"Hunt for the best."
— Norton Simon
( A related hunt: Simon Norton )
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
Norton Simon Flashback
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Friday, March 2, 2007
Friday March 2, 2007
Goddess vs. Alphabet
| "I was reading Durant's section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)" |
Part I: Phantasmagoria
Photo by Phil Bray
Transcendence through spelling:
Richard Gere and Flora Cross
as father and daughter
in the film of Bee Season.
"Every aspect of the alef's
construction has been
Divinely designed
to teach us something."
— Alef– The Difference Between
Exile And Redemption,
by Rabbi Aaron L. Raskin
Related material–
Art Theory for Yom Kippur
and
Log24 entries, Nov. 2005.
Part II: Hunt for the Real
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess:
The Conflict Between Word and Image.
See also the references
to Zelazny's Eye of Cat
in the Nov. 2005 entries
as well as
today's previous entry—
with the Norton Simon motto
"Hunt for the best"– and…
Click for details.
"Photography has always involved waiting…. the photographer is understood to be waiting for the right convergence of subject, lighting and frame before clicking the shutter– waiting for what a master of the genre, Henri Cartier-Bresson, famously called 'the decisive moment.' Lee Friedlander, another great street photographer, compared this anticipatory state to the hunting alertness of a 'one-eyed cat.' The metaphor of the hunt has seeped into the essential language of photography."
— Arthur Lubow in The New York Times, Feb. 25, 2007
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Friday March 2, 2007
Today's birthdays:
Jennifer Jones,
film star and arts patron;
Tom Wolfe, author of
The Painted Word.
"Hunt for the best."
— Norton Simon
Cover detail,
soundtrack recording
of the Jennifer Jones film
"Angel, Angel, Down We Go"
The girl's left eye in the above
portrait illustrates a remark
in yesterday's New York Times
on a figure in a painting:
"His head recedes into shadow, so you barely see his face. But a tiny fleck of white in his eye, a light that kindles his reawakening, brings him to life. It’s what Roland Barthes, the French critic, liked to call a punctum, the spot, marking time, that burns an image into memory."
(This remark, by Michael Kimmelman,
comes with a headline–
Lights! Darks! Action! Cut!
Maestro of Mise-en-Scène
— that seems to have been inspired
by Tom Wolfe's prose style.)
For further details, see
Barthes's Punctum,
by Michael Fried.
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