another tuesday. another week without a haircut. how long can you keep saying “this isn’t sustainable!” without noting that actually, well, it seems to be sustaining just fine so far. or just kind of waiting for it to stop sustaining all by itself?
we have some fun stuff this week. i don’t think the usual tone of this little newsletter is typically very dour but sometimes one piece or another is a little sad or serious. this week however i think all four are kind of silly.
very possible also this will be the longest edition yet, mostly because i decided to type out Thing Four this time instead of including it as a screenshot of text. equally possible however that this will not be the longest edition ever.
i don’t plan on coming back and checking.
here we go.
1. painting
ahhhhhh just look at that. just picture it. plunking the top of your skull off and sluicing off your brain with a nice cool stream of mountain spring water. it fills up the spaces around your eyeballs and washes away all the hot gritty exhaustion that builds up right there under your eyes. or under my eyes, anyway. streaming smoothly through your nose and all the cavities back there and just clearing things out.
i’m not sure if this is a universal fantasy but boy i sure think about this a lot.
on an art note i have mentioned i think that i don’t really draw people and at this point it has definitely become one of those things that i keep putting off precisely because i’ve already been putting it off so long. and as i keep mentioning one of the goals of this newsletter project is to twist my own arm into spending more time on the areas i know i could use more time on. details. colors. drawing from reference instead of just fumbling around making shit up. people.
this mental image has been in my head for years now, but here’s an initial sketch. one nice thing about working from home is that if you’re in a meeting that you don’t really need to participate in you can just doodle instead usually.
digital sketches. the app i use, Procreate, has a symmetry feature that mirrors every mark you make so you don’t end up doing that thing from your eighth grade notebook margins and drawing one incredibly detailed eye before kind of starting a second one and realizing at this point you’ll never get them to match so you add an eyepatch or just flip the page.
and then for the final, it was a lot of color palette tweaking. this i think so far is one of the biggest differences in the art i work on for this newsletter vs. the quicker stuff i do. it may not seem like it but a ton of the time that goes into the final version of these things is spend slightly adjusting colors across the composition. when you make digital art it’s very easy to separate out the colors into different layers — you’d do the same for something like a screen print — and then you can adjust each one individually until the whole composition works. or works better.
usually this will involve me taking a first stab at it in the beginning so i have a starting point, getting to maybe the 90% mark with the painting / drawing, then spending a ton of time fiddling with colors, then finishing the final 10% or whatever. for palette inspiration i mostly look at photos i’ve taken, at previous paintings i’ve done that i liked the colors in, and at other pieces i like the colors in.
as usual, reference makes things easier. who knew!
2. poem
“pickle poem” - summer 2020
we laughed about the Vlasic stork
bringing pickles instead of babies —
to the horror of the town —
fear, chaos. uncertainty for the future
the villagers finally convincing the witch of the woods
to come to their aid
but i think we took very different things from that conversation
i’m just not in a place
to start a family right now
i love you but
i need to finish my novel
about a witch who loves pickles
3. “fish” n’ chips
coming off the high of the crunchwrap last week here’s another failure to even things out. or mostly a failure. some redeeming possibilities but overall, big thumbs down.
it does look good though. and the fries were good but cmon that one is hard to fuck up.
so this is the base of this whole experiment. i’ve made quite a few “meat substitute” things since going vegan and i think they can be some of the most fun to make. you’re chasing a feeling and a vibe more than an actual 100% replica in most cases, and that kind of impressionistic evocation is an area i feel pretty comfortable in whether the outlet is food or art or tweets. fish is always the hardest, though.
the flavor is actually pretty easy to replicate using various types of seaweed and kelp but the texture is really tough. you may remember the carrot lox i made earlier this year. i’ve also tried to do spicy tuna rolls with tomato instead of tuna. usually it’s tasty but the texture is different enough that it jolts you out of it and as they say — the vibe is ruined.
i’ve never used banana blossom before but i think they’re kind of on the rise a bit as a meat replacement because they allegedly have kind of a layered, flaky texture that people say can get you close to cooked white fish. we will see how that goes.
this is the point — mere moments into the process — that on a deep instinctual level i realize this is not going to be good. i mean look at these things. strange alien artichokes. but i’m committed and curious.
i put together a little brine / marinade with lemon juice, dulse flakes, some salt, some “seafood seasoning”, sandwiched the blossoms between these kelp sheets, and soaked the whole setup in hot water. for about an hour, i think. this is to get the “fish” flavor in there. the banana blossoms are actually incredibly neutrally flavored so that’s one plus in the very short column of positives.
meanwhile, fries. i read somewhere you should soak your potatoes for a while before frying. no idea if that’s true or really what the desired result of that move is. doesn’t seem to hurt though.
also, beer batter!
i’ve been cooking a lot more because of quarantine and because of going vegan and one thing i’ve noticed, and i don’t know if it’s true, is that there are like a million different ways to do things. a million slightly different recipes. up until very recently that was overwhelming to me. which one do you pick! which one is “the good one!”
really, though, i think a better takeaway is that actually you can just kind of fuck around and play it by ear almost all the time, and if you’re in the ballpark things will mostly work out. i think this isn’t true for baking probably but i don’t bake.
the point here is that i’ve never made beer batter before and after 15 minutes reading 15 different recipes i basically said fuck it, it’s beer, flour, and some spices, i’ll just wing it.
here are our blossoms, fresh out of the brine / marinade. the can had 4 in them so i used the two most “together” ones and froze the other two for later. more on that at the end.
i wrapped the tops of them in a piece of nori. initially this was for “flavor” and “to mimic fish skin” but really these things ended up playing a critical structural role in keeping the blossom bundles together.
beer batter. looks like batter to me.
i didn’t take any pictures of the “fish pieces” pre-frying because it was pretty chaotic. the batter was really gloopy, both hands were covered in it, the fish pieces were barely staying together, and i had a bunch of hot oil going on the stove. but here’s a piece frying up.
prior to this i had fried the fries once already - they are staying warm in the oven. i fried them another time after the “fish” was done, to get them a nice crispy exterior.
wow look! look at that! it looks like fish n chips! some vegan tartar sauce in there too.
here’s a cross section of one of the fillets. it looks almost kind of like it could be fish, right?
unfortunately, the blossoms are definitely, recognizably vegetables. the “petals” ecook very fast and get tough on the outside, and the inside kind of gets (or stays) mushy. and overall the petals are too thin to really simulate fish. so you bite into one of these, the batter is great, the taste is great, and then you can’t chomp through one of the tough leaves and you also have a mouthful of like, plant mush.
but the flavor is actually great, like i said! it’s also possible you could adjust factors like batter consistency, frying temp, maybe like, amount of blossom per “fillet” - pack them in there more or something? i’m not sure.
my current plan for the frozen ones, next time i want some fried food, is to thaw them out and coarsely chop them up in the food processor, and form them into fish sticks. then wrap with nori and batter and fry. i think that’ll actually end up great since so much of the issue with these was texture-based.
4. lights
There’s a little town down on the coast a ways, halfway up those big dark hills and speckling its way down almost right up to the ocean.
A man lived there once. I don’t think he still does but it probably wasn’t long ago all things considered. I don’t know who he was but I think probably he was the principal at the school there, or a cop, or some owner, manager, medium big man. Probably he was the vice principal. If you met him you’d get a little sour taste there right behind where your tongue sits, and if you spent much time with him you’d get that gritty feeling in your eyes. You’d notice when you got home you’d been clenching your jaw the whole drive and you only just remembered.
I don’t know who he was but he was a grain of sand in the gears. And a town that small, well, how many gears are we talking here? You’d notice something in there. I do know that for sure.
Well his place was over there across the little bay, looking back at most of the town opening up, up the hills and across. An oyster so to speak. And he was who he was, but that didn’t stop him from doing well when it comes to money, I think probably it helped if you think about it. Man like that. So he had his place over across the bay and he had a hot tub there looking back at the town. His own place and hot tub money.
I don’t know how it happened really. Maybe it was sudden. Each family there sending a representative, a little gear, to some meeting in some backyard maybe, or a church hall with just a couple of the lights on in the corner by the stairs, or the school cafeteria but probably not the cafeteria. There’s some grumbling, some nodding, a vote. All the strong men and strong women get their shovels out of their sheds and set to work, right then, that night. Digging, lifting, dragging, setting, spreading. Smoothing. Everything in place right as the sun’s coming up and everyone back to their lives.
Maybe it was a smaller, longer thing. A couple folks down at the planning office tweaking here, bending there. Shifting a little bit when they can, knowing the rest of the town’s behind them. A little wink at the store, a little nod at the bar. A smirk. And over years maybe, maybe longer, things start to change.
Well, either way it happened - all at once or slowly rolling - every street in that little town got lined up exactly on that hot tub across the bay so that every car coming down those hills, every night, the headlights lined up right on that hot tub. Shining right in there, perfectly aligned, right in his eyes. So he had his place over across the bay and he’d sit in there in his hot tub looking back at the town but now a steady stream of lights shone back every night and not in a nice way but a sharp glare, a wince, two lights just a little too bright.
And maybe the people in the town visited their neighbors a little more, had a few more dinner parties up there in those hills across the bay. Drove around to see the sights. I don’t know for sure.
And I don’t know how long it took but it wasn’t too long. He couldn’t stand it anymore and he’s gone now.
You can still visit that little town on the coast, pointed down those dark hills right at that spot across the bay. You can sit in that hot tub even and wonder.
But last time I was there, there was nobody left to tell the story — or nobody who wanted to, anyway.
ok that’s all for this week. see ya next tuesday. bye.