once a week another tuesday rolls around. just how it goes.
i believe i wrote somewhat recently about finding balance, about how things were lining up, leveling off. sorting themselves out. arranging themselves by height.
well, i overshot it a little bit. flew a little close to the sun on that one. some things are back to being stressful - some things have returned to being annoying. some new things are slowly rubbing a hole in my sock mile after mile.
but that’s how it goes. things level off slowly and you have to step back to see the curve flattening out sometimes. and even the idea of ‘leveling off’ is, i think, misleading. compared to what, for example. or over how long a period of time, for another example. or how useful is it even to think of things in those terms - there’s a sense of finality, settling, slowing that really, when you think about it, doesn’t bear any direct resemblance to actual reality.
and if you are the type of person who, like me, has a tendency to lean on little narrative devices like that, even in your life outside of your writing, even in your thoughts you think to yourself, well, they can start to bear more weight than they should. they become more than little figures of speech or turns of phrase - they deepen from descriptions of patterns to etchings of patterns to channels the patterns start to run in. watch out!
or, you could say: well, just don’t jinx stuff.
or, you could say: well, just be more aware of how you’re summarizing things.
anyway, to be less oblique, i’m tired and my achilles hurts because i overexerted it at the gym, after a year of not really working out. and a house i spent the past two ish years of my life working on is now suddenly breaking ground. and almost as soon as my term in the national organizing committee of the architecture lobby ended, i found other organizing-adjacent things to potentially fill that time with without really pausing in between to think about that in any kind of meaningful sense. and my car got broken into again and i’m once again at the what’s-the-point-this-sucks point of my cyclical relationship with dating and i think i might want to move maybe even to a different city but at least possibly to a different sector of my field but also, who knows, but also, my lease is up sooner than i expected.
and it’s hot outside.
when i take a step back from all that stuff i was so confident i had under control two or three weeks ago, i can at least tell that most (not all) of the pinching and cramping and discomfort is a result of changes i purposefully set in motion. and it would be a little silly to bail on them all now that the ball is rolling downhill, just because i’m starting to get a stitch in my side from chasing it. the ball. chasing the ball, down the hill, stitch in my side. due to the chasing.
you get it. here we go.
1. painting
i will be the first to say it: im not happy with how this one turned out.
i went out to the desert this past weekend, specifically to a weird and wonderful little spot called crane creek hot springs. it’s in an area people who live in portland would call “the middle of nowhere” in eastern oregon - near the malheur wildlife refuge which you may recognize from the whole thing with the Bundys a few years ago. it’s north of the Steens and the Alvord and if you’ve been reading this newsletter for any length of time you probably recognize those words by now.
a few friends also made the 5+ hour trek out to meet me there, and we had a great time getting day-drunk in the desert heat under a big costco shade tent and then slipping into the communal hot springs pool when the desert heat wore off and was replaced by desert cold and desert way too many mosquitos.
and on the way back, i drove pretty much right by the currently-raging Warm Springs Fire.
those of you who are blessed enough by god to live on the west coast are no doubt becoming increasingly familiar with the eerie cast of light on the trees as it filters through the smoke. i was particularly struck by the moment when you’re finally leaving the high scrubland and returning to the foothills of Mt Hood as you head back west - there’s a stretch where Hood (Wy’East) is perfectly framed in the distance by a straight slice of the road through the trees, or would be, if the area wasn’t covered in smoke. the shape of it is striking but more so, at that time, were the colors.
this is another one where the composition doesn’t really matter much. as long as the horizon line is in pretty much the right spot, the rest of it is basic.
here’s the first pass at colors. on the left, colors thrown down in some approximation, based on memory and a couple reference photos i could dig up of similar scenes. trees fading to blue in the back as the smoke layers up, and that weird orange-yellow cast on everything in the foreground. on the right, i’ve started to layer in some smoke.
on this one, more than a lot of the others for this newsletter, i leaned into the digital tools i was using. on the left is the classic complete re-working of colors after looking at it with fresh eyes the next day. you can see some of the forms getting re-worked too. then, i flattened all those layers, duplicated them, and changed the blend mode to ‘soft light’, and added a very light color wash in between, also set to soft light.
i’m not an expert on painting software blend modes, but this bumps the contrast and brings the colors a little more into the same lines, but in a subtler way than “overlay” does. then, i flattened it again, and went through to re-work more of the forms on a flat canvas.
the process throughout was to layer on some lighter washes, adjust opacity and hue of those overlays until it looked right-ish, flatten the canvas and use those now-flat colors to keep painting more details. this happened a handful of times - sometimes the whole canvas, sometimes just in areas.
and this gets us pretty close to the end - or at least, it gets us to tuesday morning.
if i were to do this again, this would be an OK study starting point for a better pass at this same idea: the colors are almost where i want them, and some things about it are working. just as importantly though, looking at this, it’s pretty easy for me to identify a half dozen things that are not working that i could do differently next time around. you can probably guess what some of them are.
but do that privately.
2. poem
“knowledge poem” - spring 2021
i can tell you how they put this building together
which parts connected first
which parts made them roll their eyes
but
can i tell you about the lives it’s contained?
the people who flow through it like blood?
can i tell you how they think and dream?
probably also yes.
i could be more self deprecating —
but honestly,
i’m at the age now where i know a lot of stuff.
3. corn dogs !
and slaw.
going into monday afternoon i still hadn’t made any food that was destined for this newsletter as well as for my dinner. and as i covered i believe extensively above, i was in a funk and it was very hot out. but in thinking about what exactly i could bear to eat under those two conditions (heat and funk) i was struck by an intense memory of dusty fairgrounds, laughing children, the jingle-jangle of carnival games, a shimmering sourness in my stomach as one of the girls in the group held my gaze for just a second longer than usual, the rosy glow of a summer fading away into fall…
just kidding about the memory. i remembered that corn dogs exist though.
i’ve never made them before but they’re incredibly easy, it turns out. easy for the the first 90% of it then actually pretty difficult for 5% of it and then back to easy again for the home stretch. we’ll get there.
here we have dogs, apple cider vinegar, oat milk, syrup (could be honey or agave), flour, cornmeal, cayenne, salt, baking powder, and flaxseed meal.
and skewers!
add water to flaxseeds — this will create a binder (instead of egg.) add vinegar to oat milk — this will create a buttermilk. mix up dry ingredients. let sit for 10 minutes while you’re doing other stuff.
as usual, i had some cabbage in the fridge i needed to use. so i made slaw again. pretty straightforward - this one has a lemon-tahini-mustard sauce.
once your buttermilk and flaxseed have sat for a little bit and undergone their requisite subtle transformations, you mix them into the dry ingredients along with the syrup. this forms a batter. or a dough. almost a dough. it seemed a little too dough like but it ended up working out.
skewer the dogs. these vegan dogs have a great texture if you are looking for a good replica of that extremely processed almost foamy classic cheapo hot dog texture. which: i was.
here’s the hard 5%. that batter was very thick and hard to apply to the dogs. i tried rolling them in a bowl and dunking them in a glass full of it but eventually i basically just spackled it on by hand.
i forgot to mention earlier but you should have started heating your oil to 375 by now.
fry for ~5 minutes. these came out awfully lumpy but oh well. they look healthier that way huh.
there they are! yum.
i whipped up a nice little dish of coriander ketchup to go with them. mamma mia!
4. the architect’s house
you were invited to a dinner party at the architect’s house and you were almost late. but when you hurried up the sidewalk and up the three little steps each with their own little casually asymmetric pool of light and rang the doorbell, he was there right away. he was nearby, maybe. he probably wasn’t waiting just for you.
in the entry: three doors, and each to a closet. you know this because he opened each of them for you. as if to say: take your pick. and a half smile over his glasses as if to say: i know, i know.
you hung your coat in the closet that was medium-deep, on a sturdy wooden hanger. most of the other coats were there too. two were on hooks in the shallow closet that was more of a niche. and the third closet didn’t have any coats in it yet at all.
the great room was dimly lit by standing lamps in two of the corners and another small lamp on the table near the sofa. you thought: tastefully lit. and the phrase echoed around in your head and never quite died out. the lamp on the table was a cube, but one of its corners had been carved or else melted away, and it was held inches from the table surface by a delicate arrangement of polished wood legs. you thought: tasteful.
there was a lull in the quiet burble of conversation as the architect introduced you to the others in the room. polite smiles and nods and the slight repositioning of artfully slender fingers along artfully slender wineglass-stems.
now through to the kitchen and the architect was steps ahead of you the whole way. with a smooth turn and a sweep from the countertop of the side bar: two glasses of wine. one for you, and a nod to go with it. from behind you in the great room, the conversation was murmuring along again.
beams, here. and soft gold, and glowing wood. and the dark mirrors of the tall, tall windows — you couldn’t quite see outside into the night, and you couldn’t quite make out your own face. the wine was good. you thought: better than i can afford, probably.
three hallways from the kitchen and you weren’t sure if they ended in more tall glass or if they were longer than you expected. and now the architect was gliding back out, churning a slight wake in the conversation of the great room, and there was the front door, and another new voice.
you thought of the three hallways and the conversation of the great room, and sipped your wine. the architect did not return to the kitchen.
the first door in the middle hallway opened easily, the angular metal handle somehow cold and soft under your hand, and heavy. and in the room beyond: windows. you leaned your head in further but didn’t want to turn on a light. from the floor to the ceiling, stretching up into the dim, windows of all shapes and sizes. you thought of the outside of the house and couldn’t make the memory fit. mostly rectangular, some square, and a round one sprinkled in here or there. they shouldered right up against each other and for all they seemed to be a completely random assortment of sizes, you couldn’t see any wall between them. they all fit together perfectly without a gap.
you thought: well executed.
the second door opened onto a room of bricks. you lost count of the arches sweeping out into the darkness past the doorway, vaulting up out of the light from the hallway. low linear ledges between them, niches and patterns in the walls beyond that you did not know the names for. in the corner nearest the door: a trowel, propped against the brick wall.
the third door did not open and by now your wine glass was well past empty. the architect had not appeared. the conversation in the great room had not paused. back into the light of the kitchen and the glow of the beams and the dark, rippling glass of the tall windows. you stepped close on your way past but your face remained indistinct, and after a moment the fog of your breath took its place.
you didn’t hear the architect’s footsteps behind you in the kitchen until his fingertips lightly brushed your elbow. you didn’t jump, or start, and when you turned he was half smiling — one glass of wine in each hand.
ok that’s it for this week. i proofread it this time before hitting publish. hope you’re happy. have a good week everyone and see ya next tuesday. bye.