You're playing with the rifle, my angel

Alright - Trash yéyé is brilliant. Maybe I like it better than Négatif. But goddamnit, what's wrong with French people? Or at least, what's wrong with innovative French boy singer/songwriters? Rose Kennedy and Négatif were both concept albums, after a fashion, in the Serge Gainsbourg Melody Nelson fashion but, you know, about Rose Kennedy and some misanthropic outlaw called Billy Bob, and not about deflowering a 14 year old girl called Melody Nelson who dies in a plane crash a few days later.

Call it cathartic paranoia because of a combination of my historical circumstances and the classy reefer we got in Amsterdam (which the F-word methodically smoked through during his two days off - we're already out and I'll be back to smoking crappy hash while he goes on a school trip for the next five days - I've had a busy week so I think I got a grand total of 20 tokes off 3 grammes - fuck, am I pissed!) but I think Trash yéyé is also a concept album in more of a L'Homme à tête de chou way.

By which I mean more of a murderous way. I think it's a concept album about a relationship ending after a drawn out process involving a certain degree of mutual infidelity, the rejected man eventually cracking, killing the woman, and then daydreaming about her until he manages to loose his identity in upstate New York. Sounds farfetched, I know, but the thing that makes me doubt it the most is that it doesn't sound farfetched enough - she doesn't come back as a rabbit that eats his cabbage head - you know how it is.

Anyways, I'm going to see him in concert at the end of the next month, which is great - can't wait. I wonder how many people he'll be playing with, the arrangements for REAL instruments and voices on his albums are so good - though I still prefer the Arcade Fire in terms of instrumentation- which coincidentally I'm going to go see three days after I see Benjamin Biolay, at the beginning of November. The timing is perfect, because listening to Benjamin Biolay puts me back in teenage Curehead mode and listening to the Arcade Fire turns me back into a real person again.

Flick of the Red Dragon's tail

More evolutionary psychology or reproductive pyschology coming out from the BBC these days, and when I read this sort of thing at my present stage of red dragon riding (jumping off the tail, in case you were wondering) it always niggles at me some. Not this article so much, which was interesting and about an interesting study. (But considering the subjects don't use birth control I wonder if they could possibly get useful results without paternity testing and possibly causing strife in the community . . .)

No, it niggles at me mostly by virtue of reminding me of this article from a year back that keeps popping up in the 'most emailed' section, probably because James Blunt has just released a new album. Because I hate James Blunt. I hate his voice, I hate his songs, I hate that he outsells people with nice voices and nice songs, I hate every headline about him I ever accidentally read about what a great personality he thinks he has, and I hate that he's always on the fucking radio when I go about my business in the shops.

I hate James Blunt, and I honestly believe that any woman who prefers his sort of voice to Barry White's sort of voice has deep emotional problems that are subconsciously forcing her to try to select herself out by going after whiny big-girls'-blouses instead of rich-voiced men who could actually do her rather than sit in a corner whining about their last girlfriend/their mother/how beautiful, beautiful, beautiful the chick in front of them is.

So you'd think I'd actually appreciate this study, but I don't. Or maybe the study is great but the assumptions made in the article really grind my gears.

Example:

"However, the researchers found that when not fertile, women were more likely to be attracted to a more feminine voice signalling a more caring man, more likely to invest in a long-term relationship."

How does having a more feminine voice signal a more caring man? It doesn't to me and I'm surprised it does to anyone.

Takes James Blunt and Barry White again - and I'm so sorry if I make anything stick in your head like a splintery wooden stake - and consider 'You're Beautiful.' It's all about what some great ululating pansy thinks about a lady's attractions. It gazes up its own ass and doesn't get the lady anywhere, certainly not into a relationship, unless she also enjoys looking up asses and constant reassurance about her looks, in which case child-rearing hopefully isn't a priority.

And then take 'I'm gonna love you (just a little more).' It's all about what wanting to do stuff with you, enthusiastically, for a long, long time. Caring. Far better relationship material, surely.

See, there's an assumption here about how deep voiced, attractive men are more likely to do you wrong than a great whiny frog of a man who whines at you and sticks you on unnatural pedestals from which you can do nought but fall so that he feels forced to replace you with some other woman who will also fall, because he doesn't understand the first thing about women while thinking he does because he's feminine, whatever the hell that means. And I don't get that. It looks like a steaming heap of bullshit to me. It's the namby pamby ones you can't turn your back on, the ones who try to appeal to the entire female races' mothering instincts while projecting their animas on everything in their sights like a Blackwater employee projecting bullets in Iraq.

And on that tasteful note I am off to work. Here's Barry White to clean your head out:

Evil Amsterdam II

So last night we got high and watched Evil Dead II as the F-word had sworn I'd needed to do for a long time; it was so very Bruce Campbell. Wow. I sat there intermittently being impressed by what was being done with such a tiny budget, telling the F-word to stop distracting me by telling me what was being done with such a tiny budget, and being enchanted with what Bruce Campbell was doing. Nobody else could have done that, I reckon.

Such a boy movie, to be sexist about it - porn grade dialogue and one visual spectacle after another - shameless! But great. It explains why the Spiderman movies suck - Sam Raimi can't direct dialogue. I don't see why he should have to, when he can direct wonderful shameless visual spectacles with rubber-faced actors who don't care about looking like a crazy jerk. Of course, that's not the Spidermans, or at least it hasn't been and I don't suppose it will be as the series seems to be using some sort of winning formula that brings in the girls as well as the boys because there's a romantic subplot and words. But you know, if I wanted words in my movies, I'd go to the fucking theatre, wouldn't I?

Anyways, Amsterdam. We didn't do much. The weather was unseasonably wonderful so we spent a lot of time exploring. Found some nice places to eat and drink, which I'd love to write about here because finding nice places to eat there hasn't been so easy in my experience, but frankly it's gone. Stayed in a hotel room that cost €80 and was roughly the size of the bed, not to mention right next to the boiler room - felt fleeced, so I slept like a lamb.

Went to the Van Gogh gallery for, I was shocked to learn on departing from it, six hours. Usually I get museum exhaustion in two. That's a hell of a gallery - not every day that you find a gallery that has enough work by one artist that you can follow it through their life in a fully engaging way. The Picasso gallery in Paris is like that, but this was better because I like Van Gogh better than I like Picasso, and because it wasn't run indifferently by French people, but brilliantly by Dutch people, who I think should run everything in the world, except food.

Don't tell them that though; their heads are already swollen enough. I remember going to a flower show with my brother last March that was full of Dutch people, one of whom said to me, "If you're not Dutch, you're not much."

"Much of a what?" I asked, and smiled.

@.

My favourite French word is 'arobase.' It's very pretty - it sounds pretty when they say it and calls something pretty to mind, maybe because it sounds like 'arabesque.' The thing it describes is not very exciting, but it turns out to have beautiful names in other languages too. The Dutch and Germans call it, respectively, "apestaartje" (little ape-tail) and "affenschwanz" (ape tail). In Italian, it's called a "chiocciola," or snail. In English, it's just 'at'. Boooo-ring.

This leads me to mention that a song from Benjamin Biolay's new album Trash yéyé, 'Dans ta bouche,' is the prettiest song I've ever heard about oral sex and I like it even better than 'Put the South in Your Mouth (Little Lady)' by White Cowbell Oklahoma. (Oh, NXNE. I wonder how you were this year. I need more music here, being bourgeious has made me remiss.)

Prettiest - except maybe 'Sugar Honey Iced Tea' by Kelis. That's an awfully pretty song too. And 'I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More' by Barry White. Okay, I'll qualify it and say 'Dans ta bouche' is the prettiest song I've ever heard a man sing about getting blown.

Oral sex is such a weird thing when you stop and think about it, isn't it? What a pack of naughty monkeys we are. I remember when I first found out people actually did that to each other and thinking it was the goofiest thing ever - not gross, just irretrievably goofy. And now remembering that is like looking back on not knowing how to read, but there's still something pretty goofy about it, in a nice way of course.

All a way of saying that Trash yéyé is growing on me, even the first half. It's not like Négatif, where one listen shocked me with the goodness of it all, but it's better and better in my ears. So deeply depressing, though! He makes me so sad. It's like when I was a teenage Curehead, except with fewer moments of fleeting humour. At least Trash yéyé is angry too. Helps me broaden my vicarious emotional range.

Anyways, tomorrow, Mel, I'll write about Amsterdam and stop nattering on about melancholy French wasters and vicarious fellatio. Except tonight we're getting high and watching Evil Dead, and I have a feeling I'll be enthusiastic about that . . . I'll see what I can do. In the meantime, here's a little Benjamin Biolay so you can see a bit of what I'm nattering on about.

This one is from the new album:



This one is from Négatif - it's one of my favourites, I suppose, but it's hard for me to pick and choose with that album:



This one is from A l'origine and while it's good the main thing I like about it is the title, which I'd translate as 'My Love Fucked Me (Over)':

The Amsterdam readfest

Finished Fall on Your Knees on the way to Amsterdam. The commentary was right - I did like it better as it wore on - but still felt that it was wearing on and that I'd got gigged into reading something I wouldn't ordinarily read. But then what was gigging me was the quality of the writing, I suppose, or the book's reputation as a modern Canadian classic, or, I don't know. Perverse voyeurism, maybe? It was gruesome, and I'm sorry, very V.C. Andrews.

The thought occurred to me, when Kathleen's father interrupted her with Rose, that any social conservative readers would have a field day with the fact the main characters' heterosexuality and nuclear famility were so dysfunctional and the girl-on-girl action was so hot. But then social conservatives don't read long novels, besides Gone With the Wind, I suppose, which for what it's worth was way, way better than Fall on Your Knees.

But Dale was right a couple comments back - Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliette) is a fucking awesome play. And the dialogue through Fall on Your Knees is really top-notch, too. That's so hard. Good dialogue.

Anyways, on the way back from Amsterdam I read In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin. Bruce Chatwin is certainly my favourite travel writer and maybe one of my favourite writers altogether. This book is different from the other ones I've read by him - it has more of the same feeling throughout instead of being a bunch of snippets - somehow there's something more personal about the feeling, if not the stories. That's probably just in my head because I didn't know anything about his life when I read his other books.

But there's something exhausted about the person who listens and writes In Patagonia - something beyond anger, frustration, beyond anything but looking and listening. And that makes the perfect narrator to tell us about a place like Patagonia in the 70's, after the end of the Allende government and in the thick of Isabel Peron's government, yet so far from it all. Big big recommendation.