But I’m too much of a con man myself to fool easily. All it took was a few phone calls to some publicists I knew, and I soon realized that none of the “committed” artists even knew about the project, so I took a pass. But I continued to watch from afar. Soon, Ivanovich brought in a fella named Claes Nobel, a tangential member of the Nobel family, and they began seeking money for their “peace concert” from China, where, they must have assumed, people really love stone soup. In one of the greatest moments of unscripted comedy in human history, the organizers took their stock-footage promo video and recut it, removing the image of the Dalai Lama and replacing it with…Mao. Yes, Mao, arguably the world’s greatest mass murderer, featured in a promotional video for a concert dedicated to “peace” and “nonviolence.”
