Randy Kennedy in tomorrow's print edition
of The New York Times—

Art collector Albert C. Barnes "viewed his foundation
less as a museum than as a school."

Roberta Smith in the New York Times 
print edition of May 18, 2012, on
art arrangements by Albert C. Barnes—

"Barnes’s arrangements are as eye-opening,
intoxicating and, at times, maddening as ever, maybe more so.
They mix major and minor in relentlessly symmetrical patchworks
that argue at once for the idea of artistic genius and the
pervasiveness of talent. Nearly every room is an exhibition
unto itself— a kind of art wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities…."

This journal at noon on the same day, May 18, 2012—

Balakrishnan's Banners

See also Brightness at Noon from March 25.

"Time is a weapon, it's cold and it's cruel"
— Lyrics: Max D. Barnes. Singer: Ray Price.

The New York Times  in September 1949 —

CANNES, France, Sept. 17 (AP) — A. British-made film
with two American stars won the Grand Prize of the
Cannes Film Festival, judges announced today.
The film was "The Third Man," starring Joseph Cotten,
Valli, Orson Welles and Siegfried Breuer. 
VIEW FULL ARTICLE IN TIMESMACHINE »

The Wikipedia article on Christoper Knight, the LA Times  art critic 
in tonight's previous post, leads to . . .

    See as well Barnes in this  journal.

"Reviewing Ms. Allen’s staging of Ibsen’s
'When We Dead Awaken'
at Stage West in 1977, Mr. Barnes wrote that
it had 'speed, conviction and perception.'"

— Richard Sandomir today reviewing the life of Rae Allen.

From the conclusion of that Ibsen play —

"Pax vobiscum."

See as well the YouTube comments below, on Allen
in the film version (1958) of "Damn Yankees" —

See a review of the new Anne Tyler novel Clock Dance
in today's  online New York Times .

For a more abstract dance, see Ballet Blanc .

"A blank underlies the trials of device." — Wallace Stevens

In memory of record producer Ken Barnes,
author of Sinatra and the Great Song Stylists ,
who reportedly died at 82 on August 4, 2015 —

"Incantatory elegiac power"* in the context of
Log24 posts from August 2-4, 2015, that are
now tagged Stevens Owl. 

* Phrase by an academic in Antwerp

From the evening of Monday, July 27, 2015:

"SEATTLE (AP) — True-crime writer Ann Rule… has died at age 83.
Rule died at Highline Medical Center at 10:30 p.m. Sunday [July 26],
said Scott Thompson, a spokesman for CHI Franciscan Health."

I prefer fictional  crime… for instance, crime described by the late
Patricia Highsmith.  Photos show that Highsmith had, at times, 

"… that look on a face we follow like a witch-fire."
— Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

See also Log24 posts on the evening of Sunday, July 26, tagged Cauldron.

“The Transfiguration of Christ is the culminating point of His public life…. Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them to a high mountain apart, where He was transfigured before their ravished eyes.  St. Matthew and St. Mark express this phenomenon by the word metemorphothe, which the Vulgate renders transfiguratus est.   The Synoptics explain the true meaning of the word by adding ‘his face did shine as the sun: and his garments became white as snow,’ according to the Vulgate, or ‘as light,’  according to the Greek text.  This dazzling brightness which emanated from His whole Body was produced by an interior shining of His Divinity.”

— The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912

From Broken Symmetries, 1983, Chapter 16:

“He’d toyed with ‘psi’ himself…. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand– for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox….   

Peter [Slater] had never thirsted after ‘hidden variables’ to explain what could not be pictured.  Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once.  It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods….

Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem– they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry.”

Zeros

Related reading:

“Love is strong as death.”

Related viewing:

Today is the birthday of
Deborah Kerr and also
Translators’ Day.

Church Architecture

In memory of Harvard-trained
architect Edward Larrabee Barnes

From Martha Cooley’s The Archivist,
April 1999 paperback, page 301:

For related design issues
at Harvard, click here.

Song of the Father

The death of Max D. Barnes (previous entry) and the opening of the first Tennessee lottery suggested the following meditations.

Wikipedia on Jimmie Rodgers, known as the father of country music:

“Fundamentally, Rodgers was a white blues singer….”

A song by the father of country music:

T for Texas, T for Tennessee,
T for Texas, T for Tennessee,
T for Thelma, that gal
made a wreck out of me.

Gonna buy me a shotgun,
long as I am tall,
Buy me a shotgun,
long as I am tall,
Gonna shoot po’ Thelma,
just to see her jump and fall.

From Wikipedia:

“In modern Western popular music, call and response is most commonly found in the blues and in blues-derived music like jazz and rock’n’roll.”

If Rodgers’s song is the call, what, one wonders, would be the appropriate response?

In Memory of Max D. Barnes:

Time and Chance

Barnes, a songwriter,
died on 1/11/04.

Related material:

Fearful Meditation (8/1/03),

Time is a Weapon (9/26/03), and

In Summary (1/11/04).

Time is a Weapon

“Time is a weapon, it’s cold and it’s cruel.”

— Max D. Barnes song lyric,
sung by Ray Price
(See Aug. 1, 2003, entry.)

3:57

was the time of yesterday afternoon’s entry,

Aloha.

“Only through time time is conquered.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

The Shining of Park Place

Today is the birthday of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., writer, dean of Harvard Medical School, father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and author of at least seven hymns.

It is also the feast day of Saint Lewis Henry Redner, author of the tune now known as “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”  Redner was church organist for Phillips Brooks, who wrote the “Bethlehem” lyrics but then published the hymn under the facetious name “St. Louis,” a deliberate misspelling of Redner’s name.

Redner died on August 29, 1908, at the Marlborough Hotel in Atlantic City.

Since Holmes Sr. was both a poet and the father of a famous lawyer, a reference to poet-lawyer Wallace Stevens seems in order.

To wit:

“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel
instead of the hymns….”

— Wallace Stevens,
“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”

From Best Atlantic City Hotels:

Bally’s Park Place, located at Park Place and Boardwalk, partially stands on the site of the former Marlborough Hotel.

For some background on the theology of hotels, see Stephen King’s classic The Shining and my own note, Shining Forth.

Let us pray that any haunting at the current Park Place and Boardwalk location is done by the blessed spirit of Saint Lewis Redner.

Atlantic City

Bally’s Park Place

Wallace Stevens

Postscript of 7:11 PM —

From an old Dave Barry column:

“Beth thinks the casinos should offer more of what she described as ‘fun’ games, the type of entertainment-for-the-whole-family activities that people engage in to happily while away the hours. If Beth ran a casino, there would be a brightly lit table surrounded by high rollers in tuxedos and evening gowns, and the air would be charged with excitement as a player rolled the dice, and the crowd would lean forward, and the shout would ring out…

‘He landed on Park Place!’ “

Charles Lindbergh seems to have done
just that.  See yesterday’s entry

Spirit

and today’s New York Times story

Lindbergh the Family Man.

Every Boy Has a Daddy

Today is the Feast of Saint Peter.

The most timely quote I know of for today’s religious observances is from Oh What a Web They Weave, by F. John Loughnan:

“Every boy has a daddy.“

This was written as part of an attack on the father of a Latin-Mass Catholic who authored the website Ecclesia Militans, which has the logo

Note the resemblance to the Iron Cross.

Soldier of Fortune magazine, April 2002, contains a brief discussion of the German motto “Gott mit uns” that is relevant to the concept of The Church Militant.

Soldier of Fortune,
April 2002

The actor on the cover, Mel Gibson, also serves to illustrate our meditation for today, “Every boy has a daddy.”  See Christopher Noxon’s article in the New York Times Magazine of March 9, 2003:

Is the Pope Catholic… Enough?

Noxon attacks Gibson’s father Hutton — like his son Mel, a Latin-Mass Catholic, and author of

Is the Pope Catholic?

A related “Every boy has a daddy” attack appears in the June 2003 issue of Playboy magazine.  An entertaining excerpt from this attack on Joseph P. Kennedy, father of JFK, may be found at Orwell Today.  

Finally, let us meditate on the ultimate “Every boy has a daddy” attack — by novelist Robert Stone on the alleged father of Jesus of Nazareth:

The New York Times Magazine article mentioned above was prompted, in part, by Mel Gibson’s current movie production, “The Passion,” about the final 12 hours in the (first, or possibly second) life of Jesus.  If I were producing a Passion play, as Peter I would certainly cast Stone.

See also the 11 PM sequel to the above.

Meditation for Friday the 13th

The 1946 British film below (released as “Stairway to Heaven” in the U.S.) is one of my favorites.  I saw it as a child. Since costar Kim Hunter died this week (on 9/11), and since today is Friday the 13th, the following material seems relevant.

The doctor in “A Matter of Life and Death” addresses a heavenly court on behalf of his patient, R.A.F pilot David Niven:

In the film, David Niven is saved by mistake from a fated death and his doctor must argue to a heavenly court that he be allowed to live.

In a similar situation, I would want Dr. Alan McGlashan, a real-life psychiatrist, on my side.  For an excerpt from one of my favorite books, McGlashan’s The Savage and Beautiful Country,

click here.

As Walker Percy has observed (see my Sept. 7 note, “The Boys from Uruguay”), a characteristic activity of human beings is what Percy called “symbol-mongering.”  In honor of today’s anniversary of the births of two R.A.F. fighter pilots,

Sir Peter Guy Wykeham-Barnes (b. 1915) and author

Roald Dahl (b. 1916),

here is one of the better symbols of the past century:

The circle is of course a universal symbol, and can be made to mean just about whatever one wants it to mean.  In keeping with Clint Eastwood’s advice, in the soundtrack album for “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” to “accentuate the positive,” here are some positive observations on a circle from the poet (and perhaps saint) Dante, who died on the night of September 13-14:

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. Their love for God is kindled even more and grows as they find more individuals to love. Among the blessed souls are St. Thomas Aquinas and one of his intellectual “enemies”, Siger of Brabant, a brilliant philosopher at the University of Paris, some of whose teachings were condemned as heretical. Conflicts and divisions on earth are now forgotten and absorbed into a communal love song and dance “whose sweetness and harmony are unknown on earth and whose joy becomes one with eternity.”

Dante compares their dance and song to God’s bride on earth, the Church, when she answers the morning bells to rise from bed and “woo with matins song her Bridegroom’s love.” Some critics consider this passage the most “spiritually erotic” of all the one hundred cantos of the Comedy. It is the ending of Canto 10, verses 139-148.

— Fr. James J. Collins, “The Spiritual Journey with Dante V,” Priestly People October 1997

The above material on Dante is from the Servants of the Paraclete website.

For more on the Paraclete, see

The Left Hand of God.

See also the illustration in the note below.

After the Fall

“We’re in a war of words.”

— Andy Rooney, undated column 

Photo credit – Graham Kuhn

I’ve heard of affairs that are strictly plutonic,
But diamonds are a girl’s best friend!

— Marilyn Monroe, modeling a Freudian slip 

You may have noticed at Strike Force Centre or at StrikeForce.dk that “After the Fall” will be released as a Team Deathmatch map for Strike Force.

— Plutonic Design

Today’s birthday:  Fiddler Mark O’Connor.

A Ken Burns Catechism

Q – How do you get to Ashokan?

A – Take a left at Beaverkill Road.

Recommended listening:

 “The Devil Comes Back to Georgia,” 

“House of the Rising Sun,” and

“Ashokan Farewell,” on

Mark O’Connor’s Heroes album.