This article originally appeared in the New York Times in 2009.

AFTER at least 40 days and 40 nights of nonstop rain, there were, for the first time in what seemed like millennia, no umbrellas on Madison Avenue just luxuries bathed in sunshine, and the gilded personages who buy them.

I do not consider myself an envious person. I manage to live a rather fortunate bohemian life and often indulge myself far beyond my means. But there have been rare and memorable moments when I have been made acutely, grindingly and painfully aware of how great it would be to inherit an obscene amount of money.

Once or twice a decade, I see an object so covetable that it absolutely cramps my soul not to own it. Photos of Cher’s infinity pool overlooking the Pacific made my spleen throb for nearly five years. (Coincidentally, I opened a magazine yesterday and read that Cher’s Malibu estate, with the pool in question, is on the market for $45 million.)

I thought I would be safe when I was assigned to visit the jewelry boutique of Solange Azagury-Partridge. Most jewelry, to my mind, looks slightly vulgar, a somewhat primitive display of conspicuous wealth. I own little more than a handful of yawn-inspiring basics: pearls, a signet ring — mostly from pawnshops. I was prepared to focus my attentions straight into the precious rocks and enjoy the little prismatic light shows. I was not prepared to suffer from a raw and unquenchable envy that would make me consider extra moneymaking strategies like kidnapping/extortion or piracy.

I rang the doorbell before noon and was swarmed upon by a phalanx of attractive saleswomen in cocktail dresses who seemed uneasy when taking in my shredded jeans and Converse low-tops. Since I was the only nonemployee in the store, I promptly outed myself as a New York Times reporter. ( It would have been impossible to take notes, otherwise.)

“Do you have a card?” a gorgeous saleswoman in black chiffon asked with a brusqueness that could slice through chain saws.

I don’t carry a card, and their eyes began to swivel. I began stuttering through my explanation: I’m supposed to be anonymous, I ... I ...

Their body language suggested I would not be allowed past the doormat. (It has happened before that some shops are less than overjoyed at the prospect of my visit.) I finally stammered out something that sounded vaguely like a threat, which had them holding their hands up in “Whoa!” positions and assuring me that I would be allowed free run of the place.

“Oh, I thought you were on the verge of throwing me out!” I said, pinkly embarrassed.

“You’re paranoid,” Ms. Brusque said, with a charmlessness ordinarily reserved for sorority hazings. I was relieved that the warm and lovely Josephine Campanella was elected to squire me around instead.

Ms. Azagury-Partridge, according to her publicity material, has had no formal training in jewelry design, but she didn’t need it. Her work explodes with energy, brilliance, sensuality and courage. It is thrillingly exuberant, scary-smart and intensely personal. She has so clearly thrown every atom of herself into the creation of these pieces, you can feel the fiery presence of a remarkable woman. It’s art, and I’m not the only one who thinks so; the Louvre and the Victoria and Albert Museum have acquired her work for their collections.

The shop interior, its deep red walls embedded with 630,000 Swarovski crystals, looks somewhat like the opera set for “The Magic Flute,” reimagined by Marchesa Casati: goth-Freemason with a touch of chinoiserie thrown in, just to drop-kick me over into nosebleeds of unfulfillable desire.

The pieces range from the quasi-affordable enamel Hot Lips rings, in a dark rainbow of shades ($1,500; or a studded-all-over-with-rubies version, $24,000) to the maybe-if-you-just-sold-out-an-eight-year-run-in-Vegas, like the Galactic necklace, which looks like a diamond breastplate King Tut might have given to Elizabeth Taylor ($350,000).

Some popular pieces are pendants: an anatomically-shaped Heart of Gold in 18 karats is $6,800; the Bleeding Heart version of the same, dipped in red enamel, is $8,200.

But this wasn’t the stuff that really got me going. I know sacred geometry when I see it, and there was a whole lot of golden ratios and fearful symmetry going on.

The Platonic line, for example, looks like your average batch of Art Deco diamond creations. Closer inspection reveals more than meets the eye: the blackened gold and bead-set diamonds seem to have been modeled on a sideways variation of Johannes Kepler’s platonic solid model of our solar system. (An ultra-geeky thrill.)

The designer did sneak a couple of Archimedean solids into her Platonic line. (Naughty girl. I bet she thought her shoppers wouldn’t notice an extra polygon here and there.) But I was delighted, because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said that there just aren’t enough truncated cuboctahedrons and rhombicuboctahedrons to be found in jewelry today.

The lovely Ms. Campanella showed me her bracelet, a diamond cuff made into the kabbalah Tree of Life symbol. It filled me with such inexpressible spiritual pleasure that I had a nearly irresistible urge to mug her.

ON the subway home, I noticed that the tattoo-esque logo for Solange includes a honeybee sitting in the middle of what looked like an early design by the 17th-century mystic Jakob Böhme: a flaming tetractys. The honeybee, of course, constructs hive cells in hexagons, which, for some people, suggests that geometry has some deep cosmic significance in the natural world.

When I got home, I noticed an enormous rainbow out my window (a nice coincidence, considering it was gay pride day). The rainbow, at least, was free and democratic, and shone upon the gay, the unemployed and those who can afford to buy exquisite jewelry by Solange Azagury-Partridge alike.

So, until we can figure out how to geometrically deprive rich people of rainbows, we must all do as a post on lifelounge.com succinctly put it: Sell a kidney, girls.

SO LUXE The former creative director of Boucheron, whose designs are beloved of rock stars, Vogue editors and movie moguls alike, brings her vast intelligence and superb eye to those fortunate enough to afford her glorious creations.

SOLAR Much of the store’s visual theme has a distinctly pagan bent: white gold zodiac signs, enamel rams’ heads. Ideal for the numerologist in your life, but leave your evangelical aunt in Texas.

SO LOUNGE Ms. Azagury-Partridge also designs home furnishings and richly colored, distinctly Frank Stella-like rugs. It’s all bloody gorgeous and totally out of reach, but I hereby will that my cremains be stored in one of her green onyx ashtrays.

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At a point in my forties, after the demise of another disastrous relationship, I came to a realization I had never quite grokked before at such a deep, internalized level:

Holy shit, I thought. Men really, really hate us.

This hit me with a bone deep certainty.

I had been applying semiotics to fashion retail ads for a while, and I stumbled on a Marc Jacobs ad somewhere - VOGUE probably. It was a picture of a woman in a sun dress. She was laying in the dark in a park with her dress flipped up, her face dirty and her purse open beside her with its contents dragged out and seemingly strewn around her by animals. It looked like the girl had been raped and strangled to death, and abandoned to the elements.

How the fuck does this sell handbags? I asked myself.

Then I got into the psychology of motivation, and I got one of the worst shocks of my life. On some deep shadow level, I learned, men all want to rape and kill us. That wasn’t the worst of the realization. The worst was this: on a subconscious motivational level, women are hard wired to want what men want, up to and including our own rape and murder.

I had just escaped 2 horrible relationships — one with a sadistic French defense contractor, and another guy I’d known since I was 18 who ended up stalking me.

Well, fuck that, I thought. I went on strike.

I’ve spent so much of my long dating life as a doormat for malignant narcissists. Most of them dated me because I was attractive or well-known in writing circles — not because they actually cared about me. For years I felt like I ended up being the projection screen onto which asshole boyfriends broadcast old movies of every woman in their lives they ever hated.

Unless something or someone really shakes them to the core, men don’t seem to have much truck with maturity or emotional development. It’s not something they feel they need, because for the most part, the world, including women, rotates around their bullshit.

So I thought to myself, “Why the fuck am I ‘keeping it tight’ for men?” And so I stopped going to the gym. I couldn’t figure out a single reason why I’d want to work out for myself. It all seemed like another hard-wired rapey motivation I didn’t want to deal with anymore. Why should I be sexually attractive? To attract MEN? I’d utterly had it with men.

I let myself go completely. I started dressing in battered workwear I called my “Lesbian Boiler Repair” look and let my cousin give me a terrible haircut. I put on 40 pounds of emotionally protective weight. All together, it was a look which discouraged sex entirely. A fashion statement that said, “I will bite it off, sailor.”

When I went out to bars I pretended I was a butch lesbian, and found I had some of the best conversations with straight men I had ever had. They treated me like a bro, and I was shocked to find out how nice men can be when they have no inkling of fucking you.

When I interviewed Chaz Bono, he told me the same thing. He was astounded by how nice straight men are to each other. (He also said that since becoming a man, he had little patience for women talking. It became an annoying, chattering sound.)

This battered, wounded mindset continued for about ten years, most of which I spent in bed watching reruns of “Ink Master” and drinking White Claw. I didn’t, at the time, realize I was living a trauma response to repeated and prolonged narcissistic abuse. Bed rot took over, and I must confess I largely enjoyed every minute of it.

A shift slowly started happening, when I did a thorough investigation of what I thought men were and what I expected them to be, and realized that men just weren’t built that way. A male-dominated society and its various rom coms had set me up for emotional ruin. I realized I was suffering from the Cinderella Complex writ large, despite the fact that I have always maintained that a lost glass slipper often contains a human foot. I’ve left my pumpkin coach burning next to the freeway onramp more than once.

Fortunately I have a number of fantastic male friends who I love. They broke shit down for me. I adjusted my expectations and tried to learn how to appreciate men for what they actually are instead of what I stupidly wished they were.

I still didn’t want to work out in a gym anymore though. It seemed stupid and futile — and I was a bushy-tailed personal trainer in my twenties. Gyms and their equipment felt stale, soulless and corporate — the office gerbil solution to physical fitness.

Then, one day a couple of years ago while house-sitting at my scumbag uncle’s beach estate, I took a handful of magic mushrooms. It was one of the best experiences of my entire life.

I realized, permanently, that man is a contiguous element of nature. Nature is not outside of ourselves. We are nature.

This cheered me up immensely. I started walking outside a lot more often, despite my Gothic propensity to avoid sunlight at all costs.

The stuck wheel of my life seemed to slowly creak forward since then, and has been gaining speed ever since.

My opinion of men is largely benign, these days. Those poor fuckers just don’t have the inner strength to keep it in their pants.

My body, however, seems to be making a surprising comeback lately.

I’ve been on the GLPs for several months now, and I have lost over 20 pounds. Not being fat anymore feels like quite the glow-up. I’ve been doing yoga and dance workouts with weights on YouTube in my living room, and walking whenever possible in the tremendous Oakland redwoods, and/or walking the 3.5 mile sidewalk around Lake Merritt. What is most thrilling is feeling my stamina improve. My roommate and I are shopping for a treadmill. It’s feeling really good.

It’s got nothing to do with men, this new affair with fitness. It also has nothing to do with health, since I can’t afford to live to be very old. Now it’s strictly for the negative ions and the endorphins, which, I finally remembered, have a captivating high.

I’m a sucker for captivating highs.

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Yeah and then hire me as an editor so it makes bloody sense.

This piece originally appeared in the New York Times in 2010.

LIKE any Frenchman worth his fleur de sel, the new Pierre Hardy boutique immediately poses challenging questions.

Like, where is it?

Monsieur Hardy, an intriguing artist on several fronts, came to shoes after scholarly forays into fashion illustration, dance and scenography. In the store literature, he proclaims that he eschews nostalgia and history, preferring to find inspirations for his futuristic footwear through design and conceptual art.

In an architectural sense, the shop is so understated as to be virtually invisible: a wall of dark topaz glass is inset several feet from the sidewalk, with no identifying markings. This is the kind of cold, tinted slickness generally preferred by military contractors around Arlington, Va. At first glance, the shop might be the front office for an international weaponry brokerage, an illegal plastic surgery cult or perhaps an entertainment law office-slash-sex dungeon. The (presumed intentional) effect is to cause the shopper to question her own validity. Should she potentially corrupt the space inhabited by these rarefied shoes by insinuating herself into it, or should she should let all her credit cards slide from her fingers into the middle of West Fourth Street, lie down on them and succumb to a coma of existential ambivalence?

M. Hardy’s aesthetics of disinvitation are reaffirmed by the fact that there does not appear to be an actual door. Getting inside requires more than galvanizing a certainty of one’s metaphysical being; the determined shopper is forced to hurl her full body weight across panels of amber glass until a secret hinge eventually yields, allowing her to stumble inside, stripped of pride and balance. It is a somewhat Masonic experience; you realize that there were no witnesses to your fall from grace because everyone who works there seems to be somewhere in the back, and it’s really dark in there (and therefore grace arguably never hath left you).

The floors are black leather strips cut and arranged to resemble wood planks; the benches are black powder-coated industrial I-beams. Gray shoebox-size cubes appear to have crystallized like raw lithium formations in corners of the space. This is where constellations of M. Hardy’s signature items are displayed: unisex suede desert boots ($490) and high-top sneakers with Velcro ankle straps, in kicky flavors like heathery flannel, charcoal patent leather, gold lamé ($520).

The staff, once inspired to participate, is particularly lovely and laid-back in that casually hospitable, elegant French way — no fussiness or pretense, and a rather effortless way of dealing with customers.

At one point, I heard thumping and fluttering and looked toward the street, thinking that perhaps a rash of adolescent doves had performed a group suicide against the window. But no. An incognito Andy Samberg and a comely model-slash-actress seemed to be leaving mime handprints all over the glass, apparently having the same problem I had with the Zen koan of the doorless door. We watched in silence until they passed the initiation and lurched inside.

I stalked the couple for about 10 minutes before realizing that despite a distinctly Sambergian hair, face and parka combination, this young man was an imposter, who had obviously lured his comely date into the (Pierre) Hardy of Darkness hoping that the dearth of lighting would cause her to continue to believe that he were actually Andy Samberg.

Drawing my attentions back to the footwear, I began to recognize a theme. Many styles for both sexes featured grommet portholes along the sides, laced through with a leather thong: a Ricardo Montalban, Gucci-style loafer in creamy gunmetal suede, for example, featured a Top-Sider bow instead of the classic business tassel. A variation on a women’s shoe I originally dubbed the J-Lo Desert Storm Bootie, a kind of ersatz combat-Timberland with a wooden stiletto heel, had been whimsically retooled into a tactical boot-slash-boating pump, dysfunctional for both armed conflict and yachting.

It was finally explained to me that I was looking at the Cruise collection, which helped me to appreciate M. Hardy’s masterful redesign of the classic jute-soled espadrille ($660), a Cubist red patent wedge with an ankle strap, designed to elongate the leg. They were so tall, I thought they’d be difficult to wear even in a motel bed, but M. Hardy winds a lovely way about the human foot. Even the sight of my own toes was such a pleasant experience I reasoned that they probably weren’t mine. (It was awfully dark in there.)

There were instances of particular beauty — a collection of evening pumps had tiny suede straps webbed about the arch in a kind of beaux-arts crocodile pattern, sprayed all over with such tiny Swarovski crystals as to appear condensed with dew — but the best of show, IMHO, was a highly versatile pair of men’s black patent loafers. These were stripped down and totally elegant, like a vintage car with what low-rider enthusiasts call a “shave job” — all extraneous hardware and chrome is removed from the car, which is then covered in putty and sanded down to its purest shape. It’s the one shoe I’ve seen that I thought could stroll from Levi’s to pinstripes to tuxedo without breaking stride.

Pierre Hardy offers elite, leisure-class footwear for those with enough passive income to support actual leisure time, and such leisurely delicacies as $520 sneakers. The rest of us may find exiting the store a bit less painful than entering, and live to fight another day.

Pierre Hardy

30 Jane Street (West Fourth Street); (646) 449-0070.

HARDY BOYS Pierre Hardy’s new boutique features nimbly architectural, unisexy footwear for the romping dandies and fatal femmes.

NANCY DROOL Prepare to be lulled into dropping over $500 for conceptual jet-set froufrou that is more decorative than on deck.

MYSTERIES As Diane Keaton might say, the space “has such marvelous negative capability.” Bring night-vision goggles to fully appreciate it.

CINTRAW@GMAIL.COM. Full service editing, all the time.

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I have a kind of animist relationship to vehicles. I have motor lust.

Once after selling a book for more money than I am ever likely to receive again, I bought a new VW Passat wagon V6 off the lot, for the sticker price, because I was an idiot back then. I was married, owned a brownstone, had long red hair. I did a lot of yoga and wore sport clogs. I don’t know who the fuck I was back then, and remember very little of that entire life episode. I was a totally different human being, a happily bourgeois wife and homeowner. I didn’t personify or anthropomorphize the Passat. It was too grey, too new, too boring. It had no personality. It was merely a car. When I sold it several years later, it was at one of those lowball joints where you drive your car in and they buy it. I took the lowball and hailed a cab. It was wholly unsentimental.

Then I started choosing cars and motorbikes on the basis of my personal passion for them. Cars with style and character. It’s not something you can give up once you start doing it, despite the numberless financial pitfalls. There’s a kind of love you feel for your soul vehicle which is surely akin to the love animal people feel for dogs or cats or perhaps even children. Nowadays I wince whenever I see a Toyota, only because the owner is leaving so much glory on the table. Getting into your car should be like putting on your favorite pair of dancing shoes. It should give you a little shiver and thrill every time you see it.

First there was my motorcycle Donna, the Ducati Monster 695. The first truly swish vehicle I’d ever owned. My sexual stock instantly went up about 54%. Men ran out of cafes and restaurants into the street to talk to me. I never bought my own drinks again. Nobody can resist a chick on an Italian bike. I felt like a superhero.

The Ducati was so fast it pretty much scared the shit out of me and I stopped riding it after a while. It was eventually stolen, and I was a bit relieved. I’d never been in a wreck, and since it’s a “when not if” proposition on a motorcycle, I hung up my spurs while I was still lucky.

My first real car love was my California poppy orange 2012 Dodge Challenger RT. She was so visceral and so throaty, I named her for her letters: RT, after the opera diva Renata Tibaldi. She sounded so sexy roaring in the fog, with that cold air intake and the gnashing HEMI. Renata smelled like oil on the inside and was a suave, almost ladylike kind of Loud. I liked to “drive like a dick” in it and do the occasional burnout. It was pure muscle, sunshine and fun. She had a pistol-grip manual transmission, racing stripes, and the advantage of my nieces and nephews being able to hear me coming from a block away.

Renata scraped the tilt on every single driveway. One day the radiator just gave up. The engine block cracked and the whole subframe had to be replaced. Thousands later, I had to jack it up with a lift set for normal street movement. It also had terrible visibility, but I loved her, I loved her, I loved her to the bolts.

I had to sell her when I moved back to New York to run the wine bar.

Since I still required something with a glam and fun factor, I bought a black Vespa Primavera for Brooklyn. I felt too chicken to ride a motorcycle anymore - the Vespa was an ideal solution. It was like riding a sexy black lounge chair.

I named her Conchita after deciding she was a temperamental Puerto Rican girl — she threw me into a parked car the third day I owned her. She showed me who was boss. I sold her to a DJ named “Fish” when I opted to move back to California.

My car now is a sexy little German black lady — a hot little coupe named Mona, named after a dancer I once knew. She’s like Lola Falana. She’s older, has some miles on her and a few dings, but my heart flutters every time I see her. I’d say more, but I want to respect her privacy.

The other day my roommate Char-O and I drove over to San Lorenzo to see a used treadmill we were interested in. The owners of the treadmill turned out to be a gorgeous Latino couple who were both classic car enthusiasts. The treadmill was an absolute behemoth — too big for us — but the owners were so hospitable, that when I asked to see their car collection they sweetly obliged.

Opening the garage door was like opening King Tut’s tomb. We saw wonderful, wonderful things.

Inside was a metallic purple 1974 Monte Carlo. The hood was up and a spotless, chrome, supercharged Edelbrock engine gleamed inside. The top and back hood were custom painted in the multiple layer Lowrider custom — abstract geometrical shapes in subtly different colors; a tremendously difficult feat of custom painting.

“It also has hydraulics,” said the husband, and I swooned.

The husband of the couple had been a master mechanic for 30 years at a major car manufacturers — but this was his art, his baby. This was obviously his soul. The time, passion and investment represented in the Monte Carlo was like seeing a great marble statue or a mosque dome — it was love, care, expertise, design talent and devotion, reified.

In the driveway they had three other priceless vehicles. The wife, an expert at embroidery, unfolded her car from its cover: a perfectly cherried out, flawless metallic magenta VW Beetle, lowered, chromed out, exquisitely upholstered — a car for 4 Barbie dolls to pile in and drive to the tattoo parlor.

When the husband uncovered his driveway car — a black 1950 Chevy, the original prototype for the BelAir, I nearly fell into their hedge. This car so closely resembled my all-time dream car — a 1950 Mercury lead sled — I practically did a St. Vitus Dance of spazzed-out enthusiasm on their lawn. The round headlights had chrome eyelids. “You shaved it!” I shouted joyously, noticing that most of the chrome had been stripped from the body, so as to not to distract from the car body’s elegant lines.

The windshield was a two-piece, with a bar in the middle — and the roof projected over it enough to become a visor. The roof was also painted in lavish layers of Lowrider geometry. “That is La Raza, man!” I enthused. They laughed.

Their third car really spoke to the couple’s artistry, for me — a patina’d Volkswagen hatchback, the likes of which I haven’t seen in years— a car that must require constant tinkering and interference, like a diabetic cat. All these cars were labors of ongoing love, talent and automotive mastery.

I know people who think they’re artists, who really aren’t. This couple would not have described themselves as artists, but they absolutely were. It’s the work, it’s the time, it’s the skill and the emotion; their creative spirit was clear and glistening from the loving relationship they had to their beautiful, artistic car-babies. It was downright Holy.

May the Virgin of Guadalupe keep your rubber side down. Alafia.

Cintraw@gmail.com

(This piece first appeared in the New York Times in 2009).

YEARS ago, my clique habituated a Lower East Side restaurant called Hat (translated from El Sombrero for N.Y.C. natives). The enchiladas were O.K.; the main attractions were the cheap margaritas, the salsa jukebox and the nervy, unreasonable mood of the place, largely delivered by the indifferent goth waitress who always wore an enormous black turban. Hat was an oasis of counterculture that soothed feelings of general alienation and dismay by ramping them up a bit, into a pleasingly marginal sense of being beyond the strangling grip of the mainstream.

A subtle cultural revisionism gets enacted by look-makers every time they dust off an era and trot it back out into ready-to-wear. They resurrect the shapes of a decade, but leave out all the guts, glory and street cred. Boho chic brought back the hair, gauzy tunics and chewed denim of the 1960s without all the messy drugs and dissent from which they sprang.

Fashion is currently obsessed with a redux of the New Wave ’80s, which, for the most part, has also been sanitized for your reconsumption. The sleazy, over-stimulated parts were left on the old side of the fin de siècle, and only the off-shoulder Tiffany tops and “Flashdance” leggings were welcomed back to the future. But leaving all the latex, profanity and gender-bending out of the ’80s is the equivalent of plucking only the flowers from the ’60s (daisies and bell-bottoms) and turning off the power by airbrushing out Vietnam. The cultural context that built the mood of the style gets glossed in translation.

In his first boutique, on tree-lined Perry Street in the West Village, the jewelry designer Tom Binns proves he has no problem dredging all the desirable filth out of the ’80s and adding a bit of his own.

The little storefront is painted bright white, an atmosphere redolent of the bordello in “Sid and Nancy.” In the window, a black velvet torso wears a Mr. T tangle of blood-red metallic pearls and is surrounded by stuffed blackbirds.

The first display case has necklaces with long fingers of black crystals strung together like the spokes of kalimbas into New Wave Egyptian deco shapes haute-trash elegance, replete with spray-painted DayGlo orange crystals at the ends, like acrylic nail tips. Fistfuls of Japanese black Pearls in Peril are twisted together with little black chains and secured by multiple safety pins.

The Sex Pistols loom large as an explicit inspiration. Atop Swarovski crystal necklaces recalling the diamond collars worn at beauty pageants and late-’60s film premieres, Mr. Binns has hand-painted the words “Punk,” “Pretty Vacant,” “Rocker” and the anarchy “A.”

The manager, a heavily eyelinered goth princess in a black hoodie, supplied her own flavor of ’80s nostalgia, in that she seemed refreshingly uninterested in promoting the store’s products.

“So,” I asked, “if I was an alien from another planet, what should I know about Tom Binns?”

“Well, there’s been tons of editorial written about him.”

She said this rather finally, implying that I should go home and read this literature. (I did, and found that his pieces have been worn by Michelle Obama, which I found sort of worth mentioning.)

“What’s he like as a person?” I asked.

“Um ...” (Eye roll.) “He’s really different. Like, the way his head works? He loves Morrissey and everything.”

She told an amusing anecdote about how Mr. Binns, who had been trained as a fine artist and welder, ended up in a jewelry class at art school because he noted on the first day that it was “full of birds” and he would be the only male.

I drifted over to the case containing the Tough Chic line: Harley Davidson-type silver jewelry of the variety that seems to grow organically out of the knuckles of Keith Richards cuff bracelets abloom with the usual skulls, wings and four-letter words, but distinguished by cleaner lines and sharper proportions. (The skulls have better bone structure.)

Mr. Binns professes his romantic side with big silver heart pendants impaled by safety pins and pounded through with bent nails, hung on long strings of tiny pearls ($325).

I dubbed a certain collection of mixed metaphors “When Burt Bacharach Was a Skinhead”: punk jewelry blinged up for the red carpet. Studded leather cuffs with heavy sterling fasteners had big, incongruous emerald-cut crystals stuck on them, which works surprisingly well. Sterling slave collars and spiked bangles were sleek enough to be worn with a taffeta banquet gown. I liked a set of Swarovski wrist corsages on stretchy rhodium watchbands and a silver bullet necklace, which would be ideal protection against culture’s recent vampire epidemic.

Best of show, IMHO, were a white leather shoulder bag with hundreds of spiky gold studs (at $1,850, a fine investment piece for those who can still invest) and the Future Fantastic collection, inspired, I was told, by “aliens in Africa.” Gold- and silver-plated, semicircular breastplates had illustrations of gem necklaces engraved into the metal. Barbarian sterling cuffs were etched with black snowflakes. Huge, flat gold and silver half-circle earrings like Cubist ax blades (at the nice price of $175) would look like a zillion dollars on Alek Wek or Grace Jones.

Two key pieces were bouquets of mismatched vintage rhinestone brooches welded into armored neck plates, like the collars worn by Katharine Hepburn’s Eleanor of Aquitaine.

“May I try that on?” I asked the manager, who became visibly uncomfortable.

“Is it not for sale?” I asked.

“Well ... it’s technically sort of for sale,” she stammered. “It’s ... potentially for sale. It’s up for debate as to whether it’s for sale or not.”

O.K.?

“Here’s the thing: It’s, like, $30,000, so if you feel comfortable with that responsibility, that’s fine.”

I was not comfortable with that responsibility and quickly backed away from the piece, as I might a wobbling Ming dynasty vase or a sneezing infant. I fled seconds later.

Tom Binns is good absurdist fun; a macho, roguish approach to jewelry, with a nice appreciation for the birds (both female and stuffed) and a deliberate resurrection of ’80s punk-rock misanthropy, which, like a Hat margarita, can be just the right toxin to cure certain ailments cultural, personal or both.

TOM BINNS

WOULDA BINNS A former metal artist, Tom Binns has converted his fine art talent into jewelry that is unapologetically rock ’n’ roll, with all the Billy Idol sneers and nasty attitude that implies.

COULDA BINNS There is plenty of cool, colorful stuff at decent prices, but if you must spend more, many silver items can be ordered in gold.

RUMMAGE BINNS A necklace of industrial screws, combined with multifaceted crystal globes. A rhinestone bracelet with a radiant aureole of silver zippers. A silver fork-head with pearls dangling from its tines ... the recycling Binns is divine.

CINTRAW@GMAIL.COM

I heard the astrologists saying this Mercury in Retrograde was going to be a real motherfucker, and oh baby was this ever a week from Florida.

It must be said that 99% of the time, I had a terrific time touring with Michelle Shocked. I respected the hell out of her talent, I loved harmonizing with her. We got standing ovations in New York and San Francisco. I loved performing “Krapp’s Last Tape,” which is a masterpiece of Irish sarcasm. She and I got along really well until we didn’t.

I left the tour the day before yesterday. We got in a nasty fight at the Benson hotel in Portland, and I hightailed it into the night to the airport and took the first plane home.

Artists are usually unreconstructed mentally ill people, if they’re worth their salt as artists. That’s usually how it works. I’m no exception. ADHD and other shit aside, I’m a crazy quilt of triggers when it comes to narcissists and/or outright verbal abuse. Nobody gets to speak to me that way ever again, period. I don’t care who you are — I will simply and totally remove myself from the rest of your life.

There were all kinds of red flags. Michelle has what I will generously call an interesting relationship with reality. She hollers at rental car people who she thinks are violating her rights as an American when she won’t remove the black duct tape from the back of her drivers license. I suppose the blacklisting that was a result of her homophobic comments in 2013 did a real number on her head. She picks impossible battles and windmills to joust.

Her logic is completely elliptical. As a former homeless punk teen, she fights like a crackhead with no boundaries, civility or sense whatsoever. As a born again Pentacostal Christian, she “wrestles with God” for about an hour every day.

“Some people are defined by opposition,” said Char-o, my roommate, wisely.

“That’s life with a lady with a mohawk, flashing devil horns with her tongue out,” said Char-o’s daughter, equally wisely.

Ah well. Better to find out now than in Scotland that rooming with Michelle Shocked is like being zipped into a leather duvet cover with a raccoon.

The week started out even awfuller. I live in a sort of compound behind a 6 foot fence. All the doors are generally locked. I trust everyone who has ever been inside my house, and somehow, my best and favorite painting got stolen. I tried to show it to Michelle, and it was just GONE.

I would think it was poltergeists if I thought I had poltergeists. The disappearance of this object is totally confounding. There are zero suspects. Every time I think it might be someone like my sporadic cleaning lady I am ashamed of myself for even thinking it. Nobody has been here. Nobody knew about the painting. It was behind a bunch of other paintings in a stack of paintings. Its disappearance is so inexplicable, I hoped for a minute I might have spaced out or gotten really stoned and loaned it to my friend Christine. But it is well and truly missing. I even looked behind my dresser. It boggles the mind, but somebody stole it, and nothing else.

Well, I hope they’re fucking enjoying it. The loss made me cry.

But I made it before, so I can make it again.

I’m going to make a much bigger version now, the theft of which will be much more difficult.

The rupture of the tour is most disappointing, particularly when considering the loss of the Edinburgh run. But you can’t pay me enough gold, love or prestige to be trapped in a room with an abusive crazy person. Been there, done that. Not for all the radios in China, thanks.

I still have a lot of affection for Michelle, and a lot of respect for her artistry. But dealing with polecats requires a very long pole.

I am no stranger to verbal abuse. I once called my ex a cunt for 45 minutes while driving, because he was being a massive cunt. I will call a cunt a cunt. There are limits to the kind of interpersonal dynamics I will withstand. If I am pushed to the point of calling you a cunt, I’ve definitely hung around you for too long.

So I return to my little offstage life in Oakland, and the mystery of my disappearing painting.

But the orange tree outside my window is blossoming and neroli is pervading my air in an intoxicating fashion. My car hasn’t been stolen yet. The Benson Hotel is sending my lost iPad back to me. I’m starting new writing workshops on Monday and Tuesday nights (contact me at cintraw@gmail if you’re interested. Slots are going fast!) . I’m going to do something eventually, like finish this play I started before Covid or maybe do a one-man show. I should grip the horns of my own creative dilemma. I don’t know what I want yet, I’m still too jangled.

So long Michelle Shocked. Try not to catch your dick in the zipper of your own pants. Best O’ Luck.

cintraw@gmail.com

I’M OFFERING SLOTS IN MY FABULOUS FIVE WEEK MEMOIR WORKSHOP, STARTING IN ONE WEEK ON MONDAY AND/OR TUESDAY NIGHTS. MAXIMUM 4 STUDENTS PER CLASS. ONE THOUSAND WORDS A WEEK. 75 MINUTES ON ZOOM.

These classes have been genuinely amaaaaaazing. Come on down. Email me at the address above. Grazie.

“I chose this play for Cintra because it is absurdist, and this whole gambit is absurd. It’s about time, aging, memory and technology, and I think it belongs right in the middle of my show.”

— Michelle Shocked

I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into, with this tour. I just know that when a tiny green elf hands you a pair of magic elf boots, you say “Thank you Sir!” and wear them immediately. Life is improvisation and you’ve got to say YES to weird and unlikely shit, especially doing obscure Irish plays for no reason in the middle of music shows.

I have gone into the wild blue yonder with this exceptional, musical madwoman, Ms. Michelle Shocked, to experience strange new cities and even stranger new venues. It’s all rather wing and a prayer, Sisterhood of the Traveling By the Seat of Our Black Sweatpants-type stuff, which is to say, Michelle has been putting the tour together all by herself, with no infrastructure whatsoever — no booking agent, no tour manager. “I used to tour with two tourbuses, and one was just for catering,” Michelle confessed of her MTV celebrity past. Michelle and Sue the engineer of Michelle’s new audio memoir, “Bootleg This!” have been stitching the whole tour together with spit and grit and elbow grease. It’s punkrock, and I fucks with that.

I named it the “Can’t Kill Art” tour, because here we are — both women of a certain age, still out here doing our thing, even though both of our art careers completely caved in and effectively died — musicians and writers have gotten similar jackboot kicks to the groin, economically speaking.( I hear painters are suffering too, these days. )

Michelle and audio tape are deeply intertwined. Michelle, as I have previously explained, was cancelled in 2013. Her music is unavailable online because she is so deeply committed to staying out of the great AI hoovering of all known media. A bootleg tape began her career, and a bootleg tape effectively ended it when she was caught mouthing off at Yoshi’s, and the militant woke among the audience decided she was homophobic and spewed her bootlegged concert on YouTube. (I have lived in the same room for a week with Michelle, physically close enough to do Argentinian tango, and I can definitely tell you two things: She loves strawberry protein powder and is not homophobic. Not that this even bears mentioning, but maybe it does, in this shallowest of societies: most of her friends are, in fact, gay. Boo.)

I was honored to be asked to perform with such a dedicated, celebrated and disgraced artist as Michelle, and so I said yes to doing a very strange short Samuel Beckett play, as part of Michelle’s act. Now, I haven’t acted — really acted — in quite a while. Beckett is a very heady motherfucker, and I really didn’t get in much rehearsal time — just 4 sessions on Zoom with Sue, Michelle’s memoir producer, so in a sputtering panic, I hired my old theatrical comrade Stephen Pocock who also directed me for several sessions over Zoom — which fucking blows, by the way. Being directed over Zoom is like trying to experience emotional intimacy with a football. There’s just not a whole lot of nuance to the medium.

Live performance is ephemeral and you need to feel the room’s energy. Anyone’s energy. You can’t feel energy over Zoom.

At the beginning of the trip I didn’t quite believe Michelle, who is a strange and wonderful artist, that there were still trolls around committed to ruining her career, after 13 years. My attitude is that everything is immediately forgotten these days, there’s just so damned much shit going on constantly.

I didn’t believe at first that there were still people who cared about her cancellation in 2013 enough to actively go out of their way to fuck with her life now, but I got schooled when we were halfway on the 400 mile trip to Jacksonville and the bookstore we were supposed to be performing at abruptly cancelled us without warning. I was on the phone to some whimpering child at the bookstore that didn’t have the whole story, and Michelle, while driving, lunged across the car to scream into my phone. “Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Fuck that! You fucking liars!” I held the phone away from her, hung up on the girl and sat in shock for a few minutes.

“Now you see,” said Shocked, her eyes pinwheeling in fury. She scared the shit out of me, but it was true — someone had got to the bookstore’s owner, and convinced him to cancel us.

We landed in Orlando, the home of live crocodile miniature golf, and settled into the first Motel 6 I have ever stayed at. It was about what you would expect. Motel 6, at least in Orlando, is basically a homeless shelter. People and their dogs and children live there for long periods of time. When we left for our first gig, there was a crowd of black ladies making merry at a table at the far end of the pool, and a truck full of Hispanic laborers playing mariachi music.

Our first gig, in Orlando, was a Quebecois man’s private residence, inside of which was an entire stage, audience, lights and sound mixers. It was a beautiful little theater, and we performed our first show for 5 people. All things considered, it came off pretty well - nobody cried or threw up or lost their shit in the middle and broke all the sets. A minor victory.

Hours later, back at the Motel 6, the black girls were still in full effect.

I wanted to smoke, so I went down to the pool and ended up joining them. They were delightful and welcoming, drinking cognac and smoking blunts. A young white girl with bad tattoos was getting expertly braided by a woman in a shower cap, and I watched for a bit — the braiding was a bit like watching a Florentine master expertly re-string a lute. Art is everywhere, and some of it is good.

Our second gig was at the Kerouac House in St. Petersburg - a house where Kerouac once lived. We pulled up and had no idea how this was our venue — it looked like a typical post-war, suburban 2-bedroom.

“It’s sold out,” Michelle told me. “There’s 50 people coming.”

“Where the hell are they going to sit?” I asked, peering through the window shades and seeing a 1950’s living room with a velvet sectional couch. Michelle shrugged and we let ourselves in.

The Jack Kerouac house, was pretty nondescript from the front, but had a desk and typewriter in the back room that was teeming with beatnik mojo. It had been Jack’s desk, and I got to use it onstage as part of my performance.

The bungalow ranch style house opened up quite well to accommodate our audience of what turned out to be 80 people, but the stage was on the floor at the same level as them. Since I was sitting down for most of my performance, most of the audience couldn’t see me; the ones in back also couldn’t hear me.

After I walked offstage, I heard a woman say, “That was so depressing.” It is a depressing play, no bones about it.

I got in the umpty-ninth fight with Michelle that night over performing after her, which I’d been doing, which I felt made no sense on any level. It’s an ongoing battle we’ve been having since the beginning.

She performs like a valkyrie and thrills the pants off everyone, and then I come on and make everyone sad.

“But you’re the headliner,” I whined. “You get everyone all excited with music, and I’m the inscrutable bummer who comes on after your rock star triumph and bums everyone out with one of the most depressing half hours Beckett has ever crapped out.”

“You don’t understand,” Michelle said. “ I have my audience trained. They’re even weirder than Zappa audiences,” she said. “They expect this kind of thing from me.”

“What, to be fucking bummed out at the end of your show?”

“It’s art,” she said.

I just couldn’t understand why Michelle would want this.

Michelle, who explains things better in music than in conversation, dragged me outside to the Kerouac front porch, grabbed her guitar and sang her ass off for me into the Florida night, neighbors be damned. It was a song called “Stillborn,” which is a song about mortification. She had to explain to me why women died of mortification: they had miscarriages that hadn’t made it out of their bodies, and the dead baby inside them kills them eventually.

I got it. It was the full gamut of human emotion. It was art.

It really was one of the most spine tingling moments of my entire life, Michelle’s enormous voice howling straight from her uterus, straight through her femurs, shattering the sidewalk and pulling up tree roots beneath us. I knew from studying John Millington Synge in college that the sound she was making was keening. A woman wailing the wail of death. It was incredibly moving, and and I let her win the Who’s On First argument that night, because the moment was fucking unforgettable.

Back at the Motel 6 the next night, I was lucky enough to get my hair braided by the lady in the shower cap, an angel named Neeka Boo, who had a tattoo of Betty Boop smoking a joint on her right bicep. Neeka Boo was charming and delightful and we passed a joint around. I’d always wanted my hair braided and Neeka always wanted a spiked bracelet, so I gave her mine. Michelle has been calling me “hood rat” ever since

.

I’m going on in New York tonight. I did the play for my bestie Muire in Michelle’s living room and she told me my Irish accent was “OK.” I think she gave me a solid B. She has lived in Ireland after all.

Michelle and I just got an offer to play the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I hope my accent gets better, before I get the shite beat out of me by actual Irish people. If I feck it up in Scotland the Banshees will surely eat my face.

In any case: Booyah. It’s a fucking thrill to be on the road and performing. Michelle and I sing harmonies in the car. I wouldn’t say it’s glamorous, exactly, but it’s the life.

Cintraw@gmail.com

Theme song: Jack Black!

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Well, I’ve been panicking my ass off about performing “Krapp’s Last Tape.” My plane leaves tomorrow. My first performance — which will be woefully underrehearsed - is with Michelle Shocked in Orlando, Florida on March 5, which is right around the fucking corner with a large axe. My life is being sucked into a jet engine! It will be chaos! The whole thing could be a fucking disaster! Punk rock!

I’ll be keeping a tour diary in this space so watch for it. There is no telling what stories this rock tour rabbit hole will bring.

In my downtime, to calm the fuck down, all I really want to do is watch tattoo shows. I have a passion for looking at tattoos and hearing the stories that inspired them. A well-thought-out tattoo is so personal, it’s like looking at someone’s psyche swimming in a fishbowl. The right tattoo can enhance the body and save you thousands in the therapist’s office. The wrong tattoo can cost you thousands in laser removal, thousands in the therapist’s office, and years of grief. Relationships can end. Jobs may be lost. The tattoo gun is indeed loaded.

I think the tattoo industry right now is leading the art world in coming up with previously unthinkable new innovations, like athletes who can suddenly run a 3 minute mile. Crazy shit is suddenly possible in ways it never was before. Metallics. Diamonds. Glitter. Stunning photo-realistic black and grey. The skills required to make a competitively beautiful tattoo these days requires serious manual dexterity, unflinching confidence and the kind of old master techniques you develop as a serious artist.

As a painter, it is positively embarrassing to admit how much I have learned about tone, value, proportion, mid-tones, composition, color theory and other art ABCs by watching the tattoo critiques on Ink Master. Part of the problem of painting is learning how to see more accurately; the scathing critiques doled out to the competing tattoo artists really hammers home some vital art basics. This is how I justify watching Ink Master hundreds of times.

I’ve always had romantic feelings about tattoos: I love the ritual of it, the pain, the blood, the art, the intention, the weird intimacy. I secretly believe getting tattooed can open doors to other worlds. Memorial tattoos invite the spirit of the dead person to visit you in the shop. People break down crying in the middle of getting tattoos all the time —the pain can bring about a major catharsis and can really effect positive change, especially if they were covering up something horrible, like a tattoo of a toilet coughing out playing cards or yourself fucking an ostrich (Steve-O, we salute thee). Superlative tattoo artists are part psychologist, part shaman. They’re about life transformation. It doesn’t always work out that way, but it can be pure magic.

After several years of watching all 17 seasons of Ink Master over and over and over again like an autistic person, I have strong convictions that there are tattoos that nobody should ever get again. I apologize if you have any of the following, but they are PLAYED to the point of migraine:

Realistic eyes, especially on the neck.

Sea turtles.

Dolphins.

Any form of tramp stamp.

Kanji

Fucking owls.

Music notes.

Anything tribal that doesn’t belong to your actual tribe.

Your significant other’s name. One way ticket to breakup.

9/11 Memorial tattoos. Too mooky.

Heart shaped locks. Awful.

Angel wings on the back. Enough already.

A tattoo you probably shouldn’t get is a mandala, unless you’re a filthy hippy.

Then there are tattoos that I believe are always tasteful.

A smoking skull in a shiny top hat, with a monocle.

The Virgin Mary with Ace Frehley’s KISS makeup.

Those are the only ones I can think of.

I only have the one tattoo, the Vajra Chopper I got to protect me from narcissists. It’s a magical talisman that helped me make an end-run around a serious psychological issue; I couldn’t be happier with it. But I really just need the one. It’s like Santeria for me: not every issue in life requires a response as drastic as a chicken sacrifice, just like not every head cold requires a nose transplant. A tattoo, I believe, should not be entered into lightly, but be saved for major acts of irrational magic. (Revenge tattoos are always problematic in the long run. One gentleman on the show “Tattoo Nightmares” was getting a cover-up for the words, BITCH, PLEASE decorating a middle finger salute — on his neck, in honor of his ex-girlfriend. It was worth it for a day, then he started coaching girl’s softball and had to cover it up with giant caucasian-toned bandaids every day.)

Which is not to say that there is no honor in shitty tattoos. Some of the shittiest have an unintentional Basquiat-like brilliance. “You get the tattoo you deserve,” I have heard said by tattoo artists — which is kind of cold blooded, but basically, if you’re a dumbass, it’s going to show in your ink. Good art can still shine through a lack of ability, though, if your image is hilarious, like a badly drawn refrigerator with stick legs and a pointy tongue.

The way I think about my tattoo is that it is jewelry that can never be stolen from me (as someone who has had all her jewelry stolen twice.)

The Vajra Chopper and what it represents, for me, is an object of frequent contemplation. It’s basically a Hindu battle-axe, that symbolizes “separating muscle from bone,” and/or separating you from anything preventing you from enlightenment. From it, I have learned to chop toxic people out of my heart. (I am someone who has always hung on for dear life to anyone I have any kind of history with, even the total thugs.) It is my new weapon of sanity. It has worked better than years of therapy.It’s like writing something down on your arm that you want to remember every day for the rest of your life.

CintraW@gmail.com

Theme Song: Jack Black!

(This piece previously appeared in the New York Times in 2008)

Hey! For those of you in the Bay Area, I will be at Specs Bar in North Beach, SF this Sunday (Feb 22) from 2-4PM, reading some damn thing as part of the “Stranger than Fiction” reading series. Come on out! XXX CW

IT seems that with old, eccentric or artistic people there is a fine line where self-permission is pushed to excess. Sometimes they let go of the rope and allow their whims to wander. This can make for compelling art, a dissonant clang or both: a vertiginous feeling of being divorced from context.

In the storefront window, before a backsplash of beveled mirror subway tiles, a geyser of yellow chiffon ruffles stands powerfully atop a shiny black Louis XV table: cabriole legs astride a field of red lacquer. Behold the mannequin!

It appears that Christian Lacroix had some pent-up creative urges he had been itching to unleash. Perhaps they were ideas better left unrealized, but they’re loose now, and there’s no screwing their froofy fuchsia top back on. His current looks are doing a bad job of aging gracefully. They don’t want to grow up, so they’re throwing a visual tantrum and regressing to 1983. But it is definitely fun to watch.

M. Lacroix, a fashion historian, costumer and master of his own couture domain, is best known for romantic reinterpretations of gypsy costume in hot, saturated colors and clashing prints, and “le pouf,” a short, bunchy ball of a skirt — almost a tutu — favored by debutantes in the 1980s. At the moment, he seems to be indulging one of the great luxuries of fashion design: the creative recycling of past spirits of the age.

It’s a fantasy ’80s-ex-’80s, a heyday where drugs never killed the party and AIDS never ravaged the earth. A flush new look for a life of freewheeling decadence, for stepping out of red sports cars with teased hair and a rolled-up hundred in your lipstick case.

Look out! A tree-frog-green eelskin trench coat.

One display case had tiny yellow kidskin gloves that only reached above the knuckles. Not gloves so much as finger shrugs. Form: yes. Art: yes. Function: not even a little. You might wear them to ride half a bicycle.

The designer has been very busy, explained the demure French saleswoman, doing all kinds of interior design projects: a hotel in Dubai, the Hôtel du Petit Moulin in Paris. I asked her what modern artist the prints were reminding me of, but she couldn’t say. It was a fusion: Willem de Kooning and Niki de Saint Phalle, if they were collaborating on a grade school mural in Mali.

There is a small but beguiling men’s section, with dress shirts in terrific versatile prints for $260. But beware, gentlemen: the suits are ver-r-ry tailored at the waist for a swerve line not seen since the mutton chop and the burgundy formal wear of “The Dating Game.”

I did, however, love the seersucker: black, gray and white. A butch new twist.

I ASCENDED the red carpeted stairs to the area devoted to gowns, a large portion of which seemed to be indulging a Matronly Infant paradox. A washed-out candy-striped chiffon in cream and watermelon ($3,060) would tend to all the human frailties and bourbon fevers of a Tennessee Williams “sisterwoman.”

Lacroix does use superlative fabrics. The silks are silkier. The linens, more linear. You could just see Joan Collins walking away from the pool in a black lacquered hat and that pleasingly thick pair of black dress shorts ($750).

One particular gown stood out: a sleeveless white silk sheath with an elaborate print ($3,400) that said, “I am Basquiat in hell, forced to endure a Sisyphean nursery school where I trace my hand and paint multilegged monster turkeys and get an F, forever. Then these discarded paintings end up on earth as formal wear for rich women.”

Some items were an acute reminder of Mr. Lacroix’s background in historical costume. A French maid-inspired number in black matte satin ($2,025) was perfect for a Merchant Ivory soft-core, but really, it was a French maid costume. There’s only one conversation you can have in that dress, pardon my French.

I was wild about what looked like a primitive argyle seat belt made of tiny glass Lite-Brite beads ... it was $804.

A rack of beachwear hit the right balance of haute whimsy and realistic accessibility. One cotton tunic looked as if Mr. Lacroix had attacked it with a set of felt pens and made an art-brut dashiki for the friendly price of $200.

I tried a fat beaded African bracelet. “Isn’t it wonderful?” the saleswoman asked. “It is like childhood.” Proportionally speaking, it was — a bangle the size of a grapefruit.

While the rest of the developed world is circling Africa like a kettle of vultures, the French seem to be getting sentimental about the aesthetics of their old colonies. It’s a casual approach to the perpetual ransacking of pre-conquered cultures, old icons converted into trendy adornments. Old Gods are rendered symbolically meaningless at the moment that the dominant culture declares them adorable. High fashion 1, Africa 0.

There was a fitted suit that I coveted instantly, a sleek 1940s secretarial thing that I was afraid to try (the jacket alone was $1,380). Happily, it didn’t fit; the smallest size, a 36, was roomy in all the wrong places. I had the same problem with the skirt.

I also tried a long black crochet ball gown in a 38. This fit fairly well but looked disconcertingly like something an evil walk-on character would wear on “Bonanza” ($3,799).

On my way home, a gorgeous woman was dragging herself up the subway stairs, clinging breathlessly to the handrail. Enormous painted eyes, perfectly blushed and powered cheekbones, jet-black hair, black flamenco shawl, black satin dress side-slit up to her hip. She had to be 80 years old.

Perhaps boxing the dusk in the twilight of life is the inspirational purpose of all great men and women. Perhaps the task of a public life is to reach the inevitable self-parody that accompanies this pungent state of persona as slowly as possible.

TOUT À FAIT The designer famous for rich colors and pouffiness sets a new boutique ablaze with a riot of richly pouffed colorfulness.

TOUTEFOIS The clientele tends toward those with a fond a remembrance of Lacroix past — i.e., monochromatic blondes with retro mahogany Bain de Soleil tans and big silk scarves who appreciate sleeves the size of organza football helmets.

TUTTI-FRUTTI Lacroix offers a transgressive visual romp right into a gilded second childhood (case in point: a lavishly finger-painted men’s polo for $200) or at least a chance to do the ’80s all over again with fewer social humiliations.

Theme song: Jack Black!

For someone who wants revenge as badly as I do, the fact that I never get any makes me practically a fuckin saint. But oh no, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” so I don’t do anything.

For months, all I wanted to do…and I was burning to do it, I wanted it carnally… was to paint a neon swastika on my dick uncle’s Tesla. I even had a fellow vandal willing to do it for me for a price. This was a terrible, terrible temptation. It would have made me orgasm for the first time in at least a year.

This last breakup was rough in that I am so incredibly mad at myself. I knew he was a narcissist, I knew it, I knew it, I could identify all the behaviors by name from the book, I knew it. I am perhaps one of the most well-read people in the WORLD about Narcissistic Personality Disorder. There were 19,000 red flags all over that dude like a Christo landscape. And yet I conned myself and made excuses for him in order to not know what I knew in my fucking spleen. What I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.

How the fuck can I keep doing that? How do I stop? I’m seriously asking, for this person who’s not my friend anymore.

This is what happens to kids like me who were raised by narcissists: this is the relationship trauma I have replayed over and over and over again, ad nauseum, my entire dating life, with few exceptions. Narcissism never looks like exactly what it is to me. I just love being in love I guess, and I have an unreal ability to lie to myself, and I just don’t fucking see the narcissist until I FINALLY DO, and then it hits me all at once like a sickening wrecking ball, and it hits me again, like waking up from the same nightmare over and over again, that I have poured my actual love all over a gross invertebrate creep with gigantic insecurity issues who is constitutionally incapable of returning my love as anything but manipulation, mental torture and abuse. Someone who literally wants to hurt me, and delights in it. Someone who does not in fact give a shit about me.

The worst part is never being able to see that person the same way again. It ruins all their good qualities for you. You can’t unsee the slimy reptile behind the shit-eating smile. That recognition goes down to the bone. It’s a toggle switch: GOOD/EVIL.

I once literally thought he was the best man I ever knew. He turned out to be a conniving, duplicitous love rat.

And what else can you do to save yourself from toxic people but lock the doors?

It’s not even their fault: they are what they are. It’s my fault for refusing to see it. It falls through a very deliberate hole in my head, carved there by my parents. I don’t know how I see it but instantly unsee it at the speed of thought. It’s like falling asleep behind the wheel. I don’t know how to stop. I get lulled into a state of frog-boiling by the familiarity of the behavior.

This time, I literally blamed it on autism, like autism was so benign as to cancel out the narcissism, and the lack of actual love. “He’s just got a really flat affect,” I told myself over and over as he did this amazing obstacle course of things to declare his narcissism to me, in classic, name-brand ways:

DARVO - (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) Every time we got in a fight, he would paint himself as the victim, when he was actually the offender. He blamed me 100% for everything, including his own behavior.

STONEWALLING - Instead of discussing anything difficult with me, he would stop talking to me altogether. He was too self-absorbed to have a single uncomfortable, relationship-maintenance conversation of any variety.

GASLIGHTING - He would rewrite the narrative on anything that happened between us to make himself look good, in an effort to destabilize my perceptions.

SCAPEGOATING - Again, he blamed me for literally everything.He once described my playfully pushing him off the sidewalk with my shoulder as “physical abuse.”

PROJECTION - He would accuse me of doing things to him that he was actually doing to me.

DEVALUING - He would go off on litanies of my faults, and downplay my accomplishments.

…to name very few.

He was also manipulative, dismissive, judgmental, sneeringly critical, derisive, unkind, and emotionally absent. Disinterested in anything but the sound of his own voice. And ultimately unfaithful.

What’s not to love, right?

Now this is not to say I am not also a mess.

I fight like a Puerto Rican, I was once told by a Puerto Rican.

The night I got my “Lord Protect Me from Narcissists” Vajra Chopper tattoo, the ex showed his true colors, to the point where I walked out of the dive bar and left him there “lookin’ stoopid,” as Sistuh Leslie said.

And I got back together with him later that weekend, because I can’t stay angry, so I guess I somehow monstrously forgot about it (See: Betrayal Trauma Theory, which describes a thing traumatized kids like me get wherein you forget offenses as soon as they happen. You just fucking forget.) But I saw his true nature in the bar. The mask fell, and there he was, like a bitter, jealous, competitive queen. Like my mother in a feather boa, he was sneering at me, literally mocking me, saying, “Ohhhh, loook at my tattoooooo,” because I was showing it to people in the bar who wanted to see it. I showed it off because I always want to see a tattoo, and I thought mine the best I’d ever seen. I felt magical and blessed, I was glowing, and he was angry about it because I was the one getting attention and not him. He did and said everything he could to shut my groove down, instead of throwing an arm around me and participating in it as the celebratory, special thing it was. It was a big ritual for me, and he flunked haaaard.

The tattoo was PROTECTING ME. It was DOING ITS MAGICAL JOB, and I IGNORED MY OWN TATTOO WHICH WAS TATTOOED THERE TO REMIND ME NOT TO DO THAT THING I IMMEDIATELY DID AGAIN.

Well, he’s not going to like this article one bell pepper, but I’m not doing it TO HIM

I’m doing this FOR ME. And anyone else with the misfortune to endure the mindfucky nightmare of narcissistic abuse. Don’t suffer in silence. That’s how they win.

Hurt people hurt people. Avoid the bitter and miserable! I would if I knew how!

Someday I will date someone who isn’t a shithead drone-bombing around without an empathy gene. Until then, I am your dutiful cuttlefish, spraying black ink when disturbed.

(And the occasional neon swastika.)

Yeah, you oughta. And then you should have me edit it so it makes sense. CintraW@gmail.com

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This piece appeared in the New York Review of Books in 2020.

During strange times when a body is well advised to stay indoors, television can take on important new dimensions. A truly great sitcom can go beyond merely providing confectionary yuks—it can become background music for your life. 30 Rock fans, for example, tend to agree that the overall geist created by the show’s fusion of zippy orchestrals and whip-bang verbal syncopation can be an all-over mood-enhancer during the drudgeries of your day that can make your life feel quick, tuxedoed and screwbally, as though you’re on the set of Gold Diggers of 1933, even if you’re merely Lysoling your power-strips and barely even listening to it.

The star and creator of Hulu’s Letterkenny, Canadian actor and writer Jared Keeso, has described the show in interviews as an “unsafe” and “fairly lowbrow” comedy that comes from a “negative place.” This, he says, is because the cast members dress each other down all the time with brutal delight. “We take the piss out of each other; that’s something a lot of networks would ask you to pump the brakes on,” Keeso told q, a radio show on CBC.

Indeed, the characters use every conceivable swear word in English—and a few in French—to vivisect each other with almost Shakespearean invective (if Shakespeare had been drunk, Canadian, and a survivor of several concussive jet-ski accidents). In a normal world, the constant lambasting might cause all the characters to decline into psychiatric pill-popping.

But Letterkenny is not a normal world—nor, really, is it negative or unsafe. It’s more like a bucket of “day beers,” or even actual fun, if you are open to a wide-enough latitude of mature input stimulus.

For comedy fans, the dialogue of 30 Rock is usually considered the gold standard, because the writing is so consistently dense with memorable burns. (“Lemon, Lesbian Frankenstein wants her shoes back.”) Shows that funny, which bear up under repeated viewings, are as rare as two-headed snakes. The ensemble comedy Letterkenny is, in broadest strokes, like a visually luxurious, punk-rock 30 Rock, with ferociously smart, memorable, whirling-tire-chains of savage dialogue, and lyrical, slow-motion fight scenes that you end up rooting for like a hockey fan even if you deplore violence (or are merely bored by it).

Letterkenny is the name of a fictional rural Ontario town. The show began in 2013 as a short web series created by Keeso called “Letterkenny Problems”—vaguely autobiographical musings based on Keeso’s growing up on his family’s historic sawmill in Listowel, Ontario, and playing a lot of regional hockey. In the web series, Keeso and his friend, actor Nathan Dales, lean on barns and various pieces of large farm equipment, break the fourth wall and deliver short, absurd soliloquies about small-town life, lousy with fast, thick Canadian slang, directly to camera. It was such an enormous success on YouTube that the show was picked up by Canada’s CraveTV in 2015; in 2017, it won the award for Best Comedy Series at the Canadian Screen Awards. In 2019, it was licensed by Hulu, on which the show’s ninth season is said to premiere some time this year.

The photography and editing, which have also received multiple nominations for Canadian Screen Awards, deserve special mention for their beauty. The show opens on panoramic scenes of rural southern Ontario (it’s shot on location in a small town called Sudbury): an old barn, a patinated tractor sitting on acres of Easter-green farmland, a frozen lake covered in quaintly Philip Guston-ish ice-fishing sheds.

The main characters may be found, at the beginning of each episode, drinking heavily in broad daylight and talking stylized smack in front of their farm’s produce stand. The lead character is Keeso himself as the incorruptible Wayne, whose triangular, iron-pumped build and Batman jawline make him look as if he’s been drawn by Tom of Finland. Wayne is the “toughest guy in Letterkenny,” a title he defends vigilantly against a parade of musclebound “degens [degenerates] from upcountry.”

His sister, the sleek, insatiable Katy-Kat (Michelle Mylett), is a polyamorous model who prefers to date two guys at a time, and never hesitates to punt other women in the groin (“right in the Twiffer!”) during a “donnybrook” (a fight that spontaneously erupts for almost no reason between more than two people).

Wayne and Katy are joined by their omnipresent childhood friends and fellow agricultural workmates, Daryl or “Darry” (Nathan Dales)—a friendly, goofy-smiling yokel who spits and commits the faux pas of “wearing his barn clothes” out in public—and the affable, bearded, rotund, and jester-like “Squirrely Dan” (comedian K. Trevor Wilson), a “gigantic cure for loneliness” who passionately lectures the characters about their backward social attitudes, in favor of the political correctness he learns in his women’s studies class.

When this foursome of aggy “hicks” isn’t stone-picking, dog-breeding, binge-drinking, or hay-baling, they are sucked into interactions with the rest of the community and its colorful subcultures. “There are 5,000 people in Letterkenny. These are their problems,” warns the text that appears on screen before each episode.

Some of their problems are with the gooned-out, gym-rat hockey players of the Letterkenny Shamrock team (”Whale-shit, Senior A”- division led by the dim and vaguely homoerotic jock twosome, Jonesy and Reilly—the silky “Pantene pros” (the stars) of the local league, both of whom are the occasional boyfriend of Katy. There are dust-ups with the local black-nail-polished “Skids”—emotionally labile, black-jean and chain-wallet wearing, meth-addled gamers led by the handsome bowler-hatted Stewart (pronounced Stoort) and his gay creature-of-the-night sidekick, Roald, who breakdance on pieces of cardboard in front of the dollar store, and fight by stabbing each other with the EpiPens they always carry (due to their numberless allergies).

There are the Christians, led by Glen, the obviously-but-not-quite-openly gay evangelical preacher (played by the show’s co-creator and director, Jacob Tierney) who regularly tries to persuade the characters to devote themselves to “Ham” (“Him,” in Canadian). Letterkenny is located near the reservation of an unnamed indigenous tribe, which is indomitably led by its de facto matriarch, the comely Tanis (played by Kaniehtiio Horn), who is an occasional love-interest for Wayne (when she’s not setting fire to his produce stand because the Skids owe her money for bags of loose cigarettes—because when she has a beef with one group in Letterkenny, she punishes the entire town).

Each sub-group possesses its own singular patois, which is why it helps to watch the show with subtitles (not because it’s Canadian and therefore unintelligible, but for the same reason it’s fun to watch Shakespeare with subtitles—you get more Banquo for your buck.) One of the joys of Letterkenny is that its specific Ontario dialects contain many inscrutable idioms, and phrases with too many plurals in it, as some rural Canadians are wont to use:

“You could cuts the tension in here with a fuckin’ beach balls.”

“You are so fucking 5’11”.” (Translation: you’re so average.)

“Well, I don’t like that one bell pepper!” (He doesn’t like it one bit.)

“You’re spare parts, bud.”

The dialogue is jam-packed with musical wordplay and verbal towel-snaps. Some of the most delightfully lethal quips occur when the hockey players heckle or “chirp” their opposing teams—brutalizing them psychologically to undermine their performance. (Keeso maintains that while the hockey players mercilessly “chirp” each other, chirping isn’t bullying. It’s a fine line, but one that Keeso observes strictly: bullying is wrong.) But the chirps themselves are comedy poutine, if you happen to like cheese curds on your French fries (because you drink during the daytime).

“Your mom ugly-cried because she left the lens-cap on the camcorder!”

“Three things [are going to happen]: I hit you, you hit the pavement, I jerk off on your drivers’ side door-handle.”

“What’s your laundry-folding channel there, hon?”

These lightning-rounds of deadly chirps extend to the women’s hockey team, the Shamrockettes: “Who would have thought that the girl who ingested mosquito eggs after drinking out of mud puddles would ever almost be accepted to community college?”

The soundtrack of Letterkenny, curated by Toronto’s Supergroup Sonic Branding Co., has become a sensation unto itself, the subject of numerous playlists on multiple music platforms. The show has expanded the audiences of various hard-driving, obscure Canadian indie groups (each subculture in Letterkenny has its own style of music accompanying its scenes). According to the show’s music supervisor, Cody Partridge, Keeso writes the dialogue with particular music in mind. The fight scenes are so gloriously choreographed to complement the beat-heavy gnashing of bands like White Denim and Japanther, they end up feeling like dance numbers from West Side Story.

But aside from the toe-tapping brawls and rapturous character assassinations, the real star of Letterkenny is the radical moral decency at its core. Letterkenny is a decidedly Arcadian place, where there is enough leisure time (unlike in the corporate-driven, wage-slavery hellscape of the metropolitan United States) to drink, play video games, and socialize. It is a bundle of electric frictions between contradictions: a peace-loving place of brotherly love and neighbors who mow each other’s lawns, where everyone nonetheless loves a daily fistfight; a feminist place where the women all just happen to be tall, willowy model-types who wear Daisy Duke shorts and midriff halter-tops, but they’re all fiercely smart, suffer no fools, and their identities aren’t defined by men. (When Wayne derides Tanis for the unladylike act of spitting while on a date, Tanis retorts, “What? Do you want me to go borrow an ankle-length dress from my auntie?”)

It is an entirely tolerant and integrated atmosphere, where everyone drinks in the same local bar (MoDeans, which burns down several times in the course of the series). Presumably for verisimilitude, the jocks and hicks all deride each other for acting like “Sallies,” but even the dimwit hockey players make fast friends with a gay couple at the gym, and actually hang out with them. “You slam-crush butts, we slam-crush box, and the world keeps on turning, boys,” the hockey players tell the men before they teach each other vernacular handshakes.

While America is still fighting civil rights battles over race and sexuality while suffering crushing class and economic disparity issues, an imaginary municipality of white folks unreservedly loves their black friends (there aren’t many, granted), finds a way to co-exist with the local Mennonites, and even eventually befriends the French Hicks of Quebec (with whom English-speaking Canadians have always had a testy relationship). The characters of Letterkenny: small-town yokels, set in their ways, may want wrangle you into a Texas Cloverleaf or a Scorpions deathlock, but not because you’re gay or differently abled or worship golden calves. (They don’t care much for “Yanks”—that’s us—but we must presume this disaffection is well-earned.)

All walks of life are not just tolerated in Letterkenny but seamlessly integrated without issue. Tanis has a no-nonsense, barely mentioned abortion, which isn’t even a B-plot; just a side conversation between brawls. There’s no celebration of Seinfeld-style casual narcissism. The characters, for all their small-town small-mindedness, may ridicule each other unto death, but there is an unwritten rule: whenever an out-of-towner annoys or threatens them, all the disparate groups come together to kick ass as one.

A particularly strong episode includes a cameo appearance from Canadian comic Jay Baruchel as “Hard Right Jay,” an American fascist with whom the Skids become acquainted on the Dark Web, who comes to Letterkenny with a posse of tiki-torch right-wingers to campaign to save the Letterkenny Chiefs soccer team from having its name changed for reasons of political correctness. There are few scenes on television as satisfying as when the entire cast comes out to beat up the alt-right crew imported by this polemic-spewing dipshit. Letterkenny acts upon Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance” by refusing to tolerate the intolerant—which feels as satisfying as seeing Nazi planes go down in a World War II movie.

“He’s kind of a sap,” the director Jacob Tierney says of Keeso in a CBC interview, when queried about the essential nature of the show. “He applied self-tanner for this interview,” Keeso says of Tierney, on the same program. The two clearly abuse each other in real life as vigorously as opposing hockey teams would — a combustive dynamic that seems to produce their peculiar creative nectar. (I read somewhere that Keeso now has a dog named “Tierneh,” the Letterkenny hick pronunciation of “Tierney.”)

When the new season of Letterkenny drops, it may seem a chore to catch up with the previous eight seasons, but as Wayne says, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

CINTRAW@GMAIL.COM

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This class is a fabulous opportunity to read your stuff aloud, hear critiques from me and your peers, and grow exponentially as a writer.

5 WEEKS: $500 = TOTAL BARGAIN.

CONTACT ME ASAP! ONLY 2 SLOTS LEFT!

Love, Cintra

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