Most overwrought eulogy in all of human history (MJ, who else?)

[KamaAina]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/browbeat/archive/2009/...

The moment I heard he died I watched the Motown appearance on my iPhone. It is thrilling. It belongs to eternity. But it also belongs to something else. It belongs to 1983, an annus mirabilis, in its way, in American life; a year of economic recovery that, in addition to prosperity and the King of Pop, brought us Madonna, Oprah, Jay McInerney, Tom Cruise, Michael Milken, Vanity Fair, and the resurrection of Andy Warhol, downtown impresario behind the Limelight nightclub. Thus Jackson was a central figure in the re-creation of a viable American mainstream, a mainstream dominated by the larger-than-life, if you’re being polite—or credulous. I prefer the noun form of “grotesque.”

What Jackson made of himself must form part of any honest eulogy. Defendants wish to be found innocent of the charges. Jackson was no usual suspect. He wanted to be found innocent, through and through. Innocent of guile, of all bodily dross and urge. Innocent of adult experience. Instead he found himself, as he sequestered with the bones of the Elephant Man, merged physiognomy with Diana Ross, and bedded down with little boys, at some weird four corners of his own making, where the innocent and the sinister, the icon and the freak, all come together.

The falsetto speaking voice, the licorice eyes, hair steam ironed and Zambonied until it was straight. The skin—what? We still don’t know. Bleached? Blanched? Poached? The barely suppressed facial hair. Effacement, defacement, refacement, unfacement. What word could do justice to the creation, out of a perfectly normal human countenance, of the dilapidated faerie mask that MJ’s eventually became? It was as if the slightest concession to the normal human horizon would let in a besieging pain. To substitute for the childhood he never had, he picked, with uncanny accuracy, exactly those things that don’t substitute for an actual childhood. Amusement parks and toys—the placatory devices of the bad parent.

A genius; an angry dancer; a grotesque among grotesques. What to make of Jacksonian America, now that the King himself is dead? An immense and spectacular frenzy; an urgent celebration; the affect of triumph; at its center a derangement; beneath that, in all likelihood, nothing.

[Xipe Totec]

1. There's too much ham in that sandwich n/t

[rcrush]

2. yeah

ok

[Heidi]

3. This doesn't qualify because it's easily the BEST euology ever.§

Hunter S. Thompson's eulogy for Richard Nison.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/graffiti/crook.htm

[SteppingRazor]

5. My favoirte line from that obit...

is the bit about Nixon being so crooked that he had to have aides screw his pants on in the morning.




Even long past his prime, Thompson had his moments of brilliance.

[Heidi]

6. Yep.

Gotta love HST.

How ya doin', SteppingRazor?

[SteppingRazor]

7. Pretty well, all in all. Thanks for asking!

Currently planning a blowout trip to Ireland in September, so that's given me something to look forward to. How you doin'?

[InternalDialogue]

4. Somebody is channeling Tom Wolfe there.