From Kurosawa to Newport Folk Highlights

Plus John Oliver on Trump and crypto and our usual cartoons.

Still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is the author of fourteen books and director of five films for PBS since 2022. In a previous life, he was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. His latest film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” is now streaming everywhere via PBS.

John Oliver returned with a look at Trump’s crypto mania…

Then there’s this, noted by Paul Krugman:

Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. Robert Frost wrote that in 1920. With more than a century gone by, we have a verdict. It’s fire for the win….

I don’t think you can really understand what’s going on in this administration without saying that there’s a kind of hatred of the intellect, not just science, but really any kind of hard thinking. I mean, at some, not very deep level, it’s an obvious correlation between Trump saying that the reason that we had fires in Canada is because the Canadians didn’t rake their forests, — all, by the way, two million square miles of boreal forest in Canada. You know, there’s just this absurdity, this kind of evil absurdity of the whole situation.

Film Pick

From the NY Times this last week on a film to consider if you love—or were disappointed with—Nolan’s “Odyssey.” Of course one of the thrills of my life was getting to interview Kurosawa about “Ran” back in 1981:

There are fancy superlatives one can conjure to define the majesty and tragedy of Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece. They would all feel reductive. The better way to describe it is to flip the definition, to say that it is the film itself that appears to define those elemental ideas: words like epic, or color, or cinema, or Shakespeare.

A loose adaptation of “King Lear,” Kurosawa’s monumental saga chronicles the fallout of a king’s sudden decision to cede his authority and land to his sons. The swift chaos that ensues can feel paradoxical, flitting between the intimacy and self-containment of a parable that feels like it’s playing out on a theater stage, intercut with blood-soaked set pieces of staggering sweep and grandeur. Saying more pales in comparison to experiencing this opus, of scale and motion, sound and color, which speaks for itself.

Music Picks

At the Newport Folk Festival yesterday. No, Dylan did not show up and go acoustic, but Mavis Staples with Nathaniel Rateliff did a song from her latest album:

Father John Misty with Dave Rawlings:

And Rateliff was joined by a dancin’ fool named Joan Baez, 65 years after her debut there.

Brandi Carlile told “The Joke.”

My new film Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” is now streaming everywhere via PBS and airing over many stations.

From Tunes to Toons

Kal:

Goris:

Bennett:

Bagley:

Bagley again:

Clay Jones:

Photo Finish

Continuing a week of my hummingbird photos, with commentary by Barbara Bedway:

Our first plane trip since the Covid epidemic’s beginning was to Pasadena in March 2023, to visit our son and his fiancee. Outside our hotel room a tall tree grew near the balcony, and deep within it, in a fork of its branches, I spied a hummingbird’s nest, barely the size of a tea cup. Eventually the mother returned to settle in just as we were settling in ourselves, and remained a welcome neighbor for the duration of our stay.