Michael Jackson R.I.P.

TMZ and Reuters are reporting it.

holy shit!

no way! holy smoke

so are like eight other threads

OMG

!!!!

wtf @ today's toll

and yeah RIP for real.

also can't believe he was 50! i don't know how old i thought he was, but that just seems wrong somehow.

countdown to epic ilx argument over MJ's death in 10..9...8...

RIP :(

This is bumming me out! Like, a lot!

I always repped for you, Michael Jackson. The world is made better by people like you & it's sad to see you go. RIP

I wasn't really going to revive every single Michael Jackson thread on ilx.

bummed out :(

too amazed for argument -- I mean, this is the death of a guy who, when I was a child, I would dress up as and dance around like, so ... it takes a bit of processing

^^^^^^^ otm

wow

and I'm guessing I'm one of like two dozen ILXors who share that childhood experience

Where are the reports that the cardiac arrest was caused by an overdose coming from?

remembering when my sister was 8 she wouldn't go to cemeteries because "haven't you ever seen michael jackson thriller?"

and I'm guessing I'm one of like two dozen 99% of ILXors who share that childhood experience

yeah really!

Alba: TMZ

To be honest, I'm not convinced he's dead yet so I'm not putting forward condolences until there's an official statement.

yeah i think it would be weirder if you're a certain age if you didn't dance like MJ

He's dead happy that he got CPR?

idk why this would bum anyone out, even his most hardcore of fans - he was a tortured ass monster, may he find the peace in death that so eluded him in waking life~~~

http://content.ytmnd.com/content/9/9/1/991b4502ab9cad2014862726299cada2.gif

The TMZ story I'm seeing doesn't mention overdose, Dan.

Don't stop til you get enough. Come on, Mike. Come ON.

And hey canks - shut the fuck up.

Huh. The one I saw did, or maybe that wasn't TMZ and I'm mixing up gossip sites...

Stunned. It seems really not possible.

i was making a completely earnest statement

tbh (and i know it's not the time) my first thought was along the lines of cankles'

http://scandalist.thefablife.com/files/gallery/michael-jackson-memorabilia/auction19.jpg

npr is still not saying he's dead but i bet he is

I'm gonna pretend cankles meant how I first interpreted his statement: meant he was tortured by tabloids and exploitative & inaccurate lawsuits & criminal accusations, and at least in death he'll no longer be harrangued in such a way.

I'm a little distraught over here - sorry.

call all, mine kinda was too, RIP anyway :-/

I wonder how my mom is going to feel about Farrah Fawcett and allegedly MJ dying on her birthday.

This is bad news for Obama. (too soon?)

tbh (and i know it's not the time) my first thought was along the lines of cankles'

same here.

The instructor played all of Thriller during our water aerobics class last night.

The ass monster was tortured?
Or the monster was ass tortured?

uh Stan in what way? or is that some meme I missed the birth of?

pretty sure he ws an emotionally tortured dude too, abbott : /

xp So my first thought was along the lines of "Is it rational to think that my water aerobics class killed Michael Jackson?"

stan please stop trying to make bad jokes.

Seriously, cankles - my bad. Knee-jerk reaction.

i guess i agree w/cankles but that doesn't stop it being shocking and upsetting

xp Jenny: No less rational than thinking Tuomas did it, in order to finally score a point in the Dead Pool.

I read this:

http://www.amazon.ca/Be-Careful-Who-You-Love/dp/0743270924

Trashy, but I didn't doubt that most of it was true.

Is it stupid to be shocked by the revelation that MJ was indeed a child molester (or at least was attracted to children) as late as 2016? Cause as "old news" as this is to the rest of the world, having it all but confirmed has left me feeling nauseous today.

Stupid is a strong word.

Anybody "shocked" by it needs a bit of a talking to maybe

Maybe "shocked" is overstating it. No longer to comfortably live in a state of plausible denial, perhaps?

dmac otm

I'm a little shocked by the revelation that he was indeed a child molester as late as 2016, thought he'd have given it a rest by now

this prob deserves a different thread but recent scholars tend to be more skeptical of the idea that charles dodgson/lewis carroll was secretly attracted to young girls, not just b/c victorian-era sexuality and ideas about children were deeply different from our own but it turns out that there is some evidence that dodgson had affairs w/ adult women that were frantically covered up by his family and early biographers who wanted to protect his reputation, only to have this backfire when ppl later jumped to the obvious conclusions about a man who seemed to have no adult relationships and seemed curiously (to our eyes) eager to befriend young girls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll#Discussion_of_Dodgson.27s_sexuality

Certainly not "shocked," but there was always that lingering possibility for me that he was just some kind of special manchild weirdo.

Cryptosicko: I have something of the same problem in wanting to believe Pete Townshend. I might be completely naive there--his explanation at the time at least seemed plausible to me.

If the one you're referring to is that he was researching a play (or whatever) he was writing, that one seemed plausible to me as well.

But you know, if anyone here has some swamp land they wanna unload, I'm probably looking like quite the target right now.

Was it a play? I thought he (said he) was just doing vigilante detective work (or somesuch).

The explanation I remember is that he was molested as a child--no doubt of that; it's all over some of his greatest Who songs--and that, yes, he was dredging up those memories and doing research for some kind of project.

I don't know. Certainly off the chart on the stupidity scale.

The explanation I thought was that it was his childhood friend who was molested, and he was tracking down his tragic whereabouts on some adult site. This made it into his memoir (which is what he was researching).

Jeffrey Jones and Paul Reubens also had a thing for "vintage erotica." Wasn't session guitar guy Waddy Wachtel busted for the stuff as well?

i p much believed townshend but otoh i've spent years leaning toward the sympathetic spin on jackson's actions, even arguing w/ other ppl about it, and am feeling pretty gross as a result of this news

iirc the explanation for the paul reubens thing was that he'd bought a bunch of old magazines w/o realizing what was actually in them?

ok look I dont wanna be capt save a pedo here but if fuckin *People magazine* has half-queried this then idk if the Daily Mail is who you should hitch your wagon to, sourcewise

http://www.people.com/article/michael-jackson-estate-blasts-porn-reports#

i also have no interest in defending mj who was imo a bad guy but is there some way that american law works where you can be caught possessing stuff which sounds really quite extreme but still not get criminal charges?

uh no pun intended with calling him 'bad'

The first reports I read said the pornographic stuff was all with adults, and therefore not illegal, and the child stuff wasn't pornographic, nudity but no sexual situations, so also not illegal. Then I heard about torture stuff and animal killing stuff, but that may also be legal porn.

animal-killing stuff is almost certainly illegal, no? every state has animal cruelty laws.

(side note: ew. wtf.)

i never really had much doubt that jackson had molested some of the children left in his "care," but i'm not certain how this news confirms it beyond what we already knew.

even if all this stuff was in his possession, and even if it is what the daily mail says it is, that suggests a man with some abnormal and possibly some troublesome sexual interests, but it doesn't confirm that he ever acted on the latter.

ie you keep his records, I'll watch Annie Hall every now and then

this prob deserves a different thread but recent scholars tend to be more skeptical of the idea that charles dodgson/lewis carroll was secretly attracted to young girls

I've been reading this exhaustively annotated version of AiW to my daughter recently, which included a lengthy intro/analysis (which I def did *not* read to my daughter) that goes into Dodgson's bio, his interests in nude photography of young girls, his missing diary pages/split with the Liddell family etc. and tbh most of it was info I was not familiar with before, so it's been in my mind lately. The standards of the time and the lack of existing conclusive evidence def make it a bit of an unsolvable mystery, but certainly his behavior looks pretty pervy/paedo by modern standards (said behavior being normalized in the culture at the time doesn't make it any less disturbing, does it)? But yes, maybe for another thread. Certainly there's some parallels between the way Dodgson cultivated and fixated on his relationships with children and MJ's similar behavior.

at any rate it goes without saying imo that Alice in Wonderland > Thriller

but I would also say Rock n Roll Pt 1 > Billie Jean

but I would also say Rock n Roll Pt 1 > Billie Jean

gtfo w/this

I think it was in 1993 or so that an LA-based writer with many artist friends told me a pair of them were hired to sand floors at MJ's and discovered man/boy love porn in a closet :-((

whatever the content of the pornographic material seized at Jackson's house the fact that he had numerous porn mags, along with bottles of hard liquor, laying around the bedroom and en suite bathroom where he, a middle-aged man, hosted pubescent boys is something of a red-flag

behavior being normalized in the culture at the time doesn't make it any less disturbing, does it)?

Of course it does

you weren't in LA in 93 tho

Shows all you know

hey guys i'm starting to think michael jackson might have fucked some kids

this makes sense as to why the santa barbara police were all over this guy like stink on shit.

did none of this see the light of day because he paid off the kids family? ugh.

"When the shit hits the fan is you still a fan?"

"animal-killing stuff is almost certainly illegal, no? every state has animal cruelty laws."

It's legal to kill animals in certain contexts (slaughterhouse, etc) so it may have been films instances of that kind of thing (seemed like every 4th European film of the 80s/90s featured a horse of cow getting its throat cut). Not trying to be an apologist, but to explain why perhaps none of this resulted in conviction.

filmed, not films.

i've definitely seen animal torture in contemporary art museums. (bjorn norgaard's "the horse sacrifice.") maybe the material they are discussing was classified as "fine art" somehow. who knows.

in any case, there has always been more than enough circumstantial evidence to presume that jackson was a predator.

Wasn't there recently a Supreme Court case about people who step on hamsters or something?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Stevens

United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S. 460 (2010), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled that 18 U.S.C. § 48, a federal statute criminalizing the commercial production, sale, or possession of depictions of cruelty to animals, was an unconstitutional abridgment of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. After this ruling, the statute was revised by the Animal Crush Video Prohibition Act of 2010 to have much more specific language indicating it was intended only to apply to "crush videos."

Squelching

people are awful... although i guess how much more awful are those videos than the day-in day-out cruelty of animal farming? certainly the latter is done on a much more massive scale, and most people will gladly eat their pepperoni pizza and not think twice about it. so, to resume, people are awful.

people are awful

there are more than 7.4 billion people alive today, just to give you your bearings

and most of them eat meat, don't they?

when they can, yes

tbf people are awful for many other reasons, too.

tbf we are all complicit, there is after all a fresh crop of humans popping up daily, fresh as a daisy, that we are not (collectively) invested in at all; oh well?

Man, RIP Leon "Ndugu" Chancler.

?

Jackson's white alter ego

He played drums on Billie Jean (and others on Thriller and Bad), you philistines.

'LBI died'
'No way'
'Yeah way, it was reported on wereportdeathsforrealz.com so it must be true'
'Heartbroken'
'How can anyone be heartbroken? Even his fans knew this was coming, just look at 'im. C'mon ppl move along'
'Fuck this is srsly bad news for Obama (too soon?)'
'Fuck off with yr joeks Stan M'
('Sorry')
'LBI was a child molester!'
'He was a molester but he wasn't a bad dude iirc'
lbidancingfunny.gif
'What's with his face though'
'Anyone other than wereportdeathsforrealz.com confirmed this yet?'
theonion.com/lolripLBI
'But in my sentence, isn't "me" the object of the verb "is", whereas in your sentence "I" isn't the object of either "seems" or "forgot".'

Man, this is one of the worst rip threads in this place. And that's saying something.

so this happened 10 years ago today