Pictures Within Pictures
"The Chinese language is written in ideograms, pictures. Think of a DO NOT ENTER pictogram, a circle with a diagonal slash, a type of ideogram. It tells you what to do or not do, but not why. The why is part of a larger context, a bigger picture. Such is the nature of the Chinese language. Simple yet complex. Pictures within pictures."
-- Customer review at Amazon.com
See also the pictures in this journal on today's date five years ago.
See also "Chautauqua"
at Stormfront.org and
the five entries ending with
"Unfriendly Persuasion"
this morning.
Background:
"Today's Sinner"
Unfriendly Persuasion
"What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand...."
-- Frank Rich in today's New York Times
Author! Author!
On the Waterfront
"On the Hoboken waterfront, people scattered as pieces of debris fell from the sky. A wheel from one of the aircraft lay on Hoboken's Sinatra Drive." --Associated Press, August 8, 2009
Angel and Beast
Screenwriter Frank Pierson spoke at
Chautauqua Institution this morning.
The gist of his remarks may be found
in an undated graduation speech
at WarnerSisters.com.
His suggested motto for filmmakers:
"To reach and touch
the angel in the beast."
The Chautauquan Daily,
Friday, August 7, 2009
by Sara Toth, staff writer --
"Pierson listed his favorite movies as
the Italian and French films that, after
World War II, captivated him and his
friends.
'Those movies were overwhelmingly
fascinating to us, and changed the way
in which we saw movies, and the way we
saw our lives and what we wanted to do
with ourselves,' he said. 'There were so
many that were absolutely marvelous.'
Such movies are not made any
more, Pierson said, and the quality
of the movies now pale in comparison
to those of the 1970s and 1980s.
About once a year, the Coen brothers
release a movie, and Woody Allen
'occasionally' makes a good film,
Pierson said. But the mainstream movies
that are shown in the multiplexes now
are geared toward only one audience:
young men with disposable incomes.
'That's really catering so extensively
to a rather limited audience-- a mentally
retarded and emotionally stunted
audience at that-- that there's not a lot left
over for the rest of us,' Pierson said."
Dr. Joe Emerson, April 24, 2005--
-- Text: I Peter 2:1-9
Dr. Emerson falsely claims that the film "On the Waterfront" was based on a book by the late Budd Schulberg (who died yesterday). (Instead, the film's screenplay, written by Schulberg-- similar to an earlier screenplay by Arthur Miller, "The Hook"-- was based on a series of newspaper articles by Malcolm Johnson.)
"The movie 'On the Waterfront' is once more in rerun. (That’s when Marlon Brando looked like Marlon Brando. That’s the scary part of growing old when you see what he looked like then and when he grew old.) It is based on a book by Budd Schulberg."
Emerson goes on to discuss the book, Waterfront, that Schulberg wrote based on his screenplay--
"In it, you may remember a scene where Runty Nolan, a little guy, runs afoul of the mob and is brutally killed and tossed into the North River. A priest is called to give last rites after they drag him out."
Dr. Emerson's sermon is, as noted above (Text: I Peter 2:1-9), not mainly about waterfronts, but rather about the "living stones" metaphor of the Big Fisherman.
My own remarks on the date of Dr. Emerson's sermon--
Those who like to mix mathematics with religion may regard the above 4x6 array as a context for the "living stones" metaphor. See, too, the five entries in this journal ending at 12:25 AM ET on November 12 (Grace Kelly's birthday), 2006, and today's previous entry.
"Edward T. Hall, a cultural anthropologist
who pioneered the study of nonverbal
communication and interactions between
members of different ethnic groups,
died July 20 at his home in
Santa Fe, N.M. He was 95."
NY Times piece quoted here on
the date of Hall's death:
|
"July 20, 1969, was the moment NASA needed, more than anything else in this world, the Word. But that was something NASA's engineers had no specifications for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA's true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars." Commentary -- The Word according to St. John:
|
"Mr. Hall first became interested in
space and time as forms of cultural
expression while working on
Navajo and Hopi reservations
in the 1930s."
Log24, July 29:
|
"Kaleidoscope turning... Shifting pattern within |
"We are the key."
-- Eye of Cat
Paul Newall, "Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy"--"Julie recognises the music of the busker outside playing a recorder as that of her husband's. When she asks him where he heard it, he replies that he makes up all sorts of things. This is an instance of a theory of Kieślowski's that 'different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing but for different reasons.' With regard to music in particular, he held what might be characterised as a Platonic view according to which notes pre-exist and are picked out and assembled by people. That these can accord with one another is a sign of what connects people, or so he believed."
The above photo of Juliette Binoche in Blue accompanying the quotations from Zelazny illustrates Kieślowski's concept, with graphic designs instead of musical notes. Some of the same designs are discussed in Abstraction and the Holocaust (Mark Godfrey, Yale University Press, 2007). (See the Log24 entries of June 11, 2009.)
Related material:
"Jeffrey Overstreet, in his book Through a Screen Darkly, comments extensively on Blue. He says these stones 'are like strands of suspended crystalline tears, pieces of sharp-edged grief that Julie has not been able to express.'....Throughout the film the color blue crops up, highlighting the mood of Julie's grief. A blue light occurs frequently, when Julie is caught by some fleeting memory. Accompanied by strains of an orchestral composition, possibly her husband's, these blue screen shots hold for several seconds while Julie is clearly processing something. The meaning of this blue light is unexplained. For Overstreet, it is the spirit of reunification of broken things."
-- Martin Baggs at Mosaic Movie Connect Group on Sunday, March 15, 2009. (Cf. Log24 on that date.)
For such a spirit, compare Binoche's blue mobile in Blue with Binoche's gathered shards in Bee Season.
The New York Times today
on architect Charles Gwathmey,
who died Monday:
"Mr. Gwathmey's Astor Place
condominium tower drew
criticism from those who
said it was insufficiently
deferential to its
surroundings."
Astor Place tower
(click to enlarge):
Surroundings:
The above sculpture,
popularly known as
The Borg Cube,
appeared here on
Saturday:
For deferential remarks, see
Annals of Collective Consciousness.
See also the link
from noon today to
Nobel Prize Day, 2006,
and the link there to
J. G. Ballard on modernism.
"So, there is one place
where modernism triumphs.
As in the cases of the pyramids
and the Taj Mahal, the Siegfried line
and the Atlantic wall, death always
calls on the very best architects."
-- J. G. Ballard,
"A Handful of Dust"
Images from Log24 on
December 10, 2006 --
Nobel Prize Day, and
the day after
Kirk Douglas's birthday--
Kirk Douglas ad for
the film "Diamonds"
(2000)
Images from
Google News
at noon today --
"The serpent's eyes shine
as he wraps around the vine..."
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