I was on my way home to Milwaukee for the weekend, somewhere in that brief stretch of no man’s land that separates the casino town of Dubuque, Iowa from the Wisconsin state line, when 2011 National League MVP Ryan Braun, whose appeal of a fifty game suspension for having tested positive last October for synthetic testosterone – a “Performance Enhancing Drug” banned under Major League Baseball’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program – had the day before been upheld by long-time baseball arbitrator Shyam Das, concluded his twenty-five minute press conference at the Milwaukee Brewers’ spring training facility in Phoenix, Arizona. Scanning the radio dial, I was able to follow reaction to what was perhaps the most direct and impassioned public denial ever issued by a baseball player accused of using PEDs – while standard procedure is to look toward the future from behind some sort of pseudo-legal smokescreen, Braun went so far as to say he would “bet [his] life” that the banned substance in question did not enter his body, either intentionally or otherwise – in two rather different forums: on the popular syndicated sports talk show the Jim Rome Show, guest hosted that morning by NFL network personality Andrew Siciliano, and on a local sports call-in show broadcast out of Madison, Wisconsin.

Not surprisingly, reactions varied. Siciliano, addressing a national audience, scoffed – he literally produced a guttural, scoffing type sound from out of the back of his throat – at Braun’s all but unequivocal implication (though he was careful to stop short of outright accusation, noting that he knew what it felt like to be “wrongly accused” and did not want to subject someone else to such an injustice) that during the forty-four hours that his dirty urine sample was in the possession of the part-time urine collector who had taken it from him after a playoff game between the Brewers and the Arizona Diamondbacks at approximately 5:00 p.m. on October 1^st of last year, a Saturday, it had been intentionally and maliciously contaminated. It required a rather broad leap of faith, Siciliano suggested, and perhaps a bit of stupidity as well, to believe that some part-time urine collector in Milwaukee had managed to open the sample that had been sealed in Braun’s presence in the Brewers’ clubhouse, manipulate it such that it would fraudulently testify to the presence of a large quantity of synthetic testosterone in the body of the individual from whom it had been taken, and then re-seal it with such competence that no one at the drug-testing lab in Montreal to which it was subsequently sent via FedEx early the following Monday afternoon would detect even the slightest evidence of tampering – and, moreover, to believe that this part-time urine collector in Milwaukee would want to do all of this.

Nonetheless, the fact that the collector, whose name we now know is Dino Laurenzi, Jr. of Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, took Braun’s urine home with him that afternoon and did not send it off by FedEx until 1:30 p.m. the following Monday though there were, as Braun pointed out during his press conference, upwards of nineteen FedEx offices open between Miller Park, where the Brewers play their home games and where the sample had been collected, and Laurenzi’s home is apparently the reason Braun’s appeal, unlike every other appeal that has been filed since the current drug testing program was ratified by Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association in 2006, was upheld by Das. Language in the Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program specifies that “absent unusual circumstances, the specimens should be sent by FedEx to the laboratory on the same day they are collected,” a specification with which Laurenzi, in the Das’s view, did not comply. In Wisconsin, that violation of protocol was at once more than enough and utterly beside the point: Braun’s innocence was by and large accepted from the outset there – one of few things Wisconsinites from both sides of the proverbial aisle have been able to agree upon in recent months – and to that extent Das’s ruling, and Braun’s press conference, simply provided new fodder for its discussion. The Madison radio hosts to whose show I returned every few minutes as I drove prattled on admiringly about how genuine, sincere, and intelligent Braun looked and sounded during his press conference, while outraged callers in took turns raking Major League Baseball and ESPN over the coals for, in the case of the first, leaking information that, as per the terms of the Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program should have remained confidential throughout the appeal process and, because it was upheld, forever thereafter, and in that of the second reporting the leaked information back in December.

I, too, believe that Braun is telling the truth when he says he did not use PEDs, and for reasons that have little to do with the results of his arbitration case and the – depending on who you ask – reasonable or all but entirely unreasonable possibility that his urine sample was tampered with while it was in Dino Laurenzi, Jr.’s possession. Last summer, I paid for online access to live broadcasts of every Major League Baseball game through the playoffs so that, from places as far flung as a dorm room in Amherst, Massachusetts and a mountaintop apartment near Santa Barbara, California I could follow the Brewers’ most successful season since 1982 all the way through to its bitter end, a loss in the National League Championship Series to the division rival St. Louis Cardinals. What I saw, watching Braun game after game on my computer screen, was an immensely talented hitter having his best season not because, making the same swings on the same pitches, he was as though magically hitting the ball harder and further, but because he had become more patient at the plate, more able to orchestrate his at-bats rather than have them orchestrated by the opposing pitcher (except when that pitcher was the Cardinals’ Octavio Dotel, who befuddled Braun throughout the National League Championship series), something that in turn enabled him to “pick his pitches,” as the saying goes. I also saw his body looking more or less the same as it had the game – and season – before, his head no bigger and his jaw, to my eye, no squarer or more protuberant, and listening to postgame interviews I detected none of the peevishness we consistently saw out of players like Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, the great anti-heroes of baseball’s steroids glory years, but only the same California cool demeanor Braun maintained throughout his press conference in Arizona.

That said, I can hardly claim impartiality in these judgments. I was born and grew up in Milwaukee. In 1982, the last time the Brewers competed in the World Series, my father carried me into the home games at the old County Stadium on his shoulders and kept me there, thus avoiding having to pay for two bleacher seats. I had a lump in my throat when they lost the seventh and deciding game of that World Series in St. Louis, and then again when I held up a “Welcome Back, Gorman” sign the first time mustachioed fan favorite Gorman Thomas, having been traded away, visited County Stadium as a member of the visiting Seattle Mariners, and to this day I still have the copy of the front page of the Milwaukee Journal (now the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, having merged with what its in-town counterpart in 1995) published the afternoon after Paul Molitor’s epic thirty-nine game hitting streak ended in 1987 that my father laminated for me the following morning at work, at risk of being reprimanded for personal use of the laminating machine. I am a fan, in other words, and the rub of it is that if that makes me more qualified than most to speak to the question of Braun’s guilt or innocence – more qualified because I am more familiar than most with Braun’s natural demeanor, his jawbone, the speed with which his bat moves through the hitting zone, and with the incremental narrative of his rise to the top of the baseball heap that gives the lie to the notion that last summer’s was a “breakout” season – it also makes me infinitely less so, for Braun belongs, for me, to a history of longing no mere evidence could ever have the power to arrest. Each time he steps to the plate, or for that matter in front of the microphones, I am not only rooting for him to succeed but also, and precisely by way of him, rooting all over again for Gorman Thomas to wave back to us when we roar in appreciation before his first County Stadium at-bat as a Mariner, and for Rick Manning, whose game-winning hit in the tenth inning left a hitless Paul Molitor standing on deck on the night his thirty-nine game hitting streak ended, to strike out so Molitor can have one more chance at history before the night ends, and, from atop my father’s shoulders somewhere out there in the old County Stadium bleachers, for the 1982 Brewers, the greatest Brewers team of all, the ones we called “Harvey’s Wallbangers” because they had a tendency to pound the baseball so forcefully that it banged off the outfield wall and because their manager’s first name was Harvey (and because of the cocktail, I suppose), to win a World Series history tells us they have long since lost.

The unbearable weight of so many such dreams has surely led plenty of our most gifted athletes to violate what Braun, in his Arizona press conference, described as “the morals, the virtues, the values by which I’ve lived my 28 years on this planet.” And their lightness, no doubt, lifted others to greatness.

Dear Nora,

I’m afraid I’m going to be tight-lipped, I just finished that presentation, and it was positively awful. While I was speaking, the professor was flipping idly through her copy of Notes, and afterward the students just all stared at me blankly – it wasn’t that blank look in praise of sublimity either.

Wow, perhaps I need a frozen yogurt with gummi bears and butterfinger bits and chocolate chip cookie dough, too. Throwing a fully loaded waffle cone off the Pasadena Bridge sounds like a great hell freezes over gesture, but do I have to remind you that you are the one that wanted to go to Art Center instead of matriculating with me over here in the Big Apple? If I have to cross another mall to find you I may just have to give up on you altogether. Consider my American Apparel days numbered…I can see the resignation letter now…(“I hereby tender my resignation with immediate effect….”)…It’s possible I may need to converse with you on this one…You’ve got some of the best exit lines around…I’ve managed to bypass that important rite of passage at every turn.

Next time – if there is a next time – you can reach me by cell at the exact moment your unadulterated dairy sacrifice passes away from the line of sight. To be dialed in the second firmament’s hit. I bet it will make a satisfying splat sound. One day I hope to do the same myself. Fuck me – this optimism is strong stuff!

I’ve loved your last few emails. It’s good to have your batting eyelashes and twinkle-toes back in my everydays once again. Rimbaud does this all the time: who is “hideously beautiful with an ulcer on her anus.” Sigh.

You’re going to make so many friends in LA. This might take some jealousy.

My parents are coming here on Friday – that should be funny. Where should I take’m? Max is probably in on this, the minx. Maybe I’m just gonna surrender the stink powder, the trick gum ideas, and hand over the wallet-sized guide to the subway system I keep for a wallet photo (you’ve been replaced) these days instead. Have fun, kids. It serves them right…for visiting during finals.

I have to grade papers today and prepare for instruction tomorrow and I don’t feel well. It just came down all of a sudden. Sure, it’s funny when students don’t know how to make larger thematic links so instead they just give the most incredibly specific and random details about the novels…that makes me happy.

Walt Whitman will try to souse them with spray. He’s so fresh. You can’t take that guy anywhere.

Earlier in the evening I read your paper on Marx; I think I’m in love, but all you fools want to do is talk about economics.

PS: I currently entertain this wonderful image of you as this incredibly fit triathlete under the California sun – frozen treat notwithstanding. No. It adds something. It’s your Grecian urn. Keep it up. I’ll panic and get fat for the both of us.

Love,

Simon

*An early version of this particular NORA was recently published in DRIFT: A Magazine of West Coast Cultural Production (Issue 4, Fall 2011)

“All of This and Nothing. I mean, I think it just works so well for this show, right?” He’s smiling because he’s just finished telling us that the title of the Psychedelic Furs song from their eponymous 1981 album Talk Talk Talk came to him a month ago, like a bolt from the blue, while driving to a curatorial meeting in which the title of the Hammer Museum’s conceptually ambitious exhibition, All of This and Nothing was then, as yet to be determined. And, as he tells it, being a staunch fan of The Furs, not to mention somewhat of a conceptually, and pop-culturally savvy dude, he saw a perfect opportunity to contextualize the work of roughly a dozen disparate contemporary artists under this single unifying umbrella: this – according to him – fitting, poetically concise moniker. The “he” in question was Douglas Fogle, acting as museum tour guide to a group of art students, myself included, who had come to the Hammer seeking enlightenment. I gather he is a rather important figure, all the signs are there: simple yet elegant shoes, designer jeans, immaculately sculpted coif, and the fact that he can really, you know, “talk” about Art. You know the way I mean, the way we all secretly wish, in our darkest of hearts, that we could talk about Art, even though, if we’re honest, we usually find it to be rather pretentious, even a wee bit condescending when we’re forced to endure listening to it. But even were it not for these tell-tale signs, I was also fully aware that our guide was not your average docent, in fact it turned out he’s the chief curator for the Hammer Museum, a position he only recently (2 years? recent enough in the art world scheme of things anyway) attained, and the warm afterglow of this culturally significant achievement still permeates his – dare-I-say-it – boyishly toothy grin. Presently I looked up from those unnaturally white teeth to realize he’s looking at me. What’s worse, he’s still talking.

As I listened, or did my best impression of someone who is deeply involved with every syllable escaping our overly qualified speaker’s lips, I couldn’t help but fixate on the fact that this moment seemed somehow indicative of a bigger contemporary moment currently happening not only in the art world, but also in the world at large. When did engagement become so passive? When did we let all of the information, all of the analysis, empirical dogma – the authoritative words, trump the pure, mystical profundity of unencumbered experience? In a world where everything is so immediately accessible, and readily available at the touch of a highly sophisticated and meticulously engineered screen that fits in the palm of your hand, it can become dangerously easy to forget, or take for granted, the human cost, the human terms that made, and still make, such seemingly miraculous things possible. Magic is part of our everyday lives, yet we cannot see it.

In some ways, I think we’ve all given in, to one degree or another, to the contextualization provided for us by everything and for everything by an image and media-saturated culture, making it harder and harder to just see things for what they are. How do they affect us, when the words, or numbers, or binary codes aren’t there to frame them for us, guiding us by the hand like an over-qualified docent, categorizing, reducing, and commodifying them for our pleasure? (As I type this, I realize I’ve used the spell-check function on my MacBook Pro no less than five times for this paragraph alone, and the irony is using a nine-pound hammer to ensure that this fact is not lost on me.) Is it possible to escape? Is it even possible in modern life to just experience in a completely pure sense?  To see a film without knowing who of the who’s-who-set is starring in it, what the general populace’s consensus is in regards to its value as it pertains to a night out, while simultaneously seeing multiple behind-the-scenes, making-of featurettes, not to mention every significant scene the movie has to offer? To hear a song without knowing every detail about its creation: where and who and why it was made, the way it relates to every other song of a particular subset, and what other songs you would probably like if this one is so agreeable to you? Our tour through that particular contemporary group museum exhibition reminded me that such is the world I live in, and it’s making it harder for me to see a way out.

We moved from one hardly-there hyper-conceptual installation piece to the next, only to encounter more indecipherable, impenetrable photographs, and then on to paintings that beg – or is it dare? – you to reject and dispute them or their right to exist, all the while being regaled with anecdotal, historical, and contextual information which, rather than enriching the artwork before us, served to flatten it, robbing it of the “magic” this particular exhibition seemed hell-bent at the outset to establish.  The object-hood of the mundane and everyday these artists had so valiantly pitted against the all-consuming information age struggled in vain with the more metaphysical, transcendental, lyrical notions of presence, immediacy, and autonomy. In the end, we still need so many words to make them “real.”

But art and culture at their best have always been glorious funhouse mirrors in which we humans can see our reflection not for what it is per se, but for what it could be at its most distorted extremes, and by that standard it’s impossible not to appreciate these artists’ works for what they tell us about the 21^st century human condition. We don’t want to be given too much, perhaps we’re only too acutely aware that we already have too much, and we certainly don’t want to work too hard for or think too hard about what we already have, and what we should do with it. So where does that leave us? We have so much of it. All of this. Nothing.

I’m back to thinking about the Psychedelic Furs, and it occurs to me only later that the album Talk Talk Talk was released on my third birthday, a fact which I can’t exactly imbue with cosmic significance, but seems strangely appropriate somehow, given the trajectory of my life and popular culture up to this very moment in front of this particular computer screen typing, typing, typing my way of talking, talking, talking, bemoaning all the talk, talk… you get the picture. It does make it easier somehow, to just let the talking take over. Letting it compartmentalize, categorize, define, and systematize everything around us certainly helps eradicate the fear we all feel when faced with the void of finite existence. Suddenly there is a logical, rational, digestible progression leading us down the rabbit hole. And if you should start to get frightened just whip out your phone and let the world tell you why it should matter, even if it’s lying. The Furs put it best, in the song that inspired our hero, chief curator Douglas Fogle, to put on this artsy show, and more importantly give it a snazzy title. I’ll let the ending lyrics of that song take this endless blather to its final resting place:

Hey I never meant that stuff

I want to turn you on

The sound of people getting drunk

A ceiling and a sky

A bank that’s full of promises

A telephone that lies

A visit from your doctor

He crawls in through the door

A mirror you can look in

So that you know where you are

You didn’t leave me anything

That I can understand

Now I’m left with all of this

A room full of your trash

Not bad for 1981. Maybe Doug was on to something.

Bullfight posters are not hard to come by in Spain. Indeed, in any place in the country with touristic pretensions you can probably find a shop where they’ll inkjet your name on to some simulacrum of a traditional bullfight poster such that to the untrained eye it will look as though you yourself, alongside some José Tomás and Such-and-Such de la Frontera, were one of the three brave matadors who stared death in the eyes in Plaza de Toros de Madrid back in some timeless past and lived into the Disneyfied present to tell of it (what these posters in fact announce, of course, is that you or someone who cared enough about you to buy you a gift visited Spain). With its flick-of-the-wrist abstractions, and the bull about to enter the ring as though at the edge of some kind of black hole – with the blood-red text streaked, near the bottom, as though with blood – the image above, created by contemporary Majorcan artist Miquel Barceló, hardly resembles the iconic bullfight posters from which the aforementioned souvenirs take their folkloric cues. All the same, it is the most beautiful bullfighting poster I have ever seen, because the bullfight it was created to promote – on the 25^th of September at the Plaza de Toros Monumental in Barcelona – was the last bullfight ever held in Catalonia.

*
I am no bullfighting expert. But having spent probably a quarter of my adult life in Spain, and a fair percentage of that time heading up groups of American high school students who naturally can’t go back home without having seen a Spanish bullfight, I’ve been to enough to know the basic script. Each bullfight features three matadors and six bulls, each of which gets his turn to die at the hands of one of the three matadors and his six assistants. When a bull is first released into the ring, the bullfighters responsible for that particular animal runs him around using a heavy gold and magenta cape to attract his attention. Once the bull has burned a bit of energy, the matador performs a series of the close passes of the sort images of which we have all seen if nowhere else painted onto the wall of some hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant somewhere. Eventually, a bugle sounds, announcing the end of the first stage of the bullfight and beginning of the second. During the second stage, a fellow called the “picador” rides into the ring on horseback carrying an enormous lance. The horse is blinded, so he won’t scare, and draped in an impenetrable padding – a suit of fabric armor, essentially. The bull, of course, knows nothing of impenetrable padding, and so he charges the horse with his killer’s instinct, and upon his approach the picador stabs him in the back of the neck with his lance, weakening the neck muscles so that the matador will eventually have easier access, past the now hanging head, when he goes in for the kill. When the bugles have once more sounded, the “banderilleros” take their turn. The banderilleros carry two barbed sticks, or banderillas, decorated in lovely bright colors. There are three banderilleros, and each takes a turn trying to jam the banderillas into the bull’s shoulder muscles, further weakening him. Usually, they do not succeed in planting all six banderillas – but at least three or four seem to always find their way in, and they dangle, colorful and blood drenched, during the final stage of the bullfight, the so-called “tercio de muerte,” the period of death. Here, the matador emerges with iconic red cape – the muleta, as its known, draped over a fake sword that, prior to going in for the kill, he will exchange for a real sword. Using the cape, the bullfighters makes a number of passes with the ostensible intention of getting the bull into a conveniently killable position, and once he has him there – inevitably, at this point, the animal is panting, mucous is flowing from nostrils and slobber dripping from his mouth, his stomach heaving heavily – he lowers the red cape, so that, as his eyes follow it, the bull’s head, already hanging low from the weakening of the neck muscles, drops even lower, and finally lunges in for the kill. If the kill goes well, the sword passes between the shoulder blades and directly into the heart. In this case, blood often starts to flow from all of the bull’s orifices, Ebola-like, and it’s not long before, spun in dizzying circles by the matador’s assistants with their pink and magenta capes, he drops dead. More often than not, the sword does not go in clean between the shoulder blades and into the heart on the first try. Sometimes it hits bone and rebounds, sailing into the air and dropping to the blood-spattered sand, where it will be recovered by one of the matador’s assistants and returned to him for a second try. Often, it goes in halfway, or a third of the way. When this happens, in many cases, the bull – once it has been spun around enough times – falls over, often buckling at the knees, but frequently does not die. In this case, one of the assistants takes a little dagger and jams it directly into the bull’s spinal chord, at which point – usually with a spasm – the animal mercifully expires. A team of mules, whipped into action, hauls the body from the ring, and the sand is turned over before the next bull comes out, met by the next matador on the list, and the whole scene repeats itself all over again.

*

In light of the above, that one should “consider the bull,” to borrow a turn of phrase from the late David Foster Wallace, probably goes without saying. But these days that bull isn’t even what it used to be. In an article published in Spain’s El País newspaper in advance of last Sunday’s bullfight in Barcelona, Antonio Lorca described the bull of the contemporary bullfight as pitifully denatured by the time it enters the ring – its horns filed down and, though the subject is taboo, usually chemically sedated. In a sense, today’s toro bravo has been stripped of his existence even before the vicious spectacle of the bullfight itself. It is out of consideration for the bull, or the perverse cyborg that it has become, that, in recent years, protesters have lined the streets radiating like spokes from La Monumental before and after bullfights, raising placards and voices in an effort to at once shame and, in the best of cases, convert spectators (horrified foreigners on their way out were inevitably the protesters’ easiest marks). Ultimately, however, the Catalan ban on bullfighting has nothing to do with ethics or torture and a lot to do with economics – bullfights have long since ceased to be profitable in Catalonia, in particular – and even more with nationalism. Catalonia’s cultural mainstream would like nothing more than to become dissociated once and for all from the so-called “España profunda” of which the bullfight, regardless of its contemporary economic and cultural irrelevance, remains an abiding symbol. Thus, Catalan correbous, or bull runs, remain a popular tradition in small town Catalonia despite the fact that, even without taking a sword through the heart, the bulls suffer terribly during them, and frequently die afterwards from shock or injury. But these are lean times for those of us who still find sustenance in the hope for a better world – times when it doesn’t pay to be too picky or exacting. Faced with the dismantling of the European welfare state in the name of a cynical economic fatalism, we should welcome, whatever the real reasons behind the end of bullfighting in Catalonia, what looks a lot like progress according to the old liberal intuition – engine of the great democratic projects of modernity – that the suffering and destruction of sentient beings, if a necessary coefficient of the survival of the same, is bad, and wherever possible to be avoided.

Nora,

You are one of those things Proust was wrong about; that Celtic soul inhering in things is transitive, so that you might put yourself there with giggle. Thank you for the care package. Will kites or candy ever be the same?

You really know how to fold an envelope. Playboy centerfolds, paper dolls. You made the roommate blush. She’ll think twice before leafing through my mail, the jack-a-lope. I’m surprised the postman didn’t keep it for his dirty little locker. You can never tell with institutions of faith.

Blind date, huh? You jerk. I am forced to shift gears rapidly. I have lost my ergonomic detachment. Think of all the poems about rain that get written after a deluge.

Dude! Faith is for doddering fools without a plan. We’re all just draftsmen for the divine; and unless you’ve got a concept to pitch, you’re going to be subcontracted for designs of Beelzebub’s new brimstone port-o-pots. I’d hate to see it. I really would.

A blind date, really? Call me so we can deal with this.

PS: Have you heard from Simon?

Max

Thanks to the high school students with whom I’ve shared the past six weeks as instructor of creative writing and residential adviser at a pre-college summer enrichment camp on the campus of Amherst College, and thanks more importantly to my willingness to let those students plug their iPods into the auxiliary socket and turn the volume to “max” when they are riding with me in one of the fleet of mini-vans we keep on hand for class activities, evening excursions, and other sundry errands, I have of late found myself taken by the effortlessly relentless flow of a young MC from Pittsburgh by the name of Mac Miller. Just nineteen years old, Mr. Miller has not yet been signed to a major label, nor has he released a full-length album. By and large, he has made his name by way of what are called “mixtapes,” short compilations advertised by word of mouth and given away at concerts and online for promotional purposes, in the hope of eventually securing that coveted major label deal. For now, the majority of Miller’s fans are even younger than he is. But if you do not fit into that category there’s at least half a chance that you’ve heard a few bars of his “Donald Trump.” The hit song’s lyrics, coasting atop a catchy Saturday Morning Cartoons meets Sunday morning church chorus beat, include “I just wanna ride, ride through the city in a Cutlass/Find a big butt bitch, somewhere get my nuts kissed,” “I ain’t picky but these girls be acting tricky/When the situation’s sticky and the liquor got them silly,” as well as Miller’s rather inscrutable pledge, and apparent origin of the song’s title, to “take over the world when I’m on my Donald Trump shit.”

I was born in 1976, the year in which the Apple computer company was formed by a couple of similarly ambitious young fellows named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Miller was born in 1992, just as the internet was making its way toward the center of mainstream culture and mainstream culture, as a result, beginning to assume the spectacularly interconnected form in which we know it today; to become the kind place in which, from a dorm room at Amherst college, I can log on to the internet on my MacBook Pro, sign into my Pandora account, enter the name “Mac Miller” in a box, and thereafter be broadcast what is described by the popular online music source as a “personalized stream of music” the contents of which are determined via an automated comparison of the musical characteristics of Mac Miller’s songs – its so-called “musical DNA” – to those of countless other songs catalogued in the company’s massive library. There is, to be sure, something mildly unsettling about a string of programming code thusly presuming itself capable of calculating my musical tastes. In this case, however, I am far more unsettled to find myself moved – quite literally bobbing my head as it plays – by the music of someone young enough to be my son if I’d only a.) gone through puberty about five years earlier than I did, and b.) had more success with members of the opposite sex in high school. Shouldn’t our positions – mine and Miller’s, that is – be reversed, given the supposed advantages of age and lived experience? Shouldn’t sixteen extra years of hope and disappointment and bits and pieces of happiness always more modest (but, I like to imagine, also far more meaningful) than I dreamed when I too dreamed of taking over the world give me the upper hand when it comes to the capacity to communicate with others, and to move them? And if they do not, if it is Miller who is able to move me and not the other way around, then what were all those years really good for?

Perhaps these are futile questions. Ultimately, I know that this camp I’m working at will end, as it does every summer, at which point I will stop listening to teenagers’ iPods while driving them around in mini-vans, and I know that, because my resources as a consumer are limited and there is so much more out there to choose from, I will almost surely never invest in a Mac Miller album, and moreover that though I am still enjoying his songs when they come through my computer’s speakers, bobbing my head as Miller rides the beat, I’ll soon have to remove him from my Pandora index on account of all the unlistenable stuff – Eminem (too much screaming), Whiz Khalifa (his name sounds like something you do in the bathroom) – that gets thrown my way by association. And even as I write about him here, itself a gesture toward immortality, I can’t but suspect that if, whether due to a lack of sufficient “Donald Trump shit” or some other as yet unforeseeable circumstance, Mr. Miller fails in his own efforts to take over the world, it will not be long before I forget him altogether, just as I am already forgetting, and being forgotten by, the young students, barely half my age (but every day the gap between us is mercifully closing), from whom, out here in this hot, airless western Massachusetts valley, I learned about him in the first place.

The identity and cultural role of Lady Gaga is reminiscent of a line in the film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (adapted from Truman Capote’s short story.) Holly Golightly’s agent, O.J. Berman quizzes Paul Varjack on the phoniness of Holly:

Berman:  Answer the question.  Is she or isn’t she?

Varjack:  What?

Berman:  A phony.

Varjack:  I don’t think so.

Berman:  You don’t huh?  Well, you’re wrong.  She is.  But on the other hand, you’re right, because she’s a real phony.  She honestly believes all this phony junk.

Lady Gaga resides and functions culturally as a “real phony.”  A living simulation wherein what you see in the celebrity sphere is what she is 24/7, Gaga pushes the boundaries of the public/private identity as well as challenging the concept of the hyperreal.

O.J. Berman’s question about being a phony is a prescient one because it reveals the conundrum of authenticity.  How genuine is an identity that is based on an amalgam of others?[i] In the film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the query asks for a decisive judgment on authenticity, Berman’s own answer is reflective of our current navigation of identity and culture.  The question: “Is she or isn’t she?” and the answer: “You’re wrong.  She is.  But on the other hand you’re right.  Because she’s a real phony…” presents a situated identity.  An identity that is at its core a “phony” but at the same time, always authentic, a “real phony.”  It’s a good question, “is she or isn’t she?”  The question is a barometer of how inauthentic one is.  It’s the most appropriate question to ask when doing a cultural critique of Lady Gaga.  Not to say that she is the Holly Golightly of our time – that would be presumptuous.  However, the question remains, “is she or isn’t she?”

This line of inquiry has been the basis of much critical banter surrounding Lady Gaga:  is she gay? transgender? performance art? Madonna derived? Warhol derived?  The question of “is or isn’t” even goes to the essentials of her identity:  Is she Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta or Lady Gaga?  While Ms. Gaga provides an abundance of material to sift through, the answer to the decisive query is always indeterminable.  This is because she is a “real phony.”  She is always the expected cultural sign (rock star, feminist, outsider) in the midst of her performance (both on and off stage), music and lyrics.  The subtext of the phony is that there are multiples that hide the original/authentic.  This serves to undermine the idea of the original artist (especially in the rock music world which still holds to the idea of an “original” or “one of a kind” artist as the most significant/successful.)

For a cultural theorist, Gaga is a compelling subject to study because she is a signpost for the cultural shifts we are currently undergoing.  She exemplifies Baudrillard’s idea of simulation, the thing that represents the Rock Star and ultimately replaces the original context; in that sense she is the cultural avatar of a rock star.  As the oft quoted Baudrillard states:  “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”[ii] Placed in the context of Lady Gaga and the celebrity machine, Gaga is a simulated hyperreality.  It was inevitable that we would arrive here in the pop culture world.  Gaga’s progenitors, Bowie, Warhol, etc. were the first harbingers to experiment with the hypperreal.  Now that we are living in the era of American Idol, where the star is manufactured by the mechanizations of the music industry and audience consensus, the traditional mode of star building is not the only way to go (and quite possibly the more outdated way to generate stardom.)  Gaga as part of her manufacture, functions knowingly as an avatar to many.  In Rolling Stone, Neil Strauss describes Gaga’s understanding of her audience as “a collection of mini versions of her socially and romantically rejected self..”  This collection of mini-me’s is an integral part of the Gaga identity.  As Gaga states:   “Music is a lie…Art is a lie.  You have to tell a lie that is so wonderful that your fans make it true.”[iii] The Gaga identity and its meaning making relies on emulation and re-interpretation by her fans.  It is their desire to sing Gaga songs and dance her moves that makes the Gaga enterprise and identity so powerful.  It is the fans that build meaning and politic on Gaga.  With singable songs and easy choreography, they can be her – not in the secret of their teenage angst rooms, but in public; on Youtube, in karaoke bars, and most importantly, at her concerts.  She doesn’t call them fans but her “little monsters” and by that nomenclature are acknowledged, active participants of her “Monster Tour.”  This is an intimate relationship – it doesn’t end when the concert ends, but continues in the digital sphere – where fantasy can continue ad infinitum.

This is why Gaga is fascinating.  She put her performance art/art background and pop aspirations upfront and then proceeded to redefine the boundaries of the two.  Not many are buying into this with the majority of the press focused in on her inauthenticity as little more than mimicry.  Part of the reason for this is because she is claiming identity via surface; simulation/simulacrum.  She is deliberate in how her fans manifest her identity, and all the while, she claims that her surface, her shimmer, is all there is – that it is the REAL.  This is where she pushes boundaries.  She is, by default, repositioning the real with the hypperreal.  As Berman says, “she’s a phony but a real phony.”

When Gaga says, “this is me all the time” and gestures to her leotard clad body, stockinged legs, and platinum blonde hair in a bow, she is saying that the simulation – the surface – is 24/7.  Hence, there is little difference between the persona in her music videos, the concert performer, and the woman attending a baseball game.  They are all the same.   She blatantly acknowledges the celebrity machine and then proceeds to function in it.  So the paparazzi can never take a “candid” shot of her – at the grocery, dry cleaners, shopping, etc. – because she has already laid claim to all aspects of the Gaga life as “all the time.”  In effect, she has co-opted all avenues of exploitation and marketing for herself.  No one can cut in on her visual and conceptual property by unmasking the puppeteer behind Gaga.  She has already said in effect that “this” is all there is.  Her mutable, hypperreal identity is a constant displacement and as such she can operate in contradiction (artist/mimic, real/fake, etc.) without issue.

Simulation and simulacrum in the early 21^st century was often a singular project by artists; contained in one setting or event (like an experiment in a petri dish.)  Gaga is one of the few simulations that have been deliberately constructed as an all-encompassing surface.  As she states: “I talk about myself in the third person all the time. I don’t live my life in the way someone like you does.”[iv] Her embodiment of the surface has complicated the boundaries of the real and the phony.  Being a “real phony” has loosened the grasp of those who want a piece of the Gaga property because only Gaga, as the hypperreal can own it.  Whether she is being candid or not is something we can never distinguish because to us, all are the same.  There is no difference at this juncture because we cannot recognize who is Germanotta or Gaga.  Her insistence and vigilance at not showing a thread of contradiction between what she states (“me all the time”) and her public presence gives us no footing upon which to see through the surface.  All the while, it is at her leisure to use both Gaga and the Haus of Gaga as her marketing tool and her promotional object.

By all accounts, Madonna at her debut had been pronounced by many to be groundbreaking, meaning that she broke away from a pre-existing entertainment industry (system) to re-establish it in her own terms (not my claim – I am summarizing others here.)  If that is the comparative case, then Gaga is the saboteur; one who acts as a participant in a system in efforts to infiltrate, undermine and reconstitute the system.  Gaga wholly embraces the established music entertainment industry and the rock star role that serves as its apex.  She states that her future plan is to become the ” ‘grandmother of pop music,’ ” bringing up new bands, nurturing their talents, watching them grow.”[v] However, her means of getting there is through appropriation of past rock star identities which in effect renders them as types.  Rather than rising to rock stardom by pronouncing the prerequisite rebellious manifesto, Gaga acts as a flickering cultural sign – embodying all the different apexes of what has been identified as “rock stars.”  Lady Gaga, in pilfering through snippets of rock history, is actually speeding through the life cycle of the rock star.  Her versions of Ziggy Stardust (via her costuming in the video “Pokerface”), her Madonna references in “Alejandro” and her public script of “be yourself” calls attention to the artifice of the rock star.  The mounting criticism of Gaga as a thief who has no substance of her own attests to the insecurity within the rock star/music system that she invokes by her artifice.

This is the critical difference between what many writers have considered as the “truthiness” of Madonna and the “phoniness” of Gaga.  As one writer put it, “unlike Madonna–who was willing to tie provocation to a discernible purpose in ‘Like a Prayer’–Gaga offers no synthesis.”[vi] The assumption that the writer makes here is that rock musicians, as defined by their transgressive identity, must “provoke” to “purpose” to be a real rocker.  In effect, the music news media is claiming that this is what Lady Gaga must do to be a verifiable performer of significance.  Gaga, by her seeming imitation of the rock star, actually calls attention to this assumption and presents a problem as she lacks not only that definition but any current definition to address her practice.  There has been little exposition on how Gaga is significant for the purposeful detailed perpetuation of the rock star façade.

Madonna was a product of her cultural time and as such, the “female rock star” identity of the 80’s was solidly based on the (quite fictional) truth of gender and body.  This was an essential identity whose political power firmly rested on proclaiming both difference and the site of oppression for this difference.  Part of Madge’s prerequisite rock rebellion was to push her female desire and female body as the site of controversy because it was an oppressed gender.  The problem with this model – as we have come to know since – is that it actually serves to contain the oppressed identity by having it continually claim its oppressed status.  Like a broken record – the statement was always contingent on suppressed, oppressed female desire; to attempt to expand beyond that would remove the urgency and veracity of this voice. This identity structure is predicated on what it is oppressed by – when Madonna touts her sexual desires and appetites in her 1991 documentary, Madonna: Truth or Dare, her transgression is displaying that she has such desires (because she is not allowed them as the oppressed identity.)  It is the quintessential psychoanalytic Other.  This is a constant subtext in Madonna’s first phase.  When she is dressed as a nun, dressed as a virgin, and kissing the black Jesus (see Like a Prayer) – the transgression in all of these tropes is that she, as a woman, is not allowed desire.

Gaga is beyond the Other identity in that she performs the rock star role rather than be the rock star; both on and off stage.  Her lyrics, dance moves, press statements are all crafted and planned out by the Haus of Gaga (her staff of magic makers:  manager, stylist, concert designer, etc.)  As Gaga says, “I don’t want people to see I’m a human being.  I don’t even drink water onstage in front of anybody, because I want them to focus on the fantasy of the music and be transported from where they are to somewhere else.”[vii]

Gaga is fantasy but rather than be limited to the stage, she performs Gaga at all times.  Her constant emphasis in the press to assure the readers and fans that the theatricality is her all the time dovetails with her music videos and televised performances.  It is a seamless simulation of Gaga.  This is evidenced by the many interviews in which she refers to Gaga: “If I were to ever, God forbid, get hurt onstage and my fans were screaming outside of the hospital waiting for me to come out, I’d come out as Gaga.  I wouldn’t come out in sweatpants because I busted my leg or whatever.”  To be as Gaga is to be dressed in the now definitive haute couture fetish wear, complete with hair and makeup.  Part of this production is also the script that goes with it; her pronouncements to her “little monsters” (fans) to embrace who they are – freaks and misfits, along with her persistence that the simulation is who she really is.

Gaga is a cultural development that exemplifies identity in our time in the sense that we are a post-“Matrix” or, even further back, “Blade Runner” generation.  The body and self are not essential in our cultural agency, politic, or the way we think.  (Facebook, Sims, multi-gamer platforms – there is a reality within the non-physical space that we function in daily.)  Now, the surface or simulation is just as important a player in the politics of culture and identity.  Gaga, as part of the generation having been raised on a digital lifestyle, would be a different kind of identity than that of Madonna.  Her artistic and creative touchstones may be from a previous generation (or further back) but Gaga’s realization of their style comes from a life experience that is wholly different from those artists.  Lady Gaga is aware of the way politics can be played out on a body (many have already discussed how she takes a page from Madonna’s playbook) the difference between Madonna and Gaga is that Gaga makes her body mutable and polyvalent (through her interactive, digital, live concert relationship with her fanbase.)  The Gaga persona has been constructed to be a surface, a screen upon which viewers can place their hopes, dreams, aspirations, fantasies, aspersions, and criticism.[viii] The costumes, the origin myth of the Gaga moniker, her collaborations and performances, the seeming frankness of her life; all sum up to function as a mutable surface on which to read multiple meanings.  We have never really seen a true, candid moment with Gaga – all is surface.  We never see “real” because as she performatively claims, the Real is the façade.  The multiplying of her image and persona via Youtube, Facebook, twitter, music videos, stage performance; they build an accretion around any semblance of a real individual.  The end result is that in true Baudrillard fashion, the simulation has superceded the real individual.  In effect, there is no need for anyone behind Gaga.  This allows for contradictory stories, interpretations, and meanings to take hold all at once.  Gaga is a manufactured presence and as such has opened up a new kind of political body as a form of cultural practice.

Some art works operate like a bluff.  They challenge you to take them up on their offer – to call what they are as art and agree with their assigned cultural value.  While there is the concept and theory that blankets the object in its meaning, at the core of an object is the viewer’s receptivity.

For artist Jennifer Mills, every action by the viewer must be countered by an act on her part to maintain her role as saboteur.  As her art practice encompasses all aspects of the art machinery (concept, production, exhibition, viewer) the work is not finished until we have measured and documented the audience and their actions.

As part of her practice, all Mills’ objects are priced at $10 or below to counter the art industry’s valuation of works.  Specifically for the series Art Object, the artist offered the entire set of objects for a more significant sum.  Los Angeles Gallerist Steve Turner negotiated an undisclosed sum below the offered price and purchased the set.  Herein lies the criticality behind the series of these moves:  the viewer offers up a negotiated price challenging the artist’s stated worth, the artist agrees or disagrees and a sale is either gotten or forgotten.  Quite often this is the end of the artist/patron cycle in the 21^st century.  But with Mills, the cycle expands to reflect on the business of art.

Ms. Mills continues her series of detournements in this instance by generously offering the Gallerist a “gift with purchase.” She has co-opted a well-known promotional gesture within commerce – the offer of additional items for free.  In this case, the offer consisted of mice to go along with the mousetraps which were the art objects purchased.  For the artist, the circle of meaning is complete: Mousetraps join mice in a paired relationship.  Within the politics of art – the conceptual object has now become something that borders on the abject.  In effect, Ms. Mills has matched Mr. Turner’s challenge of her work via the threat of killing actual living creatures.  Everything is conceptual until the mice get involved.

So – did Mr. Turner implicate himself within the sphere of Mills’ performance?  Or does he step down from his challenge and close the performance cycle?

In answer, consider Mr. Turner’s reply to the delivery of the mice:

“I cannot have caged animals around me, so I had to refuse your bonus item.”

Rodents.  They are such a problem.

Hello Nora,

We haven’t communicated in ages, and it’s entirely my fault, but I would love to know how things are going. Email me your phone number because I’ve lost my phone book. Things here are much the same: taking classes (one with Art Historian Rosalind Krauss that’s quite good), attempting to absorb something of this city, since I feel like my time here is a protracted goodbye. I’m not returning next year, but I’m not sure I can say more than that, although it might have something to do with some sort of naive adolescent appeal made to me by Kerouac while I was sitting on a strange toilet in the middle of the night. I can’t avoid vulgarity, see? And I’ve always thought, probably mistakenly, that you were too good for it — by mistakenly I mean not that you’re too good for it, only that I never should have presumed to make a judgment about it one way or the other.

Have you talked to Max? She was in town recently. I ran into her in the Bowery. She was wearing a chainmail dress, chatting with some art people. I guess she gave up smoking. But I thought she did that a long time ago. I asked her about you, which amused her. We should get together, she said. Her eyes still have that wide-apart look I look for in a sister.

I hope that you’re doing well. Am I out of prayers?

Simon

Kate Durbin was robbed.  It was a subtle theft, one that occurred with a polite denial on the part of the thief.  Corporate theft of an artist’s intellectual property is something that happens often and very difficult to prove.  The complete story about this thievery can be read here.

What transpired after is her performative challenge, “N O Bikini,” and the derogatory comment left on her post – which leads us to the dinner conversation via Facebook.

What kind of conversation is the run of texts on Facebook?  Is it idle chatter?  Banal, overused idioms that have polluted our daily conversations?  At times, comments on a Facebook post can become criticism (even in its ad hoc state) and eventually, by nature of its form, a social commentary.  Given these parameters, I give you a little dinner conversation.  Brought to you by Facebook.

Kate Durbin will be performing Prices Upon Request at our invitation only event, Zg Presents on June 12.