Boy, there’s nothing I like better than clattering the keys for 30 minutes or so, with the certain knowledge that what I wrote, or most of it, will never see the light of day. Don’t care. It felt good.
For what it’s worth, it was a letter to the editor, and if it gets butchered, well, it’s my own fault — you just don’t submit 638-word letters to the editor. Maybe they’ll run it as a guest column. If it sinks beneath the waves entirely, I’ll post it here. But they get first crack at it.
(Don’t get your hopes up; it’s a topic of little interest outside journalism. But it’s of interest to me.)
The end of a long week. For the first time in quite a few, I have a full plate — a long-term project and a couple of meaty stories to figure out. This will require time management, i.e., not spending so much time surfing the web while picking my nose. Fine with me. It’s appalling, how much I know about stupid b.s. like blogwar squabbles and the exact tactics used by Cathy Seipp’s online stalker. It makes me think that a certain portion of the human brain is simply roped off for inconsequential data; when we’re young we fill it with the lyrics of “Afternoon Delight” and the technique for playing the “Combat” theme on the harmonica, and now we fill it with crap from the internet. If only the new data would overwrite the old. But no.
Actually, the Seipp-stalker story is pretty interesting, if only as an illustration of the ways the internet facilitates mental dysfunction. (Which is sort of a theme to my too-long letter to the editor, too, but never mind.) As many of you know, I had a crazy man obsessed with me for a long time, too. Every so often someone sends me some random spew that indicates he still hasn’t gotten over it. Lance Mannion once wrote him a letter that said, “If you don’t get professional help, soon you’ll be locked in a padded room, using your own excrement to paint pictures of Nancy on the wall. On second thought, that’s what you’re doing now.” This ranks as one of the more stylish smackdowns in my memory, and yet another reason I love Lance.
I should note, however, that it did no good. The murals continued.
OK, now should be some bloggage, some tasty tidbits to carry you into the weekend.
…Sorry, I don’t have any. Post your own in the comment. Back after the weekend.
This is what you might call an Oops moment: There was a death in Detroit a few weeks back, of an out-and-proud senior citizen named Andrew Anthos. He was what newspapers typically call a “community activist,” which is code for a type that can range from “diligent writer of letters to the editor” at one end to “raving loon peddling conspiracy theory about the mayor’s secret link to black ops at FEMA” at the other. Anthos — of whom I knew nothing prior to his death — fell at the saner end of the spectrum.
His cause was not gay rights, but, well, wait for it:
For most of the last two decades Anthos frequently rode the bus from Detroit to Lansing to wage a solitary patriotic crusade to light the capitol dome in red, white and blue one night of the year to honor military veterans and police officers. …In an interview with The State News in 2003, Anthos said he wanted to inspire other states to similarly light their capitol domes as well.
So, OK. In late February, the news reports say, he was beaten on the street by a man who hit him on the head with a pipe and left him unconscious in the street. Anthos had just disembarked from a bus, where the same man, the attacker, directed anti-gay slurs at him. “Before and after the beating,” another account went, “the attacker shouted anti-gay slurs.”
Yesterday the autopsy report was released. Are you ready?
The Detroit Police Department said it has accepted that Anthos died of natural causes and closed its investigation, saying no witnesses have been found to confirm a beating. … But it was likely a simple movement, not a whack on the head, that felled the man, Schmidt said. “He probably just flexed his neck,” which caused arthritic spurs to compress his spinal cord enough to cause paralysis of his legs. After spinal surgery in the hospital, that numbness later spread to his upper body and caused Anthos to stop breathing, Schmidt said. The only injury noted in the autopsy was a 2-inch-wide bruise on the back of Anthos’ head, which likely came when he fell, Schmidt said. The injury was minor, he said.
The anti-gay slurs? “Raised voices” from the general direction of the back of the bus. The witness to the attack? “Heard a thump,” turned around to see his friend lying on the ground, and a man walking away, nothing in his hand.
This could be the cornerstone of a great law-school class on the value of witnesses. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to the weekend’s how-the-hell-did-this-happen analyses.
Friends, I’m tapped out of everything but muscle aches today. In an amazing turn of events, my arthritic knee is pain-free. My quads, hams and glutes, however, are screaming that I should have sat out at least one set of “climb the stairs by twos” the other day. Off for something milder. Back later.
Certain jobs are more than jobs. Every editor who’s written a headline knows this. Say you are violently murdered tomorrow. If you’re a systems analyst, the headline on your murder story won’t read SYSTEMS ANALYST DEAD IN GRISLY SLAYING. (In some smaller markets, the slaying will be “GRIZZLY” for the first few hundred papers. Until an editor we’ll call “Kirk” stops the presses and swallows five Valium in lieu of beating the offender with a pica pole.) No, you’ll be “local man” or “woman, 42,” but never “systems analyst,” and not because it’s too long for the headline. Accountants have the same problem.
Now, say you’re a nurse. Or a teacher. Or a dancer. But especially a nurse. Nothing like nursing to spice up a headline. NURSE FOUND STABBED TO DEATH IN APARTMENT — now there’s one to goose street sales. It doesn’t matter that the victim’s job had nothing to do with the crime. Some jobs simply transcend such trivialities. The death is not just a loss to the victim’s family and friends, a blow to the peace of the community; it’s one less nurse in the world. No one gives a crap about systems analysts.
I must point out the obvious — that many of these jobs-that-aren’t-just-jobs have distinct erotic overtones. Admit it: When your mind’s eye envisioned the stabbed nurse, didn’t you see her (never him; a male nurse would be “local man”) sprawled out in a short white dress with a spreading blood stain, starched cap askew? Of course you did, you pervert.
(Man, I can’t wait to see the Google ads on this one.)
Teachers are another. It’s more understandable with teachers; a dead teacher calls to mind a classroom full of sad children struggling to understand why Mrs. Whoever won’t be back the rest of the year, in fact forever. You think of hushed conferences at the classroom door between the flustered sub and the principal, of the grief counselors who will soon be descending in an unmarked van, each carrying a box of Kleenex.
(True story: Alan once sent a story about those satellite trivia competitions in bars to the copy desk. The opening anecdote was about a grade-school teacher who spent three nights a week sipping cranberry juice in her favorite tavern, playing electronic trivia contests. A copy editor replaced her actual name with her online handle, so horrified was she that we were TELLING THE WORLD that a TEACHER goes to A BAR. The next time someone mentions the olden days, when teachers used to have to resign when they got pregnant, remember we haven’t come so far.)
Doctor, lawyer — these are also more-than-jobs. But not all the professions qualify. ENGINEER KILLED IN STREET-DISPUTE CROSSFIRE…nah, just doesn’t work. Even dentists are borderline; no one ever wrote a successful one-hour TV drama about hot dentists in love. But a dancer? Oooh, yes. Doesn’t matter if the decedent hadn’t put on toe shoes, or tap shoes, or even a spangly thong, for years. Once a dancer, always a dancer.
Go ahead, try it at home. Insert your job title in any of the following headlines:
(BLANK) DIES IN SHOTGUN SLAYING
MAN HELD IN BLUDGEONING OF LOCAL (BLANK)
POLICE SAY (BLANK) ‘FOUGHT HARD’ WITH KNIFE-WIELDING KILLER
Some abbreviation is allowed. If you’re the second vice-president in charge of corporate donations for a well-established charity, you can call yourself NON-PROFIT EXEC. But not TYCOON.
OK, then. You can tell it’s exercise season again, because these are the things I think about on long bike rides. Nothing like sharing the road with cars to get one thinking of death and headlines.
Bloggage:
Ken Levine’s going to build a franchise on his “American Idol” post-mortems alone. This one isn’t his best performance overall, dawg, but he starts out so strong — Getting it out of the way first, Sanjaya, with the new mohawk hairstyle is now just the Gimp from “Pulp Fiction” — that I’ll keep him around another week. (I missed much of Idol last night; kept switching back to “Elevator to the Gallows” on Flix. I came in 30 minutes late, but found it mesmerizing. How can you not love a movie that features both a gull-wing Mercedes SL and a Miles Davis score? Of course it’s not scheduled again for DVRing. Drat. Good luck finding that one at my local Blockbuster.)
A few weeks ago I mentioned I was doing a radio essay, on a topic that failed to grab the attention of all the print editors I usually deal with. Working title: “Elmore Leonard’s Master Class on Detroit.” It came out…just OK. (My criticisms are all of myself and my stupid voice, not the production, which was excellent.) It aired last week, so I’m embedding the MP3 file here. (Requires QuickTime.) Thereafter it will live in The Clip File. And I recorded another this week, which I like better. It’s nice to learn new things at my age.
In honor of the impending release of “Grindhouse,” Kim Morgan assembles a list of her favorite car movies. As a Detroit partisan, let me point out that no one makes movies like this about Toyota Camrys. (And the Mini Cooper chase scene in “The Italian Job” doesn’t count. That was just a big fat product placement.) Got any favorite car movies? You know where to discuss.
It’s my blessing and curse to remember writing, the way a fashionista remembers details of an outfit years later (“…and then there was the most extraordinary string of Mikimoto pearls, in graduated sizes, about 18 inches, falling just below the clavicle notch…”). And so I recall, in much greater detail than I’d like, the overheated phrases of an Ann Landers column that ran when I was about Kate’s age. It was about the dangers of the drug scene. Er, drug “scene.” Ann hung quotes on every word that she identified as youth-culture slang, so it was quite the column. I particularly remember her description of a “sick thrill” she called “fruit salad.” The gist: Everyone comes to the party with whatever pills they could “score” on the street or “liberate” from mom’s medicine chest. All the pills are thrown together in a bowl, and everyone at the party swallows a handful.
(At this point I should say that in my youth, which included many brushes with drug culture, I never, ever saw anything resembling a “fruit salad” that didn’t consist of mixed berries and maybe kiwi. Of course, I was behind the bleeding edge of the baby boom, so who knows? As my friend Name Redacted used to mourn, “Pot was a party drug. You lit up a joint, you passed it to the closest person. It brought people together, it made the party more fun. Cocaine is all about shutting people out. You pick whoever you want to suck up to, and invite them to go to the bathroom with you. This isn’t a good thing.”)
(I should also note that when I was Kate’s age, I was reading the daily newspaper. Two of them, in fact, as we subscribed to both the Columbus Citizen-Journal and the afternoon Columbus Dispatch. I still subscribe to two newspapers. Kate doesn’t read either.)
Well, I’m rambling. My aim, today, is to finally give the Ann Landers fruit salad a proper name. I propose: Anna Nicole’s Casserole, or if you’re French, Cassoulet a la Anna Nicole. This is in honor of her autopsy report, released yesterday. Her system was so packed with fun that the Associated Press ran the full list as a sidebar. Seriously. Here’s the text, in its entirety:
The following drugs were found in Anna Nicole Smith’s body during the autopsy, according to the Broward County medical examiner’s office:
Brand Name (Drug) indication
– Ativan (lorazepam): anti-anxiety medication
– Cipro (ciprofloxacin): antibiotic
– Klonopin (clonazepam): anti-seizure medicine also used to treat anxiety
– Methadone: strong painkiller, often used to suppress withdrawal from heroin
– Noctec (chloral hydrate): sedative and sleeping medication
– Robaxin (methocarbamol): muscle relaxant
– Soma (meprobamate): muscle relaxant
– Topamax (topiramate): anti-seizure medication also used to treat migraines
– Tylenol (acetaminophen): pain reliever
– Valium (diazepam): anti-anxiety medication, also used as a sedative and to treat seizures
In addition, she had also taken these around the time of her death, according to interviews and other evidence gathered by the medical examiner’s office:
– Benadryl (diphenhydramine): antihistamine
– Human growth hormone: touted as a muscle-building, weight-reducing agent
– Nicorette (nicotine polacrilex): used to quit smoking
– Tamiflu (oseltamivir phosphate): anti-viral medicine
– Vitamin B12: helps formation of red blood cells
Source: Broward County medical examiner’s office; University of Miami toxicology department
My favorite single item? The B12. It’s one of those health cures I’ve heard about all my life. “I need a B12 shot,” people are always saying. “Really? What does B12 do?” I ask. No one knows. It’s like “toxins.” It’s good for you. Ask no questions.
My second-favorite item: The Tylenol. Talk about feeling no pain!
And finally, bringing up the rear: Nicorette gum. Because it’s important to give up one’s unhealthy habits.
This is better than River Phoenix, who died after a similar heapin’ helpin’ of Anna Nicole’s Casserole. But he was a vegetarian, because red meat can kill you, man.
Lots to do today, not enough time to do it in. Console yourselves, children, with bloggage:
How did a deuce like me end up with an ace like Alan? This is something I think about frequently, usually on a day like yesterday, when I notice that my husband, the man who chose me to marry, is doing something like taking apart a 36-year-old bicycle drum brake and going hmm, OK, this goes here and that goes there and maybe we should clean out some of this rust, and, and…
Getting ahead of myself.
Project Tandem has reached its conclusion. After a series of coordinated phone calls, e-mails and a late-afternoon drive to Lansing, we’re the new owners of a 1971 Schwinn Deluxe Twinn, five-speed tranny, in Kool Lemon. It’s dreamy. And although it’s in excellent condition for a bike of its age, it hadn’t been ridden in decades and needed some work. Alan spent Sunday learning its mysteries.
First were the tires. How, we wondered, did such cracked and rotted tires, surely the originals, still manage to feel as full and drum-tight as they did? Whatever, they’d have to go; it was only a matter of time before they gave way. He drove a nail into one to deflate it. It not only didn’t go flat, it didn’t want to give up the nail. He tried prying the tire off the rim with a screwdriver, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally, I looked up to see Alan removing the tire with, yes, a saw. The “tube,” such as it was, revealed itself to be a length of stout rubber hose suitable for beating South American political prisoners. Weighed about three pounds each. The guy at the bike shop said he’d only heard of such things; they’re a specialty item for slender rubber tires used in places where they’d go flat frequently, like the floor in a carpet-tack factory, perhaps.
Anyway, they’re gone now. Next was the brake.
I don’t know about you, but I approach most machinery with a certain wary respect. I’m not totally buffaloed by it, but I recognize that the capability of understanding precisely how things work is either beyond me or of little interest. Alan’s knowledge is harder-won; he grew up in a working-class family, where if you needed something fixed, you fixed it yourself. The idea of paying someone to do something you could do yourself was not only preposterous, but wasteful, like paying someone to scratch your back. And since Alan was a boy with a bicycle and then a minibike and then a motocross racer, in a family that owned outboard motors and lawn mowers and small electrics, he learned quickly that if you took something apart carefully, you could usually figure out what the problem was, fix it, and then reassemble it with no harm done, at a fraction of the price a repair shop would charge.
Anyway, this bike, which weighs around 60 pounds (65 with the old tires) and carries two people, needs more serious stopping power than two caliper-style brakes would provide. So the rear brake is a drum. “I really don’t know how that works,” the seller’s wife said as we were looking it over.
“It’s simple,” Alan said. “There’s a cam, and when you put on the brake, the cam rotates and presses two shoes to the outside of the drum, and stops its turning.” She nodded politely. I recognized the expression on her face.
Alan disconnected the cable from the brake, removed the wheel, removed two nuts and then a third, and lifted off the top of the drum. “Just as I suspected,” he said. “Rust.” He cleaned it out with mineral spirits and then — I still can’t believe he can do this — put it back together. Then he put it back on the frame. And then he reconnected the cable, which involved three or four different nuts and twisty things. And he drenched it all in WD-40. And now it works like aces.
I know the feeling he gets when I marvel over this; it’s the same one a woman gets when her 24-year-old boyfriend is tucking into the first home-cooked meal she’s made for him. He looks at her with love in his eyes. She has performed alchemy, just like Mom. She’s marriage material.
And then there was more WD-40, and an Unfortunate Chain Incident (quickly put right), and we were ready to take it out. I have no pictures of the shakedown cruise, but here’s the finished project:
The basket is for carrying home picturesque bags of groceries, with carrot greens and six inches of baguette protruding from the top. The lock is for current Detroit realities. (The brand’s motto: “Tough world. Tough locks.”) The rest is for fun.
So, bloggage:
Most of you aren’t journalists, so I won’t spend much time on this, but I got an e-mail from a friend last week, when the Great Los Angeles Times Guest Editor Crisis was unfolding. A short e-mail. In its entirety, it read: Is it just me, or has our profession gone completely off its rocker? I replied: It’s not just you. I was thinking the same thing. Michael Kinsley sums it up well.
Why I love This American Life: Last week’s show was “What I Learned From TV.” The last chapter has Dan Savage, gay parent, telling why he’s creeped out by “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.” I was listening to it and found Kate creeping close to eavesdrop — after all, she kept hearing the names of characters she knows like siblings — and I had to say, while wiping laughter-tears from my eyes, “Look, someday you can hear this, but not yet.” (Astonishingly, she accepts this explanation.) But you, you’re a grown-up. Enjoy.
When I see a promo line reading, “George Will on anger,” I’m gonna read it. It should not surprise you to learn that George Will disapproves of anger. Why not try superciliousness, like him? The anger directed at Bush today, like that directed at Clinton during his presidency, luxuriates in its own vehemence, he writes. Funny how it didn’t bug him so much then.
Where does Ken Levine find these things? Girl is deathly afraid of pickles, so she goes on “Maury,” where people chase her around with pickles:
I’ve been shopping for a new toy of late — a tandem bicycle. I’m gonna offset me some carbon with a vengeance, once I get my hands on one. Kate and I will pedal all over the Pointes on it this summer, but first I have to find just the right candidate. My price range is “reasonable,” which means “below $500.” Mitch Harper had a drool-worthy one on his site earlier this week, but it’s way too rich for my blood, and I don’t think they’re going to drop the price by 50 percent. (It does, however, match my current bike perfectly; they’re both Cannondales from the same year.)
So the answer is, more likely, an old Schwinn Twinn or something similar. Poking around has led me deep into the world of vintage-bicycle nerds and their odd ideas of what things are worth. To give you a sense, I’ve seen Twinns in various states of repair at prices ranging from $80 to $1,500, and the condition of the bikes didn’t range nearly that wide. I’m convinced some people just don’t really want to sell, and so set outrageous price tags to make sure the bike stays in their garage.
Anyway, I have my eye on a couple. I love you, eBay. I cover you with kisses.
Bloggage:
Boy, Madonna and I really are nearly the same age, aren’t we? I kinda like some of these items from her H&M collection. They strike me as understated and classy. What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with her?
Laura Lippman makes the NYT best-seller list this week: I’m #11, separated by an asterisk from Mitch Albom at #10, which means our sales are virtually the same for the week. That’s gotta be a good feeling. Congratulations. Buy the book. Let’s get her above Mitch next week. SHAMEFUL UPDATE: The book is “What the Dead Know.” (Blush.)
I shouldn’t spend so much time blowing love to Ken Levine, but I’d pay money to hear him tell Hollywood stories. Fortunately, he tells them free of charge:
Our line producer informed me that the studio refused to pay our secretary’s parking. The budget for each episode was over a million dollars. Weekly parking was $13. Above-the-line people (writers, directors, producers, actors) got to park on the lot for free. Below-the-line peons had to park in a structure across the street.
And don’t let the Hollywood address fool you. This was not a great neighborhood. I used to call the lot “Fort Paramount.” While working at WINGS on rewrite night we often watched drug deals go down across the street at the parking structure. An ice cream truck would arrive every night about 11 and we would say, “Cracky the clown is here. Looks like he’s got some great shit tonight for the kiddies!”
I’ve probably heard more inside-Hollywood stories than most Midwesterners, but far fewer than the average Californian. Nevertheless, I’m always amazed at how often parking plays a major role in showbiz power struggles. It’s a place where everyone works out all the time, and yet having to walk from a too-distant parking space is considered an appalling insult. (The safety factor Levine mentions is a wild card.) My screenwriting-rewrite teacher was working on a project with Katie Holmes the semester our class was meeting; this was before she became Scientology’s zombie bride. He was going out to Los Angeles most weeks and “taking” meetings with his writing partner and Katie, who was “attached” to this project. (I just love slinging that lingo, but my outsider status requires me to put it in quotes.) One day they arrived at a movie lot in two cars. My teacher and his partner were directed to an inside-the-gate spot, while Katie was told to park at a remote lot two blocks away. That she did this cheerfully and without complaint — even keeping a pair of sneakers in her car for just these occasions — was offered to us as proof of what a wonderful, sweet, not-Hollywood-at-all, down-to-earth girl she was. “She’s really from Toledo,” he’d say.
The project later dissolved before it bore fruit, as I gather 99 percent of them do. You know the rest of Katie’s story.
My doctor last week not only told me the bad news — my ouchy knee is probably arthritic — he said that making it less ouchy is in my hands. He prescribed ibuprofen in horse-size tablets, unspecified weight loss (“every little bit helps”) and strengthening exercises on the torture machines. All this by way of saying, you guys get the blow-off today, because I gotta go to the gym. The one closest to my house is not only highly recommended and reasonably priced, they’re having a “women work out free” promotion for the month of March, so I’m going to check them out before I sign anything.
Why, you ask, might a gym around here be willing to give away services free? Why, read on:
Ashley, let us clasp hands and hold them high! Wayne County, my county, the 313, lost 19,079 residents in 2005-’06, a full 89,000 since 2000, surpassed only by Orleans Parish, La., site of Hurricane Katrina! Anybody want to buy a house? Sinn fein!
Cathy Seipp doesn’t need another blogger standing in line to sing her praises; she doesn’t need anything now, having died yesterday of lung cancer, at 49. I hope she might find a glimmer of grim humor in the fact her lack of a smoking habit is the first phrase after her name in her obituaries, in the place where “Nobel laureate” or “designer of the space shuttle” would normally go: “Journalist Cathy Seipp, a non-smoker, died of lung cancer Wednesday, at 49…”
I didn’t know her. We corresponded a few times. Five years ago, I blogged a blackly humorous piece she did in Reason magazine, about the inability of public-education zero-tolerance nanny types to deal with not-particularly-complex subtleties of their students’ medical needs, which I thought was devastating. As she told the story, her daughter has a type of asthma where she needs to carry two inhalers at all times — one to be used immediately (as in, IMMEDIATELY) after an attack, another right after. She carried these in her backpack for years until a teacher spied her using them, and demanded that she adhere to the school’s official prescription-drug policy; that is, that they be kept in a locked drawer in the office, where they could be asked for under the proper procedures.
Obviously this is absurd. Asthma attacks come on swiftly and can be deadly; you’d think a simple explanation to school administration would suffice, but Seipp did what she was supposed to do — got a note from her daughter’s doctor that laid out the nature of her illness, and assured all that the girl had been properly trained in the use of the inhalers, and so forth and so on. Not that it did any good:
I spoke to Ivanhoe’s then-principal, Kevin Baker. He said I’d been “breaking the law” for five years by keeping the inhaler in the backpack instead of in the office, and that he would “confiscate” it if he found it there in the future. If the school had allowed this before, he said, it was an oversight. “So now what we need to do,” he explained, in a sing-songy, Romper Room voice, “is set up a series of intervention meetings to help you understand our concerns about you breaking the law.” My arguments about doctor’s orders went nowhere. “When your daughter is at school,” Principal Baker said, “I am the ultimate authority concerning her health.”
If that isn’t about the best capsule description of a certain type of public-school official, I don’t know what is. (My sister can tell a few more stories along these lines.) Seipp sent me a note, I wrote back, and that was pretty much it. As a media critic, she had few peers, and as an observer of Los Angeles, her hometown, she was always worth your time. She was conservative, but not in the amen corner; she wrote about her politics in an interesting way. (At first I didn’t understand why she wrote for those lemon-suckers over at the Independent Women’s Forum, but she was a freelancer, and now I am too, and so I understand perfectly now.) She was funny and smart, she was honest, she told the truth and, from the abundant testimony of those who loved her, she was a good mother and a fine and loyal friend. A life too short, but well-lived.
Buoyed by the success of last summer’s Project Table, I’ve been looking around for another little occupational therapy task for this summer. I check the classifieds daily for just the right diamond in the rough. I’m looking for something old, neglected and without lots of pain-in-the-ass scrollwork or other detail that will drive me crazy when I’m trying to strip/stain/varnish it. If it’s something I can use when it’s all done, so much the better, but something to sell would be OK, too. It has to be cheap. It has to have a certain nay-say-quaw, as those Frenchies say.
In other words, I’m looking for a low, wide bookcase, unless I’m not. I’ll know it when I see it.
One of the great tragedies of the impending death of the American newspaper is the loss of yet another source of accidental stories. All the effort goes into Page One, but the rest of the paper is full of nuggety goodness, too, with the added attraction of not being all laid out and packaged for you; you get the thrill of connecting the dots yourself. Yesterday the editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press made Romenesko for speaking aloud this heresy: Readers buy papers for the ads, too. Well, duh.
For this reason, I’ve always loved the classifieds. Classifieds are super-short stories told in 10 words or less: Wedding dress, size 16, never worn. Make offer. Or: Moving out of state, must sell misc. furniture. Bedroom, living room, kitchen. Traveling light, all must go. When I was stuck for column ideas, I’d turn to the classifieds to get the juices flowing. Sometimes I’d be close to tears. I’d keep thinking about that size-16 wedding dress, NWT.
Now the classifieds are online, on Craigslist. People selling something inexpensive don’t want to spend much on the ad for it. Twice a day I check the furniture-for-sale listings. I have to check it twice because it’s so active, and if you fall behind you’ll miss something. You’ll be relieved to know that even without the self-imposed brevity that goes with paying by the word, the free Craigslist classifieds are as rich with narrative drama as the ink-on-paper kind. Everyone’s moving out of state, it seems. Everyone’s downsizing. Everyone’s liquidating a business, divorcing or otherwise re-ordering their lives. And there’s still stunning waste in the corporate world. Two Le Corbusier black leather chairs for sale, with this note: They were used for one day (one day!!) on stage at an executive conference for one of the car companies. We’re not using them again, so….here they are.
Other cultural notes to be gleaned: If you have an armoire-style entertainment center you’re ready to part with, take it out in the back yard and bust it up for firewood, because you’re not going to get a dime for it in this market. The new entertainment center is long, low and buffet-style, the better to show off your plasma-screen, my dear, and everyone’s trying to get rid of the old one. My father (who sold furniture) always said you should spend your money on wood, not upholstery, because the latter declined in value faster; I think of him whenever I see some poor shlub expecting to get six bills for a double-reclining La-Z-Boy sofa (“from a pet-free, non-smoking home”). Also, this: Whoever came up with the idea of the bed with bookcase headboard, recessed lighting and Luuuuvv Mirror is awaiting a place in the levels of hell reserved for the tacky. Finally, correct spelling is the trigonometry of modern life — no one can do it anymore. I’ve looked at ads for “intertainment centers,” “armwars” and my personal favorite, a pair of “Chip and Dale chairs.”
Haven’t found my bookcase/table/whatever yet. But it’s out there, I just know it. The other day someone was selling two ’40s-style office chairs, in oak, with the added backstory that they were from one of the old Ford factory offices and were given to Dad upon his retirement. See, that’s something you wouldn’t see in a newspaper classified, not when you pay by the word. Just thinking about all the gabardined behinds that sat in those chairs, and the work those people did — designing the Edsel, maybe — is almost impossibly romantic to me. Which is why I always pay too much for stuff like that.
(On the other hand, my sister credits my occasional rewrites of her eBay listings with bringing higher prices. I turned a description of a Heisy glass cocktail shaker with an etched fly-fishing scene into an evocation of the lost era of Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway. It sold for nearly $400. [Blows smoke from pistol barrel.])
So, bloggage:
You will get me on the Grand Canyon Skywalk when you pry my cold, dead fingers from the closest upright land-rooted structure, then quiet the shrieking of my ghost as my corpse is carried onto it. I mean, for someone nervous at heights, this is nightmare material. Good luck with that tourism, Hualapai tribe.
American Idol observation: If LaKisha wanted to cover a James Bond theme sung by another black woman with a big voice like hers — and I can think of no other motivation for choosing Shirley Bassey’s little corner of the British Invasion — why on earth didn’t she pick “Goldfinger”? Yet again, Ken Levine is the go-to funny guy for this:
Interesting that not one contestant chose a Herman’s Hermits song. I just picture Hannibal Phil Stacey singing “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” and Mrs. Brown being so terrified she gets a restraining order. …Sanjaya is now just humiliating himself every week. This is like when people dress up their dogs. William Hung was cringing. Please vote him off before Tony Bennett week. I beg of you.
OK, so let’s sign off with an eternal truth: When all else fails, a pretty girl can still move mountains with the right outfit. Particularly if it lacks foundation garments:
Finally finished “The Looming Tower” and will take it back to the library, overdue [kicks dirt], tomorrow. I’ll be buying it in paperback, once it has “the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller” emblazoned across the cover. I think the Big P is a foregone conclusion, but I could be wrong.
The book tells, in great detail, the story of al Qaeda, Islamic fundamentalism and, in particular, Osama bin Laden. Chapter 1 has been excerpted widely, the story of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian fundamentalist generally believed to be the father of Islamism. He was only one of many Muslims to come to America (in the ’40s, sorry Dinesh) and find himself disgusted by what he saw — mostly women, enjoying freedom of all sorts. Oh wait, there was another camel’s nose of leftism in this stew, too:
Qutb was familiar with the Kinsey Report, and referenced it in his later writings to illustrate his view of Americans as little different from beasts — “a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money.” A staggering rate of divorce was to be expected in such a society, since “Every time a husband or wife notices a new sparkling personality, they lunge for it as if it were a new fashion in the world of desires.” The turbulent overtones of his own internal struggles can be heard in his diatribe: “A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”
There you have it, America: The seeds of al Qaeda were planted when some hussy fluttered her eyelashes at this uptight Egyptian. You just never know, do you?
That’s only the appetizer, though. The soul of the book is the twin tales of two fascinating men, John O’Neill and Osama bin Laden. The O’Neill story has been told before, about the singular FBI agent whose train wreck of a personal life did not overshadow the fact he was about the only soul in the FBI who knew just how bad al Qaeda was. He finally left the Bureau in frustration, taking a job as chief of security for the World Trade Center. He started just days before Sept. 11, 2001, the day he died.
Bin Laden’s story was less familiar. I knew the outlines and quite a few facts, but I never got the whole picture until this book, and the picture is pretty banal: Bin Laden is — remains — a rich kid, one of those rich kids whose character is shaped by what he never had to do, that is, go out and earn a living. And so he became a leaf in the wind, an Arab Kennedy cousin of sorts, blown here and there by the whims of whatever caught his fancy at any given moment.
You’ve known these guys; the American version is more likely to be into heroin, or sustainable organic agriculture, or blue-green algae as the health cure doctors don’t want you to know about, but s/he’s as rigid as his al Qaeda brethren are on the subject of jihad. Bin Laden served as the proprietor of the death-to-the-infidel hangout, doling out cash to his entourage the way the American rich kid doles out drugs. He flits from project to project, swanning around Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation with his ragged band of would-be martyrs, hoping to die for Allah. The Afghans thought what you’d imagine, that they were amateurs and pikers, but hey, they all had fat wallets.
In other words, Bin Laden was an overprivileged punk. They’re the dangerous ones.
I learned a lot I either never knew, or knew and forgot. For instance: When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Bin Laden went to the Saudi king and begged him not to allow the Americans in. He said he — he and his Afghan “veterans,” his hand-picked mujahideen — would protect the oil fields in this holiest of Muslim lands. Really? said the king. And what will you do when he flings some chemical bombs at you?
“We will fight them with faith!” Bin Laden replied. The Saudi king was unimpressed and put his money on Team America. Infidel!
As amusing as this exchange is, it underlines something important: Bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein. Hated his secularism, his hedonism, his un-Islamic showboating. So of course we invaded Iraq.
“The Looming Tower” is a mesmerizing read, but also a depressingly familiar story, about the damage done by people who claim to be acting on behalf of God. When I was doing my journalism fellowship a few years back, two of our overseas fellows were from the Middle East, one Israeli and one Palestinian. Both were extremely secular. At a restaurant one night in Ann Arbor, the waitress arrived at the table with four plates of sandwiches, and delivered them to the wrong people. As we passed them around, I joked that the bacon cheeseburger couldn’t be Adi’s, the Israeli’s — so traife. It’s the sort of joke I make with my Jewish friends all the time, some of whom keep kosher and some of whom don’t, but all capable of smiling at a weak jest about dietary laws. He actually was offended. Why would I assume he was one of those Jews, the observant ones? He really wanted to know; he couldn’t believe I’d even think such a thing about him. It was a reminder that in a part of the world where most of the problems have their roots in religion, that being religious is a political act in and of itself. I guess I’m taking note of the obvious, that Sammy Bin L. has more in common with religious lunatics in this country than he does with an old thrill-rapist like Saddam. But if you really want to see the influence of this country’s God-botherers wane, there’ll have to be a lot more blood on the floor. I guess I’m saying, count your blessings.
Bin Laden turned 50 a couple weeks ago, still presumably alive, still living in something approaching comfort if not total freedom. He got away with 9/11 because we underestimated him. He continues to live as a free man because we continue to do so.
Bloggage:
The WashPost gives us a nice profile of Felicia Pearson, aka Snoop, the little assassin on “The Wire.” Like Pearson herself, it’s not what you think it is.
Now I have to go; today is the dog’s annual vet visit and I must collect the vile stool sample. I like our vet. Last year he showed me his photo album of strange animal rescues he’s participated in. (He’s on call for tranquilization and/or euthanization services.) There’s a buck with what looks like a 10-point rack being fished out of Lake St. Clair in the midst of a sailboat race, coyotes and foxes of all sizes and predicaments, and of course the savage feral dogs of Detroit. There are no boring jobs, only boring people.
