Can someone tell me what kind of crack the Times’s David Carr was smoking when he wrote the profile of Bonnie Fuller that appeared in this morning’s business section? I know, that’s probably a poor choice of metaphor to describe a guy who has famously written about his past addiction to cocaine and he is justly celebrated for being a better writer than most media reporters (for whatever that’s worth). “He writes like an angel!” a New York magazine writer once gushed to me, invoking Arnold Bennet’s famous description of William Faulkner. So maybe it was angel dust he was smoking.

Fuller, as media mavens know, has been the editor of Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Us Weekly and, most recently, the Star, taking the American Media publication from a tabloid to a glossy during her tenure there. In fact, you could say she is best known for giving tabloid culture a sort of glossy veneer. “Celebrity magazines, which once seemed to be multiplying weekly, are full of Ms. Fuller’s fundamental conceptual scoop,” writes Carr. “Stars, however stellar they may appear, are just like us — if you don’t count the parts about unusually beautiful and impossibly wealthy. The sight of an A-lister having a Slurpee or taking out his garbage has become a huge get in the current media ecosystem.”

The problem is that Carr writes about that trend, with which he credits Fuller, as a good thing, if not an inevitable thing in the evolution of human culture. After gushing over her Midas touch and “astonishing success” with the titles she reinvented, and inevitably dumbed down (and after passing lightly over the horrible reputation the woman has as a manager) he seeks out other cultural critics to second his opinion that a celebrity culture that has led to, among other things, the public self-immolation of Britney Spears, is a good thing. “What she has done is gotten at a kind of essential truth that is less about the specifics of the gossip,” says Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco. “This endless speculation and estimation about the lives of these people has become the stuff of culture.”

This is not just people who cover a business celebrating someone who has profited from feeding the hogs a particular brand of slop. This is media critics standing knee-deep in pig shit and pretending that it’s dulce de leche.

Fuller has just left American Media to start her own digital company, Bonnie Fuller Media, which aims to supply more slop, I mean, celebrity news, as well as fashion and romance for today’s always-on, on-demand types who live by blog, Pod-cast and RSS feed. I hope someone told her she won’t be able to review that stuff on paper.

I worked for Bonnie Fuller for one day at the Star. This is not all that note-worthy; the streets of New York are filled with literally hundreds of editors and writers who worked for Fuller for one day, or a week, or a month if they had armadillo skin. It’s not so much that she’s nasty as she is discombobulated; I was being paid my standard day-rate to do whatever and I recall one of my day’s duties was writing a quick piece about Courtney Cox’s new line of beauty products. (Hey, tell me what low thing you’ve done for money.) I had some notes from a stringer who had gone to a press conference where the former Friends star was talking about skin cream or whatever and of that a short “feature” was to be cobbled. What I remember was writing the copy in the morning, doing a bunch of other things that afternoon – and then getting galleys of the piece back from Fuller at the end of the day — “She only works on galleys,” I was told — and it was marked up like a manuscript page of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Some of her questions and comments were smart but, if answered, they would make the 300 word story 2000 words and there was no room for that on the layout, and no reason for it in the first place. And it also meant that everyone involved — not just me, but the reporter and the fact-checker and the designer and the managing editor — would stay extra hours to no avail: The “story” wasn’t going to run any longer and had to ship that night. And this was just one page of a hundred.

This is not simply a criticism of the woman’s time-management skills. (“Ms. Fuller is known for her hellacious hours, indifferent people skills and an approach to deadline matters that is more akin to ritual sacrifice than publishing protocol,” Carr allows.) It is a comment on a culture, micro and macro, that cannot tell what matters from what natters. Joyce wrote about shit, by the way — and urine and vomit and snot and jism. He was interested in all manner of human excretion and our fear of it and pushed against taboos in his writing and his life. (He liked to carry a pair of his wife’s panties around with them and give them a sniff in public — drop that fun fact at your next book club meeting!) But he knew slop from nourishment and liked to make fun of those who confused the two. When a boy farts in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man another says, “I thought I heard an angel speak.”

Give that kid a Slurpee.

Now that Obama is the presumptive nominee of our party, people on the left and the right are engaged in trying to parse his appeal, even as the candidate himself tries to broaden that appeal. Republicans seem to be flailing, as Karl Rove did when caricaturing the candidate as some kind of playboy of the western world — babe on his arm, martini in his hand — as if that were a bad thing. (Note to Rove: see the extremely popular Oceans Eleven series for further evidence that most men want to be that guy, and most women want to be with him. Then try new tack.) And some on the left seem determined to pigeon-hole him as the uber-liberal of their dreams, even as Obama is making compromises that piss them off.

But whatever your feelings or expectations about his candidacy, even if you hold out some bizarre hope that McCain can magically regain what’s left of his character as he changes his positions on the treatment of detainees, off-shore drilling and a host of other issues that he used to show un-GOP like common sense about, even if you can forgive his embrace of George Bush, even if you’re not afraid of his scary wife, you’ve got to be worried about Obama’s babe factor.

Forget about Scarlett Johansson (if you can, for just one moment); I’m talking about regular, mortal, sensible women. One I know quite well met the senator recently; it was a serious meeting with issues of import being discussed. She was impressed with how present he seemed, how attentive to her questions, even as she became aware that she was gazing at him the way Nancy Reagan used to gaze at her husband, and was smiling so much her face hurt when her audience was over.

After the meeting she sent her daughter a text message, describing the candidate in one word: McDreamy. This is the nickname the good women of Grey’s Anatomy bestowed on the doctor played by Patrick Dempsey (who played a similar kind of catch, a lawyer this time, in the Disney fairy tale send-up Enchanted). If Obama’s campaign was worried about his appeal to women after his battles with Hillary, the reaction of this rational, professional businesswoman might indicate that there is not much opposition there that greater exposure to his dreaminess can’t conquer.

She did say she thought he’d been smoking, though he wasn’t holding a martini.

It was just a few weeks ago we were still talking about Hillary Clinton — though her challenge to Obama’s candidacy seems like ancient history now. We’ve moved on, thank god, and our man is taking his show to a larger venue, and, like a small personal musical moving to Broadway there are bound to be some hiccups along the way.

I’m already starting to hear from early adapters complaining that they liked Obama before you did, that they never doubted for a second he would be the candidate and then the president — people who are looking down their nose at folks who are just now getting on the bandwagon. Danger, Will Robinson! If you sit around pouting like some Modest Mouse fan who hates to see her former favorite indie group playing at Madison Square Garden, you will miss the fun of the big parade. Because, inevitably, as Obama presents himself to a larger audience, his message will become broader, not more specific, and more inclusive than combative.

Take his first national ad. It’s all hard work and accountability, a flag pin and family values — you know, the kind of stuff your parents talked about. This is not so much because your parents were right (and you were wrong) about those ideas but because there is a lot of suspicion out there among those who know nothing about him and he needs to allay those fears — and take back some of that language while he’s at it. (You know: whose family, what values?)

Look at the questions the readers of Readers Digest are leaving for the candidates. Some are smart, some are scary — and some are downright off the wall. But overlooking those voters, or taking them for granted, could lead to disaster. Just ask John Kerry, or any number of good candidates who didn’t want to play to a bigger house. A good message will stand up, whether on a fortune cookie or writ large against the sky. Instead of superman at the supermarket it’s going to be Walt Whitman at the Wal-Mart: aisles wide enough for everybody.

I was saddened to learn of the passing of our old friend Amanda Green, restaurateur, raconteur, mother extraordinaire and just all around good person. She died of complications resulting from her long bout with pancreatic cancer this last weekend. The last time I had heard word of her was in the winter, when she called my wife to tell her about her life and troubles and declare herself a survivor.

When I say “old friend,” understand that this is how anyone who came in contact with her felt. Amanda worked the front door at the old La Bouillabaisse on Atlantic Avenue, back when dining in downtown Brooklyn consisted chiefly of pizza and calzone. Her partner, Neil, was the genius in the kitchen but he was a temperamental type who depended on her relentless good cheer to fill the place, and fill it she did. They didn’t have a liquor license and encouraged customers to buy wine from the Heights Chateau next door, but she was happy to pour you something from one of the bottles she had open in the back. There was always a wait but the time passed quickly in her presence.

Amanda was a British expat whose obit said she had been a dancer and exotic bird importer, neither of which surprises me; she had a dancer’s body and was a rare bird herself. She was a bit of a chanteuse as well; I remember hearing her singing to the accompaniment of an electric piano one night, not long after the restaurant had opened. The location had been a Bermuda Triangle for restaurants for years; I remember the proprietor of one short-lived curry joint telling me his business was improving “thanks to the gods” before they failed him and that joint closed too. What he needed was Amanda.

La Bouillabaisse was the site of a few key events in my life. It was there that we hosted a party celebrating the arrival of our daughter, Franny, from Paraguay on one unspeakably cold night in January 1994 and Amanda was there, sharing the joy. (Her first child, Nick, was born not long after.) And it was after one particularly drunken evening there a year and a half later that I concluded that I could drink no more. I remember feeling embarrassed when I told her, a few months later, that I had quit; she liked a glass herself and I was afraid she would pass judgment. But instead she made me feel welcome and clucked about her own intake while pouring me a nonalcoholic beer.

She had some hard times after that: a nasty separation from the father of her children, her bouts with cancer. But she always seemed literally indomitable. Her latest venture was a wine bar on Henry Street that she single-handedly made a destination in Brooklyn Heights, bringing in music and readings but that was not what made it hot. She made anyone who walked in feel welcome, made you feel in fact that your whole life had been leading up to your arrival at that particular spot. It was hard to see that it was she that was exceptional when she went about making you feel so special. It’s a gift, that, the real art of living.

There will be a memorial service for Amanda at Grace Church on Hicks Street, Monday (Bloomsday!) June 16 at 3 pm. Hope to see you there.

Have you seen the speech Obama gave to his campaign staff and volunteers at his HQ in Chicago on June 6? It’s about thirteen minutes of pure unadulterated inspiration, pretty much free of campaign rhetoric and about the best boss-to-staff speech I’ve ever heard. He recalls how low he was last August, the last time he stood before them, and how he admitted to his gaffes and frailties but added “if you guys are willing to lift me up, and pull me across the finish line, then this thing could happen.”

And lo, it came to pass. After complimenting them for creating the best political organization in America, and encouraging them to “do what you do to get your ya-ya’s out — that’s an old sixties expression” he tells them how tough it’s going to be going forward.

“Understand coming back we’re going to have to work twice as hard. We’re going to have to be smarter, we’re going to have to be tougher, our game is going to have to be tighter… I’m going to have to be a better candidate and you’re going to have to be better at what you do… And we don’t have a choice. If we screw this up, all those people I met who really need help, they’re not going to get help. Those of you who are concerned about global warming, I don’t care what John McCain says, he’s not going to push that agenda hard. All of those concerned about Darfur, I guarantee they’re not going to spend any political capital on that. Those of you who are concerned about education, there will be a bunch of lip service and then there will be more of the same….”

We’ve all felt pressure on the job before, we’ve all struggled under some pretty heavy deadlines. But how often has your boss told you the fate of the nation, not to mention the planet and hot spots like Darfur, is in your hands? And a lot of these folks are volunteers! it’s like a St. Crispen’s Day speech for a bunch of kids (mostly) who’ve been living on coffee and donuts. “Now everybody’s counting on you, not just me. And I know that’s a heavy weight. but also what a magnificent position to find yourself in where the whole country is counting on you to change it for the better.”

The happy few listening look solemn, even teary at times. Those who accuse him of being messianic are missing the point. He is not asking us to embrace him as hero, he is asking us to be heroic ourselves, to work for the ideals we espouse. He is asking the world of those who believe in him and offering our country in return.

Sounds like a plan.