Category Archives: obituaries

Casey Johnson and Brittany Murphy: Obit Crit in the Age of Celebrity

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By the time they’d Made It, they were already dead.
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Casey Johnson may have been a dazzling firecracker of a socialite, and Brittany Murphy a talented, popular actress, both of them rich, attractive, and famous, but there is nothing they achieved in their short, glamorous lives that could have brought them anything approaching the level of fame they reached in death. Once they had fame, they had cultural significance, and in this age of iNarcissism cultural significance is nothing more nor less than the opportunity to examine ourselves.

Brittany Murphy: 18,400,000 Google hits, but only 9,630,000 if you remove results with “Dead” or “Death.”

Casey Johnson: 5,460,000, or 4,930,000 if you remove the ones with “Dead” and “Death,” but she’s gaining on Brittany. She moves fast, for a necronaut.

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“Just noticed that @caseyjonsonJnJ gained roughly 3000 followers since dying. She’s dead you idiots! Thus, she won’t be tweeting anymore.”

TheCajunBoy on Twitter

Some people will do anything for attention. And boy howdy, do they ever get it.

“It’s so boring to do nothing. Believe me, I’ve tried it. It’s, like, how many days a week can you actually go shopping? You get burned out. And you feel like shit. You think, What have I ever done to alter this world? What will people say? ‘Oh, she had a lot of shoes’?”
Casey Johnson, September 24, 1979 – January 4 (estimated), 2010

Well, now we know what people will say. They will say, in fact, nearly anything, as long as it skews strongly toward the poles of vicious snark or pie-eyed sanctimony. Both offer the warm embrace of community. In the orthodoxy of the church of celebrity, one is either a Gonzo Heretic or a True Believer, and there is no room in the commentariat for sweetly becoming discretion or Victorian scruples. The Silent Majority remains aloof, silent and safely out of the fray, betraying themseleves only by a faint phosphor trail as they page quickly past the comments. It’s mutual. We don’t want their kind ‘round here.

A quick glance through the comments on gossip blogs leads one to conclude the mainstream news sites have been smarter or at least luckier than blogs, free as most of them are from the yawning, existential abyss of the comment box and the braided streams of saccharine toxicity in the trailing threads, dangling off the posts like a comic villain’s seemingly-endless, sputtering bomb fuse.

On the one hand:

OH the pathos of having too much.

OOOOHHHHHH the pathos.

and

[S]he was raised to do one thing: spend money. She had no other contribution to offer the world. […] She was raised as veal with a black Amex.

Her life was a dollar sign and a camera flash.

And on the other:

I know, I know, but Brittany Murphy had diabetes. It turns out, diabetes is a perfectly manageable health condition today. It becomes considerably less manageable when you’re doing lines all day. […] [E]veryone I talk to seems so shocked that Brittany Murphy could have actually died of a drug overdose. It’s all I’ve heard all day: “She was so pretty! She was so cute! I loved her in Clueless! She couldn’t have really died from drugs.”

And, yes,

“[…] [O]ut of respect I wouldn’t rant about her being a cocaine addict. I love King of the Hill and she is the voice of Luanne. I love Brittany Murphy, she was so talented. I find it so shocking that she is dead. As weird as her marriage seemed, I thought that she would end up living a happy life with her husband.”

And why did you think these things, my friend? Because you need to think them. We need to think them.

Depending on who we think we are, if we care at all about the The Celebrity-Industrial Complex even recreationally, we need to believe:

a) that celebrities are out there living beautiful lives that give us hope that somewhere Prince Charming and whichever Disney Princess he ended up with (wasn’t that all of them?) are living happily ever after, probably in Brad and Jen’s old house in Beverly Hills

or

b) that celebrities are out there, lolling, dazed, on Charon’s yacht, being serviced by fifteen pox-ridden Gucci models while chopping Marie Antoinette’s tiara into glittery white lines and snorting them up a straw made of their own hollowed-out femurs.

As a lifelong and semiprofessional Snarketarian, I’d love to smugly conclude that the dividing line between the two groups is an IQ of 100, with the snarksters on the plus side, but unfortunately for my ego that’s just not it. One of the most intelligent men on the internet is Stephen Fry, and he’s notoriously gentlemanly, even to professional vulgarian Jade Goody, who could hardly have been said to have deserved it.

“Jade lived life under a magnifying glass. Magnifying glasses magnify (obviously) but they distort and they burn.”

That they do. And if you look at them just right, they also reflect.

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Michael Jackson Stopped, Got Enough

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Michael Jackson, the late

Michael Jackson, the self-crowned King of Pop, is dead at the age of 50. Born an adorable, talented black boy, he died (apparently of heart failure, insert own bitter joke here) a bizarre creature somewhere between the aliens from Communion and Zombie Janice Dickinson, with a soupcon of pederasty for (as the kids say) flava. Alternately short of Money or Invincible, Black or White, Smooth Criminal or The Man, he remained a protean figure of scandal-scented mystery to his last days.

It’s just Human Nature to pursue a Pretty Young Thing, although his Monkey Business recreational tastes and pursuits brought him to the attention of the law on a regular basis. When finally confronted with the rap, he Beat It, claiming he and the boys were Just Good Friends who would Come Together in friendship. Known over the decades as a libel lawyer’s best patron (What More Can He Give?) when he felt Threatened, the eccentric musician had seemed in recent years to have turned around his notoriously aberrant behavior, although more cynical minds (like mine) figured that instead of pursuing free-range children, he’d just decided to grow his own: Blanket, Prince Michael, and Paris. Ah, the Lost Children.

I hope that, once his no-doubt vainglorious tomb is complete and he installed within it, Banksy can come up with something suitably memorable, although it’s hard to top that portrait. HIStory will judge him. Until that time, we have this, by DryHumourSteve:

His bones will given to the relatives of Joseph Carey Merrick

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Olive Riley, World’s Oldest Blogger, Goes Home

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RIP Olive Riley. You found your way home.

The Unstoppable Olive Riley

The Unstoppable Olive Riley

Olive Riley, unofficially, but probably, the world’s oldest blogger, died on Saturday at the age of 108.

Olive videoblogged and blogged from her hostel home and recently updated everyone on her move both from her self-hosted site to Blogspot and her move from more independent living to the nursing home in the same building. In her last weeks she complained of a bad cough and distress, but remained in high spirits, giving an impromptu concert for her new roommate and friends.

You can read her last post here. An excerpt:

Penny, who’s in the next bed to mine, had a visit one day this week from her daughter, who’s a professional singer. Guess what happened! She and I sang a happy song, as I do every day, and before long we were joined by several nurses, who sang along too. It was quite a concert!

Olive’s main blog is down at the moment, no doubt due to overuse, but it is located at The Life of Riley, http://www.allaboutolive.com.au/

Patron Saint of Procrastination?

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Father Adelir Antonio de Carli

Father Adelir Antonio de Carli

There’s no question Father Adelir Antonio de Carli was a good man. There’s no question Father De Carli was a nice man.

There’s no question that Father De Carli was a dumb man.

And now, there’s no question that Father De Carli, last seen in April headed out to sea carried by a bunch of helium-filled party balloons, is a dead man.

Father De Carli (name variously reported as De Capri as well), who was trying to beat the record for staying airborne via party balloons, has been found by the crew of a tugboat, hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic, which is, in a way, poetic: he’d been trying to raise money for a spiritual rest stop for those nomads of the landmass, truckers. Unfortunately, he’d been planning to travel inland, but Nature had other plans for him.

So, why am I being so mean about a nice fellow who took on grave personal risk and ridicule in the pursuit of the service of his god and his fellow man?

Because Father De Carli did not attempt learn to operate the GPS which was to relay his coordinates to trackers on the ground until after he was airborne.

From Gizmodo:

I need to contact someone who can teach me how to operate this GPS, so I can give the latitude and longitude coordinates, which is the only way that people on the ground can know where I am.

Now, as one who has always distrusted such devices on principal, and whose experiences with them have done nothing to dissuade me of my view of them as functionless Yuppie fear-sops and technofaith fetish amulets in the shape of bricks, I must say that even had the device functioned as such devices are known to do, it would have done nothing more useful than electrocute him when he hit the water, which would probably (in brutal retrospect) have been quicker than what ultimately happened.

May Father De Carli rest in peace, and may we all learn never to take off in a lawnchair pulled by a thousand helium balloons without proper preparation.

At least a windsock!

Father De Carli is airborne!

Father De Carli is airborne!

Happy 4th of July! Jesse Helms is Dead!

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Yay! Something everyone everywhere can celebrate today. America is free! Free of one of the most malevolent and powerful doctrinaire bigots it’s seen since Emancipation.

Let’s all sing along with Klaus Nomi, whom Helms would have hated on general principles, even though he’s not black. Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead!

There are some great comments over on Gawker, but it appears the site is down right now. Instead, let’s look at a sliver of what the Guardian had to say about him:

Senator Jesse Helms, member of the US Senate’s foreign relations committee for two decades and its chairman from 1995 to 2001, has died at the age of 86. To echo this newspaper’s memorable comment on the death of William Randolph Hearst, it is hard even now to think of him with charity…

He became one of the most powerful and baleful influences on American foreign policy, repeatedly preventing his country paying its UN contributions, voting against virtually all arms control measures, opposing international aid programmes as “pouring money down foreign rat holes”, and avidly supporting military juntas in Latin America and minority white regimes in Southern Africa.

In domestic politics he denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress”, voted against a supreme court justice because she was “likely to uphold the homosexual agenda”, acted for years as spokesman for the large tobacco companies, was reprimanded by the justice department and the federal election commission for electoral malpractice, and compiled a dismal personal record as a slum landlord…

Robert Pastor, whose ambassadorship to Panama was scuppered by Helms in 1995, commented that, “nothing Jesse Helms did in his entire career will enhance America’s national security more than his retirement.”

I wish the CBC had had the courage to call it like it actually was. For their mealymouthed obit, click here, although why would you?

Here are some quotes from Helms himself:

I was with some Vietnamese recently, and some of them were smoking two cigarettes at the same time. That’s the kind of customers we need!

I’m so old-fashioned I believe in horse whipping.

To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn’t have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.

Rest in place. Let’s build a monument bigger than the pyramid of Cheops on top of the bugger, lest he try to claw his way back.