I’m All Lost In, #153: Rufus Wainwright’s Art Teacher; downtown Redmond’s art walk; and insomnia is political in Paris. Plus the Week in X>Y.
I’m All Lost In
the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week
#153
The Week in X > (is greater than) Y
Going into the Office > Not Going into the Office As a hardcore member of today’s telecommute generation, I’m chagrined to acknowledge it’s true what they say about workplace serendipity. Transitioning to a new three-days-a-week RTO policy, I found myself at the office this week working on a blog post for the agency about our operation and maintenance facilities. To get started I found a video we’d done a few years earlier about OMFs; it provided some good background. And one of the staffers they interviewed had phrasing I could use. An hour or so later, when I was walking across the campus plaza on the way to lunch, I crossed paths with a co-worker who was heading back into the building. It was the woman from the video. “Hey, you’re G—, right?” I said. “Are you still in the OMF division?” Soon enough, she was giving me invaluable updates and pointing me to a few excellent new sources.
I’m not saying I like being back in the office. I don’t. But I have been mysteriously less anxious than usual this week. Maybe being in the office instead of coffeeshops has lowered my caffeine quotient.
The U.S. Supreme Court in Reality > The U.S.-Supreme-Court Grotesque in the Progressive Imagination I wrote a version of this thesis back in February when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against Trump’s tariffs [I”m All Lost In, #123, 2/21/26.] I’m happy to repeat my pro-rule-of-law, pro-SCOTUS, pro-Article III-of the U.S. Constitution-POV again this week: On Monday, the Court struck down Trump’s attempt to restrict mail-in voting. To quote the New Yorker: “The Supreme Court saved the midterm elections.”
Less Art Hanging on the Wall > Lots of Art Hanging on the Wall This may be just an excuse to write about the wooden, 1972 Billie Jean King Autograph series tennis racket my friend Dave got me for my birthday; I finally transported it back from New York to Seattle earlier this week—carrying it with me on the plane rather than stowing it—to hang in my apartment.
10/14/26
Finding a spot for it (on the back wall above the window) made me realize just how cluttered my apartment walls are; I’ve got two oversize, framed movie posters, a framed local political placard, two framed 20” by 27” paintings, a huge cloth mural hanging behind my bed, a display of vinyl LPs nailed to the wall, and lots of smaller prints, including two new additions I transferred from Mom’s apartment in June after she died: A print of Picasso’s 1955 Don Quixote and a print of his 1937 Portrait of Dora Maar that conjure my childhood home.
In order to let the Billie Jean King racket breathe easier, I took down three small art-class-level, witchy snake drawings that have been hanging to the right of the window for years.
In order to get my entire apartment breathing easier, I’ll soon be purging more of the sketches, water colors, and pictures that are crowding my walls.
This Week’s Obsessions
1) Rufus Wainwright’s The Art Teacher
My great friend Lee, aka Gregor Samsa, has been singing this poignant Rufus Wainwright piano ballad at karaoke for years. I should say: This isn’t your standard minimalist, pop piano ballad from Radio Head or Olivia Rodrigo or Lorde with light power chords on the first and third beats. Wainwright openly channels Philip Glass’ grand arpeggio style; he also colors the undulating rhythm by occasionally landing on a weird augmented chord.
I’ve always dug Lee’s rendition of The Art Teacher. He pours his heart into it even more than he does with his chosen Karaoke balladeer and guardian angel, another queer icon, REM’s Michael Stipe.
Wainwright’s quasi musical-theater showstopper is sung from the POV of a middle-aged woman reminiscing about her school-girl crush on the art teacher.
He was not that much older than I was
He had taken our class to the Metropolitan Museum
He asked us what our favorite work of art was
But never could I tell him it was him
Oh, I wish I could tell him. Oh, I wish I could have told him
I looked at the Rubens and Rembrandts,
I liked the John Singer Sargents.
He told me he liked Turner
Never have I turned since then
No, never have I turned to any other man
Sweet. But then a turn to a Cheever or Updike. Or Rufus Wainwright, evidently!
All this having been said
I married an executive company head
All this having been done
A Turner - I own one
Here I am in this uniformish, pant-suit sort of thing
Thinking of the art teacher
I was just a girl then;
Never have I loved since then
No, never have I loved
Any other man
It’s the kind of song that will make you tear up behind your glasses when you listen to it on headphones at the coffeeshop. A Reddit commenter put it perfectly: “This song always slays me.”
Wainwright’s The Art Teacher reminds me of the stream-of-consciousness school-girl crush ballad from Hair, Frank Mills, which yearns with similar strains of a proper, Manhattan teenager innocently wrestling with newfound sexual desire. Also: both songs, awkwardly, don’t rhyme.
2) XDX at the Redmond Art Walk
Downtown Park, Redmond, 9/17/26
I’ve written about my friend XDX’s daring, exciting, and increasingly convincing foray into a new life as an artist before [I’m All Lost In, #136, 5/24/26.] I must confess that while I understand the communitarian alternatives that XDX’s interactive pieces symbolize with their hacks of mainstream tech culture, the physics of how her touch-design flowers and Strawberry-Alarm-Clock optical illusions actually work puzzle me. This is on me. I’m a C- STEM student. It bums me out because I’m sure the science itself echoes XDX’s metaphors in cool ways that would expand my understanding of her artistic conceits.
And so I was happy to see that when she debuted her first public art installation, “Generative Garden,” at the Downtown Redmond Art Walk this past Thursday evening, most of the people checking out the spinning Moiré pattern blossoms were marveling at the science of it all.
This makes sense. Redmond is tech central. These were Microsoft squares out on a crazy art-walk night trying to experience Bohemia. Who knew they were about to find they were on the same wave length as one of the artists?
As artistic as XDX is, science people are her tribe. I watched it happen again and again this Thursday evening in the Park: A curious art-walk goer would approach the installation, XDX would encouragingly prompt them to spin the flower as if it were a game-show wheel, and their faces would light up at the site of the analog, yet LSD-style animation. They were suddenly overtaken with a rush of math-kid glee and giddy inquiries.
Downtown Park, Redmond, 9/17/26
Downtown Park, Redmond, 9/17/26
3) The Dud Avocado
Yes, I wrote about this busy and breathless 1950s dispatch from the Left Bank last week: Elaine Dundy’s comedic 1958 Paris novel, The Dud Avocado [I’m All Lost In, #152, 9/16/26.] And I’m still obsessed.
Our discombobulated narrator Sally Jay is still springing from cafe to bar to jazz cabaret—landing in a “tart bar” in her pajamas at one point—all the while running circles around the vagabond intellectuals, boorish suitors, and even more boorish, the civic-minded, expat Harvard grads.
And she’s still dispensing her chaotic philosophy: “Tout simplement, in a tarts’ bar, I looked like a tart.”
The Dud Avocado’s perambulatory plot reminds me of another late-1950s city-centric novel, 1959’s Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes. Absolute. Beginners, with its flight pattern into London’s Windrush Generation and simpatico youth culture, may be my my favorite novel ever.
A superficial difference between the two chatty novels: MacInnes’ wiseacre narrator, a teenage freelance photographer on the scene in Notting Hill—a stand-in for Dundy’s Left Bank—fixes his rapid-fire wit on race and class politics. Dundy’s Sally Jay, though an on-point feminist, is more in the Edith Wharton tradition, shredding bourgeois manners and hypocrisy rather than overtly getting into the political news headlines as MacInnes does about Labor versus Tories and racists.
Certainly I adhere to the feminist notion that the personal is political. And Sally Jay’s universal accounts of things like reading in bed, losing her pencil (and trying unsuccessfully to make notes with an eyebrow pencil), and then being “too sleepy to read … but wide awake … having forgotten to eat supper … I was ravenous” are ultimately descriptions of the longing at the root of all politics.
One o’clock in the morning. This made me at once more hungry and more tired. The hunger won. I rolled up my pajamas legs, pinning them with the safety pins I found on a skirt…put on my raincoat and went out…At the corner of my street I could see the lights of the new nightclub…