Larry Kart

Are you saying that Cassell and Young were similarly talented? Young, I repeat, was arguably a better QB than Montana -- the Walsh system worked even better with Young (a Hall of Fame player) at QB. As for the fair-to-middling Cassell, he flopped in KC running the NE system because KC didn't have a roster that was anywhere as good as NE's. "Some QB's are just heads and shoulders better than all others" is part of what I've been saying. What we're disagreeing about is whether the undeniably superb Manning is more beholden to the system he's always played in as a pro than QBs like Marino, Rodgers, Favre, and Elway were/are to the systems they were/are part of. Again, I think there's little or no evidence out there of how Manning would have played outside the relatively systematized system he's always played under, so were left with the evidence of how Rodgers, Favre et al. have played under seemingly less systematized systems and, in particular, how they've played when they've been forced to or have chosen to freelance. No proof, then, but doesn't your eye tell you that Manning lacks some of the over-the-top athleticism (e.g. escapability and/or near unreal arm strength. etc.) that the other great QBs were talking about possess and thus might not be as able they were/are to save the day when the system, such as it is, begins to crumble?

Seems to me that we're arguing at cross purposes here, or we're both trapped in an echo chamber. To me, a system QB is one who plays within a system (one that may, as in Manning's case, have been collaboratively crafted with his gifts in mind) and has success within it but might not have that much success outside of it. Montana might be a good example; he was, albeit late in life, pretty much a dud with the otherwise mediocre Chiefs. That the 49er offensive system was as good or better with Young, arguably a superior QB to Montana, taking over from him says to me only that a smart precision system works well with someone good at QB and as good or better with someone even better at QB. Can't prove that Manning wouldn't be great outside of the system he's always played in as a pro because as a pro I don't believe that he's never played outside of that system. But in the case of a few key games, like this year's Super Bowl, when that system has been thwarted, Manning often has been too -- he's not, in terms of athleticism and long-honed habits, a QB who can put the whole team on his shoulders the way Rodgers at his best can. Nor, I would guess, are Manning's system-honed teams built for improvisation should their plays break down -- not the way GB's teams under Rodgers (or before him Favre) seem to have been. You write: "Now, tell me how Green Bay did this season after Rodgers went down? How about when the Colts magically went from 10-6 to 2-14 when Manning sat out the season. "No, brother. There is a huge difference between a true system QB, and those whose skills exceed all others and personally carry their teams. "And Rodgers makes more plays after a play has broken down because he is incredibly athletic and mobile. That has absolutely zero to do with the system he plays in." But those are pretty much the point or points that I've been making, especially your final paragraph. Of course, GB faltered this year because the team without Rodgers was otherwise mediocre and "the incredibly athletic and mobile" Rodgers wasn't there to save their bacon. Likewise, though the system remained the same, Manning's replacement when he went down at Indy that year (I forget his name) wasn't good enough to either run that system very well or to semi-improvise his way to some success. To repeat, I wholly agree with your "Rodgers makes more plays after a play has broken down because he is incredibly athletic and mobile. That has absolutely zero to do with the system he plays in." I thought that's what I was saying from the first. All I was saying in addition was that, to my eye, Manning when forced outside of his system doesn't have the options that Rodgers has -- in terms of personal athleticism, ability to calculate at a high level on the run, and teammates who are used to free-lancing should a play break down.

I totally agree with Mike. As a matter of fact, everything I've heard Gould do I found horrible, I avoid his performances like the plague. I have 2 versions of the complete Mozart piano sonatas, one by Ronald Brautigam, the other by Maria João Pires (her later DG cycle), but, as I said earlier, these works are not really my cup of tea. gould recorded all the mozart piano sonatas, not just some of them. they're all on the 4cd box. and if you listen to these two movements from the box, you may agree that even though he didn't necessarily like them, he could interpret them probably better than anyone else (at least these two movements). http://www.amazon.com/Mozart-Complete-Piano-Sonatas-Fantasias/dp/B0000028NT cd3 1. Sonata No. 11 in A Major for Piano, K. 331: I. Tema: Andante grazioso and 5. Sonata No. 12 in F Major for Piano, KV. 332 (300k): II. Adagio Aargh! Try Vlado Perlemuter on Spotify.

Speaking in relative terms, you don't think that Manning's success has taken place more within a specific system, both in Indianapolis and in Denver (note that both of those offenses are/were virtually identical and are the brainchild of Indy's former offensive coordinator Tom Moore), than Aaron Rodgers' has? Not that GB's offense is one of improvisation, of course, but I can't count the number of great plays that Rodgers has made over the years after the play as designed has broken down. P.S. Which is not to say that Manning and Moore didn't devise their system in close collaboration. But when that offense, which depends on the interaction of so many precisely moving parts, runs into a defense like Seattle's defense that blows apart its interactive precision, Manning himself has few options, while an Aaron Rodgers would IMO have more.

I usually skip the Super Bowl halftimes, but I'm glad I didn't this year. I was very impressed with Bruno Mars' band. I think that they would make a lot of people look good. While you need to be good to excellent in a lot of places on your roster to win it all, QB is still the most important position -- a great or near-great one like Aaron Rodgers can make an otherwise almost piss-poor team like this year's Packers very dangerous and do it almost single-handed. Yes, the Seahawks' defense was awesome, but Manning at this point in his career, and maybe always to some degree, is far more of a system QB, albeit a brilliant one (the same goes for Tom Brady), than Rodgers is. Substitute Rodgers for Manning, leave the rest of the Broncos roster the same, and I think it would have been a much more competitive Super Bowl.

Incredible, gutty, connected rhythmic drive: One feels he could go on like this forever.

I enjoyed the game, too, but one key point about why Seattle and the second-best team in the NFL, San Francisco, had such great defenses: Both teams have young QBs who were not drafted in the first round and thus were playing under cheap rookie contracts; this left those two teams with lots of money to spend on developing and signing lots of talented defensive players versus teams that felt they had to spend lots of dough to acquire or keep a top notch QB. The results of this Super Bowl don't necessarily mean that defense outweighs offense but that your salary cap situation and how intelligently you deal with it pretty much determines your football fate, along name-your-poison, swings-and-roundabouts lines. Assuming that Seattle and San Francisco decide to pay Wilson and Kapernick what the market will bear when their cheap rookie contracts expire, the defenses of those teams probably will look very different. For example, last year's Super Bowl champion Ravens had to let go of a lot of their defensive stalwarts this year after they signed Joe Flacco to a very expensive contract. Could they/should they have let Flacco walk after he led them to victory? It would have taken a GM and an owner with brass balls to do that, and who the heck would the Ravens QB have been then anyway?

You know, I'm not sure I was using "eupeptic" correctly when I said that Szell's Prokofiev 5th was eupeptic. What I meant was "fizzily energetic" and/or bright-eyed and bushy tailed -- more so that way than the piece should be IMO.

Listened again to the first movement of the 5th by JH, Levine, and Leinsdorf -- all of JH's, much of the other two. Leinsdorf's didn't make much of an impression this time. Levine's is stunningly played by the CSO, and fittingly dark and brooding (but also with some sense of muscular writhing) in the intro, and the IMO crucial transition is decently negotiated, but JH's version is something else altogether. A brisker tempo (10:52 versus Levine's 12:33) more or less unites the intro and what follows; moreover (and most important), one hears an intertwined and interactive duality (or more) of moods throughout -- say, gaiety and despair, but the musical-dramatic realization of those intertwined moods exceeds my attempt to place verbal labels on them; this is, at least in JH's hands, among the most emotionally mercurial works of the 20th Century. Too bad that the sound is rather murky, but the ear adjusts.

That Prokofiev 5th was a revelation to me. Not the best played ever, but in my experience that's a very tough work to get right, particularly the first movement (e.g. the relation in terms of tempo and phrasing between the intro and the main theme), and JH nails it. I've heard several other recordings that are fairly close (could they have been Levine's and Leinsdorf's?), plus a lot of others that aren't IMO (Karajan's celebrated but alternately turgid and blatant recording, for one, Szell's eupeptic one for another). In fact, hearing what JH does, I wonder why the work is so darn difficult to get right. It's not a problem of instrumental execution primarily but of understanding what Prokofiev had in mind, and maybe that's it -- P. was in some ways a very off-the-wall cat emotionally, and if JH didn't actually know him (which he well could have), I think he "knew" him anyway.

Phil Schaap

What I was saying was: " As for the Golden Globes photo, either she's been on a starvation diet or had significant cosmetic surgery or both."

Don't know when the top photo in Jazzbo's post #15 was taken, but I rest my case. That's some serious below-the-waist baggage. As for the Golden Globes photo, either she's been on a starvation diet or had significant cosmetic surgery or both.

Very sad, but what's crazy about a one-time addict dying of a drug overdose?

Diane Keaton?!! Not with the enormous (and out of whack with the rest of her) rear-end she's been sporting in recent years.

"Washington Concerts" http://www.amazon.com/Washington-Concerts-Charlie-Parker/product-reviews/B00005AQCH/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 Small group tracks are particularly unbelievable.

I agree with Chuck but also like Klemperer with Wunderlich and Ludwig and Van Beinum with Haefliger and Merriman.

No problem.

Given who Seeger was, that seems close to unavoidable. I understand that, of course, but I was given the impression that political discussions are no longer allowed here since the removal of the dedicated forum. I know, but let's try to be commonsensical in this case -- both those who are praising Seeger here and those who have doubts are for the most part acknowledging that the man's music and its impact were significantly political (as you say). I'd say pull the shades down when the discussion is no longer directly linked to what Seeger himself did or didn't do. Seems to me that the post from Clancy Sigal that I linked to in #31 above fits and is interesting to boot, especially because it comes from a man who essentially admires Seeger. If others disagree, I'll get rid of it.

Given who Seeger was, that seems close to unavoidable.

Sigal on one aspect of Seeger, the American Left, and the times I mentioned above (scroll down one): http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/29/pete-seeger-before-pete-seeger/

I assume that it was my post #10 above that you think is "McCarthyist" and "dead-letter crap." Sorry -- but I've long been fascinated by the ins and outs of the American Left of the Popular Front era and after, mostly from the point of view of how the actual participants thought about what they were doing/what was going on when certain "anomalies" (so to speak) arose -- like the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, and the sudden shift in 1941 from an anti-war to a pro-interventionist stance when the Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. For some insight into the human aspects of the American Left of that time and later, let me recommend two IMO brilliant semi-autobiographical novels by direct observers/participants -- Clancy Sigal's "Going Away" and Christina Stead's "I'm Dying Laughing." BTW Stead remained a committed Leftist to the end of her life, and Sigal remains one.

2 degrees

Good book on the subject of folk music and the American Left: http://www.amazon.com/Great-coming-music-American-Music/dp/0252001796/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1390958103&sr=1-9&keywords=r.+Serge+Denisoff I love the author's name, R. Serge Denisoff.

Right -- he never sold out unless (and this was the case for a good many years) he was following the then-current dictates of the CPUSA. See for example the song "Plow Under" ("Don’t you…plow under/Every fourth American boy"), the isolationist anti-war song written by Seeger and Lee Hays in early 1941 when it was CPUSA policy that the US must stay out of the war (this because Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were still allies): http://peteseeger.net/wp/?page_id=1446 Then the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, CPUSA policy turned 180 degrees overnight, and so did Seeger, who with Woody Guthrie, and Millard Lampell wrote the rousing pro-intervention, pro-war song "Reuben James," about the sinking of the US destroyer of that name by a Nazi submarine in Oct. 1941, two months before Pearl Harbor ("Now tonight there are lights in our country so bright/In the farms and in the cities they're telling of the fight./And now our mighty battleships will steam the bounding main/And remember the name of that good Reuben James"): http://www.oocities.org/folkfred/reuben.html