…well, of course I have a bunch of thoughts and feelings concerning the death of Michael Jackson, not to mention the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon…I daresay if I did not, I’d probably be obliged to give up my United States citizenship. The echoes of Elvis in the decline of Jackson, for instance, and how Jackson in fact managed to outpace The King in waste and weirdness. I remember reading, in recent years, an article in Mojo magazine by soul music chronicler Gerri Hirshey, about the dawning years of Jackson’s superstardom, that ended with the still-young, still plastic-surgery free young singer half-cheerfully asking Hirshey, “Scared for me yet?” For Fawcett, I think how she never really made it as a film actress, because that’s sometimes the way that cookie crumbles, and how she gave it a good shot in Altman’s Dr. T and the Women, and was Martin Amis really fair to mutate and recast her as “Butch Beausoleil” in his novel Money, a part send-up of the disastrous making of Saturn 3? And as for McMahon, I think that were this a socialist country like Europe (I know, Europe’s more than one country, but bear with me here), McMahon would be a member of our equivalent of the Académie Française, and the taxpayers would be footing the bill for his house.
I eagerly await, incidentally, Roger L. Simon’s column on how Obama likely engineered Michael Jackson’s demise so as to further distract our populace from the situation in Iran.
That Roger Simon article doesn’t blame Obama for anything, you know.
Anyway, Ed McMahon lived a good, long life, and good for him. I have no connection with Fawcett, but I’m still very sad about her passing, just because she was a human being, and she suffered.
Jackson, on the other hand… Well, I’m shocked, but I haven’t worked up any sense of sadness about it yet.
That Simon article reminds me of this site I discovered a few days ago:
http://www.barackobamastoleyournewbicycle.com/
Keep clicking on the text.
I do feel that our culture forces us to participate in a collective media mourning. Personally, I felt Fawcett was pretty good in a couple of movies and t.v. movies. I thought Michael Jackson had a few okay songs but never owned any of his albums. And, let’s face it, Ed McMahon was best known for sitting on a couch and laughing at someone else’s jokes. Their personal lives were, how shall I put this, a little complicated.
I feel bad if anyone passes on, but death doesn’t erase the complexities of one’s life before that nor should it make people suddenly appreciate a body of work they were unenthusiastic about before. Though it is sort of sad now watching the deaths of McMahon, Fawcett, and especially Jackson become little more than about feeding the beast of a media-sanctioned catharsis.
Money is Amis’ masterpiece, the best American novel ever written by a Brit.
@Michael – “Money is Amis’ masterpiece…”
Nuh uh, LONDON FIELDS is.
No, it’s ‘Money’ – ‘London Fields’ tries too hard to be a masterpiece to actually be one.
It tries so hard that it succeeds! I win!
Actually, I thought Cheney sicced his assassination squad to get Michael so as to push Mark Sanford out of the news cycle. Score another one for The Divertor.