I Hoard Sorrow: Musing on the Cupidity of Consumption or In Defense of Working Class Shame

It all began with these Yves Saint Laurent shoes from Tom Ford's final season with the fashion house. The crystal encrusted cherries, the Lucite heel with gold glitter and rhinestones entombed within it's form, and the ruby red velvet that I imagined would feel like a lover's tongue lapping on my tootsies. That's really only half the truth.

Yes those were the reasons I told myself that I HAD to acquire these heels regardless of the fact that I had to eat off of Wendy's 99 cent menu nearly every night from the expense that came with living in Southern California. The real reason I so desperately wanted these to adorn my feet was that I wanted the women who treated me with the disdain of an S.S. Guard doing overtime in Dachau to say to themselves, "Wait a second! How did she get the editorial dream shoes? I'm going to have to treat her with less contempt now since she actually can afford Yves Saint Laurent".

Afford being the operative word. I couldn't afford these shoes. Instead it began a cycle of being able to use a department store card in order to continue to compete with women who I wouldn't have saved if they were on the Titanic. If you knew me personally you might ask, "But were'nt you also in the Communist Youth League during this time?" well....YES, but that the same working class pride that my mother had inspired me with during my childhood, even my fervent beliefs in Papa Stalin wouldn't quell the reality of being treated badly for being poor.
The next completely ridiculous "must have" item came from Stefano Pilati's first collection for, you guessed it, Yves Saint Laurent. The dress ended up on Ebay a few years after the famed Spring 2005 Ready-To-Wear show and I was convinced that if I just HAD this dress that my entire life would stop spiraling into a pool of sadness. For real. In my mind the beauty of this hot pink concoction would somehow envelope over me and I would no longer be a short, goat-herding calves, pinch more than an inch nose, girl who was still pouting about college being a "ruse". The truth?

I've never even worn this dress. Every time that it MAY have been appropriate there was always something newer and better that I had to have...the void remained unfilled and the debt continued to accumulate. There was also an incredible fear attached to the potential for "ruining" this dress if it actually ever made it off the black velvet hanger. A complete contradiction of care vs. absurdity and distorted thinking, because we all know the vision that I had as a female, and the last time I checked dresses don't make you grow 7 inches when you put them on.
The Miu Miu Baroque Wedges from Fall 2006. When I went to go pick these up from Neiman's (put on the card so therefore the smoke and mirrors act of purchasing was justified) I was ecstatic after having been told by my "Shoe Guy" (i.e. DEALER) that I had scored the only size 35's in the entire company. The words, my friends, were magic. Delightful, glorious and competitive words that made me prance around thinking that no one else with size 35 feet would be able to get these hand-carved testaments to gaudy excess. The sense of power, albeit buying power, cascaded over my 4' 11" frame. A member of Chicago's noise scene had accompanied me that day and sat in the over-stuffed chairs eyeing me as if I was a high-heeled tank crushing the bodies and spirits of Tiananmen Square.
Carolina Herrera's "Swimmers" dress remains one of my most preposterous Ebay purchases. The dress is a gorgeous silhouette featuring women of color diving into the luminosity of the azure fabric and is perhaps one of the most unique uses of the novelty print in the past decade. While those previous statements are an accurate description of said dress there's a just a small catch. You're a dress with black women on it! This is a difficult dress to wear, let's just be HONEST, we're all adults...I don't need to explain institutionalized racism to you.

As a white girl parading around in Ms. Herrera's creation the novelty of the novelty print elicits a different response depending on the amount of gentrification that Chicago neighborhoods have gone through, and let me just tell you the ONE time I've ever worn this dress I got a good taste of how people feel in Avondale, Logan Square, Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village, and Lakeview.
Would someone respond differently if the dress was worn by an African-American woman? Well...DUH. Does the dress make other people uncomfortable or does it merely make me self-conscious? All I know is that I truly love this dress, but the reality of what seems like an appropriated image seems too colonizer for me. That's just being honest.

The final pièce de résistance of my financial Trail of Tears are the Christian Louboutin "Mondrian" wedges that were, once again, the ONLY ones that Neimans bought in my size. Serotonin and endorphines gang-banged my brain.
It seemed to make perfect sense to me because they were the most outrageous shoes in the entire collection, they were literally "museum worthy", and evoked the approval of Cynthia Rowley during a store event. I was hooked! These were the greatest shoes in the universe.

Unfortunately these shoes go with nothing. A reader can correctly assume from the myriad of images above that basic black is not a part of my wardrobe and instead I gravitate towards items that can only be loved and appreciated by fellow magpies. What was I thinking? I wasn't thinking! I was feeling and clearly I was feeling like masquerading around in material items that I loved for their beauty, but also was driven to drape myself in order to garner compliments from people whose opinions shouldn't have mattered to me anyway.
The title of the post comes from the Red Eye cable show where the commentators went open season on Lindsay Lohan's infamous Insider interview whereby the Red Eye crew refers to her as being a celebrity "whore-der". The clip can be viewed here and is indisputably hilarious in mocking the troubled Lohan as both a tragedy and a farce. The statement, "I hoard sorrow" is what really articulated the underlying nature of people irrationally consuming these endless items while tap-dancing around our own uncertain financial and emotional futures.
Unless you're Fred Astaire tap-dancing just sort of makes you into a minstrel show.

This post was directly inspired by the blog Godammit, I'm Mad! and even more due to Sister Wolf's latest posting called "Because I'm Stupid" in which she describes the condition that so many of us find ourselves in, questioning our purchases and our state of mind. In the comment section the very same statements echoed from others coming forward with the world in which we all play dress up in our minds...carefully clothing our idealized selves in the Emperor's New Clothes.

All of this being said I know exactly why I continue to make the financial decisions of a three year old because I'm still playing paper dolls and imagining a world where I'm not being taunted for having "elf booties" from Payless. No recovered memories are needed here! Thank you mean middle-class white girls!

There is also the undeniable appreciation for beauty, quality, and rarity that comes from being raised to admire these works of art from afar, but the pain of the compulsion and the obsessive fetishism at some point becomes the leaded shoes upon which we drown.

The Rats, The Maggots, The Cigarette Butts: Aurel Schmidt's Death and Decay

"Supernatural", 2006

Reasons why I adore Aurel Schmidt like she is my abducted twin sister:
1. She has reconciled with her paranoia.
2. She's obsessive.
3. She didn't go to "Art School".
4. She has an extreme attachment to objects, such as a necklace her friend made her.
5. She creates an entire universe in her work.

The most unfortunate aspect of viewing Aurel's art via the internet is the sense of being cheated out of the full scale and vision that is apparent when the image is seen in the way it was intended. Specifically in regards to the above image which can been seen here , the difference is incredible...the lush texture of the fern-hair coinciding with burrowing maggots, the multitude of serpents inside the form with no visible heads, and the negative space behind the spider webs make me want fall into it's embrace and be consumed. Aurel, in essence, gives the viewer the reality of our own eventual consumption by nature and in the words sung by us all in seventh grade, "Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds oN LIFE FEEDS ON LIFE..."

"Medusa", 2006

Aurel has been quoted as saying, "it is important to me to be constantly aware of the real horror in this world" which, on a personal level, is something very near and dear to me. It's a concept that most avoid, ignore, or attempt to conceal through our consumerism, our gluttony, and our apathy. However, what is appealing to me is the callousness of nature and the sheer force of its' power that continues to crush humanity with emotionless death and destruction. The drawings seem to be a steady hum of nature's consumption; a still from time-lapse videos of food rotting, people decaying, or seedlings emerging from the soil. Above all, the pieces articulate her obsession and compulsion to create these detailed works that seem to animate as if we were wearing the 3-D glasses from "Freddy's Dead".

"Better Luck Next Time", 2006

One of her latest exhibitions entitled, "Burnouts" features thirteen drawings using cigarette burns, noses drawn out of Band-Aids and blood, old beer cans, and condoms in order to create macabre Smiley Faces. When I first viewed these pieces there was a simplicity that hadn't been shown in her previous work, and since Aurel appears to be greatly influenced by her surroundings it is of no surprise that a critique on hipsters would manifest itself. Now being that I am not the "artiste" I don't claim that this is the intention of the exhibition, however the pieces do seem to represent the vapid, mask-like faces of the urban narcissists swilling PBR specials and discarding their HPV-filled rubbers out of Williamsburg windows.

Photo Courtesy of Paper Magazine, 2009

"I moved here and I was extremely lonely and paranoid." While Aurel may appear to be some sort of a zonkey centerfold, particularly in Terry Richardson's "Purple Magazine" spread of her faux urinating with a PBR can and draped in derivative cigarette necklaces, she has continued to document the world emulating itself only to cycle towards rebirth without the tackiness of celebrity or the fleeting nature of popularity. The video linked above is perhaps the most gorgeous work since it is of herself, and I can't help but share her paranoia of consumption and the terrifying nature of the world if only to know that by purging those racing thoughts and images and by opening all the boxes do we truly come to terms with our own imminent extinction.

If you fall in love with Aurel and you aren't living on the coasts to see her art in person you can snatch up her first book on Amazon.com entitled, "Man Eater".

Candyland Appears Each Time You Smile- Dean Corll and The Boys of The Heights

The story of Dean Corll and his consequent recognition as having an unparalleled record of murder (until John Wayne Gacy) remains one of the most under-publicized and unscrutinized tales of serial murder, torture, and sexual sadism. It is understandable that the murders of 28+ teenage boys would not be easily romanticized or commercialized in the same fashion as the Tate Murders or the Aileen Wuornos franchise. After all this wasn't a gorgeous starlet shred to ribbons by psychotic hipsters or the novelty of an aggressive female killer, but instead an adult man who with the help of two teenage boys hand-plucked their childhood friends from a low-income Houston neighborhood in order to systematically destroy like discarded candy wrappers.
The intensity surrounding Dean's insatiable desire to rape, torture, mutilate, and eventually murder young boys was seemingly in direct contrast to the image of a man that co-owned the Corll Candy Company with his mother. Yes, Dean was quite literally "The Candy Man".
In fact Dean's reputation and social interactions in and around Houston paint an entirely different portrait of a man whose mother continued to insist that her son was being framed in death by his teenage accomplices, David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley.

L: David Brooks R: Elmer Wayne Henley identifying grave sites at High Island Beach

Perhaps what is most intriguing is the group dynamic that must have existed between the teenage accomplices and Dean Corll suggesting a seemingly equal and sinister pathology among the trio. One of the most chilling sections in "The Man With The Candy" (the only book published about the murders) is not the descriptions of the decaying bodies or the piles of teen-boy size clothing, but of an interaction between Wayne Henley and a neighbor; who happened to be the mother of one of the "missing boys". The book details this interaction using Henley's known rural Texan dialect to state to the frantic mother, "I rilly, rilly feel, ya know, sorry for y'all and mah heart jes' goes out to yew. David could still be rat around here. Sometimes the parents cain't see the kids and the kids cain't see the parents. He could be rat under yer nose and yew woultn't even know it."

Imagine Mrs. Hilligiest finding out that her 13 year old son David, who had been a childhood friend of Wayne Henley, had been been one of the boys that had glass test tubes shoved up his urethra and smashed while still alive.

One of the three widely published photos of Dean Corll.

In retrospect Dean Corll displayed many behaviors that can later be attributed to his alleged pedophilia, such as actively hiring only teenage boys to work in the candy factory, providing adolescents with alcohol, illegal drugs, and a space to "party", as well as providing financial rewards to David and Wayne. At the monetary apex Dean even bought David Brooks a green Corvette in order to placate the teenager after having seen a boy strapped onto the torture board. Brooks was quoted as saying, "Once you were on that board, you were as good as dead." Was this threesome an example of Shared Psychotic Disorder, perhaps a folie a trois?

Or was the savage rampage the innate desire of one, the sociopathic drive of another, and the apathetic avarice of a third?

Crime scene photo of Dean Corll's body after having been shot by Elmer Wayne Henley

The tale of torture and murder unfolded quite unexpectedly in the hands of the Houston Police Department after Wayne Henley shot Corll in self-defense after discovering himself as the next victim for having made the mistake of bringing a female into the butcher's abode. One of the more disturbing details surrounding this case is Henley's delusion about being set free since he was kind enough to show the cops where all of the rotting bodies were for nearly all the area's male missing persons cases from the past decade. While both David and Wayne are serving life sentences for their active roles in the deaths of more than 28 teenage boys neither has provided any illumination as to how they participated in acts of rape, torture, and murder. What we, as a society, are left with is the question of how murders are more or less sensationalized based on the comfort of the collective memory. Had Dean Corll created a female teen bloodbath perhaps we would be renting "The Candy Man- Based on true events" from a Red Box machine. Pedophilia does not do well in theaters.

Torture board recovered from the home of Dean Corll

One of the media coup's in this case came from a radio station who procured an interview with a nineteen year old who had a three month tryst with Dean Corll, and went under the assumed name Guy. The young man told a similar story as Dean's mother about a quiet, reserved man who was extremely gentle and sensitive. As it may be, Guy's interactions with Dean may have been the personality that Dean hoped would conquer the person capable of castrating boys while still alive and then storing said genitals in plastic bags along side the plastic and lime encrusted bodies.

As the current generation we will never have the experience of truly understanding the reality that happened between Dean, David, Wayne, and all of those boys; found and unfound, identified and those still waiting to be claimed. One can only speculate that in death, Dean found the fairytale Candyland in his favorite song, "Betcha By Golly Wow" as performed by The Stylistics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alvEUFJtMw8

*"The Man With The Candy: The Story of the Houston Mass Murders" by Jack Olsen is available through Amazon.com