Log24

For Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow

(as well as Old Man creators Steinberg and Levine) —

The New Yorker  on March 2, 1992 —

Related material:  Go Set a Structure.

Hollywood and Vine.

See Hollywood + Vine in this journal.

See also Jews on Fiction.

Yesterday's online Los Angeles Times  
on a film that inspired recent protests in Cairo—

The film… was shown on June 23
to an audience of less than 10
at a theater on Hollywood Boulevard,
a source familiar with the screening said….
The screening was at The Vine Theater,
which rents itself out for private screenings,
said one person involved in the theater.

An image from this journal on that same day, June 23—

    Source: Rudolf Koch, The Book of Signs

For some background on the symbol, see Damnation Morning.

See also Don Henley's Hollywood hymn "Garden of Allah."

Update of 8 PM Sept. 13, 2012—

Other sources give the film's screening date not as June 23,
2012, but rather as June 30, 2012. (BBC News, LAWEEKLY blogs)

The following post from this journal on that  date may or
may not have some religious relevance.

A Hollywood Easter

Part I:
Good Friday morning

Hollywood turns to divine inspiration

Updated 4/14/2006 9:55 AM ET

Inspired by box-office smashes such as The Passion of the Christ and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, studios are not only casting an eye to more religious-themed stories, but they’re also marketing movies more aggressively than ever to churchgoers.

Part II:
Good Friday afternoon

Log24, 3 PM Good Friday, 2006.

Part III:
Easter in Hollywood

Latest “Scary” spoof leads box office

Sun Apr 16, 2006 8:02 PM ET

By Dean Goodman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The joke may be wearing a little thin for critics but the fourth installment of the “Scary Movie” spoof franchise managed to open atop the weekend box office in North America with sizable ticket sales.

According to studio estimates issued on Sunday, “Scary Movie 4” earned $41.0 million in the three days beginning April 14, setting a new record for the Easter weekend.

Part IV:  Now

Blog search for SubSpecies23.

First Idea and Last Night

In memory of Saint Norman Cantor, an author of “stunning heartlessness” — my kind of historian — who died on Saturday, September 18, 2004…

a link to Log24.net entries of that date.

Give ’em Hell, Norman.

Above: recommended videos
from the date of Cantor’s death

“Dante’s hell was intended to be a shocking literary device. The Divine Comedy is not a work of theology or a spiritual treatise any more than James Joyce’s Ulysses is a sociological study of Dublin.”

— Norman F. Cantor
   Hollywood, Florida

The Script

Hollywood Writers, Producers
 Fail to Reach Agreement

Some scripts just write themselves.

Falluja Plan in Doubt
as U.S. Deals With
Furor Over Abuse

The Siege, 1998

Our Man in Baghdad
by Jon Lee Anderson
The New Yorker,
issue of 2004-05-03,
posted 2004-04-26:

“My host was a Shiite cleric, Ayad Jamaluddin…. He lives on the river, in an imposing house supplied by the Coalition Provisional Authority, to which he has close ties….

Ayad Jamaluddin dismissed the idea of the Iraqis policing themselves any time in the near future. He believed that Iraq needed shock treatment, and that it would be best administered by the Americans.

The New Yorker,
online images

‘Iraqis are sick, you know, and what they need is a psychiatrist,’ he said. ‘For thirty-five years, Saddam Hussein didn’t allow Iraqis to think. The Iraqi people are missing something: they are missing a soul. They need a dictator—that is their problem. The Shia want their dictator; the Sunnis want theirs. Unfortunately for us, the Iraqi people’s only model of a leader is Saddam Hussein.’

I remarked that his hopes for a sweeping transformation of a national psyche had few historical precedents, at least under modern American stewardship. The postwar transformations of Germany and Japan were possible only because there was a wholesale capitulation by the regimes in both countries after devastating military assaults. In Japan’s case, this had come about after the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast offering Japan’s unconditional surrender, and the admission that he was not a divine being. Jamaluddin smiled: ‘Then maybe what we need is another Hiroshima for Iraq. Maybe Fallujah will be our Hiroshima. Inshallah.’ ”

See, too, The New Yorker‘s press release for

 May 1, 2004 — Law Day —

on the legal career of presidential candidate John Kerry:

“Kerry says his background as a prosecutor made criminal-defense work unappealing. ‘I took a court appointment once in a criminal case,’ Kerry says, ‘and I realized I just didn’t want the guy out on the street. I knew he was guilty. It takes a certain kind of makeup as a lawyer to dedicate yourself to having someone like that out on the street. I know our system says someone has to represent everyone, but I just couldn’t do it. I went to the court and asked them to take me off the case.’ “

Recall the conclusion of Devil’s Advocate:

“Vanity is definitely my favorite sin.”

The Tony Nominations

Dannie Abse quoting Robert Penn Warren:

“The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”

 Dannie Abse

Abse deserves a Tony Smith award¹ for his play Pythagoras.

Frank Rich on Bush’s Top Gun speech:

“Only hours before President Bush’s prime-time speech came news of what Variety headlined on Page 1 as ‘Regime Change’ in Hollywood — the departure of the [West Wing] creator, the writer Aaron Sorkin.”

 George W. Bush

President Bush deserves a Tony Smith award² for his performance aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

 Madeleine L’Engle on the religion of Cubism:

“There is such a thing as a tesseract.”

 Madeleine L’Engle

L’Engle, former librarian at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, deserves a Tony Smith award³ for insisting on the existence of the tesseract, or 4-dimensional cube, as an object of conceptual art.

L’Engle is perhaps the best defender of the religious, or “story,” theory of truth, as opposed to the “diamond” theory of truth. (See my earlier May 12 entry, “Death and Truth,” which deals with the bishop of L’Engle’s cathedral.)

¹ See Tony Smith on mathematics.

² See Tony Smith on foreign policy.

³ See Tony Smith on conceptual art.

Arrow in the Blue

A description by Arthur Koestler (born Sept. 5, 1905) of a

close encounter with the divine:

“…a wordless essence, a fragrance of eternity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue.”

Koestler also mentions the “blue Andalusian sky.” 

Some thoughts suggested by the above and by the Sept. 5, 2002, New York Times story on the first anniversary of the murder of the Mexican lawyer

María de los Angeles Tames….

1. The blue of the Andalusian sky is essentially the same as the blue of the sky above Baja California.  See photographs of the last Jesuit mission in Mexico,

Santa María de los Angeles. 

2.  A Google search for “blue Andalusian sky” yielded two results: the Koestler page quoted above, and a page on the Gypsy film “Vengo.”  For a reasonable likeness of St. Sara, patron saint of the Gypsies, also known as The Dark Lady, also known as Kali, see the poster of dancer

Sara Baras at Flamenco-world.com. 

For the music Sara dances to, composed and played by Jesús de Rosario, listen to audio clips at

Juana la Loca: Vivir por Amor.

3. For an American version of The Dark Lady, see an homage from Catalonia to

Emmy Lou Harris. 

For a Harris song that seems appropriate to the blue-sky theme above, see

Thanks to You.