Born this Way

Lady Gaga won’t be wearing any meat this year to the music awards. No poultry. No Vegetables. This year, “We’re going more with textiles.” Let’s make our flaws famous. Wear a bra around town. Gain 25 pounds. Lose it. Wear safety pins. A wig. Another wig. A weave, extensions, short, long, two-tone. Paint your face. Show off your “curvy figure” your “curvy figure” your “curvy figure” their way of saying you are getting fat or is that just another outfit. It’s a style. You can wear a helmet of flowers around your whole head or you can be fat. Does anyone even know you’re fat if the captions dodn’t mention it under every picture? If you were thin before 25lbs isn’t fat. You don’t look fat. But curvy is code. Tall shoes short shoes black dress brown hair blonde bouffant spikey pink and streaked you are fat because fat is unusual. Let’s make our flaws famous. Take off the makeup get fat don’t brush your hair wear yellow underwear. You were born this way. Bullies were born this way too. Be kind. Be different. Be yourself. Wear what you want. Eat meat. Or don’t. Have a dog that looks like a baby bear. Dress like a man from the 1950s. Be a woman and be a man be both or neither or alternate between as your mood changes. Create a color scheme for each emotional moment. Use geometric design. Wear hats. Make your hat speak out loud. Encourage the youth. You are a spokesperson for people to go beyond or go over or go under. Be loud or quiet but do it in your own way. Wear pants. Or don’t. The trick is to learn to exist “halfway between fantasy and reality all of the time.” She completely turns the page on the last decade’s era of bimbodom, taking back the limelight from women who made their careers by admitting that they had nothing to say…She closes a strange era in female pop stardom…She’s riveting in any language, with lyrics that compose their own Esperanto…she’s effortlessly global. She wants to promote images of as many sexual combinations as are possible on this Earth…she’s a girl who likes boys who look like girls…she’s a girl who likes to look like a boy herself—a drag queen, a boy pretending to be a girl…little gives her more pleasure than the persistent rumor that she is a hermaphrodite…That’s not Madonna. Madonna wouldn’t pretend she has a penis. She is pop art, creative design color style experimentation. Creativity is stupid imaginary free space open to ideas and the outlandish which is only outlandish because it is unexpected, outside of some mainstream norm which comes from nowhere in particular or comes from resignation or an easy total lack of creativity. Splashes of color, swatches of fabric, complex engineering. She is an art project in process. The art student set free from the boundaries of the institution. Music color shape shadow nuance re-presentation, the abstract surreal realist avant-garde installation art in 3D walking through town shopping on stage talking with Ellen and the asshole Howard Stern. For Warhol, stardom was its own art form, empty imagistic vividness one of the most important forces. Become the performance. Art is life. Leave the love behind. Embody the artistic vision. Become androgyny. Become a drag queen. (Friends say that she has not been in love since, and the ritualistic killing of male lovers in her last three videos is related to this breakup.)…It’s an unlikely rise, and an unlikely name, and a totally unreal image. But what’s reality? Or maybe it’s a better version of reality or a more open one. This real is pushed to the margins, or it's homogenized, sanitized, softened making a center into which everyone aspires. Until they realize what they’ve lost and can’t get back. More real exists on the margins. More kids are bullied. More art students believe in creative possibilities…until they leave art school and are out in the world. Little kids write poems and paint pictures and play dress-up until they are adults conforming in khakis and conservatism. Women give up on dreams leave their intuition behind let go of imagination unless it is mainstream-sanctioned motherhood activities like arts and crafts at the kitchen table. Art is for non-professional non-adults who have no responsibilities and little ambition. Until someone wears a shiny red plastic dress and red glitter face paint to meet the Queen of England and the rest of us turn our un-hatted heads and consider there may be a different way of doing things. Just maybe the status is not in quo.

quotes and italics from random People Magazine web pages on Lady Gaga and from “Growing Up Gaga: The self-invented, manufactured, accidental, totally on-purpose New York creation of the world’s biggest pop star.”  New York Magazine. By Vanessa Grigoriadis, Published Mar 28, 2010