Things Fall Apart

By Peter Kline

(A companion piece to Devin O’Neill’s "Born That Way." In honor of the Born This Way Ball.)

Tonight I will return

The fame and riches earned

With you I’d watch them all be burned

– Lady Gaga, “The Queen”

I wasn’t planning on it, but I guess I’m giving up Lady Gaga for Lent.

Just a few weeks ago, on Ash Wednesday, the day Christians begin the season of Lent by having ashes smeared on their foreheads and hearing the words, “from dust you have come, to dust you shall return,” Lady Gaga announced that the Born This Way Ball had crumbled to dust. It wasn’t postponed; it wasn’t rescheduled. It was done. Gone. No more.

And why? Because a bit of flesh in Gaga’s right hip had come undone. Flesh does that. It comes undone. It gathers itself into the most beautiful forms, the most magnificent spectacles – of power, bodies, movement, pleasure, glory. But no matter how splendid or glorious, flesh always comes undone. Always. It always returns to the dust of which it is made.

We might be tempted to forget that Lady Gaga is made of flesh. “Lady Gaga” is, after all, a much more encompassing phenomenon than a particular 26-year-old fleshy body. Lady Gaga is the name of an event, a million-faced monster that shows itself in a seemingly infinite explosion of digital images and videos, aural landscapes, tweets, tumblrs, and a thousand other named and unnamed forms. Gaga has seeped her way into every crevice of that mysterious, eternity-like realm called the Internet. She lives there, breathes there, gives herself there. Her fans meet her there, touch her there, love her there. But the Internet is not flesh, exactly. Certainly it lives and pulses with energy. It also breaks down and comes undone. But it is not made of the tender and vulnerable stuff that gives us so much pleasure and pain.

To be sure, Gaga’s art challenges any easy dichotomy between what we might think of as a fleshy body and the multiple ways such a body is represented and extended into images, videos, sounds, costumes, and characters. Those extensions, for Gaga, those multiple worlds that she creates and inhabits and that are created around her, just are her self, her body. She was born this way. But what does it mean that all of those worlds can be shaken to their core when a small bit of tissue in her right hip tears ever so slightly? Is the massive universe and spectacle that is Lady Gaga really dependent on something so precarious, something so obviously fleshy? Are our lives really so fragile? Can it all come to end so quickly?

What if Lady Gaga were never to walk again, or dance again, or get on stage again and throw her body around wildly and passionately? What would that mean? Just how much is dependent on her being able-bodied? Would we still love her with such extreme devotion if she became permanently disabled? How would we love her? How would she love us? Would her extraordinary ability to create and inhabit digital worlds be enough? Or do we need her body, her flesh, her ligaments and tendons and hip sockets?

So yes, I’m giving up Lady Gaga for Lent. But not because I’m pious. I wouldn’t have chosen this had it not been forced on me. Against my will, I have to live with a desire that will go unfulfilled – the desire to see her flesh, to follow the movements of her body with my own eyes, to hear her scream and sing and preach with my own ears, to breathe the air of a shared space, to experience the energy and love of a shared moment. And I mourn that loss.

I’ve seen her in the flesh before. At the Monster Ball two years ago. It was then that I really saw and encountered her for the first time. My love for Gaga was birthed in the flesh, in the deeply bodily and erotic experience of seeing her live. There are those who love Gaga but have never seen her live. I’m not sure I would love her if I hadn’t been around her flesh. Or at least my love would be very different. Probably less visceral. Less obsessive. Less personally transformative. Seeing Gaga’s flesh made such an impact on me that I had to transform my own flesh in response. The Halloween following the Monster Ball, I dressed up in Lady Gaga drag. It wasn’t just a costume. Her flesh had touched my flesh in such a way that my flesh had in someway become her flesh. I am Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga is me.

I purchased tickets for the Born This Way Ball that was supposed to take place in Nasvhille on March 10. I probably paid too much for them. I was late to work on the day I bought the tickets because I was hovering over my computer to buy them the instant they went on sale. I canceled a church service I lead on Sunday evenings so I could get my religion that evening from Gaga instead. But now March 10 sits on my calendar like any other date. Regular, nothing special, no longer a holy-day as it had been for several months.

This is, I suppose, what Lent is supposed to be about – letting those things die that we cherish and cling to most passionately, even and especially those things that give us our deepest sense of identity. It is a time to remember that nothing survives, that our lives are vapor, here today, gone tomorrow. The idea, however, is not to induce shame or despair about our lives or our passions. To remember that you and I and all the world are dust, are nothing, is precisely the way into passion, into life. The promise of Lent is that when you give up everything, every attempt to secure your life, it will all be returned to you – just not as a possession, but rather as a gift, one you can neither anticipate nor control. To live life in openness to the world as gift is to exist precariously, but also passionately, on the edge of glory.

So I have to give up Lady Gaga. I have to let the Born This Way Ball return to dust. But this is not because I no longer love her and desire her flesh. I do. But I have to let it be flesh. Is this not the lesson Gaga has been teaching us all along? That identity is not stable but exists in a continual moment of birth, death, and re-birth? That pain, loss, tears, and blood are the stuff of life? Perhaps from the beginning she has been teaching us to die – so that we might be reborn. Now we have to let her do it.

None of this is to lessen the sorrow of Gaga’s tour being canceled. For me, that sorrow is very real. More so because I hadn’t planned on experiencing the Born This Way Ball alone. Part of what I love about Lady Gaga is the way she has connected me to other people. One of those people is Zoë, the nine-year-old daughter of my best friend. We were planning on attending the Born This Way Ball together. Zoë and I share a passionate love of Lady Gaga. We have matching Lady Gaga lunch boxes. We have frequent conversations about our favorite Lady Gaga songs and what we would say to her if we ever got to meet her –  Zoë says she would say, “You are so punk!!” She adored seeing me in Gaga drag. I am Zoë’s guitar teacher, and without fail every lesson ends with an extended wandering around YouTube looking for the latest Lady Gaga videos. Zoë says sometimes that the thing she wants most in life is to meet Lady Gaga. When I texted my friend and told him that the tour had been cancelled, his first response was, “Zoë is going to be pissed!” He tells me that when he gave her the news, she collapsed into a heap on the floor and just wept.  

My heart is broken for Zoë. I wanted so much for her to see Lady Gaga live. I wanted so much to see Lady Gaga live with her. But that won’t happen, at least for now. I couldn’t just let our shared sadness go unaddressed, I felt like I needed to do something to step into the void left by Gaga’s absence. So I drew a picture for her. I gave it to her when I went to watch her last basketball of the season, a game her team lost, which also caused her a great deal of distress. When I gave it to her, I said, “Zoë, this is a gift for you. I drew it because I know both you and I are sad about not being able to see Lady Gaga. I hope we’ll get to see her together someday.” I know that my drawing won’t make up for the disappointment over the canceled tour, or even the lost basketball game. But it is a gift of my flesh to hers. I hope she holds on to it. I hope somehow it becomes a reminder to her that it is ok to be made of flesh.

Author Bio:
Peter Kline is a PhD student in Theology and Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. His chapter in the forthcoming Gaga Stigmata book is titled, "Jesus in Drag: A Prayer." 

BORN THAT WAY

By Devin O’Neill

(A companion piece to Peter Kline's "Things Fall Apart." In honor of the Born This Way Ball.)

I wasn’t expecting much from The Ball, to be honest.

I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I was expecting to have a blast, but I’d been so immersed in Gaga’s visual and aural catalogue that I felt nothing could compete with that kind of hypersensory flow. The digital mirrors and semiotic smoke she blows out through her online content channels can be edited into wholly self-contained worlds. No mistakes, just her perfect vision. That’s the glory of twenty takes.

I’ve always felt Gaga’s primary vehicle were her videos, really. She’s an audiovisual package, and so are they. They can frame her narrative in rapidly shifting formats, now living a mythology, now breaking the fourth wall, now surrounded by special effects. I was deeply skeptical that a show constructed in clumsy material reality could match that frame-rate, could pummel me with the same razor precision. So I was looking forward to some really solid live music and some great costumes and choreography, and I wanted to dance a lot and have a good time. I was psychologically prepared for that.

The part I forgot was that Gaga would actually BE there.

Let me explain what I mean by that. I had deluded myself into believing that the point of going would be to see the SHOW. In other words, to see Gaga’s work. I was making the mistake of looking at all this as a traditional “art project”, where a creative person builds a product external to themselves and shows it off. Since she and her work and the production of her work were all rolled into one multimedia package in her videos, I had taken for granted that interacting with external product was, as in most cases of mediation, the core of the Gaga experience. I was to View The Works. I was to Sample The Dish.

What I discovered that night is that that is not the point of Gaga.

The only experience I could effectively compare the show with was a massive evangelical rally at a megachurch. The people crammed into the pit with me weren’t there to listen to music; nothing quite so simple or banal. They were there to participate in a movement, to experience an ideology. “I hope she talks to us.” “I love her so much.” “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life.” “I’m going to cry.” That was the kind of language I was hearing. I didn’t hear a single hint of speculation about what the show was going to contain or what songs were going to be played. I’ve been to many, many concerts, but this was an alien environment for me.

No, it wasn’t about a movement or an ideology. That’s not quite right.

The pounding military march of “Highway Unicorn” started, the portcullis of the castle (yes, the castle) clanked open, and a glossy black cyberpunk regiment of gorgeous girls, glinting halberds held high, led her on a stomping plod around the catwalk on horseback (yes, a real horse) like an advancing beast from the Book of Revelations.

She was crusted in wires and cages vomited up from the antediluvian bowels of H.R. Giger’s subconscious but it was still her. She was bound and blindfolded and subjugated by an army of dancers but it was still her. She could barely move but she commanded the attention of every human being in the jam-packed Staples Center.

It was starting to become clear to me. But I needed to see more.

After the electric demons dragged her into the dungeon, the operatic strains of “Government Hooker” started echoing across the ceiling. The wall slammed open, and here she crouched, skeletal armor still in place, screaming HOOKER into the microphone implanted on her face. She crawled out like an animal, gyrating, sweating, screaming. At some point during all this, her helmet was ripped off, or she ripped it off. She threw back her head and roared, and I stared into her face across the open air for the first time, and I finally got it.

I was discussing Gaga with a friend once. This friend has a television show and has worked in the technology and culture industries in various capacities for a very long time. I mentioned that I was interested in her and he was momentarily quiet. Then he said, “you know, I didn’t take her that seriously at first. I thought she was just another Madonna, or Christina Aguilera, or whatever. But then I watched her performance on Howard Stern. Have you seen it?” I had, just her alone with her piano, singing “The Edge of Glory.” He paused for a moment, then said “…there’s a dragon in there.”

I watched the veins in her throat as she screamed HOOKER at the sky again and I thought, yeah, there really is.

It’s HER. That’s why we make the pilgrimage to this massive stadium and camp out in line for an entire day. It’s not the sets or the pyrotechnics or the confetti cannons or the costumes or even the movement or the ideology. We want to be close to her, to touch the hem of her garment. We live in the economy of personality, where produced media experiences are just loss-leaders for the real sale – the sale of the self, uninterrupted by the compression of digital bandwidth.

The thing is, not everybody can place themselves at the center of that vast entertainment infrastructure and act as its reactor core. Most people would be buried. You need somebody with fire in their belly. You need a dragon. And that’s what I started to realize, as I watched her – no matter how insane the spectacle that surrounds Gaga, she has our eyes, our love. There could be an ACTUAL fifty-foot dragon on the stage and everyone’s gaze would be locked on her small, human body, pounding on the stage and roaring and pouring sweat. So many people would be lost up there, among the trained, costumed dancers and massive set-pieces. But she burns so brightly, and so fiercely, that we barely see them.

She knows it, too, and she knows how the system works. She built it. Right before the chanting bridge in “Bloody Mary,” she dropped to her knees in the center of the stage, stretched her slick arms out toward the audience with hands twisted into claws, and shrieked, begged, “SAY MY NAME! I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT THE FAME!” We obliged her, intoning GAGA…GAGA…along with the song, while she convulsed, absorbing the energy we fed her. This was a transactional relationship.

It goes both ways, though. That was the real message she was there to preach. Because between every song, she preached to us. She said things like “listen – sometimes you’re afraid. You stop yourself because of your fear. You’re afraid of what will happen if you pull out all the stops. Well, I’m here to show you what happens. THIS…” …she gestures at the surrounding spectacle, sweeping her hands back in to gesture at her own body… “…is what happens.”

This kind of rhetoric was repeated between every song. Sometimes she pleaded through her quiet, sibilant Italian nose, sometimes she crouched on the catwalk and yelled it directly into our faces. DON’T GIVE UP. DON’T BE AFRAID. DON’T LISTEN TO THEM WHEN THEY TELL YOU YOU CAN’T DO IT.

She’s an evangelist for believing in yourself. After all, Stefani believed in herself, and that’s where Lady Gaga came from.

Now, however, Gaga’s body is temporarily broken, the engine’s piston overheated; it can’t channel the fire right now. This is evidence, if we needed it: she really is the point. Without her, everyone on that tour is out of work. The entire massive multimillion-dollar machine must grind to a halt because one person injured her hip.

This is evidence too, though, of the truth of her message. We are bodies too, and we have such a small, limited idea of what those bodies can do, of the energy that can come from them, and of where that energy can take us.

Perhaps Joanna Newsom put it best:

“The meteorite is the source of the light,

And the meteor’s just what we see –

And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee,

And the meteorite’s just what causes the light,

And the meteor’s how it’s perceived –

And the meteoroid’s a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee.”

Author Bio:

Devin O’Neill is a performance artist, branding practitioner, and storyteller. He enjoys things he shouldn't, on purpose, and tries to convince other people to enjoy them too.

::++Stigmata Dreams++:: Bled Threads – Addie Tinnell

Gaga Stigmata: What is the relationship between anarchy and fashion? 

Addie Tinnell: Anarchism as a philosophy and practice is entirely dependent on fashion- nothing about it is outside of fashion. Anarchism differs from Marxism in that it emphasizes the process by which change will happen. Therefore, each anarchist act is an expression of the politic versus Marxism which is programmatic in its approach to change, and emphasizes the ends over the means. So the big question is, how do you as an anarchist share your ideas about an egalitarian world with another person? You can try to argue with them, but they probably won’t listen, or you can demonstrate it for yourself, on your body and in your actions, and try to create resonance.

Anarchists have always been concerned with fashion. You can go back to the days following the Paris Commune and see that the anarchists running the cabarets in the Montmartre region were impeccably dressed. I’m thinking of Maxime Lisbonne in particular – he was an exquisite dresser and an amazing anarchist organizer. Or the French illegalists, like the Bonnot gang. Jules Bonnot was known to obsess over stealing/wearing expensive suits and fancy cars. Or other anarchic type groups like the Os Cangacieros in Brazil – a group of Robin Hood-esque rebels that would bedazzle their outfits with various metals and wear gobs of fancy French cologne.

The connection between living outside of state domination and beautiful fashion is I think a fairly obvious one. If you do not trust the state to mediate your relationships, then you are totally dependent on the people around you for your health, welfare and safety. I often ask how you can build community with someone that has such little respect for you that they’re constantly shoving ill-fitting t-shirts and cargo shorts down your throat.

Gaga Stigmata: What are some style phases you’ve gone through?

Addie Tinnell: So so many! I try to switch my fashion directions every couple of months. I generally wear more or less the same outfit every day for a season until I get tired of it and gently transition to a new look. I find that this gives me the chance to fully contemplate the garments I’m wearing and try to aesthetically listen to what they want and what they want to say. I used to live with a bunch of crust punks and was inspired by their approach to clothes, which would organically grow and change throughout the garment’s life, adding layers of dirt that grows shiny and hard from being baked in the sun as well as the constant patching and repairs that comes with it. This isn’t even talking about the tattoos and jewelry, which are haute couture at it’s finest.

Right now I’m personally in a femme crust theme, which is basically about taking these crust strategies and femme-ing them. I’m taking a lot of classic crust patches and bleaching them and re-dying them light pink or various pastels so the original white ink sits atop a bed of light pink clouds. As well, I’m looking at the crust vest and replacing the silver studs with gold, chains for pearls, adding rhinestones and lace as well. My partner Kate Kershenstein, who I work with under the name Cake and Eat It, are thinking of setting up a distro with a few other anarchists as an extension of our art practice along these same lines and calling it Femme Strike (incidentally, Femme Strike encompasses a much larger project Kate and I are working on, that I won’t go into here, but the distro/fashion component would be its newest incarnation). An earlier fashion theme I had was called Pastel Paradise and was sort of a Miami Vice thing, with white blazers and pastels with plunging necklines. Another I called aaantwerp and was all about layers on layers of neutrals, beiges, eggshells and what not. I still love that theme quite a lot- I’m actually transitioning from femme crust to a sort of femme crust aaantwerp hybrid (name tbd). We did a fashion shoot with the aaantwerp theme on a glacier called Absence and Whispers that you can check out on our website.

Gaga Stigmata: What political potential does fashion have? Why should the political far left care about fashion?

Addie Tinnell: I think that anarchists already do care about fashion, truly madly deeply, but they are rightly uncomfortable with the consumerist tendencies of the fashion industry so they are afraid to openly talk about fashion and aesthetics. This is actually a big problem in the anarchist scene, something going back to the divide between what I call wet and messy anarchism and the anarchist movement itself. Wet and messy anarchism is kind of a universal tendency to resist all authority, you see this all over the place, people just doing little things like not talking with cops, to using humor to undermine a talking head, to outright riots. It’s wet and messy because people just do it, all the time, they play tricks on the authorities whether it’s the boss at work, the cops, or an activist-manager.

But the anarchist movement is different because it was originally an attempt by a certain group of European anarchists to translate this wet and messy anarchism into a political movement that could take down the state, which is actually a really interesting idea if you think about it. It would be like taking the act of having an orgasm and trying to make a political movement out of it... I guess you could say the queer movement does that, but yeah, I digress! The problem with the anarchist movement though is that it continues to be Eurocentric, because of this history and because I think that the origin of this idea is bound up with other Modernist tendencies like colonialism, eugenics and fantasies of returning to a pure natural state. So flash forward 100 years and the anarchist movement is in a major fashion crisis! The triumph of black bloc fashion has effectively crushed all organic forms of anarchist fashion innovation and replaced a multifaceted explosion of personal expression with an obligatory uniform of all black clothes that only reflects the German anarchist culture, which is where it originated. I’ve said a lot about the Black Bloc on my blog The Boulevardier so I don’t want to go into that other than that the Black Bloc is more in line with the logic behind a military uniform rather than anarchist ideals, which would emphasize a fluid anonymity.

Gaga Stigmata: Responses your style’s gotten in public?

Addie Tinnell: People love gold studs, absolutely love them. Here in LA, everyone loves my fashion, it makes me feel really happy to live in such a supportive place. Being trans, I tend to feel nervous in public a lot, but people here have been really positive and helped me to feel more confident. Also Los Angeles is the capital of femme in the US, and possibly the world, so in this way I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. People here really love a femme- hard femme, high femme whatever- LA loves the femmes. I was recently in rural Tennessee for my yearly queer punx retreat at Ida and people there were really excited about the femme crust theme too. I hope more queer punx step up with the fashion and just suffocate all the manarchist shit I’ve been forced to look at for the last 10 years. I have talked with some t-girls who feel really in the crosshairs with their gender presentation and society, and I just tell them to put some gold studs on your shit, people love gold, it’s like a protective amulet, that and black leather.

Gaga Stigmata: Who are influences?

Addie Tinnell: I’m influenced obviously by all the anarchist fashion plates from back in the day for one, but in reality I think people in LA are totally creative with how they dress and really turn it out every day, so they are a big influence. Probably the biggest influence for me has got to be Tumblr. The radical stoner femme community is really kicking ass there right now and I could name a thousand blogs of people posting amazing images all the time and having a really radical conversation around fashion and politics, I try to do my part with femmestrike.tumblr.com but really there are so many talented bloggers on there it’s disgusting.

Gaga Stigmata: You styled your friend Ariel Attack for court, and documented Ariel’s court outfits as an art project. What were some concerns or goals in this styling project?

Addie Tinnell: Kate and I were concerned with the image of the anarchist and the transwoman in the media, so our outfits, and the very fact we were dressing her, were totally about shifting perceptions. On the one hand anarchists are always depicted as scary foreigners who have strange fetishes, like not eating meat, and who shout a lot. And then with transwomen, we are all depicted as sadistic, pathetic prostitutes. So our outfits were about the assertion of a defiant transwoman anarchist, one that doesn’t need to answer to anyone. A beautiful transwoman who has rage and expresses it through destruction, and who will not apologize or explain why, because the act speaks for itself, and who then can show up for court looking very glamorous and seductive.

We of course were concerned with presenting her as innocent as well, so we looked at a lot of Winona Ryder court fashions, but at the same time we needed an element of femme defiance, so we were thinking about the women of the Red Army Faction, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof. Ariel’s gender presentation is a sort of transwoman soft butch with hard femme tendencies, so the styling itself was very much an act of innovating garments to match this identity, so I was and am hard pressed to think of many fashion precedents. I would also say that I personally learned a lot from styling Ariel, in particular. Kate and I had done many stylings before Ariel but with her, because her physical identity was under attack from the media and from the anarchist community as well, it had much more gravity and we really felt the intimacy of dressing another person. The intimacy that is created from advocating for another’s body, and fitting their clothes, and picking colors and textures to portray the body that they see themselves as, and the gender that they perceive themselves as, and how this complicated act is like using fashion to embrace another person and almost travel through the world together in a sort of embrace. 

Gaga Stigmata: I admire the work you’re doing with and for femme visibility/femme organizing. Why is femme visibility important? How would you define “femme”?

Addie Tinnell: Kate and I are discussing femme constantly right now. We just got done with a show where we wrote a zine about femme tactics for organizing and created a femme-ed union hall to expand on those ideas. We are not so much interested in femme as an identity, even though both Kate and I are total femmes, like totally, but we’re interested in femme as a verb, to femme something. In this way, femme at its core seems to be the creation of resonance between people, whether you call that affective labor or intimate solidarity, but it is the production of these deep bonds that are at the root of all decolonial organizing which is our primary interest. 

How can we take femme strategies and re-organize ourselves in healthy autonomous communities as we transition out of capitalism? This is really where fashion comes in, because fashion is such a major piece to being and doing femme, and this is because it’s a conversation about the desire between bodies and the bonds that are created between bodies in public and in private spaces. This conversation isn’t enough though, it needs to be taken a step further, which is why Kate and I are members of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), which surprisingly enough has a very similar approach in terms of femme organizing except applied to labor unions. So right now we’re working with this intersection between radical unionism and femme, and have a bunch of projects in this vein that are about to explode, but I’ll just leave it there to make you squirm!

Bio:

Addie Tinnell is an artist and anarchist organizer living in Los Angeles. She is half of the collaborative Cake and Eat It which creates operas, fashion shows, performances, installations, salons, books and generally gives away a lot of free clothes. She is from Denver, Colorado.

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Gaga Stigmata is currently sleeping, preparing for her cultural rebirth in print form. Submissions are currently closed. Watch for news about our book's release in Fall 2012. :: +Stigmata Love+ ::

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