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

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

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

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

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

Marshall’s rejoinder was compelling, though:

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

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

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

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

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

Loving Jimmy Destri’s New Wave tie.

And one more sub-obsession:

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

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

1) The Courts versus Trump’s Fascist Agenda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2) Renaissance in Pioneer Square

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I told the waiter compliments to the kitchen for serving the best veggie burger in Seattle, she said: I know, right? And then proceeded to tell her tale, a veggie burger odyssey through the years of cardboard flavored sad patties to the more recent highly processed “plant-based” iterations. Vegetarians know this comical history well, and my version—as opposed to her modern timeline— goes back to the freezer-burned rice and veggie mash up of late-1980s Gardenburgers.

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