oh HI!

It’s been a long time I know, and I will endeavour to change this.  But first and for now, in case you haven’t yet, you MUST, you simply must head on over to the bottom of this post, click on it, and prepare for  Lady Gaga’s latest video.  I am sure that if you’ve been to a bar/club/party/high school over the last month this is old news to you, but news reaches us old farts slowly.*

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched a video and  been engaged by the visuals. I don’t watch many videos because, well, being an old fart, I was alive when MTV was born and spent my teens watching videos, all of them, from the ridiculous (Taylor Dane writing – and I loved her!) to the sublime (Peter Gabriel Bocaccio inspired Sledgehammer, the classic Thriller) and everything in between (and anything Madonna was in). I used to watch MTV while ironing.  Now I don’t even know where MTV is on my TV.Come to think, where IS my TV? And MTV does not have a feed on hulu.com, so I am 100% out of the video loop.

But this one, this Lady Gaga Bad Romance video, has exploded – and it’s on every website and blog I visit.  I am vaguely embarrassed for being a very late comer to the trend. But then again, I am not 23.

The video is an product placement exercise of such glorious proportions you can’t hold it against the Lady, who does this sort of thing all the time anyway.  I don’t mind at all, since she is all about the Fame, even as she subverts and questions all our assumptions about what fame in this post-Michael Jackson/Madonna/John&Kate apocalypse  is based on. Academics aside, it’s the aesthetics that hooked me.  The strange pods and creatures that climb out of them in the “Bath Haus of Gaga” (she does love her gays), the amazing golden netting on her nails and her signature great Dane, the impossible fashion, some of the moves that are straight out of a Michael Jackson video, the gold chin strap on the hunky model, and finally, finally, the fire breathing bra and the incinerated body of her bad romance. Je veux ton amour and je veux ta revanche she sings en français.  Tous ce que tu veux ma petite, just keep this up and I may find my way back to MTV.

On the off chance you are even less hip than I, enjoy. And don’t covet those shoes, vertebrae or her sheer chutzpah too much. Just enjoy.

 

 

*I found out about this video from Nancy Rommelmann’s blog.  If you don’t know her blog but care about journalism, good writing, Oregon, politics, excellent coffee and now Lady Gaga, head on over there.

no voice

while this title might seem like an apt reference to my serious lack of posting lately, it is in fact the affliction that has befallen me for the last week.  i am croaking along by now, well enough to make myself understood by my 80 students, but not well enough not to pay the price afterwards (hot tea and silence de rigueur).

i lost my voice upon landing in brussels last week.  i flew out there for a week over spring break.  planet’s sister has been taken ill with the same disease that killed planet (planet = nickname of best friend who died of breast cancer 2 years ago).  i wanted to be with her for so many reasons, but many times it felt like we were both visiting a very cruel ghost.  the ghost of her sister’s -my friend’s – killer, the ghost of her struggle, the ghost of her boredom (chemo is sooooooo boring), the ghost of her. and then sometimes the ghost was gone, and we used the strange parenthesis offered by her illness to go to the movies at 11 am, eat way more than we should and make all sorts of inappropriate gallows jokes.

the last time i lost my voice was at planet’s funeral. it started going during the funeral, when i couldn’t stop crying, sobbing all the way into the car that drove me back to planet’s empty home, empty of her and full of mourners who would all get very drunk that day, the day during which i lost my voice.

i lost a lot more than my voice that day, and it better not mean anything that i lost my voice this time. this better just be a freaky coincidence or some psychosomatic response. it just better not.

inspirationally challenged

i woke up to what sounded like gun shots

then i ran down to the street to make sure i had hung the parkng permit on my car

yesterday i gave a homeless man $20 – he wore braces on his teenth – he was obvioulsy newly homeless. and it was raining.

HRH had a tumor biposied – still waiting for results

i am having lunch and dinner with friends, and both dates will require approx 1 hour of driving to and from

my friend A is turning 40 tomorrow

50% of my students failed the midterm

True Blood still isn’t out on DVD

hard to focus on one cogent paragraph when all this is floating around my brain at 9 am. i blame the gunshot wake-up.  although i suspect the sound came from the construction site 2 blocks away, and had nothing to do with guns…

25 things that are not random but are entirely about me

Facebook is the new meme producer.  I was tagged with this “25 random things about me” task, which my friend C more accurately described as “25 things that are not random but are about me” (she inspired today’s title, she is way good at those things).

In order to shake things up a bit and not let the dearth in posting run completely dry here at galainoregon, I reproduce my list for your enjoyment.  For the American grammaticists among you, I was taught English by the English, and consequently spell that past tense of irregular verbs such as LEARN with a T.  You say learnED. I say learnT. Let’s call the whole thing off.

1. I like making lists, but not necessarily this kind.
2. I met the man of my life at the Newark airport luggage carousel.
3. I vacillate between wanting to change the world and wanting to change my world.
4. I have never learnt how to play chess.
5. I like True Blood on HBO.  I really like it.
6. I wonder what Graham Greene would have written about our current world.
7. Pinot over merlot, sour over sweet, dark over milk, but tea AND coffee, no compromises.
8. I’d rather wear sneakers.
9. Sundays are for the NYT x-word puzzle.
10. My mom and I once dreamed of owning a bookstore together.
11. My grandmother was a great gardener and I am sorry I did not inherit that trait from her.
12. My dad speaks 6 languages, and I did inherit that trait from him.
13. I miss my best friend.
14. I care about manners and grammar (perhaps more than I should).
15. I learnt to swim in Rio.
16. I learnt to drive in Brussels.
17. I like royalty cookie tins, miniature Atomiums, polka dots and stripes, and skulls (but not real ones).
18. I would like to spend one year in Sweden, and then another year in Japan.
19. My desk is always quite messy.
20. I am still deliberating over an iTouch vs a new iPod. Help!
21. I am wedded and committed to my Blackberry.
22. For an historian I have a pretty bad memory.
23. I read maps quite well, but give very bad directions (confuse Left and Right).
24. I just finished writing a book.
25. I love skype, facebook, email and anything else that makes distances smaller.