Man In The Mirror

The thing I’ve been thinking, thinking about my relationship with the man and his image and his music, and watching “Billy Jean” and “Thriller” on Youtube with my girlfriend last night, is how absolutely a “STAR” he was. Older film buffs talk about the great age of the stars, larger than life actors and actresses that gave Hollywood its mythic stature, and in my lifetime there was Michael Jackson. Name any other star that loomed larger than him? We think of him in terms of the Beatles (indeed, he did a tune w./Sir Paul), but that was before our time. Michael Jackson was our star. You wouldn’t see him in a street. Even the “streets” of Billy Jean are a set — realism has no place in his world, and I suggest that this is a good thing. Stars are important. Fantasy is important. Everything today is so “relatable.” Today’s fantasy movies are written with the idea that “what if they were real”, thus we get “Iron Man” or “Batman” now rewritten with a plausible story. Even “Transformers” is now a tale grounded in reality. We have none other than Kurt Cobain to thank for this, who in his mere 4 years in the public eye sold — along with fellow Pacific Northwesterners Soundgarden and Pearl Jam — the fact that music can be made by people just like you and me. There was no American Idol in MJ’s time because no one in their right mind thought they could be that. We didn’t have the tech to record ourselves, to videotape ourselves, to see what we look like on a screen. Kurt, I argue, showed us what we look like in a magazine, on the television, on a screen. He showed that that private space was his space, thus our space, therefore Myspace. American Idol said “You can sing Michael Jackson songs in front of millions — you ARE Michael Jackson.”

MJ’s power was that you could never be MJ, never hang with him, never relate — and it is my belief that this was not only OK, but necessary. America, it has been argued over and over again, needs gods. We need myths, too, and I’d go as far as to say we need royalty — we need princes, princesses, and we need a king.

The King of Pop is dead. Long live the King.

-Erik Bader, 2009

Believe

Here we are again, another fine Saturday, another entry for the Daily Miltonian.  Some updates on things hitherto unknown and now accepted as GOOD: Lost Lake, True Blood, Morningstar Chicken + Homemade biscuits, Rabbit Redux, Fables, and canoes (in general).

Today’s photographic supplements hail from the crisp early Autumn of 2007.  Why not?  Our histories still matter.  So how’s your summer getting started so far?  Have you been in water yet?  We haven’t.  The water is too cold, here in the Northern part of the West.  We’ve been NEAR it though, sitting by anenome/crab/barnacle/swirl tidal pools next to the Pacific Ocean, or seated on the reedy banks of the Sandy River diggin in a bag of chips, or ON it, floating serenely in a canoe on an alpine lake.  Here at the Miltonian, we dig water, and its our hope that you do too.

Looks like we won’t be heading back East this summer.  Instead, we’re heading South — to California, SF to be exact.  We’ve got some people down there right now.  We’ve got some people here right now.  West Coast is where we’re all at, for the moment.  Here’s to hoping the moment lasts.

Not much else to report except that we’re still just so crazy about it, about this life and these places and our people.  We’re reading books, renting movies, enjoying comics and just laying around a whole bunch.  Summer is leisure.  We’ve got no pressing projects per say, no life-altering ideas or genre-bending concepts to speak of.  We’re just here, and to tell the truth it’s a place we’re been trying to get to for a long time.  A real long time.  So yeah, we’re happy to be here.  It should go without saying that we’re happy that you’re here too.

Everything Crash

Weather’s been cooling to a crisp these days, which would make for nice sleeping if the Wind-Up bird hadn’t taken up a 6am residence in the tree outside our window.  No matter!  If he’s up to catch the worm, so are we, and off we go.

Talk is in the pipeline about a proper Fort Saint Davids website, sort of a streamlined version of our old True Jersey site — the ghost link of which is here.  There’s also some talk about doing this in conjunction with Kindle versions of True Jersey, Volume One and The Pilot and the Panda, as well as actual booklet version of Cherry Hill and some previews of the New American Novel.

WARNING: No posting will occur next week on official GTFO the Internet Week. As in: no Internet.  Swimming, yes, hiking, of course, DVD watching, why not, park grazing, always, book reading, intense, but Web Browsing?  No sir.  De-frag your Mind, uninstall your Web Browser for one week! See you at the barbecue.

Speaking of DVD watching, what serialized television show should we add to our Summer Projects list?  We keep hearing about this one:

We’re the worst with these shows though.  We made it barely to Season 3 of Battlestar before losing interest, got bogged down somewhere around Season 4 of Buffy, barely made it into Season 2 of Deadwood before giving up — and everyone shouts: but that’s when they get good!  It’s like we lack some kind of…dedication.

NEW DINOSAUR JR. VIDEO:

MOVIES, IN THEATERS:  Nice to see we’re getting a decent spread this summer, instead of just the popcorn flick targeted at Who We Were In 1986 (Transformers! GI Joe!) there’s also a new Woody Allen flick (cannot WAIT for this one.  He wrote the script in the 70’s at the height of his powers!  And it’s got Larry David!  WIN WIN!) and what? That Mendes/Eggers/Jim from the Office flick actually ISN’T some kind of Generation Y2K Garden State Deux groaner?  That’s what we’re hearing, which truth be told was what we were hoping.  Look, we’re not that jaded, ok?  We DO have heartstrings, and a little bit of hope, and we do believe in Magic.  So yeah, impress us, give us something to feel.  We’re not so dead that we still can’t feel.  Just don’t manipulate us.  Just don’t feed it to us.  Give it to us.  Gently.  That’s it.  There you go.  Ah.  Thank you.

WHATEVS THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  It just occurred to me that I haven’t read Pitchfork in months.  Owing a lot to the terrible and rendered unreadable redesign, but mostly to its Total Irrelevance to my life and I guess the music that matters to me in general.  Did Pitchfork kill music forever?  By making every review exactly the same it seems to have made every band exactly the same.  Everything reviewed on Pitchfork sounds like music reviewed on Pitchfork?  What exactly am I saying?  Alchemy, I tell you.  Real weirdness.  Pitchfork scares me.  Avoid.  Worst New Music.

Range Life

Bones is in Oregon.  Updates to follow.