The House Next Door

by Ryland Walker Kinght

Much like our Editor Emeritus, House contributor Steven Boone is a fine video essayist. He's more of a collage artist than MZS, and he crafts a dense field of sounds and images and words and, yes, negative space. His latest piece, "MOONWALK: THE ADAPTATION," is part advocacy, part fan's enthusiasm, part history project, part speculative research, and wholly original. I think all of us aspiring video artists/essayists can learn from Steve's example. He makes these things on the cheap, with sanctions only from God, as he lets us know at the close. Fair use is a term for materials, and surely apt, but, boy, it seems too small for something like this that stops smoke mid-air to show the cloud-cover-cloak of hurt piled on that elephant flogged into a circus corner of pills and plastic surgery by tabloid pageantry. Of course David Lynch could make the movie.

Here's what Steve's got to say, from his original post at BIG MEDIA VANDALISM:

It all comes down to what you believe, because none of us knew the man. I believe Michael Jackson was a good guy. I believe he never harmed anyone's child. I believe he was one of those rare people who tried to apply his otherworldly talent to healing some of the basic, eternal problems of humanity. I believe he was a great man of strong constitution and boundless vision. I believe that the incessant lies told about him were his indirect murderer. MOONWALK is the autobiography he wrote in 1988. I believe David Lynch is the filmmaker who should make the inevitable MOONWALK movie. Lynch's capacity for empathy; his ability to describe alienation, suffering and loneliness in spiritual, visual terms; his American ear; his understanding of corporate show business as a place where dreams are nourished with candied arsenic... make Lynch the best equipped among marquee-value auteurs to say something vital about Michael's life and death.

_____________________________________________________
"Link for the Day": Each day the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.