Monday, September 10, 2018
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Big Time
The following post suggests the Spiders and Snakes of Fritz Leiber’s
Changewar , a mythology inspired by the hallucinations of delirium tremens .
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Friday, December 28, 2012
Big Time
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis in Looper :
Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys :
See also Big Time in this journal.
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Monday, January 10, 2011
Big Time*
(True Grid continued)
"They're gonna put me in the movies,
They're gonna make a big star out of me…"
“Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.”
Twelfth Night , Act V, Sc. I [text]
See also this journal on Twelfth Night, 2011.
* Background:
The Changewar stories of Fritz Leiber, including Big Time and "Damnation Morning."
The Shakespearean fool of Dec. 30 is also not without relevance.
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Sunday, August 1, 2021
Blackboard Jungle Cruise
See also Big Time in this journal.
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Saturday, April 24, 2021
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
By Fritz Leiber
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Sunday, February 17, 2013
For an Entertainer
"Forget about your rainbow schemes,
Spin a little web of dreams."
Related material:
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Saturday, January 29, 2011
Cold Open
"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
Some background—
An image from yesterday's search
God, TIme, Hopkins
"We got tom-toms over here bigger than a monster
Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla"
— "Massive Attack"
"I'm just checking your math on that. Yes, I got the same thing."
"Live… Uh, check that… From New York, it's Saturday Night! "
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Saturday, December 4, 2010
Damnation on 42nd Street
Yesterday's New York Lottery— Midday 042, Evening 919.
Here 042 may be seen as referring to New York's 42nd Street…
Below, West 42nd St., facing north, from yesterday's New York Times—
Related material —
- Yesterday's Star of Venus
in the post Black Swan
- Damnation Morning in this journal (with a version of the above symbol)
- "Damnation Morning" (the original story)
That story is part of the Change War saga by Fritz Leiber, notably represented by Leiber's 1957 novel The Big Time.
See also Comic Book Resources on the new comic-book series Spider-Man: Big Time—
CBR: “Big Time” is this title of this new era of “Amazing Spider-Man.” Why choose that title? What exactly is it referring to?
DAN SLOTT: “Big Time” refers to more than “Amazing Spider-Man,” it also refers to other Spider-Projects: “Astonishing Spider-Man/Iron Man,” the new Norman Osborn mini, and the all-new “Spider-Girl!” With “Amazing,” “Big Time” takes on a lot of meanings. In this book, everything is bigger: bigger stakes for Peter Parker, bigger threats for Spider-Man, and a much bigger comic. We are expanding to 30 pages of material, twice a month!
As for yesterday's evening NY lottery number 919, see 9/19.
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Tuesday, October 5, 2010
The Ending That Fell Off a Truck
"…the ending arrives as if dropped from a passing truck."
— Stephen Hunter, Washington Post review of the 2007 film
"The Invasion" (starring Nicole Kidman)
"The Invasion" |
Leiber's Big Time |
Related material— "The reviews are in!"— Wall Street Journal today
See also this journal on October First, the date of the above death.
"We've lost the plot!" — "Slipstream"
"Big time." — Dick Cheney
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Thursday, April 29, 2010
Spider Woman
Mathematics and Narrative
(continued from April 26 and 28):
The Web
See also
Leiber's Big Time, Spider Woman, and The Eight.
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Friday, November 14, 2008
Friday November 14, 2008
Ballistics and Faith
From a review of José Saramago‘s new novel, Death With Interruptions:
“The church has never been asked to explain anything,” the cardinal assures the prime minister. “Our specialty, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralization of the overly curious mind through faith.”
Related material:
Sept. 7, 2006- Birthday of Elizabeth I
Sept. 7, 2007- Madeleine L’Engle is Dead
Sept. 7, 2008- From the Finland Station
For some mythology relevant to the first two of these three dates, see “Damnation Morning” and The Big Time. For some non-mythology related to ballistics, faith, and the third of these dates, see Rudy Ratzinger vs. Joseph Ratzinger.
As for the main character
of Saramago’s novel…
of Saramago’s novel…
| “V. is whatever lights you to the end of the street: she is also the dark annihilation waiting at the end of the street.” — Tony Tanner, page 36, Happy birthday,
Olga Kurylenko. |
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Sunday, February 17, 2008
Sunday February 17, 2008
Big Time
New York Times today–
"Plot Would Thicken, if the
Writers Remembered It"
"We've lost the plot!"
— Slipstream
|
Excerpt from Fritz Leiber's Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it's cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I'd hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, "Look, Buster, do you want to live?"…. Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.
Bordered version The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent…. … "Here is how it stacks up: You've bought your way with something other than money into an organization of which I am an agent…." "It's a very big organization," she went on, as if warning me. "Call it an empire or a power if you like. So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist. It has agents everywhere, literally. Space and time are no barriers to it. Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future, but also the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees." "I. G. Farben?" I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor. She didn't rebuke my flippancy, but said, "And it isn't the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name." "Which is?" I asked. "The Spiders," she said. That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly. I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me– something like that. She watched me. "You might call it the Double Cross," she suggested, "if that seems better." |
Related material:
the previous entry.
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Monday, October 29, 2007
Monday October 29, 2007
Home from Home
On Anthony Hopkins’s new film:
“At one point during ‘Slipstream,’ Hopkins’s character stumbles upon a Dolly Parton impersonator while Parton’s wonderful song, ‘Coat of Many Colors,’ plays on the soundtrack. I told Hopkins that I thought he used the tune– which is about a multi-hued coat that little Dolly’s grandmother made for her out of random pieces of cloth when the future superstar’s family was dirt poor– as a sort of commentary on the patchwork structure of ‘Slipstream’ itself. Hopkins smiled broadly and his eyes lit up. Yes, he said, that’s exactly what he was doing. He said he even tried to get Parton to appear in the movie, but she was booked and couldn’t do it.”
— Paul Tatara, Oct. 22, 2007
“Our existence is beyond understanding. Nobody has an answer. I sense that life is such a mystery. To me, God is time.”
Related material:
“Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn’t seem to recall exactly the same past from one day to the next? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, then you’ve had hints of the Change War…
It’s been going on for a billion years and it will last another billion or so. Up and down the timeline, the two sides– ‘Spiders’ and ‘Snakes’– battle endlessly to change the future and the past. Our lives, our memories, are their battleground. And in the midst of the war is the Place, outside space and time, where Greta Forzane and the other Entertainers provide solace and r-&-r for tired time warriors.”
— Publisher’s description of Fritz Leiber’s Big Time.
Dialogue from “Slipstream” —
“My God, this place must be
a million years old!”
“Dolly’s Little Diner–
Home from Home”
Meanwhile…
Country Star
Porter Wagoner, 80, Dies
Wallace Stevens,
“Country Words”–
“What is it that my feeling seeks?
I know from all the things it touched
And left beside and left behind.
It wants the diamond pivot bright.”
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Wednesday, August 9, 2006
Wednesday August 9, 2006
Night Listener
(See previous entry.)
Thanks to Natalie at
KHYI, 95.3 FM, Plano, Texas
(hard country music),
for just now playing
A Fine Line, by Radney Foster:
There’s a curve in the highway, just south of town
where a man has pulled over to figure life out
with only his concience and the lonesome sound
of diesels winding up grade
he’s got a wife and two kids, and they love him so
he’s got a woman down in georgia,
and she’s startin’ to show
he’s damned if he leaves her,
and he’s sure damned if he don’t
and he wonders how life got this way
cuase it’s a fine line in between right and wrong
yea he’s been crossing over that border
way too long
he should’ve seen it coming at him
right from the start
now there aint’ no escape from a broken heart
now the call of the highway is a powerful thing
like the pull of a lover, or a child in a swing
gave his heart to two women
only one wears his ring
they’re both gonna have his babies now
so how do you confess,
what words don’t explain
he never intended to cause this much pain
now he feels like a farmer
who went praying for the rain
got more than he bargained from the clouds
[chorus]
he’ll turn his car around tonight,
go home and try to face the truth
everyone involved’s getting hurt,
now there aint nothing he can do
[chorus]
Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase.
Thus the superior man:
If he sees good,
he imitates it;
If he has faults,
he rids himself of them.
the image of Increase.
Thus the superior man:
If he sees good,
he imitates it;
If he has faults,
he rids himself of them.
(10:00:42 PM ET)
Update of 11:08 PM ET…
and, Natalie, for playing
“Late Night Grande Hotel“
just now, thanks big time.
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Saturday, June 24, 2006
Saturday June 24, 2006
In memory of
Hunter S. Thompson
On Midsummer Day:
Big Time
Parts I, II, III
Part I:
April 17, 2003: Holiday Affair
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Saturday June 24, 2006
Big Time, Part II:
April 16, 2003: Keeping Time
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Saturday June 24, 2006
Big Time, Part III:
April 15, 2003: Green and Burning
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Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Wednesday December 14, 2005
From Here
to Eternity
to Eternity
For Loomis Dean
See also
For Rita Moreno
on Her Birthday
(Dec. 11, 2005)
|
Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005
OBITUARIES 
LOOMIS DEAN Loomis Dean, 88; By Jon Thurber, Times Staff Writer
Loomis Dean, a Life magazine photographer who made memorable pictures of the royalty of both Europe and Hollywood, has died. He was 88.
Dean died Wednesday [December 7, 2005] at Sonoma Valley Hospital in Sonoma, Calif., of complications from a stroke, according to his son, Christopher. In a photographic career spanning six decades, Dean's leading images included shirtless Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck trying a one-handed chin-up on a trapeze bar, the ocean liner Andrea Doria listing in the Atlantic and writer Ernest Hemingway in Spain the year before he committed suicide. One of his most memorable photographs for Life was of cosmopolitan British playwright and composer Noel Coward in the unlikely setting of the Nevada desert. Dean shot 52 covers for Life, either as a freelance photographer or during his two stretches as a staffer with the magazine, 1947-61 and 1966-69. After leaving the magazine, Dean found steady freelance work in magazines and as a still photographer on film sets, including several of the early James Bond movies starring Sean Connery. Born in Monticello, Fla., Dean was the son of a grocer and a schoolteacher. When the Dean family's business failed during the Depression, they moved to Sarasota, Fla., where Dean's father worked as a curator and guide at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Dean studied engineering at the University of Florida but became fascinated with photography after watching a friend develop film in a darkroom. He went off to what is now the Rochester Institute of Technology, which was known for its photography school. After earning his degree, Dean went to work for the Ringling circus as a junior press agent and, according to his son, cultivated a side job photographing Ringling's vast array of performers and workers. He worked briefly as one of Parade magazine's first photographers but left after receiving an Army Air Forces commission during World War II. During the war, he worked in aerial reconnaissance in the Pacific and was along on a number of air raids over Japan. His first assignment for Life in 1946 took him back to the circus: His photograph of clown Lou Jacobs with a giraffe looking over his shoulder made the magazine's cover and earned Dean a staff job. In the era before television, Life magazine photographers had some of the most glamorous work in journalism. Life assigned him to cover Hollywood. In 1954, the magazine published one of his most memorable photos, the shot of Coward dressed for a night on the town in New York but standing alone in the stark Nevada desert. Dean had the idea of asking Coward, who was then doing a summer engagement at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, to pose in the desert to illustrate his song "Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Midday Sun." As Dean recalled in an interview with John Loengard for the book "Life Photographers: What They Saw," Coward wasn't about to partake of the midday sun. "Oh, dear boy, I don't get up until 4 o'clock in the afternoon," Dean recalled him saying. But Dean pressed on anyway. As he related to Loengard, he rented a Cadillac limousine and filled the back seat with a tub loaded with liquor, tonic and ice cubes — and Coward. The temperature that day reached 119 as Coward relaxed in his underwear during the drive to a spot about 15 miles from Las Vegas. According to Dean, Coward's dresser helped him into his tuxedo, resulting in the image of the elegant Coward with a cigarette holder in his mouth against his shadow on the dry lake bed. "Splendid! Splendid! What an idea! If we only had a piano," Coward said of the shoot before hopping back in the car and stripping down to his underwear for the ride back to Las Vegas. In 1956, Life assigned Dean to Paris. While sailing to Europe on the Ile de France, he was awakened with the news that the Andrea Doria had collided with another liner, the Stockholm. The accident occurred close enough to Dean's liner that survivors were being brought aboard. His photographs of the shaken voyagers and the sinking Andrea Doria were some of the first on the accident published in a U.S. magazine. During his years in Europe, Dean photographed communist riots and fashion shows in Paris, royal weddings throughout Europe and noted authors including James Jones and William S. Burroughs. He spent three weeks with Hemingway in Spain in 1960 for an assignment on bullfighting. In 1989, Dean published "Hemingway's Spain," about his experiences with the great writer. In 1965, Dean won first prize in a Vatican photography contest for a picture of Pope Paul VI. The prize included an audience with the pope and $750. According to his son, it was Dean's favorite honor. In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Deborah, and two grandsons. Instead of flowers, donations may be made to the American Child Photographer's Charity Guild (www.acpcg.com) or the Make-A-Wish Foundation. |
Related material:
The Big Time
(Log 24, July 29, 2003):
A Story That Works
|
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Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Tuesday November 15, 2005
Windmills
Upper part of above picture–
From today’s New York Times,
Seeing Mountains in
Starry Clouds of Creation.
Lower part of above picture–
Pilgrimage to Spider Rock:
“This magical place, according to Navajo Legend, was the home of Spider Woman, who gave the gift of weaving to the Dineh’ People. Today’s Navajos trace the excellence of their finest textiles to this time of legends, when their patron, Changing Woman, met Spider Woman, the first Weaver.”
Vine Deloria Jr.,
Evolution, Creationism,
and Other Modern Myths:
“The continuing struggle between evolutionists and creationists, a hot political topic for the past four decades, took a new turn in the summer of 1999 when the Kansas Board of Education voted to omit the mention of evolution in its newly approved curriculum, setting off outraged cries of foul by the scientific establishment. Don Quixotes on both sides mounted their chargers and went searching for windmills.”
Related material–
A figure from
last night’s entry,
Spider Woman:
From Sunday, the day
of Vine Deloria’s death,
a picture that might be
called Changing Woman:
Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat
See also the windmill figure
in Time and Eternity
(Log 24, Feb. 1, 2003)
and
a review
of Fritz Leiber’s
The Big Time,
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Thursday, August 19, 2004
Thursday August 19, 2004
Angel of the
First Degree
A few words for M.C.C.
 |
Honey Blonde She’s as sweet as tupelo honey She’s an angel of the first degree. She’s as sweet as tupelo honey Just like honey, baby, from the bee. — Van Morrison, 1971 |
Elmer Bernstein, Film Composer, Dies at 82
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:22 a.m. ET
Thursday, Aug. 19, 2004
LOS ANGELES (AP)– Elmer Bernstein, the versatile, Oscar-winning composer who scored such movie classics as “The Ten Commandments,” “The Magnificent Seven,”‘ “To Kill a Mockingbird,”‘ “The Great Escape” and “True Grit,” died Wednesday. He was 82.
Bernstein died in his sleep at his Ojai home.
That, M.C.C., is what
Fritz Leiber means by
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Sunday, January 4, 2004
Sunday January 4, 2004
Room 1010
Continuing the hotel theme of the previous entry….
John Gregory Dunne has a letter in the New York Review of Books of December 20 (St. Emil's Day in the previous entry), 1990. In this letter, he reveals that he and his wife had at one time worked on a Grand Hotel screenplay based in Las Vegas.
For related material in memory of Dunne, see In Lieu of Rosebud, which contains entries for 10/10-10/12, 2002.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
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Sunday, August 3, 2003
Sunday August 3, 2003
Dancing at Lughnasa
“The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and humanizing Soldiers fresh back from raids into time. In fact, my formal title is Entertainer….”
— Fritz Leiber, The Big Time
“And he sang:
‘Dance a little closer to me,
Dance a little closer now,
Dance a little closer tonight.
Dance a little closer to me,
hey it’s closing time,
And love’s on sale tonight
at this five and dime.’ “
— “Love at the Five and Dime,”
written and sung by Nanci Griffith
“Going up.” — Nanci Griffith
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Saturday, August 2, 2003
Saturday August 2, 2003
Late Night Grande Hotel
“I feel like Garbo in this late night Grande Hotel
‘Cause living alone is all I’ve ever done well”
“…the thought of those dark three
Is dark, thought of the forms of dark desire.”
— Wallace Stevens,
“The Owl in the Sarcophagus”
“I am not as romantically entrancing as the immortal
film star… but I have a rough-and-ready charm of my own.”
— Fritz Leiber, The Big Time
| “But she that says good-by… stood tall in self not symbol, quick And potent, an influence felt instead of seen.” — Wallace Stevens, “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” |
|
Thank you, KHYI.com, for playing Nanci Griffith on this, the feast day of Presbyterian saint Wallace Stevens. She is not Garbo or Marie Trintignant (see previous entry), but she will do.
“Beauty is momentary in the mind —
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.”
— Wallace Stevens,
Peter Quince at the Clavier
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Thursday, July 31, 2003
Thursday July 31, 2003
Killer Radio
"See the girl with the diamond ring?
She knows how to shake that thing."
— Jerry Lee "Killer" Lewis on
KHYI 95.3 FM, Plano, Texas,
at about 5:12 PM EDT 7/31/03,
introduced by DJ Allen Peck Sr.
"And on this point I pass the same judgment as those who say that geometricians give them nothing new by these rules, because they possessed them in reality, but confounded with a multitude of others, either useless or false, from which they could not discriminate them, as those who, seeking a diamond of great price amidst a number of false ones, but from which they know not how to distinguish it, should boast, in holding them all together, of possessing the true one equally with him who without pausing at this mass of rubbish lays his hand upon the costly stone which they are seeking and for which they do not throw away the rest."
— Blaise Pascal, De l'Esprit Géométrique
"When the light came she was sitting on the bed beside an open suitcase, toying with her diamond rings. She saw the light first in the depths of the largest stone."
— Paul Preuss, Broken Symmetries,
scene at Diamond Head, Oahu, Hawaii
Now playing (6:41 PM EDT) on Killer Radio:
"Jack of Diamonds, that's
a hard card to find."
"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond…."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus
Perhaps Sam Phillips was twanged by a Hawaiian guitar. (See previous two entries.)
|
The Big Time
|
See also "Top Ten Most Overheard Comments by new KHYI listeners" at Miss Lana's Anything Page, entry for
Comments Off on Thursday July 31, 2003
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Tuesday July 29, 2003
The Big Time
|
|
“The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and humanizing Soldiers fresh back from raids into time. In fact, my formal title is Entertainer….” — The Big Time, |
A Story That Works
- “There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe;
- there are the friend-enemy minds shouting and whispering their tales and always seeking the three miracles —
- that minds should really touch, or
- that the silent universe should speak, tell minds a story, or (perhaps the same thing)
- that there should be a story that works, that is all hard facts, all reality, with no illusions and no fantasy;
- and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, mortal me.”
— Fritz Leiber in “The Button Molder“
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