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.

   

The World Gets Worse

The news here in America is virtually all bad these days assuming your head is not buried in the sand. The government is on the verge of shutting down, free speech is under assault, troops are being deployed in cities, people are being disappeared, the Secretary of Defense wants to turn the U.S. military into a casting call for Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia,” and now the President appears to be back on his movie tariff bullshit. At least I could get a kick out of His Imbecility posting what was tantamount to a third-grade level book report on Amelia Earhart on his ice cream social app, except then last night I discovered that her eminence Nicole Kidman is separating from Keith Urban and I just felt sad again. The reasons are not my business and if married couples have determined that the best course of action for their own pursuit of happiness is to separate, hey, I’m all for it. Still. There are very few constants in this old world and one of them was Keith Urban attending the Academy Awards with Nicole Kidman and standing by in support while she fielded inane questions from whoever they’ve assigned to the red carpet that year and enthusiastically clapping in the audience whenever she gets mentioned and now that’s apparently gone too. I mean, maybe this means Kidman can bring Naomi Watts to the Oscars, kinda like how Michelle Williams always brings her bestie Busy Philipps, but I’ll miss him and his endearingly bad haircut.

Keep your parasocial celebrity relationships close, people. 

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

Death Kills, says the t-shirt of Spinal Tap bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), but then, you can’t kill rock and roll, as the Prince of Darkness once sang. And so, if you thought you had seen the last of the fictional heavy metal band of Rob Reiner’s landmark, eternally hilarious 1984 mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap,” they are back. Smalls, lead singer David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), and guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), spurred from some mysterious breakup 15 years ago to play one more contractually obligated show in the wake of the death of their manager, Ian Faith. The contractual obligation is a pretty good joke, but unlike the original, “Spinal Tap II” demonstrates little interest in taking the piss out of the music and concert industries themselves. Live Nation is just sitting there and…crickets. The funniest jokes are modest, and the inter-band tension feels half-hearted at best. The film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum once noted that despite the original’s merit’s, “it spawned what could be the laziest of all current subgenres, the supposedly satiric pseudodocumentary,” and so, rather than exist as its own spiritual heir, “Spinal Tap II” feels more akin to its sluggish spawn. Then again, “This Is Spinal Tap” was so successful in part because of its sincerity and that sincerity saves the sequel which isn’t the same thing as saying it’s good.

In writing about Bruce Springsteen’s reunion tour with The E Street Band in 1999, the esteemed Greil Marcus noted that what made their performances successful was that the Boss could still fail while, say, The Rolling Stones couldn’t. The Stones we’re “fixed,” Marcus wrote, “their books written, their prophecies behind them,” while Springsteen, on the other hand, still wanted more than he could have, was still taking risks live and on record, some bound to miss the mark. And it’s more than a little ironic that Spinal Tap is reuniting, so to speak, the same year that another fabled British band, Oasis, reunited after so long apart. And Oasis? As it turns out, they are too big to fail. Their prophecies were written a long time ago, as were Spinal Tap’s, and if Liam Gallagher is still out here wearing parka jackets with popped collars, then it only makes sense that Marty DiBergi (Reiner) is still out here wearing his USS Oral Sea OV-4B ballcap. That hat underlines much of the movie, which is content to literally retell many of the same jokes from the first one, as if the characters themselves are “This Is Spinal Tap” fans quoting lines to one another, just as Spinal Tap is content to play all the same songs from the first movie rather than compose any new ones. The people are here for “Big Bottom.” I don’t think it’s anymore a spoiler to say their new live performance of “Stonehenge” concludes with another disaster than to say Oasis has been concluding every reunion show with a double barrel blast of “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova.”

Some Drivel On...the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony

If the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics were the best Olympic Games of my lifetime, the viewing experience was still not quite perfect, at least not in America. I enjoyed the opening ceremonies even if the Parade of Nations on the Seine worked less well in practice than in theory, but what I liked least about them didn’t have anything to do with the ceremony itself (any appearance by Gaga is good) and more to do with NBC’s presentation of it. As hosts it chose the peculiar triumvirate of Mike Tirico, Kelly Clarkson, and Peyton Manning. In wake of their less than spectacular job, Clarkson took the most heat. She did have a tendency to speak over moments and performances rather than letting them be, and she did not seem wholly prepared in terms of research, and those are fair critiques. But also, Clarkson was the only one bringing any sense of palpable enthusiasm, hung out to dry by Tirico, who in his bland way is acceptable, if nothing more, as the traditional Olympic anchor but in this scenario failed in the role of interlocutor between his co-hosts. Manning, though, was worst. If Clarkson came across ill-prepared, Manning made a point of bragging about his preparation and then did next to nothing to demonstrate it, essentially saying things like, I talked with the American athletes last night, Mike, and they all told me how excited they are for this moment. For all his media experience, in that environment, he was a nothing burger, seeming to recede from the proceedings entirely for long stretches and leaving Clarkson to pick up the slack. The whole debacle reminded me of Anne Hathaway unfairly shouldering the brunt of the criticism for James Franco’s virtual ghosting of the Oscars in real time. 

The only moment NBC’s broadcast worked, in fact, was when the then-Today Show co-hosts Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb momentarily took over masters of ceremony duties. That’s because Guthrie and Kotb knew that you treat an opening ceremony like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, or the Rose Parade, rather than a sporting event. And that is why I am so grateful that NBC saw the error of its ways and has enlisted Guthrie and Terry Gannon to host the opening ceremonies for 2026 in Milano Cortina. In my memory, no one ever got the opening ceremony equation better than Bob Costas and Katie Couric, not just two people who understood the job and how to manifest it but a perfect yin and yang. Gannon isn’t Costas, certainly not in disposition, and so he will not be Guthrie’s yang, exactly. But he’s also worked for a decade now with Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir in calling figure skating events for NBC and understands the line between sports and showbiz and has demonstrated an ability to have fun while conveying pertinent information, just what the opening ceremony role requires. 

I was about to observe that unlike its competitor ABC, which insists on a three-person NBA Finals booth no matter what, NBC was willing to go back to two. But then, it turns out that American Winter Olympics snowboarding legend Shaun White will join Guthrie and Gannon in the booth for the Parade of Nations part. If to me, it seems unnecessary, I also understand the network wanting a little star power, and it’s better to have one person like White than two, and he should be ok because Guthrie and Gannon both have chops for setting other people up. And anyway, Al Roker is always there with Guthrie and Kotb at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, sort of the Ed McMahon, or Andy Richter of the affair and so maybe White can fill that role. He was in that Mila Kunis comedy “Friends with Benefits” after all. At any rate, he’s not another Manning.

Judging a Movie by Its Poster

I rarely, if ever, literally judge a book by its cover, though I judge books by their book jackets, or book jacket blurbs, I should say, all the time. Because what else are you going to base it on unless it’s Maureen Corrigan on Fresh Air, a review in the Weekend FT, or something from your father-in-law’s never-ending bookshelf? In the pre-streaming era, I judged compact discs, or cassette tapes, by their covers constantly, leading to myriad regrets but also some remarkable discoveries. I do not, however, judge movies by their posters. I mean, I’ll judge a direct-to-video, direct-to-streaming movie by its poster, yes, but its distribution model has essentially already rendered judgement for me. And sure, I would have judged “The Northman” based on its Nicole Kidman character poster, are you kidding me, but because of Nicole Kidman I already knew all about “The Northman” and didn’t need the poster to sell me. And that’s how it’s always been with me: I’ve known about most movies before I ever see the poster. Yet, in the last few years, as my consumption of movie news has significantly decreased, more movie releases are sneaking up on me. I didn’t know what “Weapons” was until, maybe, a week before its release. Even then, though, it wasn’t suitably creepy poster that piqued my interest, it was the buzz. (The buzz was wrong, but that’s neither here nor there.) But. All the livelong day I’m getting emails from publicity people trying to sell me on their respective movies, and though intermittently they do, it’s because of the synopsis, never the poster, until…

What’s the ice tower? No idea. Why is Marion Cotillard in it? Couldn’t care less. I’m there.

In Memoriam: Robert Redford

In addition to being an actor, activist, and philanthropist, Robert Redford also founded a filmmaking institute and a subsequent film festival with a name culled from one of his most famous characters, Sundance, that became a shorthand for a whole American independent movie movement. That was a movement I essentially grew up on in the 90s when I was first becoming a movie fan. Just a couple weeks ago, in fact, I watched Tim Blake Nelson’s “Eye of God” for the first time, released in 1997, and which Nelson adapted from his own stage play at the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters and Directors Lab. Ryan Coogler, who might well have made 2025’s best movie in “Sinners,” emerged from the Sundance Institute too. That’s what helped make Redford a true icon, worthy of veneration. He wasn’t just an artist; he created a historically significant space to help artists, to foster artistry itself. Do you put that first in the obituary now that he’s dead at age 89? I guess I just did.

With that alliterative name, so poetically plainspoken, it might sound like Robert Redford was born a star, but Charles Robert Redford Jr. took a long, winding path on account of a difficult and hell-raising youth. A college dropout, he was an extremely studious person who just didn’t like to study in a classroom, which is about the only thing I can say the two of us had in common. After roaming Europe, he enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Art. And though he began as a working actor on stage and television, the big screen truly illuminated his style. “I could do it,” he told The New Yorker’s Richard Rayner in 1998. “And I knew I could do it better than a lot of people. And I don’t know why.” There’s the famous anecdote Mike Nichols told of Redford not getting the lead in “The Graduate” because he didn’t understand what it meant to not get the girl in the end, and I wonder if that also illustrates him not understanding why he could do what others couldn’t. “He seemed to glow gold,” Stephanie Zacharek once wrote to describe Redford’s beauty and as Manohla Dargis noted in appraising Redford after his death, there is a “confidence that is specific to beauty: (he) never had to fight for your attention.”

That might be true and speaks to why he was an actor who never really cut loose, but he knew how to win your attention, nevertheless. He cultivated a distinct air on screen, one of immense restraint, and then calibrated that air in coordination with the character he was playing. If at first glance it might appear that he was just being himself, in so far as his screen persona represented “himself,” it belied the oozing nuance underneath, and suggests why despite being good in movie-movies like “The Sting,” he was best with some meat on the bone. In “All the President’s Men” his calm exterior belied the fast-thinking interior; in “The Candidate” his charming exterior belied a deliberate interior of nothing at all; in maybe my favorite Redford movie “Downhill Racer” he subversively turned his golden features against themselves in a bracingly unsentimental performance as an arrogant, self-absorbed professional skier who puts himself on a pedestal. “Downhill Racer” concluded on a freeze-frame redressing every sports movie freeze-frame ever as so much hooey, but it also epitomized the power of the camera to mold an image. Redford knew that restraint maximized the camera’s power.

Redford demonstrated that restraint in virtually all aspects. He fiercely guarded his private life and despite being one of its biggest stars, maintained a healthy skepticism of Hollywood. He won his Oscar for directing “Ordinary People” in 1980, but it was 1994’s “Quiz Show” where he really made his mark behind the camera, unmasking institutional myths in a way that no doubt felt close to home. In the new century, he did not shun the spotlight, exactly, but receded from it, acting less and less, content to stick to his home in Utah and build Sundance. It’s why even if his final film, “The Old Man and the Gun,” ultimately felt appropriate in its reckoning with time, his late period film I most liked was “All Is Lost” in which he played a nameless man all by himself adrift at sea. Redford has next to no dialogue, and his character has virtually no backstory, save for a few lines in voiceover hinting at the mess he made of things in his personal life. And though that’s typically a red flag, in this case it works, like a moment when the nameless man eats from a can of beans, one Redford improbably invests with so much searching melancholy. 

That can of beans makes me me think of John Saward’s Flaming Hydra piece about Gene Hackman when Redford’s “Downhill Racer” co-star died earlier this year. Saward focused on an image that proliferated the Internet of the elderly Hackman enjoying a cup of coffee and individually wrapped apple pie by himself to convey that after a lifetime of chasing desires and hungers and making messes in the pursuit, your wants and needs are eventually pared down to nothing more, really, than a coffee and a pie. Hackman, as Saward noted in referencing an interview with the actor, didn’t even know where his Oscars were. “You tumble around for years trying to understand yourself, starting fights, seething on four hours’ sleep; you get into debt and out of it and hit some wild jackpots,” Saward wrote. “You get the big house and all the stuff to fill it with, and in the end you try to get rid of it all. There’s a sturdy logic to this. How many different outfits do you need to go get a cup of coffee?” And in its unlikely way, “All Is Lost” brings that sentiment to life over the course of an hour and forty-six minutes as Redford’s man sees his sailboat maimed, transfers to a life raft with what little he can manage, eventually losing even that, and the raft too, shedding everything until all that’s left is whatever awaits all of us next. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Anderson Tapes (1971)

“The Anderson Tapes” is a weird ass movie. Sorry to be profane, and I intend it partly as a compliment, but weird ass is simply the best way to summarize Sidney Lumet’s 1971 adaptation of a 1970 Lawrence Sanders novel that often feels like it’s two movies in one. In one movie you have safe-cracking savant John “Duke” Anderson (Sean Connery) released from prison after a decade and rather than even trying to go straight, or even trying to act like he’s going to go straight, just goes straight to see girlfriend Ingrid (Dyan Cannon) who is being kept, in a manner of speaking, by some wealthy so and so in a luxurious apartment that Anderson immediately declares his intention to rob. No one in Anderson’s crew emerges into a character of any real substance (although young Christopher Walken’s unconventionality is already fully electric), and neither does Ingrid, for that matter, though that’s at least in part by design, with Connery deliberately funneling a deep cynicism, it not outright nihilism, through his charming exterior. “It’s dog-eat-dog,” he declares in making a pitch to an aspirant member of his crew, not realizing he’s the one on the menu as this heist film gradually becomes a comedy caper, a deadpan comedy caper, that is, as the burglary becomes a slow-moving disaster. 

Though the first movie is a little abstract in how it evokes the sensation of the heist being told to us after the fact through a series of police interviews, a half-hearted device that makes a true impact, the second movie is much more abstract by essentially being a non-narrative one. When Anderson departs prison, he flips off the security camera, thinking he’s finally free from always being watched, though life on the outside features no less surveillance even if, like so many schmucks, he remains blissfully unaware. Every member of his crew, and Ingrid too, are being surveilled by different factions for various reasons, suggested in eerie squeaks and squiggles on the soundtrack and evoked in myriad shots through windows and from behind walls. Its effectiveness is limited, though, not so much in how it never converges with the main plot in the way we might be conditioned to expect but in how Lumet never quite makes clear if this surveillance state is meant to underline the futility of the heist – of anything – in the first place or if the unexpected undoing of Anderson and his crew is meant to mock it. What’s more, the concluding joke almost seems to require what would have been knowledge in 1971 of the Nixon White House tapes, only installed in the Oval Office a few months before “The Anderson Tapes” was released, which makes me wonder if the seeming contemporary critical apathy was in part related to never being able to know when the future is sending smoke signals.