At the Winter Night Café...

... you can talk, watch the big game...

Go Hoosiers! #Hoosiers #Football #championship #miami pic.twitter.com/KR2Q17xqIF

— John Mellencamp (@johnmellencamp) January 19, 2026

... or dance all night.

@_chorgi_

♬ Charleston - Swing Jazz Parade

The shocking realization that Jack and Diane voted for Trump.

Just In:

John Cougar Mellencamp ends show early in a rage because the audience didn’t want to hear him give a lecture about his support of Joe Biden.

🔊

pic.twitter.com/rqJMn6DYKP

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) April 16, 2024

ADDED: I question whether Mellencamp was talking about Biden. Something bothered him and made him vindictive against the whole crowd:

"Only a few of the saddest, most destitute Albanians still wanted to emigrate to the States..."

"...  and that lonely number was further discouraged by a poster showing a plucky little otter in a sombrero trying to jump onto a crammed dinghy under the tagline 'The Boat Is Full, Amigo.' Inside an improvised security cage, an older man behind Plexiglas shouted at me incomprehensibly while I waved my passport at him.... A half-dozen of my fellow citizens were seated behind their chewed-up desks, mumbling lowly into their äppäräti. There was an earplug lying slug-dead on an empty chair, and a sign reading INSERT EARPLUG IN EAR, PLACE YOUR ÄPPÄRÄT ON DESK, AND DISABLE ALL SECURITY SETTINGS. I did as I was told. An electronic version of John Cougar Mellencamp’s 'Pink Houses' ('Ain’t that America, somethin’ to see, baby!') twanged in my ear, and then a pixelated version of the plucky otter shuffled onto my äppärät screen, carrying on his back the letters ARA, which dissolved into the shimmering legend: American Restoration Authority. The otter stood up on his hind legs, and made a show of dusting himself off. 'Hi there, pa’dner!' he said, his electronic voice dripping with adorable carnivalesque. 'My name is Jeffrey Otter and I bet we’re going to be friends!'... 'Now tell me, Lenny. What made you leave our country? Work or pleasure?' 'Work,' I said. 'And what do you do, Leonard or Lenny Abramov?' 'Um, Indefinite Life Extension.' 'You said "effeminate life invention." Is that right?' "Indefinite Life Extension, I said."

I'm reading "Super Sad True Love Story" by Gary Shteyngart.

"Lena thought NOHO was BORO. Then hypothesized that BO RO might stand for something. Boston Rosewater."

"Lena says it sounds like a sex act. Or when you use Guinness as perfume. 'Splash a little rosewater on your neck.' Me: 'Why would you put Guinness on your neck?' Brayden: 'Have you *been* to Boston?' Lena: 'Shhh. Boston can hear you?' Now she's calling John Mellencamp 'John Menstrual Cramp.'Also Lena is an ex-bartender and is distressed never to have had a Brompton cocktail, even after finding out what's in it (it's not something you'd consume for pleasure ... probably)..."

From Rex Parker's write-up of today's NYT Crossword puzzle, which he's doing in a "Madison Avenue Starbucks that [his] companion Lena called 'the saddest Starbucks ever.'" "NOHO" was the answer for "Big Apple neighborhood," and  "Ingredient in a Brompton cocktail" was the clue for "cocaine."

I was reading that on my iPad but I jumped up to write this on my iMac after I clicked on that link at "it's not something you'd consume for pleasure ... probably. " Oh, my! I did the puzzle last night before conking out and I got "cocaine," which was 2 Down, after seeing some of the Acrosses. It's only just now that I'm learning that a Brompton cocktail is not a recreational drink:

Brompton cocktail... is an elixir... [m]ade from morphine or diacetylmorphine (heroin), cocaine, highly-pure ethyl alcohol (some recipes specify gin), and sometimes with chlorpromazine (Thorazine) to counteract nausea, it was given to terminally-ill individuals (especially cancer patients) to relieve pain and promote sociability near death....

The original idea for an oral mixture of morphine and cocaine helping patients in agony with advanced disease is credited to surgeon Herbert Snow in 1896.

The Brompton cocktail is named after the Royal Brompton Hospital in London, England, where it was invented in the late 1920s for patients with tuberculosis. While its use has been rare in the 21st century, it is not entirely unheard of today.

To promote sociability near death....

The Kiss — a 10-item list.

1. After writing the last post — focusing on 2 magazine covers depicting a kiss — made me want to write a blog devoted to the kiss. It would be easy to keep a Google alert on the word "kiss" and blog every day on whatever miscellany relating to kissing happened to come up. I considered starting a new blog, but kiss.blogspot.com, kissblog.blogspot.com, and thekissblog.blogspot.com were all taken, so this post is a rough draft of what that blog would have been.

2. A Google news search on "kiss" brings up something I should already have blogged: Joe Biden, swearing in a Senator (Chris Coons) and wrangling various family members into good photo-op positions, got a little too cozy with a modest/nervous little girl and guessed wrong when he decided that a little cheek nuzzling would loosen her up. Reactions varied from "Holy Hell Would Be Unleashed On 'Handsy' Joe Biden If He Were Conservative" to "Awesome Little Girl Rejects Biden's Kiss At Senate Swearing-In." Hey, Joe, no means no... Mr. Violence Against Women Act.

3. Remember your first kiss? Kid Rock does — or is able to strain his voice Jack-and-Diane style in various assertions to that effect in this new video "First Kiss":



"And now these days when I drive through a small town/I turn my stereo up and roll my windows down/’Cause it reminds me of my first kiss/And those days that I always miss/Tom Petty on the radio." Tom Petty gets a big shout-out. Seems like John Cougar Mellencamp deserves a nod (or a peck on the cheek).

4. Kiss cam variations... including the deepest deep kiss:



5. "KISS frontman Gene Simmons... is as ubiquitous as ever with a reality-television show and a recent book on his business philosophy called 'Me Inc'" and a new restaurant in Oviedo called Rock and Brews. Quote: "You are alive, and you are supposed to keep moving... I'm 65, and, boy, do I look great."

6. "Tell me about the Root kiss. Was that a big gift for the fans?... Did you think it was a 'Goodbye forever' kiss, or a 'Shut up, I’ll be back' kiss?" Apparently, there's a TV show called "Person of Interest" and there was a kiss that made a big impression — "a much-anticipated kiss between the show’s electrifying women." What was so big about it? It can't just be that 2 women kissed on TV or even that 2 electrifying women kissed on TV. In the first nonplatonic 2-woman kiss the women were electrifying: Sharon Stone Mariel Hemingway and Rosanne Barr. "Television critic Frank Rich of The New York Times called 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' 'a small step forward for the stirring of homosexuals into the American melting pot' and a 'sophisticated half-hour [that] turned homophobia on its ear.'" The year was 1994.

7. The previous post — the post that got me started on this list — discussed a Charlie Hebdo cover showing 2 men kissing which I assumed was an intentional allusion to the famous New Yorker cover showing a Jewish man and a black woman kissing, and Meade said: "You know what else you should have included?" I said: "Brancusi's 'The Kiss'?"



No, he was thinking of the famous photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse: "V-J Day in Times Square" by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Scanning my Google image search results, I saw Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss" and said: "As ubiquitous as Gene Simmons." No, I said: "How many dorm rooms have you seen this in?" And "There's also that Rodin."

8. For a less famous, less over-liked artwork called the kiss, consider Tino Sehgal's "The Kiss": "On the [Guggenheim Museum's] ground floor, a man and woman entwine in a changing, slow-motion amorous embrace.... As choreography it will hold no surprises for anyone familiar with contemporary dance. Taken as living sculpture, it has amusing moments: every so often, the performers strike erotic poses derived from Courbet, Rodin, Brancusi and Jeff Koons." I'd already thought of Rodin and Brancusi, but let's check out the Courbet and the Koons.

9. Hey, Koons (#8) and Coons (#2). It's like the stars are in alignment. Is there a constellation called The Kiss? No, but The Arctic Monkeys sang: "And her lips are like the galaxy's edge/And her kiss the color of a constellation falling into place."

10. "Kiss" is a very old word in English. The OED — giving the first meaning as "A touch or pressure given with the lips... in token of affection, greeting, or reverence; a salute or caress given with the lips" — has the oldest appearance of the word circa 1000:

Ælfric Homilies II. 32   Ic hine to minum cosse arærde.

I don't read English well enough to understand that, but the language becomes more recognizable by the 1380s, when a translated Bible had: "Kisse he me with the cos of his mowth." And here's a great poet: "Ah why refuse the blameless bliss? Can danger lurk within a kiss?"

"They had to cut my head off basically, I have scar from ear to ear. That was my first experience."

"You think circumcision's bad? Wait till they cut your fucking head off! But my grandmother told me for my entire life — everyday, 'John, you're the luckiest boy in the world.' And when you hear that everyday from somebody you actually start to believe it, which made me adventurous, which made me not afraid to try things, which made me not care about stopping myself from doing things that people said you shouldn't be doing."

That's John Mellencamp, answering "What adventure changed your life?," the first question in an excellent interview. (Via Metafilter.) He was born with spina bifida, and what they did back then "is let the kids lay there, and they would die, that's just what they would do." But a doctor (in Indiana) had an experiment to try and Mellencamp's parents allowed it.

(My mother had a sister, born circa 1930, who was born with spina bifida, who died in exactly the way Mellencamp describes.)

Naming the baby after a mass murderer.

SHE: Isn't he cute? Let's name him Manson. Or... I know... Dahmer! Berkowitz just doesn't sound like a first name, but otherwise, that would be cool, you know, like maybe he'd grow up thinking he was hearing what dogs were saying, what dogs wanted him to do. Like we catch him with his hand in the cookie jar and he's all Sunny told me to get a cookie.

HE: No, no, no. Speck! I insist. Forget dogs. Nurses. Richard Speck was all about those nurses, student nurses, murdered one by one. That's the association I like for our little boy.

SHE: But a speck is like a tiny little mark.

HE: People call their kids "Mark" all the time. And he is tiny.

***

"The younger of John Mellencamp's two adult sons, Speck Mellencamp, turned himself in to Monroe County authorities Friday, then was out on $5,000 bond the same day... Court documents describe a brutal beating during the early hours of July 29, when a 19-year-old man told police the Mellencamps and Smith came to his Bloomington home after a party. According to a probable cause affidavit, Speck Mellencamp thought the man had punched him at the party. The man told police Speck Mellencamp punched him so hard in the face that he fell down."

The older son, who has also turned himself in on felony charges, is named Hud. I would have recommended for the follow-on son Harper. But they decided Speck for some reason. One can only attempt to imagine why.

"Politicians love mellencamp. Jack and diane."

I wrote that in my iPhone notes on April 1, when I was waiting in the overflow room at the Romney rally. I looked that up this morning after writing about Mellencamp supposedly being "not amused" that they're playing his song "Small Town" at Scott Walker rallies. That post also notes that Mellencamp once performed "Small Town" at an Obama rally. Neither Walker nor Obama were born in a small town or stayed put in a small town with "little opportunity" — as the song goes — but the song somehow still sounds right.

But "Jack and Diane" — is that a good song for a politician, if you start listening to the words?

Suckin' on chili dogs outside the Tastee Freez
Diane's sittin' on Jackie's lap, he's got his hand between her knees
Jackie say "Hey, Diane let's run off behind a shady tree"
Dribble off those Bobbie Brooks slacks, let me do what I please

I'm sitting there in the overflow room, thinking about how Mitt wooed Ann back in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in the 1960s. Bobbie Brooks was a brand of clothes that teenage girls were proud to wear — not cheap, but if you babysat a little, you could buy them. In 1968, you were hoping to look like this:



Maybe that helps you picture young Ann and Mitt at the Tastee Freez.

"Scott Walker's Using John Mellencamp's Music; Mellencamp is Not Amused."

Oh! Mellencamp not amused. According to headline writers at The Nation. Walker is using Mellencamp's classic song about a small town, "Small Town." (Scott Walker was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which currently has a population over 400,000.)

The article at The Nation is by John Nichols, whose only factual basis for the claim of non-amusement is that "The musician's publicist contacted the Walker campaign to inform them" that Mellencamp is "very pro-collective bargaining and the fight for a living wage." I don't know what that has to do with Walker's limits on unions representing public workers, who are trying to maintain their good salaries and benefits, not private industry workers at a level where they have to "fight for a living wage," who actually sound like the kind of people who would vote for Walker.

Mellencamp is not demanding that Walker... stop using his music. But, as the rocker did when Republican John McCain started using his song "Our Country" in 2008, Mellencamp is reminding Republicans that he is not one of them -- and that his songs are not written to celebrate their policies.

Are they written to "celebrate" anybody's politics? Seems to me Mellencamp is open to all sorts of fans, and I wouldn't be surprised if he is quietly pleased that politicians, including conservative politicians, find his songs apt.

"He's a very liberal person," [publicist Bob] Merlis says of the singer, who performed "Small Town" at a rally for Barack Obama in 2008, recorded a radio ad for Obama and appeared at Obama's inagural [sic] in 2009.

Nichols lamely stretches, saying "Mellencamp has even addressed recall politics," and going on to talk activities related to the recall of California Governor Gray Davis in 2003:

An ardent for [sic] of former President George Bush's Iraq War policies, Mellencamp wrote: "The Governor of California was removed from office based on finance troubles. And yet George W. Bush has lied to us, failed to keep our own borders secure, entered a war under false pretense, endangered lives, and created financial chaos. How is it that he hasn't been recalled?...

And that should count against Walker? Mellencamp seems to like financial discipline. Nichols ends his nitwit piece by fantasizing about Mellencamp coming to Wisconsin and singing "Small Town" at a rally for Walker's opponent, who will be one of these 4 characters. (What would they do to help the economy in Wisconsin? Their ideas ranged from spending on education to ending "partisan bickering.")

Anyway, I will now leave John Nichols to his private dreamy dreams about Mellencamp, the 60-year-old Hoosier who just might care very deeply about government workers in Wisconsin.