Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 165

Ron Burgundy--For Real?

Who shows up on this week's bestsellers lists at both Publishers Weekly and NYT ?  None other than fake anchorman Ron Burgundy with his first fake memoir.  #10 at PW and #11 at the Times.  On the fiction list?  No: On the non-fiction side.  Both outlets appears aware that Burgundy is a movie character, not a real person.  So: huh?  Well, they also place all those books by Sarah Palin and all the Fox hosts on the non-fiction side, so there you are.

Even Too Crazy for Texas?

Probably not.  That would be Rep. Steve Stockman who stunned the political world with a last-second decision to challenge rightwing Sen. Jon Cornyn--from the RIGHT.   Mother Jones has started collecting choice Stockman quotes.  Perhaps I will start a daily feature on this race.  Quotes sampler.  And see @stockmansenate.

His campaign bumper sticker: "If babies had guns, they wouldn't be aborted."This tweet: "The best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas come out."And this one: "Democrats are playing the knockout game with your health insurance."The time he raffled off an AR-15 as a campaign fundraiser.The second time he raffled off an AR-15 as a campaign fundraiser.His interview with Ted Nugent, in which he wondered whether victims of gun violence who advocated for gun control were "useful idiots"?His decision to bring Nugent as his plus one to last year's state of the union.His (empty) threat to impeach President Obama over gun control.The time he compared Obama to Saddam Hussein.The time he explained he would vote against the Violence Against Women Act because it helps "men dressed up as women."The $350,000 in income that's unexplained in his personal financial disclosures.

Beethoven and Mandela

This, of course, would be my favorite Mandela story of the day.  It's the tale of a well-known Welsh pianist who moved to South Africa and refused to play for apartheid audiences. Then he let his rehearsal space be used as a secret meeting place for Mandela and his colleagues.  To drown out their discussions he would incessantly practice one of Beethoven's greatest pieces, his Piano Concerto No. 4 and would be hailed as a hero to the cause.  “Happily the music was very loud, and if there were any bugs, all the security police would hear would be Beethoven and not us planning resistance to apartheid.  Beethoven would have been happy.”  Cool photo of Rubens--with George Bernard Shaw. 

Also note: After the change in power in South Africa, the country did not yet have a new national anthem--so at the 1992 Olympics the music played for its winning athletes was, aptly, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."  My new film and book on Beethoven's 9th.

Now here's a terrific rendition of the 4th, with Helene Grimaud.

Our Man With Havana

Gif of Obama shaking hands with (Raul) Castro at Mandela funeral today.   Chris Cuomo on this as a step forward, even if it was largely unavoidable.

Pop Pornification

A welcome piece by actress ("Parks and Rec," many movies) and avowed feminist Rashida Jones on the "pornification" of pop-culture--and what happened when she express these views earlier on Twitter.  Of course she was hit for "slut shaming"--even though the most frequent images she cites are G-strings, stripper poles, and, how to put it, bending over and sticking out tongue.    "Let me say up front: I am not a prude. I love sex; I am comfortable with my sexuality. Hell, I've even posed in my underwear. I also grew up on a healthy balance of sexuality in pop stars. Yes, we had Madonna testing the boundaries of appropriateness, but then we also had Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, and Cyndi Lauper, women who played with sexuality but didn't make it their calling card. And for every 2 Live Crew 'Me So Horny' video girl, there was Susanna Hoffs singing tenderly about her eternal flame.

"Twenty years later, all the images seem homogenous. Every star interprets 'sexy' the same way: lots of skin, lots of licking of teeth, lots of bending over. I find this oddly...boring. Can't I just like a song without having to take an ultrasound tour of some pop star's privates?"

'Lonesome' Rosanne

If you missed cut for storm-benefit album by Rosanne Cash, produced by Dan Knobler and Mason Jar Music, with Dan also on guitar.  He's the son of my old (and still) Crawdaddy pal Peter Knobler.

Snowden: He's Da Man

No, it's not me, or even Glenn Greenwald, who is saying Edward Snowden is "hands down" this year's Person of the Year.  It's the estimable John Cassidy of The New Yorker.  Time magazine has named its 10 finalists, ranging from the Pope (another good choice) to Miley Cyrus. Cassidy:

According to Time, its award, which will be bestowed on Wednesday, goes to the person who, in the opinion of the magazine’s editors, had the most influence on the news. By this metric, it’s no contest. In downloading thousands of files from the computers of the electronic spying agency and handing them over to journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman, Snowden unleashed a torrent of news stories that began in May, when the Guardian and the Washington Post published a series of articles about the N.S.A.’s surveillance activities. Seven months later, the gusher is still open. Just last week, we learned that the agency is tracking the whereabouts of hundreds of millions of cell phones, gathering nearly five billion records a day.

It’s not just here in the United States. Snowden’s revelations are still causing ruptures and generating headlines all around the world....

Spying Via Video Games

You may have heard about NYT scoop, again via Snowden.  Now they've posted a video, with sample game:

Adam Lanza's Spreadsheet

I've read a fair amount about the Sandy Hook massacre, and watched a couple of docs on Adam Lanza and his mom but it was still news to me--in a new book--that he had a 7x4 foot spread sheet listing the 500 biggest mass murders in history that his mother surely must have seen on a rare trip to his room.  From a review at Salon by Laura Miller:

For Nancy — described by a friend as a “live free or die” New Hampshire native who “came from a culture of guns” — target practice was a wholesome family activity and one of the few ways she felt able to bond with her son. Yet Lysiak also establishes that in 2012 Nancy Lanza was both very concerned about Adam’s mental state and had more or less given up on drawing him out of his shell, although she did hope that a planned move out of state might change that. Furthermore, Nancy was worried enough to venture into the forbidden sanctum of her son’s room, where she discovered many disturbing drawings, “gruesome depictions of death, images of mutilated corpses,” including a “grassy field lined with the corpses of young children.” Was she also aware of the “massive spreadsheet, seven feet long and four feet wide,” ranking “the top five hundred mass murderers in world history”? That would seem like a hard thing either to miss or to shrug off.

According to a friend in whom Nancy Lanza confided after finding the pictures, she hesitated to confront her son because “she feared he might further shut her out” and “he would be lost forever.” Adam Lanza was also, by that point, heavily armed, and if his mother worried that any disturbance might provoke a violent reaction, she was probably right. Yet a resistance to seeking help — or, perhaps, a contentious temperament that caused her to find fault with much of the help offered — had left this self-reliant Yankee with the perception that she had few options.

John Lennon: 33 Years On

Yes, he was assasinated on this night in 1980.  I was among those who first heard about via TV bulletin in NYC about 11 p.m. Went uptown to the Dakota the next day and then to the memorial in Central Park a couple days later.

 When I was at Crawdaddy for most of the 1970s, we were, at times, close to John, who was not very accessible for most of the decade (when he was mainly being bad or being a dad).  We did publish his self-review of "Imagine,"  interviewed Yoko at length, and obtained an exclusive interview with John during his season in hell in L.A.  When I asked him to contribute to a special issue revolving around Springsteen's "Growin' Up," he sent me a nice note, which I still have, and then out of the blue this photo--presumably that's him that at the urinal, with his caption--signed on the back in classic Lennonese: "Just pissing about."