it’s tuesday tuesday. gotta something something on tuesday. everybody’s looking forward to the rest of the week, rest of the week.
not really the same vibe is it.
this week my cruiser bike arrived. if you follow me on any social media platform you already know this because i’ve been posting about it as if it is a new child or dog or tattoo. it’s a fantastic little machine. whew, that blue powder coat. whew, those lines! the gearing is very low so it takes a lot of frantic pedaling to get up to my usual speeds, which means it’s not usually worth it, which means i’m cruising around at a more leisurely pace and also thinking more about my default pace on my other, faster bike. in short it is having exactly the effect i was looking for. this year i am slowing down. this year i am building systems that make me think.
also: i’ve gotten compliments shouted at me/it from a distance several times already. and also: i’ve been riding slow and on side streets and cautiously and therefore not wearing a helmet. i know that’s bad but biking without a helmet is truly one of life’s great joys. mom if you’re reading this i was kidding about the helmet thing.
i don’t want to say biking around in the sun on my new cruiser bike is 100% responsible for scouring away the stinging sludgy bitter mood i was in last week, but. i think in fact that is what has happened. pretty neat!
ok here we go.
1. painting
i can’t remember if i’ve been titling these things or not.
this week’s painting marks a retvrn to tradition in some ways, bolstered by a more rigorous (‘less lazy’ may be more accurate) process. it’s stuff i paint a lot of course. wow an a-frame cabin. wow some pine trees huh. wow some suggestion of topography way back there at the horizon. brian, you have outdone yourself with this one.
it’s true! but i took more time on this one, i put it down 4 times and came back to it, i did sketches, i looked at references, i fucked around with the colors to a truly excruciating degree. and after all that… still ended up here.
(fun note: some yimby loser on twitter dug back through months of my media tab once to find something to be mad about and after having discovered some of these paintings came back to sneeringly call me a “bourgeois pastoralist.” as if i know what that means! but i still laugh about it.)
it’s been a while since i just sat down and doodled from my imagination so that’s what i did this week. here are four sketches. you will notice some themes.
a lot similar stuff going on obviously - here and in my work (“work”) in general. and i was thinking about that in a little bit of a different way this week actually. a lot of my favorite pieces i’ve done are 2-3 years old now at this point, and i actually have not done a lot of conscious revisiting of stuff. like, i liked this about that piece, let me try to do that again in a slightly different way. i liked this color scheme, let’s run it back. in fact i have actively resisted doing that. this week for some reason that seemed silly, so i dove back into the archives.
ideas of color. blue, orange, red. i was looking for kind of a desert-late-afternoon-verging-into-twilight vibe where the blues are deepening and the hues are grouping themselves closer together but there’s still some nice orange light hitting various things and lighting them up. medium success on that.
also, take a look at those color studies - see how little contrast there is? that’s a big problem for me and something i am now actively trying to get better at.
the final colors and tree shapes are pulling a lot from this old favorite of mine (which you can buy a print of if you want):
and there you have it.
2. poem
“twilight poem” - spring 2021
i’ve forgotten now which summers we shared,
which streets you would recognize.
there’s a humming laid over these houses these yards
these dinner lights
and i never know where the moon is or where to expect it but
i’m floating home, floating west -
and which summer was it
when i last remembered how to talk to beautiful people?
and: am i going to get rained on?
if i put one foot down, scraped it along asphalt until i could stand,
they’d come out of their dining rooms and garages
with trash cans and leashes and wrinkling foreheads
and a pair of headlights would sweep around the corner
and i’d raise one hand
and nod as if we’d all shared this street in a summer before
and the hum would fade and the cut on my thumb
would sting and the close rushing blue twilight clarity
would fold itself away up behind the trees
i’ll be back in time to turn the lights down
i’ll be back in time to bring you a cup of coffee in the morning
3. fried “chicken” salad
if you live in portland oregon or have visited portland oregon and you eat meat or at least each chicken, i hope you have been to basilisk. their website says they are legendary and i don’t know if that’s true but their chicken is definitely good enough to be legendary so i think it’s fine if they put that on there. i don’t mind a bit.
they re-opened recently after hibernating through most of the pandemic (optimistic maybe to frame the amount of pandemic thus far as “most of”) and it’s hard to say which caused more of a stir in my circles: the news of this re-opening or the news that for some reason architects are eligible for the vaccine in oregon now.
their fried chicken salad is one of my favorite meals maybe ever, and it doesn’t seem too complicated, so i wanted to see if i could recreate it now that i’m vegan.
here’s most of the stuff. noodles, avocado, greens, green onions, ginger, cilantro, garlic, and some Gardein chicken strips. you could do this with tofu too - if you freeze a block and then thaw it, it gets a very meaty chicken-y texture that’s great for frying and stuff like this.
marinade for the noodles. i have never marinated noodles and i don’t know if “marinate” is really the right word, but i did soak them in this while i was prepping everything else. lemon, ginger, salt, rice vinegar, some black garlic oil i made a batch of to put on ramen, some garlic, and black pepper.
there they go.
to fry the chicken, you make a “buttermilk” with plant milk of some kind, apple cider vinegar, some hot sauce, and some uhhhh i think that might be pickle brine yes i’m pretty sure it’s pickle brine. mix this all up and let it sit for 10 minutes or so to thicken.
by the way: most of my junk food techniques come from thee burger dude who is a vegan burger guy that makes a ton of amazing and delicious and very easy food. his videos are great and so is his vibe. if burgers are a big thing standing in the way of you cutting more meat out of your diet, check his shit out, they’re great replacements.
take a bunch of the Gardein strips — they also come in patties or fillets, which would probably be easier but this worked fine too — and squoosh them into a chicken-like shape. whatever shape you want really i guess. you could do strips or tenders or a flatter patty, it all works great.
dredge it in the buttermilk liquid from before, then into a mix of flour, cornstarch, baking powder, and spices, then back in the liquid, then back in the dry. i think i did this one three times which was probably one time too many as we will see.
fry it up and let it sit for a few minutes. in the meantime you can mix some of the hot fry oil with sugar, garlic, cayenne, and black pepper to make a kind of hot sauce glaze, that you brush over the fried chicken chunk.
golly! that looks great. very thick crust though. could have done one less layer. this is fried at ~375.
then you just assemble it all up. greens then noodles so the noodle marinade drips down and coats the greens a little more, then throw the chicken on there, and some avocado, green onion, a little lemon juice, some salt.
don’t worry, i’ll be back to the unsuccessful seafood replication attempts soon. but this was very delicious.
also, if you don’t want to go the fried chicken route, you can air fry that patty. just brush some oil on so it doesn’t dry out completely. these components also go very well together without the fried chicken at all - those noodles are kind of the secret star. i had some the next day with just some spicy tofu chunks on top instead of the chicken and it was great.
4. pointing
i have had a half formed idea about this kicking around in my head for the past few weeks. i don’t think i really have a conclusion and i don’t think it really needs a conclusion, but i’ve been thinking about being the type of person who needs to point at things. and what form that takes, and why that is, and all those other little rootlings that shoot off into the dark soil away from the main stem you’ve carefully uncovered with your little red and silver trowel (11.99 at fred meyer) and carefully brushed the dirt off of with your little black-and-brown garden gloves (8.99 per pair at fred meyer).
a lot of people, a lot of people i know, a lot of people i don’t know except through their writing or their twitter posts, maybe everyone in the world (but i don’t think everyone in the world) are people who point at things. i am also one of these people. not to brag. like i said i don’t think it’s close to unique.
this is different from being a person who notices things. i am also a person who notices things, and i think that’s definitely a pre requisite to be a person who points. you can notice something just for yourself - you can put it in your filing cabinet and do a little “hm!” and jump your eyebrows a little bit or turn around once you’ve passed it and take another look from another angle or rewind the song ten seconds or flip back a couple pages, and add it to the stack, to the pile, in your head.
the desire to point, though, is not a solo activity. you are pointing because you want someone to notice the thing that you noticed. maybe someone in particular or maybe just anyone who happens to be paying attention to you. this is what art is, i think, and poetry, and most forms of writing, and twitter jokes too: a noticing, and a pointing.
pointing after all requires a second set of eyes. i found this thing, and i want to share it with you. have you thought about this too? have you noticed the same things i have noticed?
being a person who points, i think, after all, is mostly about having people look at your finger.
well it’s another very fucking long one. hope you all enjoyed it! have a good week. see you next tuesday. bye.
Damn, that fried "chicken" salad looks GREAT. Definitely good enuf to eat.