Man on the Moon In Memory of Michael Jackson
I never understood how it could be possible for NASA to lose the original footage of the first moon landing. Not that it ever really occupied my thinking: my obsession with outer space is strictly limited to the pages of science fiction novels, and the moon is a mere blank disk to me, that I have used to my own, private, advantages. Often, the moon doesn’t even exist to me, or I take its presence for granted. I rediscover the moon every 29.5 days, when it is in full shape and reminds me of the satellite that it is. These nights, I look at it, and will reflect, but only momentarily, about my own place in the universe. It is as if the moon stores my reflections onto its lunar surface, like it were a hard drive, where it is saved for retransmission into my thoughts a month later.
If it wasn’t for my own nocturnal explorations on the web, or for an avid readership of newspapers, that I found out about this incredible fuck-up of NASA. I stumbled across it in a wonderful and captivating publication of artist duo Bik Van der Pol; a small book devoted to an overlooked moon rock in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. I should ask them if they too have ever experienced this full moon existentialism to some extent.
But it is not art that I wish to talk about, though I am grateful to Bik Van der Pol for implanting this image of a lost uncategorized tape floating somewhere in the infinite space of the Goddard Space Flight Center archives, in Maryland, U.S.A. I don’t want to talk about this material proof of history, either: of course we will never lose the images of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon — it is all over YouTube and, undoubtedly on videotapes that have been transferred and digitized to cd to dvd to blu-ray and what have you. No, instead I want to take a moment to travel into the dark space of fuck-up and failure. And — who knows — into the illuminated space of the set-up.
A fuck-up however, to begin with, should never be mistaken for a set-up. Did NASA ‘lose’ the footage of the first moon landing because, within the frames of this motion picture, the future would some day discover and come to witness what had in fact been the first studio landing? Was it a fuck-up in disguise? I don’t know. Perhaps we should talk about that at full moon, around a campfire. Fact is, the theory of failure is much more appealing to me. To this marvelous idea that, despite technology, Americans (and aren’t we all Americans when in front of our TV’s?) are unable to really capture history. I don’t blame them for it. One only needs to imagine the immense opening-up of possibilities that arise if we would find peace with this; with the fact that the ever-increasing media coverage of our lives and of the ones that have ceased to live, only succeeds in covering up the truth—in adding something on top of it.
I recall the first moon landing very clearly. It was dark, some time very late at night where I was at, when the footage was transmitted live onto television. Apollo 11 slowly descended and approached a murky surface of grey cheese. On board, the crew commented upon what we were watching—what they saw with their own eyes. I remember thinking these men were far too calm to be the first to have soon accomplished a visit to the moon, an accomplishment that would propel these astronauts into immortality. But then again, astronauts are trained to behave like that. I don’t have to remind you of what was said when Armstrong set foot, or rather, bounced on and off the cheese.
For a moment, we could clearly see a reflection in Armstrong’s visor, a reflection that captured what Armstrong himself was looking at (this intrigued me most)—but all in all, the image that appeared on the TV-screen and that was into living rooms around the globe was too dark (sometimes too light) and grainy to comprehend. I couldn’t tell whether I was looking at a man in a space- or diving suit. To me, Armstrong might as well have been walking onto the deepest bottom of the ocean, which would be a giant leap for humankind as well, if you think about it. Yes, I remember it vividly: it took place 11 years before I got born.
Does this make me a faker or a fucker? A loser, perhaps, because my birth came too late: a decade after the fact? Michael Jackson was all three of them, and yet, and precisely because of this, he was a king. He had a nose, so to speak, for failure and playful deceit. He fucked up, many times, in the public eye of the world. (The image of a baby dangling over a balcony comes to my mind). He spent most of his life on the fictional estate of Neverland. He showed us how to slide backwards, and how to lean our bodies towards the ground in a 45° angle position, beyond our center of gravity—something that astronauts can only dream of. .
As a child, I tried this endlessly and in vain in front of the mirror. At least his set-up never got lost, nor will be: he patented his leaning shoes in 1992, file number 5255452. He proved that race has nothing to do with color, and still fucks with people’s mind when, today, he is remembered as a black icon; the African-American King of Pop. He certainly is the first white man to be honored in Harlem, on 125th Street, or: Martin Luther King Blvd, in front of the Apollo Theatre.
I was there, too, to pay homage to the King of my childhood. My boyfriend and I bought a t-shirt at one of the improvised vendor stalls sprawling around the makeshift memorial. It is a white shirt with several Michael Jacksons, at different ages in different arrested dance poses of his life. ‘R.I.P.’ it reads. We were not sure whether we were commemorating the man or our youth of shaking our bodies down to the ground, without worries or concerns, when we danced in peace.. When we approached the Apollo, an incredible feeling of being there came over me. A crowd was dancing and singing and I wanted to be part of it. Part of that moment where the leaning shoes still puzzled me.
It took a moment for us to take in what we saw, or rather, didn’t see: somewhere in the crowd was the epicenter of activity. We couldn’t see what was going on there. Around this epicenter was a circle of people who were thinking: ‘Wow! We are part of this!’ around which formed another circle that thought it was part of this, around another crowd gathered, and so on, until it swallowed us, too. I tried to reach the epicenter to become a first-hand witness, but failed. A little later—we were now at the sidewalk, slightly removed from the spectacle—the crowd opened up for a CNN camera crew to walk out, toward us. Before I could decide whether I wanted to be part of that, too, the camera had already caught me in its sight. I moved away, out of the picture. My boyfriend didn’t. He jumped into what became a secondary epicenter, and did something unforgivable: he pointed his camera to the camera of CNN, breaking with the magic of the moment, with the illusion that we were an authentic crowd of authentic witnesses of history. You are not supposed to witness the camera. Americans know this—they seem to know how to perform naturally in front of it. They use it to their own advantages, so that the whole event of history becomes a set-up, always a re-enactment of calculated quotes, of seeing people from the right angle.
In his later life, Michael Jackson never got the angle or lightning right, it would always expose the incredible misdemeanor inflicted upon him, and people loved that. People love to see how others fail in front of a camera—artistically this goes back as far as the first slapstick movies. A man of extremes, Michael Jackson made an art out of failure. It didn’t make him more human, as usually is the case when people expose their vulnerability. No, it made him un-human, immortal—which is why the world, I think, is so shocked with his death. Perhaps he made us feel more real. His final failure, not cardiac arrest but the series of fifty concerts that were about to take place but never will take place, seems to be his best work of art: a grand failure that makes ‘This Is It’ his most legendary performance; one of mythical proportions that will propell him into immortality, after all. Failure is a productive force—this is why it doesn’t really matter whether Neil Armstrong actually set foot on the moon, should you doubt that. Or, whether I failed to be a witness of that, or not.
Even though I was there at the Apollo to pay homage to Michael Jackson, I was never a witness of what actually took place. When I got home later that day, I watched CNN to see whether it had succeeded in capturing my presence after all. It did, but it had also captured something else that I already suspected when I had been there earlier that day: it had witnessed the set-up, the fact that all these people, rather than being part of the moment, wanted this moment to be part of history. This is how history is being produced, these days. The epicenter of the crowd was not the crowd itself, but a single young kid, 7, maybe 8 years old, crotch-grabbing his way into history. Around him were crowds of people that encouraged him and that took pictures, around which were crowds of people that encouraged this crowd to encourage and take pictures of what they failed to see, and so on. We were all there to encourage others to see something we ourselves failed to see, and that was the magic of the moment—a playful deceit of an experience that was always already lost, or better, kept out of sight. The kid, of course, was the true witness of the event, the kid that was born two decades after Thriller, only slightly younger than Michael Jackson of the Jackson Five. I failed to see that.
Did we, the crowd at Apollo Theatre, fuck up? Or did we set this up for a future to come, so that one day I can tell my children: ‘Look! See, I was part of that! I was there when it happened!’ Fact is, I have only today understood why the NASA could fuck up so badly; only today I learned that failure is inevitable in the rise of magical moments. “A simulacrum,”—Baudrillard would correct me, but he is dead himself, and isn’t the simulacrum a magical thing in itself, a trick that pops out of a hat, a thing that we have agreed to believe to see with our own eyes?
For the first time I can think of, the Internet failed. Google crashed when the world looked en masse for a sign of death of Michael Jackson. So once again, I find myself relying upon my TV—the rubbish of American broadcasting now interrupted by a repeatedly moonwalking Michael Jackson. Sliding backwards, as if he could take it all back and start over again. He never failed to do that, never failed to perform in the public eye. Illuminated, and under the flickering lights of the Apollo Theatre, the dancing kid performs and will always be performing. It’s a matter of seconds for the Apollo to lift off, leaving Harlem for the moon, the cheese that sparked—sparkled—people’s imagination and theories of conspiracy. Michael Jackson, skin-enlightened King of Pop—may he be the first to walk on the moon.
Postscriptum:
Three days after Michael’s death, on June 29, media reported that the missing moon landing tapes may have been found. Perhaps this is, at this point, not an obituary to Michael Jackson, but to failure itself.
Moosje Goosen
