oh, man, I feel like such a tool. I think everything was working ok--it appears that xorg just changed its look a little. When I run 'X' with no arguments, I expect the irritating black-and-white background. apparently it's just a black background now. the lack of mouse pointer did throw me off, but I noticed that it appeared after I ran 'DISPLAY=:0 xrandr -q' from a console shell. tried xdm, and that worked fine.
sigh...
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