Once upon a time, a belligerent German who I will call “Herr Mengele” decided to send out threatening letters to a large group of bloggers around the word, demanding money for infringing on his ‘copyright’. The bloggers, along with a British online newspaper, had posted an image of some Victorian taxidermy art.

Herr Mengele insisted that while it wasn’t his taxidermy art, he has the copyright to the widely seen images. He included with his overwrought letters a cheap postcard of the image. He also included invoices of up to several thousand EU. He demanded that money be wired directly to his German bank account by an arbitrary date, after which he would sue for damages.

The bloggers were stunned. WTF? Herr Mengele replied to questions with nefarious threats like this one:

With great pleasure will I take you to the Courts, and will just wait a bit longer to eventually get over EUR 56.000 from you.

So you know with whom you are dealing: my ex-publisher NaimAttallah/Quartet can tell you a story or two about me, kicking my shoe ALL UP YOUR ASS if you step on my toes. My friend Jos Smit from Art Unlimited, who prints all my postcards, normally tells people who don’t know me (yet) Fear him !   Or/and interview Henk Schiffmacher aka Hanky Panky (c/o Hells Angels Amsterdam) etc .

Herr Mengele continues to send threats to this very day, and alas, some bloggers were so upset that they actually gave in to his demands and paid him! No one wants a German boot up their ass (despite Sylvia Plath’s observation to the contrary) and who among us wants to incur the wrath of a Hells Angel who is named after a fancy lace thong?!

Herr Mengele also claims copyright to some explicit photos of people with tattooed penises, putting them where they don’t belong (according to Judeo-Christian tenets and my own finicky digestive system.)

The photo above is a portion of one of Herr Mengele’s more interesting pictures, which I have modified for the purposes of discussion, education and satire (as per fair use.) Can you guess what it is?

Gazing upon the most recent communique from Herr Mengele’s “Lawyers,” I must ask myself what David Bowie would do. I think he would say:

Wir sind dann Helden!

Questions, comments, threats?

I was thrilled to see these images at Rackk and Ruin, from the NYT Style magazine. I’m calling this look Nomadic Bag Lady.

I think we can all effect this look without having to buy anything new. If you put on everything you own, and just drag around the leftovers or tie it around your waist, voila! Fall 2010!

At most, you might have to buy a scrap of fur if your old man isn’t a taxidermist. But compared to last year when you had to buy an embarrassing band jacket, this look is frugaltastic, if not exactly effortless.

Anyone wishing to rock/kill this look, send me a photo and I’ll feature it in a follow up post.

Remember how rad you felt when you found out that Gnarlitude’s Old Man was learning to be a taxidermist? Well, how stoked are you to see this picture of him working on these dead coyotes! No wonder she’s so proud. This is both totally rad and totally sick.

In other rad Gnarlitude news, she was completely stoked when her Old Man got her this green monkey fur coat from her very good pals at Ksubi.

How sick is this?!?

If only coyotes were green….that would be so fucking rad!

(identities concealed to protect the guilty)

Kim { 06.21.10 at 11:22 AM }

I’ve followed your blog for ages now. and just when I thought you couldn’t get any cooler, your husband is a taxidermist! Get out of my head already! I love taxidermy so fucking much. How did your husband get into it?

The problem with Hipsters is that everything they love becomes kitsch. Hipsters in Williamsburg NY have so violated the neighborhood that Danny Hoch wrote a play about it.

The New Hipsters are “looking for an authentic experience.” They LOVE “authenticity.” They love to collect stuff, the older the better. Victorian, Edwardian, even old Americana will do. They love Amish shit, as you can imagine. It’s not only authentic, it’s “honest.”

The first time I happened upon a person called Hollister Hovey, I was severely traumatized. (See her living room, above.) I couldn’t even pull myself together to rant about her. It’s not PC to complain about Hollister Hovey, whose very name is intolerable. You have to gush about how chic and wonderful she is, with her eccentric collections of old leather hunting helmets, battered old luggage, vintage military crap, hatboxes, and most annoying, her taxidermy.

Taxidermy is officially kitsch, thanks to Hollister. What used to be creepy and morbidly fascinating is just crap now. There’s probably no hipster apartment anywhere that lacks a mounted animal head or at least some antlers.

Some Hipster in Brooklyn named Sean Crowley collects English and French umbrellas from the 30s and 40s.   His apartment is filled with old heraldic devices and Edwardian portraits. He really needs to learn from Hollister though, since he hasn’t managed to fill every inch of his dwelling with pretentious clutter.

Old medical crap is essential to any Hipster’s very being. Vintage anatomical posters, old dental equipment, a Hipster would kill its own grandmother to get at her vintage dentures.

I remember that someone came up with the term Bobos (short for Bourgeois Bohemians) to depict a certain brand of Hipster.   The New Hipster is different, in that instead of bragging about their Prius they brag about their stuffed flamingo.

If you can’t learn to hate them, I might have to offer a course in Remedial Hatred.   I have to master the video thing first, though.

I am planning to work on a thorough and definitive study of Hipsters, but naturally I’m putting it off,   because it involves a lot of work.

However, I think we can all agree for now that a Hipster is someone else, not oneself.   It’s someone we disdain, in the same way we once disdained Yuppies. Hipsters can be described as people who are already sick of something you have only just discovered.

Tonight, my nephew came over and found me at my computer, enraged by some shit I was reading. I started ranting about how much I hate the way Hipsters have to covet and collect things that might be considered morbid: old medical instruments, taxidermy, creepy shit like this nineteenth century Japanese pregnancy doll.

He rolled his eyes and said dismissively: “That was hip maybe twenty years ago.”

I got very excited, having trapped a live Hipster in the act of being a Hipster! I asked him to tell me what was hip RIGHT NOW, this week, and I even promised not to reveal the valuable secret. He told me that he’d have to think about it. Then we went out to have dinner and I got drunk.

While drunk, I accused him of being a crypto-Hipster, which was so satisfying that I didn’t even care about his denial as the conversation drifted to post post post-modernism. Please feel free to go around slandering and annoying your loved ones with this useful new insult (which I thought I made up before googling it and seeing that it already exists.)

“The ‘Dovima,’ an 11cm, spike-heeled confection of gilded silk mesh and jewels, is embellished with a pair of rose pink-dyed, taxidermy birds with gold and crystal heads.” Sound good so far? How about this: They incorporate   “semi-precious stones, jet, satin ribbons, silk chiffon, diamanté and crocodile skin fashioned into dainty rosettes.”

These shoes by Bruno Frisoni for Roger Vivier are hand made and cost $43,000. A little pricey but wait! The shoes “can be inserted into and buckled onto matching crocodile or snakeskin protective ‘platforms,’ based on the ‘pattens’ of the Middle Ages. They add height and save the expensive, fragile works-of-art for the feet from actually making contact with the pavement.”

Fuck!

Now that I’ve seen these shoes, nothing else will ever be good enough. It’s the fucking birds that get me.

Around 30 years ago, I was out with my sister, waiting for a table at our neighborhood cafe. A tall man in front of us was wearing white shoes that he’d obviously spray painted. On each toe cap was affixed a little doll head. My sister and I exchanged a look, and I said to the guy, “Nice shoes.” He smiled graciously and said, “I call them ‘Babies in the Snow.”

I’ve never forgotton about Babies in the Snow. I think I’ll call the Dovima “Dead Birds With Bling.”

Just when I was considering the possibility of throwing some shit out, I come across a group of compulsive collectors, thanks to Men.Style.com. I was looking for Philip Grangi, a jewelry designer, and discovered that he is a self-described “Avid Materialist” who can’t resist collecting things, even from dumpsters.

I personally have too many ‘collections’ but not as many as Philip Crangi. He is seized with a sudden urge to collect something and then scours the city for it. I like how unabashed he is about his compulsions. He admits that he’d rather put stuff in storage, where he can’t even see it, than sell any of it. Naturally, he loves and collects taxidermy. Who doesn’t, at this point? I’m ready to approach someone at the next cocktail party with the conversation-opener “So how much taxidermy do you own?”

On this same site, you can meet artist Hunt Slonem, who is also an Avid Materialist, but on a much grander scale. He makes Andy Warhol look like a slacker, collection-wise. You need to see the video clip to grasp Hunt Slonem’s delightful mania for color and collecting.

And then I came across these two guys who have a clothing company called Barking Irons. They are the ultimate New York Hipsters. Silly caps, long scarves, fingerless gloves, facial hair, the whole shebang. They collect old Victorian shit and they’re “obsessed with Authenticity.” One of them holds an old whiskey bottle and starts rhapsodizing about it. Why do I hate them? Oh, right, I’m a cunt!

I am exhausted from all the obsession. Anyone out there collect anything that isn’t taxidermy?

Maxfield is a celebrated bastion of high-end designer fashion in West Hollywood,   where regular people like me can rub shoulders with anorexic model types and wealthy Japanese tourists. I went there for the first time yesterday with my friend Mark, who was craving a fix of Comme des Garcons.

We were greeted by several black-clad sales people, including a fat girl who told me, “I love your Vivienne Westwood bag,” which immediately made me feel bad about myself.

I wandered around in a daze, astonished by all the skull crap. Let me tell you, in L.A. the skull is still going strong. There were glass cabinets filled with diamond skull jewelry, skull replicas of every description, more skulls than you could shake a stick at. As if to prove the point, a Japanese guy wearing an elaborately rhinestoned skull hoodie and pseudo-gangster chains passed my way and grunted “Hi,” or maybe he was clearing his throat.

Racks of overpriced shapeless garments by all the important brands formed the periphery of the store. There were shelves of pointy shoes for the men, and ugly distressed oxfords for women. A sales girl urged a pregnant woman to buy a pair of shoes that screamed “Club Foot!”   I picked up a nice belt that turned out to have skull-shaped bronze skulls and cost $395.

Elsewhere, there was a long rack of Chanel items, including a $5,000 chain belt. A vintage Birken bag was $25,000. Nothing looked tempting, except for a furry handbag with a wristlet covered in big green glass gems. The tag on it was black, with black writing, so I was spared from learning its provenance or price.

The most striking aspect of Maxfield is the owner’s love of taxidermy, which is the new hip thing if you’ve been in a coma for the last five years. There were at least a dozen of stuffed chickens dressed in little waistcoats and necklaces. Most spectacularly unpleasant were a pair of stuffed leopards, one supporting a glass table top and the other laying dead upon the table, surrounded by candles and wallets.

I pet the poor dead animal and we booked to the Paul Smith boutique down the street, where everything was happy in shades of pink, green and chartreuse.

How about a Hate Stamp Kit? You can buy it online here.

Here is a gold-billed crow you can buy from McKinley and Sons, who describe themselves as ‘London’s most dashing taxidermists.’ I have to admit I kind of like it, but I hate it too.

My hateful  term of the day is carbon footprint. You can find more words to hate here.