Godammit, I’m Mad!

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.

Cheap Monday, the Swedish fashion line that brought you those $65 jeans that make you look (and feel) like a sausage, has come up with a garment that looks just like a hefty bag.

I know everybody loves the Cheap Monday jeans, but I hate them. I’d rather pay a ton of money for my jeans and have them fit well and enhance my butt if possible. I also like the absence of brand logos and weird embroidery on the back pockets.

Swedish designers are otherwise really impressive at the moment. Whyred is pretty cool and of course Acne is, too. Even though they wouldn’t let me have the bondage-like shoes of my dreams, which are actually quite hideous and can be purchased in white here at eluxury.com.

And on the subject of bondage and shoes, check out these by Natacha Marro, from House of Harlot, where everything is totally fabulous, tempting and not quite affordable.

Even though I spend aimless hours on the internet, sometimes until my eyes burn, I’m not addicted to it. According to this test, anyway.

I guess you’re not addicted until you say “LOL” in real life conversations. Some guy somewhere starved to death because he was playing a game online. What an idiot! Why couldn’t he eat at his computer, like the rest of us?

I watched “Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project” on Sundance last night, unprepared for its intensity. It was described as a documentary about a model-turned-photographer who takes pictures of her schizophrenic mother.

Like “Tarnation,” it sucked me in from the very beginning. It only took a few minutes for me to form the opinion that Tierney Gearon is just as crazy as her 64 year old mother, if not more so. She gets her mother to stand outside in the freezing snow,  wildly taking snapshots as the older woman pleads to go back inside.

Watching this documentary is excruciating but endlessly fascinating. It forces one to confront ideas about motherhood, family, mental illness, and exploitation.

Tierney wants to be a good mother, but when her child sobs, her instinct is to photograph him rather than comfort him. She literally uses her new baby as a prop. But she clearly enjoys an intimacy with her children that is really extraordinary. She speaks to them honestly, and joyously takes part in their games, even when it means letting them jump over her as she lays on the grass, hugely pregnant.

Tierney’s mother is a vibrant old lady who lives alone in a ramshackle house and occasionally lashes out at her manipulative daughter. At one point she screams at Tierney, “I gave you everything! All my love and my beauty! But you won’t help me, you bitch!”  It’s a moment of bitter raw emotion, which cuts to the heart of the matter, I think.

Mothers who do their best are still not good enough, and crazy mothers leave their mark. Craziness runs through Tierney Gearon’s family like a virus, but she doesn’t see it. I worry for her three kids, who will undoubtedly struggle with her craziness and their own, in the end. They will probably become parents of crazy children. Nature loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger. In this family, like so many, the trigger is pulled over and over.

The photos that made Tierney a figure of controversy are beautiful and disturbing. It’s hard to see how they could have been considered pornographic. But she does manage to imbue her pictures with an ineffable weirdness that makes a family picnic look like a satanic ritual. She seems like a courageous survivor who would eat her own kids if they got stranded on a desert island.

Watch this movie if you’re up to it. You can buy it on Amazon.com.

This guy will paint your portrait with his penis.

I’m sorry!

“You think this will be so glamorous,” she sighs. “You have the idea in your mind and then you get there and the people in the hotel …” She grimaces and gestures hugely in the hip area. “There were lots of people who were so fat and like that.”

Carine Roitfeld, editor of French Vogue, on her recent visit to Thailand.