Secondly, I’d like to invite all of you to our fundraiser parties in Chicago! We have three super awesome nights planned all for your enjoyment, and money made at each event will help Vincent’s Yellow come to life.

Tuesday, JUNE 22nd at The Spot (4437 N. Broadway Avenue) at 7pm
Play TRIVIA! Win Money! Drink!
$5 entry

Thursday, JULY 1st at 63 East Lake Street (at Wabash) at 8pm
ROOFTOP EXTRAVAGANZA! Raffle! Jacuzzi! Great views of Chicago! Drinks! Sponsored by Magic Hat!
$10 entry, email me to get on the guest list

Thursday, JULY 14th at The Spot (4437 N. Broadway Avenue) at 8:30pm
Sing KARAOKE! Free drinks for an hour and a half!
$15 entry

Now, I don’t care if I hardly know you, I’d love to see you at any and all of these events. You can go out and drink anywhere, anytime, but why not support great art while doing so? I think there are pretty much no excuses. ;)If you do not live in Chicago, and cannot come to these parties, or — heaven forbid — cannot come to the show, I’d like to encourage you to make a donation to this project. I am self-producing Vincent’s Yellow, which means the whole budget (except for what I raise) is coming out of my own pocket. Your help, even if it’s $5, would mean the world to me. If you can’t come to the show, but wish you could, then why not donate the price of a ticket, $18? Every penny helps us buy costumes, paint, chairs, postcards… the list goes on and on.

Also, you’d be helping a project that I’m convinced has huge amounts of karma blessing it, and so that karma would also be spread to you. This I’m positive about. Press the donate button in the right-hand column of the webpage, it will allow you to donate through paypal.

Lastly, I wanted to share a little yoga with you all.  Yoga is a major part of our ensemble’s practice within rehearsal. It builds our strength, our flexibility, our stamina, and our team spirit. Enjoy the little video (also by Timothy Caldwell) and have a wonderful week!

But the commodification, the misinterpretation, the drama, the mythology of Van Gogh is all important, and I have eventually come to embrace it. For Vincent van Gogh created one enormous thing without a drop of intention, and that is his Myth. Van Gogh is perhaps a name with as many resonances as Ghandi, probably less than Hitler, but certainly more than FDR or Genghis Khan (and I refer to the resonances with the general population… I finally met someone who did not know who Vincent van Gogh was this past week and it about knocked my socks off). What Vincent did is in no way comparable to what these other men did, but his actions, his life, his influence has reached far and wide like a pebble’s ripple in a pool. Except that those ripples gained a force of their own, and continue to roar across cultural oceans.

What I love to look at now are the many iterations, the many re-fashionings and re-imaginings of Vincent/Van Go, and smile at the infinitely deep well of inspiration this man has become. He has become much greater than he ever could have imagined – he is sometimes so immense I wonder if I will ever know him all. As I once wrote in my journal: His life was the birth of a universe in an egg shell. I still believe that whole heartedly.

From Halloween costumes (this one is particularly well done)

Thanks to wtfcostumes.com

to NASA comparing the illumination of interstellar dust around this star to one of his paintings

Thanks to hubblesite.org

to hotel suites modeled after his paintings

Thanks to design.nl

to credit cards

Thanks to tagesanzeiger.ch

to shoes with quotes from his letters on them,

and cartoons,

Thanks to neatorama.com and bizzaro.com

and dolls with removable ears

Thanks to philosophersguild.com

or removable heads

Thanks to baronbob.com

to books (an Amazon search reveals almost 2,000) and movies (Amazon shows 22 results for movies and television, but I’m sure there are more out there that one cannot buy) and short films ranging from the more realist Vincent’s Final Moments to the surrealist Vincent and Absinthe

to the iPhone application Yours, Vincent which puts his letters and sketches at your fingertips

Thanks to iphonespies.com

to University investigations into which star Vincent painted in The White House at Night, 1890

Thanks to hermitagemuseum.org

(it was Venus, and it was precisely in that spot the night he painted it, by the way)

to songs, both the lesser known and the famous –

It becomes irrefutable that Vincent is a universe, a mountain worth climbing and full of ever-branching caverns. I am lucky enough to consider myself an explorer of all things that trace their root to him. The portrayals of this man and his work in all its iterations are not necessarily historically accurate, but they reflect what Vincent van Gogh truly means to those that reflect him back at the world and inevitably spread his words, his paintings, his life to those that did not know him at all.

In this way, Vincent van Gogh is still very much alive to me. He is an idea, a spirit that is still developing, still changing, still reaching out…

I came here every night of my stay in Arles, I believe. It is important to call it Le Café Van Gogh, because that is what it is. It is a restoration of the cafe that you painted, not the original. It is meticulously designed. Yet – it rests in the same location. And so irony, commercialism, and ghosts have all nestled in. History and dreams mix, with the bitter aftertaste of emptiness. No one there could tell me if anything was original. Few there knew much about Van Gogh at all — or maybe they were just too busy serving the customers. They do make a killing, as you might imagine. For what tourist would come to Arles and not eat here?

And so they benefit from you. You have a strange version of the Midas touch, it seems, with a century delay. For you did eat here, drink here, paint here. The townspeople did kick you out of here, that is to say, Arles. In fact, I read that upstairs they have the pool table you painted. And so, I went exploring, into the dark:

A pool table was indeed stored in the very mysterious and abandoned second floor.

I went back to the hotel that night to compare. Indeed, neither of the pool tables here have pockets, and the legs look mighty similar. I discovered Carom, or French billiards: a game played on a table with no pockets, and with only three balls, two white and one red. Though my waiter the next night denied it, I still think it must be the same table.

This brings us to the other side of Le Café La Nuit. While the painting of the terrace outside is beautiful, the painting of the inside is anything but, and this was Vincent’s intention:

“In my painting of the night café I’ve tried to express the idea that the café is a place where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes. Anyway, I tried with contrasts of delicate pink and blood-red and wine-red. Soft Louis XV and Veronese green contrasting with yellow greens and hard blue greens.” (9 September 1888 to Theo)

This is certainly an aspect of the place the owners would want to make disappear, but I found it.

In the stacks of old paintings inspired by Vincent on the second floor, piled, hiding, in the dark.

In the twisted lines – nothing seemed quite straight.

But there was always this warmth, of what you are…

Constantly cutting through the darkness.