Log24

"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Update of 1:28 PM ET on November 19, 2024 —

"The decadent legacy of Berlin between the World Wars,
and that of the American speak-easy era, have left their marks
on fashion, of course. At the Golden Globes on Sunday night,
Nicole Kidman incarnated the steamy eroticism of the Weimar
years in a clingy 20's-style gold-spangled dress by Tom Ford for
YSL Rive Gauche. Ms. Kidman's illusion top, with its suggestion
of nudity, set tongues wagging well into the next day."

— By Ruth La Ferla, The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2004

The title is from this morning's online New York Times  review
of a new Jackie Chan film.

Click the image below for some related posts.

Nicole Kidman at the end of
“Hemingway & Gellhorn” (2012)

This post is thanks to Nicole Kidman …

E! Online  today reminds us that "Bowie's song 'Nature Boy' 
was ... featured in Kidman's 2001 film Moulin Rouge ."

A YouTube video of the Moulin Rouge  "Nature Boy"
was uploaded on April 1, 2011. That date in this journal —

James Joyce reportedly died on today's date in 1941.

… and for Anthony Hopkins and a Black Widow,
as well as for a filmmaker who reportedly died on May 19.

Update of 4:48 PM ET:  See also Philip Roth on an ambiguity.

* The title was suggested in part by a series of Isaac Asimov mysteries.

See also Nicole Kidman as an earlier Black Widow.

Or: Chinny-Chin-Chin .

This post will be meaningless unless you
have seen the recent film "R.I.P.D.," starring
James Hong and Jeff Bridges.

(In that film, two deceased lawmen appear to 
the living in disguised form— as Hong, and 
as Bridges in the guise of a major babe.)

From the AP Today in History  page
for October 29, 2013 —

On this date in:
1967 The musical "Hair" opened off-Broadway.

This, together with the Halloween season and
"R.I.P.D.," suggests a bizarre show:

"And there we were all in one place,
A generation lost in space…"
– Don McLean, "American Pie" 

The show would star Cybill Shepherd and Jeff Bridges
as, respectively, Jackie Chan and Nicole Kidman in…

V.I.P.D.

See also some related posts with Jeff Bridges.

Backstory: Sermon (Nov. 18,  2012) and
Eternal Recreation (Dec. 24, 2012).

"We've lost the plot!" — "Slipstream."  Small wonder.

(The final quote above is bogus. Stevens did write "Death is the mother 
of beauty," but the "perishable" part is from a lesser poet, Billy Collins.)

For the duende  of this post's title, see a dance.

The dance suggests a 1956 passage by Robert Silverberg—

"There was something in the heart of the diamond—
not the familiar brown flaw of the others, but something
of a different color, something moving and flickering.
Before my eyes, it changed and grew.

And I saw what it was. It was the form of a girl—
a woman, rather, a voluptuous, writhing nude form
in the center of the gem. Her hair was a lustrous blue-black,
her eyes a piercing ebony. She was gesturing to me,
holding out her hands, incredibly beckoning from within
the heart of the diamond.

I felt my legs go limp. She was growing larger, coming closer,
holding out her arms, beckoning, calling—

She seemed to fill the room. The diamond grew to gigantic size,
and my brain whirled and bobbed in dizzy circles.
I sensed the overpowering, wordless call."

— "Guardian of the Crystal Gate," August 1956

For similar gestures, see Nicole Kidman's dance in "The Human Stain."

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment
of our intelligence by means of our language." — Wittgenstein

"You've got to pick up every stitch…
Must be the season of the witch."
— Donovan song at the end of Nicole Kidman's "To Die For"

Today's morning post, Rubric, suggests a check
of Alexander Bogomolny's tweets:

Clicking the hint leads to Bogomolny's Ambiguities in Plain Language:

See also, in this  journal, alea  (which appears within the derived word "aleatory").

(Continued)

Update of 1 AM Saturday—

On the late Frank Moore Cross, biblical scholar—

"When you walked into his classes, you felt
you were on the frontier of knowledge in the field,"
said Peter Machinist, who studied under Dr. Cross
as an undergraduate at Harvard and now holds
the endowed professorship† there that Dr. Cross
had held until his retirement in 1992.

For religious remarks from a different Machinist,
see a post of July 24, 2012…

† Click link for a condition on the professorship that was
    apparently met by Cross, but that has perhaps not 
    been met by Machinist, a rather rabbinical figure.

Wednesday's Marginal Remarks pictured Robert De Niro
and Sean Penn in "We're No Angels." De Niro appeared
again in a Saturday Night Live sketch linked to
in last night's 9:29 post.

Here are some remarks featuring Penn related to
Peter J. Cameron's description yesterday of Sudoku
as an example of mathematics.

(Recall that the symbol #, known as 'hash,"
can stand for checkmate.)

For a sample chess problem, see a post from Oct. 10, 2005,
the day that the Sudoku remark Cameron describes was
in the news.

But seriously—
Degreeless Noon—

Click to enlarge.
“My card.”

Related material:

"Start the new year off with a new job at Pheedo."

See January 1, 2, 3 of 2010.

Godfather

"Mr. Messina is no ordinary Twitter user. The self-described
'hash godfather,' he officially invented the Twitter hashtag
in August 2007…."

— Ashley Parker (page ST1 of tomorrow's
    NY Times  National Edition)

But seriously—
Degreeless Noon—

Click to enlarge.
“My card.”

ART WARS
continued:

Sontag’s Sermon

Sources:
This morning’s Log24 entry,
today’s New York Times Magazine,
and today’s Doonesbury.

Related material:

My Life among the Deathworks:
Illustrations of the
Aesthetics of Authority,
by Philip Rieff,
Sontag’s ex-husband.

See also Nicole Kidman in
the 2004 remake of
The Stepford Wives.

Three in One

This evening’s earlier entry, “Homer,” is meant in part as a tribute to three goddess-figures from the world of film.  But there is one actress who combines the intelligence of Judy Davis with the glamour of Nicole Kidman and the goodness of Kate Winslet– Perhaps the only actress who could have made me cry Stella! as if I were Brando…. Piper Laurie.

Homer

“No matter how it’s done, you won’t like it.”
— Robert Redford to Robert M. Pirsig in Lila

“The evening before Harriet injures Roy,
she asks him, in a restaurant car,
whether he has read Homer.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural

“Brush Up Your Shakespeare”
— Cole Porter lyric for a show that opened
on December 30, 1948

Judy Davis as Harriet Bird

                                        

Thine eyes I love…
Shakespeare, Sonnet 132

“Roy’s Guenevere-like lover is named Memo Paris,
presumably the face that launched a thousand strikes.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural 

Nicole Kidman
as Memo Paris

“Iris is someone to watch over Roy.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural 

Kate Winslet as young Iris Murdoch

From the second-draft screenplay
for The Sting,
with Robert Redford as Hooker:

HOOKER
(shuffling a little)
I, ah…thought you might wanna come out for a while.  Maybe have a drink or somethin’.

LORETTA
You move right along, don’t ya.

HOOKER
(with more innocence than confidence)
I don’t mean nothin’ by it.  I just don’t know many regular girls, that’s all.

LORETTA
And you expect me to come over, just like that.

HOOKER
If I expected somethin’, I wouldn’t be still standin’ out here in the hall.

Loretta looks at him carefully.  She knows it’s not a line.

LORETTA
(with less resistance now)
I don’t even know you.

HOOKER
(slowly)
You know me.  I’m just like you…
It’s two in the morning and I don’t know nobody.

The two just stand there in silence a second.  There’s nothing more to say.  She stands back and lets him in.

Iris Murdoch on Plato’s Form of the Good,
by Joseph Malikail:

“For Murdoch as for Plato, the Good belongs to Plato’s Realm of Being not the Realm of Becoming…. However, Murdoch does not read Plato as declaring his faith in a divine being when he says that the Good is

the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and the lord of light in the visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which [one who] would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eyes fixed (Republic…).

Though she acknowledges the influence of Simone Weil in her reading of Plato, her understanding of Plato on Good and God is not Weil’s (1952, ch.7)*. For Murdoch,

Plato never identified his Form of the Good with God (the use of theos in the Republic… is a façon de parler), and this separation is for him an essential one. Religion is above the level of the ‘gods.’ There are no gods and no God either. Neo-Platonic thinkers made the identification (of God with good) possible; and the Judaeo-Christian tradition has made it easy and natural for us to gather together the aesthetic and consoling impression of Good as a person (1992, 38)**.

As she understands Plato:

The Form of the Good as creative power is not a Book of Genesis creator ex nihilo … Plato does not set up the Form of the Good as God, this would be absolutely un-Platonic, nor does he anywhere give the sign of missing or needing a real God to assist his explanations. On the contrary, Good is above the level of the gods or God (ibid., 475)**.

Mary Warnock, her friend and fellow-philosopher, sums up Murdoch’s metaphysical view of the Vision of the Good:

She [Murdoch] holds that goodness has a real though abstract existence in the world. The actual existence of goodness is, in her view, the way it is now possible to understand the idea of God.

Or as Murdoch herself puts it, ‘Good represents the reality of which God is the dream.’ (1992, 496)**”

*Weil, Simone. 1952. Intimations of Christianity Among The Ancient Greeks. Ark Paperbacks, 1987/1952.

**Murdoch, Iris. 1992. Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals. London: Chatto and Windus. 

From the conclusion of Lila,
by Robert M. Pirsig:

“Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer over the fence that ended the ballgame.”