About Me

I'm a PhD student researching the role of the archaeological dead in contemporary British society. Think of this as a scrapbook of all the interesting links, snippets of information and random bits and bobs I come across pertaining to death, dying and the dead. Enjoy?!

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    Margaret Thatcher: Respect for the dead is an outdated and foolish principle

    Let us say what we think, and be frank about it: death does not confer privilege

    Do we owe the dead respect, even if we disagreed with them profoundly, even if we were harmed by them in some way, even if we think that their influence on their times was largely negative, and their legacy damaging?

    Street parties celebrating the death of Baroness Thatcher have been condemned by Tony Blair and others for bad taste. They are certainly unprecedented in Britain at least, and there is an unappealing similarity with television images of people dancing on the fallen statues of dictators in parts of the world where nothing like the institutions and practices of British political life exist. In suggesting a comparison, we do ourselves no favours.

    But bad taste and false comparisons aside, the question remains: must we respect the newly dead merely in virtue of their being dead? We might be mindful of the grief of family and friends, but still feel that a judgement about the life and legacy of a prominent individual should be an honest one.

    The standard trope is: de mortuis nil nisi bonum – “Of the dead say nothing but good”. Why?

    (Source: The Independent)

    Kurt Cobain, before the age of the digital zombies

    As Courtney Love cedes all rights to Cobain’s image, where it will be used in an age of CGI and holograms is anyone’s guess

    Even the background of this picture is a ghost. Kurt Cobain stands on West 42nd Street in Manhattan in 1993, in front of a semi-derelict cinema bearing the words Men Don’t Protect You Anymore. The photographer had noticed it and Cobain dug the idea of posing in front of it. Soon he would be gone and so would the grungy squalor of this part of New York, reclaimed and turned into a street of multiplexes, safe for tourists. Cobain shot himself in 1994. This week, it emerged in reports that his widow Courtney Love has ceded all rights in the licensing of his name and image to their daughter Frances Bean in return for a large loan.

    These “publicity rights” are said to be immensely valuable. Of course they are: in a world where the dead can be made to walk and talk, images of dead celebrities may turn out to be among the most valuable commodities of this century.

    There has not, so far, been a hologram appearance by Cobain at a music festival to match the recent return of Tupac Shakur to live performance. Tupac, who was killed in 1996, materialised as an electronic ghost at the Coachella music festival crying: “What the (blank) is up, Coachella?” It is clearly no coincidence that this bizarre Frankensteinian experiment took place in California, home to the world’s most advanced computer engineers. It is also no surprise that in a culture infected by digital utopianism it was reported using words like “resurrected” and “returned from the dead” when in reality the new Tupac is a digital zombie manipulated by its creator, not an animate being, not “resurrected” at all. What is the future for such zombies of the famous? What is the future for Kurt Cobain?

    Food for thought. Click through for the rest!