Month: August 2006

  • Clown

    "I need a photo-opportunity,
    I want a shot at redemption.
    Don't want to end up a cartoon
    In a cartoon graveyard."

    Mel Gibson in
    "Conspiracy Theory"

     
                                       
        
    Hence it was,

    Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served

    Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event,

    A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.   
     
    -- The Comedian as the Letter C

    Related material:

    Mental Health Month, Day 27

  • ART WARS continued

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    Adapted from Rick McKee,
    Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 2, 2006

    Click on picture for details.

    Script:

    "David Stuart, a University of Texas master of Maya writing, stopped by and tried to be helpful....

    'There's a playfulness to the script,' Dr. Stuart said.
    'It was not a writing system that was necessarily there to be as clear
    as it could be. It was communicating language, but it was doing it as
    art.'"

    -- My Maya Crash Course
    in The New York Times
    of May 16, 2006

    "... apocalypto means to open up
    and to show the truth...."

    -- UCLA's Anthropoetics

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    Log24, May 16, 2006

  •  

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    Click on picture for details.

     
    to put one's back
    into something    		 bei etwas
    Einsatz zeigen
    to up the ante
    		 den Einsatz erhöhen
    to debrief den Einsatz
    nachher besprechen
    to be on duty
    		 im Einsatz sein
    mil.to be in action im Einsatz sein
    to play for
    high stakes    		 mit hohem
    Einsatz spielen

    Score:

    "His music had of course come from Russian folk sources
    and from Rimsky-Korsakov and from other predecessors, in the way that
    all radical art has roots. But to be a true modernist, a cosmopolitan
    in the twentieth century, it was necessary to seem to disdain
    nationalism, to be perpetually, heroically novel-- the more aloof, the
    better. 'Cold and transparent, like an "extra dry" champagne, which
    gives no sensation of sweetness, and does not enervate, like other
    varieties of that drink, but burns,' Stravinsky said about his own
    Octet, Piano Concerto, and Piano Sonata. The description might be
    applied to works by Picasso or Duchamp."

    -- Michael Kimmelman in
      The New York Review of Books,
    issue dated Aug. 10, 2006

    Perhaps.
    But the description
    certainly applies to
    Bridget Moynahan:

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    "... like an 'extra dry' champagne,
    which gives no sensation of
    sweetness, and does not enervate."

    For more on the
    "Ice 9" figure, see
    Balanchine's Birthday.

  • Zen and the Art
    of Definition

    "Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer over the fence that ended the ballgame." --Robert M. Pirsig

    "How should we define goodness?"

    -- Title of an article (pdf) available online from Harvard.

    This article (Journal of Theoretical Biology 231 (2004) 107–120), examines goodness in the light of evolutionary dynamics as it involves altruism and social reputation, and concludes that goodness as an evolved social trait has two characteristics: those with good reputations are helped, those with bad reputations are not helped.  This is expressed as follows. (English is apparently not the native language of the authors, from Kyushu University in Japan.)

    "One [feature of goodness] is that a player interacting with good persons are assessed by what he does. Cooperation with good individuals should be good and defection against good ones should be bad. The second feature should we consider with much emphasis: a good player who refused to help a bad person must be labeled good. This enables players facing cheaters to refuse help without worrying about the influence of the action on their own good reputation."

    In other words,


    "... a person in good standing falls into bad if and only if he fails to cooperate with an opponent in good standing. Even if he refuses to help an individual in bad standing, he does not lose his good standing. This is because the refusal is interpreted as punishment against a selfish individual (for studies on punishment, see Brandt and Sigmund (2003), Fehr and Gachter (2000), Fehr and Rockenbach (2003), and Henrich and Boyd (2001))."

    See also Harry Truman and Hiroshima, on this date in 1945.


    Related material:

    Hitler's Still Point:
    A Hate Speech for Harvard

    The 5 Log24 entries ending
    with "Three in One" on
    December 20, 2002

    Satori at Pearl Harbor

  • John Huston
    was born
    100 years ago
     on this date.

    Huston directed
    the film versions of

    The Night of the Iguana
    and
    Under the Volcano.

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    "Borges' seminal short story
    El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan
    (The Garden of Forking Paths)
    is an early example of
    many worlds in fiction."

    "Il faut cultiver notre jardin."
    -- Voltaire 

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  • ART WARS
    continued

    "Examples are the
    stained-glass windows
    of knowledge."

    -- Vladimir Nabokov 

    Today's New York Times:

    Jason Rhoades, 41, Maker of
    Transgressive Installations,
    Is Dead

    For some background
    on Rhoades's Manhattan

    gallerist, David Zwirner,
    and his
    UCLA art school teacher,
    Paul McCarthy, see
    yesterday morning's
    The Frankfurter School.

    "UCLA is frequently described
    as the power art school."
    The New York Times Magazine
     
    For more remarks related
    to UCLA, art, and food,
    see the Log24 entry for
     

  • Quad
    by
    Samuel Beckett:

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    Click on the
    figure for details.

    "I am always about
    in the Quad"     --God

    (Rhyme attributed to
    Monsignor Ronald

    Arbuthnott Knox)

    Related material:
    the previous entry,
    an article subtitled
    "Beckett's Private Purgatories"
    in this week's New Yorker,
    Quine in Purgatory,
    and Logos and Logic.

  • The Double Cross

    The following symbol
    has been associated
    with the date
    December 1:

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    Click on the symbol
    for details.

    That date is connected
    to today's date since
    Dec. 1 is the feast--
    i.e., the deathday-- of
    a saint of mathematics:
    G. H. Hardy, author of
    the classic
    A Mathematician's Apology
    (online, pdf, 52 pp. ),
    while today is the birthday
    of three less saintly
    mathematical figures:
    Sir William Rowan Hamilton,


    For these birthdays, here is
    a more cheerful version of
    the above symbol:

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    For the significance of
    this version, see
    Chinese Jar Revisited
    (Log24, June 27, 2006),
    a memorial to mathematician
    Irving Kaplansky
    (student of Mac Lane).

    This version may be regarded
    as a box containing the
    cross of St. Andrew.
    If we add a Greek cross
    (equal-armed) to the box,
    we obtain the "spider,"
    or "double cross," figure

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    of my favorite mythology:
    Fritz Leiber's Changewar.

  • The Presbyterian Exorcist

    In memory of

    Charles W. Dunn, Harvard Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures Emeritus, who died July 24, 2006, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston at the age of 90.  Dunn was master of Quincy House from 1966 to 1981.

    "'He brought a taste of Scotland to the House, initiating an annual
    rite of exorcism in September to cleanse the place of evil spirits,
    during which a Scots bagpiper led a march of residents around the
    courtyard and Charles intoned an incantation while waving a large
    baton, banishing ghosts and other harbingers of ill will. His
    leadership was at its best during magnificent evenings in the Master's
    lodging when he taught guests Scottish country dances. Students were
    fond of him, and he of them.'

    Born in Arbuthnott, Scotland, the son of a Presbyterian minister, Dunn began his schooling in Aberdeen and Edinburgh...."

    -- Harvard University Gazette online, Aug. 2, 2006

    Related material:

    In Memory of Wallace Stevens,
    Presbyterian Saint
    (also from Aug. 2, 2006),
    and Deaconess.

  • ART WARS
    continued from
    previous entry

    In memory of
    Elisabeth Schwarzkopf:

    "Who is the fairest of them all?"

    This question might

    well be posed by...

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    Rosalind Krauss,

    Meyer Schapiro Professor
    of Modern Art and Theory
    at Columbia University
    (Ph.D., Harvard U., 1969).

    "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.

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    Adapted from
    Ad Reinhardt

    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 in "Grids"

    "Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."
    -- Katherine Neville, author of The Eight

    Related material:

    Balanchine's Birthday,

    Apollo and Christ.