Pull the Cheney

The new tricky Dicky Cheney- who just won’t go away he is so desparately clinging to power, guns, money, bad hair & religion- used his warmonger award speech to call President Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan ‘dithering.’  The White House didn’t let this one pass, dispatching press secretary Robert Gibbs

“I think it’s a curious comment, given — I think it’s pretty safe to say that the vice president was for seven years not focused on Afghanistan. . . . What Vice President Cheney calls “dithering,” President Obama calls his solemn responsibility to the men and women in uniform and to the American public. I think we’ve all seen what happens when somebody doesn’t take that responsibility seriously.

It is also being reported that The Cheney-Bush administration didn’t even have a senior WH official dealing with the war in Afghanistan for years.  Even Reb. Sen. Lamar Alexander found Cheney’s remarks so ludicrious that he threw this out “I want [Obama] to take the time to get it right.”

And then there is Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who worked for C-B,  “I will tell you, I think that the strategy that the president put forward in late March is the first real strategy we have had for Afghanistan since the early 1980s.”

dancemetros 2

BODYVOX Water Bodies

 Theme dance concerts can often result in thematic bloat.  BodyVox have no such worries with their Water Bodies, choreographers Ashley Roland and Jamey Hampton use a universal theme as a springboard rather than artistic overkill. The highlights in Friday night performance-

Esther Williams was not to be ignored and had the troupe in red velvet singlets in interlocking kalidescopes a nod to Busby Berkeley with an overhead (live) track shot for those geometric body blooms, but he would be screaming at some inprecision by the troops.  But BodyVox is going for more than static dance tricks here- namely ideas and personalities.  This group’s joy of movement just radiates off of the them.

Unexpected precision though in ensemble jetes in Serein, choreographed by company dancer Eric Skinner, with music by Bartok. Quickstepping couples in front of screens of rainy streets lead to charmingly light, quixotic duets.   A fine solo by Heather Jackson, who has such lithe clarity in her body articulation. 

  Their Titanic dance drama SOS  a lurching death march turns into a hynotic slo motion elegy and touching relationship tableau set to dreamlike music by Sibelius.

The groovy, loopy beach blanket hulabaloo of the Big Dip with music by Sex Mob has them shaking a real tail feather.   Jamey’s adventures in a bathtub has him acting out his kid in a tub rituals and going down the drain in slo-mo.  

Biking back from the Annenberg on Market St thinking about the Bartok, it started to pour down rain seemingly on cue.