“Which is to say the work has changed. The TMZ-led, wall-to-wall coverage of Jackson’s last hours proved to be an augur of what, by August, was being dubbed the “Summer of Death”—a phenomenon abetted if not entirely created by the ascendance of Twitter, where user avatars tinted green in solidarity with Iran’s dissenters solemnly announced the passing of everyone from David Carradine to DJ AM to Gidget the Chihuahua. Anyone who blogged for a living in 2009 got used to writing eulogies on a nearly weekly basis, as both the favored information-delivery systems and page-view incentives bent inexorably toward the dead. Ellie Greenwich. Vic Chesnutt. Jack Rose. Chris Feinstein. Jerry Fuchs. Suzanne Fiol. Mary Travers. Dickie Peterson. Mr. Magic. Beau Velasco. Roc Raida. Rashied Ali. Les Paul. John Hughes. Titus Glover. Steven Wells. Koko Taylor. Jay Bennett. Lux Interior. Randy Bewley. Ron Asheton. And Jim Carroll, whose “People Who Died” began playing in my head sometime in July, months before my father mailed me Carroll’s Times obituary and asked, “Two years ahead of me at Trinity, the quarterback of our football team (Gil Scott-Heron was the quarterback for our opponents at Fieldston). Does he make it to the Voice website?” He did, of course. As always, Michael Jackson was at the vanguard, providing the ur-death that gave a grim year its unifying theme.”
A thing I wrote two years ago (the worst kind of “thing I wrote,” I know) and have been thinking about a lot lately.
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