It’s an all-pop culture blog today, because that’s what we have at the moment. The news out of China yesterday was about the so-called ethnic Uighurs, which the guy on NPR kept pronouncing “wiggers,” and wandering into the report halfway through, for about two seconds I wondered what Eminem had to do with China. It’s like the stupidity of Michael Jackson’s funeral was flying through the air on invisible wings.

So, then:

You know who also played at the Motown 25th anniversary concert, the one where — we have been reminded approximately eleventy jillion times in the last, GAWD, TWELVE DAYS — Michael Jackson unveiled the moonwalk to the world? Anyone?

Adam Ant.

You could look it up. I just did, and ran across both the YouTube video (which I recommend for its excruciating badness) and this amusing recap from a blogger, c. 2006. He notices things — commercials for the Commodore 64 personal computer, and Anacin. (This was before we learned aspirin is pure poison for everyone other than middle-aged people expecting a heart attack.) And it wasn’t just Adam Ant. Two other acts of the future played. Get ready: DeBarge and High Energy.

I think it’s useful to be reminded of this stuff from time to time. Berry Gordy had his streak, for sure. He caught a big wave, surfed it perfectly, and rode it all the way to a nice beach in Los Angeles, and has spent the rest of his life telling people about it but not once even coming close to duplicating it. His best artists got out from under his grinding bootheel as quickly as they could, Stevie Wonder and M.J. among them. His new discoveries sort of define “forgettable.” While I remember DeBarge, a Jackson family with 78 percent less talent, it’s mainly for a story a hotel manager in Fort Wayne told me after they passed through town on tour, about how they ordered room service consisting of a $500 bottle of cognac and a six-pack of Coke, and yes, they mixed them.

High Energy is lost to the ages, or at least my creeping Alzheimer’s. As for Adam Ant, well, Berry was all about maximizing the audience, and that crazy English kid had that “Goody Two Shoes” song on the charts, and, what? You don’t remember “Goody Two Shoes,” either? Well, maybe Journey was busy or something. The early ’80s was a bit fallow, pop-wise.

Why am I talking about Adam Ant? Oh, right: Because Jon Mayer played at M.J.’s funeral concert — you know, the noted soul artist. In 25 more years, I think we’ll be saying, yes, he was the Adam Ant of his day, and dated Jennifer Aniston.

If you have but one Jackson-memorial story to read today, make it the WashPost’s:

Carey, wearing a long gown with a plunging mesh neckline — demure, for her — performed her version of the Jackson 5 hit “I’ll Be There,” and looked meaningfully toward Jackson’s casket.

The musician Usher also looked toward Jackson’s casket during his song, then walked toward it and placed his hands on it.

Jennifer Hudson did not interact with the casket but sang a from-the-gut version of “Will You Be There,” accompanied by a troop of backup dancers. Somber, funereal backup dancers, yes, but backup dancers nonetheless. No one tried to moonwalk. It would have seemed disrespectful.

…His transformation of his own face took more than 20 years, as did his journey from beloved, giggling child-star to bizarre, fragile child-man.

The public’s transformation of Michael Jackson, from mutant to messiah, took less than two weeks. “Michael . . . made us love each other,” Sharpton called out. “It was Michael that made us . . . feed the hungry.”

God, it’s almost like you were there.

Elsewhere on the beat, the New York Times has been running some odd culture stuff lately. A few weeks ago, they brought us the shocking news that many people who start blogs lose interest in them after a while. Today, get ready to be blown out of your chair:

Dirty movies just don’t have stories anymore.

Wha-? Huh?

The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue. But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks.

I had no idea they had even a casual interest, but then, I think the last dirty movie I saw in long form was by the Dark Brothers c. mid-’80s, and while I don’t think I lasted even seven minutes, I did see what we amateur screenwriters like to call the first act. No plot or script was in evidence then, either.

This seems to be the peg:

Plot-centrism was in full bloom in 2005 with the release of “Pirates,” about a ragtag group of sailors who go after a band of evil pirates.

That movie, with a budget of more than $1 million, had special effects (pirates materializing from the mist), and, yes, lots of sex. Two years later, the movie’s studio, Digital Playground, spent $8 million on a sequel — a remarkable sum in an industry where the average movie costs $25,000, according to the director of the two movies, Ali Joone.

I missed the era of “plot-centrism?” Pirates materializing from the mist? I need to get out more.

Finally, a last bit of bloggage, in which Billy Dee Williams comes up in discussion at a Detroit City Council meeting. That august body takes on a serious issue — malt-liquor ads that imply it’s the fastest way to something, perhaps date rape — in their own special way:

Councilwoman Martha Reeves said her beef is the way the cartoon ads portray Williams: “He’s ugly.”

I need to go in search of my brain. If you see it, mail it home.

One of the more interesting ideas to come out of the twin celebrity deaths of late last week, Blondie and Jacko, was that they represented the end of an era, and not that of easy access to hospice-strength pharmaceuticals, either. The passing of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson is the end of consensus.

Paul Farhi wrote about this last week in the WashPost:

To say they don’t make sex symbols like Farrah Fawcett anymore isn’t so much a comment on Fawcett as a comment on “they.” Because they — Hollywood, the media, whoever it is that makes “sex symbols” — can no longer manufacture consensus.

The explosion of choice for your leisure hours, first on cable and then the internet, democratized and splintered the market. We no longer had three TV channels, we had 300. In 300 channels, and 300 million more websites, everyone gets a pinup that pushes their very specific buttons. And now for a transition I’ve been waiting my whole life to write:

Nowhere do we see this more than in pornography.

The other day I surfed past “The House Bunny,” a slight little movie that came out last year. The scene I watched featured the animated corpse of Hugh Hefner telling Anna Faris to come back to the Playboy Mansion and get ready for her Miss November photo shoot, after which they’d send her on a multi-city publicity tour, blah blah blah, and I actually laughed. It was such a joke, the idea that a barely breathing skin magazine could even interest a basement-dwelling blogger, much less an editor, in their Miss November. No one has cared about a Playmate of the Month since Farrah Fawcett was still selling posters.

The other day Roy linked, playfully, to a magazine called Black Tail, and yes, that link is probably NSFW, although it’s not that bad. What interested me was the scroll-down material, the other exciting titles under the Jiffy Fulfillment umbrella — Big Butt, Big Black Butt (for those who find Black Tail too scrawny, perhaps), Juggs, Panty Play, Over 40, Over 50 (!!!) and we’re not even getting into the gay titles, Inches, Black Inches, Latin Inches, Torso, and so on.

Of course, Leg Show is among them. Dian Hanson edits Leg Show, or did. She’s the thinking man’s dirty-magazine editor — note the Leg Show poster in the back room at the Bada Bing on “The Sopranos,” a nice little shout-out to one’s life’s work — and once dated Robert Crumb, who called her the Albert Schweitzer to pathetic foot-suckers. I know I’ve linked to this profile of her in the past, but here it is again, fascinating stuff:

Fetishes are narrow, even brittle, phenomena. There are men who need to see women’s toes but not heels, or heels but not toes; men who need to see women in leg casts; men who need to see a specific kind of woman’s shoe pushing a specific kind of car’s accelerator. “That’s not at all an isolated fetish,” says Dian Hanson, the most cerebral pornographer in America. “There’s an entire club called Pedal Pumpers. The first man who called me about it could only be satisfied with a 1959 Corvette and white pumps. It had to be white pumps. He’d bring hookers home and take them to the garage.”

I don’t want to dwell on porno, but you see my point. We’ve all become fetishists of a sort, or at least specialists. Once, heavy metal was heavy metal. Now it’s Death, Slash, Industrial and 15 other modifiers of Metal. (Sometimes I think the sole qualification for being a pop-music writer is how confidently you can sling those modifiers around.) Country — alt, mainstream or traditional? Even pop — short for “popular,” the very definition of wide appeal — has fractured. There’s power pop, ballad pop, teen pop, soccer-mom pop. For all of Simon Cowell’s attempts to carnival-barker a national consensus on “American Idol,” he must surely know that much of his audience wouldn’t be caught dead actually buying a record by any of those sad-sack tools, and only watch to monitor their over/under bets on when Paula will cry.

It’s staggering, today, to imagine a world where a single artist could sell 120 million records, or 12 million posters. Who could tear us away from YouTube that long? (Speaking of which, how’s that Susan Boyle phenom holding up? Yeah.) Who, or what, could unite the multitudes even long enough to dig $12 out of their pocket for something everyone else has?

The thing about fragmentation is, it satisfies only part of the audience experience. Yes, it is exactly what you want, but it can be lonely. (Of course, the other great thing about the internet is, it connects you with your other fanboys and girls. I still recall the thrill of finding my fellow Warren Zevon fans on AOL.) Maybe “American Idol” works in part because it satisfies our need for at least one bit of shared experience to discuss with our co-workers.

Or maybe this is just the pendulum’s furthest distance from the center, that something else is coming that we will all freak for. And then we can have the strange collective experience of building it up and tearing it down together. Destruction of humanity! Now that’s entertainment.

Have a good holiday, all. Grill many meats and vegetables. The wondrous taste of charred things — that’s something we can all agree on, eh?

Jesus Christ, my brain is going to explode before MJ gets planted. This will be like Princess Diana with three-quarters of the IQ points sucked out, worse accents, bigger phonies and more baldly obvious money-grubbing. Who ARE these mutants? Do I share a country with them? How soon can we move to Denmark or Uruguay?

Even with the TV only murmuring in the background, the stupidity seeped through the room like a toxic gas. After a while I started jotting down the lines that penetrated my concentration. Entirely out of context, of course:

He’s credited with changing the way music videos were done…with changing how artists were marketed. …These people have come here to recognize this.

…And I was wearing these beaded socks by Bob Mackie, and he kept telling me, “Cher, I just love your socks.”

Larry King was really in a class of his own, running what he called “this special, sad edition of Larry King Live.” He asked one guest, a doctor: “What could be done to bring someone back from cardiac arrest?” (The doc replied: “Resuscitation.”)

He pushed his celebrity guests through the mill like sports-talk radio callers the night a big coach gets fired. Disco icon Donna Summer. Donna, you knew Michael, did you not? What are your thoughts, Donna? Donna, what was his greatness? His greatness was perfection, Larry. Will you be doing a tribute song tonight? I will, Larry. Thank you, Donna. Joining us now is Sheryl Crow, who knew him well. Sheryl, how are you feeling tonight?

Randy Jackson called it “one of the biggest shocks of my lifetime.” The helicopter took off from the hospital, bound for the coroner’s office. Where is this helicopter going? You wouldn’t happen to know, Randy? Randy didn’t know.

Madonna “couldn’t stop crying.” Maybe she can draw on this memory the next time she’s called upon to act.

Write it down: Drug overdose. In true Hollywood fashion, his stomach contents will consist of brown rice, organic vegetables and Fiji water, while his bloodstream coursed with more industrial-strength opiates and tranquilizers than you could find in 10 hard-case mental hospitals.

I’m turning off the TV, and I won’t turn it back on until Elizabeth Taylor has been wheeled home from the funeral service. You all carry on, but like Forrest Gump, I think this is all I have to say about that.

Jeez, Farrah Fawcett was 62? Groan. How the time do fly. For the record, I was young when she was young (but older!), and I lived through the era of the Poster. This poster, of course:

In about five minutes, Farrah’s poster replaced Carly Simon’s cover photo on “No Secrets” as the erect-nippled fantasy queen of the dorm room. It was time. American boys might go for a brunette from time to time, but sooner or later they always come back to the archetype of the California blonde. (Fawcett was from Texas, but then, many of the blondes in California are from elsewhere.) I argued over that poster many a night, always met by the same implacable male shit-eating grin: But I like it. OK, fine. Farrah was blot-out-the-sun beautiful and sold a million blow dryers to a million women who aped her haircut, but she was never really threatening. Take note, Angelina. It’s possible to be a sex symbol without making other women want to put a tack on your chair.

It was the smile, of course. And the fact that nothing but the hair looked excessively fussed-over. Since every woman fusses over her hair, it bound her to us, instead of pushing us away, the way breast implants and see-through blouses do. She isn’t showing an acre of skin, only the results of a healthy, athletic lifestyle and the sort of thoroughbred good looks that some people get through the luck of the genetic draw. You know what that poster says? Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful. It wasn’t something she could help.

Farrah also wasn’t a man-eater. There was that unfortunate early marriage, after which she dropped the -Majors from her name and apparently swore off matrimony forever, even as she settled down with one man, Ryan O’Neal, for nearly 20 years. And while she had many ups and more downs, most apparently of her own making, she always seemed to be carrying her own weight. She worked in crap and quality, she went off the rails for a while, she had too much plastic surgery, but she was writing her own story, not depending on others to take care of her. Is it possible the girl in the poster, who angered so many feminists, turned out to be one herself?

I am thinking of another picture of Farrah, which you probably won’t see in the obit roundups. It was from a book I bought from a remainder table, “Cheap Chic,” by the editors of Rags magazine, now defunct. The picture looks like it dates from her pre-famous, modeling days, and features her in plain old Levis, white sneakers and a man’s white shirt, tails knotted at the waist. She’s posing on a skateboard, showing evidence of skateboard competence and the customary sunny smile. She looks great, of course, the essence of the American blonde beauty but warm, not Grace Kelly cool, fresh and clean and scrubbed. Don’t hate her because she’s beautiful. She was just one of the lucky ones.

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.

A note on our type problems: J.C. is aware, and is working on it from his vacation in the Upper Peninsula, where wi-fi is something no one’s really heard tell of yet. Good news: This seems to be a home-page problem. In the meantime, if you click the headline, it’ll take you to a separate page (with comments) where everything’s OK. Noted? Noted.

EDIT: Type problem seems fixed, for now. Thanks, brother Jim! Also, a version of the Eaton Beaver clip is now linked in comments. Thanks, Duffy.

It’s a measure of how scattered I’ve been of late that I’ve been sitting here for two days thinking I have nothing to write about, and then — forehead slap — I remember that I went to see Elmore Leonard last Thursday. He did a read/chat/sign at Border’s, supporting his new one, “Road Dogs.”

The reading was brief, just the first page of the novel, which in the usual fashion, starts halfway down the page. Maybe three paragraphs, after which he said, “And that’s what the book’s about,” shut it, and started talking. He was aided in this by his son Peter, who just published his second novel — it’s a father-son book tour. The two chatted back and forth for about half an hour, took some questions, signed some books. Among the highlights:

Peter talked about the party his father threw for the cast of “Out of Sight,” after they wrapped shooting in Detroit. He walked into the dining room to find George Clooney had just arrived and was standing by himself. They chatted for a while, and then “the women heard he was there.” Surrounded.

The “10 rules of writing” were delivered at Bouchercon, the convention for crime-fiction writers, and were something he just whipped up on a legal pad. Today the list is a book, and one of the most often-quoted in stories about him, probably because they’re short, snappy and don’t require much introduction. One of the rules: Never use a word other than “said” to carry dialogue. Another: Use no adverbs. Because they suck. (In the signing line, I told him about the reporter for the Ohio University Post who used “ejaculated” to describe an exclamation. His editor announced to the room: “Someone ejaculated on Tim’s copy.” That was hard to live down.)

My favorites were the stories about the old days, about being called in to a movie set to convince Charles Bronson — I assume this was “Mr. Majestyk” — that yes, his character would have a particular female character with him in the pickup truck during the big chase scene, because otherwise who would be driving when he crawled into the bed with a shotgun to fire at the bad guys? (“I don’t know why the producers couldn’t have told him that.”) But also about the era of pulp fiction, which he barely touched on, other than to say he’d been paid 2 cents a word for “3:10 to Yuma,” “which was the top rate for the pulps.” I wish he’d talked more about this bygone era in American fiction, where so many great writers paid their dues and learned their craft. (I was once lucky enough to interview an expert on the mass-market paperback, and I could have talked to him for hours and hours about cover art alone.) Fiction workshops are all well and good, but there’s something to be said for strong characters, snappy dialogue and the whip of the market as a navigator of plotlines. Every so often Leonard is asked why he switched from westerns to crime fiction, and he always shrugs and notes that that’s what the market wanted at the time. Try telling that to the next MFA you meet.

(That said, my favorite MFA, Lance Mannion, is a great respecter of genre fiction and its writers. So this may not apply to all of them.)

Martin Amis, in an essay about Leonard collected somewhere, described his writing as jazz, and that’s the truth. He said he doesn’t outline his novels, never knows where they’re going to end until they do, and that sounds to me like a nice bebop solo, the trumpeter stepping out to noodle around with phrases, themes and melodies for a while, until he’s said all he has to say and steps back to let someone else take a turn. Leonard is Miles Davis with a pen.

I bought “Road Dogs,” which I’m interspersing with “The Quiet Girl,” two books that couldn’t be more different. If Leonard is jazz, Peter Hoeg is atonality, translated from Danish. I can only recommend one, and I think you know which one it is.

So, a little bloggage? Sure:

A tale of two Michigan economies — Ann Arbor and Warren. From the WSJ.

The right’s talking points on Sotomayor, by Dahlia Lithwick, another writer nearing national-treasure status.

Only in Detroit: A city councilwoman is billed a pittance in property taxes for a decade. How much of a pittance? Try $68 a year. Turns out the city records show her address is a vacant lot. Her reaction: Huh. I wondered about that. Now it turns out she probably won’t have to pay much at all. This city. I ask you.

Only in Detroit Journalism: Yes, I saw the “Eaton Beaver turns 69 today” clip from one of our local TV station’s happy-birthday roundup on the morning show. No, I cannot direct you to it, as the station has effectively wiped out the clip. More proof every news organization needs an editor well-versed in dirty jokes, puns and Johnny Fucherfaster stories.

And now, I have a barn to raise and a day to do it. Onward to the work pile.

I need some new idiots. Allow me to explain.

A while back I opened a new bookmark sub-folder for blogs. Called it “idiots.” It was useful in that it reminded me not to take the contents within seriously. I had a strict set of standards: The idiots had to be fun idiots, not depressing ones. I wasn’t interested in screechers, unless they were amusing, campy screechers. I started with seven or eight idiots, and one by one they have disappointed me and I deleted them from the feeds. I’m down to four. Four can’t sustain a coffee-break web-surf, although god knows, Rod Dreher tries. But even he has backed down on the entertaining hand-wringing hysteria of last fall, when the Wall Street meltdown had him running to Costco for 25-pound bags of rice and fretting how unprepared we were for food riots. Now he’s back to wearily shaking his head and disapproving of his fellow conservatives. If he can’t find a slut to kick around soon, I may be dropping him, too. Even Lileks is a bore these days, although it’s amusing to see how capably he’s motoring through the financial crisis at his newspaper, keeping his sunny side up, up. He’s made himself a TV star, he’s back to filing pointless columns about his difficulties with customer service, he’s — ohmigosh — “fisking” George Will for two million words. You need a fresher schtick to stay in my idiots folder.

So send me some idiots to check out. No, on second thought, don’t. If I relentlessly culled all my bookmarks down to the ones I actually visit, I’d be down to the Lolcats, Gawker, Jezebel, Roger Ebert and a handful of others, and I probably should. Cull, that is. I have enough ways to be distracted while working. And at the moment, I have enough work I don’t need the distractions. And Roy still does an excellent job as sort of an Idiot’s Digest.

Also, I have some fiction ideas I’d like to explore this summer, although I know I’ve said that before.

Besides, it’s time I spent more time in the analog world, and maybe admitting I can’t read the entire Internet every day is a good start. This, for example, was published in January, and I had to learn about it from freakin’ Facebook on Monday.

Also, I don’t want to end up like Kevin Smith:

As you mentioned, Zack and Miri didn’t do as well as expected. How did you take that?
I kind of dropped out of society. I just kind of wrapped myself in a weed-infused cocoon … a coma, if you will. And it was great. It was really, really wonderful, man. I don’t want to be one of those people who’s all, “Let me tell you about legalization!” But, my God, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my life. And after years and years of … you know, I used to literally fight with people online. I would waste days online, talking to total strangers, some of them probably children. I was a joke.

Don’t become a joke: New motto.

Bloggage:

The line in Obama’s Correspondent’s Dinner routine that made me laugh loudest was the poke he took at Michael Steele — in the heezy, yo! Dana Milbank, not so funny, but an amusing wrapup of the GOP’s gaffe-a-palooza.

Speaking of Roy, he has an amuse bouche up now, about reaction to Ted Kennedy’s improved health. A few of the usual bitingly funny lines are therein.

Admit it: The guy who rescued the wee ducklings is your new hero. And yes, I know there are those who say the ducklings would have been fine without the rescue, but we wouldn’t have the cute video, otherwise.

And now I’m going to make some calls, then go ride my bike for a long time. I plan to pass by an open field near the Milk River, where there will be crowds of Canada geese goslings (Canada goslings?). They will be nearly as cute as the ducks, but their parents are bigger and meaner. I won’t pass too close.

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.

Despite my best efforts, not to mention my nearly superhuman powers of procrastination, I cannot read everything on the internet, so this mustard thing nearly slipped past me. Can it be true? Did Sean Hannity actually poke the president as a fancypants elitist for having ordered “spicy mustard…Dijon mustard” on his cheeseburger? Video evidence confirms he did. Wow. I’m impressed.

It so happens I have a little experience in this area — mustard-related class issues, that is. Alan’s dad was tickled by the Grey Poupon commercials Hannity references in that segment, the one where the two Rolls-Royces pull up beside one another and the fancypants poofters inside borrow mustard. So one year for Christmas, as a joke, Alan bought him a jar. His mother took him aside later and said, “You shouldn’t have spent all that money,” having perhaps, like Sean Hannity, absorbed the wrong lesson from the ad. Of course Grey Poupon and other Dijon mustard isn’t expensive at all. It’s just…spicy. And brown. When those ads started running, when the Great Democratizing Push of Dijon Mustard began in the 1980s, mustard was yellow and that was that.

Oh, hell, you’re all graybeards like me. I don’t need to tell you this.

The Rolls-Royce ads worked the way ads are supposed to — they branded Dijon mustard as the choice of Rolls-Royce passengers everywhere, even as Kraft (its owner) was selling it to the masses for a couple bucks. I most often use it in salad dressings of all sorts. It really enlivens a potato salad, if you ask me, and it is the only choice for deviled eggs. In my opinion, Obama’s greater mustard sin was putting it, or any mustard, on a hamburger. I don’t think mustard and beef go together anywhere except on a hot dog. A friend of mine who once worked at McDonald’s told me there’s a strict order to the condiment application there, and that mustard always goes on top of the ketchup blob, because mustard, even plain old McDonald’s yellow mustard, is too strong a flavor to directly touch the meat.

In fact, if you put me in a dark room under a single hot light and sweated me, I’d lay out my whole condiment/meat philosophy: Ketchup, and only ketchup, is for hamburgers, and mustard, and only mustard, is for hot dogs. The start of grilling season at our house really begins with the ritual Sneering at Alan’s Condiment Choices for his Hebrew National, dramatized here by Clint Eastwood:

I like a single stripe of Plochman’s and a few chopped onions, m’self, although I’ve been known to use Dijon and even sweet relish, but never, ever ketchup. Some things are sacred. (Before you Chicagoans weigh in, let me just say that so-called Chicago-style dogs are gross, too — cucumbers? Tomatoes? Bitchpleeze.)

The Straight Dope tackles the mustard question with customary flair, here.

And that’s gotta be the end of it for me, today. I finally scored a new printer, and had planned to start a new Friday feature called Embarrassing Pictures, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to figure out the scanning function, and the work will not let up until mid-afternoon, at which point I’m going to celebrate with a few garage sales, not an owner’s manual. Besides, I know you people love nothing better than a big discussion about nothing — thanks for all those ringtone updates early in the week, btw — so I’ll let you take it from here.

Or maybe we’ll end up talking about torture again. Or stress tests. Or whatever. All I know is, I gotta lotta copy to edit in about two hours. You have a good weekend, you Rolls-Royce driving poofters, you.

Against my better judgment, Kate and I have started watching “America’s Next Top Model” on Wednesdays. I figure it’s best to introduce potentially damaging cultural influences myself, so that she can learn the proper response to this nitwit propaganda — jeering mockery from the couch.

And so far, so good. I mean, what other possible reaction can there be to listening to that idiot panel of judges ganging up on these long-stemmed fillies for “not knowing your angles” or having “the wrong planes in your face.” As dumb as these girls are to line up for such treatment, theirs is the lesser sin compared to the rancid misogyny from the alleged adults in the room. And having never paid much attention to Tyra Banks until she was profiled in the NYT magazine not long ago — as a worthy competitor to Oprah, no less — I have only this to say: WTF? Why does she do that stupid caroling-voice thing in every other sentence? Of course, Oprah does that, too, so I see where she gets it.

I’m hoping that someday my progeny will be able to transfer these important life skills to judging photos like this. I don’t think Lucian Freud could have painted a more devastating portrait of decadence.

(It was Donald Trump, in fact, whom I first heard use the phrase “top model,” in reference to the first Mrs. T. Who never was a top model.)

I am down on celebrities these days. I turn to them for comic relief when politics gets to be too much, and what do they do? Disappoint me, every time, and yes, I’m including you, Oprah:

Chastising a celebrity is an exercise in futility. You feel like a kitten being held by the scruff of its neck, scrabbling wildly in the air without drawing blood. Pointless as this may be, though, I will try to talk some sense into Oprah Winfrey, who has decided to go into business with vaccine skeptic Jenny McCarthy.

Zingy lead, but he’s right — it’s ultimately pointless. That women like McCarthy, who not only claims childhood immunizations caused her son’s autism, but that she “cured” it through brave, “alternative” therapies, get soapboxes like this is not only unfair, but infuriating. I respect some aspects of alternative medicine. I’m not totally in bed with the AMA. (If I was, I’d hope they pay better.) But there’s an ugly undercurrent to causes like this that chaps my ass. If Jenny McCarthy can “cure” her kid’s autism, why can’t you? You must not care enough. After all, you got your kid vaccinated in the first place. I’m glad Arthur Allen, at the Slate link above, does not spare the details:

(McCarthy’s) boyfriend, actor Jim Carrey, is even more clueless. At the rally last year, I asked Carrey to give an example of a childhood vaccine we could dispense with. Tetanus, he said. That answer did not reflect a strong—or any, really—grasp of infectious diseases. Children who get tetanus—fortunately, it has been extremely rare in the United States since tetanus vaccination began in the 1920s—suffer horrendous pain, arch their backs, and go into terrible spasms before dying. It’s a very natural disease, to be sure, because the germ causing tetanus lives in dirt. It’s a germ that will be with us forever, and the only way to prevent it is through vaccination.

I wonder where these popculch dim bulbs stand on Gardasil, the cervical-cancer vaccine. In Hollywood, I’d guess you’re far more likely to know someone with HPV than autism. My guess is, they’re on board with it. Ditto with the push for an AIDS vaccine. No one is suggesting chickenpox parties for AIDS, or that pertussis and measles are no big deal, because once upon a time, everyone used to get them.

Perhaps our time spent saying the magic words along with Tyra — “four beautiful ladies stand before me, but I have only three photos in my hand” — will serve as early training on how to judge these pretty airheads who are so hard to avoid. It will be…a vaccination of sorts.

So, a little bloggage:

General Mills finds bloggers to be oh-so-much-more-compliant than pesky journalists. Ahem:

Bloggers, particularly moms, are an audience of such growing importance to General Mills that the consumer-goods company has built a formal network to feed them free products and enable them to run giveaways for their audiences.

MyBlogSpark has recruited more than 900 bloggers — over 80 percent are moms — to register to be eligible for everything from sampling campaigns to product coupons to news of a new ad campaign. General Mills plans to use the network to promote its wide portfolio of products in the food and beverage, beauty, home, electronics, health and automotive categories.

General Mills can be confident the program will fill blogs with positive reviews. One of the requirements for participation reads: “If you feel you cannot write a positive post regarding the product or service, please contact the MyBlogSpark team before posting any content.”

Or risk losing your free cereal, I’d guess.

Bright shiny objects! Get them out of my field of vision! The NYT looks at the science of concentration. (Confession: I downloaded a program called Freedom, which disables all your computer’s links to the outside world — e-mail, internet, instant messaging — and can only be turned off by rebooting the machine. Of course I haven’t used it yet. Give up Google? How would I live? No wonder I can’t write anything of consequence.)

But I can write this. And now it’s off to the gym. Have a swell day, all.