I took a break from watching Danny Kaye in the Court Jester (“The chalice from the palace holds the brew that is true”) to watch our own court commander on Sunday night. He was not so much in a jesting mood; between trying to talk tough about the Patriotic Act and his decision to spy on Americans without oversight from the courts and his insistence that everything was going great in Iraq, he didn’t have much time to make with the jokes.

Not that he doesn’t like them. Witness his bizarre double-take at the press conference the next day when he said that in most democracies people find out who won the election the next day. Ooops! Don’t want to remind people of the Florida fiasco. Then there was that funny business with his executive order forbidding two-part questions, and how about the face he made when the door wouldn’t open in China last month? It would have been really funny if he had walked through it and never come back. But then the Chinese would have a lot of explaining to do.

No, these days GWB can’t kid with the public. He has to sound tough about spying on our citizens and he takes on the air of one telling fairy stories when talking about Iraq. But he does not sound wise and paternal; his manner is glib and perfunctory, not like your dad but like your babysitter’s skeezy boyfriend who is reading a story to you while nursing a beer and hoping you go to sleep, pronto, so he can mess around. Makes you want to stay awake to see what kind of shit he’s going to try. Suspicious, but not funny.

Danny Kaye, he was funny.

Our president gave yet another speech on Iraq today and spelled out why we should be so optimistic about the war there: while 2140 American lives have been lost, over 30,000 Iraqis have been killed by US troops. That’s a better than 10:1 kill ratio, which should be cause for great rejoicing in this holiday season. (Sorry: Christmas season.)

For Bush, raised on the WWF and Rambo, it should not seem surprising that we are killing ten insurgents for every one of our servicemen. Our guys can fire two machine guns at once, spinning in a circle, while ninja-like Arabs traditionally fall to the ground screaming, “Aaargh!” Unless they are blown out of the frame by a massive explosion, in which case they usually yell, “Aieee!”

In other words, bring ’em on. Except those 30,000 were civilians…

Meanwhile, the Democrats have demonstrated their ability to seize the moment, take advantage of discord over the war, by circling the wagons as in a John Ford western, allowing the GOP to play Indian for a change. It’s just that their playbook needs some work.

“Okay, Murtha, I want you to go over there and set yourself on fire. Dean, stay back and gnash your teeth and moan. Pelosi, get up on top of the wagon and scream hysterically. And Lieberman, I want you to go out there and join the other side. And don’t come back until everyone of us is dead!”

We’re all doomed. Civilians included.

Last weekend we went to see the exhibition Bodies at South Street Seaport, a collection of dancing, jumping, running cadavers, stripped of their skin the better to let us look at their inner workings. It was just the thing for a holiday Sunday: My wife was feeling a little low, and in need of an out-of-body experience of some sort, and our daughter (who seems wedded to her cell phone and computer these days) likes anythng gross and anatomical.

The show, which has generated some controversy, was less shocking than I had expected: maybe it was all those years of looking at my big brother’s Visible Man model as a kid but most of the bones and guts looked rather familiar to me — all though I had never seen the inner workings so animated! My favorite display featured a man’s skeleton dancing with his muscular system, a tango they both used to know so well.

The circulatory system, freed of its muscles, organs, and skeleton, looked like coral: red and spindly, as delicate as the etchings on a sand dollar. The diseased lungs and hearts of former smokers and heart disease victims got a lot of attention, too. The crowds were in some ways the best thing about the show. A lot of folks you won’t find at the MOMA were staring intently at the complex maze of material that exists beneath our skin with faces at once repulsed and relieved: Their expressions seem to say, oh, yes, I recognize you. Imagine seeing you here.

Me, I had spent a little too much time carving a 24-lb bird a few days before to really enjoy the splayed muscles separating from the bones of the bouncing cadavers. It sure didn’t make me hungry which was probably a relief to family and friends alike.

News yesterday that singer-songwriter-guitarist extraordinaire Chris Whitley had died lof lung cancer was both shocking and not. While only 45, Whitley had more than his share of problems with drugs and alcohol and had famously flamed out on stage on more than one occasion (during a Jimi Hendrix tribute at BAM a few years ago he had to be led off stage as his cover of “Little Wing” wandered off the musical map). “Couldn’t exactly call it unexpected,” my friend Jeremy Epstein wrote in an email telling me of his death.

I got to know Chris when we moved to NY from San Francisco 15 years ago. We were living in the Meat Packing District and our neighbor Ann, a hardcore rocker from Athens, GA, kept telling me I had to meet this guy, he had the most incredible record. And she was right about that: Living with the Law was the kind of rock debut that makes people sit up and take notice. The songs were dark and sexual, filled with images of incarceration and lusted after liberation. “The border town it took my hand/It was the gateway to the promised land,” he sang and the border he was hoping to cross was not one between countries. He played a mean slide guitar and had the kind of lanky, hungry rocker look that most women find irresistible.

In person he was something else: shy, almost diffident, a good dad (he and his wife split about the time I got to know him though he continued to share custody of their daughter, Trixie) and modest about his musicianship. Except when he drank or drugged and then I guess you saw another side of Chris. The loathsome Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote a thinly disguised memoir of their love affair that included accusations of attempted physical abuse (sounds like he tried to hit her when he was in his cups but wasn’t so good at it) and on more than one occasion he slagged a suit from Sony when he should have been sucking up. The label was clearly hoping for something like his debut — bluesy, folky, understated — for a follow-up and the album he hit ’em with (Din of Ecstasy) was a dark wall of noise, a junkie’s lament.

I wrote about Chris for Vogue then, and a year later wrote a bio of him for the label. What I remember was how clearly he did not want to be put in a bag musically; he didn’t want to be a “long haired kid with a dobro,” he complained; the records he had cut his teeth on as a kid — living in a trailer, riding dirt bikes — were by Led Zeppelin and Johnny Winter. Sony soon dropped him and he recorded elsewhere, dabbling in electronica and psychedelia along the way. The last time I saw him was a few years ago; I was headed into the West 4th Street station, he was walking with his now-teenage daughter, attending to her words. I hardly recognized him: he had cut his long stringy hair and his face was haggard; his eyes seemed huge in his head, like the holes in a skull. He had passed me before I recognized him. I did not say hello.

Combing through the Barnes & Noble on Court Street the other day I was surprised to find a magazine display entitled “Magazines America Loves.” One of the magazines we love, it seems, is Men’s Health but we don’t love it as much as Adrien Brody who appears on the cover of this month’s issue showing off his rock hard abs. Worse, he is standing on the deck of a sail boat, shirt opened to expose aforesaid abs.

“Scrawny to Brawny!” screams the banner that covers his pelvis. “The King Kong muscle plan” this 96-lb weakling underwent is meant to promote the Peter Jackson film (in which Brody costars with Naomi Watts and Jack Black) and nothing wrong with getting in shape, especially when one is sharing the screen with Ms. Watts, not to mention a giant ape. But Brody won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist just a few years ago. Seems mighty early to be squandering his reputation as a serious actor.

But this is a guy who already did a Diet Pepsi commercial (again post Oscar) and who is slated to appear in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thursday. He is not a snob. Few actors have won the best-actor Oscar as relatively early in the game as Brody ( now 32) or with as little screen experience. (Peter O’Toole and Ben Kingsley come to mind but they’re both Brits, who played famous historical figures in lavish historical dramas.) These kind of career moves seem more in keeping with the long list of supporting actors and actresses who accept a statuette and then disappear, never to be seen again.

Or maybe he just really likes Pepsi.