Lobenthal.com

There’s logic to Cheney’s shamelessness–

If you look at the way that he is today urging us over another cliff and into another global conflagration on the exact anniversary of his infamous kick-off thirteen years ago–you see that he is doing exactly what the Bolshies or the Nazis did. Taking actions so outrageous that the disoriented spectator seeks to somehow collaborate with the demagogue as a way of restoring internal compass.

Sure, Cheney will tell us, he’s proud of what he said on 9/8/02 and proud to do it all over again! And something in the spectator  wants to believe that no one could be that dishonest. If he’s not ashamed, do we need to be alarmed?

It’s the same kind of coercive reality inversion that enabled Karl Rove to win the 2004 presidential campaign by attacking Kerry on what the Democratic establishment thought was his strongest point, his war record. And, of course Kerry’s miserably weak and tardy response to the Swift Boat reputation-assassins was par for the Democratic course.

It seems incredible that war criminal, war profiteer, and draft dodger Dick Cheney should be making his latest plea-for-war exhortation on the anniversary to-the-day of his nefarious let’s-get-our-war pitch thirteen years ago. And we know how that turned out.

The only reason this man has retained a shred of credibility is because of the “mainstream” media’s full court attempt to legitimize him. After years of lying to the American public, years of sowing catastrophe at home and abroad, while ensuring that his company profits from same, it nevertheless defies belief that he can be given a platform to pull out his old flask of lethal snake oil.

On September 8, 2002 I was driving to New Haven to do some research at the Beinecke library at Yale. I can still hear that scoundrel’s voice on the car radio.  Let’s sit back a moment and think about all the Americans and Iraquis who were alive on that day and no longer are–because of this deplorable excuse for a leader.

“Don’t touch that score–you might give a calculated performance of  ‘Pace’!”

So shrieked La Scala intendant Antonio Ghiringhelli as he tore down the hallway to Tebaldi’s dressing room in 1955.

OK, that’s bogus. And probably gratuitous. But I couldn’t resist. And you get my point, –which is a legitimate one.

The first time I was on tour with Tchernichova was in Miami Beach in 1983–right before it went Continental. I was there again five years later to do research and it was totally different.

Anyway, she and I were at the pool and she said she wanted to make a little detour, so she could, as she readily admitted, check out in what state of post-performing career tone a trunks-clad ABT staffer was in!

Nothing whatsoever to do with sex–strictly dispassionate appraisal.

I forced myself to watch CNN for an hour this morning. Hadn’t really gotten down with the channel for a year-and-a-half or so.

I saw breathless minute after minute about Trump’s and Bush’s campaigns, while the only news of the Democrats concerned Hilary’s investigation.

Notice a pattern?

Abbey Zimet at Common Dreams reports on the Icelanders offering Syrian refugees solace after their government says it really can’t be bothered.

I have some stories from actors I interviewed along the way that I”ll contribute.

Believe it or not, among her handful of movies, I’ve only seen half.

But she is devastatingly droll in Ninotchka, and Three Broadway Girls, and ironic/heartbreaking in Claudia.

Listening to Falstaff yesterday I thought about an interview Tebaldi gave in old age–it’s on the VAI re issue of the 1958 Forza del Destino telecast from Naples–where she says that during her long offstage respite in that opera she’d peruse “Pace, Pace,” in the score prior to reappearing in the last act to sing it.

I couldn’t  help compare that to the statements of so many ballet dancers abjuring allegedly excessive rehearsing.

Are they kidding?

For one thing, I don’t think there’s a single ballet dancer in the history of the art form in this country who ever had the luxury of “over rehearsing.”

For another, the putative dangers of “calculating performances” belong to fantasies by this particular breed of performing artists that art somehow does not traffic in artifice.

Tebaldi says words to the effect that, “I didn’t want to sing ‘Pace,’ badly,”–and of course it was an aria she had sung many times. The more rehearsal, the more shot at perfection AS WELL AS more freedom onstage.

I hate to say it, but if ballet dancers–and administrations–took their art form a little more seriously, the public might, too.

On disc and in person, but never so triumphant a final fugue as von Dohnanyi conducted at the Met in 1972–and I was there! I’m going to listen again to the broadcast right now.  As Tebaldi, Resnik, Peters, Grillo, Gobbi, Alva, Paskalis, et. al. tell us with such exaltation, “Man is born to be a clown!”

The Museum of the City of New York’s fabulous theater collection now is posting visual resources from the collection on line. Naturally I looked at Tallulah first. Then I had to cut short my on line visit or I wouldn’t have gotten any work done. . .