To our liberal readers: Ever notice that the Corner rarely, if ever, weighs in on the lurid tabloid stories of the day? You won’t read commentary on Lindsay Lohan being emblematic of the waste and degradation of American pop culture. No clucking about Britney Spears not wearing panties and shaving her head. No well-honed diatribes about Madonna once again defiling Christianity by opening her act on a crucifix.
But I will break the Corner’s admirable silence on celebrity sludge and make a brief observation about the death of spin-meister DJ AM, nee Adam Goldstein.
The night-club fixture and former fiancé of Nicole Richie was found dead a little over a week ago of an apparent drug overdose in his $2 million Manhattan apartment. According to the New York Times, he had six pills in his stomach, suggesting that the death may have been a suicide.
I didn’t know the man, and I have no personal knowledge of the demons that chased and finally consumed him.
But consider: He died a 36-year-old millionaire with luxury homes on both coasts. No wife. No children. The quintessential boy-man. He lived in the perpetual late-night swim of celebrity culture. The Philadelphia native successfully engineered his life to bankroll his high-flying courtships of rich, aimless celebutantes. He was written up endlessly for his cleverness in doing so, including in that high tabloid of celebrity culture, Vanity Fair. And it appears he may have ended his life last week by choice.
Is it a stretch to say that these pursuits of modern boy-manhood failed him? That male adulthood without responsibility in the traditional sense is disorienting, anchorless, and potentially fatal?
Much ink has been spilled on the damage done to the women who are embraced and then rejected by these perpetual adolescents. But what about the perpetual adolescents themselves? Does the embrace of modern boy-manhood wither, mislead, and ultimately destroy them too?
Adam Goldstein may just have been a lost, miserable soul waging an unsuccessful fight against chemical addiction and depression. But is that an entirely personal matter? Or are there larger cultural factors at work that elevate and celebrate the life less lived?
One could say that Goldstein died too young at the mere age of 36. But one could also say that he lived too young, too.