AND NOW… NEXT WEEK’S NEW RELEASES!

A DVD: Still riding high from their reunion tour, the Robinson brothers, better known as the BLACK CROWES, are documented on “FREAK N’ ROLL INTO THE FOG,” shot live at the Fillmore in San Francisco from their four night run last August that featured your favorite hits, a treasure trove of covers, and an inspired acoustic set. 19 tracks plus bonus material.

ANOTHER DVD: DAVID BOWIE’s “SERIOUS MOONLIGHT” tour of 1983 finally gets proper DVD treatment in the US. Featuring an inspired set of new and old material as well as the bonus documentary “Ricochet,” which was shot during the Far East portion of the tour.

YET ONE MORE DVD: QUEEN – “THE MAKING OF A NIGHT AT THE OPERA” is just that, an in-depth look into the creation of one of the greatest albums of the ’70s, featuring interviews with Brian May, Roger Taylor, Joe Perry, Ian Hunter, and the always eloquent Nuno Bettencourt.

LUKA BLOOM – “INNOCENCE.” The introspective and super-sensitive Irishman releases his tenth album, hot on the heels of Purim.

ELVIS COSTELLO – “THE JULIET LETTERS” (2 CD EXPANDED REMASTER). 1993’s experiment in chamber-pop, featuring the Brodsky Quartet, was one of those “love it or hate it” records, but even if you didn’t go for the Brodskys’ classically-tinged backings, Costello’s writing and vocals were first-rate as usual. The remaster includes a bonus disc of rare and unreleased material of more of Costello’s forays into classical from throughout the ’90s, as well as some live tracks recorded at Town Hall with the Brodskys, one of which is an incredibly moving version of the standard “They Didn’t Believe Me.” For the record, Sal loves it, and Tony doesn’t dis-love it.

BEN HARPER – “BOTH SIDES OF THE GUN.” Split up over two CDs, which together equal the running time of one CD, Harper ruminates about the long running time of CDs and how they should be shorter. A concept album that really works. For those paying attention, Harper has always been a favorite among surfer dudes and jam band-loving hackysackers, and this record shows both sides of Harper’s gun. One side of his gun is really rockin’, and the other side of his gun is kind of acoustic. Put them together and you get one heck of a gun. Probably the best record he’s made without the Five Blind Boys Of Alabama.

HOWARD KAYLAN (OF THE TURTLES) – “DUST BUNNIES.” We mostly want to know what the following means: “The songs were handpicked by Kaylan from years of seldom-heard B-sides and album cuts recorded by his favorite artists and supplemented by new arrangements of more familiar pieces, and a rock original or two.” HUH?

LOOSE FUR – “BORN AGAIN IN THE U.S.A.” Sophomore release from the Wilco side project. When their first album came out a few years ago in the wake of Wilco albums like “Summerteeth,” it sounded pretty out-there, almost experimental. Now, compared to the last few Wilco albums, this one sounds like a pop album in comparison. Highly recommended, whether or not you’re a Wilco fan.

PRINCE – “3121.” OK, we said all the crap about it last week. Who cares, he’s over, yada yada. Truth is, it’s a pretty good album, and much better than the over-hyped and overrated “Musicology.” It seems as if, for the first time since 1987’s “Sign O’ The Times,” and even 1996’s underrated and underappreciated “Emancipation,” Prince has put together a cohesive collection of songs that actually sounds like one recording session, as opposed to a collection of throwaways from his vaults. Take it from two diehard Prince fans-turned-Prince haters: the first two or three songs that have been heard by the masses (“Black Sweat,” “Te Amo Corazon,” and “Fury”) are three of the weakest songs on the record. Prince is back?

SOUTHERN CULTURE ON THE SKIDS – “DOUBLEWIDE AND LIVE.” Everyone’s favorite chicken eatin’ white trash rockers release their first commercially available live record. If you’ve never been to one of their live shows, this is evidence of what a great time you’ve been missing all these years.

SPARKS – “HELLO YOUNG LOVERS.” The brilliant followup to “Lil Beethoven” gets a US release. Words cannot describe just what the Mael brothers do with instruments and words, but we will provide you with a special link where you can find a film clip of Tony and Sal explaining just what this record sounds like, with the assistance of a spatula and a whole lot of xanthan gum.

from Alter-reviews:
I saw Andrea Marcovicci perform a show of Cole Porter love songs at the Oak Room in the Algonquin Hotel last week. The woman is a throwback to a better time and place. Marcovicci, has a mature beauty, a fierce intelligence, a hungry mind, and voice that blends in with her carefully chosen material that combines into an iconic cabaret performance. Whitney Balliett, writing over a decade ago, described one of her performances, as follows: 

“[Her] set in the Oak Room generally includes over twenty songs, and lasts an hour and a half. She starts poised on a small platform in the crook of the piano, both hands on a floor microphone in front of her. A measure into her first song, her hands take off. She holds them at her sides, index fingers pointed at the floor, or moves them willow-fashion on either side of her head, or knots them together at one side of her waist. Then she rests her right hand on the piano and, folding her left leg up behind her, grasps the heel of the shoe with her left hand–a “Gee, I’m shy” gesture from a thirties Ginger Rogers movie. All the while, she turns slowly from side to side, giving the impression that she is trying to look into the eyes of each of her listeners. (When she catches you, you suddenly feel like the only person in the room.) Around her seventh or eighth song, she takes the microphone from its stand and sails easily up onto the piano. She crosses her legs, then lets one leg dangle over the edge. Her hands keep dancing. She combs her short brown hair with her fingers and rests her hands, palms down, on the piano, steadying herself in the waves of applause. Somewhere around the thirteenth number, she jumps down on the platform and finishes the set there. She smiles much of the time, but when she does a ballad her eyes go dark and the lines on either side of her mouth tighten and she looks as tragic as Duse.”

I can’t really improve on that. The current show is part of an ongoing project she is undertaking to rescue some of Porter’s lesser known material and present the better known songs in a new context. It is a warm, witty show which she is taking around the country. You can see her at the Oak Room if you have a lot of money or you can buy the cd—which she is pressing minus the artwork until she makes enough money to add that later. Read up on her here.

Hey MSNBC-TV guys. You ruined my bagel Monday morning with your full page ad.  I didn’t mind the photos—I don’t love them, but I can live with them,–but why in the world did you guys leave out the captions? Here they are, as public service:

• Norah O’Donnell, alleged moderate, no politics
• Pat Buchanan, nice guy, extremist conservative, proud McCarthyite, possible anti-Semite, Reagan adviser
• Keith Olbermann, no politics
• Chris Matthews, alleged “moderate,” hated Clinton and Gore, loved Bush, but opposed war and worked for Tip O’Neil, extremist Catholic moralist.
• Joe Scarborough, nice guy, extremist conservative, Republican congressman
• Peggy Noonan, extremist conservative, believer in magic dolphins, Bush worshipper, Reagan adviser
• Howard Fineman, alleged moderate but actually voice of (mostly) conservative conventional wisdom, no politics.

---

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fourwallers20mar20,0,6835689.story?page=1&coll=la-home-headlinesFrom the Los Angeles Times

COLUMN ONE

Playing Out of Pocket

In a Las Vegas practice known as ‘four-walling,’ entertainers pay to perform. It’s worked for George Wallace. Robert Goulet is another story.

By Sam Howe Verhovek
Times Staff Writer

March 20, 2006

LAS VEGAS — To pitch his product, George Wallace has glad-handed every concierge in Las Vegas and talked up hundreds of taxi and limo drivers. He’s gotten up at 4 a.m. to do drive-time radio on the East Coast.

He’s pored over spreadsheets, working to stretch the hundreds of thousands of dollars he spends on billboard, newspaper and radio ads.

Then, shortly after 10 p.m. five nights a week, Wallace steps onto a stage he rents at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino and presents cocktail-sipping audiences with what he’s been selling: the George Wallace show.

Wallace, 53, is a comedian, a friendly bear of a man who once wrote jokes for Redd Foxx. Now he draws laughs with a grumpy shtick of his own, a harangue on subjects ranging from a nephew in baggy pants — “I wanted to kick his tail, but I didn’t know where it was” — to indulgent ministers who preach “six commandments and four do-the-best-you-cans.”

But to perform his comedy, Wallace also has had to become an entrepreneur of sorts. He takes a multimillion-dollar risk by literally paying to play in Las Vegas.

In Vegas parlance, Wallace is a “four-waller,” the term used when an entertainer pays for his or her stage time. It’s an increasingly common arrangement that guarantees the hotel or casino rent and puts much of the marketing and production onus on the performer, unlike the more traditional contract in which the performer receives a set fee.

For the entertainer — often an aging star or perhaps one who never made the showbiz A-list — four-walling is a huge roll of the dice, with odds of success that make the craps tables look inviting.

Performers like Wallace, who is entering his third year at the Flamingo, can make four-walling pay if they sell enough tickets to make their rent and payroll, which for him is no small matter. Wallace oversees a staff of 14, including stagehands, light operators and even the maitre d’ who seats his customers.

While some four-wallers can turn a profit, they can also lose big — running through a bankroll in a hurry. And in the brutal economics of Las Vegas show business, even if they pay the rent, entertainers risk being tossed out if they do not bring in enough people. Casinos not only expect customers to go to the show, but also to arrive early or stay afterward — preferably both — and gamble.

Perhaps the most notable collapse of these self-financed arrangements happened with onetime heartthrob Robert Goulet, the singer and actor, who pulled the plug on his 2001 four-wall deal at the Venetian after just a month, calling it “the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

Expenses for his show, “Robert Goulet: The Man and His Music,” were far outstripping ticket revenue, he said. Among these were the $15,000-a-night cost of the Venetian’s Showroom stage.

“It’s a losing game, and it’s a shame Las Vegas has gone that route,” said Goulet’s wife and manager, Vera Goulet, who added that she still bristles at the experience.

“A man like Robert Goulet shouldn’t have to pay to perform,” she said. “He should be paid to perform.”

Neither party to four-walling particularly likes to advertise the arrangement, and financial details are often kept secret by mutual agreement. Some casinos run as many as four shows a day through a given stage.

And although casino executives say they use pretty much the same yardstick for four-wall deals that they would for traditional contracts — an ability to draw a crowd — four-walling has obvious advantages.

“Absolutely it’s less of a risk overall,” said Ira Sternberg, a vice president for community relations at the Las Vegas Hilton and host of a weekly radio show. Other casino executives describe the arrangement as a “more dependable” or “more straightforward” revenue source.

But the odds are against the performer, said David Saxe, a producer here who is also an adjunct professor in the hotel and casino school at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

Saxe estimated that only about 10% of those who four-wall make any money. “It’s a tough town,” added Saxe, who produces “V — the Ultimate Variety Show” at the Aladdin’s Desert Passage.

What the hell is a “weapons of mass destruction-related program activity?”  And what is its relationship to statements like these:”Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”
–Dick Cheney Speech to VFW National Convention, Aug. 26, 2002

“Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.”
–George W. Bush Speech to U.N. General Assembly, Sept. 12, 2002

“We know for a fact that there are weapons there.”
–Ari Fleischer Press Briefing, Jan. 9, 2003

“I’m absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We’re just getting it just now.”
–Colin Powell Remarks to Reporters, May 4, 2003

From John Amato at  the indispensible Crooks and Liars:

http://movies.crooksandliars.com/TDS-Bush-Iran-IED.wmv

FROM ALTERCATION: 

HO HUM, More dishonesty, more wasted money, more scandals buried deep inside the Washington Post and largely uncovered elsewhere.  This one, you guessed it: “Missile Defense Testing May Be Inadequate.”  Hey Mr. Headline Writer, that is one hell of a “may” you got there.  Anyway, I miss the days when this was one of our most significant problems.  Speaking of the Post, Michael Getler thinks there’s “lots of smoke and probably a fire” in its pro-war, pro-Bush biases

.

If Bush ruled the world

William Pfaff

MONDAY, MARCH 20, 2006

PARIS Intellectual poverty is the most striking quality of the Bush administration’s new National Security Strategy statement, issued on Thursday. Its overall incoherence, its clichés and stereotyped phraseology give the impression that Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and his fellow authors assembled it from the boilerplate of bureaucratic discourse with contempt for the Congress to whom it is primarily addressed.

It reveals the administration’s foreign policy as a lumpy stew of discredited neoconservative ideas with some neo- Kissingerian geopolitics now mixed in.

The statement’s only visible purpose is to address a further threat to Iran, as its predecessor, in 2002, threatened Iraq. The only actual “strategy” that can be deduced from it is that the Bush administration wishes to rule the world. The document is nonsensical in content, insulting to other nations and unachievable in declared intention.

If people read it to find a statement of American foreign policy’s objective, they will learn that the United States has “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Good luck.

The document’s foreign readers will have two reactions. The first will be that it can’t be serious. The second will be that it has to be taken seriously since these people have spent three ruinous years in a futile effort to control Iraq; they must be assumed capable of doing the same thing again to Iran.

An annual national security statement was demanded by Congress in 1986 legislation. The present document is the first since 2003, when an American policy of military pre-emption was proclaimed – subsequently implemented in Iraq. This document reiterates the pre-emption policy, warning that “we are in the early years of a long struggle” like the Cold War.

One asks if its authors foresee a 50- year struggle against Iran? Or with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the Iraqi desert and Osama bin Laden in his cave in Waziristan? Or against febrile and fanaticized young Muslim men in European ghettos, already repudiated by the immigrant populations from which they come? Surely the great American nation will have better things to do during the next 50 years.

While Stephen Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s former deputy, was preparing the strategy statement (or signing off on it), Rice was in Indonesia to “expand a strategic partnership” with Jakarta, a visit described by officials accompanying her as a signal of American “interest in building up [Indonesia] as a major commercial and military power … to help counter the growing influence of China.”

A few days earlier, Rice and President George W. Bush were in India on the same mission, making a “historic” gesture that conferred on India a nuclear partnership with America and authorized it to keep its nuclear weapons. This was also as meant to check China.

Speaking to the International Institute for Strategic Studies just three years ago, Rice condemned “balance of power” politics as outmoded and dangerous. She said: “We tried this before; it led to the Great War.”

In a few weeks, President Hu Jintao of China will be at the White House for a long-delayed meeting. Possibly he in turn will be offered a strategic partnership, provided that Beijing obeys the new U.S. National Security Strategy, which tells China to “give up old ways of thinking and acting … and [make] the right strategic choices for its people.” Until China takes this advice, the strategy statement menacingly adds, the United States will “hedge against other possibilities.”

The president and the secretary of state have been trying to manipulate the Asian power balance against China. At home, Stephen Hadley and colleagues have told us that the effort in Iraq has been worth it because now “tyrants know that they pursue weapons of mass destruction at their own peril.” (One has also learned that those who pursue nonexistent weapons of mass destruction also do so at their peril.)

In addition, we are told that the United States today “may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran,” and that it reserves the right to take “anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.” Whose attack? Iran’s? Under what conceivable circumstances would Iran attack the United States, even if it possessed nuclear weapons?

Finally there is North Korea, which the national strategy document seems to assume already has nuclear weapons. Pyongyang is simply enjoined to “afford freedom to its people,” and the North Koreans are warned that the United States will protect itself “against adverse effects of their bad conduct.” The Iranian government in Tehran will surely note that pre-emption is not mentioned in connection with North Korea.

BURN, BABY, BEIRNE: If it’s cold in New York, is global warming all wet? In fact, many readers wrote to remind us that warming theory predicts increased extreme weather of all varieties. Almost no pundit is really prepared to discuss the science of climate change. But even our current slackers and harlequins know that a few days of snow in New York can’t cool off the fever about warming. But clowning clowns of the pseudo-con press united when Gore gave his speech about warming (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/16/04). It was cold outside, so Gore had been burned. Indeed, to Kate O’Beirne of the Capital Gang, Gore’s speech was the “outrage of the week:” MARK SHIELDS (1/17/04): Kate O’Beirne. O’BEIRNE: With the exquisite judgment we have come to expect from Al Gore, this week he appeared in New York to blast President Bush for his inattention to the pressing issue of global warming. Gore’s attempt to turn up the heat on Bush was on the coldest day in New York in memory: Minus 1 degree. Solid scientific evidence and a unanimous Senate that rejected the Kyoto Treaty are against Gore on this phony issue. So too is Mother Nature. Poor lefty Al Gore. It’s cold way out there. There’s little chance that Kate has a clue about the science of climate change. But she eagerly joined in the clowning clownistry which seemed to be the real ’rage last week.

Speaking of which, I admit it, I am not a good person.  I am genuinely enjoying the fact that our own Little Roy Cohn, not altogether unlike Emma Bovary, is finally, painfully waking up to the fact that the political figure to which he has betrothed himself so profoundly and abjectly during the past three years has been using him for kicks, mocking his assignations while professing his true allegiance to those who would stigmatize gays as less than human and even rewrite the U.S. Constitution to prevent their becoming—Andy’s own words—“free at last.” 

The ironies are too thick and laden with multiple metaphor to unpack here.  (I wonder how many slaves fell—politically speaking—for Jefferson Davis…)  And I haven’t even mentioned the drunken-sailor spending spree that used to define exactly what a conservative isn’t—at least in the days before Karl Rove ran the country.  My heart almost goes out to the guy.  Being the world’s most famous gaycatholictoryMcCarthyiteGAPmodel ain’t as easy as it used to be.