But one idea the three of us had was a piece -- recurring -- on musical acts that deserve further appreciation.
Since that idea has not been executed repeatedly, I will note the name that the three of us agreed on: Johnny Mathis.
Johnny Mathis is a singer, one of the great singers of this country. He is still alive. He is appreciated by many and he is a legend. However, he has not had a gust of media attention or a flurry of a topical nature. He deserves both.
Johnny and Frank Sinatra were the big balladeers of their era. Johnny's biggest hit is "Chances Are." He's recorded for COLUMBIA forever and a day and has had many, many charting albums.
Few vocalists have ever sang as movingly as Mathis.
Recently, the three of us were listing to various vinyl records and one of them was Tony Bennett's TONY SINGS THE GREAT HITS OF TODAY. Betty enjoyed it -- as did we -- but it was new for Betty. She was really impressed and that's when we explained to her that this 1970 album was crucified by the critics and by Tony himself. Tony really needs to get a grip on that album. It was a fine album and though he tells it like the album was a disasster, it was one of his better charting albums -- and the highest charting one he'd have until the 1990s -- and he did not leave the label over the album. He continued to record for the lbale and, in fact, recorded "Something" (George Harrison song) on another album a few years later.
The way Tony tells the tale, he was forced by label head Clive Davis to record the album and hated the songs -- so much that he threw up before recording.
I just don't have time for that garbage.
He also says that it was a waste because the songs after 1940 or whatever aren't wroth recording and he never should have recorded songs by today's artists.
.. Okay, Tony, the album includes a song from the musical FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. Stop acting like you were forced to cover Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit."
Secondly, if you weren't so sexist, maybe you could have had better songs. Tony's always been sexist.
Clive Davis (who I know, C.I. is good friends with Clive) was the head of Columbia. As the 60s ended and the 70s began, there was a huge shift in musical tastes. Many acts were falling by the wayside. On Columbia, Clive was explaining to various artists that their album sales were dwindling. They could follow his advice or not. But if they didn't, they needed to prepare for the glory days ending (and eventually being dropped by the label). These artists were people such as Tony, Johnny Mathis, Barbra Streisand and Andy Williams. Andy and Johnny had no problem modernizing. They loved music. Barbra was the big success there. At this point, even her soundtracks were boming. Clive teamed her with Richard Perry and they did Laura Nyro's "Stoney End" as a test case. She liked it and they recorded additional material -- more Nyro, a Joni Mitchell song, etc -- and Barbra ended up with her first top ten single ("Stoney End") since "People" and her biggest hit for years. The album sold like crazy and introduced her into a whole new market. Andy covered songs and they put the titles on the cover -- this is important.
Why?
Because an Andy Williams or a Johnny Mathis, by 1970, already had over 20 albums out. Is this a new album or a repackaged one -- wait, he's doing the theme to LOVE STORY, it's new!!!
Equally true, a hit song that you hum? You see your favorite artist covering it on a new album, you're more likely to purchase it.
Andy had great success with Clive's advice. Johnny Mathis did as well and I'd argue he did better than any of them because he loves music so much. He sought out songs and wasn't limited to male writers. Like Barbra, he was looking for material he could sing and convey. As a result, it gave his career a lift and allowed him to continue recording great albums.
Tony had to wait until the songs he'd been recording for years and years came back into fashion.
He didn't seem to grasp that people aren't going to continue to pay for the same thing. They want change and variety.
Johnny Mathis did understand that and it's why he has had such a long and successful career. He did a wonderful version of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," for example. He was spot on with both "For All We Know" and "Close To You."
In the movie DINER, two characters debate who is the greatest singer -- Frank Sinatra or Johnny Mathis. One of the points in Johnny's favor, according to the movie, is that you can make out to his music.
True. He's also a gifted singer, a true singer, one of the country's greatest singers who have ever recorded.
"Media: Theater of the Absurd" (Ava and C.I., THE THIRD ESTATE SUNDAY REVIEW):
And Whoopi is someone who could be called out in the investigation.
B-b-b-but she didn't strike Chris Rock!!!!
No, but she didn't act either.
Her duties include ensuring the safety of everyone present. That's what
the Board is supposed to do. After Will Smith attacked Chris Rock, who
knows what could happen next. Who might he go after next?
And just having an assailant like Smith in the audience was traumatic and triggering for many people in attendance.
Grasp that.
People who have been assaulted and abused (and both include Chris Rock)
had to sit in the audience with a man who was too stupid and too
unbalanced to grasp that you do not rush onto the stage ofa live event
and assault someone because you didn't like the joke.
As an African-American director joked to us that night at an after party, "This ain't The Source Wards." Nor is it meant to be.
Artists often grow up bullied. They can be seen as different -- and that's not always seen in a good way.
They did not deserve to have the awards marred and, once they were
marred by Smith's actions, they did not deserve to have to remain in the
theater with Smith.
Again, it's Whoopi's fault.
But she never told her viewers that, did she? She never took
accountability for her own actions. And she nver apologized to Chris
Rock.
A lot of great points as usual, read it in full.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
For two years the left has championed policies of surveillance and exclusion in the form of: punitive vaccine mandates, invasive vaccine passports, socially destructive lockdowns, and radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology corporations. For the entire pandemic, leftists and liberals – call them the Lockdown Left – cheered on unprecedented levels of repression aimed primarily at the working class – those who could not afford private schools and could not comfortably telecommute from second homes.
Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained psychically stuck in March 2020. Its members have applauded the new biosecurity repression and calumniated as liars, grifters, and fascists any and all who dissented. Typically, they did so without even engaging evidence and while shirking public debate. Among the most visible in this has been Noam Chomsky, the self-described anarcho-syndicalist who called for the unvaccinated to “remove themselves from society,” and suggested that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit. [1]
In Jacobin, a magazine claiming to support the working class in all its struggles, Branko Marcetic demanded the unvaccinated be barred from public transportation: “one obvious course of action is for Biden to make vaccines a requirement for mass transport.” [2] Journalist Doug Henwood has scolded the unvaccinated with: “Get over your own bloated sense of self-importance.” [3] But Henwood has championed shutting down all of society in the name of safety, while refusing to engage counter-arguments – a combination that suggests a bloated sense of self-importance of his own.
Other left intellectuals, like Benjamin Bratton, author of a Verso book on the pandemic called Return of the Real, are notable for hiding amidst academic blather: “the book’s argument is on behalf [of] a ‘positive biopolitics’ that may form the basis of viable social self-organization, but this is less a statement on behalf of ‘the political’ in some metaphysical sense than on behalf of a governmentality through which an inevitably planetary society can deliberately compose itself.” [4] This is, as the late Alex Cockburn once said, “what dumb people think smart people sound like.”
Even the American Civil Liberties Union – long a bastion of objective thinking and civil liberties absolutism – has supported the mandates, lockdowns, and censorship. David Cole, the group’s legal director, debased himself in the New York Times with a tortured op-ed explaining how everything the ACLU stood for over the last 100 years suddenly did not apply during the season of freakout and overreach. [5]
In the second year of the pandemic, the chief executives of the top US corporations are on track to set new compensation records while the wages of their workers were reduced. This is the conclusion drawn by several analyses of pay data submitted by a group of S&P 500 corporations to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as part of their annual filing requirements.
On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that median pay for CEOs rose to $14.2 million last year, up from a record $13.4 million in 2020. The report said that half of the companies reported median wages for their workers increased in 2021 by 3.1 percent. However, this is less than half of last year’s inflation rate of 6.7 percent, and it means that these workers took an effective paycut.
The Journal report noted, “Most CEOs received a pay increase of 11 percent or more, and pay rose by at least 25 percent for nearly one-third of them.” It also reported that for one-third of the companies, median employee pay declined last year.
These figures are based on a review by the Journal of “pay data for more than half the index from MyLogIQ LLC.” MyLogIQ is a provider of SEC compliance services and has access to the government agency public filings database.
In recent days, a longstanding investigation by the Department of Justice (DoJ) into the taxes and financial affairs of Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, has become the subject of prominent news reports in the mainstream press. The reports, nearly all citing anonymous sources within the DoJ, confirm that the investigation, which began during the Trump administration but was not disclosed by Hunter Biden until December 2020, has broadened in scope.
As of this writing, no official charges have been made against Hunter Biden or any other member of the Biden family.
Prominent articles on the federal investigation into the younger Biden’s international business dealings began to appear in mid-March. On March 16, the New York Times reported that the president’s son recently paid off an outstanding tax liability of over $1 million. Nevertheless, “a grand jury continued to gather evidence in a wide-ranging examination of his international business dealings, according to people familiar with the case,” the newspaper wrote.
Subsequent reports, citing sources within the DoJ, confirmed that witnesses with close ties to Hunter Biden, including former business and romantic partners, are being interviewed by a federal grand jury located in Wilmington, Delaware. Among them is former business associate and fellow Yale University alumnus Devon Archer.
Archer was sentenced to 13 months imprisonment in February for his participation in a fraud scheme, following his conviction in 2018. The operation involved defrauding the Oglala Sioux tribe of roughly $60 million in bonds.
While Hunter Biden was not involved in Archer’s fraud case, the former friends and business partners both sat on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, which, the DoJ has confirmed, is under investigation.
Hunter Biden was appointed to the Burisma board, despite having no experience in the field, during the period when his father, then vice president, served as the point-man for the Obama administration’s imperialist operations in Ukraine following the US-backed Maidan coup of February 2014.
Burisma paid Hunter Biden roughly $50,000 a month between 2014 and 2019. The money was wired to a Delaware-based corporation called Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC, which was owned by Archer and registered by him on February 13, 2014. The company, according to a September 2020 report by Senate Republicans, acted as “a shell entity” to receive an estimated $3.5 million in payments from Burisma to Archer and Hunter Biden. In the same report, the Republicans detailed Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China.
In yet another major effort to escalate NATO’s proxy war against Russia, the Biden administration is seizing upon claims by Ukrainian officials of a massacre by Russian forces in the Kiev suburb of Bucha to implement a new round of sanctions and undermine any effort at a peaceful settlement of the war.
“I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” US President Joe Biden said Monday. “Well, the truth of the matter, you saw what happened in Bucha. He is a war criminal.” Biden added, “We have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need in order to fight.”
The American government, along with the media, proceeds according to the principle: first the conclusion, then the investigation. Biden, who more than one year after the January 6 coup attempt cannot make up his mind whether Trump is guilty of a crime, has already decided that Russian President Vladimir Putin is guilty of “war crimes” in Bucha.
The actual facts, however, do not prove the conclusion. Russian troops withdrew from Bucha right after the Kremlin promised to dramatically reduce its forces in the direction of Kiev in peace negotiations last Tuesday. For days, no significant civilian casualties were reported. On Saturday, Ukrainian forces—including members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion—entered the town, and a torrent of reports were unleashed in the Western press about alleged atrocities.
The images shown widely only indicate that bodies were found, but not who killed whom, when and under what circumstances. While video evidence has emerged of Ukrainian forces executing and torturing unarmed people, no similar evidence has emerged for Russian troops.
Given the systematic use by the United States of false allegations of atrocities to justify wars all over the world, and absent clear and convincing evidence, there is no reason to view the claims of a massacre in Bucha as anything other than war propaganda, aimed at enraging the population to justify military escalation.
Even if it were established that Russian troops fired on civilians—and that has not been established—that would not mean that they were acting under the instruction of the Russian government.
A number of Democratic Party strategists spoke to The Hill seven months ahead of the November midterms. One of them concluded the party is doomed.
With record gas prices and four-decade high inflation pricing some Americans out of basic commodities, party insiders weighed in. The consensus was President Joe Biden and Democrats are in serious trouble.
Worried about not only losing a majority in the House, but also in the Senate, top strategists spoke of the issues Democrats face in convincing Americans to turn out and vote for them in the fall.
Bill Galston, who advised former President Bill Clinton, said Biden’s approval numbers can only go so high right now.
“My hypothesis is that, unless and until inflation comes down appreciably, that there’s going to be a ceiling on his job approval that’s a lot lower than the White House wants it to be,” Galston said.
Gallup senior editor Jeff Jones concurred. “High gas prices are one of the biggest anchors on presidential approval,” Jones said.
Biden’s approval rating is hovering at a round 40 percent. The RealClearPolitics average shows 41.0% approve of Biden’s job performance, while 53.8% disapprove.
The Biden administration has repeatedly attempted to attribute pain at the pump to Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. There was a consensus among experts that the message is not helping the president with voters.
