Log24

Sunday, June 1, 2014

Angel in the Wings

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

Or: Corrections

Factually Incorrect:

Ed Koch in the Las Vegas Sun , May 26, 2014:

“In addition to Pearl, Bob’s other cousin, Bill Bailey,
was a song and dance man who was the inspiration
for the hit song ‘Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home.’
In fact, when William Bailey went into show business,
he took the nickname ‘Bob’ to avoid any confusion
with his older, more established cousin Bill.”

(Links added for greater depth.)

Politically Incorrect:

Correction:

Saturday, December 19, 2009

A Tale for Dickens

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:31 am

From a Spider:

Criss Angel Celebrates His Birthday,

Long Story, and

Short Story

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070107-Story.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

From the Web:

http://www.log24.com/log09/saved/091219-ShopNow.jpg

From a Spider Web:

Damnation Morning
(the complete story),

Hitler Plans Burning Man
("What the hell is next?"),

NEXT,

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/091219-NextSched.jpg

and Vegas Angel.

There must be…
50 ways to leave Las Vegas.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Catechisms

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:01 am

Q— Why is this night different from all other nights?

A—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110419-Shachath.jpg

Click on Hebrew for commentary.

See also a simpler Christian midrash—

"Who Was the Mysterious Death Angel?"

Q— Why is Leaving Las Vegas  different from all other movies?

A—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110419-Cage.jpg

Hotel bedroom in Leaving Las Vegas  (1995)

Midrash— Romancing the Junction and Damnation Morning

"… this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I'd hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, 'Look, Buster, do you want to live?'"

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Wednesday December 14, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 am
From Here
to Eternity

For Loomis Dean

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See also
For Rita Moreno
on Her Birthday

(Dec. 11, 2005)

Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005

OBITUARIES

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LOOMIS DEAN
After many years at Life magazine,
he continued to find steady work
as a freelancer and as a still
photographer on film sets.
(Dean Family)

Loomis Dean, 88;
Life Magazine Photographer
Known for Pictures of
Celebrities and Royalty

By Jon Thurber, Times Staff Writer

Loomis Dean, a Life magazine photographer who made memorable pictures of the royalty of both Europe and Hollywood, has died. He was 88.

Dean died Wednesday [December 7, 2005] at Sonoma Valley Hospital in Sonoma, Calif., of complications from a stroke, according to his son, Christopher.

In a photographic career spanning six decades, Dean's leading images included shirtless Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck trying a one-handed chin-up on a trapeze bar, the ocean liner Andrea Doria listing in the Atlantic and writer Ernest Hemingway in Spain the year before he committed suicide. One of his most memorable photographs for Life was of cosmopolitan British playwright and composer Noel Coward in the unlikely setting of the Nevada desert.

Dean shot 52 covers for Life, either as a freelance photographer or during his two stretches as a staffer with the magazine, 1947-61 and 1966-69. After leaving the magazine, Dean found steady freelance work in magazines and as a still photographer on film sets, including several of the early James Bond movies starring Sean Connery.

Born in Monticello, Fla., Dean was the son of a grocer and a schoolteacher.

When the Dean family's business failed during the Depression, they moved to Sarasota, Fla., where Dean's father worked as a curator and guide at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.

Dean studied engineering at the University of Florida but became fascinated with photography after watching a friend develop film in a darkroom. He went off to what is now the Rochester Institute of Technology, which was known for its photography school.

After earning his degree, Dean went to work for the Ringling circus as a junior press agent and, according to his son, cultivated a side job photographing Ringling's vast array of performers and workers.

He worked briefly as one of Parade magazine's first photographers but left after receiving an Army Air Forces commission during World War II. During the war, he worked in aerial reconnaissance in the Pacific and was along on a number of air raids over Japan.

His first assignment for Life in 1946 took him back to the circus: His photograph of clown Lou Jacobs with a giraffe looking over his shoulder made the magazine's cover and earned Dean a staff job.

In the era before television, Life magazine photographers had some of the most glamorous work in journalism. Life assigned him to cover Hollywood. In 1954, the magazine published one of his most memorable photos, the shot of Coward dressed for a night on the town in New York but standing alone in the stark Nevada desert.

Dean had the idea of asking Coward, who was then doing a summer engagement at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, to pose in the desert to illustrate his song "Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Midday Sun."

As Dean recalled in an interview with John Loengard for the book "Life Photographers: What They Saw," Coward wasn't about to partake of the midday sun. "Oh, dear boy, I don't get up until 4 o'clock in the afternoon," Dean recalled him saying.

But Dean pressed on anyway. As he related to Loengard, he rented a Cadillac limousine and filled the back seat with a tub loaded with liquor, tonic and ice cubes — and Coward.

The temperature that day reached 119 as Coward relaxed in his underwear during the drive to a spot about 15 miles from Las Vegas. According to Dean, Coward's dresser helped him into his tuxedo, resulting in the image of the elegant Coward with a cigarette holder in his mouth against his shadow on the dry lake bed.

"Splendid! Splendid! What an idea! If we only had a piano," Coward said of the shoot before hopping back in the car and stripping down to his underwear for the ride back to Las Vegas.

In 1956, Life assigned Dean to Paris. While sailing to Europe on the Ile de France, he was awakened with the news that the Andrea Doria had collided with another liner, the Stockholm.

The accident occurred close enough to Dean's liner that survivors were being brought aboard.

His photographs of the shaken voyagers and the sinking Andrea Doria were some of the first on the accident published in a U.S. magazine.

During his years in Europe, Dean photographed communist riots and fashion shows in Paris, royal weddings throughout Europe and noted authors including James Jones and William S. Burroughs.

He spent three weeks with Hemingway in Spain in 1960 for an assignment on bullfighting. In 1989, Dean published "Hemingway's Spain," about his experiences with the great writer.

In 1965, Dean won first prize in a Vatican photography contest for a picture of Pope Paul VI. The prize included an audience with the pope and $750. According to his son, it was Dean's favorite honor.

In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Deborah, and two grandsons.

Instead of flowers, donations may be made to the American Child Photographer's Charity Guild (www.acpcg.com) or the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Related material:
The Big Time

(Log 24, July 29, 2003):

A Story That Works

 
  • "There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe;
  • there are the friend-enemy minds shouting and whispering their tales and always seeking the three miracles —

    • that minds should really touch, or
    • that the silent universe should speak, tell minds a story, or (perhaps the same thing)
    • that there should be a story that works, that is all hard facts, all reality, with no illusions and no fantasy;
  • and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, mortal me."

    Fritz Leiber in "The Button Molder"

 

Sunday, October 9, 2005

Sunday October 9, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am
Today’s Sermon:
Magical Thinking

On this date– “In 1936,
the first generator at Boulder
(later Hoover) Dam began
transmitting electricity to Los Angeles.”
— Today in History, Associated Press

“Brightness doubled
   generates radiance.”
— Hexagram 30

“I know what nothing means.”
— Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays

“Nothing is random.”
— Mark Helprin in Winter’s Tale

Maria Wyeth in Las Vegas:

“… She thought about nothing.  Her mind was a blank tape, imprinted daily with snatches of things overheard, fragments of dealers’ patter, the beginnings of jokes and odd lines of song lyrics.  When she finally lay down nights in the purple room she would play back the day’s tape, a girl singing into a microphone and a fat man dropping a glass, cards fanned on a table and a dealer’s rake in closeup and a woman in slacks crying and the opaque blue eyes of the guard at some baccarat table.  A child in the harsh light of a crosswalk on the Strip.  A sign on Fremont Street.  A light blinking.  In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen, the only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin.

By the end of a week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.  She had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for even one micro-second she would have what she had come to get.  As if she had fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity.  She could feel smoke against her skin.  She could feel voice waves.  She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which.  ‘Maria,’ she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody.

She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water.  When the pressure got great enough she drove out there.  All that day she felt the power  surging through her own body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam’s face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself.  With a guide and a handful of children Maria walked through the chambers, stared at the turbines in the vast glittering gallery, at the deep still water with the hidden intakes sucking all the while, even as she watched, clung to the railings, leaned out, stood finally on a platform over the pipe that carried the river beneath the dam.  The platform quivered.  Her ears roared.  She wanted to stay in the dam, lie on the great pipe itself, but reticence saved her from asking.

‘Just how long have you been here now,’ Freddy Chaikin asked when she ran into him in Caesar’s.  ‘You planning on making a year of it?  Or what?'”

Related material

The front page of today’s
New York Times Book Review

and Log24, July 15, 2004:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040715-Pit2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A quotation that somehow
seems relevant:

O the mind, mind has mountains,
   cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed.
   Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Wednesday, March 2, 2005

Wednesday March 2, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:22 pm

White Stone

"I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language– and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music."

— Hunter S. Thompson, Author's Note, Generation of Swine

In memory of Peter Foy,
who died in Las Vegas
on 2/17

The image “http://log24.com/log/pix05/050302-Peter2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Revelation 2:17:

"And I will give him a white stone…."

The image “http://log24.com/log/pix05/050302-Diamond1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:

2003 2/17: "immortal diamond"
2004 2/17:  "hard core"           
2005 2/17:  "the diamond"       

For an "elegant starburst," see

"Starflight," from 10/10, 2004

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050302-S.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

the date of
Christopher Reeve's death.

See also
Revelation 10:10

"And I took the little book
out of the angel's hand,
and ate it up; and it was in my mouth
sweet as honey: and as soon as I had
eaten it, my belly was bitter."

For the relationship of this verse to
the style of Hunter Thompson, see

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050302-Apo.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

From the Department of Justice:
"LSD generally is taken by mouth.
The drug is colorless and odorless
but has a slightly bitter taste."
Among the street terms for LSD
is "Superman."

Thursday, December 12, 2002

Thursday December 12, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:14 pm

Play It

From a Kol Nidre sermon:

“…in every generation 36 righteous
greet the Shechinah,
   the Divine Presence…” 

A scene at the Sands in Las Vegas,
from Play It As It Lays,
by Joan Didion:

“What do you think,”
Maria could hear
one of the men saying….

“Thirty-six,” the girl said. 
“But a good thirty-six.”

For the rest of the time
Maria was in Las Vegas
she wore dark glasses.
She did not decide to
stay in Vegas: she only
failed to leave.

Today’s site music, in honor of
Sinatra’s birthday, is “Angel Eyes.”

Thursday, October 10, 2002

Thursday October 10, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:44 am

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.

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