what is tuesday if not monday persevering?
it’s been another week during which most of the happenings have been internal. i read something new. i saw some new art. i thought about some things that i often think about, turning them around a little bit in my head and kind of poking at them, seeing if the light coming through my eyes is hitting them in any new ways recently. i listened to some music i haven’t heard in a while.
the external manifestations of novelty are, i think many of us agree, much more rare these days. although in more ways than one, spring is just around the corner and the sunlight is starting to peek through its various veils. take that as you will. and actually this week some external manifestations of novelty did manifest themselves. quite a few friends have february birthdays and we had a nice little computer screen birthday party. i learned how to make a new cocktail (it wasn’t that hard), some friends shared news of upcoming changes in their lives that weren’t taking place entirely digitally. one couple has a new dog.
little shoots are starting to poke through. we may yet hope they blossom into beautiful flowers.
here we go.
1. painting
oh my gosh, it’s in landscape mode!
this week we have another “vegetables” painting, as in “eat your vegetables.” i think i haven’t made much of a secret of my affinity for the shapes the landscape takes in my little corner of the world. i have maybe made more of a secret - maybe not - of how annoying and tedious i find it to do all the little details that vegetation requires.
there’s definitely a spectrum here. like most things. most of the drawings / doodles / illustrations i do are on what you might call the looser end of that spectrum. the trees pretty much look like trees, there’s some undergrowth suggested there for sure, some branches from time to time. couldn't tell ya what kind of tree, what kind of plant, what exactly i’m looking at here, but the overall impression is there and it’s a true impression in some ways.
well, sometimes when i’m out and about surrounded by these trees i like to paint, i look at them a little more closely and think about what it would be like to try and portray them a little bit more accurately. so here we are today.
this is based on a photo i took of a recent-ish drive down the oregon coast. it’s some little turnout somewhere that i pulled over in on a whim and went down a little trail and wandered around in a meadow for about five minutes before getting back on the road.
so for this one - the composition doesn’t matter that much. i mean it does matter a little bit, but it’s not totally “the point” of the exercise.
the colors, though, matter much more. how vibrant they are compared to each other, the overall hues, the relative darknesses and lightnesses, and how exactly that far cliffside blurs into the fog over the ocean. what’s sharp, and what’s soft.
then after that it’s a bunch of tiny little brush strokes for the branches, the treetops, the grass, the larger bushes, the smaller bushes, and so on. i counted three separate moments during the process where i would have stopped if this wasn’t for the newsletter. so in that sense, the method is working.
2. poem
“knot poem” - summer 2020
the feeling of a sleepless night
or an early evening -
or a glass of wine,
two glasses
or a connection, disconnection
i think it’s when you chisel all those fragments into paper
i think it’s when you arrive to tie knots.
you are here to bear witness -
charcoal on paper, over rock
you are called, knot-tyer,
into the mist or through it.
3. vegan crunchwrap
this is the best thing i’ve made so far. definitely for this newsletter and maybe since going vegan. i’m not looking back to check that of course but it’s really good.
i don’t actually know what’s in an actual real crunchwrap. i kind of half-assedly googled it, basically it seems like you have some kind of meat, some cheese or cheese sauce, some sort of pico mixture, lettuce, sour cream, a crunch, and a wrap. good enough for me.
first time using TVP (textured vegetable protein.) no idea what it is, but it comes in a bag, dry, and you rehydrate it. in this case i rehydrated it with broth (“beefless” broth) and let it sit for about 30 minutes. looks kinda gross, huh!
added a whole bunch of spices to the TVP to flavor it up. cumin, garlic, onion, cayenne, a little coriander, looks like one other thing but i forgot what it is. then you cook it up.
one “cube” of beef-less bouillon makes about 2 cups of broth. 1.5 cups are for rehydrating the TVP, and then as you’re cooking you can add the other 1/2 cup to the pan too. then you let the liquid cook down until you have a nice flavorful pile of, well. it’s a pile for sure.
crunchwrap method hack: cut a circle out of a second tortilla. you’ll see why at the end. probably you can also guess why now.
TVP + cheese sauce. vegan cheese sauce is pretty easy. flour & oil into a roux, then whisk in milk (i used oat milk) and add some shreds until they melt. there are other ways to do it too but this is pretty simple.
the crunch
you may recognize this from last week.
piled up with lettuce and sour cream, ready to squish. there’s also some chipotle cashew crema in there but it looks gross in pictures so i omitted it. but it’s easy to make, toss some in.
chekhov’s tortilla circle
go around and fold up the bottom tortilla into a circle of pleats. i should have said this earlier but it’s entirely possible to over-fill this thing so the folding becomes even more of a pain in the ass than it already is.
cook it pleats side down first. put something heavy on top.
there ya go! delicious and crunchy.
4. the best you can do
i have been back on twitter recently. maybe you’ve seen me there. sucks for you.
one of the ‘spheres’ i have found myself in lately is this sort of broad collection of lefty and left-adjacent architecture & cities type people. you may have heard of “housing twitter” and this i guess is the leftmost portion of that cloud.
anyway, this past week, i posted a cynical opinion about the upswing of micro-unit construction, specifically in Seattle. it’s happening in a lot of cities on the west coast, but i’ve seen a couple Seattle projects mentioned recently, and i used to live and work in seattle, and it’s the context i’m familiar with.
a “micro-unit” is an apartment that some people call a studio, but i think that’s being generous. they’re 250-350 square feet, usually, and if that kind of number is hard to wrap your head around in real terms, i don’t blame you. they’re incredibly small. i have only worked on one of these buildings as an architect, and in our case one of the primary design problems was the door swing to the bathroom interfering with the murphy bed folding down from the wall. i think they ended up just not putting a door on the bathroom. that should give you a more visceral sense of what kind of size we’re talking about here.
a lot of people who like to think of themselves as progressives see these micro-units as a good thing. a positive development, a step forward. usually they are replacing a larger single-family home with 6-10 absolutely microscopic rental units - this is a huge increase in density! and density is good. density actually is good, in a lot of ways, of course. systems are more efficient, public transit works better, all that stuff. there’s absolutely no question that if we as a species are going to be making it through the climate collapse, our cities will need to end up being a lot more dense.
however. 250sf is barely livable, and these units will be renting for ~$1200. i have been called a “neo-malthusian” for this take and i don’t know what that means exactly but i gather that i am standing in the way of progress toward some kind of enlightened urban future by pointing out that paying almost $15,000 per year to a developer or landlord for the privilege of cramming yourself into a tiny box is, well, kind of shitty.
could we do 4 units and double the unit size? still comparatively small but 500sf is actually approaching a pleasant size to live in for a much wider range of humanity.
well, no. we need to build 8 units if we want the project to pencil. so they have to be tiny.
this is the best we can do.
i guess i would like to zoom out here at this point, because this sentiment comes up a lot. especially recently. you can easily connect this sentiment to things like the minimum wage, and migrant detention influx processing facilities (or whatever we’re calling detention camps these days), and ongoing wars of imperial aggression, and so on and so forth. we can only do so much. we are doing our best.
but for now i’d like to keep the focus on cities and housing, and to leave you this week with three questions that line always brings up in me.
this is progress. this is a small step but it’s a step forward. i know it’s not great but we are making progress. things are getting better.
question one: progress toward what? i consider myself a socialist. you may identify yourself somewhere along the political spectrum as well. but what is your end goal? what is your ideal vision of the city? if you got everything your little heart desired, what would our cities look like? how would we live? would we still be paying rent? would people still be getting evicted?
as a socialist, the star i navigate by is bright and clear, even if it’s distant: housing should be completely decommodified, and removed entirely from the predations and depredations of The Market. it is a human need, and a human right. it should be afforded to everyone by a government of the people, it should be designed and built sustainably and beautifully and densely by people who are well-compensated for their time and efforts and get to spend their four-day weekends with their friends and family.
i will admit the goals of so-called “market urbanists” in this regard are much less clear to me. i suspect they still involve the existence of landlords.
question two: given your ideal future vision, is this actually a step forward? it’s a change, certainly. a single family house, now a landlord using that private property to extract rents. you get a little bit more density. people are still paying exorbitant rents to live in a box. it’s a step toward something, for sure. it represents some kind of change.
but does the road it takes you down end up at the place you want to end up? or will you have to backtrack, unwind, cut sideways? if you will have to do that hard work of unraveling property relationships and decommodifying housing at some point in the future, is this step you are championing making that eventual task more or less achievable? if you know there’s hard work to be done ahead, are you chipping away or are you putting things off? are you kicking the can because it’s the best you can do?
and finally, question three:
what do you do when doing your best is not the same as doing enough?
that’s all for this week. i hope you make the crunchwrap, it’s very good.
see ya next tuesday. have a good week. bye.