Log24

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Pause and Rewind

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:14 am

A well in the opening scenes of the 2020 film version of Joan Didion's
1996 novel The Last Thing He Wanted

 

From a link in the previous post

Sorvino in “The Last Templar
at the Church of the Lost Well:

Mira Sorvino at the Church of the Lost Well in 'The Last Templar'

Consider the source.

Monday, September 28, 2015

Cracker Jack Prize

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 pm

From a post of July 24, 2011

Mira Sorvino in 'The Last Templar'

A review —

“The story, involving the Knights Templar, the Vatican, sunken treasure,
the fate of Christianity and a decoding device that looks as if it came out of 
a really big box of medieval Cracker Jack, is the latest attempt to combine
Indiana Jones derring-do with ‘Da Vinci Code’ mysticism.”

— The New York Times

A feeble attempt at a purely mathematical "decoding device"
from this journal earlier this month

Image that may or may not be related to the extended binary Golay code and the large Witt design

For some background, see a question by John Baez at Math Overflow
on Aug. 20, 2015.

The nonexistence of a 24-cycle in the large Mathieu group
might discourage anyone hoping for deep new insights from
the above figure.

See Marston Conder's "Symmetric Genus of the Mathieu Groups" —

Intruders for Mira

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:25 pm

"Intruders" star Mira Sorvino in "The Last Templar" —

Happy birthday.

Meanwhile

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Sunday School

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am

Venus and Mars Realigned (continued from July 20) …

Mira Sorvino in 'The Last Templar'

A review —

“The story, involving the Knights Templar, the Vatican, sunken treasure,
the fate of Christianity and a decoding device that looks as if it came out of
a really big box of medieval Cracker Jack, is the latest attempt to combine
Indiana Jones derring-do with ‘Da Vinci Code’ mysticism.”

The New York Times

A related Google image search yields more Cracker Jack prizes.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Friday February 20, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:01 pm
Emblematizing
 the Modern
 

The following meditation was
inspired by the recent fictional
recovery, by Mira Sorvino
in "The Last Templar,"

of a Greek Cross —
"the Cross of Constantine"–
and by the discovery, by
art historian Rosalind Krauss,
of a Greek Cross in the
art of Ad Reinhardt.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090220-CrossOfDescartes.jpg

The Cross of Descartes  

Note that in applications, the vertical axis
of the Cross of Descartes often symbolizes
the timeless (money, temperature, etc.)
while the horizontal axis often symbolizes time.


T.S. Eliot:

"Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint…."


There is a reason, apart from her ethnic origins, that Rosalind Krauss (cf. 9/13/06) rejects, with a shudder, the cross as a key to "the Pandora's box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it." The rejection occurs in the context of her attempt to establish not the cross, but the grid, as a religious symbol:
 

"In suggesting that the success [1] of the grid
is somehow connected to its structure as myth,
I may of course be accused of stretching a point
beyond the limits of common sense, since myths
are stories, and like all narratives they unravel
through time, whereas grids are not only spatial
to start with, they are visual structures
that explicitly reject a narrative
or sequential reading of any kind.

[1] Success here refers to
three things at once:
a sheerly quantitative success,
involving the number of artists
in this century who have used grids;
a qualitative success through which
the grid has become the medium
for some of the greatest works
of modernism; and an ideological
success, in that the grid is able–
in a work of whatever quality–
to emblematize the Modern."

— Rosalind Krauss, "Grids" (1979)

Related material:

Time Fold and Weyl on
objectivity and frames of reference.

See also Stambaugh on
The Formless Self
as well as
A Study in Art Education
and
Jung and the Imago Dei.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Wednesday February 18, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 11:30 am

Raiders of
the Lost Well

“The challenge is to
keep high standards of
scholarship while maintaining
showmanship as well.”

— Olga Raggio, a graduate of the Vatican library school and the University of Rome who, at one point in her almost 60 years with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, organized “The Vatican Collections,” a blockbuster show. Dr. Raggio died on January 24.

The next day, “The Last Templar,” starring Mira Sorvino, debuted on NBC.

Mira Sorvino in 'The Last Templar'
“The story, involving the Knights Templar, the Vatican, sunken treasure, the fate of Christianity and a decoding device that looks as if it came out of a really big box of medieval Cracker Jack, is the latest attempt to combine Indiana Jones derring-do with ‘Da Vinci Code’ mysticism.”

The New York Times

Sorvino in “The Last Templar”
at the Church of the Lost Well:

Mira Sorvino at the Church of the Lost Well in 'The Last Templar'

One highlight of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first overseas trip will be a stop in China. Her main mission in Beijing will be to ensure that US-China relations under the new Obama administration get off to a positive start.”

— Stephanie Ho, Voice of America Beijing bureau chief, today

Symbol of The Positive,
from this journal
on Valentine’s Day:

'Enlarge' symbol from USA Today

“Stephanie started at the Voice of America as an intern in 1991. She left briefly to attend film school in London in 2000. Although she didn’t finish, she has always wanted to be a film school dropout, so now she’s living one of her dreams.

Stephanie was born in Ohio and grew up in California. She has a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies with an emphasis on Chinese history and economics, from the University of California at Berkeley.”

“She is fluent in
Mandrin Chinese.”
VOA

As is Mira Sorvino.

Chinese character for 'well' and I Ching Hexagram 48, 'The Well'

Those who, like Clinton, Raggio, and
Sorvino’s fictional archaeologist in
“The Last Templar,” prefer Judeo-
Christian myths to Asian myths,
may convert the above Chinese
“well” symbol to a cross
(or a thick “+” sign)
by filling in five of
the nine spaces outlined
by the well symbol.

In so doing, they of course
run the risk, so dramatically
portrayed by Angelina Jolie
as Lara Croft, of opening
Pandora’s Box.

(See Rosalind Krauss, Professor
of Art and Theory at Columbia,
for scholarly details.)

Rosalind Krauss

Krauss

Greek Cross, adapted from painting by Ad Reinhardt

The Krauss Cross

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