Don't Stop Til You Get Enough

If this is still anything close to the pop culture blog that I originally envisioned (and, let it be said, it's probably not) then I believe I am obligated to comment on the death of Michael Jackson. Here are some things I've reflected upon:

• He was arguably the most famous person alive for a goodly chunk of my life
• He was a profoundly odd person
• He might well still have been wildly famous even without being profoundly odd -- but those two facets seem very much wound up in one another.

It's one thing to say, well, sure, Michael Jackson was a weirdo -- or a creep -- or worse (and worse was definitely alleged). Those associations were always pretty automatic whenever I'd see some new footage of his sculpted, increasingly noseless face. It's a whole different feeling to watch the little 2-minute career-summation obit roll on NBC Nightly News last night.

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What you already know to be a strange life goes just all-out incomprehensibly strange when you see it condensed like this. And as I've watched a bunch of his music videos today -- in throwback style, even MTV has been showing music videos!! -- I realize the degree to which his dancing, and his lyrics (when he penned them), and his outfits were also profoundly odd. This was never the same thing as Gene Simmons painting his face and putting on a good show for the kids. If Michael Jackson's motives and demons were mysterious to us, I cannot imagine how much more mysterious they probably were to him.

Old-Media Fail

This is a thought I had: Wow. This is a completely new way to get news and information. Sure, you could say it lacks in context and it traffics in guesswork -- but everything's on the table, and it's happening right now.

I had that thought in 1991, as I watched stuff blowing-up and listened to Bernard Shaw, John Holliman and Peter Arnett broadcasting live from Baghdad (and often under a table, if memory serves) on CNN.

In a perfect world, I'd be even more of a luddite than I am. I mourn the loss of newspapers (though not always what newspapers have become in their most recent incarnations). I tolerate and sometimes appreciate public radio on my drive in to work (what can I say? my cassette player's busted). More nights than not, I try to watch one of the Network newscasts that occasionally manage to interrupt a barrage of pharmaceutical ads. And, yeah, I even once found cable news fascinating and relevant.

But seeing Twitter trump all of them in covering the turmoil in Iran is both exciting and sad. I'm not quite one of the new information elites (this is only my first post since like March or something, yo?!), but I at least realize that it's going to take the blogosphere and the twitterverse to actually alert me that there is more to know.