I’m All Lost In, #83: Colin Marshall’s list of books about cities; cirrus clouds radio; and my neighborhood tree canopy

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#83

1) Colin Marshall's List of Books about Cities

Valium Tom and I call it the City Canon, our ongoing project to come up with a list of great city books. The list includes: novels where the city setting is a character itself; nonfiction treatises on important precepts of city planning; histories that are tied to the life of a particular city; or even histories and biographies where the subject reflects a discrete tenet of cityism, such as fashion revolutionary Mary Quant’s swinging London memoir.

Colin MacInnes’ 1950s novel about London’s emerging youth culture Absolute Beginners tops of my city lit list. Over the years, other personal city literature mainstays include: Edith Wharton’s New York Stories; David Owen’s Green Metropolis; Hanif Kureishi’s the Black Album, Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy; William Gibson’s Neuromancer; Jane Jacobs’s classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities; Stephen Crane’s Maggie a Girl of the Streets; Jonathan Rechy’s City of Night; Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep; and Robert Louis Stevenson’s London-centric Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Back in 2023 and 2024, I got serious about the City Canon and, starting with architect Jorge Almazán’s city planning textbook Emergent Tokyo, I proactively set out on my own city studies seminar, writing mini-essays on each book

My city seminar list of books:

Emergent Tokyo by Jorge Almazán (Tokyo)

Palace of Desire by Naguib Mahfouz (Cairo)

Dubliners by James Joyce (Dublin)

Quant by Quant the Autobiography of Mary Quant (London)

The City-State in Five Cultures by Robert Griffeth and Carol G. Thomas (Mesopotamia)

Billie Holiday the Musician and the Myth by John Szwed (Manhattan)

Open City by Teju Cole (Manhattan, Lagos)

Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention by Ben Wilson

Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole (Lagos)

Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey (London)

Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing by Max Holleran

Ask the Dust by John Fante (Los Angeles)

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Tomorrow Will Be Better by Betty Smith (Brooklyn)

Hard Times by Charles Dickens (Manchester)

Lot by Bryan Washington (Houston)

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell (Manchester)

All the Men in Lagos are Mad by Damilare Kuku (Lagos)

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Lagos)

Scenes of Bohemian Life by Henri Burger (Paris)

And I left off in 1920s Manhattan with Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife last fall.

I may have reignited my city reading binge this week, though, by picking up Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World; I’ve only read the chatty intro and a bit of the first chapter, so we’ll see.

But I am currently hooked on the website that tipped me off on Grabar’s parking policy book: Colin Marhshall’s Books on Cities.

Marshall is a Seoul-based writer and the former host of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas and his follow-up Notebook on Cities and Culture.

Overlapping with my list—Ben Wilson’s Metropolis, M. Nolan Gray’s Arbitray Lines, Jorge Almazán’s Emergent Tokyo, plus an apparent shared interest in Lagos (and Nigerian writer Teju Cole)—Marshall has been reviewing and keeping a list of city books too.

Note: Marshall’s list doesn’t include any fiction. It’s all urban planning (Jeff Speck’s Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time); urban context (Lewis Mumford’s The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects); city histories (Malcolm Harris’ Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World); essays (Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City); or nonfiction city closeups (Tom Scocca’s Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future).

It’s not that Marshall’s city syllabus has added to my must-read list as much as after reading a couple of his lengthy, substantive book reviews—which seem more like prompts for his own city reveries— I’m now prioritizing his gems of urban reflection themselves.

2) Cirrus Clouds Radio

Finding great space-out music isn’t as easy a To Do as it sounds. Playlists dubbed “Classical Music for Relaxation,” for example, often obliviously fail to consider that classical music is about dynamics. Better not get too drawn into that soothing cello section because here comes the angry piano.

Or: Have you ever been getting a massage when, suddenly, you just can’t avoid perseverating on the plucking harp or plinking piano instead of decompresssing to the lulling chords swelling beneath?

On the other hand, excising dynamics can leave you with a set of New Age music that’s just too banal and cheesy. This is a particular risk when Ambient is your go-to genre. But when you try to nudge the algorithm away from becoming an anodyne strain of spa friendly greatest hits, Ambient suddenly runs the risk of coming on too ominous with unnerving minor key drones.

In summary: settling on relaxing music can be unsettling.

This week, I’ve been obsessed with navigating this musical dilemma, trying to curate the perfect set of opium jams. I’ve been starting with a tune called “Cirrus Clouds,” basically a layered configuration of warm tones, and then—as a way to alert the smart play—skipping any subsequent tracks that are cluttered with overeager melodies or insistent chords on the down beat.

My quietude quest is a work in progress, but as my apartment fills up with the three-dimensional currents of The Riddle of Dreams or the flexible Hzs of Runic Inscriptions on Parapets, I’m suddenly thinking about adding achieve enlightenment to my To Do list.

3) My Neighborhood’s Beautiful Tree Canopy

Seattle NIMBYs have weaponized the soft and pleasant idea of tree canopy as a metaphor: When they talk about trees they’re not so subtly disparaging housing development.

As I’ve pointed out on PubliCola, the hypocrisy of their position is frustrating: Do they think their single family lots represent the natural state of things? To the contrary, according to HistoryLink, homeowner neighborhoods like Wedgwood used to be sylvan wonderlands of “dense forest.” But with today’s clearcut geography giving them theirs, Baby Boom patron saint Joni Mitchell evidently forbids us from cutting down any more trees to accommodate housing for others.

The compounding irony: building dense, multi-family housing, ie, skinnier and taller than than roomy single family properties, takes up much less space, and logically, takes out fewer trees. You’ve got it backwards, NIMBYs.

This week, as I do every May when my dense neighborhood’s rich tree canopy turns into Exhibit A for Seattle’s status as America’s Emerald City, I fell in love with my street’s mixed-use zoning once again.

My street is part of Seattle District 3. With urban Capitol Hill at its core, D3 has formidable 32 percent tree canopy cover; the current citywide stretch goal is 30%.

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I’ve got two notes from this week that don’t rate as obsessions, but deserve attention.

First, I’ve been watching the NBA playoffs (mostly, at Madison Pub still), and I’ve been keeping a list of now-defining pro-basketball accoutrements that did not exist when I was a kid. More importantly, they seem like cultural affronts to our MAGA era.

My NBA list:

Everyone is Dr. J (a ballerina) now;

female court correspondents and broadcasters;

Saudi Arabian advertising stitched into the uniforms;

the ubiquity of tattoos;

European stars.

And my favorite new addition: pink and other metrosexual, pastel colored basketball shoes.

Second, and file this under someplace where you can actually eat out past 9 pm: I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the interchangeable looking restaurants on worn out Broadway is actually a charismatic standout: Broadway Wok.

The generic “Chinese and Thai Cuisine” tag certainly plays into the ho-hum vibe on this spent 1990s stretch between John St. and Roy. But the reality inside this warm restaurant—overflowing bowls of tasty tofu, fresh veggies, and savory green curry, along with charming down-to-earth service—defies Broadway’s lackluster trend.