Gagablog 63: Artpop, the Holy Spirit carbonated: Mandela, peace love and liberation

Art is the Holy Spirit. Artpop is the Holy Spirit, carbonated and sparkling. Everything is divine, scientifically everything is made of light, but we take on the complexity of matter in this life. The Holy Spirit is liberation, love, the future that draws us on, gives us hope, and lets us know everything will be good in the end. The world is sharing in the event of celebrating the life of Nelson Mandela as the people of South Africa gather and are joined by the greatest gathering of world leaders in history. It's about to start, on TV, and one of the good things about working the night shift is being able to join in events live as they happen on the other side of the world, getting the world's first reactions to news. I have so much to say about it, it touches on so many issues, I actually appointed a great leader in my head to write this, somewhat, by jotting down some notes, instead of letting the mob rule of thoughts in my mind ramble on. But this is how it works and why Mandela was so important to people - we are all manifestations of the Holy Spirit but some of us put it forth more purely, just shine with it's brilliance. This is the reason we all respond so powerfully to the great figures and leaders of history, because they really bring out something, into a blazing fire, but it is something within all of us, a spark we all share and connect to. Gaga recently attended an exhibit honoring Isabella Blow and encouraged her monsters via twitter to check her out, thus virtually ensuring the immortality of her art, though I'm sure most monsters like me had not heard of her before Gaga made the introduction. She echoed something she said recently in her tweet that it is important to honor the artist while they are alive. This is especially important for artists since we often struggle and can't realize the art we are inspired by due to worldly difficulties. The reason we have these celebrations after people die is because of the nature of being an aspect of the Holy Spirit, the divine, and returning to the fullness of it - it lets people reflect on the fullness of life. Mandela has been ailing for some time and this was excpected, it is not as if people were holding off celebrating him in case he did anything in his final days to invalidate the good of his life. No, it is just that we can't fully appreciate the importance of someone while they are with us, or while we can still hope to be with them, because the real importance of people is in their spirits and until the liberation of the spirit from this world it is encumbered. Even Mandela, who was so inspiring to the whole world, had some resentment from his family for not being able to be with them as much as they would like for the cause. Michael Jackson's death was a surprise to the world, but the same thing happened that in death the full force and impact that he had on people could be felt. The reason we are sad at most funerals is because we think of the loss, of missing time with the person or missing what could have been. With Mandela and others who have great impact and live long lives, we don't feel so much loss or what might have been, but can be more completely happy for all they did. I get the impression that it is more common in African cultures to celebrate life at funerals and it is uplifting to see the joy in people as they are going to the stadium for the service. So far the ceremony is almost an hour late starting and the stadium is still filling up. There is something special about seeing all the world leaders coming together and being on equal terms paying respect to Mandela, but also the fact that the real message is that all people are on equal terms and should be treated equally. The thing we keep being surprised about is that the real power is in truth, in love and caring for each other. We keep talking about how remarkable it is to forgive people assume that liberation from fear and oppression is for the victims, but Mandela has told us and it becomes increasingly easy to see how they oppressers are the ones truly "suffering" from fear, oppressors are the ones sick with it even if they put the symptoms off onto the oppressed and take the suffering out on them. So forgivness is healing them, healing everyone. It really opens up some amazing ideas to celebrate such a great man when like the other greatest people in history his contribution involved asserting the essential dignity and worth of all people. They just finished the South African National Anthem in it's three different languages. Christine Amanpour made a good point that by keeping the old Afrikans anthem in the new anthem, Mandela "embraced and nuetralized" the old order and she mentioned this was an example they could follow more in the Arab Spring. But this is the essence of "loving one's enemies" from the Bible, or the Rule of Three or "killing" with kindness. We keep hearing anecdotes of Mandela exemplifying forgiveness and reconciliation and we can never get enough of these, we need it. But the reason we need it is because there is still so much disparity and oppression in the world. Anderson Cooper just started talking over a minister giving a eulogy and comparing Mandela to Joseph, which I thought might be disrespectful until they said Mandela himself was not particularly religious and that he believed in infinity and his belies were rooted in tribal religion he grew up with. This shows how all beleif ultimately leads to the same thing, it is the same Holy Spirit of liberation that calls us all into the future, to more ideal life. The thing about liberation and freedom is that we all long for it, we all need it. Leaders will emerge who represent this need more prefectly, who exemplify it. But we all feel it, and there are two aspects to liberation movements, the leaders and the crowds. The crowds will do it and the leaders will emerge to be the face of it and to help steer the crowd to minimize conflcit. Right now there is a crowd gathered in the Ukraine ready to force the government out because the president chose to stay allied with Russia instead of meeting a commitment to ally more with Europe. In this case, and in Syria, the government is acting against the will of the people in such a way that they are being overthrown. This is the sense that all people have for justice and equality, whether a leader has or will emerge to symbolize these movements or not. With the end of Aparthied, and so much more good and justice done in the world by Mandela, we have a clear example of how goodness wins. Goodness is the only thing that really can win because there is no real power in evil: the worldly powers that are used to oppress people are not powerful at all compared with the truth. Malala said this when she said she believes the gun has no power at all, but the pen, the truth, is what is powerful Carlos Santana said the same thing when an interviewer for our local denver news (I think) asked him what he learned from Mandela - he said it was that the Good had already won. Its the only way it can be. It's always possible to see the good if we are looking with our hearts. I was a kid in the 80's and first heard about Mandela and Aparthied because of protests in America trying to convince Reagan to support sanctions against South Africa. This awakened me to the idea that there was still injustice in the world and that some people who were supposed to be responsible to fix it weren't up to the task. There has been a "great man" version of History that idolizes Reagan but this was one area where he was obviously lacking, even if Newt Gingrich wants to emphasise the lessor efforts Reagan made to address the issue. The main reason people get to say Reagan was any good, anyway, was because he was president when the Soviet Union collapsed, but my best undestanding of that is he accomplished it by lying and scaring them by spending ten times as much as they could afford on weapons no one ever needed in order to strain and eventually wreck their economy - because weapons aren't good for anything, just a waste of resources. I was never down with that, or how the Reagan administration tried to scare us into hiding under our desks in case of nuclear attack. But I'm against most everything he stands for and oppposed to the mentality that idolizes or even likes him. As my love says, the best thing about Reagan is he had a monkey. The response to the death of Mandela shows how severely "off" some people are, how far they are away from seeing with their heart - but if we look closely it shows this about us all, in lesser degrees. When Newt tweeted praise for Mandela he got a lot of racist and awful responses from his base of support, no real surprise since they are awful, racist people. But he tries to "redeem" his mentality by implying he has any moral values with which to relate to Mandela, as if all of his policies aren't completely contradictory to the Holy Spirit of liberation. Newt is trying to distinguis himself from his base, people who call Mandela a "gorrilla" warrior, but they are all the same. He tries to make excuses for Reagan, but the truth is that sanctions did play a role in ending Aparthied and Reagan was on the wrong side of history and had to be convinced. But as I said, we are thankfully not all raging racists, though far to many Americans are and have been revealing themselevs as such especially since Obama took office. We actually want to get along, which is why we can be so unified in praising someone like Mandela who did so much to bring us together. But as we sit here praising ideals and feeling like we share them, we really need to scrutinize ourselves and avoid hypocrisy. We say we value Mandela and we do, the world did honor him in his lifetime. But are we honoring him, and what he represnets, the Holy SPirit of liberationa and eqaulity, as best we can, in everything we do? If we haven't been our best, can we start now, with this memorial service as a call to become what we know we should be? I just can't help notice some hypocricy in the way we talk about Mandela. Christine Amanpor was marvelling at how brutal African dictators also praise Mandela, and she wondered if they are being willfully blind to not actually live up to his message or if they are just going along with the crowd. I would ask that question of Newt Gingrich and other conservatives who are trying to appear compassionate by praising Mandela - as if they in any way "get it" when they are in fact the source of the problem - but not because I think they are incapable of getting the message, because we all have that spark of Holy Spirit seeking to set us aflame with liberation. And we love it when someone else does it, but one problem we have is the "great man" idea that only someone else can do it. This is the same problem we had with buddha and Jesus - lots of people like to pretend "He" is the only one who could do this, so they don't have to take any responsibility to do it themselves. In the case of Mandela and other great leaders, they do inspire people to do more themselves, and they do earn the great praise people give them. But the idea of deifying people, idolizing people, can be good if it brings us together (and unity is usually the goal of people we want to honor in the first place) bu8t it can be harmful if it makes us feel separated, less worthy, or uncapable. I heard an example of this in Dave Letterman's interview with Sir Ian McLellan - sorry about spelling - Gandalf. He said that he met Mandela on a mission to get his support for a measure to protect people from descrimination based on sexual orientation. Mandela sent him a book with an inscription that he respected or appreciated him and Ian said he was unworthy or undeserving of Mandela's praise. In a way, this is just being humble but it is also part of the problem I am talking about. Ian was seeking equality for gay people, for all people, he was doing the same thing Mandela himself did. Mandela recognized it and supported him, unlike Reagan who did not immediately recognize Mandela and support him, but it did take Ian making the trip and appeal and drawing his attention to it to make it happen. I'm not criticising Mandela or saying he might not have come to it on his own, but saying that Ian played a necessary role that should not be diminished. We can't say that only "great people" create change because we are all part of the ame thing. They just quoted Mandela saying he was not only one man, and the fairy sensitive-seeming Chris Cuomo just made the statement that the unique thing about this event was "regular people in the same place with the most important people in the world." We are all the most important people in the world and we can't let anyone else's position allow us to feel inferior or incapable. We do have way too much futiulity in the world and that is why it is so powerful to be inspired. And I'm reminded that some great people live up to the positions we put them in, like Mandela himself or Obama, and I was reminded by the heartfelt speech of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, which was sweet and powerful and reflected the Holy Spirit well. Obama is still more ideal than he has been able to realize, which reminds me of the limitations of office, even the highest offices, and makes me think how much more freely President Carter can speak about things after he is president and I look forward to Obama having that freedom and being that kind of voice and conscience for America and the world - though I also wish he could have another term or two. We should not think of Mandela, or Jesus or Buddha or anyone, as "above us" in any limiting way, only above us in a leading way, to raise us up. Nothing is too high that it is not connected to the lowest, indeed it is a sign of the highest level of development to be able to relate and help those who are held back the most, at the bottom. We also can't take the words we say and feeling we have when we honor goodness in people to be a placebo for doing good ourrselves, and this is something I hear in the way we are talking about Mandela. The newscasters say that brutal dictators honor Mandela without really following his example then they praise Mandela for speaking so bluntly to criticize Bush and Blair for the Iraq war but it's like they can't connect the dots and say that it is also ironic for Bush and Blair to claim to honor Mandela without actually doing what he said. The same is true for the conservatives defense of Reagan basically supporting Apartheid by not doing enough to oppose it, saying they chose to do that in the context of competing with the Soviet Union and communist countries for influence, as if that makes it okay. True goodness can be persued at every level, and if the opposition to Russian means we can't help other oppressed people, then maybe that should be a signal that there is something wrong with the opposition to the Russia. They're recounting now how Mandela flew to Lybia to broker a deal to free hostages when we couldn't and hatred that many conservatives here have for him is based on being allied with communist countries, but it was his ability to connect with all sides of the spectrum. The newsguys are saying he was unique in being able to connect with all sorts of leaders, even those he was critical of, because he had basic respect for all. This is what we are missing, in our society and in the world in general. We need to have respect for all people. We tend to create an "other" class to take advantage of, either certain communities or "foreign" cultures, but there is no real "other". Obama just shook hands with Castro as I typed that and Christine is shocked" :it's so true, he brought people together in life and he continues to bring people together in death." Of course it IS the spirit of Mandela to shake hands, but it was still Obama who extended his hand and Castro who shook it - even though Obama will certainly take heat from it for redneck back home, the newsman just said it, but he also tried to downplay it, like it is just the spirit of the moment, when it really could be the spirit of an even bigger moment, the sign of the new era of cooperation instead of conflict. Mandela IS the spirit of reconciliation, the Holy SPirit, but his death does not mean this is gone from the world, but the opposite, it means it is now up to us more than ever to carry the torch. The newscasters were so aghast that "Nelson" was the name given (Obama is speaking now...) to him in school, replacing his African name. But it wasn't long ago we did the same to Native American kids and we still give immigrants more American names. Okay, Obama's speech was awesome and he said a lot of what I'm trying to say here, of course better and more powerfully. I studied speeches of liberation, that promoted democracy, for the Academic Decathalon competition in high school and this was one of those speeches. It touched on all the important points, that this "giant" was not above us, but one of us and connecting with us, that holding strongly to ideals allows for comporomise to reach larger goals, that we need self-reflection to become our best, that sacrifice is required for change and that we recognize some who sacrifice but many are "unknown", that equality and unioversatl franchise are essential, and that the work is not done and won't be as long as there is persecution and poverty in the world, including persecution for ideals or who one loves. He criticised leaders who claim to ally with Mandela's message but don't tolerate dissent. Focusing on the value of ideals and also our responsibility to act to reach them, Obama mentioned the need to write new laws and keep persuing equality and said we can all do things to honor Mandela and used himself as an example, saying he was stirred up by learning of Mandela in a way that shaped his life and also invoking Ubuntu, the african word for interconnectedness, translated as "I am me because of you." Mandela is a good example of the Holy Spirit because, especially as Obama mentioned, and is being conveniently replayed for me as I write this, he shared his truth with us, his faults and mistakes as well and said he was not a saint "unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps trying." We can all fit that category, and we are all reflections of ourselves. We recognize greatness in others, in Mandela, in Obama, in Gaga, because they have gone with where this Holy Spirit leads us all. We are all who we are because of each other, we are all in this together, and we make each other by our examples and lessons we teach through them. We are all Mandela, and Gaga, and responsible for carrying out their message. And we are the nameless and not-yet-known, too, and it is our responsibilty to discover, honor, and become those poeple, known and unknown, who advance humanity. Obama said that we will never see the likes of another Mandela. Maybe the good side of this is we won't need one, that there will be no more "great injustices" to address, but they kind of need one now in Syria and other places. And there are still the worldwide issues of poverty and war, and the same problem that was Aparthied in South Africa is still many injustices around the world, and needs to be opposed. The problem is worldly power being misused, the use of force and violence. And we are all part of a system that is guilty of it, that runs on it. We still accept fear as a motivator: we use the threat of military strikes to get some compliance out of Syria or Iran, we threaten to enforce laws, good and bad, with prison time or killing you. The two most glaring hypocricies I see in the way we, Americans, honor Mandela is that we love his non-violence when it comes to not retaliating for violence, but we don't love it enough to disarm and become non-violent ourselves. Even during the memorial I see news ticking across the bottom of the page about George Zimmerman, posterchild for the craziness of our gun culture. it's just wrong, I don't need to explain it all, it is based on fear, violence, and force. That's not how you get things done. We are all so impressed that Mandela did the impossible, and he did it non-violently. If he had used violence he could have only achieved the possible, spun revenge around for another cycle. But we want the impossible, the ideal, and we deserve it and can have it if we are brave enough to be true to goodness and have faith that Goodness always wins, has already won in the eternal time, in the future paradise we all know. We can't truly honor the non-violent spirit and still make excuses for weapons and violence - we have to disarm and be an example to others, weapons are not an answer to anything, not a good answer. Another major hypocricy, for Americans, is to claim to value "universal franchise", everybody gets a vote, but not actually apply this universally. I see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a clear example of this: we keep saying the only solution is a two-state solution, but what does this mean? All over the world, countries are working together more and more, and wee have to to face major issues. We wont necessarily start merging more countries, though I guess the EU has in a way, but we will start working together for more common interests. Dividing Israel and Palestine is counter to this trend - but what would the option be? Making Palestinians eqaul citizens with universal franchise, trh right to vote? WHat would be wrong with that, other than to a mindset that only cares about the Israeli side of things? But if Israel is rhe oppressor of the Palestinian people, and we actually believe Mandela that liberation is for the captors as much or more than for the captors, then wouldn't the best way to look out for Isreai interests be to seek justice and equality for the Palestinians? I think we should live up to our ideal of eqaulity in Israel by insisting on universal suffrage - but we need this in America, too, with so many conservatives trying to repress or steal the vote from certain populations. And probably our worse hypocricy revealed in Americans honoring Mandela is how much respect we have for him, and indignation, for having endured 27 years in prison. We have another story in the media now about a man who was freed after 25 years of wrongful imprisonment in AMerica and there are many more people like that in this country, and of course there are when you consider we have the highest incarceration rate in the world. We claim to be so opposed to the wrongful imprisonment of Mandela when huge numbers of Americans are wrongfully imprisoned for similar reasons, the mistakes or prejudices of those in power. We have to be willing to examine ourselves, to look to the best examples of leaders, not as lullabyes but to wake us up to live up to them. We can't let ourselves off the hook because it is someone elses problem or expect someone else to come along to take care of it. The one thing I disagree with Obama is that we will see another Mandela, many more Mandelas, because we will see more of him in all of us, his strong, pure example of the Holy Spirit brings it out stronger in all of us, Ubuntu. Of course I have a suggestion, the ideal version that we can keep in mind to see how far we need to go, and of course it is from Oz so i will get into more detail in my upcoming book "Oz Magic: From Radio to Gaga." But oz has one jail, and in that jail they only ever had one prisoner, Ojo the Unlucky. Their "army" is also only have one soldier and his gun is just for show and doesn't work. One reason for this is no one does anything wrong, and when Ojo is imprisoned it is because he acts wrongly since he did not understand the rules. But in Oz the rules are good, compared to here, now, where laws can be wrong and bad. Mandela challenged Aparthied in his trial, he made it a trial of Aparthied since he was not wrong, the system was. There are a lot of places where our system is still wrong, there is injustice we need to fight. Legalizing weed is one such fight, removing bad laws, but there are so many areas when one group of people is oppressed in favor of another and we need to be vigilant about exposing and reconciling all of these disparities and institutional or cultrual prejudices. We only hurt and take advantage of each other out of fear, we are afraid of one another and want to control the "other" to hide the fear, or make them fear us. But fear itself is our common enemy. We can all come together in opposition to violence and oppression, if we just believe what we say and act accordingly. We say good things all the time but we do need examples of goodness in action to live up to it, to have examples to follow. We all have that feeling of goodness, that spark and yearning, and we all get frustrated by the difficulties in the world. Accidents can happen, but we should all be vigilant against abuse of power because it is not an accident, but a system. We can't be complacent and Mandela and the tributes to him are beautiful reminders of this. We can't let any injustice get a pass because it seems to big to make fail, we have to have faith and bravery and end them. One reason I call this the Holy Spirit is I know from the Bible that in times of trial Jesus, I think, said not to worry or say pre-determined things but to allow the Holy Spirit to speak through you. To me, this means that the Holy Spirit is dedicated to justice, to revealing the truth to a Judge or someone in power. This means that the power structure can, should, and will change - the Holy Spirit will arrive to make it happen. We just have to be open to this: to be willing to face hardship and injustice because we know the truth, the Holy Spirit, has already won and knowing that it takes getting into struggle to make this happen but what happens will be for the greater good. We need to be alert, aware, sensitive to others needs so we can detect injustice, we need to be willing to suffer and sacrifice to address it, and we need the faith to know the real power is on our side when we seek justice. I like the quote from professor Cornell West that justice is love expressed to the world, loving the world equally. There is no real "other", no real opponent, we are all in this together. As we realize this and come closer to unity the things that hold us back will stand out as wrong even more. We are coming out of a recession but still are not all doing well. Anti-immigrant sentiment always rises in this country when things are "bad" and people are more generous when things are good. Last week I heard that 50% of Americans think we should not negotiate with Iran, 30% think we should do more diplomacy and 20% just want war. This disgusts me when we have a chance at a peaceful solution, even with the sateks being a potential World War 3 or nuclear holocaust. Sanctions, applying them and removing them when progress is made, is what the world did to end Aprthied, we kept up our end, eventually. Sanctions are supposedly what gained traction for getting Iran to give up developing nuclear weapons. Sanctions are a form of violence, but not nearly as bad as war. The thing is, how can we say "certain" people can have certain weapons and others can't? We give Pakistan many weapons including nuclear bombs but it is not like they have a qaulity that Iran is lacking. It is not like we have some special qaulity, as Americans, that makes us uniquely qaulified to have nucear weapons - we are the only country to use them, which if anything should disqualify us. But this shows weapons aren't any good, that the real good is done by communication, consideration, and reconciliation. It is when those break down that we resort to violence, but they can't work if we don't try them. Obama himself quoted Mandela that you have to trust someone in order to get them to trust you. This is the exact opposite of insisting we need guns, missiles, or violence to get that we want, based on the idea that we will eventually need to threaten people because we can't trust them. We live in an world abundant with resources and love, but restricted by people who control and starve people of this through exertion of unjust power. We just have to oppose that wehn we encounter it, and look for it hiding in ourselves or hidden from us in the world. We all have the chance to do that, and are especially called to that duty by the memorial and memory of Madiba. It is the buddha, seeking the end of all suffering, and the boddhisattva vow, to not enter nirvana until all people do. These great examples are here to stick around for all of us, to make us all as good. We are, inside, and we will be able to live that goodness outwardly as we overcome the barriers that separate us. Art is the Holy Spirit, what inspires and guides us all to unity, justice, liberation, peace and love. Artpop is that spirit manifest in reality, a drink we can taste and feel and refreshes us in special chosen moments instead of the air we breathe that sustains us all the time and we might not even notice it. Artpop is the carbonization of Art, the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit entered into carbon-based life forms. And it sparkles. Scientifically we, everything, is made our of light - light is the basic reality that combines and produces matter, and from there grows into complexity. But we are all rooted in light, we are all light moving through, revealed in matter, and it makes us sparkle. When we really live up to the light inside of us, we glow and shine, catch fire to others and light the world. But even before we fully turn on the light in us is called forth by great lights in the world. Mandela did this for many, and as Obama said he was the last great liberator of the last century. But we already have Gaga, and Pope Francis, Obama himself, and other liberating figures of this century and more to come. As the planetarium in the Simpsons said, "Who will discover the secrets of the universe/press my reset button? Will it be you? Or you? Or you?". Ubuntu - i am me because of you. What can I do to help you, what do we need? We can save the world, from all injustice, by keeping to this spirit. Everyone is an example of this, and while I did not get into many examples of Gaga doing this in this edition, it's essentially all she does - liberates us, empowers us, and brings us together. In Love.

gagablog 62: Thanksgiving and Loneliness

I was so grateful and excited about Gaga's Thanksgiving show with the Muppets and I enjoyed it so much, but even more has happened since then making me thankful and excited that I have not written about it. In my personal life I'm going to see my dad and stepmom and mother-in-law and grandmother for the first time in two and a half years, and on top of that I just got tickets to see Lady Gaga for the first time. She's performed a lot of things, and made a commentary for Artpop, and I still have to catch up on most all of it. The Thanksgiving show was amazing and profound, and I have to comment on it for how it effected me and what it meant to me. It made me super happy to hear Gaga was doing another Thanksgiving special, especially with the Muppets. Her last Thanksgiving special is my favorite entertainment for this holiday, and the Muppets have been like family all my life. Our whole family watched “The Muppet Show” together when I was a kid, I watched Sesame Street all my life, with some breaks, through my teenage years with my little sister, and again with my kids, and I have loved the Muppets in all their movies. I put up a video on youtube with my love of Bert and Ernie singing “Just Dance” and “Beautiful Dirty Rich.” I always connected with the Muppets, especially the way they honored the qualities of sweetness, cooperation, community, creativity, individuality and even weirdness. I probably identify most with Gonzo, Ernie and Telly, and maybe Janice (Janet? Sorry, I'm tired), but with all of them in different ways. There is a certain loneliness, outkast quality to the Muppets, that makes the family they form together, and with their audience, even sweeter. Gaga is the same way, someone tweeted to me that she brings us outcasts together and I agreed that I've often said the same thing. I see it as the spiritual quality of inclusion and love, the kingdom of heaven Jesus spoke about in the parable of the Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to search for the lost one. I see Gaga as a savior figure for taking this to the ends of the world and really representing it for us, and rubbing off on us. I'm so thankful for this and one major part of thanksgiving is expressing thanks, to deity or nature or whatever for providing the goodness of the world. I also have to say that the performances were, as always, amazing and I will have to refrain from gushing about them to make my point. We are also thankful for each other, and this is possibly the most important thing about thanksgiving, togetherness. Feasting and festivities are all about sharing them with family and friends. While for many this and other family holidays are super stressful for dealing with family, and much of the talk in the media is about this, for others the stress of the holiday is from being lonely, either because you can't be with your family and loved ones or because you don't have any. I'm really lucky and thankful to have my own family here, but of course miss my family back home who I have not seen in years, especially on Thanksgivings, my dad's favorite holiday. But I still relate to loneliness because I still experience it often, due to my work and sometimes to my mood. I thought it was really sweet of Gaga to mention loneliness as a theme in the Thanksgiving show, both because it fits with that all-important theme of inclusion she shares with the Muppets, the idea of seeking out the lonely and weird and bringing everyone together, and because it is an issue for so many people on this holiday. Gaga speaks strongly to a lot of people who feel lonely, either separated from their families of “black-sheep” within them, often because of homophobia still in many societies and families. But there are all sorts of reasons to feel weird or outcast and Gaga speaks to many of us, all who listen anyway. When she mentioned she felt lonely it made me sad, of course, though it made me happy that she was taking the moment to relate to lonely people and include us, to bring us out of our loneliness by reminding us how everyone can feel this way but we are together with each other and with Gaga, even in this sad experience of feeling all alone. Like I said I often feel lonely, because I work nights all alone with hardly any contact with others – watching over kids sleeping in a treatment center. I try to reach out to people online and talk, and could not use facebook most of the year and quit doing it, though I never talked to people much there anyway. But I recently got on twitter and have had a few conversations, but so far my experience of twitter seems to highlight loneliness, in a way. So many people talking, or saying things, but not a lot of back and forth, deep conversation. It is the limits of the form, but also how the whole thing caters to a certain kind of expression and a certain level of interaction. I'm so lucky and grateful to my love who soothes me and spends time with me and cares for me, but I have issues from growing up feeling lonely a lot and still spend so much time alone that I can feel it strongly. It's probably also empathic, sensitive, Aquarian nature, etc. But I've “dealt with” loneliness on many levels, including the extreme loneliness of many of the kids who live where I work, some of whom were so abused and neglected as babies and toddlers that they have terrible behavior issues even at ages 4-11, the age we have at my part of work. Hearing that Gaga was lonely at times was touching, and that felt good, but mostly it was sad. She is reaching out to us, though, and teaching us to reach out to each other. When we are lonely the quickest cure, what we want the most, is someone to reach out to us. But often the best way to connect with others when we are lonely is to reach out to someone else. When I got on twitter last night one of the first tweets I saw was someone saying they felt lonely and unloved. I said we are always loved, and when we are alone we are loved by art. I guess I conveyed my meaning, there was a tweet back of appreciation. I meant art always loves us and we can choose to be in love with it. It's often easier, we are inspired a lot, by being in love with someone, like Gaga says “I'm my best when I'm in love with you.” If we have no one around to relate to, we can relate to the spirit of inspiration and creativity, to art, and make something. Making art is a way of connecting to people even into the future. Loneliness itself can be a strong connection to inspiration, especially for music, with as many love songs about longing as being in love. I once wrote a lyric, a year or two before I heard of Lady Gaga, that went “I'm lonely, that's why she gives these songs to me.” Gaga said one of the hardest things was getting injured and having to cancel so much of her tour, but it was at that time that she composed Artpop and we can hear and see how glorious it is. The reason Gaga says she is lonely is because on tour she has to be away from her family and friends. She is on tour for her love of Art, the Holy Spirit of creativity, and what art means and does for people. She loves us by loving art, knowing her art inspires and encourages us and makes us feel love. So she is sacrificing her personal love, time spent with family and friends, to show a greater love for art and the whole world. She is choosing to face and feel lonely at times so that others, millions of others, feel so much less lonely, or feel fulfilled for life when they connect with her or meet her. This is a sacrifice to art and to love, to the world, to us, but it is also an example to us. We can best face loneliness not by ignoring it or acting tough, like we don't need our lovers or friends or family or anyone, but by admitting we do need each other and acting on that. We can allow ourselves to feel lonely in order to get things done to help others, or we can allow ourselves to engage the loneliness of someone else to help them feel better, instead of ignoring them. This is the example that Gaga is showing for us, that the most powerful and successful of us also feels lonely but that the best response for anyone feeling alone is to reach out to others. This is a message for rich people, too, since wealth can really isolate people and insulate them from community, so much they might not notice it except a pain in their soul. Wealth may be the strongest thing to separate people, in fact, as greed is the source of the system that keeps people in strife and basically at odds with one another. Gaga's example to the rich is to embrace humanness and empathy that we all feel alone at times, and to use riches and success to connect with more people and help people more. Gaga's example to all of us is to find our inner artist, writer, singer, whatever and make the most of our true calling, to be in love with art and share it with the world, to be in love with the world through art. This is the greatest success, to make people happy and to help people, to give them what they need, and we can all live up to this better and better. We become our best selves by trying to do the most to help the world. The art we make creates community, between artists and with audiences, and community is a major love we are all missing, we just need more of it. But the more we have, the more we can make, and sometimes we discover in loneliness, with only art, that we have it all. Gaga reached her transformative moment, married the night, when she was at her loneliest, with just her and her bedazzler. We can all do this, for in accepting loneliness we are actually at our strongest, being able to go for a task, create the art only we can make, or being able to reach out to someone feeling lonely, or accept someone reaching out to us. These are all the essence of love, our greatest strength in admitting our common weakness, loneliness, and sharing it with each other, through art or the love of friendship or affection. We experience loneliness in some of the most profound ways as kids, but we all need to overcome it with love, not “toughness.” Toughness is the bullying way out as kids, but becomes the norm in a lot of ways as adults. This is a major problem and one Gaga addresses in her art and what she says to us directly. So many monsters relate to the scene in the Born This Way Ball DVD where she says, in the dressing room, that she still feels like a loser sometimes, like she did in high school. There is a reason why she connects this feeling with school, and a reason we all relate to that, some more than others. We grow up in a society where we all need more community and belonging than we have, but we come to accept the limitations and isolation and keep busy to ignore it, that's a typical American adult way, and many more societies are becoming more this way. I never accepted this and in general did not see many positive examples of “manliness”, besides in artists, mystical men and in my family. I was always happy to be “young-at-heart”, even if that meant admitting to being tenderhearted and wonderous and insecure and imaginative, even if it meant being scared and lonely at times, or making art and music most people find strange. I still feel like a kid even now that my son is 13 and way bigger than me. But one reason our society doesn't take enough actual care for kids, despite our rhetoric, is because we don't want to face that insecurity again, in general, we don't want to have to relate to that difficult time, we just don't want to really think about what kids go through, we just want to keep busy and keep them busy- generally. That's the problem. Gaga is so special and important for focusing on kids, so much of her concern is for kids and so many of the little monsters are actually little. But they are also the wisest kids, as kids tend to be, but can flourish with actual encouragement and love. Gaga gives this to us and we all need it so badly, you can see this in how people respond to her and say she saved and changed their lives. And it is because she faces her own insecurity and loneliness, her own feelings of being an outkast, with art and love, connecting us all. Because we all feel this way, it is the inner child in all of us who can always use more love, and the artists who hold onto that open heart. But the rest of us need to discover our artist, opening our hearts. The worst way to grow up is to “deal with” insecurity by saying “I don't need love or friendship, I'll just work hard and enrich myself.” This is the scrooge way and we all do it a little, more than we should. The best way to deal with it is to accept it and know that others will often feel lonely, too, that it is an opportunity to connect with people, through reaching out personally or if no one is around, through art. We grow the best of ourselves out of the tenderness of remembering we need each other. The good thing about feeling lonely, and even in ideal societies the reason we will still have times of feeling lonely, is we seek out others and hopefully find love. If we are lucky enough to find love and accept it and appreciate it enough, it is the best thing to grow and replace loneliness forever. But even love between two people is best, is what it fully can be, when it leads to the couple doing better for the world. I'm guessing Gaga found her love in Taylor, but I'm still a little worried or concerned. She said all the Artpop songs were real, no fantasy other in the magic of how the music came together, so I guess the “you” who she is in love with is someone for real, the “you” of all her songs, and most of them are love songs, is a real person or people she knows. I guess at least one of them is for Taylor, but I wondered why she did not mention him as someone she missed, but said family and friends. Maybe it is just them keeping their personal life personal and not mentioning each other much when on screen as their public image. I've caught some interviews by Extra or whoever with Taylor and he never seems to stoked to talk about her when they ask. I saw him that morning at the Thanksgiving parade and he said he was thankful for family and friends but did not mention her. Maybe monsters who pay closer attention expect this, please tell me, I seem to recall her saying she would not talk about her personal, love life. But it just seemed sad that with as many people who would be so grateful to be with her that he could not say something about being thankful for her, to connect with all the people who are thankful to get to love her from however far away and wish that they, that we all, could be closer. As “Gypsy” finishes in the background I wonder if it is someone she will be in love with for life, if it is someone mystical or she hasn't met yet, the Shaggy Man of Oz – if it is about finding the lover to travel the world with (take me!), or if it is about being a traveller in love with the world, as the countries at the end suggest. I need to listen to her commentary, but I have an idea. This was, again, supposed to be a “short one”, and I think I have one more longish gagablog in me about abundance, US/Iran, Mandela, liberation, and Art as the Holy Spirit and Artpop as the Holy Spirit, carbonated and sparkling. And maybe about Christmas, Gaga's Christmas iconography is so hot and festive. But after that I think I will try to make them shorter, maybe a commentary on each of the Artpop songs, then another one on each after I hear her commentary. Please let me know what you think, I'd love to talk about this stuff more with anyone, and while I keep writing these to put the ideas out there for any magical effect, the magic of conversation would be awesome. Thanks for reading and sharing! I'm so inspired especially by Artpop that I will be doing more drawings and music soon and can't wait to share them with everyone. Paws up, love each other, Artrave for Christmas, and Happy Holidays!