Things to bring into the 9/11 war memorial

Oh jeez lady! We felt bad for you when you were tricked by a wily New York security guard into handing over your firearm because it was "law enforcement day" down at the 9/11 Memorial, but now it turns out you were carrying a butt-load of cocaine as well? Come on.

Just to refresh your memory 39-year-old Meredith Graves was more than happy to turn in her 38-caliber gun to the proper authorities while visiting the memorial recently, but was unaware that unlike her home state, you can't just travel around with a concealed weapon everywhere. Doink!

But we all make mistakes, right? Just some of us don't also carry around two envelopes of "what appeared to be cocaine" in our purses when we also happen to be sporting a gun. Then again, Ms. Graves is a forth-year med student from Tennessee, so there's a very good chance that it wasn't cocaine...just a meth/Hydrocodone mixture.

Oh well, have fun in jail Ms. Graves!

Ms. Ricci is Rae, the skanky town slut who has done the spread-eagle position for every man and boy from here to Chattanooga. She’s got her sights pinned on Ronnie (yes, that Justin Timberlake!), a lost redneck soldier with a nervous stomach who throws up all the time. But when Ronnie gets shipped off to boot camp, zonked-out Rae goes on a sex binge at the local honky-tonk and ends up drunk, doped to the gills, raped, beaten unconscious and left for dead on the side of the road. Enter Lazarus, played like Uncle Remus by the traditionally militant Samuel L. Jackson.

Lazarus is a Bible-reading, God-fearing old birddog, bitter and broken from a cheating wife and a shattered marriage, and filled with contempt for women of any age and color. Lazarus isn’t sure what to do with the half-naked sick sister he’s rescued from Hell, but believing she’s a gift from Heaven, he determines to cure her—first of her fever, then of her wicked ways. So he chains her to the radiator, clad only in panties and half of a breast-baring shred of a T-shirt, and forces her to listen to his blues compositions—a form of revenge-punishment he must have learned from the American jailers at Abu Ghraib. The title Black Snake Moan has nothing to do with black snakes, although there’s plenty of moanin’, hootin’, hollerin’, scratchin’ and cussin’ in this cotton-pickin’ possum jamboree. It’s the title of a song that Ol’ Lazarus sings down at Bojo’s Juke Joint, in a voice almost as corroded as Tom Waits’. “Calls me when I’m ailin’ / When Ah cain’t find mah home / Got no mama now / I calls it the Black Snake Moan.” Bring earplugs.

Lazarus never gets to know Rae in the Biblical sense, although she sends out a whole slew of crotch-rubbing invitations. Black Snake Moan is about how he frees himself from his own self-hatred when she unchains the shackles of her soul. But the movie, more or less written and most dubiously directed by Craig (Hustle and Flow) Brewer, a graduate of the kick-and-run school of dramatic art, never bothers to examine the scars from abuse that turn burned-out losers into born-dead boll weevils so early in life. The characters are illogical, their motivations only lazily explored in a turgid script that drones on endlessly but rarely rises above the psychology of Amos ’n’ Andy. If Ol’ Lazarus is so concerned with saving Rae from sin and disease, why does he ply her with rotgut whiskey in a Mason jar? It might be tolerable if anybody learned anything or improved their lives in any way, but in the end Rae is lifting her skirt again on the freeway to nowhere, Lazarus is still preachin’ the cracker-barrel Gospel According to Jack Daniels with a new common-law wife, and Ronnie is still puking his guts out. These are illiterate, joint-rollin’, snuff-spittin’, fly-swattin’, time-wastin’ hillbillies from Tobacco Road who betray, deceive, cheat and torture each other, and then stand up at each other’s weddings. Whatever did the actors see in this pig slop? While Mr. Jackson stands a chance of taking his lumps from the NAACP, it is really Ms. Ricci, bruised and writhing on the floor of a black roadhouse covered with scabs and bandages, that is something to see—and it’s pretty repellent. They both sport laughable Southern accents that are about as authentic as Jamaicans playing bagpipes.

Killer Thriller

Zodiac, the stark, terrifying and magnificently directed and researched crime thriller by noir Zen master David Fincher, covers the period in which the San Francisco Bay area was paralyzed with fear by the most satanic serial killer since Jack the Ripper. The Zodiac madman taunted the cops with threats, sent elaborately composed ciphers to the press in which his identity was hidden in secret codes, and even broadcast his voice on morning talk shows in interviews with celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli. He claimed 13 victims, but dozens more are believed to be part of his midnight slaughters.

For nearly 20 years, the case consumed and changed the lives of a small army of law-enforcement officers and journalists, four of whom are the focus here: Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), the geeky cartoonist from The San Francisco Chronicle who turned his obsession into a best-seller; Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), the columnist whose frustration led to alcoholism and a ruined career; and David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards), two detectives who never gave up hopes of solving the case, even after the rest of the world threw in the towel. A great script by James Vanderbilt collates the clues, strategies, facts and theories, and catalogs the ways the Zodiac killer changed his patterns to confuse the cops, as well as the conflicting opinions of handwriting experts, the police incompetence, autopsy reports, anonymous tips and bureaucratic red tape that both helped and hindered the case. The most sinister suspect died of a heart attack in 1992, long after the bloody rampage that held Northern California captive abruptly stopped. The case was never closed, and the search goes on. Ask anybody in San Francisco and they’ll tell you that children still look under their beds at night before turning the lights out.

Zodiac is one of the darkest, creepiest and most tantalizing thrillers I have seen in years. It shows what a clever director and an intense writer can do with the kind of real-life horror-story madman that makes Dracula and the Wolf Man look like kindergarten cuties from “Looney Tunes” and “Merrie Melodies” cartoons. It is the diametrical opposite of The Black Dahlia, another slab of unsolved California Grand Guignol that played like fiction from old Vault of Horror comic books; Zodiac is the real deal. I don’t know if Robert Graysmith, the author of two books that provided the archival data on which the movie is based, is as shy and dorky as he’s played here by Jake Gyllenhaal, but the actor makes him one of the most fascinating and relentless nerds in movie history. Mr. Downey’s portrait of Paul Avery, the Chronicle’s egotistical star crime reporter, takes you by surprise as his arrogance downloads doom. Director Fincher provides so much ominous ambiance that you actually share the helpless panic of the victims in alleys, cabs and lovers’ lanes as fate moves in with stealthy fingers. This is the grim reaper who directed the unsettling serial-killer epic Seven, so he’s been down this depraved highway before and knows all the signs. Zodiac runs nearly two hours and 40 minutes, which is usually an hour more than my chiropractor allows. Miraculously, you will never be bored.

Lesbian Letdown

At the movies, it looks like lesbians are the new golden retrievers. In life, they are powerful and free and everywhere. In the movies, they keep popping up in one labored, unfunny “comedy” after another: cuddly, housebroken and begging for the acceptance and equality that are already regarded as no-brainers by a civilized audience. Gray Matters is another coming-out flop that combines passé elements of the TV shows Ellen and The L-Word with recent and already forgotten indie-prods like Puccini for Beginners. The gimmick here is that a tightly knit brother and sister who live together in such co-dependence that they sing Fred and Ginger tunes, finish each other’s sentences and share the same toothbrush face an insurmountable sibling crisis when they fall in love with the same girl. Gray (Heather Graham) is a beautiful advertising copywriter totally confused by her benign sexual confusion (Heather Graham, lacking in self-confidence?), while her brother Sam (Thomas Cavanagh, from the defunct TV series Ed) is doing his residency at Mt. Sinai, specializing in heart transplants. He’s perky, attractive and clueless in the ways of the world: Otherwise, he’d notice that Gray has no interest in any gender other than her own. How do they make up people this naïve? (His favorite movie is Free Willy!)

One day in the park, they meet a sexy zoologist named Charlie (Bridget Moynahan). Sam falls fast when she declares a passion for hot-fudge sundaes. But Gray develops an equally hot-wired spark for Charlie and tries to kill her interest in Sam. “He snores and has a hairy back,” she warns. Charlie is undeterred. She works with animals, remember? They decide to fly to Las Vegas and get married in six days. It is typical of this movie’s endlessly absurd contrivances that Gray and Charlie take a bath in the same tub, get drunk on champagne, and climb onstage to sing “I Will Survive” with guest star Gloria Gaynor. This all happens in the first few minutes, and there’s a whole 92-minute movie to go. By the time Gray and Charlie fall in bed and lock lips, you pretty much know where this dour, poker-faced farce is heading. Believe me, there is no reason to stick around and find out.

Too old to play ingénues, too young to play mothers and too tired of playing whores, the lovely and capable Ms. Graham seems content just to take whatever jobs come along. She is criminally wasted here. Mr. Cavanagh has an easy, grinning charm, but he lacks the experience and charisma to carry a leading role as the only meat in a girl-to-girl sandwich. He’s also been directed by Sue Kramer (who also wrote the tedious screenplay) to mumble so fast that he swallows whole sentences at a time. Worse still, there is the challenging spectacle of watching the pathetically miscast Alan Cumming in the irrelevant role of a randy heterosexual Scottish cab driver who accompanies Gray to her first gay bar in drag. I don’t know what to say about the tragic walk-on support of the great Sissy Spacek as a screwball psychiatrist who dispenses therapy to her patients in bowling alleys and on rock-climbing expeditions. She seems so embarrassed to sink this low that she actually looks like she’s trying to hide her face from the camera to conceal her misery. She needn’t have bothered. We understand why she’s blushing.

The other night, I watched a friend work her magic at a spot in the East Village. Her face imbued with the flush of three or 10 cocktails, she leaned in toward a guy and turned up the charm. Her saucer eyes remained both alert and beguiling. The guy responded graciously, nodding and sipping, touching and laughing. She took him home that night, had a blast, and sent him on his merry way in the morning.

“I had him in the palm of my hand,” she told me the next day. “And he had me in his.” She didn’t bother to predict the future.

It’s a city thing. A young thing. A thing learned in college after maddening power struggles with lame-ass morons. A New York thing—to kiss, drink and feel nice about it. To feel that a man-woman interaction isn’t such an agonizing mystery. To see sex as a gamble, but fun as hell. To see men as peers, not aliens.

I watch it happen in this city constantly. Nights like these turn into a romance or a sex habit, or else they remain a happy memory. They might cause a little stress, or spark a tiny epiphany (That guy was really just an idiot)—but a city girl’s got a life to lead, so she gets over it.

I think of the “hookup” culture—the adolescent no-man’s land of indefinable sex, the hormone-driven free-for-all caricatured by Tom Wolfe as fellatio and frat parties—as a necessary rite of passage. Laura Sessions Stepp begs to differ. A Washington Post reporter who investigated eighth-grade oral-sex rings back in 1998, Ms. Stepp has now spent a year with three groups of young women—mostly well-off and suburban—in college and high school. They dished about their sex lives freely, terrifying Ms. Stepp in the process.

Unhooked includes vignettes detailing everything from tense IM conversations to a 19-year-old’s near-rape experience. It’s a sympathetic warning to college chicks everywhere and, eventually, a plea to turn back the clock. Ms. Stepp’s girls are detached, stubborn. Confusing love and lust—and resisting their “natural” impulses to love and be loved—they rush into kissing, sex and everything in between. They’ve absorbed all that feminism stuff, and now they’re paying for it. Though its heart is in the right place, feminism has gone too far: It “needs to revisit its assumptions and expand its vision of what it means to be a woman.” In other words, back to the good old days, ladies: “Explore your feminine side …. Bake cookies, brownies, muffins.” Ms. Stepp declares that when you hook up, “you make yourself passionless.”

Ouch. Dare I ask what she thinks of my beguiling, saucer-eyed city girl?

Not that I don’t recognize Ms. Stepp’s rather nuanced account of well-adjusted girls feeling tortured—suppressing swelling feelings, poring over text-messages to try to get inside some guy’s head. Indeed, when I read 19-year-old Shaida’s wistful comment about her fate as a perpetual “fuckbuddy,” a chill of identification creeps down my spine. Shaida admits that there’s “a very fine line between being sexually liberated and being sexually used.” Granted.

But wait. I’m 22, went through it all, and came out fine: I took a cue from the city that had born and bred me. Midway through Ms. Stepp’s exhaustive study of the blow-dried sorority girls at George Washington University and—yep, you guessed it—Duke, I begin to feel indignant on behalf of my neglected demographic: girls, street-smart ones, who do the hookup thing and get out alive … or smarter, even.

Ms. Stepp tells us that it feels nice for a guy to pay for dinner, that lust inevitably fades, and—the kicker—that one should “think erotic, not pornographic.” Now that’s a distinction that’s pissed off pro-sex feminists for years. As I read on, it still does. “Guys are not the enemy,” she concludes. “Don’t excuse their bad behavior, but do try to understand it.” Uh, thanks, Laura—never thought they were the enemy in the first place!

In US Guys, Charlie LeDuff gives a succinct reply: Women have no hope of understanding men. Don’t even try, babe. America has been built, nurtured, enjoyed and destroyed by guys, and they have enough to stress about without bringing women into the picture. “Women here are third…. Never let a broad bust up the family,” Mr. LeDuff says about a fight club in Oakland, Calif., one of the many all-male subcultures he visits as he shuttles us through his own yearlong trip around the country. He takes us from a gay rodeo to a Custer’s Last Stand re-enactment in Montana, reporting with a rough-and-ready poetry on one impoverished group after another. “Men crave dignity and fulfillment,” he tells us—and become losers if they don’t get it. He shows us a nauseating America, unified only by its deeply dissatisfied, highly unmotivated dudes.

Women are background distractions—whores, waitresses, sad-sack wives. Men want to be fulfilled—not by their ladies, but by each other. Boarding a cross-country flight, the author leaves his own wife in tears at the airport: “She wasn’t giving the proper respect and I let her know it.” The problems of America (and believe him, there are many) is a bed that men have made for themselves, and need to lie in—alone. The dearth of women in US Guys underlines a far more ominous boy-girl disconnect than any of the faceless frat boys featured in Unhooked.

Mr. LeDuff focuses mostly on Western and Southern small towns—technically cities, but small towns all the same: Tulsa, Okla.; Amarillo, Tex.; Cleveland, Tenn. I think, smugly, “A smart urban woman could teach these guys a thing or two.” I continue to search in vain for the city girl I know. (I revise my blanket city-girl proclamation after Mr. LeDuff’s chapter on Detroit. In this dying metropolis, a guy’s only reaction to a murdered, ravaged, bloody whore splayed out like a starfish is: “She jus’ a raggedy thing, no one is gonna miss her.”)

So maybe I don’t speak for all city girls. I speak for the New York girls who might not be so baffled by men after all, whose interactions with men aren’t limited to campus mixers or illicit transactions in Detroit warehouses.

Mr. LeDuff does check out New York—and dubs it the birthplace of metrosexuality. His search for the meaning of “metrosexual”—not to be confused with “GAY”—uncovers a man whose groomed nails and sweet-smelling coif reveals a weakness for vanity, consumerism and general societal pressure. This is the closest Mr. LeDuff ever comes to finding an overlap in the sensibilities of men and women. (That he finds it in New York offers me some faint satisfaction.)

In the midst of Laura Stepp’s 14-year-old blowjob experts and sorostitutes and ill-fated feminists, and Charlie LeDuff’s slain sluts, trailer-trash wives and pathetic baby-mamas, Saucer Eyes from the other night is lost in the crowd. In a place like New York, men and women are squeezed so tightly against each other, against revelry and the grind, that they’re forced to learn how to interact. They catch on to each other’s ways … and end up seeming not so different after all.

Nona Willis-Aronowitz has written for The Village Voice and Salon.

As near as anyone can tell, it's not really his fault.

In mid-October, polls showed Ford, a five-term congressman from Memphis, pulling ahead of Republican Bob Corker, a not-at-all surprising result given that (a) the national current so strongly favored the Democrats; (b) the glib and telegenic Ford had shrewdly cultivated a red state-friendly image as a church-going, Pelosi-weary, Second Amendment enthusiast; (c) Corker, who failed in a 1994 Senate bid, had run a listless campaign that had put his party's social conservative base to sleep.

Ford's surge created considerable national buzz, since a win would make him the first African-American elected to the Senate from the South - and only the fourth African-American senator since reconstruction. In the last few weeks, though, his numbers have nosedived, and now he lags anywhere from three to 12 points behind Corker.

Ford, who was joined on the stump by Barack Obama over the weekend, claims he's closing the gap, an assertion a recent Gallup poll seemed to support.

But to some observers, the race is already over, thanks to an ugly political truth: In the privacy of the voting booth, racism, however subtle, still exists. Ford, the theory goes, needs to be ahead in the polls heading into Election Day to offset the silent defections he'll suffer when rural white voters - who may have told pollsters they'd vote for the Democratic Senate candidate - actually see Ford's name on the ballot.

Similar scenarios have played out before. The polls said that Tom Bradley, then the Los Angeles mayor, seemed on track to become California's first black governor in 1982 - a year when Bradley's Democratic affiliation was a clear plus in elections across the country. But when the votes were tallied, Republican George Deukmejian outpolled Bradley by about 95,000 votes

It happens to Republicans, too.

In 2003, Bobby Jindal, the son of Indian immigrants and a super-educated rising political star, consistently led Kathleen Blanco in the race for governor of Louisiana, a state clearly trending toward Jindal's Republican Party. But Blanco eked out a surprise victory - by carrying the state's otherwise GOP-loyal Cajun Country areas.

It is against that backdrop that the Ford-Corker race (and, to a lesser degree, the contest between Robert Menendez and Tom Kean in New Jersey) is being watched. In the anti-GOP year of 2006, a Democrat with Ford's conservative credentials should be able to win an open seat in Tennessee against a disorganized, publicly-awkward foe like Corker. To put it another way, Tennessee's four other conservative Democratic congressmen - John Tanner, Jim Cooper, Bart Gordon and Lincoln Davis - would probably be ahead right now. And as a campaigner, Ford is stronger than all of them.

If he loses, it could have a chilling effect on Obama's decision to run (or not) in 2008. And it could be some time before Democrats line up again so early and strongly for a black candidate in the South.

-- Steve Kornacki

Among the first to test out this excuse in recent days was Laura Ingraham, the hard-line radio and TV talker who insisted that the defeat of Republican candidates would somehow represent a triumph of her ideology. What she told CNN’s Larry King on Oct. 30 is worth examining, if only because we will surely hear more of the same in the days to come from other sources—and because those same claims are already surfacing in the political coverage of The New York Times.

In other words, the reactionary spin is once more set up to turn into the conventional wisdom.

To prove her point, Ms. Ingraham cited three highly competitive Senate races: Pennsylvania, where Democratic nominee Bob Casey Jr. is expected to defeat Republican incumbent Rick Santorum; Tennessee, where Democratic Representative Harold Ford Jr. was in a dead heat with Republican Bob Corker, the former Mayor of Chattanooga, until the Republicans aired a racially polarizing TV commercial; and Virginia, where the underfunded Democratic challenger, James Webb, is bidding to upset Republican incumbent George Allen.

According to Ms. Ingraham, “Whether it’s [Bob] Casey in Pennsylvania or Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee, or even James Webb in Virginia, all these Democrats are running fairly conservative campaigns.” That’s because Mr. Ford says he loves Jesus, and Mr. Casey says he opposes abortion, and Mr. Webb worked for President Reagan two decades ago.

Such simplistic notions are perfect for cable TV, but why would the Times political desk propagate them? In a feature blazoned across the front page that same day, the newspaper of record offered a strikingly similar analysis, which was based chiefly on a few relatively conservative Democrats running for Congress in what the headline described as “Key House Races.” Heath Shuler, a former football player, is the Democratic challenger in a North Carolina district where he surprised nobody by confiding that he likes hunting and dislikes abortion. Brad Ellsworth, the Democratic nominee in an Indiana district represented by a Republican, likewise disdains abortion and boasts about his “A” rating from the National Rifle Association. And Democratic candidate Mike Weaver presents himself the same way in rural Kentucky, of all places.

Supposedly, these candidates prove that the Democratic Party has repented its liberalism and recognized conservatism as the only route to restored influence. The appeal of this argument to conservatives is obvious, for it allows them to claim a specious victory even when their party loses.

It has only one defect, which is that it evaporates instantly upon closer inspection.

In Pennsylvania, Mr. Casey’s conservatism on abortion is offset by his strong liberalism on economic issues, and by the evident public revulsion against his far more conservative opponent. In Virginia, Mr. Webb’s switch to the Democratic Party has been emphasized by his social and economic populism, and by his courageous refusal to endorse a state ballot initiative banning gay marriage. He’s a libertarian progressive, not a conservative. As for Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina and Indiana, what is new about conservative Democrats seeking office in those deep-red states?

Choosing other states as bellwethers provides even more evidence of conservative decline and progressive revival. In Montana, long a bastion of political conservatism in the West, veteran Republican Senator Conrad Burns may well lose his seat to an organic farmer named Jon Tester. Nobody should be misled by Mr. Tester’s flattop hairstyle: He’s a tough progressive who defeated a more centrist, establishment Democrat in the primary. In Missouri, another solid red state, Democrat Claire McCaskill is running a progressive campaign emphasizing her commitment to stem-cell research. In Ohio, where Republicans won the last two Presidential elections, the outspoken progressive Democrat, Representative Sherrod Brown, is considered likely to oust the incumbent Republican Senator, Mike DeWine. In Kansas, Republican officeholders are deserting their party to run as Democrats because they’re appalled by the right-wing radicalism dominating the G.O.P.

Who wins and who loses, where and why, may tell us whether voters are moving leftward and away from the rightist hegemony of the past six years. What a Democratic midterm victory in either house will surely mean, however, is that Americans are appalled by the manifest failures of President Bush and his one-party conservative government, both at home and abroad.

Only a torrent of popular anger can overcome the inherent advantages of incumbency, money, organization and gerrymandering. But if such a tide engulfs the Republicans, their rickety ideology will sink with them.

The rapidity of his rise is fairly astounding: Just two years ago, Mr. Obama was a backbencher in the lowly Illinois State Legislature.

But what’s really noteworthy about the Barack boomlet may simply be that, for the first time, a black elected official has been fast-tracked to the top echelon of national political stardom on the strength of his own celebrity. His rise to prominence, keyed as much by enthusiasm among whites as among blacks, stands in stark contrast to those of Mr. Obama’s black political forebears, whose ambitions generally haven’t extended past the boundaries of their ethnically gerrymandered Congressional districts.

Contrast Mr. Obama’s career path with that of New York’s Charlie Rangel, who now, after 36 years in Congress, stands on the verge of taking over the influential House Ways and Means Committee if the Democrats win in November.

Mr. Rangel has amassed, several times over, the kind of experience and legislative accomplishments that Mr. Obama has been derided by political pundits for lacking. But never have Democratic bigwigs regarded Mr. Rangel as having the widespread appeal needed to win a statewide race for governor or the U.S. Senate.

Mr. Rangel, now 76 years old, is one of dozens of black Congressmen who cut their political teeth during the civil-rights era, beating down the doors to elected office in a way that, ironically, imposed a ceiling on their long-term career growth.

“We had to take it away,” said Donald Payne, the long-serving 72-year-old Congressman from Newark, N.J. “So we were looked on as troublemakers, people who were out of their place.”

Mr. Rangel and Mr. Payne have both championed a liberal, activist brand of politics rooted in their generation’s struggles and neatly suited for their districts, “majority-minority” jurisdictions protected by the federal Voting Rights Act. But their close association with racial politics isn’t seen as a winning recipe for statewide contests, which turn on suburban concerns.

Just look at the numbers: There are 43 black members of the U.S. House, but only one black Senator. And only once in American history has an African-American been elected governor of a state: Virginia’s L. Douglas Wilder in 1989.

“There has been a perception that a black candidate would find it difficult to be accepted in the broader community—especially the older blacks, who had to break down the barriers,” Mr. Payne said.

It is that broader acceptance, though, that Mr. Obama has found—and not accidentally. In fact, his story is merely the most celebrated among those of a vanguard of up-and-coming African-American political leaders poised to break through the glass ceiling faced by the previous generation.

In Tennessee, for example, Harold Ford Jr., the African-American Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, has run one of the shrewdest campaigns in recent memory, staking out ideological turf far to the right of the leaders of the civil-rights generation—but perfectly in sync with the electorate of a state that is now reliably Republican.

Mr. Ford declares himself a believer in the Second Amendment—heresy to someone like Mr. Rangel, a vociferous gun-control proponent. And he bends over backward to assure voters that he thinks Nancy Pelosi—the would-be Democratic House Speaker already pre-emptively vilified by the right as a wacky left-coast feminist—is too liberal. Mr. Payne, by contrast, contends that Ms. Pelosi isn’t liberal enough.

There’s also Deval Patrick, whose “politics of hope” have made him a suburban folk hero and the all-but-certain next governor of Massachusetts—where just under 7 percent of the population is black.

And Artur Davis, a young, articulate and politically moderate Alabama Congressman who dislodged a civil-rights-era Democrat in a 2002 primary. In D.C., some members of the Congressional Black Caucus eye Mr. Davis warily. But he’s made it clear enough that there’s a statewide campaign in his future—not a slow ascent in the House based on seniority.

All of these leaders are one statewide victory from joining Mr. Obama on the short list for national office.

Indeed, there’s a school of thought that Mr. Obama’s ’08 decision will be guided in no small part by next month’s Senate election in Tennessee, where polls show Mr. Ford holding onto a narrow lead.

It remains an open question how many rural Tennesseans will actually check off the name of a black candidate in the privacy of a voting booth.

But the better Mr. Ford fares, the clearer it will be to Mr. Obama—and to his African-American contemporaries in Massachusetts, Alabama and elsewhere—that the era of Congressional seniority as their best route to power is over.

To the Democratic-leaning audience, he was their favorite political martyr. But for a series of major donors and operatives across the country, he’s still very much their candidate for 2008.

“I might host a reception here for Mark Warner, I might attend some event for John Edwards, but I think certainly because of my background with Gore, they wouldn’t expect me to be committed to them if Gore were to come in at the last minute,” said Charles W. Bone, one of Mr. Gore’s major fund-raisers in 2000, who is hosting a reception this weekend for Mr. Warner in Nashville. “I think a lot of folks are just going to stand on the sidelines to see who strikes the hearts of the Democrats, and if nobody does that, it just makes the case stronger for Al Gore.”

These quiet, influential members of Al Gore sleeper cells are only going to become more recognizable in the coming months in places like New York and Los Angeles, the gold-paved El Dorados for Presidential hopefuls. They’ll be the ones who listen to carefully crafted pitches from the other prospective 2008 candidates, go to endless meet-and-greets and maybe even help raise a little money—but who won’t even hint at a commitment until they know for certain what the former Vice President intends to do.

“Al Gore has emerged as an important figure on the national and the world stage after being Vice President because of the courage of his convictions and the power of his message,” said Robert Zimmerman, who was the New York State managing chair for Gore 2000 and who has dined privately with many of the prospective 2008 contenders this year. He is, so far, neutral.

On the evening of Friday, Sept. 15, Mr. Gore and his wife, Tipper, attended a dinner at the Park Avenue apartment of the prominent Democratic donor Hassan Nemazee. The purpose of the dinner was to raise money for Democrats running for the U.S. Senate. Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee was ostensibly the star beneficiary, but the roughly 20 guests dining on Chinese shrimp and noodles seemed most interested in Mr. Gore’s intentions toward 2008.

The former Vice President responded to questions about whether he was going to run by saying that he had no interest in another candidacy, and he even dismissed the arduous process as so much “tomfoolery,” according to Mr. Nemazee. Mr. Gore seemed absolutely content, Mr. Nemazee said, with his work as the herald of the global-warming crusade, with his lucrative job as an advisor to the search engine Google and his burgeoning television company, Current TV, which just merged with Yahoo.

For his part, Mr. Gore has been perfectly consistent on that point. His most prolific fund-raisers, from New York to New Jersey, from Tennessee to Massachusetts, all swear that he has not asked them to raise money for him or withhold contributions from other candidates. According to those loyalists, he still hasn’t told them anything.

“If you are doing what a traditional candidate needs to do,” said Mr. Nemazee, “which is pulling together a group of people who are your actual campaign staff or your shadow campaign staff, or putting together a finance network or a shadow finance network, you are beginning that process, being very active—and he has done none of the above.”

Only one other candidate, Hillary Clinton, has assumed such a nonchalant approach to campaigning as Mr. Gore. With her tens of millions of dollars in the bank and superstar status in the party, she is a similarly special case.

Nearly all the other aspiring candidates—think of John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, Mark Warner, Tom Vilsack, Evan Bayh, Wesley Clark, Bill Richardson, Russ Feingold and Christopher Dodd—have been scrambling to solicit donors on the coasts and spending time getting to know the locals in New Hampshire, Iowa and the other early primary states. For them, it’s necessary spadework if their candidacies are to be taken seriously by donors and party insiders. And they’ll be under growing pressure following the November elections to announce their intentions formally.

Yet clearly, those rules don’t apply to Mr. Gore. For one thing, he has a network of operatives ready to jump into action for him—whenever he makes up his mind to get into the race.

“If he decides to run, many people like myself will come out of retirement and help him,” said Donna Brazile, Mr. Gore’s campaign manager in 2000. “He would be an instant front-runner, could raise the money, has the name ID, could put together the organization; he doesn’t have to start traveling the country till mid-year 2007.”

Chris Deri, who was Mr. Gore’s regional finance chair in the Northeast, said he would jump on board a Gore candidacy with “two feet first.”

“He is the most capable out there in the party to get nominated and win the general election,” said Mr. Deri, adding: “He has quite a unique opportunity to do it differently than the others.”

And of course, in addition to his high-rolling donors, Mr. Gore will almost certainly be able to rely upon those same liberal online activists who showed their financial strength in 2004 by raising tens of millions of dollars for Howard Dean.

“What he believes is perfectly appropriate to the historical moment that we are in,” said Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org, the liberal online organization that claims 3.2 million members. “He is, for our members, one of the greatest leaders around.”

So supposing hypothetically that he is somewhat more interested in running than he’s letting on, all that would remain for Mr. Gore, for now, would be to keep himself in the public eye.

On Monday, Sept. 18, he came to the New York University School of Law to deliver a major policy address calling for an immediate freeze on carbon-dioxide emissions and a shift from a payroll to pollution taxes. After rousing some of the party’s most prominent donors out of their seats at the Sheraton with an impassioned plea “to wake up to the reality of our circumstances and see the truth of the situation that we are in,” Mr. Gore appeared on Good Morning America with Richard Branson, whom he had helped convince to pledge roughly $3 billion to save the environment.

Later that night, he showed up in a black shirt and blazer at an arts space in Chelsea, where he was swarmed by young fans as he danced to Naughty by Nature (“Hip Hop Hooray”) at the launch party of Good magazine, at which his son is associate publisher.

Because of this activity—or maybe despite it—political strategists and key backers of other Democratic candidates seem hesitant to take Mr. Gore at his word about not running in 2008.

“I think he is sitting on the side and watching,” said Alan Patricof, an investor and key fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton. Mr. Patricof had just exited a packed “special session” at the Sheraton on Friday morning moderated by none other than Mrs. Clinton. He said he’d been there the day before for Mr. Gore’s speech and that he had applauded.

“I would say, from all his visibility, every indication is that he certainly hasn’t disappeared from the public scene,” he said.

The only question about any Gore candidacy, then, is this: How long is too long to wait?

“I think the point and the immediate question is, how much of the old network he enjoyed has either gotten out of politics or committed to another candidate?” said Warren Gooch, a Tennessee lawyer who bundled more than $100,000 for Mr. Gore in 2000. “Obviously, in a national campaign, the later that you wait, the more difficult it is to raise the money. But if the premise is correct that he can wait later than most people to do that, you’ve got to think he can raise enough money to be competitive.”

And what would Mr. Gooch do in the event of a late-breaking Gore candidacy?

“If Al Gore runs for President,” he said, “I’m going to support Al Gore.”

—additional reporting by Michael Calderone

A lot of this process, of course, involves my hot-button relationship with my Jewish roots, and my self-description as an "assimilator." I get active comment on this score, a lot of it judgmental. Frankly, I am even grateful to these people.

They are taking time to engage with me, and to comment to me. Some of them want to excommunicate me, but I believe there's also a generosity in their actions. Heck: I doubt they'll convert me, and meantime I will learn to make better argument for myself.

This is apropos of an anonymous commenter providing the following on my reflections about sitting next to my liberal Protestant, West-Bank-Arab-hospital-visiting mother-in-law at Andover commencement:

I admire his dispassionate tone. For my side, I just want to say that the program for the Andover commencement (what they call, fustily, Order of Exercises at Exhibition) states that the "Benediction" was done by Rabbi Neil Kominsky, D.D. So: talk to the rabbi about that. I think the difference may reflect real differences in Jewish custom between Reformed and more conservative Jews (I grew up Conservative, by the way, or so my father fashioned it; we didn't like the Reformed suburban megatemples).

As to my being out of the tribe—I can't fight that; I really am assimilating, though I will always be Jewish and Jewy in character—this gets to the heart of my Jewish problem. Can you achieve great success in America, indeed a place in the Establishment that "runs" America, and maintain a tribal identity that is so separate as to, for instance, require in-marriage? For myself, the answer was No. That's for myself: I don't offer a program for others to assimilate as well. But I would repeat something I've said before: Joe Lieberman had the same answer. When he was running for vice president, he lied on Imus, saying that his Jewish religious organizations (conservative ones) did not place a bar on intermarriage. Lieberman surely felt this misrepresentation was politically necessary. Maybe to counter antisemitism, which I believe was a real and unspoken factor in the 2000 race (resulting, for instance, in Gore-Lieberman losing Tennessee). Maybe another reason was that he wanted to present Jewish culture to the nonJewish public as a democratic one&#151or, in the parlance of modern America, accessible. My commenter and I agree: the tribe is not accessible.

This tension between the values of tribe and polity, experienced by both Lieberman and myself, is important. For him, politically, it could mean that antisemitism will still be a fact of high political existence: that Jews will not be trusted with the presidency (especially after the wreckage of the neocons!). Myself I feel a need to resolve it intellectually in ways that go beyond the judgment, shared by myself and many of my commenters, though maybe not by my mother-in-law, that I'm a bad Jew. I love my Americanness. When I got married, a good Jewish friend said, "You know the only question: Will they hide you?" He meant, Would my goyische relations hide me from enemies (and of course he meant the holocaust). The answer is Yes.

The “sexual aberration” of which Kessel wrote undoubtedly seemed more shocking in 1929 than it is in this current period of erotic escalation on the screen, the stage, television, videos, DVD’s and—most alarmingly of all to parents—the Internet. Indeed, Belle de Jour has reopened in New York at a time when movies are crossing new frontiers of male and female bodily exposure—gay sex, transsexualism, sadomasochism et al. And yet, of all the supposedly challenging attractions playing locally in our supposedly more enlightened era, the most compellingly erotic and entertaining spectacle is still provided by Belle de Jour—because of Buñuel’s genius, and his self-involvement in the seeming sordidness of the subject.

The plot of both book and movie is straightforward enough: Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), happily married to a handsome young surgeon, goes to work in a house of ill repute—actually less a house than an intimate apartment. The money involved is less a motivation than a pretext for her actions: Pierre, her husband (Jean Sorel), provides for all of Séverine’s material needs handsomely, but his respectfully temporizing caresses fail to satisfy her psychic need for brutal degradation—a need first awakened by a malodorous molester when she was a child of 8. To preserve a façade of marital respectability, Séverine works at her obsessive profession only in the afternoon, from 2 to 5 p.m., with the mystery of her matinee schedule causing her to be christened “Belle de Jour.”

Buñuel fragments Ms. Deneuve’s body into its erotic components: His shots of feet, hands, legs, stockings and undergarments are the shots not only of a fetishist like Stroheim, but of a cubist, a director concerned simultaneously with the parts and their effect on the whole. Buñuel’s graceful camera movements convey Ms. Deneuve to her sensual destiny through her black patent-leather shoes, and to her final reverie through ringed fingers feeling their way along the furniture with the tactile tendency of a mystical sensuality—Séverine’s, Deneuve’s or Buñuel’s, it makes little difference.

The beauty of the filmed version of Belle de Jour arises from its implication of Buñuel in its vision of the world. It is Buñuel who is the most devoted patron of Chez Madame Anais and the most discerning admirer of Ms. Deneuve’s Séverine/Belle de Jour. Never before has Buñuel’s view of the spectacle seemed so obliquely Ophülsian in its shy gaze from behind curtains, windows and even peepholes. Buñuel reminded us once again in Belle de Jour that he was one of the few men of the left not afflicted by Puritanism and bourgeois inhibitions about the sex lives of the “masses.”

Anti-Erotic Pinup

Mary Harron’s The Notorious Bettie Page, from a screenplay by Ms. Harron and Guinevere Turner, is based partly on research from The Real Bettie Page by Richard Foster, though the real Bettie Page declined to cooperate with the filmmakers. Hence, no afterword follows the final fade-out, as is customary with these quasi-biographical projects. The film itself—which, I feel, has been wildly overrated—strikes me as smugly anti-erotic in the extreme, in that Ms. Harron and Ms. Turner heap ridicule on Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee (David Strathairn) for his self-righteous crusade against S&M pinup Bettie Page. This was in 1955, mind you, and we all know how backward and bigoted people were in 1955—especially people from Tennessee, who had the churchgoing Senator Kefauver to represent their state’s Bible Belt constituency. On bread-and-butter issues, however, Mr. Kefauver was a populist liberal. Who represents the state in 2006? Why, that great statesman and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who so distinguished himself with his anti-plug-pulling antics in the Terri Schiavo case. Some progress in 50 years!

This is not to blame Ms. Page for turning out to be a dull character in such a luridly advertised come-on—nor the equally attractive Gretchen Mol, who plays the period pinup with appropriately naughty but nice complicity, down to her scanties and beyond. Still, even as a certified lifelong lecherous voyeur, I cannot report that Ms. Mol’s fleshy incarnation of Ms. Page turned me on in the slightest. For one thing, though I was always susceptible to female nudity, I never had any contact that I can recall with the Bettie Page phenomenon, perhaps because I was never into bondage and sadomasochistic fantasies. She was apparently too nice a girl to be involved in hard-core pornography, like such legendary beauties as Candy Barr and Marilyn Chambers. She was never even a striptease artist like the personable Gypsy Rose Lee and Rose La Rose. All she did was pose and make faces at the camera as if it were all a big joke.

She was born in Tennessee in 1923 and was apparently a good enough student to prepare for a teaching career, but she soon turned to modeling once she left her hometown for New York City, posing first for camera clubs and later for professional photographers. Before she left Tennessee, there is the sketchy intimation that she was sexually abused by her father, and the film also shows her very naïvely allowing herself to be picked up by a stranger and lured into a gang rape that nonetheless seems to leave no lasting psychic scars. Indeed, throughout all her posing, Bettie never projects any sensuality, and her relationships with both men and women are never anything but professional. Finally, she rediscovers Jesus and returns to her revivalist roots.

The film more or less begins and ends with Bettie sitting outside a U.S. Senate hearing chamber for hours and hours while a procession of male witnesses testify about the harm that her bondage photos have done to their sons, at least one of whom accidentally strangled himself to death. Finally, Bettie is excused without being allowed to testify in her own defense. In between the beginning and the end of her ordeal, she is shown cheerfully posing for such real-life photographers as Paula Klaw (Lili Taylor), Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer), Bunny Yeager (Sarah Paulson) and the clownish John Willie (Jared Harris).

In a strange way, The Notorious Bettie Page functions as a chick-flick fantasy of a power-wielding female turning the male gaze with little effort into grotesque submission. Ms. Harron and Ms. Turner have previously collaborated on American Psycho (2000), from Bret Easton Ellis’ sicko novel. They are working at a considerably lower voltage here, though their political attitudes are consistent in pushing the envelope far beyond conventional sexual attitudes. When one makes a joke about a young man strangling himself to death trying to imitate a bondage ritual, one runs the risk of calling into question all the striving for absolute sexual freedom and tolerance.

Altman in Queens

Robert Altman’s creative and varied 29-film career is being honored by a retrospective of his work at the Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Avenue at 36th Street, in Astoria, Queens. It begins on April 29 at 2 p.m. with Kansas City (1996), starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, Harry Belafonte, Michael Murphy, Dermot Mulroney and Steve Buscemi in a jazz-scored mix of crime, politics and melodrama redolent of Mr. Altman’s hometown memories. The series ends with his latest effort, A Prairie Home Companion, on Thursday, June 8, at 6:30 p.m., at the D.G.A. Theater on 57th Street, starring Garrison Keillor, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline and Lindsay Lohan. Mr. Altman will be on hand at both the opening and closing events of the series for a Q&A with museum curator David Schwartz.

In between the director’s two appearances are such acknowledged Altman classics as Nashville (1975), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Thieves Like Us (1974), Images (1972), Short Cuts (1993), Gosford Park (2001), Brewster McCloud (1970), M*A*S*H* (1970), The Long Goodbye (1973), California Split (1974), Three Women (1977), Vincent and Theo (1990) and The Player (1992), among others. Ms. Streep and Ms. Tomlin were clearly the comic highlight of this year’s Oscar ceremony with their well-rehearsed riff on Mr. Altman’s gift for improvisation, a prelude to the director’s richly deserved Lifetime Achievement Award. Both actresses appear as if for an encore in A Prairie Home Companion, which, I hear, is destined to become another Robert Altman classic.

The “sexual aberration” of which Kessel wrote undoubtedly seemed more shocking in 1929 than it is in this current period of erotic escalation on the screen, the stage, television, videos, DVD’s and—most alarmingly of all to parents—the Internet. Indeed, Belle de Jour has reopened in New York at a time when movies are crossing new frontiers of male and female bodily exposure—gay sex, transsexualism, sadomasochism et al. And yet, of all the supposedly challenging attractions playing locally in our supposedly more enlightened era, the most compellingly erotic and entertaining spectacle is still provided by Belle de Jour—because of Buñuel’s genius, and his self-involvement in the seeming sordidness of the subject.

The plot of both book and movie is straightforward enough: Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), happily married to a handsome young surgeon, goes to work in a house of ill repute—actually less a house than an intimate apartment. The money involved is less a motivation than a pretext for her actions: Pierre, her husband (Jean Sorel), provides for all of Séverine’s material needs handsomely, but his respectfully temporizing caresses fail to satisfy her psychic need for brutal degradation—a need first awakened by a malodorous molester when she was a child of 8. To preserve a façade of marital respectability, Séverine works at her obsessive profession only in the afternoon, from 2 to 5 p.m., with the mystery of her matinee schedule causing her to be christened “Belle de Jour.”

Buñuel fragments Ms. Deneuve’s body into its erotic components: His shots of feet, hands, legs, stockings and undergarments are the shots not only of a fetishist like Stroheim, but of a cubist, a director concerned simultaneously with the parts and their effect on the whole. Buñuel’s graceful camera movements convey Ms. Deneuve to her sensual destiny through her black patent-leather shoes, and to her final reverie through ringed fingers feeling their way along the furniture with the tactile tendency of a mystical sensuality—Séverine’s, Deneuve’s or Buñuel’s, it makes little difference.

The beauty of the filmed version of Belle de Jour arises from its implication of Buñuel in its vision of the world. It is Buñuel who is the most devoted patron of Chez Madame Anais and the most discerning admirer of Ms. Deneuve’s Séverine/Belle de Jour. Never before has Buñuel’s view of the spectacle seemed so obliquely Ophülsian in its shy gaze from behind curtains, windows and even peepholes. Buñuel reminded us once again in Belle de Jour that he was one of the few men of the left not afflicted by Puritanism and bourgeois inhibitions about the sex lives of the “masses.”

Anti-Erotic Pinup

Mary Harron’s The Notorious Bettie Page, from a screenplay by Ms. Harron and Guinevere Turner, is based partly on research from The Real Bettie Page by Richard Foster, though the real Bettie Page declined to cooperate with the filmmakers. Hence, no afterword follows the final fade-out, as is customary with these quasi-biographical projects. The film itself—which, I feel, has been wildly overrated—strikes me as smugly anti-erotic in the extreme, in that Ms. Harron and Ms. Turner heap ridicule on Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee (David Strathairn) for his self-righteous crusade against S&M pinup Bettie Page. This was in 1955, mind you, and we all know how backward and bigoted people were in 1955—especially people from Tennessee, who had the churchgoing Senator Kefauver to represent their state’s Bible Belt constituency. On bread-and-butter issues, however, Mr. Kefauver was a populist liberal. Who represents the state in 2006? Why, that great statesman and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who so distinguished himself with his anti-plug-pulling antics in the Terri Schiavo case. Some progress in 50 years!

This is not to blame Ms. Page for turning out to be a dull character in such a luridly advertised come-on—nor the equally attractive Gretchen Mol, who plays the period pinup with appropriately naughty but nice complicity, down to her scanties and beyond. Still, even as a certified lifelong lecherous voyeur, I cannot report that Ms. Mol’s fleshy incarnation of Ms. Page turned me on in the slightest. For one thing, though I was always susceptible to female nudity, I never had any contact that I can recall with the Bettie Page phenomenon, perhaps because I was never into bondage and sadomasochistic fantasies. She was apparently too nice a girl to be involved in hard-core pornography, like such legendary beauties as Candy Barr and Marilyn Chambers. She was never even a striptease artist like the personable Gypsy Rose Lee and Rose La Rose. All she did was pose and make faces at the camera as if it were all a big joke.

She was born in Tennessee in 1923 and was apparently a good enough student to prepare for a teaching career, but she soon turned to modeling once she left her hometown for New York City, posing first for camera clubs and later for professional photographers. Before she left Tennessee, there is the sketchy intimation that she was sexually abused by her father, and the film also shows her very naïvely allowing herself to be picked up by a stranger and lured into a gang rape that nonetheless seems to leave no lasting psychic scars. Indeed, throughout all her posing, Bettie never projects any sensuality, and her relationships with both men and women are never anything but professional. Finally, she rediscovers Jesus and returns to her revivalist roots.

The film more or less begins and ends with Bettie sitting outside a U.S. Senate hearing chamber for hours and hours while a procession of male witnesses testify about the harm that her bondage photos have done to their sons, at least one of whom accidentally strangled himself to death. Finally, Bettie is excused without being allowed to testify in her own defense. In between the beginning and the end of her ordeal, she is shown cheerfully posing for such real-life photographers as Paula Klaw (Lili Taylor), Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer), Bunny Yeager (Sarah Paulson) and the clownish John Willie (Jared Harris).

In a strange way, The Notorious Bettie Page functions as a chick-flick fantasy of a power-wielding female turning the male gaze with little effort into grotesque submission. Ms. Harron and Ms. Turner have previously collaborated on American Psycho (2000), from Bret Easton Ellis’ sicko novel. They are working at a considerably lower voltage here, though their political attitudes are consistent in pushing the envelope far beyond conventional sexual attitudes. When one makes a joke about a young man strangling himself to death trying to imitate a bondage ritual, one runs the risk of calling into question all the striving for absolute sexual freedom and tolerance.

Altman in Queens

Robert Altman’s creative and varied 29-film career is being honored by a retrospective of his work at the Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Avenue at 36th Street, in Astoria, Queens. It begins on April 29 at 2 p.m. with Kansas City (1996), starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, Harry Belafonte, Michael Murphy, Dermot Mulroney and Steve Buscemi in a jazz-scored mix of crime, politics and melodrama redolent of Mr. Altman’s hometown memories. The series ends with his latest effort, A Prairie Home Companion, on Thursday, June 8, at 6:30 p.m., at the D.G.A. Theater on 57th Street, starring Garrison Keillor, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline and Lindsay Lohan. Mr. Altman will be on hand at both the opening and closing events of the series for a Q&A with museum curator David Schwartz.

In between the director’s two appearances are such acknowledged Altman classics as Nashville (1975), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Thieves Like Us (1974), Images (1972), Short Cuts (1993), Gosford Park (2001), Brewster McCloud (1970), M*A*S*H* (1970), The Long Goodbye (1973), California Split (1974), Three Women (1977), Vincent and Theo (1990) and The Player (1992), among others. Ms. Streep and Ms. Tomlin were clearly the comic highlight of this year’s Oscar ceremony with their well-rehearsed riff on Mr. Altman’s gift for improvisation, a prelude to the director’s richly deserved Lifetime Achievement Award. Both actresses appear as if for an encore in A Prairie Home Companion, which, I hear, is destined to become another Robert Altman classic.