I’m All Lost In, #151: White T-shirts from Nordstrom; a lost photo; and Qinwen comes back. Plus the Week in X>Y.

I’m All Lost In

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#151

The Week in X > (is greater than) Y

The First Act at Friday Night’s Ambient Music Show > The “Legendary” Headline Act at Friday Night’s Ambient Music Show The experimental music curators at Age of Reflections brought two acts to Seattle’s magnificent Trinity Parish Church sanctuary on Friday night. The first performer, Cole Pulice, turned their saxophone into a synthesizer, allowing them to wrap notes around one another in chromatic helixes. This technique was bountiful as they found sumptuous chord combinations that gently splintered against the counterpoint drone they’d laid down from the sax signal.

The New Policy > The Original Policy ‍ One problem with the grungy vegan bars I gravitate to is that they gleefully welcome dogs. But I was the gleeful one during my trip to New York City last week when I stopped at The West, my regular spot on Union Ave in Williamsburg and saw a sign on the door that said, “NO PETS ALLOWED sorry.”

“You probably don’t hear this much,” I said to the young Bernie-Bro bartender, “but thank you for the new policy.”

“I hate the new policy,” he quickly countered.

And then his colleague, a young woman, added sarcastically, but not: “Why do you hate pets? I mean, I don’t know you, so you might be a good guy, but…” ‍

Unusually for me, I wasn’t rattled. I smiled and said, “Well, I don’t hate pets, but this is sort of the reason.” My nod to their aggression didn’t register. So, I continued: “I’m uncomfortable around dogs. But in these situations, I’m the bad guy.” I started to give an example: “I’m from Seattle and it’s a complaint-based system there, and so you have to be the one…”

The woman cut me off. She evidently hadn’t heard me mention Seattle. “Yeah. It was a snitch situation here. I hope it wasn’t you. You shouldn’t say that out loud…”

Still merrily composed, I thanked the pair for making my point, took the glass of soda water I’d ordered, and grabbed a seat next to a friendly woman where I killed some time before heading to my friends’ apartment a few blocks away for champagne on the rooftop.

Artist Statements That Don’t Talk About The Intersections > Artist Statements That Do Talk About the Intersections Painter and sculpture Hai-Wen Lin’s artist statement for her current exhibit at MoMA’s satellite Museum of Art & Design off Columbus Circle forgoes banal jargon, opting instead for poetry and clarity.

Museum of Art and Design, 9/1/26

Using lyrical phrases such as “sewing couture for the wind” and explaining that “through kitemaking” her art “explores constructions of the body and the relationship of the self to the environment,” Lin’s active voice is a welcome premise.

Her kite art of “worn and flown forms” blew me away.

Hai-Wen Li on exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City, 9/1/26

This Week’s Obsessions

1) Nordstrom White T-Shirts

Despite my recent infatuation with wearing music T-shirts (Blondie, Bad Brains, Dexys Midnight Runners) and pop-culture T-shirts (John McEnroe), I rediscovered the utility and beauty of plain white T-shirts this week.

Hot and sweaty and out of shirts at the end of my trip to NYC, I went to the Nordstrom on W. 57th & Broadway on the afternoon before my flight home and bought a box of fresh tees.

What a delight. They are comfy. They go with everything. And they are good-looking in their own right.

2) MIA Feminist Photo

‍The image is as clear to me as a perfectly written sentence: Lady Gaga’s cool eyes under her Cleopatra bangs watching us from a large poster hanging on the PubliCola office wall. Taped directly below, a cartoon rendering ECB clipped from a newspaper of 2nd-wave feminist icon Gloria Steinem (RIP). This is all captured in a photo I thought I snapped circa 2010 that distilled my PubliCola heyday.

But searching all day Saturday through my phone and my Instagram and Facebook posts ‍from the last 17 years, I couldn’t find it.

I did find a 2013 photo I took at PubliCola’s Seattle Met offices. It’s a snapshot of ECB’s desk. No Lady Gaga, only Steinem watching us.

ECB’s desk, PubliCola @ Seattle Met on Western, 9/26/13

3) Qinwen’s Comeback

I’m back in Seattle watching on my computer or following the scores on the U.S. Open app as opposed to watching live in Flushing Meadows, but the WTA bracket at the U.S. Open has produced some dream matchups this week: Jovic v Aela; Kostyuk v Noskova; Navarro v Muchova; Starodubtseva v Rybakina; Fernandez v Pagula; Townsend v Shnaider. And earlier in the week, a battle of the exquisite backhands between Anisimova and Tagger.

Two of my favorite players, calm vet Elena Svitolina and erratic 20-year-old Maya Joint, also faced off; there was no way World No. 72 Joint was going to beat World No. 9 Svitolina. And she didn’t. But I was thrilled that young Maya Joint won the second-set tiebreaker 8-6 sending the match to a deciding third set. Svitolina won that 6-4 for the match.

Not getting enough WTA tennis, I go to sleep every night listening to the recaps on the Tennis Podcast; they’re doing daily roundups, which they post around 1:30 am NYC time after the day’s action finally wraps up. 10:30 Seattle time. Perfect.

The stand-out match of the week was former-top-ten-star (now-qualifier) Qinwen Zheng’s comeback victory against World No. 24 Madison Keys.

Keys, the 2025 Australian Open champion, won the first set 6-1. Zheng won the thrilling second set 7-6. But then Zheng found herself down in the deciding set 0-5. Zheng won a game to make it 1-5, simply saving face now, I thought as I followed the score on my phone. But then, after Keys botched a match point in the next game with a backhand into the net, Zheng held on to win that game too. Then Zheng won the next five games in a row for a seven-game run that gave her the 7-5 win for game, set, and match.

Just as she did a week earlier when she came through the qualifying rounds with a win on Court 17 [I’m All Lost In #150, 9/2/26], Zheng fell to the ground in joy as if she’d just won the whole tournament.

Qinwen’s seven-game run tracked in real time.

All the matches this week have taken on this same level of intensity; particularly the three-hour Jovic v Aela match, a high-level affair of cross-court ball-striking elegance. Jovic won 7-5, 3-5, 7-5. It’s a sign of just how competitive the WTA has become with all this talent in the mix.

Next up for Zheng in the quarterfinals: Re-emergent Iga Swiatek. Swiatek, the former World No. 1, is currently on a comeback tear herself; she won the Toronto Open in August and she hasn’t dropped a set so far this week. Zheng beat Swiatek in the Olympics two years ago prompting Swiatek’s temporary, though gutting downfall [I’m All Lost In, #127, 3/22/26.]

My favorite player, World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka—who’s in a slump of her own—surprised me this week by winning all four of her matches so far. And without dropping a set. I was particularly surprised she beat surging Taylor Townsend during this weekend’s round of 16; I was certain that Townsend’s carefree mood, power hitting, and dexterous-net game would send bad-mood Saby for a loop—and into fits. Especially in front of Townsend’s hometown NYC crowd.

By week’s end, with Saby’s convincing 6-4, 6-3 win over Townsend, I’m feeling slightly more hopeful about her prospects for a three-peat at the U.S. Open. Most important, Saby has finally gotten some levity back; there was her weed-centric press conference where she misunderstood a question about feeling “high,” and there was her discombobulated, on-court post-match Q&A when she couldn’t hear the interviewer. I think this comical, light mood is more encouraging than her run of straight sets scorelines.

Next, in the quarterfinals: Sabalenka plays World No. 6 Linda Noskova, the steely and immaculate 2026 Wimbledon champion.

A final note from this year’s U.S. Open is a buzzkill, though. Excellent tennis reporter Ben Rothenberg has a sobering report on the U.S. Open’s new partnership with the gross and corrupt Trump-era betting website Kalshi. I made the mistake of updating my U.S. Open app, and now I’m waking up to sleazy Kalshi notifications on my phone.

Update: Zheng beat Swiatek, coming from a 5-0 deficit for the second time in 48 hours.

I’m All Lost In, #150: A new sweater; a fried mantou bun; and Court 17 at the Qualies. Plus the Week in X>Y.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#150

The Week in X > (is Greater Than) Y

Believing Art > Believing AI Valium Tom got me an amazing birthday present: A piece of art made by independent filmmaker and screenwriter Guy Maddin. Valium Tom follows Maddin’s Instagram page where the 70-something director sells his art.

This piece was an 8’’ by 11’ collage featuring Laurie Partridge under the title “Our Solar System.”

There’s a poem at the bottom of the piece:

THE ZONES OF ARCH ANGELS SURROUND THE WHOLE SOLAR SYSTEM, LIKE THE SPIRIT SPHERES SURROUND EACH AND EVERY PLANET

I thought Maddin may have grabbed these lines from some pop-culture source. Or even even found an occult outtake by W.B. Yeats. But when I searched online for the phrases, AI jumped in and said the poem was wrong. The search said gases, meteorites, and space made up the solar system, not deities.

8/23/26

The Bar at Your Hotel > The Bar in the Neighborhood ‍ Unless someone has a plan, head to the rooftop. Hotels are local businesses too. And they’re sexy.

8/26/26

Jamaica Bound AirTrain > Howard Beach AirTrain Don’t take the A Train.

If you’re staying in the Lower East Side, be sure to wait for the AirTrain to Jamaica from JFK. The other option, the AirTrain to Howard Beach, requires a transfer. Specifically, you have to switch from the A Train to the J Train at Broadway Junction. But the Jamaica AirTrain takes you straight to the J Train at the Sutphin-Archer Boulevard Station, the penultimate stop. While both routes take the same number of stops, 21, to get you from JFK to NoLita, and while the transfer down an escalator and then outside and then down another escalator and then down two levels in the subway station from the AirTrain to Jamaica Station isn’t particularly seamless, it is faster than taking two subway trains. And the panoramic intersection at Sutphin-Archer is action-packed with evening anticipation.

One other subway tip: The transfer from the 7 Train to the F coming from the U.S. Open in Queens back to Manhattan is confusing because it’s labeled 74th St, whereas on the way to Queens from Manhattan, it’s labeled Roosevelt. I missed it on the way back on Wednesday, and I had to catch the F a few stops later at Court St, a wandering and elaborate station.

This Week’s Obsessions:

1) The Sweater I Bought at Tokio7 It could have been the 1950s hard bop jazz they were playing (Oliver Nelson, the Horace Silver Quartet). But whatever the reason: The mood was right at Tokio7 at 1st Ave. & East 7th St. in the East Village Friday afternoon when I spent $180 for a vintage sweater. It was the perfect mid-century, Jet-Age fit for Saturday night’s get-together at the retro TWA Hotel’s Sunken Lounge.

This ice-cream-sprinkles, button-down, collared V-neck sweater was made by a company called FYC.

The guy at Tokio7, a high-end East Village thrift shop, told me the sweater had come in that very day. I’m sure he says that to all the fellows.

8/29/26, Boarding the AirTrain to Terminal 5 at JFK on the way to the TWA Hotel.

TWA Hotel, 8/29/26

2) Fried Mantou Bun with Condensed Milk at MáLà Project ‍‍ ‍

For the starter dishes on Friday night’s birthday dinner at MáLà Project in the East Village there was eggplant with roasted garlic, scallion pancakes with sweet bean sauce, and a mung bean salad with pistachios, cucumbers, and chili oil.

For the entree there was ma po tofu with oily-hot chili sauce. And lastly there was a smorgasbord of veggie dry pots heavy on lotus root, cabbage, baby corn, broccoli, oyster mushrooms, choy sum, and bean curd. For the non-veggies there were shrimp and beef dry pots.

But I’m here to talk about the dessert they brought out: A plate of mantou buns. Typically, mantou buns aren’t fried. But they fried them on this night. It’s a common adaptation for a dessert served with condensed milk.

Here’s a fried mantou bun recipe.

3) Court 17 at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center

During my first pilgrimage to the U.S. Open in 2024 [I’m All Lost In, #47, 9/7/24], I took a break from tennis to have coffee in Bryant Park with my dear old friend Jennifer M______. It was a fateful meeting. Jennifer told me: Of course, you’re now coming back every year.

Granted this permission, I was in NYC this week to watch my third U.S. Open in a row. My favorite moment this year: Slipping out of the 23,000-seat Arthur Ashe Stadium, where I’d been watching World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka practice with World No. 7 Karolina Muchova on Friday morning, and then maneuvering high speed through the mobbed grounds over to Court 17, the magical mini-stadium tucked away in the southeast corner of the Billie Jean King Tennis Center. Court 17 is a 2,000-seat stadium where you can watch matches like seeing indie bands at a small club.

This week, the Tennis Podcast’s Catherine Whitaker described Court 17 [around the 28:40 mark here] as “a great, mini amphitheater.…a cauldron that often seems to create good matches…”

Qinwen Zheng on Court 17, Wednesday, 8/26/26

It was my third trip to Court 17 in as many days to watch Qinwen Zheng; First, I saw her beat Clara Bell there on Wednesday morning. And then I watched her on Thursday playing against Elena Pridankina in between rain delays. And now I was there again, Friday afternoon.

Rain delay on Court 17, 8/27/26

Thursday, 8/27/26

Zheng was elbowing her way through the qualifying tournament, the Qualies; the 24-year-old former World No. 4 and 2024-gold-medal tennis Olympian has struggled in 2026, first with an injury, then with her game, and most of all with her mental health. By mid-summer she had plummeted to World No. 121. This unforgiving fate forced her into the qualifying rounds, where she had to win three matches to get a spot in this year’s U.S. Open. On Friday, she did just that, finishing Thursday’s rain-delayed match against World No. 183 Pridankina with an emphatic 6-0 win in the their deciding set. Final score: 6-4, 3-6, 6-0.

Zheng comes through the Qualies, Friday, 8/28/26

Victory on Court 17, Zheng and her coach, Friday, 8/28/26

On Monday, when the U.S. Open proper was underway and into its second day of action, Qinwen won her first-round match against Kristina Liutova, a 16-year-old teenage phenom who’d also made it through the qualifying rounds.

World No. 125, 16-year-old Kristina Liutova on her way to coming through the Qualies, Friday, 8/28/26

I’d actually seen Liutova win her pivotal, third Qualies match on Court 9, a small court like one you’d find outside a high school. I rushed there after Qinwen’s Friday afternoon win on Court 17. I knew Liutova was one to watch; after starting 2026 at World No. 712, she’d skyrocketed to World No. 125, gaining 100 points alone in early August after winning a lower-level WTA tournament in Memphis. She and Qinwen seemed to be passing one another as they headed in opposite career directions. But Qinwen came from a set down to win 4-6, 6-3, 6-1.

On the Tennis Podcast, Whitaker and Matt Roberts went on about the “awesome” Qinwen Zheng-vs-Katarina Liutova match for a good 7 minutes in their Day 2 recap [go to the 39:49 mark here], including this from Matt:

Dare I say, she is one of those dormant volcanoes, Zheng Qinwen. I’m not saying she’s going to erupt here and win the tournament or anything like that, but I’m saying …. her [Olympic] level, I’ve missed seeing it on the tour.

Matt had watched the match live from Court 17.

I loved this match. And I don’t know whether my take is influenced and biased by the fact that I had… some of the best media seats in tennis, those ones on Court 17 that we’re so lucky to sit in down in the front row. You’re kind of lower than the players. Those seats are a little bit sunken below the court. But I’ve never sat there and thought this match is bad. When you’re that close to the players, you just have an appreciation for how good they are in terms of their ball striking and movement and their intensity.

I’m All Lost In, #149: Watching Olivia Wilde’s The Invite; learning the Chantels’ “Maybe;” and reading Bryan Washington’s Palaver. Plus the Week in X>Y, including misinterpreting Joni Mitchell.

I’m All Lost In …

The 3 Things I’m Obsessing About THIS Week

#149

This Week in X > (is Greater Than) Y:

A Farmer’s Market Bouquet > A QFC Bouquet Obviously. But the leap in quality stands out like a peony on a sidewalk. Twice as expensive ($16 versus $8), but exponentially more lovely.

The flowers, which I bought from Simple Bloom at the Tuesday evening Capitol Hill Farmer’s Market this week also came securely set in a plastic bag—like the ones you got as a kid when you bought a goldfish—with a water-balloon serving of cool water sloshing at the bottom. A convincing touch.

8/18/26

‍The flowers were for XDX; she got some exciting news in her artist guise as Soft Portals this week. Given the botanical mode of her digital creations, a bouquet was befitting.

High Rises > Parking Lots Another obvious one, but the headline to this NYT story about opposition to a new housing development made my day. It was a clever play on the famous Joni Mitchell line “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot” from her 1970 eco hit Big Yellow Taxi.

“Landmarks Panel Approves Designs to Replace Parking Lot With High Rises.”

The story is about a city commission vote to replace a parking lot with two apartment buildings, including 200 units and 50 that will be affordable. And it noted : “Advocacy groups and residents opposed the plan because they said it did not preserve the neighborhood’s historical elements and aesthetic”

I derisively refer to this facile anti-development POV as Joni-Mitchell politics. Liberal Boomers and Xers often quote Mitchell’s parking lot line in their proud NIMBY testimony at city hall. But unwittingly, their knee-jerk "Development=Bad” mantra prioritizes car-dependent lifestyles; stalling new housing development locks pervasive car culture in place by thwarting the density needed to create walkable neighborhoods and expanded transit service.

Admittedly, the parking lots they’re supporting are mostly metaphorical, but perfectly, in this story, the parking lot was real.

A spokesman for the developer, Edward J. Minskoff Equities, said the proposal … would add housing to “a site that previously functioned solely as a parking lot.”

Watching Tennis on the Tennis Channel in My Apartment > Watching at a Bar This is a 180 from an X > (is Greater Than) Y-item I wrote in February [I’m All Lost In, #120, 2/1/26]. And it also contradicts my out-and-about urbanist code.

I don’t know if this is about the sad bar on my block or more about me, but: Excited for this week’s Cincinnati Open quarterfinal match between the WTA’s two most exciting and athletic players, World No. 4 superstar Coco Gauff and red-hot World No. 10 Marta Kostyuk [I’m All Lost In, #117, 1/10/26], I was looking forward to my Friday night plan: Cheering in the privacy of my apartment while watching what I thought might be the most glorious tennis match of 2026. Gauff and Kostyuk have the same superhuman court coverage skills, though Kostyuk looks more like the FTD flower delivery logo when she’s at it while Coco looks a bit more like Charlie Chaplin. But with their equally heroic ability to defend and smash back winners, they’re both breathtaking brick walls.

Unfortunately, their match turned out to be a total dud. Kostyuk brought zero game; she had 38 unforced errors and 8 double faults and Coco cruised to an uncontested 6-2, 6-2 win. Kostyuk’s own coach, Sandra Zaniewska [I’m All Lost In, #140, 6/21/26], was teasing and laughing from the players’ box throughout the lackluster second set.

Also from the Cincinnati Open this week, what I’ve known all along [I’m All Lost In, #15, 1/25/24]: Despite her World No. 1 ranking, some time ago the tennis gods put a deep jinx on my favorite player, Aryna Sabalenka. Blowing it yet again, Sabalneka lost her Round-of-16 match in two ugly sets by unraveling in the first-set tiebreaker 7-9 after being up 5-1, and then losing the second set by dropping five games in a row after being up 4-1. Saby’s Peter Parker status should be clear to everyone at this point. She certainly won’t score a three-peat at the upcoming U.S. Open.

This Week’s Obsessions:

1) Watching Olivia Wilde’s The Invite

You’ll be as uncomfortable watching Ed Norton and Penelope Cruz as the enlightened upstairs neighbors propositioning Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde, the neurotic and hilarious downstairs couple, as you’d be in real life if a similar, cloyingly empathetic and handsy Burning-Man couple hit on you .

But the frantic Who’s-Afraid-of-Virginia-Woolf? run-up to this calamitous overture … and the bittersweet fallout … makes A24’s The Invite a much-welcome jewel-box-theater drama in our endless era of prefab blockbusters like Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.

The camera careens around the lone set—a gorgeous, Victorian San Francisco apartment—chasing four separate character studies at once as these lurching couples sally and crash into one another, exposing the fissures in their respective relationships.

Even as Rogen and Norton (and Cruz to a lesser extent) go all out delivering energized and entertaining performances, Wilde steals the show. She directed the up-tempo movie. And her spastic comedic timing, minutely exaggerated silent-film faces, and uneasy beats are captivating. They’re also a worthy, RIP tribute to Diane Keaton, per the film’s dedication.

The quiet ending shot of Rogen’s broken character, a former musician, and Wilde’s character, his unhappy wife and lost soul herself, sitting together at the apartment piano plunking out a sentimental memory together, is a pitch-perfect metaphor for their unresolved story.

2) Learning the Chantels’ “Maybe” on Piano

8/21/26

Prompted by my recent obsession with the Chantels’ dynamo debut album We Are the Chantels [I’m All Lost In, #148, 8/16/26], I printed out the music for “Maybe,” the LP’s hit single. The 1958 teen lament was written by the group’s 16-year-old lead singer Arlene Smith and not, as the sheet music says, by the band’s manager, Richard Barrett (a legit songwriter and doo-wop singer—the Valentines—in his own right to be sure.)

While “Maybe” is yet another iteration of the bright I-vi-IV-V “50’s chord progression,” Smith adds some clouds. The passing notes heighten the progression’s heart tug by giving us early looks at the F and C from the Dominant Five chord; “Maybe” is written in B-flat Major (B♭, C, D, E♭, F, G, and A.)

When the song finally does land on the Five (an F-Major chord), Smith channels her classical training and adds a minor seventh note (E flat) and a 13th (a D at the top) relocating the 1950s soda shop to an alternate dimension.

All this trickery makes the teenage formula’s traditional route to the Five via the Subdominant Four Chord land with even more growing pains than usual. Counterintuitively, Smith just plays it straight—E-flat, G, B-flat—making it the prettiest chord in the mix. And the most satisfying to lean into.

3) Reading Bryan Washington’s Latest Novel, Palaver

I’m a fan of Bryan Washington’s short stories [I’m All Lost In, #9, 12/15/23]. Scroll down here for my review of his notable 2019 collection Lot, a book that could have been included on an econ or urban-studies syllabus. Lot’s thirteen linked short stories bring Houston’s Black, Hispanic, immigrant, queer, and working-class caste to life; ECB grew up in suburban Houston and first recommended Lot to me a few years ago.

Washington’s aimless 2024 follow-up novel Family Meal disappointed me, though. So, I was happy to see he had a promising new short story in the July 20th issue of the New Yorker this summer.

And now his new novel, Palaver—a word that, more than simply meaning “cluttered chatter,” specifically alludes to a confusing back and forth between people from different cultures. In Palaver, Houston-native Washington brings his city studies lens to Tokyo.

By leaving America Washington has returned to form.

The novel focuses on a 50-something Jamaican-American woman and her estranged prodigal son; the gay son has fled to Tokyo (from their home in Houston … surprise) where he’s now teaching English, drinking at gay bars, and hooking up with a “straight” married man named Taku. As the novel begins, the mom surprises the son by showing up in Tokyo unannounced; she moves into the son’s tiny apartment on a mission to mend their frayed relationship.

Splicing together backstories (a homophobic brother back in Houston who’s in jail for dealing drugs) and real-time dynamics (the mom’s affair with a shopkeeper named Ben in the son’s Shin-Ōkubo neighborhood) Palaver introduces us to Tokyo at the street level.

My only complaint: The two characters are identified simply as “the mother” and “the son.” Seems like a minor gripe, but it gives every sentence too much weight—”That’s not the answer I was looking for,’ said the mother”—as if each line functions as some important metaphor. It can can trip up the flow of Washington’s iterative moments, his actual and gentle way of building the novel’s touching metaphors.

When he finally made it to Shinjuku-sanchōme Station for the final train of the evening, the son stumbled as bystanders passed him, wobbling against a vending machine until the car’s doors shut, leaving him alone on the platform, and he peered down at the tracks.

I’m All Lost In, #148: Girl group royalty; DIY folk; and jet-age architecture. Plus the Week in X>Y, including light rail to Bellevue.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#148

The Week in X > (is Greater Than) Y

Keeping the “Police & Thieves” Bass Line in My Back Pocket Until the 2nd Verse > Introducing it in the 1st Verse I now wait until the second verse to play the bass-line reveal in my piano cover of the Clash’s version of Junior Murvin’s “Police & Thieves.” Combining the ricocheting bass groove with the sweet, right-hand pop hook midway through the jam boosts the song’s energy while simultaneously turning the lights down.

520 > I-90 / I-90> 520 If you’re driving to Bellevue from Seattle, which I was on Friday morning taking XDX to an appointment: SR 520 is the much calmer, easier route than I-90; I live slightly closer to 520, but both highways are a quick, straight shot from my apartment.

I-90 to Bellevue is nerve-wracking: Claustrophobic lanes. Encroaching barrier walls. Tunnels that make me think of the Lady Di paparazzi chase. And a surprise confluence of indistinguishable exits which leave you in a suburban hall of mirrors where the arterials are just more highways on a grid.

By comparison, SR 520 coasts along with the elegance of what I imagine an Irish motorway to Lake Isle of Innisfree might be like. And the exit to Bellevue drops you on an intelligible landscape of straightforward lefts and rights to your nearby destination.

At the macro level, though: I-90 is the superior route because you can take light rail. Which we did on Wednesday to see a movie at the Lincoln Square Cinemark in downtown Bellevue.

I actually didn’t snap this photo on the way to the movie—Olivia Wilde’s The Invite. I took this picture from the Link light rail 2 Line on opening weekend, 3/28/26, [I’m All Lost In, #129, 4/4/26.]

Taking light rail across I-90 is especially necessary if you’re traveling from downtown Seattle. Otherwise, by car, you have to take I-5 to get to I-90, a route that should be included on the Odyssey’s travel warnings alongside whirlpools and sea monsters.

Iga Swiatek > Marta Kostyuk, Elina Svitolina, and Elena Rybakina You remember Iga. She’s the one I decided to channel in my recent tennis match against Valium Tom instead of channeling my pop-psychology “Self 2” [I’m All Lost In, #139, 6/14/26.] Iga is also the former World No. 1 who had spiraled into an emotional tennis slump over the last year and a half [I’m All Lost In, #127, 3/22/26] slipping in the rankings.

Well, she’s back. Iga Swiatek just cruised through the Toronto Open this week to win her first 2026 title, an 1000-level title at that, after dispatching a slate of top-ranked players. She beat World No. 11 Kostyuk (3-6, 6-1, 6-2) and World No. 9 Svitolina (6-3, 1-6, 6-3); both Kostyuk and Svitolina are in top form right now. And in the final, Iga crushed World No. 2 Rybakina; Rybakina hasn’t been playing her best lately, but Swiatek’s dominant 6-2, 6-3 straight-sets victory to cap this title run should frighten the rest of the WTA field; Iga also beat World No. 15 Diana Shnaider (6-2, 6-1) on this Toronto comeback tour.

Pro tennis’ best color analyst Andrea Petkovic wrote an exciting Substack post about Iga’s Lazarus look.

Before the tournament, I asked Hawkeye for a bunch of numbers on Iga’s tennis because I wanted to make sense of why she hadn’t been able to reach a final this year. There were numbers about groundstroke speed, height above the net, serve numbers, return numbers. Interestingly, they were not much different to some of Iga’s numbers during her best years. Some were down by a very small margin of points, but others were up so they should’ve balanced each other out. When I came across breakpoints saved and breakpoints converted, though, I saw the biggest discrepancy. That’s where she had fallen off. To me, this meant one thing: the barrier in front of Swiatek was not her tennis, it was her belief. ‍

‍ This Week’s Obsessions

1) We are the Chantels

The Chantels. Arlene Smith, left.

RIP Arlene Smith, the powerhouse lead singer and talented 16-year-old songwriter for the Chantels, one of rock & roll’s first girl groups. Smith’s yearning blockbuster single “Maybe,” which went to No. 15 and No. 2 in 1958 on the Billboard and R&B charts respectively, ushered in the Kennedy-era girl-group hey day of Shirelles, Marvellettes, Ronnettes, Crystals, and Shangri-Las at a time when teenage-heartbreak doo-wop had been dominated by boy bands.

I’ve written lovingly about early rock & roll, doo-wop, and girl groups before, most recently about Queens, NYC’s early ‘60s one-hit wonders, the Butterflys [I’m All Lost In, #133, 5/3/26.] I knew the Chantels’ hit mainly because of the Shangri-Las 1964 cover version. However, with this week’s news about Smith, I listened to the group’s sole LP We Are the Chantels for the very first time. And then on repeat. .

The best comparison to this pop tour de force would be the Sex Pistols lone LP, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. The similarity? Like that seismic Pistols record, 1958’s We are the Chantels is relentlessly committed to a singular sound. In the case of the Bronx-based Chantels, the jam is overwrought-torch-song doo-wop driven by simple piano chords, blues shapes, minor-sixth melodies, and Smith’s ardent and classically trained voice.

We Are the Chantels has only one miss, a much too-punchy backbeat jam that tries to be playful—as opposed to the remaining, mournful 11 tracks (including “Maybe”) that stick to Smith’s melodramatic songwriting signature. Most of these tunes either sound like an early draft or subsequent revision of “Maybe.”

A particularly flawless sequence comes at songs 6-9: ”He’s Gone” (the group’s initial single, released in August 1957), “I Love You So,” “Every Night (I Pray),” and “Whoever You Are.” The last song on the record, “If You Try,” is also a knockout.

‘“I Love You So” is actually a cover of an early doo-wop hit by Harlem boy band the Crows. The Crows were signed in 1953 by the legendary indie NYC record producer George Goldner during the first days of doo-wop [I’m All Lost In, #33, 6/1/24.] In 1957, Goldner signed the Chantels.

2) The Cradle Show at Cowpine Theater

Paco Cathcart, aka the Cradle, carport show, Seattle, 8/8/26

Full disclosure about this rave review: Paco Cathcart, the singer-songwriter who performs as the Cradle, is something of a nephew to me; Paco, who I once name-checked in a poem as “my young avant-garde friend,” is the stepson of a longtime pal.

While Paco’s touring compatriot, alto-saxophonist Carolyn Hietter (aka Financial Collapse), opened Paco’s Seattle house show last weekend with a Martha Graham-meets-free-jazz performance that can certainly—and accurately—be called avant-garde, Paco themself has settled into a more traditional genre: folk music.

I say “settled” because Paco’s formidable and idiosyncratic catalog of indie releases includes everything from experimental music to rock music to indie rock to emo to punk, and, going way back to high school, Dungeons & Dragons metal. Paco even once composed some dub remixes for a set of poetry reels I made back in 2019. One of Paco’s electronica tracks, “The Name of Willis Reed” (from the Cradle’s 2019 NNA Tapes release The Glare of Success), may be my favorite electronica piece of all time. … My friend Valium Tom has suggested that Paco was trolling me with that one, as it’s a tribute song to the 1970 New York Knicks…

But folk troubadour it is. Paco’s flawless shredder chops—translated on classical nylon-string guitar and mixed with South American folk music and clinical, biblical civil-rights-era Dylan—captivated the crowd last Saturday night at the Cowpine Theater, a DIY venue in a carport just north of the U. District in the tree-lined Roosevelt neighborhood.

The Dylan comparison isn’t generic shorthand. Paco’s jams are patiently crafted parables that remix language and meaning in epic, insightful stories written with a poison pen against a world that’s been excavated by vicious vanity capitalism. “Man in the Mirror,” Paco’s song about the 2023 subway murder of Jordan Neely, a homeless Michael Jackson impersonator, is Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” updated for the Trump years.

3) Designing TWA, Eero Saarinen’s Airport Terminal in New York, Park Books

8/15/26

Upon having my mind blown at JFK’s TWA Hotel [I’m All Lost In, #145, 6/27/26], I ordered this coffee table book of photos and academic essays that chronicle the construction and 1962 debut of Finnish architect Eero Saarinen’s iconic JFK (née Idlewild) terminal. Though the prompt for Saarinen’s design is the shared infrastructure of Idlewild’s “Terminal City” concept, the story is framed in this account with cynical references to “corporate design,” “corporate architecture,” and “corporate communications” as “Airports [became] facilities for handling people not airplanes.” But exuberant Jet-Age capitalism is part of the beauty of the TWA terminal, which the authors acknowledge perhaps subconsciously by narrating in the present tense. “The preliminary design anticipates the arrangement of uses.”

With machine efficiency as the ideal, Saarinen went for “a barrier-free spatial continuum of zones flowing into one another” that both shrank and “fragmented” the airport process into discrete functions that paradoxically combine into one. The result? The mythical, avian split-level conception of moving walkways, tunnels, and parallel wings.

I’m All Lost In, #147: Modular Seattle in the park; an IKEA success story; and “A Message to You Rudy.” Plus the Week in X>Y, including Style > Substance.

I’m All Lost In…

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#147

The Week in X > (is Greater Than) Y

No Bagels in My Apartment > Bagels in My Apartment I don’t know if business is tanking at Rubinstein’s (I wouldn’t be surprised given how it seems like we’re in the prologue to Kristallnacht right now), but I did end up with five bags of free bagels from their 15th Ave. shop this week.

I was (the only one) eating lunch at Rubinstein’s on Monday at 1pm when one of the young workers approached me and asked: Excuse me sir, would you like some free bagels?‍ Sure, but I didn’t envision she’d then hand over bag after bag of afternoon spoils. We were just going to throw them out anyway, she explained.

It is not good to have easy access to bagels for breakfast, dinner, and snacking in your apartment. I’ve been feeling lethargic from the refined carbohydrate spikes all week. And several pounds heavier.

Maya Joint > Yuliia Starodubtseva and Sorana Cirstea, but Not Luidmila Samsonova My new favorite tennis player Maya Joint is now ranked World No. 75, one notch higher than she was last week— and more than 10 ranks higher than she was at the beginning of the summer when she’d hit a 365-day low at No.87.

Duly noted: She made it to the third round in Toronto this week, beating 2026 breakout player Yuliia Straodubsteva (best tennis name ever) and then beating Romanian Sorana Cirstea, a suddenly-surging vet; Cirstea is another personal favorite. The Toronto Open is a big deal, 1000-level tournament. Joint eventually lost to World No. 55 Luidmila Samsonova. But it’s the furthest Joint has gone in a tournament in eight months. The success is a bit of micro-symbolism for her slight change in fortune as she tries to get back to where she started 2026—ranked just outside the top 30 at world at 32 [I’m All Lost In, #114, 12/20/25.]

And though she fell short, the shape of the third-round match was also notable. Joint has been in the dispiriting habit of owning the first set with her backhand smashes and mirror shades, but then crashing out and losing the next two sets badly [I’m All Lost In, #146, 8/1/26]. This time, however, she lost the hotly contested first set and won the second in a clutch 7-6 (7-3) tiebreaker before losing in the third set in a closer back-and-forth than the 2-6 scoreline suggests.

In addition to finally going as far as the third round, pushing it to a three-sets match bests Joint’s only previous 2026 third-round appearance in mid-January. She lost that one immediately in two sets (2-6, 0-6) against fellow Gen Zer and top-ten star Mirra Andreeva.

St‍yle > Substance It’s not that substance was lacking in indie filmmaker Adam Sekuler’s documentary The Flamingo, which screened at Northwest Film Forum on Wednesday night. I just wasn’t interested in the subject and went to the show reluctantly (thanks for the nudge Annie); the movie is about the life of a not-traditionally-sexy, 60-something female dom in the BDSM community.

Sekuler, the former program manager at Northwest Film Forum, is an immaculate moviemaker with a soulful touch. His artful opening shot in this unique doc—the camera lingering on a flamboyance of flamingos—was foreshadowing. Not of the storyline, but of the fact that every subsequent scene was equally sumptuous, captivating, and patiently filmed.

I ended up invested in this unlikely dom not because of her story, but because of Sekular’s reverent camera work, lyrical pacing, and emotional attention to detail during van-life phone-sex chats, banal back-porch hang outs, and sky-diving jumps. As with so many of the lush moments in Sekuler’s film, all of these scenes scripted knowing metaphors of daily life.

This Week’s Obsessions

1) Modular Seattle in the Park

Modular Seattle, Volunteer Park, 8/1/26

Modular Seattle, Volunteer Park, 8/1/26

Modular Seattle’s hypnotic bills are emerging as a regular on these weekly obsession lists, most recently after I went to one of their hot-wired salons at the Substation in late June [I’m All Lost In, #142, 7/4/26.]

This week they brought their synthesized beats and atmospherics to Volunteer Park. And once again, I was transported by the layered sine waves, skittering BPMs, and seance aesthetics.

The last DJ of the evening, Major Tim, was particularly good, delivering a grand finale that besmirched its legit dance-floor hook with an orchestration of glitches, counter-rhythms, and looping signals.

I haven’t been drinking alcohol this year [I’m All Lost In, #124, 3/1/26], but I did swallow an orange gummy for this evening of Saturday night synthetic fever.

2) An IKEA Nightstand/Cart (RÅGRUND) and IKEA Drawer Unit (LENNART)

I am not handy. TMI: But as a single male seeking single female, this inevitable fact makes me insecure.

Handiness aside, IKEA has always struck me as a place where divorces and breakups begin. At the least, IKEA assembly is stressful for me. Why do you always end up with at least one extra screw or wayward plastic bolt?

Thus, with two IKEA tasks to do for my pal XDX this week, I was feeling skittish. But voila, IKEA: There may have been some testy groans about the stripped female thread and an extra screw left over from putting together the meshed drawer unit, but by the second project—the rolling RÅGRUND bamboo bedside nightstand—‍I wasn’t only finishing the job with craftsman’s aplomb, I was feeling the meditative comfort of Phillips head screwdrivers, ribbed wedge dowels, and getting the aligned angles just right.

Assembly Assignment #2, Tuesday night, 8/4/16

Assembly Assignment #1, Sunday night, 8/2/26

3) 3 Songs on Piano
In the never-ending assignment of practicing my piano set [I’m All Lost In, #104, 10/12/25] and [I’m All Lost In, #143, 7/13/26,] this week I locked into a jam I’ve been playing since I first took up piano: the 1967 rocksteady single, “A Message to You Rudy” by Dandy Livingstone. Like me, you’re probably more familiar with the faithful 1979 cover version by the bi-racial British ska act, the Specials.

I was prompted to revisit this straightforward pogo-beat jam after tuning up another song in my set from Jamaica’s mid-1960s hit parade; a much trickier one thanks to all the blues chords: Desmond Dekker’s “007, Shanty Town” [I’m All Lost In, #135, 5/16/26.]

The path to “A Message to You, Rudy” went like this: Okay, now that I’ve got Desmond Dekker’s gorgeous inversions in hand let me make sure I’ve got another one of my set’s trickier tunes down: David Bowie’s “John, I’m Only Dancing.” Okay, delighted that I finally discovered the trick to playing the contrasting rhythms in the meta-avant-garde chorus to his 1972 post-Ziggy single (hold the A in the descending right hand for two beats as the left hand hits the octave-bouncing E twice), I wanted to make sure I could still pounce on the Specials basic pop beat. I could, and I’ve been playing it all week.

And oh, I forgot: There are some colorful chords in “A Message to You Rudy” as well, like the F second inversion up to the G-dominant seventh during the verse.

I’m All Lost In, #146: Vegan coconut ice cream; vegan sesame-seed coffee; and an Adidas jacket. Plus the Week in X>Y, including Erica scoops the Seattle Times again.

I’m All Lost In…‍ ‍

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#146‍ ‍

The Week in X > (is Greater Than) Y‍ ‍

ECB at PubliCola > the Seattle Times This is obvious to anyone who follows Seattle city hall, but I’m writing it to memorialize Erica’s big week. She scooped the fuck out of the Seattle Times on the news that Mayor Wilson fired SPD Chief Shon Barnes on Thursday. It was perhaps the biggest city hall story to date of 2026. (LOL. She scooped them again on Friday by getting the details on Barnes’ $700,000 severance.)

Not only did ECB have the Barnes-is-toast story posted on PubliCola hours before the Seattle Times, but some of her earlier, original reporting contributed directly to his demise: ECB had receipts on Chief Barnes’ curious record of being out of town a lot. In addition to the fact that Barnes’ whereabouts raised doubts about his commitment to Seattle, there was his toxic gaffe about it too: At the beginning of the week, Barnes had to be physically escorted from a press conference after going chest out to confront a reporter who’d simply asked about Erica’s reporting on the chief’s revealing calendar.

I’m biased about ECB. We’re best friends and we co-founded PubliCola. So I’ll defer to another longtime local writer and reporter, Bruce Barcott, who posted this after the PubliCola story hit:

As Seattle staggers through its latest police chief drama, I want to pay respect to Erica C. Barnett and Publicola. She has been asking serious and reasonable questions about Chief Barnes and his WFH approach to his job since late last year. This isn't petty "gotcha" stuff. A police chief's presence in the city he's hired, paid, and sworn to protect and lead is a big deal. Some might say IT'S THE JOB. Barnett did the work of observing, asking, finding documents, actually reading those documents (a calendar), and connecting dots. And then checking facts. And then publishing facts. Public servants get to take days off. They're allowed vacations. A conference now and then is fine. We're adults here. We know this. What Chief Barnes has been up to, according to Barnett's reporting, is next level. Link to her Publicola work in first comment. ‍

An Arm Rub > A Cold Compress This pro-massage observation contradicts something I wrote in June [I’m All Lost In, #140, 6/21/26]. Under the header An Ice Pack > A Massage—I wrote: “Pulverizing my arm with the massage gun feels good in the moment, but the lasting effects are nil.”

After a massage this week, I stand corrected. I also stand before you without an aching left arm for the first time all summer. (I cannot wait to play tennis this week.*)

My pain had persisted for weeks after my ill-informed June testimonial to ice over massage. But this week, after XDX and I traded massages Tuesday evening—her back, my left arm—the lasting effects are clearly a miracle.

On the bus ride home after the arm massage, I was both buoyant and blissed out. More notably: I started the next morning without wincing awake to the strain of my arm. It wasn’t until a few hours later that I realized, Oh, my arm doesn’t hurt. It was a bit like the joy you experience when you suddenly realize, Hey, I haven’t thought about my ex all week.

Admittedly, this is the story of human hands as opposed to the hard-rubber foam massage gun I wrote about in June. However, it’s official: I’m a verbal Yes, please on the magic-cure effects of massage.

For example, this week’s recovery is also likely related to the fact that during my recent trip to New York City, I returned to my favorite room on earth: Relax Station up the stairs on Mulberry St. in Chinatown/Little Italy [I’m All Lost In, #48, 9/14/24] where I paid for a professional massage. I asked them to focus on my left arm.

Post Manhattan massage, 7/24/26

*Despite looking forward to freely smashing my one-handed backhand again, I got creamed by Valium Tom on Saturday.

World No. 229 Kristina Liutova > World No. 76 Maya Joint 20-year-old Australian tennis player Maya Joint came to the world’s attention this summer during round one of Wimbledon when she played former tennis superstar Serena Williams; 45-year-old Williams was playing on a “comeback-tour” whim. I previewed the match [I’m All Lost In, #141, 6/28/26] because I was rooting for Joint; I became a Maya Joint fan during her breakout 2025 season [I’m All Lost In, #114, 12/20/25].

In her ridiculous signature cyber-shades, the teenager had won two lower-level but notable WTA singles tournaments in 2025 (Morocco and Eastbourne). She ended the year formidably at World No. 32. However, as Wimbledon 2026 came around this June, Joint was in the throes of a dreadful spell. She had plummeted to World No. 87 by then. I was hoping she’d reverse her free fall and beat Williams. And surprisingly, she did beat Williams. It was only Joint’s fourth win of the year, though, making her a blah 4-13 on the 2026 season overall. Nor would the match turn out to be the beginning of a course correction.

Joint went on to lose 6-3, 2-6, 0-6 in the next round to fellow Gen Zer, rising 21-year-old star, Alex Aela, the World No. 28. (It was actually Aela that Joint beat last year for the Eastbourne title.)

And this week, Joint lost 6-3, 3-6, 3-6 in the second round at a minor tournament in Memphis to World No. 228, 16-year old Kristina Liutova. Joint is now 6-16 on the year; in addition to her losing run in Memphis, she went 1-1 the prior week in Prague where she also crashed out in the second round. This time she lost to World No. 64, 19-year-old Tereza Valentová, 6-1, 0-6, 3-6.

I’m being specific about Joint’s scorelines because you’ll notice a pattern: After controlling the first set (with her fierce backhand and convincing athleticism), she inexorably goes on to lose the next two sets badly. As a Joint fan, it’s become a repetitive bummer.

Maya Joint, losing in Memphis, 7/30/16

This Week’s Obsessions

1) El Cerro

A tasty cup of sesame milk coffee, aka, El Ajonjolí, 7/31/26.

Not only do I keep coming back to this brand new all-plant-based, Puerto Rican bakery & coffeeshop on the east end of E. Pike St. for their not-too-sweet, sesame-seed-milk horchata, I’m also here for the captivating mood: The chatty owner, the laid-back yet energized baristas; the light Afro-Cuban jazz playing on the sound system (Rubén González, Omara Portuondo, Compay Segundo); and the bright, archipelago mountaintop atmospherics. El Cerro = the hill.

With a lavender-speckled-and-swirled ceramic floor and mint-green walls, plus a gentle assortment of potted plants, a wood counter and high beams, and golden hanging lantern lamps, it feels like an attentive, fine-dining restaurateur spent month’s getting everything just so at this small-scale cafe.

I’m always nervous for a new business. But by week’s end, I was one in a crowd of boisterous patrons taking up all the available tables and savoring El Cerro’s single-origin Puerto Rican coffee along with the sweet bread, guava sponge cake, and twisted Bavarian cream pastries. The baked goods come directly from a Seattle-based Puerto Rican custom-cakes shop called La Antillana.

El Cerro, 7/31/26

El Cerro, 7/31/26

‍2) Adidas Jacket

I tagged along with ECB to the Soho Adidas store on Spring St. last week when we were in New York. And while she was busy checking out the assortment of flamboyant new models, I was taken with a staid, gray-tweed zip-up track jacket with stately black Adidas-striped sleeves. It was on sale too. 20% off brought it from $100 down to $80.

In comparison to the fraying, baggy dark blue zip-up I bought at Crossroads thrift store last year, this was a sleek, statement purchase.

I left the slovenly, old jacket in NYC and as if I were Mr. Rogers, I reverently folded the handsome Adidas jacket into my suitcase.

Back in Seattle, I’ve been wearing it all week despite the July heat.

3) A Scoop of Vegan Coconut Ice Cream

Another correction to an earlier assessment. In mid June, I wrote this: “But there’s trouble afoot. For the first time in memory there are no lines forming. As we head into summer 2026, it’s eerily quiet at the ice cream shop on my block” [I’m All Lost In, #139, 6/14/26.]

While still not as convincing as the queues of summers past, the lines have finally formed on the sidewalk outside Hello Robin. And despite my ongoing effort to zero out treats (as I’ve done with alcohol so far this year), I’ve been standing in these lines most evenings this week.

I’ve been getting a big scoop of their chunky vegan coconut ice cream in their trademark blue-an-white paper cup, ferrying it upstairs to my apt., transferring it to a mug, and adding a tablespoon of carob powder.
…
Lastly, an off-brand music recommendation from me: A catchy indie-pop rock song from 2010 called Pumped Up Kicks by a band called Foster the People. The lyrics—from the POV of a school shooter—are impolitic and tasteless perhaps, though classics like the Boomtown Rats’ I Don’t Like Mondays‍ ‍and the movie Heathers track the same controversial R-rated subject matter. For my part, the melancholy hook—”All the other other kids…” —jumped out at me before I’d processed the rest of the words. I was immediately smitten, and as I usually do with pop jams, I started projecting my own stories onto this sticky refrain.

I’m All Lost In, #145: The delivery economy; the TWA Hotel; no tattoos. Plus the Week in X>Y.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#145‍ ‍

The Week in X > (is greater than) Y‍ ‍

Zendaya for Five Minutes > The Remaining 147 Minutes Blockbuster filmmaker Christopher Nolan spent $250 million making the new, three-hour version of the Odyssey; I saw it with Annie at Pacific Place Tuesday night.

Nolan gives us the works: Epic battle scenes; volatile CGI-monsters; on-location Mediterranean islands; righteous tempests; and melodramatic dialogue. But it’s Zendaya as the goddess Athena—onscreen for maybe five minutes total and wearing a plain white and gold Princess Leia dress—who steals the show. With her knowing side-eye looks rather than Hollywood lines, the bi-racial superstar gives the movie its proper Homer imprimatur.

DIY Veggie Sub > The Menu Board Options This is a recommendation for when you’re starving at midnight in Manhattan. That would be me and ECB upon arriving at JFK from Seattle last Wednesday night. We took the AirTrain to the Howard Beach stop to the A Train to the J Train to Bowery and Delancey. From there, we walked straight to the Heavenly Market on Prince St. and ordered sandwiches from the young man in a Pedri jersey who was working the deli counter. I asked him to pile all the veggies on a toasted hoagie with red-pepper aioli and oil.

Be prepared to wait in line behind a couple of twenty-year-old tech dolts with their more-complicated drunk order for fried-egg subs, a sullen young woman wanting a bottled water, and a toxic young couple stepping in and out to vape on the sidewalk.

The serene Team-Pedri guy will float through it all—and make ECB her order for a chopped cheese too—with patience and care.

The Seattle Woodland Park Zoo > Seattle Coffeeshops and Bars Pavement is my favorite band from the indie-rock era [I’m All Lost In, #86, 6/7/25] and the only band from that time along with Quasi [I’m All Lost In, #40, 7/19/24] that was actually any good. Pavement frontman brat Stephen Malkmus understood that rock music was over by the 1990s, and he embraced its final days by mastering death-throes dissonance as pop melody. However, I initially dismissed my pal Annie’s invite to see Pavement at Zootunes, Seattle’s annual nostalgia-driven summer concert series because as I told her: Seeing all the ageing hipsters in their KEXP and/or rock-band t-shirts and suffering their misconstrued camaraderie over facile left-wing politics is my idea of peak Seattle hell.

However, imagining that Malkmus’ indolent high-jinks might outmaneuver Seattle’s cloying disposition, I eventually reconsidered and accepted Annie’s invitation. Surprisingly, this turned out to be a wise move. Not only did Pavement deliver an exquisitely sloppy set on Sunday night, but Malkmus excelled with his hilarious and outre banter; he managed to make fun of Seattle by simply name checking suburban Edmunds and spoof Roxy Music by simply name checking their 1979 LP Manifesto.

Class-Clown rocker, Stephen Malkmus, Seattle Zootunes, 7/19/26

Much more important: The Seattle Zoo turns out to be the most daring and radical institution in Seattle. They don’t allow dogs at Zootunes. This is in stark contrast to most coffeeshops and bars in town which have all submitted to Seattle’s self indulgence. Thanks for the excellent outing, Annie.

This Week’s Obsessions‍ ‍

1) I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan‍ ‍

This 2023 blogger-gone-viral memoir by Beijing trike delivery driver Hu Anyan is written with such cheery cynicism that his otherwise stilted, matter-of-fact cadence and droll logic gives way to living rather than to political ideology. Don’t get me wrong. Anyan is not duped. To the contrary, he’s clear eyed and well aware of capitalism’s unbalanced economics (and lacking health care!) But his CSI-level attention to detail and potent consciousness creates small-scale joy rather than revolutionary enlightenment. Resigned to mastering and enjoying the logic of daily calculations, Anyan’s any-man story of delivery-economy drudgery is quietly mythic.

His minutiae-minded memoir echoes a late-20th-century sci-fi archetype. I’m thinking of Y.T., the skateboard courier in Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk classic Snow Crash. 35 years after Stephenson wrote his fictional account of an indie “deliverator” who games the edges of the matrix state, we now have Anyan’s real-life version—a proletarian who’s lost making deliveries in the tightly-metered rhythm yet anarchic human specifics of extreme capitalism.

I’m only half way through Anyan’s hyper-local plotline and perhaps he’ll turn out to be a valiant saboteur just yet. Certainly, Anyan’s anecdote about trespassing to make a delivery in a gated Beijing mall city, the Sunshine New Life Plaza, seems ripped right from the pages of Snow Crash:

The guard grabbed me by the exit for GOME Electrical Appliances on the fourth floor, right before I got to where I was going. “I only just started delivering here. I didn’t know the rules,” I told him. I knew them, really, but I didn’t have to tell him that. “There’s no sign at the main entrance that says couriers can’t come in, and no one stopped me when I did. I’ll just go now, how about that?” But he gripped the handles of my trolley even harder and wouldn’t let go. “You won’t let me in, and you won’t let me leave. What do you want to do?”‍ ‍

2) Revolutionary Airport

Late last year, I decided I was going to dedicate 2026 to reading and writing about Finnish architect Eero Saarinen’s airports. His Jet-Age designs stir me [I’m All Lost In, #93, 7/27/25 and I’m All Lost In, #111, 11/29/25.] They’re the epitome of mid-’60s IBM-modern and the 22nd-century cybernetic future all at once.

I actually did end up doing some writing about Saarinen this year. In January, I wrote a poem titled Revolutionary Airport which includes these lines about Saarinen’s airport vision: Invisible walkways and green lights./Saarinen’s curves of flights and tulips [I’m All Lost In, #114, 12/20/25.]

TWA Hotel, 7/25/26

TWA Hotel, 7/25/26

It turns out Saarinen’s HAL-meets-Jetsons aesthetic is memorialized and fully celebrated at the TWA Hotel—a hotel that opened in 2019 on-site at JFK. This breathtaking shrine to Saarinen is re-fashioned out of the original 1962-Saarinen-designed TWA terminal. For example, the current hotel check-in desk is the original TWA terminal check-in desk, complete with the click-clacking, analog flight-arrival board scrolling high above today’s working staff.

In the middle of our trip to NYC this week, ECB and I took the subway back to JFK to visit this meta mid-century marvel (add it to the pilgrimages list.)

TWA Hotel, 7/25/26

With piped in 1960s girl-group pop music setting the mood, this busy, functioning hotel is fitted with Saarinen’s signature tulip chairs and rounded white flying-saucer tables, an automat-style food court, and an on-site beauty parlor with space-helmet hair-dryer seats for beehive dos. There’s also a vintage telephone booth bank by the women’s restroom and cushioned-couch sitting-room nooks that, judging from the saturated wallpaper, may as well have have been decorated by David Lynch.

TWA Hotel, 7/25/26

It’s all staged under the original flight center’s swooping ceilings, sleek white pillars, and curving elevated walkways. In short, this hotel thinks it’s 1962: All the signage is written in bold Chevrolet Stingray sans-serif; there’s plush blood-red-carpeting and long, tunneled breezeways; and the bathrooms come with retro soap dispensers. There’s also a Mad-Men-style, sunken cocktail lounge. And a rooftop pool and bar.

I could have sworn the uniformed pilots crossing the lobby were actors.

TWA Hotel, 7/25/26

What really had ECB and I mesmerized all morning was the small museum where you could read about the history of the terminal, sit at Saarinen’s drafting desk, and see his original airport models and penciled renderings. There were some curated time-travel exhibits as well: A collection of showroom dummies dressed in classic 1960s stewardess uniforms; a hi-fi-centric living room straight out of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis; and docked outside, “Connie,” the original dolphin-like Lockheed propeller jet.

The TWA Hotel has won a long list of awards, including in 2021 from the American Institute of Architects for historic restoration and transformation.

3) No Tattoos ‍ ‍

I’m proud I don’t have any tattoos. This isn’t a judgement of my friends who do, important friends such as my best friends ECB and XDX, and my excellent pal Glenn. Those folks are all younger than me. The pride I have in my decision to forgo tattoos is tied to my identity as an ageing Gen Xer. Tattoos entered mainstream Bohemia as my cohort entered its 20s in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Guys getting their ears pierced was also popular with my generation, and I did go along with that trend—in my right ear. This supposedly meant you were gay or at least in cahoots as an ally. I was lazy about buying earrings or maintaining the piercing and forgot I had a pierced ear after a year or two.

No tattoo, though. The word on getting a tattoo went like this: When I’m old and in my 60s I want this youthful heyday and all its glorious recklessness to still be with me. It was a romantic rationale that certainly appealed to me at the time. And when my brilliant girlfriend got one circa 1988, I momentarily settled on the idea of getting a tattoo myself: A frowning jack-o-lantern. It was an image that seemed to match my chosen sad & groovy persona and reference my favorite spooky experimental rock band at the time, Sonic Youth.

Sonic Youth, Bad Moon Rising, 1985

Fortuitously, my fear of needles and fainting—and a longstanding Jewish-identity aversion to tattoos—stopped me from going for it. I also imagined the artist would have trouble finding a design that wasn’t mistaken for an apple.

Now that I’m entering my 60s without a stitch of cool ink on my skin, the compelling pro-tattoo notion (having your youthful identity intact) is resonating from the no-tattoos point of view. I’m proud of my Mary-Mary contrarianism. Or at least my rejection of shorthand Gen-X signage.

The fact that I don’t have a tattoo turns out to be a conspicuous statement. And I’m savoring the decision. Especially because it not only differentiates me from my own demographic, but also from the ubiquity of tattoos that helps define today’s younger generations.

I’m All Lost In, #144: Black Swan; an old letter from Mom; and alcohol-free whiskey from Kentucky. Plus the Week in X>Y.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#144

The Week in X> (is greater than) Y

Judges > Goons Just consider President Trump’s dangerous but flailing playground-bully version of law enforcement, i.e. his military operation against brown immigrants.

The NYT did a thorough review of cases the Trump administration has brought against immigrants who supposedly attacked ICE agents. The feds are losing these cases at a revealing rate: Typically the government wins about 90% of cases like this, yet Trump has lost more than half of the 400 cases resolved so far.

These reality-check rulings are also providing comedic MAGA metaphors :

A judge last fall dismissed assault charges against an immigrant, ruling that the agent involved had been cut by shards of glass from a car window he himself had smashed.

Trump Policy = KKK Policy Consider Trump’s latest nativist policy initiative to revoke legal licenses for immigrant truck drivers— and give them to veterans. (I wonder if Trump knows not all vets are white.)

Immigrants rights groups are already suing the Trump administration over his earlier, related provincialist tantrum:

The parallel effort to prohibit immigrants who are authorized to live and work in the country from obtaining truck driver’s licenses drew fierce criticism and legal challengeswhen it was announced last year. It targeted asylum seekers, refugees and recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

The Athens Open in Greece, the Iași Open in Romania > Wimbledon I’m reveling in watching these 250-level WTA tournaments right now; this month’s earlier Wimbledon extravaganza is a 2000-level event.

The 250-point events (and 125s as well) give fans an opportunity to watch lower-ranked players shine and pirouette on center court. For example, I’m enjoying watching World No. 97, Egyptian player Mayar Sherif. I originally started following Sherif and her loopy game at three in the morning when I stayed up to watch a 125-level tournament from Antalya, Turkey last March as Sherif made it to the semifinals. She was world No. 111 then.

This week she’s blazed her way into the finals in Iași, beating World No. 52, Oleksandra Oliynykova in the semis today.

‍This Week’s Obsessions

1) How Bad the movie Black Swan Is

Earlier this year I was obsessed with a quasi-literary paperback novel about the elite, backstabbing world of professional ballet—City of Night Birds [I’m All Lost In, #135, 5/16/26.] When a flight attendant noticed I was reading it on the plane, he recommended I check out the 2010 movie Black Swan starring Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, and Barbara Hershey. I was aware of this movie and had always thought I’d missed a classy art film.

Nah. I tried watching it this week. I stuck with it for about a half hour; initially, the jump-scare flashes of psychosis that foreshadowed Portman’s pending mental breakdown were pulling me in. They reminded me of my favorite mid-60s art film, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.

But Black Swan’s over-the-top sexist story—edgy male auteur coaxes sheltered ingenue out of her frigid state (by instructing her to masturbate!)—was exponentially trite and cliché.

I’m sure there’s a way to go with this movie as a camp masterpiece—and Hershey as the Evil Queen certainly spoofs the script in real time. But after giving it a second try, I could only get another ten minutes in. Maybe to the part when Cassel’s male-gaze-genius character explains to Portman that her predecessor was talented because she followed her impulses.

I followed my own impulse to turn off the movie.

2) Mom’s Wit

I remembered a perfect anecdote about Mom’s wicked sense of humor this week. And I shared it with anyone I could:

The time she sent me a Halloween card. It was an envelope full of cookie crumbs with a note that read: "They were witch, ghost, goblin."

The fact that Mom (RIP) was sending me Halloween cards when I was in my 20s is also killer.

3) NKD Whiskey

This Kentucky brew leans into mushrooms instead of corn mash. It must be a magic ingredient. Or at least an addictive one. This is the third time I’ve written about NKD Whiskey—an alcohol-free concoction made from oak concentrate, distilled water, mushroom extract, and agave.

First it was an obsession after I had a few glasses this spring at an NA bar on the Lower East Side [I’m All Lost In, #137, 6/2/26.] And then again last week in an X-is greater than-Y item when I noted that my NKD shipment had arrived in the mail [I’m All Lost in #143, 7/13/26.]

It’s only five days later and I’ve finished one of the two bottles they sent.

Half and One publishes my poem “The Ball Kid Faints.”

Turkish tennis player Zeynep Sönmez assists ball kid at Australian Open, 1/18/26.

I'm always thrilled to get a poem published. But I am over the moon to have "The Ball Kid Faints” published. Thank you Half and One literary magazine.

The poem is one of several I've been working on that casts tennis ball kids as something akin to Fagin's gang from Oliver Twist.

This particular ball-kid poem is based on real events that happened late last January in Melbourne and Minneapolis related to climate change and ICE brutality, respectively.

The events are relevant this week as air quality veers into the hazardous range and Trump’s ICE agents killed two men, one man in Houston, 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and one man in Maine, 25-year-old Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero

Also: Such a hot illustration from Half and One.

Illustration by Allen B. Thangkhiew at Half and One.

I’m All Lost In, #143: 17 Pilgrimages. Plus the Week in X>Y

I’m All Lost In…‍ ‍

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#143 ‍

The Week in X> (is greater than) Y‍ ‍

Chlorhexidine Gluconate > Swollen Gums My year of dental care continues. And this prescription-strength antimicrobial is the latest magic remedy on the regimen. Meanwhile, the nitrous oxide continues to make dental surgery a 2026 highlight.

U-Lock > Chain Lock I was happy to replace my precarious and clunky chain link bike lock—I could never quite tell if it was securely fastened or not—with a handy U-lock. I know thieves can supposedly cut right through U-locks, but the comfort and ease of the intelligible U-lock versus the awkward, heavy chain has prompted me to start biking again.

The Bill when You’re Drinking > The Bill when You’re Not Drinking I’m approaching five months booze-free (with the exception of the night Mom died when I had two glasses of wine.) I’m still not seeing any effects on my health, though; i.e., I don’t seem to be losing any weight.

However, I did note this week how significantly less expensive my bills are for the black bean burger dinners or orders of vegan tacos when there’s no habitual glass or two of whiskey on the check.

Speaking of which, my bottles of NA whiskey from the Louisville, Kentucky-based NKD Distillery arrived in the mail this week. It tastes as good as I remember [I’m All Lost In, #137, 6/2/26.]

This Week’s Obsessions‍ ‍

1) 17 Secular Pilgrimages‍ ‍

My poet pal Dallas texted me from his summer road trip this week to say he’d stopped in Martins Ferry, Ohio, the hometown of James Wright; Wright was one of Dallas’ favorite poets back in college and high school.

Inspired by Dallas’ update, I started thinking about some of my own pilgrimages over the years.

To amend John Waters’ quote about how “Life is nothing unless you’re obsessed,” I say: Life is nothing unless you’re on a pilgrimage.

1. John Dillinger. In the fall of 1987, I took advantage of going to college in the Midwest by visiting some nearby, hallowed Indiana locations that historian John Toland had marked on a turquoise-tinged map in his book The Dillinger Days. There were banks, penitentiaries, and the scenes of famous shootouts to see. Toland’s classic biography of 1930s bank robber John Dillinger had been one of my favorite books in junior high. Specifically, I was obsessed with the turquoise map.

My college girlfriend and I borrowed her parents’ car and ventured off from Ohio into Indiana. This was the week of the 1987 stock market crash, which cast an appropriate Great Depression-era shadow on our Great Depression-era nostalgia trip. It was also the same week that a jet had crashed into a Ramada Inn in Indianapolis. As we crested I-70 into Indianapolis and the Ramada Inn came into view, we could see with cartoon clarity that a plane had smashed into the side of the building. It was a dramatic start to our trip.

After visiting places like Mooresville, Indiana (Dillinger’s hometown) and a bank Dillinger had robbed in Montpelier, Indiana, we made it to the Biograph Theater on North Lincoln Ave. in downtown Chicago. That’s where the FBI ambushed Dillinger in July 1934. The feds had been tipped off by “the Woman in Red,” a friend of Dillinger’s girlfriend Polly Hamilton: Dillinger and the two women were going to a Clark Gable/Myrna Loy movie at 8:30, Sunday night, July 22 at the Biograph. When Dillinger emerged from the theater after the show, lead agent Melvin Purvis positively ID’d him, signaling to his fellow agents positioned across the street by lighting a cigar. Dillinger, having made eye contact with Purvis and glancing across the street at the other agents, sensed something was up. He reached into his jacket pocket for his semi-automic Colt pistol and sprinted into the alley. The three FBI agents across the street chased Dillinger into the alley with their guns drawn. They got off six shots between them, hitting Dillinger four times. One of the bullets killed the infamous outlaw.

My college girlfriend subsequently told me the highlight of the trip was when I bought us vodka; I’d recently turned 21, she was 19. Back at our Interstate 70 motel, we mixed the booze into some Slurpees.

In August 2013, I visited another Dillinger site: The Lincoln Court Apartments on Lexington Ave. in St. Paul, MN; I was back in the Midwest for a wedding in Iowa. Dillinger hid out in apartment 303 at Lincoln Court in late March, 1934. He escaped in a shootout with the FBI on March 31. He was armed with a machine gun this time. He had about four more months to live.

Dillinger hideout, the Lincoln Court Apts., St. Paul, MN., 8/11/2013

2. U.S. Rep. John Lewis In 2006, while on assignment for the Stranger to do a feature story about U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell and her fight against the Republican effort to repeal habeas corpus, I set aside some time to sneak over to the Cannon Building. I wanted to meet one of my heroes, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee legend, U.S. Rep. John Lewis.

In addition to the Cantwell story, I ended up writing a column for the paper about my spontaneous John Lewis pilgrimage:

“Can I help you?” a woman behind the desk asked after I tentatively walked through the large closed wooden door to his offices, Room 343.

“Yes. I’m a reporter in town working on a story about the senator from Washington State, but I wanted to stop in here and see… well, you probably get this about once every few months, but you know, you guys work for a living legend… and, well, he’s my hero, and…”

The woman broke into a friendly smile. “Unfortunately, the representative is out of town this week…”

I’m sure I looked crestfallen, because she got up from her desk and said, “Come on, follow me.” Next thing I know, I’m in Lewis’s office and she’s showing me all this amazing memorabilia. Basically, Lewis has a civil-rights-era museum in his office—including rare and stunning photos from the early ’60s of Lewis and other civil-rights kids making history.

Alas. Civil rights, shmivel rights. The next day I hung out back on the Senate side and watched 51 senators make history by shelving the right to habeas corpus.

3. The Boston Tea Party. In 2006, my friend Jason and I visited our mutual friend Marco at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. We had a list of Revolutionary War spots to see during the trip such as the Lexington & Concord battlefields and the Boston Tea Party site on Congress Street near the harbor.

Oddly, there was no exhibit, no museum, nor even a marker for the famous Tea Party; I subsequently learned that a museum opened at the historic site in 1973 but was closed between 2001 and 2012 due to a fire. We sneaked behind some construction staging and scaffolding and threw Starbucks coffee into the water.

4. Jane Jacobs. When I made a pilgrimage to 555 Hudson St. in Greenwich Village in September 2015, and then again in July 2016, and once more in June 2019, there was no plaque marking the plain three-story brick building. Some 60 years earlier, urbanist patron saint Jane Jacobs lived at this address.

It was here in the second and third-floor duplex apartment at 555 Hudson that Jacobs wrote her urban planning classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities(1961) where she famously described the “sidewalk ballet” of folks working, running errands, shopping, socializing, and taking care of each other outside on the street below her window. The block she memorialized would become the human-scale ideal for modern city life. (One could also make the case that Sesame Street has emerged as the template as well.)

On my first few visits, 555 Hudson housed a luxury real estate office on the ground floor; the well-dressed woman who worked there knew all about Jacobs and happily let my friend Noah and I snap selfies in the doorway.

Now, I make the pilgrimage every time I visit New York. It’s currently an upscale gift shop. And there is a plaque these days; the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, likely NIMBYs ironically, dedicated the building in October 2020. I always stop by to honor the plaque before heading up the street to 567 Hudson where I visit Jacobs’ old haunt, the equally historic White Horse Tavern where the great poet Dylan Thomas also hung out [I’m All Lost In, #100, 9/14/25]‍.

5. West Side Story and The New York Dolls In the summer of 2016, my girlfriend Hester and I went to W. 56th St. between 9th and 10th in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood and re-staged the theatrical photo from the cover of the 1957 West Side Story LP. That’s the Broadway version.

West Side Story is the great American opera.

7/11/16

On the same day, we also re-staged the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan cover on W. 4th St. in Greenwich Village, visited the Andy Warhol-era Max’s Kansas City site near Union Square (now a loft space), and went to Gem Spa to stage the back cover of the New York Dolls’ self-titled first album, a high school favorite of mine. Gem Spa closed in 2020.

To complete the New York Dolls circuit, in December 2025 I visited the old site of the Mercer Arts Center at 240 Mercer St., now an NYU dorm tower.

6. The Notting Hill Riots In late June and early July 2017, I spent a few days in London. This gave me the opportunity to visit album cover photo sites for some of my other favorite records from high school: The Jam’s This is the Modern World; the Clash’s first LP, and David Bowie’s The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars.

I was able to find addresses for the Clash and Bowie sites, but I had to track down 70-year-old photographer Gered Mankowitz to get the details on his Jam photo shoot.

The best place to head for is Bramley Road W11—nearest tube station is Latimer Road—turn left out of the station on Bramley Road and head towards the Westway, walk underneath it and to your right hand side you should be able to access some pedestrian area where you will get a sense of where we took the shot—the pair of tower block buildings that you see on the cover are still there but an awful lot else has changed and access is very different to how it was back in the day.

7/1/17, Under the Westway, London

The Latimer Rd. tube station was also ground zero of the 1958 race riots when right-wing Teddy Boys rampaged through the surrounding post-WWII Caribbean immigrant community there; the Notting Hill Race Riots are dramatized in one of my favorite books, Colin MacInnes’ 1959 novel, Absolute Beginners‍.

In July 2017, as I was alighting at the Latimer Rd. station with MacInnes’ character Crêpe Suzette in my head—she was a fictional stand-in for real-life Notting Hill riot victim Majbritt Morrison— I immediately came upon the shocking sight of the then-recent Grenfell Tower fire. Some 60 years after the riots, the charred building looming like the council houses on the Jam’s LP cover, alongside the left-wing posters and graffiti declaring “Justice for Grenfell,” told the same old story: African and Muslim immigrant communities were still facing dire discrimination.

Grenfell Tower, seen from Latimer Rd. Station, two weeks after the fire, 7/1/17

When I returned to Seattle, I sent Mankowitz a report and the photos from my pilgrimage. He responded:

Pleased to hear that your visit was a success, but sad that you had to witness the horror of Grenfell!

 Excellent snaps – you got close!!

7. Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Fagin’s Gang I spent the rest of my brief trip to London visiting sites from two of my favorite books. I’ve lovingly read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde several times, first as a chilling horror story, later as an existential tragedy, and more recently as a tale of the city. While I was in London, I visited Regent’s Park, taking my seat on a bench in the green space to commemorate one of the novella’s most significant moments. In the book’s final chapter, written as a confessional letter from Dr. Jekyll to his close friend Mr. Utterson, Jekyll details his mad science and his moral ordeal, noting that the first time he changed, unplanned, spontaneously, and worst of all, in public(!), into Mr. Hyde, he’d simply been sitting on a park bench in Regent’s Park. No mad science nor transformation for me, but fun to daydream among these central London gardens.

As part of my Dr Jekyll & Mr. Hyde homage, I also visited Cavendish Square just south of Regent’s Park. This is where Dr. Jekyll’s former scientific associate, but estranged and disapproving critic Dr. Lanyon lived. And upon a midnight visit there from Mr. Hyde, Dr. Lanyon witnesses Mr. Hyde’s mind-boggling transformation back into Dr. Jekyll.

My other literary London excursion took me to Farringdon Rd. just north of historic central London in the Clerkenwell neighborhood. I triangulated the spot on Farringdon, a block south of Clerkenwell Rd and parallel to Saffron Hill, as the location of Fagin’s secret hideout from Charles’ Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

“Now, then!” cried a voice from below, in reply to a whistle from the Dodger. “Plummy and slam!” was the reply. This seemed to be some watchword or signal that all was right —Ch. 8, Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist isn’t a particularly great book, but it includes perhaps my favorite scene in literature. It comes in Ch. 8 when Oliver, after journeying from the parish suburbs to big city London for the first time, meets the Artful Dodger, Hermes in human form. Or more accurately, Hermes in juvenile delinquent form. This meeting immediately prompts Oliver’s submergence into Fagin’s gang of young pickpockets and establishes the exhilarating DNA of all coming-of-age narratives. There’s also something very West Side Story and “Jets gang” about the Artful Dodger (if you’re searching for a theme in all these pilgrimages.)

8. Chess Records In February 2018, while visiting Chicago, I went to the Chess Records studio. This is where Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, and in-house bassist Willie Dixon—along with R&B zealots Phil and Leonard Chess—helped invent and hone rock & roll music in the early and mid-1950s. The museum isn’t well maintained—mainly it sold Barack Obama souvenirs. And I had to make a special appointment to tour the space; the tour was given by Willie Dixon’s grandson who offered non sequitur family anecdotes and very little historic info or insight. Thankfully, in the middle of the listless tour, two young guys who’d driven all night from Cleveland joined us. They were as excited about Chuck Berry as I was, and I was able to geek out with them.

This modern-day Chess experience offered a sad contrast to the old Sun Records studio site, the admittedly equally seismic indie rock & roll label at the Southern end of the Mississippi in Memphis. I visited Sun a month later in March 2018 while I was on a trip to see the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel.

Sun, of Elvis fame obviously (but also home to other rock & roll pioneers like Junior Parker, Roscoe Gordon, the Prisonaires, Jackie Brenston, and Howlin’ Wolf too), was a slick Disneyland experience compared to the neglected scene at Chess. And mobbed. However, the two original studios themselves looked exactly the same.

2/17/18, with Willie Dixon’s bass at Chess Records, 2120 South Michigan Ave., Chicago.

3/25/18, Sun Studios, Memphis, TN

9. Snediker Ave. & Thomas Jefferson High School In December 2018, on a visit to New York, my friend Lee and I went to East New York, the far-flung Brooklyn neighborhood where my parents grew up in the 1930s and ‘40s wedged in by Cyprus Hill, Brownsville, East Flatbush, and Canarsie; Lee lives in Williamsburg to the northwest. We took the subway over, about a 30-minute trip. As long as I could remember, I’d had images in my head of East New York as a dilapidated wasteland. This imagery came thanks to my parents’ 1970s white-flight racism: When I was about 7 years old, and we were visiting family in Long Island, I asked my parents if I could see where they grew up. My dad said, “No, it’s bombed out”—powerful worlds to the ears of a 7-year-old. And ones that stick.

The neighborhood was hardly “bombed out.” It was relatively suburban and residential—and looked almost idyllic, though yes, the crime stats tell a rough story. And it was, by all accounts a grim scene in the 1970s. I found Dad’s house at 641 Snediker Ave.; I was surprised that it was a Spanish Colonial-style house that looked more California than Brooklyn. A three-block, five-plus-minute walk away along New Lots Ave. at my mom’s address, 77 Malta St., we found an empty lot next to a small mosque.

The most surprising find? Their high school, Thomas Jefferson, was still standing. It had a huge footprint and a busy, welcoming aura. Mom and Dad were Class of 1947 and 1951, respectively.

10. East Village Witchcraft Bookshop With all due respect to Jane Jacobs’ beatnik-era West Village paradise, my template for city life happened about 20 blocks east of her place and 10 years later in the hippie-era East Village. Famed rock critic Robert Christgau captured the mood I love, albeit derisively, while reviewing Black Sabbath’s 1970 debut LP:

I've been worried something like this was going to happen since the first time I saw a numerology column in an underground newspaper. C-‍

Much like the indie bike shops of today, Christgau’s reference to “a numerology column” conjures the occult bookshops of the 1970s as markers of urban counterculture—and my daydreams of a city youth heyday.

In June 2019, I went to Enchantments witchcraft store on Avenue B in the East Village. Enchantments is the oldest witchcraft shop in NYC and the closest remnant to the founding archetypes of this far out genre like the legendary, long-gone Magickal Childe in the Village.

11. The Sunset Strip Teenage Curfew Riots Many of the places on this list of pilgrimages are what I like to call socio-personal locations.

For example, like the Absolute Beginners site at the Latimer tube station, or my parents’ old neighborhood, or the Jam photo-shoot site under the Westway, these geographical coordinates pinpoint emotional landmarks from my own history rather than known tourist attractions. As such, there aren’t often plaques marking the spots.

This was the case when I went to the bland intersection of Sunset Blvd and Crescent Heights in Los Angeles in September, 2019. The overgrown, triangular traffic island there used to be home to Pandora’s Box—a youth coffee house and rock club. In 1966, Pandora’s Box was at the center of the teen curfew riots, a watershed moment from counterculture history that officially marked youth as a political strain in its own right alongside the anti-war, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and rock and fashion upheavals that were shaking up society at the time.

LA teens—urged on at the behest of the new FM rock-radio medium—showed up en masse in November 1966 to protest a new city curfew on the Sunset strip. The curfew was clearly city hall’s attempt to outlaw L.A.’s burgeoning mid-1960s youth culture. The club closed down for good shortly after the riots.

I wrote a poem about the fact that there’s no marker at the site. It’s called “Sidewalk Plaque;” it’s in my first collection Shops Close Too Early.

While there’s no plaque, there is a Chase Bank across the intersection from the empty traffic island at Sunset and Crescent.

9/21/19, Paying homage to the Teen Riots at Sunset & Crescent, Los Angeles.

12. Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles On the same trip to L.A., and fitted with a map designed by Raymond Chandler aficionado Kim Cooper, I visited a bunch of the real-life L.A. spots that figure in Chandler’s classic hard-boiled novel The Big Sleep. Chandler’s 1939 novel, along with all his other Philip Marlowe books, stars dark L.A. as much as featuring Marlowe. These paperbacks were personal favorites when I was young—and they were a delightful source of bonding between me and my dad as we traded tough-guy similes in the family room like a wizened bartender sparring with a well-dressed stranger at some dim gin joint. Dad gave me his collection of Chandler’s witty noir fiction when I was a kid [I’m All Lost In, #103, 10/4/25].

At each location—the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills (re-named the Sternwood Mansion in the Big Sleep), the Art Deco Bullocks Wilshire Building, Geiger's Rare (smut) Books and Deluxe Editions—I ceremonially broke out dad’s copy of The Big Sleep and read excerpts out loud.

13. Evelyn McHale Briefly but intensely possessed by the story of Evelyn McHale, the 24-year-old bookkeeper who leaped from the 86th-floor observatory of the Empire State Building on May 1, 1947, I wrote the longest poem I’ve ever published, “Evelyn McHale Chooses the Tallest Building in the City.” The poem runs five pages and appears in both my collections. I worked on the poem day and night (during COVID) in a manic fit, ultimately having to abide by a self-imposed deadline to walk away from it. One of my favorite poetry memories is reading the poem live at Valium Tom’s bookstore in September 2022 for the Shops Close Too Early book release event.

About a year prior to the reading, in July 2021 I visited a couple of unmarked Evelyn McHale locations: the house in Baldwin, Long Island where she was living with her brother and his wife at the time of her suicide; the Art Deco Governor Clinton Hotel, now the Stewart Hotel, at West 31st and 7th Ave. in midtown Manhattan where Evelyn likely wrote her suicide note (“He is much better off without me”); and 34th St. and 5th Ave. where McHale landed unscathed while demolishing the roof of a parked U.N. limousine. McHale’s suicide was immortalized in a stunning photograph by photography student Robert Wiles who happened to be standing across the street when she crashed down on the car.

Evelyn McHale, 5/1/1947

14. Billie Holiday’s Early Recording Sessions I have a poem that includes these lines:

A week after visiting the Parthenon in Athens, I’m eating a pretzel with mustard in Manhattan when I realize the building where Billie Holiday dethroned Athena as Goddess of Cities on July 2, 1935 is only a few blocks away. The Lazarus.

Formerly the Lazarus Building, home of Brunswick Records in the 1930s, 6/6/23

The former Lazarus Building at Broadway and W. 57th St.—now simply known as 1776 Broadway and home to a Nordstrom on the bottom floor— is the Art Deco building where young Billie Holiday recorded her breakthrough releases: What a Little Moonlight Can Do, I Wished on the Moon, and Miss Brown to You. These early Billie Holiday recordings were also my favorite tracks on the Best of Billie Holiday LP I swiped from my Mom the summer before I left for college. I played the record up in my room late at night pretending to be a wise jazz DJ

The July 1935 Lazarus Building sessions were done for the American Record Corporation (ARC) and their successful jazz subsidiary Brunswick at ARC’s 14th-floor studios. Like Holiday’s only previous recording session two years prior, she once again teamed up with King-of-Swing clarinet player Benny Goodman. For this fateful session though, they were joined by one of the Brunswick label’s top acts, the Teddy Wilson Orchestra, a small jazz combo that included Wilson on piano, Ben Webster on tenor sax, Roy Eldridge on trumpet, Cozy Cole on drums, and John Kirby on bass. This exemplary cast’s easy jazz renditions sound like ice cubes tinkling and melting in a glass of bourbon.

What a state she’s in. Yes, yes she sings as the small orchestra makes its case with slender melodies. Benny, Teddy, and Cozy wend and unspool and she wishes upon the moon.

When Holiday burst onto the scene with these records, she created the archetype for the songstress of city cool.

‍The concierge wouldn’t let me up to 14, but I was able to channel the history outside on Broadway. If you listen closely at the 0:31 mark in Miss Brown to You you can hear a car from the street below honking and making its way into the mix alongside Goodman and Eldridge as they trade horn solos.

15. The Hackers Conference In August 2023, ECB and I visited an important spot from our co-obsession—the 2003 movie, Shattered Glass, an open homage to All the President’s Men and a gripping film in its own right. Shattered Glass recounts the obnoxious and delicious rise and fall of New Republic reporter-turned-fabulist, Stephen Glass.

On a trip to D.C. to visit my parents, ECB and I went to the Marriott in downtown Bethesda (where I’m from) and up the escalator to the infamous mezzanine where Glass got busted by his editor Chuck Lane. In Glass’ calamitous phony story “Hack Heaven,” he’d written that a hackers conference had taken place there on a recent Sunday afternoon. During the finale of Shattered Glass, Lane, played by Peter Sarsgaard, goes on a fact-finding mission with a sulking Glass (Hayden Christensen) in tow. They land at the second-floor mezzanine. The key line in the scene comes from the security guard (a sly reference to All the President’s Men!) The guard tells Lane: “We’re closed on Sundays.”

Last year, ECB and I briefly did a podcast dedicated exclusively to Shattered Glass, including an episode with Shattered Glass director and writer Billy Ray. He certainly thought we were nuts. We also had Chuck Lane on the show.

16. WHBQ, Red, Hot, and Blue at The Hotel Chisca, Memphis, TN In a follow-up to my earlier March 2018 Sun Records visit, I went to the Hotel Chisca in downtown Memphis, the former home of WHBQ where jive-talking DJ Dewey Phillips did a pioneering late-night rock & roll radio show (Red, Hot, and Blue). On Thursday night, July 8, 1954, Phillips made history by spinning an unreleased acetate pressing of “That’s All Right Mama” by an unknown, local singer named Elvis Presley; I wrote about Phillips and this important night at length in an essay titled “Absolute Beginner Blues” back in 2021.

In September 2024, on a sudden trip to Mississippi with ECB for her grandfather’s funeral, I nudged us to take a quick detour to the Chisca immediately after we picked up our rental car at the Memphis Airport. The Chisca was a plain nine-story brick building that looked less like it had once been a swank downtown hotel and more like it had housed claims adjusters and private detectives. The doors were locked on this rainy Memphis afternoon, so I simply communed with the music history landmark under its beaux arts awning.

17.Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner Memorial A few days later, on our trip out of Mississippi back to the Memphis airport, we visited another site from the churning civil rights era: The marker on Mississippi Highway 19 outside Meridian (where ECB is from) memorializing slain voting rights volunteers Andrew Goodman (20), James Cheney (21), and Michael Schwerner (24). In June 1964, KKK vigilantes working in collusion with the local police carjacked this integrated trio of young, Freedom-Summer activists and brutally murdered them.

The Mississippi-Department-of-Archives &-History sign marking the spot where the young men were abducted is weathered. And it’s eerie how the winding stretch of road seems lost to 1964. But someone had recently set a trio of bright new American flags in the ground at the foot of the marker. It was a classy tribute to these long-dead patriotic men who may have been happy to learn that a Black woman was the Democratic nominee for president at that moment.

I imagine Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner also wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she lost the election to a man whose presidency is all about undoing the civil rights movement and erasing any record of its history.

9/15/24, ECB at Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner site, Neshoba County, MS

There have been other pilgrimages such as one to Power Memorial Academy where Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played high school basketball; his name was Lew Alcindor at that time. My visit was more about honoring Basketball Diaries poet Jim Carroll though, and the whole thing was unplanned; I simply stumbled upon the W. 61st St. site (now a 38-story condo building) during a trip to New York in June, 2023. I did get the chills when I saw the sign.

I suppose I’m forgetting some other sacred visits. And there are pilgrimages I still need to make, such as getting to Thebes, the city that Amphion built by animating boulders with his magic lyre. I was thinking about going to Thebes during my 2023 trip to Athens, but the tour guide at the Parthenon scoffed: “Thebes? Why Thebes? Thebes is nothing more than a truck stop!”

And a park bench is nothing more than a park bench, and a vacant traffic island is nothing more than a vacant traffic island, and a duplex upstairs from a gift shop is nothing more than a duplex upstairs from a gift shop.

…

Two other obsessions this week:

2) Playing Blondie’s Dreaming and Picture This on Piano ‍ ‍

Last Sunday, as I was plinking out David Bowie’s All the Young Dudes on piano, I asked ECB to guess what I was playing.

Blondie? She said.

Her guess reminded me that I had two great Blondie songs in my repertoire. 1979’s Dreaming with its murky opening minor and leading chords and 1978’s Picture This with its perfect lyrics—I will give you my finest hour/the one I spent watching you shower—and its irresistible chorus: Get a pocket computer try to do what you used to do, yeah.

3) French New Wave Filmmaker Eric Rohmer’s First and Only Novel‍ ‍

Eric Rohmer wrote this lackadaisically chatty novel when he was 27 in 1947 long before he started making movies. The oblique dialogue—snippets from awkward and intimate conversations in upstairs rooms at summer beach houses—read like the philosophically arch scripts that would later define his art films.

Midsummer Dream House publishes my poem “Kid Cudi at the Whole Foods”

I’m not a Kid Cudi fan nor do I even know his music. However, I’ve written a poem which bears his name.

Midsummer Dream House published it this week.

The poem was originally prompted by a comical encounter I had at the Whole Foods at Bowery & Houston in NoLita a few years ago.

A bit lost in the late night aisles like me, a fellow shopper mistakenly thought I was bonding with him over the Kid Cudi song that was playing over the intercom; evidently the song stirred some nostalgia for this guy. It meant nothing to me (I was much older than he was.) But he seemed to think I was right there with him as we both hopelessly trailed our respective partners through the store while they remained hyper-focused on their grocery shopping missions. Comic chaos ensued as the two of us connected and disconnected.

The phrase “Kid Cudi at the Whole Foods” languished in my notebook for a couple of years. Thankfully, earlier this year when I learned about the fevered 19th-century debate between Romantic composers over “program” music and “pure” music—i.e., music that functions as a reflection versus music that exists in its own right—I turned to my Kid Cudi story as a vehicle for a poem on the subject. The debate seemed like an analogy to today’s clash over A.I.

A park just east of the Whole Foods also makes an appearance in the poem, though it’s also the park just south of my own apartment here in Seattle.

An odd footnote: Shortly after the Whole Foods comedy, I googled Kid Cudi. The guy from the aisle bore an uncanny resemblance to the pop star.

Thanks to Midsummer Dream House for once again publishing one of my dispatches.

I’m All Lost In, #142: All the President’s Men 50th-anniversary screening; Catherine, Matt, and David at Wimbledon; and selfies. Plus the Week in X>Y, music edition.

I’m All Lost In…

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#142

The Week in X > (is greater than) Y (Music edition)

EdIT at Seattle’s Substation, 6/27/26

IlZCK at the controls while EdIT (right) looks on, 6/27/27

The Next DJ > The Previous DJ As the evening went on, my jaw kept dropping closer and closer to the floor. I was at the Substation, the experimental Seattle music venue where local electronic music collective Modular Seattle was hosting a DJ showcase last Saturday night. I’ve checked out previous Modular Seattle shows [I’m All Lost In, #135, 5/16/26] so it was no surprise that each artist on the bill at this default sound system clash was successfully upping the ante one after the other. First it was Vast Chains’ heavy industrial drones. Then it was Shoyei’s experimental dance tracks.

And it must be said: The third DJ of the evening, ILZXC, raised the standard exponentially. Going beyond the cool-polyrhythm + cool-sample formula of the first two beats experts, ILZXC (pronounced il-zick) took a hyper hands-on approach, “playing” his samples as if they were electromagnetic fields. Like a possessed theremin artist, ILZXC bent and shaped the catchy melodies into counter rhythms themselves, weaving them into the percussive attack of the beats.

The night’s headliner, EdIT of Glitch Mob fame, emerged from the audience during ILZXC’s set—probably as ILZXC was shapeshifting a Turkish melody into a disco hook—to take a closer look at the local DJ’s gear.

Challenge accepted, EdIT—who was up next—rose to the occasion with a heavier bag of beats and a richer assortment of colors, most notably his vocal diva samples. But it’s not a competition, they say. And upon reflection a day after the show, it struck me that ILZXC’s improvised serpentine grooves had a creativity, elegance, and energy that made EdIT’s admittedly grander set seem too polished perhaps.

But in the moment, DJ to DJ, the direction all night was jaw dropping.

11:30 pm sky after four DJs, Ballard, 6/27/26

‍Haydn > Beethoven Last May, I made a playlist: Every slow movement from Franz Joseph Haydn’s 68 string quartets. [I’m All Lost In, #135, 5/16/26.] This week I decided to do the same with the next great string quartet composer in the timeline, Beethoven. Unfortunately, despite being marked adagio, Beethoven’s slow movements cannot sit still.

Want a stately, tranquil mood decked out in sweet violins and lustrous cellos? Pick Haydn’s adagios. As for Beethoven’s supposedly slow sets: After being momentarily lulled, expect to be startled with violent violins and unnerving uptempo rhythms.

Artist’s Version > Songwriter’s Remake When Linda Ronstadt sings “I aint sayin’ you aint pretty” in her band’s debut Top-40 hit “Different Drum,” I’m a wreck. Especially when she repeats the line and all its gender hacking in the concluding verse over the chamber-pop cello:

It’s just that I am not in the market
For a boy who wants to love only me
Yes, and I ain't sayin' you ain't pretty All I'm saying's I'm not ready …. So, goodbye, I'll be leavin'

Ronstadt and her earnest, mid-’60s folk band the Stone Poneys scored with the song in 1967. There’s an earlier, 1966 recording by the Greenwich Village folk-scene band, the Greenbriar Boys; the tune was originally written by Monkees lead guitarist Michael Nesmith, but the Monkees rejected it.

Nesmith also recorded a chatty, country-skewed version in 1972. Neither the Greenbriar Boys nor songwriter Nesmith himself are able to do what Ronstadt does.

Linda Ronstadt with the Stone Poneys, 1967

This Week’s Obsessions

1) All the President’s Men, 50th-Anniversary Screening

2022, 2023, and 2024 were marked by a parade of Watergate 50-years-ago anniversaries. June 17, 2022 was the 50th anniversary of the break-in itself. October 20th 2023 was the 50th anniversary of the Saturday Night Massacre. And August 8, 2024 was the 50th anniversary of the evening President Nixon announced his resignation on national TV. “August was great.”

2026 marks the 50th anniversary of perhaps Watergate’s greatest artifact: Alan J. Pakula’s classic 1976 movie adaptation of the best-selling book about the scandal: All the President’s Men by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. In Pakula’s faithful, high-speed version, the all-star journalism duo are perfectly-cast WASP and Jew, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.

ECB and I have joked for decades now that in our modern era most of Woodward and Bernstein’s shoe-leather reporting could be done online on a smart phone in a few hours. Nonetheless, Woodward and Bernstein’s sleuthing grind had me on the edge of my seat all over again as I watched the movie (probably for the hundredth time) at SIFF Center’s Grand Illusion pop-up screening this week. Erica joined me. As did fellow-1970s-D.C. kid and constitutional romantic, Valium Tom.

Giggling at our favorite lines—”I didn’t ask them about Watergate;” “If you guys could get Mitchell, that would be beautiful;” “I can’t tell if Colson works for Clawson or if Clawson works for Colson;” “We good?”—the three of us reveled in America’s principled heyday and its accompanying, inconclusive ‘70s malaise.

J.D. Vance recently scoffed about Watergate. He said the scandal would be “like a 12-hour news story” if it happened today and “the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” This was hardly the indictment of heroic Vietnam-era investigative journalism that Vance intended it to be. Vance’s elitist cynicism was an unwitting acknowledgment that the flood of corruption, naked lying, unconstitutional and criminal operations spewing from the Trump White House make Watergate look trivial by comparison.

After the movie, I stopped to get a veggie dog from a food cart outside Seattle Center. As the 20-something vendor grilled it up, she asked me what I’d been up to this evening.

Have you heard of Watergate?, I asked. She hadn’t. I filled her in and she said, Sounds a lot like today.

Yes and no.

2) Catherine, Matt, and David at Wimbledon

The Tennis Podcast, Catherine, Matt, and David, reporting from Wimbledon, 7/3/26

My Wimbledon prediction was this: Whoever won the Marta Kostyuk-versus-Emma Navarro third-round match Saturday (Kostyuk won) would go on to win the whole tournament. I’m sticking with that. But as Week One wraps up, it’s clear Osaka, Pegula, and Krejcikova are all in Olympian form as well .

I’m obsessed with Wimbledon. And I’m still rooting for my favorite, World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka; after winning her first three matches this week, Sabalenka’s playing Osaka in the final 16 tomorrow. As for Kostyuk, she now faces surprise success-story qualifier, Ashlyn Krueger.

Catherine & Matt, 7/3/26

But what I’m really obsessed with this week are my parasocial pals at The Tennis Podcast: Clever host Catherine; philosophical boy-genius Matt; and straight-man David. Every night when the last of the Wimbledon fans drift home, Catherine, Matt, and David set up shop at an impromptu desk on the media broadcast roof overlooking the tournament complex and record their hour-long show as the grounds down below tuck in for the night.

While Catherine’s hair billows in the dark summer evening, the boisterous trio review the days’ matches with their typical hoity British accents and drama: ”I really don’t know what to say,” Matt cries (Jane Austen-style) about World No. 7 Daniil Medvedev’s on-court implosion earlier that day. “He was. So bad.”

Matt’s dramatic reports often escalate into default snippets of poetry: “Do you trust history/or do you go with what your eyes are showing you?”

There’s also the relentless snark. Mostly from front-woman, Catherine. For example, after the admittedly grating World No. 31 Jelena Ostapenko mysteriously lost her Tesco sponsorship (a clunky sponsorship that the podcast had been spoofing all week anyway), Catherine concluded drolly: “Maybe they Googled her.”

I listen to their giddy wrap up every night as I go to bed. It’s a joy to settle in with people who are as obsessed with Wimbledon as I am.

And my Wimbledon obsession continues uninterrupted into the following day when I wake up early to watch the next round of matches, several well underway long before sunrise here in Seattle.

This Saturday, after watching a couple of those matches (Mertens beating Rybakina and Aela beating Swiatek), I put on my Wimbledon-white T-shirt for my own weekly 8am game with Valium Tom at Volunteer Park

In my Wimbledon white T-shirt, Volunteer Park, 7/4/26

3) Selfies

I’ve decided, while a glimpse of my younger self is still detectable in my contemporary face, it’s time to start chronicling my impending shift into old age. I’m going to take a daily selfie for the next decade.

So far I’ve photographed myself visiting the Seattle Art Museum, leaving the tennis court, and schlepping home in the evening among several other random moments from the past two weeks.

Ten years from now, I envision scrolling through these cellphone pictures for a time-lapse essay of my ascension into the AARP demographic.

CHAPTER ONE

Selfish? I asked Nicko as we looked at his reflection in the mirror.

Selfies, he corrected, gazing at his own bare chest where the word was written backward in smudged, red magic marker.

We were in the bathroom of Neal’s parent’s abandoned apartment.

Seconds earlier Nicko had called out Oh my god, come here, you’ve gotta see this. A bit nervous about what he may have found in the bathroom, I rushed across the hardwood floor in my socks, past the ironing board and a precarious tower of books in the otherwise sparse Upper West Side two-bedroom.

Standing on the black and white tiled floor, Nicko had lifted his white t-shirt to his neck. Look he said, pointing at his reflection in the mirror. Like the lettering of a desperate Help Me sign that a kidnap victim might write on an airport restaurant napkin, the warbly script ran across his pale chest framed by his messy shoulder-length brown hair and magazine clavicles.

I had only met Nicko earlier that night. He was a friend of my friend Neva. She had invited me to see Nicko’s band play in Brooklyn. They were called Sissy Jupe. The Selfies were evidently a much cooler band in the same scene. Nicko had written their name on the front of his t-shirt before the gig as eitehr a fan or an antagonist.

I guess the magic marker writing had bled through his shirt onto his skin during the performance as he sweated on stage behind his computer under the purple PARcan lights. Now he was gawking at himself in the mirror entranced by his own drama, especially by the fact that I thought he’d written the word Selfish.

What does that mean? he pondered, leaning back into the shower curtain so he had more room to pose.

“I'm in love with myself, myself, my beautiful selfish,” he sang to himself, parroting a cockney British accent. Hadn’t I seen that it said Selfies during the show? he asked coming out of his stage lights reverie and turning to me.

I guess I had, but I wasn’t putting two and two together three hours later. I was on the chemically sleepy side of three blueberry edibles. I was wondering what I was doing in Neal’s parents’ apartment now. Hadn’t they gotten divorced and moved out? And where was Neva?

How’d we get here? I asked.

Like to this point in the story or literally, how’d we get into the apartment? Nicko asked as he pulled his shirt back down over his stomach with a jig, baltering out of the bathroom, humming the melody to a song I didn’t know. His magic marker handiwork on the front of the t-shirt itself had reconfigured into a dripping red cloud.

I wasn’t as interested in the larger story as he was.

*I’m posting this opening excerpt from my unfinished novel Ball Kids as a protest against the poorly written novel I’m currently stuck reading, Beautiful Country (2016). It’s inexplicable to me that Harper Collins chose to publish such an artless book.

I’m All Lost In, #141: Non-rush-hour ridership; the Wimbledon draw; poetry revisions. Plus the Week in X>Y.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#141

The Week in X > (is greater than) Y

Clocks without Second Hands > Clocks with Second Hands The large, institutional wall clock I’ve had for the last 30 years keeping time in every apartment I’ve lived in shuffled off this mortal coil last week. Yes, I tried installing a new battery.

The new clock I got is more stylish; it has a lima-bean-green face unlike my old clock’s white one. But also unlike my longtime clock, it has a distracting second hand. I first noticed this second hand racing its way around the dial after I mounted the clock on the kitchen wall.

I don’t need to know what time it is that badly.

Sidewalks > Desire Paths Like an urban planning version of Occam's razor, i.e., the least complicated solution is the best solution, “Desire Lines” or “Desire Paths” are popular hacks of official street design. It’s like ignoring Google Maps to take a quicker way. Classically, a desire path shows up as a worn footpath mocking the sidewalk.

Here’s a photo I snapped of a desire path in North Capitol Hill at E. Roy St. and Federal Ave. E.

6/24/26

‍However, I always find myself sticking with the paved route here. I like the serpentine way it moves gently left then right.

Close to the Madding Crowd > Far from the Madding Crowd Apologies to Romantic poet Thomas Gray and the cool sequester’d vale of life. But after spending the earlier part of Friday night hanging out with my friend Dan at a languid wine bar on the outskirts of the main drag—and on the fringes of the madding gay pride festivities—we stepped out onto the street to consider our 11 pm options. East, for a quiet nightcap away from the crowds, or West, straight into them for serendipity?

At my prompt, we chose to jump into the swirl. And I’m glad we did. Making our way through the decked out revelers on the street, we landed at a spot I’d never been to before. It couldn’t have been a better find. Up the stairs on the second floor of the ornate, turn-of-the-(19th) century Oddfellows building, we come upon a lively yet somehow mellow speakeasy called Art Table. The house band, a jazz combo, was playing in the corner framed by the brick walls and the second-story windows. Occasionally, a woman in a black, floral print top and black skirt would consult the keyboard player before taking the microphone to sing a standard.

The spacious and intimate room was crowded with chatty groups of friends huddled around tables and divans, gathered at the radiant bar, and swaying on the hard-wood dance floor. Or, like Dan and I, sitting down at the cushioned settes in the drawing-room section off to the side.

This Week’s Obsessions.

1) Non-Rush Hour Ridership Transit guru Jarret Walker published an important column on his blog Human Transit this week titled: Public Transit Is Not “Coming Back” … It’s Doing Something Better.

I would have framed the point differently, but the crux of Walker’s post is true: Non-rush hour ridership on public transit is surging [I’m All Lost In, #136, 5/24/26.] ‍My own quick math on local light rail ridership found that non-rush-hour ridership has grown at nearly twice the rate of rush-hour ridership in recent years—11% growth versus 6% growth.

Walker’s frame—stop using ridership as a metric for success—is an ill-conceived message. Nothing is more compelling to taxpayers than hearing about increased ridership.

But I think Walker’s angle, which is skewed by his aversion to comparing current rush-hour ridership to pre-Pandemic rush-hour ridership, is his roundabout way of saying something compelling: Public transit is about much more than rush-hour service these days. As a fundamental part of a city’s 24-7 operating system, public transit is about making a city click in general.

This certainly includes work commutes, but our understanding of ridership should expand to catalog the many reasons people use public transit. Running errands. Going to the doctor or to school. Working a late shift. Going to a friend’s place. Getting to the airport. Going shopping. A weekend at Marymoor Park. Going to cultural events such as FIFA World Cup soccer games, NBA championships, and music shows.

I took the #12 to the #40 to the EdIT show at Substation Saturday night, 6/27/26

Here’s Walker on making public transit not just about rush-hour anymore:

The best transit agencies are shifting their service to address other markets where there’s potential to grow ridership, … that means:

We are attracting new riders, not getting riders “back”.  Any new growth in ridership will be in new and different markets.  Smart agencies have already made these adjustments by shifting service to weekends and to more regular all-day patterns, instead of the old intensive peak.  (Increasing numbers of agencies are above pre-COVID Saturday ridership as a result.)  The great mass of briefcase commuters is gone but there are many others who will use our service if it is useful.  So it makes no sense to talk about getting “back” to 2019 performance. Even if that were possible, it’s not a fair description of what we are doing now.

2) The Wimbledon Draw: I’m Rooting for Maya Joint

Maya Joint with a towel over her head during her losing match at Indian Wells, 3/6/26

The tennis world was eagerly awaiting the news from Wimbledon all week. Specifically: Titillated by tennis legend Serena Williams’ comeback announcement, fans and sports journalists alike were impatient to find out who the seven-time-Wimbledon champion would be playing in the first round. The draw was announced Friday, and now we have the answer. In Williams’ first singles match since retiring four years ago, she will face 20-year-old Australian Maya Joint.

The world will be rooting for Williams. I’ll be rooting for Maya Joint.

One of my most colorful 2026 memories (so far) stars Joint. Or more so, it stars the kooky Australian woman who sat in the stands next to me at Court 7 during Joint’s Indian Wells match this past March [I’m All Lost In, #125, 3/9/26.]

With Joint’s signature cyberpunk (Racer X) glasses looking as conspicuous on court as her decisive backhand, the young Australian had bolted up the rankings last year after winning her first WTA championship titles. One at Rabat in Morocco against Jacqueline Cristian. And a second at Eastbourne in the South of England against Alex Eala. And so Joint started 2026 as World No. 28 (she had been No. 119 just a year earlier). I was eager to see her play, and I happily left my friends behind at one of Indian Wells’ larger stadiums so I could watch her match. Joint was officially part of the youth uprising that was crashing the women’s tour. The young Turks list included American Iva Jovic, Russian Mirra Andreeva, Canadian Victoria Mboko, Czech Tereza Valentová, and Austrian Lilli Tagger. All those players are still on the list. Joint is not.

Maya Joint, Court 7, Indian Wells, 3/6/26

The match I watched live at Indian Wells turned out to be foreshadowing. In what’s now the norm for Joint’s disappointing 2026 season, she imploded midway through the match. She lost to the woman she’d beaten at Rabat last year, Cristian. Joint’s now faltering at No. 87. I actually checked a few days before the Wimbledon draw this week to see if Joint had even qualified for the tournament. Williams couldn’t have asked for a better first-round opponent.

“You an Aussie?” a woman holding a tall can of Corona and wearing a summer dress asked as she climbed over two rows of seats and scooted across a few more to join me.

“Come on MYYY-UH!” she shouted in a thick Australian accent. “Stay steady, MYYY-UH!” These dedicated shows of support came between talking my ear off. This woman had once been an up-and-coming player on the Australian circuit, she told me. And added that she was now an invaluable member of Australia’s tennis coaching infrastructure. Her name was K___. She had long, wavy brown hair. She was in her early 30s. And it seemed to me, as her beery voice pierced the afternoon air, that she was more of a gadfly than a coach. And something of a nuisance at that. At least to Joint and Joint’s team. Like me, they seemed stuck here on quiet Court 7 with K___ and her insistent “Come on MYYYY-UHS!”

Offering me a beer, K___ told me her Slavic surname and announced that her father was “friends with Novak Djokovic.” She was oblivious to the possibility that her boasts were landing on deaf ears. What do I know from insider, pro-tennis echelons?

Nonetheless, something about K___’s fabulist chatter, her tipsy intimacy, and her volume were charming. I wish I’d been less guarded and more amenable to her mischievous flow state that afternoon. After Cristian broke Joint’s serve in the ninth game of the decider and went on to beat Joint 7-5 in that last set (all exactly as K___ had predicted), I was in a rush to get back to my friends for the evening match at Stadium 3. I never saw K___ again.

I’m not foolish nor delusional enough to think this young woman was flirting with me, but I do regret not following her camaraderie into the desert evening for another beer.

As for next Tuesday when Serena Williams’ takes the court at Wimbledon, I say: “Come on MYYY-UH!” “Stay steady, MYYY-UH!”

Maya Joint, Court 7, Indian Wells, 3/6/26

I predict Serena Williams will beat Joint handily next week, but then Williams will lose in the second round to her next likely opponent, the player Joint beat last year at Eastborne, 21-year-old Filipino star Alex Eala.

I want to be on the record with one other Wimbledon prediction: In a fraught and seismic second-round upset, World No. 53 Oleksandra Oliynykova, a Ukrainian whose game is fueled by righteous anger about the Russian invasion, will beat my favorite player, World No. 1, Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka.

3) My Poetry Manuscript

With rejection letters piling up, I’ve been feeling blah about my poetry manuscript lately.

Setting out to do revisions last week, I ended up spiraling into gloom when I realized several of the poems were not working. One poem in particular, Her Debut as a Public Singer—which was previously published in August 2024—was gnawing at me. With its longstanding excellent opening line working as the centerpiece of my manuscript—”Choosing to live in the city is not a retreat from the natural world”—my sense of urgency to revise the rest of the flailing poem accelerated into anxiety.

Thankfully, I came across a beautiful word this week: Sinusoidal (pronounced sigh-nuh-SOY-dull), which means the graphic representation of a sine wave. As in: “Sinusoidal: Anything shaped like or varying in the manner of a sine wave. It refers to a smooth, continuous, and repeating oscillation…”

Figuratively, sinusoidal means moving up and down.

With this excellent word in hand I was able to rewrite Her Debut as a Public Singer. Here’s the new, penultimate stanza:

Choosing to live in the city is not a retreat from the natural world. It is the sinusoidal sight of our respiratory systems as she fell into the minor key.  

On a roll, I upgraded several other poems, including a new one called Marina Tsvetaeva is Not a Tennis Player. And then I updated my cover letter and started sending the manuscript out once more.

Dear ——- Literary Journal,

Please consider these five poems for publication. My poetry is often prompted by city planning policy and mass transit to reflect the hopes that cities generate in the human heart. However, lately I’m more into the WTA (Women’s Tennis Association.)

I’m All Lost In, #140: Sandra Zaniewska’s woo Substack; the Psychedelic Furs’ plaintive dusk; my poem about a 1970s hairdo. Plus the Week in X>Y.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#140

The Week in X > (is greater than) Y

An Ice Pack > Massage My left arm is sore and strained. It’s either because I carried XDX’s air conditioning unit to her car; because I scroll and type too much; because I played tennis for two hours last Saturday; or because I’ve been practicing piano a lot (the Clash’s version of “Police and Thieves.”) I’m left handed.

I was momentarily excited to find an unused, brand-new massage gun buried in the back of my closet during last week’s apartment purge [I’m All Lost In, #139, 6/14/26], but it turns out the ice pack in my fridge is the far better antidote.

Pulverizing my arm with the massage gun feels good in the moment, but the lasting effects are nil. For example, after using it on my arm Saturday morning before tennis this weekend, I nonetheless wasn’t able to enjoy playing; I was protecting my bedeviled arm and hit nearly every backhand, usually my favorite shot, into the net.

I subsequently turned to the 3M Nexcare First Aid Reusable Cold Pack that I have in my freezer. The salubrious result was tangible as the pain receded for hours. I could picture my inflamed, red muscle tissue relaxing into a shade of blue that matched the Nexcare cold pack itself.

Sticking With a Book > Giving Up Midway Through Even though Atsuhiro Yoshida’s novel Goodnight Tokyo was on my list of obsessions last week [I’m All Lost In, #139, 6/14/26], I almost moved on to another book this week before finishing it. Goodnight Tokyo is engaging and well-written, but the whimsical mood sapped any urgency I had about reading through to the end.

Luckily, perhaps still curious if Kanako would ever find her missing brother Ren or if Anyao and Shuro would ever hook up, I checked in on this book of overlapping stories one more time. I’m glad I did. Otherwise, I never would have gotten to Atsuhiro’s grand finale of cosmic anecdotes.

There was the one about about the collection of stairs—just the individual footboards between each step marked Nos. 1-14, —that Ibaragi was selling in his mysterious recycled junk shop:

So the twelfth step will be called three-more-to-the-second-floor. Naturally, the thirteenth one will be called two-more-to-the-second floor, and the fourteenth one one-more-to-the-second-floor. What do you think? Which step would you like?

Alongside Anyao’s impulsive junk shop buy, there’s also a set of mixed narratives that coalesce over Eiko’s grandmother’s unfulfilled death-bed wish for a cola. First there’s Maeda, the aging movie-set stagehand, flexing his bartender skills from a previous life, lovingly preparing an icy whiskey and Coke from provisions he’d hidden in a secret fridge for his younger colleague, the prop-procurer Mitsuki. A few scenes later, Eiko “raises a toast to my grandma” with a frigid glass of whiskey and Coke at the new hit bar Maeda has started at Mitsuki’s urging.

From the first sip, she felt not that she was consuming alcohol, but rather as if her mouth was filled with the essence of the quiet late-night solitude of the bar itself.

An inexplicable sense of joy at discovering this new side of nighttime Tokyo seeped into her throat.

Preparing > Doing Speaking of alcohol: With the exception of having two glasses of wine the night my mother died on May 30th, I haven’t had any booze in four months. And so it was with Juneteenth kicking off a three-day weekend on Thursday night that I had a great plan in the works. I was going to stay up late to watch a tennis match broadcast from the Berlin Open while high on gummies.

At about 6:30 pm, I went to the pot shop on 15th and asked for gummies that would make me giddy rather than stoned. At the salesperson’s recommendation, I got some watermelon kiwi gummies called “Doozies” with 10 mg of THC and 30 mg of another cannabis compound called CBG; the salesguy said the CBG would give me the “boost” I was looking for. They came in a blueberry-smoothie-pink zip-locked package.

Next, anticipating the munchies, I loaded up on junk food from the Walgreen’s—a pint of Kit Kat Ice Cream, Cheez-Its, a box of “InnovAsian” frozen veggie fried rice, and Walgreens in-house nice! brand frozen pizza.

Supplies in tow, I spent the next few hours walking around my neighborhood in anticipation while taking in the beautiful summer evening.

Unfortunately, just as planning a vacation can somehow turn out to be more thrilling than the vacation itself, my best-laid plans were a bust. The ice cream seemed to be curdled and the Cheez-Its gave me a stomachache. And so, I never made it to the rest of the celebratory snacks. And the gummy, which I cautiously portioned into slivers, never quite kicked in. I quietly watched one set of tennis from Berlin before falling asleep.

This Week’s Obsessions.

1) “Torch” a 1989 Song by 1981’s Psychedelic Furs

In an alternate universe, I did not fall out of touch with the Psychedelic Furs.

The Furs were an early-’80s post-punk band starring the inimitably snide baritone frontman, Richard Butler. The band’s 1981 LP, Talk, Talk, Talk was my high-school bedroom favorite.

I have my high school copy of the Psychedelic Furs’ 1981 album Talk Talk Talk framed on my apartment wall.

My memory is that I bought the album for their song “Pretty in Pink,” the catchy single that was getting plenty of airplay on WHFS, our local underground station. But then upon listening to the whole record, I realized “Pretty in Pink” was the least of this stunning album with its abundance of vicious guitars, detached poetry, and clever cool songwriting. If you want to get a sense of what this droll and noisy troupe was up to, check out Talk Talk Talk’s two set pieces: “All of this and Nothing,” and “She is Mine,” or the dissonant show stopper “Dumb Waiters.”

I don’t know why I didn’t buy their 1982 follow-up Forever Now, though I did get the next one, 1984’s unimaginative Mirror Moves, which I pretended to like out of loyalty when I reviewed it for my high school newspaper the spring of senior year. Apparently, the Psychedelic Furs kept making records after that and on into the early 1990s.

When I was sure I heard Butler’s unmistakable, ashtray croon coming over the sound system at the bookstore on Monday, I quickly Shazamed the surprising jam. It was a gorgeous song I’d never heard called “Torch” from a 1989 Psychedelic Furs album called Book of Days. Clearly recorded under the influence of late-1980s REM and the then-burgeoning alt-rock sound that had displaced new wave bands like the Furs, this stripped-down, introspective track was all folk guitar strum, cello gloom, and tambourine jangle backing Butler’s languid stream-of-consciousness.

I’ve continued to treasure Talk, Talk, Talk over the years as peak high school. But it was peak mid-life this week catching up on what my high-school-bedroom confidantes had done after we’d gone our separate ways.

Having obsessively listened to this mournful track on repeat all week, I’d posit it’s less an REM knock-off than a return to Butler’s roots: Early 1970s Bowie ballad meets Mott-the-Hoople glam melancholia.

2) 1970s Hairdos

Not John McEnroe (nor Tatum O’Neal, nor Kristy McNichol) Pam Shriver, 1978

I’ve obsessed over this before [I’m All Lost In, #103, 10/4/25]. And mainly because of this great quote: “I manifested it on the subway.”

These are the words of former 1970s teen tennis phenom Pam Shriver recently reminiscing about her historic run to the 1978 U.S. Open championship match; she lost to the reigning champion and World No. 1 Chris Evert.

Backstory: A week before the tournament, Shriver, only 16 at the time, was riding the 7 train to the U.S. Open grounds in Flushing Meadows, Queens, NYC with fellow player Wendy Turnbull. They were practicing together and Turnbull gave Shriver—who was seeded last in the upcoming tournament—a pep talk; Turnbull had the same lowly designation the year before, but ended up making the final!, she reminded Shriver.

Prompted by an idea I came upon last week [ I’m All Lost In, #139, 6/14/26] that pretending to be someone else may be a better path than trying to reach enlightenment (specifically, I was channeling Polish tennis star Iga Swiatek when I was serving against Valium Tom on Saturday), I wrote a poem this week about Shriver channeling Turnbull.

Of course, the prerequisite for being someone else is remaining yourself the whole time. And so my poem ended up being about Shriver’s memorable 1970s locks.

The last few stanzas:

It’s easy to be someone else. Pam, the lowest ranked seed at the grand slam and still only a high school student, belied her Peter Frampton tresses to reach the championship match by becoming her older friend Wendy. 

I manifested it on the subway, she remembers.

 A week before the tournament, the pair were riding the 7 train to the stadium practice courts when Wendy reminded her: I was the lowest seed last year, yet I ended up making the final.

 Lo and behold, Pam repeated Wendy’s feat.

though it remains true that

        her head of hair was her own

3) Sandra Zaniewska’s Woo Substack

This could easily be an X > Y item. Patience > Revelation.

“When we stop questioning something, we stop discovering it,” writes Sandra Zaniewksa; Zaniewksa is ascendant Ukrainian tennis star Marta Kostyuk’s coach.

Zaniewska, a former WTA tennis player herself, publishes a Substack called The Unseen Court where she translates tennis-tour observations into yearning essays that add up to a kind of life philosophy. Her distinctly feminine voice puts vulnerability, uncertainty, and discovery at the center of her inquisitive worldview.

Zaniewska is expert at expanding tennis situations into inquiries about everyday life. In one essay titled The Space Between Intention And Execution, she writes about the microsecond allotments players get for making on-court decisions; the post, catalogues things like “pressure, residue of the previous point(s), the awareness of the score, and the urge to make it perfect” that can affect how a player’s decision might pan out.

This leads Zaniewska to write a concise description of how tricky it also is to navigate life itself. For example, how to get the outcome you want from a hard conversation.

On court, that space is measured in milliseconds. In life, it can be days, weeks, even years. But the mechanism is the same: the intention is there, but the execution is filtered.

One of my favorite dispatches from Zaniewska’s woo journaling (see the aphorism I quoted at the very top of this item) turns tennis into a thought experiment about the counterintuitive magic of shutting out reality to manifest a new one. Zaniewska describes the state of believing in success even when the fact-pattern lines up against you: “It just requires the willingness to not let the current information be final,” she writes, elevating the notion of possibility—over the more sought after superpower of confidence. (I told you she was woo.)

Another favorite: An essay titled The Illusion of Suddenly where Zaniewska interrogates the conventional idea that Marta Kostyuk’s recent breakout to World No. 12 (and swiftly moving in on the Top 10) comes with some notable, exciting, and tangible turning point. Nope. Kostyuk’s contemplative coach refuses to identify any inflection point even though fans and journalists desperately want there to be one. Rather, she sees “the payoff of a long, quiet accumulation finally becoming visible.”

I’m All Lost In, #139: Goodnight Tokyo; Purging my apartment; Empty libraries. Plus the Week in X>Y.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#139

The Week in X > (is greater than) Y

Long Lines > Short Lines Lines around the block—at shops, shows, and restaurants—represent a public policy victory for any municipal government.

One local line that delights me every year is the crowd that forms on summer evenings at the ice cream shop below my apartment. I’ve even memorialized it in a poem:

My neighborhood would score even higher/
if the DOT surveyed at night/
when youth appear in clinamen lines.

But there’s trouble afoot. For the first time in memory there are no lines forming. As we head into summer 2026, it’s eerily quiet at the ice cream shop on my block.

Madison Square Garden > All Other NBA Arenas The packed crowd leaning into the action at Madison Square Garden during this week’s NBA finals is a metaphor for Manhattan. Specifically, for its density; at 28,000 people per square mile, NYC is the densest major city in America. And, in turn, the most electrifying.

Madison Square Garden’s unique geometry—steep raked seating, concave bowl, low ceiling—creates a distinct, intimate and energized feel that mirrors NYC itself. The Garden is notably different from all other stadiums in the NBA where the seating sprawls out rather than stacks up.

This serving of urban energy is infectious. And as Knicks Nation captured America’s imagination this week, it’s hard to ignore the other metaphor flowing out of Madison Square Garden: The joyous urbanism of New York City, MAGA’s ultimate bogeyman, is countering Trump’s bitter, shrinking, nativist regime with big city hope.

Channeling Iga > Channeling Self 2 When Valium Tom went up 4-0 in the first set, I knew I was running out of time to change the course of our Saturday morning tennis match. I didn’t, however, turn for help to the classic tennis primer The Inner Game of Tennis [I’m All Lost In, # 134, 5/10/26] by 1970s tennis coach W. Timothy Gallwey. Gallwey wants players to find their “Self 2,” one’s free-flowing, unconscious physical persona that’s capable of transcending the analytical, often critical, cognitive “Self 1.”

Instead, I thought of WTA tennis star Iga Swiatek. Iga’s an oddball—even a headcase [I’m All Lost In, #127, 3/22/26]—and she’s been struggling on court for the last two years since losing her No. 1 ranking. Last year’s Wimbledon trophy (!), notwithstanding.

But I find her inspirational. Before every serve, Iga goes into a spooky, reverent Zen-murmur (which reminds me of Franny-Glass’ nervous breakdown.) I get comfort and ASMR just watching Iga go there as the camera angle zooms in on her service motion.

I started thinking about Iga’s serve mantra as I stepped into my own serves midway through my match; I’d been out of sync and double faulting up to that point. By channeling Iga, I nudged my game into a flow state; I fell into a spry groove for the next 10 games, even winning one service game 40-love as I iteratively built up from solid serve to solid ground strokes.

Valium Tom ultimately won the match, but I had turned it into an exciting contest by pretending I was someone else.

Perhaps, there’s a best- selling book idea called the outer game of tennis where the way to get outside of your head isn’t, as Gallwey has it, by creating a physically intuitive version of yourself, but instead by just being someone else entirely.

This Week’s Obsessions:

A new entrant in my City Canon; my Elliott Bay stamp card was filled up, so I got this Tokyo novel for free Tuesday night, 6/9/26.

1) Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida

Maybe I’m not obsessed with Atsuhiro Yoshida’s short novel as much as I am obsessed with keeping his sprawling cast of characters straight.

Mitsuki, a props procurer for movies. Kanako Fuyuki, a hotline therapist who doubles as an orchard thief on her days off; she’s also searching for her long lost brother, Ren. Moriizumi, who runs a phone disposal service. Matsui, a cabbie. Shuro, a real-life, gumshoe detective who has evidently inspired a film franchise. Chatty Kisa, Yorie, Fumina, and Ayano, who run a late night restaurant together; Ayano was once in love with the mysterious Shuro back when he was a struggling magician. Haruka, Ayano’s confidante, who it turns out, works at the film company that’s making movies about Shuro. Ibaragi, who runs a re-fab junk shop. Eiko, a young actress who’s been cast in a movie that’s in production at Haruko’s company. And Emi Fukuda, an elevator operator who’s in love with a bat that hangs around her backyard. She’s apparently “waiting for it to transform into a beautiful young man dressed entirely in black” who would “linger on the veranda behind the curtain hoping desperately to be reunited with the woman inside.”

These are just some of the eccentric characters in this light-hearted and lightly philosophical novel of intertwined stories about Tokyo in the wee hours.

The stories also establish intertwined themes, such as the search for a missing puzzle piece—or person.

As for lightly philosophical:

The item might have seemed like no more than a broken telescope. Ibaragi, however, was always happy to see broken goods put to new uses. … Whenever something created for a specific purpose wore down—and this was true of most tools that humans built—it was liberated from its human-imposed application. Only then was it set free.

2) Purging My Apartment

Inspired by boxing up Mom’s apartment last week [I’m All Lost In, #138, 6/9/26]—and more so, by finding a few meaningful souvenirs from her life, such as her 1951 high school diploma, her laminated teenage social security card, some lovely black and white photos, and some family-heirloom paintings that I wanted to put on display back home in Seattle, I was prompted to purge my own apartment this week.

I imagine cleaning out your own place is a classic psychological response to a parent’s death … Setting the stage for the next phase of your own life?

Regardless, there I was Tuesday cleaning out my closet, hauling bags to the dumpster in my building’s garage, and tossing out old clothes and keepsakes. My apartment feels 1,000 pounds lighter.

One thing I unearthed in my closet, but definitely didn’t throw out was the Watergate Blanket. Mom knit the blanket while rapt in the historic televised hearings during the summer of 1973. It remained part of our household during the rest of the 1970s and '80s. She mailed it to me sometime in the early 2000s.

After unearthing the Watergate Blanket from my closet, I aired it out in the June weather all week.

3) The End of Libraries

My default is to be skeptical of manifestos that proclaim righteous defiance to change, new technology, and the modern world. MAGA slouches toward originalism. Leftists fetishize authenticity. I see fire and brimstone politics as they both demonize phantom conspirators.

It’s with that major caveat, that I actually side with the curmudgeons and recommend this recent essay in the Yale Review by writer and academic Shiela Liming who sees—in the “exsanguination” of university libraries—an ominous sign of the times about technology’s destructive affect on the brain.

Liming writes the essay from her POV as an Edith Wharton scholar. She spent years immersed in Wharton’s own personal library where she (Liming) saw evidence of Wharton’s intellectual evolution in the marginalia of her (Wharton’s) books.

And so I give you as curmudgeonly an excerpt as exists, but one I found myself cheering on:

By studying Wharton’s physical books, I could see from the annotations how she interpreted those texts, incorporating them into her own writing. The writer writes, according to Derrida, in order to discover what they think, including what they think about what they have read. That same writer then tries to convey those ideas to a new reader, who reads to discover what they think about what the writer thinks. But both writer and reader are playing (another favorite word of Derrida’s). Both are engaged in a game that has no end, and the text is the field or pitch or court on which it is played. Derrida calls that game deconstruction.

But though he is best known for it, Derrida didn’t invent the process. Deconstruction is not something that one does to a text; it’s something the text does to itself. It’s an inherent feature of highly volatile processes, and one that turns physical books into objects of fantasy. Books exist to impose dreams of stability and order on the processes of reading and writing that are attached to them. The author might be living or dead. In either case, the book contains the event that is or was the text, to keep it alive and make it cohere. Or, to put it another way, the text is the ghost, while the book is the medium through which the ghost speaks. Without the medium, the connection between speaker and listener is broken, and the line goes dead.

This is why, Derrida says, there is no history without language. We humans communicate knowledge about the past through language—through conversation, through storytelling, through education, and, yes, most of all through writing, which creates a semi-coherent, semi-anchored record of that language. We present that record in the form of a book, something that can be turned to and consulted over and over again. And then, finally, we store that book in a place where we can get at it: a library. For someone like Wharton, that can mean a personal library, filled with the remnants of one’s own engagement with those texts. But since few of us can afford to build a three-thousand-volume personal library, there are also shared libraries, the public ones in our towns and schools.

That’s how a library becomes a final and crucial step on a chain of accessibility that permits contact with the text. There are, of course, other ways to gain access to the text: bookstores and classrooms and PDF files that can be downloaded, legally or not, from the internet. But those other ways place barriers—often financial, sometimes technical, sometimes physical—between the reader and the text. They introduce friction. Reading a bootleg PDF isn’t the same as reading a print book. Twenty years ago, UX researchers were already noting that in online reading, large sections of a text are skipped or scanned in accordance with digital scrolling habits.

I’m All Lost In, #138: Stealing pens; Lists; and Roland Garros. Plus This Week in X>Y.

Mom, 15-years-old, Brooklyn, 1949. Roz was one of the great ones.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#138

The Week in X > (is Greater than) Y

My Childhood Street Today > My Childhood Street 40 Years Ago Mom’s funeral this week brought me back to Beech Ave., a suburban stretch loaded with teenage memories. The old neighborhood is still lush and idyllic. But it seems even better these days than it was when I lived there decades ago. There’s a rail-to-trail bike route where an ad-hoc path behind the YMCA used to be. And even more, there’s a bench and micro-park at the corner where the trail crosses Beech. I imagine this spot would have been a midnight temple for me.

If You’re a Wallflower: Dancing > Not Dancing If you’re uncomfortable at a club or an ‘80s dance party, boogieing and gavotting by yourself is the best way to hide from people. Bonus: The exercise will put you in a good mood. I’ve taken this step a couple of times this month. Once in Queens and once in Chicago.

Remaining Silent > Responding There were two instances this week when upon being bullied, I mostly (and atypically) remained silent and let my antagonist talk on and on, unspooling as they tied themselves into knots. Initially, I was kicking myself afterward for not having the presence of mind to call out their audacious behavior. But later, when it occurred to me that their hot words and my cool stoicism were all that remained, I realized their inappropriate lecture became more evident to all.

This Week’s Obsessions

1) Stealing Pens

I love being able to reach into my backpack and dip my hand into a reservoir of pens. Until about a year ago, this option was readily available to me.

I’ve been frustrated by the lack of pens in my life lately. Is it a sign of the digital age? Are less pens floating around in 2026? I’m not sure, but my supply always seems low.

To address this persistent shortage, I’ve resorted to a tactic I perfected and enjoyed years ago: Stealing pens. Actively. Apparently I’d been neglecting this pastime lately. Until this week.

So far, my pen pilfering spree—at restaurants, at the CVS, at hotels, at convenience stores, at airports, at bars—has netted a respectable cache.

2) Lists

It started two weeks ago and has continued with abandon.

After noticing a pair of colorful lists that were included as part of the small explanatory cards alongside two separate art pieces in two separate MoMA exhibits, I’ve started seeing lists everywhere.

In a card describing Duchamp’s female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, the MoMA exhibit curator wrote:

She occupied roles as wide-ranging as the head of a perfume house, a publisher, the administrator of a joint stock company, and a filmmaker.

Six floors down, in the museum’s exhibit about the Nakagin Capsule Towers [I’m All Lost In, #137, 6/2/26], an accompanying card explained:

Initially marketed as micro-dwellings for commuting businessmen, they were repurposed into second homes, offices, student housing, and even tearooms, libraries, galleries, and DJ booths.

As I set out to concoct a poem through a mash-up of these two inventories, more lists caught my attention. In the Iliad, in Book 13, Homer gives us a list of human pleasures:

A person can get tired of anything—/of sleep, of sex, of dancing, of sweet song,/far better objects of desire than war./ But Trojans are insatiable for battle.

And just three pages later from the same chapter, a list of talents:

You cannot have it all!/A god give one man skill to fight in war,/ another may be talented at dancing,/another good at singing and the lyre, and in another heart, farsighted Zeus/places good judgment…

Of course, there’s also the famous catalogue of ships in Book 2.

This week, the lists have been showing up in real life. As we boxed up my mom’s apartment (RIP Roz Feit, June 8, 1934-May 30, 2026), I found myself cataloging everything we schlepped down to the cars: Two black wooden chairs; a recliner; two boxes of kitchenware; a flat-screen TV (which she hadn’t turned on since my dad died two years ago); a couch; a rolling table; several double-tied contractor’s bags of clothes; several double-tied contractor’s bags of trash; several more of recycling; and one contractor’s bag of towels. An end table. A box of hangers. An antique set of Jewish encyclopedias. A bed.

Roz Zivotofsky, Thomas Jefferson High School, Brooklyn, NY, graduation, 1951.

And on Friday afternoon, June 5, in a quiet room at Rockville’s Sagel Bloomfield Danzansky Goldberg Funeral Home on Rollins Ave.—where putt-putt golf and Ernie’s Pizza used to be in the 1970s—they gave us a formal list confirming the items of Mom’s clothing we’d chosen for her burial.

3) Roland Garros

My therapist likes to tell me “Josh, you know: You can’t predict the future.” But I can!

And I have been for the past fortnight as I constantly tuned in the French Open, pro-tennis’ spring grand slam. In fact, I’ve been predicting the future much longer than that; at least for the entire time I’ve been an Aryna Sabalenka fan.

From the moment I first happened to see one of her tortured matches on the restaurant-bar TV in September 2023 and instantly became an unconditional fan of this jinxed supernova, I have foreseen the kind of naked implosion that went down this week on center court in her Rolland Garros quarterfinal match.

Just two points away from victory—up 6-3, 5-3, 30-Love—World No. 1 Sabalenka tanked against No 25 Diana Shnaider. Daffy Saby, as we call her in my home, lost the next 9 games in a row. Her quest for an elusive 2026 grand slam victory went kaput 6-3, 5-7, 0-6. Yes, 0-6, the ultimate example of being tilted.

Had she won the match, her subsequent route to the championship trophy would have been tantalizingly close. The coast was clear. All Saby’s main rivals—Rybakina, Coco Gauff, Iga, Mboko—had already been knocked out in earlier rounds. But the tennis gods love steering Saby into the rocks (or guiding her forehand into the net). Especially in the big moments. With all eyes on her in the runup to the final, there was no escaping the pending reality of a high-profile meltdown and defeat.

Yes, she’s already a four-time grand slam champion, including winning the 2024 and 2025 U.S. Opens. And yes, she’s risen to World No. 1—and has kept the spot for more than a year and a half. But I have long known Sabalenka’s true fate: She is doomed to botch things in glorious fashion.

For the record: Much like former world No. 1 Iga Swiatek, who has never been the same since losing to Qinwen Zheng in the 2024 Olympics, Saby’s downfall was set in motion when World No. 32 Hailey Baptiste beat her last month in the quarterfinals in Madrid. Sabalenka is still World No. 1 and will be considered a favorite to win Wimbledon next month (and the U.S. Open in September).

But a note to my therapist: I know Sabalenka won’t win either tournament.

I’m All Lost In, #137: The Nakagin Capsule Tower; NKD NA whiskey; Silence Please teahouse. Plus the Week in X>Y

I’m All Lost In…

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#137

(This post covers 5/22/26-6/1/26)

The Week in X > (is Greater Than) Y

Hudson News at Sea-Tac, 5/31/26

A Mainstream Book Chain > The NYT We live in an era of spineless corporate self-censorship and odious government erasure. (See this week’s combination of both: A tortured NYT headline timidly and ridiculously saying Secretary of Defense Hegseth “appeared” to show an “anti-diversity stance” by blocking merit-based promotions for female and black officers at a disproportionate rate; I can think of a couple of clearer words to describe Hegseth’s ongoing pattern of sexism ‍and racism in his bigoted‍ ‍campaign against women, African Americans, and LGBQT people.)

And so it was heartening to notice the opposite impulse at Hudson News, the Swiss-based airport bookstore chain. During this busy week of traveling (NYC and Chicago) I noticed identical Hudson News displays at O’Hare, JFK, and Sea-Tac flaunting a shelf of proudly woke books about Iran. By Iranian authors. (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is a personal favorite.*)

Seeing the displays was a bit like seeing a tattoo peeking out from under someone’s rolled up sleeve at a corporate meeting.

Or like a middle finger to Donald Trump.

Curry Dishes with Less Curry Sauce > Curry Dishes with Lots of Curry Sauce Exhibit A is the delicious Green Curry at Sticky Rice, a lively Thai restaurant on Orchard St. in NoLita. Unlike typical curries where you have to go wading for the provisions, the coconut milk in this dish was secondary to a tall pile of green beans, bamboo shoots, and basil.

I’d also recommend the cozy vegan veggie curry puffs as a starter.

Taking the Red Eye > Flying During the Day They’re cheaper. There aren’t check-in lines. And you’re more likely to sleep; not only are you ready for bed anyway at this late hour after a full day, but they turn out the cabin lights, it’s quiet, and the person sitting next to you is likely to be sleeping themself rather than chatting at you.

And the best part: You don’t lose a day to travel. Go to sleep on Thursday night in Seattle—as I did on my flight out of Sea-Tac this week—and wake up on Friday morning in Chicago before catching the El train toward Forest Park, getting off at Logan Square and catching the 76 bus east toward Nature Museum. I alighted at Diversey & Western/Elston two blocks from my Airbnb.

This gave way to a full day. I met my magical college friend Zoe downtown later that morning; we did the Riverwalk and drank 7-11 Slurpees; and I had a gummie in the evening before going to a dance party with some old high school friends.

Zoe & Me, Downtown Chicago after the Riverwalk, on the way to get Slurpees at 7-11, 5/29/26

This Week’s Obsessions

1) The Nakagin Capsules

As part of Japan’s Metabolist architecture movement—an eco-physiological philosophy from the 1960s (of course!) which sought to entwine buildings and biology with “design and technology that denotes human vitality”—architect Kisho Kurokawa built an apartment complex of 140 prefab modules in downtown Tokyo. Attached to a pair of steel towers, the single-occupant-capsules came online in the heart of Tokyo’s up-tempo Ginza neighborhood in 1972.

MoMA currently has an exhilarating exhibit on the Nakagin Capsule Tower that includes reconfigured module A1305. I checked it out on Monday, Memorial Day.

Capsule A1305

Capsule A1305, a fully restored unit from the Tower’s top floor on display at MoMA, 5/25/26

The Nakagin Capsule Tower photographed in 1972 currently on exhibit at MoMA.

Named after a real estate company that backed Kurokawa’s urbanist vision to give “nomadic office workers” a space “to rest and recover,” the Nakagin module hive was basically a Lego building of pied-à-terres for suburban businessmen that looked like the sleeping quarters on Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise. Not only did the design embrace the sleek new age of mass production, but the solo capsules were, in Kurokowa’s words, also a “declaration of war” against it “in support of the restoration of the self.”

The gendered marketing advertised the micro-apartments as bachelor pads. The efficient oval layout came with: wall-screen TVs; submarine windows that looked out onto the glittering city; handset phones; and Sony stereo systems. And perhaps more germane to Kurokawa’s architectural philosophy: the units also featured built-in, multi-purpose furniture.

Kurokawa explained the Metabolist part of capsule living in his manifesto “Oh, the code of the cyborg!” which he published in Space Design magazine in 1969: Individual capsules could be swapped out iteratively for upgraded models that were manufactured off-site and snapped into place as needed.

“[Kurokowa] envisioned architecture capable of growth, adaptation, and transformation through what he called ‘metabolic cycles,’” MoMA’s Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design Evangelos Kotsioris writes in the exhibit notes. “Whereby at predetermined intervals ‘only those parts that had lost their usefulness’ would be replaced and, as result, resources would be conserved.”

The Nakagin Capsule Tower didn’t work out as Kurokowa envisioned, but perhaps not coincidentally, it did ultimately sync with his generative, Theseus's-Paradox conceit. Shifting purpose rather than evolutionary maintenance became the defining MO of the complex over the years as Nakagin’s micro-spaces were re-mixed into offices, student housing, tearooms, libraries, galleries, and DJ booths. “This is not an apartment house,” Kurokawa famously declared when he debuted the project design in 1969.

With an embattled history that included revivals of creative new uses alongside lost years when the units fell into disrepair, the building was decommissioned and disassembled in 2022.

2) NKD Whiskey

NA spirits are typically too sweet. NA wine is a glass of apple juice role playing as a glass of chardonnay. Thankfully, after I complained about this sickly state of affairs late Saturday afternoon to the earnest bartender at Hekate, a neurodivergent-friendly N.A. dive on Ave. B and E. 11th St in the East Village, he poured me a glass of NKD whiskey.

ALT Distilling, the Louisville, Kentucky-based company that makes NKD whiskey (pronounced “naked”), extracts the alcohol through a process called vacuum distillation while lightly singeing the oak-flavored brew with some caramel for the subconscious.

Last week was my 13th in a row booze-free. It also now marks the moment when I finally found a substitute spirit that doesn’t need to be cut with two cups of soda water. Drink a glass of NKD neat for its burn and peaty weight.

*Hekate, a warm, go-to spot for me ever since ECB and I first hung out there in March 2024, is closing. They have a GoFundMe to help them keep the doors open until October.

 3) Silence Please

In another long-running quest for quality: Last week, my commitment to discovering exemplary coffeeshops took me to Silence Please. This second-floor oasis on Bowery & Grand in NoLita is set up in a stereo-speaker design work studio. It’s a ”place to slow down,” according to the website. “To tune in and listen gently. We believe silence is not the absence of sound, but the presence of attention.”

Channeling this yoga-practice wisdom (or A.I. copy?), Silence Please is a bit Kurokowa-esque. It blurs out the grungy street below, re-making the art gallery that once occupied the spot into an elegant coffeeshop that honors the gallery mood. Delicately placed around the room, the stylish, artisan speakers echo the space’s original art show aesthetics. And the speakers are functional too, lulling the room with jams like the laid-back, guitar-jazz hip hop playing on the Tuesday morning I was there by Japanese rapper Ken Tin Min.

Crowded with diligent creative souls working at lap tops, the long library-table seating lets folks hunker down for hours to the soft tunes. There’s also peaceful window-table seating for casual coffee dates and inviting couches for solo reverie. Bonus: there’s a small, vinyl record shop and secondary seating by the barista bar and baked-goods case in the far-flung back room.

Silence Please, upstairs on Bowery between Grand St. & Broome St, 5/26/26

* How strange. Two days after I published this item, Marjane Satrapi died.

I’m All Lost In, #136: Off-peak ridership; Ambient Crafts; and the Iliad. Plus the Week in X>Y, including DJ Mudede.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#136

The Week in X > (is greater than) Y

Nil Elses upstairs at the Crocodile Hotel, 5/16/26

Leaving > Staying

Up three flights of stairs. To an electronica show. These are my favorite coordinates.

The first set I came upon Saturday night in Belltown at the Crocodile Hotel annex was an inspired combination of ambient waves and glitch beats by Nil Elses. It seemed like the perfect resting place for the night. The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But the next act—a spoken-word dose of atavistic left-wing Romanticism (over an endless drone, appropriately enough)—was a detour into banality. Andrew Sullivan once correctly labeled this type of idyllic Year-Zero politics “Reactionary Utopianism.”

I was thrilled when my fellow ambient music traveler texted me from across the room: “I’m bored.” We promptly disregarded Seattle’s progressive peer pressure to stay put and voted with our feet. We headed toward the exit and down the stairs during the middle of the tedious, aimless set.

Intellectuals > Dudes I wish I’d walked out of Shibuya HiFi when I went to one of their curated nights two years ago; Shibuya HiFi is Ballard’s self-proclaimed Tokyo-inspired listening lounge on Leary Way.

The DJ that night was playing 1960s-ska singles. I’m a fan. But evidently he had nothing to tell us about the music. No context. No background stories. No narrative. Instead, we got a man-boy lecture about the high-end Klipschorn speakers. Adding to this indulgent rhapsody about stereo equipment, the lazy DJ winged it, playing record after record while not telling us anything more than the artists’ name. This lack of prep was astounding for the steep ticket price. Could you imagine if a female DJ had tried to get away with this sort of mediocrity.

While he’s no heroine, two years later: It was the excellent Charles Mudede [I’m All Lost In, #54, 10/25/24] to the rescue. This past Wednesday night, the local urban architecture magazine Arcade commandeered Shibuya HiFi’s fine-tuned yet squandered listening lounge and brought in Seattle cultural critic, free-form intellectual Mudede to spin a night of his favorite cityscape tracks.

Mudede as DJ, Ballard, 5/20/26

Providing historical context (the emergence of trip hop at London’s Africa Centre in Covent Garden), personal memory, cinema theory, and hip hop expertise, Mudede gave the attentive audience a meaningful sequence of jams:

1) Set to an aerial escapade above the streets of San Francisco: “Roof Top” from Bernard Herrmann's 1958 score to Hitchcock’s Vertigo; 2) “Gutted,” the UK dub step classic from Burial’s 2006 debut; 3) “Respiration,” Black Star’s 1998 “conscious” hip hop classic; 4) Constantly on the turntable in his back-cottage teenage bedroom where his parents exiled him, Charles escaped virtually to “This City Never Sleeps,” an elegantly drawn-out Grace Jones-style experiment in dub from the Eurythmics’ 1983 Sweet Dreams (are Made of This) LP; 5) “Erotic City,” a loopy and magnetic 1984 Prince B-side that out-smuts every song on the overrated Purple Rain LP released the same year; 6) “Time Forest,” a stunning 11-minute track by eco-ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yiroshi from the groundbreaking 1986 album Surround (imagine Eno set to the Tokyo subway); 7) “Unfinished Symphony,” from Massive Attack’s 1991 trip-hop masterpiece Blue Lines.

As an outro, Mudede played jazz bassist Mingus’ 1956 hard-bop breakdown of Gershwin’s city-pollution standard, “A Foggy Day.”

4 > 3 I arrived at Court 3 early last Saturday morning and practiced a few serves. Aces all. It was an Elena-Rybakina omen. I went on to win 4 games off JFTA World No. 1 Valium Tom, the most winning games I’ve ever tallied against him..

And notably: Down 5-3, I staved off a break and match point at ad-out. I was evidently channeling the Inner Gamer of Tennis [I’m All Lost In, #134, 5/10/26] without even realizing it. Which seems appropriately in-the-zone of me and uncharacteristically nonchalant as well.

This Week’s Obsessions

The 1 Line, 5/15/26

1) Crush Load With all the new service coming online in the past year, light rail ridership is setting record highs. Notably, off-peak ridership is up.

The trains were certainly packed last Friday evening around 10 o’clock as my troupe of friends decided to forgo one full train and see about the next. But the next train was overcrowded as well. Realizing the numbers weren’t going to let up anytime soon, the five of us squeezed on.

You could attribute this passenger crush to the Mariners game, but that doesn’t diminish the high ridership. In fact, it confirms the popularity of Seattle’s light rail service. In short: Packed trains as a function of popular events is exactly what the service plan envisioned.

As Seattle continues to grow, this kind of non-rush-hour demand will continue to grow too. For example, my group wasn’t coming from the Mariners game. We were coming from a standing-room-only pop show at a small club in Pike Place Market, The Rabbit Box. Evenings of overlapping events like this are the norm in cities. As is mass transit.

2) Ambient Crafts

Speaking of crowded events…

Soft Portals’ digital flower flow, live at Internet Development Studios, 5/21/26

The room was percolating with stillness Thursday night at INTDEV studios on Post Alley where immersive-quietude duo Ambient Crafts were prompting community. Ambient Crafts is Isla Vidal on atmospheric loops and reverent vocals, and Soft Portals on meditative visuals, generative graphics, and 14th century Persian poetry. (At one point, Vidal sampled and hacked the poetry, looping it into the mix.) And so the simpatico pair of electromagnetic whisperers set the scene for the night’s curated slate of artists. This is the conceit of an Ambient Crafts show: Group exhibitions recast as a night market where the artists set up booths for bazaar goers to check out the imaginative wares.

On this Thursday night’s rendition you could sit for a technology hacker who projected your silhouette in visual synesthesia; you could inhale decayed peach with the guidance of the night’s scent librarian; you could attend a tea ceremony in the well-appointed side room of drapes, rugs, and low tables where a tea master invited you to join him on the cushions; or you could get to work with scissors, glue, and magazines at a crafting table. The hands-on installations, which also included a tapestry projectionist, gave free rein to earnest conversation all evening. There was also pita, hummus, and veggies, plus plenty of throw pillows and a few couches for lounging.

The mood was akin to a late-1960s Fluxus happening without any of the didactic theory. As Soft Portals said in her closing remarks about art’s ability to “alchemize hardship” : “We really hope you guys were able to slow down and be grounded. We hope the art was supporting you, rather than telling you how to feel.”

Full transparency: Soft Portals is my friend XDX, a recurring character in these weekly accounts. And I’ve been shamelessly writing about Ambient Crafts’ every chance I get [I’m All Lost In, #120, 2/1/26.]

3) A Zoom Class on the Iliad

Thanks to a marvelous tip I got a few months ago from my poet and high-school-English-teacher pal Dallas, I signed up for an online class on the Iliad. Yes, we had to buy the prof’s own translation of this classic classic ($20), but the prof is Ivy League University of Pennsylvania professor Emily Wilson and her 2023 translation is being acclaimed as the standard for the next generation. I was eager to take the class. (Wilson is already revered for her 2017 translation of the Odyssey; the first published in English by a female scholar.)

The first class was this week; about 250 people tuned in. Wilson lectured for 45 minutes and then took questions from the lively comment section for the last 15 of the scheduled hour-long session. We went more like 75 minutes because she was geeking out over the questions.

Wilson is a hoot. Ah ha, I thought to myself when she did a few over-the-top thespian readings (first in ancient Greek, then in English) as if she were in the shower playing all the characters to act out a few choice, epic scenes.

I’m All Lost In, #135: Fiction at the Bolshoi; Modular Seattle; and Desmond Dekker’s inversions in A-flat major. Plus the Week in X>Y.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#135

The Week in X > (is better than) Y

Adagio > Andante, Moderato, Allegro, Vivace, and Presto. And Largo is the best.

I cued up a 16-hour box set of Franz Joseph Haydn’s complete string quartets this week; in addition to inventing the form, Haydn wrote 68 string quartets in total between 1775-1803. They span his Op. 1 through Op. 103.

I prefer the slower movements, and I started collecting Haydn’s adagios—and his occasional (even slower) Largos—all in one soothing playlist. If only Haydn’s BPM had slowed more dramatically to the near-”Grave Lento” as well. There would be world peace.

The Vegan Menu at Moonlight Cafe > The non-Vegan Menu at Moonlight Cafe I know that sounds like I’m stating the obvious—after all, the Central District’s no-frills Moonlight Cafe on 19th & Jackson is one of Seattle’s vegan bright lights [I’m All Lost In, #66, 1/18/25.] But Moonlight has a full, traditional-Vietnamese menu as well, and my non-vegan friends fall for it every time.

I try to warn them: While the parallel vegan menu is presented as a substitute for the “regular” menu, the nod-and-wink conceit at Moonlight Cafe is that the vegan menu is the raison d'être at this Vietnamese comfort-food institution.

And so it was on Wednesday evening that while XDX remained politely reserved over a tallow-burdened pork soup, I dug into a Seattle classic: The Saute Broccoli with vegan chicken.

Moonlight Cafe, 5/13/25

Hart Crane > Hart Crane After squinting through several cryptic poems in Hart Crane’s 1926 debut White Buildings (as in: the bright glow of urbanism), I’m sad to report he’s not living up to his canonical hype as America’s machine-age bard. Crane supposedly up-cycled 19th century Romanticism and its reverence for the natural world by celebrating the beauty of America’s young, new century, its subways, skyscrapers, and most famously, one of its harbingers, New York City’s majestic Brooklyn Bridge.

Reclaiming cities as wonders of the natural world is exactly how I frame my own poetry project; traditionally, cities are seen as symbols of sinister inauthenticity. And so I was excited to learn that exalting the city had been Crane's project. I hoped reading him on this centennial of his debut collection would prove to be a highlight for me in 2026. The year’s not quite half over yet, so we’ll see.

Hart Crane’s White Buildings, First Edition, 1926

This Week’s Obsessions

1) City of Night Birds

Well this was predictable. After 30 unconvincing pages, I included this novel on my list of last week’s obsessions under the header: “I’m Not Obsessed with This Contemporary Novel“ [I’m All Lost In, #104, 5/10/26.] It turns out I am.

I realized this when I fished the book out of my backpack on the #8 bus Wednesday evening and started reading it again. I nearly missed my stop. I eagerly picked it back up few hours later; that’s when I began underling. “We all had the emotional stability of an atom missing an electron.”

Before the night was. over, I had read another 80 pages.

The book is about a fictional elite Russian ballerina named Natalia Leonova. And as I noted last week, Natalia’s murky history—told in flashbacks—kept me from abandoning the book right away. Accordingly, when that story line came to its surprising crescendo around page 60—going to see her mother meant going to the cemetery—I was hooked. Natalia’s past has now collided with the increasingly intriguing real-time story of her minefield relationships with Nina (an old bestie) and with her mysterious Bolshoi rival Dimitri. I’m sensing more secrets to come in this world where ballet is metaphor.

More underlining: “She didn’t want anything frilled and beaded that would remind her of a costume…;”

“I meandered to the center—the middle of the stage, the center of gravity in our universe, to which everyone—dancers from the corps to the principals, the conductor, the orchestra, the light designer, stagehands, and even the director—were inexorably pulled…;”

“…her face would light up in recognition—not of the choreography or the music, but the turquoise-embroidered bodice and tutu…”

2) Modular Seattle

Speaking of metaphors: Think of a modular synth artist as a DJ whose circuit patches are samples. Modular synthesizers are electronic music rigs that musicians patch together during performance to iteratively create new combos of sound effects as opposed to using a pre-programmed synth.

Avant-garde and retro all at once, modular synth music is crackling in Seattle right now thanks to Modular Seattle, an informal collective of experimental musicians who host generative synth nights

They usually hold the shows at Substation [I’m All Lost In, #27, 4/19/24], a former industrial site on the edge of old Ballard. But last Saturday night they set up shop at Pacific Science Center, the kid-friendly museum at Seattle Center transformed on this evening into a lingering hipster music scene. The event was branded as Science After Dark, SAD.

Like Haydn’s contemplative adagios ^^, we were in 60-BPM mode. Rather than arcing cello lines and plaintive violin melodies though, it was transistor drones, archival sound clips, and blocs of sound waves. You could practically see the atoms gathering in collapsed time.

Modular Seattle at Science After Dark, 5/9/26

3) Playing Desmond Dekker’s Shanty Town on Piano

Between his two rock steady hits, “007 (Shanty Town)” (1967) and “The Israelites” (1968), you wouldn’t be faulted for believing Jamaican artist Desmond Dekker descended from Orpheus. This fellow could write a catchy pop tune. And perform it with star power.

I’ve been miming his star power in the privacy of my apartment all week practicing “007 (Shanty Town)” on piano. I’ve dedicated weeks to this song before [I’m All Lost In, #29, 5/3/24.] This is an obsessions column.

It’s a pleasure to play thanks to Dekker’s pallet of inversions. Written in the key of A-flat major, his score playfully flaunts all three voicings of the root: A-flat/C/E-flat; C/E-flat/ A-flat; and holding down the wistful verses, E-flat/A-flat/C, the second inversion. Dekker lingers in the wistful mood in the final bar of his I-IV-VII verses with an inversion of the IV chord (a D-flat major played as F/A-flat/D-flat) and then rushes mid-verse to the VII, an aching G-diminished passing chord (G/B-flat/D-flat). This premature chord change creates a dragging blur against the right-hand melody, the D-flat IV note, which stays put despite the moving chords below. Remaining stationary like this, the D-flat highlights the tug underneath as Dekker sings: “Rude boys take the wheel/Toss them all to jail/Rude boys cannot fail/’cause they must get beer” stretching out the words “wheel,” “jail,” “fail,” “beer” to emphasize the rude boys’ mundane cycle of aimlessness.

In contrast, the chorus is all energy, showcasing an overload of tied notes and smashed-together triplets as Dekker starts the melody line from the III note, the C, to string together the repeated opening line: “I’m a loot/I’m a shoot/at my will.” This sets up the last two lines of the chorus where Dekker drops the melody to the root, the A-flat, and ready-set-go, climbs 9 half steps to the VI note, the F, for the first two weighted words of a triplet: “Step up,” and “bomb up.” As in: “I’m a rude boy, step up diversion” and “I’m a rude boy I bomb up the town.”

I’m All Lost In, #134: Flow States. Plus the Week in X>Y.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#134

The Week in X > (is greater than) Y

Sweetened sediment at Mintish, 5/9/26

The Dregs > The Coffee This rule is specific to Turkish coffee. I first tried Turkish coffee before I drank coffee. Back in 2013 on my trip to Istanbul.

And I’m glad I rediscovered it this week at Mintish, the Palestinian coffeeshop on Capitol Hill [I’m All Lost In, #125, 3/9/26.] It’s just as I remember it too: There’s a heaping tablespoon-worth of silt at the bottom.

The prized sludge takes on disproportionate prominence in the slight, traditional Turkish coffee cup, which feels symbolic of the fact that the tasty bitter sediment defines this drink.

Mintish adds hazelnut syrup into the brew too.

3 > 2.5 For the second weekend in a row, I won my tennis match; I play every Saturday morning at Volunteer Park. This past Saturday I beat R___, a regular JFTA (Josh Feit Tennis Association) rival who I’d never beaten before. I’ve occasionally pushed him to long deuce-ad games. And I once won three games in a row to nearly stage a comeback. But this Saturday I won outright. 6-3. That’s not the headline, though.

It’s this: There was a group of Gen-X women playing doubles on the court next to us. After the match, one of them came over and invited us to join their mixed-doubles summer league. She also asked what my rating was. When I said I was a 2.5, she said: “No. You’re at least a 3. We were watching.”

Interrogating Memory > Protecting Memory Walking the two blocks back to my apartment from the bus stop late Tuesday night in the soughing midnight weather prompted my brain to call up a recurring image from high school: Sprinting home across the suburban landscape at 5 am from my girlfriend’s house. (That summer after 11th grade, I would stay up watching the 11 o’clock news with mom while I waited for her to go upstairs to sleep. I think she was on to my subterfuge, but when she finally headed up, I’d sneak out through the sliding-glass back door and go over to S_____’s. Several hours later, I’d sprint back home, leaping across the pavement, before my parents woke up.

Part of this comforting memory includes the “Stingo!” speech from 1982’s Sophie’s Choice when Meryl Streep (as Sophie), Kevin Kline (as Nathan), and Peter MacNicol (as Stingo) high tail it to the Brooklyn Bridge one late night with a bottle of champagne. Leaping up onto a lamppost on the side of the bridge Gene Kelly-style, Kline offers a wild toast as Streep and MacNicol look on. It’s an exuberant moment in the mostly brutal movie.

I’ve always been wary to peek back at this scene. What if I had it all wrong? I didn’t want to upend the sanctity of my memory. But I finally went and watched it. And I’m glad I did. Going back in time neither contradicted nor affirmed the past. It merely enhanced the present.

While I’d remembered the wattage of the scene, I never actually remembered what it was about.

Kevin Kline as the unstable Nathan Landau, raising his glass of champagne to the night:

On this bridge on which so many great Americans writers have stood and reached out for words to give America its voice... Looking toward the land that gave us Whitman... from its Eastern edge dreamt his country's future and gave it words... On this span of which Thomas Wolfe and Hart Crane wrote, we welcome Stingo into that pantheon of the Gods... whose words are all we know of immortality. To Stingo!

This Week’s Obsessions

1) The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey

Out for a pop-psychology stroll, 5/6/26

Written in the early 1970s when even sports was under the influence of the counterculture, Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis feels like it could be called: “Zen and the Art of the Kick Serve.” With theories about “Self 1” (the judgy critical mind) and “Self 2” (the untethered body), Gallwey’s tennis primer was published in 1974, the same year another hippie classic came out: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Gallwey, the captain of the Harvard tennis team in the early 1960s and later a tennis coach, was all about flow states, “quieting your mind,” and doing away with judgment by observing what IS.

It’s all pop-psychology stuff that’s become ubiquitous and mainstream these days (the banal intro to the 50th anniversary edition I just bought is by NFL-coach-as-guru, the Seattle Seahawks’ Pete Carroll.) ‍ ‍

The hippie factor in Gallwey’s book is high. The first big metaphor he makes compares tennis skills to a flower:

When [a rose] first shoots up out of the earth, we don't condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds or not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is. Similarly, the errors we make can be seen as an important part of the developing process…

Tennis itself becomes an all-purpose metaphor in this self-help classic. Gallwey’s inner game of freeing the mind to the body can be applied to any pursuit. While my tennis playing could certainly use more Zen, I was using Gallwey’s advice this week to think about piano playing. Stop trying too hard and play unconsciously. A perfect assignment for Self 1 to let go and let Self 2 play the crushed blue notes in Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got a Hold On Me.”

2) Unflappable Mayor Wilson

Erica posts my column on Thursday morning, 5/7/26

Speaking of flow states, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is confounding mainstream conservative media outlets like the Seattle Times right now with her insouciant left-wing charisma as she settles into the rhythm of governing.

Trying to stop Wilson’s momentum, the Times fabricated a mayoral PR crisis by pretending her consistent progressive script is actually a source of political malaprops. They published a column this week wishfully titled: “The gaffes are becoming a pattern for Seattle’s new mayor.” The truth is: Wilson is at ease burning it up with her nonchalant jujitsu.

I write a column for PubliCola; always a nice task. But more so this week: When I sat down at Plus84 Coffee on Tuesday evening and wrote a response to the Seattle Times, I was peaking, getting into a flow state of my own as I offered my less-tortured assessment of our straightforward mayor.

Trying to portray Wilson as gaffe-prone when all she’s doing is demonstrating her commitment to the progressive agenda that she openly ran on last year is just sour grapes from the Seattle Times. It also shows how flummoxed they are with her casual charisma. As they reported themselves last year, the anti-Wilson campaign couldn’t get traditional anti-left memes to stick to her. This latest iteration doesn’t track either.

3) I’m Not Obsessed with This Contemporary Novel

I keep trying to get hooked on a 2024 novel I bought this week, City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim. It’s about a Russian dancer named Natalia who’s trying to return from an injury (both literal and figurative) in the cutthroat world of St. Petersburg ballet.

It’s not poorly written. Nor is it particularly well written.

Either way, I keep hoping I can remix the specifics of dance (La Bayadère and frappés) into a metaphor for universal themes. Like tennis!

And Kim’s jump cuts to Natalia’s coming-of-age backstory have stopped me from giving up just yet.

I knew that Mama couldn’t teach me happiness because she’d never been happy. At least not since Nikolai—a name that was within my name, yet so unfamiliar to me. Mama never talked about him with me; everything I know, I heard through whispered conversations between Mama and Sveta when they thought I was asleep.

——

In closing, a Quote of the Week, overheard while I was walking through Myrtle Edwards Park by Elliott Bay—and paused to look out from the W. Thomas St. Overpass.

“Looking out at Elliott Bay makes me want to quit my job.”

Elliott Bay, 5/5/26

‍ ‍