From the journal of Steven H. Cullinane... 2003 Jan. 1-7

Tuesday, January 07, 2003

Song of Bernadette

 JEAN KERR STARS IN...

               BROADWAY BABY!

In memory of Broadway's Jean Kerr —

Recall the ending of the classic film "Michael."

See also this review of  a Bernadette Peters concert:

"Then comes the moment that you have been secretly waiting for all of your life and whisks you away to the other universe, where everyone is singing happy show-tunes and appreciating the good life. Has some religious leader taken over my life or what? No, nothing like that... I just attended the first ever London concert performance of Bernadette Peters at the Royal Festival Hall....

... Broadway Baby simply brought the house down for the first time." 

I'm just a Broad-way Ba-by,
     walk-ing off my ti-red feet,
Pound-ing For-ty Sec-ond Street, 
     to be in a show.

Broad-way Ba-by,
Learn-ing how to sing and dance,
Wait-ing for that one big chance 
     to be in a show.

Gee, I'd like to be
On some mar-quee,
All twink-ling lights,
A spark to pierce the dark
    from Bat-t'ry Park 
    to Wash - ing-ton Heights.
Some day may-be,
All my dreams will be re-paid.

 4:00 pm


Tuesday, January 07, 2003

Can You See?

I finally got around to watching "Minority Report" on DVD.  My favorite part is scene 16, which takes place in a sort of high-tech fantasy park — rather like Hollywood itself.  Rufus T. Riley, the hacker who works there, asks Anderton, "You brought a precog... here?"   When the reality sinks in, he exclaims "Jesus Christ!," falls to his knees, crosses himself, and asks "Are you reading my mind right now?"

A Brief History of Time

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present
      in time future,
And time future contained
      in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is
      an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual
      possibility
Only in a world of
      speculation.
What might have been and 
      what has been
Point to one end,
      which is always present.

— T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"

Anderton and Agatha

"Is it now?"
Good question, Agatha.

 

 2:45 am


Monday, January 06, 2003

Dead Poet in
the City of Angels

Lyricist Eddy Marnay died Friday, Jan. 3, 2003.
Relevant Log24.net entries:

Certain themes recur in these entries.  To describe such recurrent themes, in art and in life, those enamoured of metaphors from physics may ponder the phrase
"implicate order."

For an illustration of at least part of the
implicate order,
click here.

Another name for the implicate order is, of course, the Tao:

"The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time."

— C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

 12:00 pm


Monday, January 06, 2003

Doctorow's Epiphany

E. L. Doctorow is 72 today.

In the Garden of Adding...

The above is a phrase from The Midrash Jazz Quartet in Doctorow's novel City of God.

Tonight's site music is "Black Diamond."

William T. Noon, S.J., Chapter 4 of Joyce and Aquinas, Yale University Press, 1957:

  A related epiphanic question, second only in interest to the question of the nature of epiphany, is how Joyce came by the term. The religious implications would have been obvious to Joyce: no Irish Catholic child could fail to hear of and to understand the name of the liturgical feast celebrated on January 6. But why does Joyce appropriate the term for his literary theory? Oliver St. John Gogarty (the prototype of the Buck Mulligan of Ulysses)... has this to say: "Probably Father Darlington had taught him, as an aside in his Latin class -- for Joyce knew no Greek -- that 'Epiphany' meant 'a shining forth.'"

From Stanley Kubrick's The Shining:

Danny Torrance: Is there something bad here?
Dick Hallorann: Well, you know, Doc, when something happens, you can leave a trace of itself behind. Say like, if someone burns toast. Well, maybe things that happen leave other kinds of traces behind. Not things that anyone can notice, but things that people who "shine" can see. Just like they can see things that haven't happened yet. Well, sometimes they can see things that happened a long time ago. I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years. And not all of 'em was good.

From a website on author Willard Motley:

"Willard Motley’s last published novel is entitled, Let Noon Be Fair, and was actually published post-humously in 1966. The story line takes place in Motley’s adopted country of Mexico, in the fictional fishing village of Las Casas, which was based on Puerta [sic] Vallarta."

See also "Shining Forth" and yesterday's entry "Culinary Theology."

 

 12:00 am

Comments on this post:

From an essay by Teller of Penn and Teller, that I just happened to read today:

It's funny how right Stanislavsky is about acting. He tells you to read the script again and again, to act it out again and again, not to think too hard, but to wait until this or that moment starts to get illuminated. Gradually, he says, the bright parts of the script will expand until the whole thing is lit up. That's a little hard to do in a short rehearsal period, but since the role was written with me in mind and since everybody was working so hard to help, the process was speeded up.

Next day we did a pre-shoot of an "exterior" where Mr. Boots gets stuck Up a tree and Greg unwillingly climbs up to rescue him. I was very glad they put thick mats under the tree, as Greg went plummeting on one of his first climbs. We did it until everybody laughed, then stopped. Gail, the director, then told me that Fred Greenlee, the man who had dreamed up the Mr. Boots character (literally, while sleeping) had offered to work with me one on one on scenes I was having trouble with.

For three stupendously fun hours, Fred and I went over each piece of Mr. Boots' "business". His original idea was that Boots took the cat concept less literally than I had thought. Mr. Boots should SEE himself in his mind's eye as trotting around on all fours all the time, but in fact often be upright (think of the horses in "Equus") moving like a cat-man. Fred is thin, so he had in mind all sorts of graceful stuff that didn't suit me, but the idea -- that Mr. Boots actually walks along the streets of San Francisco much of the time in his cat mind-set -- was an eye-opener. I started to think, Let's make Mr. Boots all about being luxuriously comfortable at all times. So we draped me over steps, refrigerators, couches, and I came up with a funny cat-trot that enabled me to do quick crosses when I needed to. By the end of our session, there were big Stanislavsky pools of light all over the script.

Posted 1/6/2003 at 2:20 am by HomerTheBrave

Oh, and an index of all the entries

Posted 1/6/2003 at 2:21 am by HomerTheBrave


Sunday, January 05, 2003

Link

6:43 pm


Sunday, January 05, 2003

Culinary Theology

A comment on "Whirligig," the previous entry:

When I hear 'red mill,'
I think Red Mill.

Red Mill
Burgers

Posted 1/5/2003 at 5:10 am
by HomerTheBrave.

From my favorite theologian, Jimmy Buffett:

"Well good God Almighty,
which way do I steer for my

Chorus:
Cheeseburger in paradise (paradise)
Makin' the best of every virtue and vice (paradise)
Worth every damn bit of sacrifice (paradise)
To get a cheeseburger in paradise
To be a cheeseburger in paradise
I'm just a cheeseburger in paradise!"

For some, paradise — or at least the gateway to paradise — is at Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

From a one-act version (p. xvi) of
"The Night of the Iguana":

"MISS JELKES: Is this the menu? (She has picked up a paper on the table.)

SHANNON: Yes, it's the finest piece of rhetoric since Lincoln's Gettysburg Address."

"Cheeseburger In Paradise, Puerto Vallarta, opened for business on November 7, 1999." — The same date, mentioned in last night's "Whirligig" entry, that Fox Studios Australia opened in Sydney with a song by Kylie Minogue. 

 

 3:36 pm

Comments on this post:

"I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and french-fried potato."

I just finished "A Pirate Looks at Fifty" again last week. We're huge parrot-heads at my house.

Posted 1/5/2003 at 3:49 pm by william_f_house


Sunday, January 05, 2003

Dinner at Eight

4:00 am


Sunday, January 05, 2003


Whirligig

Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
Twelfth Night. Act v. Sc. 1.

Twelfth night is the night of January 5-6.

Tonight is twelfth night in Australia; 4 AM Jan. 5
in New York City is 8 PM Jan. 5 in Sydney.

An October 6 entry:

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." 

Red Windmill

Kylie Minogue

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

An October 5 entry:

The Message from Vega

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

In accordance with the twelfth-night
"whirligig of time" theme,
here are two enigmatic quilt blocks:

Devil's Claws, or
Hourglass Var. 3

Yankee Puzzle, or
Hourglass Var. 5

 
One can approach these symbols in either a literary or a mathematical fashion. For a purely mathematical discussion of the differences in the two symbols' structure, see Diamond Theory. Those who prefer literary discussions may make up their own stories.
 
"Plato is wary of all forms of rapture other than reason's. He is most deeply leery of, because himself so susceptible to, the literary imagination. He speaks of it as a kind of holy madness or intoxication and goes on to link it to Eros, another derangement that joins us, but very dangerously, with the gods."
 
— Rebecca Goldstein in The New York Times,
    December 16, 2002 
 
"It's all in Plato, all in Plato; bless me,
what do they teach them at these schools?"
 
— C. S. Lewis in the Narnia Chronicles 

 

 12:12 am

Comments on this post:

When I hear 'red mill,' I think Red Mill.

Posted 1/5/2003 at 5:10 am by HomerTheBrave


Saturday, January 04, 2003


ART WARS:

The Reader
Over Your Shoulder

Recommended:

The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose
by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, London, Jonathan Cape, 1943.

See also last night's entry on "Red Dragon" and
this news story on a Chinese cannibal-artist
from today's Toronto Globe and Mail.

 

 7:26 pm


Saturday, January 04, 2003


Opening of the Graves

Revelation 20:12 
I saw the dead,
the great and the small,
standing before the throne,
and they opened books.

The Dead —

The Great: 

On January 4, 1965, T. S. Eliot died.

The Small:

On January 4, 1991, T. S. Matthews, author of Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot, died.

From the website of the Redwood Library and Athenæum, Newport, Rhode Island:

The Library of a 20th-Century
Man of Letters

Redwood is the delighted recipient of part of the personal library of Thomas Stanley Matthews ([Jan. 16] 1901- [Jan. 4] 1991), a shareholder from 1947 until his death and a generous benefactor. Matthews, who summered in Middletown for over 50 years, began his journalism career with The New Republic, where he served as assistant editor between 1925 and 1927 and as an associate editor between 1927 and 1929. He was then hired as books editor at Time, where over the next 20 years he held the positions of assistant managing editor, executive editor, and managing editor. In 1949 he succeeded the magazine's founder, Henry Luce, as editor. Upon retiring in 1953, he moved to England.

Matthews edited The Selected Letters of Charles Lamb (1956), for which he wrote the introduction. He published two volumes of memoirs, Name and Address: An Autobiography (1960) and Jacks or Better (1977; published in England as Under the Influence); two volumes of poetry; The Sugar Pill: An Essay on Newspapers (1957); O My America! Notes on a Trip (1962); Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot (1974); a volume of character sketches, Angels Unawares: Twentieth-Century Portraits (1985); and eight volumes of aphorisms, witticisms, and verse.

Shortly before his death, Matthews expressed the desire that all his books be left to Redwood Library.... [including] books by Seamus Heaney, Louis MacNeice, Ezra Pound, Laura Riding, Edward Arlington Robinson, W. H. Auden, e e cummings, and Robert Graves.

Of particular interest are the 16 volumes by Graves, most of them autographed by the author....

 
"Like the beat, beat, beat
of the tom-tom...."
— Cole Porter, 1932 

colporteur

n. itinerant seller or giver of books,
especially religious literature.

Now you has jazz.

— Cole Porter, lyric for "High Society,"
set in Newport, Rhode Island, 1956



 3:33 pm

Comments on this post:

Hey--about your apology, no prob at all.  I recognized right away that the comments were directed to her.  No problem.

Posted 1/4/2003 at 7:16 pm by WindwardSpirit


Saturday, January 04, 2003

A Darker Side of C. S. Lewis

Known for his fairy-story series "The Chronicles of Narnia," C. S. Lewis had a more serious — some might say darker — side.

His portrayals of science and scientists in That Hideous Strength  give an accurate picture of moral degeneracy in that subculture.  The hero of Lewis's "space trilogy," of which That Hideous Strength is the conclusion, is a philologist  — a student of language.  In keeping with Lewis's interest in philology and in fairy stories, and with the fact that today is Jacob Grimm's birthday, here are some philological observations related to the word "middle" — as in the "middle earth" of Lewis's friend Tolkien, or in "middle kingdom," the Chinese name for China.

From a bulletin board site, sciforums.com, that bills itself as an "intelligent science community":

Forum: Art & Culture

Thread: Red Dragon

User: aseedrain

I've just watched "Red Dragon". Not bad actually but there was a triviality in the film that somewhat spoilt my appreciation of it. In the film, the serial killer (played by Ralph Fiennes) leaves a mark behind - a Chinese character. The character is explained as a character that appear [sic] on mahjung pieces that carries the meaning 'red dragon'.

Now I know for a fact that the Chinese character that appears in the film means 'centre' or 'middle'. It is one of the two characters that make up the name "China" or its literal translation "Middle Kingdom". I'm no expert on the mahjung game but I do know that even in the game, the piece that carry [sic] this character is also referred as "chung" meaning 'middle'. I have never come across any instances where this particular character referred to dragons.

Therefore, in the absence of any other explanation, I assume the film made a mistake with this little detail....

From the Four Winds Mah Jong site:

The developers of the classical Mah Jong were educated and knew well the classical Chinese philosophical and mythological tradition, particularly the Book of Changes and the Book of Surprises. The elements of the game symbolize interaction of the three extremes of the universe: Heaven, Earth and Man, expressed in many ways, not only by images graved in the tiles, but also in a way the tiles form numerically significant groups and combinations.

Thus 144 is said to be the number of the plan of Earth, and the square formed by the tiles can be seen as a symbolic representation of the universe. Heaven is manifested in the Four Seasons, Earth in the Four regions (East, South, West and North), and Man in the Four Flowers (symbolizing motion or life). The Dragons ('San Yuan' or 'San Chi' in Chinese, meaning "Extremes") symbolize Heaven (White Dragon, 'Po', meaning "white" or" blank"), Earth (Green Dragon, 'Fa', meaning "prosperous") and Man (Red Dragon, 'Chung', meaning "center", i.e. "between Heaven and Earth"). 

From another mah jong site:

Red Dragon
Chinese Character: "Chung"

The true name of this tile is represented by the Chinese character "Chung" which means centre or middle. The "Chung" character represents interpretation an arrow striking the centre of a target. The meaning of this tile is therefore - success or achievement.

This tile is the counterpart of the "The Green Dragon" tile which shows the arrow about to leave the bow. It is commonly called "The Red Dragon" in western Mah Jong sets because the "Chung" character is generally drawn in red ink.

From a page on a pilot of the USAF China National Aviation Corp. (CNAC) Air Transport Command Group:

The significance of the chung on the plane is explained here.  Suggested as an insignia by General Claire Chennault in 1942, it may be imagined to have signified — as on the mah jong tile — success or achievement in this area as well.

Let us hope that philologists and fairy-tale students like Grimm and Lewis — rather than followers of the religion of scientism — continue to inspire and guide those who must fight for our values.

 

 3:33 am


Friday, January 03, 2003


The Shanghai Gesture:
An Exercise in Synchronicity

"A corpse will be transported by express!"

— Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry (1947)


Dietrich


Minogue

For Dietrich, see the reference below;
For Minogue, see my entry
"That Old Devil Moon"
of January 1st, 2003.

From the Turner Classic Movies website:

PLAYING ON TCM:
Jan 03, 2003, 08:00 PM

Shanghai Express  (1932)
CAST: Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook, Anna May Wong. DIRECTOR: Josef von Sternberg.

A beautiful temptress re-kindles an old romance while trying to escape her past during a tension-packed train journey. [Set in 1931] BW-82m

From The New Yorker magazine,
received in the mail this afternoon:

Shanghai Moon

"...a new play... set in Shanghai in 1931.... Previews begin Jan. 3."

Given the above, a believer in synchronicity
under the volcano 
will naturally search for a suitable corpse...
and voilà:

The Toronto Star —

Friday, Jan. 3, 2003. 05:50 PM

Syndicated astrologist
Sydney Omarr, 76, dies

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Sydney Omarr, the astrologer to the stars who came to write horoscopes that appear in more than 200 North American newspapers, has died. He was 76.

Omarr, who was blinded and paralysed from the neck down by multiple sclerosis, died Thursday [Jan. 2, 2003] in hospital in Santa Monica of complications from a heart attack, the Los Angeles Times reported. His ex-wife, assistants and several close friends were by his side.

Born Sidney Kimmelman in Philadelphia, Omarr decided to change his name at age 15 after watching a movie called The Shanghai Gesture, starring Victor Mature as a character named Omar. He changed the spelling of his first name and adopted Omar as his last name, but added a second "r," in accordance with certain numerological formulas.

"It has a ghastly familiarity, like a half-forgotten dream."
 — Poppy (Gene Tierney) in
"The Shanghai Gesture."

"It's a gesture, dear, not a recipe."
 — Peggy (Vanessa Redgrave) in
"Prick Up Your Ears"

 

11:59 pm

Comments on this post:

Thanks Stephen!! That film (Shanghai Express) is one I've been trying to think of for several days now. I was trying to place it during a conversation the other day and couldn't quite.

You're aces. I'm going to go rent that this weekend.

Hope you're doing well. Take care.

Posted 1/4/2003 at 12:57 am by william_f_house


Friday, January 03, 2003

Tolkien is Eleventy-One Today!

In observance of this milestone, some links:

3:33 pm

Comments on this post:

If not for you, I'd have missed the party.  Thanks.  He's one of my heroes.  Would that, one day, I could write half as well.

Posted 1/3/2003 at 6:18 pm by SuSu

Same as Bilbo ... Eleventy One ...
Heh.

Posted 1/4/2003 at 2:39 am by oOMisfitOo


Thursday, January 02, 2003

Faces of the Twentieth Century:
The Harvest Continues

"I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love's greeting of realer, of rounder replies?"

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Hurrahing in Harvest"

Mary Brian

Joe Foss

"Cowboy, take me away.
Fly this girl as high as you can
into the wild blue."

— The Dixie Chicks

See
"Culture Clash at Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"
in my notes of December 11, 2002.

 

 2:45 am

Comments on this post:

I also posted a tribute to Joe Foss!  That was a nice article.  He was my personal hero!  Guy

Posted 1/3/2003 at 12:15 pm by guypithecus


Wednesday, January 01, 2003

ART WARS:

That Old Devil Moon


Kylie Minogue

    From The New York Times, Wed., Jan. 1, 2003:

Richard Horner, 82,
Broadway Producer, Is Dead

Richard Horner, a Broadway theater owner and producer who won a Tony Award for the 1974 revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Moon for the Misbegotten," died on Saturday [December 28, 2002] at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 82.

According to one source, the O'Neill revival opened on December 28, 1973 — the same date on which the life of one of its producers was later to close.

From a CurtainUp review:

The revival at the Morosco was dubbed by its company "The Resurrection Play" since Jason Robards undertook the part just after a near fatal car accident and its legendary director José Quintero had just given up drinking.

According to the Internet Broadway Database, this revival, or resurrection, took place officially not on December 28 — the date of Horner's death — but, appropriately, a day later.

At any rate, O'Neill's title, along with my weblog entry of December 28, 2002,

"On This Date," featuring Kylie Minogue,

suggests the following mini-exhibit of artistic efforts:

Curtain Up!

July 2000
issue of GQ:
Australian pop star Kylie Minogue strikes a pose. The cover is a takeoff on an Athena tennis poster.

 

Under the Volcano:

A painting based on Malcolm Lowry's classic novel.

Having played tennis, Dr. Vigil and M. Laruelle talk about the events a year earlier.

The view is of Cuernavaca from the Casino de la Selva hotel.

Painting by
Julian Heaton Cooper.

 

For further details on Kylie, Mexico, tequila, and
Under the Volcano,
see my entry of November 5, 2002.

For today's site music, click "Old Devil Moon" here.

Addendum of 9:30 pm 1/1/03:

For a politically correct view
of the above GQ cover,
see Charlotte Raven's essay,
"The Opposite of Sexy,"
from The Guardian, June 13, 2000.

For a more perceptive analysis,
see George Orwell's essay,
"The Art of Donald McGill,"
from Horizon, September 1941.

An Example of McGill's Art

If there is a devil here,
I suspect it is less likely to be
Kyllie Minogue than Charlotte Raven.

Today's birthdays:

J. D. Salinger (Nine Stories),
E. M. Forster ("Only connect"), and
Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough).

Frazer might appreciate the remarks in
the SparkNotes essay on The Natural,
cited in my note "Homer" of Dec. 30, 2002,
on bird symbolism and vegetative myths.

Not amused: Charlotte Raven

Raven, take a bough.

 4:24 pm