You’ve got to hand it to Michael Jackson – or, rather, to the executors of his estate, who seem to have digested well the lesson that Elvis Presley has made more money since he died in 1977 than he ever did during his actual lifetime. There’s already a new Jacko single out, released last week and entitled “This Is It,” and you may also be aware of the movie and soundtrack – both of that same name – due for release worldwide at the end of this month.

But wait – there’s more! As Serge Bressan of the Belgian paper La Dernière Heure now reports, there’s also a Michael Jackson novel due out next June. This news comes, naturally, out of the just-concluded 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, where the announcement was made by representatives of the American publishing concern Random House.

Bressan was able to get further details from an unnamed French-based editor returning from Frankfurt. The work will be entitled Fated, and it will be a graphic novel of 200 pages or so – that is, a comic-strip novel, in black-and-white, drawn by an Indian gentleman, Mukesh Singh. Apparently Jackson had been working on it for a couple years with Gotham Chopra, son of the medical author and lecturer Deepak Chopra. You won’t be surprised to hear that the plot deals with a pop-icon who can’t deal with all the fame.

What’s next? If Elvis is anything to go by, you can expect rumors to arise soon that Jacko really didn’t die – or that he did but has come back to life by the power of pop, why not? – followed by scattered claims by people of having seen him alive, at the grocery store, at the kindergarten, one white-gloved hand and all.

My apologies: another brief Michael Jackson bit here. (No, interest in the “King of Pop” shows no sign of dying away yet in Europe, either.) Perhaps you caught this on CNN, but Denmark’s Jyllandsposten also has an interesting piece: Jackson’s glove hid skin disease. Yes, this word comes from noted Afro-American actress and FOJ (friend-of-Jacko) Cicely Tyson : “The glove was used to hide the vitiligo. That is why the glove saw the light of day. I was there when he [speaking of the glove’s fashion-designer, whose services Tyson shared with Jackson] designed it.”

And “vitiligo“? That’s the skin disease where you start to lose pigment, i.e. you start to turn white(r). Consistent with what we know about Jackson’s later ever-changing physiognomy, all that makes perfect sense.

Naturally, those single-gloves are now collectors items. The article tells of one used in a 1984 concert tour that sold at auction for 320,000 Danish kroner (although surely the auction was conducted in some other currency; that’s the equivalent today of $60,000/€43,000). If you’re really into this, you can even click here to watch a brief video of an auction-expert stating (in English) that such a glove would now likely attract that price again, or even more.

I’m afraid I devoted zero time yesterday to witnessing any portion of those ceremonies in Los Angeles in tribute to the late Michael Jackson, despite the eagerness of eighteen US TV channels and at least four German broadcasters, etc. to bring it to me. (Are you kiddin’?! Of course I didn’t watch . . . ). But I confess that I did at least read Christian Kortmann’s review of the same in Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung (Michael Jackson: His last moonwalk). And I’m glad that I did, for I can easily identify with the stance towards that inevitably lugubrious orgy of hagiography that Kortmann adopts, namely that of someone who also would have greatly preferred to devote zero time to the proceedings, but whose editor cut off any such option.

(But do let me mention here some aspects of his piece that will appeal even to non-German-reading MJ-lovers, like the videos of the ceremony that he embeds within his text and the fantastic panorama-photo at the very top – even I liked this! – of Janet and the remaining elements of the Jackson 5 plus Randy, all sitting in a row and in a sort of uniform that includes shades, black suit, canary-yellow tie, and one white glove – this “uniform” business excluding Janet, at least for the most part.)

Some interesting observations out of Kortmann’s review: (more…)

It’s a common trait of the scientific community for researchers to commune to pool their brains while investigating perplexing phenomena that no one quite yet has been able to get a handle on understanding. AIDS. The possibility of extra-terrestrial life. And, yes, the mystery that is Michael Jackson: Josef Engels brings us word today in Die Welt of the conference that took place over this past weekend in New Haven, CT, whose subject was none other than the King of Pop. (He is a Person.) (more…)

I try not to treat the same subject two days in a row, as a general principle. But I violate that today – it’s Michael Jackson time again!

What convinced me to bend the “rules” this way was what I found in cruising through today’s Danish press: a great piece in Berlingske Tidende entitled Rock’s Cabinet of Riddles. Writer Poul Høi has taken an inspired approach to the Michael Jackson controversy: yes, his case is certainly strange, but it isn’t the only oddity that has cropped up through the years from the world of rock music.

Getting by with a little help from his friends at Rolling Stone’s archives, Høi comes up with a list of seven other such “riddles.” (more…)

Time to go back to the €S bread-and-butter: the media survey. Of the recent spate of bombings in Istanbul, perhaps? Much too serious (e.g. Turkey’s September 11 – from the NRC Handelsblad); maybe later.

Instead, now that popstar Michael Jackson has run afoul of California’s “Three-Tykes-You’re-Out” law (not my line, alas; it’s Jay’s), it should be interesting to see what the press has to say about that in one country where his fans are probably even thicker-on-the-ground than they are in the US, namely Germany. There is indeed plenty of coverage to choose from the German mainstream (on-line) press; we’re not going to be able to get to it all.

But wait: One of the many articles is from the Süddeutsche Zeitung describing the American media as “Obsessed” with Michael Jackson. (more…)