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[calimac]

1. This comment is as brief as I could make it, biting its tongue on the vast amount that could be said on the topic of HIP (Historically Informed Performance, as it's called now, its practitioners having backed down from calling it "authentic"). Read the post it's on for a link to a superficial but amusing radio show on the topic of Beethoven's tempi.

1a. Finding a link to Gardiner's invigoratingly fast performance of the Eroica made me salivate for more, so I got out my set of his Beethoven symphony recordings to accompany chores. It takes two movements of the Seventh to set up our artificial Christmas tree, and three movements of the Eighth to chop up veggies and otherwise get things ready for cooking dinner.

2. Thursday is the day the weekend movie showtime lists appear in the paper. Not finding Inside Llewyn Davis, which appears in "limited release" on Friday, on it, I found Fandango to be mute on the topic of telling me where a movie not playing today was going to be playing tomorrow. So I'd like to record here for future reference that Moviefone is the site that will tell you what you need to know, in this case that the "limited release" is only four screens nationwide, none nearer to here than LA. OK, now that I know, I'll wait.

2a. Also, it has a useful article with clips from Oscar Isaac's previous movies, in case you're wondering who the heck he is.

3. Nelson Mandela. It is perhaps not possible to be sufficiently appreciative of a man who, having spent decades locked up for violence against an oppressive regime, emerges full of forgiveness and reconciliation towards that regime, helps it step down peacefully, and then becomes head of a new regime without - and this is the most amazing part - turning into a rancid dictator himself. An accolade too lightly used is true in this case: He deserves to stand with the other great founders of modern nations, like Washington, Atatürk, Masaryk, and Ben-Gurion.

Comments

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

I agree on Mandela's greatness. The comparison to Washington is apt.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

With Papa Mandela gone, it remains to be seem what direction South Africa may now take. Sadly, one suspects there's more than one 'rancid dictator' in the making out there. :o(

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Quite possibly. Mandela's immediate successor was no prize, though far from the rancid dictator a couple countries to the north that I was thinking of. And Turkey has been discarding Atatürk's secular principles with some vigor in recent years. (The other countries referred to have lost their way in other fashions.) It is some mark of greatness whether one's monuments endure. Still, as a wise wizard once said, "it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

My then boyfriend, William, paid with his life for Zimbabwe's freedom, fighting with Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU rebels.

What he'd have made of things now is more than I know. Whether Nkomo would have been any better is also more than I know, but that bad? I think not.

Whenever I listen to Mamma Makeba's singing, I think of him.