SURREAL BOUNCE: 4) IDEAS OF REFERENCE
In Search of Creativity & Madness
July 2001
At six o’clock sharp Floater and I enter Thomas Van Stein’s downtown Santa Barbara art studio, tucked inside a courtyard that housed the city’s first milk dairy.
Van Stein’s moody canvases of oil refineries at two in the morning grace the 15-foot walls of this sky-lit barn, part of the artist’s life mission to redeem hideously ugly industrial structures into something of beauty; in this case, urban nocturne meets baroque chiarscuro: a dramatic light-dark contrast innovated by Dutch masters Rembrandt and Vermeer.
Van Stein painted his first nocturne—of a full moon—in 1988 on Santa Cruz, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara.
Then, influenced by the mysterious nocturnes of Charles Rollo Peters, Van Stein in 1993 devoted a one-man show to nocturnal landscapes and seascapes. He has been painting moons ever since.
The artist’s leather bomber jacket, the back of which he painted himself, dangles from a wire hanger. Van Stein is a warplane aficionado; in his spare time he paints nose art on vintage aircraft at Camarillo Airport.
“What’s that?” I enquire about the jacket.
“An A-2. For flyers. During the Second World War the A-2 was their second set of skin.”
“Where can I get one?”
“If you want the genuine article, like mine, order it from Eastman Leather in England. Get it in horsehide. Politically incorrect, I know, but lambskin is for ladies. I’ll paint it for you. Ready? Let’s go!”
First stop, Joe’s Café on State Street.
Van Stein quaffs Bass draft beer and yaks about how he bailed all his emotional garbage through The Hoffman Process.
“It’s a program designed to purge yourself of your genetic code,” says Van Stein. “It brings to the forefront of consciousness that one is the micro of the macro, that is, a product of all your ancestors. You write everything down, ink on paper.”
“That’s it?” I say.
“Everything,” says Van Stein. “Over five days.”
“And that purges you?”
“It purged me. I put the Van back in my name.”
“What do you mean?”
“My parents, my brothers—their last name is Stein. But I did some research and discovered that, originally, we were Van Steins, from Jutland.”
“So you inserted Van?”
“Yep. A legal name change”
“But didn’t you just say the isn’t the of The Hoffman Process to purge yourself of family history?” I ask. “Sounds like you’re reverting to it.”
“No, no, no. Family history and genetic code are two different things. And anyway, I put the Van back in my name six years before I did the Hoffman Process. To be your own person, you must rid yourself of all those ancestors crowding in with compulsions and hang-ups.”
“It that why we have schizophrenia?” I ask. “Un-tamed ancestors?”
“Probably.” A drop of spittle settles on Van Stein’s lower lip, then launches when he erupts again, a signature of sorts. “Funny! So what do you do, Floater. Hit man?”
Floater glances at me, returns to Van Stein. “Do I look like a...”
“He’s a psychological hit-man,” I insert.
Van Stein giggles nervously. “Washington, Chicago—I should have known. What’s a psychological hit man?”
“He fools people.”
“Oh.” Van Stein regards Floater for a long moment. “You’re not fooling me, are you?”
“Careful,” I say. “That’s an idea of reference.”
“A what?”
“When a person relates external events to himself, mental health professionals refer to him or her as having ideas of reference.”
“Are you kidding?” says Van Stein. “That sounds like everyone in California. The ‘me generation’ was invented here—their sense of entitlement is mind-boggling.”
We set out on lower State Street, a plein air party zone for SB’s tri-college community—UCSB, City College, Westmont—to the train station and, adjacent, the world’s largest fig tree, planted in 1869 by an Australian seaman.
A “gentleman’s club” called Spearmint Rhino attempts to reel us in, but a supernatural chill runs through my body between the inner and outer doors and I freeze in my tracks. “Let’s do something else,” I say.
“You felt that too?” says Van Stein.
For a moment we are attuned to some unknown danger. (“Simple,” says Van Stein. “The message was, you’re married—get out of there!”)
Floater is too lagged to feel anything, except painful blisters on his feet from breaking in a new pair of sneakers.
We stroll up State, dodging vagabonds, snippets of rock music from assorted pubs, including the James Joyce, until we settle at Intermezzo to share a bottle of pinot noir and a plate of chocolate truffles.
Van Stein rambles on about a lady in town who teaches tantric sex. “My wife and I are thinking of taking lessons.”
“Wouldn’t it be more fun to leave your wife at home?”
Back in Washington, I’d be in bed by this time, hypnotized to sleep by the usual murder, mayhem and self-important political punditry on local TV news.
“What makes this place tick?” I ask Van Stein, knowing damn well it’s not the news, which nobody cares about, excepting the tide report for walks on Butterfly Beach.
“Abundance,” he replies. “There’s so much of everything here. Now, if only I could afford some.”
“I’ve noticed there’s an abundance of comedians in Montecito,” I say. “Yet nobody’s laughing.”
“Huh?”
“You got all the world’s funniest people living within two square miles of one another, but you’re not even allowed to approach one let alone get a laugh out of them. Steve Martin looks as if he’d just as soon drop his bloomers and crap on the sidewalk than smile. And Dennis Miller walks around looking like he hasn’t had a decent dump in three days.”
“That’s funny!” says Van Stein.
“Damn right it is—yet they’re the ones making the big bucks for being funny, not me. They need to feed a little laughter back into the community. Or maybe we need to squeeze it out of them.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“Hmmm…”