052 tuesday january 18
the one year wrap-up roundup rundown looking back looking forward overview summary edition
it’s been 52 tuesdays, can you believe it?
actually i think it’s been 50 tuesdays and 2 wednesdays. let’s round up, though.
and speaking of roundups, that’s what we’re doing today. every week for a year i sent this little newsletter out, at first to like two of you, and now to a truly bewildering number of you. where did you all come from? who are you? how did you get this number?
fifty-two weeks times four things is a lot of stuff! today i want to look back on some of the highlights and lowlights, and write a little bit about each section — what worked, what didn’t, what i’m changing, what i’m keeping. because i am going to keep writing this, in some form. i’m holding for applause. i’m waiting for your applause to die down. thank you. thank you. no, thank you. i’m going to keep writing this in some form, and that form is going to be very similar to this current form, but there are going to be a few changes.
i just want you to know what you’re getting yourself into!
i spent the last couple days reading back through the entire archive of these newsletters, and it was a very interesting experience for me. seeing the project evolve week-over-week, remember what i was up to at various points last year. laughing a little bit at some classic quips, and wincing a little bit at some less-classic quips.
for the two more “visual” sections, i put together a best 4 and a worst 4. and for the other two sections, well, we’ll get into that when we get there.
i guess i don’t have a good place to put this general note, since it’s not section-specific, but in reading back through the archive, i think i did notice myself getting better at the actual writing part. some of the early stuff is a little rough. i think my voice has come through the whole time but as the newsletters got a little longer and i got more comfortable, the writing improved. also when someone made fun of me for using too many em dashes. that was a huge step forward. i’ve never really been a “proofreading” or “reviewing” or “editing” type of guy when it comes to writing but the exercise of reading old newsletters and coming across plenty of places where some really basic edits would have dramatically improved the content has changed my opinion on that. hell, maybe i even proofread this one! who knows.
on a serious note i will say i appreciate you all reading this every week. this started as a project with the very basic goals of a) setting up some more rigid structures for my previously-anarchic creative habits, to see if that helped at all; b) giving myself a reason, excuse, and requirement to do more writing, and of course c) giving me something to do other than scroll twitter. and it did accomplish most of those goals! and selfishly, i am glad that these newsletters aren’t basically going straight into a trash can after i write them. it’s fun to put these together and it’s also fun that other people are reading them. so thank you. most of you.
ok, let’s boogie.
1. painting
ok first of all, i don’t know if substack can handle images this tall, and i guess we won’t find out until i hit Publish. if you don’t see 52 pieces of art in the above image, try loading the web version. you can count them, go ahead.
here’s every piece i did this year for this newsletter. wow! there’s a lot of blue! and a lot of triangles!
my favorite 4
here are my favorite 4. the very first one, how about that! the one that i spent the amount of time on that i was hoping to spend on all of them, but definitely did not! that’s probably not a coincidence! then we have another mountain one, pretty straightforward but i really like how the colors and contrast came out, and i like the shapes of the trees: i didn’t overwork them. of course we have to have one of the snoozing series. and then this crispy little illustration from just a few weeks ago. eight weeks, i guess. two months. yikes.
is there a theme here, in the favorites? is there a lesson? yes, i think so. i used colors i like but stretched outside that comfort zone a little bit. i didn’t overthink things but i also spent a good amount of time on all these and all of them involved quite a bit of process work. and when i stretched outside of my “usual” zone, i did enough research and working from precedent that the pieces came out well. for 035 i couldn’t figure out how light would look coming in the front of an A-frame cabin, so i actually built a quick 3D model and swooped the shadows around. for the first and second, i had good photo reference to work from.
my least favorite 4
yuck. hate it.
the theme here is pretty obvious, at least to me. these were done quickly, and for 3/4 the basic composition is garbage and the rest of the piece is not doing enough work to make up for that extremely fundamental problem. the fourth one, there’s some interesting stuff happening, but the building is way too sloppy and the foreground is way too busy, because i threw a bunch of cheeseball swooshes and swirls at it at the very end to try and make up for the work i didn’t put into it in the beginning. most of these could have used a lot more work in the sketch stage to arrive at a composition that worked better, and all of them could have made much better use of reference material. i guess it’s cool that i took a swing at the colors on 031 but the final should have stayed in the sketches folder.
the future
this section, the most prominent section, the linchpin in some ways, 75% of my reason for even starting the project… this section mostly worked. but the through-line for the entire year was that i still wasn’t spending the kind of time on these that i wanted to, i was leaving them for the last minute, and they often felt like a chore. i appreciated the (self-imposed) structure, and when i started writing about the process in more detail, that did help me think about what i was doing and why. so this will be sticking around, but i’m going to chop it into alternating weeks. one week, i’ll post process sketches and studies that will eventually (probably) work their way into a piece, or form some kind of theoretical underpinning. a bunch of drawings of just rocks, for example. a bunch of quick 15 minute tree sketches. then the next week, it’ll be a painting (drawing) that builds on that process work.
basically, i’m giving myself 2 weeks to do a piece, but setting an intermediate goal of actually doing the homework i should be doing.
should be fun!
2. poem
i didn’t go back and pull specific poems for this roundup. i went back and read them all but only one really stood out as one i wanted to highlight: the ballad of mean jim mcbride, from edition 020 (good sandwich in that issue, too — and what’s the difference between “edition” and “issue” anyway?)
i like this one a lot because it’s fun, and because it was a shitload of work. all those rhymes took forever to piece together into a story that still kind of made sense, and although there are a couple places where the meter doesn’t quite scan, overall i’m pretty proud of it and i think it’s fun. and funny. what a twist!
i believe i briefly wrote about this back in the early days, but this section was the one that represented the biggest leap. way back in the summer of 2020, Lockdown One, the early days, the best days of our lives, etc., i started reading a lot more poetry, mostly because there wasn’t much else to do, and also because i was getting drunk on the porch a lot, and poetry goes pretty well with a giant mason jar of gin and tonic. i got just about every little book two plum press (a great local printer / publisher) ever put out, and a bunch of other poetry books, and subscribed to a poetry-focused newsletter, and so on, and at some point i started wondering if writing short little twisting shimmering fragments of poetry was something i, too, was capable of.
so i started a little notebook into which i would jot phrases or fragments or ideas when they came to me (usually while tipsy) and then i would go back and comb through these little fragments and piece them together or pick them apart and assemble little poems out of them.
over the course of the year, though, i used up all the notebook fragments, and wasn’t really jotting any new fragments, and perhaps most importantly wasn’t really drinking on the porch that much anymore. reading back over the last years’ worth of the poetry section, there are a lot of similar themes: some kind of nostalgic element, some oblique references to persons not explicitly identified, some sad-sack yearning type shit. some stuff about trees and mountains too. but most of it, at least the ones built from the original notebook scraps, represents a headspace i find myself in increasingly less often.
if you liked the little poems, that is great. i liked writing a lot of them. i still like reading some of them back. but that brings us to:
the future
i’m going to use this section for writing, still, but i think it’s going to take on more of a very-short-fiction vibe. to give you an idea, i wrote a handful of things over the past year that would find themselves in this new section: the memory of the cook (002), lights (007), ghost story (024), vacation planning (040), and a couple others i think.
i would like to do more fiction writing in general, in order to build up to taking on a couple bigger projects i’ve had kicking around in my head, and the only way to get better at something is to do a lot of it, and look back at it afterwards and take some notes about what you liked and what you could do better next time. i assume this is the only way, at least. if you know a faster way, let me know, i guess.
i still might toss a poem in every now and then. i’m setting these rules now with the full knowledge that they will probably end up bending. but i just wanted to give you a heads up. there will be fewer poems in the future.
3. food
this one is changing the second-least (since the fourth section is already a wildcard and that’s not going anywhere.) i still love to cook, and i still love to try new things, and i still love to take pictures of the food i cook and make you all look at them.
since the new year, i have been relaxing my veganism a little bit, mostly for sushi and sometimes for eggs. i still eat mostly vegan, but i would not say i am A Vegan, i am not in the vegan community, i am not involved in vegan drama, i am not a vegan purist, etc. and so on. i think “i mostly eat vegan” is a less-annoying and more-accurate way to explain what it is i’m up to, dietarily speaking. maybe you think that phrase is also annoying but if you do i’m one thousand percent certain that you are actually just annoyed by the basic premise of veganism. so your opinion doesn’t count. sorry.
i guess i’ll make a quick plug that eating plant based is actually very easy and it does not have to be expensive. i think morally it’s up to you how you feel about animals vis-a-vis consuming them but i think we can all agree that factory farming sucks ass. we can also all agree that individual choices are not going to solve systemic problems but i do actually believe there is such a thing as attempting to try to live the future you’d like to see. and i do think that one way or another meat is gonna be a whole lot more scarce and more expensive in say, the next 20 years, so if you want to get a jump on it now, i’m here to tell you in a non judgmental way that i found it much easier to do than i expected. you don’t have to go all the way with it either. like i said, i’m not a purist. also, watch some videos of pigs sometime.
my favorite 4
this one was much harder to narrow down. there were some runners up that just barely didn’t make it. the corn dogs. the carrot lox from the very first edition. the ravioli of course, gosh.
but the crunchwrap, the spicy “chicken” noodle salad, the reuben, and the “scallops” were my favorite. yummm. just look at that crunchwrap.
the worst 4
this section of course was also home to some very impressive disasters. some attempts at vegan food that were truly awful, both to perceive and to consume.
the eggs from 002, i still think about those and frown. the awful fish. i still have not gotten any kind of plant to imitate seafood. there’s just something yucky about heart of palm and banana blossoms. the shrimp, hilarious but awful. and of course the hot dogs, which gross me out to this day.
the future
not much to say here! we’re gonna keep it rolling into 2022. you might see some eggs now and then but it’ll probably still be mostly vegan stuff. as always, if you have food you like, wing it my way. i’d love vegan recipes you yourself have enjoyed, but i would also like to challenge myself to veganize some non-vegan food. that’s how we get disasters like the above 4 things, after all.
4. the fourth thing
this section, being the most varied, wasn’t really worth sitting down and ranking, in my opinion, but out of the rants, screeds, lists, exhortations, short stories, and building reviews, here are four of my favorite Fourth Things:
i was worried about this section, when i started. a little bit, at least. i went into this project with a list of about a half-dozen ideas for the fourth section and just trusted that enough stuff would naturally come up that i wouldn’t have too much trouble finding something extra to write about every week. mostly, i was right. you can tell, i think, usually, when the fourth thing gets left for last. that’s how we end up with stuff like “a list of every kitchen i’ve ever lived in” or “here are some fun books i’ve read in my life.”
but overall, i did appreciate the section as a place to work through thoughts and connect dots. in These Challenging Times, it’s more important than ever to Do The Work of Self-Care and Self-Critique and Interrogate Your Preconceptions and so on and so forth, and having a weekly space to blurt out five to seven paragraphs of Whatever has been great. twitter is great for tossing off a quick thought but actually sitting down and writing about that thought is a much better way to figure out how i feel about it.
the future
no changes! except i guess the short writing is moving into section 2. but other than that.
one year down
it’s been fun. hopefully you all enjoyed at least some aspect of each week’s newsletter. i guess i would be curious to hear if there are highlights that you remember from the past year, or what your favorite paintings were, or if you actually liked any of the poems, or if you tried the food, or whatever, but don’t feel pressure to share that, actually. i think you can reply to this and it will send me an email. there’s also a comment section down there for some ungodly reason and you can use that too. or don’t! don’t worry about it! and as always, there’s absolutely no need to tell me you hated something, something sucked, something looked gross, i misspelled something, and so on and so forth.
i was going to wrap up with my favorite 4 newsletters from the 51 previous, but i don’t think i will do that, actually. i’ll just say the run from 015 - 018 had some bangers. some of the 20’s too.
so there you have it. a whole year of a project. wow! wow. and you get another retrospective / wrap-up in mid-January! just when you thought all the wrap-ups and retrospectives were done. lucky you. more content.
okay well, i think that will about do it for this week. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.
Really enjoyed the art section every week, made me want to get back into drawing/painting.
019 and 023 were some of my favourites, appreciated the lighting and atmosphere of each.