Oscars and Grammys, Oh My!
And is the filibuster going bust? Plus: Aretha and Tom Petty film previews, early Linda Ronstadt, and songs for St. Patrick's Day from Van Morrison, Steve Earle, and Fairport Convention.
Folks, got my second vaccine shot last night (Moderna) so who knows what state I will be in a few minutes from now. To play it conservative, I took it a little easy so not as many short takes today but still the usual cartoons and film previews and four songs/videos, plus Graham Greene bio and Dylan’s woman-in-red. And more time: If you missed my Joni Mitchell career profile in 15 songs/videos last weekend....Now, onward, and consider subscribing, it’s still free!
Trevor Noah: “Andrew Cuomo is the only person who wishes it was still 2020….A.O.C. wants him to resign, Schumer wants him to resign, his brother renamed his CNN show from Cuomo Primetime to It’s Just Chris, OK? It’s Just Chris.”
Jimmy Fallon: “The nominations were announced for the 93rd Academy Awards. This year’s Oscars air on April 25, two months later than usual, because if anything’s good for ratings, it’s a four-hour award show about online movies that came out a year ago.”
Interesting L.A. Times story on how and why Rep. Katie Porter lost her prized committee post.
From Politico’s morning newsletter:
Get rid of the filibuster, or allow Republicans to disenfranchisemillions of Black and brown voters who put President Biden in office. Senate Democrats may or may not agree with such a blunt framing of voting rights legislation coming down the pike — but it’s the reality they face, because that’s precisely how the party’s progressive base is framing it for them. “We’re headed for a showdown betweenthe John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the filibuster — a relic of Jim Crow,” Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) said in a statement to our Laura Barrón-López.
Progressives are dialing up pressure on Democratic senators to set aside the filibuster for voting rights legislation. This wouldn’t be the first time senators made an exception. Democrats did it in 2013 to break a Republican blockade of then-President Obama’s Cabinet nominees. Republicans followed suit in 2017 for Supreme Court nominees. And now, voting rights advocates are demanding another carve-out.
Today’s Onion headlines: “Florida Attempts To Increase Vaccinations By Leaving Syringes Around Beaches.” “Area Man Thinks Movie He Saw Should Have Been Nominated.”
Fresh off getting hammered by John Oliver, "Tucker Carlson opened his show Monday night with yet another irresponsible segment undermining public confidence in the coronavirus vaccines,” CNN’s Oliver Darcy reports. “Carlson did this by suggesting public health experts should not be trusted to make public health recommendations based on the science. He said such skepticism should be applied to recommendations to get vaccinated…. Your regular reminder: Rupert Murdoch, who controls Fox, immediately got himself a Covid vaccine in the UK last December. Yet he pays for his top host to go on TV and undermine the public's confidence in them.”
Mother Jones: Peter Thiel’s $10 million donation to a Super-PAC for writer J.D. Vance’s purported 2022 race for open Ohio seat in U.S. Senate is “unprecedented” and could “upend” that campaign.
Hooray, as Deb Haaland won confirmation in the Senate to lead the Interior Department making the congresswoman from New Mexico the first Native American ever to serve in a presidential Cabinet.
Ask me if I’m surprised: Viewership for Sunday’s Grammy Awards on CBS fell to 8.8 million viewers, according to Nielsen. That’s a new low for the show and a 53 percent drop compared with last year’s show. And it happened with a show that avoided the usual “zoom” pitfalls. The previous low was 17 million viewers in 2006, when Green Day won record of the year.
Music
Rolling Stone reviews/approves Genius: Aretha series, starting next weekend. “Erivo does a more than credible job of imitating Franklin’s voice, and producer Raphael Saadiq recreates the sounds of those records, too.”
Debuting at SXSW this week, Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free doc. Here’s Rolling Stone’s summary: “When Tom Petty went to work with producer Rick Rubin on what would become his moving, introspective and gorgeous solo project Wildflowers in the early 1990s, his longtime filmographer Martyn Akins was there, 16mm camera in tow, to document the process. Documentarian Mary Wharton (Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President) uses this previously unseen material to anchor a deep dive into the who, how, what, where and why of this album’s making, along with reflections from Rubin, Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, Petty’s daughter Adria and more.”
Sally Grossman, wife of the late Albert Grossman (famed 1960s manager of Dylan, Janis Joplin and many others and founder of Bearsville Records), has died at 81. A beloved, longtime fixture in the Woodstock, N.Y. area, she is most famous as the woman in red on one of the most famous album covers ever, for 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home, when went Dylan went electric. Here’s a little-seen photo outtake from the same session.
On this day in 1942, Jerry Jeff Walker was born. On March 16, 1970, Motown singer Tammi Terrell, known for hit duets with Marvin Gaye, died of a brain tumor at age 24. Marvin remained in self-isolation.
Film
New doc on the jailed whistleblower, United States vs. Reality Winner, debuting at SXSW this week, here is a full report and bonus footage.
If you missed: Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice won the Grammy for Best Music Film this week, the first time that a CNN Films project has won a Grammy. You’ve all heard “Different Drum” numerous times so here’s young Linda with a different Stone Poneys live song from pre-1969.
Books
Major review/profile in The New Yorker this week on one of my writing heroes, Graham Greene, author of two of the greatest postwar novels (The Quiet American and The End of the Affair), among much else. There’s a new bio. Just one bit:
Of Western “art” novelists, Greene may well be the one whose works have been most often adapted to film. Several of his novels were dramatized not once but twice or three times, and some of the films are better than the novels….The book-movie relationship becomes even more interesting in the case of “The Third Man.” The book was actually a by-product of the film Greene had agreed to write—something he produced to get a feel for atmosphere before applying himself to the script—and it will never be entirely free of the shadow, both literal and figurative, cast by Orson Welles in his indelible performance as the villain.
(Irish) Song Picks of the Day
To get you ready for St. Patrick’s Day, here’s Van Morrison with rarely viewed live version of obscure (for most people) “Streets of Arklow,” one of my all-time faves. It’s featured on his 1975 album Veedon Fleece, which held no hit singles and, for a Van album at the time, sold weakly and was not even revered by critics. After a few years as a pure cult album, it slowly became recognized as one of his greatest (and most “Irish”) albums ever. Debate continues on whether in “Arklow” he sings “and the grass did grow” or “did not grow.’
And a second for the celebration, from Steve Earle, friend of Ireland, with Sharon Shannon on his “Galway Girl.”
And last but not least, one of the greatest “She Moved Through the Fair”—which is saying a lot (Van and the Chieftains also offered a great one)—from Sandy Denny and Fairport, with RT adding guitar fills.
Greg Mitchell’s film, Atomic Cover-up, will have its American 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.