Godammit, I’m Mad!

Branding is so important, blah blah blah. You love Godammit dot com, so imagine how much you’ll love a genuine Sister Wolf t-shirt!

Is this the greatest design in the history of the world?! I think so, too. (Credit goes to my Webmaster) I need to choose a manufacturer for this project, and then before you know it, you’ll be able to buy a t-shirt for yourself and your loved ones.

100% of the profits will go to the Cause, i.e. staying out of debtors’ prison.

YES, you would buy one; or NO, go fuck myself?

I just tried to read an essay in the New York Times that cited the words “cellar door” as the most beautiful phrase in the English Language.  HUH? Normally I enjoy lists of “beautiful words” but this threw me. Cellar door doesn’t do anything for me, in sound or meaning. It actually makes me feel a little tense, since I automatically presume that something bad exists behind a cellar door, like a maniac or a dead animal.

I screwed around on google and found this list of “The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English.” Take a look! I was surprised by how many I disagree with. Usually lists of beautiful words are big on euphonious words like shimmer, iridescent,  and lullaby, but this list is all over the place.

It includes “plethora” which I hate, and “inglenook,” which I think is the name of a cheap wine, but I’m not sure.  I misread “fetching” as “felching,” which was a momentary shock that has ruined “fetching” for me, at least for tonight.

“Ineffable” is a great word, and so is “imbroglio.” I also like “pungent” and “woodwind” and “melancholy,” none of which made the top 100. On the other hand, it did include “penumbra” which is too reminiscent of “pudenda” for my comfort.

“Halcyon” is a lovely word that made the list, as one might expect. It would be beautiful even if it didn’t evoke a nice tranquilizer. I once told a friend that the drug Halcion made me think of people laying in the grass beside a sun-dappled lake. He replied, “They should have called it Seurat.” I nearly fell in love with him for that, but I was already in a relationship and he was a prick.

What words do you find beautiful? Feel free to list your own 100 if you love that many.

It’s on! Cunt of the Week™ will be a new feature, and you can nominate a candidate by writing to me at sisterwolf666@gmail.com.

Sting set the bar pretty high, but let’s face it, he’s not the only cunt around. Years ago, in the office where I worked with my BFF, we honored our Cunts of the Week™  by putting their picture on a nice gold ribbon we hung on the wall. It’s a lovely tradition that I will always cherish.

Here is the only criterion for nominations: The person has to have been a cunt during a given week, NOT just in general and NOT because of some behavior six months ago.

At the end of the year, we can vote for the prestigious Cunt of the Year™, and of course there will be a Lifetime Achievement Award too. (Madonna, I’m thinking of you here….)

In recent days, two idiots nice individuals have cited my hatefulness as a moral flaw in my nature (not to mention my blog.)  I will point out yet again that the title of this blog is “Godammit, ‘m Mad! and I’m Getting Madder,” not “Look What I Love.”

However, just to remind anyone who doesn’t know what a fucking cornucopia of love I am, here is a list of fifty people I love, in the order they popped into my brain:

Patti Smith, William Borroughs, Van Morrison, Vermeer, William Bouguereau, Aretha Franklin, Thomas Hardy, Elvis Costello, Edith Wharton, Flaubert, Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons, Kingsley Amis, Mervin Peake, Johnny Depp, Ingrid Bergman, Chris Rock, Richard Feinman, Arthur Lee, Bob Dylan, George Eliot, Amy Winehouse, Denton Welch, Balzac, Vivienne Leigh, Brigitte Bardot, Prince, Amanda Palmer, Donna Summer, Paul Erdos, Frida Kahlo, Bert Jansch, Fred Neil, Iris Murdoch, Joan Armatrading, Tolstoy, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, Oscar Wilde, Karen Horney, Derek & Clive, Neil Young, Tim Buckley, Leonard Cohen. Robert DiNiro, Alice Miller, Yukio Mishima, Ricky Gervais, Larry David, Tony Duquette.

See?

Now, who do you love that I should love too?

Thanks to Hammie, I now know what actress should play me in the movie based on my life: Catherine Keener. Perfect choice, Hammie! She is definitely an idealized version of me…an attractive, mature hippie type. Or as I like to call her, the thinking man’s Demi Moore.

Years ago, my sister’s husband had an “adventure” that I won’t go into, except to say that afterward, my sister and I liked to secretly cast the movie of it. The title would be “On the Lam.” We figured that Karen Allen or maybe Debra Winger could play us, and Sam Neil could play her husband. I can’t remember how we cast the other characters in our lives, but it was a great game.

The other night though, I saw a movie with Debra Winger, who is now an old hag; she’s definitely out. And I have remarried. My husband can be played by Carlos Santana, since he’s been mistaken for Carlos Santana more than once.

If for some reason, Catherine Keener is too busy to play me, I would settle for Dita Von Teese.

Who would you cast as you in the movie of your life?

I was honored to serve as the Los Angeles premiere* of Kate Battrick’s short film, “Dress Up,” this week. Kate is known to some of you as the author of Make Do Style.

Her film is a charming and ambitious look at celebrity, aspiration, fashion and status, told through the chance meeting of a young couple who misread each other’s expectations.

When Kate becomes a famous auteur, you can say you remember her start in film-making. Great job, Kate!

*Sweater from my Grandma, shoes from SWEAR London.

The other night, I saw the film Blow-Up for the first time. What a piece of shit!

Don’t you hate it when a movie you’re supposed to revere turns out to be crap? Blow-Up is the boringest most pointless movie I’ve seen in years.  I know it’s a landmark movie of the 60’s but seen today, it’s just ponderous and stilted. David Hemmings can’t act to save his life and never changes out of his bright white jeans. After an hour of nothingness, all I wanted was a different pair of pants.

In the end, David Hemmings comes upom a group of mimes and pretends to return an imaginary ball to them. The End. Fuck! Reading the reviews now, I wonder if everyone was too high on acid to figure out what a stupid bad movie it was.

Black Dynamite, on the other hand, is delightful! It’s a loving homage to blaxploitation films, just funny enough to provoke laughs without devolving into a winking satire.  When a sexy lounge singer tells Black Dynamite “I get off in about 15 minutes,” he answers “I know you do, baby.” My husband and I are still having fun saying, “I can dig it.”

Much more entertaining than a Beatle-haired photographer sulking around his apartment or staring into space. One review of Blow-Up explained that it was about meaninglessness. I think that’s just a euphemism for “Huh?”

What classic or cult films have failed to live up to your expectations?

Just look what happens when you take away Mrs. Palin’s trademark big hair! It’s like Samson after Delilah got through with him!

A genius over here altered some pictures of Mrs. P by removing the long hair (along with the glasses and trashy earrings.) Voila, she is instantly disempowered.

Without going into my Nobel Prize Exegesis on the subliminal sources of Mrs. Palin’s magnetism (because I haven’t written it yet) I will just say that without these totems, she loses the medley of conflicting archetypes that serve to resonate with both her fans and detractors.

With the Big Hair and other accoutrement’s, she is simultaneously a Vixen, Church Lady, Librarian, Dominatrix, Stripper and Mommy. Take that shit away and  what do you have?

(I know Mr. Duff will have a good answer.)

I finally decided to see the doctor today, when my terrible sore throat turned into a fever with body aches and a rattling bronchial cough. Since I didn’t already have an appointment, I was told I could be a walk-in patient but I’d have to wait.

After an hour of waiting in a nearly empty waiting room, I was joined by a teenager who’d been stung by a bee. Her father was an asshole. They took the bee-sting girl and left me to wait, coughing my guts out. I asked why the girl got to be seen before me, and that seemed to elevate the hostility from behind the window.

I lay down across some chairs, and tried to stop coughing. Patients arrived and were led behind the door to see their doctors. They were all fat. The women behind the glass window were fat as well, and spoke in proud pidgin English or whatever it’s called when you’re Latina and refuse to use proper grammar.

A father arrived with four kids under the age of ten. I was entranced by how gently he brushed his son’s hair behind an ear stuffed with cotton. The youngest child walked over to me to look at the fish tank. We talked about the stuff in the tank and she called the sponge a “ponge.”  I was brokenhearted when her father took her away to see their doctor.

Three hours passed. I decided that the office women were punishing me for not being fat. I wanted to stick my head through the window and scream, “It’s not my fault I’m not fat.”

Meanwhile, I brought a book with me that I’ve meant to read for years: The Afterlife, by Donald Antrim. It turned out to be a memoir about a crazy mother. The writing is amazing. The kind of writing that hits the exact right spot, like sex. It was so intense that I had to keep putting it down to recover from it.

Finally, I pretended to have to use the restroom, and I went behind the door. I sat on a chair in the hall where no one could ignore me, and coughed dramatically.

A doctor I’ve never met before asked me what the problem was. I told her that one problem was the 3 1/2 hour wait. I confided that it was punitive because the office women hated me. She reacted badly to this so I apologized and told her my symptoms.

She gave me some antibiotics, some cough syrup with codeine, and a ridiculous lecture about my attitude. She told me that there was a time to be stoic and a time to be vulnerable. Except she said “vunerable” without the L. That was the last straw. I felt a visceral* repugnance for this doctor, who then went on to ask “What are you doing for yourself?” I am always disgusted by that question and I  don’t like to lower myself to answer it. I told her, Well, I write.

She said, “That doesn’t count. I mean, like music.”

*The word for this week is visceral.

Kelly Bensimon, on why her Playboy photos don’t feature gratuitous shots of her genitals:

“I don’t think that part of a woman’s body is really evocative. The roundness of the hips, the buttocks, the breast, the shoulders, the clavicle, the hair, the teeth–those are things that I think are most evocative and provocative parts of the body. So I don’t think it’s really necessary to show that.”

Tavi G. on her first ever ‘aha’ fashion moment:

“I think one I can pinpoint is Comme des Garcons fall 2009. That collection made me cry, and I was just seeing it online.”

Karen Finley as Jackie Kennedy, in her new one-woman show, “The Jackie Look:”

“Please release me. Please don’t look at me.”