Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 92
May 9, 2014
Novel Idea from Michael Hastings
We'd forgotten that the writer's widow found a manuscript of a novel he'd written after he died and now soon to be published by a small press. I don't know if it was something he wrote long ago and stuck in a drawer or if he was writing or tinkering with it when he died, one years ago. Here's a bit of a preview. It's based on his early days in magazines, before Iraq and Afghanistan. Brad Pitt still set to star in movie "The Operators" based on that latter part of his saga.
May 8, 2014
Still a 'Mystery'
News of a 25th anniversary of Roy Orbison's all-star Mystery Girl album, with new CD and DVD. Including this preview of a track-in-progress. Roy, of course, died shortly thereafter. As some may know, I was an early Orbison, interviewed Roy and wrote liner notes for one of albums, and may have been pivotal in Springsteen's eventual embrace (read about that here) . Some of this in my little video:
Screwing Up State Murder
Good Mother Jones piece on the new uproar after the botched Oklahoma execution--focusing on the "incompetents" and ethically challenged individuals who administer lethal injections. Excerpt below. I will not that important history and background on all this is found in my recent ebook on the death penalty, Dead Reckoning, and my book with Robert Jay Lifton, Who Owns Death?
Historically, lethal injection has been plagued with problems just like those that occurred in Lockett's case, and they are due in large part to the incompetence of the people charged with administering the deadly drugs. Physicians have mostly left the field of capital punishment; the American Medical Association and other professional groups consider it highly unethical for doctors to assist with executions. As a result, the people willing to do the dirty work aren't always at the top of their fields, or even specifically trained in the jobs they're supposed to do. As Dr. Jay Chapman, the Oklahoma coroner who essentially created the modern lethal injection protocol, observed in the New York Times in 2007, "It never occurred to me when we set this up that we'd have complete idiots administering the drugs."
May 7, 2014
Johnny Cash IS John Brown
To mark the 214th birthday of the anti-slavery zealot this week--read great novel about him this year, by James McBride--here's Johnny Cash as John Brown in Hollywood/TV version (with, I believe, Patrick Swayze). From North/South series.
Common Gun Death in U.S. Sets Off Debate...in Germany
Great new piece at NYT about what happened after an armed homeowner in Montana took out his shotgun and blasted away into his garage in the dark at an intruder--and killed an exchange student from Germany. This naturally set off a debate about guns and violence and the differences between America and most of the rest of the world.
German consular officials have called for justice. In an interview with a German news agency, Mr. Dede’s father criticized an American cowboy culture for contributing to his son’s death. In Mr. Dede’s hometown, Hamburg, hundreds of his stunned relatives, friends and soccer teammates attended memorials, holding photos of Mr. Dede and unfurling a banner that read, “Our brother is dying while America is looking on.”
In Montana, which has one of the country’s highest rates of gun ownership, the killing has renewed criticism of the state’s “castle doctrine” laws, which allow residents wider latitude to use force to defend their homes.
The Ninth on the Seventh
A red letter day in the cultural history of the world today--190 years ago, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony got its premiere, in Vienna. The stone-deaf Beethoven insisted on conducting but was placed to the side with someone else actually doing it as he waved his arms out of time. When it was over the crowd behind him went nuts but he could not hear them, so someone had to turn him around to see (if not hear) that. Then he was carried off by the crowd, some say. And since then? See our acclaimed current film and book about the Ninth's amazing cultural and political influence today.
May 6, 2014
Today in Gun Nutty USA, Part #6176
Andy Rosenthal, editorial page ed. of NYT, so enraged by latest "accidental" shooting (really, murder) in New Jersey--uncle kills nephew, age 11--that he pens a hot blog post. "One of the many problems with the growing normalization of gun ownership is that a growing number of idiots will want to buy and keep guns for no particularly good reason, and a subset of those idiots will go on to kill people."
Monica Speaks
Vanity Fair just posted highlights from its "exclusive" piece on Monica Lewinsky going on at some length--they claim, for the first time, not quite true--about her affair with Bill. She still maintains that while Bill "took advantage" of her it was still fully "consensual," so nothing to see here, move along.
After 10 years of virtual silence (“So silent, in fact,” she writes, “that the buzz in some circles has been that the Clintons must have paid me off; why else would I have refrained from speaking out? I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth”), Lewinsky, 40, says it is time to stop “tiptoeing around my past—and other people’s futures. I am determined to have a different ending to my story. I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative and give a purpose to my past. (What this will cost me, I will soon find out.)”
Maintaining that her affair with Clinton was one between two consenting adults, Lewinsky writes that it was the public humiliation she suffered in the wake of the scandal that permanently altered the direction of her life: “Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position. . . . The Clinton administration, the special prosecutor’s minions, the political operatives on both sides of the aisle, and the media were able to brand me. And that brand stuck, in part because it was imbued with power.”…
After the scandal, writes Lewinsky, “I turned down offers that would have earned me more than $10 million, because they didn’t feel like the right thing to do.”
Ready, Cassette, Go!
You think cassette tapes are, like. over, and just shooting the breeze with Mr. Eight-Track up in Tech Heaven? Like for thirty years? Think again. They're about to re-appear in versions that can hold, literally, millions of songs--or the Library of Congress several times over...Or maybe every Springsteen live show ever....And here's a history of the cassette.
