We almost bought one of these four or five years ago, when we came to the Ann Arbor art fairs from Indiana. It was, however, at that precise moment that, with the sun beating down on my head like a blunt instrument, I said, “If I don’t get out of the sun and into some air-conditioning right this instant, I’m going to faint here in the street.” And so we ducked into a restaurant, and somehow lost interest in the retablos being sold by Nicario Jiminez, a Peruvian artist who now lives in Florida.

This year we planned better, and reached Jiminez before the sun did its damage. Ours is from his Mask Maker’s Workshop series. It’s small, but the detail is amazing:

I just love it.

I didn’t find this clip, The Poor Man did. There are so many outstanding single shots in it — I can’t decide between Miles in the foreground w/ Trane in the background awaiting his solo and the trombone player taking a drag on his cigarette — that you’ll just want to watch it over and over. I didn’t buy this record until I was 35, a mere 33 years after its recording. Proof that every day in every life, something amazing can still drop into it.

The fate of my ex-employer is semi-known — McClatchy gets Knight Ridder, plans to immediately sell 12 papers, including Fort Wayne. Beyond that, I’m as clueless as anyone. Again, discuss.

Note: Fort Wayne Observed seems to have the energy to go after this one, and is speculating that whoever the buyer is, it’s already a done deal. We live in interesting times.

UPDATE: FWO now backtracking and saying the sale isn’t a done deal.

This has been a good week for spotting our old seminar speakers, but not always in the, you know, good sense.

Juan Cole was one of them. He’s a Middle Eastern scholar at the U of M who blogs here and is widely interviewed. I thought this interview with him in our otherwise pretty limp alt-weekly was must reading, particularly if you’re looking for a reason to stick your head in the oven:

There is a problem, and I don’t think people have any idea how much of a tightrope we’re walking in the Gulf region. If Iraq did go to a conventional civil war; if it drew Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey into it; if you have generalized guerrilla war among countries; and if they started hitting pipelines the way they’re hitting pipelines in Iraq, you could really send the world into another Great Depression.

Cole: I would give it 5 percent. I don’t think it’s a high probability. It’s out there as a possibility.

There’s the worst-case scenario: Full-on civil war in Iraq triggers worldwide depression. I hit Cole’s blog today. I knew the news would be horrible, but it was worse than that:

Tuesday was an apocalyptic day in Iraq. I am not normally exactly sanguine about the situation there. But the atmospherics are very, very bad, in a way that most Western observers will miss.

Terrific.

Off to Chicago. Try not to dwell on the bad news.

When something appears in the New York Times, you can’t really say it isn’t getting attention, but I was struck by a passage in this Selena Roberts column, about Johnny Weir, the flaming figure skater, and wanted to point it out:

He isn’t required to satisfy anyone’s curiosity (about his sexuality). He doesn’t need the validation. He is guided by his confidence and by working-class parents who nurtured his individuality from the start.

“He is a role model in how he has achieved a goal,” Battiste said. “But he hasn’t really said, ‘This was my childhood and here’s how I dealt with it.’ Maybe he will. I have to keep reminding myself that Johnny is still young.”

I was talking to someone a few weeks ago, who has a friend with a son like this. Five years old, plays with Barbies, loves to play dress-up and clamors to help mommy arrange flowers.

“Let’s put these in the living room,” he said when they were finished. “It needs some detail.”

I asked another friend about this, one of those gay-from-birth men, wondering what he’d tell this mother. And he said he’d do what Weir’s parents seem to have done: Nurtured his individuality from the start. It’s a fine line for a parent to walk, between “You’re perfect just the way you are” and “If you wear nail polish to school, sooner or later you’re going to get your ass kicked.”

He wrote me, “I have a feeling that the Isaac Mizrahis of the world had mothers who gladly let them play with the sewing machine and gave unconditional encouragement. Today Mizrahi’s probably the number-one reason any of his classmates attend a reunion.”

I think he’s right.

Cards on the table: I’m not much for alternative medicine. That’s not to say there isn’t comfort, even healing, in herbal teas, reflexology, chiropractic and the like. As my doctor friend Frank says, “Hey, I like a massage as much as the next guy.” I just don’t think it can cure asthma. Not yet, anyway. Research into alternative therapies? All for it. Herbs are just drugs in green leafy form. But I’m always wary of its practitioners. I don’t know why I should trust someone pushing vitamins and practicing iridology more than one who graduated from Johns Hopkins’ med school. That’s all.

That said, I think even someone who’s less skeptical than I am could be dismayed at the news that Coretta Scott King died not at home or in a hospital close to home, but in a Mexican cancer clinic in Baja California. How sad.

(I’m sorry, but every time I see this movie poster, I think about the runaway boob in “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.”)

I mean, you know, just speaking of the Super Bowl.

And so it hath begun. The dailies have their own gossip blogs, but I prefer the Detroit Yes celebrity sighting thread. And I wonder what the Freep will do when they find this in their reader-participation celebrity-sighting thread:

I met one of my fans, Candy that I used to bone back in the day and she was so so nice.

Quick, someone call Deborah Howell.

For the record, I drove through the city on 94 again today — another hop to Ann Arbor and back — and it was still clean, still amazingly pleasant and the route lined with happy billboards welcoming all to Grittyville. While I doubt there’ll be any celebrity sightings out this way, if there are, I’ll keep you posted.

Note to mothers and other sensitive souls: Avoid the New York Times this morning. First, seven kids, being driven by their 15-year-old sibling, die when their van is rear-ended by a semi.

Worse: six-year-old strangled by playful golden retriever.

Some days, the Wall Street Journal is comforting.

Big today today, busy busy busy, so not much time to dilly-dally here on this busy busy day. A few links:

The Poor Man deconstructs the Deborah Howell thing (if anyone cares) entertainingly in Let’s stage an all-star panel on blogger ethics in my pants.

In Fort Wayne — speaking of things no one cares about — there’s been a mini-drama going on in blogs and (to a far lesser extent) in the newspaper, regarding a student’s expulsion over the “publication” (photocopying, I presume) of a “book” about his high school. It’s supposed to be a hilarious send-up of Carroll High School life, written in the tone and spirit of Jon Stewart’s “America (the book).” School officials responded to this impertinence in the usual Allen County high-school-administrator fashion — i.e., they expelled the kid. (Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen had nothing on these folks.) One thing you need to know: The kid is either a founder or a member of the Allen County Teenage Republicans, which means he’s getting an awful lot of hand-holding and support from non-teenage Republicans in the area. And all this discussion has been happening with only a few people having actually seen the book in question.

Well. Nathan Gotsch at Fort Wayne Observed has scanned and posted all 14 pages, and now we can all judge for ourselves. My take: Expulsion was overreacting, but if this kid thinks he has a career in comedy, he has inordinately high self-esteem. My further cynical take: In two years he’ll be at some comfy university, offering $100 for examples of professors with liberal bias. Yawn. Fifteen minutes up….now.

One of our regular commenters has a funny one in the post below about newspaper ad policies:

I have in my possession a deeply hilarious list of prohibited words from from my newspaper’s ad manager after an adult entertainment ad containing the phrase “golden shower�? actually made it into print.

The memo concludes, “If you have any advertisers currently using any of these terms, please inform them of our change in policy.�?

All this as a setup to point to a letter I wrote to Romenesko today. Someone at the Louisville Courier-Journal changed Ray Nagin’s “chocolate city” comment to “predominantly African-American.” And the paper’s dumb ol’ readers thought this was worse than the original remark — go figure.

UPDATE: My old colleague and near-roommate Jeff Borden chimes in with his recollection of the Day Readers Were Spared Andy Capp’s Ass.

I guess it’s obvious why, but I’ve been thinking a lot about design lately — what makes it good, what makes it appealing, what people want from it. This story today, in which the Detroit News took a bunch of Motown everyfolk through the auto show and paid attention to their reactions, made me think about it more:

“The Imperial is gorgeous,” said Detroit teacher Zora Callahan Jones, 48. “If I drove it, it would say I’m a classy lady.”

I think the Imperial is a gorgeous car, too, but one I wouldn’t buy if I had all the money in the world and you held a gun to my head. And the thought of what “it” would say about me, as opposed to what I would think of myself for choosing such an overfed pig of a ride, doesn’t even enter my head. When it comes to cars, the thoughts of the message it might send about its driver is so far off my list of considerations, it’s in another county.

To me, great design — whether in a car, a computer or a hammer — is all about how it facilitates the job it has to do. Form always has to follow function. A great dress should make the wearer look great. A tool should do its job and feel as good in your hand at 5:30 p.m. as it does at 8 a.m. An electronic device should be easy to figure out. A saddle should be comfortable for both horse and rider and put you in a position to facilitate communication between the two.

I used to ride horses, and developed a lot of ideas about design from the time I spent in barns, working over and under those beasts. People have been riding horses for thousands of years, but someone’s always trying to build a better currycomb, so to speak. I was a sucker for geegaws for a time, until I finally figured out that no geegaw can substitute for hard work and understanding, and the whole business is expensive enough that if you can substitute hard work for a $20 geegaw, you’re better off.

Some advances really are — breeches made of modern miracle fabrics are better than those of wool. But spare me the saddle made of synthetic fibers; I don’t care if you can wash it with a garden hose, it’ll never beat leather.

One of the things I really liked about my particular discipline — hunters — was how every piece of equipment had a purpose, or else you didn’t bother with it. Buy me a drink sometime and I’ll tell you how everything worn by the pink-coated foxhunter and his horse has a specific purpose beyond the obvious.

Even the flask. When a person is suffering from a broken collarbone, a little brandy can be a powerful anesthetic.

Enough of that, then. On to the bloggage:

I’m so out of it — how out of it are you? — I’m so out of it that when the news of James Frey’s nonfiction-as-fiction caper broke last week, I had to do some supplemental reading. I’d never even heard of this book, probably because I pay little attention to memoirs and even less to Oprah’s book club choices. And oh dear lord, but if I wasn’t sure I was right before, I certainly am now, if the passage Seth Mnookin quotes in his very fair-minded column about Frey is any indication:

A Man walks out on stage and Everyone starts clapping. I recognize the Man as a famous Rock Star who was once a Patient here. He holds up his arms in triumph and he smiles and he bows and his black leather is shining and his long, greasy black hair is hanging and his patterned silk shirt is flowing … He claims that at the height of his use he would do five thousand dollars of cocaine and heroin a day mixed with four to five fifths of booze a night and up to 40 pills of valium to sleep. He says this with complete sincerity and with the utmost seriousness. … Were I in my normal frame of mind, I would stand up, point my finger, scream Fraud, and chase this Chump Motherfucker down and give him a beating. Were I in my normal frame of mind, after I gave him his beating, I would make him come back here and apologize to everyone for wasting their precious time. After the apology, I would tell him that if I ever heard of him spewing his bullshit fantasies in Public again, I would cut off his precious hair, scar his precious lips, and take all of his goddamn gold records and shove them straight up his ass.

My tolerance for writing this bad ends after one paragraph. (Why does he capitalize “Public?” Me no getta.) More to the point, in all the discussion about whether it’s OK to embellish in a memoir and whether people should get their money back and whether Oprah damaged herself by defending this heap of bilge (no, yes, yes), only Mnookin, a recovering addict himself, seems to see the problem here: Recovery only takes place when one is honest. Isn’t that one of the 12 steps, the “searching and fearless moral inventory?” How can you do that when you’re spinning a web of lies about spending three months in prison, when what you really did was spend a few hours in a police station?

It is to puzzle. I’m not a huge Mary Karr fan, but she gets it exactly right: Call me outdated, but I want to stay hamstrung by objective truth, when the very notion has been eroding for at least a century.

Elsewhere in the theater of Truth and Consequences, here’s one reason to be grateful I never went to work for People magazine. I could have spent the weekend freezing my ass off, standing outside the security perimeter of Eminem’s second wedding.

He remarried his first wife, the mother of his child, the mother of another child (whom Em adopted), his teenage sweetheart, his…god, you can’t call her a “muse,” can you, when he writes stuff like this about her: Sit down bitch / If you move again I’ll beat the shit out of you.

Ah, but that was another country, and besides, the wench is dead. Everyone’s grown up now, they’ve been down the bad roads, and hope springs eternal. The bride wore white. Their daughter was flower girl. Nobody’s perfect, and everyone deserves a second chance. All happiness to them.