My cousin appreciates Lady Gaga. She's 22 and a recent graduate of NYU (an institution lucky enough to have been graced by Gaga for a semester or so). However, being the good gays that we are, Bryan & I decided to show her some videos by that other chameleonic Italian-American with an NYC mythology. For context's sake.
First we watched Express Yourself (directed by David Fincher, no less). The video seems extraordinarily slow after watching a few of Gaga's, though I was able to better appreciate the laboring-proletariat/homoeroticism registers-of-meaning than I was back in the late 80's. I was also able to identify previously-decoded visual puns, such as what it meant for a lycanthropic Madonna/cat to become increasingly drenched as the video progressed.
Next came Bedtime Story, a surrealistic smorgasbord rife with Cell-like orientalist nightmare/dreamscapes. Here, Madonna channels Dali and she channels Sherman. See, dear cousin, how matron Madge offered herself as a geisha-canvas for all things freaky-deaky? And when Gaga was but a sprog!
Is it no wonder, then, that alien Bjork (appropriately McQueened - and geisha-swagged - for Homogenic's cover) wrote the lyrics for Bedtime Story? And look how she, too, echoes Sherman in her videodromes!
So when I saw that Amie Dicke's Opium was being liquified, I remembered when I first saw her work. It wasn't in person, but in an article, and the work accompanying the review was titled I Suck My Tongue in Remembrance of You. I knew that this was a line from Bjork's Possibly Maybe, and I remember being pissed that the article made no mention of this!
But being wiser now, I sit zazen and know that all of these things are mere vapours in the pop-surrealist atmosphere, more exquisite mash for the meat-grinder...
*Ruby-nibbed/headed naked Carrie dumped by frakbuddy, altared by j1p2m3 here (and a reference to Gaga's seminal MTV VMA performance of Paparazzi, which was an homage to Lady Di)
