READY TO ROLL: These two guys have a pretty 'to do' list for Wednesday. They're leaving the planet atop a rocket launched from Florida's Space Coast.
In the photo above, NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley, left, and Robert Behnken, are wearing their brand-spankin'-new SpaceX spacesuits in a pre-launch dress rehearsal. They are scheduled to lift off at 1:33 p.m. Seattle time.
You can find mission coverage live on NASA Television and the agency’s website, as well as numerous other platforms (like YouTube, for one). Here's a schedule of events for Wednesday afternoon. They're all listed in Florida time, so adjust accordingly.
12:15 p.m. – NASA TV launch coverage begins (continues through docking)
4:33 p.m. – Liftoff (1:30 West Coast time)
5:22 p.m. – Crew Dragon phase burn
6:05 p.m. – Far-field manual flight test
7:05 p.m. – Astronaut downlink event from Crew Dragon
Recently, we all watched "ReMastered: The Two Killings of Sam Cooke." (We found it on Netflix, but it's available on other platforms.) Here's a trailer for the movie.
And here is some of what CJ wrote in response to questions (I've paraphrased) his professor posed about the film.
Q: How much did you know about Cooke before watching the film?
A: I knew very little about Sam Cooke prior to watching ReMastered: The Two Killings of Sam Cooke. I knew that he was an African-American civil rights activist and popular singer, but had no idea about his story beyond that.
Q: Can you think of any contemporary artists who are scrutinized by intelligence agencies the way Cooke was?
A: I don’t think there are any figures in contemporary (as in, the last ten or so years) popular music that I would compare to Sam Cooke. I doubt that even contemporary politically outspoken African-American artists like Kendrick Lamar are under any sort of surveillance, let alone the sort of intense FBI and CIA surveillance that Sam Cooke was.
The only musician in my lifetime I am aware of who was widely reported to be under the watch of the FBI was rocker Ted Nugent. It wasn’t very hard to surveil him, as he made his bombastic threats to murder then-U.S. President Barack Obama very loud and clear. Nugent threatened, “Obama, he’s a piece of shit. I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Make no mistake: Sam Cooke and Ted Nugent are in no way equivalent in their societal import. It’s just that Ted Nugent is a relatively recent example of a popular musician who was under surveillance, at least briefly, by the FBI. According to CNN, Nugent was interviewed by the U.S. Secret Service in April 2012 for his threats of violence against Obama.
Going back further in time, it’s also worth noting that late rapper 2Pac attracted attention from the U.S. government. In 1992, Texan Ronald Ray Howard fatally shot and killed Texas State Patrol trooper Bill Davidson. At the time of the shooting, Howard was listening to 2Pacalypse Now, 2Pac’s debut album. Immediately afterwards, then-Vice President Dan Quayle demanded that the album be banned. This had the opposite effect that Quayle intended, propelling a then-unknown 2Pac into superstardom.
In a way, Cooke’s and 2Pac’s cases could be considered opposites - Cooke attracted government attention because of his fame, while 2Pac got famous, in part, because of his government attention.
Q: Do you think the killing of Cooke was part of a conspiracy?
A: According to the finding of the court, Sam Cooke was not murdered. Rather, the woman who shot him, Bertha Franklin, was found not guilty of murder due to acting in self defense. Despite the ruling, there are a number of conspiracy theories surrounding Cooke’s premature death. Predictably, many of them assert that there was some degree of government involvement or there were financial factors in play. That said, while the law enforcement investigation into Cooke’s death was woefully lacking, and the press did an inadequate (at best) job covering the killing of Sam Cooke, to date, no one has been able to prove that Cooke’s death was part of a conspiracy. For example, music journalist Peter Guralnick, who wrote Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, a book about Sam Cooke’s life and times, told an NPR interviewer the following in a 2005 interview: “The central tenet of every one of those [conspiracy] theories [about Cooke’s death] is that this was a case of another proud black man brought down by the white establishment who simply didn't want to see him grow any bigger. I looked into this very carefully. I had access to the private investigator's report, which nobody has seen and which filled in a good many more details. And no evidence has ever been adduced to show--to prove any of these theories. But, you know, it's--the love that people felt for Sam Cooke, I think, is far more significant than the circumstances of his death. But in the research that I did and also all the people who were closest to him, I don't know anyone who doubts the official story, as much as they might wish that it were otherwise.”
In the period leading up to Cooke’s death, his best friends in the documentary reported he was “changed,” was a heavy drinker, was flashing cash around, and was a womanizer. His last night on Earth, those things seemed to combine for a disastrous outcome. It could very well be that the two women (allegedly a pimp and a prostitute) worked together to rob Cooke, and, like some robberies, events escalated and he wound up dead, which could result in a murder charge. (The fact that Elisa Boyer, the woman he was with in the motel room, went on to be found guilty of an unrelated murder in 1979, certainly makes her innocent victim act on the witness stand even less credible.) However, the alleged involvement of Klein and others is unproven.
The bottom line is, Cooke’s death was a tragedy to his family, community, a loss to the music world, and a blow to the civil rights movement, regardless of the circumstances surrounding it.
Cooke's death came while we were living in Las Vegas. I worked with a couple of guys who knew some of those involved
ReplyDeleteIt was a sad, shady end to a story largely left unwritten, it seems.
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