ART WARS continued
 

Exhibit A:
A science vulgarizer in today’s New York Times–

In the Quest for Coolness, Science Could Really Use a Vito Corleone

“Somewhere out there, more elusive than a snow leopard, more vaunted in its imagined cultural oomph than an Oprah book blurb, is the Science Movie.

You know, the film that finally does for science and scientists what ‘The Godfather’ did for crime and what ‘The West Wing’ did for politics, accurately reproducing the grandeur and grit of science while ushering its practitioners into the ranks of coolness.”

— Dennis Overbye

Exhibit B:
John Updike’s review in the May 22 New Yorker of a new novel by Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island—

“Nor is Houellebecq…. entirely without literary virtue.  His four novels– Whatever (1994), The Elementary Particles (1998), and Platform (2001) are the three others– display a grasp of science and mathematics beyond that of all but a few non-genre novelists.”

A character in the new novel– “a lengthy exercise in futuristic science fiction”– writes that

“The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity– which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are.”

Exhibit C:
A mathematician hopes for more exciting vulgarizations of his subject–

“I would hope that clever writers might point out how mathematics is altering our lifestyles and do it in a manner that would not lead Garfield the Cat to say ‘ho hum.'”

— Philip J. Davis, “The Media and Mathematics Look at Each Other” (pdf), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, March 2006

Exhibit D:
Today’s Garfield—

Exhibit E:
Log24 entry of May 18, a parody of “Contact,” a 1997 film that vulgarized science–

Exhibit F:
Gilbert and Sullivan, “The Mikado“–

“(With great effort) How de do, little girls, how de do? (Aside) Oh, my protoplasmal ancestor!”

Coda

“It might be asking too much
to make us cool.”
— Science vulgarizer   
Dennis Overbye

Robert De Niro as the
young Vito Corleone

ART WARS continued…

Braque

“The senses deform, the mind forms.  Work to perfect the mind.  There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.”

— Georges Braque, Reflections on Painting, 1917

Those who wish to follow Braque’s advice may try the following exercise from a book first published in 1937:

Hint: See the above picture of
Braque and the construction of
a tesseract.

ART WARS from
April 9 two years ago:

3 PM
Good
Friday

(Spider Web)

and Jay Dee
(Donuts)

From Dogma Part II: Amores Perros:

"Do Catholics believe that when you die your soul goes up in the sky? To heaven, if they go to heaven?"
 — Hope of Heaven, by John O'Hara (1938), Carroll & Graf paperback, 1985, page 162

"My blue dream of being in a basket like a kite held by a rope against the wind…. It's fun to stretch and see the blue heavens spreading once more, spreading azure thighs for adventure."
 — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (1941), Collier paperback, 1986, page 162

The following work of art
illustrates the above remarks.

Rehearsing Hell

Art critic Michael Kimmelman
in today’s New York Times:

For descriptions of the Vienna Actionists, do a Google search.

From yesterday:

It seems that Mike Kelley and Michael Kimmelman are among Chris Whitley’s “devils.”  Let us hope that they enjoy the company of General Augusto Pinochet (see previous entry) in the afterlife.

Related material: Art Wars and The Crimson Passion.

ART WARS:
Dark City

Jennifer Connelly at
premiere of “Cinderella Man” —

In memory of Martin Buber,
author of Good and Evil,
who died on June 13, 1965:

“With a little effort, anything can be
shown to connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”

— Opening sentence of
Martha Cooley’s The Archivist

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness Isaiah 5:20

As she spoke about the Trees of Life and Death, I watched her….  The Archivist

The world has gone mad today And good’s bad today, And black’s white today, And day’s night today Cole Porter

Jennifer Connelly in “Dark City”

(from journal note of June 19, 2002) —

And, one might add for Flag Day,
“you sons of bitches.”

From Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column of June 9, 2002:

“The shape of the government is not as important as the policy of the government. If he makes the policy aggressive and pre-emptive, the president can conduct the war on terror from the National Gallery of Art.”

To order, see the
Amazing Music Box & Gifts Company.

Tea Privileges

On Janet Leigh,
 who died Sunday:

On the redesigned
Museum of Modern Art,
11 West 53rd Street:

“… the ultimate judgment will have to wait: Taniguchi himself told a MoMA curator who’d complimented him that considering the building without the art in it is like admiring the tea cup without the green tea. Next month the museum will have art on the walls and crowds in the galleries—and then the tea ceremony will begin.”

— Cathleen McGuigan, Newsweek,
    issue dated Oct. 11, 2004

Related material:

Review of A Man and His Art, a book of paintings by Frank Sinatra:

“… he’s a solid abstractionist with an excellent eye for color, composition and geometric precision.”

— Booklist (Jan. 15, 1992)

“Blue Eyes took his Sunday painting seriously.”

— Eric Banks in Artforum Magazine,
    September 2004

See also
Art Wars.

Tribute

“Un train peut encacher un autre.“

Modern Times:

ART WARS September 27, 2002 —

From the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, October 2002, p. 563:

“To produce decorations for their weaving, pottery, and other objects, early artists experimented with symmetries and repeating patterns.  Later the study of symmetries of patterns led to tilings, group theory, crystallography, finite geometries, and in modern times to security codes and digital picture compactifications.  Early artists also explored various methods of representing existing objects and living things.  These explorations led to…. [among other things] computer-generated movies (for example, Toy Story).”

— David W. Henderson, Cornell University

From an earlier Log24.net note: 

John Frankenheimer’s “The Train” —

Und was für ein Bild des Christentums
ist dabei herausgekommen?

Shell Beach

“It was a dark and stormy night….”

— Opening of A Wrinkle in Time, a classic novel by Madeleine L’Engle.

For those who seek religious significance in the name of Hurricane Alex:

“Alex Proyas directs this futuristic thriller about a man waking up to find he is wanted for brutal murders he doesn’t remember. Haunted by mysterious beings who stop time and alter reality, he seeks to unravel the riddle of his identity.”

— Description of the 1998 film Dark City

See also ART WARS of June 19, 2002.

ART WARS
for St. Peter's Day

Compare and contrast:

Pigi Cipelli for The New York Times

The Pantheon, Rome

Institute of Contemporary Art,

Philadelphia

Dirty Trick

Some quotations in memory of philosopher Stuart Hampshire, who died on June 13, 2004.

From the Hampshire obituary in The Guardian:

From a log24 entry on the day before Hampshire’s death:

Whether Hampshire is now in Hell, the reader may surmise.  Some evidence in Hampshire’s  favor:

His review of On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry, in The New York Review of Books of November 18, 1999.  Note particularly his remarks on Fred Astaire, and the links to Astaire and the Four Last Things in an earlier entry of June 12, which was, as noted above, the day before Hampshire’s death.

As for the day of death itself, consider the  following  remark with which Hampshire concludes his review of Scarry’s  book:

“But one must occasionally fly the flag, and the flag, incorrigibly, is beauty.”

In this connection, see the entry of the Sunday Hampshire died, Spider Web, as well as entries on the harrowing of hell — Holy Saturday, 2004 — and on beauty —  Art Wars for Trotsky’s Birthday and A Mass for Lucero (written, as it happens, on June 13, 2002).

X

Tonight on PBS:
The Jesus Factor

From Good Friday:

From Eternity:

From Holy Saturday:

“…a ‘dead shepherd who brought
tremendous chords from hell
And bade the sheep carouse’ “

(p. 227, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1990)
— Wallace Stevens
    as quoted by Michael Bryson

See also the entries of 5/12.

3 PM
Good
Friday

ART WARS:
Mother of Beauty

In memory of architect Pierre Koenig…

Mother of Beauty: A Note on Modernism.

“… Case Study House #22 … was high drama — one in which the entire city becomes part of the architect’s composition. Approached along a winding street set high in the Hollywood Hills, the house first appears as a blank concrete screen. From here, the visitor steps out onto a concrete deck that overlooks a swimming pool. Just beyond it, the house’s living room — enclosed in a glass-and steel-frame — cantilevers out from the edge of the hill toward the horizon.

The house was immortalized in a now famous image taken by the architectural photographer Julius Shulman. In it, two women, clad in immaculate white cocktail dresses, are perched on the edge of their seats in the glass-enclosed living room, their pose suggesting a kind of sanitized suburban bliss. A night view of the city spreads out beneath them, an endless grid of twinkling lights that perfectly captures the infinite hopes of the postwar American dream….

    “My blue dream…”  
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Perhaps no house, in fact, better sums up the mix of outward confidence and psychic unease that defined Cold War America….”

— Los Angeles Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff

ART WARS Update

Two New York Times reviews today are relevant to the themes of ART WARS:

Minimal Art, by Michael Kimmelman

Hannah and Martin, by Margo Jefferson.

The themes of these reviews
— a minimalist dividing line,
and polar opposites —
are combined in my March 15 page,

The Line.

Truth and Style

From today’s New York Times obituary for Amy M. Spindler, former fashion critic of The New York Times and style editor of its magazine, who died yesterday at 40:

“Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, whom Ms. Spindler regarded as a competitor when she became style editor of The Times Magazine, in 1998, said: ‘She took criticism in a new direction. She wasn’t afraid to tell the truth.’ “

“I don’t believe in truth. I believe in style.”
— Hugh Grant in Vogue magazine, July 1995

Again from Spindler’s obituary:

“In a front-page article on Sept. 5, 1995, she [Spindler] noted a new piety on parade, marked by store windows and catalogs full of monastic robes, pilgrim’s boots and dangling crosses. Perhaps, she wrote, ‘the financially strained fashion industry is seeking salvation from above.’ “

Perhaps.

Amy M. Spindler

See also
Strike That Pose (August 1995)
and the two previous log24.net entries
on art and religion at Harvard.

For even more context, see
Truth and Style: ART WARS at Harvard.

ART WARS at Harvard

From today’s Harvard Crimson:

“The VES [Visual and Environmental Studies] department is still recovering, both internally and in public perception, from the firing of former chair Ellen Phelan in spring 2001. Phelan, a distinguished painter who brought in top New York artists, was replaced by Kenan Professor of English Marjorie Garber, an English scholar with no formal background in the practice of visual arts.”

Here’s more on Phelan and art at Harvard (rated R for colorful language).

See also Strike That Pose.

Toy

“If little else, the brain is an educational toy.  While it may be a frustrating plaything — one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them — it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled; you don’t have to put it together on Christmas morning.

The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too.  Sometimes they’d rather play with yours than theirs.  Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs.  The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated.  If you don’t play some people’s game, they say that you have ‘lost your marbles,’ not recognizing that,

while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.

One brain game that is widely, if poorly, played is a gimmick called ‘rational thought.’ “

— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Sol LeWitt
June 12, 1969:

“I took the number twenty-four and there’s twenty-four ways of expressing the numbers one, two, three, four.  And I assigned one kind of line to one, one to two, one to three, and one to four.  One was a vertical line, two was a horizontal line, three was diagonal left to right, and four was diagonal right to left.  These are the basic kind of directions that lines can take…. the absolute ways that lines can be drawn.   And I drew these things as parallel lines very close to one another in boxes.  And then there was a system of changing them so that within twenty-four pages there were different arrangements of actually sixteen squares, four sets of four.  Everything was based on four.  So this was kind of a… more of a… less of a rational… I mean, it gets into the whole idea of methodology.”

Yes, it does.
See Art Wars, Poetry’s Bones, and Time Fold.

Chinese Theatre, Part II:

Just Say NO

For more on the above “spider” symbol, see

ART WARS for Trotsky’s Birthday
(Oct. 26, 2003), Parts I and II

and the site from which
the above figure is taken,

Yin & Yang and the I Ching.

For some Chinese poetic justice, see

The Song of Saint Ezra,

Library of Paradise, and

Endings and Beginnings.

See, too, the Chinese character for “end”
used to sell the work of Ian Fleming:

Note, in Endings and Beginnings, the strong resemblance between this character and the name of the Chinese-American architect of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College.  Then meditate on the following passage by Amherst graduate Stephen Mitchell:

“We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle
    and knows,”
Robert Frost wrote,
looking in from the outside.
Looking out from the inside,
    Chuang-tzu wrote,
“When we understand, we are at
    the center of the circle,
and there we sit while Yes and No
    chase each other
around the circumference.”

A view of the Robert Frost Library
from the inside is available in the entry

Library of Paradise

mentioned above.

See, too, my entry

Keats and the Web

of July 28, 2002.

The Tables of Time

Implied by previous two entries:

See, too, Art Wars and Time Fold.

Library of Paradise

Click to enlarge.

In memory of architect Philip Chu, who designed the above library at Amherst College:

“Chu was best known for his designs of college libraries, which his family said blended ‘modern influences from such innovators as Frank Lloyd Wright, the Oriental use of space and exterior design together with the traditional materials.’ Critics characterized his designs as ‘warm and inviting,’ his family said in a written statement.

Among his designs were the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College, which was dedicated by President John Kennedy…”

— Honolulu Advertiser, Nov. 3, 2003

And now I was beginning to surmise:
Here was the library of Paradise.

— Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi

Chu died at 83 in Honolulu on
October 27, 2003.

See Dream of Heaven, Oct. 27, 2003.

See, too, ART WARS for Oct. 26, 2003…
Forty years to the day after Kennedy’s remarks at Amherst.

ART WARS for

Trotsky’s Birthday

Part I:
Symbols

From my entry of July 26, 2003, in memory
of Marathon Man director John Schlesinger:

For the meaning of the above symbols, see
Kubrick’s 1x4x9 monolith in 2001,
the Halmos tombstone in Measure Theory,
and the Fritz Leiber Changewar stories.

No se puede vivir sin amar.

Part II:
Sunday in the Park with Death

  To Leon from Diego —
Details of a mural,
A Dream of a Sunday Afternoon
in Alameda Park,
Fresco, 1947-48,
Alameda Hotel, Mexico City:

Three’s a Crowd:

Symbol:

ART WARS:
Judgment Day

“…Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter.  They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit.  From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal….”

— Rosalind Krauss, “Grids”

Krauss is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University.

For more on Meyer Schapiro, see the link on the phrase “art historian” in my March 10, 2003, entry.

To view that entry in a larger context, see the web page Art at the Vanishing Point, which includes a picture of Mondrian’s own Paris staircase.  The picture below might be thought of as illustrating Krauss’s “grid is a staircase”… a staircase to, in fact, a vanishing point.

Frame not included in
 Terminator 2: Judgment Day

For a different view of what the New York Times Book Review has characterized as “high culture,” see the link on that phrase also in my March 10, 2003, entry.  This leads to a work by T. S. Eliot titled Christianity and Culture.   See too the remarks of the Meyer Schapiro Professor in my Oct. 5, 2003, entry, “Art Theory for Yom Kippur,”  in which she likens the Cross to Pandora’s box.

Eliot’s attitude toward this Jewish approach to high culture might be summarized by the following remarks of Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day—

Dr. Silberman: You broke my arm!

Sarah Connor: There are two-hundred-fifteen bones in the human body, [expletive deleted]. That’s one.

ART WARS:
Time and the Grid

Art theorist Rosalind Krauss and poet T. S. Eliot on time, timelessness, and the grid.

Time’s Breakdown

“… even if we can break down time into component Walsh functions, what would it achieve?”

— The Professor, in “Passing in Silence,”
    by Oliver Humpage

“Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave.”

— Gösta Kraken, Perception Perceived: an Unfinished Memoir (p. 9 in Fremder, a novel by Russell Hoban)

“The Underground’s ‘flicker’ is a mechanical reconciliation of light and darkness, the two alternately exhibited very rapidly.”

— Hugh Kenner on T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” in Four Quartets

From last year’s entries:

ART WARS September 12, 2002

For some further reflections on flickering time,
see an essay by Nicholson Baker on

the Geneva mechanism
in movie projectors.

“At three o’clock in the morning
Eurydice is bound to come into it.”
—Russell Hoban,
The Medusa Frequency

For June Carter Cash as Eurydice,
see The Circle is Unbroken.

Let us pray that Jesus College
will help this production,
with Johnny Cash as Orpheus,
to have a happy ending.

Pre- and Post-Cognition

Majority Report:

From

A Matter of Life and Death,

an entry from Sept. 13, 2002, linked to in last night’s ART WARS notes:

“In the sun, Dante and Beatrice find themselves surrounded by a circle of souls famous for their wisdom on earth. They appear as splendid lights and precious jewels who dance and sing as they lovingly welcome two more into their company.”

Minority Report:

Doonesbury, Monday morning, Sept. 8, 2003:

©2003 G.B. Trudeau

For more chanting,
click here.
 

ART WARS Sept. 1, 2003:

Sir Terry Frost Dies

A noted English abstract painter died at 87 on Monday, September 1.  From a memorial essay on Sir Terry Frost, born in 1915, in The Daily Telegraph: 

“He was educated at Leamington Spa Central School where he edited the art magazine, but left at 15 to work….” His first jobs included, the Telegraph says, painting “the red, white and blue targets on to fighter planes.”

The “target” the Telegraph refers to
is known as the Royal Air Force Roundel.

It may indeed have functioned as a target, but it was originally intended only as a distinctive identifying mark.

Some of Frost’s later work may be viewed at the British Government Art Collection.  For some of Frost’s work more closely related to his early “target” theme, see the Badcock’s Gallery site.

An example:

For related religious
and cinematic material, see

Pilate, Truth, and Friday the Thirteenth,

a meditation for Good Friday of 2001,

A Matter of Life and Death,

a meditation for Friday the Thirteenth
of September, 2002,

and

The Unity of Mathematics,

from the day Frost died, which concludes
with links related to the religious symbol of

2001:

Monolithic Form
and
ART WARS.

The Unity of Mathematics,

or “Shema, Israel”

A conference to honor the 90th birthday (Sept. 2) of Israel Gelfand is currently underway in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The following note from 2001 gives one view of the conference’s title topic, “The Unity of Mathematics.”

Related Reading

For four different proofs of Euler’s result, see the inexpensive paperback classic by Konrad Knopp, Theory and Application of Infinite Series (Dover Publications).

Related Websites

Evaluating Zeta(2), by Robin Chapman (PDF article) Fourteen proofs!

Zeta Functions for Undergraduates

The Riemann Zeta Function

Reciprocity Laws
Reciprocity Laws II

The Langlands Program

Recent Progress on the Langlands Conjectures

For more on
the theme of unity,
see

Monolithic Form
and
ART WARS.

11:11

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, the Great War ended.  See

Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript:

ART WARS:
Invitation to the Dance

While checking the claim of art historian Anna Chave that “the veil is an age-old metaphor used from Plato through Hegel and Heidegger for the concept of truth as aletheia or unveiling,”  I came across the following essay:

“Taking the Veil,” by Jessica Kardon.

Kardon writes very well.  A related essay I particularly like is

“Invitation to the Dance.”

Today’s entry on Kardon is part of my “ART WARS” series of journal notes.  This title began partly as a joke, but it seems rather appropriate in light of Anna Chave’s claim that minimalism in the 1960’s was part of the “rhetoric of power.”  See my later entry today on Tony Smith at the National Gallery.

If we are in a war of art,

the essays of Jessica Kardon

are a powerful weapon.

ART WARS:

The following flashback to March 2002 seems a suitable entry for May, which is Mental Health Month.

From On Certainty, by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1969):

#508: What can I rely on?
#509: I really want to say that a language game is only possible if one trusts something. (I did not say “can trust something”).
— Quoted by Hilary Putnam in Renewing Philosophy, Chapter 8 (Harvard University Press, 1992)

An Arab on Deconstruction

From “Deconstructing Postmodernism,” by Ziauddin Sardar, at the website “The Free Arab Voice”:

Doubt, the perpetual and perennial condition of postmodernism, is best described by the motto of the cult television series The X-files: ‘Trust no One’….

Deconstruction – the methodology of discursive analysis – is the norm of postmodernism. Everything has to be deconstructed. But once deconstruction has reached its natural conclusion, we are left with a grand void: there is nothing, but nothing, that can remotely provide us with meaning, with a sense of direction, with a scale to distinguish good from evil.

Those who, having reviewed a thousand years of lies by Jews, Arabs, and Christians, are sick of language games, and who are also offended by the recent skillful deconstruction of the World Trade Center, may find some religious solace in the philosophy of Zen.

Though truth may be very hard to find in the pages of most books, the page numbers are generally reliable. This leads to the following Zen meditations.

From a review of the film “The Terminator”:

Some like to see Sarah as a sort of Mother of God, and her son as the saviour in a holy context. John Connor, J.C. , but these initials are also those of the director, so make up your own mind.
— http://www.geocities.com/
   hackettweb2/terminator.html

From a journal note on religion, science, and the meaning of life written in 1998 on the day after Sinatra died and the Pennsylvania lottery number came up “256”:

“What is 256 about?”
— S. H. Cullinane

From Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun (Ballantine paperback, 1993) —
John Connor (aka J. C.) offers the following metaphysical comment on the page number that appears above his words (256):

“It seems to be.”
“Is your investigation finished?”
“For all practical purposes, yes,” Connor said.

Connor is correct. The number 256 does indeed seem to be, and indeed it seemed to be again only yesterday evening, when the Pennsylvania lottery again made a metaphysical statement.

Our Zen meditation on the trustworthiness of page numbers concludes with another passage from Rising Sun, this time on page 373:

Connor sighed.
“The clock isn’t moving.”

Here J. C. offers another trenchant comment on his current page number.

The metaphysical significance of 373, “the eternal in the temporal,” is also discussed in the Buddhist classic A Flag for Sunrise, by Robert Stone (Knopf hardcover, 1981)… on, of course, page 373.

ART WARS:

All About Lilith

Today’s birthdays:

Sam Peckinpah (Feb. 21, 1925)
The New Yorker Magazine (Feb. 21, 1925)
Alan Rickman, 57
Kelsey Grammer, 48
Mary Chapin Carpenter, 45
Jennifer Love Hewitt, 24
Charlotte Church, 17

This list suggests that in an ideal future life Sam Peckinpah would direct, and The New Yorker review, a prequel to “All About Eve.”

Casting would be as follows:

Mary Chapin Carpenter as Margo Channing
(originally, Bette Davis)
Charlotte Church as Lilith, sister of Eve Harrington
(originally, Anne Baxter)
Jennifer Love Hewitt as Claudia Casswell
(originally, Marilyn Monroe)
Alan Rickman as Bill Sampson
(originally, Gary Merrill)
Kelsey Grammer as Addison DeWitt
(originally, George Sanders).

Since today is also the anniversary, according to Tom’s Book of Days, of Schultes’s identification of teonanacatl in 1939, the following classic painting, “ Caterpillar’s Mushroom,” by Brian Froud, might be adapted for a poster for our heavenly production*, to be titled, in accordance with celestial fairness doctrines,

All About Lilith 

* A footnote in memory of publicist/producer Jack Brodsky (“Romancing the Stone,” etc.), who died on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2003 — See the website Eight is a Gate for the mystical significance of the number “78” in Judaism. The New Yorker and Sam Peckinpah were born 78 years ago today.

ART WARS
At the Still Point

“At the still point, there the dance is.”

— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets

Humphrey Carpenter in The Inklings, his book on the Christian writers J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams, says that

“Eliot by his own admission took the ‘still point of the turning world’ in Burnt Norton from the Fool in Williams’s The Greater Trumps.”

— The Inklings, Ballantine Books, 1981, p. 106

Carpenter says Williams maintained that

It is the Christian’s duty to perceive “the declared pattern of the universe” — the “eternal dance” of Williams’s story The Greater Trumps — and to act according to it.

— Paraphrase of Carpenter, pp. 111-112

“The sun is not yet risen, and if the Fool moves there he comes invisibly, or perhaps in widespread union with the light of the moon which is the reflection of the sun.  But if the Tarots hold, as has been dreamed, the message which all things in all places and times have also been dreamed to hold, then perhaps there was meaning in the order as in the paintings; the tale of the cards being completed when the mystery of the sun has opened in the place of the moon, and after that the trumpets cry in the design which is called the Judgement, and the tombs are broken, and then in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done.  Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known.  It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead.”

— The Greater Trumps, by Charles Williams, Ch. 14

If we must have Christians telling stories, let them write like Charles Williams.

Note that although Williams says the Fool Tarot card has no number, it is in fact often numbered 0. See

“The Fool as Zero.”

See also Sequel — about the work, life, and afterlife of Stan Rice, husband of Anne Rice (author of The Vampire Chronicles) — and the following story from today’s N.Y. Times:

The death and arrival at heaven’s gate
of The Producers‘ producer, Sidney Glazier,
on Dec. 14, 2002, is described in the web page
Eight is a Gate.
 

ART WARS:

The Reader
Over Your Shoulder

See also last night’s entry on “Red Dragon” and
this news story on a Chinese cannibal-artist
from today’s Toronto Globe and Mail.

Durga

Today's site music* is in honor of a memorable date.   *© 1963 Northern Songs. Quiet may be restored by using the midi control box at the top right of this page.  Please let me know if your browser is not showing this control box.

Veronica

From a June/July 1997
Hadassah Magazine article:

"Plato is obviously Jewish."

— Rebecca Goldstein

Readings on the Dark Lady  

From a July 27, 1997
New York Times article
by Holland Cotter:

"The single most important and sustained model for Khmer culture was India, from which Cambodia inherited two religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, and an immensely sophisticated art. This influence announces itself early in this exhibition in a spectacular seventh-century figure of the Hindu goddess Durga, whose hip-slung pose and voluptuous torso, as plush and taut as ripe fruit, combine the naturalism and idealism of the very finest Indian work."

From The Dancing Wu Li Masters,
by Gary Zukav, Harvard '64:

"The Wu Li Masters know that physicists are doing more than 'discovering the endless diversity of nature.' They are dancing with Kali [or Durga], the Divine Mother of Hindu mythology."

"Eastern religions have nothing to say about physics, but they have a great deal to say about human experience. In Hindu mythology, Kali, the Divine Mother, is the symbol for the infinite diversity of experience. Kali represents the entire physical plane. She is the drama, tragedy, humor, and sorrow of life. She is the brother, father, sister, mother, lover, and friend. She is the fiend, monster, beast, and brute. She is the sun and the ocean. She is the grass and the dew. She is our sense of accomplishment and our sense of doing worthwhile. Our thrill of discovery is a pendant on her bracelet. Our gratification is a spot of color on her cheek. Our sense of importance is the bell on her toe.

This full and seductive, terrible and wonderful earth mother always has something to offer. Hindus know the impossibility of seducing her or conquering her and the futility of loving her or hating her; so they do the only thing that they can do. They simply honor her."

How could I dance with another….?

— John Lennon and Paul McCartney, 1962-1963  

Sequel

“This world is not conclusion;
A sequel stands beyond….”

— Emily Dickinson (See yesterday’s notes.)

And the hair of my flesh stood up (Job 4:15).
The emotional quality of the moment is
The religious experience of the atheist.
This is Day Three.
Ezra Pound makes me sit
Under the gold painted equestrian statue
At Central Park South and 5th.

— Stan Rice, “Doing Being” (See yesterday’s notes.)

Stan Rice died on Monday.
Today is Wednesday. 
This is Day Three. 

ART WARS: 

A Metaphysical State

“Heaven is a state, a sort of metaphysical state.”

 — John O’Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938

“I’ve always been enthralled by the notion that Time is an illusion, a trick our minds play in an attempt to keep things separate, without any reality of its own. My experience suggests that this is literally true, but not the kind of truth that can be acted upon….

I’m always sad and always happy. As someone says in Diane Keaton’s film ‘Heaven,’ ‘It’s kind of a lost cause, but it’s a great experience.'”

 — Charles Small, Harvard ’64 25th Anniv. Report, 1989

“As a child she would wait out her naptime like a prison sentence.  She would lie in bed and stare at the wallpaper pattern and wonder what would happen if there were no heaven.  She thought the universe would probably go on and on, spilling all over everything.  Heaven was kind of a hat on the universe, a lid that kept everything underneath it where it belonged.”

 — Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge, 1987

Today’s site music illustrates 
the above philosophical remarks.

ART WARS:

Shall we read?

From Contact, by Carl Sagan:

  “You mean you could decode a picture hiding in pi
and it would be a mess of Hebrew letters?”
  “Sure.  Big black letters, carved in stone.”
  He looked at her quizzically.
  “Forgive me, Eleanor, but don’t you think
you’re being a mite too… indirect? 
You don’t belong to a silent order of Buddhist nuns. 
Why don’t you just tell your
story?”

From The Nation – Thailand
Sat Dec 7 19:36:00 EST 2002:

New Jataka books
blend ethics and art

Published on Dec 8, 2002

“The Ten Jataka, or 10 incarnations of the Lord Buddha before his enlightenment, are among the most fascinating religious stories….

His Majesty the King wrote a marvellous book on the second incarnation of the Lord Buddha…. It has become a classic, with the underlying aim of encouraging Thais to pursue the virtue of perseverance.

For her master’s degree at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Arts, Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn wrote a dissertation related to the Ten Jataka of the Buddha. Now with the 4th Cycle Birthday of Princess Sirindhorn approaching on April 2, 2003, a group of artists, led by prominent painter Theeraphan Lorpaiboon, has produced a 10-volume set, the “Ten Jataka of Virtues”, as a gift to the Princess.

Once launched on December 25, the “Ten Jataka of Virtues” will rival any masterpiece produced in book form….”

“How much story do you want?” 
— George Balanchine

ART WARS

Driving the Point Home

From

SUSAN WEIL

EAR'S EYE FOR JAMES JOYCE:

From Finnegans Wake,
by James Joyce, p. 293:

The Vesica Piscis,
also known as
The Ya-Ya:

See also the
Geometries of Creation
art exhibit at the University of Waterloo.

ART WARS: Music for Henry

HomerTheBrave has provided a link to an excellent Tom Tomorrow strip dealing with Ford’s Feb. 23, 1997, commercial-free sponsorship of “Schindler’s List” on TV.

To honor Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Co. and author of

The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,

which includes a chapter titled

Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music,

this site’s music is now Rhapsody in Blue.

For more on art and power, see the article on Cardinal Richelieu by Deborah Weisgall in today’s New York Times.

ART WARS   September 12, 2002

John Frankenheimer's film "The Train" —

Und was fur ein Bild des Christentums 
ist dabei herausgekommen?