Weird Al was born this way.

And as for Lady Gaga, maybe she was born that way.

ADDED: The link on "that way," above, was wrong. Try it now! It's funny.

"Amazon.com Inc.’s one-day, 99-cent promotion of Lady Gaga’s highly anticipated second studio album..."

"... 'Born This Way,' is resulting in downloading delays on the Internet retailer’s website due to high volume, the company said Monday."

Join the traffic jam: download here.

It's not Lady Gaga unseating Oprah that disturbs me. It's Elton John and Bon Jovi in the top 10.

"The World's Most Powerful Celebrities"... according to Forbes.

We need better celebrities! It was bad enough back in the 80s when Elton John and Bon Jovi were the celebrities we had to settle for. But here they are. Still "powerful," whatever that means. Growing up in the 50s and 60s, I really got the wrong impression of the speed of the flow of new celebrities into the popular culture.

Maybe this is why time has seemed to go faster as we (Baby Boomers) have gotten older. Or do you think it should be a reason why things should appear to be going slower? When nothing's happening and you're bored, time does seem to go slower. But uneventfulness also makes long stretches of time look shorter. It's a paradox. The paradox of the puzzling persistence of Bon Jovi and Elton John.

Judas, the guy on the motorcycle wearing a crown of thorns.

"I fell in love with Judas," sings Lady Gaga.

Because, you know, the girl always falls for the bad boy.

And Lady Gaga always tries to out-Madonna Madonna.

BONUS: Lady Gaga and Yoko Ono.

"So I lost. 'Celebrity Apprentice.' Big Deal. What they don't know is that they are on a show called 'Charlie Sheen' and they all lost."

"I'm on the drunk diet... I like to drink whiskey and stuff while I'm working."

"But the deal is, I've got to work out every day, and I work out hung over if I'm hung over... I live my life as I want to, and creatively... It's about the cross-training and keeping yourself inspired. I have to say, I do a ton of yoga."

Said Lady Gaga, either telling the truth or cleverly inserting a promo for her boyfriend's book — "The Drunk Diet" — into the viral media. 

What everyone wore at the Grammys, beginning with a man in shorts...

... tight gold plastic short shorts — panties really, almost Spanx, don't you think? He's carrying Lady Gaga inside a prop left over from "This Is Spinal Tap."

More tight shiny men's pants at #25 (Ricky Martin). Justin Bieber also models the comically male, spoofing adulthood, I think, doing bagginess instead of tightness, at #36. Katy Perry, at #40, seems to be spoofing the old mishap of unwittingly dragging toilet paper with you out of the bathroom. Rihanna, at #47, seems to have collected all that toilet paper and crimped it into millions of tiny ruffles to band around her body in stripes — alternating with — apparently! —nakedness.

It's the Grammys. It's perfectly apt to dress as a joke.

Are you excited about the new Lady Gaga single or did you feel compelled to hit pause and start singing Madonna's "Express Yourself"?

You can listen to Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" here. And here's Madonna over at YouTube, where there are lots of new comments about "Born This Way."

Gaga is singing about self-affirmation in this form:

Rejoice and love yourself today
'Cause baby you were Born This Way

No matter gay, straight, or bi,
Lesbian, transgendered life
I'm on the right track baby
I was born to survive

Madonna's "Express Yourself" had you expressing yourself and demanding that your man express himself:

What you need is a big strong hand
To lift you to your higher ground
Make you feel like a queen on a throne
Make him love you till you can't come down

Who should be TIME's Person of the Year?

Here's a list. They are taking votes. Inanely, Lady Gaga is in first place by a lot. I'm going to say Nancy Pelosi.

"BRUCE BAWER: Whatever Happened To Camille Paglia? She was never the same after crossing swords with Ann Althouse...."

Ha ha.

And here's the direct link to the Bawer piece:

In those first years after Sexual Personae, Paglia seemed to turn up everyplace. By 1992 she had churned out enough irreverent, entertaining essays for a sizable collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture. Two years later along came another grab-bag, Vamps and Tramps. For a while, the pieces just seemed to pour out of her.

But Paglia was too hot not to cool down. As the years went by, her output declined. And what she did turn out seemed increasingly familiar. She was repeating herself. What had once been provocative was now stale. And her determination to inject herself and her personal history into everything she wrote grew tiresome....

And then came 9/11.... On this all-important subject, Paglia was all but silent....

For some years now, Paglia’s chief forum has been a monthly column on the salon.com website in which she’s combined pop-culture commentary with political opinions. Though she continues to try to sound boldly irreverent, her schtick is old, her voice is tired, and her politics are more consistent with the official liberal line than any Paglia enthusiast of twenty years ago would ever have expected...

Then, on the Sunday before last, the London Times ran what seems to be the longest essay Paglia has published in years. It was touted by the newspaper as “explosive.” What was it about? Banning burkas? Suicide bombing? Female genital mutilation?  No, it was about Lady Gaga....  her Lady Gaga piece accomplished was to affirm her irrelevance.

Here's my reaction to the Gaga goo goo.

And here are: "My Dinner With Camille" ("I didn't know I was capable of stressing out such a big rockstar diva") and "Try to Survive a Tornado With a Post-Structuralist" (the blog post that stressed her out).

"Her bodice looks like the outside of the rib. Over the shoulder looks like it does come from the shoulder."

How fitting!

"There are no expensive cuts here, no real steaks," he said. "The best you've got is the flank steak on top of her head."...

"It's the cheaper end cuts - not including her. You got about $100 of meat there," said Mark Cacioppo, 30, of Queens....

"It ain't refrigerated. It's probably stinking bad. She's in the lights: It's cooking," said Peter Cacioppo....

"What's next: the family cat made into a hat?" asked Ingrid Newkirk, head of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

PETA always uses that rhetorical move. Instead of that animal you don't care about, picture the family pet.

Anyway, Lady Gaga went on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" — too bad YouTube hasn't yet perfected the internet equivalent of Smell-O-Vision — and explained herself...



... with delightful incoherence. She doesn't want to be "just another bitch in a dress." She claims it has to do with her opposition to Don't Ask Don't Tell, which flummoxes the poor vegan Ellen.

I love the part where she proclaims herself "The most judgment-free person on the face of the earth." Ha. When did "judgment" acquire a 100% negative meaning.

"Cher held her own next to Lady Gaga, who wore a controversial dress that appeared to be made from meat..."

Advantage... Cher!

Isn't Camille Paglia afraid of sounding geezerly?

Even as she led the way in Madonna appreciation, Paglia was behind the curve in lavishing attention on Lady Gaga. What to do? Go negative:

Gaga's fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Borderlines have been blurred between public and private: reality TV shows multiply, cell phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence, Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina…

Negative about Gaga and modern life in general. These kids today. Get off my lawn.

Jerry Seinfeld attempts to do a comic riff about Lady Gaga giving Mets fans the finger.

Seinfeld was asked about this because the singer was moved to his private box at the stadium the other day:

"This woman's a jerk. I hate her," Seinfeld said. "I can't believe they put her in my box that I paid for! You give people the finger and you get upgraded? Is that the world we're living in now?"

"It's pathetic," he added....

"She's a jerk," he continued. "What is she giving the finger [for]? What's the finger anyway? Speaking of interesting and new, how old is the finger? How did it even get to be the finger?"

This finger incident happened a while back. All he has is "How old is the finger? How did it even get to be the finger?"? That's pathetic. If she'd just given the finger, I would have thought it was interesting to see how Seinfeld gets started working on one of his little what's the deal with that routines. But he's had time.

And, by the way, I remember the subject — "How old is the finger? How did it even get to be the finger?" — being discussed at great length back when the movie "Titanic" came out. It was an important moment in character development when Kate Winslet (as "Rose") gave some guy the finger. Was that an anachronism in a movie set in 1912? But I'm not going to do your research for you, Jerry. You're going on the radio. You've had some time to put some jokes together. Do some research!

You think the new issue of Rolling Stone is tough on General McChrystal, but how do you think Lady Gaga feels?

She posed for the cover in a big machine-gun bra and a nearly naked ass and purports to "tell all," yet everyone's talking about McChrystal, whose name isn't even on the cover! Life is so unfair to Lady Gaga!

ADDED: That gun bra made me think of this crotch-gun in "From Dusk 'Til Dawn":

I said Lady Gaga looked like she'd been swimming in seaweed, got caught in a net, and then, without removing the net, took up beekeeping.

But let's hear how Television Without Pity's Jacob describes her woeful "American Idol" performace:

A giant angel statue under blue lights, a naked gay man having spazzers on the floor, and Gaga at the piano covered in spray-painted black branches, herself in a black chiffon version of the costumes they had to wear in The Handmaid's Tale....

Link added.

She's still got a fishnet thing over her face, because she's weird about her face. Because it's weird.... The song is very slow and not my favorite of the catalog...

Yes, it was slow. Leaden. Odd when a [big star's] mediocre performance takes place on the "American Idol" stage. Even though the judges won't judge it, you construct judgely comments in your head. Man, if she were a contestant, they'd flay her. They'd peel off that seaweed and netting and flay her.

Lady Gaga stalks over to a giant Halloween Tree/Meat God, and plays the piano hardcore and things get kind of Shakira for a second, musically, but now she's singing about somebody named "Roberto." Maybe this song is actually written from the perspective of somebody named Roberto and she's even more about appropriating gay men's sex lives than usual, taking it global. Or maybe those are the names of two of her dancers and she's just making this song up as she goes along. Or maybe this is a tribute to Cinco de Mayo, because she keeps talking about Mexico....

I thought it might be some sort of commentary on the immigration crisis. What I heard was: hostile words for a series of men with Hispanic names — get away from me Hispanic men. I imagined that she might be on the anti-immigrant side of the debate — or trying to tap into that side of The American Brain.

But we can read the actual lyrics here:

You know that I love you boy.
Hot like Mexico, rejoice.
At this point I gotta choose,
nothing to loose.

Don't call my name.
Don't call my name, Alejandro.
I'm not your babe.
I'm not your babe, Fernando.

Don't wanna kiss, don't wanna touch.
Just smoke one cigarette and hush.
Don't call my name.
Don't call my name, Roberto....

Don't bother me.
Don't bother me. Alejandro
Don't call my name.
Don't call my name, Fernando.

My theory is not so far-fetched now, is it? She even cites Mexico as their country of origin.Yes, I realize there's love relationship talk in there, but I'm talking subtext. (Remember interpreting "American Woman" by the Guess Who?)

Jacob has nothing to say about the immigration subtext. He's all about her questionable relationship to homosexuality:

Lady Gaga creates culture, but more importantly if you have a subculture of any kind, Lady G would like to be a part of it, because she's an upper-class prep school New Yorker and thus has been exposed to subcultures her entire life that do not admit her. So when that happens -- when you are too interesting for your world -- you have to do things like this, which are awesome, but also things that are not so awesome, like glomming onto gay culture so hard you actually have to pretend that your bisexuality is more than hypothetical. 

Glomming!

IN THE COMMENTS: Daniel wrote:

I got into Lady Gaga because of American Idol. Her first performance last year. Playing that bubble piano then rocking out, with that S&M zippered leather eye cover. Whew! Hot.

Now, symmetrically, I'm souring on Gaga because of American Idol. Yesterday was a snort fest. Her cheap costume. The dude skirt shorts -- a weird mix of rib-high waists (because you're not a woman, you're a mom!), bike shorts and mini skirts. The gallons of sweat pouring off the dancers shaved chests. The fake tree. The flame spitting angel -- because that's what angels do, they shoot flames out of their heads. Gaga's apparent boredom (the only part of the performance that was dead on for me). TERRIBLE. Between that and her crappy telephone song, I really don't care how many women she makes out with -- she's sucking hard right now.

"Considering the level of sexuality expressed in some of these musicians’ music, maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised if they gravitate towards celibacy..."

"... it’s like the butcher who is a vegetarian just to avoid taking the stench of flesh home with him."

The female female impersonator.

An interesting category, but who would we put in it? Guy Trebay starts with Wendy Williams. (It's an article about Wendy Williams.) But who else? He suggests Phyllis Diller, but then he backs off:

But Diller was a comedian...

(Ahem. Diller lives. Born in 1917 and alive.)

... and so are her spiritual descendants, people like Kathy Griffin and Margaret Cho, women sharp enough and shrewd enough to wade into the cultural scrapheap that is gender and recycle all the trashy signifiers they find there for laughs.

Williams is different, Trebay says, because she's a talk show host.

Like a kooky media divinity, a god in a comic book myth, Williams, 45, is permeable, superpotent and with no observable boundaries. She performs tricks on the air that involve her surgically amplified bosom. She suggests to guests like Omarosa Manigault Stallworth, the confrontational star of “The Apprentice,” that she look into facial fillers to correct the marionette lines that frame her stiff, practiced smile. She vows to keep her audience up to date on her vaginal toning. She cries, but then on television lately it’s hard to shut off the waterworks.

“You just have the audacity and the unmitigated gall to say what you think and let the chips fall where they may,” Williams said.

Nice. But I'm more interested in the general idea of the female female impersonator. The first person who sprang to mind for me is Dolly Parton. And Marilyn Monroe. And then Courtney Love, Madonna, Lady Gaga.

And as long as I'm in YouTube, here's the great Phyllis Diller:



And here she is with Groucho Marx — and she's the one with the drawn-on eyebrows — and here she is with Liberace.

Anyway, the topic for discussion is female female impersonators. And Phyllis Diller. And eyebrows...

Let's talk about Lady Gaga.

This is great fun. Make sure you watch all the way to the end. It's funny. Great costume changes too.



Ooh, that really was a bad romance. Love the shoes.