Two things worth reading

A little off-topic (we know you'll allow this, occasionally), but I recommend to readers two pieces of recent writing:

• First, Cintra Wilson has reprinted on her blog a chapter on Michael Jackson from her first book A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease (2000. A Massive Swelling was (and is) a headlong and vastly entertaining rant about celebrity in our times and the chapter on the pop star has a creepy prescience about it, given the circus atmosphere surrounding Jackson's death.

Jackson epitomizes the fullest scope of uber-fame in the United States. He's lived through the whole gauntlet : the best parts of it in his earlier years, the worst humiliating and scandalous parts in the more recent. Anything Michael does now just reads like Outsider Art - he has become as strange and isolated and deranged as anyone who ever walked or crawled through shock treatment. He's the strangest uninstitutionalized crazy person in the public eye since Howard Hughes. My fear is that now, instead of fading away like his natural skin tone, Michael will remain in the public eye, and his bids for world acceptance will just get weirder.

• Second, David Olive at the Toronto Star writes in his blog The Great Recession an impassioned denunciation of the homogenized flannel that passes these days for newspapering. There is a certain irony, given that Olive's blog is hosted by Canada's largest newspaper and one which is guilty of at least some of the sins he enumerates.
  

Many editors and TV news directors regard in-depth journalism as commercial folly, believing it will drive away an audience that suffers "time poverty," and won't sit still for even the most compelling account of events or conditions of the greatest interest and importance.

They're wrong, of course, and their formulaic output of trivia is killing their media "platforms."