I have always loved old houses. But I would not have bought this ruined frat house had Jill not wanted it so badly. That’s how far gone in love I was with her. We had been dating for only six months at the time. Call me impulsive. Is it remarkable that we saved the house and stayed together through all that mess? A sense of humor helps. The ability to live with chaos helps too. As we share the house with two dogs and two cats, chaos has become one of our specialties.

We have a website dedicated to our ongoing adventure: houselove.org It’s a big site because it tracks ten years of renovation. A decade seems a long time until you find yourself at the end of one. When we moved into our wreck, our new friends down the street kept reminding us that their spectacular home was the product of twenty years’ work. Twenty years? I thought. I’m not working twenty frigging years on a house. But I’m halfway there already.

Jill and I got married in our old house, by the way. That was the third year in. At the time, we thought the house was looking pretty groovy. But, the truth is, it was just starting to look livable. NOW it’s looking groovy. But you see how it goes: it’s all relative. You start with an Animal House wreck and pretty soon you’re willing to give yourself a lot of credit for living in something that looks only somewhat wrecked. There are people — a few of my in-laws, for example — who think that we live in a slum because all of the houses are old. Only in America will you get that attitude. Did you know that strip malls across the nation are being abandoned in favor of newer strip malls? We’re creating a landscape of deserted — zombie — strip malls. Something similar is happening with subdivisions.

But I digress. Is 113 years really old? Relatively, I mean. Think England, think France. Think George Washington.  Apparently, Jill and I will grow old in this oldish house, tinkering with it and improving it. I should confess that the only reason we keep working on the house is that we keep learning how to do this work better. We could have stopped years ago and the house would have been good enough. But, if you believe in progress and the advancement of humankind, good enough is never good enough. Take a peek at houselove.org and you’ll see what I mean.

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Let me be clear: seedless watermelons suck. Before this summer, I’d buy one occasionally on a whim. Every time — every time — I have been disappointed. Seedless watermelons are a) too dense and sometimes downright tough — you don’t get the textured chew that you get from a seeded watermelon, whose flesh has more air in it and, as a result, melts in your mouth;, b) too sweet but without any balance of flavor, like they’ve been infused with glucose or, in surrendering their seeds, have surrendered their flavor; c) or too sour — there is something wanting at the heart of these melons: their sourness seems an expression of loss. So, we get all of this melon failure in exchange for what, the absence of seeds?

Are you kidding? Seeds make eating watermelon fun. What’s more, that little bit of work augments the joy of eating — our mouths take delight in the exercise, which only increases our appetite. So let me say it straight: traditional — seeded — watermelons are more robust in size and flavor and, significantly, better looking, a rich dark green, which seems to say it all about their goodness. With the rise of the bloated, tasteless seedless watermelon, is my old favorite going the way of the tomato?

Here are a few fun facts from the Watermelon Promotion Board:

• The first recorded watermelon harvest occurred nearly 5,000 years ago in Egypt.
• Over 1,200 varieties of watermelons are grown worldwide in 96 countries.
• In some Mediterranean countries, the taste of watermelon is paired with the salty taste of feta cheese.
• Watermelon is 92% water.
• Watermelon’s official name is Citrullus Lanatus of the botanical family Curcurbitaceae. It is cousins to cucumbers, pumpkins and squash.
• By weight, watermelon is the most-consumed melon in the U.S., followed by cantaloupe and honeydew.
• Early explorers used watermelons as canteens.
• The first cookbook published in the U.S. in 1796 contained a recipe for watermelon rind pickles.

Mark Twain had this to say about the watermelon: “The true southern watermelon is a boon apart and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world’s luxuries, king by the grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat.”

One old college prank was to wager than nobody could eat a whole watermelon in a single sitting, rind and all. If you attempt this in the usual water-eating fashion, you are doomed to lose the bet. The only way to win is to squeeze all of the water out of the melon first, eat the solid parts, then drink the liquid.

Here’s a watermelon story: when I was in my twenties and living in Berkeley, CA, as a musician, I rented rehearsal space in an sprawling old building that had once been a laundry plant. It was made of wood and should have been condemned. Two brothers, recent immigrants, owned it. The elder was trying to refurbish the place and rent out space to various enterprises. His dream was to turn it into an arts center. The younger brother, let’s call him Joseph Fong, spent his days driving around the Bay Area collecting old pianos, which he’d bring back to the plant and fix up to sell. He must have had fifty old pianos crowding the front part of the building.

One evening, Joseph arrived with an old-style farm truck and unloaded about one hundred watermelons onto the concrete floor just beyond his crowd of pianos. I assumed he had come upon a wholesale melon deal that he could not refuse. When he left, I inspected his coup: in the gloom of the building’s center the 100 melons lay, huge and ripe, like dinosaur eggs nearing their time. A poor musician (and mad about watermelons), I was sorely tempted to take one. But I did not.

Every day I would arrive at the laundry to practice my instrument and every day I’d see the watermelons sitting in their gloomy repository. By the weeks’ end, I began to worry for them. What did Joseph Fong have in mind? By the end of the second week, the melons were odorous. By the end of the third, they were blackening. They stayed, and rotted, for three months until they puddled the floor and that part of the laundry smelled like a meat-processing plant on a hot day.

Then one day, it was all gone, the concrete floor scrubbed clean, though the smell lingered for a while. To this day I wonder what went through Joesph’s mind as he wheeled his broken pianos into the laundry every day and smelled the rot of his forgotten watermelons. And what did he say to his serious, enterprising brother? It seems an example of good intentions — and dreams of commerce — gone awry. If you got one hundred watermelons tomorrow, could you get rid of them?

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It used to be that every household had doorstops. From 1850 to 1950, hundreds of varieties were made in cast iron, most of them of animals, but also in the shapes of light houses, baskets of flowers, stage coaches, gnomes, soldiers, Southern belles and so on. My country grandmother had three doorstops in her rickety, little house: a terrier carved of stone (maybe chalk), a fabric-covered brick, and a pale oblong stone that, for reasons no one could explain, smelled of rot. The “rotten rock,” we called it.

A few years back, I gave Jill a doorstop as a gift. It’s a Boston terrier of cast iron, made about 1900. It must have been the most popular doorstop ever made because it is, without question, the most numerous in antique shops and online and, even now, reproductions of it are coming in from China. The appeal of the cast iron Boston terrier resides in its startled, slightly disturbed doggish gaze. The reproductions don’t capture this expression, but the originals are quite fetching.

You may wonder what ever happened to the doorstop. Or maybe not. The explanation is simple and twofold: 1) In the 1950s, people grew less inclined to lug doorstops around because Americans started moving more than ever. Cheap, lightweight, and unobtrusive doorstops came into fashion–those springy pegs jutting from baseboards, those rubber-nubbed kickstands on the back of doors, and those bulbous bumpers screwed to the wall. In short, those quaint, heavy, often garish doorstops seemed way too old-fashioned. 2) Then air conditioning all but eradicated the need for doorstops because, thanks to air conditioning, we now seldom open our windows wide for a breeze. It’s the breeze, of course, that makes the doorstop necessary.

A brisk breeze reduces the air pressure on the exposed side of the door. This causes the stronger air pressure on the unexposed side to push the door shut. Or slam it shut. Since Jill and I have only window unit air conditioners, we avail ourselves of mild weather more often than not — and then we “open the house.” All the windows up, all the doors open wide. You better believe you hear doors slamming in our old place. So we have need of doorstops.

I’ve installed my ship at the most problematic place, against the third floor guest room door, which often slams shut with a thunderous crack! as a wicked breeze banshees its way from the top of our house to the bottom, finding egress at last through the kitchen door, which we open wide to our back yard.

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I first discovered that I suffer from motion sickness when I was nine and attempted to ride The Octopus at an amusement park. I had come to the park with my third grade class for just that kind of turn-‘em-around-and-upside-down fun. As The Octopus began its gyrations, rising and tilting and spinning, I was abruptly surprised and dismayed at my body’s reaction: my dizziness was not a fun dizzy, it was a brain-mashing, stomach-wrenching, limb-quivering dizziness whose analogue I would not discover for another nine years, when reeling with drunkenness, I would puke most of the night into the bushes at the front of my parents’ house until I was weak and weepy from the ordeal. Instead of screaming my delight, like my fellow Octopus riders, I flattened myself against the seat-back and gripped the rails and prayed for the ride to end soon, please, very soon. When the ride ended, I stumbled to the nearest bench and lay down for a good twenty minutes until my pulsing stomach, my spinning head, my trembling limbs settled at last.

I made some experiments. I was fine on the roller coaster because it moved fast in a relatively straight trajectory and its dips and rises were short-lived. I couldn’t tolerate anything that spun me in a circle. This prevented me from enjoying 95% of the rides. It was a devastating discovery not only because it stifled my enjoyment but also because it set me apart from my peers. It marked me as a weakling. On that same school, Ellen Sloan — a sickly mama’s girl — threw up in her cupped hands just as the bus arrived at the amusement park. She was notorious for getting car sick, sometimes after only a few miles of riding. As she rushed out of the bus ahead of us, her cupped hands brimming with her half-digested breakfast, the rest of us exchanged looks of disgust to confirm what we already knew about Ellen: what a loser. Little did I know that twenty minutes later, I’d have more in common with Upchuck Ellen than with my unafflicted buddies.

My oldest brother, Mike, was plagued by motion sickness until he was a teenager. Every car trip we took for the family’s summer vacation guaranteed that Mike would be puking out an open window. This usually happened in the mountains, where winding roads did him in. I had no trouble with car sickness as a child. When the road got too windy, I’d lie down in the way-back of our station wagon. As for air sickness, I was thirteen when I took my first flight. When a too-bumpy flight flattened me finally and I handed my bulging barf bag to the attendant, I was humiliated. Since then, every flight has been a gamble. The worst parts are take-offs and landings. Most of the time, I can ride out the turbulence because most of the time it doesn’t last long. If it persists, I must descend into several circles of agony before I reach the frozen, black lake of absolute air sickness. I am in awe of airline attendants and their ability to work and walk about so casually on a bumpy ride.

I am discreet about vomiting. I open the bag, place it to my mouth as if to inflate it, then let go. I am not loud. I do not cough or spit or retch. That comes later, after I’m on the ground –if the flight has been particularly bad. If, upon arrival, I have to rent a car and get somewhere, I am good to go because I have focus. If, on the other hand, I must ride in a car, especially a long distance and, heaven forbid, on winding roads, I am in danger again. Those who do not suffer from motion sickness may think that this is all in the sufferer’s head. That’s why, as children, we considered the motion-sick to be weaklings. They should have more control. They should tough it out. There is in this assumption something fundamental to evolutionary biology: the sick one must be left behind if he or she cannot keep up with the tribe. That’s why the kid sitting on the bench morosely watching his classmates ride The Octopus with giddy abandon is the kid most likely to get his lunch money stolen and his pants yanked off and tosses into the nearest Dumpster. He’s one who can’t keep up. Twenty thousand years ago, he’d have been left on the veldt as the tiger’s next meal.

You may wonder at my ability to recover if I have to drive a car, for this seems to suggest that motion sickness is just a head game. The most persuasive theory about motion sickness is that it arises from physiological confusion. When the plane starts to buck and pitch, my body can’t reconcile the conflicting signals it receives in three areas: visual, aural (inner ear), and tactile (how sensors in our skin perceive movement). My inner ear — which contains the tiny gyroscope that keeps us balanced and lets us know when we are standing up or lying down — is getting signals that I’m being turned upside down. But my eyes are telling me that I’m maintaining a steady, if a bit bumpy, course. And then my body as a whole is perceiving jarring movements in a different way. The result is nausea. If you’ve ever gotten dizzy from watching an I-MAX movie of flying into a canyon, it’s the same phenomenon: your inner ear is telling you that you’re rock-solid stable while your eyes are telling your brain that you are flying. This contradiction confuses your body. As a result, you get dizzy. If the confusion persists, your body may bail on you altogether and you get sick. This theory seems to explain why I recover more quickly after a bad flight if I have to drive: driving a car realigns my senses as nothing else can.

Apparently most mammals are susceptible to motion sickness. You may have a dog that has trouble riding in a car. There are many remedies, none of them perfect. One scientific study shows that the removal of a part of the brain alleviates the ailment in monkeys. I’ll opt for something less dramatic. Dramamine and its associates suppress your nausea by depressing your senses. Essentially, as it makes you drowsy, it puts you out of your misery. My brother Mike swears by those beaded acupressure wrist-bands. I don’t believe it but I’ll try it. Ginger capsules seem promising but the medical community considers them unproven so far. Supposedly, you can train your body to withstand motion sickness by exposing yourself regularly to turbulent motion. It’s like exercise. But who would want that kind of exercise? By the way, you can go online and buy your own supply of airsick bags, some quite fashionable. The need to carry that large a supply suggests that there are some serious sufferers out there. If you’re interested in the barf bag as cultural artifact, there are many online museums: airsicksack.com

The most sympathetic response I’ve received from an in-flight seat mate after I’ve apologized for puking was: “Hey, you can’t help it.” The least sympathetic was an appalled stare from a teenager. Children are afraid of losing control and don’t want to believe that a normal grown-up like you or I could be reduced to a trembling, sweating mess as a result of a bumpy flight. It’s nothing I can explain easily to a youngster, especially under those circumstances. I can only sit there, barf bag in hand, and wait for deliverance.

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The mice got in because I had opened holes in the walls on two floors to run some new electricity. (If you’ve got an old house, you’ve got mice in your walls.) I had left the walls open for nearly a week because it’s too hot to work. We’ve stopped doing all of the chores we normally do around the house in the summer. Our window-unit air-conditioners aren’t especiallly good. They sort of keep us cool, the house temps hovering about 80-84 degrees. Outside offers no relief, even at night. Last night I was watering the front yard at 1:00 A.M. and one of my neighbors trudged by walking her four greyhounds. “It’s the only time we’re comfortable,” she said, “and even this is hardly good enough.”

Jill and I have cabin fever, I’ve decided. Sure, cabin fever is usually associated with being cooped up in winter. But it applies to a bad summer too. We got so desperate for relief that we took the dogs to the woods late yesterday and went wading in one of the Gunpowder creeks. Frieda, our basset hound loves to swim. All of us got plenty wet. Then we stopped to pick raspberries. When we got home, despite the heat — or, rather, to defy the heat — Jill and I made raspberry pies. That’s not exactly ideal food for this weather but we didn’t complain.

There’s no relief in sight for this too-hot Baltimore summer, I’m afraid. And, for the next couple of weeks, you can bet that Jill and I will be a bit jumpy in the house — until the cats evacuate all of our little visitors. Just now we caught another: I chased it into an empty tomato sauce can. Jill was going to help me bag it but then it leapt away when Jill recoiled at the sight of its tail draped over the can edge — Eek!  ”Oh, well,” I said, “we’ll get it eventually.” Jill laughed and laughed. I love a woman with a sense of humor.

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We visited a couple of friends in Tucson. They live in an adobe-style house on a rise west of the city. You take a dirt road to get to their place. Their yard is a wilderness. If you haven’t been to the saguaro desert, where cacti grow twenty-feet high and the creosote bushes are as tall as you, which means it wouldn’t take but a few missteps to get lost, you don’t know how wildly overgrown these places are. It’s not just sand and rock.

Our friend’s mom was a nature-lover. She had a few dead curiosities in her freezer — animals she’d found, like the gila monster that drowned in her pool. We petted the monster and a frozen rattle snake but not the bat.

Our friends’ house has evaporative cooling instead of air conditioning. It’s old technology, patented in 1906, and consists of a fan blowing air cooled by evaporated water — a system that costs about 1/5th as much as air conditioning.

We shook our head in wonder at how our friends were living in that hot, wild, prickly place. They collect rain water in a cistern and raise chickens for eggs but they’re not anywhere close to being off the grid, though they dream of it. A bobcat got their first brood of hens not long ago. Coyotes and hawks and great horned owls will pick off incautious housecats, they told us. They had dwarf owls nesting in the car port recently.

You’ve probably seen one of those cheapo horror movies from the 1950’s that features a giant tarantula or mantis or ant. The story always takes place in the desert. There’s a reason for that. We were walking to a Tucson taco joint and encountered a monster insect on the sidewalk. It was dead but totally intact and worthy of its own horror show. Jill didn’t flinch when I placed it into her cupped hands. You go, girl!

When we returned to Phoenix, we told Mom about the critters but she didn’t seem impressed. She’s a country girl from an Appalachian mill town. She’s seen plenty of critters in her time. We couldn’t leave Phoenix without going to Pizzeria Bianco. It is, believe it or not, one of the best pizzas you’ll ever eat. Go later rather than earlier to avoid the crowd. And ignore the heat: coal-fired crust is good no matter how hot the pavement is outside. At dinner we talked about living off the grid, which seems appropriate to Arizona’s quirky inclinations. Then Mom revealed that when she was growing up she didn’t have a flush toilet until she was ten. I never knew.

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Some of the most gratifying moments of Roadshow are when somebody has found something very valuable that he/she has retrieved from a Dumpster. Or bought at a yard sale for a dollar. What can any of us buy for one dollar any more? Antique hunting is like prospecting — panning for gold or digging a mine. You get dirty, you waste a lot of time, and, more often than not, you come home only with muddy shoes or a sunburn. But if you get lucky . . . .

It may be a sign of our waning Empire that, in this country, shopping — whether for old stuff or new — is recreation. My ex-wife used to love spending a full day in shopping malls. We once drove to a mega-mall for a weekend of shopping and stayed in the Red Roof Inn next door. I can’t do that any more but I will happily spend a day on the road, driving from yard sale to yard sale. Our friend Scott likes to drive north along Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River and pass through the many picturesque river towns. On this trip, we came upon a community flea market at a riverside high school. It was our first stop.

It is surprising what people think others will buy. I often see piles of old VHS tapes stacked on sellers’ tables. Cassette tapes too. Battered shoes. Broken vacuum cleaners. CB radios. Rusted chains. Boxes of baby clothes. And a lot of new crap from China. But, every once in a while, I come across somebody who has cleaned out an oldster’s basement or attic. At this flea market, Jill and I were pleased to find some fifty-year-old brass lamp parts and some old tools. I found some old toys too. Scott found a feather tree for one dollar. He was ecstatic.

A feather tree is a 70-100 year-old table-top, artificial Christmas tree designed to display ornaments. Its branches are decorated with feathers dyed to look like spindly pine boughs. It doesn’t look like much but it is rare and, when found in an antiques shop, costs $300+. So there we were, at nine in the morning, and Scott had already scored the find of the day. But, of course, one find just makes you hungry for the next. And here’s where the trouble begins. If you know the market for an item, you may be inclined to pick it up — even if you don’t want it — just to re-sell it. I collect old toys, for instance, and pick them up whenever I find them cheap. But, then, you have to ask yourself, How much am I going to stockpile for resale? Do I collect any and every good deal I  find?

When I watch Antiques Roadshow, I often shake my head in dismay when I hear the appraisers (antiques dealers)  award an item some outlandish value. It’s easy for the dealers to claim a high price when they have a stable of prospective buyers in the highest end of the market (i.e., New York, San Francisco, etc.). But the average Joes and Janes don’t have those connections and they don’t have high-profile auction houses to sell from. Jill and I have tried to sell antiques at our annual yard sale and have discovered that nobody — at a yard sale — wants to pay market value for anything. Why should they?

Which leaves you to sell in an antiques consignment store or on eBay. Antiques stores are closing like speakeasies after the end of Prohibition. It’s not just hard times. It seems that the antique boom has waned. And the demographics are changing. Generations X and Y are buying stuff from the 1950s and 1960s, which aren’t exactly antiques. As for online selling: the good thing about eBay is that it has leveled the market internationally so that nobody can claim something is rare and valuable when in fact it is not. The bad thing is that eBay has glutted the market. Think that little lobby card (advertising the 1959 blockbuster Ben Hur) you found at last week’s yard sale is a treaure? Check out eBay and, guess what, there are fifty of them just like it — listed for $3.99 each.

Scott told us of a friend who has become a hoarder of old stuff. It’s a scary story of how a collection overtakes one’s life. The man in question is has no place to sit in his house because of the piled-high junk and now pays  more on rental space for his treasures than he pays in mortgage for himself. It starts when you keep picking up “bargains” with the thought that you are going to resell them. Notable examples of hoarding include the Collyer brothers in Manhattan, who both died in 1947 buried under mounds of old books, newspapers, and other junk they had amassed for twenty-five years. 130 tons of junk. It fell atop one brother, then the next, trapping both until they died of starvation. The most recent example occurred just a month ago in Chicago, where an elderly couple was rescued from their junk-filled apartment.

Saturday, we came upon an antiques warehouse that was clearly a hoarder’s stash. There was barely room enough to edge yourself down the aisles of junk, which was heaped in piles that, at one time, had been more or less orderly. The good thing was that owner was selling it off, or trying to. There was so much to pick through, we just gave up on the yard sales. We didn’t have time enough to do it justice, though, and promised to come back. As we drove off, Scott observed that the key to sane collecting is that for every item you bring into the house, something else has to leave the house. It’s a yin and yang thing. Jill and I decided that it’s time to sell off our many extras and bargains we have been accumulating in our too-big house. If all else fails, Scott says, just take your treasures to an auctioneer, dump the load for any price, and don’t look back.

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It seems Gaga came out of nowhere, another manufactured disco queen in wild outfits. We’ve seen many like her before. Start with Madonna, circa 1989’s “Just Like a Prayer,” stir in a little Cher circa 1998, as Cher was getting her ultra-glam Liberace-like Vegas act together (and take a listen to her techno-hit “Do You Believe in Love After Love”), add a dash of Christina Aguilera — and a dozen other platinum-blonde sex kittens — and there you have it: Lady Gaga. Or do you?

How is it that Gaga is getting ten times the video viewers that Madonna’s getting, and a hundred times the viewers that the long-lived, sexy, (and still young) vocal powerhouse Aguilera is getting? Aguilera must be sweating blood. She’s got better chops than Gaga can dream of having. But Gaga’s not about chops, the critics have made clear.Critics point to Gaga’s melodies — her hooks. I agree, Gaga’s got some good ones. But good melodies alone don’t make a star.

Lady Gaga doesn’t have great looks either. She’s a narrow-faced, skinny kid, just this side of knobby-kneed. Her ladylike derriere and always-elaborate make-up save her from looking like a waif. But a good butt and fancy face paint aren’t enough to make her crazy-famous either.

Watching Gaga’s videos, I realized I’ve heard her hits often at the gym I frequent, where the music is always pitched to the 18-20-year-olds. None of it impressed me. Really, her music is forgettable. And her early videos, I’m sorry, are shite. Cliches of a white party-girl trying to sound black. Dog turds steaming on a summer sidewalk make better entertainment.

But wait a second. Her recent videos — especially “Bad Romance,” “Telephone” and “Alejandro” — are powerful entertainment. And they make her music powerful. And they make Gaga a very appealing entertainer. Why have viewers watched her “Bad Romance” video 226, 630, 136 times? Because it’s bizarre, other-worldly, mystifying, fascinating, funny, weird, and there’s nothing else like it on the internet.

Here’s the difference between Lady Gaga (now) and every other female pop star: Gaga’s recent videos don’t worship Gaga as a sex goddess. By contrast, look at Christina Aguilera in “Not Myself Tonight,” which has earned her a paltry 3,546,969 views since its April 2010 release. It’s all about Aguilera straddling and strutting and bumping and grinding. It’s conventional fare, really, the kind of dominatrix-themed quasi-porn pop that Madonna wore out in the 1990s. The camera is always leering at Aguilera and the story, such as it is, doesn’t go any farther than this Bad Woman pinning a sweaty partner in a big bed. It’s boring. That said, I like Aguilera and think she’s really talented (much more so than her former Disney-kids peer Brittany Spears). But Aguilera, like most women in pop music, is trapped in a one-pony sideshow. When that pony gets old, the show folds.

Girlish Gaga can’t compete in the same tent. She’ll never be a bombshell. I suspect that’s why her videos have changed. Look at Gaga in her newest video, “Alejandro,” which has earned her a staggering 16,794,408 views since its June 8, 2010 release — that’s one week ago. The video doesn’t start with Gaga herself, it starts with storm troopers in a mystifying, timeless, menacing place. The choreography isn’t particularly novel — Michael Jackson set the standard for ensemble steps like these back in the early 1980s — but the dancing is different enough, with its awkward squats and mincing marches and ersatz-Egyptian snakiness. The odd dancing suits Gaga because she’s like a kid at play. She’s not exactly a woman in these videos and, unlike Madonna et al., she’s never clearly defined as a sexual predator. The main thing is this: she’s always part of an ensemble. And she’s always in disguise. Her look morphs wildly in these videos. The message is clearly about performance — we enjoy watching Gaga play with these wild costumes and sets.

You’ll notice that Gaga’s recent videos are long — the longest clocks in at nearly 9 minutes. These are far more than songs, these are mini-movies. They seem to have introductions and epilogues. They do not try to make sense, though they do adhere roughly to thematic strands, as in “Alejandro,” with its storm troopers and dark Nazi other-world. Yes, we see Gaga stripped down and wrestling with muscled men on beds in this video but it’s not the main event and, in any case, it’s not particularly sexy. It’s mostly good choreography, pretty dancing, a good show – that’s the attraction. These videos are entertaining film and Gaga is nothing more and nothing less than the main actor in each. In other words, the story is far larger than the CFM fantasies that other women singers offer.

There’s one other element that seems to account for the unprecedented appeal of Gaga’s act. In these videos, Gaga assumes a martyred-outcast-heroic role (starting with “Paparazzi”). In “Alejandro,’ she’s asking to leave a relationship. As she puts it, “Don’t call my name [any more], Alejandro” The visuals suggest things the song never does, that Alejandro is a fascist lover, unforgiving and unrelenting. And Gaga is beseiged and conflicted by her need to get away from him. So, yes, she’s a victim of love but more than that. Her first wild costume makes her look like the princess of some snowy, high-tech, Tim Burton future-world. And she seems to get the upper hand (and dominant position) in many scenes. The suggestion, finally, is that this young woman prevails somehow against great odds and adversaries or, if nothing else, puts up a good fight, even as she is doomed. In other words, there is a vulnerability here that we don’t see in other women’s videos. There’s nothing vulnerable about Christina Aguilera wielding a riding crop, for instance.

Gaga herself isn’t a particularly strong presence in any of these videos and that’s a bonus because the production absorbs her in ways that productions do not, cannot, absorb stronger women, like Madonna. This too makes Gaga vulnerable and appealing. It seems Gaga knows that she is strongest when she lets herself be swallowed by costume and cast. In sum, it comes down to this: she owes a lot to her creative team, those who dream up and direct and choreograph and costume her recent wild and wonderful videos. And, yes, Gaga gets some credit too. In two short years, riding a rocket of fame, she has made and re-made herself. It’s a promising beginning and an act worth watching.

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