Friday on My Mind

Banish any fears of a weak end with the latest news and movie previews, plus Johnny Cash & Fats Domino, Nora Jones & Sharon Van Etten, and Bob Dylan & George Harrison. And Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head!

Yes, the Easybeats did it first, Bowie did a popular cover, and now the song is eternal. Here’s a fine recent version by the great Brit—now American—songwriter and guitarist Richard Thompson. And he has a memoir coming out this spring which we hope is as witty as his concert quips. Feel free to comment or share. Or Subscribe—it’s still free!

News & Politics

Twitter announced plans to introduce a subscription service for content creators and said it would explore tipping. Tweet by my old E&P colleague Graham Webster: “Can I pay people to put a selection of their tweets behind a paywall where I can’t see them?”

As you know, Trump finally turned over millions of docs re: his taxes to Manhattan prosecutors. Jimmy Fallon: “You can tell that they’re Trump’s real tax returns because under ‘total loss’ he still didn’t declare the election.”

Politico this morning:

In Florida last year, a $15 minimum wage passed with 61% of the vote as Trump cruised to victory there. Hiking the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 and indexing it to inflation would redistribute an enormous amount of income from the richest to the poorest Americans, according to the CBO. That makes the Senate parliamentarian’s decision to exclude the proposal from Biden’s American Rescue Plan because it doesn’t meet the stringent budgetary requirements of reconciliation an especially tough blow for progressives — even as it may help Biden pass his Covid relief bill. But the Left is not giving up.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, for example, has announced his next move: An amendment to take tax deductions away from large corporations that don't pay above $15-an-hour wages. Costco, meanwhile, says it will raise the minimum wage for workers to $16 an hour.

The other top news story of the day: Hasbro introducing a gender neutral Potato Head! “Naturally, when this news hit Twitter, the world’s top idiots weighed in,” Stephen Colbert reported. “Piers Morgan tweeted, ‘Who was actually offended by Mr. Potato Head being male? I want names. These woke imbeciles are destroying the world.’ Yes, they’re destroying the world. How will children grow up without a strong male potato role model? Won’t someone think of the tots?”

Contrary to early news reports, however, Hasbro plans to continue making the standard separate versions of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head as well. Steve Doocy on Fox this morning falsely stated that Hasbro was trying to be politically correct until "the backlash was enormous."

Proud Boys leader declared yesterday that he may run for office as a new way of taking over the government. On the Greene Party? Or as a Litterarian?

Another George Floyd? Mother Jones headline: “Please Don’t Kill Me, Angelo Quinto Pleaded. Then the Cops Kneeled on His Neck for Four Minutes.” He was 30 and a Navy veteran in Antioch, CA. And his mother had to watch it, and then filmed the aftermath as she asked: Why?

The former U.S. Olympic gymnastics coach John Geddert committed suicide Thursday shortly after he was charged with human trafficking, criminal sexual conduct and other crimes. His body was found at a highway rest area outside Lansing.

CNN warns: “After six straight weeks of declines in new Covid-19 cases in the US, that number has started to plateau, even as hospitalizations and deaths continue to drop..."

One of the most debated stories of the week is The NY Times’ “Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College.” Lawyer and longtime blogger John Aravosis:

This story is pretty outrageous. And it raises a point I’ve raised many times in the past: Treat allegations seriously, but they’re not true until proven true. In this case, they weren’t true at all, yet everyone shared them, including the ACLU….You do your due diligence before publicly defending someone’s accusations and alleging them as true. I’ve done this repeatedly on LGBT issues, I’ve actually interviewed alleged victims to see if their story rings true, before publicly promoting their version of events….And, as I said, sometimes you get it wrong. And in this [Smith] case, boy did folks get it wrong. And they dragged a lot of otherwise good people publicly through the mud, by name, online, and nationwide because of their mistake. And that’s not cool.

NBC: “The U.S. Capitol Police plans to maintain its enhanced level of security around the Capitol through at least President Joe Biden's first official address to Congress because intelligence suggests extremists could be planning an attack, acting Chief Yogananda Pittman said Thursday: ‘We know that members of the militia groups that were present on January 6th have stated their desires that they want to blow up the Capitol and kill as many members as possible…’”

Someone leaked Friday’s CPAC schedule to The Daily Show.

Media

The Wash Post is defending one of its White House reporters, Seung Min Kim, after she became the target of vicious attacks. With Neera Tanden’s nomination at a crucial point, she had shown Lisa Murkowski, a key vote in the Senate, an old Tanden tweet critical of her. Murkowski had never seen it and Seung Min Kim asked for her response. Some felt this suggested the reporter was helping to torpedo the nomination, even if accidentally. Others called this standard journalistic practice. The Post then released a statement backing her and denouncing the “racist, sexist” vitriol: “No one should have to deal with the hate that has been directed at Seung Min. She did her job, and she did it well, like she always does.”

Music

As he promised a couple of months back, Bob Dylan pushed out today a 3-lp boxed set of his unreleased studio sessions from 1970 (the title of the collection), including nine rough takes with George Harrison, his future Wilburys mate. Not exactly prime Dylan amidst this Self-Portrait/New Morning resting point but completists will want it. He actually first released it in a very limited edition in the UK last November to secure copyrights. List of songs here. The Bob/George version of “Yesterday,” which is beyond parody, below. We presume Bob knew that Paul wrote it.

Fun stat: Vinyl is now the #1 selling pure album format in the U.S. so far in 2021 with 5.2 million units sold.

What a date in music history, as Fats Domino was born on this day in 1928—and Johnny Cash four years later. Was thrilled to attend a tribute to Fats in NOLA with Peter Knobler a few years back for one of his final public appearances (he did walk, yes indeed, by our table). Now here, two vids from the same epochal year, 1957: Fats with perhaps my favorite Domino, and then John walks the line, sandwiched between Carl Perkins and Patsy Cline—and introduced by Tex Ritter!

Film

First trailer for the much anticipated ten-part Underground Railroad series coming in May via Amazon from Barry Jenkins, based on the much-honored Colson Whitehead book.

Just dropping today on Hulu, The United States vs. Billie Holiday. I previewed it awhile back. Today’s NY Times review may give you pause, as does Hilton Als’ blast in this week’s New Yorker (“interminable… feels like a revenge number on Blackness and whiteness”). I can recommend, in any case, the recent doc Billie, which also covers her problems with drugs—and the FBI. Also out today, the long-awaited The Father with Anthony Hopkins as a man beset with dementia. The movie is only in theaters, however—remember them?

Plus: a new Pele doc on Netflix. I had the thrill of watching him in one game in the mid-1970s from field level on the soccer pitch at Randall’s Island in NYC, at times just 100 feet away. Also streaming today: the Billie Eilish doc The World’s a Little Blurry which I previewed a couple of days back.

Scoop: Filming underway this week in my little town of Nyack on upcoming Apple TV thriller Severance (with John Turturro and Patricia Arquette and directed by Ben Stiller).  Supposedly about people who get their work and out-of-work memories “severed.” Okay.

Song Pick of the Day

On this day in 2002, Norah Jones released her Come Away With Me album, which later won an armload of Grammy awards. Have to hand it to her, she made no attempt to duplicate that afterward and instead made a number of bold choices. Here she sings with one of my current favorites, Sharon Van Etten, on the latter’s recent acclaimed song on the Colbert show.

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.