The Farm Report

We watched the news reports of Michael Jackson’s death and I had Elvis flashbacks.

I so clearly remember the day Elvis died. My first wife and I walked into a Wendy’s restaurant in our new hometown, Bowling Green, Ky., and the clerk behind the counter was crying. “Elvis died,” she said. “May I take your order?”

And that night, as I painted the bathroom in our new home (peach, if you want to know), I listened to hours of Elvis on the radio.

So when Michael died, I again felt the passing of a musical icon, but with mixed emotions. Elvis abused his body. Michael abused the bodies of others – of innocents.

But then I got a text message from my eldest son. And that’s when it hit me.

“Daddy! Daddy!” it began. “Fwilla!”

My son is a 27-year-old man now, a public-health professional, a responsible and dedicated citizen. But in that message, he took me back to the time when he was 2 years old and infatuated with Michael Jackson. I’d be in my study, working on my dissertation, and he would leap into the room to announce that the new Michael Jackson video, “Thriller” (Fwilla!) was on MTV. Then I’d go sit and watch it with him. He loved it and was scared by it at the same time and he needed his daddy with him. He’d stand spread-eagled in front of the television – like Tony Olivia at the plate – and begin those instinctive, involuntary dance moves. How could you listen to Michael Jackson and not dance?

When I got that message, I realized that my son’s generation has lost its Elvis.

Elvis’s death was heartbreaking. A revolutionary figure in American music and culture died at 42, in the bathroom of his mansion, reading “The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus.” Shakespeare could not improve upon that tragedy.

Michael’s death, at 50, has other complications. As with my son watching “Thriller,” all of us felt  with Michael that we loved him and were scared by him at the same time.

I was reminded of a famous quote from American poet and physician William Carlos Williams: “The pure products of America go crazy.” Peter Guralnick, to my mind the greatest writer on popular music, often used that quote when he wrote (eloquently) about Elvis Presley.

It’s appropriate for Elvis’s son-in-law as well.

None of our friends in the press seem worried about libel and present as fact that Michael’s father, Joe Jackson, brutalized his children, setting into motion a cycle of abuse. If, as charged, Michael was a serial child molester who somehow beat the rap, then his crimes are unforgivable. There is a special place in hell for people who hurt children.

There’s much more baggage with Michael than with Elvis. Elvis was his own victim. His sloth and addictions killed him. Michael’s addictions cost his victims their innocence and their childhoods. Perhaps he used these third parties to exact revenge on his father for his own lost childhood. Forced onstage at an early age, a professional entertainer while still in single digits, it was no surprise when “adult” Michael built a fairyland in which to live. No surprise, but pathetic all the same.

Another quote comes to mind. It was said about musical savant Brian Wilson, the tortured soul behind the joyful music of the Beach Boys: “He was a genius musician, but an amateur human being.”

That, too, applies to Michael.

So I get the text message from my son, that dancing 2-year-old who is now a grown man, and I recognize this as another generational shock wave, a reminder of our mortality. If Michael, that Peter Pan of popular music, can die, then none of us is safe.

When we first saw him as a child, he sang songs that were at once nursery rhymes and  love songs. Though he obviously sang with the voice of a child, his phrasing and delivery were those of a mature singer. That was a gift.

I will remember him for “Off the Wall” and “Thriller,” one of the great one-two punches in popular music history. I will remember the charming child singing “I Want You Back.” I will remember the joy of watching him dance, of marveling that a human being could move like that. I’ll remember my little boy, standing mesmerized in front of the television, trying to emulate those moves.

And there are other things that I also can’t forget.

I noticed it 30 years ago, when I began teaching. In my history class, students seemed to have little interest in the cast of characters until photography came along. Pictures changed the way we looked at history. We were never as interested in George Washington as were in Abraham Lincoln. It was because of those portraits of Lincoln, where we could look into his haunted eyes.

You can’t hide from pictures. The horrific video of a young woman bleeding out on a Tehran street not only makes the political upheaval in Iran more tangible, it also shows the power of new media. We don’t turn to television, toward any immaculately dressed network news anchor, to see these images. We click on YouTube and get handheld cell phone video from a helpless bystander.

The photographer was a doctor, not a journalist. But the new media have changed the way we regard journalism and changed the very nature of the game. That journalists are bitching about this is somewhat hypocritical. Journalists have always bowed and scraped before the gods of competition. We believe that competitive journalism is better journalism. And as newspapers folded or were gobbled up by chains, we lamented at the cost of competition. If you wanted to create a competitor in a one-newspaper town, you were out of luck unless you have a couple billion for start-up cash.

Now all it takes is a kid with a keyboard or a bystander with a cell phone. The citizen journalist is all around us. It’s taken us back to the days of colonial journalism in America when a kid with a printing press could make a difference. So why should we – i.e., journalists – bitch about this?

Because we can. As Morley Safer said this week, “I would trust a citizen journalist as much as I would trust a citizen surgeon.” Agreed, big guy.

There are still a number of questions to be raised about how new media have democratized journalism. I go into detail about this in my new piece for The Florida Engineer. In the piece, I chat with Tom Wolfe about his concerns about how new media and all of our cool new time-saving toys are eating all of the precious hours from our too-brief lives on this planet.

But if we raise issues about any of this, we’re put down as Luddite assholes for even asking questions. (Odd . . . that would seem to make them the small-minded ones.)

Certainly, information posted on the New York Times Web site carries with it the credibility of that magnificent franchise. Maybe JoeBobsDailyNews.com can’t complete with that. (Don’t Google that. To the best of my knowledge, there is no JoeBobsDailyNews.com).

The arrogance of now – whatever generation sits in the throne room – is that what we have achieved is it. But we need to see that we are always in transition. The over-used buzz phrase on campuses these days is that “change is the only constant.” Like all clichés, it suffers from truth.

Newspapers and news organizations are evolving. The public now has tools to rival a reporter’s toys. We’re coming together and something new is emerging. It’s fun to watch and it’s scary. We teeter on the precipice of trivialization. If you don’t believe me, ponder the media attention this week given to Perez Hilton’s face cut and resulting rant.

Yet on the other side of the precipice is a new world order of information sharing. It continues to make this — despite the media saturation of “Jon and Kate Plus 8” — a fascinating time to be a media watcher.

Sometimes, my friends in the newspaper business tell me they’re baffled that our journalism enrollments are through the roof at the University of Florida. We are more than 100 students above our enrollment cap in journalism. Despite bad news in the news business, students still  line up to petition to get into our program.

“Don’t they read newspapers?” my friends ask. “Don’t they realize what’s happening to our business?”

Of course they do. But I have some good news.  The best of today’s students still have the same convictions about public service and the people’s right to know as any newspaper journalist. They are committed to strong and accurate storytelling.

They’re just not so sure that these functions require newsprint.

I tell my friends that today’s journalism students have “faith in the function, if not the form” of journalism. No matter how it’s delivered, there will always be a demand for news and information.

(From Bill McKeen’s Book Blog in Tampa’s Creative Loafing.)

LEARNING TO FLY: Maybe it doesn’t happen for everyone. But for those who love books, it’s not hard to remember that moment when they fell in love with reading.

Maybe it happened early on, with Dr. Seuss. Maybe it came later, during the early pangs of adolescence, with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

For me, it happened when I first laid hands upon The Wind in the Willows. What a strange and wonderful world Kenneth Grahame described in his 1908 novel for children. This tale of a mole, a river rat, a badger and the officious Mr. Toad was the first major step in my lifelong reading habit. Not sure where that first copy came from: It was the 50th anniversary Scribners edition, illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard, and it came out when I was three. It was probably my older brother’s copy.

At school, I plunged into reading – Robb White’s The Lion’s Paw , a whole series of biographical books aimed at the elementary school set – but Wind in the Willows was sort of a secret. None of my other friends had read it. Maybe, I figured, it was an English thing. I’d spent my first few Wonder Years in England. Later, when I read that the book was one of John Lennon’s childhood inspirations, I felt some kind of vindication.

None of my friends here in the States had read Wind in the Willows, though they were conversant in Poohspeak. A.A. Milne’s Winnie-The-Pooh came two decades after Grahame’s book, but both books were illustrated by the same artist, Shepard, who did the Wind in the Willows I knew best.

Now, just after its 100th anniversary, Wind in the Willows is back, in the deluxe treatment. That classic Scribners editionI grew up with is still available (from Atheneum Books), butW.W. Norton, the publisher that produces the “Annotated” series of books, has turned its reverent and superb attention to this classic of children’s literaure. (Norton has produced several books in the “annotated” series. Click here for more.)

The Annotated Wind in the Willows (W.W. Norton, $39.95) fascinates and entertains on so many levels.

First of all, there’s the great story of the adventures of Mole and Rat and how they band together with Badger to assist Mr. Toad in his battle against evil. There’s also a moment of revelation about the mystic powers of language. The chapter titled “Pipers at the Gates of Dawn” struck me in ways I didn’t begin to understand as a child. Yet it took me to another level and I realized language could guide you into a dream state. (It also might have inspired my first hallucinations, but that’s another story.)
For someone who grew up with this book, it’s the “annotated” stuff that gives this beautiful volume its added value. The Shepard illustrations are here, but so are pictures from earlier editions. The notes on the creation of the book – the “Dear Mouse” letters that Grahame wrote as prelude – are fascinating. All my life, Kenneth Grahame was simply the name of the man who wrote a wonderful book. The Annotated Wind in the Willows not only gives us the book, but the story of the creator and his life and struggles.

A beautiful book. It’s a crime if you don’t read this aloud to a child in your life. Think of the door you’ll be opening.

NOT FOR THE KIDS: OK, on the opposite end of the spectrum. Don’t read this next book to kids. But it’s a lot of fun and you’ll probably feel like a big, goofy kid if you follow the writer’s instructions.

Absinthe and Flamethrowers (Chicago Review Press, $16.95) by William Gurstelle is a mash-up ofMr. Wizard and Hunter S. Thompson. Gurstelle is an engineer who has now written two books (the first was Backyard Ballistics) about controlled mayhem.

In short, he tells us how to have all kinds of dangerous fun and the science and ballistics behind this delinquency. Absinthe and Flamethrowers is a guidebook to all sorts of mischievous projects you can do yourself.

Mr. Wizard – Don Herbert, host of the old smart-kids TV show – used to show how to do things on his weekly program. “First, get a used toilet-paper roll, then …” You do need a few props here and there, but Gurstelle’s primary interest is urging his readers to take risks. To that end, he offers us tips on the best places in the country to drive fast. For those of us who’ve had 50 years of Indianapolis 500 fantasies, this may be the closest we’ll ever come.

The comparison to Mr. Wizard is apt. Gurstelle de-mystfies science and engineering and makes it fun for all. The comparison to  Thompson is also on the money. Gurstelle, like the late doctor, loves to blow up shit.

LEONARD, WE HARDLY KNEW YE: Leonard Michaels crossed my mind the other day. I was reading a particularly insightful interview he’d done with the great American novelist, Thomas McGuane. And I thought: Damn, I haven’t read anything by Leonard Michaels in a long time.

   

 

With good reason. He died in 2003. Obviously, I should have renewed my New Yorker subscription when it expired in 1982. I’m so out of it with regard to belles-lettres.

I do remember admiring Michaels’ short stories when I was a young swain, reading damn near anything I could get my hands on, trying to learn how to make money out of pecking a keyboard.

Though it’s been years since I read anything by Michaels, the memory of his work always lingered, and so I immediately glommed onto The Essays of Leonard Michaels (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26).

It makes me recall how I felt about John Updike and Philip Roth. Their fiction didn’t always hit me. Much as I loved Updike’s Couples and his Rabbit books, some of his novels fell flat, in my opinion. But man, did I love his essays. Same thing with Philip Roth – when he is good, he is very very good and when he is bad … well, he’s still better than most of humanity. But one of the most enjoyable reading experiences of my life was diving into Roth’s Reading Myself and Others.

So Michaels – whose fiction often moved me but was just as often too delicate for me – turns out to be that special novelist who is also a brilliant essayist.

Michaels’ book of essays is not a doorstop and you get the sense that the editor truly culled the greatest hits from the late writer’s archive. The first half – the critical essays, the writing about others – shows him to be as astute an observer of the literary scene as Updike, Roth, Norman Mailer or other heavyweights who also wrote reviews.

But it’s the second part, the autobiographical essays, that gives the book its tremendous heart. These stories shed the artifice of fiction and Michaels just tells us the story of his life. His greatest stories were his own. These are brilliant pieces of writing and it makes me realize how much I miss his work in my life. This book is at once thrilling and immensely sad. If you haven’t read Leonard Michaels before, you should.

(From Bill McKeen’s Book Blog, featured in Tampa’s Creative Loafing.)

FATHER ALONG: Nobody knows how to be a parent. When people enter adulthood and see the rest of life yawning ahead, they look at this parenthood thing and cringe. How the fuck am I supposed to do that? A young friend once said he thought he might not be a good parent because wasn’t very good with his dog. I didn’t say anything, but I thought, “Dude – trust me. It’s different.”

I’m a father of seven and I’m still trying to figure out this shit. No. 7 is just as perplexing as No. 1. What worked for No. 2 doesn’t faze No. 5 at all.

But one thing I’m pretty sure about: You only begin to understand the profound depth of love when you become a parent. At least, it was that way for me.

And it seems like it was that way for Michael Lewis too, based on Home Game (W.W. Norton, $23.95). Lewis sees himself as a Yuppie curmudgeon and was dragged kicking and screaming by his wife – formerMTVer Tabitha Soren – into life as a daddy. Once he joined the club, there was anger, resentment and self-pity. But then he seemed to get it.

That ideal family of television situation comedies does not exist. Families are complex organisms and parenthood ain’t pretty. The best we can do is try and certainly it’s a parent’s duty to protect children and let them be children as long as they can.

Lewis has the usual neuroses and then some. The majority of parents probably fall in love with their child at first sight (if they haven’t already loved the idea of the child in utero).

In Lewis’s case, the first baby arrived and . . . nothing. Or, at least, next to nothing. He doesn’t feel the overwhelming wallop of emotion he’s been told to expect.

So Home Game is sort of a running diary of growing into love. No one will accuse Lewis of being overly sentimental, but he does achieve a cumulative, deep resonance of love in this book.

There’s a holiday coming up on June 21 that honors fathers. This might be a great gift for the old man. If he isn’t much of a reader, it’s cool; Home Game clocks in at just under 200 pages, and it has pictures. Oh – and did we mention that Michael Lewis is a brilliant writer? He’ll get pop over the hump.

   

ERIC HARRIS and DYLAN KLEBOLD, Columbine’s killers

CONCENTRATED EVIL: I used to drive past the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building a couple times a week when I lived in Oklahoma. When terrorist Timothy McVeigh bombed it in 1995, he killed 168 people in the building, but he wounded a whole country.

That was two years after the fiery siege of cult leader David Koresh’s religious compound and four years before two schoolboys shot up some classmates and a teacher in Littleton, Colo.

All of these events happened the same time of year, right around April 20, the birthday of Adolf Hitler.
Some of my Oklahoma friends still won’t go near any sort of Federal building – even a post office – that time of year. It’s the time of concentrated evil.

So this year, we all held our breath for the 10th anniversary of the Columbine shooting. We made it through it, and now it’s time to consider Columbine without tears.

Dave Cullen’s Columbine (Twelve Books, $26.99) is a masterwork of journalism. Since the heady days of New Journalism in the 1960s (Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, etc.) that style those writers pioneered – no longer “new,” it’s called Literary Journalism — has sometimes been suspect. One of the tenets of journalism is that it’s true. So many authors try to blend fact and fiction and “re-imagine” things that happened … things that they cannot verify as truth. So a lot of stuff that is essentially fiction has been published under the aegis of Literary Journalism. (Which raises another question: Is anything ever over the aegis?)

All that is by way of saying that Dave Cullen might single-handedly give Literary Journalism back its good name. Much like the moment-by-moment telling of the 9-11 attacks – Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn’s 102 Minutes – this book looks unflinchingly at something that shows what horrifying acts humans are capable of committing. 

Lots of great, heart-tugging stories emerged from the Columbine massacre. Some of them weren’t true. Some storytellers never let truth get in the way, but Cullen sifts through the mythology and delivers the truth. Cullen has done a magnificent job of burrowing into the dark souls of the teen-age assassins, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

In press releases, the publisher compares Columbine to Capote’s In Cold Blood. That story of a multiple murder and its consequences is carved into the Literary Journalism Rushmore.

Maybe we need to start carving Columbine into that mountain. It not only deserves the comparison with Capote, it sets a new standard.

INSPIRATION, Part 1: Everybody loves a comeback story. Watching Dara Torres in the last Olympics was inspiration to even the most loathsome couch potato. At 41, with a new baby, retired from swimming, she got back in the pool and earned three silver medals at the Beijing Olympics.

Age is Just a Number (Broadway Books, $24.95) is a biography with a purpose. Torres’s life hasn’t been easy and she has struggled with bulimia and other tribulations. Her memoir is inspiring and remarkably frank. Torres excelled at the University of Florida, but Gator administrators have to cringe at this line in Torres’ book, where she describes how she made the decision to go to school in Gainesville: “At the time, the University of Florida, the University of Texas and Stanford University were the best swimming schools in the country. I ruled out Stanford – too academic. Between Texas and Florida, I chose Florida.”

Oh well. UF swim coach Randy Reese demanded much of his team and a chance encounter with another Gator athlete – not a swimmer – made Torres think that puking up every meal might make her the lean-and-mean machine Reese wanted his swimmers to be. Thus began her long battle.

Age is Just a Number is an effective sports memoir on a number of levels and Torres (and her collaborator, Elizabeth Weil) have a good story to tell. For anyone suffering an eating disorder, this is a guidebook for a return to health. And for old fucks like me, it’s truly inspirational. Soon as I’m done here, I’m hopping into the pool.

INSPIRATION, Part 2: Or maybe that should be “inspiration, lack of.” Losing My Religion (Collins, $25.99 by William Lobdell traces a classic odyssey for a journalist. My friends who began their careers as sportswriters often found that after a few years they hated the sports they covered.

Same thing happened to Lobdell, though instead of sport, it was religion. Lobdell covered religion for the Los Angeles Times and gradually lost his faith.

This might be good for an oh yeah at most, but Lobdell is such a good writer and with such a strong sense of self-awareness that his journey fascinates us. Even if you are firm in your faith, this book should be a good read. Lobdell has no interest in evangelizing against God. This is, simply, one man’s story. And, since Lobdell is a superior reporter, the story is meticulously reported and movingly told.

(From Bill McKeen’s Book Blog at Creative Loafing.)

A TALE OF TWO MYSTERIES: Sure, it happens at the movies all the time.

Somebody jumps out of the darkness with a knife and we all shudder. A whole film genre has been based on such scares.

But when was the last time that happened to you while reading a book?

For me, that happened just last week, at the halfway point of The Scarecrow (Little, Brown, $27.99) by Michael Connelly. Even though you know something is up, the moment that makes you jump and do yourGood-God! James Brown impression hits you with the same shock and fear that grips the novel’s hero, Jack McEvoy.

Moments like that make you appreciate what a great novelist Connelly has become. His books will still be read 75 years from now in the same way that college students are required to read Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. Connelly leaves most of his contemporaries in the dust.

The Scarecrow doesn’t feature Connelly’s main attraction, L.A. Detective Harry Bosch, but instead focuses on newspaper reporter McEvoy, the central character in Connelly’s The Poet and a supporting character in a couple of other Connelly books.

This story grows from the freak show that is the modern newspaper business. McEvoy is a dedicated and talented veteran journalist and so he is laid off from the Los Angeles Times and forced to train his young-sprout replacement, a naïve and ambitious rookie from the University of Florida. Connelly vents a lot about what’s happened to the newspaper business – he was an LA Times star for several years before becoming a novelist – but uses that heartbreak to open the door to yet another thrilling narrative. It’s a great tale about a cast-aside reporter on the trail of a bad-ass computer-whiz serial killer. That the book also shows evidence of the immorality of big-time journalism is an added bonus.

It’s a thrilling, masterful book and it reminds us of why we love to read: we love to get caught in the web by a brilliant storyteller. Connelly lives in the area and he has a few shoutouts to Florida homies that make the book even more fun.

It seems that it was just 20 minutes ago that Connelly published his last novel, The Brass Verdict,and he’s got another one – Nine Dragons, the latest Harry Bosch novel – coming out in October.Janet Maslin of the New York Times is always a tough review, but she praised The Scarecrow, then said at the end of her review that Connelly was too prolific, that he needed to slow down. But Dude – as long as the books are this good, please … please keep them coming.

We’ve said it before about Connelly: he’s so talented that he elevates the whole genre. But there’s only so much one writer can do.

Cemetery Dance (Grand Central Publishing, $26.99) by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child is hovering near the top of the New York Times best-seller list. It’s silly, far-fetched and fun and no one would mistake it for great literature. But once you start reading, you can’t put it down.

 

DOUGLAS PRESTON and LINCOLN CHILD

It comes with the required arresting opening: A happy couple relaxing at home, planning an anniversary celebration, to be followed by a Big Sex Night. Woman leaves to go pick up a surprise at the store. In her absence, a zombie shows up, carves the man to pieces and runs away … almost demandingto be seen. The zombie (zombii, we’re told it should be) is that dude from the apartment upstairs who shitcanned himself off the bridge a couple weeks back. How could a dead man be a killer?

The central attraction of Cemetery Dance is the Holmes-and-Watson pairing of effete FBI investigatorAloysius Pendergast and blue-collar Vinnie D’Agosta of the NYPD.  The interplay between these two characters and the what-is-this-shit response to the zombie stuff keep you turning the pages.

We love stories. We always have. Cemetery Dance is a fun story, no doubt about it. You learn a lot about voodoo (we’ve been spelling that wrong too) and about old New York.

But The Scarecrow . . .  whew. You can’t help but marvel how Connelly takes the concept of a mystery novel and takes it up to the next level.

BASEBALL TRAGEDY: My three little boys have discovered baseball and so we’ve at the YMCA field a couple nights a week, cheering on miniature Braves, Royals and Yankees. We play catch at home and they’ve been begging to watch Field of Dreams with me, but I always cry at the end and it might fuck up the boys to see Daddy blubbering like a baby.

But there are real tears with Heart of the Game (Ecco Press, $24.99) by S.L. Price. It’s the story of Mike Coolbaugh, a minor league coach killed by hard-line foul ball.

Price works for Sports Illustrated, America’s best-written magazine (take that, New Yorker weenies), and the sheer craft in this book is enough to wither the ambition of any poor swine who ever sits down before a keyboard of letters.

We know the ending of the story before it begins, so Price brings Coolbaugh back to life, shows us his family, his childhood, his love of the game and his eventual heartbreak at its hands. Still, as a somewhat spurned and devoted lover, Coolbaugh stays with the game and eventually it kills him.

The greatest joy often causes the greatest pain andHeart of the Game gives us evidence of that in abundance.

I might not have the boys read this one until they’re older, but I did make sure they all got new batting helmets.

TERRORISTS ‘N’ THE ‘HOOD: Two of last year’s best novels – both set in Florida – have just come out in paperback.

Andre Dubus III (rhymes with caboose) wrote The Garden of Last Days (W.W. Norton, $14.95) about what some of the 9-11 terrorists were up to in the week before they forced their way into the cockpits.

 

ANDRE DUBUS III

They spent time in South Florida strip clubs and Dubus’ brilliant and brutal novel takes us into the minds of the terrorists, a stripper and a local loser seeking refuge at the Puma Club. The shifting narrative builds tension and his insight to all the characters takes us into the dark corners of the soul.

Irvine Welsh is perhaps best known forTrainspotting, but that’s only one of his nine novels. Crime (W.W. Norton, $14.95) is a fish-out-of-water story as a transplanted Scottish detective, trying to escape the aftermath of a horrific crime back home, comes to Florida on vacation. Of course, he becomes involved in a Sunshine State crime-against-a-child and Welsh takes us into the mind of this complicated and tortured soul.