Killer Radio

"See the girl with the diamond ring?
 She knows how to shake that thing."

-- Jerry Lee "Killer" Lewis on
    KHYI 95.3 FM, Plano, Texas,
    at about 5:12 PM EDT 7/31/03,
    introduced by DJ Allen Peck Sr.

"And on this point I pass the same judgment as those who say that geometricians give them nothing new by these rules, because they possessed them in reality, but confounded with a multitude of others, either useless or false, from which they could not discriminate them, as those who, seeking a diamond of great price amidst a number of false ones, but from which they know not how to distinguish it, should boast, in holding them all together, of possessing the true one equally with him who without pausing at this mass of rubbish lays his hand upon the costly stone which they are seeking and for which they do not throw away the rest."

-- Blaise Pascal, De l'Esprit Géométrique

"When the light came she was sitting on the bed beside an open suitcase, toying with her diamond rings.  She saw the light first in the depths of the largest stone."

-- Paul Preuss, Broken Symmetries,
    scene at Diamond Head, Oahu, Hawaii

Now playing (6:41 PM EDT) on Killer Radio:

"Jack of Diamonds, that's
 a hard card to find." 

"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond...."

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus

Perhaps Sam Phillips was twanged by a Hawaiian guitar. (See previous two entries.)

See also "Top Ten Most Overheard Comments by new KHYI listeners" at Miss Lana's Anything Page, entry for

Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 2002.

Twanged!

The Father of Rock and Roll,
music legend Sam Phillips,
died in a Memphis hospital
Wednesday night.

See also my entry Wednesday morning
on rock and roll, country music,
the Stones, and The Last Picture Show.

Meditation for this, the feast day of the founder of the Society of Jesus:

"If there's a rock and roll heaven,
Well you know they've got
a hell of a band."

Toronto Day

Today is said to be the day Toronto was founded, and is the day, they say, of what will be the largest concert in the history of Canada....

The Rolling Stones at
Downsview Park, Toronto. 

Comparisons to Woodstock have been made, with attendance expected to be about half a million strong.  Thoughts of Woodstock reminded me of Joni Mitchell, and so I sought Joni's advice for an alternative to the spirit of this event, recalling her words

Oh honey you turn me on
I'm a radio
I'm a country station
I'm a little bit corny
....................................
I'm a broadcasting tower
Waving for you
And I'm sending you out
This signal here
I hope you can pick it up
Loud and clear

A search for the promised
country station yielded....

The redneck alternative....

KHYI 95.3 FM Plano, Texas TWANG 'EM!

Today's culture wars quote:

"God help me, I do love it so." 

Into the Day

"...no-one sang the night into the day"

-- Carly Simon, "Embrace Me, You Child," quoted in yesterday's entry Trick of the Light.

I have no song to bring night into day; the best I can do for this morning, the birthday of director/author Peter Bogdanovich, is supply a Frank Russo RealAudio rendition of "Long Ago and Far Away," from his CD "Quiet Now."

The song's connection with Bogdanovich, who turns 64 today, is through Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles.

Transcendental Meditation

The bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson was on May 25, 2003.  For a commemoration of Emerson on that date, click on the picture below of Harvard University's Room 305, Emerson Hall.

This will lead you to a discussion of the properties of a 5x5 array, or matrix, with a symbol of mystical unity at its center.  Although this symbol of mystical unity, the number "1," is not, pace the Shema, a transcendental number, the matrix is, as perhaps a sort of Emersonian compensation, what postmodernists would call phallologocentric.  It is possible that Emerson is a saint; if so, his feast day (i.e., date of death), April 27, might reveal to us the sort of miraculous fact hoped for by Fritz Leiber in my previous entry.  A check of my April 27 notes shows us, lo and behold, another phallologocentric 5x5 array, this one starring Warren Beatty.  This rather peculiar coincidence is, perhaps, the sort of miracle appropriate to a saint who is, as this week's politically correct New Yorker calls him, a Big Dead White Male.

 Leiber's fiction furnishes "a behind-the-scenes view of the time change wars."

"It's quarter to three..." -- St. Frank Sinatra

The Big Time

A Story That Works

• "There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe;
  
• there are the friend-enemy minds shouting and whispering their tales and always seeking the three miracles --
  
  
  
  • that minds should really touch, or
    
  • that the silent universe should speak, tell minds a story, or (perhaps the same thing)
    
  • that there should be a story that works, that is all hard facts, all reality, with no illusions and no fantasy;
  
  
• and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, mortal me."
  

  -- Fritz Leiber in "The Button Molder"

Trick of the Light

For Carly Simon

"... on the dance floor she seemed to be the only one completely alive.  It was a trick of the light that followed one person around.  Joe had seen the quality before; it was rare, but not unknown.

Every time we say good-bye.... Porter had written an intimate ballad.... "

-- Martin Cruz Smith, Stallion Gate, Ch. 2

"At night I heard God
                          whisper lullabyes
While Daddy next door
                   whistled whisky tunes
And sometimes
            when I wanted,
                   they would harmonize
There was nothing
                    those two couldn't do

...................................................

Then one night Daddy died
                      and went to Heaven
And God came down to earth
                          and slipped away
I pretended not to notice
                      I'd been abandoned
But no-one sang the night
                                 into the day
And later night time songs
                          came back again
But the singers don't compare
                        with those I knew
And I never figured out
          where God and Daddy went
But there was nothing
                   those two couldn't do"

-- Carly Simon,
  "Embrace Me, You Child"

11:11

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, the Great War ended.  See

Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript:

With a Smile

Heaven, Hell, and Hollywood:

On parent knees,
     a naked new-born child,
Weeping thou sat'st
     while all around thee smiled:
So live, that sinking to
     thy life's last sleep,
Calm thou may'st smile,
     whilst all around thee weep.
-- Sir William Jones, 1746-1794  

Reuters, July 28, 2003 5:56 PM ET:

Bob Hope Dies With a Smile

"... surrounded by family, including his wife of 69 years, the former Dolores Reade, and their children, as well as his personal physician, several nurses and a priest who celebrated mass in Hope's bedroom."

"Say Formaggio."

City of God

Today's site music is

Nous Voici Dans La Ville.

The central aim of Western religion --

"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...

the bridging of

                 masculine and feminine,

                      life and death.

It's redemption.... nothing else matters."

-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)

The central aim of Western philosophy --

                 Dualities of Pythagoras

              as reconstructed by Aristotle:

                 Limited     Unlimited

                     Odd     Even

                    Male     Female

                   Light     Dark

                Straight     Curved

                  ... and so on ....

"Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is... the central aim of all Western philosophy."
-- Jamie James in
   The Music of the Spheres (1993)

"In the garden of Adding
live Even and Odd...
And the song of love's recision
is the music of the spheres."
-- The Midrash Jazz Quartet in
   City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)

Today is the feast of St. Johann Sebastian Bach.