Graeme Abernethy is a writer from Vancouver, British Columbia. His book, The Iconography of Malcolm X, is forthcoming in The University Press of Kansas’s CultureAmerica series in September 2013.
Features
Tuesday, April 9 2013
The Pop Culture Death Trap, Part 4: Projections
Who will be our next dead celebrity? Does it matter? Regardless of who, as Joseph Conrad suggested, we each remain loyal to the nightmare of our choosing.
Thursday, March 21 2013
The Pop Culture Death Trap, Part 3: Grief and Immortality
Through the act of collective mourning, we elevate dead celebrities to near-divinity. The need is both a primitive and a decidedly American one: to define ourselves by something other than an alienating individualism.
Monday, February 25 2013
The Pop Culture Death Trap Part 2: The Death of Beauty
Despite having seen it all before – the rock star and the blonde actress – we look on each such instance of celebrity death with the same mixture of surprise, curiosity, horror, and glee. Pop culture reflects our capacity to simultaneously ignore death and make of it an obsession.
Thursday, February 7 2013
The Pop Culture Death Trap Part 1: The Athlete as Hieroglyph
In a money- and youth-driven culture that seems to understand nearly all human activity as part of a contest, death, like poverty, has come to be associated, however imprecisely, with losing.
