I don’t know about you, but on the day after a big awards show, I could spend hours reading Tom & Lorenzo’s take on the red-carpet outfits. Of course, the pans are the most fun, what with Zosia Mamet’s bizarre leather boobs, and Christian Hendricks’ ace putdown of Ryan Seacrest:

…she told Ryan Seacrest she picked this dress because it looked “like a Sargent painting,” which is absolutely true and the stating of such caused Seacrest to blink vapidly for a few seconds and weakly repeat “… a Sargent painting… ” because he CLEARLY had no frikkin clue what she was talking about. Anyone who can reveal Seacrest for the uncultured tool he is with one phrase is someone who deserves all the neck rolls and finger snaps in the WORLD.

(The Sargent painting in question.)

Cat Deeley’s rueful regret:

A lot of arching of the back with the arms clamped to her sides. A shame. Your instincts were telling you not to wear this, hon, but you fell in love with the sheer Bob Mackie-ness of it all, didn’t you? We can understand.

My personal best in show: Anna Gunn.

Claire Danes’ mistake:

You just barely have your nipples covered and you’re going with anchorwoman hair, clean eyes, and sensible diamond studs in your ears? Girl, no.

But if you’re just perusing the home page, the best of all is Miley Cyrus, trotting out yet another of her fun outfits, which includes black pasties, panties with suspenders, and a fishnet dress with a bunchy zipper.

Nothing says “I have no persona of my own” than freezing your face into nothing more than a logo for pictures and thinking that it makes you look interesting.

Yeah, she’s doing that tongue thing again.

I’m talking fashion because I can’t talk about “Breaking Bad” — the last few episodes are killing me. It’s simply magnificent, brave television, and you can read dozens of great TV critics pulling it apart. You don’t need me.

I’m out of gas. Enjoy the dresses.

“Low Winter Sun” just aired its third episode, and I am watching out of a sense of duty — it was shot here in Detroit, the story relocated here (from Britain, I understand), friends worked on the crews, etc. My tax dollars at work. I want it to succeed. So far? Not an unqualified success.

I do give Ernest Dickerson, who directed the first two episodes, a great deal of credit for finding the visual interest in the city. He gets the ruin thing, of course, but that’s not all he gets. The cameras have found some largely unseen (even by locals) corners, particularly down near the end of Alter Road, one of my favorite bike routes. He sees the way someone who’s been here a few times (but hasn’t been jaded to it all) sees, so I can’t complain about the look of the show or its setting.

What has bugged me are the local touches to the dialogue, all of which sound like they were gleaned from a one-sheet sent over from the Free Press features department. One character cuts down another, saying something like, “You haven’t gotten a thrill like that since you were 15 and got a blow job hand job at the Dream Cruise,” truly a laugh line, as the Dream Cruise is attended almost exclusively by older people who generally have to plan for blow jobs hand jobs, with medication.

This week, there was an exchange about coneys. Detroit has two next-door neighbor coney islands in the middle of town, American and Lafayette, and allegedly there is a great tribal thing over which one you patronize. You know me, I’m just a tourist here, but I find both equally gross, and I keep waiting for someone to point this out in the many stories I’ve read about this great dividing line. (Interestingly, I have never, not once, heard a native express a preference for one over another, although they’re always doing so in newspaper and magazine stories. Whatever.)

I keep thinking about “The Wire,” in which the city of Baltimore was, as the critics like to say, a character in the story, and the difference between it and “Low Winter Sun.” I think it comes down to David Simon and his writing staff’s deep familiarity with the place. Simon, of course, worked as a police reporter there for years, and had a long embed with the homicide squad. That’s how you get wonderful details that became plot points and other great moments in the show — the Sunday truce, the exchange between the tourists and the stoop-sitting corner kids about the Poe House, and the two cops eating crabs in an interrogation room, one scooping out the guts with his fingers and reproving the other for being too much of a pussy to eat them.

It’s the difference between really knowing a city and only being here for the scenery and tax credits.

Last week on “Low Winter Sun,” one cop tells his partner that he took a woman “across the border, to Windsor.” No one would say that here; they’d just say Windsor, or across the border. Not both. That’s forgivable, though, because most non-Detroiters don’t know where Windsor is, and judging from how often the Canadian border is even left off locator maps in major newspapers, maybe we should be glad the line wasn’t, “I took her across the Canadian border, to Windsor, Ontario. That’s a province in Canada, Frank, not exactly equivalent to a state in the U.S. More a regional thing.”

I’m going to keep watching, because the show isn’t bad. I only wish they’d hire a local to read the scripts first. (I think I’m available.)

So, speaking of local weirdness, I was amazed by this story in today’s Freep, about a longtime political fixer — sort of a professional connector — suing a judge over an unpaid bill. The fixer, a woman named Jean West, brokers appearances by candidates running for office at local churches, senior centers and neighborhood groups. This was the part that hit me:

The 77-year-old plaintiff, a retired nurse who dived into politics after helping the first black woman get elected to Detroit’s City Council, called it a first. Never in her 43 years of working on campaigns had she ever gone unpaid, she said, despite her old-school methods.

When candidates seek her services, West brokers deals with a verbal contract and a handshake, promising to get them into as many Detroit churches as possible. And when she wants to get paid — her typical fee is $350 per week — the clients meet her in her backyard or at her dining room table and pay her, usually in cash.

No invoices. No formal contracts. She gets paid.

She’s suing for $3,500. Do you think the attention she’ll draw from the IRS will be worth that much?

Via Jeff the MM, one of those great Telegraph obits, of Col. Julian Fane, deceased at 92, a war hero:

On May 28 they received a message to make a break for it and head for Dunkirk. Fane, at the head of a small group of men, managed to slip away in the darkness. He was wounded in the arm by a mortar bomb as they scrambled through hedges and over ditches, guided by the flashes of guns on the coast and the light from burning farm houses.

At 3am they hid up in a barn and grabbed some sleep. During the day, the Germans arrived and the farmer climbed up a ladder and whispered to them to stay concealed under the straw. The next night, Fane and his men crept past an enemy bicycle patrol which was fast asleep under a hedge beside a towpath.

On June 2, after covering more than 20 miles of enemy-held country, he was standing in the doorway of a small terrace house close to the beach when a bomb fell nearby. The house collapsed and he was blown into the street.

His party reached Dunkirk in time to be evacuated back to England. Fane received the first of his MCs for his part in the fighting withdrawal.

Finally, I have nothing to say about a certain Disney pop tart a few years past her sell-by date, and her activities of the past couple of days, but before you write her off entirely, ask yourself whether this girl still lives inside her somewhere, and how she might be encouraged to reassert herself.

In the meantime, I just wish she’d put her damn tongue back in her mouth.

What a weekend. High pressure, unlimited ceiling, temps in the 80s. After a delightful improvement over last summer — Rain! Temperatures in the 60s! IN JULY!!! — it seems 2013’s is going out with what everyone expects and wants. I’m watering for the first time this season. But everything is still juicy.

And with that, I’ve once again violated Elmore Leonard’s No. 1 rule of writing. Oh, well. It’s what Midwesterners do — talk about the weather.

Besides, nothing much else happened, other than the usual weekend-y things — farmers market, dry cleaners, grocery, laundry cooking, exercise, sailing. We took the dog:

She has to wear her life jacket until we can trust her not to take a flying leap after a passing flock of geese. Also, it’s easy to grab her by the handle on top when we need to move her quickly.

As I was in aggressive fun-type mode this weekend, I wasn’t exactly trolling for linkage, although I’m pleased to report Mitch Albom had the day off Sunday and did not write anything about Elmore Leonard, which is a very good thing. They’d still be cleaning the brain explosion from the walls.

However, there is this, from the NYPost, not a paper I read regularly. Call it the confessions of a high-dollar college-admissions counselor:

One father requested that my meetings with his son take place in the Midtown offices of his private-equity group. His son would take the train in from Greenwich and meet me there. I offered to meet the boy somewhere easier, but no. It wasn’t safe, the father explained, as he led me into the vast glass space of his office, where his son was sitting; in fact, he had personally walked to Penn Station to meet his son’s train and escort him here.

Then he took out his checkbook and asked me, in front of the boy, what I’d charge to write his essays.

Oh, and I watched “History of the Eagles,” at least the first part of it; my interest in the solo career of Henley and Frey died in a 1980s aerobics class that used “The Heat is On” once too often. Bill Simmons take on it, linked last week, was pretty much dead on.

And we found our way to “Beware of Mr. Baker,” another rockumentary, but amusing where the Eagles thing wasn’t. Ginger Baker — what a wild man. At first I thought we were going down a path that would lead to another great musician robbed of his treasure by a trick of the copyright laws. He’s broke, he makes no money off the Cream catalog, what an injustice, etc. Later we learn he received $5 million for the Cream reunion, enough to take care of him for the rest of his life — if he hadn’t immediately gone out and spent it on 38 polo ponies and an endowment for a veterinary hospital.

Musicians. Go bloody figure.

Anyway, good Monday to all and a good last week of summer.

From the Who ARE These People file, a Colorado state senator with the charming name Vicki Marble puts her foot so far into her mouth that the drool from her sock could fill a 55-gallon drum.

Short version for non-clickers: At a meeting of the Economic Opportunity Poverty Reduction Task Force, the senator went off on a strange, rambling speech that managed to blame fried chicken and barbecue for African Americans’ health problems, a lack of vegetables for Mexican Americans’ (“I’ve read a study”) and towards the end, goes of on this sort of Tourette-y thing — “freedom,” “personal responsibility,” etc. I’m not usually one for these long, you-must-listen-to-the-whole-thing files, but this one sucked me in. It has the strange magnetism of a public meltdown, which I guess it was, complete with ridiculous apology:

“My comments were not meant to be disparaging to any community,” she said. “I am saddened they were taken in that regard. I take my responsibility seriously and I hope our work on this committee will offer real solutions to the health and financial challenges of our vulnerable populations.”

And in other entries in the same file, we have Scott Lively, and a typically excellent Dahlia Lithwick piece on him — exploring whether he can be prosecuted in this country for fueling the anti-gay movement in faraway Uganda:

Lively has openly bragged of his own role as the “father” of the anti-gay movement in Uganda, calling his campaign “a nuclear bomb against the ‘gay’ agenda in Uganda.” The question is whether all this constitutes mere speech or something more.

Last year Lively was named in a lawsuit brought by the organization Sexual Minorities Uganda, aka SMUG, that included three claims under the Alien Tort Statute, a law that gives “survivors of egregious human rights abuses, wherever committed, the right to sue the perpetrators in the United States.” SMUG, represented in this lawsuit by the New-York based Center for Constitutional Rights, claimed at argument in a motion to dismiss the suit last January that Lively’s actions over the course of a decade resulted in the persecution, arrest, torture, and murder of members of Uganda’s LGBT community. Federal Judge Michael Ponsor heard arguments in Lively’s motion to dismiss, and last January he seemed to suggest that he saw little activity on Lively’s part that wasn’t protected expressive behavior. But last week Ponsor tossed out the motion to dismiss, allowing the suit to go forward.

But that’s enough weight for a Friday. Here’s Coozledad’s favorite stew bird, Madonna, opening a gym overseas. The grill picture will rock you back in your seat. WITH HORROR.

Is it Friday? How can this be? How can it not be?

The thing about the death of most 87-year-olds is, their heyday is usually long past. The other day Kate was mourning the loss of Ray Manzarek, and I pointed out the Doors stopped making music more than 40 years ago. Acknowledge great work when its maker passes, sure, but don’t soak your pillow with tears. We live in the age of the internet. Everybody’s best work is right here at our fingertips.

Elmore Leonard, though — he’s an exception. At 87, he got a lot more years than our allotted threescore-and-ten, and made them count. He was working, and writing exceptionally well, until the very end. I don’t think “Raylan,” “Djibouti” or “Road Dogs” (his last three novels) belong in his very top rank, but they were still better than 90 percent of the crime fiction published today, still very entertaining reads. If I’m doing work like this past my 80th birthday, I will die happy.

Leonard has been dead less than 24 hours, and already I’m tired of reading his 10 tips for writing, which is a good lesson, but if you really want to learn how to write, just read his books. Figure out how he does it.

In “Unknown Man #89,” a process server is looking for a man and thinks he may have found his wife. She’s an alcoholic, drinking the afternoon away at he Good Times Bar in the Cass Corridor in Detroit. (Just those details alone — the name of the bar and the neighborhood — tells you something, at least if you’re a Detroiter.) See the way he captures a drunk’s speech patterns, how they laugh at their own jokes and go off on their little verbal jags. Less observant writers make it all about slurring. Later on, he sets up a showdown at a bar, deep in a black neighborhood, called Watts Club Mozambique. It’s midafternoon, hardly anyone in the place, when the shit starts to go down:

The manager and the lady bartender, in the pen of the U-shaped bar, standing by the cash register, didn’t move. It it wasn’t a robbery, they assumed it was dope business. The employee in the cloakroom stood by the counter of the hall door. No one in the place screamed; no one said a thing.

You go to work in a place called Watts Club Mozambique, you know how these things play out.

A friend of mine, an English professor, says that when the historians of the future want to know how we lived, the details of our daily lives, they’ll turn to the genre novelists to tell us. They will find a deep vein in Leonard’s work. Take “52 Pickup,” a great slice of ’70s life in Detroit. It’s about an extortion attempt on a successful businessman who’s been having an affair. He runs an auto supplier in Mount Clemens, lives in Bloomfield Village. The girlfriend was in on it, and has turned over some home movies to the two guys running the deal, one of whom is showing him the spliced-together film of him on the Bahamian beach with her, narrating the action:

“Here comes sport now, rum collins for the broad and a Heineken. Loaded and he still drinks beer. That’s your background showing, man. Eleven years on the line at Dodge Main. Couple of shots and a beer every day after the shift, right?”

Loaded and he still drinks beer. Perfect. You can learn more about white-collar and blue-collar lives, and how they intersected in Detroit, from that novel than any dissertation on class boundaries in the Wayne State library.

There’s more, there’s so much more, but I don’t have time to pull down every book and transcribe long passages. I do want to hit some bullet points, though:

** He wrote great female characters, not the way women write them, but the way a man who likes women does. I interviewed him once, and commented on it. He said, “I don’t think of them as women. I think of them as people.” Quick, read “The Switch,” published in 1978, before Hollywood pollutes it forever.

** His villains are great, too. I’m with Matt Zoller Seitz:

His books were tough, but his heart was warm. He liked people. He felt for them. He was able to see through their eyes, no matter how naive or cruel or dumb or scared they were. He didn’t seem to believe in evil, only in stupidity: meaning, you have to be stupid, or stupidly selfish, to be evil. Most of his villains are pathetic and deluded. He never wrote a Hannibal Lecter or Tom Ripley. No masterminds, no puppet masters, no Corleone-style crime lords. His criminals were criminals because they were too dumb or greedy to do anything else, or because they’d fallen into crime a long time ago and never got out. Maybe they were lazy. Maybe they had bad luck. Whatever the explanation, Leonard understood it, even if he didn’t condone it. He believed in free will, but he also had compassion. He got it.

** Speaking of Hollywood. For a writer best-known for his great dialogue, filmmakers hardly ever got his material right. Leonard told the story many times of how he coached Barry Sonnenfeld on how to direct his characters in “Get Shorty,” which many acknowledge as the first adaptation to be worthy of the source material. He told Sonnenfeld no reaction shots, medium shots only and tell your actors that they are saying funny things, but their characters don’t know they’re funny. Personally, I think “Get Shorty” is overrated as an adaptation; it can’t hold a candle to “Out of Sight,” which to this day remains my favorite EL movie, my favorite Detroit movie and my favorite George Clooney movie — the actor was just emerging as a heavy-duty movie star but didn’t act like it and (more important) director Steven Soderbergh didn’t shoot him like one. Can we also say that Soderbergh achieved the miracle of a fine performance out of Jennifer Lopez? Because he did. Her wardrobe in that movie was killer, too. Favorite scene:

And though “Out of Sight” is my No. 1, “Jackie Brown” was also very good. After that, it mostly sucks. Some profoundly so. “Freaky Deaky,” shot in Detroit two summers ago, went straight to video and who can be surprised, when it was uprooted out of its time period and cast with standouts like Crispin Glover? “Killshot” did even worse; thanks, Mickey Rourke and …Joseph Gordon-Levitt? As the bad guy?

** Leonard was refreshingly bullshit-free. About pretty much everything. He always told the truth about writing, anyway. Besides the 10 rules, mainly you just have to sit down every day and do it.

So, I have some links for you:

First and best of all, the Detroit News, bless ’em, re-ran a 1978 piece by the man himself, a deep embed with a Detroit homicide squad. It’s great:

Five a.m. on Terry Street, Detroit’s Northwest side. The fire equipment had left the scene. The gutted two-story colonial stood empty, with its door open, windows smashed, the smell of wet ashes filling its darkness, a faint sound of water dripping in the basement. Someone said the woman found down there, lying on a bed, had been “iced.” A curious verb to use. The woman had burned to death, or had been beaten to death with a blunt instrument. The fire had been started to destroy evidence.

Dick Newcomb, Executive Sergeant of Squad 7, came out of the house with his foot-and-a-half-long flashlight and a photo album of smiling high school graduates in red caps and gowns.

One of them, a 17-year-old girl named Michelle, was at that moment in intensive care at Mount Carmel. She had been found unconscious — severely beaten and bleeding from deep lacerations – in an abandoned house several doors north of the burned-out colonial.

“You can go in if you want,” Newcomb said, “but you’ll smell of smoke all day, have to have your suit cleaned.”

While we’re at the News, a seven-year-old piece by columnist Neal Rubin on EL’s relationship with Woodward Avenue, the city’s spine and east-west dividing line. Again, very good but maybe of less interest outside of Detroit.

A five-year-old profile by Neely Tucker at the WashPost.

Glenn Kenny, to whom I link because lots of you probably don’t know about him. A film blogger, but an appreciator of prose as well. I had to laugh because Abel Ferrara agrees with me about “Get Shorty:”

He rolled his eyes. “God. So studio-ized. Every time they shoot Travolta from a low angle they’ve got the fucking key light giving him a halo.”

I laugh because Ferrara was fired midway through a p.o.s. movie a friend of mine worked on here, and achieved the remarkable feat of being banned from every single restaurant in the Book Cadillac hotel in something like 10 days. And Kenny takes a look at a typical paragraph of EL text, and explains why it’s good.

Here’s an audio piece I did years ago, for WDET, a version of the blog I linked to yesterday. My takeaway: I hate the sound of my own voice.

Finally, the Onion. Because.

Have a good Wednesday, all.

I didn’t realize until yesterday that it was the 10th anniversary of the great midwest blackout, which I am not going to capitalize and you can’t make me. The Free Press headline writer asked where I was, and OK, I’ll bite:

I was at the pool at Veterans Memorial Park in Ann Arbor, enjoying some idle time before my Knight Wallace Fellowship commenced at the end of the month. Kate and her buddy were enjoying the water slide when suddenly the water stopped sluicing down the chute. There were a few moments of confusion, and then the lifeguards started whistling everybody out of the pool. Power was out, pool was closing. This was around 4 p.m. or so.

So we went home, just a couple blocks away. Power was out there, too. I turned on the battery-powered radio, and learned power was out in a whole lot of places. The NPR reporter’s voice was shaking; just two years after 9/11, it was plain she feared this was a terror attack, and if the terror was lacking for now, it would surely be on its way.

Alan came home, and we assessed the situation. We’d been intending to go back to Indiana in the next couple of days anyway, and with no juice for the foreseeable future, we packed up and hit the road, already low on gas. We pulled off the freeway in Jackson. No power, and hence no working gas pumps. Tried again around Marshall. Nope. On I-69 we dropped our speed to save fuel and crossed our fingers. There’s a truck stop just over the Indiana line with enough gas to fill an ocean. As it hove into view, it hove into view — we could see the lights and the warm glow of civilization.

We coasted in on fumes and filled ‘er up, then filled ourselves with Wendy’s. I reflected that Indiana is out-of-step with its neighbors on so many things, but I’d finally found something I could get behind — it’s even on a different power grid. But that time, it was one that worked.

Most people’s stories of how they weathered important events are boring, and I am no exception. Man, those Wendyburgers tasted good.

Bloggage:

So today, the same guy who did the Crisco Fist art prank pulled another — putting For Sale signs on street lights, public statues and other buildings around the downtown area. As jokes go? Pretty lame, but you can see how the media covered it dutifully. It went a little like this:

(God, I loved that movie.)

Second somebody-explain-this-guy request of the week: I don’t read sci-fi (with a few exceptions), and so know nothing about Orson Scott Card, but I thought he was a generally respected author in the genre, albeit one with a problem with gay people. Now it appears he is, instead, actually nuts. Do these crazy ideas get passed around in a newsletter or something? This is the second or third time I’ve heard the Obama’s Band of Urban Gangs theory.

Over and out. I’m thinking it’s Oberon time.

Someone is going to have to explain Elon Musk to me. I know the basics — founder of Tesla, fighter with New York Times auto writers, etc. — but beyond that, all I have to go on are a few clues. I’ve noticed he seems to be very popular with a certain sort of young libertarian male, who believes all we have to do is cut the chains that keep our young geniuses from soaring, and man, will they ever soar! Etc.

But I read this the other day, and I have to say…well, you tell me:

Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk is announcing his plans for the “Hyperloop” Monday — a high-speed transportation system that, ideally, could take passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles for a fraction of the cost and faster than the $68 billion high-speed rail system scheduled to begin running in 2028. Musk has said the Hyperloop, as he envisions it, could get you from San Francisco to Los Angeles in about 30 minutes, traveling at about the speed of sound.

As exciting as all of that sounds, the key word here is “ideally.” Musk described the Hyperloop at the D11 conference in May, and the outline was less than scientific.

“It’s a cross between a Concord and a rail gun and an air hockey table. If they did a threeway and had a baby somehow,” said Musk, you’d have a kicking, screaming Hyperloop.

O rly? There are other buzzwords in the piece, including my fave (“he is publishing the plans as open source”) and my other fave (he “requested ‘critical feedback’ from the general public via Twitter”). It’s all very something-something-and-then-a-miracle-happens, although I suppose there is room for people like that in the world. In the Henry Ford museum, you can walk through Buckmister Fuller’s Dymaxion house, which he envisioned as a sort of metal yurt that could be easily collapsed and transported to another site, should you want to move but not necessarily live in a different house. It was all very futuristic, except that reality intruded and the miracle never happened.

Ninety minutes from New York to Paris, why by ’76 we’ll be A-OK…

So, I needed to get out of the house for a while today, and chose to work at the library. What’s this, the American Spectator? God, it’s been years; the editorial page editor used to subscribe, and I used to read it regularly. Let’s see how this once-proud journal of the conservative movement is attracting the next generation. OK, the cover:

Yep, that’s a paean to AM radio, and that cover says so much, doesn’t it? Gathering around the console in some fantasy of the past — how old do you have to be to even get the cultural reference of a living-room radio? (My age at the absolute youngest.) How old do you have to be to give a fat rat’s ass about a radio band you only subject yourself to if you’re…well, that you never subject yourself to, because who cares?

But that was just the cover, which could be excused as a nostalgia piece. What else is in the July/August issue? This:

Those are the movie reviews, by the way. “Reminders of America’s decline.” OK, so, anything else?

And this:

Yep, that’s Ben Stein, taking his Diary column into its 4,821st year. Because the life of a Hollywood whatever-he-is is nothing but fun. Finally, Taki, also a contributor of many years, winds up and takes a swat — because that’s what he does, slaps like a little bitch — at that menace to society, Barbara Walters:

I used to read this rag and get angry. Pity is a new feeling.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you…

the many moods…of WENDY:

It’s so much fun to have a dog in the house again, seeing how she’s different from and the same as the last one. Having an excuse to get up and take a walk at noon, instead of reading something you’ve been putting off. Someone to talk to. Taking her to the dog park at the end of the day, where she can amuse herself for 20 minutes by throwing a crabapple in the air and catching it. She must have learned to play by herself when she was in the shelter; it’s like working out in a 4-by-8 cell, using only your own body weight.

So.

Of all the artistic regrets in my life, one of the biggest is that I never learned to appreciate opera. I don’t think the ship has sailed, but a window has closed; I’m just never going to get the art form like a lifelong fan. My sister dated a boy in high school whose family was sort of aggressively Italian, and I remember her playing “Pagliacci” in her room for a few weeks. But other than pop-culture moments here and there, the whole thing mostly escapes me.

Joe Queenan wrote one of his famously misanthropic columns a few years ago, about liking opera because it’s one place where the fans do not put up with bullshit. Ever. Think of all the times you’ve seen cowlike American audiences give standing ovations to mediocre performances, and contrast that to opera where, so Queenan said, getting booed offstage is a fairly common occurrence, especially in Europe, where they know their opera. He cited a famous case where a male lead was handed off to an understudy between acts, because the star just wasn’t making it, and the audience was in open revolt.

That’s a crowd I can identify with.

So imagine my delight and vexation to read this New York Times story — oh, how I hope you haven’t used up your 20-article quota this months yet, but what am I saying? It’s Aug. 2 — about a spectacular debacle in Bayreuth, Germany, where a radical reimagining of Wagner’s Ring cycle didn’t go over well:

When Frank Castorf, the avant-garde German director responsible for this confounding concept , took the stage with his production team, almost the entire audience, it seemed, erupted with loud, prolonged boos. It went on for nearly 10 minutes, by my watch, because Mr. Castorf, 62, who has been running the Volksbühne (People’s Theater) of Berlin since 1992, stood steadfast on stage, his arms folded stiffly, he sometimes jabbed a finger at the audience,essentially defying the crowd to keep it coming.

This “Ring” was presented as “a metaphorical story of the global quest for oil,” and the accompanying photo shows a giant Mt. Rushmore featuring Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. I’ve never seen the Ring cycle, or even a little bit of it, so I’m not sure where he’s going with that, but I loved the detail that “for no clear reasons singers smear one another with crude oil.”

And you’ve heard about the fat lady singing? Holy shit:

My earnest attempt to be open-minded about this baffling “Ring” almost foundered for good near the end of “Siegfried” when (you can’t make this up) a monster crocodile swallowed the poor Forest Bird in one big gulp.

This last scene, of course, is the ecstatic love duet between Siegfried, our rambunctious hero (who, by the way, instead of forging a sword assembles a semi-automatic rifle), and the smitten Brünnhilde. In this production, at the most climactic moment in the music the stage rotated to reveal two of those monster crocodiles busily copulating.

Looking hungry after sex, the squiggling reptiles, their jaws flapping, headed toward Siegfried and Brünnhilde, who were singing away.

That would be so awesome, I don’t think I could handle it. I’d be the one screaming BRAVO among all those boos.

Another week gone by, another Friday looms. Oh, let me kiss Friday’s sweet lips.

I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself. Reading reviews of the new Kanye West album, that is. I’m not trying to be down with the kids, or up on the Kardashians, but it seems everywhere I turn there’s news about “Yeezus,” i.e., the album, and I’m just…just…well:

New York magazine:

Shock, surely, is the point. Kanye wants to get under our skin, to rile and appall. In recent years, we’ve had a lot of dark-tinged music about sex: the brooding boudoir R&B of the Weeknd, the glum sex raps of Drake. West means to deliver the ultimate in “bummer sex” — unfiltered nastiness, set to a punishingly bleak soundtrack. The problem, ultimately, isn’t moral; it’s aesthetic. Kanye’s a wack rake. If he has a weakness as an artist, it’s his rapping, his stiff flow and sometimes awkward rhymes. When he tries to come on like a rogue, the corniness is accentuated: “Baby girl, he’s a loner/ Late-night organ donor”; “I’m a rap-lic priest/ Getting head by the nuns”; “Eatin’ Asian pussy/ All I need was sweet and sour sauce.” In the words of that rock critic Barack Obama, he sounds like a jackass.

Grantland:

On “Blood on the Leaves,” he revives the soul-sampling, love-’em-and-leave-’em crowd-pleaser of “Gold Digger.” Only this time, instead of Jamie Foxx’s sunny Ray Charles impersonation, West provocatively deploys Nina Simone’s rendition of “Strange Fruit” in a song that finds him complaining that he can’t force one of his “second-string bitches” to get an abortion because of all that religious “Jesus Walks” stuff. On “I’m in It,” the thoughtful messages of Watch the Throne are perverted into a devilish dancehall-accented treatise on the pleasures of multicultural sport-fucking. (“Uh, black girl sippin’ white wine / put my fist in her like a civil rights sign” is the queasiest lyric on a record with lots of competition for the distinction.) On “I Am a God,” the anti-materialism of “All Falls Down” from his 2004 debut, The College Dropout, is negated by a campy stew of clanking, Sprockets-y industrial-rock portentousness and West’s overplayed petulance about the painfully slow service at French-ass restaurants.

The Wall Street Journal:

At Monday’s event, he said having YouTube display his videos next to other people’s would be like a store stocking Louis Vuitton next to lesser brands. “I don’t want to be in that context,” the rapper said while introducing his album to the crowd with a characteristically breathless and topic-hopping statement. “I got this new strategy: It’s called no strategy. I got an idea how to sell more music: It’s called make better music.”

The New York damn Times:

Mr. West is angry, all right. In “Black Skinhead” he snarls, “I’ve been a menace for the longest/But I ain’t finished, I’m devoted,” over a track that switches between a blunt glam-rock drumbeat and a distorted synthesizer line. In “New Slaves” he’s furious at the segregation his mother’s generation faced, at corporations trying to control him, at profit-making prisons, at the media (of course) and — after many songs on previous albums that proudly itemized his collection of designer clothes — at the way designer labels are marketed to those who can’t afford them.

I don’t even know what this shit means anymore. I only know I don’t want to hear this record. Not even a little bit. Eating Asian pussy without sweet-and-sour sauce? Sampling “Strange Fruit” to bitch about your groupie problems? Why doesn’t someone clock this idiot and put us all out of his misery?

I’m writing this in early evening, having laid the groundwork for dinner this morning. Wednesday is Alan’s late night at the office, but he sometimes gets home before 9, so let’s be optimistic. Then the day unfolded, events that included:

Suspension of the Hoffa dig;
The exit of the mayoral front-runner due to filing errors, his disqualification upheld by two courts;
Plans for a new hockey arena, to be partially funded with public money

I’m probably forgetting something. But now I’m wondering if he’ll ever come home.

We’ve been having a string of perfectly lovely, perfectly perfect days, the kind where you think you should be wearing sunscreen just sitting on the couch. So of course we’re going to be smothered starting this weekend — high ’80s and chance of storms, which means humidity of the sort that makes mold grow in the elastic of your bra. Tomorrow night should be the last of the perfection, so I’m going out.

So, some bloggage:

Back to Grantland for something I fear is true: Season six of “Mad Men” was a disappointment. Since we were talking about what we’ve been watching lately.

Well, if Paula Deen thought Anthony Bourdain was tough on her before, wait until he gets a load of this.

And with that, I’m uncorking a bottle and about to enjoy a lovely evening. Hope your Thursday is what you want it to be.

The sun was out today, the temperatures reasonably mild, and in what I hope is the first of many mild, sunny evenings, I headed out on the new two-wheeler. Did I tell you I bought a new two-wheeler? I did. A used one, of course — a Volkscycle, an old frame tricked out with new components from the hipster bike shop down in the Cass corridor. Weren’t too much money, and I’m adding some clipless pedals. Look for me to add a broken elbow to my wounded eyeball any day now.

But it was a glorious ride, and I am so, so glad to be out of the house after all these months. What happened to me? I used to love winter. Now it’s just an ordeal to get through. Is this how people end up in Florida? Because this is disturbing. Along with this eye thing, this is making me feel very, very old. Other than the standard-issue lower back and knee pain, I’ve not really had any age-related decrepitude yet. And now it’s just dawning on me that I’ll be seeing a fucking ophthalmologist every six months for the rest of my life.

Makes me want to get on my bike and ride until I reach some other place. Someplace younger. Not Florida.

Oh, but before I do, I have bloggage:

This is so damn disturbing. Remember Patiend Zero from Randy Shilts’ AIDS book, “And the Band Played On”? The sexy Canadian flight attendant, whose promiscuity jump-started HIV all over the globe? He existed, but he didn’t really function as the Typhoid Mary of AIDS. It was exaggerated to sell books. Doesn’t that make you feel wonderful about American health reporting?

Here’s a long, readable and compelling story about what happens when the Satmar sect of Hasidism takes over an entire town.
And what do they do? Dismantle the public schools. Because they don’t use them, and besides, they really want to the few non-Jews left around to move out. It’s a fairly horrifying story.

This might be worth a trip to the National Archives: Searching for the Seventies. This woman could have been me, c. 1978. I loved this decade.

Finally, the Boston bombers’ horrible parents.

And now, let’s get Tuesday under way, OK?