Learning Lessons from MJ ... the "following his steps" thread; understanding my hero [Merged]

[Word Smith Sr]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

edit.

 

[jackie11]

Re: Learning Lessons from MJ ... the "following his steps" thread; understanding my hero

bump lol

great thread, i meant to say earlier haha, ive been looking on here a while xx

 

[MIST]

Re: Learning Lessons from MJ ... the "following his steps" thread; understanding my hero

He must have read Shakespeares Hamlet , because he told K.Ortega that he could identify with Hamlet.
He sang a song from Porgy&Bess and danced to it when he was warming up for this is it.

 

[Lucilla]

Re: Learning Lessons from MJ ... the "following his steps" thread; understanding my hero

Yes, just listen to Morphine and 2000 watts! I love NIN! unk:
Great thread! :clapping:

I love them too.

I'm amazed about his tastes. I mean, he liked dark stuff. I'm not saying emo or anything like that :lol:
I love almost everythig you guys mentioned. Freud and Jung are hard subjects. I'm studying psychology and even though I'm not a freudian I love to read about them.
And yes, he definetely love Poe, said so in a radio interview in 2001 or 2002.
About the Prelude to the afternoon of a faun (I love Debussy), more than a disney-like sound, has an erotic tone :cheeky: according to Debussy. It was inspired by the poem L'Après-midi d'un faune by Stéphane Mallarmé.

 

[Rockin.]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

There were photos of some books from his library somewhere.. hmm.. I can't remember where I saw them..

 

[jackie11]

Re: Learning Lessons from MJ ... the "following his steps" thread; understanding my hero

He must have read Shakespeares Hamlet , because he told K.Ortega that he could identify with Hamlet.
He sang a song from Porgy&Bess and danced to it when he was warming up for this is it.

kool do u know which song it was from Porgy&Bess??

 

[Gottobethere]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

There were photos of some books from his library somewhere.. hmm.. I can't remember where I saw them..

I have some photo from the LA auction that never was.

 

[Emerald]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

Wow, amazing Gottobethere. Thanks a million!

 

[Rockin.]

Re: Learning Lessons from MJ ... the "following his steps" thread; understanding my hero

I was reading an interesting article about the Opus book and it said this:





I don't know about you, but I think Michael would have made an excellent lawyer some day. He was a perfectionist, and he had such a spirited style of rendering his ideas that he paid a great deal of attention to detail. You can see it in the way he wrote his songs. Love you Michael.

I read something to do with the Opus, I don't know whether it was for his own or for the Disney one but he was interested in the kind of paper they were using, and the Opus person said he knew like all these different kinds of papers by their actual category numbers!

I also read somewhere he had scientific journals that he used to read.. I'm not sure what subjects they were on.

I knew he was interested in psychology, it's blatently obvious. You can tell with a lot of the things he speaks about. Thats my subject.. I got a 2.1 with honours Psychology BSc degree.

These are pictures of some of the books from his library.. just found them on my laptop, thought they'd be useful here :

 

[Rockin.]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

I have some photo from the LA auction that never was.

YEP those were what I was talking about.

I found them on my laptop and posted them in the other thread.. came in here to tell Pac.. and saw you've posted them too

I missed this one though, so you can post it in the other thread if you wish -

 

[Gottobethere]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

YEP those were what I was talking about.

I found them on my laptop and posted them in the other thread.. came in here to tell Pac.. and saw you've posted them too

Hey sorry for the hassle, here's a few more

 

[PlatinumMJFan]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

Wow thanks for the pictures!!! I wonder what religious books he read. Obviously the bible. I know that Michael used to love a book called "They cage the animals at night" By Jennings Michael Burch. Take a look below

 

[max000]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

At the top of OPRAH'S interview with MJ at neverland she said she was surprised to find a complete library with all the CLASSICS.

 

[souldreamer7]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

He also Liked to read Edgar A. Poe Other Poets and Musicans/composers Like Debussy.

 

[Lucilla]

Re: Learning Lessons from MJ ... the "following his steps" thread; understanding my hero

These are pictures of some of the books from his library.. just found them on my laptop, thought they'd be useful here :

these are so cool :clapping:

 

[Word Smith Sr]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

Wow thx everybody for all the answers. You guys actually came up with pics lol wow!!!!! Thx for taking the time to answer my thread. Keep the titles coming if you have some more !!!

 

[souldreamer7]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

Thursday, July 02, 2009
Michael Jackson “Extremely Well-Read,” Had 10,000 Books

The King of Pop a dweeby book lovin’ geek?

Apparently so, and hooray. He was an avid reader who had an appropriately majestic library at Neverland that held 10,000 volumes on its shelves, according to two recent Los Angeles newspaper articles.

In the midst of a lengthy interview in the L.A. Weekly, Jackson attorney Bob Sanger revealed the following as his last of three golden attributes that defined the Gloved One.

“Michael was extremely well-read…I knew Michael, but I got to know him a lot better at the trial. The judge was doing jury selection, and it was time for break. Judge Melville said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to know that jury service is very, Tvery important.' He's trying to convince people not to have stupid excuses to get out of jury service. All judges do this. He says, 'The jury system is a very time-honored system. It's been around for 200 years. We're going to take a break and come back in 15 minutes.’

“We stand up and the judge leaves, and Michael turns to me and says, ‘Bob, the jury system is much older than 200 years, isn't it?’ I said, 'Well, yeah, it goes back to the Greeks.' He says, 'Oh yeah, Socrates had a jury trial, didn't he?' I said, 'Yeah, well, you know how it turned out for him.' Michael says, 'Yeah, he had to drink the hemlock.' That's just one little tidbit. We talked about psychology, Freud and Jung, Hawthorne, sociology, black history and sociology dealing with race issues. But he was very well read in the classics of psychology and history and literature.

“He loved to read. He had over 10,000 books at his house. And I know that because - and I hate to keep referring to the case, because I don't want the case - the case should not define him. But one of the things that we learned - the DA went through his entire library and found, for instance, a German art book from 1930-something. And it turned out that the guy who was the artist behind the book had been prosecuted by the Nazis. Nobody knew that, but then the cops get up there and say, 'We found this book with pictures of nude people in it.' But it was art, with a lot of text. It was art. And they found some other things, a briefcase that didn't belong to him that had some Playboys in it or something. But they went through the guy's entire house, 10,000 books. And it caused us to do the same thing, and look at it.”

“And there were places that he liked to sit, and you could see the books with his bookmarks in it, with notes and everything in it where he liked to sit and read. And I can tell you from talking to him that he had a very - especially for someone who was self-taught, as it were, and had his own reading list - he was very well-read. And I don't want to say that I'm well-read, but I've certainly read a lot, let's put it that way, and I enjoy philosophy and history and everything myself, and it was very nice to talk to him, because he was very intellectual, and he liked to talk about those things. But he didn't flaunt it, and it was very seldom that he would initiate the conversation like that, but if you got into a conversation like that with him, he was there.”

I’ll Be There
As reported in the L.A. Times. Doug Dutton, proprietor of the legendary and now, alas, defunct, Dutton's Books in Brentwood, was at a dinner with people from Book Soup, Skylight and other L.A. bookstores.

"Someone mentioned that Michael Jackson had been in their store," Dutton recalled. “Everybody said he'd shopped in their store too."

Doug first met Jackson in the early 1980s when the icon came in his shop wearing "very large sunglasses" and a suit of bodyguards. MJ was solitary and quiet. "There was no display of 'I'm Michael Jackson,'” he recalled. "I don't remember him actually saying anything." Jackson bought four-five books during visits.

Doug’s brother, Dave, remembers getting a call in the late '80s - early '90s from an MJ minion, who requested that the shop be closed early so Jackson could privately shop. "We did close early," Dave said. Then, "about a quarter to nine he showed up in a big van. Once you got over the initial caution because of those burly guys with him, he was very nice. He loved the poetry section," Dave’s son Dirk asserts that Ralph Waldo Emerson was Jackson's favorite author. "I think you would find a great deal of the transcendental, all-accepting philosophy in his lyrics."

I would have bet the farm that, considering his obsession, Michael Jackson would have been a compulsive collector of all things Peter Pan, the collecting completist’s completist, acquiring every single edition of the book, every scrap of paper associated with it, and everything from the story’s subsequent incarnations.

"He was a longtime and valued customer," a spokesperson for Hennessey + Ingalls, the renowned art and architecture bookstore in Santa Monica, said in the L.A. Times piece.

It turns out that Michael Jackson was a sort of Johnny Appleseed of reading, spreading books to all children. Former Los Angeles resident Cynde Moya remembers that "back when I worked at the Bookstar in Culver City, his people would have us keep the store open after hours, and he'd come in with a vanload of kids, who could buy whatever books they wanted."

As MJ’s life got stranger over time, so did his book buying habits. He would wear a surgical mask during his book shop visits, and in a video of him from New Year's Eve 2008, he’s at Hennessey + Ingalls browsing for books, a black umbrella, held by an assistant, shielding him from the unflattering glare of florescent lighting.

Or, maybe to prevent his love for books from being exposed.

This is a problem that will never threaten the unread, book-hating and proud singing star Kanye West. It is a fact that intellect and pop entertainment values do not mix well in American culture: A pop star could never mysteriously disappear for a few days, drive family, friends, and the nation crazy with anxiety, then resurface with the rambling confession that he was incognito in Buenos Aires visiting the sultry, irresistible National Library of Argentina, full of hot-blooded Latin-American tomes, because he needed a change of scenery.

Completely unbelievable. There must have been something else, something seamy, going on, perhaps with La Biblioteca Nacional de la Republica Argentina’s head of special collections, right? I mean, really, is nothing sacred?


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And This is a quote from 'Nurse Lee' of how Michael is very smart..
"...And Michael is very smart, very smart man, very articulate, as you know. But very smart, and very well read. So he knew."


Michael Jackson, the bookworm
REMEMBERING MICHAEL JACKSON
Owners of local bookstores, including Dutton's, recall encountering the late pop star perusing their shelves.
When news broke in early 2009 of Michael Jackson's return to Los Angeles, it was not via reports of him being spotted dining at the Ivy or dancing at the hottest new Hollywood club but book-shopping in Santa Monica.

"He was a longtime and valued customer," a store representative of art and architecture bookstore Hennessey + Ingalls said Thursday. "We'll miss him."


If Jackson's bookstore appearance surprised his pop fans, it was nothing new for booksellers. A few years ago, Doug Dutton, proprietor of then-popular Dutton's Books in Brentwood, was at a dinner with people from Book Soup, Skylight and other area bookstores.


"Someone mentioned that Michael Jackson had been in their store," Dutton said by phone Thursday, "And everybody said he'd shopped in their store too."

It was the early 1980s when Dutton first saw Jackson, who came in wearing "very large sunglasses." He had bodyguards with him, but he was solitary and quiet. "There was no display of 'I'm Michael Jackson,' " Dutton recalled. "I don't remember him actually saying anything." Each time he shopped at Dutton's store, he'd buy four or five books.

Brother Dave Dutton got a call in the late '80s or early '90s from an assistant, who asked if he'd close his store early so Jackson could shop there alone. "We did close early," he recalled by phone as his wife Judy and son Dirk discussed Jackson's visits. "About a quarter to 9 he showed up in a big van," Dave Dutton said. "Once you got over the initial caution because of those burly guys with him, he was very nice."

In later years, Jackson would wear a surgical mask during his visits. In an X17 online video of him on New Year's Eve 2008, in what appears to be Hennessey + Ingalls, he browses for books under a black umbrella, often held by an assistant.

"He loved the poetry section," Dave Dutton said as Dirk chimed in that Ralph Waldo Emerson was Jackson's favorite. "I think you would find a great deal of the transcendental, all-accepting philosophy in his lyrics."

Largely an autodidact, Jackson was quite well read, according to Jackson's longtime lawyer. "We talked about psychology, Freud and Jung, Hawthorne, sociology, black history and sociology dealing with race issues," Bob Sanger told the LA Weekly after the singer's death. "But he was very well read in the classics of psychology and history and literature . . . Freud and Jung -- go down the street and try and find five people who can talk about Freud and Jung."

Hours after his death, Jackson's 1988 autobiography, "Moonwalk," despite being out of print, entered the Amazon bestseller list for biography and memoir at No. 25.

"I've always wondered if there was a library in Neverland," Doug Dutton mused. Indeed there was -- Sanger told LA Weekly that Jackson's collection totaled 10,000 books.

And while the seven-bedroom Holmby Hills home that he leased this year had a sunny pool and other luxuries the sunlight-wary Jackson might not have taken advantage of, it also featured something he very well might have: a wood-paneled library.

 

[BillieJean84]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

Did Michael read the bible? I know this might be a stupid question - but I don't know or understand Jehavas Witnesses all that much....

 

[souldreamer7]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

Did Michael read the bible? I know this might be a stupid question - but I don't know or understand Jehavas Witnesses all that much....

Hi BillieJean84, To me no question is 'stupid'
Yes. Have you watched all the times he quotes from the bible in interviews etc.? How he talked about going door to door as a jehovah's witnesses,surely he knew alot about God. He loved Michelangelo,who painted the Sistine Chapel from the Old Testament. Michael seemed to read anything that inspired him and I Do believe God was a major inspiration for Michael,obviously. Michael seemed spiritual.
But,let us not change this to a religious topic.

 

[xo_lola_xo]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

I would love to read the books Michael read! I need to read more :mello:

My favourite book of all time is To Kill A Mockingbird. I think it's also my favourite movie.

 

[smile4mj]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

Seeing those books..No offense but I wouldnt want to buy it. I have this feeling that those books belonged to Michael and I wouldnt want others or even myself to own them..

 

[Ashtanga]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

Michael was always a very intelligent man and I think he liked all types of literature so read on all subjects.

I never read about it but does anyone know the QI of Michael?

 

[Rockin.]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

I think this should be merged with the other thread, the 'understanding my hero' one.

 

[StaceyMJ]

Re: Learning Lessons from MJ ... the "following his steps" thread; understanding my hero

Threads merged.

 

[Word Smith Sr]

Re: Learning Lessons from MJ ... the "following his steps" thread; understanding my hero

Threads merged.

Thx for doing that, i wanted it to be done but i didnt know how to ask for it.

 

[Lucilla]

Re: Question about Michael's intellectuality

Michael was always a very intelligent man and I think he liked all types of literature so read on all subjects.

I never read about it but does anyone know the QI of Michael?

Interesting question. I never read about it either. But given the fact that he showed so much talent at such a young age and he was always interesting (hungry, really) in learning everything, was obviously an autodidact and a genius in different arts and in bussines; I think his QI was far from wat is known to be a "normal QI" :yes:

 

[Rockin.]

Re: Learning Lessons from MJ ... the "following his steps" thread; understanding my hero

Thanks for that long post Tamara. Interesting

With those books in the photos.. some could have come from fans, like some of the disney books as we know he liked it.

I saw 'The Maltese Falcon' there.. I don't know what the story of that book is but I'm half Maltese, so I'm glad it seems like he heard of the Island of Malta!

I think I need to go to a library and see if I can find these books - ''They Cage the Animals at Night" and "Jonathan Livingston Seagull".

 

[prismsagainst5live]

Re: Learning Lessons from MJ ... the "following his steps" thread; understanding my hero

what QI? do you mean IQ?

I would think it was in the gifted range, above 130. His hunger to learn coupled with his ability to do so was really quite impressive.

 

[Ashtanga]

Re: Learning Lessons from MJ ... the "following his steps" thread; understanding my hero

Interesting question. I never read about it either. But given the fact that he showed so much talent at such a young age and he was always interesting (hungry, really) in learning everything, was obviously an autodidact and a genius in different arts and in bussines; I think his QI was far from wat is known to be a "normal QI" :yes:

Yes, Michael was always so smart and always read as many books on various subjects, traveled the world and different cultures and met so many other things they did improve their knowledge of it. I wonder the library of Michael. Surely he had thousands, thousands and thousands of books. :wild:

what QI? do you mean IQ?

I would think it was in the gifted range, above 130. His hunger to learn coupled with his ability to do so was really quite impressive.

:bugeyed I thought it was this number. 130 is great! :yes:

 

[Tinker_Bell]

Re: Learning Lessons from MJ ... the "following his steps" thread; understanding my hero

I love this thread!