Tom Bubul .info
tom.bubul@gmail.com, @tombubul. Last modified .
Studio Chair: December 2025
old / new / todo / movies
Old news
in October I wrote but didn't post the following:
I just got back from spending two weeks out east at Lucy's house; great visit, Lucy is 1.5 years old now.
most of the last month or so was spent on finishing work for Three Renés via the editorial process it landed in(!) - traveling from the "I'm done" state (completed third draft) to the "it's done" state (completed fifth draft) ... it'll be out in the spring.
the plant tables came out great. even though sanding, staining, and polyurethaning added like 400% to the project timeline, I feel like the results look like "actual furniture" in a way that my typical smashed-together raw pine projects obviously never do. nice to feel the demands of New Spahouse exerted over the project plan: to be forced to slow down, learn a little bit, and make something nicer than my typical rushed and purely functional ad hoc solutions have historically tended to be.
feels good to take the longer view, building out nice stuff for the house, even if still only barely "real" ... New Spahouse is my sixth(!) address in Minnesota in four(!) years, moving begets moving, and then eventually, a sort of aftershock denial/resistance to moving being "done"... I'm trying hard to escape this mindset as we get close to the end of year zero in here... finally moving all of my D&D stuff, highschool notebooks, etc. from storage out east is maybe toward that, a gesture in stuff toward this being the last stop, which will maybe help create permission to go hard in making the situation as good as I can...
New news
- we opened Guest Room for season 4, feels great/wild to pass so much time and get back into a familiar cockpit, absolutely delightful to see everyone at the opener, so nice to spend time in there
- people keep asking me about the fate of that house and the answer is, I'm formalizing a residency program there, and trying to find one or two other synergistic nighttime programmers. a separate page about that is here: residency-2026.html
- when you make chicken parm one thing you do is dry/salt the chicken, dip it in egg, dip it in breadcrumbs, then lightly fry the chicken. but when you're done battering the chicken, you also take the leftover egg, and put that in the leftover breadcrumbs, and fry that; in my family this is called making eggburger. I mention this because I have some big sections of Renés unrelated to the story that didn't make the final cut that are becoming eggburger; I finished a first draft of that and am now in the "don't look at it" phase before the edit.
- drawing is BACK baby!!!! I'm making all kinds of stuff in the drawing space ... and I don't mean digital ... I mean dry/wet line on surface. no idea what will become of this stuff but feels great - I sent an intention last year to "return to big drawing" and, I have now done that.
- maybe related is, I did a holiday trade with Colleen, for which I made her "Oshi in... midnight at the oasis":
- house for the holidays 3, incredible to get to do this three years in a row, honestly amazing that year one, Flannery is visiting for tg, year two she's in an apartment here, year three she's bought a house of her own a mile from mine and we're doing it there. I mentioned last time that I wanted to do extended "teachers" mix but wasn't gonna because nobody cares, well, I sorta just did it here
- I ALSO got to be a guest on LLPQ ... Louie also a wonderful friend, also a mile from home, also so nice and fun to do ... just straight up two hours of saying whatever popped into my head ... video with annotations is here
- I visited Bela, Sadie, and Ro in Iowa City and this was extremely inspiring and restful... we did sauna/hot tub/infinity pool(!!), watched the klaus nomi doc, watched four hours of music videos, drank a lot of turkey broth, went on two nice walks... I got to help Bela hang up two of Jordan's amazing drawings from her 2018 show that remains the best drawings show I've ever seen ... such a blessing to get to see them again!
- Nonni and Ravs (cats; brothers) are now in effect in our house, please join us in saying Welcome
Todo at time of writing
- work on the paintings
- clean up studio one million
- cinefoil drawings
- big drawing
- new yorker cartoons
- finish eggburger
- finish cathedral
- demon video
- the new collages
Movies
***** Stress Positions (2024)
**** Pee-wee doc (2025), Pumping Iron (1977), Soul Kitchen (2009), The Way Back (2010), Three on a Match (1932)
*** Ham on Rye (2019), The Nomi Song (2004), Marty Supreme (2025), Harvest (2024), Wrongfully Accused (1998), Lurker (2025), The Sound of Silence (2019), Smashing Machine (2025), Phoenician Scheme (2025)
** Materialists (2025), Past Lives (2023)
* Downton Abbey (2025)
rewatched Phantom Thread and Burn After Reading. probably a few others, still not keeping great track. scale is: ***** Great movie, **** Good movie, *** That movie, ** Bad movie, * Garbage movie; steeply bell-curved and in order of preference.
Home