Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain

WHY I STOPPED WORKING OUT FOR YEARS

Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain is entirely supported by YOU, SO COUGH UP ALREADY. , Consider becoming a paid subscriber. Art is had work. 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.MORE OF MY FRANKLY AMAZING MEMOIR WORKSHOPS ARE COMING UP in a few weeks. Holler at me at Cintraw@Gmail if you’re interested. Space is extremely limited — first come, first serve. Yeah and then hire me as an editor so it makes bloody sense. Get full access to Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain at cintra.substack.com/subscribe

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CHRISTIAN LACROIX: Advanced Stages of Regression

Feb 1900:09:19Tap to summarize

(This piece previously appeared in the New York Times in 2008)Cintra Wilson is about to spend a year performing Beckett and staying in Motel 6’s across the land. Please make her life less grim by becoming a paid subscriber. 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 CWIT 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! Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain at cintra.substack.com/subscribe

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THE KILLER INSIDE ME

Feb 600:08:22Tap to summarize

To help Cintra Wilson survive, because she’s clearly bad at it, please become a paid subscriber.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 HIMI’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 Get full access to Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain at cintra.substack.com/subscribe

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THE BRUTALLY FUNNY, RADICALLY MORAL WORLD OF LETTERKENNY

Dec 2100:15:17Tap to summarize

Cintra Wilson actually relies heavily on the income from paid subscribers. If you read me regularly, you owe me.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...

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ADOPTING A LOOK, NO BOYS ALLOWED

Sep 2200:06:41Tap to summarize

Cintra Wilson relies heavily on the financial support she receives on Substack. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber.This article first appeared in the New York Times in 2011.BACK in the dark ages of my misspent youth, the cost of used clothing was always inversely proportional to the difficulty of finding it. Dumpster diving, though the least expensive, was the biggest long shot, and potentially the most nauseating and dangerous experience. Next came straight thrift — i.e., any rummage store named for a Catholic saint or the Salvation Army (a k a Sal’s).Then there was a tectonic fashion shift: suddenly cool trash had cultural cachet. Better labels and fabrics were segregated from the thrift racks, and the word “vintage” replaced terms like “used,” “secondhand” and “next-to-new.” Some hipsters became a baby merchant class of scavenger-chic garmentos, just like the hippies before them, who trafficked in the kitschy Victoriana of their grandmothers.The happy medium of a “vintage” clothing store has always been an elusive sweet spot. The ideal: a well-curated post-junk store that can articulate, anticipate and deliver style trends without losing sight of the fact that, from a financial perspective, the clothes are basically rubbish that happens to resemble the shapes of certain prevailing fads.Shareen Mitchell began her retail career in Los Angeles, with both a robust eye for hipsterism and a pragmatic sense of thrift. Shareen Vintage in New York is an eccentric site — an unmarked black door above a hair salon — with almost obnoxiously weird store hours. (Wednesday and Thursday, 5 to 10 p.m.; Saturdays, 12 to 6 p.m. That’s it.)The day I visited, the shop was being run by a British gal of the young Phoebe Cates variety who was welcoming in that popular-senior-going-out-of-her-way-to-be-nice-to-the-hapless-new-sophomore kind of way. I hurried to keep up with her as she swept through the three rooms of crammed racks, breezily indicating sections with a lazy hand while reciting a breathless run-on sentence.“Everything is organized by sleeve length, these are reworked and resort, these are party dresses, there’s minis, these are classic length, these are staff picks, most things are $48 and under except party dresses, and anything on a black velvet hanger is $88 and above because we paid a bit more for them, and the back room has furs and stuff for $80 and under ... and there’s no boys allowed, so you can just change anywhere.”(True enough: While I was there, someone’s boyfriend was refused entry and had to sit in a desultory manner on a bench in the outside hallway.)One of the problems with vintage stores is that they tend to cater to a limited range of looks, usually the one personally worn by the hipster-owner. The Shareen inventory, however, covers an impressively broad spectrum: billowy shirtdresses in Kool-Aid-colored silks and “Dynasty”-era shoulder pads (most around $52); pouffy Lacroix-knockoff prom dresses in taffeta and sequins; Gunne Sax dresses for that Australian girls’-school picnic at Hanging Rock; a rack of fringed suede and multicolored leathers.The space has the feel of a secret girls’ clubhouse. There’s a big couch in the back room near what seems to be a functional but unused kitchen; foreign chick flicks are playing on a large flat-screen TV near bowls of Starburst fruit chews.“It’s a proper girl place,” another saleswoman said. “You get to see other people trying things on. Girls say, ‘This would look better on you,’ and they swap. We serve wine in the evenings and just hang out.”One gets the feeling that some girls are more invited than others, but unlike, say, the dehumanizing experience of the Loehmann’s group dressing room, being at Shareen with a bunch of trendy 20-somethings in chatty locker-room states of dishabille does seem to inspire a kind of situational intimacy.I TRIED on a fluorescent pink-orange St. John knit dress from the mid-1960s — very “Mad Men,” with gold buttons up the front. With a visible question mark over my head, I turned to a girl who I assumed from various overheard remarks was an aspiring stylist. She appraised me with careful and squinty attention. “You know?” she eventually winced, through her big glasses, “maybe it’s not the greatest color on your skin.”“Aha! I thought I looked more dead than usual. I think the pink has too much blue in it. Thank you.”I replaced the dress, with a twinge of regret. Wherever you may stand on St. John knits, they are woven to an indestructible, almost antiballistic density; it was a real steal at under $200. Some duskier beauty than I will look like a Starburst fruit chew in it.I succumbed to my usual tendencies. I found a Nicole Miller dress: a black jersey mock-turtleneck with big shoulder pads and a kind of harem skirt pin-tucked into multiple pleats for a sort of triangular, futurist bustle effect. Very Tilda Swinton and Mildred Pierce go to a Manhattan Transfer concert. It had threads coming loose, and it needed a severe dry-cleaning, but the shape was there; there was still life in it.“You do look intimidatingly fashionable in that dress,” Phoebe Cates said. “And it’s got a great arse.”Did I feel as if I belonged to Shareen’s special girl club?No. That aspect is high-school tribal — you’re either one of their crowd, or you’re not. But I bought the dress anyway. I wasn’t shopping for cliques, and it was only $52.(An Open Note to the Merchants of New York: The mystical incantation uttered by the saleswoman above is all you ever need to make my wallet magically appear. Even the most antisocial Gorgons are subject to the usual feminine vanities, once you charm the snakes out of their hair.)…like me! CintraW@gmail.comTheme Song: Jack Black Get full access to Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain at cintra.substack.com/subscribe

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KIKI DE MONTPARNASSE

Aug 2900:09:08Tap to summarize

Cintra Wilson’s singular devotion to the art of writing has made her tragically broke. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber.Dearest Subscribers:I am pleased to be offering my next 5 week memoir workshop (via Zoom), which starts MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1. I still have 2 seats open.“Taking a writing course with Cintra is the best investment I have ever made in my career and in myself. Cintra knows where to cut and how to find the kernal of what you want to communicate. She will build your confidence, bring out your best voice, and help you write like a professional badass.”Check out the flyer below, and contact me at Cintraw@gmail.com if you’re interested! This article previously appeared in the New York Times in 2010.NOTHING is actually known about the Christian martyr who was buried near Rome on Feb. 14. There were a number of different St. Valentines; even Pope Gelasius had no idea who the guy was when he established a feast in his name in the fifth century. Historians assume that he did so as a means of whitewashing the pagan holiday Lupercalia, an ancient Roman tradition of worshiping the goat lord Pan (known as Faunus in Roman cosmology), to rid the city of evil spirits and restore fertility. A dog and a goat were usually sacrificed; salt cakes were burned by vestal virgins.The high-end lingerie store Kiki de Montparnasse is named for the mistress of Man Ray, an artist’s model for a number of Dada guys back in the wild nineteen-teens. It’s quiet, sleek and expensive with dim, soft lighting, vintage black-and-white nude photographs and a library of erotic art and literature. They play slow, moany French lounge-pop and Portishead. The whole decadent vibe seems designed to be alluring even to the rich, uptight and squeamish who, in the past, may have shied away from the trappings of bondage because they seemed too garish and sleazy.The store’s atmosphere has the effect of making its superbly made (and astronomically priced) fetish accouterments look respectable. If the movie “Atonement” had been rated NC-17, Keira Knightley might have been ravished in the library wearing a silk blindfold and leather wrist cuffs from Kiki de Montparnasse, and it still wouldn’t have looked too Cinemax.In the entranceway, a heavy black Jacobean table with spiral legs is set with a plunge-necked silk corset by the Parisian house Cadolle, copies of “X: The Erotic Treasury” by the literary sex-bomb Susie Bright and a mirrored tray with gold-plated handcuffs and a matching half-mask. Vitrines and glass cases throughout the store hold a royal dungeon’s worth of silk ropes, leather whips and pearly restraints.I was curious about two medium gumball-size silver ball bearings.“Are those Ben Wa balls?” I asked the saleswoman, a Library Spice type with cat-eye glasses in a low-cut silk boudoir top. “I thought they were supposed to be attached to a rope.”“These are the more traditional Ben Wa, like the geishas used,” she informed me warmly, taking them out of the vitrine and placing them in the palm of my hand, where they jingled in a suggestive fashion.“These are advanced,” she said in response to the confusion in my eyes. “We also have a practice version, for beginners.”She guided me to a much darker corner of the store and produced what I supposed was the Fisher-Price version: larger gumballs in light marble colors with a white rubber ring like a silicone six-pack holder attaching them.Apparently Ben Wa balls are marvelous for exercising your pubococcygeus muscles — and at least you can lord that over your Pilates instructor.Agent Provocateur is only few of blocks away from Kiki de Montparnasse, but it is considerably closer to the old 42nd Street in spirit. The vibe is more user-friendly for embarrassed guys shopping alone and packs of teenage girls; the lights are brighter, the music is dumber, louder and younger. The haute factor seems played down everywhere but in the price tags (purple silk garter, $100; matching bra, $150; matching thong, $70). Many items fall into a black and pink, rockabilly hot-rod style. It is, in essence, a vamped-up version of Victoria’s Secret by way of Johnny Rockets, the retro diner chain.The saleswomen at Agent Provocateur do not resemble the Anaïs Nin, lipstick feminist, sexual adventuress types at Kiki. These are inked-up, Amy Winehouse Jezebels with black liquid eyeliner and button-bursting clinical pink dresses, worn with dark stockings and gold stiletto mules.The special underthings hit certain nails so directly on their heads as to resemble high-quality, goofy-kinky Halloween costumes: Minnie Mouse polka-dot bra and panty sets; a mini-and-midriff candy striper uniform, a knit Dallas Cowgirl cheerleader leotard ($990).I guessed that a rack of short see-through plastic raincoats were designed for something akin to intimate pudding wrestling. Then I realized they probably were really designed for ... I can’t remember what, because when I got home, I snorted Clorox and bleached the thought right out of my mind.Agent Provocateur recently introduced a “demi-couture” line called Soirée, for those who wish to pay more for what the Agent puts out. A handmade studded bra top with a Peter Pan collar and capped leather sleeves was $1,590. I admired the studded and structured Heloise corset — it had three-inch metal spikes protruding from each hip — that resembled an amorous blowfish ($4,900).I INQUIRED about the price of a ladies’ tuxedo jacket, since I couldn’t find the tag, and learned that the jacket was not sold separately from its matching black satin teddy ($1,700).“Would you still like to try it on?” one of the tattooed ladies asked.“I’d rather see it on you, actually,” I replied.She very sweetly and immediately obliged.I inspected the peplum and the Balmain-esque shoulder pads. “It’s a very small size, isn’t it?”“Well, I’m a 32D, so it fits great,” my helper said in response.It was refreshing to hear a demi-couture jacket’s merits discussed in terms of cup size. I was surprised that a 32D didn’t look at all freakish or disproportional, like a Japanese robot or Pam Anderson during her Kid Rock phase.It is important to remember that Valentine’s Day was originally a time to ritually exorcise evil spirits and restore one’s city to health and fertility.Good luck finding a vestal virgin or a goat at Kiki de Montparnasse or Agent Provocateur. But salt cakes can be made inexpensively. And ancient pagan bacchanals, in all likelihood, have always involved some form of lingerie.Theme song: Jack Black! Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain at cintra.substack.com/subscribe

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FAIRYLAND AT NIGHT

Aug 1900:08:54Tap to summarize

Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain is entirely reader-supported — so if you love it, please become a paid subscriber, because I need MONEY. I’m having a scented bath oil and slow-jam flavored love affair with the city of Oakland, which I’ve taken to calling “Brooklyn By the Bay” because of its rainbow of Sesame Street diversity. I’m ignoring the staggering crime statistics, but I enjoy reading about them and the various lost cats and stolen tires daily on the NextDoor website, written by the citizens of my immediate neighborhood.I’ve been trying harder to get off my ass more and move around in a mildly athletic manner. The trauma of various upheavals in my life turned me into a bit of a hermetic vegetable. I was a hardbody once; now I am as soft and white as a boiled parsnip. The truth is that I stopped caring about fitness once I realized I’d never have enough money to grow old. ( I never had enough money to have kids, either - even back in my bougie heyday when I had enough money. )My girlfriend Bridget and I try to walk the three and a half miles around scenic Lake Merritt once a week, in the name of health and community. Lake Merritt is the central hub of humanity nearest me — a gorgeous little lake tucked in the hills with a functional landmark movie theater nearby, and a sidewalk all around its circumference which collects drummers, runners, occasional jazz trios, tents of the otherwise unhoused, African garment stands and men who sit in their Toyota Camrys all day blasting thumpy urban radio.There are black motorcycle gangs devoted to roaring motocross dirt bikes around Lake Merritt and doing block-long wheelies. The collective roar is deafening; the brazen lawlessness and the way they stand on their seats with one foot is impressive, and fucking crazy. Safety is not at the forefront of the mind of all Oakland drivers. I check my six whenever I am on the 580, because you can see the psychopaths in Toyota Camrys swerving through the traffic behind you at 98 mph, riding kamikaze, without fear of death or license plates. Walking to the gas station in my neighborhood, you can see certain cul-de-sacs where cars come to burn black donuts into the asphalt, creating primitive Spiro-Graph designs of hi-octane vandalism. The Fast and Furious movies weren’t taken as entertainment so much, by the citizens of Oakland, but as a suggestion of daily driving habits, and how you’d be driving too if you weren’t such a pussy.This is why I love NextDoor: somebody once wrote an entry saying there was a car full of guys in my neighborhood in a white Camry, all wearing ski masks. Where were they going, I wondered, creating such a fashion sensation? Why are Toyota Camrys at the epicenter of Oakland’s criminal activity? I am also alerted to packages being swiped by local “porch pirates” — security cam pictures of the thieves posted on NextDoor, more often than not, show the perpetrators wearing fuzzy slippers or shower shoes. It’s footwear that asks so many questions. Are the perps in disguise? I’m not stealing your catalytic converter, I just got out of the wet sauna.Killer Joe has a kind of animist, almost Shinto feeling about California. Its hills are alive, and he knows them all by name. He’s trying to instill more communion with nature in me. It’s hard for a girl who spent 25 ½ years in Brooklyn. I have never successfully kept a plant alive for very long, but when I am tripping on mushrooms I become absolutely convinced of the divinity of trees, and the indivisibility of man from nature. Joe dragged me and his friend Yueh Hai to Point Reyes over the weekend for a Bataan Death March of six miles in order to view a herd of massive tule elk bucks, loitering manfully around a water hole.It was a majestic experience, trudging through the soft sandy dirt up hills and up hills and up hills in thick white fog, which was blowing fast and sideways across the path like an Akira Kurosawa fever dream, causing the entire Pacific Ocean at our immediate left to disappear entirely. Only the sound of waves crashing nearby gave any hint.All I could keep thinking, watching my feet trudge along the seemingly endless path, breathing the sensational coastal air, and witnessing great mammal beasts, was how lucky I was to live in Northern California, and how I would have enjoyed the experience a whole lot more if I had been on mushrooms.I have always wanted to visit Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, which is right on the shores of Lake Merritt. Like, ALWAYS. I am annoyed by the fact that this revered old monument to children’s playtime was just a short trip over the bridge from where I grew up, and my parents never took me. What an egregious oversight. I offered to take my nieces and nephews to Fairyland but was haughtily shut down by my sister. “That place is for toddlers,” she snapped.But there is a toddler inside me yearning to breathe air full of glitter.So I got Joe and Bridget to take me to the “Fairyland at Night” event for adults. “You’re reparenting me right now,” I told them. They both looked at me and said, “We know.” I jumped up and down at all the wonderful little storybook installations that have been lovingly preserved since 1950. Walt Disney was said to be inspired by Fairyland to make Disneyland. Most of the paintings of elves and fairies are Black, Asian, and Hispanic, to reflect the children of the area. “Trump would BOMB Fairyland,” said Bridget, as we got jiggy on the outdoor dance floor to some excellently thumpy R & B.My beloved lifelong friend Benny was up north recently, on a trip from LA; we were able to grab a glass of wine together at an old hotel bar with a famous Maxfield Parrish mural. We’ve been the dearest of friends since high school. He was the drummer in our unnamed band. I couldn’t help but remember the way we used to get really stoned, and tear up the hill to his mom’s house in Mill Valley at breakneck speeds in his Volkswagen Golf— taking our lives in our hands, really, because the streets were too narrow for any oncoming car to get out of the way, and there were dozens of blind corners. It’s that sweet Freebird of Youth, I guess, that tells you to drive in a way that death could come instantaneously, at any second, and yet you hit the accelerator anyway, because you can feel the psychic bubble of impossible luck surrounding you, because you’re young and stoned.The President has threatened to send the National Guard into Oakland. I suppose they’re going to murder or imprison our extensive homeless population. They will find a fizzlingly active community that doesn’t rat on its neighbors, or scare easily. Maybe they’ll address the Toyota Camry problem, but I doubt it. Fairyland is off limits. There will be no occupation of Fairyland. Blood may run from the gingerbread homes, but the glitter will prevail.MEMOIR CLASSES ARE STARTING AGAIN! 4 SEATS ONLY! 2 ALREADY FULL! CONTACT ME AT CINTRAW@GMAIL.COM TO ENROLL. Theme song: Jack Black! Get full access to Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain at cintra.substack.com/subscribe

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BALENCIAGA: NOT QUITE SEVEN SAMURAI, BUT ENOUGH

Aug 900:09:04Tap to summarize

HERE’S a secret message in to my writing students about this piece: This is the article where you can see me figuring out the deeper meanings of fashion for the first time. I like this piece because you can pinpoint exactly where the subject took hold of me, and I took hold of it. My Memoir Mayhem workshops will begin again in September. “Cintra and my amazing classmates helped me dress my trauma — and unconventional life experiences — in sequins and a feather boa, and taught them to dance within 1,000 words at a time. Memoir Mayhem was more healing than seven therapists and showed me the power of sharing my story to support others.” — Lindsay ThomasContact me at Cintraw@gmail.com if you’re interested. Cintra Wilson needs financial support like Tinkerbell needs applause. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. This article originally appeared in the New York Times in 2007.I MADE tourists stare at me in a kiosk months ago. Leafing through photographs of this fall’s Nicolas Ghesquiere designs for Balenciaga, I involuntarily said, “Blecch!”I thought: dislocated Missoni clown suits.The clothes looked unwearable in the way that the food of ingenious chefs becomes perversely inedible: fiendish experiments wrought in strawberry-dill fish foam and raw poultry.But morbid curiosity made me trek into deepest Chelsea to the industrially cavernous Balenciaga boutique, set self-consciously into a row of serious art galleries. The visual overload was such that, walking in, I couldn’t help immediately scribbling notes, grabbing at the confetti-blizzard of information. A staff member was quickly dispatched to investigate.“Usually journalists show us credentials,” said the nervy young sales fellow.They needed to see my badge?“I’m sorry if I’m making you uncomfortable,” I said, sympathetic but unmoved to reveal my identity.There was too much to describe. Each rack was a discrete planet. A gem-shaped cave painted frosted army green featured a coat inside that looked tailored for Ethel Kennedy out of a Cuban shower curtain.I needed to ask about the season’s smash hit: a British schoolboy blazer with a Chinese character on the front.The head salesclerk was a severe woman whose hair was cut in what neo-Nazi skinhead girls used to call a “fringe,” a crew cut with short bangs designed for one utilitarian reason; in a fistfight, you couldn’t grab their hair.“We have nine of them, but they’re all sold, and all in back,” she said, not offering to show them to me.“Can I ask how you are describing that silhouette?” I asked, pointing in a curious reverie to the cinched figure-eight shape of a shearling coat.“You want me to tell you how to describe it?” demanded the Fringe, seemingly appalled that I wanted her to do my job for me.“No, I want you to tell me how you describe it.”“I usually tell people to just look at it,” she replied, black nerve gas misting from her venom ducts. I fantasized about helping this delightful woman discover the true, original purpose of her haircut.“It was inspired by samurai,” blurted the sales fellow in a tension-dispersing but helpful way.There was indeed a samurai influence in the riveting designs, and also a 19th-century French sailor, a 1920s flapper, a 1960s ski chalet …Mr. Ghesquiere’s palette achieved a fascinating vintage effect with dulled versions of brightly artificial 1970s colors. A silk dress in gray-washed purple might have been spun from the pelt of Barney the basalt-mining Dinosaur, or dyed with grape Kool-Aid in the Ganges.I tried on a dress I called “Pocahontas Does the Lindy Hop,” a riot of inch-wide felt strips, unfinished silk and golden beads ($3,275). On the body, it was bonkers — a tube of gathered white silk jutted from the sternum and reached down the front like the parasitic sleeve of John Smith’s pirate blouse.I wasn’t sure it worked, but it certainly took Navajo quilters six years to complete. It may not have been clothing, but it was definitely art.I tried a sleeveless turtleneck in dishwater-electric blue, with padded stripes waving up the sides, and the fine tight knit of vintage winter-sport apparel. It was a revelation. The stripes formed a firm serpentine hug up the hips and around the bosom, sculpturing the wearer into an Art Deco fertility vase. This sweater ($565) was a theme with variations in black, red and ivory — a dress Coco Chanel might wear on her snowmobile, a samurai cheerleader sweater.Gad, I wondered, is Ghesquiere the Mozart of couture?I finally abused the fragile patience of the staff by trying on one last jacket. It turned out to be the Rosetta stone of Balenciaga for me.It was a bouclé jacket such as Nancy Reagan might wear, but toughened up: tighter, thicker, more compact ($2,765). The interwoven wools were black and white, with loud sparks of fluorescent primary color going “Bang!” inside.On the body, the collar was surprisingly high and rounded; the shoulders jutted straight out into hard little puffs. It was a brass horn section: lusty, confident, noisy, strong and regal. An Elizabethan motorcycle jacket for the Lady President of Tomorrow. This was a heartbreakingly generous interpretation of female power: radical chic that still made traditional sense. Its empowering structural muscle could be protective corporate armor, but it was nonaggressive: stronger for being penetrable. Mighty like a rose.Many unlikely, paradoxical tightropes converged into this impossible, rowdy, schizophrenic, sublime jacket. Ultimately, it revealed something stunningly simple. Like a dream, it installed new doors in an old room, and opened them, revealing a shockingly bright, open, robust new vista of feminine grace. It was refreshing and gladdening to see such courageous invention; an outpour of inspiration with such vivid affection for women.I was convinced: Nicolas Ghesquiere’s genius is big and bold enough to give nudity a run for its money. It is the work of an angel.“What do you really think?” the uncomfortable sales fellow asked as I rehung the jacket.“It’s absolutely brilliant.”He seemed doubtful and still unnerved that I refused to reveal myself.I put my arm around him, invincible for having felt Mr. Ghesquiere’s transcendence.“I am a Critical Shopper for The New York Times,” I said with Batman-like importance.I let this hover like a platinum anvil, then turned and walked up Balenciaga’s long, echoing concrete hallway into the early darkness, eager to brave the first cold night of fall.++++++++++++LADIES AND GENTLEMEN AND LOVELY SUBSCRIBERS: I AM CURRENTLY ACCEPTING OIL PAINTING COMMISSIONS. GET A PORTRAIT OF YOUR LOVED ONE IMMORTALIZED IN OILS. HELP A LADY PAY THE BILLS. I’LL DO NUDES, PETS, WHATEVER YOU FANCY, CHIEF. STILL LIVES WITH WEIRD OBJECTS. SKY’S THE LIMIT. I’M ENJOYING A GOOD MOMENT IN PAINTING. TAKE ADVANTAGE!Theme song: Jack Black! Get full access to Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain at cintra.substack.com/subscribe

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ROMPER CLOSET

Jun 2800:07:13Tap to summarize

Cintra Wilson is slathered with poverty. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. 5 bucks a month! Chump change! DEAR PEOPLE! Since there was only one taker for the fiction class, this coming Tuesday is the first night of a new Tuesday night MEMOIR WORKSHOP. These have been ON FIRE. There are a couple of seats left (I take 4 students max so everyone gets real attention) so please, if you want to participate in a completely catalyzing and inspiring writing class that will take you to the next level, contact me at CintraW@gmail.com. My first theatrical foray was a one act play that I wrote in high school, called “Cafe Wars,” when I was 15.At fifteen, I had a partially shaved head and a fake ID. I was a profligate runaway — my relationship with my parents was abysmal. The play was based on my relationship with two very sarcastic young queens (one of whom I had briefly dated) with whom I spent most of my hours at the Cafe Trieste in Sausalito.I only had one typewritten copy. I gave it to my hippy drama teacher hopefully, thinking she might mount a production of it, only to be told weeks later that she had lost the manuscript.I thought the play was actually pretty fucking great, but it was so perverse, it’s possible my drama teacher “losing” the only copy was the result of her trying to save me from something — the people with the knotty pine torches who would come after us after seeing the play, perhaps. Perhaps she thought it undermined my sanity or reputation, or hers.She probably just got stoned and lost it in her car.It was about a couple of utterly bitchy young homosexuals and a young woman who were talking in an utterly campy way about the other patrons of the cafe, and coldly rating them. I can’t remember much else, except that everyone got a proper dressing-down, except for the most fabulous person on earth: Puppy, a young boy, who enters the cafe wearing a leather g-string and a dog collar. The trio of sarcastic harpies are overwhelmed by his fabulousness.I wrote the part for my friend Mike Aron, who was an adorable doe-eyed freshman who still looked 12.So, my first play effort probably died on the floor of a Volkswagen hatchback, before anyone but me had read it. Or maybe my drama teacher did read it and found it so disturbing she destroyed it. Either way, it died an ignominious death.I became an underground club kid. I called myself Cintra Sinatra and swanned around in old black gowns wearing a white bathing cap and a spitcurl in the center of my forehead. I had gained entrance to most of the clubs at the time because I had been interviewed about the San Francisco underground club scene in the Chronicle, and I had said it was all about “whoever’s attitude is loudest.” The club entrepreneurs liked that, and started printing my name on invitations.I originally wrote “Romper Closet” when I was around 18, as a comedy act for one of these underground clubs, but it was more like performance art. It was an openly disturbing act based on “Romper Room,” a children’s TV show. I was the neurotic host, Miss Bunny. I wore my mother’s knee-length, cornflower blue wedding dress — a strange bit of lacy, layered, early 60’s formalwear — blue eyeshadow, and I acted completely terrified for the entire presentation.I did some large mixed-media drawings on pieces of thick matting material to accompany my set — they were on an easel, and I would shuffle the cards from front to back. It was primordial Power Point.I don’t entirely remember what happens, but there was a segment called “Mr. Homunculus Insists.” The card on my easel featured an armless and featureless black doll which Miss Bunny was clearly terrified of. I hoped it became sort of clear to the audience that Mr. Homunculus was the dark God unto whom Miss Bunny and the entire ethos of Romper Closet was enslaved.Miss Bunny had to do segments she clearly found distasteful, like gutting a fish with her co-host, “El Capitano,” a Mexican wrestler, Luchador doll I had found somewhere.People found the act curious and somehow charming.I once performed it for the impresarios of the long-running show “Beach Blanket Babylon,” who were, that year, in charge of running the Oscars halftime show, which would feature Snow White. It was between me and one other actress, who would play a singing, dancing Snow White at the Oscars. My second audition I was sick as a dog with the flu, so the other girl got it. Later I was glad, because Snow White was the biggest scandal of that Oscar night. She was singing a duet with Rob Lowe, and Disney executives were horrified that her dress didn’t cover her knees. It became a legal brouhaha that I was entirely glad not to be associated with.Sometimes a tall, beautiful girlfriend of mine named Sarah and I would get dressed for hours, go to an underground club and stand on the speakers like we were models, unmoving. People told the club owner, “Yeah, everything was great, but why did you have those two girls modeling on the speakers?” The owner was somehow impressed when he found out we were just doing it on our own, for kicks.The club entrepreneur, noting that I was game for almost anything, started using me in new ways. Once I was hired to be a Go-Go dancer in a cage about 30 feet above the dance floor. Since Quaaludes, the greatest pill of all time, were plentiful and abundant, my girlfriend and happily swallowed them. Go-go dancing in a cage on Quaaludes is one of the more golden experiences in life’s rich tapestry, and we were wilding out. At one point I noticed that the chicken wire that was our “cage” wasn’t connected to the bottom of the stage, so I started holding onto it, launching off the dance floor and swinging out over the heads of the audience.The owner of the club suddenly grabbed me, sweaty and pale.“My god, you could have DIED,” he said. “That chicken wire is only held on with staples! It can’t hold you!” I laughed, because everything is hilarious on Quaaludes. It was all the best parts of being happily drunk without the sour stomach. We confined our crazy dancing to the cage floor.It is precisely these kinds of experiences that kids are really missing out on these days. They just don’t have the right kinds of drugs or clubs anymore. It was, however, formative in all the right ways for all the theatrical antics I was to inflict on San Francisco night life in the future. You gotta build a freak to make a freak.Theme Song: Jack BlackArtwork: “Grace in your Face,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2023 Get full access to Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain at cintra.substack.com/subscribe

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THE VAJRA CHOP JOB

Jun 400:07:07Tap to summarize

Cintra Wilson is despairing of funds. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. I grew up really loving to look at tattoos on other people — a love that still consumes me (anyone who knows me knows how addicted I am to Ink Master) but it seemed nightmarish and terrible to get one myself. I couldn’t imagine any image I’d want painfully scarred into my flesh forever, with the dark ink degrading under my skin into a greenish blur. I survived the nineties without getting any tattoos, despite working in nightclubs and the advent of Modern Primitivism, rockabilly, Goth, Bauhaus, and Ed Hardy’s ‘Realistic’ tattoo studio mere blocks from my warehouse in North Beach.When I lived in Park Slope Brooklyn in the oughts, I had a great witch/healer friend - the writer Sarah Falkner. She introduced me to a great many esoteric concepts, but for some reason the one that stuck with me the most was the Vajra Chopper, sometimes known as a Kartika — a ceremonial symbol in Vajrayana Buddhism. It looks like a mezzeluna, or a curved blade, topped with a dorje — four lightning bolts joining together into a bulb, which represents everything that cannot be dissolved by time. The blade represents “skillful means,” also the separation of muscle from bone, and/or the removal of anything that separates you from enlightenment. In a particular practice of Vajrayana caled “Chöd,” the blade is for cutting through demons. I’ve encountered quite a few in my life, at close range. It is my spiritual weapon of choice.Anyone familiar with my Facebook page knows I love black cars — particularly lowriders — particularly dropped, channeled, chopped and shaved Mercuries from around 1949, 1950, 1951. Those big chrome teeth. Those beady little headlights. When they get customized into ‘lead sleds,’ everything goes long, bumpless and streamlined as an art deco panther. The windows go slitty and the doorknobs go away. They look sinister, sleek and delicious.I had an idea back then I really wanted to do - a conjoined book and art piece, called “The Vajra Chop Job.” When I traveled around the country to explore the semiotics of regional fashion for my book “Fear and Clothing,” I noticed that most places I went had Christian car shows. I was hoping to score a deal with an art gallery and a publisher. I wanted to build a Buddhist lowrider — each part of it blessed and/or customized to be Buddhist ( e.g. any wheel that rotated would be engraved like a Buddhist prayer wheel )— and describe all of the Buddhist customizations and rituals we did to it, and drive it around the country, into the Red states, to Christian car shows, to see if I could change any hearts or minds.At the end of the grand tour, the Buddhist lowrider would be driven into an art gallery, and dissembled piece by piece and sold at auction or eBay or on site, or given away, or otherwise distributed and atomized… like a sand painting. And I’d write a book about it.Nobody wanted that for some reason.For the last 8 months, ever since my egregious ejection from my uncle’s rental and my subsequent cutting off of various toxic family members, I have been realizing that my life has been consumed by narcissists, for the most part. I started visualizing a Vajra Chopper on my inner left wrist, to go with a gesture I had been making, every time I was feeling agonized about people I am estranged from — I make a long, left handed karate chop to cut myself further off. The more I visualized it, the more I realized I needed the tattoo - my first and only.I was ready for 6 hours of agony to receive this sigil, but was extremely surprised when the artist, a brilliant micro-realist named Oro, was so gentle, it didn’t hurt at all. At all. I was so surprised. It was only as painful as having your teeth cleaned.I sat ‘like a rock’ (as tattoo artists say) for all six hours of the tattoo without so much as a twitch or a wince. While I was laying on the table (with no intoxicants whatsoever — I wanted to feel the burn, which was weird because there literally was none. I had thought some kind of Catholic torture penance was required of me to get the tattoo. ) I had sort of a mystical experience. I wasn’t asleep, just kind of unfocused with my eyes half closed, listening to the Neo-soul on Oro’s playlist, and I suddenly felt the impression that someone was holding my right hand, then realized that was impossible because I was laying next to the wall. I shook off that strange sensation, and a few minutes later I had the impression that my left hand was grasping the small golden Mexican pyramid that Oro wore around his neck. That wasn’t actually happening either. I chalked it up to angels.The tattoo came out startlingly perfect, beyond my wildest imaginings of dopeness. I’m so stoked with it. I keep staring at it in disbelief. It looks like a museum piece. I got it to grant myself a magic ability; I imbued the symbol with the power to protect me from toxic people, who, since I was so narcissistically abused growing up, I tend to hang onto like grim death. I got it to cut people off; to slice through the invisible emotional tendrils and the remaining sinews of deep emotional connection. To stop giving people that hurt me free rent in my brain, and active space in my heart. To utterly disengage from people who are bad for me — something I’ve always had problems with. Usually, I never want to let go of anyone.Unfortunately the first toxic person to get the chop was the person closest to me. The blade was blooded within the day. But that’s another tale for another time. I am not grieving — I just look at my tattoo and know the magic is working: I feel strong, and I know beyond a shadow of doubt that it is protecting me.Cintraw@gmail.comTheme song: Jack Black! Artwork: Vajra Chopper by Ink de Oro Get full access to Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain at cintra.substack.com/subscribe

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All episodes

WHY I STOPPED WORKING OUT FOR YEARS

CHRISTIAN LACROIX: Advanced Stages of Regression

THE KILLER INSIDE ME

THE BRUTALLY FUNNY, RADICALLY MORAL WORLD OF LETTERKENNY

ADOPTING A LOOK, NO BOYS ALLOWED

KIKI DE MONTPARNASSE

FAIRYLAND AT NIGHT

BALENCIAGA: NOT QUITE SEVEN SAMURAI, BUT ENOUGH

ROMPER CLOSET

THE VAJRA CHOP JOB