The Obamas have some competition in the T-shirt aisle.
There are times I truly miss being a G.A. — that’s old-fart-journo-speak for “general assignment reporter.” You never know what’s going to turn up. I had plans to spend yesterday relaxing with my kid, maybe cleaning the house. The phone rang at 8 a.m. with news the Detroit Police dive team was going to spend the next two days fishing cars out of the river. Plans changed.
A little background: In May, this same team was doing a training dive at the point where Lake St. Clair joins the Detroit River, preparing to recover a car, when the team leader discovered what seemed to be a hand, reaching up from the bottom. It turned out to be a bronze sculpture that had been stolen several years earlier from a local institution, part of a rash of outdoor-art thefts in the area. At the time, we told the team leader to call us the next time they went looking for a car, thinking a tick-tock on how they work would be a nice feature for my journalism students.
Of course they had to call only hours ahead, too little time to scramble a team of overscheduled college students. But I was able to go, and I don’t know about you, but to me, the great thing about journalism is the permission you get to watch other people work at interesting jobs. I could have watched these guys all day, and in fact, that’s pretty much what I did. The 60-ton heavy-duty tow truck alone was a marvel; it looked like you needed a master’s in engineering just to run the thing.
The divers were trying to clear at least 14 and as many as 16 (sonar was unclear) drowned cars from what must have been a popular dumping spot, once upon a time. A patch of riverfront land that had been the site of your standard-issue 20th-century poison factory — metal plating with casual environmental standards, shudder — stood empty for years, and if you took the time to drive or push a car through the weeds to the riverbank, you found a nice open area with no seawall and 15-20 feet of water ready to swallow the evidence of your insurance fraud, no questions asked.
The divers went down in teams and strapped up the axles or frames, and the truck operator ran the winch. The wrecks came up groaning and dropping vast cauldrons of mud and crawfish. As soon as they cleared the water, the gearheads started calling out models and years. Several fell to pieces as they came free; a Ford EXP, second cousin to a Mercury Capri I once owned, lost its roof and necessitated a second dive to retrieve the rest.
And once they were on dry land, photo ops galore:
What interested me the most: Even in that stew of heavy-metal waste and pollution, nature is always trying:
Those are salamander eggs — mudpuppies. Ah, well — based on what crawled out of those wrecks, there’s no shortage down there.
Note the zebra mussels, an invasive species that first entered the Great Lakes in the ballast water of oceangoing freighters. They have played havoc on treatment-plant intakes and other underwater structures, but have had an undeniably positive effect on water clarity; I’ve heard many long-time Great Lakes anglers say the water’s never been cleaner.
So that was yesterday. Today I’m giving blood. In consideration, I’ve gone off all my over-the-counter analgesics for the last 72 hours. Man, do I feel old.
Bloggage:
My TV now has to stay off for two reasons: The still-unplanted corpse of Michael Jackson, and the governor of South Carolina, who has now raised humiliation of his wife to a high art. I’m with Josh Marshall — just go be with her, already.
As for Miguel Jacko, the NYT lead says it all:
Nearly a week after he died, Michael Jackson still has not been buried, new complications have arisen over settling his vast estate, and his will has given up tantalizing details, including his choice of Diana Ross as a guardian of his children if his mother were unable to care for them.
I think his family is dragging their feet because they like the publicity. I fully expect him to be stuffed and mounted by the time this is over.
To the gym and to the exsanguination table after that. Back in a bit.
Today I plan to spend most of the day at the Volkswagen dealer’s, getting the car serviced. I assume the internet service is still a single crappy, for-your-convenience 90’s-era PC with track ball mouse — yes, way — so I’m taking a bunch of work that will benefit from no internet distractions.
That includes you guys.
If I’d had time, I’d have written something yesterday for today, but yesterday was like today, only sunnier and warmer. I did get a chance to see “Hung” on demand, the latest set-in-Detroit series to take advantage of those fat tax incentives. I believe most of it is shot elsewhere, but the credit sequence and the pilot had some serious D-town locations, the most amusing being the final scene, in which the main character finds his son waiting in an all-night line to buy concert tickets. The line is at Harpo’s, and both Alan and I guffawed at the idea of a nice suburban mom allowing her teenage son to spend the night outdoors at the corner of Chalmers and Harper Avenue in Detroit; he’d be safer in South Waziristan. I seem to recall the former Mrs. Eminem used to buy her drugs in that neighborhood.
Otherwise, I liked the pilot. The rest? We’ll see. Anything with Jane Adams can never be a waste of time.
No bloggage, but why I love the New York Times: Their reporters can use “Stygian” in a lead.
Back later, I hope.
My Russian teacher and I have been talking about having lunch at St. Sabbas Monastery for months now, and finally put it on the calendar a few weeks ago. Naturally this week is one of the busiest ever, but part of the point of a monastery is to slow down and shut the world out for a while, so what the hell, even if making it there on time required a speed shower after the gym and leaving the house with my hair still wet. Yes, friends, I was rushin’.
I’m glad I went, if only for the essential weirdness of finding the place, which is on a residential street in Harper Woods. And I mean, right on the street. They have six acres, which appears to have come from clearing a few houses, because as you’re driving down Old Homestead Road, it’s house house house house house house ONION DOMES house house house:
It’s a Russian Orthodox monastery, obviously. I wish their website had more information about how they ended up there — it’s only been at that address for a decade.
I’m not sure precisely what their work is, but they sell a few trinkets and, twice a week, open a small restaurant to the public — one lunch and one dinner. The price is right and the lunch is long (two hours), but the food is only meh. We went hoping for a Russian meal, but the seven small courses included pasta salad, and pasta salad from a supermarket deli, I suspect. But you couldn’t beat the atmosphere. We ate outdoors, overlooking the gardens:
They did serve a nice tea, and in Russian glasses, and there was borscht. Afterward, one of the monks told a little group about the rules of the church: Women must wear head coverings. OK, no biggie, lots of churches have that rule, but he felt the need to say why, and got into St. Paul and how we arouse demons with our hair, and all I could do was sigh. It’s always something, isn’t it? Thanks for the lunch, brothers, but I’ll pass on the prayer.
Bloggage:
Hey, Sarah Palin! Real America exists in New York, too. (While we’re at NYMag.com, what is it about Donald Trump’s wife? Is this her only facial expression? She dropped out of top-model class before they got to smiling, I guess.)
Maureen Dowd is insane; why do I even bother reading her? I’m glad someone from Jezebel was up to the task of taking apart today’s column, because I have better things to do.
Lately I’ve been disappointed by the Lolcats, but every time I think I’ll drop the bookmark, one like this turns up:
Oops, it’s past 10 and I have copy to edit. Rain is pitter-pattering on the leaves — finally! leaves! — outside and the weather is perfect for a little word surgery. Enjoy your day, as I hope to enjoy mine.
The Free Press ran a picture of the new mayor’s new house, and as soon as I saw it I knew exactly where it was, without even reading the story. That almost never happens; this city is still largely unknown to me, which is one reason I drive through it whenever possible.
In this case I knew it from the other direction. I took a rowing clinic a couple summers ago, and we rowed on the canals behind the Shore Pointe subdivision, a little slice of buppie heaven built on a landfill peninsula on the Detroit River. Afterward, I tried to drive back there to see the front side of the houses I’d admired from the back, but no dice, it was gated. Not surprisingly, the site has history to burn:
Bing’s subdivision sits on the site of the former Gar Wood mansion, legendary home of the famous race-boat driver that four decades ago became a communal residence for young people and, later, as it decayed, a biker hangout and party place.
This is what the rowing-clinic instructor said, too. A big abandoned house right on the river, barely bothered with by the police? What biker could resist?
It is just down a canal from the Lawrence Fisher home, which the Fisher family donated to the Hare Krishna movement.
I think this is not quite true; I seem to recall a hop-skip-jump between the Fishers and the Hare Krishnas that involved two scions of the industry, a Ford and a Reuther, both of whom were HKs, probably disappointing their parents terribly. The Detroit Women’s Rowing Association boathouse is on the grounds of this place, in a new building the Hare Krishnas used as a preschool. They’re still there, and have a big free vegetarian meal every Sunday. We took a tour of the mansion after we came off the water. There were several wax figures of the head H.K., whose name I won’t even attempt to find. It was startling to walk into an empty room and find him there:
A couple stopped by after their wedding, to take pictures:
I wonder if they’re still married.
On my way back out to Jefferson after being turned away by the gate, I passed the customary boarded-up squalor. It’s never far away in Detroit. But of course, that’s what makes the place so interesting, that one day you can be riding your bike down a crummy street and all of a sudden come across a bunch of people in saffron robes and shaved heads, feeding their flock of peacocks. Hi, neighbor!
My next thought was wondering if I could write a short story about a crime in the neighborhood, where the bad guys make their getaway by water. One of these days when I stop wasting my time on my stupid blog, maybe.
So, a little bloggage:
My patience with Sarah Palin and her sense of entitlement grows fades by the minute. Am I the only one who not only didn’t think CHILD RAPE over the Letterman joke, but barely noticed the offense? Granted, I am old and grizzled and a subscriber to premium cable, but it really didn’t seem beyond the pale for late-night monologue humor. And now he has apologized again. I’m still waiting for an apology from Governor Sensitivity and her real-America cracks, her silent witness to the “kill him” shouts from her audiences, etc. I think I’ll be waiting a while.
Oh, and look: Other party members are real sensitive, too. Caught red-handed, the excuse is still, “I sent it to the wrong mailing list.”
OK, that’s it for now. I’m off to the gym. The other day I was idly scratching my arm and came across a lump below my shoulder. It was a tricep! How the hell did that happen? I better try to keep things going.
Back later.
Two movies this weekend, both old and banished to cable, one a pleasant surprise, the other its opposite. Why? Because it’s Monday, I have to finish a story for money and do the customary work for no money, and why else? Because it’s quarterly tax day, the little fountains of joy for all self-employed lucky devils like me.
First, “The Wrestler.” I’d been resisting it for what I considered perfectly good reasons, primarily an allergy to Mickey Rourke and a question I could honestly answer no way, i.e., do I really care about professional wrestling’s permanent undercard? Friends, was I wrong.
Honestly, Rourke is nearly unrecognizable as Randy “the Ram” Robinson. No, he is Robinson. Whatever ’80s buzz he had as an actor, the stuff he squandered so readily with the usual vanity projects, bad relationships and worse behavior, lurks behind every shot of his ruined face. The fact the actor’s was ruined by plastic surgery and the wrestler’s by bad behavior and work is just serendipity. Rourke can barely move his mouth, but it plays as suppressed pain instead of Botox. But he’s not the best thing about “The Wrestler.” The details are, and I wished we’d gotten an extra 24 hours of pay-per-view, because I wanted to watch it again and just look at the products on the dressing-room counters, the set dressing in his crappy trailer, the way Randy and his stripper girlfriend exult over ’80s hair bands before “that Cobain pussy came around and ruined it all.”
And, I should add, the ending was absolutely perfect. So go rent the DVD.
Next up: “Feast of Love,” a two-star disappointment that only gets the second star because of the costumes and set design — everybody and everything looks real good. Otherwise, bleh. The novel was one of the great discoveries of my year in Ann Arbor, recommended by one of my writing teachers, who’d chosen Michigan’s MFA program over Iowa’s solely so she could study with Charles Baxter, the author. It’s a wonderful book, a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” of relationships romantic and familial, old and young, and the movie is just pretty actresses getting naked. I know what you’re thinking, but seriously: All those lovely breasts can’t save it.
One of my old screenwriting profs mentioned the film last January, at a panel discussion about Michigan’s tax incentives for moviemaking, and suggested relocating the story from Ann Arbor to Portland was a great mistake and insult. I can’t agree 100 percent, but there is one scene that left me sneering, in which a medical emergency mires a car trying to make its way to an ER; in the book they’re stuck in gridlocked traffic on Stadium Boulevard, just as the Ohio State-Michigan game is ending. The characters’ cries for help blend in with the exultation of the crowd — the Wolverines pulled out another one — and it’s just a wonderful scene of tragedy and absurdity, the individual buried in a sea of humanity. Robert Benton tries to duplicate it, but there’s something about seeing these wan Oregonians waving their stupid thunder sticks that was just ridiculous. It might have helped if they could have wrangled more than 30 extras to pretend to be Big 10 football fans, too, but I guess they blew the budget on body makeup.
Also, if we give Morgan Freeman a sizable sum of money, can we get it in writing that he will never play a wise old man again? I know, I know — the voice, it’s Morgan Freeman, but all he’s required to do anymore is stare over the top of his reading glasses and be wise.
Bleh.
Can’t stay long today; see the usual excuses. A bit of bloggage:
The Detroit dailies may be on life support, but they’re going down swinging. Yesterday in the Freep, yet another tale of official misconduct — a pension board that travels the world on tax dollars, leaving two days early, coming home five days late, etc. What a bunch of weasels.
Best new boat name in our neck of the lake: Amy’s Wine House. I’ll try to get a picture next time I’m out in the kayak.
OK, off to the bakery and to start the Monday sprint. Good times!
One of my local Twitter follows has established a coyote-sighting Google map. He rendered it in Earth, which gives it that CIA-surveillance flava:
Of course I tweeted it to GrossePointeToday.com, and with that I conclude today’s edition of Sentences That Wouldn’t Have Made a Lick of Sense a Decade Ago.
No, one more: Shopping with Kate the other day, I heard a song I liked on the store’s playlist, so I Shazam’d it, but waited until we got home to buy it.
(It was “Rock & Roll Queen” by the Subways. Go ahead and laugh, but I’ve always had a weakness for a tight little single that can reach the finish line in under three minutes.)
I was making my cop-shop rounds yesterday in sandals and a T-shirt, freezing to death, when I glanced at the dashboard thermometer and read an appalling figure: 56 degrees. I began an R-rated sort of gibbering rant not unlike the father’s battles with the furnace in “A Christmas Story.” School is out in two days, summer swimming programs begin the following Monday, and the pool is about as appealing as, well, a pool on a 56-degree day. I’m all for a little character-building weather, but my character feels fully constructed at the moment, thanks very much.
When I took responsibility for collecting the public-safety reports for the new website, I anticipated handing this chore off to one of my students, but now that I’ve done it a while? No way. It’s too much fun for a storyteller to examine these little tragedies and comedies, rendered so succinctly in the passive-voice poetry of Copspeak:
A traffic stop was effected…I detected an odor commonly associated with intoxicants…Suspect was confrontagious…
Some of these accounts could be entered in a short-short story contest. Disputes between neighbors are the most interesting, because I have the advantage the involved parties do not: Distance. In my god’s-eye view of things, I can look down with a cool head and only marvel that all these hard feelings, all this yelling, all this paperwork was over…a barking dog. (On the other hand, there is nothing like being awakened at a too-early hour by a gas-powered leaf blower to send the blood pressure off the charts; I have experienced this myself.) Two weeks ago there was an account of a gutter-cleaning job that nearly came to fisticuffs. My takeaway lesson: Do not spray gunky gutter debris on a freshly washed car. In the Motor City, people take these things very, very seriously.
As you can see, I’m short on material today. Fortunately, I have an excess of bloggage:
I hope Kym Worthy sends Kwame Kilpatrick back to jail, and this time she throws away the key.
Jon Stewart, national treasure: Make sure you watch the embedded clip.
The Pope was “visibly upset” over details of abuse in Irish penal institutions church-run homes for wayward children, but the report doesn’t say what, exactly, he was upset about. My money’s on: “that the rest of the world heard our secret.” Count me among those with more than two working brain cells who believe the idea that Rome didn’t know about this vast national network of sadism academies as, well, bullshit. Maybe he didn’t have “The Magdalene Sisters” in his Netflix queue.
But because we like to end on an up note: Sex With Ducks, the music-video response to Pat Robertson’s concerns what legalizing gay marriage may lead to. Safe for work, at least with headphones.
I have so much work to do it’s not funny. So I’m off to do it.
I read both Detroit dailies every day, not every word but a lot of them, usually returning to the websites several times. I think the Freep may have lost me for good today. I don’t know what the print edition looks like, but you know what the lead story is on the website? (Underneath the Red Wings package, of course; I mean, the bankruptcy of the cornerstone of the underlying industry that supports a whole region might be news, but hey — priorities, people!)
A really stupid one.
One with lots of one-sentence paragraphs and padding creative white space.
Oh, and a repetitive catch phrase, like a refrain, because you know Mitch is a songwriter, too.
It is: All fall down.
It’s hard for a newspaper to insult me, these days. I’ve gotten used to the degradation. I told my boss the other day, the one I farm news for, that the hardest thing about this job has been watching the steady decline of newspapers over the last three years. There was an oncology conference in Florida this week, a big one, that we were tracking for our clients. Monday’s Wall Street Journal and New York Times had several stories on the news coming out of it, about new cancer drugs and therapies. So I made sure to visit the website of the local paper, once one of the finest papers in the south, in search of stories. They had punted it to the AP.
But Mitch Albom writing about General Motors? That might just do it for me. I can’t even stand to take it apart for laughs, it’s so depressing and stupid. OK, one line:
We have each other.
What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?
Nothing like starting the first day of the rest of Michigan’s life on a high note, I always say.
I’m starting to like these one-sentence paragraphs. I think that extra white space really gives flaccid prose that extra oomph, don’t you think?
It’s sort of like the very short sentences in children’s books:
Look, Sally, look. Mitch is writing a column. See Mitch write. Write, Mitch, write. See Mitch write while he’s doing his radio show. Multi-task, Mitch, multi-task. Mitch is quoting the governor: Gov. Jennifer Granholm told me Monday on WJR. Synergy, Mitch, synergy.
OK, that’s not funny. Here’s what is: I’d be willing to bet a mortgage payment that Mitch makes at least $200K from his Free Press revenue stream, perhaps more. They could get Sweet Juniper for half that, the columns would be better, he’s shoot his own photos and show up in the office more. I know I’ve made this suggestion before, but it bears repeating.
Well. It’s a bad day in Michigan, innit? We are officially in free fall. I’m now working under the assumption we are capital-F you-know-what. For a while now, I’ve been asking old-timers, “Is this the worst recession you’ve seen in Michigan?” and they all say, “No, early ’80s were worse.” That was the “Roger & Me” downturn, the tent cities in Houston, the “Continental Drift” migration of the blue-collar working class to the south. They don’t say that anymore.
Fortunately, we still have the solace of television. Dexter posted this excellent interview with Vince Gilligan, creator of “Breaking Bad,” which just finished its second season. I was a little worried as the season began; whereas last year’s had a fairly constant undertone of comedy, year two dawned under dark, dark clouds. Gilligan faced the same problem David Chase did with “The Sopranos,” i.e., how do you make a show with an evil character at its heart and still make viewers want to tune in? I remember Chase saying at the time how frustrating he found it to hear viewers describe Tony as a nice guy, when he clearly wasn’t. I think the turning point for viewers came in that show’s second season, too, with the Scatino bust-out and subsequent whacking of Big Pussy. You really couldn’t hold on to your illusions after that.
Walt had more sympathy going for him; the guy had cancer, and his turn to meth cooking was initially because he felt he had to leave a grubstake behind for his family. So Gilligan had to rub our faces in the fact even a noble end doesn’t justify the evil means, and the first few episodes were so, so bleak. But Chase figured it out — when you need relief, turn to the other characters. And so we got buffoons like Paulie Walnuts and sweet, clueless Adriana to leaven Tony’s march into hell. Gilligan did, too, and found depth in the characters of Skyler and Jesse and even Hank the DEA agent. Jesse, Walt’s toddler-dressed accomplice, turns out to be the one who most regrets his actions, and his suicidal depression at the end of this season will be interesting to watch in the next.
And in the meantime, we have “True Blood” to look forward to, and then “Mad Men,” coming back in August. If we still have cable then, that is. You never know.
Not much bloggage on this depressing day, but what I have is amusing: my left armpit smells while my right one doesn’t. this isn’t even a shower issue, it smells right after a shower — Oversharers on Twitter. HT: Brother Jim.
Off to the gym. Because if only the strong survive, I want to at least be able to carry one of their suitcases.
Look, it’s like a United Nations of hockey:
Saturday night in Detroit, before the game. (The Wings won. You knew that.) Walking around this particular neighborhood with friends — our zombie flick was part of a short-films festival in the same block — I marveled at how often you still hear the ghost-town claim about downtown, always from people who don’t live anywhere nearby and haven’t visited since 1974. You should have been there. It’s not Chicago, but it’s a hell of a lot more than you might think.
I cannot deny it: I look forward to P.J. O’Rourke’s byline. Mostly I am disappointed by what I find under it these days, but he still can find the mark once in a while, and he’s always good for a guffaw here and there. But I smelled something when I read his Saturday essay in the Wall Street Journal pegged to the GM bankruptcy, The End of the Affair: Old-man smell. And it started so promisingly:
Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.
Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War.
Insert another “power” after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass.
This touches on something I’ve been thinking for a while: I’m worried about a government-imposed plan for the domestic auto industry, because I think cars are one of those things like newspapers, magazines and anything else with even a soupçon of creativity at its heart — they just can’t be made by a focus group. And the public is fickle. They wanted fuel economy last summer, when gas was $4 a gallon, but a few months later it was down to $1.50 and Priuses were sitting unsold in California lots near where they’d been unloaded from the freighters. The Obama administration is absolutely justified in imposing some harsh restrictions on a company so badly managed it’s taking on staggering cash infusions and bleeding them out nearly as fast, but…still. O’Rourke is right. The automobile is a powerful tool of personal freedom, and all the bike trails in the world won’t change that.
He loses me, however, when he lapses into his you-kids-get-off-my-lawn act. “In the name of safety, emissions control and fuel economy, the simple mechanical elegance of the automobile has been rendered ponderous, cumbersome and incomprehensible,” he writes, and in an underhanded way “to make me hate my car.” He adds:
How proud and handsome would Bucephalas look, or Traveler or Rachel Alexandra, with seat and shoulder belts, air bags, 5-mph bumpers and a maze of pollution-control equipment under the tail?
Oh, for God’s sake. Let me see the hands of all those who want to return to the golden era of bare-metal dashboards, leaded gasoline and seats free of safety belts. Thought so. There’s a great deal to be said for automotive design of a bygone era, but complaining that cars pollute less seems like a spectacular case of missing the point. To me, what makes cars dull and boring today is their slow transition from conveyance to living room, a sea change driven entirely by what a good libertarian like O’Rourke would recognize as the holy of holys, the Market. At least once a week, I pull up in the carpool lane at Kate’s school behind an SUV or minivan with a backseat entertainment system, and even though the kids are just going to school, it’s on and playing Sponge Bob for the backseat occupants. Modern cars are big and comfortable and climate-controlled and some of them make me yearn to stretch out on the third seat and take a little nap. That’s sort of the opposite of sex appeal.
My six-year-old VW has pollution control and 5 mph bumpers and cupholders and air bags, and it’s a blast to drive, a little Audi wearing dress-down clothes. It’s even a station wagon. The modern driver appreciates tight handling in the corners as much as an early XY-chromosome boomer like O’Rourke appreciates speed off the line. I’ve driven John and Sam’s Prius, and it’s a blast, too. Al Gore’s kid was clocked doing 100 in his. So the modern “shade-tree mechanic” can’t work on them anymore — so what? The best mechanic I knew in Fort Wayne, a guy whose customer base was so devoted they followed him from a Mercedes dealership to his own driveway after he got forced out, told me once he couldn’t work on modern cars anymore, they were so technically advanced beyond his tool chest, but he didn’t care. They’re better now, foreign and domestic. Keep the oil changed and even a cheap one should last 100,000 miles at the very least, a milestone that used to be remarkable. One of Alan’s colleagues drove an Acura with 260,000 miles on it, until it got stolen. (In Detroit. Only in Detroit.)
My proudest moment with a car came on M-129, a road as straight as a plumb line, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Four of us had borrowed my friend’s bad-ass ’69 Camaro, and decided to see how bad-ass it could be off the line. I forget who was driving. He dumped the clutch, laid rubber in first gear, chirped the tires again going into second, and then, blurp — it wouldn’t go into third gear. We pulled over and for the first and maybe only time in my life I said, “I can fix it. Got a wrench?”
This had happened before, the first week Mark had the car, and I was riding with him. It had happened in Columbus, back when every gas station was a service station, and Mark had limped it into one, where they put it on the lift. I watched the mechanic find the problem — jammed transmission linkage — and fix it with a smart whack of a rubber mallet. So I took a hefty wrench, wiggled under, found the linkage, gave it a similar whack and lo, it was healed.
While I think it’s fine that the problem could be so simple that a dumb ol’ girl could fix it with a blunt object, honestly, can you imagine that happening to a modern car today? I’ve had my transmission problems, but you could speed-shift my Passat every day of its life and not have the linkage jam. And my car is about as old now as the Camaro was then.
(On the other hand, that Camaro was promptly christened the Coolmobile. I can’t imagine anyone bestowing such a name on my car.)
It’s sad to grow old and have more of your life behind you than ahead. But yearning for your lost virility shouldn’t get you the cover of the Weekend Journal. Just sayin’.
OK, then. I suppose everyone will want to talk today about Dr. Tiller. I don’t have much fresh to add except to note that I’ve only known one woman who had a second-trimester abortion, and I don’t know where she got it, but she had her reasons: She needed chemotherapy for a devastating cancer diagnosis that came at the worst possible time. I don’t judge people who sometimes need an unpleasant and unpopular medical procedure. I’m just glad there are at least a few doctors willing to provide it. One less, today. Sigh.
Busy week ahead. Enjoy yours.
A note on our type problems: J.C. is aware, and is working on it from his vacation in the Upper Peninsula, where wi-fi is something no one’s really heard tell of yet. Good news: This seems to be a home-page problem. In the meantime, if you click the headline, it’ll take you to a separate page (with comments) where everything’s OK. Noted? Noted.
EDIT: Type problem seems fixed, for now. Thanks, brother Jim! Also, a version of the Eaton Beaver clip is now linked in comments. Thanks, Duffy.
It’s a measure of how scattered I’ve been of late that I’ve been sitting here for two days thinking I have nothing to write about, and then — forehead slap — I remember that I went to see Elmore Leonard last Thursday. He did a read/chat/sign at Border’s, supporting his new one, “Road Dogs.”
The reading was brief, just the first page of the novel, which in the usual fashion, starts halfway down the page. Maybe three paragraphs, after which he said, “And that’s what the book’s about,” shut it, and started talking. He was aided in this by his son Peter, who just published his second novel — it’s a father-son book tour. The two chatted back and forth for about half an hour, took some questions, signed some books. Among the highlights:
Peter talked about the party his father threw for the cast of “Out of Sight,” after they wrapped shooting in Detroit. He walked into the dining room to find George Clooney had just arrived and was standing by himself. They chatted for a while, and then “the women heard he was there.” Surrounded.
The “10 rules of writing” were delivered at Bouchercon, the convention for crime-fiction writers, and were something he just whipped up on a legal pad. Today the list is a book, and one of the most often-quoted in stories about him, probably because they’re short, snappy and don’t require much introduction. One of the rules: Never use a word other than “said” to carry dialogue. Another: Use no adverbs. Because they suck. (In the signing line, I told him about the reporter for the Ohio University Post who used “ejaculated” to describe an exclamation. His editor announced to the room: “Someone ejaculated on Tim’s copy.” That was hard to live down.)
My favorites were the stories about the old days, about being called in to a movie set to convince Charles Bronson — I assume this was “Mr. Majestyk” — that yes, his character would have a particular female character with him in the pickup truck during the big chase scene, because otherwise who would be driving when he crawled into the bed with a shotgun to fire at the bad guys? (“I don’t know why the producers couldn’t have told him that.”) But also about the era of pulp fiction, which he barely touched on, other than to say he’d been paid 2 cents a word for “3:10 to Yuma,” “which was the top rate for the pulps.” I wish he’d talked more about this bygone era in American fiction, where so many great writers paid their dues and learned their craft. (I was once lucky enough to interview an expert on the mass-market paperback, and I could have talked to him for hours and hours about cover art alone.) Fiction workshops are all well and good, but there’s something to be said for strong characters, snappy dialogue and the whip of the market as a navigator of plotlines. Every so often Leonard is asked why he switched from westerns to crime fiction, and he always shrugs and notes that that’s what the market wanted at the time. Try telling that to the next MFA you meet.
(That said, my favorite MFA, Lance Mannion, is a great respecter of genre fiction and its writers. So this may not apply to all of them.)
Martin Amis, in an essay about Leonard collected somewhere, described his writing as jazz, and that’s the truth. He said he doesn’t outline his novels, never knows where they’re going to end until they do, and that sounds to me like a nice bebop solo, the trumpeter stepping out to noodle around with phrases, themes and melodies for a while, until he’s said all he has to say and steps back to let someone else take a turn. Leonard is Miles Davis with a pen.
I bought “Road Dogs,” which I’m interspersing with “The Quiet Girl,” two books that couldn’t be more different. If Leonard is jazz, Peter Hoeg is atonality, translated from Danish. I can only recommend one, and I think you know which one it is.
So, a little bloggage? Sure:
A tale of two Michigan economies — Ann Arbor and Warren. From the WSJ.
The right’s talking points on Sotomayor, by Dahlia Lithwick, another writer nearing national-treasure status.
Only in Detroit: A city councilwoman is billed a pittance in property taxes for a decade. How much of a pittance? Try $68 a year. Turns out the city records show her address is a vacant lot. Her reaction: Huh. I wondered about that. Now it turns out she probably won’t have to pay much at all. This city. I ask you.
Only in Detroit Journalism: Yes, I saw the “Eaton Beaver turns 69 today” clip from one of our local TV station’s happy-birthday roundup on the morning show. No, I cannot direct you to it, as the station has effectively wiped out the clip. More proof every news organization needs an editor well-versed in dirty jokes, puns and Johnny Fucherfaster stories.
And now, I have a barn to raise and a day to do it. Onward to the work pile.