In 1979, my parents would attend Saturday Night Live parties thrown by our neighbors in suburban Philadelphia. We children were always dragged along, encouraged to play nicely in a hideously paneled basement, with the hope that we would pass out long before the TV show began. Most of us followed suit, but as a spiteful insomniac, I would bribe my little sister to stay up with me in order to creep up the stairs to see what the big deal was. The poor thing would usually fall asleep on the top step, but I could hear the skreetchy jazzy opening music of SNL and then the exciting cast introductions. I could never keep my eyes open much past that, but would always remember a boozy neighbor yelling that Gilda Radner “should have a sandwich!” Then laughs all around. (This coming from Mr. M. who yet other, uninvited neighbors would say, “could barely keep the shirt on his back, from his little Atlantic City problem.”) Invariably on the heel of the laughter from the witty sandwich comment, Mrs. S. would jump in with “And someone should throw that Laraine Newman a bucket of chicken too!” More hilarity. And this from the woman who drank hairspray when she ran out of “the good stuff.” Ironically, I never heard anyone hoot and yell that John Belushi (whose contempt for female writers was savage) should drop the fucking cheeseburger. I’m not judging my parents’ neighbors or their choices in life. My point is that they are just normal, flawed, vulnerable, occasionally graceful, sometimes vile humans, just like “Gilda and Laraine”. When Angelina Jolie and her pin thin arms and dramatic leg pose took center stage at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, it was clear that we, as an...

    For a long time, I was suspicious that Angelina Jolie wasn’t real.  While there may be an actual person named Angelina Jolie, it wasn’t the person in films, on magazine covers or the “candid” shots on the web.   In fact, I have never seen the real Angelina Jolie; she is an actor and as such, anytime a camera is trained on her, she disappears and performs “Angelina Jolie.” Part of this has to do with media oversaturation of course.  With a consistent flow of films and tabloid narratives to satiate even the most rabid fan, there is a constant erasure of  the Real.  Through the sheer repetition of her face and body plastered everywhere – we recognize “Angelina Jolie;” her pose, facial expressions, gait, stance and manner of dress.  The candid moments elide into the professional events of  the brand known as Angelina Jolie, so much so that it becomes difficult to tell them apart.  When she became Lara Croft in the 2001 “Tomb Raiders” film franchise, Jolie was perfectly believable as a fleshly apparition of the video game avatar because we believed knew her off-screen persona as a cold, femme fatale with softness on the side.  In her more recent roles as Grendel’s monstrous mother in the CGI animation Beowulf and as the kick-ass ultra spy in Salt, she seems as real as we can possibly see her.  That is to say, all of the sultry looks and commanding postures we see of her on-screen, visually matches her off-screen (or more accurately her print) persona.  Not to overuse the phrase of the century but there really is no there there with Jolie and that has worked to her advantage.  As an actor, the person is the product and whatever privacy is...

  In the forty-eight hours after Todd Akin, the current Republican Senate candidate from Missouri, made an international fool of himself by asserting, in response to an interviewer’s question about his opposition to abortion in the case of women who have become pregnant as a result of having been raped, that when the rape in question is a “legitimate rape the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” nearly every Republican of any importance on the national stage stepped forward to denounce him. Pundit types on the left were quick to determine that a plan was afoot. By denouncing Akin, they pointed out, the rest of the party was in reality only trying to make itself look comparatively moderate, comparatively sympathetic, comparatively not crazy, with regards to women’s health and reproductive rights, and in so doing perhaps win the votes of a potentially crucial bloc of undecided female voters in the upcoming presidential election (white female voters, I should say, as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is currently polling at 0% among likely black voters of either sex). Unwittingly, it seemed, Akin had offered himself up as something of a sacrificial lamb and the rest of his party, hoping to curry favor from the electoral gods (the swing voters), did not hesitate to let the killing blade fall. The analysis is no doubt accurate, as was the observation of many of those same left leaning pundit types that the fatal flaw in the plan was that in denouncing him Akin’s fellow party members could not but call attention to the fact that to a man (and the occasional frightening woman) they all hold the same radical anti-abortion views Akin’s absurd anti-logic was intended to justify – that they are...

Photograph by Tom Flynn 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...

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...

  “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...

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 25th 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...

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?...

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...

  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...