Log24

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

“A Fair Thought” — Hamlet

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:56 pm

"Nothing can come from nothing," or
"Ex nihilo nihil fit " — Classic adage

"Creation is the birth of something, and
something cannot come from nothing."
Photographer Peter Lindbergh

See as well Peter Lindbergh's short film of
Emma Watson with goat and horse.

"Elemental, my dear Watson."

Saturday, October 14, 2023

“Sally go round the sun,
Sally go round the moon….”

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:18 pm

Related material —

And then there is Goddard College . . .

"Seeing the potential in an idea is everything."
https://www.goddard.edu/person/darrah-cloud/

" Cloud’s father once asked her why he was paying tuition
if she was working at Goddard for free. Her reply?
'I can’t tell you — all I know is I can drive an ambulance now.' ”

Sunday, July 30, 2023

The W Omen* Continues . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:11 am

An image from the previous post —

The W image at lower left above suggests a variation —

Vogue — Promotion photo for "Bombshell."


* Title suggested in part by a post of Dec. 11, 2022 —

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

Disney Overtones

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

From other Log24 posts tagged "The Phantom Date" —

“… her mouth is red and large, with Disney overtones. But it is her eyes,
a pale green of surprising intensity, that hold me.”

— Violet Henderson in Vogue , 30 August 2017

Tuesday, March 9, 2021

Alternate Past: LA/91506

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:36 am

(Title suggested by the beanie label "Alternate Future: NYC/10001")

Salinger's 'Nine Stories,' paperback with 3x3 array of titles on cover, adapted in a Jan. 2, 2009, Log24 post on Nabokov's 1948 'Signs and Symbols'

A version of the Salinger story title "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" —

"… her mouth is red and large, with Disney overtones. But it is her eyes,
a pale green of surprising intensity, that hold me."

Violet Henderson in Vogue , 30 August 2017

See also that date in this  journal.

Saturday, January 23, 2021

Tiny Dancer

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:45 am

The above image was suggested by a link in a
Philadelphia Inquirer  obituary from yesterday evening.

Exercise: What is controlled by the middle-finger string?

Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Toy Problems

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:45 am

The above story's conclusion —

" … the current state of the art in quantum computing is still
not quite ready for solving anything but toy problems and
testing basic algorithms."

From "Annals of Square Space" (Log24, Sept. 3, 2019) —

" 'Before I go somewhere for a story, I have a certain understanding of
what form it will take, and when I get there, it’s always far, far more
complicated,' says the journalist and poet Eliza Griswold, over lunch
in Gramercy Park.  'They begin with a neat little bow' — she pantomimes
tying it, her wide blue eyes growing wider — 'and then:  kaboom.' ”

— VOGUE Lives: Eliza Griswold, August 27, 2010, 9:10 AM,
     by Megan O'Grady

Saturday, August 24, 2019

The Tale of  24

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:33 pm

Sunday, October 1, 2017

The Giant Passing

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:11 am

"A giant of the publishing world, and a true believer
in talent and creativity, his passing marks
the end of an era in American media."

— Unsigned "obiturary" in Vogue  online this morning

https://www.vogue.com/article/si-newhouse-obiturary

O for the days of Avedon and Vreeland!  (See Dick Finds Jo ).

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Lucky Number

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Quoted here from Vogue   on August 17, 2013

See also Stations of the Clock.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

A Paris Review

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:56 pm

The half-hour referred to here was from 12 PM ET
to 12:30 PM ET on Friday, April 4, 2014

12 PM at Log24 —

12:30 PM at Princeton —

The New York Times  on an art lecturer who died on Nov. 9 —

She became a Vogue  correspondent in postwar Paris
and worked for art magazines before starting her own,
the celebrated L’Oeil  (The Eye).

See also Obituary Metaphysics from November 11th —

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Celebrity Hurricane

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:29 pm

The New York Times  today on the late LA theater director
Gordon Davidson —

" When Mr. Davidson announced his retirement in 2002,
Mr. Eustis summed up his achievement succinctly.
Mr. Davidson, he told The Los Angeles Times ,
'has managed to make serious theater in the eye of
the celebrity hurricane.' " — William Grimes

From a Google image search today for "Mobius 8 4" Configuration

See also this morning's Square Ice and an image from yesterday's
Recursion Revisited

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Strike a Pose

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:40 pm

Online Vogue  today —

"For the first time, an exhibition at the Kunsthal Rotterdam
'Peter Lindbergh: A Different Vision on Fashion Photography'—
will offer a robust survey of the photographer’s opus."

I find Lindbergh's early work as "Sultan" more interesting.

Monday, May 30, 2016

Perfect Number

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 am

"Ageometretos me eisito."—
"Let no one ignorant of geometry enter."—
Said to be a saying of Plato, part of the
seal of the American Mathematical Society—

For the birthday of Marissa Mayer, who turns 41 today —

VOGUE Magazine,
AUGUST 16, 2013 12:01 AM
by JACOB WEISBERG —

"As she works to reverse the fortunes of a failing Silicon Valley
giant, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer has fueled a national debate
about the office life, motherhood, and what it takes to be the
CEO of the moment.

'I really like even numbers, and
I like heavily divisible numbers.
Twelve is my lucky number—
I just love how divisible it is.
I don’t like odd numbers, and
I really don’t like primes.
When I turned 37,
I put on a strong face, but
I was not looking forward to 37.
But 37 turned out to be a pretty amazing year.
Especially considering that
36 is divisible by twelve!'

A few things may strike you while listening to Marissa Mayer
deliver this riff . . . . "

Yes, they may.

A smaller number for Marissa's meditations:

Six has been known since antiquity as the first "perfect" number.
Why it was so called is of little interest to anyone but historians
of number theory  (a discipline that is not, as Wikipedia notes, 
to be confused with numerology .)

What part geometry , on the other hand, played in Marissa's education,
I do not know.

Here, for what it's worth, is a figure from a review of posts in this journal
on the key role played by the number six in geometry —

Friday, February 19, 2016

Marissa Mayer News

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:45 am

"Have you ever thought about
 the properties of numbers?"

 — "The Maiden" in Shaw's
 Back to Methuselah , quoted in
 the Fritz Leiber Changewar  story
“No Great Magic” (1963), Part V

Friday, November 28, 2014

The Soul of Stanford

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:00 pm

A search for background on the academic
author cited in the previous post yields…

"The debate is, in the words of one professor,
'a struggle for the intellectual soul of Stanford.'"

Some may doubt there is such a thing.
See Marissa Mayer in this journal…

and in Vogue  (a story dated August 16, 2013)—

IMAGE- Marissa Mayer on numbers in Vogue magazine

Monday, January 13, 2014

A Prime for Marissa

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:00 pm

"I don't like odd numbers, and I really don't like primes."

Marissa Mayer

See Cube Symmetry Axes in this journal.

IMAGE- The 13 symmetry axes of the cube

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Therapy

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 am

Meanwhile, at a different office

IMAGE- Marissa Mayer on numbers in Vogue magazine

Click (or tap) Marissa for The Story of N.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Secretary

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 pm

Margalit Fox in The New York Times  this evening

Judith Daniels, the founding editor in chief of Savvy ,
the first glossy magazine aimed at executive women,
died on Sunday at her home in Union, Me. She was 74….

Savvy  will not tell you how to be a good secretary,”
one of its early promotional fliers read. “Savvy  will tell you
how to hire a good secretary— and how to fire.”

From the date of Daniels' death:  The Crossword Omen.

See, too,  Vogue  in this journal and Ontology.

From a post of January 26, 2013

IMAGE- Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and the ontology of entities

Sally in the 2013 film Oblivion : "Are you an effective team?"

Saturday, August 17, 2013

The Story of N…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:28 pm

Continues.

IMAGE- Marissa Mayer on numbers in Vogue magazine

— Marissa Mayer in the current Vogue  online

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Spring Style*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110223-VogueUK-Feb2011.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110223-PantomimeHorse.jpg

From www.4to40.com/poems/

* Suggested by yesterday's post on a Martin Harris Centre production of "Posh,"
  by last night's remarks on horseness and Guild Awards, and
  by last year's  February Mysteries of Faith.
 

Sunday, August 15, 2010

The Game

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:07 pm
'Magister Ludi,' or 'The Glass Bead Game,' by Hermann Hesse

We shall now give a brief summary of the beginnings of the Glass Bead Game. It appears to have arisen simultaneously in Germany and in England. In both countries, moreover, it was originally a kind of exercise employed by those small groups of musicologists and musicians who worked and studied in the new seminaries of musical theory. If we compare the original state of the Game with its subsequent developments and its present form, it is much like comparing a musical score of the period before 1500, with its primitive notes and absence of bar lines, with an eighteenth-century score, let alone with one from the nineteenth with its confusing excess of symbols for dynamics, tempi, phrasing, and so on, which often made the printing of such scores a complex technical problem.

The Game was at first nothing more than a witty method for developing memory and ingenuity among students and musicians. And as we have said, it was played both in England and Germany before it was ‘invented’ here in the Musical Academy of Cologne, and was given the name it bears to this day, after so many generations, although it has long ceased to have anything to do with glass beads.

The inventor, Bastian Perrot of Calw, a rather eccentric but clever, sociable, and humane musicologist, used glass beads instead of letters, numerals, notes, or other graphic symbols. Perrot, who incidentally has also bequeathed to us a treatise on the Apogee and Decline of Counterpoint, found that the pupils at the Cologne Seminary had a rather elaborate game they used to play. One would call out, in the standardized abbreviations of their science, motifs or initial bars of classical compositions, whereupon the other had to respond with the continuation of the piece, or better still with a higher or lower voice, a contrasting theme, and so forth. It was an exercise in memory and improvisation quite similar to the sort of thing probably in vogue among ardent pupils of counterpoint in the days of Schütz, Pachelbel, and Bach — although it would then not have been done in theoretical formulas, but in practice on the cembalo, lute, or flute, or with the voice.

Bastian Perrot in all probability was a member of the Journeyers to the East. He was partial to handicrafts and had himself built several pianos and clavichords in the ancient style. Legend has it that he was adept at playing the violin in the old way, forgotten since 1800, with a high-arched bow and hand-regulated tension of the bow hairs. Given these interests, it was perhaps only natural that he should have constructed a frame, modeled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes, and colors. The wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the time-values of the notes, and so on. In this way he could represent with beads musical quotations or invented themes, could alter, transpose, and develop them, change them and set them in counterpoint to one another. In technical terms this was a mere plaything, but the pupils liked it; it was imitated and became fashionable in England too. For a time the game of musical exercises was played in this charmingly primitive manner. And as is so often the case, an enduring and significant institution received its name from a passing and incidental circumstance. For what later evolved out of that students’ sport and Perrot’s bead-strung wires bears to this day the name by which it became popularly known, the Glass Bead Game.

Hermann Hesse

“For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.”

— “Albertus Secundus,” epigraph to The Glass Bead Game

From DownloadThat.com

(Click to enlarge.)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100815-ThePaletteSm.jpg

Monday, January 4, 2010

Google’s Apple Tree

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 am

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100104-Apple.jpg

Google has illuminated its search page today with a falling apple in honor of what it is pleased to call the birthday of Newton. (When Newton was born, the calendar showed it was Christmas Day, 1642; Google prefers to associate Sir Isaac with a later version of the calendar.)

Some related observations–

Adapted from a Log24 entry
of Monday, March 24, 2008–
 

 

"Hanging from the highest limb
of the apple tree are
     the three God's Eyes…"

    — Ken Kesey

"But what's beautiful can't be bad. You're not bad, North Wind?"

"No; I'm not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they are beautiful."

"Well, I will go with you because you are beautiful and good, too."

"Ah, but there's another thing, Diamond:– What if I should look ugly without being bad– look ugly myself because I am making ugly things beautiful?– What then?"

"I don't quite understand you, North Wind. You tell me what then."

"Well, I will tell you. If you see me with my face all black, don't be frightened. If you see me flapping wings like a bat's, as big as the whole sky, don't be frightened. If you hear me raging ten times worse than Mrs. Bill, the blacksmith's wife– even if you see me looking in at people's windows like Mrs. Eve Dropper, the gardener's wife– you must believe that I am doing my work. Nay, Diamond, if I change into a serpent or a tiger, you must not let go your hold of me, for my hand will never change in yours if you keep a good hold. If you keep a hold, you will know who I am all the time, even when you look at me and can't see me the least like the North Wind. I may look something very awful. Do you understand?"

"Quite well," said little Diamond.

"Come along, then," said North Wind, and disappeared behind the mountain of hay.

Diamond crept out of bed and followed her.

    — George MacDonald,
      At the Back of the North Wind

   

From Log24 on Sunday, March 23, 2008–

 
A sequel to
The Crimson Passion

Easter Egg

Jill St. John with diamond

Click on image
 for further details.


Duality:


A pair of book covers in honor
  of the dies natalis of T. S. Eliot–

http://www.log24.com/log10/saved/100103-TheAristocrat_files/100104-Duality.jpg

From Virginia Woolf,  "Modern Fiction" (Ch. 13 in The Common Reader, First Series)

Woolf on what she calls "materialist" fiction–

Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking, as critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to define the quality which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among whom Mr. James Joyce is the most notable….

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Thursday October 8, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
In memory
of Irving Penn:

Graphic
Austerity

Chessboard (Detail)

Christopher Knight
on a current exhibit
of Penn’s work:

“In American Vogue,
strict grids of nine pictures
establish an egalitarian
framework; the design
anticipates Minimalist art
by a decade.”

Friday, December 28, 2007

Friday December 28, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:11 am
The Gospel according to
Harvard Business School:

Last Temptation
 
The New York Times today:
 
NY Times obiturary for Steven T. Florio, 12/28/07

Teen Vogue

From The Harbus, the Harvard Business School independent weekly, a 4/28/03 interview with the late Steven Florio:

HARBUS: It seems you attribute the ability to ‘invest in quality’ and to say ‘we’re going this direction because it’s going to help us be the best’ directly to being a private company.

SF: For the 10 years I’ve been CEO, that has been the marching order I’ve given to my staff, to all the Editors and Publishers, and quite frankly the order that has been given to me by Newhouse. Now, this doesn’t mean that I don’t get memos from him saying ‘I noticed that we spent an additional $100,000 last year on Christmas parties, can you please cut this back?’. He’s not a guy who’s just standing on top of the building throwing off $100 bills. He wants the company run efficiently.

On the other hand, if I say to him we really ought to take a hard look at this idea called ‘Teen Vogue’, he’ll smile, as he did, and say ‘The rest of the industry is cutting back, and you want to do a $50 million launch?’.

And I said ‘It’s time. It is time for this magazine, it is time for line extension, and we should do it’. I have a management meeting once a week, which he [Newhouse] attends more often than not, where I presented the new magazine idea to the whole management team, which is only 6 or 7 people. I looked at him and said ‘We’re doing it’, and he said ‘Go ahead, it’s a great idea’.

A Great Idea:

Teen Vogue sidebar: Runway box
Model:
Irina Kulikova
Teen Vogue model Irina Kulikova
Kulikova
elsewhere

Related material:

Plato’s “Heaven of Ideas”

Welcome to the Cave
April 22, 2007

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Wednesday August 17, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
At Cologne

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/050817-Ludi.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    “The Game was at first nothing more than a witty method for developing memory and ingenuity among students and musicians.
     The inventor, Bastian Perrot of Calw… found that the pupils at the Cologne Seminary had a rather elaborate game they used to play. One would call out, in the standardized abbreviations of their science, motifs or initial bars of classical compositions, whereupon the other had to respond with the continuation of the piece, or better still with a higher or lower voice, a contrasting theme, and so forth. It was an exercise in memory and improvisation quite similar to the sort of thing probably in vogue among the ardent pupils of counterpoint in the days of Schütz, Pachelbel, and Bach….
     Bastian Perrot… constructed a frame, modeled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes, and colors….”

Hermann Hesse at The Glass Bead Game Defined

Tuesday, January 4, 2005

Tuesday January 4, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 am
The Romantic School

Today’s New York Times:

“Mr. Denker was of the romantic school
of chess – always looking to attack.”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050104-Chess.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:

From Endgame:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050104-Endgame.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Black the knight upon that ocean,
Bright the sun upon the king.
Dark the queen that stands beside him,
White his castle, threatening.

In the shadows’ see a bishop
Guards his queen of love and hate.
Another move, the game will be up;
Take the queen, her knight will mate.

The knight said “Move, be done.  It’s over.”
“Love and resign,” the bishop cried.
“When it’s done you’ll stand forever
By the darkest beauty’s side.”

From Log24.net, Feb. 18, 2003:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050104-Kali.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Kali, a goddess sometimes depicted
as a dancing girl; Kali is related to kAla,
time, according to one website,  as
“the force which governs and stops time.”
See also the novel The Fermata,
by Nicholson Baker.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050104-Ferm.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

From an entry of Sunday, Jan. 2,
the day Denker died:

“Time had been canceled.”    
— Stephen King, The Shining

From Truth and Style, a tribute
to the late Amy Spindler, style editor
of the New York Times Magazine:

“I don’t believe in truth. I believe in style.”
— Hugh Grant in Vogue magazine, July 1995

From a related page,
The Crimson Passion:

“He takes us to the central activity
of mathematics—which is imagining….”

Harvard Magazine on
Harvard mathematician
and author Barry Mazur.

For related material on Mazur, see

A Mathematical Lie.

“The teenagers aren’t all bad.
I love ’em if nobody else does.
There ain’t nothing wrong
with young people.
Jus’ quit lyin’ to ’em.”

Jackie “Moms” Mabley

Saturday, February 28, 2004

Saturday February 28, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Inner Truth
and Outer Style

Inner Truth:

Hexagram 61: Inner Truth

Outer Style:


Joan Didion

“Everything I learned,
I learned at Vogue.”

Joan Didion, Nov. 2001 interview
with Amy Spindler.

Spindler died on Friday, Feb. 27, 2004.

For related material, see

Truth and Style: ART WARS at Harvard

and

blogs.law.harvard.edu/m759/.

Saturday February 28, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Truth and Style

From today’s New York Times obituary for Amy M. Spindler, former fashion critic of The New York Times and style editor of its magazine, who died yesterday at 40:

“Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, whom Ms. Spindler regarded as a competitor when she became style editor of The Times Magazine, in 1998, said: ‘She took criticism in a new direction. She wasn’t afraid to tell the truth.’ “

“I don’t believe in truth. I believe in style.”
— Hugh Grant in Vogue magazine, July 1995

Again from Spindler’s obituary:

“In a front-page article on Sept. 5, 1995, she [Spindler] noted a new piety on parade, marked by store windows and catalogs full of monastic robes, pilgrim’s boots and dangling crosses. Perhaps, she wrote, ‘the financially strained fashion industry is seeking salvation from above.’ “

Perhaps.


Amy M. Spindler

See also
Strike That Pose (August 1995)
and the two previous log24.net entries
on art and religion at Harvard.

For even more context, see
Truth and Style: ART WARS at Harvard.

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