Bourdain and Beatles

Hot news and politics, cartoons, and films, Anthony Bourdain's surprising favorite song--and Paul McCartney's. Plus: Johnny Cash and Louis Armstrong re-create historic session 91 years ago today.

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News & Politics

The Onion: “Company Struggling To Find Diverse Leadership Candidates Among CEO’s Golf Buddies.”

Seth Meyers: “We really need to come up with a better early warning system than tell-all books. ‘We’re in danger — quick, get me a typewriter!’”

At least no shrimp or chorizo: Yes, there’s this new flavor from a respected ice cream maker: Kraft Mac & Cheese. And you can order it online…. \Meanwhile, Coca-Cola Is Changing the Flavor of a Soda. Again. This time it’s Coke Zero. Debacle ahead?

Still, lock up your daughters: “Ticket sales are moving slowly for the coming Trump-O’Reilly stadium tour.”

L.A. restores mask mandate for indoors even for the vaxxed. Plus: “Surgeon General Reveals He’s Lost 10 Relatives To Covid As He Campaigns Against Vaccine Misinformation.” And “Yankees’ Shutdown Emphasizes Staying Power of the Coronavirus.”

Courting disaster: I'm old enough to remember when calls for RBG to resign in time for another liberal to replace her were deemed sexist "and you wouldn't demand that of a man." Except look at now: very same calls for Justice Breyer to quit while a Democrat in office to try to replace him. I wanted exit for RBG, and now.

First hearing of new congressional Jan. 6 panel is scheduled for July 27, with police officers who defended the Capitol expected to testify.

Florida, man: Without Trump in the race, Gov. DeSantis dominates 2024 GOP White House hopefuls in new poll….Another poll shows progressive Nina Turner’s lead shrinking in Democratic primary in Ohio special election for Congress.

Finally tomorrow: “Cuomo to Be Questioned in Sexual Harassment Inquiry.”

Bloomberg: “Joe Manchin said he wouldn’t carve out an exemption to the chamber’s filibuster rule for voting rights legislation, effectively dashing chances that Democrats could maneuver around Republican opposition to overhauling the nation’s elections laws. “

Major leak: The Guardian with Trump/Russia scoop and the “pee tape” jokes will begin again:

Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents. The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present.

They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position. Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature….

There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected – the document says – from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory”. The paper refers to “certain events” that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow.

Health costs of gun violence exceed $1 billion a year, GAO says: Treating firearm-related injuries in the U.S. costs more than $1 billion annually, with public health programs like Medicaid picking up most of the tab \, according to new Government Accountability Office estimates shared with Politico.

Today’s Wenner: Rolling Stone Hires Daily Beast Editor Noah Shachtman as its next editor in chief, the magazine announced on Thursday.

My Countdown to Hiroshima today reveals what happened 76 years ago on this date—with a radioactive cloud drifting from the site of the first atomic test at Trinity over people and livestock nearby (and then to the East Coast).

Iran away: “You’re Gonna Have a Fucking War”—Mark Milley’s Fight to Stop Trump from Striking Iran.

Music

In the new doc opening today (see below) we learn that Anthony Bourdain’s favorite song, as chef friend David Chang says in the film (claiming it’s “heroin music”), was "Anemone" by Brian Jonestown Massacre, here live.

The Rick Rubin doc with Paul McCartney, 3,2,1, starts streaming today via Hulu. Here is Rolling Stone’s review and excerpt from it:

Rubin, in his barefoot-Yoda mode, totally understands that his job here is to just listen and say “Wow.” It’s just three hours of conversation, stretched out over six episodes, but it flies by. This is Paul at his most charming — he’s like the barber in “Penny Lane,” giving us a tour of every mind he’s had the pleasure to blow….

3,2,1 jumps right in with Paul telling Rubin about writing “All My Loving” with John on a tour bus. Since they had no recording devices, and couldn’t read music, their first priority was writing a tune they could remember the next day. “Coming from Liverpool, there’s a lot of sort of Irish Celtic influence, and the Celts never wrote anything down. It’s the bardic tradition. So that’s our excuse. Me and John used to say, ’It was the bardic tradition!’ ”

But the weird highlight of McCartney 3,2,1: Paul discusses the 1964 deep cut “Baby’s In Black,” one of the Beatles’ favorite Beatles songs. John and Paul loved to sing this gloomy freak-folk ballad together, invariably sharing the same microphone, harmonizing eyeball to eyeball. They kept it in their live set to the end, right down to their final shows, even though they knew nobody liked it as much as they did. “We used to want to do this onstage, but it wasn’t a big fan favorite,” Paul says. “We were kind of proud of this one. We thought we were getting kind of, you know, getting into funky folk.”

Film/TV

Morgan Neville, Academy Award-winning director of the new doc on Anthony Bourdain, Roadrunner, explains a bit about his final year and his suicide to Esquire:

Suicide is a singular act. Tony is somebody who had been thinking about suicide for decades. He could tell you every famous person who ever committed suicide and how they committed suicide. He joked about it endlessly. He reenacted it in shows several times. He almost committed suicide in the early 2000s….

Putting aside his relationship with Asia, which to me is not the cause of any of this, Tony is somebody that had issues his whole life, and I think a lot of what he was going through those last couple of years, it was really coming out of the dissolution of his marriage and him feeling like, "Well, trying to settle down doesn't work. So let me do the opposite. Let me go back to being bad boy Tony." He goes from the dad sitting on a diving board in a Hawaiian shirt in the backyard, saying, "I'm not cool whatsoever," to suddenly wearing his leather jacket and smoking again and drinking heavily. That last year of his life, where that was a philosophical decision he seemed to have made after his marriage broke up, I think that is the bigger point. And it's hard to watch at times.

Naomi Osaka, a three-part look at the tennis star finding her political voice, premieres on Netflix today.

Song Pick of the Day

91 years ago, a historic day: When “the father of jazz,” Louis Armstrong played a session with “the father of country music” Jimmie Rodgers in L.A. Here, Johnny Cash with Satchmo re-create it.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels, the current The Beginning or the End, and The Campaign of the Century, which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. For all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he won more than a dozen awards as editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony andnow has written and directed his first feature, Atomic Cover-up, which will have its American premiere at a festival this spring.