Media Set for 'Trial of the Decade'
Will George Floyd get justice? Plus music from Neil Young, Elton John, Brandi Carlile, Tina Turner and Allison Russell.
Two bits of business. First, if you missed, here’s yesterday’s Profile in Music #4, this time for Emmylou Harris, with 16 songs/vids going back to pre-Gram and 1970. Next, just a reminder there are only two days left to watch the premiere of my Atomic Cover-up film streaming at the Cinequest Film Festival. Here is a link for tickets ($3.99)—or you can try to use free promo code (FM17Y4N). Via same link see early responses to the film from top people. Jake Tapper added support yesterday by tweeting out link for the film. And now my usual: please subscribe to this newsletter, it’s still free!
News & Politics
Headline of the Day, from Rolling Stone: “Birx, Who Gushed Over Trump’s Handling of Virus, Now Says He’s Responsible for Hundreds of Thousands Dead.” Runner-up also from them: “We Asked Satanists What They Think of the New Lil Nas X Video.”
Brian Stelter of CNN last night: “From a media perspective, the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin will be the biggest trial of the streaming TV age. People will be watching on streaming-first services like Law & Crime as well as TV networks like HLN. Gavel-to-gavel coverage will be available all over the web and highlights will be available on demand. And Court TV will be back, having relaunched in 2019 with a mix of broadcast, cable and online distribution deals….CNN.com will carry a live stream at all times."
And Fox? Stelter’s colleague Oliver Darcy reminds us: “Led by Tucker Carlson, some of the right's biggest stars have argued that Floyd's death wasn't the result of Chauvin kneeling on his neck, but from a drug overdose. Expect that narrative to be advanced in the coming days.”
Meanwhile, “Billions (Yes, Billions) of Cicadas Soon to Emerge From Underground.”
Some kind of media consensus has emerged that Dana Carvey’s impression of Joe Biden is better than anyone’s on SNL. This came after he trotted it out on Colbert show last week.
The great Barry Blitt advises Biden on “How to Make Press Conferences Interesting Again.”
Keith Olbermann pushing this hard: “Major League Baseball must move its All-Star Game out of Atlanta. If not, on 4/15 the players have to boycott the day honoring Georgia-born Jackie Robinson.” Other possible Georgia-based boycott candidates: Coca-Cola and Delta.
The Biden administration is developing digital “vaccine passports,” The Washington Post reported.
Pepe Le Pew has now apologized for all that skunking of females, via Jay Martel at The New Yorker:
Questions have been raised about some of my past interactions with cats and dogs whom I perceived to be highly attractive lady skunks. I never intended to offend anyone or cause any harm. It was all about the amour, non? But, still, my actions are not—how do you say—appropriate. Pepé is très sorry.
It would be easy to blame my behavior on having been insulated by privilege—the privilege of being a well-known celebrity skunk. But I will not do this. It would also be so easy to make some excuse. Like, other skunks have engaged in disreputable behavior for decades without getting caught. Or, only a few unreliable cats and dogs have complained, and they can’t even talk…
I now understand that my interactions may have been insensitive and too personal, and that some of my comments, given my position as a powerful, public skunk, made others feel in ways that I never intended. What I took to be an innocent game of “lover’s chase” was to them predation by an aggressive animal. What I read as the normal bulging eyes and terrified grimace of flirtation was instead a concerted effort to escape me.
Voting in Alabama in the fight to form a union at Amazon ends today—but it may take days to tally the ballots.
Nearly a week after a man walked into a supermarket in Boulder, Colo., and killed 10 people, investigators say they are still searching to understand a motive.
Associated Press:
The Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum has sharply denounced an article in the New Yorker that looks at Holocaust scholarship in Poland, accusing the magazine of publishing lies and distortions of Poland’s role during World War II.
The Auschwitz museum is located in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during the war. Today it is a Polish state institution that acts as the custodian of the remains of Nazi Germany’s most notorious death camp. It spoke out sharply on Saturday after the New Yorker on Friday published an article by Masha Gessen, which looks at the case of two Polish historians of the Holocaust who were recently found guilty by a Polish court of defaming a deceased wartime village official. The key points of contention surround a subtitle that says: “To exonerate the nation of the murders of three million Jews, the Polish government will go as far as to prosecute scholars for defamation.”
The New Yorker article’s claim that the Polish government prosecuted the scholars is not accurate. The government has made its distaste for the scholars clear. Yet the case was a civil suit brought by a right-wing group friendly with the government.
When Lindsey Graham announced that he kept an AK-47 handy in case a “gang” threatened to invade his house during a disaster, Jason Isbell tweeted yesterday that Kool & the Gang would have to pick on a new house. I added that the Gang of Four, the James Gang, and Spanky and her Gang would have to do the same.
Music
Neil Young is releasing a live album from one of his earliest (acoustic) gigs in 1971, from Stratford, CT, so aptly titled, Young Shakerspeare. Here’s a trailer, below, with bits of it, plus the entire “Helpless” is here:
Department of Small World: Very fine new song, “The Nightflyer,” on the debut solo album by Allison Russell, one of the founders of Our Native Daughters (with Rhiannon Giddens and others). And who plays on, and produced, that song and album? Dan Knobler, son of my great friend since 1970, Peter Knobler—former editor of Crawdaddy for most of the 1970s (when I was his #2). Dan previously produced the likes of Erin Rae, Lake Street Dive and Rodney Crowell, among others.
Major NY Times profile of Merry Clayton—singer best known for her amazing vocal on the Stones’ original “Gimme Shelter.” After a half-century as one of music’s most in-demand backup singers, “Clayton suffered a tragedy that has tested the limits of both her physicality and her faith.” Now she has a new album. And here, if you’ve never heard parts of her isolated vocal on “Gimme Shelter.”
Movies/TV
The Tina Turner doc on HBO is quite terrific, though with the usual handful of holes—for example, we jump from her mega-comeback tour to recent years with no explanation of why she quit touring long ago (partly for health reasons, but more than that). Also surprised there was no mention at all of Ike & Tina opening for the Stones on their biggest big tour (and how it came about)—and the major exposure they got in the Gimme Shelter movie which set the stage for their crossover "Proud Mary" success a few months later. Also thought Mick might be interviewed. But overall: a moving tribute. Here is her greatest single, “River Deep and Mountain High,” though a flop in the USA. As the doc shows, it was produced by one horrid person (Phil Spector) after he barred another one of the worst (Ike Turner) from lending a hand.
I can also, as many have done, recommend The Father, just now streaming, for Anthony Hopkins’ career-topping performance plus the usual fine Oliver Coleman work. Possibly the film would have been even more effective if the intentional audience confusion caused by the character’s dementia-caused fantasies had been handled a little more clearly.
If you have somehow missed Maya Rudolph returning to do Beyonce on SNL this week, here is a link.
Song Pick of the Day
Like so many of us, I liked Elton John’s first few albums, but unlike most, I grew tired and indifferent by the time of, say, “Crocodile Rock.” Was reminded of how much I liked his early work when Brandi Carlile covered—spectacularly—his “Madman Across the Water” on her live show from the Ryman last night. Elton was her hero growing up. Here’s why, live, from the year that song came out, with jazzy piano interludes, in 1971.
Greg Mitchell’s film, Atomic Cover-up, has its world premiere at the Cinequest Film festival March 20-30. Go here to read more, watch trailer, buy tix. He 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.