Restaurant recommendation: Chengdu Taste in Alhambra. I haven’t had Chinese food this good since I was last in China, a decade ago. If you’re in greater LA, strong recommend checking it out. I was particularly delighted to once again have what their menu called “Garlic Arden Lettuce 蒜蓉A菜.” So green and bitter and garlicky-sweet and crunchy, the winning lottery ticket of leafy vegetables.

For a vegetarian like me, it doesn’t get better than good Chinese food. This meal reminded me of a James Beard quote: “In all the world there are only two really great cuisines: the Chinese and the French. China’s was created first, untold centuries ago, and is judged to be the greater-when executed by superb chefs. It is the most complicated cuisine; it uses ingredients no other employs; and it is distinctive in that, for the most part, it is cuisine à la minute.” (I don’t know the source; it’s the epigraph of Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo.)

My partner and I first got into the comedian Connor O’Malley through his serialized vertical videos about being a disturbed, chino-wearing superfan of would-be presidential candidate Howard Schultz (“because only the coffee guy can defeat the covfefe man”). He has since then put out dozens of conceptually bizarre YouTube videos (“Smoking 500 Cigarettes for 5G,” “Top 10 Wisconsin Dells Haunted Houses For Free Pulled Pork”) in which he really claims the lane of deranged physical comedy about millennial masculinity. So we were delighted to find that his new video, “Rap World,” might be his best yet. Upsetting, hilarious—and so sharp. Part Safdie brothers, part found footage / mockumentary / haunted fiction, and featuring some of the worst rapping you can imagine. Rating: must-watch.

(More than a few friends we’ve showed his stuff to just find it upsetting and not funny, so if you hate it, you were warned!)

Speaking of these vehicles that are so dangerous to pedestrians that they’re illegal on the entire continent of Europe, a recent 404 Media report on the vandalism and mockery being reported on a Cybertruck owners’ forum included one owner’s recording of his Cybertruck being flipped off by a man driving a budget sedan. Under that video, another Cybertruck owner commented this gem:

I am baffled at how any male can have that much audacity while driving a Ford Fiesta. Dude probably sits when he needs to take a piss

It’s almost like some people get their confidence from other places, right? (I might be deluded, though, as a proud Ford Fiesta driver myself…)

Now, for something completely different! The NBA season is winding towards the playoffs, and my Warriors are on a six-game win streak. They traded for Jimmy Butler a month ago, and the vibes, as they say, are good.

Despite this, most people still think that last year’s champs, the Boston Celtics, are a better team. Maybe they are. But they play a style of basketball on offense that I find deeply unpleasant—almost the inverse of the joyous improvisation of the Warriors. So I was so delighted by this sick burn from the writer John Saward:

The Celtics, a kind of perverse, analytics-defiled basketball project joylessly hunting 3-pointers with the cold determination of a hedge fund manager…

The rest of the piece, about the surging Detroit Pistons and the idea of “momentum” in sports, is also excellent. (I’ve been really enjoying my subscription to Flaming Hydra, the daily newsletter it was published in.)

I’ve avoided politics for many posts, but these days being what they are, I can’t make it any further. This week I’m finding the extrajudicial abduction of American permanent resident and father-to-be Mahmoud Kahlil to be a very bad sign of where things are going.

It’s also the week when California’s governor, the Democrat Gavin Newsom, decided to soft-launch his 2024 presidential campaign by starting a new podcast and using the first episode to identify the true threat to American freedom: underage trans girls competing in sports. I just want to register how sick this makes me feel. As you’re reading this, roughly 50% of trans and nonbinary teens have “seriously considered attempting suicide” in the last year. Meanwhile here’s one of the most powerful people in the country, a cis-man, and he’s going to use his platform to amplify some invented panic about a high school triple jumper. What a creep. What an evil cretin.

Beyond indignation, I do have one insight to offer here: remember November when there was a minor obsession among liberals with finding “the liberal Joe Rogan”? The timing is too obvious for this not to be true—Newsom thinks that that’s him. He’ll be the one to do it. By selling out trans people. What a loser.

If you’re in LA, you really should go see “The Spiral Universe,” a solo show of artworks by Madam X that just opened at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz. (It closes April 19.) The show has many intricate, mandala-like paintings, textiles, and sculptures by this visionary outsider artist, who spent decades in near-total obscurity until last year’s “Circumnavigating the Sphere of Time” at Space Ten Gallery (a show organized by friend-of-Lightplay Axel Wilhite). That initial show resulted in a beautiful catalog, which I’m delighted to have a copy of. This latest show, which runs through April 19, lacks a catalog, but it has its own magic, partly stemming from the setting. Madam X’s alternately metaphysical and satirical works are presented in the occult complex of the Philosophical Research Society, a strange space built by the prolific magical-tract-writer Manly P. Hall. I plan to eventually write more about Madam X’s work in this space (here’s a blog post I wrote after her previous show went up). For now I heartily recommend seizing the chance to see her work in person.

My dear friend Abraham Cohen has been pursuing music as his primary art form for at least as long as I’ve been pursuing writing. They have cultivated a fantastic talent. Yet till now, he’s never recorded an album or EP or anything. That’s hopefully going to change, this May. Abraham’s band Queer Country has studio time lined up with Oz Fritz (producer of Tom Waits’s Alice and Mule Variations, among many, many others), and they’re intending to professionally cut at least four tracks.

Right now Queer Country is running an online fundraiser for the many costs that will go into this endeavor. If you can spare some money, I think it’s a worthy project to support. Donate here.

(Also check out this cool bios page on the Queer Country website (which I host!))

Did you know that mussels reproduce via broadcast spawning? That on one lucky day, all the mussels just send their eggs and sperm out into the world? I have been thinking about this video on at least a weekly basis ever since I saw it:

In high school some of my friends became obsessed with banana slug sex (look up at your own peril). I never really got into it, though. But then I found out about mussel spawning, and now I’m obsessed. It makes me want to take up a daily tidepooling practice, just so I could be there on the wild day when this happens.

I have learned what a rat king is and now must tell you that “the strange expression ‘rat king’ is traditionally applied to a rare phenomenon—a group of rats whose tails are tied together.” This definition comes from the article “Rat kings in Estonia” which includes this as its Figure 1:

Here’s the story behind this remarkable (is that the right word?) specimen:

On 16 January 2005 farmer Rein Kõiv discovered a huddle of squeaking rats on the sandy floor of his shed in Saru village, Mıniste parish, Vıru county, Estonia. The animals were unable to escape, and the farmerís son killed them with a stick. After that a cluster of 16 rats were excavated from the frozen sand. Their tails were tangled in a knot that contained frozen sand. At the time of discovery only about 9 of the rats were alive. Obviously the animals tried to dig themselves out of the narrow tunnel, and the first rats buried the last ones under the sand. The crater in the sandy floor could still be seen even two months later.

The farmer knew nothing about rat kings. Nevertheless, the find seemed curious and he put the rats on a pile of planks where neighbours and chance visitors could observe them. It was only about two months later that Mr. Evar Saar, a relative of the farmer’s wife and a local reporter, ran across the animals and asked zoologists for comments. After that an avalanche of reports followed in Estonian journals and newspapers, and on the radio and television.

I can’t say I recommend reading the Wikipedia page for Rat king. It has all these upsetting passages where the term rat king is used as if it were a discrete thing that is either “alive” or “dead” rather than a collective made up of discrete beings. For instance:

On 20 October 2021, a live rat king of 13 rats was found in Põlvamaa, Estonia. The rat king was taken to Tartu University and euthanized due to the rats having no way of freeing themselves. Before that, scientists were able to film the rat king alive.

This term/phenomenon struck some extra fear into me because as soon as I read it, I half-remembered using the phrase “rat king moves” in one of my stories, to describe a character’s climbing a fence. Reader, I had not meant this kind of rat king. I just meant, you know, in the manner of the king of the rats!

I just went back and checked the story, and I’m happy to report that the term I used was slightly, crucially, different.

I climb three-quarters up the chain-link, king rat moves, but then I grab some barbed wire by the barb. Bleeding, cold, I clink back down. Suck on my palm.

Today’s installment of Chartbook is vital reading for anyone who cares about schools and universities. He starts with the term scholasticide and goes into current instances in Sudan and, on an exponentially more intense level, in Israel. The details are riveting and painful—and also insightful, placing these actions in the context of precious genocides:

As in other cases of scholasticide, this is not just frenzied looting or vandalism in the heat of conflict; we can see pleasure taken in the burning of the enemy’s books and libraries, because the political, cultural value is recognized. In one social media clip, an IDFsoldier standing in the rubble of al-Azhar University says, “To those who say why there is no education in Gaza, we bombed them… Oh, too bad, you’ll not be engineers anymore.” Israeli forces used over 300 mines to destroy the huge al-Israa University, near Gaza City, last January, having first used the building as a military base in the war’s first months.

Tooze draws attention to this interview with Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina, the vice president of al-Israa University. Here’s a selection from the larger quotation:

So many mosques, hundreds of mosques, hundreds of schools. Every single university was hit somehow. Some of them partially damaged, some of them totally destroyed. Schools are all mostly gone. Mosques, hospitals, medical centers. Even, like I said, libraries, the oldest library — Gaza City Library — also was destroyed. I don’t know, what else can you explain [about] this? It is what it is. It is a destruction of everything Palestinian. They want to make Gaza unlivable and they want to destroy its history.

One can know this is happening and still be shocked to remember, to notice again, to grapple again with the immensity of the destruction, the violence, the erasure. Even as we confront attempts to dismantle the state here in the U.S., it’s our tax dollars (under the previous regime) that have bought so many of these bombs.

Most of all, I think this provides another way into understanding and resisting the genocidal actions of Israel. As Tooze puts it,

Folks outside the conflict who have professional attachments to Universities and education have every reason to be horrified and to protest.

Today while researching the 1960s-era Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, I encountered the work of the photographer Danny Lyons, who embedded with them for a chunk of the 1960s. He’s still active on Instagram. I started scrolling his page and found his stridency on a bunch of issues (Jimmy Carter, fascism, the fires in Altadena) notably eloquent and unashamed.

This post and picture particularly stopped me short. I don’t necessarily agree with Lyons, but I think this bitter paragraph captures a deep rage that crosses a lot of our self-spiting nation today:

FREE LUIGI. Link in bio:Heroic Corporate assassin surrenders. McDonalds customer rats him out. The Russian Revolution was proceeded by waves of assassinations of the instruments of the Czar. Our young hero’s target was corporate greed. Greed, a deadly sin, is destroying our country and destroying Mother Earth. Malcolm said “The Ballot or the Bullet”. The ballot has failed us for decades. The gap in income is unprecedented and off the charts. A clerk at my Walgreens just said, “Why do they want so much money? When they die they will all burn in hell”. Good idea. The picture is from I Like to Eat Right on the Dirt.

I found this copy of The King of the Golden River, or The Black Brothers by John Ruskin in my stepdad’s workshop. Written in 1841; this edition printed in 1889. A handsome, battered old book.

The story concerns three brothers—the elder two pure evil, the youngest with a heart of gold—who find their fates through several encounters with fairies. It’s short, beautifully written, with all the pleasures of a fable where each character gets his just deserts. (There are no female characters.)

I happen to be reading Little, Big by John Crowley right now, a book from 1981 with a similar emphasis on the little folk. The two books even nearly share a character—Crowley has Brother North-Wind while Ruskin has Southwest Wind, Esquire. Coming across source material is always interesting. I will say that Ruskin’s fairies—there are just two in the story—are strange and eerie in a way not always matched by Crowley’s much more multitudinous but also more mysterious and evasive fairies.

The strangeness of the story is enhanced by the artifact quality of the book. Look at the marriage of engravings and typesetting, and the now-ancient repairs.

This edition belonged to my step-grandma, Pat, who passed away in 2022. She was given it by her own grandma’s boyfriend, in 1945, about nine months before the end of the Second World War. At the time, this edition was already 46 YEAR OLD, as someone helpfully noted on the frontispiece. It is now 128 years old.

And it has a peculiar ADVERTISEMENT before the text. Ruskin wrote this for a 12-year-old Effie Gray, who he later married when she was 19. (He was 21 when he wrote this book for her.) This seems bad but is slightly complicated by the fact that when they divorced both parties insisted they had never consummated the marriage—he had refused her. He went on to be perhaps the most famous art critic in English language history. She went on to be one of the greatest pre-Raphaelite models, as well as a writer herself.

Tomorrow I’m posting the first installment of a new project—a short daily podcast called You Know What’s Good? I don’t know what it will be. Good? I hope so.

I’ve recorded a week’s worth of episodes so far. (I’m releasing them on a one-week delay.) The daily labor—five minutes or so—feels sustainable. But will it be?

Will it be a brief experiment? A year-long adventure? Something more? I have no idea. And I don’t know if anyone will like it. From my end, so far it’s turning out to be intimate, unpolished, fun, funky.