Michael Jackson is gone and I’m not sad. I guess that makes me as much of a freak as he was, given the massive media explosion of coverage on a wretch of a man whose megalomania apparently knew no bounds. I will try my best in the coming days and weeks to avoid the sycophantic rubbish from fanatics that will inevitably follow his timely demise. No doubt these same fanatics will queue through the tears to retrieve their ticket money from the cancellation of 50 miming events, er, sorry – concerts. Now that’s dedication!

And let’s not forget his own admission of sleeping with children – his grooming and patronage of their parents beforehand was classic predator behaviour. Remember how he sat in court exclaiming “The pyjamas don’t fit – you must acquit!”, only to walk away scot-free? OK, maybe I’m getting confused with another famous trial there, but he did walk away from very strong allegations of child abuse. At the very least it was inappropriate – even Peter Pan didn’t feel up Wendy or the other kids – maybe TinkerBell got some but that was purely between consenting magical practitioners!

Lest we forget his frivolous lifestyle, the wasting of an entire fortune, the pretentious costumes and lavish spending sprees. His earnings propped up his abusive family, their entourage, the several religious groups he affiliated himself with (Jehovah’s Witness, Scientologists, Mormons and probably some sect of Islam in his latter days), Paul McCartney and Richard Starkey, Quincy Jones and entourage, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, bubbles, blanket, Debbie Roe, Lisa Marie Presley and entourage, Uri Geller and countless other friends, sycophants, cling-ons and well wishers. The modicum of sympathy I feel for the man now extends to these poor souls who now have to find an equally barmy patron.

As an artist, well, I can hardly reconcile the words “Jackson” and “artist” in the same sentence. Despite being widely credited as a writer on a lot of his own albums, when you see who actually played the instruments he is rarely on the list of musicians, but often credited with “arrangements”. In modern recording studio parlance that usually means he had very little real musical talent.

And finally, lest we forget, remember that little black kid singing “Ben”? He turned into a little white dude singing “it don’t matter if you’re black or white”. Apparently irony wasn’t one of his strong points either.

Bah humbug.

MJ-RIP (lest we forget)

We normally only see Saturn from the “sun-side”, but the Cassini probe recently took this sublime image from the far side of Saturn looking back towards the sun. And with Saturn eclipsing the sun we see the rings in a way we never have before. Firstly you’ll notice how translucent the rings are when we see them through direct light and not the reflected light that usually illuminates them. Secondly you’ll see the outer rings which are normally not visible, but this view of the “F-rings” lets you see exactly the sheer scale involved.
And that little dot on the left between the regular rings and the F-ring? That’s us on earth that is!!!

This is obviously a composite image of the earth at night. What struck me about this pic is that it speaks volumes about the global distribution of wealth versus the distribution of human population.

Our nearest galactic neighbour – the Andromeda Galaxy. I just love the resolution and detail of this photo from Oct 2002. The apparent tranquility of this scene belies the fact that a super-massive black hole resides at the center of this and most other galaxies, including our own Milky Way. At once the black hole both supports the galaxy with a gravitational center and violently consumes it, releasing vast quantities of energy in the x-ray and Gamma-ray spectrum.

Many of you will be aquainted with Brian Eno in some fashion, from his formative years in Roxy Music, or his groundbreaking production on many Talking Heads records (especially on “Fear Of Music” and “Remain In Light“), through to his numerous other collaborations with musical luminaries like David Bowie, Robert Fripp (King Crimson) and John Cale (Velvet Underground). Eno is a typical modern day polymath, so to talk more about him here (and trust me, there is MUCH more) is beyond the purpose and scope of this post. His Wikipedia profile is HERE to get you started.

On the other hand you may not think you know Will Wright, but anyone who’s played any of  ”The Sims” series of games will know much more about him than they realise. This conversation is loosely based around Wright’s demonstration of his latest gaming masterpiece, Spore, for which Eno “created” the music using generative composition tools.

Oh, there’s Cellular Automata on display here too!!!