Summer of Soul
Today's hot news and politics, preview of Questlove flick, music from The Kinks, Nina Simone, The Doors, Lake Street Dive and Fairport.
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News & Politics
Headline of the Day, from Popular Mechanics: “For the First Time, Drones Autonomously Attacked Humans. This Is a Turning Point.” Subhed: “Drone experts have long dreaded this moment.” March, 2020, civil war in Libya.
Couch potato: NY Times asks this morning, “When your therapist is a bot, you can reach it at 2 a.m. Can it really understand you?”
Trump’s hideous blog, which should have been titled “From the John of Donald J. Trump,” has been killed by his aides after just 29 days. An adviser told the Wash Post that he wanted to open a new platform and didn’t like that this platform was being mocked and had so few readers.
New threats from nuts: Overturn-the-election chatter among Trump supporters and QAnon followers on platforms like Telegram is "creating concern on Capitol Hill" about the possibility of further violence. Andy Borowitz mocks Trump’s latest vow: “Trump to Be Reinstated in August as President…of Trump University.”
What a title for new series: We Are Lady Parts. It is “A Fierce and Funny Series About an All-Girl, Muslim Punk Band…Peacock’s new comedy import from the U.K. makes representation matter in all the right ways,” sez Rolling Stone.
The Trump Justice Department secretly seized the phone records of four New York Times reporters spanning nearly four months in 2017 as part of a leak probe, the Biden administration disclosed on Wednesday. Last month, the DOJ disclosed seizures of phone logs of reporters who work for Wash Post and the phone and email logs for a CNN reporter.
Never knew this was a thing, but the AP reports: “The NFL says it will halt the use of race-norming — which assumed Black players started out with lower cognitive functioning — in a $1 billion settlement of brain injury claims. The practice had made it harder for Black players to qualify.”
Greenwald Agonistes: “Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of Right-Wing Media?” by The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove and Justin Baragona. “And now he is effectively operating as something of a Fox News assignment editor, as indicated by The Daily Beast’s spot check of the frequency with which Greenwald’s online musings on social media and elsewhere, especially his Substack page, have served as the basis for dozens of articles on Fox News’ website.”
From the great Steve Brodner:
Manch-Sin: VoteVets, a progressive outside group, is launching a pair of ads aimed at prodding Sens. Mannchin and Sinema to get behind voting rights legislation, reports Axios. The ads, which will run in their home states, are crafted to give cover to the moderates to back voting rights legislation, the group says. You can watch the spots here and here.
Colleen Flaherty of Inside Higher Ed writes: "Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose tenure vote was deferred by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Board of Trustees, is giving the university until Friday to reconsider her case."
Bird brains: Researchers have concluded that some birds might not be as susceptible to hand tricks as humans because they don’t develop assumptions about what the hands will do.
No die job: Biden announced the National Month of Action plan yesterday to boost vax rates, including teaming up with Black-owned barber shops and beauty salons to increase vaccine education in the "Shots at the Shop" initiative.
Putting his nukes up: Joe Biden ran on a platform opposing new nuclear weapons, but his first defense budget backs two controversial new projects put in motion by Trump and also doubles down on the wholesale upgrade of all three legs of the arsenal. This has sparked an outcry from arms control advocates and progressives, who are vowing a fight to reverse the momentum.
Changes (or not) in Israel. Politico preview:
Netanyahu will essentially be replaced by a more extreme, though much less politically savvy, version of himself. At 49, an untested and ambitious Bennett — the first Orthodox prime minister and a former aide to Netanyahu — will have to keep his fervent annexationist convictions and implacable opposition to Palestinian statehood under control. His new coalition government will be weighed down and checked by opposing factions that may constrain — but not eliminate — the right-wing impulses of the prime minister and his conservative partners.
Wood, not: At least a tenth of the world’s mature giant sequoias were destroyed by a single California wildfire last year, according to a draft report prepared by scientists with the National Park Service.
Music
On this day in 1967 the Doors’ “Light My Fire” was released in the US, and later reached #1. In a rather famous incident, when the group was booked on The Ed Sullivan Show, Jim Morrison was asked to change the line "girl, we couldn't get much higher"—the sponsors felt this was a drug reference. The band agreed to do so, and did a rehearsal using the amended lyrics—however, during the live performance, Morrison sang the original lyric (see below). So they were informed they would never appear on the Sullivan show again. Watch the incident below, and then see how it was portrayed in Oliver Stone’s The Doors.
On this date in 1970: Head Kink, Ray Davies, was forced to make a 6,000 mile round trip from New York to London to re-record one word in future hit “Lola.” He had to change the word Coca-Cola” to “Cherry Cola” due to an advertising ban on product names at BBC Radio. Here he has some fun with the start of the song with the word change. Below that a fun Lake Street Dive cover.
On this day in 1983: Famed session drummer (with Clapton and dozens of other heavies) Jim Gordon murdered his mother by pounding her head with a hammer. A schizophrenic, it was not until his trial in 1984 that he was properly diagnosed. Still, Gordon was sentenced to sixteen years-to-life in prison in 1984. As we noted recently, he earned riches off getting credited for writing the popular piano “outro” for “Layla,” a claim long contested by ex-girlfriend Rita Coolidge.
On this day in 2016: Master English fiddler/violinist Dave Swarbrick died aged 75. He was called in to play on one epic song for Fairport Convention in 1969 and the results (especially lengthy jamming with Richard Thompson) were so sensational it has been credited as turning point in the “electric/ traditional” trend.
Film
My film Atomic Cover-up, which as I noted earlier just won top prize at a film festival in Rio, has just earned a second award, as runner-up for Best U.S. Documentary at the Venice Shorts Festival. Here’s the new citation from Rio fest: "Greg Mitchell is the big festival winner selected from the audience and the jury. It is a masterpiece. The film brings the hard work of Japanese and American cinematographers who fought side by side against the global nuclear arms race from the darkness of the cover-up into the bright cinema lights," says festival director and co-founder Marcia Gomes de Oliveira from Rio de Janeiro.
Questlove’s Summer of Soul, on the 1969 Harlem music fest, which I’ve already previewed a couple of times, finally is opening this month. Rolling Stone has a feature on it and him this week.
Questlove was skeptical. In early 2019, the Roots’ drummer was approached by two Hollywood producers who claimed to have 45 hours of footage from a long-forgotten music festival in Harlem that had included performances from Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, and more. Questlove, who’s renowned for his encyclopedic knowledge of music history, had never heard of the event. He had, however, become used to fellow crate-digging obsessives trying to one-up him with dubious historical tidbits. “That’s really what I thought it was,” the drummer, a.k.a. Ahmir Thompson, recalls of his first meeting with producers Robert Fyvolent and David Dinerstein. “I thought these two were trying to gas me up for some Jimmy Fallon tickets.”
Song Pick of the Day
Tip: that Questlove film closes with the great Nina Simone singing her “Young, Gifted and Black.”
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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. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. 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.