Sunset, Friday, 13 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Out on the long walk today, the rains having let up but the breezes still blowing from the trailing remnants of the storm (The Monster Nor’Easter That Ate Hurricane Ida), the woods and fields weren’t too wet – you could walk through the overgrown fields of pine without getting soaked by the turnstiles of the lower boughs. On the jeep trail plastered with oak leaves, with the air beginning to turn a little milder, there was a strangely pleasant vista of almost nothing but fallen light brown leaves converging ahead with the light gray sky – duotone all the way (except the occasional scrubby evergreen in the margins of the woods made it more like a tritone). Because of all the rain and wind we’ve been having (it’s raining again, very close to sunset – this storm doesn’t know the word quit), something about this ordinarily very dull vision of brown and gray felt happy and bright. As Flint and I got down toward the Rivanna, we heard the railroad at the Preddy Creek crossing less than a mile downstream – a singular definite roar I took to mean an Amtrak passenger train, versus the bumpy and elongated rumble of a freight.

I’ve seen many admirable paintings of this kind of dim gray-brown late fall or winter scene, but something is missing in them generally. It’s true that in what I saw and heard, nowhere was there visual evidence of any bright color – a broad swath of brilliant red or a line of electric turquoise. Yet it was there – I saw it anyway. My advice is, don’t let November fool you.

Sunset, Thursday, 12 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Even though it hasn’t really stopped raining – thanks to the monster nor’easter off the coast – I’m ready with my little aside to The Men Who Stare At Goats.

I’ve learned that some wild ideas I published an article on 28 years ago have come full circle – or maybe it would be more accurate to say, have done an acrobatic loop – and are the basis for the film. Since the ideas were new when I ran the article, and are now being satirized by Hollywood, it may be safe to conclude that they’ve gone through some sort of complete life cycle.

The story was by L.A.-based writer Bill Crandall. This was my intro to his piece, in the August 7, 1981, issue of my poster-sized publication The Wall Paper:

The Los Angeles Reader recently ran a feature story on Army Lt. Col. Jim Channon and his “First Earth Battalion.” The article explains Channon’s concept of a special ‘holistic’ ‘new age’ Army unit of ‘warrior monks’ that would conquer with deadly force if necessary but might also use ‘will’, ‘spirit’ or ‘love’. Although the Battalion does not yet exist as an operational unit, its content and objectives are being developed with the support of the Army command.

As Crandall then explained:

Channon takes himself for the focus of a dialectical synergy between the Pentagon and the New Age folks. He wants to send his soldiers out with “ginseng, amphetamines, megavitamins, herbs, and night-vision [all-natural] foods.” ... These sweeties are also to be armed to the teeth and trained in oriental martial arts. Military lunacy is nothing new, but this man wants to freak out with style, he wants his killing with spice – ritual, he says, after the manner of warpaint and feathers. Tanks blaring Black Sabbath or “something like the sound of a 110-piece black high school band really jiving ... crescendos that go higher and higher.”

When I ran the story, I pretty much decided to take Bill’s word, and the relatively sober reputation of the L.A. Reader, as reason to accept that this concept was actually being entertained by our military. But I did have my doubts. Now I find out, in 2009, it was all true all along – all this, and more. Practitioners of these, how to say, enlightened black arts, were and in some cases still are, associated with our armed forces.

If you go to the website for The Men Who Stare At Goats, to the highly informative and entertaining page by the author of the original book, you learn that there was only one man who actually stared at goats in the First Earth Battalion:

... the goat starer ... says he managed to drop one goat once, although there is no way of verifying this. The goat starer runs a dance studio in Ohio now. When I approached him for an interview I asked him if he was still practicing the technique and he said yes, and only last week he killed his hamster just by staring at it.

Actually, if I were that guy’s hamster, I might have died of a heart attack just thinking about my owner.

As funny as much of the material sounds – an Army general kept expecting to be able to walk through walls because, after all, they’re composed of tiny atoms whirling in space – the endeavor eventually made its way into what the author calls “the most whacked-out corners of George W. Bush’s War on Terror,” into diabolical torture techniques and ideas for remote killing.

Another personal connection with this stuff I didn’t know I had is a lengthy interview I did, for a client’s book, with psychic Joe McMoneagle at The Monroe Institute. I had no idea at the time (early 1990s) that the powers of ‘remote viewing’ he was describing – and he mentioned working with the government – might be used in ‘black ops’ by First Earth Battalion types. 

Given these kinds of serious implications, perhaps it’s just as well that the film, overall, is apparently not nearly as entertaining as the cast and crazy material might lead you to hope and expect. One of those that, when the trailer played, my wife and I turned to each other and said, “Seems like we’ve just seen the good moments.” 

Meanwhile – no big deal – but I seem to be able to make the sun go down every night by staring at it. Look for the forthcoming film.

Sunset, Wednesday, 11 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

The walk today with Flint – five miles instead of the usual seven, because of the weather – was like walking between two sponges, one being wrung out, the other getting soaked.

I was hoping to have something for you, more or less for Veterans Day, about the film The Men Who Stare At Goats, and an oblique connection I have with its underlying story. It (the item) keeps changing. It’ll show up here as soon as my mind clears – or tomorrow’s sunset comes – or it stops raining ...

Sunset, Tuesday, 27 October 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Rain and completely overcast. It took a while to begin to see any sort of pattern in the clouds ... then things just sort of happened from there.

Sunset, Friday, 23 October 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Overcast and about to rain.

I was driving through the Alley Field (named for the narrow lane of grass at its entrance) with the firewood I’d just cut, when a fantastically vivid red leaf fluttered down through the branches in the woods just to my left – at an odd angle – and a little too fast. 

Cardinal.

Sunset, Thursday, 15 October 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Rain and 46°F.

Yesterday Bob Leweke, morning host on regional NPR station WMRA, introduced the weather forecast this way: “For the next few days we have a 100% chance of dreary.” It’s a little bit difficult to gauge the situation now from here, but late this afternoon as I drove along the Southwest Mountains the clouds were only a few hundred feet above the ground.

Usually at times like this, in painting I look for the light, even if another observer of the sunset would probably say it wasn’t really there at all. Either that, or go with the darkness. An example of that approach that I like is the next-to-last sunset in the few paintings I’ve been able to photograph so far from 1997 – November 6th, from down by the railroad tracks in Charlottesville, near the University of Virginia Medical Center.

Actually, now that I look again at that painting, and yesterday’s, I realize what’s happening is both the light and the dark.

While I’m referencing WMRA, I’d like to recommend a fine blog by their super-producer Martha Woodroof, who is, among many other things, one of the best writer-reporters anywhere. You’ll sometimes hear her stories on national NPR. I’ve recently added a standing link to Martha’s blog at the side of this page.

On the 12th, Martha’s post started out with the furor over Rush Limbaugh’s efforts to buy the NFL’s St. Louis Rams. This got her into the subject not simply of Limbaugh’s controversial status but his popularity as a commentator. 

I had hoped our romance with polarization had ended on election day, but it appears that it hasn’t – if, that is, Rush Limbaugh’s ratings are any way to take the national pulse. And I don’t mean to pick on Limbaugh. He’s just such a clear-cut example of the kind of figurehead ranters we Americans spend our time listening to.

We elected President Obama in what appears to have been a brief flirtation with the concept of consensus and civility. Yet how impatient we have become with his efforts at consensus-building, his incessant information-gathering, his unfailing politeness in response to rudeness.

Is consensus-building just too much work for us as a culture? Is arguing and fighting about getting what we want, when we want it, too ingrained in us to allow serious consideration of reasonable compromise? Could it be that we are actually more comfortable, as a culture, wading through the wake of polarization left by The Decider et al.? Can we change our political conversation to one of consensus-building without being willing to change our own conversational tastes?

I had heard Martha talk before about the need for civil discourse and debate but hadn’t thought much about it, perhaps because I don’t feel all that civil myself on many hot-button topics. In other words, I didn’t see how things could really be any different. But something in her column jumped a spark for me.

I remembered reading not long ago how Nixon-Agnew (with the speechwriting help of Pat Buchanan) launched a successful ‘wedge’ strategy that has been expanded, developed and refined to this day – and they did this in part by personifying political positions. Some positions belonged to effete disloyal hippies – and others to patriotic true Americans of the silent majority. From that period, and increasingly during the traumas wrought by the previous administration, political positions, political opinions, have become no longer something we THINK, but something we ARE. We can’t talk to each other anymore because we’re not just talking about debatable topics of interest ‘out there’ (outside of ourselves), we’re protecting our very identities, ‘in here’ ... the whole thing was made very personal and we take it personally. When political controversy arises, many of us can hardly breathe, much less settle down and have a reasonable debate. As much as we may not think we agree with the personification of politics, many of us suffer from its consequences and its ongoing influence.