(I am not laughing. Three children are motherless. But jeez: “Somebody lit it and it didn’t go off immediately. She looked over the top of it and it went off.” A cautionary tale for the Age of Blowing Shit Up. Life is not a Road Runner cartoon.)
I’ve always found medicine interesting, but also, how you say, gross. I shadowed a general surgeon once, and watched him remove a gall bladder (pre-laparoscope days), repair a hernia, do a breast biopsy and one other procedure I can’t recall. It left two overwhelming impressions, the first of tenderness for the patients, whom I only saw after they were completely anesthetized. Laid out on their tables, their heads tipped to one side, skin stained with Betadine, their most intimate body parts exposed, it was almost unbearable to watch them. I wanted to cup their cheeks and kiss their foreheads, tell them they’d be OK.
The other was that all that crap about the “delicate hands of a surgeon” is just that — crap. “Nancy, would you like to see the appendix before I take it out?” the doctor asked. (Apparently it’s routine to snip the appendix anytime you’ve got the abdomen open.) I said OK, took my look, and watched as this very competent general surgeon stuffed the patient’s large intestine back into her cavity with all the grace and care I bring to stuffing my Thanksgiving turkey. Doctors are, essentially, very highly skilled, and highly paid, mechanics.
But it was the breast biopsy that got to me the most, for obvious reasons. The patient was a woman in her 40s with a long history of benign lumps, and fortunately this one was, too. But it took a chunk out of her breast, and so it made me think of the big C and the small r (that would be “reconstruction,” for those who cannot read my mind).
Which made me think of plastic surgeons, the bastards.
OK, they’re not bastards. But there’s a reason they’re not cardiologists, either. About 10 years ago, a top-heavy stripper won a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. She’d deducted the cost of her implants as a business expense, the IRS disallowed it, and she appealed, and won. The woman was nobody you’ve heard of, but it turned out she “lived” in Fort Wayne, “lived” meaning she got her mail and spent a couple nights a year in an apartment there. It was a nice central location for the clubs she spent her life touring between. (The life of a B-list stripper is not a glamorous one.) And she’d had her surgery — surgeries — done there. Really? the city’s journalists queried as one. By whom? Sorry, folks, that was a secret more closely guarded than Dick Cheney’s undisclosed location. But one of the city’s corps of plastic surgeons had opened this girl up multiple times and installed implants of ever-ballooning size until she had the 54-inch bustline of a true stripping entrepreneur. (Part of her argument was that every surgery boosted her income by a predictable margin, and that once she was ready to retire she planned to have them removed, as they impeded life as a private citizen. Amish men at the mall would walk into walls staring at her.)
Call me crazy, but I don’t think this counts as “practicing medicine.” Whenever I talked to a plastic surgeon, I tried to balance the polarities of the job. On the one hand, a talented plastics specialist at Ohio State University had repaired the faces of two of my friends when they hit hard, unforgiving surfaces. Others gave women maimed by cancer a chance to feel whole again. But on the other, well, a doctor friend of mine put it best: “A kid with asthma in Brooklyn has to take four buses and trains in the middle of January to get a breathing treatment and we can’t seem to do anything about that, but let a cardiologist’s wife want to upgrade to a D-cup, and man, we are all over that.”
All this by way of taking the long way around to the NSFW link o’ the week: The Plastic Surgery Beauty Enhancement Awards, brought to you by Make Me Heal, for “all your cosmetic surgery and anti-aging needs.” Actually, the links above are SFW, but if you go further into the site — and don’t think I don’t know where you’re headed, you perverts — be advised it’s not only unsafe for work, but probably unsafe for breakfast, too. Especially some of the postop photos.
Ah, beauty.
So, bloggage:
Nothing is sacred, but this, this! Is elephant dung on the Virgin Mary!
Oh, look. The president of the United States committed an act of craven bullshittery. Shocked, shocked. Etc.
Back to real work now. You all flay Scooter in the comments.
I don’t understand newspapers anymore. Oh, I get the gist, but it’s this making-it-up-as-we-go stuff that sometimes escapes me. Everyone has a dream of how journalism will work in the age when you no longer buy ink by the barrel, and the dreams will differ. Some people see a world in which investigative reporting contains hotlinks to the various public databases that offered the information; others see dog pictures. To be sure, the internet means you can have both, but it all adds up to a lot of confusion for dinosaurs like me.
By the way, I should say: I love that dog picture. That’s one that belongs in the newspaper.
Lameness continues today. Alan said if we want any family-vacation time we have to take it in July, because he has a maternity leave coming up on his staff in August, which means he’ll be chained to the grindstone. So now I have to hustle and figure out how we can enjoy a few days in fabulous New York City sooner rather than later. This trip has been in the discussion stage for a while, but I’ve been dragging my feet, waiting for the airlines to get their act together. Ha! And now we’ll be arriving just in time for TerrorFest 07. Ah, no worries. I’m a Brit at heart on this subject, and nothing but nothing will stop me from dragging my kid through the nation’s greatest city. I don’t care if there are car bombs on every corner.
I wonder what we might be missing here. This is the 40th anniversary of Detroit’s personal When Everything Changed moment, and the collective recollection of the ’67 riots has already begun. In the writing class I took this spring, the instructor asked if anyone had a story to tell about “the riots, or the uprising, whatever.” Interesting how “uprising” is now a preferred alternative for civil unrest, although even honkies here acknowledge that police brutality was a leading cause of our own personal Troubles. (Note, in that link, the reference to the “Big Four,” four-man jump-out squads of cops that patrolled black neighborhoods, with a license to hassle.) It was well before my time, though, and I’ll leave the recollections to those who were here.
(Amusingly, one of the best riot stories anyone in that class told was that of a young man who lived, as a toddler, through the 1984 World Series riot. He sat on his mom’s lap while the crowd rocked their car menacingly. It was one of his earliest memories, and guess what the takeaway message was? Baseball must be a very important game, if it makes people act like this. Gotta love it. He talked a lot about this photo, the iconic image of that crazy October.)
So, instead, have a load of bloggage:
Irony of ironies: Michael Moore and General Motors have common ground on the issue of health care.
A typically absorbing WashPost read on a family of fierce competitors. In this case, competing with coonhounds.
And for the parents in the house, one of the best comment threads — and most-linked, I’m sure — ever: Tell us how your kids embarrassed you. Some great stories, many involving little kids and the stories they tell about their genitalia. Loudly, and in public.
I’m outta here. Back in a bit.
One of my old boyfriends had a father who used to take the family on long car trips. Like lots of dads, he didn’t like to stop once he got a head of steam going. For anything. He made them — we’re talking four boys here — pee into Coke bottles; only number two would get him to pull over.
That said, he was a kitten compared to Mitt Romney:
Before beginning the (12-hour drive with the family from Boston to Ontario), Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family’s hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon’s roof rack. He’d built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.
Then Romney put his boys on notice: He would be making predetermined stops for gas, and that was it.
The ride was largely what you’d expect with five brothers, ages 13 and under, packed into a wagon they called the ”white whale.”
As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ”Dad!” he yelled. ”Gross!” A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.
As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.
Call me Tony Soprano, but: Poor Seamus.
One of the first lessons you learn in the newspaper business is how cracked people are about animals. Animals and dead babies, but mainly animals. When something bad happens to a kid, readers are outraged, but if that happens to a dog or cat, multiply the outrage by 10. Or 100. Even stories about bad animals — say, a pit-bull fighting-ring bust, accompanied by photos of menacing-looking pits with scars and demi-ears and spiked collars — will get the phones jingling with bleeding hearts offering to take those poor animals in and retire them to the countryside.
It’s easy to laugh at these folks, and I have, but after a time I came to accept it. We love animals, and this is not a bad thing. I get upset when they’re valued higher than people, but as we see from the case of Mitt Romney, sometimes a dog’s life is nobler and worth more on the karmic scale.
Something I’ve noticed, and it’s entirely anecdotal so take it for what it’s worth, but: The more religious a person is, the lower their regard for animals. Living in Amish country pretty much stripped away every last shred of romance I might have felt for the Amish, but nothing flayed my expectations like learning that the Amish are a prime force behind puppy-mill dog breeding. To them, dogs are just another form of livestock.
And yes, I know how easy it is to go the other way, as a glance down the “pet clothing” aisle at Target will attest. In my dealings with critters, I’ve tried to take my cue from the many excellent professional trainers I’ve been privileged to know, who understand dogs and horses better than anyone. All were kind but firm, and understood a dog is not a child. A dog is a dog.
Still, none of them ever strapped theirs to the goddamn roof of the car.
Strap him to the damn car, is what I say.
OK, bloggage: I told you the glycol story was scary. Not that I would ever say, “I told you so,” but…
I don’t have the patience to read about Amy Winehouse. Someone who knows more, please tell me if I need to care about her or if I can just wait for the obituary.
P.S. I realize this space has been Tops in Lameness of late, but stay with me: I believe we have depths still to plumb.
Went for a long bike ride yesterday. Temperature: low 90s. Humidity: Merciless. I felt like riding fast and hard, so I did. About halfway through I started noticing people looking at me. Normally people don’t look at me. I’m no head-turner on my best day, and have fully arrived at that state of middle-aged female invisibility where you begin to blend in with the wallpaper. (I’m convinced I could walk into a bank, enter the vault, fill my pockets with cash and walk out unnoticed. At least if the bank is anything like the deli counter.) But I was turning heads. Pigeon crap on my forehead? The vile jiggling of my thighs? A bloody nose? The hint of cleavage even my hydraulic sports bra cannot contain? I turned the final corner, slowed for a cooldown and thought, “Hmm. I don’t think I’ll be cool by the time I hit the driveway.” Parked the bike, went inside, checked a mirror. My face was the color of an overripe tomato. I mean, not just a flush, not just a healthy glow, but the alarming shade people get before their head actually bursts into flames. I looked about to sustain a cerebral hemorrhage.
Ah well — exercise isn’t for sissies. I drank a quart of water, filled a ziploc with ice and sat with it on my head a while. It still took 45 minutes for the flush to clear. I wonder how close I was to actually passing out.
You know those ads that always say, “See your doctor before starting any exercise program”? And how you say, “Yeah, right”? Well, there’s a reason for those, and I think I’ve found it. Onrushing decrepitude is no longer a vague concept; the fragility of one’s body is a fact that must be faced. Your entire youth was the writing of a check that is now being presented for cash.
On the other hand, look at Jack Lalanne. Please. (And note well: Nice package, Jack!)
Speaking of “stakes” at the movies — we were, weren’t we? — I’m looking forward to the new “Die Hard,” if only to see what’s at stake. The first one touched off a furious round of movie-heist inflation, as I believe Alan Rickman was angling to steal something like $600 million in bearer bonds. (For a long time I was convinced “bearer bonds” were a Hollywood fiction, as they seemed such a convenient stand-in for cash and turned up in so many movies. But no, they really exist.) In the second “Die Hard,” I forget what the bad guys were after, except that it involved a squirrely Latin American dictator and perhaps a planeload of drugs worth considerably more than $600 million. And in the third installment, we all remember Jeremy Irons’ plan was to steal all the money in the world. Seriously; they were carting it away in dump trucks — the gold that backed all the G8’s paper currencies. The bad guys evidently planned to enjoy their wealth in a world where money was worthless, and they held all the precious metals.
As far as I can tell from the previews, in the newest “Die Hard,” Timothy Olyphant is threatening to take away everyone’s e-mail and internet connections. Which means the stakes are terrifyingly high, indeed.
As a former Hoosier, of course I took note of Richard Lugar’s big splash yesterday. I always felt conflicted about Dick when he was one of my senators, for reasons that, to fully understand, you had to live here. On the one hand, I took him as he presented himself: Smart, sober, conservative-but-not-crazy Republican who at least seemed to understand that the rest of the world existed, and conducted himself as such. Like so many Indiana office-holders, he is cemented in office. Democrats ran against him for reasons entirely divorced from the crazy idea that they might take his job — name recognition, street cred, whatever. The whole exercise was simply a more polite version of stretching your neck under a guillotine. On the other hand, I remember one year when he actually bought TV ads — I guess he needed to spend some money — and they featured him in a flannel shirt, proclaiming himself a man of the soil. While always a safe message in Indiana, it creeped me out. Donald Trump is more a man of the soil than the brainy Rhodes Scholar Lugar. It suggested there was a cruder sort of calculation inside that silver head. I didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about it — there’s always the point at which you think “at least he’s not Dan Quayle” — but there it was.
Fortunately Doghouse Riley, who still lives there, puts his finger on it pretty squarely:
Somehow nobody asks “Why is it a moderate Republican, a respected foreign-policy expert, takes five years to recognize and moderately object to an utter fucking Republican foreign policy disaster?” Dick Lugar had the opportunity to be the William Morse of his day and party, or at least its Bill Fulbright; his Hoosier seat would have stayed warm, or at least body temp. Instead he goes on providing cover for dingbats at risk of getting mussed in the next election.
Oh my, look — someone stood up to Ann Coulter. (Well, we knew it wouldn’t be Chris Matthews.) Nothing like putting the mother of a dead child up against a fortysomething bullshit artist to say, “Stop making cheap cracks about my dead child” to make some great TV. Coulter plays it cool, but be not fooled — she felt the need to flip her hair about 60 times once she knew who was on the phone. Playing with her long, blonde locks is her tell. Maybe someone will point this out to her (Coulter), and she can make a crack about how at least she HAS hair, unlike that chemo-crone Elizabeth Edwards.
The best writers tell you about something you don’t really care about — in this case, a dead pitcher — and make you care. Jon Carroll on the late Rod Beck:
I loved watching Rod Beck. He was the closer back when the Giants were good. He had a body that did not appear to have encountered the wonders of Pilates; he had an amazing, unapologetic Fu Manchu mustache; he had a mullet so large it seemed to be a separate creature that had agreed, in exchange for considerations, to spend some time on top of his head.
He looked badder than you; he looked badder than anyone. His entire attitude on the mound was aggression. Just the expression on his face as he leaned in to take the sign was malevolent. The hunch of his shoulders was frightening. I saw major league batters bail on a Rod Beck pitch before it was halfway to home plate. “Life is too short,” I could almost hear them muttering to themselves.
The joke y’all are playing on Brian in the comments reminds me of something that happened in Fort Wayne, back when the newspaper business used to be fun and not fraught with doom lurking around every corner.
An editor — let’s call him “Steve Grimmer,” since that was his name — had one of the coveted semi-private cubicles along the newsroom perimeter, which he wasn’t in most of the time, because he did most of his work out on the copy desk. The office/cubicle was for job reviews, plotting coups, etc. Unfortunately, his had a door in the back wall that opened into an alcove where the second-floor vending machines were located. You could get to the machines two ways: Take the long walk around, or the extremely short cut through Steve’s office. Steve was very explicit in his desire that people should not treat his office as a newsroom highway, and we all listened politely and nodded sure, sure Steve, I’ll never cut through your office again, but he left early in the day, so after 1:30 or so, our promises went right out of our heads. After 4 or so, lots of times we didn’t even bother closing the door.
He was good-natured about all this until the Sandwich Incident. Steve brought his lunch one day and left it on his desk while he worked on the copy desk. It was a standard sandwich on white bread, cut diagonally. Someone — the culprit was never fingered — cut through his office, stopped at his desk, took one bite out of each half, put it back in the plastic bag and left the crime scene.
Well. Suddenly this trespassing was not a minor irritation. A memo was written by a higher-ranking boss, forbidding the uninvited from setting foot in Steve’s office. Hints of serious retribution were dropped. This was no laughing matter. A sandwich had been vandalized.
Then Steve went on vacation. We took over his office.
Every day, someone brought in a plate of cookies or brownies, and we had a bake sale on Steve’s desk. A designer set up a series of photos of people using the office for various unapproved activities, and at one point there was a group photo where everyone in the newsroom crammed into the office. The pictures were mounted on a bulletin board on an easel in the middle of the office, under the words, WHAT WE DID ON STEVE’S VACATION.
To his credit, he was very good-humored about it all. Not long after he left the paper, the office was surrendered to the vending-machine highway, and by the time I left it had been equipped with a refrigerator and microwave, and was a de facto cafe.
By that time, cubicles were so plentiful they were no longer coveted. Tumbleweeds were blowing through the newsroom, and a committee was in place working on a plan to move out all the empty desks. Where have all the good times gone?
How should we welcome Brian back?
(When I took screenwriting, we talked a lot about “stakes,” how they have to be high enough to match the action. That is, it makes little dramatic sense to kill four people over a song a rock star has yet to write, to use but one vivid in-class example. It made me think that comedy comes from people fighting over low stakes, as anyone who’s seen at episode of “The Office” can testify.)
Notice I changed the On the Nightstand book. I’ve been waiting for “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” to get off the hot list at the library, and it finally did. Read three chapters at the pool yesterday, where I planned to swim laps. That’s a comment on the lure of the prose, not on my ability to avoid exercise under all circumstances. This account of life in the Green Zone was well worth the wait, and highly recommended. Click on the book in the right rail to read an excerpt from chapter one. Note how, in this Muslim country, in a cafeteria staffed by Pakistanis and Indians, the main protein on the menu was? Yes, pork. It gets better from there.
A little bloggage:
A great YouTube clip, which I won’t embed, but it’s recommended — a waterhole squabble between some lions, two crocodiles and a herd of water buffalo. It’s like high school, especially when the water buffalo come back to kick some lion ass.
If anyone’s interested in reading the WashPost Cheney series, here’s the index page for the whole shootin’ match. Yes, shootin’ IN YOUR FACE.
And thanks to Alex, for picking up this personal souvenir for yours truly at the Chicago gay pride parade last weekend. Click for a larger view:
Sorry for the late start today. I had to run my wounded VW out to the body shop, and came home in the closest thing to camouflage Detroit has to offer — a silver Chrysler Sebring, rented from Enterprise. I felt invisible, driving home on the freeway, just another auto-industry drone in a car the color of cement. Automatic transmission, too. Every so often the government posts a list of most-stolen cars, and bland ones like the Sebring are always right up there. If you were going to rob a bank, would you nick a red Ferrari for your getaway, or a black Corvette? Of course not — you’d pick the one in my garage right now, merge into traffic and never be seen again.
Sitting at a light, I saw four PT Cruisers pass through, not in a caravan, just four drivers who chose PT Cruisers. Kate has a new game she plays in the car; when you see a VW Beetle, you say, “punchbuggy!” and punch the driver on the arm. PT Cruisers are known as “PT bruisers” and get you a squeeze. If she were strong enough, or I were easily bruised, my arm would be purple by now. Not so many punchbuggies; scores of PT bruisers.
Not much to report from the weekend, so let’s get right to the bloggage, which has a bummer theme today:
In my night-shift work as a news farmer, this story has been one of the most fascinating — and disturbing — to track. It’s still virtually ignored outside of the NYT/WSJ journalism orbit, but I predict that sooner or later it’ll get some major ink, perhaps when a dozen or so American kids die of glycol poisoning from their cough syrup.
The story is, specifically, about how sweeteners tainted with glycol, a poison found in antifreeze, are finding their way into pharmaceutical and personal-care products like cough syrup and toothpaste. You dog owners know why you’re warned to keep pets away from antifreeze spills — glycol tastes sweet. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous factory owners, primarily in China, find it an acceptable way to extend supplies of glycerin, used to make the medicine go down easier. At least 100 people died from taking poisoned cough syrup in Panama late last year. It was recently found in some dollar-store-brand toothpastes in Miami, and in some counterfeit name brands elsewhere. The first story linked above is how the Panama case is an echo of a similar one that happened in 1996 in Haiti, where 88 children died, and every effort to track the problem ingredient back to China ended in a brick wall. Depending on your level of ambient cynicism, it’s possible to find a certain pitch-black humor in these comedies of errors:
Federal investigators sought help from senior Chinese drug regulators, who promised to help find the manufacturer, but said it “will take time,” records show.
When another month passed without any word from either regulators or Sinochem, the embassy tried again. Chinese regulators said they had done nothing to find the factory, according to a confidential State Department telegram from September 1996.
Sinochem did finally offer the manufacturer’s name: the Tianhong Fine Chemicals Factory in the city of Dalian in northeastern China. But Sinochem “refused” to provide an address, saying it was illegible. A telephone number would have to suffice, it said.
That, too, was unproductive. When American investigators called the plant manager, Zhang Gang, they were told he was not available. Send a fax, they were told. That did not work either. “The phone was always busy,” investigators reported.
Finally, they got Mr. Zhang on the phone, but he, too, refused to give out his factory’s address.
All of this would merely be one of those tragedies that happens elsewhere — yet another South American bus plunge — if it weren’t for the far scarier implications. As we all know, the world’s marketplaces are global now. Coincidentally, the NYT had a story Saturday about Sara Lee’s efforts to maintain a semblance of oversight over their ingredient supply chain, which you’d think wouldn’t be so hard, but when you’re shopping the planet for the best price on gums, stabilizers and “foaming agents,” it gets complicated. A lot of dogs and cats paid the final price for adulteration of their food earlier this year, and if you think it’ll be different because you walk on two legs, wake up and smell the pound cake. Or, more likely, the “putrefying bacteria” on that Chinese seafood.
I don’t know why I get so irritated when I read stuff like this. Probably because Asia is such a glorious example of “the market” that is supposed to spare us the horrors of government intrusion like the FDA. Wouldn’t you love to live in this place of such glorious freedom?
As Nguyen Van Ninh needles his chopsticks through a steaming bowl of Vietnam’s famous noodle soup, he knows it could be spiked with formaldehyde. But the thought of slurping up the same chemical used to preserve corpses isn’t enough to deter him.
I’m also flattened by those numbers. Nearly 90 kids dead in Haiti. A hundred in Panama. How many did the Tylenol killer get? Seven, eight? And the country freaked out over it — rightly so. Food and drug safety in much of the rest of the world is approximately where it was in this country when Upton Sinclair was writing about meatpacking. And now we’re shopping there.
Not that I wish to bum you out. (Here’s a funny Jon Carroll column to lighten your mood.) Why look, it’s nearly lunchtime. Have a nice day.
Just another day in the D, or in this case, Dearborn Heights:
But I did anyway:
At the risk of taking sides in what must be the episodic-television wuss-out of the decade, let me just say the more I think about the last Sopranos installment, the less I hate it. It was a bold gesture, and a hard truth: Nothing really changes, especially with people who don’t want to change.
Tony and Carmela have arrived in middle age, failures in the one thing they strived to do (besides make money) — raising their children to escape their parents’ lives. Meadow’s on her way to being a mob wife and lawyer, having laid aside the one “pure” career path that would have set her apart. AJ’s the self-deluding, shiftless little shit he was always destined to be. (And how ironic, that by saving him from the Army, they’ve drawn a target on his back that will be hit sooner or later. Never mind Tony and Carmela’s support for the war and the president, but not when it comes to actually fighting the thing. Sure, he’s going to be an officer. And learn Arabic. Right.) In fact, the kids aren’t even sheltered anymore; they both know what DefCon 3 is, and discuss FBI protection at yet another family funeral the way they might talk about parking at the Meadowlands. Carmela has sold her soul so often she’s not even bothered by it any more, as long as there’s another house to divert her attention, or a nice piece of jewelry, or an Hermés scarf. Janice is ready to break up Bobby’s poor orphan children, in the name of being a “good mother,” so the next generation of lunatic killers is well under way.
Paulie’s a whack job, still. Sil’s in a coma. Junior’s getting off easy, wasting away in a poor farm with his glasses held together with duct tape. Everyone else is dead. The envelopes are lighter than a rejection letter. The party’s over, and seven years of therapy didn’t make a dent. Sounds like hell to me. As the song on the jukebox says, Oh, the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on…
I’d say more, but I know you all want to dis–.
[Twenty seconds of black.]
Oh, my, it was a nice weekend. Perfect weather. Alan went on a man-date with himself Friday night. It was fully in keeping with my secret to a happy marriage: Space.
You gotta give one another a little room to be something other than Mr. or Mrs. Better Half. Two become one, but before two became one they were two ones on their own. I was, anyway. So when Alan called late Friday afternoon, at the hour when we begin calibrating the closing of the Features section with whatever I’m making for dinner, and said, “The Sun Ra Arkestra is playing a 10 o’clock show in town, and I want to go,” of course there was only one answer: “Have a nice time.”
He didn’t say “without you,” but there was no chance of getting a babysitter at that hour, and on the subject of Sun Ra, we’ve agreed to disagree. I happily acknowledge I am not cool enough to fully appreciate a jazz musician who claimed to have been teleported to Saturn in 1936, where he was given instructions to drop out of college and speak to the world through his music. The show was at a building in southwest Detroit I’m actually familiar with, the Old Bohemian Hall, a relic from the early 20th century, when your tribe was your life. I did an interview there last fall. There was a scraggly art party going on downstairs, and the interview was up, on the second floor, where there’s a stage about the size of something you’d find in an elementary school. The owner showed me the bronze hooks recessed into the floor, where they set up the gymnastic equipment on Saturdays. I kept looking at the stage.
“You can almost see John Reed up there, talking to the crowd about one big union,” I said. Exactly.
Anyway, the place was a mess. It was one of six buildings the owner bought in the ’90s, he said, for a combined price of less than he paid for a Jeep Cherokee a few years later. Of course, the expense in real estate in places like this is not the purchase but the demolition and/or stabilization. You pay $1,500 for the building and put $100,000 into the roof. Alan said it was still a mess, very Fabulous Ruins. The stage lights consisted of a pole lamp with the shades removed, some clip-on work lights from Home Depot and, of all things, a trouble light in a cage, like you use to work on your car. The Arkestra does a bit where they stand up and walk around the hall playing their instruments, and they looked mighty vexed with the un-railed, unlit and crumbling steps they had to use. Did I mention most of these guys are in their 60s and perhaps 70s?
So what was the music like? “Oh, it was good,” Alan said. “Imagine Duke Ellington’s band in tinfoil hats and on acid, and with one guy playing a ram’s horn.” As I said: Not cool enough.
Bloggage:
There was so much good stuff in the papers over the weekend I can scarcely get to it all. Joel Achenbach on Red Meat Politics in the WashPost, along with a satisfying thumbsucker on cultural genocide by someone other than Americans, and the NYT did a short piece directing me to TrashTheDress.com, a website dedicated to a new wrinkle in wedding photography — the post-wedding dress-trashing session. Some gorgeous photographs. I wish I’d done this. Of course, my dress was off the rack and not Vera Wang.
But for pure knee-slapping humor, though, nothing matches the Bambi-vs.-Godzilla clash of this priceless interview of Jack Kevorkian by none other than Mitch Albom. Two of the nation’s leading hucksters of death go mano a mano, but the contest ultimately disappoints:
What do you think happens when we die?
“You stink. You rot and stink.”
No soul?
He laughed. “What’s a soul?”
It’s like watching Strawberry Shortcake in a steel cage match with Ted Bundy.
Regular readers have long ago given up hope of seeing even a glimmer of self-awareness from either of these guys. Kevorkian thought there would be riots in the street when he was sent away these last seven years, and Albom long ago accepted the job as the national expert on death and dying (Good Morning America Division). Still, it would’ve been even funnier if Kevorkian had messed with Mitch’s head a little bit, and instead of saying death leads to “rot and stink,” if he could have given a more Mitchlike answer:
“I think, Mitch, that when we die we find ourselves irresistibly drawn to a bright white light. As we step into the light, we suddenly find ourselves in an old-time drugstore, with a soda fountain. Sitting at the small tables are all your loved ones who preceded you in death; your father is the soda jerk, putting the finishing touches on a root beer float, which he places before you as you sit down. All your dogs, cats and other pets are there, too, waiting to be petted, although I think there’s some dispute about pet reptiles — they may be in a different facility. But definitely the dogs and cats are there. OK. So you sit down, and everyone is smiling at you. You may be confused. If you were taken quickly, say by a car crash or explosion or something, you probably are. You’re all like, “How did I get to this soda fountain, and why is my dad wearing a paper hat?” But you’re not afraid, because you’re suffused with the light, and also you have a nice root-beer float to enjoy. Then, the door opens again, and a guy who looks a lot like Wilfred Brimley walks in. This is God. Yes, God is Wilfred Brimley, but Wilfred Brimley is not God. It will all make sense to you as you experience it. Then–”
“Excuse me for a moment please, Jack. I need to go make some notes.”
It’s another lovely day. Enjoy it.