Today marks the one year anniversary of the late great Prince of Pop. You may remember him from such incidents as “No Michael didn’t molest me!” and other such Thrilling headlines.
What the pop icon stood for was everything that is superficial (but wrong) with Hollywood today. He was the precursor to Marilyn Manson. He’d claimed the shock jock title before Howard Stern started even getting press.
It started slowly. The one glove and jock grab. Maybe we should have seen it sooner.
The monkey. The nose. The huge ranch devoted to childhood…
Modern technology only further showed how much of a disaster ones public life really could be. Perhaps Britney learned a thing or two from him.
Last year I was living in Los Angeles. I remember the reports. I remember the circus that surrounded his death. It was so ridiculous, I wrote a post about it on my other blog in a moment of frustration with my beloved city.
Where was I when all of the commotion was going on? That night, I was at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
Now before you start, let me tell you that me being there had absolutely nothing to do with MJ. I was there for a movie screening. (This is a very wonderful event that happens in Los Angeles during the summer due to a nonprofit organization called Cinespia.) However, this is where the most superficially iconic moments to date of my tenure in Los Angeles occurred.
Before the screenings, there is a dj playing music as a crowd of bohemians, artists, and a myriad of color sits in the grass awaiting the vintage movie to be played on a projected screen on a building in the cemetery. The dj, to no surprise, played MJ’s Thriller. At which point everyone in the cemetary stood up and danced. It was surreal.
For a man who’s life of colorful chaos shaped a generation…
Rest in peace finally sir. Here’s to the peace this world couldn’t give you.
Superficially Iconic 