Words and Pictures from John Paul Turnage

Current Project Update - Mid-year 2009

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:53:30 -0700

I hope the summer of 2009 finds you well. Many of you want news of my painting, so here you go. I’m working every day on the same project, a panoramic painting of San Francisco, seen from the top of Alcatraz Island. The picture is on four canvases, each 7 feet long. The origins of this project are described in this earlier post. The light in the painting is summer light, and only occurs for a a short time. For most of the year, the north shore of the city is in shadow.

The weather smiled on me this year. I bought a ticket for the longest day, June 21, and the sky was clear of fog. The city was unbelievably beautiful in the summer light, as you can see in the video above.

The work is going well. I’m using mainly black and white, drawing in the city and getting more precise with each new layer. The detail above is of Yerba Buena Island and the Oakland Hills.

This detail shows Telegraph Hill and Fisherman’s Wharf. It is a great joy for me to paint the city. After living here twenty-two years, I have memories of almost every object. I’ve worked in these office towers, eaten in the restaurants, and waited in the freezing fog for a dawdling Muni bus, on almost every corner.

This is the place in the composition I’m working on today. You can see I’m moving left to right, making each object a little more specific.

Somebody is bound to ask, “When will you finish?” The answer is, “Not this year, and probably not next year.” It’s an odd sensation, looking at the same image for several years. It opens up different parts of my brain. Many years ago, I asked Ben Kamihira how he could work on the same painting over so long a time. He said, “At this point, my attitude changes very slowly. Ten years to me is like two weeks to you.” You were right, Ben. I’m glad I made it to your side of that observation. Wish you were still here to compare notes with.

My Neighbor, the Vicar of Satan

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:29:51 -0700

One night in 1993, I walked out of my Richmond District apartment and went to the nearest grocery store. Scanning the shelves of canned vegetables, my head swung to the right. My eyes rested on the bald head of an older man. A warmth came over me; my father was bald, so older bald men reminded me of him. In a couple of seconds, I realized that this wasn’t just any old bald guy. I was standing next to Anton LaVey, founder of The Church of Satan.

We didn’t talk, but I stood in line behind LaVey and his girlfriend, Blanche Barton. Anton ducked out of line to get ice cream as Blanche approached the register. They both looked happy, and LaVey’s face was most unusual; scary and charming at once. That’s what I love about San Francisco: you can walk out for lima beans and run into the Anti-Christ.

Later I read several books by and about Anton LaVey. I’d heard of him while growing up in the late 1960s. The Church of Satan was hot news back then. Many magazine covers and TV news stories flashed LaVey’s face toward a terrified public. Most of my information came from Christian alarmists, for whom his Church of Satan was literally a god-send, the fulfillment of their dire warnings. My father was a Christian minister, and the polarity of his influence—mirroring this other bald man who lived down the street—startled and intrigued me.

LaVey’s writing was a mixed bag. Some of it read like a joke, and at times the joke wore thin. But his underlying philosophy was down-to-earth, even conservative. He said the point of the Church of Satan was to break up dull intellectual conformity. If he’d begun the Church later, he would have organized it around patriotism and traditional values, because they were intellectually out of fashion. He warned his readers to avoid watching television, as this would make them as stupid as the victims they wanted to dominate. LaVey presented these thoughts with a good-natured wink, but he also produced flashes of brilliance, especially in his book of essays, The Devil’s Notebook.

About music, LaVey said the value of hearing a piece is the feelings and memories we associate with it. It’s often more powerful to listen to music from other times or countries, because you can control what you associate with it. If you listen to what’s hot on the radio, the associations are random.

He also wrote about loving this life, with all its limitations:
People don’t realize how long forever is when they say they want to live forever. All the settings would blend together — the emotions would remain strong but the individual scene wouldn’t stand out in your memory. There would be so much blending and melding in your past. Better to live a shorter time and let each instance, each setting stand out in your mind as strong as the emotions themselves.

These quiet, poetic thoughts and LaVey’s physical impression stood in stark contrast to his reputation. According to the news stories, he had legions of followers, who kept him in vast luxury. He lived in a famous “Black House,” filled with secret passage ways. He had a chauffeur and a fleet of classic cars. His Church of Satan was an active, powerful organization, plotting to rule the world.

LaVey’s skill at telling these lies was matched by amazingly gullible journalists. No one seems to have fact-checked a story about him during his lifetime. His own writing about himself approached the preposterous. I don’t know how anyone could sit across the interview table from Anton LaVey and believe he was wealthy, when one glance at his teeth would inspire doubt. You can enjoy a list of Anton’s entertaining whoppers here.

Just before Anton LaVey died in 1997, I met author/publisher Jack Boulware at a bar in North Beach. I’d read Jack’s article on LaVey in his offbeat magazine, The Nose. I said to him, “What I want to know is this: How does Anton LaVey make a living? He’s eating and paying property taxes somehow. Is he another San Francisco nutcase, with no visible means of support?” Jack said he couldn’t figure it out either, but he thought some rich widows in Pacific Heights paid LaVey to place hexes on their enemies. After LaVey’s death, Jack discovered that he’d made almost no money in his life. He got by with the help of welfare, but he’d let his house deteriorate to a near crumbling state.

Anton LaVey’s distaste for working appears to have driven all his creative efforts, including his legendary persona, Satan’s Press Secretary. This revelation makes me sad, because I think he had unusual talent, and could have done well for himself. I wonder how many cults begin with one person’s desire to live without working.

Anton’s Nemesis: The Anti-Anti-Christ

You may think Anton LaVey was a skillful con-man, benefitting from people’s fear and ignorance. Con-games are endlessly fascinating. At any point, they can be taken over or turned around. The competition is watching, and they don’t miss a trick.

In 1973, a young author in Southern California named Mike Warnke released his first book, The Satan Seller, an account of his former life as a “Satanic High Priest,” and his subsequent conversion to Christianity. In many ways, Warnke’s story was more spectacular than LaVey’s. During his career as a Satanist, Warnke claimed to have ruled over a “coven” of 1500 members, and presided over bizarre, horrifying ceremonies. These included animal sacrifices, one rape, and eating a human finger, severed from one of his followers. To cap it all, Warnke’s stories dripped with the ecstasy of the repentant sinner: “Look at my wretched, disgusting sins! I can’t believe how evil I was!” Who could resist?

I read The Satan Seller at age 14 and ate it up. Parts of the book should have aroused suspicion in Christian adults, however. During his tour of duty in Vietnam, Warnke claimed he was wounded by an arrow, presumably flung at him by a Vietcong archer. In fact, almost every line of Warnke’s book was a lie, but he would not be exposed to the Christian public for almost twenty years. During the 1970s, no one questioned his account. He was talking about the Devil, after all, to people who believed in the Devil. His readers couldn’t say, “Well, Satan is real, but this finger-eating stuff is implausible.”

The book rocketed Warnke to instant celebrity in Christian churches. His book flew off the shelves and he had his pick of speaking engagements and television interviews.

The irony approached perfection: Anton LaVey performed his seedy, carnival side-show rituals for a few dozen people in his tiny house. He gave himself a biography that’s greatly inflated, but he admitted Satan did not exist, and that he was mainly having fun with the character of the Devil.

Then—then!—comes Mike Warnke, who never worshipped Satan, confessing to atrocities LaVey never dreamed of, and selling his story to Christians who wanted to sho0t Anton LaVey on sight! He told them Satan was real, alright! Satan was coming in the window to get them.

And here’s the kicker, because this story only gets better—while Anton LaVey died a pauper, Mike Warnke made millions with his lies, verified by his tax returns. Today his operation is smaller than it once was, but Mike Warnke is still telling his story to anyone who’ll listen. And contribute.

The Way of the Buddha in America

Fri, 5 Jun 2009 13:47:50 -0700

Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups. — Friedrich Nietszche
The building in this photograph is The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, in Colorado, USA. One of its functions is reliquary for the skull of Chogyam Trungpa, 1939-1987, a Tibetan lama who attracted a following in America.
I attended a lecture by Trungpa in Philadelphia in 1983. I’d been meditating with the local Buddhist community for two years at that time. Buddhism had interested me since I heard recorded lectures by Alan Watts and read his books in high school. The Philadelphia community had an open house in 1981, where I met a man named Jonathan who taught classes. This meeting turned out to be bad for my judgment of the greater effort.
Jonathan did not talk about Tibet, but about his own search for meaning and what the Buddhist concepts meant to him in his American life. I fell in love with Jonathan. I liked the way he talked, the little half smile on his sculpted face. I liked looking at his pretty wife, Ellen. I went to their apartment, on a tiny tree-lined lane off Rittenhouse Square, got drunk and watched our thoughts fly around the room.
The year after I met him, Jonathan went off to a Buddhist seminary. I stayed on, meditated and tried to make meaningful contact with the other Buddhists. This did not go well. Many of them of them spoke to me as if from behind a stone wall. I wanted to know what they cared about besides Buddhism. Either they kept all that secret, or else the rest of their lives was an accident. It was a shelf of empty vessels, people without a thought in their heads, and they found Buddhism because it happened along. They could just as easily have followed Joseph Smith or Jerry Garcia. They were obsessed with Chogyam Trungpa and the Wisdom of Tibet. Every scrap of information about the teacher was treasured like a diamond. If he drank tequila, they drank tequila. If he liked David Bowie, they ran out and bought all of Bowie's records. I often wondered what they did with their lives before their lama arrived.
More serious warning signs appeared. The Buddhists did a lot of whispering. Many questions were answered with, "We'll tell you that when you're ready." Even at age twenty-two, I knew this secret-keeping was a bad sign. I read an article from a Boulder newspaper, telling of another "seminary," at which Trungpa's personal guards dragged a married couple out of their room and stripped them naked before the other students. When I asked a local teacher about this, she said, "I can only tell you that he would never do anything to intentionally hurt someone. Whatever he did was for the good of his students, to help them reach enlightenment sooner." I'm ashamed that I didn't get up from that conversation and leave the whole business for good.
I was still trying to judge whether to continue when Trungpa Himself came to town. I put my best blue shirt on and rode my bike down Sansom Street, locking it to a light pole. We sat in the shrine room and waited for the divine presence. New people were standing by all the doors, men with scary expressions on their faces.
I saw a short, stooped man with slick, black hair. His tanned face was perfectly round and flat, and too large for his small body. His voice was grainy, and he held a shiny paper fan in his hand as he sat and talked to us. He began by referring to a new book, How the Swans Came to the Lake, about the arrival of Buddhism in America. "The swans come because there is lake," he said. He went on about the path, and finding your seat, staying put. At the end of his talk he thanked everyone for their hospitality. He said, "I have heard of this place Philadelphia. Thanks to all of you, now I know there is a place that is Philadelphia. When you finally loose your ego, you realize there is no one to witness, no need for announcement. And I think that is why Liberty Bell is cracked." Everyone joined in a soft "Aw."
During the question period, I asked, "How do you reconcile those ideas you spoke of, traveling a path, but also finding your ground, staying grounded?"
CT: "Every step you take, when your foot touches ground, then you are stationary. So in this way, you travel while staying grounded."
After the talk, we all got in line to greet the great teacher. I was excited by the prospect, though I had no idea what I'd say to him. While standing in line, I got a little nervous, listening to the others as they looked for divinity in his every gesture. When he held a little child on his lap, a man whispered in my ear, "When he touches that child, something happens!" Um, yeah.
Before I reached him, Trungpa got tired and moved slowly out of the room, with the help of the creepy door guys. All eyes were on him and the silence was oppressive. He turned around with effort and said, "Cheer up." Another pearl of wisdom.
If you want your own Trungpa experience, you can get a sample here and here.
To summarize a long story, Trungpa died of alcoholism the age of 48. His designated heir, Thomas Rich died three years later at age 47, under contemptible circumstances. You can read about their transgressions online in Geoffrey Faulk’s important book, Strippping the Gurus: Sex, Violence, Abuse and Enlightenment. The chapter on Trungpa appears here.
The elaborate housing of Trungpa’s skull demonstrates his followers’ continuing devotion. They referred to him as “venerable” while he was still alive. Ever after, they confound themselves, adding new honorary titles. Nothing in Trungpa’s life or teachings justifies this adulation, in any way. At best, Chogyam Trungpa and Thomas Rich were skillful opportunists. They destroyed themselves and damaged many people around them. But many of these victims continue to venerate them today, and they rewrite history in favor of the dead.
If you read more than two biographies of cult leaders, you will notice they use exactly the same tactics to attract and manipulate their followers. Faulk’s book is a good example. Tactically, Yogananda is L. Ron Hubbard is Maharishi is Thomas Rich. Next door, Reverend Moon is Jim Jones is David Koresh is Michael Travesser. And these are only a few recent examples of the game, played successfully since ancient times. The monotony is shocking.
Love and suffering are bound together in us. Suffering attaches us to others in ways pleasure cannot. I once ate dinner with two men who had lived with Bagwan Shree Rajneesh at his ranch near Antelope, Oregon. They answered Bagwan’s mail, and witnessed many of his excesses. They joked about their naivete, but always stopped short of dismissing the Bagwan as a charlatan. They did not believe they’d wasted their time with him. Carl Sagan wrote about this pattern:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise. —The Demon-Haunted World
To set the record straight: I was bamboozled, I was taken. My involvement with Tibetan Buddhism was largely a waste of time, an extremely un-clever choice.
Each of us contains dangerous forces. One is the will to power over others, and another is our desire to be protected by an elevated hero. When these two forces collide, reason flies out the window. And it's no good waiting around for reason to return; it won't.

Common Luxuries

Tue, 26 May 2009 09:19:57 -0700

All I ask is a chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.—Anonymous

Money flows through my life like water. I often ask, “When did I buy something that made me happy?” Truly happy, and not just for a few minutes. A while back, I noticed an alarming pattern: I spent a lot of money on temporary things, like traveling, entertainment, and clothes I almost never wore. On the other hand, I lived each day, surrounded by objects worth only a few pesos. Working at home pushed me further in this direction: I wore my oldest clothes, sat in a chair I found on the street, etc.

I vowed to spend less on temporary, fringe items and more on the stuff I touched every day. This was surprisingly difficult to justify. Why should I get new clothes to sit at my desk in my house? Yes, these pants look like hell, but they haven’t actually disintegrated yet. “Waste not, want not,” you know! Besides, who’s going to see them? Um, your wife, for one. That’s another interesting pattern I wanted to break: I dressed up to make a good impression on people I rarely saw, then hagged out at home with Misa, whose opinion mattered much more. I didn’t start wearing a tie every day; I still wore a sweatshirt on cold mornings. But it was the Rolls Royce of sweatshirts, and looked as good as a sweatshirt can.

You wouldn’t think this kind of change would make a big difference in the happiness department. But for me, it did. These are the dollars that feel well-spent, months later.

Two appliances made me happy. One is my coffee maker, the Chambord French Press from Bodum. It looks like a piece of laboratory equipment from the 19th century. This is the perfect tool for my scientific quest to make the strongest coffee in the solar system.

Another artful appliance is my basic Waring Blender. I use it nearly every day, and it’s a simple, elegant machine.

Three Books, One Disturbing Subject

Sun, 17 May 2009 05:18:35 -0700

Hello everyone. My apologies for the gap in posting; lots going on in other realms, and those responsibilities would not wait.

Meanwhile, I’ve read some interesting writing. Check out Mr. T’s Human Nature Blog “The Rawness” on the modern, urban male here.

Journalist Dave Cullen recently published a book about the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999. I listened to the audio version at Audible.com. It was well-produced, and read by the excellent narrator Don Leslie.

In the spring of 1999, two high school seniors killed thirteen of their classmates with guns, before shooting themselves at the school. They’d planned to kill many more, and only failed because their bombs did not detonate on time. The boys were white and upper-middle-class. They lived in large, comfortable houses and came from intact families.

I wanted to know what Cullen found out about this horrible event in the ten years he wrote about it. How did these children of privilege become so bitter, so young? Did they exhibit any warning signs beforehand? Could anything be done to prevent this kind of tragedy?

These questions are the only pertinent subjects for a book on Columbine. Unfortunately, Cullen spends a great deal of his time elsewhere, recounting the mistakes in news reporting in 1999, which are frankly irrelevant now.

When he gets to the big questions, Cullen’s expert sources tell him that one shooter, Eric Harris, was a psychopathic personality, adept at deception and essentially marked for mayhem from birth. His accomplice, Dylan Klebold was merely a frustrated, depressed teenager, who might never have acted out, but for Harris. Klebold unluckily formed the closest friendship of his life with a psychopath, and went down with him.

Both Harris and Klebold behaved badly long before the murders. Harris published a personal web site, where he threatened violence repeatedly. Both boys were arrested a year before they died. Neither their parents nor local law enforcement took adequate measures to protect the larger community from the boys’ misanthropic ambitions. Cullen’s experts point out that psychopaths are brilliant actors. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on those who, in retrospect, might have recognized the warning signs. I had some sympathy for this point of view, knowing how difficult a parent’s position can be.

But the boys did not fool everyone in their community. Randy and Judy Brown, whose son Brooks Brown knew both boys, called the police many times, asking them to search Eric Harris’s house, promising they would find illegal guns and bombs in his room. The police never searched the house, and the Browns’ complaints were not taken seriously by Eric’s parents. These failures raise more questions. Were Harris and Klebold a separate evil, unrelated to the culture they lived in? Or, were they partly products of their environment?

Ralph Larkin is a professor of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. His book, Comprehending Columbine takes a different approach to the big questions. Larkin disagrees with Cullen. His evidence indicates that other people did contribute to the killers’ state of mind:

Although it is said that [Harris and Klebold] hated everybody equally, that simply is not true. They did not hate adults, but they hated their peers for the humiliations they heaped upon them.

What form did this humiliation take? Harris and Klebold lived at the bottom of the Columbine High School social caste system. Those at the top—the star athletes—regularly insulted and assaulted them. According to their friend Brooks Brown, the complacency of the School Administration further injured the outcasts. Larkin documents Columbine’s inequality:

The state wrestling champ was regularly permitted to park his $100,000 Hummer all day in a 15-minute space. A footbal player was allowed to tease a girl about her breasts in class without fear of retribution by his teacher, also the boy's coach. The sports trophies were showcased in the front hall—the artwork, down a back corridor.

Larkin also points out that the Columbine community and high school population was majority protestant Christian, with strong evangelical student groups. Even so, several of their pastors cited a “godless culture” and the absence of prayer in school as causes for the murders.

The author closest to the killers, Brooks Brown, wrote his own book about them, No Easy Answers. , with the help of journalist Rob Merrit, when he was about twenty-one years old. Brown writes with surprising wisdom, for so young an author. Brown details the indignities visited on Harris and Klebold. He agrees with Larkin that rules were not enforced equally at Columbine High School. In Brown’s mind, this partly explains the future killers’ fascination with computer games:

When Eric and Dylan got into the world of video games, they loved it, because it was a world with definite rules. Those rules were present, and they could not be broken. For a young man in a world like ours, it was a godsend. In the real world, the rules change constantly—and you could be in trouble at a moment's notice. But video games are different.

Brown acknowledges that Harris was already “mentally inbalanced” when he came to Columbine, but his rejection by the social elite of the school amplified the danger in him and in Klebold:

People ask all the time why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did what they did on April 20, 1999. I believe it was hopelessness. They saw no real future for themselves, and no acceptance from those around them. They became self-hating. Then they started to hate those around them. Then they became angry, and then they became violent. Finally, in one insane, twisted moment, they believed they had power over a world that had kept them down.

If Columbine was an isolated incident, a freakish accident, we could dismiss it. Unfortunately, Harris and Klebold were not aliens from another planet. The published excerpts of their journals sound familiar notes of fear and frustration. Many of us have been where they were. I have been where they were. Brown’s use of the term “hopelessness” raises a broader tendency in humans, especially young people entering the adult world.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Triumph of Death, ca 1562

The Apocalyptic Urge

All of us experience fear. We question the difference between what we want and what we have. That tension affects our feelings about the larger world. We nurture hopes of how the world should be, and especially how it should treat us. Experience erodes these hopes; we learn that the world will not always treat us the way we’d like. Other people will not always recognize our greatness. We won’t always get what we want. In fact, it is possible that we’ll never get what we want.

This fear of disappointment is especially painful for young people, who have no reservoir of experience to soften the blow. If a young man’s first, awkward advances are rejected by a girl he likes, his world crashes. It is easy for his elders to say, “You’re just starting. You’ll do better next time,” but not so easy for him. He lives in the painful present. In that moment, his entire romantic career is a failure. His current frustration and disappointment appear permanent features of a cruel world. He may despair, believing he will never get what he wants from life.

One response to these unsettling feelings is the desire to change the world. This possibility is immensely appealing to young people, who know so little about it—fear of the unknown being the worst kind—and whose fear of failure is so intense. It is no accident that many soldiers in religious and political mass movements are college students. The promise of a better world soothes their fear of the present one; no need to compete and risk failure. They won’t play the game until the rules are rewritten in their favor.

Visions of Utopia revolve around one person’s guaranteed success. You can find every Utopian architect, sitting on the throne of his imaginary kingdom. Plato’s Republic will be ruled by a “Philosopher King.” Can you guess who this person would be?

The promise of a perfect tomorrow acts upon human initiative like an opiate on the human body. We feel momentary courage, followed by greater fear and weakness. The more we indulge in vague fantasies of the coming, Golden Age, the less we can tolerate the imperfect present. Soon, our increased discomfort pushes us to desperation: the world must be made over, and it must happen soon. Otherwise, there’s no hope for us. We are not particular now, about what form that change takes. We can tolerate anything, except living in the world as it is.

One way to change the world is to destroy it. Many people, driven by frustration, indulge this bitter fantasy. But the disaffected crusader cannot destroy the world on his own; it’s just too big. He can, however, destroy himself and several people around him. That will effectively end the world, as measured by his shrunken horizons.

This final solution often presents itself after a humiliating defeat. The residents of Jim Jones’s commune in Guyana killed themselves when their isolation collapsed [1978]. They knew American law enforcement would soon arrive. A similar dynamic was observed at the MOVE house in Philadelphia [1985] and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas [1993]. People outside the cults could not understand the followers’ refusal to surrender and save their own lives. For the followers, surrender meant more than a temporary defeat. They would be forced to give up their golden dreams of a better world, and return to the real, hostile and messy world they’d rejected. They might also be forced to admit that they’d been deceived by a talented con-artist, and their years with him had gone for nothing. Apparently, some people prefer death by fire, over those painful admisssions. They can die and still reject this present world; their death being the last, successful act of rejection. But surrender will involve accepting the world—at least partially. This is the one thing they’ve vowed never to do.

Lessons?

I’m always looking for the bottom line in any body of information. What can we do with it? I have a son starting school. I plan to tell him there is never just one way to get what you want. He needs to stay out of the downward spiral: The world is bad, if we don’t change it, we’ll never get what we want.

When he gets to high school, I hope I can impress upon him that high school is short, and largely unrelated to the rest of his life. Getting this message across will require creativity and luck; I may not succeed. He may disagree, but least he’ll have that thought in his head.