3. It is what it is. – lynn phillips & maggie cutler

Category: 3. It is what it is.

trump prepares Reform Party Presidential bid in 1999

From “The Secret Life of Kitty Lyons, by Maggie Cutler”

July 26, 2016 / admin / 0 Comments

Between 1999 and 2000 I published some 40 columns on the hipster sex site, nerve.com, and in their print publication, Nerve. In the French tradition the columns fused political satire and porn. Their premise was that Kitty Lyons, a work-from-home day trader in her early thirties who shared Henry Kissinger’s conviction that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac”, would occasionally retire to her couch to masturbate while having sex fantasies about movers and shakers in the news. Although Kitty was a fantasist, her husband, Max, was a documentary filmmaker who, as she put it, “believed in reality.” Nevertheless, she was able, on occasions such as this one, to lure him into her premise. When this piece ran, Donald Trump had left the Republican Party to explore a Reform Party bid for the White House.

Trumped Up

Original Publication date: Nov. 24, 1999

Last Wednesday, every chakra in Max’s body went chapter 11. His documentary, Homebuilding in the Heartland, was only half in the can when its German funder pulled the plug, and despite the windfall I took with 200 shares of AOL, he slid into a major droop. I tried sympathy, massage; I even sat with him through Ric Burns’ epic Donner Party, but nothing could induce the man I love to lick my wounds instead of his own.

Fantasizing about sex with a billionaire has been known to pull me through a funk; maybe it will perk up my husband, I figure. I book a room at the Plaza Hotel and tell him to meet me at 6:00 the next evening. “You must arrive as Donald Trump,” I command him, “and be prepared to rule the free world.”

Things begin well. In a blonde wig, spikes and enough mascara to tar a roof, I enter the Oak Bar feeling as mischievous as Eloise on hormones. Max arrives wearing the perfect Trump shirt: expensive and repulsive. He’s strutting with his chest puffed out, and he has combed his eyebrows up into frightened caterpillars.

In our tiny room (the best we can afford), I strip slowly, as if my body were a shady bank loan whose details it might be dangerous to fully reveal. Donald-Max lets out a whistle and tries to talk me into doing a Playboy centerfold. “Get you a million bucks American for it,” he wheedles, caressing my hip,” and I’ll only keep one third.” But like Marla, his ex, I’m obliged to decline due to deep religious and spiritual convictions.

My coy refusal (a transparent bid for a favorable pre-nup) accompanied by the sort of sultry pout that assures a man you love him primarily for his liquid assets, makes Max feel all mogul-like. His manhood skyrockets in value, burgeoning instantly from indebted worm to $9.2-billion-dollar Reform Party Contender.

I grab his handle as if he was my lucky slot machine, then go down on him like a pro, without the preliminary licks or sniffs that normally make it fun for me. Now that my husband’s a greedy go-getter worth billions, it gets me hot anyway.

“Fund me now,” he cries, and proceeds to excavate my foundation.

“I’m going to make Mike Tyson Secretary of State,” he pants. “I’ll meet with Arafat at Wrestlemania. Subsidize plastic surgery for the ugly and uninsured. Reporters who don’t like it will get audited.”

No sooner do I begin to congratulate myself on coming up with this clever scheme, when Max enters turn-off territory.

“I want a divorce,” he continues, “so I can bed every good-looking babe on the Elite Modeling Agency roster, except, of course, my daughter, whom I must by law bequeath to another billionaire to marry and dump when she gets old enough to have a brain.”

All of a sudden this fuck is starting to feel like one of those bright ideas that, once begun, drag on for dismal eons — like The Blair Witch Project or the House of Lords. I fake a few moans to hurry him up, ready to settle for what Marla got (about .001%) and bail the hell out.

Maybe Max can tell, because all of a sudden he breaks character completely. The way he calls out for Kitty, his intensity and the need I feel in him make giddy sensations spin through my tits and twat like roulette balls. Casino lights flash in my blood and my clit tingles like a gambler on a roll. By the time Max’s newfound confidence spurts forth, I’m wet enough to . . . to . . . Soak the Rich!

Afterwards, the latest Trump campaign slogan hovering in my post-coital mind, I can practically hear my mother lecturing about how Trump is the only candidate who addresses the problem of income disparity. Thanks, Mom, but I’ve learned more than enough about Trump from sleeping with my husband. For me, The Donald was only truly sexy before his famous Comeback, when he was down, in doubt and in love, when the swell of his desire was pressed against the locked doors of edifices he himself had erected, when he was raining flop sweat and looking up the skirt of fortune, begging her for one more taste. Cocky and on top of his world he gives off all the emotional complexity of a gold brick.

I’m just about to tell Max how much I prefer his own student-loan-afflicted self when he preempts me.

“I’m not Donald Trump anymore,” he declares.

“Good Boy!” I exclaim supportively.

“I’m Steve Forbes!”

I beat him with my wig until he agrees to drop out of the race.

Spalding Gray Interview

July 20, 2016 / admin / 0 Comments

Titled “Heaven Can Wait,” From The Downtown Express, column, “The Big Idea by Lynn Phillips” November 7th, 1990

What’s striking about the Soho loft Spalding Gray shares with his sometime director and collaborator is its modesty. There’s nothing on the walls but two exotic masks, as if somebody started a collection but immediately thought better of it. There’s an old, lushly red kilim versus a simply functional kitchen. In the middle, all alone, is a small table, tin-topped. Sitting at it, you’re perfectly suspended between sensuality and monasticism, hominess and disengagement, self-acceptance and penance.

Gray has built a solid culture-circuit career sitting at just such a small table, telling stories about his adventures, insights and worries. And the minute you hear those flat New England “A”s, his past performances come flooding back in all their edgy charm: Point Judith; Sex and Death to the Age

14; Swimming lo Cambodia. His current monologue, Monster in a Box, which opened in previews at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater on November 2, is nearly sold out for its November 14 to December 31 run. But what is it about this guy that makes what’s intially a cheesy, self-obsessed routine so expansive, so inclusive, so richly amusing?

Jimmy Swaggart comes up right away: ”It terrifies me to see Jimmy Swaggart on television,” says Gray, “although l watch him all the time. I see the form of what l’m doing in it. I wish I had seen him ask for forgiveness, the way he turned it around and used it us more material.”

Gray is crusty, not a nay-sayer, but a disputer who once compared his creative process to an oyster’s. The very idea of Big Ideas be finds especially irritating, (“Truth,” Gray counters, “is in the details.”) and the most annoying Big Idea be can think of offhand is Heaven. “It’s about putting off pleasure,” he explains, “the idea that ‘What’s really happening hasn’t happened yet.’ That’s a Big Idea I wish I hadn’t been exposed to. I don’t think I’ll ever deprogram myself entirely.”

Gray, who was raised os a Christian Scientist in Barrington, Rhode Island, recalls “my mother asking for the silent prayer, which was like a form of meditation, and my father being completely addicted to rare steak. So we used to bow our heads and pray with rare steak blowing up our noses. It was hard to think anything but carnal thoughts.” Later in life, meditating in a zen monastery, he found “the hardest times were when they were cooking.”

So there it is, in the furniture, in the anecdotes, on TV: a dualistic tug-of-war between the spirit and the flesh, transcendence and banality. It’s a tricky tussle. The carnality of meat is a trap, but repudiating meatiness for the sake of some post-carnal “heaven” is a trap, too. Gray’s main story is about how he tries to thread his way between all the moral contradictions and ambiguities of a modern, media-mediated life. It’s a story of process. “It was never an idea to sit behind a table and tell stories,” Gray insists. “It was an evolution.” And still is.

Gray gravitated towards the arts, he says, in part because he felt like an outsider. “Because I was a Christian Scientist, all my friends would say, ‘So you don’t believe in goin’ to doctahs, right?’ I’d say,

‘That’s right.’ and They’d say, ‘What if this tree fell on you?’ Horror after horror. It felt like all my friends had death wishes for me.”

In 1977, when he was 36, Gray co-founded The Wooster Group at The Performing Garage with Liz LeCompte. LeCompte, The Group’s director, would ask him to repeat his stories so she could tape them and work them into a text.

Gray, however, felt himself pulling away from the collective mind; he wanted to “take responsibility for everything.” One day, touring with The Wooster Croup in Amsterdam, “Walking alone in Van Gogh Park, I had what was like a revelation that I’d be doing a series of autobiographical sketches. l was elated. I thought it would involve props, costumes, a one man version of The Wooster Group shows I didn’t know I’d just be sitting at a table speaking.”

The table he sits at when he does his act is an important revision of LeCompte’s staging, part of Gray’s dispute with religious Bigness: “Liz worked with a big table; mine is the shrunken version: the card table version of the Last Supper”

After Gray left the Wooster Group, he went to Santa Cruz and began to crash classes at the university. ln a course called, “Philosophy of Emotions,” he befriended the professor, Amlie Rorty.

“We were walking in the redwoods. I’d mistaken my predicament with leaving the The Group with the end of the world. And she said, ‘You know, the last artists in Rome when it was collapsing were the chroniclers.’

“And I said, Of course! That’s it! I will chronicle my life in stages, but not write it down—this is the other epiphany – it would be oral. The world could end. It could end that night. There would be no product left over. It would be an epitaph.”

The purity of this formal metaphor was soon diluted by the hope of salvation and the smell of steak: “Then I started to get these offers to publish and do a film of my monologues, and of course, I’m like anyone, any man, I’m afraid of death, I yearn for immortality…” Products were spawned, as Gray, in recent years, has mastered the spin-off. When success as a monologuist won him Hollywood movie roles (The Killing Fields, Beaches), his show-biz misadventures became part of his act. Now he’s writing Spalding Gray’s Book, for Knopf. It’s all about Spalding Gray, person, and “Spalding Gray”, his stage persona. The distractions he experienced while writing the book have become the subject of Monster in a Box.

The phone rings. Somebody wants “Spalding Gray” to do a dress rehearsal. What does a dress rehearsal mean when you play yourself? “It means I put on my plaid shirt,” says Gray.

The difference between the plaid shirt Spalding Gray removes and the one that makes him “Spalding Gray” is miniscule—but crucial. The Gray without the quotes is torn. He’s studying Buddhism under Robert Thruman, and Life with loftmate Renee Shafransky, who mistrusts all mysticism. “Spalding Gray” in quotes is booked into ’92. He’s a show-biz sage, a Swaggart of ironic self-awareness. Part of his job, now that he’s a product, is to control how he’s used.

“I think in terms of ‘horizontal fame,’ he says. Keep your audience growing without thinning your act. Don’t go for mass “bigness” at the expense of downtown complexity. In recent appearances, he’s also begun to interview audiences, to cross his proscenium, share his spotlight.

Meanwhile Gray the truth-seeker is tempted to swap spotlight for halo: “My Big Idea is, um, probably dangerous.”

He reads from a tiny spiral notebook: “‘To conceive of my inter-connectedness and realize pure, selfless compassion.”‘ Meaning: “that I would feel the same about you as I do about myself — a very exhausting concept. It usually leads to Mother Teresa and working in hospitals.” He pauses. “Or to the insane asylum.”

Luckily for you, Spalding Gray is still dizzy with possibility, and heaven can wait. The awful bigness of Gray’s vision of enlightenment, juxtaposed with the devilish details of his attempts at it, are what makes his self-centered performances so selflessly universal. Stuck between paradise and Burger King, Gray sums up his current stage of spiritual awareness with a line of urban zen: “It’s all about trying not to litter.”

Why read it? My editor at The Downtown Express was Jan Hodenfield. Years after Gray’s terrible death in 2004 Jan called to tell me he’d reread this interview and it remained his favorite piece of mine and also his favorite piece on Gray, In the light of subsequent events, the themes it strums and conflicts it delineates are really haunting.

The DILFIT Fashion Disaster Award Alert…

Back in the spring of 2008, I created the DILFIT Awards for Self-Loathing in Fashion. My list of winners ran in The New York Times’ T Magazine. (“DILFIT,” as you have no doubt guessed, is the acronym for “Do I Look Fat In This?”)

I had hoped to bestow the DILFITS annually, but, lazy worm that I am, I haven’t. I am happy to announce, however, that there is a winner for the 2012 Spring and Summer season.

Comme des Garcons gown 2012

It is Rei Kawakubo, whose inspired creation—pictured here—so perfectly reflects the “complexity and feminist ambivalence” that Vogue’s Sarah Mower admired in the Japanese designer’s Comme des Garcons collection for Spring.

On days when a woman applies too much eye makeup, and it smears all over her face when she tries to remove it, and rubbing only makes her skin look raw, and she’s knee-deep in used cotton balls and late for work, or a date, and it’s that time of the month, this is surely what she will want to wear to flagrantly and stylishly express her dismay at being herself.

The white boots, which reminded Style.com’s Tim Blanks of technician-wear appropriate for a post-tsunami nuclear reactor melt-down, or “equally….sixties couture a-go-go,” will show off every bit of mud a determinedly self-loathing woman drags herself through.

And, yes, you will look fat in it.
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If you have a nominee you would like me to consider, I’d love to issue further awards. Please use the contact form and include a link to the image as well as your reasons why the outfit reflects, soothes, illuminates or compliments self-loathing.
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Focus v. Awareness

December 10, 2011 / nex2zero / 0 Comments

stare at red dot fixedly and blue circle fades

Fixed focus and general awareness don’t play well together. Concentrating on any one thing can cause “attentional blindness,” the inability to notice something obvious.

Stare at the red dot above fixedly and the blue circle will gradually fade from view. Remember: if you focus on your self-loathing your actual loathsomeness will evaporate from your peripheral vision, but if you focus only on the positive you will eventually go blind.

(Image originally obtained here).

Boviscopophobia, the David Foster Wallace Disorder

November 29, 2011 / lp / 0 Comments

Go On: Look Like a Cow!

In A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace peered down on his fellow passengers as they debarked from the luxury cruise ship M.V. Zenith, and recoiled at the sight of them “waddling in expensive sandals into poverty-stricken ports,” a morally and aesthetically repulsive herd.

“For me,” he confessed, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we’re in port. “Boviscopophobia,” he explains in a footnote, is “the morbid fear of being seen as bovine.” He feared looking like a cow.

He imagines that not all the tourists are unaware that, to locals, they might resemble fat cattle. Perhaps, he muses, that despite it, they…

…refuse to let their boviscopophobia rule them:they’ve paid good money to have fun and be pampered and record some foreign experiences, and they’ll be goddamned if they’re going to let some self-indulgent twinge of neurotic projection about how their Americanness appears to malnourished locals detract from the 7NC Luxury Cruise they’ve worked and saved for and decided they deserve.

But Wallace is too truth-loving to compartmentalize. He can’t shake “a self-conscious and somewhat condescending concern about how I appear to others that is (this concern) 100% upscale American,” which is to say:

…large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance-conscious, ashamed, despairing, and greedy; the world’s only known species of bovine carnivore.*

His may be the purest example of self-loathing conflated with America-bashing we have. You don’t have to be a self-adoring patriot to see why non-self-loathers and the self-loathing-impaired might not want to ratify this sort of vision, might resent it, even.

Liberals get accused of being self-loathing a lot because, well, we often are. And we get accused of hating America because, hey, many smart, articulate liberals—like many radical Christian evangelicals—genuinely do. That is, they can only love America when they imagine it filled with people who agree with them. And it isn’t.

You can try to explain to activists why the odor of this attitude is like weaponized ammonia when it comes to organizing for change in the US, why most of their country-folk would rather eat glass—or at least corndogs—rather than identify with a vortex of self-awareness, self-rejection and moral superiority that seems destined for suicide, but listening, alas, is not the visionary’s strong suit.

What’s great about the OWS upsurge, however, is that it rightly re-assigns ordinary Americans to the ranks of the oppressed and despised—hence (for anti-authoritarian power-haters) the loveable underdog sector of the world. There’s an opportunity here to offset liberal self-and-other revulsion with some genuine fellow feeling. I hope we grab it. Fan as I am of self-loathing as insightful as David Foster Wallace’s, I don’t want his sensibility leading our country into another impotence-infatuated Naderite ditch.

Fellow citizens: Do not be afraid! Look like a cow! Love yourself as you would any other grass-fed, pasture-raised icon of bucolic simplicity. Stuff your face and your shopping bags. Waddle to freedom. Drop your cow pies and make your milk. Watch your Housewives of Atlanta. Remember: We, too, deserve liberty, good governmnt, democracy, and a reasonable amount of equality—no matter how bovine we appear to great writers…or to ourselves.

*for quotes, see .pp 310-311 hardcover ed.

Bad Sex Science

November 19, 2011 / lp / 0 Comments

gendered colors

I can’t stand it when people gender the spectrum, though I am mortified by exactly how much I care. For example, read this article from Science Magazine’s blog along with me and see how excessively furious I get over its every little idiocy.

It’s called “Blue and red” and it’s by a professor, at San Diego State University, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, named Thomas J. Impelluso. He writes:

The color blue is often associated with boys, while red (or pink) is associated with girls.

[Keep your eye on that “often.”]

Neuroscientists Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling demonstrated through a series of tests that women tend to prefer the red end of the spectrum. But is this a cultural phenomenon or is it biological? Chinese researchers demonstrated through another series of tests that this preference extends across cultures.

[Well, two cultures. Because let’s not get all fixated on the British Redcoats, Stalinist Russians, and Catholic cardinals. They obviously wore red, not to express their preference for it, but to attract warm-spectrum-loving girls. ]
Continue reading

Top Ten Secret Commandments for Self-Loathers

November 8, 2011 / lp / 0 Comments

These commandments are so secret, most self-loathers don’t even know when they’re following them.

1. Thou shalt not compromise thy principles, ever.
2. Thou shalt be best at everything, else thou hast failed.
3. Thou shalt be chill; let nothing get to thee.
4. Thou shalt eschew banality, nor be ordinary.
5. Please thee thy crazy parents, be they satiable
or be they not.
6. Thou shalt feed the hungry—every living one of them.
7. Feel at all times happy, for moodiness is an abomination.
8. Remember: to err is regrettable, to forgive thyself, defeat.
9. Thou shalt trust thine own judgement, yea, even when thou art nuts.
10. Thou shalt not self-loathe.

From SL4B; “the Building Blocks of Self-Loathing,” page 29

NY Times Discovers Self-Help Addiction

November 8, 2011 / lp / 0 Comments

Alina Tugend, in her November 4th column, Pursuing Self-Improvement, at the Risk of Self-Acceptance, has finally noticed that America’s self-improvement addiction has a downside. She was aided in part by a book annoyingly entitled, Good Enough Is the New Perfect (Harlequin, 2011), by Hollee Schwartz Temple and Becky Beaupre Gillespie. The pair, Tugend tells us,

…surveyed about 1,000 mothers in their 30s and 40s nationwide and interviewed about 100 for their book. They found that the women broadly fell into two categories: “never enoughs” and “good enoughs.”

Never-enough women felt they had to be the best at everything and often agreed with the sentiment that “I need to be a superstar even if it kills me.”

As a recipe for self-loathing, that’s hard to beat. One of Tugend’s blog readers, Fritz Ziegler, moreover, noticed the Catch-22 of self-acceptance:

… Acceptance includes accepting that sometimes we act in perfectionistic ways about self-improvement, i.e., accepting that we aren’t accepting enough. This can also be said as: Complaining about not being accepting enough is just another version of perfectionism. It’s all so recursive!

Yes, Fritz; it is. You’re catching on.

paws

September 30, 2009 / lp / 0 Comments

The stylish self-loather will want a pair of these hand-crafted shoes for incorrigibly flamboyant sub-human moments. This article appeared on page 100 of T Magazine’s Fall 2009 issue in the ReMix section. You can click on it to make ita readable size. Bob Bassett and his workshop, the creators of these, do other amazing things with leather, mad masks and dragon bags, all very steampunk and passing strange.

Stumble Into Darwin

March 19, 2009 / lp / 0 Comments

This is a big year for Darwin, and his work. Also a big year for over-evolved shoes. Multiple celebrations will offer self-loathers numerous opportunities to fall off our platform pumps, put our feet in our mouths and generally humiliate ourselves in the festivals of academe.

Click thumbnail to see larger version of my T Magazine piece on the subject of Darwinian Shoes, or download the PDF file below.

Darwinian shoes PDF

fall fashion self-loathing

August 17, 2008 / lp / 0 Comments

This piece of mine ran Aug 17th in print, and can be found online here. It is unusual for The Times to do humor, let alone about neuroscience, so attempting a project like this was an invitation to a kind of filigree-style self-loathing, wherein the insatiable concerns of psychobiologists for repertorial accuracy (you just can’t convey the complexity of neurocircuitry in ten words and still have room for the graphics) and the delicate feelings of celebrities’ lawyers (note the ample use of words like “seemingly”) twist their tendrils about your waking mind and spin spiderwebs through your dreams.

Is it clear in my article that the brain doesn’t really have clearly-definable “centers” for complex functions like speech? No. Is it clear that diffusion of Botox into the upper reaches of the cranium from a shot in the forehead has (as yet) no support from experimental evidence? Not really. Was I able to suggest that the nicotine receptors that Botox blocks have never specifically been shown to occasion the release of dopamine – a neurotransmitter associated with a very different set of receptors? Barely.

So this article makes me out to be something of an idiot, neurology-wise. And that for me is the fun of it. Because really we don’t need Botox to make us into fools; the simple task of trying to write clearly will do that nicely and far less inexpensively. Alas, it also causes the brow to wrinkle.

ClickHERE to order Self-Loathing for Beginners from Amazon.

Donald Lipsky Cuts Up

August 3, 2008 / lp / 0 Comments

book art by donald lipsky artist Donald Lipsky was inspired to create a version of SL4B that ate its heart out. Unfortunately, it is not for sale. But you can get self-loathing cups and care bears, etc. through Cafe Press, if you like. Click the tab above to navigate to our shop. The cup is especially nice. and will remind you to loathe yourself better and more stylishly with every sip.

Amy takes the cakes

May 8, 2008 / lp / 0 Comments

Courtney Love
may want
to be the girl
with the most cake,
but when it comes to
cocktail-style self-loathing
(see Self-Loathing
for Beginners, p. 22)
Amy Winehouse is
the one on a roll
(bad puns go
down well with Brits).
She handled her
recent arrest
(for impersonating
a crack ho)
with crocodile sobs,
then went
scampering about
for the cameras,
celebrating her
flagrant and adorable self-loathing,
as these astounding
photos from the Daily Mail attest.
Thanks to Gawker for
shipping us across the pond
for this treat.

Postscript: Fall 2011. Amy didn’t always convey the romance of degradation when she was in the tabs or botching a concert, but her music was something else. “I’m No Good,” is a great and beautiful anthem to the exquisite intensity of self-detestation in love. For making blues the new black and being “too hard to ignore,” we love her and miss her. —LP.

Arianna Used the Word “Self-loathing Today

April 24, 2008 / lp / 0 Comments

Arianna Huffington: The Self-Loathing “Liberal” Media

Newsweek hires Karl Rove. The New York Times hires Bill Kristol. CNN hires Tony Snow. What is it with these media outlets? Have they been so cowed by the Right’s relentless branding of them as “liberal” that they feel compelled to show that they are not by sleeping with the enemy? . . . By embracing these unabashed propagandists, the mainstream media have revealed a self-loathing streak a mile wide.

She ends, speaking on behalf of the radical right, with this paraphrase of Lenin:

“Self-loathing liberals will hand us the microphone with which we will bludgeon them.”

I hope they buy my book.

The DILFITS

April 16, 2008 / lp / 0 Comments

On April 13th, the fashion supplement to The New York Times (called “T Beauty”) ran a piece of mine on the self-loathing fashion awards. (Click the image at left to see a legible version.) A few of these images benefit from still further enlargement, both visually and mentally, because of the playful way they violate human dignity. Since dignity is one of those things we must often abandon to survive (or even to charm those whose baser affections we seek), it’s worth a self-loather’s time to study these costumes further.

The men’s outfits were particularly delightful for self-loathers this spring because they so wittily elaborated upon what sort of things men might want to loathe themselves for. Specifically, for being either a pussy or a brute. In times of war, it’s tempting to go for one or the other, even if you aren’t a man.

According to numerous sloppy thinkers in government and the academy, when faced with a vague, power-seeking enemy who wants to turn tables on you, you must agree to do terrible things to these enemies in order to protect your friends. Shackles and hoods, orange jumpsuits and women’s panties, all kinds of fashion accoutrements have been deployed in assaults on the dignity of war captives in the hope that once they are dignity-free they will be willing to help us. Both our willing interrogation teams and those of us exposed to images and tales of their exploits, are also frequently dressed down by those who still cling feebly to decency.

The Thom Browne fashion plate is a man who refuses to let his manhood bloom, lest it take him into such murky waters. This outfit’s frilly gray roses—at once tender and dead looking—so beautifully express the terror of cowardice we all feel that I think we should all spend a day or two wearing them. Galliano’s gladiator, conversely, is a lord of flies and carnage, a man less likely to sip a martini than to guzzle a goblet of bull’s blood. He has renounced the civilizing principle, refusees community; he has abandoned any trust in refinement, in pencil skirts and purses and bouquets, and so thoroug is his fear of femininity that his mighty hose has turned on him and now pumps him full of his own toxic juices. Galliano sees this warrior as a figure of fun, a grotesque, an object lesson, but also a curious object of desire. That hose may be useless, but it is impressively large, and I imagine that it would be hard to get it out of your mind once it came strutting down the runway at you. But the point is, that these are the outfits we’re all metaphorically wearing these days, and it’s always a joy to see our general discomfort (malaise? revulsion? embarrassment?) so amusingly caricatured.

The Library Journal

April 15, 2008 / lp / 0 Comments

April 15th 2008 (It’s about a third down the page)Phillips, Lynn. Self-Loathing for Beginners. Santa Monica. Apr. 2008.

c.216p. ISBN 978-1-59580-029-9. pap. $12.95. HUMOR

Phillips, who has written for publications ranging from the National Lampoon to Newsweek International, here presents-to quote the book’s promotional material-“the essential primer on how best to despise yourself!” This assessment isn’t far off: Phillips has written a gleefully sardonic guide to self-condemnation and disapproval that offers up wisdom in bite-size morsels. Short chapters are broken up with quizzes, “questions from the floor,” tips, and inspiration boxes.

Although the material isn’t groundbreaking-Phillips mentions self-loathing through abuse of food, bad love relationships, or demeaning family dynamics-the deftness with which she ties it all together makes this a delightful read. The sections on meta-self-loathing and spiritual self-loathing add an unexpected bit of flavor as well. Phillips is a self-described media tramp, and, as such, many of her examples will best resonate with those who follow celebrity news. This smart, accessible title-good for sit-down comic reading and with outstanding sound-bite potential-will entertain audiences from precocious high schoolers to retirees. A good choice for all public collections; academic libraries may also wish to consider.

–Audrey Snowden, Cleveland P.L.

NYT Contributors’ Page

April 13, 2008 / lp / 0 Comments

From “T Beauty” magazine, the New York Times fashion supplement, April 13th, 2008.

If you click this picture it will get BIGGER! But, in case you still can’t read it, here’s the text:

The New York-based writer Lynn Phillips is a self-loather and proud of it. “I have an allergy to people telling me to cheer up,” she says. Phillips, who was once a writer on the cult 70’s television show “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” has even written a book called “Self-Loathing for Beginners” (Santa Monica Press) that covers the basics for thoughtful cynics and all those who “respond better to gloomier encouragement.” (Chapter 1 has a section called “Self-Love—Friend or Foe?”) Phillips was kind enough to present the first annual self-loathing awards for this issue (And the Winner Is…” Page 26*); naturally, she turned her weary wit to some of the fashion industry’s worst culprits. She cites a history of people saying good things about dark moods, such as the psychologist William James and the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (center), whom she calls a master of the genre: “He even relocated humanity in the universe so we realized how pathetic and small we are.”

*NOTE: The article to which this squib refers was actually on p. 28, not p 26.

Tired of being a doormat? Be a rug.

April 12, 2008 / lp / 0 Comments

According to the New York Times, a Swedish company, Kasthall, is displaying a “Negative Text Rug” which proclaims “I feel like everyone is walking all over me. I feel so low. Like someone is standing on me. I feel as if I am flat on the floor.” The words, written in white cursive script on a dark ground, were created with a “pneumatic yarn gun” (whatever that may be) and the rug is displayed in Kasthall’s New York showroom hanging on the wall, (making every word it utters a lie). The rug’s pimps are asking $6,091 for it, far more than it thinks it is worth, which is what makes it so valuable to the self-loather in us.

Thank You for Not Writing Your Memoir

April 12, 2008 / lp / 0 Comments

Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila Matas and translated by Jonathan Dunne, is a small masterpiece of literary self-effacement. It is presented as a series of 86 footnotes to an otherwise unwritten book devoted to writers who stop writing (Robert Walser who went mad, or Rimbaud who wandered off after his spectacular debut) and writers who never actually write at all (like Socrates—who leaves the penmanship to Plato—or Paranoid Pérez, a character created by Antonio de la Mota Ruiz, who never gets to author a book because any time he has an idea for one, another character in the story writes it first).

Vila Matas lauds writers whose humility forbids them to attempt the impossible feat of writing accurately, writers who—properly conscious of the vanity of literature and the irrelevance of acclaim—beg to be forgotten, writers who, like Melville’s Bartleby, “would prefer not to.” This most amusing and inspired meander through the history of creative self-negation is a must for the serious self-loather who wishes to go for a higher degree.

The Chicago Sun Review

April 8, 2008 / lp / 0 Comments

Striving to make success of self-loathing

PAIGE WISER pwiser@suntimes.com

The bad news? I have recently spent actual money on:

• • A lavishly illustrated book by one of the “Biggest Loser” trainers, a show I have never watched.

• • A 2008 page-a-day calendar for “Women Who Do Too Much,” which I have not yet bothered to take out of the box.

• • And Scrabble for my cell phone. I figured I could keep my mind sharp by playing myself and improving my strategy skills.

You guessed it. I cheat.

Clearly, I hate myself. But there is good news: It turns out that I am directly on top of a trend, which is documented in the new book Self-Loathing for Beginners.

Author Lynn Phillips explains that, even if you sometimes love yourself, that should never stop you from loathing yourself, too. As an example, she offers up Oprah Winfrey — a woman equally known for her philanthropy and her yo-yo dieting.

“Oprah is able to layer her public self-love and private self-loathing like low-fat whipped cream and sugar-free Jell-O so that both can be tasted distinctly, but at the same time,” writes Phillips.

(The book is so smart and densely funny that several times I had to pause, just to hate myself for not writing it.)

Chicago: Capital of self-loathing

Phillips knows that we talk a good game. As Americans, we like to pride ourselves on democracy and diversity. The truth is that globally, we are considered a superficial, dangerous country absorbed in a never-ending pursuit of self-improvement . . . which inevitably leads to credit card debt and Cheetos binges.

And as Chicagoans, forget about it. We insulate ourselves from the preposterous weather with layers of parkas and fat. We root ferociously for losing sports teams. We call ourselves the Midwest, when anyone with a map can see that we are much more Upper Right. We are the Capital of Self-Loathing.

read the table of contents

April 2, 2008 / lp / 0 Comments

Introduction

Part I—The Basics

Chapter 1: The FAQ
Are You a Beginner?
How Much Self-Loathing Is Enough?
Self-Love—Friend or Foe?
Perpetual Motion Self-Loathing
The Free Pass

Chapter 2: The Building Blocks of Self-Loathing
Self-Loathing’s Seven Essential
Questions (and Their Answers )

Chapter 3: Self-Loathing’s No-Brainer—The Body
Women First
Men Can Do It Too
More Women
Unisex
Chapter Review

Part II—The Material World

Chapter 4: Celebrity Culture
The Tabs
People Who Need People
Porn
Show Biz

Chapter 5: The Fashionable Self-Loather
First Impressions
Fashion Minefield
Don’ts, Dos, and Dids

Chapter 6: Food for Self-Loathing
Diets
Gorging
Purging
Foraging
Dining Out with Civilized People

Part III—Interactive Self-Loathing

Chapter 7: Self-Loathing Sex!
Before
During
After
Hooking Up

Chapter 8: Love and Other Romantic Involvements
Fishing for Love
Getting Hooked on Love
Cutting Bait

Chapter 9: The Self-Loather’s Family Album
The Self-Loathing of Minors
Self-Loathing Quality Time for Adults
Self-Loathing and Marriage

Chapter 10: Workplace Self-Loathing
Buckling Down
Horizontal Motion
Vertical Promotion

Chapter 11: The Social Self-Loather
Act Locally
Act Globally

Part IV—The Self-Loathing Elite

Chapter 12: Self-Loathing Dabbles in the Arts
Fine Art
The Performing Arts—Theater, Dance, and Music
Dead Trees

Chapter 13: The Spiritual Self-Loather
World Religion
The West
The East

Chapter 14: All in Your Mind
Meta-Self-Loathing
Ancient Philosophy and Self-Loathing

Chapter 15: Endgame
Old Age
Decline
Fall
Death

Appendix

Graduation
Acknowledgments
Author’s Bio

the spitzers

March 13, 2008 / lp / 0 Comments

eliot and silda spitzer/reuters The Spitzers appeared to be in an advanced state of self-loathing when Eliot abandoned the gubernatorial ship yesterday. But loathing over what? Was his shame as durable as he claimed in his resignation speech? He looks like he has swallowed a big gulp of crow, but is “The remorse I feel will always be with me” an accurate statement on his part? We detect a note of relief in his departing words:

I go forward with the belief. . .that as human beings, our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

In other words, he will not stay limp for long. He goes on…

As I leave public life, I will first do what I need to do to help and heal myself and my family. Then I will try once again, outside of politics, to serve the common good. . .

Serious students of self-loathing will detect in this trajectory the mark of the pseudo self-loather. Like Al Gore, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton before him, Eliot Spitzer’s dive may be a self-preserving stratagem designed to escape the harsher sort of public scrutiny and land someplace more cushioned where a person can be more effective, less embattled, better paid and — should he so desire — better laid than a public official.

As for Silda, her self-loathing seems at least temporarily authentic. “How could I?” reads her thought bubble. “How could I have gotten so entangled with this worm it no longer pays to leave? I should have run for Governor myself — like Hillary! And that hooker is so lame! ‘Ashley!!!’ When I think that he stuck his dick into a mouth from which came the words, ‘I am all about my music, and my music is all about me,’ I want to puke my guts out. And now I’m the icon for doormat wives. Thanks, girls.”

This fall’s self-loathing academy award…

March 4, 2008 / lp / 0 Comments

viggo - eastern promises In US cinema, self-loathing in the line of duty was pretty much this year’s theme, making it hard to award SL4B’s coveted SLOscar to just one performance in the category: “Best Depiction of Self-Loathing.”

In Eastern Promises, Viggo Mortensen’s “Nikolai” had to become London’s top Russian mafioso in order to fight crime effectively. He ended up defaced by sinister tattoos and the splatter of underworld butchery, feeling too slimey to claim a woman’s love. That was also, more or less, the plot of Sweeney Todd, the vengeful barber and class warrior, magnificently portrayed in puddles of stage blood by Johnny Depp. Both actors were quite convincing and, more importantly, attractively miserable.

So was George Clooney’s “Michael Clayton” as a giant law firm’s fixer, a character who felt compromised (a) from the start and (b) to the core. After Clayton’s equally self-loathing friend, Arthur Edens (pb Tom Wilkenson), generously teaches him to put his self-loathing to work saving innocent maidens, (much like mob infiltrator Nikolai), Clayton ends up loathing himself for trading his livelihood (and ability to pay child support) for a hollow moral victory. He communicates this without lines, thank God, by slouching and looking empty, plus sad, palpably conveyong that the alternative to feeling compromised is feeling fired.

Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood and Til dd lewis in There Will Be Blood da Swinton in Michael Clayton both played ambitious strivers who spend their lives desperately running from themselves towards something they wrongly assume will be better. Swinton achieves a shivering state of free fall, and maintains it brilliantly, while Lewis keeps shooting black bile skyward as if we will never run out of the stuff. Bravo.

So who wins the SLOscar for best portrayal of making one’s self want to puke? Subtle Viggo? Operatic Johnnie? Suffering George? High strung Tilde or the explosive D.D.?

Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton Well I just can’t decide. Isn’t that pathetic? Except I will say that Daniel Day Lewis’s Daniel Plainview does a little bit too much eye-crossing, shouting and turning red in the face to make a credible self-loather. When he famously bellows “I’ve abandoned my boy!” at a revival meeting, you suspect what he’s really feeling is tired of ingratiating himself with the saps he’s fleecing. There’s never a moment in which Lewis’s Plainview sees the worst in himself and figures it’ll be hard to live with. You can imagine him pouring himself a stiff one and cutting himself some slack, like, “Hey: At least I didn’t invade Iraq.” The giants of self-loathing don’t hedge like that. It was a fine performance, but less a portrait of a self-loather than of someone interestingly loathsome.

So, while we end up with an awkward number of SLOscar winners, I’m happy to say that we could at least pick a loser.

be kind to self-loathing-for-beginners