180 Degrees

I’m sure that I should write some long expositional piece about why I haven’t posted in over 1.5 years and what I’m up to but the skinny is that I’m working as the asst. editor of Next Magazine by night and at my old desk job by day. I’m going to segue this blog into the random thoughts I have that don’t fit into the goddamn 140 character limit on my Facebook status and perhaps develop a following (yea, right Jackie). Today’s news of the death of designing Alexander McQueen sent the fb status world into a tizzy which I wanted to talk about:

I feel the grief-mongering in the United States over the past year has almost reached the fevered pitch of the fear-mongering that took place post-9/11. Watching people mourn over the passing of someone they most likely did not know nor comprehend beyond the Bad Romance video is both entertaining & frightening as it seems to be becoming a trend. Day like this make me glad I don’t have cable. I can only imagine what exploits E! is rolling out.

I'm not even saying this as a reflection on McQueen himself, it's just really odd how this sort of thing snowballs.

I have a girlfriend of mine who is bbm-ing me about it and she's saying:
"I heard he might have hung himself. See, ya never know!"
Which prompted me to ask:
"Ya never know what? People die. Either naturally, via homicide or they kill themselves."

She responds by telling me how he would have had a show in a few weeks and instead now he's dead. It feels so TMZ, so E! True Hollywood Story. The only way she would even know who he was or that he had an upcoming show was because that was listed in all of the reports of his apparent suicide.

I understand that it's a part of the sensationalizing our media does, but the regurgitation of that information to justify mourning in Facebook statuses just feels really phony.