One of my favorite cultural critics, Ernest Hardy, has been writing extensively about the King of Pop since the singer’s death last week. These posts are can’t-miss material not just because of Hardy’s witty insights, but also because of wonderful video clips that the writer immerses in context. Check all of it out. You’ll be smarter when you finish.

Magazine journalism work has dried up in ‘09, hence my efforts at screenwriting. Were it not for my book deal and one great, secret gig, I’d not be working in print at all.

Except for Entrepreneur. I ought to thank Mike Kessler for putting me in the mix, not just because I need the work, but because the work is so, so interesting. My first contribution, a short piece on the Burning Man-born Podbelt, poured right out of a great Silver Lake party. Isa Gordon, one small dynamo of a businesswoman, devised this invention as an alternative to purses because fanny packs are for dorks and women’s hips bear weight better than their shoulders.

But read the story. It’s pretty funny, and the PodBelt is something like a phenomenon.

Finally, visit the Podbelt site. All of the bondage sexuality that’s hinted at the Entrepreneur article is embodied by Podbelt model Masuimi Max. Your mom or dad might like one of these items, even if they aren’t into kinky sex.

Richard Nixon: “There are times when abortions are necessary, I know that, you know that’s when you have a black and a white.”

And you wonder why I was so happy to have Obama. I disagree with him on Afghanistan, health care reform, gay marriage, bank bailouts. But our current president don’t want my sons dead. Sheesh.

The first one is pretty tabloid.

The second, a comic-book curiosity.

And, finally, something about his thespian work. As in, acting like he had no penis in order to make it big in America. In Newsweek, David Gates asks, “Which was the more imaginative creation: his music or his persona?”

Happy reading.

Fundamentalism in the U.S. military is the subject of a new Faultlines video. Here is, to quote from Truthdig, a disturbing look at efforts to transform American soldiers into “government-paid missionaries,” as one Christian fundamentalist group put it.

These nationalists want to create a Christian state, which is insane.

Since Thursday, life in L.A. has felt very weird.

For starters, I’ve been talking a lot with the neighbors in my Westside apartment complex. It’s an extremely international bunch that inhabit the building, and they seem like a good lot of people, but I’ve made it a policy not to have extra conversation around me until I get my career together. Regardless, from the moment that I told the woman upstairs (whose origins I can’t for the life of me figure) of the passing of the King of Pop — at that point only confirmed on TMZ — it’s been chat, chat, chat. Relatively speaking, of course. I don’t plan to let things go too far.

And my cable went out while all of Thursday’s media ramp-up was building. Internet, too. This forced me to deal with it in a very old-school way. There were not carrier pigeons or even newspapers in my mix. However, I did shun talking to folks about it on the cellie, beyond a quick text to my sister. And, the following morning, I discovered that a Facebook conversation that I’d started about Michael Jackson had gone too far, too real. I de-friended my son and all of his teenage friends.

The traffic’s been bizarre. People seem extreme one way or another, either friendly as if to say you are not alone or testy, perhaps because they’ve not gotten over hating a person the world is celebrating that one’s got too hurt.

I’ve done my best to steer clear of news media converage, in large part because I agree with Al Sharpton that opinion makers have conveniently changed their take on Michael Jackson. The mediated moment that’s stayed with me most was Dodger Matt Kemp’s  performance on Friday night. Andre Ethier’s career-high three home runs and six R.B.I. are famous, but for me, personally, it’s the young Sooner Kemp whose performance resonates. He changed his plate appearance to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and had three hits, including an unusual triple. He stopped just beyond second base and raced to third when he spotted hesitation in the outfielder. Matt Kemp literally didn’t stop until he’d gotten enough. The sight of it was amazingly tangible inspiration.
The subject of our town’s present upheaval came up when my friend Dave stopped by yesterday. From the, let’s just say it, king’s randsom that AEG lost on the London concerts to small, inter-personal oddities, the craziness is everwhere. (Traffic has been just horrible, even for summer in Los Angeles.) And I just had to say something that was increasingly on my mind.

“L.A. being so hung up on fame, built on it, actually, maybe this really is what it feels like when royalty dies. I can’t believe this is coming out of my mouth, actually.

‘Cuz I don’t really believe in royalty. Even Diana was dirty, to my way of thinking. Everybody is a star, you know?

What I think is of little consequence here. When one man gets the world on the same page with a life’s work, that shit’s mad kingly. No one can deny it. And I’ve found myself asking, what if he’s only told the truth? About his virginity. About his skin condition. About the kids, just everything. And what if his increased weirdness was a kind of indictment of human nature? Wouldn’t that be something?

It would undercut a lot of what I’ve come to believe. Which is interesting and weird. Just as weird as the fact that he’s out of our lives.

I’ve stuck with the Cubs catcher through his early season slump, and for reason his stats don’t give away. Soto is in the club.

Soto’s coach had an interesting take:
“Look, I have smoked dope one time in my life,” Piniella said before the Cubs faced the Chicago White Sox at U.S. Cellular Field. “And it didn’t do a damn thing for me, and I never tried it again. I’m fortunate because of that. A lot of people do. You can even buy it in California from a pharmacy.”

Sweet Lou is an overrated manager and a piss-poor pot smoker.

The players have changed since this piece was published in The View at the late, lamented MOLI.com in 2007. Now the Spaniard in question and his wife Pamela are preparing to move to Brooklyn. I thought it might be nice to re-visit the piece as both have become ardent fans of the Dodgers.

When the following was first published, it wasn’t even clear that they’d be regular baseball fans —

Miguel the Cranky Spaniard has a genuine interest in American culture. His serious, almost clinical approach to learning about sport in this country knocked aside all reservations I might have about explaining the game in brass-tacks terms. Hand-holding with baseball isn’t something I do, even with my children. The Cranky Spaniard is exceptional. He was sure to develop a take, so I was game.

But then my cell phone rang while Nil and I waited outside the loge at Dodger Stadium and we learned the Spaniard and his wife would be a while. He’d parked down the hill to avoid paying parking.

This was gonna be a tough one.

“Fifteen dollars?” his wife asked.

“Dude,” I replied, “In SF it costs $30 to park.”

If he didn’t get over the exorbitant costs we were bound to face throughout the Dodgers-Diamondbacks match — big Michelobs are $11 up at Chavez Ravine — we would never get to the guts of dissecting baseball. So, I dug in on the walk to our seats. Macro to micro. Innings to outs. Outs to strikes. I broke it down, swiftly, for this smart, inquisitive man.

Once we’d found our seats, we were ready to rock. An awful, senior-citizen-oriented trip through Arizona had bred in the Cranky Spaniard a deep hatred of Phoenix. So I had that workin’ for me. He asked if the starting home pitcher was good.

Derek Lowe isn’t what I’d call good, not at this point in his career, I explained, but he’s one of my favorite pitchers in the National League. He’s a gamer, a guy who gets by on guts and creativity more than pure arm strength. He put Boston on his back and led the Red Sox to an elusive championship in 2004. Then he took a big payday with L.A. I outlined the pitcher’s scandalous affair with a Fox Sports Reporter from a previous season, just to provide the backstory that allows newcomers entry into the sometime arcane world of baseball.

We quietly surmised that screwing the press seems to be a right of passage for new stars in this town.

Lowe walked the second batter he faced and I informed Miguel that the Dodgers’ starter tends to have trouble early in the game. As if to punctuate the remark, Arizona leftfielder Eric Byrnes slam a home run. Two-zip. Diamondbacks. Lowe’s sinkin fastball works best when slightly tired and I told Miguel he just had a bit too much pep.

Turns out that a hip-injury was hobbling Lowe and he’d eventually leave after giving up four runs.

A round of boos oozed across the stadium. We looked around to see what play had sparked this. But the impetus was instead a jumbotron new report. Barry Bonds, whom people in LA hate for a wide array of reasons, had just tied the all-time American home run record. The Giants hate the Dodgers, for reasons that go back to New York. It is one of the all-time rivalries in our nation’s sports milieu.

“Are the Giants good?” Miguel asked.

I explained that they’re actually horrible. Since before the Giants’ 2002 World Series appearance, the team has been leveraged toward Bonds heavy playing contract. Until he’s gone, they’ll only stink, as the team can only afford one or two other decent players. For a while, banking on Bonds had worked. Now that he was old and mediocre, San Francisco sucked. Their fans would just have to live with this.

Here is where I learned about The Cranky Spaniard’s nickname.

It infuriated him that American players cannot move with greater freedom. Why should they be tied to these owners, he asked. If a soccer player wanted to move from say, Real Madrid to an American soccer franchise, the original team would have no say. All talk would be between the player and his suitor franchise.

In the fourth inning, I explained a balk, which is not so simple. The Spaniard and his wife went trekking off for the $8 beers they’d been hearing about. Arizona went up 8-1. Our intermittent conversation sprawled wildly. Inevitably it came back to Beckham. “I think he’ll get bored. A lot of people say that he did it for his wife. She wanted to be here,” he said, somewhat conspiratorially. “Why else would he play for a shitty-ass team in a shitty-ass league?”

Delwyn Young pitch-hit for D.J. Houlton in the fifth. Young, just called to the team from its minor league franchise in Las Vegas, hadn’t gotten a major-league hit yet. Here was a Reggie Bush situation.

“Okay, I said, after a quick sum of pinch-hitting. “If he gets a one, you are officially good luck.”

Young slammed a single to left-field. Then the Dodgers scored six runs in the four innings. With Arizona up 8 to 7, We had a game on our hands. The crowd was bonkers. Beachballs circulated. The wave went away. Throught, the play onfield remained fairly crisp.

Then, in the ninth — and final, I explained to my friend — inning, the crowd rose to its feet. Nomar Garciaparra, the team’s borderline-washed-up East LA mascot — he of the three-run homer that closed the margin a couple of innings back —came to the plate. Two outs. Two strikes. Arizona closer Jose Velarde rears back and fires one right across the plate.

Garciaparra strikes out. And all of the air goes out of this stadium that holds 55,0000. The deflation alone isn’t something you can feel very many places in these United States.

And the Cranky Spaniard gets this. He only wishes he hadn’t spent $90 to learn this. Ninety bucks, and still ahead a Herculean walk down the hill to mount that scooter that would have made this a three-digit night.

Yesterday, Al Sharpton was very candid in calling the news media on its newly respectful MJ take.

It reminded me of Paul Mooney’s classic bit about the infamous 1993 child molestation case. The comedian properly suggested a posture of defiance.

“I wouldn’t care if you found a naked 13-year-old in my living room…”

I’ll be spinning MJ-related tunes through the evening on blip.fm.

How bizarre that I’d just finished watching Tupac’s section of Welcome to Death Row when I heard that Michael Jackson died.

Tupac Shakur’s fame was bizarre and, of course, enormous. But it was nothing compared to MJ. From his beginnings with the Jackson 5, the kid from Gary, Indiana was off the charts. And past the peak of his career, the music stood up. Five years ago at Maverick Flats on Crenshaw, a DJ threw on some of the early solo stuff, and the hip, Hollywood crowd went batshit. It was remarkable in that Michael hadn’t made a hit in ages and, if you observed L.A. on the surface, the town seemed engulfed in MJ’s child molestation trial. Ridicule was in the air, but the music squashed that. There was no competition.

The earliest music shows that, to use an old folks’ term, that boy had been touched. (The Jackson 5 was a great group for many, many reasons. Personally, it was their music that introduced me to the work of James Jamerson. Lots of folks to this day think Tito and the brothers were originating the incredible licks. But it was a clique of committed artists such as Jamerson. Pop in the service of art was the concept, and as an adult it’s been a guiding principal of my professional life.) Touched by an especially large dose of spiritual energy, to be specific. A chosen few just have it like that.

It’s impossible to believe that being unimaginably famous doesn’t take a toll on the physical self, if only because regular human relations become impossible…