Wendy McClure

Author and Professional Obsessive.

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OhNoMoBlo

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Can I do NaBloPoMo without actually having to call it that? What if I pretend it actually stands for Narcoleptic Bloated Post-Modernism and just write lots of coy footnotes instead of blog posts? Or, better, what if I actually just post a little more often than I have in the past couple of weeks? Okay then!

I’m sorry that my Halloween costumes are getting more obscure every year. Last year I was a VC Andrews character, to the delight of approximately six people. This year Chris and I went as Raymond and Connie Marble, which I’m sure appealed only to the four people who have seen Pink Flamingos, or at least the two people who do not deeply resent us for reminding them that they have seen Pink Flamingos. Maybe next year I will dress up as a mumbled song lyric for a band nobody has heard of. (Well, nobody except Chris.)

We were thinking of going out again in costume last night, but we were waylaid by exhuastion and a surprise airing of Mommie Dearest on the Oxygen Network. Oh my God: I forgot about this freaking movie. I watched it constantly on HBO from the time I was about eleven to, I don’t know, the time my brain went soft and mushy just like the slab of rare prime rib little Christina defiantly refused to eat in that one scene REMEMBER THAT PART? REMEMBER? Ahh! And Chris had never seen it, so of course I had to usher him through the satin-upholstered luxe corridors of this fine, fine film. I hadn’t seen it for at least ten years and yet my memory is such that I can tell exactly which scenes are deleted or edited for TV broadcast and I am compelled to describe or even act out the missing dialogue. That’s right, I experience cinematic phantom limb pain for Mommie Dearest. How hideous is that?

Okay, I probably won’t post every day in November, since I have a column due soon and a trip next weekend. But I might have to tell you about how I lost seven pounds last month, and wow, that came out sounding like an informerical, didn’t it? I’ll tell you more later, hopefully not at all like an informercial and much more like the half-assed diet blog this site used to be.

The big fat picture

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Last Friday I dashed off that post about the fat Gaultier model and I kept meaning to come back and elaborate, and in the meantime plenty of you left comments. It’s last week’s news by now, but what the hell, here’s what I think, about both the model and the comments:

I think this fat model Velvet D’Amour is beautiful, but I think lots of people are beautiful. Like I think Paris Hilton is beautiful, except for her squinty left eye and her soul. And I think it’s nice that a famous high-fashion designer has decided that a fat woman is beautiful, but of course, famous high-fashion designers have also decided that junkies and dead people and Mischa Barton’s outfits are beautiful. So really, why should we care who thinks whoever else is beautiful?

But go on and talk all you want about whether Velvet’s hair was ugly, or her outfit was weird, or whatever. Because the only thing I love more than being too big for the largest pair of Gaultier Jeans is knowing that apparently it doesn’t matter whether the lady on the runway (or in the magazine, or the billboard) is skinny or fat, since either way, we’re going to pick her apart like an order of KFC. It’s not like any of you meant to be malicious—but still, what the fuck?

We’re entitled to our opinions and beauty is a state of mind, but maybe we need to get out of our own damn minds once in awhile. I’m getting tired of the whole world just standing around looking at little pictures muttering, she’s pretty, she’s ugly, she’s pretty but her hair is ugly, while the bigger picture looms behind us, and we’re all a part of it, and it’s full of plenty of things uglier than bad hair.

Randa linked to this interview with Velvet d’Amour, who can clearly see the big picture. Read it and see how the interviewer tries to bait her— all like, oh, don’t you hate these skinny models? Don’t they make you feel ugly? Don’t you think they’re ugly? And Velvet, bless her heart and her great big booty, doesn’t bite. Now that’s beautiful. But that’s just my opinion.

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On a related note, you know what else is beautiful? When designers go beyond the supposedly mind-blowing act of putting a fat chick on the runway and actually make clothes for her. Clothes that she can wear to work and to parties, because oddly enough, fat chicks do these things. Last year I bought a couple of tops from Igigi and liked them, and whenever I wear one of them I think idly, yeah, I should buy another one of these thingies. And one day recently, after I did just that I got an email from Ozlem, who works at Igigi, who offered to send me some stuff to try out. And then I bought them. On sale. Awesome.

Idi bitty tidbits of my week

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Oh my sticky stars, I’ve had so much catching up to do now since I’ve gotten back from the prairie. I’ve gone from whispering into my cell phone and having cicadas chirp me to sleep at Ragdale to going out almost every night to attend various reading/party thingys. Somehow we are lucky enough to know people like Alpana Singh, Andi Zeisler and Lisa Jervis from Bitch, and John Hodgman, all of whom had reading thingys here in Chicago this past week. Somehow we are lucky enough to not know people like Idi Amin, because last night we went to a preview screening of The Last King of Scotland, which had just about everything you could reasonably expect from a movie about Idi Amin. It was a good movie, though of course it had moments where I couldn’t cover my eyes enough, not even if I had three dozen hands, not even if Idi Amin himself provided three dozen hands in a handy wheelbarrow for my convenience. Those scenes were definitely more unpleasant than drinking Malort, and that is saying A LOT.

Speaking of disgusting things, I thought I had a pretty high threshold of tolerance when it comes to freaky reality show antics, but that was before I watched the new season of America’s Next Top Model and saw Monique sprinkle furniture and housemates with her alleged Moniqueness. (I am talking about both the time she “marked her territory” on one of the beds, which involved just water—but still, the idea was there—and the incident where she subjected Melrose to That Shower-Fresh Feeling. I do not know how to relate it any more delicately. If you don’t watch the show, I assure you that whatever foul thing you have imagined will likely suffice.) And while I have not watched Flavor of Love this season (I caught a little bit of the first season, and I’ll watch again only if Sister Souljah guest-stars and storms the house and punches Flav somewhere below his timepiece), I have heard that one of the contestants left an even more substantial mark on the stairs, just for you-know-whats and giggles. To all this I say: Dear Hostile, Bodily-Substance-Flinging Reality Show Contestant, if your excuse for acting like an crazed macaque is that it “gets attention” and makes for “interesting television,” then it ought to be okay for the camera crew to shoot tranquilzer darts at you whenever necessary, because that would make for interesting television, too.

Finally, the little radio segment I did for Writer’s Block Party last week can be found online here. It’s supposed to be sort of funny, though I think I sound oddly mournful on audio. Oh, well.

More Bad Times and other bitchiness

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Wow, I almost forgot to tell you about my Bad Times at a CVS! It was in the parking lot at the Western and Elston location one night a few weeks ago. Chris and I were stopping there on our way home. I’d started to pull into a parking space when I saw an even closer spot along the side of the building, and directly across the aisle from me. For some reason I decided I HAD to park in that spot—that I would be a total chump to not park there, considering that all I had to do was coast straight ahead five yards or so. There were no cars in between, only open space and a single pigeon puttering around. I pulled ahead a few feet and stopped.

“I’m waiting for the pigeon,” I told Chris. Somehow it hadn’t flown away yet. There were parked cars on either side, so I couldn’t just drive around the pigeon. I rolled forward—slowly—and stopped again. Now I couldn’t see the pigeon.

“It flew away, right?” I asked Chris. “It had to have flown away,” he said. I pulled ahead into the parking spot and turned off the car. I had a funny feeling, though, and sure enough, when I looked back there was a crumpled ball of grey feathers right where I’d driven.

We got out and just stood by the car and stared for a minute. “How did I manage to kill it?” I said out loud. I was a little stunned. I wanted to blame my car. Maybe my Subaru Forester was a big clumsy killer, I thought, just like the halfwit in Of Mice and Men.

“Don’t worry about it,” Chris said. “It’s the city. It’s a dead pigeon.”

Another couple had come out of CVS and were walking to their car, which, as it turned out, was pretty much right next to the dead pigeon. The man had just walked over to the driver’s side when he spotted it a few feet away. He stopped, rather dramatically. “I think you just took out a bird,” he said.

I nodded. “Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “Weird, huh?”

But the guy just stood there, frozen with either horror or disgust. He opened his car door as if to get in, but then froze again. Definitely with digust. “God,” he said. He shook his head. “God,” he said again. The woman who was with him waited on the passenger side of the car. “Honey?” she said. “Let’s go.” The man looked at us one last time. He actually sighed. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

We could feel him glaring at us through the windshield as he started his car. “Does he think I ran over that bird just to ruin his day?” I asked Chris. “He thinks that, doesn’t he?”

“Good for you,” Chris said, and then we went in to shop at CVS. Though we have yet to determine whether this incident makes this CVS a Bad Times CVS.

In other news, USA Today liked my book just fine last year and thought us bloggers with book deals were just peachy, but apparently Stephanie Klein’s book sucks so bad that the rest of us now suck in retrospect. Awesome! Thanks, Stephanie Klein!

(Also, I hope Carol Memmott writes more publishing trend sidebar pieces about books written by people who got their start writing things that totally weren’t even books. Like maybe she can write about all those journalists who only got their book deals because they’re journalists, and who don’t make the USA Today Best-Selling Books List because, in the end, they’re nothing but journalists who can’t write anything as good as The Kite Runner or The Clique #6: Dial L for Loser (A Clique Novel) and therefore ought to go back to journalism, where they were “bigger” anyway, according to the latest hypothetical un-statstical non-data she’ll totally forget to cite.)

Side note 1: I’m going camping in Michigan this weekend, so any comments left after tonight may not appear on the site until Sunday night or Monday. Though, hey, if you’re a disgrunted Stephanie Klein fan, maybe you’ll just leave a multiple one-star reviews on my Amazon page just like you did with my friend Jen Lancaster’s book.

Side note 2: You know, I haven’t even READ Stephanie Klein’s book yet and I don’t know if I will, though if USA Today reporters are going to equate blog books with self-indulgent suckage, I’d sort of like to know what I’m being blamed-by-association for, so maybe I will read it, though when I do, maybe I’ll keep my mouth shut and stay out of all this.

Side note 3: Wow, I think I need to calm down. Let’s all watch this highly amusing video ad for John Hodgman’s book, shall we?

Summertime, and the living is… well, getting easier

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This has been the first time in weeks that I haven’t needed to give my time and energy over to moving boxes or houseguests or column deadlines or IKEA pilgrimages or I Love The 70s or grotesque, soul-withering heat. For the next three hundred words or so I’m devoting myself to YOU, the people.

Hello! How are you? How are your walls? Do you have stuff hanging on them? Do you have stuff on your shelves, too? How did that happen? How did you do that? Did you ever know that you’re my hero? And everything I would like to be? We’re definitely making progress, but it’s taking awhile. Right now, we’re at the point where almost everything with a power cord is plugged in where it needs to be, and all the electronic displays are sentient and unblinking. However we keep buying power strips, which baffles me. I mean, X is the number of things we need to plug in and Y is the number of available wall outlets, and in the course of changing apartments, X remains constant, at least for now, and Y, thank God, has increased, AND YET, this means that Z, the number of power strips we need, somehow increases as well. I mean, first the logic was: if X > Y, then Z, right? So why is it now X ≤ Y+Z = EVEN MORE FUCKING Z?

But of course, I’m glad we moved. Here is a list of totally mundane things we have in our new place that I did not have the pleasure of experiencing in my old building, and, in a few cases, my entire adult life thus far:

  • Garage space.
  • A bathroom exhaust fan.
  • An open-air back porch.
  • One of those sprayer thingies in the kitchen sink.
  • Three-prong receptacles in every outlet.
  • Water pressure. No, really.
  • Enough room to comfortably walk around the bed.
  • Basement storage that is clean and dry and well-lit and does not appear to have been dug out by Jame Gumb.
  • A laundry room that can be reached without having to go outside and through the alley.
  • Lights in the (get this!) CLOSETS.

See how easy to please I am? I know this might sound totally absurd to those of you who live in suburban areas and/or newer buildings, where everyone has central air, and remote-control windows, and wet bars in every cathedral-ceilinged walk-in-closet. But for the city, and for an older building, what we have is pretty good.

I didn’t have a chance to link to it before now, but I have to agree with Mr. Walter’s letter in response to my NY Times piece about the Eno Incident (the news of which also somehow managed to reach The Guardian, as well, so you really ought to be pleased with yourself, O Unknown Rossi’s Jukebox Prankster). I feel I should add that while “Thursday Afternoon” is best experienced in a quiet environment with a quality sound system, Here Come The Warm Jets is best listened to in a new apartment, while cooking dinner, on the quality sound system your boyfriend somehow managed to set up and get all plugged in.  Or so I learned last night.

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