Exhibitions of Insanity and Shame
The days have been cold of late. Even Michael Jackson has the flu, manifesting itself shortly before he was due in court yesterday. A strange turn of events among many...the word is that he will be calling Elizabeth Taylor as a witness during the trial and nobody is quite sure why. Never mind your surprise witnesses...this is an unexpected electric shock to the genitals from behind witness. But we will have to wait until next week to find out what she is going to tell the court, leaving us with nothing to do but speculate.
Well...unless our Cleopatra delivers a startling eyewitness account that it was the busy hands of Bubbles the Monkey all along, this only leaves two possibilities. Either she will be Michael’s alibi or his character witness. In the first case she would provide a testimony that Michael was round her house on the nights in question buffing up her Oscar. This may ask more questions than it answers. In the second case...ye gods! Hour upon hour about how Michael is the most beautiful man in the world and how his soul is purer than an angel and how they are all being so beastly to him and should hang their heads in shame for trying to blacken the name of the bestest man in all the world.
The answer to that will come in due course. Right now Michael is sitting at home in a sterile glass cube, surrounded by hundreds of specialists in radiation suits dabbing his forehead with cotton wool held on the end of long tongs, reminding him how much he means to his fans. He knows these accusations are false because he is Michael Jackson and he is beyond this world’s petty concerns. People are jealous of his beautiful face and always seek to put him down for caring too much. The spiteful beasts! And so he sits on his silk hammock, unscrewing and screwing his nose absent-mindedly, lost in reverie about how much the world owes him a great debt of love and beauty and respect and must not ever question him, damn them.
He pities us. Are our lives even worth living as we sit here in this broken world of shattered dreams and spiteful lies?
Oh yes. Shattered dreams are a speciality down here amongst the ordinary people. We all swim against strong currents and only the select few ever make it upstream. Otherwise half the world would be astronauts by now.
Hmm...I am in danger of swapping my shirt and tie for a black polo neck here. We shall leave behind such cod-Sartre gibberish and instead take a look at how different channels have been covering the story.
Last night Channel 4 pushed the story deep into the running order, concentrating instead on the latest echoes of the McDonalds libel trial. Five approached the story with much more gusto. They opened in a quite frightening manner by sitting the presenter in front of four enormous screens, each showing a slow-motion video of Michael Jackson gurning into the camera, each one out of sync with the others. This was terrifying and lacked only a caption reading “FREAK” flashing on and off to complete the effect. Sky News, meanwhile, stunned their viewers by observing in all seriousness how Michael Jackson currently looked “thin and pale”. Whereas before the trial he was a dead ringer for Missy Elliot, of course.
As I was saying, the days have been cold of late. The weekend was particularly cold; it hailed on Saturday whilst I was at the bear enclosure at London Zoo. The bears looked forlorn and I felt little better.
Indeed...London Zoo does not look good on a freezing February afternoon. Pale sunlight filtered through storm clouds and cast onto muddy concrete is a depressing sight...the whole place seemed down-at-heel and unkempt.
But on the whole it was worth the visit. I have been to tourist attractions far worse than that before, the worst being a place that was billed as a museum in Salem, Massachusetts. From the outside it looked quite impressive, an imposing church with lurid promises of the excitement within plastered across the doors. Once we paid the sizeable entrance fee we were herded into a dark room. The door was locked and bolted behind us and we soon found out why. We were trapped in this place for about quarter of an hour, during which a procession of small glass display cases lining the walls lit up, some mechanical models of men chopping wood wheezed to life, and an inaudible narration was pumped in through tinny speakers. Our jaws collectively dropped. Was the whole museum going to be as fantastically bad as this?
The truth began to dawn on us that this wasn’t the introduction to the main exhibition but was, in fact, the entire museum. So we decided to cut our losses and leave early. But the makers were one step ahead...they had constructed a room so fiendish and disorientating it was like something out of the Avengers. We were going nowhere until the show was over... It was bizarre. You would approach a door only for it to melt into the wall and reappear on the opposite side of the room. And the soundproofed walls smothered all attempts at screaming for help.
On the way out, none of the staff would look us in the eye.
But for bizarre museum experiences I still relish the memory of a science museum in Ohio that I wandered around for two hours without realising the place was closed. Nobody challenged me, nobody asked for any money, and I only noticed my mistake when I headed back to the entrance to find the place now staffed and letting in hundreds of children. None of the staff batted an eyelid at my appearance. Well, if they will leave side doors open, they deserve to have people like me helping themselves to free science. It’s the perfect crime!
Well...unless our Cleopatra delivers a startling eyewitness account that it was the busy hands of Bubbles the Monkey all along, this only leaves two possibilities. Either she will be Michael’s alibi or his character witness. In the first case she would provide a testimony that Michael was round her house on the nights in question buffing up her Oscar. This may ask more questions than it answers. In the second case...ye gods! Hour upon hour about how Michael is the most beautiful man in the world and how his soul is purer than an angel and how they are all being so beastly to him and should hang their heads in shame for trying to blacken the name of the bestest man in all the world.
The answer to that will come in due course. Right now Michael is sitting at home in a sterile glass cube, surrounded by hundreds of specialists in radiation suits dabbing his forehead with cotton wool held on the end of long tongs, reminding him how much he means to his fans. He knows these accusations are false because he is Michael Jackson and he is beyond this world’s petty concerns. People are jealous of his beautiful face and always seek to put him down for caring too much. The spiteful beasts! And so he sits on his silk hammock, unscrewing and screwing his nose absent-mindedly, lost in reverie about how much the world owes him a great debt of love and beauty and respect and must not ever question him, damn them.
He pities us. Are our lives even worth living as we sit here in this broken world of shattered dreams and spiteful lies?
Oh yes. Shattered dreams are a speciality down here amongst the ordinary people. We all swim against strong currents and only the select few ever make it upstream. Otherwise half the world would be astronauts by now.
Hmm...I am in danger of swapping my shirt and tie for a black polo neck here. We shall leave behind such cod-Sartre gibberish and instead take a look at how different channels have been covering the story.
Last night Channel 4 pushed the story deep into the running order, concentrating instead on the latest echoes of the McDonalds libel trial. Five approached the story with much more gusto. They opened in a quite frightening manner by sitting the presenter in front of four enormous screens, each showing a slow-motion video of Michael Jackson gurning into the camera, each one out of sync with the others. This was terrifying and lacked only a caption reading “FREAK” flashing on and off to complete the effect. Sky News, meanwhile, stunned their viewers by observing in all seriousness how Michael Jackson currently looked “thin and pale”. Whereas before the trial he was a dead ringer for Missy Elliot, of course.
As I was saying, the days have been cold of late. The weekend was particularly cold; it hailed on Saturday whilst I was at the bear enclosure at London Zoo. The bears looked forlorn and I felt little better.
Indeed...London Zoo does not look good on a freezing February afternoon. Pale sunlight filtered through storm clouds and cast onto muddy concrete is a depressing sight...the whole place seemed down-at-heel and unkempt.
But on the whole it was worth the visit. I have been to tourist attractions far worse than that before, the worst being a place that was billed as a museum in Salem, Massachusetts. From the outside it looked quite impressive, an imposing church with lurid promises of the excitement within plastered across the doors. Once we paid the sizeable entrance fee we were herded into a dark room. The door was locked and bolted behind us and we soon found out why. We were trapped in this place for about quarter of an hour, during which a procession of small glass display cases lining the walls lit up, some mechanical models of men chopping wood wheezed to life, and an inaudible narration was pumped in through tinny speakers. Our jaws collectively dropped. Was the whole museum going to be as fantastically bad as this?
The truth began to dawn on us that this wasn’t the introduction to the main exhibition but was, in fact, the entire museum. So we decided to cut our losses and leave early. But the makers were one step ahead...they had constructed a room so fiendish and disorientating it was like something out of the Avengers. We were going nowhere until the show was over... It was bizarre. You would approach a door only for it to melt into the wall and reappear on the opposite side of the room. And the soundproofed walls smothered all attempts at screaming for help.
On the way out, none of the staff would look us in the eye.
But for bizarre museum experiences I still relish the memory of a science museum in Ohio that I wandered around for two hours without realising the place was closed. Nobody challenged me, nobody asked for any money, and I only noticed my mistake when I headed back to the entrance to find the place now staffed and letting in hundreds of children. None of the staff batted an eyelid at my appearance. Well, if they will leave side doors open, they deserve to have people like me helping themselves to free science. It’s the perfect crime!
posted by Jamie at 6:34 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home