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If you need a fun break to start with, John Oliver—who was off this week at HBO—posted an online only segment yesterday on one of his obsessions, the return of “Air Bud.”
Some of us warned about this, and Gov. Newsom was mocked by the MAGAs for closing part of the freeway, now NYT reports: “An artillery shell fired during 250th anniversary celebration of the Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton on Saturday detonated prematurely over Interstate 5, damaging a California Highway Patrol vehicle on JD Vance’s security detail.”
Natalie Merchant spotted at No Kings rally, I am presuming near where she lives just north of us in upstate NY. Sister Tilly approves!
Bon Jovi in Jersey:
Brandi Carlile, with new album, sat for a major NY Times piece but also a perhaps more wild one for The Independent in the UK. Excerpts:
A new album song called “Joni” paints the revered singer as a down-to-earth, no-nonsense, fun-loving “wild woman”. “Joni will drink you under the table,” Carlile laughs. “She’s the last person to leave the party, she’s 83 and she’s a party animal.” The track recalls one memorable night at the Grammys in Las Vegas when Mitchell spent the night bitching about the acts (“listening to the shit she was saying, it was fucking hilarious”) and convincing starstruck blackjack dealers to lower their stakes so she could play all night.
There’s also the curious line “she threw a party on her grave”…..That’s real, Carlile reveals. “She has this grave in Hollywood and it’s just a blank grave marker and she sometimes goes there and has lunch and drinks champagne with a couple of her friends.” Carlile was naturally “shitting myself” over playing the song to Mitchell. “She held that contemplative, furrowed brow until it got to the part of the song that said ‘when I tell you I love you and you tell me, OK’. Then she had a huge smile on my face and called me an asshole. I knew that she loved the song.”
Then there’s this:
Someone who might not be so enamoured of the record is Donald Trump. The fury-driven “Church & State” – the album’s one overtly political punk rock track, jammed out on the night of Trump’s second election win – imagines an intellectual revolution against the current US administration’s appropriation of so-called Christian values to enable its oppressive ideology.
“It’s just straight up about the separation of church and state and the creeping in of theocracy into the ideology and eventually the laws and practices of the country that I live in,” she says, herself a faithful Christian. “The mystical does not belong in the practical. When we start legislating along dogmatic and religious lines, we’re seeing the beginning of a significant decline as a people… And it’s deeply, deeply personal, because my marriage depends on that not being the case.”
Here’s that rocking protest song live a few days ago at Red Rocks:
And kids, guitar-based rock ‘n roll hasn’t gotten any better than this from my first rock hero Ricky Nelson in, gasp, 1958, with young James Burton almost inventing the genre’s guitar soloing here….
From Tunes to Toons
Steve Brodner at the massive NYC march:
Photo Finish
Continuing my new feature, from my camera to you, let me know what you think. Today: Holy Grail: Louis Armstrong’s first horn, as young kid at orphans’ home, now in Jazz Museum in his hometown New Orleans.
Love your photo finish! Very elegant.
That Brandi Carlisle song rocks!