i, too, have embraced madonna as a physical embodiment of my own aging.

i saw her at Danceteria, the Blond Ambition Tour and this last workout video of a performance.

yet I did. and that says something about our fascination with The Past.

"At one point -- and I do not think this particular disco egg is worth cracking open here and now -- she rode a black man like a horse."

Why have so few critics of this show discussed her mainstreaming of BDSM pony play? It makes today's writers/publications seem so boring and staid.

I have not enjoyed an article about Madonna for a while - all are either fawning or critical, taking her way too seriously. This article really captured so much of what Madonna used to mean to us in our early thirties and the strange sort of disconnect we feel now with her too-perfectly orchestrated concerts.

For you, or for Madonna?

How so. Madonna worked hard, did what she had to, and made it big. She has always called her own shots. You may or may not like her music, but you have to respect her drive. She needed a man like a fish needed a bicycle.

If the tickets cost so much that you can't really afford to buy one despite being gainfully employed, then you're not hanging with the cool kids. You're hanging with old people with lots of money. It's fogyish.

But Madonna, I mean, ewww. It's crass commercialism on display. When RT was praising her ability to offend, that's what struck me as most fogyish. Every single thing Madonna has ever done that was "offensive" was immediatly and transparently obvious to anyone who grew up as a child of a child of the 60's. It's attempting to package a product as offensive. It's selling Authentic, Just like the Grungers Wear flannel shirts for 100 bucks a pop.

Madonna humped everything that stood still long enough for her to wrap her legs around it.

That aspect of her persona was already legend in the East Village before she ever recorded her first album.

but I got the feeling in this article that Rebecca Traister has read too much Elizabeth Wurtzel recently.

Or is she trying to sound like Elizabeth Wurtzel on purpose?

Or is it a new law of the universe that every white American woman of this generation who writes autobiographical non-fiction will end up sounding like Elizabeth Wurtzel sooner or later?

Why do I find the naggingly familiar rhythms of Traister's prose more thought-provoking than anything that was actually in this article?

I guess that answers one question, anyway: Yes. For Madonna, it really is too late.

Thought a seismic jolt that goes by the name of Camille Paglia kicked that idea out on its ass about fifteen years ago. Oh well, I enjoy antiques, so seeing that one trotted out again is sort of quaint.

Guess Collette wasn't much of a feminist, either. Oh no, no sarcastic agreement, or it will be taken as a concession. Of course both these women are feminists, and anyone who says otherwise is just trying to force feminism to fit a narrow, intolerant definition.

I'm not a big Madonna fan. I was 15 when she hit it big with the album Like A Virgin, and I didn't much care then or later. But it has nothing to do with politics. Other than "Material Girl," which was a cute, catchy song, and which was the first 45 I ever bought on my own (and I guess the last since they went the way of the dinosaur before I graduated high school), I never cared for her stuff.

I didn't much care for Prince, or the Boss either, to name the complete trinity of 84-85. None of the 80's music, now recyled on the soundtrack of the nation, every really did anything for me. Though I got a kick out of David Lee Roth's Crazy from the Heat, and the "California Girls" and "Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" videos, which seemed to bring back vaudeville momentarily (he said himself in an interview he was pretending to be Al Jolson). I like the early (as in 1970's) Springsteen better now than I did then.

For the most part in the 80's, I was listening to 60's music (though my best friend was heavily into punk, so I'd heard the Sex Pistols by the time I was 14) The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel and Jefferson Airplane, mostly. The cast album of Hair. And the Supremes. In spite of sarcastic moments like those in Repo Man, it hadn't been decided yet that Gen X Hates the Sixties. There was a nostalgia for it, I guess just like the 80's nostalgia now. But my teenage years were rapped around The Rocky Horror Picture Show, anyway, so that music was really the score to my teens.

Sorry for rambling. The point is, yes, Madonna's a feminist.

If Salon is going to have someone explore territory which has been stomped flat by countless essayists over the last twenty years, PLEASE do some editing. Real editing.

As an author and essayist, I don't understand how could anyone let an insight as banal as this pass for an epiphany:

"Time goes by -- so slowly" -- and all I could think was that time goes by so quickly. And that sometimes, like tonight, it can fold in on itself, and remind us of how far away we are from our old selves, our old bodies, our old memories even as we experience things that bring the past to mind."

This is as shallow and empty as the song it valorizes.

Oh, well, maybe it's time for Salon to do another breathtaking piece on Jennifer Aniston . . .

I didn't discover Madonna until 1998 when Ray of Light was released. That album became one of my favorites and became the "soundtrack" to my high school and college years. Most people are incapable of writing about Madonna outside the context of nostalgia because they were there during "Like a Virgin," but I wasn't. So it's a little baffling to me when people call Madonna over-the-hill because every album since Ray of Light, (except American Life) has been great music. I've been to the Drowned World, Reinvention and Confession Tours. And it hasn't been to relive my youth, it's been to see the music from her latest albums. At her Confessions Tour in LA, I felt transcendent by the end of the concert. I wasn't looking to be shocked. The image of her on a cross was in front of a video message about donating money to AIDS orphans in Africa. I didn't pontificate about her age, or my age, I was just taken up in the tremendous energy of it all. I can understand why a man in his 30's with a 6-week-old would find it appealing to dismiss Madonna as "an old fogey," but to many of us who still live in Madonna's world, she's our lucky star, and will continue to be for a long time. If she's so old then name one up-and-coming musical act that could do what she did on stage better than her. I also find it interesting that the concert was so good that it could move Ms. Traister to tears, and yet the second she walks outside, her and her friend questioned whether it was too late. Did they mean was it too late for them to go to a performance and actually feel an emotion that wasn't preapproved by their parents, siblings and friends?