The winners of LIVE FOREVER The Michael Jackson Monument Competition. I’d like to go to Foreverland…
The Daily Death: When A Celebrity Dies Every 15 Minutes
In the future, a famous person will die every fifteen minutes. Already it’s happening. The ascent of the microcelebrities, the 24 hour news cycle, citizen journalism, and our darkest fantasies all collide on Twitter now. The website’s question “What are you doing?” sometimes feels more like “Who died today?”
Every day on Twitter, news of another death. Les Paul, John Hughes, Farrah Fawcett, those big names, but also the editor at this publication, the founder of this startup, the people who we might not all know, but someone you know knew them and they are using the space to remember them.
Sure, Maria Shriver’s euology made me sit up straighter and think I want to be like that. But, I mean, was I supposed to be shocked that Eunice Kennedy passed on? I guess it’s small talk of a darker sort. You could talk about the weather or whose heart stopped.
Sometimes I feel like I don’t want to sign on Twitter, precisely for that reason. What if David Cronenberg died? Or Bill Callahan? Sophia Coppola, Rachel Maddow, Tilda Swinton, anyone I like.
Although you don’t even have to be a fan to feel affected by the death of a celebrity. Something about Dash Snow really hit me hard and I had a few dark days thinking about it. Perhaps because it felt so retro — the overdose — those kind of tragedies used to happen all the time in the 90s. I have as many friends now with babies as I had friends who were junkies when I was a teenager. It’s a relief, but sometimes I miss the high stakes of things.
Michael Jackson and Bubbles by Jeff KoonsThen there’s Michael Jackson. The Twitter crashing, diverting attention from Iran, OMGWTF?!?! death. Now as the smoke has cleared, when I see his image in TV clips it feels like he’s still alive. He’s so far removed for our everyday existence, living a life as though written by a pathological liar (Lou Ferrigno as his personal trainer, midnight buying blitzes on eBay, the nose that disappeared from the mortuary, and Gunther von Hagens friendship, among the countless strange things)
I wrote a short story a few years ago — a science fiction mystery — about a computer programmer hired by a gossip glossy to design software to help them find actresses wearing the same dress for their “who wore it best” feature. Instead he becomes obsessed with the like clockwork weekly deaths of nubile teenage singer/actresses.
I’m going to spoil the ending because I wrote it three, almost four years ago and it’s lingering unread by anyone but me as a text file on my desktop. Plus, with things like TinEye now, the matching software MacGuffin feels a little dated.
So, he uses the software to find that no fewer than 25 of the girls died in the same unusual shape — their arms and legs contorted oddly. The causes of death varied — car accident, overdose, plane crash, flu, cancer; but the shape of their bodies were the same.
A number of adventures lead the protagonist to a manufacturing center where he finds a secret assembly line building pneumatic female androids. Tomorrow’s stars.
Since every time the newest Miley dies, her song is number one for the rest of the week, music corporations eventually decided to build popstars rather than breed them. Planned obsolescence of celebrity. The title of the story is “The Daily Death,” after a morning TV program they watch that is simply rattling off every dead celebrity that day like an irreverant speeded up version of Stephanopolous’ “In Memoriam.” (The story was to be a modern update to The Stepford Wives. If enough of you ask, I might clean it up and post it here as a pdf.)
I wrote this in 2007:
SKEPTICISM IS the natural response to all web content. If you read about Owen Wilson’s suicide attempt online, your first reaction was likely that of disbelief. Rumored “suicides” of everyone from Winona Ryder to Jaleel White were debunked in the same minute they were spread, and yet, there seems to be no end to these kinds of morbid lies.
On the Internet, mourning has surreal or even sanctimonious undertones, especially for those who only knew the deceased as a web presence. It could be because emails and blogs are the worst places to communicate sincerity. You can easily alt-tab from a deceased person’s website to view “LOLcats,” or you might get an instant message “ZOMG, I got sooo drunk last nite.” The time-shifts that are the natural web-crawling experience prevent us from ever really dwelling on a tragic experience.
(from The Web is the Worst Place to Grieve)
I still think the web has the capacity to bring out the best and the worst in us. We’re going to look back at the spectacle of Jade Goody’s wedding earlier this year and think how innocent it was, how damn near respectful people were to her and her family. It’s all downhill from here. Death is just something you think about until the next 140 character tweet appears.
“The Autopsy of Michael Jackson” and “The Presentation” by Dana Schutz. Found via Hrag Vartanian and MRod.
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