So, I made a promise about writing on the internet again. This is not my best work, and obviously I shouldn’t be telling you that right at the top, but the idea is to get things going again. I’m thinking two posts a week. Haven’t picked days yet. Stay posted.

On a flight to Portland, watching This Is It on the teeny JetBlue screen. The disclaimer here is that I was never a Michael Jackson fan–I never got an impression of him uncolored by the freakshow of his public image. Last summer, while I was moving out of my apartment in Brooklyn, a girl in high-tops flung open the door of her family’s brownstone and yelled down the block, “The King of Pop is dead!” And that was the first time I’d thought about Michael Jackson for awhile, and what I thought was that it seemed to me the action of a merciful God, not to let this man live on inside a ruined body and life.

And it’s weird in light of that reaction to see that he was still comparatively able so close to his death. It’s weird to see him as anything other than a symbol of some ruinous strangeness. Because the ruinous strangeness is there, but it’s not crowded everything else out. This is not to say that he’s not nuts; he is. “Are we misunderstanding something here?” says the director, and the white-suited star says, “We’re sizzling.” Or: “Just bathe in the moonlight,” he instructs during a session on musical arrangement, “just let it simmer,” and he raises his shoulders and his hands like he’s going to lose it. This might once have sounded like the special language of a specially gifted artist, but now it sounds more like a set of hollow touchstones. He’s struggling: “I’m trying to adjust to inner ears. When you’re raised using your own aural, your own auditory ears.” The people he works with are tiptoeing around him. But he’s creatively engaged. He’s making decisions. And perhaps most importantly, he’s going through the motions. He can still make his body and his voice do those things well enough that you remember how impressive they are.

There’s something remarkable about the way he moves, something about it totally unlike the way the men around him move, all the dancers, every one carefully culled and choreographed. None of the other dancers collapse into themselves the way he does. He’s less hard-hitting than they are in his movements, and I don’t think this is just because he’s near to death. His movement seems to come from a different place in him than it comes from in the other men. Their motion seems to emanate from some essential kinetic core, while his is like an external force rippling through him. Which has sort of always been the thing about him, right? That his movement is sort of magic and inexplicable? (The obvious example here is the Moonwalk.)

Dancing isn’t a display of strength for him, and it’s not a performance of masculinity. It’s not exactly that there’s nothing sexual to the way he moves, or nothing sexy (although he’s unquestionably less sexy, in this degraded state, than he was) but there’s absolutely nothing interactive in the sexuality in his performance. When he touches a female dancer’s pulsing thigh, it might as well be her shoulder. When his movements trace hers, it’s not sexy; there’s nothing vibrating between them. His is a solitary kind of charisma.

This isn’t exactly new–I think of him in the “Thriller” video and there’s absolutely no sexual chemistry between him and the girl, whoever she is. So there’s that as something that’s constant, but there’s also something that’s been lost in comparison to the Michael Jackson of yore. The major difference, I think, is that he no longer seems to be enjoying himself. There’s a loss of a certain buoyancy. He’s less light on his feet than he used to be, of course, and less fluid, but I think the most crucial loss is of this kind of driving energy. It’s hard to tell how much that’s reinterpretation in light of hindsight, or reinterpretation in light of his public image–our sort of inability to trust the intention behind his motion, and thus to read it as authoritative.

More devoted people than I have tried to solve this problem. What I can’t figure out is whether or to what extent the charisma and the crazy are inextricable from one another. And as much as this is falling back on something really uninsightful and cheap, he’s just so interesting. What was it that he meant?