I’m All Lost In, #94: Tap-and-go; ta-da!; portable magnetic wireless power bank.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#94

1) Tap-and-go (and other Transit Notes)

The MTA is phasing out its iconic yellow fare cards by the end of 2025; no more swiping only to be greeted by an obstinate turnstile. It’s all tap-and-go now: Tap your credit or debit card; use an MTA OMNY card, which you buy at vending machines much like traditional pre-loaded cards ; or easiest of all, tap on with your phone, as I did this past weekend on my excellent NYC visit. There’s also a fare cap: You ride free of charge after 12 taps per week.

Hewes St., Brooklyn, 9:45 pm, 7/26/25

And there’s no fumbling around. You don’t have to open your smart phone wallet first and then double click and hold your card to the reader. All you have to do is touch your phone to it. Shazam. You’re in—to midtown for a movie at the air conditioned MoMa Film Center (Jean Renoir’s ridiculous 1955 flick French Cancan); to Bushwick to see late night comedy at the Tiny Cupboard; or leaving town from Delancey St. and Bowery on the J Train to Sutphin Boulevard where you catch the AirTrain to JFK.

And here’s another note on transit system innovations from my travels back East last week; this one from WMTA, the DC Metro:

On my train ride to the northwest Maryland suburbs for my visit with Mom, I was bemused that during the first leg of the commute on the Silver Line from Dulles, the announcer kept saying: “This is a Silver Line Train to New Carrollton.” New Carrollton is not a stop on the Silver Line. It’s at the end of the Orange Line.

Stare as I did at the map on board the train, which showed that while the Silver Line runs parallel to the Orange Line (“interlining”) through the city, it does not continue to do so in the suburbs out to New Carrollton. Rather, it showed, as I thought, the Silver Line staying course through to Downtown Largo, its own suburban terminus to the south of New Carrollton. None of this was relevant to my trip, I was changing trains at Metro Center and taking the Red Line Northwest to the NIH station. But still. I was curious and flummoxed. Was there a shuttle at Largo that went north to New Carrollton? How did this work?

When I alighted at Metro Center, I saw an updated Metro map. And indeed, indicating a seamless change up with a hatched line, it showed that every other Silver Line train split to the northeast onto New Carrollton as the train made its way into Maryland. This type of heads up routing—based on things such as where the train yards and turnarounds are (New Carrollton) and transit hub efficiency (go to slide 12 here to understand the smart overall frequency benefits)—demonstrate the kind of nimble and simple construction-free changes you can make to fixed-right-of-way subway infrastructure (as opposed to highway infrastructure for cars) that improve commutes for more people proportionally speaking.

As I texted my Sound Transit workmate Eliza upon this discovery: “Cool. Silver Line doesn’t merely interline w/ Orange; it has two different termini. Every other Silver Line train takes you to New Carrollton (trad Orange Line only) without a transfer.

One last transit planning win I noticed this week. Hitting NYC for the weekend after my stay in DC, I sent Eliza this picture from Manhattan showing a subway stop at W. 4th St. embedded in the entrance of an Uzbeki grocery store.

I captioned it: “Fantastic TOD.”

“Be Still my heart,” my transit bestie Eliza wrote back when I sent over this pic of Transit Oriented Development perfection from the West Village in Manhattan. 7/26/25, NYC

2) ta-da! at the Greenwich House Theater

ECB is an expert at finding plays for us to see whenever we’re in NYC; not the easy-to-scout-out Broadway shows, but sneaky gems playing in the Village. On ECB’s prescient recommendation during last year’s trip together, we saw the Tony-award-winning Broadway hit “Oh, Mary!” long before it took center stage. Theater Cred: We saw it back in March, 2024 in the West Village at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher St. We had front row seats.

This week, just a few blocks away from the Lortel, we saw a show called ta-da! at the Greenwich House Theatre on Barrow St. 5th row.

ta-da! at the Greenwich House Theatre in the West Village, 7/26/25

.Like the madcap Oh, Mary! this was an amphetamine-tempoed comedy showcasing a self-deprecating gay guy. Unlike Oh, Mary!’s ensemble-cast madness though, this was a one-man show—an 80-minute monologue delivered by a lanky muppet-like actor/writer named Josh Sharp. Occasionally slowing things down with his brainy former-SAT tutor chops to explain how things like parallel universes work, Sharp otherwise performs the piece as a Ted Talk on Benzedrine, chasing a wordy PowerPoint that spits out jokey amended commentary on the script. This smart aleck slide deck plays the role of traditional Greek chorus standing in as Sharp’s candid alter ego.

It’s an I-laughed-I-cried (though, mostly laughed) stand-up routine about Sharp’s belabored coming out journey. He didn’t come out until he was 22 when his still-young, once-vibrant mom is dying from a rare form of cancer.

One side-splitting bit from this bittersweet coming-of-age story features Sharp, who grew up in the closet in the rural south, recasting a hayseed bro’s drawling boast about “wrestling parties” where the ladies “lift they skirts and show you they pussies.” Hilariously, Sharp turns the boorish rap into a thespian poetry reading (in iambic pentameter). He caps this absurd sample by leading the mostly gay male crowd in an audience-participation read along.

Unbeknownst to ECB and me, ta-da! was directed by Sam Pinkleton, the same guy who directed Oh, Mary!

We got to town right on time. Here’s the 7/22/25 NYT review. ECB was tipped, though, by a fairly unclear 7/25/25 New Yorker review.

But all my comparison’s to Oh, Mary! are misleading. Where that show charged along without dynamic variety, Sharp adheres to the competing drama masks. He gives us both play and poignance, nonsense and nuance.

3) My New Wireless Portable Phone Charger

As I write this, it’s petering out on the table at the coffee shop. But still. The portable Belkin magnetic wireless phone charger I bought in the throes of my latest bout with an Apple iPhone that refuses to connect to the cable cord and take a charge, is a revelation.

After getting the scripted empathy at the SoHo Apple Store from a salesperson (I’m not blaming you) about maybe a mutant dust bunny in the charging port or a possibly fraying cord—thanks for acknowledging how shoddy your products are— I charmed my way around scheduling a dreaded appointment at the Genius Bar and fast forwarded the process.

Why don’t you first try the portable charger to see if the problem is the cord ? a young salesperson asked me standing her guard position atop the escalator (where I’d been sent by the first nice salesperson).

You have portable wireless chargers?, I asked glimpsing a table off to her left dappled with wireless portables—and also glimpsing my light at the end of this tunnel.

No less than five minutes later, I was back out on Prince St., early on a Friday evening, with this elegant best-thing-since-sliced-bread fix tucked away in my Apple bag.

Death to phone charging cords.

It packs two 100% charges-worth of power once it’s all filled up itself; which admittedly, you have to do with a charging cord.

And I do have some complaints. “Magnetic” is an overstatement. It’s never evident if you’ve securely locked the phone in position to receive a charge; you have to blindly suss this out without ever feeling the phone click into place. Furthermore, when the phone is actually in position, you have to or don’t have to? press the power button to start charging; it’s hard to tell because, again, it’s never clear if the phone is in the proper position. Additionally, there’s enough awkward delay time between getting the phone into place and getting some sort of sign that the phone is actually charging, that you often assume it’s not and are inclined to keep nudging it around the slippery block. Shall I continue? The sometimes satisfying oversized charging icon that appears as a green circle on the face of your phone to display the battery’s charged percentage, comes on or doesn’t without rhyme or reason; often it doesn’t appear even if the phone is in fact being charged. In this instance, it half-heartedly sometimes says “charging” in small print at the top of your phone.

I’m impatient. I’m a Gen Xer. Which certainly explains some of my maybe-user-error disappointments. But I’m all in anyway. This $60 solution to the predictable and interminable erratic life of Apple’s shitty charging cables rates right up there with the charm of using your phone to tap-and-go on the subway.

My watch recommendation of the week: a 1949 B-movie classic, Side Street.

Lastly, this week’s movie recommendation: 1949’s Side Street, a noir B-movie starring Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell. I came across this enchanting number because when I got back to Seattle this week, I couldn’t let go of my trip to the Big Apple. You see, this tell-tale heart, cat-and-mouse police procedural starring a tripped-up working class hero and his benevolent loving wife, a crooked lawyer and his cold-blooded henchman, a no-nonsense detective and $30,000 gone missing, a sad lounge singer and a compromised Upper East Side financier, plus lots of bartenders, decoys, and dead bodies, was filmed on location in NYC. Check out one fan’s obsessed blog post that maps out the whole thing with screen shots from the 1949 film that morph into the present day sites of the locations. One of the locations is the same as it was in 1949, a bar called Marie’s Crisis. During our trip, ECB and I actually went to Marie’s Crisis. We didn’t know anything about Side Street at the time. We went because the place is evidently a historic Stonewall-adjacent queer piano lounge. (I could have done without the pianist’s baby boom pedagogy on the night we settled in there, though.) I figured out the Side Street connection after the fact when I was googling Marie’s Crisis and the entry mentioned that it shows up in this old movie. That was my cue to search out Side Street on YouTube. The bar shows up the film’s stand-out scene. It’s when the aforementioned forlorn lounge singer traps our working class hero into his final misstep.

I’m All Lost In, #93: IAD at 6 am; heroic water misters; Reagan fashion revival.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#93

1) Dulles International Airport

Dulles Airport, 6:15 am, 7/21/25

For me, airports symbolize melodrama. I’ve long longed for that great airport moment, a tender goodbye (like the “far freakin’ out” moment between Peter Parker and Mary Jane in Amazing Spider-Man #143) or a joyful hello. Kinda had one with XDX picking her up from Beijing last summer. And did I have one last week at the Sea-Tac light rail parking lot?

It’s 2001’s Dr. Heywood Floyd on his layover at Space Station 5 en route to investigate Clavius Base. It’s Case in Neuromancer en route from Istanbul to the Villa Straylight on Freeside. I wanted to have it in 1989 picking up my then-ex on her way back from England. No luck. I witnessed my mom’s tears when we dropped her dad off after his sweet visit, probably his last, from Israel in the mid-1980s. There was the time a high school pal picked me up after my first semester back from college. I never really had one with my parents, and only really remember the time when they were getting old and increasingly confused and couldn’t find me at the arrivals gate.

I wax about my airport longings in plenty of my poems. Here are excerpts from a few…

…I flew to an airport made of parks/    

and ponds and hiked to the stargazing area. 

•••

“When the line to the airport opens, it will be the end/

for multiple routes being discontinued.”/

At this very airport, decades ago,/

I knew possibility for the only time when/

a school friend met me at the arrivals gate holding/

a courteously wrapped gift./  

I now know possibility is another word for psychopomp

•••

7) After the airport, at home, we throw our coats/

      over the chairs and stand in the kitchen/

      under fluorescent lights before sitting down at the table

•••

Go to the airport without any explanation

•••

the magnitude of airplane wheels retracting >/

 > pavement irrelevant.

•••

Wayfinding: JFK Airport to Diana’s sister’s apartment

Descend into New York’s ascendant skyline > AirTrain > the 8th Avenue Express toward Ozone Park > Hoyt-Schermerhorn > it’s late > exit at 59th > step toward the river > the hospital > the high school of sky hooks > to the food truck at the corner of 60th & Columbus > eat dinner on wiseacre infrastructure > Home (the apartment is your younger sister’s) where there’s a cache of date cookies > stay awake on the couch watching the History Channel > Cyrus the Great captured Babylon in 539 BC > an open city > he preserved its ziggurats.

All of this to say, I love Dulles International Airport. I landed there at 5:40 on Monday morning after a red-eye from Seattle; I visited my elderly mom in suburban Maryland this week. It may just be that the airport is relatively empty at that tranquil hour, but the clear signage, logical layout, hushed walkways, mellow lighting, effortless trajectory to the baggage claim, and seamless subway connection are IBM-immaculate mid-1960s-mod and 22nd century cybernetic aesthetics all at once.

Dulles Airport, 6:20 am, 7/21/25

Dulles Airport Metro station, 6:35 am, 7/21/25

2) Cooling Down at Mubadala Citi DC

I took advantage of my week in DC (suburban Maryland) to trek into Rock Creek Park on Thursday for a day’s worth of pro-tennis action at the Mubadala Citi DC Open (pronounced moo-BOTtle-lah as opposed Moo-BAH-DAH-LAH as the Slavic tennis star ladies pronounce it on Instagram and TikTok.) It’s only a 500-level tournament. So, while most of the big names were not competing, there were a few Top 10 players and a crew of exciting challengers on hand. At a county-fair-sized tournament like this, I was able to get up close. So close that I could see the beads of sweat falling off No. 36 Leylah Fernandez’s face onto the court as she aced World No. 4 Jessica Pegula on her way to a major upset in the 90 degree DC heat.

Leylah Fernandez at the Mubadala Citi DC Open, 7/24/25

Tennis legend Venus Williams, Mubadala Citi DC Open, 7/24/25

However, this item isn’t about my endless obsession with the WTA. It’s about the 90-degree heat and the heroic industrial-sized water misters that tournament organizers strategically placed at every nook of the outdoor complex. Nirvana for overheated spectators suffering in the blaring, simultaneously crisp and muggy sunshine.

Gaggles of enervated tournament-goers huddled around these hydro Shangri-las, entranced human bodies going immediately limp in euphoria as the palm-frond-sized fan blades whirred with mechanical grace. Coupled with a blue razz lime icee, misters are a source of earthly bliss I hadn’t previously pondered nor given their due.

3) Reagan Fashion Reboot

Speaking of tennis, I’m seeing women wearing tennis dresses everywhere in NYC. Apologies to my New York friends for not saying hello, but after spending time in DC with Mom, I took Amtrak up to Manhattan for a quick, personal getaway weekend. One fashion observation from this trend-setting capital of the sartorial: The same staid style that ruined the 1980s—think women’s high-waisted stone-washed jeans—is back. It’s not high-waisted jeans specifically; I haven’t seen many of those. But an athletic, clean cut, country club look has taken hold.

I can only surmise that just as boring aesthetics accompanied the reactionary Reagan era, the MAGA backlash against anything that hints of counterculture has similarly given way to a homogeneous retrofit. It’s characterized by pleated tennis skirts, activewear sets in neutral colors, tiny floral prints, and ironed polo shirts.

I’m All Lost In, #92: New Woody Guthrie songs; buildings > trees!; and beta blockers.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#92

1) New Woody Guthrie

I haven’t heard these new 1951 songs yet—they’re coming out on August 14th according to an exciting NYT article. But this seems like the space time continuum handing out some beautiful and historical comeuppance.

Given that Guthrie already pinned the tail on the donkey in the early 1940s with his anti-fascist folk song “Lindbergh,” a perfect exposé of the first America First movement, this new find isn’t entirely surprising.

Wait for it:

The 13 new songs, previously known only as written lyrics, underline the variety of Guthrie’s songwriting. One standout is “Backdoor Bum and the Big Landlord,” a parable about two characters trekking toward heaven. The bum has practical skills — building a fire, cooking a stew — while the landlord weighs himself down with gold, expecting to buy his way into salvation. In a Woody Guthrie song, that doesn’t happen.

(Guthrie’s landlord at Beach Haven was Fred Trump, the president’s father. Guthrie [also] wrote a song, “Old Man Trump,” denouncing him for segregation. )

2) Tall Buildings are Cool

Thanks to my pal Glenn for pointing me to this opinion piece.

File it under the most contrarian essay ever written.

Buildings > trees this article argues, positing that as our environmental crisis accelerates, the public needs to see tall buildings and their “shadows as a form of urban cooling.”

Outlining the stunted trajectory of urban planning that has stigmatized tall buildings, this piece pushes back against the conventional wisdom that open space dappled with trees is the only and best deterrent to climate change.

Although New York and other American cities badly need more shady spaces like this, it’s far too difficult to create them. Planning codes discourage new high-rises in many neighborhoods, and urban designers claim their thousand-foot shadows make the open spaces around them less inviting. But the opposite is true on extremely hot days: The monolithic shade of buildings can actually enhance parks, playgrounds and plazas by cooling them down. As extreme heat becomes more common, urban dwellers need to relinquish their bias against daytime darkness and embrace the shadows.

While the nervous author does too much editorial hiccupping and hemming and hawing to reiterate the favored urban planning tenet that trees are awesome and that new development is problematic, he nonetheless offers a startling rejoinder.

When the air temperature is about 95 degrees and the humidity is around 60 percent, a sunny park is dangerous for healthy older adults, according to an international team of heat experts.

The essay concludes with an anecdote about finding shade under a gigantic building.

In the long run, the public needs to get over its fear of more permanent shadows. ….

In fact, that exact dynamic is playing out right now near Lands End II, the building complex that created the oasis for my son and me — in the form of four new skyscrapers, ranging from 62 to 80 stories tall, that would loom over the older towers. It’s not hard to imagine how those glassy, mostly market-rate developments could spur higher costs that could displace long-term residents. Some have already sued, many times, to stop them. But on a sweltering summer afternoon, as I pass by empty basketball and handball courts and abandoned playground slides, I can also imagine how their sweeping shadows could be an improvement.

3) Beta Blocker Dust

These light green pills have made my list before [I’m All Lost In #36, June 21, 2024]. God bless beta blockers.

The scientific concept at play in these anti-anxiety meds (or the magic) is this: As opposed to the more common mood regulating SSRI medications that literally meddle with your brain chemistry, beta blockers (Propranolol is the brand I use) reverse the physical symptoms of anxiety such as a racing heart. By slowing down your pulmonary system, beta blockers trick your brain into thinking you’re not anxious. And Shazam, you’re not.

Thanks to a generous scrip, I’ve been popping Propranolol sporadically over the past two years whenever I feel an anxiety attack coming on. To my joy, it works every time: The basketball in my throat and the weight in my chest simply vanish. I wish I’d learned about this medication when I was younger; I’d always thought I was just stuck with the high-pitched feeling roiling my chest.

Propranolol is now making it’s second official appearance on my obsessions list because “sporadic” is no longer the word I’d use to describe my self-care regime; it’s been a week.

In addition to my daily attempt at crisis containment these days, my dosage has inadvertently increased for another reason as well: Ever since my friendly doctor first prescribed me beta blockers back in late 2023, I’ve been carrying a bottle in my backpack wherever I go. My supply has since been jostled around to the point that most of the cache has been reduced to green powder. Using teaspoons and liberal guesswork, I’ve ended up binging on the stuff like it’s cocaine, licking the dusty extra debris off my finger tips.

I’m All Lost In, #91: Zheng Xiaoqiong, “Migrant Worker Poet;” April Wheeler, nebulous force; Aryna Sabalenka,“She now finds herself in a curious position.”

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#91

1) Zheng Xiaoqiong

“Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry is about global capitalism and income disparity, geopolitics, feminism, wage discrimination, and workers’ rights.” —from translator Eleanor Goodman’s intro to Xiaoqiong’s collection In the Roar of the Machine.

As a weepy white liberal, I’m politically sympathetic to Zheng Xiaoqiong’s proletarian poetry. But I do want her to write more fanciful lines like these: “That hungry machine, every day eating iron, blueprints/stars, dew, salty sweat, it picks its teeth/and spits out profit, bank notes, nightclubs…it sees/” —from Zheng Xiaoqiong’s 2006 poem “Machine” …

and humanist metaphors like this:

“My body contains a vast open plain, a train/is travelling across it, but autumn is in its deep/suffering twilight, and I follow the train’s/meandering path, planting a thousand hawthorn trees in the/wilderness/ … sparse unconvincing shadows/move with the train, one tree, two trees… it stops on the/grey indistinct plain/I say to the trees, this is my friend, my dear one” —from Zheng Xiaoqiong’s 2006 poem “Train”

These are standout verses from the otherwise (a bit too) straightforward and literal protest poetry of Xiaoqiong; she’s a contemporary Chinese poet who’s been dubbed “the migrant worker poet” and who writes immersively about sweating factory floor laborers, global capitalism, her employee badge number, and industrial machinery.

Slumping through the shelves at Elliott Bay Books on Thursday after work—an evening of whiskeys that eventually flowed into my midnight decision to call in sick on Friday—I was about to leave the store without a new book in hand. Fortuitously, I gravitated back to the poetry section one last time. Xiaoqiong’s 2022 survey collection In the Roar of the Machine (published by the elderly and precocious New York Review of Books) stopped me in my tracks. The title itself and a glance at the opening poem, “Life” (“What you don’t know is that my name has been hidden by/ an employee ID/my hands become part of the assembly line, my body/signed over/to a contract, my black hair is turning white, …”) melded with my epiphany for a much needed, self-imposed three-day weekend.

Xiaoqiong’s unencumbered candor about workstations, underarm odor, toil, assembly lines, and “these fragile hearts” didn’t only seem germane to my myopic bad mood, but it also resounded with the week’s bigger picture: Trump’s recent legislative attack on Medicare and crass sop to corporatists.

I’ve since read the entire first sequence in Xiaoqiong’s In the Roar of the Machine , “Huangling” (named after an ancient Chinese village turned “Industrial Zone” for the “floating workforce”), and I’m eagerly onto the subsequent sequences: “Poems Scattered on Machines,” “Woman Worker,” “Rose Courtyard,” and “Finale.”

God bless finales. I can’t wait.

2) Richard Yates’ 1961 Novel, Revolutionary Road (and the 2008 movie version.)

Kate Winslet as April Wheeler in the faithful film adaptation of Yates’ excellent American novel.

More Sylvia Plath than John Cheever (that is, more psychological than theatrical, more drama than drawing room, and more candid than clipped), this mid-20th century domestic tour de force hits all those pull-the-curtain-back-on-white suburbia delights: abortion, infidelity, mental illness, muddling alcoholism, meddling neighbors, and commuter capitalism.

Yates’ knack for conjuring symbolism from the picayune details of marriage, his ear for mastering the desperate internal monologues of flawed strivers, and his skill at crafting fraught backstories that are on a collision course with the future all give Revolutionary Road the weight of “the great American novel.'“ Yates is also a wicked good storyteller, which leavens the hefty themes with a page-turning fever.

Most important, though, Yates has given us a character for the ages: April Wheeler, a nascent feminist and nebulous force whose imprecise daydreams snare those around her in their own delusions. And ultimately, in a collective tragedy.

April Wheeler is perfectly rendered by Kate Winslet in Sam Mendes’ 2008 movie version; after devouring the novel at the top of the week, I had to watch the movie on Friday night. In this faithful film adaptation, Winslet distills what’s ubiquitous in the pages of Yates’ 1961 novel, but isn’t at the fore until we see Winslet’s eerie countenance: whether she’s doing dishes, having cocktails, or inducing an abortion, her demeanor is one of constant disassociation.

One thing that distinguishes Yates’ reflection on the emptiness of monoculture circa mid-20th century America from similar literature such as Cheever’s short stories is that April Wheeler and her clever but merely along-for-the-ride husband Frank aren’t in the process of awakening to the confines of their oppression. They’re onto the American ruse from page one. This is a novel of neither sudden desperation nor liberation, but of dispirited yearning for what’s next.

After easily seducing Shep Campbell, the salt-of-the-earth husband half of the neighborhood couple who serve as the Wheeler’s default besties, April dismisses him in her ongoing state of remove, foreshadowing her inexorable fate.

There was just enough light to show him where her face was, not enough for him to see its expression or even to tell whether it had any expression at all.

“It’s not that. Honestly. It’s just that I don’t know who you are.”

There was a silence. “Don’t talk riddles,” he whispered.

“I’m not. I really don’t know who you are.”

If he couldn’t see her face, at least he could touch it. He did so with a blind man’s delicacy, drawing his fingertips from her temple down into the hollow of her cheek.

“And even if I did,” she said, “I’m afraid it wouldn’t help, because you see I don’t know who I am, either.”

This scene takes place in a parking lot in the back of Shep’s car after the two couples spend an evening drinking and dancing at Vito’s Log Cabin on Route 12, a cheesy jazz club for the masses located off a lonely exurban highway exit. Yates’ literary powers are on full display inside Vito’s, particularly in the chapter’s seemingly desultory opening paragraphs where Yates puts the reader in the mind of another downcast dreamer, a long thwarted and frustrated middle-aged bandleader, the perfectly named Steve Kovick. Kovick’s stumbling career (he peaked 20 years earlier with a Gene Krupa-induced high school performance) seems a concise abstract of the novel’s obsessions with personal disappointment. “He would never play that well again.” There’s also a bittersweet resonance when Kovick’s out-of-date love for swing-era Benny Goodman jazz stirs April’s memories of her lonely teenage years. This moment, which prompts April to ask Shep to dance and then impulsively seduce him, was one of the few joyous moments in the novel.

Mendes gives this scene its due screen time with a dance scene where Winslet’s April Wheeler is more present in life than at any other moment in the film.

3) Sabalenka at Wimbledon (and Swiatek)

“She now finds herself in a curious position. Her consistency at majors—11 semifinal-or-better finishes at her past 12—is remarkable. But her record when things get tight in those late stages is unspooling. She is now 3-9 in deciding sets of semifinals and finals at the Grand Slams.”

So wrote NYT/Athletic tennis beat reporter Matthew Futterman after my tennis hero Aryna Sabalenka went down on Thursday morning 4-6, 6-4, 4-6 in a two-and-half hour Wimbledon semifinal thriller against ascendant American Amanda Anisimova (ranked No. 13).

Nothing curious about it if you ask me. Sabalenka’s Charlie Brown clouds have been apparent from the first time I watched her on television (the 2023 U.S. Open).

To be fair, the folding-under-pressure rap isn’t quite accurate. Sabalenka has won her last 14 tiebreakers in a row. And she did overcome the “dark arts” of trickster Laura Siegmund (No. 102) in a wild Wimbledon quarterfinal match; I woke up at 6 am on Tuesday morning before work to tune in. But her predictable flame outs at Grand Slams are adding up. Despite a stellar year to date (securely World No. 1 by 3,700 points, and the first player on tour to already lock a spot at the elite year-end WTA finals), Aryna Sabalenka has flopped on the big stage again. Here’s her post-match press conference where she jokes “Are you guys waiting for something? You’re not going to see a ‘Roland-Garros press conference’” —a reference to last month’s meltdown at the microphone.

Maybe it was a good thing Sabalenka didn’t make the final. Poland’s Iga Swiatek, the previous World No. 1, who has mysteriously plummeted during her own lackluster year, returned to her phenomenal early-2024 form just in time for this Wimbledon fortnight. She barrelled through the tournament without dropping a set on her way to an emphatic 6-0, 6-0 final win over Anisimova on Saturday.

Iga also won over hearts this week in her on-court interview after a third-round 6-2, 6-3 win against Danielle Collins (yay, can’t stand Collins) when she revealed that her favorite dish was pasta with strawberries and yogurt.

Iga Swiatek talks about pasta and strawberries at Wimbledon, 7/5/25

I’m All Lost In, #90: A speakeasy on Olive Way; repurposing obstruction into construction; a secret ice cream shop.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#90

Of course, I’m obsessing over the fact that the president of the United States blithely used a cancerous anti-Jewish slur at his Des Moines, Iowa rally this week as he celebrated his depraved signature legislation; the bill kicks 11 million people off Medicaid while adding billions of dollars to Trump’s deportation crusade. Channeling his KKK worldview, Trump told the MAGA faithful that they wouldn’t have to worry about “Shylocks” anymore. In addition to spouting such incendiary hate spittle, Trump is being duplicitous. It’s sociopathic and obnoxious to portray pro-oligarchy legislation (that will cost the poorest Americans $1,600 a year, save the wealthiest Americans $12,000 a year, hand out tax breaks to big business, and attack social programs such as SNAP aid for food) as if it’s a populist affront against those supposedly evil Jews. Sigh, the convoluted rhetoric fronting Trump’s classic Republican agenda (anti-poor, pro-big business, and hyper militarized) made this a July 4 of despair.

I toasted the limping holiday at one of my favorite hangouts on the Drag where I talked to a Korean fellow who said he regretted his decision to swap his Korean citizenship for U.S. citizenship; he no longer felt safe or welcome in America, he told me as we cheers-ed over vodka sodas and lime.

Earlier in the day, I indulged another personal “of course.” I watched Aryna Sabalenka’s third-round Wimbledon match against surging London hope Emma Raducanu. It was a thriller; Saby eventually won the two-hour match 7-6(8-6), 6-4 after being behind 2-4 in the first set and 1-4 (!) in the second as she defied Week 1’s big story line: Upstarts ousting top seeds. Saby is the only Top-5 seed left as we head into Wimbledon Week 2, affirming my contention (and the data) that she’s the most consistent player on the 2025 tour.

Onto this week official items, including two recommendations:

1) A Speakeasy on Olive Way
They had me at warm hand towels.

I’ve walked past this place a million times: the nondescript, storefront on Olive Way’s otherwise electric commercial strip at the western edge of Capitol Hill. I’d assumed from the anonymous facade and drawn curtains that it was a defunct business.

The Doctor’s Office, 7/3/25

It’s actually a popular local speakeasy called the Doctor’s Office, a refined yet unpretentious slip of a room (“Maximum Occupancy 17”) that serves lovingly prepared cocktails such as their crisp Suntory whisky Toki highball poured over a rectangular obelisk of ice.

Hard wood flooring and latticed panels frame this cozy room with its slight set of corner tables and cushioned bench seating nestled tightly up against a handful of spots at the bar, which runs along the entire facing wall.

The Doctor’s Office prescribes a Valium setting, an oasis of romance and peace percolating right under the nose of the cavorting throngs outside. The close quarters prompt a pacific intimacy where each tipsy pair can laugh and flirt, exchange life stories, and make pinky swear oaths unbeknownst to the smattering of other pairs doing the same as they sit mere feet away.

This past Thursday night, on the cusp of a three-day weekend, the male/female duo running the place was friendly and attentive while understanding the assignment: Bartending with gentle and unobtrusive aplomb.

They started things off by presenting the aforementioned warmed hand towels with complimentary glasses of champagne.

In contrast to the clandestine, Saigon ‘63 Graham Greene aesthetic of the cocktail lounge, the magically capacious bathroom is bright and playful. I note the loo, which features a bidet, because it distills the common denominator at play here: It’s as if a thoughtful Airbnb host attends to this charmed Seattle nightspot.

The Doctor’s Office is open to walk-ins, but I’d recommend making reservations.

2) A Hack for Housing

Single family zone protectionists are so put upon by any smidgen of additional housing in their neighborhoods, especially rental housing, that they’ll even fight mild density like mother-in-law apartments; I’ve been reporting on this parochial resistance for decades.

So, I wish Erica and I had gotten this latest installment in which housing naysayers get their comeuppance; three cheers to Seattle’s NYT stringer for following the issue so closely.

And more so, three cheers to Seattle developers for devising an elegant hack to a monkey-wrenching amendment that had undermined some 2019 pro-housing legislation. The original yes-in-my backyard city council bill dared to increase the number of mother-in-law units allowed in traditional single family zones from one to two. Conservative neighborhood groups pushed for a change requiring that one of the two units had to be attached to the main house, a ploy to limit the opportunity for more development. Housing advocates, however, turned the rule into an architectural prompt for creating new “three-pack” housing compounds where multifamily developments are strung together by skybridges.

The NYT reports on how ingenious developers repurposed the NIMBY obstruction into housing construction:

In that political environment, allowing for two detached A.D.U.s would have been a step too far, said Nicolas Welch, a senior planner at the City Office of Planning and Community Development. Enter the skybridge. Some housing experts call them umbilical cords.

Under the building code, any enclosed structure wider than five feet can qualify as an attachment — “leaving room for interpretation,” Mr. Welch said.

“You write something down and it gets used in some creative ways that weren’t anticipated,” he added.

The 3-pack is a product of that flexibility. Developers have formed these A.D.U. compounds as three-unit condo associations, charging a nominal homeowner association fee (often $10 or less) to cover the filings.

3) An Ice Cream Secret
”July 4 is the ice cream holiday.”

This bit of summer wisdom relayed to me in the checkout line at the convenience store persuaded me to seek out an ice cream shoppe ice cream cone.

To avoid the long summer lines at the popular ice cream places in my neighborhood such as Molly Moon’s, Salt & Straw, or Frankie & Jo’s, there’s a small wonder tucked away in the urbanist cluster at 11th Avenue’s Chophouse Row: Sweet Alchemy.

Partnering with local organic farms to champion eco-conscious treat making, the shop comes with laudable spiels about “producing small batch, organic, and locally sourced ice cream… [to] craft our Sweet Cream base daily from organic ingredients…”

That’s cool. But more relevant is that on two recent visits to this small, casual specialty shop—which feels more like a farmer’s market stall than an actual storefront—I’ve scored some malty delicious vegan flavors scooped into sugary, non-vegan waffle cones.

On my July 4 visit, I got a delightful scoop of mocha.

I’m All Lost In, #89: Yiddish Techno in Wallingford; Mary Tyler Moore in 1980; “Eastern” dyads in the Key of C.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#89

1) Yiddish Techno

Manhattan-based Yiddish revivalist Chaia, an ambient musician (and low-key EDM aspirant) who infuses her hypnotic beats, loops, and chanteuse-like prayers with the plaintive sounds of the shtetl, brought her “Kleztronic Yiddish Techno” to the Good Shepherd Center’s experimental Wayward Music Series on Thursday night. Thanks to XDX for the find. And as if this wasn’t already the perfect night of Josh Feit catnip, there was a pro-transit pop tune included in the evening’s mix as well.

Curated as a night that “re-imagines the Yiddish song tradition,” Chaia’s program also featured an improvisational closing set from legendary local avant-garde cellist, Lori Goldston, and an earnest opening set by Seattle-based Levoneh, a gentle folk pop group—bright electric guitar, stand-up bass, trumpet, clarinet, piano, and sad harmonies. They kind of reminded me of my own yearning, Galaxie 500-as-chamber-group rock band from my lost mid 20s, the Diary of Anne Frank String Quartet (true.)

Chaia started things off by giving a captivating talk on Eastern Europe’s pre-Holocaust Jewish ghetto culture with its Yiddish vernacular of dance, dress, humor, argot, and resistance. This brief history lesson concluded with her near-poetic manifesto about how she wanted to honor her ancestors’ diaspora folklore by remixing it, “scattering it and then walking forward into it.” As she said this, I imagined Chaia tossing rice and confetti into the air at a Polish Jewish wedding and then ambling into the gentle diaspora of debris as it rained down upon her.

Her showstopping set itself flowed from the melancholy Klezmer accordion melodies she played live over pre-programmed electronic signals before ascending into her layered sound design of haftara crooning, psilocybin sine waves, samples of mourning bubbes, and four-on-the-floor dance club rhythms, all as she conducted from the mixing board.

I could have done without Levoneh’s requisite “stolen land” number (political lecture), but their “Free Bus Fare” Robert Zimmerman as Woody Guthrie-style rambler was a delight. As was their closing love song to the moon. And Goldston’s buzzing, free-form performance, particularly when she started rough housing the cello as if she were Parliament-Funkadelic bassist Bootsy Collins circa 1975, was yet another one of her at-ease, improvised masterpieces.

Chaia, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, 6/26/25

Lori Goldston, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, 6/26/25

Levoneh, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, 2/26/25

Chaia, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, 6/26/25

Since we were at Wallingford’s Good Shepherd Center—the hippie nonprofit haven is tucked away on a leafy neighborhood side street off the main drag—XDX and I had dinner before the show at Pam’s Kitchen, Seattle’s longtime Trinidadian comfort food spot. Apparently, Thursday night is karaoke night at Pam’s. So in addition to the sweet and thick pumpkin purée, stewed potatoes, coconut fry bread, and basketful of soft beach blanket-sized roti, we were treated to a goofy hit parade of live performances (John Sebastian’s Welcome Back Kotter theme song and Grace Slick’s “White Rabbit” included) as the dedicated regulars cued up at the mic.

2) Ordinary People

When Valium Tom walked into the apartment, he found me with my headphones on, tearing up on the couch. I was watching the 1981 Best Picture Academy Award winner, Ordinary People (1980). I did not see this movie in junior high school when it first came out, but I was well aware of it back then: Mary Tyler Moore in a serious role.

Tom was on hand because he was guest starring in the 5th episode of a podcast I do with ECB, a monthly show dedicated exclusively to our favorite movie, Shattered Glass. Tom was with ECB and me back in 2003 when we first saw Shattered Glass in the theater. And this was enough of a hook to have him on the show so we could tap his brain power as a means of getting another episode recorded.

Tom warned us in advance that he had an “Ordinary People theory” about Shattered Glass, so, I was prepping with some research. Excellent. Not only can Tom and I go on about Hollywood’s arty, gritty, 1970s heyday—of which Ordinary People fits dramatically into the fleeting last moments alongside Kramer vs. Kramer and 9 to 5. But Billy Ray, the Shattered Glass writer-director that ECB and I interviewed for last month’s installment, cited Ordinary People as one of his favorite movies.

Valium Tom’s theory had to do with the wealthy Chicago suburb Highland Park where Shattered Glass’ tortured main character Stephen Glass hails from and where Ordinary People (or perhaps, Ordinary White People) takes place. All good. But damn if the only thing I could think about for the next several days was Ordinary People.

Oh so many feelings about this late 1970s gloom, which is based on the reportedly grim 1976 Judith Guest novel.

Sure, MTM’s lead character leans hard into sexist tropes about icy, brittle women as the root of all psychological trauma in the world. But the super villain Moore created with her poisonous cadence and scary monologues is so powerful—sorry, Mom—we’ve got a universal tragic character study here of Shakespearean proportions. Also. Timothy Hutton. At 20. Wow. Best Supporting Actor Oscar. 100% deserved.

I think mostly it’s the dizzying layers of personal nostalgia that had me riveted (and teary on the couch). First, there was remembering the stir that this candid movie created 45 years ago in my suburban school hallways. On top of that, there was watching 45-years-ago high school hallways depicted in a 45-year-old film itself. Experiencing an after-the-fact meta narrative like this left me stumbling through my own hall of mirrors.

Oh, and a bizarre footnote: The IRL actor who played Buck, the Timothy Hutton character’s dead brother, was actually my roommate for a few minutes in 1990 during what seems to be a theme in this post—my lost mid-20s. Scot and I weren’t friends; just random co-losers in a crummy apartment we shared with another stranger in freezing cold Minneapolis. I’ll never forget the time Scot barged into my room one night at 3 am to yell at me in a drunken rage.

That coincidental drama is secondary, even tertiary, to the matter at hand: I’m a total sap and sucker for dreary melodramas when they were filmed in this fraught era of brittle America on the cusp of Reagan.

The specter of Reaganism, i.e., a total disengagement from reality, is something worth noting here. Ordinary People stands apart from the sweaty epoch of minimalist, character-driven 1970s filmmaking in that it’s a wholly apolitical movie. MIA in this hermetically sealed white suburb are both: A) any coincidental, adjacent, or background references to the politics of the day, like say sullen Jimmy Carter appearing on a TV screen or on the cover of Time as he does in 1980’s the Shining) or B) any explicit political narratives or extended allegory to the social issues of the day. Even a horror movie like 1973’s The Exorcist was grappling with the tumultuous times. (See “That Thing Upstairs Isn’t My Daughter,” Ch. 10 of Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.)

Ordinary People director Robert Redford was clearly aware of 1980’s sudden jump cut away from the daily hyper politics of the 1970s. There’s a telling flashback in his movie when we see Mary Tyler Moore presumably just a few years earlier as a slightly younger mom. In this sepia-toned shot, she’s shown with groovy long hair and a hippie frock. In the rest of the movie, MTM is cast with a stiff short coiffe and prim 1980s blouses, a uniform that’s metaphor for how tightly wound she is.

Redford saw it: Even as early as 1980, the mid 1970s already stood as a stark and meaningful contrast to the looming absentee Reagan era.

Mary Tyler Moore in 1980’s Ordinary People. Yikes.

3) Learning Pictures of Matchstick Men on Piano

The Status Quo on 1968’s Top of the Pops. Far Out.

Just like two weeks ago when my renewed running regime prompted an obsession with my sparkling bathtub [I’m All Lost In, #87], this week, my return to running has me voraciously printing out sheet music so I can learn new songs on piano.

The connection is straightforward: I go jogging to a playlist of my favorite classic rock, new wave, and punk songs from junior high, high school, and college. A lot of these songs are perfect for learning on piano. Accordingly, when the Status Quo’s 1968 psych pop-rock sludge groove ”Pictures of Matchstick Men” came on while I was running this week, I quickly bookmarked it as a song to figure out. Now I’m obsessed.

You’d think a garage rock ditty like this—in the all-white Key of C, no less—would be a bore when it comes to breaking it down for piano. Not a chance. As I messaged my music savant friend Eliza (and my boss at the transit agency): Learning a cool ‘60s psych garage rock song on piano, btw. Despite that it's in C, there are some weird dyads in there. The kids were into “Eastern” music at this point.

I’m All Lost In, #88: Where to eat after midnight; why I can’t listen to my favorite podcast anymore; and where’s my tax refund? Also: Crossing the Rubicon in 2025.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#88

1) Late Night Falafel at Al Bacha

Let’s discard Dick’s, I said; this sage wisdom uttered as we landed at Denny & Broadway at 11:50 pm en route initially to Seattle’s beacon of late night burgers and fries after a rollicking weeknight music show.

Just one block south of Dick’s Drive-In (why a drive-in across the street from a light rail station, anyway?) there’s now a new haven for mavens of after hours plates: Al Bacha, a neon-lit Middle Eastern gyro and falafel corner storefront with bright white menu boards—veggie sandwiches, meat sandwiches, lunch & dinner, and salads & soups—hovering over the open kitchen, a carefree smattering of tables, and a wall-to-wall line of soda coolers.

With eight items on the veggie menu (which includes French fries and Greek fries as option #4 and #6 respectively, by the way) they’ve got what vegans or vegetarians need at midnight regardless. Try the Falafel Sandwich, or for a dollar more the Arabic Veggie Sandwich; the former comes in a pita and the later is wrapped as a gyro and served with hummus and cauliflower along with the falafel. Both perfect late night snacks are packed with veggies and graced by Levant touches including parsley and tahini.

They’re happy to give you extra sauce too (for the fries in my case) which they handed off liberally in an ad hoc, oversized paper bowl.

Al Bacha stays open until midnight on weeknights and until 2:30 am on Friday and Saturday nights.

2) I Can’t Bring Myself to Listen to My Favorite Podcast

Anyone reading this knows I’m an Aryna Sabalenka fan boy. It all started when I randomly happened upon her 2023 U.S. Open semifinal match; it was playing on TV at a local restaurant as I strolled by. After that three-set thriller, where I instinctively found myself rooting for Saby from my solo cheering section at the bar, I was subsequently drawn to her discombobulated interview M.O. and to the Peter Parker storm clouds that seemed to hover consistently over her head. A jinxed compatriot.

Her tennis trials and tribulations quickly led me to the rankings race for No. 1 and to everything WTA, including my now daily check ins at the action-packed WTA website. It also led me back to the tennis court. But most of all, my tennis convert zealotry led me to The Tennis Podcast: Snarky Catherine Whitaker, straight-guy David Ward, and boy-genius Matt Roberts

So, consider this week’s entry the opposite of an obsession.

I’m not obsessing about World No. 1 Saby right now. Her funny one liner about “Mykonos, gummies and alcohol” aside, Saby’s boorish meltdown after losing to World No. 2 Coco Guaff at Roland Garros (a sore loser tantrum at best or a pique of convoluted racism at worst) pained me to the point that I’ve been anxiously skipping my daily WTA website fix for the past two weeks. And I’m downright avoiding Catherine, David, and Matt for fear that their rowdy analysis, sardonic wit, and caustic honesty will no longer cast Saby as a flawed Charlie Brown character, but as an execrable villain. This is the longest I’ve stayed away from tennis and the WTA in a year and a half.

As opposed to everyone’s favorite player Coco Gauff, Sabalenka is not a natural celebrity; and like a tilted misfit, she’s been awkwardly forcing the issue all year with a cringe PR campaign. Now, with last week’s Coco fiasco, which she tried to retract, Sabalenka has most likely sabotaged her already-iffy hopes at viral stardom.

As to her tennis form: I feared Coco’s big win at Roland Garros served notice that Saby was about to swirl into a downward spiral. Her garish loss (70 unforced errors) already seemed to nullify her outstanding 2025 form just as the all-important Wimbledon/U.S. Open summer stretch was getting underway. Those fears were momentarily allayed this week: Sabalenka bounced back with a couple of wins at the Berlin Open—including a quarterfinal thriller over 2022 Wimbledon champion and current World No. 11,  the admittedly troubled Elena Rybakina. (Coco, for her part, lost in the second round.) But then Saby quickly lost in the semis to World No. 165 (albeit 2023’s Wimbledon champion) Markéta Vondroušová.

I will say, tipsy on Friday night (before the news of Sabalenka’s semifinal loss), I was singing Vondroušová’s catchy name to myself as I walked home after happy hour.

Vondroušová is now up against another surprising (and exciting) finalist: Xinyu Wang. Wang, World No. 49, had an eye-popping run in Berlin this week. She beat No. 16 Daria Kasatkina (another Josh Feit favorite), toppled Coco, beat No. 10 Paula Badosa, and beat No. 20 Liudmila Samsonova in the semis.

Admittedly, I can’t wait to listen to this week’s The Tennis Podcast after either Vondroušová or Wang stuns tennis fans by hoisting one of the season’s first grass court trophies in the run up to Wimbledon.

3) Where’s My Tax Refund?

I used the Juneteenth work holiday this week to set aside the 10,000 hours I anticipated I needed for a phone call with the IRS.

Earlier in the week, wondering where my return was two months on now, I checked the “Where’s My Refund?” page on the IRS website. After entering all my info, including the a-okayed refund amount indicated on my completed tax returns, they said my return had been directly deposited into my checking account on May 30.

It had?

So, I checked my bank records. I did find a direct deposit from the Feds that day. But it was for a partial, much smaller amount than the amount I’d been expecting.

Unfortunately, all I could do on the phone “with” the IRS was talk to an automated voice that requested the same info the website had requested—and it ended up giving me the same half-right answer.

The android voice claimed it could answer any follow-up questions. But it couldn’t. I tried that option in vain and it simply sent me into a loop where I was prompted to repeat my initial inquiry. After saying “No” and pounding the pound key enough times, it gave me another phone number. But that simply led me to the exact same loop. As did a third and altogether different number I found when I googled “How do you talk an actual person at the IRS?”

I’m low-key wondering if I should even bother haggling with the IRS these days. When I think of the shoddy state of affairs in D.C. under Trump right now, I’m reminded of the joke about the old Soviet Union where the workers pretend to work and the government pretends to pay them. Under Trump, it feels like the kakistocracy he’s installed is only play acting at governance as we taxpayers are only phoning in citizenship.

…

Let me close this week’s installment with The Word of the Week.

It’s not tilted, a word you may have noticed above to describe Sabalenka’s conniptions. That’s a slang word I learned a few weeks ago; it refers to the free-fall cycle of making a mistake, getting frustrated with yourself, and as a result, making several more mistakes ad nauseam until you’re a puddle.

Fun word, but the word I’ve actually been noticing all week is Rubicon. Rubicon is showing up regularly these days in the context of the Trump administration’s authoritarian mindset (sending the marines to L.A., defying court orders) and their gestapo tactics (body tackling and arresting Democratic officials, siccing anonymous goons on immigrants), thuggish transgressions that are stressing America’s constitutional norms and traditions.

Rubicon is, of course, part of the phrase “crossing the Rubicon,” which means reaching the point of no return. It comes from an historical anecdote that describes the day in 49 B.C. when Julius Ceasar led his army across Italy’s Rubicon River sparking his successful civil war against the Roman Republic and the ascent of his dictatorhsip and the Roman Empire.

A typical sentence from this week in 2025: “Well, it looks like the Rubicon has officially been crossed,” my friend NF wrote on social media accompanying a video clip of unmarked security guys (and eventually FBI troopers) bullying, tackling, and cuffing U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) for trying to ask a question at Dept. of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem’s press conference. She was praising Trump’s assault on lawful, anti-deportation protests.

It’s no wonder the phrase “crossing the Rubicon” is on people’s minds this week. With a convicted felon in the White House; unbridled racism on the lips of every MAGA politician; widely reported, but apparently not-shocking-enough quid pro quo corruption posing as public policy (i.e., selling off public lands to top corporate donors or accepting gifts from obsequious foreign governments); and right wing U.S. senators promoting false flag conspiracy theories to shift blame away from overt right wing violence, America has sadly lost the plot. Our breached Republic is giving way alongside other alarming collapses, such as zero-to-sixty climate change and insane AI creep.

While I was typing all this: Trump bombed Iran.

I’m All Lost In, #87: Los Angeles; Paju; and a clean bathtub

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#87

1) Los Angeles (in the 1960s)

Years from now, when we look back at America’s fall into authoritarianism under Donald Trump, I’m hoping we identify this week in June as the moment when popular resistance to his brutish, undemocratic agenda took hold. The L.A. protests against ICE’s thuggish roundups of immigrants—including immigrants in the middle of the legal process— seems, in this season of dismay about fraying civil rights, a small but undeniable sign of hope: The American spirit may still be alive.

It’s a risky scenario, of course. Bodies in the streets could easily trip into the Reichstag Fire moment that Trump and his creepy attaché Stephen Miller have been scheming for.

With the promise of L.A. action on my mind this week, I returned to an instructive book I started reading, but didn’t get very far into, a few years ago: Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties (2020) by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener. This sweeping near-700-page epic about L.A.’s largely teen driven—and overwhelmingly Chicano and Black teen driven—civil rights, anti-war, and anti-colonialist movements is an inspirational and cautionary template for today as it documents the organizational, tactical, and street specifics of mass political protests that gathered form, crescendoed, and crested from the early 1960s onward through the incendiary early 1970s.

Inspiring history from L.A.

I was originally drawn to this book, which unfortunately prioritizes reams of data and statistics over stories (I want stories!) because of Part V. The Great High School Rebellion, Ch. 21. Riot Nights on the Sunset Strip (1966-1968). This specific section of the book explains the Sunset Strip Curfew Riots, an unsung uprising of L.A. teenagers versus the L.A.P.D. that coupled two seemingly disparate and even oppositional 1960s story lines that had been separately upending American culture during the 1960s in their own right: rock music and woke youth.

The famous 1960s protest anthem, Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth, i.e., “There’s something happening here/what it is ‘aint exactly clear,” is about the Sunset Strip Curfew Riots. (I have a poem about these historic protests in my first book.) Most people likely think the signature sixties song is about Chicago ‘68 or Kent State or some other combustible anti-war protest, but guitarist Stephen Stills wrote the song in December 1966 in the immediate aftermath of the curfew riots after several of his friends in the burgeoning youth counterculture, including Peter Fonda, were beaten and cuffed by the cops as they picketed against a new city-imposed curfew on club going teenagers.

It turned out the standoff with the police was about bigger things. As are today’s L.A. protests.

*I went to the anti-Trump “No Kings” march (good marketing from the left, for once) on Saturday, June 14. Two-and-a-half hours after we reached the final congregating spot near Seattle Center, we got word that the last waves of marchers were just leaving Cal Anderson Park where we’d all started out. I’m gonna say 100,000+.

2) Paju, Fine Korean Dining

Surprise: I love grilled octopus, Paju, 6/12/25

In addition to revisiting that germane book this week, I also returned to Paju, an excellent upscale Korean restaurant that I originally checked out back in 2023. An unassuming sliver of place located in Seattle’s Lower Queen Ann neighborhood when I first visited, Paju is now—on the same #8 bus line—a large, chic South Lake Union spot with a glowing purple front door, a rock-encased wood-fire hearth, and a chef’s table anchoring a sweeping room of high windows and intimate tables.

The Seattle Times review, otherwise a rave, says the service here leaves something to be desired. But the service was charming and cheeky this past Thursday night. It starred a chatty young server who brought each plate—Hama Hama Oysters; a pistachio cream, parmesan, crispy green salad; buttered and smoked octopus; white kimchi, truffle aioli mushrooms; browned veggie pancakes topped with paper-thin slices of dancing fish flakes; and squid ink fried rice—with a knowing playfulness. She seemed to be savoring each dish along with us. And, with each dish dressed in creamy sauces (unusual for Korean cuisine), simmered in spicy seasonings, prepped to perfection, and often topped with piles of finely grated parm, these were all plates worth savoring, particularly the meaty octopus and buttery mushrooms.

Mushrooms, Paju, 6/12/25

Veggie pancake, Paju, 6/12/25

3) My Clean Tub

Something else I returned to this week: running. Once a basic and comforting part of my daily routine circa 2018—2024, I hadn’t suited up, slipped on my New Balance running shoes, nor put on my earbuds for a meditative 5.5-miler for seven months (November 10, 2024, according to Strava).

I was back at it this week. I wasn’t doing 5.5, though; more like 2.7 on average over my five runs through the neighborhood, again according to Strava. I’m writing about this mostly as a way to note this week’s final obsession: my newly sparkly clean shower.

Plagued by an Alien: Resurrection drain clog that barfed up staph infection standing water; a slimy shower curtain and bath mat, each looking as if they were homes to biohazard disasters; and seemingly indelible streaks of grit in the tub, my bachelor pad tub was a ruin.

No longer. Hours of charwoman labor this week transformed the tub into a gleaming operating-room-ready safe space where I’ve been happily retreating for a spacey shower after my daily run.

I’ve even been randomly sneaking into the bathroom for a minute (no shower on the agenda) to simply slide back the curtain and just peek at the tub for kicks so I can admire my apartment’s spotless new holy place. The vibrant blue bath mat and white acrylic tub are now radiant.

I’m All Lost In, #86: Leichacha tea; NIMBY city council member resigns; the Pavement movie.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#86

In last week’s report about the renaissance afoot in Pioneer Square, I was delinquent for failing to mention my go-to Pioneer Square lunch spot: Saigon Drip, where I regularly place an order for their Vegan Vortex, a tofu bánh mì with the pickled veggie works and vegan mayo.

Saigon Drip’s delish vegan tofu bánh mì

In addition to featuring this tasty sandwich—a soft and crispy baguette, quality tofu, dripping sauce, fresh carrots, daikon, and cucumbers—the mod and brightly lit Saigon Drip is located at the epicenter of the action off Occidental Square and S. Washington St. This is the Pioneer Square strip that also includes my favorite new music club, Baba Yaga [I’m All Lost In, #69, 2/8/25], a vintage clothing shop, a burger and fries diner and dive, an art gallery, and just around the corner, a sexy bar.

Before I get to this week’s list proper, here are a few more follow-ups:

First, the New York Times obviously reads my weekly dispatches. They ran a piece this week titled “Denouncing Antisemitism, Trump Also Fans Its Flames.” Yes, please. You may remember back in late April [I’m All Lost In, #79, 4/20/25], I wrote an item titled: “Trump’s antisemitic fight against antisemitism.”

Second, I was psyched to see that one of my favorite new Capitol Hill coffee shops, Seasmith [I’m All Lost In, #49, 9/21/24]—isn’t only expanding its hours (open until 9pm now), but they’ve also added a couple of sleek shared tables to the seating mix; a necessary move given that it’s been hard to find a spot to post up at Seasmith lately.

Seasmith adds new seating, 6/5/25

The crowded coffee shops and on-point new seating are also emblematic of how busy Seattle is right now. From heading down the stairs to see a punk show in a crowded basement club on a Sunday night, to jamming into a booth at a busy Mexican restaurant on a Thursday night, to cheering last second shots with a roomful of default NBA fans at a neighborhood dive bar on a random weeknight, Seattle is lit.

My young friend Rob’s punk band Fell Off sets up shop downstairs at the Cha Cha Lounge for a Sunday night show, 6/1/25.

Poquitos on Capitol Hill, Thursday night, 9/5/25

Finally, as I noted last week during Week 1 of Roland-Garros, I’ve been glued to the screen, 2 am and 4 am matches included and welcome.

Watching Daffy Saby beat her thorny rival, World No. 8 Qinwen Zheng, 7-6(7-3), 6-3 early Tuesday morning in the quarterfinal, and then watching her officially dethrone Iga Swiatek 7-6 (7-1), 4-6, 6-0 (!) in the semifinal on Thursday morning further defined Sabalenka’s 2025 runaway year as World No. 1. With a tour-best 34 match wins now and 3 tournaments titles after making 6 finals, Sabalenka leads the rest of the pack by 4,000 points this season. Meanwhile, there was the wild Lois Boisson story, the out-of-nowhere wildcard French player who blazed through to the semifinals. Tearing her way through the tournament, Boisson ascended from No. 361 to No. 61 with a yesteryear game of lobs and looping slices that bewildered opponents such as World No. 3 Jessica Pegula and World No. 6 Mirra Andreeva who Boisson dispatched in the later rounds this week. It was as if Boisson had stepped out of a time machine from 1970 giving contemporary fans the illusion of watching today’s stars face off against Margaret Court. Additionally, Boisson’s flat, grim demeanor, triathlete physique, and 7th grade gym class fit (a sleeveless tank top and running shorts) all added to her disarming aura.

Posting episodes daily from Roland-Garros, The Tennis Podcast crew was bewildered by Boisson

Boisson’s Cinderella run finally ended on Thursday morning with a 1-6, 2-6. semifinal loss to World No. 2 Coco Gauff. Cue up Sabablenka v Coco for Saturday’s final.

*Ah. Coco won in three sets.

A final note on Roland-Garros: The sexist scheduling, including tournament execs refusing to give Boisson’s big match versus Gauff a prime time slot, led to an outcry in the righteous tradition of Billie Jean King. As the NYT reported, there have only been "4 women’s matches in 55 night sessions since their introduction [at Roland-Garros] in 2021."

Okay on to this week’s official obsessions:

1) Green Tea Leicha
Known as “pounded tea” for all its smashed up beans (soy, mung, adzuki, pinto, jack) and crushed seeds (black sesame, pumpkin) plus a grocery store aisle worth of other finely ground ingredients such as rice, barley, sorghum, millet, green peas, black eyed peas, chickpeas, buckwheat, oats, corn, yam, ginko, and green tea leaves, Leicha is a powdered Hakka Chinese tea billed as a “centuries” old “health brew” according to the Leichacha brand homepage.

The green concoction—it looks like matcha— does appear to be a magic potion. The long list of benefits touted on the website include lowering cholesterol and blood pressure, repairing muscles, aiding hormone production, supporting the immune system, protecting against chronic diseases, promoting a healthy gut, and “ensuring regular bowel movements.”

The magic part to me, though? Leichacha brand leicha tastes like nutty malted milk, right down to the sweet goopy silt that settles at the bottom of the my morninf cup. Maybe it’s the soymilk powder and cane sugar that’s in their mix as well.

Leichacha is a Hakka family business, and their tasty concoction is available at Mixed Pantry, Belltown’s Asian imported goods store.

2) North Seattle City Council Member Cathy Moore Resigns

Erica does a thorough job at PubliCola reporting on first-term Seattle Council Member Cathy Moore’s sudden resignation this week. Mainly, Erica documents Moore’s stuck-in-the-1990s agenda with its “neighborhood character” appeal to slow growth. This includes Moore’s recent support for slowing down Sound Transit expansion (which the Urbanist’s Ryan Packer reported on as well) along with Moore’s ongoing efforts to keep upzones out of neighborhoods that have historically been zoned exclusively for detached single family homes but are now required by state law to allow density. (I’ve editorialized on PubliCola about Moore’s intransigence as well.)

Erica goes with my bitchy headline for her PubliCola editorial

Moore’s resignation is a great moment for Seattle. Or at least I’m savoring it. While Moore dismisses the opposition to her slow-growth POV as an uncivil mob that won’t respectfully give her the mic, what she’s really identifying is this: The public has soured on longstanding city policy that keeps 75% of Seattle off limits from multi-family housing development and, in turn, has driven up rents. Logically, the public has also soured on listening to council members like Moore who speak from the same old NIMBY script that seconds these persistent policies. Thirty years on, a vocal movement that has paid the price for exclusionary zoning and the resulting affordability crisis is now seeking a new approach.

Moore’s resignation confirms that the public doesn’t believe in the old policies Moore is stumping for. Her opponents are simply articulating a critical response to legislative proposals like hers that maintain the housing status quo.

3. The Pavement Documentary Mockumentary

Actor Joe Keery, upside down top right, plays himself playing Stephen Malkmus, right side up bottom right.

Class clown ‘90s indie rockers Pavement are one of the very few alt rock era bands I actually like. But I was hesitant to see independent filmmaker Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, the new documentary about the band because as I told my pal Annie (who invited me to see the movie last Friday at SIFF Uptown), I’m not sure I want to listen to Stephen Malkmus talk for two hours; Pavement front man Malkmus is the sardonic floppy haired singer/electric guitarist/free verse songwriter whose bratty slacker sarcasm and general boredom with everything is generally unbearable. His blasé wit and stream of consciousness brain are best confined to rock albums where they’re paired with the band’s raucous and dissonant DIY guitars, herky jerky rhythms, and catchy melodies. In that context he’s a delight. Think of Pavement as drunk Nirvana, but without Nirvana’s macho riffage. Pavement’s electric guitars are certainly badass, but they are less sludgy, heavy homages to 1970s rock than they are off-kilter and totally kidding.

Anyway, I’m glad I decided to go to Pavements; the film’s title is a reference to the time the band was misidentified (as in, the internets) by Stephen Colbert on live TV.

The plural also refers to the clever conceit of the movie which transcends the rock doc format by blurring real life Pavement with several imaginary story lines. The actual documentary here— contemporary footage of the band rehearsing for a 2022 reunion tour interspersed with archival film and video of old interviews and performances—is frenetically mixed and matched on split screen with a series of mockumentaries. Mockumentary #1 is a faux behind-the-scenes doc about the making an imaginary Pavement Broadway musical. Mockumentary #2 is about an imaginary Pavement MoMA exhibition (Malkmus’ notebooks behind glass). And best of all, and nearing comedic brilliance thanks to Stranger Things actor Joe Keery playing himself playing Malkmus, Mockumentary #3 pretends to tell the story of a make believe Pavement biopic. The connecting, comedic premise behind all four threads, including the real one about Pavement themselves, is that Pavement was supposedly a supergroup that achieved massive commercial success. (One thing I actually learned from this movie: Pavement was never as big as I thought they were at the time.)

Not only does Pavements’ hyper meta narrative mirror Pavement’s own evasive Gen X sensibility, but the movie strikes sarcastic topical gold with the biopic story line by (accidentally?) spoofing Timothée Chalamet’s earnest turn as Bob Dylan. Keery (playing Keery as an overwrought method actor playing Malkmus) hilariously mocks Chalamet’s Dylan just as, circa 1994, Malkmus and Pavement hilariously mocked Smashing Pumpkins.

I’m All Lost In, #85: Trump’s fascist playbook; Pioneer Square’s renaissance; Seattle’s best veggie burger.

My mind is racing. There are a lot of things going on.

First: A follow-up to an obsession from two weeks ago: Colin Marshall’s newsletter about city-themed books. This week, Marshall reviewed a book I’ve been picking up and putting down in frustration ever since I first bought it 15 years ago (and which I’ve never finished), David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries.

Zooming in on the chapter about Manila, Marshall articulates exactly why I’ve found Byrne’s book—nominally about bike infrastructure around the world—so disappointing:

“Not a whole lot of Bicycle Diaries' Manila chapter is about cycling, and even the nature of the city itself remains a relatively minor theme,'“ he writes.

Marshall’s rejoinder was compelling, though:

But it does get him meditating on a variety of broader subjects, from colonialism to markets and malls to class mobility…

This might sound like a criticism to a reader with narrow expectations of this book's content: that it will be mainly about bikes, or cities .... In fact, as he writes in the acknowledgments, the project was conceived by his literary agent as using "the thread of my bike explorations of various cities as a linking device. His reference was W. G. Sebald, specifically his book The Rings of Saturn, which uses a rambling walk in the English countryside as a means of connecting a lot of thoughts, musings, and anecdotes."

… The appeal of cities as a subject, I often say, is that it in practice allows you to write about practically anything you feel like.

Prompted by Marshall’s engaged review, I perused my bookshelves and was surprised to find I actually still owned this book. Despite the fact that Byrne is a much better musician than he is a writer, I now feel compelled to give his searching treatise one more try.

Another follow-up: I’m still learning Blondie’s 1979 meta pop number, “Slow Motion.” God bless the key of C. I’m taken with Blondie’s uncanny knack for scrolling out discrete catchy melody after discrete catchy melody all using the same five white notes; they would have called them motifs in the 18th century. This week I’m working on the dramatic “Still/she knows/she’ll never lose a thing” pre-chorus section. The way Blondie fashions such warm beauty from B, E, A, G by simply dropping low on the E and then lower on the G is masterful. This latest Blondie discovery comes courtesy of their keyboardist and songwriter in this instance, Jimmy Destri.

Loving Jimmy Destri’s New Wave tie.

And one more sub-obsession:

The year’s second Grand Slam, Roland Garros, is underway in Paris right now. In addition to monitoring the bracket during Week 1 as it proceeded to the Final 16, I stayed up until 2am on Thursday night/Friday morning to watch Zheng Qinwen’s round three match (6-3, 6-4 over 18-year-old surprise American/Canadian/Congolese upstart Victoria Mkobo) followed at 3am by still-in-stellar-form Daffy Saby’s round three match (6-2, 6-3 over Serbia’s Olga Danilovic, No. 33.)

All that aside, I’m officially all lost in these three things right now:

1) The Courts versus Trump’s Fascist Agenda

A federal judge temporarily halted Trump’s assault on NYC’s successful congestion pricing program this week. It was the latest court ruling to flip the bird at Trumpism.

In fact, with two other new court rulings this week alone—one stalling Trump’s isolationist tariffs and another undercutting his nativist effort to prevent Harvard from admitting international students, the court’s pile of decisions have now become, to quote The New York Times, the main defense for fighting Trump’s petty despotism:

While Congress has mostly fallen in line behind Trump, the judiciary has emerged as the primary check on the president’s power. Over the first 130 days of Trump’s second term, courts have ruled against at least 180 of his actions.

The Trump administration’s reaction to this legal reality check on their punitive policies—telling judges to run for elected office themselves and condemning the judiciary as  “tyrannical”—mimics a traditional tenet of fascist movements: Attack the rule of law by trying to de-legitimize the courts. It’s a dangerous escalation of the “activist judges” talking point that was popular with Republicans during the Reagan-through-Gingrich era. This is why I was never comfortable with a recent leftist cause celebre (after Roe was overturned) to blame the Supreme Court for our problems.

Trump’s populist demagoguery about the judicial system goes hand in hand with his obsession over international students. In addition to attacking the courts, another basic of the fascist script is creating and targeting bogeyman among us. This is nothing new for MAGA. The anti-trans, anti-immigrant, and anti-China messaging has been central to Trump’s narrative from the start. His heated urgency right now about “international” students, and Chinese students in particular, simply reflects how far Trump is tacking in the fascist direction.

Speaking of the Supreme Court, I was a bit sad that my beloved free speech Supreme Court decision, the 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines School District ruling that imprinted on my high school brain during journalism class circa 1983, was actually used as the rationale for a (not unreasonable) conservative dissent in another high court ruling this week. The anti-Tinker majority signed off on a Massachusetts school’s rule prohibiting a student from wearing a T-shirt that said “There are Only Two Genders.”

I 100% disagree with the T-shirt’s prejudiced, toxic attack message. I’m a firm believer in another T-shirt slogan: “Gender is a Drag.” But given Justice Abe Fortas’ liberating and resounding statement in Tinker that students “[don’t] shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” I’m not sure I agree with the majority decision to uphold the school’s T-shirt ban. Certainly, Tinker was refined over the years to allow school administrations to proscribe disruptive speech, which obviously includes noxious anti-trans hate speech. But it’s worth asking if liberals are exercising the infamous “Hecklers’ Veto.”

2) Renaissance in Pioneer Square

A new rooftop bar in Pioneer Square, 5/25/25

Rave kids on the 1 Line after midnight, 5/24/25 into 5/25/25

This week, I kept landing in the brick maze and 19th century architecture of Pioneer Square, Seattle’s historic downtown neighborhood immediately east of Elliott Bay. On Saturday night I went to a new rooftop bar called Firn atop a boutique hotel on 1st and King. This was after first killing time at a new waterfront promenade ice cream shop and watching the sunset at nearby “habitat beach” before Firn’s maître d' texted that seats were now available.

I was back in Pioneer Square again on Tuesday night a few blocks away at the WaMu theater for a packed concert—and then some late-night, after party drinks at trusty Baba Yaga, the newish upstairs bar and downstairs stage where I’ve already seen some young rock bands this year.

This is all fodder for an urban pastoral: The chatter of dressed-up patrons sipping cocktails on a garden rooftop deck seated under the nimbus of the downtown skyline; last call overruled by a rush of late night customers extending their giddy wedding party into the early morning; a concierge posted on the fourth-floor elevator, touting gauche in-house art shows, the gym, and in-house DJs; lit tourists gawking and strolling the brick crosswalks as if they’re perusing NoLita in Lower Manhattan; throngs of glittered-up rave kids heading to the nearby light rail stop after an electronica show; a crowded train, including the decked out rave kids, after midnight.

More city verse: Alighting the train into winding string light alleys with other concert goers toward the hawkers and bustling auditorium gate where ticket takers scanned you in; Phrygian mode world music featuring flatted-2nd electric guitar phrases backed by casual drums and “Genius of Love”-style bass played over looping found footage; taking neighborly hits on a spliff from a dude on a date putting his arm around my date; strolling through the gantlet of hot dog food trucks before settling in a few blocks away at an elegant dive bar with high ceilings and hanging plants all dimly lit from above by red orange globe lamps. (This would be the aforementioned Baba Yaga.)

Khruangbin at WaMu Theater, Tuesday, 5/27/25

My Pioneer Square supercut is meant as a revelatory Before-and-After. The Before is 2021 when the neighborhood was flogged by the reactionary “Seattle is Dying” faction as Exhibit A in their narrative that supposedly permissive social justice priorities led to the decline of our city’s original nightlife warren: The art galleries, bars, restaurants, oddity shops, underground tours, artist housing, and quaint bookstores had evidently given way to the apocalypse. My sense is that Pioneer Square was battered by the confluence of the pandemic, the homelessness crisis, and the fentanyl crisis that left businesses shuttered. But this was a citywide phenomenon—and one that had less to do with defunding the police (which didn’t happen) and more to do with the desperate stakes of the larger, national affordability crisis and how that compounded with the three grim COVID-era currents noted above.

Sorry, but Pioneer Square—where I work, by the way—hasn’t actually been relevant as a vibrant go-to destination since the early 1990s, when it was then displaced as a cultural mecca by Capitol Hill, Seattle’s youth culture epicenter.

My Pioneer Square supercut is also meant to demonstrate this: Far from a decimated shell of a neighborhood, there’s a renaissance afoot there.

3) Linda Tavern’s Holy (Not a) Cow Burger
This is long overdue.

Ever since February when I started heading back to classic 1990s grunge-era-Capitol Hill hangout, Linda’s Tavern—the default happy hour and burger spot while I was Stranger news editor back in the 2000s—I’ve wanted to praise their new (to me) veggie burger.

If memory serves, the just-fine veggie burger option when I was a Linda’s regular circa 2002 was a grainy flattened bean patty conveniently loaded with lettuce, onion, tomato, and all the sauces to hide the bland substitute.

I was expecting the same passable patty when I ordered the veggie burger on my first visit back earlier this year after a decade and a half away. After all, the menu simply said: “Housemade patty with black beans & veggies served with lettuce, tomato, burger sauce, pickle & onion.”

Best veggie burger in Seattle on the menu at Linda’s.

But wow, do they lean into the black beans. Linda’s upgraded veggie burger is a serious whopper. Hearty and oozing with spiced bean flavor.

When I told the waiter compliments to the kitchen for serving the best veggie burger in Seattle, she said: I know, right? She then proceeded to tell her tale, a veggie burger odyssey through years of cardboard flavored sad patties to the today’s highly processed “plant-based” iterations. Vegetarians know this comical history well, and my version—as opposed to this young woman’s relatively recent timeline— goes back to the freezer-burned rice and veggie late-’80s era.

And zeitgeist footnote. Her veggie burger habit was not about being a vegetarian, it was, she told us proudly, about keeping kosher. It was comforting to encounter a young, out-and-proud Jew in the heart of left-wing Seattle. Also disheartening, though, that her pride would be something worthy of note.

I’m All Lost In, #84: Falafel food truck; Midnight Safeway; 1975 drummer wanted ad.

I’m All Lost In…

the three things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#84

1) Falafel Salam Food Truck

On Tuesday evening, by happenstance, XDX and I discovered the best falafel in Seattle. After making the mile-and-a-half jaunt to 13th and Jefferson to hang out at Peloton Cafe (XDX had never been) we were met with a “closed” sign; it said Power Outage Closed Until Further Notice : (.

So we started the mile-long shamble to our old favorite standby, Kanom Sai Cafe on 23rd and Spring for some taro pastries. We eventually made it there, but not before following my impulse pivot to Chuck’s Hop Shop at 20th and Union. I had a craving for their veggie dog (like the one I had there on New Year’s Eve). They’ve since taken that off the menu, so I got in line at the falafel truck parked out front by the plastic tables under the tented lot. Falafel Salam’s long white truck seemed as if it was reclining there on its own BarcaLounger, beckoning.

Falafel Salam sets up outside Chuck’s Hop Shop at 20th and Union, 5/20/25

Their prominently displayed vegan option—it’s listed first on the menu— was stuffed with onions, cucumbers, cabbage, lettuce, and cilantro induced, green-on-the-inside falafel balls that were nearly as fluffy as the thick pita bread; I had to hold the messy dinner like I was eating a McDonald’s Big Mac. Falafel Salam’s special sauce? An unwieldy helping of mouth watering creamy tahini and, the key, hot turmeric.

(Unbeknownst to me, Falafel Salam has been around since 2009. You can find them at Chuck’s in the Central District on Tuesdays, in South Lake Union by Amazon on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and at the Ballard Farmer’s Market on Sundays. They’ve also got a brick and mortar spot in West Seattle.)

We rounded out our urban hike three blocks over at Kanom Sai, where we got the Shakespearean update from the solo kitchen staffer/baker/counter worker (she’s also the owner) before stopping at the 22nd and Madison Safeway where XDX, arrested by a window display, made an impulse buy of her own: two 12-packs of Waterloo Seltzer, which we attempted to stuff in her orange backpack.

2) Tipsy at the Safeway

Speaking of jumping into Safeway: The descent into my own sylvan green neighborhood from Capitol Hill’s properly lit nightlife district is marked by a Safeway at the corner of 15th and John. Fortuitously, it’s open late (until 12 am). Fortuitous because I often find myself ambling back from The Drag late in the evening longing for a Dagwood Sandwich.

My version of this comforting cartoonish sandwich: A colorful assortment of veggies dressed with herbs, spices, chili oil, and a dash of mustard or vinegar, packed into a refrigerated soft spinach tortilla or lovingly set on two tears of sourdough baguette with garlic hummus or pine nut and spinach pesto spread on each slice.

Swaying through Safeway’s quiet produce section while the sprinklers cycle on and off and the dégagé night staff unpack boxes, I dreamily track down my chosen salad sandwich ingredients like a post-apocalyptic traveler happening upon an army surplus store.

On the list (for fine dicing and, in the case of carrots, shredding): purple cabbage, red peppers, hot peppers, onions, tomatoes, black olives, baby spinach, banana peppers, capers, broccoli, and those bright carrots.

I won’t lie, there are a few other things on my spur-of-the-moment list for these heady late-night Safeway excursions: a tub of hummus; maybe some super processed Tofurky slices or vegan cheese; and definitely a box of Cheez-Its.

Drunk at Safeway, 5/21/25

I ran into another late night Safeway shopper on Wednesday night; she too was cavorting in the cookies and cracker aisle at this strange hour. And she too hailed from D.C. We reminisced about Dupont Circle’s legendary “Soviet Safeway” before she disappeared cradling her box of Oreos on the way toward the sole check out lane that was still open.

I surveyed my Cheez-Its options—Italian four cheese, buffalo wing, cheddar jack, smoked gouda—went with original and floated off to the self-check out where other post-apocalyptic revelers were swiping and bagging.

Late night snack courtesy of the late night Safeway with Cheez-Its on the side, 5/21 into 22/25

3) “Freak Energy”

I have never felt so seen.

On Saturday morning, as we sat down at the coffee shop for an overdue hangout, Valium Tom slid a freshly folded black T-shirt across the table: I got you a present.

Last month, in the wake of Blondie drummer Clem Burke’s recent death (RIP), former Blondie guitarist Chris Stein went searching for and successfully unearthed a treasure from the band’s pretend-we’re-already-superstars origin story. What he found may be the perfect expression of the droll post-hippie (but kinda still hippie), indigent glamour that characterized the wily, bohemian aesthetic of Lower Manhattan’s mid-1970s emergent punk and new wave music scenes.

Stein posted his historic find on Instagram: It was the drummer wanted ad that he and Debbie Harry and the rest of the yearning band put in the Village Voice in March 1975.

This number is not in service anymore.

I’d seen Stein’s post; I’m a devout Blondie fan and had started following him around the time I read his flailing memoir, which, thanks to his inept storytelling, failed to divine staglfation New York’s countercultural heyday. (I lovingly panned his book here.) He’s made up for it with this eloquent artifact, though.

Valium Tom saw Stein’s post too, and he put the slovenly elegant ad on a T for me.

With my new Blondie T-shirt, 5/17/25

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%.

——————
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.

I’m All Lost In, #82: Finding a new hoodie; digging the new Capitol Hill; and working in Sharepoint, aka Shitpoint.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#82

Back in the 2010s, whenever I’d write (what turned out to be) a prescient item in PubliCola’s persnickety “Morning Fizz” column, or whenever we broke news there, I’d hype it on social media by crowing: Learn to Trust the Fizz.

Well, Learn to Trust I’m All Lost In…

Back in October, when I read poet Marie Howe for the first time (her New and Selected Poems, 2024), I was floored and tagged her as one of my obsessions that week raving about her “masterful” poetry.

This past week, Howe’s New and Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

A snippet from my October post: “Howe’s talent lies in describing discrete POVs and then putting them back together again in a new way that seems to connote God.”

Another I’m All Lost In favorite, Blondie, also came up big this week; at least in my own private narrative. First, on Saturday night, the drummer for a band on the bill at Baba Yaga (the Sasha Bell Band from Montana) sounded exactly like Blondie’s big beat, crash and boom drummer Clem Burke. (RIP last month, sadly.) It was glorious, and we were awestruck, marvelling at the doppelganger sound. But this guy looked to be in his late 20s or early 30s, so who knows how he managed to channel so precisely Mr. Burke’s garage beat BPMs.

In other perseverating-on-Blondie news: I started learning a Blondie tune on piano this week. It’s another one of Blondie’s Catherine Deneuve-as-early 1960s-Parisian-teen-who-now-takes-the-stage-at-a-punk-club songs: “Slow Motion.”

The boy in the back on his second attack/
Wants his baby back (wants his baby back)/
What's all that commotion that you hear?

That’s it for this week’s goods of the order. Onto this week’s obsessions.

1) Why Can’t I Find a Good Hoodie?

My Palm Springs hoodie is not on brand: I’m neither an elderly golfer, nor a California property owner, nor a Burning Man techie. But the insistent “Authentic/Palm Springs, CA/USA/Desert Oasis” logo aside, this easy hoodie has been my comfortable and casually flattering go-to fit ever since XDX bought it for me two years ago; we were at the Palm Springs airport where I was shivering as we waited for our flight back to Seattle from Joshua Tree.

My ongoing chagrin with the gross yuppie messaging has finally prompted me to get a different hoodie. But after visiting several neighborhood shops—Crossroads Trading, Magpie Thrift, Creature Consignment; as well as Bon Voyage Vintage near work—I’m still stuck with this odd sartorial staple. All the hoodies I found this week were either baggy and awkward fits, besmirched with overly complicated aesthetics, or came with off-key logos themselves. The plain, sturdy front zipper and casual hoodie ideal, neither misleadingly youthful nor senior center friendly, seems to be more of a shopping Holy Grail than I’d realized.

Do I need to abandon my dream of scoring one secondhand?; people likely hang on to the excellent hoodies rather than casting them off. Do I need to embrace adulthood and pony up at J Crew online rather than sticking with my idealistic plan to hit Goodwill this weekend?

Cal Anderson skate park off Pine St. commandeered by death metal, 5/3/25

2) No, Capitol Hill Was Not Cooler “Back in the Day.”

Call it St. Mark’s Place Syndrome, which writer Ada Calhoun nailed in her great 2015 book St. Mark’s is Dead, an in-depth history of the storied Greenwich Village bohemian drag which also spoofed every generation’s perennial sense of horror that the city’s heyday enclave is not as cool as it was back in their day.

I wrote about Seattle’s version of this Gen X delusion, call it Capitol Hill Syndrome (or Grunge Delusion) back in 2021, arguing by the numbers that Capitol Hill is more diverse today, busier, and just as youth-centric as ever. There may be fewer artists living on Capitol Hill today (though I haven’t seen anyone prove this pervasive theory), but I’d argue there are certainly more venues here for artists to actually show work or gig. Yes, Capitol Hill is more expensive than it used to be, but so is the entire city.

It’s also more green and sustainable than it used to be. Not only does Capitol Hill now have a separate bike lane and a light rail station, which it didn’t “back in the day,” but the Capitol Hill Station is the second busiest station in the system with 9,100 daily riders during the week.

I’ve lived on Capitol Hill for more than 25 years, and I can tell you it was so white and predictable in the 1990s and early 2000s that if a white Capitol Hill hipster saw a group of POC kids on The Drag, they’d start to wonder if there was a hip hop show going on. I should qualify that: if anything was going on in the first place. For the record, weeknights on Capitol Hill were a bust 20 years ago. And the weekends weren’t reliable either. (An anecdote: I distinctly remember strolling through the sparsely attended Capitol Hill Block Party circa 2002 when it looked as lonely as closing time at a farmer’s market.)

As spring begins in earnest this year, I’m struck by Capitol Hill’s diversity and electricity and reminded once again how things have changed for the better and cooler. Strolling among the crowd during May’s 8:45pm gloaming this past Saturday, it was impossible not to take note of all the POC faces crisscrossing the groovy corridor. Groups of cavorting 20-somethings were cruising from the jam-packed 20,000 square foot bookstore (which didn’t used to exist on the Hill) to the unwieldy food truck lines (tacos, hot dogs, shawarma); or shambling from the noisy dive bars and clubs to the glittering string-lit restaurants and epic, de facto party scenes at the slices or Hot Chicken place (open until 4 am). I for one followed the crowds to watch the death metal band that, fronted by a Latino singer and an Asian guitarist, had set up in the skate park.

I memorialized the action with a tipsy post on Bluesky directed at the figurehead of my generation’s calcified gatekeeping:

A few nights later, after Wendy’s Stealing Clothes and I caught a crowded Wednesday night show at Neumos, we landed at Bimbo’s, a boozy, Mexican-comfort-food Capitol Hill institution (still very much there) that used to be more Edward Hopper Nighthawks than today’s Hieronymus Bosch orgy. Again, hard not to notice and love: As white middle-agers we were in the minority.

If, as my curmudgeonly indie rock generation has it, Capitol Hill is dead, I say: Long live Capitol Hill.

3) Sharepoint Ate My Homework

In a follow-up to last year’s 2 Line debut, Sound Transit, the regional transit agency where I work, is opening two new light rail stations on the Eastside suburbs this weekend. This means I’ve been busy writing remarks all week for Sound Transit leaders who will be speaking at the Downtown Redmond ribbon cutting.

Growing the 2 Line on the Eastside to 10 stations and 10 miles today with a 3.4-mile addition that represents a 50% expansion will give folks living both to the east and west direct, fast, easy access to Microsoft. …  

…quick access to Downtown Redmond’s vibrant and visionary downtown.  

…reliable access to concerts and recreation at Marymoor Park. 

….and seamless access to our great trails: EastRail, the East Lake Sammamish Trail, or the Bear Creek Trail.

It also means I’ve been relying on Sharepoint, Microsoft’s Word doc management platform.

Predictably, fiasco struck on Thursday morning. Trying to do rewrites while tiptoeing around Sharepoint’s manic track changes pop-up windows, ornery formatting protocols, and Exorcist III-possessed cursor, induced my own solo clusterfuck. With my colleagues similarly paralyzed in their own Sharepoint hell, important changes were lost and errant versions were en route to the Exec Team.

“Everyone, pens down,” my wise boss said reining in our increasingly haywire Teams chat. Her Zen temperament is the only antidote to the inevitable bedlam of Sharepoint, or Shitpoint as I’ve referred to the frustrating program for years now.

As I wrote speeches about ferrying thousands of new riders to the Microsoft campus, I fantasized about directing all of them straight to the Sharepoint department.

I’m All Lost In, #81: New shoes; new poetry; and the best place to watch the NBA playoffs is a gay dive bar on Capitol Hill.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#81

Before I get to this week’s three preoccupations, I’ve got a recipe of the week

Two recipes, actually—one for mushroom paste and one for mushroom dip. The backstory is that I recently went to Yalla, the Lebanese food window over on the Drag Beyond the Drag and ordered the same mushroom gyro that I got back in January. Unfortunately, the former standout vegan menu item left me longing this time; the mushroom filling was flat and flavorless.

So, I decided to take mushroom matters into my own hands. I googled a few recipes, but I couldn’t decide which one to go with: a shallot-based one (identified as duxelles) and a heavy-on-the-parsley-and-walnuts one. Frying pan and mini-food processor going all at once, I whipped up both and slathered the meaty results on facing pieces of toasted jalapeño bread with romaine lettuce, dressed red cabbage, homemade bread crumbs, sliced tomato, and (secret ingredient) yellow mustard.

I didn’t snap a picture until I had an open-faced version for seconds (pictured below). It was delicious, but I’d recommend the traditional sandwich version.

Mushroom paste and mushroom dip combo sandwich, Monday, 4/28/25

1) New Shoes

I’ve always been hard on shoes. Holes. Soles coming unglued and falling off. This was particularly hard to admit with the two most recent pairs of shoes I’d been wrecking as I rotated between them all year. One was the slim pair of shiny black dress shoes I bought at Ross Dress for Less for Dad’s funeral back home in Maryland in March 2024, and the other was an old-fashioned tasseled pair of soft black slip-ons I pilfered from Erica’s grandad’s closet to wear at his funeral in Mississippi in September 2024. Despite my enchanted hope, the sentimental value was not enough to fortify these standard issue men’s shoes from decomposition.

Wearing my also-fairly-ratty gray New Balance track shoes, I walked downtown on Saturday as my Seattle shopping compass directed me to Nordstrom Rack at 5th and Pine. After working the crowded aisle of size 9-1/2s for an uncharacteristically patient half hour of perusing and trying on, I ended up going with the two pairs I had picked from the start: some stretchy navy blue mesh Cole Haan sneakers with a cushioned white sole and brown leather accents, and a shiny pair of classic black leather oxfords with brown and white trim.

Tuesday afternoon, 4/29/25

I was paranoid that the tight spots around the insteps (that I’d pretended not to notice) would actually become aggravated in the real world beyond the store mirror. But after a week of walking around town, the leather has softened, the mesh has eased, and with last year’s set of funeral shoes safely ensconced for sentimental keeping in my closet, it’s time for these solid, cozy, and even elegant new kicks.

2) Andrea Cohen’s The Sorrow Apartments

During my 2018 heyday—aka, my obsessive, initial excursion into poetry—I had several autodidactic strategies to make up for lost time and discover as many poets as I could. Among these strategies—which included reading all the classics I’d skipped in high school and college; finding more by poets who were showing up in literary magazines; and getting recommendations from my old bookworm friend, high school English teacher, Dallas—there was also this: spending tipsy Friday nights in the poetry aisle at Elliott Bay Books where I’d literally judge a book by its cover. This impulsive ploy actually led me to the great Louise Glück; her definitive 1962-2012 collection has a sci-fi picture of Saturn on the cover.

In a bit of a poetry reading drought these days, I returned to my Friday night game of chance this week. Based on the excellent Impressionist cover mockup of what looks like contemporary Brooklyn on a muggy summer night of flickering apartment building windows, I bought The Sorrow Apartments (excellent title, too) a collection of taut yet chatty verse by a poet I’d never heard of, Andrea Cohen. In a mysterious postscript to this wild Friday night shopping spree, Dallas claims to have sent a few of her poems my way earlier this year.

Written in clipped short lines of two or maybe three words, and often using slant rhymes (mantle/nail, bottle/still, boa/holds) to propel the reader along, Cohen drafts near-epic short stories about lost moments with former lovers or distilled snippets from long lost childhood summers.

These expansive minimalist dispatches from her melancholy memory banks had me deciding again and again that I’d just read the perfect poem; I dogeared about 15 of the 80 or so in the collection, including this one:

Mantle

I have——/on my mantle——/

a jam jar filled/with nails. Every-/

thing I love has/burned down,

but I still have/my mantle/

and my nail/aquarium. I/

still have/my fire.

3) The Madison Pub

The best place to watch the NBA playoffs is a gay dive bar.

I’d never been to the Madison Pub before, a neighborhood oasis of tap beers, busy pool tables, pinball machines (Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars, Ghostbusters), and a well-lit, mazey expanse of four-top seating.

Madison Pub, May 2015

Dappled with neon beer signs and big screen TVs hovering around this spacious dive, I’ve been settling in at the long bar to watch Denver’s Jamal Murray go for 40, the unimaginative Lakers forget there’s a key, the Timberwolves’ Anthony Edwards smirk and score at will, Houston and their coach idle in anger, and GSW have fun, while I nosh on Cheez-Its; they don’t have a kitchen. But not to worry. The warm staff lets you bring in food from nearby businesses like Dave’s Hot Chicken.

Quip-making cast of bartenders included, there’s lots of playful kinship at the bar (one fellow in town on tour with a Broadway musical put us on the guest list for a Saturday matinee at the Fifth Avenue Theater). The bar also has magically cold beer served in frosted mugs that, if you luck out, comes with a layer of slushed ice below the foam. And their comprehensive jukebox keeps the old rock (“Spill the Wine”) and new pop (The Weeknd) in steady rotation, along with a weird downtempo cover of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” that seems oddly popular.

I’m happy to report that this week’s Quote of the week—”This is like the Zapruder film”—came during an NBA watch session at Madison Pub. This pithy bon mot was uttered in response to the TNT announcers as they endlessly reviewed a technical foul sequence during GSW’s game 4 win on Tuesday night.

…

The other Quote of the Week comes from my favorite British-accented trio from The Tennis Podcast who were posting installments during the Madrid Open where, by the way, my parasocial goddess, Daffy Saby affirmed her 2025 status as World No. 1 and beat Coco Gauff in the final 6-3, 7-6 (7-3). The quote, however, was about cryptic World No. 2 Iga Swiatek, who I think of as J.D. Salinger’s catatonic Franny Glass. “Of course Iga Swiatek loved the blackout. Of course she did,” host Katherine Whitaker observed with delight after the tournament was temporarily suspended during the curious Spain/Portugal power outage and broody Swiatek savored the chill time.

Lastly this week, a follow-up on the Scrabble obsession I wrote about back in I’m All Lost In, #70: “Randiest,” the week’s most impressive Scrabble play, earned a 50-point bonus for using all seven letters and included “Triple Word Scores” on both the “R” and the “T,” and a “Double Letter Score” on the “I,’ for a grand total of 116 points.

I’m All Lost In, #80: Planning; Paying; and Visiting.

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#80

1) Planning (ahead)

It’s Spring. And the 65 degree weather has inspired me to seize the day. Suddenly I’m planning the future.

This is a notable change in M.O. for me. I’m someone who relies on the structure of recurring weekly rituals as a repetitive bass line for improvising the week. From working out of PubliCola’s Philip Marlowe-sized office in Pioneer Square every “Playpen Wednesday” to submitting my poetry every “Submission Sunday” to writing this very column every Friday after work at Otherworld Wine Bar over the ambient din of snobby DJs and groups of young tech employees flirting with each other, I riff on these weekly set pieces to score my week in real time.

Now, however, slowly but surely, I’m taking control of my time. For starters, I proactively lock down Saturday mornings in advance, starting on Tuesday when I log onto the Seattle Parks & Recreation website and make a tennis court reservation. Then, I send out a “first dibs” bat signal to the small, group-text thread I’ve organized of potential opponents; last Saturday I ended up playing T. Suarez, a guy my age from work. He’s a gracious and sincere tennis pro type who still plays in local tournaments. I’d never faced off against someone who hits as hard, low, fast, and tricky as him. He beat me 6-0, 6-0. But it was a blast. With his streak of one-two-punch serve/crosscourt return winners, friendly tips, zoom-in advice on my serve, and a plastic bucket of Penns (it was too damp out for his ball machine, apparently), I got a welcomed and de facto tennis lesson.

Volunteer Park, Lower Court 3, 4/19/25

This new micro bit of calendaring is paying off; the courts have been slammed lately with hopeful duos showing up, racket bags in tow, thinking they’ll be able to just grab a court. Well, good luck comes to those who plan, and reservation in hand, I, for one, have been starting every Saturday with a morning tennis match.

This small-dose of planning also seems emblematic of a grander trend. Just this week, after years of sneaking out of their invites, I cordially RSVP’d to hippie technocrat nonprofit Futurewise’s annual fundraiser for May 24th; it’s at a sustainable ag co-operative farm in Woodinville. I also bought tickets to a May 27 concert at WAMU Theater. I’m seeing moody psychedelic guitar meditators, Khruangbin; they’ve been in heavy rotation in my after-hours apartment ever since I came upon their lulling jams late last month.

There’s also some bigger planning afoot: I bought tickets to the Mubadala Citi DC Open, the 500 level pro tennis tournament in DC, my hometown where I’ll also visit my mom and then take Amtrak up to NYC for the weekend. I sent a buzzing email to my New York pals this week giving them details.

This hardly counts as spreadsheet neurosis, but something about the delicious longer hours has me wanting to take hold of them.

2) Paying

Easygoing places that should know better—Hood Famous Cafe in the ID and Aviv Hummus Bar on 15th Ave. E. in Capitol Hill being the latest offenders—are making dining out feel like cyborg capitalism closing in.

Call me a Luddite, and I am a bit of one. But when an otherwise cozy joint insists customers become staff (host, waiter, and front counter) by scanning a QR code to access the menu to fill out an order to pay on your phone, the mood goes from night out to the “And begin” moment during a final exam.

Even young, tech savvy XDX (she works at Apple), who I met for dinner at our old favorite Aviv on Tuesday night, was flummoxed by the new cranky ordering interface. The cramped iPhone process led to a rushed and discombobulated order that was more us throwing our hands up in exasperation than perusing the baba ghanoush.

The computations of capitalism are even more dispiriting at a daily oasis like a coffee shop as yet another part of the day becomes an iPhone-forward experience and yet another set of employees becomes displaced. Typing your name, address, billing address, credit card expiration date, and CCV onto a touchy phone-screen app to simply pay for a morning cup of coffee kind of defeats the pleasure of stopping in for a morning cup of coffee. That is to say, the act of dehumanizing restaurants and coffee shops is the opposite of restaurants and coffee shops.

3) Visiting (often)

I joined Bluesky in August 2023 in a fit to crash Elon Musk. But posting on Bluesky seemed kind of like going with the salad instead of the tater tots. And it didn’t help that the site seemed a bit needy with those buy-one-get-one-free invite pleas.

While I certainly sensed an urgent increase in traffic immediately after Trump’s election, Bluesky still didn’t feel like a main arterial.

This week, I noticed that has changed. Bluesky is suddenly the first place I visit (repeatedly) daily—not the NYT anymore, nor my email, Instagram, Facebook, nor, as I was doing passively and questionably in 2024, TikTok.

I can’t say I’m addicted or smitten with anyone on Bluesky (so, no must-follow recs yet) though I do have my favorites: M. Nolan Gray , Jamelle Bouie, Ryan Packer, David Roberts, Erica C. Barnett’s dispatches from city hall, of course, and God bless NYT Pitchbot, whose mind games must baffle the NYT’s stumbling-to-understand-what-the-problem-is editors.

….

In conclusion this week, I leave you with

… the Overheard Quote of the Week from J—, a barista at Fuel, the airy coffee shop on my block (where they don’t use QR codes to place orders). She was filling in a coworker about an apparently problematic fellow and this jumped out: “He goes to Burning Man. I feel like that already explains a lot.”

…the Local Politics Quote of the Week from Kirk Hovenkotter, the executive director at pro-transit nonprofit Transportation Choices Coalition. He was doing the fundraising pitch at King County Executive candidate Claudia Balducci’s campaign kickoff breakfast. After hyping her successful decades-long fight to bring light rail to the Microsoft suburbs he noted sly: “There’s Bellevue city council video to prove it.”

….and a Follow-up item. In last week’s post I wrote: “Not only do I now need to write a new PubliCola column about this unpave-paradise provision, but the concept of redeveloping park & rides into housing seems like a prompt for a poem as well.”

I didn’t write the poem, but I did write the PubliCola column.

“Gaining this flexibility,” Metro spokesman Jeff Switzer said, “would be really important to help both the state and King County Metro achieve their shared goals around transit oriented development and building housing conveniently near frequent and reliable transit service.”

You don’t have to convince me, Jeff. Turning parking into housing is an urbanist’s version of turning swords into ploughshares.

I’m All Lost In, #79: Trump’s antisemitic fight against antisemitism; Kurt Weill’s black keys; turning parking lots into housing.

I’m All Lost In …

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#79

1) Trump’s Fake Jews

Sorry if I don’t buy it when Donald Trump, whose consistent mix of America First populism, Ku Klux Klan nativism, and Third Reich authoritarianism—all infamously paranoid ideologies that demonize Jews as bogeyman and shadowy puppet masters—says he’s fighting antisemitism. To the contrary (and hardly surprising): Trump’s clampdown on campus antisemitism traffics in antisemitic tropes itself.

Trump’s effort to fight antisemitism is nothing more than a brute attack on the First Amendment rights of those who dare to criticize Israel. To claim he’s defending Jews by going on the offense against students who criticize Israel, Trump is equating condemnations of Israel with antisemitism. There are certainly strains of anti-Israel rhetoric that eagerly channel antisemitism, but they’re not synonymous. And more to the point: Trump’s move reduces American Jewish identity to Israeli identity, a sweeping and condescending configuration of the age-old, toxic idea that Jews maintain a secret-password loyalty to an alien brotherhood, typically conjured as a cabal of internationalist bankers, that disqualifies Jews from being authentic Americans. Trump is not fighting antisemitism. He’s embracing it.

Last November, Jews overwhelmingly rejected Trump; more than 70% voted for Kamala Harris. Cue Trump’s name calling. In his febrile brain, this made the super-majority of American Jews “fools” who “hate their religion.”

While Trump dismantles basic government services, due process, America’s favorable status around the world, and the economy, I’d say Jews are the opposite of fools: 5.25 million of us knew our monthly checks from George Soros would no longer be enough if our 401Ks were wiped out, so we voted en masse against Trump’s dangerous tantrum. We also knew, per Woody Guthrie in the early 1940s singing about notorious antisemite Charles Lindbergh and the original America First movement, “When they say America First, they mean America next.”

While we’re on the topic of giving Trump the thumbs down, it did seem like a few flashes of resistance to his KKK agenda captured a subtle but noteworthy shift against MAGA this week: U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s (D-MD) trip to El Salvador and unusually successful (for a Democrat) press conference to highlight the unconstitutional plight of Trump deportee/political prisoner Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia; the agitated crowd at Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-Iowa) town hall; a series of court rulings calling out the Trump administration’s delinquent behavior; Harvard! (us Jewish elites like that one); another weekend of protests; and, not too surprising, but I love this: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Jackie Robinson Day defending the importance of Black history.

2) Weill’s Black Keys

Speaking of antisemitism, this week I’m all in lost in Kurt Weill; the German Jewish composer fled Nazi Germany in 1933, but not before writing his lumpenproletariat, urchin chic classic, 1928’s The Threepenny Opera.

Realizing what a huge mistake it is that I haven’t been practicing piano much this year, I revisited one of my favorite songs to rejuvenate my keyboard brain chemistry: Weill’s tale of working class vengeance, “Pirate Jenny,” the anti-capitalist showstopper from The Threepenny Opera.

For a song that’s supposedly written in all-white C Major, there are a lot of dissonant black keys in Weill’s mix. This is most notable when, after the chorus concludes with its way-off-script and dramatic F#, the only way to segue back into the verse—already an off-kilter circus polka in its own right with its C to D/E-flat cluster—is to pause, take a breath, and then jump back in to Weill’s revolutionary fervor.

As verse two kicks off, Pirate Jenny, incognito as a washerwoman, presses fast forward on the dialectic: “You gentleman can say, ‘Hey girl, finish the floors, get upstairs, make the beds, earn your keep here!’” Little do they know more pirate black notes are coming. Third verse: “Then you gentleman can wipe off the laugh from your face, every building in this town is a flat one…”

3) Turning Parking into Housing

I wrote a PubliCola column in late February about the excellent Transit Oriented Development bill that’s in play this year in the state legislature. The newsworthy part to me was the breakthrough compromise that matched the longstanding proposal’s originally unfunded requirement to include affordable housing near transit stops with the dollars to actually pay for affordable housing. Call it Funded Inclusionary Zoning, or FIZ.

But this week, as the bill was on its way to pass the senate 30-18 (it passed the house in early March, 58-39), Urbanist reporter Ryan Packer posted about an amendment to the legislation. And now I’m obsessed. The extra language enables King County to turn a bunch of park & rides into housing.

Not only do I now need to write a new PubliCola column about this unpave-paradise provision, but the concept of redeveloping park & rides into housing seems like a prompt for a poem as well.

P.s. Be sure to check out episode #3, just out this week, of the monthly podcast I record with my bestie ECB, “Are You Mad at Me: A Shattered Glass Podcast.” It’s all about the greatest movie of all time, 2003’s Shattered Glass.

I’m All Lost In, #78: Doom on 15th Ave. E.; new poetry from Arthur Sze; impending doom on 19th Ave. E.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#78

I’ve only done a few RIPs here—early 1960s juvie hall diva Mary Weiss; the great Jerry Feit; Rosalynn Carter; 1950s doo-wop eccentric Maurice Williams; Jimmy Carter; DIY Brooklyn rap artist, Ka; New York Dolls’ lead singer David Johansen; urban planning guru Donald Shoup; and my childhood basketball hero, Jerry West. Sadly, this week I must add another name to my (mostly) para sentimental list of losses: RIP Clem Burke, the magnificent Blondie drummer whose gigantic beats always packed the band’s sardonic new wave, disco, rock, and nod-and-wink-‘60s-girl-group-pop mix with a consistent knuckle sandwich.

Whether learning “Dreaming” or “Picture This” on piano or marveling at late-1970s masterpiece LPs such as Parallel Lines or Eat to the Beat, I wrote a lot about Blondie last year. Blondie is a favorite band from my adolescence that has emerged on the 21st Century’s list of now-revered musical pioneers who still also sound fantastic. In a June 2024 post about the first, and perhaps best, new wave album I ever bought—Eat to the Beat—I wrote this about Burke:

The star of this expert mix is Blondie’s drummer Clem Burke. Every track on Eat to the Beat, from pop dynamos like “Dreaming,” to sexy disco rock like “The Hardest Part,” to insouciant pop like “Union City Blue” is driven by Burke’s rolling tympani fills and nonstop trap kit assault.

I guess, in the end, not nonstop. Luckily, his work is preserved on record.

Onto this week’s preoccupations:

1) Where Have You Gone Bites of Bangkok?

Bites of Bangkok on 15th Ave. E., Still closed, 4/11/25

Speaking of not-nonstop. Is Bites of Bangkok’s magical run over?

Every time I walk by the striking red storefront and black awning of my neighborhood’s dive nirvana these days, I’m cast into a stream of memories: proudly rushing my out-of-town guest Gregor Samsa, aka, Lee, to this slapdash spot on 15th Ave. E. for the miracle of late night dinner in Seattle; sweeping in with a date after a groovy rock show, a little giddy and a little drunk, sitting down at a cozy table waiting—and whispering with hope, is that ours?—for two sloppy plastic takeout bags of tasty noodles, veggies, and hot soup; locking down with my friends Wendy’s Stealing Clothes, aka, Annie and suburban State Sen. Marko L. for a beautiful intra-Democratic party squabble while eating bok choy, broccoli, and tofu entrées with crispy hot eggrolls on the side; or strolling in solo to read a book at the bar while sipping a cocktail alongside the gaggle of regulars who are busy chatting with the superstar (gracious pour) bartender as a second-tier ‘90s movie plays in the background on the mounted TV.

I’m lingering over these memories because Bites of Bangkok has gone dark in 2025. The always-kind-of-a-surprise gem closed “temporarily” back in mid-January; my theory is that there was no way to replace the secret ingredient: the aforementioned and lazily charismatic bartender who moved to Amsterdam in January to be with his girlfriend. (We all thought he was gay). According, incorrectly, to a staffer at the comedy club next door, Bangkok Bites was set to reopen a month ago now. In reality, its large darkened window has loomed over the sidewalk all year, enervating the deceptively welcoming bright red storefront and prompting the same kind of disappointed feeling you get when a tall guy takes the seat directly in front of you the moment before the movie starts.

I’ve lost count of the number of times recently I’ve thought, I’m craving a strong whiskey and an oily plate of rice and stir fried veggies, only to realize my neighborhood’s perfect choice might not exist anymore. As Bites of Bangkok’s apparently defunct Instagram account says: “We’re taking a break…we will open again on January 8th @5pm…” The lone comment frets: “When will you guys reopen? Been closed for a couple months…”

2) The Poetic Juxtapositions of Arthur Sze

How pleasantly surprised was I to find that a set of 26 new poems closes Arthur Sze’s otherwise retrospective collection, 2024’s The Glass Constellation.

Even though Sze is a woo-woo nature bard—daffodils, mesas, honey locust leaves, herons—he is one of my favorite poets. Indeed, despite my zealous commitment to cities, Sze’s go-to conceit is constantly enlightening: He rapidly strings together simultaneous events at play in the material world.

Searching for lightning petroglyphs, I stumble/ on a rattlesnake skin between rocks/—at dusk, soldiers set up machine guns/ near the entrance to the Taj.

As University of Virginia professor of creative writing Lisa Russ Spaar explains in her review of The Glass Constellation, Sze’s “signature cocktail” is his gift for mixing images:

..in the shaker that is the poem, [Sze] mix[es] exquisitely sensory (often synesthetic) detail; things occurring in the same moment but in different places…; intimate, political, violent, natural, erotic, and historic instances, perceptions… corded together; an expression of the mysteries of time, sexuality, and natural beauty that infuse human experience with meaning (“we hear / a series of ostinato notes and are not tied /to our bodies’ weight on earth”). For as with … any interrelated series or simultaneous frisson, such as a musical chord, it is the quality and specificity and arrangement of the various parts brought together — the catalogue, the list, the various notes — that make something new, fresh, inimitable about each configuration. In fact, one way to engage with Sze’s substantial new and collected poems might be to read a poem a day as a kind of koan or text upon which to meditate — such is the richness of this precise, fiercely observant, metaphysical and elegant work.

I first read Sze in 2022 when I bought his then-most-recent collection Sightlines (2019). The potential joke was on me. The title struck me as an urban planning term (it also sounds like the name of a local housing density and sustainability think tank I admire). Rather than being thrown by what turned out to be Sze’s lingering nature walk poems, I was instead blown away by his effortless flashcard series of precise and transcendent observations.

A neighbor hears gunshots in the bosque/and wonders who’s firing at close range;/I spot bear prints near the Pojoaque River/but see no sign of the reported mountain lion.

Or, and as is often the case, more dramatically in his closing stanzas:

I want to live on this planet:/alive to a rabbit at a glass door—/and flower where there is no flower./ —During the Cultural Revolution, a boy saw his mother shot by a firing squad—

The new poems stir this same juxtaposition chemistry, including a gorgeous six-part sequence titled appropriately enough “Entanglement” in which Sze outlines what’s up:

When you least expect it, your field/of vision tears, and an underlying landscape/reveals a radiating moment in time./Today you put aside the newspaper,/soak strawberry plants in a garden bed;/yet, standing on land, you feel the rise/and fall of a float house, how the earth/under your feet is not fixed but moves with the tide.

3) It’s Not Going to Work

In which I weigh in once again (this is an obsessions column after all) on the disappointing restaurant that just opened on my block.

We gave Rocket Taco 2.0 one more chance, taking seats at the expansive, yet nearly vacant bar top, ordering whiskeys, and trying in earnest to make a nightcap of it. Too bad for us. An indolent staffer, more a service worker than a neighborhood bartender, reluctantly gave us our drinks. They never checked in with us again. And to be fair: It’s clearly not their job to. There is seemingly no dedicated bartender position at this local bar. It’s evidently not part of the business plan.

Oblivious to the cozy potential, Rocket Taco’s owners do not not seem up to the opportunity of moving into this elegant neighborhood space on 19th Ave. E. For starters, despite the capacious moody restaurant digs, patrons are greeted at the door with a cash register queue where they’re made to order and pay in advance—checking in to check out, rather than being seated and encouraged to stay for a flowing evening of table service and kismet.

My prediction: despite some chatty, initial crowds (loose usage), these diners are not going to return. In sync with the fast food check-in parameters, the staff botches any dining-out mood as they eagerly get busy mopping the floor, unplugging the music—with a loud electronic fart the night we were there, and putting up chairs at the too many conspicuously unoccupied tables as the egregiously early 8:30 clean up time kicks in.

Nothing about the interior design choices say stay and make memories here this evening. In fact, there are no evident interior design choices to speak of other than the prominently displayed stack of to-go boxes at the bussing station by the front door. No art. No plants. And, give it a month, likely not enough customers.

——–

What would this weekly report be without a tennis update? And this one’s important: On Saturday morning, I hit my first-ever two-handed backhand, smashing a crosscourt winner past Valium Tom as he rushed the net. I’ve always used a one-handed backhand, but possessed by impulse, my inner Monica Seles seized the opportunity for not only a two-handed return, but one with a satisfying, skidding bounce into the open court.

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.