Music, Movies, Media & the Mob

Hot takes on the trial plus more chaos at the "Times," Springsteen in trouble, a song for Audrey Hepburn, and 50th anniversary tunes from The Band and Carly Simon.

Moving right along….Let me ask again for feedback on what you might want to see more, or less, of in this Newsletter. Use the Comments button or send an email. And you can still subscribe for free! Or consider ordering on of my books. Now, on to the hot takes, fun and (musical) games.

Politics

Stephen Colbert on who stormed the Capitol after the evidence presented yesterday at the Trump trial: “I’m pretty convinced it wasn’t Antifa now.” I tweeted something similar to the following yesterday and it got seemingly a million RTs and likes, but here is Colbert again:

Despite the powerful evidence supplied by the House managers and objective reality, many G.O.P. senators seemed to be barely paying attention. Instead, they were seen explicitly not listening: feet up on their desks, reading books and reading briefing papers on other topics. Yes, other, more interesting topics like, “How does history tend to remember cowardly, fascist-enabling, worthless pieces of garbage?”

GOP senators shaken, not stirred? After the past two days, I still don’t expect much movement on the GOP side to convict—those favoring it might double from a total of 5 to10, but far short of the 17 needed. Still, watching the evidence unfold for hours, I have to feel pleased that the Dems went ahead—to lay out the horror and high crimes, for the short-term, and for the future.

Bombshell, if true: Here’s Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse on MSNBC discussing the possibility of some GOP senators on Jan. 6 delaying the 2020 election certification to give the insurrectionists enough time to breach the Capitol–working in conjunction with Trumpers. Or as he put it: “to open a window long enough that the mob could fight its way in and disrupt the count."

Insight relevant for this week from my old friend Joe Heller, from Catch-22: "It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”

Hope everyone saw in the new security camera video from the Capitol that when VP Pence was fleeing he was trailed by the man with the "nuclear football" in a bag with the launch codes. Which I guess could have been seized by the Trump mob that day.

Time to get trending a new name for Mike Lee: “Karen.”

Jake Tapper: “Mike Lee expressed more outrage about being misquoted —allegedly—today than I have heard him express about what happened at the Capitol on January 6th. And that says everything you need to know about where the Republican Party is right now.” Lee even claimed this week that Trump deserved “a mulligan” for his rally speech inciting the insurrection.

Preet Bharra: “Meanwhile, the Senators who would acquit Trump are beating up Biden’s OMB nominee for mean tweets.”

Note on “marching to the Capitol”: First time I did that was November 1969, and then dropped a large card with the name of an American soldier killed in Vietnam—in one of dozens of caskets near the Capitol steps—the night before the massive peace march, with vet leader John Kerry nearby. Photo below:

Spirits in the Night: By now, hundreds of Springsteen memes or jokes (“The Ghost of Tom Collins” etc.) posted since news of his DWI and reckless driving arrest in NJ last November. A sad affair and naturally Jeep has yanked that Super Bowl ad off YouTube—pulled it out of here, to win? We’ll see if they ask Bruce for any money back….UPDATE: Neither of these newspaper stories officially confirmed but one has Bruce only blowing a blood alcohol reading at 1/4 the legal limit and the other (NY Post) claims he was on his bike, with fans taking pictures, and one offered him a shot of tequila which he drank in view of police and started to drive off…

Samantha Bee last night made the case for raising the minimum wage.

Great news: Activist Loujain Hathloul has been released by the Saudi government—apparently to ease tensions with the Biden administration.

And this number seems low: Around 40% of Americans killed by COVID-19 might have lived if better political decisions had been made, a new Lancet study reports.

Media

And now what seems to be my daily update on Donald McNeil Jr. getting forced out at the NY Times. Joe Pompeo at Vanity Fair with the most dramatic follow-up yet, painting a picture of “chaos” and the biggest uproar at the paper in recent history. When I was editing E&P we covered obsessively the Jayson Blair and Judy Miller scandals and the firing of Howell Raines, so if true that’s saying a lot.

The New Yorker has published the story about how Paul Desmond of the Dave Brubeck Quartet jazz group was so entranced with young Audrey Hepburn when she was on Broadway he wrote a tune for her called, naturally, “Audrey,” but he was never sure if she actually heard it. This tale was told in the form of a ten-panel cartoon (that’s one panel above). And here’s the song, below….Note: in the months ahead I will be covering, based on my extensive research, Audrey’s lifetime connection to Anne Frank and her own heroism with the Dutch Resistance during the Nazi occupation.

Four more years! Four more years! Twitter announced that Trump’s ban is permanent— even if he runs for president in 2024….

Larry Flynt has died. I failed to put any money in his pocket since I never bought Hustler nor visited one of his clubs. The movie with Woody Harrelson and Courtney Love wasn’t bad, though.

Music

Perhaps you’ve seen that Morgan Wallen fans have gone wild in buying his latest album apparently to show their support after his well-publicized racist slur, and the album is now #1 for a 4th week. Enter my man Jason Isbell. One of his songs, “Cover Me Up,” happens to be on that album—in fact, is one of its most-streamed. Embarrassed? Hell no. He tweeted yesterday: “I’ve decided to donate everything I’ve made so far from this album to the Nashville chapter of the NAACP. Thanks for helping out a good cause, folks.”

Indeed, one of Isbell’s most recent songs is titled, “What Have I Done to Help?” Recently he declared, “Wallen’s behavior is disgusting and horrifying. I think this is an opportunity for the country music industry to give that spot to somebody who deserves it, and there are lots of black artists who deserve it.”

Strong and lengthy article up at Rolling Stone for tomorrow’s release of fresh package marking 50th anniversary of The Band’s Stage Fright album (their third). Covers a lot of ground: Order of songs has now been re-sequenced, going back to Robbie’s original plan—”W.S. Walcott” to open!—which he changed when other members of the group complained that their own co-written songs were kind of buried. Then a revealing interview with that album’s young engineer Todd Rundgren. New quotes from Robbie on the turmoil in the group at the time, wide drug use and etc. His song “Sleeping” was “a private message to myself that there was heroin in the house.” New release includes alternate takes and a live concert from Royal Albert Hall, 1971, so here’s one song from that, below, with Richard’s sadly autobiographical vocal. And here’s link for video of them performing another tune from the album (although from footage you’d never know Richard and Garth were in The Band).

Film

The Onion: “Christopher Nolan Still No Closer To Understanding End Of Tenet After Watching Dozens Of YouTube Explainer Video.” And humor piece from the New Yorker: “Pitches for Hollywood’s Next Hit Lesbian Period Piece.”

Gina Carano, a star of The Mandalorian series, was finally fired by Lucasfilm yesterday after another round of right-wing social media posts, following a long series of anti-mask, vote fraud conspiracy claims, and etc.

Finally a number of those films up for awards that have been in some theaters since December or promised for months will be showing up starting this weekend, and then in days ahead: Minari, Judas and the Black Messiah, Nomadland, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, The Father, and more.

Song Pick of the Day

Well, I honored the 50th anniversary of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On last month, then Carole King’s Tapestry the other day, The Band’s Stage Fright today, and I will no doubt do the same for Joni Mitchell’s Blue in a few months—so why not add a singer/songwriter I never ranked even close to any of them, Carly Simon. However, with Joni and Carole, she did inspire many women, in and out of music, at perhaps the high point of the women’s movement, to speak out and stand tall (and she is a tall drink of water herself). Here’s a Jim Farber piece marking the anniversary. One connection for me: This song below was was co-authored by Jacob Brackman, and much later I did a bit of war & peace writing for his mother, Selma (the family owned the giant Freelance Photography Guild archives). Compelling video below from a national TV show from Central Park, in 1971, a kind of coming out party for Carly when she was still in her own famous stage fright mode (and look for Art Garfunkel and George Harrison in the wings).

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.