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Pop Culture
Jan 08, 2025, 06:28AM

You Pay Your Five Bucks

A 1982 Interview Magazine interview with pop star Michael Jackson vs. a 2020 Brooklyn Rail interview with light artist Helen Pashgian.

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Michael Jackson: We get on the phone and we just gossip, gossip, gossip. I was kind of scared.

Helen Pashgian: Three hours, no freeways. (Laughter) Little two lane roads, shortcuts.

Jackson: You just feel like you can’t get away.

Pashgian: Yes, and particularly at the coast.

Jackson: But I don’t go many places, I don’t know many places.

•••

Pashgian: Yes, two or three people have said nothing for a long time and then they begin to cry.

Jackson: The ram is called Mr. Tibbs and the fawns are Prince and Princess.

Pashgian: The differences are very, very subtle. Of what you see.

Jackson: Especially when you really believe it and it’s not like you’re acting.

Pashgian: Part of it looks that way because there are so many buildings that are white and then there’s so much metal, hundreds of thousands of cars on the freeways—metal glinting. Somebody is using it as a coffee table or something.

•••

Jackson: You pay your five bucks to get in and sit there and you’re in another world.

Pashgian: And if the lens is formed correctly, you should see just the color in space, with the edge essentially disappearing so that you can’t determine where the work ends and where the space around it begins, as it were.

Jackson: Oh, yes. It’s magic. Standing there watching it and becoming part of the scene. Daydreaming most of the day.

Pashgian: I just taped something on the floor as a kind of base and made a pancake that was around 5 feet in diameter.

Jackson: I’m a vegetarian.

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