From The New York Times this afternoon —
Transylvania III, a 1973 tapestry made of horsehair and goat hair.
Backstory —
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
Saturday, April 22, 2023
De Facto
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Monday, April 3, 2023
Sunday, July 10, 2022
Annals of Strange Fiction: Words and Games
Alice illustration by Lily Padula . . .
Related material —
Category theory at The New Yorker :
/science/elements
/science
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Saturday, July 9, 2022
Strange Fiction
"You can work in the undercroft." — Doctor Strange
A related geographical note —
See also "Swiftly Tilting Planet" in this journal.
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Monday, May 2, 2022
Art Wars
"Moon Knight" will conclude at 3 AM ET Wednesday.
Related art —
Related cinematic art — ("Tomb Raider," 2018) —
An image that some — perhaps even Uncle Walt himself —
might prefer to the above depiction of Lara Croft —
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Wednesday, March 16, 2022
Midnight Memorial
"On a crisp Fall morning…." — The late Maureen Howard, writer of fiction.
Non-fiction: Feb. 19, 2022,
https://news.yahoo.com/frances-haugen-
on-meta-headquarters-122958675.html —
FRANCES HAUGEN: To give you a sense of how absurd the space is,
so Facebook is obsessed with 15 and 30-minute meetings. It's like they're
very efficient, everyone's– they're obsessed with the word crisp, like are
your documents crisp, is your explanation crisp? The space is so large that
I would regularly walk 15 minutes, 10, 15 minutes to go to a 30-minute meeting.
And again, fiction . . .
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Wednesday, January 19, 2022
Tuesday, January 18, 2022
LA Story
November 2020, billboard at La Brea Chevron — His Dark Materials :
December 2020, same billboard — TENET :
November 2021, Croft House to the above Chevron station :
"All we want are the facts." — Jack Webb
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Sunday, November 4, 2018
Dead Poet
The New York Times today on a poet, Judith Kazantzis,
"who died on Sept. 18 at 78" —
"Judith’s oldest sister is Antonia Fraser, the biographer
and novelist and widow of the playwright Harold Pinter."
"Her [Judith’s] death was confirmed by Andy Croft, who runs
Smokestack Books, the publisher of 'Sister Intervention' [sic* ]
(2014), Ms. Kazantzis’ last collection of poetry. He did not
specify the cause or where she died."
Notable lines from that book's poem "In the Garden" —
Two trees of life, not in the woods,
but in the garden.
See also the post "Death Day" in this journal on Sept. 18.
* The title is actually "Sister Invention ."
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Sunday, June 3, 2018
“Use the Source, Luke”
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Wednesday February 18, 2009
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.
“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.”
Sorvino in “The Last Templar”
at the Church of the Lost Well:
at the Church of the Lost Well:
“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:
“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.
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.)
Krauss
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Friday, July 4, 2008
Friday July 4, 2008
REDEMPTION
"I need a photo-opportunity,
I want a shot at redemption.
Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard."
— Paul Simon
From Log24 on June 27, 2008,
the day that comic-book artist
Michael Turner died at 37 —
Van Gogh (by Ed Arno) in
The Paradise of Childhood
(by Edward Wiebé):
For Turner's photo-opportunity,
click on Lara.
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Wednesday, June 8, 2005
Wednesday June 8, 2005
Quest
“Mike Nichols, who oversaw Monty Python’s Spamalot, picked up the prize for directing a musical.
A somewhat flustered Nichols told the audience he had forgotten what he intended to say, but then went on to thank his company and Eric Idle, ‘from whom all blessings flow.'”
One of my
favorite books:
Excerpt from the chapter
“All Blessings Flow (Very Large Array)”–
“I started to cry. My search was over.
In a home for the deranged I had found
the last of the holy Thirty-Six….
‘Beam me up, Scotty.'”
Related material:
In memory of Anne Bancroft
and her work in
84 Charing Cross Road —
and her work in
84 Charing Cross Road —
entries of Dec. 11-13, 2002,
and entries of
All Souls’ Day, 2004,
and of June 8, 2003.
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Friday, March 12, 2004
Friday March 12, 2004
Bush’s Stalinist Justice
From Ashcroft the Nihilist:
“… victims had no idea just how rigged the federal court system really has become until they actually were in the dock, protesting their innocence (which federal law also has deemed a crime – see the Martha Stewart case). They had no idea that federal prosecutors can legally suborn perjury (called “statements of interest”) and that judges are sickeningly pro-government to the point where they are simply another arm of the prosecution. And they had no idea that their trial would differ only in name but not in substance from the famed Stalinist show trials of the late 1930s.”
This note commemorates Communist author Howard Fast (Spartacus), who died one year ago today.
“In the memoir Being Red, published in 1990, Fast wrote: ‘In the party I found ambition, narrowness and hatred; I also found love and dedication and high courage and integrity — and some of the noblest human beings I have ever
“Fast wrote critically about Soviet leader Josef Stalin and left the party after the Soviet Union’s crushing of an uprising in Hungary.” — CBS News
Howard Fast was twice the man George W. Bush is, since Bush’s Stalinist justice department makes him, at best, half-Fast.
(See, too, yesterday’s entry A Half-Right Leader.)