hello again and happy tuesday.
i hope you’re all doing well this week. it’s the day after valentine’s day. feels like valentine’s day was kind of dormant for a handful of years and has started to climb back up the rankings again in terms of highly visible holidays. maybe that’s just me, i guess. could be me! it’s nice to see everyone’s photos of their sweeties, though. and some of the joke posts are funny, too. i’m seeing fewer and fewer of those, though. maybe they’ve run their course.
maybe valentine’s day is reclaiming some ground as an unironic holiday. irony is on its way out, in some ways, i think, and maybe valentine’s day is capitalizing on the movement of that particular tide to try and cast itself as more of a relatable everyman kind of holiday, rather than a holiday for self-referential jokes about how stupid of a holiday it is. everyone’s buying into it. valentine’s sincerity is a bull market. if you aren’t in already, it might be too late. you might have missed the boat.
i don’t think i have a very strong opinion about it one way or the other, actually. i don’t have a comedy club type exaggerated opinion along the lines of, for example, “fellas, if your girl says she doesn’t care about valentine’s day, she’s lying, am i right” or “valentine’s day, or as i call it, Ben and Jerry’s most profitable day of the year!” or something like that. hating it feels hack, just like being super into it feels corny.
it’s also two days after super bowl day. i was sad to see the cincinnati bengals lose because it seemed like a fun story for them, although i admit i only have tangential connections to that franchise or team or city or area of the country and really not much of a connection to football at all. it seemed like a good game, though. i was sad to see that every commercial was for either cryptocurrencies or electric cars, though. that did bum me out in a pretty major way. i was happy to eat some delicious food and have a couple beers and a can or two of some kind of rosé marketed at the girlboss demographic but having every ad at the super bowl be for some kind of gambling or pyramid scheme or gigantic sleek electric behemoth was a little bit of a buzzkill, i gotta be honest. i am not looking forward to the near future where we’ve just done a find-and-replace and have more cars on the road than ever but they’re all silent and sleek and enormous now because they’re electric. and president buttigieg is condescendingly explaining to anderson cooper on national television that bolivia’s people were crying out for freedom and that’s why we had to airstrike them back into the stone age and it had nothing whatsoever to do with their massive lithium deposits and he’s doing the politician thumb thing and democrat voice and then anderson cooper nods somberly and it cuts to commercial and donald glover is in a wacky surreal commercial explaining to pete davidson how easy it is to trap fifteen other people into paying half your mortgage via an app that translates the churning glittery foam of the crypto-derivative-socio-financial-real-estate “economy” into a cheerfully clickable pyramid scheme.
just doesn’t sound great.
1. painting
a person! what? a human subject? what’s going on!
hey, there’s also some of those trees from last week. and something that’s almost certainly a dog.
sketch for this one. things we are looking to explore this time: trees, pushing the idea of depth, a night scene, and a person. that’s a long list!
as usual i did not snap as many process shots as maybe i could have, but here are the first colors. i was referencing a couple of sydney laurence’s night paintings for the colors on this one. painting things at night is still mostly a mystery to me. how dark do you make stuff? how light do you make stuff? we know how things look in the day, and it’s easy to check with your eyes or with photos or whatever, but at night, you’re pretty much only relying on your eyes and on vibes. you gotta try and capture what your eyeballs were seeing, since cameras do not do that great of a job of making the night-time look good. they didn’t, anyway. maybe they’re getting better at that.
this is something i have seen quite a few painters handle well, though, so looking at paintings for reference is more helpful than looking at photos. again, in my opinion. there’s sydney laurence of course, and also when i was in santa fe last (whenever that was) i did see some work by zhaoming wu that was amazing. i know i have seen landscapes by them, but there aren't many linked on their actual portfolio site. maybe their instagram? who knows. anyway check it out.
going in after the first pass and starting to add details and flesh things out. again i am working back to front, mostly, so check out the far mountains, hills, the treelines, and that near snow for most of the changes. again i am putting off dealing with the foreground and the guy who’s sitting there thinking about getting up and keeping going.
things are looking decent here. except that dog. sheesh.
essentially no difference between this one and the final up above since the final color tweaks were so slight this time. i think i would take out the aurora or at least rework them. hell, i might take out the dog, too, looking at it now. of all the things in this painting it’s clear that that’s the one i am least comfortable painting. i think the guy turned out okay actually although i think i would add a little fur ruff around his hood. maybe some breath fog. check out that little cabin. kinda fun.
2. poem
valentines poem - feb 2022
roses are red
violets are blue
we’re not exclusive, no —
sorry, thought that you knew?
3. broccoli carrot nests
everyone’s cheering. everyone’s going nuts. “yes! broccoli!” they’re screaming. “yes! he’s writing about bad food again!”
well it’s true. this does involve broccoli and it was not very good. so you get a twofer this week.
pretty simple story on this one. i had some broccoli to eat. i needed some breakfast. i had other projects to get to so i wanted it to be simple. and i was curious. a potentially lethal combination, to be honest.
i love sweet potato nests, or i loved them before i stopped eating eggs, and now that i am kind of eating eggs again and kind of trying to be a little more conscientious about the types of stuff i am eating i think they will be making their way back into the rotation. they’re pretty easy to make without a ton of salt and oil, which i think is mostly an upside.
so i figured maybe it was possible to do this with broccoli and carrots, too. i mean they’re all vegetables! carrots are even roots.
grated the carrots and quickly food-processed the broccoli. i didn’t go too wild with the broccoli because i didn’t want it to become broccoli paste but actually in hindsight broccoli paste may have worked better for this whole exercise. lesson learned. put it in the lesson book.
i added some flour, some paprika, some other spices, a little bit of olive oil. i wasn’t really sure at this point what would be binding the nests together, hence the flour. i figured flour would help. i don’t know what binds sweet potato nests together either, i just know that they stick better than this stuff did. maybe the gluten? maybe some sort of gluten?
scrunched them into nests. i still have about half this mixture, actually, i’m just realizing. i need to use it for something. i guess i’ll probably have this for lunch again even though it kind of sucked.
bake the nests a little on their own first and then the fun part is you can just crack an egg right into the middle of these and put them back in the oven to bake. i usually bake at like 350 for 15 ish minutes then check on them. they cook right up! it’s fun! they look great, at this point!
they’re actually really not that bad, i mean how bad could they be, but they do fall apart pretty easily and they were a little bland. i put some hot sauce on but i think they need almost like a creamy element, like a cashew crema or something. not too sure. maybe chili crisp? maybe something else? more condiments could only help, at any rate.
4. giving it 90%
they say you’re supposed to give it 100%. sometimes they say you should even give it 110%, especially in the context of a sport. they say whatever it is you’re doing, whatever you have your sights set on, give it 100%, give it your all, give it your full focus. find something you love, or are good at, or are driven to do, or are compelled to do, and when you’re doing that thing, give it 100%.
well, if you’re giving it 100% (or more!), how are you supposed to situate that thing in a larger context? your life, maybe. your week. someone else’s life. i don’t know, any number of other wider, broader, more sweeping arcs that everything can be situated in and positioned on. if you’re in laser focus tunnel vision mode on this one thing, what do you have left over?
well, you could give it 100%. and then when it’s time to do something else, like cook dinner, or something, you could stop giving it 100%, you could start giving it 0% and then start giving dinner some amount of percent. 100, ideally, i guess, if this is the philosophy you ascribe to; you would be giving your dinner 100%. you would be slamming the gas pedal into the floor on your knitting project and then you would be yanking on the emergency brake and bringing the knitting to a screeching smoldering halt and then you would be switching to the dinner lane, you almost missed your exit because you were going so fast in the knitting lane, and slamming on the gas again. seems wild to me. seems crazy to me to do it that way but of course this is all just a metaphor. seems like if you were cruising at a more comfortable 90% you would have plenty of time to ease off the gas and switch over to the dinner exit.
you could go vegan and give that 100%. you could ruthlessly cut every animal product out of your life, you could go beyond that even and begin haranguing your friends, colleagues, classmates, family members, known associates, you could harangue them about ruthlessly cutting every animal product out of their lives.
you could submerge yourself in your work, just really dive in there, you could focus in, laser in, hone in, you could give every corner of the building 100%. you could spend weeks down there, in the dark, submerged, focused. coming up for air occasionally maybe i guess but if you come up too fast you get the bends so it’s just easier to spend your whole time down there. you could really dial it in. you could get everything pretty well perfect if you gave it 100, 105, 110%. you could make that thing sing.
of course, from the outside, 90% is pretty darn close to 100%. looks very similar. especially from a distance, they are pretty close together. 90 is very close to 100 although if you squint a little bit there is a small gap. take a few steps back though, and look, wow, that gap looks smaller. you, who are very close to that gap, would feel it very strongly. you might feel bad about it! you might wonder what you could achieve if you really gave it that last 10%. but you could also think about what kinds of things you could fit into that 10%. or what kind of perspective even that little gap could give you. and again, from the outside? from further away? from one or two contexts away, or from across the room? from across the street? very small gap. not really worth mentioning, probably. to you? big gap. across the street? small.
90% is certainly closer to 100% than it is to 50%. i don’t think you want to be giving things 50%. you don’t want to be half assing it, ha ha ha, excuse that joke, i’m sure many of you saw that one coming from several paragraphs away. you could give some stuff 40% and be fine for a while, i think. i think we can all think of things in our lives we don’t really need to give more than 40% to. you want to be careful, i think, probably, that your life is not full of things that you are just giving 40% to. i think you want to be careful that you are not slowly drifting between lanes, to return to the highway analogy, at 40% speed. you might want to check and see how full your life is of things you are giving 40% to, in fact, but that’s a fourth thing for another time.
get out there and give it 90%. get out there and do a pretty good job. whatever you do, do it pretty well. we went out there, we gave it 90%, we did a pretty good job. hell, we won the game, didn’t we? might have been closer than it could have been. but now it’s time to hit the showers. time to hop up out of the pool. time to switch lanes. time to make dinner. time to eat some vegetables, but hell, throw an egg on there too. why not.
well, that’s it for this week. i’m high-tailing it down to california on thursday and i’m sure i’ll have some interesting stories to share with all of you next tuesday. maybe one interesting story. maybe more of an anecdote. who knows! have a good week. see ya next tuesday. bye.
I'm lucky if I manage 70%
The nests are kind of similar to a Filipino fritter called Ukoy. That comes with a super tangy dipping sauce that's made of cane vinegar, fish sauce, minced garlic and a Thai chili. Might work with those if they were bland though I dunno if it would play well with a fried egg.