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So I’ve been procrastinating with this painting I’ve been working on.  Keep second-guessing what I want to do with it.  I really want a smooth, detailed top layer to contrast with the rough crudeness underneath.  I’ve been toying with ideas of collaging materials over top, maybe building up layers of spackle to make some 3-D architectural-looking structures that’d protrude out.

And yeah, I don’t want to screw it up.  So, tonight I mocked it up in Photoshop, trying a few different approaches.  I settled on my original idea: a portrait of Nikola Tesla.

Ehh, those damn buildings make it all a bit crowded though.  Not very Tesla, either.

That’s more like it.  Clean.  Not sure if I’m going to go freehand or stencil.  Will probably stencil out the framing box there and then see about the portrait.

Any suggestions for the paint type or ink I should go for?  The underneath is thickly textured sludgy tempera over a salvaged acoustic ceiling tile so yeah, clean lines will be a challenge no matter what.

Sketch by Adam K. Olson, from Takoyaki Night

I’ve been getting a lot more serious about being a Cooking Human.  Haven’t succumbed to the kitchen gear fetish quite yet (though I have lusted in my heart) and I’m hoping to not get too carried away even as I upgrade my tools.

Best pieces of kit I got this past year?  Rice cooker and food processor.  Way to drop the work load.  And figuring out you can freeze portions of rice in nothing more than plastic wrap has been a godsend for the cause of bringing my lunch.

My main fixation this year has been upgrading my basic ideas of flavor combinations.  I’ve been getting a lot of mileage off of some pretty cheap tricks for most of my life (”hey!  garlic and ginger!  I’m a genius!”) so I’ve been trying to figure out some ways to make things taste good without them tasting generically pan-Asian or Italian backyard cookout.  I’m still pretty much a marinate-then-saute default kind of cook but I’d like to think I can be better than that.

I’ve been trying to get into Indian cooking more.  Toward that goal, I’ve been doing more with whole spices.  Probably should evolve from smashing them on the countertop with a hammer, though.  As cool as that is…

And I’ve finally gone over to cooking clean.  Setting up a space, doing dishes in the lulls, keeping everything organized… yes, I read Kitchen Confidential and got embarrassed at what a pig job I was doing.  To that end, I’ve been organizing my kitchen a lot more systematically and yes, hygienically.  A battle with Indian Rice Beetles led to more jarring of foodstuffs in mostly repurposed containers (see above… those little bastards eat anything).  More of that this year.

This year: Mortar and pestle.  Sunday roast chicken = week of meals.  Converting cooking skills into media product (cookbook, videos, more recipes on the blog).  Baking things that are not baked goods.  Bread.  Figure out how to bone a chicken thigh without slicing off any fingers.  Cooking dumb, tasty things like meatloaf without being a showy jerk about it.

AquaBillyJoelLand (2003)

Just put this up, finally.  Somehow every DVD copy I had made fell into some kind of black hole, requiring me to dig through my backups.

I made AquaBillyJoelLand back in 2003 for Non-Fiction Film Prod.  I was inspired by some typically breathless reporting in an abandoned Newsweek or U.S. News Report I was reading in a waiting room or bus station.  I remember there being an article on the rise of the ‘Gamma Girls’ who were going to take over the world with their benevolent self-esteem rays and can-do spirits followed by some You’re Going to Die By Fire and Ice and Pestilence (But Maybe Not!) about global warming.  So I asked myself, ‘What Would A Gamma Girl Do?’  And there you go.

Yep, that’s my sister.

Earlier this year, I’d just keep Notepad open all day at work and fill a file with whatever random detrius flashed across my brainpan: links, lyrics, story ideas, shopping lists, etc etc.  I’d then paste this all into an email to myself.  That was alright but it basically replicated the same process of my analog, pocket notepad, needing to be filed again once I’d gotten home.  Tends to make a mess.
A couple months ago, I switched to Google Notebook.  I break it up into various headings: Doomed/Not Doomed (grim meathook future stuff mixed with clever sustainability projects), BUY THIS, Novel, etc.  Here’s some links from there:

• Where to buy octopus in NYC
  
• 3D open source structure synth Imagine this thing gets absorbed into a swarm of self-aware nano-machines and goes viral, chewing up the landscape and reforming all into manic waves of cubist structures.
• Medika Mamba… fighting malnutrition in Haiti with magic peanut butter.

This year: Umm… stay the course, I guess.  Google Notebook’s been going pretty well, just need to dip into it and review my notes more often when I’m on a desperate hunt for novelty in those weekend early afternoon hours or those Just Got Home and Not Doing Anything hours.

Back in high school, I had a microcassette recorder that I would ostensibly take notes on in that whole “note to self:” sort of way you see on TV.  Didn’t work.  It mostly ended up getting turned on and left on the table at house parties to collect evidence of pointless conversations further warped by excessive Southern Comfort. I still have the thing and plenty of incriminating tapes but I’m pretty sure the whole thing got dunked in a pitcher of Staten Island Ice Tea (recipe: 1 part fake ice tea, 1 part lemon, 2 parts rum) at Jake Timmons’ house and now it’s guts are fused with mummified stickiness. The basic problem with this method is that A - I’d be too embarrassed to mumble lyrics, lines, ideas, and other stuff into it in front of other people and B - I don’t think I ever transcribed a thing off of it.  Not a natural extrovert, not into adding extra steps.

I’ve kept a notepad in my pocket since freshman year at Marist.  Some guy was handing out NY Times mini-reporter pads in the lobby of my dorm to promote newspaper subscriptions.  I’ve always had some paper in my pocket since then.

This year I thought I’d switch over to a PocketMod, and that worked well for awhile, but lately I’ve been just folding a sheet of unlined printer paper into six sections and jamming the thing in my pocket.  Holds up better than any notepad I’ve ever bought and takes up less room.  On an unscheduled, usually weekly basis, I write down what’s been written on the paper into the appropriate file on my computer.  If there’s a sketch of something I want to keep, I throw the paper into one of my bins for stuff to be scanned.

For bigger sketches, novel work and train rides and such, I have a moleskine of the 8″x5″ variety with graph paper lines inside.  It’s a decommissioned daily planner I made back in Boston when I thought I was going to be a GTD minion.  That didn’t take off, really so now it merely receives my scribbles, sketches and ends the lives of non-winged bugs I can’t identify.  (”Whatthekill it!”)  There’s also a few off-brand composition notebooks I grab when the moleskin is buried under a pile of broken electronics or dirty clothes.

This Year: I think I’m generally going to stick to this haphazard system with some updates.  I’d like to tweak my on-computer file system and link it to my schedule a little more rigorously, both updating it and taking a look back at my short story ideas, cartoon ideas, project ideas and acting on them or passing them along.

I think I need to do a little thinking out loud about my working methods here.  And yes, that’s a little weird to say ‘thinking out loud’ because I’m typing, this is the internet and I don’t say the words as I type them (usually).  My new favorite blog, Daily Routines, has me thinking about my habits, though, and I think maybe writing ‘em out might be helpful, might start a conversation.  KT7, Mr. Sheldon, I’m speaking of you amongst others.  Nice year-end wrap-up sort of thing, too.

2008 has been a big year for self-analyzing my behavior, my habits, what I want out of what I do.  Somewhere in late high school/college, I realized I was a lazy jerk with nothing to show for all self-esteem I’d wrung out of people telling me I was bright.  Since then, year-by-year, I’ve been slowly making a god out of productivity, out of turning my ideas into action, product, experiences, slowly coming around to not just thinking but doing and figuring out the intermediary steps between where I am and where I want to be.

I’ve noticed a weird sort of wasting disease among a good chunk of the people I like and identify with as, for better or for worse, my tribe.  On some level, it seems that the highest good is to be funny, slow and drunk, an entertaining dilettante without any of that uptight seriousness and methods and talk and planning.  I guess this is all a bit of the Peter Pan syndrome, the 90s media-hyped slacker epidemic and a thousand other things it’s been called before, depending on who or what group or generation is getting accused of it.

I think I had a breakthrough moment when I was living in Osaka and I went to the top floor of Loft Shinsaibashi and saw the 50 square feet of floor they devoted to hip looking daily planners and I was excited. Admitting that to myself and not feeling like Carlton on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air did a lot for easing the path to getting things together.

So.  The next few posts are about how I do what I do when I’m doing the stuff I call ‘work’, this being something separate from the body-rental of my day job.

Oh yeah, and the picture is from my brother’s wedding last year.  I was discreetly adjusting the Earth’s magnetic field.

>>6424355362766

Yo beats me.

• made an attempt to buy shoes
• cooked chili ramen with sesame-soy grilled tofu
• had a beer or two with Crystal and Steve and Crystal’s high school friend Jen(n) (Levee)
• Read about John Berryman and Douglas Coupland
• had a beer or two with Kiley, Sam and Kiley’s high school/college friends (Matchless)
• became more determined to follow through with karaoke video tests

weak sauce.  more tomorrow before you party.  make bean dip.  sketch stuff.  write novel.  write down fake curry recipe from last night.