Everybody is Dying, and I Can't Keep Eulogizing
...but what am i supposed to tweet?
I hadn’t experienced a death in the family until I was 24. In the six years since, I’ve visited that Jewish cemetery on the west side of LA too many times. Eaten too many grief-stricken deli platters. Developed a heretofore unseen rapport with family members, grounded in a shared sense of morbidity. “We have to stop meeting like this,” I said to a cousin, while throwing a spadeful of earth on our Grandmother’s casket.
I hadn’t experienced the death of an idol — someone whose work I passionately admired from a distance with the reverie of a dozen grandparents — until Lou Reed. Over a decade has passed since, and I’ve written weepy social media posts about how the legacies of Lou, and then David Bowie, and then Philip Roth, Leonard Cohen, Jean-Luc Godard, Abbas Kiarostami, Norm Macdonald, James Chance, Steve Albini, Cormac McCarthy, David Lynch, and now Brian Wilson have helped shape the way I live my life and see the world around me. It comes with the territory of obsessing over artists who burst onto the scene in the 60s and 70s: mathematically, they’re on their way out.1
Starting with the passing of Bowie, and later intensified by the loss of Prince, the social media economy of grief-stricken tributes began to take shape. Tributes pour out, sincerity overflows, and naturally, cynicism takes hold. Plenty of ironic, detached posters begged the rhetorical question, “Did David Bowie really teach you it was okay to be weird?” A mix of possessive gatekeeping (“don’t say RIP to Lou if you only know ‘Walk on the Wild Side!’”) and disaffected cool (“Brian didn’t even sing ‘God Only Knows’”) define the backlash to this online ecosystem. As someone who has always taken great pride in my own taste, as if it were a pension I worked hard at a factory for 40 years to earn, these reactions, their backlash, and the backlash to the backlash is all too understandable. It was some responses to the death of Jean-Luc Godard that triggered me to burn dozens of Film Twitter bridges, with some of the nastiest and most vindictive shit I’ve ever said online or in person.
Why? Because if you’re like me, Jean-Luc Godard is as important as your family. So are Philip Roth, Norm Macdonald, and Brian Wilson. My parents raised me from birth until my eighteenth year, but these figures introduced themselves to me with a little after-school babysitting in my teens, and eventually won full custody in college. Not only were they my parents, they were my teachers. My college education isn’t remembered by any particular lecture or individual professor, but by long hours in the library, reading people like Rosenbaum, Kehr, and Bordwell tell the history of cinema, and then going home to expand my studies through the films of Godard, Kiarostami, and Altman, all while treating my soul to comedic and musical interludes by Neil Young, Bob Dylan (knock, knock, knockin’ on wood for those two), Norm Macdonald, Harris Wittels, Scharpling, or the Cum Boys. It’s remembered by the long walks I took during my one semester at San Francisco State, when I listened to Pet Sounds every single fucking day. Even the day Lou died. These figures were worthy of parental admiration, but more appropriately, worthy of your protection as if they were your own flesh and blood.
I’m running out of things to say.
I used all of my most casually poetic anecdotes about being and the small moments in life that make up our existence at the first two family funerals, and passed on my opportunity to speak at the next handful. I spent a whole 24 hours online when Lou died, going on forums I hadn’t visited in years just to get every single megabyte of online reaction that I could. I was sitting on the toilet when I found out Norm died, and I stayed in the bathroom sending clips to my friends and watching clips that my friends sent me for over two hours. For Brian, a few tweets and a weepy text to my ex sufficed. I’m running out of things to say at these moments. Like my family members two generations removed, the artists who have shaped my view of the world are dying. Their work and their impact will always be here with me, but what’s missing is a feeling that the person who gifted us these artistic miracles shares my planet, my species, my air. The feeling that another can come along, because if a David Lynch can exist on earth, we can’t be doomed forever. But now, I look around to see if the men are still out there. The ones who showed me the dark side of Hollywood history, taught me that images have both aesthetic and ideological meanings, re-introduced me to reading for pleasure, or made me think that someone out there still believes in me. Their impact remains, but the professors are gone. Now, we have to find younger instructors, worthy of passing down these sacred lesson plans.
Norm was the exception here, a truly rare case of a genius gone too soon. He was also better at comedy than anyone who did it in the 60s or 70s, for whatever that’s worth. I could also say the same about the late, hilarious Harris Wittels.
this is really lovely