Log24

From http://msa-x.msa-x.org/?p=1064 —

"Exit Art New York, The Labyrinth Wall:
From Mythology to Reality" —

From tonight's online New York Times  obituaries —

Ms. Ingberman died Wednesday. Related material—

Symmetry (Wednesday), Design (Thursday), Solomon's Labyrinth (Friday).

See also an essay by John Haber —

"Exit Art may yet offer an alternative: shut them up in the labyrinth, with the Minotaur and, as in Iraq, no Ariadne's thread to guide them out. Jeannette Ingberman and Papo Colo line the space with 'The Labyrinth Wall: From Mythology to Reality,' inviting fifty-one artists to cover its sixty-two panels."

— "Marlene Dumas, The Labyrinth Wall, and Emily Jacir"

Haber  (ibid .) also describes artist Marlene Dumas, a recent winner of a Royal Swedish Academy Schock Prize. For a fellow Schock winner— mathematician Michael Aschbacher— see Thursday's Design.)

* For another version of the title, see this morning's front page.

The Finkelstein Talisman —

"Before time began, there was the Cube."

— Optimus Prime in "Transformers" (Paramount, 2007)
 

Wikipedia on Hasbro —

Three American Jewish brothers,^[6] Herman, Hillel, and Henry Hassenfeld^[7] 
founded Hassenfeld Brothers in Providence, Rhode Island in 1923 . . . .
 

The Hassenfeld Auction — 

Also on September 16, 2015 —

The Hindman Image —

The Hood Warenkorb —

Under the Hood —

Megan Fox in "Transformers" (2007) —

This Way to the Egress —

For a memorable eccentric who reportedly died
on Wednesday, July 24, 2013—

• A photo collection of other eccentrics at
  halmos.tumblr.com with a concluding note
  dated April 10, 2013
• Log24 posts from that date, which might
  be summarized as "This way to the egress"
• A musical version of that theme

Last night's 9:29 PM (ET) post featured the phrase
"This way to the egress."

Last night's 10 PM post featured two deaths:

The author of  The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
reportedly died at 85 on Tuesday, July 9.

A former director of the Museum of Modern Art
who was famously shown the exit door there 
in his younger years reportedly died at 80 on
Saturday, July 6.

For a sort of pageant combining Christmas,
the Museum of Modern Art, and an egress,
see St. Stephen's Day, 2008.

Himmelfahrt

Cafe Society Part I –
Jack Torrance at
the Overlook Hotel:

Cafe Society Part II –
Don Imus at The FanHouse,
Friday the 13th:

Cafe Society Part III –
The Bank Dick at
the Black Pussy Cafe:



“Which way to the egress?”

Popcorn Theology,
Part II:

Justice at
the Supremes’ Court

From today’s New York Times:

LeRoy Myers, tap dancer and
road manager for the original Supremes,
died April 26, 2004.

From a log24 entry of April 26, 2004:

Mozart, 2006

Mozart, 1935

Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.

That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclouded concerto . . .
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.

Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.

Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.

We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.

— Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (1936)

From the center:

“‘Mozart, 1935’ immediately discloses a will to counter complaints of pure poetry, to refute that charge heard regularly from Stevens’s critics, to find ‘his particular celebration out of tune today’ on his own if necessary; and, in short, to meet the communist [poet and critic Willard] Maas’s ‘respect for his magnificent rhetoric’ at least halfway across from right to left.”

— Alan Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 211

From the left:

Norman Lebrecht on this year’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth (January 27, 1756):

   “… Mozart, it is safe to say, failed to take music one step forward….
   … Mozart merely filled the space between staves with chords that he knew would gratify a pampered audience. He was a provider of easy listening, a progenitor of Muzak….
   …  He lacked the rage of justice that pushed Beethoven into isolation, or any urge to change the world. Mozart wrote a little night music for the ancien regime. He was not so much reactionary as regressive….
   … Little in such a mediocre life gives cause for celebration….
   … The bandwaggon of Mozart commemorations was invented by the Nazis in 1941….
   …  In this orgy of simple-mindedness, the concurrent centenary of Dmitri Shostakovich– a composer of true courage and historical significance– is being shunted to the sidelines, celebrated by the few.
    Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours. Beyond a superficial beauty and structural certainty, Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st century. Let him rest. Ignore the commercial onslaught. Play the Leningrad Symphony. Listen to music that matters.”
     
The left seems little changed since 1935.

The Last Word

Beethoven Week on the BBC ended at midnight June 10.

“With Beethoven, music did not grow up, it regressed to adolescence. He was a hooligan who could reduce Schiller’s Ode to Joy to madness, bloodlust, and megalomania.”

— Arts and Letters Daily, lead-in to an opinion piece in The Guardian of Tuesday, June 7, 2005:

Beethoven Was a Narcissistic Hooligan “If Beethoven had dedicated his obvious talents to serving the noble Pythagorean view of music, he might well have gone on to compose music even greater than that of Mozart. You can hear this potential in his early string quartets, where the movements often have neat conclusions and there is a playfulness reminiscent of Mozart or Haydn. If only Beethoven had nourished these tender shoots instead of the darker elements that one can also hear. For the darkness is already evident in the early quartets too, in their sombre harmonies and sudden key changes. As it was, however, his darker side won out; compare, for example, the late string quartets. Here the youthful humour has completely vanished; the occasional signs of optimism quickly die out moments after they appear and the movements sometimes end in uncomfortably inconclusive cadences…. In A Clockwork Orange it is the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that echoes in the mind of Alex whenever he indulges in one of his orgies of violence. Alex’s reaction may be rather extreme, but he is responding to something that is already there in this dark and frenzied setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy; the joy it invites one to feel is the joy of madness, bloodlust and megalomania. It is glorious music, and seductive, but the passions it stirs up are dark and menacing.” — Dylan Evans, former Lacanian psychotherapist (pdf) and now head of the undergraduate robotics program at the University of the West of England.

Speak for yourself, Dylan.

“Evil did not have the last word.”

—  Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005

Evil may have had the last word in Tuesday’s Guardian, but now that Beethoven Week has ended, it seems time for another word.

For another view of Beethoven, in particular the late quartets, see the Log24 Beethoven’s Birthday entry of December 16, 2002:

See also the previous entry.