Godammit, I’m Mad!

Listening to ‘Bookworm,’ a weekly radio program hosted by Michael Silverblatt, I discovered the French poet  Pierre Reverdy. He is known as a Surrealist, but his poems seem very straightforward to my untrained ears. They are morbid, dismal, creepy, and cut to the heart of things with unusual eloquence. Keep in mind that I hate poetry, though.

Ron Padgett read his new translation of a prose poem by Reverdy that ended with “….alas, my hate endures” bla bla bla. I experienced that shock of recognition: Mine, too! I thought happily.

I’ve been thinking of getting a tattoo, probably a terrible idea, but I haven’t been able to come up with a good idea until now. So I’ve been trying to find out how to translate this phrase back into French, without success.

Can anyone help? “My hatred endures” is the single best description of my worldview that I’ve ever stumbled upon. I know it’s pretentious to get a tattoo in a foreign language, but at least it’s not Latin. I just read about some actress/moron who has a tattoo in Sanskrit, which seems like some sort of milestone in stupidity. My other tattoo idea, for the last few years, was a gang-banger name that I think I made up: Lil’ Spiteful. I’m not ruling that one out, but I’m wondering how it will go over in the nursing home where I’ll end up, with nothing left in my memory bank except the Complete Lyrics of Bob Dylan.

Meanwhile, my hatred endures, and tonight it is flowing in several directions. I tried Lunesta last night for the first time, and instead of that cute little butterfly I got nothing but grinding insomnia. I’m so disgusted by this failed experiment in pharmaceuticals that I don’t want to try my sample of Rozerem. If I can’t achieve the butterfly, it’s hard to believe I’ll get Abe Lincoln and that hedgehog. I don’t even know if that thing is a hedgehog, a gopher, or a beaver.

Alas.

Thanks to thesmokinggun.com we can see this postcard from Phil to fellow dirtbag/bigshot Allen Klein, mocking L.A. District Attorney Steve Cooley. Click on it to read.

The use of ” ’twas ” is totally indefensible. Ugh! Guilty as charged.

This guy escaped from jail after killing a guard. Later, he was caught at an Arby’s. Click on his picture to fully appreciate him.

I’ve never been to a ‘sample sale’ before, and now I know why. A friend invited me to go along with her to the Rock & Republic sample sale in Hollywood on Sunday. Her friend Marissa was working there.

We arrived around thirty minutes before the end. We walked up to the door after paying ten bucks for valet parking. My friend told them to page Marissa, but her name failed to get a reaction. We were sent to take our place in line by an arrogant turd with gelled-up hair and a fake tan. We soon entered a large, dark warehouse full of wall-to-wall racks of clothing. Deafening hip-hop music assaulted our ears. My friend’s kid, who has perfect pitch, had to go outside to escape the pain.

Inside, the pain continued in the form of hideous overpriced denim, festooned with rhinestones, skulls, embroidered logos and chains. It was the type of clothes that people in Omaha probably associate with celebrities. Pam Anderson probably has some shit by Rock & Republic (with all due respect, Pam.)

Latinas and Black girls manned the aisles, either bopping to the music or looking like they had been awake for 72 hours and weren’t happy about it. My friend handed me one red shoe in my size, with a lethal stiletto heel and several buckled straps. She assumed correctly that I would like it. I looked for the other shoe for around twenty minutes. After finding it, I decided against spending $200 to look like a prostitute who can’t walk.

Meanwhile, my son found some black jeans in his size but didn’t realize it had sparkly letters on the back pockets. I advised him to pass on the washed-up rock star look and he agreed. To make it up to him, I offered to pay for some hole-punching gadget he needs in order to make a low-tech computer with a bicycle-driven engine. Don’t ask.

Anyway, my friend bought a cashmere sweater marked ‘irregular’ that will probably self-destruct after one wearing. I bought a horrible denim vest with big silver buttons that cuts off my circulation and earned a smirk from my usually non-judgmental husband.

Anyone want an awful vest by Rock & Republic in size XS? It’s yours for shipping and handling.

Just making sure that everyone has seen Mick out with his girlfriend, L’wren Scott, a model-turned-fashion designer whose specialty is body-hugging dresses favored by Botox casualty Ellen Barkin and the very very heterosexual Nicole Kidman. Ms. Scott is 6′ 3″ tall, a nice treat for Mick after that midget Jerry Hall.

Recently, I discovered a whole new category of mental disorders, known collectively as Delusional Misidentification.

With Capgras Syndrome, the person’s primary delusion is that a relative or loved one has been replaced by an imposter who is an exact double. In married  people, it is always the spouse. Well, duh!

Cotard’s Delusion makes a person doubt his own existence; he often believes he is dead.

There’s a bunch of other variations. I like autoscopic phenomena, in which a person believes he is an imposter of himself. That one sounds like a really sticky situation, doesn’t it? It seems like a paradox, or at least a conundrum. Larry King would call it a ‘Catch 22,‘ as I heard him refer to some mundane conflict last night. Then there’s intermetamorphosis, reverse intermetamorphosis, temporal reduplication, and mirrored-self misidentification.

I once knew a woman who was hideous in every way, including aesthetically. But she would describe her impact at a party or somewhere, by saying “I looked like a million dollars!” She was absolutely sincere, even though her enormous snout moved up and down as she spoke. There should be a category for that sort of delusion! Or what about those creepy guys who are always talking about their screenplays in a really loud voice. I heard a guy last week in Ross For Less, explaining into his cellphone that if a producer said she “got” his script, then it wasn’t “smart” enough. That’s probably Joe Eszterhas Syndrome.

I found Joe Eszterhas by googling ‘worst screenwriter.’ I wonder if he’s proud of coming up first. I’m not sure what his particular disorder is, but I like that he’s given us a yardstick for awful screenwriting.

My own delusion is that I can still wear really tight jeans at my advanced age. But wait, maybe that’s because I don’t have a full-length mirror! Ignorance is bliss. Or a Catch 22.

Gore-monger Eli Roth is not just a douchebag, he’s a big baby. He’s mad that Hostel II bombed, and he’s blaming it on piracy.

“Piracy has become worse than ever now, and a stolen workprint leaked out on online before the release, and is really hurting us, especially internationally,” he says, before going on to specifically tear into critics who reviewed a leaked copy of the film. “Critics have actually been reviewing the film based off the pirated copy, which is inexcusable,” he says. “Some of these critics I have actually known for a few years, and while I wouldn’t dignify them by mentioning them by name, I know who they are, as do the studios, and other filmmakers, and they will no longer have any access to any of my films.”

Aw, he wants to take his ball and go home. Now he says he won’t make his next project, “Cell,” any time soon. Huh, he’ll show us.

What a baby!

Poor Salman Rushdie! Just when I was starting to think it all worked out for him, he goes and gets Knighted by the Queen of England. Now, Pakistan wants him dead again. Get over it, people!  Rushdie has a beautiful young wife now, and he’s just trying to go around being an eminence grise or whatever it’s called.

While reading about Pakistan’s ire, I came across the latest survey of “failed states,” an index put together by Foreign Policy Magazine and the politically independent Fund For Peace. Pakistan ranks as #12, between Afghanistan and Haiti. Sudan currently ranks as the number one state most vulnerable to failure. The twelve indicators of instability are political, economic, military and social. You can see the survey here. The more you read about it, the more dejected you will feel, but at least you’ll sound annoyingly well-informed around the water cooler.

On a personal note, the Queen gave my brother-in-law an OBE earlier this year, and thank god Pakistan was willing to stay out of it!

Julian Schnabel seems like my kind of guy. I don’t know much about him, but his work has been described as ‘confrontational.’ He bought a three story apartment building in Greenwich Village and then added eleven stories, after a protest by local residents failed to thwart his plans. Now he has painted it pink, either to punish the neighborhood or because, I don’t know, I forgot what the other reason would be.

I also like Schnabel’s current wife, Olatz, who has opened a swanky shop that sells bed sheets. I like this ‘Antonia’ style, which is priced to sell, at $1,000 for a king-size sheet.

Finally, I like that the Schnabels have named their twin sons Olmo and Cy.

This morning, on Father’s Day, one of my neighbors shot his wife and then shot himself. Their 14 year old son was at the store. He came home and found them, and then I guess he told his grandparents, who lived in the front house, where they’ve lived for more than thirty years. They are a large, Mexican-American,  hardworking family, except for the one who killed himself. He never wanted to work, and preferred polishing his car. When he was little, he was obsessed with fireworks, and he discussed them all year long with my son, who was the same age.

Eddie and his fireworks, we used to say. He was particularly interested in ‘M 80s.’ He got his girlfriend pregnant when they were both seventeen, and he was very proud of himself. He named the kid Eddie Jr. As soon as Eddie Jr. was old enough to hold his neck up, his dad adorned him in gold chains, just like a little gang banger. It seemed kind of tragic to me; Eddie Jr. was groomed to be a lowlife, just like his father. Soon, Eddie Jr. was playing out on our street, bullying my younger son, just like Eddie Sr. had once bullied my other son. Those Eddies, we started saying. History repeating itself, etc.

Today, Eddie Jr. was running around the street, wearing his gold chains and dark sunglasses. He told me that his parents were dead, and that his middle school graduation is next Wednesday. He was concerned about the two tickets he had paid for.

What the fuck!  The street filled up with sobbing relatives. Eddie’s sister was beside herself. She couldn’t stop screaming “Why? Why?” I held her baby, mostly for my own comfort, while she sobbed with her elderly mother, who looked very, very tired and shell-shocked. Relatives continued to arrive, women crying and men trying to hold it together. The relatives of the dead wife arrived but kept their distance from Eddie’s house. They were angry as well as distraught. It was terrible.

From what I could put together, it seems like Eddie was depressed and increasingly unwilling to leave the house. His wife, Nellie, who always had a fulltime job, was sick of him and wanted to leave. I always felt sorry for her. She was always so friendly when we complained about the weather or our kids.

I can’t feel a  glimmer of empathy for Eddie, even though I guess he was a desperate soul, in the end. Why in the world should that fucking Eddie have a fucking gun? That’s the part I will never be able to understand.