Archived copy. Current journal entries are at
log24.net.
Plain Hunt Maximus
Thursday, December 19, 2002
ART WARS:
Bach at Heaven's
Gate
From a weblog entry of Friday,
December 13, 2002:
Divine
Comedy
Joan Didion and her husband
John Gregory Dunne (author of The Studio and
Monster) wrote the
screenplays for the 1976 version of "A Star is Born"
and the similarly plotted 1996 film
"Up Close and Personal."
If the incomparable Max
Bialystock were to remake the latter, he
might retitle it "Distant and
Impersonal." A Google search on this phrase
suggests a plot outline for Mel Brooks
& Co.
Academy Award-winning producer
Sidney Glazier died early Saturday
morning [Dec. 14, 2002] of natural causes at
his home in Bennington, Vt. He was 86. Glazier... is
best known for producing the 1968 film "The Producers." That film, which has
since become a Tony Award-winning Broadway play,
also marked comedian Mel Brooks' directing
debut.
Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of "Heaven's Gate," the Film that Sank
United Artists, Second Edition, by Steven
Bach
From Newmarket Press:
"Steven Bach was the senior
vice-president and head of worldwide production for United
Artists at the time of the filming of Heaven's
Gate.... Apart from the director and the producer, Bach
was the only person to witness the evolution of Heaven's
Gate from beginning to end."
See also my journal entry "Back to Bach" of 1:44 a.m. EST
Saturday, December 14, 2002.
4:07 am
Plain Hunt Maximus
This midnight's site music is in honor of Sinatra's first
recording session for Reprise on December 19, 1960 (which
included "Ring-a-Ding-Ding").
See also The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers, and
this applet for devising your own peal of
changes.
Those who prefer Disney may go to this web page and click on the title "The
Bells of Notre Dame" for a different midi. For Mary Gaitskill's more mature approach to
Victor Hugo's classic, click here.
12:00 am
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
Not Amusing
Anymore
I need a photo-opportunity I want a shot at redemption
Don't want to end up a cartoon In a cartoon graveyard
— Paul Simon
"Rebecca Goldstein remembers
discovering Plato at the age of 12 or 13 in Will
Durant's 'Story of Philosophy' and feeling
'that I was out beyond myself, had almost lost
all touch with who I even was,
and it was . . .
bliss.'"
1:06 am
Monday, December 16, 2002
Rebecca Goldstein at
Heaven's Gate
This entry is in gratitude for Rebecca
Goldstein's excellent essay in The New York Times of December 16, 2002.
She talks about the perennial conflict between
two theories of truth that Richard Trudeau called the "story theory" and
the "diamond theory." My entry of December 13, 2002, "Rhyme
Scheme," links the word "real" to an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy that contains the following:
"According to a platonist about
arithmetic, the truth of the sentence ‘7 is prime’ entails the
existence of an abstract object, the number 7. This
object is abstract because it has no spatial or temporal
location, and is causally inert. A platonic realist
about arithmetic will say that the number 7 exists and
instantiates the property of being prime independently of
anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes,
and so on. A certain kind of nominalist rejects the existence
claim which the platonic realist makes: there are no abstract
objects, so sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are
false..."
This discussion of "sevenness," along with the
discussion of "eightness" in my December 14, 2002, note on
Bach, suggest that I supply a transcription of a note in my
paper journal from 2001 that deals with these matters.
From a paper journal note of October 5,
2001:
The 2001 Silver Cup Award
for Realism in Mathematics goes to... Glynis
Johns, star of The Sword and the Rose,
Shake Hands with the Devil, and No
Highway in the Sky.
Glynis Johns is 78 today.
"Seven is heaven, Eight
is a gate." -- from Dealing
with Memory Changes as You Grow Older, by
Kathleen Gose and Gloria Levi
"There is no highway in the
sky." -- Quotation attributed to Albert Einstein.
(See Gotthard Günther's
website "Achilles and the
Tortoise, Part 2".)
"Don't give up until
you Drink from the silver cup And ride that
highway in the sky." --America, 1974
See also page 78 of
Realism in Mathematics (on Gödel's Platonism) by Penelope Maddy,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990 (reprinted, 2000).
Added 12/17/02: See also the portrait of
Rebecca Goldstein in Hadassah Magazine Volume
78 Number
10 (June/July 1997).
For the cabalistic significance of "Seven
is heaven, Eight is a gate," note that Zayin, Seven,
signifies "seven chambers of Paradise" and that Chet,
Eight, signifies the "gateway to infinity."
"
