Countdown

So I gave notice yesterday and mostly people at work are jealous, which wasn't the reaction I was expecting. I mean, it doesn't take an enviable effort of will to drive your 'career' in mainstream media advertising into a big brick wall at full tilt. It just takes, I don't know, not doing it anymore. I guess I'm luckier than I can really fathom with the F-word. Yesterday really gave me the feeling lots of people are just doing what they're doing, lots of people have slipped into that tender trap, to maintain the nice stable situation their life-partner type expects - or that they think their life partner expects.

Speaking of which, when I was speaking with my lovely manager about my departure, I alluded to the F-word as my 'partner' and when he sent my notice around the office he used the 'partner' word too. Two minutes later, I got a message from a colleague saying I'd always intrigued her. Do you think that means she thinks I'm gay? Or is it just me who assumes gaiety whenever she hears someone describe her lover as her partner? Not really believing in marriage and hoping this relationship lasts, I feel the need to think of a new epithet to replace partner - not that I have a problem with the events manager thinking I'm gay - it's just sort of a cold word. In France, where they don't have common-law marriage, they call people you live with without marrying 'la concubine' or 'le concubin', but English being useless we don't have a word for a boy concubine. So I'm looking for suggestions . . .

The Red Dragon Is Not Fond of the Guardian

The Guardian backpedalled furiously over the suggestion that Martin Amis may be Britain's greatest living author. Even the furious backpedalling infuriated me because it made clear there was some frontpedalling in terms of that perception the first place. I'd be interested in whatever argument people have that Amis is a good author, let alone better than a large quantity of others, let alone in a league anywhere close to Kazuo Fuckin' Ishiguro's, who fuckin' rocks, fuck, and who didn't even get mentioned in the Guardian's backpedalling, which re-enforces my feelings of hostility towards the fuckin' Guardian, fuck.

Anyways, there must be something in Amis's work that strikes a chord with a lot of people and I'm fucked if I can tell what it is. He does have a talent for painting pictures with descriptive language - a passable turn with an adjective. He should write non-fiction, maybe. Or possibly for the Guardian - it seems they have some perceptions in common.

Reading that article does make me wonder why someone would try to determine a best author, but it also, knee-jerk like, makes me start thinking about who my favourite living author is. Who's yours?

For me, Kazuo Ishiguro is a candidate. So is A.S. Byatt, though I found Possession a bit of a slog; I like her shorter stories and novellas better, as with Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. Patrick Süskind is so very, very good. If I had to choose a favourite, I guess it would be him, because everything I've read from him is perfect in my eyes. And yet I have this intense weakness for Fay Weldon; sometimes her style will annoy me at the halfway point of her books, but I still love them, and I've loved her since I was 13, so that's definitely the longest I've loved a living author.

Anyways. The two reigning sentiments I've got on the question are that at least I don't have to choose, and that it's annoying that there are so many authors whose books I haven't read yet, and shows I haven't used my time effectively.

The Red Dragon Enjoys Superlatives and Absolutes

Deciding enough was enough, I took yesterday off to sleep and start putting my papers in order. I'm trying to start with the worst parts of the moving task first, and the worst part of moving is putting papers in order. One of my putting-papers-in-order goals was to see if I paid first and last, or just first, on my ghetto apartment. Miraculously, I could find the bank statements for the month before and the month after the pertinent one, but not the pertinent one itself. Isn't that incredible? Sometimes I think my guardian angel, great as it generally is, has a Seinfeld-esque sense of humour and really gets a lot of pleasure at watching me stumble through semi-ironic, annoying situations that I myself would never dream of laughing at, having really disliked, even hated Seinfeld. I like my humour surreal, please and thank you. In fact, I think I'll go so far to say that the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life was the Olympic Hide and Seek final from the Monty Python series. Watching that was the closest I have come to peeing myself for a quantity of time I consider meritorious.

Other things I love are goat milk lattes and Marvin Gaye. I've spent a considerable amount of time jizzing about them in this blog already, but I'd like to reiterate by writing that if God held a gun to my head and told me I could only have one kind of stimulant and listen to one dead singer for the rest of my life, if would definitely be goat milk lattes and Marvin Gaye. The school where I'm going in Belgium is catered, except on the weekends, when we get turned loose in the kitchens - I hope I find a way to make myself lattes though. It's in the thick of eco-agro country, so maybe - let me visualize the best possible possibility - I'd even be able to find raw goat milk.

Not much else. Had some top-notch analysis last night that helped work out why I'm occasionally a disproportionate bitch, and I've been shortlisted for another position in Brussels, more exciting than the others so far. Also heard from the less exciting Brussels possibility that actually interviewed me in Montreal weeks ago - same old same old - "you'll hear from us soon." Argh.

The Red Dragon Is Judgemental

That conference was interminable, purgatorial, stultifying, and every other word you can think of that suggests length, pain, and shit. There were some good things about it, though. One of them was that the night before I went, the F-word finally succeeded in persuading me to watch Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist, which I'd heretofore avoided because I had to watch Stealing Beauty in a third year Italian cinema class and it had made me want to vomit, like aspartame. Although Bertolucci also did that nice film with Thandie Newton, right? Anyways, The Conformist was brilliant. It was about - wait for it - conforming.

I only had time to watch the first half before having to go to bed for an early morning start, and it played on my mind for the whole two days until I got back last night and watched the rest. Part of the reason it played on my mind, besides the strength of the images and structure, was that, obviously, it was a fucking advertising conference which I attended, full of people who really seem to enjoy the motivational speakers who encourage them to do the inhuman things they're doing. To use people the way they do. To reassure them their choices are the right ones and all they need to do to enjoy them more is to live through them better. The emotion was abstract because I had accepted the Belgium job, but it remained distressing and depressing that everyone there had to have known on some level, despite six or seven spazzy motivational speakers telling us how to get in touch with our authentic selves, how deeply we betray any sort of authentic self by treating perceptions of people's attention like commodities. Treating media users like idiots and treating their clients like idiots.

I've been thinking about it and I'm pretty sure I'm not just projecting a personal antipathy to the advertising industry on to the rest of the world; I'm pretty sure you can't treat thousands or millions of users and clients like that while remaining fully human. But I bet most of the attendees weren't deeply spiritually wounded or anything - just a bunch of arts grads who floated into the industry, more or less like me, except into the sales bits my company is trying to flip us into now. Because we live in a society that congratulates that sort of career enough to make it attractive. Mussolini's Italy? Not quite - Via always runs late.

So anyways, that was one good thing about the conference; the way it gave The Conformist a nice context. Another good thing was that we went to the racetrack on Monday, and I discovered I really like horse racing. Not that it matters because I'm not going back. I felt bad for the animals and I'm not stupid enough to believe with 100% of my head I can keep winning money because there really is a science or some such shit to this. But it was very, very exciting.

Stepping gingerly out of the frying pan

While it's not my usual form to post on weekends, I'll be busy in a bullshit, bullshit conference for the next couple of days that will only be redeemed by any L'Occitan samples I manage to gouge out of my room at the Four Seasons. And so I'm posting now, in part to publicize that the F-word and I got a provisional offer at the residential school in the south of Belgium I think I mentioned awhile ago. We're now pretty aware of leaving soonish. Varying between excitement, dread of the moving process, and in my case some frustration I'm going to a school instead of straight to a real (that is, high paying and something to do with my degrees and not with television or advertising) job.

Coming to terms with everything over the next five weeks or so will no doubt provide some fuel for a very, very boring blogging fire. But today I don't feel like getting into it all, so on to some things that are completely different.

1. For some reason, this story about Omar Sharif seems awfully funny to me. I don't know why . . . it's just so absurd. I guess there's something that is really stupid about someone who wouldn't take a $25 tip for being a shitty valet - so far so good - but then why punch him, or call him "Mexican" (which the way this story is reported is coming across as some awful ethnic slur)? Silly Omar! He just saved you 20 euros! I have to say I have a red hot pash for Omar Sharif - his eyes remind me of Figaro's and he looks good in a moustache, which is so rare. He was hideously miscast in Lawrence of Arabia because he was so much nicer to look at than Peter O'Toole.

2. We've been having a lovely weekend and one of the lovely things about it was a Caribbean hot sauce Luke Duke introduced me to a couple of weeks ago called Mado's - the House of Spice in Kensington sells it for six bucks. It's fucking delicious. I can't describe it otherwise - it's really really hot and it tastes really really good. And the main ingredient in it is paw paw, which I'd never heard of before but which, according to Wikipedia, is otherwise known as a Michigan Banana. Sometimes I'm disgusted by thinking about the sheer volume of edible things I haven't tried to eat or don't even know about. Like abalone. I've never even seen an abalone in the flesh, and I bet they're fucking delicious.