Log24

"Bad news on the doorstep…." — American Pie

A story from the NY Times  Sunday morning print edition —

"A version of this article appears in print on March 3, 2019,
on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: 

Kevin Roche, 96, Is Dead; Famed Modernist Architect."

" When Mr. Roche received the Pritzker in 1982, he delivered
an acceptance speech that displayed both his capacity for
self-deprecating humor and his belief that architecture was
a noble pursuit. He quoted from a letter he had received
complaining that his work was 'moribund' and that the Pritzker
jury 'must be out of their minds' to have given him the prize.

He could only respond, he said, by asking: 'Is not the act of building
an act of faith in the future, and of hope? Hope that the testimony of
our civilization will be passed on to others, hope that what we are doing
is not only sane and useful and beautiful, but a clear and true reflection
of our own aspirations. And hope that it is an art, which will communicate
with the future and touch those generations as we ourselves have been
touched and moved by the past.' "

— Paul Goldberger

Goldberger on Roche's earlier career —

". . . He continued to finish projects Saarinen had started, including
the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, designed
in collaboration with Charles Eames . . . ."

Illustration —

The IBM Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair

See also the film "Tomorrowland."

"Bad news on the doorstep…." — American Pie

The word "artifacts" in the above obituary summary
suggests three Log24 posts now tagged with that word.

See as well . . .

"Bad news on the doorstep…." — American Pie

Wikipedia on a George Clooney film released yesterday —

"The studio's major production is Hail, Caesar! ,
an epic set in ancient Rome and starring Baird Whitlock
(Clooney). During a shoot, Whitlock drinks from a goblet
of wine drugged by an extra; he passes out behind the
soundstage and is abducted. A ransom note soon arrives,
written by a group calling itself 'The Future' and demanding
$100,000, which Mannix arranges to have paid. Whitlock
awakens in a beach house and finds his way into a meeting
of The Future, a Communist cell. The members explain their
doctrine to him, and he begins to sympathize with their cause."

See also this morning's post Space Program:

"Bad news on the doorstep…." — American Pie

From a piece in The Harvard Crimson  today:

"The refrain of one of my favorite songs goes,
'Tension is to be loved when it is like a passing note
to a beautiful, beautiful chord.' I don’t want to seek
the allusion [sic ] of finding balance anymore:
It can’t be found."

Allusion —

"No angel born in Hell
Could break that Satan's spell"

— "American Pie"

A passing note —

"The name diabolus in musica  ("the Devil in music")
has been applied to the interval from at least the
early 18th century…."

— Wikipedia on the tritone

See also Music & Noise at a physics site and the square root
of two on page 56 of Barry Mazur's Imagining Numbers  
(Picador imprint, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) —

Or: Chinny-Chin-Chin .

This post will be meaningless unless you
have seen the recent film "R.I.P.D.," starring
James Hong and Jeff Bridges.

(In that film, two deceased lawmen appear to 
the living in disguised form— as Hong, and 
as Bridges in the guise of a major babe.)

From the AP Today in History  page
for October 29, 2013 —

On this date in:
1967 The musical "Hair" opened off-Broadway.

This, together with the Halloween season and
"R.I.P.D.," suggests a bizarre show:

"And there we were all in one place,
A generation lost in space…"
– Don McLean, "American Pie" 

The show would star Cybill Shepherd and Jeff Bridges
as, respectively, Jackie Chan and Nicole Kidman in…

V.I.P.D.

See also some related posts with Jeff Bridges.

Backstory: Sermon (Nov. 18,  2012) and
Eternal Recreation (Dec. 24, 2012).

"We've lost the plot!" — "Slipstream."  Small wonder.

The Space Case

"A generation lost in space"

— Don McLean, "American Pie"

Last night's post discussed Jim Dodge's fictional vision of a "spherical diamond" related to physics.

For some background, see Poetry and Physics (April 25, 2011).

That post quotes a July 2008 New Yorker  article —

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells, contributing editor at Rolling Stone
and sometime writer on space—

“There’s a dream that underlying the physical universe is some beautiful mathematical structure, and that the job of physics is to discover that,” Smolin told me later. “The dream is in bad shape,” he added. “And it’s a dream that most of us are like recovering alcoholics from.” Lisi’s talk, he said, “was like being offered a drink.”

Or a toke.

"Now John at the bar is a friend of mine
He gets me my drinks for free
And he's quick with a joke or to light up your smoke
But there's someplace that he'd rather be"

— Billy Joel, "Piano Man"