i must admit for the longest time i thought camille paglia was crazy. in the late 80s and early 90s she was forever appearing on talk shows at the height of the feminist backlash against porn. it's not so much what camille was saying but the fast galloping clip at which she always seemed to be speaking.one was too busy being steam rolled and confused by the lurid rush to stop and consider the content. lately, however, she's one of the only ostensibly traditional left wingers- a feminist and a lesbian- who is daring to be critical of the toxic misogynist fascist persona beneath barack obama and his theater of the absurd presidency- even though she inexplicably supported his election. although i never paid much attention to paglia- and i did try to read her famous Sexual Personae several times- i got the impression she was most critical of those who's scholarly aspirations lacked good research and were not backed with critical thinking . anyone researching barry for a nanosecond through google would be instantly struck by his creepily empty past, scarce on documentation and anyone left alive willing to speak of it, and his even creepier, malignant adult associations with florid anti-Semites, bomb throwing commie-lite hippies, and black racists.
i know you love the gaga- you probably love the gaga and can't help yourself. i fucking hate the gaga. it's not so much that i do not get her appeal, it's just that i find what passes for addictively appealing nauseating and even more vapid than fucking madonna-a great love of paglia's - and we know how i hate the madonna. i HAD to play those records for years. it ruined me.
but if madonna was the chameleon sponge slicing, dicing, and stealing from all the usual places- pre- WW2 berlin, underground marginalized black and gay culture, hollywood- and trying desperately to remain relevant in our whimsical shallow fad and memory loss driven culture , gaga has turbo driven the process into almost instant oblivion for every passing fancy. a vast messy sea jam packed with chaotic loud nothingness, a kaleidoscope of flickering purloined obsessions of the mere moment. she's hello kitty with tits. a hello kitty devoid of any apparent appeal which one assumes is her whole pointless point. hello kitty was generated by a computer which was fed information concerning what children of a certain age found most visually pleasing. lady gaga is what you get when you have a computer create a robot out of the bittersweet tears of a million lonely emo brats who can't be weened off their ipods and cell phones, rendered in 1's and 0's.
but camille has managed to lay gaga out effectively and definitively. i may just have to pony up the one pound it costs to read the whole article.
"Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.
Gaga's fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Borderlines have been blurred between public and private: reality TV shows multiply, cell phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence, Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina… "
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/magazine/article389697.ece
