my baby's always dancin'

I honestly have really never cared that much about Michael Jackson—never detested him or loved him, just duly noted his talent and influence and recent weirdness all from a comfortable distance—so I've experienced his death and everything that's come since like it happened to a close friend of a close friend, recognizing the loss and the absence and sorrow of everyone else but not really feeling it personally for my self. But two things have really broken through the haze and hit me hard.

The first was Joan Acocella's New Yorker piece about Jackson as a dancer. Of all the so many things about him that had been rendered into caricature before I was able to develop my own idea of who and what he was, the dancing seems foremost—the moonwalk, the crotch grab. Growing up in the 90s, I think I knew about those things before I really even knew his name. But Acocella really teases out all the nuances of his skills and how he presented himself as a dancer throughout his career, and I felt I understood him in a whole new way after reading it.

The second is this video for The Jacksons' "Blame it on the Boogie" which I just sat stone-still watching all of on BET (which is having an all MJ, all the time would-be birthday celebration for him this weekend, so I'm catching up). The cheesiness is remarkable—it's like whoever made it had just discovered that motion-effect the day before and was just like, "Yeah yeah, let's just do... a lot of that!"—but somehow, despite everything, Michael Jackson is totally and obviously a star, way greater than all the polyester suits and the awful sparkly star sweater-vest. You can just see it in how he moves, even though he's hardly even dancing there.

I can hardly walk sometimes, so this ability seems absolutely magical to me.