benjaminteicher.com – freelance writer

Jackson was a man who symbolised glamour to every ten year old whose world was bordered by splinter riven fences and whose stage was a yellowing lawn under a blue sky.

There was sun in my eyes as we passed through the automatic doors at a concrete box shopping centre at surfer’s paradise. My brother and I understood that mum would buy us both a cassette. I was giddy. At the age of seven the only cassettes that made up my collection were juvenile: Peter Coomb and things with names like The Jellybean Jar. This was my first venture into popular culture.

Reflecting enduring divides in white fancies for black music, I purchased Dangerous while Josh settled on Prince’s Purple Rain. I remember that the cover seemed like an incandescent whole rather than a set of elements. I can evoke only its aura in my mind, not the detail. And I remember the hiss of my cassette walkman more clearly than the music itself.

Some days later, my brother gently asked and then vigorously demanded that we swap Dangerous for Purple Rainthe tapes. But I resisted. I think that this was for me a formative event in the emergence of an independent psyche.

For many years he remained a figure of intense fascination. So intense was our attachment that I can still remember the pain I felt as the Jackson myth slowly capsized as the weight of rumour gradually convinced even the most hardened twelve year old Jackson fan that there was some truth to the claims that he was having sexual relations with children, that through plastic surgery Jackson was trying to assimilate the appearance of a white man, that he slept in an isolation chamber…

He became a figure of ridicule, emerging into our awareness now and then through yet another sleazy crisis. As we became adults we cared less and less about him, until he was revived for boozy, rowdy house parties, a convergence of pop tastes with the sensibilities of the musical sophisticate, pretentious twenty year olds dancing alongside their cruder companions in harmony.

So I was sad when he died, not so much because I am touched by the emotional intensity of the celebrity cult, but for the spotlight each song shines on disparate fragments of my past.

I watched La jetée recently and was captivated. Oddly enough, the experience closed a time loop that I’d been caught in since some time in the late nineties.

We used to visit a comic store down an old arcade in the suburbs, myself and mike, and maybe some others on occasion. I had little interest in comics, more of a fascination in Mike as some kind of brooding teenager par excellance.

Phil, who ran the store, would talk for ages to us. He was, apparently, a University science drop out. It seems peculiar that he would want to spend so much time with people of our age, not peculiar in that sense. Just odd.

He insisted that we watch this magnificent film, told in photos, about time travel, upon which the Terry Gilliam film Twelve Monkeys was based. This is La jetée.

La jetée depicts a man sent to the past in order to save the future. The realness of his world is never firmly established, he could be mad. In any case his obsession with the past, and of a woman in it, eventually has him killed.

So, I’ve been returning to this moment, in which I am advised to see this film, in which my interest is aroused over and over for probably a decade, and I’ve come close to watching the film many, many times, and have returned to this moment over and over, but have been stopped by some sort of deep-seated reluctance and dread, like Freud, who for years could not bring himself to visit Rome, a city that held such fascination to him.

Anyway, the loop has been closed, along with its more recent sub-loop, in which my brother also advises me to watch this eery and sad piece.

As for the myriad others, I live in them still.