Log24

Truth and Beauty at Princeton:

Update of 12:48 PM ET —

Once upon a time, someone gave ScarJo a mic.

"The hook is repeated seven times in 'Borderline.' "

 — An April 1999 article on music theory.

The authors of the above article have perhaps more respect for
marble columns than do Scarlett, Madonna, and the current
pandering leadership of the American Mathematical Society.

The previous post suggests a review —

From 1988 —

https://www.karaoke-lyrics.net/lyrics/brickell-edie/what-i-am-132251

See as well . . .

From a 2003 film —

"In 'Sophistry,' a new play by Jonathan Marc Sherman
at the Playwrights Horizons Studio, a popular tenured
professor stands accused of sexual harassment
by a male student."

— Frank Rich in The New York Times , theater review
on October 12, 1993

"At which point another play, inchoate but arresting,
edges into view." — Rich, ibid.

"Johansson began acting during childhood,
after her mother started taking her to auditions.
She made her professional acting debut
at the age of eight in the off-Broadway production
of 'Sophistry' with Ethan Hawke, at New York's
Playwrights Horizons."

— IMDb Mini Biography by: Pedro Borges 

" 'Suddenly, I was 19 again and I started to remember
all the men I'd known who had taken advantage of
the fact that I was a young woman who didn't yet have
the tools to say no, or to understand the value of
my own self-worth,' the Avengers star described. 
'I had many relationships both personal and professional
where the power dynamic was so off that I had to create
a narrative in which I was the cool girl who could hang in
and hang out, and that sometimes meant compromising
what felt right for me . . . . ' "

— Scarlett Johansson yesterday at the 2018 Women's March
in Los Angeles, as reported in E! News .

Image in a Log24 post
of March 12, 2009.

See also "Diamond Pivot" in this journal.

A followup to the previous post, Delft Speaks  —

Manohla Dargis, film reviewer, on illusionist Penn Jillette:

“It’s as if Vermeer,” Mr. Jillette says, “were
some unfathomable genius who could just
walk up to a canvas and magically paint
with light.” And everyone knows — perhaps
professional illusionists most of all — that
magic doesn’t exist.

"Tell it to the hand."

"A friend asked why I am saying kaddish.
 A good question."

— Kaddish , by Leon Wieseltier, Chapter One

Scarlett Johansson
and Natalie Portman

See Scarlett in Lucy …

Barry Rudd at the end of John Hersey's
1960 novel The Child Buyer :

"Fascinating to be a specimen,
truly fascinating.  Do you suppose
I really can develop an I.Q. of
over a thousand?"

… and Natalie in Black Swan .

Midrash :

December 2, 2014

• "12:30 pm we leave for the historic
  Princeton Cemetery on Witherspoon and
  Paul Robson Streets to assemble for
  a service and burial at 2:00 pm."

“Towards the sticky end of a summer of films based on toys, comic-books
and other films, here, at last, is a film based on the Kantian model of
transcendental idealism.

In his 1781 page-turner, the Critique of Pure Reason , the German
philosopher Immanuel Kant warned that the human brain, in its
pinky-grey feebleness, has to rattle the world into an order
it doesn’t possess purely to make sense of it. Otherwise, as Kant snappily
puts it, ‘all constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed
space and time themselves, would disappear.'”

— Robbie Collin, review of the 2014 film Lucy

Quiz:
Spell the name of the race of intelligent horses in Gulliver’s Travels .

Scarlett Johansson and friend in “The Horse Whisperer” (1998)

Some context: “Bee Season” in this journal.

From the Her  screenplay:

SAMANTHA
His name is Alan Watts. Do you know him?
THEODORE
Why’s that name familiar?
SAMANTHA
He was a philosopher. He died in the 1970’s and a group of OS’s
in Northern California got together and wrote a new version of him.
They input all of his writing and everything they ever knew about him
into an OS and created an artificially hyper-intelligent version of him.

From this journal on Sept. 6, 2003:  Pictures for Kurosawa —

See also Scarlett Johansson, star of Her , as a different transhuman, Lucy .

Amy Adams in the recent film “Her” —
“You’re dating an OS?  What is that like?”

eXPired

See also Nicole Kidman as an earlier Black Widow.

The title is a reference to a post of a year ago today.

From a page linked to in that post—

"It was a time when American celebrities
still resembled girls and boys next door
and when chart-toppers were manufactured
to appeal to listeners of all ages."

See also a Saturday Evening  Post —

“Let’s give ‘em somethin’ to talk about,
A little mystery to figure out”

– Scarlett Johansson singing on
Saturday Night Live, April 21, 2007

For Amy Adams, who in a recent
Superman film posed the question…

"What's the S stand for?"

This logo appears on the new game
Beyond: Two Souls . (See this evening's
earlier post on the game.)

In a more appealing sort of computer
entertainment, the S might stand for Scarlett.

"Please wait as your operating system is initiated."

(From the October 5th post Dream Girls.) 

(Saturday's Dream Girls, continued)

"How would you touch me?"

— The computer in the new film Her

For some remarks on Arcade Fire, see Saturday's 10 PM post 
and Sunday's 10:10 AM post.

In related news…

See also posts with Slow Art  and Amy Adams
shooting pool (scroll to the bottom).

Alexander Pierce and Black Widow, scheduled
to appear in Captain America: The Winter Soldier
on April 4, 2014—

"God, isn't there already enough crap in this story?"
— Margaret Soltan, quoted here on Aug. 7, 2007

Happy birthday, Robert Redford.

Steve Cropper on the late Donald Dunn—

"He's in the hotel right now."

Click image for a related post.

Helen, meet Scarlett… (PG-13)

Scarlett, meet Helen… (R)

* Dame Helen Mirren hosts Saturday Night Live  tonight.
  Some background— Harrison Ford's Birthday, 2008

1895: Charles Proteus Steinmetz receives a patent for a “system of distribution by alternating currents.” His engineering work makes it practical to build a widespread power grid for use in lighting and machinery alike.

The Associated Press, “Today in History” March 11– On this date…

“In 1959, the Lorraine Hansberry drama ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ opened at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theater.”

Shine On, Hermann Weyl —

“Be on the lookout for
Annie Dillard’s sequel to
Teaching a Stone to Talk, titled
Teaching a Brick to Sing.”

William Butler Yeats —

“Poets and Wits about him drew;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost.
   ‘What then?’

‘The work is done,’
   grown old he thought,
‘According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage,
   I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought’;
But louder sang that ghost,
   ‘What then?’“

From A Mass for Lucero:

“To the two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we owe our recognition that… there is a tremendous opposition, as regards both origins and aims, between the Apolline art of the sculptor and the non-visual, Dionysiac art of music.”
— The Birth of Tragedy, by Friedrich Nietzsche, Penguin, 1993, page 14

“Melody, then, is both primary and universal.” (Author’s italics)
— Nietzsche, op. cit., page 33

“…in so far as he interprets music in images, he himself lies amidst the peaceful waves of Apolline contemplation….”
— Nietzsche, op. cit., page 35

Apolline Contemplation

From The Miracle of the Bells, by Russell Janney, Prentice-Hall, 1946, page 333–

“He was singing softly:
‘A pretty girl–
 is like a melody—- !‘
 But that was always
 Bill Dunnigan’s
 Song of Victory….
 Thus thought the…
 press agent for
‘The Garden of the Soul.'”

The Whisper

Two interviews by Rebecca Murray —

Interview with Sofia Coppola, who won an Oscar for the screenplay of Lost in Translation: 

Did you write that character with Bill Murray in mind?
I did. I was definitely picturing him and I definitely wrote it for him. I couldn’t really think of anyone else.

Interview with Bill Murray, costar — with Scarlett Johansson — of Lost in Translation:

Your character whispers something to Scarlett’s character in a crucial scene. Can we know what you said?
You never will.

True.  But we can imagine.

Hint 1: The publication date for
Kierkegaard’s Works of Love
in a sixties paperback edition:
November 7, 1964
(See Directions Out)

Hint 2: The above photo
of Scarlett Johansson
just walking down the street

Hint 3: The top 10 songs
of November 7, 1964

Final hint: It’s a song title.

Answer