Urge overkill

James Parker on Lady Gaga (in The Atlantic):

Born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, in New York City, she was baptized Gaga by her former songwriting partner Rob Fusari. “We were working one day in the studio,” he told an interviewer, “and Queen’s ‘Radio Ga Ga’ came on, and I was like, ‘You are so Radio Ga Ga.’ So Gaga became her nickname.” “Radio Ga Ga,” released in 1984 (two years before Germanotta’s birth), was a reactionary lament at the dawn of the video age: “We watch the shows, we watch the stars / On videos for hours and hours / We hardly need to use our ears / How music changes through the years.” Oh dear! Pop being Pop, though, the only thing anyone remembers is the futuristically inane chorus: “All we hear is Radio ga ga / Radio goo goo / Radio ga ga / All we hear is Radio ga ga / Radio blah blah …” Lady Blah Blah would have been pretty good, but ga ga, gaga, gaga: a monstrous orality, a tyranny of infantile desire, with the added suggestion of surfeit, overkill, something being gagged on. Perfect.

Parker/Park

At The Atlantic, the great James Parker—who wrote about Personal Days a couple of times when it came out in ’08—calls the book one of the Top Pop Culture Moments of the Decade (alongside Radiohead and Grand Theft Auto)!

Volcanic impetus superadded

My latest L.A. Times column is up early. This month I look at a strange, unfinished tale from 1881 entitled The Great Romance, by a New Zealander sporting the insoluble nom de plume "The Inhabitant."

Here's a sample:

Perverse by design or accident, the Inhabitant conveys an improbably gripping scene of mortal danger (in Volume 2) in a series of rhetorical questions, including this humdinger:

"Vast was the speed of the Star Climber, but might not some erratic fragment have a speed still vastly greater—hurled from the bosom of a monstrous volcano, whose pent-up pressure had consolidated diamonds, like mountains, and whose terrific discharge should leave the shattered ruby masses like an avalanche of loosened rock, and hurl outward fragments, large as little worlds, flying with all the speed of the parent orb, and all the mighty volcanic impetus superadded?"

(Shades of Keeler's famous sentence from Traveling Skull!)

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James Parker's nuanced reading of Personal Days takes the lead slot over at the Barnes & Noble Review.