Friday 14 January 2011

How can I decide? vs Raw Glamour Lady

This Southern hemispherical winter I will have the opportunity to make it a summer again. Despite still tossing up a remarkable number of options -

In the early days of 2011 I announced that there were 11 countries on my must-see travel list: Iceland, Norway, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Denmark, Taiwan, Japan, Argentina, Mexico and Canada

- I have more or less narrowed my options to visiting Spain (including Barcelona, Madrid, Seville and Bilbao) and Portugal (including Lisbon, Coimbra and Sintra) in a road-trip style, then flying elsewhere, with my number one destination being Iceland (Reykjavik, with a possible side of something tourist-friendly).

Earlier I was quite determined to fly via Taiwan and spend a month (at least) in the country, but after seeing the photos of Japan a friend of mine took, I feel the urge to fly JAL again, and see something beyond Tokyo and Kamakura (including Takayama, Kyoto and Nara). Even two weeks would be sufficient there. 

If I am to allow myself to sit with the 'slow approach to travel' as made popular by writers like Rolf Potts, Spain and Portugal are plenty to try to fit into about a month... perhaps, instead, I can enter Europe through Moscow or St Petersburg, then catch an onward flight to the Iberian peninsula.

That's one option. But do you know how many others I'm considering? ...

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Raw Glamour

I think what Lady Gaga wore (or didn't wear) to accompany her strikingly attention-grabbing meat-dress at the 2010 MTV Awards is significant; - Gaga rarely wears "classic" make-up, hair and attire, yet the meat-dress itself is very feminine, slinky, emphasising her hourglass figure. This is offset by her appropriating the role of traditional red-carpet-friendly glamourous celebrity, with immaculately smooth blonde hair (okay, there's a tinge of blue creeping up from the ends, but it's subtle), "sexy" make-up of red lipstick and dark eye-shadow. It's almost conventional. Gaga wraps herself around a layer of red animal flesh in order to emphasise the stylised handsomeness she utilises as a way of keeping the eyes of the mainstream on her. Her pointed verbal accompaniment, "I am not a piece of meat," is revealing in that is shows her NLP - I am (not) a piece of meat. No matter the depth or complexity of what she does, in order to maintain her massive popularity, she needs to gage the gaze of those who decide what is socially acceptable for women to look like in the music industry. That she is yielding to/rebelling against her own objectification is a constant consideration. This is how she has chosen to make her message, and I... look on. I listen and consider my own methods of subversion - because I'm aware the subversion is there.

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