I was looking up michael jackson images to accompany a note about how weird America is with its celebrity orgasms and this came up. it's labeled 'Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder at the Grammys.
really. I guess celebrities are interchangeable. does it matter anyway? some famous entertainer dies and we go down on our knees in a way we never would have in real life...yet we do it too much already.
I might feel differently if we actually cared about what they did. if we actually gave half a shit about their art and magic of their craft. if we as a culture truly cared about what art does to and for us. that is, if we revered the power of art and entertainment in our lives on a daily basis and were in awe of that mystical exchange to the point of wanting to understand it, wanting the essence of that exchange to mean something beyond the superficial way we download and debate who's cool and what IT is.
if we understood a bit of that we might truly understand the significance of it when a major conduit of what that is goes away. that would mean a whole lot more than, "
there's no looking behind the story. 2 headlines: Beloved MJ Dies or Troubled Icon Passed Caring. that's it. oh, and Look at all the Freakin Fans. that's as much as we get. endless retrospectives on his heyday and how cool the moon walk is. there's no scratching the surface. they barely pawed the lid in the same place over and over.
whatever. do whatever you guys wanna do. it's none of my business.
but hey, mr. celebrity uploader...mistaking dylan for mj? whoa.
I guess we all look the same after a few years in the grave.
2 comments:
hilarious, that pic of dylan.
i hear you. MJ's not your thing, OK. but seriously, do you know anyone who can dance like this? i know there are some dancers out there, but isn't it funny how they get little to no respect in our culture?
maybe it was different just being here in LA where it happened. we (at metro) had reported on our wire that TMZ was reporting MJ had passed away. the phones started ringing off the hook, everyone started going bonkers and monitoring every single tv station and web site they could pull up, tv trucks homed in on UCLA and crowds started piling on the front lawn; and then in encino and bev hills, each jackson house became a major media circus event, with holiday crowds of people just walking around and dressing like MJ and dancing and showing love for the guy. maybe you had to be here...but it was cool.
it was kind of unbelievable, but you know the enquirer did call it. 6 months ago they said he had 6 months to live. they showed him in a wheelchair and it was a startling photo because anyone could see the guy was in terrible shape and in no way could do some fifty concerts. you just had to wonder.
i'm not exactly sure why the whole thing affected me, but it did. i just like any kind of respect for performing arts, since every other town on the face of this continent worships football and baseball and other sports....in our town we celebrate performance and that's what this was about, respect for a performer who had been brilliant and given a lot to the world, and also someone who obviously had broken wings and dark corners in his life that are fearful, mysterious and weird.
if you look at MJ from the perspective that he's just another wasted artist who didn't do anything good for a long time, it's not going to matter much to you. but if you consider how rarely we see dance glorified, for all the tv sets that crowd our interior spaces, it's nice that someone danced for us.
I wasnt saying anything about MJ one way or the other. I thought he was great.
I'm just complaining about the superficial way we treat the magicians who speak to our hears through whatever media.
and because of that I feel sorry for any gifted performer who may get their clothes ripped off by 13 year old girls while being totally misunderstood by 99% of the population.
when you base your music system on idiot companies trying to sell what they dont understand to a population who has no idea what theyre buying...you have one huge fuck.
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