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I genuinely hope that every one of these people besides Marla Maples and probably Kato Kailin is well.
This week, Mitski was outed by red rose twitter as having a father whose career in international relations potentially involved some illicit behavior. This is what week 8 of quarantine looks like and I for one am HERE for it.
It reminded me a bit of when our generation found out that Ke$ha wasn’t some trailor-trash flunky with an alcohol problem, but was actually the daughter of a famed songwriter and possibly the offspring of Mick Jagger. Or when the next generation found out that Billie Eilesh wasn’t some suburban outcast with an alcohol problem, but was actually the daughter of a (different) famed songwriter. You get the picture.
So at the risk of ruining your perception of these beloved celebs forever, I did a little digging on who else secretly comes from powerful families—and you’re not gonna like it:
Now, it’s not all bad. As a bonus, did you know that Jenna Fischer is Carrie Fisher’s daughter? We absolutely love to see her carrying on her mom’s legacy! ❤
Love is dead. You heard it here first, or maybe a few days ago when the boys’ group chat lit up with the news that Jay Cutler and Kristin Cavallari are divorcing after six years of marriage and three years of occasionally meme-worthy TV.
So what should come next for the newly single Cutler? Should he return to the broadcast booth? Or endorse his favorite brand of smokes? The people have a different idea: Make Jay Cutler the next Bachelor. Our panel of experts weighs in on whether that’s such a good idea:
Pro: Make the Cut with Jay Cut
Con: Un-Bearable
Spider-man
Captain America
Black Panther
Thor
Thanos
Hulk
Iron Man
Ant-Man
10. “There’s no I in team, but there’s an I in win.” – Michael Jordan, when it was suggested that he could have had the ball slightly less often.
9. “Straight up bitches.” – Horace Grant, describing the dauphin dynasty Detroit Pistons leaving the court without shaking hands after being disemboweled by the Bulls 4–0 in the 1991 ECF.
8. “Are those the pills you take to keep you short or are those diet pills?” – MJ, a tall king, mocking body positivity icon Jerry Krause.
7. “They had Craig Ehlo on me, which, in all honesty, was a mistake.” – MJ, 31 years after making a shot over Craig Ehlo.
6. “Mom and dad, he’s an alcoholic.” – MJ, as Scott Burrell pleads with him to stop bringing up his infidelity and alcohol consumption on camera.
5. “Michael was like the Pied Piper walking down the Champs-Élysées.” – The late David Stern, slandering MJ with allegations of paedocide.
4. “Well, I think it’s been pretty easy.” – MJ, as a rookie, when asked about playing in the world’s foremost professional basketball league.
3. “Scottie, ya know, he’s got feelings.” – MJ, talking about the complex mental machinations of the greatest number two of all time.
2. “I’m not gonna fuck my summer up.” – Scottie Pippen, unveiling those complex mental machinations to be primarily a desire to have a sick, surgery-free hot girl summer.
1. “That was God disguised as Michael Jordan.” – Former Indiana State University letterman Larry Bird, falsely implying there is a distinction between God and Michael Jordan.
If you’ve logged on recently, you might have noticed that online is bad. But in recent weeks, a sort-of-almost-maybe-kind-of-good trend has sprung up amongst the quarantined. Or at least, a trend that seems like it could be good at first glance. You’ve seen it: the no-skip album challenge, the five perfect films, whatever that Bill Clinton thing is.
These challenges offer a chance to bask in shared cultural connections and revisit some of our favorite pieces of art. They also offer a chance to stress the fuck out.
I mean, what even is a no-skip album? Like I know definitionally what those words mean, but is it an album I’ve never once skipped a song on? Or an album where I love every song? An album where I like every song enough to give it a listen? Even my favorite albums of all time get boring if I’m not in the right mood.
And is everyone else adhering to the same rules? Or should I just pick my favorite few albums and call it a day? When I first started thinking of no-skip albums my mind flew to Channel Orange, but then… I looked at the track list. And yeah, it’s got some all-time great songs. More classics than any album really has a right to, in my opinion. But then there’s the slightly underwhelming forgotten tracks too. And the interludes! If I skip an interlude, is that no longer a no-skip album?
And more importantly, what will other people think if I don’t include Channel Orange? Am I a fake Frank fan? Uncultured swine? And what if I include My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy? Am I endorsing Kanye’s misogyny and absurdist political semi-ideology?
Or what if I end up with just Springsteen, Bon Iver, Carly Rae Jepson, and Fleetwood Mac? #NoSkipAlbumsListSoWhite?
And don’t even get me started on the five perfect movies challenge. No movie is perfect, even the greatest films ever made. It’s A Wonderful Life was an easy inclusion for me, but the treatment of Annie (and other women) throughout is deeply troubling. Silence of the Lambs still takes my breath away, but at what point are gender non-conforming individuals going to stop being portrayed as deranged and dangerous?
Truthfully, the challenge lies in putting together a list that shows just how cool, cultured, intelligent, and relatable you are. You need a mix of high brow and humorous, a list that shows you’ve got love for the classics but are in touch with the times,* one that includes diversity of experience but does not include Green Book.
Ultimately, I think the problem with these challenges is that I am wildly insecure and need everyone to love and cherish me constantly. A therapist might say that’s unrealistic or self-defeating but joke’s on you, my insurance doesn’t have first-dollar mental health coverage so we’ll never truly know.
So I’ll just keep curating, desperately trying to hone my brand through my choices. As I write this, a friend has literally just tagged me in the Bill Clinton one. I think this is just albums I vibe with, right? Or is it ones I listen to after not inhaling a marijuana cigarette? My favorite jams for corporate-friendly center-left activism?
Rest assured, I’ll stress about this one a lot too.
*If you don’t have Moonlight or Get Out on your list, I don’t fuck with you anymore. Sorry, that’s the rules.
Stephen (hereinafter, the “Recording Secretary”): Thank you for gathering here today in the living room of my 600-square-foot apartment, Bruce Springsteen, Barack Obama, Michael Jordan, and Abraham Lincoln. It’s a pleasure having you all here for our first all-apartment meeting. Now I’m sure you have a lot of quest —
Michael Jordan: Yeah, first of all, what are we all doing here?
Recording Secretary: That’s a good question. Things certainly are pretty crazy these days. As best I can tell, somebody asked me, “Who is on your Mt. Rushmore of people you’d want to be quarantined with,” and I listed off you four, and then this sort of happened.
Abraham Lincoln: What’s Mt. Rushmore?
Recording Secretary: Well, so, there’s this range of hills in what was formerly the Dakota Territories that is considered sacred land by the Sioux Tribe and —
Barack Obama: Let me get this straight. You got to choose the four people to be cooped up with during a pandemic, but you didn’t choose your girlfriend?
Recording Secretary: Yes, thank you Mr. President, that’s a very astute observation, and one that I can assure you has already been raised several times.
Bruce Springsteen: I actually have something I’d like to address now that we’re all gathered together.
Recording Secretary: Sure, you’re the boss.
[Everybody groans but Lincoln, who is preoccupied studying an electrical socket.]
Springsteen: Well, I’d like to say that I’ve been sensing a lot of… competitive tension in the apartment recently. [Looks at Jordan] I mean, just the other day I missed a small spot while doing dishes, and Jordan stared daggers at me and then lashed into a tirade about how my early 70s work sounded like “nothing but a shitty-ass cheap-motherfucking-knockoff of if Bob Dylan and Van Morrison’s did the audio equivalent of two girls one cup.”
Obama: Jesus. But I know what you mean. Just the other day I heard Jordan call Stephen “a slower, whiter, less-Twitter-woke version of broken-back-ass Steve Kerr” just because Stephen roasted the brussel sprouts a bit too much.
Recording Secretary: I don’t want to talk about —
Springsteen: Yeah! And then I took $25k off Jordan after we bet on the Lincoln–Obama debate over universal health care, and he wouldn’t let it go until we doubled or nothing on our pick-up basketball game.
Recording Secretary: Yes, yes, about that. I really don’t think those teams were fair. Maybe next time it shouldn’t be me, Obama, and Bruce versus Jordan and Lincoln.
Lincoln: If I may, I have a question. Why did Jordan keep calling me “Will Perdue–looking ass” during the game?
Obama: My fellow teammates, I am deeply troubled by the fact that we lost five straight games by a collective score of 105–7. We will do better. We. Must. Be. Better.
Jordan: You all are some weak motherfuckers. Especially stovepipe over here—I bet I could’ve dropped 50 on Stonewall Jackson before this chin-strapped jagoff could take a typhoid-laced dump.
Springsteen: Abe was on your team!
Jordan: Yeah, but I’m also getting pretty tired of hearing him remind me that he was friends with Frederick Douglass.
Lincoln: Hey man, Republicans buy shoes too.
Springsteen: You’re, like, not a Republican any more!
Recording Secretary: Mike, I’d also like to raise an anonymous comment I received complaining that you are “absolutely draining our internet with your online poker habit” —
Jordan: I don’t know anything about that.
Recording Secretary: Well, I don’t want to have to make you retire early from our 2K tournament if —
Jordan: I said I don’t know anything about that.
Lincoln: Excuse me, but a thought occurred to me. Why does Mr. Springsteen over here always count off “Hu-n, Hu-oo, Hu-ree, Hu-r” every time he’s about to start a task?
Springsteen: Clearly you’ve never seen the American dream light up ahead of you like the headlights of a ‘59 Chevy down the Jersey turnpike
Obama: I think maybe we could all spend a little less time pestering each other, like some people around here who keep coming to me about things like “why the fuck is goddamn Grant on a bill that’s worth ten times more than mine” or “what modern magical marvel is behind these menthol cigarettes”?
Lincoln: I’m sorry, I’m not right in my head. Anyways, who wants to play Catan?
Jordan: Down. And I’ll bet fifty grand that Lincoln can’t raise the biggest army again.
[Barack throws Stevie Wonder on the Sonos, and we play Catan. It’s awesome. Later, Barack and the Recording Secretary go out to walk Bo and get carryout from Valois while Bruce and Lincoln roll a spliff and talk about resenting their fathers. Jordan has disappeared to play 36 holes of night golf before sunrise. High fives all around. Everybody in attendance agrees that the Recording Secretary’s Mt. Rushmore decision was the best thing to ever happen to us.]
Meeting adjourned and the minutes submitted for final approval.
In 1970, Roger Ebert walked out of a movie he was reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times and into the Fifth Peg, a folk club in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. Out of “sheer blind luck,” he saw John Prine and wrote the first review Prine ever received.
Today, John Prine is in critical condition with COVID-19 symptoms. And the Fifth Peg is a La Colombe coffee shop, next door to a Freshii and down the street from both a Warby Parker store and the 4am bar where my dad’s Rolling Stones cover band plays sometimes.
Life comes at you fast. But, re-reading Ebert’s review and thinking of the destruction that coronavirus has wrought on a personal and civic level, I’m struck by just how deeply the people and places in our life are intertwined.
I like to think of a person or a place’s meaning both vertically and horizontally. Take the vertical meaning of an address like 858 W. Armitage, Chicago, IL 60614. Maybe today you passed it on a social distancing walk through a Lincoln Park neighborhood suddenly void of $2,000 baby strollers or designer labradoodles. Just a month ago you could have taken a date or a friend to coffee at La Colombe, sitting outside on an unseasonably warm day as you watched your fellow Chicagoans walk past. 50 years ago, that La Colombe was a packed folk venue where word of mouth led people from Steve Goodman to Ebert to come together and listen to a mustachio’d mailman sing about a guy who died because he couldn’t see through all the flag decals he stuck on his truck. And that venue, with a bar down one side and apartments up top, had been around since 1885—built a decade after the Chicago Fire but four years before the neighborhood was annexed by Chicago. You can think about John Prine’s meaning vertically too: You can draw a straight line from Hank Williams and Bob Dylan to Prine, and then extend Prine’s influence out to just about any songwriter today who picks up an acoustic guitar.
Both Prine and the place where Ebert first saw him have horizontal meaning too. At the time Prine was performing in Lincoln Park, the wealthy and mostly white (even then) neighborhood existed in a complex urban context. There was the poor and mostly black Cabrini-Green housing project next door to the south, or the more integrated Lathrop Homes to the northwest. Just a year before, the Young Lords had held protests against gentrification in Lincoln Park and the CPD had assassinated Fred Hampton on the West Side. The Hancock building had just gone up a few miles to the south of the Fifth Peg, and meanwhile the city’s factories and stockyards were looking down the barrel of a decade of deindustrialization. Prine, too, could be defined in the context of what was going around him. Ebert did just that, contrasting Prine against peers who sang “adolescent acid-rock peace dirges” or “narcissistic tributes to themselves.”
We understand a neighborhood like Lincoln Park in part based on what it isn’t: it’s not Wicker Park, it’s not Hyde Park, etc. We understand a singer like Prine in part based on who he isn’t: as Ebert noted, he was way more Hank Williams and Bob Dylan than Roger Williams or Phil Ochs. And, right now, we’re experiencing this quarantine based on who we aren’t with: the friends, loved ones, and strangers whose company we never knew we could miss so badly until it was taken from us.
Coronavirus will be a key point in our vertical memory. We’ll mark time based on what happened before or after the pandemic. The same way that Prine could probably mark his life based on what happened before versus after he got his first review. And I’ve never felt so crushingly aware of the horizontal space between us—the video chats with people who I would ordinarily see in person (or never think to video chat with in the first place), and the great effort it now would take to reach them.
John Prine wrote perfect music for when you’re down and alone. And he wrote perfect music that has, and will continue to, bring people together.
When I woke up this morning
Things were feeling bad
Seemed like total silence
Was the only friend I had
or
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this living
Is just a hard way to go
No matter when he passes—and we know that now isn’t his time, like so many others—he’ll live on in our memory. And his music will help us try to bridge the physical and emotional gap that separates us from one another.
By now, you’ve probably seen the news, and I want to start by saying that I fully admit it: I filed a trademark on the concept of a parody song in which the lyrics to “Come On Eileen” are replaced with “COVID-19.”
I’m aware of the speculation that has begun about my motives for this move. There are those who say I’m preparing some sort of viral video with pop stars and the like dancing (or perhaps “twerking”) to this topical wordplay. Others insist I’ll be hawking trendy “Come on Eileen? More like COVID-19!” crop tops outside of the nation’s top discotheques.
Family and friends, I want to assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.
The reality is that someone is going to weaponize the ease with which the novel coronavirus strain fits into this beloved ‘80s hit, whether we like it or not. By proactively filing this trademark, I hope to have the full weight of the American legal system at my disposal to stop them. In times of crisis, heroes emerge. And I intend to be that hero.
I’ll take down YouTube compilations, cut off the production of “humorous” neon fanny packs, and even unleash my attorneys upon unsuspecting meme accounts. All in the service of keeping your father from ever discovering the most formidable pun of this year’s coronavirus season.
So slander me all you want. Call me names like “putrid boy” and “rotten lad.” I do not care. I will do what I must to protect my country, and for that I will never apologize.
5. Bowling for Soup, “1985”
4. Macy Gray, “I Try”
3. Neil Diamond, “Sweet Caroline”
2. Wilson Phillips, “Hold On”
1. Tom Petty, “Walls”
Left on Read 