After the Weeknd--Back to Work!

We survived Super Spreader Sunday, so today enjoy some fun quips and songs from Dusty Springfield and John Hiatt and a Beatles classic like you've never heard it before.

Finally our long national nightmare is over—the two weeks leading up to the not-so-Super Bowl and then, as it turned out, the game itself. Since it failed to meet high expectations as a tight thriller, we will call it “Deflate-gate” in honor of Tom Brady. Well, Major Tom certainly had ground and air control. Onward with today’s takes. Feel free to hit the “Comment” button. And maybe subscribe—it’s free!

Politics & Media

Trevor Noah: “BREAKING: Armed Trump supporters have stormed the church in the Bruce Springsteen Jeep ad.”

My old pal Stevie Van Zandt defends Bruce from a critic hitting him for “selling his soul” with that Jeep ad: “Oh please! Sold his soul! Really? It’s an important message and a very cool ad that’s not even an ad. He didn’t even give them a song! So knock off the drama please.” Some would still argue that “the middle” is now…nearly mythical.

P.S. Even that streaker was selling something: business for a porno site. But as the CEO in the Oatly commercial commented: “Wow. Wow. No cow. No, no, no. Wow. Wow. No cow. No, no, no. Wow. Wow.”

Many fun quips in real time about The Weeknd’s halftime show—I didn’t see it, as I was zooming with my son. Even Dan Rather weighed in. But maybe actress Elizabeth Banks for the win: ”I’m reserving judgment of @theweeknd but if he’s not in a fringed bikini on a giant pole, is it even a halftime show?”

Not so fun: More mask-wearing in half-time show than in much of crowd. And from NY Times afterward: “The raucous crowds just outside the stadium after the game were far more intense, with fans celebrating Tampa Bay’s win in huge gatherings without a mask in sight.”

Barry Blitt:

NY Times claims Chuck Schumer is “cozying up” with the AOC wing of the Dem party—partly to head off a challenge from her in a 2022 primary.

On a recent Sunday evening, about a dozen liberal housing activists from New York gathered for a virtual meeting with Senator Chuck Schumer. Though the newly anointed majority leader had served in Congress for four decades, a number of participants had scarcely interacted with him before, and some regarded him as an uncertain ally.

But Mr. Schumer was eager to offer reassurance. At one point, he described himself as a former tenant organizer who was now in a position to deliver on housing issues on a grand scale, several participants recalled.

“He had done a bunch of homework and knew everything that we were going to ask about and made a bunch of commitments with us to make it happen,” said Cea Weaver, a strategist for New York’s Housing Justice for All coalition. “He was like: I’m talking to Ilhan Omar, I’m talking to Bernie Sanders, I’m talking to A.O.C.”

Andy Borowitz jokes (we think): “After being stripped of her committee assignments, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has created a committee of her own, the House Committee on Semitic Aerospace Weaponry. Greene said that such a committee was sorely needed, given that ‘Semitic aerospace weaponry is the second-biggest threat facing this country, right after plane crashes caused by the Clintons.’”

Fund-raising email from Elizabeth Warren: “Four years ago tonight, Mitch McConnell silenced me on the Senate floor because I tried to read a letter from Coretta Scott King. He was trying to tell an entire movement to sit down and shut up. Nevertheless, we persisted. And now, he doesn't get to call the shots anymore.” Meanwhile, from Substack’s own Heather Cox Richardson: “Biden Puts Trump’s Foreign Policy in Reverse.”

Interesting debate raging over the firing of Donald McNeil Jr. by NY Times for using a racial slur (or more?), as I’ve covered here twice already. PEN America calling it overkill, many others say not enough information released yet (no transparency) to make up their minds, while some Times colleagues say his personality was always an issue and hint at other incidents. Stay tuned.

Music

Nice piece by Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker on the late Dusty Springfield, with a new collection of her peak singles 1968-1971 coming out. Story focuses on the Brit star’s classic Dusty in Memphis album and her work with Jerry Wexler. Revelation: Her vocals for that album were actually recorded in….Manhattan.

Her voice was effortless, yet there was something warm and vulnerable at the center of each note. Dusty in Memphis is now considered a creative apex for “blue-eyed soul”—the teasing sobriquet, coined in the nineteen-sixties, given to Black music performed by white singers—but sales of the album were measly at first, and Springfield made just one other record for Atlantic, “A Brand New Me,” in 1970, before leaving the label.

Film

PBS is re-airing tonight its 1993 “American Experience” film on the (once buried, now famous) 1921 Tulsa Massacre, Goin’ Back to T-Town, as the 100th anniversary nears. It was produced by Sam Pollard (who most recently directed MLK/FBI) and wife Joyce Vaughn.

The film may subvert the expectations of a contemporary audience in a more fundamental way as well. The violence itself, vividly depicted in recent dramas like “Watchmen” and “Lovecraft Country,” is not the dramatic focus of “Goin’ Back to T-Town.” The film’s account of it, from the accidental contact of a Black man and a teenage white girl to montages of smoking ruins and corpses lying in the street, occupies about 10 anguishing but subdued minutes halfway through.

Pollard and Vaughn are telling a larger story. It begins with an inspiring, deceptively cheerful account of the growth of Greenwood, the largest of a number of all-Black communities in Oklahoma.

In other screen news: The Obamas seem to have eight projects lined up with Netflix.

BOOKS

A welcome Ben Smith piece today on the major publisher most willing to publish books by right-wingers, Hachette, toning it down following the Capitol insurrection. They even fired the go-to editor for that crowd—the woman who brought us books by Don Jr., Newt Gingrich, Corey Lewandowski and Jeanine Pirro, just for starters (or should I say, for dead-enders). But beware:

A former Trump adviser, Kellyanne Conway, is in talks with major publishers and expects a sizable advance, a person involved in the conversations said. The same person said that former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are also working on books and anticipating large advances from New York publishers.

Song Pick of the Day

After Phoebe Bridgers’ laughable axe-smashing stunt on SNL on Saturday, we have to let John Hiatt respond here: I don’t know who they think they are / smashing a perfectly good guitar…. Then a very early, little heard and quite amazing Beatles take on George’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” acoustic—with Paul on lead harmonium.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and now has written and directed his first feature, Atomic Cover-up, which will have its American premiere at a festival this spring.