043 tuesday november 16
snow houses / dusting poem / "scallops" / songs i've forgotten then remembered
happy tuesday to all who celebrate.
i’m writing this week’s edition from my new kitchen island, which i just put together yesterday. i’ve written before about how small this apartment is, and that’s still true. i’ve written before about my frustrations with, and ultimate acceptance of, that fact. at least, i probably have. this kitchen island is not a game changer per se but it is on that spectrum for sure.
i like to cook, and i like to have a lot of counter space to use when i’m cooking. i don’t think that’s weird to say. i hope i can still say that in 2021, that i prefer a lot of counter space. i hope that’s okay to say. when i moved in here, i knew the dimensions of the space and the layout of the kitchen were going to be a challenge to work with, and i knew that a kitchen island set off from the built-in counter a few feet was going to be part of the solution.
but ikea was sold out of the kitchen island i wanted. and thanks to the supply chain, they stayed sold out for a very long time. i don’t really know where else you buy furniture when you’re single and living in an apartment: i have friends who buy furniture from real places with real names you would recognize, furniture that is made out of real wood and costs several thousands of dollars (probably) and doesn’t lock together with those pegs that are somehow also screws. of course i also have friends who are very good at thrifting furniture and somehow have the patience and wherewithal to sift through an endless stream of posts on craigslist or facebook marketplace or whatever, and end up with great furniture that is kind of quirky, maybe slightly beaten up but still made out of real wood, and not costing several thousands of dollars (i assume.)
i do not have a facebook account, which you need for facebook marketplace, but more importantly, after a couple days of investigation, the thought of either checking pages every day or somehow setting up an alert for “kitchen island” that wouldn’t inundate me with spam every morning, and then going out and looking at the thing, and maybe liking it, but wait it won’t fit in my subaru, okay, i can go get a truck i guess, can you hold it, or wait maybe i should have just rented a truck to go out there in the first place, the pictures looked pretty good and Linda and Dean seem like they’re probably real people even if they live 45 minutes away in a town i’ve never heard of and have made several oblique references to “Joe” in a way where it’s like, okay, i hate the guy too, but i feel like we’re coming at it from very different directions here…
anyway i just signed up for the text message alerts at ikea. and yesterday an island came in and i went and got it and built it. and now, two months in to my tenure here, the apartment is finally starting to take shape. people warn you about the dangers of materialism and tell you that physical things cannot make you happy. well, in some cases, they are wrong.
1. painting
i had fun making last week’s painting. illustration. whatever you want to call it. sometimes these are not really “fun” and are more “studies” i guess or “obligations” or “chores.” but after last week i’ve decided to lean more into the “fun” part.
this did not start out fun, though.
i had sort of an idea that i wanted to do like a snowy scene. with some big tall funny looking houses, and a foreground that was totally covered in drifts, maybe there’s like some stuff sticking out of it (a box?), trees in the background, nice warm light from the house. something like that. and i wanted to do it in more of a “painterly” style, i guess as opposed to more “illustration-y.” not sure i’m using those words right.
i think i’ve written before in this section about the danger zone between those two, where i sort of muddle along in a weird gray area between the two ends of that spectrum, trying to make some things “realistic” and stylizing other things. never goes well! let’s check it out.
laying in sky and snow tones. snow is hard. it’s not white, obviously. maybe that’s not obvious to you but i think it sort of should be, sorry. but neither is it exactly the same tones as the sky.
we’re getting into some trouble here. tones are getting muddy. it’s not a big deal at this point, everything can get fixed later, but if you look at the snow and how some of those strokes are real tentative and others are way too sweeping - that is a dead giveaway that i was not working from reference but rather my memory and imagination. which is fine, i would say, if you are hewing closely to the “illustration-y” side of the spectrum. but a disaster if you are not. not a disaster obviously. but you know what i mean.
after reworking the snow and the sky one million times, i threw in some totally cheeseball trees. and some fun shingles, too! the trees and the shingles are fun. but the sky is not really of that same visual language. neither is the snow, or the background trees. or really, the light on the snow from the house. so: it becomes a mess.
so i re-did the whole thing. new canvas, fresh start, everything. and that’s the one you see up at the top. i kept some of the fun ideas and kept the rest a lot simpler. and it’s not perfect but it does work a lot better.
2. poem
“dusting poem” - winter 2021
opening every door in the house
to let in the air
in some rooms, a feeling that someone else has just left
dust still settling
in others, you’re there
still staring out the window
3. “scallops”
the mushrooms are the scallops.
lately i have been being less strict in my veganism. my vegan eating. my vegan commitment. i don’t know what to call it, all of those seem a little extreme. my basic vegan orientation, maybe. anyway i’ve been making some exceptions for seafood. because it’s good! and also because i’ve been taking a lot of weekend trips to places where seafood is about as good as you can do on the ol’ vegan scale.
i keep hearing, though, about the wonderful properties of mushrooms when it comes to emulating some kinds of seafood. long time readers may recall some of the early attempts i made to replicate seafood and how badly that went. but mushrooms seem like they have a higher floor, a better fail-case. what’s the worst that can happen when you try to make a mushroom act like a scallop? i figure, worst case, you still have a delicious mushroom.
i saw this dish (or the inspiration for it, i guess, since the one i made ended up different in a couple key ways) on the instagram account of another vegan guy who makes great stuff. another recommended follow. check him out.
here’s the stuff. shallot, garlic, spinach, lemon, white wine, mushrooms (these are “trumpet” mushrooms i think - people say to use “oyster” but the store did not have any with stems long enough to emulate scallops), pasta, sun dried tomatoes, and nutritional yeast. not pictured: olive oil, salt, and pepper. but i’m not going to picture those things! they don’t need to be in the picture. you should just assume them.
here’s some chopped stuff. i cut the heads off the mushrooms and saved them to use in something else, then cut the stems up in to roughly scallop-size chunks.
sear the mushrooms first. wow! don’t those look like scallops kind of?
then you pull them off the heat. and as usual i didn’t take too many pictures of the actual cooking here because my stove always gets kind of gross when i cook and there’s steam and stuff and i haven’t figured out a good way to make those images look interesting. or good.
so we’re skipping ahead a bit here, but basically you cook up the shallot, then a couple minutes later add the garlic, let that go for just a couple more minutes, then add the tomatoes. originally this called for capers but i forgot to get some and needed to use up my sun dried tomatoes. then add white wine. stir that all up, bring it back to a simmer, and add the yeast, spinach, salt, lemon juice, anything else i’m forgetting. let that all simmer for a bit and add a scoop of your pasta water, too. then at some point toss the mushrooms back in but i waited a few minutes on that so they wouldn’t get overcooked and would still keep some of their “snap” from the searing.
then once the pasta is done, dump that in too. i don’t know what kinds of pans all these food people are using but i clearly need to get some bigger pans because mine are constantly overflowing.
ta da! wow! look at that! so tasty. in fact, since it’s almost lunch time, i think i’ll heat up the leftovers and have a little more right now!
4. songs i’ve forgotten then remembered
has this ever happened to you? you’re minding your own business when suddenly a 3-4 second snippet of a song bubbles up into your brain, from somewhere way down there, and starts bumping against the edges like a fly trying to escape a tent. like a fly you don’t know the name of, i guess is a crucial element of this scenario, because in this scenario you do not remember enough of the rest of the particulars about the song (title, artist, any of the rest of it) to pull it up and listen to it, or at least to identify it. and of course the chunk that has manifested itself into your prefrontal cortex is a chunk without lyrics, or without enough lyrics to actually google, or with lyrics that you realize, after googling, that you have apparently been mis-hearing your entire life because when you google them nothing comes up.
has this ever happened to you?
the first time i noticed a repeat song getting stuck in my head this way — a song, in other words, that i knew i had tracked down before and identified — i started keeping a playlist on spotify called “songs i’ve forgotten then remembered” just so i wouldn’t have to fish the same metaphorical popcorn kernel out of my metaphorical gums over and over again.
here are a handful of those songs. and some words about them.
“Ashokan Farewell” - various artists apparently
in sixth and seventh grade, ish, i played mandolin in a “band” with my sister and one other kid. we mostly played bluegrass songs, and we were mostly not that great. i think we played at the saturday market a couple of times for some reason. although the third kid in the band actually was really good at music. and my sister is good at singing now. so my earlier summary of our abilities was maybe a little over-broad. anyway this was really fuckin hard to figure out because there are no lyrics. i think i just googled “bluegrass songs” or “sad bluegrass songs no words” or something like that and listened to dozens before i found this one. and now it’s on the list! it’s not going anywhere.
The Skin of my Yellow Country Teeth - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
what! you say. how could you forget this! you exclaim.
well, the snippet in my head was mostly the bass line. and the guitar or whatever that’s making the mosquito noises. also, off the top of your head, and be honest now, could you string together enough of these lyrics from memory to google? my man’s vocal strengths are not enunciation, i’ll just say that. hwaaaaah hwanna west virginiaaaaah, hyaaaaah hyabba himma huh! hudda huh!
not helpful.
Wakin on a Pretty Day - Kurt Vile
another shocker i’m sure, but once again, the part i remembered was the guitar solo. but! i remembered the one way towards the end, which is enough different from the opening that it was kinda hidden. and in that part of the song, there are not really any lyrics anymore (message has been delivered by that point re: pretty days) so the little chunk that was bouncing around my skull didn’t really have any other context that would help.
i was pretty sure it was kurt vile, or “someone like kurt vile” which actually does open things up quite a bit these days. but like i was saying, the part i was remembering is pretty different in tone and even tempo to the intro of the song. so just flipping through the top hits, it was camouflaged.
Burning - The Whitest Boy Alive
a lot of these, i have no idea where i heard them first, how i came across them, how they came to be buried down in the depths of my brain in inconveniently-sized fragments. some of the songs on this list are definitely milepost markers to various times in my life, to the point that it’s a little surprising i could have forgotten them.
this is not one of those. the part i remembered was just the intro. nothing else about it. i guess it’s a fine song in kind of a television commercial type way. but that first little hook is definitely very catchy and the lyrics are definitely completely forgettable.
Cover Your Tracks - Young Galaxy
this one does actually have lyrics, but they don’t really stick in your head. the intro hook, again, is definitely the part i remembered most, but some of the chorus lyrics did also stick in my head. i think i misheard / misremembered them just enough that googling the lyrics didn’t find this song at all. listening to this again i’m not sure how that’s possible. but it’s been on the playlist for a few years and it’s not that big of a band. so maybe it just wasn’t really that findable.
Corazon - FM Attack
this was my white whale for like, five years. maybe more. the only part i could remember was the little musical “phrase” that starts at 1:06. this song is like the perfect storm of un-findable and whenever this little snippet would pop back into my head it would actively negatively affect my mood because searching it down was so fucking frustrating.
the “phrase” doesn’t happen until over a minute in, so even if you knew the artist, skimming through would be tough. even if you knew the artist, this song is not really one of their hits, either, so you’d have to be digging through track by track. also, who knows what the lyrics are! even if you remembered that someone was making sounds that sort of sound like words, i got no idea what anyone in this song is saying. either the whisper part (sha la la la, sha la la la??) or the robot part (not even gonna try).
also, at this point, i was listening to a lot of this “type” of music but mostly in the background as i was working on other things, and mostly from huge aggregated playlists other people had put together.
as i got more into FM Attack (they’re great) i kept thinking more and more that it had to be them or someone very similar to them. i skimmed through their entire catalog at least a couple times i can remember before giving up yet again, but that phrase being buried a minute in kept the song hidden.
i believe i finally found it when i had given up, and was just listening to one of their albums for unrelated music-enjoying reasons.
ain’t that always how it goes.
okay well that’s enough for this week i think. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.