i’m here from the future - 2022 is worse than 2021! ha ha. go back! ha ha.
just kidding. just messing around.
it’s the first edition of a bright shiny new year. everyone is in resolution mode. it’s a hack observation at this point but my tiny little gym is once again slammed with people. and i wish them all well! including the late-highschool early-college guys who hang out in threes and fours in the squat rack and bench press for a set every ~15 minutes and spend the rest of the time scrolling on their phones together.
i made some very light resolutions at the end of last week’s newsletter and i haven’t made any other ones. the mood, at least among people i know, seems to have distinctly shifted away from the calendar-year-based-resolutions model toward something either like “i don’t believe in calendars” or “i don’t believe anything will ever get better.” i guess i don’t have strong opinions on either of those but they do strike me as a little silly.
one resolution i do try to do every year and that i am also doing this year is logging off of twitter from january 1 until my birthday in mid-february, an idea i adapted from my friend chuck who does a similar cleanse at the end of the year. i think i like goofing around on there too much to ever completely bail but more and more i am recognizing the need to be make sure i can still quit if i want to. like they say. that my brain hasn’t completely turned into blue mush.
and it works! since logging off four days ago i have written two-thirds of a novel. i learned how to weld. i taught myself Mandarin.
just kidding. let’s get into 2022.
1. painting
hmm, well that looks kind of familiar, doesn’t it. some things do not change.
i have been thinking about what i want to do with each of these four sections if i decide to continue writing this newsletter for another year, and i have some ideas, but Edition 52 is further away than i thought, so there’s still some time to think about those and think about writing about them.
for this week we are going back to basics.
i started reading david brin’s the postman (also a kevin costner movie, which i did not know until googling it just now) this week and was thinking about some kind of post-collapse scene with a crumbling modern elevated freeway in the background and some kind of rustic wood bridge in the foreground, and some kind of guy poking his head out of the woods. two thirds of those things didn’t happen.
i think i’ve gotten a little better handle on the transition phase from linework sketch to blocking out more of a “traditional” painting and really it just involves turning the opacity of the linework layer way way way down and making sure your big blocky paint shapes look OK without lines holding them in place. simple as. here’s the first pass at some colors.
when coming back and writing about these i’m somewhat beholden to the screenshots i decided to snap while i was painting. usually it’s hard to go back and recreate process. so for some reason i took some pretty incremental snaps here as i was figuring out the colors. the color of that far bridge i will definitely end up muting. but some of the foreground darks turn out to work pretty well.
pretty big jump here.
the far mountain shapes are refined and a lot of detail is added. the shape of the bridge is figured out. you can see i’m working back-to-front and cleaning things up in pretty much that order. this is almost entirely because i know that some of the foreground stuff is going to end up covering the background stuff and doing the background stuff after i’ve drawn some giant foreground trees would be way more of a pain in the ass.
and here’s the fore and mid ground worked out in more detail.
you can see the colors are mostly the same, the big differences come with refining the shapes. there’s a lot more detail in the foreground because that’s where we’re standing. and there’s a lot of detail on the big mountain because that’s another focal point of the piece. in between it kinda mostly looks right but if you take a second look it’s really just a bunch of nonsense.
after this step, as usual, i added some color and texture overlays, lightly. scroll up to see that.
2. poem
new boyfriend poem - winter 2022
he seems like one of those guys
who doubles the amount of garlic in every recipe
he seems like he has opinions on beer
(types you and i have heard of but never discuss openly)
he could probably explain what a crypto wallet is
he used to really love bacon, i bet, but doesn’t talk about it much anymore
you and i read russian novelists
we know the names of at least five philosophers from the 1900’s
we have identical opinions on elena ferrante
(could he even pronounce her name?)
we’re thinking about starting to write books
3. big noodles
i am on a big noodle quest.
the other week i was struck by a sense memory of a specific bowl of noodles, a memory that was somehow simultaneously incredibly specific as a tiny kernel but completely abstract and featureless the second i tried to bring it into focus.
some things i know, or i’m pretty sure i know:
i had this bowl of noodles in college, which means it was somewhere in boulder colorado or denver colorado
the noodles were big
the sauce was thick and rich, not a broth. it wasn’t soup.
the flavors were somewhere in the almost-uselessly-broad-potentially-harmfully-reductive category of “Asian Food”
i ate it more than once. i think it was a go-to at whatever this place was.
i can’t remember if there were toppings, like you might get on a big bowl of ramen. i can’t remember if there were vegetables submerged in the sauce, like you might get in a big bowl of curry. i can’t even remember if the flavor profile was closer to ramen or closer to curry. i remember it being kind of orange.
and i remember it being delicious.
after racking my brain for any other possible identifying details of this dish or the place i may have gotten it, ten years ago, half a country away, i came up empty. so i figured the only way i was gonna get close was to do some experimenting. it’s either that or give up on it forever. or wait for it to fall back into my lap. which probably amounts to the same thing, in the end.
the first take on this is not pictured here. i was going to make ramen when the idea hit me to try and make the noodles instead, and so i kind of did a half-ass conversion of my already-in-process ramen broth to some approximation of this mythical bowl of noodles. it didn’t really work but it gave me some ideas.
clockwise from the lower left we have miso + tomato paste, some curry powder, garlic, coconut milk, peanut butter, vegan chicken broth, lime, onion, mushrooms, green onions, and udon noodles.
the garlic, onions, and the white parts of the green onions will all get started together. the mushrooms will go in just a little after. the green parts of the green onions i saved for toppings.
i’ve been experimenting with starting these guys off at a much lower temperature for quite a bit longer than i used to, whenever i make something that starts this way. i think it works better. also i’m becoming one of those no-seed-oil types of guys in 2022. this is coconut oil.
after the garlic, mushrooms, etc. cook for about 10 minutes on medium-low, i add in the pastes and the powder. let that cook for maybe 3-4 minutes.
in the meantime i chopped up some thai basil to get it ready. by this point i was pretty sure the mystery noodle flavor was somewhere in the southeast-asian-probably-Thai-adjacent range.
deglaze with the chicken broth, then reduce heat and let it simmer. the thai basil leaves are gonna simmer too. i think i added some water at this point, and just let it simmer on low or low-plus for about 10-15. really just going by vibes.
after it’d been simmering for a while i put it in the blender. i found a vitamix blender on sale for shockingly cheap so i got it for myself for christmas. it makes a wild amount of difference. blended this stuff up and added the peanut butter and some coconut milk then returned it to the pot to let it simmer a little more and thicken up, gradually adding the rest of the coconut milk as it went.
the big noodles just need to be boiled very briefly to revive them. i added some roast broccoli and cilantro, onions, lime, peanuts, etc.
this was… not that close. too mushroomy. too umami. did not match up with my memories at all, except for the texture, which was very close. which is helpful, actually, because it tells me more about what the mystery noodles were not. and by process of elimination, the next batch will be closer.
4. a great start
i had some thoughts on something else i was going to write but i spent my afternoon trying to track down a covid test, and becoming increasingly more frustrated at the general state of the whole american medical “deal” that’s going on and the little bizarro dual-power-mutual-aid i heard they have tests over here, my friend got a test from over here, i have some spare home tests if you want, i might have a line on some tests let me call you back hodgepodge quilt of personal experiences, recommendations, and quasi-connections that are currently failing to even approximate a coordinated response by the government. anarchists may be right about some things. citation needed. but for things like this… gimme that state power, baby.
i want one app that i open and push a button that says “give me a covid test” and it says “right over here sir, we have dozens of locations operating at full capacity all under one umbrella, you can get one in 15 minutes or 20 minutes or 25 minutes, this is all the national guard does now, we sold their guns and helicopters and bought them masks and gloves instead, we bought all the private clinics and put a big official looking government seal up there on the wall above the doors, it looks like the post office logo kind of, there’s a center .9 miles away and one .7 miles away, you can stay in your car, which would you prefer, no need for insurance sir it’s completely free of course, and not just free in that weird way it has been where it’s free but you still have to give us your insurance card for some reason and just kind of trust that won’t come back to bite you in the ass later, ok, appointment confirmed, see you shortly, here’s a voucher for a hamburger too by the way, and by the way sir we are delivering one dozen test kits to your home address as we speak.”
i do not want seven thousand apps and websites that all say “searching…” or “no appointments found, try another date” or “schedule visit, choose reason for visit, choose what kind of test you want based on no context or background information, enter your details, searching, choose appointment date, choose another appointment date, no results found, please contact our telemedicine line between the hours of 9 and 4pm, please have your insurance card ready, no charge to patient for certain types of screening, charges apply for other types of screening” or “covid-19 screening is unavailable for walkins, no appointments found.” i don’t want fifteen different calendars. i don’t want one hundred logins and one hundred passwords.
i love my friends but i do not want to hear from half a dozen people that a friend of a friend of theirs might have some at-home test kits left over, maybe. or that this one drive in testing center might let you just drive in, or that this one was looking pretty empty last time they were there. or that this clinic is usually pretty open on tuesdays, or that they had success driving an hour outside the city to scrounge up some tests from the blasted hinterlands. or that these tests are sort of reliable, or that these ones aren’t, or that these ones are reliable in a very specific window, not sure exactly when, though, the CEO of Delta wasn’t clear about that.
i do not want to sit in a line in my car for 2 hours. i do not want to see cheery ads about how actually you have to pay for covid treatment now, it’s your fault now, we didn’t really make a big deal of it before, we picked up the tab, but hey, you’ve coasted for long enough. you should have gotten your shots and you should have gotten boosted. you shouldn’t worry about the fact that everyone you know who got their shots and got boosted has also now gotten the new strain of covid because we prioritized giving pfizer one billion trillion zillion dollars instead of pointing a big gun at them and ordering them to make enough vaccines to poke every soul on the planet five times over.
anyway, you get it.
welcome to 2022.
that’s it for this week. happy new year to those who celebrate. see ya next tuesday. bye.