Track Mangoes

I was introduced to Lady Gaga, the New York honey with a degree from Tisch, by a friend of mine who is just Enamoured with her. Her ability to entrance him gave me faith. I felt that if this boy is just as if not more in love with Gaga to the extent I am in love with Madonna then maybe we have something to talk about and maybe I should watch Gaga's rise to pop-stardom. Her ability to completely consume her watchers, like my friend, with a hypnotic force seemed to override the looming fact that her work is a little tacky…and all the more wonderful for it.

The first video he showed me was "Poker Face," which I have attatched below. From the album, "The Fame," a theme of which "Poker Face" doesn't really seem to touch, departs from Gaga's usual style, but I foudn the thing entertaining, as a giddy little gay boy nonetheless.

The video opens with the lady herself rising out of a pool of dark water. She is covered in black rubber and metallics. The weather around her, a hazardous autumnal mix of lightning and thunderclouds, pathetic fallacy no doubt, casts an apocalyptic tenor to her entrance.




The beginning is an overt reference to the Greek conception of hell, and Gaga, clad in black rubber and spikey shoulder pads, is Persephone. She rises out of the depths, masked as the goddess of the underworld. The entrance is guarded by Cerebus, the three headed dog of Hades, or, in the case-Gaga, two reclining black and white great danes. Gaga as hell goddess crouches down in an animalistic squat and then, metamorphosing into the fertile goddess-daughter of Demeter, she casts off her former self, embodied through the casting off her mask.

It’s no mistake that her mask is made of mirrors or that mirrors constitute a large consitutency of the video's visual effect. A reoccurring theme in the video, and Gaga's work, is/are the eyes. Her makeup, for one, accentuates them, whether that makeup be a Smokey liner or a pearlescent shadow. But also the obstruction of eyes: Gaga is known, in this video and outside, for her ostentatious choice of sun glasses. In “Poker Face” she hints at this by gesturing toward the eyes through mirrors but also by encircling her right eye with her fingers, in an OK gesture, like a monocle. The effect is two fold: in the first place it reminds the audience that “Looks are not what they seem," but at the same time it functions a salutory wink, a naughty rejoinder, to say "Looks are not what they seem, but looks are all we have.”

The metaphor seems fitting for the story of the song: a girl who, with her romantic tomfoolery, her amorous trickery, her “Poker Face,” fools a man into loving her so that she can jump his bones (Ring a bell? “Oops I Did It Again” anybody?). Persephone was the embodiment of the Earth's fertility. Addled with sexuality, the Persephone persona seems...appropriate...for Gaga.


The video eventually cuts to Gaga actually playing poker. They metaphor has materialized At Long Last! What are they doing in this scene? They surely aren’t playing poker! The chips flying randomly, the cards falling at inappropriate intervals…what exactly is going on here? At one point Gaga, clad in a separate persona, supposedly the persona of which the lyrics make reference, the one that bites cards, eew, turns over two aces and placed them next to the five cards, two of which are the other aces. Yet, no one else has cards on the table. Regardless everyone says “Oh Gaga! You won again! How unfortunate for us!” It then becomes apparent that the crew is playing Strip Poker, the losers are stripping left and right after Gaga puts down her aces, in which case, WHY ARE THERE EVEN CHIPS ON THE TABLE TO BEGIN WITH?!

But I digress.

Gaga never goes back to where she came from, the pool, which would solidify the Persephone metaphor. Instead she ends the video dancing around in her various characters. It’s as if Persephone/Gaga has Avoided hell by confusing the man who’s got her in chains, Hades/male patriarchy. The Poker Face, then, is her method of escape, her key to the outerworld. The irony of the video, perhaps, is, contrary to her contention, we, the audience, can see right through her poker face, just as her boy-toy can (why else would he look so depressed? He knows that her affection is an empty vessel) and, in fact, her poker face works on nobody besides herself. Gaga's character deludes herself with myriad personae such that she can no longer exist in a singular locality, a material body, but rather in a multifarious, liquid, hyper-sexual, power driven, existence. Gaga is a ghost of her own fabulousness, and a hungry one, who needs to consume for fear of being consumed.

Male patriarchy is, for her, inescapeable, but so is the alternative. We can’t call her a slut, because she’s not that, we can’t call her a liberated woman, because she’s not that either, we can’t call her glamorous because she’s a little scary, she dominant, but she’s submissive, she’s free and in chains. What are we to make of you Gaga?! Are these contradictions a sign of artistry or just dumb luck? Is Gaga liberated? A slut? or Should We Even Care?

I wanted Gaga to fill Madonna's shoes, something which, I am sad to say, I doubt she will be able to do. Madonna's prowess came from a simplicity of image, a single idea, a concept that changed with the time. Gaga has many concepts which do not change one bit. Madonna and Gaga are, in effect, polar opposites, and this, I fear, forcasts Gaga's sucess in the music business. Gaga tries to straddle the line between glamour and substance, something only Madonna has since acheived, but I fear she cannot reconcile them both AND be GOOD.

Why should I care about Gaga? Because since Madonna, who has made a lot of mistakes in the recent past, pop culture is seriously missing a diva who can redefine sexual personae using the very language of sexual hegemony and hollywood. Feminist idols like Ani DiFranco have failed to rise to the level of pop stardom because they constantly combat Hollywood image tropes. "They're just masks!" these ladies say, "Empty masks! They Don't Mean Anything!" Madonna on the other hand said, "Yes, these stereotypes ARE masks, but Masks are All We Have." Some see this as ceeding, I see it as a very smart business move, something the leftish underground doesn't really hold as one its high values.

There's always more money to be made in Shit. Everyonceinawhile someone comes along and puts a gold leaf on that shit. Time will tell but, for now, my guess is that work poor miss Gaga will just be shit without the goldleaf.

A ranty post with very little evidence

In Yiddish, the word "macher" means "one who arranges, fixes, has connections; a big wheel; an operator. It is often used to describe someone who is active in an organization or community. Now, the American man will read the word and doubtlessly hear the word "mocker" or one who mocks.

To the American soul, thinking in Anglo-Germanic locutions, the two concepts are inseparable. One cannot do without mockery, that is, a sense of humor.

It seems to me that the machers of the liberal arts college campuses have lost their sense of humor. And is it their fault? Or do we blame professors? The sixties stood for individualism. What is most disgusting about current political correctness on campus is that its proponents have managed to convince students and media that they are authentic Sixties radicals. The idea is preposterous. Political correctness, with its fascist speech codes and puritanical sexual regulations, is a travesty of Sixties progressive values.

I want to stand for the kind of crack-pot-amazonianism that the ecclectic sixties emblematized. We are told that disagreement is healthy, and yet myriad "groups" of college campuses demand allegence. The silencing of authentic debate among feminists, queer theorists, race theorists, and their allies just helps the rise of the far right. When the media gets locked in their Northeastern ghetto and become slaves of the feminist/queer/brown/liberal establishment and fanatical special interests, the American audience ends up looking to conservative voices for common sense.

Practicality seems like the radical on campuses today.

This tyranny of political correctness is self defeating.

I was watching the Laramie Project at a highschool close to my house and I was struck by the fact that the play was boring, poorly written, poorly acted, and uninteresting. However, with any and all works of art which revolve, not around characters, but around "issues," like the Laramie Project, that audience is faced with a choice: you either like the play or you HATE gay people.

It's a doctrine of liberal infallibility. This is madness! The idea that somehow one cannot critique liberalism from the left. How can people be so stupid? Liberal arts college students are completely removed from the reality of street life beyond their missionary-istic volunteer sites. When I speak to working-class induviduals in my neighborhood, even though they are left-leaning they are so sick of being bullied by these sanctimonious puritans who call themselves feminists/queer activits/and race theorists.

I'm a feminist, a queer activist, and a race activits, but who are these other-than-self "radicals" who have a death grip on college politics now, who are antiporn, anti-women, anti-freedom, and so on.

College's main problem for the last twenty years has been that it is incapable of appreciating art, okay? There is no aesthetics in feminism, or queer thoery, or race theory. All there is, is a social agenda. Art is made a servant to a prefab social agenda. Classical art of any kind is seen as part of a long line of injustices made by white men conspiring to control the earth. How reductive! How snobby! How un-fun!

The gay activist establishment has been stupid and narrow in the way it has conducted its civil rights campaign...Shrilly self-interested and doctrinaire, gay activism is completely lacking in philosophical perspective. Its sorrow became the only sorrow, its disease the only disease

As machers of mockery we can only have a healthy sense of humor and a desire to stir the pot. It's our job. When it comes to blood and bone, liberals don't know their foot from their elbows.

TO SAVE A PAINTING FROM MOLD
Acrylic on canvas















'


This was how I found the painting. As you can see, the "archival" paper backing was melded to the actual cloth painting itself. The painting was suffering from mildew stains and severe fogging.

First Thing's First: you need to get that icky backing off the painting because it is causing the problems in the first place.




In order to remove the backing you need to soak the whole unit in a hot acid bath. I used lemon juice. After awhile the paper backing should peel right off the cloth. There was tape melded to the cloth too, so you need to be careful with that if it is there.

Wear a mask. Mold spores hurt the lungs.

Next thing you want to do is discard the culprit, in this case the archived backing. Then take a softbrush.

I used a toothbrush, and brush away the mold. It should come off and you can feel the slimey places you missed.

Give it lots of love. It needs it.

After you're done brushing you need to drain out the water that is now infected with spores. Clean out your basin and rinse the painting in another acid bath. FRESH water man.




Dry the painting on a flat surface. I used a hairdryer and check for spots of mold that you've missed.








The end result was pretty nifty. The mold stains went away for the most part, but are still there. Just faintly. The painting dried relatively flat and hopefully it will be as nice looking as this for another 10 years.

Exegesis on a poem by Hughes--

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

That which lesbians and straight women have in common, I feel, are those things which, I also feel, code female behavioral patterns most adeptly. Women, then, are like bakers when it comes to relationships. They like to spin a pastry of community and keep it warm.

Women are capable of a kind of intimacy that only gay men can even come close to understanding. It's an intimacy that revolves around chatting and polydrama. Their stunningly honed perceptive tools, a result of the fact that they Are smarter than men, become self defeating, often, leading to this pastry syndrome. The bun gets stickier, warmer, sweeter, until its frosted and dripping.

In "A Dream Deferred" Hughes reaches out to the male reader, a fellow suffering of the female travail. "What happens to a dream deferred?" he asks the reader in a mellow yet direct tone. In this way, the narrator winks at the reader with a male gaze as if to say You Know Just What Dream I Mean. It's the dream of love while maintaining autonomy. It's the dream of making two things, both incompatible, functional.

The narrator then begins to compare this dream to food items. Perhaps the dream looses all it's substance and possibility leaving behind the pathetic carcass of a "raisin in the sun." This desire, this dream, perhaps it freezes, more like sweet that crystallizes, dusted of dirt and gnats. Or perhaps it simply begins to go sour and stink. Either way the dream gets older and as it does it beings to deteriorate.

Time, for the narrator, increases the impossibility of the dream. The dream is self defeating, self destructive, like a maze with no exit.

And like a maze with no exit the poem ends exactly how it had started: with a question. The poem is cyclical, in that way, yet the final word cuts the reader off. The abruptness of the final word makes the last question mark feel like a slap in the face after one has been starring at something for an extended period of time. SLAP and then back to the begging. Men are Sisyphus and women are the rock that they must push up the hill, but women are also that force that makes his foot slip, the inertia that rolls the rock down the hill and the open sore after the rock has trampled the reader all together.

The contiguous desires for individuality and and the need for outside support In Order To achieve such autonomy negate one another. The poem circles around and at the beggining the reader realizes just what exactly Happens to that Dream Deffered: that is, the more it is deffered, which is all that can be done with it, the more it must Be deffered.

Maple syrup, when it gets old, crystallizes. It crusts over with sweetness. Women spin pastries of home and house and men are the raisins of these pastries, dried up in the dampness of the very womb from whence they came and where they desire to return.

I never really expect ESPN to be politically correct. In fact, I look to them as a platform on which I can flex my CRT muscles. But this story, I feel, pushes my buttons, and not for the obvious reason, that being my zeal for nit-pikin' at ESPN; no, but much more for what that story evokes in regard to that sense of alienation, not from mainstream culture, but from the CRT underground.

Of course ESPN makes it seem like its every little Indian's dream to make it on a baseball team in America because a few thousand people came out for a reality TV show, a few thousand out of a country that is home to nearly a (edit: sixth) of the world's population. And the thing that kills me the most is that, growing up around Nepalese/Indian adolescents, some of whom lived in the motherland, actually do want that. And what am I to say?

Not to mention the whole ordeal stinks of old British snobbery. When did we forget that India can kick the UK's ass in cricket Any Day? Why, I ask, would this story even interest ESPN's contingent audience?

I think the shot of the man on the pitcher's mound playing a sitar pretty much sums up everything wrong with this story.

But I can't worry too much, nobody watches baseball anymore Anyway.

This afternoon I spent all day in the campus center working on papers and studying. When I returned to my room this evening there was a very strange note tacked to my door. It read as follows.

This is an official notice from the Ottoman Empire that you are hereby excommunicated until further notice. PERPETRATOR: Jens Tamang.

The note was signed by three guys who live down the hall from me.

Now, before I post my response, I must mention that the guys who live down the hall and I have a little inside joke about the Ottoman Empire that has, I feel, now gotten way of hand. They have one ottoman (the foot stool kind) in their room. It's a little gray one. One day I walked into their room and there was magically, not one, but two gray ottomans. I declared that, from that moment on, the room would be known as the Ottoman empire.

Apparently I have offended the Ottomans. (Yeah what else is new: first the CA's are on me for saying that maybe women should take a little more sexual responsibility in college, then it's the ARC for saying that the Action Awareness Week points were classist, then it's the Queer Theoristas who wanted me to go to rehab for using the word 'fag', then it's every pig-headed-Mac-faux-liberal who's up in arms that someone would even suggest that Sarah Palin had anything to offer to the politcal discourse...why should I be surprised that the sultans from a distant past want it out with me. Oi.)

In rh here is my response to the Ottomans:

Dear Ottoman Empire,

What the heck?! I feel really hurt by the note you left on my door. That was really rude! I mean I have been really busy and, I mean, it's not my fault, OK? I really did like you, Ottoman Empire. Why couldn't we make this work? I'm SORRY. That said the choice to "excommunicate" me was yours to make and there wasn't anything I could do about it. I guess I support you in that decision, just like I support you in all your decisions. I hope that we can still be friends without having it be awkward.

But, you know, Ottoman Empire, during my time in exile I've met some really cool people. I think you guys actually know each other: Murad Bey, Ahmed Riza, Damad Mahmud Pasha and Prince Sabaheddin. I think they have Facebooks; I told you they were cool! lolz

Damad and Sabaheddin are especially cool. And you know what? You won't believe this! They're actually defectors from your Sultan's own royal fucking family.

Now I can take a joke and I can take "excommunication" but I think you really hurt these guys' feelings. If I were you, Ottoman Empire, I would watch my back. You wouldn't want a coup, would you? Because word on the street is that these guys are gonna start some shit called Young Turk Revolution. I'm not sure I want to join, but, you know, I have to be honest, I don't know what choice you've left me with.

What's it gonna be Ottoman Empire?

Sincerely yours
-the Nationalists

P.S. I don't like to start gossip but I heard that Austria wants get with your girl Bosnia-Herzegovina. You best keep an eye on her. Colonies aint' nothin but hos and tricks.

I guess Bosnia-Herza and I would get a long swimmingly: we both like getting annexed from behind.

Christmas has never had a singular cultural consequence. Historians have long speculated that the holiday’s origins have been largely, if not entirely, socially conditioned.

The Bible provides very few clues as to the actual date of Jesus’ birth. So, the 25th of December seems like an arbitrary choice; that is, unless you takes into account its proximity to the Roman festival of Saturnalia, the winter solstice, and the Natalis Solis Invincti.

The Saturnalia was a weeklong segment of a larger celebration occurring in late December. Hijinks including feasting, infirmity, a slave/master role reversal, and public nudity/orgies ruled these festivals. Christmas, some argue, may have been created to distract gentiles from this pagan party-time.

Natalis Solis Invincti, which roughly translates to "Birthday of the Invincible Sun God," (making it the coolest holiday name evar!) allowed citizens to worship several deities at the same time—Elah-Gabal, the Syrian sun god; Sol, the god of Emperor Aurelian; and Mithras, a god of Persian origin.



The earliest reference to the celebration of Christmas on December 25 is found in ancient Roman manuscripts dating back to 345 A.D. From there on out Christmas enjoyed multiple manifestations. It was seen as the revival of Catholicism in 378, the feast of Constantinople in 379, the "forty days of St. Martin" during the middle ages (otherwise known as “Advent”), and, in 1647, England's Puritan rulers banned Christmas because of its Catholic origins, or as they aptly put it, “popery.”

Today, Christmas has taken a new cultural consequence: money. No longer the religious fest it once was, December 25th has become a kind of economic milepost for big and small name retailers. Black Friday refers to the day when retailers move from the “Red” (losing profits) to the “Black” (making profits). Not surprisingly, the majority of retailers make the bulk of their income during the Christmas season.

Christmas has never had any sort of corollary because it has never had a unilateral definition. Or, if it has, if it has, then Christmas has stood for that which we cannot define in the moment, a palimpsestic holiday. With no sense of its current significance (what does Christmas mean in light of, say, Cyber Monday and the Techno-culture?) all we can do is name its idiosyncrasies: family, gift exchange, and charity etc. Like a social Polaroid that takes a hundred years to develop, Christmas provides an impression of the holiday zeitgeist while constantly escaping those who experience the phenomenon as it happens.

As a gay heathen, growing up in Portland, I could not help feeling like an outsider on Christmas. For me, the holiday, by definition, excludes those who have no family, money, or do not desire to participate in the mainstream culture. I can’t speak for all marginalized groups, (for fear of Matt Won) but I will say that ever since Christmas adopted a gentile overtone it did discountenance to the group whose origins are distinctly pagan: gay boys!

Just like the Saturnalia, gay boys are intrinsically connected to Earth Cult: the mysterious, bubbling, Chthonian mystery of pleasure. Feminists (the new Puritans), liberals (the new Catholics), and bourgeois academics (the new Romans) are all a continuation of Earth Cult’s nemesis: Sky Cult—the cool, centralized, joyless Apollonianism of “reason.”

Are queers the historical residue of paganism?

Perhaps I should frame the question in the form of a request: this season, bring Christmas back down to earth. Don’t get your friends Ipods—give them blowjobs. And if you can’t, it might behoove you to ask why not. Sex with someone you love, is, after all, the Magi’s greatest gift.
Happy Holidays.
.