In Lieu of Rosebud...

On this date in 1985, Orson Welles died

...sitting at his typewriter, working on the next day's script changes for his movie,"The Other Side of the Wind."

-- Louis Bülow, The Third Man and Orson Welles

From a review of "Leaving Las Vegas" -- a film starring Nicolas Cage that includes a tribute to Welles:

At least Cage dies without saying "Rosebud."

To me, the musical equivalent of "Rosebud" in this film is a song that Sting sings on the soundtrack, "Angel Eyes," which of course was rendered to perfection in Vegas by Sinatra long before Cage and Sting.

One visual equivalent, in turn, of "Angel Eyes," is to me a sketch for a painting I did in 1976.  This has been likened to the many eyes of an angelic creature named Proginoskes in a novel for children and adolescents by Madeleine L'Engle.

Perhaps the dark cynicism of Leaving Las Vegas (the book) might be somewhat counterbalanced by the looney religiosity of A Wind in the Door, L'Engle's novel.

At any rate, here are links to the "Angel Eyes"

music and picture.

© 1976 Steven H. Cullinane

Also, "Angel Eyes" is now the background music for this site; one night of the Bach midi was enough.

Annie's Song

In honor of Apollo (see entries below) and of the Red Mass celebrated tonight on the TV drama "The West Wing," this site's music is, for the time being, Bach's

Mass in B minor  (BWV.232) 
   § 17. Et in spiritum sanctum (10k) (arr. for 2 guitars by Richard Yates) (David Lovell)

from the Classical Guitar Midi Archives.

ART WARS:

Apollo and Dionysus

From the New York Times of October 9, 2002:

Daniel Deverell Perry, a Long Island architect who created the marble temple of art housing the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., died Oct. 2 in Woodstock, N.Y.... He was 97.

From The Birth of Tragedy, by Friedrich Nietzsche (tr. by Shaun Whiteside):

Chapter 1....

To the two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we owe our recognition that in the Greek world there is a tremendous opposition, as regards both origins and aims, between the Apolline art of the sculptor and the non-visual, Dionysiac art of music.

Chapter 25....

From the foundation of all existence, the Dionysiac substratum of the world, no more can enter the consciousness of the human individual than can be overcome once more by that Apolline power of transfiguration, so that both of these artistic impulses are forced to unfold in strict proportion to one another, according to the law of eternal justice.  Where the Dionysiac powers have risen as impetuously as we now experience them, Apollo, enveloped in a cloud, must also have descended to us; some future generation will behold his most luxuriant effects of beauty.

Notes: 

• On the Clark Art Institute, from Perry's obituary in the Times:
  

  "When it opened in 1955, overlooking 140 acres of fields and ponds, Arts News celebrated its elegant galleries as the 'best organized and most highly functional museum erected anywhere.'"

  
  
• The "Nymphs and Satyr" illustration above is on the cover of "CAI: Journal of the Clark Art Institute," Volume 3, 2002.  It is a detail from the larger work of the same title by William Bouguereau.
  
  
  
• Today, October 9, is the anniversary of the dedication in 28 B.C. of the Temple to Apollo on the Palatine Hill in Rome.  See the journal entry below, which emphasizes the point that Apollo and Dionysus are not as greatly opposed as one might think.

See also
The Angel in the Stone

"Everything is found
and lost and buried
and then found again"
-- Tanya Wendling

"The main character is Maurice Castle, the head of the Africa station for a branch of British intelligence....  [the] writing is sparse and neat rather than languid or flowery...."
-- Kevin Holtsberry 

From Chapter I: 

"Castle could see that telling the truth this time had been an error of judgement, yet, except on really important occasions, he always preferred the truth.  The truth can be double-checked."

On fiction and truth: 

Here is a short story that is
tight, focused, sparse, and neat.

The story is also true.

Mate in 2  V. Nabokov, 1919

This problem embodies the "starflight" theme;
for details, see Tim Krabbé's
 Open Chess Diary, entry 9.

As the example of Nabokov shows, a taste for truth (as in chess or geometry) may accompany a taste for fiction.  This applies also to Krabbé, as shown by the following reviews of his novel The Cave:

New York Times
“Krabbe’s carefully constructed narrative has a geometry so precise that the patterns buried under the surface emerge only in the final pages.”

Library Journal
“A diamond of a book- perfectly proportioned, multifaceted, and containing not one wasted word”

Music for R.D. Laing

In honor of the birth in Scotland on this date in 1927 of R. D. Laing, author of The Facts of Life, this site's music is today taken from the classic film "The Piano."

From the 1991 4th draft of Jane Campion's screenplay for
                     "The Piano":

Twenty-first Century Fox

On Sunday, October 6, 1889, the Moulin Rouge music hall opened in Paris, an event that to some extent foreshadowed the opening of Fox Studios Australia in Sydney on November 7, 1999.  The Fox ceremonies included, notably, Kylie Minogue singing "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend." 

For the mathematical properties of the red windmill (moulin rouge) figure at left, see Diamond Theory.

The Message from Vega

"Mercilessly tasteful"
 -- Andrew Mueller,
review of Suzanne Vega's
"Songs in Red and Gray"

Zen holy day:

Bodhidharma Day

Epigraph to Chapter 23 of Contact, by Carl Sagan:

We have not followed cunningly devised fables....
-- II Peter 1:16

Song lyric:

It's still the same old story....
-- Herman Hupfeld, 1931

From Chapter 23 of Contact, by Carl Sagan:

  "You mean you could decode a picture hiding in pi and it would be a mess of Hebrew letters?"
  "Sure.  Big black letters, carved in stone."
  He looked at her quizzically.
  "Forgive me, Eleanor, but don't you think you're being a mite too... indirect?  You don't belong to a silent order of Buddhist nuns.  Why don't you just tell your story?"

Moonlight and love songs,
never out of date.... 

See also my journal note 
for Michaelmas, 2002,
"Pi in the Sky." 

ART WARS:
The Agony and the Ya-Ya

Today's birthdays:

• Charlton Heston
  
• Anne Rice
  
• Patti LaBelle

To honor the birth of these three noted spiritual leaders, I make the following suggestion: Use the mandorla as the New Orleans Mardi Gras symbol.  Rice lives in New Orleans and LaBelle's classic "Lady Marmalade" deals with life in that colorful city.

What, you may well ask, is the mandorla? This striking visual symbol was most recently displayed prominently at a meeting of U.S. cardinals in the Pope's private library on Shakespeare's birthday.  The symbol appears in the upper half of a painting above the Pope.

From Church Anatomy:

The illustration below shows how Barbara G. Walker in her excellent book "The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets" describes the mandorla.