August 4, 2009

August 3, 2009

August 2, 2009

  • A Tale and Its Moral:

    Spider Girl

    "The 'magico-religious' tarantella
     is a solo dance performed
    supposedly to cure...
     the delirium and contortions
     attributed to the bite of a spider
    at harvest (summer) time."

    -- Wikipedia 

    Mira Sorvino in 'Tarantella,' with film's motto-- 'Life's a dance'

    Garfield on Sunday, August 2, 2009: Spider gets tail-slap learned from Jersey cow, says 'Those Jersey girls are TOUGH.'
    Moral:

    Life's a dance
       (and Jersey girlshttp://www.log24.com/images/asterisk8.gif
    are tough).

    http://www.log24.com/images/asterisk8.gif For Mira Sorvino, star of "Tarantella,"
        who was raised in Tenafly, New Jersey--

        Bull on sacred cows:

    "Poor late nineteenth-century, poor early twentieth-century! Oh, brave new world that had such people in it: people like Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel. Seven people who did more than all the machine-guns and canons of the Somme Valley or the Panzer divisions of Hitler to end the old world and to create-- if not the answers-- at least the questions that started off the new, each one of them killing one of the sacred cows on which Western consciousness had fed for so long...."

    -- Apostolos Doxiadis, "Writing Incompleteness-- the Play" (pdf). See also Mathematics and Narrative.

  • From Tinker Shuffle to...

August 1, 2009

  • Annals of Collective Consciousness:

    And the Tony
       goes to...


    The New York Times     today:

    "Tony Rosenthal, who created 'Alamo,' the eternally popular revolving black cube in Astor Place in the East Village, and many other public sculptures, died on Tuesday [July 28, 2009] in Southampton, N.Y. He was 94."

    The Astor Place sculpture, near Cooper Union, is also known as The Borg Cube:

    http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/090801-CooperCube2.jpg

    The Borg Cube, with
    Cooper Union at left

    Wikipedia on The Borg Queen:

    "The Borg Queen is the focal point within the Borg collective consciousness."

    Possible Borg-Queen candidates:

    Helen Mirren, who appeared in this journal on the date of Rosenthal's death (see Monumental Anniversary), and Julie Taymor, who recently directed Mirren as Prospera in a feminist version of "The Tempest."

    Both Mirren and Taymor would appreciate the work of Anita Borg, who pioneered the role of women in computer science. "Her colleagues mourned Borg's passing, even as they stressed how crucial she was in creating a kind of collective consciousness for women working in the heavily male-dominated field of computer technology." --Salon.com obituary

    http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/090801-AnitaBorgSm.jpg

    Anita Borg

    Borg died on Sunday, April 6, 2003. See The New York Times Magazine for that date in Art Wars: Geometry as Conceptual Art--

    http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/090801-NYT_Magazine030406.jpg

    (Cover typography revised)

    I would award the Borg-Queen Tony to Taymor, who seems to have a firmer grasp of technology than Mirren.


    Julie Taymor directing a film

    See Language Game,
    Wittgenstein's birthday, 2009.

July 31, 2009

  • Culture Wars continued:

    Again with the...

    ALLURE

    at The New York Times.

    For previous notes on
    allure at the Times, see
    St. Luke's Day, 2008,
    and its links.

    Teaser at the top of
    this afternoon's Times's
    online front page:

    "Vampires Never Die:
    In our fast-paced society,
    eternity has a special
    allure." (With fanged
    illustration)--

    NYT teaser, 'Vampires Never Die'

    Yesterday's afternoon entry was
    related to both the July 13th death
    of avant-garde artist Dash Snow
    and the beauty of Suzanne Vega.

    A reference to Vega's album
    "Beauty & Crime" apppeared here
    on the date of Snow's death.
    (See "Terrible End for an
    Enfant Terrible    ," NY Times,
    story dated July 24.)

    The Vega entry yesterday was, in
    part, a reference to that context.

    Suzanne Vega album cover, 'Beauty and Crime'

    In view of today's Times
    teaser, the large picture of
    Vega shown here yesterday
    (a detail of the above cover)
    seems less an image of
    pure beauty than of, well,
    a lure... specifically, a
    vampire lure:

    Suzanne Vega as Vampire Bait

    What healthy vampire
    could resist that neck?

    To me, the key words in the
    Times teaser are "allure"
    (discussed above) and "eternity."

    For both allure and eternity
    in the same picture
    (with interpretive
    symbols added above)
    see this journal on
    January 31, 2008:

    Abstract Symbols of Time and Eternity

    Jean Simmons and Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus

    This image from "Black Narcissus"
    casts Jean Simmons as Allure
    and Deborah Kerr, in a pretty
    contrast, as Eternity.

    For different approaches to
    these concepts, see Simmons
    and Kerr in other films,
    notably those co-starring
    Burt Lancaster.

    Lancaster seems to have had
    a pretty good grasp of Allure
    in his films with Simmons
    and Kerr. For Eternity, see
    "Rocket Gibraltar" and
    "Field of Dreams."

    For less heterosexual approaches
    to these concepts, see the
    continuing culture coverage of
    the Times-- for instance, the
    vampire essay above and the
    Times's remarks Monday on
    choreographer Merce Cunningham--
    who always reminded me of
     Carmen Ghia in "The Producers"--

    Carmen Ghia from 'The Producers'

    Related material:

    "Dance of the Vampires"
    in "At the Still Point"
     (this journal, 1/16/03).

July 30, 2009