Cable news networks’ ratings boom during wartime (surely one of the reasons there weren’t that many hard questions asked at CNN et al in the buildup to the Iraq invasion) and small wonder: death doesn’t pause for commercial announcements, chaos needs to be witnessed live. Blink and you’ll miss the end of someone’s life.

State funerals, on the other hand, are like watching black paint dry and show up the shallowness of the newscasters more than scripted programs. (It’s hard to ad lib when you have nothing on your mind but your hair.) Gerald Ford may have wanted a simpler send-off than the one Reagan received (it’s hard to imagine one more spectacularly pompous) but that won’t stop cable news from treating it like a Leni Riefenstahl spectacle. By going through his old home of Alexandria and pausing at the House chamber, Ford probably hoped to keep it real, remind folks that he really was a man of the people — not a phony one, like the 43rd but an authentically ordinary guy.

Nothing ordinary about James Brown and his own funeral tour — the Apollo Theater yesterday, Augusta GA today — was meant to evoke his own remarkable life. When Ford died they could only think of one great quote from him — “Our long national nightmare is over” — while James dispensed more wisdom than the Tao: “Money won’t change you but time will knock you out,” he sang and who can forget the immortal words of “Superbad”: “Sometimes I feel so nice I wanna jump back and kiss myself.”

Too bad you couldn’t have seen your funeral, JB! When your widow got done singing “Hold On, I’m Coming” you would have thought she was going to jump in the casket with you. Michael Jackson was there, looking pretty dead himself, and the house band entertained the mourners with a redition of “Sex Machine” (you think they’re gonna play that at my funeral?). If Ford were to get into heaven he’d do it unostentiously, slipping in the side door. Al Sharpton asked St. Peter to “open the gates of heaven wide because James Brown likes a lot of room to swagger.”

Get on the good foot.

As if confused by the holidays, the Jesus of Wyckoff Street has rolled away the stone — or opened the glass door — to leave his phone booth sized home. The life-sized plaster statue of Christ crucified that for many years adorned the block of Wyckoff between Smith and Court streets has flown the coop, along with the owners of the brownstone He stood before.

There goes the neighborhood.

That was my old neighborhood and back in the day the long-suffering savior was a reminder that you were not in Manhattan anymore. Like the battle of the Christmas lights that occurred on First Place each holiday season, or the mobbed-up restaurant Marco Polo, the Wyckoff Jesus was a real slice of Italian Catholic whaddya-whaddya Brooklyn. When He went, He took some of Cobble Hill’s character with him.

There had been other signs of the Apocalypse in downtown Brooklyn of late; the pizza place at the corner of Warren got menus and booths and started charging $2 for a slice, and before that the Musician’s General Store went out of business clearing the way for another Starbucks, presumably.

Another former Hill dweller told me that the folks who owned the Jesus house finally sold out (no doubt pocketing a cool mil or more) and gave the Son of God the send off He deserved. A little parade escorted Christ to one of the nearby Catholic churches, one that has not been converted into apartments, where He will dwell forever and ever, amen.

Long after Heath and Michelle have moved on…

This morning our president received the much-anticipated Baker report on Iraq and declared it interesting. “It is a report that brings some really very interesting proposals, and we will take every proposal seriously and we will act in a timely fashion,” he declared of the much-anticipated bipartisan group-think product called “The Way Forward”, which sounds more like a forgotten Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford vehicle than a serious peace plan but that could be because Bush isn’t serious about peace. “I’m a war president,” he has insisted since 9.11 and his remarks constitute such a classic don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you blow-off that it’s hard to imagine any of the gentlemen on the committee waiting by the phone.

Much has already been made in the press of how much (or little) GWB would make of the Baker proposal, given his Oedipal relationship to Dad and all the Realists (fightin’ words to neocons) who served him. If there is one central image of our president that sums up his foreign policy it may be that of him trying to open a ceremonial door after leaving a stage in China last year. He made a comic face, probably not unlike the one he would make when the keg ran dry back at Yale,

He still thinks there is a secret door out of Iraq and that if he turns the handle we can exit — gracefully, even. Unfortunately he thinks the door is the same one he came in through when he got this party started. (Not the Grand Old Party; he ground that one to a halt.) Drunk on the fruit of his own nectar — “Come on everybody! Try some democracy! I’m driving!” — he is starting to realize no one else wants to boogie with him and it’s making him surly. In the words of Joe Walsh, “It’s hard to leave when you can’t find the door.”

Maybe saying one picture sums up this failed administration is unfair — there are so many to choose from. Some people still like “Mission: Accomplished” while a minority dig the box-on-the-back debate picture. (When in doubt, blame the tailor.) I’m starting to warm to a mental image, one conjured by Donald Rumsfeld’s eleventh hour memo, in which he says the Iraqis have to “pull up their socks.”

Aren’t you glad he left before one of his subordinates had to inform him that the men in Iraq don’t wear socks?

Just before Thanksgiving I decided to vary the menu in my memoir class with a few selections drawing on the experience of two very different African-Americans: James Baldwin’s Notes from a Native Son, orginally published in 1955, and a few chapters from Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler. The reaction from my 15 white students was informative, to say the least.

A few of them were grateful to be reading something that wasn’t by white people. This would probably be unremarkable in any college class today but seeing how this is Eugene Lang, of which Lang alumni Sean Wilsey complained students use to spend entire classes talking about how unfair it was to observe Columbus Day, I was kind of surprised that there wasn’t a greater reaction of that nature. From what I have seen of the syllabi of other classes there, racial diversity is often the number one creiteria for inclusion and I am remiss in not including more minority writers.

At least one other student volunteered the idea that perhaps race wasn’t that important in America anymore. After all, McCall came from a life of street crime and time in prison to become a reporter at the Washington Post and the name of Barack Obama is being floated as a presidential candidate in ’08 with most of the talk focused on the subject of experience rather than skin color. Maybe it’s just not that difficult being black in the USA today, he seemed to be saying.

That’s when I had one of those great teachable moments you hear about. I told my students that my wife had just received an award from the National Breast Cancer Coalition for her work as a magazine editor in covering the topic of breast cancer. Introducing her at the event was one of the anchors of the CBS Early Show, Rene Syler. Talk at our table turned to Ed Bradley’s passing and his role in breaking barriers for black journalists like Syler. Bradley, I mentioned, used to complain about not being able to get a cab in midtown, despite being familiar to the millions who watched 60 Minutes. A white woman said that living in NYC she tended to forget about racial prejudice. “I never forget about it,” said Syler and then offered two tales for our edification.

She described her experiences trying to return a new Mercedes-Benz in White Plains (nice name!) on the weekend, dressed casually in jeans and a sweatshirt, and the sort of attitude she received. No one quite said “Drug money,” but you can bet they were thinking it. (When she complained about it to MB’s corporate offices, her name appeared in a blind item on Page Six, making her sound like one of those haughty TV people.) And when she visited a consignment store in Westchester to see about unloading some of the couture she wears once for work and doesn’t need again, the woman looked at her casual attire and said, “Well, first you have to have clothes people would want to buy.”

And you can bet that even on her days off, she looks a lot better than most of us.

News of Robert Altman’s death was not enough to stop me running today but neither have I been able to stop thinking about him. I first became aware of him about the same time I really became aware of film as an art form, a means of expression that could be shaped by this person called a director. Watching Beth Orton sing Leonard Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy” in I’m Your Man last night I thought of how that song is now inextricably linked to a whorehouse in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, just one of many cultural artifiacts Altman casually appropriated.

Nothing he stole ever stayed that way, though. There was something very lacksadaisical about the look and feel of his films (might have has something to do with all that pot he smoked) and what he borrowed it always felt like he returned. His intentions beneath were of steelier stuff; conned by the easy-going feel of his films, viewers were always surprised when he slapped them back out of the druggy haze. Like the moment when the bad guys shoot sweet Keith Carradine in McCabe. Or when Chris Penn attacks the girls he and Robert Downey picked up at the end of Short Cuts. Or in my favorite of his films, The Long Goodbye, when Mark Rydell as the gangster Marty Augustine ends a loving tribute to his mistress by smashing a Coke bottle against her face.

When I interviewed him in 1993 for Vogue, he was working on the post-production of Short Cuts, talking casually in the editing bay while playing solitaire with a pack of Tarot cards: a game of chance played with the deck of destiny. That was the way The Long Goodbye seemed to me: he took a Phillip Marlowe novel and bent it out of shape in the hippie-dippie West LA of the seventies, added drugs and naked models doing yoga, but at the end it still comes out with the right guy dead, the guy who’d underrated the shamus. Have your fun, the director seemed to be saying. It all ends in the grave.

You’ll hear a lot about how much actors loved him (everyone worked for scale with Bob) and small wonder: He loved them back. I remember Julianne Moore describing how he would follow his actors just off camera, sort of cheering them on as they improvised, like a little kid who just loved to watch. Artists saw things we didn’t see, he believed. His favorite joke that year was about two jazz musicians working a gig on an ocean cruise. They go out on the deck to smoke a joint and one of them says, “Man, look at all that water.”

“Yeah,” says the other, “and that’s just the top.”

Float on, o maestro.