A Few of My Fellow Americans

The blog will be shuttered for the next week or two as I make my triumphant return to Italy, site of one of the worst experiences of my life. Like I could have stayed away. I have really taken to Europe in my travels there, the cafes and the piazzas, the prioritization of leisure, the emphasis on making cities walkable, and how even if the apparatus of the state sometimes moves slow, it is there to help you, as I learned during my Roman misadventure in late 2021 when I might have wound up in a COVID hotel but didn’t have to pay a dime and even got served chicken on the bone and cuttlefish for dinner. Even so, by the end of my extended stay, I was longing for home, for giant mugs of coffee and college football and Hallmark Channel Christmas movies, for America.

It has reached the point in the United States, a current 3.8 million square mile flood zone of atrocity and evil idiocy, that I don’t even know what to say, not least because if you say something, it might be deemed by vile actors as un-American. That is but one reason it is hard to love my country these days, though I do. Not just the idea of America, mind you, of what it can be at its best, but America itself, here, now, still. This country is not supposed to be made in the image of one man, no matter how much that one man at the top wants it to be, and no matter how hard he tries to make himself the main character of every day of our lives. America is a country of 340 million others; here are eight of them. 

A Few of My Fellow Americans

Selena Gomez. The Grand Prairie, Texas native was so unbearably wooden in the first season of “Only Murders in the Building” that it kept threatening to sink the whole venture for me. But she worked at it, got better, and has kept getting better, and so far in this fifth season she has been better than ever, truly becoming the deadpan straw that now stirs the whole drink. She’s a billionaire, she doesn’t care what I think, that’s fine, but I’m proud of her.

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. America might have the world’s worst leader, certainly its dumbest, but despite it all, we still have the World’s Greatest Athlete. After charting new courses in the 400m hurdles, McLaughlin-Levrone of New Brunswick, New Jersey transitioned to the 400m flat with the intent of boldly going where no woman had gone before save for one who competed for a track program that has openly confessed to state sponsored doping. At the recent World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, she came as close as anyone ever has to surpassing that 40-year-old world record, though it was not just what she did but how she did it. The glory in the 400m is only achieved by surviving the agony of the last 100m when a proverbial piano lands on your back, rigor mortis seizes your body, locking up your muscles as you try to finish, a herculean struggle waged against your own body as much as against the other runners. She was pushed to her world championship record by the Dominican Republic’s equally incredible runner-up Marileidy Paulino, but in the homestretch, Paulino turned into every 400m runner ever, grimacing and flailing while McLaughlin-Levrone just pushed through what must have been immense pain with transfixing grace. It’s impossible, but she makes it look easy. I’m thankful every time I get to see her run.

Maria McKee, Ryan Hedgecock, Marvin Etzioni, Don Heffington (1950-2021). On Friday I saw this Portlandia-inspired variety show with Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen and they did a whole bit talking about bands that were destined to be forgotten. The list they flashed up onscreen included Lone Justice, the Los Angeles cowpunk band that blazed across the sky for a short time in the 80s before the hype and the imagemakers (and the struggle to translate the energy of their fabled live shows to record) quickly did them in. And though Brownstein and Armisen settled on The Plimsouls as the band they wanted our crowd to focus on keeping alive, I’m respectfully eschewing their appeal to instead venerate the memory of Lone Justice. If there are three bands from any era that I wish I could have seen live they are the 1978 version of Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, Emmylou Harris when she toured with the ephemeral Spyboy in the late 90s, and the classic lineup listed above of Lone Justice. I mean, Maria McKee was the greatest rock and roll front woman of all time and I’ll bet most people don’t even know it.

Meredith Marks (on the right) on a recent episode of RHOSLC giving off some real Billy Zane in Zoolander energy.

Meredith Marks. In playing with modes of storytelling in what is tantamount to real time and with a slippery sense of not just reality but truth itself, “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” more so than any so-called prestige TV drama, encapsulates and expresses our weird postmodern age. Season 4 went through the looking glass completely. And no one inhabits this world with more revelatory magnificence than Meredith Marks, Windy City native turned Pharoah of Park City, whose air constitutes a class alone, charismatically illuminating equivocation as the ultimate shield against inconvenient truth, and who hasn’t won an Emmy only because there is no award for Best Performance as Oneself. 

John Mellencamp. Like my Iowa homegirl Hailey Whitters, I never stopped being a fan of the Bard of Bloomington, IN. Even so, I had not listened to a new Mellencamp record since “Cuttin’ Heads” at the turn of the century. The algorithm, though, finally did one good thing this year when streaming served me “Hey God,” the opening cut off his most recent album, 2023’s “Orpheus Descending.” The song is essentially that line from “Everyone Says I Love You” about mankind collectively filing a class action suit against God but remade as an angry dirge. It’s direct, and didactic, but listen to Mellencamp’s voice, reduced it a primal growl that makes it sound like he has no time to waste on couching what he wants to say in poetry or subtext. What’s more, on “Orpheus Descending” he reteamed with violinist and fiddler Lisa Germano, one of his preeminent collaborators in the late 80s, early 90s glory days, which I learned upon checking the album credits after hearing the violin solo in the middle of “Hey God” and thinking, “Is that Lisa Germano?” The whole record sounds like a man taking stock of the world as he nears the end and not liking what he sees and therefore evoking something life-affirming by bringing an old friend back into the fold.

Anyway, apropos of all that, here are my 5 favorite Mellencamp deep cuts:

Beige to Beige. A takedown of mindless conformity with an upbeat melody that suggests pulling on the party’s blue, nay, beige overalls and whistling while digging your own grave. 

Women Seem. The funniest joke the thrice-divorced Mellencamp ever wrote and refreshingly he made himself the butt of it.

Danger List. “American Fool” is mostly known for its two big singles but, man, the whole album has some monster heartland riffs. Like on this track where he so thoroughly inhabits the mind of the sort of self-isolated male that has come to dominate our present that honestly, it’s a little frightening.

We Are the People. An anthemic reminder that this country belongs to us; that we the people have the power. Even given such timelessness, or maybe timeliness, of the theme, what I like most about this one is how it showcases both Germano and backup singer Crystal Taliefero as true co-stars, evoking how Mellencamp’s masterpiece “The Lonesome Jubilee” is as much about his band. 

Between a Laugh and a Tear. “Authority Song,” sure, “Jack and Diane,” of course, “Pink Houses,” obviously, but to me, this is the ur-Mellencamp-text.