Dammit, Madge!

I had to stop at Halloween Stupor-store yesterday to find a sumo wrestler wig for Boy-child (yeah, talk about specialty outfits). Whilst walking through the life-sized motion-activated Freddy and Jason dummies, and the buckets of Real Fake Blood with the dripping decapitated head on a hook overhead, I heard this ethereal music over the loudspeakers and Local Radio Station started playing “Like a Prayer”. Y’know when you hear a song and you get this…well…”feeling”…like something happened sometime when you heard the song and you’ll go the rest of your life with that ooky feeling whenever you hear the damn thing?

I couldn’t figure out why the internal hubbub, bub. Then it hit me. OH YEAH. That’s the Madonna song that spawned the video with lit crosses, and The Church Powers condemned her to holy burning hell, and didn’t Pepsi or someone boycott her somehow? Oh and some furor over her kissing a black angel man? (What is this, 1950, fer chrissake?) I didn’t get the turmoil. It’s art. Art is whatever you want it to be. ("Ars Gratia Artis", meaning "art for art's sake", is MGM's slogan with the lion.). "Piss Christ"? Well, it's not my cuppa tea, but okay, if people really want to see that, sure, it’s art. Thomas Kinkade, the "Painter of Light"? No thanks, but it's your dime...go ahead and buy it. We still have Free Will, and if you know you’re gonna be offended, just stay away. (One thing that offends me…those Mondrian colour ‘compositions’…dude, they’re squares of primary colours. Big deal! My 6-year old can draw a dog, his house, AND his bone…she passed the “blocks of colour” phase when she was 3…pffffft.)

Back in the early 90s I went to the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit in Cincinnati, y’know, the one that caused So Much Ruckus that hardliners picketed outside, and inside was a ‘special room’ where you could see lovely photographs of men in bondage gear fisting and such. They really were lovely photos. Not just the fisting ones. Still lifes, self-portraits, Laurie Anderson, flowers. "Thomas"...oh, I love that. I bought a t-shirt after the show that said, “Censorship is obscene”. I wonder where I put that thing?

I do tend to ramble, early morning, with not much caffeine in me. Where was I?

Oh yeah, Madonna.

So I’m shopping for wigs in cavernous H’ween store listening to Madonna and feeling ooky, because I just didn’t care that she chose that imagery, I didn’t care, it didn’t bother me, but it seemed to bother other people, and THAT bothered me. So I left H’ween store with sumo wig and an ooky feeling that chased me through the night, and I woke up singing “Like a Prayer”, and Madonna, darling, would you just get the HELL outta my head? Please?

(I had a momentary reprieve, I just stopped for more coffee, and as I walked under the Muzak speaker, I heard, “Gimme a beat!”, and Janet (Miss Jackson, if yer nasty) came on. But, alas, Madonna kicked her ass to the curb, damn echolalia.)

Who knew I could be so militant, so early in the morning?