Irving Thalberg's 'Attack Ads'

Plus: A visit to "Nomadland," David Bowie re-visits Mars and then joins Arcade Fire, movie music from the Kinks, and 10,000 sing Beethoven.

My second “Sunday music profile” will appear next week, after the positive response to last week’s career-spanning songs/videos for Leonard Cohen. Today, as usual, a couple of political cartoons and a few song picks, some political items, and then a little attention to one of my books featured on C-SPAN last night. This still leaves you time to check out the first chapter of my memoir-in-progress published here yesterday, recalling the day I re-launched the legendary Crawdaddy in 1971 (plus period music from Marvin Gaye, George Harrison, Carole King, Neil Young and Little Feat). Feel free to Comment or Share. And maybe subscribe—it’s still free!

News & Politics

NBC: “Thousands of service members are saying no to Covid vaccine. Some Army units are seeing as few as one-third who agree to the vaccine.” Rampant right-wing and conspiracy views may not be helping.

Former President Trump will speak at next week's Conservative Political Action Conference conference in Florida, his first public appearance since leaving office. George Takei responds: “A certain irrelevant nobody is scheduled to speak at CPAC. What if the media declined to give it their usual breathless coverage?” But with Trump out of the White House (at least), Jim Carrey announced that he is taking a break from political cartooning to gain some “neurological health.” Of course non-Carrey fans might ask, when did he start cartooning? Four years ago.

Headline at The Onion today: “Truly An Honor To Receive This Gift From The Black Community,” Says Trump in Graciously Accepting NAACP Lawsuit

NY Times reported last night: “Even as Texas struggled to restore electricity and water over the past week, signs of the risks posed by increasingly extreme weather to America’s aging infrastructure were cropping up across the country.”

The crisis carries a profound warning. As climate change brings more frequent and intense storms, floods, heat waves, wildfires and other extreme events, it is placing growing stress on the foundations of the country’s economy: Its network of roads and railways, drinking-water systems, power plants, electrical grids, industrial waste sites and even homes. Failures in just one sector can set off a domino effect of breakdowns in hard-to-predict ways.

The opening of last night’s SNL “Weekend Update.” To start: “Well, if you hate Ted Cruz, this was a pretty fun week. And if you like Ted Cruz, then you’re Ted Cruz.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper on Rudy Giuliani’s comments on Steve Bannon’s podcast re: golfer Michelle Wie and her skirts: “Pervy, gross, & sexist.” If you missed this Saturday: Michelle herself had explained, “My putting stance was designed to improve my stats, NOT an invitation to look up my skirt!” She added: "What this person should have remembered from that day is the fact that I shot 64 and beat every male golfer in the field leading our team to victory."

Sorry to see that Germany, which had managed Covid so well in the first wave and beyond, is now suffering like most of the rest of us during the second wave. “Like elsewhere, fears of new variants first identified in England and South Africa are knocking the best-laid plans sideways. Germany’s vaccination program, lashed to the fortunes of the European Union, has floundered.”

One business plan paying dividends thanks to boredom during the pandemic lockdowns: “Next to Goop’s vaginal jade egg and a candle called ‘This Smells Like My Vagina,’ a vibrator seems almost, well, old-fashioned. But that did not stop fans of Gwyneth Paltrow’s often-mocked wellness company, Goop, from snapping up its new, double-sided wand vibrator, which looks like a candy-colored gelato cone.”

Upton Sinclair, "Mank” and MGM

Since you probably missed the C-SPAN special last night focusing on my book about Upton Sinclair’s wild left-wing race for governor of California in 1934—now also featured in the David Fincher movie Mank—I’ve linked to it below (it’s a tidy 39 minutes). It includes the most extensive airing ever of parts of the three movie shorts/newsreels ordered by Irving Thalberg to torpedo Sinclair’s highly influential candidacy, a key plot point in the Fincher movie (with Bill Nye as Upton, no less). This was the first use of the screen to destroy a candidate, with obvious relevance for today. Mank is up Golden Globes already and sure to get Oscar nods.

Below that I am providing links to recent articles I’ve written about this subject rather than post any of the pieces in full. My book, The Campaign of the Century, won the Goldsmith Book Prize and was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of the five greatest books ever about an election.

Here’s the link to last night’s C-SPAN program. Or catch it when it re-airs today at 4 p.m. ET on C-Span 3. For more:

See my NY Times piece on what Mank gets right, and wrong, about the Sinclair campaign and Hollywood. At the Daily Beast—who was this guy Sinclair anyway and why was he so important? And a more detailed account of the radical “EPIC” campaign at my blog. Bill Nye as Sinclair below:

Music

Terrific piece here as a noted orchestra conductor outlines what is so staggering in the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth—no, not the “Ode to Joy” but what comes before. And it’s even relevant, one might say, re: today’s focus on humanity vs. “rioting.” As co-author of a book and co-producer of a film (Following the Ninth) on the political influence of the symphony, naturally I find this fascinating but worth a look by everyone. And below, you can enjoy what comes next after the “Ode” kicks in—here sung by 10,000 Japanese (and featured in our film). Kind of a return to a few years back at my blog where I did a weekly feature Sunday Morning in the Church of Beethoven.

A great new Dave Davies interview. He really does hate his introverted but allegedly “nasty” Kinks brother Ray. The first time I interviewed shy Ray back in 1971 he revealed (with some regret) that he had recently stabbed Dave in the hand when he reached for one of his chips. That night on stage a seemingly drunken Ray staggered backwards and fell against a stack of amps which threatened to fall and crush him as Dave stood nearby, picking some notes, without making a move to intervene.

If you missed the lavish multi-media museum exhibit and tribute to Leonard Cohen in Montreal, San Francisco or New York City (I caught it in the latter locale) you can now experience it online.

Virtual benefit for the great Harry Belafonte’s 94th birthday on Feb. 28 will feature everyone from Common and Chuck D to Bernie Sanders.

Film

Sorry to say, I agree with at least half of what Richard Brody at The New Yorker says about re: Nomadland in his new review here, which goes against the grain of the critical consensus. Certainly an honorable, and highly unusual, movie these days, but the central character Fern (a composite) remains a kind of mystery to the end. Loved the director’s previous movie, The Rider. And Anthony Lane, the main New Yorker reviewer, had a much more positive reaction. It’s true that when you fully expect Fern, in classic movie fashion, to adopt that dog, she just leaves it behind, which was refreshing. But I found this Facebook comment on the mark: “In successfully avoiding every possible narrative cliché the movie was too free-floating and unstructured for my taste. I much preferred the book.”

Brody:

[T]wo elements work against each other, each revealing the fault lines of the other: the fictional side remains bound to (and limited by) the most conventional and unquestioned observational mode of documentary filmmaking, while the documentary aspect strains against the simplifying framework of the drama in which it’s confined.

My friend Rod Lurie and the cast of his hit film The Outpost discuss the issues of making a war film (especially on a limited budget and when a star breaks an ankle).

Sidney Poitier turned 94 this weekend. You can still call him “Sir,” with love. Or Mr. Tibbs.

Song Picks of the Day

First, keeping the glory days of MGM theme going after my C-SPAN gig, we have to go with The Kinks’ “Celluloid Heroes.” Maybe best to hold off on Steely Dan’s pervy “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies.”

And after a week when we landed on the red planet again—here’s David Bowie with “Life on Mars” and then joining Arcade Fire as they “Wake Up.”

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.