New “radio” stream went up yesterday. This time it’s all Italian stuff, a change form the eclectic pop mix I’ve stuck with so far. For starters, none of the Italian stuff is in English, so I may lose some listeners, at least in the U.S. But maybe not.
There was a review in the NY Times of the SummerStage show. No mention at all of the Sons Of Thunder, so I suspect the reviewer didn’t stay for the end. Maybe he didn’t even stay till the end of my set, who knows? As there was no break at all between my set and theirs, in fact I never even said goodnight, how could they possibly have missed them? Wasn’t the reviewer even curious? Whatever, he missed an important part of the concept of the evening. Too bad. The review was not positive, which was a little sad, as both the band and the public seemed to enjoy it as we stretched out in a variety of directions during these shows. The audience, to their credit, goes with it a lot of the time. Some audiences prefer old favorites, but not everywhere. That could be a factor of the venue more than the audience. An arena-sized crowd tends to be conservative. Most adjectives in the review were backhanded begrudging compliments to this effect, so maybe that says more about the reviewer than about what we have been up to for the last 4+ years.
The Freedom Tower, the building proposed to fill the World Trade Center site, or a least the most prominent one on that site, has been redesigned yet again. Apparently all the self-congratulatory design competitions and ceremonies for the site in the years immediately following the attack were just for show, as this most recent proposal has nothing to do with higher ideals of any sort.
The new proposal is a glass tower on a massive fortified concrete base. 20 stories (!!) high almost windowless concrete. Basically, a fortress. Or a prison. It wouldn’t look out of place to have a gun turret or anti-aircraft weaponry on the roof. My daddy’s reaction was, “this says: ‘we have no faith in the future.’” I think he’s right. The site could have stood for all that is good and open and innovative about the United States. The can-do spirit, the possibility of re-invention, tolerance of all kinds of weirdos, mixtures of a multitude of races and creeds, all living together. Sometimes the U.S. is like that anyway. And the site could be a way of saying THIS is what we believe in and what we stand for.
This instead is a big fuck you to the rest of the world at the entrance of NY harbor, it says we are isolationist, protectionist and closed. As dad suggests it says we don’t think things will get better, we don’t believe good will triumph; instead we think things will get a lot worse. It’s back to medieval days for us.
On a purely practical level, what kind of attack are the people who thought of this expecting? A car bomb that could somehow get across a well-protected plaza? Didn’t the previous attack come from the air?
I think it’s not really about the practicalities of security or protection, but about symbolizing an attitude, a climate of fear and of a walled-in nation.
