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...

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...

And then, despair. Despair which is, I suppose, the best word I can summon with which to describe that suffocating sensation of a certain familiar combination of anger, frustration, and helplessness. Despair like a reoccurring dream in which you feel like you want to hurt somebody, like you want to hit somebody, hard, but at the same time know even before you try that all your blows will be glancing. Or – the other side of the coin – like after a punch to the gut, when all you want to do is the one thing you can’t do, which is breathe. If you have been following the news out of Wisconsin – the state that, though I have not lived in it for over a decade, I stubbornly insist on continuing to call “home” – then you probably know already that the recent State Supreme Court election, which pitted incumbent justice David Prosser against a former Assistant State Attorney General by the name of JoAnne Kloppenburg, was more than just that. Indeed, because it was framed this way by the media, and by tens of thousands of riled activists, and by the in- and out-of-state interest groups that poured millions of dollars into run-up advertising campaigns, it was also something of a referendum on newly elected Republican governor Scott Walker’s ongoing efforts to sterilize the state’s public employees’ unions by stripping them of their right to bargain for anything other than base wage increases commensurate with inflation, which it to say, for anything at all. Prosser, it so happens, was not only Republican Speaker of the State Assembly in an earlier incarnation, but today counts himself (and is counted) as one of the governor’s political mentors. Kloppenburg, on the other hand – well,...

As I compose these remarks, the latest news from Japan is that over 6,000 people are now officially confirmed dead with over 10,000 others still missing – most of them presumed dead, as well. More ominous still is the specter of nuclear holocaust, with a full-scale meltdown happening, or about to happen, or having happened already, depending on whom you ask and who answers, at the Daiichi nuclear plant, 150 miles north of Tokyo. Radiation released by damaged reactors at the Daiichi plant has been detected in the United States, but it has not reached and, we have been assured, will not reach, dangerous levels. But how, in that case, to explain the uncannily incandescent madness that seems to have taken hold of some among us in the wake of the tragedy? Consider the case of rapper 50 Cent as one example. On the morning of the earthquake and tsunami, he took to Twitter to quip: “Look this is very serious people I had to evacuate all my hoe’s from LA, Hawaii and Japan. I had to do it. Lol.” Shortly thereafter, as though realizing the genuine gravity of the situation, he backtracked from those glib comments, tweeting: “Nah, this is nuts but what can anyone do about it. Let’s pray for anyone who has lost someone.” But moments later, as though seized by an almost pathological indecisiveness, the rapper retracted his retraction, writing: “Some of my tweets are ignorant I do it for shock value. Hate it or love it. I’m cool either way.” Not long after, and also by way of Twitter, came a series of half-baked one-liners from comedian Gilbert Gottfried, including the somewhat illiterate “I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, ‘They’ll [sic] be another...