Remembering

In Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card suggests a new type of post-life remembrance. Rather than being the subject of a white-washing eulogy, the deceased should be “spoken for”, in a Cromwellian warts-and-all type way. The speaker for the dead should speak not merely positively, but honestly; describing hopes, dreams, and aspirations, as well as foibles, failures, and flaws.

Michael Jackson died this week. Perhaps you’ve heard.

Immediately after his death, the eulogies began. And somewhat surprisingly, what I saw tended to focus on his rarely paralleled gifts as a performer, rather than on his past few decades of true batshit insanity (which tended to be glossed over with a mention, as if this did them justice). I saw also a second camp of eulogists, that denounced him as a pedophile, and pretty much nothing else worth mentioning.

Now, we don’t know if Michael Jackson ever broke the law during his strange, strange relationships with children. Certainly, whether the letter of the law was followed or not, those relationships were, in the parlance of our times, fucking weird. Grown-ass men sleeping in beds with boys who are not their own is passing strange, and creepy, and profoundly icky, and gross. My guess, for whatever it’s worth, is that he was damaged to the point where he honestly believed there was nothing wrong with his actions, because he honestly believed that he himself was also a little boy. This is not a defense, note. Honest belief is never an adequate defense.

But I am surprised by how few appraisals and obituaries I’ve seen that take both sides of the man into account. This may, admittedly, be because I have not been looking at enough appraisals and obituaries, and because those that I have read tend to be your Facebookian status updates and Twitterish 140 character shouts, which are not the world’s finest places to craft a coherent argument. But it seems that one group wants to ignore the insanity and focus on the art, and the other wants to focus on the art and ignore the insanity.

Is there room for both?

I don’t know. I’ve thought about it. Quite a bit. Do an artist’s non-artistic thoughts, opinions, doings, political alignments, felonies, &c. have anything to do, at the end of the metaphorical day, with an artist’s art? Just as a for-instance, Orson Scott Card, mentioned at the top of this essay, is a raging bigot. Does this in any way diminish the value and beauty of his Speaker for the Dead concept?

Does Michael Jackson’s creepy weirdness detract from the brilliance of Billie Jean?

Is art a “conversation” between artist and audience via the art, or a “conversation” between the art and the audience in which the artist is vestigial at best?

Is a blog post interesting if it just poses unanswerable questions?

Here is my appraisal: Michael Jackson was one of the strangest people to ever walk the face of the Earth. He was also one of the most talented. Each of these statements is true. His talent seems like it was at least partially the result of abuse. His weirdness seems to stem from the same root. I do not think his death is tragic; I do think that his life was. His performance added joy to the world, but I don’t believe he ever experienced any of it. His pain entertained us, whether we danced to his songs or laughed at his plastic surgery. He behaved inappropriately, dangerously, and criminally (baby over balcony, in any case) with children. He was a disturbed, sick, fucked-up human. And between now and the day I die, I will never be able to stop myself from dancing when Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough starts playing.

This is all true. So how will we remember? We get to decide now. Always.

Theater.

How Jamie Roach Inadvertently Kick-Started My Theatrical Life

I don’t remember the exact order of things. Because that’s what tends to happen with events more than fifteen years gone that at the time didn’t seem particularly noteworthy.

My fifth grade teacher, the late Mr. Gillis, was the kind of teacher that movies get made about. He wanted to impart to his classes of ten year olds a love of learning for its own sake, a love of literature, and culture, and music. He conducted the school choir, had us reading constantly, and introduced me and I’m sure countless others to the works of one J. William Shakespeare. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? He wrote under a pseudonym. Not a very clever one.

One of our class projects was a performance of various excerpts — language lightly modified for the non-Elizabethan young’un — from Shakespeare’s plays. I was to play Petruchio from the wooing scene in Taming of the Shrew.

(This was, side note, a role that I’m sure I already had memorized somewhere deep in the subconscious twists and turns of my brain, as I had listened to the BBC’s 1980 Taming countless hundreds of times during my infancy. As a wee tyke, I didn’t much like to sleep during the night, and my mother had a fair few sources of entertainment to choose from in those heady non-cable days in Tokyo. Therefore, it was John Cleese in tights and me in arms together on many a many early 80’s night. So, actually, come to think of it, maybe it was THAT that kick-started my theatrical life. If those Baby Einstein tapes are supposed to somehow make our infants more adept at spatial organization, maybe the tape of my childhood made me more adept at iambic pentameter and salty puns.)

Anyhoo, somewise because of this performance, I ended up being asked to audition for the Grossmont College (the local J.C.) production of Harvey Fierstein’s On Tidy Endings, as part of an evening of student-directed one-acts. My classmate and friend Jamie Roach was also asked to audition. I think that he had played Romeo in the balcony scene at our little class production, there, so obviously whoever was scouting out the elementary school for thespian talent was aiming strictly for the heavy-hitters. It was my first real audition for anything, and it went well, and I think they told me how cute I was and all in all it was a great time.

And lo: I got the part. I ended up at Grossmont College several nights a week for the next while, rehearsing and reading and sitting backstage waiting for my scenes. I worked with my first director who wasn’t a parent or teacher, the lovely and talented Ms. Alex Apostolidis, who gave me my first real instruction in things like “subtext” and “character” and “not moving just because you’ve been directed to move because then it looks stupid”. I got a chance to meet wonderful people, and to be part of a cast that included me even though I was just some damn kid, and to work in a theatre outside of school for the first time. And good grief: I was hooked.

After one performance of the show, an older man I had never met approached me. He told me that he would be directing a production of To Kill a Mockingbird at the college the next autumn, and I would be perfect to play the role of Jem, and would I maybe like to do that? I said yes, of course. And so after a summer off, I was back at Grossmont, in a bigger production with a budget and large cast and sets and lights and at least one bonafide professional actor and I knew pretty much right then and there that I never wanted to do anything else ever. Except maybe play basketball with Michael Jordan. I wanted to do that too.

So, yeah. I don’t remember when exactly in all this I found out that Jamie Roach had been offered the part first and had turned it down because his parents found the material objectionable (what with dealing with the AIDS and the gay and whatnot), but sometimes now I think about how things might have been different if his parents had been as cool hip & groovy as mine, and it’s hard to know, and it’s hard to think about, and it’s hard to wonder just how much would have changed.

Dream Dumpage

Two nights ago, woke up just after I had discovered (written on a wall?) a four line or perhaps four couplet poem that was so intensely beautiful that it put me on the edge of tears. Came fully awake, the poem drifting away as I sought to hold on to the end, at least. Couldn’t, although I kept the sense of it. My guess now is that the dream logic imparted some impossibly few words with some impossibly loaded meaning. Anyway, as close as I can get to recreating the final couplet is this:

Who of us, with flowers newly blossomed

Would rather cut them down than see them tended?

*****

Last night, long involved rambling thing that took place mostly at a picnic. A large yellow awning was erected to block the sunlight (making me think that I must have had this dream just as the sunlight began to come through the blinds). Someone suggested that any color shade was OK when in the sun, but this one stayed fiercely yellow. The conversation turned to artistic and athletic agents. My brother suggested that maybe some agents make decisions for their clients based on rolling dice like a game master, which would explain why many of their decisions seem so awful. I went to get some vodka over at the concession stand. A military plane circled overhead sounding several sonic booms and then crashed somewhere off in the distance.

The Spoken Word