Barack and Bruce Are 'Renegades' Again

Former POTUS and rock 'n roll MOSTUS team up, but Slate suspends a veteran podcaster and Daft Punk retires. Plus: Music from the Fab Four, Jimmy Cliff and Lucinda Williams.

On this day in 1964, the mop tops made their third and final appearance on the Sullivan show. You have probably seen their “Twist & Shout” from that night but they’d been doing that cover song for awhile, notably in this far superior one, below, with the Queen in attendance as Beatlemania in the UK heated up. John is wailing. Enjoy, and then consider subscribing—it’s free!

News/Politics

Trevor Noah: “Texans get hit with $17,000 electricity bills—and Ted Cruz reverses his stance on energy regulation like it's a flight path to Cancun.”

Afternoon Update: One of the West Coast giants of our time, San Francisco poet and City Lights Bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti has died at 101, the store announced.

Ferlinghetti is the author of one of the best-selling poetry books of all time, A Coney Island of the Mind, among many other works. He continued to write and publish new work up until he was 100 years old, and his work has earned him a place in the American canon.

For over sixty years, those of us who have worked with him at City Lights have been inspired by his knowledge and love of literature, his courage in defense of the right to freedom of expression, and his vital role as an American cultural ambassador. His curiosity was unbounded and his enthusiasm was infectious, and we will miss him greatly.

Who can forget Ferlinghetti’s “prayer” in The Last Waltz.

Sarah Kendzior: “We are now at 500,000 dead and there is not even an attempt to hold Kushner and others on Trump's Covid team accountable for purposefully enabling mass death. If there are not consequences, this will happen again. The dead deserve justice and the living deserve closure.”

Charlie Pierce: “We were smart enough at the beginning to differentiate between what we wanted to believe and what actually was. We were smart enough at the beginning to understand exactly what we needed to do. We just decided not to do it, and now a half-million of us are dead. This is a profound failure of every aspect of American society, as profound a societal failure as the Great Famine in Ireland.”

Jim Jordan, call your office: “George Clooney and Grant Heslov's Smokehouse Pictures will produce a docuseries about a decades-long abuse scandal in the athletic department at Ohio State University. The series is based on an October 2020 Sports Illustrated story by Jon Wertheim, which detailed a long list of allegations against former Ohio State sports doctor Richard Strauss and university officials' lack of response.”

Daily Beast: “The White House is privately assembling a left-wing ‘Brain Trust,’ building on weeks of early talks & courtship with top progressives. The goal, described by chief of staff Ron Klain, is to make them a permanent part of the policy-making process.”

Big showdown today at confirmation hearing for Rep. Deb Haaland for the Interior cabinet post. GOPers claim they oppose her because of her “activism,” which never bothered them with past Trump and Bush nominees.

If you are like me you have probably wondered at some point in the past month, “How come I’ve long known that the Capitol policeman named Brian Sisknick died in the January 6 insurrection but have received received no updates on how and why he died, have seen no footage or photos, and there have been no arrests or even hints of any?” Well, it turns out this tragedy has been mired in confusion and misinformation from the start, giving rightwingers a bonanza for charging media bias and official cover-up. It appears that he did not die from being hit over the head with a fire extinguisher or other weapon but may have died from a chemical spray or a stroke. Here Yahoo News tries to re-cap where we are now. And so does Politifact.

By now you’ve probably heard about Obama doing a Spotify thing with his “good friend” Springsteen. Two episodes are now out with six to come. Here is the “trailer.”

Stephen Colbert last night already imagined Bruce plugging a podcast sponsor. But now let’s go back to more innocent times, with Bruce singing “The Rising” at a final Obama rally in 2008.

Disney has decided to put a disclaimer on re-runs of beloved but creaky Muppets show indicating that some stereotypes may offend. So Don Trump Jr., naturally, tweeted: “Apparently The Muppets have now been canceled. There’s nothing these psychos won’t destroy. Liberalism is a disease.” Disney says the warning will also appear before some iconic but aging movies, including Aristocats, Dumbo, Peter Pan, and Swiss Family Robinson.

Andy Borowitz claims in his latest satire after twin SCOTUS losses for Trump: “Donald J. Trump said on Monday that his ‘greatest regret’ as President was his failure to name his three adult children to the Supreme Court. Appearing on Fox News, Trump said that Ivanka, Eric, and Don, Jr., would be ‘way better judges’ than ‘those three clowns’ whom he did name. ‘Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are the worst people who have ever worked for me,’ he said. ‘And that includes Scaramucci.’”

Comedy gold in a CPAC tweet on Monday: “We have just learned that someone we invited to CPAC has expressed reprehensible views that have no home with our conference or our organization. The individual will not be participating at our conference.” Could apply to half their speakers in recent years—including Trump coming this weekend.

Cool and unusual “Google Doodle” pick on Monday if you missed it: the little-known Yankton Sioux writer, teacher, musician, activist and suffragist Zitkala-Ša “Red Bird” with her violin on a ledger, for her 145th birthday.

Media

The online publication Slate late Monday suspended well-known podcast host Mike Pesca after he debated with colleagues over whether people who are not Black should be able to quote the N-word in some contexts. Pesca, host of “The Gist,” a podcast on news and culture, said he was suspended indefinitely after defending the use of the slur in certain contexts via the interoffice messaging platform Slack. This was set off by a discussion of the recent controversy involving NY Times reporter Donald McNeil, which I have covered often here.

A welcome profile by Tim Noah of the horrid history of the Brent Bozell family through four generations of right-wing horrors and nutty media criticism. The youngest, who could be called Bozell the Clown, just busted for January 6 criminality.

Music

French electronic duo Daft Punk has broken up, the group announced yesterday in suitable style—no words, just music and iconography, in a video titled “Epilogue.” It had nearly 10 million views by the end of the day. Stephen Colbert quips: “I feel like someone should tell Daft Punk this is literally the worst time to hang up your masks.”

The great Jamaican deejay, “toaster” and rap precursor, U-Roy, has died. This takes me back to the mind-blowing revelation for nearly all of us that was viewing The Harder They Come back around 1973. The reggae explosion, led by Marley & the Wailers, Toots & the Maytals, and others soon followed. From the film, with its star, the great Jimmy Cliff:

Film

Casting choices for the upcoming Showtime anthology series on First Ladies include Viola Davis as Michelle Obama, Michelle Pfeiffer as Betty Ford, and Gillian Anderson, improbably, as Eleanor Roosevelt.

Predictably, Woody Allen and wife with statement today calling the new HBO series a “hatchet job” (after seeing one episode?): “It is sadly unsurprising that the network to air this is HBO – which has a standing production deal and business relationship with Ronan Farrow.”

Julia Roberts and Sean Penn will play Martha Mitchell and Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell in Gaslit, for Starz… Meanwhile, Amazon Studios has acquired the worldwide rights to the documentary Mayor Pete, which follows Pete Buttigieg on the 2020 campaign trail."

Preview for the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick doc on Ernest Hemingway, coming to PBS on April 5. Meryl Streep voices Gellhorn. Jeff Daniels apparently is Hem.

Books

New graphic novel focuses on monumental upset in Zaire in 1974 when Ali took back the title from scary (though later lovable) George Foreman. I recall watching the fight at MSG in NYC and almost holding my breath the entire time, fearing that rope-a-doping Ali would get knocked flat any second. When, instead, he KOed George, Peter Knobler and I returned to Greenwich Village and found people celebrating in the streets almost as if the Mets had just won the World Series. Indelible memory. We then produced an Ali cover story at Crawdaddy, the debut of Timothy White, later the famous music writer and Billboard editor. He even got from Ali a first-person piece entitled, “I Am the Master of My Destiny.”

This month marks the 74th anniversary of the gala premiere in D.C. for the first Hollywood drama about the atomic bomb and the devastation of Hiroshima an Nagasaki. My 2020 book, The Beginning or the End, carries the same title as that movie, but the subhed gets to the main point: “How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” In fact, President Truman and the Pentagon intervened, in unprecedented fashion, to force dramatic changes in the movie so that it fully endorsed the use of the weapons against Japan—and building more of them in a nuclear arms race with the Soviets. The FBI also tailed and/or tapped the phones of bomb skeptics Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

My book was picked by Vanity Fair as one of the 21 best books of 2020 and by Sight & Sound as one of the ten best books about films last year. Here’s my Mother Jones piece on Truman re-writing the movie. Plus how Hollywood re-wrote history, as usual, in Charlie Pierce review at Esquire. On Ayn Rand’s wacky script for a competing film.

Song Pick of the Day

This takes me back to 1989 when I was early in on Lucinda Williams, who would not for a few years yet be recognized as one of the best songwriters of our time with her Car Wheels album (and she’s still at it).

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.