I'm loving it. (Part three--Regions, Successful Compositions)

The second season of Jersey Shore will premiere any minute now (next week?). It's passage, from odd, low-budget, themed, Real World-modeled house&party show to straight-up phenomenology, has been a pleasure and a surprise. And that "phenomenology" is both the same and different. Like, it was a "meme" and Twitter accounts and paid party appearances and makeovers in magazines, but also, really REAL and HAPPY. That's the cast. The cast is full of friendship. (Also, they are dancers.)
Critically, I'm not coming from a place of mistrust-of or disrespect-for reality programming. It is the lion's share of what I watch, and as I don't believe there is such a thing as "guilty pleasure," I take its actors and creators v. seriously. I'm used to fame-for-fame's sake. I've written here before about Paris Hilton's genius, por ejemplo. There is something so wholesome and enlightening about her (and Kim Kardashian's) work ethic (pushing those perfume portfolios on at least three Continents). It's nuts to me (to me) that folks still portion out "real celebrities" and "fake celebrities," like movie actors and the movies aren't a big WHATEVER right now (except for Zac Efron, Twilight and cartoons). Anyway, Snookie, Pauly, JWoWW, Mike, Ronnie, Sammy, and Vinny are, among those who make a living appearing as themselves, sort of special. Just especially candid, nervy, but nice.

I have previously (privately, publicly) decried the rise of shamelessness in American (Youth) culture. There is something dangerous in the group-mind habituation of "bad boy and girl behavior," or the obsessive uptake and reuptake of avatars. But perhaps, there are two forms of such: "shamelessness" and "unashamedness." Like, "shamelessness" is hubristic and unstable, over-delusional and sort of line-stepping (disruptive). But "unashamedness" is simply a way of not being burdened by self-doubt, of being brave and transparent and CELEBRATORY. I don't know. Advocating shame doesn't sound quite right to me. Personally, I'm mortified by (the prospect of my own) self-promotion (though I don't lack in self-absorption). And I am beginning to think of it as a personal failure, a kind of parochially educated cross to bear (that drives me offside). Self-promotion and Unashamedness are (here we go) essentially American manners, processes. Americans know how to think themselves blessed, how to be certain about their own rectitude or beauty or anything without much angst, like the 'dumb' and 'ease' mentioned in the last part. The Jersey Shore cast derives their glamour and likability from straightforward, unashamed realness, from confidence in their estilo, their avatars (which are like surface souls? wishes and dreams for the self made semi-material?), their paths to success (their belief in the very fact of success...).
Then the clever duality of/in Jersey Shore is like this: the broadcast of the self, like a product, a brand, an idea is a piece of our New World, our Web and stuff (the patriotic eating of television commercials, celebration of Better Brands), while the regionalism, the extreme, charming specificity of this group of Eastern Seaboarders is a piece of our Old New World.

As a Southerner, I have witnessed the slippage of Regional styles (no one talks quite like people's grandmothers anymore, unfortunately), and felt the need to keep whatever of the old, local stuff I could (if only by remembering how some forebears looked and sounded). To 'keep' The Region feels imperative for us now. We must 'keep' a balance between the Universalized and mega- (which, as I've outlined in the first part, are important and embraceable) and the local, regional, personal, small. America must have everything she wants, both ways---down-home and Global (even, Space-y).
Petrova started the conversation (at home, not en blogsite) some months ago about Jersey Shore's success as a regional program, and about her desire for endless, continual regional programming. Shows about everybody, everywhere, ourselves included--as in, "I wonder what's going on in ____ right now..."--And then I was like, "OH WAIT, that's what Youtube was supposed to be about! Right?"

So, I'm loving this exchange of local and super-Global objects and ideas, like the Coors commercials of the first part: from The stylized Rockies to your market, proud, shining, fast, loving, self-loving, lucky (blessed), happy, just a little careless but somehow steady, unashamed. The ads thrive on a benign tension; they are general and specific at once, contradicting themselves so contradicting themselves.

********************

I hate to indulge her attention-trix-ery, but Lady Gaga persists (demands post and repost).
There's this Japanese television interview I found from last summer.....

The way she looks.
But also, the oblique straining toward an Asian audience (as interpreted by an American private schoolgirl)-------all the talk of piano lessons!!!
There's also this embarrassing 106 & Park appearance from the same season, where all reference points are for black audiences-----I worked with Kanye, Jay-Z, "You all must love Beyonce!"

She is reshuffling her product line for this demographic, then that demographic. And she has been successful, has achieved cross-demographic appeal. But how kinda ugly when you stop and pay attention, set one appearance beside another. It's sheisty, condescending, very suit...not (keeping it) REAL.
Gaga is, like any of us 80s babies, a student of The Brand, The Market, The Branding and Marketing. But I feel like the great branding work is in the universal, the image, the sound (the humanity!) that crosses borders without losing its home-country, its regional identity...not this thin maneuvering and shapeshifting...? Right? Gaga comes by her false and uncomfortable regionalism honestly...Manhattan [as opposed to the other 4 boroughs], her homestead, hasn't been a region for some time---what with the turning out of the lower and middle classes, the strict, to-the-letter Capitalism that has no sympathy for history, no sentiment, that tolerates fakes and users, anybody with cabbage...maybe I just hate the theater, butI thought it was worth mentioning that working on this essay has helped me to understand my ultimate resistance to/with Gaga, whose voice and hooks I like so much (because of their glitzy emotionality), who I find endearing as a worker in the way of aforementioned Paris and Kim. She is an overnight icon of "our New World, our Web and stuff (the patriotic eating of television commercials, celebration of Better Brands)," but she pointedly eschews the other half, the realness, our Old New World. There is all kinds of consternating bluster about growing up in "The Upper West Side Arts and Culture District" (pardon?) and being a "dirty L.E.S. Artiste" (barf and bull-----a Dad-subsidized apt. [not that I have a problem with that] above Max Fish is not the look she meant to look for, or meant for us to see) and how "New York" the middle finger is (lol whatever) and how she has been in straight-up Madonna costume all summer. Her regional identity, and, in turn, her whole identity, is stuffed to the gills with affect, because she came from post-'86 Manhattan, the island of affect, of neighborhoods and ways of life dictated by real estate agents and club promoters, defectors from home (the Middle and South), people who often hate (out loud) their native regional identities. Though of course, until two minutes ago, Gaga--née Stefanie Germanotta--was doing something brilliantly regional. She was a guidette (a total compatriot of the Jersey Shore cast). But self-conscious about it. Because Manhattan, unlike Staten Island or Jersey (where most of that cast is from), is full of that affect that must needs degrade the outer-boroughs and regional identities, The Bridge and Tunnel (with callous inattention to the class repercussions of such narrowness and dismissiveness). The second Miss Germanotta saw the way to shed her (perceived unsophisticated) regional self, to become a costumed non-citizen (a "true" Manhattanite), she did, and HOW. So, I see her and I say, "Where's Stephanie?" And The Brand is incomplete, unfinished. It's not a good commercial.

WAY OUT WEST

HAPPY BASTILLE DAY (RACIST PRICKS)

R.I.P.----

Obit.


But how do you thank someone, who has taken you from crayons to perfume?...

...If you wanted the sky I would write across the sky in letters,
That would soar a thousand feet high,
To Sir, with Love.