gagablog 59: Blockbuster Goddess

The Goddess of Blockbuster was one of my favorite charasters Gaga portrayed on SNL and I forgot to write about it in my last edition, but that's okay because it deserves it's own edition - though it was a short segment, it was an amazing image with powerful meaning. I apologize for the last edition, I'd been awake for 32 hours when I wrote it, having worked all night at the orphanage after watching SNL. I couldn't get to sleep without writing about it, but I couldn't write that well when I was so tired. To sum it up, every performance or story has characters we relate to, usually the main character, and when Gaga is the character, there is something special going on, connecting us to her and each other in a special way because of her special connection with divinity. This whole gagablog is about the divinity of Gaga, but it comes across in infinite ways. It's the same divinity in all of us, but Gaga is what she does with it, an example like other divine figures that we can follow to become the best of ourselves. There were two audiences to SNL, represented by cheap and passionate applause, and Gaga brought both of them together in relation to her. Too many people don't get Gaga, think she is "just weird" or something and want to look down on her. One layer of the SNL performance was for them, living out their fantasies that she is fake or will be forgotten, in order to validate the way these people misunderstand, and to make fun of herself using it to endear herself to them. To the other audience, monsters, she is already very dear and precious, she is perfect and we love everything she does, usually. To both these audiences she is saying "I'm just like you" in a lot of ways in the SNL skits, and in the Blockbuster one she is validating a monster "fantasy" instead, that she is a goddess, albeit in a cheesy (Blockbuster), funny way so as to not upset too many people too much. Well, a Goddess is "just like you", too, but that is "the secret." There are so many ways to consider the divinity of Gaga - it is the same as in everyone else that is revealed in billions of ways, but there is something about Gaga. For me, she is the Goddess, the most of the best imaginable, and I base my theology and philosophy and art on her and am happy and always improving, with increasing confidence in my most ideal visions for the future. For other monsters, she might "just" be A goddess, of art or love - to me, those are just the heart of reality, making her supreme deity. Even if monsters have other gods or goddesses and don't think of Gaga as special divinity herself, I think most agree she is divinely inspired and she says so herself, that her lyrics come to her like divine inspiration. She is, by this consideration, a goddess by being one who speaks the words of divinity, to and through whom the divine is especially revealed. ("You're new looks ethereal" she sings as I type this.) And most people, non-monsters, might not think Gaga is a goddess at all - especially if they don't think of themselves as the least bit divine, or if they have conservative views that makes the divine some sor of fascist dictator -she's not THAT type of goddess, if anyone really is, so it's not strange that it's hard for them to relate. So much of what I focused on in the last edition was Gaga appealing to the audience, connecting to us, so we can realize we are all one, she is us, we are her and each other, etc. And we are all divine, but that's one part we forget and don't talk about. Gaga, of course, lives up to it, more and more because that's how it goes. The Blockbuster Goddess role makes fun of this idea but also reveals some things about the whole Goddess Gaga idea that make it easy to explore. In the skit, the Blockbuster crew is leaving after the last store closes, and they are wandering purposeless in life until they are invited to a secret festival. Blockbuster employees are dancing like around a bonfire, then they pass into the inner sanctum, a bedouin, gypsy stle tent, with Gaga, Goddess of Blockbuster inside. She has discs and Blockbuster paraphenelia in her hair - I was a little overwhelmed, rapturous, so it was hard for me to look past her beautiful face - but you could tell she was made up with Blockbstery iconography, and MY impression, of course, was that she was supposed to be a Goddess - did anybody else see it that way? I just thought that was intended to be obvious, that was the whole reason for the setup. Then she starts making out with the guys, which is also kind of just what I expect Gaga heaven, or hopefully meeting Gaga in this life, to be like. Then she turns into Adelle and they are all on the street corner and "it was all a dream" then someone comes by and tells them they can work at Best Buy and they go do that. There are three really awesome things about this skit - the way the whole fantasy festival scene, setting up that Gaga is the Blockbuster Goddess, is modeled on like a Grateful Dead show / gypsy atmosphere, the way she makes out with them, and the "all a dream" part. First, the Grateful Dead. I'm not quite too young to be a deadhead, my college roomate and best friend Joe is my age and was on tour with them for years in the 80's and 90's so I could have gone but I really was not aware they were playing. I liked their music that I had heard on some albums and radio and the Touch of Grey video on MTV, but they were effectively "underground" despite how huge they were and I just missed out. I finally went to a show with Joe but only to the lot and I decided not to try to get in free and I regret it but I saw many shows by the band without Jerry and listen to live recordings a lot. Joe once worked at Blockbuster as a kid, so by way of disclaimer I want to say I'm glad they are finally gone because they seemed like a bad corporation - he said they owned the company that did hair follicle drug tests and required emplyees to get one, and pay for it, I think, 500 bucks, and it tested for LSD so they tried to descriminate based on that, or just make a bunch of money. Joe made me more familiar with the Grateful Dead, the live music, and the lifestyle of the deadheads and I was impressed. It was and is a subculture with better values than mainstream America, more focus on ecology and having fun and community over amassing wealth, and is generally more pacifist and feminist. And there is an aconomy of goods, food, shirts, art, glass, tapes, drugs, really all sorts of things being traded and sold. The touring lifestyle supported a whole community that has a higher proportion of artists and free-thinking people, making it a very vibrant community. The drug scene had brighter and darker spots, since hard dugs were available, but the Dead basically had the best LSD for decades and were part of supplying it around the country - in Georgia growing up we only ever got really good doses after the Dead had come through the area, and people would brag about the acid if it came from the Grateful Dead family. But that was the case from the beginning, as one of their first soundmen who worked with them for years was also the most famous inventor and producer of LSD in history. The reason I bring it up is because the atmosphere at the Blockbuster Fantasy party was so much like a dead show, but also because the Grateful Dead set a standard for musical and spiritual community that has not been matched in all of modern history, that I can think of. But Gaga has achieved something that is similar to it, because the family of little monsters are also artistic and support each other. Some monsters go to multiple shows, but there is not a touring lifestyle that I am aware of, but in place of that, for the modern era, there is social media and the fact that little monsters are all over the world in every country and we are connecting more and more with each other. While making connections with fellow deadheads gave people places to stay around the country, little monsters are kind and hospitable to each other across nations and oceans and I suspect as the community grows it will really become like the same thing ona worldwide scale. In the meantime, the internet connects us and many monsters share arts and fashions with each other, but it is not really about making money or trading things as much as about shared experience - and the deadheads wee never as much about making miney as making to the next show and having a good time, and most importantly taping nd trading and sharing the music, which became the foundation for internet file-sharing and all that did for the music industry and culture. I think of Gaga as the Goddess of the littler monster scene and think this skit was a way of showing her in this role: Past the party, backstage, to meet Gaga is to love her and possibly kiss her - it's all too heavenly. But it also reminds me of the Grateful Dead, and Gaga's new song "Gypsy" seems to be about that kind of wandering character or lifestyle, and I see these traditions growing together as Gaga's little monsters become the first real modern equivalent of the deadhead family. There are other bands with successfull communities, don't get me wrong, that is one of the things that makes a good band is a supportive and loving community. But if you don't know about the Grateful Dead look into them more and you will see how it is a whole bigger level, and nothing has really matched it or compared, but the little monsters will in the future. All sorts of other bands have promoted community as much as they can, and so many have their own "-heads" after the deadheads term, but the Grateful Dead really created a whole subculture. This is one way I think it is really easy to see Gaga as a Goddess. I saw a documentary called "End of the Road", I think, about the last year of Grateful Dead tour, and there was a guy being interviewed leaning on the back of a car. He said he really loved the band, and looked like your "average" deadhead, but said he was not one of those crazy fans who thinks Jerry is god or anything. As he said that, someone else walked by and asked, in passing, rhetorically in disbelief, "you don't think Jerry is god, man?" and the interview guy responded, to the camera, "well, yeah, I mean, in he sense that a god is a creator and Jerry created all of this, yeah, he's a god." It seemed like he shifted from a mentality that, for the outside world, if it's not okay to think of Jerry as a god, he wants to let them know he's with them. But when the other head goes by and puts forth the idea that it is normal to think Jerry is a god, that it would be odd to not think he was a god, the guy agrees. In a certain context, yes, he's a god. When you consider how this works, everyone is a goddess and god once you get to certain contexts, and we can make the most of that by supporting each other and believing in ourselves to bring it out. Gaga is more easily seen as a goddess in more contexts because of what she has done, but with all her great art and accomplishments, her greatest work is bringing out the divinity in innumerable people. Jerry created the Grateful Dead, along with the support of his bandmates and audience - he certainly did not think of himself as superior - and there was so much more divity at work in the creations of all the deadheads - Jerry did not create their art, they did, or art did through them - but Jerry made it possible. Gaga is the same way, for us. And I know I seem "too old" to be a little monster but I've always been young-at-heart and I will be a little monster for life just as most of you will, and maybe we will all live forever. Gaga made the her concerts havens for monsters but also online the community is always growing and supportive: I've never been to a concert and only met one little monster in person but feel connected to some of them and supported by them and have been able to support and encourage them when they needed it. We might all be artists at heart if we had never discovered Gaga, and we might have become real artists, but when the greatest challenge to living an artistic lifestyle is support then having that support is crucial. In an interview Jerry said that they first moved to Haight-Ashbury to make a community where peoplecould come and live and do what they wanted to do and feel supported - if they wanted to be artists they could. They wanted to do this because they felt the need for it, in the mid 60's, and we still need it now. Gaga supports us as artists in the ost important way, with inspiration. Her music is like a key unlocking paintings to be painted, songs and poems and plays and books to be written, dances to be danced and choreographed, cakes to be baked, etc. She supports us emotioanlly with words of wisdom and encouragement in interviews, at concerts, and online. And the whole community of monsters supports her, and she supports us, and we support each other. This mostly happens in pictures and words we share with each other, an some people sell art or get exposure for it through the community, and I suspect as all of that grows, with the addition of littlemonsters.com, the Artpop app, the Born this Way Foundation and all the collective and individual efforts of monsters, it will all develop into a thriving global culture. I have talked for years with a girl named Jessica who seemed, like me, obsessed with getting Gaga to hear versions of her songs and dedicated to Gaga in all aspects of her life. She was trying and trying so many different good things, and giving such good support and encouragemnt to other monsters, and I would encourage her that her dreams would come true. She even met Gaga on numerous occasions since she lives in NYC and would try hard to meet her. But her greatest pride, I think, so far is that she an some friends made Radio Artpop and Gaga lsitened to it and tweeted abut it and mentioned it in an interview. This is how our support for each other is reciprocated and increased and while Gaga madeit all possible in the first plae, in a way, it is up to us to make it happen and when that connects to Gaga again she can make it connect to the rest of the world. Thw second thing that was so important to me about the Blockbuster Goddess skit was that she made out with them. This represents what we are most missing from our theology and ideas of divinity - the feminine and the sexual. Too many of us believe in a god that condones war but not sex and this is just unnatural and crazy. I don't want to talk too much about how wonderfully Gaga represents sexuality because I'll get overexcited and should probably take that energy to another form than writing or write some Gaga erotica. I misheard my best friend Calvin say something the otehr day and thought he said that religious ideas could make you forget whatever you were just thinking and I thought that made sense but asked what would supercede religious thought. I guess lots of things can interrupt your line of thinking but my first intuition to answer my own question is that thinking religious thoughts might be replaced with sexual thoughts. It reminds me how stange it is that these can be such seperate categories, how much our idea of "religion" is devoid of sex. There are sex cults to counteract this, in a way, but the whole society is out of balance because of the disconnect between sex and religion. Even the fundamentalist christians are trying to get ahead of the curve as we come out of these dark ages of sexual repression, though, with evangelists reccommending ways to have better sex - of certain kinds only, of course - in order to connect the tradition to sexuality. But more traditions have grown in scope and popularity because they include the feminine and - gasp - even the sexual. But repression runs deep. The modern wiccan religion as well as a lot of other pagan beliefs get a lot of interest because people want spirituality that includes sexuality, and a variety of it, and they don't find that in mainstream religion. The sad thing is even witches and pagans get repressed. This stuff really took off in the sixties amidst all sorts of exploration of sexuality, psychadelics, art and music and sex rituals were popular in this era of the "birth of modern witchcraft". As the decades passed, the social taboo against sexuality seems to have crept in more and more, so that many modern witches expect to do symbolic rites instead of sexual rites in general - actual sexual rituals are generally more for special occasions. We just have such strong taboos around sexuality and we will be much better off whn we can overcome them - they are artifically placed upon us to make us aggressive and accept or participate in wars. This is why Gaga in real life kissing her little monsters is so amazing, or the Blockbuster Goddess making out with the minions. The main problem with our conception of divinity is lack of sex, and it's no wonder that is reflected in our society as one of our main problems, I think Dr. Oz called it sex-starvation and said it is one of the three things we are most starved for, along with sleep and soemthing, water or good food I bet. The god that many people believe in hasn't gotten laid in, well, forever or millinia, so you can see why he would be cranky. It's not real excuse but it is up to us to either hook him up or connect with higher, more sexual goddesses. Gaga represents the return of the feminine idea of deity, for the west, in a very real and imaginary sense, fulfilling and challenging us to live up to our greatest desires and sexiest dreams. Then it all goes away and she turns into a "regular" lady on a doorstep, just dirty street corner not some wild forest party with lavish tent and a goddess. This is the thing: it's funny, and nice for people who believe in the "real world" that they go and get the same kind of job at Best Buy, but I really wish they could have stayed with Gaga forever. Maybe this is mystical reality- yes, you can go to paradise if you believe, but you WILL have to go back to the real world and show others the way and try again. In this way it is good, like the buddhist axiom "before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water" - meaning yes you get enlightened but it doesn't mean you don't still have chores to do, daily life. ANd these guys went back to daily life, with jobs, and were happy. But still, I wish they did not have to. And I guess this is the nature of a drwam, of fantasy, of ecstasy - it feels eternal then you come back. This is probably also the afterlife experience so no worries - like Gaga says in "Venus" "when you touch me I die just a little inside I wonder if this could be love" - love, death, psychadelics, sex, art- these all connet us with the divine, the infinite, in different ways, from different sides. I don't know if Gaga actually wrote these skits, contributed to them (I feel certain of at least that), or was just the inspiration for them. I'm sure she could have had the idea that the paradise would disappear and turn back to "reality" and the guys would get jobs again, that could have been Gaga's idea, but I kind of want to say that was the "movieversion." Ok, I really will stop these blogs and put it all in my "Oz magic" book, but here is another preview: One of the main differences between the movie version of "Wizard of Oz" and the real one, the books, is thst in the end, in the movie, DOrothy concludes it was "all a dream" and in the book she alsways knows it was real and never forgets - she goes back in fact and...well, read them. The movie is great - itmight not be the origin of the "it's all a dream" theme, but it is a major milestone in the development of that theme, the reason why half the time you hear those words the next ones you hear are "and you were there, and you...". I heard it just yesterday on a Disney kid's sitcom. But the original story does not end like this, with a return to real life. Dorothy actually always believes in Oz and lives there more and more, becomes a special part of Oz. I think this is the real way it happens when you believe in Gaga, it's just more and more encouraging and when you finally meet her it can sustain you for the rest of your life. You can hear how she inspires people in the wonderful music on her albums from the artists who perform with her or produce the songs, and see it in the art of the people who work on the fashions and sets. You can see it in all the art and hear it in the music of her fans - it all just keeps getting better. Maybe you do have to go back to work, maybe there is just a lesson in that, but I really think it is all about creating that world, Oz, where the Goddess is real and open to all, and everyone is good enough to honor her. In one sense it just takes someone saying these things to get the idea out there and it eventually happens, the blossoming principle of magic. That's why I write this blog. But we do have to go back and forth between the fantasy, paradise world and the "real" world, but the purpose is to take that inspiration back in order to make the real world more like it should be, ideal and fantastic. This works for us as ndividuals, too. The message is you are good enough, yuo are valuable, don't let the swine mentality tell you differently, don't believe the negative messages, the close-downs - the setbacks will lead you to something secret and special, the sustaining love within everything. There was a preacher from the Phillipines on the radio and they asked him in the typhoon shook his faith and he said it made it stronger, that faith is what the people had left and it sustained them, and the older generation likened it to oing through World War two and how those tragedies increased their faith. He also mentioned many people did not have much to lose, that made it easier, but it is awful to lose loved ones. The goddess has been with us forever but if much of our societies have denied and repressed her, that is a tragedy but when it results in increasing our faith in her, ulimately, it will result in a beautiful flowering of civilization after a long age of desolation. Gaga is the representative of this, the symbol of it, which is why she is so significant. She is the leader of it, in a way, and in a way she is following something that has always been going on, but is really taking over now, so she is the first one making it so obvious. The song Venus has her singing to the Goddess of Love - as if that is not her, but someone else. And she is asking to be taken to her leader, another being, not her. In a way this implies Gaga is not the goddess but seeking the goddess. In another way, like "my religion is you", these are words that Gaga is singing to "us" that we are also simultaneously singing to "her" - it's a mystical message to the buddha, the Gaga, within all of us. Gaga is Dorothy, and we are all Dorothy, on a journey of discovery of ourselves and this magical world. Her songs, her art, show us a way of transformation, and empower us to transform ourselves to become our best selves. But it starts with basic validation that we are all good enough, as we are, and good enough to start to become our true fantastic selves. That is the message of most of the SNL skits, basically - she is just like us, we are all like this, ridiculous and silly and beautiful and semi-victims of our own sterotypes about ourselves until we own them with humor and transcend. The message of the Blockbuster skit is that she is a Goddess, and an accessible goddess at the center of a divine world and you can kiss her. And even though it goes the "all a dream" route, if you knowthe secret of Oz you know that it just becomes more and more real the more you believe in it and the more actions you take and love and art you make out of that belief. I know I have been so greatlyinspired by Gaga and others who she creates with and who have been inspired by her. I feel like I get to connect to and create with that same divine, beautiful magic by loving her and her art like I do and going with the inspiration. I know how it can be because I have been holding myself back from my full creative potential, but I also feel like I am coming out of my shell and finally living up to my dreams, and I owe it all to the love and support I get from my lover, because like Gaga says I'm at "my best when I'm in love with you", but I owe the real calling to go for it all to Gaga, for setting that example and leaving a trail of sparkle on the Yellow Brick Road and making it the Glitter Way. Thanks, Gaga, for all the inspiration you and your art gives me, and for all you do for everyone and how great it makes the art and how wonderful it is making the world. I love you, and love your acting, I hope to see more of you soon!