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.

The pay-per-view choices on Saturday night at our house came down to “Milk” or “Pineapple Express.” I know I’ve been saying I want to see “Milk,” but I was kinda sorta hoping Alan would be lured into the Pineapple camp by the presence of Danny McBride, star of our new favorite HBO comedy, “Eastbound & Down.” Alas, he voted for “Milk,” and so “Milk” it was.

And it wasn’t bad, if you don’t count against it that it prompted a new vow from my corner of the couch: No more biopics, at least not of people whose story I already know. I don’t know how many more two-hour chunks of my life I want to give over to these earnest, medicinal stories squashed into standard three-act structure, perhaps tarted up with a few invented anecdotes or imagined juxtapositions. (Milk, dying, looks poignantly out the window of City Hall at the opera house where he’d seen “Tosca,” another operatic assassination tragedy, only the night before. Oh yeah, I’m down with that.) Or maybe it’s just that it’s difficult to make politics cinematic. All those maps and papers and clipboards. Directors and writers fall back on the most movie-like thing about politics — a man leading a march and/or delivering a speech through a bullhorn before a cheering crowd — until you get sick of the story entirely and start appreciating things like the set design and wardrobe. Loved Emile Hirsch’s glasses — I had my own pair, back in the day. Loved the ringer T-shirts, a look I could never endorse. Loved the 501s and flannel shirts. Loved Josh Brolin, and loved that the script didn’t dwell overmuch on Milk’s theories about Dan White’s closet status. In the end, there’s nothing more dangerous than a failure with a gun.

And as someone whose initial awareness of San Francisco, as a child, was as the center of the hippie movement and the necessity of wearing flowers in one’s hair, it was interesting to see what that replaced, the city’s working-class roots, now thoroughly buried by yuppification. Milk’s voiceover mentioned in passing that the Castro was once an Irish-Catholic neighborhood, and I’m all, really? I had no idea. And perhaps because the political story wasn’t exactly a page-turner, I started thinking about cities like that. White represented the resentful long-time residents being pushed aside by the wave of the future, Harvey’s people, the gay men who colonized a place where they could kiss their lovers on the street and not get their asses kicked for it. I thought of a comment I read on a blog recently, from a religious conservative in San Francisco who feels persecuted because he has four children and another on the way, and, I dunno, people glower at his double stroller, or something.

I thought of the hundreds of places in the U.S. where a person like that might feel right at home, but of course it’s unlikely that person would want to move to Salt Lake City or Fort Wayne or Holland, Mich., because a) it’s not home; and b) there’s a strong possibility he likes feeling persecuted, just like Jesus. I guess what we all want is to feel at home wherever we live, whether we’re there because of corporate vicissitudes, family obligations or choice.

I also thought of the people on the short end of all such gentrification, who wake up one day to find their neighborhood is filling with people radically different from them, who move in and say, “Finally, I have found my true home.” My guess is they’d feel like Palestinians.

And then I reconnected with the thread of the movie, and discovered the Briggs amendment was still keeping Harvey Milk awake at night. Tried not to think, I could be laughing at potheads right about now.

Lance Mannion spent Saturday night being disappointed by another holiday movie release. It was that kind of weekend.

Sigh. I’m thinking about movies to avoid thinking about the economy. I’m trying very hard not to despair. But I am starting to wonder where we’ll be in a year. We’re both working hard — everyone I know is working hard — and you have to believe work leads to something good, but of late I’m starting to consider lighting a match to the whole place and going on welfare somewhere with a sunny climate. Kind of like AIG.

A little bloggage for you to bat around on a Monday? Let’s see what we can do:

I found this via Memeorandum, as I don’t usually read the Sun-Times. Most of you are aware that the big trend in city management these days is to sell off the assets to private concerns. These schemes are easy to sell, because the numbers are so eye-popping and it fits in with the general idea that government can’t do anything right and private business will find new efficiencies. Yes, we’re told, the price may go up in the short term, but service will be hugely improved.

This worked with the Indiana Toll Road. Nine-figure sum to maintain/improve other roads in the state, followed by toll increases. But the plazas were improved, and lanes added, and regular commuters would find the roads easier to use.

But what can you do with a parking meter? How can you improve service at a parking meter? Well, you can’t. Chicago privatized its meters last month; Carol Marin explains:

…A month ago, when the City of Chicago privatized parking meters, rates were immediately jacked way up, and you now have to feed 28 quarters into the meter to park a car in the Loop for two hours. In exchange for a 75-year lease, the city got $1.2 billion to help plug its budget holes.

But by handing over municipal parking meters to a private company, the city has given its citizens a colossal case of sticker shock. The cost of most meters will quadruple by 2013.

Detroit parking meters take plastic, btw. I love it so much I don’t even pay attention to the per-hour cost.

Just for laffs: One of Josh Marshall’s readers finds a small tragedy deep within the Madoff victim statements, submitted by e-mail.

Something I read in the Free Press this morning: The annual exhibit of work by students and staffers at Pewabic Pottery has been attracting metro Detroiters since the ’70s. The just-opened show is loaded with edgy and provocative creations… All in favor of banning the words “edgy” and “provocative,” especially as they describe ceramic, raise your hand.

(You wait. I’ll go to this show, and find a display of dinner plates with giant holes in the middle.)

And so it is Monday, which for me means: Time to study irregular Russian plurals. Dosvidanya.

The other day I saw a movie trailer online — “The Education of Charlie Banks.” It features Eva Amurri. Because my memory for celebrity trivia is stickier than it is for, say, math, I know Eva Amurri is Susan Sarandon’s daughter. I thought I’d watch the trailer, see how much of the old block chipped off on Eva. And I learned something else:

Eva Amurri pronounces her name EH-va. I think it’s fair to say most of the other Evas in this country go with the more conventional EVE-a. I think it’s fair to say young Ms. Amurri has spent a large chunk of her life saying, “No, it’s EH-va” to people who mispronounce her name. Using current actuarial tables, if you totaled up all these moments at the end of Ms. Amurri’s life, they’d come to four days.

Now that I’ve driven most of you away…

One of my alma maters (almas mater?) had a layoff earlier in the week. The Columbus Dispatch severed 20 percent of its staff — 45 people. For those of you who are my age, saying, “Oh, well, I’ve been here 20 years, the Grim Reaper isn’t coming for me,” kindly note that Columbus’ reaper came for a great many people my age or older. From the list of “people you may know” passed along to me, I see a couple people who were there when I was there (and I left in 1984), and a few others with much snow on the mountain. Some of these folks will undoubtedly land on their feet — unemployment in Franklin County is fairly low — but it’s safe to assume others won’t, or they’ll land and twist an ankle, or whatever metaphor you prefer.

This is why I chuckle at the current craze among our friends on the right, which they call “going John Galt,” a shout-out to one of the worst-written novels in the English language. The idea is to protest the current legislative proposals by voluntarily reducing their work output. Withdrawing from the workforce. Some call it “depriving the world of my talents,” which is particularly amusing, as it’s usually the most untalented who are calling it that.

I encourage them to do so, even in this dicey labor market, nay, especially in this dicey labor market. A lot of talented people are on the park bench, and would be happy to take your place. Your bluff is called. Go John Galt.

Much work to do, nothing much to write about here. So let’s skip instead to the bloggage:

Another outstanding interactive map from the NYT, showing unemployment by county throughout the U.S. I learned the jobless rate in Mackinac County, Michigan, where a friend of mine lives, is an astonishing 24.2 percent. That’s the December figure, and in that Upper Peninsula county the work is distinctly seasonal. Still, that’s 6.2 higher than the same time last year. My old Hoosier neck of the woods is equally eye-popping — 15.1 percent in LaGrange County, 11.2 in Steuben? Yikes.

When you die, your heirs have no legal obligation to pay your bills. Most people don’t know this, so a debt-collection industry has grown up to take advantage of this. Ah, America.

WDET is rejiggering their programming again, trying to brand themselves with a capital D, and brought back Ann Delisi, a DJ with a legendary local reputation, for a weekend show called “Essential Music.” I’ve written before about never hearing new music anymore, how you have to be a dedicated detective to find anything interesting, unless you have satellite radio, a fondness for certain podcasts, or just more time than I have at any given moment. All this by way of saying I discovered JJ Grey and MOFRO over the weekend, and have been downloading ever since. I’d like to know how long you people have been hiding them from me, and who’s to blame.

Brother Rod Dreher, who makes his living scratching his beard and expressing opinions, finds inspiration in a right-wing chain letter making the rounds. The “Letter From the Boss” is the usual story — blah blah I worked so hard building my business blah blah no one ever gave me anything blah blah now I have to bail out a bunch of lazy bastards blah blah I am moving somewhere they appreciate me blah blah blah.

Expect it to appear, edited for space, as a letter to the editor of an Indiana newspaper any day now.

As a piece of grassroots conserva-ganda, it’s only average, and it’s not what interests me. What does is how these pieces morph with every e-mail forward, how the details change. I Googled a phrase and beheld the pages upon pages that have seen fit to reproduce it. In one version, the self-denying boss lived in a “300-square-foot studio apartment.” In another, it’s a “two-bedroom flat.” In most iterations, he’s been building the company for 28 years, but in others, for only 12 years, or 48, or nine.

One version changed many details, presumably for an Australian audience. The 300-square-foot studio apartment of deprivation is “a three-bedroom villa house,” (which doesn’t sound so bad, really). The “rusty Toyota Corolla with a defective transmission” — the first detail to mark is as b.s. for me, because as every Detroiter knows, Toyotas never have defective transmissions — is in this version a “rusty Holden Torana with a wonky transmission.” No Ramen Pride for this guy, but “baked beans, stew and soup.” And so on.

Who thought to make these changes? Who said, “Nah, it’s more effective if he’s worked at the business 19 years, not 28.” Maybe because Ramen Pride noodles weren’t common in U.S. markets 28 years ago?

The time to study these phenomena was after 9/11, when they arrived in in-boxes hourly. That was when I though the good folks who run Snopes should all be given MacArthur genius grants, the better to fund their work toward making this a better, or at least less bullshit-saturated, world. In the days after the disaster, I heard a Fort Wayne talk-radio host, a man who considers himself imbued with military rigor and discipline, blithely pass along the whopper about the six firefighters who were found alive and well under a vast pile of rubble, protected by their sturdy American SUV. Never mind the simplest questions would have poked the story apart like the toothpick construction it was — how much rubble? how did they breathe? who are they? where did the story first appear? why were six firefighters driving around under the towers in an SUV? and so on — it was a good story, and for some people, that’s plenty.

By the way, the Letter from the Boss is pretty amusing. The fact owners of small businesses work hard is hardly news to me, but just for balance, here’s how it worked in my little corner of corporate America: The boss was fond of ordering vast changes in the weekend’s papers around 4 p.m. Friday, after which he’d stroll back to his office, pack up his gear, and then leave, caroling to all in earshot, “Well, I’m off to the lake!”

Not that it matters. Another country, dead wenches, and all that.

Via Roy, I see Videogum is looking for the Worst Movie of All Time. Roy congratulates them for singling out “Crash” and “A.I.,” and I do, too, but I would have added the other “Crash” and, well, dozens more. I’m not quite following V’gum’s reasoning — why “Man of the Year” and not “Patch Adams?” Why “Alexander” and not “Showgirls?” Such questions make up the great barroom discussions of our time. Feel free to join in, here or there.

Friends, I’m off. Have a good weekend, and I hope I survive the coming snowstorm. Five to eight inches and no, I’m not happy about it.

Kate had an unexpected sleepover Saturday night, normally a clarion call to head out and see an R-rated movie, but we were both dead tired, and so we stayed in, cooked a Splendid Table pasta recipe, and watched a triple feature of movies we’d already seen, on cable.

I’m a big fan of the re- experience. I reread books, rewatch movies, rewrite stupid blog entries that no one gives a fig about. It’s a form of mania, maybe, but you learn something. Among the things you learn: Kathleen Turner is so sexy she managed to make a nation forget that air conditioning had, indeed, reached Florida by 1981. So, first up: “Body Heat.”

I recall being blown out of the water by this one. Saw it several times in the theater, went around quoting its best lines. My favorite: “You’re not too smart. I like that in a man.” While I could never pull off the Full Turner — tight skirt, no bra, poky nipples and Veronica Lake hair — in my mind, I aspired to be Matty Walker. Who wouldn’t? She apparently possesses the world’s most powerful sexuality, enough to hypnotize William Hurt into killing her husband, after which she frames him for the deed and escapes to the tropics with all the cash. But I was ignorant then. In 1981 I’d not yet seen the film’s predecessors, “Double Indemnity,” “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and other noir classics. I see now what I couldn’t see then, that Lawrence Kasdan was referencing an earlier era, and his story is equal parts homage and retread. The update, I guess, is that one of the two killers skates free at the end, which was not the case in the earlier era, when the guilty had to be punished.

I was thinking it would have been more interesting with a few more contemporary details. The lack of air-conditioning, even in Matty’s mansion, shows the script isn’t entirely rooted in reality, but I’d like to have seen Hurt with, say, a minor cocaine habit. That was certainly pretty standard for weasel Florida lawyers in the early ’80s, and would have underlined his poor judgment. Even in 1981, did men ever fall for lines like, “I’ve never wanted it like this,” breathed in his ear as he’s dragged back to bed? With a head full of coke it’d be more believable. And, OK, it’s a young Kathleen Turner delivering the line, so I concede the point: He wants to believe.

But these are quibbles. The script is as tight as Turner’s skirt. It’s refreshing to see what was sexy in a less vulgar time, when hemlines were lower (but the slit skirt was in its full flower). When Hurt peels off Turner’s panties, they’re real panties, not a whale-tail thong. And how brave is Turner, showing off her lean, nude body so boldly. So that’s what a pair of unaugmented breasts looks like. Not bad.

So: It holds up. Just don’t think too hard about the air conditioning.

Next was “Igby Goes Down,” c. 2002, another film I recall loving at the time, but now? It just got on my nerves. It’s an update of “Catcher in the Rye,” a rich-kid-loose-in-the-city tale, but it’s a story that didn’t need updating in the first place, unless you have a deep need to sympathize with rich brats. The stagy dialogue grates, even in the hands of great actors. What is Susan Sarandon doing in here? Looking fabulous and classing up every scene she’s in, that’s what. Ditto Claire Danes, Jeff Goldblum and an early Amanda Peet who wasn’t quite recognizable as the current Amanda Peet, so I’m wondering if there hasn’t been a little work done in between, or maybe just the five pounds of weight loss that makes the face of a woman in her 30s different from the same face in her 20s.

This is another story that has to be looked at with of-the-period eyes. In 2009, it’s impossible to find the existential angst of a rich prep-school dropout compelling in any way. Get a job, kid. The world’s a tough and unforgiving place.

And the late show was “Bringing Out the Dead,” which I told Alan during the opening credits was “a rare Martin Scorsese disappointment,” but found myself loving. I had my head up my ass in 1999; this is a wonderful movie. Halfway through, I figured out what I was responding to: Scorsese’s heart. The guy always swings for the fences, and if you can’t respect that, go rent “The Dark Knight.” I recall this movie got meh reviews at the time, so I wondered what Roger said, and hmm, looky here:

To look at “Bringing Out the Dead”–to look, indeed, at almost any Scorsese film–is to be reminded that film can touch us urgently and deeply. Scorsese is never on autopilot, never panders, never sells out, always goes for broke; to watch his films is to see a man risking his talent, not simply exercising it. He makes movies as well as they can be made…

I love it when Roger agrees with me. “Risking his talent, not simply exercising it” — that is the challenge for the talented, particularly the greatly talented. Watch “Kundun,” a film about the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism, a story about meditation and silence and inwardness, and goddamn, but it works, and how many filmmakers could have pulled it off? I’ll follow this guy anywhere.

So that was Saturday movie night. I went to bed around midnight, exhausted but thinking “Milk” will have to wait for another sleepover night.

Do you still want some bloggage? How about this: The Portland mayoral sex scandal, in which Taylor Clark wonders how it might have played out if the mayor weren’t gay.

I was rooting for the terrier, but I respect the winner. An elderly Sussex spaniel takes home the big bowl at Westminster. Although I already miss Uno.

And with that, it’s time to start the real work. Good day to all. More coffee for me.

Joe the Plumber shows his crack:

“I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think journalists should be anywhere allowed war. I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what’s happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I-I think it’s asinine. You know, I liked back in World War I and World War II when you’d go to the theater and you’d see your troops on, you know, the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for’em. Now everyone’s got an opinion and wants to downer–and down soldiers. You know, American soldiers or Israeli soldiers. I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, ‘Well look at this atrocity,’ well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.”

Sarah Palin makes moose jerky:

“I did see that Tina Fey was named entertainer of the year and Katie Couric’s ratings have risen. And I know that a lot of people are capitalizing on, oh I don’t know, perhaps some exploiting that was done via me, my family, my administration. That’s a little bit perplexing, but it also says a great deal about our society.”

I know people frequently fall apart when a microphone is on. I know not everyone is glib and polished and can reel off coherent sentences with subject-verb agreement at the drop of a hat. I know the rest of the world hears people like Palin and Plumber and thinks, “why, they’re just like me” and that anyone who would say otherwise is an elitist. OK. I’m an elitist. I’m old-fashioned enough to think the ability to express yourself clearly, on the page and in spoken words, is a basic skill everyone should have. But how is it possible that an adult who doesn’t have a gym membership is seen as lazy and unserious, but an adult who hasn’t read a book in the past year is simply busy and hard-working?

Palin is one of those public speakers who thinks extra syllables = extra smart. I know that a lot of people are capitalizing on, oh I don’t know, perhaps some exploiting that was done via me, my family, my administration. Remember the “use fewer words” resolution? Let’s see if we can boil this down, eh? [Cartoon device lowers over sentence, lights flash, smoke puffs. Device lifts.] “I was exploited.” See how easy?

Joe we can’t help. He’s just a moron.

Much work to do today — starting with shoveling snow, quel surprise — and not enough time to do it. So just a bit of bloggage:

Via Defamer, “Marley & Me” spoilers for those dim enough to not have figured out the ending.

After the Golden Globes I keep hearing that Mickey Rourke’s face is the result of his ill-starred boxing career. You know: He earned that face in the ring. Oh, I don’t think so. This man is a plastic surgery addict.

Hey, California! Join the club! Love, Michigan.

Off to fire up the snowblower. Today’s predicted temperature drop: 25 degrees. Groan.

Are you guys still waiting around for a post today? Sorry. I got distracted. The basement floor drain is glugging, but fortunately, I speak fluent Floor Drain. It is saying: Don’t you dare do any laundry today. Also, I’m investigating the Amazon Associates program site again, trying to figure out a non-obnoxious, non-intrusive way to mildly monetize NN.C. I’m sending out seven million e-mails relating to my other site, which is no longer entirely mine and is going to need some major attention if our plans for its relaunch are to come to anything other than a spinning buttfall. There’s a film festival we’d like to enter “The Cemetery Precincts” in, which requires attention and more e-mails. And there’s the fact it’s Friday, Jan. 2, which feels like something other than a weekday but not quite a weekend, so I’m discombobulated.

Also, I overslept, if oversleeping means clear ’til 8:20 a.m. after retiring at 1:20 a.m.

How about a little hors d’oeuvre tray of bloggage, then:

Republicans flee D.C. on the eve of the Obama inaugurations. Stay gone an extra week, folks.

I agree with TBogg, who said that whenever he’s asked what three historical figures he’d like to have dinner with, he replies, “I’d rather have three dinners with Kathy Griffin.”

Finally, I took Kate to see “Gran Torino” on New Year’s Eve, on the grounds it was shot in and around our new hometown, including the Grosse Pointe Shores home of one of her friend’s cousins. I subjected my tender baby’s ears to a virtual barrage of profanity and racial slurs in the hope she might get a valuable takeaway message from it, and this is what she took away: “Where are the black people? I thought this movie was about Detroit.” Anyway, a big disappointment. If you’re torn between, say, Manohla Dargis’ review in the NYT or David Edelstein’s in New York magazine, take it from me: Edelstein speaks the truth. Alas.

Have a good weekend.

A novel I read once — can’t remember which one — described a woman in a blouse with one too many buttons undone over abundant cleavage. The wording is lost to me, but it said something about the picture she made, somewhere between maternal and sexy, a suggestion of warmth and generosity. That’s always stuck with me, and not as an excuse to leave an extra button open. One of the advantages of having a bosom, after all, is its invitation, not to grope but to comfort. Children, friends, amusing pervs — women have been holding them to their chests throughout history. It’s just fun to say: “Come. Let me clasp you to my bosom.” Try it on a friend today. (This works for men, too.) Share the warmth.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about generosity of late, as the bad news piles up like an avalanche. There’s a meeting scheduled for early next week that could settle a few things in our household, in the sense that when a roof falls in, it eventually settles somewhere. Every time I hear another story, I find a Salvation Army bell-ringer, a help-the-homeless collection jar or someone to tip. And I stuff another bill in. It’s disgusting.

Disgusting because it’s so nakedly craven, so plainly rooted in self-interest. On the other hand, I know others who go to church, light candles and send up prayers when they find themselves under siege. After the L.A. riots in the ’90s, rich west siders poured into South Central to sweep up broken glass and do good works. Is this so different? It’s hope for a little good karma, mixed with a realization that there are others who have it far, far worse, and gratitude is called for. The stock market falls 700 points, and I know I’m about to be $5 poorer. A 700-point drop calls for a fiver in the bucket. Two hundred points and I can get away with a buck. Now that the Senate has killed the bridge-loan package for the Big Three, I might as well sign over title to my house. It won’t be worth much soon, anyway.

And generosity, even generosity meant to deflect the Evil Eye, is better than the other impulse that fights with it at the moment — incandescent anger. Apparently the Senate finally called it quits when they couldn’t agree on when American auto workers would accept the same wages paid by foreign car makers doing business here. These men and women have never accepted a pay cut in their lives, never saw a deal they couldn’t sweeten for themselves, think organized labor should be taken down a peg and start accepting shitty health care and salaries under $40,000 a year, not that any of them would consider such a thing.

I really don’t know what’s going to happen now. No one does. But the next time a hurricane comes ashore in Alabama, they can figure it out themselves. I’m feeling all out of generosity at the moment.

So what else is happening here? The New York Times liked “Gran Torino” pretty well. That’s the movie that was shot in and around Detroit and the Pointes last summer. Oh, wait:

Despite all the jokes — the scenes of Walt lighting up at female flattery and scrambling for Hmong delicacies — the film has the feel of a requiem. Melancholy is etched in every long shot of Detroit’s decimated, emptied streets and in the faces of those who remain to still walk in them. Made in the 1960s and ’70s, the Gran Torino was never a great symbol of American automotive might, which makes Walt’s love for the car more poignant. It was made by an industry that now barely makes cars, in a city that hardly works, in a country that too often has felt recently as if it can’t do anything right anymore except, every so often, make a movie like this one.

Well, OK. Seems like a good note to knock off on. I’m off to prepare for yet another job that promises little other than a heapin’ helpin’ of not cash, but personal satisfaction, i.e., citizen journalism. FTW.

Seventeen degrees as I write this. It seems it’s been 17 degrees forever, except for earlier this week when it was 38 degrees and raining. Did I mention I bought some cool-weather cycling gear, and tried it out when it was briefly not 17 degrees? I discovered my personal threshold of misery was 40 degrees — anything above, and I could handle it. It hasn’t been that warm since Halloween.

Because I know that my readers come here for a weather report, that’s why.

You know the worst part of being chronically sleep-deprived? The constant failure. You make a to-do list of, say, five items, and you’re lucky if one gets done. You just don’t have the energy. Today, for instance, mine has three: Take dog to groomer, work out, write three script pages. Just watch me fail to do at least one, and maybe two. The first only requires me to stumble to the corner, but who knows? It’s 17 degrees outside! I may not make it. Besides, there’s all sorts of stuff to read on the internet today, like hot details on the “Twilight” sequel. I did my parental duty on that score last weekend, and took Kate to an afternoon matinee that still cost $9.50 for an adult ticket. It was…well, it was competent, assuming the director’s intent was to produce 100 minutes of teen entertainment that looked great and contained many smoldering glances.

When I go to these things, I think of my friend Adrianne, aka Lance Mannion’s Blonde, whose father dutifully took his children to every “Planet of the Apes” movie when they were growing up. He would buy everyone some popcorn, escort them to a row, take up the end seat and promptly fall asleep. In the great tradition of children everywhere, Adrianne and her siblings had no idea how agonizing these films were to their father, until years later he let loose with his mockery of the final installment. “Ape has killed ape!” he intoned, capturing the moment when the arc finally came back down to earth, when the apes realized they had become the humans they’d spent all that screen time conquering. (This would be “Battle for the,” etc. title in the series, for you cineastes.) In the tradition of Adrianne’s father, I kept my snide remarks to one, whispered in Kate’s ear in the early moments of the film, “Whoever has the teeth-whitening contract for this high school is doing a great job.” The rest of my petty observations — if she’s so in love, why does Bella always look constipated? why do the vampire teens go to high school if they don’t have to? why doesn’t the same school change its name to Diversity High and get it over with? wait, her mother has a 17-year-old daughter and she’s married to a minor-league baseball player? let’s see more of this cougar! — I kept to myself. This movie wasn’t made for me, it was made for Kate’s demographic, and she liked it well enough, although even she said, aftereward, “Bella doesn’t smile very much.” That’s my girl.

If Alan had come along, I might have slipped out and gone down the hall to see “Milk.” A friend of mine used to do that — get his kids settled, then say, “Daddy’s going to see ‘First Blood’ now. You wait for me outside when the movie’s over.” A simpler time.

So, we have a few odds and ends to get out of the way, then? We do:

My local papers get on my nerves plenty, but at least they have a few good writers. It’s hard not to read the rest of a story that starts like this…

On third thought, Wayne County Probate Judge David Szymanski has concluded maybe it wasn’t a great idea to jail a woman for writing about her court case on a Web site.

…and continues with this…

Szymanski jailed Anderson, 59, twice Monday after she refused to shutter the site, which she has used as a pulpit in her tangled battle with her brother over the care of their elderly mother. The battle has extended to the mother’s ailing, 17-year-old cat, Toupee (who has his own, first-person column on the Web site).

Judges hate gadflies. Not to mention cats with columns, evidently.

It’s that time of year again: “A Christmas Story” cast, 25 years later. Ralphie in particular has aged well, and Scut Farkas continues to terrify. Thanks, Dexter.

Finally, in the last, desperate days of my time at The News-and-Sentinel, the staff was showed some market research that said, basically, that our readers were dumbasses who thought local television — yes, those even dumber dumbasses — did more in-depth and follow-up reporting. This is preposterous on its face, and it’s probably good that I wasn’t doing the questioning, as I might have been tempted to ask the respondents a further question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, just how stupid would you say you are?” The only reason we could see for this is that TV marketing people said so, constantly: Now with more in-depth reporting to serve YOU, etc. This led to us adopting a bunch of standing column sigs that read FOLLOW-UP ON THE NEWS and IN-DEPTH REPORTING. I only wish I were kidding. But since this next item involves my N-S ex-colleague Dorsey Price, let’s dust off the sigs and call this…

FOLLOW-UP ON THE NEWS

You remember Dorsey’s son Derek, who made the incredibly cornball video, in pursuit of a pile of college cash? And who asked us to vote for him, because the cash went to the video that got the most popular support? He won! We can’t say what the NN.C bump may have had to do with it, but $20,000 is $20,000, so who cares? The money, by the way, came from iCorn. Which is? Ahem: At iCORN we’ve created a new way to select and purchase seed corn and soybean seed….your way and on your schedule. iCORN is now starting their 9th year of business providing high-yield potential corn and soybean genetics with the latest traits.

Now you know.

Time to leash the dog and check one item off the list. Have a good one.