What's Happening and What's on our minds about It.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Pain management
PHOTO :
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
Cynthia Toussaint, a former ballet dancer, campaigning for election to the California State Assembly.
Managing pain is extremely important to those who suffer from it. Funny how others dont "get it" hardly at all ! Be forewarned.
The New York Times May 30, 2006 Doctors Struggle to Treat Mysterious and Unbearable Pain By KATHLEEN McGRORY
It was supposed to be a typical ballet class. Cynthia Toussaint, then a senior dance major at the University of California, Irvine, engaged in her usual stretching routine: she raised her left leg to the barre and slowly bent her upper body down to her right knee.
For a moment, she delighted in the long stretch. But as she returned to an upright position, she felt a sudden pop in her hamstring. "It felt like a guitar string had been plucked and it had broken," said Ms. Toussaint, who is now 45.
An intense burning sensation followed; it felt as if her leg had been doused in gasoline and set on fire, she said. The next day, the college athletics trainer determined that she had pulled her hamstring. But even years later, the pain would not subside. It migrated to her other leg, leaving her bedridden for nearly a decade, and overtook her vocal cords, leaving her temporarily mute.
All the while, doctors puzzled over and even doubted her mysterious condition.
Ms. Toussaint now knows that she is among an estimated one million Americans living with complex regional pain syndrome, a nerve disorder formerly known as reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome. For patients with the disorder, a trauma as mild as a fractured wrist or a twisted ankle can cause the nerves to misfire, so much so that intense pain messages are constantly sent to the brain.
For the past 150 years, so little was known about complex regional pain syndrome that it was often diagnosed as psychosomatic. But doctors now believe that the condition complicates 1 of every 1,200 traumatic injuries. And desperate patients are turning to new, often unproven, drugs and treatments. "It is still quite a mysterious condition," said Dr. Scott M. Fishman, a pain management specialist at the University of California, Davis, and the author of "The War on Pain."
"It raises doubts in the eyes of doctors and the people that are looking for hard lab evidence or good imaging confirmation," Dr. Fishman said. "With this condition, we simply don't have that."
Baffling as it may be, the syndrome is not new to the medical literature. It was first documented by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a Civil War surgeon. But few physicians are familiar with it; the average patient sees 8 to 10 doctors before a diagnosis is made, according to a recent survey by American RSDHope, a support organization.
Pain is the hallmark of the condition, which outranks cancer as the most painful disease on the McGill Pain Index. For some, the sensation remains in one place, most commonly one of the extremities. For others, it spreads throughout the body, making even a light touch or minor changes in temperature agonizing.
For Ms. Toussaint, as for many other patients, the pain was life altering. When she tore her hamstring, she was on the verge of completing her bachelor's degree. She was also being considered for a part on the television series "Fame." But the injury left her in debilitating pain. She could no longer stand on her own or leave her house; riding in a car on the bumpy California roads was torture.
Ms. Toussaint dropped out of school and fell into a deep depression, she said. It took 13 1/2 years for her disorder to be diagnosed. Dozens of doctors told her it was "all in her head"; one even suggested she suffered from stage fright.
Without clear clues as to what induces the syndrome or who is particularly susceptible, doctors say that treating it is a challenge. Sympathetic nerve blocks can reduce the pain, and doctors say the relief often lasts longer than the anesthetic.
More than two dozen drugs are also being used to treat the pain. But none of the medications, which range from acetaminophen and ibuprofen to morphine and methadone, have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for this use.
"The myth is that this condition isn't treatable, but the truth is that it responds to the same kinds of treatments that have been found effective for other neuropathic pain," said Dr. Anne Louise Oaklander, director of the nerve injury unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of neurology at Harvard.
Dr. Russell K. Portenoy, chairman of the department of pain medicine and palliative care at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, added that treatment was "a trial and error" process.
Doctors tend to use the drugs that are most commonly prescribed for other conditions before the drugs that are less commonly used," he said. "But in many cases, doctors need to perform sequential trials to find out which drug or combination of drugs helps the most."
Dr. Portenoy said he is a consultant for drug companies but not on work related to the syndrome or its treatment.
Another treatment is to implant an electrical stimulator near the base of the spinal cord or the injured limb. The device sends low-level electrical signals to the spinal cord or to specific nerves and blocks pain signals from reaching the brain.
Dr. Robert J. Schwartzman of the Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia is skeptical of the electrical stimulators. Although he first began implanting them in patients in 1986, he no longer does. "Long term," he said, "stimulators don't work. From what I've seen, they wear out and then they stop working."
Dr. Schwartzman treats the condition with ketamine, an anesthetic that blocks one of the body's pain receptors. In most cases, this five-day inpatient therapy reduced the pain significantly for three to six months, he said.
In addition, a 10-day outpatient procedure — more than 1,200 people are on a waiting list for it — is being tested in a controlled experiment. Although the trial has been approved by the F.D.A., it is awaiting approval by Drexel's institutional review board.
Dr. Schwartzman has also sent the most extreme cases — the 30 patients who were found to be intractable to all other treatments — to Germany for five days of prolonged ketamine anesthesia, enough to put them into a coma.
Ten patients were completely relieved of their pain, Dr. Schwartzman said, noting that the treatment has not been approved in the United States.
Some doctors have strong concerns about the ketamine treatments. Dr. Oaklander, for one, believes there is not enough research to support its effectiveness, especially in light of the risks.
Either way, said Ms. Toussaint, who has not had the therapy herself, "It says a lot about this disease that we are willing to be put in comas." New research is also helping doctors understand the pain syndrome. In early 2006, a team at Massachusetts General was the first to identify organic nerve injuries in a large group of people with the disorder. The research, published in February in the journal Pain, confirmed that the syndrome was not psychosomatic, said Dr. Oaklander, who led the study.
This progress is promising for Ms. Toussaint. Since her illness was diagnosed in 1995, medications have reduced her pain, enabling her to stand and speak again. She and her partner, John Garrett, now manage For Grace, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing awareness of complex regional pain syndrome. Ms. Toussaint is also running for the California State Assembly on a health-based platform.
"People see me and they recognize me as the ballerina, but they don't remember the name of my disease," she said recently, "but that's all about to change." ###
I love blogging and its impact on American life. Wish I were in Vegas this week ! Enjoy.
The New York Times May 28, 2006 The Way We Live Now Can Bloggers Get Real? By MATT BAI
Las Vegas, as the ad campaign likes to remind us, is a place people go to untether themselves from reality — to become, if only for a weekend, anonymous and uncensored. It's odd, then, that Vegas is about to play host to a gathering of ordinary Americans whose objective is precisely the reverse. Next week, 1,000 devotees of the liberal blogging universe — people who know one another only as pseudonyms on a screen, connected by only their running commentaries — will descend on the Riviera Hotel in hopes of affixing names and faces to their online personas. The event has been dubbed the YearlyKos convention, and it is the first-ever corporeal assemblage of the bloggers at the Web site Dailykos.com. These are the people who are said to be changing the very nature of American politics, transforming the old smoke-filled room of insiders into an expansive chat room for anyone who wants in. And so it's not surprising that Democratic luminaries like the party's chairman, Howard Dean, and its leaders in Congress, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, have arranged their schedules to address the convention, along with at least a few 2008 presidential contenders. No small contingent of political professionals and journalists will show up as well. (I myself will sit on a panel about political journalism, which is kind of like being the Dunkin' Donuts spokesman at a cardiologists' convention.)
Barely four years after Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, a former American soldier who grew up in El Salvador and Chicago, started Daily Kos from his home in Berkeley, Calif., the site is now less a blog than a civic phenomenon. With some 600,000 visitors a day, Daily Kos reaches more Americans — albeit like-minded Americans — than all but a handful of the largest daily newspapers. The Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly, recently profiled a 23-year-old law student who writes on Daily Kos's front page under the pseudonym Georgia10, positing that she may well be the most-read political writer in the city, even though few people know her real name. (For the record, it's Georgia Logothetis, and she lives with her parents.) In this way, Daily Kos and other blogs resemble a political version of those escapist online games where anyone with a modem can disappear into an alternate society, reinventing himself among neighbors and colleagues who exist only in a virtual realm. It is not so much a blog as a travel destination, a place where what you have to say can be more important — at least for a few hours each day — than who you are or what you do.
It shouldn't be so surprising, then, that the lead architect of the YearlyKos convention is a married, 36-year-old Memphis native named Gina Cooper, who until recently taught high-school math and science. (Moulitsas lent his trademark to the conference, but the whole enterprise was proposed and organized by some 25 volunteers.) Though she had never before been involved in politics, Cooper began to blog, in between classes and when she came home at night, during the weeks before the invasion of Iraq. In just a few short years, at the dawn of the online age, Cooper has gone from banging out her first musings on politics to speaking from the dais of a hotel ballroom, standing alongside the Democratic Party's most powerful figures. She says she hopes the convention will show politicians that the bloggers are just ordinary Americans — and vice versa. "I think we need to see leaders as people," Cooper told me recently. "If we keep seeing leaders as magical and distant from us, then we have every reason in the world not to see ourselves as leaders too."
The party's leaders see an obvious opportunity here. Ever since Dean became the first candidate created by the Internet, Democratic candidates have struggled to understand and exploit this new online movement in their party — as well as to raise funds through its channels. John Edwards does podcasts from his kitchen. John Kerry posts on Daily Kos as if it were as natural as flossing his teeth. ("My wife, Teresa, blogs passionately, and I follow blogs, too," he wrote in his first entry.) Reid holds conference calls with bloggers to discuss party strategy. The conundrum for these politicians is that they are used to dealing with definable interest groups. If you want to win over the African-American vote, for instance, you go speak to the N.A.A.C.P. If you want the support of labor, you get on the phone to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. But who can deliver virtual voting blocs? Who speaks for pseudonymous bloggers? For the politicians, YearlyKos would seem to put online activism into a familiar rubric. Here, at last, is the impersonal ballroom with garish lighting and folding round tables, the throng of attendees whose hands can be shaken and shoulders gripped. Here is the Netroots as just another influential lobby to be wooed and won over, like the steelworkers or the Sierra Club.
This is, at best, an imperfect view of online activists, many of whom disdain traditional interest groups and can't seem to agree on what to call themselves, let alone on any common agenda. Even so, the politicians may understand the real significance of this first blogger convention of its kind better than some of the bloggers themselves, who imagine that cyberpolitics is no less than a reinvention of the public square, the harbinger of a radically different era in which politicians will connect to their constituents electronically and voters will organize in virtual communities. Politicians know that politics is, by its nature, a tactile business. New technology may change the way partisans organize and debate, and it may even spawn an entirely new political culture. But at the end of the day, partisans will inevitably be drawn to sit across the table from the candidates they support or oppose, just as votes will still be won and lost in banquet halls and airport hangars and all the other seedy, sweaty stalls of the political marketplace. Online politics can't flourish in the virtual realm alone, any more than an online romance can be consummated through instant messaging.
That's because politics, like dating, is as much about the experience as it is about the winning or losing. Whether we're talking about the reformers of the progressive era or the immigrant ward leaders of the urban heyday, 1960's antiwar protesters or 1980's religious conservatives, new political movements have always evolved, ultimately, into thriving social networks. We have seen the beginnings of this online with the "meet-ups" for Howard Dean and the house parties organized by MoveOn.org. As these social circles congeal, their members will inevitably want to share hugs and handshakes with their political leaders, too, rather than merely threads and diaries. The advent of television didn't change this visceral aspect of choosing our icons, and neither will broadband. As Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune's architecture critic, noted in a recent article about pro-immigration protests, the Web doesn't replace the public square; it drives people to it.
All of this suggests that for all the philosophizing about the meaning of online campaigns and the passing of the 20th-century political model, this next iteration of American politics won't really look so dissimilar from the ones that came before. Just as the liberal social activists of the first television generation overthrew the urban bosses who had ruled the Democratic Party, so, too, the Gina Coopers of the world, a decade from now, may very well be running for Congress, managing campaigns and lobbying for legislation. This is as it should be. Technologies change and movements flourish, but the essential process of American politics endures. And those who lead the most consequential revolts against the status quo never really vanquish the party's insider establishment. They simply take its place.
Matt Bai, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia and a potential presidential candidate. ###
PHOTO RIGHT: At Paws for Effect in California, Guin Dill coaches, from left, Casey, who was in "Desperate Housewives"; Sydney, who was in "Dude, Where's My Car?"; and Sherman, who can dance on his hind legs. Animals have been at the center of my life since I was a little boy. Here's some of the reasons why. Enjoy.
May 28, 2006 This Star Works for Chicken Bits By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON THERE are those who would claw, beg or crawl to get into the movies or on television.
If they're good at it, they do.
Hollywood has its hits, like "Mission: Impossible III" and "Desperate Housewives." And when it does, dogs take their turn in the winner's circle, too. Tom Cruise's best friend in his new "Mission: Impossible" is Tanner, a yellow Lab. Casey, a basset hound, plucked from a litter of average pups, is Felicity Huffman's newest single male. He now takes his walks on Wisteria Lane.
And then there's Lassie, a star in her own right, returning to the big screen in September and reviving an entertainment franchise that would make Tanner twitch his paws in his sleep.
Hollywood has an animal side (not the one you think you know). Dogs, cats and "exotics" (mandrills, dolphins, yaks and others) work as career professionals. Tanner, Mr. Cruise's co-star, was not the dog next door. He has a powerful agent, Debbie Pearl of Paws for Effect, a talent agency and training ranch with offices in Los Angeles and New York. And he has a résumé of movie cameos and commercials. "Mission: Impossible III" was his breakout role.
Like other actors in the industry, animals have open calls and closed auditions, hair and makeup experts, special diets, red carpet appearances and retirement to a ranch. There are stars, unknowns, hopefuls and has-beens. There is hard work, and there is reward: chicken bits, in Lassie's case.
I met with Lassie at the Tribeca Film Festival this month. The star made an onstage appearance with the director of "Lassie," Charles Sturridge, before a screening of the movie. Then she met the press, resting in the green room with her handlers — a trainer and a pack of publicists — posing for photographers and receiving reporters. With her mantle of ermine-white chest fur, brightened with tea tree oil shampoo, Lassie looked as poised as the Queen of England.
Hey Hey, the collie I met, was one of four dogs who played Lassie. Typically, animals are hired in teams to play a role. Birds & Animals Unlimited — the William Morris of animal talent agencies — supplied the collies, which among them provided the personality (close-ups), athleticism (stunts), high energy (reaction shots and spontaneity) and people skills (appearances) to portray the character.
Hey Hey, with Carol Riggins, her trainer, was doing Lassie's personal appearances, a five-month tour, which included introducing a new pet food, biscuit and treat line, Lassie Natural Way, and raising money at a charity event for Bide-a-Wee, the animal shelter. On tour Hey Hey drinks only distilled water. Bottled water, a stock item in many performers' contracts, is too regional and potentially upsetting to her system, Ms. Riggins said.
Unlike the four Lassies, most dogs who work in the entertainment industry are rescued animals. Agencies adopt them from shelters for specific parts, matching the lead dog, or "hero" dog, to several others and training them for the role. Animals adopted by an agency become part of its stable, for work in the future, not unlike the old Hollywood studio system. Trainers are union teamsters, and animals are hired at $300 to $450 a day. An animal appearing frequently in a successful television series might make $10,000 a week.
Being discovered in an open call, where people show up with what they believe are their amazing pets, is rare, as agencies and their animals have largely cornered the market in the last 20 years. Being cute or playing dead in the living room doesn't cut it when you're on location with Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Matt Damon and Julia Roberts (a Paws for Effect dog worked on "Ocean's 11"), and time is money.
Animals also have to be taught not to try to kill their colleagues. "You have to make sure you set up a shot safely," said Mark Forbes, of Birds & Animals, who is the animal coordinator on "Evan Almighty," a retelling of the story of Noah's ark starring Steve Carell, where 20 species might be included in a single take. All the vegetarians — horses, cows, rabbits and chickens — work together in crowd scenes. "You put enough distance in so if something decides it likes something," he said, "you don't have accidents."
Hollywood being Hollywood, there is type-casting. Krystal, a capuchin monkey with an impressive list of credits who last appeared in "Failure to Launch," gets cast as a monkey. In the entertainment industry, a monkey is a monkey.
As dogs, Jack Russell terriers get comedy. Newfoundlands get date pictures. Rottweilers and pit bulls are attack dogs. Huskies pull sleds and only get work in movies about snow.
Collies are Lassie, period.
What directors want right now in stars, though, are mutts.
"It's not a supermodel thing like you want the perfect retriever," said Roger Schumacher, a veteran trainer who worked on the pilot of "Frasier" with Moose, the Jack Russell terrier that played Eddie. (There are dynasties like the Douglases: Moose's son Enzo took over the role of Eddie on "Frasier" when Moose went too gray to play a youthful dog. Moose made a "Golden Pond" return as a senior Skip in "My Dog Skip.")
"Mutts have more character and a fresh look," Mr. Schumacher explained. The Fonz, a pit bull and Shar-Pei mix, co-stars with Jason Patric in "Walker Payne," a movie Mr. Schumacher worked on recently, about a man who makes his dog, Brute, fight for money.
"There's an expression on his face, and watery rich brown eyes, because the Fonz has Shar-Pei and its wrinkled brow," said Matt Williams, the director. "It's emotive stuff."
Mr. Sturridge, when asked how he directed Lassie to give a star performance, said that the viewer "does 90 percent of the work." This can be rough for actors competing for an audience's attention.
He said that before each take, Peter O'Toole, Lassie's co-star, "would clear his throat in the loudest possible way, which was his way of setting out his canine territory," Mr. Sturridge said. "The actors got used to it, but the dogs would always jump," he added.
Do Hollywood's most likable actors like animals? Steve Carell is a dog person, said Mr. Forbes, who is working with him and Barnum, a boxer that Evan adopts in "Evan Almighty." Julia Roberts is a horse person. She had Hightower, a sorrel American quarter horse who starred in "The Horse Whisperer," flown by FedEx from the set where he was working to the set of "Runaway Bride," so that she could ride him away from her wedding in the movie's opening scene.
Other stars are not animal people at all. Mr. Forbes, with 20 years in the business, would not name names, though he said it is hard to love someone who doesn't love dogs. "When I like an actor, I'm reluctant to meet them now," he said. "Your ideal gets shot down. Not very nice."
Showing up on the set in a fur coat (your own) doesn't mean you don't require hair and makeup. When the original Lassie lost a large lock of hair after a child yanked it out in 1943, Max Factor made the hairpiece he wore to cover the damage.
The woman to go to now is Rose Ordile of Animals of a Different Color. Ms. Ordile, a colorist and trainer in Los Angeles, made hair extensions for the sheepdogs in "The Shaggy Dog," starring Tim Allen. She matched markings on the 40 huskies who played the eight sled dogs in "Eight Below," and she colored two new Lassies.
She travels with the Target trademark dog, a bull terrier with a red target-patch eye, "to make sure his eye is right at every moment," Ms. Ordile said.
She is also Morris the cat's agent. And she works on the team of Persians that are the face of Fancy Feast cat food.
She said, "It's washed six times to get the oils out — cats' coats can look greasy — then hand-dried, fluffed out, with every hair falling into place." She recommended Kelco Plum Cream Rinse, which blues fur to an ultrawhite.
"The Fancy Feast cat," she said of the commercial celebrity, "that cat is perfect." ###
My only interest in re-publishing this article is the role the Beatles have in all of this. Enjoy.
The New York Times May 14, 2006 What Happened to the Fortune Michael Jackson Made? By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN
This article was reported by Jeff Leeds, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Timothy L. O'Brien and written by Mr. O'Brien.
SEATED in a $9,000-a-night luxury suite in the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, Michael Jackson played the role of a wealthy pop star as he met with two senior executives of the Sony Corporation last December. From the opulent setting to Mr. Jackson's retinue of advisers, there was little indication that Sony's troops were paying a visit because they were concerned that he was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy proceedings.
Sony was worried because Mr. Jackson was the company's partner in a lucrative music publishing business that included songs by the Beatles and other musicians. If Mr. Jackson became insolvent, his 50 percent share of that $1 billion business would be up for grabs to the highest bidder, leaving Sony to confront the uncomfortable possibility that it would be forced into a new, unpredictable partnership not of its own choosing.
With the waters of the Persian Gulf and a teeming, prosperous emirate splayed out far beneath them, the group got down to business. According to those who attended the meeting and requested anonymity because confidential financial matters were discussed, Mr. Jackson was pensive and cooperative, seemingly well aware of the gravity of his situation despite the grandeur of his surroundings. He only chirped up occasionally to remark on what a wonderful investment the catalog had been.
After listening to Mr. Jackson, Robert S. Wiesenthal, a senior Sony executive, eventually proposed that Sony would help the singer find a bank to lend him more than $300 million to pay off his debts. In exchange, Mr. Jackson would possibly forfeit a portion of his half of the Beatles catalog.
Just last month, Mr. Jackson — still swamped in debt, with his musical career in stasis and his personal life limned by scandal — agreed to that financial overhaul. It is likely to strip him of about half of his remaining stake in the catalog, which he has relied on as a financial lifeline for about a decade. According to executives involved in the restructuring talks, Mr. Jackson used the catalog, as well as copyrights to his own songs, as collateral for roughly $270 million in bank loans he took out to fund a spending spree that includes upkeep for his sprawling California ranch, Neverland, and other exotic luxuries.
Given how precarious Mr. Jackson's financial situation appears to be, it is unclear how long he will be able to retain his remaining stake in his prized music catalog. A reckoning appears near, and Mr. Jackson's ability to hold onto his fortune has proven to be as fleeting as stardom itself.
The arc of Mr. Jackson's career, and his management of his business and financial affairs, tracks some of the timeworn truisms about the realities of the entertainment industry and those who inhabit its upper tiers: a child star unwittingly beholden to others who control his bank account; a more mature adult who is savvy about packaging and marketing himself but who grows increasingly undisciplined about his spending; and, finally, a reclusive caricature locked inside a financial and emotional fantasyland of his own making.
For those without access to Mr. Jackson's personal accounts, assessing exactly how much money has passed through his hands over a career that spans decades is impossible. Sales of his recordings through Sony's music unit have generated more than $300 million in royalties for Mr. Jackson since the early 1980's, according to three individuals with direct knowledge of the singer's business affairs. Revenues from concerts and music publishing — including the creation of a venture with Sony that controls the Beatles catalog — as well as from endorsements, merchandising and music videos added, perhaps, $400 million more to that amount, these people believe.
WHATEVER portion of those earnings actually ended up in Mr. Jackson's wallet is also difficult to assess because it would have to account for hefty costs like recording and production expenses, taxes and the like that would have reduced income from his business endeavors. Mr. Jackson could not be reached for comment.
"I think that Michael never had any concept of fiscal responsibility, or logical fiscal responsibility. He was an individual that had been overindulged by those that represented him or worked for him for all of his life," said Alvin Malnik, a former financial adviser to Mr. Jackson and a former lawyer for Meyer Lansky, the late mob kingpin. "There was no planning in terms of allocations of how much he should spend. As a businessman, you can forecast your spending for the next six months to a year. For Michael, it was whatever he wanted at the time he wanted.
"Millions of dollars annually were spent on plane charters, purchases of antiques and paintings," Mr. Malnik continued. "If you want to take a trip to London, that's one thing. If you want to continue that trip and have your entourage of 15 or 20 people go with you, it gets expensive."
Others close to Mr. Jackson say that the performer's finances have not deteriorated simply because he is a big spender. They say that until the early 1990's, he paid relatively close attention to his accounting and kept an eye on the cash that flowed through his business and creative ventures. After that, they say, Mr. Jackson became overly enamored of something that ensnares wealthy people of all stripes: bad advice.
"Some people can go to a person like Michael and say, 'Listen, this is out of hand.' Other people would much rather say, 'Whatever you want,' and they don't care," said Frank Dileo, who was Mr. Jackson's manager from 1984 to 1989. "I think after me, there were a lot of people that didn't care. All they were interested in was what they were getting. And they killed the golden goose."
Michael Jackson has spent a lifetime surprising people, in recent years largely because of a surreal personal life, lurid legal scandals, serial plastic surgeries and erratic public behavior that have turned him — on his very best days — into the butt of late-night talk-show jokes and tabloid headlines. But when his career began to take off nearly four decades ago as a member of the pop group the Jackson 5, fans and entertainment industry veterans recognized something else about the pint-size musical dynamo that was unusual: He was in possession of an outsize, mesmerizing talent.
Deke Richards, a writer and producer who worked closely with Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, in shaping the earliest stages of Mr. Jackson's career, recalls watching the singer in one of his earliest performances in Los Angeles. It was 1969 at the Daisy Club, a Beverly Hills venue located on Rodeo Drive, and while the entire Jackson entourage impressed Mr. Richards, Michael was the star.
"It was almost evident that it was something special, it was like the reincarnation of Frankie Lyman," said Mr. Richards, referring to the 1950's teenage vocalist who turned "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" into a hit. "Nobody had seen anything like that since Frankie, a kid with chops like that who could sing like that. It was like a 30-year-old man was inside this little boy."
Although Mr. Gordy promoted Mr. Jackson as an 8-year-old wunderkind in advance of the Daisy Club appearance, the singer was just weeks shy of his 11th birthday when he performed there. Even so, he had already spent years in talent shows and performing in seedy Midwestern clubs under the aegis of Joe Jackson, his dictatorial and ambitious father. Joe Jackson and Mr. Gordy were the singer's twin mentors during Michael's early career; neither of them could be reached to comment for this article.
Despite Michael Jackson's youth, Mr. Gordy and others recognized that in addition to the singer's talent he also was an observant, diligent understudy keen to learn all that he could about the workings of the music business.
"Michael had a knowingness about him," Mr. Gordy recalled in a 1994 interview with Billboard magazine. "He paid close attention to every single thing I said. Even when my back was turned, I knew he'd be watching me like a hawk. The other kids might have been playing or doing whatever they were doing, but Michael was dead serious. And he stayed that way."
Mr. Jackson had his own recollections of those years. "When you're a show-business child, you really don't have the maturity to understand a great deal of what is going on around you. People make a lot of decisions concerning your life when you're out of the room," he wrote in "Moon Walk," his 1988 autobiography. "Berry insisted on perfection and attention to detail. I'll never forget his persistence. This was his genius. Then and later, I observed every moment of the sessions where Berry was present and never forgot what I learned. To this day, I use the same principles."
Mr. Gordy paid many of Motown's most successful acts, including the Jackson 5, far stingier royalty rates on their albums than they might have earned in a later era, and certainly lower than what Mr. Jackson himself earned during his heyday in the mid-to-late 1980's. According to J. Randy Taraborrelli's 1991 biography, "Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness," Motown paid the Jackson 5 a royalty rate that was just a fraction of what Mr. Jackson secured for himself later in his career.
"There was a lot of pressure on Michael as a youngster to perform for the family," said Shelly Finkel, a former rock 'n' roll promoter who currently manages professional boxers and who periodically intersected with the Jackson family when Mr. Jackson was a child. "You get a kid like Michael Jackson and he's unsophisticated with his money and people take advantage. It's not a real upbringing. He didn't mature as a human in all directions."
The Jackson 5 jumped from Motown to CBS Records in 1975, and the company rewarded them with better contracts. They also received guaranteed fees of at least $350,000 per album, according to Mr. Taraborrelli's book, well above their Motown fees but still not approaching the stratospheric, multimillion-dollar guarantees Mr. Jackson would begin getting in the 1980's. Concerts offered another source of income, but it was still income that Mr. Jackson shared with his siblings and upon which his father kept a tight rein.
Mr. Jackson eventually broke with his father and the Jackson 5, a move toward creative and financial independence marked by his collaborations with Quincy Jones on a trio of albums. The most memorable of those is 1982's "Thriller," which eventually racked up sales of 51 million copies globally, according to the Guinness World Records, making it the best-selling album in history. Yet "Thriller" took a heavy toll, Mr. Jackson's associates say, setting a benchmark of success that the entertainer never stopped chasing.
Mr. Jackson's pre-expense share of the "Thriller" bounty — including the album, singles and a popular video — surpassed $125 million, according to a former adviser who requested anonymity because of the confidential nature of Mr. Jackson's finances. Those who counseled him in the "Thriller" era credit the pop star with financial acumen and astute business judgment, evidenced by his $47.5 million purchase of the Beatles catalog in 1985 (a move that served to alienate him from Paul McCartney, the Beatles legend who imparted the financial wisdom of buying catalogs to Mr. Jackson during a casual chat, only to see Mr. Jackson then turn around and buy rights to many of Mr. McCartney's own songs).
John Branca, an attorney who structured the purchase for Mr. Jackson and represented him from 1980 to 1990 and periodically after 1993, said he saw no signs of wayward financial behavior in the years straddling the release of "Thriller." "I think Michael was brilliant for a good part of his career — savvy, involved, on top of everything," Mr. Branca said. "I also think he was a marketing genius."
In the midst of the "Thriller" phenomenon, Mr. Jackson's appetites were still relatively modest by celebrity standards, and he had just begun to experience the possibilities of riches he had never known in his childhood. Acquaintances from that period say that he would occasionally borrow gas money, and he still lived in the Jackson family home in the suburban Encino section of Los Angeles.
Although he made an unsuccessful attempt in 1987 to buy the bones of Joseph Merrick, more famously known as "The Elephant Man," for $1 million, it wasn't until the end of the 1980's that he began to exhibit more baronial tendencies. In 1988, he made his $17 million purchase of property near Santa Ynez, Calif., that became Neverland.
At the same time, Mr. Jackson was redefining the concept of spectacle in pop music. He hired Martin Scorsese, the film director, to direct a video for his album "Bad," a clip that one adviser with direct knowledge of the production budget said cost more than $1 million. The same adviser said that Mr. Jackson netted "way north" of $35 million from a yearlong "Bad" tour that began in 1987, and that heading into the 1990's Mr. Jackson was in sound shape financially.
While Mr. Jackson began to routinely rotate through different teams of advisers in the 90's, and pour more of his own money into pricey projects like videos, at least one of his advisers from the period contends that Mr. Jackson kept a lid on his spending until even the late 1990's.
"I didn't ever see him take all kinds of people all around the world," said James Morey, who served as one of Mr. Jackson's personal managers from 1990 to 1997 (when Mr. Jackson fired him and turned for advice instead to the Saudi sheik Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal). "Michael is very bright, and Michael pretty much knew — even when he was advised something was too expensive — if he felt it was right for the art, he had the means to pay for it. He wasn't oblivious to what budgets were."
Other events, however, suggest that Mr. Jackson's finances were already under strain by the mid-90's. He retreated from working regularly after the release of "Dangerous" in 1991 and settled a child-molestation lawsuit for about $20 million. More significantly in terms of his finances, he had to sell Sony a 50 percent stake in the Beatles catalog in 1995 for more than $100 million, which one adviser said helped shore up the singer's wobbling accounts.
Mr. Jackson wouldn't produce another studio album of completely new material until 2001, yet whenever he surfaced with other works that were compilations of previously released material he still expected promotions and spectacles beyond anything done before. For his 1995 album, "HIStory," for example, he sought to shoot an extravagant "teaser" video to promote it. He shot the video in Hungary for millions of dollars and hired Hungarian soldiers to march in it.
"When they were shooting this thing in Hungary, the production company would call me in the middle of the night and say, 'Michael wants more troops,' " said Dan Beck, a senior marketing executive who worked on the video. "He dreamed the big dream. It was P. T. Barnum."
MR. JACKSON indulged in other pricey vanity projects, including what one adviser believes to be the most expensive — a 35-minute film called "Ghosts" that he co-wrote with the novelist Stephen King and shot in 1997 with Stan Winston, a special-effects whiz that cost well above $15 million. One person with direct knowledge of Mr. Jackson's spending said that the star paid a substantial portion of as much as $65 million on video projects in the mid-90's — outlays that contributed significantly to his financial problems.
Mr. Jackson also came under the sway of an assorted rotation of new advisers who apparently convinced him to make heavy bets on risky investments that never panned out. In late 1996, according to court papers, he met Myung Ho Lee, a Korean adviser who emerged as a central figure in the performer's debt binge.
Documents indicate that by late 1998, Mr. Jackson had already taken out and depleted a $90 million bank loan and Mr. Lee arranged a new, $140 million loan from Bank of America that was collateralized by the Beatles catalog and used to pay off earlier debts. Just several months later, the $140 million had evaporated and Mr. Jackson, fresh off of his divorce settlement with Lisa Marie Presley, obtained another $30 million line of credit from Bank of America. Mr. Lee said in court papers that in late 2000 he raised the original $140 million bank loan to $200 million, using part of that loan to pay down the $30 million credit line, which had been entirely tapped.
Although documents indicate that Mr. Lee brought at least two risky investment opportunities to Mr. Jackson, Mr. Lee still managed to castigate the performer in court papers for a lack of financial discipline in 1999 and 2000. "Jackson became fixated on obtaining expensive possessions and feeding his ego by listening to the advice of hucksters and imposters," Mr. Lee noted.
All the while, Mr. Jackson's spending ramped up. As described by several of Mr. Jackson's former associates, he routinely borrowed large sums of cash to pay for things he may not have been able to afford. Marc Schaffel, who formerly served as an adviser on Mr. Jackson's television projects, alleges in a lawsuit scheduled for trial next month that Mr. Jackson failed to reimburse him for outlays of more than $2.2 million, much of it in cash.
THESE expenses included $46,075 in August 2001 for appraisals and architectural work done as Mr. Jackson considered buying a home in Beverly Hills; a $1 million fee paid to Marlon Brando in September 2001 so that the film star would appear at a Madison Square Garden event and in a video honoring Mr. Jackson; more than $380,000 for the purchase of a Bentley Arnage sport sedan and a custom Lincoln Navigator sport-utility vehicle; and $250,000 in June 2003 for antique shopping in Beverly Hills.
Mr. Malnik, who began advising Mr. Jackson a few years ago, said in an interview that the entertainer had spent about $8 million annually on plane charters, antiques, paintings, hotel rooms, travel and other personal expenses, and that the annual upkeep for Neverland and its staff was about $4 million. A forensic accountant who testified in Mr. Jackson's criminal trial last year said that the singer's annual budget in 1999 included about $7.5 million for personal expenses and $5 million to maintain Neverland. None of this explains the scale of Mr. Jackson's borrowing, however, or the rapidity with which he burned through those funds.
The leading drain on Mr. Jackson's ample resources may have been monumentally unwise investments that apparently produced equally colossal losses. Mr. Malnik estimates that some of Mr. Jackson's advisers squandered $50 million on deals that never panned out — what he describes as amusement-park ideas and "bizarre, global kinds of computerized Marvel comic-book characters bigger than life." Mr. Malnik said that he had loaned Mr. Jackson $7 million, part of which was used to settle various lawsuits related to deals gone awry.
It's possible that Mr. Jackson's biggest costs may have shifted in early 2000 away from his shopping sprees to simply shouldering enormous monthly interest payments on his debt. According to one executive involved in his affairs, Mr. Jackson was making monthly payments of about $4.5 million in 2005 on $270 million in debt. That works out to an annual interest rate of about 20 percent, a toll more familiar in the worlds of credit cards, subprime lending and loan sharks and not commonly encountered by wealthy people with substantial assets. But Mr. Jackson's wildly errant spending had forced him to confront harsher realities.
By the time Mr. Jackson finally met with the Sony executives in Dubai last December, his onerous interest payments had left him in a bind. Fortress Investment Group, a New York-based investment group that specializes in distressed debt, bought Mr. Jackson's loans from Bank of America in 2003 after the singer missed some payments. It then began levying high interest rates. Fortress, which did not respond to an interview request, threatened to call its loan on Dec. 20 last year because of Mr. Jackson's delinquency. What especially concerned Mr. Jackson about that, said one person familiar with the talks, was that it was just five days before Christmas.
TO keep Mr. Jackson afloat, Sony arranged an extension with Fortress and brought in Citigroup and other potential lenders to arrange new financing at a lower rate. At a meeting in London on Valentine's Day earlier this year, Citigroup offered Mr. Jackson a new loan with a 6 percent rate. Citigroup struck a deal because Mr. Jackson agreed to give Sony the right to buy half of Mr. Jackson's 50 percent stake in the Beatles catalog at a future date for about $250 million, providing a backstop for Citigroup if Mr. Jackson defaulted.
To the amazement of others involved in the talks, Fortress then offered Mr. Jackson the same terms — a measure of how desirable the Beatles catalog has been and continues to be to the various financiers and advisers who have hovered around Mr. Jackson since he bought it two decades ago. By April, a final deal was in place. Citigroup ended up providing a $25 million mortgage on Neverland, most of which Mr. Jackson used to buy back a 5 percent stake in the catalog held by one of his early advisers, Mr. Branca.
For his part, Mr. Malnik said he thought Mr. Jackson might have been able to continue to afford his lifestyle and errant spending if he had continued to work, but, of course, Mr. Jackson chose to work less and less. "For Michael, it was, whatever he wanted at the time he wanted," Mr. Malnik said. "This was perpetuated over a great number of years. Ultimately, if you don't change the course of things, you get to the end of the day."
Even at the end of the day, however, some people still remember the beginning. When put on hold, telephone callers to Mr. Gordy's office are treated to the 1971 ballad "Got to Be There," Mr. Jackson's hit on his first album as a solo artist for Motown. ###
I have long thought that Ben Franklind had it exactly right: moderation - not either extreme - is the key to a balanced life. Cheers.
The New York Times May 7, 2006 Ideas & Trends Between Addiction and Abstinence By BENEDICT CAREY
A HUMILIATING accident. An apparent memory lapse. A sudden, emotional confession.
Representative Patrick Kennedy's car crash on Capitol Hill early Thursday and a news conference a day later had a familiar rhythm, especially for those who study addiction or know it firsthand.
Mr. Kennedy, a six-term Democrat from Rhode Island, said that his addiction was to prescription medication and that he planned to seek treatment at an addiction clinic, as he had done before.
"I struggle every day with this disease, as do millions of Americans," said Mr. Kennedy, who is 38.
But will a cure that apparently didn't take the first time be successful the second time around? Mr. Kennedy, for one, ruefully acknowledged how easy it was for him to backslide.
Mr. Kennedy is seeking treatment at a time when the entire field is undergoing a transformation. Once akin to exorcists, committed to casting out the demons altogether, those who work with addictive behavior of all kinds are now trying less dogmatic approaches — ones that allow for moderate use as a bridge to abstinence.
A government-financed study of alcoholism released last week, the largest to date, suggests how deeply this "moderate use" idea has taken hold. The study found that the treatment produced "good clinical outcomes" in about three-quarters of the almost 1,400 heavy, chronic drinkers in the study. Some quit altogether; most, however, had moderated their drinking — to 14 drinks a week or fewer for men, 11 or fewer for women.
"The fact is that these moderate measures are becoming more and more accepted in judging treatments," said Dr. Edward Nunes, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University.
Millions of recovering addicts and their families as well as counselors working in the trenches consider this approach to be foolhardy and immoral. Addicts are by definition unable to control or manage their addictions, they say, and leaving an opening for moderate use only encourages the experimentation that can lead to ruin or death.
Cases like that of Mr. Kennedy dramatically illustrate how close to breakdown many addicts live, they say. "Implying you can simply cut down does a tremendous disservice to those who have this addiction," said Stanley L., a recovering alcoholic in Pennsylvania who still attends group counseling sessions.
Yet the openness to moderate use is likely to increase, driven by changes in the science of addiction, like pharmaceutical treatments.
The latest option for opiate addiction, bupenorphine, is a substitute drug, like methadone, replacing one habit with another. The drug naltrexone, which seems to numb the brain to the euphoria from drinking or gambling binges, is more likely to reduce the consumption than shut it down altogether. And perhaps the biggest recent advance in smoking cessation, the nicotine patch, is itself a badge of compromise, an admission that many smokers need a habit to lean on, temporarily or perhaps indefinitely, as they strive for life without.
When studying these pharmaceutical crutches and prescribing them, doctors tend to emphasize improvement over abstinence for good reasons, researchers say.
"Third-party payers," said Dr. Barbara Mason of the Scripps Research Institute, where she treats and studies addiction. "One way you can convince people holding the purse strings to cover treatment is to say, look, if you pay for this and it lowers the level of drinking or substance use you won't have to pay for E.R. visits. That's really important. If you prevent one case of fetal alcohol syndrome, you don't have to pay for a lifetime of care."
Some studies of drug use and gambling have also contributed to shifting the thinking about addiction. For example, surveys find that most smokers who quit do so on their own, after many attempts and periods of moderation. An estimated 20 percent of compulsive drug users and drinkers have had similar recoveries, experts say.
In a 2002 study, researchers at Harvard Medical School tracked the behavior of more than 6,000 casino employees, many of whom were heavy drinkers, gamblers or both. Over a period of three years, many of those with diagnosable disorders changed their behavior, moving from heavy use to moderate levels, and sometimes back up again.
"The conventional wisdom is that you get the habit and start down this slippery slope and it just gets worse and worse, but that was not true for many of these people," said Christine Reilly, executive director of the Institute for Research on Pathological Gambling and Related Disorders, in Medford, Mass.
Heavy gamblers and drug users are much more diverse groups, in short, than many presume, and their compulsions have different meanings in the context of their lives that are important guides for treatment.
Some addicts are depressed and anxious and in need of psychotherapy but can't get it because therapists require that they give up their habits first, said Alan Marlatt, director of the Addictive Behaviors Research Center at the University of Washington. "Maybe the drug use is responsible for the depression, or the depression led to the drug, but it's all mixed up and they never find out, because they can't get treatment," he said.
Many addicts, it is true, spiral only downward, and must quit to stay alive. But others are ambivalent about whether they want to quit or not. Their routines, their pleasures, some of their most sustaining relationships are tied up with their habits, and it is far from clear what will nourish them if they suddenly give up. The very idea, common in abstinence-based programs, that one "slip" can lead to total loss of control may undermine their best efforts to self-regulate.
"It's very scary for them to contemplate life without this habit, because it has become very meaningful for them," Ms. Reilly said.
Offering moderate use as a first step, some therapists say, is the only way of "meeting people where they are," and getting them down to a level of use that keeps them from driving under the influence, petty crime or other trouble.
"The idea is to reduce the consequences of the heavy use, and work from there," said Mr. Marlatt.
This was more or less the view offered by Charles Barkley, the former N.B.A. star, in an interview on ESPN last week: "Do I have a gambling problem? Yeah, I do have a gambling problem but I don't consider it a problem because I can afford to gamble. It's just a stupid habit that I've got to get under control, because it's just not a good thing to be broke after all of these years."
By treating the habit as just that — a habit — and not a disease, therapists may be able to make progress in reducing the bad consequences, whether a broken marriage or an embarrassing car accident.
On the other hand, the risk to addicts of this approach is incontestably real, and no one knows in advance who can and cannot safely moderate their addictive behavior.
"I am deeply concerned about my reaction to the medication and my lack of knowledge of the accident that evening," Representative Kennedy said on Friday. "But I do know enough to know that I need to seek expert help." ###
A resort in Entropia Universe where players can be charged to "visit."
It had to come to this. All categories are illusions.Caveat emptor. Enjoy.
The New York Times May 2, 2006 Entropia Universe Players Can Cash Their Online Earnings at the A.T.M. By SETH SCHIESEL
When you put your card into an automated teller machine, view your balance on the screen and then receive money from the dispenser, you probably understand that a merely electronic notion — your bank account — is being translated into a physical object with value: greenbacks.
But what if you are at the corner A.T.M. and your net worth is locked up in an imaginary asteroid mining venture?
Until now you would be plumb out of luck. But today the makers of Entropia Universe, a popular online science-fiction game, plan to introduce a real-world A.T.M. card that will allow players instantly to withdraw hard cash automatically converted from their virtual game treasury. So a player with, say, 2,000 spare P.E.D.'s (Project Entropia Dollars) left over after purchasing a new laser rifle in the game could withdraw $200 and take a date to a real-life ballgame.
With around 250,000 players, Entropia is the leader of a small but growing group of online computer games with virtual economies explicitly based on real-world money, and today's announcement is the most ambitious step yet to meld an in-game economy with the real global financial system.
The game's maker, MindArk, based in Gothenburg, Sweden, estimates that Entropia players generated $165 million (or 1.65 billion P.E.D.'s) in total economic activity last year. Since the game's inception in 2003, it has been relatively simple for players to add money to their Entropia accounts via credit card or electronic bank transfer. But until now withdrawing money from the system was a cumbersome affair that could take months, as MindArk employees manually verified that the player's virtual fortune had been earned legitimately (and not by hacking).
"We want this game to be a full second reality," Jan Welter, MindArk's chief executive, said in a telephone interview. "We want you to be able to have fun, make friends, make a business, enjoy music and art and do it in our game. The A.T.M. card is a big step toward bringing people into our world because they can have comfort that they can access their virtual funds immediately."
In most mainstream online games, like the spectacularly popular World of Warcraft, spending real money for virtual items is not only against the rules but also considered the worst sort of louche behavior, like paying for sex. But in Entropia, the entire game system is based on the fact that 10 P.E.D.'s equal a dollar and that the game's virtual items and assets have real-world value.
For instance Jon Jacobs, known online as Neverdie, a 39-year-old Entropia player in Miami Beach, last year sold almost everything he owned (real and virtual) to scratch together $100,000 (1 million P.E.D.'s) to buy a huge space station in the game. By selling apartments and storefronts to other players and by imposing taxes on players' hunting and mining on his real estate, he is now making about $12,000 a month on his investment, he estimates. And his big nightclub is still under construction.
"The A.T.M. card is a huge step forward because it's all about making the experience more immersive, and now that we know we have easy access to our money, it's going to give people even more confidence in the system," Mr. Jacobs said. "Among the higher echelon of players we're moving money around big time. Like when I'm upgrading my resort, and I want to buy a new creature for people to hunt, we're talking about $1,500 or $5,000.
"People are spending $10,000 for land that's not even prime property. Now people are hunting in my resort, and I can take money out and go buy a real dinner. That's fantastic."
Mr. Welter said that MindArk software engineers had been working on the A.T.M. project for years, and that they had finally developed a system secure enough to allow instant verification and cash authorization. He said his company was in contact with the Swedish government, and that systems were in place to prevent money laundering and other potential abuses.
"We have ways of detecting abnormal fluctuations between players and so on, and if this would happen, we would know about it," Mr. Welter said.
He said that MindArk had never been asked about the game by the Internal Revenue Service or United States law-enforcement agencies. ###
"Our love must not be a thing of words and fine talk; it must be a thing of action and sincerity."
" Be the change you want to see in the world" - Gandhi
"Choose friends and lovers not for money - you can earn more; not for knowledge - you can learn more; not for looks - we grow older by the season; favor disposition, that's the best reason." - Grandma Lillian
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