

Bonus: Poet Allen Ginsburg, an elder gay statesman by then, is particularly compelling and well-spoken here. He likens the AIDS epidemic to the global environmental crisis that was (already) “a cancer” ravaging the planet.

2) Seattle’s Waterfront

Decades ago, when Erica and I were at the Stranger (me as news editor and ECB as star reporter), we editorialized in favor of civic activist Cary Moon’s compelling idea for the waterfront: Instead of accepting the state and city plan to replace Seattle’s Alaskan Way viaduct with a new 4-lane highway tunnel, we should replace it with a pedestrian concourse and a human-scale boulevard (just one north-bound lane of traffic, one south-bound lane, and a center turn lane. Nothing more, but trees, parks, and food trucks.)

I’ll never forget convincing my editor Dan Savage and publisher Tim Keck to put this radical (“Nothing Goes Here”) option on the cover of the paper; other than election endorsement issues, we didn’t put politics on the cover. For months, both Dan and Tim, a bit oblivious to the news section’s regular reporting on the viaduct issue, had been fretting that we needed a new cause célèbre. (Our earlier hill-to-die on, turning the Seattle monorail into a citywide mass transit option, had finally flamed out.) So, I made the case that taking a stand against replacing the viaduct with yet another highway (albeit an underground highway), and supporting a pedestrian-centered promenade instead, could be the centerpiece of our fight for an eco-smart green metropolis.

They signed off on this new editorial campaign. But, as with our earlier monorail crusade, we would eventually lose this battle too.

Fast forward. In 2019, Seattle replaced the six-lane viaduct with a four-lane tunnel and a four-lane (and up to eight lanes at times) street-level arterial on Alaskan Way. Not only do we now have even more concrete for cars in total than we used to, but we squandered an opportunity to create a pedestrians ＞ cars waterfront mall.

With the Brutalist viaduct now long gone, the city did at least get creative around Pike Place Market. They seamlessly connected Seattle’s famous market bazaar to the waterfront at the doorstep of the aquarium and the nearby event-friendly, Pier 62. The “Overlook Walk,” as it’s called, opened two-and-a-half months ago in early October. I checked it out this weekend.

Instead of being forced to pad across the roaring street between the aquarium and the market, and scurrying underneath the groaning viaduct to access a steep set of dirty concrete stairs—or taking that infamous freight elevator—folks can now take the Overlook Walk. Just float from the sidewalk plaza in front of the aquarium onto a set of capacious steps that sweep up a casually tiered ascending pedestrian walkway from airy landing to airy landing. At the top, you come upon friendly plywood theater seating and an elevated park where you can gaze out at Elliott Bay and the Olympics before strolling on to Pike Place Market.

To be honest, I had my back to Elliott Bay during my visit to Overlook Walk this Sunday. I was too busy snapping pictures of the city.

12/15/24, “Overlook Walk,” Seattle waterfront

Book-ending this bit of reclaimed waterfront, there’s also a new hang out spot ten blocks south of Pike Place Market. Just west of Pioneer Square, between Pier 48 and Colman Dock, there’s the new Habitat Beach, an edible-friendly oasis of wild grass, pebbled sand banks, lanky driftwood, and Paleolithic seating where you can look at the bay.

You do have to push the “Wait! Wait! Wait!” pedestrian beg button and cross four lanes of traffic on your way over from Pioneer Square, though.

3) ABC TV Capitulates to Trump

Of all the foreboding recent news about Trump’s pending second term——robber baron Elon Musk’s ascension to Trump bro whisperer; anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist RFK, Jr. getting Trump’s nod to head DHHS (anti-polio vaccine, specifically); vindictive MAGA cultist Kash Patel getting tapped to head the FBI; and (is anyone surprised besides the anti-Kamala left?) a collection of Rapture evangelicals and West Bank annexation hawks coming on as Trump’s Middle East policy people——I think ABC’s decision to blink in the face of Trump’s weaksauce lawsuit is the most chilling development of all. (Trump sued ABC for defamation over their 100% accurate coverage of the E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse case.)

It isn’t so much Trump’s despotic impulse to go after the media that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand at attention—I got state media vibes from Trump all the way back in 2015 when he kicked Univison’s Jorges Ramos out of a campaing press conference. It’s more the Neville Chamberlain vibes I got from ABC this week.

Rather than total appeasement, ABC could have easily won this case by standing up to Trump’s bullying. After all, as they originally reported: Trump was, indeed, found guilty of rape and truth is a rock-solid defense against libel suits.

ABC’s acquiescence signals that the company—with its compromised corporate family tree—prefers (because of its compromised corporate family tree) to kowtow to Trump. This does not bode well for democracy.

***

This week’s Recommended Listening: Electronic music duo Frank & Tony’s 2024 LP, Ethos. Or more to the point: the moody and floating opening track, “Olympia” featuring vocals by Eliana Glass. (Myllck tipped me on this LP.)

This week’s Recommended Viewing (and, I admit, also an obsession): Lana Wilson’s 2023 Brooke Shields documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.

I ended up watching this because, as you may remember, I’m reading her ex-husband Andre Agassi’s autobiography. I’m not liking him much (he comes across as a superficial dullard). And the fact that he thinks she is superficial (he condescends to her throughout his book) made me think Shields was probably way over his dim-witted head and probably far more interesting than he is.

It turns out, yup, with a personal story that puts her at the center of queasy 1970’s Hollywood/teen super model sexploitation, a Reagan-era goody-goody rewrite, and a late 1990s Friends-era slapstick sitcom renaissance (after some dark nowhere years), she is, in fact, totally interesting. Thoughtful, and down-to-earth, Shields also had an alcoholic manager-mother, who is shown in Wilson’s film through contemporaneous TV interviews, calmly and philosophically unapologetic about Shields’ starring roles in soft-core Hollywood films and those infamous “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins” jeans ads.

1980

1978

Shields is just a year older than me, and I remember most of her story line clearly; the titillating tween movies Blue Lagoon (1980) and Endless Love (1981), and of course, the controversial 1980 Calvin Klein adverts. At the time, though—and I now understand that this is central to the feminist critique that child porn was being normalized—I thought Shields was too mainstream and Wonder Bread-pretty to seem risqué or transgressive. In fact, for me, her Reagan-era makeover into a virgin ended up defining Shields more than the gross late ‘70s Lolita voyeurism. In contrast, I readily understood that other (and similar) zeitgeist players such as Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver or Linda Blair in the Exorcist represented (and were forced into) messed up moments. In my mind, they, rather than Shields, highlighted the greasy-haired, creeper 1970s.

I will say that Shields’ disassociation, which she talks about in the documentary, comes through in the Calvin Klein ads in a way that (problematically so) de-sexualized them when I first saw the commercials as a young teen. There was a meta quality to the ads that seemed to say this isn’t happening, I’m acting. And despite the obvious sexual crime being committed in these commercials by director and photographer Richard Avedon, when I re-watched them this week, Shields’ Twister-mat flexibility was reminiscent of the physical comedy to come circa 1997 in her successful slapstick sitcom, Suddenly Susan.

The documentary also includes Shields, with tears in her eyes, telling the horrifying story of being raped after a phony casting call meeting when her star briefly faded in the early 1990s. But perhaps the most powerful moment in the doc comes at the end when Wilson’s unobtrusive camera settles in on Shields’ easy-going, current family. The scene captures Shields and her clearly still-smitten and loving second husband, and her two college-age daughters in a free flowing dinner conversation about Shields’ early career—particularly the problematic 1978 Louis Malle movie, Pretty Baby. This sexploitation film was made when Shields was just 11-years-old, and featured her in nude scenes and a kiss scene with then 28-year-old actor Keith Carradine.

During their family dinner discussion, Shields, seemingly unfazed by her past, plays the role of a contrarian yet inquisitive researcher (into her own history). Sounding uncomfortably like she’s parroting her own mother’s measured defense of the movie somewhere back on the Phil Donahue Show, she challenges her daughters to articulate exactly what’s so wrong with her 1978 kiddie porn debut. One of her daughters makes a clear-eyed point that seems like news to Shields: “You weren’t the only young female actor this was happening to during that time,” her daughter says.

Lastly, the Best Holiday Season Gift of the Week:

After Dad’s funeral in Gaithersburg, Maryland back in March, I took the Amtrak up to New York to decompress. During the trip. I did a load of laundry at my friend Dave & Jen’s apt, and I loved how floral and fresh my clothes came out smelling. They use Mrs. Meyers Clean Day detergent.

My bestie ECB, an expert gift-giver, apparently made a note of it and surprised me this week with an early Hanukah present.

CBD sodas; a pesto veggie sandwich; waiting for Brooke Shields to show up.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#61

I’ll get to this week’s list momentarily, but first, here are a few quick updates on some recent obsessions I’ve written about before:

For starters: Psyched with how Alterations Plus Dry Cleaning transformed my slacks into crisp and plush sartorial options last week, I brought in another pair to be pressed. And once again, voila!

Second, in a city where most coffee shops close by 6 pm, Basecamp Cafe (at Harvard Ave. E and E Thomas on Capitol Hill) is serious about being an evening neighborhood hang out; they had a live piano, bass, and drums jazz trio in the house until 9 pm on Sunday night.

Third, the WTA announced their year-end awards this week, and my recent picks (as opposed to tennis expert Ben Rothenberg’s) swept the voting: “Player of the Year,” Daffy Saby; “Doubles Team of the Year,” Sara Errani & Jasmine Paolini; “Most Improved Player,” Emma Navarro (who, for the record, I don’t like, but I did pick); “Newcomer of the Year,” Lulu Sun; and “Comeback Player of the Year,” Paula Badosa.

Lastly, here’s the Disappointment of the Week: For the second time in a month, I find myself on the losing side of the popular vote. Interviewing the vox populi, the Washington Post reported results of a new poll showing 57% of Americans (versus 42% of Americans) prefer car-dependent, suburban sprawl over sustainable green metropolis living.

I’m proud to be part of the Petula Clark 42%, but, Sigh.

P.s. For my Millennial and Gen Z friends, Petula Clark is this:

Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city/Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty/How can you lose?/The light's so much brighter there/You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares/So go downtown/Things will be great when you're downtown.

Petula Clark’s urbanist showstopper: “Maybe you know some little places to go to/where they never close/Downtown.” —1964

Onto this week’s list.

1) CBD Sodas

Like THC, CBD comes from cannabis plants; it stands for Cannabidiol. Unlike THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol), which is the main psychoactive ingredient in pot, the science says CBD doesn’t make you loopy. There is some evidence, though, that it helps you relax, and it may work as an anti-inflammatory.

Well then, perhaps being anti-inflamed made me loopy. Because the Rogue Blackberry Cucumber 30 mg CBD Seltzer Water I had at the Lookout Bar & Grill on Saturday afternoon filled me with giggles.

Saturday afternoon, 12/7/24

Wednesday evening, 12/11/24

I had such a good time with my CBD-dosed blackberry cucumber soda, I attempted to replicate Saturday’s bliss mid-week. I tried another CBD drink on Wednesday night: a “Higher Potency” Wyld Blood Orange Real Fruit Infused Sparkling Water.

This seems like a road to ruin—I chose this one in part because it was a higher dosage. 50 mg. (Wyld is a cannabis edibles company.)

No giggles this time. But I did find myself taking an aimless, three-mile stroll through the neighborhood afterwards.

Both drinks are more acidic and spumy than, say, a La Croix seltzer; also they’re fruitier, though not too sweet. For an unscientific time, I highly recommend these abstract sodas.

2) Post Pike Bar & Cafe’s Vegan Pesto Sandwich

I can’t tell you the endless number of well-intentioned places in town that have debuted with a (doomed) vegan option on the menu; I stand by with the knowing heart of a dad watching his Kindergartner bound off to the bus aware that these days are numbered.

Thankfully, this is not the story at Post Pike Bar & Cafe, which opened four years ago and…

Still available alongside the Deluxe Ranch BLT, the smears and bagels, the tuna melt, the hot roast beef, buffalo chicken, prosciutto caprese, or breakfast sandwiches, Post Pike’s crowded, labor-of-love, comfort-food menu features several vegan go-to options.

There’s the hummus breakfast sandwich and the hummus wrap. But my pick is the Vegan Pesto Sandwich with its perfect piled-on medley of good-and-good-for-you veggies: cucumber, red onion, roasted red pepper, and avocado. It comes on toasted yet fluffy sourdough bread slathered in the magic pesto. And though the sandwich is on the smaller side (for $14), it’s always hardy and filling.

After a heads-down, busy day at work on Tuesday, where I had to draft answers to a series of questions from the citizen oversight committee, I was famished. So, I stopped in to Post-Pike and ordered this now-classic local sandwich. I savored every bite, and then I was on my sleepy way home, hunger pangs vanquished by the swirl of basil, garlic, and pine nuts still lingering in my head.

3) Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi

The first 100 pages are excellent; but the jury is still out on the rest…

“That’s the kid I was telling you about—the prodigy. It’s the prettiest word I’ve ever heard applied to me,” Andre Agassi remembers thinking as the hushed talk around the amateur circuit turned into a reverent buzz .

A short time later, after making the finals of a satellite masters tournament, he turned pro at 16, simply because, broke and living out of motels with his older brother, he wanted to take the $1,100 dollar check (amateurs aren’t allowed to take the money prizes). It was, of course, also a way to escape the “prison” that was his father’s homemade tennis camp and his official tennis boot camp boarding school. A bit nervous before taking the money (“If I take that check, I’m a professional tennis player, forever, there’s no turning back..”), he calls his dad for advice. His dad had forced little Andre into tennis (when he was still in the crib his dad “hung mobile tennis balls above my head and encouraged me to slap at them with a ping-pong paddle he’d taped to my hand”). Now, dad berates him on the phone: “You’ve dropped out of school. You have an eighth-grade education. What are your choices? What the hell else are you going to do? Be a doctor?”

Packed with harsh moments like this, the opening 100 pages of Agassi’s writerly and apparently atypical sports bio (published in 2009, it was ghost written by top-shelf-writer-for-hire J.R. Moehringer) chronicles Agassi’s tortured childhood and chaotic high school years with thoughtful strokes:

“It was my life, and though I hadn’t chosen it, my sole consolation was its certainty. At least fate has a structure.”

Open initially does seem more of a coming-of-age novel than non-fiction. It’s anecdote after anecdote. There’s Agassi’s tyrannical father, who made him hit 2,500 tennis balls a day when he was just seven, punching Agassi in the face when the boy mistakenly pounces on his father at the door thinking it’s his playful uncle coming home from work. Or there’s his (once again) tyrannical father … (his dad, an ex-Olympic boxer from Iran, now works as concierge at a Vegas casino) buying a run down house outside of town oblivious to anything but his obsessive tennis plans for young Agassi:

It would have been funny if it hadn’t been scary. At house after house, even before the [real estate] agent’s car came to a full stop my father would jump out and march up the front walk. The agent, close on my father’s heels, would be yakking about local schools, crime rates, interest rates, but my father wouldn’t be listening. Staring straight ahead, my father would storm through the house, through the living room, through the kitchen, into the backyard, where he’d whip out his tape measure and count off thirty-six feet, the dimensions of a tennis court. Time after time he’d yell, Doesn’t fit! Come on! Let’s go! My father would then march back through the kitchen, through the living room, down the front walk, the real estate agent struggling to keep pace.

We saw one house my older sister Tami desperately wanted. She begged my father to buy it, because it was shaped like a T, T for Tami. My father almost bought it, probably because T also stood for Tennis. I liked the house. So did my mother. The backyard, however, was inches too short.

Doesn’t fit! Let’s go!

Finally we saw this house, it’s backyard so big that my father didn’t need to measure. He just stood in the middle of the yard, turning slowly, gazing, grinning, seeing the future.

Sold, he said quietly.

Unfortunately, it’s nothing but faults and unforced errors for the subsequent 50 pages. And that’s where I’m now stalled, wondering if I should continue reading this book. In a dramatic shift, the writing has become inexplicably macho and cheesy as Agassi finds a surrogate father in his gruff new trainer, Gil (who “grew up fast on the hard streets.”)

The Hallmark Channel cheese continues: “Enough said. I’ll never ask again. Merry Christmas, son,” chapter 10 concludes after Gil presses 19-year-old Agassi on why he’s chosen to spend the holiday’s with Gil’s family—where there’s only a couch to sleep on—instead of with his own family and friends.

The book started so artfully that I’m hoping this current ham-fisted section is intentional? Maybe it’s setting us up for some actual revelations? Otherwise, I’m quickly growing to dislike Agassi’s he-man bravado about his Corvette and his banal epiphanies. (He reports on Gil’s guru wisdom: “You’re asking me to put you through a workout here that leaves no room for where you are, how you’re feeling, what you need to focus on. It doesn’t allow for change.” [Italics his].

I didn’t know much about Agassi (I’m a recent convert to tennis fandom). But I do know that at some point, he marries fascinating Gen X icon Brooke Shields. So, I’m trying to push through until he meets her to see if this book becomes special again.

***

I leave you with two contenders for The Quote of the Week.

First—and this is to be spoken with a British accent—because it comes to us from the very British Catherine Whitaker, the host of The Tennis Podcast.

I like all the animals, apart from the snakes.

The second potential quote of the week comes to us sarcastically in a text from my friend XDX, a legit student of Vipassana, as opposed to, say, a post-Steve Jobs Silicon Valley executive tripping on ayahuasca.

Gonna go meditate now. Maybe I’ll be a CEO.

The UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting; lots of online shopping; Alterations Plus Dry Cleaning.

I’m All Lost In…

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#60

Before I get into this week’s obsessions, I have some reading recommendations, a historic listening recommendation, and a You-must-watch-this-video recommendation.

Reading Recommendations:

* PubliCola’s report about progressive Seattle City Council member Tammy Morales’ disappointing resignation is mandatory reading for anyone trying to understand the dynamics of Seattle’s current reactionary political landscape. Erica documents how bully culture is the go-to M.O. for 2024’s conservative-backlash council. On Bluesky, I called them the Cancel-Culture City Council.

* For another dose of local politics (and more on Seattle’s conservative slide backward) check out this Urbanist article about how local spending on transformative transportation upgrades is becoming a thing of Seattle’s progressive past:

The Seattle Transportation Levy represents a step back, prioritizing the “basics” of the city’s transportation system over investments that set Seattle up to be able to reduce emissions, create more vibrant communities, and get ahead of expected population growth.

Robot hand

* More reading: An article in the December 2 print edition of the New Yorker (November 25th online), “A Revolution in How Robots Learn,“ is the latest tale from the dystopian frontier of A.I.

Featuring Google subsidiary DeepMind and its ALOHA project’s experiment in teaching robotic hands to tie shoes, fold laundry, and play ping pong, (and potentially, the reporter panics, “someday shoot somebody”), this article outlines competing approaches to teaching robots menial, yet surprisingly complex tasks. There’s “imitation learning,” which uses repetition of analog, human-controlled physical directives, and there’s “reinforcement learning,” where a robotic hand tries to figure out practical skills all by itself as it creates a datalog of stored wisdom through trial and error and “flywheeling” (a concept the writer didn’t do a great job explaining, but basically means building momentum through small wins.)

There’s also a third way.

Founded by an ex-ALOHA engineer, Stanford robotics professor Chelsea Finn, a company called Physical Intelligence combines both approaches:

The A.I. driving this remarkable display, called π₀, can reportedly control half a dozen different embodiments, and can with one [program] solve multiple tasks that might challenge an ALOHA: bagging groceries, assembling a box, clearing a dinner table. It works by combining a ChatGPT-esque model, which has broad knowledge of the world and can understand images, with imitation learning.

This article, (though, admittedly, not 100% clear … “If robotics models turn out to be embodiment-agnostic…” ??) reminded me of my favorite aperçu from fast-fashion revolutionary Mary Quant, an important city culture ideologue. Quant quipped (circa 1965): It’s ridiculous, in this age of machines, to continue to make clothes by hand. Why can’t people see what a machine is capable of doing itself, instead of making it copy what the hand does?

* And a related reading recommendation: The Washington Post published an article this week about personal companion App companies such as Chai and Replika that market addicting chatbots.

Listening Rec:

1957

I had never heard of late 1950s/early 1960s blues pianist, Ray Bryant. But now, thankfully, I have. His hard bop version of jazz standard “Angel Eyes” is a piece of nightclub perfection. It’s the second track on Bryant’s refined, dynamite piano, bass, and drums debut album, 1957’s The Ray Bryant Trio.

Watching Rec:

* Lest you think I’ve forgotten about the WTA, don’t worry, that’s not happening. I’m still crazed about professional women’s tennis.

My recommended viewing is this 26-minute year-end compilation of the winning match points of every non-Grand Slam final (there are 50) from the 2024 women’s tour. (As we know, World No. 1 Daffy Saby won two of 2024’s four Grand Slams, while World No. 2 Iga Swiatek won one, and World No. 10 Barbora Krejčíková won one.)

Watching this highlight reel of lower-level 500 and 250-point tournament winners gives you a sense of which players are poised to break into the top rankings next year. (The video also highlights 1,000-point level tournaments, but those were dominated by the big names like Saby, Swiatek, and World No. 3 Coco Gauff.)

20-year-old Russian Diana Shnaider, World No. 13, stands out on this 2024 winners medley; she won four of these lower-tier tournaments, the most of any player. China’s Qinwen Zheng and Kazakhstan’s Elena Rybakina, won three apiece, but both of them are already ranked in the Top 10 at 5 and 6 respectively. So, Shnaider didn’t only rack up more trophies, hers felt weightier.

Now, onto this week’s obsessions:

1) In addition to having unstoppable melodramatic appeal, this week’s UnitedHealthcare CEO assassination at 6th Ave & W. 54th St., right around the corner from MoMA in Midtown Manhattan, is a defining political moment in the otherwise confusing upheaval that is 2024.

In a year dominated by Trump’s chaotic, populist, and ugly disrespect for civic norms, the TikTok left now seems—analogously—to be rallying around populist violence in the name of corporate accountability.

What strikes me about the left’s glee (and I do understand their logic) over this “Eat the Rich” hit is that their clever snark (“The conservatives always said we needed more good guys with guns”) feels oblivious. Even if this good looking, instant-folk-hero vigilante turns out to be a Chomsky-reading Bernie bro) lefties are 100% misunderstanding the MAGA right. Yes, hypocritical Donald Trump practices corrupt crony capitalism, but he sells class war.

A reality check for inattentive liberals on MAGA ideology: please watch one of right wing U.S. Sen. Josh Hawely’s (R-Nebraska) recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings where he has verbally slaughtered cocky CEOs and execs from the credit card industry, the airline industry, and the health insurance industry for their greedy bottom line values.

I’m not trying to hype Trumpism. As a lefty myself who detests the MAGA cult, I’m issuing a “Be careful what you wish for” warning to my political compatriots, cautioning in part that a class war program will quickly be co-opted by Trumpers, who similarly prioritize gut anger over humanist analysis.

And just as the “First they came for the trans youth…” poem goes, so go hit lists.

There is a fun (sorry) side note about this assassination, though: Biking is obviously the quickest way to get around Manhattan. (The assassin, who fled on a bike, zipping through Central Park to the Upper West Side, was 30+ blocks away just 15 minutes after the shooting, where he ditched the bike on W. 86th St.)

12/4/24

2) It’s probably not the healthiest way to deal with the Holiday Season blues, but this week has been all about online shopping therapy:

Banana Republic slacks (an olive green pair and an umber pair), a troupe of colorful new dish towels, a book of Euripides fragments, a thick, fuzzy gray bath mat, yet another Dexys Midnight Runners t-shirt, another Joshua Tree baseball cap, a pack of new underwear, and a John McEnroe “You Cannot Be Serious” t-shirt (my now on-loop response to Trump) all arrived pronto in the mail room this week after I blissed out online with my credit card.

I also gave my dear old friend Gregor Samsa a gift subscription to Ben Rothenberg’s Tennis substack.

3) Speaking of Banana Republic slacks … I (despondently) noticed that my fantastic, chalk blue slim-fit pants had an incorrigible grease stain on the upper right thigh.

My washing machine was outmatched, so I brought the besmirched pair of pants to Alterations Plus Dry Cleaning, the reliable neighborhood dry cleaners four blocks from my house on 15th Ave. E.

Alterations Plus Dry Cleaning, my expert neighborhood dry cleaners.

I pointed out the maddening grease stain to the 60-something Chinese matriarch who runs the shop, and after she cast her eyes up and down the entire pant leg, she looked up, and corrected me: “Everywhere.”

Two days later, seemingly sandblasted, my favorite pants were immaculate top to bottom. And soft.