I sometimes wonder if John Kerry is like one of the kids in Half Magic, the children’s book by Edward Eager in which some half-lucky kids get half of what they wish for: instead of landing on a desert island, one of them wishes himself onto a desert etc. (That’s the basic idea behind the old Peter Cook-Dudley Moore comedy Bedazzled as well, except there it is Satan, played deliciously by Cook, who keeps tricking the mortal Moore). Don’t you think Kerry went to bed last week wishing he could be on the front page of the newspapers again? And two years ago, isn’t it possible he wished with all his might that he could be his party’s nominee when faced with the most incompetent president in modern history as an opponent? (No one said that meant winning.)

In the wake of the botched joke scandal a reporter asked him if he should go to joke school. A contrite Kerry answered in the affirmative. Sad to say that this stupid contretemps has made international news. My friend Josh Rushing, who is in Qatar for the launch of Al Jazeera International, was interviewed by his own network about it yesterday. As a former Marine, reporters wanted to know if Kerry had offended the troops. What it offends is our intelligence, he told them; truly stuck in Iraq, our administration is desperate to talk about anything but. Including the Senator from Massachussetts and his unlikely second act as a stand-up.

Josh told me it reminded him of a joke his son Luke tried to make once at a dinner party in West Hollywood. Most of the people at the dinner table were gay and I guess Luke, in that awful age when preadolescent boys feel they must push whatever envelope they can find, thought he would try out some outre material. Josh remembers rescuing him from some lame routine about Christ on the crucifix wearing only a Speedo that must have seemed hilarious in his bedroom. “To this day it is the most embarrassing thing I can mention to him,” says Josh.

I remember my own son, Adam, at that age, throwing out malapropisms and show-stoppers when he most needed a friend. On Block Island one summer, fresh from watching a spate of old crime films with his dad, Adam tried to win some new friends by asking a young boy and his sister where on the face they wanted to be punched. They stared at him agog, even after he said, “That’s from Popeye. Popeye Doyle. The French Connection.” I remember the sound of silence, distant coughing, crickets in the distance as I led him off, suggesting that these kids might now know cop flicks from the seventies…

But would you rather have a president who can’t tell a joke or a president that is one? A college graduate who can at least try and joke about military service because he actually served in active combat, or a college graduate who did everything in his power to avoid going to war but feels no compunction about sending others into what is looking more and more like an endless conflict?

Who’s kidding who?

You can tell when fall has arrived in New York; the last of the air-conditioners come out of the windows, the heat comes on for the first time in six months and both of our city’s baseball teams are absent from the Series. (Can’t say I was excited about the Cardinals’ victory; as Henry Kissinger said of the Iran-Iraq war, “It is a pity that both sides cannot lose.”) Tomorrow we turn the clocks back, hastening the sense that darkness is falling across the land.

Not content with external darkness I went to a matinee of the remarkable — and remarkably painful — film, Half Nelson. There are finally other films in theaters that I want to see, but I had heard great things about Half Nelson and suspected it would be hard to find in the near future. Sure enough, there were four other people at the matinee I attended in the Village — and two of them left before the film was half over.

Ryan Gosling plays an eighth grade public school history teacher in Brooklyn, but that is the least of his character’s problems. He is also a junkie who arrives to class, and the basketball court where he coaches a girls’ team, in a just barely functioning state. Shareeka Epps plays one of his students and best players who knows his secret. She lives by the Red Hook projects and has her own issues: a mother who works constantly, an absent father, a brother in jail for dealing and her brother’s old kingpin who wants her to start working for him…

None of which really does justice to the story. It’s many things beyond that — includiing a surprising indictment of sixties radicalism and the hide-bound public school system — but for anyone who knows addiction it is more painful than a horror film. I saw much of the movie through my fingers, actually saying “No, no,” each time Gosling’s character picked up, each time Epps took a ride with her “friend.” The final scene is as strangely painful and hopeful as any I’ve seen in a movie this year, and recalled for me the children who haunt the great books of Dostoevsky — Crime and Punishment, The Demons, parts of the Brothers K. Their existence, and the existence of innocence itself, is a reminder, a reprimand, an apparition and a goad. When the lights come up, the darkness remains. Don’t see it alone.

Long time New Yorker readers will recognize that opener as one that used to grace the Talk of the Town section on a regular basis. It was the magazine’s way of including dispatches from such far flung locations as Madison, Wisconsin or Marin County and disguised the fact that the friend in question could be some famous writer or just someone off the map (the New Yorker map that is) who had a good tale and a way with words. (Now the pieces in Talk are all signed and half of them seem to be the by-product of some press release, as if Sidney Falco were now editing the section.)

I always liked the anyomous nature of the setup — whose friend wrote? It implied that Talk’s friend was your friend, which I found oddly comforting. So I was moved to open an email from a name I did not recognize with the subject line “Hello old friend.” (I’ve been feeling in need of a friend lately.)

It was spam. Damned clever spam, I guess (I don’t remember what penny stock it was hawking) but I felt preyed upon. Maybe it’s the loneliness of my middle-aged, internet connected existence but it made me think I’m not that far removed from those grannies who sign their savings over to some con artist selling South African coins just because he was nice to them on the phone.

I was determined not to be had again and almost deleted another email I got just 24 hours later from another address I did not recognize. “Just catching up with you” this one said — right! How many times have you fell for that? But I opened it anyway and this one turned out to actually be from and old friend (okay, an old girlfriend but I’ll take what I can get) who had found me on the internet. And I found that oddly comforting, too. I grew up with the sense that everything had to be taken away from you, eventually — home, family, especially friends — and it’s nice to think that we can all come boomeranging back out of the wild blue yonder.

But you won’t believe what the former president of Nigeria is going to do for me…

I went to the Tower Records on Broadway for the store’s final, going-out-of-business, everything-must-go sale on Thursday and the scene was pretty much what you would expect: A bunch of middle-aged guys like me poring over the CDs and walking around the aisles carrying their payloads in a protective crouch, like pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers carrying their pods.

And I don’t mean iPods.

I wrote about my early love affair with Tower and don’t mean to wax nostalgic anymore for the days of wax and jimmy shands. Technology moved on, like it or not, and the downloading phenomenon (legal or extralegal) separated the men from the boys (and I didn’t see many women or girls in Tower Thursday) years ago. Even Bob Dylan, whose albums were among the first I bought at (yes) Tower in Sacramento, recently gave his jaded blessing to the free download phenomenon. In a conversation with Jonathan Lethem that appeared in Rolling Stone last month, the sage of Hibbing weighed in on the controversy in his own unique way. “I remember when that Napster guy came up across,” Bob told the novelist, “it was like, ‘Everybody’s gettin’ music for free.’ I was like, ‘Well, why not? It ain’t worth nothin’ anyway.'”

That’s easier to say when you’ve moved tens of millions of units yourself and your brand is now so ubiquitous that you can get away with doing Victoria’s Secret ads and Twyla Tharp shows without anyone saying boo. But the man, as usual, has a point: I probably could have got most of my haul (eight CDs and one LP, a birthday gift for my friend Jeremy, the name of which I cannot reveal at this time) online for nothin’ — but would I have thought to get the History of Township Music if I hadn’t seen it on display? Or the double album package of Jerry Lee Lewis’s first country records, Another Place, Another Time and She Still Comes Around (To See What’s Left of Me)? Without record stores how will we find the random music we never knew or forgot we wanted?

I know, the Limewired will say you can scroll for your favorites there and there are professional precogs working at the download sites who can tell you what you want before you want it — but what are the chances you will stumble on the Killer in that purple velour nehru jacket? For some action you’ve still got to leave home, providing you can find a record store that hasn’t become a Starbucks.

That’s where I bought the new Dylan.

We went to DC this weekend to see my friend Charles in the Roundabout Theater Company’s traveling production of Twelve Angry Men. You probably remember the 1957 movie version (directed by Sidney Lumet); it was black and white and full of sweat and fury.

It was also a lesson in democracy and like the play on which it was based a sort of ham-fisted yet durable testament to the legal system. What made Reginald Rose’s story so innovative then was its concentration on the jury; until then courtroom dramas centered on the trial itself and the only important players were the defendants, the witnesses and possibly the lawyers. The judge was just an black robe and the jury was just a set of pawns, who filed back into the courtroom at the trial’s end with few surprises and no hint of having suffered in deliberation. Who knew what went on back in that jury room? Who cared?

Rose, a regular writer in the golden age of early TV drama, had served on a New York jury and was moved to recreate the experience in a real-time staged environment. The big clock on the jury room wall ticks for actors and audience alike and the heated deliberations over the evidence that will send a kid to the electric chair for murdering his father reach a boiling point several times in the course of the production, keeping everyone on their toes. “That play’s just like a carnival ride,” Charles — who plays the blue-collar mediator, Juror No. 6 — said after the performance. “Once you get on, it just takes off.”

Despite the rather stock characters — the advertising weasel, the blowhard bigot, the well-meaning foreigner — the prejudice that is at the heart of the play (and the trial) remains a timely topic. The Other on trial is a race of people (Puerto Ricans in Rose’s day) that could just as easily be — I dunno — illegal aliens or suspected Arab terrorists today. In fact, Charles said that the Secret Service had swept the theater the night before because Condi Rice and Alberto Gonzalez were in attendance. I hope they were listening when Juror No. 9 asks the bigoted Juror No. 10, “Do you think you were born with a monopoly on the truth?”