It’s another white-out day on the Wasatch front, which is only serving to underscore, highlight, and blot out the mounting disdain I have for this bitter, bitter season. Last week, Molly Young put it down sharply over on her site:

Winter exacerbates the usual human needs because it adds the extra pressures of darkness and cold. Everything must be done as quickly as possible in order to thwart the cold, even as the cold retards movement. Distances can’t be measured in the usual way—they take longer in foul weather and then you’ve got to factor in time to recover.

Also: darkness. There is just less time in the day to do things. The days compress, lightwise, but stretch out in the way that a cold five-minute wait feels twice as long. And just when you think winter should end—February, say—it turns out to be only halfway through.

I am done with you, Utah. I need to be somewhere else next year when this garbage rolls in — maybe on, say, assignment in Morocco/Rarotonga/Australia. What kind of assignment? Who knows? Who cares! Just get me out of here.

Stef, Angenelle, Josh, and I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button over the weekend, and I, once again, find myself in complete agreement with Kyle’s Review, so I will just let you read it there. I will say though, that I loved the first 10 minutes of the movie (the sub-story about the clock maker), and the last 20 minutes of the actual story (I am thoroughly bewildered by the final montage of characters; beautifully shot as it was). I felt mainly like the movie was on the fence as to what kind of movie it was: teetering between Big Fish and something closer to Forest Gump.

Meanwhile, more drawing. This time Suheir Hammad, with a little color.

Well it’s New Year’s Eve and I officially have NO plans. This always happens. After the rigmarole of the Christmas, and with my dad’s birthday on the second, I never seem to get around to making party plans for the Eve, and always end up regretting it. Last year we ended up bar crawling in Park City, watching Old Old Men trying to dance with Pretty Young Things.

I am however, making resolutions… and feeling pretty good about being able to keep them. There are the standards: eat better, actually use my gym membership, etc. But I’ve got a couple travel goals that I feel like will actually come to fruition. I am not, however, going to talk about them: I am afraid of the jinx.

As far as the standard resolutions, I used to be a pretty firm believer in waiting till January 1st to start on them, gorging myself on the soon to be nixed behavior until New Year’s day — but this year I just went ahead and started this week. So far I have had, with very little trying, had absolutely no artificial or processed foods. I’ve made most of my meals, and in all honesty, even when rushed, it has been very relaxing. I mean, we’ll see how long this lasts, but for now I am sticking with it. When I have eaten out, it’s been at places where I know they are making everything from scratch: muchas gracias, Gallo Giro. Best authentic Mexican food in Utah, I swear.

Meanwhile, I have been sketching in Illustrator. From top to bottom: Audrey Hepburn, Eartha Kitt, Eyvind Earle, and Mary Blair.

I actually did Earle and Blair a month or so ago — I just keep adding to this file.

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.

Man, this is stacking up to be a fantastic weekend, requiring little-to-no leaving the house! Here’s why:

1. This morning I woke up to a chirping iPod, letting me know that I had email. I crossed my fingers and whispered “Please let it be Fleet Street! Please let it be Fleet Street!” AND IT WAS! It turns out that I won the Notcot/FleetStreetScandal Giveaway! All of Kevin’s Secret Agent Yuki posters are on their way! I am thrilled and I cannot wipe this smile off my face!

2. Two inches of snow on the ground (in the last 40 minutes), fire in the fireplace, hot-delivery food on its way (well, on its way I guess is a relative term — as of right now, it’s 45 minutes late!)

3. Plenty of drawing to do, unwatched DVDs at the ready! Meanwhile, I’ve paid my insurance, credit-card, and phone bills. All before lunch. Thanks, Internet!

4. A veritable laundry list of music to check on, courtesy of Jason’s Best of 2008 List.

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?

This weekend has been a whirlwind of activity! Redecorated the living room, music room, and bedroom! Drew a lot! Had my family over for dinner! Finished the lawn! I am still kind of coming down off this crazy get-er-done high.

So here are some shots from recent projects:

I took a day down at my folks house, and my mom and I re-covered the pads for my Saarinen-esque dining room chairs. They were a horrible green polyester/tweed looking mess: stained, frayed and scratchy. Shown here, in my mom’s kitchen:

But I managed to score some great upholstery fabric in chocolate/sky-blue/turquoise pinstripe on sale from a local fabric store. Pair that with pale blue linen for the reverse and we were in business!

They look great, and feel terrific! This weekend, I made some stops at some local second-hand stores, Deseret Industries and the Green Ant, and managed to score this cool Jens Risom chair on the cheap! I will upload some shots of that once I get some better shots — I took a few but they look they were taken on a cell phone, I had the ISO up so high.

Meanwhile I’ve been up to my eyeballs in old cartoons — and it’s starting to show in my work at my day job. I was asked to illustrate a wintry scene for a local fundraiser’s holiday card, and this is what I came up with:

Tons of fun! In other news, I finally succumbed, and despite being warned I went ahead and delved into Heroes Season 3. And… wow. This is why I got rid of our television: shows like this rot my brain, are so infuriating, and I spend all day thinking “Man! That was horrible!” But I can’t. stop. watching!

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.”

Hexl is sick, sick, sick. He was fine yesterday at breakfast, fine again when I came home at lunch, and when I got home at dinner… he had deposited a frisbee-sized platter of doggie-vomit on my pillow.

Classic.

Anyway, I am good pack-leader, which in this case meant not setting a good example like the alpha-dog, but rather being the best friend at delta-nu: holding his ears back while he horked into the toilet, until like 6 am.

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?