Godammit, I’m Mad!

I was amazed that Amy WInehouse actually made it to the concert for Nelson Mandela. Just days ago at death’s door, she looked like a little Q-tip under her giant hair. Not only did she wear that crazy Blake thing in her beehive, but during her wailing rendition of the old anthem “Free Nelson Mandela” she substituted the lyrics: “Free Blakey, my fella!”

Hahaha! Amy is nuts but godammit I love her. If only we could save her!

You can watch her performance here. Listen up at 5:25 for the shout out to Blake Incarcerated.

In this new reality show, eight women with “differing disabilities” will compete before a panel of judges to prove they have what it takes to be a mainstream model.

Huh?

Is there something wrong with me or is there something wrong with this premise for a show?

On the one hand, I support the disability rights movement. On the other, I’m squeamish about any fetishistic appreciation of the disabled. It feels like exploitation to me, even when the disabled person is so willingly seeking the attention. One of the contestants on the show will be Debbi, who has recently posed for Playboy and says she’s met more men since she lost her arm than before. Here’s Debbi.

This whole thing is making me feel like a cunt for not celebrating the moxie or whatever it is that drives these disabled women. They’re kind of pissing me off, in fact. It’s like, I’m missing a toenail, so why don’t I try to be a foot model? Or, My voice has a limited range, so why don’t I compete to sing opera?

No, those are bad analogies. And that guy who “needs” to be paralyzed is going to be mad at me again.

Can anyone help me to articulate what is wrong with this show? Or if not that, what’s wrong with me?*

*No saying It’s because I’m a cunt, since I’ve already admitted it a million times.

Spidery things are on my radar today. I’m proud to say that I have no fear of spiders. I’m afraid of squirrels and rodents and midgets, but spiders are nothing. I enjoy killing them. I’ve even sprayed them with gold paint, just to make them ornamental for a moment.

Here is a spider web t-shirt from Urban Outfitters. If I were 20 years old, I would definitely want this shirt.

More problematic are these shoes by John Galliano. There are reduced from $850 to only $150, and they are available in my size, an enormous and crowd-pleasing size 40. The thing is, I would never wear them. I know from experience that I’d just add them to my Museum of Shoes I Can’t Walk In. On the other hand, wouldn’t they make a nice addition to the collection?

Isn’t it sad that I am mostly reacting to the original price? I want to save $700!

I read some thing at Time magazine online, about people who are trying to live with only 100 things. It’s a concept that I find very appealing and also terrifying. I probably have 100 hair products. Maybe I could throw some out, though. And then I could buy the shoes.

No matter how much time passes, The Manson Family endures as the epitome of depraved evil. It just never gets old. This week, a new documentary about Roman Polanski has been playing on TV every night. Now, Manson murderess Susan Atkins is seeking parole, with a request for a “compassionate release” from prison. Atkins, now 59, is terminally ill with brain cancer. She says she has 6 months to live, and she has been a model prisoner.

A story about this in the L.A. Times has generated 750 comments. People obviously still feel strongly about the the Manson murders. But maybe there is support for the idea of redemption through serving “God,” which Atkins has done with the same zealous commitment she once reserved for Charlie Manson.

Susan Atkins runs a ministry and donates her prosaic artwork to good causes. She has even found two men to marry her during her incarceration!

And just like everybody, she has her own website. I laughed out loud when I saw the heading “Accomplishments.” Her accomplishments are listed in minute detail. I’d love someone to make a similar list of my accomplishments, like “Sister Wolf participated in watching TV without stabbing anyone.”

Susan, I’m sorry about your brain cancer but shit happens. You should have read “The Secret” instead of stabbing a pregnant woman in the stomach and drinking her blood.

Finally, I was shaken to the core by hearing a demo of Charles Manson singing one of his own compositions. He actually had a great voice! Isn’t that awful?!?

Just when I was considering the possibility of throwing some shit out, I come across a group of compulsive collectors, thanks to Men.Style.com. I was looking for Philip Grangi, a jewelry designer, and discovered that he is a self-described “Avid Materialist” who can’t resist collecting things, even from dumpsters.

I personally have too many ‘collections’ but not as many as Philip Crangi. He is seized with a sudden urge to collect something and then scours the city for it. I like how unabashed he is about his compulsions. He admits that he’d rather put stuff in storage, where he can’t even see it, than sell any of it. Naturally, he loves and collects taxidermy. Who doesn’t, at this point? I’m ready to approach someone at the next cocktail party with the conversation-opener “So how much taxidermy do you own?”

On this same site, you can meet artist Hunt Slonem, who is also an Avid Materialist, but on a much grander scale. He makes Andy Warhol look like a slacker, collection-wise. You need to see the video clip to grasp Hunt Slonem’s delightful mania for color and collecting.

And then I came across these two guys who have a clothing company called Barking Irons. They are the ultimate New York Hipsters. Silly caps, long scarves, fingerless gloves, facial hair, the whole shebang. They collect old Victorian shit and they’re “obsessed with Authenticity.” One of them holds an old whiskey bottle and starts rhapsodizing about it. Why do I hate them? Oh, right, I’m a cunt!

I am exhausted from all the obsession. Anyone out there collect anything that isn’t taxidermy?

There I was, minding my own business, and by that I mean I was trying to research a disorder called somatoparaphrenia, when I came across a blog called Transabled.org.

It’s like a mini-mother lode for anyone who’s ever been curious about Body Integrity Identity Disorder. You know, the one where people feel that they can’t be happy unless they have a limb amputated. You have to love it. I actually saw a documentary about it, featuring several British guys with BIID.  The Britishness was an excellent counterpoint to the disorder: It was like a surreal Monty Python sketch.

Anyway, over at this blog, there is a discussion about the disabled community’s ‘ableism’ in refusing to acknowledge the transabled as deserving of sympathy. Since ‘transabled’ is defined in the blog as ‘wanting to be disabled,’ you can see the problem.

I love disorders! Somatoparaphrenia is the delusion that one of your limbs belongs to someone else, like your doctor or even a stranger.  It could be useful, like if you punch someone in the face you could blame your doctor! Or in my case, I could tell my husband that my new tattoo (which he hates) is actually on the wrist of someone we don’t even know!

I’ll try this when he gets home.

For a long time, I’ve been thinking about introducing some of my more obscure Objects of Hatred, for anyone interested in post-graduate Hating. I’m talking about raising the bar for those who seek more people to hate besides Chloe Sevigny or Selma Blair. That kind of hating is child’s play, after all. Everyone hates those two, it doesn’t take any brains or discernment.

My first Object of Hatred in this advanced curriculum is the one and only horror known as Liz Goldwyn. She is the granddaughter of film mogul Samuel Goldwyn and therefore has a huge trust-fund. She has used her buying power to divest eBay and the auction houses of all the best vintage gowns on the market.

So unrelenting is her hunger for more vintage finery that she courted some aging burlesque artists in order to get to their priceless spangled costumes. In her documentary about them, she pretends to have some kind of sociological interest in stripping. What she really wants is to get her hands on the clothes. The best part of the documentary is when a savvy old stripper tells her to forget about getting any of her outfits. She sees right through the horrible greed and manipulation.

I hated Liz Goldwyn before the documentary and I hate her each time I see her name. She recently “sourced” some crappy vintage sweater clips for the shop Opening Ceremony in Los Angeles. When I saw them, I sneered to the sales person, “Did you know you can get these at the VIntage Fashion Expo for around ten or fifteen dollars?” Liz has priced them at something outrageous but I’ve forgotten the figure.

Now to make matters worse, I’ve come across a video clip of Liz visiting the guest house of Tony Duquette, a brilliantly over-the-top designer whose close friend Hutton Wilkinson manages the Duquette estate. If you watch the video, you can see how much Liz wants to keep the jewelry Wilkinson shows her.

She has ‘designed’ her own jewelry for Barneys, and it looks like Duquette-on-a-budget. I fucking hate her. Too much money in the hands of an acquisitive narcissistic bitch like Liz Goldwyn makes the world a tiny bit worse for the rest of us. She has plundered the earth’s finite stores of Vintage treasures, and now she’s messing with Tony Duquette.

I hate Liz Goldwyn and now you can, too!

This is a clip from an episode of This American Life, currently playing on Showtime. It’s called ‘Never gotten a break’ and it’s the story of a young man with a degenerative muscular disease that leaves him nearly paralyzed and connected to breathing tubes. We meet Mike at age 27.

I watched the show with my husband, both of us transfixed in horror at Mike’s situation. At this point, Mike is no longer able to speak and uses a cursor to laboriously type out his thoughts. We noticed that Mike had a pierced eyebrow and wore purple nail polish. He literally coudn’t do anything, but he still wanted to effect an ‘alternative’ style.

We were even more flabbergasted when we learned that Mike has a girlfriend. I guess she answered an ad he placed online. So here’s this guy, for all intents a vegetable, but he has a girlfriend! It was fascinating. Then our TV froze and we couldn’t watch the end of the episode. For awhile, I whined to my husband, “Get me the cripple back!” but it couldn’t be done.

Then last night we were able to see the rest of Mike’s story. His girlfriend broke up with him and he became deeply depressed. He didn’t know if it was worthwhile to keep living. He nearly became addicted to pain killers but his mother manged to wean him off of them.

Then, Mike agreed to take out his breathing tube so that he could speak for a minute or two. With great difficulty, Mike answered a question. Suddenly, I saw that Mike was a person, not a thing. He seemed to have a nice personality….a cool guy, in fact. He told his girlfriend, who had come back to him, that he loved her.

I was devastated. It was easy to mock him when he wasn’t a real person. Now I see that this guy has lived his life with more courage and determination than I can even imagine. He is a fucking hero of the first order. Try to see this piece and renew your sense of humility, gratitude and wonder.

I went to a dinner party and someone’s sister-in-law sat on my Vivienne Westwood handbag. I believe I have post traumatic stress disorder due to this event, and I’d like to sue her fat ass to kingdom come. There’s a photo of the bag somewhere here if you want to better understand the Horror.

Meanwhile, I’m resorting to my big Paul Smith bag from January 2007, and everyone will think I’m a dope who just jumped on the Yellow Bandwagon. Hmph, as if. I’ve even started wearing my yellow shoes just to show that I’m not afraid to match my accessories. Sister Wolf makes her own rules, Godammit.

Please take a moment to pray for my injured bag, may she fully recover her former glory, amen.

I am apparently too hardened and jaded to feel bad for the crazy Mormon wives who want their children back. Like Pink Floyd says, “Leave those kids alone!” I am especially taken with the wife who led the tour of the “compound,” who resembles a young Frida Kahlo with her unibrow. Maybe the women can be de-programmed and make use of their pompadours to become rockabilly chicks?

Anyway, over here I found these two photos that suggest Marc Jacobs is thinking “Cult Wives” for fall 08.