Spinnin' Wheel, Spinnin' True

See last year's
October 12 entry,

"She's a Twentieth Century Fox."

For Patricia Collinge

of Collinge-Pickman Casting, Boston, whose credits include casting for the film A Civil Action.

"Take us the foxes, the little foxes..."

KHYI just played Tish Hinojosa's "Something in the Rain."  Here, Ms. Collinge, is a rather strange website related to the themes of A Civil Action and to Hinojosa's song:

Something in the Rain

The Mysterious West

Thanks again to KHYI, Plano, Texas, for great poetry.  In tonight's KHYI playlist...

From Spike and Jamie:

WAIT A WHILE AND YOU'LL GROW OLDER;
NEVER MIND WHAT THE OLD FOLKS SAY.

JUST KEEP AN ANGEL ON YOUR SHOULDER;
AND NEVER THROW YOUR DREAMS AWAY
FOR THEY MIGHT SAVE YOUR LIFE ONE DAY.

SONG IS JUST A BOX OF VISIONS;
YOU CAN UNLOCK IT WITH A KEY--

A MESSAGE ROLLED UP INSIDE A BOTTLE
AND DROPPED INTO THE SALTY SEA.

SONG IS JUST A BOX OF VISIONS,
A JAR OF HARPS AND GYPSY'S EARS,
 
A LABYRINTH OF WILD ROSES,
A JOURNEY THROUGH A HOUSE OF MIRRORS.

WAIT A WHILE AND YOU'LL GROW STRONGER;
NEVER MIND WHAT THE SAD FOLKS SAY.

From Tish Hinojosa:

"It's the way of life in the real west..."

A search for information on the singer of "Real West" led to a site in Japan that mentions Hinojosa, among many other makers of recommended music:

From Japan--

Random Diary & Essay...

"an example of understand beyond language is still possible"

Such an example is one of the themes in a movie I admire greatly....

Ghost Dog - The Way of the Samurai.

The hero's understanding of what his friend says, even though he does not know the friend's language, is a recurring theme in this film.

As for me... "No entiendo.  Sigo trabajando."

Pro-Semitism

As the president of Harvard has pointed out,  many have found good reasons recently to become anti-Semites.

Here are three good reasons to be pro-Semitic:

1. Jordan Ellenberg's course on Numbers, Equations, and Proofs this fall at Princeton,
   
2. Ellenberg's phrase, contained in a syllabus for that course (3-7 Nov. 2003):
   "The heartbreaking failure of unique factorization," and
   
3. Ellenberg himself.
   

Unlike many with a Harvard background who project with success the appearance of intelligence, Ellenberg seems to be in fact genuinely intelligent... a rare thing.

He also seems to be Jewish... This may be false, though, since Elllenberg, intelligently, does not state any ethnic or religious preferences.

Fine Hall 1201

The classic question of Sir Laurence Olivier-- "Is it safe?"-- may, in view of the above, be answered in the affirmative... provided, that is, that the "it" refers to number theory at Princeton... one of the crowning glories of Western civilization.

Storyline

To hear a story, or to read it straight through from start to finish, is to travel along a one-dimensional line.  A well-structured story has, however, more than one dimension.

Juxtaposing scenes shows that details that seem to be far apart in the telling (or the living) of a story may in fact be closely related.

Here is an example from the film "Contact," in which a young girl's drawing and a vision of paradise are no longer separated by the time it takes to tell (or live) the story:

(See my entry of Michaelmas 2002.)

For details of how time is "folded"
by artists and poets, see the following:

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle,

and Time Fold, by S. H. Cullinane.

The West Wing's
Story Line

See also the "story theory of truth"
versus the "diamond theory of truth."

"Fair and Balanced"?

"Schwarzenegger made a lot of promises that we know are lies," Bob Mulholland, the campaign adviser to the California Democratic Party, said today. "And now he's going to find out that being in the governor's office is not a movie script. We'll be holding his feet to the fire." -- Kirk Semple, NY Times, Oct. 8, 2003

Franken disgusts me, so I'm with Arnie.

As for Mulholland... click here.

Update of 5:35 PM:

I see the NY Times has killed the Semple story and replaced it with another at the above Times link.

Annunciation

"A ray of light striking through a wall or window... is a conventional sign of the Annunciation."

Annunciation,
by James Cameron, 1991

ART WARS:
Judgment Day

"...Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter.  They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit.  From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal...."

-- Rosalind Krauss, "Grids"

Krauss is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University.

For more on Meyer Schapiro, see the link on the phrase "art historian" in my March 10, 2003, entry.

To view that entry in a larger context, see the web page Art at the Vanishing Point, which includes a picture of Mondrian's own Paris staircase.  The picture below might be thought of as illustrating Krauss's "grid is a staircase"... a staircase to, in fact, a vanishing point.

Frame not included in
 Terminator 2: Judgment Day

For a different view of what the New York Times Book Review has characterized as "high culture," see the link on that phrase also in my March 10, 2003, entry.  This leads to a work by T. S. Eliot titled Christianity and Culture.   See too the remarks of the Meyer Schapiro Professor in my Oct. 5, 2003, entry, "Art Theory for Yom Kippur,"  in which she likens the Cross to Pandora's box.

Eliot's attitude toward this Jewish approach to high culture might be summarized by the following remarks of Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day--

Dr. Silberman: You broke my arm!

Sarah Connor: There are two-hundred-fifteen bones in the human body, [expletive deleted]. That's one.

Ado

Born on this date:
Producer Joshua Logan.

March 9, 1975:
Broadway Tribute to Joshua Logan

March 9, 2000:
Is Nothing Sacred?

"Of course there is nothing afterwards."
-- Thoughts of a dying man in Nabokov's The Gift

"There is nothing like a dame."
-- Oscar Hammerstein II, South Pacific

For more on the religious significance of the date March 9, see

Art Wars.