it’s tuesday again and you know what that means: nba basketball is back.
and not a moment too soon.
this isn’t really a sports newsletter but i have to say, it’s shaping up to be an interesting season. at least in the west, the only conference i really pay attention to. nothing really seems obvious. the defending conference champs are led by an old annoying guy. lebron has used his powers to summon every former superstar in the league over the age of 35 to the lakers. steph curry looks poised to take the warriors to a 20 win season record despite scoring 40 points a night. and the blazers did not really make that many interesting moves, and who knows how happy dame is going to be about that by the trade deadline.
mostly i am looking forward to never hearing about baseball again until the next baseball season inexplicably starts three weeks from now or whatever. i mean my god.
the past week has been a blur of work, during which despite my best efforts and all my usual personal rules i have been working more than 8 hours per day. this is how it always goes, i guess. you chip away at a project and pace yourself for a couple months and make slow steady progress and carefully lay down foundations you can thoughtfully build upon and then a week before you were planning to wrap everything up the client can call you up and say hey actually can we make the ceilings two feet higher everywhere. and your engineer can call you up and say hey actually we misread your drawings and tried to connect some posts to some beams that do not actually connect and as a result we need to re-engineer, well, most of the thing. most of the whole deal we’ll need to re-engineer unfortunately.
one upside is all the head-down drafting and drawing work has been a great opportunity to listen to music. whee. what an upside. and this past week although i did not really like the movie much at all in retrospect, a couple of the songs on the Promising Young Woman soundtrack have been really hitting. one is a cover of a cigarettes after sex song, one of my go-to bands for mindless working music and also unfortunately led by a rumored creep. and the other one is a song i have heard a bunch of different versions of and i think this one is the “authoritative” version (here meaning “best” i guess) although reasonable people can disagree on that. i am going to try to put a couple of youtube links in here and if they don’t work you are not allowed to yell at me.
and
that’s it for music corner. and sports corner. and this past week corner. let’s get into it.
1. painting
due to the aforementioned “work” and “deadlines” at my “job” i have been getting up early lately. i don’t think i’m in danger of permanently becoming a long-term morning person but you know what they say about habits. now that it’s fall outside, it has been nice and foggy in the mornings, and right across the street from me is a big cool water tower that looks pretty dramatic in the morning. so i wanted to do something with it and with fog.
i took a couple elements from around the neighborhood and combined them into some kind of composition that would allow me to try out some of the atmospheric effects i was interested in exploring. and also i wanted it to feel a little spooky. it’s the month of feeling spooky. it would be nice if we had more months with definitively associated vibes. i guess probably i’m describing astrology.
first layer of “fog color.” the plan on this one was to get the fog color in, and to lay in some tones, and then gradually work up with semi-transparent layers of color to keep things kind of desaturated and foggy feeling while still working in some tones and hues. this is sort of a bad digital replica of painting with pretty wet oils. or layering up watercolors, i guess. it’s not quite like either of those things but it’s something like each of them.
more tones. and wouldn’t you know it, looking back, the water tower shape at this stage is way more expressive than it turned out to be. Oh Well.
turned the lines off, and laid in more paint. by putting a base color down first and just kind of lightly touching it with other hues, you can kind of keep things in a tighter range, which is how things look when it’s super foggy out. to me.
pretty big jump here i guess. as usual the trees were a pain. i think i said last week that i should do some rock studies. i need to do some tree studies too. that could be enough for one week’s edition. not particularly interesting to read about maybe but hey i’ve phoned it in before.
as usual scroll up to check out the final for some subtle tonal shifts. does anyone do that? sound off in the comments if you scroll up to check out the final for some subtle tonal shifts.
2. poem
“notebook poem” - fall 2021
in january you walk to the little store on one corner
— it’s time to get new notebooks to think with
you don’t worry about those co
uple few days
before you can get to the little store on one corner
where everything is wrapped in brown paper
that sells notebooks
those first few thoughts you let crumble out
and roll down your sleeve
and belong to everyone else again
3. soup mode
all it takes is spending a year with a 3 in front of your age instead of a 2, and one quick walk from the car to the apartment lobby during which your teeth chatter just a little bit, and if you’re not careful you’ll find yourself endorsing soup. as a project, as a meal. it happened to me. nobody is safe.
if i got hit by a bus tomorrow and found myself at the pearly gates and kind of stood back a little bit looking at my phone like i was looking something up and waited for the line to clear up a bit so i could go up and have more of a conversation with st peter before heading inside, and i guessed out loud that i had made vegetable soup from scratch a grand total of one time in my life, i would not be surprised at all to hear st peter say “good guess.” i am not a soup guy and when i am pretending to be a soup guy the disguise does not extend to the depths of pretending to be a make-my-own soup guy.
but this week i tried it. and i didn’t really know what i was doing so i just got a whole pile of fall type vegetables and thought about some flavors and just kind of winged it.
i chopped them up and put them all on pans to roast in the oven. salt and pepper and red pepper flakes and olive oil.
i added fresh basil after a while so the basil wouldn’t get burnt
in the meantime i used the rest of the basil, and some pantry stuff, and some spinach i had in the fridge that i was in danger of not eating in time, to make some vegan pesto. that’s nutritional yeast over there on the side. that’s my food processor over there on the other side.
veggies all roasted up…
…and jammed into the blender.
after blending them up i put them in a big pot and heated it up and gradually added some coconut milk and coconut cream. just kind of by feel. more of my life is vibes based than i think i would have guessed (1 point for st peter) and that is okay.
i omitted a couple of intermediate steps here but i think you probably get it. i toasted some baguette slices in the oven, then spread the pesto on, then sliced off some little shreds of trader joes new vegan feta cheese which is incredibly delicious. like surprisingly delicious. their other vegan cheese sucks but this shit rocks. and i know a lot of you are like ‘a bloo bloo bloo i’m too much of a big shot to try vegan cheese a hew hew hew.’ you are not too much of a big shot. try it out. for real.
4. spooky occurrences
i don’t think i’ve ever encountered a ghost that i know of. in some ways i think this topic is kind of becoming the “are hot dogs a sandwich” of overdone conversational crutches but it’s october and it’s my own newsletter so i am giving myself a pass. i think they probably exist, or something does that we could identify and go ah, yeah, that’s definitely close enough. this isn’t a strongly held or deeply rooted belief but it’s kind of in the same spiritual neighborhood as thinking about volcanoes on venus, or how consistently lucky certain friends are. there are little strings that vibrate and connect the idea of these things to some impossible-to-perceive-but-nevertheless real element of our shared physical reality but it’s impossible to perceive (see previous) and it doesn’t really matter anyway. but sometimes something twangs one of those strings in a way that makes you go “hm!”
every year jack wagner, one of the hosts of the podcast yeah but still does a long halloween episode for which he spends weeks beforehand tracking down firsthand accounts of various paranormal phenomena. lots of aliens. some ghosts. some other stuff too i can’t remember, it’s been a while, but they are some of the best episodes of the show and although in some ways a real departure from the tone of the regular episodes, they are very worth checking out.
i don’t really have any ghost stories. ghosts and i so far have decided to stay out of each others’ ways. but here are all the spooky occurrences in my life that i can remember right now on tuesday afternoon off the top of my head.
one building i lived in had two elevators next to each other. this is pretty normal i think in bigger buildings. you press the button and get in the first one that shows up. you know how this works. one morning i was in a hurry and had not slept well and i got in one elevator and took it down to the lobby and came out of the other elevator. i had switched places during the ride down. been transposed across elevator shafts by a paranormal force. at the time, i was going to school in a building that also had an elevator, but just one, but it had two doors, and to get to the architecture studios, you walked forward into the elevator car and kept facing the same direction and walked forward out of the second door of the car into the studio. in a normal elevator you turn around. i believe i was pretty sleep deprived and half paying attention that morning and i just got mixed up. but the possibility remains that i entered some kind of lynchian liminal space during that elevator ride and shifted myself sideways into our current hell dimension. i think i crammed about as many obnoxious tropes into that sentence as i could.
recently i have been sleeping under three blankets: one comforter, and two quilts. each of these blankets has a distinct “long edge”: that is to say, they are not even close to being square. each morning i make my bed with the blankets in the correct orientation, and each night i tuck myself under them and fall asleep. i used to be the kind of sleeper that would wake up to hopelessly tangled and twisted blankets, but recently, the blanket stack has been staying perfectly aligned to itself… but i wake up and the stack has been rotated 90 degrees. no tangling, no twisting. just a simple 90 degree turn.
the actual spookiest one i can think of is also sleep related. a while ago i was wondering if i snore when i sleep. i got one of those apps that you leave running on your phone during the night and it detects snoring sounds and flags them in the recording so you can go back and listen the next day. if you subscribe to snore app premium you can log things that may have affected your sleep, like whether you had a bunch of drinks, or whether you were extra tired. i guess. i don’t actually know. and if you subscribe to snore app platinum a big wooden mallet will actually bounce jauntily out of the phone and bonk you once on the head and put you out like a light.
anyway i left this app running and checked it the next day and scrolled to one of the flagged areas and the noise i heard was not snoring but it was someone talking. i immediately uninstalled the app. i think it was probably me, in my sleep, but if it wasn’t, hell, it’s none of my business.
and that’s it for this week. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.