Rejoice and love yourself todayMadonna's "Express Yourself" had you expressing yourself and demanding that your man express himself:
'Cause baby you were Born This Way
No matter gay, straight, or bi,
Lesbian, transgendered life
I'm on the right track baby
I was born to survive
What you need is a big strong hand
To lift you to your higher ground
Make you feel like a queen on a throne
Make him love you till you can't come down
"Okie From Muskogee," 1969's apparent political statement, was actually written as an abjectly humorous character portrait. Haggard called the song a "documentation of the uneducated that lived in America at the time."... "I wrote it when I recently got out of the joint. I knew what it was like to lose my freedom, and I was getting really mad at these protesters. They didn't know anything more about the war in Vietnam than I did. I thought how my dad, who was from Oklahoma, would have felt. I felt I knew how those boys fighting in Vietnam felt."That text is from Wikipedia. "Abjectly humorous character portrait"? Somebody doesn't know the meaning of "abjectly." But I'm inclined to say that Andrew Sullivan is abjectly humorless... at least when it comes to marijuana....
If only he had stuck around. He might have heard a whispered "Thank you."Ha ha ha ha.
I yelled at Madonna today, and I didn't even realize it until later!
She's apparently directing a film (!) and was shooting right in front of my house in Brooklyn on Wednesday. I came outside to do my morning walk and there were crowds of people all over the place: screaming black girls, curious Chassidim, hipsters in Ray-Bans feigning disinterest, irritated cops... I saw a bunch of Arri equipment boxes and realized it was a film shoot of some sort. I walked a few feet down my block and a chick with a headset held up her arm and said "You have to cross the street, sir!" I replied: "I don't have to do anything. This is my neighborhood, and a public sidewalk, and I'll go where I please!"
I walked a few more feet and another drone with a headset came rushing up to me and said "The sidewalk's closed. Please cross the street!" I replied: "This is a public sidewalk. I will continue to walk where I please."
I pushed past him and a I came upon a haggard woman in sunglasses, a baseball cap and a scarf printed with a stylized skull pattern holding a clipboard and looking into a hand-held monitor along with a couple of other people. Being a veteran of the terrible world of film production, I recognized that this woman was probably the director. I paused as I passed and said to her: "You need to inform your brain-dead P.A.s that they need to treat us residents a little better, honey." She looked at me, expressionless behind her sunglasses for a moment before one of the men with her said "Move along, sir." I replied "a hearty fuck you to both of you" and I walked onward.
Later, when I was on my way home, I stopped in the local market and the Korean guy who runs the place said to me: "what do you think of that mess out there?" I told him of my encounter with the production assistants and the director. He laughed and said: "do you know who that director is? Madonna!"
I smiled and said "No, I didn't recognize her.. but she looks like hell and sure runs a shitty location shoot."
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…Negative about Gaga and modern life in general. These kids today. Get off my lawn.
From the start of her career Madonna was a savvy pop trickster, using outrageous imagery as a distraction while smuggling ideas about religion and social politics into her music. Most of the Gaga generation, however, is interested in distraction as an end in itself.As a 60s person, I'm highly amused by this presentation of the 80s as the standard what was once real in popular culture. Madonna was fake as a means to an end, but Lady Gaga is really fake, and fake is what's real now. To my 60s ears, that sounds like something Andy Warhol would say.
Lady Gaga has become successful by adhering to the belief that there’s no inner truth to be advertised, or salvaged: all one can do is invent anew.Wait. People took Lilith Fair seriously? 11-year-old girls, maybe. Seems to me it was mostly abhorred.
It wasn’t that long ago when artifice appeared to be on its last leg. In the mid-to-late-1990s female performers especially were in a confessional place, a movement captured and branded by Lilith Fair, the summer tour package founded in part by Sarah McLachlan that ran from 1997 to 1999.
The last couple of years have seen the first wave of 1990s nostalgia, which might explain in part why Lilith was resurrected this year. But Lilith aesthetics haven’t aged well....Do we say hasn't aged well about something that was never pretty?
But Diller was a comedian...(Ahem. Diller lives. Born in 1917 and alive.)
... and so are her spiritual descendants, people like Kathy Griffin and Margaret Cho, women sharp enough and shrewd enough to wade into the cultural scrapheap that is gender and recycle all the trashy signifiers they find there for laughs.Williams is different, Trebay says, because she's a talk show host.
Like a kooky media divinity, a god in a comic book myth, Williams, 45, is permeable, superpotent and with no observable boundaries. She performs tricks on the air that involve her surgically amplified bosom. She suggests to guests like Omarosa Manigault Stallworth, the confrontational star of “The Apprentice,” that she look into facial fillers to correct the marionette lines that frame her stiff, practiced smile. She vows to keep her audience up to date on her vaginal toning. She cries, but then on television lately it’s hard to shut off the waterworks.Nice. But I'm more interested in the general idea of the female female impersonator. The first person who sprang to mind for me is Dolly Parton. And Marilyn Monroe. And then Courtney Love, Madonna, Lady Gaga.
“You just have the audacity and the unmitigated gall to say what you think and let the chips fall where they may,” Williams said.
"I do feel like there's a bit of a double standard in the entertainment community, on television, on radio... I feel like women performers have been pushing the envelope, especially, for the past 20 years. And all of the sudden a male does it and everybody goes 'Oh, we can't show that on TV.' For me, that's a form of discrimination and a double standard. And that's too bad."The head in his crotch was female, by the way. Lambert subsequently canceled that discrimination by kissing a male.
Michael Jackson was born in August 1958. So was I. Michael Jackson grew up in the suburbs of the Midwest. So did I. Michael Jackson had eight brothers and sisters. So do I. When Michael Jackson was six, he became a superstar, and was perhaps the world’s most beloved child. When I was six, my mother died. I think he got the shorter end of the stick. I never had a mother, but he never had a childhood. And when you never get to have something, you become obsessed by it.She tells about the time she tried to befriend the ultra-strange superstar:
I spent my childhood searching for my mother figures. Sometimes I was successful, but how do you recreate your childhood when you are under the magnifying glass of the world?
I asked him out to dinner, I said “My treat, I’ll drive — just you and me.”I'll drive. Ha ha.
He agreed and showed up to my house without any bodyguards. We drove to the restaurant in my car. It was dark out, but he was still wearing sunglasses.Just one more reason why you need to do the driving.
I said, “Michael, I feel like I’m talking to a limousine. Do you think you can take off your glasses so I can see your eyes?”I feel like I’m talking to a limousine. Ha ha. Brilliant. I wonder if Madonna really does come up with lines like that in real time or some great comic writer punched up the dialogue. Dead men correct no quotes.
Then he tossed the glasses out the window, looked at me with a wink and a smile and said, “Can you see me now? Is that better?”What a goody-two-shoes that guy was! Imagine getting lessons in how to be bad from Madonna.
[I]n that moment, I could see both his vulnerability and his charm. The rest of the dinner, I was hellbent on getting him to eat French fries, drink wine, have dessert and say bad words. Things he never seemed to allow himself to do.
Later we went back to my house to watch a movie and sat on the couch like two kids, and somewhere in the middle of the movie, his hand snuck over and held mine.Who knew the peak moment of Michael Jackson's life was the moment Madonna made him feel — at last! — human?
It felt like he was looking for more of a friend than a romance, and I was happy to oblige. In that moment, he didn’t feel like a superstar. He felt like a human being.
We went out a few more times together, and then for one reason or another we fell out of touch.Dead men tell no anecdotes.
Madonna has now confirmed that she is divorcing husband Guy Ritchie.
Kate Hudson Does Elle UK
Madonna Does Dazed & Confused
Lily Allen had to leave the GQ Men Of The Year Awards last night because she was too drunk, according to Daily Mail.
