Quick, Gimme an Obsession!

There was a segment today on TV3's "Ripley's Believe It Or Not!" featuring a German guy who has spent the last ten years of his life trying to become Michael Jackson. And he's not even black.

He has spent tens of thousands of Deutschmarks to undergo countless cosmetic surgery sessions, and now gets weekly doses of saline injected into his nose so his facial skin can hold the familiar shapes and contours for which he so desperately craves.

It made me think about that thing called 'drive'.



Emmanuel has this drive, this passion to not just mimick his idol, but to become him. Totally. The bloke has even gone so far as to renovate his entire home to what it is in Neverland, Califormia. Talk about a full-on compulsive obsession.

I know what it's like to be gripped by something. To become aware of an object, a condition, an objective, and to be consumed with the overwhelming need to acquire it, achieve it, reach it. The last time such a feeling came over me was about a year and a bit ago when Evelyn Hii at No Black Tie played a CD by the late singer Eva Cassidy. (Yes, mostly I lead a rather detached and aloof existence.)

In the deep dark cavern that is No Black Tie, the urgent, heart-rendering vocals of Eva singing a version of Sting's "Fields of Gold" sent me into a quiet frenzy. Later that night (or perhaps later that morning) I surfed over to amazon.com and ordered myself not just one but two of Eva's post-humously released albums.

I can't imagine having that grip on me ten years on, driving me to use skin-whiteming creams, to surrender to the scalpel so that I could have a neat little cleft under my chin, to weekly injections of saline into the sides of my nose.

OK so maybe there is no parallel here. Eva Cassidy was an unknown pub singer who never made a music video in her short life. On the other hand, Wacko Jacko almost monopolised the Billboard charts in the '90s.

While Eva's grip on me was purely aural, though she looked like she might have been quite a pert little blonde number, Michael however presented an awesome package. His music videos practically deified him. (Remember that "hands outstretched, wind-swept" pose in the "Black Or White" music video when Michael walks out of a wall of fire?)

While I do play her CDs often enough, I believe I've gotten over Eva -- which, come to think of it, makes me sound rather shallow.

I guess before we can be nicely and totally gripped by something, it must be that that something must seek to engage with most if not all of our faculties. Or it must be something that makes us believe it has engaged wth all our faculties. (Hence, we have what is known as event marketing?)

Its reality becomes so desired that we'll risk surpassing our credit limit to have it subsume us into its seductive embrace.

Emmanuel's on-going obsession with Michael Jackson might make him out to be a rather peculiar individual. But don't we all every now and again long for this or that, sometimes so badly that it hurts?

He has the guts to live his dream. I'm still figuring out what mine is.