Michael Barrett @ Abouthalf.com

David Hockney at the Portland Art Museum

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I started tinkering with computers pretty late. I had a used Commodore64 when I was a kid, purchased from a yard sale. I wrote some silly 10 PRINT “POOP”; GO TO 10 programs but mostly it was a video game machine. During my last full year of art school I took a computer aided design class and plonked around in Adobe Photoshop on Apple Macintosh Quadra computers. I began playing with printers then. I remember creating a small, 8” x 10” swirly abstract paint study on a canvas board. I scanned the little painting. I printed it in color and black and white. I photocopied the painting. I took the scan into Photoshop and ran a half-tone screen filter over it, creating a knock-off Roy Lichtenstein version. Then I took all of these prints to my local Kinko’s copy shop and had them spiral bound together with a cardboard cover. I glued the original painting to the front.

At Kinko’s they had a giant photocopier. 18” x 24” inches. A huge slab of glass suspended over a cavernous machine. I created an 18” x 24” painting of my buddy scraping on a wall with a big drywall trowel. I took the painting to Kinko’s and photocopied it. Neat. A black and white version of my painting spat out of the machine. Next I tried some poster paper they had loaded into the machine. Same image, now on color! I came prepared. I fed a sheet of printmaking paper into the machine. This looked good. Like a wood block print almost, but instant. Now I was cooking. I tried feeding a sheet of watercolor paper through the machine. It jammed. I sat on the floor of the Kinko’s, disassembled the machine, wrenching the ruined paper out. I put the machine back together, paid for my prints, and left. The sleepy college kids working behind the counter didn’t notice or didn’t care.

Later, during graduate school, when I was making big ink jet prints, or transferring big inkjet prints to watercolor paper with an etching press, calling it art, and then arguing with my professors about whether it counted or not, I discovered David Hockney’s work.

I knew about Hockney’s famous swimming pool paintings. In my history classes they aligned Hockney with late pop art. This wasn’t wrong but it wasn’t right either. His work was figurative in a world of abstraction, and at the time that meant “pop”. Any other classification would disrupt the grand historical narrative of art history.

I discovered that David Hockney started making art on computers in the 80s. I learned that he made art with fax machines. He break up an image into a grid of rectangles, and fax each one separately, to be reassembled into a large print somewhere else in the world. Hockney used Xerox machines(!) like a printing press. He would run paper through multiple times, changing toner cartridges to achieve different color effects. I was elated. For one, now that I had significant art historical precedent I could shut down any arguments about computers and art from tired faculty members. I also found a new hero.

The David Hockney exhibition at the Portland Art Museum features a lot of work from this later, more experimental period of his life and career. In a way, it’s the best printmaking show I’ve ever seen.

Intimacy and innovation

The exhibit at PAM includes many of Hockney’s Xerox prints, some photographic drawings (basically Photoshop creations), some of his famous photo and Poloraid collages, as well as a number of conventional etchings and prints. The stand-out images, for me, are the luxurious iPad paintings.

Printed at huge scale, these images cover a wall and fill your view. That’s a feature of digital imaging that I find very interesting, and that art critics ignore. Dimensions are variable and infinite. A single iPad painting can exist directly on the 12” screen of an iPad. It can appear on your phone, as a little square on an Instagram feed. It can be a billboard. It can be projected and fill a room. By being virtual an iPad painting surpasses Greenbergian “flatness” becoming an idea floating in space.

But art must be collected, so these digital images are printed beautifully on very large paper in very small numbers to make the infinitely reproducible precious. The printing is amazing - the colors pop in a way that I find surprising. Hockney’s press achieves vivid greens that I didn’t think were possible in print.

When David Hockney first began painting on an iPad, he used the app “Brushes”. But the app got updated (as they do) and Hockney no longer liked it. He liked the immediacy and simplicity of the original app, and they went and made it complicated. So he worked with a mathematician friend to create his own app.

Some of these images are singular vast compositions. Landscapes painted in Yosemite, his garden in Normandy. Some are grids - several individual paintings at slightly different angles, composed together in a large print. These call back to his photo collages and earlier experiments with copiers and fax machines.

Hockney always embraced technology, or at least the parts he could use to make art. He seemed always interested in finding new ways of seeing and new ways of looking. He was a good modernist in that way. Hiis subject matter was often intimate, personal, and approachable. His portraits of friends, family, and lovers are touching but energized by the hyperreal iPad colors and frantic finger marks. His iPad paintings of his home in France create bucolic yearning for a simple, good life, puttering about in the garden before the rain comes.

Passing

The timing of my visit to this exhibition became accidentally poignant when I learned of Hockney’s passing last week. Every museum I follow on Instagram had something to share about Hockney and his amazing career. I’ve seen fans of bad decisions crowing about Hockney’s life-long cigarette habit (and how he outlived several of his doctors). I shared an an impromptu art history lecture and tribute onto my company’s “random” Slack channel.

This isn’t true of course, Hockney’s work will be shown for years and years, but I feel like I caught this exhibit just in time. There’s a special feeling of anticipation in seeing the work of a great living artist. The excitement of “wow what’d next?”. I’m glad I got to see this show with that frame of mind.

8 Pieces

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 2026 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial is up at Oregon Contemporary through July 5th, 2026. It’s a strong show and worth a visit. Here are 8 pieces from the show which resonated with me.

Glory Glory

by Bean Gilsdorf

Glory Glory opens the exhibition. A run-on-sentence in flag form complete with golden tassels, borders, and a red satin backing winds its way from the entrance and into the main gallery. Cheesy illustrations from history textbooks are collaged together with the stammering text “uh uh uh” floating over the top. It’s like the flag is making excuses.

Fifty Clocks Made to Strike Together

by DeepTime Collective

Fifty Clocks stare across the entry way, facing Glory Glory as if to say “hurry up, get to your point”. It’s a good paring.

The title is taken from a John Adams quote:

…thirteen clocks were made to strike together—a perfection of mechanism which no artist had ever before effected.

Each clock has a little note next to it about when it was wound, set, reset, leveled, or adjusted. There is a clock for all 50 states, can they strike together?

York

by Todd McGrain

In 2020 a statue of Harvey Scott, noted racist shit-stain and former editor of the Oregonian, was toppled by protestors. McGrain secretly replaced the statue with the first bust of York.

York was a slave owned by William Clark and served along with Lewis, Clark, and the Corps of Discovery on their journey west. As we was enslaved, we was paid nothing.

A permanent bronze version of the bust is on display at the Portland Art Museum.

By Day and By Night, Deposition #3, Deposition #2

by Stephen Hayes

Hayes’ three monochrome panoramic intaglio prints on the back wall of the main exhibition space. They read like smeared video stills captured in ink. The wall text tells me they are intended to resemble the traditional keffiyeh scarf. I didn’t see that immediately but I buy that as inspiration. The shape alone implies either panorama or textiles.

Benevolent Dictator

by Raphael Arar

Benevolent Dictator is an interactive work that allows you to ask a question about governance to an unseen tech overlord. Scan the QR code to visit a web-site. There you can ask a question, answer a question, view others responses, or vote.

When you vote (I voted) you get to choose between the human and AI generated response. If you vote for the AI generated response (I did), the machine wins and the printer outputs a record of the victory.

extreme industries (we deserve we desire we demand)

by Demian DinéYazhi'

This glowing neon demand feels like an antidote to those tedious “we believe” yard signs that I see all over Portland.

Messages of Hope I - IV

by Marcelo Fontana

“Messages of Hope” is just what it says it is. Four hopeful messages, nicely printed, pinned to the wall and stacked. Take one, share it, pin it to your wall, mail it to your mom.

I took home “Does holding onto hope make you a revolutionary?” (yes) and “What are we building in the invisible hours” (not enough). I haven’t decided if I want to post them, guerrilla-style, on some wall in my neighborhood or suffocate the prints in a mat, in a frame, under glass.

This piecer reminds me a little bit of something that Félix González-Torres might have made (that’s a complement). I like that the art is anti-precious. The prints are nice, nicely designed, nicely typeset. But they’re just paper pinned to the wall and stacked on the floor. There’s something about the artistic potential of office supplies that makes me very happy.

The Beast Within, Hunter, and Shadow Self

by Wayne Bund

It’s hard to capture in a photo of a photo - but these are big photographic prints, not inkjet prints. Real photos just pop off the wall.

I see man-as-minotaur in the left image, minotaur hunting or being hunted in the center, and the shadow revealing the true minotaur self. According to the wall-text the center photo was taken at Rooster Rock, a state park in Corbett, OR not far from Portland. The wall-text omits that Rooster Rock has a clothing-optional beach, notorious for cruising. I love the metaphor of queer identity being a secret minotaur. A strong, dangerous, mythical beast hiding in plain sight.

Themes

TK Smith is the curator of this exhibition. You can find him on the internet here:

The following quote is the mission statement appearing on the wall opening the exhibition:

THE 250TH ANNIVERSARY of the signing of the Declaration of Independence offers us the opportunity to reflect on the state of the "great American experiment," a nation designed to prove that the people—no monarch nor aristocracy—could govern themselves.

The United States was built on such ideals as freedom, liberty, and justice for all. These ideals give us something to aspire to, but rarely reflect our lived experiences, in the past or the present moment. The question of who counts as "the people," which precedes the American Revolution, is still contested to this day. The state of Oregon offers a microcosm for the country, as its history has been greatly impacted by the struggle to define and redefine what makes a true Oregonian, worthy of all rights and protections offered by the state.

The Price of the Ticket explores the disparities between ideals and individual realities. The artists assembled here were asked to put forward artworks that speak to their own inherited or lived experiences. In addressing these disparities, the artists present a sobering state of the union that implores us to grieve, resist, and speak our truths. Through the mediums of painting, sculpture, print, photography, video, audio, installation, weaving, text, and performance the artists offer us ways to address complicated pasts, confront an uncertain present, and dream of new futures.

Tall order.

I typically bristle against “political” art. I often don’t like it; I find it doesn’t work. Fine art is a very poor form of protest (if you care about results). Overtly political art, especially in a gallery setting, is a sign pointing to another conversation you should be having. Divorced from its immediate context, political art can seem disconnected. It’s like trying to understand an unfamiliar movie poster in a language you don’t speak. I think these 8 pieces resonated with me because they exemplify TK Smith’s mission statement and also extend it.

Brace face

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I am two months into wearing grown-ass-man braces. Braces on my lowers, aligners on my uppers. Of the two, the actual old school metal braces are the least worst. I need to clean them fastidiously, and the general ouchieness of my teeth and jaw means I’m prioritizing a lot of soft foods. The aligners are a clear plastic tray that clamps on to my upper teeth. Invisialign is a common brand name, though I’m not sure if mine are those. My upper incisors, bicuspids, and first molars all have little resin ‘attachments’ glued to the surface of my teeth. They are the same color as teeth and are virtually invisible from a short distance. These attachments lock into cavaties in the aligner tray. They provide the necessary grip to torque and push and twist teeth into their proper position. On the back side of the aligner tray, some extra plastic is built in to create a resting place for my lower teeth. This is called a “bite ramp”. It keeps my jaw where it’s supposed to be and applies passive pressure in the right places throughout the day. It also happens to be positioned in my mouth exactly where my tongue likes to make an “S”. If you google “speaking problems with aligners” you’ll find a number of liars saying that most people adapt and speak normally in a few days. Liars. I sound like Sylvester the Cat. My Sean Connery impression has never been better. Sufferin’ succotash, Miss Moneypenny.

One is supposed to wear aligners for 20 to 22 hours a day. I am a Director of Technology, which means I talk for a living. Like, a lot. A point which I explained during my consultation. A point which was ignored. You are not supposed to drink anything but water while wearing an aligner. For a deranged coffee addict, this is unpleasant. Now, I time my coffee for my meetings, where I can wrench out the aligner, blot up the drool with a tissue (off camera), speak like an adult then thoughtfully sip my coffee while others talk. By the end of the day, the aligner feels like it has tripled in size. My tongue and mouth feel tired – which is weird. Brushing and flossing was once a chore, but now it’s a respite from wearing this horrible, giant saliva collector. Only 16 months to go. Hopefully.

But why even do all of this? Surely you’re not that vain? You’ve had a gappy smile all your life. It’s charming, just like Margaret Qualley’s. Stop, you’re too kind. About a year ago I had an exceptionally bad allergy season. The roof of my mouth swelled up so large I couldn’t fully close my jaw. Benadryl didn’t help. I asked my dentist. He shrugged and said “I dunno maybe surgery”. My wife, la Doctora, produced a steroid dental paste from her stash which reduced the swelling back to normal. The swelling lasted long enough and was so severe that my front teeth are no longere where they were. I looked in the mirror one day and noticed “oh. that’s different”.

I went back to my dentist (maybe I need a new dentist) and asked about an aligner to straighten things back out. I worried that teeth would keep drifting apart and may one day erupt out of my ear. He referred me to an orthodontist.

During my onboarding they stuck a contraption in my mouth to create a horrifying digital 3D model of my teeth. They had me stand in a special x-ray machine which takes pictures of your whole skull. I got to see the inside of my own head. I remembered a nightmare I had as a child where the flesh fell from my face and head revealing the red stained skull beneath. I learned that I have a stronger-than-average bite.

So sure. I could fix the slight misalignment. But, they told me, if you don’t fix the overall alignment (deep bite, over jetting), with your stronger-than-average bite, you’ll just slowly push your teeth out of your face (paraphrasing). I think I might want a carrot when I’m 70. I chose this deeply annoying path. I’m very fortunate to have some dental insurance coverage and can afford to pay for the rest. So, I’m trying to stay in a positive frame of mind. I can tell that teeth are moving. I can feel it. Progress is heartening.

Watch it

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the day I drove away from Greensboro, North Carolina in my white 1993 Toyota Camry towing a U-Haul trailer to start my new life in Portland, I snagged the bedraggled, worn out band of my department store wristwatch on a metal flange in the doorway of the U-Haul. The crusty leather band snapped and my watch fell off my wrist into the snow. I tossed the watch into a cubby on the center console of my car and forgot about it and drove across the country. That was December of 2002.

I bought the original Apple Watch not long after it debuted in 2015. First watch I had worn in 12 years. My colleagues at Nike teased me about it. They all wore one within a year.

I bought an Apple Watch for me and one for my wife. I was running a lot at the time and it did a great job as a fitness tracker. I chose the dorkiest watch face, with my calendar, the weather, my fitness circles, and a timer all smashed into one little square. I liked seeing my next meeting at a glance and knowing if I needed a jacket at the flick of my wrist.

I wore it for about 6 years. Eventually the battery barely made it through the day and creaked and groaned under the weight of the operating system. I replaced it with a Series 3 Apple Watch in March of 2021. This model features a GPS with the alluring promise of even better step and distance tracking. Almost immediately I felt like it wasn’t quite as good as the original. This new watch should last longer, be faster, all the things you expect a computer to do. But it felt more or less the same as my original Apple Watch, but with a better battery life. I could wear it to bed if I wanted.

5 years later, the battery on the “new” was getting flakey. Seemingly at random, it would be nearly dead at 3 in the afternoon. Routinely the watch would fail to clean up after a software update and fill up with previous versions of the operating system. The watch had only gotten more annoying. Example: The watch detects, via the built in GPS that I’m moving out of doors at a walking pace. Instead of just recording an “outdoor walk” the watch blips at me “hey it looks like you’re walking, do you want to track your walk?”. The watch alerts you to this by ‘tapping’ your wrist. I feel a tap, thinking it’s maybe a text from my wife. No it’s a dumb confirmation box asking me to confirm what it clearly already knows.

The watch became annoying in other ways: one, two, sometimes three taps to start a timer; the watch face not lighting up without a tap. More and more this thing felt like a cheap, gimmicky, and kinda dumb.

I replaced my Apple Watch with a Timex Weekender. It’s a watch that only tells time. It has a blue face and a brown leather band. It lights up with an eerie blue light when I press the crown. I can’t wear it in the shower. I can’t use it as an alarm clock. I have to yell at Srii to start a timer. I have to look at my phone to learn what the weather is. It’s better in every way.

Make an app

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When I was really getting started as a developer, in the early 2000s, the internet was all about blogs. Developers built and rebuilt their blogs over and over again. They’d roll their own publishing system, they’d customize Wordpress, tear it all apart and do it all over again. I built and rebuilt abouthalf.com a dozen ways. It was fun, I learned things. I got to show off and share what I learned with others. I got into arguments on the internet about it. It was great.

Blogs got so hugely popular they began to influence legacy media and Google took notice. Google Reader sprang up out of Google Labs and became the de facto RSS reader for a generation.

RSS - Really Simple Syndication - was a great, simple invention of the open internet. A website could publish a standardized XML file that listed website updates in reverse chronological order. Then a news reader, which could be a stand alone app on the web or your desktop, could fetch a number of website “feeds” and display them all together. This was perfect for web junkies like me. Everything, together, all at once.

Early news readers looked like an email app and Google Reader looked like Gmail. But it had a couple of superpowers. There were keyboard shortcuts, unheard of for a website at the time. You could move up and down your list of articles with a key press. Open, mark as read, or add a star (to bookmark) with a keystroke.

Then Facebook happened. Internet users got swallowed up by the radicalizing dopamine casino. Google killed Reader. But the spirit of blogs never died. Weird nerds continued to implement RSS in platforms and find a use for it. Podcasts are all delivered via RSS feeds. Most popular website platforms create RSS feeds by default. Bluesky provides RSS feeds for their social profiles. Don’t tell Substack this, but you can follow public newsletters via RSS and never once see a pop-up asking for your email.

I’m part of that old guard who misses blogs in general and Google Reader specifically. I never stopped using news readers. I see a lot of smart people working on the web today calling for a return to these simpler, more independent ways. Until recently I was using Reeder. Reeder has been a very good app for a very long time. They had a mac and iOS version. They synch back and forth. I happily paid for upgrades. Recently they moved to a subscription model. I hate this.

I understand. The people behind Reeder are running a business, they need to find revenue. I get it. But I am so done with software subscriptions. Especially ones that charge me to sync between devices, which I’m already paying Apple to do. (Looking at you Day One).

I wrote all of this to explain why I made my own RSS reader: Teensy News.

Teensy News is a very simple web application which let me upload my exported feeds (in an OPML file) organize them into folders, and read through them on a clean and simple web page.

I built the app using Redwood SDK - a fairly new, slightly bleeding edge web framework. It’s like Next.js but simpler. It prioritizes Cloudflare’s ecosystem over Vercel (pick your poison). Cloudflare has all the parts I needed to make this project without me worrying about running a server somewhere. They have background tasks which run on a schedule, they have databases and storage, they have services for proxying and transforming images.

This lets me run code which can scan an RSS feed, check for new entries, and stash them in a database. Every user gets their own small database. I love this little detail. For one, it’s so much simpler to manage one persons data at a time. No complex joins, just simple select statements. But there’s also virtually no chance that one person’s feeds get mixed up with another’s. A data-isolation structure like this helps enforce privacy and security.

I’m most happy with the reading experience. I opted for simple - I didn’t want to replicate a complex app-like navigation structure. Browsers have back buttons, let’s use them. Modern devices let you swipe back and forth on screens or trackpads to navigate back and forth in the browser. Let’s Use The Platform and keep things simple.

I’m using IBM’s Plex Serif typeface for the content of feeds and most typography and Plex Sans UI elements like buttons and forms. Plex is a handsome font that’s modern and built for screens.

Most RSS feeds include a lengthy snippet of HTML content, if not the full article. The feed reader cleans up this content, removing anything potentially nefarious, proxies images, along the way resizing them and compressing them for speed, then caching them for later. The result is a nice clean article or article intro with a link to the full article at the bottom.

For a couple of weeks, in the evenings, and maybe during one dull all-staff meeting, I plunked away at this with the help of a coding robot. I started with feed management and worked my way into browsing and reading feeds. I finished up by adding a home page with a little illustration, and some boilerplate website stuff. An about page, a privacy policy, and a contact form. I knew I was on to something when I found I had stopped using Reeder and started using Teensy News. Now it’s my full time news reader.

I built this for me originally. As I worked on it, I realized this might be of use to similarly minded web junkies and pivoted to making it public. So here’s Teensy News. I hope you like it.

If you’ve never used news readers and want to find a way to dive in, I recommend Molly White’s blogroll. She’s a great journalist and covers lots of important tech issues, and her Save one of her OPML files (feed lists) and import it into Teensy News to try it out.

Make a book

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When I shared my 90 notes to self project with my wife she gave me a great suggestion: Have all of the images printed and bound as a book. She meant “hire a service to have a book printed” but where’s the fun in that? I have a printer, book binder‘s glue, and a free Saturday. Let’s make a book.

Before the weekend came around I found this great little YouTube video which demonstrates the technique I wanted to use. This is a pure, wholesome YouTube video. No demands to like and subscribe. Just a demo on how to do a thing. The technique is straightforward. I don’t have the book press he has, but I could improvise with my big binder clips and strips of wood. I don’t have a bench clamp, but I do have a giant stack of heavy art books. I could make this work.

I used Affinity to lay out all of the pages for the book. Affinity is proving to be a really good software platform but their help documentation and AI search bot are incomplete and incorrect. It took a while to figure out how to do page numbering. Affinity’s “Layout” mode supports page spreads and will automatically organize your pages into the wonky order needed for printing a book.

I created a title page, and end page, and a small intro to describe the project. Then I transcribed all of the notes so no one would have to suffer through my handwriting. I then “printed” the file as a PDF. I have found that printing from Apple’s Preview app is typically easier to manage than most other applications. It’s not only smaller, lighter, and faster than a big design tool; it remembers printer configurations and makes it easy to select a batch of pages to print.

Printing turned out to be a bigger ordeal than I imagined. My Epson Sure Color T2170 is a beast. It prints 24” wide and handles paper, canvas, and even water color paper. Oddly it will not print anything smaller than 8 ½” x 11” paper. And it is finicky.

I tried to print a couple of test pages, and while my Mac could “see” the printer it couldn’t talk to the printer. Everyone seemed to be connected to the network. Try again. Restart. Try again. Give up. Download new printer software. Install. Try again. Success!

Test pages printed, I started printing pages onto card stock. The card stock was too thick to just feed through the printer like regular paper so I staged 4 sheets at a time. I worked up slowly. One page. Two pages. Four pages. I printed odd pages first, like pages 1, 3, 5, 7 and then flipped them over and printed 2, 4, 6, and 8 on the back. I fouled up only once.

My plan was to split each US Letter into a 5 ½” x 8 ½” sheet. I taped a cutting mat and rulers down to my table to create a jig to reliably cut the pages in half. I finished watching The Outfit on Netflix while cutting pages.

I used some big rubber-tipped binder clips to clamp all of the pages together in between strips of wood. I’ve had these binder clips since the Clinton administration. I bought them in college to clip big paper to big drawing boards. I painted the edge of the page-block with book binding glue, let it dry, painted it again, and again. While the glue set and dried I worked on the cover.

Here’s where I miscalculated twice. While my pages were glued and drying in my makeshift clamp, I tried to measure the width of the block in order to create a spine. As the glue dried under pressure of my clamp the block was compressed further and further. So the final width was a sixteenth of an inch or so smaller than my measurement.

I cut a spine and the front and back covers from acid-free illustration board and glued them into a sheet of primed canvas for my printer. I failed to leave enough space between the spine and the covers. That space between the covers and the spine allows the cover to flex and lay flat when the book is open. Mine was too tight so it doesn’t quite work.

Still the result is pretty nice; not bad for a first try. I like the size, a little bigger than a paperback book. Now that I’ve done this once, I’d like to try again and do better with my measurements. It has me thinking “what else could go in a book?”

90 Notes to Self

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I am wrapping up a silly little Instagram piece I am calling “90 notes to self”. For 90 days (technically 89, I missed one) I created post for Instagram featuring a snapshot and an illustration of a sticky-note with a hand-scribbled message. The message is typically referencing something about the photo. Some times the note is quite oblique.

This exercise forced me to take lots of photos. I think this is a good creative habit. If you have a smart phone (and if you pay for cloud storage) you have an unlimited photo and video studio in your pocket. So use it. Take a photo of your food, your dog, that neat flower, that funny sign, everything.

There is something artistically satisfying about posting an image to social media, but then covering must of it up with a sticky-note. What’s he hiding under there?

I created these notes en masse. I began using Sketch.app - which used to be my favorite graphic design tool. Recently Sketch changed their business model to chase after Figma. It’s now primarily a subscription service. Your old license still works, but they really want you to subscribe. I think whoever is in charge at Sketch failed to understand that an app which works offline and is explicitly not collaborative is a feature, not a bug.

And here’s a secret: No one likes Figma. It kinda sucks actually. It lacks very basic features. The only thing it does do right is collaboration.
So, Sketch is chasing after a star that is already fading. As a result (the point of this digression), is that the quality of the software has lapsed. What used to be a stalwart workhorse of an app crashes repeatedly. So much and so often that I gave up and switched to Affinity.

Affinity was purchased by Canva and for the moment is free. They hope to make money by charging for premium “AI enabled” features. I’m still not very proficient with Affinity, but it never crashes.

My process for this project was, first, shoot a lot of snapshots. Then once a week or so, I’d curate a collection and add them to a giant art board in Sketch, and then Affinity. In each image I’d layer in a sticky note. I made yellow, blue, pink, and green sticky notes in three “shapes” - three curls, some with turned corners, some straight. This gave me variety and the option to play against the colors in the photo. Yellow, blue, pink, and green are the canonical sticky note colors. To handwrite a note for each sticky I used Procreate on my iPad Mini (which lives by my desk). I set up a canvas in procreate, a big square, and chose a “marker” brush. I’d scribble out a note, copy it in Procreate, and then on my Mac paste that image of handwritten text right on top of the sticky note. This uses Apple’s “hand off” feature you probably only ever see in commercials. But if you have an iPhone and a Mac, on the same network, signed in to the same Apple ID, you can copy on one device and paste on another. It works well, and seems a little like magic. Look at me. I’m an Apple commercial

All together the images become a sort of journal, which is what I expected. This is why I titled it “90 notes to self”. But the flow of images is a little time line back over the last 3 months. It includes lots of dog walks (where I find my best snapshots), some travel, and a lot of daily life.

By accident, I learned a little bit about the Instagram algorithm. If you’re on social media, you have that one friend who “likes” everything you post. I could tell that my posts were showing up on others’ feeds a day or two late, based upon when the likes showed up.

Posts with my big dumb face reached more people. Likewise, photos of my dog seemed to travel far and wide. So I guess if you want to do well on Insta, post pictures of yourself holding a dog.

I’ve collected the output of this project here, in a new section of this site called “projects” which I hope to fill up with other nonsense soon.

What even is a website?

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I work for a tech-forward creative agency and we build a lot of websites and therefore I think a lot about websites. I look carefully at websites when I use them or read them.

I really like this website a lot: https://internet.dev

A cool website by cool people

INTDEV is a small creative technology shop out of Seattle. I had the good fortune to meet some of the principles at this company while on a trip for a work conference. They function as a studio or small agency, doing work for hire. To show off their chops they create interesting open-source tools and projects. Their site is both a digital garden showing off their work, and a sales pitch for their talent and team.

Simple visually, not technically

The site is a long scroll. Most links go external projects or specialty sub-sites. Everything you need to know is on one page. They use a techy monospace typeface and accent the design with electric Matrix-techno-green. On the surface it looks like a very straightforward site. It could even be hand-coded without a content management system backing it. That simplicity hides a custom interactive user-interface library. It’s a subtle way to brag about their accessibility-first approach without sacrificing the richness of the modern web.

List of lists

The site is a long scroll of lists. Some of the lists contain lists. Each list can be closed to make room for other lists. There is a clear hierarchy of information for the human reader and for the AI powered bot that’s churning up this site for quick answers to your questions.

The site is long and tall, but everyone knows how to scroll. Clicking a heading turns it bright green so it’s easy to find your place as you scroll. The interaction is simple and navigation is easy, because there is none.

Questions and answers

The lists are organized as the kinds of questions you’d probably want to ask an agency before hiring them. Questions like “Who are we working for?” and “How much does it cost?” and “Can I get a discount?”

Amazing transparency. Think about how many calls they don’t have to take because the just put their price online.

Amazing clarity. Who is this? What do they do? What do I get? How does it work? All the stuff that takes up the first 20 minutes of a pitch meeting taken care of.

Who or what is a website for?

I think INTDEV has a really smart little website that anticipates the shape, form, and function of websites for the near future. Websites are still very important for companies, brands, and individuals even if their audiences never actually visit. Websites provide the canonical raw material for these systems. Without that data, there is nothing to search for and nothing to chat about.

I used to tell people (coworkers, clients) that the most important visitor to your website is Google. Today I would be more general and say “bots” - search bots, chat bots, bots.

Like it or else, people are migrating to chat-like interfaces for finding information. This is because people can simply ask a question in natural language and get an answer. Yes, the answer might be wrong, but you have to remember traditional Google delivered wrong, bad results all the time. Think back to searching the web 5 years ago; do you remember skipping to the second page of results to get past the ads and the dreck to get a real answer? Chatbots strip away the fluff. If you ask ChatGPT for a recipe you’ll get a recipe and not an SEO optimized tale about someone’s grandmother in the old country.

For website owners - especially those who are trying to sell something - your website needs to be prepared to answer visitors’ questions. Those answers are probably going to be intermediated through a chatbot. When real human visitors to your site you should afford them the same courtesy. Your site should anticipate questions a visitor (potential customer) will have in the form of a semantic headline, and then answer that question clearly and concisely. Use a bulleted list.

This where I think INTDEV is doing a great job. The clarity, structure, and (importantly) transparency makes their site very readable to search and robots. I think this what websites need to do.

Not that every website should be so minimalistic as INTDEV. Human eyes will still appreciate good and accessible design and branding. But well structured information with a meaningful hierarchy should be the first priority. I think this also mains that most brands should play down or limit flashy interactivity like scroll based animations. These things demo well but become a chore the second time a user encounters them, and the robots don’t care. I think also this implies real human customers are visiting your website after some amount of prior vetting via search and chatbots. This means they are ready to purchase or are looking for specific details. These customers are purpose driven and benefit from clear navigation and might be dissuaded by overly “creative” web experiences.

Minimalism Club and some rambling thoughts about AI

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Minimalism.club is a silly little conceptual art joke of a website that I released into the world over the weekend. The central premise is that it’s sort of funny that Minimalism requires books, a documentary, a podcast, and many YouTube channels. Why not a club too?

So if you were to have a club for minimalists, how minimal could you make that club? That’s it. That’s the website.

The site is built on Astro with a smidge of React and is hosted on Cloudflare. I created graphics for the site in Affinity Studio.

I won’t spoil the fun. Check it out. It’s silly

This silly website is a little different from other silly websites that I’ve created. Minimalism.club is 95% vibe-coded. I reserved hand coding for a couple of bug fixes and visual design. I’m fast enough on my fingers with Tailwind classes that I can sculpt a UX out of HTML pretty quickly. Fast enough that a coding agent doesn’t provide much benefit. Maybe visual design coding is my John Henry moment.

I’ve recently been investing more of my hand-on-keyboard time into so-called “vibe-coding” - that is - creating software with AI powered code-generation tools. Some folks call it “agentic coding” which I hate. I think of it as Google Translate for code. You type in English, the machine gives you code. This is where the art of vibe-coding entirely lies. If you are unable to express your ideas in clear terms, the machine will give you garbage. But if you can write a good spec, you can get good code. The other subtle art is an instinct for knowing when to stop. You may have a 10-step plan in your head, but perhaps you should only have the machine do steps 1 through 3 first. These machine learning models have sort of working memory, known as a “context window” - that is the amount of data it can hold while processing a prompt. Many popular models can hold a context of about 200,000 “tokens” - which is a numerical representation of a word or part of a word. To keep things simple, I “round up” token to word in my head. 200,000 sounds like a lot, but not in a large software project. So if you can develop an instinct for staying under the context limit, you will find more success.

My first real success with vibe coding came with some clean up work. I support two mobile applications as a side hustle.These apps are built with React Native. They are long-lived and React Native changes frequently. I needed to some very tedious clean up. I chose a couple of representative examples, and hand coded the clean up work I wanted done. I instructed the robot to read these files to understand the pattern I wanted, then to do the same thing here and then here and oh! over here too. The robot (GitHub CoPilot) did the job. My biggest complaint was that it was over eager. It kept asking “do you want me to do this with the whole project” and I had to tell it to slow down there Tex, let me review the work. In the end dozens of files were tediously updated without bugs and I removed some large, dated, kludgey dependencies from the project.

In my work life my job title is Director of Technology. While I do some actual programming work, I feel I am actually paid for my experience, decision making, team leadership, client relations, and Don-Draper-esque pitch abilities. When I touch code it’s generally to solve a very hard problem (experience), or to set the stage for how a project should work (leadership). Sometimes I touch code because there’s no one else to do it. The point I’m making, I guess, is that I’ve been a bit sheltered from the progress these AI powered tools are making. I follow the new, so I’m informed but that’s different from knowing.

My company has been carefully, cautiously, but steadily embracing AI tooling for engineers. Recently I received formal blessing to use our tools of choice. I’ve made a very intentional effort to get better at using these systems. Building Minalism.club in about 6 hours start to finish was an experiment to see what I’ve learned. Can I start from scratch and make something that was only a nebulous concept in my head? Yep. I sure can. The slowest part of the project was futzing over colors and layout choices.

I like to stay current. Even if I’m not using the latest engineering techniques (because my job is meetings) I want to know enough about them to be dangerous and to help make decisions.

I suspect and I’m worried that software engineering is about to become a much smaller field. I need to be prepared to survive.

The landscape

You may have seen in the news recently that the CEO of Block, Jack Dorsey, laid off about 40% of the company because they believe that AI tooling will allow them to do more with less.

It’s unclear if the gains from AI are beginning to be realized, if they have already been realized, or if this is a big bet on the future. There is also the very real possibility that this is just a lie to cover up for layoffs that resulted from over-hiring during the COVID pandemic.

Part of my skepticism follows this kind of reasoning: If you can produce the same amount with half as many people, why aren’t you producing twice as much with the same number of people?

Popular tech YouTuber and serial start-upper Theo posted a 40 minute video where he dives into this topic. You can watch it here. Disclaimer: Theo is an acquired taste. His video may not be appropriate for your workplace. But he’s a very talented engineer in addition to being a streamer and he and his team have built lots of amazing things with only vibe-coding. I think his opinions are worth considering.

Theo credulously accepts the Block statement about layoffs being due to AI. And to be fair, Theo is shipping like a madman. I can understand why he believes it. In his video he makes some very important points. Code used to be hard to produce. It required a large number of expensive talented people. Those people have to be managed, wrangled, and focused on the right job to be done. But in an AI world - the bottleneck is not creating code. Decision making and code review are the bottlenecks. AI tools replace programming, but they don’t replace engineering.

Jack from Block may be full of shit, but the tools are real and they really work.

Cloudy Mexico

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I hope this is becoming a tradition. We took advantage of the long weekend to return to Guadalajara for a supposed sun-break. The rain gods followed our plane and bestowed clouds and scattered showers upon us.

We arrived early in the morning via Volaris, a budget airline which serves the US, Mexico, Central America, and South America. The seats are uncomfortable, but the flight from Portland is direct, and the flight attendants have amazing retro uniforms in bright purple. The flight announcements are made in Spanish followed by recordings in English.

GDL feels different this time. On our way through immigration a fancy robot turnstile scanned my passport, took my picture, and granted me a tourist visa. After we collected our bags and escaped through the giant frosted glass sliding doors into the international terminal we were greeted by a giant new Starbucks. There are shops and restaurants all around. Once there were only taxi stands and anxiously waiting families.

One of my wife’s old friends volunteered to pick us up. We bought her a latte as a thank you. She led us to her car, parked in a shiny new parking structure, and drove un into town. She dropped us at our hotel and we made plans for dinner later in the week. We checked into the Hotel Morales, dropped our bags in our room, freshened up, then ran back downstairs for breakfast. We sat by the courtyard fountain beneath string lights decorated with paper marigolds. Then back upstairs for a nap.

We woke and showered and made our way to the city center. Guadalajara is under massive renovation for the 2026 World Cup. Construction crews are everywhere, refreshing public infrastructure, widening roads, fixing this and that. It’s a huge overhaul to prepare for thousands of visitors. The central city feels transformed.

This transformation isn’t entirely welcome. We came to understand later that funds used to improve the city have been diverted to the renovations for the World Cup and away from other programs. Many people are angry and want to see basic necessities prioritized first. Bus prices were increased significantly to help raise funds for the effort. People are rallying and protesting in response. Additionally Mexico’s bombastic neighbor to the north has not been a good trading partner lately. Anti-tariff posters and graffiti cover walls and construction barriers.

We found an iced coffee near ‎⁨Plaza Universidad and then found our way underground to the light rail station.

The light rail in Guadalaja is futuristic, shiny, and new, but it’s still easier to pay for the train with coins. A nice woman helped us decipher the ticket machine and swapped our paper pesos for coins. As our train arrives another train full of people coming to the center for weekend shopping arrives from the other direction. It’s mid-morning so we’ve missed the early morning throngs of commuters. The ride is quiet and smooth. Once you’re out of the center the underground train is suddenly above ground and you can take in great views of the sprawling city. We took the train out to Zapopan. The station is a big modernist rectangle that floats over the ground, held to the earth by stairs. It sits right outside the historic center of the city. A wide pedestrian boulevard leads to the plaza and the cathedral. Along the way more construction crews are making improvements. The concrete benches around the plaza have been broken up into chunks and removed into piles of debris as bright white, freshly poured benches replace them. We strolled around the center. I bought a straw hat to protect my balding noggin from the sun.

We caught a cab to my wife’s friends home. When she studied abroad here years and years ago, she became friends with the college age children kids in the neighborhood, visited often, and eventually became part of the extended family. The kids are all grown with kids of their own, some have emigrated to the US for work. The ageless matriarch of the family has prepared a giant lunch of tacos, nopal salad, roasted chiles, and stacks of corn tortillas. The youngest son introduced me to salsa chapulines - a smolderingly hot and spicy salsa featuring roasted crickets. The the roasted crickets are crunchy and savory, almost nutty, and the oily chiles sear my tongue, clear my sinuses, and move down my throat like a hunk of red-glowing charcoal. I went back for more. My wife shared the story of visiting Mexican friends in Puyallup, Washington, where I sampled the not-for-gringos-salsa and nearly died. I started to go for seconds that time too, but the host took it away from me to prevent injury and death.

The following day we met some of my wife’s friends for breakfast at restaurant called Chai. Chai is famous for their breakfast buffet with many flavors of chilaquiles. The four chicas met years ago when my wife was volunteering at Albergue de Frai Antonio Alcalde - which housed an organization which cared for mostly rural patients and families of patients at the main hospital in Guadalajara. An American equivalent might the Ronald McDonald house. Now they all have success, careers, and families. I tried to follow the conversation, picking up every 5th word in Spanish, but mostly drinking Café de Olla until my toes vibrated from the sugar and caffeine.

After breakfast, we made our way into the Museo Cabañas so I could pay a visit to the Orozco murals. More construction. The wide pedestrian boulevard that leads from the central plaza to the museum was barricaded. Vendors and foot traffic are diverted to either side on skinny makeshift walkways. Between the barricades I saw the big stone pavers upended revealing soil beneath.

When we arrived at the museum we saw a young bride-to-be posing for photos in the courtyard twirling and posing for her camera crew.

We stood under the domed ceiling craning our necks to look at Orozco’s frescoes. Tour groups came and went. Others laid down on the benches to get a better view.

The rest of the museum is quiet. We strolled through the exhibits, but mostly just enjoyed the space. The museum, a former hospital, also a former government building is really a maze of corridors encircling courtyards. The rigid geometry of the place catches the sun and the sky in neatly framed vignettes.

The next day we left the hotel to find a great 1970s diner called Café Madoka. 5 decades of old men sit with drink coffee and a cigarette and read the newspaper. Today there is no smoking and the newspaper is replaced with a smartphone. I ordered, quite well I might add, huevos divorciados - divorced eggs - two sunny-side up eggs, one swimming in red chile, one in green chile.

I was trying very hard not to make a mus, so naturally I managed to splash red chile on myself. Back at the hotel I tried to scrub the stain out, but failed. I dropped my shirt off at the front desk to be laundered. We waited for my wife’s aunt to come and collect us for a drive out to Lake Chapala.

My wife’s aunt married a Mexican man, an architect, and has lived in Guadalajara for decades. She’s windowed now and struggles with what to do. She debates about returning to the US to be close to her family, but her life, her world is Mexico. In her 70s, she drives like a maniac, speaks grammatically perfect Spanish with a broad American accent, talks to everyone, flirts with waiters, and basically lives her very best life. She’s worked as a realtor for years and knows the city better than most taxi drivers.

She collects in her SUV and pushes her way through traffic to get out onto the highway. She drives fast. Speed limits here are merely recommendations. We’re zipping along and suddenly traffic is at a dead stop. We sit and wait. Soon people are getting out of their cars. She rolls down the window and begins asking folks what’s going on.

It is a manifestación - a demonstration. The newly widened highway has cut local vendors off from street traffic and they are suffering lost businesses. So they have blocked the highway. Cars and trucks begin inching backwards down the freeway, making room. Cars pull a hard U-turn across three lanes and go the wrong way down an on-ramp onto side streets. We zig-zag through narrow cobblestone roads back onto the main road and back into the city. How about we go to Tlaquepaque instead?

Tlaquepaque is known for arts and food. The city center is full of shops, artisans, galleries, and excellent restaurants. We wander and window shop, while my wife’s aunt talks to everyone, making friends and hearing stories. We settle for lunch a bit open patio restaurant where I get even more chapulines, this time spiced and roasted as a crunchy topping for guacamole.

We wind down the day by strolling through the city center again. Very near where we caught the train is a massive old neoclassical temple. We discover this is a library for the University of Guadalajara. In Spanish this is Universidad de Guadalajara and like we call the University of Oregon “U of O” - in Guadalajara the University is U de G - which is pronounced like Ooo-day-hey in Spanish. The temple library has many heavy wooden desks with students quietly working and two stories of books lining the walls. Above the books are murals by Amado de la Cueva. His name translates to “beloved of the cave” which is pretty cool. He worked with Diego Rivera but died tragically young in a motorcycle accident.

One day, when I when I win the lottery and become an insane millionaire, I want to fund a documentary series about all of these Mexican muralists and their crazy lives.

The following day we had already planned to visit Tlaquepaque and have lunch with one of the chicas. Why not? Tlaquepaque is great. We wanted to do some site-seeing before lunch so we caught a cab out to the la Minerva - a grand statue of Minerva (or Athena if you prefer the Greek original over a shoddy Roman copy) - she stands in the center of a fountain, with her spear, helmet, and shield protecting the city. The Minerva has native features, a broad nose and full lips. She blends Mexico’s past with myth and legend. Her shield features the face of the gorgon, Medusa, as is traditional.

Minerva is a sort of personal saint for my wife. We joke that if she were to take up roller derby, her stage name would be Minerva Damage. The statue is awesome. I sent a photo to a buddy. His response: “who is she?”.

Minerva’s fountain is in the center of a huge roundabout, fronted by giant yellow arch. The surrounding neighborhood is affluent, tree-lined, well landscaped, and beautiful. I think most Americans would be surprised at how lush Mexico is. I think our popular imagination is border towns with rough banditos. On one end of the eastern compass point of this roundabout is a small park with some old modern homes. One home belonged to José Clemente Orozco. Now it’s a sort of museum or cultural center. It’s not quite clear. When we walk inside it’s clear that, at the moment, the house is a house and nothing much else. Two women are needlessly cleaning the place. It’s a beautiful, white stack of brick and tile. There is one giant painting. A mural painted on big slabs of masonite with industrial paint. Orozco was innovative in his materials. The assembled painting has a funny angle on the top. Originally it lived in the kitchen of a famous restaurant, so the painting snuggled in under the slanty ceiling.

There is a barricaded staircase to the second floor. A large printed photo of Orozco glares at you, scaring away intruders.

And that’s it. There is nothing more to see. We sign the guestbook and leave. There’s still time before lunch; Mexicans eat later than Americans, so we take a taxi over to the University of Guadalajara Museum of Art. We’re a little early so we cross the street, find a coffee, and sit in the plaza in front of a grand old cathedral. We wait for the clock to strike so we can see the clockwork figures emerge from the tower and announce the hour. The bells ring, but nothing happens. Robbed. But now the museum is open.

In the center of the museum is a huge, domed auditorium. This is a university museum, so this is probably where students receive their art history lessons. Beneath a vast dome, decorated with Orozco’s frescos. I think back to my undergraduate art history classes. Leaving the house before 7am to park and make my way to the physics building (for some reason) to look at slides, in the dark at 8am, in the only auditorium that was available. Somewhat less inspiring. I remember falling asleep and having strange art dreams.

After we tour the museum we’re off to Tlaquepaque again for lunch and talk for hours.

Our flight home leaves late in the day so we have time to read by the hotel pool, walk around the city and have lunch at our favorite spot. We booked the hotel van to take us back to the airport. By the time we get checked in and through security it’s close enough to dinner time that we should eat. We found ourselves having Mexican sushi at a posh little place in the newly renovated Guadalajara airport. Ready for the world.

New work: The crows return to Venice in autumn

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This painting began with two failed experiments.

I have a giant roll of sheets from my very large Stendig wall calendar (4ʹ × 3ʹ). One sheet for each month. The Stendig Calendar is typeset in Helvetica Bold with tight kerning. A tiny hairline divides the days into columns.

First experiment: Wouldn't it be cool to print a photo on one of these sheets so that the calendar shows through the image? I carefully cut a calendar sheet down into two 18ʺ × 24ʺ sheets. I chose a snapshot of a vibrant green tree in my neighborhood. The canopy of the tree is bright yellow-green and casts a shadow over the trunk, creating a sort of cave beneath. I carefully loaded the first sheet into my printer, twiddled the digital knobs, and when the paper emerged, the photo was cropped to a thin strip on the left side of the page.

I tried again. Same result. I realized the printer was "seeing" the black letters M, T, and W at the top of the page. The jet-black convinced the printer that there was no paper there and it should only print between Monday and Tuesday.

Second experiment: Wouldn't it nice to use these (failed) prints as a backdrop for a painting? Like I do with my printed canvases? I tried laminating the sheet of paper to a painter’s panel using the same archival book binding glue I use on big heavy canvas. I used too much. The paper became saturated and buckled.

Once it dried the surface was wrinkled and lumpy. I sanded it smooth with my orbital sander. This left the surface distressed and broken, as if my calendar was very very old.

It all worked out fine.

Visual inventory

What are we looking at here? From top to bottom, there is first the calendar backdrop with the thin strip of tree printed over some of the letters and numbers. Next there are two crows. One on the left is an photo-image transferred to the surface using science and the other is a hand-painted rendition of the same bird. Twins?

Sticker-dots mark off days on the calendar. They infiltrate the crow on the left.

Next are three trompe l’oeil sticky notes: pink, yellow, pink. Below the notes is a vast stretch of water, reflecting pink and yellow from an unseen sky. In the distance is a bit of skyline.

One more sticker-dot floats in the ocean.

Eakins digression

Drawing of the Pair Oared Shell by Thomas Eakins

I think I might have been in Junior High or maybe High School when I saw this image. It must have been a reproduction in a book, but in my hazy memory I’m looking at this framed on a wall. That seems unlikely, but maybe the Mint Museum of Charlotte really did have an Eakins study on the wall.

What you see here is a study for one of Eakins’ famous paintings of rowers. Eakins has laid out a 1-point perspective grid to represent the surface of the water. What I remember tickling my brain was that Eakins was creating a system to paint ripples and reflections in water. Here he has divided each perspective grid square up with diagonals and assigned each section a part of the reflection. Once painted, the effect is completely lifelike, as if the water held still long enough for him to paint it.

This is a magic trick. He used predictable, orderly grids to depict something fluid and chaotic. I remember feeling like someone peeled back the top layer of the universe so I could peek underneath.

Painting water

The reference for my lagoon was a snapshot photo I took from a vaporetto (water taxi) in Venice just about a year ago. We were chugging along into the mouth of the Grand Canal. The sun was going down.

To try to capture the surface of the water, I ripped off Eakins and created a 2-point perspective grid using a 48ʺ ruler, an 18ʺ ruler, blue painter’s tape, and some books to level everything out. A classic 2-point perspective drawing exercise renders a cube turned so that one corner is turned out to the viewer. The resulting grid is little diamonds instead of trapezoids. Imagine standing on a giant checkerboard and turning 45º to look to the corner of the board.

I painted a rough gradient of sunset colors over the grid. The lines were faint, but visible. I painted the shadowy side of waves in dark blue using the intersection of grid lines as a guide. I added highlights and then glazed the surface in unifying colors until everything felt cohesive.

Stickies

Above the ocean I’ve placed three stickies in pink, yellow, and pink. I feel like these are classic pastel sticky note colors, but they also directly reference the colors “reflected” in the water below. Here they are functioning as a stand-in for a sunset sky.

On my first attempt, I painted three pink stickies all the way across and tried to add a hand-drawn happy sun in the middle. It was a little bit on-the-nose, but more importantly it just looked like shit. So I taped it off, pained over it with white gesso, and repainted as a sunny yellow. The color is the metaphor; no need for a graphic.

The stickies are actual size at approximately 3 inches square. They are a tiny bit curled, so they’re not perfect squares. The size, color, and the tricky shadow should fool the eye at first glance.

Birds

It’s crow season in Portland. They are everywhere. They show up in Autumn and roost here for the winter. Great flocks of them show up and take over city blocks. It is ominous and no one seems to care. It looks like the end of the world.

By winter time the crows are roosting and adolescent crows start hanging out on power lines and yelling at passers by. Crows are beautiful, smart, and creepy. Like a squadron of mean goth girls who get your attention just to make fun of your shoes. I shoot many pictures of crows lurking on power lines.

On the left, is a stock photo of a crow, which I set to black and white and applied a half-tone filter (like you see in printed newspapers). I transferred the image to the surface by embedding the printed image into acrylic medium and then removing the paper. I followed the technique I found in this charming little YouTube video which works by applying a thin layer of liquid acrylic medium to your work surface, applying your ink-jet print ink-side-down, waiting 5 minutes, and pulling off the paper. Most of the paper is removed this way. Any bulky blobs of paper fiber can be rubbed away, and the rest is rendered transparent through the application of acrylic varnish. It’s a pretty neat trick.

On the right I hand painted the self-same bird. I created a rough outline of the bird by using graphite transfer paper, ensuring my birds are the same size. Then I carefully painted my crow friend with bright blue eyes and shiny feathers.

Dots

The dot-stickers on the painting are real, in that they are real stickers I really stick on my real calendar to mark the days. I added a dot sticker over the left crow to integrate it into the background of the painting.

But that’s a lie. One of the stickers is paint. I carefully cut a ¾ʺ circle out of painter’s tape, matched the color of another sticker with paint, and created a sneaky replica.

That’s one interpretation

When I work on a painting I try to not to plan and execute, but instead try to explore and discover. I’m leaning hard on happy accidents and reacting creatively to the last thing I did. In my day job, as a Director of Technology, I am beholden to plans, schemes, schedules, deadlines, and agendas. So when I’m working on a painting I want to let my mind wander and see what happens. I suppose if art was my day job I might be more architectural in my approach.

This painting began with a failed printer experiment and became a meditation on time. After my printing blunder, the panel sat under my desk for at least a year before I discovered what I wanted to paint on it (and found the time to do it). The calendar back-drop is on-the-nose symbolism for marking the passing of time as it’s a literal artifact of that activity. The water is inspired by a memory and another memory; remembering a moment in Venice brought to life by remembering an Eakins drawing.

The repetition of elements imply time passing. The two crows (or the same crow twice?) are like frames from a film. Sticky notes are used by product and engineering teams for planning and roadmapping exercises. Sticky notes with ideas scrawled on them in black marker cover conference room walls like confetti after a clown explosion. “This is our 14 month roadmap” a product manager will say, gesturing to a wall of colorful squares.

Bean Boy

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In August, the 4-year anniversary of my adopting a mostly plant-based diet passed without my noticing. I only thought of it, because, over the holidays, during a family dinner, someone asked “are you still doing that?” Oh yeah. Turns out I still am.

What does mostly plant-based mean?

I eat some fish, some dairy and eggs, but no beef, chicken, pork, etc. You could say “ovo-lacto-pescatarian” but jeez.

Basically it’s approaching food with a focus on personal health and harm reduction. The goal isn’t perfection. If I am traveling, I go with the flow. If friends or family attempt to feed me, I eat what I am served. I am not on a mission to convert anyone. I am just trying to do better for myself. Thankfully, my wife has enthusiastically joined me on this journey. I don’t have to cook dinner twice.

Why though?

A little while before I decided to change my diet my wife and I were hanging out with an old friend. My wife and the friend are both doctors. If you’re drinking wine with doctors, sooner or later someone is going to break out a blood pressure cuff and a stethoscope. Our friend, the marathon runner, checked her blood pressure and it was - let’s say - athletic. Then we all checked our blood pressure. My wife’s was normal. Mine was alarming.

I visited my doctor and got a prescription for a medication. It helped, but not much. We added a second medication. A little better, but not much. I realized that soon I’d be taking a fistful of pills every morning. So I made a change.

But this is only part of the story. This was my camel-back-breaking-straw. For years I have had an intrusive thought buzzing around my head: For an American, with a good job, living with abundance, there is no excuse for killing animals for food. It’s not necessary, it hasn’t been necessary for a very long time. It is not justifiable.

Before you start drafting up a rebuttal with which to lecture me: Yes, I know there are many other horrible things in the world. This is a small thing, I get it. But small good things are still good things. Small good things lead to bigger good things. I also return my shopping carts to the corral.

What do you eat?

Early last year, I caught up with some cousins outside of Memphis, TN. My wife and I were trying to explain ourselves. They were asking us, in good faith, and out of curiosity: What do you eat?

It was actually a very good question, and it seemed hard to answer in the moment. The short answer is “beans”.

Most Sundays I’ll make a big batch of pintos or black beans just to have around. I’ll sometimes make refried beans. Other times I’ll add tomatoes and onions. To black beans I might add frozen corn. If I’m feeling fancy I might roast the corn on a sheet pan. The beans go with rice or tortillas for a meal or an egg on top for breakfast.

I make a hearty ragu from red lentils tomatoes and onions which is great on rigatoni. I occasionally buy fancy lima beans from Rancho Gordo and make a quick pan sauce from the beans and their cooking liquid, butter (or plant based butter), and toss this with fettuccine.

But generally the answer is “beans”. It’s beans.

Bowls over plates

Changing my diet meant changing my expectations.

The classic American dinner plate with a slab of animal protein, a starch, and one or two vegetables doesn’t translate well to a vegetarian diet. A block of tofu doesn’t anchor a plate like a roasted chicken breast does. This plate will feel empty. Fake meat products are generally pretty awful (and loaded with salt). Vegetarian meals need to be more holistic and integrated. So bowls, not plates.

I go for bowls of rice or grain (quinoa, barley, faro) with legumes or tofu. I go for curries which are spicy, hearty, and rich. Hummus smothered with spicy roasted vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, etc) and drizzled with olive oil sits in between a snack and a meal. Perfect for lunch. Nothing in the bowl feels like a substitute.

Fancy toast

I have baked my own bread for a long time. Recently I’ve been trying to get better at focaccia. Good bread begets excellent toast. The millennial favorite avocado toast is great. It pairs well with a fried egg if you want. I also like to do a spin on a Mexican dish molletes, which is refried beans on good toast with onions and perhaps cotija cheese. In Mexico this is typically a breakfast dish, served alongside eggs and coffee.

A toasted or grilled slab of bread smothered in ricotta cheese and topped with pistachios is one of my favorites. When I’m feeling more virtuous, I’ll blend medium-firm tofu up with salt, lemon juice and zest, nutritional yeast, and olive oil to make a rich spread. Either of these topped with toasted nuts and balsamic vinegar is a treat.

Curries

Indian cuisine is really complex and difficult to master, but it’s not too hard to create a very tasty (if not authentic) dhal with lentils, split peas, or chick peas. Chana (chick pea) masala is pretty easy to fake as well.

I never have all the right spices around but I get by with whole and ground cumin, turmeric, coriander, cinnamon, and nutmeg. I will substitute paprika for chili powder for flavor and color when I’m cooking for us both. My wife suffers from a serious condition known as “baby mouth” and cannot handle even mild chilis. I keep a pre-made garam masala around as well. I’m missing fenugreek some other whole spices, and probably an army of peppers too.

But it tastes great, makes the house smell wonderful, and topped with a drizzle of yogurt and fresh cilantro and a squeeze of lime juice, it’s a great dinner and leftovers are great for lunch the next day.

When I have time, I’ll make roti, Indian flatbread. Roti is very simple, just flour, a pinch of salt, and enough water to make a dough. I mix about a cup of flour with 5-6 ounces of water. I mix this together in a bowl until it forms a ball, and knead it just a few times. I divide the dough into 8 golf-ball sized pieces, flatten these into disks, dunk them in flour to prevent sticking, and then roll them out to 8-inch rounds. Each round is cooked in a dry skillet until brown spots appear. Then I place the roti over an open flame on my stovetop until they puff up. Brush with melted butter or olive oil and stack in a plate, wrapped in a towel. Leftover roti at breakfast makes a good wrapper for a scrambled egg.

Complex rice

In wintertime I like to make a risotto and pair it with a small salmon fillet. I use vegetable stock and white wine instead of chicken or beef stock. I start with onions, carrots, and celery diced and cooked in olive oil until soft before adding the rice, wine, and slowly ladling in stock.

Paella is another cold-weather go-to. I like to add red bell peppers and green beans for color and texture.

I also like to make onigiri, Japanese rice balls, and fill them with steamed soybeans or a slab of salted tofu or whatever. They’re great for lunch or a quick snack. I bought a small set of molds to make it easy. I steam short grain rice, season with a little rice vinegar and mirin, and let it cool a bit. Add a little rice to a mold, add some filling, press the top onto the mold, then pop out your perfect little rice triangle. Wrap in nori and dip in furikake.

Frozen veg

I think there’s a trend of people realizing that frozen vegetables are really pretty good, actually. They’re not going to be great in a salad of course, but work fine coated in olive oil, seasoned, and roasted on a sheet pan. Frozen green beans can go right into a hot wok and be stir-fried quickly. Frozen peas can quickly top pasta or be stirred into the rice for onigiri. The heat from the rice will thaw the peas and give your onigiri a nice little pop of color and some protein.

One of my favorites is frozen pearl onions. I toss these with salt and olive oil and roast them on a sheet pan for about an hour so they caramelize. They are delicious on top of an omelet or a bowl of hummus.

Don’t you miss bacon?

I don’t really miss any meat. On the rare social occasions where I have a little beef or chicken, it’s only just fine. It’s not amazing. I don’t suddenly find myself craving fried chicken. I never want a burger.

I do miss some rituals of cooking. I used to roast a whole chicken on Sundays. I really enjoyed the art of carving up or spatchcocking a bird for the oven. I liked making stock from the carcass and using that stock to make risotto or adding to veggies later in the week. This made me feel like a chef.

I miss convenience. If I’m traveling and looking for fast food in an airport, there’s often only a sad egg-salad sandwich or an anemic caprese sandwich in the cold case. It was nice to be able to grab basically anything without thinking too much about it.

Does it work?

Well don’t I seem smug and self satisfied?

The best “results” I can claim is that my hypertension is stable and well managed with minimal meds. My weight is stable (this is a happy accident). And now, I can cook lots of different things.

Before I changed my diet, I spent a lot of time trying to wade through complicated decisions, trying to do the best thing. Is grass fed better than organic? The same? Is pasture-raised the same as cage free? Are either of these organic? There’s a small universe of decisions and considerations I don’t have to think about. I never worry about the provenance of a lentil.

So healthier, happier, simpler, smug. It works for me.

Three shirts

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Last summer I listened to season 3 of Articles of Interest all the way through for a second time. The host of the podcast, Avery Trufelman, discussion fashion the way you might talk about art history: providing context and cause for fashion in history and culture.You not only learn what a blazer is, but why they are the way they and where they come from.

Season 3 of the podcast discusses the Ivy Style. When I first listened to this series, I remember having a shock of recognition. Oh that’s me. Ivy style is the progenitor of what we might call “preppy” today. It’s a very American (and democratic) way of dressing that began with kids enrolled at Ivy League schools. Think Oxford-cloth button-down polo shirts with a sweater and chinos. Maybe the sleeves are rolled up. Maybe the pant-cuffs are rolled up to do some rowing. Sporty, active, collegiate clothes. Well made casual wear that can be dressed up with a jacket and tie but isn’t ashamed of a little wear-and-tear. In fact, being a little bit worn, and a little bit rumpled is a point of pride. It’s the gentleman’s C of fashion. A disaffected, confident, elite, cool without trying too hard. I’ve been trying to dress this way for as long as I can remember.

At the same time I was listening again to season 3, I was also working my way back through Blake Gopnik’s biography of Andy Warhol, in preparation of visiting the Warhol Museum. When Warhol entered his business art phase he dropped his “Raggedy Andy” persona and style of dress and took to shopping at Brooks Brothers. He was co-opting the fashion and cultural language of his future patrons. There’s a great photo of Warhol, taken by Annie Leibovitz, where Warhol is dressed in a blazer, sweater, shirt and tie, blue jeans, and smart leather shoes. Warhol points his camera at the camera, holding his tape recorder under his arm.

In college I remember my uniform of a thrift-store blazer, button down shirt, and paint slathered jeans. I think I somehow absorbed this look from history. Young men my age certainly didn’t dress this way. Most of my professors looked like they just fell out of bed. Learning first that my amorphous understanding of men’s fashion was a real thing with a name and a history and then learning that my art history icon is also a fashion icon felt like parts of my brain clicking together like magnets.

When I visited Pittsburgh last September I was primed with fresh sartorial vocabulary from the podcast and buzzing from a fresh visit to the Warhol Museum. The trip coincided with my birthday and Brooks Brother’s was right around the corner from my hotel. I decided to treat myself to a new shirt. I left with three. (They were having a sale).

I got to chatting with the two salesmen working that day. One shared his battered and tattered copy of Esquire’s Handbook of Style (with a photo of Andy Warhol dog-eared). We talked about the podcast. I asked for a belt to match some brown leather shoes I was wearing. They refused to sell me one, because none were a good match. As we wrapped up the sale, the fellow who was helping me neatly remolded the shirts I had tried on. He pulled and snapped the fabric so that the shirt looked as if it had never been worn.

Since then, I’ve retired several worn-out Uniqlo shirts and replaced them with higher quality shirts from Brooks Brothers. Now, I adore Uniqlo. Uniqlo’s history is tied up with Japanese innovators who imported the Ivy Style to Japan in the 60s. I remember stepping into a 3-story Uniqlo in Osaka on my first trip to Japan. It was bright and clean and radiated calm. I bought a knit long-sleeve shirt that scored me complimentsfor years. Uniqlo is affordable (not cheap) in part because there is less fabric in each shirt, comparatively. A Uniqlo shirt worn twice will not just wrinkle but will hold creases around the elbows and armpits. It looks truly worn. The shirt tail will grow creases up from the belt line and look truly shabby. Washing and ironing will fix all of this. But, a Brooks Brothers shirt recovers fully after a night on a hanger or a door knob. On day three it’s a little rumpled, but the rumples have character. It still looks good. These shirts will be washed less, worn more, and last longer. It’s a great example of the old saw “buying quality saves you money in the long run”.

The crows return to Venice in autumn

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A crow and his twin observe a post-it-note sunset over the open mouth of the grand canal. Spring foliage is a background memory.

Oh no, I broke my poodle

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Two weeks before Thanksgiving my wife and the poodle went on a long run. The poodle did about 5 miles. My wife dropped him off and went a little further.

He clambered up onto the couch which he was never supposed to get on and panted and smiled until he had cooled down enough for a nap.

For an almost 11 year old dog, with chronic health issues, he is mighty. He seemed unfazed by the long run.

When he stirred from his nap he slinked off the couch in his way. He steps two front paws down onto the floor, then raises his hindquarters up into an exaggerated downward facing dog yoga pose and then sort of floats his back half down to the floor.

I saw him limp, just for a bit, on his right back leg. He stretched it out the way he does - toes pointed backwards while leaning forward. His long thin poodle-body becoming an elongated arrow toe to nose.

Ok. Noted.

I vowed to take him on short walks and keep an eye on that leg.

The week passed without incident. On the following Saturday I returned home from grocery shopping to a happy bouncy dog. I let him into the back yard to relieve himself. He returned to greet me with his bouncy, clock-wise pirouettes.

And then he stopped. He held his right hind leg off the ground, toes clenched, tail down. He gave me a sad-eyed look.

I scooped all 57 pounds of him up and hauled him up the back steps, through the back door, and back to his green couch.

I called the local emergency vet. On the phone, I was greeted by a terrible AI voice-assistant which I had to cajole and convince into connecting me to a real human person.

I explained the situation, requesting advice. Got some wisdom. Luckily we had gabapentin and trazodone on hand from previous puppy mishaps. I relocated his bed to the living room and gave him some medication to ease pain and keep him calm. I texted my wife. We began canceling plans. We couldn’t give last-minute symphony tickets to anyone.

We got in to see our vet on Tuesday, had x-rays read on a Wednesday. The radiologist confirmed what our vet suspected. Our poodle tore his cranial cruciate ligament. He would need surgery.

Our vet gave us some codeine for his pain and a list of vets in the area who do orthopedic surgery.

I started making phone calls. Reached back out to the same emergency vet, which is also a regular vet, where they performs the required surgery. I wrestled with the AI operator again and finally got to talk to a human and got a consultation scheduled, only to find out that they had no openings for surgery until January.

I reached out to a friend who is engaged to a veterinarian, and she was nice enough to recommend some surgeons and to steer us away from the most expensive places.

I made some more calls and got an appointment in Vancouver, Washington.

I cancelled work meetings, and then called back the terrible AI robot to cancel our consultation. I was assured my prepayment would be fully refunded.

I was consulted by an appropriately serious animal doc who reconfirmed the reading of the x-rays and walked me through the procedure - a TPLO - this would create a stable platform for his knee by reshaping the top of the tibia.

Friends reassured me. Their dogs had the same operation and fully recovered.

We got lucky, this doc had a cancellation and could get our pup in for surgery the following day, the day before Thanksgiving.

I dropped the pup off in the morning. I had gotten accustomed to picking him and hauling him upstairs. But squeezing him into the back of my tiny Prius with only three working legs was a challenge. I met the vet tech, went over the details and handed off my poodle and crossed my fingers. On the way into the parking lot, the Apple AirTag on his collar alerted me: “Jonah has been left behind”.

I collected our dog first thing the next day. he was drugged and confused with a Frankenstein scar on the inside of his leg. The vet tech held his hindquarters up with a special padded sling. They held him while I pulled the car around. I hefted him up, sling and all into the back of the car. They handed me a paper bag full of medication. We have a small puppy pharmacy collecting on our kitchen counter.

They handed me yet another plastic cone-collar. Our 4th. We have a stack of cones in our basement. I noticed on my bill that this piece of plastic with velcro tape cost me $35 dollars.

We arrived home and I hoisted him out of the back of the car and tried to let him walk and find a spot to pee while holding his back-end up with our brand new sling. The idea is to let the dog assume the pee position and pull the sling away. I failed. The sling went right into the washing machine. We got inside and began the recommended regimen of medication and bed rest.

The prescribed trazodone is supposed to make dogs calm and sleepy. It makes our dog agitated and loopy. He doesn’t really rest. It destroys his motor control so he peed his bed. I took the cover off the bed and washed that and the soiled blanket. I picked him up and placed him on the couch next to me, and we watched Star Trek II and III together. I slept downstairs on the couch that night.

In his bewildered, drugged state, our pup refused to stay put on his bed. He desperately wanted up on his green couch. I relented and placed him carefully on his favorite spot. He relaxed and went to sleep. I slept with one eye open, startling awake periodically to make sure he didn’t roll off the couch. He was completely stationary through the night until morning. I was puttering in the kitchen when I saw him start to groggily roll over and right off the couch. I shot across the house at super-human speed and caught him before he hit the floor.

Sufficiently chastened, I pulled the hide-a-bed out of the couch half way so that it was no longer an inviting place to sit. I buried the other couch in furniture to make it unusable. I rearranged rugs from all over the house to create a high-traction path from bed to bowl to door and back.

By now we have given up on the trazodone, opting for codeine and gabapentin. This did the trick. The poodle was both calm and resting. But we were almost out of codeine.

This is Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. We call the vet who performed the surgery (our normal vet is closed), and beg for a codeine prescription. We get promises and no call back. We’re worried. This vet doesn’t stock codeine. Codeine is tightly controlled and rarely available at regular human pharmacies. My wife called around to find a one with a supply on hand. We call again and again and stress that it is a holiday weekend and everything is closing early. Finally we get a prescription. I drive back to Vancouver to collect a hand-signed paper prescription and run it to a Fred Meyer where I received enough codeine to kill a man and his horse. We had asked for five 30mg tablets.

After the disaster of the holiday weekend passed, our pup made a fast recovery. Not even two weeks out from his surgery he was walking more or less normally.

His incision was practically invisible and we never even used that stupid cone.

Our biggest challenge now is keeping our pup from running and playing. His energy has returned and he’s even learning to handle steps again. I’m still doing lots of poodle presses and poodle squats, but he is stronger every day.

Some time in February he should be ready to run, jump, and play again.

Marking the days – an artwork for Instagram

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I have a calendar hobby. About two (or three) years ago I purchased a Stendig wall calendar for my office. I got into the habit of marking off each day with a simple dot sticker, the kind of stickers you get in the office-supply aisle at the supermarket. Dots in three colors. I cycle through the colors in the same order, one per day.

When I look up from my monitor and see my calendar I can quickly get a sense of where I am in the month. More dots, fewer days left.

I bought some glittery gold star stickers. I’m a gentleman of a certain age and I need to trick myself into good health habits. Sober days get a gold star. No specific rule of thumb here, just that more stars is more better.

If a most of a month has gone by and I don’t see many (or any) stars, I know I’m fucking up.

I bought some glittery heart stickers in multiple colors. On days I get a workout in, no matter how small, I get a heart. More hearts is more better.

It’s a silly but effective game. Stickers are fun. I’ve found this little ritual to be artistically satisfying. At the end of the month, before I climb up on a step-stool to carefully tear off, roll up, and store the calendar sheet, I have a little collage representing the month.

I like the zen-like repetition of marking off each day. I like the bright colors of the stickers, and I also like that the symbolism of the dots, hearts, and stars is only meaningful to me.

I thought it might be fun (for me) to take this idea over to Instagram. After Instagram changed their profile format, I tried to reinvent my account as a kind of visual blog.

I found that to be unrewarding. Instead what if I do the Warholian thing and post the same thing every day?

In Sketch I created a giant art board full of calendar days. I riffed (ripped off) the Stendig calendar design and typeset everything in Helvetica bold, and alternated each day - dark on light, light on dark.

I created digital versions of my dot stickers and my star stickers. I realized I could create any sticker I wanted from emoji characters. I created a little algorithm to mark the days with stickers.

Odd days get an orange dot

Even days get a blue dot

Days divisible by three get an additional pink dot

Prime-numbered days get a star

Mondays get a skull (no one likes Mondays)

Thursdays gets a wine glass, because Thursday is when we go out on the town

Holidays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve get relevant emoji.

And there are scribbles.

On a traditional paper calendar you might scratch out days with a pencil. You might circle important days in red. Using Procreate on my iPad, I chose a marker brush and created 7 different scribble types, circles, slashes, scratch-outs, check marks, etc. Each day gets a different scribble. I converted the scribbles into three colors: red, green, and blue. Each week gets a different color.

With my algorithm in place, I created a calendar image for each day for the rest of the year, starting in October, ending on New Year’s Eve.

48 hours in Pittsburgh

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

We arrived in Pittsburgh on a Saturday; I’m flying home alone on a Monday. The plan was for me to join my wife for her conference, visit the Andy Warhol Museum, and kick around for a couple of days. However, work conspired to cut my plans short. The website was supposed to launch on Tuesday.I’m a team player. I changed my flight from Wednesday to Monday. The site will now launch in October (allegedly). It was too late to change my flight back.

We arrived in the near-Brutalist retro-70s Pittsburgh International Airport. We tried to catch a Lyft, which got lost somewhere in a parking structure, doing donuts. We watched the little car icon circle the map. We cancelled the Lyft and grabbed a awaiting cab.

Our driver was a friendly and charming local fella. We chatted and compared Portland and Pittsburgh. We drove through a tunnel and emerged on a bridge near the confluence of the Allegheny and Ohio rivers, with the Pittsburgh skyline sparkling in the background.

Downtown Pittsburgh is really pretty. I was surprised, I don’t know why. Surely I didn’t expect to see steel mills belching fire and smoke into the sky. My wife’s conference has us at the Omni William Penn hotel - a beautiful old stack of red brick in the heart of downtown.

After checking in, we rode the elevator up and opened the door to an enormous, opulent suite. An administrative error which we were not willing to financially absorb. We were very careful not to touch anything. I ran downstairs and made the rather unusual request for a room downgrade. I bounced back upstairs with two new room keys, relocated us down one floor to a standard, but still quite lovely room, then quickly returned the previous room keys to the front desk. With all of this finally sorted, we went downstairs to find food and alcohol.

I love to tag along with my wife to these conferences. I get a break from routine and see a part of the country I might not visit otherwise. Not long ago, we visited St. Louis for a conference and discovered a lovely city with a fantastic art museum and a wonderful zoo and the friendliest people you could ever hope to meet. I got to repeat a trip to Denver and revisit the Clyfford Still Museum.

It’s great. I get to rediscover America and get a mostly free hotel room out of the deal. When this trip came up, and my wife asked if I had any interest in visiting Pittsburgh (the answer is always “yes”) but I had a faint recollection, I quickly Googled to confirm: the Andy Warhol museum is in Pittsburgh!

The next morning, on Sunday, I found us a tasty quiche in the coffee shop downstairs. We lingered over coffee and then made our way West from our hotel through downtown Pittsburgh to the 7th street bridge.The bridges surrounding downtown Pittsburgh are painted bright team-spirit yellow. We’re too early for the museum so we walked along the waterfront, talking, and enjoying the sights along the river. We took a right turn, back uphill, and found a cute coffee shop with cute hipster ladies working and apologizing for the lack of recycling. One young lady took our glass bottles and promised to deliver them to Maine to be recycled the next time she visited her parents.

The museum opens at 11 on Sundays. I like to avoid crowds and lines and I’ve done a good job. We stroll up to the front desk, I show them my phone so they can scan my receipt, and off we go to the 7th floor to wind our way down through the collection.

On the 7th floor the museum opens with a bit of context. Who is Andy Warhol? Who is his family? Where did they come from? What was Pittsburgh like back then? Some ominous black and white photos of war-time Pittsburgh showed the daytime sky dark as night, street lights and headlamps ablaze as the smog from steel production blocked out the sun.

Right before this trip, I finished listening to the audio version of Blake Gopnik’s biography of Andy Warhol for a second time. The audio book is about 43 hours long. I’ve listened twice, meaning I’ve clocked in about 90 hours of educational audio and I am bursting with Andy Warhol facts. And I am annoying. I can’t stop providing context to everything we see with the excited tone of a little boy explaining his favorite Transformers toy to his grandmother. You see, it’s not just a truck he’s a robot, he’s a robot in disguise (as a truck), and he’s from space, but the toys are from Japan though.

The museum collection begins on the 7th floor. The collection is organized roughly chronologically as you move downstairs. As we pore over old family photos a tour group appears. The group is neither quiet nor reverent enough for my liking. So we sneak downstairs and into the future a couple of decades. When the tour group makes its way downstairs to find us, we snuck back upstairs hoping we stay one or two floors behind them.

I was very happy to finally see some of Warhol’s early commercial work. Warhol worked as an illustrator in the 1950s and perfected a blotted-line technique which caught the eye of major art directors all over New York. Warhol’s illustrations were used to sell classical music, clothes, and shoes. The drawings are really beautiful.I loved seeing these early works. It shouldn’t matter, but I loved seeing the evidence. Warhol was very skilled traditional artist. He could do anything. He chose to silk screen soup cans.

The works on display have camera-ready registration marks and the ephemera of the mid-century pre-press process. Most of his commercial illustrations were destroyed. Commercial art only lives long enough to make it to the printer.

One floor featured Warhol’s experimental and underground film. On one big wall Empire was flanked by rotating screen tests. Empire is an 8 hour film study of the Empire State Building over the course of one night. Warhol and his crew obtained access to an office with a window facing the skyscraper. They turned out the lights, mounted the camera on a tripod, turned out the lights, and pointed it out the window. The result is what you might expect. There’s the Empire State Building just sitting there like buildings do. The sky gets dark, lights go out. There it is. Supposedly you can catch a reflection in the window glass from time to time, when one of Warhol’s crew lights a cigarette in the dark. I wasn’t lucky enough to catch that.

Sitting in a movie theater and watching a building just be would probably be a pretty terrible theatrical experience. But the movie projected on a wall as art works really well. It becomes a kind of documentary painting. Here is a block of time which happened in the universe at a particular place. I think about Empire whenever my Apple TV goes into screen saver mode and shows me slow drone footage of San Francisco. So much of Warhol’s work is eerily prescient. The screen tests, too, feel weirdly modern. The concept is simple. You sit here, Warhol puts hid camera on a tripod, points it at your face, and starts recording until 3 minutes of film run through the camera.

I watched 3 minutes of beautiful young Edie Sedgwick give good face to the camera. She understood the assignment. The screen test flanklinkingEmpire on the opposite side featured some young rock-and-roller dude who fidgets, smokes, and drinks a coke from a glass bottle. Both little films are self-conscious, self-aware, three minute selfies. They’d be right at home on Instagram.

On a lower floor Warhol’s archives and time capsules are stashed behind secured doors. Warhol was an avid collector and a bit of a pack rat. He turned both proclivities into a life long conceptual art piece by filling identical banker’s boxes with the detritus and ephemera of theday annotated, dated, sealed, and stored. These boxes contain letterhead from a screen printer, snapshots, McDonald’s receipts, junk mail, all manner of random stuff. Some of the contents of these capsules have been laid out, under glass, so you can peruse it. It’s a wonderful junk drawer from 60 years ago.

On the way out of the museum, we stop to enjoy some of his later paintings, from the 1980s. Huge skulls, memento mori on a grand scale, in happy pastel colors. These paintings are just great and they made me very happy.

Back to the first floor, we took photos in an old fashioned photo booth. I tediously explained how Warhol used photo booths to create the source material of his first commissioned portraits. He’d drag his subjects around town to photo booths, with a bag of quarters, taking dozens of photos. He’d pick the very best and have them enlarged and turned into photo silkscreens.

On the way out we stopped at the museum café to have a Coke in a glass bottle (of course) and bask in the afterglow of my fanboy afternoon before walking back across the bright yellow bridge to our hotel.

Virginia Jaramillo at the Bechtler

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I slipped away to Charlotte, NC the week before Memorial Day to have a quick visit with my family. American Airlines flies direct from Portland to Charlotte, but with the time zone change, every option is bad. My working solution is to fly from Portland late in the evening, sleep on the plane, and arrive in Charlotte early in the morning.

The flight was uneventful. I slept through wearing big over-the-ear noise canceling headphones. American took about 30 minutes to unload the plane. My adrenaline wore off while standing at the luggage carousel and I could feel sleep catching up with me. Once I had my bag, I trundled across the crosswalk to the rental car emporium. One sole employee covered the Enterprise, National, and Alamo counters alone. This poor woman was blessed with the worst possible customers and I was lucky enough to get in line behind all of them. After an hour, a second employee showed up to help with the growing line. She apologized profusely for the wait.

I buzzed out of the airport parking deck in my shiny, rented Nissan Altima and made my way through downtown, and onto Independence Boulevard, headed southeast, towards Matthews.

On the way, as is my tradition, I stopped at the Waffle House. I parked right by the door, just like James Bond and noted the car next to me held a sleeping driver with one sock-foot dangling out of the driver-side window for some cool air. I grabbed a booth and ordered an egg sandwich, loaded hash browns (smothered, covered, diced), orange juice, and lots of coffee. My waitress had incredible pink dreads. Two ladies sat in the booth next to me and gossiped about their lives, their men, their kids, and spoke profoundly about how their parents parenting styles differ from theirs. More wisdom, but more violence.

As I was left, a mighty squall blew in. My friend napping in his car tucked in his foot and rolled up his window. I climbed in my car and watched the rain.

I got home to see the parents, glugged down some sweet tea then took a power nap and a shower.

***

Later in the day I headed to Uptown Charlotte to visit the museums. The center of Charlotte is a well cultivated little jewel of a center city. It is completely artificial, like a southern fried Las Vegas attraction, but it is, undeniably, nice.

When I was in college (in the 90s) downtown Charlotte was basically closed at night except for a restaurant and maybe two bars. Technically some of the big hotels had bars which, technically you could visit if you dressed well enough and didn’t arouse suspicion. The center of the city was a business district for business.

Today there are all kinds of fun things to do and see in the center of Charlotte, including the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art.

Through June 8th, you can see Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence, a retrospective of Jaramillo’s painting from the 1960s to today.

Virginia Jaramillo is Mexican American and an El Paso, TX native; she was born in 1939. She is still painting today, in her mid 80s. She is completely new to me. She rose to prominence in the mid 1960s, She was selected to appear in The De Luxe Show along side Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. My art history courses completely ignored her

The show opens with big wall text and a short biography. The exhibition began, chronologically to my right. I hung a left and began at the end. When I saw 2023 on one of the wall labels I did a double take. I went back to review the big bio on the wall to check that birthdate again. Impressive.

Jaramillo’s grand triptych To Touch The Earth shimmers in gold, bronze, and silver at the end of the room. Inscribed in the brushy metallic panels are tiny, thin, hard lines that almost get lost behind the brushwork. They have an archeological feeling, as if they are evidence of a past space faring civilization. Her most contemporary work has a touch of the cosmic. Many of these paintings remind me of Feynman diagrams, as if they are describing the interaction of exotic sub-atomic particles.

This retrospective Jaramillo’s work is a short walk through 60 years of art history. Each room in the exhibit has echos of the art world at the time the paintings were created. One room includes many large stain paintings, echoing the work of Helen Frankenthaler. Where Frankenthaler’s paintings evoke estuaries or landscapes seen from the passenger seat of a speeding car. Jaramillo’s stain paintings are more like strata of earth. She also stains with oils instead of Frankenthaler’s acrylic. I was told in art school that acrylic must be used as the oil paint would rot the canvas. Lies.

Jaramillo’s torn collage works evoke Robert Rauschenberg’s combines. Her later Curvilinear paintings remind me of the mature pop art of Lichtenstein, and the post painterly abstraction of Frank Stella. In each case, though, Jaramillo is making these influences her own. She was engaged in the changing art world and her work reflects that awareness.

It might be a little strange to comment on such a thing, but so many 20th and 21st century artists arrive at a mature (marketable) style and stop there. No one wants to buy a weird Warhol. They want people to know it’s a Warhol. Artists have tremendous pressure to maintain a style of working that is immediately recognized. An artist becomes a brand. When I run across an artist with a long career who changed and evolved along the way (as they should) it’s a tiny thrill. Oh look! Change.

If you find yourself in Charlotte before June 8th, stop by the Bechtler

Instagram in 2025

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Back in February I wrote about Instagram changed the visual design of their profile pages, breaking years of multi-post collages. I created large images, sliced them up into squares, and then posted each square individually. Each post would be a detail or cropped image, while the full design only appeared on my profile.

It was a fun creative outlet, but you can’t count on social media to be reliable.

After the change, I deleted everything from my feed and locked down my account for a while. I took a pause and considered whether I wanted to be on the platform at all. After a break I acknowledge that Instagram does two things for me:

Helps me stay in touch with distant friends and family
Helps me share my creative work

Instagram is also an addictive toxic waste pit of algorithmically optimized slop and reposted TikTok videos. Without careful curation, Instagram will happily serve up the worst content from the worst people.

So if I’m going to use this thing, I need to be mindful about how I use it and why I use it.

Secure the perimeter

I did this a long time ago, but I think it’s important to share. Turn on 2Factor authentication for your Instagram account. I’ve known too many people have their account compromised or stolen. Instagram has no real customer support. If you lose access to your account, it’s lost. Instagram won’t help. They don’t care.

No phone zone

The first way I keep social media from becoming toxic is to keep it off of my phone. Uninstalling Instagram means it can’t become a fidget spinner every time I’m waiting in line at the supermarket. At first I thought I might try to replace Instagram with a eBook or just skimming the news. I found, though, that my phone actually just stays in my pocket.

I check Instagram on the web, from my desktop computer, once or twice a day. That’s enough to catch up with real people. Rule of thumb: Close the browser tab after seeing my first ad.

There are many features of Instagram that aren’t available on the web version. This is fine. Those features are crap.

To fully manage your account, it is usually necessary to use the mobile app. I try to set things up, and then delete the app. I can always download it again.

Post what, post how

My Instagram posts are an extension of my writing here. I create 5-10 posts in advance, usually on a weekend, and schedule them to be posted. I use Buffer’s free plan to do this. To use Buffer, or a similar platform, you’ll need to convert your account to a Business or Creator account.

I create my posts in Sketch. I pull in a quote from something I’ve written along with a photo, and create a little blog snippet. Otherwise I share a photo of some art that I’m working on. I’ll export these as high quality images, and upload them to Buffer. Posts go out at 7am and I don’t think about it.

Results

I am posting more often, but I am not engaged with Instagram when I do it, thanks to scheduling my posts in advance. Regular posting has increased my engagement a bit, and that’s nice. After all, the whole point is to share my creative stuff with other people.

Once or twice a day is plenty to see what’s happening with people in my life. I feel connected, but I am not drawn into a doom scrolling black hole.

I am free(er) of slop content and ads. I am not tempted to tap onto a post by an internet hottie, and then corrupting my feed with a million more posts of the same thing. The algorithm does not forgive. It pounces on every weakness.

My suggested posts are more art and musicians, and occasionally things like advanced woodworking. That’s irrelevant but inoffensive.

This is positive, overall. I stay in touch, I get my stuff “out there” and I’m not inundated with garbage.

Visiting Monet at PAM

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The Portland Art Museum is undergoing a massive renovation projection, creating a new “Rothko Pavilion” which spans an existing courtyard and connects the original museum building to an annex next door.Rothko’s connection to Portland seems a bit tenuous. His family relocated to Portland in 1913 from Latvia to join his father. He was already 10 years old. Rothko left for Yale in 1921 and made his way to New York City in 1923. Rothko was given a show at the Portland Art Museum in 1933. He returned to Portland for a short time in 1943, but immediately left for Berkeley, California (where he met Clyfford Still). It’s unclear to me if he ever returned to Portland or how much Portlandreally factored in his life and work. It seems like Portland was a place his father chose, and being a child, Rothko had no choice in the matter. At any rate, the museum expansion looks great and I’m excited for it to open. I hope that by naming it “Rothko Pavilion” it means we get at least one Rothko painting on permanent display here in Portland.

While the construction is ongoing, the museum’s exhibits are pretty sparse and sometimes the permanent collection is inaccessible. The museum seems to be looking inward during this time. The current long-running exhibit titled Monet’s Floating Worlds at Giverny: Portland’s Waterlilies Resurfaces and celebrates the restoration of Waterlilies (1914-1915) by Claude Monet. It’s a chance for the museum to show off a jewel in its permanent collection.

The exhibit opens with a small collection of impressionist paintings, some by Monet, some others, and compares them with Japanese wood-block prints from the Edo period.

The title “floating world” refers to Edo-period culture in Japan known as Ukiyo , referring to the fleeting bon vivant nature of urban life.Art from this period is known as Ukiyo-eand includes the woodblock prints that everyone thinks of as Japanese art. If you are thinking of The Great Wave off Kanagawaby Hokusai (1831) you are correct.

The restored painting is amazing. The restoration process removed varnish which was applied after the painting was purchased and brought to America. A video installation on the wall opposite the painting shows the painstaking process of scrubbing off varnish with gentle solvents to reveal the bright painting underneath. One striking visual in the video shows a horizontal band of varnished painting over a restored portion of the painting, Resembling a Rothko painting, the varnished section is dull and dark, the unvarnished is bright and lively.

Looking closely at the unvarnished paint, the colors are almost cartoonishly bright. The paint strokes blend optically and create a more unified surface. The varnish darkened the entire painting, but not uniformly. Some colors receded more than others, making the overall work appear more brushy than it actually is. I realized every impressionist painting I’ve seen has been a lie. They’ve all been varnished. Varnish does protect the paint surface. But many collectors had paintings varnished to make them look older. It was a deliberate choice. Can you imagine, walking into a gallery today, buying a painting, and then paying some jerk to slop some varnish on top?

The exhibition includes many Japanese prints (and also French imitations of Japanese wood block prints, which are interesting in a different way). The French impressionists were famously greatly influenced by this artwork from Japan. One thing that struck me, though, is how far apart in time these two things really are.

One piece in the exhibition is a huge lithograph poster advertising a French exhibit of Japanese prints, some 50 years after the newer of these prints were made. The impressionists were fascinating by an art form that was already 100 years old by the time the Impressionists were working. Hokusai’s Great Wave was printed 9 years before Monet was born. Of course, the world was much bigger then. Those Japanese prints had to be purchased, loaded on a boat, and sailed back around Africa to get to Europe.

Inadvertently, this exhibit got me thinking about time. I’m re-listening to the audio version of Blake Gopnik’s biography of Andy Warhol, and at the same time, making my way through a 2012 biography of Sol LeWitt by Lary Bloom. These are two of my favorites. As I was reading / listening it clicked for me that these two artists were born one month apart in 1928; Sol LeWitt on September 9, 1928 and Andy Warhol on August 6th, 1928. They both came to New York about the same time, and were both admirers of Jasper Johns (Warhol was an early collector of Johns). I have to imagine LeWitt and Warhol must have stood elbow to elbow in front of a Johns painting together at a gallery opening at some point. Their biographies barely mention one another. Like two drivers on the same freeway, driving at the same speed, vaguely aware of the other, going the same way, but completely separate.

Tomatoes are not in season

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A young man emerges from a calendar to let you know his sweater and cap are available in two spring-forward colors and also that it is too early for tomatoes.

April Art

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

About two weeks ago, on a Zoom call for work, I listened in as our creative team and our client had a spirited debate about buttons. The creative team offered rectangular buttons but the client wanted round buttons. The rectangles look “pro” but the round buttons look more humane. On the client side of the call we had a mix of marketing, e-commerce directors, IT, and website content managers. Personally, I liked the rectangles. Every button on every website is a round pill-shape and the rectangles felt fresh. Also big, easy to tap. Good for mobile device users.

I thought about this again today, when I went gallery hopping. I was thinking back at how the average person has such a high degree of visual literacy. The language folks were using sounded like a critique from art school. But we were talking about buttons. We are all swimming in visual culture and we’re all experts.

Laura Beth Reese: Influenced

Laura Beth Reese’s show Influenced is up through April at Blue Sky, the Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts. The show is situated in the large back gallery, away from windows. You have to enter the gallery and turn a corner to see the work. This makes the reveal all the more shocking. When I turned around the corner to see her work I felt like I had accidentally walked into a strip club. It’s Portland; that can happen.

Reese’s show is of and about the internet, specifically the culture of internet marketing on social platforms like Instagram. In Reese’s words, from the exhibition website:

#influenced (2020-present) examines the ever-changing landscape of the internet and its impact on our culture. Using a large format camera, I photograph carefully constructed temporary installations that investigate the phenomenon that occurs at the intersection of social media, celebrity, and consumerism: the influencer. The subjects of the photographs are celebrities and influencers—like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, and Kylie Jenner—who have achieved fame by marketing and branding themselves, creating public personas designed for mass consumption.

Kim and Paris are represented here as well as the overwhelming candy coated yuck of the world of Instagram influencers and celebrities. Reese is asking herself “why do I find this crap so compelling?” and examines this by photographing photographs found on social media.

Above, where she describes her subjects as Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton - yes they are there. But to be pedantic, Reese has photographed photographs. She has created large blown-up cut-outs of these influencers and photographed the cut outs in space with the same lighting, staging, and props you might find in the original social media.

The effect is jarring. By using the same photographic techniques that render human features, flat, and flawless the cut-out Kims-Kardashian blend seamlessly with their “real” props and backdrop. It’s a live-action Photoshop trick flatting the real and the hyperreal smashed together in one image. Reese’s images carefully crank up the absurdity of the source material in a way that is both disturbing and compelling. To be less poetic: This shit is weird, and we consume it every day.

The photos themselves are digital prints on vinyl, glued to the wall. The prints are huge. 40” x 50”. Big enough for the characters within to feel like they occupy your same space.

I left the exhibit asking myself similar questions. Why do I feel so drawn to this slop? What is it that’s so compelling? It also left me wanting to make big digital prints and glue them on walls. When viewing art makes me hungry make art, that art is a success.

See more of the exhibition work on her website.

Ben Buswell: This Land

From the photographs in the newsletter, Ben Buswell’s This Land looked compelling. The centerpiece of the exhibit is a large array aluminum angle bars arranged almost like a weaving. Lights are arranged overhead, so the shiny aluminum catches the light in a way that reminds me of Walter De Maria’s Broken Kilometer.

Photo from here.

From the exhibition notes:

The centerpiece of the exhibition is an expansive floor piece, a mirrored landscape that despite its reflective surface disallows the viewer to catch sight of their own image.

So immediately, the work is losing me. I like the aluminum floor piece, aesthetically. It’s compelling. But I’m an artist. I will look at and enjoybricks, wood grain, and that weird leaf over there on the ground.

De Maria’s Broken Kilometer works so well, in part, because of the clarity. The title tells you everything you need to bring to the piece. This is one kilometer of brass, broken up so it fits in the gallery. Look at it. Look how big it is. Look how shiny it is. Imagine it stretched all the way out in one long line. Did you ever think you could fit a whole kilometer in here?

From the exhibition notes, Buswell’s Magpie is supposed to be a mirrored landscape which disallows my reflection. But, no, it isn’t. The aluminum isn’t polished. It’s not mirrored. it’s shiny. This is a categorical error. This is tantamount to saying the sticky wooden bar table I’m sitting at to write is disallowing my reflection. I mean, maybe, I guess. Or maybe it’s just not reflective? (If somehow the artist had created a truly mirrored surface that wouldn’t let me see my reflection, then we’d really have something).

We’re off to a bad start.

As I look at the aluminum floor piece, directly behind my head is a framed collage of photographs with what appear to be holes punched through, revealing something behind them. Perhaps cursive writing, perhaps numbers. The exhibition takes the title of this piece, This Land

The overall effect is like an orderly constellation of points. The gallery guide indicates that the piece is made from “embellished emulsion prints, data”.

The exhibition notes state:

Similarly, the titular photographic work in the exhibition is a visualization of data points (violence rates, income levels, federal money, etc.), collected and reimagined through simple physical acts in an effort to “see” the nation without preconceptions.

Based upon this I assume that maybe the number of hole punches correlate to some number or another. There is an aspect of this that tickles me. I imagine estimating projects at work with a handful of beans. As each project is finished, add the estimated beans to a jar. Taking longer than you thought? Add some beans. At the end of the project, you can count up the beans. Look at them beans!

But the piece This Land is a chart without axes or a key. (A Bezos Chart) Without knowing what represents what, it’s just stuff.

I hesitate to use terms like good and bad when describing art. These can be qualitative terms, but they also carry a moral judgement. Bad artist! No! Bad!

I try to think in terms of success or failure. I think this work fails.

I think it’s to ask “how can you determine an artwork’s success or failure? It’s art? Isn’t it all just...art?”

With contemporary, institutional art, art of the museum, art of the MFA program, art of the academy tradition art methods have been long abandoned and can’t be used as a yardstick for measuring quality. Beauty isn’t a qualitative measure for this kind of art either. This kind of work is often anti-beauty, or at least has no aspirations towards beauty. So again, not relevant. If the work happens to be beautiful, that’s a bonus.

I should stress: All of this is fine even it’s not your cup of tea. It’s a big world, there’s something for everyone. This is why I split my time visiting art institutions and commercial galleries. One (hopefully) makes me think, the other makes me yearn.

But this art can be judged, I think, by the conditions it lays out for itself in its artist statement. Institutional, academic art can only function with wall text; an adjoining essay which lays out the concepts you should consider when experiencing the art. Contemporary art outside of a white cube, without wall text to describe it, is just stuff. Without that context, there’s no way to know how to consider it, or even if you should.

When the artist says “I want to collapse space through empathy in order to give our position in that space potential for a greater understanding, particularly in our relations with others” I can question whether or not they have done so. These are the terms the artist sets for themselves and the work and I don’t think they were met.

Secret Gallery

I didn’t love the show at Oregon Contemporary. I have to admit though, it got me to think long and hard about why I didn’t like it. There was something special hidden around a corner.

The main exhibition area of Oregon Contemporary is made up of two large galleries. Along the left side of the space, a sort of curtain wall divides the exhibition spaces from other parts of the building. Art collectives Well Well Projects and Carnation Contemporary rent these spaces for their own gallery shows. But there’s a special, secret, third space. A small gallery with a desk and a nice lounge chair. The art on the walls is in between spaces. Perhaps it’s on its way to a show. Maybe it’s just resting.

You never know how long any piece may be there. You never know what’s coming next.

This time there was a bold Keith Haring figure drawn onto a sheet of framed glass, a stately homage to the square by Josef Albers, and a lavish painting by Manoucher Yektai. Yektaiis totally new to me. The luscious paint tempted me to dip my hands into the surface of the painting and scoop out big handfuls of paint. (I resisted).

Notes on Memphis

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

We arrived by taxi at the Hotel Indigo about 9 o’clock at night. We checked into the hotel, went upstairs, dropped our bags, and went back downstairs in search of a snack and a cocktail. The girl at the front desk sent us to the adjoining restaurant. The restaurant is styled like an old fashioned diner; their menu is heavily focused on breakfast, biscuits mostly. When we bumbled through the door we found the restaurant a line of smartly dressed couples waiting in line while a harried hostess communicated with unseen people downstairs.

Below the breakfast diner is a speakeasy-style bar with live music. We were underdressed but they let us in anyway. A 3-piece band was setting up, guitar, bass, and drums. They cranked out covers of Otis Redding hits. They played the best, hard driving, soulful cover of The Beatles “Come Together” I’ve ever heard. We had a couple of drinks, a little snack of spinach artichoke dip, and watched the solo bartender struggle to keep up with the crowd. We watched dapper men flirt with sassy ladies at the bar.A man and his date could see we were a little bewildered and took us under his wing, described the band we were about to see, explained the music scene in Memphis and how many of these young people in bands get their start playing in their church, then branch out to local gigs, sometimes finding success out in the larger world.

We stayed through the band’s entire set, finished our drinks, and went upstairs to flop into bed.

The Hotel Indigo is a retro-themed hipster hotel. The interior is decorated with the zoomy images of transistor radios, trying to capture a “music city” vibe. The lobby and rooms are decked out with cool looking but ultimately crappy furniture. The walls are covered with big, blurry, black and white photos of radio dials and neon signs. Graphic Americana. Look closely and you can see the seams peeling apart on everything. The investors probably didn’t set aside any funds for upkeep of their hipster palace.

In the morning I realized that our 9th floor room afforded us a north-facing view of downtown. Look to the right and east, the downtown buildings drop away quickly to the flat landscape of western Tennessee. Look left, and west, a clustered knot of high rise office buildings and hotels. The Mississippi River is hidden from view. Directly north, straight out the window, is a beautiful old brick building with five columns of paired windows. At the top of each column is an ornate cap of stone and tile, a circle incscribed within a half moon, with verticals and horizontals recapitulating the shape of the windows below. It’s the kind of decoration you’d never see at street level, it’s only visible from another building or from a great distance away.

The inside of the building is gutted, stripped down to the concrete. You can peer into the windows and see the sunrise on the other side of the building. Stripped of interior walls, the building is eerie, like an open tomb or the inside of a skull.

There are a lot of derelict buildings in downtown Memphis. I suspect many are victims of the pandemic. No amount of return-to-office-mandates will save commercial real estate. Building investors are struggling against a wave of convenience and lower cost. Companies heavily invested in real estate are going to find themselves at an economic and cultural disadvantage to those companies who broke their lease or opted for the hybrid approach. You can only swim upstream for a while.

The morning is cold. There was a recent snow storm here. There is icy evidence in the shadows of the tall buildings. The occasional sidewalk is still treacherous.

We came back to the diner, now open for breakfast with no evidence of live music below ground. I had excellent shrimp and grits, the best grits I ever had, coffee and orange juice. We got ourselves put together and waited for my cousin to arrive. My cousin is a mathematician, working at Mississippi State University. Being a brilliant mathematician, she is completely flummoxed by freeways, parking, and text messaging. She arrived safely, parked illegally across the street from the hotel.

We jaywalked over and hopped in her car, and drove to the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. The Stax museum is a wonderland of soul music. Each exhibit has a sound track. The museum is laid out as sort of a timeline of soul music history, beginning with a reassembled one-room church illustrating the history of gospel music and its place in music history.

The museum has incredible memorabilia, instruments, stage outfits, vinyl records, and even Isaac Haye’s 24 karat gold-detailed Cadillac. In the center of the museum is a recreation of the famous Stax recording studio. The original studio was repurposed from an old movie theater. The recreation is perfectly accurate, complete with the sloping floor. Standing in the recreated studio, you can look through a glass window onto the original recording console. The whole experience is pretty magical. I felt like I might hear a ghost tuning a guitar at any minute.

We returned to downtown Memphis and decided to visit the Peabody Hotel. We arrived just in time to snag a seat before the Duck March began.

At 11am every morning, the Peabody Hotel duckmaster heads upstairs to the rooftop duck palace to collect 5 North American mallards. There is one male (a drake) and four females (hens). The ducks waddle from their palace, across the rooftop deck, to the elevator and down to the lobby. When they arrive they are greeted by a crowd of onlookers. The ducks then march down a red carpet, up a small staircase, and into the grand marble fountain in the center of the lobby. All the while the duckmaster tells tales of the ducks and their history at the Peabody. At 5pm the ducks, and their duckmaster, march back upstairs to their palace where they rest and nest for the night.

The next morning my wife went for a run along the waterfront of the mighty Mississippi which left me free to find a coffee shop and a little quiet time to write. The Crazy Gander coffee shop is just around the corner from the hotel. The shop is bright and cheery with a big roll-up garage style door, yellow upholstered furniture, and big leafy plants everywhere. The shop was run by two cute college-age kids with lilting Tennessee accents.

We were on our way to Graceland this morning. My cousin met us again in her favorite illegal parking spot and we drove off to find Graceland. If you remember Graceland as a stately southern mansion surrounded by trees, you are correct. But today, Graceland is a giant complex of museum exhibits, dining, and event spaces. When you arrive you park in a giant lot across the highway from the historic home and enter the complex through a white iron gate, modeled after the gates in front of the house. The main entrance and ticketing area sits beneath giant, swooping signage reading “Welcome to Graceland” in bold yellow cursive. Once you have your tickets you are herded into a small theater to watch a short film about Elvis’ career. Then they load you into a shuttle bus to leave the mega-complex and visit the historic family home.

My wife, cousin, and I brought the average age of the tour group down to about 68. The little shuttle bus zipped through the dedicated intersection which serves the museum complex, across the 4 lane road and through the white gates. We gathered on the front porch of the house for a brief lecture on how we were to behave once inside. Take all the pictures you want, but no video or audio recording. None. No sir. None.

Of course, as we filed in through the screen door in the main entryway, a Boomer-dad waltzed in with his phone up in front of his face, shooting video the entire time. One of the guides, another older man, was not having it and yelled at Boomer dad to stop shooting and to delete the video. They do not mess around at Graceland.

The home is at once more modest and more absurd than I expected. It’s not small, but after years of McMansions littering the nation’s suburbs, it doesn’t seem big either. In most respects the house is pretty tasteful, if a little opulent. My grandparents would have regarded the parlor and dining room as perfectly nice. The kitchen, though cavernous and carpeted, looks like a 70s kitchen. Dark wood, dark colors, These parts of the house are a quick tour through my parent’s world. Things don’t get really Elvis until you see the living room.

Giant sitting chairs with giant ash trays on huge pedestals crouch on deep green shag carpet. Plants grow everywhere, and a now-defunct waterfall is dramatically lit against one wall. Down a mirrored stairway to the basement, we are led into the eye-popping yellow and black bar and lounge with the infamous three televisions mounted into the wall. I recall hearing about the three TVs and that it was excessive. Three TVs? That’s too many! Now we are surrounded by screens all the time. Elvis was prescient.

We were led up the back stairs, green carpet foreshadowing that we would emerge near the grotto of a living room. We strolled outside to see Elvis’s father’s home office which belongs in an episode of Mad Men. We saw the racquet ball court, which was clearly just an ancillary man-cave to supplement the grotto and the lounge. Then we were led up to the swimming pool and meditation garden.

The meditation garden holds the tombs of Elvis, his parents, and Lisa Marie Presley. Elvis’ and his daughter’s graves are covered in small offerings and mementos. The graves surround a small fountain. A brick wall, fitted with stained glass windows curves around this sacred space, shielding it from the neighbors.

We were directed to the carport to await our return shuttle. Now is our appointed time to take our selfies in front of the house. Back aboard the shuttle, we were carted back to giant museum complex to gawk at memorabilia, a collection of outlandish automobiles, and Elvis’ old military uniforms. I stood near a bright red MG convertible, watching a video screen high up on the wall over the exhibition space. Home movies of snow at Graceland. Elvis’s mother Gladys arriving home in a snow-covered-land-yacht of a car. An old woman on a motorized scooter barked at me to get out of the way so she could snap a picture of the MG and buzz off to the next exhibit.

The whole experience of Graceland left me melancholy. It felt like a funeral. There were only nice things to say about Elvis. Nothing said about his untimely death or the entertainment industry that devoured him.On our way out of Graceland, we stopped at the faux 50s diner named after Gladys. We all got peanut butter and banana sandwiches, as you should, and sat in a hollowed out Cadillac to eat.

The last big grid

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Back in January, Instagram changed the format of their profile pages from a 3-wide grid of squares to a 3-wide grid of 4 x 5 rectangles. This change probably reflects Instagram’s continued effort to become a generic TikTok clone for boomers. The 4 x 5 grid of rectangles is better than squares for displaying video previews.

For me, though, this undid a few years of work. I had been using Instagram as a sort of sketchbook or playground where I’d create one very large image and break it apart into a three by nine grid of squares and then post each square individually. In my feed you’d see a detail or close up of some image, but if you viewed my profile, you’d see pages and pages of unbroken images rolling into each other. When I was really on my game, one big grid would blend into the next big grid to create a sort of seamless experience. This is The Wrong Way to use Instagram. It doesn’t result in a lot of engagement, it’s not a great promotional tool. But that’s all fine. it’s a fun creative exercise.

My last big grid was a top-down view of a tiled breakfast table with coffee, toast, and eggs. As I worked on the image, it reminded me of a diner in central Guadalajara that had pictures on the menus. The tables are faux wood grain, and not tile. This is where I learned that eggs, sunny side up, are huevos estrellados. This became theme of this piece and when I posted each square to Instagram, I added a little note about eggs in Mexico.

I created the image entirely in Sketch, which is a vector-based tool, primarily used for designing user interfaces and other digital products. It’s not really an illustration tool. This is The Wrong Way to use Sketch. Each component of the image is made from geometry. A stack of circles becomes a plate. Add colors and gradients and it starts to take on dimension, like painting with math. The result is a sort of hyper-real, polished rendering of a table top. I tried to layout the image in such a way that it was almost, but not quite, a repeating pattern.

But no more; big grids are done. This app updated coincided with Meta’s decision to eliminate fact checkers and other trust and safety features. Together, these two events made for a good time to stop posting to Instagram. Since then I’ve deleted all of my old posts by the. They were broken by the layout change anyway, so I’m not losing anything. I’ve deleted the app from my phone and along the way deactivated my Threads account. Threads is Instagram’s sad Twitter clone and has the all of the quality and character of a glossy airline magazine stuffed deep inside your seat-back pocket.

I haven’t quite gone as far as to delete my account. Instagram is my only connection to a few real people in the real world and I’d hate to lose that. I’d also hate for some discount shoe store to scoop up my username. I’ll keep the account active for now.

My Instagram usage has dwindled. I check-in on my people on my computer, at my desk, in the morning, after I check my email. Instagram is no longer an annoying calorie-free dopamine hit in the checkout line of the supermarket.

I think I like it that way.

Tamara de Lempicka at the De Young

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The hotel looked cute on Expedia. It’s an old San Francisco building with those famous bay windows. My cab driver was surprised to discover its existence. I have now learned that $200 a night in San Francisco gets you a clean but basic traveler’s hotel. Most of the units have shared baths on the hallway. This hotel is for college kids and hipsters on the cheap.

The hotel is very basic and quite shabby with lots of renovation in process. Plastic sheets cover the hall carpet where the walls are being resurfaced on every floor. It smells like the carpet was just cleaned. It felt slightly damp under my sock feet.

The hotel has no amenities except wifi and a coffee machine. When I arrived I had to go find a bodega to buy toothpaste. Are they called bodegas in San Francisco?

The room is a corner unit with one of those bay windows. I sat and watched late night traffic and ne’er-do-wells on the street. In the building across the street there was a late night house party of some kind. It wasn’t a teenage rager, but some adults doing adult things, milling around the apartment with a drink in hand.

I’m here to go to the DeYoung museum and to see the Tamara de Lempicka retrospective. The show closes in February and now is my chance. My tickets are for 10am. There is a small coffee shop around the corner. I plan to have a lingering breakfast, go see the painted ladies, then make my way to the DeYoung.

I found breakfast a little coffee shop called “Alamo Square Café” which opened at 8. The signs and the internet said they open at 7:30. The Alamo Café is a local place and everyone but me knew the staff. I sipped coffee and ate a bagel sandwich while typing on my iPad. Immediately across from me a man roughly my age had his laptop on a stand with a split ergonomic keyboard and a mouse. Soulmates.

I hopped a bus to the museum as a novelty. Look at me! I’m on a bus! I made my way to the museum, flashed my virtual ticket, dropped my bag and coat at the coat check, grabbed an audio guide, and entered the exhibit.

The exhibition opens on a large, glamorous photo of de Lempicka surrounded by some of her early academic work (mostly pencil studies) and an unfinished portrait posthumously titled “Russian Dancer”. In this portrait the face is nearly complete in that clean, smooth style that de Lempicka is famous for. Parts of the portrait are roughly blocked in with transparent color. Around the hand and sleeve you can see her strong, geometric line work.

I love unfinished paintings. I love to see the bones, to see how the painting was put together. In this painting you can see de Lempicka relies on very little underdrawing. This reveals her confidence in her ability to see and understand the forms in front of her and capture them reliably. She’s not using tools like a grid or sight lines, just a few spare painted strokes to delineate the figure.

I’ve been a quiet fan of de Lempicka since I was a kid in art school. Once, in Las Vegas casino, I thought I saw a de Lempicka hanging in a stairwell. I remember asking a rough looking man in a suit and name tag if I could take a photo. He said “knock yourself out”. In retrospect, it was probably a poster in a nice frame. I might have seen one real painting of hers in a museum in New York once. Maybe.

This retrospective is the first of its kind in the United States. I’m lucky to have the time and means to come and see it. The show features a collection of De Lempicka’s most famous paintings, some sketches and studies,a few comparative samples of work by her teacher André Lhote, all alongside flapper dresses, evening gowns, ceramics, and yellowed copies of Vogue and Vanity Fair to set the mood.

Her jazz-age cubism renders her subjects in machined perfection. Her figures are constructed with geometry. Nudes are formed like steel auto parts. Ringlets of hair are copper shavings glinting in the light. Eyes are inset glass. The surfaces of her paintings are impossibly smooth with no visible brushstrokes. Her lines are clean, her edges are sharp. This might sound cold, but her work radiates eros. There’s a heaving, warm life to her figures that defies the method by which they are painted. That tension makes the work sing. There is a cliche in painting that big sloppy brushstrokes represent big strong feelings. When you see the maintained passion of de Lempicka’s work, you quickly understand that big sloppy brushstrokes are kitsch.

Many of her portraits were commissioned by Very Important People. But the others are lovers, sex workers, husbands, and ex husbands. De Lempicka’s love life was far reaching and epic. She paints her female lovers as strong and confident with squared shoulders, making direct eye contact, but still feminine. Her men are demure, almost coquettish, leaning at relaxed angles, inviting, but still masculine. De Lempicka doesn’t subvert gender roles, but broadens them. Her women and men contain multitudes.

De Lempicka lived a glamours life, finding herself in Vogue magazine (on the cover as an illustration, and between the pages). She navigated the world of celebrity expertly and used it to build a career as an artist. Wall text in the gallery and voice-over in the audio guide tried to make comparisons to Instagram influencers. That’s not wrong but it seems, to me, to diminish what she accomplished. Instagram influencers are over first of all, but more importantly, they don’t produce anything of lasting value. They are disposable and interchangeable. De Lempicka wielded celebrity to create great works of art.

A new year, a new microwave

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The Frigidaire over-the-range microwave, model number FGMV176NTF, has a critical design flaw. The big heavy door has two mechanical latches which hold the door shut and protect you from dangerous microwave radiation. One latch on the top, one on the bottom of the inside of the big, heavy door.

Because the microwave is over the range people tend to grab the door handle from the bottom, and pull a little bit downward when opening the door. This causes the latches to wear unevenly. This means that the hidden switches behind the latches may not be switched at the same time. This causes the microwave to sometimes trip the breaker, sometimes blow a fuse.

This microwave is 6 years old.

You can confirm my observations by going onto YouTube and searching for “frigidaire” and the model number. You’ll find dozens of helpful home improvement dad-bros showing you how to pull apart the microwave, to replace fuses, and even entire switch mechanisms.

Oh. There’s also, a secret third switch. When the bottom door latch gets worn enough, it not only switches unevenly, it also fails to switch the hidden switch. This means the microwave will trip the breaker every time you use it. The light and exhaust fan still work, but now the microwave only serves as a ver cumbersome lighted cabinet.

The Home Depot was having a sale. I bought a shiny new Whirlpool slim-line over-the-range microwave with a better looking door situation. Priced originally at $600, it was on sale for $400. Great, I guess. I suspect that prices don’t actually mean anything. I’d place a strong bet that with shipping, packing, assembly, and some small overage to cover design and development of the product, the actual cost to Home Depot is probably $200 or less for any microwave in the store. So whatever. $400 or $600. Home Depot got paid.

The new microwave was delivered on a Thursday and waited patiently for my wife to go out of town over the long MLK weekend so I could wreck the kitchen and hopefully get it back together again by Tuesday.

Over the range microwaves are heavier than their counter-top counterparts. They house a microwave, exhaust fan, vents, and lighting in the same clunky metal box. I think ours weighed about 50lbs. To get these things off the wall is typically a two man job as you can’t unscrew the giant bolts which hold the thing up without it crashing down on top of the oven below. Typically one person would hold it in place while another unbolts it and then together gently lower the thing to the floor.

I was solo on this mission so I created a sort of stand for the microwave out of the heavy packing cardboard for the new microwave. That sounds flimsy, but this cardboard was incredibly dense and strong. I cut it to size with a saw.

Once I got the microwave off the wall I surveyed the cabinets and the wall behind the hutch where the old microwave sat. The installers of this microwave couldn’t find a stud in our plaster and lathe walls, so they figured why not just use seven or eight wood screws in the lathe. That should work. Right? There was also a hole left in the drywall. The kitchen installers ran tile rightup to the bottom of the microwave. There was a row of poorly cut ⅓ size tiles glued into place on the wall with no grout. The kind of sloppiness you wouldn’t notice unless you stuck your head under the microwave and examined the walls.

I removed the tile with a chisel. I patched the hole in the wall, and skimmed plaster over the drywall where the tile had been. At this point I was very glad I turned down installation from Home Depot. I know what would have happened. A couple of guys would have yanked down the old microwave, and slapped up the new one, leaving all the tile, holes, and all the rest for the future.

Plaster drying on the walls, time to look at the cabinets. The microwave was nestled between two wall-mounted cabinets. The sides of those cabinets formed a square alcove for the microwave. The outer sides of the cabinets formed the inner walls of this alcove. And they were peeling.

I asked Chatty Gwhy my cabinets were peeling and Chatty G told me about ThermoFoil.

ThermoFoil is trash.

ThermoFoil is a thin sheet of vinyl or plastic heat-formed to the surface of MDF cabinets. The MDF here, is fine. Modern MDF is durable, strong, paintable, patchable, etc. ThermoFoil wraps something inexpensive, but effective, in plastic garbage.

There is no way to shield the cabinets above the stove. The cabinets around the microwave just sit and absorb heat from the oven and presumably from the microwave. Prolonged exposure to heat causes ThermoFoil to slowly break down. The glue fails, the surface becomes brittle and starts to peel and flake away. Heavy use or high-friction areas show the same kind of wear. The corners of cabinet doors and drawers will begin to show wear over time.

These cabinets are 6 years old.

I found that my wife’s very powerful salon-quality hair dryer did a surprisingly good job of removing some of the old ThermoFoil. That’s not an Approved Use Case for a hair dryer, so I bought a small cordless heat gun and together with a flat scraper I easily removed this vinyl trash. I wiped down the exposed surfaces with denatured alcohol to dissolve the remaining glue and then applied three coats of semi-gloss paint. Better than new.

The plaster dried, so I sprayed on more orange peel texture to match the existing wall. Along with the creators of ThermoFoil, the creators of spray-on orange-peel wall texture need to be tied to a pier and left there while the tide comes in. The silly spray-junk dried and I painted the back wall of my microwave hutch to match our sunny orange accent wall. I cleaned up the tile with new quarter-round bull nose edge tiles to match the rest of the kitchen and matched the grout color as best I could (how many medium grey grout colors can there be).

Most of this job was a fit of heavy work, like removing a microwave, followed by a spurt of light work, like patching a wall, and then a lot of waiting for things to dry. So drying time became dog-walking time. I took the poodle out for a jaunt and discussed with him the next phase of the project. He is a very good listener.

It was time to install the new microwave. I prepped everything, drilled new holes for new bolts. Attached the mounting hardware to the wall. I found the wall studs. Maybe I should be a contractor. My neighbor, the Handsome Actor™ helped me heave the microwave into place and held it there while I bolted it down. After cleaning, the kitchen looked better than new.

While I was going down this rabbit hole I remembered my grandparents microwave. When I was a kid, we didn’t have a microwave. My parents shunned them for reasons of cost and amorphous principles. But my grandparents had a microwave and I thought it was magical. It was probably new in the 70s and lasted at least 20 years, the chromed knobs and faux wood grain gleaming brightly well into the Clinton years.

La Biennale

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

When we landed in Venice, the smartly dressed and well pressed young man who escorted us to our water taxi asked what our plans were for Venice, what would we see? What would we do? I explained that, while we had tours scheduled to see the city, our big plans were to visit the Venice Biennale.

“Ah, la Biennale…” he responded as if that explained everything.

The Venice Biennale was the seed that grew into our Italian vacation. It was our reason, or at least my driving reason for visiting Italy. A trip to Venice to see art was my 50th birthday present to myself.

Our jam-packed trip allowed us to visit the Biennale twice. Our first visit was to the Giardini Della Biennale. Our vaporetto chugged eastward to the mouth of the Grand Canal to the historic, 19th century gardens which have been the home of the Biennale since the beginning. Along the canal we saw the bright red signs and crowds of visitors making their way to the entrance. The vaporetto pulled up to the dock as the attendant who managed the passengers deftly tossed a thick, heavy rope around a big steel post on the dock. With a little twist and a flip of his wrist, the rope knotted itself securely and creaked, snapped, and popped as the boat pulled the rope tight, then pulled itself against the dock with athump.

We disembarked from the boat, turned right, and followed the signs and the crowds. A large, semi-temporary, gently sloped aluminum ramp was built up and over the traditional marble steps bridging a small canal, making the gardens wheelchair accessible.We collected our passes at the entrance and made our way into the gardens past a restaurant guarded by a giant bronze goddess.

I really didn’t know what to expect. I deliberately went in a bit blind. I didn’t do any research. I just wanted to be there and see what there was to see and learn all about it.

The Giardini is dotted with international pavilions, small buildings which host a country’s contribution to the Biennale. Some pavilions are small, some are grand, some are architectural wonders. The United States pavilion is a postmodern pastiche of neoclassical architecture reminiscent of the US capital. This year Jeffrey Gibsonrepresented the United States in a solo exhibition and the US pavilion was painted in a bold patchwork colors work of colors matching his artwork.

We wandered around and through the different pavilions, admiring the art and sometimes just the buildings. Sometimes a country will lend its pavilion to another country which can create an interesting friction between politics of the art and the country named over the doorway. We found lunch

The title of the Biennale this year was “Foreigners Everywhere” which, for a city often overrun by tourists, evokes perhaps a different meaning than intended broad inclusivity and diversity the show is aiming for.

We looked at art until our brains were full. You can’t see everything. I try not to make art exhibitions into a marathon. If the art is blurring together and you can’t remember which century you’re looking at, it’s past time for a break. When you leave an art exhibition, you should feel energized and perhaps inspired. You should not be exhausted.

We will come back to the Biennale in 2 days.

The following day we toured St. Marks square, the Doge’s palace, and the adjoining cathedral. We learned about Casanova’s incarceration there and his outrageous escape. I recalled seeing a movie about Casanova as a child. It must have been the made-for-tv movie and not the Fellini film. My memory of the movie prison cell matched well with the real thing.

The following day we took our time coming back to the Biennale. The venues are open well into the evening, plenty of time. We took the vaporetto to the same stop as the previous day. This time we took a left and followed the signs to the Arsenale venue. We found ourselves on a wide boulevard. Strange for Venice. I had become accustomed to narrow walkways between buildings or along canals. I assumed that this boulevard must have once been a canal, filled in to create space for shopping and dining.

I learned much later through Google Mapping and internet sleuthing that this street, Via Garibaldi was, in fact, a canal converted into a boulevard by Napoleon.

Along the way we stopped for wine and a snack. Dotted all over Venice you can find small cafés which are something between a bar and a coffee shop. They serve mainly wine and small appetizers called cicchetti, small servings of bruschetta with interesting toppings. Two is a snack, four is a meal. Our café had a few tall tables out in the street, a big hand-written menu of wines by the glass, and a glass case of beautiful toasts covered in savory delights. Mrs. Barrett used her very best DuoLingo Italian to ask about the wines. The women working the café found this endearing and took extra care of us.

We slid off our tall barstools and followed signs to the Biennale. The sun was setting and as we cut through a small alleyway to get to the venue we watched an older man, neck craned back, having a conversation with a woman on the second floor, pinning laundry to a clothesline which spanned the street.

Before we arrived at the official entrance, we bumbled into a pop-up location for Hong Kong artist Trevor Yeung. The exhibition space was dark, eerily lit with purple lights. The artist sought to recreate his experience of being a child and visiting pet stores and hiding among the aquariums. Rows of stacks of aquariums, glowed under strange light, and bubbled away. The effect was incredible. I was immediately a kid staring at fish in the back of a giant pet store in Charlotte. Interestingly, there were no fish. Just aquariums.

We left the bubbling water to find the Arsenale. We presented our passes and as we entered a voice on the loudspeaker admonished that closing time was fast approaching.

What? No, we have plenty of time.

We did not have plenty of time. We learned that we misread the hours. Those hours we read were summer hours. It is October. Autumn hours close early.

God damn it.

I took off through the space. I hurried to try to see as much as I could before I was kicked out. I was hoping to see something, anything, profound or great so that my last day wouldn’t be a waste.

I power walked past lots of things, pausing only for moments at things that I thought I should look up later. Fine, fine, good, no, no, good, no. Room after room.

The space is enormous, a vast old building with a pitched roof, and brick columns. Under ordinary circumstances, this would have been a great place to wander and ponder. But now I wanted to take home something.

I got lucky.

I passed a claptrap assemblage over a square pool of water into a darkened room. I stumbled into The Mapping Journey by Bouchra Khalili.

The darkened space had carpeted floors, to prevent echoing footsteps. About ten, maybe a dozen video screens hung from the rafters on wire. On each screen was projected a map. Then I noticed subtitles. Then I noticed a hand with a pen drawing on a map.

I chose a screen and watched. An unseen narrator with a marker, mapped out a journey, while explaining what happened to them along the way. The narrators were migrant workers from Northern or Eastern Africa, the Middle East, or South Asia. They recalled their journey to try to get to mainland Europe to find work.

The stories were harrowing in their detail, but each narrator was so matter of fact. “That’s just life” you could imagine them saying. They jumped trains, hid in box cars, took buses, hitchhiked, walked, got scammed by devious uncles, got robbed. They lost their papers, got nabbed by the authorities and sent home. They would get word of work or a supportive family member in, say, Spain, and then embark on an epic journey to get there only to find the work had evaporated. Each story was moving and the presentation was so simple and effective.

Some narrators traced the roads and rail lines they traveled on. Some drew straight lines from place to place, inadvertently creating patterns of interlocking triangles. The maps got cluttered with marker as the stories unfolded. Often the stories ended “and here I am today”.

The exhibition space, with many screens gave me a sense of scale. That there are many such stories. But the format was so simple and perfect it would work in a movie theater, as a streaming documentary, or a YouTube channel. Just brilliant. This was the most profound and moving artwork I have seen in years.

We left as folks in official attire started shooing folks towards the door. We walked to the exit bifurcated. I was partly enraptured by this artwork, but also just so damn mad that we messed up the entrance times.

On our way back to the vaporetto, we walked down a side street next to a canal. We found a busy restaurant with lots of outdoor seating. we took a table and ordered wine and pizza.

I sat and brooded for several minutes. Eventually the wine worked and I started to feel better. The Biennale will be here again in 2026 and I can be too. You can’t see everything.

Nightcap

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

"Nightcap" began with a snapshot of my kitchen window, taken from outside at just past dusk when the sky was dark, but weirdly illuminated by city lights. The exterior lights cast a strange yellow light on the grey walls of our house.

I was thinking about windows and reflections, so I created a grid of bright sunny sunrise colors which I promptly buried behind iconic clouds.

A wedge of lime invites you to have just one more before turning in.

Street art in Florence

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

As we walked all over Florence, I kept seeing these faces looking out at me. These posters were always placed for maximum impact, right at eye-to-eye level. I’d find these on a corner jutting out into the street, or at a bend in an alley-way, any spot which seemed to naturally frame the portrait.

The first poster I saw was this ¾ view portrait giving me side-eye.

If you look carefully you can see that the whites of her eyes have been colored (white) to provide a tiny bit of contrast. The figure is a silhouette, cut from a large piece of paper. She blends into her surroundings, as if she’s about to disappear into a doorway.

The next image that stood out to me was this direct, frontal portrait:

Here, she’s crowning the top of some electrical junction box, slathered in stickers and graffiti. Her jaw and neckline disappear into the background, as if she’s lit up by a papparazzo’s flashbulb. Who is she? Jane Birkin? Margot Robbie? Or an artistic amalgam?

Here she is again, with a new friend:

Our new friend has a sort of signature: Be_Onigiri.

Here’s our new friend again with green highlights

This time in shocking pink. It looks like someone tried to take her home, but failed.

These faces were all over -- there was a lot of other great street art too, but these portraits really spoke to me. I think it’s the confrontational gaze; the strong FAFO vibes.

After I returned home I kept thinking about these images. I wondered if I could find out more about them. First I did a reverse-image search for Be_Onigiri.

I found that Be_Onigiri is the Instagram handle for an artist calling themselves “Brat Effimera” - which is a great name. Could be a band, a brand, or a superhero from outerspace.

The profile has link, no description, only encouragment to have a nice day and be onigiri (I will try). How mysterious.

I searched for the other two portraits the same way, and discovered the stencil artist Ache77.

Ache77 also has a great Instagram page:

Internet searching brought up this interesting short interview (in Italian) on firenzeurbanlifestyle.com - try your browser’s translation feature.

He is a co-founder of Street Levels Gallery in Florence. He sells prints and other pieces through their online store (mine is on it’s way and according to UPS currently in a warehouse in Bologna).

Helen Frankenthaler at Palazzo Strozzi

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Our hotel is right nearby Palazzo Strozzi. Today this is a venue for cultural exhibitions but once was a family home of the Strozzi family who feuded with the Medici family during the Renaissance. Lucky me, this palazzo survived to host an exhibit of Helen Frankenthaler’s painting.

The exhibit includes a small number of companion pieces from Pollock, Motherwell, and Rothko. The show is overwhelmingly Frankenthaler, but these additions give a little historical context.

The exhibit winds around the atrium on the second floor of the Palazzo and ends with a video montage of several filmed interviews with the artist. Frankenthaler speaks about her process and her own training and education in modern art. She was an ardent student of modernism and cubism. In the video, she describes her work as an extension of those traditions, a natural outgrowth of those modes of thinking and painting. This makes the title of the show – Painting without Rules – seem a bit, I don’t know, out of touch with the painter and her work. Frankenthaler’s painting technique is an innovation born out of careful study of both history and of contemporary artists around her at the time (Pollock and friends).

Anyway, it doesn’t matter. What matters is these paintings are gorgeous. One in particular Ocean Drive West #1 from 1974 made me feel like I stood at the bottom of a deep swimming pool, looking up at the sky. The colors are so deep and they create such subtle shapes and hard edges. The image evokes landscape without being a landscape, and without any visual cliches like a big horizontal line to mimic the horizon. As the title suggests there is a sense of motion, of driving by, and a sense of distance. It’s like the emotional impact of a drive down the coast was distilled into an aquamarine liquor, then chilled to freezing. It comes to life on your tongue and makes you remember the lives of your ancestors.

The piece reminds of a piece, Swimming Pool by Leandro Ehrlich. Elrich's piece is a literal swimming pool, deconstructed so that you can experience it without scuba gear. Both pieces put me in a similar state of mind.

The exhibit opens with an enormous, wide, panorama Movable Blue from 1973. The painting is more than 20 feet wide and 5 feet tall. An immense blue pool takes most of the frame, bordered by golden yellow and lavender grey. The image evokes estuaries and coast line, but also a grotto or the mouth of a cave. It is at once sunny and open, and enveloping. When I arrived at the show, an older couple entered just before me. The husband (the art lover) kissed his wife good bye and we found ourselves standing shoulder to shoulder admiring this painting before wandering through the rest of the show.

Bumbling

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

She wants to listen to the vespri at a cathedral we passed while walking through Florence. I think vespri are a version of liturgy which is sung instead of spoken.

I have no interest in such things. Besides, I’m a heretic. I might burst into flames and ruin everyone’s day.

We walked to the cathedral and she finds a seat. I bumbled down the street and found a noisy corner bar labeled “Bar” in gold letters painted on glass. These Italian bars are part coffee shop, part bakery, part pizzeria, and also a bar. They are noisy and busy; full of locals and dimwit tourists alike.

I approached the counter and buono serra’ed my way into finding out I could just take any open seat. A dark haired young woman took my order. I had learned that, in Italy, pizza by the slice is typically a sheet pan pizza cut into rectangles. It’s often sold bt weight. Does it have a different name? I clumsily pointed and asked. She explained that this was a margarita pizza.

I felt foolish. But I’m a fool with a slice pizza and a glass of Chianti.

My pizza reminds me of school lunch. But the crust is crisp, gently fried in the oil from the sheet pan. The cheese is delicious and salty and the tomato sauce is rich with depth. It only superficially resembles the cardboard and government-cheese pizza from grade school. I am nostalgic and satisfied but worried that they might not accept credit cards. I only have €15 in cash and I want more wine.

I’m having mixed feelings about Florence. I have seen the most beautiful things here. The city is great. But when I play the travelers’ game of “could I live here” I can only imagine myself transferred here for work and making the best of it.

Now, if I find myself in a job which transfers me to Florence, Italy, and I complain? Shoot me dead. I don’t deserve to live.

But Florence is full of tourists in a way that is very different from Venice. There are too many Americans. Too many bumbling parents with strollers, and just too many. This city would be great if you could empty it of all the people for the weekend.

As I write this, I suddenly remember the book “The Brief History of the Dead” by Kevin Brockmeier.

In this book people who die find themselves in a city which grows and shrinks to accommodate the total number of dead. I realize now that my mental image of this city is (was) Florence. Prognosticating travel through literature.

I have eaten my pizza sqaure and I’ve ordered another glass of wine. I have found that ordering a second glass of wine is usually met with a “sure” or a “why not?” as if it were a foregone conclusion. The most obvious thing in the world. And I suppose you’ll continue breathing? Very good.

With a full belly and one glass of wine, I like Florence more. I pay at the counter, now with much more confidence. I leave to find the cathedral where I left my wife. While I wait for the service to end, I stand on the stone steps by the entrance and watch people walk by.

In the right frame of mind, the crowds become the ocean. Noisy, possibly dangerous, something to perhaps watch from a safe place.

Florence by Train

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I left my wife sleeping deeply in the hotel room.

At the end of the day, yesterday, she came down with some kind of mysterious tummy bug. It began with motion sickness in the vaparetto and ended with no sleep. The following morning, she barely made it through breakfast. We managed to pack and catch our boat to the train station.

The Venice train station was busy and crowded with no place to sit. We found a corner out of the way and perched on our luggage. I paced around, checking the lighted signs for our train. I’m a fastidious traveler by nature. In a foreign country, I am extra vigilant. I check the signs every 5 minutes. On one my rounds trips to the platform, I pop my head into a Moleskine store and dream of fancy notebooks and backpacks.

Our train arrives and we line up. A young woman in a conductor’s uniform checks our ticket and immediately clocks us as Americans. She asks, in English, where our seat is. She is trying to split up the crowd into even lines and the front and back of the train car, so that boarding is less of a jumble of bodies and bags. She’s pretty. The Beatle’s song “Lovely Rita” plays in my mind. As we board a young couple with absurdly huge bags struggle with the reality of limited luggage storage. Ultimately they shove their bag in front of their seat, and the young woman sits atop it.

My weary wife slept on the train. I dozed a bit and watched the landscape roll by. I was struck by how empty this world is. Between major population centers there is nothing. This seems in contradiction to the fact that there are 800 year old churches all over. Where is everyone?

Our driver meets us by the pharmacy on the platform of the Florence station. I didn’t catch her name, but she drove a big Mercedes van through narrow streets while cursing at pedestrians. She’s a pro.

Traffic patterns in Florence are impressionistic. It reminds me a little of Mexico. Our drive explains (complains) that since they’ve limited vehicle access to much of central Florence, the traffic is far worse, because the pedestrians have become lawless and clueless about cars.

Our hotel is a repurposed, ancient fortified tower. We are early. Our room is not ready, so we were led to a rooftop bar. We could see the dome of the famous Florence Cathedral golden in the afternoon sun. I ordered their special martini and wolfed down peanuts and potato chips while my wife nursed a sparkling water and nibbled cautiously. To our left sat a clutch of the worst, tacky Americans you could imagine. They were failing, loudly, to book a taxi or operate their phones.

We are fetched when our room is ready. My wife quickly fell into bed to sleep away her ailing tummy. I doom-scrolled election news on my phone. I finally grew restless enough to accept that no matter how far I scrolled, I couldn’t fix it. So I left the hotel for a quick walk through the neighborhood. We are next to the Arno River and very close to the Uffizi and surrounded by high fashion shops.

I listened to a street performer sing a part of an opera. I popped into a very cool shoe store (don’t worry, I’ll be back later). I came back to the room and tried to recharge my phone and myself. She was still sleeping. I asked if she was hungry. No. I asked if she wanted me to go eat on my own. Yes. I reminded her that if I take the hotel key, the room will be plunged into darkness. Fine.

I walked around the little plaza near our hotel and peeked at menus. I am drawn to a little trattoria, but I kept searching. My first instinct was correct. Other places were too formal, other places only served wine and snacks. I wanted pizza and I didn’t want to roam too far to find it.

I returned to the trattoria and meekly asked the maître d’ for a table. He clarified “to eat?” Yes please. I grabbed a seat on the street and bumbled my way into ordering a glass of red wine and a pizza with tuna and red onion. That might sound strange, but when cooked atop a pizza, canned tuna loses any fishiness and just becomes rich, savory, and almost buttery. The sharp red onion keeps it from being too rich and it all goes well with red wine. This was one of my favorite meals from my trip.

A young blonde woman sat in the table next to me. She sheepishly ordered “chicken parm” in a broad Midwestern accent. I imagined she was abandoned by her traveling companions and making the best of it. I wondered: is she visiting with family or is she an exchange student? She looked my way a few times, looking for a conversation. I did not engage. I did not want to adopt a lost college kid for the week.

The plaza is getting quiet and I’m finishing my second glass of wine. The young lady finished her chicken parm and disappeared. She has been replaced by a British couple and some quiet white-haired Americans. The British couple has gone and now I’m eavesdropping on a two ladies having dinner and getting to know each other. Seems like a date. One woman is an art student. She is wearing a bulky button-up sweater, opened to her belly button. She’s wearing nothing underneath her sweater. This is definitely a date. I hope it went well.

Welcome to Venice

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Our little wooden speedboat left the dock at the airport behind and churned down a channel marked by wooden pylons. Great tripods of wooden posts - the kind you’d see holding up a dock, were lashed together at the top to form a triangular structure. These were spaced at regular intervals to mark the path for water taxis. Every other pylon had a watchful seagull perched on top.

Our boat arrived at the island and entered canal with no name on the map and a fuel station on a pier. We crawled down the water way and onto the Grand Canal. We chugged through the surreal landscape of ancient, crumbling palazzos. The tide is in and the water laps at doorjambs. Little docks and piers jut out into the water. There are no walkways or promenades on the Grand Canal, except at a few major piazzas. It is as if the palazzos grew up out of the water on their own, like a coral reef. It is preposterous and beautiful.

We reached our hotel, an old palazzo, not far from a vaporetto stop. We get checked into our room and throw open the windows to see the canal. After a shower, a rest, and a change of clothes, we are refreshed and decide to explore.

The “front door” of the hotel is on the canal. So, to leave on foot you walk through a small piazza out the back and into a narrow alleyway. We hang a left and bumble into a site-specific work by Richard Long. Craggy boulders are arranged into a long rectangle. Most boulders are white, but a snaking canal-like path of pink stones winds its way down the center of the rectangle.

We are hoping Siri knows the way to the Rialto bridge, because we do not. The streets are windy and narrow. When the streets have signs, they are large tiles placed on the second story of a building. Sometimes there is an informational sign, in yellow with black type, pointing you to a historical site. Mostly we trust our pocket computers. We cross a couple of small canals and find ourselves in a small piazza with a café and a gelato shop. We get a coffee and then get a gelato. Two scoops. She gets coffee hazelnut, I get mint coconut. Directions fail us a few times and we have to restart. But eventually we find ourselves on a “main” street leading to the Rialto bridge. We are hungry, it’s close to dinner time and we stop into a small restaurant for pasta. This is pasta as street food. This isn’t something I had ever considered. I ordered a pasta puttanesca, she got cacio e pepe. We each got a tiny bottle of wine. The pasta came in a paper container, the diameter of a large American soda, but much shorter. A lid could be folded over the top and latched. This is pasta on the go. Several folks came in and left with their pasta on the way somewhere. We sat with our wine and ate our pasta and tried to eavesdrop on two fashionable young women who ordered calzones and chatted in Italian.

The Rialto bridge is covered in small artisanal shops. Theatrical masks, leather goods, art, all manner of things. The bridge spans the Grand Canal and offers beautiful views of the city. We keep marching to St. Marc’s square through more twisty, winding streets.

Eventually we find ourselves on a grand piazza with the enormous bell tower and cathedral. We’re tired from travel and walking and take a seat at an outdoor café facing the canal.

We order drinks which come with salty crunchy treats and watch the crowds thin out. The locals are hurrying in. The sky is threatening to rain so we finish our drinks and make our way back through completely different winding streets and find ourselves on the other side of our hotel. We finish the night with a drink at the hotel bar. Wine for her, a negroni for me. Back in our rooms we throw open the windows and listen the water, boats, and late night party-goers as we fall asleep.

Departing and Arriving

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Leaving Portland was easy. Drop off the poodle, get a Lyft to the airport. Go.

We were taking a puddle-jumper up to Seattle to catch a flight to London and then Venice. Portland’s newly remodeled airport is a symphony of hewn wood. It’s truly beautiful. But it’s ¾ done. Passageways are blocked. Some parts of the airport are still draped in nylon construction wrap. The Alaska wing of PDX is right there when you drive in. As you drive into the airport to drop someone off, look to your right. That’s the Alaska terminal. But you can’t get there from here. The mostly complete new airport layout requires that you circumnavigate the entire facility instead of taking what should be an easy hard right turn at the ticket counter.

Alaska says we are checked it through to Venice. Great. When we land in Seattle, British Airways does not agree. For days prior I could not get the Alaska or British Airways app to grant us a boarding pass. But now? Now that we’ve landed in Seattle-Tacoma Airport, I guess I am blessed. I can now download an electronic boarding pass. But only for me. Not for her.

We get to the gate with our assigned group (we are law abiding airport citizens) and my electronic boarding pass works just fine. Her paper pass requires a trip to the front desk. Furious typing resulted in a freshly printed and minted British Airways boarding pass which, apparently, transcends borders. It worked from Seattle through London to Italy. It must be the British Airways logo stamped in the upper left corner.

On the flight I fall asleep listening podcasts, wake up, restart podcasts, and sleep through them again. I try reading. I’m working my way through Cathedral by Raymond Carver. Carver is a short-story writer from the Pacific Northwest, but I read all of his stories with a southern accent. I finally finish a short tragedy about a boy killed by a motorist on his birthday, and a forgotten birthday cake. His stories are about human connection at its most mundane and they will punch you right in the gut when you least expect it. I find myself misty on the flight, and remember why I usually watch garbage movies on planes.

We land at London Heathrow. I am pleased to find that Brexit doesn’t require us to revalidate our passports. Heathrow Terminal 5 is a cacophonous tire fire. We manage to find a vegetarian take on a full English breakfast (no rashers, no black pudding, vegan sausage, grilled tomatoes, hash browns, eggs, a distressing lack of mushrooms, and HP sauce). The breakfast performed to specification. My breakfast Guinness cured what ailed me. Guinness made close to the source has a depth, a quality, that makes you want to whistle a little tune. It’s hard to describe, but it is better in every way.

Heathrow and British Air conspired to not give us any gate information until boarding time, so we sat with noise canceling headphones and watched the video billboards repeat the same ads for jewelry and Marshall guitar amps. A beautiful blonde woman fashion-walked through a world of gold and Swarofsky Crystals then a cool-dad silently whaled on a guitar in a dusty barn repeatedly and forever. We are surrounded by Gucci, Prada, and other aspirational brands. I try to imagine a bored prince wandering the airport. "Yes, give me the most expensive one you have."

We smooshed our way onto our tiny plane to Venice, full of tourists and travelers returning home. I dozed through most of the 2 hour flight.

The Venice airport had the most efficient passport control I have ever experienced. I stepped up to a gate and scanned my passport. I stepped up to another gate, removed my hat and glasses then a robot took my picture. A green light blinked; the gate opened; welcome to Italy.

Our travel agency arranged for someone to meet us at the airport and finagle transport to our hotel. A young Italian man who spoke English with a British accent guided us out of the airport to a small seaport built of brick and concrete. The modernist rectangles reminded me of a nice And there was a smoking area. Ah Venice. Some papers and carbon copies of those papers were handed to serious looking men, who led us to a wooden speedboat and we were ferried to the island of Venice.

October Photos

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Here is a small photo-dump from the backyard, on a Saturday, during an unsasonably warm October.

Our tomatos were anemic all summer and now, finally, at the very end of the season, they are producing like mad. These tomatoes were washed in a big bowl of water with a teaspoon of bleach (to kill any bugs hiding on the surface). I rinsed and dried them on a photogenic green towel. I ground them into sauce skins and all. Cherry tomatoes are delicate; no need to skin.

Finally two big mason jars of sauce went into the deep freeze for a cold winter pizza night.

I expect to get two, maybe three more jars full before the plants give up.

Mums and marigolds are in season. They are bright, cheerful, cheap, and plentiful at your local Fred Meyer. Decorate your porch.

I have been on a Quixotic quest to slowly replace all the grass in our back yard with clover and wildflowers. Earlier in the year I chose an 8' wide stripe next to our fence. I mowed the grass down as short as I could get it. I raked up the soil as best I could without buying a tiller. Along the way I found the remenants of an ancient brick patio. The patio was buried under about an inch of dirt with scrubby grass over it. The patio disappears under the fence into our neighbor's yard. Now it's the home for potted plants.

With the grass destroyed, I spread a thin layer of topsoil and planted a seed mix of clover, wildflowers, and other low-mow pretty things. For the rest of the yard, I systematically mowed it really short and spread red and white clover everywhere. The clover is taking hold and beating out the grass. One day soon will be the last day I mow the grass.

Mr. Smith tries some electric ski goggles

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I recalled an anecdote about the sculptor Tony Smith I read or heard in undergraduate school.

I did some interneting and found this description:

One dark night in 1951, Smith found himself in a car with three students from the Cooper Union riding down the not-yet-opened New Jersey Turnpike. They made the illicit trip from the Meadowlands (Exit 16) to New Brunswick (Exit 9), with no street lamps, lane markers or guard rails, relying only on their headlights and the industrial glow of North Jersey.

Smith described the experience of barreling down an unfinished expressway in the dark as revelatory. The unfinished but completely human-made landscape unrolled in the car’s headlights as if it were a vast sculpture.

Not long after that drive, Smith took a break from architecture, spending two years painting in Germany, where he visited abandoned airstrips and other World War II ruins, “surrealist landscapes, something that had nothing to do with any function, created worlds without tradition.”

I like to think that Smith saw the world with fresh eyes, and saw that something had changed, something was new, and he could not go back.

This anecdote bubbled up for me a day or so after I tried the Apple Vision Pro.

I had a quiet afternoon at work one Friday. I had been curious about the device. I scheduled a demonstration at the Apple Store in Pioneer Square, in downtown Portland. A nice young man whose name I will never remember sat me down on some curvy blonde wood benches and he went to fetch the device.

When I signed up online, I provided my prescription. They explained to me that they didn’t have my exact prescription, but the lenses they had were close. He removed the device from a cloth bag and pulled out some inner shielding, and popped in two magnetically mounted lenses.

I hung my glasses on my shirt front and we tried on the device for fit. The Vision Pro went through an adjustment cycle, having me look at a UI while it calibrated to my wonky eyeballs. At first everything was way too dark. My handler apologized, fetched some help, and they readjusted something so that everything was bright. One of the employees had been noodling with the settings.

Now with the lenses calibrated, the brightness adjusted, I had a slightly heavy pair of electric ski goggles on my noggin. Not uncomfortable, but not unnoticeable either. A dialog box appeared before me. A little to my left. It appeared to me as a sheet of frosted glass hanging stubbornly in the air. It cast a shadow. I could see people through the frosted glass, milling about the store, fading behind the frosted glass. Their silhouette blurry and indistinct until the emerged from behind the dialog box.

I had the opportunity to sit with this UI element for a long while. The young man working with me had to go fetch a special iPad to run my demo, so I just sat and looked at this magical glass hanging in the air.

My brain did cartwheels as I tried to reconcile the very real fake thing floating in the air before me. My Apple friend returned, and it was time for a demo.

He guided me through the basics of navigating the device. If you’ve seen a commercial, you know that you can just look at icons and UI elements to activate them. It’s hard to describe how uncanny that feels. One very weird aspect of this interface paradigm is instinctively and accidentally knowing how it works - you look at a thing, it glimmers, you tap two fingers together, and it does something - and then you become self-conscious of the mechanics and you try too hard. Instead of letting your eyes drift over the UI, you try too hard to focus, which paradoxically makes it hard to use. Take a breath, relax, and suddenly you’re zooming through the virtual world again.

Over the course of the demo we tried out photos and the web browser. I clumsily “typed” my website into the search bar. My website appeared. I stretched it out as big as a billboard and hung it in the air across the room. My handler coached me into watching a few standard movie clips. This was nice. A private theater experience, albeit one strapped to your head.

They cleverly keep the most immersive and jaw-dropping experiences for the end of the demo. Instead of watching some Hollywood movies, they had me watch some “spatial videos.” These were various clips of scenes and activities which were chosen to highlight the immersive and three-dimensional quality of the experience.

A train approached me on a snow-covered mountain pass. I found myself in the basket beneath a hot-air balloon. Baby rhinos approached me, eating greens and grass just beyond a fence. I tried to pet the rhino. The rhino was not there. A mountain climber perched on a peak, I gripped my seat as my heart jumped out of my chest. I’m no good with heights, not even virtual ones.

The demo was over and I removed the space helmet, disappointed to find I was still on earth. I actually don’t remember how I got home from the Apple Store. I think I drove? Maybe. That night I had strange VR dreams.

The Apple Vision Pro is not one-of-a-kind. Sony and Meta both have VR sets, but I have never taken an interest in these devices. They are centered around gaming, and I find the culture of video games to rancid. But I am on board with petting baby rhinos.

I was profoundly moved by this tech demo. I had to muster incredible restraint to not buy one on the spot. These devices are still quite costly, and I can’t describe what I would do with this thing. But this felt like the future in a way that makes me ache. I think this might be my Tony-Smith-Turnpike experience.

I remember Clyfford

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

When I visited the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, CO this month, I learned that Still sent a fan letter to Jackson Pollock. The two men were contemporaries and probably travelled in the same broad circles. The letter, hand-written on typing stock, is dated October 29, 1953. By this time Still may have already severed ties with commercial galleries.

I wonder if Pollock ever read the letter. I doubt Pollock would have written back. From what I understand about Jackson Pollock I wouldn’t expect more than a drunken grunt of acknowledgement.

Still, in his letter, describes elbowing his way into a gallery office to see some of Pollock’s most recent work and closing by saying “thank you” for the renewal of courage.

Unlike Pollock, Still could actually paint. The museum exhibit opens with two of Still’s early work. A stoic self-portrait and an impressionistic painting of the family farm. A photograph hangs near showing the farm, the silo, barns, and equipment from a similar angle. The painting is energized with vigorous brush marks describing a partly cloudy sky over browning fields and farm machinery.

I don’t believe traditional painting skills are better or required to make good paintings. But there is something powerful about the choice. Still could paint anything he wanted, but he chose giant, colorful, abstraction. This is the courage Still refers to in his letter to Jackson Pollock. Still, and his contemporaries, created something entirely new, and they knew it. This had to be a little bit scary.

Still’s paintings are sometimes described as evoking stalagmites and stalactites, as the edges of colored fields can form sharp, triangular shapes. Instead, I see trees. Not literally of course, but the surfaces of paint, applied with a knife, create many tiny patches, catching the light at different angles. They look like bark.

When one massive shape gives way to another color, I feel like I’m playing hide and seek in a forest. Still’s work evokes a profound sense of calm. I can stand among his paintings and be quiet for a long while.

The museum itself is a raw concrete cloud. From the outside, it appears to be a bit understated, as it stands next to the zoomy, triangular, metalic Denver Art Museum. The Clyfford Still Museum is a rough hewn box of poured concrete. But once you go inside and go upstairs, the walls and the ceiling dissolve and the space feels light and free.

The Museum has two floors. The bottom floor holds the front desk, a small gift shop, a droning video with voice over about the Museum and Still and the works inside. Behind a stairwell you can find the archives.

Two large, darkened rooms with immense sliding glass walls hold nearly everything Clyfford Still painted. Giant rolling walls made of steel beams and rigid steel mesh hold dozens of huge paintings in tight quarters. The rolling walls are artfully arranged to give visitors a glimpse at what is stored there in the dark.

Upstairs, at the top of the stairs, is the only color that isn’t art. A red wall holds Still’s self-portrait and farm landscape. This implies these works are of the past. Once you turn the corner and view his mature work, the walls are pale, raw concrete. The floors are bleached wood, and the ceiling is an open, oval grid of concrete. The entire ceiling is a skylight, buffered by the concrete mesh. Some rooms are confined. The walls meet the floor and the ceiling. In others, the walls give up at about 12 feet, the ceiling floats above, allowing light and air to pass from one gallery the next. Here and there the floor is punctuated by openings revealing the floor below.

Romantic Mexico

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

This trip to Mexico has been two things.

A sun break from gloomy Portland winter
A chance for my wife to reconnect with family and friends

The weather has been perfect. Low to mid 80s in the hottest part of the day, cool breezes, and no humidity to speak of. I’ve had only one work emergency, so I’ve been able to disconnect and indulge myself in great food, a vibrant and bustling city, art and culture, and romance.

On Saturday night, I had some time to myself. My wife had gone to visit with her old friends and graciously left me behind. This way the 4 friends could chatter away in Spanish without having to stop and interpret for me. They could also speak their minds without lurking husbands.

I saw her off in a taxi and decided to explore the hotel. The building is really two old buildings, renovated in such away that they blend into one another through a connecting hallway. This creates space for an elevator. The architectural style changes as you pass through this portal. The half of the hotel which contains the lobby is 4 floors with a rooftop terrace. I hiked up the old tiled stairs to the roof, hoping that I’d find a bar up there. There is one. But it is closed. It must not be the season for rooftop bars. The view is fantastic. As the sun sets, I can look out over a small plaza on the next block. People are lining up to catch a bus, the plaza is alive with people. The sound of music drifts up. I decide to go exploring.

Back on street level I walk over into the plaza. Like most plazas, it is anchored by a church. There are many smaller older churches dotted all over Guadalajara. As the population grew, eventually a large cathedral was built. I suppose superseding the other churches? Or not? Not sure how all of that worked. The church is artfully lit but quiet. Music is playing and couples are dancing. Just dancing in the plaza. It’s Saturday night. Let’s dance in the street.

The following day, Sunday, after visiting with my wife’s old friend and coworker, we stumble around town seeing the sites, and find our way back to the theater in the center. There is a small café at the corner of the theater. This café has been here for a very long time, and has surely changed hands half a dozen times. The menu is different, but the umbrella covered seats beneath the neoclassical columns at the entrance of the theater are there. We stop for a snack and a drink and watch as young people stop in front of the theater and use it as a backdrop for a selfie. Young women in big, floofy quinceañera dresses pose for pictures, lifting up their big hoop skirts to reveal Chuck Taylor sneakers in colors matching their dress. Tiaras sparkle in the setting sun. At the table in front of us, a young couple on a date settles in. She’s carrying a hard-shelled backpack with a tiny bubble-window. A cat peers out of the window. They order frappes and pizza. He knocks back his frappe and gets a second. Ah to have the metabolism of a 20 year old. They are absolutely adorable.

As we wind our way back to the hotel, the sun has set, and we find a bandstand in the center of a small plaza. A community orchestra, conducted by a young woman, is playing the Marriage of Figaro.

The following day, as we wound down our day of site-seeing, we decided to try a restaurant atop the Doubletree Hotel. On our way to find the main entrance of the hotel, a woman stood in the plaza singing Ave Maria into a microphone. The bar and restaurant was nearly empty, so we got to watch the skyline slip into shadow while the domed cathedral clung on to the last rays of sunlight.

Visiting Orozco

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

After checking in at the Hotel Morales we were shown to our room. After getting thorough instructions on how the room worked, we splashed our faces and went back downstairs for breakfast.

Breakfast was a buffet with trays of fruit, potatoes, pintos, sausages, and more. A young man stood behind a large grill making eggs on demand. I was too tired to negotiate eggs in Español so I went for a giant plate of beans and cheese empanada with a giant cup of café de olla. Café de olla is strong, black coffee, flavored with cinnamon and other spcies, then sweetened with Mexican brown sugar. It’s rich and sweet and almost too much.

We returned to our room, fat and happy. We figured out how the electronic safe worked. My wife napped, I wrote for a bit then showered. After napping and showering we felt revived and ready to go do some site-seeing.

I try to dress well when I travel. It’s bad enough to deal with a tourist, even worse if they’re shabby. I wore a light blue linen shirt, artfully distressed skinny jeans, and brown leather brogues. I checked myself in the full-length mirror in the alcove by the door saw my grandfather’s ghost looking back at me. I’ve lost some weight, wearing my hair buzzed, looking lanky again, and the family resemblance hit me like a brick.

We hung a right out of the hotel, headed toward the cathedral. A small coffee shop was giving away samples of carrot cake. We got coffees and split a piece. Sweet with carrot-y carrots and cream cheese frosting. We continued towards the plaza, then spontaneously hung a left and wove through early morning street vendor crowds.

We found ourselves on a street occupied entirely by shops selling wedding dresses, quinceanera dresses, and communion dresses. Moms and daughters wandered about as shopkeepers perched on stools in doorways watching expectantly. Around another corner, we found a street full of music shops and statues honoring mariachis. A 7-year old hustled us for spare change.

I bought myself a ridiculous hat for the sun (it’s a tradition) and we stepped into an enormous jewelry market. Armed guards flanked the doorways, and countless vendors of gold, silver, and precious stones fill the building. We left with my wife’s new treasures, and spilled out into the plaza.

Our goal this morning is the Museo Cabañas . I want to see the Orozco murals.

The museum sits at the back of a large plaza, a trio of strange surrealist bronzes to one side. It’s a bright, clear day and visitors are using the museum as a selfie backdrop. We stand in line to buy tickets behind a small crew of beautiful, trendy young people dressed smartly and looking worldly.

The murals are frescos. This is a fact which I knew, intellectually, but I hadn’t really deeply considered. Orozco’s murals are expressive, with big, bold brush marks. You could easily assume they were giant oil paintings, like Picasso’s Guernica. But, no, they are quick drying pigment embedded into plaster.

Frescos are generally quite precise. The medium is unforgiving. The plaster and the pigment cure quickly, so the artist has to work fast. There is one chance to do it right. If there’s an error, the plaster must be scraped off the wall to start over. Because of this, frescos tend to take on a monumental quality with solid figures, strong lines, and high contrast.

Orozco’s frescos have an immediacy to them. They are enormous and close enough to the floor in places that you can walk up and put your nose on one (don’t do that). And what you see is are large, big, expressive brush marks, embedded into the plaster. There are no visible seams. I’ve always found these murals to be moving and beautiful, but I hadn’t realized their technical mastery before.

As we sat with the murals, a tour guide shuffled people around the space and surrounded us. We snuck to the other side of the hall to find empty benches. We sat beneath the murals for about half an hour, scooting out of the way whenever a tour guide found us.

We left the hall to wander about the museum and stumbled into a small gallery of Orozco paintings. Small is a relative term. These paintings are around 4’ x 6’ though their dimensions vary. This series, Los Teules, (the gods, an old indigenous word) are painted on masonite panels with proxylin (or nitrocellulose) along with more traditional materials. Proxylin is used to create lacquers for furniture finishing and other uses. I immediately thought of Pollock and other American modernists and their use of industrial paint.

Looking closely, I notice these paintings are executed on the back of the masonite. Masonite (you can find it at your local Home Depot), is made by blasting wood fibers at a screen, then pressing the fibers flat with heat. The “front” of masonite is quite smooth, even shiny. The back takes on a waffle-texture from the screen. The edges of these paintings are painted more thinly, revealing the waffle texture underneath. If the front of these paintings is on the back of the masonite, is there a hidden painting on the back-front?

These paintings feature large mask like faces and abstract figure. X-ray photographs are placed along side the paintings to illustrate how the layers of proxylin lacquer create luminosity in the painted surface. Most of the explanatory wall-text is in Spanish, but I’m getting the gist: Orozco was an innovator throughout his career. These late paintings are reminiscent of De Kooning and Picasso and his willingness to experiment with new materials places him squarely in the modernist tradition.

The proxylin lacquer may have been a poor choice. The surfaces of these 77 year old paintings are cracked far worse than any renaissance oil painting. One day a large paint flake will peel itself free and drift to the ground and these paintings will have to go and live in a windowless, dark vault for the rest of history.

Escaping the rain and the dark

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

We dropped off the poodle at the wife’s parents place. He watched forlornly as we left. Siri gave us bad directions to the airport, trying to save us half a minute by weaving us through tiny side streets, stuffed with cars parked on the streets. At the airport there was no line. I couldn’t remember what TSA PreCheck would let me get away with. The last open bar is just behind security. At PDX they close up shop early. Most restaurants and bars are closed by 8 or are no longer taking new customers.

We sit at the bar to begin our 3-hour wait for our red-eye flight to Guadalajara, Mexico. We order two gins and tonic, followed by a Jameson whisky to toast the passing of my wife’s uncle in Ireland. While we sit and sip, we catch up after a hectic day of trying to wrap up work, pack up a poodle, and get out of town. We did pretty well. I forgot sunscreen.

A few seats down from us at the bar a woman, perhaps 60, loudly announced “I don’t care, I’m getting a drink.” She reiterated, loudly. Her traveling partner, probably her husband, a man about the same age, maybe a little older, fumbled with his rolling suitcase and took a seat next to her. She tried to order a glass of their grenache wine. They were out.

We talked about the funny Lyft driver I had earlier in the week. He had a sign mounted on the back of the front passenger seat, offering his life coaching services. I asked him how life coaching usually worked. Was it one-on-one, in person, or video, etc. He explained that he was trying something new. He organizes a cohort of folks with similar goals and does a group coaching session. Two folks to-be-coached are put on the hot seat. And for thirty minutes he coaches them both in parallel, tag teaming. At the end of 30 minutes, the remaining folks get to chime in with their thoughts and questions.

At the other end of the bar, the older couple, who have been testy all night, begin arguing. She accused him of once saying something, he denied that it ever happened. Back and forth accusation and denial, louder, and more defiant until the man slapped some cash down on the bar and walked to the gate. She called after him “oh sure slap your money down and leave.” For just a moment I thought he might be walking to the airport exit. He continued down to the gates. Perhaps they could use a life coach.

We left the bar to go and wait for our flight to board. It’s busy and a bit noisy by the gate. The rest of the airport is dead. I spot a “sensory room” - a quiet room with bean bag chairs and bubble lights intended for folks who find airports to be overwhelming and anxiety provoking. We slip inside, find some beanbags and snooze for half an hour.

We’re flying Volaris, a budget-friendly Mexican airline with non-stop service from Portland to Guadalajara. Volaris is well run, but not luxurious. We board our plane, endure safety lectures in Spanish and English, and promptly fall asleep in uncomfortable seats.

Our descent into Guadalajara seems to take an hour and a half. We must have flown to the moon overnight. Immigration is easy. The young man checking passports remarks that I look like Thom Yorke. I haven’t heard that in years. I am throughly amused.

My wife is the best travel agent you could hope to marry. She has booked us into a hotel near the historical center of Guadalajara. The hotel offered to come collect us at the airport. Our driver never arrives. After a call to the hotel, we choose a taxi over waiting for another car. The taxi driver is friendly and chatty. At 6:30am the streets are mostly empty and he drives like James Bond.

We arrive at our hotel. It’s a beautiful old pile of stone from the late 1800s. We learn our original driver was in a car accident. He’s OK. Perhaps a charming taxi driver sideswiped him on the way to the airport.

Eggs Benedict

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I think Eggs Benedict is one of the best low-brow fancy meals. Poaching eggs and making hollandaise both require better than average cooking skill. It’s just hard enough to do right that you can really impress your friends if you can pull it off.

I’m at Slim’s (of course) finishing a plate of Eggs Benedict with hash browns. The best part of this dish is slicing the eggs open just right, so that the molten yolk runs down into the hash browns. Now each bite of crispy shredded potato is drenched in rich yellow goodness. Eggs Benedict looks beautiful on the plate, but becomes a horrid disaster after even the first bite. You have to commit. You can’t linger over this dish. You can’t idly pick at it like nachos. You have to dig in now or it will get cold and ruined.

I am here trying to take advantage of a quiet Saturday morning to do some writing. I’ve brought my new “computer” prescription glasses and I hate how well they work. My normal walking-around glasses have progressive lenses with a reading, medium, and distance vision zones. But apparently that’s not enough for my old-man eyes. So now I have a second pair of glasses which allow me to focus on that odd desktop distance where your monitor would be. And dammit they work great. If they didn’t work I could blame science or the eye doctor, but the fact that they do work, and work well, means that my stupid eyes are the problem. It’s 2024 why can’t I get new eyes?

I’m hoping to indulge in a rare dry winter day in Portland to finally clean up the yard after months of wet weekends. Wet or busy. I’ve been working a lot of weekends lately. My team is down three people thanks to new babies. Therefore, I have spent several Saturdays coding. This is strangely, OK? I can’t reliably get this work done during the week, thanks to meetings, and other duties. So I code on the weekends. I’ve been working on some big updates to a pair of mobile apps that my company supports. The updates have finally shipped. My shoulders are lighter. It has not been as smooth of a process as I would have liked, but the apps are in their app stores doing their job.

Writing code for an app, a website, or a little dumb script to a job is such a rewarding process. Type a little code, save, build, reload, and there are your changes coming to life. It’s like a slow form of telekinesis. You think a thing, write it down, and it becomes something. It’s remarkable. I find it sits somewhere between painting and writing. When painting I see something, either in front of me or in my mind’s eye, and make it real with my hands. When I’m writing my fingers race across a keyboard to record my thoughts as I think them. If you read my written thoughts, those thoughts become your thoughts. Telepathy at scale.

Coding does both of these things. Being forced by circumstance to dive back in and try to do a good job at it has been strangely rewarding, if a little tiring.

Snow thoughts

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Snowy, winter weather in Portland reminds me a lot of where I grew up. In Charlotte, North Carolina, real winter weather is relatively rare. It’s easy to imagine summer holding onto the region by its fingernails and only periodically losing its grip and allowing winter to slip in and blanket everything. It stays mostly in the 40s through most of the winter season in Charlotte. With a sturdy jacket and a scarf, maybe a sweater, you’ll be warm enough. Surrounded by evergreen pine trees you might forget it winter entirely

Portland summers are mild, so they don’t have the same grip on the landscape as summers in the Southeast. Winter is kept at bay here from (relatively) warm ocean currents. If Portland were sentient it would want to keep the thermostat at 55ºF all year long.

Both Charlotte and Portland have inadequate infrastructure for dealing with the snow. It makes sense. Snow is rare. How much winter stuff should you store and maintain when it might not snow again in 4 years?

When the snow comes it follows the same pattern. The snow starts light and fluffy. It’s pretty. People go out and play. Schools are cancelled at the first credible threat of snow, and parents begin scrambling. Daycares (which seem to be the least reliable businesses) also refuse to stay open. Parents everywhere take sudden time off to manage their families. Work grinds to a halt. People share fun videos of sledding and snowman construction.

The sleet comes and the fluffy, mostly safe, snow becomes crunchy ice pellets. People who can’t or wont stay home drive over the roads and compact the sleet/snow into a hard pack of ice.

Then the freezing rain comes and turns every flat surface into a skating rink. All the eager beavers who shoveled their sidewalks immediately after the first snowfall are faced with a half inch of solid ice coating the pavement. The pattern is always the same. Wait it out, wait for the freezing rain, and then shovel. This is why I prefer the minor ecological disaster of a big bag of granulated ice melting chemical from my local Ace Hardware. The salty sludge it produces prevents refreeze, at least a little.

By now the main roads have probably been mostly cleared. Center lanes are a disaster. Side streets and your neighborhood will never see a plow. As the main roads are clear, folks have to start returning to work, so they creep, crawl, slip, and slide their cars out of their neighborhood, over an embankment of grimy slush, and onto the main roads which are crunchy with strewn gravel and other debris.

I worked at home the entire week, a welcome break from my company’s new ‘hybrid’ model. The week before, completely ignorant of the coming snow, I blocked my calendar and tried to lay the foundation for a focus week. No (well few) meetings, and me with my head down on work. With half of our company out wrangling feral snow-day invigorated children, I actually got my wish. Focus time with no meetings.

My team of developers is shorthanded due to a gaggle of fresh new babies. This means me and my leads are diving into client work. This is not ideal, but family leave is short. We won't suffer for too long. We could bring on a freelancer or two, but then we’d be training and managing freelancers. It’s cheaper and faster for us to just do the work. A freelancer would only be up to speed and productive by the time it’s time for them to leave. The opportunity cost is the same.

The short version: I worked on a lot of websites last week.

I miss this kind of work. I like the feeling of watching a product come to life bit by bit. Most modern website development toolkits include a bit of magic that automatically reloads and refreshes the website in your browser as you develop, so you can quite literally see the website come together as you work.

For uninterrupted hours I would assess, analyze, code, review, fuck it up, redo, and move on. I was in the zone and time spread out and slowed down.

I think making things (whatever the things are) is my first, best destiny. It’s the same thing whether it’s code or art. In my mind and heart I think of this as Real Work™. Everything else I do is management. People management, process management, department management, project management. All necessary, all important, sometimes even very interesting and compelling. But management means meetings and meetings chop your day up into tiny slices. Meetings are always too long and never long enough. Time shrinks down and speeds up. The day is gone and I feel nothing has happened. I feel like the day is lost.

The actual work, here, is making decisions. Or helping other people make decisions. Decisiveness, the ability to not only decide but stick to and live with decisions, is the fundamental requirement of leadership.

I wish I could get the same satisfaction from decisioning that I do from making.

Replacing Substack with Astro and Buttondown in 12 easy steps

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

A bit of a warning up front - this is more than a little bit technical and nerdy. I'm posting this here for the purposes of shring knowledge and helping others who have similar plans and schemes. Fee free to skip it if it's not for you.

I recently left Substack behind (for reasons I wrote about here). I chose to repatriate all of my written content back to my own website, not just spin up another newsletter service.

I wanted to share some details about how I did this. Hopefully it’s useful.

Recommendations for normal humans

If you’re a Substack user, and you want to leave, I’d recommend Buttdown as an easy alternative. Buttondown imports from Substack and a variety of other sources. It has many of the same features for newsletter authors, but isn’t attempting to become a social network. The free tier is generous and the paid plans are priced fairly.

If you want a more robust website experience, perhaps look into Wordpress.com. They support newsletters and membership options as well.

I’m a developer, and what I’m about to describe is for other developers.

What to expect when you export

Substack allows you to export your content. In the account settings area you can schedule an export. You receive an email when it’s complete.

The export file - a zip archive - is retained and downloadable from account settings.

The zip archive contains:

Posts (HTML format)
Subscriber list (CSV format)
Analytical data about posts (CSV format)

The zip archive does not contain:

Post images
Social media images (thumbnails) for posts

Posts

The posts archive contains every post, including drafts in HTML format. Each HTML file is a fragment. That is, it contains only the content in HTML format, but is lacking the HTML header, styles, metadata, etc. This makes it easy to import into another blogging tool.

The HTML itself is the same HTML used on your Substack website. This means it includes links to larger images, little SVG icons for enlarging images, and so on, but does not include the styling or scripting to make those things work.

If you are importing these things into your own site, you’ll need to either fix the HTML or create new CSS rules to display this to match your new site. I chose to programmatically fix the HTML, which I’ll describe below.

Images

As a I mentioned above, no images are included in the export file. All images are linked and are hosted on Substack’s servers. Substack appears to be hosting images on Amazon’s S3 service, but proxying those URLs through an image service which resizes and converts the image to a desirable format like WebP.

It is unclear what Substack will do with those images over time. Are they committing to perpetual image hosting? Who knows?

This motivated me to download all of my images.

Buttondown and Wordpress.com (Wordpress the commercial product, not the free version) will both import those images for you.

Choices

Site

This site is built with Astro. I’ve been happy with Astro. It’s a good HTML-first tool for building custom websites.

Astro has good support for working with content collections in Markdown, JSON, and other data formats.

I already use these features for my portfolio. Incorporating newsletter content works the same way.

Astro has some built in image processing tools. At build time, Astro will reformat and resize images for use on the web. This means I didn’t have to pay for my own image hosting service, nor roll my own.

Email

The newsletter “format” of sending my writing out via email to people who want it works well. It shows up in your inbox. You can read it now, or read it later. Once downloaded, it lives on your device. I didn’t want to give up sending email newsletter, so I looked into a couple of options:

Mailjet is a professional tool. I’ve used it at work as a system to bulk send emails to testing platforms (ask me if an emoji works in a particular email client, I can tell you).

Mailjet will absolutely support newsletters, but also requires I configure a special email sending sub-domain (like email.abouthalf.com or something similar).

I’m not ready for that level of commitment. I ended up choosing Buttondown. It’s very similar to Substack, but not problematic.

One of the best features of Buttondown, is that I can choose my own “read on web” URL - so I can publish a blog post, copy it into a newsletter, and direct readers to my website instead of Substack.

Process

After reviewing Substack’s anemic export, I realized I wanted all those thumbnail images I carefully chose over the past 2 years.

The RSS feed provided by Substack included the thumbnail image, but doesn’t include every post, only the last several.

The archive page which Substack generates includes thumbnails, but it’s a dynamic web application. All of the content is generated by a JavaScript application, so there’s nothing “in” the HTML. Unclear if this is just lazy or a deliberate mechanism to prevent writers from getting organic traffic outside of the Substack ecosystem.

The archive page is an “infinite scroller” - that is when you get to the bottom of the page it loads in the next block of posts. I scrolled all the way to the bottom to load in all the posts, then used my browser’s developer tools to extract the generated HTML. I saved this to a file and wrote a script to find all the images, and then download them.

I used cheerio to process the HTML. Cheerio is a NodeJS package which replicates the jQuery API, but in server-side JavaScript. The basically means I can load up an HTML file and pass in a query like:

undefined

Then iterate over the results and create a list of images to download.

My script collected image URLs and extracted the URL slug of each post. That way I could map slug-to-image and create a look up map for my posts later.

Next I needed to work on the posts.

The same downloading technique I used for thumbnails worked for post images as well. I was able to download 700-ish megabytes of images (several times actually, it took a few tries). I stored all of these locally in my project. That’s not small but I’m not rebuilding my site every 5 minutes. so I can live with it.

As I mentioned above Substack is hosting their images using S3 behind some image hosting service. This created a challenge in that many of these URLs are missing file extensions. In order to name the files properly, I checked the mime-type of each image on download, and renamed the file with the corresponding file extension.

The HTML provided in Substack’s export has a lot of stuff I don’t want. Using Cheerio again I was able to restructure markup I didn’t want - in this case I was mostly fixing image URLs and removing links to images. Basically I’d find all the links to images, wrapped around <picture> elements and replace those links with a simple image element.

I also wanted something a little more versatile than clumps of HTML. I used turndown - a tool which converts HTML into Markdown to strip out all the unwanted formatting and cruft from the HTML leaving me with minimally formatted text.

Astro works directly with standard Markdown files, but if you want to include thumbnails or metadata like a title, publication date, and so forth, you need to add frontmatter to the Markdown file. Frontmatter is just a set of variables, in YAML format, at the top of a Markdown file, demarcated by three dashes before and after the data. Like so:

undefined

I updated my thumbnail extraction script to include publication dates, titles, and other metadata. Then was able to marry the thumbnails and metadata to each converted HTML file. I used the markdown processing library gray-matter to prepend frontmatter to each Markdown file.

With all of this complete, I had a giant collection of blog posts in a folder in my website project. I updated my content configuration in Astro and created a page template for blog posts, and an index page to display links to all the posts.

With 700MB of images, this takes about 10 minutes to build (converting all the images is slow in NodeJS) but my build tool caches images between builds, so subsequent builds are faster.

The only thing left to do was to make blogging easier. I created a small script which accepts a title, then creates a new Markdown file with metadata, including publication date. This saves me a lot of manual work. I can just copy / paste from my writing software (Byword or Day One) into the new file, preview in dev mode, then push my changes up to GitHub.

This is all very manual, and I’m not going to lie, I miss the convenience of using a tool like Substack. But now, at least, I own all of my content and I can migrate any and all of it anywhere else.

Examples

Create a new newsletter with easy metadata

Below is my "make a new blog" script. I run it like so:

undefined

It's a pretty simple little script.

commander provides command line parameters
gray-matter generates frontmatter in a markdown file
slug generates URL-friendly slugs from my title
fs is the standard NodeJS file system module, which lets me write out the file

undefined

Image downloader with renaming

This image downloader uses the ubiquitous Fetch API to grab the image.

I grab the mime-type from the response headers an duse the mime-types library to look up the proper file extension. If the provided url has no file part (a lot of S3 URLs are just a long ID) I can append a proper file extension and make Astro and everyone else happy.

The finished API from the standard stream/promises NodeJS package allows me to await asynchronously downloading data and know when it's completed writing to a file. From there I return the new file name to stash where needed.

undefined

New Year's Eve Getaway

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The internet is closing in on Glenwood, Washington. Years ago, cellular service would drop off long before you reached the high plateau of open pastures and the small farming community with a general store and a gas station. On this trip, my phone held tight to that one last bar of signal all the way into the campground. The signal thankfully dropped off as we rounded the bend towards our cabin. But one day soon cell service will overtake this place as it overtakes every place on earth.

In something of a new tradition we are spending the New Year’s weekend in a bougie cabin in the woods with the poodle. There are other cabins here, but the vibe of this place is to keep to yourself and keep quiet. It’s about getting away, not making friends.

Our poodle will never understand this, but part of our motivation is to escape the idiot parade of illegal fireworks so he can sleep through the night without the terror of crackling booms overhead. At the moment he is lounging on the bed like the spoiled prince he is. Vacation rules: The poodle can sleep with us. None of us sleep well when all together, even in a large king bed. But the sound of a poodle gently snoring as his head rests on your thigh while you doze is worth a couple of nights of bad sleep. You will not find many things more therapeutic.

I packed food carefully and thoroughly. We have salmon and roasted root vegetables for dinner. Smoked trout for breakfast, and an array of dried fruits nuts (a Christmas gift) for lunch. We have a ration of wine for each day.

I weighed out 4 one-ounce containers of whole bean coffee and packed my exceedingly hipster hand-crank Japanese coffee grinder (ceramic burr, naturally). Of course the one thing I forgot was the coffee pot.

I woke up with the poodle this morning at around 6. I threw on yesterday’s clothes and harnessed up the good boy for a quick trip outside. In the dark, in this still-strange place he formed a circuit around the cabin sniffing and marking the same three spots three times each. A tree trunk, a small scrubby shrub growing outside the main cabin window, and a patch of tall grass standing alone between fallen trees on the backside of the cabin.

Three loops, three marks, and the poodle tried to drag me onto the gravel road which circles the campground. No sir, we are not walking around the campground in the dark and the cold (I explained patiently). We returned to the cabin and I fed the poodle. I sat and thumbed through a book in the dim light over the kitchenette counter. With breakfast finished, the poodle needed to go out again. Here “need” is psychological. What if someone else marked where I marked? I must investigate. If I refuse to take him out he will stand at my side and stare into my soul until I comply. Once the second walk was complete I wiped down his feet and coaxed him back onto the bed next to my sleeping wife. I jumped into the shower. The tiny hot water heater is no match for me and soon the water becomes tepid.

I drove into the little intersection that passes for town and bought two extra large coffees from the general store. The store is done up to look more country than it is. We’re in wine country, and this little store has a better wine selection than your grocery store. The store is ramshackle with tiny aisles of random things. The store serves the farming community and campers at the bougie campground. So they carry a mix of assorted camping stuff, canned goods, some fresh produce, odds and ends that people are likely to have forgotten - like batteries,An assortment of hot prepared sandwiches, coffee, and drinks take up one corner. Oh, and I can’t forget the splendid display of lottery tickets. The nice lady behind the counter tries to sell me a breakfast sandwich.

Back in the car with coffees and a small carton of half-and-half I check my phone. The internet has blown away over the night. Dead again. Yesterday’s cloud cover must have ricocheted the internet up the mountainside. I drive back to the campground and slow down to 10mph, creeping down the road between dark cabins. Back inside I does my strong coffee with a splash of cream and begin making breakfast.

You can't un-know something

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t assume that everyone is as hopelessly online as I am, but perhaps you’ve heard: Substack has a Nazi problem.

I’ve been following this story as it develops through Jonathan Katz’s newsletter, The Racket. Ken White (née Popehat) has some good commentary on this topic as well. (I should note that both of these writers are making plans to leave the platform.)

Substack’s leadership has (finally) made a statement via a “note” posted by Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie. The statement is mealy mouthed apologia for making money from Nazis and the Nazi-adjacent:

“I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.”

This is, frankly, horseshit.

So now I know something. Until this statement was released, I could sit around and wonder what Substack was going to do. But now I know they’re not going to do anything. (They like Nazis, or at least Nazi money.)

And now that I know something I can choose to ignore it, or I can make a choice.

Substack is a nice service and a well-made platform. It has been great for my tiny little blog with my tiny number of subscribers (hello! I love you!).

There is good writing to be found here, and many independent journalists are making a living and building a business on this platform. I can forgive those folks for being scared to make a change. Their income is on the line.

But me? This is just for funsies. I’m also a developer. I recognize, that while Substack is nice, it’s not unique. I can use another service, or I can roll my own.

During this quiet break between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I’ve decided to use my developer powers and some of my precious time off to export all of my content from Substack and created a permanent archive of my own. You can find it here: https://www.abouthalf.com/newsletter/.

I’ve also spun up a Buttondown account. Buttondown is a lo-fi DIY service similar to Substack, but smaller, and with an eye towards independence and privacy. I considered rolling my own system with MailJet, but that will have to wait for another day.

As of now, all the pieces are in place to say goodbye to substack.

What does this mean for you?

If you are a subscriber here (thank you) you should start to see notes coming from my new Buttondown account in the new year.

I’ve also set things up so you can read full articles on my website.

Otherwise, the only thing you should notice is that my newsletters will look a little different.

I plan to leave the archives up at Substack through the first quarter of the new year, just in case there are some readers there who aren’t subscribed.

After that time, I’ll delete my Substack entirely.

Alternatives to Substack

If you’re running a Substack and want to get out of the Nazi bar, here are some alternative services which look pretty decent. (I’ve not vetted these thoroughly, so consider this an introduction and an invitation to look deeper.)

I’ve already mentioned Buttondown - This is a paid service with a free tier that’s generous enough for most hobbyists with a small audience (Hi!). The aesthetic is very DIY and less polished, but the paid accounts have a great deal of customization.
If you are a developer or writing for a technical audience, you may want to give Hashnode a look. Similar in many ways to Substack in terms of features, but differs in that Hashnode makes money from “pro” users and from business accounts. Similar to Slack - you can make a personal project for free, but teams and companies pay.
Ghost is a hosted website and CMS platform with newsletter support. No free tier, but for serious hobbyists the starter platform is affordable.
For the semi-pro or professional user, consider using a proper Email Service Provider like MailChimp. Many of these offer a starter or free tier and integrate with popular website tools like Squarespace.

In closing:

Low stakes, magical drama

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I recently finished Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami. It’s a bittersweet, melancholic story of an unrequited love triangle with a touch of magic. During my trip to Peru I found both the downtime and discipline to be a better reader. I’ve started a habit of reading 15 minutes every morning (and saying it out loud here will make me feel terribly guilty if I stop).

With this new habit I was able to maintain my vacation reading momentum and dig through the remainder of the book, a chapter a day, until I reached the bittersweet and magical conclusion.

I finished another Murakami book as well, Novelist As A Vocation, a collection of essays and musings on what it means to be a writer as your job.

Prior, it took me nearly a year to complete Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World and way too long to finish the collection of short stories First Person Singular. Now, I’m on to Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and losing myself in it.

Not long ago, I lamented to a colleague that I have become a poor reader. Or actually, just not the kind of reader I want to be. Taking a calendar year to finish a book is embarrassing. Not that I don’t read, I read all the time. Documentation, newsletters and articles, client briefs, SOWs, a million social media posts. But I wasn’t doing that long-form reading that’s so good for the brain. I couldn’t focus. I’d find a little time to read in fits and spurts.

If I tried to read on an electronic device, I would invariably read something interesting or thought provoking, then swipe over to the internet to look up something and then my focus was lost. As much as I like the idea of electronic books, I find it too easy to bounce out and get distracted. (I’ve not tried a dedicated e-reader like a Kindle, but I don’t think I want yet another device.)

Traveling and stopping time for a moment allowed me to change my game. I set a daily reminder to read for 15 minutes. The reminder blips on my phone at 6am and annoys me until I do something about it. Morning is best for reading because I wake with the chickens to feed the poodle and wash the dishes. So why not sit with my coffee for 15 minutes and read. On a good day I can finish a chapter. On a bad day I still make progress. It feels like an accomplishment.

Now, on my 5th Murakami book, and ready for my 6th, I think I can say I’m a fan. Murakami’s stories have a very interesting scale to them. They are small and personal. The events that happen, even if they are fantastical, fit into a shoebox. I think he captures the big drama found in the little moments of life. Think about the last time you got into an argument or developed a crush on someone. Those feelings are so big, and the world is just the same. That tension is where Murakami plays and I love it.

Murakami is an interesting character in himself. In Novelist as a Vocation he tells the story of marrying then leaving college (doing things in the wrong order) and then opening a jazz café. In Japan there are special coffee shops where the owner puts their prodigious record collection to use on a giant stereo system. (vinyl records, rarely CDs, never digital). The idea is you go to this place to have a coffee or a beer and a snack and listen to whatever is on the record player. No, you don’t get to make suggestions. Is there live music? Maybe? Sometimes? That’s not the point though.

Murakami opened his jazz café in Tokyo by borrowing money from friends and family. He and his wife ran the place, paid back their loans, paid their bills, and made a life. He also avoided the crushing corporate rat race of Tokyo in the 1980s.

Running a café means keeping odd hours, so one afternoon before the café opened he takes in a baseball game. The “stands” out behind the outfield are just a grassy hill. Murakami recalls sitting on the grass in the sunshine with a cold beer, watching the game. Then, like catching a pop-fly, just decides to write a book. And then he goes home and just does it. That’s like me telling you that I’m going to become Superman this afternoon and living up to the promise.

He writes openly about how his first attempts at writing were failures: failure to find a voice, failure to make anything he felt good about. In an interesting twist of logic, he chose to write in English for a few chapters. This reframing of the problem through another language helps him to find his voice. Before becoming an internationally best-selling author Murakami worked translating works in English to Japanese. I find it fascinating that he doesn’t translate his own works, instead having close relationships to two or three translators.

Finding Murakami, finding time, and learning how to make time, I’ve read more in a month than I did last year.

Old Mountain

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

We woke very early to catch a 6am train to the tiny mountain village of Aguas Calientes , also known as Machupicchu Pueblo. The train platform is literally just outside our hotel door. Our guide, Juan meets us with tickets. We drop our large bags at the front desk for safekeeping, say goodby to the hotel dog, Chaska, and weave through the crowds to find our seats on the Vistadome Train to Machu Picchu.

Sorry Chaska

The platform is crowded with travelers. Folks who have hiked the Incan trail have returned by train with giant packs on their backs and weary looks. Porters, hired by the hikers, are fighting to get bags and equipment off the luggage car in a large scrum. We elbow our way through and take our seats in the glass-domed train car. Juan has had a late night, up with sick kids. He quickly settles in for a nap. We find ourselves seated across from a Scottish couple in their seventies. We can barely understand them, but they are hilarious.

As the train climbs uphill we pass a point where the landscape changes suddenly from arid and scrubby to lush and green jungle. We’ve entered the cloud forest. The Amazon River basin is to the east. Warm wet air blows into the Andes mountains and as it rises it cools to become clouds. We watch the vegetation zoom by as we crack jokes with our new Scottish friends. About half way the train stopped for hikers to disembark. They’re doing a “short” run of the Incan trail. Just the hard parts in the mountains.

The train arrives at Aguas Calientes. Crowds pile out of the train and try to find a restroom. Juan leads us around a corner to a deserted waiting room with empty restrooms. Juan is Batman. He just knows things. The exit from the train station is enveloped in vendors hawking tourist crap. It’s hard to even find our way out. Juan spots the crew from our hotel. The crew adds our bags to a large cart full of more bags. This town only exists to get people into and out of Machu Picchu so the hotels cater to that need. Hotels will collect and hold bags, and return them to your train station.

The little town straddles the Urubamba River , which here in the foothills is a roaring rapid. The town is stitched together with small bridges. Our early train and immediate bus ride is scheduled so we can beat the throng of tourists arriving behind us. It takes our bus about 30 minutes to weave up the mountainside on switchbacks and hairpin turns. At the top buses unload their passengers and tourists line up to enter the archeological site. We have a choice. We can take the high road over the top of Machu Picchu - where all the famous photos are taken - or we can take the low road where all the interesting features are. We only have Juan to guide us today, so we choose the low road and continue our informal education in Andean and Incan history.

At the gate we have our tickets stamped and march down a small stone path into the archeological site. Juan directs over to the one bench in the whole site. Next to us a beard tourist in hiking gear snores, supine on the bench. Juan gives us an impromptu lecture about the rediscovery of Machu Picchu by explorer, academic, and bon-vivant Hiram Bingham . Bingham reintroduced Machu Picchu to the world in 1911, which is the same year our little house in Portland was built. I imagined Bingham tromping through the jungle on a mountain top with a teenage guide at the same time some burly lumberjacks were hammering planks onto my home’s roof. The synchronicity of time and space tickles my brain and for a brief moment I am four dimensional. Machu Picchu is a good place to touch the universe.

Juan leads us through the ruins explaining the use of the different structures and waxing almost lyrical about the ingenuity of the agricultural terraces (still occupied by llamas). What you see with your dumb gelatinous eyes are a stair-step structure of a wall holding back earth. If you are four-dimensional like me you can see that beneath the carefully managed topsoil is a network of aggregate rock and channels which route excess water away from the site and prevent erosion. But seriously, the site maintains a glass-encased aperture into the terraces where you can see the layers of rock and soil and get a sense of the complex structure hidden beneath your feet.

Temple to the sun standing above the entryway to the priest’s house.

We approach the temple to the sun - which is a curved wall with two trapezoidal windows facing out. Juan borrows a pen and using the pen as a prop mimes stabbing the pen into a paper envelope that once held our tickets. He explains that of course the sun would cast a shadow from the stick (pen) placed in the ground. And if you tracked the position of that shadow through the year to the winter solstice, the shadow will stop at a certain angle. He draws a line to indicate this. 6 months pass and he draws another line to indicate the position of the sun at the summer solstice.

Juan bisects the angle. “Now you know north and south”. A line perpendicular to this first line is east and west. The temple to the sun is a calendar. The little windows align to the position of the sun at the solstices. A few minutes later, my brain starts working and I look around and realize that all the windows on every building face east or west. to capture the sun. Beneath the temple to the sun we find a structure labeled “priests house”. Juan explains that this is a guess. We don’t know for certain. Next to the priest’s house is another structure beneath the temple to the sun, the king’s house. Both of the structures have the most elegant and precise stonework. The Incan tradition seems to emphasize status through quality of architecture.

We walk and listen to Juan and try to absorb knowledge and I surreptitiously touch ancient walls trying to feel history in my fingertips. He tells stories of idiot politicians trying to land helicopters at the site, too proud and lazy to take a bus they destroyed an important features of the site.

Tourists have started flowing in behind us. Tour groups are muscling their way through to important site, blocking paths, with little regard for others. Silly Instagram girls, both under and overdressed, are taking selfies. One absolutely Karen is holding a FaceTime chat while her tour guide is trying to explain the significance of the site they’re viewing. “I have to be quiet, I’m on a tour.” There are so many cliffs at Machu Picchu. It would be a shame if someone were to fall to their death while live-streaming on Instagram. A darn shame.

We finish our tour and my brain is full and bubbling. The bus ride back down the mountain seems to take seconds and my attention is elsewhere. Back in town, we find our hotel and collect our bags from the crew who gathered them from the train station. We head to our room and take showers. This town, Aguas Calientes, is such a tourist trap. It’s cute. The bridges over the river offer spectacular views. It seems like the town is under constant construction, more hotels for more tourists, at varying price points and degrees of luxury. We do a little shopping for souvenirs but soon the cacophony of street music, vendors, and clueless tourists is too much and we retreat. Mrs. Barrett books a massage in a quiet place. I put on headphones and read.

This entire town can only exist thanks to the railroad. There are no drivable roads in or out. This means the buses, construction equipment, food, everything, comes on a train each day. Amazing. We mostly hide the rest of the day, enjoying a nice meal at the hotel. Eventually the street grows quiet and the town is peaceful.

The next morning we are up early and on our own. After a quick breakfast in the hotel we line up for our bus. While we wait we watch a very confident dog stroll across a pedestrian bridge over the river, down some stairs where he pauses to check for traffic, then trots across the street to see if he can score some pets or treats from the tourists lined up. When this doesn’t pay off, he trots back across the street to a gaggle of school kids where he is immediately lavished with attention.

There are bus stops for each entry time into Machu Picchu. We line up at the 7am, entry stop. We take the bus up the twisty mountain road and to the park. This time we choose the high road, which requires a short but serious hike uphill over ancient steps.

Our path today will come down from the mountain side to the “top” of Machu Picchu - an alternate trail on the highest ridge line. It’s cloudy this morning and we’re not sure if we’ll get any good photographs, but the hike is lovely and there’s so much to see.

There are few restored thatch roofed buildings dotted around the site to help folks understand what the place might have looked like 600 years ago. The clouds are thick this morning and it seems to keep things quiet. Our walk around the site leads us to a high terrace overlooking the rest of the site. The clouds are a grey wall between us and the rest of the citadel.

We decide to wait and rest with all of the other tourists hoping to take the photo. It’s pleasant hanging out there. We lean up against a wall and watch folks sitting on their ponchos, talking amongst themselves. About 45 minutes later we see motion in the clouds. The crowd stirs and gasps as the whole of the city is revealed below us.

An interesting community formed spontaneously. Unlike the terrible Instagram girls, these folks waited patiently for a turn to take their great photo. People gestured to one another with the internationally understood symbol of “I’ll take your photo, will you take mine?” We get our photo taken, we take several more. At this point, as lame and bougie as it is, I am very glad that I recently upgraded my iPhone. I got a truly excellent photo.

We linger a while watching people watch each other take photos and then proceed through the rest of the trail. This trail leads up to an astronomical observatory on a small peak. Another temple to the sun with a small outcropping of carved rock which seems to serve as a compass point. The way there is treacherous. Tiny paths and tiny steps cling to the side of terraces overlooking cliffs and certain doom.

My brain does backflips and I breathe heavy. I begin to try to cling to the wall with both outstretched palms. I try to focus on my feet and walk but at every corner I can see deep into the valley below and my brain tries to jump out of my skull. Idiot tourists park at the top of stairs to take photos, oblivious to my suffering. I curse like a sailor under my breath. Everything we’re seeing is amazing and hate that I can’t take it in because my dumb brain doesn’t know that I’m safe. We finally descend from the maddening peak and nervous system calms down. I feel like I just sprinted a mile.

At the exist there is a lovely small café for tourists to relax at while waiting for a bus or waiting to enter. We have a little brunch. It’s still quite early, just barely 9am. We get small pizzas and I order a beer. The café is open to the air and overlooks mountain peaks through the trees. The beer works on my jangly nerves and we sit and chat for a bit, comparing photos.

We line up for our bus behind a throng of school kids in really cool uniforms. The school uniforms look like they were designed by Nike. Sleek track gear. I really wanted one of my own. An attendant wrangling the lines motions us forward. We take two of four remaining seats on the bus. The school kids are loaded together, en masse, on the next buss. Good planning.

Back in the little town, the noise has returned. The street musicians are back and filling the streets with the same four songs, Andean renditions of American boomer-pop hits. Terrible. We hide in a coffee shop until it’s time to board the train back to Ollantaytambo.

The road to Machu Picchu

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Our guide, Juan, and our driver, Carlos, collect us at the hotel in Cusco to drive us West towards Machu Picchu. We’re taking the scenic route, which is the only route.

Our first stop is the tiny town of Chinchero, not far outside of Cusco. What we see of the town, from our van, is unpaved dirt roads surrounded by a mix of old and new buildings - all brick. The town seems busy for its size. We are here to learn about traditional textiles created in the Cusco Region. Our van stops at a small cultural center. We hop out and tip-toe around the mud puddles to head inside.

The center is one part outdoor classroom, one part shop. As you enter, the first thing you see is a small pen with alpaca and llama hanging out, munching on grass. Have you ever pet an alpaca? They are so fluffy.

We are seated on a covered patio and a woman in traditional dress (red coat, black hat, black skirt, all local wool) greets us and proceeds to give us a quick lesson in the fabrication of traditional text tiles. Behind her is a large stone oven, already hot with coals from a fire started early this morning. The oven is an organic round shape, a sort of dome with three apertures on top. Each opening cradles an iron pot which looks like it was made just for this purpose. Water boils away in two of the pots.

Our instructor is sly and funny. She cracks little jokes here and there. I get the sense that she could clean up at a poker table. She passes us a sample of alpaca wool. It’s incredibly soft, but dirty. She explains that alpaca never take showers.

She pours boiling water from one of the pots into a bowl placed before her on the ground. She then grates a small amount of local root into the water and swishes it around. Soap-like bubbles form. She explains that this root is used as a natural cleaning agent, and is even used as shampoo. She dunks the wool into the steaming bowl by hand and begins to wash out the wool which becomes nearly white after a few rinses. She then demonstrates how the wool is spun into thread. This is done with a spool dangling in the air by the thread the spool itself is creating. She explains that folks just walk around spinning wool all day. Instead of fidgeting with your phone, how about make some thread instead? She deftly sets the spool to spinning as it hangs from the thread and wool and carefully feeds more wool onto the thread, gauging the thickness by hand. Once in a while she reaches down add a little momentum to the spinning spool. It all looks like a carnival trick, wool becoming thread before our eyes. Alpaca come in white, brown, and black. So we know now where the black skirt and hat come from.

Next she explains how different colors are created with natural pigments and minerals. On a low table there are many baskets filled with flowers, leaves, grains, and small chunks of crystalline minerals. One basket contains a single ‘leaf’ from a cactus encrusted with some white stuff. To me, this looks like lichen or perhaps even crusted sap from the cactus. Nope. It’s bugs. The tiny insects create a white case for protection and live off the cactus. Our teacher explains that usually the white material is scraped off and dried, but she will “sacrifice” some bugs to demonstrate. With a small amount of white granules in her hand, she quickly smashes and grinds the white stuff and it becomes shockingly liquid and red. Deep red, like blood. She demonstrates that by adding acid, say from a lime, you can change the red to orange. She rubs a small crystal on her hand and the deep red turns to more of a magenta color. Very versatile bugs.

Next she demonstrates dying a skein of yarn. The yarn soaks up color immediately and becomes bright yellow. The same crystal minerals are aded to the boiling pot and the mixture is left to simmer. The mineral works in some way to help set the color.

We walk from the patio to a little patch of grass surrounding a tree. Two stakes have been placed in the ground about 4 feet apart. Loops of colored thread are wrapped around each stake, making a pattern of horizontal stripes in red, blue, white, and black. The loops of thread are crossed at the halfway point between the two stakes, making a ‘X’. Next to the assembly staked into the ground a younger woman is sitting down with a loom made with the same criss-crossed arrangement of threads, now attached to a loom. The loom is tied to the tree and by leaning back a bit, the tension the young woman keeps the loom tight and the threads straight. The long horizontal threads become the warp and she is carefully weaving in colored thread. The weaver creates patterns of triangles, dots, and squares which hold symbolic representation and meaning. After looping thread in and around she keeping everything aligned with a carved and sharpened bone. Our teacher tris to convince us that it’s the bone of a human child and appears amused with herself that we must have looked very concerned for a moment.

We pile back into the van and continue west. Juan points out the location of a soon-to-be built international airport. This tiny city hardly seems to need an airport. Juan worries aloud about the change that the airport will bring.

After driving for a while, our van trundles up dirt roads and switchbacks until we’re looking down into a deep valley with a muddy stream at the bottom. The roads and mountainsides are all brick-red with scattered vegetation. Peering out the window into the valley makes my head spin. The road is rough and uneven. We pass earth moving equipment parked alongside the road, taking a break from the endless task of keeping this road passable. Eventually we turn a corner and see the Maras Salt Mines .

No one is quite sure how old the salt mines are. They predate the Incan empire, and there is evidence of some civilizations here dating bak to 700 BCE. The andes mountains were once under the ocean. When the earth heaved them up into the sky, they brought salt deposits up with them. People here discovered a natural spring bubbling up through the salty rock and began harvesting salt. Oddly, this salt is sea salt due to its origin underneath the ocean, even though we are far inland.

The spring is diverted through a series of clay and stone channels which fill some 4,500 evaporation pools. Each pool is about 4 square meters in area. During the dry season pools are filled and allowed to evaporate over and over again creating layers of increasingly pure salt. The top layer, highest quality, is light pink due to an infusion of trace minerals from the water. This Peruvian pink salt is highly prized in restaurants. Below this layer is white salt, standard household kitchen-grade salt. Below this is brown salt containing mud and heavier minerals. This salt I used for industrial and agricultural purposes.

We sit on the observation platform and watch families use special trowels to collect salt into the center of the pool so the water drains. The salt is collected into 50 kilogram bags. Strong young men heft a bag up to their shoulders and tip-toe on the edges of pools to drop the bags at a weigh station for processing.

Today, the salt mine is a co-op owned by families in the region. Families tend to their salt pool (or perhaps hire workers to do it for them) and they receive a share of the profits from selling the salt.

The place is eerie and alien and beautiful. When the sun breaks through the clouds, my sunglasses barely hold back the glare from the gleaming white salt encrusted pools below.

Our last stop for the day is the archeological site at Moray .

A natural sink hole in the limestone mountain was crafted by the Incas into concentric ringed terraces. Each level is about the depth of a tall man standing. On the terrace walls, floating stairs are constructed by cantilevered flat stones.

The limestone beneath the soil allows for water to drain away, preventing flooding. This is why, I suppose, this isn’t a swimming pool.

The different levels of the terraced structure create micro climates at each level. The lowest is the warmest. Archeologists believe that the Inca used these terraces to adapt crops. Corn from the low lands was cultivated at the lowest level. Seeds from plants that grew best were moved up a level where it’s slightly colder. This process would repeat until the adapted corn would thrive at the highest level and thus be fit for farming at high altitude.

We walked slowly around the entire site, taking it all in. The terraces strike me like earth-art from the 70s. Man-made but embracing the earth.

At one end of the site we spot an offering to Patchamama, the earth mother.

Our van winds its way to Ollantaytambo, our last stop before heading to Machu Picchu. As we wind our way to the little town in the valley I get a glimpse of the river and farmland below.

It is lush and green and nestled between the mountains. Suddenly the name “Sacred Valley” makes sense.

Ollantaytambo is a small cluster of a town nestled beneath Incan ruins on the mountain side.

The town is a bit touristy, but lovely. We are dropped at the train station, beyond the gates of the train station is our hotel where we will rest before taking the train to Aguascalientes, the tiny town at the foot of the mountain home of Machu Picchu.

Two nights in Cusco

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

After our harried departure from Lima, landed and were collected by our local fixer, Alejandro, and our driver Carlos. They help us load our luggage into a black Hyundai van, and we leave the small airport for the city of Cusco.

Cusco sits in a valley among the Andes mountains. The earth is red clay, just like where I grew up, in North Carolina. Most of the low buildings are brick. Peru gets earthquakes so buildings cling close to the earth. Our van bombs through traffic to the historic, ancient, and trendy neighborhood of San Blas. Cars barely fit down the tiny Incan streets. Sidewalks are barely a foot wide. Some intersections require a 3-point turn in order to hang a left. Our hotel up one of these tiny streets. Like everything here, our hotel is hidden behind a thick wall with a small door. This opens into a small chamber, which opens onto a courtyard. The Spanish-Colonial architecture is built atop Incan foundations, and that’s probably the reason it survived many earthquakes over the years.

Cusco sits some 11,000 feet above sea-level. Our travel agency has admonished us not to do anything to strenuous today. Walking from the van to our hotel room has us winded. We started taking altitude sickness medication some 24 hours earlier. The medication is weird and makes unexpected parts of your body tingle as if they had fallen asleep. Like your face. High altitudes affect people very differently. Some feel basically nothing but a little winded. I feel like I’m breathing sand. Everything is difficult.

After checking in and freshening up from our flight, our first job is to find lunch. There is a profoundly excellent vegan restaurant on the very same tiny street as our hotel, so we carefully walk downhill on the tiny 18-inch sidewalks, dodging cars, wheezing, to find lunch. The restaurant Green Point is tucked behind a door, down a corridor, and up some stairs, and then, somehow, an open terrace. The architecture here makes no spatial sense, doors at street level are suddenly 3 stories above ground, but also downstairs. The hills, the walls, and the tight spaces conspire to make things confusing. Reading a floor plan of the building would require VR goggles.

Like everywhere in Peru, the portions at Green Point are absurdly huge. It’s a lesson we never learn. Our starter and two mains is enough to feed 7 people. We have a little starter of a hummus like salsa of chickpeas with bread. I get a “ceviche” starter made with all manner of veggies, paired with thin slices of sweet potato. My main is two huge skewers of grilled oyster mushrooms atop roasted corn, potatoes, and a stuffed chili.

Many foods served in Cusco are served with a mild yellow chile salsa. It’s slightly fruity, earthy, rich, and fantastic on potatoes.

We are stuffed and sleepy and we can’t breathe at this elevation. The hotel is uphill from here, and we feel every single step.

We settle in for a nap. I wake up hungry. She wakes up sick. Traveller’s belly has caught up with us. It will be my turn tomorrow. We lay low in the hotel until dinner time. She takes all the meds and rests. I fluff around on my iPad. We are following our travel agents instructions after all. Later I venture back down the hill to find us something mild to eat. My strength is returning. The air is beginning to feel like it air again, only 60% sand. I find a cute little pizza place. My terrible Spanish is enough to order a margarita pizza to go. I note the menu offers vegan cheese and gluten fee crust. Is Cusco the Portland of Lima?

We have some of our pizza for dinner. Her appetite is nil. I swipe a beer from the mini-bar. We wrap up the leftovers and tuck into the fridge, behind the sodas and beers. I spend a little time freaking out about whether the phone chargers we’ve been using our whole trip. (They were fine)

By morning, Mrs. Barrett is well enough to adventure. Our guide, Juan, meets us at the hotel with a driver Franco. Juan introduced our driver as Chaleco and then have a good laugh at our expense. Apparently chaleco is slang for “bad driver” in Peru. His actual name is Franco. (When I got home and looked up chaleco it seems to mean vest so perhaps the joke is on us twice).

Franco threads the van through the tiny streets of Cusco, northwest and of town to visit Sacsayhuamán (pronounced like sax-y-hwa-man or even sexy woman).

This sexy woman is a fortified citadel atop a hill overlooking downtown Cusco. Since we were feeling puny and gasping for air, we strolled along the base of the three, massive stone walls which surround the terraced structure overlooking the city. The walls are enormous, some 20 feet high and made of immense blocks of stone.

Stones are cut in this intricate, organic, pattern with interlocking curved corners. The effect reminds me of corn kernels tightly packed together.

The joints seem impossible. So tight a credit card can’t slide between. There is no mortar between these stones.

Much of the stone was pilfered by the Spanish during their invasion and used to build much of old Cusco below. The stones left behind were too large for the invaders to move.

Our next stop is Quenko, a holy place or huaca, devoted to Patchamama, the Earth Mother goddess of Andean and Incan belief. Quenko is hewn from natural rock formations, with cracks, crevices, caves, and tunnels. To commune with Patchamama, you must enter the earth. Through out the huaca there are small offerings of coca leaves. This is an active temple, still used by farmers. Much of the Andean faith survived Spanish conquest, practiced privately at home, away from the murderous, oppressive scolds at the cathedral in Cusco.

Coca leaves offered to Patachamama

Inside one of the little caves you can see a sort of altar sculpted from the rock with three small steps leading up to a small platform. Juan explains that you will often see this altar scattered with offerings from the local farmers.

On our way back into town, we stopped at a marketplace. Juan showed us around and told us about the challenges tourism brings to a place like this. The market supports local farmers and communities with produce, fruit, meat, as well as prepared meals. We see farmers seated at tables enjoying a hearty chicken soup at 10:30am. They’ve been working since sun-up so it’s time for lunch. Juan tells us about how folks usually build relationships with two or three vendors, becoming regulars. As tourism has grown in Cusco, the market is transforming to sell more things for tourists. Alpaca textiles and other tchotchkes are pushing out traditional market fare. It’s more profitable but the cost to the community is dear.

We leave the market and make our way to the Convent of Santo Domingo. We are not here to the convent itself, but rather Intiwasi , also called Coricancha, this temple to Inti, the Incan god of the sun.

On our way to the temple we come across dancers performing traditional Mexican dance. Mexican music, food, and culture is imported here much like it is in the US.

Outside of the convent we see traditional Peruvian dancers as well, wearing tall hats and gesturing rhythmically with handkerchiefs.

This temple marks the (mythic) location where Cusco was founded. The temple is said to have once been covered in gold. When Spanish conquerers came, the gold was stolen and the temple mostly destroyed. The Incan stone work became the foundation for the convent. The remaining in-tact rooms create a cloister along one corridor. The temple remains are a museum within a museum. I imagine the bureaucracy governing this state archeological site within an active Catholic Church must be dizzying

The precision on these stone blocks is uncanny. Again stones cut precisely with no mortar, nothing wobbly, perfectly level. Throughout Cusco Incan foundations were repurposed for Spanish buildings. Once you are shown, you begin to see it everywhere. It makes for some interesting integration into the modern city.

Incan foundation with Spanish architecture above. The slanted walls are characteristic of Incan buildings and protect against earthquakes.

After a day of site-seeing we return to the hotel to find our laundry has returned pressed and folded. With Amazon sweat and grime rinsed from my shirts, I feel fresh and new. We polish off our leftover pizza and head out to explore on our own.

Just down the the slanted road from our hotel is a little pie shop with a bawdy name. We stop for coffee and end up chatting with the owner. He’s a Peruvian-Ameican who moved to Cusco to reconnect with family and ended up stating a business.

We make our way back to the main plaza and visit a museum full of pre-Columbian artifacts, a community art museum, stumble into a body-building competition next door to the art museum, and then stumble across a what appears to be photoshoot for a quinceañera on the steps of the old cathedral.

Night falls and we head back out to the plaza for dinner at Chincha, an absolutely amazing restaurant blending Peruvian and world cuisine.

The restaurant is upstairs, overlooking a smaller plaza, one block from the main plaza. Fortunately we have reservations. Many folks are sitting around the small waiting ara with hopeful looks.

We’re both feeling wobbly, but we’re going to rally and try to enjoy the food. She orders a sweet potato stuffed pasta dish. I order a relatively simple dish of grilled trout with spinach and potatoes. The trout is crispy outside and melts in your mouth. For dessert we split a custard made with the local fruit lúcuma.

Back at the hotel we choke down medicines for traveler’s tummy and sleep. Tomorrow we head northwest to Chinchero, Moray, and Ollantaytambo.

Three nights in the Amazon Rainforest

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Our itinerary for getting to the Amazon required:

A flight from Lima to Cusco
Sitting on the tarmac at Cusco while some passengers left, and others arrived
A flight from Cusco to Puerto Moldonado
A motorized canoe ride down the Madre De Dios river

We departed our hotel in Lima and wormed through traffic to the Lima airport. The process of checking in and getting through security seemed hectic, a bit mad, and definitely rushed, but from the time we were dropped off at the airport to getting through security was under 25 minutes. The American TSA needs to be sent here to take lessons. Incredible.

We found a quick breakfast and our flight was uneventful. When we landed on the tarmac in Puerto Moldonado, the crew pushed wheeled stairs up to the front and back doors of the airplane. With the doors open, the air conditioning struggled to keep up with the heat and humidity. Fog rolled down from the ceiling.

We clanked down the stairs to the tarmac to the tiny airport to collect our bags

A crew from the Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica is waiting for us. We are shuffled aboard the vans and driven through the small city of Puerto Moldonado to the riverside where a number of motorized canoes wait to haul us downriver to the lodge.

The boat ride takes about 30 minutes. The pilot makes big sweeping s-curves across the river. We spot a few other boats headed to other places on the river, bobbing up and down as we cross their wakes.

Along the way one of our guides, Miguel, gives us a brief orientation about what to expect this afternoon and tonight. Mostly the trip is quiet and peaceful with a cool wind from the speed of the boat hiding the intense heat and humidity. About 10 minutes into the ride, cell phone service drifts away and my phone becomes my camera.

We arrive at the dock for the lodge. I say “dock” but this really a ramshackle set of stairs leading down to the water’s edge. You can see the water level in the river changes frequently and a normal dock wouldn’t work. Our boat pilot does a large u-turn in the river, pointing the bow of the canoe upstream, turned slightly to the bank. He idles the motor just enough to stay in position on the river, letting the current pull us sideways to the dock. We are instructed to leave our life jackets on the bench seats and climb up the stairs. Agile and sure-footed crewmen jump aboard the boat and haul our luggage away for us.

As we walk up to the lodge a handsome young waiter greets us with some tropical passion fruit juice beverage. I worry that we have landed in the next season of White Lotus. I look around to see if I can spot the victim. If you find yourself in a White Lotus situation, try to spot the victim. If you can’t spot the victim, it’s probably you (we survived).

We are given the logistics of our stay, our passports are whisked away to be photocopied, and we haul off to our cabins to freshen up before dinner. This is entirely necessary. No one from the plane has acclimated to the heat and we’ve all sweat through our clothes.

Our cabin is adorable, with a river view. We freshen up and change clothes. I realize immediately that my 4 linen shirts and my week’s worth of other clothes will not withstand the rigors of the amazon. Next is dinner in the lodge followed by our first excursion.

The lodge is beautiful and rustic and built and furnished from an absurd amount of wood. The central space is one large screened porch with a conical roof held up by a huge central pillar, which was once a tree trunk. The tables are giant slabs of giant tree, the chairs are hewn from logs with a chainsaw. Ridiculous. But lovely.

Dinner was a light three courses. We were relieved to find vegetarian options. We wobbled off the log-chairs and made our way to the “eco center” to get a breakdown on the options for our various excursions.

Our assigned guide, Gustavo sat us all on some couches overlooking some posters describing all the activities the lodge has to offer. Those of us who arrived on the boat together were destined to take all of our excursions together. We had the pretty and quiet Chinese expat, the divorced dad and his two kids in tow, and us. The six of us, plus Gustavo and another boat pilot climbed onto a motorized canoe for a trip upstream in the dark.

Gustavo stood at the bow of the boat with a hand-held spotlight. We were admonished to keep flashlights off, as our guide needed complete dark, and the boat’s pilot needed to see signals from the guide.

Gustavo appeared to use a side-to-side sweeping motion to indicate “go” and an up-and-down motion to indicate “stop”. Or maybe I have that backwards. He guided us to the shoreline and began scanning for critters. He spotted a small-ish caiman and trained the spotlight on it. The caiman seemed annoyed and slipped into the river. Gustavo made slashing motions with the spotlight and we were off again. Gustavo scanned the bank, explaining to us that he was looking for eyes. A bright light will reflect back from the retina of an observant critter, revealing their location. We stop to observe a larger caiman, this one several feet in length.

We spotted more caimans and several birds. Gustavo directed the boat out into the center of the river. The pilot turned off the motor and Gustavo turned off his spotlight, instructing us to take a minute to look at the stars. My eyes adjusted slowly and I began to see the milky way emerge from the blackness. The spotlight clicked back on, the motor revved up, and we were piloted back to the dock of our lodge.

Now, after 9pm, the heat has finally broken. Back at our cabin, a cold shower is refreshing and we prepare for bed, periodically waking up to the sound of mangos falling from a tree and landing with a heavy thud on the ground.

I wake before 5. The sun is rising and birds are making jungle bird noises. I shower and dress and slather on absurd amounts of sunscreen. It won’t matter, it will all melt off as I sweat gallons throughout the day. The dumb, stupid hat I bought at the beach in Lima turns out to be the perfect jungle hat. The wide brim protects my dopey ears and neck from the sun; the drawstring keeps the hat on my head while racing up river on a boat.

There is no universe where I would have chosen a trip to the amazon. But this trip is for my wife. She turned 40 and wanted to see Machu Picchu and the Amazon and so here I am, sweating at 5am looking at the river at sunrise. Marriage is compromise. I am leaning in and finding joy in the experience. This far from civilization there is no cell service, no internet, and the power goes off for several hours a day. The electricity comes from diesel generators, which need refueling and periods to cool down each day.

Each day is the same, more or less. We wake around 5, shower, find breakfast in the main dining room, get on a boat to go see something, return to the lodge, shower, have lunch, shower, read and nap, get back on a boat to see things, return, shower, have dinner, shower, perhaps have a drink in the lodge, and then retire. The lights go out around 10 when the generators are switched off for the night. We sweat constantly. Sunscreen is pointless. We wear long sleeves and big hats and hope for shade.

Time expands. Each day is a week long. My phone becomes a camera with extra icons I never tap. I nearly finish a book. I write in my journal.

We take a long hike through the jungle arriving at a creek. Along the way monkeys jump from branch to branch. We take canoes down the creek to a lake and look for birds and turtles.

We hike out from the lodge to a tall wooden tower. At the top, several stories above the jungle floor, the tower connects to a network of rope bridges, allowing guests to see the forest canopy up close. I try to climb the tower, but I crane my neck up to see the rope bridges and my brain begins doing anxious backflips, alarm bells ringing in my ears. I don’t do well with heights. I “nope” my way back down the tower and walk through the forest to wait at a small covered patio. I listen to the trees and the rain and the birds and the kids in our group go nuts on rope bridges 100 feet above the ground. When the crew descends and returns I hear tales of sloths in the trees.

We go out at night, after dinner, to hunt for tarantulas, scorpions, and other creepy crawlies. The little girl is stung by a wasp. The guide whisks us back out of the jungle where she receives pain killers, hydrocortisone, and piles of attention.

We visited a fruit farm - which is helmed by a man and his wife, living in a cabin on legs (in case of flooding). When you think “farm” you might imagine neat rows of trees. This farm is a forest which includes fruit trees. We try limes straight from the tree. We try cocoa pods - slimy and white like alien eggs, they taste like fruity candy. There is star fruit, oranges, grapefruits, all kinds of things growing here, in abundance, just in the forest. Most of this fruit finds its way onto the menu at the lodge. Chickens follow us everywhere hoping for corn. We hike from the farm through the forest to a another creek and take a lazy canoe ride down the creek back to the dock and our boat.

We visit another lodge, famous for its medicinal plants. Our guide shows us a plant used by indigenous people to create blue temporary tattoos. I still have a blue squiggle on the back of my left hand. Gustavo deftly trims a large flower with his machete, showing us how the huge petals can be worn like a parrot’s bill. We take silly photos.

At our final dinner we say our goodbyes to our guide, Gustavo. Miguel, the man who collected us at the airport, gives us a rundown of our escape plan. We are to meet at 6am to board the boat back to Puerto Moldonado.

In the morning we take the notarized canoes back. Within sight of the bridge crossing the river at Puerto Moldonado, our phones begin coming back to life, bleeping and blooping, and time shrinks back down to size. We leave the canoes for vans, which take us to the airport. Miguel hands us printed boarding passes (somehow? not sure how he collected this information). The tiny airport is overrun by the one flight leaving that day. We finally get on the plane, hot and sweaty. When the air conditioning comes on shiver in our seats.

Our flight takes us to Lima, and then back to Cusco for the next leg of our trip. We realize in the Lima airport that Miguel has failed us. We were supposed to have two boarding passes each, not one. At this discovery we race all over the airport trying to find someone who knows something. The LATAM airlines app is useless and won’t connect, so we can’t use a digital pass. Finally someone is able to reprint our passes and we race to security. We duck the line and race to our gate just in time to run downstairs to the tarmac to the waiting shuttle bus as the doors are closing.