Sweetney Archives

Faced with the aggrandizing media spectacle that’s ensued since Michael Jackson’s death last week, I can’t help but wonder if we aren’texperiencing some kind of collective cultural amnesia. The sudden,overly reverential elevation of Jackson’s body of work and life these past few days is an odd turn to say the least, and in that sense a fitting end to the highly unusual life of very peculiar — and yes, uniquely talented — man.

For many of us, what we felt upon hearing of Jackson’s death and what we’ve felt in the days since are things much darker and more complex than the endless coverage of celebrity tributes and inconsolable fans would suggest. But I’d wager that if Jackson supporters and Jackson defamers can agree on anything, it’s that time has not been kind to ‘The King Of Pop’. Much like another King — Elvis Presley — before him, Jackson achieved an almost unfathomable level of fame early in life and then rapidly collapsed beneath the psychic weight of dwindling record sales and his own overindulged eccentricities, in the end retreating to his own iteration of Presley’s Graceland, Neverland Ranch. Since that fall from superstardom in the early 1990s, any media attention directed at Jackson has arguably had more to do with his legal woes, prescription drug addictions, odd
behavior, and ongoing physical metamorphosis (which the singer publicly attributed to treatments for Vitiligo and Lupus, though there’s little doubt that Jackson engaged in extensive retooling of his facial structure by way of plastic surgery), than it had to do with his fading musical talent. And I don’t deny that talent was there — it was, clearly. I’m just not entirely sure how to go about reconciling my appreciation for the music of the Michael Jackson of the 70s and 80s with the pity and confounded revulsion I feel for the Michael Jackson of the 90s and 00s.

That segmenting of the man… I of course realize it’s a convenience, an attempt to disassociate his art from his curious and at times downright disturbing life, marred as it was by bizarre publicity stunts, outlandish affectations, and, in particular, a troubling obsession with children and childish things, which taken together served to make accusations of pedophilia seem all the more credible. The questions, suspicions, and halo of guilt lingered around Jackson long after he settled out of court with the 13 year old boy who publicly accused him of molestation in 1993 (reportedly to the tune of $22 million dollars). It’s understandably difficult for many people to believe an innocent man would pay that kind of money to someone who falsely accused them of anything, let alone something as reputation-shattering as pedophilia. And so some of us can’t help but feel that tension pulling at us, making the unrelenting media frenzy that seems hellbent on ennobling Jackson retrospectively practically unbearable. It’s almost as if the hive-mind of the media actively wants to convince us that the past 15-20 years of dissipation, questionable behavior, and creative irrelevance didn’t happen, and that we should all just pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, wash our brains together, and drink the damn kool aid already. But comments like these from a post announcing Jackson’s death provided a much different point of view:

I know he was talented and all that other stuff but to me once you sexually abuse someone that does overshadow the other stuff. I also think that he probably had a sad life and I am trying to focus on that and the music today. That said. It is hard to do that and I am struggling.

I feel as though it is fine to be sad that a part of our
childhood is dead. Still, I guarantee if one of our kids was hurt by
this man, it would infuriate any one of us if the world mourned his
death this way.

I’m not sure how I feel about this – he was a fabulous
entertainer and he had a screwed up childhood that we can blame Daddy
Jackson for – thanks Dad. But he was also accused of some heinous
activities with young children and the issues surrounding the birth and
the raising of his own children are questionable.

This is surprising. But, somehow, I can’t seem to mourn the death of a multimillionaire pedophile.

Yeeeeah. And in all honesty I’m still trying to figure out just what I feel about all of this, what to make of all of it. But I will say that earlier today, as I was going through clips about Jackson in preparation for writing this piece, my daughter — who had not the slightest idea of who Michael Jackson was — asked what I was writing about. So in response I told her to come sit next to me on our couch, and I played this for her:

And really, what I felt most while watching that with my daughter was overwhelming sadness. It was easily the first time I’d seen the video in 10 years, and watching it gave me a startling jolt of nostalgia mixed with the strange sense of freshness that something long lost but unexpectedly rediscovered bears. I wasn’t prepared for how handsome he is, or was, rather. How indescribably magnetic. In a way, I’d forgotten about that Michael Jackson. And as I watched I couldn’t help but feel for the young, talented man Jackson was — the one frozen for all time in that video, unmarred by terrible accusations, drug addiction, and the generalized trainwreck of his later years — and think to myself that his two-decade-long degeneration from that bright star into what he eventually became is, indeed, something worthy of our collective sadness.

I realize that, at the moment, this isn’t exactly a popular position. Please refrain from the pelting with stones and the smearing with animal feces for just a moment, while I try to explain myself.

The past few days have been, well, unkind to Kanye West, and with good reason. I’ve publicly pointed to his antics at Sunday night’s VMAs as being downright douchey myself, and stated in no uncertain terms that I’m in total agreement that West is very much worthy of the backlash he’s experiencing. What Kanye West said and did was rude, childish, and completely out-of-line. None of that is in dispute. His actions were, in a word, indefensible.

HOWEVER.

Having said all of that, I must openly admit to having something of a soft spot for Kanye West. And it’s precisely because of his uncontrolled outbursts, poor impulse-control, over-the-top braggadocio, and what can only be described as EPICALLY BAD decision making — in other words, his naked, glaringly flawed humanity — that I find him sympathetic. That West so clearly appears to struggle with himself and is so often his own worst enemy… it’s hard for me to not empathize with that, even when he’s being a total freaking ass (which, indeed, he frequently is).

A good part of how and why I feel the way I do about West I think also relates to having an strong natural capacity for compartmentalization, whereby I’m able to easily separate out an artist — the person and persona behind the art, their life and what they do and say in it — from the actual art. And though by every possible measure Kanye West may be a jerk (I don’t know if I agree with THAT sweeping of a condemnation, but for the sake of argument), he’s also an extremely talented man who has been acknowledged by public, press, and the music industry alike as one of the important musicians of our day. He is, simply put, a complicated and contradictory individual: by turns arrogant to the point of absurdism (at one point calling himself the second coming of Christ, for example) and humble to the point of discrediting himself and his achievements (upon winning Video Of The Year at the 2007 BET awards, West took the stage and said, with apparent sincerity, that Outkast deserved the award and he didn’t, and then proceeded to try to actually give the award to them), among other things.

And it’s that complexity and tension that makes him all the more appealing to me, while unsurprisingly it’s a gigantic turn off to others. From my perspective, that West is a broken, imperfect man, a man who makes ridiculous mistakes with the unflinching obliviousness of a child, and like a child so often seems genuinely taken aback by people’s negative responses to him — these are things which suggest that in many cases West honestly isn’t trying to hurt or upset people, but rather that he simply lacks a particular segment of interpersonal wiring and emotional intelligence that most of us take for granted. I’m not even trying to defend him or excuse his behavior in saying that, because as an adult, yes, he should at some point have taken it upon himself to learn how to behave and control his impulses. But I do think he’s a more complex individual and artist than people give him credit for, and despite his anti-social behavior that complexity, coupled with his undeniable talent, are things I’m almost irresistibly drawn to.

But it should also be noted that I’m a person who has long stated that I would rather be friends with an interesting asshole than a boring nice person. I do realize I’m probably in the minority in feeling that way. Still, I’d like to humbly suggest, in this perhaps overly heated moment — when the furor regarding the events of Sunday night is reaching a fever pitch, and everyone is jumping on the Let’s All Trash Kanye West bandwagon — that we try to remember that Kanye West isn’t a role model, he’s an artist. And I am of the opinion that our wanting him to behave himself and be a Good Citizen and a Nice Guy in addition to being a great musician is not only misguided, but kind of irrelevant.

West is an entertainer, not someone you should point out to your kids as a hero to emulate on an interpersonal level. That he produces great music should suffice, because relative to his art who Kanye West is in real life doesn’t and shouldn’t matter. Need I even get into the reality that, historically speaking, a huge portion of artists in any and all mediums — one could convincingly argue a majority of the truly great ones, in fact — have not been what one might call Great People (or sane people, or stable people, or healthy people, for that matter)? And we could get into all the reasons why that’s the case, and debate whether or not great art is indeed almost invariably born of internal and/or external conflict, and argue about the idea that conflict and strife are in fact necessary for the production of great works of art, but I’m not going there. I’m merely suggesting we try to keep things in perspective. Just a wee little tiny bit.

And so, to that end:

Things I love about Kanye West that you should too:

[Comment: An emotionally complex, but also undeniably catchy song that, for all its vocoderyness, to me underscores West’s inventiveness by way of its production.]

[Comment: This well-known bit of Kanye Tourettes alone is enough of a reason to love him. What strikes me most about this is West’s demeanor — he’s so clearly genuinely upset, aghast, and (adorably) perhaps a little nervous about speaking on TV. Somehow, all of that put together, along with the simple, matter-of-fact delivery of what was easily the quote of the year that year, kind of makes me want to hug him.]

[Comment: Relatedly, I love him for his follow up to/explanation of that statement in this clip from Nightline, which reveals what people might consider an unexpected degree of self-awareness.]

[Comment: Objectively a completely kickass song. I won’t even entertain suggestions that it’s anything but.]

[Comment: Great, great song, made even greater by this video that West himself actually proposed to Zach Galifianakis, and Executive Produced. HILARIOUS.]

Other random lovable bits:

– Getting Murakami to do album graphics (albeit after Louis Vuitton had made Murakami a crossover name in the hiphop world)
– Dedicating songs to his Mom
– Pillaging 80s-style clothing with unselfconscious abandon
– He’s cute (shrug. Just sayin’.)
– His blog is HYSTERICAL. And sure, perhaps not intentionally so, but genuinely hilarious nonetheless.

I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve a public shaming for Sunday night. He does, and it’ll probably be a positive, healthy thing for him in the long run. But I am saying we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water, dig?

. . .

Psst! Kanye! Call me!

———-

PS: Something else to consider: The NYT’s The Ethicist on the question, Can you hate the artist but love the art?

It was late July before I finally noticed it. The ivy.

There was something distinctly unsettling, almost shocking, about it. To look out my dining room window one morning and observe, with a sinking feeling of dread, thick, spurred cords twining their way across the outer screen, splaying broad emerald leaves to trap the light that would otherwise have run in bright rails on the hardwood below. It cast a shadow that dimmed the entire room.

More disturbing still, to walk out onto our four square’s wrap-around porch and see that it ran up one full side of the house, past second-story windows, and dangled from the drooping gutter. Other tendrils curled around one corner of the house near the roof, clutching at it like thorny fingers on a gigantic hand sprung from the earth, summoned by some dark magic to tear my house apart.

It seemed it had happened overnight, with a terrible suddenness. Or, as in fairy tales, that I’d been asleep for a very long time — a girl subdued by enchantment and then brought back to the world of the living one hundred years later, only to find herself buried in a forest of briars.

At camp, an older girl tells her ghost stories.

Days later she recounts these to me, wide-eyed and in hushed tones typically reserved for the sharing of deep, dark secrets. But it’s like that in a way, I suppose. These dark things, these dark things that go bump in the night, are pieces of her dawning comprehension of the truth of mortality. Of death, the deepest and darkest of all secrets.

Driving home from the grocery store she unexpectedly bursts into tears. “I want you to stay with me forever and ever and never leave me,” she sobs. “Mommy, I don’t want you to die.”

How can I comfort her? I tell her I’m going to be around for a long, long time. But it means nothing. That I will die, that I must die, that this will happen regardless of how much she loves me, that is what matters to her.

I can’t deny it, though every part of me wants to spare her pain. “Death is a part of life,” I say. I’m trying to find something true to say that she could find solace in, but I can’t. Death is death. It terrifies me, too.

She asks to sleep with me almost every night now, and though my heart’s sore and aching I put her off. I’m afraid of setting a dangerous precedent, one I’ll have to wrestle with at bedtime for weeks to come, one that in the end will only serve to deepen her insecurity and fear. I have to think this way. I have to do the right things for her. The things that will be right in the long run, in her future life, for her future self, however unpleasant and difficult now.

I’ve begun to understand that real parenting — the hard stuff, the stuff that hurts you more than it hurts them, the stuff that’s for their own good whether they like it or not — is comprised almost entirely of denial. It is a gigantic stone wall of refusal generated by a distant and murky future that like oracular mediums we’re forever straining to see into, sniffing the ether to catch a whiff of impending disaster and despair that must be averted at all costs. That’s my job. It’s every parent’s job, in a way. To erase terrible mistakes that have yet to be made. To conjure every possible nightmare and battle all of them into extinction. To make a monster from clay that holds your child’s name under its tongue like a terrible promise, so that you may inscribe death on its forehead.

It’s like motherfucking Wild Kingdom around here these days. WILD KINGDOM OF THE DAMNED.

So here’s what happened.

I was sitting in my living room this morning trying to jump-start my brain with epic doses of caffeine, when I heard a very light scratching sound coming from behind our TV cabinet. The scratching sound lasted for perhaps two or three seconds and then stopped, so I shrugged it off. Our house was built in 1914, it makes all kinds of random and unexplainable noises, believe me. I mean, if I got freaked out every time I heard scratching, or the sound of rattling chains in the basement, or blood curdling screams coming from the attic at 3am, well, I’d be freaked out a whole lot of the time. Anyway, a few moments later I looked to my left and saw a teeny tiny gray baby mouse punch-drunkenly climbing out from behind the cabinet over the thick white satellite TV cables strung along the baseboard.

Right about this time, give or take a few stunned, horrified seconds, was when I began running around in circles like a cartoon character, hands flailing wildly, repeating over and over like a mental patient off her Very Important Meds: OH NO OH NO OH NO OH NO OH NO OH NO OH NO OH NO. Yeah, so basically I’m real good in a crisis and stuff.

I then did what any sane person would do, which was find a bowl, plunk it down over the mouse to trap it, and then proceed to stand there for five minutes with my mouth hanging open staring at said bowl, as if awaiting further directives from the part of my brain containing Reason and Problem Solving skills. Sadly, my brain was all, Dude, I’ve done what I can. You’re kind of on your own from here on out — I have some equations related to wave-particle duality I need to be working through. I’M OUT! Stupid brain.

At that moment I was standing about two feet away from my desk (and I use the term “desk” loosely — it’s not so much an actual, functional workspace, but rather a shambolic dumping ground for bills and paperwork and other distinctly Not Fun things I don’t really want to deal with (an appointment request card from my dentist has been sitting atop one of the several piles that comprise the mountainous terrain of my desk for well over 6 months; my teeth will surely rot and liquify before I make that goddamn appointment now that the card has been consigned to The Desk Of No Return)), so I grabbed the nearest folder and gingerly scooted it, inch by inch, under the now-mouse-filled-bowl.

On a motherfuckin’ roll (I AM A WOMAN OF ACTION! TAKING CHARGE OF THE VERY SERIOUS AND COMPLEX MOUSE SITUATION! YEAH!!!!), I gently picked up the folder/mouse/bowl and took it out onto our broad front walk, so that upon release from its bowl-prison the baby mouse would instantly be vulnerable, exposed and clearly visible to birds of prey from the air.

Yeah that’s not very impressive.

Okay, how about this?:

DINNER IS SERVED!

Okay, a couple of things to note here:

(Sorry, got a little caps-lock crazy there. Deeeeep breaths.)

So after a few stunned and trembling seconds, baby mouse scuttled off under the ivy surrounding our front porch. Which probably means that baby mouse will be reappearing inside my house within 24 hours. But really, what am I going to do? Feed it to my cats? Flush it down the toilet? Create a baby-mouse-inspired theme park and animation studio and become a bazillionare? Oh, wait…

(The truth I’m trying very hard not to admit to myself is that baby mouse is probably done for. Poor thing could barely walk yet — he’s not going to present much of a challenge to nearby wildlife with the fever for the flavor of the mouses. Can’t say I don’t feel bad, I’m kind of a pussy about cute fuzzy mammals truth be told, but it’s not like we could keep it…)

(Alright, fine, Circle Of Life and shit, I’m over it. Sigh. Stupid life circle.)

There’s a dead bird on our porch, he said.

He’s always been overly repulsed by the sight of dead animals. And so from our earliest days together it was one of the few critter-related matters I had to take on in our relationship, as he, incongruous as it may seem, has no problem killing hideous eleventy-bajillion-legged alien bugs, or escorting by hand the odd lost ladybug that materializes inside our house back out to its proper place among our garden’s hydrangea blooms. But I am the sole Person Who Deals With Dead Things around here, and as such have, over the years, had to dispose of a fair number of hapless former mice, tangible evidence of our retiring housecats’ still formidable hunting skills. Anyway, the point is that I knew immediately he’d be of no help in dealing with the thing on our porch.

Where is it? I asked, grimacing.

His left arm flew up, gesturing broadly toward the front of our house. He winced visibly. Over there.

I peered out our front door and spotted it, laying beside our rocking chair. Indeed, that bird is no more. It has ceased to be. It has kicked the bucket, bought the farm, it’s pushing up daisies. It is an ex-bird.

I have no idea what to do with it.

And so there it remains. Rife with symbolism so obvious it makes me want to punch whoever’s in charge of dropping these metaphoric talismans into our lives squarely in the ethereal jaw for insulting my intelligence with such a ham-handed, amateurish trope. I mean come on, universe — you can do better than that, can’t you?

But what do you do with a dead bird? I honestly don’t know.

Maybe it’s a natural byproduct of the narrowing gap between myself and the big Four-O — which is, given present life expectancy, the age at which it becomes virtually impossible to deny that fully half of your life is actually over, and yes you did just hear my voice shake in terror as I said that — but I’ve been meditating on change and the passing of time quite a bit lately. Okay, more like brooding about it really. About how what we want and will about our lives and everything and everyone in it seems to bear so little actual weight in the end, each of us apparently having about as much real power over the grand narrative arc of space-time as a shadow has over the ground it falls upon. And while it’s true that I have enough sense to know that none of us should want to suppress the changes that bless and befall us — everything having as it does a season and a time and a purpose, turn turn turn — being as I am in possession of nothing but flawed human judgment and my own subjectivity, I of course still do. I still want to press my will into time, and have it leave an imprint there.

And so I’m brought to this photo I took a couple of years back of my daughter M with Mr. Moo, amiable pet of a neighborhood restaurant owner. Mr. Moo was a fixture along our hood’s Main Street, a tenderly anthropomorphised friend to all who crossed his path. Year after year, all spring and summer long, Moo would sunbathe on the steps of his owner’s restaurant, squinting demurely at passersby as if daring them to resist stroking his deliciously fluffy white belly. Few resisted. And M adored him.

I’m guessing that you know where this story is going.

Last summer we stopped seeing Mr. Moo around his usual haunts. M inquired after him endlessly — what had happened to him, where was he, did he move? — and though I knew the answers to her questions as surely as you do reading this now, I finally cornered Moo’s owner and asked her point blank what had happened to him. He’d died, of course. Of old age, and happily, if it matters. To me it didn’t.

The point is, I still haven’t told M about this. In fact, I’ve lied outright about it. As far as my daughter is concerned Mr. Moo now lives on a distant farm — yes yes, that ridiculous old cliche — and I’ve made his pastoral life sound so glorious and appealing that she often asks to visit him there. At which point my chest tightens, and I quickly change the subject.

But I don’t feel bad about the lie, about shielding her from confronting in a very concrete and personal way the sad reality that everything and everyone she cares about has an expiration date. An unknown expiration date, sure, but an expiration date nonetheless. No, I can’t bring myself to feel guilty for hiding from her the truth that — whether by some manner of estrangement or, ultimately, death — even the strongest attachments of the heart invariably end in grief, that every connection foreshadows separation, and that despite the certainty of this all her life she’ll pursue these fleeting bonds that will rend her with a doggedness insensible to reason, ceaselessly imploring this world, as we all do, to break her heart.

M: “Mom! MOM!!!”
Me: “Yeeesss?”
M: “Did you know that the first people ever borned, the first humans, that they were ANIMALS?”
Me: “Uhh…we’re still animals.”
M: [nervous, uncertain laughter]
Me: “We evolved. From other animals that lived before us. We’re sort of like… monkeys. LIKE SUPER MONKEYS.”

Evolution 101. Super Monkeys. Tell your friends.

When he kicked me, I didn’t feel anything. Just the compression of my chest and stomach, the air being forced from my lungs again and again. No pain, only movement.

It wasn’t until fifteen minutes later that my body was socked with the agony of what had happened, so powerful it made me literally double over. As I sat on the curb sobbing, one Bobbie questioned me about my assailant while another gingerly wrapped my hand with gauze in a manner I imagined similar to how the embalmers of ancient Egypt spooled long strips of cloth about their dead. In the weeks that followed I would have to perform this ritual every few hours myself, carefully tending the wound like a loved thing though it was a gash so deep and ugly the chemist I’d visit the following morning would audibly gasp when she saw it.

When I jolted awake in the night overwhelmed with fear and shocked by the relentless hurting, my friend held me. And it seemed that his arms comprised the fabric of a net pulling the fragments of me together, that those arms were the only thing keeping me from disappearing into the pain. Cradled against him for those few moments I could almost convince myself that I wasn’t irretrievably broken, but once again whole and safe and not at all alone.