In case you haven’t heard: White shirts are in for fall 2009. (Citation, high and low.) On the one hand I am thrilled, as I am a big fan of white shirts and own several, so even though I don’t follow trends, it’s nice to have a trend follow me from time to time.

On the other hand I am disillusioned. Here’s why: A few years ago Alan and I went to New York and saw the Mingus Big Band one night, at a club called Fez. It’s a dense basement space, and all the tables are the same size — six-tops, I think. If you don’t have that many in your party, you share your table with strangers. The woman we sat across from was very nice, also a journalist — what are the odds? As we talked before the show, she said she covered the garment industry for a trade journal so far inside I’d never heard of it, and was based in Los Angeles. She’d come to New York in hopes of finding a job closer to the creative end of the business, as she was tiring of covering the nuts-and-bolts part. What do you write about? I asked.

“Textiles,” she said. Hence the L.A. location — textiles are an industry of the Pacific Rim.

“So,” I asked, “is brown really the new black?” She looked puzzled for a minute, and then said she didn’t really know, as she was so far from the consumer end of the business, she couldn’t even say anymore. The textile industry, she informed us, is two to three years ahead of what you see in stores, and whatever arm of the industry is looking for that sort of thing left the brown/black question behind literally years ago, and had moved on to whether orange was the new pink, or whatever. Industrial looms can’t be changed on a whim, and it takes time to set up raw materials and dyes and supply chains and shipping and whatever else is involved in getting you a new white shirt for fall.

I guess I wasn’t that surprised — the auto industry is the same way, and one of the frustrating things about the discussion of it in recent months has been the public’s ignorance of what exactly it takes to take a car from the imagination stage to the showroom floor. The length of the lead time seemed a bit much — it’s fabric, not a Prius — but who am I to question the mighty Asian textiles industry? I’ll take her word for it.

Like a lot of information, knowing this bit of it both spoiled and deepened my appreciation of fashion. Now, when I see white shirts everywhere, I think that two or three years ago there was a bumper crop of cotton on the world market, not a single simultaneous idea across the entire creative end of the industry. (I don’t know what the return of the ’80s shoulder means, but I’m sure shoulder pads are manufactured and supplied under much the same market conditions.)

The older I get, the more interested I am in commercial and utilitarian art. You could argue that all of it is, but I especially like art that we touch, use, work with or see every day, art that does a job other than entertain or hang on a wall in a museum. It’s interesting to think about the great convergence of market and creative forces battling for the upper hand. Plus I love great design, and the feel of a well-turned handle is a real pleasure. Almost as much as a great white shirt.

And now a pause for Meryl Streep’s great speech in “The Devil Wears Prada.”

You go to your closet and you select, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? …And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of …stuff.

Bloggage? Sure, we got some:

I’m not crazy about anthropomorphizing work animals, but this was an interesting story, with a great slideshow — about the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery, which every year around this time takes a break from ordinary training and goes to the seashore at Cornwall for few days of galloping on the beach.

The long-awaited sequel to “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is here — “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.”

A great Detroitblog piece, from the Metro Times (but I’m linking to the blog, because of the extra pictures), about the city’s small troop of outdoor sign painters. That’s one thing I noticed immediately after I moved here — how much of the city’s signage is painted. Paint is cheap, even when you use an artist, and many don’t. I love them for their odd punctuation: We do not buy “stolen” tires or rims. Well, I hope not.

Now I have to read a big chunk of “Walden” — the great-books reading club starts today.

God, I hate it when NPR tries to be hip. I also hate it when they show willful obtuseness in the face of pop culture. On this score, I’m impossible to please, and should probably just tune out when they try something like an “appreciation” of Patrick Swayze, which didn’t quite work. Terry Gross could have handled it, but she’s got her own fish to fry, and can’t be popping in to the other shows to give them notes.

It’s hard to say what was wrong with the Swayze piece; maybe it was done by someone too young to really grasp the dual wonder and disappointment of the guy — he was always the best thing in a bad movie, but couldn’t really make the leap to good ones. He belonged in a different era, when his Gene Kelly combination of physical grace and unquestioned masculinity could have been packaged in his own “Singin’ in the Rain.” Either that, or he needed to live a little longer, until Quentin Tarantino could have built a script around him, like he did for John Travolta and Robert Forster. As it is, he’ll be remembered for doing his best work in individual scenes where he could shine — the last few minutes of “Dirty Dancing,” the Chippendale’s sketch from “Saturday Night Live” — rather than one single movie.

If you’re a fan of “Point Break,” I don’t want to hear about it.

And while I hate it when bloggers link to their own past work like it’s some sort of scholarship, I reread what I wrote about Swayze at the time of his diagnosis last year, and I’ll stand by it. You can read it here.

I just watched the “Dirty Dancing” clip again. Great dancing, of course, but why did the rest of the movie have to suck so bad? Why is Jerry Orbach glowering when everyone around him is happy? Why is the orchestra leader conducting, when we’ve already clearly seen they’re dancing to a record? And when the old people join in I have to pull the covers over my head and die a little bit.

(You know a movie I’d pay to see? One about Jennifer Grey’s nose job. I know it’s been discussed on TV, but a smart movie that drills down into plastic surgery and all its implications, using Baby’s rhinoplasty as a through line? That would be worth doing.)

Oh, and my all-time fave Excruciating NPR Pop-Cult Moment is when Noah Adams tried to lead a segment explicating the career of the late Big Pun, the rapper. Yeah, that guy. Yeah, Noah Adams. It’s still one of the funniest things I ever heard.

Friends, it appears that casting a couple worms in the job pool this morning has eaten up my blogging time. What are we thinking of “Mad Men” so far this season? I’m thinking it’s simultaneously wonderful and awful, which is, I hasten to add, a very good thing for me. I love entertainments where everyone involved points at the highest rows in the house and says, “That’s what we’re aiming for” and then maybe falls short, but dies trying. The mood so far this season seems to be “the thing that’s coming? It’s getting very close…” It’s not quite there yet, so we’re seeing a lot of Peggy slowly getting the message about what women are worth, really, and Betty ditto, and we really need more Joan, but so far it’s hard to see how it’s all coming together. The last scene this week was wonderful, all of Betty’s hopes deserting her at the time hope likes to do so — in the middle of the night — while the primordial ball-and-chain of all womankind wails from its crib. (Yes, it’s a joy, too. It’s both. That’s the point.) She’s going to have the worst post-partum depression ever.

I’m getting a little tired of the hollaback lines and scenes we’re all supposed to titter over. From the un-seat-belted children playing with dry cleaner bags in the first season, we’re now expected to gasp over the OB nurse telling Betty to get ready for her shave and enema. standard for childbirth back in the day. This feels forced.

What say you? I’m off to the gym to think about it.

Is mental illness afoot in the land? If you say, “Spiders are crawling up the wall! Can’t you see them?” And I say no I can’t but here, let’s take a picture of them; if there are none in the picture will you believe they’re imaginary? And you say, well, OK, and I take the picture and there are no spiders, and you say you cast a spell and made the spiders invisible! Does that suggest disordered thinking to you?

It does to me. Which is only my way of saying the people who are today saying, “Sure, Obama’s school speech is innocuous now. What do you think it looked like before brave patriots stood up and objected, huh?” Those people? Sound insane.

But I’m keeping my mouth shut. I sent an e-mail to my local school board about the administration’s decision on the speech. (They’re delaying it for later use — defensible under the circumstances — but allowing for parental opt-out, which… isn’t.) I hope I struck the right note of arch douchiness; I described myself as disappointed and disillusioned, which I think is just perfect for notes like these, a little bit of parallel redundancy to underline one offense with another. There’s something about writing a j’accuse letter that makes me want to use phrases like “I think not.” You just can never de-smug them entirely.

OK, then. Summer’s mostly over, and the past week — the last week of Kate’s vacation — was lovely. We went to the pool Sunday, and I made an appropriate end-of-summer gesture: I went without sunscreen. Ask me how much I regret my sun wrinkles. Yeah. About that much.

Meanwhile, I spent a chunk of a relaxed weekend catching up with a bit of neglected culture. First, “In the Loop,” one of those movies so small it barely exists, but god, funny as hell. Set in the U.K., Washington and New York in the drumbeat before the Iraq war, it’s sort of a meaner, blacker, harder-to-understand “West Wing,” with Aaron Sorkin’s politics sucked out and extra funny pumped in. I only caught about a third of it, cloaked as it was in thick Scottish burrs and English slang, delivered at a blistering pace. I think I’d need about two more watchings to absorb it all.

The action begins when a somewhat dim British politician tells the BBC that war is “unforseeable,” a word that puts the prime minister’s office into a tizzy and incurs the wrath of Malcolm Tucker, the p.m.’s chief of communication, so gloriously profane his rants edge into poetry. (When the minister steps further into the goo by saying, that sometimes a country must “climb the mountain of conflict,” Tucker accuses him of being a “Nazi Julie Andrews.” It’s the flat-A sound in “Nazi” that kills.) Soon said politician is off to Washington and then to the U.N., trailing aides far smarter than he is, if only at the fine art of ass-kissing and jockeying for favor.

If you have a decent on-demand cable service, you’ll find it on one of the IFC channels for about six or seven bucks. Definitely worth it.

And I got a good way into “Closing Time,” Joe Queenan’s memoir of growing up with a father so drunk and brutal he could only have fathered, well, Joe Queenan, the celebrated master of mean. Reviews tell me this story ends without the customary weepy reconciliation between father and son standard in alcoholism memoirs, and that’s what intrigues me — the bleakness that lies at the heart of a man who can honestly say his father beat him so hard, so often and so unjustly that he finally thrashed every last shred of love out of his own child. The NYT critic notes:

There will be truces near the end, but when the family attends the old man at his deathbed, there is precious little warmth or nostalgia. Two of his daughters consider their father “beyond redemption,” and their mother refuses, for herself and those daughters, to be listed in the obituary. The son feels neither love nor respect; he is there only because “having a bad father does not give anyone the right to be a bad son.” Three years later, the anniversary of Joe Sr.’s death passes unnoticed. “My father was dead,” Queenan writes, “and I did not miss him.”

As grim as that sounds, it’s still a vastly entertaining read.

And now it begins. Fall. Still weeks of warm weather ahead, but for all intents and purposes, we must put away our white shoes and put our noses back to the grindstone. I’m packing the sunblock and thinking of projects. How about you?

The 48 Hour Film Project awards were this weekend. The event was held in a loft with the sort of sci-fi-apocalypse-hello-America-this-is-your-future view Detroiters take for granted:

That’s the Packard plant, beloved of lazy photojournalists looking for a tragic symbol of Detroit’s industrial decline; Jim at Sweet Juniper (and many others) reminds us frequently that the plant’s been closed more than half a century, but don’t let that bother you, Mr. Parachuted-in Freelancer. Its history is long and complicated and — standard for around here — tragic, but the bottom line is, it’s been abandoned for decades, fell into receivership years ago and presumably belongs to the city. Yes, it should be torn down, but a conservative estimate on what it would take to demolish and haul away more than 3 million square feet of Albert Kahn-designed factory is in the eight figures, and the city doesn’t have that kind of money. A search on Flickr demonstrates the site is a favorite of urban explorers; it stands open to the world now, but even they’re getting bored with it, and it now belongs to the scrappers, who are busily trying to take it apart from the inside, with some success and occasional self-injury — here’s a pretty good Bill McGraw column on the state of things.

The latest craze is arson, and as we stood on the deck drinking and socializing, we could hear the sound of glass breaking, as restless vandals and scrappers worked out their excess testosterone on the few remaining windows. There’s a stripped car sticking halfway out one of the windows two or three floors up; for a while I thought the project was to push it out, but no, they were firebugs, too:

It wasn’t much of a blaze, and it didn’t last long. According to McGraw, the city fire department doesn’t even bother responding to many alarms there, and never at night — it’s just too dangerous. But 3 million square feet holds a lot of puzzlement, and some of it will burn:

Kirschner said Engine 23 and other fire companies responded to a fire recently during the day and discovered about 25,000 square feet of shoes burning. The smoke, partially from the shoes’ rubber and glue, was dangerous for the firefighters and anyone in the neighborhood who might have breathed it.

Hazardous-materials crews monitored the air Monday night and found no need for evacuations. The cause of the fire was not known, but firefighters were certain it was set. They called for an arson car, but none was available.

(I hope you get a sense of the weirdness life in and around this city is, on almost a daily basis. Twenty-five thousand square feet of burning shoes? Shrug.)

The fire was only the appetizer. The main course was the awards, and how did we do? Reader, we won:

(The award says Best Film, but I’m calling it Best Picture until someone tells me to stop.) This puts us in the running for the nationals, and enters us automatically in Filmapalooza, held next year at the National Association of Broadcasters meeting in Las Vegas. I have very few illusions about our chances up against the fearsome teams of Los Angeles and New York, but on the other hand, I’ve never been to Vegas, and don’t you think I should go before I die? The NAB meets in early April, a little late for spring break, but what the hell.

Yes, I’ve never been to Vegas. Atlantic City, yes, but once you’ve seen “Casino,” do you even need to go to Las Vegas? I don’t think so.

We were lucky. Ideally, when you make a film, you start with a story and add your elements. In a challenge, you start with your elements (genre, prop, character, line of dialogue) and craft the story around them. The time constraints and guerrilla element means you have to work with what you have, and this lends a certain Mickey-and-Judy air of homemade chaos. Stories get shoehorned into places where someone had a friend who would let them shoot — a haunted house, a tattoo parlor or, in our case, the Theatre Bizarre, which was easy to work into our thriller/suspense genre draw. One team drew Musical and put on a fun show called “Love Between the Lanes” at the Ypsi-Arbor Bowl (which has one of the great names, and great signs, in Michigan business). Another, faced with a dud genre (fantasy), threw up their hands and did a “Princess Bride” takeoff that was pretty funny. But there was a lot of crap, too; I haven’t heard so much expository dialogue since, well, the last 48-hour challenge.

(Expository dialogue: “Hello, Bob, let me introduce my sister Sally Mae. You may recall her from last August, when she fell into the punchbowl at our other sister Julie’s barbecue, which required her to take an immediate shower. While she was rubbing the stains from her shirt, the door opened and our brother-in-law Simon came in. He was drunk. Sally, why don’t you tell Bob what happened next?” And so on.)

Watching the screenings, I was reminded of my pal Lance Mannion’s observation about the terrible dialogue in “The Deep”: No one gets out of here when they can get the hell out of here. One film had that intensifier in, seemingly, every other line: What the hell are you doing? Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? Where the hell are we? And so on. I vowed to never, ever write that again. And then watched our film, where a character tells another, “Lady, you need to get the hell out of here.” Wince. Live and learn.

So, then, any bloggage to start the week? Not very much, but some:

Hank liked “Julie & Julia.” So did everyone else I know who saw it this weekend.

Overheard in the Newsroom, one in a series of Overheard blogs. Makes me miss the crazy places:

Intern: “I know what happens when I assume.”
Editor: “Yep. You run a correction.”

We had one crashing thunderstorm a few hours ago, with another one expected around dawn. Best sleep while I can.

Good story in the NYT this morning on food styling for the movies, pegged to “Julie & Julia,” of course. I’m not sure I’ll be seeing J&J, at least not in theaters. I can’t think of a person whose work I enjoy so much in one place and dislike in another other than Nora Ephron. I find her journalism marvelously entertaining; her early pieces were the sort of thing that gave me strength to try writing essays. And yet, I’ve been meh-at-best over nearly every one of her movies, with a few exceptions — “Silkwood” annnnd….I guess that’s it. “When Harry Met Sally” was one of those movies that went down like a bag of potato chips, but gave me the same feeling afterward. (Self-loathing.)

I’m just not a rom-com girl, I guess. My favorites are the off-kilter ones like “Flirting With Disaster,” which can still make me laugh after ten million viewings. Films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail” — in which I am expected to identify with Meg Ryan and her big blue eyes and her adorableness — make me break out in a rash. (Also, Tom Hanks, love object? Please.)

Here’s the thing: I never believed that a woman as smart and sophisticated as the Ephron on display in her journalism could ever be the women in her movies, despite all the interviews she’s given about staying up late to cry over “An Affair to Remember,” or whatever. I just don’t. It always seemed she was doing it for the money.

Here’s a movie I’d like to see Nora Ephron make: One based on her fabulous ’70s-era Esquire essay, “Dealing With the, Uh, Problem,” about the formulation and marketing of the first vaginal deodorant. Talk about unplowed ground. From that furrow could sprout a hilarious comedy about relations between the sexes, Madison Avenue, feminism, love, sex, period outfits and everything in between. Or what about her equally fabulous piece about the Pillsbury Bake-Off? A movie about the Pillsbury Bake-Off, either documentary or fiction? I’d be there on opening night.

She once eviscerated Rod McLuhanMcKuen and Erich Segal in a piece entitled “Mush,” about how with the right amount of egomania and savvy marketing, you can sell pretty much anything to the American public, especially when the egomaniac doing the marketing is the type we’ve come to call a SNAG (sensitive new-age guy, HT: Christine Lavin). That’s what I think of “You’ve Got Mail” — mush. In fact, now that I think about it, I recall a passage from the vaginal-deodorant piece, in which an ad executive names the target market for FDS: Secretaries and stewardesses. Ephron pauses to say something like, Well, that figures. Scratch a trend no one you know is into, and you’ll find secretaries and stewardesses. Too many of Ephron’s movies seem pitched directly at that demographic.

Oh, well. Everyone has to make a living. I just fear “J&J” will be a little too sugar meringue-crusted, if you follow my drift. Still, the food-styling piece is great — Kim Severson is rarely anything else — with the sort of details I love:

For stylists, the game is all about reading the actors’ appetites and knowing when to employ a few tried-and-true tricks. But really, food styling for movies boils down to doing more prep work than a Hamptons caterer in August.

Mr. Flynn had to debone 60 ducks over the course of “Julie & Julia.”

And, of course, there are other problems. (Eye roll.) Actors:

Two actresses in the 2008 cop thriller “Pride and Glory” were vegan. So Ruth DiPasquale, an assistant property master for the film, called in a vegan chef to help style a big Christmas dinner scene that had a ham as the centerpiece. She ended up piling slices of sham ham made from soybeans near the real stuff, careful to make sure the two versions never touched.

By the way, if I could go to any movie this weekend? “The Hurt Locker,” followed by “Humpday.”

Bloggage:

I love college towns. This one was mine. Southern Ohio is a beautiful place.

There’s nothing like seeing a headline like this — “A Long, Long Post About My Reasons For Opposing National Health Care” — followed by “by Megan McArdle” to make a girl say, “Don’t click on that.” So I won’t.

I’d rather read about William Vollmann than read anything by him. In fact, I tried, once, and couldn’t get past page 10. I’m stupid, I guess.

It’s getting late, and work must commence at some point. Have a good one.

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!

Gourmet magazine has a recipe this month for homemade ketchup, and Alan asked if I’d be making any. Short answer: No. But it reminded me I already have a cookbook with a homemade-ketchup recipe, and for the first time in years, I dug out the Southside Farmers Market cookbook, published as a fundraiser for Fort Wayne’s market in 2001.

When I left town, the market wasn’t exactly dying, but every year it got a little sadder to visit. The old stalwarts who kept it going were well past retirement age, and the locavore movement hadn’t caught on yet. When I asked people whether they visited, most said they didn’t, citing the usual reasons — convenience, distance. Sometimes they said they wouldn’t buy lettuce fresh from the farm when you could get it cheaper at the Wal-Mart Super Center; these folks I wrote off as missing the point. A few talked vaguely about it being “so far away,” and sometimes they were and sometimes I sensed what they were really saying is, “But it’s in a black neighborhood!” These folks I also wrote off. But I told everyone they were missing something, that you could find the best tomatoes and corn and melons and all the rest of it. I still miss Cherry Day in June, when a guy drove a truckload of frozen cherries up from southern Indiana. He sold one unit — 25 pounds of pitted tart cherries mixed with five pounds of sugar and frozen in a five-gallon bucket. I waited until it thawed enough to handle, then broke everything down into one-quart bags and put it all back into the freezer, and had enough to eat cherry pie all year long. There’s nothing like that in Detroit. Dammit.

Anyway, the cookbook had not one but three ketchup recipes, all aimed at the home canner; one calls for 15 pounds of tomatoes, which suggests you’ll be giving the condiments aisle a pass for a good long while. But I spent some time going over the rest of it as well, and realized it was a mistake to leave it on the shelf so long.

Cookbooks are all products of their time. Auguste Escoffier may have been the modern father of French cuisine, but who makes his recipes anymore? Who has time? Even Julia Child’s original recipes seem slightly ridiculous; in “My Kitchen Wars” I remember Betty Fussell talking about making a roast encrusted in Swiss cheese or something. Veal Prince Orloff is mostly remembered as a punchline in a Mary Tyler Moore episode.

Times change, technologies change, one day you look up and you can get fresh lemongrass and Mexican tomatillas in your local supermarket, spring mix year-round, so you know, you have to have ideas on how to use them that match.

But these sorts of cookbooks aren’t getting perused by Ruth Reichl, which is why I love them. They’re the collected wisdom of hundreds of Hoosier cooks handed down to their daughters, who might change them a little or a lot, and hand them down some more.

Face it, some should have been dropped along the way, like the Braunschweiger Ball, which is you-know-what mixed with onion soup mix (I guess because a soft, subtle flavor like Braunschweiger needs a little kick in the pants) and formed into a ball, after which it’s covered with a mixture of cream cheese and Miracle Whip (I guess because, you know, there’s just not enough fat in it to make it satisfying otherwise).

But there’s also a recipe for dandelion wine, although where I might find a quart of dandelion blossoms I’m not sure. Beyond that, the ingredients are one orange, three pounds of sugar, one sliced lemon and one cake of yeast. Hmm. There’s also something called Russian Tea, which calls for Tang, powdered instant tea, powdered lemonade mix, cinnamon, cloves and sugar. Mix all the powders and make it one cup at a time. Again: Hmm.

There’s a fair amount of the sort of country cooking that would disappoint Alice Waters, food like the Amish make, with canned this and dehydrated that, and if you don’t like it, see what you feel like making after you’ve spent an entire day in back-breaking labor, either in the field or at the factory. Dump Cake, Oreos layered with Cool Whip, that sort of thing. But there’s also a beet-apple puree that looks worthy of “The Splendid Table” if not Chez Panisse, and I may make it myself in the fall. There are quite a lot of cabbage recipes, which remind me I like cabbage and should do more with it. I wasn’t surprised to find the fish chapter is very short, only six recipes, five of which call for canned tuna or salmon. Indiana is far from any ocean.

And then there’s Impossible Pie:

I cup sugar
4 eggs
2 cups milk
1/2 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 cup melted butter
1/2 cup coconut

Put all ingredients into blender for 30 seconds. Pour into 9 inch pie pan and bake for one hour at 375 degrees. Makes its own crust, filling and topping. Easy! Enjoy!

I’m tempted.

What’s your favorite countrified recipe?

And how was your weekend? We saw “Up,” in 3D. Once again, I’m reminded there are two ways to make “family” entertainment. One is the Rugrats/Dreamworks way, which is to sprinkle the script with pop-culture references that kids don’t get and adults do, which I’ve always thought was cheap and snarky and ultimately reminds you how much you don’t want to be there.

The other is the Pixar way — to write outstanding stories that appeal to every person in the audience, to tug the adults toward their children and children toward their parents, and then do them completely sincerely, without irony, and with the highest possible technical standards. That’s “Up,” in a nutshell. Not my favorite (that would be “Ratatouille,” which had me in tears at the reading of Anton Ego’s restaurant review), but they are all so uniformly wonderful trying to rank them is just a waste of time.

This is also the first movie I’ve seen to use 3D as a way to enhance the visual experience, rather than as a gimmick. Nothing is flung toward the viewer, there are no gotcha shots, there’s nothing that, when you see it on your own TV in six months, will make you think, “What were they going for with that one?” It’s just visual artistry, pure and simple. My kind of guys.

Manic Monday commences in five, four, three, etc. Have a good one.

Against the good counsel of our better judgment, a few of us signed up to do another 48-hour film challenge. Not the one we did last year — this one, the original-recipe contest. So I’ve been thinking about stories. This means wasting time with the Apple trailers site, where I’m always left with the overwhelming feeling that I’m just not cut out for showbiz. A movie about a guinea pig strike force in 3D? See, I never would have thought of that.

The next step is wondering if we can assemble a team without turning to Craigslist, which last year gave us a mixed bag, including a guy who presented himself with great enthusiasm. He called me to tell me his idea for a sci-fi short: A man possesses a pack of cigarettes, and… well, I’m trying not to describe them as “magical” cigarettes, but it’s hard not to, because every time he smokes one, he sees a vision of his future. The last one in the pack tells him how he will die.

Now that I write it down, I see it isn’t really a terrible idea, if you did it right. You could make the brand of smokes something like Oracles. He’d have to buy them in a creepy shop; the clerk could be a nice little part. Twenty smokes would give him time to figure out what’s happening. The visions could increase in significance and jeopardy as the pack diminished. The last one would bring the action to a nice climax. You could pepper the dialogue with snarky lines about giving up this filthy habit and “these things are gonna kill me.” Title: “Bob Quits Smoking.”

Unfortunately, when I talked to the guy about it, I must have failed to express my enthusiasm. I believe I told him that under the rules of the contest, sci-fi was only one of the seven or eight possible genres we might be assigned, and did he have any ideas for a chick flick? Because a day or two later he sent me an e-mail withdrawing from the team and complaining that he didn’t feel his ideas were being respected. He didn’t even make it to a single meeting. So I also get a Fail on dealing with sensitive artistic temperaments.

Nevertheless, I think we should do it. The true challenge will be to play it sincere; too many teams treat the assignment as a lark, and end up doing spoofs on whatever they draw — “Snakes in a Minivan,” etc. I think you could stay on the table* just by not cocking your eyebrow.

* Obscure Pulitzer-judging reference for journalists only.

Whatever we end up doing, I hope it includes a follow shot. This link is recommended, especially the video clip. See how many you get. (I was a Fail here, too.)

A quick skip to the bloggage today, because I have ten tons of work today, and ten more tonight. I’m listening to highlights from Barry’s speech in Cairo today, and I have to say, I’m impressed. I’m sure others won’t be. After all, you can’t say something like this…

“Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.”

…without being called a wussy little quisling by someone, probably starting with whoever is on Fox at this very moment. But don’t let that hold you back. Discuss.

Something I didn’t know and find sort of sad: What happens to a man married (and divorced) four times? You end up buried next to your mother. What would John DeLorean say about GM? a Freep columnist wonders. My boycott of Mitch Albom’s employer didn’t last long, but I did avert my eyes from Mitch.

I can say uno mas mojito, por favor therefore I speak Spanish. At least, according to Michael Goldfarb, via Steve Benen.

Remember the “terrorist fist jab?” Gawker does:

Here are ten photos from the past year, proving that fist jabs have overcome their scary, black-person-centric origins and flowered into a glorious tableau of diversity.

And with that, I’m out of here. Sharing week continues with today’s Decorum Share: Tell us something that would have been scandalous in a prior century. I’ll start: Some days, I don’t wear a corset.

The short version: If you get a chance to see Leonard Cohen on his current tour, take it. You won’t see a better show this year.

In fact, if tickets are available, stop reading now and go buy some, fool. They’re pretty ridiculous, pricewise — the cheap seats at the Fox Theatre in Detroit Saturday were $65 plus service charge, ranging up to $250 — but like I said, this is a rare pop-music outing that’s worth the price. The 74-year-old Cohen plays for more than three hours, and if you have a favorite song, you’re likely to hear it. Alan is not an easily pleased concertgoer, and he turned to me after the third number and said, “This is a top-fiver.” That’s not an annual ranking.

An elegant stage set — a riser for the band, simple scrims lit by changing-color lights, everyone in black and white — walked a careful line that suggested the gravitas one of the greatest living singer-songwriters has accumulated over his long life, but never edged into pretension. This guy worked hard for the money. There was less love-me vibe coming from the stage than you’d find at the American Idols also-rans show. Cohen spent five years in seclusion at a Zen center during the 1990s, and he must have learned some powerful lessons about simplicity and understatement.

Oh, what am I saying? He’s known that for a while. Truth be told, I didn’t leap at the chance to go when Alan suggested it; it’s been my experience that singer-songwriters frequently put on lousy shows, and the sole time I saw Bob Dylan live will remain a lifelong disappointment. Get them in a small enough venue and it works, but what is Cohen about? The lyrics, and that mournful, whispery baritone. He plays best on CD, when you’re alone and able to concentrate and stare out the window at some Canadian landscape. The thought of seeing him overpowered by an electric guitar didn’t sound worth $130, plus service charges, parking and add-ons.

I shouldn’t have worried. The sound mix was a miracle — you could hear every word, even while the musicians did anything but fade into the woodwork. There was everything from a Hammond B3 to an oud to a gong onstage, and you heard every one as well as you did Cohen’s voice. Add three angel-voiced chick singers, one of them Cohen’s longtime collaborator, Sharon Robinson, and that was a stage full of talent that could have supported any singer capably.

At the final encore, everyone took a quick solo, and Cohen lined up the whole gang for an extended farewell that sounded like a valediction. “I don’t know when we’ll be passing this way again,” he said. In other words: This is it, folks. (The story goes that this tour was necessitated by money troubles, but ah well — even the greatest artists have to eat.) As the last show of a distinguished career, it’s hard to imagine how it could have been better.

[Pause.]

In other news at this hour, Kate and I went to see “Star Trek” on Sunday, and that was pretty good, too, although once time travel gets introduced into any movie plot, that’s my signal to stop asking questions and just let it wash over me. Fortunately, it was a pleasant bath.

If you’re looking for a way to intellectually justify your attendance at the same movie, take one op-ed and call me in the morning:

I can still remember the first time I saw “A Piece of the Action,” which was set on Sigma Iotia II, the gangster-movie planet, on which Kirk and Spock donned fedoras and pinstriped suits to blend in. As a boy in grade school, I found it excitingly ridiculous but baffling. Why was Spock waving around a tommy gun?

Fortunately, my big sister, then already in high school, was on hand to explain the wondrous narrative physics of the episode. I was watching a puzzle made from three things, she said: one, the “Star Trek” I understood; two, a period crime movie our father liked, called “The Roaring Twenties”; and three, the clownish “Soupy Sales Show.”

I realized years later that I had heard the future in my sister’s cheeky teasing out of the pop-culture influences in one wonderfully, unashamedly preposterous episode of “Star Trek.” Today, my 22-year-old daughter talks that way about everything.

If you want to relate “Star Trek” to the new world of Hope and Change, well, you take that shit down to the comments, because in this bar, we take our big-explodey-movie fun straight.

Related: Hank Stuever on the Trouble with Quibbles, or how fanboys ‘n’ girls ruin everything. Or try to.

A final bit of bloggage: My poor suburb made it to the front page of Sunday Styles. Of course, it could have been better news — Grosse Pointe Blues.

The other day we were watching a promo for the newest iteration of “Grey Gardens” on HBO when Alan asked, “Am I the only person in the world who doesn’t think that movie was a masterpiece?” I assured him he was sitting next to another one. In fact, I thought, we’d watched it together, just a year or two previous, on DVD from the library, and we’d turned it off midway through. It was during the feed-the-raccoons scene, as I recall.

If you haven’t been backgrounded: “Grey Gardens” started life as a National Enquirer story and became a documentary film, and that’s where it stayed for the longest time — a cult classic, as the phrase goes. It’s about a mother-daughter team of lunatics, both named Edie Beale, who lived in an enormous, ramshackle house in an exclusive nook of the Hamptons. If you’ve known a crazy cat lady in your life, you’ve known the Beales, except the Beales were crazy with a twist — they were aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (the elder Edie was Edie Bouvier Beale, sister of Jackie’s no-good father). They lived in this huge, crumbling pile together, filth and decay forcing them into one or two rooms, where they spent their days talking crazy to one another in these upper-class accents. I guess that made them irresistible to the Maysles brothers, who made the original documentary.

Eventually, in the days of home video, “Grey Gardens” emerged from midnight-screening-at-the-art-house obscurity and into pop culture, and then there was a Broadway musical and now a dramatic remake of the doc, with the story of their early, pre-crazy lives folded in. I’ll probably watch it at some point, but I watch with a cold eye. “Eccentric” may be the polite word for insanity, but ultimately finding entertainment in a portrait of two mentally ill women just doesn’t feel right to me. Whatever floats your boat — I don’t judge. But it creeps me out.

All over this country are people like the Beales, living in less picturesque but very similar surroundings. Once I had this idea for a reporting project — to do a profile of every single person who filed to run in the city election in Fort Wayne in 1995, for council and mayor. The idea was not to look at their positions on the issues, but at them as people, on the grounds these are the politicians you’re most likely to meet in the supermarket, and you might want to know about them. My editors like the idea, and when the filing deadline passed, we made up a list and I divided it with another reporter.

I thought the project was, on balance, a success, but I hadn’t accounted for the Crazy factor, and so we found ourselves obligated to profile at least two people who were not only hopeless candidates, but, frankly, a little nuts. One was borderline and ran for mayor; the other was all the way there and was up for a council seat. Both were on my half of the list.

I walked into the latter’s apartment, a much less picturesque version of Grey Gardens, to find the furniture had been turned upside down. “Spring cleaning,” the candidate said by way of explanation. Two chairs were righted, I was served tea in a filthy cup, and the interview commenced. An hour later I made my escape, having been led on a magical mystery tour of his personal crazytown. I was advised that I should never leave appliances not in use plugged in. I was told that my subject had been caught in a crossfire with the Purple Gang and another band of gangsters, and that’s why he was physically disabled. I was told he had several advanced degrees, but didn’t possess the diplomas because of administrative persecution. And so on.

The next day, just for the hell of it, I went spelunking in our ancient, non-digitized clip files and in nothing short of a miracle, turned up a brief story that mentioned the would-be council candidate. Decades earlier, he had opened an unsecured fire door of a hospital under renovation and stepped into thin air, falling two floors and seriously injuring his back and legs. I was not particularly surprised to learn it had been a plain old accident (likely an attempted suicide) and not Purple-Gang thugs who left him a physical wreck, nor was I shocked to hear the door he’d used was on the mental ward.

I might still have the story in my files, but I like to think I walked a careful line in my reporting, enough to let the readers know who was living in the apartment with the upside-down furniture without holding him up for unnecessary ridicule. Ditto with the other candidate, who lived in a house with a front door about 15 feet from a major thoroughfare, one of those places you wonder why anyone would stay in. He served me coffee from an elaborate china service, added a big dollop of Cool Whip, and we struggled through an interview while every passing truck rattled all the cups and filled the room with its roar. (This, I’m convinced, is what drove him around the bend. I was only there an hour, and it nearly did it to me.)

When one of your names isn’t Bouvier, this is what being nuts is like. No arty documentarians, just a third-rate columnist wondering how she’s going to tell your story without bringing the authorities into your life.

I wrote a lot about mental illness when I was a columnist. The mother of a schizophrenic said something to me I’ll never forget, describing her son: “He’s sick. He’s in pain. Why can’t anybody see that?”

Good question. I guess part of it was that fashionable attitude that flowered in the ’60s, the in-a-crazy-world-who’s-to-say-what’s-sane wave of the hand. Part of it were the revelations of what institutionalization was really like for people who couldn’t afford the best care. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” played a part. And mental illness, like most illness, is a continuum, and one doctor’s judgment of who needs help imposed upon them and who doesn’t isn’t the same as the next doctor’s. Of my two candidates, the guy in the loud house was firmly in the “eccentric” range, the other edging into intervention territory, but neither was a danger to himself or others, as the legal standard goes. But I also don’t think either was happy, nor healthy.

I see the publicity surrounding the new “Grey Gardens,” and that’s what bugs me about it — this idea that the Beales should be celebrated, because Little Edie liked to wrap sweaters around her head. That their tumbledown house should somehow still encompass their legacy of illness, maybe in the famous gardens. Sally Quinn, the journalist who bought the house from Little Edie and restored it, gets it, although she’s too polite by half:

What do you recall of Little Edie that day?
Well, I thought she was nuts. I thought she had serious psychological and emotional problems. There was no question about it. She had just escaped into her own fantasy world. I didn’t know the story that much and so honestly, I feel bad about Edie. Your reaction was just to laugh at her because she was such a character and so crazy, dancing in the hall, saying isn’t it beautiful and this incredible outfit she had with safety pins and a turban and all that—and later when I saw the Maysles documentary and then the Broadway play and now the HBO movie, it’s so heartbreaking. I wanted to rewind and go back to that moment and just put my arms around her. I wanted to help her, do something for her.

Putting your arms around Edie wouldn’t have helped. She needed something a lot stronger.

So.

The weekend looms! Any bloggage?

What is it about the gays and “Grey Gardens.” With YouTube.

And that’s it. Add your own if you like. And have a good weekend.