Tom Bubul .info
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Studio Chair: June 2026
Kinda too much stuff going on to say it all, so feel like I'm saying too much without scratching the surf, but I'm erring on the side of it being useful to capture whatever fragment of this moment this way, and putting this chair together this way anyway. Okay so:
Sixth epoch
Natalie and I got married on March 28 in San Francisco, thus commencing the sixth epoch of my life. :)
ICE out
Winter in Minneapolis was materially and psychically dominated by "Operation: Metro Surge." Like the pandemic, the moment is "passed," though the distortions it created in the reality-fabric persist, the ledgers around it remain unbalanced, and the whole thing continues to reverberate.
Despite the national "open season" on takes and reporting, I feel that very little meaning has really been made of this time so far. (A local exception, and model, is Post Modern Times, which I feel is extremely inspiring.) I get that the over-reality’s vibe is super fucked, and that national attention can only stay focused on a single facet of hell’s prism for so long, especially during such an information-diseased time, when lurid and chaotic new debacles, real and fake alike, continue streaming in like parade floats. But man, nothing in this life ends like a tv show episode, and almost nothing ever passes by linearly again, if/once you become an adult...
I wrote a lot more about this at the time; no idea what will become of all that. Regardless, on a few levels, the major feeling is "this time is still with us."
Studio at new spahouse, take two
In the studio I realized I’m always trying to "get back to" something... to drawing cartoons, to painting, to writing... but I think if this season shows anything, it’s that these various threads continue to become more integrated over time, that it's only ever and always a forward process of new invention, never a returning process of "dusting off" or rediscovering ancient knowledge...
I'm always saying the projects follow the shape of the selected ideas, but I realized I was still acting adversarially toward this fact on some level, e.g., as though I "should" be selecting certain idea shapes on some other basis than my level of interest in them, such as their external legibility. I think I'm finally ready to accept that this is totally unhelpful to me - that my own curiosity, interest, and desire alone provide 100% of the guidance, and that it’s impossible to redirect these animating forces toward "more productive" outcomes (e.g. visual artwork intended for exhibition; writing that anticipates publication). In actual fact, the only time I’m "productive" is when I get out of my own way, work the esoteric projects of my heart’s delight, and then move on when I'm free of them. It’s only through this process that the space I need in order to make "visible" work can be created. It's an extended ecosystem in which I don't just cook dinner 100% of the time - I also do dishes and go shopping too.
My old formulation of this is "fucking around and rolling around on the floor are part of the process"—but I think it’s maybe more accurate to say "fucking around and rolling around on the floor are part of the work." (I.e., cleaning the kitchen is part of making dinner.) Like it’s not about excising these things via efficiency, or about viewing them as artifacts of an elaborate method - it’s about recognizing their peer-level relation to the "higher" work. "Getting to" making that work is a matter of extended strategy related to how I live my life, not a tactical matter of "only working on fiction from now on," or whatever.
Anyway, I often do feel like all of my drawings sort of just are aspects of my drawing line, all of my writing is just my writing line, etc., and that while there are more or less exemplary instances of each, the field of the work is infinite and visibly continuous to me across each form, as well as in the hyperspace of my ideas (my "idea" line) that connects them. In an extremely humbling but also exciting, middle-aged feeling way, this seems to force the thought that it’s even less about making "good" work than I thought, and more about articulating the possibilities of these different lines in as total a way as possible, i.e., traveling through and exploring hyperspace. Toward what? I guess the notion that when I’m dying, I will feel that if there had been something to communicate, though I probably was not able to communicate it, maybe there will be some restful satisfaction to be found in having made a coherent attempt?
...
I internalized something John Fleischer said to me this way: When you go into a museum and see large artwork, you see a self-perpetuating capitalist distortion of artwork's natural scale. The distortion self-perpetuates by suggesting to artists who see large museum artworks that not only are this exhibition format and scale both natural, but that it’s natural for artists to do this type of scaling up themselves - that, in fact, they should (and maybe must), in order to anticipate future museum shows.
In this way, the impulse to make larger work toward "career" - disconnected from inspiration and ideas that require scale themselves - can be thought of as a Tetsuo-ing outward mutation into grotesque monstrosity of artwork and the mind of the studio, via museum-temple radiation. I see this bearing out on my own work, which from 2010 to 2021, continued to get bigger, for no clear reason beyond the extent to which scale implies this type of ambition or latent desire related to this set of outcomes. I take Agnes Martin's advice to "turn away" seriously, from the Chelsea of the mind. I look for these ways in which I realize I still may not have completely -
...
I was saying to Abby Hari that, 17 years ago, in Providence, "painting" was an important center of my self-conception as an artist, in a way that's just not significant anymore. I don't think I understood until recently that this may have been due to some need to feel "serious," particularly in the absence of any credentials or "accomplishments," and while living through the rather chaotic and unserious third epoch. The grounding "being a painter" provided as a stable identity marker helped me organize what I thought I was trying to do ("make paintings"), and also functioned as a possible explanation to anyone looking at my life as to why it was organized that way... particularly to me, looking at myself from a distance.
Later in New York, painting became a zone to practice and/or defend and/or reaffirm by candlelight a kind of continuity around "core" selfhood ("artist"), during a different kind of hermetic, difficult season.
But now, on the other side of all of this, it's almost as if painting has moved out of the center because the anxieties that had so animated it just aren't relevant to me anymore, and that to make new paintings must now mean following new idea lines leading through painting, rather than remaining vestigially committed to the old lines, when the old reasons no longer animate them.
These big "why am I doing this" thoughts have been occurring as I destruct my studio down to zero, to re-prepare it for making visual artwork for an exhibition context again, after spending the last four years doing just about every other possible thing with my time. If I had stopped doing something for four years in my 20s, it would have felt as if I had quit, or lost so much time, and that the earth had changed completely. But now in the loping mid-life tempo, where nothing passes by and everything comes back around, four years feels like a totally normal amount of time to do or not do something, particularly to "get my house in order."
Since it takes so long to establish trust and context, it feels natural that it would take this long after moving to a new region of the country to figure out how exactly that would apply here, how I'd want to or could participate. John and I become friends over a few years, John asks me to make some drawings for a show; that's an easy one. Eric Ruby and I become friends over a few years, Eric asks me to do whatever I want for a little DIY show; that's an easy one too. Meanwhile all this respiratory work, all of this easy movement of the hand printing the mind, all this running, cooking, rolling on the floor, writing... all this work on these houses... Guest Room, getting married, changing jobs again and again, becoming an uncle, learning to use the sewing machine, planting a hedge, having parties...
All of this coalesced when I got a flatfile and rebuilt my studio around it; it's good now. One of the drawing shows is at a space called "This" in Winona, for a group show John is curating, alongside Rachel Collier, Hannah Lee Hall, and Katelyn Farstad, opening in August; the other, at Eric's garage space, Summer Yield, opens mid July.
My other little projects
- I redrafted a few open writing projects recently; not sure what's happening with those. I also have a small story I'm working on, and a longer one I hope to work on as the main thing this fall.
- I'm particularly proud of thirty or so New Yorker cartoons I pitched in Q1 - they're all native digital drawings (ipad + stylus), a totally different workflow from when I was last doing this in 2020, and with a new motivation. After Natalie and her team won a Pulitzer, I thought it would be funny to be able to say, "the magazine has also published my little jokes." (This scenario itself feels like a cartoon premise.)
- I built a new chandelier for Natalie's office, and another for the bedroom upstairs. I need to make a page for this sort of thing.
- The chandelier unlocked using a sewing machine for me, sort of a major breakthrough.
- I just finished planting a hedge at new spahouse; 11 yew in the back, 5 juniper in the front. I got extremely dirty and sweaty, when I showered, it looked like I was washing out a brush.
- I got to make the poster for Bela's events at the n+1 office and Mouse Arts and Letters in Chicago. Delightful collab. We're working on an extremely fun sideproject together that will hopefully see the light of day before too long.
- Writing group with Bela and Mark still very important; welcome to the world baby Sasha.
- The residency season at tph is now open; Auden Lincoln-Vogel and Philip Rabalais are there as I write this, with seven more sets of people in there through I believe November. Very satisfying for theory to become practice on this project, plenty more to say about this also.
- My project "Three Renés", a novella length story I've mentioned in previous blog posts, is about to be available in McSweeney's Quarterly #82. Events etc. likely inbound.
- I sorta want to include "having parties" on the list of things I consider to be my typical forms on this website's front page, haha.
Moving image roundup
*****: corpo celeste (2011), peter hujar's day (2025)
****: dangerous liaisons (1988), mastermind (2025), if I had legs I'd kick you (2025), leaving las vegas (1995)
***: valley girl (1983), my so called life s01 (1994), out of the past (1947), our grand despair (2011), resurection (2025), the boy friend (1971), haru (1996), high school (1968), sumo do, sumo don't (1992), yeast (2008), the secret agent (2025), unbearable weight of massive talent (2022), napa boys (2025), to have and have not (1947), dark passage (1947), sweet smell of success (1957), sirat (2025), body heat (1981), roofman (2025), dirt bike kid (1985), paterson (2016)
**: quick change (1990), great gatsby (2013)
*: the housemaid (2025)
rewatches: the player (1992; 2nd time), mulholland drive (2001; millionth time), girls s01 (2nd time), point break (1991; 3rd time), paddington 2 (2017; 2nd time)
scale: ***** Great movie, **** Good movie, *** That movie, ** Bad movie, * Garbage movie; steeply bell-curved. Still probably missing some.
Notes =
I loved Peter Hujar’s Day, killer in the My Dinner With André category. Rohracher's Corpo Celeste, also amazing, cool/mysterious to see many ideas that would resurface in both Happy as Lazarro and La Chimera. Excited to watch her other ones.
Dangerous Liaisons has Malkovich vs. Glenn Close as frenemy libertines who destroy each other via parlor manipulations in 18th century France, featuring Pfeiffer, Uma in her first role, Keanu, and a surprise Peter Capaldi as Malkovich’s valet... Malkovich duels Keanu... just delightful.
Mastermind is a breezy art heist Running Man-format thriller by maestra Reichardt, like if Martino Supremo was extremely chill, and with Josh O’Connor, who I feel is more cute than Chalamet. Looks great, a safe general rec.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You somehow establishes this totally wild instability where in every single scene, Rose Byrne (who I love; here in scenery-chewing full blast main character mode) is either/both the biggest and most selfish asshole around, and/or the only sane person left, desperately trying to survive amid and despite continuous irrational resistance. Both readings of the movie are constantly playing out simultaneously, as if in a strobe light... pretty extraordinary writing, never seen anything like it. This one also compares favorably to Marty as the better movie. Conan O'Brien is better in this than Adam Sandler is in the one he's in, Inadvisable Parlaying, or whatever.
Leaving Las Vegas made me depressed for like four days, imo a more fucked up movie than Dancer in the Dark.
Lots of stuff in the "its a movie" tier here is pretty good. Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is fun, and better by a lot than I thought it would be. The sumo movie is cute, I liked Valley Girl a lot, Napa Boys is a smart, mean, highly-dialed punisher written by obvious movie lovers, etc. I didn't like the new Bi Gan nearly as much as Kaili Blues; it's more beautiful and satisfying structurally than as a time-based movie, and it has a strong City of Lost Children-ass production design quality that's just not for me, and many great individual moments (a few of which are kind of eye-poppingly inventive) that still, idk, just don't cohere, a la Enter the Void (which seems to be a direct reference). Feel like I really just don't need every art house movie ever to be a "love letter to the cinema," and man, this one is very heavy on that front also. (Secret Agent also does this, with the same exact elegaic "loss of the movie house in time" motif, tho a bit less egregiously.)
Gatsby is terrible, Maguire is one of my least favorite people to see in a movie, though there's one really amazing and funny scene where Leo (who just gets better and better) makes it rain nice shirts.
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