sashinka | observation orientated, with a twist of lime | a blog

Multicultural Mayhem
Saturday night, A mentioned that he'd been working out to Madonna's new video to Die Another Day (released, strangely, on my birthday), and that it was not a little weird. D used all his latest home-entertainment gee-whizziness to download it, and it's... thought provoking, I think that's what I'll say. Although not quite as mesmerising as the windows screensavers we watched while listening to ambient-something-or-other, which, when you've, er, had a little, er, y'know... anyway, very mesmeric.

It's the theme to the new Bond movie, in which Madonna has a cameo role, doubtless negotiated by her legal department as part of the music deal. The video's got references ranging from Nazi (torture, uniforms, whips), S&M (check same), comics (the whole chair thing is very The Invisbles where King Mob is being tortured by Sir Miles, and strangely, Madonna's "injury" is in the same place as KM's.

But here's what got us: she has L A V tattooed on her arm in Hebrew letters. Well, something like that; aleph doesn't have an equivalent, I've just put A. We know Madge is the Kabbalah queen and all that, but what the hell does it mean? As a hebrew word, it means something like "not" or negative, which is pretty context-free here. We concluded that it must mean "LOVE". How tacky. And at the end of the video, Madge disappears - gets invisible, geddit - and all that's left on the chair is the L A V thing. So, it's like the power of love? Isn't that another song all together?

Our collective thoughts were that we didn't like our heritage being plundered for promo-videos, not least when it didn't make sense. Z lent me the Autograph Man - the new Zadie Smith - which I'm yet to read, but glancing at it, she also uses a Kabbalistic construct, this time to shape the novel, but I'm not sure it does anything. It's cool that being Jewish and Kabbalah and stuff is now trendy, but people have been Jewish for thousands of years, and will continue to be for many more millennia, and fifteen minutes of fame is kinda meaningless to people who've been doing stuff for generations. Probably like women in Southall don't really care that last summer was the sari-edged jeans look; it's just what they do. Jewish mysticism takes years to study and understand, and I resent famous people stealing our logotypes to make them look ethnic. Get your own, Madge.