Tangled Up In Bob

In the calm before the possible storm: A new Adam Driver film and Peter Gabriel-era Genesis video, a strange story about (and classic song by) Dylan, and live music from Joan Armatrading.

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New & Politics

MyPillow lunatic Mike Lindell launched his social media platform yesterday with a livestream set to run 48 hours straight. Jimmy Kimmel: “It’s like the Jerry Lewis telethon—if Jerry was on a public access channel and on crack….At one point he claimed they had 75 million people watching. Even Trump was like, ‘Oh, please, quit exaggerating.’”

The Onion: “Biden Begs Migrants Not to Come to U.S. Until There Are Enough Cells to Imprison Everyone.” And: “Rainforest Tree Remains Very Still in Hopes That Bulldozer Will Lose Interest and Drive Away.”

NOT The Onion: The teen who shot and killed eight people at FedEx in Indianapolis wrote about My Little Pony in a Facebook post less than an hour before that. “I hope that I can be with Applejack in the afterlife, my life has no meaning without her,” Brandon Scott Hole, age 19, posted. He also had two Facebook accounts dedicated to the show. Meanwhile, prosecutors never sought to invoke a law that would have kept Hole from obtaining firearms, a top law enforcement official said on Monday.

Minneapolis braces for Chauvin verdict: “Businesses boarded up, fearing a repeat of last year’s unrest if the jury brings back a decision that the public sees as unjust. City schools will shift to remote learning, and Facebook said it planned to limit posts that contain misinformation and hate speech related to the trial.” Atlanta and other cities also on edge.

The judge in his final remarks to the defense in court on the case made the extraordinary claim, “I’ll give you that Congresswoman {Maxine] Waters may have given you something on appeal that may result in this whole trial being overturned.” This was a reference (as we noted yesterday) to her warning about public reaction if the verdict didn’t go a certain way—now the lead story every hour on Fox. Nancy Pelosi continues to defend her.

News that Rep. Steve Stivers will be quitting to head the Ohio Chamber of Commerce mainly helps the Dems by giving Pelosi one extra vote margin until a special election—upping her bulge to a whopping 3. He hoped to run for U.S. Senate so that’s now out. But his laughably gerrymandered red district not likely to flip to Dems.

The NASA helicopter Ingenuity accomplished the first flight by an aircraft on another planet yesterday, albeit for just half a minute and over a distance of ten feet. It carried a bit of wing fabric from the Wright Brothers’s plane that made history at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. Jimmy Fallon: “The flight lasted a total of 30 seconds. The men on the team said it was a complete success while the women agreed so they wouldn’t hurt their feelings.” Stephen Colbert: “I say they’ve got two more flights before it ends up stuck on the neighbor’s roof.”

First the bad news, then… “Nearly 1,800 bills have been filed to change election laws,” the Wall St. Journal reports, “but only about half have a fair chance of passing. Even fewer will become law.”

Over-the-hill rocker Ted Nugent has caught COVID-19 and been sick for ten days after calling it “not a real pandemic." Now sez: "I got the Chinese shit."

Pandemic blahs: And yes, there’s a name for the blah that you’re feeling, according to the NY Times. “It’s called languishing: a dull void between depression and flourishing. And it may be the dominant emotion of 2021 — the emotional baggage of a long-haul pandemic… and it’s not depression. It’s a joyless, aimless feeling that can dull your motivation and focus. It’s ‘meh.’”

CNN’s Oliver Darcy: "One America News has retaliated against a staffer who spoke out on the record against the far-right channel's misinfo. The NYT's Rachel Abrams, who spoke to the senior producer, Marty Golingan, for her Sunday deep-dive into the channel, reported Monday that he has been fired. Abrams said that Golingan previously told her being fired from the outlet 'would make me feel good' and that he would 'wear it like a badge of honor...'"

Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick died of natural causes after the Jan. 6 attacks, the D.C. medical examiner has ruled. The office said that the 42-year-old died after suffering a pair of strokes hours after confronting rioters. This complicates the F.B.I. and Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute anyone in his death. In March, federal prosecutors charged two men with assaulting Sicknick with bear spray.

Lucian Truscott IV:

Everything you need to know about the folly of appointing a so-called “independent commission” to investigate the insurrection at the Capitol on 1/6 is contained in the first sentence of a story in the Washington Post yesterday about the collapse of the effort. Nancy Pelosi is having trouble finding b-partisan support for a commission because “Republicans face sustained pressure to disavow that it was supporters of former president Donald Trump who attacked the U.S. Capitol.”

That’s a little basic, don’t you think? They’re in the beginning stages of negotiation over the nature and make-up of whatever commission they can eventually agree on, and the position of the Republican Party has hardened around the idea that it wasn’t Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol.

Music

Tangled up in you: There’s a bizarre Dylan story in the new issue of Harper’s, about a woman who may have had a year-long affair with him while he was married, and her son (who looks like him) wondering if Bob might be his Dad. It’s neatly summarized in a press release sent to me, click link below for full piece :

Throughout his childhood, Sam Sussman heard every adult he met marvel at his uncanny resemblance to Bob Dylan. Most of them didn't know that Sussman's mother had dated Dylan years before Sussman was born, while she was living in Manhattan trying to make it as an actress and studying painting in a class where Dylan was a fellow student. She read him Petrarch, a happening that seems to have made it his lyrics. (She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me / written by an Italian poet from the thirteenth century.) But there are as many verses in “Tangled up in Blue” as there were women in Dylan’s life at the time.

Sussman’s mother quietly ended their affair by changing her telephone number and ignoring his letters; she married Sam’s father, divorced, and though she loved stories, rarely spoke of her time with the man who is arguably one of the greatest artists America has produced. Then one day, while the teenage Sam was listening to Blonde on Blonde to tune out his mother on a drive, she won his attention with an admission about a later encounter with the voice in his headphones. The revelation left Sussman to wonder whether Dylan—whom he had idealized throughout an adolescence marked by difficult paternal relationships—might actually be his father. Or did his mother want him to have that image as a gift?

After his mother’s death, the answer seems lost forever, but it also seems to matter less, and a meditation on paternity becomes instead a moving tribute to a woman with the strength and confidence to walk away from such a singular figure and find her own place in the world.

Get “Tangled” yourself, below:

Sooner or Later One of Them Must Know: The Guardian on savage battle of Dylan biographers. “Howard Sounes says he has been outraged by insulting comments made about him and his 2001 bestselling Dylan biography in the pages of Clinton Heylin’s new Dylan biography. In his introduction, Heylin calls Sounes a ‘professional dirtdigger’ who had written a ‘semi-literate’ book. Sounes told the Guardian: “In response, I would say he’s a clunky, self-indulgent writer.… His books are all very long and baggy. They’re about his interpretation of Dylan songs.…and it’s incredibly boring.”

P-MRC, the owner of Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Billboard and Deadline has announced that it has made a strategic investment in SXSW – the annual music/film/tech conference and festival based in Austin.

Film

The Genesis: Parts of an early-1973 concert by Genesis—still with Peter Gabriel and, of course, Phil Collins—at the Bataclan Club in Paris have finally been posted on YouTube (by the Genesis Museum) after being circulated by fans for some time. It’s mainly just parts of several songs, plus all of “The Musical Box,” but in great quality—if you are a fan you will love.

Sparks will fly: Rolling Stone reports, “Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard and Simon Helberg star in Annette, a musical romance featuring an original soundtrack by Sparks and directed by French filmmaker Lepos Carax in his English-language debut. The movie received its first trailer on Monday when it was announced that it will open the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.” Set in contemporary Los Angeles, Annette tells the story of Henry (Driver), a stand-up comedian, and Ann (Cotillard), an internationally renowned singer.

Song Pick of the Day

Like Sandy Denny, Joan Armstrading an important ‘70s singer/songwriter too little remembered today, so here she is live with “Barefoot and Pregnant.”

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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.