Advanced Ballistics

From The New Yorker:

At one point in this sweeping novel of twentieth-century Poland, Szymek Pietruszka lies in a presbytery attic, recovering from three German gunshots.

Sunset, Friday, 15 January 2010

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

Happy Birthday, MLK. My parents – even my parents made us shut up and listen to that speech, on the radio on the way back from the beach.

Following from yesterday’s mention of Andy Warhol: Something I appreciated, as a painter and in a larger way as an artist, was Louis Menand’s essay on Warhol in the January 11th New Yorker. While commenting, more or less, on recent books about Warhol, Menand manages to distill the history of contemporary art criticism. For anyone like me who missed the meeting about Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art and what has come after, it’s a brilliantly accessible and illuminating short course. 

Sunset, Friday, 4 December 2009

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

So, what’s the written equivalent of doodles?

Cat’s eye, golden, through an opening in his carrying cage, yellow.

Cat thought balloon: I’m almost 18 and doing O.K. What could they say that would make any difference?

Man thought balloon: I don’t know ... veterinary marketing ...

Elton John Christmas song (the one they always play) on the waiting room radio.

Sorry to do that to you. (Meaning you, the reader.)

I’m supposed to be writing today about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Now there’s something: Elton John and KSM, together again for the first time.

Client flies 757s and 767s and although, thank God, he’s not into ‘911 Truth’, he also doesn’t think al Qaeda remotely capable of what we assume they did.

Not a pleasant thought. Makes the prospect of a trial interesting indeed.

Vet waiting rooms make me edgy, much more than if it were just me in a doctor’s office.

Reading Jane Kramer in The New Yorker on preparing all kinds of Thanksgiving dinners all over the world. Very good so far, as you would expect from her, although – this may seem paradoxical – if she had to do a blog, perhaps she’d become a little less focused on the first-person singular aspect of things. (Revised from: “ ... if she had to do a blog, I think she’d become ... ”)

Blogging, one can become painfully aware of one’s self-orientation. Can’t always tell, of course, how one is doing with this on a given day.

Client’s book is here. Again, keep in mind, despite all the wacky stuff Amazon puts on the same product page (“Buy this book together with I Was the Shooter on the Grassy Knoll! by Oswald Rabbit”), the author is not in sympathy with the sad indeterminate notions of so-called ‘911 Truth’.

Got to clean brushes as soon as I get home.

Sunset tonight: supposed to get cloudy, then rain, then snow. After so many hundreds of sunsets, I have an idea what that might look like. It’s odd to think, first, I can never know what my subject will really be, and then what the painting will be, in response.

A thought: Just make it count.

The vet comes in: Dr. Richard Freedman. A prince, an archduke – no, better, a knight among vets. Makes me happy we made the trip. He loves animals. In his hands, veterinary marketing is redeemed.

On the way home, on the seat beside me, through an opening in his yellow carrying cage, a cat’s eye, golden.

Sunset, Tuesday, 1 December 2009

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

Today is my friend Sarah Bruce’s birthday. Not sure about her age, except it’s somewhere under 40. Anyway, usually – in fact, always – Sarah, who controls the weather on her birthday because she’s some form of witch, contrives to deprive me of any sort of skyscape on December 1st except for a clear cold blue sky and that’s it, no clouds, no other color, thanks very much.

I guess this year she relented. I want to thank her for the sky.

Sarah moved north from here to be closer to Salem, I guess. If this sort of thing interests you, you might check out her blog, I Nap, Therefore I Am a Witch.

Around a week ago I posted a little item about the cover of The New Yorker and its image of a pumpkin pie – and a ‘pumpkin cloud’ – by Wayne Thiebaud and I made a wild guess that the original painting might run you $75,000. Now, thanks to a link in the blog emdashes, I’ve seen some of the actual prices for which Thiebauds have sold recently. Did I say last week that $75,000 was probably way, way off, on the conservative side? Well, out of some 30 Thiebaud paintings at what seems to be a sort of meta–auction site, I did manage to find one that had gone dirt cheap for $62,000 – and all the rest, forget about it.

In fact, speaking of pumpkin, a Wayne Thiebaud of slices of the pie sold for $1,900,000.

If you’d like to get in on the pop art action, but didn’t start saving 30 years ago, you can buy a Mike Fitts now and thank me later.

Sunset, Sunday, 22 November 2009

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

I experienced an uncharacteristic twinge of jealousy when I saw that the cover of my November 23rd issue of The New Yorker featured a “Pumpkin Cloud” – a luminous and shadowed cream-like cloud hovering over a mound of whipped cream in the middle of a pumpkin pie. Like so:

In discussing how this lovely apparition made it to the cover of The New Yorker, I said to Laura, “Well, it’s a Wayne Thiebaud.” Then, although I just made this up and it may be way, way off (on the conservative side), I added, “The original of that will cost you $75,000.”

I’ve only ever sent them one cover, a tree with eight suns in its bare branches, for which I got a nice pat on the back from the art director. I’ll freely admit I’d love to get a cloud on the cover – any kind of cloud – a pumpkin cloud, a sidewalk subway vent cloud, a cloud from the stack of QE2 arriving in the harbor, a Staten Island landfill garbage fume cloud, a butternut squash cloud – I don’t care. Maybe someday. 

Sunset, Sunday, 15 November 2009

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

Having been for a long time – too long a time, about eight years, from age 16 to 24 – a devotee of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, I don’t think I can stand to read the two recent Rand biographies, even though they’re the first to be done by people outside her camp. About the most I could manage was to read the lengthy review by Thomas Mallon in The New Yorker. Mallon makes a number of excellent observations, including various ways Rand manifested behavior that was exactly the opposite of the qualities she espoused – for example, prizing meek compliance by others with her every view while publicly claiming to worship the character trait of independent thinking.

There’s only one contribution I’ve ever wanted to make to the discussion of the life and work of Ayn Rand, and Mallon comes very close to taking care of it in his review, when he writes:

Rand may be, in an aesthetic sense, the most totalitarian novelist ever to have sat down at a desk.

Along those lines, what I’ve wanted to say – hey, I’ve been saving this up since 1972, ever since I began to notice that the thought progressions in The Ayn Rand Letter were, beneath their confidently hard-waxed surface, positively deranged – is that Rand ultimately relied on the use of literally compelling rhetoric rather than on the actual content of ideas. In other words, her chief weapon – and it was exactly that – was a device she condemned, and which she called “the argument from intimidation.” You can find it defined in a really scary website assembled by her disciples, the Ayn Rand Lexicon. 

Rand made her living rendering rhetoric that would be so forceful, so powerfully, even sometimes beautifully symmetrical, so ruthlessly logical in its sound and its appearance, once you allowed yourself to step inside its force field, you could be overwhelmed. There would appear to be no escape. But it only looked logical. It sounded rational. It was in fact a fantastic structure based on a profound desire to make the world conform to what she wished it to be in her mind, which became the will to intimidate.

O.K., I feel better now.

Update on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:07AM by BVD

For anyone interested in the American right wing’s attempts to claim Ayn Rand as part of its ideological heritage, I strongly recommend a recent post on DailyKos, “The Ayn Rand Myth” by Laurence Shatkin.