Nedrock

This post originated as a letter to my younger brother, Gus. It was accompanied by a list that I had drawn up for him of my favorite albums from my childhood. Gus was born in 1989, so I wanted to make him aware of what I felt were some of the milestones of music from before his time, as well as clue him in to some of our family's history.

It is an axiom of human behavior that we regard the things we learned and the artifacts we encountered in our youth as the best of their type. The language spoken by our family seems proper. The morals that are modeled for us become our morals. The culture that we are raised in becomes second nature. And, of course, the music that we grew up with will always sound to us like the best music there ever was.

But the music that I grew up with really was the best music of all time! I’m only halfway kidding. Obviously, as I’ve just stated, most people who were young during the Big Band era or the early stages of rock and roll will regard these periods as the best, and probably regard the later stages with disdain. But the music produced in the wake of the Beatles and Bob Dylan after 1964 is definitely a high-water mark in rock music. The latter half of the Sixties saw a succession of bands trying to outdo one another, which is a classic recipe for greatness. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Cream, Led Zeppelin and so many more contributed to this golden age of classic rock. Then the singer/songwriter era of the early Seventies, exemplified by such greats as James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and Warren Zevon, influenced such bands as Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. 

I got most of my early musical tastes from my mom, who had a beautiful soprano voice and was totally into the Sixties music revolution. [Gus is my half brother; we share a common father.] Like most kids, my first record collection was basically my parents’. The first of Mom’s albums that became one of my favorites was Abbey Road, by the Beatles. There is no room here to go into the overall greatness of this album, generally considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, rock albums of all time. The quality of the songs is top-notch from beginning to end. Side One opens and closes with two of John Lennon’s greatest songs, “Come Together” and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” There are two classic Paul McCartney confections, “Oh! Darling” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” Ringo chimes in with one of his few Beatles songs, the classic “Octopus’s Garden.” And the album contains two of George Harrison’s greatest songs, “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun.” The latter opens Side Two, but this side of the album is best known for its medley of unfinished Lennon/McCartney songs that McCartney mashed together in a most amazing way. The album ends with the famous line, “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” The album was the second to last released by the Beatles—Let It Be was their last release before breaking up in 1970—but Abbey Road was the last album they recorded. I listened to Side Two of Abbey Road every day after school during my junior and senior years in high school. Every. Single. Day.

My second favorite album from Mom’s collection was Janis Ian’s Between the Lines. This was Mom’s favorite album too, with its songs about divorce, one-night stands, etc. (Mom was the only prominent divorcée in Barnwell throughout the Seventies. Mom and Dad divorced in 1968, when I was four.) Beautiful melodies and awesome arrangements. Still one of my favorite albums. 

One single that stands out from this period is “Bohemian Rhapsody”; I didn’t buy the album it was on. When I finally started buying my own records, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, by Elton John, were favorites that I listened to over and over. I should mention that I was the only brother who had his own record player. Mom had a nice sound system in her bedroom that I listened to before I got my own. Dad also had a nice sound system in his house on Manville Drive. (We spent half the week at Mom’s and half the week at Dad’s.) Dad wasn’t really into music, but somehow he had a pretty good record collection. Maybe he was a member of the Columbia Record Club, because he inexplicably had some of the best records of the Seventies at his house, including American Pie, Sweet Baby James, Me and Bobby McGee, Don Quixote, etc. He never listened to them, but we wore them out. In retrospect I feel like maybe he got them for us.

I’m leaving out a lot of stuff for brevity. Everything on the list is an absolute gem. Frampton Comes Alive. Jesus Christ Superstar. Beggar’s Banquet. Who’s Next. Blood on the Tracks. I moved to Hilton Head with Dad in 1980 when Mom moved to New York to marry Bill Kolb. One of my best friends there turned me on to Hunky Dory, by David Bowie, still one of my favorite albums of all time. The Eighties was a weird time for music. I loved the singles from that period. We had a great radio station in Charleston throughout my college years and beyond, 96 Wave. They played all the funky Eighties singles, from “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” by Cyndi Lauper, and everything in between. This is a whole nother story. Suffice it to say, I loved the singles but didn’t buy any of the albums. I basically continued to listen to all my favorite albums from childhood all through college. I might be exaggerating a little, but it wasn’t until I went to graduate school in 1987 that I finally fully turned on to R.E.M. and U2. In my defense, their big breakthroughs both came out that year, Document and The Joshua Tree.

I’ve always considered myself lucky to have grown up during not one but two great periods of Anglo-American rock music. After the Eighties descended into the depths of hair metal, there came the great renaissance of rock music in the early Nineties. One of the harbingers of what became known as Alternative Rock was R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” which became a most improbable hit in the spring of 1991, even in the South. I had just spent a year in New York working my first stint at ------------. I decided I wanted to move back to South Carolina and I secured a position teaching summer school at the College of Charleston. Since Charlie and Missy were getting married that spring, I convinced Dad to let me come down early and live with him between the wedding and summer school. The plan was to attend Charlie and Missy’s wedding and then spend a month or so prepping for my teaching gig. Well, as everyone knows, I chickened out of teaching and convinced Dad to let me spend the summer at Banksia Hall pursuing a career as a painter. This didn’t really work out either, but I did spend the summer hanging out with ---------, whom you called Jen-Jen.

That fall was when Bob opened the Sports Pub, and I went to Charleston to take up my position behind the bar in basically the same place I had tended bar at San Miguel’s. Perry went with me, and we shared an apartment in Mt. Pleasant. I didn’t have a car at the time, so I either rode in to work with Perry if we shared a shift, or I borrowed his car to go in when I was working and he had the night off. One day on the way in to work we heard “Alive,” by Pearl Jam on 96 Wave. I had heard snippets of this song, which had just come out, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was or who Pearl Jam were, because we were listening to 98 Rock (the “classic rock” station that didn’t play new music) at the Sports Pub, due to some putz of a manager whose name I forget. That day, after hearing “Alive” on the way in to work, I strode into the bar and announced that we were listening to the wrong radio station. I don’t know how I had the balls to declare this. The putz manager could easily have overruled me, but thankfully he didn’t. I’d been gone from the downtown Charleston scene for four years, and I felt like I was defending 96 Wave’s place as the cool radio station in Charleston. 

That fall was fucking amazing. Aside from the fact that we opened a sports bar at the exact same time that the Braves decided not to suck anymore and went on a two-year World Series run, the music was awesome too. The Sports Pub was a phenomenal success, packed every night, and I just have to imagine that part of it was due to the fact that we played the best radio station (this was in the days before satellite radio, much less the internet). It is difficult to describe the impact that Pearl Jam and Nirvana had that fall. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was simply one of the coolest songs ever written, and it and “Alive” and “Black” and “Jeremy” by Pearl Jam just opened up the floodgates. Achtung Baby came out that fall as well. U2’s Joshua Tree was great, but it cemented U2’s and Bono’s reputation for bombast and melodrama, for lack of better terms. Grandiosity, not to mention egomania. (There was an old joke about a person who was in a car crash, then in a coma, then dead and in heaven. When he walks through the Pearly Gates, he sees Bono running around, ranting and raving about world peace. He can’t believe that Bono has died. Saint Peter says, “Oh, that’s not Bono. That’s God. He just thinks he’s Bono.”) But Achtung Baby had a grittier, industrial edge that U2’s earlier albums did not, and it transformed them from a great band to a band in a class all by themselves. The fact that U2 pivoted to an alternative sound right before Pearl Jam and Nirvana hit the scene attests to their sense of the zeitgeist.

And then, like I said, the floodgates opened. I might not have the order right, but over the next few years came such classic songs as “Creep,” by Radiohead, “Plush,” by Stone Temple Pilots, “Round Here,” by Counting Crows, “Girlfriend,” by Matthew Sweet, “Longview,” by Green Day, “Today,” by Smashing Pumpkins, “Linger,” by Cranberries, “Jealous Again,” by Black Crowes, “Hey Jealousy,” by Gin Blossoms. A slew of hits by Pearl Jam: “Better Man,” “Rearviewmirror,” “Daughter,” “Animal,” “Corduroy.” I mean, I’m not even scratching the surface. And 96 Wave would play deep cuts that would become hits, like Kristin Hersh’s “Your Ghost.” We sang all these songs when they came on the radio, I mean me and the customers at the Sports Pub. I was known as the Singing Bartender. Between midnight and two a.m., when there was no sports on, we would put the T.V.s on MTV. I remember when “Creep” came on we all just went crazy. I did, anyway.

This was also when I laid claim to my nickname “Nedrock.” There was this old dude who drove a candy truck in our neighborhood on Colonial Drive in Barnwell who gave all the kids nicknames. Perry was “Pericho” (as in Jericho); Charlie was “Charlie over the River” (as in I have no idea); John was “John Henry”; and I was “Nedrock,” which rhymes with “bedrock.” Clearly mine was the only one that was any good. (He called one of the girls in the neighborhood “Mud Puddle.”) Still, nobody in Barnwell ever really called me Nedrock—that would have made me too cool. Dad called me “Crud.” And I never used it in college. But it was always in my back pocket, and when people at the Sports Pub started to call me “Nedly” (a common variation on “Ned” that I despise) I again had the balls to say, “It’s Nedrock,” and it stuck. Everybody who knew me during that Sports Pub period—I worked there from fall of '91 to fall of '94—knows me as Nedrock. 

Anyway, between Nedrock and the Braves and the renaissance of rock music, the stars aligned for me in the early Nineties. I’m not even scratching the surface of all the great songs and bands that came out during this time. I’m just saying how lucky I was to have experienced the two great periods of rock music in the last third of the twentieth century. And we went to many great concerts during this time. Black Crowes played the Gaillard. Lollapalooza came through Charlotte in 1992, featuring Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ministry. U2 played Williams-Brice Stadium that same summer on their Achtung Baby tour (officially the Zoo TV Tour). The whole period culminated with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Woodstock in August of 1994, which featured many of the bands of this renaissance. I went to all of these concerts. And it was in the spring of '94 that I finally learned how to play guitar. Many of the first songs I learned were from this second renaissance. When I decided to play music in clubs in the late Nineties, I was determined to establish a new canon of cover songs for the nightclub scene. 

Going to Hilton Head for the Heritage every year in the Seventies, then going to high school there in the early Eighties, then living in Charleston for most of the Eighties, I was exposed to the “guy with the guitar” in nightclubs and tiki bars from early on. I would often get up and sing with these people, and I always said that one day I would learn how to play the guitar. It wasn’t until I went to Paris in the summer of 1993 that I finally made the decision to actually do it. I saw many buskers on the streets of Paris. I flew back through NYC on my way home and spent a weekend in the Hamptons with an old friend from college. Also there that weekend was some dude that I barely knew in college. There was a guitar in the rental and this dude picked it up and started playing a Bob Dylan song. I loathed this guy, and now he was the one who was serenading the women when it should have been me, just because he could play the guitar. I figured, “If this asshole can play the guitar, so can I.” Still, it took me until the following spring to fully knock the Coke machine over. I borrowed a friend’s acoustic guitar, bought an instruction book that came with a cassette and taught myself how to play the guitar. Our greatest fears lie in anticipation, and honestly when I started out I really didn’t know if I would be able to play the guitar or not. In reality, it probably didn’t take much more than a month. 

A lot of the early songs I learned were favorites from childhood, like “Behind Blue Eyes” (from Who’s Next) and “She Came in through the Bathroom Window” (from Abbey Road), but I also determined early on to learn many of the songs that I had just fallen in love with during the previous three years at the Sports Pub. Ironically, when I started playing out four years later, back in Charleston after my second stint at ------------ from '95 to '97, the kids in Charleston all came up to me and asked me to play songs by Creedence Clearwater Revival, James Taylor, Jimmy Buffett, Van Morrison, etc. Basically, the old canon. I figured they’d want to hear the new canon, but they really just wanted to hear the songs that they’d grown up with in their parents’ record collections.

Nedrock, Houston Street, NYC, 1997

The view from the asylum

This post originated as a letter, with an accompanying folder of images, to my friend Laurie Israel.

(Click on images to enlarge them.)

I thought you might find this fun. Vincent painted fifteen pictures of the view from his bedroom window in the asylum at Saint-Rémy (sixteen if you count The Starry Night). In addition to being painted from two slightly different vantage points, they are also all painted from a slightly different perspective, sometimes looking toward the left (north), sometimes looking directly east, sometimes skewing more toward the south. I thought it would be fun to superimpose an outline of all the paintings on top of each other to illustrate the range of Vincent’s perspective over the fifteen paintings. I ordered an LED tracing light box from Amazon and bought a ten-pack of my favorite pen, the Pilot G-2, in assorted colors.

Vincent’s second-story cell in the asylum looked out over a field enclosed by a stone wall. Beyond the wall was a rolling countryside of fields and woodlands, with the Alpilles mountains on the horizon. The Alpilles are a subrange of the Alps situated south and east of Saint-Rémy. There were four buildings on the other side of the wall, at least one of which Vincent included in every painting of the view. Two of the buildings are nondescript, but the other two are fairly distinctive. The two nondescript buildings are to the left and right of the view (I have christened them “left” and “right”). In the distance is a building comprised of two sections: a larger section in the rear and a smaller section in the front, which I picture as an anteroom to the larger structure. In the foreground of the area just beyond the wall is a building with an asymmetrical roofline and gable. I have christened these buildings “anteroom” and “asymmetrical.” 

The noted Impressionist and Postimpressionist scholar John Rewald visited the asylum at Saint-Rémy in the 1950s and took photographs of the view from Vincent’s cell. In 2015 I requested and was granted access to Rewald’s slides in the archives department of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. When Rewald took his photos, “anteroom” and “asymmetrical” were still there, which was cool in and of itself, but it also confirmed that Vincent was painting what he saw, which will turn out to be integral to my interpretation of The Starry Night.

Rewald's photo of the view

I started with an outline in black ink of the major elements visible in the Rewald slide. It’s hard to make out in the picture in the folder, but “anteroom” is situated directly above “asymmetrical,” and “left” is also there. “Right” may also have still existed when this photograph was taken, but it would have been hidden by the foliage that had grown up on the south side of the enclosed wheat field and the row of cypress trees that appear to have grown up just beyond the south wall of the field. The one element that appears in all the paintings, besides the mountains, is the stone wall, so I used this as the anchor for tracing all the paintings, specifically the crook in the wall where the south wall turns inward from the east wall at a roughly ninety-degree angle. 

At the upper left of my superimposition you will see each painting identified by its current location and its de la Faille and Hulsker numbers. Jacob-Baart de la Faille was the first to catalogue Vincent’s works and give them numbers (The Starry Night is F612). Jan Hulsker later compiled his own catalogue raisonné; his numbers are preceded by the initials “JH.” You will count eleven paintings. I did not trace the other four pictures for a couple of reasons. First, two of them are exact copies (“repetitions,” as Vincent called them) of an earlier version, namely the one commonly called Reaper. The original version (F617/JH1753) is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands. They call it Korenveld met maaier en zon; Wheat Field with Reaper and Sun—their translation, not mine! (Many of Vincent’s paintings are known by differing titles. He rarely gave them titles, per se. Rather, he gave them descriptions, which themselves often varied from letter to letter.) The two repetitions of Reaper are in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany. The original includes all four buildings; the two repetitions leave out “right.”

The other two pictures that I didn’t trace are only very loosely based on the view. One (variously titled Wheat Field with Plowman or Laborer in a Field; F625/JH1768), formerly in the collection of Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass of Fort Worth, Texas, and which was sold to an anonymous bidder at Christie’s in 2017 (for $81 million), includes the wall, a rather flattened depiction of the mountains, and the rising sun, but otherwise contains imaginative elements, including a building that doesn’t resemble any of the actual buildings and what appear to be weeping willow trees. A similar picture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (F706/JH1794) is even more fanciful, with Dutch windmills in the background. 

All of the pictures except for the one in Amsterdam are painted horizontally in what we would now call “landscape” view. The Amsterdam picture and the one in Richmond are quite small, roughly nine by thirteen inches. Of the remaining thirteen, nine are painted on Vincent’s preferred Size 30 canvas, roughly twenty-eight by thirty-six inches, the remaining four being only slightly smaller.

I don’t know that my superimposition image teaches us much more than what we learn by simply looking at the paintings. I just thought it would look cool, you know, as a work of art (What is art?). One thing it does highlight is that in addition to painting the view from the different perspectives identified above, Vincent also depicted the view from two slightly different vantage points. Six of the paintings show the view from his room, where “anteroom” is pretty much directly behind “asymmetrical.” In seven the vantage point is from slightly to the north of Vincent’s cell, so that “anteroom” appears to the left of “asymmetrical.” This occurs in one of the first paintings he made of the view, the dramatically skewed perspective depicted in Wheat Field with Rising Sun (F720/JH1728), currently in Otterlo. 

Wheat Field with Rising Sun

It also occurs in all three versions of Reaper. And it occurs in one of the last versions Vincent painted of the view, Green Wheatfield (F718/JH1727), currently in a private collection in Zurich. It is unclear whether Vincent based this angle on the view from another room in the asylum or if it was taken from a position within the enclosed wheat field itself. He never mentions where this second vantage point came from, and even when he refers to one of the paintings from this position, he still calls it the view from his window. This makes sense since it is still the general view. It’s also possible that he simply skewed the view for compositional effect.

Another element you will notice in some of the pictures is the rising sun (and in one case the rising moon). Shortly after checking into the asylum, Vincent now famously wrote to his brother, Theo, "Through the iron-barred window I can make out a square of wheat in an enclosure . . . above which in the morning I see the sun rise in its glory." You see the sun in the skewed image above. It is in all three versions of Reaper. It’s in the one from the Bass collection. And it is in the painting that must be considered the masterpiece of the series, also usually called Wheat Field with Rising Sun (F737/JH1862), formerly in the collection of none other than Robert Oppenheimer—yes, the father of the atomic bomb! (Oppenheimer actually inherited the painting from his parents. He sold it in 1965 to Florence J. Gould, daughter-in-law of nineteenth-century robber baron Jay Gould. Florence Gould auctioned the painting off through Sotheby’s in 1985, where it was sold to a private collector for just under ten million dollars. I would give anything to know where it is today.)

Wheat Field with Rising Sun

I call this picture the masterpiece—in the classical sense of the term—because Vincent painted it specifically for inclusion in a public exhibition. In November, 1889, Vincent was invited to participate in the annual exhibition of Les Vingt (stylized as Les XX [The Twenty]; Vincent called them les Vingtistes) in Brussels. Vincent exhibited six paintings in this exhibition, held in January and February of 1890. Five of these pictures, including the two original versions of his iconic Sunflowers (now in London and Munich) and The Red Vineyard (the only painting he sold during his lifetime, as a result of this exhibition), were already finished and were in Paris with Theo. But he clearly had the desire to include an example from the series of paintings of the view from the asylum window, and instead of choosing one of the already completed views, he created a new version, a true showpiece.

With apologies to Sanford Gifford, this might be the most amazing picture of the sun ever painted. Brushstrokes of light radiate out from the yellow-white disc, filling nearly half the sky. Anyone who has ever even momentarily looked at the sun knows that it is not just the disc one sees but the aureola surrounding it. The darker shadows just inside the wall are a virtuoso example of Impressionist coloration. And the furrows that fill fully two-thirds of the canvas rush toward the viewer, giving the picture a dynamism which places it squarely at the transition from Impressionism, which Vincent generally considered himself to be a practitioner of (depending on his mood), to Postimpressionism, the tag which later scholars gave to painters like Van Gogh and Gauguin, who were seen to have infused emotion into the more dispassionately naturalistic works of Monet, Pissarro, et al.

Vincent described this painting in a letter to Emile Bernard: “Another canvas depicts a sun rising over a field of new wheat. Receding lines of the furrows run high up on the canvas, towards a wall and a range of lilac hills. The field is violet and green-yellow. The white sun is surrounded by a large yellow aureole. In it . . . I have tried to express calm, a great peace.”

Vincent also showed this picture in the Spring 1890 exhibition of the Salon des Indépendants, along with nine other works, including a vertical painting of cypresses now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which I will discuss below), one of the two iconic Sunflowers, and one of the other iterations of the view from the asylum window, Landscape after a Storm (F611/JH1723), now in Copenhagen. (This is generally considered to be the first iteration of the view.) Vincent received favorable press coverage for his pictures in this show, and Theo wrote to him that none other than Claude Monet, whom Theo represented in his gallery, had said Vincent’s paintings “were the best in the exhibition.” Gauguin said they were the feature attraction.

Landscape after a Storm

Another element you’ll notice that turns up in two of the paintings is a lone cypress tree atop one of the distant hills. 

=//=

The standard interpretation of The Starry Night, not to overstate it too much, is that it is the hallucinatory vision of a madman. Even with the knowledge that Vincent could not work during his epileptic fits or the days following them, pretty much everyone from Meyer Schapiro to the Van Gogh biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have sought a way to interpret the picture in this way. A classic example is Ronald Pickvance’s interpretation in his catalogue for the monumental Van Gogh exhibition (the second of a tandem of exhibitions, actually) presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the winter of 1986-87. Pickvance interprets The Starry Night as being a composite of two other pictures from that same June of 1889: the first iteration of the view, Landscape after a Storm (mentioned just above), and a painting of cypress trees and a farmhouse in a field of wheat painted around the same time (now in the National Gallery in Prague) which Pickvance suggests is taken from a different area in the vicinity of the asylum.

Vincent checked into the asylum at Saint-Remy on May 8, 1889. He was given a second-story room to live in and a ground-floor room to paint in. Even though he had voluntarily committed himself, he was not allowed to leave the grounds of the former monastery for about a month. His studio was near the entrance to the former cloister, now simply an enclosed courtyard garden. In his first letter from the asylum, written on May 9 to Theo and his new bride Jo, Vincent wrote, “I have two [paintings] on the go—violet irises and a lilac bush. Two subjects taken from the garden.” The Irises are the famous ones currently in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. 

The usually prolific correspondent didn’t write again for two weeks. In his second letter from the asylum he reported that he now had two more paintings “on the go” (as he liked to say). “Since I’ve been here, the neglected garden planted with tall pines under which grows tall and badly tended grass intermingled with various weeds, has provided me with enough work, and I haven’t yet gone outside” of the asylum grounds. This is also the letter where he said he can see the morning sun rise in all its glory. (Vincent had been sober for a few months now, so he was probably waking up early for the first time in a long time.) His next letter is from yet another two weeks later. Now he was evidently waking up even earlier because it is in this letter that he reported that he could see Venus: “This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.” Still, he had yet to leave the asylum grounds: “[W]hat a beautiful land and what beautiful blue and what a sun. And yet I’ve only seen the garden and what I can make out through the window.”

Then, three days later, on June 9, he reported that he had finally gone off the grounds of the asylum. “Thanks very much for the consignment of canvases, colors, brushes, tobacco and chocolate, which reached me in good order. I was very glad of it, for I was pining for work a little. Also, for a few days now I’ve been going outside to work in the neighborhood. . . . What can I tell you that’s new, not much. I have two landscapes on the go (no. 30 canvases) of views taken in the hills.” He immediately describes Landscape after a Storm: “One is the countryside that I glimpse from the window of my bedroom. In the foreground a field of wheat, ravaged and knocked to the ground after a storm. A boundary wall and beyond, grey foliage of a few olive trees, huts and hills. Finally, at the top of the painting a large white and grey cloud swamped by the azure.” He then loses his train of thought and never identifies or describes what the second picture is of.  

Vincent’s next letter is a week later to his sister Willemien (sic), whom he calls Wil. In this letter he describes his three latest paintings: “I’ve just finished a landscape of an olive grove with grey foliage more or less like that of the willows, their cast shadows violet on the sun-drenched sand. Then yet another that depicts a field of yellowing wheat surrounded by brambles and green bushes. At the end of the field a little pink house with a tall and dark cypress tree that stands out against the distant purplish and bluish hills, and against a forget-me-not blue sky streaked with pink whose pure tones contrast with the already heavy, scorched ears, whose tones are as warm as the crust of a loaf of bread. I have yet another in which a field of wheat on the slope of the hills is completely ravaged and knocked to the ground by a downpour, and which is drenched by the torrential shower.” The first picture is of nearby olive groves that Vincent would do two series of over the next few months. The third picture he describes is the one he described in the previous letter to Theo, before he lost his train of thought. The middle picture is Wheat Field (F719/JH1725), currently in the National Gallery in Prague. Given its proximity to the depiction of Landscape after a Storm in this letter, along with the fact that it was clearly “taken in the hills,” this is most likely the second painting that Vincent meant to describe in the previous letter to Theo. 

Wheat Field

This is the picture that Pickvance wants to say is one of the two paintings that Vincent incorporated elements of to compose The Starry Night. “At the asylum,” Pickvance writes, “he had been given a room overlooking the garden to use as a studio. But from the studio, unlike the bedroom, he had no view of the Alpilles. In that studio in mid-June, several recently painted canvases were drying. From two of them, Mountainous Landscape Behind the Asylum (F611 [this is the title Pickvance uses for Landscape after a Storm]) and the Wheat Field now in Prague, van Gogh extracted elements that he then used in his new painting [The Starry Night]. From the one he took the outline of the Alpilles, and from the other he took the cypresses.” Aside from the fact that it is immaterial that there is no view of the Alpilles from the ground-floor studio, since Vincent would have used sketches made from his second-story cell to paint all images of the view, Pickvance is suggesting that the Prague Wheat Field actually depicts a field with cypresses in another area of the countryside. “The Prague landscape cannot be identified as the second view ‘taken in the hills’. Rather, it is the very opposite. Van Gogh turned his back to the Alpilles.” This doesn’t make any sense. First of all, there are other hills in the distance in this picture. And secondly, if he turned his back on the Alpilles, he must necessarily be in the vicinity of the Alpilles. 

Pickvance pushes this theory in order to characterize The Starry Night as a product of Vincent’s imagination. He writes: “[W]ith its mixed genesis, its composite procedures, and its arbitrary collage of separate motifs, it is overtly stamped as an ‘abstraction’ of the kind he painted in Arles under the tutelage of Gauguin.” Gauguin (and Bernard) actually used the term "abstraction" in two different ways. They used it to refer to paintings composed from the imagination—in other words, compositions that they basically made up, composites of different ideas, rather than images taken directly from nature. They also used it to refer to a style of painting using broad, perhaps even arbitrary colors and/or infusing personal expression into the picture. Pickvance seizes on Vincent’s comparison of The Starry Night to another painting of his from the same time, Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background, now in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA just calls this painting The Olive Trees; F712/JH1740. This is the first of the three paintings Vincent refers to in his letter to Wil, quoted above). To support his argument, Pickvance quotes Vincent writing to his brother, “Though I have not seen either Gauguin’s or Bernard’s last canvases, I am pretty well convinced that these two studies I’ve spoken of are parallel in feeling.” The problem is, this second painting is not an abstraction of the composite variety; it is a plein air view of olive trees with the Alpilles in the background. Vincent is linking these two pictures based on painting style, not arbitrary, composite composition. 

Pickvance’s assertion that the Prague painting depicts a separate parcel of the vicinity seems to suggest that there were no cypresses in the countryside visible from Vincent’s bedroom window, which is kind of like saying that there are sections of Parris Island where there are no sand gnats, or indeed that there are parts of the night sky where there are no stars. (Another art historian by the name of Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski, in a paper based on a lecture given at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the occasion of the second Pickvance exhibition, basically parrots Pickvance’s assumption, stating unequivocally that there were no cypresses visible from Vincent’s bedroom and giving as “proof” just one of the fifteen paintings Vincent made of the view, Landscape after a Storm.)

But Provence is lousy with cypress trees, as Vincent noted on several occasions in letters to his brother. In June 1889, a week or so after painting The Starry Night, he wrote, “The cypresses still preoccupy me, I’d like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers because it astonishes me that no one has yet done them as I see them. It’s beautiful as regards lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk. And the green has such a distinguished quality. It’s the dark patch in a sun-drenched landscape, but it’s one of the most interesting dark notes, the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine. Now they must be seen here against the blue, in the blue, rather.” Elsewhere he referred to the color of the cypresses as being “that difficult shade of bottle green.” 

In a letter from November, 1889, he wrote, “I still have the great desire to do for the mountains and for the cypresses what I’ve just done for the olive trees, have a really good go at them. The thing is, the olive tree and the cypress have rarely been painted.” The next month he reiterated this plan: “I have a great desire to do more of both the cypresses and the Alpilles.” He had earlier stated that these pictures would “form a kind of ensemble, ‘Impressions of Provence’.” And in January, 1890, he was still talking about it: “To give an idea of Provence it’s vital to do a few more canvases of cypresses and mountains.” “The cypress is so characteristic of the landscape of Provence,” he wrote to the critic Albert Aurier. “[B]efore leaving here, I am planning to return to the fray to attack the cypresses.” (All of these quotes come from the invaluable online resource provided by the Van Gogh Museum Foundation, the Van Gogh Letters Project.) 

Vincent actually started his attack on the cypresses in June of 1889. Around June 18 he wrote to Theo that he had “a new study of a starry sky.” (The Starry Night is actually Vincent’s third nocturnal painting, following two he had executed in Arles the previous summer: Café Terrace at Night and Starry Night over the Rhone. Vincent referred to most of his paintings as “studies,” works that he intended to utilize at a later time to produce what he considered finished works. But except for a few notable repetitions of some paintings, the majority of the paintings that we consider Vincent’s greatest are “studies.” He did not sign his “studies”; The Starry Night, for example, is not signed.) A week later he wrote, “We’ve had some fine hot days and I’ve got some more canvases on the go, so that there are 12 no. 30 canvases on the stocks.” Included among these canvases were three new pictures of cypresses, in addition to The Starry Night and the Prague Wheat Field. Two of these pictures are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Cypresses

Wheat Field with Cypresses

The cypresses in each of these two paintings are very similar. They both appear to be a pair of cypresses growing right next to each other. There might be a technical term for this in botany. Anyway, they are clearly the same pair of trees in each picture, and in each picture the blue slope of the Alpilles is visible in the background. (One of them also has a stylized crescent moon.) These also appear to be the same two trees depicted in the Prague Wheat Field, only from the opposite side, as the smaller of the two trees is now on the right rather than on the left. And, of course, The Starry Night depicts two companion cypresses, a big one and a little one. 

The Starry Night 

According to Hulsker’s catalogue, there are at least nine extant sketches of the view that Vincent would have based his paintings on. Most of these sketches actually show the view from the slightly skewed northern vantage point, but one is a preliminary drawing for the one vertical version of the view, in Amsterdam.

Preliminary drawing for F723/JH1722

This drawing shows what appears to be a lone cypress on a little hill just beyond “anteroom.” Although this cypress does not show up in the finished painting based on this sketch, it does appear in two of the horizontal versions of the view. It is visible in the skewed view in Otterlo shown above. And it is visible in the version in the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which I was able to view in person two years ago on my way back from visiting my stepfather in Memphis. 

Enclosed Field with Peasant or

Plowed Field with a Man Carrying a Bundle of Straw

The romantic in me likes to think that Vincent identified with this solitary cypress (or what looked like a solitary cypress) on a distant hill, and that on one windy day that June when he was finally allowed off the grounds of the asylum he trekked up into the hills to find his kindred spirit. Once he got there he saw that it was actually two cypresses, but no matter. They don’t show up in all of his paintings of the view, just as a lot of particulars are left out of the various versions, but they do show up in the two I’ve identified (in addition to the preliminary sketch). And I believe these are the cypresses that famously dominate the foreground of The Starry Night. 

My theory is that while the fifteen iconic versions of the view are all basically panoramic views, for The Starry Night Vincent telescoped the view to focus on the cypresses on the distant hill. From the earliest days of his painting career, Vincent relied on a perspective frame whose construction he had specially commissioned from a carpenter in The Hague (he had a couple of them made). The use of such a technical implement runs contrary to our perception of Vincent as an expressionist artist, but the fact of the matter is that Vincent was not a very good freehand draftsman. This is one of the reasons he was always pining for models. And it’s one of the reasons that he bristled at painting “abstractions.” He needed to have something in front of him to draw or paint. And he made extensive use of the perspective frame to paint his landscapes. He probably didn’t have the perspective frame with him in the asylum, but the window itself would have served the purpose. After all, a window is essentially what a perspective frame is, an analogy that goes all the way back to the invention of linear perspective in the fifteenth century by Brunelleschi, as chronicled by Alberti in his seminal On Painting. All Vincent would have had to do was stand back in his bedroom in order to telescope the view of the cypresses on the hill, not to mention the bright morning star, Venus. 

But Pickvance doesn’t mention Venus, beyond quoting Vincent’s now famous statement to Theo about seeing the morning star, “which looked very big.” Maybe it’s the post-Enlightenment separation of the so-called “fine arts” from all other arts and sciences that accounts for Pickvance’s failure to recognize Venus as an integral part of The Starry Night. Arty people are not supposed to know anything about science, and Pickvance allowed Vincent’s mention of Venus and his inclusion of it in this painting to fly right past him. (Albert Boime, longtime UCLA art historian, did not. He and Harvard astrophysicist Charles A. Whitney, working independently, have conclusively established that Venus was visible from Vincent’s bedroom window that Summer.) Venus is one of the key indicators that The Starry Night, so often characterized as a product of Vincent’s imagination, is in fact a fairly literal depiction of the view from his cell in the asylum. 

I say “fairly literal” because there are definitely some imaginary elements in the painting. First and foremost among them is the village, which everyone agrees is made-up. (Pickvance argues that the church in the picture is in more of a Dutch style than Provençal, but this is immaterial, since, Dutch or Provençal, it’s imaginary anyway.) And, except for Venus, the positions of the stars (and the phase of the moon) are imaginary. Vincent painted the picture during the day in his ground-floor studio. He would have known where Venus was, but otherwise there were no distinctive constellations visible in that part of the sky on those mornings, so he just randomly filled the sky with stars. The moon was waxing gibbous when he painted The Starry Night, meaning it would have been visible in the east in the early evening, not in the early morning. So for compositional effect, Vincent just put a stylized crescent moon in the upper right-hand corner. At least he got the orientation right if the moon had been there, something that cannot be said of his inclusion of a crescent moon in some of the cypress paintings. The swirls in the sky represent the mistral, and the whitish-blue brushstrokes just above the horizon line represent the first light of morning.

So the score is tied at 2. There are two imaginary features: the village and (collectively) the stars and moon. And there are two features that are definitely not made-up: Venus and the slope of the Alpilles mountains. The tiebreaker hinges, literally, on the cypresses.

There is actually one more element in The Starry Night that comes from the view. In the foreground of the imaginary village is “anteroom.” This is one of the few buildings of the imaginary village that is depicted boldly and large. My theory is that Vincent painted it first as an established element of the telescoped view, and then decided for whatever reason to surround it with imaginary buildings. 

It’s fun to crop the upper left-hand area of the Indianapolis painting of the view, to create a miniature version of The Starry Night (albeit during the daytime). I’ll admit that Vincent moved the cypresses forward in The Starry Night, but I’ll chalk this up to artistic license and stand by my theory.

The best of times or the worst of times?

This post originated as an email to my stepfather, Rev. Bill Kolb.

My best friend here and I have been having an ongoing conversation about how we are witnessing a revolution in filmmaking, at least in terms of the ways that films are distributed and watched. More and more, "little" films are being released on streaming services, and the multiplexes are reserved for action/adventure films and franchises. With more options in home theater, a film has to be seen as an "event" to compel people to leave the house to go see it. One of my favorite movies of the year was Booksmart, which got really good reviews but didn't sell a lot of tickets. It is possible that eventually all "little" movies like this will go straight to streaming. This leaves people like me in a bad position, because if I'm going to commit to a streaming lifestyle, it seems like I'd have to subscribe not only to Netflix but also to Amazon Prime, Disney+, AppleTV, etc, and paying for each of those will quickly add up—this in addition to paying for internet access in the first place. So I miss a lot of stuff.

And there is a lot of stuff! I've been following this awards season, and there are a lot of shows and movies that I feel like I might be interested in, but (a) I don't have the streaming services and (b) I don't have the time. And a lot of it is grossly overrated. There just doesn't seem to me to be enough ideas in the world to justify so much content. The content is being created because the streaming services exist. For instance, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has gotten a lot of positive commentary, but when I tried to watch it last year—when I briefly had a free trial of Amazon Prime—I thought it was awful. Fleabag is now the big thing, but I haven't seen it. 

It's funny, when I go to the theater, I see a bunch of old people and I think, "Well, this is my demographic now." Like everyone, I don't think I'm that old, but when I sit in a movie theater I realize I'm sitting with my peers. Young people don't go to the theater anymore, unless it's to see a blockbuster. I am nostalgic for the days when there were gatekeepers and a limited number of films were released every year, and certain films would become cultural touchstones that you could be fairly confident that most people you rubbed elbows with at work or at parties or at the grocery store had probably also seen. Of course there are problems with this system, but it did foster a cohesive populace. Somebody like Walter Cronkite could embody a centrist voice of reason that everybody could trust. Those days are long gone, the most significant casualty being trust itself. 

So much content, it seems to me, is a cynical ploy to make money. I measure every television series I watch against Mad Men, which was the earnest vision of one man who had an idea that he believed in that he wanted to dramatize for people. This is one of the reasons why Little Women is so powerful, because you can tell early and throughout that Greta Gerwig has a genuine belief in the story she wants to retell and that she is being honest in her retelling of it. 

Jordan Peterson talks about the importance of true speech. He actually interprets the opening of Genesis as a metaphor for the importance of true speech. The fact that God the Father Almighty pronounces that his creation is "good" is an example of this, according to Peterson. Peterson is an interesting personage right now. He is reviled by the Left because they feel that his critique of identity and gender politics automatically places him on the right, and indeed on the far right. But I consider myself a liberal and yet I am enthralled by Peterson's viewpoints. He is arguing that the radical Left and the reactionary Right have both lost their minds—and abdicated true speech—and for me he represents a voice of reason cutting right down the middle. 

Whether it's television shows and films that play fast and loose with the truth or politicians who refuse to acknowledge the truth and pander to their benefactors, our culture has lost faith in virtually all authority. And there are studies that show that young people do not believe there is any such thing as objective morality. This is a serious development that is having an absolutely devastating impact on our society. Although there are obviously some good things happening right now, the current epoch will definitely go down in history as one of the bad times as opposed to one of the good (the Renaissance, for instance, or the Enlightenment). Of course I know that there were bad things happening during those periods as well. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" can probably be applied to every epoch of human history, but clearly some times are better than others. And with the ineptitude and corruption of our government leaders, the vacuousness of our "art," the pervasiveness of mass violence, the demise of truth, etc, this epoch will, on balance, definitely go down as one of the poorer epochs of history.    

I think about those people who lived in other poor epochs. I think that there were enlightened people who lived during the Middle Ages. I reflect on the fact that the Enlightenment happened during the frivolous Rococo period of the eighteenth century. And I'm thankful that I am able to speak my enlightened thoughts without fear of being executed. The bottom line is that you just have to live your best life and let history take care of itself. If you want to change the world, the only real way you can do it, unless you break through and become famous or otherwise get a platform to promote your ideas, is to do it at the micro level, to treat the people you come into contact with the way you feel like people should be treated. "Always do right," Twain said, "it will gratify some and astonish the rest."

One cool thing that happened to me recently involved utility shears. I had a pair of scissors that I was using in the kitchen that I finally figured out were the wrong type of scissors. But it took me a long time to come to this realization, partly because they were good scissors. They were Scotch scissors, made by 3M, with beautiful Cherokee red handles with grey highlights. But they sucked. They couldn't cut through the bacon wrapper. There's this pasta that I get from the deli section that comes in this sort of wax-lined paper bag that these scissors just would not cut through. And I was like, "Why do these scissors suck so much? They're a good brand of scissors." It was infuriating. 

And the scissors were real nice about it. I know they wanted to say, "Dude, you know we weren't made for these jobs. We're paper scissors." But they didn't say anything, even as I was badmouthing them.

Then one day I was in the Target, looking at the kitchen utensils. I wasn't actually shopping for kitchen utensils. Whatever I had gone into the Target for I had already gotten, and now I was just looking at the kitchen gadgets hanging on the wall like I was looking at art in a museum. And then I saw them. KitchenAid utility shears. They were gorgeous. And, of course, I'm a sucker for established brand names. (I was thrilled a couple of years ago when I realized that "Cuisinart" was a portmanteau of "cuisine" and "art." I had never noticed it before because we don't pronounce "Cuisinart" "cuisine art," we pronounce it "quiznart." But then one day I saw it and it blew me away, like the first time I saw the arrow in the FedEx logo. My last girlfriend, whom I lived with, the house she bought came with a vintage KitchenAid dishwasher that still worked like a charm, which I loved.) Looking at the KitchenAid utility shears in the Target, I thought, "That's what I need in the kitchen." I mean, I think in the back of my mind I always knew I was using the wrong scissors. I knew that utility shears existed, but I'm an old bachelor, so I had never bought any. I know what a duvet is, too, but I don't own one.

So I bought these shears and brought them home and they changed my life. And the scissors were, like, "Dude, yes!" I always knew that the scissors belonged in the pen cup that I keep on my desk. Every month when I pay the bills and I have to cut the payment portion off of the bottom of the bill, I think I should keep the scissors in the pen cup on my desk, but I say to myself that I use them more often in the kitchen, even though they suck. So when I brought the utility shears home, the scissors were so proud of me. "I know you probably thought we'd be insulted if you replaced us, but we aren't because we just weren't made to be used in the kitchen. We're so proud of you." So I placed them in the pen cup on my desk, and the pens and the ruler and the letter opener were all, like, "Dude, where have you been?" And the scissors were, like, "In the freaking kitchen!"

And now I'm buying things at the grocery store just to cut them open!

Clemson and bowl games

This post originated as an email to my brother, Gus Hartley.

I said [in an earlier text to Gus] that I have a soft spot in my heart for the Sun Bowl. When I was a kid growing up in the Seventies, there were far fewer bowl games than there are now. There were the big four--Rose, Orange, Sugar and Cotton--and then there were a handful of other bowls, including the Gator Bowl (first played in 1945), the Tangerine Bowl (1946; now called the Citrus Bowl), the Liberty Bowl (1959; first played in Philadelphia, hence the name), the Bluebonnet Bowl (1959), the Peach Bowl (1968), the Fiesta Bowl (1971), and the Sun Bowl, which was first played in 1935 and, with the Orange and Sugar bowls, is tied for the second oldest active bowl in the land, after the Granddaddy of Them All, the Rose Bowl, first played in 1902. (These dates all come from Wikipedia, so they could be slightly off.) There were a lot of other bowls that came and went during that time, so I give props to the Sun Bowl for surviving. It ain't the most prestigious bowl, but since the late Sixties it has attracted major programs, and it has a competitive payout. It's a cool stadium--a horseshoe bowl carved out of the rock in El Paso, hard by the Mexico border. And, of course, it honors the Sun, which I am a big fan of.

So, you could have a good year in those days and still not go to a bowl game. It wasn't until the 1980s, starting with the Outback Bowl, that there started to be a plethora of bowl games that were basically marketing tools, mostly named for commercial products rather than having clever names based on things that go in bowls (like sugar). You look at storied programs like Alabama and Michigan, and even they didn't go to bowl games every year the way they do now. Frank Howard coached at Clemson for thirty years and won 165 games, but he only took six teams to bowl games. But when they did go to bowl games, as often as not they were the Orange and Sugar bowls.

It was also in the 1980s that bowls started accepting corporate sponsorships. The USF&G Sugar Bowl. The FedEx Orange Bowl. The Rose Bowl has the gravitas to have never had a corporate name appear before its own name, always being called (in the era of corporate sponsorship) The Rose Bowl Game Presented by Corporation X. (They call it the Rose Bowl Game to differentiate it from the Rose Bowl proper, which is the stadium itself. There's an old trick question: Which team has played in the Rose Bowl the most often? The answer is UCLA, since the Rose Bowl is their home stadium.) The worst thing is when the corporate sponsor drops the traditional name of the bowl game altogether, which is how we got the Chick-fil-A Bowl for many years. Or the Taxslayer Bowl. 

I'm obviously too young to remember the Frank Howard years. I reached the age of enlightenment in 1970, a year after Frank Howard retired and a year after South Carolina won the ACC and went to the Peach Bowl (which they lost). So, the first years that I remember of college football in South Carolina, neither Carolina nor Clemson went to bowl games. Carolina finally went to the Tangerine Bowl in 75, but they lost to Miami of Ohio, which was embarrassing since this wasn't even a major program. Even the bowl itself seemed like a cheesy version of the Orange Bowl ("Citrus Bowl," for some reason, sounds so much better than "Tangerine Bowl"). Then we went to the Hall of Fame Bowl, which also felt like a cheesy bowl, and lost to Missouri. Then we went to the Gator Bowl and got waxed by Pitt, which was a powerhouse in those days. Then Clemson started going to bowl games again, first in 77, when they too were beaten by Pitt in the Gator Bowl. But then the next year they went back to the Gator Bowl and beat freaking Ohio State, which was a perennial power that usually played in the Rose Bowl and regularly contended for the national championship (which they won in 1968). And they had a famous coach with a famous coach's name, Woody Hayes. Well, Woody didn't take too well to losing to "little old Clemson," so when a Clemson player intercepted an Ohio State pass late in the game to seal the victory, Hayes punched him in the throat! Hayes was fired the next day, ending his storied career.

Then a couple of years later Clemson won the freaking national championship, beating freaking Nebraska in the freaking Orange Bowl. It always happens like this. Carolina had the first surge of success in the Seventies, under new coach Jim Carlen, but even when they showed promise, they usually got killed in their bowl games. Then Clemson comes out of nowhere and beats a traditional power like Nebraska in a prestigious bowl like the Orange Bowl. In the 2010s, Carolina had three 11-win seasons and beat the Tigers five years in a row. But when they played for the SEC championship in 2010, they got their doors blown off by Auburn. And since Spurrier left we've mostly sucked again. Then Clemson comes out of nowhere and not only starts winning but starts regularly beating traditional powerhouses and winning national championships. What I'm saying is, even when Carolina is good, they look like they're doing it with smoke and mirrors, and when Clemson gets good, they are genuinely good. 

I grew up pulling for the Gamecocks and so I naturally hated Clemson. As we age we mellow and now I like Clemson and hope they keep on winning. Dad's second wife, Frances Lawton, was the daughter of a man who played for Clemson back in the day. He must have played for Frank Howard. I don't actually remember his given name. His nickname was "Streak" (Streak Lawton), because he played running back and was supposedly fast, although I have never been able to find anything on his career as a player at Clemson. [I have since learned, via the Clemson football media guide, that Streak Lawton earned letters in football at Clemson in 1935 and 1936. This means he would have played under head coach Jess Neely; Frank Howard was an assistant coach on those teams. Streak's son Winston lettered in 1969.] Anyway, he was wealthy, and for the few years that Dad was married to Frances we all went to the Carolina-Clemson game whenever it was played at Death Valley (I think we went to two). The adults had seats in the stands, and we four boys sat on the Hill. I proudly wore my Gamecock colors, but Clemson won both games that I went to. At one game, I caught the football on an extra point attempt or a field goal. Okay, I didn't catch it outright, but nobody did, and I caught it on a couple of bounces and threw it back down to the field. I would have only been about ten at the time, and I remember that football feeling like it was about the size of a pumpkin! After I threw it back, I caught sight of my girlfriend at the time, whom I didn't realize until that moment was also on the Hill, down below me. She gave me a thumbs-up and a big smile. I felt like a total badass.