Don't open your door until the ring is on your finger

Gounod's Faust last night. Don't know what it is about the opera season but the shows come thick and fast when they do come - Lady Macbeth of Mtensk is two weeks from now and then there are three in May - Luisa Miller, Elektra and La Traviata, which is in the week before Sugar's wedding so I probably won't have to miss it. Anyways, Faust was magnificent. Every bit of it - I've never seen such a well-staged opera, and it benefits from having a fantastic story too.

I'm not going to lie; I had a spell of wishing that Méphistophélès was being played by Paolo Szot, the uber-hot baritone I was foaming about in Carmen more than a year ago - make him really seductive-like. That probably wouldn't have occurred to me if Marguerite hadn't been played to a delightful turn by the same soprano who ham-fisted Michaela in the production where he was Escamillo. As Gigi said, she more than redeemed herself; she was lovely. With Tintin's Bianca Castafiore's signature song, "Je ris de me voir si belle dans le miroir" - my god, she was charming. She made a good madwoman, too.

Anyways, Méphistophélès - that was done by Egils Silins - not so seductive but wonderfully physical and believable. Dancing, obscene gesturing, the works. Nice strong current of post coitum animale triste through the production that doesn't always get the treatment it deserves in opera. Showed the realistically boring nature of naughty or illicit post coitus without being boring. Top fucking marks. Strongly reccommended.

Won't it be strange when we're all fully grown

In my dissolute days, I dated an English teacher for awhile who did it for me except in that he looked like what I thought Daniel Radcliffe's Harry Potter would look like grown up. At the time that disturbed me, as Harry Potter is a child and I didn't want to be thinking about children while 'dating' this man (definitely the bowdlerism of all time here, or at least since Dr. Thomas claimed Caligula enjoyed heated games of cribbage with his sister).

According to the ubiquitous posters for Equus, Daniel Radcliffe is now all grown up and it turns out I needn't have worried; they don't look anything at all like each other. Or at least I think they don't, as I haven't seen Daniel Radcliffe's knob - the only thing yesterday's National Post left to the imagination. And I amn't likely to, considering I want to make that comparison rather less than I want to avoid seeing a play about a psychiatrist 'finding himself' through the passionate bestiality of a patient. Jeebus. I know the kid wants to avoid typecasting but honestly, a fucking play about a psychiatrist finding himself? You know what, I can find the psychiatrist for you without you having to pay for a ticket. He's sitting in a comfy chair like a twat, making $90 an hour at the bottom end of his sliding scale and refusing to let that perverted old dinosaur Freud go. There. Found.

My long-short haircut looks good but is unexciting. Which is fine, I guess; I wanted something fairly unexciting for the interview so I can put up a convincing appearance of strait-lacedness. And that is all the news that is fit to procrastinate with before I go to the gym this morning.

Baby you've changed

I have an almost ritualistic approach to big interviews, and this one is no different: the lead-up rituals involve a loooong overdue haircut (any editorial suggestions need to come to my desk by 5:30 this evening) and the loooooong overdue purchase of some tights without holes in them. Although I might just wear those thigh socks from American Apparel since I always feel more self-confident when my snatch is closer to liberty.

Speaking of which - since in the back of my mind I've always assumed by the time I was in my late 20s humanity would have evolved enough to be running around nekked, at least during the summer - in the last year I've got closer to realizing in a practical and non-moany way the world is not an easy place to change. It's full of stupid people. Some of them are friends of mine. It's been very hard to realize that friends have become really brazenly racist.

I don't have any illusions about immigration being an easy thing, and I understand objecting to some of the principles of Canadian immigration laws even if I don't agree with the objections, as came up at a dinner party a few weeks ago with guests who never read this blog so I don't know why I'm making clear I'm not writing about them. But that's really not what I'm writing about. I'm writing about people who are content to feel a sort of visceral, unthinking hate and angry lack of intelligence, a wilful lack of intelligence about visible minorities.

It reminds me how the Holocaust must have been quite easy to manage and it was good luck rather than good intentions that all the Japanese who were interned in Canada during the second world war weren't killed outright. No wonder we've built up a mythos of Germany as a country full of scheiße porn and anal-retentive sado-masochists. We want so badly to believe that never could have been us who did those things. That it never will be us.

I drew these tides of men into my hands

So once the application madness was through yesterday, I had a little rest, saw the kids, saw a student, came home and watched Lawrence of Arabia, which was neat. Peter O'Toole was great, but the scene where he gets stripped and whipped by the Turks shattered a beautiful illusion. Later on, when he was pinching his titty at Omar Sharif saying, "this is what I am! This is me!" or some such, I could only shake my head and agree. So fucking white - like blancmange! And so little of it! And yet such a lovely face!

I wonder if he was wearing powder to make him that white, but I think it's far more likely he was just one of those pasty Scandinavian/Celtic throwbacks who drink too much to grow shoulders or digest protein but still manage to cultivate a fine neck and head. Big actors can't get away with that shit anymore, you know? Brad Pitt may have a face like a demented horse but he has a real Ritz-Carlton dessert trolley of a body. Even the face-homeliest lead actors these days are worth seeing dressed in less.

There's some sort of weird contradiction there, because actresses' bodies have been getting less and less interesting. I might just be saying that because I saw Once Upon a Time in the West recently and Claudia Cardinale's figure was a great distraction from the lame plot and the swarthy Sicilians pretending to be Scottish. But I don't think so. I think actresses are actually a lot more boring-looking now. All skinny, or else all skinny with tacked-on tits and tiny, tiny bums. Besides Salma Hayek, who I haven't seen in anything for ages since I don't watch television, I can't think of any contemporary actresses who are fun to look at.

Collusion

Feeling like poo and making exorbitant promises to myself even I don't believe anymore about how I'm not going to beat myself up with applications so badly now that this one is almost done. It's just this fucking university application - so involved. I translated my French transcript last Friday and it was a terrible trip down memory lane. Although I did well in the end and that made things better, I have never had such a roundly mortifying academic experience as going to school in that bloody country, and I have a feeling part of my lack of motivation now might have something to do with memories of being accountable to a group of fucking pompous twats and not getting paid for it. Oh, it exhausts me just remembering.

Anyways. I've run myself sick so now I'll have time to polish the application material, which suggests to me my body is in collusion with some part of my brain I'm not happy with at the moment. I'll tell you one thing though - I can no longer bear weekends like the past one. I really can't . . . hours and hours and hours in front of the cocking computer while shelves of delicious books beckoned and soooo many other pleasanter courses of action reared their head.

Not much else to tell you that I can recall. Went to Matignon for a Winterlicious meal. Pretty good. Had better. The fish was beautifully fresh but the sauces were over-salty and the chocolate cake was unremarkable. Should have gone for Italian. Now I'm going to fix the last page of the fucking outline of the fucking dissertation and go back to bed.