Let us Now Praise Famous Men/Recess in the Afterlife

Michael Jackson is dead. God is dead. Maman est mort. A friend reminded me of a beautiful day last summer. We were at Brooklyn's Havana Outpost, an outdoor venue brimming with idyllic diversity to the extent that it feels like a set. A series of Micheal Jackson videos came on via projector as soon as the sun dimmed; with them an air of digital serendipity sent the whole outpost into slurred, ecstatic renderings of MJ's lyrics and dances. We were in a classic pop-trance. The park benches that had been seats turned into stages and the stages into safe bootleg opportunities to displace our obsessions onto our entertainment.

My friend's message/reminder read 'Alas, Poor Michael... remember watching his videos in Brooklyn...' echoing the polemical James Baldwin essay about Richard Wright "Alas, Poor Richard." This has me thinking, what would James Baldwin say of Michael Jackson, to eulogize him and just in general what would he say of the martyr in my eyes, summer in my eyes, child with slow songs in his cameras, chills in his eyes, fast lens in his songs. I am working on a piece, text with audio accompaniment, that explores this. Michael Jackson as eulogized by James Baldwin. The piece will serve as a collaboration between the two men, an attempt at capturing the places where they overlap, jumping over their shadows into the practical obscurity of their less distorted demeanors. It will also function as an imagined outcome, for both Baldwin and Jackson. Let us now let famous men--out
of our selfish low-fidelity fantasies, out toward their own