065 tuesday april 19
second look sketches / thirtysomething poem / stuffed peppers / writing class
okay we’re back on track. back to tuesdays. until the next slight hiccup throws a wrench into the schedule.
what’s new this week. a federal judge overturned the airline mask mandate, mid-flight in many cases, which is great news if you’re an immunocompromised person who needs to get somewhere on a plane. or have a kid. or are visiting an immunocompromised person. the biden admin will absolutely not be doing anything about it, of course. like most important stuff. and yet the “reasonable” and “progressive” voices in our media, who are paid giant wads of cash to enforce hard limits on how far leftward “the discourse” can be allowed to drift are all baffled as to why biden’s youth support is absolutely cratering.
a real mystery! we better round up scooby and the gang!
there’s an argument to be made that media is fake, to a large degree, or that it’s not “real life” or that media consumption is not political. i think media spectacle like this actually does matter on some levels. the right wing uses it all the time to whip their base (your parents, maybe) into often-violent hysterics, which we have been seeing the fruit of as “groomer panic” sweeps the nation and a series of horrifying anti-trans, anti-worker and anti-woman bills are hastily passed through republican controlled state legislatures. but also, the center-right (NPR, CNN) uses it all the time to convince well-meaning liberals (your parents, maybe) that neoliberal capitalism is the underlying fabric of the universe and all the solutions to our many, many, compounding problems must therefore necessarily adhere to that set of rules. the housing shortage & attendant homelessness crisis has a market solution, we just need to tinker with our policies on the margins and builders will suddenly find themselves galvanized to produce abundant beautiful housing that real estate conglomerates will be quite content to rent at a loss. by gently subsidizing electric car startups we can transition our fossil fuel based economy to a lithium based economy and save the planet using nothing more than the power of the market and a gentle nudge from uncle sam. but for now biden needs to jump start american oil and gas production, just for a while, just until we get out of the woods. NATO is a force for good. small business owners are saints. incentives. frameworks. discourse. fact-checking. Paying Attention. Uplifting and Centering.
there’s no question in my mind that media can be powerful. and that there are people out there with huge platforms doing their damndest to steer the world into a flaming wreck in a ditch. or just as bad, doing their damndest to convince you that things are mostly fine and mostly going well and we don’t really need to do any dramatic rethinking of how our entire society and political economy is structured. but what i have lately begun to doubt more and more is the value in engaging yourself too deeply on that terrain.
i think it’s important to roughly know what’s going on, but i no longer think it’s critical to Pay Attention as if that’s a political act in and of itself. i think it’s important to have a sense of how these many, many unfolding crises can intersect and reinforce each other but i no longer think it’s a moral imperative to drop everything and comment on each specific frightening manifestation of imperial collapse. sure, this is a social media thing, but social media has reached the point now that it’s completely inseparable from “Life.” and from other media, and from business, and entertainment, and politics. it’s all one glittering, swirling foam, and you can’t point to one whorl of that maelstrom and label it “Not Real Life.”
you should care about things, you should know things, you should be interested in and working toward learning things and understanding things better, but if you are interested in making things better, you should also be aware of how that happens, you should have some sense of how power works, and what’s worth spending your time and energy on, and what’s superfluous. logging on for the fortieth day in a row to breathlessly marvel at how hypocritical your political enemies are and how Facts And Logic And Science are on your side: not useful. making sure you are seen to publicly comment on the latest atrocity that you were unaware of hours before and know next to nothing about, out of some misplaced sense of moral necessity or misunderstanding of what “action” is: not useful!
and my new favorite, passive aggressively scolding people online for not being aware of or commenting on or “getting angry about” any particular issue: not useful! and kind of insane! i’m angry about stuff all the time, if i make a post about it is that any more useful? nope. “while you weren’t paying attention, the tennessee legislature did some absolutely heinous shit.” ah, my bad! that’s on me for not paying attention.
if you believe, as i do, that when something sucks it’s usually connected to a whole host of other things that suck, and if you believe, as i do, that the only thing that has ever changed the average working person’s life for the better in all of human history is collective action with other working people, then there is a clear course of action for you: find a group that is doing something you believe in, that has at least some understanding of power and how to obtain it and how to use it, and, ideally, how the fundamental baseline problem is capitalism, and join that group.
and almost as importantly, reminding yourself constantly that if you are right about how things work and how things change, that change will not be happening overnight, but that nothing you could be doing instead would bring it about any faster. and that you, individually, are incapable of simultaneously working to fix everything or even three or four things but as part of a collective, you can trust that other likeminded people are pulling on oars that you can’t reach in other boats you can’t see, and that they are heading downstream to the same harbor as you.
i mean, that’s the whole point, right? the power of the collective. the beauty and the terror of it is that you can’t do it all yourself. you shouldn’t sit on the shore. you shouldn’t limit your involvement to making snappy comments about what’s going on out there, in the boats, on the river. but it would also be pretty silly to try to row four boats at once. and it would be pretty silly to feel bad about not being able to do that.
nothing new there. ok let’s go.
1. second look sketches
it’s sketch week. phew! good timing because i didn’t do a real painting.
this week i looked back through the archives of pieces i’ve done for this newsletter, and picked out a few that i thought were bad. compositionally bad, to be specific. there are a few back there where i think the composition was good but it turned out badly for other reasons. that’s not what we’re looking at today.
long time readers will know that usually i do a couple quick thumbnail sketches as a starting point for a more involved painting (i’m just going to call them paintings). the idea is to quickly look at a couple of different compositions, and proceed with the best one.
well, sometimes i don’t do that. or i don’t do enough of it. or something. somehow, i have produced quite a few paintings for this project that kind of suck, compositionally. so i went back and did some more composition sketches, with the benefit of hindsight and the wisdom of distance, and today i have a few of those to look at.
this one i don’t totally hate, actually, but i definitely don’t love it. the main issues, looking back at this, are that the two plateaus or whatever those are, back in the distance, are too similar in height and scale, and too symmetrically positioned. the positioning feels static, and the scale makes it feel like they’re on one “layer” back there. it flattens the feeling of depth. check out the new thumbnails for another look at how this basic idea could have been composed.
this one, on the other hand, i do totally hate. i don’t remember exactly the process of the original but looking at it, i assume it was like 10pm on a monday night and i went “oh shit, i forgot to do a painting for the newsletter tomorrow” and slapped this together with the absolute bare minimum of effort and a total lack of reference material. the perspective on that boat is totally fucked up too. also there are other problems here besides the composition but that’s not what we’re focusing on today.
the new thumbnail sketch tries to balance out the scales of the visual elements a little better while keeping the main idea (cabin on a cliff across the river.) the trees get way less stylized (or maybe, stylized in a way different way.) the perspective on the river in the mid-foreground feels a little more correct, and the big swooping ramp (?) from the original is gone.
another one i really actively dislike. when i was looking back on this one there are some things about it that i think work, actually. maybe just one thing. the transition of the nearer hillsides, in shadow, to the far riverbank way in the back that’s lit up with sunlight, i think that works. i think that works pretty well.
but the foreground bridge shadow is a total miss, compositionally. the tripod on the river is in a weird spot. something about the bridge itself is off, too, i think the perspective is wrong, and then also you just end up with a ton of nothingness from the mid ground all the way up to the foreground, which i decorated with ice, kind of, originally.
the thumbnails take a couple different approaches to these issues, the top one being a little more faithful to the original but tweaking the bridge perspective and adjusting the curve of the river to give us some more foreground. the second one is a total reimagining, keeping the subject matter (the Nenana tripod they use for the ice classic) but adjusting the point of view so we’re not standing under a bridge or whatever.
2. poem
“thirtysomething poem” - april 2022
i met you too late
to stay up all night talking
3. stuffed peppers
i’ve done a pretty good job this past couple weeks of working my way through my fridge full of leftovers. so it’s about time to start filling it up again.
after scrolling through the new york times recipe app’s “vegan” tag and not really seeing anything that struck my fancy, and scrolling through a couple pages of “vegan meals high protein” results and not really seeing anything that struck my fancy, i was somehow reminded of the existence of stuffed peppers, and thought hey, i don’t think i’ve ever done that. that would be fun.
and it was.
i was going to use some spinach but i forgot. i was also going to put this in my food tracker app to see what the ratio of the macros actually ended up being but i didn’t do that either. sue me.
garlic, shallot, peppers, black beans, tomatoes, then we have tempeh and TVP. protein, yum.
i totally winged it on the spices. added more while it was cooking, too. my assumption that the tempeh and TVP would be pretty bland on their own proved to be correct, of course. i probably could’ve marinated the tempeh a little bit.
i cut the peppers this way because that seemed easier to portion out later and pack for lunches and stuff. baked them at 425 for ~25 minutes before filling them, to get them nice and blistery.
no real mysteries on the filling. it’s a bowl of slop.
i also made some vegan mac n cheese and i used a small enough pasta shape that i thought it would fit pretty well into the peppers. just for fun. i was hungry while i was cooking.
ta da, part 1
ta da, part 2. pretty good! the filling could have used a little more flavor but i’ll have to think about what that could be.
4. writing class
i started taking a short-story writing class at the local community college. it meets on thursday evenings, in case you want to come by and heckle me. i figured the class would involve reading some short stories and discussing them, and that these discussions would help me understand the mechanics of what makes a story work, and that maybe it would inspire me to write a short story or two of my own. maybe a novel! probably not. maybe!
and actually, there are a surprising number of people in the class who, when they introduced themselves, mentioned that they had already written at least one novel. for some reason i was very surprised to hear that. i figure that either writing a novel is much easier than i thought, or this class is going to be much more useful than i thought. or some combination thereof, but maybe it’s just that novelists are lonely people. or that novelists are constantly running out of groups of people to inform about their novelisms. who knows. i thought it was interesting though.
one component of the class involves reading an assigned short story and coming to class having read it and prepared to discuss it with the group. another component of the class involves submitting a piece of writing, weekly, to the professor, for critique and comment, usually in response to a weekly prompt.
so for the first time in almost a decade, i have homework again.
for the first class, last week, we hadn’t all read a story together yet, and it was more of an introductory class, so the professor had us do an in-class writing exercise which i thought was fun, frustrating, and eye-opening. we then had to share a piece of that writing with our neighbor and offer comment on theirs in turn. which i wasn’t necessarily expecting, but my neighbor (a novelist) turned out to be very nice. “i’m hooked” he said, “i wonder what happens next.”
the exercise went like this: we opened our notebooks and got out our pens, or flipped to a new sheet on our pads of paper, or opened our laptops, and started writing based on a series of prompts, in timed chunks. i think this is a “known thing” but i can’t remember what the professor called it, or if it was invented by someone else, or what, and for that i apologize. at any rate, the exercise went like this:
(15 minutes ish) imagine yourself as a character observing two people who are — for whatever reason — not where they’re supposed to be.
(maybe 10 minutes) Now, focus on one aspect of the dress or appearance of one of the people you are observing.
(maybe 10 minutes) Write one of these two phrases on your paper: “What I’ve never understood is…” or “What I’ve always wanted to know is …” Finish one of the two sentences and then continue writing.
(maybe 10 minutes) Start a sentence with “Now…” and try to bring the story to some kind of resolution or conclusion.
well, for starters, i found prompt 1 to be a little confusing, so i was off to a bad start right away. i didn’t really get to the part where there was a second character, and i did not really imagine myself as a character doing the observing.
i started to hit my stride in prompt 2, though. and the specific beginning of prompt 3 was great, almost entirely because it signaled to me what perspective i should be writing from (“what I’ve never understood…”). but prompt 4 didn’t really help, and there wasn’t really much of a resolution to be had anyway, due to the awkward start.
i’m pretty much out of space for this week, but my plan is to start including some of my assignments in section two of this newsletter. it’s either that or stare out my window on tuesday mornings and try to conjure up some kind of poem before hitting “Publish.” which i guess also has been working OK. so next week you may see some more refined version of the class exercise. i thought it was pretty neat. and as my novelist neighbor said, he was hooked. so hey.
well i think that’s it for this week. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.