Saturday, April 05, 2003

Trimming Pinnochio's Nose   Every day brings even more bizarre counterclaims by this muddlebrained noodle who has the job of Iraqi disinformation minister. I would think that even the rather brainwashed Arab audiences can see through his schtick by now, but he blathers on ... his nose getting longer by the minute ... and besides which, he's ugly... ... which raises this suggestion in my mind. Since the Ministry and Iraqi TV are well-known to be hiding out at the Palestine Hotel (so say Reuters and CNN), and since this stooge holds his daily press conferences there ... how about a little Special Ops raid? Then he can give his next (i.e. last) press conference from a cell ... 5:05:05 PM    comment []

Sand In The Vaseline   The new annoyance on CNN this week has been their Miles O'Brien, who is the 'guy with the models and maps'. It is quite incredible to hear him ramble on, at a mile a minute, in his yappy voice. Whenever he has a guest -- usually some poor old retired general who might actually know something -- they can't get a word in edgeways as he asks four-paragraph questions and then interrupts them. A perfect match, in his own showboaty way, for Wolf Blitzer.  And the cliches! 'The fog of war,' indeed. BTW, don't you just love the CNN self-congratulatory ads that are running? "Wolf Blitzer covers the war in Iraq, blah blah blah." Guy hasn't been outside the hotel in Kuwait once, in the whole time! Thank heavens for the 'embeds.' And the 'babes.'  3:40:16 PM    comment []

What We're Listening To: 4  No, not the same night! This is In Spite Of Ourselves, a classic John Prine set of duets with the likes of Lucinda Williams, Patty Loveless and, especially, Iris DeMent. You just have to hear We're Not The Jet Set, Let's Invite Then Over (Again) and In A Town This Size ... priceless old C&W songs ...  Must have been thinking 'small town', cos this is Small Town Romance, a recorded-live-in-NYC collection by Richard Thompson. Working solo, he is as brilliant on guitar as ever, though this CD highlights the degree of career fade he has suffered lately. Songs like Genesis Hall, Meet On The Ledge and the title track are thin on the ground these days.  9:50:48 AM    comment []

What We're Listening To: 3  This might be one of the best classical CDs this year: it's Happy Birthday by Kremerata Baltica. Done as a kind of 10th anniversary present to themselves, it features a dozen or more amazing variations on the song of the same title, a string of variations on Auld Lang's Syne, and a hilarious Mozart/Scottish pastiche, among other things ... it's amazingly well-performed, and raises a smile, every time.  This is the first new version of Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade I've bought in years. A live recording by Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra, it's very impressive. Truly Russian, in the Tsarist (complimentary) sense of the word. One of the classical records 'rock people' always tend to like, because of its thematic, rifflike construction. I guess I was thinking 'Baghdad' when I put it on ... 9:36:13 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Peter Savage.