Friday, December 5, 2008
Michael Jackson Color Drawing
[This page updated October 1, 2009]
Michael Jackson - Born August 29, 1958 – Died June 25, 2009
From Yahoo News - Michael Jackson's Health
From October 1, 2009 Yahoo News AP article about Jackson's health at the time of his death:
Michael Jackson's arms were covered with punctures, his face and neck were scarred and he had tattooed eyebrows and lips, but he wasn't the sickly skeleton of a man portrayed by tabloids, according to his autopsy report obtained by The Associated Press.
In fact, the Los Angeles County coroner's report shows Jackson was a fairly healthy 50-year-old before he died of an overdose. His 136 pounds were in the acceptable range for a 5-foot-9 man. His heart was strong with no sign of plaque buildup. And his kidneys and most other major organs were normal.
One hundred-thirty-six pounds sounds way too thin for a normal 5'9" guy, but maybe they are accounting for a thinner frame altogether?
The Media Michael Jackson
The death of Michael Jackson has opened a can of worms for the world wide media. How do you simultaneously lament the passing of a popular icon loved by (apparently) tens of millions of people, and while extolling his life also include the man's legal problems involving young children (or, for that matter, the junkie-sized prescription drug habit)? The reflex in obituary writing is to push forward the achievements and to make short mention of the travails and faults, unless the person in question is accepted broadly as a villain, in which case their villainy is much of the main story. Thus far, it seems like the reporting tightrope is walked by either ignoring the source of the singer's later fame, or by going grey on what were the actual legal issues involving those kids.
I expect that once the death of Michael Jackson has become old news, his former associates, former friends (and others) will begin revealing the kind of inside information that only comes out when a powerful person is no longer alive to pull on the reins. There will be money to be made by those who have the best stories, and a queue will develop of properties making the rounds of the best-paying book publishing and TV-movie making studios. Elvis, John Lennon (and many others) are properties that were (and are) exploited with a slightly different bent to the information once the subject was no longer living.
Michael Jackson Color Drawing - ink and photoshop colors
Click to enlarge.
Drawing of Michael Jackson - Brush and Ink (Black and White)
When I was a kid I received a Jackson 5 album ("Skywriter") and I tried to connect (without any success) the mid-seventies pop of that album with the likable adventures of the television cartoon show that featured the Jackson Five. The 30-minute cartoons ran saturday mornings (paired with episodes featuring the Osmond's) and featured a brief story with various Jackson-5 tunes thrown in. Michael was then just one of the "Five" and had not become the independent success story of later years. Just a kid who sang the songs while the older brothers portrayed the musicians of what was a 5-man funk/soul/pop set-up.
Years later when I was a law firm messenger in Washington DC, the Michael Jackson "Thriller" album had become a pop music phenomenon, and as I walked around the city I saw many people duplicating Jackson's clothing and hair style. There were young men wearing a lone white glove like he did; some wore shiny leatherlike jackets patterned after Jackson's from the music video where Michael Jackson is surrounded by monsters. I didn't really know what was going on at first: why are people wearing one white glove? Instead of Jackson, it made me think of the one-glove wearing character "Curley" from the John Steinbeck novel Of Mice and Men.
Decades later, Jackson had become famous for mostly the wrong things: enormous debt troubles, legal cases involving kids, and celebrity from being a celebrity. His physical appearance became grotesque and something like a blinking neon sign saying a human being was trapped behind a wall made of pop culture expectations and the license that allows pop idols to devolve into strange creatures when left to commanding (and being commanded by) a willing staff of sycophants.
At his death this June, the smiling cartoon facade of Jackson from Saturday Morning cartoons looks like a bitter portrait of Dorian Gray.
Related in some way: Elvis and Nixon Together at Last
