This Is It

There's a scene midway through "Michael Jackson's This Is It" where
Michael is working with the show's musical director on a slow, sultry version of "The Way You Make Me Feel."

The musical director is tapping the melody out on a keyboard but not getting the tempo exactly like Michael wants it. Frustrations seem to be building ever so slightly when the musical director says that he'll need explicit guidance if Michael wants, for example, "more booty in it." With that, MJ cracks up, and they try again, with everything seeming to go well until Michael puts out his hands in a "stop" gesture and says, gently but firmly, "You've got to let it simmer!"

This moment epitomizes what I loved about "This Is It." The film offers an intimate glimpse into Michael Jackson's creative process, and the picture is one of wit, perfectionism that's exacting but always professional, and of course great talent.

If you want to see Michael belt it out, you might be slightly disappointed, as throughout the movie it's clear he's saving his voice for the main event that never came. Still, there's a lot to like about the movie's music and dance. You just have to be patient and take the glorious moments when they come, sometimes in surprising places: The dance he does during an extended ending of "Billie Jean" is tremendously cool (and made better by the small cluster of awestruck dancers cheering him on). The rehearsal of "Human Nature" — especially the way he says "I like lovin' this way" — is fierce. With "I Just Can't Stop Loving You," he and backup singer Judith Hill luxuriate in an exceptionally drawn-out ending that seems pretty close to perfect. (By the way, if you feel like being sad, check out her memorial tribute song to Michael.)

The movie also offers insightful peeks at the man behind the music — his work style and inspirations. I liked watching him work with the young blonde guitar player on "Black or White," encouraging her that "this is your time to shine." Also good is a moment during "Smooth Criminal" where director Kenny Ortega points out that the staging Michael wants to use means that he won't be able to see an important visual queue — it will be happening behind him. "Yeah," Michael says, in what seems like complete seriousness, "I gotta feel that." It's cute, too, near the end of the film when Ortega makes some big sweeping movements with his arms, looking a bit like he's pointing toward the emergency exits on a plane, and Michael enthuses, "I love when the stewardesses do that!"

A pleasant surprise was seeing some of the other artists, particularly the dancers. The movie opens with scenes of the dance auditions, and it's a great sequence — very "A Chorus Line" (Michael even says "She's the one!"). From there on, the dancers are impressive. I particularly liked the snippet of one, I think it was Travis Payne, dancing in the foreground during "Shake Your Body." I also liked Mekia Cox, who is the object of Michael's advances during "The Way You Make Me Feel." She plays that part perfectly, and it looks like she's having so much fun.


I don't want to go off on too much of a tangent, but concurrent with seeing this movie, I went back and re-read the cover story from this summer's Rolling Stone special edition on Michael, and I was surprised at how much the piece annoyed me the second time around. I still like certain things about it, but, fresh after having seen the movie, I was especially turned off by the following passage:

"That [the 1983 Motown anniversary show] was the last truly blessed moment in Michael Jackson's life. After that, everything became argument and recrimination. And in time, decay."
I don't know exactly how that dramatic statement is meant to be interpreted, but "This Is It" seems a stark contradiction to any suggestion that Michael's later years were ones of "decay." Certainly anyone who watches this movie will see that he was, up until the end, an artist in full control of his considerable gifts, someone who inspired others, not to mention a person of humor and kindness.

You really get a sense of this near the end of the film when Michael and the rest of the performers gather in a circle, and he talks about his reasons for doing the concert, how he wants to bring audiences a positive message about caring for one another and the Earth, and to convey some "love."

Judging from the cheers, singing, and spontaneous applause that burst out in the theater the two times I saw it, I'd say mission accomplished.

One day in your life

On Sunday, I woke up with the idea that I should draw something to submit for possible inclusion in the Kraken Opus book on Michael Jackson. The deadline was the next day, so that meant I had to act quickly.

Most of the submissions, as you can see from the Flickr group devoted to the contest, are portraits of Michael. I get the impression that Kraken likes this sort of straightforward image — still, I wanted to do something slightly different. I've always loved drawing cityscapes, so I decided to draw something based on the fantasy scenery of the "Billie Jean" video.

You may remember from the video that there is a scene where Michael dances on an isolated sidewalk while two haughty models look down on him from a billboard. At first they are unaware of him; then they look at him; then they smile. None of their movements are presented in live action — they move in a series of stills, which makes their appearance more surreal.

Later in the video, Michael disappears down this same walkway — at this point, he is invisible, the only sign of him the stones that light up as his feet touch them. During this scene, the billboard is gone, replaced by Billie Jean's bed.

As I was thinking of a proper tribute to Michael, it occurred to me that the scene of him leaving this city was quite affecting. I decided to sketch this closing scene, but in doing so, remove the image of the bed and replace it with the billboard. Only now the models would have lost their haughty compusure and would instead be weeping at the thought of him leaving.

I'm not very good at drawing faces, so I started by drawing several sketches of the models. Then I looked for images of women crying and tried my hand at those. At first I had trouble finding the sort of facial expressions that I wanted, so I re-watched the memorial video of the MJ song "One Day In Your Life," which I first saw on one of my favorite blogs, MJ365: A year-long Michael Jackson online scrapbook project. Then I started trying to morph the two, giving the models the expressions of grief. Since I had only one day to do the whole thing, I did only a bare minimum of this exercise, then sat down to do the primary drawing of the walkway, distant cityscape, and billboard, onto which I imposed the models' faces.

The result was only passable, though as someone who has never been good at drawing faces, I was pleased that it came out at all recognizable.

My initial idea was that I would color the sketch in, but as soon as I started doing that, I regretted it, feeling that the pen-and-ink-only piece looked better. As soon as I realized this, I scanned the piece in and then painstakingly used SnagIt to erase the small amount of color I had added, with slightly degraded but acceptable results. Then, working on the original piece of paper, I colored in only those parts that I thought were critical to emphasize — the stones that Michael's feet were touching, the tears running down the models' faces, and the puddle formed by the models' tears.

In a slightly later version, I decided it would be a good idea to color in the puddle more.


I then did several additional versions that used more color. I have never been very good with color, and I generally liked these versions less. I'm not happy at all with how the models look colored in. However, the one thing I do like about some of these later versions is that, compositionally, the purple sky and distant buildings extend the path of the sidewalk up into the upper portion of the drawing, which I think makes for a nice line. Still, I prefer the spare look of the earlier versions.


I would be shocked if any of these drawings were chosen for the Opus, but I'm glad that the contest spurred me to work on it. If I had it to do over, I would spend more time working on the models' faces. I think that's the weakest part of the sketch, especially the one on the right. She came out better in some of my practice sketches. I also am not thrilled with the water circles in the puddle.

If I were to attempt using color again, I think it would be interesting to give the piece a darker feeling, perhaps with the use of more and bolder background color. The dark colors of the video suggest paint or an oil-based pastel (I used Prismacolors — all I had on hand).

Help me sing it!

I saw a poll the other day asking people to name their favorite Michael Jackson songs, and it got me thinking about whether I have one of my own. I'm not sure I do. How does one choose between the taut dread of "Billie Jean" and the delirious fun of "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough"? Between the relish of "Human Nature" and the pain of "Will You Be There"? Some of these songs, as Newsweek recently pointed out, are "so perfect of their kind that they'll never sound dated."

Still, there's one song for which I have a particular affection. I'm not sure I can explain why, because there's no big dramatic story, but I'll try.

We moved around a lot when I was a kid, because my dad was in the Air Force. I usually adapted pretty well, but one move was kind of overwhelming — when we went from Spain, where we'd been for four years, to a small town in Oklahoma. I had just turned 13 when we came stateside, and I didn't know what to make of anything. I really missed my old life. I'd loved the Spanish architecture, the Spanish countryside, and the Spanish food. Moreover, the military community had been inclusive and welcoming. We'd had a nice house with a backyard, from which I rode my bike all over. We hadn't had things like current American TV, so we'd apparently missed a few cultural phenomena including "Who shot J.R.?," but I was
fine with that.

By contrast, Oklahoma seemed small, and the people in our town homo-
goneous. It felt like we were the only new ones, and for some reason we lived in an apartment with no windows. It's hard to believe now that the fire codes allowed that, but apparently they did. The apartment had two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, all weirdly dark. We took to clustering around the TV.

Life outside the apartment wasn't so hot, either. I thought the area was desolate, and I missed my friends. It didn't get better when my mother took me to register at the middle school. I remember that weekday afternoon quite clearly; she and the assistant principal got into a long, boring conversation that didn't grab my attention until my mother asked when I should start class. My brain desperately screamed "not today," while the administrator said, "Might as well jump right in." I was reluctantly led to a classroom.

I never fit in at the school. I thought the other kids were cliquey, and I was horrified to find that the Oklahomans were way ahead of me in math.

My fondest memories of the first few weeks are of holing up in my room, writing in my journal, and occasionally walking to the Arby's next door. And of course, visiting the record store. Back then, I listened to ELO, Billy Joel, and the Beatles, along with a healthy smattering of Eighties froth. I had a wonderful stereo, a Christmas gift from the year before that had been carefully selected for me by my dad. It was a silver mini-component set. Most of the components were Fisher, but the piece that sat on the bottom was a little Pioneer turntable. You just pushed a button and the turntable slid out magically from its enclave below the tuner.

We hadn't been there long when the 20-something daughter of family friends left her home a couple of states away to come stay with us for a while. I liked Sarah, though she made me self-conscious. She was self-assured and beautiful, whereas I was clumsy and wore glasses. I remember watching some sort of music show with her on TV, and talking about which were the best John Cougar songs — I was thrilled I could hold up my end of the conversation. Initially neither she nor anyone else told me the real reason she was there, but after she left I found out why: her boyfriend had been beating her up, and after she'd left him, he'd stalked her. She'd come to our home to disappear for a while. In my memory, those facts make the shadowy apartment seem even more like a bunker than it might otherwise.

Eventually Sarah went home, and life started going really well for her (as it has ever since). I found I was sorry to see her go. In her absence, I spent more time angsting over various things, some real, others not so much.

Left to my own devices, one of my favorite distractions was listening to Casey Kasem. I heard the first few "Thriller" singles that way. As I wrote in a previous post, I resisted the album at first, but the snippets I heard won me over. Making the decision to buy the record got me kind of psyched, in a way. No one in my family liked Michael Jackson, so buying the record, even though it was so popular, felt in some ways like a private thing, just for me. I remember bringing it home to my darkened room and sitting on my bed to unwrap it. I put the record on, heard "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" for the first time, and it was like someone turned the lights on.

I don't know what exactly happened. Maybe the song inspired me while I was feeling a bit off my game. Maybe it reminded me that there was a world outside Oklahoma. Or maybe it's just a really kick-ass song. With its urgent beat and that glorious, high-octane African chant, it was like nothing I'd ever heard. And yet, I also had the strong sense that the song couldn't be new. I know now that the chant is a riff on the one from Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa," but if you've heard that song, you know it sounds nothing like Michael's, so that doesn't account for my aural déjà vu — how in a very strange way, I felt like I'd always known "Startin' Somethin'." I was sure the song must have been years old. I put this to people many times over the coming weeks. For some reason, they all insisted the song was new. Eventually I accepted that. I concluded it was just some peculiar magic that made the song seem special, timeless. That song, and the whole album, felt like a gift.

Like I said at the top of this post, I don't really have a favorite Michael Jackson song, but the sheer power of that one — the way it instantly brightened everything like no single song had before or has since — will always give it a special place in my heart and mind. Perhaps that's an overly sentimental notion about a song that really couldn't be less so itself, but there you have it.

Can we stop judging now?

I was on the green line the other day, heading toward Kenmore Square, when the woman next to me leaned over to peer at the Michael Jackson video I was watching on my iPod. "Which one is that?" she asked me. I told her. She watched a moment with me and said, with what seemed like real sadness, "It's too bad that he died."

But when she spoke again, the sadness was gone. "You know he did it to himself. Drugs."

I didn't respond, but her comment got me thinking. Why do people love criticizing Michael Jackson so much, and why do I react so badly to it?

In a previous post I described how much I've enjoyed Michael's music over the years. After reflecting more, I realize that I also empathize with his angst, or what I imagine his angst must have been. In many ways, I think he got a bad deal in life. From a more selfish perspective, I think he epitomized for me at a very early age what it is to be vibrant, likable — unbeatable, even — so much so that both his death and the apparent unhappiness of his later years are sobering. So is the scorn that some seem to feel for him, even in his death.

Of course, judgments of Michael Jackson are nothing new, but back in the day, they were way at the other end of the spectrum. I remember it, even though I was only 13 when I first became aware of him in a significant way. As I recall, up to that time the sexiest thing I'd ever seen on screen was Han Solo. And great as Han Solo was, Michael Jackson was more electric, more vulnerable, and more real. Closer to my age than most celebrities, he seemed both the same as me and yet nothing like me. He was like the impossibly cool older brother of a friend, winking at me knowingly from light-years away. For a lot of his 1983-era fans, it would have been more comfortable if he'd stayed that way, but of course he didn't.

When "Bad" came out, I saw the same physical changes everyone else did. But to me the biggest change was the expression on his face, which now seemed worried, and maybe just a little bit pissed off. I can still remember how, like attack dogs smelling fear, pop-culture critics — even the amateur 18-year-old ones — zeroed in mercilessly on these perceived weaknesses. Me, I didn't see them as weaknesses. I commiserated. At the time, I too was worried and a little angry, as, with a perfectionist's unforgiving eye, I lamented the distance between my accomplishments and my goals. Thank God my goal wasn't to top "Thriller."

These days as writers chart his life, they make much of the fact that he apparently became angrier in the years following his biggest success, as if this were the first sign of fatal flaws. These articles often have headlines like "The Talent and Tragedy of Michael Jackson." For many, the "tragedies" are the unproved allegations about him, but a strong emphasis is also placed on his oddities: his changing appearance, his penchant for exotic pets, his childlike tendencies. And don't forget the fact that he dressed his kids in veils, that he commissioned some kitschy artwork, and that his fashion sense declined during the '90s, as the Globe helpfully reminded us the week after his death. In general, the mainstream coverage has been kinder than it was during his life, but poor taste still rears its head: The generally good Time special edition uses the pejorative nickname "Jacko" (which, as Jon Stewart wisely observes, should have died when Jackson did). In a separate piece, a writer for Time.com declares that Jackson was "a pariah to all but the most brainwashed of fans."

Many of the blogs out there are even more harsh. I read one item recently that speculated favorably about what it would have been like if MJ had died in 1984. This same blog entry stated that had MJ just been busted for drugs or hitting a photographer, the public would have been more understanding of him. Perhaps not all of these comments are meant to be taken literally, but to me they're still a bit chilling. What kind of commentary on our culture is it when we think it's better to be violent — or dead — than alien? Not a good one.

Interestingly, those writers most scandalized by Jackson seem fond of stating that there were "two" Michael Jacksons: a good early one and a bad later one. This strikes me as an awfully convenient way of compartmentalizing the various black-and-white judgments to which these observers are so committed. But is it honest? Think of the worst thing you ever did. Was that the "bad" you? Or was it the only you, the one that's predominantly good but fallible?

I admitted previously that it had crossed my mind, "Why did he have to get so weird?" then I later felt bad about it. When I examine that thought, I realize that we like what we understand. We understand a good-looking black kid who can sing and write songs. That's easy. We don't understand, and don't like, someone who changes the color of his skin, whose pop sensibilities grow more off-key, and who engages in behaviors that seem foreign.

So, it seems to me that two mistakes are being made. One, people often are equating "unusual" with "bad," and in some cases "sinister." People also apparently want to assign blame, which leads to the second mistake: blaming the person, not the circumstances. One wonders if these critics would also blame the anorexic, not anorexia.

Personally, I don't think we need to throw up our hands and investigate why it is that Michael Jackson had a pet chimpanzee or walked around with a parasol. His addiction to plastic surgery is more disturbing, but even if we take the most negative view — that for some reason, he didn't want to be black — we should consider his environment. Undoubtedly he experienced racism. Add to that the fact that his childhood traumas were more spectacular than most of us can grasp, that international stardom brought pressures the average person can't imagine, and that he was damaged throughout life by a camera crew of "Truman Show" proportions, and we can't know what he went through. None of us knows how we would have fared under the same circumstances.

But for those who see his arc as negative, perhaps that's the scary part, and that's why they feel the need to critique him so harshly. They prefer to label him as a fundamentally flawed because to do otherwise is to acknowledge the possibility of frailties within themselves. After all, Michael's arc in many ways is the same as anyone's: Who among us, except the very young, can't recall a time when we were more beautiful, our lives more promising, our histories unmarred by some embarrassment? Throw in a few exceptional obstacles — physical abuse, isolation, public condemnation — and who knows how one's own arc would skew.

I'm reminded of a debate I once had with a friend about Patty Hearst. His position: She should have been stronger. My position: She was kidnapped, locked in a closet, raped and worse, and when finally freed, she found that the country was furious with her, not with the SLA. Why? In my view, it's because people didn't like to think that they could be as vulnerable as she turned out to be. My intuition is that we are all more like Hearst than we want to admit. We're fragile. We're not necessarily designed for abuse, and none of us should be punished for that.

Unlike Patty Hearst, Michael Jackson was never convicted of a crime. The vast majority of criticisms against him are for utterly benign things. In almost all cases, his actions affected no one but himself.

So, as to the "tragedy" of Michael Jackson: The tragedy is not that he became angrier after "Thriller." It's not that people became displeased with his appearance, his personal life, or his music. The tragedies are that he suffered, and that he's gone.

Miracle in the Sooner State

One of my earliest memories about Michael Jackson is also one of my clearest of middle school. I was sitting in my eighth grade math class, waiting for it to start. I was new — my dad was in the Air Force, and we'd just moved to town. I was your basic shy outsider, trying to move silently through insular environs. In that class, I sat next to three of the most popular boys in school, a trio who, in my opinion, acted a bit more superior than was warranted. That day, they were talking about Michael Jackson's new album. "Do you have 'Thriller' yet?" the blond son-of-the-teacher said to the football player. The athlete nodded sagely and said, "yeah." And then they fell silent for a moment, reflecting, or so it seemed, on how cool they were.

I was determined not to like this record. My aversion was spurred not just by these Heathers, but also by my tendency then to distance myself from things wildly popular. Not that we in that corner of Oklahoma really knew what was wildly popular, but we knew about "Thriller." And despite my principles, I heard "Billie Jean" and "Beat It," and soon it became clear that resistance was futile. One overcast Saturday afternoon I walked down to our little record store, where they displayed posters of Prince next to Def Leppard and John Cougar, and I bought what was to become one of my most beloved pieces of vinyl. In the coming years, "Thriller" would travel with me everywhere — when my family moved to yet another town and school system, when I went away to college, and when my various journalism gigs propelled me around the country still further. The record got a bit battered in greater St. Louis, when I unwisely situated my music a little too close to the air conditioner, but luckily no major harm was done.

"Thriller" was hardly the only memorable Michael recording in my life. During my freshman year at school, one of my two roommates was fond of playing Jackson 5 cassettes (to the disapproval of our other roommate, who favored INXS). I wasn't ready for the Jackson 5 back then (or INXS); that was the year I listened to "Abbey Road" over and over. Still, to this day when I hear "ABC," a track I now love, I can see that room we three shared: complete with boom box, Anne's fish bowl, and a stash of Swedish cupcakes, which were occasionally delivered by Ingegärd's mom.

A couple of years later, I was living and working in Texas. After a Bad Breakup, I decided a change was in order, so I moved from the antiseptic, urban sprawl of Arlington to Dallas's funkier lower Greenville area. From there, I and my fabulous best friend, a singer and dancer, explored dance clubs in Deep Ellum and Cedar Springs. We also made a mix tape of dance tunes that featured some choice "Off the Wall" tracks. But the real victory of that era was when I stumbled across an LP that featured five different mixes of "Black or White," which I promptly bought and recorded to a cassette that I labeled "45 minutes with Michael." That song's infectious exuberance — undercut with just the right amount of steel — is one that still gives me a lift, particularly the Clivillés & Cole House/Club Mix.


The mid-'90s found me on Martha's Vineyard island, where, like many other year-round residents, I bounced between gorgeous winter apartments and humble summer shacks at the whim of the tourism industry. My first summer was spent in a centuries-old house in Vineyard Haven, where the rotating cast of residents included a waitress, a high school student, and a handful of chain-smoking musicians who liked to tell stories about the place possibly being haunted. My housemates were diverse in age (17 to 40-something) and in ethnicity (Venezuelan, Cuban-American, Anglo), but united in their desire to cluster 'round the TV for the world premiere of the "Scream" video. I'll never forget it: stark and angry, it was an entirely valid rebuke to the venomous tabloid press and, more broadly, to the sometimes judgmental nature of the public's celebrity fascination. And while its refrain — a cry for mercy from oppressive pressure — was clearly not inspired by the sorts of problems I had, its effect was cathartic. I loved it.

Of course, despite the message of "Scream," over time it became ever more the fashion for people to mock MJ's oddities. It seemed like I was always the last to hear about the latest gossip, but I admit that occasionally I too was put off by his eccentricities. Still, I was generally inclined to defend him. So was one of my later roommates, Kate, a small-business owner who was endlessly curious about MJ's life. "It makes sense that he would marry Lisa Marie," I can still remember her saying. "Look at the lives they've led — they're the same."

Eventually I ditched the island for Boston, and the journalism gig for Corporate America. As Michael's output slowed, I suppose I thought about him less, though with the advent of iTunes I loaded up on his work, buying several vintage tracks I hadn't heard before, including the joyous "Just a Little Bit of You" and some cool previously unreleased "Thriller"-era recordings. Last year I drew heavily on all stages of Michael's oeuvre when I created my "Best of the Jacksons" playlist, a favorite for when I'm cooking or working out.


My iPod and the playlist were with me at my gym last Thursday night, but I wasn't listening to them; I was watching CNN's coverage about Michael Jackson being taken to the hospital. My initial reaction was one of mild concern, yet whenever they showed recent footage of Jackson, I was also — selfishly — a bit irritated. Why did he have to get so weird? It's uncomfortable to admit that now, but it crossed my mind. Still, when Wolf Blitzer paused and said darkly that there was new information, I drew in my breath and brought the elliptical machine to a halt. How could Michael Jackson be dead?

Since then, television and Internet reports have shown me a lot of fandom. When I hear people say "I feel like I knew him!", the hyperbole makes me cringe a bit and yet, I kind of get it. Perhaps anyone who follows an artist for a long time starts to feel they know the person. Yet we obviously didn't know him. So why does the loss seem so acute?

For me, a partial answer came tonight when I was streaming videos: "Thriller," "Remember the Time," "Bad," the sublimely simple "Rock With You," and others. MJ's intonations are so familiar, and yet no less pleasing for being so. Likewise, the imagination and style of his performances still floor me, even those I've watched countless times. The work would be great even without the nostalgia component, yet the latter is there too, and it's strong. The music of Michael Jackson has been such a constant in my life, throughout many miles of travel, friendships that came and went, and a few decades of growing up. I'm scarcely the same person I was when I first dropped the needle on "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," yet MJ's music has been a steady soundtrack, and a damn good one. When I think of his voice, his smile, and his grace, I'm rather thrilled that anyone could have had these gifts. I realize now that, in a way, those gifts must have been a burden to him. That makes me all the more grateful that I got to enjoy them, and it seems wrong, somehow, that I can't thank him for that.