happy 4/20 everyone. everyone’s favorite completely non-annoying holiday. please celebrate responsibly. w**d is not a joke.
i got my undergrad degree in boulder colorado, home of some kind of world-famous 4/20 gathering. my freshman year, there was a huge gathering on the quad (we love a quad don’t we folks. when it comes to places to gather, i don’t think you can beat it. the best kind of space) and as is traditional for a freshman in college, i got high out of my fucking mind and had to go back to my dorm room to lay down and contemplate my surely-impending death. then once the mortality vibes had worn off a bit i ate a bunch of saltine crackers and didn’t have anything to put on them except for mustard packets from the dining hall. my roommate walked in on this little culinary experiment and it remains to this day a more embarrassing memory than the time he walked in on my then girlfriend and i having sex.
sex: cool and normal. scrounging for mustard packets to put on dry saltines so i don’t have to think about the cold earth of my inevitable grave: not as cool.
the second year, maybe the third year, the university tried to crack down on the gathering by spraying some kind of disgusting fertilizer on all the quad lawns (our beautiful quads folks!) that i think was literally made of some kind of atomized salmon. also of course fences and cops. but the salmon thing was already a pretty big deterrent. people were pissed off. the university put out some kind of statements like “weed is not who we are as proud Coloradoans” or something like that.
and then like six months after i graduated, they legalized weed in Colorado. ain’t that something!
well anyway. this isn’t a sex and drugs type newsletter. it isn’t that kind of newsletter! it simply is not. so here we go.
1. painting
sheesh that looks really fuckin blue on this screen. oh well.
back to the well this week! the well = some old abandoned sketches and some ideas i’ve doodled on a couple times already. lifting color ideas from another one of my favorite pieces of mine. not including an image here because substack is incredibly touchy about quantity of images. but here’s a link.
sketch progress from left to right. a loose concept on the left, better linework in the middle, and a first pass of color etc. on the right. and then at that point, i put it down for a day to come back to later.
one thing about color work in a night scene is i don’t really know how it works. everything seems like it should be sort of some kind of shade of blue. but you can still tell some color differences. obviously the thing on the right, some of those colors are way too saturated and their hues are way too far away from “blue” on the spectrum. especially the trees.
as usual i came back to this and restarted the colors from scratch. my process on this and a lot of stuff is to start with the sky, and then build the back-mid-and-foreground colors out of that sky palette. so everything starts as a slightly darker version of a color that’s in the sky already - or the hue shifts a very little bit.
at this point in my life, i have taken maybe three separate Color Theory classes. they all are incredibly informative at the time, and then i forget everything because i am not a professional artist and i don’t have to think about this stuff 8 hours a day, but i think little pieces of knowledge sediment do lodge themselves in the cracks of my brain and inform the way i work intuitively at this point. isn't that interesting.
okay so on the right was another “set it down” point. and i came back to it and realized it feels pretty dark empty and spooky, despite the lights being on. so i drew some people in and a little guy running away from another guy and some people watching that happen.
2. poem
“desert poem” - spring 2021
you’re working on a screenplay i don’t ask about anymore
and i was going to take a figure drawing class
we come to these wide dusty places to be lonesome together —
the night snowing down,
the stars splintering
and i heard you painted your flower pots gold?
and i’m telling myself now
that i can’t see your edges glinting anymore —
and what’s the worst that ever happened
on a dark ocean, silver squint, full speed ahead
3. spring rolls etc.
when i was thinking about what i wanted to make this week, i knew i wanted to use dill and lemon.
i had some left over tahini i needed to use up, so that was the next piece. dill lemon tahini, that sounds like a good start! that’s a good dip. what might we want to dip into that?
something with cumin and coriander, i thought. vegetables definitely. something in that relative neighborhood. and something light ish and summery - maybe in a spring roll wrapper?
and then of course a half step after that is the remembering that you can fry spring rolls and a nice crisp spring roll is truly one of life’s great joys.
here’s the stuff. some of it anyway. wrappers, lemons, cucumber, carrot, broccolini, garlic, mint, dill, tofu.
and something to sip on while i cook. this is gin, lemon, mint, date molasses, and fresh grated ginger.
tofu marinating in lemon, veggie broth, ginger, cumin, coriander, olive oil
tahini, lemon juice, and dill, mix it up, you get a dip! ta da! a dip. very tasty.
i have been on a fresh ginger kick lately. on a trip. an absolute tear. i got a new microplane that works like a dream so now i’m looking for any excuse to get that fresh gingery taste into my food. it’s probably only a matter of time before i try to brew ginger beer and kill myself with botulism.
this is for another dipping sauce. date molasses, water, lemon, ginger. hoping to simmer this up into a nice glaze-y dip.
ok here’s the filling! cilantro, the marinated tofu which i baked for a bit to get a little more of the moisture out, roasted cumin carrots, and some cabbage for more crunch (and color, let’s be real)
i’ve never done this before but compared to some other stuff i’ve tried for this newsletter this was actually phenomenally easy.
there it goes. i only took one pic, sorry for the cilantro scrap. dab a little flour-water mixture on the top part there before finishing rolling so it glues itself up.
lettuce, dill, cucumber, cilantro, mint. a nice little bed of salad to lighten things up.
and here’s the roasted broccolini and lemon. too much going on? extremely possible!
fry up the rolls with the oil at about 350, get your dips together, and wow! look at that!
this was… mostly a hit. something was still kind of off about it though. the lemon dill tahini was not as light as i was envisioning and i think the fried rolls didn’t really help that. it ended up very tasty but kind of heavy in odd places. i don’t really have the food making vocabulary or experience to accurately diagnose the issue. just vibes like usual. all i ever have is vibes.
4. doing everything
this year i have been thinking about what it means to be doing enough. i’ve written about doing stuff a couple times in this newsletter using a killer analogy to boats heading various directions, getting in the boat that’s going your way, oars, pulling, etc. etc.
and i think it probably has also somewhat shined through in this that i have a pretty large amount of disdain for the instagram-infographic-self-improvement industry. lots of people have pointed this out but it’s worth just staking that position out really quickly here: consumption is not activism, and modifying your consumption choices is not really a political act. also: self-improvement is not activism, and the vibe (vibe!) i get - maybe you get this vibe too - from the constant stream of very shareable content urging people to do better, be better, educate themselves, change their habits, confront internalized racism / misogyny / transphobia, is that improving the world is first and foremost an individualist project.
it is not. politics is what you do, not who you are. it’s good to educate yourself! it’s good to unlearn biases, it’s good to confront preconceptions, etc etc. but that is not a precondition for doing things that materially impact the world. which, i’m sorry, but reading your fifteenth book on how to be an anti racist is not materially impacting the world. if i locked myself in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and refused to emerge until i had read every major work by ever major socialist / anti-colonialist / anti-racist thinker of the 20th century, well, frankly, i wouldn’t be doing jack shit to help anyone.
so: i think you have to do stuff with a group, and i think that the social media focus on individualism is bad and destructive.
what i have been thinking about though, is how much of yourself you should be pouring into what people now like to call “the work.”
i have been involved in leftist political projects since 2016, like many of you (some of you?) in varying forms. this has taken the form of contributing my graphic design skills and sometimes writing skills, knocking doors, phone banking, text banking, shouting at city council meetings, showing up to project meetings regularly, chipping in where i am able, offering thoughts when they’re appropriate, helping new members get involved in an organization, carrying chairs, spending every weekend for months with the Bernie campaign, starting a local chapter of the Architecture Lobby, chairing and organizing those meetings, running reading groups, pitching in on small local projects, and most recently, holding a nationally elected position in that org.
that list may sound like a lot written out like that! and i’ve been working at least 40 hours a week at a job to pay my rent too!
but here’s the thing: my current batch of heroes are (or appear to be) astonishingly more involved, knowledgeable, active, confident, and so on. to the point where i feel as though my toe is barely dipped in, and to the point where i almost don’t know how it’s possible! and probably, realistically, it isn’t possible long-term. that’s probably part of it.
there’s no question that the work desperately needs to be done. the scientific community essentially agrees that in order to prevent our own extinction, capitalism has got to go. and soon. but if that’s the backdrop: is it okay to go on a little camping trip? can i sit on my couch and draw a little drawing? can i live with myself if i hard-cap my extracurriculars at 20 hours a week? 10? 5? can i live with myself if i’m not an expert in everything from prison abolition to bloc tactics, tenant rights and organizing to healthcare organizing, the nuts and bolts of the Green New Deal, the pressure points of every local politician, every local march or street response?
of course the answer is yes, i can, to some degree. and of course the beauty of doing things in a group is that people can focus on different things!
and of course the real answer is: who cares man aren’t you just doing that individual morality shit you were just complaining about.
anyway, i have been thinking about those spectrums. the work to be done and who will do it. my one little life on earth and how i will spend it.
no answers this week! maybe you’re thinking about this stuff too.
another long one sheesh! it’s almost like i would rather do this than answer another grumpy email about a fireplace. but that’s all for this week. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.