Joan Didion, The White Album:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live….

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple
choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the
imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’
with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which
is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when
I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever
told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

An Alternate History
 
(based on entries of
the past three days):

“A FAMOUS HISTORIAN:

England, 932 A.D. —
 A kingdom divided….”

– Introduction to “Spamalot”

Washington hosts
Hollywood elite
for Kennedy Honors

Reuters
Sunday, December 3, 2006; 12:12 AM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – “Washington’s elite mingled with
artistic icons at the Kennedy Center Honors on Saturday….

The Kennedy Center Honors weekend was to conclude on Sunday
with Bush hosting an afternoon reception at the White House
followed by an evening performance at the John F. Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts.

The show will be broadcast on the CBS television network on
December 26.”

From “Today in History,”
by The Associated Press:

On this date (Dec. 3):

In 1925,
“Concerto in F,”
by George Gershwin,
had its world premiere
at New York’s Carnegie Hall,
with Gershwin himself
at the piano.

In 1947,
the Tennessee Williams play
“A Streetcar Named Desire”
opened on Broadway.

In 1953,
the musical “Kismet”
opened on Broadway.

In 1960,
the musical “Camelot”
opened on Broadway.

Related material:

Yesterday’s entries–

Monroe and the Kennedys
and

Monroe and the Kennedys,
Part II.

Click on the picture
for further details.

Steven Rosen in The Boston Globe, Sunday, Nov. 26, 2006:

“Emilio Estevez still doesn’t know why, but one day in 2000 he and
his brother Charlie Sheen found themselves doing a photo shoot at this
city’s long-closed but still infamous Ambassador Hotel. It was where
Senator Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot the night he won
California’s crucial Democratic presidential primary in 1968.

The site made little sense for the film they were promoting, ‘Rated
X,’ a feature about the real-life San Francisco pornographers Jim and
Artie Mitchell….  he [Estevez] and Sheen co-starred as the
Mitchell brothers.

‘It wasn’t something I had requested,’ Estevez says today of the
photo shoot’s location. ‘It was perhaps the photographer. I never got
to the bottom of it, but there I was.’

To him, it was one in a series of ‘divine interventions’ that gave
him the inspiration to write and direct the new film ‘Bobby,’ which
opened Thursday [Nov. 23, Thanksgiving Day 2006].”

Brothers

John F. Kennedy

Brothers
Charlie Sheen and
Emilio Estevez

“We keep coming back
and coming back to the real:
To the hotel instead of
the hymns….”

In honor of
the film “Bobby,”
now playing.

(“Venus at St. Anne’s”
is the title of the final
chapter of
the C. S. Lewis classic
That Hideous Strength.)

Symbol of Venus
and
Symbol of Plato

Related symbols:

Click on pictures
for details related tp
the Feast of St. Anne
(July 26).

“The best theology today,
in its repudiation of a
rhetorical religious idealism,
finds itself in agreement
with a recurrent note
in contemporary poetry….

We keep coming back
and coming back/
To the real: to the hotel
instead of the hymns/
That fall upon it
out of the wind.  We seek/
… Nothing beyond reality.
Within it/
Everything,
the spirit’s alchemicana….

(From ‘An Ordinary Evening
in New Haven,’
in The Collected Poems
of Wallace Stevens….)

… Not grim/
Reality, but reality grimly seen….

(Ibid.)”

– “The Church’s
New Concern with the Arts,”
by Amos N. Wilder,
Hollis Professor
of Divinity, Emeritus,
at Harvard Divinity School,
in Christianity and Crisis,
February 18, 1957.

“All the truth in the world
adds up to one big lie.”

– Dylan, “Things Have Changed“

Day Without Art

From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

crucial – 1706, from Fr. crucial… from L. crux (gen. crucis) “cross.” The meaning “decisive, critical” is extended from a logical term, Instantias Crucis, adopted by Francis Bacon (1620); the notion is of cross fingerboard signposts* at forking roads, thus a requirement to choose.

“… given the nature of our intellectual commerce with
works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something
crucial– the means by which our experience of individual works is joined
to our understanding of the values they signify.”

– Hilton Kramer in The New York Times, April 28, 1974

“I realized that without making the slightest effort
I had come upon one of those utterances in search of which
psychoanalysts and State Department monitors of the Moscow or Belgrade
press are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium: namely, the seemingly
innocuous obiter dicta, the words in passing, that give the game away.

What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, ‘to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.’ I read it again. It didn’t say ‘something helpful’ or ‘enriching’ or even ‘extremely valuable.’ No, the word was crucial….

The more industrious scholars will derive considerable
pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists
of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and
art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the
paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato’s cave
dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them,
which was the Word.”

– Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

For some related material from the next 30 years, 1976-2006, see Art Wars.

* “Note that in the original Latin, the term is not by any means
‘fingerpost’ but simply ‘cross’ (Latin Crux, crucis) – a root term
giving deeper meaning to the ‘crucial’ decision as to which if any of
the narratives are ‘true,’ and echoing the decisive ‘crucifixion’
revealed in the story.”

– Wikipedia on An Instance of the Fingerpost.