I’ve been thinking about the idea of heritage and identity lately. I’ve dropped a few video’s in here from the incomparable Bassey Ikpi, Suheir Hammad, and the Hebrew Mamita herself, Vanessa Hidary. I hope you will take some time and listen through.

Allow me to talk about something serious for a moment. And I’d like, if you’ve had similar experiences, to share them. Back in September, my office took a trip to Deer Creek, up in Heber Valley. On our way home in Jac’s jeep, Jac and I were talking a lot of nonsense when I looked out across the lake and saw the dales of the far shore.

It felt like getting punched in the chest.

I was overwhelmed with the strongest sensation of something like a memory… but almost in reverse: a weird mix of nostalgia and déjà vu. In German, this is called Sehnsucht. C.S. Lewis explored the concept of sehnsucht in depth, and describes it as the “inconsolable longing” in the human heart for “we know not what.” In The Weight of Glory, Lewis says:

In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.

Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Doesn’t that just kill you? “They turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

When I saw those valleys across the lake, with the clouds casting their drifting shadows, I wanted to bow down and sob. To me this is Sehnsucht — as Tabori put it, the “relationship (encapsulated in one word) between ardent longing or yearning (das Sehnen) and addiction (die Sucht) that lurks behind each longing, waiting to turn the feeling into a destructive, self-defeating force.” I feel it in certain places at certain times: I’ve felt it in the first bite of frost at the end of autumn, in the perfunctory bows of Magpies in barren orchards. In my first breath of yellow ginger, in the Russian olive. I’ve felt it in the final chords of Avril the 14th, and in the haunting opening lines of We have a Map of the Piano. However, I know that describing these things to you, in giving you examples, I am trying to paint a picture that cannot be painted.

Again from, Lewis, in The Problem of Pain, on the difficulty and impossibility of describing my Sehnsucht to you:

You have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw—but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported…

All the things that have deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want … which we shall still desire on our deathbeds….

Fifty People, One Question: New York from Crush & Lovely on Vimeo.

I just watched this video over on Chels’s Tumblr, and I don’t know… it hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s just so beautiful, and simple. When it was over I felt like the blind guy on Amélie after he’s escorted across the street. It’s that good.

When the guy talks about his cancer, I don’t know why that is so powerful… but it is.

It’s quiet right now; Hex is rollin around on my bed completely lost in his little rawhide bone; it’s warm enough outside to just be out, cold enough to make little apples blossom on your cheeks; my little sister’s birthday is today… this is just a really good day. I hope you are having one, too. And if not… maybe tomorrow?

According to my dream last night, my subconscious is primarily concerned with the following:

• The cleanliness of my socks, and what my friend Brett (who I have not seen in over three years) thinks of them
• “Cheaters” in Mario Kart
• The availability of piña colada Slurpees, and BottleCaps
• Passionate midnight rendezvous

And, when I woke up this morning, the absolute first words that popped into my head were “Nu, Pogodi,” which after Googling, I found was a Russian cartoon that I have never even seen before, but I know I am aware of its name due to it showing up in the “related videos” pane of the Vinni Puh episodes, on YouTube.

So, it is pretty much business as usual around these parts.

While reading Guy Trebay’s latest over at the Times, Backstage, It’s Down to Bare Essentials, and while watching the season finale of Project Runway, I was reminded again of the very different way you come to see people After Art Classes™*.

Trebay writes,

What is strangest, perhaps, … is that being around rooms filled with unclad women and men is anything but stimulating. At least this is true for people in the fashion business, who are either puritanically decorous about nudity or so involved with clothes that often they can barely see the naked limbs for all the glorious weeds. And it is true for me.

And me.

Living here in Utah, and having many friends that go to BYU, I cannot count the number of times I have had to field questions regarding the nude figure drawing classes held regularly at UVU or at the Springville Art Museum.

For those of you who aren’t aware, it is still 1825 in my neck of the woods, and the sight of the milky mile above the knee is still cause for some alarm in certain circles. Cover your shame! Hue, and also cry.

Can we just get something straight? Figure drawing classes are the most un-erotic places on the whole earth. For all the nudity, the models’ curvaceous forms and wiggly bits may as well be built out of legos. Because that is exactly what nude models are: building blocks. When you are looking at a nude, charcoal in hand, newsprint at the ready, all you are doing is trying to figure out how they are put together so you can reconstruct them on the page.

Figure drawing classes are like being at the doctor’s office for a physical, and while the nurse might be hot, there is really nothing exciting about having a gloved finger jammed up your inguinal canal.

“Um… I felt like a table lamp.”

So says my friend Amy who has modeled for the past two semesters. Her roommate, Megan, concurs. “You don’t even feel like a person. You’re like… a statue — no, you’re like a cow skull with an old tin pitcher. You’re a still life — except, after you’re done you get to walk around and see the people who really botched it, or who really nailed your likeness, right down to your weird, saggy, left boob.”

And can I just say, from the business side of the art-board, that your saggy left boob is really all we’re looking at. And actually, less the boob, and more the sag. How will I draw your sag? How does it compare to your perk? How will I contrast the two? Chalk on tone? Or erase out the highlights? Scumble or Smudge? Your boob, real and spectacular as you may think, is hardly ever entering into the picture. And that goes for you, Mr. Prince-Albert-sans-can, too. Keep your pants on, for all I care, just show me your core shadows.

*I get the feeling that this could be a regular topic here. “After Art Classes: a look at the way art education forever warps your world view.”

I know that this is a common topic around the blahgs, a meme in its own right, but I need to take some time to talk about my love of Wikipedia. Coming off of recent posts about my love of dictionaries, this is hardly a shocker, I know.

But I mean seriously, I have come off of four-and-a-half-hour binges, Rip Van Winkle-like, cobwebs clinging to my rusty limbs, completely unaware of how I started out looking up Luisa Casati, but ended up at Nukekubi, which, FYI, by day “appear to be normal human beings. By night, however, their heads and necks detach smoothly from their bodies and fly about independently in search of human prey.” I come of out of these sessions almost drunk: kind of drowsy, disoriented, feeling deeply satiated and full (perhaps I am a nukekubi, where “human prey” = “obscure wikipedia entries”).

Which brings me to the point, an idea I am just going to throw out there, Ironic Sans style. Why is there not some bit of code, be it a browser plugin, or a user log-in system that could track your procession through Wikipedia, noting the articles you read, creating a breadcrumb-like trail from one article to the next, and showing your total time spent on each article. I think this would be so, so cool.

Some articles I have read recently, that were extremely interesting and/or enjoyable :

• The Ogopogo Monster, a lake monster reported to live in Okanagan Lake, British Columbia, Canada, ala the Loch Ness monster.
• Baba Yaga, one of my favorite characters from Russian folklore, or really anybody’s folklore. Not to mention her friend and mine,
• Koschei, the Deathless, who is “an evil person of ugly senile appearance, menacing principally young women.”
• The incredibly interesting sounding Toilet Claw.
• Yor, the Hunter from the Future.
• St. Dunstan, St. Bartholomew, and St. Vitus.
• Sehnsucht, Heimat, and Zeitgeist.

And that’s just from like, 10 minutes ago, to oh, this morning.

One of the things that I got teased for a lot as a kid was my know-it-all-ed-ness, having a ready answer for just about any question whether I was asked one or not. I butted in, piped up, spouted off just about whenever I could. I remember Ryan Lamb on more than one occasion teasing me with “What do you do? Like read the dictionary?” Laughter would ensue and he or Josh would do their best to impersonate me reading the dictionary in my leisure time.

Which taunt I think about often, because, secretly I did. And still do, although I am a bit less taciturn about it now. I find the dictionary incredibly interesting, both as a book and as a concept. Words are so tricky, and so deceptively simple, and I never grow tired of learning more about them. There are few days that go by that I do not consult the OED, The Brothers Grimm, or the online etymology dictionary, which as the name suggests, is a website that lets you look up word origins, histories, etc. Which may sound like a snooze to you, but where else would you go when you needed to know where the word haberdasher comes from?

Anyway, one of the most absorbing books I have ever read was The Meaning of Everything, which is the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, as told by Simon Winchester. To this day, when asked that tired “Who is one of your heroes?” question in get-to-know-you situations, my go-to answer is usually James Augustus Henry Murray, the tireless editor of the OED. If you really wanted to have me flip-out on Christmas morning, you would give me a subscription to the OED (only $295 annually! Takers?)

The book was eye opening. I guess when I think of a dictionary, I usually thing of a list of words in alphabetical order, with definitions for each. Which, should you ask anyone, is what a dictionary is. What I didn’t realize however, is that the OED was conceived of as a history of the English language. So not only would every word have its definition, but its definitions: every shade of meaning that the word in question could have, with — and this is the crucial element — citations and reliable example of usage to back it up. Every word would have its first known usage listed, and then for every alternate meaning, the first time that word was used to mean that, also cited. This is why the OED’s latest complete print edition is printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages.

The citations are another thing I think about, because every now and then someone will say something, use a unique turn of phrase, and it will catch my ear, not only because it is a unique turn of phrase, but because I can usually remember — cite, if you will — the first time I heard it.

I think this every time I hear someone say “mea culpa,” or just the word culpable. First time I heard it? Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame soundtrack, “Hellfire,” where a choir backing up Frollo’s musical confessional trill “Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa! Mea Maxima Culpa!” Were you, back in 1996, following along with the music in the fold-out cassette tape liner, reading the lyrics as you sang along (like I was), you also would have seen those words with accompanying asterisked definition.

(Ahem: )

Other words I learned from that soundtrack: Janvier and dross. And that’s really just the beginning.

Facetious and eptiome as printed words joined the spoken ones I already knew in Mr. Kemmer’s English class, back in ninth grade.

Archipelago in fifth grade geography (a girl later got this wrong in our geography bee), and atoll from Waterworld. Simile was taught to me by Ms. Kirsten Knieff, my eighth grade English teacher, as “a comparison using like or as,” which she illustrated using Pearl Jam, “Even flow, thoughts arrive like butterflies.” (She demonstrated metaphor, which I already knew, with the Stone Temple Pilots, “Flies in the vaseline we are, sometimes it blows my mind…”.)

Uncanny from the X-men 1993, Peloton last year from my mother in Sugarhouse park.

I don’t know why some stick in there and some don’t… I remember Anne Fadiman writes about something similar in Ex Libris, but I’ve mislaid my copy. Am I alone in this, are there any that you can remember off the top of your head?

Well I’ve been back from Brooklyn and the ICON5 conference for about a week, which is just about the amount of time I’ve needed to settle back down and really digest everything that I learned.

I met so, so many people that I admire: James Jean, Sam Weber, Jillian Tamaki, Keri Smith, and last but quite the opposite of least, Nancy Stahl. I actually got to sit down for lunch with Nancy, which was a little bit overwhelming — because she is so nice. I guess I just expected all illustrators to be like the photographers I met at the conference back in October, which is to say icy, abrupt tools. But they totally weren’t! I could not get over how genuinely kind everyone was! There was zero sense of competition, and just a great feeling of camaraderie.

In fact, in her panel discussion with Tara McPherson, Jordin Isip and Jonathan Levine, Martha Rich underscored how the camaraderie of ICON has really come to mean so much to her, both inspirationally and commercially — you build relationships which can evolve from personal to professional and vis versa. It was this closing remark that just made me feel like, Wow! I am coming to this every year! The key points they seemed to hit the most were: if you want to get into galleries with your illustrations, you need to take your time and build relationships with the gallery owners. You need to support the shows, talk to people, make connections, etc. Do your best to promote yourself without asking for favors; prove your merits before it comes to shopping your portfolio around.

By far the most inspirational segment for me was Tall Tales & Simple Stories with Enrico Casarosa and Ronnie Del Carmen from Pixar. Enrico especially has had an effect on the way I draw now. He spoke a lot about the “inertia of drawing,” how you must keep that inertia going, and must always be ready to draw. He tied this back into his Sketch Crawl, and about the benefits of such a practice and of keeping a fresh sketch book. Ronnie had some wonderful insights regarding telling stories with our drawings, beyond story boarding and sequential art. It seemed like both of them were essentially saying: draw quickly and with abandon. Do not refine. Work on capturing the emotions/essence/exposition of a moment the first time, and as simply as possible. Develop a visual vocabulary: know how to draw anything because you’ve drawn everything.

During the lunch with Nancy, some interesting topics came up. Mainly, how, as digital illustrators do we foster the same sense of skill and self-discovery that comes with sketching, when there is such a disconnect between the act of sketching and the act of producing work on the screen. Am I articulating that well? I mean, you learn how to handle a medium as you play with it — and I think that is what sketching is, play, in the psychologically constructive sense of the word. But when you sit down in front of the computer to draw, you are rarely playing, you are working. You are setting out to produce a finished piece of work. At least thats my experience. There are several illustrators that I can think of that I am sure sketch digitally, who play digitally — Chris Turnham and Kevin Dart spring immediately to mind. I may need to conduct some interviews. More on this later.

Here are some shots I took while I was up there. Surprisingly (or rather, unsurprisingly), I did not sketch much during the trip, and didn’t take tons of pics — I think in moments like these I become a much more verbal person, capturing everything in notes and journals rather than pictures. I think I need to work on that; maybe marrying the two. Anyway -

You want to know something that irks me every time I encounter it?

When I am at a cash register, and I am using a debit card, and I have to run through the rigamarole of learning how this specific card reader works because they just can’t all work the same way. It’s like “Ok, pin number… check, no cash back, correct amount, done. Oh no wait. It wants my zip code.” or, “Ok, pin number, no cash ba— er, no, I mean, yes, that is the correct amount, oh now no cash back; what the? Yes, that is now, still, the same correct amount. What? Show card to cashier? She already approved. Kajhfkas askjdhajshd asjasd.”

What drives me up the wall even more though — is when it says something like this:

Select the amount of cash back you would like:
[$20] [$40] [$60] [Other] [No]

This always trips me up, because I don’t want cash back but for some reason my brain will not automatically recognize “no” as an amount. And that reason is because “no” is not an amount. “None” is an amount (or a non-amount, (look, just leave it)). I just stare for like, five whole seconds with nothing but the Hypno-Toad sound in my head. And then I suddenly get it, and am like “Gahhh! NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!” Jabbing it with my finger. This does not work however, as I have to use the stylus, on this card reader.

There's a science to all this, you see. Its not in how you dress, or how fast you take your steps; its in the very sound of your footfall. You must walk like you mean it, you must walk like you are bigger than all of it. When you are faced with a gale that stings your eyes and blisters your cheeks, you must dig your toes into the ice and let him have it. Be careful to not to step digging forward, do not reveal your ambition. Mark your feet straight down, your footing must be firm to deny the ice its quiksilver clip.

You must let your face go, and learn not to shiver. You will feel the blood retreat from the surface of your flesh and escape to deeper levels; you will feel your skin go white and smooth like icy porcelain. You must narrow your eyes, and let them whither to tiny slits, your lashes fringing your vision with shelter and warmth. Grant the smoky strain of your breath to escape your lips ever so slightly, and resist the urge to lick them. Let them dry, and harden like tiny petals, thin but strong. I like to keep a secret on my tongue, to roll it around in my mouth with every step; I like to whisper it to myself without moving my lips.

Ignore the violent pink of your exposed hands, it is not so cold to force them to freeze, remember that. The pain will yield to the dull ache of numbness, and then feeling will flee altogether. I let each finger find its niche in my palm, allowing a fist to form and to cradle my thumb. Nothing can breach her; nothing can force its way in.

Upon entering again indoors and in shelter, let yourself warm gradually; do not rush. Allow the blood to trickle at first, and then careen its usual routes at its own pace. Remain silent, your jaw will be tight in its skin, the muscles close to solid, give it time to flex and stretch. Let each finger curl and uncoil like a tendril; let your fist blossom at your side. This is a way across frozen sraights, this is a way through the chill.

And he says to me "You know you're going to be expected to walk at least six miles a day, right? Even in the cold?"

I just nodded and said it was no problem, thinking of the seven miles earlier today, and the day before that, and the day before that....