Month / June 2009

by Edward Champion

What Michael Jackson Gave Me

thrillerpicturedisc

1. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up. But the first (and one of the few) albums that I had was the picture disc of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Before that, I would nervously call the DJ at my FM radio station and ask him to play Michael Jackson. The disc was played over and over, and I began to deconstruct how the sounds came together. The synth egg shake on “Wanna Be Startin’ Soemthin'” and “Billie Jean.” The way in which the guitars were mixed together in “Beat It.” The fusion of vocals. Michael Jackson helped me find my ears.

2. I really liked Eddie Van Halen but was to shy to say anything about it. Until Eddie Van Halen showed up on “Beat It.” Then it was cool to dig Van Halen. Same went with Vincent Price. And then he showed up on “Thriller.” Michael Jackson helped me find confidence in enjoying the seemingly strange. (On the other hand, in hindsight, I now wonder if I was the victim of marketing. But I suppose strange tastes have to start somewhere.)

3. I had a Michael Jackson “Human Nature” folder in the fourth grade. I carried it close to my chest when I walked and was ruthlessly mocked by my schoolmates for not only having a passe interest in Michael Jackson (the folder was purchased from the discount bin), but for holding it “like a girl.” I then started carrying the folder in the “manly” way, holding it from the side, placing it perpendicular to my arm with my fingers curling over the edge. I was never hassled again for it, until the same schoolmates tore it from my hand and ripped it into shreds just after they beat the shit out of me. Michael Jackson, in his own oblique way, gave me a very good reason not to be a conformist.

4. Weird Al Yankovic parodied “Beat It” and several friends and I discussed the close similarities between Michael Jackson’s video and Yankovic’s video. Michael Jackson, by giving the okay to Weird Al, helped me appreciate satire.

5. Michael Jackson always appeared in gritty videos, often with a fantastical element attached. No matter how impoverished one was, street tiles could light up if you were simply who you were. Michael Jackson gave me optimism during a dark childhood.

6. Michael Jackson died yesterday. As a kid, I had turned my back on Michael Jackson sometime after Bad and rather ungratefully pretended that he hadn’t done anything for me. This wasn’t the case at all. Michael Jackson, in dying, has reminded me of my core values: to value what I have, to remember what others have been kind enough to give me, and to always pay it forward. For the good that you put out there, whether directly or indirectly, means more to people than you know.

by Edward Champion

Michael Jackson Dead

While TMZ and Gawker are reporting that Michael Jackson is dead, I wish to point out that there has been no official confirmation of his death. I spoke with Craig Harvey of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office and he informed me that there was no official confirmation of his death as of 3:00 PM Pacific Time. The person who is legally obligated to confirm the death is Jackson’s physician. And as of yet, there has been no official announcement.

UPDATE: As of 3:15 PM Pacific Time, the Los Angeles Times reports that Michael Jackson is dead after arriving at a hospital in a deep coma.

UPDATE 2: Michael Jackson’s death confirmed by AP (as picked up by The New York Times). (Thanks for the minor correction, vidiot.)

by Edward Champion

Three Producers Fired from American News Project?

I received a tip that three producers at the American News Project had been fired. The American News Project is directed by Nick Penniman, who also serves as the Executive Director of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. The Investigative Fund was only just announced by Arianna Huffington back in April.

I managed to get associate producer Lagan Sebert on the phone, who sounded a bit nervous. He told me that he could neither confirm nor deny that there were firings, but indicated that there may possibly be an announcement. I then asked if there was anybody in authority there who I could speak of to clear up the news. He returned to the phone and told me, “I can’t say anything.” He suggested that I get in touch with Penniman directly. And I have sent an email to Mr. Penniman. I will update this post if I learn anything.

by Edward Champion

RIP Farrah Fawcett

The above clip, from The Partridge Family, set a celebratory impulse into motion. Farrah Fawcett was 23. And even within the seemingly vanilla universe of the Partridges, she still wore a dress that revealed her tawny anatomy, which was always offset by her bubbly voice. Fawcett, of course, would become best-known for Charlie’s Angels for these qualities. And as I was to understand from friends who had surfed along the raging tide of puberty ten to fifteen years before me, Fawcett was the picture you had on the inside of your high school locker.

My generation viewed Fawcett as the sad and flighty space cadet past her prime making frequent appearances on David Letterman. The older woman who bared all in Playboy just as the term MILF was gaining popular usage. Robert Duvall’s troubled wife in The Apostle. Even Robert Altman exploited her as Richard Gere’s mentally afflicted wife in Dr. T and the Women. You couldn’t really make fun of Fawcett, because doing so would mean perceiving her through this troubling misogynistic prism. But if you empathized, would you fall into the same trap? Fawcett, unlike Marilyn Monroe, didn’t have the brains to match her beauty. What was the solution? Directors casting her in roles as the aging ditz? Celebrating her as a kitschy icon?

The cancer encouraged public sympathy. That 1970s pinup was dying. And so too was a sentiment that had lingered long after Third Wave feminism had settled the score. Fawcett carried this additional burden of public scrutiny, one that we can possibly never know, and thus deserves our condolences.

by Edward Champion

Review: Pleasure at Her Majesty’s (1976) and The Secret Policeman’s Ball (1979)

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You know that cultural journalism is in a sorry state when only four people show up for a screening, and not a single dead soul (save for myself, still chortling with pulse) has the courage to laugh at legendary comedy material or get excited by consummate performers tinkering with sketches like tetchy scientists.

I was in a darkened theater for a film called Pleasure at Her Majesty’s, part of The Secret Policeman’s Film Festival, which kicks off this Friday at the Lincoln Center. The Festival even includes, for those cineastes saddled with an equine constitution, a full screening of the 660 minute film, A Conspiracy of Hope — essentially Amnesty International’s 1986 answer to Live Aid, but probably not up there with The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. Despite the hopeful title, you won’t find Freddie Mercury wowing at Wembley. This screening seems to be a wild gamble on the Film Society’s part. For who out there in New York is really interested in 23-year-old footage of Jackson Browne and Bryan Adams? (Then again.)

The common assumption is that, if an esteemed film society is holding something called The Secret Policeman’s Film Festival, you should probably check out the main film. But I’m here to tell you that you can probably skip the primary offering. The true can’t-miss movie here is Pleasure at Her Majesty’s, which features some fascinating behind-the-scenes footage of, among many geniuses, the Monty Python troupe (sans Eric Idle) rethinking the Courtroom Sketch. We see the Python team trying to pinpoint why the sketch doesn’t entirely work. They make changes. They argue. And even after they have performed the sketch later in the film and have received laughs, John Cleese walks off-stage and remains unconvinced that it worked with the audience.

This is fascinating if you’re interested in dramatic rhythm. And it isn’t just Python here. Deep division among the Beyond the Fringe performers is intimated in a conversation with Alan Bennett and Terry Jones, both seemingly unaware of the camera. “I could never do anything you do,” says a wan-faced Bennett. “The atmosphere with you is different. You don’t seem competitive in the way we were.” And we begin to wonder if Beyond the Fringe’s anti-authoritarian comedy was motivated by internal strife. At what social cost does one break new ground?

The Secret Policeman’s Ball, which doesn’t permit us these interesting peeks behind the curtain and features more music in the place of many comedy sketches, remains an enjoyable if badly dated film. The Amnesty organizers began changing the formula. And the contrast can be seen in the choices. Pleasure has Neil Innes’s delightful “Protest Song.” Policeman gives us Tom Robinson’s “Glad to Be Gay”: brave at the time, but precisely the kind of sanctimonious fury that Innes was satirizing.

In Policeman, Peter Cooks’s sendup of the Jeremy Thrope 1979 trial is funny, but only if you know all the scandalous details. It is indeed ironic that the very sketch Cook wrote in response to criticisms that the Amnesty shows contained nothing more than regurgitated material has secured its own time capsule. And the less said about Billy Connolly, the better.

On the other hand, one of Policeman‘s highlights is a wild and wonderful performance from a pre-Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy. McCoy hammers a four inch nail into his nose and attempts to dodge a toy train approaching his testicles with a fork while he remains chained to a chair. The late David Rappaport is even involved. McCoy’s antics, which involve jumping atop audience heads while wearing a kilt, are almost unthinkable today. McCoy — and Rowan Atkinson, who appears in an early version of his Schoolmaster sketch — presents the kind of free-wheeling comic anarchy no longer welcomed in our sanitized corporate atmosphere, where uncourageous Establishment types like John Hodgman stand before an audience, tell them the “clever” niceties they like to hear, and fail to challenge their assumptions. (Stephen Colbert, on the other hand, had stones.)

But Policeman stands in the shadow of Pleasure. Unlike Policeman, which features “slight direction by John Cleese,” Pleasure really permits us to see just how brilliant Cleese is on stage. A filmed version of a stage show limits itself by necessity to subjective camera angles, but the sheer authoritative energy that Cleese brings to the Dead Parrot sketch (with the line “This is your nine o’clock alarm call” added when he beats the parrot) is a marvel to behold.

Pleasure‘s vérité format permits us to witness a strange old boy’s world where John Cleese is seen with a McDonald’s cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and everybody is fiercely competitive. There’s one moment in which Jonathan Miller and Barry Humphries puff nervously on their smokes and bitch about who’s the oldest. Small wonder that it took a high-energy legend like Miller to corral these guys together.

But the lack of women in both films, aside from Eleanor Bron and Carol Cleveland, is unsettling. A few decades (and a few more Policeman films) later, women are now finally permitted to be funny, even when Christopher Hitchens declares that they aren’t. It’s just too bad that comedy remains shoehorned by the cobblers who wish to keep talent running inside the track. The Policeman films document a bygone era in which you could get crazy for a good cause. Perhaps it’s still possible today, if some innovator with deep pockets conjures up some charitable comedy that’s feral and progressive and inclusive.