Immersion and growth

I feel this song rattle around in me, a bear running its thick body against the bars of a cage. Junior Kimbrough was from north Mississippi, but it's hard to imagine this coming from anywhere but the swamp. The distant metallic guitars, the echoing bays, low toad-like hum underneath it all, they create not only an atmosphere but a presence. This recording is an encapsulation, a haunting record of the dark brooding South.

I think of this song because I've been thinking about immersion. Into places new and unfamiliar. Not passing the time earning a living, hanging out a little, maybe going on dates sometimes, and being generally comfortable just being - instead, to come out looking, smelling, even tasting like becoming something different. That's the point for me, to be here in New York and make something of myself, not in the sense of finding something meaningful to do, but to morph into something different than I was before I came here.

But isn't that the point of going anywhere? Why travel if you end up exactly in the same place you started from? To travel with an absent or unwilling mind is a waste of gas. Mind your carbon footprint and give your seat up, bandwidth is cheaper and HD pictures can look better than real life anyway.

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Going along with the art theme, I'd like to shift to one of my favorite webcomics, Questionable Content. I discovered it through Google Reader during one of my many spurts of boredom in California. Admittedly, I wasn't particularly drawn to it at first; it wasn't particularly witty or funny, it wasn't drawn especially well or in a way that grabbed my attention, and it didn't offer an enticing story line in small doses. But it kept showing up, so I gave it a chance. I'm glad I did.

What really struck me is how the entire comic is a public display of gradual artistic growth. In comics, the only facets that every really grow are the characters' personalities or the range of subject matter (I'm only speaking about comic strips, rather than comic books, just to clarify). This happens because over time audiences become with familiar with either the characters or the material, allowing the writer to add the nuance necessary to keep things fresh. Outside of this, comic strips don't typically grow or improve. Sure, the drawing style can become a little more clean or tight or expressive (I'm thinking about strips like Calvin and Hobbes), but the writer has an established look and the artistic skills to match that vision.

Questionable Content is different. Look at the first strip compared to the last. The difference is staggering. In this capacity, the comic is as much about the growth of the writer as it is about the characters in the comic. It's as if the world in the comic develops and fleshes itself out as its story develops and fleshes out, a sort of post-structural existence as a multivalent object where the abstract story and visual expression affect one another through their own dynamic activity, spurring the other to react in a similar way. This change is only obvious if you follow the chronology, since the differences are too drastic and spread out to have this kind of causal relationship in the first and last examples. The visual changes are so gradual they go unnoticed as you move further away from the beginning; eventually you reach the current installment and do not actively recall that what you you are seeing was once much cruder.

I think it's great to be able to see this kind of steady progress, to watch a writer/artist to develop and improve skills in such a subtle (yet obvious) manner. I wish this was more prevalent.

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Big shout out to Friendship dairy products for their California Style cottage cheese. You might be a little salty for my taste, but you're the only palatable cottage cheese I've found outside of California.

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My friend Dave is having adventures in Spain and is chronicling them in a blog whose name is a smart and subtle reference to the dialectic tendencies of the Spaniards. Read them here: Deliberate Lisp.

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"Don't hold. If your mind is not holding anything, it is clear like space. Clear like space means that sometimes clouds come, sometimes rain or lightning or airplane comes, or even a missile blows up, BOOM!, world explodes, but the air is never broken. This space is never broken."
-Zen Master Seung Sahn

Zen, though notorious for being simple to understand yet near-impossible to practice, offers lots of sound advice. I try to keep things like this in mind in the face of unemployment frustration.