April 2006 Archives

AHEAD-OF-HER-TIME SINEAD, NOW WORSE... FLAILING IN A NETHERWORLD OF POST-CONSTITUTIONAL DENIAL... PILLAGING A SEEMINGLY MORE INNOCENT PAST TO MAKE EVEN LESS SENSE OF AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE PRESENT... TOM LEHRER DROPS SATIRE WHEN REALITY SURPASES HIS ABILITY TO MAKE FUN OF IT... OVER FORTY YEARS AND RUNNING...

Or, "Subtextual chatter from the Dept. of Redundancy Dept": Jagger Joins ABC Sitcom...

YEAR TO BE HATED

Sung to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs

QUOTE OF THE DAY

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'TIL YOU GET ENOUGH

In retrospect, the crotch clutch seems at once desperate and abstract. It is as if he were telling us, "Fine, you need to know I'm a man, a black man? Here's my dick: I'll thrust my dick at you! Isn't that what a black man's supposed to do? But I'm Michael Jackson, so just look but you can't touch." It wasn't real, it was symbolic. Not a penis but a phallus...

--from ON MICHAEL JACKSON, by Margo Jefferson.

WILL NOT APOLOGIZE

"Billy Joel is no Leonard Bernstein..."

FOR ITS CHEESE

[WAIT! THERE'S MORE...]

MORE CATHOLIC RECRUITMENT SLOGANS:

"I think for myself not to come up with my own teaching," he writes, "but to make the Church's teaching my own."

DIED. CASPAR WEINBERGER, 88, wry, intellectual public servant whose long record of toil in the White Houses of Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan was marred by a late, rare blemish: a 1992 indictment for allegedly covering up facts in the Iran-contra scandal, which he vigorously denied and for which he was pardoned; in Bangor, Maine.

Reagan suuposedly taught us how "perception is reality," and most hook that line up to the Bush onslaught on a "reality-based" opposition. To me the Bush era correlative goes something like "All information is political: the weather, obituaries, school lunch menus..." This Weinberger obit is so slanted as to be authored by somebody to the right of Novak. How does one choose the first two adjectives for this reptilean slime to be "wry, intellectual..."? Does anybody remember anything close to witty and/or intelligent Cap ever said? And his "long record of public service" (read: rank cronyism) was "marred' by a "late, rare blemish" (read: grand jury indictment for high crimes, including diverting funds drug profits to those "moral equivalent of our founding forefather" Contras from a fellow Republican, Lawrence Walsh), and pardoned on a Christmas holiday Friday evening by Bush Sr. on his way out of office, the most shameful kind of "exoneration," the Nixonian kind.

Worst thing about it: it goes by completely unremarked, as if Time, which once had airs of respectability, can adopt its irrefutible tone without redress. Which it can.

Gasbag cranium duty on History Channel's 10 DAY-WORLD -SHAKE series, the Elvis installment, airs Tuesday, April 11, at 9/8pm. Brought to you by MasterCard: the freaky-deeky credit card with the curiously pre-Wiki CompoundName.

Tickets are still available for this Concord Chamber Music Society's Special Artist benefit, featuring Yefim Bronfman. Here's the scoop:

Friday, April 7 @ 7:00pm
(Pre-concert lecture with Steven Ledbetter begins at 6:00pm)
Concord Academy Performing Arts Center
166 Main St. Concord, MA

Fantasy, Op. 49 by Frederick Chopin
Gaspard de la Nuit by Maurice Ravel
Islamey by Mily Balakirev
Sonata Op. 27 #1 ( Quasi una Fantasia) and Sonata Op. 27 #2 (Moonlight) by Ludwig van Beethoven

If you haven't heard his Tchaikovsky Seasons, snag it now. My kids have wandered around the house humming his Shostakovich Second Piano Concerto, from FANTASIA 2000. And this recital includes Gaspard, so there should be lots of familiar faces and budding turks.

SHILLING FOR HISTORY

Go here and click on "When America Was Rocked," airs next Tuesday, April 11 at 9/8 on the History Channel. Taped last summer.