The notation "O" in the previous post suggests
a review of the new "Grease" theory in light of
a phrase from a May 2014 Oslo art exhibition —
"a desperate sense of imagined community."
Illustration (click for a video) —
"I'll have what she's having."
See as well Olivia Newton-John in this journal as the Muse of Dance.
Heidegger’s birthday: September 26.
Einstein’s birthday: March 14.
Fred Zinnemann, who won an Oscar
for directing “From Here to Eternity“:
Zinnemann’s birthday: today, April 29.
In honor of Zinnemann, a cheerful man, who died on Einstein’s birthday in 1997, our site music today is the cheerful Gershwin tune “Our Love Is Here To Stay.” In honor of Olivia Newton-John (granddaughter of physicist Max Born), who notably portrayed the Muse Terpsichore
in “Xanadu”◊ and who shares a September 26 birthday with Gershwin, T. S. Eliot, and Heidegger, today’s midi of “Our Love” has a special arrangement. Ms. Newton-John might wish to commemorate the romance (“Passionate!” — Yale University Press) of Hannah Arendt, a Jewish political theorist, and Heidegger, a Catholic Nazi, by listening to “Our Love” on the acoustic bass and glockenspiel.†
Terpsichore is the Muse of Dance.
See also Einstein’s first paper on relativity:
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,”
Annalen der Physik,
September 26, 1905.
◊ Not to be confused with an Orson Welles
film based on the life of
William Randolph Hearst,
whose birthday is also today.
† Glockenspiel means “bell-play.”
See Metaphysics for Tina.
Balanchine's Birthday
Today seems an appropriate day to celebrate Apollo and the nine Muses.
From a website on Balanchine's and Stravinsky's ballet, "Apollon Musagete":
In his Poetics of Music (1942) Stravinsky says: "Summing up: What is important for the lucid ordering of the work– for its crystallization– is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the life-sap rise must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally be made to submit to the law: Apollo demands it." Stravinsky conceived Apollo as a ballet blanc– a "white ballet" with classical choreography and monochromatic attire. Envisioning the work in his mind's eye, he found that "the absence of many-colored hues and of all superfluities produced a wonderful freshness." Upon first hearing Apollo, Diaghilev found it "music somehow not of this world, but from somewhere else above." The ballet closes with an Apotheosis in which Apollo leads the Muses towards Parnassus. Here, the gravely beautiful music with which the work began is truly recapitulated "on high"– ceaselessly recycled, frozen in time.
— Joseph Horowitz
Another website invoking Apollo:
The icon that I use… is the nine-fold square…. The nine-fold square has centre, periphery, axes and diagonals. But all are present only in their bare essentials. It is also a sequence of eight triads. Four pass through the centre and four do not. This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason….
In accordance with these remarks, here is the underlying structure for a ballet blanc:
This structure may seem too simple to support movements of interest, but consider the following (click to enlarge):
As Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, paraphrasing Horace, remarks in his Whitsun, 1939, preface to the new edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse, "tamen usque recurret Apollo."
The alert reader will note that in the above diagrams, only eight of the positions move.
Which muse remains at the center?
Consider the remark of T. S. Eliot, "At the still point, there the dance is," and the fact that on the day Eliot turned 60, Olivia Newton-John was born. How, indeed, in the words of another "sixty-year-old smiling public man," can we know the dancer from the dance?
Birthday of T. S. Eliot,
George Gershwin,
and Olivia Newton-John
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
In time the Rockies may crumble
Gibraltar may tumble
They’re only made of clay….
— Ira Gershwin
 |
In honor of Tom and George (not to mention Olivia) the muse of dance, Terpsichore, suggests that today we recall Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron as they dance by the Seine in “An American in Paris.” |
Today is also the birthday of Martin Heidegger, author of Being and Time. In honor of Heidegger and his girlfriend Hannah Arendt, I looked for a rendition of “Our Love is Here to Stay” on the glockenspiel, but could not find one. The birthday song “Las Mañanitas” will therefore have to do for Tom, George, Olivia, and Martin, as well as Michael and Catherine (see Sept. 25 note below).
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