Sunset, Monday, 10 August 2009

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

Tonight we’re making panzanella, with a recipe very freely adapted from Saveur Cooks Authentic Italian. Since we don’t have a garden this year – we usually have at least 30 tomato plants – we broke down and bought a flat of tomatoes from Planet Earth Diversified. We’re using baguettes from Albemarle Baking Company and – hey, what’s this, has product placement come to the Daily Sun Times?

No, just enthusiasm. Saveur was once a truly great magazine, before they changed editors a few years back, and if you ever had a baguette from Albemarle Baking, you also might gratuitously advertise its virtues.

As for Planet Earth Diversified, they’ve been pioneers, in this region, in the growing and distribution of ‘local’ food. Not only that – their delivery truck runs, not on regular gasoline, and not on corn or soy or some other agricultural product that could otherwise feed someone, but on used fryer oil.

Sunset, Sunday, 9 August 2009

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

Following Thoreau, in Walden, I might compare the Blue Ridge to a sort of universal music.

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.

That’s the sweet sort of sound I’d noticed, as a child, when we stayed up on the side of Fox Mountain – a filtered music rising from the valley floor and off the opposite massive wall of Pasture Fence Mountain. Now, each night, all sounds between here and the mountains, from Fox Mountain and Pigeon Top to the hum of U.S. 29 a mile away to the birds in the nearby woods, merge into one twilight tone.

L’heure bleue, the Blue Ridge, a blue note.

Sunset, Saturday, 8 August 2009

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

Clouds apparently aren’t approaching storms but steam rising off an oncoming heat wave. Peeps just west have been sending stifled, gasping distress signals like the last telegraph transmissions from front-line outposts just as they’re overrun by an overwhelming enemy force.

Meanwhile, much farther west, in southern California, a woman named Regina Jones is writing ... and writing ... with a book due soon ... and with no idea how beautifully and naturally she writes. Regina once gave me a critical opportunity to write, and to interview some of the greatest people in the music industry.

Among the things I owe you, girl (if I may), is the truth. Let me tell you something.

YOU

HAVE

GOT

‘IT’

Sunset, Friday, 7 August 2009

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

Noon, Friday, 7 August 2009

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

The view was from today’s walk with Flint, on a section of jeep trail we (Laura and I) call the Power Line Road. (Not sure what Flint calls it.) View is toward the Southwest Mountains, which here means toward the south-southeast. Notes on my sketch feature ‘steamy’.

Full Moon and Jupiter, Thursday, 6 August 2009

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

This was just before midnight. The Southwest Mountains would normally be visible under a bright moon, but dense fog over the Rivanna River in the distance completely obscured them.