'Heroes' and Villains
Latest news and political takes, cartoons, new Bo Burnham special, and music from Bowie, Joni Mitchell & Johnny Cash, Gene Clark and Blind Faith.
Here we go again….don’t forget to share, comment or subscribe, it’s still free and easy, right to your mailbox. If you missed my two-parter on meeting Roy Orbison at low point of his career—and what happened next—go here.
News & Politics
The Onion: “Time Is Running Out To Reach An Infrastructure Deal,” Reports Pundit Speeding To Outpace Highway Crumbling Behind Him.
Pizza delivery: Rome has its first pizza-making vending machine. Will Italians bite?
Sinking feeling: Trump trotted out an addition to his rally/speech soundtrack on Saturday—the theme for the movie Titanic.
John Oliver focused on Asian-Americans in his main segment last night, including that poll that found few Americans could name even one—not even Kamala Harris. Full segment.
Hey, Joe, Where You Going With None in Your Hand? Axios: “House progressives are getting fed up with efforts to accommodate Republican senators — and Joe Manchin. Look for them to start demanding swift action — and threatening payback.” My own congressman, Mondaire Jones, tweeted Sunday after Manchin said he would not back a key voting rights bill: “Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled, 'Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.'" Meanwhile, from AP: “Democrats are growing wary because time is running out for Biden to negotiate a sweeping infrastructure package and other priorities are piling up undone. The days ahead are often seen as a last chance at legislating before the August recess and the start of campaigns for next year’s elections.”
From Barry Blitt at The New Yorker, what he calls “Fringe Groups.”
More than 1,000 towns, lakes, streams, creeks and mountain peaks across the U.S. still bear racist names or other slurs, Axios reporter Russell Contreras writes after consulting a federal database. One of the worst: Dead Negro Spring, Oklahoma. New Mexico is home to a reservoir called Wetback Tank. Then there's Chinaman Hat in Wasco County, Ore. The database lists six places with the term "Polack," and around two dozen places with the word "dago." And don’t get them started on “Squaw.” The U.S. so far has only banned use of “Jap” and the N-word.
Mayor of Feast Town: AOC finally weighed in on New York’s mayoral race, endorsing Maya Wiley just a week before early voting starts. But is it too late? Meanwhile, Ben Smith of the NY Times today profiles Anthony Weiner in exile. Weiner is thinking “really seriously” about “getting into the booming business of digital collectibles, known as nonfungible tokens or NFTs, and starting with some of his own holdings…..He could make an NFT, he said, of the errant tweet that began his long spiral in 2011. He could make an NFT of the search warrant for his laptop, or of the email his old friend, the comedian Jon Stewart, wrote to apologize for making fun of his troubles, or of the check that Mr. Trump wrote to one of his earlier campaigns. ‘Cashing in would be nice,’ he said.”
Nightmare Scenario 2024: A very popular, and scary, Substack post this past weekend by Yale historian and author of On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder. Money shot:
The [Big Lie] is institutionalized by state legislation that suppresses voting, and that gives state legislatures themselves the right to decide how to allocate the electoral vote in presidential elections. The scenario then goes like this. The Republicans win back the House and Senate in 2022, in part thanks to voter suppression. The Republican candidate in 2024 loses the popular vote by several million and the electoral vote by the margin of a few states. State legislatures, claiming fraud, alter the electoral count vote. The House and Senate accept that altered count. The losing candidate becomes the president. We no longer have "democratically elected government."
No one is seeking to hide that this is the plan. It is right there out in the open. The prospective Republican candidates for 2024, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley, are all running on a big lie platform. If your platform is that elections do not work, you are saying that you intend to come to power some other way. The Big Lie is designed not to win an election, but to discredit one.
Green New Deals: Ransomware attacks are closing schools, delaying chemotherapy and derailing everyday life. Wash Post: “It can feel abstract: A group of organized but faceless criminals hijacking corporate computer systems and demanding millions of dollars in exchange for their safe return. But the impact of these ransomware attacks is increasingly, unavoidably, real for everyday people.” Then there’s this: F.B.I. Director Compares Danger of Ransomware to 9/11 Terror Threat.
Power Dangers: Asked by Jake Tapper yesterday if U.S. adversaries, right now, have the capability to shut down the power grid, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm replied: "Yes, they do."
Troubling: Fewer than 1/4 of Black Americans had received their first Covid shot as of June 3.
Europe has 5,400 offshore wind turbines. The U.S. has seven.
GOP for Texas: On Saturday, McAllen, TX, a border city of 150,000 people, 85 percent Hispanic, elected their first GOP mayor ever.
Music
Emmylou Harris and Mary Chapin Carpenter respond to Kennedy Center honors for Joan Baez (televised last night).
On this day in 1969: The first so-called “supergroup” Blind Faith, with Clapton, Winwood and Baker (annd Grech), made their live debut at a free concert in London's Hyde Park. I became one of the relatively few Americans to see them (during their brief reign) at a gig in Toronto that summer. The cover of their only album got pulled as it featured a topless pre-teen girl, which was bad enough, but she was also holding an (alleged) phallic symbol—a silver space ship—and rumors, even before the Internet, held that the band was keeping her as a sex slave….Below, from that Hyde Park debut, no wonder they sang, “I Can’t Find My Way Home.”
That same day, in America: It’s well-remember that “Nashville crooning Bob” Dylan appeared on Johnny Cash’s hit Saturday night show but did you know Joni Mitchell showed up on the same night? Here she duets with John on “Long Black Veil.”
On this date in 1977: The Sex Pistols held a party on a boat as it sailed down The River Thames, from where they performed “Anarchy In The UK”— outside The Houses Of Parliament. This ended with some members from the party getting busted when the boat docked.
And on this day in 1987: David Bowie played a concert in West Berlin in front of the Reichstag—with speakers aimed over the nearby Berlin Wall carrying “Heroes” (which he had written in the city) to thousands of young East Berliners.
Film/TV
Enjoyed the new Bo Burnham special on Netflix, a creative, often barbed or fun, mostly musical “one-man show” from a man trapped inside during the pandemic year (but fortunately he had filmed his role in Promising Young Woman before that, I’d add). Swell New Yorker review here.
One of the leading auteurs of the mediated mind, the thirty-year-old comedian Bo Burnham, has a new Netflix special, “Inside,” that captures, with a frenzied and dextrous clarity, the unmoored, wired, euphoric, listless feeling of being very online during the pandemic. The ninety-minute show, which Burnham wrote and directed, is in no way a traditional comedy special, in which a person tells jokes while standing in front of an audience. It contains barely any spoken punch lines at all outside of a few canned, tinny segments, in which the “bits” feel deliberately hackneyed and out-of-date….At its core, “Inside” is an exploration of what it means to be a performer when you are stuck to a screen but also stuck inside your head.
Song Pick of the Day
The great, if still lesser-known country-rock guitarist, Clarence White was born on this day in 1944. After a few years of tremendous session work—as with Gene Clark on “Tried So Hard,” below—White joined The Byrds but could not get them safely in the air again, before his untimely death in an accident at age 29.
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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. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is winning awards. 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.