On Several More Inconsequential Things...

1. Shaq: It is his world; we just reside in the shadow of his nonsensical lyrics and serve to disseminate his latest batch of truly tasteless jokes. In the past week, the Man of Multitudinous Nicknames has aroused curiosity for A.) Inveigling a fortuitous trade to Cleveland,* B.) Selling his house at a loss, C.) Soliciting "Yo Mama" jokes on Twitter, and D.) Challenging a bank teller to a game of H-O-R-S-E. He is the human embodiment of the Internet, a trash-talking new-age invention who provides amusement and demands constant attention and can induce seizures upon overexposure.
This past weekend, in an attempt to separate myself from his suffocating presence and avoid getting sucked into yet another replay of the long-form version of the "Thriller" video,**my girlfriend and I walked to a new park on the west side of Manhattan called the High Line, which is essentially an extremely narrow mile-long strand of elevated railroad track that has been converted into a park at the behest of Steve Buscemi. It was O.K., except:
--There was a line. For a park. Proving further that New Yorkers are prepared to line up for anything. Also, there were hand stamps, which meant by the time we arrived at the top of the stairs, I expected Pearl Jam would be into their second set.
--There were no live tigers mixed in among the vegetation.*** This would certainly have kept those bands of tourists moving along the path.
Anyway, while ambling along, I passed a billboard advertisement for the Boys and Girls Club. On it, in all its life-sized glory, was a photo of Shaq at age 9, no doubt revving up a "Yo Mama" joke for the photographer.

2. Brandon Jennings: I don't really know much of anything about this dude, except he managed to thumb his nose at the NCAA cabal that somehow believes sending a kid to school for a single semester during his freshman year will improve both his life and our appreciation for the college game. Anyway used to be, in the olden days of "books" and machines with "metal switches," an athlete would refute the claims in his own autobiography. At least then, he could blame the co-author. But after this YouTube exchange with a rapper named Buddens, I have a feeling Brandon Jennings might not just declaim this video--he could soon wind up becoming the first NBA player to issue a statement refuting his own Twitter feed.

3. Leave Me Alone. If this video doesn't sum up the dichotomous black hole of tabloid weirdness that Michael Jackson (and our entire culture) was on the verge of descending into, circa 1987, I don't know what else I can give you, except perhaps a copy of Kazaam on VHS. And in case you're not satiated, courtesy of GQ's Alex Pappademas, here are 23 other evocative and non-obvious MJ YouTube clips, replete with excellent commentary like this: "... it comes across, eerily, like Michael as Bubble Boy, desperate for human contact."

*Perhaps the first and only time those words have been uttered in public.
**Is it possible to trace the last time before Thursday afternoon that MTV (and I mean the mothership, not the seventeen spin-offs, not MTV Guatemala or MTV Acid Jazz) played the long-form version of "Thriller"? My guess is 1993, but I could be persuaded to take the under.
Also, before we move on to the Nancy Grace phase of this story, here is the best instantly percolated Michael Jackson eulogy I've read.
***Also, at one point along the High Line there is an elevated theatre-like structure, similar to what you'd see at, say, a contemporary art museum, which pointed at a series of plexiglass windows overlooking 10th Avenue. So there were groups of parched European tourists resting on benches, drinking four-dollar iced coffees and staring at a street, as if awaiting the appearance of a man eating a mushroom. To liven up the proceedings, I suggest an occasional flash mob. Or this dude.

On Michael

It has been said, and it will be said...

And yet I suppose the moment I realized that yesterday was much bigger than I could have imagined was when I began to remember things that I didn't even know were still contained within my hippocampus: The time Scott Holderman and I attempted to transcribe all the lyrics to Thriller,* the old Bloom County strips where (I believe) Opus accompanies the Jacksons on the Victory Tour, the innocent horror we felt when we heard about Michael's hair-related pyrotechnics (because even then, Michael seemed somehow invulnerable), the fact that every replay of the "Thriller" video became a paralyzing event upon which all the frenzy of childhood came to a standstill. It was around this time that Michael became the embodiment of '80s celebrity, and it was around this time that he probably lost himself for good. And I think it is probably around this time that we lost ourselves a little bit, as well.

This, for me, is what will last about Michael, beside the music: It is the fact that he came to represent the acceleration of media over the past three decades; it is that, even as he declined to evolve, society evolved through him, in the same way it had evolved through Elvis a generation earlier. We became a tabloid culture, with Michael as our emperor; we developed an overweening obsession with the foibles of the rich and pampered, and Michael became a cipher, and while he brought much of this upon himself, it is also true that he is a reflection of us, and of just how far we've come in the 25 years since the Victory Tour. At some point--and I would argue it might have come around 1986, the period I've spent the the past couple of years exploring for my next book--the emotional walls built up around celebrities were torn down for good, and we were deluged with a sea of new (and often false, and crude) mythologies, those of O.J. and Jacko and Tonya and Nancy. And for better or worse, the cultural landscape we inhabit became a very different place.

This is why those of us who grew up in the 1980s view him in a completely different way than those who came after: Because we might not always see it, but there is a dividing line between us. Because we view culture differently. Because we were the bridge between the age of innocence and the age of cynicism, and Michael Jackson, more than any figure, carried us over that gap.

I cannot remember the specifics of most of those Bloom County strips--the books remain stranded in my room at my parents' house in Pennsylvania**--but I remember, even as their creator, Berke Breathed, poked holes in the notion of modern celebrity through the foibles of the Jacksons, he managed to display an unmistakable sympathy for Michael, for this person who seemed entirely unprepared for the frenzy he'd unleashed, a supremely talented manchild who was about to embark on a journey into an age where he never really seemed to belong.

*This was much more difficult than we realized, given that we had to continually lift the record needle and place it back down precisely where we'd left it. It may have occupied an entire week of our summer, and even then, our translation was woeful. We were especially confounded by "This is the end of your life," from "Thriller, which we translated as, "There's something in or behind," apparently revealing my early fondness for prepositions.
**And I'm not sure how they hold up, but in the moment, they formed the sharpest satirical portrait of the era. I have no doubt there are several thousand writers, like me, who would cite Bloom County as one of the top five cultural influences of our childhood.