Here, appropriately enough for the day, is a labor of Questlove that opened his excellent documentary about Saturday Night Live’s musical legacy. You can watch the mashup montage directly in his Instagram post or as embedded a couple of paragraphs into an article on the NBC website. The entirety of Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music re-airs tomorrow night, Feb. 15th, from 8 to 11 p.m. ET on the network and is streamable on Peacock.
John MacDonald is credited as editor of the montage, and Oz Rodríguez as co-
director on the special. Questlove’s 2021 doc Summer of Soul, about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, is for my money one of the best films of the decade, period, and not just because I hadn’t seen Marilyn McCoo in too long; you can watch it on Hulu.
I did the absolute bare minimum in support of our democracy on January 6th,
2021: I bore witness. Sat down in front of my TV set to experience what’s supposed to be a mere, if potent, formality and stayed there all day long. I could hardly believe my eyes and ears.
How anyone watching footage of the assault then or now can honestly describe it as a peaceful expression of free speech is beyond me.
I and every other American would have been collateral damage if the rioters who overran the Capitol had successfully forced the United States Congress to halt its proceedings in some indefinite fashion. The people actually placing their lives on the line, however, were both those like the police who chose a career that puts them in a position to run towards danger, or stand as a bulwark against it, and citizens such as the Congressional staffers whose job it is to keep the cogs of government moving as smoothly as possible. We owe it to them and ourselves to never let what truly, clearly happened be forgotten, and so I do this; I share these words, reeling with turmoil over the knowledge that consequences have been avoided by too many who belittled, distorted, and outright lied about the horrific events of that day, but hoping that with enough of us speaking up and simply pointing to what the cameras saw history will get it right.
I was digging into my copy of Comics for Ukraine — and so already keenly aware
of the compartmentalization we practice daily to appreciate art in the midst of tragedy or, more generally, simply live our lives even as they or the lives of others are under imminent threat — when reports came in from Israel of the horrifying assaults there
on Saturday.
The book, just recently arrived, was crowdfunded in June of last year through Zoop
to benefit the work done by Operation USA. Its subtitle is Sunflower Seeds after the curse directed at Russian soldiers by a bold Ukranian woman who told them to put seeds in their pockets so that when they die sunflowers will grow in their place on the land they attempted to occupy.
Need a laugh?
I’m conflicted. The dissonance of firing up the blog again, rooting on my Phillies, and hoping to get out for my birthday this weekend despite such unending pain existing half a globe away is acute. Yet I just passed an hour listening to Episode 5 of the podcast Strike Force Five while doing some graphics work for an upcoming project and the only reason I’m not incapacitated from cackling out loud nearly the entire time is that my asthma’s so bad I’ve kind-of unconsciously trained myself not to push out breath as I’m silently convulsing in hysterics.
Strike Force Five united late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers in a series of highly candid, very lightly structured conversations, sponsored to bring in money for their staffs as the strike by the Writers’ Guild of America halted production of their programs. Twelve installments were released over six weeks.
