here we are, on the second to last tuesday of the year. gathered together. reading this little newsletter.
this is a late edition today because of several factors (early site visit in another city, last-minute COVID test, lack of foresight and planning) and this time i’m glad it’s late since some exciting things happened since the time i would have otherwise pressed “publish” and then clicked “ok” or “yes i’m sure” or whatever’s on the next screen after this one, i don’t remember right at the moment.
from my perspective, the most exciting has gotta be the announcement in the New York Times this morning that a group of architecture workers at SHoP (not a typo that’s how they capitalize it) are forming a union. if you, like me, are not one of those people who inexplicably has an online subscription to every major news outlet, you can at least read the headline. and if you are not one of those people that likes to at least click through and read the headline before the ad pops up that’s like “democracy dies in darkness subscribe now to keep reading, this season of democracy brought to you by BetterHelp, use code ‘TRUTH’ for 20% off your first session” here is a screenshot of the headline. which i think is funny.
the tone of it is what’s funny. whenever one of the billionaire-owned newspapers of record in this country has to cover labor issues against its better judgment, it’s always interesting to see what subtle anti-worker angle they will decide to go with.
in this case, there is a definite implication here that white-collar workers do not, in fact, deserve unions. and they “say” they are “overworked and underpaid” but how are you, the reader, supposed to know that for sure, and in fact we, the reporters, feel obligated to do our best to make sure you, the reader, are left with a little seed of doubt about whether these white collar “workers” really have it as bad as they think.
as you know, this is horseshit. everyone deserves a union. even if your job is good, you deserve a seat at the table. and if your job is good, what’s keeping your boss from making your job less good all of a sudden? or gradually, over the course of three or four years? you do not have to be making sparks at the spark factory or turning a giant wrench down at the plumbing yards to be deserving of a union. it’s worth thinking about.
i am very curious to see what the line from SHoP management will be. and also from the American Institute of Architects which allegedly is the professional organization that represents architects but in reality is the professional organization that protects architecture firm ownership.
i also had my annual Compensation Review at my decidedly non-unionized architecture job (if you are reading this for some reason and you are a co-worker, don’t be a narc please) and after about 4 years of being extremely underpaid for my position i decided to ask for what i am actually worth. i did not really get an answer but the ownership is allegedly mulling it over. so we’ll see how that goes. wouldn’t it be nice if these conversations didn’t happen in little silos where everyone is just doing their best to grapple the other party into submission and the results are therefore wildly varied? maybe if there was some sort of contract in place, that the workers as a whole could negotiate on. hmm. once again i will politely mention that if we work together you should not be a narc. but let’s grab a beer some time off of work premises. unless i get fired for asking to be paid what i’m worth. in which case, good luck.
let’s get into it this week.
1. painting
maybe you know the work of francisco fonseca, the portuguese skateboarder / illustrator. i really like his stuff. this is sort of similar to what he does in some ways but in others is not very similar, but i definitely took inspiration from his vibe. his process is pretty wild, to me, in comparison to how i usually work, and i think he has a lot of videos of his process on his insta. check them out.
here’s an initial sketch, underneath, and over top i’m about halfway through the “final” linework.
i wonder if i went back and looked at all these drawings and paintings, if i would be able to remember what i was listening to when i drew them. sometimes that stuff stays stuck in your head for a long time, in funny ways.
final linework. look at that guy hustling out of his house. where’s he headed. how come they make that other guy live by himself way down by the river away from the town huh.
night colors. pretty loose. really more about figuring the value range out than anything.
here we are a ways further down. i tried out some other, rougher, sketchier brushes on this one. in some places, colors are layered up on top of those base colors from before. in other places, they’re pretty much entirely covered and i just used them as a starting point.
scroll up for the final, with pretty significant work with washes and overlays to get the colors where i wanted them.
2. poem
“worm poem” - winter 2021
i’m crushing all my goldfish crackers into little tiny crumbs
i’m sprinkling them on pasta
i’ll never see them again
i’m digging up worms in the little strip of dirt
between the sidewalk and the street
i’m moving them to the park
they’ll have a better life and, i think,
they’ll never know what they missed
3. mongolian tempeh
typing this out i’m not really sure that’s what we call it anymore. feels like one of those descriptors that is slightly too specific re: nationality. but a bunch of other people still use that word online. so i bet it’s ok.
i’m back in broccoli mode now after a recent slump. i’m also gearing up for an extremely quick trip to my hometown for christmas and as a result did not want to get myself into anything too complicated. and also i had a hankering.
this stuff is incredibly easy to make and i’m sure it’s not that great for you. it has a lot of sugar in it. otherwise it’s pretty good, maybe? i mean it’s vegetables and tempeh. but yeah. sugar.
we’ve got some tempeh, some red pepper flakes and 5-spice, some cornstarch, sugar, ginger, garlic, an onion, some bok choy i needed to use, some green onion, soy sauce, and broccoli.
garlic and ginger ready to go
tempeh sliced up along with the onion and green onions. i don’t use tempeh that much because it has a texture that does not, uh, fade into the background really. you know you’re eating tempeh. but i didn’t want to make a bunch of seitan right before leaving for five days.
cooking up the onions and tempeh while making the sauce on the side. the ginger and garlic goes in the sauce. this gets things softened up in some ways and crisped up in others before the sauce gets glooped on there.
and here’s the sauce glooped. the sauce is basically just ginger and garlic, cooked for a bit, then you add the peppers and spice, then the soy sauce and sugar and simmer while it thickens, then the corn starch and a little water. add more water if it gets too thick. that simmers for just a few to thicken up while the other stuff cooks.
then you gloop it in.
roast the broccoli separately, then throw some sesame seeds on and put it in a bowl.
4. horizons
another couple of things happened in the media cycle this week that i have been thinking about a little bit, to the point where i want to use this section to write out some thoughts and figure out how or if they connect and how (or if) i feel about them.
the first one, which i think a lot of you probably saw, is this bizarre statement from a White House press briefing on Covid-19.
essentially, if you took the correct personal actions and acted in a virtuous manner as an individual, you are rewarded by getting to continue to go to work and keep the capitalist machine humming along. nice work!
if you didn’t do the morally virtuous thing, if you are a bad individual, well, fuck you, i hope you die. i hope your family dies.
there are a lot of things you could say about this. you could, for example, raise the very pertinent question about all the people who are immunocompromised or who are at high risk even when vaccinated or who are unable to get vaccinated at all by virtue of being, for example, babies. all the people who i’m sure would love to make the good moral choice and become Good People but who are unable, for one reason or another, or for whom becoming a Good Person is not enough to uh, keep them alive.
i think that’s pretty well-trod territory.
you could also say, about this statement, as some people did, that the tone of it is baffling, and why is it so hostile, and who is this going to convince to get a vaccine? some people did ask that, and the white house doubled down. that’s the chief of staff, by the way. incidentally he was a former lobbyist. lol. for fannie mae. double lol.
but at this point, i think it’s pretty clear that to the extent the White House has a plan to manage Covid (they don’t, not really) that plan does not involve convincing people to just get the shot, not really. the lines are drawn and everyone who’s eligible has basically chosen which side they fall on based on cultural signifiers and whether your team thinks getting the shot will get you into heaven, make you a good person, allow you to scold others, etc., or whether your team thinks getting the shot will make you a cuck, a wuss, a communist, a soy boy, etc.
all of this is pretty well-trodden as well. and that’s not really what i was thinking about.
what i was thinking about was the response to this statement, mostly from the moderate center to slightly-left-leaning-maybe-culturally-but-not-really crowd that makes up a big chunk of the college-educated people in this country. actually i saw this line from a lot of people further left than that, too, which is part of what i think is interesting.
the response i am talking about is: “so what? they had their choice. i wish they would get the shot but at this point, fuck ‘em. they made their bed and it’s pointless to engage with them any further.”
i am, i guess, a little sympathetic to this. refusing to get the vaccine at this point is indeed very selfish, and annoying, and immature, and so on and so forth.
what i am not sympathetic to is the idea that “fuck ‘em” is a thing you can say about, roughly, 40% of the political subjects in the country. this is the idea of horizons: where are you going? what does your future look like, if you get your way, if you achieve your political goals, if you and yours succeed in remaking the world in the image you’ve decided is most appealing? all political projects need guiding lights to steer by, and remaking the world in a better image is of course, a political project.
when you peer through the gauzy mists of time to your perfect future decades hence, what happened to those people you wrote off?
you are not allowed to just bulldoze them into a ditch. you can ignore a dozen assholes. you cannot ignore tens of millions of assholes. your political project has to reckon with them, at some point, in some way or another. if you are trying to build a better world you are not allowed to say “fuck ‘em” to 40% of the american electorate. it’s something a baby would think! you can’t close your eyes and make them go away! they’re going to be there no matter what, at best neutrally letting you and yours impose your political will on the nation, but realistically, probably impeding that.
the liberal approach to this problem, i think, is to scold and hector these unwashed violent masses into becoming better people of their own volition, better individual moral agents, worthy political subjects. and otherwise writing them off. how well has that worked so far? do we really believe two years of passive-aggressive pastel infographics, reading groups, confrontational thanksgiving conversations, are turning people away from the path of fascism by the tens of millions? i certainly don’t believe that. i wonder if you do.
it sucks! it sucks to think that at some point in the future, if you want universal healthcare, something has to happen to the huge numbers of people in this country who think that wanting to survive a basic medical procedure without being in debt for the rest of your life means you are a gay trans socialist communist reverse-racist and therefore deserve death. those people suck to talk to! they suck to be around. they suck!
but you are not allowed to bulldoze them into a ditch. even if you had the power to, which you don’t. so something has to happen. something has to change, on a very big scale. and unfortunately, you need to reckon with that.
the other little thing i was thinking about in conjunction with this was a post that went semi-viral on my little corner of twitter, at whatever the nexus is between architecture and housing and leftism that i wriggle around in every day like a little piggy in digital slop. it was from a developer in minneapolis, a young-ish cocky looking white dude with some light progressive signaling in his bio and on his feed but who mostly seems to believe, by my estimation, that he is doing the Lord’s work to alleviate the housing crisis by building housing just as fast as he can, and doing his best along the way to make it nice. if he makes a couple bucks “providing” a basic necessity along the way, well, that’s the way it shakes out. if the units he’s building are strictly market rate and operated by landlords and only further entrench the oppression of the tenant class and contribute to displacement but in kind of a savvy, elder-millennial pro-free-market-but-good-intentions type way, well, that’s the way it goes out here.
he was bragging about a new 12-unit building he’d just completed, in which he did not have to provide an elevator, because the building was only three stories tall. it looked nice enough. but soon, a group of people this country absolutely loves to shit on caught wind of this development and started asking questions like, if i’m in a wheelchair how do i get to a unit on the third floor? inconvenient little questions like that from a group of people who are so far from even being an afterthought most days it’s criminal. literally, usually.
there was backlash, of course. most of it pretty predictable. elevators are expensive, the line goes, and would you rather this project not pencil at all because an elevator was required? there are three accessible units on the ground floor, the response was, and isn’t that good enough? you can live on the ground floor if you’re in a wheelchair. if you get there at the right time. isn't that good enough for you? would you rather these twelve units not be built, thereby making twelve hypothetical Minneapolitans homeless at some unspecified future date?
yeah maybe in your future perfect utopia, all the units are accessible. maybe in rainbow fantasy land, wheelchair users aren't an afterthought. but for now this is the best we can do, and actually it’s pretty good, and actually you hate housing affordability if you have questions about the priorities that led this building to be constructed this way, and actually, come to think of it, you are probably racist as well?
i don’t actually give that much of a shit about this one building in one city. in the big picture, twelve units is a drop in the bucket. even in the medium picture. and the small picture, for that matter. at a certain level, who cares about this particular guy. scold him if you want, whatever. hector him about elevators. make sure he’s got his vaccine too while you’re at it.
because of course what this actually reveals is that the “free” “market” will never provide housing that is pleasant, accessible, green, resilient, whatever, whatever, and affordable. It Just Doesn’t Pencil. a lot of people read this as: well then, i guess we need to compromise on some things. i guess that’s reality. i guess we need to dust off our hands and get down to brass tacks and have some hard conversations and make some hard choices and eventually end up building more of the exact same market-rate for-profit housing and telling ourselves that this is probably moving things in the right direction, somehow.
so again we come to this question of horizons.
what does your future vision of a city look like? does it involve elevators? is every unit accessible by everyone? these are important questions.
does it involve landlords? are cocky business school shitheads involved in “providing housing” for some reason despite never swinging a hammer or sheetrocking a ceiling? does it involve phrases like Highest and Best Use and Pencil Out and Market-Rate?
if so, why?
and if not, what does cheerleading that stuff now get you?
these are not just important, i would say they are critical.
so i guess, what i have been thinking about, is how absolutely critical it is to have some kind of vision of the future you are steering yourself by. you need a compass to check your actions against. you need a map! you don’t have to know every step of the way there but you should actually have some idea of where you’re going. and what it looks like. and what is still there, and who isn’t, and how, and why.
and what is going to have to shift before you get from here to there.
okay well i think that will do it for this week. have a good week everyone. merry christmas etc. see ya next tuesday. bye.