Monday, Monday, Can't Trust That Day

A pandemic milestone and a nuclear option. Plus: Bob Dylan paints, George Saunders talks, and music from John Lennon, Nina Simone, Jackson Browne and Jonathan Richman.

Thanks for the (apparent) strong support for Chapter One of my “Crawdaddy” memoir-in-progress on Saturday, and here is link in case you had better things to do or read this weekend. Onward….and if you wish, please subscribe (it’s still free). From the great Ann Telnaes:

News/Politics/Media

As deaths from Covid-19 likely cross half a million in the USA today, Biden will mark the moment with a candle lighting ceremony at the White House around sundown. CNN's Jake Tapper will lead a special televised tribute, "We Remember: 500,000," at 11 pm ET. One year ago tomorrow, Trump said: “We’re very — very cognizant of everything going on. We have it very much under control in this country.”

USA Today/Suffolk poll of Trump voters: 58% believe the January 6 insurrection was "mostly an Antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters." Also, nearly half — 46 percent — say they’d ditch the GOP for another party if Trump were at the helm. A frightening 73% say President Biden’s election win was not legit. This perhaps shouldn’t be surprising considering major news networks—shown again yesterday— keep inviting prominent Republicans onto their shows to spread election lies.

Supreme Court just (Monday) threw out another Trump election challenge in PA (although the unholy trinity of Gorsuch, Thomas and Alito wanted to hear it) and separately “that Trump's got to turn over his tax records” which “presages an historic endgame,” as Jane Mayer puts it, adding “BOOM.”

CNN: “Leader in alleged Oath Keepers conspiracy in Capitol insurrection claims she was given VIP pass to Trump rally Jan. 6, met with Secret Service agents & was providing security for legislators & others, according to new court filing.”

Donald Glover has tapped some upstart named Malia Obama to write for his new series.

Last night’s John Oliver opening. Then he moved on to…meat packing.

Every year it seems we get a major article, or film doc, that asserts that nuclear power has gotten a bum rap in this country on safety concerns—and that climate change activists should recognize how it offers a, or maybe the, solution to that global crisis. Though it’s early, the 2021 article that sets wide debate and controversy in motion might be up at The New Yorker this week. I still have severe doubts about that thesis (hello, nuclear waste, plus the danger that even one glitchy accident could kill tens of thousands) but here’s the argument. Key characters in this story are two women who run an organization, Mothers for Nuclear, which argues that nuclear power is an indispensable tool in the quest for a decarbonized society.

Nuclear energy scrambles our usual tribal allegiances. In Congress, Democratic Senators Cory Booker and Sheldon Whitehouse have co-sponsored a bill with Republican Senators John Barrasso and Mike Crapo that would invest in advanced nuclear technology and provide support for existing plants that are at risk of closure; a climate platform drafted by John Kerry and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez included a plan to “create cost-effective pathways” for developing innovative reactors. And yet some environmental organizations, including Greenpeace and Climate Justice Alliance, deplore nuclear energy as unsafe and expensive….Among opponents, there is a long-standing assumption that anyone who promotes nuclear power must be a shill.

So here’s Jackson Browne, a leader of the popular 1979 MUSE anti-nuke concerts (which also featured Bruce, Bonnie and James & Carly) with his most famous anthem/warning, accompanied by original backing star, David Lindley.

On the anniversary of his assassination yesterday, Malcolm X’s family released a letter from a former FBI agent who alleged that the bureau and the NYPD were in on the kill, as they led two of Malcolm’s bodyguards to commit a crime that would get them off his security detail on the fatal, fateful day.

David Pakman: “Hilariously, AOC is better at being a Texas Senator than Ted Cruz is. What a time to be alive.”

Thank god, the San Francisco school board has paused in its rush to junk the names of so many schools (some on dubious grounds) and provide new ones, instead deciding to prioritize Covid-related issues and re-openings.

Music

The New Yorker has posted a special offering this week centered on pieces from the past on “protest musicians.” They include Nina Simone, Simon & Garfunkel (from 1967), Jimi Hendrix (and his National Anthem), and closer to the present with N.W.A. and Kendrick Lamar. Well, no one did it better than Nina, here with the amazing “Backlash Blues.” Even has a Langston Hughes reference.

Speaking of 1960s protest singers, Bob Dylan, besides creating whiskey and the occasional new song, has now become a pretty good painter after a long apprenticeship. This gallery handles his work and his new “Asia Series” is quite good. One example:

Now you might expect me to plug in Bob’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece” here but, really, how predictable do you want me to be? (Please don’t answer that.) Well, truth is, I probably would have done that, but there’s no good Bob or The Band live version out there, so instead let’s go oddball and turn to Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers’ proto-punk “Pablo Picasso” with one of the great rhymes in rock ‘n roll history: “Pablo Picasso / never got called / an asshole.” Not true, by a longshot, but still a great line.

Hard to describe, or believe, this but you can spin the globe at this site, click and listen to radio stations anywhere on earth, instantly.

Some of us, of a certain age and inclination, recall pilgrimmages (or just plain visits) to the “real” Woodstock in the early to mid-1970s, which would have included visits out to the Bearsville complex built and managed by the legendary Albert Grossman when the area was home to Bob, Van, The Band, Butter, and othe notables. Included might be meals at one of his eateries or something in the theater. The recording studio and Bearsville Records were home to Todd Rundgren, Jesse Winchester and many others. Grossman soon died but offerings carried on for decades until everything shut down. Now it’s been thoroughly renovated and here’s a little video introduced by another longtime local, John B. Sebastian.

Film/TV

If you started the Woody vs. Mia series on HBO last night (or didn’t) here’s an amazingly detailed and handy chronology going forward. The first episode was slow-moving but chilling, and you can tell that rather than “he said/she said” the filmmakers are going to be relying on a lot of “they said”—friends and observers who also noticed stuff. A re-cap here. Woody and wife with statement today calling it a “hatchet job” (after seeing one episode?): “It is sadly unsurprising that the network to air this is HBO – which has a standing production deal and business relationship with Ronan Farrow.”

Never been a David Lynch fan, except for much of Blue Velvet and a few episodes of the original Twin Peaks, but if you are, this new New Yorker profile will please you mightily. It also has links to a number of his projects that I did not know even existed—his comic strip, animated series, contraption-building (including a hideaway urinal), daily weather report and “number of the day,” and etc.

Since you probably missed the C-SPAN special this past weekend 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’ll link to it here (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.

Books

The notable author (and Jason Isbell fan) George Saunders has been interviewed by Ezra Klein for a podcast that runs over an hour. The title will give you some of the flavor: “What it Means to Be Kind in a Cruel World." Klein says he’s wanted to talk to Saunders for 15 years: “We discuss the collisions between capitalism and human relations, the relationship between writing and meditation, Saunders’s personal editing process, the tension between empathizing with others and holding them to account, the promise of re-localizing our politics, the way our minds deceive us, Tolstoy’s unusual theory of personal transformation, and much more.”

But Saunders also warns that whatever led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 is “still happening, it's got an organic cause….It’s almost like if somebody — you see a caveman and he picks up a grenade and he thinks it’s a pineapple. And it blows up. It’s kind of on the cavemen: He misunderstood that grenade.”

And I’m trying to be a scientist about it, and understand it in a deeper way. Which is both a way of finding a way to write about it. But also it’s actually a way to find the best way to push against it, is to diagnose it is a really important — and diagnosis from inside, with some kind of psychological insight into it, and a novelistic insight is, in my way of thinking, the best way to position oneself for resistance.

If you can’t listen, here is the full transcript.

Song Pick of the Day

A little over 50 years ago, John Lennon released his first solo album, which included his startling song “Mother,” which he performed live for the first time a year later. Missing in the vid below is his intro, claiming that the song was on one of his albums “after I left the Rolling Stones.” This was at the benefit in Madison Sq Garden for Geraldo Rivera’s Willowbrook cause. Backed by his Elephant’s Memory pals. Amazing performance.

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.