AZspot AZspot

blue bits. red rocks.
Monday 29 June 2009

I’m not really any sadder about Michael Jackson’s death than I already was about his life. It was clear that this was a guy whose Maslovian pyramid took a sharp turn somewhere above “safety needs” and ended up with its tip pointing in a direction nobody else has ever been interested in going. It’s always uncomfortable to see someone who’s been ruined by fame; what was distressing about Jackson was that even though he was ruined by fame before his 20th birthday, he kept pressing the lever, and getting rewarded with still more fame, and still more ruination. Fame ruined him as an artist and it ruined him as a person, and then it kept on ruining him. In one sense, Neverland is just a point on the same curve that connects Iranistan, San Simeon, and Graceland. But unlike its predecessors, the overarching sense that I got from everything I ever heard or saw about Neverland is not “this is what happens when you marry too much money to too little taste” but rather “this is an inarticulate expression of uncontained misery.” Also, Barnum and Hearst and Presley held their citadels of damaged self-expression till the day they died: Jackson lost his. And he didn’t seem too unhappy about losing it, either. Bob Rossney

A GNT creation ©2007–2011