Twenty-First Century Renaissance
By Armond White
Michael Jackson’s renaissance (occasioned by his death past June at age 50) is the most encouraging event to happen in pop culture over the last quarter century. All summer long now, every where you go, Jackson’s music rises from car speakers, p.a. systems, spills out of strangers’ headphones. It’s a better day when “Pretty Young Thing” compliments the sunshine or contradicts a rainstorm. And yet, the haters persist: after reining-in its cynicism in response to the public’s grief and surge of interest in MJ’s music, the media vultures are going back to their trash-talk and calumny. But popular affection for Jackson continues; resistance to media fiat is proof of democratic good will in action.
This sudden recovery of Jackson’s song catalog comes from a remarkable personal need: In wanting to remember the good times – from the astounding youthful energy of The Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back,” “ABC,” “The Love You Save,” “I’ll Be There” and “Ben” to the phenomenal all-pleasing Thriller – the public’s instinctive pop-art retrieval goes deeper than nostalgia. It is true that different stages of Michael Jackson’s music career have accompanied various events in world history and, especially, private memory: listeners can relate particular songs to birthdays, disco-dancing, weddings, romances, heartbreak, concert-going, TV-watching, etc. But replaying those songs after the news of MJ’s death isn’t scrap-booking; it’s stomping the blues with music built on the time-honored soulfulness and profound emotion of sensitive artists inspired to express themselves in new, world-shaping ways. This form of popular art connects to listener’s commonest and sincere needs to understand their joy and sensitivity; to feel their own lives affirmed.
Responding to internet traffic after MJ’s death, the New York Times reported “[AOL] called the day ‘a seminal moment in Internet history. We‘ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth. Historically celebrity news prompts a worldwide outpouring with several key consumer behaviors–searching, sharing and reacting to news followed by online tributes has become the modern way to mourn.’” After a few days of living with the dread MJ news, I dreamed about it. In the midst of the dream I told myself “I’m dreaming this.” Then, while still dreaming, the awful realization took hold. The sadness was worse than nightmare; it was like the daymare recognition that the world’s gone akilter. “A madmare no matter which way mare,” a disco diva once sang. In the waking reality of a world continually going mad, our loss of MJ’s presence was a cultural disaster and something more. Our compass-point of feeling and aspiration came unmoored – same as when Brando, James Brown, Katherine Hepburn and Norman Mailer passed. But they never sang “Ben” or presented the astounding vision of the “Black or White” music video. MJ’s art countered an unfeeling world with pure feeling – also high creativity and utterly convincing sincerity.
Retrieving MJ’s art gives us a chance for new and better appreciation. It let’s us get past the confusion and controversy of his on-going career. Not just assess its meaning, but re-experience its essence. At the July 7th memorial at Los Angeles’ Staples Arena, the mourning and eventual catharsis seemed right, necessary and churchlike. There was no church music per se but the balm was in the healing strains of Jackson’s own music. If you forgot what was at the roots of “Billie Jean” but upfront in the anthems “Man in the Mirror” and “Earth Song,” you couldn’t overlook it now. That’s why Berry Gordy’s eulogy “He was simply the greatest entertain who ever lived” doesn’t settle one’s awe. Fact is, there was always gospel (God’s word) in MJ’s love-spreading and truth-telling messages. MJ’s devoted fans find themselves involved in the sober, justified endeavor to receive truth and love through music that once gave pulse to their lives and will do so in perpetuity.
We need to hear a groove, a lilt and – not forgetting the moving jeremiads and wise reflections of MJ’s later recordings – the power of art that met life on its own terms then, through gospel-like phrasings and syncopation, hoisted those terms. When the secular media continues its Jackson denunciations and music-non-lovers complain that the attention paid to the passing of this legendary artist is excessive, it is proof of the secular world’s cruelty. Whether or not these pundits ever had a song in their hearts, they appear heartless.
Could it be goodness that haters resent in MJ’s work? The joy in “ABC,” “Rock Wit You” and, yes, “Bad”? Or is it the complexity in songs like “Beat It,” “Bad,” “Black or White,” “Scream,” “Stranger in Moscow,” “You Are Not Alone”? MJ wrote, sang and danced the arduousness of life and made it graceful and rousing. The media commentators who pretend that more important matters were being ignored only approach matters from their own limited, self-important perch. As Rev. Al Sharpton reminded MJ’s children: “Wasn’t that your father was strange. Strange is what he dealt with.” These strange media-politicians don’t admit to complexity, contradiction, compassion – elements that make Jackson’s final four albums Dangerous, HIStory, Blood on the Dancefloor and Invinciblemost worth recovering. Rev. Sharpton cogently observed that “Michael out-sang his cynics, he out-danced his doubters, he out-performed the pessimists. When they knocked him down, he got back up. Every time they counted him out he came back in. Michael never stopped. Michael never stopped. Michael never stopped.” Sharpton’s own gospel fervor alluded to the indomitable resolve that has been the backbone of Negro spirituals, the blues and the greatest R&B, Soul, Pop, Hiphop and, scariest of all, The Beat.
Carping pundits want to stop that beat as well as celebrations of Jackson. Their monotonous hostility is akin to the racism that drives so many social and professional institutions. When the current president of the united states grudgingly admitted to “have all of his stuff on my iPod,” it seemed either disrespectful or just further submission to the will of the media elite. What POTUS didn’t say was that even a relative “ditty” like the imperishable “PYT” was more than “stuff.” Listen to the way Jackson took R&B’s romantic entreaty and sang it as more than booty-begging or nut-busting but as the epitome of goodness. It is the kind of manifold richness that many people underestimate in black pop (sometimes even when a white postmodern brainiac like Green Gartside deconstructs Jackson’s aesthetic into Scritti Politti). MJ’s “Wooooo’s” and “repeat after me” were sensual and rhetoric confirmations of personal and communal loving. He solicited call-and-response from the world – and got it. “PYT” makes the joy of life and art into one – it‘s just an added blessing that you can also dance to it. If that doesn’t justify our democracy, then trade MJ’s Civil Rights moonwalk for a goosestep.
Still, the media elite falls back on accusations about MJ’s personal life (definitively reproved by Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee’s eulogy). They ignore Jackson’s art – and his acquittal – as if to denigrate another black criminal, and to discredit any defense. These music non-lovers reveal their own inhumanity by their indecency. It’s convenient for them to ignore that the MJ serenades now filling the streets, malls and dance clubs amount to a victorious plebiscite. Music lovers retrieve MJ’s oeuvre, responding with the best that is in them to the best that he had to offer.
Armond White’s articles on Michael Jackson have been collected in the new book: “Keep Moving: The Michael Jackson Chronicles.” (Email resistanceworkswdc@yahoo.com for information on how to buy the book.)
The Price
By Eric Greene
I began writing this standing at Michael Jackson’s star on Hollywood Boulevard. I came to this spot a month earlier, the day after he died. On that morning it was too crowded with well wishers, onlookers and media to get very close. Since then on my bus ride to work I have passed this spot every day. The news trucks are gone. The crowds have swelled and shrunk. But still they come. They come to leave mementos, to snap photos, to cry, to touch a spot where once stood one who touched them. Like me, they come to join others publically feeling their private emotions. I am not surprised to see people still gathering. I am, surprisingly, surprised by the languages. In less than 60 seconds I hear Spanish, French, Japanese, German and English. And some that I did not recognize. Were I there longer I am sure I would have heard more. It’s somewhat embarrassing to say that I forgot what he meant so many people around the world, so focused was I on what Michael meant to America, to Black America, to me.
In the days that followed his death I was disappointed but not surprised by the cultural illiteracy of much of the media coverage—the inability to account for why he was so ground breaking; the historical, social and political context of his rise to prominence; what he contributed that was new; how he touched an emotional chord especially, but certainly not exclusively, in Black America; what we all collectively had lost. And while the scandals and speculation certainly could not be ignored, they seemed to have taken up a disproportionate amount of the coverage and eclipsed a deeper understanding of who Michael was and what he achieved. (By contrast the initial reporting on the death of Senator Ted Kennedy, a beloved White icon, seems to have gotten right the balance of public accomplishment and personal scandal). I was not surprised by tone of the press coverage because by the time Michael died, partly because of Michael and partly because of the distortions and exaggerations about him, so many had forgotten why we cared about him in the first place. As is often the case with superstars, for a long time Michael’s fame obscured his talent. Then, as is also often the case, the inevitable backlash did the same. And then his dysfunction further buried the memory. When he died I sent friends a link to an official video for the 1991 song “Who is It.” The video is a compilation of clips of Michael’s performances. I sent it to remind people of a time before the scandals to remind them what was so extraordinary. One friend who shared a dance class with me in the 80’s wrote me back “Thanks…I had forgotten.”
So while I did not expect the press to get it right, most offensive was the sheer musical illiteracy of the coverage. Most writers and commentators failed to appreciate the music that Michael made post 1987. No one seemed to remember–if they had ever paid enough attention to know in the first place – that, for example, the wonderful, revealingDangerous album in 1991 was far superior to the more hyped Bad. And completely overlooked was that Michael was doing interesting work at least through 1997’s Blood on the Dance Floor–a collection of remixes and new songs that could be self-pitying, but were darker and more complicated than the pop perfection of Off the Wall or the mass appeal juggernaut of Thriller. The coverage logline seemed to be: “cute kid, sure could dance, made great records and videos in the 80’s, then went crazy” – a witless and shallow view. The coverage was so sloppy that amidst the early speculation about prescription drug abuse most of the press seems to have missed that in 1997. Michael released a song about this very topic called “Morphine.” And a damn good song at that.
In those first weeks I tried to filter out the chatter in the days following Michael’s death and instead immersed myself in his music. And as I did so questions flew through my mind: Why did his death hit me so hard? Why for days after I heard the news did I wake up several times in the night, stunned and disbelieving? Why I did I get so sad when I saw footage of him in concert? Part of the answer lies in the emotional involvement we attach to artists whose work has touched us. Artists are strangers who are close to us. Michael is like a lifelong friend I never met. Part of it is feeling the loss over the fact that that electrifying current of excitement and excellence has been cut off. Part of it is the knowledge that his story is over. There can never be another, better, next, final chapter. A career that had so much right has ended and a life that had so much wrong can no longer be redeemed. As long as he was alive there was, at least some, hope. Hope for one more amazing video, one more perfect song, one more terrific album, one more magnificent performance that could show the world again what had made him worthy of our affection. Hope that he could extricate himself from the denial and dysfunction that had seemed to distort his life. But now there is no chance of that. Where once was music, the rest is silence. And I feel for him.
And I feel for me and feel with those like me. I feel like a big part of my childhood and formative years have died. I had a longstanding love of Michael Jackson’s work – danced to the Jackson 5 as a kid, dressed as him for Hallowe’en as a teenager, hopped a ride during college to see him perform a few towns away with no idea how I would get home, donated my old Michael costume to my law school musical, kept buying and enjoying his music long after it was cool to do so. Yeah, a lifelong friend I never met. I was so strongly associated with him in friends’ minds that some emailed me saying that I was the first person they thought of when they heard he had died. I was not around for Elvis or the Beatles on Sullivan, for Dylan at Newport, for Jimi at Woodstock. But I watched Motown 25. And I knew I was witnessing history being made.
But even Motown 25 could not compare to Thriller. Not the way I saw Thriller. I was one of the lucky ones who saw Thriller on the big screen. One of the biggest and best screens in Los Angeles, before it was chopped up into smaller theatres. It was showing on a double bill with the re-release of Disney’s Fantasia. Seeing it was not my idea, I was invited to join my friend Alan and some of our friends on opening night. As strange as it may sound now, I confess that then the idea of standing on a long line to see a Michael Jackson video seemed silly. I didn’t have MTV and the whole video thing was a mystery to me. That night was my initiation. I know Thriller is the most popular video ever but, trust me, if you have never seen Thriller on the big screen you have not really seen it and – just like if you have never seen Michael live – probably can not really understand. It was all well and good until Michael turned into a zombie, started the pelvic thrusts, the girls screamed, he danced that remarkable dance and my mouth dropped open. I knew I was seeing something extraordinary, unprecedented and revelatory, if not life-changing. I didn’t know a person could have that kind of effect on others. I didn’t know that a performer could be that, excuse the word, thrilling. I didn’t know that the human body could move like that. That remains one of my most vivid and favorite movie memories. Thinking about it now my breath catches a little and I can still feel the excitement.
Michael’s specialty, of course, was amazing us by moving in ways the human body is not supposed to move: the Robot, the Moonwalk, the Smooth Criminal lean. Even absent the transformations in his videos which used state of the art movie technology to turn him into monsters, animals even vehicles – all of which gave his video personae a sense of invulnerability – Michael was a human special effect, constantly defying expectations, pushing himself beyond normal limits. It helped make him great. It also may have helped kill him. Perhaps the human body, especially a 50 year old human body that had not endured the rigors of touring in over a decade, could not do what he thought his career demanded and could not withstand the excessive chemical interventions needed to keep the illusion going.
If so, it would not be the first time Michael was betrayed by his success. The pet chimps and lamas, the leaked stories of sleep chambers and the “Elephant Man’s” bones, the white glove, taped fingers, arm brace and crotch grabs, all served Michael’s strategy to be a larger than life, modern P.T. Barnum, a figure of fascination that people would continually write, talk and speculate about. It was, for a while, a great publicity strategy. We may have made jokes, but as long as we were asking “what is going on with Mike?” we were talking about him. And for a while that suited his needs just fine. But those who think there is no such thing as bad publicity would do well to think again. In time his strategy backfired and combined with the real life transformations, accusations, and questionable behavior to make him seem more than eccentric – they made him seem freakish. Once that happened, though he still had the admiration of much of the public, he lost their affection. When the first child molestation allegations were made many were prepared to believe the worst about him. By the time he participated in the 2003 Living With Michael Jackson TV special, his uncanny ability to read the public and make every right move had failed him. No doubt believing that the show would reveal him to be a pure and loving soul it instead–again partly because of him and partly because of questionable journalistic and editorial tactics–made him seem indulgent, irresponsible and dangerous. The result was to further alienate him. Artists can afford to seem bizarre but when they seem too far outside the realm of human experience they have crossed a line of viability. After all, who could relate to what they saw on that screen? Ironically, however, while the special was a miscalculation to be sure, Michael’s desire to be recognized, as few of us ever are, in his entirety, his craving for approval, love and acceptance, was ultimately, not freakish at all, but achingly, tragically, recognizably, human.
Some may want to suggest that the public reaction was more racially polarized than it was and claim that Michael’s Black audience always stood behind him. But that is wishful revisionism born of the grief of the moment and learned defensiveness (when Jamie Foxx says he liked both Michael’s old nose and his new nose, don’t buy it). Yes, long after many others had written him off, Black audiences retained a special appreciation and understanding of Michael. But as his physical mutilations took him farther and farther away and his personal behavior led to a sense of exasperation—”I’m handing in my glove!” Chris Rock quipped after the latest round of molestation charges – Black audiences also had a special sense of betrayal and abandonment. Many went from uniquely proud to uniquely embarrassed. This, too, is part of Michael’s complicated story.
It is easy to forget, and for some impossible to remember, that there was a time when Michael Jackson was young, Black, beautiful, strong…and singular. God it felt good to watch him at that time. To be entertained by him at that time. To be uplifted by him at that time. To be dazzled by him at that time. To be be inspired by him at that time. Though lately he seemed to have run out of ideas, the memory of that time can not disappear and must be cherished. In some way, the moment in Thriller when Michael turned into a zombie and started dancing anticipated his future: no matter how distorted, indeed monstrous, he looked later in life, underneath the scary visage there was still an essential funkiness, a charisma that remained magnetic, remained, well, bad.
It is also true that Thriller was a long time ago. Indeed he had not been that Michael Jackson for many years. Those who loved him have to acknowledge the whole picture or our love is unthinking, weak, superficial. Defenders and detractors are both boring in their narrowness, intent on focusing on only one aspect of his story to the exclusion or minimization of others. That’s not only dishonest but worse — in failing to understand the completeness of someone else’s humanity we miss an opportunity to more fully understand our own.
So we who admired him must take account of how we also felt let down by him and concerned for him. As for the allegations, I wish I could say “oh they can’t be true” but that feels hollow. And it is a vastly different statement than the more honest “I’d like for them not to be true.” While it is worth remembering that, true or not, all it takes is an accusation to damage a reputation and that the only time a child molestation charge against him was subjected to scrutiny by a jury in a court of law the charge was found wanting, I am left inclined to think he was likely guilty of the first charges though there is a good chance that he was set up on the second ones. The apparent lack of adult romantic attachments, predilection for being around children and the fantasyland home filled with delights and attractions that could be a lure to young kids, while not proof, seem at least consistent with pedophilia. And Michael’s career was filled with songs featuring sexually threatening, even predatory women: Billie Jean, Dirty Diana, the title character in Dangerous, the femme fatale in Blood on the Dance Floor. It is risky to casually assume an artists’ work is autobiographical or a reliable window into their psyche, but his repeated fascination and return to this theme throughout the 80’s and 90’s makes me wonder if it betrayed his real anxieties. Certainly the infidelities of his father and the disturbing stories he told of pretending to sleep while his brothers had sexual encounters with groupies in hotel rooms might have skewed his views of sex and relationships. And if sexual adult women were in some way scary to him it is at least plausible that he would instead be drawn to their exact opposite: young boys. If he was indeed guilty, no amount of talent can erase the tragedy of those crimes. And his inability to be honest, and likely unwillingness of those around him to be honest, meant he probably never bested the many demons driving him. But that is all speculation, not proof. Some will always believe he was a too trusting innocent taken advantage of by opportunists. Some will always believe he was an abuser whose fame and money bought him immunity for his crimes. Some will recognize that both may be true.
I can’t say what his culpability was but the question that bothers me even more is about our own. The month before he died I joined hundreds of people of every hue at one of DJ Spinna’s wonderful “Michael Jackson & Prince” nights at a LA club and danced until 3am to almost 40 years of their work. The amount of good feeling in that room was astounding. 40 years of thick, rich, electrifying joy pouring out of the speakers, encircling the crowd, lifting us up, bringing us together. No one but those two magnificent artists could have brought us quite that experience. At his best, Michael was magic. But did that magic come at too high a price? The beatings he said he suffered as a young boy which helped drive his professional perfectionism; the social depravation and loneliness imposed so he could hone his craft; the isolation and lack of privacy he endured his whole life; the emotional pain he carried in and inscribed upon his body; the pain he may have inflicted on others –were these a fair or necessary price for the enjoyment he gave the rest of us. For all of us, no matter what our field, sacrifice is a price of accomplishment. But just as his talent and movements seemed somehow beyond human, were the sacrifices demanded beyond what was reasonable or bearable? Was his work the musical equivalent of blood diamonds or sweatshop garments? How do I listen to his music with a clear conscience knowing what made it possible and what it may have wrought? I’m left without an answer to this and with the lingering fear that for all its magic, for all that I want my love of Michael’s work to remain uncomplicated and uncompromised, when the bill is tallied up, that love may forever feel like a guilty pleasure.
Eric Greene is a Los Angeles writer and civil rights activist. His first book, “Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics and Popular Culture” (Wesleyan, 1999) was recently declared “a classic” by the Los Angeles Times. Eric has recently been a contributor of cultural criticism to several publications and books including “Jack Bauer for President:Terrorism and Politics in ’24,'” (2008), “Serenity Found” (2007), “So Say We All” (2006) and “Boarding the Enterprise” (2006).
I Want to Be 10 Years Old and Sleep with Michael Jackson
By Carmelita Estrellita
(This writing’s a bit disjointed: I haven’t had any weed in weeks.) There will always be a place for the king of Pop in the pharmacy of my love. I was arguing idiot-to-idiot with some white guy about nothing while Michael lay dying on my television at home.
If I’d been watching the news an hour earlier Michael Jackson’d be alive today.
The customary Vietnam reference: a lot of us didn’t approve of the Vietnam war, but we all know by now we still needed to honor those soldiers when they returned home. They believed they were doing it for us, so they were. Whether you liked Michael Jackson’s music or not, whether or not you cared for him as a person, I feel strongly we should honor him highly as he too returns home from a brilliantly debated career as a soldier in the army of never having gotten, like the Vietnam vets, the love he/they had earned. These people have left the building, so all the love in the world may not be enough, but it’s all I, or any of us, have.
Also: Billie Jean, I am the one. Sorry for any inconvenience.
We love you Michael. Peace and happiness.
The Many Deaths of Michael Jackson
By Ben Kessler
I
“The sense we get is that death does not come to all men uniformly, but that a more advanced wave from its tragic tide, as it rises, carries off an existence situated at the same level as others that will yet be long spared by the waves that follow.” – Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
When the news of Michael Jackson’s death broke on the internet, the work of the workday in my office all but stopped. Colleagues gathered in little groups around TV sets and computers, reacting to the half-facts that were available at the time with expressions of disbelief and grief-muted, morbid humor. No one was indifferent, but the response I’ll always remember belonged to a female co-worker who, half-mockingly, half-mournfully, suddenly sang the entire chorus of “Man in the Mirror” at somewhere near the top of her lungs.
It was that song, more than any other, that was seized on in the wake of Jackson’s passing. Why “Man in the Mirror”? Mourning is a medicine. A culture that has lost the capacity for self-examination would naturally turn to that song in an attempt to fill the void left by the death of one of the only pop artists on the planet with the power to show us to ourselves.
Consider: The tragic tide that swept away MJ also eroded the media-manufactured Twitter Revolution, in which the feel-good outpouring of online support for Iranian protesters was misinterpreted as an event with urgent political meaning. Meddling media made a harmless, freedom-loving and spontaneous internet phenomenon into, ironically, an instrument of repression by misrepresenting both the stakes and the sacrifices of Involvement. But the truth of tragedy, as often happens, drowned out the sentimental fantasies of the powerful.
The same True-vs.-False principle operated in the realm of identity politics, where Jamie Foxx’s BET Awards statement — “Michael Jackson belonged to black people, and we shared him with everybody else” —showed greater depth of knowledge and emotion than Sonia Sotomayor’s line about the “wise Latina.” Foxx invoked the richness of our shared pop-culture experiences, and reminded the world of the prideful generosity that has been at the heart of so much of it. He held the mirror up.
II
Mary Gaitskill’s MJ eulogy, “Michael Jackson and the Cruelty of the Ideal” on Ryeberg.com, isn’t a middlebrow disaster like, say, Margo Jefferson’s 2006 book On Michael Jackson. Unlike Pultizer-winning Jefferson, who devotes nearly a third of her book to analyzing Jackson’s child-molestation trial, Gaitskill is a novelist (her Veronicamay be the best American novel of the century so far) with amazing powers of imaginative sympathy that she brings even to her essays. She has written very well on pop music in the past (e.g., her great liner notes for Remain in Light). In an interview, she once suggested Roxy Music’s “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” as a companion piece to the novelLolita.
Even an artist of Gaitskill’s ability, however, can fall prey to the compulsion to condescend to the MJ audience, the same condescension Jefferson shows in her book when she describes Motown as “the musical equivalent of genre fiction” (would she say that about the Stones?). Picking apart our pathologies on Ryeberg.com, Gaitskill finds the source of “mad love” for MJ in “a country of record obesity with a fanatically thin, adolescent ideal of beauty…in which working-class people believed that a patrician fake cowboy was one of them and elected him president…”
In opposition to pathology-ridden Jackson, Gaitskill places the comparatively obscure jazz singer Jimmy Scott. “When I hear him,” she writes, “I hear the sadness, the impossibility of ideals such as love or beauty.”
If you’re like me, you want to take these deep thinkers by the shoulders and ask point-blank, Well, are we emotional creatures or aren’t we? Or, as Armond White asked someone who dismissed Spielberg’s The Terminal as “sentimental,” “You have feelings, don’t you? Don’t you feel them?”
Not everyone who goes in search of an ideal is an Ahab. Gaitskill forgets that Ahab-like suicidal visions can only take hold in an unmoored culture, which ours, admittedly, is fast becoming…but Michael Jackson made art to anchor us.
What’s more, Gaitskill neglects to mention (or does she not know?) that Jimmy Scott had his Pop Moment, too: He figured prominently in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks finale as a harbinger of the final corruption of innocence, the snatching of Special Agent Dale Cooper’s soul by the forces of darkness. The finale was broadcast just a few months before the premiere of MJ’s “Black or White” music video, which was censored immediately after airing. Lynch, whose movie The Elephant Man Jackson famously admired, clearly intended, as did Jackson, an act of pop subversion that would shatter complacent TV-watching habit, but his finale’s stroboscopic panic, though memorable, was irresolute compared to MJ’s vivid, political anger in “Black or White.”
Gaitskill fully regains her artistry late in the piece, offering Veronica-worthy insights: “[MJ] was doing on an epic scale what all humans must do, keep going through the illusions, mistakes, hurts, conceits, self-hate and masks of human life…All this while, dear God, simply trying to preserve the divine spark that he came here with…”
III
“We dream a great deal of paradise, or, rather, of numerous successive paradises, but they are all, long before we die, paradises lost, in which we would feel lost.” – Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
You might have expected to see a poster of David Lynch on the wall at the now-closed East Village Kim’s Video store. Kim’s specialized in hipster esoterica. No indie rock was too lo-fi, no electronica too abrasive, to be played at top volume in the ground-floor CD area. Upstairs, where the movies were sold, sardonic employees watched vintage porno DVDs all the time, which made shopping for even the toniest films into something slightly sordid.
A strange place to find a poster of Michael Jackson and E.T. holding hands, but as anyone who visited the St. Marks Place Kim’s will attest, the poster was indeed there. I often thought about buying it from Kim’s management in order to liberate MJ and E.T. from a store I had come to refer to as “the belly of the beast.” But I knew that it would take more cash than I was likely to have on hand to entice proud hipsters into relinquishing one of their totems.
The image encapsulates everything that makes me love pop, everything that Mary Gaitskill, with her non-hipster skeptical intelligence, innately distrusts. The clasping hands at the center of the composition form a physical bridge between human and alien, a metaphor for how pop art can transform even the most isolating pain into a shared, transcendently human experience. (“I used to say ‘I’ and ‘me’/Now it’s ‘us,’ now it’s ‘we,’” lonely-child Michael sang in “Ben.”) The benevolence of the two faces is almost blinding. It reminds me of a line from Larkin: “I choke on such nutritious images.” Yes, the poster is a pop-lover’s vision of paradise, in which the viewer is blessed by – beckoned into – pop’s palace of essences.
What did the Kim’s employees think of it? Instead of choking, were they scoffing? Could they secretly feel the power of the image, of that vision? Did they ever even notice it, or was it just an unremarkable piece of the landscape from which they launched their daily assault on everything responsible and sincere?
Maybe to them it was an image of paradise, too. Or, rather, a part of the paradise in which they worked, one of the few places on earth where the demands of adult capitalism didn’t preclude a salesperson openly mocking a customer, or responding to customer queries from deep within an internal cavern where boredom, bemusement, and thwarted intelligence obscured all information. Perhaps the poster was hung in an act of unconscious wit by someone who recognized a connection between the two paradises: the lonely child “grows up” into the compulsive CD/DVD collector. The sad child is the seed of the hipster.
The image has new meaning now, of course. Now that Jackson is gone, any thought of the MJ/E.T. connection must usher in memories of the ending of Spielberg’s film, where grief-stricken kids vow never to forget their departing friend or the uplifting gift – their own feelings – to which he introduced them. It all comes back to the heartbreak of a paradise lost. E.T.’s last line, pointing to Elliott’s broken heart: “I’ll be right here.”
Just call my name, and I’ll be there.