Spread across a junction box in Silver Lake ... I'm not really sure how old this ballerina is likely to be, although her strained neck would suggest that she's not a youngster. The box seems to be falling open and stretching her left leg even more than her finely tuned muscles and ligaments can bear, but that's another sort of decay.
Geriatric dancing seems to be the internet order of complaint after Madonna's Super Bowl half time show (and, pray, how many of those writers could do what she's doing at 53, or will be able to do it, when they hit that advanced age?). She was hardly in the nostalgia-category of The Who a couple of years back (not that they, in their turn, weren't excellent - but one felt that they were for the older people who could afford the tickets). OK, so undoubtedly she was lip-syncing - never, ever did she sound out of breath when she was doing her prancing and acrobatics and thrusting - but it was a wonderfully over the top piece of camp. Heliogobalus, in the 3rd century AD, had nothing on her (he was the guy, you'll recollect, who among other things had a whole lot of dinner guests smothered to death in a bath full of violet and rose petals; married and divorced five time; had a range of gay lovers; and implored his physician to swap out his genitalia for those of a woman. Neil Gaiman did a comic strip bio of him, if you're interested).
What was especially odd about her Vogue-meets Cleopatra-meets cheerleaders show was that the decadence begged to be read in conjunction (in Gibbon like fashion) with all the apocalypse and ruin that was on display in the ads. Apart from the Chevy Silverado doomsday scenario (in which a box of Twinkies survives, too), there looked to be a large number of exploding cities in the films heading our way in May. Ah well, there's always the happy flip-side of this - Chrysler rebuilding Detroit. Or the extremely athletic dogs, who did, in various commercials, indeed give Madonna's fitness a run for its money.
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