On the whole, I avoid picking on celebrities, because they are cheap targets and no one can possibly get paid enough to put up with the fame crap.

That said, there’s Michael Jackson.

I thought you’d enjoy seeing this link to the auction of his worldly goods, including this memorable work which proves that money can’t buy good taste:

I admire the technical proficiency of the painting, but WHO THE HELL BUYS SOMETHING LIKE THIS!?!?!

And you know he paid through the nose for it, so to speak.

My guess is he paid at least $50,000 to a portrait painter for it, so with an auction estimate of $8,000, no bargain there.

Then again, Jackson was notorious for not paying clients. Science fiction artist Michael Whelan said in interviews that he had a devil of a time getting Jackson’s people to pay up on the big bill for the art to a cover painting Whelan had created for one of Jackson’s albums. I’d love to link, but the interview is in an old fanzine: Interzone, I believe.

Jackson’s money people declared that Whelan should be flattered to do art for Jackson, and that the publicity would be good for Whelan’s career. Why should he expect to get paid?

Whelan did eventually collect on the debt.

Great pics of Jackson’s goodies at that article. I know someone who would love that Superman figure.

Here’s another article about lifestyles of the rich and stupid, saved from the old message board, “Mark Twain’s Quest for Bling”:

America’s most beloved writer, the man who brought us Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, spent most of his life on a wild quest for big bucks, investing in schemes, and oddball inventions. While writing satires that sneered at the Gilded Age uber rich, Mark Twain gave every indication that he would very much like to be one of them, and his harebrained plots usually left him broke. (EDIT: The original link to the quotes here have disappeared, but I’ve found another great article to replace it. Enjoy!)

“While Clemens expressed satisfaction with his writing and tended to crack himself up with his own humor, he measured his success by his personal production and income,” Krass writes…

“It would be fair to say that he probably would not have necessarily decided to earn his living as a writer unless he had failed as a silver miner,” Fishkin said, but “he learned things from all of his experiences and adventures that came in handy when he wrote.”

Perhaps the uncertain nature of the writer’s life helps to exacerbate this problem. Or maybe Mark Twain was just a little too much Tom Sawyer.

Get-rich-quick delusional behavior gets even worse if one actually has had some measure of success in one’s career. Some seem to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to chase down that magic formula that will repeat that success. The minute money comes in, they blow it. They live beyond their means, trying to impress their friends with how successful they are.

When income was sparse, one acquaintance (not in comics) lied his way into getting a wholesaler account with a manufacturing company, and then began selling the goods online for tidy profits. The requirement was that the account go to retailers with storefronts: he had no store, he was simply reselling on ebay.

This went well for a time, and he earned thousands of dollars in a matter of months, every single penny of which he blew in 120 days by indulging in high living. Dining out alone accounted for $6,000 of expenditures. Someone who earns $1,000 a month as a writer has no business spending $6,000 on food.

To make matters worse, he went on to lose a small fortune on those goods he was selling, because by then everyone had gotten into the online sales scheme he was running and suddenly he had huge competition. He was stuck with loads of inventory, much of which he had to sell at a loss.

This was just one in a series of bad moves. Financial planning? Retirement accounts? Mutual funds? Forget it. Some people are entitled to be rich. Smart people shouldn’t have to work hard!

What happened to the guy? We dunno. This was years ago, and while he generously shared his cautionary tale for my blog, he seems to have disappeared off the radar since.

This sense of entitlement is usually accompanied by utter contempt for people who actually do have money as well as an inordinate fondness of celebrity proximity. Duck and run when these people get anywhere near an actor. They whip out their cameras with such speed you can hear a sonic boom.

c

PS: This may or may not be related: Steve Geppi, Diamond Comic Distributor boss, experiencing financial woes, including unpaid back rent on his pop culture museum.

Bargains galore and mountains of bad taste in the Michael Jackson auction catalogues. The pop superstar’s money problems brought his stash to the brink.

Alas, those of you hoping to walk away with a genuine painting of Michael as 16th century monarch are going to have to wait. Jackson’s managers staved off the sheriff. Still, this website has his worldly goods for your perusing pleasure.

Jackson possesses a disturbing collection of sculptures and paintings of little children. And ephebe youths.

There is no way you could look at all that lladro and not question the man’s…taste.

An undistinguished collection of art. Some of the antiques are nice, but the juxtaposition of Americana, Baroque, Neo-Classical, Victorian, Edwardian, 19th century Chinese, and Disneyana…holy cow.

The only painting I recognized is the 19th century Cleopatra by D. Pauvert. I have the Sotheby’s catalogue in which it was originally offered for sale.

Missing from the auction, conservatively estimated at $1.5 million to $3 million, are two paintings by the highly rated 19th-century French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau, which Jackson bought in New York in 2002 for $1.34 million. Jackson did not pay for them (a spokesman at the time said that the reason was that the paintings “no longer fit” into the pop star’s collection), so Sotheby’s had to file a suit for damages.

There are a few fine genre landscapes and faux Norman Rockwells, inexpensive reproductions of nostalgic paintings of rural children.

Don’t miss this distillation of the weird. This blogger took some snaps of the collection of Michael memorabilia, and if you have never even imagined a monumental triptych of Michael Jackson as a reigning monarch crowning and knighting himself in two separate panels, well, now you don’t have to. Someone painted it for you.

Thanks to Scribbler (Sarah Beach) for the links. Sarah guest blogged about screenwriting and comics here.

And our thanks to Arlnee (Arlene Harris, who guest blogged about the whitewashing of Avatar: The Last Airbender).

She has alerted us to the return of the Russet Noon Lady, the rather forward fan who decided to take it upon herself to write a Stephenie Meyers Twilight sequel. And sell it.

For one brief shining moment, it seemed that the Russet Noon writer had come to her senses, as her book was pulled and her website taken down. But the Lady of the Sparkling Vampire Potato had a change of wank and decided to give it all another go, declaring:

Characters don’t belong to authors. Authors don’t create characters. They merely channel them. Characters are recurring universal archetypes. The only thing that changes is their names and identities, but their essence is always the same.

And then came the sound of Joseph Campbell spinning in his grave.

I’ve met some professional authors who say the same things about characters-and-archetypes-and-everything-is-beautiful to their public.

Because they are pandering.

It makes people feel warm and fuzzy to believe we are part of the Hive Mind, and if we could just learn the secret code, then we too could become best selling authors.

Yet I’ve never met an author who espoused this who wouldn’t sue the shit out of anyone who violated their copyright, or their publisher who didn’t pay the royalties. And I’ve yet to meet a bestselling author who was willing to put that Hive Mind love to the test by letting any of their best selling works go into the public domain.

Hive Mind is all well and good for other people.

When my Hive Mind taps the well, baby, I’m staking my claim to that gusher. There’s no Kumbaya in my copyright.

Massive wank-a-licious follow ups at Fandom Wank, where the Lady of the Sparking Vampire Potato responds to her critics, writes letters of fan martyrdom, engages in sockpuppetry, invoketh the teal deer, and makes with the massive attention whoring, which I am aiding and abetting here because I like to study TEH CRAZY so as to better spot it and avoid in future.

Holy Massive Spud-a-licious-Vampires Batman! Comics scribe Peter David is organizing a POTATO MOON parody project to benefit The Comic Book Legal Defense fund! Count me in!

Would it totally freak people out to know that I have been considering that Edward Cullen would SO make a better boyfriend than Sandman’s Morpheus?

Moving along, Val Trullinger puts the smackdown on some weirdo who shows up at her blog to mark territory with anonymous hate.

I have never seen some of those words in my life.

My guess: the abuser is a woman. What do you all think?

I blogged Debbie Schlussel’s psychological break over Watchmen (still haven’t seen it myself. My car has no engine.)

Over at Acephalous, another look into the dark heart of Schlussel.

Acephalous blogged about Watchmen far more intelligently than I did. He also gets far more interesting trolls. Smart people can be scary, I guess.

But I can’t find the exact links to the weird trolldom, so just read the smart posts about Watchmen, the movie I still haven’t seen.

Have fun.

UPDATED! Oh wait, one more for the road. Rus Wornom points to this: Could The Girls From Planet 5 Be The Best Novel ever? I dunno, but one of those covers looks like it was painted by Frank Kelly Freas. Cooked Timber goes deeper into this glorious tome.

A flying saucer full of beautiful female aliens has landed, wiping out Alexandria, VA by accident. But they are apparently friendly. These seductive Lyru are welcomed in ‘Biddyland’, as the Texans now refer to North America outside of Texas. (They haven’t actually seceded, but they’ve basically severed social and cultural contact with the rest of the country. Oh, and you have to be able to rope a steer in order to vote. It’s sort of Cowship Troopers, that way.) But all is not well …

Wow! Awesome! Must read!

c