Clip Show, Aggregates, and Lady Gaga Videos

Selling Sex in Midtown

I am a busy boy with thousands of images to edit and figure out how to present.  Work is super busy with pushing out employee training deliverables (business speak)on a really crap project that I can not control. Personal life is full with visitors, yard work, and other obligations.

I am tempted to create the blog version of a clip show and hope that will do.  For those who have been spared the pain of watching clip shows on TV, they are a cheap and easy ploy where the characters reminisce about things that happened on prior episodes.  The scene clips from those earlier episodes offer very little new content, just a cheap filler.  They are easy and cheap to make.  They are similar and about as inspiring as a greatest hits album.

In an effort to avoid creating a clip show,  I am going to do  the next cheesiest thing - stealing... errr... I mean aggregating (hate that term)... err, spotlighting things I've seen or read lately and not offering much for an opinion on them.   Seriously though, they are interesting nuggets and insights into art and music.

Here are some interesting quotes from the McChrystal career-ending issue of Rolling Stone  (July 8 -22, 2010).  Text emboldened by me for emphasis.  None of the quotes are from the McChrystal article.

Interview with veteran rocker Tom Petty being asked about his new album, Mojo.

Interviewer: To me, this album has a feeling of being on the run, outrunning the cops...
Petty: ... or outrunning life itself.  I didn't write it as a theme.  Inevitably, though you find a theme creeping in.  But any attempt to intellectualize my stuff embarrasses me.

From the article about Lady Gaga.

The former Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotto is on a mission: to prove that Lady Gaga is art and that her art is not a mask.  It is her life.

"I'll always have one high heel in New York City.  I live in Hollywood, but you can't make me love Hollywood.  I'll never love Hollywood."


"I think, creatively as a woman, you change once you give birth.  I'm totally not ready for that."


"When you resign your life to something like art music or art or writing, you have to commit yourself to this struggle and commit yourself to pain.  And I commit myself to my heartbreak wholeheartedly.  It's something that I will never let go.  But that heartbreak, in a way, is my feature.  It's a representation of the process of my work.  As artists, we are eternally heartbroken."

"... So I guess I am a woman now.  I don't know when or why you realize that you've become a woman, but I'm different.  I feel different.  And I care less and less about what people think as the hours go by.  I feel very strong."

"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.  People can't do that if your just on Earth.  We need to go to heaven.


"Some people need to be reminded it's OK to be different."

"When I wake up in the morning, I feel just like any other insecure 24-year-old girl.  But I say, 'Bitch, you're Lady Gaga, you better fucking get up and walk the walk today.'"


"Music is a lie.  Art is a lie.  You have to tell a lie that is so wonderful that your fans make it true."

Interviewer: It's interesting to speak with you, becuase you have this ineffectual and artistic side, but half of your hits are about clubbing and being drunk...
Lady Gaga:  Well, now I have a little bit more of an opportunity to be that, don't I?  I don't mean to speak arrogantly about my musical strategy as a pop artist in the Warholian sense, but today you have to almost trick people into listening to something intelligent."
Interviewer:  So you're thinking, "I'm going to trick this idea down your throat"?
Lady Gaga: Or seduce people to be interested in something uncomfortable.  And I have been for three years baking cakes -and now I'm going to bake a cake that has a bitter jelly.  The message of the new music is now more bitter than it was before.  Because the sweeter the cake, the more bitter the jelly can be. 

For those who stuck it out to this point, I am interested in hearing from you what you think of these two performers and their art and quotes.  I become increasingly fascinated by Lady Gaga the more I learn about her and see her videos.  I wonder if she has staying power to remain current or ahead of current trends or will she fade into oblivion in the next few years.

Here are a few of her videos.  The first, Alejandro,  is filled with amazing imagery from many different themes and genres.  The second video, Telephone,  is an interesting twist on the Thelma and Louise, Kill Bill, and femme fatale themes in cinema.  The final video, Bad Romance,  has very interesting retelling of old movie archetypes and themes mixed with a Matrix  sensibility.


Alejandro -


Telephone -


Bad Romance -