Thursday, June 28, 2012

Roswell

"Something happened at Roswell that has come to symbolize what we don't yet know about the nature of life on other planets, the possibility of inter-galactic travel, the state of national security, and how far the government will go to ensure it."  Phil Cousineau, UFOs: A Manual for the Millennium, 1995


On an early July night in 1947, something came falling out of the sky in eastern New Mexico near the small ranching community of Roswell...

Hundreds of books and articles have been written to say what fell and what did not fall.  A goodly number of writers have fattened their bank accounts on the subject.  Sadly, I'm not likely to be one of those fortunate scribes since I can't tell you what fell even though I'm pretty sure about what happened...

Late June 1947 was a busy time in the sky.  A politically conservative businessman with a private pilot's license saw nine unidentified somethings flying in formation near Mount Rainier on June 24.  Kenneth Arnold of Boise, Idaho, was participating in a search-and-rescue operation at the time of his sighting.  He was experienced and knowledgeable enough to estimate the objects were some 20-25 miles distant and moving at 1200 to 1700 miles per hour...
Artist's conception of Kenneth Arnold's sighting of nine objects
flying over the Cascade Mountains on June 24, 1947

Arnold never intended to become publicly known for seeing unusual aerial phenomena.  Suspecting he had seen a government project of some sort, he told other fliers about his sighting when he landed at Yakima.  They urged him to contact the local FBI office.  Arnold found the office closed.  He checked with the area's newspaper to see if any similar reports had been filed.  Reporter Bill Bequette placed Arnold's story on the AP wire, describing the objects as saucer-like and flying...

The story likely would have enjoyed a day or two's run except for the fact that Arnold wasn't the only one seeing objects unidentified and flying.  Within days, newspapers carried reports of sightings by police officers in Oregon, farmers near Milwaukee, and bus drivers in Iowa...

It would be years before the general public learned other witnesses to the elusive flying saucers included military pilots and civilian scientists entrusted with extremely sensitive and highly classified information.  On June 28, an Air Force officer observed five or six disks flying at about 6000 feet.  He and they were approximately 30 miles north of Lake Meade, Nevada.  The following day, White Sands Proving Grounds scientists reported the aerial intrusion of a single, silvery disk moving at 700mph.  Yet another military pilot observed two UFOs moving at "incredible" speed near Williams Air Field, Arizona on that same day of June 29...
W W "Mac" Brazel

On July 5th, a rancher living in Lincoln County, New Mexico, inspected his rangeland for injured sheep after a night of violent thunderstorms.  William "Mac" Brazel came across some very unusual debris on his rain-ravaged stretch of desert and decided to report his findings to the local sheriff on his next trip into town.  He did exactly that.  Sheriff George Wilcox thought personnel at Roswell's Army Air Force Base might find Brazel's find of interest.  They did.  Major Jesse Marcel and an aide accompanied Brazel back to his ranch where they were highly baffled by what lay strewn across the desert.  Intelligence officer Marcel collected debris and brought it back to the base for analysis...
The site of the Roswell Crash-- a yucca studded stretch of desert
grassland on the Foster Ranch where Mac Brazel worked as the
outfit's foreman



The base commander authorized his Public Affairs Officer Walter Haut to inform the public a crashed flying disk had been recovered.  Within hours, Brigadier General Roger Ramey, commander of the Eighth Air Force, personally intervened with a press release of his own. It essentially said Ramey's 509th Bombardment Group commander and that commander's Intelligence Officer didn't know a weather balloon when they saw one.  Major Marcel was instructed to pose with what was purported to be the crashed device, despite the fact that officials had earlier refused requests for pictures on the grounds this was "high security stuff"...
Roswell Daily Record of July 8, 1947


[Links to July 1947 newspaper accounts of the Roswell Incident:



Roswell Crash News Reports, July 1947:
http://www.roswellfiles.com/Articles/PressReports.htm

Roswell Daily Record Interview with Mac Brazel, 9 July 1947:
http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/brazel.htm ]




After General Ramey's intervention, Roswell's flying saucer disappeared from press reports and stayed disappeared until the late 1970s.  Unfortunately for the Army Air Force, a 300 mph weather balloon didn't get the news in time and visited White Sands again, roughly an hour and a half before Walter Haut announced the recovery of a crashed disk...

Beyond this point, the Roswell Incident becomes a tangled mess worthy of a Pulitzer Prize winning historian's talent...

The tangled mess began nearly thirty-one years later on February 20, 1978 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  Nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, who had worked on many highly classified projects, was in town to address an audience of LSU students on a topic of great interests to him-- flying saucers.  Friedman was promoting his lecture through a radio interview when casual conversation with the station director changed both his life and the course of the debate about UFOs...
Bitter Lake recreation area near Roswell, New Mexico



The director knew a former Air Force officer, a retiree named Jesse Marcel.  The two gentlemen were good friends, sharing an interest in short-wave radio communications, a fancy way of saying they were ham radio operators...




Friedman sipped coffee and listened to the station director explain that Marcel knew flying saucers were real because he had, in the course of his military duties, handled debris from one that had crashed somewhere in the southwestern desert country...
Missile Park at the White Sands museum.  In late June and early
July, 1947, a number of  apparently manufactured and intelligently
controlled objects of unknown origin appeared over this important
national defense site.

Before leaving Baton Rouge the next day, physicist Friedman decided to call Marcel.  He expected a person of dubious reliability and found himself surprised when he spoke with a person who told a straightforward story about an incident that occurred at a specific place.  Marcel didn't remember the exact dates but said the information had been reported in the local press.  He did say that he knew for a fact that he hadn't handled a busted-up weather balloon and implied General Ramey knew for a fact the crashed object wasn't a busted-up weather balloon.  He said little else over the phone other than he still didn't know what he had handled but was still sure it wasn't a busted-up weather balloon...
Jesse Marcel poses with weather balloon debris as the official
attempt to cover-up the Roswell Incident begins.  The Army Air
Field base where Marcel served as Intelligence Officer was the
home to the only tactical nuclear bomber group in the world at
the time of the incident.

Stanton Friedman found the story interesting.  He also suspected he would waste his time looking for more information.  That soon changed-- a conversation with fellow UFO buff, Bobbi Gironda, revealed another name that might have something to do with Marcel's story.  Ms Gironda, a writer based on the West Coast, had spoken with a forest ranger named Sleppy who suggested Gironda speak with his mother...


Lydia Sleppy, the ranger's mother, worked at a radio station in Albuquerque in the 1940s when a reporter with the Roswell affiliate phoned in a story about a crashed flying saucer.  Mrs Sleppy claimed she'd just started transmitting a report over the teletype when her machine went dead.  The interruption was immediately followed by an anonymous teletyped message: DO NOT COMPLETE THIS TRANSMISSION...
UFO Museum at Roswell, New Mexico: a once sleepy desert
town saw its economy improve greatly as the general public
became more curious about the 1947 incident.

Friedman and Gironda followed the Sleppy lead and listened to her story which hinted that government officials had monitored civilian communications into and from Roswell after Brazel reported his find.  Working uncredited, Friedman provided background material for Charles Berlitz and William L Moore who published The Roswell Incident in 1980.  This was the first book on the subject and its contents appealed to Berlitz' legion of loyal readers who had, since 1969, followed his explorations of lost continents, the Bermuda Triangle, and alleged government time-travel experiments...


An even larger audience for the Berlitz book was assured when the National Enquirer tabloid published its interview with Jesse Marcel in February, 1980...


Let us step back and ask why the Roswell Incident is the mystery that it is.  To start with, even the few "facts" listed so far have been disputed.  A Roswell Daily Report story of July 9, 1947, supports an argument Brazel found the wreckage on July 5th, possibly a day or two earlier or later, by stating the rancher's discovery occurred "several days" earlier.  However, a second story on the subject in the same day's paper, quotes Brazel as saying he and his son Vernon discovered the unusual material on June 14th...
Mac Brazel and Jesse Marcel (with a man sometimes identified as
Sheridan Cavit, in the background) inspect and collect the debris
field on the Foster Ranch.  Brazel reportedly noticed the material
when his sheep refused to cross the area.



There is a substantial difference between several days and several weeks.  Brazel died in 1963.  He is not available to explain or clarify his account.  Many years later, Frank Joyce, who worked at Roswell radio station KGFL at the time, claimed he'd confronted Brazel about the time line inconsistency since it didn't match the story Brazel told him the previous day.  The foreman of the Foster Ranch, Joyce said, became agitated and said "it would go hard with him" if he said too much more on the subject...



It becomes obvious fairly quickly to a serious researcher that investigating the Roswell Incident requires a historian's skepticism and a lawyer's cynicism.  My personal brief summarizing the various claims and counterclaims extends to more than fifty pages-- and it is simply a chronology of what allegedly happened when and who said that it did with a source citation...

As things stand today, there are two major theories about what happened at Roswell.  One group of researchers believes an extraterrestrial craft crashed in a remote section of New Mexico in the late spring or early summer of 1947.  Another camp argues the wreckage Mac Brazel found belonged to a Project Mogul weather balloon.  Both agree the military went to extraordinary lengths to keep the nature of the wreckage secret...
Desert plains near Roswell



One thing that we can say is the matter stayed secret for a very long time.  Dozens of books about unidentified flying objects were published between the late 1940s and 1980.  The only reference to an unusual incident at Roswell in any of them seems to be in Frank Edwards' 1966 best-seller, Flying Saucers--Serious Business...   



In Edwards' version of the story, an unnamed rancher observes a flaming disk crash into a mountainside during a violent thunderstorm at an unspecified date near Roswell.  His dramatic tale, which does not agree with the published reports in the Roswell Daily Record, was intriguing.  It also lacked useful data for other researchers.  The Roswell Incident remained basically forgotten until Stanton Friedman met Jesse Marcel...

[Edwards' knowledge of the Roswell Incident likely came from his memory of the initial 1947 press reports.  He is known to have mentioned the crash in lectures about flying saucers as early as the mid-1950s.  Among the nation's first radio broadcasters with a career dating to the early 1920s, Edwards was hired by the Treasury Department as a celebrity War Bonds salesman during World War II.  He enjoyed an audience of millions as a news commentator for the Mutual Broadcasting Network from the end of the war until his abrupt firing in 1954. 
Broadcaster Frank Edwards (right) with former
President Harry S Truman

Conspiracy theorists claim Edwards lost his job because he mentioned UFOs in his broadcasts.  It is more probable a dispute with the show's sponsor, the American Federation of Labor, over Edwards' favorable reporting about its rival, the Congress of Industrial Organizations led his firing.]



Perhaps the greatest mystery surrounding the Roswell Incident is one that has received little attention in the many books and articles on the subject.  Despite multiple readings, I can find no direct mention of the Roswell Incident in The Report On Unidentified Flying Objects by Edward J Ruppelt.  Any input from readers who are able to cite a chapter in this book with any such reference would be greatly appreciated...


Captain Ruppelt headed the Air Force's Projects Grudge and Blue Book investigations from 1951 to 1953.  An engineer by training, he refused to simply explain away reports of UFOs and is generally acknowledged (even by critics) to have been an honest man constrained by limited funding and a small albeit capable staff.  His Report has limits in its value to researchers but Ruppelt acknowledges the role national security concerns play in some of his reporting.  Overall, the book can be seen as a remarkable document graphically outlining very real confusion and occasional panic in military circles caused by unidentified flying objects during the late 1940s and early 1950s...



Ruppelt goes into very considerable detail about the summer of 1947.  He lists major sightings and the consternation each caused to the Pentagon.  Yet, he remains silent on the Roswell Incident, despite the fact that a general officer personally and publicly intervened in a way that left egg on the faces of his subordinates.  Is it possible that Captain Ruppelt did not know about Roswell?  Given his position, it seems unlikely but there may have been something about the incident that called for extremely limited access to the data.  Perhaps, he avoids mentioning it out of respect for the feelings of the officers who had been publicly humiliated by their boss...
Edward J Ruppelt, trained as an engineer, headed
the Air Force's Project Blue Book investigation of
UFOs.  His writings suggest he privately believed at
least some of the unknown objects were likely of
extraterrestrial origin.


I personally do not believe Captain Ruppelt had any personal knowledge of a crashed flying saucer.  His writings and job performance bespeak a man of integrity.  He officially remained an agnostic on questions of the nature of the mysterious objects in our skies.  He privately argued at least once that they were likely manufactured craft and extraterrestrial in origin... 


Writing in the May, 1954, issue of True, Ruppelt categorically denies that the Air Force had wrecked UFOs or alien bodies in its possession.   He reminds readers there is no proof flying saucers came from space, commenting this lack of wreckage may support the theory that they are "not of this world"...



As for whatever it was that fell out of the sky 65 years ago near Roswell, it could collect a Social Security pension with full benefits if it were a tax paying citizen.  But it wasn't.  It was just a mystery to the rancher who found it and the first military men to examine it...


Roswell UFO Museum display.  Were "they" here?



Links of Interest:

Edward Ruppelt, "What Our Air Force Found Out About Flying Saucers," True, May 1954:


A military officer drove up and ordered everyone to leave, swore them to the silence that was their patriotic duty... the Roswell Incident in song:
Suzanne McDermott, The Roswell Incident:



NEWS CORRAL:

An article about a particularly low form of life, two-legged parasites for which I can find no possible use.  I suspect they are like pedophiles--  so foul that even the residents of Hell would prefer not to have them as neighbors:



LRNARTS MARKETPLACE

Artwork by Louis R Nugent now available:  For fine art prints and greeting cards, visit:
http://louis-nugent.artistwebsites.com/

Featured this week: In Old San Angelo



Fine Art America now features West Texas painting, drawings, and photographs by Karen Slagle of Amarillo, Texas,  Linda Cox of Graham, Texas, Suzanne Girard Theis of Houston, Texas, Judi Bagwell of Greenwell Springs, Louisiana, Karen Boudreaux of Houston, Texas, Joe JAKE Pratt of Kerrville, Texas, David Pike of Lubbock, Texas, Ken Brown Pioneer of Sand Springs, Oklahoma, and Louis R Nugent of San Angelo, Texas at:



This week's featured artist: Ken Brown Pioneer:



Fine Art America also features work by Susan Bordelon and Lawrence Scott:




CREDITS
Note: All photographs and other images for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: none

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Art Is A Three Letter Word



"I took a deep breath and slid the handle down over the end again and worked the blade loose from the table.  A curious knife, with design and purpose in it, and neither of them agreeable."-- The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler, 1949



Recently, I began re-reading Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister.  The novel is one of several about a perpetually 38 year old private investigator named Philip Marlowe.  Mr Chandler served in World War I and became the director of a number of independent oil companies based in southern California.  Along came The Great Depression and the end of a career in the petroleum business for Mr Chandler.  He turned to writing lurid tales for the pulps and critically acclaimed books...


Paleolithic men decorated the walls of Lascaux Cave in south-
western France with hundreds of images over 20,000 years ago.
Some scholars believe the paintings were a part of magic rituals
meant to insure a successful hunt.  Others argue these ancient
artists simply recorded what they saw in the world around them.
Chandler's book "got me to thinkin" (as they say here in West Texas) about beauty and why something is beautiful and why something is not. Philip Marlowe moves through a morally ambiguous world peopled with crooked cops and raving-mad heiresses who pose for pornographic pictures and then kill bootlegger boyfriends... 

But Marlowe never fails to notice beauty, deadly or not.  The Little Sister ends with the former policeman staring at the body of Miss Dolores Gonzales.  A knife protrudes from her chest.  It is silver, exquisitely crafted.  The knife's handle is the skillfully done and fully nude representation of a most beautiful woman...

Beauty, in the case of The Little Sister,
was a deadly dagger wielded by a
disgraced doctor married to a woman
who dallied with gangsters.
Art and Beauty, the Sage of the well-known village Cliché informs us, are both in the eye of the beholder...

There is unintentional wisdom in this truism which suggests a viewer and something to be viewed.  Martin Buber, a philosopher of profound insight, would say there is an I - It relationship between me and the canvas or sculpture I call art.  Buber was not primarily concerned with aesthetics.  He wrestled with the way humans interact with God.  To him, God is ever-present in our consciousness and manifests Himself or Herself through our culture-- art, music, literature, and so forth...


It is one thing to say there is a thing called Art that can be appreciated by my eye or which is a trace of the Divine.  But defining what it is?  Ah, another thing entirely.  Lady Luck seems to want to help us because the dictionary (Merriam Webster's Collegiate, Tenth Edition) tells us "art" involves the conscious use of skill and creative imagination in the production of aesthetic objects...


Aesthetics, we learn when we flip pages in MWC, 10 ed., has to do with the nature of beauty and how our mind (by way of our senses) defines whether or not something is attractive.  Great thinkers have wrestled with "beauty" for many centuries.  Plato theorized beautiful objects incorporated proper proportions, harmony, and unity in their parts.  His pupil Aristotle echoed him to a certain extent: order, symmetry, and being clearly defined were qualities he considered essential...

Ancient Greeks decorated everyday objects such as
amphoras with scenes taken from their rich religious
history.  Here, Zeus prepares to wield his deadly
thunderbolt. 

Greek art from the Classical (and Hellenistic) Period catches the viewer's eye and refuses to let go.  Its makers adorn gems and coins with striking, realistic portraits and figure studies.  Cups and vases celebrate fantastic stories of gods and heroes like Theseus battling the minotaur.  Perhaps most striking are sculptures of the same gods, heroes, and ordinary men:  almost perfect examples of youthful and mature physical perfection.  Yet the faces of these statues hint at pensiveness-- the contemplation of deeper realities of soul, life, and creation...

But, then again, the Greeks themselves were like that... 

They recognized man's basic nature incorporated the cool rational thought of Apollo and the madness of Dionysus...

The Artemisium Zeus, dating to around the 4th
century BCE, depicts the King of Gods and Men
as a virile, perfectly proportioned mature male.
Their gods were one big happy dysfunctional family, each terribly protective of their sphere of influence and suspicious of the fidelity of their mates.  Zeus (like Egypt's Osiris) married his sister Hera.  He had a wandering eye, begetting Perseus by one mortal woman, Hercules by another, dozens more by other the attractive daughters of kings and farmers...

Perhaps this lack of attention from her spouse encouraged Hera to participate in a contest with ultimately disastrous results for the town of Troy.  Zeus had hosted a banquet honoring the marriage of Peleus, a mortal man, and Thetis, an immortal sea goddess.  Weddings being the frenzied affairs that they are, someone forgot to invite Eris to the festivities.  This was a mistake since Eris was the goddess of discord and trouble.  She attended the wedding anyway, tossing a golden apple at the revelers.  It had an engraved inscription: For the fairest one...


Naturally, there were three fairest of all present-- each a goddess of major importance.  Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite all claimed the apple was meant for them.  Zeus wisely declined their request to decide who was loveliest lady in the room... 

French illustrator Georges Barbier places the
Judgement of Paris in a contemporary setting
as the young prince chooses the loveliest of
models at a fashion show in this 1915 Art Deco
work.

It was in Zeus' interest to do so.  One woman was his wife and the other two were daughters (depending on which myth about Aphrodite's birth one choses to believe) who both knew they were Daddy's favorite child.  Zeus remembered a recent bull-judging contest in which a Trojan prince named Paris had decided wisely and with considerable courage against the God of War.  He suggested his divinely lovely trio ask Paris to give the golden apple to the loveliest...



Poor Paris had been set up for disaster.  Zeus undoubtedly thought he was doing the lad a favor.  The three most beautiful females in the universe suddenly appear before you stark naked.  "Take your time.  Study our bare selves", they say, "then tell one of us she's a teeny-weenie smidgen prettier than the other two."  Such a wonderful deal would probably cause friction even if the three ladies were mortal.  Give each woman an almost limitless power to create misery for a guy who even dares to think another gal looks better naked...  


For a very long time, the Greeks ignored the nakedness of woman in their art.  Male nudity did not suffer the same fate-- Zeus, father of gods and men, is shown bearded and naked as he prepares to hurl his thunderbolt.  Hermes, the messenger of Mount Olympus, stands idly skyclad as the infant Dionysus demands affection.  Apollo gladly and rather proudly advertises why he was considered the incarnation of masculine virility...

The courtesan Phryne defends herself against the
charge that she falsely claimed to be as beautiful
as Aphrodite in Albert Wein's 1949 sculpture.

This inattention to woman ended with Praxiteles who lived in the 4th century BCE.  He was the first, a large number of scholars say, to sculpt the nude female form into a life-size sculpture.  Praxiteles' model for the statue was a courtesan named Phryne who was once accused of blasphemy after she stepped naked into the sea at the festival of Poseidon at the town of Eleusis.  The painter Apelles was so awe-struck that he commemorated the moment in a painting he called "Aphrodite Rising From The Sea"...

Bernini's Rape of Proserpina tells the story
of Persephone (known to the Romans as
Proserpina).  Her abduction by the god of the
underworld became the basis of an ancient
cult centering on the Mystery of death and
resurrection in nature.
His (and her) political enemies seized the moment and charged her with making false claims of divinity.  Much evidence was entered against her and but little to support the extremely wealthy courtesan.  A guilty verdict seemed assured.  The story goes, as the judges deliberated, Phryne stood and wordlessly loosened her robe.  She stood naked and there were none among her accusers who could deny that Aphrodite herself had chosen to incarnate herself into mortal form...

[The historian Polybius later wrote Aphrodite became quite angry when she first saw the sculpture of Phryne, furiously demanding to know when Praxiteles had the good fortune to see the most beautiful of goddesses naked.]     

Medieval men celebrated the majesty and beauty of
Creation with hewn stone cathedrals, such as the one
at Chartres, where the sacred geometry of God's
creation dwarfs mortal worshippers.
Medieval men studied the classical thinkers but did not share ancient Greece's urge to celebrate life through human eyes and contemplate its meaning from that standpoint.  Their focus was rebuilding lasting political and social order after the collapse of Rome so the world would be ready for the return of Christ and his eternal kingdom.  True, Saint Bonaventure did retrace Art to Theology, seeing an artisan's skills as a gift given him by God so God may be known to mankind.  And Thomas Aquinas' restless mind demanded more of beauty than merely being evidence of the Divine... 

For this scholarly saint, Umberto Eco has noted, beauty required measure, nature, and order.  Measure meant the artist used proper materials for his work.  Nature demanded proper forms be used.  Order had to do with a fitting inclination in the artist and morally correct purpose for his work...

Renaissance artists such as
Masolino used Biblical tales
such as the story of Adam and
Eve to explore human forms
in a context acceptable to
powerful religious leaders.
This 1425 work graces the
Brancacci Chapel of Florence.
But, by and large, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, patron of the Knights Templar, seems to have summarized Middle Ages' thinking about beauty.  He saw it as a double-edged sword akin to Adam's wife.  Could there be a thing lovelier than Eve fashioned by the very hand of God?  And what could be deadlier than beauty which leads Man to eat fruits of forbidden knowledge?  It's best a spiritual man avoid thinking about temptation and its handmaidens lest his soul stray down the wrong path.  And the best way to do what was best was to celebrate and honor the glory of God...

The Greek love of symmetry and order came from observations of nature.  Every man, animal, or plant has two roughly identical halves... a right eye is balanced by a left eye, a tree's branches vary somewhat in shape and number from one side to another but on the whole they spring from the trunk in basically equal fashion.  (Monsters such as the Cyclops were not balanced but there were heroes available to do them in and restore order.)  Greek thinkers vigorously studied the natural world to learn the natural order of things so men could live in harmony with creation...

Chaim Soutine's Chartres Cathedral
shows a place where the rigid stone
structure becomes a fluid interface
with the supernatural.

Medieval men saw the same order and symmetry in creation.  But their concerns were different than Greek concerns.  For the ancient Greeks, the underworld was a vaguely defined place.  Not so in the new Christian world: an eternal Heaven or Hell awaited the soul which had to find salvation in a creation corrupted by man's disobedience to God.  Children of the Church acknowledged beauty and order of the universe with great stone cathedrals meant to last centuries.  Statues in these massive structures did not celebrate the folly of Lascivious Man or Vain Woman: they commemorated the piety of Prophet and Martyr instead...

[In the odd ways of history, classical religion helped pave the way for the Church.  Late Greek spirituality revolved heavily around the Mysteries of Orpheus and Eleusis which touch on the theme of Beauty Lost-- the musician who travels to Hades to reclaim his lovely Eurydice and loses her again, the beautiful Persephone who is snatched from the world of light and joy to become Queen of the Underworld.  These and similar cults grappled with the questions of death, resurrection, and the fate of the soul.  They were widespread throughout the Roman Empire.  The story of Jesus' victory over the grave touched a chord in a tailor-made audience waiting to hear it throughout the non-Jewish world of Europe and the Near East.]  
Mystery, beauty, and danger intertwine in Noir genre work like
Moonlight Invitation.  These long-linked themes are likely to
continue to inspire artists as long as there are artists to ponder
mystery, beauty, and danger.

We ordinary mortals sometimes speculate about which historical figures we would like to meet.  Some of us think conversation with Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton would be enlightening.  I suspect, given the opportunity to speak to souls of previous times, our medieval churchmen would be like many people I know and leap at a chance to speak with Jesus or Moses or Isaiah.  Me?  I think I should prefer a chat with Phryne over wine and bread at a quiet sidewalk cafe in Paris on a lovely April day...



But, should three goddesses fair suddenly appear naked before me and demand that I choose the fairest of all, I think I would take a knife and cut the Golden Apple they give me in three identical portions and beg for mercy, crying out the task cannot be done by a mere man since each of them becomes a thousand times lovelier with each passing second...


The story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the basis of
another Greek Mystery religion, has been told in
dance, film, sculpture, and painting.  Choreographer
Sarah Ruhl's ballet, Eurydice, is but one retelling.

NEWS CORRAL:

The fate of the dune lizard rests in the hands of companies whose profits are enhanced by drilling for oil and gas in its habitat.



LRNARTS MARKETPLACE


Artwork by Louis R Nugent now available:  For fine art prints and greeting cards, visit:

Featured this week: Vintage Nude In An Even More Vintage Building






Fine Arts America now features West Texas painting, drawings, and photographs by Karen Slagle of Amarillo, Texas,  Linda Cox of Graham, Texas, Suzanne Girard Theis of Houston, Texas, Judi Bagwell of Greenwell Springs, Louisiana, Karen Boudreaux of Houston, Texas, Joe JAKE Pratt of Kerrville, Texas, David Pike of Lubbock, Texas, Ken Brown Pioneer of Sand Springs, Oklahoma, and Louis R Nugent of San Angelo, Texas at:



CREDITS

Note: All photographs and other images for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Phryne Before The Judges by Albert Wein from Ossining.org; Interior of Chartres Cathedral from artappreciationmf.wiki.uml.edu; Chartres Cathedral by Chaim Soutine from wikipaintings.org; Zeus on Greek Amphora from theoi.com; the Rape of Proserpina by Gian Lorenzo Bernini from mlahanas.de; Chris Smith and Rachel Story as Orpheus and Eurydice from Sarah Ruhl's ballet Eurydice from gailsez.org; Ballantine Books 1971 edition cover art for Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister by Tom Adams; Moonlight Invitation by Louis R Nugent from louis-nugent.artistwebsites.com

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Journey To The Desert's Edge, Part 6

 Note: this is the sixth in a series of occasionally appearing entries focusing on deserts in general and the drylands of West Texas in particular


Location, location, location, says the Realtor and the Business Marketing Advisor.  One is unlikely to encounter deserts in Delaware.   Or France or Iowa or Malaysia.  There is, Good Reader, a recipe for making them... 
The first ingredient is location...

Desert landscapes are not always sandy.  The Chihuahuan Desert
is dotted with pockets of grassy shrublands from southeastern
Arizona (shown here) to the western Concho Valley of southwest
Texas

Deserts, at least those we call Hot Deserts, generally form between 20 degrees and 30 degrees latitude.  Atmospheric circulation patterns such as the Hadley Cell play key roles in creating conditions needed to bake land dry.  Heated by the sun at the equator, air rises and expands and cools.  Rain falls and lush tropical rainforests are created... 

The air continues to rise, eventually coming down in the subtropics before it returns to the equator.  As it descends, physics dictates air becomes compressed and warm.  Its relative humidity plummets.  Deserts form below these descending and dry air masses...

Chihuahuan Desert: Chisos Mountains in the Big Bend of Texas
A person would (reasonably) expect all land under them should be desert country.  But, obviously, this is not the case.  We ask ourselves: why, at the same latitude, is wet and rainy Louisiana not an arid wasteland like West Texas?  The answer: location, location, location... 

The tendency to dryness is interrupted in certain places, especially on the eastern side of continents.  Winds loaded and heavy with moisture from the ocean blows onshore.  Rain falls.  As the distance from the coast increases, the amount of moisture available to generate precipitation decreases.  Mountain ranges create "rain shadows" blocking westward movement of clouds that already have very little moisture in them.  In the United States, the hottest and driest desert country lies between the Rocky Mountains and the coastal ranges near the Pacific...
A tendency to dryness thanks to unpredictable rainfall is a second and, perhaps, most important ingredient in our recipe...   

The basic nature of desert precipitation is to be low, erratic, and often violent.  It is also generally ineffective since the potential for water loss through evapotranspiration (pET) significantly exceeds actual rain totals in deserts.  (Readers may recall, from a previous essay in this series, that studies by H C Trumble show an area is "water-deficient," i.e, a desert, when potential for water loss is three times or greater than precipitation)  In a statistically average year, Tom Green County in Southwest Texas receives 18.2 inches of precipitation with a pET of nearly 72 inches.  Few are statistically average years in deserts: a worldwide correlation exists between total rainfall and its predictability.  The lower the annual rainfall for a location, the higher the year-to-year variation in amounts that actually occur...  

Sonoran Desert: The giant saguaro cactus symbolizes
the Arizona drylands

An extremely arid place like Yuma, Arizona, might average 3.39 inches of precipitation yearly.  The actual totals for a given climate cycle there, however, could be as low as 0.28 inches and as high as 11.42 inches...

Back in Texas, San Angelo fares better than Yuma.  National Weather Service numbers give it annual average rains of 21.25 inches over the past three and a half decades.  Nevertheless, precipitation is unpredictable: actual totals of under 10 inches and more than 30 inches have been recorded.  Yearly rains of 20.25 inches to 22.25 inches, one inch plus or minus the average figure, fell only four times in the last thirty-five years...


The range of actual yearly rainfall totals in semi-arid deserts are not always as variable as those in very, very dry places.  West Texas is dry largely due to distance from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.  Seasonal storms provide much of the annual rain in this dry country.  Cold fronts and stationary hot air masses collide, triggering violent and sudden storms in spring and autumn... 


But even these seasonal rains cannot be predicted accurately.  For San Angelo, we see data showing September is a "wet" month that averages 2.95 inches of rain.  True totals range from less than 0.01 inches to 11.0 inches during the ninth month of the year...

Mojave Desert:  North America's smallest desert is known for
Joshua Tree yuccas and for being one of the hottest and driest
places on the continent

North American deserts have "rainy seasons" during which most of a year's precipitation usually occurs.  The Mojave and Great Basin see a "winter pattern" when Pacific Ocean storms move eastward and inland.  The resulting precipitation is low intensity, may last for several days, and often cover large areas.  From spring through autumn, storm cells from the Gulf of Mexico track to west and northwest to create a "summer pattern" in the Chihuahuan.  These rains are likely to be convective thunderstorms-- intense, localized, and brief.  A mixed pattern of summer and winter rain characterizes the Sonoran since it is centered between Pacific and Gulf storm systems... 


Relative humidity tends to be below 50% in the North American deserts.  This adds one more ingredient in our recipe for making a desert.  Since water in air molecules acts to trap infrared radiation from both sun and earth, low relative humidity guarantees a large percentage of possible solar radiation reaches the ground during daylight hours and that much of the accumulated surface heat radiates back into the atmosphere after dark.  Low relative humidity also aggravates aridity by limiting cloud formation, increasing the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground...
Desert Grasslands along US Highway 87 north of San Angelo, Tx

Depending on relative humidity levels, maximum and minimum temperatures can vary from twenty-five degrees or less to fifty degrees or more during a twenty-four hour period.  (This variation does not always affect desert cities due to the urban heat island effect.)  Low relative humidity also translates into extremes between annual maximum high and low temperatures.  Annual mean temperatures in deserts range from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies degrees Fahrenheit...

Temperature, in conjunction with air movement and precipitation, plays a major role in determining evapotranspiration rates.  High temperatures accelerate the process and low temperatures retard it. Summer heat, sustained for months at a time, rapidly bakes already dry land.  We have yet another recipe ingredient...

Great Basin Desert: Mile after mile of sagebrush dots the dry
country of Nevada and Utah
 
Heat and aridity lead to higher percentages of bare soil (areas lacking vegetation or other ground cover) in our desert since plants become widely spaced due to lack of moisture. 



Lack of plant life results in soils low in humus, those organic components formed from decomposition of plant or animal matter.  Desert soils are, therefore, often light colored at the surface and low in organic matter.  They have developed in areas where limited precipitation is insufficient to leach salts and other chemicals from the soil.  These various minerals accumulate in the subsoil to form the hard layers often referred to as caliche in the southwest...
Arches National Park near Moab, Utah

This combination of poor soil and bare ground can be added as two more ingredients for our recipe.  Perhaps we can best describe them as flavoring: not all desert locales are characterized by aridisols and mile after mile without discernible vegetation...    

Arid region soils are described by those who study their ability to sustain vegetation as immature, weakly developed in terms of soil profile, and alkaline.  Desert soils do vary: they include sands, sandy or gravelly loams, shallow stony soils, alluvium, and scree-derived deposits...

Wind, too, is a major ingredient in creating a desert.  Those of us who live in the dry country think of it as a constant... rarely stopping for more than a few minutes, always drying the land, eroding soil and rock to create ravines and mesas and fantastically shaped stone formations...

It may be that one or two readers recall my comments about the Irrigation Technology Center associated with Texas A&M University in an earlier installment in this series.  A few days ago, I revisited the Center's website to pull up its data for San Angelo.  The non-archived information covers the period from May 1, 1998 to June 26, 2012, some 3980 days... 

Bison herd at San Angelo State Park in Texas


During these many years, 183.55 inches of rain fell on the Concho Valley less than ten miles north of San Angelo.  Potential water loss via evapotranspiration was a tad higher-- 745.24 inches.  Daily numbers included: minimum relative humidity of 36 percent and winds of about 7mph.  Solar radiation, on a statistician's day, averaged 18.01 megajoules per square meter... 

Life in each of our four major North American deserts is more complicated and present than most people believe.  Variations developed as regional responses to the common theme of aridity can be used to distinguish one desert from one another.  At the same time, however, plants and animals in every desert share common patterns as universal responses to challenges posed by dryness, heat, wind, and poor soil quality common to arid and semi-arid deserts...

The Twin Buttes on the western side of San Angelo silently
warn travelers they have entered the harsh and lovely drylands
of Southwest Texas


NEWS CORRAL:


The Toledo (Ohio) Blade offers some brief but well-considered thoughts about the reduction in forces which will accompany military drawdowns as US soldiers depart Afghanistan and Iraq and the nation moves toward a pre-9/11 strength.



Pat Magee of Corpus Christi believes oceans and surfing belong to the world.  The former champion wave-rider opened a free-to-the-public museum where one can see the first surfboard made in Texas. 





LRNARTS MARKETPLACE



Artwork by Louis R Nugent now available:  For fine art prints and greeting cards, visit:




Fine Arts America now features West Texas painting, drawings, and photographs by Karen Boudreaux of Houston, Texas, Ken Brown Pioneer of Sand Springs, Oklahoma, Joe JAKE Pratt of Kerrville, Texas, David Pike of Lubbock, Texas, Judi Bagwell of Greenwell Springs, Louisiana, Suzanne Guirard Theis of Houston, Texas, Linda Cox of Graham, Texas, and Louis R Nugent of San Angelo, Texas at: http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html?tab=overview

CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Chihuahuan Desert: Chisos Mountains at Big Bend from Brittanica.com; Joshua Trees in Mojave Desert from LonelyPlanet.com; Great Basin Desert Sagebrush from Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center; Arches National Park from USParks.com; Twin Buttes, oil on canvas, by Dwight Holmes from San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts; Desert Shrublands from cas.vanderbilt.edu; Bison Herd at San Angelo State Park from Texas Parks and Wildlife