Oscars 95: The High and Low Point

First the high: Navalny won for Best Documentary. The courageous Russian dissident Alexei Navalny chose to return to his homeland from Germany, after being nearly poisoned to death by Putin's executioners. He is currently languishing in a prison east of Moscow. Accepting the Academy Award last night, Navalny's wIfe Yulia said, "Alexei, I am dreaming of the day you will be free and our country will be free. Stay strong, my love.” It was the peak emotional moment of the ceremony.

The low point: The All Quiet on the Western Front director Edward Berger, who accepted the German film's award for Best International Feature, decided not to mention the war in Ukraine, even though it's bloodily raging miles from his country's border. When he won BAFTA's Best Film award recently, Berger told the audience, "There are no heroes" in the Ukraine war -- a head-scratching statement that got a lukewarm reception at the London ceremony. (There are actually countless Ukrainian heroes -- dead and alive -- who bravely resisted the Russian invasion.)

So, at the Oscars, Berger obviously decided to stay mum about the war (a close-mouthed strategy emulated by the film's winners in three other categories). This was wimpy. Berger came across as a shallow man who lacked the courage of his convictions -- the maker of an antiwar film who had nothing to say about the war that is tearing apart his Europe -- and the entire world.

For the record, here is what I would have said last night: "This award is for the courageous people of Ukraine. It's time for the world to intervene, to stop the carnage, to insist on a just, peaceful settlement."

All Quiet on the Western Front director Edward Berger

The Human Race Can’t Save Itself

That's the real takeaway from the House subcommittee hearings on the origins of Covid, which has claimed some 7 million lives worldwide and drastically changed our political, economic and social lives. It's become increasingly clear that the deadly coronavirus leaked from a virology lab in Wuhan, China that was conducting risky "gain of function" research. But what are we to do about it?

Yes, China is a closed society with a dictatorial regime -- which makes independent scientific investigation impossible. But before you go on a China-bashing rampage, remind yourself that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been financially supported by the U.S.-based nonprofit organization EcoHealth Alliance, as well as by Dr. Anthony Fauci's National Institutes of Health. Remember also that gain-of-function research on engineered, potentially dangerous viruses is also conducted at poorly supervised labs in the U.S. and elsewhere around the globe.

If the U.S. public settles on a Covid origin theory, it will come from our spooks, not our scientists, because of China's authoritarianism. Washington's sprawling intelligence complex now seems to be leaning toward the Wuhan lab leak theory.
The Energy Department's intelligence agency (who knew that even federal energy bureaucrats have their own spy apparatus?) reports that it has "low confidence" in the lab leak theory. The FBI has "moderate confidence" in this theory.

At this point, let's give a shoutout to novelist Nicholson Baker -- who wrote a serious investigative article about the suspicious origin of Covid in New York magazine back in January 2021 -- and other critics of the establishment line, who were vilified for raising the right questions about gain of function research.

But here's the problem. Because Covid origin research -- from China's clampdown to Republican weaponization of the Congressional hearings -- has been so hopelessly politicized, we'll never derive the lessons we should about how to stop future pandemics.

Whether it's Covid or climate change, humanity seems unable to respond in the proper way. Science, logic and self-preservation are trumped again and again by greed, politics and stupidity.

We're fucked.

The NAMES Above the Title

I was reminded (yet again) of the central importance of the screenwriter while reading the wonderful old Hollywood memoir Fay Wray and Robert Riskin by their daughter Virginia Riskin. (The unlikely marriage between the King Kong star and Mormon-raised Wray and the Jewish lefty playwright from New York flourished until his stroke and death in the 1950s.) Riskin wrote many of Frank Capra's greatest movies, including It Happened One Night, Meet John Doe and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The writer was known for his witty, sparkling dialogue, his feisty female characters, and his socially-conscious, Depression-era themes. (Check out John Doe if you need a refresher course during this Trump time about fascistic demagogues and how long they've been with us.)

But Capra hogged the credit for his films. (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was written by Riskin's friend Sidney Buchman -- a member of the Communist Party and later a victim of the Hollywood blacklist. And It's a Wonderful Life was written by a string of writers, including the lefties Dalton Trumbo, Clifford Odets and Dorothy Parker.) Capra was a hugely talented director. But he was a political conservative and a terrible man. And his great films were crafted by writers who believed in the "Common Man" -- like Franklin Roosevelt did.

I just finished writing a a screenplay for a major Hollywood director. If the movie gets made, the screenplay will credit my name first, as it should. I didn't have to fight to get primary screenwriting credit -- the director offered. He's a writer himself and he knows that great movies begin with great scripts.

But Frank Capra tried to puff himself up. He only made himself smaller in the process.

Robert Riskin (left) and Frank Capra

The Billionaires’ Crying Game

Tim Redmond schools Micahel Moritz, the"whining" billionaire publisher of the San Francisco Standard, who complained recently in the New York Times that the left has run SF into the ground. Writes Redmond, who edits the scrappy 48 Hills:

"I am getting tired of fighting this fundamental misconception about San Francisco politics. The progressives aren’t in charge; the moderates are, because they have the mayor’s ear, and any problems that exist are more the fault of the billionaire class than they are of anyone on the left.

"if, for example, the 60 or so billionaires who live in San Francisco, and the hundreds more who have wealth of more than $100 million, each put up (or were taxed at) just three percent of their wealth, the city would have enough money to house all the homeless people they keep complaining about."

As I recently told billionaire Ron Conway at a tech forum, plutocrats like him (and Moritz) and their political pawns run this City. San Francisco hasn't had a progressive mayor in 40 years, Redmond reminds Moritz. This broken City, with its homeless squalor and gaping wealth divide and boarded-up downtown, is on YOU, I told Conway.

Mayor London Breed does whatever Conway and his crowd tell her. Breed has no vision for uplifting SF. She's a corporate stooge.

Full disclosure: I was called on by Moritz to advise him before he launched the Standard. Moritz is a former journalist, and the Standard has a well-paid newsroom that has broken some good stories. But editorially, the Standard reflects Moritz's moneyed perspective. I should know: I recently emailed him that he should hire me as a columnist to broaden his daily's perspective. He quickly shot me down.

Michael Moritz

We All Loved Each Other So Much

Now is the time when we try to make sense of our lives. We never do. But we try. For me the highlights involve other people. We tried to change history, and we did. Not all the way, of course. Nonetheless, we changed each other’s lives forever.

When I was in college at UC-Santa Cruz in the early 1970s, there was the Chestnut Street collective -- we were too radical to call it a commune. (Santa Cruz was the only institution of higher learning that would have me, god bless them, after my vindictive headmaster forced me out of military school midway through my senior year, branding me a “disciplinary risk” in letters to every college where I applied. He was right.)

In Santa Cruz, we lived in an old Victorian pile bought by my girlfriend Robin Baker’s parents that housed a sprawling group of socialists and feminists (mostly lesbian). We fought -- sometimes with truncheon-swinging, body-armored SWAT police in the streets -- to end the war in Vietnam. We staged guerilla theater plays (the future medical author Laurie Garrett was especially good at those). We – or at least my sister, the future Dr. Cynthia Talbot and HER sisters – organized the first women’s health clinic because the Catholic hospital in town wouldn’t perform abortions (sounds familiar). We taught classes in California prisons and worked to reform the state’s dungeons. We threw wild parties, dressing Cockettes-style in the gowns and bangles we bought from the old courtesan who once lived there. We tried to reengineer the human heart – exciting and disturbing romantic and sexual experiments that thrived for a time and then failed (mostly). Above our ornate wooden stairwell, we posted the lyrics to the John Prine song made famous by Bonnie Raitt:

If dreams were lightning

And thunder were desire

This old house would've burned down

A long time ago

After I left Santa Cruz, I tried – my whole life, really – to reignite that visionary spirit. It sparked, for a time, at the Socialist Media Group in Los Angeles. My then romantic and political partner, Barbara Zheutlin, and I organized the group of aspiring filmmakers, screenwriters and actors, meeting at night each month in cinematographer Haskell Wexler’s Santa Monica loft, while interviewing the Hollywood radicals who were “burrowing from within” by day for our book, “Creative Differences.” We put our slogan – “Everybody Is a Star” – on a button with a bright red star. Group member Sarah Pillsbury wore the button onstage at the Oscars when she won the Best Documentary award. We thought we could revolutionize the movie and TV industry. We tilted at windmills. Barbara just emailed me that a scholar is doing a study on the group. I’ll say this about us: We boldly rocked the word “socialist” at a time when our neighbor and political comrade Tom Hayden was using the euphemistic term “economic democracy” and over four decades before Bernie Sanders’s first presidential race brought it out of the closet.

Someone should also write an academic report on Salon, the online publishing enterprise (experiment) I launched in 1995. For a brief and shining moment, Salon redefined journalism. But we had the temerity to create Salon in San Francisco – the provincial media establishment is still centered in New York. At Salon, the inmates (the staff) ran the asylum years before the suits caught up with us. We published whatever we wanted, we saved the Clinton presidency from the likes of New Gingrich and Ken Starr (Bill himself gave us credit), and we launched (or boosted) the careers of countless women and men: Joan Walsh, Laura Miller, Michelle Goldberg, Glenn Greenwald, Dave Eggers, Anne Lamott, Farhad Manjoo, Dwight Garner, Jake Tapper, James Poniewozick, Stephanie Zacharek, Joe Conason, Murray Waas, Gary Kamiya, Rebecca Traister, Steve Kornacki, Camille Paglia, Susan Straight, Cintra Wilson, D. Watkins, etc. For a time, Salon was the golden oasis in a media wasteland. We were always on the verge of bankruptcy and oblivion. We withstood bomb scares and death threats and advertising boycotts. But we kept putting on a “show” every day. Around 6 pm every evening, managing editor Gary Kamiya would stroll into my office and say, “It’s time to write the headlines.” He and I riffed like musicians -- the zaniest and wittiest headlines won. At Salon we were limited only by our imaginations.

Scoop Nisker, the San Francisco underground radio reporter, used to sign off his broadcasts with, “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.”

Like you, I hate the news today. It’s all about the monsters and mediocrities in power and their victims. It’s time for a new wave, a new generation to assert its agency. To create the world they want to live in.

Below is a photo, circa 1976, of me (bottom left) my then-partner Barbara (upper left), my sister Cindy and Dave Davis, a documentary filmmaker and her future husband. We all lived together in Venice and Berkeley, California.

San Francisco in the Rain and Mist

I'm still besotted with this City, despite it all. I celebrated its strange magic and resilience in Season of the Witch, and I've railed against its robotic takeover during the tech era. But it still enchants me -- or at least the DREAM of San Francisco does.

Today I ate lunch in my favorite restaurant; waiters who know me and friends dropped by my table. Later I walked the streets with the aid of my cane (or Caen named after Herb). I was chilled to the bone, despite my heavy coat and scarf. Puffy clouds, white and gray, drifted lazily across the ice-blue sky. All was bright and clear.

My wife and I are moving out of our ramshackle house later this year. During the last 30 odd years (and there were some really odd ones), this old bungalow served its purpose. We raised three boys-to-men here and hosted countless friends and relatives. It's filled with memories, and some ghosts.

We're moving. Looking for something smaller and more manageable. But we'll stay in San Francisco. It's who we are. Where else would we go?

Speaking of Gene Clark (which I was on my Facebook page) and "Frisco," knock me your lobes on this song. Rain, mist, a woman with a strong mind of her own... what other City could it be?

Let Us Now Praise Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter's Unfinished Presidency... That was a wonderful lead editorial in today's New York Times about Jimmy Carter, who has entered hospice care at age 98 in his Plains, Georgia home. Written by progressive journalist Kai Bird, who authored a 2021 biography of Carter (The Outlier), the editorial makes a strong case that Carter's exemplary post-presidency (which includes building homes for the poor, as well as mediating international conflicts and stamping out plagues for the Carter Center) is actually "an extension" of his one-term presidency.

Bird cited Carter's many accomplishments as president -- including the Camp David accord between Israel and Egypt, the SALT II nuclear treaty with the Soviet Union, the integration of human rights into U.S. foreign policy, the redirection of the country toward renewable energy, the appointment of more minorities and women than any president before him, etc. Carter's mistakes came when he caved to the relentless pressure from the right -- including the powerful lobbying of Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and his own national security advisor Zbigniew Brezezinski on behalf of the exiled Shah of Iran. When Carter finally gave in and allowed the sick monarch to live out the rest of his days in the U.S., our embassy in Tehran was promptly seized by protestors, and the 444-day hostage crisis became the biggest challenge for Carter.

As Bird points out, it was the treasonous Paris meeting in summer 1980 between William Casey -- the snaky advisor to GOP nominee Ronald Reagan and his future CIA chief -- and representatives of Ayatollah Khomeini that sealed President Carter's doom. Casey's secret deal with the ayatollah's men led to Reagan's presidential victory, as well as to the Iran-Contra scandal.

Jimmy Carter also deserves credit for attacking the Israeli government for sabotaging his Camp David agreement by building settlements in Palestinian territory. Carter bravely labeled this Israeli policy what it is -- apartheid. For his courage, Carter was condemned as anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic, neither of which is true.

Jimmy Carter at the end of his life deserves our acclaim for venturing into the sick cauldron of politics, during his presidency and afterwards, and trying to elevate human affairs. It was and is an impossible task. But he never gave up.

The Best Movies Ever Made

The Sunday New York Times riffed on the 100 Best Movies list recently released by the British film journal Sight & Sound. Predictably, the 2022 S&S movie list has changed with the times. ("Citizen Kane" has been replaced at the top by "Jeanne Delmian," the 1975 film by Belgian director Chantal Akerman. Okaaay... I haven't seen the film.) And predictably, the current list is also more culturally -- that is, more racially and sexually -- aware. This has its plus side, as well as its obscure one.

But the sometimes baffling S&S list did prompt me to write down my own Favorite Movie List, which I herewith share with you. Feel free to add your own choices.

Number One is:

"The Godfather"

Btw, I had an interesting conversation about this choice with my 32-year-old son Joe Talbot, director of "The Last Black Man in San Francisco" (which I rank -- objectively -- as one of the best debut films of all time). Joe picks "The Big Lebowski" instead as Number One (also high on my favorite list) -- he insists it's a generational thing. He ranks the Coen brothers even higher than Coppola and Kubrick.

Here is the rest of my movie list. It's in no special order. And note that I include comedies as well as "genre" movies like film noir and Western classics. These lists tend to give short shrift to both categories. Note also that this is my "favorite" list. I don't pretend I'm scientific about it - but it is vaguely chronological.

-- Three on a Match" (Yes, this early example of film noir costarred my father, Lyle Talbot, but so what? It's hard-bitten and great. It also features a young Bogie and Bette Davis.)

-- "His Girl Friday"

-- "The Maltese Falcon"

-- "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"

-- "The Grapes of Wrath"

— “Modern Times”

-- "Duck Soup"

-- "Night at the Opera"

-- "Casablanca"

-- "Snow White"

-- "Pinocchio"

-- "Wizard of Oz"

-- "It's a Wonderful Life"

-- "Out of the Past"

-- "The Third Man"

-- "Odd Man Out"

-- "In a Lonely Place"

-- "North by Northwest"

-- "The Fugitive Kind"

-- "A Face in the Crowd"

-- "Ace in the Hole"

-- "On the Waterfront"

-- "All About Eve"

-- "Lawrence of Arabia"

-- "Dr. Strangelove"

-- "The Shining"

-- "Eyes Wide Shut" (Certain directors -- like Stanley Kubrick -- deserve to have more than one film on this list.)

-- "Burn!"

-- "Midnight Cowboy"

-- "Women in Love"

-- "Day for Night"

-- "Z"

-- "Missing"

-- "Apocalypse Now"

-- "The Wanderers"

-- "We All Loved Each Other So Much"

-- "One Sings, the Other Doesn't"

-- "Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down"

-- "My Brilliant Career"

-- "Do the Right Thing"

-- "Malcolm X"

-- "25th Hour"

-- "After Hours" (I like this obscure Scorsese comedy better than his dramatic films)

-- "Annie Hall"

-- "Hannah and Her Sisters"

-- "Crimes and Misdemeanors"

-- "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"

-- "Midnight in Paris" (I know you're not supposed to enjoy films by Woody Allen anymore, but he got a raw deal and he's one of our greatest filmmakers)

-- "Born on the Fourth of July"

-- "JFK"

-- "Fearless"

-- "The Verdict"

-- "Last of the Mohicans"

-- "Collateral"

-- "Chinatown"

-- "The Ghost Writer" (Yes, the last two films were directed by Roman Polanski. Should he be allowed on the list? Can filmmakers who are sex offenders make great art? Discuss.)

-- "Unforgiven"

-- "Pulp Fiction"

-- "3:10 to Yuma" (the remake)

-- "The Crying Game"

-- "The Boxer"

— “The Paper” (One of the best movies — THE best ? — ever made about the newspaper racket.)

-- "The Big Lebowski"

-- "Miller's Crossing"

-- Jerry Maguire"

-- "The Wonder Boys"

-- "The Nightmare Before Christmas"

-- "Family Man"

-- "Vampire's Kiss"

-- "Brokeback Mountain"

-- "Pan's Labyrinth"

Like I said, show me yours!

Marlon Brando in The Godfather

How the Media Failed Julian Assange

That's the subhed of a very important article by the excellent journalist Andrew Cockburn in the current Harper's magazine. (It's still unavailable online, but I encourage all of you to seek it out and read it.) Assange -- who was vilified by the liberal elite -- for exposing U.S. foreign assets to harm, for raping two women in Sweden, and for collaborating with the Putin regime to sabotage Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential race against Donald Trump, turns out not to have done any of those things.

What Julian Assange's Wikileaks operation -- an investigative network once used by the New York Times, Guardian and Der Spiegel -- was guilty of was practicing journalism. As Cockburn points out, without Wikileaks, we wouldn't know about:

-- U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killing of 11 handcuffed people, among them five children

-- The CIA's massive hacking of private data, including the software that powers our cars, computers and TVs

-- The efforts by the Democratic Party establishment to derail the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders

Instead of being hailed as a free speech hero, Assange has been under confinement for over ten years. Since April 2019, he's been held in Belmarsh Prison, known as "Britain's Guantanamo," under cruel and unusual conditions. He's desperately fighting extradition to the U.S., where he'll likely be convicted of espionage charges and thrown into a super-max dungeon for the rest of his life.

Belatedly, the media establishment has rallied to Assange's cause, because corporate news organizations like the New York Times finally realized that the same espionage charges could be leveled agaInst their reporters for doing their jobs. While this media support is welcome, one journalist close to the Assange case dismisses the November joint statement on his behalf released by the Times and other major news outlets as "a tame and bloodless attempt to get on the right side of history... simply too little, too late."

If President Joe Biden and his Attorney General Merrick Garland want to be on the right side of history, they will drop all charges against Julian Assange now.

Julian Assange

Journalism vs. Propaganda: Seymour Hersh’s Explosive New Report

What we read and see about the machinations of the global U.S. national security complex in the mainstream press is -- there is no nicer term for it -- fake news. The New York Times, Washington Post, network TV, PBS, CNN, MSNBC and all the rest are entwined with the U.S. war state. Their reporters are embedded at the Pentagon and CIA headquarters. And former CIA, FBI, NSC and DoD talking heads fill the airwaves, as if they're objective experts. In fact, forget the term "fake news" -- it's nothing more than propaganda. And we're fed it by the corporate media EVERY DAY.

So it's no surprise that the latest bombshell by legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has been totally ignored by the mainstream media. In a detailed report based on interviews with national security officials, Hersh revealed that last year's Nord Stream explosions were carried out by U.S. Navy divers, in close cooperation with CIA and Norway officials. The Nord Stream detonations destroyed three of the four underwater Baltic Sea pipelines that carried Russian natural gas to Germany and the rest of Western Europe. The pipelines, which were an economic bond between Russia and Europe, were targeted before Putin invaded Ukraine, but the invasion made Nord Stream an even bigger target. The explosions, realized the U.S. government, were also an act of war -- but President Biden and his national security team were willing to take the risk. And, of course, the New York Times and the rest of our supplicant media "watchdogs" went eagerly along with the official line -- the Russians probably blew up their own highly lucrative natural gas pipelines, they reported.

The White House has called Hersh's report "complete fiction." But, after reading his lengthy report, I believe Hersh.

Yes, Seymour Hersh is a flawed journalistic hero. He exposed the My Lai massacre and CIA wrongdoing in the 1970s. But I attacked him in my book Brothers for also falling for his CIA sources in his scurrilous book about President Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot.

But he got this one right. Seymour Hersh, who once worked for the Times, knows a lot more about the national security state than the newspaper of record ever prints.

President Biden and the Nord Stream explosion

Remembering a Legendary Underground Cartoonist

I'm very happy to announce that Bad Attitude, the documentary about the late underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez by the filmmaker Susan Stern -- who is also his widow -- is now available for streaming on Prime Video. Spain, a gentle bear of a man and a legendary artist, was my friend and neighbor and sometime collaborator. He drew some of the most memorable art for the serial "Dark Hotel" when I ran Salon. He also illustrated my "pulp history" book about antiwar Marine hero Smedley Darlington Butler, Devil Dog.

Spain was an eclectic historian, radical, patriot, connoisseur of women's bodies (and their power), lover of vintage cars (and old, weird America), devoted husband and father. He represented the best of the lost San Francisco. There's not a day that I don't miss him whenever I walk by his old house.

During a rowdy Christmas party at our house, where the guests were required to sing a song or recite a poem for their meal in the Irish tradition, Spain was strangely quiet. But as he and Susan headed for the door at the end of the drunken evening, Spain suddenly turned and belted out "No Pasaran!" (They Shall Not Pass), the defiant anthem of the anti-fascist cause during the Spanish Civil War.

They don't make them like Spain Rodriguez anymore. Watch the warm and sharply observant film and see why.

Spain Rodriguez

The Growing 99 Luftballon Crisis

Edward Wong of the New York Times reported today that instead of joining Secretary of State Antony Blinken on his canceled diplomatic trip to China, he joined friends instead at a Chinese restaurant in Washington DC, where they sang an ironic version of the 1983 hit, "99 Luftballons." What Wong did not write is that the song, which was released in the midst of the Cruise missile crisis by the West German band Nena, was an international cry for peace and sanity as the nuclear tensions between West and East spiraled out of control.

I met with Nena's lead singer (real name: Gabriele Susanne Kerner) in a West Berlin loft soon after the song was released. At the time, legendary peace activist Dave Dellinger and I -- a young Mother Jones editor at the time -- were leading a magazine-sponsored tour of Europe, where people were demonstrating loudly against President Reagan's proposed deployment of the Cruise missiles.

I remember Nena as a serious (and very beautiful) young woman. It was a time when even Europe's pop singers took a strong stand on war and peace. The smell of smoke and radioactive ash were in the air. The protestors of the global Nuclear Freeze movement thought they could make a difference. They did. We're still here.

And now our masters of war want a calamitous showdown with China. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Here, in honor of the human yearning for peace, is an English translation of lyrics from "99 Luftballons," which presents a nightmare scenario: a nuclear holocaust is ignited by the playful release of some toy red balloons. (By the way, we now know that an accidental nuclear war nearly broke out in September 1983 -- the world was saved by one cool-headed Soviet Air Defense watchman, Stanislav Petrov.)

99 red balloons

Floating in the summer sky

Panic bells, it's red alert

There's something here from somewhere else

The war machine springs to life

Opens up one eager eye

Focusing it on the sky

The 99 red balloons go by

99 Decision Street

99 ministers meet

To worry, worry, super scurry

Call the troops out in a hurry

This is what we've waited for

This is it boys, this is war

The President is on the line

As 99 red balloons go by

99 knights of the air

Ride super high-tech jet fighters

Everyone's a superhero

Everyone's a Captain Kirk

With orders to identify

To clarify and classify

Scrambling the summer sky

99 red balloons go by

Nena

“Season of the Witch” — The Movie

The screen rights to my other books, Brothers and The Devil's Chessboard, have been bought by producers and directors several times. (Let's see if either one ever gets made.) Even my "pulp history" about antiwar Marine hero Smedley Darlington Butler was once optioned as a dramatic movie. But Season of the Witch -- my bestselling chronicle of the wild years in San Francisco between 1967's Human Be-In festival in Golden Gate Park, the 49ers' first Super Bowl victory in 1982 and the wounded city's heroic response to the AIDS epidemic -- has never attracted screen interest.

This Hollywood oversight must and will be corrected. San Francisco -- along with London and Motown -- invented the '60s. Our "San Francisco values" continue to be a beacon of human liberation in a dark world. The story of how this city liberated itself -- for a brief and shining moment -- is deeply inspirational.

Fresh off writing a screenplay for a major Hollywood director, I've drafted a fictionalized story line that draws together all the tumultuous events that rocked SF (and the world) in those years: the creation of the counterculture (including free heath care, food, housing and music in the park) and the gay freedom movement; the violent backlash (Altamont, SLA and Patty Hearst, the Zebra serial killings, People's Temple and the mass deaths at Jonestown, the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk); and the bleeding city's wondrous resurrection.

It's one of the greatest stories never told. The right producer or director will contact me.

Go, Joe, go!

I just watched a replay of President Biden's State of the Union speech, and he won my vote for reelection. This was the Biden we wanted to see: tough, unapologetically progressive, ticking off all his accomplishments and fighting to finish the job. Against Big Oil and Big Pharma and Big Tech and all the billionaire tax cheats who game the system and screw the people.

Biden targeted all the right enemies -- police vigilantes, assault weapon manufacturers, insulin price gougers, etc. But he did it while employing charm and a bit of Aikido, turning the angry outbursts of Republican hecklers against his opponents. When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republicans shouted he was a "liar" for accusing them of trying to cut Social Security and Medicare, Biden smiled and told them he welcomed their "conversion." He cleverly completed his checkmate by calling on his Republican detractors to "stand up for the seniors" and declare that Social Security and Medicare were "off the table."

All in all, it was a masterful performance. I haven't seen this Biden in years, maybe ever.

Biden showed the same winning charm as Ronald Reagan. Unlike Biden, Reagan pushed policies that were detrimental to the public good, but he did it with a seductive smile and shake of his head. Reagan even persuaded the Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, to sometimes politically partner with him.

Biden displayed the same skill Tuesday night. He made his ideas about climate change and labor organizing and tax reform and gun control seem like common sense. In contrast, his Republican naysayers seemed juvenile and unhinged.

"Capitalism without competition is extortion." If Bernie Sanders (the only one in the cavernous room to wear a mask) had said it, he would've sounded radical. But Biden said it, and it sounded all-American.

"Do something... finish the job... prove that America can still do big things..." These were not just Biden catch phrases during his State of the Union speech. They were what millions of Americans want and demand from their political system. They are what the waitress at my favorite diner told me during lunch after she watched the president's forceful speech.

Biden won her over. Me too. Reelect Joe Biden in 2024. He might be the oldest president in history. But he showed that he can still fight and win.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene goes mental during President Biden’s State of the Union speech.

Friday On My Mind

I'm 71, but I can still remember the anticipatory energy, the sheer horniness of being a teenage boy and waiting anxiously for the weekend to come, with its sweaty dancing and deep kissing that special girl. No song captured that excitement better than "Friday On My Mind" by the Australian rock band The Easybeats. Sung by the adorably bouncy lead vocalist Stevie Wright (who died in 2015 at age 68) and made even more urgent by the memorable riff by lead guitarist Harry Vanda, the song just soars. It packs all the hormonal intensity and longing of youth. And it still makes me FEEL. Here's a live version of the song, which was released in 1966. Play it before you go out this weekend.

Stevie Wright of The Easybeats

“All Creatures Great and Small” and the Search for Serenity

Let's get this over quickly. Yes, Sunday's NFC Championship game was awful -- all the worst aspects of pro football on vivid display. The hotly anticipated 49ers-Eagles showdown -- played in Philadelphia -- began with a show of militaristic pageantry, with an American flag as big as the field, and soon descended from there. 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan inexplicably didn't contest the long Eagles pass-- and non-catch -- that set up Philadelphia's first touchdown. And then 49ers rookie sensation QB, Brock Purdy -- the main reason I was lured back to pro football this year --- got seriously injured on his team's FIRST set of downs. The game was over -- even before Josh Johnson, the FOURTH Niner quarterback this season, sustained a concussion and the desperate team had to send out a wounded Purdy, who was unable to throw. Pathetic. On a wing and a prayer.

As this dismal denouement was playing out, we were barraged with what seemed like even more Americana than usual -- a nonstop parade of commercials for junk food, gas-guzzling pickup trucks, and shoot-'em-up, kickass TV shows.

I'm going to skip the Super Bowl.

Thank God it was Sunday. Only recently I was bitching about the soporific sentimentality of the PBS "Masterpiece" show All Creatures Great and Small. But by the evening, I was looking forward to the latest episode. I want an oasis of calm on Sunday evenings, and to my amazement, this homely little show supplies it.

Last week's episode, which featured actor Samuel West (the standout performer in the cast) and his love for horses (with a disturbing flashback to World War I), was by far the best this season. But I'll take even the show's predictable plots and warmed-over homilies.

Once upon a time, in a nod to Karl Marx, I would've called All Creatures nostalgic fluff that demonstrated the idiocy of rural life.

Now I look forward to Sunday evenings.

It's true, I'm getting old and soft. And the world seems ever more harsh. I need my moments of Zen. Even when they come in corny packages.

Samuel West in All Creatures Great and Small

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.