Oh, Superman!
Sexy Clark Kent/Lois Lane poem by Nabokov found. Cuomo and Trump in even deeper trouble. Music from the Yardbirds and Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, Patsy Cline and Laurie Anderson.
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News/Politics
Late-night hosts mocked Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) forcing clerks to read the entire Covid relief bill for 10 hours. Jimmy Fallon: “This means for 10 hours Ted Cruz wasn’t the most hated senator in Congress.” Stephen Colbert: “Perhaps it’s just Ron Johnson’s way of telling us he can’t read. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Senator—we’re sending LeVar Burton.” James Corden: “I’m going to wait until it’s adapted on Netflix.”
Fun quip by someone on QAnon’s latest claims falling flat: “The crowd for Trump’s second inaugural Thursday was even smaller than for his first.”
CNN’s Jim Sciutto: “Federal investigators are examining communication records between members of Congress and the pro-Trump mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol, as probe moves closer to exploring whether lawmakers wittingly or unwittingly helped the insurrectionists.” Breaking today: Rep. Eric Swalwell has sued Donald Trump, Don Jr., Rudy G and Rep. Mo Brooks, alleging they are "responsible for the injury and destruction" at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
A mid-level Trump aide in the State Dept. has been arrested for his Jan. 6 actions, including unlawful entry, violent and disorderly conduct, obstructing Congress and law enforcement, and assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon. Federico G. Klein, who was seen in videos of the riot resisting officers and assaulting them with a stolen riot shield, is the first member of the Trump administration to face criminal charges in connection with the storming of the Capitol. He also worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign.
A new scoop from NY Times today on Gov. Cuomo aides hiding the full nursing home death toll by re-writing a report. “The extraordinary intervention, which came just as Mr. Cuomo was starting to write a book on his pandemic achievements, was the earliest act yet known in what critics have called a months-long effort by the governor and his aides to obscure the full scope of nursing home deaths.”
Barry Blitt with what might be titled (by me) “Cuomo Batter Blues.”
Glenn Greenwald in new interview with right-wing Daily Caller:
I would describe a lot of people on the right as being socialist. I would consider Steve Bannon to be socialist. I would consider the 2016 iteration of Donald Trump the candidate to be a socialist, based on what he was saying. I would consider Tucker Carlson to be a socialist.
Fun little Colbert video here mocking Texas governor’s move to re-open the state, featuring a cowboy “shootout” with Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef.
Barack and the Boss out with a new episode of their Spotify chat series, this time focusing on how they felt about the Vietnam war.
Rex Huppke: “So now Donald Trump is trying to get Fox News to fire Karl Rove? Guys, I’m starting to think the GOP’s cancel culture rhetoric isn’t entirely sincere.”
Politico headline and subhed in the wake of the Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss brouhahas: “Biden World Gives a Shoulder Shrug to the Raging Culture Wars: Can arguments over children’s books and kids' toys really turn the political needle? Is there a wocket in my pocket?”
New Yorker with an illustrated special titled “Ways Non-Woke People from History Tried to Be Woke,” going back to the days of the cavemen (male “hunters” now pay attention to female “gatherers”) and the Pharoah (who is so environmentally-conscious he agrees to have his body wrapped when he dies in “fair trade papyprus”). Here’s one example from the Amercan revolution:
Bloomberg: “Justice Amy Coney Barrett Rejects Sierra Club in First Opinion for SCOTUS.” The ruling limits the ability of environmental groups to use the Freedom of Information Act to get government documents. “The 7-2 decision is a defeat for the Sierra Club in a clash stemming from a proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule governing structures that use water to cool industrial equipment.”
Powers to the people: Politico reports today, “President Joe Biden intends to work with Congress to repeal the war authorizations that have underpinned U.S. military operations across the globe for the past two decades and negotiate a new one that ends the open-ended nature of America’s foreign wars, the White House said Friday.”
Media
Just a couple of days ago we covered actress Emily Mortimer penning a piece for the NY Times on Nabokov’s Lolita somehow getting published and remaining (largely) revered today—her dad was a famous obscenity lawyer in the UK. Then yesterday this shocker from The Guardian: “A lost poem by Vladimir Nabokov, written from the perspective of Superman as he laments the impossibility of having children with Lois Lane, has been published for the first time.” Rejected by The New Yorker in 1942, it was found and appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. Nabokov said it was inspired by the cover of the comic above.
In it, Nabokov, whose son loved the Superman comics, writes in the voice of the Man of Steel. He imagines the hero walking through a city park with Lois, forced to wear his glasses because “otherwise / when I caress her with my super-eyes / her lungs and liver are too plainly seen / throbbing”.
Nabokov’s Superman goes on to mourn how although he is in love, “marriage would be murder on my part” because his euphemistic “blast of love” could kill his would-be wife. Even if her “fragile frame” survived, he ponders, “What monstrous babe, knocking the surgeon down / would waddle out into the awestruck town?”
Man of Steel, indeed. Naturally, we turn to Laurie Anderson for “O Superman” here:
CNN: "Trump will eventually regain access to his YouTube account. CEO Susan Wojcicki said Thursday that when the threat of violence diminishes, the platform will turn the keys back over to him. 'It's pretty clear right now that there is still an elevated risk of violence,' she explained.”
Music
On this day in 1965, the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love” was released in the UK. One of the most underrated groups ever, they are still best known for their cast of guitarists—named Clapton, Beck, and Page. Here they are in the Beck incarnation:
And speaking of “Yardbird”: Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker just out with a major piece on efforts (which I publicized last month) to “save Birdland”—that is, the latest incarnation of the iconic jazz club now on W. 44th St. in Manhattan. More to the point, for me, is that I revived Crawdaddy in the offices sitting directly on top of the original Birdland, near 52nd and Broadway, in 1971—which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago here at the newsletter. I noted Miles Davis beaten out front by cops and a couple of likely gangland murders, one right in my office there—with a bullet hole remaining over my desk. Here’s Charlie “Yardbird” Parker with Coleman Hawkins and Buddy Rich in 1950, the heyday of Birdland:
Film
Last month I previewed the re-release of the film F.T.A. (for “fuck the army”), from Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, on their anti-war tour of U.S. military bases in the early 1970s. I was one of the few to see it at that time before it was pulled from theaters after Jane’s trip to Hanoi drew such controversy. I had interviewed a good number of anti-war vets and also met Jane when she did a presser for the film. Now the film is available in various virtual theaters, and Jane (who was on Colbert show last night) has done a new five-minute intro for it, here:
Plans afoot to re-boot beloved cult favorite series Party Down although not known for sure that original cast members Adam Scott, Lizzy Caplan and etc. are on board as yet.
UPDATE: As I’ve noted, my first film, Atomic Cover-up, has been selected by the major Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose for its U.S. premiere later this month. The festival page for film now has the trailer and link for tickets at just $3.99 for any time between March 20-30. Rod Lurie, director of hit film The Outpost, wrote this week, “There's a reason I agreed to intro this documentary. It isn't just brilliantly done —it's a fucking historical first, including images from the Japanese atomic bomb devastation that were suppressed for decades. If you're a history student it is malpractice to not see the movie.”
Aaron Sorkin and Sacha Baron Cohen on MSNBC last night hitting social media “disinformation” and, of course, still flacking Chicago 7.
Song Pick of the Day
Tragic day in country music history in 1963, when Patsy Cline’s plane went down in a swamp, also killing the pilot and fellow stars Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins. Here she sings “I Fall to Pieces” live.
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.