Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up- Frank O’Hara
It’s been a few weeks since my last essay. I fully expected to return from holiday in the south of Italy to first reviews of Madonna’s long-awaited Celebration Tour, scheduled to have begun on 15th July.
Instead, whilst I was walking around sun-drenched Puglian towns, the world was in a waiting game for any news on her health and the future of the tour.
You have surely heard by now that Madonna was admitted to the ICU in late June with a serious bacterial infection. According to some accounts, she was found unconscious by an unidentified person who may have ‘saved her life’ by rushing to get her medical help.
When planning our Italian trip we’d decided — as any good gays would — to have dinner at Casa San Giacomo in Ostuni, the restaurant where Madonna memorably celebrated her 63rd birthday…
…I didn’t imagine, though, that I’d find myself in Puglian churches, like a good Catholic boy, saying Hail Marys for the Queen of Pop. What was I praying for? Her full recovery, of course. But more than that, for the triumphant cultural moment we had all hoped for her this year.
oh Madonna we love you get up
In Puglia, shrines to specific saints are everywhere. I’m reminded of the contention by entertaining but eternally problematic scholar Camille Paglia that Madonna in the 80s unleashed ‘the latent paganism and pornography in Italian Catholicism.’
I do know my saints, but in the picturesque hilltop town of Locorotondo I encountered an unfamiliar and striking one. Saint Rocco (take note of the name!) is traditionally accompanied by a dog holding a loaf of bread. Most distinctive of all, though, is his pose: Rocco lifts his cloak to display a naked thigh with bleeding wound
Had I been a young boy kneeling at Rocco’s altar, the ‘latent pornography’ of his statue -- looking not unlike a bruised rugby player -- would hardly have been lost on me. Once I could look past the flesh, I might have learned Rocco’s legend. A young nobleman, he gave up his wealth and went about praying for those infected with plague and curing them. When he himself contracted plague, as indicated by the sores on his thigh, Rocco was banished to a cave (that’s where the miraculous dog came in, conveniently bringing Rocco bread to eat).
Understandably, Saint Rocco is now venerated as the protector against plague and all infectious diseases. He’s had a busy few years, I reckon.
And Rocco’s feast day? The 16th of August.
If you don’t know whose birthday that is, you’re reading the wrong article.
The image of Saint Rocco is a comfort not for any superhuman powers on display but because of his physical vulnerability. His statue is rare for depicting a very human affliction on a saintly body.
Madonna has trafficked in the iconography of the Church but she’s rarely dabbled in its veneration of suffering. Like Rocco, Madonna’s constantly showing leg, but it’s never been to display her wounds.
The image of a vulnerable Madonna, laid low by illness, causes cognitive dissonance. Sure, she’s had flop albums, scandals and unsuccessful movie projects. But her strength in bouncing back, proving her critics wrong, has never been in question.
Gay men have identified with plenty of doomed, suffering divas from Judy Garland to Amy Winehouse, but Madonna has won our allegiance by continually projecting a fuck-you attitude of resistance in the face of misogyny, moralism and homophobia.
Coming to prominence during a time of rampant plague, Madonna preached protection without sacrificing pleasure. She will forever be the patron saint of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but her interventions came not through prayers and candle-lit vigils but cheeky latex advocacy and sweaty danceathons.
Later, as she morphed from Camille Paglia’s Whore of Babylon into the her post-Ray of Light Earth Mother image, Madonna embodied a form of Wellness (influenced by the teachings of yoga and kabbalah) that attempts – and, until now, has mostly succeeded – in transcending the bodily. Health and strength have forever been her M.O.
Consider the notable moment from 2004’s Re-Invention Tour when she stops the action with a performance of ‘Lament’ from Evita. According to the thesis of the original musical, this is the moment of Eva Peron’s self-conscious apotheosis into posthumous sainthood.
But for the woman playing her on the concert stage, the cos-play of human frailty becomes a complex text:
She begins by literally spitting in the face of her aggressive male torturers, never missing an opportunity to enact what my favorite Madonna scholars have identified as her signature gesture: pushing men away from her.
Strapped to an electric chair, aged 45 and in obvious glowing health, she turns this dying broadcast into a manifesto of defiance:
The choice was mine, and mine completely
I could have any prize that I desired
I could burn with the splendor of the brightest fire
Or else, or else I could choose time
In her mouth, the message of Tim Rice’s lyrics becomes a refusal of risk avoidance, a disavowal of cautious conservation of energy in pursuit of her single-minded goals.
Remember I was very young then
And a year was forever and a day
So what use could fifty, sixty, seventy be?
I saw the lights, and I was on my way
She was 45 when she sang that, I am 44 now – and coming to terms daily with the limitations of a body that was hardly ever the machine that Madonna’s was.
During her 2019 Madame X Tour, Madonna sustained an injury that led to hip replacement surgery. Her mindset, as expressed from a video Q&A at that time, rejected any notion of slowing down:
“During my tour – I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but I’m limping a lot – I was in more pain than I’ve ever been in in my life… So, how do I stay in shape? It’s all in your head … It’s called will, it’s called no one’s gonna stop me, and how I stay in shape is no one’s gonna stop me. And how I stay in shape is I don’t believe in limitations.”
Limitations consist not just in spent breath and torn ligaments. Life is made up of forking paths and the more of them you take, the more you understand that you don’t have an infinite supply of do-overs.
When Madonna returns to us in October, God willing, she will have had another reinvention, one that she surely didn’t plan but one which, we hope, can bring her closer to us than ever.
oh Madonna we love you take care of yourself
As generations of her fans age, one hopes that she and we can face certain facts not with resignation but with new understanding. The years ahead will require different forms of defiance and vulnerability from all of us.
What use could fifty, sixty, seventy be?
So many of Madonna’s contemporaries didn’t live to ask that question.
The answers, as they arrive, needn’t stop the Celebration.