How Lady Gaga got schooled

A few posts ago, I lamented the lost art of the Pop Music Video. I never thought I would have to look to the military to appease my need for booty-shakin' good.

I mean, really: group choreography is the scientifically proven answer for pop success. They didn't even need cleavage, and it's still better than the over-budgeted, over-acted weakling skin flick that was the original Gaga video.

El muerto en motora

Yesterday, my boss had me Google "custom made men's underwear." I spent the day discovering companies like buffdbod.com and yourprivates.com.

Today, my students told me I was too old to have children.

"Miss Lohmann, you got kids?"

"No."

"Just babies?"

"...no. Two cats."

*student wrinkles nose*

"Miss Lohmann, how old are you?"

"24."

"Well whatchyou waitin' for?? You can't be havin' them in your 30's. You supposed to be a grandma then."

And all I could find on the internet was this:

Grandmother makes a baby! With her grandson.

and this:

Incidentally, it's been a rough week.

A very tiny soapbox

I generally don't like to get involved in political discussions over the internet, as they are often polarizing and easily misinterpreted, but this new law in Oklahoma is making me completely sick to my stomach.

Regardless of one's stance on abortion, the fact is that it exists. It has always existed.* And whether or not it is legal, it will continue to exist.** The question to abolish it is nonsensical; the question to regulate it is complicated. However, requiring that the pregnant woman must undergo an expensive and invasive procedure (from which the doctor retains the right to lie to his patient about the developmental status of the fetus) begs the bigger question: is Oklahoma going to be spending an equivalent amount of money and effort on this child after they manipulate the woman into keeping it?

Somehow, I believe the answer is, "Well, no. She's in charge of the thing now, isn't she?"

I believe in shades of gray and exceptions to rules.*** And I believe that laws like these do not consider the complexities of a very muddled issue (these screenings require the woman to hear a detailed description of the fetus' heart, limbs and features, and are mandatory for all women, including rape and incest victims). It is in this regard that the law is not only ludicrous, but also downright disgusting.

*The "Concerned Women of America," Conservative, Anti-choice site dedicated to spreading biblical principles throughout the land.

**"National Abortion Federation," Liberal, Pro-choice site dedicated to spreading awareness about women's health and safety across the land. Both sites acknowledge the rich and dangerous history of the black market abortion.

***I do not readily identify with the Elephant or the Donkey. I was raised in an extremely conservative household but went to an arts high school and then a women's college: I've visited both sides of the mirror. While I do not believe entirely in either political party as they currently present themselves in our country, I do believe in certain inalienable rights: everyone, not just the financially privileged, should have the opportunity for healthcare and a safe educational environment. Both the Elephant and the Donkey have ignored these rights when they don't best serve their respective agendas. (Because isn't voting what politics are all about anyway? We're only fooling ourselves if we believe that any time a politician is faced with a national dilemma they don't poop their pants over voter's retention before having a go at a real solution. If they ever have go at a real solution.)

How Pop Music Saved My Life (or, Disillusionment and the Music Video)

While driving, I exclusively listen to top 40 stations. It began in college when I found myself road-tripping through the Blue Ridge on a weekly basis, sometimes driving straight through the night on an ill-advised Red Bull and cigarette high. When the caffeine buzz waned and my car companions had all gone comatose, I found myself completely alone on a deserted highway at 3 am. Virginia is not big on the street light, and being the lone car in the pitch of early morning puts you at considerable risk for Death by Deer. I remember once, while driving from Roanoke to Houston (a nonstop 26 hours), I found myself in what appeared to be the drop point for the local serial killer-- limbs were strewn across the road as though they had been dumped from the back of a pick up truck, and all I could make out were their spindled shapes, sometimes flattened, studding the bloodied ground. As I slowed (which still baffles me; in my right mind the instinct would surely be to flee) I caught site of the tapered nose from a decapitated deer. Some poor truck driver, no doubt, had unwittingly come upon a pack of deer; the impact was clearly so immediate that the bodies more or less exploded, leaving nothing behind but a 50 yard stretch of solid carnage.

Despite the fear induced by facing what appeared to be the opening shot of a B horror film (or worse, a Tarantino/Rodriguez mashup) I still found myself overwhelmed with exhaustion. Nothing in the world made more sense than to fall asleep. Right there. Wheel in hand. Surrounded by dismembered roadkill. And so I turned to the radio.

Sometimes, it's the obvious appeal of pop music: the catchy beats, the flashy vocals, the simple lyrics. One year, I went through a phase where the only thing that could keep me from nodding off were the first three songs on Britney's Blackout album, blasted at decibels rivaling the crowd at a Hanson concert circa 1998. I will be in my car, on hour 12 of straight driving, past the point where food or caffeine retains any kind of effect whatsoever, and Rihanna is my upper. The Black Eyed Peas. Justin Timberlake. Lady Gaga. The Pussycat Dolls. Basically, all the stuff you would never list under Facebook's "Favorite Music" section.

But sometimes I listen to top 40 stations because they get me riled. Some of these songs are so poorly written, so blandly executed, that I am baffled at their success. Take, for example, Ke$ha. Now, I have no animosity towards the girl herself-- she, like all the rest of the pop starlets out there, is a carefully crafted, heavily marketed image for the pop crowd who needs a breather from Gaga. She is plain ol' easy-to-swallow vanilla pop, whose heavily synthesized music can get your foot tapping despite her stupid name and asinine lyrics (The boys are lining up cuz they know we got swagger/ but we kick 'em to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger). The less I know about the puppet behind the song that keeps me from crashing into a tree at night, the happier I am to sing along to, laugh at, and rant about the songs themselves.

But we all have YouTube. And I have the relatively common habit of looking up the photos and music videos of the people whose music prevents my untimely demise. Sometimes, I am pleasantly surprised: take Kanye's Love Lockdown, JT and Madonna's 4 minutes, or Gaga's Bad Romance (the Cremaster of pop music videos: over-budgeted, overrated, heavy with semi-ambiguous symbology... but visually delicious). But then you get videos like this, where the song is a flimsy pretext for an outrageous plot with bad acting and over the top product placement. It's like a bad porn without the sex, and maybe a little Super Bowl ad campaigning thrown in for good measure. Vomit.

But nothing could stop me from searching for La Roux's "Bulletproof," a somewhat "breath of fresh air" amongst all the Chris Brown and Train my Top 40 station has been overplaying lately. And this is what I found:

No! No! No!!!! It's like watching Kate Gosselin on Dancing with the Stars--those vacuous eyes, the plastered expression of unmasked discomfort. Elly Jackson, what were you thinking?? I can run with the geometry-- I don't generally need to know "why" for my music-video-viewing pleasure-- but why did we go with "sad face" for this one?? I really thought, when I heard the song on the radio, we'd have some humor, something a little more energetic-- think Depeche Mode's gogo dancers from "Personal Jesus."

The music video is an absurd thing. To go back to my former comparison, it is not unlike a porn-- there's the basic premise of a song (sex), for which the video is responsible to accommodate. The storyboards these days seem to attempt the "plot line" more and more, which (as in a porn) generally feel groundless and wanton. I'm more into "Pick a theme" videos, where they run with some kind of general aesthetic and add some dancing. It's MUSIC. We don't need a 4 minute sitcom or documentary. We need costumes! Synchronized jazz squares! Maybe a few booty shakes and a little animation!

There's the old joke about rap videos showing nothing but booty, cars and money, and honestly I feel like it's a much better formula than the crapshoot that occurs when pop strays from their own group choreography, sexy faces, and glittery costumes. If you MUST stray, just don't axe the choreography-- we don't want to see you cry in your video and stare soulfully into the camera's eyes (or, the case of Elly Jackson, attempt to stare soulfully). We want to see you strut, pop and lock it. I'm not even going to qualify the statement as a generalization. It's practically science.

An example of how a well-crafted video made me overcome initial gag-reflex to the song. Well done Michel Gondry: we are not worthy.

Bibliophilia

For the sole, arbitrary reason that the book is sitting on my bookshelf, I've decided that my summer will look like this:

1. Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes
2. War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
3. Ulysses James Joyce
4. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust
5. The Brothers Karamazov Feodor Dostoevsky
6. Moby-Dick Herman Melville
7. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
8. Middlemarch George Eliot
9. The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann
10. The Tale of Genji Murasaki Shikibu
11. Emma Jane Austen
12. Bleak House Charles Dickens
13. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
14. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
15. Tom Jones Henry Fielding
16. Great Expectations Charles Dickens
17. Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner
18. The Ambassadors Henry James
19. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
20. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
21. To The Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
22. Crime and Punishment Feodor Dostoevsky
23. The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner
24. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
25. Invisible Man Ralph Ellison
26. Finnegans Wake James Joyce
27. The Man Without Qualities Robert Musil
28. Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon
29. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
30. Women in Love D. H. Lawrence
31. The Red and the Black Stendhal
32. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne
33. Dead Souls Nikolai Gogol
34. Tess of the D'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy
35. Buddenbrooks Thomas Mann
36. Le Pere Goriot Honore de Balzac
37. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce
38. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
39. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass
40. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable Samuel Beckett
41. Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
42. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
43. Fathers and Sons Ivan Turgenev
44. Nostromo Joseph Conrad
45. Beloved Toni Morrison
46. An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser
47. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
48. The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing
49. Clarissa Samuel Richardson
50. Dream of the Red Chamber Cao Xueqin
51. The Trial Franz Kafka
52. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
53. The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane
54. The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
55. Petersburg Andrey Bely
56. Things Fall Apart Chinue Achebe
57. The Princess of Cleves Madame de Lafayette
58. The Stranger Albert Camus
59. My Antonio Willa Cather
60. The Counterfeiters Andre Gide
61. The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton
62. The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford
63. The Awakening Kate Chopin
64. A Passage to India E. M. Forster
65. Herzog Saul Bellow
66. Germinal Emile Zola
67. Call It Sleep Henry Roth
68. U.S.A. Trilogy John Dos Passos
69. Hunger Knut Hamsun
70. Berlin Alexanderplatz Alfred Doblin
71. Cities of Salt 'Abd al-Rahman Munif
72. The Death of Artemio Cruz Carlos Fuentes
73. A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway
74. Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh
75. The Last Chronicle of Barset Anthony Trollope
76. The Pickwick Papers Charles Dickens
77. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
78. The Sorrows of Young Werther Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
79. Candide Voltaire
80. Native Son Richard Wright
81. Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry
82. Oblomov Ivan Goncharov
83. Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston
84. Waverley Sir Walter Scott
85. Snow Country Kawabata Yasunari
86. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
87. The Betrothed Alessandro Manzoni
88. The Last of the Mohicans James Fenimore Cooper
89. Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe
90. Les Miserables Victor Hugo
91. On the Road Jack Kerouac
92. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
93. The Leopard Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
94. The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
95. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
96. The Good Soldier Svejk Jaroslav Hasek
97. Dracula Bram Stoker
98. The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas
99. The Hound of Baskervilles Arthur Conan Doyle
100. Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell

I love setting realistic goals. For the sake of time, I'm going to skip over the books I've already read (highlighted). I figure that, if I'm seriously going to attempt an MFA (and shortly thereafter, a PhD) in creative writing/literary arts, the least I can do is read all the books that are archetypal standards for comparative literature. You know, all the books we were supposed to read in school. (I cannot believe I've never read a stitch of Dickens, but am super grateful to have already trudged through the hobby horse that was Tristram Shandy.)

Aiming to read 75 books whose average page count is hovering around 500 before September is totes reasonable. An achievable goal. Lest you forget that I once hit the entire Harry Potter series in less than a fortnight.

What's a delusional knight got on preteen wizardry, anyway?

The Orangutan and the Hound

Tuesday-Thursday, I teach art at a charter school in downtown Baltimore to 1st-7th grade. The school is young and a little rough-- the older students are separated by gender (after too many were getting expelled for fornicating in the hallways...yes, you read that correctly) and I've lost not a few students to concealed weapon and assault charges. I begin my week with a 1st grade class of 28 who behave mostly like The Dog Whisperer's pit bull pack on crystal meth; without fail, my class ends with me on my knees, physically restraining a 6-year-old child who's spewing something along the lines of, "Bitch Imma kill you!" I end the day with a combined class of 6th and 7th grade boys who call me "Shawty." While they also become aggressive with one another every now and then, the biggest danger in that class is some light, casual, sexual harassment:

"Hey Miss Lohmann, can I get yo digits?"

"Um, whatever for?"

"So I can call you."

"I'm not sure the school board would be too happy about that."

"Miss, they don't got to know!"

The exchange is usually concluded with a stealthy duck and roll on my part when the boy goes for a full body hug. Though more than a decade younger than me and (supposedly) still prepubescent, all of my boys are roughly the size of a baby rhinoceros, and it's a littler terrifying to be charged by one.

Needless to say, I often come home in desperate need of decompression, and sometimes my mind craves Light, Fluffy, and Cute. I bring to you, as a Friday gift, Suryia and Roscoe.

I want an orangutan.

Twit for Tat

This week in Twitter Feuds, we learned about "True Facts" from the Baios (as well as discovering the hidden aspects of the Attorney General's job description) and reexamined the Insult. Today, we get the thrill of discovering "False Lies!" via Twit Scrap between one Spencer Pratt and one Perez Hilton.

Now, I have no idea why Mr. Pratt is so angry, and honestly, I think it's more or less completely insignificant. The following exchange is cut down, mostly because Spencer just says "Bitch!" 200 times over, and it gets a little redundant. But you get the gist: he makes "bitchass lying unethical traitor" all sound like one word. The boy's got a gift; let's observe him in his natural habitat, as he hones his craft with nothing but a phone, the Internet, and 140 characters.
I'll be honest, I'm not a Twitter user, but the whole "@" thing looks ridiculous to me. I do love how Perez put Spencer's name in quotations, like he's allegedly "Spencer Pratt." I also like how he keeps the name calling to a classic MF, and maintains defense solely on attitude. Point to Hilton.
Okay, so, what the cuss is a "False Lie?" Wouldn't that be a truth? Point Hilton.
He'll take it street. Going the "Yo Mama" route without even having to use a mother. Beautiful. Point Pratt.
Laaaaaaaaaaaame. Rotten-produce-wielding-lame. This is just a big fat DUH. Point Pratt.
I love how he manages to call Ke$ha a pumpkin in the process of insulting Perez. Pratt is a machine of disparagement when he's on his game..AND he keeps it PG; see how he takes it playground? Double to Pratt.
He's so good at the Defame Game, he even took a knock at himself. I like it. 3 points Pratt, just because I laughed for a good 3 minutes after reading this zinger.
Allright, Hilton's been a little lame on the offense but I will say this: Pratt is exactly where Hilton wants him. All media is good media, in this case, and Hilton's got absolutely nothing to lose engaging with a shrill bitch-happy sleazeball via Twitter. Point Hilton.

For those of you keeping score at home, the final count is Pratt:8, Hilton:3 Pratt wins mostly for volume and consistency, though I think we all know that winning the Douchebag race is kind of like coming out first in a diaper-eating contest. Congratulations are not necessarily the first thing on anyone's mind.

An excellent article on How Twitter is Ruining the Celebrity.