FEED THE PEOPLE

11-year old Paris Jackson was given a microphone at the conclusion of the Michael Jackson memorial service: “I just wanted to say, ever since I was born. My daddy has been the best father you can imagine.” I was moved as the little girl buried her tears in Janet Jackson’s embrace.

Earlier in the program, former child star, Brooke Shields also cried as she recalled her carefree times with MJ. They had a bond. A dominant theme in the life of Michael Jackson was his absolute faith in the innocence of childhood. I was a child in the 1980s and I witnessed Jackson transform into a genderless and ageless enigma -- pale, bizarre, and blank. As he got older and more reclusive, his vast wealth became a means to arrive at perpetual childhood. The soul music blackness of Jackson’s childhood had no place in the Peter Pan fantasy of his adulthood.

It was the young Michael Jackson, the black Michael, that garnered mythic language in a rousing speech by Reverend Al Sharpton. Despite all of the ambivalence displayed in Jackson’s life and music, Sharpton still insisted on the singer’s key contributions to the civil rights struggle. It was a dubious claim and endemic to an older generation of black leaders. He said: “I want his children to know there was nothing strange about your daddy, it was strange what your daddy had to deal with.” But Jackson’s behavior was, in fact, very strange. His weirdness was inextricable from his brilliance. Sharpton wished to normalize Jackson -- to bring the whitest, queerest sheep back into the fold.

As it was in life, Jackson’s death is impossible to separate from spectacle. The sadness of watching little Paris Jackson was not simply a little girl’s expressed loss of a father, but also the televised exhibition of mourning that could help redeem Michael’s competency as a loving father. Surrounded by the Jackson clan, I didn’t question the sincerity of the Paris Jackson’s tears. Instead, I wondered if this child, like her father before her, had been stage-managed to vindicate the Jackson name.

While alive, Michael Jackson obsessively sheltered his children and that practice will hopefully continue. I don’t want to watch Paris cry on TV again.

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STERLING RUBY REVIEW

enxuto — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:42:17 +0000

Please read my review of the current Sterling Ruby show at the LA MOCA in West Hollywood.

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Jacques Ranciere’s Worker-Poets?

enxuto — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 07:33:26 +0000

An MTA employee taking photographic portraits of co-workers at the Metropolitan stop on the G train in Brooklyn. This activity appeared to be happening during regular work hours.

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Kickin It At The Westin Bonaventure

enxuto — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 07:17:03 +0000

The views from the Westin Bonaventure are magnificent. The elevator lifts you to one of those revolving cocktail lounges, in which, seated, you are passively rotated about and offered a contemplative spectacle of the city itself, now transformed into its own images by the glass windows through which you view it. The observations above are partly mine and partly Frederic Jameson’s. Below is all Jameson:

So I come finally to my principal point here, that this latest mutation in space — postmodern hyperspace — has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment — which is to the initial bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of spacecraft to those of the automobile — can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. (from Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Verso, 1991)

At the BonaVista lounge I ordered a “Bonaventure Boot” cocktail. It was a mix of tropical liquors that included Midori Melon. Without this green elixir, the lounge was pure 80s pastiche (so many sad returns). After the drink, I channeled Jameson’s histrionics. The rotating lounge became a vessel as I transcended my capacity to organize the immediate surroundings The city’s horizontal and vertical grids appeared as a simulacrum mapped onto the screen/windows. The constant rotation decentered my views. The interior space was lit with mobile lamps inspired by the late work of Frank Stella. The pipped music was 80s fare. Was this the cultural logic of late capitalism?

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