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.