Welcome to Spring.
If you can get your head out of the Iraqi sand and take a look around you, everything in the world all of a sudden is beautiful. This morning on the bus as it first stared out alongside Ford Lake the fog was so heavy that I couldn't see the lake. Then the bus turned a corner and the fog opened up, and there it was - the whole lake still half-frozen, gray-blue and the jetty stretching out into the water with a thin wisp of fog curling above it as though spread out like a butter knife. Beautiful.
There is a loud-mothed retarded guy on my bus who seems to think his mental condition is an excuse to abrogate the social contract and yak to anyone unfortunate enough to seat themselves in his proximity. Last winter there was a day when the roads were icy, and I was on a bus driven by the only A2 bus driver that I would typify as "sexy". She was having trouble keeping control of the bus and slammed it into the curb at least four times. Everytime she hit the curb the retarded guy would start shouting "Oh Baby! Oh Baby!" I almost puked.
This morning he came on the bus with a large plastic container with a lid and a handle - it contained extra socks and some other miscellaneous neccessaries, but at first I thought it held a dead bunny rabbit.
Woke up with this in my head this morning. None too imaginative, but appropriate:
(Sung to the tune of "Three Blind Mice")
Light, Sweet, Crude
Light, Sweet, Crude
It comes in a barrel
It comes in a barrel
Men and soldiers will lay down their lives
In order to keep down its asking price
Nations will fall and and nations will rise for
Light, Sweet, Crude
For years I have watched War coverage on ABC almost exclusively. This time I realize that ABC really isn't coming across with the goods. Peter Jennings comes off as tired, confused, pissed off and cranky. Last night he even barked out something like, "C'mon - help me. Is there someone out there who can help me?" Indeed, the nature of their news coverage is going from one boring guy who has nothing to say repeating the same "nothing to say" he said 15 minutes ago to another guy, same deal. Jennings interviewed two congressmen who had just left a confidential briefing with Rumsfeld - and of course, they had nothing to say. But Jennings still felt compelled to get them to say something, while admitting that upon discovery of the confidentialty of their meeting that he would have preferred to terminate the interview then and there. But he still thought of a question, and the congressmen patiently played along - all three men were standing around trying to think of something to say. I said something like "this is ridiculous!" and turned it to FOX.
I can barely stand Shepard Smith - he looks like a Brooks Brothers mannequin from Hell and feels not even the slightest guilt about openly editorializing while reporting. He spouts right-wing views while also insisting the Fox News is "fair and balanced". Conservatives wont even follow where Shepard Smith goes - like asking Newt Gingrich "what (Newt) thinks about 5,000 people protesting the war in San Francisco when they could've been volunteering or doing something useful?" Newt is a conservative, but he's no dummy, and blandly answered that the 5,000 people in San Francisco have the right to excecise free speech, and that we are to expect the protests. I'm sitting there shaking my head in disbelief, feeling my brain slowly losing it's hardness.
But despite Fox' repoting being so "fair and balanced", they kick ABC's butt in terms of the feed of info from the battlefield. I've never seen anything like it - Peter Jennings with all his integrity and stamina simply cannot compete with Geraldo Rivera turning a video cellphone towards troops in South Afgahnistan advancing through the desert to go disturb another nest of Al-Quaida from its slumber. All "live". I can't stand Geraldo either, but that's NEWS. I'd certainly rather watch FOX than to witness the impending nervous breakdown of an anchor I've respected for more than thirty years on ABC. This wouldn't be the first time for ABC either - I remember Frank Reynolds losing his cool during the handling of President Reagan's assassination attempt, and Jessica Savitch's amazing and incomprehenisble coke-fueled psychobabble news breaks back in the 1980s.
The "shock and awe" plan is said to facilitate bringing 3,000 missles to the outskirts of Baghdad in only an hour. But dropping more bombs than even that is Hollywood, which seems to have forgotten how to make a good movie. As far as I'm concerned, they should just call off the Academy Awards this year and given all of the awards to the people who made "Chicago", "Gangs of New York" and "The Pianist". While I'm the kind of fellow who scours the end of the earth for tapes of films like "Ingeborg Holm" (1913) and "A Page of Madness" (1927), my wife watches whatever movie is on cable, and that's any time of day. As far as late-model commercial movies are concerned, she is really very well informed- we go to a video store and I'll say "want this one?" And she'll say "No -- seen it -- seen it -- seen it..." for video after video.
A couple of days ago she was watching something that even got my attention, and not in a good way. It was a song and dance routine taking place in a Chinese restaurant, and Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair was singing a song about -- the penis. Just when I thought that Hollywood had reached the bottom of the barrel, and that the barrel itself was filled to overflowing with toxic waste, they have managed yet to get all the yucchy waste to melt through the bottom and into the very core of the earth. The movie was "The Sweetest Thing" (2002) and was in no way good, in fact far worse than I thought a movie could be. But as it was made by a major Hollywood studio, all of the technical proficency was there, and like Chris Rock once said about "Showgirls" "there is a crispness to the badness." Personally, I have a real problem with a studio exec who would look at a script like "The Sweetest Thing" and say " yeah - this is funny. This is good - I will throw my millions of dollars behind it to make it", not to mention all the (likeable) stars who signed on to be in this abomination.
I was reading an article on the bus yesterday about some Italian composers from the 16th century and their thoeretical practices. This inspired me to draw up an outline for a 48-minute work scored for winds, brass, no strings but 2 pianos, 3 percussionists (one of whom is the conductor) and electric bass guitar. I can't reveal the title because this idea is so good that one of my colleagues WILL steal it and I don't want that. But I have everything I need in the outline to make the score happen. The one thing I don't really have is time to score the piece. I usually have things to do like change the carpet, rather than get the peace, quiet and solitude a composer needs to whip a score in shape and copy out parts. I have two large solo cantatas from the 1980s that are complete in outline, "Pop" (1984) and "Rapture 42" (1990). Both would take relatively little time to "dish up" as the recipe is completely laid out (although one aspect that mitigates against "Pop" is the lack of a complete libretto.) Nothing has happened with them since the were first drawn up. I certainly hope that's not the case with this new work here. It looks like a winner, and once I get scoring, things move pretty quickly, especially if I'm using a computer program to do so.
Finally yesterday I reviewed the Dragon disc "Swedish Jazz All Stars" by Parisorkestern 1949 (featuring the great Alice Babs; Dragon CD 349.) I can't publish the review here as it was written for work, but if you love the jazz of the 1940s you owe it to yourself to seek this disc out. My guess is that their version of "Truckin'" will make you get up out of your seat and dance- it's that great. I will publish a link to the review here once it appears.
Uncle Dave Lewis