The Red Dragon Picks and Chooses

So, Casino Royale is better than any James Bond movie since, like, Octopussy. The theme music was crap, the credit sequence was crap, the bit where Daniel Craig was naked was crap because I couldn't bear to look because his testicles were getting whipped, the product placement was obtrusive and the lovey-dovey scenes were crap. But it really doesn't matter because the all the action sequences were good, especially for someone like me who usually thinks action scenes are retarded.

As for Daniel Craig, well . . . If our Lord held a gun to my head and commanded me to have a two-man threesome with the partners of my choice, they would be Daniel Craig and Benjamin Biolay. Which is really the point of good Bond, isn't it? Except if I walked into a bedroom where Benjamin Biolay and Daniel Craig were waiting, I think my knees would give out. Not that it would matter; I don't think the point of a two-man threesome would be me doing a lot of stuff.

No other news. No other news in particular from Belgium; perhaps that ship has sailed. I wonder how much that bothers me. Some. Some not. This weekend will be nice. I need to decompress because work has really been making me want to shoot myself lately. Maybe if I didn't have a job like the one I do now, I wouldn't notice product placements in Bond films. Maybe Dr. No was actually full of product placements in equal measure, and I never noticed because Ursula Andress was so pretty.

Oh god, I hate the advertising so. Yesterday I editted an article about a television advertising campaign in the States for stomach stapling or banding or something, that's going to go on air post-holidays when everyone is feeling extra fat. Merciful fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

The Red Dragon Gets Sentimental

Who says heartbreak is for babies?

This change of my tune hasn’t come about from a new round of my own heartbreak, as I cynically suggested it would in yesterday’s comments; all remains quiet on the Eastern front. It’s from that same track I was going on about yesterday, “Little Darlin.’” Yesterday I ate big slabs of the Midnight Madness cake for lunch, topped by a few chocolate chip cookies, and finally felt the full import of the song with the sweet rush of the lyrics “mon coeur, j’ai echoué” into the Carter Family tune, and damn near cried.

Eating retarded amounts of chocolately sugar and getting weepy over French pop at work. Yes. Sometimes I prefer the Red Dragon to come out sort of angry, but not when I have cake.

See, it reminded me of all the heartbreak that’s been before. I think I get tetchy about heartbreak as a general idea because mine hasn’t followed standard patterns too well; it’s too Catholic, too guilty, too confused. There’s always been the idea of failure in it – either mine or theirs - and failure, as we all know, is for losers, and losers are a bad thing to be or to have emotional intercourse with. Benjamin Biolay makes it beautiful, though.

Okay, I’ll try to move on from Benjamin Biolay tomorrow – going to see Casino Royale tonight and I have a feeling I’ll be distracted from Biolay’s melodic loveliness by Daniel Craig’s sweaty grunty muscley loveliness.

Sans dévoiler trop de mystère

I wish to continue to treat myself visually (and orally - oh yes - it's coming with me everywhere today) to this Baker Street 'Midnight Madness' cake, just as I continue to treat my ears to Benjamin Biolay. Track 7 of Négatif, "Little Darlin,'" is the prettiest thing I've heard in ages and the remix of the bluegrass track through it brings out what I've always liked about bluegrass while leaving out all the annoying buzzes and pointy things that never have enough bass to give them a context.

Anyways, it's so very good. Négatif is copy protected. I don't mind that - on principle one should buy rather than borrow an album this good. I'm just annoyed because I can't buy it. I guess I can pay to download it from somewhere, but in all honesty I, like Melbine, have my Luddite tendencies. I dearly like to have a CD to hold and put somewhere appropriate. Too many computers have crapped out on me for me to want to trust them with my music.

"Little Darlin'" is a song about offing oneself, which came up as a topic of conversation recently in the context of a person of my acquaintance who'd been more or less promising to, over a former relationship. Friends, initially supportive, are becoming alienated, feeling used and under-appreciated in their efforts to be there for him, which often end in "I hope you tell _____ what she's doing to me."

So when does one walk away? God, what a question, eh? As a general question it's ridiculous, of course, since every case is different.

But I think in this case some of the frustration of the people around him comes from confusion over being suicidal and being depressed. This person doesn't seem depressed in the medical sense. But in my experience depression and suicide don't have the direct causal link people think they do. The more the sad-ass stories about this person sink in, the more it seems like he's un-depressed enough to have the energy to actually do it. And at the same time, it's like he's furiously applying this energy to chase away the people who are there to support him.

Don't know why I'm going on about it, except it's disturbing me and I need to think about it in general terms to deal with it. Damn: I wish people paid less attention to relationships sometimes. North American society has got to a point where romance is the only really obligatory passion and that's pathetic. Not in the case of this person particularly, but in the broader scheme. Thinking of killing yourself over a peice of ass . . . I don't blame him for it or anything like that, he's suffering and he's sick right now, and not knowing him well enough to have ended up taking care of him in any way I can feel bad for him without feeling annoyed. But I do rather blame the world around him for making it seem like an okay idea.

Yesterday I heard from my favourite kid student from Paris. She's hitting puberty now and dealing with drama over her first boyfriend. It fucking begins so young . . . I told her not to take seriously anything anyone her age, including boys, says for the next ten years. I love that kid like a neice so I hope she listens. Love + drama + dissappointment = silly pigshit. God, it's awful to think of the kids in my family or old students getting sucked into these so-called adult romantic notions. Arts and crafts are so much more fun. Sigh.

Hooray for Biolay

The man you see before you, this musical child of Gainsbourg who, unlike his father, hurts neither eyes nor ears as he delivers gently beautiful melodies and soft but sharp lyrics backed by lovely arrangements, has struck deep into my brain.

I have a feeling this song, "Los Angeles", is ubiquitous because I've heard it more times than I can count. Nobody else around me seems to have heard it, though. I've realized that since the concept album it's from, Rose Kennedy, came out while I was living in Paris it's possible that it was only ubiquitous there as background to that most emotionally sloppy and difficult period, and it stuck with me because that repeated trumpet rise perfectly delineates the resigned melancholy with which I wandered through a bad dream life.

This would mean people in Canada might not know about Benjamin Biolay (as is evidenced by his stuff's non-availability on Amazon.ca - I had both Rose Kennedy and Négatif on order for assfucking months before I gave up and borrowed them from Mr. N, and his lady was complaining last week about how he'd made her go into every record shop in Montréal trying to find more) and that's just wrong, wrong, do you read me, wrong. This is a bilingual country. If we have to put up with French/English cereal boxes, we might as well listen to lovely French music too.

Anyways, treat yourself. It's really nice. I don't like him as much as I like Serge Gainsbourg because I like the perv and the bizarre (I mean, a concept album about Rose Kennedy isn't a bad idea, but a concept album about killing your lover and her coming back as a rabbit that eats your head which has turned into a cabbage - which would you rather listen to?) but he sure is prettier. Some trivia for you: his wife Chiara is the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and and Marcello Mastroianni. HAWT.

28 years of Spliffery

Another year older and still too lazy to look up how you wrap text around images using HTML. My birthday was pretty good. Red dragon started yowling on the afternoon of it, not from any sort of angst about aging; more about not having a reservation for a pre-opera restaurant on Saturday night in a badly underserved downtown core and the oppressive early darkness of the beginning of winter combined with the knowledge that it's just going to get worse until the 21st of December.

Mentioned it to Figaro and he said he always found it was more cold temperatures that got him down, and that when things got dark so early he found other ways to look at things as beautiful. Beauty isn't the problem as far as I'm concerned, though. Early dark is beautiful. Everything being night when people are still buzzing around on banal kinds of business, this sort of inky artificial blackness pressing down among the streetlights, lit-up shop windows fighting back our natural urge to go off and sleep or something - it's pretty cool. It also fills me with strange little flutters of panic and fury that it's dark when I still want sun.

Fitting, then, that my birthday opera was that funny old Masonic parable of the victory of sunny truth over starry coloratura, The Magic Flute, as produced by Opera Atelier. Made me cry. Penelope Randall Davis stuck in a few extra high notes during the Queen of the Night's big aria that got me going, as did Papageno's first song. Otherwise, I don't have much to say about it - Marshall Pynkoski didn't offer a pre-opera talk, which was refreshing; the orchestra was great, the singers okay, the dancers underused, and the stage directions occasionally baffling or annoying. It was sung in English as the Magic Flute often is because of all the spoken dialogue, I suppose. Gigi found that outright alienating; I found it annoying. I know librettos are usually stupid in any language but romance language rhyme with fewer struggles and German just sounds cool.

Got a lovely stack of music in presents this year: Rebirth of Cool, new K-os, Rimsky-Korsakov, mixed CDs from Mr. N - he does such a good fucking job - as well as the loan-to-copy of two Benjamin Biolay CDs, sexy yum - and of course KC and the Sunshine Band. I'm almost looking forward to work so that I have enough time sitting in one spot to listen. Almost.