RSN: FOCUS: Yoko Ono and John Lennon's Poignant Final Collaboration

 

 

24 January 21

---

Help Out, Dang It!

Sorry but long slow fundraisers are the worst for everyone, and the project itself. We can easily finish this fundraiser TODAY.

Why not?

Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

---

Update My Monthly Donation

---

If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611

 

24 January 21

It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News

“I LOVE RSN. I WON’T HELP.” Sound like a remarkable statement? It’s not. We hear that sentiment expressed in one form or another all the time. Guess what? That’s not going to cut it. I hate fundraising. I do it because of what we are able to achieve with the funding you provide. You can add and subtract as well as we can. You know what it takes to produce community-based news. It’s not much. How about it? / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

---

FOCUS: Yoko Ono and John Lennon's Poignant Final Collaboration

Kenneth Womack, Salon
Womack writes: "Along with 'Give Peace a Chance' and 'Imagine,' 'Walking on Thin Ice' holds a vaunted place among the collaborative works of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Indeed, it would be the final, poignant act in the story of their remarkable artistic association."

"I think you just cut your first number one," Lennon told Ono during their 1980 recording session

long with "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine," "Walking on Thin Ice" holds a vaunted place among the collaborative works of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Indeed, it would be the final, poignant act in the story of their remarkable artistic association.

Composed by Ono, "Walking on Thin Ice" began to take shape for Yoko during one of the Lennons' car trips between their estate in Cold Spring Harbor and New York City's Dakota apartment building. After writing the song's ethereal lyrics, Yoko challenged herself to concoct an ambitious new sound to bring the composition's music to fruition. "I wanted to push it a little further, experimentally," she later recalled. "So I was thinking about Alban Berg, in one of his operas, you know, where a drunk is going 'ahaahaahaa.' Just sort of saying things, but in such a way that the emphasis is all wrong, distorted" (Madeline Bocaro, "Just a Story: 'Walking On Thin Ice,'" December 8, 2016).

"Walking on Thin Ice" was originally attempted during Lennon and Ono's August 1980 recording sessions at the Hit Factory. Recorded in seven takes, the song featured some wicked guitar runs from Earl Slick, backed by Tony Levin's galloping bass and Yoko's dance-club vocal turn. After one of the takes, John suggested that guitarist Hugh McCracken restrict his playing to the backbeats. "That's great, really funky," said Yoko, and the guitarist tried out the new playing style.

For his part, John was jazzed about Yoko and the band's progress on the song, which was still relatively simple at this juncture, save for Slick's ambient guitar sounds. When Yoko and the group finished the last take, John couldn't wait for her to join him in the control booth for the playback. "Come and listen before I break your neck!" he said to his wife, anxious for her to hear what he had been experiencing in the booth with producer Jack Douglas. After they listened to the most recent run-through, John couldn't contain himself any longer. "I think you just cut your first number one, Yoko," he announced, borrowing the phraseology, if not the intuition, of George Martin's proclamation to the Beatles nearly 18 years earlier. On that day back in November 1962 at EMI's Abbey Road Studios, Martin activated the studio PA and announced, "Gentlemen, you've just made your first number-one record" after witnessing the band's performance of "Please Please Me" (George Martin with Jeremy Hornsby, "All You Need Is Ears," 1979).

But for all of the Lennons' excitement, "Walking on Thin Ice" didn't make the final cut for their November 1980 "Double Fantasy" album release. Undeterred, John and Yoko returned to the studio — in this case, New York City's Record Plant — during the first week in December. "We're going back. Again. I feel like I just don't want to leave the studio," John told Douglas. "Just you and me and Yoko. That's all I want. Get an assistant, get an engineer, and produce" (Ben Yakas, "Record Producer Jack Douglas Opens Up about Working with John Lennon," Gothamist, July 18, 2016).

Douglas met the Lennons in a small 10th-floor studio, where they began hatching plans to remake "Walking on Thin Ice." As Douglas later recalled, "We only had a germ of that record, so we made a loop of I think eight bars. It's just loop-based. And a loop then was just a tape machine, I had it on a two-track spinning back to a multitrack, cutting bars together." With the tape loop in place, Jack and John were able to begin overdubbing voices and instruments to the song. On that first night back in the studio, Yoko remade her lead vocal, while also recording a spoken-word middle section: "I knew a girl who tried to walk across the lake," she said in an intentionally nonchalant, even disconnected voice. "'Course it was winter, when all this was ice." As Jack remembered, "Yoko was great," and her poetic interlude was the turning point for the song. "John knew that Yoko was onto something with that one — especially with that spoken-word" (Yakas).

On Thursday, December 4, John enjoyed one of the finest moments of his storied career when he overdubbed a sizzling guitar part onto "Walking on Thin Ice." When it came to the guitar that John used, Jack didn't have any doubt about the instrument's identity. "It was the Capri," he recalled, referring to John's fabled 1958 Rickenbacker 325, the very instrument that Lennon had played on "The Ed Sullivan Show" back in February 1964. For the solo, John simply wailed on the guitar, executing a series of power chords as Douglas, sitting nearby, reached over and worked the instrument's Bigsby tailpiece. As with a whammy bar, the Bigsby tremolo arm allowed the producer to manipulate the vibrato sound and heighten the eerie ambience they had been creating for "Walking on Thin Ice" (author's interview with Douglas, August 2018).

By Monday, December 8, the song had evolved into a discothèque-friendly six-minute opus, complete with Yoko's eerie vocal sound effects, spoken-word poem, and Lennon's seering guitar solo. John was ecstatic as he listened to the mix in all of its glory. "From now on," he told Yoko, "we're just gonna do this. It's great!" — adding that "this is the direction!" After listening to the latest mix of "Walking on Thin Ice" with record executive David Geffen, the couple agreed to release it after the Christmas holidays to allow for a full media blitz (Ken Sharp, "Starting Over," 2010).

As history well knows, John wouldn't live to see the song's 1981 release. But as he had predicted, "Walking on Thin Ice" eventually topped the charts. Following through on the couple's plans, Yoko released the single in February 1981. "Getting this together after what happened was hard," Yoko wrote in the liner notes. "But I knew John would not rest his mind if I hadn't. I hope you like it, John. I did my best." In its initial pass at the Billboard charts, "Walking on Thin Ice' landed a number-58 showing. But even more impressively, it fell into heavy rotation in the dance clubs. But the song's fate hadn't been sealed just yet. In the new century, "Walking on Thin Ice" enjoyed new life through a series of dance club remixes and cover versions by the likes of the Pet Shop Boys. And in 2003, John's prophecy came true when the track notched the number-one spot on the US Hot Dance Club charts.

Listen to "Walking on Thin Ice":

READ MORE

---

Contribute to RSN

Update My Monthly Donation

ROBERT REICH: How we can remove seditionists from Congress

 

Now that Democrats are in power, I've got an idea: Let's defund Donald Trump's presidential pension and divert the funds to reunite migrant children with their parents.

Trump is no longer the president, and I say that we treat him as though he never was. No $200,000 pension. No million-dollar travel budget. No national security briefings. No respect. Not for someone who led a white supremacist insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, did everything he could to attack Black and brown communities, and trampled on our democratic values.

But we can't stop at holding only Trump accountable. We also need to hold accountable Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and all other right-wing members of Congress who helped incite a deadly, white supremacist attack on our Capitol and our democracy.

Which is why my friends at MoveOn—the biggest progressive advocacy organization in the country—are leading a huge, all-hands-on-deck campaign to demand that Trump be convicted in his Senate impeachment trial and banned from seeking federal office again, and that the seditionist members of Congress be immediately removed from office.

 I was greatly dismayed when I read the explosive court filings in which federal prosecutors allege that the white supremacist mob that stormed the Capitol aimed to "capture and assassinate elected officials."¹

I was sickened when I read that some members of the mob even carried nooses, bats, pipes, chemical weapons, and zip-tie handcuffs, and that others planted bombs around Washington, D.C., in an effort to divert law enforcement from the Capitol.²

And I was disgusted by the video released last week in which the violent mob clearly says they were inspired by Trump, Cruz, Hawley, and other right-wing members of Congress. Members of the mob are heard saying: "[Ted] Cruz would want us to do this." "We are listening to Trump." "We are at war … traitors to the guillotine."³

But nothing has repulsed me more than the chilling allegations that sitting members of Congress may have actively aided and abetted the attack. Bombshell reports allege that Republican members of Congress may have led leaders of the white supremacist riot on "reconnaissance" tours of the building the day before the attack, apparently to make sure that they would know where to find the targets of their violence, including then-Vice President Mike Pence. And there are allegations that right-wing Representative Lauren Boebert live-tweeted Speaker Nancy Pelosi's location and movements during the attack on Capitol Hill, in what appears to have been an effort to help the racist mob locate her.^4,5

We simply can't let this despicable attack on our principles and one of our most cherished democratic institutions—an attack instigated from inside Congress—go unanswered. Which is why we absolutely must do everything we can to ensure that any right-wing politicians who incited racist violence are removed from office and held to account.

Like you, I watched the inauguration on Wednesday and felt a surge of hope and redemption.

We witnessed our cherished tradition of the transfer of power when Joe Biden was sworn in as president of the United States.

We saw Kamala Harris make history as the first woman, first Asian American, and first Black person to assume the vice presidency.

We saw Trump leave office, with his tail between his legs, scurrying off to Mar-a-Lago.

Today, Stephen Miller no longer works at the White House, and Jared Kushner no longer has an office in the West Wing.

And Mitch McConnell is now officially the Senate MINORITY leader.

Darn, that feels good.

But while our nation came together to toss these vile figures out of power, the harm they've inflicted remains. And the work to undo their despicable legacy begins with ensuring that there are serious consequences for Trump and every member of Congress who incited the white supremacist mob to launch an attack on our Capitol that left several people dead and many others injured.

Thanks for all you do.

–Robert Reich

Sources:

1. "Capitol rioters aimed to 'capture and assassinate' officials, federal prosecutors allege," Los Angeles Times, January 15, 2021
https://act.moveon.org/go/149571?t=8&akid=288629%2E3735812%2EdJWu-W

2. "Lawmakers Were Feet and Seconds Away From Confrontation With the Mob in the Capitol," The Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2021
https://act.moveon.org/go/149572?t=10&akid=288629%2E3735812%2EdJWu-W

3. “A Reporter's Footage from Inside the Capitol Siege," The New Yorker, January 17, 2021
https://act.moveon.org/go/149573?t=12&akid=288629%2E3735812%2EdJWu-W

4. "Lawmakers gave groups 'reconnaissance' tours of the Capitol one day before riots, Democratic congresswoman says," The Washington Post, January 13, 2021
https://act.moveon.org/go/149348?t=14&akid=288629%2E3735812%2EdJWu-W

5. "A Colorado Republican tweeted about Pelosi's location during the Capitol siege. She's now facing calls to resign," The Boston Globe, January 12, 2021
https://act.moveon.org/go/149350?t=16&akid=288629%2E3735812%2EdJWu-W

Biden Must Reverse Pompeo’s ‘Terrorist’ Move Against Cuba

 

TomDispatch

 

Sored

At the Nation, Peter Kornbluh on Mike Pompeo's final abomination, putting Cuba back on the terror list. Tom

"On October 6, 1976, a Cuban airliner carrying 73 passengers was blown out of the sky off the coast of Barbados. All of the men, women, and children aboard were killed in what was, at the time, the most flagrant act of aviation-related terrorism ever committed in the Western Hemisphere.

"CIA and FBI intelligence reports identified two leaders of the violent anti-Castro movement, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, as masterminds of the plane bombing. Both were arrested and incarcerated in Caracas, Venezuela, their base of operations. Both managed to get out—Posada escaped from prison in 1985 and, a year later, Bosch was acquitted by a Venezuelan tribunal after dubious legal proceedings. And both eventually returned to the United States, illegally, to take up residence in that bastion of anti-Castro activity, Miami. Despite the fact that the Justice Department identified Bosch and Posada as purveyors of terrorism (“For 30 years Bosch has been resolute and unwavering in his advocacy of terrorist violence,” one DOJ assessment stated in 1989, before President George H.W. Bush ordered his release from an immigration detention center and granted him asylum), both of them managed to evade full accountability for their atrocities and live out their violent lives as free men in Florida.

"Their cases reflect a long history of perverted politics surrounding terrorism and Cuba—which continued with outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s shameless decision to redesignate that country as a sponsor of terrorist acts. “The State Department has designated Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism for repeatedly providing support for acts of international terrorism in granting safe harbor to terrorists,” Pompeo declared on January 11, reversing the Obama administration’s decision to delist Cuba in 2015. To make this claim, Pompeo reportedly circumvented his own State Department’s Bureau of Counter-Terrorism, where the professional analysts know there is no evidence to support it. Indeed, the Cuba designation has been widely denounced as baseless—a self-serving political gambit by Pompeo to attract Florida voters to his expected 2024 presidential campaign, and Donald Trump’s parting effort to sabotage the incoming Biden administration’s ability to restore sanity to US-Cuban relations.

"The State Sponsor of Terrorism (SST) list was created in 1979 as part of the Export Administration Act—a legal clause intended to give the executive branch the ability to restrict exports, arms transfers, and other commercial transactions to sanction rogue governments for backing international terror campaigns. Syria, Libya, Iraq, and South Yemen were the first nations to be designated sponsors of international terrorism. But on March 1, 1982, the Reagan administration formally added Cuba. No clear rationale was given at the time, and the economic sanctions that accompanied the designation were inconsequential, since the US embargo already prevented commercial relations with the Castro government. But in his January 1982 State of the Union address, Reagan telegraphed that he would redefine Cuba’s support for revolutionary movements in Central America as support for terrorist activity. “Toward those who would export terrorism and subversion in the Caribbean and elsewhere, especially Cuba and Libya,” he told Congress, “we will act with firmness.”

"Once Cuba was on the list, it proved impossible to get it off—not because there was ongoing evidence of Cuban support for terrorism, but because no president wanted to face the political repercussions from the powerful anti-Castro lobby in Florida. In the mid 1990s, the Clinton administration’s top Cuba official, Richard Nuccio, began exploring ways to remove Cuba from the list but found little interest from his superiors. “I never saw any intelligence that justified Cuba’s listing on the terrorism list,” recalls Nuccio, who held the title of “Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State for Cuba” at the National Security Council. “It was done for political reasons and sustained for political reasons.”

"Yet, even as political inertia kept Cuba on the terrorism list, Washington and Havana found ways to collaborate on counterterrorism efforts. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Cuban authorities uncovered what they believed to be an extremist plot to assassinate President Reagan in North Carolina; Fidel Castro authorized one of his top UN diplomats in New York to pass that information to the head of US security at the UN mission. In 1997, after Luis Posada Carriles—by then a fugitive in Central America—orchestrated a series of hotel bombings in Havana that killed one foreign businessman and injured 11 others, the US Interests Section in Havana began to share intelligence on bomb plots that enabled Cuban authorities to intercept the bombers. In May 1998, Castro dispatched a special emissary, the famed writer Gabriel García Márquez, to Washington with a message for Clinton about a plot to bomb another passenger plane and a discreet invitation for an FBI team to come to Havana and review the intelligence. García Márquez met with the National Security Council’s counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke, and other officials in the West Wing. Clarke agreed to an FBI-Cuban collaboration; a team of agents quietly traveled to Havana in June for three days of confidential briefings.

"The election of Barack Obama created high expectations for what Obama called “a new beginning with Cuba” and an honest revision of the terrorism list. “I know there’s a longer journey that must be traveled to overcome decades of mistrust,” Obama declared in April 2009, a few months after his inauguration, “but there are critical steps we can take toward a new day.” For the first six years of his presidency, however, removing Cuba from the terrorism list was a “critical step” Obama could not muster the political will to take. Instead, the administration revisited the SST designation following the December 17, 2014, accord between Obama and Raúl Castro to normalize diplomatic relations. As part of that dramatic announcement, Obama directed Secretary of State John Kerry to undertake a full legal and intelligence review to determine if Cuba met the statutory criteria for “rescission of Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism.”

"After 33 years on the SST list, on April 14, 2015, Obama certified to Congress that “(i) the Government of Cuba has not provided any support for international terrorism during the preceding 6-month period; and (ii) the Government of Cuba has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future.” The United States would “continue to have differences with the Cuban government, but our concerns over a wide range of Cuba’s policies and actions fall outside the criteria that is relevant to whether to rescind Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism,” the White House stated in a press release. “That determination is based on the statutory standard—and the facts—and those facts have led the President to declare his intention to rescind Cuba’s State Sponsor of Terrorism designation.”

"Those “facts” have remained essentially the same over the past five years—despite Pompeo’s decision to reverse Obama’s rescission. The aged US fugitives that Cuba is once again accused of harboring have been on the island for close to half a century. While condemnable, their crimes do not meet the statutory criteria for international terrorism, as American University professor William LeoGrande has pointed out in Responsible Statecraft. Similarly, the Colombian guerrilla leaders in Cuba cited in the State Department designation are there under an international accord for peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the militant National Liberation Army, facilitated by Cuba and Norway—not because Cuba is providing safe haven for them to organize terrorist atrocities. “Cuba has been Norway’s partner in the Colombian peace process,” Norway’s foreign minister, Ine Marie Eriksen Søreide, stated last week, rejecting Pompeo’s arguments. “If a country risks being placed on a terrorism list as a result of facilitating peace efforts, it could set a negative precedent for international peace efforts.”

“Cuba opposes terrorism. It has been a victim of this scourge,” President Miguel Díaz-Canel reminded the world last week. Members of Congress, former Obama administration officials, and even veteran CIA experts have also denounced the Trump administration for crassly playing politics with the deadly serious threat of terrorism. “In the final days of the Administration, efforts to politicize important decisions concerning our national security are unacceptable and threaten to damage future diplomatic efforts toward Cuba and set a harmful precedent for future designations,” Senators Patrick Leahy, Amy Klobuchar, and seven other senators wrote to Pompeo. “One of the consequences of the sort of misuse of the tool that the secretary of state is contemplating is to weaken the deterrence of true state sponsorship of terrorism and undermine the incentives for improved behavior” by rogue states, Paul Pillar, a former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, warned in The National Interest. “The ultimate cost of misusing and thus weakening the tools of counterterrorism will take the form of lives lost in the future to international terrorism.”

"Most immediately, there will be a cost to future US-Cuba relations. Putting Cuba back on the list, as Obama’s former White House aide Ben Rhodes stated via Twitter, is nothing less than “politicized garbage meant to tie [Biden’s] hand.” Although Biden can reverse many of Trump’s executive directives with a stroke of a pen, removing Cuba from the SST list requires a series of time-consuming, statutory steps: a formal State Department review; a presidential certification to Congress, and a 45-day waiting period during which Congress can object before Cuba can be, once again, rescinded. That lengthy timetable gives opponents of positive engagement, led by Pompeo, Senator Marco Rubio, and every other Republican with presidential aspirations and an eye on the Florida electorate, ample opportunity to attack the new Biden administration and attempt to sabotage the restoration of normalized bilateral ties.

"Amid the avalanche of executive actions President Biden has promised during his first days in the White House to undo Trump’s ugly legacy, initiating the process to delist Cuba will be taken as an early signal of the new administration’s intent to reset Cuba policy. Restoring a serious, honest approach to US-Cuban relations is at stake, and so is the credibility of US leadership on an issue of grave national and international security. For the sanctity of truth and integrity, it is time to remove Cuba from the terrorism list—once and for all."

https://www.thenation.com/.../world/biden-cuba-pompeo-trump/

THENATION.COM

Biden Must Reverse Pompeo’s ‘Terrorist’ Move Against Cuba

Far from being a “state sponsor of terrorism,” as the Trump administration claimed, Cuba has been an ally in fighting it.

LINK

Good Riddance to a Terrible National Labor Relations Board Head

TomDispatch

 

Gabrielle Semel at Jacobin on the removal of the NLRB's Peter Robb.

—Erika

On his first day in office, newly inaugurated president Joe Biden sent a letter asking general counsel Peter Robb of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for his resignation — and advising him that if he did not resign, he would be fired.

Robb refused to resign; he was discharged the same day. No other general counsel has been fired in the history of the agency. One was asked to resign, many decades ago.

Many in the labor movement had pushed for Robb’s removal; they cheered. Employers, not so much. But who is Robb, and why does it matter?

The NLRB is the federal agency that administers the National Labor Relations Act. When most workers interact with the NLRB, it is with their local regional office. They may call with a question, file an unfair labor practice charge, give an affidavit, be a witness, vote in an election for a union, or even watch an NLRB trial — all involving the local region.

They may also know that there is a board somewhere in Washington, DC, deciding cases. What they usually don’t know is that between the regions and the board is a very powerful person — the general counsel (GC).

JACOBINMAG.COM

Good Riddance to a Terrible National Labor Relations Board Head

 

The Bernie Meme

 

From retired Air Force Lt. Col. and historian William Astore at his Bracing Views blog, a little commentary on Bernie's mittens and our world. (You have to go to the original for the illustrations.) Tom

"The Bernie Sanders meme has been good fun over the last few days. At an inauguration ceremony where everyone was dressed to the nines, like the rulers of the Capitol in “Hunger Games,” Bernie looked like one of the downtrodden from the districts. He looked like one of us. A no-frills man of the people. And so the photo of him with his practical coat and handmade mittens has caught on exactly because it was real. As Caitlin Johnstone put it,

“This is why something as simple as Bernie Sanders turning up in mittens captured everyone’s hearts and imaginations. It was such a glitch in the whole phony performance and such a nice break from being lied to all the fucking time. We need to give people that experience way more.”

"Bernie has already been pushing and pressuring the Biden administration to be more aggressive in helping people suffering in the districts, to use “Hunger Games” terminology. (We’d say “flyover country.”) Meanwhile, back in the Capitol, people were gushing over Michelle Obama’s fashion sense, or Lady Gaga’s inaugural outfit, with its huge golden bird that truly echoed the privileged getups of Capitol denizens (credit to Ron Placone for the Gaga/Hunger Games reference).

A full-throated Lady Gaga. If only that golden bird had been a mockingjay.

As Bernie wrote in his recent op-ed:

“In this moment of unprecedented crises, Congress and the Biden administration must respond through unprecedented action. No more business as usual. No more same old, same old.

"Democrats, who will now control the White House, the Senate and the House, must summon the courage to demonstrate to the American people that government can effectively and rapidly respond to their pain and anxiety. As the incoming chairman of the Senate budget committee that is exactly what I intend to do.”

"Good luck, Mitten Man. We need you now more than ever."

https://bracingviews.com/2021/01/23/the-bernie-meme/

BRACINGVIEWS.COM

The Bernie Meme

Bernie with Ulysses S. Grant W.J. Astore The Bernie Sanders meme has been good fun over the last few days. At an inauguration ceremony where everyone was dressed to the nines, like the rulers of th…

LINK