{"id":16016,"date":"2009-06-26T20:08:28","date_gmt":"2009-06-27T01:08:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=16016"},"modified":"2009-06-27T14:44:26","modified_gmt":"2009-06-27T19:44:26","slug":"michael-jackson-sociology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/michael-jackson-sociology\/","title":{"rendered":"wafting in"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thoughts about Michael Jackson have been wafting in all day. Dominick had on some cable music thing piped into his cafe that was playing a bunch of the old songs, ‘Dancing Machine’ came on, and I had a flashback to third grade when I was stage managing a talent show and these three hot girls did this dance act (we’re talking 1973 or so) and I did the lights, flipping circuit breakers to make the footlights on the elementary school stage create a disco pattern.<\/p>\n

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\"Dancing<\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

It was very effective and I had some of my first experiences of directly witnessing female sexual power, at the same time theater magic and my own creativity fusing into one experience.<\/p>\n

‘Ben’ came on a little while later and I remembered getting that album for my birthday one year, from my mom. I started to get the feeling that his music was ubiquitous in my life, though I didn’t realize it earlier. I grew up in a black neighborhood till third grade so I was more immersed in the Jackson 5 than I might have been in another place.<\/p>\n

‘Billie Jean’ is among my favorite rock songs of all time…I know I speak for all of us when I say, the guy at his peak was truly an artist, and like his stuff or not, the talent behind it is obvious. The more I work at my own talent the more I respect the talent of others. He made those dance moves look easy, but trust me he worked at them. How easy they look is how you can tell.<\/p>\n

But all day long there has been something disturbing me and I’m starting to get clearer about it. It involves our perception of celebrity. The whole kid thing he had going on is being glossed over as a cloud over his life, charges dismissed, not anything worth really thinking about. Which is not surprising, we are often kind to dead people, it’s part of being afraid of death. But if you tune in and feel the potential for what might have gone wrong in that household, how weird it might have been, and how disturbed he became, it’s another world. I am not saying he did or didn’t do anything — I’m curious about our response to the potential.<\/p>\n

We have an example here of the world covering up the question of abuse itself; it has nothing to do with MJ per se. However, as someone with iconic status, he does get the special role of projection screen and the current media environment — despite the utter frenzy about protecting kids made by politicians — is not projecting this particular issue onto him.<\/p>\n

There’s something else tho…maybe unrelated. It involves the ‘monster’ quality that plastic surgery created. This, in a world of perfect looking celebrities. We had this zombie roaming around, a living parody of the botox-perfect teeth-forever young thing that Hollywood does.<\/p>\n

It seemed that as he went through his plastic surgeries his true face was revealed; the face of how he felt about himself; the inner reality of how ugly people who have that kind of self-esteem crisis feel about themselves. Often they are so physically magnificent and yet beneath it is such acid selfdoubt. Looking at that monstrous face we were looking at the feelings that led to him even thinking he had to change at all; the inner loathing.<\/p>\n

We can’t imagine this is true in some of the other celebs we love so much because their well- crafted faces — pretty much the prerequisite for fame — cover up their deeper sentiments. So we have no idea, really, it barely occurs to anyone how they might really feel…and yet we look up to them…Michael Jackson unmasked that whole phenomenon.<\/p>\n

The scrim of the 12th house made it look like something else was happening — botched plastic surgery. All along we were looking at a vision of the motivation to do it at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thoughts about Michael Jackson have been wafting in all day. Dominick had on some cable music thing piped into his cafe that was playing a bunch of the old songs, ‘Dancing Machine’ came on, and I had a flashback to third grade when I was stage managing a talent show and these three hot girls … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16016"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}