The Sydney Morning Herald, the apparent ‘Newspaper Of The Year’, has featured a section on its website about Tiger Woods’ visit to Australia… with a most disturbing headline (apparently cached by Google).

The headline read:

Fans swing from branches to see Tiger

If you don’t see what is wrong with this headline, here’s an educational video. Though be advised that the video contains photographs of what this song is about.

Here is a strange, and bitter crop…

[Hat tip: @glebe2037 (via Twitpic)]

Oh my God can’t believe what I saw as I turned on the TV this evening…

Michael Jackson is dead. You probably already knew that. I never really thought of myself as being a big fan of his, I only own a single album and a couple of CD singles (mostly for the remixes). But the news filled me with such a profound sense of sadness. I heard someone suggest he was ‘our generation’s’ John Lennon. It is difficult of course; Lennon was gunned down, Jackson died of natural/medical causes as far as anyone knows pending the coroner’s report. But for me this is the first time I’ve really connected with a public figure who has died. I suddenly feel like I understand in some ways how people felt when Elvis died, or JFK, or Kurt Cobain or Jeff Buckley. I really admire the contributions of a lot of now deceased individuals but invariably I’ve discovered their works after they have died. This is new, this is strange. To me, at least.

And Twitter… oh, Twitter. Twitter, moreso than any other technology, embodies everything about humanity. It is us at our best and our worst, our most trivial, our most flippant, our most philosophical. Everything, really. So many people dismiss the service as a triviality but it doesn’t speak for itself, we speak via it. Just waking up and seeing the way these rumours of deaths (Farrah Fawcetts’, confirmed, and those of others besides Jackson that were all apaprently hoaxes) perpetuated the service was interesting. We know that we can’t blindly accept anything at face value, we need evidence. Half the world complains that journalistic interests don’t research their stories thoroughly enough, the other half complains that they take too long to report news, to be current. It is a balancing act, surely?

It seemed more and more certain that the rumours were true over time. And for me Twitter sort of embodies such a wide range of people that on any really topical issue you get the full spectrum of responses. A lot of flippancy and jokes about Jackson, people who were really passionate and distressed, people who weren’t really that interested at all.

I’ve been listening to Michael Jackson’s Blood On The Dance Floor album all day. I’ve really enjoyed it since the day I first heard it, but only actually bought a copy of it earlier this year. Some part of my psyche was searching for changed meanings in songs – perhaps Ghosts would take on a different significance for example. But, no, that song isn’t really about ghosts, it’s about jealousy. I am just impressed by the musicality of the songs, and also the raft of social issues present in the selections.

Jackson was 50. That Motown Records is also celebrating their 50th year this year is not lost on me. Indeed lately I’ve been enjoying their Motown 50 podcast, and just a few weeks ago I was listening to one episode featuring the Jackson Five, themselves just children, talking about their musical inspirations and which Jackson was interested in which girl at school. And then somebody mentions that actually for African-Americans 50 is a fairly typical life expectancy age, and this saddens me and angers me, and like the song goes it does make me wanna scream. And I think about Jackson in a larger context of African-American singers singing for equality. I think about Nina Simone and Billie Holliday, and how I had studied their plight briefly at university and how I understood it intellectually at that time but how I didn’t understand it emotionally until I connected with that music, that work. That is the function of art – to make us feel. [But then I stop and realise that the plight of Aboriginals in this country is at least as bad, and that their life expectancy is disgusting low. And the whole thing levels me feeling bewildered and sad.]

I guess that is why he is so dearly missed, because he did make us feel. He made us dance. He made us think. He made us sing. He mastered the art of the music video, staging elaborate theatrical masterpieces to accompany the musical ones. I don’t really think I can say anything that hasn’t been said already, but I did want to say something.