Daily Office: Wednesday
¶ Matins: What’s next, starving quarterhorses? “Boats Too Costly to Keep Are Littering Coastlines.” And here you were worried about fossil fuel emissions.
¶ Lauds: In June of next year, the Toronto summer festival, Luminato, will mount the premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s opera, Prima Donna. The work was to have been created at the Metropolitan Opera, but the composer rejected Met director Peter Gelb’s demand that Prima Donna be translated from French into English.
¶ Prime: Whatever you think of HRH’s fire station at Poundbury — and I don’t think that it’s so bad; in fact, I rather like those black drainpipes — you have to love the no-less-traditional irreverent fun that Justin McGuirk has talking about the “daft mess.”
¶ Tierce: Sounds like a good idea: Cash for Clunkers. You bring in your old car — old car — and get a credit toward the purchase of a new one — a smallish, greenish one. The move is unlikely to provide help for Cerberus, though — the private equity firm that bought Chrysler a few years ago.
¶ Sext: It’s a great day for checking out Despair, Inc.
¶ Nones: While the Times thinks that Velupillai Prabhakaran is indispensable to the Tamil insurgency, the BBC expects that the rebels would be able to carry on without him.
¶ Vespers: Not only are they both cartoonists whose work is regularly published in The New Yorker, but their styles are not remarkably dissimilar. Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin have even collaborated on a book, called My Funny Valentine. It’s about them: they are married to one another.
¶ Compline: Kathleen called in the middle of the afternoon to report that the people in London who had to sign off on a deal this afternoon couldn’t — they were without power. Here’s why.
Oremus…
§ Matins. Welcome to the land of “personal responsibility.” As conceived by Gary Lambert, that is. (The Corrections, pp 483-501)
§ Lauds. Ordinarily unmoved by the prospect of “new opera,” whether traditional or not, I’m looking forward to Prima Donna with intense interest: this could be good. Great, even. If there is an artist working in any field today who understand what opera is all about, it is Mr Wainwright. If you doubt me, just listen to the peroration of “Between My Legs,” on Release the Stars. Or “Memphis Skyline,” from Want Two — a song that’s not really a song at all, but a meditation out of Parsifal by way of Ibert.
§ Prime. It’s true that the most hopeful thing that I have to say about this structure is that it may “age very nicely.” As for the people who have to use it,
I think the good firemen of Poundbury should be forced to wear Regency breeches and powdered wigs, and rush to their infernos in a red barouche carrying water in wooden pails. The poor, hapless souls. Kill this building. Kill it with fire.
The piece goes to show that, just as the Spy style infiltrated the intelligent marches of America’s mainstream press, so Private Eye did the same in Britain. Insouciant comparisons of Prince Charles to Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, and “Mad” Ludwig might have provoked a gasp when I was in boarding school.
§ Tierce. I’m finding it impossible not to gloat just a teeny-weeny bit about Stephen Feinberg’s discomfort.
Cerberus, many agree, was like so many private equity firms that overreached during the late boom in corporate buyouts. But the firm also seems to have miscalculated in Washington. Mr. Feinberg employs a Who’s Who of Washington insiders, among them John W. Snow, the former Treasury secretary, and Dan Quayle, a former vice president. Cerberus has lobbied aggressively in recent months to shape the government’s rescue of the auto industry, to little avail.
“There was a certain degree of hubris here,†said John Gabbert, the chief executive of PitchBook, a firm that researches private equity.
Cerberus’ problems, you might well think, begin with its name. How many of its investors, do you think, knew that the firm was named after the mythological multi-headed dog that prevents the dead from returning to life?
§ Sext. Check out the new products! How about a T shirt with a “Kleptocracy” (mock-Monopoly) Community Chest card:
Taxpayers Fell For Your “I’m Too Big To Fail” Crap
Collect $700,000,000,000
The folks at Parker Bros must be printing money.
§ Nones. What Seth Mydans and Alistair Lawson disagree about is the impact of financial support by the Tamil diaspora, which has been funding Mr Prabhakaran’s hitherto successful guerillas.
The United Nations has got, at some point, to investigate and restrain the rivers of émigré cash that effectively destabilize so many governments. Like lobbying, exilic funding encourages a nasty strain of influence peddling and allows foreigners and unnatural persons to meddle in political affairs.
§ Vespers. Can’t wait to get the book, a dandy excerpt from which you’ll find at The Daily Beast if you click through.
By the way, has anybody seen my copy of Summer Blonde?
§ Compline. The BBC report was strong on broken glass. The chill to bear in mind is that the Bank of England demonstration involved about a thousand people — only a thousand. If a truly populist mob showed up to complain, there is no force in the First World that could resist it. That’s because there is no force that would resist a massive showing. Where do you think policeman come from, after all?