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.