butterfly dream

There is a great disturbance in the pop-culture Force.
 

Michael Jackson is dead. He who has been in my vision for as long as I have been aware of the wider media universe, who has acted first as the ultimate definition of cool, then of wretched excess, then plain ol'what-planet-is-this-guy-from weirdness...isn't there any more.

I did not expect to be nearly as moved by this as I am.

Well, perhaps moved is the wrong word. Something more along the lines of what happens when you try and go home again. Your worldview has been so comfily arranged for so long that when a piece is removed the whole thing feels unsettled for a little while. Farrah Fawcett, who also died today, was undoubtedly a beautiful, talented and courageous lady, and my heart goes out to those who knew and loved her, but she had no such niche in my memory.

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The Jackson family apparently took a few stabs at being Jehovah's Witnesses over the years; our belief system revolves around a final resurrection to a Paradise earth. The great tragedy of Jackson's life is that something - a whole lot of somethings, all of which will be lovingly analysed in exhausting detail over the next weeks, so I don't have to - drove him to try and recreate that Paradise here and now, in this system of things. By the time he was done he'd pretty much canonised himself Lord Protector of All That is Pure & Innocent Amen.

As many of your major works of literature have observed, an imperfect human playing God is never a smart idea. Playing God with American celebrity culture for a throne...now that's just prime cosmic comedy.

So we laughed - and then cringed, as you do when the joke just goes on way too long, reveals way too much. Then...finally left, shaking our heads.

A lot of us did, anyway. Unfortunately (speaking of great tragedies) a sense of humour is not universal among the human race; never mind perspective. So a lot of other people bought wholeheartedly into Saint Michael. The misunderstood emissary, mocked and bullied by a world too jealous and shortsighted to appreciate his Vision.
This is what I'm really afraid of now. That natural guilt re: slandering the dead will translate into a huge backlash of mindless sentiment. A warm collective glow will arise from the media - which after all has been ready with fists poised melodramatically over breasts ever since the Britney circus - and suddenly the World Will Understand. Perhaps he really was a saint, after all!

Um, no. He was a humongously talented kid that warped into a sad, strange monster, finally unable to cope with reality to such an extent that - guilty of an actual crime or not - he honestly didn't see anything wrong with his taking little boys to bed. I'm not even sure if a proper understanding of what led to all this would be worthwhile, so little of it applies to real life. It'd be like holding Howard Hughes up as a warning example of overwork among businessmen.
 

So I got a note from my editor yesterday telling me that he was very pleased with the results of my condense-and-focus job on the article…

[pause while those who know me well pick their jaws up from the floor]

…thank you. At any rate, his only major changes involved tweaking my idiosyncratic grammar into mass-magazine mode…which was kind of a peculiar experience. Not unpleasant, per se; believe me, nobody should be crushed at the discovery that the general public doesn’t share my stream of consciousness.

Just…well, by now I’ve got used to the thing having a certain rhythm and flow – my rhythm - and it feels decidedly odd to have it go off among strangers and come back sounding so carefully mature. [snif] My little article, all grown up and ready to stun the world…

Or something. I’ll know in about two-three weeks, he says, when the article goes up onsite. He also says there’s going to be a reference to this blog in the footer to the article…meaning I suddenly have a whole new set of literary anxieties.

This is after all a very classy magazine – I can tell, because a friend who holds a professorship in political science has heard of it. Which means these very classy readers are going to land @ Shoe Central expecting, like, reams of thoughtful, sensitive pop-culture critiquage, and you can’t just cheerily explain it was all a fluke, ha ha, and hope you like the Transformers review!

Thus I have only a fortnight or so to reinvent myself as a sophisticated, culturally-aware literati of whom same would not be wholly embarrassed to be seen engaging in discussion. Basically, I’m thinking of referring to the French Revolution a whole lot from here on in.

Ooh, and post-modernism. I have never had any clear idea what that means, except that Andy Warhol mocked it a lot, and boy howdy did that turn out to be the place where enthusiasm goes to die. However, it apparently has a lot to do with ‘theory’ and ‘irony’, so I figure I get the usage down pat enough to drop it into casual conversation (“The theoretical irony of robots philosophizing in Transformers is, like, mega-post-modernist, dude!”), and I’m totally covered in any discussion past 1952.

More immediately, this puts paid to my ambition to be the sole Oscar-free blog of 2008...

So the other day I decided to recklessly shell out some Audible.com credits on John Ritter and Arte Johnson reading Dave Barry’s columns. Quite good value, really; if only for the nostalgia factor. At that it’s funny how the one defect in Ritter’s reading is that he hurries a little, as if anxious to get it over. You’d think Barry’s Everyman-to-the-comic-extreme schtick would fit him as comfortably as if, well, they were sharing a beer.

At any rate, the collection also turns out to contain Johnson’s reading of the lengthy piece Barry wrote on the 10^th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. It’s not about The Pelvis, per se, but his fandom – the hardcores, the Graceland ‘gate people’, the ones who made up the eager audience when he rented a local theatre for exclusive showings of (for instance) The Nutty Professor, night after long night.

The thrust - excuse it, please - of Barry’s essay is that, contrary to the popular notion, the really hardcore fans idealized, not the image, but the man himself. That they rode the downhill slope more faithfully with each stop, all the way to the sick, sad, trailer-park joke he was at the end – circling the wagons as you would for a family member, Barry points out. “I still don’t understand it,” he concludes, “but I’m not laughing anymore.”

I was standing in the checkout line @ Wal-Mart pondering this, and the thought occurred that – well, to be entirely honest, that I finally had a way of working Britney Spears into my journal [waves happily at theoretical oodles of new Google traffic] without feeling like a total sellout.