Log24

"The heart of the doctor's show is a magic mirror that allows
those who go through it to experience another dimension of
their own minds. Once inside, people choose for good or evil,
opting for — to give one example — either the difficult but
rewarding heights of Mt. Parnassus or the easy pleasures of
Mr. Nick's Lounge Bar. As the doctor angrily puts it when asked
what he's playing at, 'We don't play, what we do is deadly serious,' 
which means nothing less than the eternal battle with the devil
for the spirit of man."

— Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times  film critic, Christmas Day 2009,
reviewing "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus."

In terms that might interest the late museum director of the previous post …

Quoted here from The New Criterion  on June 2, 2017 —

Quoted here from The New York Times  on June 1, 2017 —

MoMA’s Makeover Rethinks the Presentation of Art

"The new design calls for more gallery space and a transformed
main lobby, physical changes that, along with the re-examination
of art collections and diversity, represent an effort to open up MoMA
and break down the boundaries defined by its founder, Alfred Barr.

'It’s a rethinking of how we were originally conceived,' Glenn D. Lowry,
the museum’s director, said in an interview at MoMA. 'We had created
a narrative for ourselves that didn’t allow for a more expansive reading
of our own collection, to include generously artists from very different
backgrounds.'"

“Where past and future are gathered” — T. S. Eliot

From a recent film —

From the Museum of Modern Art —

From this journal 10 years ago today —

This morning's post has the following from Borges—

"Yo sé de un laberinto griego que es una línea única, recta."
 —Borges, "La Muerte y la Brújula"

This suggests a search for "bruja brújula" (witch compass).

The search yields a Facebook page that leads, in turn, to Lhasa de Sela—

A search for material in this journal from the date of her death, 1/1/10, yields

The Celestine Dream, with its text on Doctor Parnassus  and its image from Shutter Island —

     Click to enlarge this item from Christmas 2009.

All this is by way of commentary on the April-30-to-May-1 Walpurgisnacht-to-May-Day scenes in Disney's Fantasia … which I watched last night.

I had not known anything about Lhasa de Sela until this morning, but in the combined context of Fantasia  and of Russia's Victory Day observances today, her song "Los Peces" seems worth noting.

* For the title, see Celestine Bohlen on the Bolshoi Ballet.

(Pace  James Redfield)

"…after all, the word 'bolshoi' means big, great or grand."

— Celestine Bohlen, 1999

"How much for a dream?" — This journal, January 1, 2010

Star of Bolshoi Ballet Dies at 102

                                                                  I was eight—
I saw the different weights of things,
saw the vivid performance of the present,
saw the light rippling almost shuddering where her body finally
                                                                                     touched
the image, the silver film between them like something that would have
                                                                           shed itself in nature now
but wouldn’t, couldn’t, here, on tight,
between, not thinning, not slipping off to let some
                                                                       seed-down
through, no signal in it, no information …

— Jorie Graham, "The Dream of the Unified Field"

Update of 10:25 AM June 10— Click to enlarge—