You don’t have to approve of pornography to admire the business acumen of someone like Jenna Jameson. Most prostitutes have to do their two-backed-beast-making with many men, collecting their fortune one grubby C-note at a time. Whereas Jenna has figured out a way to do it with relatively few, and make millions of others pay her for it. This is a model any Harvard MBA would love to apply to more legitimate business, but Jenna’s even ahead of them there — thanks to photogenic, slickly marketed gals like her, porn is a legitimate business now. I can recall a time when her visit to town — to “host a party” — would have been studiously ignored by most metro newspapers, much less covered on a minute-by-minute basis.

There are three links there, to short stories from the Free Press website; go ahead and click through them to see how it went. If you don’t have time, it’s pretty simple: The crowd waits for Jenna. Jenna arrives, but immediately bolts for her super-secure VIP room, to which only “Jenna and her girls” are admitted. And then Jenna leaves, again quickly and without any crowd contact, although the girls put on a lingerie show.

Tickets to this pigeon-plucking ranged in price from $500 to $1,000.

Jenna is quite the dish, so maybe getting a glimpse of that blonde ponytail was worth it. Can’t say, but I will say her behavior underlined what must be the real downside of her line of work, i.e., those millions of others. The fans. I mean, do you blame her for bolting from a crowd of several hundred self-confessed wankers? Would you want to shake hands with some of these guys? And you know, of course, that many would want to give her a little hug and kiss, too. Man, I’d be in that secure VIP room so fast the ponytail would be all you’d see.

When I first saw “Top Gun,” I came out — of the theater — and said, “Jeez, what an incredibly gay movie.”

But when you say that to two friends outside a movie theater in Fort Wayne, Indiana, no one listens. You have to be Quentin Tarantino, and then everyone hails your genius.

Still, it’s good to know I was right all along. The site seems to be getting slammed with bandwidth issues, so you may have to check back. (UPDATE: People report they’re getting through fine. It may be a Mac-based Windows Media Player thing. I finally got to see the whole thing, but it took a couple reloads.)

A rare Saturday night out for the NN.C Co-Prosperity Sphere, and it was a glorious one (if a little chilly). Off to Ann Arbor to see Andy Bey, then a little dinner. The rule in Ann Arbor is, generally, this: Students can have as much of the town as they want, but Main Street belongs to the grownups.

There are exceptions, some cheaper restaurants and clubs that draw undergrads. But what I had in mind was dinner at a place where I had lunch on a June day last summer, and recalled as a sophisticated restaurant where two adults who hadn’t had much face time lately could share expensive food on white plates with the sauce dribbled artfully around with a squeeze bottle.

And I can’t say it wasn’t that, exactly, except that it was full of students.

Dressed-up students, sure. Upperclassmen, I’m fairly certain. But unquestionably sub-B.A. students, many wearing $200 jeans and swingy tops, yakking on cell phones and drinking selections from a cocktail menu that featured Pink Ladies and Key Lime Pies. It looked like Carrie Bradshaw and about 100 of her closest friends.

To say it was culture shock would be an understatement; I recall wearing a rotating selection of pilled shetland-wool sweaters with either turtlenecks or oxford buttondowns (at least in JANUARY), Levis and hiking boots from a shoe factory down the road in Nelsonville, Ohio. They had red laces, and everyone seemed to have been issued a pair with their student IDs.

Most of all, though, I remember drinking beer. Buckets of cheap beer we bought by the pitcher, with only rare exceptions. I don’t recall eating tapas, certainly, or whatever its equivalent was in 1978. If I had the money to buy a nightcap snack from the Bagel Buggy, I was lucky. A steak sandwich at the Pub was an unimaginable luxury. Are you sensing a theme here? Yes: Poverty.

I wasn’t above selling plasma for beer money. It was always in short supply. And that was the situation with nearly everyone I knew. Many were from well-to-do homes, but no one had the sort of parental blank check that would allow for dressup Saturday nights at places where wine starts at $8 a glass. Everyone scraped by. But it was no biggie. We had it all in front of us.

Bricks-and-boards shelving, beater cars, secondhand couches and draft Stroh’s — that’s what college was. (And, for many of us, that’s what young adulthood was.)

As we were leaving, I asked the busboy — busman, that is — what the hell. He spoke with an accent. “Spoiled keeds,” he said, hoisting his tray. “They tell their parents the books cost $300, and they cost $200. And they spend the rest here.” He couldn’t talk long, though; it was a busy night. I don’t know if his kids will go to college, but I’d say the odds are good, based on their father’s willingness to spend a Saturday night bussing tables with his eyes open.

And I wonder about all these young Carrie Bradshaws, accustomed to such high living. What happens when they get jobs and start out at the entry-level salary? How will they know how to make $5 buy three days’ worth of food, until payday arrives? (My tip: Learn to love peanut-butter sandwiches.) Maybe they’ll stay on the parental dole after graduation, too. They probably feel like the world belongs to them, but it doesn’t.

The world belongs to the hungry. I’m betting on the busboy’s kids.

Bloggage:

You wonder if, in the final moments, if this man saw Death in the eyes of a panicked Labrador: Beware of falling dogs.

My earliest lessons in how tetchy newspaper ad managers could be were learned at, well, my earliest newspaper job, at the Columbus Dispatch. They were always monkeying with ads that tried to push the boundaries a little. And it was a tough job, considering the paper ran ads for strip clubs, adult movie theaters, escort services and the like.

Things crept in, anyway, and it was always funny to compare before-and-after changes. The adult-movie ads, for instance, had to be business-card size, no pictures, and titles and screening times only. But after a time they started allowing limited review quotes. And so, between editions, “Full er*ction — Hustler’s highest rating!” would become “Hustler’s highest rating!”

My all-time fave was for a stunt performer at Columbus Motor Speedway, the city’s stock-car track: “Bennie Koske, ‘the human bomb,’ will blow himself and a car up Sunday night!” Oops. In the second edition, he would “blow up a car and himself.” Which, really, is much better grammar.

But one ad in particular was a problem, and it was for one of the James Bond movies. This one. The art was of Roger Moore, framed between the legs of a babe with a bodacious can. Braver papers ran the picture whole; the Dispatch (and many others) cropped her at mid-thigh.

I thought of this when I started noticing internet ads on newspaper sites for “Imagine Me and You,” which looks like we should call it “Lipstick Mountain.” From the trailer, it seems to be about a woman whose lesbian affair interferes with her upcoming wedding. But I noticed two versions of the ad. This one:

And this one:

Only problem is, I noticed both ads on the same newspaper websites. Damn. Seems to be a vertical-horizontal question.

And a pretty crummy movie, if its January release is any indication. That’s Piper Perabo in the lead — went to Ohio University, starred in “Coyote Ugly” with assorted supermodels and, well, isn’t an Oscar contender.

Finally, maybe my all-time favorite ad at the Dispatch came after I left, a line of 6-point type buried deep in the classifieds. It was for a piece of buildable land, close to a middle school. “Buz Lukens special!” it crowed. Evidently the classified-ad takers don’t read the rest of the paper.

Jeezus on a damn cracker, this can’t be true: Medved is doing it again?! Yes, according to James Wolcott:

Unable to impugn (“Brokeback Mountain”) on the caliber of its acting, directing, etc, he’s reduced to whining that the film hasn’t been “honestly advertised,” as if he were some consumer advocate. Medved must think moviegoers are bigger idiots than he is. He couldn’t be more wrong. Nobody’s a bigger idiot than he is. …There are no recorded incidents of someone being lured into the cineplex under false pretenses and coming out Gay.

The “false advertising” crapola was what worked for Medved in the “Million Dollar Baby” flap last year, and I guess he figures that pony has a few more miles in him. Do these conservative culture warriors assume their supporters are dumb enough to beliee this, or are they just so cynical they know that of course they don’t, that of course the problem is with those FAGGOTS, but there are certain things you can’t say in public anymore (dammit!), even on the Factor.

I mean, I just can’t keep up.

OK, then.

Got my eyes checked today, just doing my best to keep the world’s “eyewear designers” in business. Seventy million frames in the store, and they all look the same. I considered some Buddy Holly Specials, but decided against embarrassing my friends and family and opted for the Usual — small horizontal frames that identify me as a pain-in-the-ass yuppie twit.

I should have gone for the Buddy Hollys. What ever happened to those frames so big you could spell your name out in little letters down the side?

The doctor said, “Have you considered Lasik?” I nearly fell on the floor. My old optometrist shared my feelings about Lasik: No. I know it’s worked for many, many people, but for me the calculus has always been, expense + lasers in your eyeballs + risk of losing your night vision + still having to wear reading glasses anyway vs. making peace with glasses. I vote for the latter. Wearing glasses is like smoking in that it gives you something to do with your hands, a way to procrastinate when someone asks you a difficult question — you can take them off, twirl them around, polish the lenses, resettle them on your nose…and then answer.

And yeah, sure, sometimes you lose them, knock them off the nightstand and later step on them. I’d still rather wear glasses than have back pain.

And I’d rather you have a good weekend than a bad one.

You’re never too old to learn new stuff, and it wasn’t until I moved to Detroit a year ago that I learned about urban exploration. Which is? Trespassing in abandoned buildings, for purposes of just looking around. (Urban explorers have a code of conduct similar to that of those who explore wilderness. Unfortunately, there are bad apples, many of them armed with spray-paint cans.)

As you might imagine, Detroit is the Mecca of this practice. No other North American city has the number and variety of abandoned buildings, many of them architecturally significant and most badly secured. There’s a hotel of some sort next to Alan’s office that’s just standing wide open; when you walk by you can smell the building’s exhalation of mildew, rot and something else — wino, I guess.

I talked to a few urban explorers when I wrote a story earlier this year on Flickr for Hour Detroit magazine. Lots of them post their pictures there. Because this is pretty obviously illegal, some keep a lower profile. (And some don’t care who knows, because when people leave abandoned buildings wide open, they’re asking for this sort of activity.)

But one of my favorites is the anonymous journalist who runs detroitblog and posts accounts of his explorations there. What a find he had recently, exploring the Donovan/Sanders building before its demolition earlier this month. This is where Motown’s studios were housed — after Hitsville U.S.A. but before they pulled up stakes for L.A. Detroitblog apparently found Marvin Gaye’s office, and posts a couple of items found there, including a “be right back” note in M.G.’s handwriting, and a bill for his wife’s fur storage at Hudson’s; it cost $7 to store and insure a “yellow coat with lynx tuxedo collar and cuffs” in 1967.

Detroitblog notes that Mrs. Marvin Gaye c. 1967 was the former Anna Gordy, Berry’s sister. The breakup of their marriage years later is a pretty good story by itself, but whether there was any inkling of it in the abandoned office in the Donovan/Sanders building, we’ll have to wait to find out.

One thing that’s clear is, Anna Gordy Gaye loved coats made of dead animals: In the handful of documents I grabbed from Marvin Gaye’s overturned desk were receipts for his wife’s purchase and/or storage of an autumn haze mink coat, a Russian sable coat, a chinchilla coat, a chinchilla hat, a tiger coat, a morning light mink coat, a dark brown dyed baum marten shrug, and a tip-dyed sable coat, in addition to business cards from various furriers around the country.

Tiger. Wow. It sure was a different time.

Mindy wrote earlier today and said I haven’t been talking much about the dinner menu lately. Oh, but all I need is a little encouragement, doncha know? Tonight: Crock-pot beef stew, salad and crusty bread. I don’t need to tell you it was good, do I? But I just realized I don’t remember removing the bay leaf, and it wasn’t in my portion, or Alan’s portion, or the stuff I put in Tupperware for tomorrow’s lunch. Those crock pots are amazing, aren’t they? They can tenderize the cheapest cuts and vaporize the bay leaf.

Yesterday: Beef stroganoff. I seem to be self-medicating an iron shortage. Tomorrow: Spaghetti. Just because it’ll be Thursday.

Any more bloggage? Sure: Defamer shows us why women larger than a natural C cup shouldn’t go braless. I always thought that gal was sorta half-trashy, anyway.

That picture of Whitney Houston looking like the crack ho she has apparently become is all over the nets these days. Huh. I have sympathy for drug addicts (to a point), so I say get her into rehab and let’s move on. We have other reasons to have Whitney publicly flayed.

I’m speaking of what she’s done to pop singing.

I just watched the last 15 minutes of the “American Idol” debut, where they humiliate all the people who thought they could sing, but of course they can’t. And six out of seven have Whitney Houston’s Disease, where she reaches for the high notes but warbles around getting there, so that when she screeches, o’er the la-a-a-a-and of the free-e-e-eeee-eee-e-eee…….and the ho-o-oo-o-ome of the…buhuhuhhraaaaaav…..uh!

Why does she do that? And why do people think this is the way you should sing?

Is it a drug thing? Must be.

Not much happening today, so here’s a plate of tasty linkage:

John Scalzi tells the story of how he got out of the newspaper business today, and the story was, er, familiar — manhandled by editors who saw him not as a person but as one of those Fisher-Price people-pegs to be plugged into whatever slot they felt like sticking him in, capped by a coup de grace of his own: Three weeks later I got my formal job offer, and called my editors into a meeting in which I told them I was leaving. They asked if there was anything they could do to keep me; I told them that it seemed unlikely. They asked if they could ask what I was going to be making; I told them. They both blinked; it was more than either of them made. It was their first real encounter with the online world, I suspect, and the first realization that major changes were on their way.

That was 10 years ago. John, some of them still don’t know.

Greg Beato on Fat TV.

Coyotes have much to fear from us, but coyote hunters have more to fear from other coyote hunters, still. A cautionary tale.

Forget that stuff I said last week about foreseeing my death on a bicycle. I saw it for real today — the Grim Reaper will be at the wheel of a late-model SUV, talking on a cell phone.

Two close-ish calls yesterday — at freeway speeds! aiiieeeee!!! — and another today, although today’s would have been merely a fender-bender, caused by a guy coming up in my rear-view mirror who was both talking on the phone and READING SOMETHING he had spread across the steering wheel. He looked up just in time, chirped his tires a little in stopping, then cut across three lanes of traffic to make a U-turn.

So much for evolution.

And just for a jarring transition, how’s this: Yesterday we went rug-shopping. Didn’t buy anything — it was strictly reconnaissance for a down-the-road purchase. But we wandered into one place, and I immediately saw the rug of my dreams. One look told me I couldn’t afford it, but I could certainly appreciate it in the store. Its lines were so delicate they seemed to have been drawn with a Rapidograph, and one pass of the hand over its surface gave the telltale feel of ahhh, silk.

That is one beautiful rug, I thought, drinking in its detail and explaining its excellence to Kate (who couldn’t have been more bored). Time to check the price tag. I was guessing somewhere in the $12,000 range.

No. Thirty-nine thousand dollars.

Now, I know there are many rich people in the world, for whom $39,000 is the equivalent, in our household, of maybe $500. And I know that a $39,000 silk Persian rug costs that much in part because it’s durable, and woven to be an heirloom for generations. But even if I had their money, I still would spend my days fretting. “I hope the dog isn’t throwing up on my $39,000 rug,” I’d think. (Hell, he’d better not even walk on it.) I’d ban shoes and offer foot-washing supplies at my front door. I’d stop serving red wine. I’d put down those little plastic runners beloved by ethnic grandmas all over the U.S. This magnificent piece of art could actually make my house look worse. It would call attention to itself in all the worst ways.

That’s the test, then — not whether you can afford it, but whether you can afford to use it. I happily — relievedly — fall short.

Bloggage:

It’s a tough town: DETROIT — School safety worries resurfaced dramatically Thursday when two students were stabbed in the chest during a fight with another student’s mother outside one of the district’s most prestigious schools, school officials said. I’m sure she had her reasons.

Shelley Winters, a woman after my own heart:

Tough-talking and oozing sex appeal, Ms. Winters was blowzy, vulgar and often pathetically vulnerable in her early films. … Even when she became the dominating force in many of her later movies, Ms. Winters often played vulnerable monsters. …Shrieking, shrewish, slutty or silly, Ms. Winters always seemed larger than life on screen. …Off screen Ms. Winters lived with an equal gusto… With a hearty appetite for food and men, she was not hesitant about naming the actors with whom she had shared a bed…

All the good ones are dying, eh?

“Million Dollar Baby” made it to HBO over the weekend, so we watched. (Our motto: “Seeing the movies everyone’s talking about — six to 12 months later.”) I don’t know if it was the best film of 2004, as Roger Ebert said; I didn’t see all of them, and he probably did. But it was an excellent movie, and after it was over, I was left with one overwhelmind conclusion:

Michael Medved is a very bad man.

He’s certainly no film critic. A film critic has to understand, first and foremost, that he’s judging a work of art. Commercial art, sure; art by committee, no question. Compromised, but always with the possibility of art, and the things art has to teach us about ourselves, our lives, and other people. The campaign he led against this movie, which he seemed to justify on the grounds that the movie was falsely advertised, shows that he’s little more than a yapping little pipsqueak pissant piece of it, and ought to stick to something he knows more about. Mustache grooming, perhaps.

“Million Dollar Baby” has its problems, but in the end — pay attention — it’s not an argument for euthanasia, or a commercial for the “culture of death,” whatever that is. (Jeez, people, get some new catch phrases, will you?) It’s a story about pain and redemption and forgiveness and a few other things. An eighth-grader could see this; how were so many otherwise intelligent people fooled enough to express opinions on its cultural influence? It’s a puzzle.

(Here’s where I need to say that spoilers are coming up. If you’re among the four people left in the world who doesn’t know the big plot twist, click away now.)

Although the story is set in the present day, it has the quality of a fable about it. It’s Los Angeles, but it’s really Anytown, USA. The characters live on Lonely Street, move about in a place where women can reach boxing’s highest levels and still end up in a nursing home where they get bedsores and there’s lousy security. Honestly? It reminded me of an old “Twilight Zone” episode more than anything, a place where things look normal, but aren’t. Which is why I could forgive the liberties taken with reality, because — again, pay attention — it’s not a goddamn documentary. How anyone would half a brain could watch this movie and come away with the message that it’s some sort of propaganda film simply astonishes me. I found it moving and honest to its last moment. This must be what you miss when you’re a faithful follower of the religious right’s “leaders.” No wonder those folks are crabby.

I thought it was, like many of Clint Eastwood’s later films, a visual expression of jazz — mournful, distinctive, dark, singular, ultimately uplifting. I really, really liked it. Go to hell, Medved, and the horse you rode in on.

The car show ended today, a decrescendo after Monday’s frenzy. Chrysler topped itself, at least as far as the jam-kicking part of the job went. I can’t tell you what it was like to sit in the audience during that “snowstorm.” I opened my mouth to say something to the guy next to me, and it filled with tissue-paper snowflakes. Finally, all you could do was hunker down and wait for the snow to clear, at which point you looked up and there was an SUV.

Here’s a much better story than anything I wrote. Final price tag for the glass-breaking stunt show — $500,000.

The press preview for the show ended today, as GM’s saddle burr laid the smack down at the RenCen down the street. I was there, and filed the blog version. When shareholders advise management on how to deal with a $24 million daily burn rate, we are in a whole new ballgame.

But my job is done. Dammit! Back to lackadaisical working at home for me, tomorrow.

A word or two about the car show while I have a minute to breathe. Tomorrow’s the last day, after which I hope the feeling returns to my right arm. (As an always-on-deadline blogger, I shlep my laptop around all day. By noon, it starts to feel like a corpse.) I was thinking today about the staging of the show, which is never more evident than in press week, when new models are being rolled out in splashy press conferences. Many people find cars exciting, but the bottom line is, it’s hard to unveil a piece of machinery stylishly. There’s a thin line between stylish and ridiculous.

Buick showed a concept — that’s a model that’s not in production, still in the thinking-about-it stage — SUV called the Enclave. It was preceded by a series of vignettes with various Buick operatives talking about icons of American design, about the genius in the details, the thought that obviously went into the process — a Les Paul guitar, an iPod Nano and an Eames chair. Then out rolled the Enclave, accompanied by models and swirly new age Enya-style music. The girls fluttered their veils, the car was shown in all its glory, and the audience was left to think, the next Eames chair? We shall see.

Mercedes had dancing girls at its rollout. Dancing boys, too. They were dressed in flowing blue dresses and curiously modest blue suits. The technology being shown was Mercedes environmentally friendly Bluetec diesel engine. The dancers were dancing all bluey around the stage, and then, and then! They’re wearing dolphins! They’re wearing clouds! We realize they’re wearing blue-screen blue, the blue that’s invisible to TV cameras, the same technology that allows your weatherman to walk into a pulsating storm cell on the map and not get wet. The female dancers gracefully reached up to their shoulder blades (which is hard to do, gracefully) and unfolded yards of batwing veiling; the men’s full-coverage suits finally made sense. Evidently the Bluetec is so environmentally friendly, it encourages dolphins to swim with it.

The Americans were, by and large, less artsy-fartsy. The Camaro went for noise, and it seemed to work, because the Camaro concept was the day’s big-excitement event — Chevy passed out periscopes to those far back in the crowd so they could see. The other big talker was Chrysler, which drove a Jeep through the plate-glass windows in the front of Cobo Arena. (See the video here.)

Clouds of steam are popular. So are models that rise from below the stage while music pounds. Less fancy is the whisked-away cover, yanked swiftly into the wings or rafters. Multiple video screens, strobes and lasers are routine. The slow reveal — a car that rotates from behind a semicircular screen, a la “Let’s Make a Deal” — is a biggie.

Music is top volume. Techno music is big, although a few of the brands skewing to younger drivers seem to favor a bouncy pop single like Beck’s “Summer Girl.” Aston Martin premiered a concept with an operatic soprano’s aria — maybe a lament for James Bond, lost to BMW. But the best was the anonymous band that plays behind a scrim at the Chrysler events. (I call them the New Chrysler Players.) Today, for the Jeep, they were going with a country-rock theme, and played the Eagles’ “Take it Easy.” With one key lyric change: I’m standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, such a fine sight to see / It’s a girl I see, in a Grand Cherokee, slowing down to take a look at me…

Yeah, if they’d sung it straight, that would have been embarrassing, eh?

In other news at this hour, I finally saw “Million Dollar Baby.” I have some thoughts. Later in the week, maybe.