Monday, August 19, 2013

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

GZ: Superhero



It's like a movie. You get fed up. You blow something up. Or you fall down and cry. Or you shoot. Or you become paranoid. Or maybe paranoid happens over time. A slow boil. A rumbling toward a breaking point. Or many breaking points. Only eventually one break is one too many. What do you do in your spare time. I mean your other spare time. When you're not paranoid or obsessed with what's outside your window.  What are you looking at inside? Not inside yourself, that might make you a different person, less paranoid less rationalizing of the irrational. I mean inside your house. How many movies have you watched? How many movies with good guys and bad guys and action and explosions and shooting? How many movies with a scary bad guy sneaking around hiding in the shadows ducking out of the way until the good guy looks down for just a second? The bad guy comes out of nowhere. Hits the good guy in the face. "What you want? Why you watching me? I'm gonna kill you motherfucker." You know in the movies, when the bad guy circles the good guy's car staring menacingly in through the rolled up windows. The good guy notices the bad guy has a hand in his waistband hiding a gun or a knife. The bad guy disappears and the good guy gets out to follow (because otherwise the plot would stall the action would never move to the conflict and fight scene). The good guy follows but can't see the bad guy. The good guy has 911 on the phone but then says the bad guy is gone. Hangs up. Starts walking away. Feels nervous. Looks for his phone but this time he can't find it (which pocket? oh crap which pocket?). Caught unaware he is hit in the nose (because bad guys like evil nemeses can appear without sound in a flash and catch the bad guys off guard... that's why we cheer for the good guys, they come from behind to triumph win over evil) staggers gets knocked to the ground. Bad guy "you got a problem?" Good guy: "no." Bad guy: "you do now." And before he knows it the good guy is down head on cement bleeding can't get up. Bad guy holds him down. Good guy: "help!" Bad guy: "shut the fuck up." Bad guy slams good guy's head into cement. Bad guy: "you're gonna die tonight motherfucker." Bad guy reaches for good guy's gun holstered at good guy's waist. Good guy gets a surge of adrenaline. Suddenly pushes back. Grabs his gun first. Good guy puts the gun to bad guy's chest and pulls the trigger. Bad guy: "you got me." Bad guy sits up sways a little. Good guy pushes him off down to the ground face down gets on top of him spreads his arms out to the sides to keep him at bay. While the bad guy dies. This is the screenplay for GZ: Superhero. It's already half written. You wrote it. In your own words. GZ neighborhood protector. GZ local hero watching out for dangerous potholes and piles of trash. Calling 911 on kids playing in the street, kids playing basketball, dogs wandering aimlessly. GZ calling 911 on suspicious black men wearing tank tops, leather jackets, sweatshirts. GZ has studied the law. GZ wants to be a police officer. GZ can protect the people take down criminals has a gun goes on patrol wants to be a judge one day. GZ is ready to kill the bad guy. In the non-movie version the bad guy is a kid barely verging on adulthood. The bad guy is not a bad guy but a kid walking home from the store. The kid who is mistaken for a bad guy has candy in his pocket no criminal record no record of violence walks home in the rain talking to his friend on the phone. The kid  weighs 80lbs less than you GZ. In the silent version unwritten the kid tried to run away instead got caught on a movie set shot dead with not-fake blood.