Welcome to the Working Week

And as Elvis Costello also sang, "I don't know where to begin...." Well, how about some hot takes, films and cartoons, and music from Dylan, Brandi Carlile, Bonnie Raitt and....her Dad?

Onward for this week, and catch up here if you missed my latest installment of Running with Springsteen over the weekend. Then share, comment, subscribe.

News & Politics

Headline of the Day, from NY Times: “After Threats to Turn It Into a Toilet, a Confederate Monument Is Recovered.”

The Onion: “Amazon Celebrates Union Defeat By Raising All Prices 150% Anyway.”

Robert Reich: “Jeff Bezos made $3.9B in one day last week. That's 122,000 times more than the average Amazon warehouse worker makes in a year.”

First film project takes midnight train out of Georgia: In response to the restrictive voting laws of Georgia, director Antoine Fuqua and actor Will Smith are withdrawing the production of their slave drama Emancipation from the state, they announced today.

Another black motorist was shot and killed by police just ten miles from site of the Chauvin/George Floyd trial—and late last night a large crowd confronted cops at the police station as violence threatened, looting broke out, tear gas deployed and National Guard called out. Steve Brodner, below, covers a previous case still causing outrage in Virginia:

Rep. Dan Kildee told NBC on Sunday that the U.S. Capitol riot left him with post-traumatic stress.

Sixty-six years ago today, a trial showed that Dr. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was highly effective.

Axios: “There are growing signs that parts of the country may be close to meeting demand for the coronavirus vaccine — well before the U.S. has reached herd immunity....Red states in the South are administering the lowest portion of the vaccine doses that they receive from the federal government — a sign of low demand, slow public health systems, or both. The most vaccine-reluctant Americans are white Republicans, polling has found.”

Biden is getting ready to appoint Cindy McCain (who backed him over Trump) to a coveted ambassador post in Western Europe in what would be his first Republican appointee to a Senate-confirmed position.

Barry Blitt shows Biden updating the famous Trump quote at The New Yorker:

Fox News has yet to publicly respond to the Anti-Defamation League's letter calling for Tucker Carlson's ouster.

CNN: Vice on Sunday apologized for an article that featured manipulated images of victims of the Cambodian genocide. On Friday the outlet published an interview with artist Matt Loughrey who had retouched photos of victims from a notorious prison. But observers pointed out that some of the photos of the victims had been additionally altered—to add smiles to their faces.

Ben Smith's Monday NY Times column: Substack's impact on the media industry, with word of a number of new writers moving to the platform.

Probers in Washington State concluded that a self-described “antifa activist” probably opened fire before officers killed him last year. A new investigation found that key evidence raises questions about that conclusion.

Sightings of UFOs are up, but there’s no alien invasion. Reports rose by about 1,000 nationwide last year to more than 7,200, according to the National U.F.O. Reporting Center. The main reason: As more people stayed home and fled cities, they simply found more time to…look up.

Median pay for the CEOs of more than 300 of the biggest U.S. public companies reached $13.7 million last year, up from $12.8 million for the same companies a year earlier and on track for a record.

Music

Rolling Stone with lengthy excerpt from the Brandi Carlile book, mainly on coming out as a teen. And there’s this:

Artists I love never seem to reveal themselves later in life as a person who struggled to get by in their youth and also a person who is a narcissistic, insufferable asshole at times. I just personally find it liberating to tell you this because it’s true. I can’t be seen as an angel in these times or any times, although I wish it were so. I have been lost, racist, religious, brutal, and broken before. I hurt people as much as I’ve been hurt. 

Photo below after she broke her mom’s heart and got a haircut.

Well, if her book is half as good as this…She has long claimed to be an Elton fan-girl and they often chat on the phone. She performed this song, not among Elton’s top early hits, live as recently as her live-streamed concert at the Ryman two weeks ago.

On this day in 1954, and truly monumental: Bill Haley (and his Comets) recorded “Rock Around the Clock” at Pythian Temple studios in New York. Helped launch rock and roll (and sparked youth riots) when used over the opening titles for the film Blackboard Jungle. Written by Max C. Freedman and James E. Myers, it was first recorded by Italian-American band Sonny Dae and His Knights. Here’s that very first Sonny Dae recording:

On this date in 1963: Bob Dylan performed his first major solo concert at Town Hall in New York City. Here’s Bob that night doing his great but still now well-known, “Who Killed Davy Moore.”

And three years later: Jan Berry (the Jan with pal Dean) was nearly killed when he crashed his car into a truck near Dead Man's Curve in Los Angeles. He suffered brain damage but much later returned to the stage. The duo’s prophetic “Dead Man’s Curve” had been co-written by Brian Wilson and with Beach Boys backup.

Film

Alex Gibney’s two-part doc on opioid crisis coming in May via HBO.

Palestinian director Farah Nabulsi won BAFTA prize yesterday for her film The Present—we’ve seen this short (also up for an Oscar) and I can recommend it, and it’s at Netflix.

Fleabag actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge will star alongside Harrison Ford in the upcoming fifth installment of the Indiana Jones series, Lucasfilm announced.

Song Pick of the Day

Yeah, you may know that Bonnie Raitt’s dad was the famed Broadway musical star John Raitt—but did you know they once sang her classic “I’m Blowing Away” live?

“Essential daily newsletter.” — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

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.