Click the above image for an obituary. Shanks reportedly died Friday.
See Art and Space from Friday.
Related material:
In Memoriam (August 1, 2015) and Backstory (July 28, 2015).
Monday, August 31, 2015
A Mirror Darkly …
… Continued from a post of Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2015 …
This, as noted, was in the online Times on Monday, August 24.
Here is related news about the following day, Tuesday, August 25 —
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Stylist
Or: A Shema for Sacks.
"We’ve already seen the hexagon painted over a
propaganda poster. It’s obviously a mark of defiance,
or maybe a geometry lesson. It’s still not clear.
Hey, it’s that clown dictator again. Who’s his stylist?"
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Nightmare for Wes Craven
Adapted from posts tagged Cryptomorphisms
in this journal:
"Hear it not, Craven, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven, or to hell. “
Max von Sydow in Branded (2012)
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Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis
Thesis and antithesis at last night's
MTV video music awards:
A geometric synthesis —
Related material —
The Wrench and the Nut (Aug. 24) and Cryptomorphisms.
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Sunday, August 30, 2015
Nut
(A companion-piece to the previous post, Bolt)
" In one of her more memorable roles, Ms. Craig
played Marta, a green-skinned slave girl, in the
'Star Trek' episode 'Whom Gods Destroy.' She
performed a seductive, loose-limbed dance that
seemed to nearly overwhelm William Shatner’s
red-blooded Captain Kirk, while Leonard Nimoy’s
Mr. Spock pronounced it 'mildly interesting.' "
— Obituary by Katie Rogers in the online
New York Times of Aug. 19, 2015. Rogers was
describing actress Yvonne Craig, who reportedly
died on Monday, August 17, 2015.
Related material from this morning's online Times —
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Lines
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." — Joan Didion
A post from St. Augustine's day, 2015, may serve to
illustrate this.
The post started with a look at a painting by Swiss artist
Wolf Barth, "Spielfeld." The painting portrays two
rectangular arrays, of four and of twelve subsquares,
that sit atop a square array of sixteen subsquares.
To one familiar with Euclid's "bride's chair" proof of the
Pythagorean theorem, "Spielfeld" suggests a right triangle
with squares on its sides of areas 4, 12, and 16.
That image in turn suggests a diagram illustrating the fact
that a triangle suitably inscribed in a half-circle is a right
triangle… in this case, a right triangle with angles of 30, 60,
and 90 degrees… Thus —
In memory of screenwriter John Gregory Dunne (husband
of Joan Didion and author of, among other things, The Studio )
here is a cinematric approach to the above figure.
The half-circle at top suggests the dome of an observatory.
This in turn suggests a scene from the 2014 film "Magic in
the Moonlight."
As she gazes at the silent universe above
through an opening in the dome, the silent
Emma Stone is perhaps thinking,
prompted by her work with Spider-Man …
"Drop me a line."
As he gazes at the crack in the dome,
Stone's costar Colin Firth contrasts the vastness
of the Universe with the smallness of Man, citing …
"the tiny field F2 with two elements."
In conclusion, recall the words of author Norman Mailer
that summarized his Harvard education —
"At times, bullshit can only be countered
with superior bullshit."
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Saturday, August 29, 2015
Studio Time
(The title is a phrase from Oslo artist Josefine Lyche's Instagram page today.)
Note that 6 PM ET is midnight in Oslo.
An image from St. Ursula's Day, 2010 —
Related material:
"Is it a genuine demolition of the walls which seem
to separate mind from mind …. ?"
— Clifford Geertz, conclusion of “The Cerebral Savage:
On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss“
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Friday, August 28, 2015
Art and Space
Observatory scene from "Magic in the Moonlight"
"The sixteen nodes… can be parametrized
by the sixteen points in affine four-space
over the tiny field F2 with two elements."
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Thursday, August 27, 2015
The Space of Art
"Thinking Outside the Square:
Support for Landscape and Portrait
Formats on Instagram"
Related material from March 18, 2015 —
Play Is Not Playing Around
|
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See Saw Seen
See
“ [An] ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world
where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness …
Think of Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion …
Mandel spins a satisfying web of coincidence and kismet …
Magnetic … a breakout novel. " — Kirkus (starred)
Saw
Seen
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Wednesday, August 26, 2015
A Mirror Darkly
This post was suggested by the publication date — July 7, 2015 —
of a novel reviewed in The New York Times online last Monday.
A synchronicity check of the publication date yields …
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Ride
"Why don't you come with me, little girl,
on a magic carpet ride?" — Steppenwolf lyrics
Related material for fans of Christopher Alexander
(see previous post) — "The 'Life' of a Carpet."
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“The Quality Without a Name”
The title phrase, paraphrased without quotes in
the previous post, is from Christopher Alexander's book
The Timeless Way of Building (Oxford University Press, 1979).
A quote from the publisher:
"Now, at last, there is a coherent theory
which describes in modern terms
an architecture as ancient as
human society itself."
Three paragraphs from the book (pp. xiii-xiv):
19. Within this process, every individual act
of building is a process in which space gets
differentiated. It is not a process of addition,
in which preformed parts are combined to
create a whole, but a process of unfolding,
like the evolution of an embryo, in which
the whole precedes the parts, and actualy
gives birth to then, by splitting.
20. The process of unfolding goes step by step,
one pattern at a time. Each step brings just one
pattern to life; and the intensity of the result
depends on the intensity of each one of these
individual steps.
21. From a sequence of these individual patterns,
whole buildings with the character of nature
will form themselves within your thoughts,
as easily as sentences.
Compare to, and contrast with, these illustrations of "Boolean space":
(See also similar illustrations from Berkeley and Purdue.)
Detail of the above image —
Note the "unfolding," as Christopher Alexander would have it.
These "Boolean" spaces of 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 points
are also Galois spaces. See the diamond theorem —
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Monday, August 24, 2015
Quality Report:
The Wrench and the Nut
From Schicksalstag 2012 —
The Quality
with No Name
 |
And what is good, Phaedrus,
and what is not good —
Need we ask anyone
to tell us these things?
— Epigraph to
Zen and the Art of
Motorcyle Maintenance
Related material from Wikipedia today:
See as well a search in this journal for “Permutation Group” + Wikipedia .
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Sunday, August 23, 2015
Quality
"William Tell’s weapon of choice has become
the symbol of Switzerland, a sign of sovereignty
and a guarantee of Swiss quality. On the eve of
the Second World War, these values seemed
especially important and necessary to the Swiss.
This five-centime green stamp was issued for
the 1939 national exhibition."
Related material in this journal: Basel.
See also Jung + Imago.
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Saturday, August 22, 2015
It’s 10 PM…
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The Space of Art
In memory of a woman who died on August 5th:
An excerpt from Svetlana Boym’s
“Nostalgic Technology:
Notes for an Off-modern Manifesto” —
For further remarks on art and technology,
see posts tagged Stevens Owl.
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A Tony for Kristen*
From Kulturkampf for Princeton (Jan. 14, 2015) —
| A sequel to Princeton Requiem, Gesamtkunstwerk , and Serial Box — Fearful Symmetry, Princeton Style:
|
* Wiig. See Dancer (June 10, 2013). Happy birthday.
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Friday, August 21, 2015
Finite Geometry at GitHub
(This post was updated on Jan. 10, 2016.)
See galois.io .
(That URL forwards to http://finite-geometry.github.io/galois/ .)
Recommended for editing: c9.io .
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Thursday, August 20, 2015
Sounds Like a Case for Damon
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