A Grave Act

The foul stench was very strange, the funk of fifty years and change, a grizzly ghoul inside his tomb, all closed up to seal his doom . . ..

Yeah, they finally buried Michael Jackson. I don't understand what the heck took so long, I didn't think the autopsy could have been all that complicated.

Anyway, Jackson was interred in a vault in a mausoleum in Forest Lawn Memorial Cemetery, which includes the remains of several other deceased entertainers. Access to this mausoleum is severely restricted, meaning that fans won't get to leave any mementos.

Incidentally, anyone notice that Ted Kennedy died two months to the day after Jackson, yet he was interred before Jackson was?

I know that it's not cool to make fun of the way Jackson's interment was handled, but his survivors didn't do anyone - least of all Jackson himself - any favors by begging to be lampooned.

King vs. King!

U.S. Representative Peter King, a Republican from New York, recently posted a video that's bound to make them the most unpopular man in America - even more unpopular than George Walker Bush or Dick Cheney. The Long Island lawmaker, considering a run for the Republican nomination for the special U.S. Senate election in New York next year, complained that society is glorifying a low-life like the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, and not honoring the teachers, police officers, and firemen.

King called Jackson a pervert who was obviously a pedophile because he slept with young boys (Jackson insisted it wasn't sexual) and added his constituents were complaining about all the media coverage given to Jackson's death. He did admit, though, that he was a good singer and dancer.

While King's arguments about the media coverage have some merit, and even though many people have been suspicious of Jackson's claims, this video was the least tactful and most obnoxious way of getting his point across. But then, King is a Long Islander. Newsweek journalist Howard Fineman even suggested that King may have been trying to score points with white voters in suburban areas like Long Island by picking on a minority entertainer with a large black and Hispanic urban audience, but Jackson had a large white suburban following as well.

Jackson's fans are already calling for their own version of Jacksonian democracy. They want King to resign, and some of them are even collecting money for his primary election opponent, and, if nominated, his general election opponent.

King is lucky he didn't bash Madonna. He would have been forcibly removed from office by now. Her fans are even less tolerant of detractors.

Rodney Frelinghuysen, my own congressman, once got into similar trouble complaining about the 1995 Marilyn Monroe U.S. postage stamp, insisting that movie stars were inappropriate subjects for stamps. So I've seen this before - but never like this.

King claims to have been spurred by his constituents, and while he praises teachers, policemen (many New York Police Department officers live in Long Island), and other working class heroes, he, being a Republican, is hardly suited to drinking to the salt of the earth. (He probably thinks the Rolling Stones are animals. No, that would be Eric Burdon. :-D)

While King has yet to join the Senate, Al Franken joins it today. His sixtieth vote for the Democrats, while welcome for the party, is less important than the fact that Minnesota now has a second vote in the Senate.

The Curious Case of Michael Jackson

It just occurred to me that Michael Jackson's life was like a movie. Guess which movie.

He started out as a seasoned, professional entertainer who comported himself as an adult. In his twenties, he dated, but than as he got older he played with toys and little children. By the time he died, he was completely dependent on others for his welfare.

So, he aged backwards.

Just like in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

That freaks me out. :-O

Style Over Substance

One of the most fascinating things about Michael Jackson's death is how quickly history has been revised right after he received the weaver's answer. One commentator on MSNBC commented on how Jackson broke the color barrier in popular music and how he gained a large white audience when he crossed over into the mainstream.

Interesting. That's news to me. Let's see . . . Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis, Jr., Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington . . .. Dude, how far back do you want to go? White people were listening to Louis Armstrong in the twenties.

Jackson's barrier breaking was limited at best. "Beat It" got airplay on white rock radio thanks to Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo on that single, and even Prince benefited from Jackson's achievement for awhile, but the breakthrough didn't last. Things quickly reverted to business as usual. And it's hard to imagine someone "crossing over" to the mainstream when he'd been in the mainstream since his career began. The Jackson Five performed on Ed Sullivan's show, and in the sixties, you couldn't get much more mainstream than that. If you wanted to go against the mainstream, you played on the Smothers Brothers' show. Ask Pete Seeger.

Jackson did shatter the barrier for black musicians that kept their videos from being aired on MTV, and it legitimized the channel as a pop-cultural institution, but with his emphasis on style, visual charisma, and elaborate production, Jackson made it possible for anyone with more style than musical substance to break through.

And so there was Duran Duran. And then came . . . Madonna.

Not a great legacy . . .

On the other hand, the inclusion of Jackson's videos on MTV meant that the channel had to cut some performers from its playlist. That's one thing I'm grateful to Jackson for - I never had to watch videos from obscure but awful bands like LeRoux or Red Rider ever again.

Then again, Night Ranger still managed to break through anyway.

Imitation Is Not the Sincerest Form of Flattery

Someone on MSNBC - I think it was Keith Olbermann - suggested that Michael Jackson's death may lead to a slew of Michael Jackson impersonators, just as Elvis Presley's death led to people impersonating him. 

 There already are Michael Jackson impersonators. Their names are Justin Timberlake and Chris Brown.

They're Out of Our Lives

I have mixed feelings about the death of Michael Jackson. I appreciated his showmanship and his obvious musical talent, but his life and his public persona in recent years always perplexed me, as it did others. In that same time, he seemed to keep putting out the same musically cliched pop songs that sounded more banal and tired with repeated listening. And I don't even want to start about his history with children.

In truth, the Michael Jackson I remember fondly died several years ago. I liked the Michael Jackson who sang and danced with his four (later five) brothers, the Michael Jackson who recorded Off The Wall, the Michael Jackson who sang "She's Out of My Life" and "Rock With You" (from that same LP). The Michael Jackson I watched for the past twenty-five years or so was someone I never knew. That Michael - the Michael who tried to buy the Elephant Man's bones and made elaborate but empty promotional videos that were more important than the singles they supposedly promoted - freaked me out.

I guess I feel about Michael Jackson the way John Lennon did about Elvis Presley. Lennon contended, upon learning that Elvis had died, that Elvis died the day he was drafted into the Army.

Meanwhile, Farrah Fawcett also died of cancer. I found the media coverage of her in her last months in infuriatingly bad taste. I'm not talking about the NBC documentary on her battle with her disease. I'm talking about how they wrote about her as if she were already dead while she was still alive. In fact, I think some commentators were already referring to her in the past tense. For Pete's sake, I wanted to shout, she's not dead yet!

Special attention should go to Ryan O'Neal, Fawcett's love for the last several years, who was her caregiver for so long and went beyond meeting his responsibilities by always being there for her. It's sadly ironic that O'Neal lived out in real life the ordeal of his most famous character, Oliver Barrett IV, in Love Story. Those who remember the 1970 movie recall that Oliver had to endure the death of his love Jenny (played by Ali McGraw) of . . . cancer.