LA Times: Jackson memorial "both affirmation and denial"

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Jackson memorial: both affirmation and denial

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-jacksontv8-2009jul08,0,3762196.story



(From left) Janet Jackson, Paris Jackson, LaToya Jackson, Jermaine Jackson and Prince Michael Jackson I during the public memorial service for Michael Jackson held at Staples Center.

By ROBERT LLOYD, Television Critic

July 8, 2009

The protracted departure of Michael Jackson from this world formally ended Tuesday morning with a private funeral at Forest Lawn and a public memorial at Staples Center. The first event was seen from afar, on television and so by the world, primarily as a sequence of arriving and departing black cars. The latter was planned from the start as a television event and carried live by all the major broadcast and cable news networks. The stars of the evening news were all on site, blinking in the sun outside the very arena where Jackson had been rehearsing his upcoming return to the stage.

Like the gold-plated casket in which he was laid to rest, and which sat before the stage at the Staples Center, the day provided the brighter coda to the darker days that preceded it. The memorial service, often referred to by reporters or commentators as a "show," seemed staged as if in partial recompense -- to Jackson himself, even more than his audience -- for the 50 London shows he'll never play. As does most any memorial service, it mixed mourning with celebration, laughter with tears. But in the way that it was universally reported on, from before its beginning until after its end, it also seemed a kind of apology for prior doubting or nasty press. Death, for a moment, wipes a slate clean.

You can say that the world has been divided in recent days into people who wondered what the fuss was about and people offended by the thought that anyone would wonder what the fuss was about. Practically speaking, there was no call for that much coverage -- one network's was very much like another's, and once the memorial itself began, the feed was identical. But there is a power to pop culture that a broadcaster ignores at its own peril, and once one network had signed on for the full run, it was inevitable that others would. In the end, everyone came.

"Circus" was a word often used in expectation of the event. You had to wonder, said Shepard Smith of Fox News Channel, "what sort of crazy something-or-other is going to happen, because Michael Jackson is in the house, and when Michael Jackson is in the house, crazy things happen." But pandemonium never erupted, and to the extent that a circus atmosphere reigned, it was one created and embodied by the media itself.

[bliss_eternal]

1. The LA Times can kiss my ass.

Seriously.

I'm so over the rag they seem hell bent on becoming.
:grr::mad: