Such a strange artifact I found today: A letter from an old lawyer to a new one. Published in the American Lawyer, found via New York magazine’s website, getta loada this:

Dear Sarah,

Your father tells me you started a job at Cravath, Swaine & Moore earlier this fall. Perhaps you are aware that I spent some of my formative years at that firm.

I’m sure you will learn a lot at present-day Cravath. I, certainly, learned a lot when I went to work at the firm in the fall of 1952, just after graduating from law school. The firm was then located at 15 Broad St., directly opposite the New York Stock Exchange, the facade of which, outside my window, was not yet covered by a gigantic American flag.

Actually, the window was the province of E. Gabriel Perle, a more senior associate who got the desk nearest the window in the office we shared. “Gabby” took me out to lunch and dinner and introduced me to the many stanzas of “The Partners’ John,” a song telling the story of the rise of a young associate to the long-anticipated moment when he receives a key to the partners’ john.

I use the pronoun “he” because there were only men at the Cravath of 1952. No women lawyers, no women secretaries or stenographers, no women in any capacity at all were allowed in the hallways of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. “We are a place of business,” it was explained to me. Ladies would be a “distraction.” Even the messengers, who carried documents from one office to another and sharpened our stacks of pencils every morning, were elderly men in gray office jackets, reputedly recruited from among the ranks of retired runners at the exchange. If I needed to dictate, a buzz quickly brought a male “steno” who was older than I was. There was a special midnight shift of stenos who would have any late-night work freshly typed and ready on a partner’s desk first thing in the morning. “Women wouldn’t be safe in downtown New York during these night hours,” it was explained.

It could be difficult to tell a male secretary or steno from an associate, but clothes made the difference. Lawyers wore suits from Brooks Brothers. Stenos did not. Moreover, lawyers wore hats, something I completely failed to understand, despite frequent admonitions to “take your hat and come to lunch.” I never acquired a hat, nor, as you can imagine, did I ever see the inside of the partners’ john.

Every few days I get something in the e-mail about Hillary Clinton — what a bitch she is, what a ball-breaker, needless to say a dyke, an asshole, you can take your pick. And then I think about an interview I did last year, with a woman lawyer of Hillary’s age. Here’s the entry from my notes: When I decided to apply (to law school), was accepted and spoke to the dean of admissions. “Will I be employable?” Dean said, “Of course you will be, we need women to take low-paying legal work that men won’t take.” Representing juveniles, etc.

This was at the University of Michigan, by the way, not exactly Bob’s College of Law and Bartending. Then, as now, a tough nut to crack. And this was the dean of admissions talking, no doubt already pissed that he had to give one of his 450 precious seats to someone destined to work in juvie legal aid. (Two word coda to her story: She didn’t.)

Obviously, things have changed. But if, in 1952, women were considered so toxic to the legal mind that they couldn’t even be seen in the background of the office landscape at this particular white-shoe firm, that was still recent history in 1972, when Hillary graduated. I’m not going to belabor this point; I can’t imagine what I would bring to the discussion that hasn’t already been said. Just: Follow that link up there to the whole piece. It’s fascinating reading. And then think about it a while. That’s all.

You are also allowed a snicker or three at the homoerotic overtones of it all. I mean — all those jokes about the partners’ john. Please. A large infusion of estrogen must have been a downer in more ways than one. At least for some of them.

Bloggage:

This arrived a little late to do any good — it’s the entry for a YouTube/Home Depot contest to win a major cash infusion for renovating your home, and entries are closed. But you Hoosiers in particular are urged to watch. It’s funny, and it’s about a town in your orbit (Huntington). What did old buildings do before gay men were invented? Wait for the inevitable blow from the wrecking ball, I guess.

Also: This project has a blog. I really hope they win.

The Free Press, like all newspapers, is series-heavy this time of year; gotta get ’em published before year’s end, to qualify for awards. Columnist Bill McGraw’s assignment — drive every street in Detroit, then write about it — started strong on Sunday, faltered a bit Monday, and is back today with an entertaining piece about art, guerilla and otherwise, in the city.

Off to drive around the city in a panic finish my shopping. Strength and honor!

Not much today, friends, but you’re free to play like kittens in the comments. Just to get you started…

Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to be Mitch Albom, to get up every morning, look in the mirror and say, “I am worth every penny.” Think he does that? Or does he, like so many other successful people, secretly believe he has pulled off an illusion worthy of Ricky Jay, and tremble inwardly at what will happen when the audience finds out? I dunno. All I know is, I have never been a sportswriter and everything I know about baseball could fit in a shoebox, and I could have written a better column about the Mitchell Report than this. In fact, if you’d given me the Mitchell Report as a challenge, and asked me to write something about it, something suitable for a daily newspaper, I would have turned in something very much like Albom’s column. Watch me as I reveal the mysteries of punditry:

First, state facts already in evidence:

… the report was not earth-shattering, only because we already have suspected much of what it contained. Sure, many more names were thrown on the bonfire, including All-Stars such as Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Miguel Tejada, and as you read this, analysts and fans are screaming over how to view their careers.

Then, ask a lot of rhetorical questions:

So now what? … And if they had nothing to hide, why didn’t any of them talk? …Or will the net result be, as many suspect, a big fat nothing?

Sign off with that time-tested waffler:

Where we go next is anyone’s guess.

Cash check.

Michael Rosenberg, the other Freep sports columnist, does a better job. Not hugely better, but better. Writing a first-day column about a big event expected to have wide repercussions someday, but not today, is always an exercise in thumb-twiddling. But some twiddle better than others. For instruction on how to do it well, I recommend Thomas Boswell and Harvey Araton.

For the scores of you keeping track at home, let me report the dog’s health has taken a dramatic turn for the better on his new food. Within 24 hours, his energy improved, his tucked-in skinny flanks began to fill out and he stopped looking like a sick dog, and more like a very healthy one. There was a trip to the groomer in there for a bath and haircut, which helped, but you can’t fake weight gain. He goes back next week for another blood test, and unless my eyes deceive me, the results will be good.

Something to think about for later this month. Last year we spent that down week between the holidays posting pictures submitted by you folks. Because we have so many regular commenters here, it’s nice to get a closer look at one another when there’s not much else going on. So send in some holiday pictures, and we’ll fill the waning days of the year sharing them here.

So have a great weekend. Mine will be exhausting. Hope yours isn’t.

We start our video features today with one from the vaults. It takes a great deal of courage stupidity to put this video up today, and I do so with a long list of apologies up front: There are some bobbles in the playback that seem to be an importing/encoding problem, but that’s the least of it. The camera work is atrocious, the sound is bad, the music is laughable, and if I stabbed myself in the leg every time I see footage of someone’s back when I should be seeing their front, I’d have the limb amputated in six minutes. I’m sorry for all that. My only excuse is, I was just fooling around, and the resulting video was never meant to be seen by anyone but a few friends.

“What I Saw at the Execution” is a video notebook I shot when Ron French, my former Fort Wayne colleague now working for the Detroit News, suggested I come along to the lethal injection of Tim McVeigh in Terre Haute, Ind., in June 2001. I was credentialed, and I was there with an assignment from my own employer in Fort Wayne, but it was Ron’s idea; he was going, and he thought it would be fun to have someone he knew there, so what the hell, it was national news and it was happening in Indiana. I asked my editor and she said yes, with the usual instruction: Spend as little money as possible.

That was Ron’s mission, too. The Detroit connection to the Oklahoma City bombing was a bit distant, but solid: Terry Nichols had lived in the Thumb, had kin there, and McVeigh had spent time at his old Army buddy’s Michigan spread. So off we both went to Terre Haute. The federal penitentiary was in the middle of nowhere, with a vast field of many acres alongside. That’s where the media village was.

I spent my newspaper career in places where big national news rarely happens. I’ve never covered a national political convention. Never done a big natural disaster, or a huge celebrity show trial. But presidents travel and campaign, and occasionally even a backwater like northeast Indiana would be struck a glancing blow by the spotlight — August 19, 1988 comes to mind — and I thought I knew what a media clusterfuck looked like. I didn’t.

It’s sometimes hard to remember, today, what the first eight months and 10 days of 2001 were like, and when I look at this video, a little comes back. This execution, an event that only a tiny handful could witness, scripted down to its last nanosecond, required the attendance of all the national networks, broadcast and cable news, teams from most nearby cities, the national newspapers, the ones that aspired to be, and oddballs like me. There were something like 1,600 credential holders. The media village sprang up seemingly overnight, a Brigadoon of yuppie type As, with its own roads, power supply, restaurants, transportation and, of course, class system. Fox had a huge presence. CNN had a private bus running continually between the hotels and the prison. And the print media had Tent A. Or Tent B.

Even with lithium-ion batteries and cellular modems, most people needed a better place to work on-site than their cars. So the Bureau of Prisons set up Tent A, with electricity, lighting, phone lines, tables, bottled water, snacks, assistants, security and other amenities. It was white, like the tents where wedding receptions are held, with walls and isinglass curtains you could roll right down, in case there’s a change in the weather. A space in Tent A cost $1,200.

Tent B was army-green, had no walls, no tables and no electricity. But it was free. Ron consulted with his editors and decided Tent B would do, as long as he could get a table. He rented one with two chairs for less than $10. It was waiting for us when we arrived, a raw wooden-topped table with a sign on it reading DETROIT NEWS. It was the only table; we were the only people in Tent B. We laughed about this until we peed our pants, then went over to Tent A, where each table had a clean white cover, and a flower arrangement. I got but one fleeting shot before a security guard kicked us out.

Anyway, the weekend went on. More people arrived hourly. The news from the prison consisted of occasional briefings saying, “Mr. McVeigh is resting comfortably. That is all.” It was generally agreed that the big news would be the huge demonstrations that would occur. So we went looking for the throngs. An anti-death penalty demonstration had about 40 marchers and giant puppets, which meant they were outnumbered by journalists approximately three-to-one. The pro-death penalty folks were even fewer, and more than once I witnessed reporters standing politely in lines, waiting to interview the talkative ones. Basically, if you showed up with a sign and could give a decent quote or two, you could get on TV. Ron went off to do some interviews and I rambled through town, navigating by the satellite antennas raised on the dozens of trucks on the street — if you saw two or more in one place, there you would find “news.” (Sort of like the traffic jams at Yellowstone, which is how you find animal photo ops.) It’s how I found the Catholic church glimpsed briefly in the video.

On Sunday, a meeting was called in a hotel parking lot to decide who was going to get the scarce witness seats in the death chamber. The Bureau of Prisons had already divvied it up into categories — Terre Haute media, Oklahoma City media, wire service, broadcast, etc., with all the remaining newspaper people competing for two seats, which were up to us to assign. We met to discuss how we might do this, and the first suggestion was the most obvious and fair — throw business cards into a hat and choose two. Most people nodded and said, yeah, that was probably the way to go. And then it started: Wahllll, an Alabama drawl rose over the other voices. We might want to think about this a little.

It was Rick Bragg, a New York Times bigfoot, who wasn’t about to give up without a fight. He gave a little speech about how much respect he had for all of us, y’all wouldn’t be here if your editors didn’t think you could handle it. But. Being the pool reporter for the whole print-media section of the village would be a big job. One would have to have superior observational skills. One would have to be able to see the ah-rony. Needless to say, Bragg, with his Pulitzer Prize and best-seller, was up to the task. I’m standing behind him thinking, hey, I know ah-rony when I see it too, Mr. Pulitzer-pants. Then I said so, in somewhat more polite language.

Fortunately, a lot of people were thinking the same thing. Special irony-detection skills were deemed unnecessary. As it turned out, the lucky business cards belonged to a guy from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and (I think) USA Today.

So anyway, Tim got his hot shot. His final statement was the text of “Invictus.” The hearse carried him away. And Brigadoon started to disassemble itself. I filed my story, set out for home and stopped for pancakes in Anderson. While I mainlined coffee, I reflected on how much money had been spent (but not by me! Or Ron!) covering this event, which could have been capably handled by a trio of old wire-service hands and one photographer. And, in a few more months, we’d learn another lesson about terrorism, and McVeigh would be all but forgotten.

Well, that’s all you need to know. Enjoy, or don’t:

One last note: Anything new I post won’t have the 21st Century Nance open; it’s too long for web video, and is, ultimately, an inside joke that should stay inside. But it was already on the completed project, and so it goes.

A few years ago, I had to do a phone interview with two Israelis, living in Jerusalem. Because of the time difference, and the ridiculous hoop-jumping one had to do in our office to make an international call, I opted to call them from home, first thing in the morning, and expense the bill later. Two calls to Israel, 70 minutes total = $240 on my phone bill.

I should have just passed the pain along to my ungrateful employer, but the sum was so insulting I called to see if it could be negotiated. It could. For signing up retroactively for an international calling plan, and understanding that it could be cancelled in five more days, they gave me the international-plan price: $17.

I took Econ 101 AND 102, but when prices can vary that much, it makes me realize I wasn’t cut out for life in the business world (or running a hospital). Today I got another lesson: The 4-pin to 6-pin Firewire cord.

At the Apple store: $30.
At Best Buy: $40 (I should note this specimen was 17 feet long).
Via the internet, a 3-foot version: $4.

Ah, well. If you want to talk about ridiculous prices, yesterday I paid more than $4 for a sugar-free triple-shot vanilla latte at Starbucks Fourbucks. I had a caffeine-deprivation headache at the time, however, which made it more like buying aspirin. The headache went away while my stylist painted blondeness into my hair.

“If only I were a man, I could enjoy having your boobs two inches from my cheek,” I said, all at once realizing that said boobs were significantly larger than they were the last time I got my hair cut. “Why, you’re pregnant.” Six months, in fact, which means I didn’t notice last time, when she was 4.5 months along. Well, no one ever said I was a good trained observer. Besides, haircuts are the only time I can bury my nose, guilt-free, in In Style magazine; I’m not really looking around to see who’s packing a fetus under their apron.

The highlights came out well. Decrepitude is held at bay for another few weeks. I asked the stylist if she’d consider a few platinum streaks in front a good idea, and she said that not only was her answer no, “if you asked, I wouldn’t do them.” Well, excuse me. See how you feel in 20 more years when your gutters guy, the one with the freshly healed bullet wound and the Chris Farley physique, says you remind him of someone famous. Vintage Brigitte Bardot? Mid-period Susan Sarandon? Bette Midler, for cryin’ out loud?

“Carol Burnett,” he said. I wanted to dye my whole head green.

Ah, well. Enough of my mid-century angst. On to the bloggage!

“My chicken is in political exile” — only in Ann Arbor.

My birthday appears 647,751 digits into pi. How about you?

Via David Mills, three short web “prequels” for “The Wire,” a few scraps as we count the days until the best show EVAR starts its final season. He likes When Bunk Met McNulty, and it’s OK, but my heart belongs to Young Omar. Also: Young Proposition Joe.

Assholes With Guns, chapter 7 million: Seven-year-old girl shot six times trying to protect her mother.and it’s still going on. Via Roy.

To the gym. Have a swell day, all.

Yesterday’s surface-street trip through Detroit made me wonder if I’m the sort of person who gets a thrill from slumming. Isn’t it sort of ick to find ruin and degradation so interesting? Would I be so pleased to take the long way home if I had to do it on my bike, instead of in my nice safe car? Points to ponder. My gutters guy came by late in the afternoon, begging for work. He did our fall gutter blow-out last year, did a great job, and left not even a business card behind. I tried to find him in the spring, but the only thing I could remember about him was “John Friendly.”

That’s ridiculous, I thought. Johnny Friendly is the gangster boss in “On the Waterfront.” You must be getting that perimenopausal swiss-cheese brain thing. So I was thrilled when he knocked on the door last week with a flyer, which explained my confusion: His business name is John’s Friendly Tree Service, and he had indeed introduced himself the previous year as John Friendly.

“Like in ‘On the Waterfront,'” I said.

“I can’t believe you know that movie! That’s how I got my nickname!” he said. “No one knows that movie anymore.” Then he showed me the year’s big news in the Friendly household: a six-inch scar down the midline of his abdomen, next to a nickel-size hole: “Someone tried to rob me, and I wouldn’t give ’em my truck.” Wow. We agreed he’d clean the gutters in a couple weeks when the oaks were finished, and said goodbye.

It was a reminder that there’s a good reason not to drive through the city taking pictures, although to be sure, he was shot in Eastpointe, not Detroit. On the other hand, one reason the city doesn’t spook me (much) is, it’s just so empty. Not everywhere, of course; anyone who tells you downtown is a ghost town after 5 p.m. hasn’t been there lately. It’s not exactly Chicago, but it’s miles closer than it used to be. But the neighborhoods can have an eerie ghost-town vibe, especially in cold weather.

Anyway, John Friendly was tapioca for the week, and asked if he could do the gutters now, get half his money, then come back after Thanksgiving and do them again for the other half. We negotiated a price, and I paid him the full amount up front. “I appreciate this,” he said. “I’m broke.”

I said, “I’m a writer. We invented broke.” Coming from someone living in a nice house, I’m sure it sounded just about as repellent as it reads on the page. But I know a thing or two about cash-flow problems. Anyone willing to work as hard as John Friendly will be OK, as long as he doesn’t get shot again.

Today is Birth Day, Alan’s and Kate’s twin natal celebrations. We got up early and opened presents at the breakfast table. This year’s theme: Fleece. Kate’s been craving a pair of Uggs, the sheepskin boot that’s all the rage wherever there are chilly toes. Ugg is also the sound you make when you look at the price tag, but I found Acorn makes a seam-for-seam duplicate for one-third the price with only one major difference: it doesn’t say Ugg across the heel. I discussed it with her before I bought them, and told her to expect some blonde tootsie would point this out, and she should be prepared. She said she was ready, but then they came out of the box and …didn’t fit. Looks like baby inherited her mother’s sense of humor, nonchalant attitude toward homework and a boatlike shoe size.

So, let’s get bloggin’:

Are you there, God? It’s me, Mitch: Albom does what only he can do — commune with the dead and assure us that, yes, there is almost certainly high-def TV in heaven. Or maybe something better! Mind your tooth enamel and blood sugar as Mitch talks to Bo Schembechler. (Thanks to a merciful God or perhaps an editor who took his supplemental testosterone this week, Bo doesn’t talk back.)

Detroitblog turns up another gem in a city full of them: The world’s coolest music teacher. It says he’s willing to take on a few more students. Maybe I should call him, if only for the bragging rights of taking piano lessons from a guy who played on “Goin’ to a Go-Go” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.”

It’s funny how, even if you don’t follow baseball, the best baseball announcers insinuate themselves into your life, somehow, maybe by coming out of a thousand summer radios or your dad’s TV on warm nights. One of the best, Joe Nuxhall, is dead. He and Marty Brennaman were inseparable from the Cincinnati Reds, especially in that team’s pre-Marge Schott glory days. RIP.

Ahem:

Paul Tibbets is dead. I predict a Bob Greene column in the next few days, remarking on how reclusive the man was, and how rarely he gave interviews (except to BOB). Note: I’ve read at least half a dozen of these rare Tibbets interviews over the years. And I haven’t even been looking for them.

Well, I was half right. The column appeared as expected, in the New York Times, but didn’t mention his reclusiveness. Although, of course, it leads with an anecdote illustrating their special relationship:

My mother, who is 88, told me last month that it had been a long time since she’d seen Paul Tibbets in the Bob Evans restaurant on the east side of Columbus, Ohio. She thought this was odd; she ate lunch there so often, and he ate lunch there so often, that his absence worried her.

As the Bob genre goes, this is lacking is sucktasticness. There’s the blah blah rehash of what’s already been gone over for decades, the soldier-who-did-his-duty nod of the baby boom to the greatest generation*, the banal you-are-there details only Bob could provide:

On the road, I would see him make up his hotel room or clear his plates in a restaurant. When I would tell him that other people would do that, he would say that no able-bodied man should expect another person to do this work for him.

Bob’s signature purple prose isn’t as evident in this one. He’s either improving, or has a better editor at the Times. I only found one example of why-say-it-once-when-you-can-say-it-twice Boblines:

On this Veterans Day I will think about the men and women in their 70s and 80s whom I would see when I was with Mr. Tibbets. These were soldiers and sailors, now grown old, who had expected to be sent to Japan for the land invasion, and perhaps die on those shores.

I love how Bob feels the need to underline that people in their 70s and 80s are “now grown old.” As a reiteration of what we’ve read a dozen or more times since Tibbets died, it’s just average. What is happening? Is Bob getting better? Ah, that question is answered in the tagline:

Bob Greene is the author of “Duty,” a book about his father and Paul Tibbets, and the forthcoming “When We Get to Surf City.”

Ohhh-kay.

* A peculiar sub-genre Joe Queenan summed up, and dismissed, in a sentence: “I want to spend the whole of my youth reading books deploring the moral bankruptcy of my parents’ generation, then, when I am in a position to inherit their life savings, ostentatiously cover the coffee table with stacks of kiss-ass, My Pop the War Hero-type memoirs praising their extraordinary valor.” — from “Balsamic Dreams”

So how was your weekend? Mine was fine. I see Norman Mailer died. Roy Edroso has his quibbles with the NYT obituary, but I found it alternately delightful, fascinating and repellant, and it pulled me through to the end. I thought it was a fair portrait of a man who could be called, quite truthfully, both an irresponsible asshole and one who never wasted a day. I ran hot and cold on his writing, but now that I think about it, I haven’t read much — “The Executioner’s Song,” “An American Dream,” parts of other novels, a bit of journalism and some essays here and there, including “The White Negro.” I have a general rule that I try to follow when considering the work of artists like Mailer, that they should be judged by their art, not by their lives, and that if you must judge them, it should be by the standards of the times they lived in. It’s particularly hard to separate the man from his output in this case, however — they were too closely intertwined. Much of Mailer’s poor behavior was, regrettably, standard-issue intellectual-class mulishness for the time, which doesn’t make it any better, just more understandable.

But running through the story of his life is another strong theme, and the flip side of his more regrettable antics — fearlessness. Mailer never shrank from anything, it would seem. If one wishes he’d chosen his battles better — Jack Henry Abbott, anyone? — you can’t really fault him for getting out there and taking his shot. I heard an interview with him on NPR, around the time “The Spooky Art,” his book on writing, was published. Still haven’t read the book, but listening to him talk about writing, what it takes, what it gives back, what it means, was rapturous. An Amazon.com reviewer sums it up pretty well:

Mailer is like a great coach in this book, inciting the reader to be braver, to work harder, to want more, to cultivate appetite and a certain recklessness that is an antidote to what he calls the “paranoid perfection” imbued by writing programs. I think Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird is a kinder, gentler counterbalance to Stormin’ Norman’s inspiring hectoring to step up to the plate–in life and in writing–and is also an excellent book on writing. Where Lamott is compassionate, gentle, a chamomile tea-offering, hand-holding tutor, Mailer is a grizzled veteran exhorting us to throw ourselves into the mix, to take chances, to aspire to more than we may ever achieve.

That’s good advice for anything, including life in general. On that note, I’ll quit the blogging for today and go throw myself into the mix, thinking of Mailer. (I have to drive to Ypsi. Hope the Mailer in me doesn’t have an accident.)

A letter from the Department of Silver Linings:

RENO, Nev., Nov. 5 — As his wedding day approached last spring, Marshall Whittey found that his money could not keep pace with the grandiosity of his plans. But rather than scale back, he chose instead, like millions of homeowners across the country, to borrow against the soaring value of his home.

He and his bride, Holly Whittey, exchanged vows on the grounds of a sumptuous private estate in the Napa Valley. They spent their honeymoon at a resort in Tahiti.

But now, in an ominous portent for the national economy, Mr. Whittey has grown tight with his money. His home is worth far less than it was a year ago, and his equity has evaporated. And like many other involuntary adopters of a newly economical lifestyle, he can borrow no more.

I’ve become accustomed to reading bullshit like this about hedge fund zillionaires, money managers and other solid-gold-toilet vulgarians, but anyone want to guess what Mr. Whittey does for a living? He’s a sales manager at a flooring and tile company. In an area with a building boom at full steam, I’d imagine he knocks down a good buck, but not enough to afford his pimptastic wedding without tapping the home-equity ATM. In his attitude toward money, I expect he’s like a lot of people in that part of the country, where benjamins are like buses — there’s always another one coming along. And I hesitate to say he deserves what he’s getting, since all he’s getting at this point is a rather easy lesson in how to economize, far easier than many of us have gotten over the years. May I see the hands of everyone who’s had to economize in order to eat at some point in their careers? Yes, I thought so. This bozo — and many other bozos like him — are only living without restaurants.

And yes, I know that even Mr. Whittey’s pain is real to him, and the decline in his fortunes is shared by everyone, and that money he spends so foolishly every day supports real, non-foolish people in his chain of connections. Still: Cry me a bloody river.

Girlfriend is surly today, isn’t she? Not really. Just under-caffeinated and under-showered. So let’s make this quick, since it’s a bloggage-rich day:

I was having a major walking-into-walls day yesterday, so the news of the Robertson/Giuliani alliance circled my head for a while before coming in for a landing. My reaction was to quote well-known Hoosier sage John Mellencamp: Nothing matters and what if it did? As usual, Roy puts it better.

Fred W. McDarrah died Tuesday. If the name means nothing to you, it’s because you weren’t reading the Village Voice in its glory years, when McDarrah was a staff photographer. I was a subscriber, but I’d never heard this story:

As Mr. McDarrah’s renown as a Beat chronicler grew, his second, inadvertent career took shape. One day in the late 1950s, according to several news accounts of the period, a breathless Scarsdale matron phoned him at his office. Did Mr. McDarrah know where she might rent a real live Beatnik, not too dirty, to read poetry at a party she was giving?

Mr. McDarrah, who by this time knew hundreds of Beatniks (a few scrubbed and all needing cash), happily complied, and a going concern was born. Shortly afterward, he placed the following advertisement in The Voice:

add zest to your tuxedo park party … rent a beatnik. completely equipped: beard, eye shades, old army jacket, levis, frayed shirts, sneakers or sandals (optional). deductions allowed for no beard, baths, shoes, or haircuts. lady beatniks also available, usual garb: all black.

Calls flooded in. For $15, The New York Mirror reported in 1960, the client got one Beat and a half-hour of poetry. Two hundred dollars bought three Beats, who read poetry, answered questions, played the guitar and, of course, the bongos. Mr. McDarrah, who took a small commission and let the artists keep the rest, supplied Beats for school groups, photo shoots, meetings and catered affairs in and around New York for about two years, till the early 1960s.

As an agent, Mr. McDarrah was careful to protect the talent from the clientele. He would not procure lady Beats for bachelor parties. Nor would he rent a Beat of any kind to a children’s party. He once turned down a request from a scoutmaster looking to hire, for a speaking engagement, any Beatnik who was a former Eagle scout. (Mr. McDarrah’s refusal in this case may have owed simply to the sheer impossibility of filling the order.)

Necessity is the mother of invention: The anti-rape device. Ouch! Women seem to be showing their teeth all over lately, most notably in Seattle, where a woman bit off her ex-boyfriend’s lip while they were kissing, then spit it on the floor, where it was found covered in cat hair. And in Fort Wayne, a gal named Constance got right to the point:

An argument between a man and his girlfriend of nine months turned so heated Wednesday morning that the 49-year-old woman is accused of biting the man’s groin area and refusing to let go, according to a probable cause affidavit.

Constance Marie Manning, of the 7200 block of Hickory Creek Drive, is also accused of striking her boyfriend with a dog figurine – causing it to break – and chasing him with a kitchen knife.

You know what makes that story funny? It’s not Connie McToothy, but the reporter who thought to include that detail about the dog figurine’s fate, and set it off with em dashes. Our local weekly’s reporters are constitutionally incapable of translating police-report language into English, and so every drunk-driving arrest is reported thusly: “The officer noted a strong odor of intoxicants coming from the driver’s facial area.” We look for this priceless phrase every week, and we’re rarely disappointed.

And finally, two more YouTube links I forgot yesterday:

Via Ashley, the New Orleans story, in 65 seconds, performed by smart kids.

Ken, I’ve contracted something: Barbie breaks the bad news.

This one goes out to the 614, yo.

Via Romenesko, news that what I’d previously believed was one of the more elaborate and amusing circulation-boosting gimmicks in newspaper history, the Columbus Citizen-Journal’s “Miss Citizen Fair,” was nothing but a retread. It’s identical in nearly every detail to the Minneapolis Tribune’s mysterious Mr. Sly, which dates to 1906.

The game: The mysterious Mr. Sly walks the streets of Minneapolis, with a cash reward on his head. Clues to his identity and whereabouts are published in every edition. Every day, the reward gets bigger and the clues better. There’s a strict procedure to claim your prize: You must be carrying a copy of that day’s paper (in Mr. Sly’s day, you had to have the right edition). You must lay your hand on him. And you must say, “You are The Tribune’s Mysterious Mr. Sly. Do you deny it?” If he didn’t, he took you to the newspaper office and paid out your reward.

Miss Citizen Fair didn’t require a touch, but you did have to carry a paper and say , “You are Miss Citizen Fair.” She usually got through a week to 10 days of the two-week Ohio State Fair before she was identified. The clues started with a vague, whole-body silhouette and concluded with close-up photos of her shoes, earrings or ponytail.

I don’t need to tell you that as a child, I was enthralled by the hunt for Miss Citizen Fair, who usually turned out to be some circulation district manager’s college-age daughter. She was photographed with the lucky winner on the last day, passing a check for a couple hundred bucks. If I were writing one of those “you know you’re from Columbus” lists, I’d include Flippo the Clown, Dick Clifton’s Ramblerland, and Miss Citizen Fair.

You’d think I would have figured this scheme wasn’t original by now, but what can I say? My History of Journalism class didn’t cover it.

Today’s fun fact to know and tell: Michigan state legislators are about to take an 18-day break, earmarked for deer hunting. Someone once told me that opening day of gun season is a school holiday in West Virginia; I don’t doubt it.

But today isn’t opening day of anything but the polls. I’m alerting the media there will be a photo opportunity to capture me voting later this morning. Not much on the ballot here — a couple of school-board seats, and a power grab by the mayor of Grosse Pointe Woods to take full control of city council. He already has a 4-3 majority, but that’s not enough, I guess. I’m voting against his endorsed candidates; if the last seven years have taught us anything, it’s that dissent is good. Also, we need some oxygen in our commercial district and a view to the future that’s wider than that of a 70-year-old retiree.

Note: The above paragraph contains more information about the council race than you could read in the local weekly, which told me a lot about each candidate’s degrees but nothing about the power split.

OK, then. This will be brief. I’m on another of my semi-annual Get Your Shit Together binges, which requires me to spend less time online and makes my life very boring. Not only to you, but to me — yesterday I finished my to-do list and, in the grips of a near-spasmodic desire to get the hell out of my house, took a drive into Detroit. Always, always a treat. I regret I forgot my camera, because, as usual, the city served up a heapin’ helpin’ of ugly-lovely treats. My two new favorite business signs: LIQUOR ISLAND and, at an exterminator’s, ROACH KILLER. If I lived in Detroit, I would so totally buy my booze at Liquor Island, you’d probably never see me anywhere else.

The drive was so entrancing I pretty much forgot the excuse for my errand — to hit some junk furniture stores in search of another refinishing project. Craigslist has been no help, as it seems the entire industry has been taken over by particleboard. Doesn’t anyone discard nice oak pieces that have been painted for decades? Is everyone trying to get rich on eBay? Curse them all.

OK, the bloggage:

As bad as local TV news gets here, it can always get worse: In Fort Wayne, they asked two mediums to predict the mayor’s race. If nothing else, this was as pretty a package you can get on a redefinition of “it’s all bullshit:”

Both mediums use meditation to peer into the future, but they both said their visions are just a peek into what might be.

“I only see what’s destined at one moment in time. There is still free will, free choice to off set what is destined,” said Peters.

“Nothing is written in stone,” explained Smith.

Off to vote! Alert the media!

Join us today, friends, for another edition of…

…Tim Goeglein theater!

Actually, today’s episode doesn’t suck the way it usually does, which is to say it isn’t about his parents’ deep love of Jesus, his interest in an obscure operatic composer, or… no, I’m wrong. This column, about Hoagy Carmichael, is standard-issue Tim — overwritten, oversugared, over-Hoosiered.

Instead of ridiculing it paragraph by paragraph, let’s stack up the usual TimBits.

How many “one of the most” superlatives appear in the first paragraph?

Three:

…one of the most luminous of all American mid-century composers, one of the most beloved composers of the classic American popular music songbook, and one of the most unusual bright lights in a starry field.

In one paragraph!

Does the column claim a Hoosier connection to a well-known person, state that this individual is extricably connected to Indiana in some way and wouldn’t be the person he or she grew up to be without this background, and further, that it was always calling him or her home? Yes:

He was from old American stock and was born and raised just down the street from Indiana University in Monroe County. …Though most of his composer contemporaries were urbanites, Carmichael came from what was then still a very small town in the southern part of our state. He got back as often as he could, but in a large sense, he never left. You can see it in his music.

Does the column give a nod to non-Hoosier influences, but claim that, deep down, Indiana is far more important? Yes:

He was deeply influenced by Irving Berlin and Louis Armstrong; he venerated Duke Ellington and George Gershwin; yet his own music was sui generis. He loved jazz, especially in the years of his apprenticeship. The jazz influence is self-evident in many of the songs he wrote – “Rockin’ Chair,” “Old Man Harlem,” “New Orleans.” The dominant figure of his music, though, was his Hoosier upbringing: small-town and rural America, born of a family that did not have much money but gave to him a boyhood full of what he called “memories of solid things, warm and endearing things,” and these are what he celebrated in songs that will be played forever.

Is this Hoosier influence credited with something far, far larger, thus inflating the state’s value in the grand scheme of things? Yes:

The real him had a remarkable life: a brilliant songwriting partnership with the great Johnny Mercer, a film and TV career, but above all a giant place of reverence in the hearts of millions of Americans who needed and loved his music as America was emerging as the unchallenged leader of the free world. America and Hoagy Carmichael’s music came of age together. It all began in Bloomington in his living room under the tutelage of a mother who always called him Hoagland – “a boy with dusty feet coming into the cold parlor where stood the upright golden oak piano,” he later wrote. Southern Indiana was the center of his life and his aesthetic inspiration.

It’s too bad, but maybe it isn’t: Hoagy Carmichael deserves all the respect and accolade he received in his life and continues to receive in death, and Tim Goeglein can’t take anything away from him. Here’s something I wish he’d address in a future column: Why is Indiana’s role in all these artists’ lives to spawn them, give them a few soft-focus memories of childhood, and then chase them the hell out of town? The obvious answer — that Hollywood is in California and New York City is in New York and there’s not much in between — isn’t the entire one. Frequently embryonic great artists run off to those places at the first opportunity because they’re so uncomfortable in the fleecy cradle of their youth. Cole Porter was from Peru, Indiana, but can anyone see him spending a minute there once the train left the station? James Dean? Even Hoagy, with his love of black jazz and ragtime could hardly have been happy in a place where the Klan was still strong well into the 20th century and lynchings weren’t unheard of. (Never mind that both Dean and Porter were gay.)

The problem remains in places like Indiana, Ohio, Alabama, and dozens of places that wave farewell to their brightest young people, whether bound for careers in showbiz or software engineering, and wait until the kids make it big before claiming credit for them. Until then it’s “hey, queer bait.” I hear even John Mellencamp is taking abuse down in southern Indiana these days, for his failure to support the commander in chief.

Just wondering.

Friends, this is it for me today. Oh, wait: Something for Robert Rouse. See you tomorrow.