Vous m'accorderez une derniere dance

I'm feeling like a cat in a small house where someone is vacuuming in another room. It's been a trying week and the next few weeks promise to be trying too - emotionally, physically, mentally. I don't anticipate even a bit of relaxation until I get on the plane for Vancouver. Today I will deal by pottering through the packing and perhaps organizing which books to take, which books to leave, and which books to ship. I've already organized which books to ditch:

1. Robert Hughes, Things I Didn't Know. Sometimes it doesn't pay to meet your heroes and it rarely pays to read their memoirs. Three words: wah fucking wah.

2. Retro Food Fiascos. Two hundred pages of graphic proof that office Kris Kringles are a bad idea. Looking at this book hurt me.

3. Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda. I have started reading this book three times, and never finished. It has defeated me, which is annoying, because by objective measures I bet it's good, and it reminds me of Ralph Fiennes looking vulnerable.

4. Irene Nemirovsky, David Golder. Promises great things from the writer but on its own doesn't call for a second read and wouldn't have called for a first one if it hadn't been a free advance copy, which I'm incapable of resisting, like being told a secret.

5. Bill Clinton, My Life - The Presidential Years. He talks so pretty; why couldn't he have got his speechwriters to ghostwrite? Tedious mess.

6. Max Lenderman, Experience the Message - Book given out at ad conferences by one of those faux-iconoclastic "guerrilla marketers" who talk too loud and swear not just gratuitously, but labouredly.

Among others. Not very many though. I tend to fetishize books and find it hard to part with them if I like them even a little bit, although I do enjoy giving my books to people I care about. I guess that comes from family expressing their love at Christmases and Bidets by giving books instead of toys.

In less navel-gazing news, go see the Overcoat while you can. I can't think of a dance production I've seen that I enjoyed for itself as much as this one - of course I get an umami-like warm feeling from the Nutcracker every Christmas, but that's more despite than because of the National Ballet's staging. Categorizations aside, this was the closest production I can think of to perfect that I've seen since I saw the Barber of Seville on mushrooms, which gave it an unfair edge.

The story is predictably Russian. That having been said, I went to the show depresses and though it touched me deeply it didn't make the depression worse. It's the story of a much put-upon civil servant in a gross, alienating, cruel (Russian) urban world who nonetheless has the inner equipment to be reasonably happy, and whose uneasy equilibrium is shattered by a beautiful new coat. Until he gets a new one, that is - the ballet is based on a delicious story by Gogol but has some twists of its own. I won't give them away, but I WILL say there are no corpse-ghosts in this one.

I can hardly start to say how great the production was. The dancing was completely evocative of the plot's reality and completely evocative of the fantasies and imaginations of the characters. And characters were perfectly established through their movement without the proceedings descending into mime. The whole cast was great, but . . . I'd been telling the F-word earlier that same day I couldn't think of anything more viscerally emotionally touching than the sight of crying Korean men; the lead character of this play, as danced by Peter Anderson, gave that a run for its money. The Man was not a completely sympathetic character, but I sympathized with him completely, if you'll allow that abuse of language.

And of course it was all set to Shostakovitch's music, which I love more and more. This is the third or fourth Shostakovitch event I've seen in Toronto in the past little while, which is nice. I wonder why he's suddenly everywhere, though. How about a Rimsky-Korsakov revival too?

I guess this has been as long as I can excuse not packing, so I am off.

Stupidafuckinweather.

Because of the miserable condition of the universe, my parents aren't coming this weekend, and propose to come next weekend instead, which is my last weekend in the city and already chock-a-block, thick, full, a real fatty strained Balkan yogurt of a weekend. So I might go to North Bay tomorrow with my brother and skip da work on Monday - that way if I don't spend every blessed minute with them next weekend I won't feel like the world's crappiest daughter. The only advantages to this plan are that I get to see the Shostakovitch dance spectacular tonight that Dale wrote about awhile ago, and that if I don't go back with my brother tomorrow I suppose I can pack a little bit.

I already finished (more or less) putting my papers in order last night, including a whole whack of journals and notes from my time in Piemonte and Paris, which was a little bit controversial until I settled into grad school. I couldn't help but enjoy the arrogance of the girl who wrote them, the pig-headed, angry arrogance of a girl who hadn't had such an opportunity to be pig-headedly arrogant before that, and enjoy reading such immediate accounts of such baffling behaviour. I think even at the time I was aware of saving up anecdotes and cautionary tales, and that eventually I was going to have to stop being a holy terror and start putting experiences in perspective and approach the world with authority instead of balls-out, snatch-first. There was such an element of exploration in those days that felt more dangerous than now.

Things are different now because I'm not quite so much of a bitch - I know how to protect myself from being a bitch better - and reading those notes wasn't quite like reading the notes of a stranger, but there was a divide, almost like I used to be a character I'd made up. The fun thing was I liked a lot of what I was reading - not necessarily the moral qualities of the character, but how I was writing. That was fun.

Feedback

There are some things I'm going to miss about Toronto, and the tsoundcheck is one of them. Symphony tickets for $12 for two just because I'm under 30 - anybody fitting that description in the city who even pretends to like classical music who isn't on tsoudcheck is a fucking sucker.

After "Knussen's Choice" last night, part of the New Creations Festival, I feel a little sad inside when I realize, besides next week's "Bold and Brassy," I'm pretty much done with Roy Thomson Hall besides serendipitous coincidences when I come back to visit. "The Composer is Dead," which Daniel Handler of Lemony Snicket fame both wrote and will narrate*, is playing Saturday, and I'd have gone to that except my parents will be visiting (that means I'm missing The Overcoat on Friday too, and the twats wouldn't let me exchange my ticket for one on a less crowded night - twats - anyways, does anybody want some $20 tickets to see that tomorrow?) and I'm not sure they'd be into that.

The only thing that comforts me about my intimacy with Roy Thomson Hall and its fucking perfect acoustics coming to an end is its relentless beigeness:

I don't understand why Canadians are so fond of making their cultural landmarks look like aeroports from the 1970's. I miss disco too, but this is missing the point completely.

So, "Knussen's Choice" - up and down. All the composers were in attendance, which was nice, because besides Kulesha they were all self-effacing Brits who gave a self-effacing explanation of where they'd been coming from with their compositions - enjoyable even when I didn't enjoy the compositions.

Gary Kulesha's Fireworks and Procession was the only thing I found flat-out beautiful. Simon Bainbridge's Scherzi were distinctly unjokey, even tediously so, so I think I'm missing the point of what an Englishman means when he calls a piece of music uno scherzo. Mark-Anthony Turnage's On Opened Ground for Viola and Orchestra didn't do much for me, although the lyrical viola phrasing he asked the audience to look out for at the beginning of the second movement was really worth looking out for - very enchanting.

Julian Anderson's Book of Hours was difficult. As it was putatively inspired by medieval tapestries, the sight of the harp, some electronic clavier-type thing and a couple of Powerbooks really got me excited - especially when Anderson came on stage and explained the sounds from the Powerbooks were meant to provide the aural equivalent of gold leaf on a medieval manuscript. What a great idea, and what an awful delivery of it. The Powerbooks provided lots of annoying sounds, including loud fake feedback and loud maddening buzzing, over an annoying orchestra and an intensely annoying clavier-type thing. All in all, I'm hard pressed to imagine how much farther it could have been removed from stark, unrealistic but symmetrically pleasing medieval tapestries.

Halfway through I got really sad and started having depressing thoughts about artists, musical or otherwise, who judge their success by their popular inaccessibility. How shit it was orchestral composers had the benefit of years of training in theory but had stopped trying to write transcendentally beautiful music, and were leaving that up to undertrained pop musicians with nasal voices, which was silly because earlier that same evening Gary Kulesha's peice had been transcendentally beautiful. But I got an intense jones on to listen to some Arcade Fire nonetheless.

*As an aside - I love the Series of Unfortunate Events series. Not enough to read more than the first one, obviously, I'm a busy woman and all that, but I'll still venture to say they kick Harry Potter's ass.

A Taste of Money

I wish I knew more about international economies in terms that would actually help me invest my money in a clever fashion, but I can still promise you the fantasies I have about it all are very amusing to me in a story-line kind of way. They involve some hot-ass trader who's golden on the inside, like Sébastien from Les invasions barbares, actually taking some interest in my piddly little nest egg and turning it into great baths of cash by taking merciless advantage of market fluctuations, whether brought on by cataclysmic events or no. The sort of hot-ass trader who'll invest in Thailand right after a royally-approved coup, for example, or who'll've been geopolitically realistic enough to get heavily into oil futures in the summer of 2001. At a given point, after treating me to multiple digit returns through my fertile years, he takes me away from all this, which usually involves moving to Italy and raising goats somewhere close to a good opera house where our children perform and get us free tickets.

If analysis has taught me anything, it's taught me other things, but now I understand that generally my fantasies are ways of understanding bits of myself, and that the hot-ass Sébastien character in my head is the way I understand the bit that cares about investing and accumulating money. I can tell this because since the death of my Grandpa, who made his money more with investments than with his job, Sébastien has been looking less and less like a scathingly hot buttoned-down Stéphane Rousseau and more and more like a post-war banker from Leicestershire who has a nose and chin like mine. He's also been getting quite a bit more strident, and you wouldn't believe how the big worldwide stock slump that started yesterday is making him whinge.

Not because we stand to lose money - I don't think we do at all - but because there has to be a way to take advantage of this, investorally speaking, and the Sébastien/Grandpa bit of me doesn't fucking know what it is, and doesn't know what it is just at the moment that it has become urgent to consolidate my tax-free investment portfolio with a new investor's group, since I'm leaving my job. I have a notion that now, or a week from now, or whenever the slump bottoms out, is a really great time to buy things. But what the hell does that mean, anyways? Buy what? Buy into funds? What funds? Would most mutual funds be diversified enough at the moment that they wouldn't be slumping? Would they be over-priced at this point because people are selling off their individual stocks and jumping into those? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. The real Sébastien and the real Grandpa would. So fucking frustrating.

Gossipology

Awhile ago I started a blog called Gossipology that was meant to give a timely criticism on the gossip industry, but I let it slide fast because it felt like a pretentious excuse to read gossip blogs, which I couldn't stomach anymore since I realized they made fun of little girls my niece's age. But the drift of the thought behind it was that, like all advertiser sponsored media, its crappy effects are things the audience bears the moral responsibility for.

We know the nasty effects of making private details of public life news items and lots of people excuse them - including most of the gossip mongers, I expect - by explaining some celebrities invite that sort of attention in an effort to remain in the public eye. But can we really excuse ourselves as an audience or perp by saying "lots of celebrities invite this sort of attention" when there are lots who DON'T, but because it's a lucrative thing to do paparazzi will still fucking follow their children to school and gossip rags will publish icky intimate accounts of sexual encounters from spurned former lovers that their kids or parents might come across?

I mean, ew. If I imagined the possibility of details of my sexual life being of sufficient interest to the public that even the men of no importance who've occasionally kept me company could get serious cash to publish, I'd lose my fucking mind. That poor gorgeous bastard Ralph Fiennes is hardly a tabloid darling but a few moments of shunting in an aeroplane bathroom with a gold digging stewardess had good enough market value to get into the IHT. Can you imagine the trust issues? The neurosis? The deep feeling of misgiving every time you want to surrender to the moment? It's inhuman.

Speaking of which, of course drunk driving may have had, in quantifiable terms, more to do with Dodi and Diana Whatser's death then anything else, but I can't believe the fact the poor bastards died like that hasn't made us as a society draw back a little and think 'paparazzi are fucking dangerous so maybe I'm going to devalue their product now, no matter how some celebrities might enjoy or invite that attention.' It killed people - real people, with children and parents and people who'll miss them. For what? A more interesting wait in line at the grocery store? A few hours of amused clock watching at our crappy office jobs? Why don't we just look away?

Kids these days

I suppose everyone feels like they were lucky in the education they got when it comes to matters of taste. But some eavesdropping I couldn't help but do yesterday, since it was carried out on a small gaggle young ladies who hadn't yet learned to modulate their post-pubescent voices in the grocery store queue, convinced me at least parts of my tasty superiority complex are founded on something.

Grocery store queues are the last-ditch effort, the final thrust, the veritable Little Bighorn of consumer temptation fighting back against budgets, diets, and common sense. So that's where they hawk the tabs and yesterday Britney Spears was on the cover of all of them. As far as I can tell (and I can tell pretty far despite having given up gossip pages, since even the BBC has been covering her lately), that's because she shaved her head. So these young ladies were treating themselves to a free read, looking at all the gross pictures and wondering with strident notes of betrayal in their voices what she's on, if Justin can help her, and when she's going to get better.

At first they just annoyed me like most young ladies do these days, with their cakey makeup, gouged pores and processed extensions yanked at a fraction of market cost from the scalp of desperate Moldavians, no doubt. But later I started thinking about the note of betrayal in their voices, and started feeling awfully sorry for them. They were a few years older than my niece, so they would have been impressionable right when Britney Spears was most popular. She was probably some sort of hero to them. In fact, their annoying aesthetic was pure 2003 Britney. What garden path had this woman led them down, they could have asked; what price will we pay for our respect?

So I felt sorry for them, and I felt lucky, because when I was their age it was different. Grunge had been a big force in music and fashion for awhile, and nineties Britpop was aesthetically interesting enough to go on posters and things. Those musicians were visibly and audibly full of heroin, cocaine, alcohol and Ecstasy, and it wasn't particularly surprising when one of them dropped out of the public eye for awhile or even - tragic though it was, and I remember crying for complete strangers back then - died in a more or less active fashion. So I grew up in a pop music environment that made clear pop music heroes were profoundly human; disreputable, angry, mentally unhealthy people who could have ended up dead in a ditch somewhere if they hadn't been musicians, and who sometimes did anyways. People who didn't promote a single fashion or physical aesthetic and who tended to look good despite themselves. It was because of this aesthetic that I could go through highschool wearing Docs and cotton nighties, without makeup and without brushing my head hair or removing my body hear, and fit right in. That was conforming back then. And that's how I'd be dressed right now if I didn't work in a business-casual office.

But more importantly, it meant that when, say, Kurt Cobain killed himself, I was sad but I didn't speculate about what other celebrity could have helped him. When Jarvis Cocker rushed Michael Jackson's twatty showpeice, I didn't wonder what he was on. And when Pearl Jam decided to hamstring their popular exposure by not doing music videos anymore and trying to duck Ticketmaster, I didn't ask myself when they were going to get better. I guess my point, if I have one, is that when I was those girls' age I didn't have to tweeze, diet and extend myself to participate in my heroes' aesthetic to the degree that when those heros had a breakdown, an overdose, or a scalp shave, I didn't feel betrayed or wonder at all what the implications of that event was for me.

It's hard for me to tell if I'm writing out of my ass or not, or if I've just turned into a curmudgeon who thinks pop music these days is hitting new lows because it used to be funny when one the Spice Girls popped out of her dress and now Janet Jackson's pastied nipple can cause legal showdowns. But I think it's a shame, what expectations young girls get stuck with these days.