Against The Sky

*

My hometown was famous for two things—lacrosse and liquor. Year in, year out, Manhasset produced a disproportionate number of superb lacrosse players and a still-greater number of distended livers. Some people also knew Manhasset as the backdrop for The Great Gatsby. While composing portions of his masterpiece, F. Scott Fitzgerald sat on a breezy veranda in Great Neck and gazed across Manhasset Bay at our town, which he turned into the fictional East Egg, a historic distinction that gave our bowling alley and pizzeria a certain archaeological grandeur. We strode each day across Fitzgerald's abandoned stage set. We romanced one another among his ruins. It was a kick—an honor. But like Steve's bar it was merely an offshoot of Manhasset's famous fondness for drink. Anyone familiar with Manhasset understood why liquor surged through Fitzgerald's novel like the Mississippi across a floodplain. Men and women throwing raucous parties and boozing until they blacked out or ran someone down with their car? Sounded to us like a typical Tuesday night in Manhasset.

J.R. Moerhringer

Well it was so often missing, the heart, the soul of the matter. They reached out but there was no one there. The package was empty. Faced with yet another difficult situation, he retreated once more into the silence of the ages. No one noticed. The human race was remarkably self absorbed. He was invisible. Nothing he said could possibly make any impact. They went about their duties as if he didn’t exist. The silence grew deeper, yet no one noticed. What’s he hiding, he heard them ask; while whispering, he’s not on the program, he’s different. He was used to it. He had always been different, the subject of gossip and innuendo.

The difference now was that he was old, and there was even less interest in someone who so clearly didn’t fit in. He was compromised. Burnt out. Mad from sleep deprivation. Lost in soul and body, lost. You frightened me, the little, frail voice said. Old before its time. He wasn’t to be compromised, or mocked. It was so corny. He heard them say it time and again, I always felt different, uncomfortable in my own skin, it wasn’t cold enough to be punishment within itself. It was that feeling of being at odds with the world. It was the distinct uncomfortably.

It was a life lost and a life reborn, a heartfelt compromise, a hand reaching out, the light touch on the shoulder by a handsome young man. They were all so sincere. He could feel himself register disappointment when the man used the words “we”, as in “we live in the Blue Mountains, we moved there last year”. He couldn’t imagine, didn’t want to imagine, the comfortable wife. Time had moved beyond all desire. She no doubt kept him happy, grounded, as he undressed beside the bed and climbed rapidly under the covers, keen to get away from the cold, snuggles, all snuggles.

Well they were wreathed in the human smells, and the concrete walkways of the Barbican in London were a long way away. In those days it had been his turn to always be in the arms of someone, to always share his bed. The level of synchronicity was currently very high. If he heard one more person crap on about their higher power, spout absolute fantastic garbage, all so they could feel they fitted in, then he would feel remarkably absent, would retreat yet further. There was no room for doubt. The program was full of self-referencing absurdities, self-fulfilling prophecies.

If you don’t believe then you are deceptive, distorted, incapable of honesty. But even you can recover, if willing. He was shocked by his own history, shocked ot find himself here at the Kincumber Spiritual Retreat on the Central Coast, just one of about 25 people, most of whom he had never seen before. Voices ran fast and fluid and mad. The fluidity, liquidity of the situation was something he could never adjust to. They were not interested in being challenged or confronted, certainly were not prepared to welcome doubt into their midst. If only he could believe. If only he could be certain. There were so many strangers, lining the sidewalks, jeering. He was not prepared to sacrifice integrity. Repeat after me: the twelve steps are not the ten commandments.

Let us go to the ends of the earth, to the ends of logical absurdity. Let us sacrifice all doubt, all integrity. Let us forgo all pain. Let us be silent in the hearth, silent in the reaches. He smiled, a weak, flickering, too intelligent, too doubting smile, and wrapped the silences of the place around him like a protective blanket, and gazed out the window at a different world. “It’s too bad,” he heard them say, “too bad he never got the program”. He was ready to die now. They could pick across his heart and demean his psyche, they could move to a more practical residency, they could be shocked at the world they had created. Nothing would ever make him fit in, nothing, no amount of distortion, no amount of personal compromise. He was lost - and had known it all along. Can’t you see, can’t you see, what is happening to me?

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/107828-the-fawn-in-the-burning-forest-our-beloved-monster

I imagine these past few weeks were a bit like what it felt like to be alive in 1984. Michael Jackson was again ubiquitous. He was on every television set, seeping out of every car radio passing down the street, in the backdrop of every conversation. The world was in love again. We had forgiven Jackson for betraying us, and were now proving our devotion the only way we knew how: by spending exorbitant amounts of cash.

The whole rotten exchange stunk. It was as if a murderer had crashed the funeral of one his victims and turned it into a fiesta. In the end, our anointed king of capitalism was broke, in debt, forced to go on tour (the grimly named This Is It tour, practically a death knell unto itself), plagued by lupus and alopecia, anorexic, addicted to prescription pills, possibly suicidal, and haunted by voice troubles. He was the butt end of every hack comedian’s ire, a broken and fractured shell of a man. Jackson may have been a weirdo creep pervert, but he had gotten a pretty shit bargain for surrendering his identity for the greater good of the church of the dollar. Now, after having sucked every ounce of life out of the man, here was the American public, stumbling down the streets like a drunken vampire ready to fuck the corpse.

Unfortunately for Michael, his biological father was not the only abusive paternal figure that he would encounter in his life. He was host to a lifetime’s worthy of parasitic relationships with substitute fathers who would eventually turn him into the golden goose of their avaricious and exploitative yearnings, and subsequently shit down his platinum throat whenever the abrasion of living life in this ridiculous fashion began to show.

A lonely child who was never quite alone, surrounded as he was by a gaggle of siblings, insatiable fans, and omnivorous music biz vermin, Michael Jackson self-described himself as a lost boy, a la Peter Pan. Like one of the orphaned swashbucklers from J.M. Barrie’s infamous tomes on childhood, Jackson was able to live out all his fantasies and create an adventure narrative that pre-prescribed himself as the victor (as his 1984 “Victory” tour would make apparent). However, this luxury of Disney-esque fantasy-making was not elicited in Jackson’s life through the manifestation of absolute freedom. The rock n’ roll ideal in a pre-Jackson world, total freedom was a countercultural challenge posed to the American dream. To be free, as the hippies envisioned it, was to remove oneself from the unreality of systemic logic, which prescribed one’s social role based on a set of mostly arbitrary codes and dogmas.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2009/07/07/lessons-michael-jackson/

"Who do you believe, me or your own eyes?"

-- Groucho Marx

If my friends are any indication, this country is divided into three camps -- those who think Michael Jackson was a genius, those who think he was a pervert and the rest of us who think he may have been both.

For nearly three decades Jackson asked us, his fans, to suspend belief and believe him instead of our own senses. He swore to us that he hadn't had any plastic surgery, that relationships with boys who slept with him in his bed were all platonic, that he wasn't intent on erasing his African-American heritage, that his obviously Caucasian children were his genetic offspring, that it was acceptable even heroic for him to intentionally bring three human beings into the world without a mother, and that he didn't really mean some of the weird things he was singing about. And we believed him. And those of us who enjoyed his songs and can, to this day, sing along to every line of his amazing repertoire like "Rock With You," "Don't Stop 'Til you Get Enough," "Billie Jean," "Thriller" and others are complicit not only in what he did to himself, but what he did to us: getting us to give tacit approval to things we'd never approve of our neighbors doing.

Jackson was clearly an amazing entertainer, probably the greatest dancer of all time, a very good singer and a decent songwriter. While attention is always on "Thriller" because of its enormous sales, I'd make the case that "Off the Wall" is his strongest record of all, skillfully weaving elements of pop, disco, and R&B to create a masterful collection of songs that still sound fresh today.

Most of Jackson's songs like "Rock With You," "You Are Not Alone" and "She's Out of My Life" were relatively innocent and harmless, but others like "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," though musically brilliant, were more troubling to some, with its insistence that a young man should "keep on with the force" and not be dissuaded from taking what he needs and wants from his girl.

The most troubling thing about "Thriller" wasn't so much with the lyrics or even the dancing corpses, but Michael's weird double-cross of his pretend girlfriend at the end. When he looked over his shoulder at us, the audience, and asked for our complicity in whatever creepy thing he had planned for his date after tricking her into believing he wasn't what she thought he was, he also tricked us into doing something we were trained by a million stories not to do: suppress our honorable instincts to save the damsel in distress and instead laugh at her predicament.

But considering the child-rape charges that would later dog him, perhaps nothing in Jackson's musical repertoire is as troubling as his hit 1992 song "In the Closet," which sounds like an amalgamation of every threateningly cheesy line that a million sexual predators have used on their victims: "whatever we say -- or do --we'll make a vow to keep it in the closet." And in case you missed what the song was about Jackson would add, later in the track: "if it's aching, you have to rub it."

Psychologists could have a field day with that line, but we, his audience, just giggled along, this time slightly uncomfortably and chalked it up to his "just being Michael," and shelled out more money for him to indulge his real-life fantasies and eccentricities.

http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s3i56000

Hours after Michael Jackson's body was discovered missing from his ornate, gold-trimmed casket, a Xombie resembling the pop superstar was observed stalking a Boy's Home in Central L.A. Sitting on the steps of the L.A. Home for Memory Challenged Boys Aged 10-13, a man wearing a surgical mask was observed talking to a crowd of boys and playing with a jack-in-the box about 10:00 a.m. pacific time. When an attendant noted that it wasn't exactly a snake that was popping out of the box, he chased the Xombie away with a picture of a vagina he'd recently printed out from the school computer.

As it rapidly moonwalked away from the scene, the attendant instantly recognized it as Michael Jackson. "We should've put a wooden stake through his heart!" said the attendant indignantly. "Now, we've got a perverted, undead freak running around with his wick hanging out...oh wait, my porn download is finished," he said before slinking off to attend to other business.

Since then, the Xombie has been reported at boy's schools all across the L.A. area. "We're not really sure if this is the same Xombie," said Special Agent Mulder leading the task force. "Plus, he...it...whatever is reported to be wearing a mask, so a definitive identification hasn't been possible at this time." Special Agent Mulder and his partner Special Agent Scully are reported to be part of a secret FBI task force charged with investigating crimes that are entirely too damned creepy for regular law enforcement.

Self as man in his 50s.