I’m All Lost In, #142: All the President’s Men 50th-anniversary screening; Catherine, Matt, and David at Wimbledon; and selfies. Plus the Week in X>Y, music edition.
I’m All Lost In…
The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week
#142
The Week in X > (is greater than) Y (Music edition)
EdIT at Seattle’s Substation, 6/27/26
IlZCK at the controls while EdIT (right) looks on, 6/27/27
The Next DJ > The Previous DJ As the evening went on, my jaw kept dropping closer and closer to the floor. I was at the Substation, the experimental Seattle music venue where local electronic music collective Modular Seattle was hosting a DJ showcase last Saturday night. I’ve checked out previous Modular Seattle shows [I’m All Lost In, #135, 5/16/26] so it was no surprise that each artist on the bill at this default sound system clash was successfully upping the ante one after the other. First it was Vast Chains’ heavy industrial drones. Then it was Shoyei’s experimental dance tracks.
And it must be said: The third DJ of the evening, ILZXC, raised the standard exponentially. Going beyond the cool-polyrhythm + cool-sample formula of the first two beats experts, ILZXC (pronounced il-zick) took a hyper hands-on approach, “playing” his samples as if they were electromagnetic fields. Like a possessed theremin artist, ILZXC bent and shaped the catchy melodies into counter rhythms themselves, weaving them into the percussive attack of the beats.
The night’s headliner, EdIT of Glitch Mob fame, emerged from the audience during ILZXC’s set—probably as ILZXC was shapeshifting a Turkish melody into a disco hook—to take a closer look at the local DJ’s gear.
Challenge accepted, EdIT—who was up next—rose to the occasion with a heavier bag of beats and a richer assortment of colors, most notably his vocal diva samples. But it’s not a competition, they say. And upon reflection a day after the show, it struck me that ILZXC’s improvised serpentine grooves had a creativity, elegance, and energy that made EdIT’s admittedly grander set seem too polished perhaps.
But in the moment, DJ to DJ, the direction all night was jaw dropping.
11:30 pm sky after four DJs, Ballard, 6/27/26
Haydn > Beethoven Last May, I made a playlist: Every slow movement from Franz Joseph Haydn’s 16 string quartets. [I’m All Lost In, #135, 5/16/26.] This week I decided to do the same with the next great string quartet composer in the timeline, Beethoven. Unfortunately, despite being marked adagio, Beethoven’s slow movements cannot sit still.
Want a stately, tranquil mood decked out in sweet violins and lustrous cellos? Pick Haydn’s adagios. As for Beethoven’s supposedly slow sets: After being momentarily lulled, expect to be startled with violent violins and unnerving uptempo rhythms.
Artist’s Version > Songwriter’s Remake When Linda Ronstadt sings “I aint sayin’ you aint pretty” in her band’s debut Top-40 hit “Different Drum,” I’m a wreck. Especially when she repeats the line and all its gender hacking in the concluding verse over the chamber-pop cello:
It’s just that I am not in the market
For a boy who wants to love only me
Yes, and I ain't sayin' you ain't pretty All I'm saying's I'm not ready …. So, goodbye, I'll be leavin'
Ronstadt and her earnest, mid-’60s folk band the Stone Poneys scored with the song in 1967. There’s an earlier, 1966 recording by the Greenwich Village folk-scene band, the Greenbriar Boys; the tune was originally written by Monkees lead guitarist Michael Nesmith, but the Monkees rejected it.
Nesmith also recorded a chatty, country-skewed version in 1972. Neither the Greenbriar Boys nor songwriter Nesmith himself are able to do what Ronstadt does.
Linda Ronstadt with the Stone Poneys, 1967
This Week’s Obsessions
1) All the President’s Men, 50th-Anniversary Screening
2022, 2023, and 2024 were marked by a parade of Watergate 50-years-ago anniversaries. June 17, 2022 was the 50th anniversary of the break-in itself. October 20th 2023 was the 50th anniversary of the Saturday Night Massacre. And August 8, 2024 was the 50th anniversary of the evening President Nixon announced his resignation on national TV. “August was great.”
2026 marks the 50th anniversary of perhaps Watergate’s greatest artifact: Alan J. Pakula’s classic 1976 movie adaptation of the best-selling book about the scandal: All the President’s Men by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. In Pakula’s faithful, high-speed version, the all-star journalism duo are perfectly-cast WASP and Jew, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
ECB and I have joked for decades now that in our modern era most of Woodward and Bernstein’s shoe-leather reporting could be done online on a smart phone in a few hours. Nonetheless, Woodward and Bernstein’s sleuthing grind had me on the edge of my seat all over again as I watched the movie (probably for the hundredth time) at SIFF Center’s Grand Illusion pop-up screening this week. Erica joined me. As did fellow-1970s-D.C. kid and constitutional romantic, Valium Tom.
Giggling at our favorite lines—”I didn’t ask them about Watergate;” “If you guys could get Mitchell, that would be beautiful;” “I can’t tell if Colson works for Clawson or if Clawson works for Colson;” “We good?”—the three of us reveled in America’s principled heyday and its accompanying, inconclusive ‘70s malaise.
J.D. Vance recently scoffed about Watergate. He said the scandal would be “like a 12-hour news story” if it happened today and “the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” This was hardly the indictment of heroic Vietnam-era investigative journalism that Vance intended it to be. Vance’s elitist cynicism was an unwitting acknowledgment that the flood of corruption, naked lying, unconstitutional and criminal operations spewing from the Trump White House make Watergate look trivial by comparison.
After the movie, I stopped to get a veggie dog from a food cart outside Seattle Center. As the 20-something vendor grilled it up, she asked me what I’d been up to this evening.
Have you heard of Watergate?, I asked. She hadn’t. I filled her in and she said, Sounds a lot like today.
Yes and no.
2) Catherine, Matt, and David at Wimbledon
The Tennis Podcast, Catherine, Matt, and David, reporting from Wimbledon, 7/3/26
My Wimbledon prediction was this: Whoever won the Marta Kostyuk-versus-Emma Navarro third-round match Saturday (Kostyuk won) would go on to win the whole tournament. I’m sticking with that. But as Week One wraps up, it’s clear Osaka, Pegula, and Krejcikova are all in Olympian form as well .
I’m obsessed with Wimbledon. And I’m still rooting for my favorite, World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka; after winning her first three matches this week, Sabalenka’s playing Osaka in the final 16 tomorrow. As for Kostyuk, she now faces surprise success-story qualifier, Ashlyn Krueger.
Catherine & Matt, 7/3/26
But what I’m really obsessed with this week are my parasocial pals at The Tennis Podcast: Clever host Catherine; philosophical boy-genius Matt; and straight-man David. Every night when the last of the Wimbledon fans drift home, Catherine, Matt, and David set up shop at an impromptu desk on the media broadcast roof overlooking the tournament complex and record their hour-long show as the grounds down below tuck in for the night.
While Catherine’s hair billows in the dark summer evening, the boisterous trio review the days’ matches with their typical hoity British accents and drama: ”I really don’t know what to say,” Matt cries (Jane Austen-style) about World No. 7 Daniil Medvedev’s on-court implosion earlier that day. “He was. So bad.”
Matt’s dramatic reports often escalate into default snippets of poetry: “Do you trust history/or do you go with what your eyes are showing you?”
There’s also the relentless snark. Mostly from front-woman, Catherine. For example, after the admittedly grating World No. 31 Jelena Ostapenko mysteriously lost her Tesco sponsorship (a clunky sponsorship that the podcast had been spoofing all week anyway), Catherine concluded drolly: “Maybe they Googled her.”
I listen to their giddy wrap up every night as I go to bed. It’s a joy to settle in with people who are as obsessed with Wimbledon as I am.
And my Wimbledon obsession continues uninterrupted into the following day when I wake up early to watch the next round of matches, several well underway long before sunrise here in Seattle.
This Saturday, after watching a couple of those matches (Mertens beating Rybakina and Aela beating Swiatek), I put on my Wimbledon-white T-shirt for my own weekly 8am game with Valium Tom at Volunteer Park
In my Wimbledon white T-shirt, Volunteer Park, 7/4/26
3) Selfies
I’ve decided, while a glimpse of my younger self is still detectable in my contemporary face, it’s time to start chronicling my impending shift into old age. I’m going to take a daily selfie for the next decade.
So far I’ve photographed myself visiting the Seattle Art Museum, leaving the tennis court, and schlepping home in the evening among several other random moments from the past two weeks.
Ten years from now, I envision scrolling through these cellphone pictures for a time-lapse essay of my ascension into the AARP demographic.
CHAPTER ONE
Selfish? I asked Nicko as we looked at his reflection in the mirror.
Selfies, he corrected, gazing at his own bare chest where the word was written backward in smudged, red magic marker.
We were in the bathroom of Neal’s parent’s abandoned apartment.
Seconds earlier Nicko had called out Oh my god, come here, you’ve gotta see this. A bit nervous about what he may have found in the bathroom, I rushed across the hardwood floor in my socks, past the ironing board and a precarious tower of books in the otherwise sparse Upper West Side two-bedroom.
Standing on the black and white tiled floor, Nicko had lifted his white t-shirt to his neck. Look he said, pointing at his reflection in the mirror. Like the lettering of a desperate Help Me sign that a kidnap victim might write on an airport restaurant napkin, the warbly script ran across his pale chest framed by his messy shoulder-length brown hair and magazine clavicles.
I had only met Nicko earlier that night. He was a friend of my friend Neva. She had invited me to see Nicko’s band play in Brooklyn. They were called Sissy Jupe. The Selfies were evidently a much cooler band in the same scene. Nicko had written their name on the front of his t-shirt before the gig as eitehr a fan or an antagonist.
I guess the magic marker writing had bled through his shirt onto his skin during the performance as he sweated on stage behind his computer under the purple PARcan lights. Now he was gawking at himself in the mirror entranced by his own drama, especially by the fact that I thought he’d written the word Selfish.
What does that mean? he pondered, leaning back into the shower curtain so he had more room to pose.
“I'm in love with myself, myself, my beautiful selfish,” he sang to himself, parroting a cockney British accent. Hadn’t I seen that it said Selfies during the show? he asked coming out of his stage lights reverie and turning to me.
I guess I had, but I wasn’t putting two and two together three hours later. I was on the chemically sleepy side of three blueberry edibles. I was wondering what I was doing in Neal’s parents’ apartment now. Hadn’t they gotten divorced and moved out? And where was Neva?
How’d we get here? I asked.
Like to this point in the story or literally, how’d we get into the apartment? Nicko asked as he pulled his shirt back down over his stomach with a jig, baltering out of the bathroom, humming the melody to a song I didn’t know. His magic marker handiwork on the front of the t-shirt itself had reconfigured into a dripping red cloud.
I wasn’t as interested in the larger story as he was.
*I’m posting this opening excerpt from my unfinished novel Ball Kids as a protest against the poorly written novel I’m currently stuck reading, Beautiful Country (2016). It’s inexplicable to me that Harper Collins chose to publish such an artless book.