Last week the Freep had a story about the outgoing Detroit school superintendent — “outgoing” because he’d been fired in March — still driving a Ford Explorer that was part of his compensation package. So far, so good, your basic tawdry story of a public servant declining to unclasp the teat when told to, but, as so often happens here, the punchline to this joke was buried far down in the story. The Explorer is one of two cars the superintendent is entitled to use, the other being a Lincoln Town Car with a security detail attached.
Yes, the superintendent of schools rolls with muscle. The board member quoted said he had no problem with that, because there were some crazy people at those school board meetings. A few weeks ago, a member of the audience threw a handful of grapes at the board after a vote she disagreed with. (Question: Does the superintendent’s security detail pledge to take a grape for the boss?) But maybe for good reason: Yesterday the outgoing supe was indicted, in Dallas, for miscellaneous financial shenanigans. Was a yacht involved? Oh, of course: Sir Veza II, if you’re keeping score at home.
(Yacht names in indictments are like pulling your jacket up to hide your face from photographers on the perp walk — they just make you look more guilty. Last week Terry Gross interviewed someone who’d written a book about Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the crookedest ex-congressman in all the land. The yacht Cunningham was living on, the very kind favor extended by a defense contractor, was called The Dukester. Is that a guilty name or what? Note to self: If one plans to accept a yacht in lieu of dirty money, have the sense to name it something dumb and innocuous, like Tranquility Base, or Windsurfer. Even Liquid Refreshment is tempting fate.)
I remember in Fort Wayne, when the superintendent sent flowers to some woman on his expense account; we wrote stories for days and days, which prompted letters to the editor for more days and days, wondering how long the taxpayers of Allen County were going to carry this sort of outrageous spending and blah blah blah. I wonder what they’d do with two cars, a security detail and an indictment? Faint dead away, I expect.
Kind of a mixed bag today, appropriate for a day promising temperatures in the upper 80s. Lord knows I have work to do, but I spent some time yesterday contemplating two personal essays detailing bad experiences — Jon Carroll’s account of being kept awake by drunken Sherpas in a Nepalese teahouse, and James Lileks’ disappointment with a meal at a Thai restaurant.
If that’s all I told you about the two pieces, which one do you think had a higher probability of bugging the crap out of you? The first one, of course. Just the setup sounds like something you’d hear from J. Peterman — Seinfeld’s J. Peterman, that is. Ah yes, Elaine, I recall when my bride and I honeymooned on Everest, and the teahouse we bunked in was invaded by partying Sherpas imbibing rakshi, their native moonshine… And yet, you read the column, and not only do you not get that feeling, that cry-me-a-river-asshole feeling of a person complaining about having an exotic experience in an exotic land you will never, ever visit, much less be able to write sentences like this about: “We were four weeks into the journey when we came to Pangboche, a charming town at 14,000 feet…” You not only don’t get the feeling, you sympathize. Poor Jon and Tracy in that smoky hut! Rude Sherpas! The least they could have done was expand the hole in the ceiling. It’s the kind of story I wish I could tell, but never could, and not because I’ve never been to Nepal. I lack the self-effacement gene.
But I’ve had many bad meals in restaurants — who hasn’t? — and yet, reading Lileks whine about his own, which involved being served chicken thighs in his curry, instead of the expected white meat, left me thinking this guy should change his name to Babbitt and get it over with. (Let’s leave aside the plain fact that the thighs are where the flava lives on a chicken, and that many Thai recipes call for thighs by name [Lefty and Righty, perhaps]; some people just don’t like dark meat.) I think it’s the ridiculous, out-of-proportion hostility over what was, in the grand scheme of things, no big deal, the sense that Lileks brought not just a gun to a knife fight, but a high-powered sniper rifle, which he used on the restaurant owner long after the fight should have been concluded, digested and sent into the sewer, so to speak.
Your impressions may differ. Share them if you like. Oh, and be advised that the Thai-food anecdote comes about halfway through the big wad o’ text. And since you’ve been so good, here’s a bonus Jon Carroll story, headlined “The Afghans Next Door” but should have been called “Canapés for the Revolution,” which was in the subhead. Cheese puffs?
Fred Thompson is running for president, some say. It’s a pity that James Wolcott already summed him up in a phrase, when he called him a grumpy old dog farting on the front porch.
A few days ago I wrote about architectural salvage in Detroit. Well, not all of it is salvaged — some just gets thrown in the woods, as Detroitblog points out.
And that is all. Good day to everyone.
Good news: The divorce lawyers will have to find some other couple to put asunder. I only had to warn Alan to stop yelling once. And he did. But now the deed is done, the boat floats for another season and eventually it’ll be rigged (with NEW sails) and we can go sailing. It seems like a lot of work, and it is, but let me point out the current price at the gas dock: $3.99/gallon. The wind, I remind you, is free.
I promised pictures. But I haven’t moved Photoshop over to the new machine. So some thumbnails to save bandwidth. (Click if you want to see them bigger.)
That’s the last bit of bottom-painting, and Alan lying down to whisper sweet nothings to his mistress. Not much in the way of pictures, but what can I say? It was hot. And I was helping raise the mast.
And today comes another flake-out. I’m a chaperone for the payoff on Kate’s year of service on student council — Tigers v. Angels at Comerica. The forecast is for bright, sunny skies and unseasonable warmth, sunglasses weather. Take me out to the ballgame. But I leave you with…bloggage:
Jon Carroll was there during the ’60s (although, he notes, much of it took place in the ’70s), and contrary to the standard witticism, there’s a lot he remembers. And thank God for that:
I was working for Rolling Stone in 1970, which should have meant that I was at the white hot center of whatever the hell it was. I was assigned to go cover a press conference announcing something called the Toronto Peace Festival. The press conference was at the Jefferson Airplane (as they then were) house on Folsom. John Lennon was supposed to be there but wasn’t.
So I was listening to these people describing the event, which would of course be free and would have every fabulous group you ever heard of, and there would be a big area right at the center of the festival that would be brightly lit because, on the last night of the show, our alien brothers were going to join us. In a spaceship. With gifts.
There was such a fine silence in the room. The late Michael Grieg, a wonderful Chronicle reporter and an old beatnik who had seen it all, asked softly, “alien spaceships?” Nods all around. So we all knew we were covering the biggest story of our lifetime, or we were listening to crazy people.
I have been giving the Freep a certain amount of abuse lately, so let me call out something I enjoyed, a story and short video on Jim Dunne, known in the trade as an “autorazzi,” because he stalks the reclusive and takes pictures, only he’s after cars, not people. Yes, you can make a living at it; he raised seven children on the proceeds of auto-espionage, and had the sort of brass ones you need for the job. He once purchased a small strip of land with a fine view of Chrysler’s proving ground in Arizona and shot with impunity for some time before he was found out and foiled. (I bet he sold the property to Chrysler with a twinkle in his eye, and for a fat profit.) Note the fool-the-autofocus camouflage on the cars in the video, a common sight around the Motor City. Inside joke: the “disgruntled executive” who speaks from the darkness in the video is GM’s Bob Lutz.
It’s a boy! And he has grandfather’s dead, soulless eyes! (Joke stolen from a Metafilter thread, I think.) Happy birthday, Samuel David Cheney, and congratulations to both your mommies.
I should have known it would be a lousy night. The proverbial strong line of thunderstorms blew through the area late in the afternoon. When I showed up for my writing workshop at Wayne State, I was one of two (2) to do so. And it wasn’t a very productive session, either, even with a vastly improved student-teacher ratio.
I got disoriented leaving the library — why are college campuses laid out so oddly? I ask you — and had to walk halfway around a long city block, in the driving rain, to find my car.
And then it was out onto I-94 for the chariot race home, only things were moving slower because of the rain. But it was moving, and then the taillights up ahead started winking red for something involving police lights. This being Detroit, it could have been anything from a flooded dip in the road to a rabid pit bull firing a machine gun. I was slowing down in the center lane when the person behind me on the right did the quintessential D-town freeway move — the multiple-lane high-speed cutover in heavy traffic. I felt the crunch as s/he clipped my left taillight.
And watched as the offender sped off into the twilight.
I scanned my options for a moment and considered the correct one was probably the most ridiculous: Pull over, stop, call 911 and await further instructions for a no-injury, minor-damage accident during a howling thunderstorm. Or I could get proactive. Reader, an air bag of inspiration deployed; I gave chase.
Hit me and take off, will you? Well, we shall see about that! The vehicle, a pickup, was easy to track — DODGE in big white letters on a black tailgate. I gained on it, dropped in behind, flashed my brights in search of the plate number. At which point the driver felt an urgent need to exit, which fit my purposes perfectly; I could catch up the way a yellow flag bunches up a Nascar field. I got the license plate, scrawled it on my writing-workshop folder, and what’s this? S/he’s pulling over? Excellent. I pulled over behind the truck. As soon as we were both stopped, the driver laid rubber going away. I followed for a few more blocks of amateurish left-right-left-right shenanigans, then stopped and called 911. I didn’t need to get lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood at night. The man at the state police post was very nice. I have to go down today and file a report, at which point the system will yawn in my face. As much as I might hope for a CSI-style investigation, complete with flyovers with infrared scopes and Marg Helgenberger gathering paint chips from my bumper, this is a no-fault insurance state. No injuries, no complications, sign here and here and here and pay the $500 deductible.
So that was my night. How was yours?
It got me thinking later, when the blood had settled a bit. The last time I was in an accident serious enough to get insurance adjusters involved was nearly 20 years ago. I was sitting at a light at Creighton and Fairfield in lovely south-side Fort Wayne, Indiana when I looked up to see a driverless car leaving the gas station, approaching my passenger door at a 90-degree angle. It hit me hard enough to push me into the next lane. I got out and walked over to the car. Sitting behind the wheel was a smiling, gurgling, apparently unharmed boy of about 2. His father had left him unrestrained in a running car while he went inside to buy cigarettes or something. Guess what he said when he came out to discover his son had had his first fender-bender before he was toilet-trained.
“I told him not to touch nothin’.”
Well, at least I have amusing accidents.
Moving on, then. I see Brian got a little miffed at the “grave-dancing” in yesterday’s comments, over the late Rev. Fartwell. No less a pinko than Roy opted out as well. Fine, it’s a defensible choice. When someone dies, it zeroes the scales, or at least reduces them by 21 grams. Don’t speak ill of the dead, etc. At the same time, though, we have to give a dead man his due. I really don’t have an ax to grind with the guy — he existed in the realm of Ann Coulter for me — so I started thinking back, as dispassionately as I could, on the Rev’s public statements, trying to recall if, even once, he tried to be taken seriously, if he ever brought anything to the discussion to indicate he wanted to play fair in the fields of policy debate.
And I couldn’t think of anything. Tim Noah at Slate gives us the highlights. And let’s not forget his role in the Clinton Chronicles. I won’t say “good riddance,” but I will say: I won’t miss him. Oh, and thanks to Kirk for finding this YouTube clip from the breaking-news cycle that shows, as if you needed to see it again, how credulous too many journalists can be.
The iPod threw out a gem on yesterday’s bike ride — “It’s Madison Time,” by the Ray Bryant Combo. It’s the most complicated dance record in history, I think: Now when I say hit it, I want you to go two up and two back, double cross and come out of it with the rifleman. Later verses call for a “Cleveland box,” “Jackie Gleason” and a “basketball, with a Wilt Chamberlain hook.” What-ever. I first heard the song in “Hairspray,” original recipe. I figured it, like so much in that movie, was an obscure Baltimore reference, and thought of asking Ms. Lippman about it. Asked Google instead, and I’m so glad I did. Because it turns out the Madison started in…Columbus, according to William “Bubbles” Holloway, anyhow. (Warning: Really obnoxious embedded sound.) The scanned newspaper clip on that page shows a sharp-looking line of black folks doing the Madison at “the LVA Club on E. Long St.” Get out!
Let’s bring the bloggage full circle, back to Detroit, as we wrap up with Detroitblog’s report from the Cinco de Mayo parade:
The Freep mentioned the parade on its front page the day before, so I expected an influx of newcomers eager for a glimpse of the city outside the usual downtown radius most people think of as “Detroit.” Instead there was a mere handful, consisting either of pale hipsters exposing their pasty flanks to the climbing sun, or several odd academic types in their 50s, complete with standard professorial attire like a tweed jacket (seriously), whose confused demeanor suggested they came to observe this mysterious and heretofore unfamiliar phenomenon called Local Mexican People, who constitute nearly the entire population of this area.
The prof types near us looked slightly disappointed or bewildered as the parade plowed forward, as if they expected to see perhaps a solemn procession paying tribute to ancient Mayan roots, or marchers carrying effigies representing genocidal conquistadors imposing an alien culture on meek native peoples, the kind of scene that brings a flutter to the modern academic heart.
Instead they got chihuahuas, Virgin Mary tapestries, low-cut shirts, pit bulls pulling children in wagons, child boxers, tortillas handed out from floats, and hot rods galore, painted in varying levels of gaudiness and beauty. Their facial expressions suggested that they were seeing brazenly and merrily paraded before them the same supposed stereotypes they’ve likely lectured their students to avoid assuming.
But every ethnic parade is a host of stereotypes, or cultural icons, depending on your point of view. One person’s stereotype is another person’s “screw you, I actually do like hot rods.”
Me, too. Off to do battle with the insurance industry.
The colonists are overfamiliar. Make sure you page through the photos for the reverse-angle shot.
Every day this week, my neighborhood roars from morning to late afternoon with the sounds of power tools. Mowers, edgers, blowers, whiffers, whaffers, that thing-that-digs-up-your-lawn-and-makes-it-look-like-geese-crapped-all-over-it, but is somehow good for it. (Oh yeah, an aerator.) My neighbors will be doing their second mow of the season this weekend. We have yet to do our first.
It’s not that we don’t care about our lawn. We do. We just don’t care that much. Once again, we’ve found ourselves out of step with our neighbors.
For much of my life, I found myself living near at least one person who objected to lawn care as bourgeois bullshit. You know the type: Obsession with a weed-free patch of grass in front of one’s house is the ultimate distraction from the stuff in life that really matters, and so they opt out. That “the stuff that really matters” tends to be “sitting in front of the TV watching basketball” is only evidence of their superior sensibilities. And so they let their lawn grow long and shaggy, and sometimes they glance out the front window and say, “Thank God I’m a Libertarian, and above all this shit.”
To these people I have but one thing to say: Move to Mongo. (Mongo is a small town in northern Indiana, but in this usage it’s more representative of that outback town where civilization is always kept at bay. In the 1980s and ’90s, when the city of Fort Wayne was aggressively annexing its urbanized, unincorporated neighborhoods, a knot of whiny individualists could always be counted on to write tiresome letters to the editor about the changing city-limits sign. These missives always contained some version of the line, “But Marge and I moved here five years ago to get away from the city,” as though buying a three-bedroom house in a subdivision where volunteer soybeans still occasionally sprout in the back yard, close enough to the city limits to lengthen one’s commute by no more than eight minutes, gave one an eternal claim to some sort of “country” life. A colleague and I came up with “Move to Mongo” as a way to say, “If you really want to get away from it all, then get away from it all. And stop complaining”)
In matters of the lawn, as in so many things, I’m a committed moderate. You will never catch me out there fretting over crabgrass and dandelions, but I accept that I live in a neighborhood, and neighborhoods only look as good as their crummiest property, and I promise not to be that property. I will never be the nicest one, either, but I’ll do my part.
Here in the GP, we find ourselves falling closer to the libertarian end of the spectrum. People here tend their landscaping with the tender loving care of a pothead with hydroponics. Some people here simply live to putter in the yard. Most of our neighbors have automatic sprinkler systems, which go on at 5 a.m. with a loud, sibilant hiss, awakening certain late-staying-up journalists in the neighborhood, not that I am complaining. But it’s damn hard to keep up with these folks, so I don’t try. “Maintenance-free landscaping” — there’s a Realtor’s phrase to steal my heart. We’ll have to get the mower out this weekend at the very latest, or risk becoming Those People. We’ll hold up our end, keeping up, if not with the Joneses, than certainly the Smiths.
Whew. This week has been less-than-good, but at least I now have new prescription bottles littering the coffee table. I’m asking Kate to “bring Mommy her medication” so that she’ll have lots of good stories to tell her therapist. As soon as I can teach her to mix a daiquiri, she’ll be well on her way.
So, bloggage:
When it comes to colorful, you really can’t beat a colorful lawyer. The DC Madam’s mouthpiece is a case in point:
You do a computerized database news search for Sibley, and what you get is information on his representation of Arthur Vanmoor, better known as the aforementioned “Big Pimping Pappy.”
BPP ran an escort service in Fort Lauderdale a few years back. He got busted and deported (he’s Dutch), then sued his clients for having sex with his employees. Sibley was his attorney.
It was the same tactic Sibley is using now to advise Palfrey: The manager of BPP’s escort service was merely providing “quality time with a quality woman,” Sibley told MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson in an on-camera interview in March 2006. Customers had to sign a receipt saying they wouldn’t engage in illegal sexual activity. If they did, then they broke the law.
Sibley sued them for breach of contract.
Let’s go to the videotape:
Carlson: “You sound like you look down on these men. That they would somehow get the idea that just because you call an escort service . . . and have a girl in a tube top and a vinyl skirt come over to your hotel room — that somehow they got the idea sex was involved. You sound like you’re unimpressed with their judgment.”
Sibley: “Well, Tucker, is that what the girls look like that come to your hotel room?”
Carlson: “I don’t have girls come to my hotel room who I’m not married to.”
I don’t know about you, but when I saw that Joan Baez was getting some ink earlier this week, claiming military officials refused to let her perform for the troops, I had a few questions, including:
1) Joan Baez is still performing?
2) Someone wants her to perform for them?
3) People young enough to be soldiers? Come on.
Well, it’s more complicated than that. The invitation was extended by famous Hoosier grump John Melly-mel Cougar Mellencamp, to “play with him,” suggesting a role shaking a tambourine and singing backup on “Small Town,” not crooning “Joe Hill” in her own soprano warble. Whew. I was fearing a comeback tour.
Have a great weekend. Back, and feeling better I hope, next week.
Some years ago, I offered the theory that the back-pages, business card-size ads and classifieds in any print publication constituted the id of its readers. It was always so amusing, back when the newspaper I worked for actually had the budget to subscribe to political journals, to turn to the back and see all those increase-your-word-power pitches in right-wing publications. (The lefties leaned heavily on meet-women-who-will-appreciate-your-genius dating services. Woody Allen got a laugh out of this in “Annie Hall”: Probably met by answering an ad in the New York Review of Books. “Thirtyish academic wishes to meet woman who’s interested in Mozart, James Joyce and sodomy.”
I’m still deciding what porn spam indicates. I get so much of it in my comments, 99 percent of it caught by filters, but occasionally I like to poke around (sorry) there and see what’s what. I can report two trends: 1) absurd sub- sub- sub-niche specialization (mature hairy black Texas Hold’em nudes); and 2) comical trickery. As to the latter, I just deleted a comment that said “fried chicken recipes here” and linked to you-know-what. Ah well. As Willie Dixon said, “I eat more chicken than any man ever seen.” He wasn’t talking about the wings.
Today is, we’ll be reminded approximately a million times, the four-year anniversary of President Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech. Alan just recalled the fond memory of sitting in the morning news meeting that day, gazing at the Page One proofs, which featured that memorable phrase in tombstone-size type. “We were discussing how to note the casualties,” he said. “There had been something like 66, and someone said, ‘We’ll run that on Memorial Day.’ I said, ‘I guarantee you there will be more dead by Memorial Day, and in two or three or four or seven years, we’ll still be fighting in Iraq.’ They looked at me like I was a communist sympathizer. Especially Name Redacted.” Ah, well. That was another country, and besides, the wench is dead.
What I recall of that time — invasion to Mission Accomplished, which petered out into counting the days to my Ann Arbor fellowship — was how strange that time was. Obviously our little newspaper didn’t have correspondents in Baghdad, or even Washington, or even Indianapolis by that point, but we were doing our part to cover the home front. There was a list of story ideas that boiled down to “How is (name of public institution) preparing for the war?” The schools, the police department, etc. I was baffled; what were we looking for, duck-and-cover drills for second-graders? Blackout exercises, lest we be bombed by the Iraqi Air Force? “Pray For Our Troops” signs covered lawns — freebies from the local G.O.P. — and every so often a tiny knot of anti-war protesters would show up at the Courthouse Green for a demonstration, and people would honk at them. I felt like I was speaking to my fellow Americans through a thick sheet of plexiglas.
In the midst of this, someone handed me a slip of paper with a name and a phone number, a local Iraqi of fairly recent immigration who might be willing to give an interview. I went to the guy’s house and we sat for a while watching the war on Arab satellite TV. (He was out of work, and watched it non-stop.) He switched between Al Jazeera and stations in Abu Dhabi and Lebanon. Obviously I couldn’t follow the audio, but I noticed the video emphasized not heroic images of soldiers in Hummers, but civilian refugees walking down the road with their belongings on their back. My subject, a Shiite, told of the ill-fated rebellion after the first Gulf War, how the U.S. had led the Shia to believe we had their back and then oops, we didn’t. He spent a couple years in a Saudi refugee camp before making his way to Indiana, which must have been a strange transition, to say the least.
He was of the opinion — this was April or May 2003, around that time — that now that Saddam had been booted, it was time for the U.S. to leave. He did not express gratitude; it was more like, “OK, we’ll take it from here.” He also said the longer we stayed the more we’d be resented, and that the prime reason we wanted Saddam out after all this time was to get our hands on the oil fields. He also shared his belief that the Mossad had used remote control devices to fly the planes into the World Trade Center. The copy desk cut that part, but they left most of the rest. At least one reader wrote a letter to the editor suggesting that my Iraqi should be more grateful.
A crystalization of the war, right there. Mission accomplished.
So, bloggage:
Readers frequently call the work of columnists “musings,” as in, “I was reading your musings the other day, and…” Jon Carroll is one of the very few who can muse, in print, and lead you along from the first word to the end. Today: Musings on miracles.
I was away with the Girl Scouts when this story broke, so I missed it until yesterday. If it weren’t so jaw-droppingly shocking — another GOP hypocrite caught with his pants down, literally — I’d have reported it then. As it was, I had to call for smelling salts to get off the floor.
Off to Flex Appeal. Back soon.
Well, lots of things, but up there in the top five would be that I had no photographers following me around when I was 19.
(What’s the old saying? “The girls all get prettier at closing time.” No. And I don’t even want to know what that stuff is all over her face. She looks like she’s about to suggest we go get some French toast.)
Jack Valenti came to Columbus once, and I can’t say when, except that I was old enough to read the newspaper and Jim Rhodes was governor. Valenti was paying a call on Big Jim, and the Dispatch story about it said the secretaries were all a-twitter. Why? Valenti was a good-looking man, but he’s no Clooney, either. I think it was just that he knew Clooney, or the day’s Clooney-equivalent; he reflected the Glory of Hollywood, something rare in the Ohio governor’s office. Especially that governor.
(I’ve heard many stories about Rhodes’ boorishness, and I don’t know how many are true, but here’s one, reported by an eyewitness: The governor was meeting with the presidents of Ohio’s public universities, a group he was not inclined to think much of, education bein’ for lawyers and fags and so forth. This one spoke, and that one spoke, and then the president of Kent State chimed in, and Big Jim stood up and stepped over to his bathroom, which opened onto the office. “Keep talkin’!” he said. “I can hear ya fine!” As the KSU president went on, haltingly, the governor of the Buckeye State had a nice, long, relaxing pee. With the door open. He had issues with Kent State.)
Anyway, Valenti. I don’t recall what he was doing so far from Hollywood, but it had something to do with the industry. The obits said he was a b.s. artist without peer, with a Texas drawl :
In his many public utterances, he orated and declaimed, grandly and voluminously, as if addressing the Roman Senate about the urgency of conquering Gaul. A fan of Shakespeare and Yeats and Greek mythology, Valenti spoke in baroque phrases, filigreed and curlicued — all inflected with a slight Texas accent. From his tongue, an opponent’s proposal wasn’t merely unacceptable; it was “an arrow dipped in curare.” And as spun by him, America wasn’t just a great and fine nation; it was “a free and loving land.”
Some people found such verbiage pompous and smarmy, particularly since Valenti, who wrote all his own speeches, was usually talking about something relatively mundane, such as DVD piracy or runaway movie-production costs. Such lofty language would have been ridiculous — if it weren’t such a pleasure to hear a man so out of step with ordinary speechifying.
One had to marvel at the self-confidence it took to gather oneself before an illustrious audience and utter such preposterous phrases as “springing full-blown from the head of Zeus.” And the thing was, you never remembered what a rival had to say.
Well, that’s the lobbyist’s secret charm, isn’t it? Blow into town, get the secretaries all steamy, fill the governor’s ear with sweet nothings, and on to Washington or Cannes or wherever.
Personally, after hearing what some of the Democrats had to say last night, a reference to curare would be welcome. Where did great political oratory go? This is one reason I can’t dislike Jesse Jackson; the guy understands that a speech is, on some level, entertaiment, and he delivers.
Not much to deliver, today, and I apologize: I have a busy day before I blow out of town late this afternoon for a weekend “camping trip” with Kate’s Girl Scout troop. I call it “camping” because we sleep in bunk beds in a heated lodge, making the experience less woodsy and more like a weekend in a bad hotel. But there will be S’mores, and wine if I have anything to say about it.
Back after the weekend.
Nobody edits Mitch Albom. That’s the only explanation I can think of. He just opens his laptop, types any old crap, and they put it in the paper:
I was sitting at the Pistons game, fans screaming, giant men racing up the court, when Matt Dobek, the Pistons’ PR vice president, pointed at a TV and said, “My god, did you see this?”
There in the corner of the screen, was a “breaking news” alert: David Halberstam killed in a car crash.
Yes, I think we’ll all remember where we were when we heard the news of David Halberstam’s death. Mitch was schmoozing with NBA executives. I was sitting on my Ikea chaise lounge, trying to write some fiction for my workshop tonight. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn I was procrastinating by reading the wires.
Halberstam, who was 73, would have understood the “breaking news” part.
That’s good to know.
A Pulitzer Prize winner from his Vietnam days, he was as good a journalist as we’ve produced in this country. And since he wrote famous books about the news business, the sports business and even basketball, I guess the setting was not altogether inappropriate.
Mitch, one writer to another: Beware the obvious adjective, i.e. “famous” books. If the books were obscure, no one would give a fig.
But the news itself? Halberstam? Dead? This made no sense. Not a car crash. Not on a Monday. Not being driven by a graduate student in northern California. You couldn’t imagine Halberstam going out that way. Maybe covering some war in some hot zone. Maybe dying at his desk in New York, copious notes piled in giant stacks around him. But not like this.
For a man who made his bones writing about it, Mitch is surprisingly flummoxed by death. Mitch can never believe how people can just…die. And in such unexpected ways! Even on Mondays! As I recall, he was similarly amazed to hear of Bo Schembechler’s passing. The old coach was 77 years old and had had two — two — heart bypasses. And…yet…he just…died? Halberstam was 73, still in good health, but hey, everyone who rides in a car can die in a car crash. Hell, he could have choked on a piece of popcorn; hasn’t Mitch ever watched “Six Feet Under”? Mitch would be more comfortable with death in a war, a “hot zone,” never mind that Halberstam hadn’t covered a war since Vietnam. Or maybe dying at his desk, surrounded by “copious” notes. (Oops, the obvious adjective again. A lawn appears in a subsequent passage. In what condition? Why, “manicured,” of course.)
I tried to turn back to the game. I failed. In his later years, David had become a friend of mine.
Ah, so now we get to it. This is one of those Mitch’s-friend obits. The first one of these I read was Mitch’s tribute to Warren Zevon. Now there was a death with some irony attached. A decades-long smoker dead at 56 from mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer not related to smoking. A writer could do something with that. But, and color me astonished, Mitch’s tribute to Warren quoted the dead man praising Mitch. Mitch is never uncomfortable quoting someone with the opinion that Mitch is a wonderful writer. Bo Schembechler was another F.O.M.: When we finished our book together, the publisher asked if there were any dedications or thank-yous we wanted to insert. I listed dozens of Bo’s relatives, friends and former players. Bo only wanted to put in one sentence. He wrote “I want to personally thank Mitch Albom. The poor son of a bitch had no idea what he was getting into.”
Ha ha! As I was saying to my close friend Tony Bennett the other day…
Oh, why go on? What is the point of this? I still have fiction to write, and picking on Mitch is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die. You can’t stop him; he’ll be writing his treacly novels and Broadway play tie-ins and Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movies until that day when we all look up at a nearby TV screen and gasp as one to read: Best-selling author Mitch Albom dies of exploded head; “stress of ego too great,” docs say…
I just hope he goes before Tony Bennett.
One last note: One of Halberstam’s most “famous” books was “The Reckoning.” It was about the decline of the American auto industry, based guess-where. It’s not mentioned in Albom’s column.
Bloggage:
If anyone cares, yes, I think Sheryl Crow is kidding.
Brooke Shields demonstrates what makes a first-birthday party tolerable for the adult guests: beer. (Actually, the more I see of Brooke, the more I like her. Talk about a girl who could have turned out differently. And a beer-drinker to boot.)
If I still lived in Indiana, the bureau of motor vehicles would have made me a believer by now, or at least encouraged it through license fees. Doghouse Riley explains.
The genius of Oliver Stone, screenwriter, via YouTube. Absolutely NSFW, unless you have headphones.
Back to the fiction. Someone, help me feel poetic ‘n’ stuff.