you're so dead 11:14

yes, this is another blahg about Michael Jackson. But it's also about Farrah and Ed, but not so much Billy Mays.

This past week or so has been astonishing. So many dead celebs in such a short time. It hasn't made me question my own mortality (I'm sooo done with that), or even my parents' (haven't started yet). And it's not like their deaths are more significant or important than the lives of people I've never even heard of... except that they are.

People like Farrah and MJ and Ed McMahon were notable and already on the downslope of fame before I understood what fame was. These were our parent's celebrities. Yes, Michael Jackson reached the pinnacle of his career in the 80s, but he had been famous since the early seventies as part of the Jackson Five. Farrah and Ed were already history at that point, even though they remained cultural icons (and arguably still are).

Their collective passing represents something really important. The early cultural capital--the stuff that manifests itself as 'worth' something in culture--of Generation X is dying off. Old episodes of Charlie's Angels and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (also dead) will always be available, but the zeitgeist that gave those stories life is being snuffed out.

This is different than when someone goes before their time. Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin died with possibility looming over them. They were martyrs in this sense. Like Obi-wan, when they were struck down they became more powerful. Not so with Farrah, Ed, and MJ. Their deaths are the deaths of the spokespersons of traditional broadcast media. I mean, they were the birth of new television: music videos, late night satire, and sexy action shows. Back when that programming was genuine and 'innocent', and Gen-Xers stayed up late to peek at the dawn of the communication age through their TVs, Farrah, Ed, and MJ were like a trinity of face, voice, and crotch-grabbing spirit of the late twentieth century.

And now they're dead.

I guess this leaves us with fewer of the vestiges of the last media revolution. All that feathered hair and those rhinestone-covered gloves seem like empty props. "Here's Johnny"is so heavily referenced that it may not matter that the man who made those words famous in the first place is gone... but now that he is, are we free to reinvent them? Is the death of the forebarers of bland, homogenized, broadcast culture what we need to truly enter the tribal media of the internet?

I suppose that's my problem: I'm so wedged between the culture that everyone knew and the culture that everyone makes, that I need these symbolic deaths of the old to embrace a new childhood.

blog for joy 15:29

I'm the assistant editor now, of that little publication called Will.

There were some setbacks. Ads fell through. Articles fell through. The publication date for second issue kept getting pushed back.

I had done an interview with Centre for International Governance Innovation fellow, John Curtis about the economic shitstorm which never made it to print. Oh well.

In an act of desperation I emailed the publisher and told them that if the magazine was ever going to work, they'd need a dedicated editorial board to make it happen. I volunteered my services. I quit my dead-end mall job. I moved out of my parents' house. I got a place in uptown Waterloo. Now, I'm broke, the second issue is still languishing, and I'm doubling as a communications consultant for the publisher's other business.

At least I'm working in my field.

And I'm blogging again.

Lucky you.