Austin American-Statesman from Austin, Texas • 81

4m Austin American-Statesman LIFE ARTS Sunday, July 6f 2003 K7 AOL: A wild ride comes to a messy, brutal end- SEWING n.L.n,.,, i i iti I i SALE! Etrif item in the etort. THREE DAYS ONLY! Thursday, Friday Saturday July 10, 11 12 Only! IlMMMJllIUIllPWinilJlW Humane rift Pets of the Wee! It For more information on the code of the pet you may be interested in adopting. cUflfiflfiEV (A I AmOn Tmto CMpt. www.aushnspca.com .7 up ads to run on its site, stealing graphics from potential customers' sites. At one point, to book revenue, AOL ran ads from the giant Spanish phone company Telefonica on its welcome page the best Web real estate of all.

The problems: The ads were done on an alleged oral agreement, and directed viewers to a Telefonica page en espafiol. Case became a polished executive, but he was unable or unwilling to rein in the deal-makers who built the Internet giant. His llth-hour maneuvering to salvage his job presents him as a mercenary, not the Internet visionary he claimed to be. Levin is presented as a more complex character. "It was almost as if here were an accidental CEO who had actually meant to become someone else," Klein writes.

"The biblical literature major at Haverford College who had burned all his school papers out of humility had somehow lost his sense of direction and veered right when he meant to go left, and here he was, at the age of sixty-two, weathered, scowling, a solitary figure." Both men were forced from their positions. One eventful year after the merger, executives from stodgy old Time Warner had consolidated their power over the Masters of the Internet who had acquired them. Synergy was dead. Statesman business writer Robert Elder a Time Warner employee in the mid-1990s, once got a very nice letter of commendation from Jerry Levin. You may contact him at relderstatesman.com or 445-3671.

Continued from K5 value of AOL was so wildly inflated by the Internet bubble that it was able to acquire the old-line media company Time Warner. And when AOL started veering like a drunken driver, Time Warner was there for the ride, strapped in and helpless to keep the car on the road. The book's subtitle promises a story primarily focused on the twin towers of AOL Time Warner, Steve Case and Jerry Levin (pronounced La-VINN). Case, the shy and nervous but preternaturally driven preppy, steered AOL to Internet dominance. Levin, the one-time biblical scholar, became a withdrawn, ruthless chief executive.

Of the two, Case emerges worse for the wear. Klein contends that the official story of Case as inventor, of AOL and subsequent Internet visionary is a base canard. He identifies a rascally entrepreneur, Bill von Meister, as the real father of AOL. Von Meister was a gifted child who grew into a man who loved creating things more than anything else. He also had a gift for talking people out of their money and then never telling them what happened to the money they were investing in his next big idea.

He burned through $20 million in venture capital invested in an online gaming venture and produced a grand total of $40,000 in revenue. Case hooked up with von Meister through his big brother Dan, an investor in von Meister 's company. Dan Case got him the job, von Meister kept him on board, and an ex-military man turned savvy executive named Jim Kimsey became Steve Case's mentor. Oddly the short history of von Meister is more compelling than anything we learn about Case or Levin, whose rise and fall have been widely chronicled. The outline of the merger story is familiar.

AOL's stock price was so inflated by the Internet boom that it was able to acquire Time Warner, a company with the kind of "hard" assets that would seem to make it much more valuable than AOL. The promise of the merger was that old Internet buzz word, "synergy." Warner Brothers' movies would be touted on AOL; artists such as Madonna would have their concerts promoted by AOL. The problem was the company cultures were so different. This bred suspicion. Suspicion bred stubbornness, and pretty soon top executives began to loathe each other.

The AOL side of the equation had a lot more swagger than their old-media counterparts. In the boom, this fed an incredibly successful deal-making machine. Sadly for the combined company, deal-making swagger turned into desperation as the dot-coms began running out of money. As the bubble burst, AOL executives were reduced to tracking how much money Internet startups had left, desperately calculating how much more they could bleed from their victims. Klein is strongest in describing these deal-making contortions work that builds upon his stellar reporting for the Post on AOL's accounting shenanigans.

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The future of medicine could in your hands. WWW.ppdi.COHl current opportunities important to the way he writes. He quotes Thomas Wolfe: "The only way to know your country is to leave it." For now, readers would be wise to keep an eye out for future publications from the genre-hopping writer. In the next few years, they'll be hitting stores by the bushel. There's "Floaters," a novella which is equal parts thriller and horror that's based on the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York; a collection of short stories set in Central America titled "Trujillo" from Four Walls Eight Windows expected this fall; and a collection of his Dragon Griaule stories scheduled for publication sometime in 2004.

And the writer himself? He'll be traveling back down to Central America, to research a novel he's writing that deals with the indigenous population and the lobster industry. "Many of the lobster boats are owned by the cocaine industry, which uses them for smuggling," Shepard maintains. It is, says the writer, "Really 'Heart of man. Joseph Conrad land." Missouri writer Dorman T. Shindler regularly contributes to Pages, Publishers Weekly and BookStreet perspective that produced fellows like Hemingway or Harlan Ellison: He likes to get out in the world and experience whatever he writes about, rather than using a library or an assistant.

"Yeah, I don't have much of an imagination," Shepard jokes. "I don't know if anybody really does. It's supposedly how you process what you see, and I tend to directly process things more than some other writers." That need for real-life experience has resulted in Shepard learning first-hand about drug smuggling, guerrilla fighters in Central America and, most recently, the life of America's drifters, in order to write short stories and journalism that will be collected next year in a book called "Two Trains Running" (Golden Gryphon Press). "I was sort of interested in FTRA, Free Train Riders of America," says Shepard. "They were purported to be a kind of hobo mob." His research took him up and down the West Coast, riding trains, living in homeless communities and dodging unsavory folks but for the most part, he says, the people he met were friendly and often well-educated.

For Shepard, traveling and experiencing other cultures are age compensation requirements Continued from K5 (Golden Gryphon Press) is a fantasy-cum-horror story that celebrates the unusual and magical culture of that state. "I always considered Louisiana the weirdest of the 50 states," says Shepard with a laugh. "It's always fascinated me. I know some strange folk down there. And every five or six blocks you've got a new belief system." The futuristic "Aztechs" (Subterranean Press) is science fiction that deals with artificial intelligence, drugged-out, AWOL American soldiers who work along an electrified fence along the U.S.

border with Mexico. And his latest, "Colonel Rutherford's Colt" (Subterranean Press), is a mainstream novella about gun dealer Jimmy Guy, who feels compelled to act out the history of the weapons he sells. Shepard calls the story a "parable on how my fiction gets written. Like method acting, writing is, for me, a kind of controlled dissociative behavior. But I don't take it to the extremes that Jimmy Guy does." Even so, some writers might think Shepard's methods of research are extreme.

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