121212 --The Review You Won't Read In The Papers.

Wrote the following to a friend and decided everybody should read it:

...I turned off the concert after the Who, much as I’d love to have seen Paul McCartney.  The other names, whatever.  Their promo pictures looked scary, and at two hours, I’d had enough.  Getting old, I guess, just like everyone on the show.  Bon Jovi?  I’m sorry – I call him the Zenith of Nadir. Steven Colbert's idiot blathering about "doing a line of helping someone"?! Wha...?  That wasn't just bombing, that was suicide bombing.  Yeah, that's it: help people because it gives you a buzz.  I was embarassed just listening to that idiot.

I love attitude, having quite an attitude myself, but this whole “we’re New Yorkers and WE CAN DO ANYTHING” stuff is getting really overplayed.  It might even be mostly true, but it’s been milked.  Isn’t a bit like shaking one’s fist at God?  I can’t imagine it isn’t accruing to some cosmic backhander to put us all back in our place.  And the fact is, all the pissing and moaning I’ve heard about this freaking storm has made me sick.  The fact that there is even a fundraiser for it is sickening. FEMA’s out there throwing money at people, whose biggest problem is that they have to wait a month for the brand new insurance replacement cars, furniture, wood flooring, whatever.  Some guy at work was whining day in and day out about this. Woe is he, with his insurance-reimbursed new kitchen, new car, etc etc.  Nope, if New Yorkers were THAT tough, we’d have just done it and not cried and sung about it so much.

Where were the telethons and global concerts when no less than four hurricanes in a row hit central Florida?  There weren’t any.  There were billboards and editorials blaming George W. Bush for them, but no gratuitous, hyperdramatic, grandstanding and cheerleading mega-concerts brought to you by mega-corporations.

Getting back to the show…Townsend looked like he’d lost his bearings a couple of times, jumping around like a teenager with his Strat.  But that’s because he was giving it his all, as did Roger Daltrey and the whole band.  It was excellent.  Then they fucked the whole thing up by flashing a picture of President Zero smiling that narcissistic smile while feeding two starving, scrawny orphans  from the Serengeti or somewhere in Jersey; mooing about “love raining down”.  What a jolting juxtaposition of sensory shocks: great music and putrid propaganda.