It’s a beautiful springlike day in Madrid today. We had a meeting at City Hall this morning, and I walked home absurdly proud to have successfully navigated another layer of Spanish bureacracy. I’m back on this page earlier than I had imagined, because I wanted to share an episode of a podcast an old friend and I are starting. It’s his idea, really, and it emerged last year after a marathon discussion he and I were having by phone. He said, “You know, you and I have great conversations. I bet some people would want to listen in.” It’s still a work in progress, and it hasn’t been properly launched, but we’ve started to Zoom once a week with a vague idea of the topic in our heads. To keep the content fresh, we don’t talk beforehand. The podcast is called “Americanata,” which is the disparaging–-yet sometimes admiring–-term Italians use to describe anything American that’s over the top, kitschy, or ridiculously overblown. So far, it’s been really fun, and it forces me to think about the present, something that my daily reading doesn’t encourage. The question for the episode below was whether the Trump era taught us anything about the American people. We had some thoughts. And, yes, the photo of me is an homage to the late Los Angeles radio great Gary Owens.
