1.
My father liked to order egg foo young from cheap takeout joints with faded menus and bulletproof glass. God, how I shamed him when I was growing up. “That’s not real Chinese food, Dad.” Because I knew about mei fun and sticky rice and dim sum, I thought I was worldly. He would smile and nod as he tucked into his gnarly pork omelette soaked in Thanksgiving gravy. After he died, I ordered some egg foo young to remember him, and holy christ it was a joyful concoction of salt, fat, acid, and the rest of it.
My mother-in-law is a small but mighty Taiwanese woman with intense opinions about food. I was surprised to see egg foo young on the menu of one of her favorite spots, and I mentioned my father’s affection for it. “Let’s try it,” she said. After she’d eaten a fair amount of it, she said my father was a very smart man, and I like to think he’s looking on from wherever the dead are and saying, “I fucking told you.”
So this holiday season, give the people you love the greatest gift of all: righteous vindication.
2.
I once asked my students to define beauty. "Beauty is remembering the sad times without crying," said a fourteen-year-old girl who is wiser than I will ever be.
3.
A formative memory: six years old on a soccer field when the sky turned orange and green. The sound of something terrible filled the air, a cosmic revving that stopped us on the field, the ball forgotten, our little faces tilted up as we watched the clouds. I still remember the air, the sense of something being sucked out of the world before it returned in terrible form. Maybe it was just the barometer dropping, but this sensation is still with me when a summer storm gathers or the telephone rings with bad news.
Our parents argued on the sidelines about whether to take shelter in our cars or under the trees. But here comes my mom, racing across the field, scooping me into her arms—maybe scooping all of us because she was a hero that day, how she scooched us under a picnic table and lay on top of me, saying don’t worry, hunny bunny, it’s gonna be alright while a terrible engine crossed the sky and took the roof of a gazebo with it.
4.
In my Thursday Night Men's Book Club, we've been discussing whether suffering is required for transcendence or even plain old growth. It’s a hard problem. Tragedy did not make me more intelligent or bring me closer to faith. In fact, it made the transactional nature of religion repellent—as if I lost my parents because I did not pray enough or we were bad people.
A few years later, I came across a quote from Epictetus: Never say something is lost, only that it is returned. These words consoled me on an intellectual level (although I am very much not a stoic) but it would take several more years before I came to inhabit them. This transformation occurred so slowly that I only noticed it in the rearview mirror. Now I feel damned lucky to have been raised by such big-hearted people. This world owes me nothing and, while our time together was too short, most people don’t get even that.
5.
Like these thoughts on egg foo young and tornados, tonight’s broadcast is all over the map—but I’m increasingly fond of intensely personal playlists that ratfuck the algorithm. We kick off with a Breakfast Club anthem pitched down into Sisters of Mercy gloom, followed by a heavy slice of Detroit electro I bought in '95 and played to death, entranced by its bottomless growl. Years later, I heard this track on a compilation CD and realized it was meant to be played at 45rpm. This might be the godhead of my passion for slowing things down, and the ritual continues with a song from ’74 that reminds me of my parents’ kitchen and the big romance they had when they were young. Then comes a dub techno staple that sounds like a beautiful machine at 40% speed, which gives way to a Swans track I love. It came to mind after reading Adam Greenfield’s delightful piece about wanting to eat God while watching them perform—and I discovered “Leaving Meaning” degrades into a lovely ambient song if you fiddle with the equalizer and douse it in reverb. Then we head to heartbeat city, here we come.
- Simple Minds - Don’t You Forget About Me (38% slower)
The Breakfast Club | 1985 | More - Will Web - Spacewalk (30% slower)
Cosmic Driveby | Direct Beat, 1995 - The Hollies - The Air That I Breathe (20% slower)
Hollies | EMI, 1974 - Vladislav Delay - Huone (46% slower)
Multila | Chain Reaction, 2000 | Bandcamp - Swans - Leaving Meaning (20% slower)
Leaving Meaning | Mute, 2019 | Bandcamp - Pole - Hafen (40% slower)
2 | Kliff/Matador, 1999 | Bandcamp - Aphex Twin - #1 (Cliffs) (42% slower)
Selected Ambient Works II | Warp, 1994 | Bandcamp - The Cars - Jacki (31% slower)
Heartbeat City | Elektra, 1984
Thank you for listening.
