The Agitation
No really, I’m gonna step on stage and stand still in the spotlight, motionless like John Cage did for four hundred and thirty three masonicly intoned, messianically recovered slave years in varying degrees of blighted— come with me. (Impossible) That sly I’m leaving now/ come with me that Hess gasps softly after he finds God in Bill Gunn’s 1973 masterpiece of leave me alone/come with me, Ganja and Hess, an horrific never ending romance with black secrets. Black is nature’s hiding place, where she stores her loot, Gunn muses in the outtakes. We here! (Killer of Sheep). No longer hiding, or being secretive about arrival, maybe also a little overexposed because nature has us on display to prove her power, and we are attracting thieves, our very bodies. Corporeal looting is proof of black arrival. But if you relinquish the current moment in search of its future again, acting all forensics before the crime, I’m leaving again. Such a pathetic series of deferrals gets us here, to where we spend all year threatening departure for a living, in poems, in clipped wings. Here come our leaving records.
Michael, Come Back
We’re at the Palace Theater in Downtown Los Angeles, a monument to filth and beauty, strife and opulence. Its marquis is featured in Jackson’s Thriller, making it one of the best places in Los Angeles to discuss how Michael Jackson haunts this city. We make a pinup of our lineup of admirers, now we haunt it with him. Collective improvisation sustains the ecstatic window between now and new. The idea was to form a prayer circle around the chromatic ghost of Michael and come to know him a new way, a better way, by way of reckless reacquaintance. Since we refuse to let him die, or split in two like the prefix di— undivide his soul, inverse Isaac Hayes hot buttered copper coil of praise dance in sinking spotlight soil. It’s romantic to have already forgiven him and to enter with the exuberance of a deliverer of redemption. I decide that Michael wanted privacy and we gave him surveillance. He keeps his blackness to himself, not to defy it. The crisis is, you refused to give him this for an eternity and now your muse is your demon, and you blame him. The West is sustained by its unrelenting invention of villains. Contrived villains appear where totalizing love should be. Its culture is to find an enemy to sell love’s insistent inadequacy in the face of fame, money, and freedom that no one really wants or uses wholly, but demands for sport.
After discussing Nicole Miller’s sculpture Michael in Black, which features a bronzed cast of the star genuflect and unhanded, we conclude it’s all inconclusive. Do we forgive him or punish him forever to abdicate the shame we feel for loving him anyways, some ask. That is not my question. My question is: who is on trial now that the man is dead, gone, absconded, or free? What glory rests in abstaining from a truly visceral love of a sound and feeling, and a total immersion in the legacy that doesn’t reduce it to its most terrible elements? Can’t he be a god and a king and a criminal, smooth, terrible, so impressive you hear wanna be starting something and shadowbox with your own morality for permission to enjoy what you love. Tacit devotion creates a more lasting erotics and we are lost in that when we regard Michael Jackson, gasping with desire while committing to obligatory scolding of him and ourselves for having a taste for the people we ruin or who make our paradise of ruins.
No.
What are your secret loves? The ones that could get you in deep and endless trouble and also maybe heal you if you trusted yourself enough to test them? And what about rehabilitation as an alternative to deciding someone should be condemned for eternity? Are you sure you’re above condemnation for the secret desires running through your own mind, and that if you had the power to fulfill them wouldn’t you be on your knees in the auction gallery/galley/gallow, praying into no hands or invisible diamond-studded gloves? We are his hands, and have a hand in his doing, and in how he comes undone. We are responsible for the fate of our idols, not the other way around. They owe us nothing, we ossify them with our hazardous, endless gaze. This is why worshiping anything is so raggedy and dangerous. Love is not worship. Maybe worship is a form of fear, an extension of not understanding someone’s source of power, and so you belittle it with your own uncalled for submissiveness when you’re meant to be its mirror and get powerful yourself.
After the discussion we took the Palace elevator down into the alley for drinks and conversation, an intermission and then reentered through the stage door. Suddenly all of us in attendance were standing on the stage of the Palace Theater facing closed curtains. They opened on Slauson Malone 1, the cover band Slauson Malone created for his former likeness by the same name sans the 1. How do we dismantle our own mythologized selves when those selves become brands and in some cases saviors? Or when they become obsolete? When we burn off our karmas, do we earn other names? And how do we do that without contrived martyrdom?
The curtains opened and a quartet was assembled amidst the red velvet audience seating. All of the additional seats remained empty. The musicians were set up in the plush chairs, with the exception of the tuba player who faced them from just beneath the stage, for acoustics. I watched each song in the setlist flung to the floor as he switched sheet music between them. Slauson Malone 1 is a subdued theatrical magic castle quartet that sometimes breaks into screeching or a player takes off sprinting like these outbursts are parts of speech that complete a song. Band leader Jasper Marsalis interrupts himself to ask members of the audience what time it is like a 1960s black revolutionary, and one audience member gets the lyric— it’s nation time. The urgency is to get through a set before the group is meant to change forms again, to hover so close to the currency of the moment that you yourself could become obsolete. Jasper is not a pop star but in this way his work and performance taps into the plight of the King of Pop, who always has to outdo himself, either by being more of a genius or more of a freak or finally nothing. The most devastating magic act. Followed by disappearing act, the stark oblivion that comes when someone you loved but think you’re over is gone and you realize you’ll never be over them. You’ll cover them forever and that makes you their shadow. And you won’t give his hands back or free them from the shackles of your own need for a herovillain and that makes you the villain here. We made an impromptu play about Michael Jackson’s potential resurrection as someone at once forgiven and banished to the purgatory of popular song. The curtain closed on the audience like a final rehearsal before it reopens for our performance of real listening. Michael spent his last day on earth in rehearsal, preparing to be enclosed or ambushed by something final and eternal. Coaxing his most rabid spectators to come see something forever.
We endlessly litigate the crimes of those we love because it makes us feel close to them. It’s hysterical devotion and our own repentance. No one owes you their darkside and if you take yours back you might even forgive yourself for letting it get so lost on the outside. Jasper is the son of Wynton Marsalis, I am Jimmy Holiday’s daughter, Hamza’s father is a jazz musician. Even uttering Michael’s name with upbeat optimism feels illicit, but we all have the sense that one day the same could be true of our own fathers, by some cruel reversal their music could turn illicit and wretched, so we enter the eighth notes trapped between sorrow and enjoyment and say Michael’s name without malice.
We’re in an era where it’s dangerous to forgive the villain of the day, which only makes me more adamant about unconditional love and rehabilitation. Some are far too envious of the dead to hide their hands from pillagers, I don’t have that affliction. If I’m asked to hold Michael’s hand and he has no hand I’m gonna say yes and tug at the sleeves of ghosts until one appears. If there’s blood on his hands, we’ve all been wounded. As we cleanse them with salt and toil, we exonerate ourselves. It’s been too easy to look away and recoil from those we’re told we’re forbidden to love. What Nicole Miller’s sculpture of Black Michael does is confront our precious and very ugly evasiveness with a beauty that is too flattering to look away from. And the monograph that accompanies it is a series of acts in a play about walking toward what you’re most afraid of and giving it a name. We’re worried that after all that torment, Michael won’t take us back, that the ones we turn on are the ones we need most and what if they get along without us very well. Of course he does. (Impossible).
Production
Lauren Mackler/Public Fiction
Inspired by Nicole Miller’s Michael in Black
Personnel
Altar Michael Jackson, as praying statue
Bells Harmony Holiday
Bass Hamza Walker
Vocals and Guitar Slauson Malone 1
Avec
Nicky Wetherell
Imaad Wasif
Osita Atikpoh
10.07.2022 Downtown, Los Angeles, Palace Theater