The Ryan White Care Act

Here's something I did not know until I read last week's edition of The Economist - that HIV positive people were not allowed to visit the USA unless they had a hard to get waiver. President Obama has announced that this ban will be reversed. I had no idea! This travel ban had been in force for 22 years!

Obama has also appointed an AIDS tsar and reathorised the Ryan White Care Act, which provides funding for AIDS care. Ryan White was the boy MJ befriended in the 80s and who we see walking round Neverland with MJ in the Gone Too Soon film.

MJ and Discoid Lupus

Have tons to say but I am feeling grotty after a long day (for me) yesterday. I went to the first session of the Expert Patients' Programme, (where people with chronic illnesses learn from each other and make action plans for self-management). It was really excellent, but wouldn't you know it, I feel like death today!

There was a leaflet about discoid lupus, a condition Michael Jackson was said to have suffered from. J Randy Taraborrelli talks about this in The Magic and the Madness.
The leaflet revealed how patches on the skin, especially on dark skin, can lead to pigment loss, 'leaving white areas'. Also that the patient can have a marked sensitivity to sunlight - and sunlight must be avoided at all costs. Hair loss is also common. Arthritis is common among sufferers. (All things MJ suffered from).
Till later,
J

In Tandem

New image from This is It film...

Waking the Dead

Just wondering if anyone here saw Michael Jackson: The Live Séance at the weekend? I didn't as we do not have Sky1.

Sounds really bizarre. The programme, hosted by the usually credible June Sarpong MBE , featured medium Derek Acorah. In the programme, our Michael, through the person of Derek, complained that he had not been buried next to Marilyn Monroe. I ask you!

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame, spent many of his later years attending seances. He became obsesed with the afterlife.

I love ghostly things and find the whole subkect area tanatalising and fascinating but this MJ seance takes the biscuit. I don't think he would mind though (MJ) as this is exactly the kind of shenanigans that might have surrounded the deaths of MJ's heroes such as P T Barnum and Harry Houdini.

Chart Watcfh Reveal Jackson Successes

http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/chart_watch/41978/week-ending-nov-1-2009-this-really-is-it/

Blogger via Google

Hey, great stuff... just found out I can post updates to Am I Scary from my Google Home Page. Should make life easier... I hope.

This Is Michael Jackson

http://www.themillions.com/2009/11/this-is-michael-jackson.html

You've got to read this article by Sonya Chung on the website The Millions.
Here's a smashing quote from the piece:

"The emperor’s clothes are real and they are fabulous. It’s all deeply, healingly of a piece, witch-hunting sexuality police be damned. This is Michael Jackson."

Smashing article from The Huffington Post, yet again, (can you buy this publication in hard copy form, I wonder? I'll subcsribe if i can) that Ligaya found for us.

I reproduce a few extracts from it here...

"Online, Michael Jackson is a singular attraction.

We saw this on June 25, a day that will forever live in online infamy, when the King of Pop's death literally stopped the Internet. Within a day, Jackson's main Wikipedia article was viewed more than 6 million times. Twitter and AOL Instant messaging went berserk. Text messages flooded phones. (I, for one, didn't learn about Jackson's death from TMZ or CNN; a cousin had texted me with "Michael Jackson is dead.")

Which is not at all surprising given Jackson's draw on social networking sites, and the kind of connected world we're living in. Events don't just happen. Events are shared. On Facebook, for example, the biggest Jackson page has 10.3 million fans. To put that figure into context, consider that the official Barack Obama page has 6.8 million fans and the official Sarah Palin page has more about 951,000. On YouTube, type "Michael Jackson" and about 950,000 videos pop up -- easily more videos than when you type some of biggest names in music: "U2" (131,000) "Beyonce" (275,000), "Taylor Swift" (249,000), "Lil' Wayne" (472,000), to name just a few...."

"Just what is it about Jackson?... A unparalleled global star on the world stage, touching fans across borders, time zones and languages. While growing up in the Philippines, in the small town of Pasig, in Manila, the first English song I committed to memory was "The Way You Make Me Feel." At age 6, I remember trying to figure out what the word "ecstasy" meant -- "just hold me baby, and I'm in ecstasy" -- and when I moved to California years later, I remember being struck by all the talk about Jackson's changing physicality -- his skin tone, his racial background, the way he looked. I never realized Jackson was African American until I was in the U.S. In my mind, while growing up aboard, he was just American.

For his fans -- at least those of us who first framed him outside of the white-or-black dichotomy that, I think, often imprisons American artists -- it wasn't the way Jackson looked, it was the way he made us feel. And continue to feel. Because of the Internet, because of the digital afterlife, Jackson will live on."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jose-antonio-vargas/michael-jackson-online_b_337267.html&cp

This Is It Becomes World's Highest Grossing Concert Film in History.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-mendelson/this-is-it-becomes-the-wo_b_341575.html

Thanks to Ligaya for the link. Loving the Huffington Post.

Contentious Subject Matter

I've been reading a book called 'The Sociopath Next Door' by Martha Stout. This reading has not been connected to my minstrelsy studies but to another area in life. However, I have heard Michael Jackson described by a couple of commentators as having sociopathic tendencies.

Walter Yetnikoff, former CBS boss and MJ's right hand man for many years, describes his desperate need to 'win', to be number one as so and recent Sunday magazine interview quoted one aide who said MJ was 'almost sociopathic'. (Must get my cuttings out and have a look at that piece again.) He has also been described as a narcissist by journalists and writers like Margo Jefferson.
I read the section on narcissism and he did seem to fit the bill. (I can write more about this in a future post if people want to know what this book says about narcissism .)

The sociopath angle is much more confusing. Some of the behaviours I have read about do seem to fly dangerously close to the MJ bone but others seem widely off mark.

As you know I adore MJ, while not being blind to his faults. Reading this book has brought up even more stuff for me to think about in relation to him. I'm not trying to attack him just understand him. For me he is like a many faceted diamond - fascinating, dazzling, infinitely complex. Note I use the present tense. It's not that I believe he's alive, I don't, it's just that I never met him, I don't know him as a physical entity. He will always be an ethereal presence in my life - an 'is' not a 'was'!

I have a chance to go and see the film again tonight with some friends. I'll let you know if I succumb...