look out! he’s got a battery!
Tomorrow Brazil will lose to the United States in THRILLERBOWL. Here is my song and video for the occasion.
This is a true story, one I thought you all knew. Since the Grapefruit Gal didn’t know, maybe you don’t either.
When I was 12, Michael Jackson touched me in a Las Vegas hotel.
My family, in an attempt to one-up the Griswolds, takes a Christmas Vegas Vacation. I am 12, my brother is 10, and we are staying at the Excalibur hotel/casino, back when it wasn’t the (lovable) dump it is today. We arrive late, get dinner, and take a brief tour of the casino’s second-level entertainment & shopping area. We return back to the escalators when they stop with a heavy thud. (In other words, they transform into stairs.)
Immediately, a roar is apparent from the floor below us. Yes, every Las Vegas casino has a characteristic din, a combination of inhaled cigarettes, stacked chips, idle conversation, and slot machine bells. But this is different; this is, as I said, a roar. Not the kind that come from Sigfried and Roy’s white tigers, either, if they roar, which I don’t know if they do.
This is a roaring crowd.
Six burly, black-shirted, bald men storm up the steps, clearing a path for what comes behind them. Not that any path needs to be cleared; the escalator is empty and the shopping floor mostly so, given that it is after midnight on a weeknight in a family hotel. The only thing, living or otherwise, in their way is me, standing near the top of the escalator.
They don’t move me.
A glint catches my eye. Nowadays, these glints seem to be sourced by gaudy engagement rings. But on this night, the blue glare is being cast by the shoulder pads of a jacket — a head barely rising above which is covered in tight black curls, and the head turns, and big black sunglasses bend toward me.
Not rhinestones, but whatever the glittery blue material is, I follow it down the arms, where the right sleeve ends at a hand clad in a shiny silver glove.
The left hand is bare, and holds the right of a young black boy maybe half my age.
The figure, barely taller than myself, is looking at me. Or at least I think he is; the glasses are very dark. And there is no mistaking who this man is, and in fact I don’t need to see his face, sunglasses, jacket, or gloves to know.
I know because his presence announces it.
My right hand is extended due to my having been playing with the static escalator handrail just prior to his arrival. He grasps it with his gloved hand (and I should note here that it is not “the” glove, just ‘a’ glove) and peeps in a higher pitch than I expect,
“it’s nice to meet you.”
He turns, and another bald, black-shirted, burly man pushes me aside. The unlikely, to me, couple walks past us followed by another six burly, black-shirted, bald security guards.
And the roar swallows me. Hundreds of people, nearly all of them women, storm up the steps — most screaming, few comprehensible. Some are crying. The ones that I can understand are just yelling, “MICHAEL!!! MICHAEL!!!” over and over again.
I watch them rush past me. I am an island in their river of adoration, one destined to flow toward an ocean that does not exist. The crowd trickles down, and finally ends, and the escalators start back up.
The shopping floor is not that large, and when the ensemble returns to the escalators, I am still here, frozen. The escalators stop, the security guards walk down them, Jackson and his… friend… step gingerly down them, security guards follow, 250 screaming women follow, escalators chug back to life.
MTV is now running Michael Jackson videos, with no commentary, interruption (save for commercials) or otherwise. Better yet, they’re the longer, lesser-known cuts from some of his more overlooked releases.
Very classy. It’s also THE SAME DAMN THING THEY DID IN 1994 WHEN KURT COBAIN DIED. You remember. They just ran the Nirvana Unplugged performance over and over again.
Still, they are slightly off the hook.
So Michael Jackson is dead. There are plenty of jokes to be made (two famous white women die on the same day, amirite?) but this is what pisses me off about this whole affair.
When I heard Jackson had been rushed to the hospital, and was probably dead, I yelled out to the Grapefruit Gal, asking what channel MTV was. Then I switched to it, and found this:
I tried MTV2. I tried VH1. Nothing. But really, even MTV2 is a disgrace.
MTV would not exist without Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson would not exist without MTV. One of them is gone, and the other one might as well be. That MTV is so brazenly ignoring this story (in b4 “it’s on MTV News,” if such a channel exists, I don’t get it) goes to show how far our culture has gone; the entertainment news has migrated to our “real” news media, and the entertainment news media now doesn’t inform us of anything — entertainment or otherwise.
Once upon a time, Kurt Loder walked American teens through Operation Desert Storm.
I’m not only making songs, I’m MAKING VIDEOS.
USA WON FIFA USA WON FIFA USA WON FIFA
The USA lost in the Confederation Cup today thanks to a turncoat traitor scalawag named Giuseppi Rossi.
I dedicate this song to him.
(1:55 mp3)
So you might recall a little project of mine known as “Classic Hits by Microsoft Songsmith.”
It is no more. YouTube deleted my account. Interestingly, they did not do it because of the Classic Hits By Microsoft Songsmith. They did it because Major League Baseball forced them to. Why?
In April of last year, I uploaded a short clip of Aki Iwamura hitting a game-winning home run against the Red Sox. It sat there, quietly labeled “Aki” for more than a year, until “MLB Advanced Media” found it and brought the YouTube banhammer down upon my head.
So that’s why none of my YouTube videos are working. Maybe eventually I’ll have the time to re-upload them and change all the URLs. Maybe.
If you missed the Yankees vs Phillies game on Fox Saturday afternoon, you missed them spending half the game with a camera aimed at a man they claimed was the father of Phillies rookie John Mayberry Jr. As it turns out, the man was not the father of John Mayberry, Jr. John Mayberry’s father is from Detroit, whereas this man was clearly, well, maybe he was from Detroit too, but his Panama gear would suggest at the very least HE WAS NOT JOHN MAYBERRY’S FATHER.
Obviously LeBron James’ game-winning three-pointer is getting a lot of attention. It should, but the meaning of it all is being a bit lost. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve seen James hit that shot at least a dozen times in his career. Indeed, it wasn’t even the most spectacular shot of this past season. The context of the shot does not by itself make the shot any more miraculous (or any less).
Last night’s game-winner is important because it fundamentally changed LeBron James’ character for one moment. James has always been the quintessential cool man, whether he be fronting someone, posterizing someone, or hitting 80-foot buzzer beaters.
Yet last night, he was not, not, not cool. He was, indeed, frenzied.
The response is why last night’s shot is monumental. It’s why it’s historic. Not how he got open, or that it won a must-win game. It’s the shot that in one moment made a man both superhuman and brutally regular-human.
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