For my family, the death of Michael Jackson was one of those call-your-people-and-make-sure-everyone’s-okay moments. I was checking the New York Times on my cell on the way to Tampa International Airport when the story was still that he’d been rushed to the hospital, reportedly for cardiac arrest. The way they’d written the story, though, with eulogistic snippets of bio fleshing out the news report, it felt as though the writers had pasted in text from Jackson’s canned obit, which I interpreted as a bad sign. I kept saying to the folks in the Super Shuttle that I had a bad feeling about it. As I handed my boarding pass and license to the TSA inspector, she passed it back slowly, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Michael Jackson is dead.”
So. Muse upon a problematic and epic life with me, Snarketeers. What have you seen that lives up to the moment? I’ll kick us off with this reminiscence, by Minneapolis writer Max “Bunny” Sparber. And the MetaFilter obit thread is always a propos.
And, for the road, from Tim:
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Combing through the MeFi thread, this thought is the best brief encapsulation of MJ’s latter years that I’ve read so far tonight: “There was that documentary a few years ago, the one in which he was totally unable to hide how batshit loonball he had become. But there’s this part of it, where in the middle of being a total lunatic, he explains coming up with the music for Billie Jean, and suddenly he stops and beatboxes the bassline, and it sounds fucking awesome and I realized oh shit, somewhere buried in all that crazy, the genius is still there. How sad that it got buried.”
You Snarkmarketers may already realize this, but Max Sparber is Astro Zombie at MetaFilter.