Godammit, I’m Mad!

In the current New Yorker, there is a long profile of the performance artist Marina Abramovic that caused me to wonder: Is my life actually Art?

Abramovic has been provoking and shocking people for thirty years. Next week, MOMA is hosting a retrospective of her work, with actors performing some of her most famous “pieces.” That alone is controversial; even her former collaborator and lover, Uwe Laysiepen, thinks it’s fundamentally dishonest to recreate performance art.

Most of Abramovic’s art has involved subjecting herself to pain and humiliation (a genre called ordealism.) Reading about it, you can’t help but feel that this art is beyond parody. My favorite piece is the one where she scrubbed a roomful of rotting, maggot-infested cow bones on her hands and knees, sobbing while video’s of her parents were projected on the walls of the “space.”

In another early piece, she stood still while the audience was offered a wide array of implements with which to torment her.

At MOMA, she will mount a work called “The Artist is Present,” in which she will sit still at a table for ten hours a day, staring into space, throughout the retrospective. Audience members may choose to sit opposite her at the table.

Here is the thing: I personally sit staring into space for MORE THAN TEN HOURS A DAY! I never thought of this as Art, but now I’m mulling it over. Maybe it is Art,  a sort of confrontation with time and eternity, a refusal to interact with gainful employment, and therefore a statement about the subjugation of of modern Man, I mean Women.

Read the article in the New Yorker if you possibly can. It’s a transformative experience that doesn’t even require you to get up off your ass!

Most recently, Sea was thrilled to acquire a garish coat that matched the dowdy skirt she had earlier obtained from a shop in Dallas. Now she can wear them together and look like a kooky bag lady from the 70s.

More important, in my opinion, is the price of her new brogues, pictured above. Barneys is nice enough to send me catalogues even though I never go there, and now in the latest catalog, uh-oh,  Sea’s shoes, priced at $795. No wonder she was so excited when they arrived!

Sea and Mom show no signs of slowing down this frenzy of spending. It’s not Sea’s fault, though. She is the Bristol to Mom’s Sarah. She hasn’t had a chance to learn anything about anything. If only Mom would let her watch TV! I don’t believe for a minute that Sea’s other blog is her own project. The nudity, the KKK, the horrible fish. It seems like the work of a demented pedophile.

Oh well. Sea doesn’t want to hear your comments, but you can leave them here anyway. I’ll go first:

Dear Sea, Why those Comme des Garcons saddle shoes for $795?? Remember you just got those Givenchy flats for $450! It’s good that you’re not worried about money but it’s also good to just “live.” (That’s the stuff people do when they’re not shopping or posing or tweeting.) I don’t think I’m ever going to get through to you but I’ll keep trying.  Maybe you should read Gravity’s Rainbow again. Bye for now, love, SW.

Thong strap, zippers, folded cuffs, snaps, fake weaving, six inch heels….what, no kitchen sink?

Remember how in The September Issue, Anna Wintour cringes and says, “We don’t use [the word] bootie?”  Ha. Anna, you’re too sensitive. Try saying “Moto Bootie.”

The Lana Moto Bootie by Dolce Vita. $275

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.

Once upon a time, Mrs. Palin was just a poor innocent little girl whose only friends were a pair of huge prawns. As she grew up with only a voracious appetite for power to substitute for intellect, she turned her back on those faithful prawns. She found herself a baby with Down Syndrome and decided to use it as both sword and shield.

She found out that a TV show called Family Guy made a joke about her. She went and made her daughter Bristol write a crybaby communique on Facebook, complaining that the Family Guy writers were heartless jerks. Waaah!

But Mrs. Palin and Bristol were too retarded dumb to figure out that the Down Syndrome character in the family Guy episode was portrayed as a normal young woman out on a date! A woman who assertively instructs her date to pay more attention to her needs.

The actress who gave voice to that character has spoken out. Yay! She doesn’t know why Mrs. Palin has no sense of humor. And she doesn’t know why Mrs. P is so mad.  She explains: “I’m like, I’m not Trig.”

YES! She is not Trig. Can we have a fucking moratorium on Trig? No? Then, how about an organized opposition among the disabled community against being used to further the agenda of a delusional megalomaniac? Our “special needs” kids are regular people, not Perfect Little Gifts From God to stop everyone from having the option of abortion.

~

I am working on a word salad to represent all that is repellent about Mrs. P.  I’m not finished yet, but so far it goes like this:

Our great country full of real people, real people who have to put fresh moose protein on the table, not to be lectured by a Harvard lawyer, but also too the terrorists who seek to hide behind our great constitution, where Putin and others like him may wish to use Death Panels to kill my precious baby, unlike the real America, real hard workin’ Americans, if you just let the private sector do its work, use some of those good decent common sense values, like those out on the north Slope, those written by our Founding Fathers, I can tell you as a mother of five who chose Life along with some good natural Alaskan moose with which this great country is so rich in natural old and gas, we can make America great again. God bless you!

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.”

I’ve always loved literary feuds, and now there’s a new one, between Andrew Sullivan and Leon Wieseltier.  Because the two men were once very close friends, their rift seems especially bitter.

I love Andrew Sullivan  because he was a vocal detractor of Mrs. Palin from the very beginning. He is also a Trig Truther, and has taken a lot of shit for it.  Leon Wieseltier, his former mentor, has accused him of being anti-Semitic.

I hope their feud goes on for a while longer, but I hope they make up in the end.  If their feud is too dry and political for you, you might like the Fax Feud between Camille Paglia and Julie Burchill, which degenerates quickly into hilarious name calling. It’s probably my all-time favorite.

Luckily, some literary feuds have been preserved on YouTube, like this one between William Buckley and Gore Vidal, where Buckley flips out and calls Vidal a “queer.”

Years ago, I enjoyed starting feuds in newsgroups, posting under the name “Latasha’P.” They area still search-able via Google groups. I managed to turn the men against the women by constantly referring to My Period. Ah, those were the days.

I’m glad that Feuding hasn’t become a lost art. A good feud is so bracing! I’ve noticed that no matter how provoking or obnoxious Sister Wolf is, no worthwhile feuds have developed. They are not for the timid, I guess. Or maybe  it’s because  everyone knows that deep down, I’m the nicest person on earth!

Mrs. Palin is calling for Obama to fire his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, for calling a group of liberals “fucking retarded” during a private meeting.

How dare that big Jew use this hateful slur in a private meeting?!?

In a sanctimonious rant on her Facebook page, entitled “Are You Capable of Decency, Rahm Emanuel?”, Mrs. P compares his use of the word retarded to the use of “the N word.” She goes on to say: “Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities – and the people who love them – is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking.”

Jesus, this woman is a piece of work. She is beneath shameless. Is there a word for that (besides “cunt?”) She even asks in her idiotic Facebook screed, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”  I know that she employs a ghostwriter for her Facebook communiques, but what do you think the chance is that Mrs. Palin knows who made that phrase famous, and in what context?  If she did know, would she be stupid enough to compare Rahm Emanuel to Joseph McCarthy?

I don’t like the way Mrs. P has positioned herself as the public defender of the disabled. Just because she happened to get herself a Down Syndrome baby, she doesn’t get to represent Down Syndrome. Her exploitation of her child’s disability is deeply immoral. This photo of her, posing with a “constituent,” is what’s heartbreaking.

Sometimes, in private, we use words that others might find offensive. I know I like to scream “you fat pig” at people on TV, for example.  The first time I heard Bob Woodward on television, I asked my husband, “Is that guy retarded?” It was a real question: Woodward speaks very slowly. Every time he’s on TV now, my kid or my husband calls out, “There’s that retarded guy.”

Big fucking deal. I am a special needs mom, and I know where my heart is. I don’t need some self-appointed Queen of the Disabled Community to scold me or Rahm Emanuel.

Does that retarded bitch have no decency?

Sea has been very busy with “work”, but here we find her taking a well-earned rest, covered fetchingly with nothing but a curated fur coat. Note the cascade of streaky hair.  Would a mother take such a photo of her teenage daughter? Surely not. So….did Sea pose for herself? Or for the gay boyfriend?

In other news, Sea confided that she didn’t really have a pair of casual flats, so she obtained/acquired a pair of studded Givenchy ballet shoes that are currently available at Barneys for $450.  A girl needs flats, right? $450 is really pretty reasonable, when you think about it.  It’s a steal, in fact.

Sea also confides that she’s sick and tired of the bad weather. Maybe it’s hard to shop in the rain. Where is a Margiela raincoat when you need one, for fuck sake? If only Mom would buy a TV!

If you need to leave a comment for Jane, this is your chance, since her ban on comments is still in effect. I’ll go first:

Dear Sea, the pose in the fur coat is an unfortunate development. Don’t ruin your brand by playing the slut card! Find a good colorist who can fix the hair, I’m sure they have one in Texas, or call Chanel to see if they’ll send one from Paris. Love, xo SW