Kate had an unexpected sleepover Saturday night, normally a clarion call to head out and see an R-rated movie, but we were both dead tired, and so we stayed in, cooked a Splendid Table pasta recipe, and watched a triple feature of movies we’d already seen, on cable.

I’m a big fan of the re- experience. I reread books, rewatch movies, rewrite stupid blog entries that no one gives a fig about. It’s a form of mania, maybe, but you learn something. Among the things you learn: Kathleen Turner is so sexy she managed to make a nation forget that air conditioning had, indeed, reached Florida by 1981. So, first up: “Body Heat.”

I recall being blown out of the water by this one. Saw it several times in the theater, went around quoting its best lines. My favorite: “You’re not too smart. I like that in a man.” While I could never pull off the Full Turner — tight skirt, no bra, poky nipples and Veronica Lake hair — in my mind, I aspired to be Matty Walker. Who wouldn’t? She apparently possesses the world’s most powerful sexuality, enough to hypnotize William Hurt into killing her husband, after which she frames him for the deed and escapes to the tropics with all the cash. But I was ignorant then. In 1981 I’d not yet seen the film’s predecessors, “Double Indemnity,” “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and other noir classics. I see now what I couldn’t see then, that Lawrence Kasdan was referencing an earlier era, and his story is equal parts homage and retread. The update, I guess, is that one of the two killers skates free at the end, which was not the case in the earlier era, when the guilty had to be punished.

I was thinking it would have been more interesting with a few more contemporary details. The lack of air-conditioning, even in Matty’s mansion, shows the script isn’t entirely rooted in reality, but I’d like to have seen Hurt with, say, a minor cocaine habit. That was certainly pretty standard for weasel Florida lawyers in the early ’80s, and would have underlined his poor judgment. Even in 1981, did men ever fall for lines like, “I’ve never wanted it like this,” breathed in his ear as he’s dragged back to bed? With a head full of coke it’d be more believable. And, OK, it’s a young Kathleen Turner delivering the line, so I concede the point: He wants to believe.

But these are quibbles. The script is as tight as Turner’s skirt. It’s refreshing to see what was sexy in a less vulgar time, when hemlines were lower (but the slit skirt was in its full flower). When Hurt peels off Turner’s panties, they’re real panties, not a whale-tail thong. And how brave is Turner, showing off her lean, nude body so boldly. So that’s what a pair of unaugmented breasts looks like. Not bad.

So: It holds up. Just don’t think too hard about the air conditioning.

Next was “Igby Goes Down,” c. 2002, another film I recall loving at the time, but now? It just got on my nerves. It’s an update of “Catcher in the Rye,” a rich-kid-loose-in-the-city tale, but it’s a story that didn’t need updating in the first place, unless you have a deep need to sympathize with rich brats. The stagy dialogue grates, even in the hands of great actors. What is Susan Sarandon doing in here? Looking fabulous and classing up every scene she’s in, that’s what. Ditto Claire Danes, Jeff Goldblum and an early Amanda Peet who wasn’t quite recognizable as the current Amanda Peet, so I’m wondering if there hasn’t been a little work done in between, or maybe just the five pounds of weight loss that makes the face of a woman in her 30s different from the same face in her 20s.

This is another story that has to be looked at with of-the-period eyes. In 2009, it’s impossible to find the existential angst of a rich prep-school dropout compelling in any way. Get a job, kid. The world’s a tough and unforgiving place.

And the late show was “Bringing Out the Dead,” which I told Alan during the opening credits was “a rare Martin Scorsese disappointment,” but found myself loving. I had my head up my ass in 1999; this is a wonderful movie. Halfway through, I figured out what I was responding to: Scorsese’s heart. The guy always swings for the fences, and if you can’t respect that, go rent “The Dark Knight.” I recall this movie got meh reviews at the time, so I wondered what Roger said, and hmm, looky here:

To look at “Bringing Out the Dead”–to look, indeed, at almost any Scorsese film–is to be reminded that film can touch us urgently and deeply. Scorsese is never on autopilot, never panders, never sells out, always goes for broke; to watch his films is to see a man risking his talent, not simply exercising it. He makes movies as well as they can be made…

I love it when Roger agrees with me. “Risking his talent, not simply exercising it” — that is the challenge for the talented, particularly the greatly talented. Watch “Kundun,” a film about the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism, a story about meditation and silence and inwardness, and goddamn, but it works, and how many filmmakers could have pulled it off? I’ll follow this guy anywhere.

So that was Saturday movie night. I went to bed around midnight, exhausted but thinking “Milk” will have to wait for another sleepover night.

Do you still want some bloggage? How about this: The Portland mayoral sex scandal, in which Taylor Clark wonders how it might have played out if the mayor weren’t gay.

I was rooting for the terrier, but I respect the winner. An elderly Sussex spaniel takes home the big bowl at Westminster. Although I already miss Uno.

And with that, it’s time to start the real work. Good day to all. More coffee for me.

Some of you may have noticed I finally got a new book on the nightstand, after trying for weeks to finish “A Bend in the River.” (It was a compelling read that I unfortunately found easy to put down for days at a time. I’m saving it for summer at the pool.)

I broke down and bought Mark Bittman’s “Food Matters” because it’s time to make a change. We’ve discussed foodies and foodie religion here before, but I could never find a version of it that appealed to me, for a number of reasons that boiled down to stupid snotty elitism and stupid snotty worship of tomatoes. But I’ve been reading Bittman for years, and I’d follow him anywhere, and he has enough of a common touch that he can take the basics of the foodie argument — that our food choices do, indeed, matter — and strip away the vileness of the San Francisco School, which basically says, “And if you had it together, you’d choose what I choose.”

Maybe it’s because he structures the book around his personal story of losing 35 pounds following a fairly simple non-deprivation diet he calls “vegan until six.” Who doesn’t love a new diet book? Or maybe it’s the timing, me walking past the book at Border’s at the same time the latest salmonella scare was working its way through the news in its usual fashion:

Step 1: Salmonella (or other food-borne illness) breaks out somewhere, government assures us all is well and under control.
Step 2: Hmm, it turns out the contamination may be wider than we previously thought, however government assures us all is well and under control.
Step 3: Further investigation reveals government agencies are unable to actually track the problem very well, because of deregulation and open markets and the like, however, government assures us all is well and under control.
Step 4, 5, etc.: Contamination is wider than previously believed and may never be entirely contained, however, all is well and under control.

When the latest outbreak occurred, we were assured that the problem was confined to “peanut paste” used in those neon-orange vending-machine crackers and a few other easy-to-avoid products (under control! all is well!). Then, no, it’s in this stuff, and that stuff, and finally, yesterday, the last straw, a look at the peanut-processing plant where it all started. Warning: Put down your sandwich and drink a quick glass of water before reading:

BLAKELY, Ga. — Raw peanuts were stored next to the finished peanut butter. The roaster was not calibrated to kill deadly germs. Dispirited workers on minimum wage, supplied by temp agencies, donned their uniforms at home, potentially dragging contaminants into the plant, which also had rodents.

Even the roof of the Peanut Corporation of America plant here in rural southwest Georgia was an obvious risk, given that salmonella thrives in water and the facility should have been kept bone dry.

“It leaked when it rained,” said Frank Hardrick, 40, an assistant manager who, along with four other workers, described life inside the plant. “Different crews would come in to work on it, but it would still leak.”

It goes on at great, disgusting length, and it and similar stories are simply the last straw for me. I’m not naive; my husband has worked in factory-level food processing and I’ve heard the stories. I have a strong stomach — a strong appetite, anyway — and you know what they say about sausage-making. Even hand-crafted food, lovingly prepared, has a decided ick factor. But this is something else. This is a public-health issue.

Among the many things I am furious at my government for at any given moment, the failure of the Food and Drug Administration to keep us safe from the Peanut Corporation of America and its filthy plant is high on the list. I know that absent a workforce of inspectors equal to the armed services, “keeping us safe” is a pipedream. But the more you read about these owners, how they knew they had contaminated product and sent it out anyway, how they were more concerned with low-cost labor than quality labor, how they couldn’t even seem to swing a decent roof repair, it becomes clear that the plant was run this way because they knew they had nothing to fear from the FDA. In fact, they got advance notice of coming inspections, and instructed their minimum-wage workforce to say nothing.

So I’m doing the only thing I can: I’m opting out. I can’t go whole-hog, but I’ll go half-hog. I’ll restructure my grocery shopping around the assumption that every last item in the store could make me sick (especially the meat), that every word on every label is a lie, and I’ll offer in return the appropriate customer attitude and loyalty. And if making my own granola, decreasing demand at a feedlot and eating more fresh vegetables turns out to be a good strategy for my own health, well, then the foodies will win this one ugly. But as the Captain said in “Cool Hand Luke,” “This is how he wants it.”

Screw Big Food.

So, what’s going on in the world? Good to see the Curse of Madonna remains undiminished. I told someone last year, when she took up with Alex Rodriguez, that just you wait — he’s going to have a very bad year. Madonna has that effect on men. Sean Penn, one of the greatest actors of his generation, married Madonna and made “Shanghai Surprise.” Guy Ritchie, the English Tarantino, married Madonna and made “Swept Away.” Warren Beatty made “Reds” when he was with Diane Keaton and “Bugsy” with Annette Bening, “Dick Tracy” with Madonna. A-Rod is trickier, being a non-creative sort; I don’t know enough about baseball to make a credible prediction when they hooked up, but I knew it would be something, because it’s always something with Madonna. It’s her curse, the dark side of the fame and fortune, a sort of reverse Midas touch for men who dare to come near. She extracts their essence and injects it into her wrinkles, or something. Get away quickly enough, and you’ll live to work again (Penn, Beatty). Stay too long, and it may be all over; I hear “RocknRolla” sucked pretty hard, but Ritchie is still young.

Oh, so you say, and what about Carlos Leon, the personal trainer/sperm fountain tapped to produce Madonna’s Mini-Me? The rules may not apply, seeing as how he was essentially used for stud purposes and discarded more or less immediately, but let’s do a little Google … hmm, the NYPost spoke last summer of the Leon Fitness Center, said to be opening “this fall,” i.e., last fall. Oh, here’s more: It’s part of a condo complex in glamorous Long Island City, and is 1,050 whole square feet, about half the size of my house. I’d say: The curse holds.

It’s hard to know how much of this is honest journalism and how much is the cynical kind, perpetrated by editors looking for buzz, so you can take all this with as much salt as you wish, but.

First, New York magazine:

The long-anticipated war of the world versus Wall Street has erupted, and we non–Wall Street New Yorkers are caught right in the line of fire. On the one hand, how can we not share the populist outrage over bankers’ squandering a decade’s worth of profits and still taking bonuses as they bag federal bailouts? Most Americans just read about these guys; we got shouldered aside at the bar by them, and watched their bonuses push real-estate prices beyond our reach. We have greater cause than anyone to loathe the bastards.

On the other hand, until recently, America’s losses were our gains. Those Wall Street bonuses, in part, went to cover taxes that kept our streets clean and safe. They underwrote charity and culture. They supported restaurants, shops, and galleries. They paid the wages of cabdrivers, maids, doormen, and hairdressers. All New Yorkers stand to lose a lot in the austerity plans being imposed upon Wall Street by Washington.

Hmm, yes, I guess that’s true. All New Yorkers will lose a lot if deprived of the rich crumbs that fell from Wall Street’s table. Regrettably, the damage wrought by these greedheads is not confined to New York, and in fact spreads all over the world, to a lot of places where you cannot enjoy the New York City Ballet and related cultural luxuries. And so my sympathy is the proverbial world’s tiniest violin, playing a sad, sad song.

Oh, and please: Do not tell me that not being able to afford a Manhattan apartment is somehow equal to owning a Michigan house actively sending real dollars down the toilet, in large part because of Wall Street’s criminal behavior. Just…don’t.

Next, the cheekier NYT Sunday Styles. Hed: You try to live on 500K in this town. You sense that a story sourced by an author of an “Upper East Side novel of manners,” real-estate agents and the editor of the New York Social Diary is trying to apply the needle:

Private school: $32,000 a year per student.

Mortgage: $96,000 a year.

Co-op maintenance fee: $96,000 a year.

Nanny: $45,000 a year.

We are already at $269,000, and we haven’t even gotten to taxes yet.

Oh, my. [Pause for thought.] You know, this story is just here to push my buttons. I decline to have my buttons pushed. If you’d like to bat it around in comments, fine, but include me out.

I’m disinclined to engage with Candace Bushnell’s thoughts on what taking the train over a chauffeured Town Car might say about a banker forced to do so, in part because I read this story today, too, and a similar one, from the New Yorker, on Friday. You can read it at that link, but you’ll have to register; a video distillation is here.) The New Yorker story is better, but longer, and takes a look at how Florida’s “Ponzi economy” was brought to a catastrophic halt by the mortgage debacle, how housing was the engine of a long train representing Florida’s linked businesses, and when the engine hit a wall, the subsequent derailment was felt all the way back to the caboose. Reporter George Packer talks to people all along the socioeconomic spectrum, all of whom are suffering varying degrees of calamity. It was, honestly, the most depressing thing I’ve read in a very long time, although I was cheered to see that the “we all must share the blame for this” rhetoric was called out a time or two. A St. Petersburg Times journalist said the blame for this disaster looks like an inverted pyramid, with Wall Street and politicians at the top, and I think that’s about right. Packer talks to a couple who never went subprime, never treated their house like a cash machine, never overspent on credit cards, just tried to eke out a living near the bottom of the economy, and they are now the ones saying things like, “Maybe I’m a bad person. That must be why this is happening to me.” This, Packer observes, is more penitence than it currently being shown in New York or Washington at the moment.

So that’s what you should read.

A bit of bloggage? OK, a bit:

When Jim Harrison wrote his wonderful essay, “Ice Fishing, the Moronic Sport,” he wasn’t kidding. Really:

The day began with fishermen setting down wooden pallets to create a bridge over a crack in the ice so they could roam farther out on the lake. But the planks fell into the water when the ice shifted, stranding the fishermen about 1,000 yards offshore.

One hundred thirty-four saved from their own stupidity, one dead. The day’s temperature: Just shy of 50 degrees. I only wish I was kidding.

My mother’s favorite cabaret singer died this weekend. My mother and thousands of gay men, that is.

Finally, I know I’m very tough on the world’s most overrated newspaper columnist, but in the tradition of even broken clocks being correct twice a day, I give you…(drumroll)…a Mitch Albom column I actually liked. Halley’s Comet will likely appear before this happens again.

Finally, is it just me, or does “Stimulus Package” sound like the title of a dirty movie? Just wondering.

Enjoy your week.

I was having lunch with a friend yesterday, and we were discussing the general mood of the city, the state, the country these days. (Stop the presses: Not good.) It isn’t just the punishing winter, we agreed, which has been tough but well within normal parameters. It’s not just the income loss and belt-tightening, which has most people fretting, scrimping, cutting back and otherwise hunkering down. It’s not just the relentless parade of bad news from every corner, which is always accompanied by such phrases as “worst ever,” “in the 80 years since records have been kept,” and “defying even the grimmest expectations.”

It’s the combination of all of it, which leads to moments like the other day: My friend was picking up his Cadillac after some routine maintenance. He knew there was a timing-chain problem, but it was covered under warranty, and he was expecting a bill of around $50. So he gets to the cashier’s window, and she says, “That’ll be twelve ninety-five.” He goes nuts — what the hell, more than a thousand dollars?!?! And so on. The cashier quailed.

No. That’s $12.95, for the oil filter. But you get the idea — you just expect that when warm weather returns, it’ll be followed by a plague of locusts. The first in the 80 years since records have been kept.

I don’t have much today, or rather, I have too much. I have to get in the shower in seven minutes to make a busy morning schedule, after which I plan to indulge in a little me time — the library, lunch at a place other than my own kitchen, what the hell, maybe even an exploration trip to Hamtramck or the DIA or something. Let’s go crazy.

So this is just an open thread for a cold Friday in February, with an invitation to discuss whatever you like in comments. I may be back, but I probably won’t. Have a good weekend to all, and I’ll see you when I see you.

One of the things I like about my Russian teacher is that she’s a bit older, retired after 30 years in the public schools, and unlike my UM grad-student TA, we share a common initial reference point for Russia — the old Soviet Union. She shares her library of Soviet-era books with me, and understands what I’m asking when I wonder whether young Russians ever call one another tovaritch (comrade), you know, ironically. Some things seem to have made the transition from Communist Russia to oligarchical Russia intact, however. Take the national airline, Aeroflot:

It is normally a moment of cheery reassurance when an airline pilot greets passengers during preparations for take-off. But Alexander Cheplevsky sparked panic on flight Aeroflot 315 when he began to speak.

His slurred and garbled comments ahead of a flight from Moscow to New York convinced passengers that he was drunk. When he apparently switched from Russian into unintelligible English, fear turned to revolt.

It gets better. After the airline sent reps to calm the passengers, they offered this comforting rationalization:

One sought to reassure them by announcing that it was “not such a big deal” if the pilot was drunk because the aircraft practically flew itself.

And then the pilot finally came out of the cockpit to face his accusers:

Mr Cheplevsky did little to ease passengers’ fears by refusing to leave the cockpit to show that he was sober. When he was finally persuaded to face them, witnesses said that he appeared unsteady on his feet and had bloodshot eyes.

“I don’t think there’s anyone in Russia who doesn’t know what a drunk person looks like,” Katya Kushner, one of the passengers, told the Moscow Times, which had a reporter travelling on the flight.

Well, they can’t all be Chesley Sullenberger, I guess. That last quote made me giggle — vodka is to Russia what gin was to Victorian England, i.e., what crack cocaine was to late 20th-century urban America. Remember crack? Remember crack babies? America was birthing a generation of monsters, we were told, a zombie-youth corps that would doom our already impoverished cities to true nightmare status. I believed it. You probably believed it. And guess what? It’s not true. While smoking crack during pregnancy isn’t harmless to infants, and while it’s true that babies can be born addicted to drugs, the lifelong effects are about roughly equivalent to…well, let the NYT nut graf tell the tale:

Cocaine is undoubtedly bad for the fetus. But experts say its effects are less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco — two legal substances that are used much more often by pregnant women, despite health warnings.

All of this is leading to something you probably already read — it’s gotten a lot of circulation in the last few days. I normally hate “the speech he should have given” pieces, but Radley Balko’s thoughts on what Michael Phelps should have said about that bong picture breaks the bounds of the genre by being actually readable and, um, true:

I take it back. I don’t apologize.

Because you know what? It’s none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months per year. It’s that hard work that gave you all those gooey feelings of patriotism last summer. If during my brief window of down time I want to relax, enjoy myself, and partake of a substance that’s a hell of a lot less bad for me than alcohol, tobacco, or, frankly, most of the prescription drugs most of you are taking, well, you can spare me the lecture.

It goes on, and it’s worth reading. I generally object to drugs on more practical grounds, i.e., does the world need more stupid people pinned to their couches, laughing at “Jackass”? But it’s a free country, and you don’t have to join them, and Balko’s argument is sound. When it comes to drugs that really take a toll on society, it’s hard to top alcohol. This isn’t an argument for prohibition. We already had it, and we lost, or rather we scrambled to some sort of Gaza/partition deal, where alcohol is OK but other drugs aren’t. So the swimmer who earned 14 Olympic medals has to grovel and pretend what he was photographed doing is precisely the same as injecting a speedball into his arm. While somewhere halfway around the world, the dark comedy of Aeroflot and its drunken pilot unfolds as farce.

I don’t get it, either. But I appreciate it.

And so we come to the news I’ve been avoiding so far: Amy Welborn, my ex-neighbor in Fort Wayne, lost her husband suddenly yesterday. Michael Dubruiel went for a run at the Y, collapsed and died of sudden cardiac arrest. They had recently relocated to Alabama and were loving their new home (even while their old one sits like a rock on the moribund Fort Wayne real-estate market). Besides Amy, he leaves behind two little boys and all the usual holes in many other lives. This is the third time in a year that someone I’ve known has died and left little children without a parent. Worst year ever.

Our lonely quest for accuracy remains unfinished, so let’s put this at the top of the blog today, so our vast and influential readership sees it, first thing:

A commode is not a toilet.

It’s true that the word is a euphemism for toilet in many places, including the American south. But the one purchased by ex-Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain for his office likely supported his tabletop cigar humidifier, a Baccarat crystal decanter, a solid-gold dildo or perhaps his latest golf trophy, but not his overpaid ass.

This is a commode:

Thanks, Wikipedia.

No one, including his editors, tells Mitch Albom anything other than “yes, sir” and “great column, sir!,” so we’ll write him off, and let him snicker, you can’t justify $35,000 for a commode — yes, a commode …

But David Brooks has the best editors money can buy, so what’s his excuse? Ahem:

Then there was John Thain, who was humiliated because it is no longer acceptable to spend $35,000 on a commode for a Merrill Lynch washroom.

The Wall Street Journal, run by well-paid journalists who presumably know their Louis Quinze from their Louis Seize, explained it very well a few days back, but still, the confusion persists.

The WSJ is good enough to provide the original itemized list of Thain’s office furnishings, and you’ll note the commode is for the reception area. Think about it.

And that will be our last word on the subject, until someone screws it up again.

While we’re on the subject of language, however, let’s take a look at what the ex-governor of Illinois is doing. Oh, look. He’s lashing out:

CHICAGO — Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich today lashed out at lawmakers who booted him from office, calling his removal a “hijacking.”

Someone is always lashing out in the newspaper. “Lashed out” is straight journalese, the language reporters and editors speak amongst themselves that no one else does. Let’s use the miracle of Google to see its awesome power of description:

Drunk George Tenet lashed out at Bush’s neocons…

Noam Schalit lashed out at Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government on Wednesday…

Pictured: The moment Sharon Osbourne lashed out at reality show contestant…

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lashed out Friday when quizzed about the flap over a landscaping crew working at his home…

Kanye lashes out at Britney’s return to VMA…

Lashing out is done so often in news stories, and describes such a wide range of behavior, that the term is effectively meaningless. Follow that link to Sharon Osbourne, and you’ll see a proper lashing out — she’s throwing a drink in some slut’s face. Whereas Mitt Romney, whom you wouldn’t think has a lashing-out bone in his body, got tagged after responding to a question with another question: “If I go to a restaurant, do I make sure all the waiters there are all legal? How would I do that?” the former Massachusetts governor asked.

Of course, the first is from the Daily Mail, the second from the uptight L.A. Times. When in doubt, always trust a Brit. They know their lashing.

So. Kwame Kilpatrick was sprung from the slam shortly after midnight this morning. Of course he had a security detail, ineptly described in the Freep as “self-important, well-dressed men,” but the writer gets a pass — he was on deadline. I’m amazed at the politics of security details in this town; it really seems to be a badge of honor. (The superintendent of schools gets security as part of the position’s compensation package.) Kwame in particular appears to love rolling like Suge Knight, which I always found amusing, because the guy played college ball and packed on the usual few dozen retirement pounds, and hardly looks like a handy mugging target. He likes multiple vehicles and a big carbon footprint — his private posse last night went for no fewer than five SUVs. I guess Fidel Castro gets more, but in a place like this, it just reads as TGFW. Too Ghetto for Words:

The security guys, some wearing bow ties and long coats, others with Bluetooth-like devices in their ears, made it seem like the ex-mayor would be getting into one vehicle parked illegally in front of the jail.

For 20 minutes before Kilpatrick appeared, they stood next to an open door and kicked at the icy snow piled on the curb. It was a bush-league feint reminiscent of the body-double stunt Kilpatrick’s Detroit Police Executive Protection Unit employed last year during one of the then-mayor’s court appearances.

Instead, Kilpatrick walked about 100 feet to the west and entered the Suburban.

Sigh. Well, politics at the other end of the American class spectrum doesn’t seem any prettier. I read the New Yorker’s story about the brief political career of Caroline Kennedy and came away with two conclusions: New York dodged a bullet, and Lawrence O’Donnell is a gold-plated asshole. You’d think we’d have moved past the era of Kennedy brown-nosing, but nooo. Here he is on the woman who did get the job:

Now Caroline Kennedy has had her moment and flubbed it. Paterson has appointed Kirsten Gillibrand, a second-term congresswoman from Hudson, near Albany. “Paterson has no comprehension of upstate New York, absolutely none, and has chosen someone better at representing cows than people,” Lawrence O’Donnell says. “What you have is the daughter of a lobbyist, instead of the daughter of a former President or the son of a former governor. This is the hack world producing the hack result that the hacks are happy with.”

Good god. Now there’s a lash-out.

OK, off to Gymville. I feel like shit, but I’m soldiering on. Have a better day than mine doubtless will be.

I wrote a story last summer about the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, and I wish I’d had this story to read beforehand — I had no idea lesbian separatism existed beyond short-term deals like the Rosie O’Donnell cruises. (And the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.) The organizer and I talked a lot about the idea of maintaining a purely male-free zone — artists who commonly perform with male backup musicians are asked to perform solo, and there are restrictions keeping boy children past diaper age away from the action, to name but two. At the end of it I came to the shrugging acceptance I apply to most of these deals: It takes all kinds.

The NYT story I linked to concerns the “about 100 below-the-radar lesbian communities in North America, known as womyn’s lands (their preferred spelling), whose guiding philosophies date from a mostly bygone era.” The bygone era referred to appears to be the crunchy-granola ’70s, but really goes back far further — Americans have been trying to create insular, utopian communities as long as there’s been an America. Maybe Alex can give us a few thoughts about this; he’s an Underground Railroad historian, and many of these groups provided refuge to escaping slaves en route to Canada. He’s also gay, so maybe he has some insight about why a bunch of white-haired crones want to live in a world where no penises are tolerated anywhere, although God knows the women themselves are plenty forthcoming:

“Outside the gate, it’s still a man’s world,” said Rand Hall, who retired as the publisher of a gay and lesbian newspaper in Tampa and St. Petersburg, Fla., and moved to Alapine in 2006. “And women are not safe, period. It’s just that simple.”

I got news for you, sister: No one is safe, inside or outside the gate, but I suspect she knows that already. Even Alapine isn’t safe, as the story suggests — younger lesbians are increasingly uninterested in living like this, which current residents maybe don’t see as progress, but I do. They never knew the world that made these women feel so uncomfortable in the first place, and that’s one of the things I talked about with the Michigan festival founder, who was a few years older than me and only caught the tail end of it herself — the police raids on gay bars, estrangement from families, the threat of job loss and public humiliation. Not every gay woman can pass, after all, or get away with a Boston marriage in a rose-covered cottage in some university town, masquerading as sisters or dear friends united in shared grief over the loss of their beloved husbands. But she — the festival founder — had been stopped going into women’s restrooms and had others hassles related to being very butch at a time when it simply wasn’t accepted. So I get it.

Unlike some of the crueler comments on Metafilter or the utterly clueless Brother Rod Dreher (who’s always threatening his readership with something called the Benedict Option, and I for one hope he gets off the pot sooner rather than later), I think the passing of these settlements is a sign of progress. This is something the festival founder and I batted back and forth for a while. Are women really threatened or degraded by the presence of a man playing bass on a stage behind lights? She said no, but that someone like me could never understand the attractiveness of such an environment to someone like her, and it’s only for a few days, after all. I’ll give her that.

I’ve known deaf people who would just as soon never interact with the hearing world, black people who’d love to live in a no-whites zone. Just about every group that’s been marginalized, abused or otherwise made to feel unwelcome will always have a few members who simply turn their backs on the whole game. Even men have their no-girls-allowed clubhouses, only we’re more likely to call them by their proper names — “seminaries” and “troop ships,” and yes I’m making a joke.

Ultimately, however, I think segregation is a losing game, and to the extent that women like these would certainly feel more welcome in today’s larger world, I think you can definitely call that progress.

What you can’t call progress, I fear, is a bit of news that broke Friday, too late to even make a final pilgrimage: One of my favorite bars in Fort Wayne closed over the weekend, a victim of the recession and, probably, a citywide anti-smoking law. Fort Wayne has a local-pub tradition similar to St. Louis’. It’s full of humble places where you can always get a cold beer and a decent cheeseburger for not a lot of money. Or was. (Please, someone: Tell me Jack & Johnnie’s is still in business.) The Acme was the regular lunch place for Dr. Frank and me, and he was the first person I called when I heard. He was equally gobsmacked, and proceeded to reel off all the family decisions he and his wife had made there, all the after-event rounds he’d bought there, etc. The place was decorated in the sort of style widely imitated in more self-consciously ironic yuppie boîtes — individual jukeboxes at tables, vinyl upholstery, knotty-pine walls. The neon alone is a treasure.

Gone the way of all things, I guess. I’m still sorry to hear it.

Finally, one bit of bloggage: How to hack portable roadside electronic signs. A guerilla-filmmaking skill I’m going to keep in my back pocket.

My old boss Richard did one of those 25 Things lists on Facebook. He did 35, however, and they were all wonderful, but especially Nos. 2 and 3:

2. We had this weekly feature on one of the newspapers I worked for. This elderly guy would draw an animal and write about it. Very educational. After about three years, though, he started drawing animals that didn’t exist.

3. We also had a hunting column, i.e., which animals were in season, etc. We called it “Dinner.” And we had a chatty obit column called “Cadaver Palaver.”

And so another week begins. Enjoy it, all.

The dead guy frozen in ice was found in the Detroit Public Schools book depository building. I should have picked up on this yesterday, but I was rushed and disorganized as usual, and it wasn’t until later that I remembered: This was the building whose contents and criminal decay were photographed by Jim from Sweet Juniper (and, to be sure, about a million other professional and amateur shooters, urban explorers, blight tourists and various slumming gawkers). He put together one of his typically thoughtful posts about it, which got Boing Boing’d, Fark’d, Metafilter’d and Web 2.0’d to a fare-thee-well, culminating in one photo running in Harper’s Magazine last year.

The post was also featured on some racist websites, used by its proprietors to show what happens when you let “them” run their own school systems, and Jim responded to that with a follow-up post that describes the building and how it got to the state it’s in. It’s pretty long, but it’s probably the best single explanation of how decay happens and why it persists in this city, and it boils down to: It’s complicated.

What’s most important for purposes of looking at the How and Why of the Dead Guy is probably the building’s most recent chapter, when it was sold to Manuel “Matty” Moroun, whose hip-pocket, one-phrase media description is usually “reclusive billionaire.” Moroun owns — yes, owns outright — the Ambassador Bridge across the Detroit River, which carries 70 25 percent of all the freight that moves between the United States and Canada. Some people think a crossing that important should be in the public’s hands — and if you’re thinking this sounds kind of like “Chinatown,” you’re not alone — and efforts have been underway on both sides of the border to bring this monopoly to a halt. Moroun is opposed to this, of course, and has taken steps to preserve his holdings, including buying key real estate parcels near the bridge, one of which is the building where the dead guy was found.

Moroun has no motivation to either demolish the building or even secure it. Like a lot of structures built around that time in this city, it’s solid to a fault. (You did know one of this area’s architectural innovations was the invention of reinforced concrete, didn’t you?) It would cost millions to demolish and he doesn’t need it demolished, and so, writes Jim:

So for seven years, Moroun’s company has held a permit for the demolition of the former Detroit Public Schools book depository, but he has done nothing but neglect the building. …Instead, because this is Detroit, it just sits there. It is left unsecured, open to scrappers, looters, crackheads, graffiti artists, suburban taggers, vandals, prostitutes, and local bloggers.

I imagine it’ll be secured now — at least for a while; the Freep today ran a photo of the perimeter fence being repaired. The Freep, having been beaten on this story, is pushing the city’s defense, which is: We responded to the 911 call and found nothing. Now that Kwame Kilpatrick, beneficiary of much Moroun campaign cash, is gone, city officials are blaming Moroun for the incident, for failing to secure the building. I’m sure this will still be playing out long after the dead guy is or isn’t ID’d and laid to rest in whatever potter’s field the city is currently using.

This is interesting: The News story today doesn’t mention Moroun at all. It, like yesterday’s story, was written by Charlie LeDuff, who also had a coup of sorts late last year, when he lured the reclusive billionaire from under his bridge for his first interview in forever. It was, not surprisingly, a pretty respectful one, and didn’t touch on this issue. (He does mention the building adjacent to the book depository, the infamous Michigan Central Station, which Moroun also owns. He claims he can’t tear that one down, because it’s a historic landmark. No word on whether that applies to the book depository, probably because it doesn’t.)

This is getting complicated. Like most things around here.

Anyway, there are many more links in the ones I’ve already given you. The link to Jim’s follow-up post is to all his depository-tagged posts, including the original. A quick Flickr tag search for “detroit book depository” will take you to hundreds of photos of the place. And for those of you puzzled over the headline for this post, it’s a reference to “So Much Water So Close to Home,” a Raymond Carver short story about the problem posed by a dead body. It was one of the threads in the movie “Short Cuts,” for you film buffs.

So. A little bloggage:

I suspect the maternity wedding dress is nothing new — what else is an empire waist for other than fetal concealment — but still, here’s a story about the latest styles.

And while we’re stealing links from Jezebel…now there’s a talent competition.

Why we have a health-care crisis in this country: Because there are doctors who will implant eight embryos in the uterus of a woman who already has six children. Remember that the next time your insurance premiums go up.

Have a good weekend, all. I hope to.

ADDED: Oops, almost forgot. When the Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at George Bush, Alan said, “You wait. They’re going to put up a statue of that guy.” Not quite, but close. Alan would like you all to know he told you so.

You’d think, with the heaps of frozen water in the yard, that moisture wouldn’t be a problem for a Michigan family on a day like today, but you’d think wrong. Winter is perverse that way. I’ve identified a large part of my physical misery as a lack of moisture, and am working to rectify it. If you’ve never awakened at 5 a.m. with parched nasal passages swollen shut and a mouth that feels like a cat peed in it, well, you’ve never lived in your average heated house in winter. There’s no furnace-linked humidifier in the world that can keep up with it, so you have to supplement — with vaporizers, saline nasal spray, industrial-grade moisturizers and other foofraw, trying to find some sort of equilibrium. It sucks. What sucks even more is knowing that by July, I’ll be bitching about the humidity along with everyone else.

Is there a place on earth where naked primates can live in comfort year-round? I read somewhere that some Caribbean island suspended daily weather forecasting because it was the same every single day except when a hurricane was in the neighborhood — highs in the low 70s, winds steady out of the west at 10-15 knots, slight chance of late-afternoon showers. Maybe that’s the place.

You want to see what winter can do to a girl? Watch the trailer for New in Town. Cold weather appears to have frozen Renee Zellweger’s face to the point she can only move her mean little mouth! (And it’s her skin that looks worst of all, at least in the trailer. When a movie can’t make Renee Zellweger look pretty, it’s time to investigate the straight-to-video option.)

OK, enough. It’s not so bad out there. We’re predicted to break the 20-degree mark today, woohoo. And a white winter is always a better than a brown one, so I’ll take it.

For the sake of relativity, Jeff TMMO posted a link in comments to the webcam at the South Pole. It’s -19 in what is, after all, high summer down there. No one will be joining the 300 Club today.

OK, then. Let’s talk fresh starts. Does anyone else find it ironic that Detroit’s ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, convicted felon, local disgrace and all-around shitheel, apparently has a job prospect after he’s sprung from the slam in a few days? With actual law-abiding working people falling like dead soldiers every day, you’d think the guy might have to spend some time swearing at Craigslist with all the rest of us, but no. The good news: It’s in Texas. A few more immigrants like him, and the Lone Star state will be the new Florida.

A little bit of bloggage today:

Watch the first clip. Are all pageant dads nancyboys? Is there some way to grow girl babies in wombtanks rather than make innocent women marry these guys?

You thought this blog had the stupidest comment about John Updike yesterday? Not even close.

Not much for you today, I know, and I apologize. But it’s off to Costco for me — we’re out of beer and wine. That’s a must-rectify situation in our house. So maybe later, eh?

I had Sunday lunch at Lance Mannion’s rooftop aerie in Fort Wayne many many years ago, back when Lance was an assistant professor teaching freshman English at Ball State. Among the guests were a couple of his colleagues, and one told a hilarious story that Lance now has zero memory of:

A third English department colleague was having lunch at a McDonald’s in Indianapolis. He had just bitten into his Big Mac when a woman approached him and said, shyly, “You’re John Updike, aren’t you?” The guy telling the story mimed the action perfectly — the sandwich held to his mouth, the glance up at the woman standing next to the table — and the English professor’s reaction, which was to put the burger down, wipe his hands on a napkin, chew a bit to clear his mouth and then reply:

“Yes. Yes I am.”

The woman, needless to say, was delighted. John Updike! Eating at a McDonald’s in Indianapolis! What are the odds? About the odds of a man misidentified as a famous writer being an actual English professor with a deep familiarity with that writer’s work, that’s what, because he carried on a conversation with the woman for several minutes. She said things like, “I know most critics say (this book) is your best, but I always liked (that book) better,” and he replied, slyly “This is just between us, but (that book) is my favorite, too.” It turned out she had a copy of one of his novels with her, and presented it for signing, which he did, along with a warm personal note. By the time she excused herself, I’m sure she felt she’d had a Celebrity Brush With Greatness for the record books, the sort of thing you hope for when you spot one of your heroes out in the wild and almost never have. Now that we’ve entered a time when everybody has a blog, I’m Googling “‘john updike’ + mcdonald’s + indianapolis” to see if maybe that woman is sharing the story, but so far the only references I get are to Lance’s blog, when I prompted him to tell the story a few years back, and my own, when I alluded to it. It’s sort of suspicious that Lance had no memory of this story; I recall it bringing the house down that day, and now I’m wondering if it’s just a figment of my imagination. No. My imagination isn’t that inventive.

Some prime bloggage today. I have something you journalists are going to love. The rest of you will love it, too:

Rotary-dial phones! Those old modems with the cups! You’ll notice one of the participating papers was the Columbus Dispatch — that’s because the service provider for all this was Compuserve, based there. I can still summon the sight of the copy editor whose job it was to handle the upload, and Kirk will remember his name, but I don’t. I sent this to someone this morning, who replied: It’s like a slasher movie; THE INTERNET’S IN THE HOUSE!!!! GET OUT!!!! IT WANTS TO KILL YOU AND YOUR PROFESSION. Man, I’ll say.

Eric Zorn at the Chicago Tribune sends me a lot of love, and I don’t send enough of it back, but it’s not guilt that prompts me to recommend his bloggage of Blago, which has been truly inspired — from an over/under estimate on use of the word “people” in a particular interview (he set the bar at 23, which turned out to be waaaaay low, as the guv dropped the p-bomb 73 times), to this analysis of yet another set of pet phrases. This particular public embarrassment was made for blogging, and you could do far worse. Go see Eric today.

In the Department of Other Shoes, I hesitate to link to this because it won’t mean anything to readers outside of Detroit, and those who know about it don’t need the prompt, but: As usual, the sex scandal is only the appetizer for the money scandal, as we are finding out in regard to city administration. This place makes Chicago look like Minnesota.

Short shrift today, but we’re in the midst of another snowstorm — it does, literally, look like Minnesota at the moment — and I have to go deal with it. New question: Will the snowblower fling the dog poo from the driveway, left there because the snow’s too deep for the little guy to find his usual grassy spots? I’ll keep you posted.