My gift to you

Too sick to blog today, so ladies and gentlemen, in one word: le Pétomane.

Invalidated

Horribly, devastedly sick . . . again. A girl I went to university with who already lives here warned me that people sicken here even more than we used to when there were fifty of us living on the same residence floor, breathing our cooties on each other. She's right. The weather is just so shit, and then the odd days it's not shit just weaken up your immune system for the inevitable moment 12 hours later when it's shit again.

It is a hostile environment weatherwise, and horribly polluted for its size. And while there are a million appealing things about Brussels, we're both dreaming about moving on. But then, of course, the question is how predictable will the weather ever be, anywhere, anymore . . . oh, what a hateful race we are, turning our planet into a hostile environment and fighting each other too much for us all to live in polyandrous peace around the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Can't we just stop fucking shit up?

Whatever is not forbidden is mandatory

When I was a teenager I had a little World War One obsession. My Italian grandfather had fought in it but by the time I was ready to ask him questions about things like that he couldn't speak English anymore and I hadn't learnt Italian yet. My British grandfather didn't remember WWI at all, but something he would occasionally obsess over in the last couple decades of his life was sitting with his mother as a little boy while she chatted with her friends about the aftermath of the war. She said she felt bad for all the young women, as all the young men were dead.

So after the Italian grandfather died and the British grandfather told me that chilling little vignette, I read everything I could get my hands on about that war. Part of the fascination I had was probably morbid, because that was a morbid war, with something like 10 million people dying over four years. But I think what was really keeping me in the books was realizing the degree to which even 'nice' governments didn't give a fuck about the lives or well-being of their people and would do anything, including slaughtering the cream of their youth, that they could get away with. And then, they got away with so much - you scurried over trenches and got shot, or if you tried like a sensible person to run away you were shot, and the only thing you were allowed to do was die or kill as many people as you could who were just like you - that I'm shocked we've allowed them to get away with anything since.

I think that's shaped the way I've felt about government ever since and made me admire the French, who boss their government around in and out of the democratic system, and not admire Americans, who seem to have had a supine relationship with a series of unrepresentative governments ever since they bossed Richard Nixon into getting rid of the draft. I've spoken to sensible people who have voted Bush/Cheney - I mean, if you have two fiscally irresponsible parties with nearly identical platforms, as the Kerry/Bush tickets were in 2004, why not vote for the one that promises to tax you least? But while there's something sensible in that, there's nothing to admire. Not if you're calling yourself a democracy and not if you care about keeping yourself safe from the people with the guns.

All of which is a long-winded way to say I'm really enjoying Blackadder Goes Forth, which I hadn't seen before and which is set in the trenches. People should show it to children in highschool when teaching about that time, but as I remember we didn't learn about it in highschool, and they say 'shit' too much to be okay with the Christian types who used to have to stand outside during the National Anthem. And look how good Hugh Laurie still looks in it:

Ranting mood

So the Banksy review is done, and you can look at it here. It turned out to only have a little to do with Banksy. I was in a ranting mood after reading that boneheaded article from Jonathon Jones. Nothing pisses me off as consistently as the Guardian's arts section, although this digested read of House of Meetings is pretty fucking funny. Anyways, it's too bad because the Banksy book could have borne more attention, it's neato. I love getting these things for free but it's probably worth the $30 or whatever it costs.

I should have pointed out something about how my favourite part of the book is the section where he smuggles his work into galleries and sees how long it takes security to take them down. There's something really appealing in that. A sort of invitation to everybody to keep on their toes, maybe, as we're not so good at keeping on our toes.

Good, rather, at collapsing after work and turning on one idiot box or another, or in my case a clunky three year old laptop, and pretending that's the sort of rest we deserve after working a whole 7.5 hours. Come on. You know how many hours people work in real countries? As you can see I'm a little dissatisfied with myself these days. I probably need more aerobic exercise or welding classes or something.

Time keeps on slipping into the future, and then furiously apologizing

Holy tittyfuck, how could the weekend have passed so quickly? It seems just five minutes ago I dragged my tired carcass home of a Friday night and proclaimed my intention of doing nothing for two days. I think the problem was we did do things, and that made time go faster. Also the weather has been awesome. Why does time go faster when the weather is awesome?

One of the things I did was write a review for Mediated, by Thomas de Zengotita. It's in the running for the worst book I've read this year, against Martin Amis's House of Meetings. HoM might avoid the title by virtue of being readable, but Mediated has the advantage of not being a nasty rehash of vastly superior works.

Anyways. We have some downtime at the magazine this week, as everybody in Europe except me is on holiday, so hopefully I'll have the time to get out reviews of To the Castle and Back by Vaclav Havel and Wall and Piece by Banksy - thank god, both good. Writing a damning review has its charms but it also means having to pay rapt attention to a book you'd rather use as kindling.

Another of the things we did this weekend was watch a couple of episodes of Blackadder, as a girl at work loaned me the complete series. Of course my favorite season, like everyone's, is the third - featuring Hugh Laurie as the Stupid Prince Regent delivering some of the best lines in the whole production, like 'I'm as happy as a Frenchman who's just invented a pair of self-removing trousers!'

I am a big admirer of Hugh Laurie and pleased for his sake to see that he's become a superstar sex symbol with the success of House. But I fucking hate House; it represents everything I despise about the 'lather-rinse-repeat' formula of broadcast television. And I can't fully wrap my head around him getting famous for a 'drama' when he's such a brilliant comedian; A Bit of Fry and Laurie and the Jeeves series have both turned me purple with laughter.

And I really can't wrap my head around him getting to be a sex symbol as a fucking cranky American doctor in a fucking 'drama'. What the fuck. When I was a spotty teenager one of the first naughty dreams I ever had was about Hugh Laurie in his full Stupid Prince Regent mode, and the idea of his audience finding him attractive in a completely different way baffles me at a deep psycho-sexual level. I mean, check this shit out:

Woof woof.