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    The Way He Made Us Feel: A Michael Jackson Roundup

    Posted Wednesday, July 01, 2009 2:37 PM | By Dana Stevens
    To write about Michael Jackson is to write about so many things at once: race, gender, sex, fame, money, music, dance, childhood, child abuse, aging, the media, the law. America, really. Maybe that’s why his death has prompted such an outburst of good writing. Tomorrow will mark one week since Jackson’s death; by the pitiless clock of the news cycle, we should be done thinking about him already. But a lot of smart people are just getting started.

    Some of the best stuff I’ve seen on Jackson has appeared in the most unexpected places. Of course you’re going to turn to Robert Christgau on Michael Jackson, or Ann Powers, or Greg Tate, or Slate’s own Jody Rosen (as well you should; all four have written powerfully on the Jackson enigma). But who would have expected to find James Wolcott recounting his attempts to learn the moonwalk? (“My heel caught on a cat toy […] and I found myself reeling backward like Martin Balsam on the staircase in Psycho.”) Roger Ebert, on his indispensable Chicago Sun-Times blog (it's not just about movies, and the man responds to reader comments with the promptness and energy of a 24-year-old blogger with nothing else to do), relates the experiences of his wife, who as a young dancer once opened for the Jackson 5. Joe Posnanski, a sportswriter for the Kansas City Star, interrupted his vacation to write a fantastic blog post about the inescapability of Jackson’s music in the early 80s. And a guy named Bob Rossney, who maintains a seldom-updated blog called “Koax! Koax! Koax!,” wrote perhaps the best thing I’ve read on the unfathomable sadness of Jackson’s personal life.

    David Gates’ remembrance in Newsweek contains one image I can’t shake; recalling the wraithlike backup- dancing zombies in the “Thriller” video, he writes: “When you watch it today, it appears to be a whole stage full of Michael Jacksons, the real one now the least familiar-looking, the most unreal of all.” (Newsweek’s photo spread opens with a shot of the Jeff Koons sculpture of Michael and his pet chimp Bubbles, which now looks like the Pietà of the 1980s.) And (I swear this isn’t just logrolling for a colleague and friend) the first piece of Jackson writing to make me cry was Stephen Metcalf’s trenchant and stunningly written reflection on this blog.

    Then there’s the experience of coming across things written long before Jackson’s death that, if they were creepy before, seem positively frightening now. In 1983, a 24-year-old Jackson granted a rare interview to the Guardian (insisting, as he often did, that all questions be filtered through his then-teenage sister, Janet), in which he gushed about his love for children: “I feel I'm Peter Pan as well as Methuselah, and a child. ... Thank God for children. They save me every time!” Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, then writing for Salon, reported on Jackson’s 2005 child-molestation trial in chilling detail. Seth Stevenson’s dispatches from that same trial are a glimpse of the macabre spectacle Jackson’s late life had become. (In ’06, Seth also compiled a video roundup of red-flag moments from early Jackson videos.)

    Brow Beat readers, what are your favorite pieces of writing (or tributes in other media) that you’ve seen about MJ? Send links to SlateBrowBeat@gmail.com. (And thanks to the Twitter followers who responded to my call by suggesting some of the great links above.)
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