My birthday is coming up, and to celebrate Roman Polanski now being in prison awaiting some sort of evaluation of his case for longer than the big bad old 48 day sentence he ran away from in the 1970's, and with no immediate prospect of release, I'd like to post Chris Rock being Chris Rock, that is, awesome.

I heart DILFs

You may have gathered by now that I'm not Brussels' biggest fan, indeed that I'm counting the days, but nonetheless there are some really great things about it, and now that I'm back to being only seasonally depressed and not quite so gutted about the tragedy at work - amazing how one just gets used to things being totally fucked - I'm able to appreciate it more. Some of these things are tied to what we spent the weekend enjoying, ie culture, which all and sundry are warning me Australia is utterly bereft of so I should get it while I can. Fair enough.

Another thing about Brussels, indeed most of northern Belgium which is pretty sweet is the DILF population. I'm not very well positioned to enjoy it as I'm in a satisfying long term monogamous relationship with the man who I'd call my soulmate if I was the sort of fucking wet who believed in soulmates. But as the bishop said to the vicar, no one has poked my eyes out, and all the hot young men with babies is a sight to soothe their soreness.

I don't know if it's the excellent creche system or the comprehensive social security at large or just if these people aren't very handy with the condoms, but damn, there are some hot young professional motherfuckers who look like Ken Dolls except you can tell are swinging some serious pipe by the knowing way they smile at you, and who you can tell have pipes that work by the legions of little poppets hanging off their arms and being pushed around in prams. Too bad they're all blond. Blond men in general just look sort of imaginary in an unattractive way to me. Having boffed a couple I can say I really dislike getting them naked and looking at the startling lack of contrast between their skin and their hair. It's alllllmost gross. At least redheads have comic value.

Orientalism rising

Besides making it to the concert last weekend we went to one of the attractions at the Europalia festival, which this year has as its theme China. Synchronously this is the first week I'm editing the Asian magazine solo, and I'm realizing in a whole new and much more concrete way that I don't know shit about Asia. And from the magazine's perspective, while China isn't Asia, it's 80% of Asia. At the moment that's far more interesting and exciting than intimidating; working in a town like Brussels while I edit features on China is a very gentle introduction to something I don't know shit about.

Anyways. As mentioned, that is happening at the same time as the Europalia festival, which is about China, as stated, and this past weekend we went to see a photo and architecture exhibition. A few weeks back we'd already seen the Son of Heaven exhibition, which was neat, I guess, especially the jade burial suit, but where I learned that I've stopped giving a shit about ruling class lifestyles and objets d'art in an internationalist context, not just a European one.

I enjoyed the photo and architecture exhibits a great deal more, because sometimes it seemed like I was looking at things that came from somewhere else entirely somehow. And the F-word and I found a place we will have to visit, as photographed by Ruan Xiarong - Gulangyu Island, where in the ultimate in urban decay there are trees growing out of old Victorian embassies, and which apparently has the highest number of pianos per capita in the world.

My lovely horse, you're a pony no more

On Friday I felt like ass on a plate, or as the French say, 'une assiette'. Both physically and mentally. It's cold season, which explains the physicality, and mentally - well, of course it's my boss. I sort of swing between missing him and realizing for the first time what a shithole the world can be sometimes.

Nonetheless that night I dragged myself to a concert with the F-word and some of his friends: this one. And it was lovely, and I don't think anything else could have reached me properly that evening, since when I've been feeling substantially better. Julia Charkova of Khakassia - her instrument and her nasal tuneful singing - was very lovely and sent my brain off thinking about Mongols and what they've done to music as well as the map of Asia.

And then Albina Degtyareva of the Sakha republic was incredible. I read the programme, I knew she's been to university to put as all in a shamanistic state of mind, but it put me in mind of some militant First Nations guys who used to live around my hometown, who were anxious to recover their culture and willing to do so through the medium of dreams and meditation in the cases where us fishbellies had successfully expunged the record. But in Sakha I guess the degree of isolation was so huge that even the Russian Orthodox Church is calling them syncretic, and going to one of the republic's university's is a way of dreaming or meditating . . . I don't know. It gave me a powerful urge to go there, though.

And she was incredible, it was really incredible, what can I say? It took me outside of myself at a time I really needed to be taken outside of myself. Like a Jehovah's Witness knocked on my door right after my dog died. I'm grateful I just had some quick shamanistic exposure on Friday instead of bumping into any religions that would require me to stop boffing the F-word extramaritally, now that I think about it.

Here she is with her old band:



Here's another with more giumbarde - sorry, just can't bring myself to call it a jew's harp - except I guess I just did.

Sin before suffering

Wrapping up the Jarrett. I've never read a book like it and the further I get into it the more bizarre it becomes. I don't know where its academic utility would be exactly - perhaps not for history; more, I think, for training people in how to be literary critics or commentators or psychoanalysts, which I think was his idea too, to some extent. I do know that I would love to write books in this one's style, but I don't have the general knowledge, or the in-depth understanding of a given era.

A history of the imagination, it calls itself, from Victoria's accession to World War One; a history of the more changeable bits of collective thinking that seem so immutable when you're the one thinking them. A self-confessedly Jungian history, with an unexpectedly dramatic tone - almost something serialized about they way he organizes it, the way Conan Doyle and Victoria and Gladstone and Disraeli pop in and out of focus . . .

The other night I was struck by an account from the "Watchers upon the high towers" chapter, which is full of apocalypse. Many people before 1881 thought the world would end that year, and many people after 1881 thought the world had ended - that they were now in post-Rapture chaos or the reign of Christ on earth (I can never keep all those Christian stories straight). Jarrett mentions one extremely popular lecturer and author, Josiah Strong, who I'd never heard of before, who believed that the Christians of the United States had it in their power:

". . . during the next ten or fifteen years to hasten or retard the coming of Christ's kingdom in the world by hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years." But first they must stop letting members of inferior races into America, since only the Anglo-Saxons were "exponents of a pure spiritual Christianity". Then they must steer clear of idleness, atheism, popery, alcohol and above all socialism, "which attempts to solve the problem of suffering without eliminating the factor of sin". . . the Librarian of Congress later said the book had an impct second only to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Looking into this sort of thing strikes me as incredibly important, and incredibly underdone in terms of how history is presented to dilettantes like myself at least. . . the beginnings of ideas, the emotional bases of what we're convinced is our rationalism, seem to me like one of the most important things you could know about history. Socialism isn't just a problem because the rich have to sacrifice some of their wealth, it's an emotional problem because you don't know that the people it benefits have done anything to deserve that we attempt to relieve their suffering - there's a moral angle to the history of the massive resistance to socialism in the United States that needs to be understood, if not admired . . .