Spielberg’s “Lincoln” with Daniel Day-Lewis – Going in My Collection
What a movie! See it while it is still in theaters. Daniel Day-Lewis brings Lincoln to life – he was born to play the part. Sally Fields, Hal Holbrook, Tommy Lee Jones – and, of course, Director Spielberg, how many Academy Awards can one movie get? I think Tony Kushner will be remembered as much for the “Lincoln” screenplay as his wonderful, powerful screenplay for “Angels in America.”
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- Lincoln visits war front
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- Lincoln with cabinet – securing votes for the 13th Amendment
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- Lincoln – determined
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- Lincoln – telling another story
George Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel, and Alan Turning: “The Vertigo of the Modern”
A roller coaster ride for your mind — have a look at this documentary, “Dangerous Knowledge,” on the work of Georg Cantor, Kurt Gödel, and Alan Turing. YouTube changes its offerings for all sorts of reasons, so you might need search a bit if this video link goes bad. At one point, the narrator uses a most memorable phrase to characterize what it is to be “modern”— I can only paraphrase:
The vertigo of the modern: the whirlpool of thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking . . .
Ken Nordine: Alive and Well – Word Jazz Forever
Ken Nordine-Stare with Your Ears
This morning I found myself remembering the early 1960′s when I used to listen to Ken Nordine on AM radio while doing homework. He was the first poet I ever heard perform and to this day I have never heard anyone deliver lines of verse better. I have been to many poetry readings, most readers have a strange, stilted, stiff, and stylized delivery that has little to do with the meaning of the words. I’m sure you know what I mean. Most singers—folk and country especially—render their lyrics with rhythms, pitch, tone, and inflection that express so much more faithfully the meaning of the lines they perform. Ken Nordine is unique in that while he does not sing his lines, the manner in which he speaks them is essentially musical–spoken song, or as he calls it, “word jazz.”
Podcasts of many of his performances and shows are available at his Word Jazz website: http://www.wordjazz.com
If you have not yet had the pleasure of hearing Ken Nordine — please, treat yourself, have a listen to his “Infinite O’Clock.”
Quotable
Oh, cruel time! which takes in trust
— , Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk (31-36)
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave
When we have wandered all our ways
Shuts up the story of our days.
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