The Red Dragon kicks out the jams

Last night I figured out why I've always sorta disliked the Killers and Franz Ferdinand without thinking about it too hard. It's because their music is a big noisy nonsense mess. Amazing, the epiphanies these days. I also discovered that one can dance to the Arcade Fire after several drinks and a solid month of no sex. What else . . . you know, I'm 27 and I've been going out for more than a decade. I understand some things that came out when I was first partying count as retro now. But . . . please . . . can't we leave some things in the grave? In this world full of lovely underplayed music available at the click of a mouse, can't we forswear ressurecting "Love Fool" or any other sugarpop single that was featured on television programmes when I was a teen? Familiarity doesn't make them any more palatable; less so in fact. I respectfully advise anyone in charge of the music for retro nights, whenever they feel the urge to put on "Love Fool", to put on "Paint It Black", "Touch Me", or "Midnight Confessions" instead. They'll cause the same glow of familiarity in all your listeners - well, maybe not "Midnight Confessions", but people will have probably heard it over supermarket PAs - are underplayed on dance floors since they don't come from dancey bands, and people will dance to them. I promise. They'll really like dancing to them. And if you want a female vocal, just put on the goddamn Jackson Five. Fucking "Love Fool". Make me wanna puke.

Okay, night night.

Will work for money

I strongly identify with crystallized ginger today. Delicious, yes, pretty even, and certainly easier to store than fresh or pickled ginger, but brittle and badly neglected in modern cuisine. If you understand what I mean you're way ahead of me; nonetheless, I promise you I feel like crystallized ginger. Nobody European has offered me a new job yet. The closest thing I've got to a job offer for something lucrative is in Gatineau (Québec), and from all accounts that town is such a shithole they might as well pay me in smack to nurse me through living there. I don't blame the Europeans - personally, I would never hire anyone for jobs as well-paid as the ones I'm applying to without checking their teeth and sniffing the back of their neck, and from the outset I'd been pretty sure I'll have to wait out some time in my present position, go, and THEN look, as I'd been planning before my heart grew back.

Nonetheless, the lack of Europeans jizzing all over themselves to throw money at me is adding to my crystallized-ginger feeling, because I'd take a job in La Courneuve tomorrow filing my worst ex-boyfriends' corns for the right pay (I wonder what the right pay for that would be. I think I’d do it for EUR60,000 and full benefits. Does that make me a ho?) if only to be closer to Figaro right away; we have a date now for when he’ll move here but it seems sooooooooo faaaaaaar awaaaaaaay.

Anyways, yesterday I had my first Italian conversational class, which was the blind leading the blind to a certain extent but interesting because my ‘teacher’ had just wrapped up her degree in political science with a minor in post-colonial literature. Isn’t it funny Australian and New Zealand stuff seems to count as PC literature, and Canadian stuff doesn’t – I suppose even when we were part of the empire our relationship with the United States and our internal cultural schizophrenia was more dominant in our psychology than our relationships with England and France and that’s reflected in our rather goofy (but lovable) literature.

But for just those sorts of reasons – of other, more local factors always being at play, and almost always being more urgent - "post-colonial" is a fucking dumb way to classify literature at all. Not to knock people who concentrate on it, it seems like a great excuse to study a lot of great books with a broad range of perspectives and styles, but one might as well concentrate in post-feminist literature, or post-nuclear, or post-internal combustion engine, or . . . whatevs. Choose your poison. Comparative literature in general gives me the shits. Maybe the patterns people find and base thier entire fucking academic careers on make sense, but it seems a silly, parasitic, even destructive way to interpret genius - a waste of analysis and a waste of art- sort of like using Fabergé eggs as bocce balls.

The Red Dragon sits and counts her little fingers

But insists on feeling better. Despite assoholicism up, down, and everywhere.

One thing making me feel better is this quiz from Shimura Curves. Usually I only do these in my head. Today, however, I would like a written record that I’m halfway to becoming my mother. And that that’s great. You can guess which answers are her legacy and which are dirty, dirty me. Hint: she doesn't like Schubert much.

1. Of all the bands & artists in your collection, which one do you own the most cd’s by?
Mozart. Hah!

2. What was the last song you listened to?
Body Movin’ from the Beastie Boys, but that was over the gym PA and thus doesn’t count. The last one I listened to on purpose was Un pensiero nemico di pace, which is fitting, as my thoughts are the opposite of peaceful right now.

3. What’s in your CD player right now?
Opera Proibita, Vivaldi, and a retrospective mix of 2004 pop

4. What is your favourite instrument?
Meeeeeeeeeee! Though I need tuning.

5. Who’s your favourite local band?
Golden Dogs

6. What was the last concert you attended?
Casual TSO show. With my mum.

7. What was the greatest concert you’ve ever been to?
Il barbiere de Siviglia from Opera Lyra, but that was probably the drugs. Sans drugs, Brazilian Girls, I was clean that night, I think. Or maybe the Kathleen Battle gala in Ottawa in 2001. Neil Young's was the best set I ever heard, but he came on right after Oasis so I can't really say it's the best concert.

8. What’s the worst band you’ve ever seen in concert?
Oasis. But Neil Young came on almost right after so I didn't really care.

9. What band do you love musically but hate the members of?
I don't hate people. Well, maybe Simon Cowell for creating Il Divo, but I'd probably brake if I saw him crossing the street.

10. What is the most musically involved you have ever been?
I’ve probably never understood how important it is to me better than right now.

11. What show are you looking forward to?
Magic Flute, my birthday, eeeeeeeeeee!

12. What is your favourite band shirt?
I AM NOT A FUCKING BILLBOARD. Even for a band.

13. What musician would you like to hang out with for a day?
Bach

14. What musician would you like to be in love with you for a day?
Just for a day? So if he wasn’t in Toronto I wouldn’t actually be able to nail him? Hmm. Does Leonard Cohen count as a musician? I want someone to write poetry about me.

15. What was your last musical “phase” before you wizened up?
I think the kids call it “I’m turning into my mum, nooooooooo, crank the bass! (snnrrrrrrrrrrorrrt) boom-tss-boom-tss-boom-tss . . .”

16. Sabbath or solo Ozzy?
Sabbath. But I bet there's some lovely grass in Riverdale Park whose growing I could listen to instead.

17. Did you know that filling out this survey makes you a music nerd?
No, it makes me look like my mum.

18. What was the greatest decade for music?
Easily 1790’s. Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn are active. Paganini debuts. The Beijing Opera is born, as is Rossini, Donizetti, and Schubert. And I just came.

19. What is your favourite movie soundtrack?
The Godfather, in terms of the cinematic experience. Though Run Lola Run is the only one I’ve ever bought, and I still listen to it seven years later. So there you are.

20. What would you be without music?
Inhuman. See Singing Neanderthals.

You know that I’m a wicked guy and I was born with a jealous mind

I have a feeling there are two kinds of jealousy, and one is normal; some visceral, animal emotion whence you get fucking pissed at the idea of your sweetie with someone else. And not just in some “I can’t trust you, adios” or “you slut, you’re going to give me a disease” type way either – I guess it amounts to possessiveness, the same anger one gets when a possession is stolen, even if it gets stolen by someone who can . . . uhm . . . make it happier . . . I don’t fucking know.

But there’s a second kind of jealousy – or maybe this second kind is just an intellectualization of the first, or maybe it isn’t jealousy at all. Which is, one can think the words or deeds of his* lover are calculated to make him viscerally, bestially jealous. And one associates, right or wrong, such provocation with insecurity; thinking a person who engages in it does so to get some visible, violent reassurance of importance, being too insecure to be convinced of this importance with tenderness - and hence is probably ultimately a shitty lover because confident tenderness is the tits. So the 'provoked' lover gets pissy, dissappointed, even exhausted.

Do you know what I mean? Is this actually jealousy or is there a better name for it? Anyways, I’m perturbed at the moment because I have a feeling some people who are dear to me are getting needlessly provoked into the second type of jealousy, and it’s wiping them out. I hate seeing people get wiped out by each other. It’s the worst non-traumatic emotion I can think of, hands down – fucking horrible – like a goddamn looooong T.S. Eliot poem minus the imagery. And it can last for months, years even, because it's not quite enough all at once to make you stop loving whoever and after awhile you figure it's just normal. But is it totally unrealistic not just to hope, but to expect our relationships would be more refreshing tham exhausting?

Figaro isn’t tiring or provoking yet. Although he did talk too long about how nice Maggie Cheung looked in her wardrobe from In the Mood for Love , which (though true) I resented after I made a specific effort to spare his feelings by not mentioning the dream I’d just had about getting magnificently plowed by Stéphane Rousseau**. But martyr complexes are a different issue altogether.



*Just let me use the masculine as generic, please, it’s easier.
** Neither Figaro nor Stéphane Rousseau read this blog.

Jeebusfuck, people.

As mentioned, if you Google "she was such a fine cocksucker", it leads straight to this site, which I proudly accept as a straight-up testimonial. However, today it has come to my attention, once more via Statcounter, that Googling "bittersweet and twee" also leads straight here, which I have a harder time with, as it's far too easy to imagine my oldest brother Magnum using exactly that phrase in a girly voice with a mime of lilac-sniffing light-heartedness to describe me.

Fack. What's bred in the bone will come out in the Google.

You roll over when I want more

Yesterday I made vegan cookies for Gigi. Although if I had my way I’d wander the earth baking cookies for everybody like Samuel L. Jackson at the end of Pulp Fiction, I didn’t do it out of pure altruism, nor out of a Malibu Stacy-esque desire to make cookies for the boys – hee hee hee hee! They were supposed to be payment for our first yoga lesson, supposedly in Lady’s building's gym supposedly with Lady. But Lady is a crackhead, which was disappointing.

So instead we went to Commensal, a vegetarian place off Bay. They charge you based on how much your plate weighs after you load up on the buffet, which is how I feel food should be priced – by the sheer quantity of kilos I’m about to noisily consume. And though I'm not a vegetarian, vegan, or anything else that will preclude me eating things that don’t make me die, Commensal serves things I’m occasionally willing to pay their inflated rates for. The slabs of firm tofu fried with ginger, for example, are fucking yums. Like sausage without any gross bits. They have an arame salad that is also fucking yums, and an avocado salad that's just - oof - so satisfying, in taste and texture. The sweets are also awfully good; I’m especially partial to their maple pie, but I’d eaten too much of the mains to be able to fit any into me.

So the complete blanket smoking ban everywhere that exists publicly indoors in Ontario enters into effect soon. I'm glad I've managed to stop already because it's been piss cold lately and I don't want to stay outside out of compulsion. Pope Urban VIII banned tobacco once upon a time. He said snuff was naughty because sneezing was so much like sexual ecstacy. I want to sneeze like Pope Urban VIII. Which reminds me, I've started reading The Great Transformation by former nun Karen Armstrong, and the first 30 pages of it are absorbing, even inspiring. I’ll write more about it when I’ve read more of it. Thank Jeebus there are only three days of work this week . . . work is so much worse than not-work.

Lovely Day

The gym has these amazing machines I love using, called “The Wave” (not to be confused with the Patti Smith album or the Canadian pop duo, neither of which I use) that give your booty just the most tremendous forward/lateral workout. I’d like to write that if I keep givin’er on them, my booty will be as huge and firm as the Wave Rock of Australia, but the Wave Rock is totally the wrong shape for booty. The Wave Rock is close to the Hippo’s Yawn; I believe neither of those is close to Ayers Rock, The Three Sisters, or the Olgas. Australia surely has a lot of rocks. Anyways, hopefully it will make my booty look like Ayers Rock. Except not red.

I also love the disc Opera Proibita, featuring Cecilia Bartoli. I do love her voice; I’d snuggle up with it by the fireplace, if I had a fireplace. The disc features 15 arias by Alessandro Scarlatti, Handel, and Antonio Caldara that were probably written in the opera-banning Rome of Clement XI (whence a series of jubilees, wars and earthquakes gave him an excuse to crack down on public sensuality in the first years of the 18th century). The reaction of composers and patrons (who were often rich church officials, because, you know, that’s us Catholics for you – while Tammy Faye weeps and wrings her hands, we turn hypocrisy into a fucking spectator sport) was to explore the oratorio for performance in private theatres.

Shocking sensuality burst through unplotted abstractions featuring characters like “Beauty”, “Pleasure” and “Pride” – at least, it sounds shockingly sensuous when Cecilia Bartoli sings it, and probably sounded shockingly sensuous at the time, as her parts would have been sung by castrati (thanks to another papal ban on women performing – God, those popes all needed a serious spanking), whose delivery systems must have been fucking incredible – a woman’s range with a man’s upper body – wow. Aside from how zany its history is and how beautiful Cecilia Bartoli’s voice always is, the music on the disc is lovely to hear – makes one think a little of Vivaldi, that same Baroque quality of seeming to instantly echo itself and the melody building out from the echoes, which intense coloratura vocal acrobatics make the voice do too. This shit is out of this world.

Finally, I love the Singing Neanderthals. In the body of the book, sometimes the text was a hard slog to read and it seemed like the author – indeed, the whole field of pre-historic anthropology – was pulling silly, subjective ideas out of someone’s ass, like the Sexy Hand Axe hypothesis. Sometimes what he wrote was super interesting in terms of the evolutionary history of music, like a physical, chemical description of how hominids with a sense of self and other (like us) use dancing and harmonizing to trust each other. And sometimes it was just plain super interesting, like a concise explanation of the necessity of emotion as a guide to action that must come before rationality - my analyst had been trying to convince me of that for months and it only sank in after I read it in SN last Tuesday. I’m dim. But then in the final chapters Mithen draws all the strings together and you understand Neanderthals in a whole new loving way. And you’re left with a burning regret that you’re never going to hear them sing. Delicious!

Dear YMCA of Greater Toronto:

I am going through trying times. You are really not helping.

The trying times are not so trying, not like Jeebus or Spartacus trying. So, fine, I've decided, I'll just have to live with them. Institute a good clean sensible regimen of cold showers, bike rides, Scrabble, wholesome foods and unsexy thoughts. But I'm getting pervy. And you, YMCA of Greater Toronto, are exacerbating this.

Like, while I'm at the gym on the rowing machine and pondering - I don't know - sunshine, what a poor job Yves Rocher did with my last snatchwax, the universality of the human drive to make music, if Po the Teletubby was Asian and that's why it was cutest, if I could ever sing as pretty as Nina Simone in a million years, dustbowl farming, the downward trajectory in the quality of Russell Crowe's performances since L. A. Confidential, springtime, and whether there's time for the sauna, I'll suddenly realize I've been thinking about all these things while staring unblinkingly at the crotch of the blonde guy using the free weights in front of me. I don't even like blonde men, they smell like ketchup. But there you are. Trying times.

Now, in your wisdom you have moved the rowing machines from the free-weight area to the machine area; in fact, you have put them right the fuck in front of the abdominal planks, which as any simpleton knows are the sexiest peice of equipment in the gym. First they attract exclusively men; second, exclusively super-fit men with already powerhouse abs that you just know would let them go for hours without even thinking about it, and third, exclusively uber-hot motherfuckers of men with the self-confidence to do really silly-looking exercises in front of a large exercise room full of people looking for visual distraction from thier physical pain.

I know the straight-to-gay man ratio at this YMCA is about 1:10. I don't care. You are still being utterly unsupportive of the trying times I am going through by subjecting me to this proximity to the abdominal planks while I use the rowing machine, which I must continue to do to help realize my fitness goal of being able to punch through a watermelon. Please move the rowing machines again, preferably to a place where the users face something unattractive, like the police precinct across the street or a wall with a picture of this on it.

Yours,

Mistress La Spliffe