What's Going On? Special Snowstorm Edition

A few answers, from Marvin Gaye to John Oliver. Plus: Dylan, Sandy Denny, and the question, "Will the GOP actually take a Q?"

Launching today’s edition a few hours early due to fears of power loss in the Great Northeast Snow Event. Carrying on: Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the release of an album universally regarded as one of the all-time greatest, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. Naturally there’s a new re-issue package. You’ve all heard the title track many times, but have you ever watched Marvin perform it live? Well, here ya go, below. Now, a note to the many new subscribers—and remember, it’s still free—inspired by my two Springsteen pieces this past weekend: Many signed up too late to receive Sunday’s newsletter, so here’s the link for that. And thanks for joining us.

Politics / Media

Samantha Bee asks the reasonable question: can Rudy G get arrested already—or at least disbarred? Meanwhile, a major NY Times project went up last night tracing “77 Days”—the length of time Trump (and then a mob) tried to overturn the election. Among its many behind-the-scenes revelations:

Women for America First was the original organizer of the Jan. 6 rally in Washington. But at the turn of the year, Mr. Trump decided to join the rally himself, and the event effectively became a White House production, with several people close to the administration and the Trump campaign joining the team.

The former Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson was the liaison to the White House, a former administration official said. And the president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations.

Ben Smith, also at the Times, has a major piece today on the very uneasy relationship between editors and social media and the frequent slapping or firing journalists—most recently my friend Lauren Wolfe at his paper—for maybe revealing too much about their political views on Twitter and elsewhere. Well down in the piece we learn that Ben himself recently sponsored a Morning Consult poll of 3,423 people, with a margin of error of 2 percent.

Given the choice between two alternatives, 41 percent agreed with the statement, “I trust journalists more if they keep their political and social views private,” while 36 percent agreed with the opposite statement, “I trust journalists more if they are open and honest about their political and social views.”

Other survey responses suggested that, perhaps, just perhaps, journalists are living on a more Twitter-obsessed planet than normal people. When the pollsters showed a version of a tweet from Ms. Wolfe that caused her Twitter trouble, the muddled response made it clear that ordinary Americans had no idea what the fuss was about.

Since John Oliver is still not back (next week, they say), and you may still be wondering what the fuss about the filibuster is all about, here is his primer from awhile back—note the studio audience—that may help.

Actual exchange on ABC on Sunday:

ABC: “Marjorie Taylor Greene has voiced support for executing Nancy Pelosi. Is she fit to serve and should she serve on the Education Committee?”

GOV. ASA HUTCHINSON of Arkansas: “Well, first of all, the people in her district elected her and that should mean a lot. I'm not gonna answer that question as to whether she's fit to serve because she believes in something that everybody else does not accept….She’s going to stand for re-election.”

Then there’s this bombshell from NBC’s Julia Ainsley today: “Federal law enforcement officials were directed to make public comments sympathetic to Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager charged with fatally shooting two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, according to internal Department of Homeland Security talking points obtained by NBC News. In preparing Homeland Security officials for questions about Rittenhouse from the media, the document suggests that they note that he ‘took his rifle to the scene of the rioting to help defend small business owners.’"

Yes, Rochester, N.Y., cops cuffed and pepper-sprayed a kid, age 9, and now there’s body-cam footage.

Music

I previewed the streaming Lyle Lovett-Jason Isbell chat and songfest last Friday and it did turn out great— you can still watch this week (for $10). Spoiler alert: Was happy to see it close with an encore of my man Townes Van Zandt’s classic “Pancho and Lefty.” But the highlight of that might have been Jason revealing that it is his five-year-old daughter’s favorite song—and he sings it to her every night at bedtime. (Good thing it’s not TVZ’s “Waitin’ Around to Die” or “Nothin” or “Lungs.”) On another note: They both want to make sure you know that it’s pronounced “Is-bill” not “Is-bell.”

Check out this video with a couple minutes of Miles Davis’s famous score along with footage from the 1958 film, Elevator to the Gallows. Reconsidering Cinema explains that it “was composed and performed by Miles Davis in a one session recording while he watched a screening of the film. He had taken notes once while watching the rough cut and then invited 3 fellow musicians without preparation to record it in one go.”

Film

As noted last week in my favorable remarks about Promising Young Woman, we have been steady fans of Carey Mulligan going all the way back to the stellar Bleak House series, and ditto for Ralph Fiennes since Schindler and Wuthering Heights. So anticipation ran high for their new movie, which dropped on Netlfix on Friday, The Dig, especially after the nice reviews and fascinating, if odd, subject.

Did we, ahem, dig it? It turned out to be a little too Masterpiece Theater for me, with a romantic subplot (featuring Lily James of Downton Abbey, not the two stars) that distracted from the two main questions: Who owns these archaeological discoveries on private land? And will, Fiennes, the excavator, get any credit? Still, the true story is so unusual you ought to give it a shot. Here from an article i in the Guardian that goes well beyond the movie:

Beneath a large mound of earth on private land outside Woodbridge in Suffolk, Brown – who is played by Ralph Fiennes – uncovered the buried remains of an entire 27-metre-long ship; a secret chamber filled with gold and silver; a sword with a jeweled hilt; shoulder clasps of gold inlaid with garnet; and pieces of iron that were later assembled to create the elaborate, iconic Sutton Hoo helmet. The seventh-century hoard was the richest grave ever excavated in Europe.

“Brown uncovered this country’s greatest archaeological treasure and in the process transformed our understanding of English life in the early medieval period,” says Sue Brunning, curator of the British Museum’s Sutton Hoo collection. “Before Sutton Hoo, it was thought Britain had declined badly in cultural and economic terms after the Romans left.”

The effort and resources involved in dragging a ship deep inland before filling it with treasure and then burying it would have been a remarkable undertaking that brings to mind images of the Old English poem Beowulf with its soaring timber halls and powerful kings and nobles. Brown had helped to repaint our image of early medieval England.

The Spirit Awards, meanwhile, are out with their nominations for best documentary, with few surprises: Collective (my pick), Time, Crip Camp, Mole Agent, Dick Johnson Is Dead. For feature dramas: First Cow, Nomadland, Minari, Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

Books

Just received from friend Steve Wasserman, who runs Heyday Books in Berkeley, the galleys for The Magic Years, coming in May by Jonathan Taplin. You may know his name from one of his two major careers: as director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC — or much earlier as tour manager for Judy Collins, Bob Dylan and The Band, and producer of Marty Scorcese’s Mean Streets and The Last Waltz (among other films). He also helped George Harrison pull off “The Concert for Bangla Desh,” partly by managing to get Eric Clapton to the stage, though ravaged by heroin and needing a fix (Phil Spector supplied some smack but it was judged inadequate, like his mix for Let It Be).

I’ll hold off further commentary for later, after I finish reading it, but I’ve already learned a thing or two about that notorious earth-rattling day in the summer of 1965 when Dylan strapped on an electric guitar at Newport. Didn’t know it was Johnny Cash who handed Dylan an acoustic guitar and urged him to get back on stage to quiet the hooting crowd after Bob had stalked off. (“Play them a song, son.”) Taplin, at age eighteen, and working his first rock star job, was backstage to observe. Here’s Dylan that night, introduced by…a chorus of boos.

Now in a kind of sidebar to the above: My buddy Lucian Truscott IV has a new post at his excellent Substack site which takes him from getting involved in Woodstock’s budding porta-a-potty crisis to covering Jonathan Taplin’s Dylan/Band arena tour in L.A. in 1973, with a Part II promised today.

I couldn’t put my finger on what was going on there at the quiet, out of the way Wilshire Hilton.  So I made my way downstairs to the lobby and sought out my friend the doorman.  What the hell’s going on here tonight? I asked him.  There’s an orgy happening around the pool!  Who the hell are these people?

Song Pick of the Day

Been an admirer of Sandy Denny, going back to her Fairport days in the late-1960s, with “Who Knows Where the Times Goes,” and through some of her solo work—a path which ended tragically for her, and for all of us, in 1978 when she passed away at the age of thirty-one. She was merely the greatest Brit singer, male or female, of that era (and hear her guesting on Led Zep’s “Battle of Evermore,” which Plant can’t quite ruin near the end). Check out this live performance of one of her most intense and haunting songs, which is also a kind of two-fer on social issues: anti-gun and anti-war. Said John the Gun: “Ideals of peace are gold / Which fools have found / Upon the plains of war / I shall destroy them all.”

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. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he won more than a dozen awards as editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and now has written and directed his first feature, Atomic Cover-up, which will have its American premiere at a festival this spring.