As IF Times

link Lady Gaga and the death of sex | The Sunday Times.

Most people would profess not to care for the shtick and move on.  Not Camille Paglia, a person you do not want writing critiques of you.  Ms. Paglia, for those not familiar with her writings,  is a teacher, author and social critic who is quite influential among intellectuals and liberals.  However, despite writing articles that appear in Salon Magazine, one could hardly describe her as a liberal.   She can write opinions that are divergent from the typical liberal mindset and has been known to voice opinions quite in contrast to them.  Though many conservatives may not agree with many of her views, they are insightful, original and thought provoking.  It would be unfair to categorize her as a liberal, she is independent and iconoclastic in her views. 

So when she decides to take the scalpel to the whole Lady Gaga phenomenon, it’s not as a music critic but as a culture critic.  At last someone more qualified than yours truly, has dared to come out and declare what I’m sure has been on the minds of many.  Lady Gaga?  We don’t get it. Banal music aside, the most interesting thing she had to say was not about Lady Gaga per se, it was this comment:

“…despite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Gaga isn’t sexy at all – she’s like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era…”

I have a simpler, less intellectually embossed version of this.  It’s been done.  The originality and honesty of musical artists appears now to have been replaced by images and personas that are packaged and marketed according to successful formulas created on an excel spreadsheet.  Fame and exposure has taken precedence over talent as a measure of success in western society. When William Hung famously mangled a Ricky Martin song on American Idol years ago, he achieved not boos and the hook, but instant fame, fortune and a record deal!  When you consider almost any ‘rock’ or pop band over the past 20 years, they could be interchangeable versions of each other.  The long hair, dirty jeans and  unkempt look is essentially a uniform for musicians.  It’s as if band publicists all shopped at one rock star store like some LL Bean outlet to outfit their people.  “Hey Irv, if you’re going to the Rock Store, could you pick up a few things for me from the new Keith  Richard collection?”.

It’s almost impossible to think of any successful young female artist today that isn’t obliged to flout her sexuality and comeliness in the most overt ways in order to achieve popular success.  If it’s not outrageous, it doesn’t capture media attention, if it doesn’t capture media attention, it’s not going to sell.  The phenomenon of Lady Gaga is reminiscent of cars you’d see in Tijuana or Manila, garishly overdecorated vehicles which only happen to be cars.  A lot of today’s acts are far from being edgy and original, in fact they are stereotypical and cliche.  Any argument as to good or bad is doomed to endless inconclusive debate, but the biggest danger to ‘outrageous’ acts is not that they are bad, it’s that they are boring.

And don’t even start me on that hugely oxymoronic genre of rap music.  Rap music has as much to do with Black sensibilities as Chop Suey does to Chinese food.  We’ll visit this later.

link Chinas UN diplomat in drunken rant against Americans – Telegraph.

Staff were quick to brush this over as merely a rant initiated by too much fortified grape juice.  Actually, this is the most illuminating story to come out of the useless U.N.  in decades, if not ever.  It’s a poorly hidden secret that diplomacy is all about smiling in the face of your enemies until you can find a rock big enough to hit them over the head with. 

At the outset, the goal of the UN was to provide a civilized, structured forum for resolving issues between nations versus the historic option of waging war and destruction.  As some may know, this organization arose from the ashes of the precursor League of Nations, formed after WW1 in order to prevent world war from happening again.  This group disbanded upon the onset of WW2.  Since that didn’t work too well, the UN is actually the second attempt to play nicely among world nations.   At the end of WW2, the founding nations came together to create the structure we know today.  They included China, Russia, France, the UK and of course the United States.  The U.S. of course had the most money and military might at the time, so therefore the most influence.

Fast forward 65 years later and we notice that the peace loving founders find themselves at odds on many major policy issues, sort of like siblings that begin to resent each other.  Rather than work collectively for ‘world peace’ as per the original intent, they found themselves working to forward the best interests of their own nation states.  Resentment of the U.S.’s disproportionate power and financial influence has become more apparent as nations developed economically and increasingly flex their political muscle.   Except of course in the case of France.  They had resentment from the git go. 

So in this new atmosphere of increasingly equal national powers, the US has commensurately become isolated in their votes on major and minor policy issues.  The most notable dissension arises from the Americans’ support of Israel.  As of now, there is not so subtle competition going on for the world’s resources as everyone maneuvers to gain access to oil, commodities and markets.  Underneath the diplomatic veneer of civility at the UN are fierce battles to get or retain key strategic markets by all nations, notably by China and Russia.  The recent outburst by Sha Zukang is a diplomatic gaffe but lays bare the  resentment for the U.S. that is shared by all UN members.  

Here’s a suggestion.  Why don’t they serve drinks at all UN meetings?  Make it mandatory.  In this way, you can circumvent the charade of diplomatic negotiations and get to the nub of the matter.  You know the old Latin saying, ‘ in vino veritas’.  They’ll more quickly find out the various viewpoints and it won’t be couched in verbal gibberish.  This guy Sha has set new ground in political negotiations; he’s a no spin zone guy.  If you serve booze at the meetings instead of after, you’d likely have much more lively debates and quicker resolutions.   Plus, you wouldn’ t need armies of clerks, secretaries and interpreters to decipher what was said and what was meant.  

At the moment, the only people who are honest and candid about their intents are the ‘bad guys’ like Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong, etc.  They make their positions clear.  Ahmadinejad says, ‘we want to nuke Israel’: the west responds with, “well let’s see if we can find some middle ground’.  Kim Jong sinks a South Korean ship: the west responds with, ‘well it’s an accident, anyone could have done it’.    If we brought booze into all UN meetings, you’d bring back some realism to political debate.  In the 60’s, the Soviet’s Nikita Kruschev achieved notoriety for banging his shoe on his desk at a meeting to get attention.  It’s unknown whether he was over-refreshed at the time, but it’s time we brought back some sincerity to political debate.

You may get the odd fist fight a la Taiwan’s parliament, but better at the UN than in the real world.