Hair Textiles and Gaga

By Tove Hermanson

We all know Gaga loves her wigs, but she also dabbles with clothes that resemble wigs, as with this LaVer dress she recently wore to a taping of The View:

Gaga on the View, May 2011

LaVer couture hair dress, 2010 collection

Since medieval times, locks of hair have been given to lovers as amulets, and the Victorians wove hair of the deceased into jewelry (more on fashion and mourning). These customs reveal the sentimental properties we imbue hair with (in a way we do not imbue, say, fingernail clippings or dead skin), as a representation of a greater spiritual, emotional, and sensual body.

Victorian hair jewelry

Hair is one of those components of the body that has a split personality: one the one hand, it's a sensual symbol of youth, fertility and sexuality; on the other hand, when it is removed from its proper (that is, expected) source, it becomes something horrible and icky (in a tub drain, on your clothes, etc.). Alexander McQueen tapped into both the marvelous and the macabre associations of hair (specifically that Victorian prostitutes would sell theirs for kits of hair locks, which were bought by people to give to their lovers[i]) by sewing clear packets of neatly coiled tufts of hair into the linings of his garments as his signature label; in early collections, it was his own hair:

Alexander McQueen hair label

While hair from a loved one may conjure desire, longing, or melancholy (relatively benign emotions), a clump of unfamiliar hair is typically met with repulsion. Kate Kretz explored the comfort, familiarity, sentimentality, and seemingly contradicting uneasiness displaced hair elicits from us by embroidering human hair directly onto a pillowcase; the hair could just as easily be a blood stain, so wrong does it seem, severed from the body that produced it (imagine laying your face onto that!):

My Young Lover, 2005 by Kate Kretz

Humans are obsessed with caring for the hair on our heads (the hair product isles in any drug store is testament to that), and equally obsessed with removing hair from “undesirable” places (legs, underarms, bikini areas, backs, chests). Body hair on women has been considered undesirable in many cultures for millenia. Since the great Ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern cultures, women having been mixing their own version of Nads (a sugary depilatory, if you haven’t seen the hilarious infomercials) and home-brewed bleaches to remove and conceal unwanted facial and body hair: golden razors were even found in the tomb of Egyptian Queen Hetepheres[ii] (so she could shave in the afterlife?).

Simply moving hair from a “desirable” location (head, eyelashes), to an “undesirable” one (anywhere else) grosses most of us out. Lady Gaga loves to push the boundaries of psychological comfort, and she revels in the sartorial social statement. To wit, in performances of her new song “Hair,” she has been appearing in a series of dresses made entirely of hair extensions (frequently matched to her wigs). In her recent performance of “Hair” on the Paul O’Grady Show, she wore a bald cap over her natural mane while serenading her wig (which matched her hair dress), and put it on halfway through, to complement the chorus “I am my hair”:

Gaga on Paul O’Grady Show with dyed hair dress by Charlie Le Mindu, June 2011

The piano itself is covered with a textile of darker, curlier fake hair that looks not unlike Alexander McQueen’s synthetic hair coat from a decade ago:

Alexander McQueen “Eshu” collection, Fall/Winter 2000-01

Words like “freak” and “free” appear in Gaga’s “Hair” and also the song “Hair” from the ‘60s musical Hair, as well as an ambiguous social agenda that is nonetheless important to the singers, embedded within their respective ‘dos (long and natural as in Hair, or long and fake for Gaga). Each song’s lyrics refer to parental disapproval, judgement from the public, and an overwhelming urge to fight this prejudice against nonconformist appearance, with hair as the symbol of individuality.

At a Good Morning America Summer Concert, Gaga shared with the audience, “People used to make fun of me for my wigs, and I’m just telling you without my wigs I feel like I can only be one person and I want to be so many.” She then proceeded to don not one, but several wigs over the course of the song.

Compare Gaga’s blonde hair dress and blonde wig to Maison Martin Margiela’s hair dress from a couple years ago:

Gaga in blonde hair dress, October 2010

Maison Martin Margiela, SS09

Like Gaga, Margiela also paired the wig jacket with a wig of identical false hair that tumbles into the garment, burring the boundary between desirable (i.e. head) hair, and undesirable (i.e. body hair).

Until the last few decades with the emergence of the so-called “metrosexual,” men’s body hair has gone largely unnoticed and unregulated, while women’s body hair has been increasingly vilified: women’s shrinking underwear and swimsuit styles have corresponded to shrinking stylized pubic hair surface area. Compare this illustration from the original The Joy of Sex (published in 1972, a singular decade when body hair of men and women was encouraged to grow undisturbed), to this more recent photo of Gisele Bundchen in a bikini-- Gisele’s pubic hair must be depilatoried to the size of a quarter for none to show:

Left: from The Joy of Sex, 1972; Right: Gisele Bundcen

The delightfully vulgar electroclash-y singer Peaches pushed the limits of “acceptable” female hair in her music video Set it Off. Over the course of the video, her hair grows – head hair and eyelashes, but also underarm hair, her treasure trail advances on her belly, and her pubic hair creeps down her legs. Gaga wore a similar merkin, underarm hair, and head wig in teal for a performance of “Born This Way” at the MuchMusic Awards:

Peaches in Set it Off video (excuse the terrible quality of the video still)

Gaga at MuchMusic Awards, 2011

Beyond the pure gross factor (which in and of itself is satisfying, I think), by experimenting with hair dresses and body hair wigs, Gaga contributes to this commentary on controlled female sexuality via (head) hair care and (body) hair removal/censorship.

Though her underarm and pubic hair is not usually depicted, Mary Magdalene of the Golden Legend is frequently portrayed with her (natural) hair so long that a) she can wash Jesus’ feet with it, and b) she can wear it as a flimsy dress of sorts. John the Baptist is also said to have worn a shirt of hair, though it is not his own (the itching was a perpetual, self-inflicted punishment):

Penitent Mary Magdalene by Titian, c. 1531 – 35

Maesta: St. John the Baptist by Simone Martini, 15th century

Roland previously wrote:

In the collapsing of Biblical stories there are three Marys that are merged into a single figure: Mary of Bethany, Mary the Magdalene, and Mary the Prostitute. In Western Christianity (i.e. Catholicism), Mary is the redeemed prostitute who meets Christ, abandons her ways, and goes on to preach the Gospel to the idol-worshippers in Marseilles. Eventually, following the Golden Legend, she becomes a hermit. She resides in the desert, and every day is lifted by angels to receive nourishment from God. While she originally wears a hair shirt (or simply covers herself with her long flowing hair), in artistic representations her hair shirt is sometimes depicted as actual body hair.

Mary’s hair is a symbol of her sex’s sensuality, an instrument of charity and redemption, and it also hints at her profession’s presumed immodesty. Like Madonna, Gaga returns again and again to themes of religion and sex in her performances; as a prostitute-turned-Christian, Mary Magdalene literally embodies both. In the “Judas” video, Gaga places herself in Mary’s role (albeit not in hair dresses).

Mary Magdalene is a likely reference point in the phenomenal “hair sculptures” of stylist duo Gregory Dean (the first of which resembles Gaga’s LaVer dress, yes?). Note how the model’s ponytail merges seamlessly into her dresses, eradicating the boundaries between head and body tresses, “acceptable” and “unacceptable” hair, simultaneously rebellious, political, and irreverently religious:

I don’t know about you, but I kinda want one.

---

[i]Alexander McQueen quotation from “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” by Andrew Bolton, Yale University Press, New Haven: 2011. p. 35.

[ii]Virginia Sarah Smith, Clean: a history of personal hygiene and purity, Oxford World's Classics, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.66f

Author Bio:

Tove Hermanson is a freelance writer and lecturer on fashion history and culture with a background in English, Film Theory, Art History, and Costume Design. She explores everyday culture through a fashion-historical lens to gain insight into politics, social and class struggles, gender and sexual identity themes, race issues, and more. She currently publishes articles in the Huffington Post, the academic fashion blogs Worn Through and her own Thread for Thought, in addition to ad hoc lectures. Additionally, she is the Editor of the Costume Society of America's monthly E-Newsletter.

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"let me go"

By childishpropaganda

YOGAGA

By Meghan Blalock

Cut the ignorance-born doubt abiding in your heart by the sword of Self-knowledge, and get up (to fight), O Arjuna. In the battlefield of our hearts we all must face both our virtues and our vices, our Jesuses and our Judases. Sex, money, vanity. By approaching both the dark and light parts of ourselves, we aim not to destroy but to acknowledge them as inextricable and equally powerful elements of our Selves. They will aid us in fulfilling our destinies, in realizing the Highest version of our Selves. Jesus is my virtue, and Judas is the demon I cling to. Without the Fame there would be no Fame Monster(s) and without the Fame Monster(s) we could not have been Born This Way. A Karma-yogi gets freedom from both vice and virtue in this life itself.

My cocaine soundtrack was always The Cure. I would lock myself in my room and listen to “Never Enough” on repeat while I did bags and bags of cocaine. Bullying damaged Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta’s ego and her damaged ego drove her to anger and her anger drove her to self-worship. Then her self-worship unconsciously drove her to achieve self-realization and her self-realization has spawned the self-realization of millions. Therefore, Gaga is a yoga teacher. Because yoga is learning to deal with the consequences of who you really are.

She leads us by example, a warrior queen living passionately tonight. Considering also your duty as a warrior you should not waver. Because there is nothing more auspicious for a warrior than a righteous war. Only the fortunate warriors … get such an opportunity for an unsought war that is like an open door to heaven. Warrior queen, warrior one, warrior two. It is this that constitutes the essence of yoga: this self-realization that we are all seeking, consciously or unconsciously, and towards which we are all gradually evolving. Reverse warrior.

It is only our own ignorance, our inability to discriminate between the real and unreal, that prevents us from realizing our true nature. In typical Gaga fashion, it is through her yoga that she also defies yoga, as by all accounts she is realizing her true nature precisely by refusing to discriminate between the real and the unreal. I know not the difference between the hair that grows from my head and the teal wigs that grow from my imagination. They are the same. When we practice yoga, we are encouraged to penetrate illusion to become one with the true nature of our Selves; Gaga continues to discover her core Self by not only penetrating illusion, but also by immersing herself in it, so that there is no meaningful difference between what is illusory and what is real. I’m in a permanent state of Gaga.

It’s important, though, to discern between illusion as performance and illusion as expression. Yoga teachers young and old will warn against yoga as fashion show. Yoga, they will say, is for the practitioner to work on herself and not to create a display for others; the former aims to transcend the ego – the ultimate goal of yoga – while the latter feeds it. One may ask which, if either, if both, Gaga has achieved. People criticize her for trying to divert attention away from her music by wearing “outlandish,” “weird,” and “bizarre” things. But that verbage only has meaning in the context of a subject judging an object. Does her motivation for wearing teal wigs originate from her Self or from the desire to please others? The former is yoga, the latter is not. We all exist as images in the minds of others, but yoga and Gaga posit that even without those subjective minds making us into objects, we would still exist. Life is not slain! Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; Never was time it was not. Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit for ever. This reflects Gaga’s now-infamous philosophy of Fame: I want people to find a sense of inner confidence and Fame for themselves that has nothing to do with being famous.

Another thread in Gaga’s narrative is the transformation of reality into dreams, and the melding of the two so they are intertwined as to be inseparable, in the same vein as reality and illusion. We just told lie after lie after surreal dream after moment, ‘You can do it, you can do it, you can be it.’ And then we woke up one day and we were like, ‘We are. It worked.’ I told so many people for so long that I was a superstar [when] I wasn’t, and one morning I woke up and the delusion was real. This yoking together of dream and reality is in line with the textbook definition of yoga: The word yoga means literally “joining.” Of course, in yogic tradition, the two aspects of Self being joined together are body and mind (the third element being the manipulation of breath as a method of tying the two together), but this body/mind duality parallels both Gaga’s reality/fantasy and reality/dream dualities. 26 postures to freedom. Possible yoga junkie, is there such thing as Bikram rehab? Before you can get into Bikram’s standing head-to-knee posture, you have to have an idea of what that is; Gaga teaches that by simply having that idea, by imagining it to be real, we manifest its reality.

The underlying purpose of all the different aspects of the practice of yoga is to reunite the individual Self (jiva) with the Absolute or pure consciousness (Brahman). It might be argued then that what Gaga has done is to reuinte her Self (reality) with the Absolute consciousness (fantasy and dreams): she continues to yoke together Stefani and Lady Gaga, Judas and Jesus, human and pop superstar, pedestrian life and theater. While we know Gaga practices yoga – I’m feeling great! I just went to yoga in Singapore. Red lipstick all over the place. – we  can see that she also lives it.

Yoga is to put together your spirit with the movement. You become.

And this is what life is - to become.

The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.

The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

Don’t believe your limitations.

Works cited:

1.     Krishna, The Bhagavad Gītā

2.     Lady Gaga, “Judas”

3.     Krishna, The Bhagavad Gītā

4.     Lady Gaga: Just Dance: The Biography, Helia Phoenix; Orion 2010

5.     Sam Chase, Yoga Teacher, New York City, June 2011

6.     Krishna, The Bhagavad Gītā

7.     The Sivananda Companion to Yoga, The Sivananda Yoga Center; Simon & Schuster 1983

8.     The Sivananda Companion to Yoga, The Sivananda Yoga Center; Simon & Schuster 1983

9.     Lady Gaga, V Magazine, July 2011

10.  Lady Gaga, Gagvision #4

11.  Krishna, The Bhagavad Gītā

12.  Lady Gaga, Gagavision #7

13.  Lady Gaga, The Backseat Prayer, HBO Special, May 2011

14.  The Sivananda Companion to Yoga, The Sivananda Yoga Center; Simon & Schuster 1983

15.  Lady Gaga, Twitter, November 2010

16.  The Sivananda Companion to Yoga, The Sivananda Yoga Center; Simon & Schuster 1983

17.  Lady Gaga, Twitter, July 2011

18.  Michel Swornik, Yoga Teacher, Student of Swami Rama, New York City, July 2011

19.  The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran; Wordsworth 1996

20.  Michel Swornik, Yoga Teacher, Student of Swami Rama, New York City, July 2011

Author Bio:

Meghan Blalock is a writer living in New York City. She writes for Gotham magazine, and has also written pieces for the local music blog Sound System NYC, The Rumpus, Southern Living, Gaga Stigmata, Woman's Day, and other publications. Her poetry has also been published in amphibi.us. Her work is viewable here and here. She's currently training to be a Yoga instructor.

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Puke On Gaga – Honoring Vomit

By Rachel Clark

In this short film, used both as an opening to the second act of the Monster Ball tour and previously exhibited within the SHOWstudio exhibition “Inside/Out,” Gaga is first seen elegantly dressed in a Marko Mitanovski gown. Standing atop a small marble podium in a plain studio setting, her all white costume and stony expression are reminiscent of the classical sculpture of Greece and Rome. The sharp constructs of Gaga’s dress, whilst shifting gracefully in the breeze of a wind machine, reflect the textual carving of fabric in Renaissance masterpieces such as Bernini’s “Ecstasy of Saint Theresa.” In an unflinching, powerful stance, Gaga embodies these two celebrated canons as a perfectly constructed object, stationed in homage to fine art and high fashion for the twenty-first century.

Yet, within seconds, the image is disrupted. We hear Gaga scream “Make it Stop!” on the overlaying soundtrack as her legs are reversed, thereby challenging the previous illusion of the ideal, and forcing its reassessment in the wake of this now divided human body. She is at once a beautiful object and a physically fractured human subject as the statement “I’m A Free Bitch” begins to permeate the disco beat soundtrack. These two declarations provide a subtle commentary to the visual discord. “Make It Stop!” is screamed like a battle cry, functioning as a catalyst for the corruption of the harmonious opening scene. The classical quest for visual perfection is abandoned in favor of the twisted image Gaga becomes. In this disruption, Gaga is freed from art’s confining rules regarding the beautiful and logical, and becomes capable of embodying the monstrous and fantastic in its place.

The title “Puke On Gaga” is taken from the film’s following segment, wherein the New York performance artist Millie Brown is seen straddling a now seated Gaga, vomiting a stream of sparkling, luminous paint upon her. Significantly, Brown is dressed in all black, wearing an outfit that fans of Gaga will associate with her pre-Gaga Stefani Germanotta Band stage attire. Gaga has also previously referenced Stefani Germanotta in the video for “Telephone,” where she cast her younger sister as her younger self.  The effect in this case is that we bear witness to Stefani Germanotta vomiting on Lady Gaga.

Some have suggested that the vomit should be interpreted as an act of disgust, an expression of a repressed disappointment felt by Germanotta that her past identity had to be erased in order to achieve worldwide success as Lady Gaga. It could be that this is an act of rebellion against the superficiality of the Lady Gaga construction, but then, how does this sit with Gaga’s frequent refusal to separate these two personas? As she herself often attests, Stefani Germanotta was always Lady Gaga: “I don’t want anyone to separate who I am with my makeup on from who I am without it. I’m the same person.”

Modern artists have frequently explored their relationship to their own bodily fluids. Marcel Duchamp upturned his urinal, Piero Manzoni canned his “Artist’s Shit,” and today, Millie Brown performs by vomiting rainbows of colored milk onto blank canvases in order to “use [her] body to create art in a way that challenges people’s perception of beauty.

In a literal act of artistic regurgitation, Brown/Germanotta turns her insides out, and splatters the superficially ideal image of Gaga with the glittering colors of her interior self. There is no medium of creation other than the physical body in this moment. Against the traditions of formal art training and beauty, which the unwavering Gaga-as-sculpture represents, there are no words, no consumable images, only a visceral demonstration of the potential of turning what is inside us into an artistic act.

In Gagavision 43, Gaga states, “the creative process is fifteen minutes of vomiting … it all happens in fifteen minutes this giant regurgitation of my thoughts and feelings, then I spend days, months, years fine tuning. But the idea is you have to honor your vomit, you have to honor those fifteen minutes.” What does it mean to honor one’s vomit? Why does Gaga feel affinity with what would be an abject act? The answer, I believe, lies in the physicality of the act itself. Our bodily expulsions are the most primal of life experience, and we are often powerless to control them. When our bodies reject these fluids, they are forced outside ourselves as we are forced outside of ourselves when we observe them. As Julia Kristeva has argued, they are made by and of us, yet they embody an entire otherness in their gross exterior existence. To observe the abject is to briefly rupture consciousness, as the many paradoxes of subjectivity and objectivity come to dwell upon a terrible truth of physical existence. To honor one’s vomit is to honor the power of this realization: that we can never escape bodies, that before culture we are animals, and that understanding is not akin to reality. This sensation, a compelling leap into deep thinking and primal repression, has been described by Giles Deleuze as a “discordant accord,” and its potential to create a collision of the senses can be understood as central to the world’s most affective works of art. Via a stream of shimmering blue Gaga invites us to find this artistic potential inside of ourselves, and regurgitate our own thoughts and feelings without shame or regret.

As we hear Gaga scream “Make It Stop” once again, the film cuts to a close up of Gaga eating a raw bovine heart. The story goes that Nick Knight challenged her to do this as means of externalizing the traumatic fears she faced concerning her father’s heart surgery. The effect is a conceptual reversal of the previous image of externalized artistic creativity, as we watch Gaga devour the symbolically laden internal organ.

One must not only produce to create art, but also consume: such is the cyclical nature of creativity. In her first V Magazine column, Gaga asserts the necessity of consumption to inspiration: she considers the act of re-appropriation as both transformative and radical. In Gaga’s interpretation, the creation of art is marked with violence and suffering, as illustrated in the grotesque images of self-induced vomiting and eating raw flesh. As tears of blood are seen to run down her cheeks as she bites, her voice is heard listing the names of tragic beauty queens in what is both a tribute to the damages of fame and a testament to its immortality.

The final scene shows Gaga in the studio being decorated, powdered, gagged, and bound by Matty Dada (the creative director of Haus of Gaga at the time of filming). Gaga retains her silent, objective composure, becoming the passive puppet of fame that the world’s superstars are commonly imagined to be whilst her image is physically developed by a rough-handed assistant. Her alteration by the hands of Dada becomes gradually more aggressive, the connotations of bondage increasing as Gaga is bandaged, blind-folded, braced, and strapped to pieces of wood that imitate the hoisting of a figure onto an easel, or even crucifix. Again a theme of immortality emerges, and the famous vessel becomes an icon of worship. Gaga has adopted religious iconography across her oeuvre, and here, once again, we find fame fashioned as a new religion and Gaga suffering for the love of her fans.

This construction via an act of extreme styling represents the modern-day public persona. Manipulated to the point of abstraction, Gaga objectifies herself as a celebrity, whilst casting a shade of violence over the ritual of getting done one’s “hair and make-up.” Beauty and pain go hand-in-hand for women the world over, but Gaga pushes the boundaries of these expectations, forever forcing confrontation with unspoken truths through her elaborate performances of celebrity such as this.

In all, the film’s sequence works to remind us of what we often forget – that our sense of reality is a fragile construction. She challenges first the classical notion of beauty, severing it with a simple twist of her legs, before “honoring her vomit” across the ideal object and staining it with her creative juices. In the final scene, we see the literal process of beauty being constructed, but it is rendered exploitative and disabling. This seemingly innate sense of what makes another person attractive is one of the many false truths our lives are constructed upon, and Gaga pushes us to examine what thought really is. By tapping into the Deleuzian “discordant accord,” she liberates her Little Monsters by making these strict social expectations ridiculous, and by offering art as a means of salvation. The real art here is not the beautiful mannequin the viewer is first introduced to, or her final subtly Christ-like transformation, but the artistic regurgitation upon them. By honoring our vomit, we confront our subjective existence within the raw meat of our bodies and recognize that it is only through imagination and creative expression that we can be free.

Author Bio:

Rachel Clark is a 22-year-old Cultural Studies postgraduate student, BA Hons in Art History and Museum Studies, with a keen interest in contemporary art, memory studies, and postmodern theory. She is currently based in Leeds in the North of England. As an avid fan of techno and electro, Gaga isn’t her usual cup of tea, but she was ‘enlightened’ by her dear Mum, who took her to see the Monster Ball live – She’s been a little monster and proud ever since!

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GAGAGRAPHY: “Born This Way” & Jemima Wyman

Definition: Gagagraphy is the branch of Gaga studies that seeks to identify, describe, and interpret the content of images depicting Lady Gaga. A Gagagraphy studies all the various components of an image of Gaga, mining for meaning the image’s positioning of its figure, her gesture, her costume, her props (animate and inanimate), her facial expression, her makeup, etc. A Gagagraphy also studies potential visual precursors to images of Gaga, seeking to understand from where Gaga’s iconography draws its inspiration, its influences, its visual quotations. Gagagraphy often necessitates comparative analysis, drawing meaning from the exercise of comparing and contrasting Gaga’s images with her visual influences.

Please leave your analyses of the following images in the comments.

Image 1

Jemima Wyman: A Special Variety of Soft-Skinned Dangerous Game

Originally published on Gaga Stigmata on October 31, 2010.

From the “Artist’s Statement” (also first published October 31, 2010):

The “Gagaesque” protagonist looks out from a body that desires the viewer’s gaze, from a complicated ever changing, non-classical body that is in the process of understanding its own parameters. The two-in-one body that is represented mimics one of the fundamental tendencies of grotesque imagery, that is it exceeds its own limits. She goes further than her own meatiness; she gives birth to herself over and over again!  

Image 2

Lady Gaga: “Born This Way” video

First released February 27, 2011

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Help Soto Go Gaga: Paws up, everyone, and let’s make a GAGA MUSICAL!

Hello Gaga Journal!

My name is Soto. I’m a devoted little monster and a film student seeking the support and help of the Gaga community. For my final thesis I’ve decided to make a musical based on my artistic interpretation of Gaga’s hit song “Bad Romance.” But the Film School won’t let me do it unless I get Gaga’s approval to use the song.

Undaunted by this task, I decided to create an online movement titled “Help Soto go Gaga.” The campaign consists of a YouTube video where I explain my dilemma, showcase my film idea, and ask for the support of fellow monsters and Gaga herself. I’ve also created a petition and website where we’ll be adding content such as concept art for the project.

I reach out to you guys because I’d like for you to help me spread the word by any means; link the video on your site, tweet about it, it’s very simple!

I hope I can count on my fellow monsters! 

Paws Up,

Soto.

Sign the Petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/sbr12148/petition.html

Official Website: www.sotobadromance.com

UPDATE!!!

July 20th is “The Day we Reach Gaga”! A massive online collaborative effort taking place on Twitter and Facebook, where all our supporters and friends will tweet/wallpost Gaga and her close friends a key message: Gaga go Soto!

It’s the grand finale to make my Gaga musical. We’re now one step closer to make it a reality as the campaign has gotten the attention from the Mexican division of Universal Music.

Over 20 newspapers have published articles on the event and over 300 little monsters from all over the world have joined the Facebook event page as well as our twitter account (@sotobadromance).

Here’s the facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=195866683798929

Gaga Stigmata Seeks Assistant Editor for Creative Works

Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga seeks an assistant editor to read creative submissions for the online journal, respond to creative queries, solicit creative work, share creative-development ideas, and to potentially make creative works for the site. The assistant editor will also be in charge of developing Bled Threads, our Gaga fan couture section. Ideally, new works would be posted on a weekly basis.

If interested, please submit a CV or resume and a paragraph detailing your ideas for the kind of artworks (poetry, fiction, video, image-based works, mixed media, creative-critical works, etc.) you’d like to see in the journal. Please name some artists and creative writers who you believe would be a good fit for the journal, and why you think so.

Also, please tell us why you want to work with Gaga Stigmata.

Unlike other journals, Gaga Stigmata does not simply read submissions—we solicit work, and create our own work in response to Gaga, oftentimes in collaboration with one another. We champion risk taking, boundary-blurring between the creative and the critical, and radical ideas that evolve alongside Gaga’s ouevre. We cannot say for sure what the next six months will hold, as we are not sure how Gaga will evolve—but we seek a fellow ambitious, hard-working, and forward-thinking person to evolve with us and with Gaga. Your ideas will be valuable to us, and the democratic/synergistic nature of the journal allows space for you to experiment in ways that other journals won't.

All creative works posted on Gaga Stigmata will pend final approval from founding editor Kate Durbin, with whom you will work closely on a regular basis.

This is a six month position, to be potentially renewed at the end of six months.*

Submit your information to: gagajournal@gmail.com, and please spread the word!

*The position is not currently a paid position, though it could develop into that down the road.