The grind of twelve-or-so busy days has finally come down to a lull, and my normal downtime weekend involves cooking marginally-more-interesting breakfasts (egg AND cheese English muffin sandwiches!) while catching up on podcasts (nowadays going straight for Reply All or Radiolab if there are episodes, KQED’s California Report, NPR Politics then The Weeds in that order, Waking Up With Sam Harris, Filmspotting if I have recently watched the film being reviewed, and The Ezra Klein Show), walking down the street to the SF Public Library for free WiFi to catch up on my unread email newsletters (mostly Vox Sentences, Slate Star Codex, and a hodgepodge of urban newsletters like City Observatory, Strong Towns, SPUR, and Sidewalk Labs — I’m always looking for more and better so please share!) and my personal bookkeeping (just barely breaking even since the start of this year which is quite promising as it’s been entirely predicated on 35 hours of work per week, not counting personal projects; some interesting indicators I keep tabs on include: my personal wealth currently increasing $36.50 per day; my income spent on housing and H+T at a surprisingly unsurprising 46.23% and 51.11%; my average sleep at 7 hours per day; and my average consumption of beef, pork, chicken, and seafood meals down to 1.22, 1.61, 3.56, and 1.83 per week, with the remaining 12.78 being vegetarian), pushing onwards through my goal of 40 books this year (currently on my 14th), and spinning gleefully convoluted sentences like this one for my blog.
Last weekend I returned to Squaw Valley with a mix of Arcadia and Stanford friends and experienced the best skiing of my life with my very well-matched ski-buddy Paul Chen. It was also my first chance to try out my first pair of personally-owned skis, little 79cm skiboards that I have christened the Boboskis. My skis, boots, and snow gear fit entirely in a blue IKEA bag, which I was able to bring on the Caltrain to Stanford last Friday morning (to meet, coincidentally, with some Swedish acquaintances from the IKEA+Skanska venture Boklok), and the Boboskis totally delivered on the mountain in terms of maneuverability, although I lost them in deep snow a few times before optimizing the bindings, and I will definitely need to tune them up if I want to get anywhere near the speed of a normal skier. Most satisfyingly, I was finally able to break through the threshold of confidence and stamina to get down the steeper black diamond moguls at Squaw like The Shot, High Voltage, and Trail 90 (we didn’t have time for K-22), and even got some praise from people on the Silverado chairlift who probably rarely see idiots on short skis trying Squaw Backside on super fresh powder. Besides the incredible snow, Tahoe was once again a delightful getaway full of great cooking, great games, great antics, and great people.
My work weeks have gotten quite intense, with Stanford pushing forward with exciting new program and project opportunities while drowning me in bureaucratic cost disease, Nueva’s Advanced Architecture studio aka 131 East sprinting to its first competition submission for the Young Architects Competition Castle Resort project (work I’m very proud of), Stockton development work progressing well with the help of some excellent students, and my newest venture with Rob Best, a nonprofit company called City Systems (more on that in its own time). It’s about the time of year where I have to start planning ahead to summer, and I’ll be looking for an optimum size team of stellar students from Nueva and Stanford to work on exciting projects that I otherwise don’t have time to do during the academic year, as well as curriculum development for new Stanford courses that I’m excited about, like Methods in Urban Systems, and hopefully, Ethics in Urban Systems. All these weird individual pieces of my sporadic professional career, from design and engineering methods to urban systems to evidence-based planning to intellectual honesty, are starting to crystallize into a coherent narrative.
In terms of music, there hasn’t been much new recently, so I’ve just been listening to Flock of Dimes’ If You See Me, Say Yes and Jens Lekmans’ Life Will See You Now on repeat, discovering new layers and new favorite moments in every listen. On Wednesday night I went to see Jens Lekman at the Independent. I had impulsively purchased two tickets for the shower a few weeks back, assuming that at least one of my friends on my FB Music group would be interested in coming with me after my showering of praise for the album. Apparently, I need to reel back my enthusiasm, because nobody took the bait. And I couldn’t even sell my second ticket in front of the venue for a good 30 minutes, so I ended up heading in alone, in defeat, for the price of two tickets. But I suppose one of the greatest virtues we can exercise in life is forgiveness and grace in the face of one’s own failures, and it was easy in this case to do so, given how wonderfully delightful the concert was. Now for a more thorough review of this album (the release of which he joked was what Trump meant by “what happened in Sweden last night”): while I did not listen to Lekman before this album, so much of his persona and musical influence reminds me of Belle & Sebastien, especially the sound from Dear Catastrophe Waitress favorites like “If She Wants Me”. There is a specific genre of music in which Northern European bands inject old sounds like funk, disco, bossa nova, and calypso with a Nordic songwriting sensibility that I can best describe as painfully honest. There are some moments of searing prose that really need the delightful soundscape to soften: “Instead of talking about religion can we just talk about how it feels /To know your mission” from the opening track; “He puts the tumor on our table / Says, ‘So, this is what caused all my fears’” from “Evening Prayer”; and “I couldn’t really see / How I built a bomb shelter under every dream” from my current favorite, “Dandelion Seed”, which I was grateful for him to finish on with his delightful three bandmates, before he returned for an encore solo of an old song “Black Cab” dedicated to the memory of a friend he lost in the Oakland Ghost Ship fire. Lekman is fragile and endearing like Stuart Murdoch and infuses his belief in the power of storytelling and compassion into his art; I’m particularly inspired to learn about his Postcard project from 2015, where he committed to write one song a week for a year — much like my past attempts at 365 poems, and even this blogging project. I can’t wait to dive into his discography and follow him moving forward. My rating: 4.5/5
I also have to give an extra shout-out to Flock of Dimes which has continued to grow on me. I’ve already talked about the album a bit before, so I’ll just note that the songs “Given Electric Life” and “You, the Vatican” have joined the ranks of 6 out of 12 songs on the album I completely adore, and I expect that number to increase. Also, Jenn Wasner will be opening for Sylvan Esso August 22nd at the Fox Theater, and you can bet I already have tickets for that. My rating: 4.5/5
I have a lot of intellectual topics to write about but just haven’t had the time to get into the mindspace of it (I’ve even had to concede my morning Caltrain ride to catching an extra 40 minutes of sleep a few times this week), so I will continue to try to carve that time out in the next week. Suffice it to say that the political discourse I see on my feed, from both the right and the left, continues to be troubling, and my open call still stands for intelligent people to sift through the bullshit and realize that the most important thing we can do is find each other and work on developing an honest system of ethics. It’s been heartening to hear from a handful of acquaintances, old and new, who are telling me that this writing has been helpful, and I look forward to having great conversations with you.
In book news, the final book of the Three Body Problem trilogy, Death’s End, though falling short of the climactic heights of The Dark Forest, ventures to the end of frontiers with satisfying breadth. It has firmly beaten out the Ender universe as my favorite science fiction of all time, and I have been making that adamantly clear to half a dozen or so more people ever since I finished.
In movie news, Jordan Peele’s Get Out was a work of genius that I cannot describe in much detail for fear of spoiling it, which is simply to say, GET OUT AND WATCH IT. Yesterday, after a field trip with SUS students to Palo Alto City Hall and dinner, Kevin and I went to see the Oscar Nominated Live-Action Shorts at the Aquarius (my first time there since it was renovated; unfortunately the theater is not on Moviepass), a regular outing of mine (past excellent shorts like 2015’s Everything Will be OK (Alles Wird Gut) and 2014’s Boogaloo and Graham having made deep impressions on me). I enjoy watching the nominated shorts all at once because they paint a concisely insightful picture of our collective social and political consciousness; this year was an especially striking example of that, with excellent French entry Enemies Within (Ennemis intérieurs) and not-so-excellent Danish entry Silent Nights both tackling immigration and xenophobia directly, and the beautiful Hungarian entry Sing (Mindenki) evoking the spirit of justice and compassion with half the material but double the weight.
Derek Ouyang 