Grim Reader: This Week in Death 7/3/09
by Michael Schaffer
JULY 3, 2009 TAGS:
It was easy enough to understand why the death of Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, dominated the headlines last week. But just a couple days after Jackson’s death occupied nearly the entire front page of the Los Angeles Times, the ordinarily sober California broadsheet went Page One with the death of yet another person who in life became a ubiquitous presence at the intersection of television, commerce, and entertainment: Billy Mays, the King of Infomercials.
With all the notables who’ve dropped dead this summer, why devote valuable real estate to a guy known for pushing the Zorbeez super chamois? For one thing, Mays’ death, a day after making a bumpy landing on a commercial airliner, was bizarre. For another, Richard Fausset’s Atlanta-datelined obit was stellar, explaining Mays’ place in the odd advertising format ostensibly designed to fool people into thinking it’s a real television show. “Other small-screen pitchmen, like Ron ‘Ronco’ Popeil, have become quasi-household names,” Fausset writes. “But in a broader advertising culture that regularly deploys irony and subtlety to ward off the whiff of cheesiness, Mays proved the enduring power of the hard sell.”
Eventually, internet jokesters started parodying Mays’ look (“a signature style that made him resemble a bear that had fallen into a vat of Just For Men”). And Mays, in the best postmodern style, started cutting ironic, self-parodying spots for still other products. Last spring, he became a star of “Pitchmen,” a new Discovery Channel show about informercial makers. Unsurprsingly, his costar on the show found enthusiastic, over-the-top words to praise Mays. “He was the best friend a man could wish for — he was much more than people knew,” the New York Times quotes Anthony Sullivan as saying. The Los Angeles Times obit finds an even more infomercialtastic portion of the same press release: “I hate to say it, but the king is dead.”
--
In a rather more up-market realm of popular culture, all the major Obitosphere players give serious attention to the life of Karl Malden, who died at age 97. The Guardian does the best job of tracing his rise from Mladen Sekulovich, the millworker son of a Yugoslavian immigrant, to the character actor famous for roles in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. He might have been a leading man in his own light, obituarists note, but for a legacy of two broken noses suffered playing high-school sports, leaving him with what the Guardian calls “one of the most celebrated non-Roman noses in cinema” and everyone else just labels “bulbous.”
Oddly, the Guardian’s is the only Malden obit that doesn’t mention the reason pretty much anyone under 40 first got to know the actor: his 20-year-run as the TV pitchman for American Express travelers checks, during which time he turned “don’t leave home without it” into a national catch-phrase. The Los Angeles Times’ obit, on the other hand, went into a bit too much detail on that. As Hollywood’s hometown paper, the Times tends to include often superfluous, prominently placed reaction quotes from other Tinseltown notables whenever someone big dies. Thus right after a fourth-paragraph statement from former costar Michael Douglas revealing that he “admired and loved” Malden, readers are treated to a quote from a certain Joanna Lambert, an Amex spokeswoman, declaring that Malden “was one of the first and most memorable” of her firm’s celebrity endorsers. Thanks for that.
--
The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times report on the death of Alexis Arguello, three-time boxing champ and current mayor of Managua. Both versions are heavy on his boxing career and distinctly lighter on details about his entry into Nicaraguan politics or the circumstances surrounding his death, of a gunshot wound to the chest, at age 58. (The Times references news accounts saying the shot was self-inflicted, and notes that he had earlier battled drugs and alcohol and spoken of suicide; an autopsy is pending.) Grim Reader hopes the papers stay on the case. There’s been a flurry of reports in recent years linking athletic concussions to depression and suicide. That news would likely cast a pall over to the Post’s detailed descriptions of epic Arguello bouts like 1978’s “Bloody Battle of Bayamon” against Alfredo Escalera.
--
Elsewhere, obituarists vie to find the best synonym for “perky” to describe the on-screen style of 1950s sitcom star Gale Storm. Grim Reader votes for the Washington Post’s “chirpy,” which is well ahead of the AP’s antiseptic “wholesome appearance and personality” and the Los Angeles Times’ too-sophisticated “vivacious.”… The Times of London does a nice send-off to the innovative German choreographer Pina Bausch, while the New York Times adds a critic’s appraisal atop a straight obit. … And the New York Times also devotes a nice obit to Michael Martin, the graffiti artist who worked under the nom d’aerosol Iz the Wiz. Though Martin was only 50, his obit represents the week’s biggest blast from the past, a reminder that you don’t even have to be especially old to remember subway graffiti.
--
But, really, it was still the week of Michael Jackson, whose initial obits ran last week. As news of the death sank in, the Obitosphere took a baroque turn, with TV hype turning absurd even as the spectacle created an opportunity for ideologues, parodists, and media critics to weigh in, using the scene to buttress whatever argument they’d likely be making anyway.
Among the highlights: People.com reveals that Bubbles, Jackson’s pet monkey, had been tracked down, alive and well, in a Florida sanctuary, prompting a “breaking news” alert when CNN picked up the story. The Weekly World News, which built an entire franchise around (allegedly) posthumous Elvis sightings, catches sight of Jackson this week, soon after his own “death.” Who was the King of Pop with? Why, the King of Rock n’ Roll, of course. The New York Times’ Marcus Mabry does a smart story about how, in death, Michael Jackson won a degree of solidarity from the black community that he rarely received in life.
On a more meta level, Slate’s Jack Shafer wags a finger at reporters who name-drop about their rare personal encounters with Jackson — a phenomenon that reached its nadir this week, Shafer writes, when journalist Jim Impoco wrung a Huffington Post lede out of a 1987 Jackson interview he was promised, but never received. Shafer’s fellow critic Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times frets that there’s been too much Michael Jackson coverage, an indication that an economically panicked mainstream media has surrendered its editorial instincts: “Whatever they say, many newspaper editors and TV news producers have begun to allow website hits and social media volume to function as a kind of sub rosa ratings system whose numbers dictate coverage and the play of news stories.… No reasonable editor or producer should ignore the kind of public interest we're seeing. But surrendering utterly to it ultimately undercuts what's genuinely valuable about serious news media.” Of course, Exhibit A might well be Rutten’s own newspaper, which gave over its entire front page to Jackson’s death.
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Grim Reader’s choice for the most asinine piece of Jackson obituary riffing goes to Ilya Shapiro, blogging for the libertarian Cato Institute. Shapiro declares that Jackson’s career was nothing less than a vindication of the free market. “Jackson represents a capitalist success story,” Shapiro writes. “No central planner could have invented him, and no government bureaucracy could have transformed pop music in the way he did.” All true! But what about those lengthy portions of the Jackson obits that concerned the abusive father who relentlessly rode his performing, breadwinning kids? I suspect a government child-protection bureaucracy might nowadays have something to say about that. And if fewer Joe Jacksons meant fewer Michael Jacksons, that might be a worthwhile tradeoff.
Tendentious Jackson death commentary also provided fodder for a parody that ran in the Huffington Post. Tallulah Morehead transposes all the Jackson handwringing onto the death of Malden, “How many of us spent our childhoods watching Karl get his heart broken by Blanche DuBois, and then playing a succession of crusading urban priests and hard-bitten cops?” Naturally, Morehead’s piece concludes that all of us, in our lust for celebrity detail, killed Malden at the premature age of 97: “The man who brought happiness to every person on earth was so hounded by his overwhelming fame, he couldn't stick his nose out the door of his compound/private-amusement park, Skagland, without the paparazzi that were camped outside 24/7/52 for the last 40 years setting off strobe-lights in his face.”
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears every Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
With all the notables who’ve dropped dead this summer, why devote valuable real estate to a guy known for pushing the Zorbeez super chamois? For one thing, Mays’ death, a day after making a bumpy landing on a commercial airliner, was bizarre. For another, Richard Fausset’s Atlanta-datelined obit was stellar, explaining Mays’ place in the odd advertising format ostensibly designed to fool people into thinking it’s a real television show. “Other small-screen pitchmen, like Ron ‘Ronco’ Popeil, have become quasi-household names,” Fausset writes. “But in a broader advertising culture that regularly deploys irony and subtlety to ward off the whiff of cheesiness, Mays proved the enduring power of the hard sell.”
Eventually, internet jokesters started parodying Mays’ look (“a signature style that made him resemble a bear that had fallen into a vat of Just For Men”). And Mays, in the best postmodern style, started cutting ironic, self-parodying spots for still other products. Last spring, he became a star of “Pitchmen,” a new Discovery Channel show about informercial makers. Unsurprsingly, his costar on the show found enthusiastic, over-the-top words to praise Mays. “He was the best friend a man could wish for — he was much more than people knew,” the New York Times quotes Anthony Sullivan as saying. The Los Angeles Times obit finds an even more infomercialtastic portion of the same press release: “I hate to say it, but the king is dead.”
--
In a rather more up-market realm of popular culture, all the major Obitosphere players give serious attention to the life of Karl Malden, who died at age 97. The Guardian does the best job of tracing his rise from Mladen Sekulovich, the millworker son of a Yugoslavian immigrant, to the character actor famous for roles in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. He might have been a leading man in his own light, obituarists note, but for a legacy of two broken noses suffered playing high-school sports, leaving him with what the Guardian calls “one of the most celebrated non-Roman noses in cinema” and everyone else just labels “bulbous.” Oddly, the Guardian’s is the only Malden obit that doesn’t mention the reason pretty much anyone under 40 first got to know the actor: his 20-year-run as the TV pitchman for American Express travelers checks, during which time he turned “don’t leave home without it” into a national catch-phrase. The Los Angeles Times’ obit, on the other hand, went into a bit too much detail on that. As Hollywood’s hometown paper, the Times tends to include often superfluous, prominently placed reaction quotes from other Tinseltown notables whenever someone big dies. Thus right after a fourth-paragraph statement from former costar Michael Douglas revealing that he “admired and loved” Malden, readers are treated to a quote from a certain Joanna Lambert, an Amex spokeswoman, declaring that Malden “was one of the first and most memorable” of her firm’s celebrity endorsers. Thanks for that.
--
The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times report on the death of Alexis Arguello, three-time boxing champ and current mayor of Managua. Both versions are heavy on his boxing career and distinctly lighter on details about his entry into Nicaraguan politics or the circumstances surrounding his death, of a gunshot wound to the chest, at age 58. (The Times references news accounts saying the shot was self-inflicted, and notes that he had earlier battled drugs and alcohol and spoken of suicide; an autopsy is pending.) Grim Reader hopes the papers stay on the case. There’s been a flurry of reports in recent years linking athletic concussions to depression and suicide. That news would likely cast a pall over to the Post’s detailed descriptions of epic Arguello bouts like 1978’s “Bloody Battle of Bayamon” against Alfredo Escalera.
--
Elsewhere, obituarists vie to find the best synonym for “perky” to describe the on-screen style of 1950s sitcom star Gale Storm. Grim Reader votes for the Washington Post’s “chirpy,” which is well ahead of the AP’s antiseptic “wholesome appearance and personality” and the Los Angeles Times’ too-sophisticated “vivacious.”… The Times of London does a nice send-off to the innovative German choreographer Pina Bausch, while the New York Times adds a critic’s appraisal atop a straight obit. … And the New York Times also devotes a nice obit to Michael Martin, the graffiti artist who worked under the nom d’aerosol Iz the Wiz. Though Martin was only 50, his obit represents the week’s biggest blast from the past, a reminder that you don’t even have to be especially old to remember subway graffiti.--
But, really, it was still the week of Michael Jackson, whose initial obits ran last week. As news of the death sank in, the Obitosphere took a baroque turn, with TV hype turning absurd even as the spectacle created an opportunity for ideologues, parodists, and media critics to weigh in, using the scene to buttress whatever argument they’d likely be making anyway.
Among the highlights: People.com reveals that Bubbles, Jackson’s pet monkey, had been tracked down, alive and well, in a Florida sanctuary, prompting a “breaking news” alert when CNN picked up the story. The Weekly World News, which built an entire franchise around (allegedly) posthumous Elvis sightings, catches sight of Jackson this week, soon after his own “death.” Who was the King of Pop with? Why, the King of Rock n’ Roll, of course. The New York Times’ Marcus Mabry does a smart story about how, in death, Michael Jackson won a degree of solidarity from the black community that he rarely received in life.
On a more meta level, Slate’s Jack Shafer wags a finger at reporters who name-drop about their rare personal encounters with Jackson — a phenomenon that reached its nadir this week, Shafer writes, when journalist Jim Impoco wrung a Huffington Post lede out of a 1987 Jackson interview he was promised, but never received. Shafer’s fellow critic Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times frets that there’s been too much Michael Jackson coverage, an indication that an economically panicked mainstream media has surrendered its editorial instincts: “Whatever they say, many newspaper editors and TV news producers have begun to allow website hits and social media volume to function as a kind of sub rosa ratings system whose numbers dictate coverage and the play of news stories.… No reasonable editor or producer should ignore the kind of public interest we're seeing. But surrendering utterly to it ultimately undercuts what's genuinely valuable about serious news media.” Of course, Exhibit A might well be Rutten’s own newspaper, which gave over its entire front page to Jackson’s death.
Grim Reader’s choice for the most asinine piece of Jackson obituary riffing goes to Ilya Shapiro, blogging for the libertarian Cato Institute. Shapiro declares that Jackson’s career was nothing less than a vindication of the free market. “Jackson represents a capitalist success story,” Shapiro writes. “No central planner could have invented him, and no government bureaucracy could have transformed pop music in the way he did.” All true! But what about those lengthy portions of the Jackson obits that concerned the abusive father who relentlessly rode his performing, breadwinning kids? I suspect a government child-protection bureaucracy might nowadays have something to say about that. And if fewer Joe Jacksons meant fewer Michael Jacksons, that might be a worthwhile tradeoff.Tendentious Jackson death commentary also provided fodder for a parody that ran in the Huffington Post. Tallulah Morehead transposes all the Jackson handwringing onto the death of Malden, “How many of us spent our childhoods watching Karl get his heart broken by Blanche DuBois, and then playing a succession of crusading urban priests and hard-bitten cops?” Naturally, Morehead’s piece concludes that all of us, in our lust for celebrity detail, killed Malden at the premature age of 97: “The man who brought happiness to every person on earth was so hounded by his overwhelming fame, he couldn't stick his nose out the door of his compound/private-amusement park, Skagland, without the paparazzi that were camped outside 24/7/52 for the last 40 years setting off strobe-lights in his face.”
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears every Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
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