Pianist Jenny Lin; Emerging Ecologies; Excising the Beatles.

Here’s week #8 of All Lost in… my regular round up the things I’m currently obsessing over. (I stole the idea from the New Yorker’s Take Three column.)

1. I was in Manhattan last weekend, and I saw a piano recital matinee at Carnegie Hall’s intimate chamber music venue, Weill Recital Hall. It’s a jewel box of a theater up four flights of winding late-19th century stairs.

I cannot seem to let go of this performance.

Pianist Jenny Lin played a 75-minute program of nine pensive and extroverted pieces, including works by Philip Glass, Dmitri Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Schubert, Liszt, and Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. The common denominator of these pieces seemed to be: Adventurous composers leaning into a kind of lyrical, nostalgic Romanticism that they’d originally rejected. When the crowd brought her back for an encore with a devoted standing ovation, which I gleefully took part in, Lin added a soft, minimalist tone poem, “the best piano piece of all time,” she said, by Spanish composer Federico Mompou, Impresiones initmas: IV: Secreto.

Lin’s fluent, athletic style, particularly on the raucous Listz piece, Apres une Lecture de Dante, struck me as unique because of its simultaneous force and delicacy.

I stepped out onto W. 57th St. afterward feeling giddy, and upon returning to my hotel room, I immediately made a Spotify playlist replicating her set; I tacked on Lin’s entire album of dreamy Mompou pieces as well.

Still wanting to hang onto her performance, the next day I Iooked online for any reviews; I only found this one, and I’ve been googling for more ever since.

She did show up on a new release by an art jazz accordion composer named Guy Klucevsek, and she steals the show with the same masterful style that captivated the audience at Weill Hall.

2. More from my (obviously excellent) New York trip: The Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism exhibit at MoMa .

The exhibition showcases the wave of eco-conscious architecture that blossomed under the influence of Rachel Carson during the green awakening that took place in the brainy optimistic heyday of 1960s and ‘70s American counterculture——and presents it as modern art.

Many of the radical concepts of sustainable building on display here, such as solar panels, have long since become mainstream design practices and LEED Standard basics. However, much of the work—such as the Olgyay brothers’ bioclimatic Thermoheliodon, Joseph Murphy and Eugene Mackey’s computer-driven Climatron, Glen Small’s Biomorphic Biosphere, and the Ant Farm Collective’s Dolphin Embassy of “inter-species dialogue”—feels eccentric and more adjacent to contemporaneous psychedelic science fiction and Back-to-the-Land movements of the time than to architecture degrees.

I will say, as a Gen X 50-something, it’s wonderful to see the ecology zeitgeist (that I readily recognize as the backdrop to my groovy, liberal elementary school days) showing up so proud, prescient, and germane at a MoMa exhibit.

My favorite piece was James Wines’ Highrise of Homes rendering which places detached suburban single family houses inside the steel-framed floors of a single building.

I also dug Phyllis Birkby’s Women’s Environmental Fantasies project, a feminist response to our male-designed built environment. Inspired by female consciousness raising sessions, this 1973 (obviously) piece features the un-scrolled sheets of butcher paper that Birkby rolled out, asking women to “imagine and draw their ideal living spaces, free of pragmatic constraints.”

My great, lifelong friend, Noah, who teaches the history and theory of urban design at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, recommended the exhibit to me; he wrote a comprehensive review of the show that’s as clear, thoughtful, and thorough as it is keenly critical.

3. I am obsessed with excising the Beatles from my social media feeds.

The algorithm keeps putting the Beatles in the mix, and I keep clicking remove. Then, prompted to pick a reason, I click: not relevant.

Just How many iterations of Beatles nostalgia sites can there possibly be? I’ve whittled it down to notifications from groups such as “GeorgeHarrisonLegacy.com,” “The Beatles Club 921” and “Abbey Road Tribute” who surface clips of things like middle-aged Paul McCartney jamming with an elderly Carl Perkins. And again: Remove! But they just keep coming.