what a week! this one was very nearly late!
the sun is coming out again but the foggy rainy days are still sliding in often enough so that we can all pretend fire season is a little further off than it actually is, and that we have months yet before we’ll be forced to retreat into our apartments and tape up our windows and rubber band our air filters to our box fans and make our nervous blade runner 2049 jokes to each other and let the future dust of the apocalypse settle a little deeper into the folds of our brains.
it’s springtime, in other words.
this week was shaping up to be a nice one, actually, until incredibly recently: the weather is nice but not too nice, work is busy but not too busy, my second vaccine appointment is coming closer and closer, i’m thinking about the path i’ll be picking through the medium-term future to some slightly-less-than-medium term destination tbd.
and also: one of my coworkers (still anonymous, to me at least) got mad enough about a joke i made on twitter that they sent it to one of the owners of the firm we work at, and that owner thought it was worth talking to me about this afternoon, and here we are now, with me finishing up this week’s newsletter way later than usual.
it was a joke about the rebranding process we are doing at the firm - a process i actually very much like the results of - but i fired off a quick stupid tweet about it mid-presentation the other day. something to the effect of being unimpressed with all the post-hoc reasoning branding agencies give you for why they did something that looks nice. like the agency that put together an entire binder for the new pepsi logo. i think we all know what i am talking about. i deleted it, i can’t remember exactly what it said, but it was a fairly obvious observation and also, crucially, a joke. and also my twitter account is not linked to my actual job in any way, and nobody at my firm would have even seen it if you hadn’t decided to circulate it for whatever eggbrained reason, and i furthermore can’t believe among all the bullshit i tweet that that was the tweet that turned you into a snitch.
twitter is whatever and this is just one more reason to leave it, but really, crossing a work/life boundary that dramatically (tattling to our boss) without talking to me first (or at all) is a fucked up thing to do and i am actually not at all chill about it.
like i said i’m not sure who it was. i don’t really know who all of my followers on there are, and i haven’t checked the actual subscriber list for this newsletter, but it’s pretty possible they are reading this, and if they are: what the fuck were you thinking. and what is wrong with you. and please just unfollow me instead of being an absolute weirdo about a tweet. and if i find out who it was i will never respect or trust you again. in any capacity. sorry! just how it goes.
ok that’s enough of that. like i said, almost a nice week. here we go.
1. painting
it’s another house!
the food section is a little shorter this week so hopefully i can fit some more painting process pics in.
loose sketch on the left. then corrected perspective. just giving myself some interesting shapes to color in.
i’m a huge fan of the series of illustrations Lorenzo Ghiglieri did for the American Plywood Association in the 60’s for their publication “Great Ideas for Second Homes.”
I may have written about this already, I can’t remember, but the book is a collection of cool houses and cabins that the APA put together to show off their plywood products. A lot of them are based around an actually plywood module, they’re all pretty straightforward structurally, and Lorenzo really knocked it out of the park illustrations-wise. also this book is impossible to find a physical copy of, so if you have one - send it to me.
every so often, i dip back into this well and draw up some 70’s ish goofy looking house real quick to practice rendering it in that style of his.
from the corrected perspective, i went back and re-drew the whole thing in way more detail. illustrations like this live and die in the details (in my opinion) and it’s also a fun opportunity to actually go through and think through all the little architectural implications of stuff. frames on the windows. the soffit material at that overhang. what the siding is. what the door looks like.
also i drew a car there and as you will see i lost my nerve midway through the color process and bailed on it.
i threw in some colors right after i finished the linework, with the express purpose of just getting something down so i could go to bed and revisit it the next day. and boy - these are stinkers.
re-doing the colors from scratch the next day got me here. at this point i am relying on the linework and filling in just big colored planes until it sort of looks OK.
linework off and the base colors in. the car is gone how about that.
turning that linework off gets rid of a lot of the detail (duh) so this is the starting point to go back in and start to add some of those things back, but in a painting fashion instead of outlining edges with a pen.
an hour or two later we arrive at the piece on the left.
the piece on the right is the same, but with a blue overlay (and some sky adjustments) that really helps amp up the contrast and unify the tones a little bit. the piece on the right is the final above if you want to scroll up.
2. poem
“moving poem” - spring 2021
if i had to pare it down
it’s a bowl and a strainer
and a kettle, and a knife -
a glass
two glasses
it’s every street light for a quarter mile
it’s a dozen splintering railings.
and i’m not sure i remember exactly,
so it’s every necktie i’ve ever gathered in one hand -
and gently reeled in -
it’s one more cigarette
and the frost on every tree
3. two great meals
nothing too inventive this week! but here are two good things i have eaten recently that i did not assemble or invent myself out of various fake meats and seaweed essences and oils and vinegars.
the first one is this creamy vegan tofu noodles recipe by hetty mckinnon for the new york times. i have had it bookmarked for a while and finally decided to try it. i’ve never made a sauce out of tofu before, but essentially you just blend up an entire block with some spices and a little water and salt etc. and you get a nice creamy sauce!
next up is a salad i am eating a lot now that it’s getting warmer.
start with greens.
add some rice noodles. i like these because you just boil some water in a kettle (hey, from the poem!) and soak the noodles in them for 4 minutes and then strain them (also from the poem!) and they’re good to go. very quick!
i also try to keep a tupperware of tofu chunks in my fridge that i can just add to stuff i’m making. basically you press a block of tofu, cut it into chunks, fry the chunks in a skillet real quick til they’re crispy on each side, and then crumble up those chunks and put them in a tupperware with a marinade of your choosing (i usually do some combination of rice wine vinegar, ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil, and chili crisp or sriracha) and shake them around and keep them in the fridge til you need to add them to something.
add green onions. if you slice them this way they are fancier.
sesame seeds and cilantro!
then add some of that topping from the creamy tofu noodles above (it’s in the recipe) to add some heat and zip and zing…
yum!
4. lover’s spit
as i get older i can feel myself starting to fall into a music rut. this is extremely common, i think! which is not the same as not interesting to talk about. it’s still a wide rut but there are definite trends and go-tos and a comfort zone and less and less exploration.
and one manifestation of that rut i have recently noticed is a tendency for music-listening sessions to quite often end up at the same song: the 2002 broken social scene smash hit “lover’s spit.”
i actually do not know if it was a smash hit. i was never really a broken social scene fan at the time they were popular (i’m assuming… early to mid iraq war era? possibly even earlier?) i would consider myself to be someone who’s always been very nearly a music snob without actually truly diving in to music exploration in a way that would push me over that edge. i listen to a pretty wide variety of stuff and am passingly familiar with quite a bit more but for example i have a friend who worked at a Cool Radio Station whose knowledge of music from say the 90’s onward - especially pacific northwest music - is truly staggering. and also for example i have never willingly put on a radiohead album.
but i do like stars, and some of metric’s stuff, and eventually somehow some broken social scene songs bubbled their way onto my radar. including lover’s spit.
frankly i find the lyrics to be somewhat gross. fortunately for me however, i am not a person who really gets got by song lyrics. it’s only occasionally that they register as impactful or even noteworthy, and it’s easy enough to just enjoy the music. is this the opinion of a robot? i would argue: no.
when i’m listening to music, if i’m not listening album-by-album, the progression i take is usually pretty free-associative. one song will end and something about the ending, the tempo, the last instrument you hear, hell, the vibe, will remind me of something else i suddenly want to listen to. my radio station friend and i have built entire playlists together based on this premise: one person adds a song and the other person adds the song that they would instinctively queue up next, and so on and so forth. it’s fun and cool, i know!
maybe half the time the step right before lover’s spit is, perhaps somewhat obviously, “ribs” by lorde. i mean she name checks it right in there. pure heroine was not a huge album for me and “ribs” hasn’t really ever been in heavy rotation - but melodrama was huge, and after listening to “the louvre” seven times on repeat, “ribs” is usually somewhere next in line.
and actually, this all probably could have been about the louvre (which bafflingly, does not appear to be the most popular track on that album) because there’s almost nothing that doesn’t make me want to put that song on next. whatever those strings are at the beginning - a cello? a bass of some kind? - are almost always the perfect followup to whatever last note just faded out of your bookshelf speaker, your headphones under your hood in the rain, your car speakers as you hit the halfway point of your journey down the highway racing against the sunset.
there are other routes that end at lover’s spit too, i’m sure. i’m not making a sex joke there it is not that kind of newsletter. there’s a blink-182 song whose ending strings are almost exactly the same note as lover’s spit’s opening strings. there’s a song on nation of language’s excellent ‘introduction / presence’ that somehow through a couple more steps gets there as well, but i can’t remember which one it is. i didn’t take very good notes for this section unfortunately.
and i also didn’t really think of a satisfying neat way to end this! but think about it next time you’re listening to music. how about that. not bad.
okay well, that’s enough for today i think. have a good week everyone. quit snitching. see ya next tuesday. bye.