Wednesday

 

BANDA ON THE RUN

From this post of MarK's on FAMILY VALUES (and the War on Terror); to my remarks below on the decimated, unstable Family presented in PRIME SUSPECT, to ...

... well, surely to some kind of head-scratching meditation on the ridiculously over-blown "media circus" attending MADONNA's current Family arrangements (or, 'geo-politics as playing at Grown Ups') over the past few days.

BBC News 24 cut yesterday to a reporter standing outside Madonna's Mayfair home.
The next five minutes was a roll-call of News-24 cliches: "nothing to report, I'm afraid...", "nobody really knows...", "nobody seems 100% sure...", "part of the problem is, nobody knows the precise facts..."

At one point the reporter used the phrase "Right at the top of the agenda is the question..." Right at the top of WHAT?!

All the things that are going on in Iraq (60-100 killed EVERY DAY), in Darfur, in China, in North Korea, all the executions, all the rapes, all the un-ending torture, all the stage-managed internecine strife, and we see our media professionals stampede, like a slavering mindless pack, around this one displaced* kid ... crying foul in the 'interests' of the little innocent (as if he were a kidnapped babe from Grimm's), at the same time staging an unrelenting, claustrophobic and then high-speed ambush around him.

I'm not saying the story doesn't have resonance, isn't interesting on a number of levels, but is it really LEAD story material? The fate of - well, WHAT, exactly, WHO, exactly, hangs in the balance here?

(Havent we been here before, in some sense? With Madonna using the exotic pull of the Other as - very exactly - local colour to spice up her soundbyte narrative? From the Black Christ of 'Like A Prayer' to the Krumping/Clowning dancers of 'Hung Up', with all the lesbians, urban jumpers and break dancers, Vougers, hotel corridor S&M-ers, inbetween, she has always "adopted" the Other as some kind of strobe-lit supplement to the remorseless drive of her world domination...

And the question 'Why African? Why now?' - might produce some not especially pleasant answers, I suspect.

__________________

*{Celebrity as refugee camp? Maybe Madonna and Angelina could start an alternative United Nations? God knows the old one has been asleep on the job for decades now...)

posted by Ian 10/18/2006 11:22:00 AM

Comments:

Fear not IP, a real story is about to sweep Madge off the front page:
"Bono in court showdown with stylist over his 'iconic' stetson".
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2409050,00.html

# posted by  Anonymous : 18/10/06

 

Oh no - THIS is the fan-bloody-TAS-tic new front page story:

uk.news.yahoo.com/18102006/140/heather-mills-macca-beat.html

Awesome! Gossip apocalypse!

# posted by  Ian : 18/10/06

 

I find myself having greater respect for Macca, coming home pissed saying 'where's me dinner' and then passing out in the bath while Heather crawls around the house bleeding - you can take the boy out of liverpool..

# posted by  me : 19/10/06

 

it's nice to see that Miss Invincible herself cannot get her way
as for her co-opting of the Other: i would say that Madonna herself is a kind of Other now -- she's hopelessly lost now amongst her various Little Lord Fontleroy's, horse-riding disasters and terrible records that she can barely have a hit single ...
ha ha ha ha ha HAHAHAHAHAHA!

# posted by  Anonymous : 20/10/06

 

i hope heather mccartney tells the courts every single detail of her tawdry 'marriage' to macca -- its time him and those other geriatric nuisances were stripped and de-mythologised for the sake of future generations
i like the idea of him being a drunken, abusive scouse also - it gives him the edge he hasn't had for over 30 years!

# posted by  Anonymous : 20/10/06

 

Let's hope Bono turns out to be some abusive domestic monster, eh?

# posted by  Anonymous : 20/10/06

 

The vision of Madonna I see most of the time is her as H&M model, looking vaguely smug in her inevitable way.
Not really the Other...unless it's a kind of slumming-it Otherness she's going for, y'know, woman 'of the people' and all that...

# posted by  Lena : 22/10/06

 

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