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MAGIC, PURE AND SIMPLE

 
"Michael was magic, pure and simple. He was a man who believed in the goodness of mankind and embodied pure unconditional love for the world. [...] Michael believed in magic, he believed that we could change the world, and had such unconditional love that when you were around him, you couldn't help but believe it too." ~ KELLIE PARKER (Katie från Moonwalker)

MJ PUSHED HIMSELF

   
   
 
MJ would not stand for mediocrity. I only realized that I had adopted his work ethic a few years after I stopped working for him. Whenever I was tired and my heart was not into my work, I’d find myself thinking about how MJ pushed himself to maintain a high level of quality, and this made me not settle for “good enough” in my photo work. I always strove to achieve the best I was capable of producing, regardless of the circumstance or size of the job. I passed this onto my students over the years as motivation to achieve greater heights than they thought themselves capable. “Shoot for the stars, and if you don’t make it, at least you’ll land on the moon.” - Todd Gray

RETRO

 
Tack för länken! Här kan ni se ett avsnitt av "Retro" där de bland annat pratar om MJ.

R. KELLY BERÄTTAR

 
R. Kelly berättar historier om Mike under "Live listening Lounge"!

STAND-UP

 
Tack till anonym som tipsade om denna stand-up som Chris Tucker nyligen gjort!

MICHAELS KÖRLÄRARE

 
John Diggs, körlärare, berättar om hur det var att lära Michael köra bil.

DEEDS

 

A WAKE-UP CALL

INSPIRATIONAL

 
"That's what I loved about my uncle. You truly believed you could do anything when you were with him. He made you feel like that. He was so inspirational." ~ TAJ JACKSON

HE HAD EVERYTHING

 
"I could never dance like him. He had everything. He was where I realized can do-ness because he never lived with boundaries. He kind of lived with no time… I’ve not met many people like that, who don’t perceive parameters.
 

Sometimes they go too far and off the deep end but Michael was teetering on that line of genius and insanity and you’ve never seen anyone walking that tightrope for so long and he did. That man was a special one."

 

~ Pharrell Williams

WINDOW

    
    
 
Chris Tucker I see him every blue moon because he’s all over the world. Sometime we bump into each other when we are traveling. Last time it was in London and I knew Michael was in my hotel because everybody was outside yelling “MICHAEL MICHAEL” and I was mad because they were yelling at MY window, so I said: Michael is on the other side of the hotel!
 

Chris Tucker & Jackie Chan intervju 2007 @ Jimmy Kimmel

PSYCHOTIC

 
“I met Michael more than 20 years ago; I went to teach him meditation at Neverland. He was very shy, very introverted, but very curious about consciousness and spirituality. 

 

You know, while the world called him weird, he wondered why the world was so weird. He’d ask me, Why do people go to war? Why is there genocide? What’s happening in Sudan? Why have we killed the environment? Why is there racism and bigotry and hatred and prejudice? 

 

We talked about starving children in Mumbai, and he would start to cry. Or we’d start to talk about the trophy-hunting in Canada of the grizzly bear, and he would start to cry. In his mind, the world was psychotic.”

 

~ Deepak Chopra 

WHEN MICHAEL NEEDS US

 
 
Det här är definitionen av lojalitet och sann vänskap.

SMIRKING

(Michael fotograferad av Todd Gray, cirka 1981) 
 
While on tour, the Jacksons would reserve and secure a complete floor of the hotel and keep their individual doors unlocked, resulting in a sort of clubhouse atmosphere full of practical jokes. In this shot I had just entered Michael’s room and woken him up with the flash of my camera. Michael vowed that he would pay me back for the merciless wake-up call, and he did  Before that evening’s concert, Michael instructed me to be at the left side of the stage when he performed ‘She’s Out Of My Life’; he said he wanted to do “something special” and he wanted me there to photograph it. He wouldn’t say what — “Just be ready to get the shot.” In the middle of the song, he walked toward the foot of the stage, stopped directly in front of me, made eye contact, nodded his head slightly, signalling me to get ready, then dropped to the floor in anguish and cried out unexpectedly, “I’m so lonely — will somebody please come and touch me? I need you, come to me.” A huge wave of girls surged forward, and I was pinned between the girls and the stage, unable to even free my arms to take the shot. I looked up to see Michael smirking, a little twinkle in his eye. After the show in the limo, I said, “Oh, so you think you’re cute. I was crushed out there!” Michael replied, “What are you talking about?” Me: “You know what I’m talking about, Michael. You told me to stand in front of the stage and then called out to all those girls to rush the stage and trap me.” Michael: “You’re crazy, Todd. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” After more pressing, he finally said, “Todd, I don’t plan these things. The spirit just moves me and I do it without thinking.” — Todd Gray, fotograf

LET'S DO IT AGAIN, LET'S DO IT AGAIN

 

“There was a beehive up in the sound stage and they were falling onto that round circle thing and we were rehearsing. Michael came in and we were running, he was a little bit scared and Tony (Tony Fields) just went up and stamped it thinking ‘I’ll save you” and Michael was heartbroken because he killed a life. He said: ‘That bee had a soul too Tony’“

 

"I found him to be the hardest worker of anyone that I had worked with and I was fortunate to do many jobs, so I’ve worked with everybody and he just kept saying to me: ‘Let’s do again, let’s do again’. And if he did something incorrect he could be told. You know, a lot of divas can’t be corrected. I remember at the beginning of the shoot one day he had this, like a chocolate bar and I’m allergic to chocolate. I was like: ‘What is it?’ and he goes: ‘Oh, it’s carob’. At that time I didn’t know what carob was. I tasted it and I said: ‘Oh my God, I love that!’ Well, every day from that tiny conversation, every single day, he had a chef find me on the set and bring me a carob bar”

 

(Här kan ni lyssna till intervjun med dansarna bakom Captain EO)

EMMANUEL LEWIS OM MICHAEL

 
(Emmnauel Lewis är en dvärg, om ni inte förstår hur han kan vara så liten, han är 40+ här)

AND HE KNEW

 

Bill Whitfield: ..there was one memory that kept running through my mind, a conversation I’d had with Grace back at the Monte Cristo house when I first started working there. She and I were in the garage. I was putting together some of the security equipment, and Grace was at the little workstation she’d set up. Mr Jackson had told her to try and get in touch with somebody. 

 

She was getting frustrated and she said, The boss wants me to get in touch with this person, and I keep leaving messages, but nobody’s calling me back. It’s like he forgets sometimes that people don’t want anything to do with him after all this mess.“ I said, ”What mess? What are you talking about?“ 

 

The trial,“ she said. ” Since the trial, a lot of people just don’t call back anymore.“

 

She was giving me the heads up, filling me in on how things worked, like she often did. She started telling me about the days right after the trial was over. ”After he was acquitted,“ she said, ”we had a party at Neverland for him to celebrate, and nobody came.

Nobody?“

A few people,“ she said, ”but not many“.

She said they’d put together a guest list of all these friends and people Mr. Jackson had worked with over the years. They invited close to three hundred people. Maybe fifty showed up. And a lot of people who did come were people that worked for him. People that worked the grounds at Neverland. People from his lawyer’s office. People who were paid to be there. Everyone else called and said they couldn’t make it or they had other things planned.

And he knew,“ Grace said, ”He knew why they didn’t come. People called him and told that they loved him and that they were praying for him, but very few people would go public and say that they believed him. A lot of people act like his friends but not they’re not really his friends. If he’s not making money, they’re not really around.

- Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days

LIKE A WOUNDED ANIMAL

 
After one of the shows in Las Vegas, Joseph called a group meeting… However, Michael decided not to go.
Later, Joseph caught up with Michael as he was wandering through the casino of the MGM Grand. He tapped Michael on the shoulder. Michael glanced back, saw who it was, and continued walking. Joseph roared, ‘What the hell?’ He shouldered aside patrons in an effort to reach his son.
  ‘I remember it like it was yesterday,’a Jackson 5 fan who had gone to Las Vegas to see the show. ‘Michael was dodging his father all over the casino, hopping around like a jackrabbit, trying to outrun Joseph. ‘You listen to me,’ Joseph demanded. Then he grabbed Michael by the arm and yanked him over so roughly even I almost stepped in. I had no idea what was happening, what the problem was, but I couldn’t help but watch.’
  Huck recalled that Joseph spoke softly, rapidly into Michael’s ear. Michael listened, his face a blank. Then, in mid-sentence, it seemed, he shook himself free of Joseph and pushed him away. 'Don’t you ever touch me again. Do you hear me?’ Michael’s voice could be heard above the din of the slot machines. People in the vicinity turned to stare and, upon recognizing him, began to whisper among themselves. No one came forward.
  ‘I never dreamed that Michael Jackson could raise his voice to his father, or to anyone else. I was shocked. He sounded hurt. When he shouted, it was an odd sound, like a wounded animal.
 
~ STEVEN HUCK (i Las Vegas under en Jackson 5-show)

DON'T BE AFRAID TO BE DIFFERENT

 
"One of the things he always told me was, don't be afraid to be different. In other words, when you have that desire, that drive, people are going to try to pull you away from that, and pull you closer to the pack to be 'normal.' And he was saying, It's O.K. to be that driven; it's O.K. to be obsessed with what you want to do. That's perfectly fine. Don't be afraid to not deviate from that. One of the books that he gave me that helped him communicate with me was "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," which was about that.
 

Beyond the genius of what he was, he was just a genuinely, genuinely nice person. He got me hooked on movies that I would normally never watch. Fred Astaire movies. All the old classics. I would never, never watch those. I remember my fiancée and I telling him we were getting married, and him just being really excited and actually just offering up the ranch to have our wedding there, because privacy was going to be an issue. We wanted to get married in a church, so that's what we wound up doing. But he made the offer. He was just a genuinely nice person who was exceptionally bright, exceptionally bright, and driven and talented. You mix those things together, man, you have Michael Jackson."

 

~ KOBE BRYANT

NAPKINS

 
Seconds before the camera flash went off, a Jackson’s aide rushed up to MJ and handed him a Sharpie pen and about 25 or so cocktail sized napkins into his “GLOVE” and then said “Hey Mikey….the promoter wants you to sign these”. I well remember the aide getting out of the way of the shot but MJ is looking straight at him and no….not too happy. More mad than sad. After the flashes of about 10 cameras went off, Michael just sorta’ said to anyone who could hear…”Don’t we have any regular pictures to sign? I mean c’mon man…NAPKINS????” Hahahahahahaha!!!!!! That’s the TRUE STORY of the look on his face in that picture. Up until then he was a very quiet yet pleasant superstar who was happy to talk about Gospel Music. This picture was taken on 7/31/81.
 
~ RUSTY GOLDEN (William Lee Goldens son)
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