It’s Only Love
Yesterday it was a sunny afternoon in San Francisco and my friend and I went to our favorite pizza hole-in-the-wall. (Did you really think I'd name it?) The cook and wait staff are young and smart and one of them put the Help! soundtrack on the restaurant sound system in honor of us old fogies. (She also happens to genuinely love classic pop music, bless her heart.) My friend and I hadn't heard this 1965 Beatles song in a while and it hit me deeply. It was written (mostly) and sung by John Lennon, who disparaged it as a "lousy song" with "abysmal lyrics." Included in the British version of the Help! album (and on the Rubber Soul LP in the U.S.), the song was compared unfavorably by critics at the time to other Lennon tunes on the Help! soundtrack like "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" (one of my favorite Beatles songs of all time).
But "It's Only Love" withstands the test of time. At least MY time. The song immediately grabs your heart, with John's aching, longing voice (one of the best in rock 'n' roll despite what he himself thought) and George Harrison's twangy guitar accompaniment.
Even the lyrics are NOT abysmal. "It's only love and that is all. Why should I feel the way I do? It's only love and that is all. But it's so hard loving you." In John's voice, the words sound as complicated, as wounded, as DEEP as he was.
Play it again.
The Ghosts of Candlestick
There they were, the gray icons of yesteryear -- Joe Montana, Steve Young, Charles Haley, Jerry Rice (always looking spry and fit). They came out with the 49er Faithful to see one more playoff battle with the hated Dallas Cowboys. And we won! Barely, after a hard-fought defensive battle. The Disney-like magic continues. (I'm channeling SF Chronicle sports columnist Scott Ostler here. The newspaper actually roused itself from its usual slumber to cover yesterday's big game, in a style reminiscent of the Sporting Green's old glory.)
Tight end George Kittle finally spurred the 49ers to victory with his magical third-quarter catch (and vivid acting after he was fouled on the same drive). "I was just trying to be dramatic," the gloriously ebullient Kittle said after the game. "It was all for TV. I was just trying to get ratings up. That's all we're here for."
But Kittle also commented that football is "a kid's game. Goodness gracious, if you have fun, it's so much easier."
Kittle tries to get his whole team to play with his loose abandon. And it's been so easy to fall in love with them -- Kittle, "The Kid" (aka rookie sensation Brock Purdy), running back Christian McCaffrey, receiver Deebo Samuel, defensive stars Fred Warner and Nick Bosa and all the rest.
So yes, let's celebrate the 49ers victory -- and the kid's game. But let's also remember the ghosts of Candlestick. The ones who couldn't be there yesterday. Like Dwight Clark -- who made the legendary Catch thrown like a prayer by an off-balance Joe Montana, the miraculous reception that turned around the team's fortunes in the 1980s. Clark died in 2018 after a long battle with ALS, the victim of too many hits to the head during his football career.
Dwight Clark fought for glory -- his own, his team's, the football fans of Northern California. The 49ers are still fighting.
The miraculous Kittle Catch
Song for a High-Flying Byrd
David Crosby has winged to a higher place. A true original of the 1960s and beyond, Crosby enchanted us with his music – and often unsettled us with his words. He liked to provoke people, raise them from their comfortable slumber. The Byrds fired him for being so “outspoken” – that was the word used in the New York Times obit. According to the San Francisco Chronicle obit, Crosby – who died at his horse ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley (California) on Wednesday surrounded by his family – former friends like even the forgiving Graham Nash were no longer speaking with him. “They actively hated him,” according to the Chronicle obit.
Crosby himself admitted that he was often hard to take. But sometimes it’s the obnoxious ones who speak the truth. Crosby was one of the ‘60s rock legends who dared to know. He encouraged band mate Neil Young to write the searing song “Ohio” after National Guard soldiers fired into a crowd of Kent State students protesting the Vietnam War. After Senator Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down, killing the dreams of all those who yearned for a more just and peaceful country, Crosby wrote “Long Time Gone” for his “super group” Crosby, Stills & Nash (and sometimes Young).
Onstage at the now-iconic Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, Crosby took over the Byrds’ between-song patter. Introducing the song about JFK “He Was a Friend of Mine” by band mate Roger McGuinn, Crosby stunned the audience. Even though the song seemed to pin the Kennedy assassination on Lee Harvey Oswald (“from a sixth-floor window a gunman shot him down”), Crosby made the following statement:
“When President Kennedy was killed, he was not killed by one man. He was shot from a number of different directions by different guns. The story has been suppressed, witnesses have been killed. And this is your country, ladies and gentlemen.”
After the song, referring to his courageous statement, Crosby commented, “As I said, they will censor it, I’m sure. They can’t afford to have things like that on the air. It’d blow their image.”
David Crosby was known for his angelic harmonies. And for his prodigious drug-taking, which the obits lingered on. But I’ll also remember him for his political boldness.
Looking back on the 1960s and ‘70s years later, Crosby told the Chronicle, "I don't think it was for nothing. We did manage to stop the Vietnam War, and we did some good work for civil rights. Music is a great tool for propagating ideas. Ideas are the most powerful thing on the planet. Underline that."
That devil-may-care attitude of Crosby and other counter-cultural leaders, that willingness – that DRIVE – to speak the unspeakable is what shimmers from that time. It still lights our way forward.
David Crosby onstage at Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967.
Revolt of the Elites
I've been reading the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Ever since cofounder Robert Silvers died, NYRB has been led by faceless editors without a clear personality or viewpoint. But NYRB has published a series of articles that not only display its liberal contributors' (and readers') contempt and hatred for Trump's (faux) populist rebellion on the Right, but go so far as to suggest it's time for the liberal elites -- that is the suburban voters, professionals, college-educated whites, and Blacks who make up the base of the Democratic Party -- to revolt against our skewed political institutions, which have been rigged by the rightward skidding, minority Republican Party.
The current issue of NYRB contains two such articles -- one by Fintan O'Toole ("Dress Rehearsal"), which suggests that Trump's attempted coup did not succeed only because of his personal deficiencies as a would-be dictator -- and that the next January 6 could be much more catastrophic. O'Toole, who became the literary establishment's darling with his recent memoir/history of his native Ireland ("We Don't Know Ourselves"), teaches at Princeton University.
Alexander Burns, a Politico columnist who formerly worked as a national political correspondent for the New York Times, goes even further. His NYRB article suggests that it's time for liberals to overturn the political institutions created by the hallowed Founding Fathers that have fallen under tight Republican control -- the Senate, Supreme Court, and the Electoral College.
In other words, Burns calls for a Trump-like coup of the Left, not the Trump-led Right. (Remember this article was published in the staid, intellectual New York Review of Books -- not in Jacobin.)
Here are Burns's key, closing paragraphs:
"No iron rule in American politics says an electoral majority greatly disadvantaged by the country's political institutions has to operate with effusive respect for them. A Democratic candidate who wins the popular vote and loses the Electoral College -- like Hillary Clinton and Al Gore -- is not bound by law to concede promptly. A popular president constrained by the Senate's rural majority does not have to keep private his view that the institution is obsolete.
"In the age of Trump, Democrats have developed a great sense of pride in their role protecting America's frayed democratic norms. But there may come a time... when many of the voters who make up the Democratic Party's base and a majority of the country... might find that it is no longer tolerable to be ruled by a dwindling and overpowered minority. There is only so much satisfaction to be drawn from being the sole party with an unblemished record of dutifully surrendering power."
I find myself cheering this new kick-ass attitude on the part of liberal pundits. Yes, as I've long argued, it's time for Democratic leaders to bring the same weapons to the Republican brawl.
But -- as independent voices like Glenn Greenwald point out -- there is something unnerving about this liberal backlash against Trump. Are the intellectuals featured in NYRB -- and the rest of the liberal media -- simply making an argument for the neoliberal status quo? The Clinton-Obama-Biden political establishment that has repeatedly sold out working people and upheld the corporate dominance of the Democrats' biggest contributors?
I don't recall one article in NYRB -- or in any liberal opinion publication -- calling for the radical redistribution of wealth in this country. Yet, as Bernie Sanders's presidential campaigns -- which came under daily fire from the New York Times and Washington Post -- showed, much of Trump's scorned constituency were first and foremost Bernie voters.
Rather than appeal to this white, working-class electorate -- by offering them a more equitable vision of America -- the liberal punditocracy is now calling for a political revolt. I'd start by calling loud and clear for a tax-the-super-rich plan. But don't hold your breath that the liberal elites will campaign for that.
Btw, where is the organized Left in all this? I forgot.. there isn't one. At least one that matters. They're too busy finding their sexual identities and attacking comrades who don't agree 100% with them -- or have accomplished more. Or something.
The New Church Committee?
Senator Frank Church is rolling over in his grave. Rep Jim Jordan -- one of the nastiest Trumpies on Capitol Hill -- and his lunatic legislative brigade have formed a Congressional subcommittee to investigate the "weaponization" of federal intelligence agencies and they have the nerve to compare their MAGA operation to the highly respected Church Committee. In 1975, Senator Church of Idaho oversaw a vital investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies that, among things, exposed the CIA's assassination plots against foreign leaders and its domestic spying on American citizens -- as well as the FBI's twisted obsession with Martin Luther King Jr. In sharp contrast, Jordan's subcommittee, which Democratic critics charge is more akin to the witch-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee, is determined to protect Trump and January 6-type rebels from the Justice Department.
By the way, current new reports hail the Church Committee, but fail to mention that its most explosive findings at the time had to do with the CIA's assassination program. Senator Richard Schweiker, a moderate Republican (remember those?), was so unnerved by the committee's assassination discoveries that he persuaded Church to let him and young Democratic Senator Gary Hart (D-Colorado) form a subcommittee to look into President Kennedy's assassination. What the two senators found out blew their minds, as I related in my book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years -- for which I interviewed both men.
"We don't know what happened, but we do know that (accused assassin Lee Harvey) Oswald had intelligence connections," Schweiker told the press at the time. "Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence." (This CIA connection corresponds with the latest reports about Oswald.)
Unfortunately, Schweiker and Hart were unable to complete their investigative mission about JFK. When Senator Schweiker handed over their file to Robert Tanenbaum, the tough New York City homicide prosecutor who agreed to serve as the deputy chief counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations -- the investigative panel that took up where the Church Committee left off -- the senator told him "the CIA was involved in the murder of the president."
When Schweiker told this to Tanenbaum, the prosecutor physically recoiled. "When I heard that," Tanenbaum -- whom I also interviewed -- told me, "every capillary in my body went into electrified shock. This was a United States senator telling me this!"
That night, Tanenbaum and his chief homicide inspector Cliff Fenton pored over Schweiker's file on the Kennedy assassination at a Washington townhouse he had rented. Afterward, standing in the early morning chill on the brick sidewalk outside, the New York homicide cop looked at his boss and said, "We are in way over our heads."
They were. The House Assassinations Committee's investigation of the JFK assassination was also stonewalled and sabotaged.
I tell the whole inside story in Brothers.
Senator Church holds up a CIA poison dart gun while Senator John Tower, Republican of Texas, looks on.
Make-Believe Faces
I look 71. That's how old I am. In fact, I look not only my age but like someone who had a stroke five years ago. Because I did. In my admittedly distorted vision, I look better than I did at 51 or 61, when I was fleshier and felt more stressed. (My father's looks improved with age, too.) Maybe I'm fooling myself. But if I did, I tricked myself without a plastic surgeon's scalpel. What you see is what you get with my face. I kind of like my weathered contours -- they reveal a life fully lived.
But Hollywood, where I'm from, is a different place. They expect men and especially women NOT to look their age even as they get older. This realization hit me, well, in the face yet again the other night as I watched (cringed) at Michelle Williams play the mother in Steven Spielberg's autobiographical The Fabelmans. Williams, a favorite actor of mine ever since "Brokeback Mountain," now looks like... an animated duck. There's no kinder way to put it.
Hollywood is obsessed with avatars and other fantastic creatures, so why not turn its live action performers into anime characters? That must be the reasoning. But there is something creepy and UNNATURAL about the physical demands placed primarily on female actors. (Although some male actors --- like Don Johnson -- also feel a need to obliterate their facial identities.) Even radical Jane Fonda felt compelled to redo her face.
Call me strange -- but I prefer to see my favorite actors, both male and female, age with time on the screen. I celebrated one thing about the Covid pandemic -- it encouraged most of the women I know to finally go gray, which men have been doing forever.
I know -- most men (especially studio chiefs and casting directors) have been telling women for years NOT to gracefully age. To look like Barbie dolls. Well, fuck them. Or, better yet, don't. I find women who look and act their age sexy. And there are many men and women like me.
So, please, please, Hollywood stars -- the next time you feel the entertainment industry compulsion to undergo plastic surgery, RESIST! We want to see what you really look like at 71. Not some weird, cosmetic version of yourself.
Michelle Williams in The Fabelmans
Ripples of Hope
What a train wreck the Republican Party is. The Democrats, at worst, might be the party of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood -- and the permanent war machine. But at least they can elect a House leader. The Democrats, for their sins, provide the only political stage where people like us can still fight for some democratic control. The GOP is a wholly-owned subsidiary of extractive industries, white supremacists, Christian extremists, gun nuts and other fanatics.
And how about the latest January 6 revelations? As I've written, our democracy is a fragile eggshell in the torrent of history. But only close observers of the January 6 hearings realize HOW fragile it is. According to "Courage Under Fire," a new book by ex-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, the armed January 6 mob was able to overwhelm his officers and occupy the Capitol because the intelligence agencies failed to alert him to the dangers they knew were coming his way days before January 6, and the Pentagon refused to authorize National Guard support until way too late. According to Pentagon officials, they were worried that President Trump would use the National Guard troops to help him overturn the presIdential election that day. What a fucking mess our country is.
And if you don't think our country is STILL a mess, just wait for the next mass shooting by a far-right nut job. It should occur any hour now.
Thoughts and prayers won't pull together this bleeding nation. Neither will Kevin McCarthy or his political foes... or President Biden for that matter. We need someone historically unique to do that.
Did you see that photo exhibit a few years ago that showed the men, women and children who solemnly lined the tracks to pay their last respects to Bobby Kennedy's funeral train? There were white people and black people and brown people. There were men in suits and overalls. There were mothers with children on their hips. They silently waved American flags and held up hand-scrawled signs. There's been nothing like this all-American display for a political leader since then. The mourners knew they had lost more than RFK -- they had lost their country.
We've been trying to get it back ever since.
Glenn Greenwald on JFK and the CIA
The truth is finally coming out about the JFK assassination. Glenn Greenwald just gave my book The Devil's Chessboard high praise on his weekly videocast. ("I can't recommend the book highly enough.") As readers of The Devil's Chessboard know, the book peers inside the national security state created by Allen Dulles and his espionage accomplices during the Cold War. I make the case that Dulles's national security cabal carried out the assassination of President Kennedy -- who was determined to end the nuclear nightmare of the Cold War, a lucrative racket for the military-industrial complex -- as well as the JFK cover-up. (Dulles conveniently served on the Warren Commission and largely directed its investigation, pinning the crime on espionage agent Lee Harvey Oswald, a hapless "patsy" -- as he called himself -- framed by the CIA.)
Despite the CIA's outrageous refusal to abide by the law and fully release all JFK documents, the truth about President Kennedy's killing is finally emerging. The government and corporate media's JFK cover-up, which has led to the erosion of public faith in established institutions, has now been largely rejected by independent media pundits like Greenwald.
Btw, the CIA's fallback position has long been that the Mafia killed JFK (and perhaps a few "rogue" CIA agents in league with the mob). This is an absurd line of propaganda -- one embraced by Kennedy "experts" like the scholar David Kaiser. The faulty reasoning behind this theory is plain: Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, a highly aggressive hunter of organized crime figures, would have gone tooth and nail after the Mafia conspirators if they had organized his brother's assassination. Nor did the mob -- which long served the intelligence community, carrying out some of its dirtiest work -- have the government and media power to create a suffocating cover-up of the monstrous crime. Yes, Jack Ruby -- who silenced Oswald -- was a Mafia errand boy. But the assassination of President Kennedy and the massive deception around the crime was carried out at a much higher pay grade. Scholars like Kaiser are too timid to go that high. The New York Times and the rest of the media establishment is even more cowardly.
Here's the transcript of Greenwald's January 1 JFK commentary:
Let me move now to the second story I want to cover, which is the, I think, rather remarkable fact that just this week the CIA released some documents from its archives regarding the assassination -- the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy -- so, almost 60 years ago. And I think the news here is not so much that they released similar documents, but that they continue to conceal at least 4000 documents that are still marked top secret and that they refused to release about the Kennedy assassination.
How can anybody consider that justifiable? It's not designed to protect anybody. Almost all of those people involved are dead. We're talking about an event 60 years ago. And yet, the CIA has so little respect for democratic values or for the law, that they just refuse to release these documents, even though the law requires them to do so.
Some of you may recall, those who were old enough, that in the early nineties, Oliver Stone, then the most successful and influential directors in Hollywood, he had won three Academy Awards for Platoon and other films he directed, had produced a film about JFK that imagined, not asserted, but just imagined fictionally a different scenario about how to understand what happened, suggesting it was highly unlikely that the president of the United States was killed by a single gunman, acting alone, who just so happened to have all kinds of connections to the CIA and, then, right before he could speak, the day after the day of the murder, someone just was able to walk right up to him, Jack Ruby, and shoot him. And ever since that film and the success of it, there has been a lot more awareness on the part of the American people that they know the truth has been kept from them.
This film ended with a screen noting that documents that would shine light on what actually happened -- that the Warren Commission used to conclude that this was a lone gunman, there was no conspiracy, that the House used to investigate -- would mark top secret and would not be released until 2037. And the pressure that got created in the wake of that film basically forced the hand of Congress, and Congress enacted a law that required all documents to be declassified and released to the public relating to the JFK assassination by 2017, five years ago, and yet, to this day, there are still 4000 documents the CIA refuses to release, just in blatant violation of that law that required them to release it.
Now, what entitles the CIA to do that, to act as its own government and to simply ignore the law? Apparently, they're getting away with it.
One of the videos that we produced here on Rumble prior to beginning this show about seven or eight months ago, asked the question, “Why is it that Donald Trump failed to pardon Julian Assange and Edward Snowden?” Despite reports -- and I was getting these reports privately at the time that he was very, very close to pardoning at least Snowden, not quite as close to pardoning Assange, but strongly considering it.
One of the things I explained was that the reason they initiated that second impeachment against him, even though he was leaving office and there was no reason to do it, it would never have gotten him out of office, was because it was a sword of Damocles over his head to control him, because Republicans in the Senate, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, the kind that serve the National Security State, were petrified and angry that Trump was even considering pardoning people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, and basically said to him, If you do that, we will vote to convict you and you will never be able to run again. But what they were also worried about was not just the pardons of Assange and Snowden, but also the fact that Trump was very likely to declassify all of these documents he'd been vowing to for years, and he left office without doing so, and I regard that as one of the main reasons why.
Now, there is a book about the CIA and the post-World War II history of the U.S. National Security State that I cannot recommend highly enough. The book is by David Talbot, whom I know because he was a founder of Salon. I ended up writing at Salon. The book is entitled The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government, and it tells the story of how we ended up with this permanent power faction in Washington, the intelligence community that operates completely in the dark, without any democratic accountability and with complete secrecy to the point where they continue to keep secret the truth about what happened in one of America's most important historical events, the assassination of our president because they simply wanted to.
And there's nobody that has the power, evidently, to force them to abide by the law. This book, along with a second book I will recommend to you by Vincent Bevins, the journalist Vincent Bevins called The Jakarta Method, that talks about what the CIA has been doing in secret since the end of World War II, tells the story of why this is such a menacing and insidious agency. But how are we not out in the streets, furious, that the CIA just refuses to reveal these documents we have the right to see when the law requires them to do so?
JFK’s nephew, Robert Kennedy Jr, the son of JFK's brother, Robert Kennedy, who also was assassinated, posted this week a tweet about a segment Tucker Carlson did on the CIA and he wrote: “The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA's murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered.”
As I said, Allen Dulles, as I talked about this last night, was probably the second or third most powerful person in Washington, maybe the most powerful in the 1950s when he ran the CIA until John Kennedy fired him, in 1961, because he blamed Dulles for the fiasco in the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. And Dulles had every reason in the world to want to kill Kennedy, as did a lot of people in the CIA.
But here, let me show you part of what Tucker Carlson said about why, under the Trump administration, these documents were not released, despite the law requiring that they should be, and despite Trump's repeated promises to do so.
Tuck Carlson: Americans have trusted their government less with every passing year since the killing of John F Kennedy. Maybe this is why. And people have known this for a long time. The people who knew would include every director of the CIA since November of 1963. And that list would include Obama's CIA director, John Brennan, one of the most sinister and dishonest figures in American life. That list would also include, we are sad to say, our friend Mike Pompeo, who ran the CIA in the last administration. Mike Pompeo knew this. We asked Pompeo to join us tonight, and though he rarely turns down a televised interview, he refused to come. We hope he will reconsider.
First of all, I'm really glad that Tucker emphasized the role that Mike Pompeo played here because Mike Pompeo has deceived a lot of trusting Trump supporters who assumed that -- because he was Trump's CIA director and then Trump made him Secretary of State -- Mike Pompeo must be a believer in America First or MAGA foreign policy. Mike Pompeo is everything but that. He is the most standard old-school establishment Republican that exists. His foreign policy is indistinguishable from Dick and Liz Cheney's. His foreign policy is everything that Donald Trump ran against.
One of Trump's major weaknesses, as I think most people know, is that he's very susceptible to flattery by smart people. Pompeo is smart. There's no denying that. And he easily deceived Trump by pretending to be on his side and getting into his good graces, always remaining loyal, but every step of the way, subverting what Trump wanted to do. Pompeo is an old-school warmonger and neo-con, and his voting record in the House leaves no doubt about that.
He was also the primary official in the Trump administration most responsible for the destruction of WikiLeaks and the prosecution of Julian Assange. That was Mike Pompeo's dirty work when he was at the CIA. And also, as Tucker says, Pompeo was the person who impeded and refused to release when he was at the CIA these documents that all of us have the right to know. Why would you ever trust Mike Pompeo with anything after what you know?
Now, let me just make one point about this secrecy regime that we're seeing with the CIA, that they think they have the right to keep everything from you even 60 years later. One of the things that was obviously the most important experience journalistically in my career was the work that I did with Edward Snowden and the gigantic archive of top-secret documents he gave me from the U.S. Security State that came from the NSA.
And although I've never put an exact number on how many documents we received, I've often said that is many, many, many hundreds of thousands of pages of top-secret documents, a huge archive. And yet you can go and look at how many we published over the course of three or four years of reporting on that archive and you will see the number is a tiny fraction of many hundreds of thousands. I think we ended up publishing maybe 2,000, or 2,500. And people often ask me why. ‘Why did you publish so few of those documents?’
One reason was that my source, Edward Snowden, imposed conditions on us when he brought us these archives: he made it very clear that he did not want the entire archive published. If he wanted that archive published in full, indiscriminately, he didn't need to work with us. He could have just dumped it on the Internet or given it to WikiLeaks to publish it in full.
He asked us to curate it very carefully to make sure that no programs that were genuinely or legitimately necessary to protect American lives would be exposed and that we did not reveal anything that could put innocent people in harm's way. And we honored those wishes, we would have adopted them ourselves anyway. We think that's the ethical way to conduct journalism. We didn't just go around the world indiscriminately releasing documents. We only did release documents we believe were necessary to inform the public.
But the other reason was that most of the archive was just boring. It was banal and uninteresting. And what was so amazing about that fact -- I'm talking about instructions on how to get parking credentials at NSA facilities or how to put in requests for vacation days, or what kind of staffing would be at the lowest levels of NSA on the administrative level. These kinds of documents have no interest to anybody, they're just even too boring to want to read. Every one of those documents was marked top secret or classified or secret, meaning it was a crime to reveal them, even though they are not conceivably sensitive in any way. And what does this show? Something very important.
It shows that the U.S. security state regards everything they do -- everything they do -- as presumptively secret. That's not how that's supposed to work. Classified information. We're supposed to have a government that is presumptively transparent. We're supposed to have access to everything the government is doing, except in those rare cases when they need to make it secret for legitimate reasons, like troop movements or to protect things that are genuinely sensitive to national security. I don't even put this another way, a kind of broader and more principled way. I think this is a crucial point to understand. If you think about it this way, it's a reason why I talk so much about the U.S. Security State and the dangers it poses.
If you think about a healthy society, and how a healthy democracy functions, we would know -- we, the citizenry would know -- essentially everything that our government is doing. That's why they're called public servants or the public sector. It's supposed to be public and open and transparent. We're supposed to know what our government is doing because they're doing it with our money and in our name, and it's supposed to be a democracy, which can only happen if we know what our government is doing, so, we can make informed decisions.
And by contrast, they're supposed to know basically nothing about us. That's why we are called private citizens. Our lives are supposed to be private. So, we should know everything that the government is doing and except in those rare cases -- when they have a legitimate right to secrecy -- and except in very rare cases -- like when they get a search warrant because they can prove that we're likely to have been involved in a crime -- they're not supposed to know anything about us. We're supposed to be private citizens and they’re not supposed to keep dossiers on us.
And yet what we've learned is that is completely reversed. The U.S. government has built an almost impenetrable wall of secrecy around it so that even the most banal documents or the oldest documents, from 60 years ago, are kept secret so we know nothing about what that government is actually doing and, at the same time, they know everything about us. They track our movements. They track our telephone calls. They surveil our conversations, all without warrants. That was the point at the start of the story. That is all continuing to go on.
So, think about that power dynamic where we're supposed to have power over our government, they're supposed to be our public servants, but -- because we know nothing about what they're doing, because they hide it all behind a wall of secrecy, and they know everything about what we're doing since we're subject to mass, indiscriminate warrantless surveillance -- the power dynamic has completely reversed. And that to me was the point of the Snowden story and it's the point of this latest refusal of the CIA to release all of the documents that are required under the Law of Release and instead releasing just enough to make us think that they're complying with this process, five years after the law required the full disclosure of the entire archive.
My Favorite Classical Music Releases of 2022
As promised, here are my Top 20 classical music releases of the year. Some are compositions from movie soundtracks, because I believe that some of the best musical creations are for the screen. I confess: one or two might have been released in previous years. If you catch me, you get a prize! (My gracious acknowledgement of your perspicacity.) And, yes, that’s Cate Blanchett conducting with FEELING in the movie “Tar” (which you should see if you haven’t already).
So here are my very subjective classical picks for 2022, in no special order. (Reminder: In the thread below are my pop music picks for 2022.)
1. Sir Edward Elgar: Cello Concerto in E Minor, London Symphony, from the “Tar” soundtrack
2. Alexandre Tharaud: La valse d’ Amelie, performed by Yann Tiersen, from the album “Cinema”
3. Mozart: Church Sonata No. 13 in C Major, performed by Louis-Noel de Bestion Camboulas, from the album “The Unexpected Mozart”
4. Arvo Part: Summa, performed by the Morphing Chamber Orchestra, from the album “Arvo Part, Stabat Master”
5. Ennio Morricone: Gabriel’s Oboe, from “The Mission” soundtrack
6. Giuseppe Agus: Sonata No. 1 in A Major, performed by the Quartetto Vanvitelli, from the album “Agus”
7. Johann Christian Bach: Bassoon Concerto in B-Flat Major, performed by Sophie Dervaux and the Munich Chamber Orchestra
8. Handel: Theodora, HWV 68, Courante, performed by Maxim Emelyanychev etc., from the album “Handel: Theodora”
9. Olafur Arnalds: Loom – Piano Reworks, performed by Arnalds and Eydis Evensen, from the album “Some Kind of Peace”
10. Benjamin Britten: God Save the Queen, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, from the album “HM Queen: The Commemorative Album”
11. John Blow: The Glorious Day Is Come, performed by Ceruleo, from the album “Purcell: Love Restor’d”
12. Petr Aleksander: The Whole World Laid Out Before Me, performed by Aleksander, from the album of the same title
13. Traditional: Gaudette, performed by John Metcalfe & Thomas Gould, from the album “Carols Without Words”
14. J.S. Bach: Partita No. 3 in E Major, performed by Mats Bergstrom, from the album “Portfolio”
15. Mozart: Gloria, performed by the Bavarian Radio Chorus, from the album “Mozart: Coronation Mass, K. 317”
16. Mozart: Die Zauberflote, performed by Simon Lopez, from the album “Prodigies”
17. Jean-Baptiste Lully: Alceste ou le Triomphe d’Alcide, performed by Lucile Tessier and Ensemble Leviathan, from the album “Music for Lady Louise”
18. Claudio Monteverdi: Settimo libro de’ madrgali, performed by Rinaldo Alessandrini & Concerto Italiano, from the album “Monteverdi Concerto”
19. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: The Sea and Sinbad, performed by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, from the album “Scherezade”
20. Beethoven: Andante cantabile con variazioni, performed by Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos, from the album “Beethoven For Three”
BONUS TRACK: Inbal Segev: Room to Move for Cello Octet, performed by Segev, from the album “Inbal Segev: 20 for 2020”
My Favorite Songs of 2022
My Top 40 Songs of 2022... I'm hibernating with my family for the holidays, but I want to leave you with the pop songs that caught my ear in 2022 (in no special order... I'll follow up the next day or so with my favorite classical music pieces released in 2022). I roamed the world (digitally) for these tunes, so the list contains a wide spectrum of music, but still reflects my own (ahem) unique tastes. Let's hear YOUR recommendations.
1. "Grapevine" Weyes Blood
2. "Free Fallin'" (from Live at the Fillmore -- a 1997 concert album released this year) Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
3. "Tfelegaleh" Hewan Gebrewold
4. "Always" (from Live at the Hollywood Bowl) Ella Fitzgerald
5. "My Mind and Me" Selena Gomez
6. "On My Way" June McDoom
7. "Carolina" (from the movie "Where the Crawdads Sing") Taylor Swift
8. "Sequana" Souad Massi
9. "In the Light" Mary Bragg
10. "Spitting Off the Edge of the World" Yeah Yeah Yeahs
11. "Family Affair" (from a live concert album) Mary J. Blige
12. "No Tomorrows Now" Tommy McLain
13. "Real Down Lonesome" Early James (with Sierra Ferrell)
14. "Son Individuales" Elif Sanchez
15. "All Our Pieces" Collective Soul
16. "Fall" Pandamonae
17. "Etran de L'Air" Tarha Ebouse Dighe Mane
18. "Shine a Light" Paolo Nutini
19. "Les Racines" Vieux Farka Toure
20. "Al Amau" Noori & His Porpa Band
21. "Je Veux Je Peux" Almwaya
22. "A Day Passed" Linda Sikhakhane
23. "I'm Tired of Taking It Out On You" Wilco
24. "In Heaven" Julius Rodriguez
25. "Strange" Miranda Lambert
26. "Go Home" Angel Olsen
27. "Happy" Jadea Kelly
28. "Noam" Oded Tzur
29. "A Random Act of Kindness" Kevin Mobry
30. "Skirting on the Surface" The Smile
31. "I'll Try" Sharon Van Etten
32. "Just Like That" Bonnie Raitt
33. "Let Me Down"/"Blush" (OK,I cheated on this one: two songs from the same LP., "Bronco") Orville Peck
34. "Dance Around It" Lucius (the video will brighten your day)
35. "California Belongs to You" Erin Rae
36. "L'enfer" Stromae
37. "Sweet Home" SYML
38. "U & Me" Alt-J
39. "Harbour" Cate Le Bon
40. "Carry Me Home" Mlorgan Wade
Orville Peck
JFK - The Truth Will Out
I've come out of holiday hibernation briefly to help spread the word about the mounting pressure on President Biden to release ALL of the CIA documents on President Kennedy. Tucker Carlson of Fox News has reported that according to a source who has access to the CIA files, they confirm that the spy agency was involved in the assassination of JFK --- "a coup d'etat from which the country has never recovered," commented RFK Jr. No matter what you happen to think of Carlson (personally I regard him as a scumbag who occsionally tells the truth) or Bobby Kennedy Jr. (whom I regard as a friend who has done much in service of the truth, but with whom I disagree on his vaccination politics)... the awful truth about November 22, 1963 seems to be on the brink of coming out.
And the liberal corporate media is working hard with the intelligence community to make sure the truth remains hidden. Don't be hoodwinked by the New York Times and all the rest, when these media institutions try to uphold the threadbare story about "lone gunman" Lee Harvey Oswald -- who was actually working for the CIA and on whom the agency amassed a large file before the assassination.
The liberal media routinely ridicules conspiracy theorists -- and because the media doesn't do its job of thoroughly investigating power in America, the press has encouraged the growth of the most far-out conspiracy mongering. But some of these conspiracy "theories" are demonstrably true. That's the way power prefers to operate -- in secret.
-- Yes, Virginia, the Johnson administration (and the mainstream media) hoodwinked the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the tragic escalation of the Vietnam War.
-- Yes, the Nixon administration lied about its secret assault on the Constitution that led to Watergate.
-- Yes, the Reagan administration covered up its secret dealings with Iran and the Contras.
-- Yes, the George W. Bush administration lied about the WMD -- a lie that paved the way to the disastrous Iraq War.
The list goes on and on. Government agencies and corporations lie to us all the time. They cover up. They CONSPIRE. If it weren't for a few brave journalists and congressional investigators, we'd know next to nothing about how power in this country really operates.
So, yes, it's time to demand the full truth about the JFK assassination -- and all the political violence that changed the course of history in this country in the 1960s. And when we truth-seekers get called "conspiracy freaks," turn the argument on our accusers. THEY'RE the cowards or collaborators who want to keep the truth hidden.
PS... Know the top spymaster who conspired to kill President Kennedy and cover up his murder: Allen Dulles gets a medal pinned on him by JFK after he fired the agency chief.
Playing Hurt
I winced last night as young Brock Purdy again led the San Francisco 49ers to victory, 21-13 over the Seattle Seahawks. I felt the 22-year-old's pain as he "toughed it out" (in Coach Kyle Shanahan's words), throwing an "unbelievable" 11 straight completions to start the game, and seeming to get stronger as the violent contest went on.
Purdy was playing with an injury to his oblique, the muscle that runs on the side of your body from the ribs to the pelvis. As former Niner All-Pro offensive tackle Bubba Paris (one of the team's best post-game analysts) explained, an oblique is one of the most painful in football. "It hurts to even cough or laugh," Paris remarked.
After the game, which secured the 49ers' Western Conference championship, Shanahan said Purdy's gutsy performance had taken him to a new level of team “respect."
"Welcome to the NFL kid," the team's older, more battered players told Purdy.
Brock Purdy's willingness to play hurt yesterday underlines my ambivalent feeling about football (a game my brother and I played in high school). Yes, other sports take a physical toll on their players -- Warriors star Steph Curry has just been sidelined for weeks. But NFL football is uniquely violent and its casualties are routine.
Still, I get a thrill from the sport, a kind that doesn't quite match my celebratory feelings about the SF Giants' or the Warriors' triumphs. I wrote about "The Catch" and the 49ers' first Super Bowl victory, with Bill Walsh and Joe Montana at the helm. As I wrote in Season of the Witch, that victory helped raise San Francisco from its deep gloom after the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk and a string of other civic tragedies.
Part of the thrill I get from watching football is admittedly primordial --- there's no denying it IS a gladiator sport. There was a satisfying brutality to how the 49ers' relentless defense (under the brilliant -- and handsome -- DeMeco Ryans) absolutely smothered the Seahawks. But there's also an elegance, a balletic beauty to the game. And the speed and strategy behind football is unmatched.
Maybe I like pro football -- again -- not only because the new 49ers are fun to watch, but because I play hurt too. Most of us do, especially at my "team's" advanced age. Nearly everyone I know has something physically wrong with them. They go about their lives, even though their injuries are sometimes life-threatening.
Yes, it sucks that Brock Purdy felt compelled to play hurt last night. And yes, he did it for his team's respect, to earn more professional status, to make more money -- and for his own sense of fun and glory. And maybe to earn more of his father's love and admiration. In other words, for all the reasons we play to win.
Forty-Niner Coach Kyle Shanahan and QB Brock Purdy
Nancy Pelosi — The Leader for Our Strange Times
Yesterday, they unveiled the official portrait of Nancy Pelosi, the outgoing Speaker of the House. The only woman to hold the position, she was hailed by a bipartisan group. including Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who called her (for good reason) "the most effective Speaker in U.S. history." I must say that my own views of Pelosi, my congressional representative, have shifted over the years. Yes, she's the commander of the anti-left Democratic establishment. Yes, she's an unabashed cheerleader for an aggressive foreign policy (read: U.S. empire). But Pelosi is also an ardent proponent of "San Francisco values," the most gutsy Democratic leader to take on Donald Trump, and a target of the lunatic right. (Her husband, Paul, had his skull cracked by one such lunatic, after Nancy was demonized for years by Republican adversaries.)
Nancy Pelosi's tireless, heroic leadership was on full display in the HBO documentary about her that premiered this week. Yes, the documentary was made by her daughter Alexandra Pelosi. Nonetheless, the insider footage showed why Nancy Pelosi was usually the only grown-up in the room during the time of Republican scoundrels like Trump, McConnell and McCarthy -- and feckless Democrats like Schumer. Pelosi clearly loves our constitutional principles -- and is willing to aggressively defend them.
Toward the end of the HBO documentary, Pelosi invokes an African proverb about a man who meets his Maker at the end of his life. "What wounds do you have?" asks the man's Creator. When the man says he has none, his Maker asks him, "Was there nothing in your life worth fighting for?"
Nancy Pelosi, who fought hard for national health care and against the "madman" Trump, clearly will have wounds to show. (So will her genial, supportive husband.)
This all resonated even more strongly for me because I happen to be reading a very revealing history about revolutionary upheaval in 1848 France called Writers and Revolution by the historian Jonathan Beecher. Beecher profiles authors and intellectuals who got caught up in the political whirlwind and later found themselves stranded when the tempest took a sharp turn right under Louis-Napoleon, who declared himself emperor.
George Sand was one of the writers who giddily allowed herself to be swept up by the romance of revolution, only to later turn against some of the same "imbecilic" radicals who led the revolution. While she never gave up on the spirit of democratic change, she came to believe that a moderate republican leader (as opposed to a monarchist) was the best that France could do in the foreseeable future, given the conservative nature of much of the peasantry and even the urban work force.
Nancy Pelosi was not my ideal leader. But she was the best that Washington was capable of producing during my lifetime (at least who escaped assassination). I'm proud to call her my congresswoman.
Writing Is Not Typing
The greatest authors throughout history write as if words matter. This is a recurrent theme of mine -- and I feel very strongly about it, because I am a writer AND a reader. To my great frustration, most fiction writing today is banal and colloquial. It's no more than what I call "talk-writing." It lacks poetry, it lacks craft. "He said this , then she said that." When you crack a modern novel, that's the level of creativity that you find.
As an experiment (and because I wanted to find out, as a curious reader), I read the opening pages on Amazon of about a dozen novels recently highlighted by the New York Times as "notable" books of the year. The novels were by authors from around the world. They all sounded as if the author was TELLING you the story, not writing it, with artistry and precision.
What's to blame for this simplistic, pedestrian development in fiction writing? The global literary marketplace? All cars now look the same -- even luxury cars. Why shouldn't novels sound the same?
To underline this sad decline in the art of fiction, I present to you the opening of Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Lodging for the Night," RLS's first published short story. Stevenson, who lived in the second half of the 19th century, is too often dismissed as a boys' adventure writer, because of his classic novels Treasure Island and Kidnapped. But the man could WRITE. My wife , Camille Peri, who has just completed a book about the Scottish-born Stevenson's bohemian marriage to his untamed American wife Fanny, asked a small dinner party of literati to read the story. We were all impressed --- not only by Stevenson's prickly narrative, but his descriptive power. (Camille's book will be published by Viking Penguin in early 2024.)
Here is the way that Stevenson begins his story. Every time I read evocative descriptive prose like this, I drink thirstily like a man long parched:
"It was late in November 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices, sometimes there was a lull, and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a tavern window: was it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus or were the holy angels moulting?...The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing, and the flakes were large, damp and adhesive. The whole city was sheeted up. An army might have marched from end to end and not a footfall given the alarm."
“Triangle of Sadness” and the Awful Truth
In Thursday's New York Times, a writer was bemoaning the death of the independent film because smart moviegoers (like you and me ) have stopped going to theaters and "buzzing" about our favorite new films. Well, I plead guilty, sort of -- I rarely go to theaters these days. BUT I still buzz about the few films that wake me up or make me laugh out loud. Ruben Ostlund's Triangle of Sadness did both to me.
The film -- a rollicking, scathing morality tale about the absurd excesses of modern capitalism -- also contains a stunning commentary about the murderousness of the American Empire. Midway through the film, the drunken captain of a super yacht for billionaire clients (Woody Harrelson) gets on the ship's loudspeaker and tells the awful truth to his pampered patrons --about their rampant greed and tax evasion and the suffering of the world's poor.
The captain also tells his stunned passengers that the U.S. government killed JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy -- and violently overthrew democratic leaders in other countries. This is a stunning moment. Yes, Swedish director Ostlund plays it for comedy, like much of the movie. But it's the truth -- and the filmmaker and his audience know it.
A few years ago, a distinguished list of Americans -- including two of the Parkland Hospital surgeons who worked on the mortally wounded President Kennedy and the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations -- signed a statement that said the same thing. That JFK -- as well as his brother Bobby, Malcolm X and MLK -- were killed by the national security state for political reasons. The open letter (which I helped organize) was barely covered by the press, but it was still a landmark event.
In 2020, Bob Dylan, our nation's bard, sang the same thing in his chilling "Murder Most Foul."
Our most astute artists know the truth. As poll after poll shows, the American people suspect the truth. And yet the political and media establishments (hello, New York Times) remain adamantly committed to the coverup.
This establishment duplicity is behind the dangerous erosion of belief in expertise and the rise of the loony right. The corporate media is quick to point fingers at this social madness, but it NEVER admits its own responsibility, NEVER examines why the wild charges of "fake news" often stick to them.
The mainstream media in the U.S. -- I'm talking about the Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News etc -- is essentially a propaganda arm for the national security state. When the U.S. is looking for a war to fight or weapons to pour in, you can count on an army of CIA, NSC, Pentagon veterans to flood the airwaves and the Internet, rattling the sabers and frothing for someone else's blood.
As the wise captain tells his wealthy passengers in Triangle of Sadness, America is first and foremost a war state, not a democracy.
David Bowie and the Art of Death
David Bowie turned everything into art, even his own death. I was put in mind of that again while watching the recent documentary Bowie: Moonage Daydream, which is kind of a sound and vision, well, daydream. The documentary puts you in Bowie's strange and beautiful head (was there any human creature so immensely variable, switching looks and musical styles on artistic instinct?), down to his very end, which was not bitter. "Life is fantastic," Bowie's disembodied voice tells us near the end of the documentary.
Did Bowie, who died of cancer in January 2016, believe in an AFTERlife? It seems that way. He left us an album, Blackstar, released the same month of his passing, that contained these lyrics:
"Something happened on the day he died
Spirit rose a meter
then stepped aside
Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried
(I'm a blackstar, I'm a star star, I'm a blackstar)"
The album also contained a song called "Lazarus," after the man whom Jesus miraculously raised from the dead, that featured these lyrics:
"Look up here, I'm in heaven...
Dropped my cell phone down below
Ain't that just like me?"
The man always had a sense of humor. He played with life... and death. I get it. As I wrote in my stroke memoir, Between Heaven and Hell, getting in touch with the great unknown heightened my sense of the absurd.
Bowie's songs on Blackstar comforted and discomfited me. That's what great art does. It's also what the onrush of our finality -- at least on this earthly plane -- does to us.
As I get closer to the end, I dwell more on death. It's not morbid -- although our youth-oriented, acquisitive culture drums that idea into us. Death is the great mystery. The looming Blackstar. Maybe it's the ultimate extinction, in which case we don't have to fret any longer. But, like Bowie, I choose to think, to feel, it's the beginning of a new mystery.
I don't exactly look forward to it. After all, life is still "fantastic," even in my debilitated state. But I'm more and more ready for whatever comes next...
The End of the World… As We Know It
We're awash in apocalyptic literature, TV shows and films these days -- and I don't have to tell you why. Plague, war (with a potential nuclear finale) and the lethal warming of the planet will do that. But if it's a happy ending you crave, I recommend Michael Robbins's sort-of cheerful cover essay in this month's Harper's magazine, "Apocalypse Nowish: The Sense of an Ending." Yes, Robbins is a poet and what does he know -- shouldn't doomsday predictions be written by scientists, environmentalists or other experts? But I'd much rather read people in ineffable touch with the culture or zeitgeist nowadays. And Robbins seem to be.
Robbins dismisses all the obvious players in the global struggle to save the Earth. The fossil fuel giants (and the political leaders they own) are determined to kill us all in their unquenchable thirst for profits. The war in Ukraine and pandemic shortages have made the people of the world even more desperate for the polluters' deadly products. Even radical environmentalists like Andrew Malm (author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline) look to government for solutions.
But Robbins sees the bright side of the coming apocalypse. Yes, millions are already dying or being forcibly displaced by climate change and its brutal consequences. But in the end, Robbins writes, those of us who survive (or our descendants) can remake the world in a healthier way.
It turns out that Robbins is the son of a 1960s-era hippie mother. Yes, he concedes, she and her tribe were often irresponsible about childrearing. But they gave him something invaluable -- a sense that we were living in a dying society and we were creating a different way of living.
As I wrote in Season of the Witch, this counterculture was born in some ways in January 1967 in San Francisco, where a "happening" known as the Human Be-In greeted the dawn of the new era at a mass gathering in Golden Gate Park.
"The night of bruted fear of the American eagle-beast body is over," wrote the Human Be-In organizers, including another poet, Allen Ginsberg (below). "Hang your fear at the door and join the future. If you do not believe, please wipe your eyes and see."
This is still the correct manifesto for today.
Robbins ends his essay this way: "Is it not when things are darkest, when all hope is lost, that one fights with abandon, shamelessly shoots for utopia? For then there is nothing left to lose. And I have heard that another word for nothing left to lose is freedom."
I tell young people (including my own family members, when they want to hear it) that the hippie era contains some useful lessons for surviving the apocalyptic future. Learn survival skills like mechanics, medicine, farming and storytelling. Take care of each other. Create the world you want to live in.
I find it a hopeful message. I've been learning it --- and teaching it -- since I was a young man. Together, we'll survive.
The Case Against Harvey Weinstein — and for “Tar”
Let me say right up front that Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein got what was coming to him -- justice, after many years of raping and sexually abusing women with grotesque impunity. Weinstein was a notorious predator and a thug and nobody (except his defense lawyers) publicly supports or "explains" his criminal behavior. Then there was the latest witness against him -- Jennifer Siebel Newsom.
Yes, I applaud her courage in going on the witness stand against Weinstein, in the latest trial of the fallen mogul. She tearfully and strongly withstood the assault of Weinstein's aggressive attorney, after recounting how the powerful producer raped her in a hotel room when she was an aspiring actor. But the other story was bound to come out -- and her explanation for it was weak.
Why did Siebel solicit Weinstein's advice after he raped her? Advice about how her then boyfriend and now husband, California Gov. Gavin Newsom -- should extricate himself from a SEX scandal that threatened to derail his political career?
Jennifer Siebel Newsom was raised in a wealthy Marin County family. She married into privilege and power. She has been blessed with many options. But after being brutally attacked by Weinstein, she reached out to him and asked for his confidential advice -- advice aimed at helping her politically wounded but ambitious future husband.
Is it wrong to suggest that Jennifer Siebel Newsom undermined her later case against Weinstein by asking for his help in a sex scandal?
All this came up for me after I watched Todd Field's provocative new film Tar, starring Cate Blanchett. (Sort of spoiler alert) Blanchett plays a world-renowned female symphony conductor (there are still very few of them) who reached her exalted position by being brilliant, driven and, yes, arrogantly certain of herself. Lydia Tar also happens to be a lesbian who feels that adoring, vulnerable younger women are her right.
Yes, she too deserved the fate that befalls her. But filmmaker Field also sees something tragic in her fall. She is a great artist -- greater than the women who adore her and ultimately bring her down. The world of symphonic music loses something rare when she disappears from the stage.
It's true, artists are often capable of monstrous deeds. (Weinstein was no artist, but he produced some great film art while preying on women.) I wish that beauty came in less ambiguous packages. But it's complicated...
The courtroom can resolve some of the complexity about sex and power, but not everything. Maybe we're finding other forums, like art.
The Newsoms
Elon Musk’s Twitterloo
There’s a brilliant (if obvious) analysis of Elon Musk's Twitter Waterloo (Twitterloo?) in The Intercept. Here's the problem for the boy billionaire: Advertisers (who represent the vast bulk of Twitter's revenue) can't handle "The Truth" that Musk keeps proclaiming he's bringing to Twitter. (It turns out that not even Musk wants the unvarnished truth -- just ask comedian Kathy Griffin.) So what's a poor, impulsive billionaire do with a quickly sinking (get it?) ship?
Here's the key graf:
"This is why Musk is now thrashing around in incompetent fury. He enthusiastically impaled himself on the horns on this fundamental dilemma of free speech, one that no one has ever solved. He could have avoided his hilarious nightmare, if he'd just read a few books with a radical perspective on the media. But people who do that tend not to become the richest person on earth."
When I ran the trailblazing online publication Salon from 1995 to 2005, we barely got our media startup to breakeven -- because half of our annual income came from readers. About 100,000 Salon readers were willing to pay $40 a year for our brave, independent journalism. We were the only national publication to devote substantial resources to investigating Grand Inquisitor Kenneth Starr instead of Bill Clinton. Salon lost ad revenue because of our courageous journalism -- but the spike in paying readers kept us afloat.
That's the only way for The Truth to flourish in the Media World. If the public wants it and is willing to pay for it.
Why should people pay for Twitter?
Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley — Peacemaker?
Who would've predicted that the nation's top military man, General Mark Milley, would've emerged as the Biden administration's dove when it comes to the war in Ukraine? Milley, fearing the conflict will turn into a grinding World War I-like bloodbath, called earlier this week for a diplomatic solution to the war. In a speech on Wednesday, he urged Ukraine -- which has scored some military victories lately -- to "seize the moment" and negotiate a settlement with Russia.
Meanwhile, administration hardliners like National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (who looks like he never spent a day in combat) are calling for more war and remain ready to fight until the last Ukrainian.
Down deep, we all know that this war must end at the diplomatic table. Concessions must be made on both sides. Both Ukraine and Russia must be able to declare victory. Yes, Russia was the aggressor. Yes, Putin and his military commanders are guilty of war crimes. But the U.S. and NATO were also guilty of baiting the Russian bear -- and of escalating the bloody war, which has mostly taken a toll on Ukrainian civilians.
I listen when military commanders like General Milley -- who are usually hawks -- call for peace. We all should.
Gen. Mark Milley