Glowers hath murdered sleep

Wednesday is the peak of work hardness, and I must thank heaven for that small mercy because by my reckoning I got shit-all sleep last night. Anything I write today will be in reference to what took away my sleep, which will be more appropriate to write about either a year from now or never. So I'll direct you instead to an extended review of After Dark and wish you good day, sir, madam.

Spinning off the shoulders

I'm trying to pretend my job isn't eating my brain by spending at least a few minutes a day with Robert Hughes' Fatal Shore. Some day when I'm not rushing off to work, watching my twenties spin away from me like a dead goldfish down the shitter, I'll write about it more at length, but suffice to say now it's like watching an awesome car wreck.

I liked his book about Goya better because it had more pictures and was better organized; Fatal Shore is all over the place, with apparently the only organizing factor being an artistic rise and fall of gross-out factors and accounts of indignation-rousing monstrosities. Of course, that has its own morbid charm, and I'm not considering looking away as long as I'm not slowing down the traffic behind me.

Vagaries of the male race

Masonic Boom is back and her latest post reminded me of my walk home from work last night. I don't know what it is about Brussels - if this is a wierd place or if I just notice weird stuff more here . . .

Anyways, I was walking down the same street I saw the window-jumper on, thinking about who knows what, and suddenly a front door opens to the view of a lovely naked man picking up his copy of Vlan. Perfectly timed, to the degree that I wondered if I was being flashed, but then his attitude was one of a man who had opened the door to get his magazine caught in the hinge without really considering the consequences of doing so naked on a busy street; he performed a little dance to try to shield his bits. All of this happened in the span of two seconds and I kept walking without turning my head or doing anything extraordinary with my eyes as though I'd noticed nothing, while thinking ROCK AND ROLL. ROCK AND ROLL.

I was in a really good mood after that, and I remembered posing for an artist a few years ago who hadn't had a naked chick model for years before that, and how he said afterwards looking at tits he hadn't seen before always put him in a really good mood. This story doesn't have a point and now it's over.

A few minutes later, when I was nearing the flat, a 10-ish boy was keeping pace with me while walking his bicycle on the pavement. My heart was going out to him because he kept crashing the pedals into his calves. He looked slightly perturbed, and kept looking at me, finally approaching me in his formal kiddie French.

'Excuse me, madame, may I ask you a question?'

'Good sure that yes.'

'Is it normal to have a red mark on my arm like this after walking my bike as I hold it by the handlebars?' And he indicated a very faint reddening on his forearm.

'No, not for truly. A little bit of ache, could be, but not a mark red. It must be something of other.'

As you see I'm not fully confident in my French so the conversation ended there. I should have reassured him it was nothing, of course, instead of leaving him hanging, wondering if the 'something of else' was leprosy or the bubonic plague, but that didn't even occur to me until five minutes later. I must shed my discomfort with this language. After all, I'm fully capable of expressing 'I am certain that it not is the plague bubonic, but you could consider of to put on it some creme anti-bacterial' and there is no need for me to go around scaring cute little Belgian kids.

Music makes the Belgian museum come together

It has started being a right bitch to go to work on Mondays. Nice weekend - met some very nice new people and saw the best museum ever, or one of them, which is the Musée des Instruments de Musique. It's in the finest Art Nouveau building in a city of staggeringly fine Art Nouveau buildings - fuck, do I love Art Nouveau - as the F-Word says, the last time architects tried to make their art aesthetically pleasing and livable - anyhoo, it's in one of those.

And it has intruments from all over the world on the ground floor, and then classical instruments on the first, and then I don't know because we got kicked out when it closed. Which is something, because we were there for two hours and usually after an hour in a museum, I'm thinking of getting a waffle or having a beer - sad but true. The charm isn't just the insane variety of instruments, like glass trumpets and displays of international jew's harps and bagpipes, although that's worth the price of admission - they also soundtrack it, so that most of the display cases broadcast a performance on the instrument it displays to the headsets they hand out. Fucking amazing.

And I'll tell you one thing: without Africa, we'd all be fucked. We would have no rock and roll or dirty beats, and no bass at all. We'd all be fucking polka-ing to violins and Edith Piaf, not that that would be so bad occasionally, but I like having a little more. It was really striking how contemporary the African instruments sounded, especially from the Congo - the beats and the instruments.

Here's an extended Suite Française review, and I am off.