there’s a tuesday for everyone, out there, somewhere.
do you guys know that song “please come to boston”? i think probably you do. my research indicates that the original recording was by a guy named dave loggins. he’s the second cousin of kenny loggins. i actually assumed the relationship would be less distant than that.
i’ve been listening to that song a lot this week. another little peccadillo in my complicated (not that complicated) and potentially fraying (overstatement) relationship with music (as listener to) is remembering some song i heard once when i was twelve, probably in the background of a shopping mall or on the radio in the car and then listening to it on repeat for like a month. until all the juice is squeezed out of it. until i’ve completely remapped my emotional connections to it.
“please come to boston” doesn’t exactly fit that pattern — my parents listened to it all the time when i was a kid — but it’s close enough. i don’t think it was one of the songs that got put on on Sunday afternoons when it was time to clean the house together: that was usually something more upbeat like Toto or Fleetwood Mac. something you can really sweep a floor to. i can’t remember which parent was more into “please come to boston” or was usually in charge of putting it on. let’s say dad. doesn’t matter. anyway i hadn’t thought about it in literal years possibly decades and it popped into my head the other week and i’ve been jamming out to it, as much as you can jam out to a soft rock song from the 70’s by a guy who is the second cousin of kenny loggins.
what hit me on around the 15th listen is sheesh, this lady (the so-called “number one fan”) is sure putting up with a lot of shit from the narrator (the so-called “ramblin boy”). at a certain point, it’s like, okay it’s pretty clear this relationship is not really a priority for either of you. maybe you have to move to boston for a job, or school, or something, yeah, that’s pretty normal when you’re young. but then all of a sudden you’re in denver. and then LA? i think probably if being in tennessee was a priority, nashville and denver had roughly similar economic prospects in the 70’s. what we have here is a fundamental mismatch in lifestyles. that’s a shaky foundation to build a life on — but i will admit it’s a pretty good premise for a love song.
by the time we hit our third city (LA) our protagonist decides it’s time to actually put his cards on the table, inviting the tennessee woman out to live forever. he’s found his place, against all odds, and is ready to commit to a life with this woman he’s been stringing along for two other cities now (or has she been stringing him along? let’s not diminish her agency in all of this) but, heartbreakingly, she just says “no” a third time - and you can hear Dave Loggins’ voice crack and the tempo of this line is sung much more naturalistically. he realizes she is not fucking around. she will never leave tennessee. not even for a house on the beach.
damn, Dave! you didn’t have to end up here. plenty of hotties in boston! don’t even get me started on denver. and anyway she’s in love with the “man from tennessee” — you may once have been that man, Dave, but i think we all know you aren’t anymore.
but hey, your 20’s are all about hopping from place to place, simultaneously terrified of leaving the past behind and forgetting your roots, stretching out long-expired relationships just to feel any kind of connection, and writing sad sack letters to some lady you made out with like two times at a drive-in in Memphis because you struck out at the bar again in Denver. as Dave reminds us.
ok let’s get into it.
1. painting
i will say: i can feel myself getting better at doing bad paintings.
saw some pictures of canyons this week, in some context or another, and was intrigued by the difference in color temperature between the surface (weird word, can’t think of a better one) and the canyon walls. reds and blues and oranges, and not always where you might expect! so, very loosely from reference, kind of, i set out to try something like that.
sometimes it’s just that simple.
very basic. hey maybe there’s some kind of town or something by one end of that bridge? or, as we will see, maybe there isn’t! and i gave myself a mountain in the background as a way of easing into things — like stretching before you lift weights. compositionally it doesn’t hurt either.
i painted this all on one layer and didn’t really pause a lot so this is already sort of developed in terms of what colors are going where. the reds on the near canyon wall will change, keep your eye on that. the shadow tone of the mountain way back there will change too, keep your other eye on that.
reworking the sky, and reworking the far distance so the tones are much closer together, temperature-wise. adds to a sense of distance. i hope.
almost-final. next week i think i’ll be painting from reference again — i put the reference away for the home stretch on this one and could feel myself floundering. it’s very hard to imagine what a rock looks like. it’s even harder to imagine what a different, but similar, rock looks like! and what would you put in a big flat expanse of desert that would look normal. there’s gotta be something, look how empty those mesas look.
as usual, i threw a light color wash on this to get the “final” up top.
2. poem
cracker poem - summer 2021
what happened to those crackers
you used to have, they were right here
they looked kind of like these ones but
the texture was different, it was crunchier
or something
or softer, somehow
oh those, they stopped making them
but these ones here, these are pretty close
and anyway
everything is mostly like something else
3. tofu benedict
it’s been over a year of being vegan now and recently that ol’ craving for a nice poached egg has been creeping back in. i thought i would miss cheese the most, but actually, cheese gives me incredible heartburn these days, so that’s been easy to ditch.
eggs, though.
i made these kind of on a whim this weekend while i was recovering from a hangover, and they were actually very easy. the hollandaise is not quite like real hollandaise but is very close, and the tofu is not really at all like a poached egg but really, with eggs benedict, it’s more about the hollandaise, if we’re being honest.
here’s the stuff: tofurkey slices, english muffin, lemon, plant butter, greens, flour, chives, nutritional yeast, avocado, oat milk
for the hollandaise, since you can’t use eggs, basically you make a roux with the plant butter and the flour, then gradually add the oat milk and stir constantly while it thickens up into a sauce consistency. then, remove from heat and mix in the mustard, yeast, and lemon juice. i also added just a sprinkle of turmeric for color.
two tofu circles, seasoning each of them with nutritional yeast, salt, pepper, paprika, and cayenne
toasted muffins
add avocado
add greens
add some slices. i cooked them up a bit beforehand but it did make them harder to cut and didn’t really improve things that much. so your call on that.
the tofu rounds, also cooked up so they’re a little crispy on each side and soft in the center
then go nuts with the hollandaise. just pour that shit on there. really go for it. chives and paprika on top as well.
4. winning II
i think maybe i never actually wrote “winning I” in this newsletter, now that i think about it. might still be in the notes. but, like everything else, it’s a collection of some of the same pieces and parts that swirl around, however diluted, in most everything i think about and write about.
this week a couple things happened that i have been thinking about in conjunction with each other. i don’t think i’m going to come to a strong conclusion here but as usual, feel free to hold these shapes up to each other and see how they fit together, from your perspective. look through one at the other. weigh them both in your hands like you’re a stock photo protagonist. you know the deal.
one, as you probably know, is the big D word. the delta variant. per social media, breakthrough cases are skyrocketing. i tangentially know a couple of vaccinated people who have gotten sick, and you probably do too. mask mandates are coming back. i don’t really keep up with the exact stats on this, but i think in Oregon and probably a lot of places, vaccination rates have plateaued and don’t look too likely to creep above 60% for full vaccination.
what do you think about that? personally, i think it sucks. what do you think might be done about that? ah — that’s the interesting question. what would winning look like?
two, the city of seattle, where i regretfully used to live, published a report on its much-touted inclusionary zoning plan, “MHA.” the Grand Bargain, it was called - a bargain between landlords and developers on one hand, and i guess, uh, landlords who felt a little guilty on the other hand. nonprofits, maybe that was the second group at the bargaining table? certainly it was not really much of a bargain involving actual working class tenants being pushed further and further to the brink of houselessness.
but anyway, the deal was, hey, you can build your luxury apartments, but you have to include some affordable units in the apartments as well when you build them. or, you have to pay us a fee, so we (the city, in this case, to be clear about the “we”) can then go and build those affordable units elsewhere. dealer’s choice! build the affordable units, or pay a fee.
well, wouldn't you know it, basically everyone just opted to pay the fee. the program resulted in 21 actually-constructed affordable apartments. i’m no math guy but that does not seem like a lot.
but hey! they paid fees. and actually those fees can likely be more impactful elsewhere, resulting in more units! we just have to uh, shuffle them off a little bit further from the city. unfortunately this will result in some further concentration of poverty and economic segregation, but what are you gonna do? not build them? and they definitely will get built, in a few years. four, max. maybe five or six. so in five or six years, hey! we will have up to 650 more units of affordable housing.
hey!
the type of people who get excited about this see this as progress. but i have to ask: towards what? 1500 affordable units built in a rapidly growing city of millions, over a decade? is that progress?
is that what winning really looks like to you? is that the future you’re excited to tell your kids you fought for? a maximum of 1500 affordable units built in a decade?
these two things have some things in common. a certain type of well-meaning too-trusting under-informed historically ignorant “believe science” type liberal (maybe: your parents. maybe: your co-worker) is excited to talk about each of them for reasons that, when you step back, are very bizarre. they are darkly excited at the opportunity to yell at more “Trumpers” about vaccination rates — they are secretly thrilled that the weird technocratic zoning fix they maybe half paid attention to turned out to raise some money, or something, or anyway wasn’t a total bust — there is a barely-sublimated frisson of sheer delight that unvaccinated people are getting their just desserts and dying in huge numbers — there is a crackling glee that developers and landlords can continue to live their lives uninterrupted and the system secretly works.
what if we paid everyone who got the vaccine a thousand dollars. what if we paid everyone who got the vaccine ten thousand dollars. what if we built fifteen thousand affordable units in five years. what if we built one hundred and fifty thousand three bedroom apartments in five years and we never paid rent again, only taxes.
what does winning actually look like to you?
okay well, that’s a good place to leave it, and i’m out of space anyway. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.