My award-winning film “The Atomic Bowl” started streaming on PBS.org and PBS apps last month and via Vimeo (you can easily watch it via links here), plus it is airing over many PBS stations. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for FREE. And there is now a companion e-book for “The Atomic Bowl” with the same title, read more here or order. Thank you.
Last night’s “South Park” even featured Apple’s Tim Cook among those paying tribute (literally) to Trump.
The New York Times with “Welcome to the Resistance, Eric Cartman”
The show’s history may also be exactly what makes “South Park” a compelling voice at this moment….the show has amassed cultural capital, a reputation for not being in any party’s corner.
So when it starts spending that capital to suggest that one side is more out of control than the other — that government bullying of network news and academia is a mite more worrisome than social pressure to say nice things about Caitlyn Jenner — people listen. (After the brouhaha over the first episode, linear ratings for the second doubled.)
It’s crude; it’s vicious; it’s a little gross. And it may just be the kind of satire this era deserves. This raunchy, body-horror comedy homes in directly on the vanities of an administration that is fixated with its image — specifically, with displays of virile masculinity and exaggerated femininity.
Then there’s this, in real life, on a true joke—NYC’s mayor—from the Times today:
Adams Adviser Suspended From Campaign After Giving Cash to Reporter
A campaign volunteer for Mayor Eric Adams of New York was suspended after giving a journalist cash in a potato chip bag.
A few days back, we featured a fiery statement from Jack White on MAGA use of White Stripes’ “Seven Nations Army.” Then yesterday this from The Hollywood Reporter:
The Trump Administration is in yet another feud with a major musician who’s voiced their disapproval of the president, this time trading barbs with prolific rock star Jack White.
After previously critiquing Trump’s “vulgar, gold leafed and gaudy” redesign of the Oval Office this week — which caused the Trump administration to call him a “washed-up, has-been loser” — White is speaking out again, voicing his concern that Trump is “dismantling democracy.”
“How funny that it wasn’t me calling out Trump’s blatant fascist manipulation of government, his gestapo ICE tactics, his racist remarks about Latinos, Native Americans, etc.,” White wrote in a lengthy statement on Instagram, further including callouts of Trump’s “ignorance of the dying children in Sudan, Gaza, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, his lack of empathy for military veterans and those struggling with poverty” among many other claims. “No, it wasn’t me calling out any of that, it was the fucking DECOR OF THE OVAL OFFICE remarks I made that got them to respond with insults. How petty and pathetic and thin skinned could this administration get?”
White is clearly supporting Ry Cooder’s demand to “Take your dirty stinking hands off my Constitution.”
To chill out: Brand new song from Jeff Tweedy, “Feel Free.”
From Tunes to Toons
Wal Mart is apparently selling them in 13 states:
Hey! That last goes too far. Homer has a much greater intellect than Rump.
Sad how timely the Ry Cooder tune has remained over such a long time.