I’m All Lost In, #128: The movie of Dorian Gray; a delicious Egyptian meal; a delicious vegan snack; and this week in X > Y.
I’m All Lost In,..
the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.
#128
The week in X > (is greater than) Y
1) Walking in the Street > Walking on the Sidewalk Rats everywhere. They squeak and rustle in the shrubbery along the blocks that converge toward my apartment. I’ve noted some particularly notorious stretches on my walk home: the path under the canopy by the low-slung apartments on the south side of Mercer between 17th & 19th; next to the Safeway parking lot either heading north on 14th or east on John; the stretch of 15th just north beyond Pine St. where the rodents linger on both sides of the block; or on any non-arterial really, as the overgrown grass shrouds the skittering just beyond.
If it’s safe—and even when it’s not so safe—I’ve started drifting off the sidewalk and edging away from the bushes into the street where it’s less anxiety inducing to avoid cars than rats.
2) The Preview > The Movie Last month I saw a promising coming attraction for a new animated sci-fi movie called Arco. It looked lush and elegant. And exciting: Time travel. A.I. High-stakes pursuits.
This past Wednesday night, XDX set up the projector in her apartment, and we streamed it on the wall.
The movie was charming for a while. Artisan animation featuring: gentle robot servants and floating sleep nimbuses in hushed idyllic homes; automated street scenes of self-driving cars and e-scooters gliding past the shops of the future; and sylvan colonies atop fantastic infrastructure. This was the setting for Arco’s classic plot which starred a time-traveling lost boy from a distant-future ecotopia and a sullen and brainy girl who’s stuck in humanoid suburbia circa 2075. They collide at random and careen toward a tear in the sociopolitical continuum.
Too bad the movie itself—as opposed to the intriguing preview that hinted at philosophical tension—seemed more like a hijinks Saturday morning cartoon than a midnight movie.
3) -145 > +110 I asked Valium Tom to explain gambling odds to me; in addition to his literary brain power [I’m All Lost In, #123, 2/21/26], Valium Tom is an A math student.
Don’t worry, I’m not interested in gambling. But the Tennis Channel uses Las Vegas odds to tell you who’s favored in my beloved matches, and I haven’t been able to make any sense of it. For example, my favorite player Aryna Sabalenka was favored to beat Elena Rybakina in this week’s seismic women’s Miami Open semifinal -145 to +110. Huh? (Saby did end up winning convincingly in straight sets, setting up a final with Coco Gauff, which Saby also won big.)
An A.I. agent explained the odds this way:
-145 means that player is the favorite — you must risk more money to win a smaller profit. Positive odds, e.g., +110, mean that selection is the underdog — a smaller stake wins a larger profit.
I remained confused in part because the A.I. went on to say betting $145 only gets you $100 while betting $100 gets you $110. I couldn’t follow the lack of parallel construction; why did the winner’s -145 translate into betting a commensurate $145 while the underdog’s +110 translated into betting $100 not $110?
I’m not sure I’ve made sense of it yet, but I was able to find my own phrasing. Rather than framing things as what you win, frame them from the POV of the risk. You stand to lose $145 versus losing $100.
It’s been a week of confusing wording all around. I have to admit I had similar trouble parsing a statement I came across while reading the intro to a book of classical poetry: “The law is honored more in breach than in the observance,” the editor wrote, paraphrasing a famous Shakespeare line from Hamlet. I was taking the word “honored” literary, and so it took me a while to grasp the meaning: People break certain laws more often than they follow them. The additional implication is that it’s better for society when we breach certain laws.
I also had some trouble tracking one of the pivotal sound bites in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a book I returned to this week after my disappointing foray into Aria Aber’s novel Good Girl [I’m All Lost In, #126, 3/14/26.] Wilde’s quip-prone stand-in Lord Henry advises Dorian: “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
I understood the idea of curing the soul with the senses, but I didn’t follow the idea of curing the senses. Is there a problem with the senses? Eventually, I gleaned that if you view the senses as sources of depravity and the soul as a moral force, Wilde means “regulating” or “curbing” rather than “curing.”
The real source of confusion for me, though, is this: I don’t consider the senses as prompts for bad behavior. Nor do I consider the soul as a moral spirit. I’m hardly qualified for a battle of wits with Oscar Wilde, the pithy master of instant philosophy. But my credo would be: “Feed the soul with the senses. Feed the senses with the soul.”
This Week’s Obsessions
1) The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Movie Version, 1945
Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray, 1945
After delighting my soul and my senses with Wilde’s novel, I watched the 1945 Hollywood version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, a quiet and surprisingly arty MGM film of shadows, haunted music, and gothic scene setting written and directed by Albert Lewin. (A young Angela Lansbury has a major role in the movie too.)
It’s a spooky flick thanks to lead actor Hurd Hatfield’s friendly yet unrelenting flat-line delivery. And chilling eyes.
While the movie largely follows and quotes Wilde’s novel verbatim, there are some changes, including a significant one. Lewin adds a new character: Portrait artist Basil Hallward’s niece Gladys Hallward, Dorian’s love interest (played by Donna Reed.) This improvisation on Wilde’s fable enhances the plot because it adds more substance to Dorian’s psychological paroxysms. It also helps deliver a more dramatic wallop to the already-stunning finale when the devil completes Dorian’s bargain and transfers the monstrous and doomed soul within the painting’s frame into Dorian’s corporeal frame. Some 30 years later, the Exorcist would echo this scene with its own haunted climax when young priest Damien Karras summons Satan’s soul into his own.
There’s a second excellent dose of artistic license in this movie rendition as well. The music. Not only do we get to hear the tranquil sounds of Chopin and Beethoven conjured live on a charmed piano—something we only get to read about in the novel —but we also get to witness one of Dorian’s “curious concerts, in which mad gypsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave yellow-shawled Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes,” as Wilde puts is.
19th-century Orientalism and Lewin’s apparent fetishism for “exotic” music are cringe-worthy. But the jarring house concert scene that suddenly surrounds Gladys and Dorian’s dangerous courtship quietly captures Dorian’s growing disassociation and the emperor-has-no-clothes dynamic that exists between him and his intimidated acquaintances.
2) Au Beur
It was as ephemeral and unconcerned as an hour could be. Somewhere between 5:00 and 6:00 pm on a late Saturday afternoon. The perfect time for getting a table at Au Beur, the Egyptian-French pop-up that settled into Fisherman’s Terminal off W. Nickerson. Au Beur is slang for a North African resident of France.
Setting up shop at the worker-owned, locally-sourced Filipino Pidgin Collective restaurant, a refashioned brewery space in the vague North Interbay neighborhood, this one-time menu featured a bevy of North African dishes.
We went wild ordering three servings of pita bread, a plate of toasted Egyptian short-grain rice, and three bowls of classic Middle Eastern spreads: Harissa (red-chili paste) mixed with shredded carrots, mashed squash, and fig tapenade; hummus loaded with charred veggies, pine nuts, and za’atar; and the evening’s prize, toum (fluffy, creamy garlic sauce) with a heavy dollop of diced onion, sumac, and celery cream spooned into the center.
A spread of Egyptian-French spreads, 3/21/26.
Hummus with charred veggies, Au Beur pop-up, North Interbay, Seattle, 3/21/26
XDX also ordered the cardamom and caraway seed chocolate mousse for dessert.
3) Melt-In-Your-Mouth Vanilla and Carob Treat
Consider this a follow-up to my Vegan Ice Cream is better than Ice Cream Ice Cream item from a few weeks ago [I’m All Lost In, #124, 3/1/26.]
In other words, XDX isn’t the only treat fiend. In addition to digging into the mousse at Au Beur myself, I breached my no-sugar diet at home this week. I blame it on one month now of being booze free.
Couple that with yet another lengthy dentist appointment and I award snack of the week to my improvised dessert: Take an Alden’s dairy-free vanilla bean frozen chocolate-cookie sandwich, smash it down with a spoon into a short chilled glass, and sprinkle two heaping scoops of carob powder on top.
Wait for it to begin melting before serving.