"The helicopter pilot on the raw feed said that the body is in 'a gold casket with flowers on top.' Someone else emailed me to say that Jackson is being buried without his brain, because they needed it to finish toxicology. There's something eerie about so many people watching Michael Jackson in death. I'll try to figure out exactly what it is as we go through this massive, bloated, sad event." The New Yorker is liveblogging the Michael Jackson funeral. [Hack joke follows.] Yes, the New Yorker.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
16
Good God. What the hell is going to happen when Madonna dies? We are going to see riots. A new stadium will have to be built to hold the service.
Wait, Madonna is still alive? What does she do now?
Their commenting feature did not allow my question: Is this the pinnacle of journalism or the rock bottom?
Sigh.
Yet another comment ("This live-blog is a brilliant idea.") was just posted.
Sasha Frere-Jones: His world. His rules.
And yet there is something about the passing of a Star with multigenerational appeal--yeah, even one who's gone to shit in the last 20 years--that goes right past the critical functions/brain and straight to the viscera.
Can't explain it. Stuck at work; just put on the mp3 of Jackson 5 "I'll Be There"; had to take it off because I was tearing up.
Could one of you enterprising gentlemen live blog the live-blogging? I'm hoping if this whole thing gets meta enough, the world will finally end.
I'm disappointed to be at work and missing the TV coverage. I can't say that I'm particularly saddened (my reaction to his death was that "Our long national nightmare is finally over"), but I sure do love a good spectacle.
Holy shit. MLK's kids are embarrassingly self-referential. And she's speaky-yelling angry-like, as if it were a civil rights gathering or something.
"Nobody understand how bit the hearts of entertainers are. How [entertainers] heal the world. In times of war" Congresswoman. D-Tex. Who is this woman? She's CAMPAIGNING!?!?
Walter Reed? Whaaaaat?! "As politicians we listen to The People...."
These people are out-garishing MJ's wardrobe.
Aaaaaaand there's a congressional resolution! #600 (i.e., not healthcare). Declaring him an icon. Aaaaaand then she saluted him. For real, military style and everything. Wow. Just wow.
I did a paper on this woman in my "The American Congress" class back in college. She has been around forever and is batshit crazy. She throws phones at her assistants Naomi Campbell-style. It was probably the most fun I had writing a paper in college. The stories about her office behavior were hilarious. People in Houston are terrified of her or think she's a joke.
Somebody (who is not me) needs to look at every sentence of this memorial and see how many start with "I" and do not reference anything about MJ.
Jermaine just took the cake.
What goes through the Jackson bros.'s minds when picking out their matching uniforms? Were any of them like, "Maybe the matching sparkly single gloves is too much?" Or did they all have one of those at home.
Wow. His daughter just made everyone else's put-on so transparent and... dirty. That was actually sad. Can;t wait until those apparent shreds of actual humanity left in her are shredded during the custody battle.
Seeing Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson trying to dance made it all worth it. This whole thing was a very odd and scary look into the fame machine and how the bottom line is there are no points taken away for self-promotion, self-promotion, and self-promotion. Watching everyone up there doing their thing makes me understand Heidi and Spencer.
"Greatest entertainer in the history of the world."
I just want to recognize The Awl's graphic design department's work on this post.
Sasha and Ben's coverage was actually the perfect tone. And agreed - Paris surprised everybody and there was so much sincerity and grief and missing-her-daddy there; I nearly cried myself.