Month: June 2005

  • ART WARS:
    Darkness Visible

    "No light, but rather darkness visible
     Serv'd only to discover sights of woe"
    -- John Milton, Paradise Lost,
    Book I,  lines 63-64

    From the cover article (pdf) in the

    June/July 2005     Notices of the
    American Mathematical Society--

    Martin Gardner



    A famed vulgarizer, Martin Gardner,
    summarizes the art of Ad Reinhardt

    (Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt,
      Dec. 24, 1913 - Aug. 30, 1967):

    "Ed Rinehart [sic] made a fortune painting canvases that were just
    one solid color.  He had his black period
    in which the canvas was totally black. 
    And then he had a blue period
    in which he was painting the canvas blue. 
    He was exhibited in top shows in New York,
    and his pictures wound up in museums. 

    I did a column in Scientific American
    on minimal art, and I reproduced one of
    Ed Rinehart's black paintings. 
    Of course,
    it was just a solid square of pure black. 
    The publisher insisted on getting permission
    from the gallery to reproduce it."

    Related material
    from Log24.net,
    Nov. 9-12, 2004:

    Fade to Black

    "...that
    ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a
    gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of
    mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of
    probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of
    intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of
    force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent."

    -- Trevanian, Shibumi

    "'Haven't there been splendidly elegant colors in Japan since ancient times?'

    'Even black has various subtle shades,' Sosuke nodded."

    -- Yasunari Kawabata, The Old Capital

    An Ad Reinhardt painting
    described in the entry of
    noon, November 9, 2004
    is illustrated below.

    Ad Reinhardt,  Greek Cross

    Ad Reinhardt,
    Abstract Painting,     1960-66.
    Oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches.
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

    The viewer may need to tilt
    the screen to see that this
    painting is not uniformly black,
    but is instead a picture of a
    Greek cross, as described below.

    "The grid is a staircase
    to the Universal.... We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who, despite his repeated insistence
    that 'Art is art,' ended up by painting a series of... nine-square grids in
    which the motif that inescapably emerges is
    a Greek cross.

    Greek Cross

    There is no
    painter in the West
    who can be unaware of the symbolic power
    of the cruciform
    shape and the Pandora's box of spiritual reference
    that is opened once one uses
    it."

    -- Rosalind Krauss,
    Meyer Schapiro Professor
    of Modern
    Art and Theory
    at Columbia University
    (Ph.D., Harvard U., 1969),
    in "Grids"

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041109-Krauss.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    Krauss

     
    In memory of

    St. William Golding

    (Sept. 19, 1911 - June 19, 1993)

  • The Quality of Diamond,
    continued

    From Log 24.net on
    Thursday, February 19, 2004:

    Five Easy
    Pieces
    for Lee Marvin's
    Birthday

    1.

    "EVERYTHING'S a story.
    You are a story-- I am a story."
    -- Frances Hodgson Burnett,
    A Little Princess
    2.

    "You see that sign, sir?"
    [Pointing to a notice demanding
    courtesy from customers]
    3.

    4.

    "You see this sign?"
    5.

    "Aquarians are
    extremely independent."

    Lorna Thayer, 85,
    the waitress in Five Easy Pieces,
    who was once someone's little princess,
    died on June 4, 2005.

    Lorna Thayer, 1954
    Lorna Thayer,
    1954


    The 2 PM June 4 Log24 entry
    has a link to
    The Quality of Diamond,
    where more of the Lorna Thayer
    story may be found.

  • Final Arrangements, continued:

    "Joe Strauss to
    Joe Six-Pack"
    (Editor's sneering headline
    for a David Brooks essay
    in today's New York Times)
    and Back Again

    "I was emptying some boxes in my basement the other day and I came across
    an essay somebody had clipped on Ernest Hemingway from the July 14,
    1961, issue of Time magazine. The essay was outstanding. Over three
    pages of tightly packed prose, with just a few photos, the anonymous
    author performed the sort of high-toned but accessible literary
    analysis that would be much harder to find in a mass market magazine
    today....

    The sad thing is that this type of essay was not unusual in that era....

    The magazines would devote pages to the work of theologians like
    Abraham Joshua Heschel* or Reinhold Niebuhr. They devoted as much space
    to opera as to movies because an educated person was expected to know
    something about opera, even if that person had no prospect of actually
    seeing one....

    Back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, middlebrow culture, which is
    really high-toned popular culture, was thriving in America. There was
    still a sense that culture is good for your character, and that a
    respectable person should spend time absorbing the best that has been
    thought and said."

    -- David Brooks,
       The New York Times,
       June 16, 2005

    The Time essay begins by quoting Hemingway himself:

    "All stories,
     if continued far enough,
     end in death,
     and he is no true
    storyteller
     who would keep that from you."

    Here is the top section of today's
    New York Times obituaries.

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050616-NYTobits.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    Here is the
    middlebrow part --

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050616-NYTbrow.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
    Esteemed Conductor
    Dies at 91

    -- and here is a link that returns,
    as promised in this entry's headline,
    to "Joe Strauss" --
    complete with polkas.

    *  "Judaism is a religion of time, not space."
        -- Wikipedia on Heschel.
        See the recent Log24 entries
        Star Wars continued,
        Dark City, and
        Cross-Referenced, and last year's
        Bloomsday at 100.

  • Cross-Referenced

    From today's New York Times,
    a review of a Werner Herzog film,
    "Wheel of Time," that opens
    today in Manhattan:

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050615-Mandala.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    From the June 13-14
    midnight Log24 entry:

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050614-DarkCity.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    "With a little effort, anything can be
    shown to connect with anything else:
    existence is infinitely cross-referenced."

    -- Opening sentence of
    Martha Cooley's The Archivist

    These images suggest
    a Google search on the phrase
    "crucified on the wheel of time,"

    which yields the following.
    Click to go to DARK CITYDARK
    CITY (1998)
    Crucified on the Wheel Of Time.
    A visual feast.

    From Dark City: A Hollywood Jesus Movie Review --

    "There is
    something mesmerizing about this important film. It flows in the same
    vein as The Truman Show, The Game, and Pleasantville.  Something
    isn't real with the world around John Murdoch. Some group is trying to
    control things and it isn't God."

    Amen.

    Related material:
    Skewed Mirrors and
    The Graces of Paranoia

  • Darkness at Noon

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    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050614-Cross.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    I stood
    out in the open cold
    To see the essence of the eclipse
    Which was its
    perfect darkness.

    I stood in the cold on the porch
    And could not
    think of anything so perfect
    As man's hope of light in the face of darkness.

    -- Richard Eberhart,
    "The Eclipse"

    See also March 11.

  • ART WARS:

    Dark City

    Jennifer Connelly at
    premiere of "Cinderella Man" --

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050614-Connelly.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    In memory of Martin Buber,
    author of Good and Evil,
    who died on June 13, 1965:

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050614-DarkCity.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    "With a little effort, anything can be
    shown to connect with anything else:
    existence is infinitely cross-referenced."

    -- Opening sentence of
    Martha Cooley's The Archivist

    Woe unto
    them that
    call evil
    good, and
    good evil;
    that put
    darkness
    for light,
    and light
    for darkness

    Isaiah 5:20

     

    As she spoke
    about the Trees
    of Life and Death,
    I watched her.... 
    The Archivist

    The world
    has gone
    mad today
    And good's
    bad today,
    And black's
    white today,
    And day's
    night today


    Cole Porter

    Jennifer Connelly in "Dark City"

    (from journal note of June 19, 2002) --

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050613-DarkCity.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    And, one might add for Flag Day,
    "you sons of bitches."

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050614-Flag.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
     

  • STAR WARS

    continued     

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050613-Crowe.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    Picture from Feb. 8
    (Martin Buber's birthday)

    For John Nash on his birthday:

    I know more than Apollo,
    For oft when he lies sleeping
    I see the stars at mortal wars
    In the wounded welkin weeping.

    -- Tom O'Bedlam's Song

  • Cliffs of Moher

    My father's father,
        his father's father, his --
    Shadows like winds

    Go back to a parent before thought,
        before speech,
    At the head of the past.

    They go to the cliffs of Moher
        rising out of the mist....

    -- Wallace Stevens,
       "The Irish Cliffs of Moher"

    A Portrait of the Artist
     as a Young Man    ,
    James Joyce, Chapter 5:

    As he came back to the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step,
    Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at him from the pale
    loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no
    spark of Ignatius's enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the
    company, a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled books of
    secret subtle wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of
    apostleship. It seemed as if he used the shifts and lore and cunning of
    the world, as bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, without joy
    in their handling or hatred of that in them which was evil but turning
    them, with a firm gesture of obedience back upon themselves and for all
    this silent service it seemed as if he loved not at all the master and
    little, if at all, the ends he served. SIMILITER ATQUE SENIS BACULUS,
    he was, as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man's
    hand, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather,
    to lie with a lady's nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace.

    The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin.

    --When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? he asked.

    --From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a fortnight if I am lucky.

    --These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is
    like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go
    down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go
    down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.

    See also Kahn's The Art and Thought of Heraclitus and the references to a "Delian diver" in Chitwood's Death by Philosophy.

    From
    Death by Philosophy:

    "Although fragments examined earlier may enable Heraclitus’ reader
    to believe that the stylistic devices arose directly from his dislike
    of humanity, I think rather that Heraclitus deliberately perfected the
    mysterious, gnomic style he praises in the following 
    fragment.

    31. The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor hides, but 
    indicates. (fr. 93)

    Heraclitus not only admires the oracular style of delivery, but
    recommends it; this studied ambiguity is, I think, celebrated and
    alluded to in the Delian diver comment. For just as the prophecies of
    the Delian or
    Delphic god are at once obscure and darkly clear, so too are the
    workings
    of the Logos and Heraclitus’ remarks on it."

    Related material:
    A Mass for Lucero.

    That web page concludes with a reference to esthetics and a Delian palm, and was written three years ago on this date.

    Today is also the date of death for Martin Buber, philosophical Jew.

    Here is a Delphic saying in memory of Buber:

    "It is the female date that is considered holy, and that bears fruit."

    --  Steven Erlanger,
        New York Times story,
        dateline Jerusalem, June 11

  • Fathers' Day Meditation

    Who is my father in this world,

    in this house,

    At the spirit's base?

    -- Wallace Stevens,
    "The Irish Cliffs of Moher"

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050612-Imago2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    Il Miglior Fabbro:

  • Bedlam Songs

    By a knight of ghosts and shadows
    I summoned am to tourney...

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    In the desert you can
    remember your name

    'Cause there ain't no one
    for to give you no pain.