The Inquiring Manatee

Michael's Big Comeback

    

When Truman Capote died, Gore Vidal, no friend of the writer, commented: "Good career move."
     So it is with Michael Jackson. His CDs, old albums and memorabilia are selling out everywhere. He is achieving success that his 50-show London comeback attempt this summer might well have missed. It's unfortunate that Michael is not around to see it happen.
     One lesson in the tragic and untimely death: It provides yet one more example of celebrities messing around with painkilling drugs, risking a fatal overdose. Drugs can kill, and in this case they killed again. Let's try to bear up under our aches and pains and not to rely on pills and injections.

Memories of Michael

    

From the time of the Santa Barbara County sheriff's raid on Neverland in 2003 to Michael Jackson's acquittal at his Santa Maria, Calif., child molestation trial in June 2005, the eccentric singer took up a good portion of my life as I reported his troubles with the criminal law.
     Though I never could pierce his phalanx of guarding lawyers and flacks to go one on one with him, I did ask him a question or two as he left court on many days of the 15-week trial, and received a carefully monosyllabic answer. Otherwise, I can't say I knew the guy. But I was able to observe his lifestyle: his supportive family, his entourage, his frailty and pain, his fiercely loyal fans who came to the trial from Spain, Japan, Germany and other distant points.
      Jackson's defense lawyers did a fabulous job of raising reasonable doubt about the child molestation charges brought by members of the Arvizo family. The complaining mom in particular was a piece of work with the least credibility I have ever seen in a courtroom witness -- and I'm a lawyer, myself. So Jackson, who may or may not have acted inappropriately with the boy and his brother, was off the hook. But he went off to Dubai with his reputation in tatters over what I still consider his highly reprehensible practices with young boys in his bed.
       He was a tragic figure, the product of too much celebrity and no perspective about it. I'd describe him as a former African-American. He tried to erase his black identity, and went to at least one too many plastic surgeons in the process. By the time of the trial, he was simply grotesque-looking, his onetime beauty transformed into painted-on ugliness and an imposed bone structure.
       Jackson lived too high, took too many pills, blew through his money, amassed a mountain of debt. Who knows if his comeback try in London would have worked? What was promising was that his 50 shows had sold out. Overseas if no longer in his homeland, he remained beloved.
       His tumultuous life is over now, and his talents are a matter for history. May he rest in peace.

Pink Martini for New Year's Eve -- and the Sexiest Song Ever

       

Happy New Year, blog readers.
   The New Year's Eve offering at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on a foggy night in downtown Los Angeles was the Portland, Ore.-based musical group Pink Martini. It was the second New Year's Eve I'd attended their concert at the ultramodern Disney. And again this big group of 19 musicians was terrific, singer-songwriter China Forbes (very pregnant) and pianist-songwriter Thomas Lauderdale taking lead roles in delivering multilingual world music to infectious tropical beats. Their CDs were for sale in the lobby and we bought two, giving us their total collection of three CDs. They're producing a fourth.
    Forbes, who like Lauderdale is a Harvard graduate and something of a musical genius, sang, among other songs from Pink Martini's CD "Hang On, Little Tomato," the title song "Anna" from the 1953 Italian movie that starred Silvana Mangano (she later married producer Dino DeLaurentiis). When the song came out, sung in sultry fashion by Mangano, it was my immediate favorite, and it has remained so. But I never knew the words until I bought the CD recently.
    "Anna" was written by Italians but the slangy lyrics are in Spanish. Here they are, with translation at long last:

(The guys in the band sing):

    Ya viene el negro zambon
    Bailando alegre el baion
    Repica la zambomba
    y llama a la mujer.

   (Repeats)

(The woman sings):

   Tengo gana de bailar el nuevo compas
   Dicen todos quando me ven pasar
   ?"Chica, donde vas?"
   Me voy para bailar el baion!

   (Repeats)

The words are even more mindlessly hedonistic than I'd imagined, but the song works.

   Here comes the Negro guy
   Joyously dancing the baion.
   Playing the drum
   He calls to the woman.

  I've gotta dance the new beat.
  Everyone says when they see me pass by
  "Girl, where are you going?"
  I'm going to dance the baion!

There. It was good to learn that the woman sings "chica, donde vas?", not "she gobbles it up," as Betty Jane Warren joked at Junior High School 240, Brooklyn, in 1953.

I have no idea how anyone dances the baion. And this has nothing to do with politics. But I thought I'd share this song with the world for a happier 2009. You can download "Anna" from iTunes.