1. A couple of Saturdays ago, our 4-year-old lost his backpack on a bus. The next day, he and I went to pick it up from the lost & found at CTA’s North Park Garage.

   

   Now, this isn’t what I would’ve planned for my Sunday, but it was great for him to see a bus garage, with lots of bus drivers hanging around in the building—it’s always good to see more of how things work. And this was a nice echo of a picture book we’ve read for a long time.

   

2. The bus garage was half a mile away from Kabobi, our favorite Persian restaurant in Chicago (or anywhere). We ordered takeout, and that was everyone’s dinner. We’ve had trouble trying new things at Kabobi because we simply have to get the lamb koubideh (ground lamb kabob) every time, and the portions are so generous. This time, we were able to get kashkeh bodemjan (eggplant dip with fermented whey) which was great.
   
   Persian restaurants like Kabobi and Noon-O-Kabob have long been hubs of the Iranian community. We are weeks into a war with Iran that we did not ask for and do not approve of. If you’ve never had Persian1 food, I highly recommend trying it as a way to experience one wonderful aspect of Iranian culture.

3. Here’s a provocative essay by the Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë, with the subtitle “For all the promise and dangers of AI, computers plainly can’t think. To think is to resist – something no machine does”. I agree more than you might think.

The extent to which we regard something as behaving in an intelligent manner is determined as much by our own state of mind and training as by the properties of the object under consideration.

—Alan Turing, “Intelligent Machinery” (1948)

It’s been 10 years since AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, one of the strongest (human) go players of all time. That was one of the first big public demonstrations of the power of deep learning—an early phase in the ongoing AI boom2. It may also end up being the last dramatic moment in the long history of people trying to get computers to play games3.

Alan Turing, the pioneer of computer science and artificial intelligence, thought games were a good place to demonstrate a computer’s intelligence4. He even developed what may be the first computer chess program. This is the thread that leads directly to Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov in 1997, the other famous human-computer contest5.

Here’s what I’ll tell you about instead: in the early 2010s, just before AlphaGo, computer shogi programs started defeating top-level human players. This is barely known outside of Japan, but it was a big deal there. I watched some of the game videos in real time, and closely followed the Twitter discussions on what it all meant6.

I find that this episode informs my view of what happens when computers surpass humans at something we thought was uniquely human.

What is shogi?

Shogi is Japanese chess, and I mean that pretty literally. You may know that chess is a game that developed from an ancient Indian game called chaturanga. Shogi is another descendant of chaturanga.

There are many commonalities. It’s a 2-player game on a square board, with the objective of capturing the opposing king. Each side has a row of pawns, there are bishops and rooks, and so on.

There are also many small differences, like the board being 9-by-9 instead of 8-by-8, and how every piece in shogi (except the king) can get promoted to a stronger piece.

But most importantly, when you capture a piece in shogi, you hold on to it, and later in the game, you can spend a move to place it back on the board anywhere as your own piece—chess players might recognize this rule as being similar to a chess variant called crazyhouse.

This last rule often allows for a long sequence of checks7 that leads to a checkmate, and shogi puzzles usually require the attacker to find such a sequence, where every move directly threatens the king. Strong shogi players are capable of finding these sequences very quickly8.

It pains me to say this as someone who prefers the game of go, but shogi is by far the most popular traditional board game in Japan. If you talk to a random person in Japan, they’re much more likely to know the rules of shogi than the rules of go.

How do you become a shogi professional?

Before going into how computers beat human shogi professionals, it’s important to talk about how professional shogi players are not normal people9.

In order to become a professional shogi player, you first need to enter Shōreikai (奨励会10), which is the apprentice school with the Japanese Shogi Association, before you turn 19.

But wait, before you can apply for Shōreikai, you need a recommendation from a professional, who is agreeing to take you under their wing as a disciple. So what you really need to have done is to play at local clubs and do well in tournaments when you’re in grade school. And if you’re serious about shogi, you can get connected to a pro who can help you through this process.

Entering Shōreikai involves a test, where you play fellow applicants as well as people who are already in Shōreikai. Because they are so selective, even the weakest Shōreikai players are already very strong amateurs11. Oh, and there’s only two locations for Shōreikai—Tokyo and Osaka—so you may have to move.

Once you enter Shōreikai, you play in league games against fellow Shōreikai members. If you do well in the league games, you rank up. Depending on how strong you are when you enter Shōreikai, you may need to rank up 9 times, before you can finally become a professional shogi player. Only 10-20% of people who enter Shōreikai become pros in the end.

If you are exceptionally strong, you can get through all this as a teenager. However, many players go well into their 20s, trying to become pros. Since there are age limits—you need to reach 1-dan by age 21, and become pro by age 26—most players consider Shōreikai to be a full-time endeavor, and they rarely go to college.

Imagine the pain of missing becoming pro at age 25, having put your life into this game.

Imagine the feeling of overcoming these odds to become a professional, a select group of 300-odd people in the 100-odd-year history of the Shogi Association.

What happened at Denō-sen

Around 2010, computer shogi programs got good enough that the pros started taking seriously the possibility that computers would surpass them in the near future. This led to a series of human-computer matches that ran from 2011 to 2017, called Denō-sen (電王戦), which means something like “Electronic King Match”12.

One aspect that made Denō-sen different from Deep Blue and AlphaGo matches was that from 2013 to 2015, Denō-sen was a 5-game series between 5 different professionals and 5 different shogi programs. If you include the developers—and you should—that’s at least 10 different personalities involved every year13.

In 2013 and 2014, computers won the 5-game series against teams of pros who were mostly not near the top level. 2015 was when the pros got serious, with a lineup of strong young players who were familiar with computer shogi, and who were expected to win some top-level tournaments in the future14. This series was also the most dramatic.

Game 1 between Shintarō Saitō and Apery was a fascinating study in game etiquette.

In a game like shogi, the rules are easy to write down, but in human play, there are certain conventions. Playing on when it’s obvious that you have no chance of coming back is often considered bad form—you’re wasting everyone’s time, and might even be insulting your opponent’s abilities.

But how do you program that into a computer? In games between two computer shogi programs, it was often seen as desirable, even beautiful, that each program would simply play the move that it considers best, and let the chips fall where they may.

At Denō-sen, developers were given the ability to resign on behalf of their programs. In this particular game, Apery’s developer talked to Saitō beforehand, to let him know that he would not be resigning and his program would continue playing until the end—he thought that was the most computer-like way for the game to go. And this became reality, as Apery played a sequence of desperate checks before Saitō finished off the game with a checkmate.

Even though Saitō himself was fine with the situation, many shogi fans saw the program’s play as disrespectful.

In game 2, the professional, Takuya Nagase, was ahead in his game against Selene, when he intentionally played a move that did not promote his bishop when he could have. Computer shogi programs have a feature that allows them to think about possible next moves when the opponent is thinking—much like a human player would. Nagase knew that Selene would have expected him to promote the bishop, and would have been thinking about the followups. By not promoting the bishop, he was making Selene’s (inflexible) analysis obsolete.

He was hoping for Selene to spend more time thinking. What actually happened was that this revealed a bug in Selene, which played an illegal move and lost.

So the pros were up 2-0. But in games 3 and 4, the computers won convincingly, and it was down to Chikara Akutsu and AWAKE in game 5 to decide the winner of the series.

Akutsu was under immense pressure to win the series at all costs. What he did was to direct the game into a known trick play, where a computer loses its bishop, but only after a long sequence of moves—which makes it harder to detect for the computer.

After only 21 moves, once the trick was in place, AWAKE’s developer resigned the game. He was a former Shōreikai member who could not become a professional, and his main interest in building AWAKE was to help professionals get stronger. For him, the trick play made this game pointless.

In the end, the pros won the 2015 series 3-2, but 2 of the wins involved specific anti-computer tactics. To an objective observer, the eventual outcome here was obvious. Denō-sen continued in 2016 and 2017 in a new format, but the humans could not win another game, and the series was discontinued.

What’s the point of playing now?

As in chess before and go later, people worried that the computer becoming stronger than the top humans would make people lose interest in shogi. This has not been the case for any of these games.

People still enjoy playing, and they enjoy watching the best humans play against each other. Yes, human professionals’ egos may have been badly bruised, but they are still highly respected for being the best humans at what they do.

One thing we discovered about these games is that computer programs may be able to figure out “the best possible move” in a given position, but it’s your best move only if you can figure out the correct followup to every response—something not even the best human players can always do. On the flip side, some moves are suboptimal according to the computer but still very difficult to answer for a human opponent.

In short, there will always be drama in a game between two humans.

The strongest shogi player right now is Sōta Fujii, who turned pro in 2016 at the age of 14, exactly when Denō-sen was happening, and he has made no secret of studying with the help of computer programs. In 2023, he held all 8 of the major professional titles, leading to a surge in interest for shogi. He is undoubtedly stronger because of computers, which everyone knows are stronger than him, but this does not seem to have dimmed his popularity.

What about the idea that games were a good demonstration of a computer’s intelligence?

We now know that these games are some of the easiest things for computers to learn. Rules are fixed, and results are well-defined. Much of life, where people don’t even think to mention “intelligence”, does not work like that15.

People no longer talk about these games as pinnacles of human intelligence, and they’ve almost forgotten that that’s how people used to talk. Partly, that’s self-preservation. We don’t want to confront that computers are better than humans at something we thought was central to human intelligence. But partly, we also learned the truth, which is that these games were not central to human intelligence.

We will keep moving the goalposts, and sometimes, we will be right to do so.

What I’m listening to now

Fabiano do Nascimento is a prolific Brazilian guitarist, and here’s his album Vila.

Do Nascimento16 comes from the Brazilian classical guitar tradition, but his recordings are very genre-fluid. He usually lives somewhere in between jazz, classical, and ambient music. For this record, he collaborated with Brazilian trombonist Vittor Santos and his orchestra.

The strings are very prominent, but used differently. Songs like “O Tempo (Foi O Meu Mestre)” and “Spring Theme” have a strong bossa nova feel, while “Valsa” is a contemplative “waltz” that honestly doesn’t seem great to dance to.

The trombone in “Tema Em Harmônicos” is wonderful.

This is good focus music, perhaps for playing shogi.

1. Chicago Restaurant Week happened a few weeks ago. It’s mostly an excuse to go to steakhouses—relatively cheaply—and restaurants that we’ve been meaning to go for years. Trino (Mexican) and Hawksmoor (British) were very good, very different steakhouses. Galit (Middle Eastern) was the best meal we’ve had in quite some time. We got delivery from them a few times during the pandemic, but the falafel fresh out of their kitchen is far, far superior to what we were getting then.

2. Following up on my previous post about poetry, here’s an essay called “They Forgot to Sing”, which is a review of the book Poetry as Enchantment by Dana Gioia1. The book does sound interesting—it’s about how poetry has become less relevant to the broader culture by abandoning things that worked in the past. I feel vindicated in focusing on musical qualities of the poetry I’ve been reading.

One kitchen gadget that’s very common in Japan but not in the US is an electric griddle. I found some online polls2 that said a majority of Japanese people own one. My family didn’t have one when I was a child, but I did see relatives whip them out to make something right on the table.

The Japanese call it a “hot plate” (hotto purēto).

The photo above was taken at Gangnam Market in West Town, and I’m guessing most decent-sized Asian supermarket would carry something similar.

Of course, I’m talking about this because we recently got one, and we’ve been happy with what we can make with it. We like the communal aspect of tabletop cooking, and how easy it is for the kids to watch the cooking process. We also think they can participate in the cooking more easily, when they’re old enough.

Japanese staples

One of the first things we made on the griddle was gyoza (potstickers). When you try to make a lot of gyoza on the stove, you end up going through many batches because you’re limited by the size of your pan. On the griddle, you can easily cook dozens of dumplings at once.

You can buy frozen gyoza at grocery stores, or make them from scratch. Making them from scratch is a fun group activity—I like the basic recipe from sirogohan.com as a way to get started (The recipe is in Japanese, but your computer should be able to translate it pretty well). We have done gyoza parties already3, and those should only get better when the kids are old enough to do some wrapping.

For the sheer amount of food on the griddle, the current record must be yakisoba, or stir-fried Chinese-style noodles.

Even cooking 2 servings of yakisoba on the stove can be a challenge, so a griddle is almost a necessity if you want to cook it for a family.

The other big one is okonomiyaki. We haven’t made it yet, but we did buy an okonomiyaki mix during our last Mitsuwa run.

With Julie’s family being in Osaka, I’ve been spending a lot more time in Osaka over the past decade. Okonomiyaki is one of the iconic Osaka dishes, and many Osaka families would cook it at home on their griddles. It does feel like something I should get into, if only to feel more like an Osaka person.

The okonomiyaki chain that we usually go to when we’re in Osaka, Fugetsu, was involved in creating the mix that we bought. So we know what the end result should look and taste like—we’ll see how it goes.

Breakfast food

Really, you can use the griddle for anything that restaurants make when they have a big flat-top griddle. That includes a big portion of the standard diner breakfast repertoire.

Again, the griddle makes it so much easier to cook a lot of stuff at once, like multiple pancakes.

French toast has been a hit with the 4-year-old, and you can even cook some bacon or sausage alongside. You can do egg dishes, too.

I’ve long thought that most generic brunch places are highly overrated in terms of food quality4. Even if your main goal is to socialize, why not gather at your home and cook breakfast dishes together instead?

Other ideas

Since we got the griddle, I think we’ve used it more than once a week. The most common use case, actually, is warming up tortillas—picture taco joints and their griddles. Warming them up on the stove can be a huge pain, and don’t tell me the microwave is fine because it’s not.

I do want to lean in a bit more in this direction and make quesadillas, cook taco meats on the griddle, etc.

Korean BBQ is something else we want to try at home. You can get nice marinated meats from an Asian grocery, and it’s another great communal eating experience.

Do you have a griddle at home? Or any other tabletop cooking equipment? If you have one, what do you use it for?

What I’m listening to now

Here's a new album from Shintaro Sakamoto, called Yoo-Hoo (ヤッホー/Yahhō in Japanese).

Sakamoto was the singer for the band Yura Yura Teikoku, whom I talked about 3 years ago. Musically, he’s always at least a little bit psychedelic, and often old-timey at the same time. Lyrically, he’s wry, and often singing from inside a vaguely unsettling scenario.

The first song, “おじいさんへ (Dear Grandpa)”, is the best song, with all those characteristics. The song takes place in an unspecified emergency, and he tells an old man to rest somewhere safe, because he’ll take care of the situation—whatever that could mean.

The seventh song, “麻痺 (Numb)”, is another standout. This is a horn-based funk song with some 80s Talking Heads feel, and he sings about being numb, both physically and mentally, and about wanting to feel more.

1. In the first week of the year, our 1-year-old got sick. In the second week, Julie and I got sick. In the third week, our 3-year-old started coughing but did not get too sick, and now in the fourth week, the 1-year-old gave us a scare with high temperatures one night but he might be OK—we’ll see.

2. Federal immigration agencies are still in the news1. In a convergence of two of my recent posts, Thalia Hall held a public meeting on whether the Chicago Police Department helped ICE in their operations in the city.

3. The Monks in the Casino by Derek Thompson pulls together many strands to talk about how so many young American men have failed to find lives with true joy, which comes from connecting with others.

Last November, before issuing a ruling to restrict the use of force by federal immigration agents, US District Judge Sara Ellis read Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago”.

The context: Trump administration’s justification for its Operation Midway Blitz in the Chicago area was that we are supposedly overrun with immigrants who should not be in the country and are committing crimes, and that the operation would target such dangerous people. When people started showing up to protest or to observe and witness the agents’ activities, the administration began to paint the area as full of rioters, who are forcing agents to use tear gas and pepper balls. The judge clearly saw all that as bullshit.

The Sandburg poem—if you’re not familiar with it, please read it here—is from 1914, and full of anachronisms. For one thing, Chicago hasn’t been “Hog Butcher for the World” for more than 50 years. But Chicagoans still have pride for their city and disdain for outsiders who put it down:

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them

Whatever you may think of a judge reciting poetry, I found it remarkable that a poem from 111 years ago crystallizes how so many people feel right now.

This was one of many events and circumstances that converged on me in the last few years, making me read more poetry in the past year than all the years before that in my life.

There are some art forms that you’re naturally drawn to, and others you’re not. You all know that for me, food and music fall in the former category, and you might know that television and film fall in the latter. Poetry is another one that is not a natural fit for me—you may have known this from my writing style, too2.

I do think there’s value in specializing, digging deeper into things that you have deeper feelings for. But it’s a loss to completely close yourself off from a whole art form—there are things songs can do that novels can’t do, things poems can do that movies can’t do, etc. So I had been keeping my mind open for poetry, even if I wasn’t seeking it out.

Here are some more of my encounters with poetry.

Last year, I came across an online syllabus for “Great English literature”3. The author is unequivocal about the value of poetry:

And remember: we live in a benighted age that thinks “storytelling” is a high art. But poetry is the heart of literature. What we most justly love in great literature is language, character, pleasure, beauty, truth, imagination, and the promulgation of virtue. Storytelling is an important aspect of literature, but it is given far too much prominence in modern culture.

This led me to following its recommendation—more on that near the end.

Another catalyst has been the Atlantic. I’ve had a print subscription for years, and they print a poem every issue. It’s given me a slow but consistent exposure to contemporary poetry.

One particular poem, “The Unspoken” by Ada Limón, left enough of an impression that I checked out her book The Hurting Kind from the library last year. Here’s one of the poems that I liked from the book, “Cyrus & the Snakes”, about a childhood episode of her brother holding a snake, and how that episode reflects on his character and the relationship between humans and non-humans.

I wrote about my grandmother last year, and mentioned that she has a book of poetry that she published in the 1990s. During Thanksgiving, I was able to read the book at my parents’ place.

As I suspected, in this book were depths of feeling about people and events in her life that she wouldn’t volunteer in conversation with a grandson. I have been sharing some of my favorites on Bluesky (the Japanese thread here, and my translations to English here).

Some of the poems are impossible to translate without losing the poetry—how do I translate amanattō? Even for the ones I was able to translate, I’m essentially writing a poem in English that preserves as much of the meaning and the feeling of the original as I can.

Many children’s books involve poetry, and my favorite children’s book resource, , often explicitly highlights poetry books. But more than that, reading to kids involves getting in touch with how words on the page get turned into sound. Appreciating that physicality of reading may have been a necessary step for me, before going further into poetry.

There’s of course classics like Dr. Seuss’s books and Goodnight Moon. Among more recent books with obviously poetic text4, our 3-year-old enjoyed The Gruffalo and Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site.

Now back to the syllabus: it recommends going through The Oxford Book of English Verse, an anthology of poems in English, to see what you are drawn to. Starting with anthologies is actually a common recommendation for getting exposure, but the mention of a particular anthology helped me get started. That anthology turns out to be British-heavy, so I’ve also been looking at The Oxford Book of American Poetry5, and I’ve gotten to people born in the early 1800s on both.

Now that I think about it, going through an anthology is similar to how I sometimes get into a musical genre or a scene that I’m not too familiar with—go through a curated playlist and dig deeper on songs and artists that I like.

What I’m liking out of these poems also has a parallel to music. In music, I’m with Ella Fitzgerald6—it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. You could call it swing, groove, flow. If the music has a good rhythm, and all its elements work to enhance that, that’s a good song already in my book.

Likewise, I’m finding that when a poem has great rhythm, I don’t particularly care that I don’t fully understand what it’s saying. I can appreciate that many of the best-known poets choose the right words to make the lines flow much better than others. Two examples from poets that I hadn’t read before: John Dryden’s “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham” and Emily Brontë’s “The night is darkening round me”. It’s hard to articulate why these work for me—you should read them out aloud and see if they work for you.

I’ll end with a hot take: William Wordsworth does not do this at all.

What I’m listening to now

Pilot Light is Liam Kazar’s second album.

Kazar is from Chicago, with a lot of backstories locally, like how he has multiple musicians in his family, and his connections to other great local artists like Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and Macie Stewart.

But I think the music speaks for itself. On average, it’s in a Wilco-like indie folk space, with some songs like “Day Off” veering into alt-country, and others going more pop. His range is impressive—the debut album Due North was also great, and that even had a few funky R&B songs7.

“The Word The War” and “Didn’t I” are my favorite songs here.

1. For Open House Chicago in October1, we explored the western part of the West Loop, where the Metra tracks go over Ashland. We saw Ignite Glass Studios, where we watched artisans make drinking glasses and horses—a huge recommendation generally for anyone with kids is to see places where things get made—District Brew Yards, where we didn’t do the OHC tour but had lunch from Lillie’s Q and drank self-serve beer by the ounce, and The Roof Crop, where we saw the basil being served at Maxwells Trading.

2. At the Chicago History Museum, there’s now an exhibit about the history of Latinos in Chicago, called “Aquí en Chicago”. Some background on the Tribune—lack of Latino representation at the museum led to a protest, which led to this exhibit.

3. And this just came in: Time Out named Pilsen Community Books the best bookstore in Chicago. It’s not big, but it really is good.

Everyone’s doing end-of-the-year posts, and this is kind of one.

I talked about Silvana Estrada in the last 2 posts, and I will keep doing it, because her latest album is my favorite from the year.

Last month, we spent Thanksgiving with my parents in Memphis and came home on Black Friday, so Julie and I could make it back for her concert at Thalia Hall that night. Despite a bit of a language barrier—we estimated about 80% of the audience was Spanish-speaking, and I understood maybe just over half of her Spanish monologues in between songs—this was one of the best shows I’ve been to in years.

There were two strands of thought that came to me repeatedly during the show. One was the parallel with Weyes Blood, whom we also saw at Thalia Hall in 2019. The other was the depth and breadth of the Spanish-speaking musical culture that I’ve only dipped my toes in.

On the Weyes Blood parallel: what came through from the monologues was Estrada’s earnest and thoughtful approach to her art—exactly what I remember from Weyes Blood. Both of them had a song specifically about a friend’s death (“Un Rayo de Luz” for Estrada, “Picture Me Better“ for Weyes Blood). And they both clearly believe that a concert should be a communal experience.

On Spanish-speaking music: her closing song was the protest song “Solo Le Pido A Dios” by Leon Gieco, who is from Argentina. Other references throughout the concert made it clear that she listened to all kinds of music from elsewhere in Latin America2.

Given we were in Pilsen, a center of Mexican-American culture, with the background of federal immigration agents acting lawlessly in Chicago, a pro-immigrant message was all but expected during the show. It came in the form of Manu Chao’s “Clandestino”, maybe the most famous song about undocumented migrants.

Interlude—Pilsen and Thalia Hall

Pilsen is the German name for the Czech city of Plzeň, in the region of Bohemia. Also named after the city is the pilsner3, the original pale lager and the grandfather of all of the most popular beers on the planet (except Guinness). So you see this was a Czech/Bohemian neighborhood at one point.

Czech immigration to America picked up after the failed uprising against the Austrian Empire in 1848, and many of the immigrants settled in Chicago. After the Chicago Fire in 1871 destroyed their initial neighborhood, they settled in Pilsen4.

Pilsen’s north and south boundaries are very clear: to the north are the railroad tracks on 16th Street, and to the south are industrial facilities on the Chicago River South Branch. The neighborhood was self-contained, with housing, shops, churches5, and communal spaces. One such community space was Thalia Hall, named after one of the muses in Greek mythology and built in 1893 by the Bohemian immigrant John Dusek6.

Thalia Hall hosted concerts, of course, and also held political meetings, where Czech nationalists plotted how they could gain independence from the Habsburgs. In an ironic twist, their success led to the end of Pilsen as a Czech neighborhood. After WWI in 1918, Czechoslovakia formed, and the flow of Czech immigrants stopped. More and more of the Czech-Americans became, well, Americans, and needed less and less of the Czech neighborhood.

The Mexican history of Pilsen starts in the 1950s and 60s, with the constructions of the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290), the Stevenson Expressway (I-55), and the University of Illinois Chicago campus, all just west of the Loop. We still know the area around the confluence of these big projects as Little Italy, but there were more Italians then, as well as Mexicans and other ethnic groups, and thousands of residents were displaced.

In Pilsen, the Mexicans found a plug-and-play neighborhood. Quoting one document that I found, “While the Bohemians had been the builders of Pilsen, the Mexicans were its preservationists.”7 The displaced Mexicans took advantage of the urban infrastructure that could meet all of their daily needs. So many of the buildings in Pilsen still date from the Czech days, but with murals created by the Mexicans, giving Pilsen a unique cityscape.

Pilsen has been a working-class neighborhood for most of its history, but it’s currently gentrifying, with rising housing costs8. For now, though, Pilsen remains the most transit-accessible Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. And as immigration enforcement has led to lower foot traffic in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations9, I’ve been trying to support some businesses in Pilsen when I’m working remotely.

This truly isn’t a sacrifice on my part—just a slight inconvenience. I can personally vouch for only a very small subset of businesses there, but they include two purveyors of carnitas (Uruapan and Don Pedro), two very different kinds of birria (Birreria Reyes de Ocotlan and Quesabirria Jaliscos Tacos), cafes serving Mexican-style drinks (Café Carranza and Sleep Walk Chocolateria & Cafe), and a big Mexican grocery store (La Casa Del Pueblo)—see a map of all of this.

Mariscos San Pedro

Now, back to Thalia Hall.

It was lying dormant for many years, with only the lower levels utilized as a restaurant. It’s only in 2014 that the current owners restored the theater space above, and updated the restaurant spaces below. Thalia Hall books so many great acts that you shouldn’t need extra motivation to go there, but I’d been excited about Mariscos San Pedro, the Mexican restaurant that opened on the first floor in 202410, and that’s where we had dinner before the show.

Mariscos means seafood in Spanish, and that’s what they specialize in. The chef also runs Taquería Chingón, a chef-y taco place in Fulton Market. Mariscos San Pedro is also very creative and not exactly an everyday staple kind of place.

One good example was their lobster quesabirria.

Quesabirria has been a trendy food item for a while, with photogenic red broth and bold flavors. Done badly, you end up with a greasy mess that you should only eat while young and starving. For this dish, they nailed the balance—you want a bit of a mess to make it fun, but have enough control so you can taste the lobster.

My favorite dish was the brandade dorados.

Brandade is a French dish that mixes salt cod, olive oil, and potatoes, and they put that in empanadas here. Hot potatoes with oil is already a killer combination, and the flakes of cod give you tingles with sharp hits of salt and umami.

The two of us shared three small-ish plates from the “cold” and “hot” sections, and that gave us some room for dessert. Their “mains” are probably better with bigger groups. In any case, everything we had was great.

And I must end with a bathroom review: the wallpaper is fantastic.

So that was my favorite album, concert, and one of my favorite meals from 2025.

See you again in 2026!

1. We’ll be in Memphis for Thanksgiving. After that, we don’t have any travel plans for a while. We’ve talked about going to Japan again sometime next year, but nothing concrete yet.

2. A few months ago, I mentioned in one of these updates that public transportation in and around Chicago was facing a huge budget cut. Last month, the state legislature not only filled the budget gap, but increased funding and made some governance reforms that can improve the whole system. Also part of this was eliminating minimum parking requirements in areas served by transit1. These are great first steps, but we have a lot more work to make transit in the area what it could be.

3. Here’s an interesting post on what makes a meaningful life: Flow as a component of meaningful living2.

We were in New York City for a long weekend last month, visiting our 3-year-old’s friend, whose family moved there last year.

Even Julie was surprised to learn that this was only my second visit to New York City. My first visit was for the 2014 US Go Congress, held at the Hotel Pennsylvania in Midtown3. I was there for a whole week including the weekends on both sides. But almost all of what you would call sightseeing happened when (then-girlfriend) Julie joined me during the second weekend.

Trying to demonstrate just how little sightseeing I’ve done in New York, I looked at the top 30 “Attractions” in New York City according to TripAdvisor. It turns out I only did 3 out of 30 on that 2014 trip: Times Square, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Broadway4. We did actually watch a musical—prophetically, Chicago.

Second time around, I checked off…none of the other 27. And that’s OK. The purpose of the trip was for the 3-year-old to see his friend, and that goal was accomplished handsomely—they slept in the same room, and got to play together for most of their waking hours.

Julie has a lot more experience with New York, having gotten her masters there and living in the Upper West Side during the program. Being from the Chicago suburbs, she was initially wary, maybe even resentful of New York, but soon accepted that it was a great city.

I mention this because I’m at the resentful stage. New York is the most important city in the world for so many things, and I’m a big fan of big cities. The problem, I think, is that when your main exposure to New York is online content, you get exposed to the loudest people—and loud people are oh so loud in New York because so many people are trying to “make it there”5. I also wish Hamilton didn’t popularize the phrase “the greatest city in the world” to describe New York6.

Anyway, it’s a city that I’ve barely scratched the surface of, and I’m not a good guide in terms of “here’s what you should do there”. Instead, I’ll do a quick rundown of good food we ate, and give you some of my observations and musings.

Food

We were staying in the Upper West Side, and had some local but not-New-York-style pizza from Mama’s TOO!. The square slices reminded me of Roman and Detroit styles. I really liked the poached pear pizza—I seem to be a sucker for good sweet pizzas.

Earlier in the year, it was reported that Din Tai Fung, the Taiwan-based dumpling chain, was the restaurant chain with the highest revenue per location in the US. This was amusing to us, because a lot of Din Tai Fungs in Japan are in relatively small restaurant spaces in department stores7, and each location is not handling huge volumes.

We went to their gigantic location near Times Square—they just have a very different strategy in the US. The soup dumplings were very good as you’d expect, and noodles with sesame sauce—spicy and nutty—was a hit. My favorite was the chocolate dumplings…I’m sensing a theme.

If you have kids, definitely check out the view of cooks making dumplings in the kitchen.

One night, after the kids went to bed, I headed out by myself to Ippudo Westside. New York has a lot more Japan-based ramen places than Chicago, and this is one of them. I did actually go to this location of Ippudo 11 years ago.

I sat at the counter, sharing space with people who just got out of Wicked, and got the yuzu shoyu ramen. This was a really good bowl of ramen with an unconventional choice—red onions in the soup—that worked. I did leave thinking that the top-tier ramen in Chicago (Akahoshi and Monster) is right up there with these guys.

Harlem

From LaGuardia Airport to the Upper West Side, we took the M60 bus. This took us through Astoria, Randalls and Wards Islands, and Harlem. Astoria is somewhere we want to get to, especially for the Noguchi Museum, which we wanted to go to this time but missed out on8. Randalls and Wards Islands are a curious donut hole surrounded by Manhattan9, Queens, and the Bronx.

But the most interesting segment of the bus ride was Harlem.

My knowledge of Harlem comes in bits and pieces, but a lot of it is from reading jazz history. By the time New York became a major hub for jazz in the 1930s10, Harlem was the center of African-American culture there11. Minton’s Playhouse stands out for me as the place where people like Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie were doing jam sessions, leading to the creation of bebop.

Even before that was Duke Ellington, who ran the house band at the Cotton Club—which shamefully had a mostly whites-only policy for the audience—and his signature tune “Take the ‘A’ Train” is about taking the subway to go up to Harlem. My favorite on that theme is “Uptown” by the Chambers Brothers, from 196712.

Riding along 125th St on the bus, you do see that this is a special neighborhood. It’s a corridor with a lot of foot traffic, with many small businesses, including restaurants serving soul food, Caribbean food, and African food.

But you also see signs of gentrification, with generic big-name stores like Whole Foods taking up a lot of real estate. The most jarring might be the Banana Republic next to the Apollo Theater.

To be clear, it’s not a bad thing for a neighborhood to get popular amenities. The problem is that New York City is not building enough housing to accommodate all the people who want to live there. Housing costs rise, and lower-income residents have to move out of neighborhoods like Harlem.

Quick research showed that gentrification in Harlem is mainly a 21st-century phenomenon, and there’s quite a bit of literature on that gentrification and the activism opposing it. I’ll be sure to check out some of that before I finally set foot in the neighborhood.

Hudson River

The other observation comes from going to Riverside Park, a miles-long park along the Hudson River with nice paths and many playgrounds. What I didn’t appreciate before this trip was that both sides of this section of the Hudson are basically cliffs13.

I knew that the Hudson River was an essential part of what led to New York becoming what it is. Here’s a very good explainer on why New York got big, and it’s because the Hudson provided New York with easy connection to a large inland region, extending past the Appalachian Mountains to the Great Lakes.

How this worked geologically is that the Hudson River Valley was carved by glaciers, which cut through mountains and made the river wide. But I was also seeing how this also led to difficulties developing the riverfront in Upper Manhattan and New Jersey.

It also explained why it seemed so hard to go from the Upper West Side to New Jersey, which you can see right across the river. The closest river crossings to the Upper West Side are the Lincoln Tunnel around 40th St, and the George Washington Bridge around 180th. I could easily find two points, a mile apart on the map, separated by 10 miles of road.

And these river crossings did not exist until the 1930s. Trains first crossed the Hudson from Manhattan in 1908 (Uptown Hudson Tubes), and cars did the same in 1927 (Holland Tunnel). Before that, it was all ships between New York City and New Jersey.

I’ll stop here, but you can see I’m grappling with many aspects of what makes New York great, whether or not it’s the greatest. I’m looking forward to the next trip there.

What I’m listening to now

I’ve been a fan of Silvana Estrada since I heard her 2017 album, Lo Sagrado (“The Sacred”). She’s a singer-songwriter from Veracruz, Mexico, and her new album is Vendrán Suaves Lluvias (“Soft Rains Will Come“). She’s touring North America, and we plan on seeing her at Thalia Hall on 11/2814.

Her vocals are impeccable, usually a bit of drama but not too much, and she often plays the Venezuelan cuatro, a small string instrument similar to the ukulele.

There are so many pretty songs on this album, like “Flores” and “Como Un Pájaro”, but my favorite is “Good Luck, Good Night”. I already thought it might be a perfect song, and then I saw how she sets it up in her Tiny Desk concert (from 4:50): Imagine you’re at a cantina in Mexico, having had a few too many after getting ghosted by a date. And then this song comes on.

Yes, it’s a perfect song.

1. It took them a while to announce the lineup for the World Music Festival. I’m mainly looking at Ragamala (9/26-27), the annual overnight concert of Indian music at the Chicago Cultural Center, and the final concert at Navy Pier Beer Garden (10/5). A lot of the artists they book for this festival are pretty obscure, but I’ve listened to Rogê (Brazil) who’s playing at Navy Pier, and his last 2 albums are great: Curyman and Curyman II.

2. Open House Chicago is happening 10/18-19 this year, and they just announced the sites. One site that’ll be open to public is The Roof Crop, the rooftop farm above Maxwells Trading that I mentioned in my last post. Here’s my post from last year’s Open House, when I went to Ukrainian Village.

3. If you’re like me, you’ll get something out of this post by : How to get your time back

Let me start with the principles that guide how I try to use AI1.

1. AI is the last word on nothing

2. Use AI to reduce drudgery and enhance joy

3. Make AI distill knowledge from the open internet

I’ll talk about what I mean and the reasons behind these, but I first want to talk about a recent success I had with Claude2.

Adventures in Mexican cooking

Continuing the home cooking theme from last time, I want to tell you about trying to learn a new cuisine.

I’m not one of those Japanese people who need to eat rice every day, but I do cook Japanese food quite often. The other cuisine I cook a lot is Italian—mostly but not exclusively pasta. These are the cuisines that I’m familiar enough with that I can whip up decent weeknight dinners without necessarily following strict recipes.

I’ve been trying on and off to add a third element to this mix. For everyday cooking, I want to have some idea of what the end result should taste like, so that suggests cuisines that I’ve sampled on many different occasions: Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, maybe a couple more.

When you’re cooking something that’s not generic “American” food, obtaining ingredients can be an issue. I have a couple of Thai cookbooks that I bought before going to Bangkok, but I haven’t cooked out of them too many times because the ingredient lists can be long and hard to collect.

In Chicago, there are so many people of Mexican heritage3 that obtaining Mexican ingredients is probably the easiest out of the list of cuisines above. I did attempt in the past to cook more Mexican, mostly cooking out of Rick Bayless’s Authentic Mexican. I’ve mostly liked the results, but the dishes could be more time-consuming than I wanted, and taco nights weren’t happening consistently.

One reason I’m telling you all this is that something like this is what I told Claude. I also told it what kinds of cookbooks I like—I named some Italian cookbooks that I regularly cook out of4, and also Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and The Food Lab, which are books that help me understand what’s going on in the kitchen (and when I eat out).

Then I asked Claude to recommend me Mexican cookbooks using its research mode (which requires a paid subscription). Here’s the resulting document.

Claude’s top recommendation was Truly Mexican by Roberto Santibañez. This is far from an obscure book, with more than 300 reviews on Amazon, but it’s not a book I’d heard of before. In any case, I went to the library, and started reading it.

It was clear this was the right book for me, just from this quote in the intro:

To truly empower people, I knew I had to relegate a passion of mine—the history and culture of my home country—to the backseat. Fortunately, Mexican food already has some wonderful chroniclers—authors such as Rick Bayless, Susana Trilling, and Marilyn Tausend, have spent their careers showcasing the cuisine’s vast regional variation. My objective is different. Instead of emphasizing this diversity, my goal is to show you how much the seemingly disparate food actually has in common.

Santibañez takes a pretty unusual approach—he organizes the book by the sauces.

And this makes sense once you start cooking. Usually, sauces that you make end up being more than enough for one meal. So a book that teaches you the sauces, and what kinds of dishes would work well with a given sauce, is great for cooking multiple meals in a short time period.

Dried chili and adobo

I had a day off by myself last month, and spent most of the day biking to various places in Uptown5. For dinner, I wanted to make adobo, which requires some dried chili peppers. So I biked to Edgewater Produce6, which was recommended by Claude, and I scored some small bags of dried chili. They also had bigger bags, but I didn’t know how much I would like using these ingredients.

Making the adobo is pretty simple. You roast the dried peppers—a process Santibañez explains in detail because it’s central to building the flavor—then blend them with other ingredients like vinegar and spices. And then you can use it to marinate meats or as cooking liquid or as sauce. With my first batch of guajillo adobo, I marinated salmon and chicken, and braised pork shoulder in it.

That last one, cerdo en adobo, is easily my favorite Mexican dish to make at the moment. After the initial searing of the meat and the adobo, you can leave your pot in the oven for 1.5-2 hours, and you end up with fork-tender pork with mild chili flavor.

And then I slightly went overboard and ordered 3 lbs of dried chili online, from a vendor recommended by Claude.

Some of this might end up in mole if I’m feeling ambitious, but at the very least, I’ll be making a lot of adobo.

Back to AI

Now that you’ve read this whole episode, I can talk about how AI was used.

1. AI is the last word on nothing

You’ll notice that none of the final product is AI. I’m not asking Claude to draw a picture, write a novel, or even to have a conversation, really. I’m asking it to give me recommendations, and I’m using it to have real experiences, which I may or may not like.

It doesn’t always work as well as I described for Mexican food. I’ve asked Claude recommendations for cookbooks in a lot of other cuisines7. For Persian food, its top recommendation was Food of Life by Najmieh Batmanglij. It did look like a very good cookbook when I looked through it at the library, but it’s not what I got with Truly Mexican, where the book explained the cuisine in a way that made it easier for me to cook it more regularly.

Some of what Claude says about this book is also factually incorrect, like this:

The book explains the science behind Persian cooking—why certain rice varieties work better, how to achieve perfect tahdig (crispy rice bottom), and the precise meat-to-fat ratios that make koubideh kebabs stay together on skewers.

At this point, everyone should know that large language models “hallucinate”. It can produce bullshit that sounds plausible, because producing plausible sequences of words is what these models are mainly trained to do8. Turning on research mode does anchor Claude’s answers to what it finds on the internet, and I think it reduces the impact of these hallucinations, but it’s still a problem.

I guess this is where I should note how I’ve used Claude in the process of writing this Substack. I’ve used it to find mistakes, and gotten feedback on potential problems with things like the structure and narrative flow—I sometimes agree with the feedback and incorporate it. I’ve asked for words and phrases I’m trying to think of—“emblematic” from my last post, for one—but I’ve never had it write a sentence9.

2. Use AI to reduce drudgery and enhance joy

Now, what would’ve happened if I didn’t use AI? I may have looked for a Mexican cookbook with internet search as my main friend. It would’ve taken some trial and error to find a book that works for me—I’m almost certain that I would not have landed on a book as good as Truly Mexican on the first attempt. It may still work out in the end, and I’d find some Mexican dishes I’d cook regularly, after a few attempts.

The fact that I needed to do a lot of trial and error, though, would make me hesitant to even start—and this isn’t a hypothetical, because I was on pause for months after trying to cook out of the Rick Bayless book.

I knew Claude’s advice may not always be accurate, but I was willing to give it a shot because it was based on some very specific preferences of mine10. This greatly reduced the amount of time I spent figuring out which books to look at, and the amount of worry that I would’ve had about if I had the right books.

When computers started beating humans at chess, one thing people realized was that a human and a computer working together—a “centaur”—was actually stronger than the computer on its own. Since AI and humans have different strengths, you can do what you’re good at, and let AI do what it’s good at.

One huge weakness of AI as it exists is that it cannot have real experiences and enjoy things. That works out great for you because the whole point is for you to enjoy things and be happy. And one strength—if you can call it that—of AI is that it does not get bored or tired. You should let it do the tedious work that detracts from your experiences.

I do want to say, though, that understanding something new is actually a big human strength compared to AI, as it exists now. Yes, you can make Claude remember something you said, but it’s essentially holding that in its memory so that its answers are more consistent with it. There’s no permanent change to the model because of what you said.

3. Make AI distill knowledge from the open internet

What makes some people think AI understands everything is that it is extremely well-read, at least when it comes to stuff that’s available for free. It has read a significant fraction of the internet, which includes discussions on every topic that people find worthy of discussion. The amount of text Claude saw during its training is many, many orders of magnitude larger than what the most well-read person in human history managed. That’s why it makes sense to make Claude figure out what people are saying on the internet.

I’m almost certain Claude has never seen the text of Truly Mexican because it’s not available online for free. But it can read what people are saying about it online, and what people are saying online about all the other Mexican cookbooks, and that’s why it was able to make a good guess for which ones I might like.

Some more examples

Let me close it out with some examples of how you can use AI in a way that follows these principles.

• Book recommendations more generally—You can provide the AI with information about books you’ve read and what you thought of them. Then you can ask which Mexican novels you might like, for example.

• Product recommendations—One annoying thing that keeps happening as a parent is that we often have to figure out if we need to buy something for our kids, and if so, which exact product we should buy. There are websites like Babylist that give recommendations, but there are many of these websites, and not all the recommendations are relevant for our particular situation (we don’t have that much space at home, for example). Instead of going through a bunch of these recommendations, we can perform an initial filter by asking AI for a list of recommendations given our situation.

• Foreign language conversation practice—In order to speak a new language, you do have to practice speaking that language at some point. Until very recently, you really needed to get someone who speaks that language and practice with them, whether with a teacher/tutor or with a friend. Being capable of reasonably natural conversation in many languages is one of the core features of AI chatbots, so it really makes sense to use this to practice speaking in a language you want to learn. You do want to make sure you aren’t just having nice conversation with the AI—you should be learning and practicing so that you can talk to a real human. So I think it does help to use specialized apps like Langua, which built language learning features on top of AI conversation.

What I’m listening to now

Here’s a live album recorded in Chicago: Live At Thalia Hall by LA LOM.

LA LOM is short for the Los Angeles League of Musicians, and yes, they are from LA. And they play instrumental Latin dance music with a surf rock guitar sound.

I liked their debut album from last year, and thought they had an interesting style that was a mix of polished and rough parts. The live album does make it sound like a fun show—I thought the same about Neal Francis’s Francis Comes Alive, also recorded at Thalia Hall, so maybe the venue is just great.

The best song is the opening track, “Alacrán”, with Middle Eastern elements. The guitar in “Lucia” is great fun.

1. Last month, I dropped my personal laptop and broke the screen, which led to me not having access to my computer for more than a week, which led to me re-evaluating and rearranging my routines. We’ll see how that goes now that I have my computer back, but I did finish 3 books while it was gone.

2. In the coming weeks, you might hear about Chicago in the context of the US President sending in troops, supposedly to fight crime, and increasing immigration crackdowns in the area. I just want to make a few comments. 1. Sending troops for civilian law enforcement is illegal. 2. Even if it was legal, troops aren’t trained to deal with crime so that’s not a serious solution. 3. Crime has been going down in Chicago1. 4. Immigrants make Chicago great, and America great.
   
   OK, end of rant, and back to the regular programming.

Last summer, I wrote about going to Dear Margaret for our anniversary.

We really enjoyed it, but I also wanted to go back at a different time of the year because their menu highlights seasonal produce. So where else to go this time? I mentioned that there was a place that we’d wanted to go where we couldn’t book a reservation. We made it there this year.

Maxwells Trading

A big reason we wanted to do Maxwells Trading for our anniversary was that Erling Wu-Bower runs this restaurant, and he was the chef at Nico Osteria, a now-closed Italian place where we had our wedding lunch. He’s actually not working in the kitchen, and we saw him, in a dress jacket and obviously not cooking, greeting guests during our visit, but he’s involved in developing the menu.

It’s been more than a month, and the menu has changed a bit. I’ll go through 3 out of the 5 savory dishes we had that are still on the menu, since those also happen to be highlights.

My understanding is that the suzuki tartare is their best-selling dish, and it’s always on the menu. Compared to my expectations given that information, the chili was a lot stronger. And the lemongrass was a lot stronger. It’s a really interesting dish to be the best-selling one.

Out of the dishes we tried, the brûléed Japanese sweet potato seemed the most emblematic of Maxwells Trading. This had sweet (sweet potato and the caramelized sugar), sour (pickled onion/shallot), spicy (Thai red curry), and even bitter (some of the scorched sugar). The brûlée thing might look like it’s just for show, but it was doing a lot of work.

The best thing I had, though, was the Japanese eggplant with confit tomato. This was a dip served with their homemade bread. Tomato and basil are a classic combination, and here you get a huge boost of umami from the eggplant. It tasted like summer.

I really enjoyed the meal. It’s clearly fusion cuisine with strong Asian influences, but I didn’t feel like any of the interesting combinations were forced. Proxi is the only other place that comes to mind that does something similar in Chicago at a very high level, and I preferred my Maxwells Trading experience.

Interestingly, 4 out of our 5 savory dishes and the dessert (Basque butter cake) came with basil—you can see how much they put on the eggplant dish. I told Julie that their rooftop must be drowning in basil. It was a joke but it really must have been true. The restaurant does have a rooftop garden, and some of what’s served comes from there.

You probably couldn’t do this in a buzzier part of town. Maxwell Trading is technically in West Loop, but it’s on the far western end of the neighborhood between Ogden and Ashland, where there really aren’t other restaurants. The development of West Loop could be the topic of a whole another post.

One final comment on the restaurant is that we saw 2 groups with kids eating here, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves just fine. It’s always nice when a fine-dining restaurant makes an effort to be welcoming in this respect—we might take advantage someday.

Confit tomatoes

Now, I want to get back to those confit tomatoes.

I’ve been looking more into preserving and pickling recently2. There’s multiple ways of saving tomatoes, but making confit is one of them—confit (with a silent “t”) meaning cooking slowly in oil. With this method, it’s really magical how concentrated the flavors become. This is an algorithm for saving the abundance of summer for the leaner seasons3.

has a really nice recipe. He says to cook it on the stove, but I highly recommend putting the ingredients together in an oven-safe pan and cooking in the oven—it’s less work.

Once you make these, you could use them as a dip, like Maxwells Trading and Ottolenghi. You could make pasta sauce with them. You could use it as topping in a sandwich, omelet, etc. Or you could also just have them as a side dish.

What I’m listening to now

Tabla Dhi, Tabla Dha is a new album from the Japanese musician U-zhaan, who plays the tabla, which are Indian drums4. The title seems to be a reference to, well, tabla, obviously, but also the way they use spoken syllables to describe notes on the instrument—there’s a lot of different tones that the musician achieves by hitting various parts of the drums in various ways.

U-zhaan plays in all the tracks, but the diversity of the music here is something else. The album starts off with a track featuring the Japanese hip-hop artist Chinza Dopeness, who begins by reciting the Japanese ABCs5. The interplay between the guest and U-zhaan’s tabla is very pleasing, and that’s a constant feature of the album.

The 2nd track was my entry point to this album because of Cornelius, the Japanese experimental pop artist who is featured here. It does sound like a Cornelius track, but with Indian percussions.

There’s the silly but well-executed ode to going out to an izakaya with friends (track 5), a remix of a song with the late Ryuichi Sakamoto (track 6), another hip-hop track but with a Bengali artist (track 7), cover of an old-school anime theme song (track 8), and finally a more traditional collaboration with a sitar player (track 9).

This was a really fun album with all kinds of music.

1. We’re probably going to the Chicago Jazz Festival, and we’ll try to make it to another Millennium Park concert, just before that. Anjélique Kidjo, one of the biggest African singers—whom I’ve seen covering Talking Heads at Ravinia—is playing with Yo-Yo Ma on 8/26.

2. We’re planning on going to New York in October. More to come on this, I’m sure.

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My biggest quick tips for finding interesting food in Japan are going to a konbini (convenience store) and a depachika (department store basement), as I wrote in this post almost 3 years ago:

There’s obviously many layers to understanding food in Japan—or anywhere—so there’s a lot more I can say. I’ve thought a bit more about this during my Japan trip in June, and I was able to distill a lot of what I want to say into the following 3 points:

1. It’s easy and cheap to get A-minus food in Japan.

2. Japanese people don’t eat sushi every day.

3. Seek out regional specialties.

It’s easy and cheap to get A-minus food

If you go to a random restaurant in the US, especially in touristy areas, you’re likely to get very predictable menus consisting of very mediocre food. I claim that this is not the case in Japan, which you could probably guess from how you can get decent food at 7-Eleven. The default quality—I sometimes call it the replacement level1—of restaurant food is higher in Japan. Not everything is exceptional food, obviously, but you will usually find good recipes executed well. It’s not A or A-plus, but just below that.

One implication of this is, it might be better to find, say, a tonkatsu place near where you happen to be, rather than trying to figure out where “the best tonkatsu in Tokyo” is2. This is especially true in Tokyo, a city that is as dense as New York and as spread out as LA. I’ve seen advice online saying you should book restaurants in advance when you visit Japan, and I disagree strongly. The only exception is if you’re really, really sure you want to go to a particular very popular or exclusive restaurant.

My real advice is to just find any old place and try it, but if you feel that’s too risky, Tabelog is the most reliable food review site in Japan. Unlike Google Maps or TripAdvisor, most of the ratings come from locals. The main thing to keep in mind is that its reviewers are extremely tough—3 stars (out of 5) means you’re pretty good, 3.5 is really good, 4 is a rare achievement.

Japanese people don’t eat sushi every day

I’ve had multiple people in America ask me if Japanese people eat sushi every day. The most recent was our driver taking us home from O’Hare after the Japan trip. Even after I explained how there are many, many Japanese dishes that Japanese people eat everyday that aren’t sushi—and that, in fact, most Japanese people only eat sushi on occasion—he still seemed convinced that sushi was the best thing to have in Japan.

Let me talk about this in a different way. If you’re in a big city in the US, there are 2 kinds of Japanese food that you could often find at the replacement level in Japan (i.e. A-minus) or even higher: sushi and ramen3.

In Japan, you’ll find that lots of restaurants specialize in a narrow range of Japanese dishes. It could be soba, udon, unagi (eel), yakitori (grilled chicken skewers), tonkatsu—actually I’m just reading off some of the categories on Tabelog—and each of these specialities are as worthy of mastery by cooks and exploration by eaters as sushi and ramen.

If you love the best sushi places in your city, I don’t want to stop you from trying to find even better ones in Japan. But if you want to have an experience that’s hard to find outside of Japan, you should really be going for all the other things that you’re not that familiar with.

but also, there’s sushi that’s hard to find outside Japan

When you say “sushi” in the US, most people would think of nigiri, or more likely, maki (rolls). But there are other types of sushi in Japan that you don’t see often in the US.

Chirashi, or chirashizushi4, or “scattered” sushi, is a dish where various pieces of seafood and other ingredients are placed on top of sushi rice. I remember chirashi being served at home when I was growing up, probably made by a grandma, so it’s a kind of sushi that home cooks can manage, similar to maki. In Chicago, you can find it at Gene Kato’s Momotaro and Itoko, and restaurants catering to Japanese people, especially in the suburbs. We did get a chirashi bento in Okayama this trip, but I shamefully failed to get a photo. The photo below is from Itoko, and it’s way more precious than your regular chirashi in Japan.

The other common one is oshizushi, or “pressed” sushi. For this one, the cook would put the topping on rice, then press the whole thing into shape using a rectangular box. This is a great option for ekiben (bento boxes you can buy at train stations or on express trains).

I didn’t think pressed sushi was available in Chicago until recently, when I found 2 menu items at Cocoro in River North.

Seek out regional specialties

The best dish I had this trip was udon in Kagawa.

This was at a serufu—”self”, as in “self-service”—udon restaurant, meaning you order the noodles first (in a hot broth, cold and plain, in curry, etc.), you add the toppings yourself, then pay at the end depending on what you put on top of the udon. So it’s a no-frills place, but even at fancier places, udon in Kagawa is a simple joy. The noodles are famously firm, almost al dente, and your soup or dipping sauce provide satisfying umami. Kagawa is so serious about udon that our hotel had udon as part of the breakfast buffet. I’m not sure if I’ve seen that anywhere else.

Wherever you are in Japan, you’ll find regional specialties, and it’s almost always worth trying them.

Osaka famously has a few.

Okonomiyaki is a savory pancake cooked on a griddle, and Chicago has a great exponent of this dish in Gaijin. It’s much cheaper in Osaka. Takoyaki (octopus ball) is now a pretty common dish at Japanese restaurants in the US, but you’ll find better versions in Osaka.

One Osaka specialty that I’ve never seen in the US is kushikatsu, or deep-fried skewers. You dip the skewers in dipping sauces to enjoy. You can make this look fancy but it’s obviously street food.

What I’m listening to now

I’m going to talk about Switcheroo, the LA-based artist Gelli Haha’s debut album. It’s indie electropop, with quite a bit of weird stuff mixed in there.

The best track is “Bounce House”, a distillation of fun. This is as busy as a song can be and still be perfect. The music video is also great.

The weirdest track is “Piss Artist”, where a narrator recounts a drunken party incident. The first half of the album is stronger, but the whole album is a lot of fun.

1. I recently got a bike seat for the 3-year-old1, took a couple of short trips, then did our first bike-on-the-L trip last weekend. I thought the first step of being able to bike with the kid really expanded the range of where we can go together without a car, but the second step of using trains with the bike REALLY expands the range. I feel like my brain is getting rewired as I think about routes to different places.

2. It’s only been 2 weeks since the last post so there isn’t that much new, so I’ll highlight a new music festival in Chicago called Sound & Gravity from 9/10 to 9/14. I recognize a lot of the acts, and they’re invariably good. Among them are musicians with Chicago ties, like Third Coast Percussion, Jeremiah Chiu, and Macie Stewart.

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Last time, I spent all my time talking about expos/world’s fairs from the past.

This post is all about Expo 2025 in Osaka, which goes until 10/13.

Where is it?

In an echo of the 1939 San Francisco world’s fair in Treasure Island, Expo 2025 is happening on an artificial island in Osaka Bay called Yumeshima, which means Dream Island. Unlike Treasure Island, Yumeshima wasn’t built specifically for the expo, but it was a big container station before, and no one has ever lived there.

I’m sure I’ll talk more about Osaka soon. For now, all I’m going to say is that the big park to the east in the satellite image is where Osaka Castle is, and downtown Osaka is just a little west of that—I know, everything is dense so it’s hard to tell. You can see that Yumeshima (in red) is way off to the west.

If you zoom in, the most prominent thing, by far, is the big circle on the southwest side of the island. I’ll talk about that first.

The Grand Ring

As I wrote last time, past expos have left us with parks, museums, and other famous buildings—I didn’t even mention the most famous one, the Eiffel Tower from the 1889 World’s Fair, for the simple reason that I’ve never been to Paris.

Architecture fans would find a lot of interesting buildings at the expo, but the most impressive structure we saw was the Grand Ring. This is what it looks like from below.

My sister posted a much prettier photo of the ring.

It’s a huge wooden ring that surrounds a big portion of the site. It’s about as tall as a 4-story building, and about 2 km around. It’s apparently the largest wooden structure in the world2. You can walk below it for the shade, which so many people were doing as you can see, or above it for the view.

What’s the expo about?

Expo 2025 does have a theme, “Designing Future Society for Our Lives“, which is…uh…pretty vague. The sub-themes, “Saving Lives”3, “Empowering Lives”, and “Connecting Lives” are just a bit better. There’s definitely too much officialese on the website.4

Having said that, what’s officially the expo’s theme is actually not that important. If you ask a visitor at the expo what the theme of the expo is, they most likely can’t answer.

There are many countries that spent millions of dollars to showcase something about their countries at the expo, and ultimately, that’s because they think it benefits them for a lot of people to see what they’re displaying. They’re hoping more people will visit as tourists, buy products, etc. There’s some element of propaganda here—you are seeing what each country wants you to see about that country.

Many of the “big” countries—the US, China, France, Italy, etc.—have their standalone buildings, or pavilions. Some of them are very popular, and you either need to get a tough reservation or line up for a good amount of time. It’s an amusement park where each attraction is some kind of experience curated by a country.

See the next footnote for things I wanted to see but couldn’t5.

Our strategy

There are well over 100 countries with some sort of an exhibit, and there are some more pavilions from corporations and such. We had some intel from friends and family, but that still only covered a very small fraction of what was there.

So we needed to narrow down what we wanted to see. Here’s some of what we considered:

• It was hot and humid most of the time we were in Japan. So no long lines in the sun.

• We wanted to see cultures of someone we know, and especially someone that our 3-year-old knows.

• I logged into X6 and searched for what people were saying about each pavilion. I wanted to see that people enjoyed going to one, and also that they liked it for the right reasons.

  
  This may surprise my readers, but if people were only talking about the food they got at a pavilion, that was a bad sign for me. A lot of the food on offer wasn’t new to us7, and getting in a long line to order didn’t seem worth it with the kids.

• We were going to have a stroller, and there were pavilions that prioritized entry for groups with strollers, wheelchairs, etc.

• I’m interested in cities, and the 3-year-old is interested in vehicles.

What we saw

The only standalone pavilion we went to was Malaysia, which involved a hack. There was a long line to get in, but because their exhibit starts upstairs, and the only accessible entrance is an elevator, strollers can bypass the line entirely.

And what did Malaysia want us to see? They had a scale model of life in Malaysia that showed both rural life on a farm as well as urban life in apartments with all the vehicles outside. And they have another scale model, of Kuala Lumpur this time, to show you that they really do have a big modern city.

And they have Japanese-style fake food displays for each region’s local dishes. At the end of the exhibit, there’s a food counter where you can get Malaysian food. I would’ve loved some Malaysian food, even if we do have some of it in Chicago, but the line was long.

We also saw the Peru pavilion, which was part of a big building that hosted a few countries. We wanted to go mainly because the 3-year-old has a teacher from Peru.8

Peru showed us an immersive video—they also wanted us to see that they have rural and urban areas, but unlike Malaysia they have deserts. They do offer samples of Peruvian food, but we were unlucky with our timing and couldn’t eat any9. Predictably, they also highlighted their archaeology. When we went, we saw some artifacts associated with the Lord of Sipán, a mummy from the Moche culture. They’re now showing something about the Nazca lines until the expo ends.

One thing that’s really cool is some of the least glamorous part of the expo. There are “Commons” buildings that house many countries under one roof. In the photo from the top of the Grand Ring above, you can see a (very nondescript) Commons building all the way to the right. It’s like a convention center, with booths for dozens of countries. Many of the countries are ones that you may not know much about10, and there’s someone from that country at the booth, ready to answer questions. How often do you get a chance to talk to someone from Yemen and Tonga, minutes apart?

Myaku-Myaku

This is Japan, and everything needs to have a cute mascot. Expo 2025’s official mascot is Myaku-Myaku.

I don’t know what you think, but I love it, and so does the 3-year-old. The best word I heard that describes Myaku-Myaku’s aesthetic is kimo-kawaii, or “creepy cute”. The people who came up with “Designing Future Society for Our Lives” and the person who designed Myaku-Myaku are very different people, and I know who I want to hang out with.

And we got to meet Myaku-Myaku.

What I’m listening to now

This is still 1970s Brazilian music, but so so different from Sérgio Mendes. Azymuth is a Brazilian funk band, and this album is from 1979.

According to Wikipedia, the first track “Jazz Carnival” was a hit in the UK—it’s definitely good, but it’s a long track and probably not to everyone’s taste. The next song, “Partido Alto”, I recommend wholeheartedly. It has an unbalanced beat, with the bass taking center stage most of the time.

My favorite is “Young Embrace (Um Abraço Da Mocidade)”. This song is built on a repetitive melody played on keyboards and a samba rhythm on the percussions. What this reminds me of is the album São Paulo Confessions by Suba. This track wouldn’t sound much out of place in that great electronic album from 20 years later.

1. There’s no shortage of bad political news these days, but I’ll highlight a local one that’s close to my heart. Illinois legislature failed to pass a transit funding bill in May. That means unless they pass some version of the bill later this year, Chicagoland’s transit agencies (CTA, Metra, Pace) will face severe service cuts—really severe, like stopping whole “L” lines and many bus lines. I think they will pass something, but these agencies can’t budget based on hope so they’re already spending resources figuring out what to cut.

2. Summer means free Millennium Park concerts. We just saw Lido Pimienta (Colombia/Canada) and she was fun. From the Millennium Park Summer Music Series, I’m interested in Novos Baianos (7/21), Orchestra Resavoir (8/4), and Caramelo Haze (8/7).

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We returned from Japan about 2 weeks ago, after spending 2 weeks there. I do want to start by linking to 2 of my posts from the last time I was there.

All the COVID-related impressions are not relevant anymore, but the rest is still pretty relevant. One thing I would add, now that our older kid isn’t wearing diapers anymore, is that the public bathrooms in Japan are great. They’re ubiquitous in city centers and train stations, they’re generally very clean, and there’s often “multi-purpose” bathrooms which are family bathrooms with extra amenities.

This 2nd post, highlighting konbini (convenience stores) and depachika (food sections in department store basements) as good places to get something the locals eat, is also very relevant. This is still the main general advice I give when someone asks for recommendations in Japan, and we ourselves got food from these places multiple times.

Expos, what are they?

We mostly stayed in Osaka again, and one of the things we did was to go to Expo 2025, happening close to where we were staying. It runs until 10/13, so if you’re in Japan anytime before that, I definitely suggest you look into it. From talking to Americans, though, I found that I need to first explain what an expo is. That’ll be this whole post, and I’ll talk about Expo 2025 in the next post, coming soon.

Expos, or world’s fairs1, are big events where a host city invites countries around the world to showcase their culture and technologies. Major ones called World Expos have been happening once every 5 years since 2000, so you can think of it as the Olympics of culture. They used to be a lot more common in the US, but the last major ones in the US happened in the 60s.

I happen to be pretty familiar with many cities2 that were shaped by world’s fairs in the past. See how many of these you know about:

• Chicago hosted World’s Columbian Exposition in 18933. Most of the fair took place in Jackson Park and Midway Plaisance, 2 parks in and around Hyde Park. These parks exist in their current forms thanks to the fair. Almost all of the buildings from this event are gone, but the 2 that remain are now the Art Institute and the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI). Field Museum was a previous occupant of the MSI building, and I learned that the earliest part of their collection comes from the fair.

  

  
  I’ve finally been reading The Devil in the White City about this fair and a serial killer who operated in Chicago during that time—this may be the most famous book about any world’s fair.

• From the 1904 world’s fair, St. Louis still has Forest Park, St. Louis Art Museum, and Washington University’s Brookings Hall.

• From Seattle’s world’s fair in 1962, we have the Space Needle, the area around it now called the Seattle Center, and the monorail that connects the Seattle Center to downtown.

• San Francisco is an interesting one because it held 3 different world’s fairs that each left little traces. The 1894 fair was in Golden Gate Park, leaving behind the Japanese Tea Garden among other things. The 1915 fair took place in what is now the Marina District, and we still have the Palace of Fine Arts there. The Legion of Honor is a replica of the French pavilion from that fair. Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay was built specifically for the 1939 world’s fair.

• Montreal was proud enough about Expo 67 that they named a baseball team after it. Both the Biosphere and Habitat 67 are pretty iconic.

• Finally, Osaka4 previously hosted Expo ‘70. The venue is now a park, and the only thing remaining on site is the Tower of the Sun, a gigantic sculpture/building created by the artist Tarō Okamoto.

  

  A few years ago, we were lucky enough to see the insides of the tower, which is usually closed to the public. It’s supposed to be similar to what the visitors to the expo would’ve seen when they went inside.

  

  In Japan, the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and Expo ‘70 are considered hugely significant events that symbolized Japan’s rapid growth in the decades after WWII. I can point to the manga series 20th Century Boys as a work of art that depicts the expo’s cultural impact.
  
  And the title of this post is true. Conveyor belt sushi started in Osaka Prefecture in 1958, and became a lot more popular after it was served at Expo ‘70.

Are expos not as big these days?

This post from Ted Gioia5 is based on the premise that no one has heard about Expo 2025. I was very annoyed and wrote an annoyed comment that ended up becoming the most liked comment. I did agree with him, though, that expos are just not as big a deal as they used to be. 64 million people visited Expo ‘70 in Osaka. Expo 2025 is expecting less than half as many visitors.

In the comment, I also linked to the essay “The world of tomorrow” by Virginia Postrel, where she discusses how the future used to be glamorous, but it no longer is. The 1939 New York World’s Fair provides her with an example of glamorous depictions of the future. People used to get really excited about flying cars and all that.

I really recommend reading the full thing, but here’s 2 things she points out:

1. Modernists, who thought experts would keep improving the world, were culturally influential, until the counterculture, skeptical of expertise, gained the upper hand.

2. Things look glamorous from far away, when you don’t know all the annoying details. When we got actual technological advances, we quickly got used to the benefits and noticed the imperfections.

The first point is very relevant for world’s fairs. The first world’s fairs happened as the Industrial Revolution was starting ot affect people’s lives, and if you look at the themes for expos, most of them are about progress due to technology. As people got less excited about technological progress, expos became less culturally relevant.

I can think of other reasons for why expos got less glamorous. Air travel has gotten much cheaper over the past few decades, so more people can afford to travel abroad. The internet also lets you get a sense—however imperfect—for what other countries are like, so people are much harder to impress now.

And yet, Osaka decided to host Expo 2025. More on that next time.

What I’m listening to now

Thinking about that Expo ‘70 in Osaka, my mind went to this album. This is also an opportunity for me to say something about Sérgio Mendes, who died last year.

I bought this CD at a Tower Records when I was visiting Japan during my college years. The CD was actually never released in the US.

Mendes’s main formula is adding Brazilian touches to popular songs in English, with a shameless focus on pleasing the crowd. “Daytripper” is probably the strongest example of that. “Mas Que Nada” is his biggest hit6 and a fun one. There’s other times, though, when maybe he should have had a bit more shame.

One fun moment comes at the end of the first track. Mendes’s first word is “おおきに(ōkini)“, an Osaka-dialect word for “thank you”7. He follows it up with “もうかりまっか(mōkarimakka)“, which is “how are you?” in Osaka dialect, but the literal meaning is “are you making money?”, which reflects Osaka’s history as a merchant city8. The audience surely appreciated how he did his homework.

1. We’ll be in Japan for 2 weeks in June. We’ll see if the next post happens during the trip, or soon after.

2. We do plan on going to Expo 2025 in Osaka. Expect some kind of Expo-related content here.

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My first trip away from the baby1 was a work trip to Charlotte, North Carolina.

The last place I lived before Chicago was Columbia, South Carolina, which is less than 2 hours from Charlotte by car2. So I had been to Charlotte a few times. This trip was for just 2 nights, and most of the days were spent in the office. And yet I saw a lot of things that were new to me.

Let me start with my general understanding of how Charlotte came to be, then talk about a relatively new development (trains!), before getting into food.

History of Charlotte in 200-ish words

Charlotte was founded by English colonists at the crossroads of two Native American trading paths. The first really remarkable thing in its history is the Carolina gold rush in the early 19th century. This led to the creation of the Charlotte Mint, where they were minting gold coins from all the gold being dug out in the area.

Charlotte isn’t near a big river, so the location really wasn’t great when so much trade was happening on boats. At the time of the Civil War, it was only the 5th largest city in North Carolina3. Charlotte became the largest city in the Carolinas in the 1920s, when it was a railroad hub and a textile manufacturing center.

More recently, Charlotte has been a banking town4. Bank of America came out of a small regional bank in Charlotte growing rapidly with a series of mergers. Wachovia, also based in Charlotte, had a similar history, until it was acquired by Wells Fargo during the financial crisis.

Most of the big cities in the South have been growing rapidly for the past few decades, and Charlotte fits that pattern. Even within that group, though, Charlotte is one of the least historically rich places, for better or for worse.

Cat-themed transit

Like most Southern cities, Charlotte is generally a very car-friendly city surrounded by a lot of sprawl. But it does have a train system. Since I was staying somewhat close to downtown—or Uptown, in local parlance—I was able to avoid taking a single car trip.

Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) runs the Lynx Blue Line (light rail) and CityLynx Gold Line (streetcar). This time, I didn’t ride the Gold Line, but used the Blue Line extensively. One thing that’s really obvious when you’re on this train, or around most of the stations, is that there’s a LOT of new apartment/condo buildings along the route.

I did a Zillow search for rentals on apartments built in 2015 or later.

If you guessed that the Blue Line must run from the northeast to the southwest, you’d be correct. When the line initially opened in 2007, it extended only in the southwest direction from downtown. The northeast direction is an extension that opened in 2018. I left the area in 2017, so that explains why so much seemed new to me.

The explosion of new housing is accompanied by a large amount of businesses catering to the residents. This really is a successful case of transit-oriented development, where you allow for dense development around public transportation, and you get nice walkable neighborhoods with a lot of amenities.

After the visit, I realized that there was a post on Charlotte’s light rail from a Substack I subscribe to. It’s a good read, especially about the shortcomings that are not so apparent on the ground:

The Urban Condition

The triumph and tragedy of light rail in Charlotte

Charlotte’s light rail line has unfurled a ribbon of density across the sprawling landscape, proving that high-quality transit can have a transformative impact on even the most car-dependent American cities. Since the Blue Line opened in 2007, millions of square feet of office space and tens of thousands of homes have risen around its stations. The line…

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3 years ago · Benjamin Schneider

During the morning rush hours, trains heading downtown were packed. One nice thing about the trains was that it was a very smooth ride. Some people on those full trains were standing without holding onto anything.

Trains generally run about once every 15 minutes, which isn’t that great. But the schedule seemed to be very reliable. I saw a large number of people timing their walks to the station so that they could catch their train without waiting too much.

And another surprise, as I was walking on the trails next to the train tracks: drivers were very good about yielding to pedestrians and cyclists when they were supposed to. I’ve gotten too used to how terrible Chicago drivers are on this point.

Botiwalla by Chai Pani

And now, I’ll talk about some food and drink places that I enjoyed. Here’s a map.

Chai Pani is an Indian street food restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina. I actually spent more time in Asheville than in Charlotte when I lived in Columbia, and I did eat at Chai Pani once. Botiwalla is a more casual restaurant from the same people, with locations in Asheville, Atlanta, and Charlotte.

The Charlotte location is in Optimist Hall, a food hall just northeast of downtown. I did do a walk through, and saw a bunch of interesting-looking places including the Dumpling Lady, which served Sichuan dumplings and noodles. But I ended up getting most of my calories at Botiwalla, which I was eyeing from the start.

The standout was SPDP (Sev Potato Dahi Puri), which I believe is also a staple at Chai Pani. It’s flour crisps stuffed with potato, with a bunch of toppings. Fried food involving potatoes is always a great idea, but the toppings here are genius. Sweet yogurt gives you both sweet and sour. There’s funk from tamarind, and the crunchy texture from the sev noodles. It’s sensory overload in a small package.

It’s one of the best dishes I’ve had this year5.

Vicente

Vicente was a bakery and bistro, sort of within walking distance from my hotel in South End—thanks to the trail by the Blue Line. They specialize in croissants. This includes the standard flavors like chocolate and almond, but also some unusual flavors.

I do get a bit skeptical when the presentation is so Insta-friendly, but it’s hard to deny the good work involved here. 2 of the unusual croissants I tried were dulce de leche and harissa & tomato, and they worked.

Idlewild

This cocktail bar was a recommendation from the folks at American Weekender. I’m more into craft beer usually, but I trust their cocktail expertise. I needed to dispense more trust once I got in, because this place doesn’t have a menu6.

The bartender would talk to me and figure out what kind of drink I wanted, then make it. I do tend to use menus as anchors to figure out what I want at places, so this was a process of discovery for the both of us.

We first landed on the Bennett, a citrusy gin drink, to start. I liked it, but then I realized that everything I had that night was fruity, like Blue Razz Burst, a blueberry-raspberry sour ale from Wicked Weed, my favorite NC brewery. So we pivoted and settled on a Coffee Negroni to end the night.

Idlewild is within a minute walk from the 36th Street station on the Blue Line. So quite literally, without the Blue Line, it wouldn’t exist where it does, and I wouldn’t have made it there.

What I’m listening to now

My love language seems to be songs in languages I don’t understand. Here’s an album by the New Zealand singer-songwriter Marlon Williams, sung entirely in Māori.

I was going to talk about how Māori is an Austronesian language, which makes it related to Malay, Tagalog, Fijian, Hawaiian, etc., but then realized I already did that when I talked about indigenous Taiwanese music.

What I will say about these languages is that they’re quite vowel-y, like Japanese or Italian. And what that means for music is that they’re great for belting out long notes—think Italian opera. Williams definitely knows this.

“Aua Atu Rā” is a masterpiece, and the first song to be written on the album. It’s a lament by someone who is alone and hopelessly stranded on the ocean7. “Rere Mai Ngā Rau” is another highlight, a more joyful song.

And yes, it’s Lorde singing in Maōri on “Kāhore He Manu E”.

1. In a delightful piece of tactical urbanism, people put benches on a block of Lincoln Avenue that’s closed to traffic for construction. I’m planning on checking this out with my 3-year-old son this weekend. This is also just north of the places I’ll talk about in this post1.

2. Given that the theme here is enjoying things we encounter in life, I highly recommend this post: How to like everything more. It has a lot of concrete advice for enjoying (mostly artistic) things. I found that I do practice many of them, and also that I’ve never verbalized most of them so clearly.

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One concert I mentioned in the short updates section recently was a Ballaké Sissoko show at the Old Town School of Folk Music, back in March. The Old Town School, which really is a music school2, is in Lincoln Square3. And it’s a great venue for folk music—very broadly defined—which for me makes it one of the best places to see African music in Chicago4.

Another great thing about the venue is that there’s a lot of great dining options in the area. Lincoln Square is an old German neighborhood, with a beer hall and a sausage shop, but there’s all kinds of cuisines represented on Lincoln Avenue and nearby streets. Luella’s Southern Kitchen is probably our current favorite5.

But we’ve ended up at Menya Goku6 for dinner before the last couple of Old Town shows. It might have something to do with how we think it’s one of the top places for ramen in the city, and how they’re not open for lunch.

Menya Goku is a pretty small restaurant, with less than 20 seats at tables, and they don’t take reservations. We were hoping, this being a Wednesday, there would be 2 open seats, and sure enough, we were able to sit at the bar, but there were people after us who had to wait for seats to open up.

We don’t always trust a ramen shop to make great clear soups (shoyu and shio)—you can’t hide your not-great broth with other strong flavors—but we trust the Ramen Wasabi/Menya Goku crew to make very good to great soup, regardless of the style. Their shoyu ramen includes sous vide pork and chicken instead of the fatty char siu, which definitely reflects their confidence in the broth.

One imperfection this visit was that a few noodles were stuck to each other, leading to a not-great bite. This is where a reviewer in Japan would say “2 stars” (see the note on Tabelog), but really, it was a very good bowl of ramen.

By the time we paid up, it was 5 minutes before the show7. Of course, the show didn’t start right on time so we were fine, but it was funny to see a woman power-walking in front of us, and finding that she was also going to the show.

As for the show, the video below gives a good sample. We’d seen Ballaké Sissoko (kora) and Vincent Ségal (cello) before at Old Town, and Vincent Peirani (accordion) and Émile Parisien (soprano saxophone) were new to us.

I’d listened to their studio album from 2023, but there’s so much you miss compared to live. Like, I didn’t know Peirani wasn’t wearing shoes—seriously, though, his stage presence doesn’t transfer to a studio recording. I’m also convinced everyone needs good accordion music sometimes.

Ségal commented that this collaboration was really just Parisian music. It was a bunch of friends, with different personal and musical backgrounds, throwing ideas at each other.

Another comment he made was about the Old Town School as a venue. Usually on tour, he would have to spend some time before the show in boring dressing rooms with nothing much to do. But at Old Town, he could check out some instruments at the shop or go to the music library. Another reason to like this place.

What I’m listening to now

I’ve already talked about 2 Montreal bands in this space, and Choses Sauvages (“Wild Things”) is another one8.

I’d say this is for Talking Heads fans. I could try to say which song here is most like a Talking Heads song, but an easier question might be which Talking Heads song is most like a Choses Sauvages song. I’m going with “Making Flippy Floppy“ or “Moon Rocks”9. It’s that combination of punk intensity, disco beats, and synth shenanigans.

What makes Choses Sauvages not like Talking Heads? They sing in French, almost in a speaking voice, with a lot more vocal harmonies.

I appreciate it when an album is crafted with the two-sidedness of the vinyl record in mind. This album is a good case. The A side ends with “Chaos initial”, the B side with “Big Bang”. These are the most relaxed songs on the album, with “cosmic” themes. “Chaos initial” just might be my favorite track.

1. We’re planning on going to Japan in June. More to come on this trip in this space, I’m sure. Sadly, I’m probably missing Natalia Lafourcade at Chicago Theater (6/14 & 15).

2. Speaking of visiting Japan, the Italian musician has been writing some great posts on eating in Japan (part 1 on sushi and part 2 mostly on noodles, so far).

3. I thought I might write about eating at Obélix or Brasero, but I don’t think these will be full posts. They were both excellent, especially Brasero, which is a South American restaurant with a heavy dose of Brazilian, which is uncommon in Chicago.

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I’ll write about an internet activity that I’ve been doing for the past 2 years, and could conceivably continue to do for the rest of my life.

What is Go?

I need to start by talking a bit about the game of Go and my history with it. Let’s grab the first paragraph of Wikipedia:

Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to fence off more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day. A 2016 survey by the International Go Federation's 75 member nations found that there are over 46 million people worldwide who know how to play Go, and over 20 million current players, the majority of whom live in East Asia.

Great. In terms of game play, all you probably need to know to understand the story below is that Go involves 2 players taking turns, trying to outsmart the other, kind of like chess. And here’s a visual from the Wikipedia page.

Go is a reasonably popular game in Japan1—though it’s often seen as a game for old men—and I knew about the game when I was growing up there. But I don’t think I played a single game until my mid-20s when I was in Berkeley.

What inspired me to start was a conversation with my grad school friends about game AI. We all knew that computers have been stronger than humans at chess for some time, and some of us knew that computers weren’t even close to beating the strongest humans at Go2. I got curious about why this was the case.

I found a website where I could play against a computer program, weak even by the standards at that time, and quickly started to beat it most of the time. I needed to find better opponents, so I found a place to play against other people online. Then, a couple months into playing online only, a friend—who was not part of that game AI conversation—asked me if I wanted to go to the UC Berkeley’s campus Go club, so I went.

You may or may not be surprised to learn that this game has been a major source of adult friendships for me. I’ve made friends at Go clubs in Madison, western Massachusetts, and Evanston. And at various local tournaments and at the annual US Go Congress—the last Congress I attended was near Cleveland in 2023.

When I saw the advice that lonely men should seek fellowship before friendship, I immediately had an example of how that worked.

If you’re in even a medium-sized city in the US, there’s almost certainly someone playing regularly in your vicinity. The Baduk Club3 website can help you find clubs and players.

Beginnings

One of the more popular servers to play Go online, especially among English speakers, is the earnestly-named Online-Go Server (OGS). A big feature of this server is that you can play “correspondence” games, which can go on for many days. A common time setting is to get a day added to your clock when you make a move, so if you want, you could have dozens of games going at the same time, leisurely making a move on each game every day.

It’s a very different challenge compared to the fast-paced games that are the norm elsewhere. You get to use the online board to try out different sequences of moves and analyze the future states of the game, instead of trying to do that all in your head.

Just before the start of 2023, I was invited to join a correspondence tournament on OGS, called 2023 Rounds Survival. They were clearly sending these invitations en masse, and 2575 players joined this tournament.

“2023 Rounds Survival” is a strange but perfectly descriptive name that I did not fully appreciate when I accepted the invitation. As the name suggests, there are 2023 rounds of play. This is an insane number. I would guess that 99% of tournaments end in less than 20 rounds. This tournament is 100 times longer than that.4

Given the premise of trying to play such a large number of rounds, there are some unusual rules for this tournament. OGS allows users to be in “vacation mode”, which lets them pause their games for days. For players in this tournament, vacation mode is highly discouraged. If you use it for more than 5 days during a game, you can get disqualified from the tournament.

Similarly, if your game clock runs out of time, you not only lose that game but are disqualified from the tournament.

How it’s Go-ing

In the early rounds, LOTS of players got disqualified for losing on time. Or they realized what this tournament represented—fearless exploration of the unknown, of course—and quit the tournament.

After a year, we were in round 30, and there were only 115 players left from that initial 2575.

Now, let’s extrapolate that 30 rounds/year pace. If that stayed constant, we would finish the tournament after 67 years. That would be year 2090. I am pretty pessimistic about my chances of being alive at that point.

Thankfully, as the tournament progressed, we’ve filtered ourselves down to an elite corps of diligent non-vacationing players, and the rounds have gotten faster. We got through 40 rounds last year.

If we keep that pace from here on out, we’ll finish in 2073. I think I have a chance.

You do wonder, though. Will OGS still be maintained in 2073? Will the tournament keep working without crashing somehow? How many of the current 45 remaining players, even if they’re still alive, will get disqualified from the tournament? Quit OGS? Quit Go?

One twist here is that the creator of the tournament has been disqualified already, and doesn’t seem to be actively involved anymore. Once set in motion by their intentional acts of setting up the tournament and inviting a huge number of people, the tournament is running on its own5 through OGS’s code.

Live-testing OGS’s code

And speaking of code, the code that runs OGS clearly wasn’t designed for a tournament with 2575 players that runs for 2023 rounds, and we’ve found bugs and other problems during this tournament. (I think this section is hilarious, but it gets into the nitty gritty of running a tournament. So feel free to skip to the music section.)

One bug involves byes. When there’s an odd number of players, there’s a player who isn’t paired with anyone else. Most tournaments try to make the competition to get 1st place fair and competitive, so you would give the bye to one of the people near the bottom of the standings, and assign a win to them for that round. In this tournament, the top player in the standing would often receive the bye—so they would keep running away with their lead.6

There was a mundane web development issue: On the tournament page, there’s a section with links to all the rounds so far. The links used to be arranged in one row, so as we went into 50+ rounds, you had to start scrolling left and right to find the round you wanted to look at. One of the players requested for multiple rows in this display, so that we can see all the rounds on the screen at once. And the OGS developers—it’s an open source project—were nice enough to implement it quickly.

I’m trying to imagine what the display will look like when there are 2023 rounds.

Finally, a series of apparent bugs involved some of my own games. Most pairing methods try to pair you with someone you haven’t played before, so you wouldn’t have many repeat matchups. We quickly realized that, since there were many more rounds than players in this tournament, we would start getting only repeat matchups at some point.

What appeared to happen was that the player in 2nd place could not play anyone new after round 74. So in round 75, the top 2 players in the standings played against each other, which makes perfect sense. In round 76, player #1 got a bye7, and player #2 played against player #3 (me). So far, so good.

In round 77, we all assumed that player #2 would play player #4 or someone around there in the standings. Nope. They got paired with me again. My guess is that the pairing algorithm only cares about the true-or-false question “have you played against this person?”, and doesn’t consider how many times the matchup happened.

Whatever the cause of this behavior, I’ve played player #2 in 5 of the past 6 rounds. I’ve never played the same person this many times in a single tournament before, and I expect the number to go very high.

What I’m listening to now

This might be my favorite album since Jardin by MUNYA, which I discovered in early 2024. So this is at the album-of-the-year level of enjoyment for me. Flora Hibberd is London-born and Paris-based, so she’s a English/French bilingual, like MUNYA, but there’s no French in this album.

I love the starting lyrics to the album.

There you go again, attaching meaning
Thumbing the archives of this feeling

There’s been choices made with these words, and they set up some of the recurring themes in the album: sending and receiving messages (especially through radio), and memory.8

Along with that opening track, “Code” is probably the other candidate for best song on the album. The angular melodies on these remind me of Aldous Harding.

Surprisingly given Hibberd’s background, this album was recorded in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The arrangement and production are excellent. Some things I love: the rocking outro for “Every Incident Has Left Its Mark”, the country rock steel guitar in “Canopy”, the exuberance of “Lucky You”.

1. In addition to Ballaké Sissoko et al. in March, which I talked about last time, we’re going to see A Raisin in the Sun at Court Theatre next week, and Kishi Bashi at the Auditorium Theater in April. I guess we’re settling into a one-date-a-month routine.

2. Paczki day (aka Fat Tuesday) is March 4. We haven’t really found a replacement after Dinkel’s closed. I’m sure we’ll try some new ones.

3. I was reading the book How to Be an Epicurean by Catherine Wilson, which I don’t fully endorse because the author tries too hard to make the content contemporary for 2019 and I don’t think it’ll age well. But I did find this segment that perfectly captures the sentiment I was going for in my last post (the part that starts with “Another thread that I’ve been exploring”):

   To experience oneself as part of this system [of living nature] is to feel at once diminished—since our petty concerns about being liked and disliked, successful or ignored, rich or strapped for money to fulfill consumer ambitions, can come to feel trivial—and at the same time enlarged. The very fact of having been produced by mindless atoms and yet having a mind; of having been produced by blind forces and yet having direction and purpose, can seem miraculous. We become aware of our good fortune in existing in a vast and—for all practical, if not theoretical, purposes—otherwise lifeless universe.
   
   The eating, drinking and mirthfulness of any social animal are not in every way different from our own. The Epicurean philosophers were more concerned to break down exalted human pride in our species than to puff it up by echoing the more usual views about human exceptionality. But as far as we know, we are the only species that can put pleasure in vitality and sadness over any death that is too abrupt a departure from the ‘feast of life’ into the wider context of life and beauty.

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No, I won’t be talking about the Japanese restaurant Momotaro in West Loop1. This is about what it’s named after.

My older son, who recently turned 3, was asking me to read a particular picture book to him almost every day in January. And this was Momotarō. Momotarō just might be the most famous folk tale in Japan. If you ask a Japanese person to tell you the story of Momotarō, you’ll almost certainly get something like this:

A long time ago, an old man and an old woman lived together in a village. The man goes to the mountain to get firewood, while the woman goes to the river to do the washing2. As the woman is washing at the river, she sees a large peach, floating down the river3. Surprised, she takes it home to share with the old man.

Back at home, as she is about to cut the peach, it splits open on its own, and out comes a baby boy. The couple names him Momotarō (basically “peach boy”), and raises him as their own child.

As the boy grows to be a strong young man, he learns that oni (ogres) are pillaging all the nearby villages. So he decides to raid Onigashima (literally “island of the ogres”) to put a stop to it. The old couple makes him kibi dango (millet dumplings) for the road, which are apparently great for fighting. Momotarō befriends a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant on the way by giving them the dumplings. With their help, Momotarō defeats the oni, and everyone lives happily ever after.

You may have some questions, like why peach? Why dog, monkey, and pheasant? The question that came up in my head was, why is this story making me think of my grandmother every time?

My grandmother in Okayama, at 96-years old, is my only living grandparent at this point. Early in January, we learned that she caught the flu and was unable to eat for many days, making us fear the worst—I guess one message to you is to get your flu shot, so that you can protect people like her a little better.

Her situation seems more stable now, but the episode made it clear that I may not necessarily see her again. I think I had been operating under that assumption, but it’s still painful to be confronted with that.

Now, why does the story of Momotarō make me think of her?

First, it’s not every book that has a picture of an old Japanese woman, so that’s one reason.

Second, a lot of people think Okayama is where the Momotarō story came from4. There is a statue of Momotarō with his animal friends in front of the Okayama station, and they even named a big road extending from the station after Momotarō.

Kibi, that word for millet, happens to sound the same as an old name for the region around Okayama. So there’s traditional sweets called Kibi dango, as in dumplings from the Kibi region. And Kōeido, the most famous producer of this confection, have gone all-in with the idea that these are the dumplings in the Momotarō story.

A note on these sweets: Kibi dango is a very good souvenir. You can buy them at the Okayama station or depachika, the food section in department store basements. They are soft mochi balls with delicate sweetness that go great with tea—exactly what you hope for from depachika Japanese sweets.

But you can do even better with Kibi daifuku from the same shop, where the same mochi surrounds some red bean filling. Where Kibi dango can get a bit monotonous, the red beans in the daifuku give you a great contrast. This is top-tier even in the competitive field of depachika sweets.

Finally, the peach in the story reminds me of summers I spent in Okayama as a kid with my grandparents—which I’ve already written about:

When I was in elementary school, I remember visiting my grandparents in Okayama during summer breaks. They would buy white peaches that grew ripe on the tree at a peach farm nearby. Those were about the juiciest peaches anywhere, and it was messy. And Grandma being a grandma, once she figured out that I liked peaches, she gave me a lot of them. Even accounting for the nostalgia factor, I think these are still the best peaches I’ve had.

Here’s the outline of my grandmother’s life, as I understand it.

She grew up in Engaru, Hokkaido, one of the coldest and remotest parts of Japan, where her father worked at a boarding school for kids with behavioral problems—essentially boys who were at risk of getting locked up. She was raised at the school with these boys.

She was a teenager at the end of World War II. Her future husband was slightly older, being in training near Hiroshima where he saw the mushroom cloud5. He went into child education after the war, which I believe is how they met.

In the 1950s, she gave birth to two sons—my uncle and my father. By all accounts, they were extremely rambunctious, and she routinely had to go around the neighborhood apologizing for whatever trouble they caused. Since my first son was born, and especially since my second son was born last year, I’ve felt a strong affinity to boy parents, and she’s one of the people that I think of in that context…although, I don’t imagine us having to go around apologizing for the boys with any regularity6.

I realize I’m doing the thing where I’m defining a woman’s life by the men around her. I suspect this reflects the time and place she lived in, and that includes how reluctant she was to tell her grandson details about her life7. But she did have an outlet for expressing her feelings and reactions to her surroundings, and that was tanka.

Everyone knows about haiku now, but did you know that haiku developed from a slightly longer poetry form called tanka? Where haiku consists of 3 lines, with syllable counts of 5-7-5, tanka consists of 5 lines, with syllable counts of 5-7-5-7-78. People have been writing tanka since at least the 8th century9.

My grandmother was writing tanka when I was growing up. She published a collection in the early 90s, which I should read the next time I visit my parents or Okayama. I don’t know exactly when she started, but considering the number of these short poems that fit in a single page, and how the collection surely only contains a small fraction of what she wrote, she must have been writing more than a poem a day for many years.

Selfishly, I only know about the poems that I’m in—my parents helpfully bookmarked the pages. In one of them, she’s describing a phone call, where I sang her a well-known kid’s song called “Shabon Dama” (“bubbles”). So this is another kid’s thing that will always remind me of her.

What I’m listening to now

Here’s another mini-genre that shows up on my Spotify from time to time: Turkish psychedelia. I’m no expert on Turkish music, but it seems to have a lot of “exotic” elements that psychedelic bands were experimenting with in the 60s, so it makes sense that there’s a lot of bands digging in this mine—you can say the same about Southeast Asian music.

This whole album by Kit Sebastian is a vibe, and I’m not sure if I have a particular favorite song. This feels like something you should just immerse yourself in.

What’s interesting about Turkish psychedelic music is that so many bands are based outside of Turkey. Kit Sebastian formed in the UK, and I can think of others like Altin Gün10 (the Netherlands), Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek (Germany), and Şatellites (Israel). I do know that the Turkish diaspora is very large in Europe (over 10 million people), so I’m not sure if I should be surprised that there’s so many very good Turkish bands outside Turkey.

The only Turkish band in Turkey that I remember listening to is Baba Zula. If you’re a Turkish music lover, I’d welcome suggestions on what to listen to.

1. Hooray for congestion pricing in New York! Making the tolls more expensive when you expect higher traffic volumes is basically the only way of “solving” traffic1, and it’s been around for a while in cities like London, Singapore, Stockholm, and Milan.
   
   I’ve personally been for congestion pricing since at least 2017, when I tried to do a data project that looked into the possibility of congestion pricing in Chicago2. I’m glad it’s gotten started in an American city because we don’t learn as much from other countries as we should, and hopefully it spreads to other cities that need it.

2. Ballaké Sissoko (kora) will be playing Old Town School of Folk Music with Vincent Ségal (cello), Emile Parisien (saxophone), and Vincent Peirani (accordion) on March 26. This one sneaked up on me because it’s not listed as one of Ballaké’s tour dates on Spotify or Songkick. See Peirani’s tour dates here. In North America, they’re also playing in Pine Plains (NY), New York City, Somerville (MA), Minneapolis, and Ottawa.
   
   Curiously, Parisien’s website shows additional tour dates in Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria. Not sure what’s going on there.

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This Substack has been called Satoru’s Newsletter since 2022 when I started writing it. While that’s a good way to keep anything and everything up for grabs, it doesn’t give anyone a reason to be interested unless they’re interested in what I have to say to begin with. So I’d been meaning to come up with an actual title, something that describes, or at least suggests, what I’m writing about.

The new title is Satoru’s Greedy Algorithm.

I’ll explain what I’m going for in this post, and I’ll keep it for the foreseeable future unless someone can convince me that it’s terrible.

What has this newsletter been about?

I do want to make it clear that the new title doesn’t mean I’ll write about vastly different topics than before. It’s more a way to tie together the topics that I’ve already been writing about into some sort of a framework.

So what have I been writing about?

1. One major theme is art appreciation, broadly.

   1. Music has been part of every post. Even when it’s not the main topic of the post, I have a What I’m listening to now segment at the end3.

   2. Food has often been the main topic of my posts, the most popular being this one on ramen in and around Chicago (with two followups).

   3. I’ve also talked a few times about art exhibits that I saw.

2. The other main theme is trying to figure out how things work, and how they may work in the future.

   1. Many of the posts about Chicago and other cities try to figure out why some things in these cities are the way they are.

   2. I have a couple of posts explicitly about AI4.

How does the new title capture these?

Obviously, I’m writing about these things because I’m interested in them. But why am I interested in them? At the risk of over-intellectualizing something that could just be my personal biases, here’s my attempt to reorganize these topics into the words “greedy” and “algorithm”5 (you can safely skip to the next section if you only care what will happen with this Substack):

1. Greedy: A very short answer is that “greedy” is obviously a good word for a Substack that talks about food a lot.
   
   I also have a very long answer.
   
   Increasingly, I’ve been drawn to 2 ethical traditions—utilitarianism and Epicureanism—that teach you that it’s morally a good thing for people to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to try to be happy. Most people would agree that they like having pleasure rather than pain. But is it the right thing to do, to prioritize it? You could probably think of situations where enduring pain seems like the right thing to do. So this isn’t an obvious thing to agree with, but I am agreeing with it.
   
   Hopefully more to come on these philosophies, but my writing on food and music is about having good, pleasurable experiences. Having good experiences is a surer way of being happy than having more stuff. And even better, food and music are two arts that can be very communal—the point is often to enjoy them with other people. That builds relationships and community, which makes them even surer ways of being happy6.

   
   One caveat about focusing on good experiences is that when you start comparing yourself with others to see who is having the most fabulous experiences, it tend to go badly because then you’re in an arms race. So I want to remove the status game from these experiences as much as I can.
   

   The academic term for the idea that morality should be based on pain and pleasure is ethical hedonism, which sounds bad but it’s just what it is. There’s inherently an idea here that some actions that may be labeled “sinful” by others may actually be ethical, suggesting “greedy” as a self-deprecating label7.

2. Algorithm: Another thread that I’ve been exploring, especially with respect to AI, is the tension between the following beliefs that I hold strongly in my head:

   a. Humans are awesome: Cities are awesome. Food is awesome. Music is awesome. A large fraction of what I value in the universe was made by humans.

   b. Humans do not inherently have a special status in the universe: In particular, there’s nothing supernatural about the human brain.
   
   For the first belief, I hope it’s clear that I wouldn’t spend my time writing about these things if I didn’t think they were great.
   

   As for the second belief, when we feel that we’re making a decision or a judgment freely, our whole body is simply following the laws of physics. It’s really hard to sneak free will back into this picture without sounding like a teenager who wants an exception to the rule. My suspicion is that human thought is deterministic to a large degree, with some randomness thrown in, and that free will is an illusion that has been useful for us8.

   
   So I’m claiming it’s fair to compare human thought to algorithms, which are well-defined procedures that turn inputs into outputs9. This thought connects to so many questions I have about what’s good in life: How do we decide what’s good food/music/etc.? How do we find these good things? Why can/can’t computers make good things?

   
   When you see the word “algorithm” in non-technical settings these days, it’s usually when someone complains about things like social media feeds or AI, where they feel that there’s an opaque and unaccountable piece of computer code that is controlling some aspect of their lives.
   
   I guess the title is doubly self-deprecating.

Now, the people who have studied algorithms are screaming at me: ‘You started with the phrase “greedy algorithm” and worked backwards!’

And they’d be correct. Greedy algorithms are algorithms that always go for the best immediate results—it’s not so much greedy as shortsighted10. I’ve always liked the phrase as colloquial-sounding terminology, and it turns out that I can make a long-winded argument for how both “greedy” and “algorithm” apply to what I’m writing.

So what does it mean for what I’ll write?

Here’s what I expect:

• I’ll still write about 1 post per month

• Just about everything that I’ve written so far can fit into the themes I presented above. What might change is the focus, and one thing I’ll try to write more about is my process for finding whatever it is that I enjoyed.

• One topic that I’ve been meaning to write about, but haven’t yet, is parenting. How having a child (or two) can be a source of joy (or not) seems like an obvious topic.

What I’m listening to now

In a funny coincidence, I’ll be talking about the same artist as in my first post for Satoru’s Newsletter. Then, I talked about De Todas las Flores by the Mexican singer Natalia Lafourcade. She played at Carnegie Hall in 2023, and the live recording came out near the end of last year.

The first half covers most of the songs from De Todas las Flores. In the studio album, I especially liked 2 of the lighter songs, “El lugar correcto” and “Caminar bonito”, but the live band really nails the more sombre songs, like “Pajarito colibrí”, “María la Curandera”, and, of course, “Muerte”.

The second half is older material. She had some truly special guests for this show: David Byrne reads an English translation of the lyrics for “Muerte” (basically the end of the first half), then Jorge Drexler—the Uruguayan artist that I talked about in my second post—does an excellent duet on “Ya No Vivo por Vivir”, and Omara Portuondo of Buena Vista Social Club fame is in a couple of songs.

She’s probably the most popular artist that I’ve covered in this space, if we look beyond gringo culture. I consider her one of the greatest singers of my generation.

Final note: she just announced a tour. She’ll play most major cities in the US, though somehow not a single show in Southern California. I will try to make her Chicago show on 6/14, but that may conflict with a Japan trip that we’ve been hoping to take.

1. I’m on Bluesky regularly now (with the handle satoruinoue.com). I still check my Twitter/X account where I post in Japanese1, but it stopped being a place to discover something new on the internet 2+ years ago—that’s a big reason why I started writing here.
   
   There’s definitely a lot more food content on Instagram2, but otherwise Bluesky is looking promising.
   

   Fair warning: I’ve already exhausted my Rolling Stones takes.

   

2. It looks like the former Ramen Takeya space in Fulton Market, which became a Korean pub with the same owners, is turning back into a ramen place. I’ll need to check this out, but tentatively, this is again part of my top 5 ramen places in the city of Chicago.

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This being my wrap for the year, I should first go over my Spotify Wrapped, a few weeks late. Here are the top artists and songs that I played on Spotify this year:

I’m happy with how much I was able to reflect my actual listening habits in this newsletter.

1. I wrote about the kora master Toumani Diabaté, who died this year.

2. I wrote about Pearl & The Oysters in my last post. “Big Time” is their song.

3. I wrote about Selton, my favorite Brazilian band in Italy. “Sangue Latino” and “Café Pra Dois” are their songs.

4. I wrote about MUNYA from Montreal, whose Jardin might be my favorite album from 2023. “Caramel” is something from French opera that she reimagined.

5. I wrote about “Hello” by Girl & Girl, an Australian garage rock band.

6. I did not write about the jazz electronica group cosmic collective. I’m guessing they got in there because they are prolific and I listened to most of their releases.

One thing to note is that we have a separate Spotify account for our toddler, so that his music doesn’t mess up our recommendations.

My best of 2024 playlists

I keep a number of “best albums” playlists on Spotify, where I add good albums as I encounter them, and organizing them by some (usually geographic) criteria. It helps me keep track of music scenes that I’m interested in, and it’s also a way for me to make sure I see where the music is coming from when I like something3.

I’ll talk a bit more about the Chicago playlist below, but here’s a short rundown of some of the other ones.

• Best African albums 2024: Out of albums that I haven’t already talked about here, Musow Danse by Les Amazones d’Afrique was a highlight.

• Best Australian albums 2024: I really like this whole playlist, but Grace Cummings might be more obscure than others.

• Best Brazilian albums 2024: Pique by Dora Morelenbaum is my favorite here.

• Best Italian albums 2024: I would highlight the 2 Italo disco albums, Città Futura by Bassolino and The Napoli Exchange by EX GENERATION.

• Best Japanese albums 2024: Ogre You Asshole is a really good krautrock band with a bizarre name.

• Best Montréal albums 2024: Bon Enfant and Mon Doux Saigneur are my favorite bands in here.

And here’s my 6 favorite Chicago albums from this year, in the order that I discovered them. I did not specifically go looking for music from Chicago, so I've surely missed out on a lot. Let me know if you know good albums that are not in here.

Valebol by Valebol

I wrote about this album back in April, and I’m OK calling this my favorite Chicago album of 2024. I occasionally get “Netuchepa!” and “Row Row Row” stuck in my head.

The Light Up Waltz by Minor Moon

This is alt country with apocalyptic sci-fi lyrics. I love the “Blue Timing/I Could See It Coming” sequence. V.V. Lightbody, who is one half of Valebol above, contributed vocals and flute and some production work.

Mestizx by Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly

Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti (Bolivia/Brazil) and Frank Rosaly (Puerto Rico/Chicago) are both based in the Netherlands, but recorded this in Chicago. This album is very genre-fluid, with latin, jazz, punk, electronica all in the mix. “TURBULÊNCIA” and “MESTIZX” are my favorite tracks.

Currents / Volume 3 by Third Coast Percussion

Third Coast Percussion is a great classical percussion ensemble, and their Currents series is where they collaborate with composers who aren’t used to writing for percussion to make new music. I especially liked “Tree Songs”, the last 4 tracks.

Bamako*Chicago Sound System by Nicole Mitchel & Ballaké Sissoko

Now that Toumani is gone, Ballaké Sissoko is the one great living master of the kora (West African harp). This came out a month after Toumani’s death, and it was such a gift. Nicole Mitchell is a jazz flautist who was based in Chicago for a long time, with serious avant garde cred, but I think this music is very approachable. Apparently the recording for this album happened way back in 2017.

Composers Collective: Beyond The Jukebox by Marquis Hill

Here’s a more straight-up jazz album. If you have Joel Ross on vibraphone, I already know I would probably like it. There’s a lot of music here, written by a bunch of people, with a bunch of guest artists. I still need to re-listen and digest it.

So that’s it for 2024. I wish you all a great new year.

1. Baby boy #2 arrived last month. See the subscriber chat song share thread for an inside scoop on a song that got played during delivery—I wasn’t expecting to see that posted.

2. This is for the construction site aficionados among you: I went to the Loop to get the baby’s birth certificate, and realized that the Thompson Center construction site is really striking. Google bought the building from the State of Illinois, and they’re replacing the façade and the internal systems. Whatever you think of the building and what’s happening to it, this is an unusual sight.

   

3. Not sure how many of my readers here expect an election take from me. I think it’s greater than 0 but not too much higher. I’ll just say that a large part of the explanation for what happened in the US presidential election is that incumbents are struggling everywhere in the world, most likely due to inflation.

   Here’s some readings that I found helpful: 1, 2, and 3 (from early this year)

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Right before the baby was born, there was Open House Chicago. As I wrote in my last post, we were planning on exploring Ukrainian Village. We did go through with that plan, but without Julie, which was wise given what happened soon after. Our group was me, my 2-year old son, and another father-son pair.

What is Open House Chicago?

Open House Chicago (OHC) is a free festival run by the Chicago Architecture Center, where many buildings that are usually not open to the public become free access for a weekend in October. Many of the sites are well-known buildings downtown, and there’s certainly a lot of gems there, but we’ve found that it’s a great way to explore a neighborhood that we’re not too familiar with. Unless we happen to be out of town, we try to do it every year.

Apparently there’s similar events in other cities, and you can see a list here.

What is Ukrainian Village?

As you can tell from the name, Ukrainian Village is a neighborhood that’s historically been heavily populated by Ukrainian immigrants. It’s located in the Near West Side, and although there’s no official boundaries, I would say it’s between Damen and Western in the east-west direction, and stretches down from Division to a little south of Chicago Avenue.

It’s been a while since I had a map to go with a post. There are pins on the map for all the places I talk about in this post, and it looks like the pins mostly cover the western half of the neighborhood.

On the history of Ukrainian Village, this guide from Chicago Reader is the best one-stop resource that I found online. The origin of these ethnic neighborhoods can be somewhat random—once you have a critical mass of a certain ethnic group, newcomers sharing the same culture will try to be near them—but it does make some sense for the Ukrainian neighborhood to be here. Neighborhoods to the east and north, including Wicker Park and Bucktown1, were heavily Polish, with a culture very familiar to the Ukrainians.

Another thing to note is that transit access to this part of Chicago used to be better than what it is now. Currently, the most obvious way to get to Ukrainian Village on the L is the Blue Line2, but you need to walk ~1.5 miles from the train to get to most of the places I talk about in this post3. Until the 1950s, though, there were trains running along Paulina Avenue, and the Chicago Avenue stop would’ve been much closer to the neighborhood.

What’s immediately obvious when you get to this neighborhood is that flying the Ukrainian flag isn’t just a trendy thing that you do when people are talking about the war in Ukraine4. You see the flags on people’s apartments, on local businesses—many of which are run by, and for, Ukrainian immigrants—and on churches that I’ll talk about below.

On the map, you can also find the 2 Ukrainian museums in the neighborhood that were part of OHC. So even though the concentration of Ukrainian residents in the neighborhood has decreased over the decades, there’s still a lot of Ukrainian cultural institutions that bring people in.

St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral

We first visited St. Nicholas Cathedral, which is from 1915 and is the much older of the 2 Ukrainian churches we visited that day. OHC volunteers over the years have been invariably nice5, and many of them are people who use the building regularly. The volunteer at St. Nicholas that I talked to was a parishioner, who told us some of the history as well as what’s happening with their renovation (you can see the scaffolding in my photo below).

I failed to get a photo inside, as I was holding the 2-year old the whole time, so you should check out the photos on the OHC webpage. One detail that was unbelievable and very believable at the same time was that when they installed the 480-light chandelier in the 70s, it was the largest working chandelier in the US.

Here comes a really deep rabbit hole. If you just want the food and the buildings, you can skip to the next section, but I (clearly) think it’s super fascinating.

You may know some of the following:

1. Most Christians in Russia are Orthodox.

2. Most Christians in Poland are Catholics. Famously, a relatively recent pope was from Poland.

3. Most Christians in Ukraine are Orthodox.

4. There’s currently a rift among the Orthodox churches because the Patriarch Kirill, who heads the Russian Orthodox Church, publicly supports the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Ukrainian Village hosts all the relevant parties here.6

1. Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral, designed by Louis Sullivan (!), was part of OHC, but we didn’t make it there this time.

2. St. Helen Roman Catholic Church originally served a predominantly Polish parish, and still has service in Polish. They were also part of OHC and we visited them right after St. Nicholas.

3. St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral was part of OHC in the past.

This tells you how deep and wide the Eastern European connections run in this area. If you were reading carefully, though, the church we visited was a Ukrainian Catholic church. What is that?

It turns out that a sizable fraction of western Ukrainians are Catholics, but they are not part of the Latin Church, which covers the vast majority of Catholics in the world. Ukrainian Catholic churches are part of the Eastern Catholic tradition, which has distinct practices.

On this point, the volunteer at St. Nicholas simply said “We do things a little differently”. I’ll take his lead and not get too deep into the weeds here, but one way to summarize it is that the Ukrainian Catholics use the Byzantine rite in terms of their rituals and such. This is what Orthodox Christians also use. So there should be a lot of surface similarity there.

And this is the deepest I got in this rabbit hole: one claim I heard that day was that the Ukrainian branch is the largest of the Eastern Catholic churches, and this turns out to be probably incorrect. Syro-Malabar Church is a tad larger according to Wikipedia (4.5 vs 4.3 million members).

And where is this Syro-Malabar Church based? In the state of Kerala in South India. This is a group of South Indians who have been practicing Catholicism since premodern times. Truly remarkable.

Tryzub Ukrainian Kitchen

We had lunch at Tryzub, a Ukrainian restaurant that I had been eyeing for years. Julie and I had their varenyky, which is the Ukrainian equivalent of the Polish pierogi, at something called the World Dumpling Fest. I thought they were decent, but it seemed like the dumplings were sitting there for a while and I wondered if they were better fresh.

So yes, I had to get their basic varenyky. When you have things in 2 cultures that are similar like varenyky and pierogi, my instinct is to try to figure out how one is not quite the same as the other, but the server literally said, “this is the potato and cheese pierogi”, and I don’t think there’s a major difference.

And yes, it was much better on site. The skin was soft, light and not bloated, and the toppings and sour cream added the accents that you want for the carb-heavy dish.

This being brunch time, I also enjoyed their mini potato pancake trio, which came with toppings like smoked salmon and dill cream sauce. And look at this fun chicken stew (paprikash) in a pumpkin.

We got another order of varenyky, with sour cherries. Since it was brunch, we were half-expecting it to arrive with the rest of the food, like it was pancakes. They actually intended it as dessert, and I agree with that decision.

One key detail here was that the skin had cacao flavor. I’m having trouble coming up with close comparisons—maybe nama yatsuhashi in Kyoto. It was definitely a surprise to have dumplings that taste like this, and I mean that in a very good way.

As we were eating at a booth, a formally-dressed group of 30+ people came in for what looked like a funeral luncheon, taking up most of the indoor seating. The patio was still open as of one month ago, and it was mostly populated by casually-dressed young Eastern European couples. There was a strong neighborhood feel for sure.

I know Anelya in Avondale is supposed to be a great Ukrainian restaurant at a higher price point, and I do want to try it, but Tryzub was great.

Sts. Volodymyr & Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church

The last place we visited that day was Sts. Volodymyr & Olha, another Ukrainian Catholic church. It’s only 2 blocks away from St. Nicholas, and the obvious question is why there’s 2 Ukrainian Catholic churches so close to each other. The answer is that St. Nicholas switched to the Gregorian calendar, and some people wanted to keep the Julian calendar so they splintered off.

Here, we got a 10-minute talk on how Eastern Catholic teachings inform the architecture of the church, starting with how the church is laid out in a Greek cross, i.e. equal-length in all 4 directions, with the altar on the east side. This is the sort of thing you love to see at OHC.

Setting aside the lecture, though, the space itself is spectacular. After the structure was built, they worked for nearly a decade to finish the decorations. I’m confident that no photo does justice to it, and you really could go to Ukrainian Village just to see it. I hope to take Julie and the baby—however old he’ll be—next time.

What I’m listening to now

I’ve mentioned Pearl & The Oysters multiple times before, and I had to talk about one of their albums at some point. They’re a duo of musicians who met in Paris, moved to Florida then to LA. They have a distinct take on indie electro-pop. I would describe some of their songs, such as “Together, Alone” and “A Planet Upside Down” here, as being like The Beach Boys if they grew up playing Nintendo7.

My favorite track is “Big Time”. I first heard this song around the same time as “Hello” by Girl and Girl (I talked about it here), and these are both upbeat songs about being down. This one is also a great LA song.

After my last post, one of my readers pledged to support this Substack if I turned on paid subscriptions. A few responses to this:

1. Thank you!

2. For the foreseeable future, I don’t plan on having paid content, as I don’t expect to be able to devote the time and effort to make it worthwhile for people1.

3. The reader expressed interest in having more of a community of my readers. This is something that I agree would be nice, so I turned on the Substack Chat feature. I started a song share thread in there—I’m hoping this can be one where people can just drop songs they really like. Any subscriber can start a thread, so we’ll see what people want to talk about.
   
   Substack wants me to suggest getting the Substack app for using the chat, but it’s not necessary. You do need to subscribe to this newsletter to participate in the associated chat.

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Last time, I talked about how Spotify sometimes recommends me spammy music that’s probably AI-generated. This time, I’ll talk about a good recent experience with their recommendations.

Before I get to that, I have a tip on getting the best out of these recommendation systems. I find that most people just do not react to enough songs to get great recommendations. Consider:

1. There are millions of songs by millions of artists on Spotify.

2. Your likes and dislikes are complex and unique2.

In order for the recommender to give you things that you’re more likely to enjoy, and even surprise you at times, it needs a lot of data about which songs you like and which songs you don’t. So instead of waiting for songs you absolutely love, press that + button for songs that make you think “ok, I kind of liked that and want to hear more like it”, at least until you start getting great recommendations3.

One thing that started happening once Spotify’s recommendations got really good for me was that it would drop me into a music scene that I wasn’t very familiar with. Many of these were fairly obvious, like when I kept getting music from Montreal. Some were less obvious, like when I got a lot of music from Goiânia, Brazil4.

Recently, I realized that there was a pattern to some of the music I was getting, months after the trend started. I was getting music made by East Asian immigrants in Europe. The pattern wasn’t obvious at all because these were people in different European countries, with different origins within East Asia.

Here’s some of my favorites.

Yong-Gwanglo Part One by Ki!

This album from the Korean-Danish musician Ki! is remarkable for the different styles of music he manages to nail. “Yong-Gwanglo (용광로)” means “melting pot” in Korean5, so that checks out. After the synth-heavy intro track “Off World” that leans into the Asian pentatonic scale, we get Ethio-jazz (“Jimma”), Afrobeat (“Elko”), a Thelonious Monk composition complete with a hum-along (“Pannonica”), something out of a spaghetti Western soundtrack (“Nassomato”)…you get the picture.

Letter To Yu by Bolis Pupul

Belgium-based Bolis Pupul’s album is a tribute to his mother who was from Hong Kong. It also sounds like a tribute to the city itself. The music is alternately glittery and nostalgic, sometimes both at the same time. Strong Yellow Magic Orchestra vibes.

Nandakke? by Aili

Aili Maruyama is the Japanese-Belgian singer for Aili. The title track “Nandakke?” is a song about forgetting a word for something in one of your languages, a universal experience for multilinguals.

Her Japanese is not quite native level—linguists would call her a heritage speaker. The private nature of her language and the origin of her slight Kansai accent are revealed in “Takoyaki”, where a voice recording of her dad explains how to make takoyaki, an Osaka specialty.

There’s something interesting here about her deciding to sing comical songs like these two, old fashioned lyrics set to electropop (“Babychan”, “Yubikiri”), and more experimental songs (“Gari Gari”, “Oyasumi”) in a language that most of her audience likely doesn’t understand.

Honorable mentions

• Notes on Listening by Suki Sou (old-school electronica from a Burmese/Japanese/Chinese musician who is from Macao and based in the UK)

• nothing or something to die for by mui zyu (whimsical indie pop from a Hong Kong/UK artist)

What I’m listening to now

Kishi Bashi’s6 latest album Kantos ends with "Tokyo Love Story (Love Story Wa Totsuzen Ni)". This is a cover of a 90’s Japanese megahit by Kazumasa Oda, with Kishi Bashi adding some English lyrics. This sent me into a deep dive of Oda’s music, including the music of Off Course, the band that launched his career.

Oda is still active at age 77, and I’m guessing it’s hard to find someone who listens to a lot of J-pop who isn’t familiar with at least some of Oda’s songs. Growing up in Japan, I’d definitely heard a few. What really left an impression for me, though, was when I listened to a compilation album of “New Music”—that’s what the Japanese used to call Western-style pop songs played by Japanese people—that my mom brought over from Japan when we moved to the US. Some of the best songs in there were Off Course songs.

So I knew some of their hits, but one thing that streaming services made so much easier than before is going through someone’s discography. You get a better sense for where those hits came from, and you find some overlooked gems, and sometimes it’s just a time suck. In the case of Off Course, I found that when they started out in the early 70s, they didn’t fully realize that Oda’s voice was their biggest weapon7.

Since most of my readers have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a couple of songs that really show off that voice: one, “Sayonara”, is a 70s rock anthem that is amazing for karaoke if you can pull it off, and the other, “Wain No Nioi“ (“The Scent of Wine”), the tenderest of ballads.

After going through much of Off Course’s music, my favorite album is We are from 1980.

One highlight is the 7th track, “せつなくて(Setsunakute)” (something like “Because I’m Sad”). Yes, it’s just a simple soft rock song that might remind you of the Bee Gees, but the technical execution is impeccable. The understated bass gets better and better as I put this on repeat. And a fun twist: the main singer on this song is not Oda, but the guitarist Kazuhiko Matsuo, who wrote the song. What that gives us is the glorious backing chorus that includes Oda.

The next track, “Yes-No”, is another of their big hits. After the instantly recognizable keyboard intro, there is a key change, before Oda starts singing. Why mess with the momentum that you built up in the intro? In the first lines of the lyrics, the singer asks his love interest what she just said, because he’d been looking at her absent-mindedly. So the key change is him waking up from his daydream. Now that’s how you do pop music.

1. We saw the jazz harpist Brandee Younger with Macaya McCraven at last year’s Chicago Jazz Festival, but missed her free show at the Museum of Contemporary Art back in July because it was the day after Béla Fleck’s Millennium Park concert. She played another free show, this time at the Hyde Park Music Festival. We got to see her for 30+ minutes before we had to go home, and it was great. There’s no one quite like her at the moment.1

   

2. 10/19-20 is Open House Chicago, a great excuse to explore Chicago neighborhoods. One thing we’re planning to do this year is to visit 2 Ukrainian Catholic churches2 in Ukrainian Village and get lunch at Tryzub Ukrainian Kitchen.

3. Perhaps unwisely looking beyond the birth of another child, we are low-key planning a trip to visit Julie’s parents in Osaka sometime in the middle of next year. The timing is partly so the younger kid is not walking yet, and partly for Expo 2025, being held near the in-laws’ place.

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Sometime last year, I started noticing songs on Spotify that I suspected were made using generative AI. After a few of them, I started keeping a playlist of such songs that I encountered.3

The first one I have in the playlist is “Tinging” by Khukzuk Zendogiu—by the way, I’m writing out the information here so you can open up an incognito window to play it, instead of contaminating your recommendations.

From the music alone, you may or may not feel particularly suspicious. It seems like whoever’s playing can’t keep the beat sometimes, but that could be for effect…or they might just be bad musicians.

But note the strange artist name. Not unpronounceable, but very foreign4. When you Google “Khukzuk”, you only get this artist, and when you Google “Zendogiu”, you only get this artist. So it doesn’t seem like a regular person’s name.

More importantly, all the webpages you see are the pages for songs that are supposedly by this artist, on different platforms (Spotify, last.fm, Soundcloud, etc.). Basically, this is an artist who has no internet presence other than on streaming platforms. No Instagram, no Facebook, certainly not their own website, and no concert info.5

Spotify lists the source of this song as IncazeLabel. Googling doesn’t give me a website for this label, but it turns up this list of songs that got played on a radio show. They played a song called “Infrahumans” by Clats Pesmygz—somehow an even less likely name than Khukzuk Zendogiu—also released by this IncazeLabel. For me, this song really hits the uncanny valley, which I didn’t even know existed for music until recently.

These are songs released by seemingly not-real artists through a seemingly not-real label.

So is this, like, illegal?

Possibly. There’s at least one person who’s been charged with stealing royalties by uploading AI-generated songs and having bots play them.

“Tinging” has more than 360k plays on Spotify, and “Infrahumans” has more than 200k. Everyone knows—or they should know—how little musicians make from 1 play on these platforms, and each of these songs would probably be making measly tens or hundreds of dollars. But who knows how many songs have been posted by whoever is behind this, under how many artists?

Let me give you one example where I know the artists are fake. Below are 2 EPs of 5 songs each. 2 weird band names and mostly weird song titles.

“Stopword”6 by Lect Drecs and “Hayed” by Fruveegsea have the same lengths, and in fact, they are identical songs. One of these entities is misrepresenting something, and most likely both. This discovery reminded me of this one.

The Honest Broker

Spotify Gives 49 Different Names to the Same Song

Adam Faze kept hearing the same song on Spotify over and over again…

Read more

3 years ago · 477 likes · 141 comments · Ted Gioia

My experience with listening to these songs is that sometimes I do like how they start, then after 10-20 seconds, I start to suspect something is amiss. So I dig into the provenance, and find…no provenance, as you saw above. So I would not be surprised if there’s an AI-generated song, or a few, that snuck into my Spotify library at this point.

If you like ambient-ish music with no lyrics and amorphous beats, and especially if you like streaming playlists that you didn’t create, I would guess that you’ve unwittingly listened to AI-generated music already.

I have no direct proof that the songs above are AI-generated. Circumstantial evidence suggests, though, that the people who uploaded these songs are simply interested in getting as many streams as possible on these platforms at the lowest cost, which suggests that they didn’t hire human musicians—or, God forbid, put in practice so they can make music themselves.

State of AI music in 2023

But just to be safe, what does music that we know to be AI-generated sound like? One caveat for everything that follows: I’ll focus on the technical feasibility of making music using AI, and will ignore all other related issues such as intellectual property, whether it’s good for human musicians, etc.

Here’s a post talking about Suno. It’s one of many services that let people generate music by entering written prompts—think of it as a music version of ChatGPT.

The author posts some songs that he was able to generate on his own—I do recommend listening to some of the songs in the post and songs on the Suno website, and maybe even trying to generate some songs yourself. He then writes, “Now I know what you’re thinking: Yes, these songs aren’t great. But here’s the thing: They’re not terrible either.”

My first comment to that is, these songs are pretty bad. I definitely prefer it to most of the music that I have in my suspected AI music playlist, because there’s no terrible technical issues with the music. But there really isn’t much here other than a collection of musical clichés. One reason I want you to try to generate some songs yourself is so you can try getting a song that’s not full of clichés. I can’t say I succeeded.

The author is correct when he points this out:

But remember how there were complaints that the first AI image generators couldn’t get the number fingers right? Or when the first deepfakes wouldn’t blink? We don’t hear those complaints anymore because the technology very rapidly improved.

Just like AI image generators improved quickly, I do think music generating AI will improve over the next few years.

But where does that get us?

The biggest use of AI images right now seems to be as a replacement for stock images. Even if you can’t draw well yourself, you now can make a somewhat realistic picture of some scenario that you have in mind that is much more appropriate than what you can easily find on the internet. And even if you can draw well yourself, it’s much less effort to use an AI if you don’t care that much about things like artistic quality and originality. When you make the analogy to music, this sounds like you’d be using AI to make background music.

Looking over at the written text, I’m aware that there’s corners of fiction where human authors are using AI to help them write, but ChatGPT is very far from generating a decent novel on its own. At the moment, it’s much better at generating generic text that expresses something with reasonable skill than at generating something with literary quality. Same conclusion as above when you make the analogy to music.

Why this is hard

A machine learning model that generates music has to learn patterns that exist in its training dataset, which is a huge database of existing songs performed by humans. How such a model represents music is an interesting topic that I might get into in the future, but the main point I want to make for now is that the model has an easier time learning common patterns than rare patterns.

The model is likely to have a much larger volume of piano music in its training dataset than, say, harp music. So you’d expect its piano music to be better in many ways than harp music. Similarly, the dataset contains a huge amount of mediocre—or, if that sounds too negative, average—music, compared to the amount of great music. So you’d expect it to generate mediocre music more readily than it generates great music.

Now, it’s totally possible to make these models generate things that are not typical. Speaking extremely broadly7, the question answered by models that generate text or music is, what is the probability for getting a particular item (word, musical note, etc.) at a particular point in the sequence? It’s relatively easy to tell the model to adjust the probabilities so that the output includes things that aren’t common.

The real problem here is not that you can’t make AI create atypical things, but that being atypical almost always takes you away from being great. If you have an orchestra of people who haven’t played their instrument before, you get very atypical music that is also hilariously bad. Great music is not only atypical, but atypical in all the right ways.

So you need a way to weigh the probabilities so that whatever makes better music becomes more likely to be generated. One way to do this would use some sort of objective metric, like the number of streams on Spotify or YouTube, and bias the probabilities toward things that appear in songs with higher streaming counts. This should get the AI to make music that approximates popular songs better in some way. Another way would be to include human judgement in the process. We know that large language models are trained with human input. Companies that make these models are pretty cagey about what they do exactly, but I’m sure they’ve already been trying something along these lines.

Are methods like these enough to give us great AI music, or even just an annoying yet catchy hit song? Maybe. Or maybe we need something drastically different to get there.8 But nothing in the problem suggests to me that it’s impossible to get a computer algorithm to generate great music.

So, as in many things about the future, I’m pessimistic in the short term and optimistic in the long term for pure AI music. Pretty soon, though, we’ll start seeing more “centaurs”—humans and AI working together to create music. What exactly will come out from that, I won’t even try to predict here.

What I’m listening to now

For your palate (eardrum?) cleanser, here’s some extremely not-AI music.

KOKOKO! is an experimental electropop band from Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Until recently, the only Congolese bands I was familiar with were Franco & le T.P OK Jazz, who played African rumba decades ago, and Jupiter & Okwess, who I’ve actually seen live9 but are based in Europe. But Kinshasa is a mega city with lots of music.

KOKOKO! starts with Congelese melodies and rhythms, which are already great. Then the electronics add so much frenetic energy, as do the vocals that are, for lack of a better term, shouty. My favorite track is “Bazo Banga”.

8

This fascinating experiment in getting ChatGPT to make art does make me think we might need something drastically different.

Donkeyspace

Art Project

Day 1…

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2 years ago · 42 likes · 18 comments · Frank Lantz