Mar 5, 2010
"I have a spiritual guide, not a therapist but someone who in my mind is connected with a higher being, and he helps me a lot. What I like about him is that he doesn't speak to me like I am a normal person. He understands that I have an eccentric way of life and personality. And he also understands that I am famous, and I appreciate that. He tells me that I no longer serve my life in the normal way that people serve their life, that I must serve the greater good in my service to the universe. And for me, it's my fans. I only serve my fans." Don't you think it's kind of creepy when you refer to yourself in the third person? "No. Not if you're an artist, it's not. I talk about myself in the third person all the time. I don't live my life in the way someone like you does. I live my life completely serving only my work and my fans. And that way, I have to think about not what is best for my vagina but what is best for my fans and for me artistically." — Lady Gaga in an interview with T Magazine.
OH NO!!!!!!!!
I like the bit about "a spiritual guide, not a therapist," but then....
Are we only two kinds: famous artists with fans and un*famous non-artists who put their vaginas first? Tell me tell me.
OH NO!!!!!!!!
I like the bit about "a spiritual guide, not a therapist," but then....
Are we only two kinds: famous artists with fans and un*famous non-artists who put their vaginas first? Tell me tell me.
Mar 4, 2010
Mar 3, 2010
Verses
Burning Our Ouija Board
Jennifer - Oakwood, Illinois - Summer 1984
I wanted to share with you an occurrence that convinced me that there is more to this world than what we can see. I was merely seven years old growing up in a typical turn of the century home in the Midwest. I can recall many happenings that made me fearful. Being a small child, that is typical. It was not until I began having very odd occurrences like someone rubbing my back when I was lying in bed half asleep, turning and expecting mom, only to find no one was there! Oftentimes when I would be lying in bed there were odd noises in the kitchen when no one was up. Scary as some of those encounters were, nothing could have prepared me for what happened one summer evening.
It was a beautiful sunny evening. At that time, only one of my brothers stilled lived at home, and he was gone for the day. My parents were in the garage playing ping-pong with friends and visiting. I had been outside playing and went in to retrieve any young girls favorite -- Barbies! I had brought a few out with me and went back in a few moments later to get some wardrobe changes. I walked into my room like I had just prior, and as I flipped the light on I was astounded! My room was ransacked! Certainly my room was not perfectly clean, but things were in disarray. I mean totally turned over. A desk was flipped and the typewriter which did not work (did not have type writer ribbon) had been strategically placed in the entrance way -- oddly enough it had a typed paper sticking up from it. In shock and looking at my room, I bent to get read the paper. It read "I hate my brother, Timmy," which was my brother who I greatly missed and had recently moved out. I stood there only a moment and was overcome by a very odd feeling. I ran out to get mom. She was visiting a friend and was having no part of my frantic behavior. Finally after insisting, she did come into the house with me only minutes later. As we arrived at my room I came around the hall corner and saw the light was off -- knowing I had not turned it off -- then to my utter disbelief, the room was not in the condition I found it moments before. Things were "back to normal."
I was crying and shocked and expressed to mom what happened. She honestly did not know what to think and chalked it up to my imagination. I was terrified for months and it seems the activity was more aggressive at night at that point. I recall having very spooky, vivid dreams of a man attacking me in my room and standing there over me. I awoke night after night in screams with either mom running to me or vice versa. Little to my knowledge, being young, mom was trying to protect me. She withheld a lot of odd activity that had been taking place. She had been hearing voices calling her at night and she too was feeling threatened by the activity occurring. She kept her fears to herself.
Well, by chance one day her evangelist sister had dropped by town unexpectedly. She stopped by our home to find the house open but empty. She came in and was immediately overcome by an evil feeling. She felt very ill and left quickly before we arrived. Later she came and expressed to mom how she felt. She returned one day and felt compelled to enter my bedroom. There was a game closet in my room which held many games and among them was a Ouija board. As soon as my aunt saw this she knew that was the source of her anxiety. (I will add that, I personally being only seven had played with this game a few times as it was in my room, unaware that it was a tool to contact the other side.)
My aunt began praying and took the board outdoors. We had a burn barrel and she and mom started a fire. They placed the board in once the fire was burning well. The board would not burn, nor would it even char. The fire went out, again and again! About that time, I returned home from school and there they were around the fire… they did not explain to me why they were burning stuff when I questioned them. I knew it was odd that my aunt would be concerned that the fire would not burn. I was sent in the house. Later, I mean hours later, they were still at it. Finally, my uncle, a preacher, arrived. By that time my dad had come home for the day, too. He was about to put diesel fuel on it to try to burn it but, my uncle approached. He stood there, praying as did mom and my aunt. Next thing you know, the board more or less burst into a fire ball and was disintegrated before their eyes! Once I was older and made aware of what had actually taken place, I knew that the source of the disturbances began when I had gotten out the Ouija board! Come to find out -- this Ouija board mom and dad had purchased 20 years before and had been told some devastating news which some had come true, others had nearly (loss of a cousin), but many prayers went up. Mom vowed never to "play" again after what they encountered. Apparently, leaving it in the closet was not the best idea. The good news is God is bigger than the boogie man. Please be leery -- Ouija boards can lead to many hazards! Since then, I have had many odd occurrences and am well aware that there is another realm that we cannot see; both good and evil.
----above from www.ghostvillage.com/encounters
Jennifer - Oakwood, Illinois - Summer 1984
I wanted to share with you an occurrence that convinced me that there is more to this world than what we can see. I was merely seven years old growing up in a typical turn of the century home in the Midwest. I can recall many happenings that made me fearful. Being a small child, that is typical. It was not until I began having very odd occurrences like someone rubbing my back when I was lying in bed half asleep, turning and expecting mom, only to find no one was there! Oftentimes when I would be lying in bed there were odd noises in the kitchen when no one was up. Scary as some of those encounters were, nothing could have prepared me for what happened one summer evening.
It was a beautiful sunny evening. At that time, only one of my brothers stilled lived at home, and he was gone for the day. My parents were in the garage playing ping-pong with friends and visiting. I had been outside playing and went in to retrieve any young girls favorite -- Barbies! I had brought a few out with me and went back in a few moments later to get some wardrobe changes. I walked into my room like I had just prior, and as I flipped the light on I was astounded! My room was ransacked! Certainly my room was not perfectly clean, but things were in disarray. I mean totally turned over. A desk was flipped and the typewriter which did not work (did not have type writer ribbon) had been strategically placed in the entrance way -- oddly enough it had a typed paper sticking up from it. In shock and looking at my room, I bent to get read the paper. It read "I hate my brother, Timmy," which was my brother who I greatly missed and had recently moved out. I stood there only a moment and was overcome by a very odd feeling. I ran out to get mom. She was visiting a friend and was having no part of my frantic behavior. Finally after insisting, she did come into the house with me only minutes later. As we arrived at my room I came around the hall corner and saw the light was off -- knowing I had not turned it off -- then to my utter disbelief, the room was not in the condition I found it moments before. Things were "back to normal."
I was crying and shocked and expressed to mom what happened. She honestly did not know what to think and chalked it up to my imagination. I was terrified for months and it seems the activity was more aggressive at night at that point. I recall having very spooky, vivid dreams of a man attacking me in my room and standing there over me. I awoke night after night in screams with either mom running to me or vice versa. Little to my knowledge, being young, mom was trying to protect me. She withheld a lot of odd activity that had been taking place. She had been hearing voices calling her at night and she too was feeling threatened by the activity occurring. She kept her fears to herself.
Well, by chance one day her evangelist sister had dropped by town unexpectedly. She stopped by our home to find the house open but empty. She came in and was immediately overcome by an evil feeling. She felt very ill and left quickly before we arrived. Later she came and expressed to mom how she felt. She returned one day and felt compelled to enter my bedroom. There was a game closet in my room which held many games and among them was a Ouija board. As soon as my aunt saw this she knew that was the source of her anxiety. (I will add that, I personally being only seven had played with this game a few times as it was in my room, unaware that it was a tool to contact the other side.)
My aunt began praying and took the board outdoors. We had a burn barrel and she and mom started a fire. They placed the board in once the fire was burning well. The board would not burn, nor would it even char. The fire went out, again and again! About that time, I returned home from school and there they were around the fire… they did not explain to me why they were burning stuff when I questioned them. I knew it was odd that my aunt would be concerned that the fire would not burn. I was sent in the house. Later, I mean hours later, they were still at it. Finally, my uncle, a preacher, arrived. By that time my dad had come home for the day, too. He was about to put diesel fuel on it to try to burn it but, my uncle approached. He stood there, praying as did mom and my aunt. Next thing you know, the board more or less burst into a fire ball and was disintegrated before their eyes! Once I was older and made aware of what had actually taken place, I knew that the source of the disturbances began when I had gotten out the Ouija board! Come to find out -- this Ouija board mom and dad had purchased 20 years before and had been told some devastating news which some had come true, others had nearly (loss of a cousin), but many prayers went up. Mom vowed never to "play" again after what they encountered. Apparently, leaving it in the closet was not the best idea. The good news is God is bigger than the boogie man. Please be leery -- Ouija boards can lead to many hazards! Since then, I have had many odd occurrences and am well aware that there is another realm that we cannot see; both good and evil.
----above from www.ghostvillage.com/encounters
Mar 2, 2010
I've been sitting on a couple of post.ideas: Jennifer Lopez's event dressing, 2002-present; Beyoncé's use of the word "it" in reference to ladies/herself, "check on it," "put a ring on it"; Tom Ford in New Mexico.
This addendum to a previous post seems most pressing though (and less research-oriented and now that I've typed those three gists I'll probably never get around to realizing them anyway...).
When I wrote about Tavi Gevinson last week (or the one before that?), I didn't feel great. I felt worse when I pushed through/out those paragraphs on Lady Gaga.
I've never been deft at (capital P)Philosophy, asking 'why,' or charting others' courses, questions, answers. I have a way of wearing a blithe, religious cloud. How I ignore people I know in restaurants, drop classes, wake up and board a train. That's not really it it's that....
my first and last degree of inquiry are
our emotional life and cultural life and how to read events, phenomena through them.
I always thought, "There's enough over and on top, enough that's decorative or enough that's mystical, narrative or good to eat or funny or tragic. I'll never need to note the mechanics of things, draw out workable theorems, order." I liked Venn diagrams for jokes.
And it still holds. But I've begun to wonder, with the tremor of faith-crisis:
"Why do we criticize?"
The answer, for me, I think, lies in emotional life and cultural life, no deeper (if there is a deeper depth?); so maybe the line of inquiry isn't so shattering and strange after all, doesn't demand new and better Philosophical discipline?
Except that it's a nervous and looming question, a schmaltz-ily general one too. It sounds like Philosophy.*
I've never been deft at (capital P)Philosophy, asking 'why,' or charting others' courses, questions, answers. I have a way of wearing a blithe, religious cloud. How I ignore people I know in restaurants, drop classes, wake up and board a train. That's not really it it's that....
my first and last degree of inquiry are
our emotional life and cultural life and how to read events, phenomena through them.
I always thought, "There's enough over and on top, enough that's decorative or enough that's mystical, narrative or good to eat or funny or tragic. I'll never need to note the mechanics of things, draw out workable theorems, order." I liked Venn diagrams for jokes.
And it still holds. But I've begun to wonder, with the tremor of faith-crisis:
"Why do we criticize?"
The answer, for me, I think, lies in emotional life and cultural life, no deeper (if there is a deeper depth?); so maybe the line of inquiry isn't so shattering and strange after all, doesn't demand new and better Philosophical discipline?
Except that it's a nervous and looming question, a schmaltz-ily general one too. It sounds like Philosophy.*
I probably criticized Tavi, because I'm afraid of her, also because I feel not-unrelated to her.
I'm turning 25 in April and I'm spooked. I was 23 (not 22) when I graduated art school in May 2008, but it doesn't really matter either way. Time has both seeped costively and run away from me since. It hasn't felt like much has happened/is happening, or not much more than a sealing in and a series of limits met and an actual grinding of the days (even on weekends). Pillow has called this period an 'adolescence,' but worse (smarter). Social life is confusing, but also boring. One seems to not know what one can do, should do, what one is capable of. I suppose I do a lot that nobody knows about. I feel secret. But it's not...sexy? I feel like I'm turning into a character in a play or a novel about work and morality. I feel like I am missing the boat--several boats, several a day. I feel like there's a gamer and sunnier self I ought to be and am not being, that that self might be successful, while I am not. Success is a great issue.
******
I'm turning 25 in April and I'm spooked. I was 23 (not 22) when I graduated art school in May 2008, but it doesn't really matter either way. Time has both seeped costively and run away from me since. It hasn't felt like much has happened/is happening, or not much more than a sealing in and a series of limits met and an actual grinding of the days (even on weekends). Pillow has called this period an 'adolescence,' but worse (smarter). Social life is confusing, but also boring. One seems to not know what one can do, should do, what one is capable of. I suppose I do a lot that nobody knows about. I feel secret. But it's not...sexy? I feel like I'm turning into a character in a play or a novel about work and morality. I feel like I am missing the boat--several boats, several a day. I feel like there's a gamer and sunnier self I ought to be and am not being, that that self might be successful, while I am not. Success is a great issue.
******
As you read (I, me, to me, for me, in a personal way), when I blog, I'm talking about myself. So perhaps none of what I've posted to A&P is actual (capital C)Criticism; I don't pretend distance. But does "distance," "critical distance" even exist?
I don't know what it's like for other people, but I'm full of prejudices. Not necessarily ugly ones, but I see how I see and nobody else does, just so.
******
A kind of blundering stagnation must be somewhat normal for 24to25 year-olds. I think. But--and forgive me because I haven't mentioned it in a long time--the Recession, the Job Crisis.
Tavi Gevinson sends me into slow panic,
seeds a ranging fear that ours is a Lost Generation professionally,
that as we plod and pluck and try to do regular things
(pay rent, give Thanks),
babies, bona fide children, are jumping queue with adorable YouTube videos and creditcredit, audiences, opportunities, attention, co-opting relevance every minute.
This kind of paranoia is dumb and dangerous and lazy.
But I thought I might get honest about the whole thing. And source, as I write, some balance and wisdom and will (We have will!).
Over the weekend, I watched The September Issue, which was great. The film's position chronologically is perfect, the total footage taken during the publication of 2007's Fall volume, the largest (ad-sales-iest) in Conde Nast's history. I imagine 2008's was the real era-ender, arriving a week or so before the Banks failed and publishing doom got writ bolder and bolder and luxury got universally depressing, ghostly. But this view in/of 2007, Manhattan in summer, a place I was
a season-off college student lolling around, eating, drinking and crying about my boyfriend with
**dramatic irony in hindsight**
no idea what was going to happen, how credit was so thin and impossible, how I'd break-up and get my bubble burst too, and how maybe, nothing would really happen, the system would fry.
It's beautiful. Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington, the English, female leads (as the men seem to pose [Talley] and bluster [Testino] and worry [Newhouse]), are beautiful. Anna is an economist. Grace is an artist. They both go to work everyday. There's a lot happening (like, how incredible that Anna's house looks the way it does), but this thread of DAILY WORKING LIFE--how life is long and how the very start of employment eventually recedes with a ribbon of labor--is the stuff.
Even Tavi, with her crazy-precocious success, will have to show up, over and over; she'll have to have a 20s and a 30s and a 40s and a 50s. I will too. One's career is never actually a matter of sublimation...
And maybe (Oh G-d), we(I) can learn something from Tavi and her currently forming generation.
The power and sense of possibility they draw from the Internet, the way it makes them feel capable of participation, or at least, publication with/into the large World is exciting.
We'll need to feel their hope and thrill and luck
if we're ever to make it through our long lives of work.
*In general here, I'm afraid I don't make it so clear what the meanings of "religious cloud" and "Philosophy" and "faith-crisis" are. I don't really know.
I don't know what it's like for other people, but I'm full of prejudices. Not necessarily ugly ones, but I see how I see and nobody else does, just so.
******
A kind of blundering stagnation must be somewhat normal for 24to25 year-olds. I think. But--and forgive me because I haven't mentioned it in a long time--the Recession, the Job Crisis.
Tavi Gevinson sends me into slow panic,
seeds a ranging fear that ours is a Lost Generation professionally,
that as we plod and pluck and try to do regular things
(pay rent, give Thanks),
babies, bona fide children, are jumping queue with adorable YouTube videos and creditcredit, audiences, opportunities, attention, co-opting relevance every minute.
This kind of paranoia is dumb and dangerous and lazy.
But I thought I might get honest about the whole thing. And source, as I write, some balance and wisdom and will (We have will!).
Over the weekend, I watched The September Issue, which was great. The film's position chronologically is perfect, the total footage taken during the publication of 2007's Fall volume, the largest (ad-sales-iest) in Conde Nast's history. I imagine 2008's was the real era-ender, arriving a week or so before the Banks failed and publishing doom got writ bolder and bolder and luxury got universally depressing, ghostly. But this view in/of 2007, Manhattan in summer, a place I was
a season-off college student lolling around, eating, drinking and crying about my boyfriend with
**dramatic irony in hindsight**
no idea what was going to happen, how credit was so thin and impossible, how I'd break-up and get my bubble burst too, and how maybe, nothing would really happen, the system would fry.
It's beautiful. Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington, the English, female leads (as the men seem to pose [Talley] and bluster [Testino] and worry [Newhouse]), are beautiful. Anna is an economist. Grace is an artist. They both go to work everyday. There's a lot happening (like, how incredible that Anna's house looks the way it does), but this thread of DAILY WORKING LIFE--how life is long and how the very start of employment eventually recedes with a ribbon of labor--is the stuff.
Even Tavi, with her crazy-precocious success, will have to show up, over and over; she'll have to have a 20s and a 30s and a 40s and a 50s. I will too. One's career is never actually a matter of sublimation...
And maybe (Oh G-d), we(I) can learn something from Tavi and her currently forming generation.
The power and sense of possibility they draw from the Internet, the way it makes them feel capable of participation, or at least, publication with/into the large World is exciting.
We'll need to feel their hope and thrill and luck
if we're ever to make it through our long lives of work.
*In general here, I'm afraid I don't make it so clear what the meanings of "religious cloud" and "Philosophy" and "faith-crisis" are. I don't really know.
Mar 1, 2010
verses
'July'
Ted Berrigan
Lady, she has been my friend for some years sketches, I haven’t explained Actually of horror subject to neither of our laws intimate incantations under the sheets tried nothing a quivery sort of fellow hurts my forehead this shower No thought for your life and casual abductors in books I cant stand if it die. The life range examination as I am a cowboy it is unless it isnt and you imaginary scenes soot years of writing this most of it movies I cant stand a particular buttressing of the body. Olive green color. Let’s take a sentimental journey. Dont forget to bleed. I have. Many days writing the same work into itself the appearance of a role but How dark for some forty years Irish brogue rolls toward sister mother shunted aside that’s the penalty of time or of space Certainly not a place. So we come together in this bed. Later glee (lie) now pills (no lie) The End. Bugles call no snow to the powderhouse the library abductors, woe unto you also ye lawyers! No. Not reminded, I go (revealed) (No Smoking In This Room)
from Angel Hair 4, Winter 1967–68
Ted Berrigan
Lady, she has been my friend for some years sketches, I haven’t explained Actually of horror subject to neither of our laws intimate incantations under the sheets tried nothing a quivery sort of fellow hurts my forehead this shower No thought for your life and casual abductors in books I cant stand if it die. The life range examination as I am a cowboy it is unless it isnt and you imaginary scenes soot years of writing this most of it movies I cant stand a particular buttressing of the body. Olive green color. Let’s take a sentimental journey. Dont forget to bleed. I have. Many days writing the same work into itself the appearance of a role but How dark for some forty years Irish brogue rolls toward sister mother shunted aside that’s the penalty of time or of space Certainly not a place. So we come together in this bed. Later glee (lie) now pills (no lie) The End. Bugles call no snow to the powderhouse the library abductors, woe unto you also ye lawyers! No. Not reminded, I go (revealed) (No Smoking In This Room)
from Angel Hair 4, Winter 1967–68
Feb 25, 2010
After not writing about Lady Gaga, or rather, giving her a fullish treatment* for so long, I thought I might just avoid avoid for always (a talent). And the information ('the fame,' the hype) mounted, the task became fatter and fatter, further delayable, -whelming.
But this article in--I know it's stupid--Advertising Age, "Gaga, Oooh La La: Why Lady Gaga is the Ultimate Social Climber,"
has got me really bothered, in a semi-clarifying** way.
The piece frames discussion of Lady Gaga (to frame it at all is a help) outside, or aside from art (thank G-d); it's a lot of shop talk about a sudden media mogul and a character of our youth and times, a shameless self-promoter.
After a first skim, I got real sour over how there's no such color as "cherry pink," and how this sort of dissonance that isn't proper dissonance so much as error is exactly Gaga, her bad poetry and air-puffed stylings. Which brings me round to how "air-puffed stylings" are a thing I love. And bad poetry is a thing I hate. And LOVE HATE LOVE HATE; this always seems to be the way with Gaga. She does so much at once, and some of it well, and you get to digging the half and getting a little enraged at the rest and thinking and talking about it all through. So her missteps have little/zero bearing on big, lots-of success.
Being careful and quiet and curatorial about your output, your clothes and tongue and artworks is a game with some shame. And Gaga is principally (I'm restating this) shameless. In a personal way, her shamelessness, her costumed theater-kidness, prevents me from getting too invested, despite her clear abilities as a pop author and professional celebrity. Obviously, it's not performance full stop that makes me ill at ease. It's frenetic, thready performance (passed off as fully-cooked, impeccable), and masturbatory performance for performance's sake. Or she's just not that smart? I guess. I'm not so keen on actors, on inauthentic roles made "real," or presented as such. I wonder how I might have felt about early and mid- Bowie in real time....this is immeasurable. I'm sure I'd have been thrilled by him, and his character strangeness. For starters, his music, his poetical skill, is unassailable. Bowie is so smart, smart in ways young Gaga never will be, Madonna never was, etc. And, plainly, those were different times. Bowie's flashy difference was politically significant in ways that I'm not yet convinced Gaga is or could be...
I'm no surly adolescent; I feel pretty wretched about pop cultural non-embrace. I like to like the general, present likes. And I do. I do like "Summerboy" and "Paparazzi" and the newer "Alejandro" and "Monster." I like the way they sound, all Euro and emotionally punchy, and, even if I don't like the total lyric, I am moved by certain passages: the line in "Monster," "He ate my heart and then he ate my brain;" the repeated protest in "Bad Romance, "I don't want to be friends/I don't want to be friends." Comic-tragic disco. This is a rather great thing Gaga is doing: crafting, as her idol Bowie urges, "dance song[s] that can make you break down and cry." But the high speed of her rise and release of singles and images paired with singles (the artifice) has made for some holes, gaps, confusions, sort of degraded the quality of the recordings, the foundational work.
Gaga has invented Gaga on the road, in process, in the midst of some endless press tour. Witness the shift in avatars between the videos for first single, "Just Dance," and last (discounting "Telephone") single, "Bad Romance." 2008-2009...We're led to believe this shift was a matter of forethought, that Gaga has been working with a tight, over-arching narrative, from FAME to FAME MONSTER. I don't buy it, really. It seems to me she's gotten bigger budgets and a bigger circle and a bigger experience, like she's a good mimic whose happened to learn a little bit about looking art-y or art director-y. Even if it's so, this plan laid in 2008, it's flimsy; it's not all that scrutable. I don't hear or see a story, or gather that there's much connective tissue between Gaga efforts, aside from a certain look, an attitude, an any sort of non-thing that only people who work in fashion seem to think is solid or meaningful or even, um, cerebral....And like I said, "air-puffed stylings" are excellent, as long as they're not being passed off as grounded and circumspect. I've gathered a good bit of pseudo-intellect from Gaga's corner, and oooof it's the worst.
The AdAge article talks some about Gaga and Madonna. The author finds, incorrectly, that one can make a parallel between Madonna's Downtown life of the eighties and Gaga's Papa-funded L.E.S. rental of the late Aughts, when Downtown was unarguably dead, rotting even, alive only in the imaginations of provincial schoolgirls and a couple of promoter dopes (ahem, promotion). That said, Gaga&Madonna is a conversation worth having. I don't really want to have that whole conversation but...
But this article in--I know it's stupid--Advertising Age, "Gaga, Oooh La La: Why Lady Gaga is the Ultimate Social Climber,"
has got me really bothered, in a semi-clarifying** way.
The piece frames discussion of Lady Gaga (to frame it at all is a help) outside, or aside from art (thank G-d); it's a lot of shop talk about a sudden media mogul and a character of our youth and times, a shameless self-promoter.
After a first skim, I got real sour over how there's no such color as "cherry pink," and how this sort of dissonance that isn't proper dissonance so much as error is exactly Gaga, her bad poetry and air-puffed stylings. Which brings me round to how "air-puffed stylings" are a thing I love. And bad poetry is a thing I hate. And LOVE HATE LOVE HATE; this always seems to be the way with Gaga. She does so much at once, and some of it well, and you get to digging the half and getting a little enraged at the rest and thinking and talking about it all through. So her missteps have little/zero bearing on big, lots-of success.
Being careful and quiet and curatorial about your output, your clothes and tongue and artworks is a game with some shame. And Gaga is principally (I'm restating this) shameless. In a personal way, her shamelessness, her costumed theater-kidness, prevents me from getting too invested, despite her clear abilities as a pop author and professional celebrity. Obviously, it's not performance full stop that makes me ill at ease. It's frenetic, thready performance (passed off as fully-cooked, impeccable), and masturbatory performance for performance's sake. Or she's just not that smart? I guess. I'm not so keen on actors, on inauthentic roles made "real," or presented as such. I wonder how I might have felt about early and mid- Bowie in real time....this is immeasurable. I'm sure I'd have been thrilled by him, and his character strangeness. For starters, his music, his poetical skill, is unassailable. Bowie is so smart, smart in ways young Gaga never will be, Madonna never was, etc. And, plainly, those were different times. Bowie's flashy difference was politically significant in ways that I'm not yet convinced Gaga is or could be...
I'm no surly adolescent; I feel pretty wretched about pop cultural non-embrace. I like to like the general, present likes. And I do. I do like "Summerboy" and "Paparazzi" and the newer "Alejandro" and "Monster." I like the way they sound, all Euro and emotionally punchy, and, even if I don't like the total lyric, I am moved by certain passages: the line in "Monster," "He ate my heart and then he ate my brain;" the repeated protest in "Bad Romance, "I don't want to be friends/I don't want to be friends." Comic-tragic disco. This is a rather great thing Gaga is doing: crafting, as her idol Bowie urges, "dance song[s] that can make you break down and cry." But the high speed of her rise and release of singles and images paired with singles (the artifice) has made for some holes, gaps, confusions, sort of degraded the quality of the recordings, the foundational work.
Gaga has invented Gaga on the road, in process, in the midst of some endless press tour. Witness the shift in avatars between the videos for first single, "Just Dance," and last (discounting "Telephone") single, "Bad Romance." 2008-2009...We're led to believe this shift was a matter of forethought, that Gaga has been working with a tight, over-arching narrative, from FAME to FAME MONSTER. I don't buy it, really. It seems to me she's gotten bigger budgets and a bigger circle and a bigger experience, like she's a good mimic whose happened to learn a little bit about looking art-y or art director-y. Even if it's so, this plan laid in 2008, it's flimsy; it's not all that scrutable. I don't hear or see a story, or gather that there's much connective tissue between Gaga efforts, aside from a certain look, an attitude, an any sort of non-thing that only people who work in fashion seem to think is solid or meaningful or even, um, cerebral....And like I said, "air-puffed stylings" are excellent, as long as they're not being passed off as grounded and circumspect. I've gathered a good bit of pseudo-intellect from Gaga's corner, and oooof it's the worst.
The AdAge article talks some about Gaga and Madonna. The author finds, incorrectly, that one can make a parallel between Madonna's Downtown life of the eighties and Gaga's Papa-funded L.E.S. rental of the late Aughts, when Downtown was unarguably dead, rotting even, alive only in the imaginations of provincial schoolgirls and a couple of promoter dopes (ahem, promotion). That said, Gaga&Madonna is a conversation worth having. I don't really want to have that whole conversation but...
Madonna, in her hyper I-am-being-aware-of-myself-now-ness, is sort of quaintly, naively (believe it or not) unaware. You know? Like there's some stuff that she invented, but also a lot just sort of happened to/for her and she's sparky and ambitious/ruthless. And maybe this has less to do with her and more to do with the sweetness of an old, slower media, of Pepsi commercials and Dick Tracy and "Come on girls, do you believe in Love," and an album called Music and on and on and children's books. One of your principal differences between Gaga and Madonna is how Gaga's self-awareness and self-promotion and self-modeling is standard, a piece of the greater celebrity, taken for granted, while Madonna's [action to self-form] was taken as the point, the center, the thing to discuss. It's more meet to pair Paris&Gaga, partners in seamless, shrugging fame-play.
Also, speed again and some singularity. Madonna worked and still works at the old pace (not lazily, mind you). Her ranged personas and reinventions happen/ed one at a time and with lulls in between—one kind of agenda and then a vacation and then another and a vacation, and so on. Gaga is in-a-flash and ceaseless and jumbled, a dizzy circle.
The real trouble—a notion AdAge*** and everybody else offers up clumsily—Gaga&Art.
The Polaroid consultancy has had me boiling for a minute. I mean, I'm jealous. And also confused and feeling slighted for (I'm really empathetic) all of the photographers who might have had brilliant residencies with Polaroid, a long, no-brainer of a list. The Polaroid has been central to contemporary art-imaging, a quick but powerful tool that makes sculptures and talismans of pictures. How will Lady Gaga, dame of the new social media, of the various, mixed-up and amaterial, improve the existing (if bankrupt [for no reason but bad boardroom dealings]) brand? Maybe if she were part of a group of media figures from all strata—photographers, painters, sculptors, musicians, filmmakers, writers—brought in to do mini-projects or pop-up stores and shows....but the sole creative director? And Gaga's manager's statement:
"You won't see her face plastered on any packaging or anything. We're comparing it to when Tom Ford went to Gucci or Steve Jobs went into Apple and brought a different thought process and taste level in. We're looking for her to do the same exact thing at Polaroid," he said. "It's not about her putting her name on something -- it's reinvigorating a brand."
Woah dawg.
Woah dawg.
I am, in theory, a supporter of multi-genre employment. Success in one creative field ought'nt to prevent legit' success in any other (though it so often does). But this is just too greedy. And I guess I'm being small, because this directorship is a job I'd love to have. But it's just more of Lady Gaga being rewarded as an artist, not a recording artist, but a performance and visual artist. I'm not saying one must have formal training or anything; all people make works in one way or another. But American commerce (in general) needs to open up more to visual artists, and an overnight dance-music sensation, however sensational, doesn't count, not in this context, not in the matter of a plum job consulting makers film and cameras. And I think her work, what we've seen of it, even at its best, lacks integrity. She is a communicator. She emotes, is both tough and vulnerable. She writes fantastic melodies and sings very well. But her communications are never clear, or even clear about their own non-clarity. Gaga spouts and spouts without a point of origin (like Dada's socialism and post-Victorian.ism) or a destination or a nod to the fact that she gets nonsensical with it. She just needs to clean up her act, get smarter.
In December, I couldn't sleep. I listened to every Gaga track; I watched every Gaga video. I saw this, the—judging from hair-bow—early video for non-single, "Eh Eh." It's not crazy remarkable, and it apes Gwen a bit with the spaghetti and rolling in sunny sheets (which is cool, if obv). It's pretty and fun and cheese; it seems fluid and authentic. It's Stefani Germanotta, Italo-American-pop.ster. I think I'd like this draggy Fame Monster Gaga much more if I'd been able to see a year's worth of the other (pretty!) bubbly version, if she hadn't come on so fast and strong and shedding skins daily, if she hadn't, herself, behaved like the fleet, brutal Internet.
*There was a smallish post about liking the choruses and hating the verses of most singles off The Fame, the mess of the performative elements, a remarked no-longer-favored favorite...
**Clarity, like actual clarity, will be impossible here. Gaga is, as ZBS noted in our comments last week, 'entropy,' a lot of noisy mezcla.
**Clarity, like actual clarity, will be impossible here. Gaga is, as ZBS noted in our comments last week, 'entropy,' a lot of noisy mezcla.
***Obviously this article's assertion that,
[Gaga was] hired specifically to create new products and inject life into a brand that hasn't been hip for years -- save for maybe a popular reference in Outkast's "Hey Ya!"
is deaf, nuts and deplorable.
Feb 24, 2010
Feb 23, 2010
Feb 19, 2010
Feb 18, 2010
N.Y. Mag's The Cut has this (below) to offer on Tavi-at-Fashion-Week. And what? What is happening here? I need a nap!--
Last night, 13-year-old blogger Tavi joined Susie Bubble, Bryanboy, Phil Oh of Street Peeper, and Britt Aboutaleb and Lauren Sherman of Fashionista.com for a panel discussion on “The Future of Fashion Blogging” at the Evolving Influence Fashion Blog Conference hosted by the Independent Fashion Bloggers. Tavi — clearly the blogger everyone was most excited to see — won coos and applause with almost every comment. And with good reason! Some highlights below.
On personal-style blogging:
“You can write about what you care about. There’s always someone who also really loves, like, Seinfeld as well as dead dolls, as well as Prada. I think the few times I’ve tried to do more news reporting, I can only go so far until I have to make a Freaks & Geeks reference. For me it’s easier to write as a personal-style blog.”
On technology changing the media landscape:
“Nick Knight started ShowStudio in 2000, like a decade ago, and the scary part is in five years, it’s going to be like the iPhone. I remember there was this old Lindsay Lohan Disney Channel movie and she was video chatting with her friends about what they were going to wear, and that was so technologically advanced to me, and now you don’t have to be like a spy on Disney Channel to do it.”
On people saying bloggers have no business sitting front row:
“Well, if you generalize it like that, then it’s like people with computers can’t be in the front row.”
On the blogger-versus-editor argument:
“A lot of it is kind of made up. I think it started to sort of come back and gain a little more momentum when a Grazia writer was sitting behind me and couldn’t see because of my hat. But like I saw what [she] Twittered, which was ‘Can’t see behind Tavi’s bow,’ and it’s like, I think [she was] just sort of like making a joke. But then it was like [transfers to ominous voice-over voice] ‘Bloggers and Editors at War — which side are you on?’” [Audience erupts into laughter and applause]
On reading her own press:
“I read my own comments because I rarely get a negative commenter on my blog. I don’t read comments on other sites when other people have written about me and I generally don’t read the article. I have to be with myself all the time, and I don’t really want to read about myself. If somebody doesn’t like me, it’s probably somebody I’m never going to meet. It’s just part of the game.”
Feb 17, 2010
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