Asking for Your Help!

On the third anniversary of this still-free newsletter, you can lend a hand in various ways. Thank you.

Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books and now writer/director of three award-winning films aired via PBS: please see links at bottom of this post. Before all that, he was a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.

This week we mark—if I may so, celebrate—the third anniversary of this little old newsletter. I introduced it back then in the first post, which was titled “Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself.” It opened not with “pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name” but this:

Greetings, and thanks for taking a look, as I navigate during this pandemic from Subterranean Homesick Blues to Substack.

After a brief bio and an idea of what was to come (so you’d know “the nature of my game”)—a regular, sometimes daily, mix of curated music and political analysis and cartoons, plus movie tips (it turned out pretty accurate)—I closed with:

I hope you’ll share (or subscribe if you have not) and I look forward to your comments on any post. See you again soon, I hope. And here’s today’s first song pick, Woody Guthrie’s “All You Fascists Bound to Lose,” with Rhiannon Giddens.

Since then, I’ve published 532 posts here, all for no charge, with no pay wall, which is a little unusual. I’d like to continue to do that but now I am asking for your help, which you can offer in several ways:

—Hit the “share” button below and/or spread the word with a link at your favored social media site.

—If you are a subscriber already, use the subscribe button again to offer to pledge a small amount if we ever do have to go “pay” here (you don’t have to pay now).

—If you are not currently a subscriber…well, subscribe for free now! Also consider subscribing to my “other” newsletter on Oppenheimer: The Legacy of His Bomb Today.

—Provide some compensation for my work by purchasing one or more of my many books, now listed below with links. Nearly all are available as both paperbacks and e-books (with prices as low as $2.99). Thank you. You might even enjoy the books quite a bit or send as a gift.

—In Comments, tell me what changes, if any, you’d appreciate going forward.

Songs of the Day

From the new John Prine Hall of Fame induction special on PBS’s “Austin City Limits” this week (featuring Allison Russell and Ethan Hawke, among others), a fine honky tonk Prine tune from Tyler Childers, “Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You.”

We are not sold on new “True Detective” season as yet but here is theme song, via Billie Eilish.

Cartoons of the Day

»Greg Mitchell’s films and books

Films: Watch award-winning “Atomic Cover-up” at PBS site and via PBS apps now, or free from Kanopy, and see companion book at Amazon. Watch “Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried” at PBS site and via apps, also companion book at Amazon. Read about “The First Attack Ads: Hollywood vs. Upton Sinclair” or purchase the DVD here for yourself or your library.

Books include: Best-sellers “The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Film JFK Tried to Kill.” Award-winners “The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics” and “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” A New York Times Notable Book, “Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas.”

Also, two acclaimed books with Robert Jay Lifton, “Hiroshima in America” and “Who Owns Death? Against Capital Punishment.” On the media and Iraq, “So Wrong for So Long,” with an preface by Bruce Springsteen. And in a different vein, “Vonnegut and Me,” “Journeys With Beethoven” and “Joy in Mudville: A Little League Memoir.”

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