I’m All Lost In, #147: Modular Seattle in the park; an IKEA success story; and “A Message to You Rudy.” Plus the Week in X>Y, including Style > Substance.
I’m All Lost In…
The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week
#147
The Week in X > (is Greater Than) Y
No Bagels in My Apartment > Bagels in My Apartment I don’t know if business is tanking at Rubinstein’s (I wouldn’t be surprised given how it seems like we’re in the prologue to Kristallnacht right now), but I did end up with five bags of free bagels from their 15th Ave. shop this week.
I was (the only one) eating lunch at Rubinstein’s on Monday at 1pm when one of the young workers approached me and asked: Excuse me sir, would you like some free bagels? Sure, but I didn’t envision she’d then hand over bag after bag of afternoon spoils. We were just going to throw them out, anyway, she explained.
It is not good to have easy access to bagels for breakfast, dinner, and snacking in your apartment. I’ve been feeling lethargic from the refined carbohydrate spikes all week. And several pounds heavier.
Maya Joint > Yuliia Starodubtseva and Sorana Cirstea, but Not Luidmila Samsonova My new favorite tennis player Maya Joint is now ranked World No. 75, one notch higher than she was last week— and more than 10 ranks higher than she was at the beginning of the summer when she’d hit a 365-day low at No.87.
Duly noted: She made it to the third round in Toronto this week, beating 2026 breakout player Yuliia Straodubsteva (best tennis name ever) and then beating Romanian Sorana Cirstea, a suddenly-surging vet; Cirstea is another personal favorite. The Toronto Open is a big deal, 1000-level tournament. Joint eventually lost to World No. 55 Luidmila Samsonova. But it’s the furthest Joint has gone in a tournament in eight months. The success is a bit of micro-symbolism for her slight change in fortune as she tries to get back to where she started 2026—ranked just outside the top 30 at world at 32 [I’m All Lost In, #114, 12/20/25.]
And though she fell short, the shape of the third-round match was also notable. Joint has been in the dispiriting habit of owning the first set with her backhand smashes and mirror shades, but then crashing out and losing the next two sets badly [I’m All Lost In, #146, 8/1/26]. This time, however, she lost the hotly contested first set and won the second in a clutch 7-6 (7-3) tiebreaker before losing in the third set in a closer back-and-forth than the 2-6 scoreline suggests.
In addition to finally going as far as the third round, pushing it to a three-sets match bests Joint’s only previous 2026 third-round appearance in mid-January. She lost that one immediately in two sets (2-6, 0-6) against fellow Gen Zer and top-ten star Mirra Andreeva.
Style > Substance It’s not that substance was lacking in indie filmmaker Adam Sekuler’s documentary The Flamingo, which screened at Northwest Film Forum on Wednesday night. I just wasn’t interested in the subject and went to the show reluctantly (thanks for the nudge Annie); the movie is about the life of a not-traditionally-sexy, 60-something female dom in the BDSM community.
Sekuler, the former program manager at Northwest Film Forum, is an immaculate moviemaker with a soulful touch. His artful opening shot in this unique doc—the camera lingering on a flamboyance of flamingos—was foreshadowing. Not of the storyline, but of the fact that every subsequent scene was equally sumptuous, captivating, and patiently filmed.
I ended up invested in this unlikely dom not because of her story, but because of Sekular’s reverent camera work, lyrical pacing, and emotional attention to detail during van-life phone-sex chats, banal back-porch hang outs, and sky-diving jumps. As with so many of the lush moments in Sekuler’s film, all of these scenes scripted knowing metaphors of daily life.
This Week’s Obsessions
1) Modular Seattle in the Park
Modular Seattle, Volunteer Park, 8/1/26
Modular Seattle, Volunteer Park, 8/1/26
Modular Seattle’s hypnotic bills are emerging as a regular on these weekly obsession lists, most recently after I went to one of their hot-wired salons at the Substation in late June [I’m All Lost In, #142, 7/4/26.]
This week they brought their synthesized beats and atmospherics to Volunteer Park. And once again, I was transported by the layered sine waves, skittering BPMs, and seance aesthetics.
The last DJ of the evening, Major Tim, was particularly good, delivering a grand finale that besmirched its legit dance-floor hook with an orchestration of glitches, counter-rhythms, and looping signals.
I haven’t been drinking alcohol this year [I’m All Lost In, #124, 3/1/26], but I did swallow an orange gummy for this evening of Saturday night synthetic fever.
2) An IKEA Nightstand/Cart (RÅGRUND) and IKEA Drawer Unit (LENNART)
I am not handy. TMI: But as a single male seeking single female, this inevitable fact makes me insecure.
Handiness aside, IKEA has always struck me as a place where divorces and breakups begin. At the least, IKEA assembly is stressful for me. Why do you always end up with at least one extra screw or wayward plastic bolt?
Thus, with two IKEA tasks to do for my pal XDX this week, I was feeling skittish. But voila, IKEA: There may have been some testy groans about the stripped female thread and an extra screw left over from putting together the meshed drawer unit, but by the second project—the rolling RÅGRUND bamboo bedside nightstand—I wasn’t only finishing the job with craftsman’s aplomb, I was feeling the meditative comfort of Phillips head screwdrivers, ribbed wedge dowels, and getting the aligned angles just right.
Assembly Assignment #2, Tuesday night, 8/4/16
Assembly Assignment #1, Sunday night, 8/2/26
3) 3 Songs on Piano
In the never-ending assignment of practicing my piano set [I’m All Lost In, #104, 10/12/25] and [I’m All Lost In, #143, 7/13/26,] this week I locked into a jam I’ve been playing since I first took up piano: the 1967 rocksteady single, “A Message to You Rudy” by Dandy Livingstone. Like me, you’re probably more familiar with the faithful 1979 cover version by the bi-racial British ska act, the Specials.
I was prompted to revisit this straightforward pogo-beat jam after tuning up another song in my set from Jamaica’s mid-1960s hit parade; a much trickier one thanks to all the blues chords: Desmond Dekker’s “007, Shanty Town” [I’m All Lost In, #135, 5/16/26.]
The path to “A Message to You, Rudy” went like this: Okay, now that I’ve got Desmond Dekker’s gorgeous inversions in hand let me make sure I’ve got another one of my set’s trickier tunes down: David Bowie’s “John, I’m Only Dancing.” Okay, delighted that I finally discovered the trick to playing the contrasting rhythms in the meta-avant-garde chorus to his 1972 post-Ziggy single (hold the A in the descending right hand for two beats as the left hand hits the octave-bouncing E twice), I wanted to make sure I could still pounce on the Specials basic pop beat. I could, and I’ve been playing it all week.
And oh, I forgot: There are some colorful chords in “A Message to You Rudy” as well, like the F second inversion up to the G-dominant seventh during the verse.