Emmylou Earns Tribute, Taylor Swift Gets 'Wood'

Plus: the 'NY Times' gets spanked, our usual cartoons, and a new Photo finish.

Greg Mitchell has authored 14 books and directed four PBS films since 2022. His latest, “The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero—and Nuclear Peril Today” has been airing over PBS stations and now streaming for free (key links to watch now and more here). A companion book is available, and you can read more or order here. The New Yorker magazine last month has a piece about the PBS film, which you can read here. And subscribing to this newsletter is still somehow FREE.

Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC:

Tonight, The New York Times is lost. The New York Times has no idea how to cover the madness of Donald Trump. And so The New York Times ignores it, just as the madness of King George III had to be ignored by the London Times in 1789…

The New York Times and the Washington press corps are drowning in the deviancy and perversity of Donald Trump and his White House, all of whom, everyone working in that White House, supports this deeply perverse use of government-operated social media to put out poison, and what is clearly raw insanity, from the darkness of Donald Trump’s mind, and the White House press corps has just drowned in it. They’re lost in it. They have internalized it. They have fully accepted it….

And so, it’s not with some sense of superiority that I find The New York Times has struck out in the face of the madness of Donald Trump this week, which has reached new extremes that we haven’t seen before, even from Donald Trump….They’re lost. We could only hope that they find their way.

Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker: “Taylor Swift might not be capable of making a bad record, but ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ is at least a little bit cringe….On ‘The Life of a Showgirl,’ Swift is occasionally tender—’Honey’ is arch, delicate, lovely—but more often she is vengeful, eschewing vulnerability in favor of bombast. Sometimes it works; often it doesn’t.”

Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic:

Success certainly puts her under no obligation to fake a smile and hide her anxieties. Unfortunately, “Showgirl” is the sound of an overworked and overexposed entertainer reaching the mountaintop to find something worse than disappointment: burnout….Though the album’s genres are superficially diverse—you’ll hear flashes of grunge, trap, and, yes, reggae—its arrangements could work fine as royalty-free background music for content creators.

Swift’s songwriting isn’t pushing ahead either. Old tricks abound: perspectives switching between verses; high harmonies adding drama to a song’s final chorus. Lyrically, she tends to restate familiar themes in crasser terms than ever before.

Members only? Taylor also debuted in theaters an 89-minute film about the album. Of the childish, embarrassing, song clearly about Kelce’s member, she claims, according to The New York Times, that “Instead of fessing up to her not-so-thinly-veiled innuendo, she says that it’s a song about superstitions.” The lyric video changes “His love was the key that opened my thighs” to “His love was the key that opened my skies.” I presume “redwood” and “magic wand” remain.

In a completely different dimension, at an all-star tribute to Emmylou Harris on Thursday night, the cast (Bonnie Raitt, Lucinda Williams, Rosanne Cash, Margo Price, Steve Earle, Allison Russell, Joan Baez, et al) closed it out with “Save the Last Dance for Me.” Note: On this date in 1960, that song hit #6 in the Top Ten in the original Drifters version. Also hitting the Top Ten: Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang.”

The gals, backstage:

From Tunes to Toons

The U.S. Mint is to produce a coin for the 250th birthday of the USA, mandated by Trump to include his portrait. One proposal:

Photo Finish

A new feature spotlighting an image from my own camera, a personal Photo of the Day, let me know what you think. Today: Preservation Hall, New Orleans.