The Red Dragon has an appetite for development

Wow. I'm in a very dragony mood indeed today. Better think pleasant thoughts.

1. Appetite for Destruction. Had the F-word acquire it after having a dream that I'd heard the first single from Chinese Democracy (which I haven't) and that it was surprisingly, enchantingly good (which I doubt). Remembered what a good song 'Mr. Brownstone' was and demanded the whole thing. I'm glad I did, except for some of the lovey-dovey crap in those whiny grating vocals, ugh, but mostly glad to have 'Mr. Brownstone' again. That must be one of the best songs ever. Add it to the list, I guess. I always think I would have liked that sort of '80s grock music better if the composers had limited themselves to writing about drugs. Once they start singing about sex or violence I start figuring I should either be listening to soul or the Bad Seeds. Anyways. 'Mr. Brownstone'. Awesome.

2. Arrested Development. Finally MSN is streaming the full episodes to markets outside of the US and we're trying to watch it all before we leave for Italy on vacation, after having seen and lurved the first season. Almost there now. Well into the third. I can't find ways to praise that show enough, besides to say I don't think I've ever seen such a successful American television comedy, besides maybe the first season of the Sopranos. And that makes it the funniest situation comedy ever, as far as I can figure out. Don't believe me? Watch the fucker and try to argue. Or at least read this exchange:

Gob: My God. What is this feeling?
Michael: You know, the feeling that you're feeling is just what many of us call... a "feeling".
Gob: It's not like envy, or even hungry.
Michael: Could it be love?
Gob: I know what an erection feels like, Michael. No, it's the opposite - it's like my heart is getting hard.

That's all I can list at the moment. Very hard to look for bright sides today. Tomorrow will be better, when deadline is past and I can really appreciate we're about to go somewhere warmer and sunnier for a couple of weeks. It's just so dark here - so cold and dark - half a week away from the darkest day of the year. I fucking detest living this far noth. A full seven fucking degrees north of Toronto. It may be easier to die of exposure or get frostbite in a Canadian city than it is here, but at least there's some light. At least you don't get fucking rickets there. I could cry. But I won't. Instead I'll drink a coffee and work.

The Red Dragon is on the rag

It's early days yet, but in my capacity as a budding investigative journalist and as a creature who, in the immortal words of Mr. Garrison, bleeds for five days and doesn't die, I think I may have discovered the biggest scam since a bunch of technocrats in the late Roman Empire turned Jesus from a revolutionary to a patsy. And I'm not talking about come cunt called Madoff and thousands of pansies who thought they could get something for nothing. Small change, frankly. Men, look away if period talk makes you queasy, because there's about to be rather a lot of it.

I'm talking about how awesome this is relative to disposables. Not the brand itself, which obviously I'm too cheap to buy, but the idea, which I executed at home with a minumum of ingenuity, a sewing machine, a square metre of super-soft cotton flannelette, and the enforced domesticity that comes with a hangover. Now, I was pretty sure it was going to be more comfortable. Well, duh. Barring some weirdo masochistic perversion, what's going to feel nicer on the most sensitive part of your body: super soft cotton flannelette or a sticky bandage made of wood pulp and plastic? And otherwise, I decided to do it because I'm too cheap to pay for disposables every month, and because I don't like all the non-biodegradable waste associated with them. So three benefits I was expecting. Great.

A benefit I was not expecting was that the set-up would work so much better than disposables. That came as a complete fucking surprise. The first day I was checking on them every ten minutes in mortal fear of making a complete mess of myself, and each time I couldn't believe it. I'll spare you the gory details and let the numbers speak: on the peak day, I usually run through nine disposables. On the peak day this time, I ran through three inserts, and the second two were for freshness.

Hence the scam. It turns out that women don't actually bleed that much - within a range of 10 to 80 millilitres - something like half a cup. I've been amazed at that figure before, because whilst bleeding onto the finest disposables money can buy sometimes it feels like a fucking deluge, an unstoppable flood of gore, like when the fucking Tsarevich got a nosebleed. But like an idiot, I didn't figure out the implications of that until peak day this red dragon ride, when I actually bled into something besides a sticky bandage made of wood pulp and plastic. And realized - 'hey. This doesn't need changing every three hours.' Synapses fired . . . slowly (I've been drinking a lot lately). 'Hey. Hey. Erm . . . hey.'

Finally it came home to me: disposables are designed to be shitty. They're designed to be about as absorbent as soggy crackers, they're designed to be changed frequently, they're designed to cost five euros a month for a packet, they're designed, in short, to help a bunch of cunts at Procter & Gamble, et cetera, stick their fucking hands into my wallet. Motherfuckers. Sisterfuckers. Cuntwipes. The industry has always pissed me off, with its retarded commercials and exploitation of feminine insecurities and non-biodegradability and the way the products get taxed as cosmetics, like you're wearing them to look good instead of to not stain your furniture. But I'll admit, it had never crossed my mind that they were doing a half-ass design job on purpose to move more product. What fucking bullshit. I'm thirty years old now. That means I've given those fucks, those opportunistic, parasitic, exploitative shitheels, about $1200 they really, really don't fucking deserve, and helped them fill the planet with non-biodegradable biowaste to boot. Holy fuck.

The Red Dragon is prepared

With my poor time management and upset over the last week or so, blogging has gone straight out the window. Upset = PMT and the fact that the Belgian economy is going straight to the dogs. December is a brutal fiscal month and San Francisca was the first of many to get canned during it. And my whole neighborhood is going out of business. I'll admit it makes me nervous. My neighborhood was the shivving capital of Brussels before its economy swang up with the rest of the country's over the past ten years. Say what you want about social commercialism (and there's a lot to say, some of which I'll say tomorrow, because I have a warning to issue you about perfluoro compounds in your emulsified fat products, that is butter, and that is that you're getting rather a lot of them, to a degree that may be illegal in a few years), but it's better than me getting shivved.

Anyways, some of the sackings at work look like a sign of intense financial weakness, so I'm preparing myself to be let go next quarter, notwithstanding my promotion being officialized today and notwithstanding the Christmas party liquorflow unearthing the fact that my whole department has made its bonuses. I'll be alright with that. As long as I can get my full driver's license here before getting sacked, and as long as I can go on the dole whilst the F-word wraps up his school year, I'll be fine - won't make the full amount of money I was planning on from the Brussels sojourn, but a good portion of it, and then I could spend the spring and summer preparing us for a move to warmer climes, leaving in August, perhaps, and never subjecting myself to a full European winter again. Holy shit. It's quite an attractive thought, actually. But I'm probably just feeling that way because it's FUCKIN' COLD, I'm sick, and I need a vacation, which thankfully starts before too long.

Poor time management = devoting my spare hours to sewing, helping San Francisca move (she left yesterday and I miss her dreadfully already, not least because I need someone to take care of Lexie while I'm away) and present buying/making/sending. Also a little porn. Last night we saw The Erotic Adventures of Dickman and Throbbin. It was more interesting than horny, we found. I've watched a fair amount of porn in my time, for a girl, anyways, but I'd never seen porn that old. With dialogue and big hair and everything. John Holmes played Dickman, and the thing is, he did have a monstrous dick, but it never really got hard, hence the Boogie Nights, I guess . . . Also ruining any erotic charge the movie was too funny to have had in the first place was finding out that it was made in 1986, when he knew he was HIV positive. Fucking hell. What a fucking world, full of fucking idiots. It's amazing any of us make it past twenty, frankly.

Provided that he or she gives notice or pays compensation as prescribed by FUCKING CIVILISED law

Hungover after celebrating San Francisca’s dismissal with her briefly but efficiently on my way home last night. She’s ecstatic - she's been working here more than five years, which means she gets half a year's severance pay instead of the standard three months, and the timing couldn't have been better in terms of her family's move to Amsterdam. Not to mention she’s feeling as though she’s dodged a bullet, having turned down a transfer back to San Francisco a few months back, which would have seen her get handed a box and a fortnight’s pay, instead of half a year, minimum, upwards-ly negotiable . . . Unworthy as it is, I'm having to deal with jealousy issues where she's concerned, not to mention upset because I'm going to miss her so much, but I'm trying to just focus on being happy for her.

I feel a bit sad in an abstract sense* about all the Americans who got canned, though. Here's a box and two weeks pay, merry Christmas, fuck off now. I don't know how Americans, or Canadians for that matter, can bear it . . . those are some of the worst labour laws in the eurocentric world, in a couple of countries that pride themselves on being the best in the eurocentric world, with that sort of ‘we rock, you suck’ nationalism. And now here we are in this crumbling economic edifice we call the 2008 financial year, and thousands of North Americans are learning the hard way that their political and employment structures don't give a shit . . . they can watch middle class assholes who bought more house than they could afford get mortgage holidays so that whole neighbourhoods don’t run to seed and erode general property values, while the unemployed queue at overstretched soup kitchens. If this all gets as bad as I fear it will it’s going to be really dreadful, and the Marxist lizard part of my brain says ‘about fucking time’. I don't know how long I'll still be able to keep hearing that if this downturn touches my friends and family harder than it has, but something has to give, as they say, and people have to see how powerless they are to get their power back.

*BTW, I say 'abstract sense' because out of the nine Americans who got canned, I only knew two personally, and one probably needed canning, and the other apparently did too, despite being a piece of ass. Ho hum.

Merry Christmas (Income is Over)

Hatchet fell at work yesterday in preparation for the next financial year. Nine Americans gone, one girl here, where it's much more expensive to sack people. It was serendipitous it was that girl, who was planning to quit in January anyways, and who now gets a great big payout instead of possibly having to work through her looooong European notice. Nonetheless, it hardly fills me with emotions of security, or affection and attachment to my company. She was a good friend of mine, who's already been locked out of her computer - she just won't be back - and I'm going to miss her being around. Oh well.


This is one of the really fucking charming things about publicly owned companies. Their share price rises and falls in part by function of their quarterly reports, and the financial planning they announce in each quarterly or yearly report. Take the present quarter and year – Q4, 2008. It's a bad quarter, all over the world, and turning out to be a bad year. Companies are losing sales. As companies report losing sales, their share price falls. This is unacceptable, because the company is run by shareholders, or a board of directors representing shareholders, and of course their raison d'être is to maintain a high share price. Not to run a quality company, in terms of ethics or even good production standards, but to maintain or improve the value of the shares.

So, our company, like most, is having a bad quarter. Last quarter was also bad, and there isn't much prospect of next quarter being better in terms of making money come in. That means that to maintain share price, or at least stop it from sliding too much, the only thing to do is announce that in the next financial year, starting January, you're going to stop money going out. And that means firing a bunch of people a couple of weeks before Christmas. That is, right before the most successful consumptive holiday season in the history of capitalism, that whole industries rely on. And then retailers complain because they're not making the Christmas bonanza they usually make, because of course when you're sacked two weeks before Christmas, or see your competent colleagues sacked two weeks before Christmas, like literally millions of people are this dismally unsuccessful year, you don't buy shit. So retailers sack staff and cut their orders in an effort to stop their own cash outflow, and then manufacturers, who were already fucked enough to fire a bunch of people, are more fucked, and then our customers, who tend to be manufacturers, are fucked, and then my company is fucked, and next Christmas a bunch more of us will be fired in an effort to shore up the share price for 2010.

And in the meantime, we who see the hatchet come down swiftly disabuse ourselves of any notion that the company we work for will have any regard or loyalty to us as employees, so we should feel free in every way to jump ship at any attractive opportunity. And this means the company loses assets it's spent time and money training to do very specific work, and must hire more, and waste thousands and thousands of dollars training them, and those thousands must be saved somewhere, so come December, if you've been at the company for a few years, long enough to get a salary management feels might be disproportionate to the amount of money you're bringing in . . . merry fucking Christmas.

You know, capitalism works, but so do guillotines.

The sun shines on Benelux

Opening the weekend was this year's Christmas party. That was a nice time but I think some of my co-workers drank more than they meant to and said some things they didn't mean to; it seems to be some sort of outlet for them and they'd really been looking forward to it. Interesting. Highlight of the evening: friend of the vp's husband gave a good college try at getting into my pants, which he opened, upon a colleague asking him what his profession was, by eyeing me and murmuring 'I'm a wildcat tamer.' Nice. Ten years ago it might have worked. A few hours later, spent a sleepy, headachey Saturday hanging out, baking, getting through a sewing pile I've accumulated over the past five years, and making a pair of these. Obviously now I can't wait for my period to start, which is an emotion I haven't experienced since those now very long-ago days of fucking wildly inappropriate people.

Yesterday we went to Amsterdam to see the Fledermaus. Gosh. Bit of a psychological headfucker, isn't it? I had only known things like the Laughing Song and whatnot before, and in general terms that it was a tale of revenge. But goodness gracious, what a nasty little tale. What the fuck is wrong with Austrians anyways? But it was lovely from first to last; the staging was just magnificent - no heat-lamp funeral pyres or Don Giovanni-having-indigestion type shit there - and the performances all very good.

And by the grace of God, Amsterdam was sunny. All day. Amsterdam must be one of the loveliest cities in the world when it's sunny. I sometimes think I'd never leave Benelux if the weather was only about a million times better. So it was a lovely trip.

Read Robinson Crusoe in the train, having exchanged my defective copy from a London Waterstone's at the Brussels Waterstone's without any issue at all. Apparently the Oxford Press has developed a pattern of occasionally fucking up page order at moments of high dramatic tension. Fuckers. I enjoyed it in the normal sense of enjoying any book with lists of comforting possessions and tales of adventure and gunplay, but I was surprised at the layers of irony, social commentary, sodomy, and at how Robinson Crusoe had his moments of being rather an asshole. Friday was quite sympathetic. Lots to think about there in terms of noble savages, and ignoble savages, and grasping towards some sort of moral relativism, and such like.

Anyways. That was the weekend. It was good and now it's over. Fuck.

Consider the lilies

I don't like detailing the minutae of my life, but to prove something of a point this morning I must. Yesterday, started feeling very sick at work yesterday, flu-like symptoms, and went home for the afternoon. Got here, felt better, and sewed one of these. The F-word came home, had a nice chat about stuff, he did his carpentry thing while I finished off the circle pad (if it works, I'm fucking sold - lovely easy pattern and relatively tidy-looking once done). Spent some more pleasant time with the love of my life, he cooked dinner, I did laundry, we ate dinner, watched the funniest episode of Bottom I've seen so far. I felt quite tender towards him, so baked some oatmeal cookies (these ones, though giving the butter flavoured shortening [????] a miss in flavour of more butter, and used crunchy evaporated cane juice instead of white and brown suger, and gave the raisins a miss altogether for the simple reason of not having any), which were good. Spent more pleasant time. Finished reading the Periodic Table. Went to bed happy.

Woke up this morning. Realized I had to go to work all day. Nearly puked, got headache, nose started running.

My point is, even at the laziest of times I'm not a lily of the field, who neither spins nor toils, and Solomon in his glory was probably arrayed rather more tidily than me (Matthew 6). Left to my own devices I find things to do - tender things, utilitarian things, things that exercise my spatial relations, which I realized as I was executing yesterday's simple pattern have not been much exercised for a long, long time - and oh, it felt so good to exercise them just a wee bit yesterday!

I have a sort of unfocussed hunger for a life with more time, for an escape from the slavery we've imposed on ourselves; before the Industrial Revolution nobody incinerated so much of their lives in a profession, even the farmers got the winter off! It's contrary to our genetic makeup to do the same damn thing all day every day, and then try to cram our entire animal existence into our weekends - to devote the bulk of our waking hours to the abstract accumulation of money, of an intangible, of something whose value fluctuates on the whims of markets and speculators, and is totally beyond our control as individuals, or even a society!

In short, feeling like I have quite a strong Messianic lifestyle message this morning. I wonder how many Messiahs this credit crunch is going to produce.

Of toys and genital comfort

Yesterday I bought a sewing machine. The F-word and I aren't big consumers; we eat like royalty and travel around a good bit, but we don't spend money on things, as a generality, in a desperate bid to scrounge as much cash as possible into the basement. But this is a fucking cold winter and we need curtains for our enormous and eccentrically shaped single pane Art Deco windows. So enormous and eccentrically shaped are they that finding appropriate curtains for them would be prohibitively expensive, or rather prohibitively expensive for us. Or at least, more prohibitively expensive than buying a sewing machine and 20 square metres of fabric.

So on Monday I heard this machine would be on sale as of yesterday at one of the big box stores I could take a tram to. Great! In fact, very great. So great that I was blindsided with how excited I was getting. Really happy and sort of Christmas-y feeling for the whole three days. I'd forgotten that feeling which stands to reason as I don't remember the last time I bought a toy. And now that it's here I'm totally fetishizing it. The Singer 8280. Read all the reviews. Low-grade, entry level machine that some people hate and some people think is lovely for the money. And now that I have it all I can think about is how it purrs so nice once you figure out the ridiculous front-load bobbin and Step 4 on the threading. I don't want to go to work today; I'm less excited about going back to Amsterdam this weekend for Fledermaus Attempt Redux. I want to stay here and sew stuff.

Particularly some of these. Call me a hippie, and I am, just cleaner, but having menstrual cycles is really great. It gives me an excuse to inform the world of some plain truths for three or four days a month, and reminds me that some day I might make babies, and reminds me that no matter how shitty things at the office get, in the end I'm a female mammal - that is, the awesomest creature that God ever brewed. What I fucking hate about riding the red dragon is keeping a piece of plastic and superprocessed woodpulp over my delta for a fucking week or wadging a rough compressed mix of cotton and superprocessed woodpulp up my pussy. Fucking ew. Ew. And, for the fucking privilege of so abusing the tenderest part of my surface, I get to hand over about 5 euros a month (more than I pay for telephoning now that Voip exists) to multinationals that advertise this shit with some of the fucking stupidest, lamest commercial campaigns that have ever advertised anything, all featuring people getting Blue Lagoons all over the unwrapped product. Jesus, it's just so pissy on so many levels.

So in Canada I bought some lovely supersupersoft cotton flannel that's practically begging to be wrapped around my naked body. And if the whole thing works I'm starting on the silk and satin. Because the delta deserves it. She's a good girl.

The law is an ass - an idiot

What a strange book Oliver Twist is. I love his sentences - nice big Victorian monsters of sentences. Do love a big sentence. The coincidences were rather trying and made it difficult to suspend disbelief at every moment of the narrative, but most of the right emotional triggers were there and the death of Nancy was properly brutal and amazingly unsentimental. It was hard to believe, though, that Bill Sikes was going to get mobbed for murdering her if he hadn't been mobbed for any of the other dreadful things he'd done.

I wonder if that's just a spot of heavy literary irreality, or if perhaps there was a different attitude to murdering women back then. After all, Jack the Ripper only got through eleven or so, and that was the biggest media scrum ever, and Robert Pickton killed goodness knows how many just the other day, historically speaking, and confessed to it, and the justice probably won't even charge him with all of it. I reckon there's much, much more to that Robert Pickton shit than meets the eye. Well, fucking duh. Dozens get killed at a busy pig farm/events locale (???) and only one fucker gets charged for it - and he's sent up on second degree charges? What absolute bullshit. What bullshit.

Where's the Oliver Twist making people acknowledge what life and death on Vancouver's downtown east side is like? It needn't be so different. Ineptitude from the police and justice system, indifference from the public, and a swarming, uncomfortable scrounging life in bad rooms and wet streets only alleviated by fucking yourself up or by desperately underfunded social services. The main deviation would be that the general public isn't going to get too upset when you knock off the women like Nancy . . . not until gruesome details emerge from the slow and belated investigation about their flesh being fed to pigs and mixed up with pork. Oh, I hate it all this morning. What a comfort it is to believe in hell sometimes.

Silly geese

Almost through Oliver Twist. Nancy has been getting to me - she's got some good lines, that poor stupid girl in love with Bill Sikes. What a delicate sort of game Charles Dickens played to make such tales readable to a Victorian audience. But I have a feeling Victorian puritanism was more about snobbery than about prostletyzing, and it's fascinating to me his audience would have accepted the idea quite happily that a degraded, friendless girl like Nancy was living with her man with no thought of marriage one way or another in either of their heads.

This is part of what tickles me, if being punched in the gut can tickle, about the fuss over gay marriage. People act like marriage is this big, marvellous, ancient, romantic, spiritual institution that seperates us from the monkeys, and to a certain extent that's true, though it doesn't seperate us from the geese or the sleepy lizards. But all our ideas about it as Westerners are shaped by the Victorians, who were socially perverse enough to make Marx and Engels think that the world needed a Communist revolution because their workers' lives were so shitty, and socially perverse enough to put social pressure on every class to beggar themselves over a white-dress wedding . . .

When before, marriage (if you were lucky enough to not be Catholic and hence subject to a hocus-pocus sacrament, but Catholics have ignorance programmed into their fucking religion, so it neither surprises nor disappoints me they're so down on the gays - fuck them) had just been an announcement of exclusivity, a public promise that you would keep to one and only one partner as long as you both should live, but no farther - just to keep all the inheritance processes straight, all the sharing of resources within your own chromosomal pool, just like a fucking goose or sleepy lizard. Hence, it being okay for Dicken's Victorian readers if a man and a woman with zero-to-negative assets, like Bill and Nancy, were shacking up without dreaming of getting married.

Anyways, I do get the feeling deep down that's all marriage is, because love and emotional loyalty are things that exist in themselves, and no matter how homophobic someone is, they'll never be able to prevent gays from loving and being loyal to each other. So why people are thick enough to want to deny them some stupid fucking contract is absolutely beyond me, and why they imagine letting them have some stupid fucking contract would weaken the institution of the stupid fucking contract . . . ah, fuck it.

Die Flederbond

Dear oh dear. What a hilariously disastrous weekend. Well, it's hilarious now that it's over. Simply: the way the cookie crumbled meant that I spent Saturday night in an Amstelveen shell watching Quantam of Solace and You Don't Mess with the Zohan instead of Die Fledermaus, which I'll watch next Sunday instead in a a return visit to Amsterdam. Qualitatively, both Quantam of Solace and You Don't Mess with the Zohan were ridiculous, obtuse, and/or offensive in two or three ways each, but You Don't Mess with the Zohan actually made marginally more sense than Quantam of Solace.

Nonetheless I enjoyed Quantam of Solace more. It was funnier. The product placement was, once more, hideously intrusive, and combined with a two-hour search for cinematic grittiness that's just hilarious. The Jack-White-and-whoever-the lady-was-theme was yelpy, silly and helpfully reminded me why I don't like the White Stripes. And Daniel Craig is a peice of ass, which is always a pleasure.

God, what a silly weekend.

Not only with respect and awe, but with love

The other night, we saw the bizarrest little movie called Colossus: The Forbin Project. The F-word found it, I think because he'd read something about Eric Braeden in the Guarniad, and we're both fascinated with Eric Braeden, aka Hans Jörg Gudegast, better known as Victor in the Young and the Restless. In university I'd watch General Hospital whilst studying - these sort of rhythmic, predictable shows helped me store information in my brain; Dukes of Hazzard repeats on TNT were another such, and the Dukes of Hazzard had John Schneider's ass in it too, which was an awesome, lovely, big Michaelangelo-type ass. But never have I watched an episode of the Young and the Restless. It should be completely off my radar. And yet I know exactly who Victor from Young and the Restless is. He's that guy, that classy guy with the moustache and the slut eyes. I think most New World Anglos know exactly who he is. And I have no idea how that's even possible. Eric Braeden is magic.

So Eric Braeden had the lead role in Colossus, which was made in 1970, when people were more worried about nuclear disasters, I'd imagine, though personally I think we should be worrying about it more than they did back then. But I suppose back then, there was the surreal, nonsense element to nuclear doom that fixed on the imagination easily. Two massively nuclear powers aiming their thingies at each other and both incapable of aiming them away - both incapable of the initiative that would have ended the possibility of their own utter destruction - in fact, both dependant on the strategic idea of mutual assured destruction. Which, I suppose, is why Colossus is such an interesting movie.

I don't know if I can reccommend that you actually watch it. We're not talking The Conformist, a must-see movie that came out in the same year and in a very roundabout way - very roundabout way - very - covered a little of the same ground. The major difference though (besides, basically, everything - I'm stretching like a Chinese acrobat in the morning when I link the two movies at all) is that Colussus is geeky. The central character, even more than Eric Braeden, is the titular machine. I don't have the time or seemingly the will to get into it this morning, so I think I do reccommend that you watch it - it's watchable, for sure - and though it isn't Moravia or anything it is lingering on my brain and being thought-provoking, mostly in terms of provoking thoughts about the government people want or need - which is probably what's tying it, in my head, to the Conformist. Besides them coming out in the same year.

Anyhoo, Eric Braeden was so suave in this film, and it was weird to see him young and without a moustache. And still speaking with a German accent, what's more. I've always known exactly who Victor from the Young and the Restless was, but fuck me, I was suprised to hear he was German. Just like John Schneider, except more so. You see, it's all a complex tapestry.

Everything below the waist

When the F-word and I started the fundraising venture that is our life in Belgium, he warned me that there were big parts of me - the fun, creative parts - that were going to have to go on ice for awhile. To make the money I make, to work the hours I work, to concentrate on capitalist minutae, was going to of a necessity mean that I had very little energy left, not to mention time, to do the creative things that people like us go a little nuts without doing. He felt prepared to offer that warning because he went through his super-hard-work-nest-feathering period a few years ago, and is now sitting on a big pile of money, working part-time and painting like a lucky, lucky motherfucker.

That's well and good, and information I tried to take on board through a few deeply depressing and exhausting initial months, when I felt as though I was throttling myself with a money noose. And I have taken it on board. 1.7 or something years into my job, I feel like I've got to a point where I can see what I'm doing, and why I'm doing it, and why the present is helpful to the future beyond the ever-growing stack of money hidden in the basement, which is always strictly abstract: though I have a euro figure in mind, as the philosophers say money-making is an activity without a goal, without a natural and satisfactory stop-point, and part of the frustration of those early months was that money seemed like such an unsatisfactory thing to be working for.

So. Now I've resigned to keeping that part of myself on ice. But. The consequence of that is sometimes the glacier splits and vomits up a few literary or creative boulders. Yesterday, while sitting at the millionth fucking conference this year about how industrial actors can convince consumer audience they give a fuck about the environment, what got thrown up was a bunch of stuff about France.

Now every young lady should benefit, as I benefited, from a hedonistic and anonymous block of time in their early lives; in my case that was Italy. It's only recently that I'm accepting the fact a block of time like I had in France is probably necessary on some sort of character-building level too. I've said it was before, but without really meaning it. And I'm not going to pretend the years I spent in Paris were all dogshit and drizzle. I had a lot of fun, some really great sex, and met people who I hope to be friends with all my life. But there was a degree of adversity and misery in some events there - and I'm not just talking Bluebird, who I appreciate more and more was sometimes a victim of me and my circumstances, as well as the vice-versa being the case - that changed everything.

And this is becoming fodder, not for anything biographic, or even journalistic, but for the strangest sort of epic that ever crossed my mind, with a microscopically specific component on one side, and something big, sweeping, and ridiculously macroscopic on the other. It's been on my mind for two or three years now in one form or another, and all I can do is take notes; note down some of this extreme chatter in my brain on something so bizarre, and try to get myself together in terms of the mechanics of drawing a realistic picture of France - while I'm benefiting from living right next to it without living in it. I can't schedule time for that sort of note-taking, so sometimes it spills over, and that's what I spent the white-noise part of yesterday's conference doing. Spilling over into notes. And it makes me feel much better to know that the chatter is there and that I can note it down to work with later

But fucked if I don't feel like Lilly Von Schtupp afterwards. I guess if it's not one fun, creative part of you on ice it's another. At least it's only one a time. Once more for posterity:

Periodically gothic

So, woke up this morning still in my thirties. And I know it's a little vulgar, but I really must discuss presents. Most are in the mail, or were given to me in Canada during my visit there last month, or something like that. But what knocked my socks off a little bit was my department head taking the department out for lunch to celebrate, and giving me two books I actually really wanted.

2. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table. Whilst reading the Oxford Book of Modern Science, which see, I came across his excerpt - 'Carbon' - and it was so unsettling and beautiful, so grand and sweeping, that I resolved to find and read the Periodic Table post-haste, and of course forgot. We'd spoken about it then, my boss and I, but not since, although since meeting Rodelinda's neurochemist man it had been back on my brain in a low-key way . . . and then my boss bought it for my birthday! I was that touched; it was so thoughtful. Obviously work doesn't know about this blog since I don't touch it from there, so you can believe me when I write that I feel really lucky in the two managers I have here - such good communicators, good motivators, and now the department head has bought me the Periodic Table for my thirtieth birthday. Pity the Americans are as they are but I only have to deal with them once a quarter, so, well, there you are.

2. And she also bought Rule Britannia by Daphne du Maurier. She'd previously lent me a bunch of du Maurier books and I find them intriguing - there's something a little bit extra about them when you're just expecting a gothic romance, something a little stinging, rough and dark. I loved Rebecca in that sense. And then she also wrote some books that were just plain fucking nuts - whose premises were quite distant from the gothic romance she gets pigeon-holed in because of how famous Rebecca got. One which my boss already lent me is The House on the Strand, which is fucking nuts in this somehow rigorously bourgeois way - a drugged-out time travel book told in the language of a stodgy, conflicted middle aged white collar man who gets addicted to the past. Rule Britannia also seems a little nutbar - the story of the US occupation of the United Kingdom as told from the perspective of the inhabitants of a rural Cornish town.

Anyways, I can't get over the thoughtfulness of it all. She got me presents that some people I've known all my life have never rivalled in appropriacy. I'm a lucky girl to have her in charge. I've been really lucky with bosses before and I know that's not necessarily typical. Maybe I can do a better job of counting my blessings in my thirties.

I am become Woman, the Comforter of Worlds

Today I am WOMAN. Numerically. There are some womanly milestones I hit years ago, like giving up faked orgasms, and others I've yet to reach, like being able to keep mittens in my possession without running a string between them and threading them through the sleeves of my coat. But today I'm 30 years old, and I've lost any excuses for bad behaviour on the basis of immaturity, and I've gained status in society for making it this far without poking one of my own eyes out or getting addicted to crystal. I'm mature. I'm robust. I'm drinkable and my Beaujolais days are behind me though I'm still quite fruity.

And yet thinking about it - which I do, as 30 is an important birthday - despite the two degrees and the international travel and the reams and reams of material for my biographers veering from the salacious to the pornographic to the administrative over my 20's, I don't feel there's much difference between the Me now and the Me yesterday, brain-wise. 30 is a marker for the rest of the world, and the day I ditched girlhood for womanhood in my brain was the day I realized the prospect of fucking only one man until I died was more attractive than tragic. But as a generality, the last decade, which happens to have been my twenties, did teach me five valuable lessons that I didn't even dream were on the curriculum when I was nineteen:

1. Play nice.
2. The 'nice' is more important than the 'play'.
3. The 'play' remains imperative.
4. The 'play' is not the same as 'act'.
5. The 'nice' is not the same as 'likable'.

Those were occasionally hard-learned lessons, and I'm trembling with anticipation and a degree of nervousness over what my 30's will teach me. Hopefully how to sew, and perhaps how to grow my own. Happy Mistress La Spliffe's birthday, everyone!

SADdo days are here again

The warning came last Wednesday in London. After the Bacon exhibition we were walking through one of the many parkettes to meet Rodelinda, and we were enjoying the unseasonal heat and sun - 'frolicking', I believe you could call it. At one point we were frolicking around a copy of Rodin's Burghers of Calais, and I noticed the burghers, and indeed I, and indeed my lover, were casting long, long shadows, and that the sunlight had a strange crystalline quality. I looked at my €35 Nokia. 12:19. High-ish noon, and the sun, when I glanced at him, was riding so low in the sky that he threatened to pop behind the horizon at any minute.

'We're in fucking Scandinavia,' I told the F-word. 'We're enjoying a nice fucking day in the fucking Arctic.'

London is rather more to the north than Brussels and the Death of Day is more apparent there, but the event shook me out of complacency here. It had already been making me suffer, the damnable daylight savings shift meaning I was now walking home from work in the damnable dark, but London got me into proactive mode, and that just as the sudden brutal rollout of cold and snow and winter happened here in Brussels; it snowed like a motherfucker all weekend and it's been cold. So, no more reefer and drink, except on social occasions. Forced marches no matter what wet or frozen shit is falling out of the Belgian sky, in a desperate bid to get some Vitamin D. Unfettered baking. Butter and oats in everything. More cheese. Suddenly the diet is super rich in fat and tryptophan.

Anyways, so far it's all going quite badly. My temper has shortened, I'm falling asleep compulsively all over the place despite getting 10 hours a night, and the weirdo paranoia has started. This morning, as I slooooowly shook myself out of sleep, the palindrome 'a man, a plan, a canal, Panama' went on loop in my poor addled brain and started freaking me out, scaring the shit out of me. And getting the Van Halen song stuck in my head on a loop on top of the palindrome loop was the opposite of helpful. I'll hope for the best.

Mmmmmmmm bacon redux

Oliver Twist is even better than television. I wonder, as I wondered with North and South, what it would have been like to read it as a serial. It really does move me to tears . . . Feeling rather melancholy at the moment generally and not sure why. All is fine, good even, and somehow seeing Rodelinda gave me some perspective on where my life is going - those sorts of long, catch-up afternoons can do naught else. And while I'm going through a frowny period at work, I'm expecting that frown to be turned upside down when the budget is worked out for next year - by hook, by crook, or by bluster. Any which way, that's fine. So I'm fine. Beyond the garden level dissatisfaction with my industry that should be there, driving me a bit.

Could be because I'm on the rag. Not on the Red Dragon, though. It's been a painless process this month too, which makes me think. We're not really vegetarians - we eat fish and cheese like nobody's business. Otherwise, however, we don't eat meat, for most of the normal reasons (concerned about resource overconsumption, we're too cheap, it makes us fat, watched too many David Attenborough documentaries resulting in a resolution to avoid eating anything who's mother loved it, etc.).

But ending up at a lousy conference in London where the only recognizable foodstuff on offer was chunks of cow marinated in something, and then ending up in a hotel in London, where they were serving a full breakfast buffet with wonderful, wonderful bacon, good lord, how I love bacon, that salty ambrosia, I ended up eating lots of meat two days in a row at an apparently critical juncture, and then not suffering the crippling pain that's become par for the course over the last couple of months. Maybe I'm just wildly casting around for an excuse to eat more bacon but I think I shall set aside a couple of days every 28 to get really bloodthirsty. Wasn't there a Danny Boyle movie about that?

Mmmmmmm Bacon

Super quick trip to London these past two days and it was just lovely. Well, the Tuesday conference, for which I went, wasn't. I won't go into it. You know the drill. Putatively about sustainability, really about how to present the appearance of sustainability, and deeply depressing. But yesterday at least was a wonderful day.

We started it with a trip to the Francis Bacon exhibition, as planned, and that was marvellous. They'd got nine rooms of his paintings from museums and collections all over the world and I found it revelatory to see them all, together and themselves close up; there were so many things I'd never noticed from reproductions and visits to individual works at different galleries. And the F-word was like a pig in shit, of course, loving Francis Bacon as he does in that special cannibalistic way artistic types love each other. And in just the sort of thing my archivist brain likes, a tenth room had pictures and notes and sketches from his studio, showing crumpled figures stuck and painted back together, prefiguring the ghastly shapes on the paintings in the other rooms. Photos of his circle there, and I was interested to see that George Dyer was a piece of ass. Exactly the sort of aubergine-nose thuggy looking type I go for and then feel guilty about, just like Francis Bacon. Ah, lapsed Catholics and our rough trade . . . thank God, in all seriousness, I've found an aubergine-nosed thuggy looking type who's also the kindest man in the world. Anyways, it was a really well put-together exhibition. Not to be missed, if missing it can be avoided.

And then, after the F-word departed, a lovely afternoon and evening with Rodelinda, who I hadn't seen for an embarassing number of months - 1.5 years, really. We went on a trip to a lovely big bookstore next to the university, and I bought three - a Stephen Jay Gould book about the millenium, Robinson Crusoe, and Oliver Twist. Now this post is long enough and I have to run to the office and deal with being a professional so I can get home in time to let the vet tend to my cat, so I won't go into books on trains, much. Just let me tell you this one absolute fucking horror story. On the way to London and during the non-pertinent bits of the conference I read Nathaniel's Nutmeg, which I'd picked up in the Oxfam shop here on a whim, since I didn't know much about how all that shit in Indonesia and how everything had worked out with the spices and the Dutch and the British. It wasn't the most academic book ever but it was an excellent and compelling read, and left me in a Boy's Own Adventure sort of mood.

So Rodelinda recommended Robinson Crusoe while we were book shopping, and after bidding goodbye to her and to her neuroscientist darling at the train station - more on him and his fascinating projects later - I dove into it. Rollicking good read, so eventful - so many things happen apart from getting stranded on a deserted island, at the beginning. And finally, just when I got to the moneyshot 40 pages in, when the brutal waves have pushed-pulled him to the shore of his island, the edition skipped to page 198, and was all fucky order-wise after that, and completely missing pages 41-89. I was so angry I could have shat myself. Instead I started reading Oliver Twist, which was compelling enough to distract me from my fury. But the sting in the tail is that Robinson Crusoe had been the only book I'd paid full price for at the shop, Oliver Twist and the Stephen Jay Gould book having been marked down to less than 50% of their normal price. Ugh. I'm still pissed off.

'Gomorra', fuck, it's even a great title

This week will be busier than I'd like, starting with today, but it's for a good cause because, as mentioned, we're running off to London tomorrow. Yaaaaaay! Nonetheless, today I have to tell you about not one but TWO new favourite things:

New Favourite Mobster Movie: Gomorra, by a fucking landslide. Shows those people as the lousy parasitic cunts who'd fuck their own mothers they are. I've been feeling quite strongly about this lately - probably started a couple of years back, post-season four, when I realized the Sopranos had turned into well-shot lifestyle commercials and didn't have anything to do anymore with the psychology of men who are worthless enough to decide that sort of life is for them. Or maybe it even started 12 years ago when I went to Calabria for the first time as an adult and realized what these sorts of organizations do to their own country. And it's been getting stronger with the last year because of some things with my family and some things with work, because those people are all wrapped up in the economic organization of Italy, which we cover for the magazine - without shame, with impunity.

Suffice to say the tidy, surgical precision of the way bad guys only killed bad guys except when there was some sort of dreadful mistake in The Godfather and similar such was starting to feel like the biggest whitewash since the medieval gentry managed to convince themselves they were chivalrous because they serenaded aristocratic women in between raping the peasants. Gomorra isn't like that. At all. It's excellent - textually, and also aesthetically - very good to look at in a gritty way and very nice music from Massive Attack.

New favourite Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel: Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Holy shit. It makes the Metamorphosis look like an ode to social cohesion. Wow. It was so good that I can't find ways to describe how good it was, but that's never stopped me from trying before, so, well, it was a ripping good read, and an utterly convincing literary universe despite being so short. And it should be mandatory reading in all civics classes.It had the unusual merit of being so convincing, as mentioned, but at the same time contriving to feel very much like an allegory of something - but of what? And the action of wondering, 'what is this an allegory of?', sort of forces you to realize it's an allegory of everything - of how we shy away from some of our more confusing duties. Ah, I really can't describe how good it was. Just fucking read it. 128 pages, you've got nothing to lose.

When did 'provocative' become a synonym for shitty?

Hoping for third time lucky at the maison communale today. Belgian institutional incompetence still not getting to me - much. Not as much as the economy, as I wrote about 131 more layoffs yesterday and there are strong deflationary pressures deflating things. Including the British pound, which is actually approaching euro levels. Can you fucking believe it? I can't. Do you fucking care? I do. We're going to London next week - I have a conference, and then a date with Rodelinda, and the F-word and I both want to see the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain. Skipping the Turner Prize exhibition, though we could get a bundled ticket for a mere extra GBP 2.5 or EUR 2.9. It's not that we dislike the sort of things they have on display, it's just that there's no reason in heaven, hell, or in between to pay EUR 2.9 to look at the sort of things they have on display.

And looking at the things they have on display, I must point out I do actually dislike the things they have on display. Crawling up the asshole of something that had already crawled up its own asshole and died. It would all just be a ghastly joke, except there are actual artistic endeavours rolling out all over the world that aren't unbearably boring and masturbatory, and that don't rely on relentless, unimaginative referentialism and the least intriguing and involved symbolism possible for their impact or appeal, and that would benefit by a fraction of the attention this ridiculous, expensive Guarniad joke garners for assholes so mentally and aptitudinally debile they rip off Jeff Koons.

Anyways, I'm off to queue now.

Are you going to the Scarborough job fair

Off to the maison communale again this morning to get the provisional license. We'll see if anybody bothered showing up today. Sigh. Fucking failed state! Otherwise in a good mood - sort of. A therebutforthegraceofGodgoI sort of mood, actually. Yesterday, a couple hours before deadline, I got breaking news of 500 people getting sacked via two different companies. One of the sites was in Scarborough, my earthly paradise when I was a child. It made me sad. Besides tourist trade I'd figured there was already nothing to do for work there and now there's 100 or so fewer things to do. And all of the other editors present also got word of mass layoffs, all that afternoon.

Balance I suppose - so many people were off for four days for the Armistice celebrations and then it's still more than a month before Christmas, so nobody can accuse the companies of ruining anybody's holidays . . . except, of course, a lot of these layoffs will roll out just before or just after the holidays. I shouldn't think about it so much. But I do. No doubt for selfish reasons - doing it to remind myself my own current prosperity may be ephemeral and I mustn't do things like buy a kayak until I'm a little more confident I won't be getting sacked.

Could be worse. Wrapping up Runciman's First Crusade. I could have been anybody in that, particularly one of the poor people or the women, and that would have sucked. You know I've actually met people who've defended the crusades as more than desperate land grabs by aristocratic younger sons? No doubt thousands of the people who went were seeking something holy, but I see no way they'd have gone to war without fierce goading by their ruling classes. Which brings me to my favorite Goering quote, given when the lousy asshole was awaiting suicide at Nuremberg, trotted out here because I've got to run to the maison communale now and it's as good a way to wrap up as any:

"Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship . . . voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide enough to those who have little

Work is much more interesting these past two months, I have to say, as the economy tanks. Even in the good times, and 2007 counted as a good time for the markets I cover, it was always dancing on the edge of catastrophe, in part thanks to the corruption of some of the players, in part because of capital flight to Asia and the Americas as regulation here got stronger - anyways, it was always in trouble, and now it's melting down, and the people I'm interviewing are aware it's melting down. Some of them are distressed, and one can't help but be sympathetic, though I'm not as soon as I hang up, really - I feel sorry for the thousands of employees under them. By the time anybody is authorized to speak with me they make obscene pay packets, and anybody pulling in such pay packets over even five years should be pretty much set for life now.

Their employees, not so much. I mean, they are mostly Europeans who I speak to, and those labour types who aren't Mediterranean or British have the sort of excellent conditions that will see them get a healthy severance package, some retraining and decent pogey. Things could be worse for a lot of people, but I suppose when you're feeling these things it's not necessarily relative, and you're not thinking about all the poor cunts in China who are losing their jobs without a safety net. People are distressed.

They've just promoted me so now would be a funny time for them to sack me. I suppose if I was thinking sensibly, what I should be worrying about is how tiny a raise they're going to give me next year after working my promotion into the budget. But - and I can't believe I'm writing this - thank god I live in Belgium; they have to give me a healthy percentage legally just to keep up with the inflation index - it's the law here. So that's not really what I'm thinking about. I'm not thinking about a whole hell of a lot, actually. My equilibrium is just a bit disturbed because my mum is pre-emptively worrying about the economic fates of all us childers, and confided that worry in me last night after I'd spent the day researching how the markets I cover are crashing (answer: messily).

And now I feel that I can't worry. Because these things are relative. The F-word and I have so much to be thankful for compared to most people our age: I have no debt, and he only has Australian student debt, which amounts to much the same thing; we both have substantial and safe savings; and, for now, the money is still rolling in. At work I see things getting pretty bad - worse in some places than others, but pretty bad all over. But we're going to make it and I have a horrible feeling many other people won't. So how can I worry? I can't. The global economy has unveiled itself as a huge set of masticating jaws grinding us all up, and what complaints can I make when billions of people are in front of us in the queue to docilely march into them?

Ah, shit. Where's the change I can believe in? We all have to try something else.

You've got to think, oh geez, would I do that?

Got the papers for my provisional license yesterday. Took them to the maison communale so as to get my actual provisional license - this thing is a Byzantine complex of complexity. But the maison communale was closed. Not because yesterday was a holiday - because today is a holiday, and they do the 'bridge' here to get four day weekends. And you know what? It didn't piss me off one little bit. I shrugged and walked on. It's like my boss told me once upon a time: when something in Belgium goes right (qualifying for the provisional license), celebrate it; when something goes wrong (incompetent, bloated civil service not showing up for work because nobody feels like it) accept it as the status quo, and walk on . . .

Today isn't any old holiday, but Remembrance Day. Actually, Armistice Day is what they call it here. Commemorating the end of the first world war, rather than the war itself, which is reasonable. In German (which is an official language here, as well as French and Flemish/Dutch - little known fact to help you at your trivia nights), it's Waffenstillstand. Isn't that adorable? Waffenstillstand. Hee hee hee. Who knew people who talk a language that adorable could murder millions of ethnic types so soon after the waffenstillstand of the first world war. Waffenstillstand. Precious. I guess it didn't stand still for long.

Anyways, I'm not doing much to celebrate. I keep thinking, living in Belgium as I do, that I should visit some of the nearby killing fields, get devastatingly high, and spend an hour or so mourning those millions of young men who were maimed and slaughtered in the interests of their ruling classes. Today's certainly not the day for that, though. It's raining, I'm working, and the killing fields will be choked to the gills with visitors.

But last night, we did watch some more Australian television, Four Corners this time, doing a special on how the first world war has been used and abused by politicians and different kinds of historians. I recommend it if you have a spare hour or so. One thing I like a lot about Four Corners is that the documentaries have an arc . . . 20, 25 minutes of the proceedings, and then around minute 30 there's some sort of fucking punch to the gut that alters the entire philosophy of the thing at hand. In this case, it comes from Garth Patten, an Australian teacher at UK's Sandhurst military academy, who after more than half an hour of war historians making more or less wanky arses of themselves - acting like the scarier kind of nerdy child who gets really excited over toy soldiers - sketches out why the first world war continues to be important in the training of the officer class. And it's fucking devastating, what he says.

The whole extended interview with him was fascinating. It was interesting to hear what all the interviewees had to say in the context of a discussion about how the first world war has been used, wankers included, but I would have liked to just listen to Garth Patten talk for the full hour. Whenever anybody asks me from now on why I went into the military strategy concentration for my international relations degree, I'm going to send them to that interview. Military strategy and its history tell you the horrible secrets about humans' relationships with each other. My undergrad, with all that literature, music, philosophy, language and art, was about the romantic secrets of how people relate to each other; the grad degree was about the ghastly, ugly, irredeemable secrets. And you know, it's the grad degree that prepared me for business journalism. Sigh. Off to the wars now.

It's not bad, it's good tucker

Yesterday we were going to go to Antwerp, get high, and look at Russian dolls. You know, that sentence is the answer to a bunch of questions about female preferences right there, notably, 'how do struggling artistic types (in this case the F-word) manage to score women who you'd think would be going for rich types because they have more resources and we are ruled by our Selfish Genes?' Here's one answer: the artistic types' aesthetic sense is such that they are not only willing to, but propose getting high and looking at Russian dolls. Squeeeee! Dolls! But we didn't go. We started in the wrong order, getting high before going to Antwerp, and then it just didn't roll out - I wanted a woodland ramble in the nearby Dudenpark, as well as to catch up on my own life here by cleaning out our shithole of an apartment a bit, and go for a lovely long grocery shop on the Parvis and the big Delhaize next to the Porte de Hal, and then to bake some bread, and then to do a little light social visiting.

So I or we did all that, and the soda bread I made was a fucking winner - extremely good. The first time I've made a heavy multigrain bread that really worked instead of seeming like a murder weapon. It will be hard to go back to yeasty breads now, particularly as this only took 10 minutes to prepare and 20 to bake. I worked off of this recipe but made some changes:

- we don't have any buttermilk so I used normal milk with a squirt of white vinegar stirred into it
- instead of using only oats, I used mostly oats and some rye flakes
- I used maple syrup instead of sugar
- instead of sprinking sesame seeds on top, I sprinkled cumin seeds, thinking in my height that they were caraway seeds. But the cumin was actually really fucking good.

This weekend was also notable for the quantity of Australian television that we watched. Not sure why. I think the F-word is getting nostalgic as the fucking stupid northern European winter sets in, and I'm probably just looking for a replacement for the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, now that I don't care about the American election anymore. Three shows: Bush Mechanics, Bush Tucker Man, and The Chaser's War on Everything. Call me a stoner but I loved them all. Bush Tucker Man was probably my least favourite, not for the concept, but for the way the Steve-Irwinish Australianisms made the F-word cringe (one of them being the title of this post). He tried to tell me it would be like a Canadian television host using 'eh' at the end of every sentence and saying 'aboot' in an exagerrated fashion, but I'm hard pressed to see any problem with that.

Anyhoo. The Chaser's War on Everything is great. I can't compare it to much - it's a satirical show whose stunts are simultaneously cuter, edgier and, as the title suggests, more scattershot than one is used to from Canadian and American satirical shows. Here's their most famous stunt to date, and the one they only cleared up the legal trouble from earlier this year . . .

But the clear and absolute fucking winner was Bush Mechanics, which I'm tempted to call the best television show ever. I don't like using language enervating or prejudicial to our gay brethren and sethren, particularly after the brutality that's been done to them and their ability to swear their fucking lives away to their lovers in a bunch of American states, but what can I say, it seems my education has failed to provide me with an adequate simile beyond this one (yes, I'm blaming society): Bush Mechanics makes the protagonists of Pimp My Ride look like a bunch of fucking mincing fairy queens. Have a quick judge for yourself with this little teaser.

And on that note, I'm off for the final lesson before hopefully getting my provisional license . . .

I now pronounce you unsympathetic

The Dutch intimidate me. But, as I've mentioned before, in the sort of way that makes me wish they ran the world. That's on my mind this morning not only because those crazy beautiful fuckers are talking about building islands to make their country bigger, and not only because it looks as though a mate of mine here is moving to Amstelveen, which rocks because then we can crash with him in Amstelveen, and not only because we're going to Amsterdam in a couple of weeks to see the Fleidermaus and some marionettes for my 30th birthday, but also because a high proportion of my acquaintance from the Netherlands are gay men, and I've seldom heard people express themselves so clearly about their animosity with certain kinds of ethnic groups as they do, because those gay men sometimes feel in physical danger from these ethnic groups whilst walking down the street being obviously gay, and now this morning MSNBC is blaming blacks and Latinos for getting rid of same-sex marriage in California.

In terms of those statistics or polling numbers or whatever out of California, it's really interesting, the way it's partly instinctual to think any socially marginalized group is automatically going to feel sympathy for and supportive of other socially marginalized groups. But it's also a completely unreasonable thing to think, because let's face it: if marginalized groups all felt sympathy for each other, they wouldn't fucking be marginalized anymore, would they?

The whole process makes me impatient. I'm a big believer in direct democracy, but I can't help but feel that matters of legal and familial obligations like marriage or adoption should be left for courts and religious groups to decide - it beggars belief that something so civil should be decided by political processes. That's like asking for a referendum on McDonald's being liable if I burn my twat by spilling one of their coffees on her. Marriage is either a legal contract or a religious sacrament with a direct bearing on the contracted parties, and not on the wider community - that's all it fucking well is - it's not stockpiling machine guns, for fuck's sake - and that means either religious figures should decide within their own religious community or that judges should decide for the secular community. Especially in a place like the States, that's blessed with civil law. Maybe I'm full of shit and I'd be cheering on another victory for direct democracy if California had voted the way that I'd sort of wanted it to. I doubt it though. I'm actually not that keen on gay marriage. I think it would strengthen an institution that outlived its usefulness, but not its iniquities, when women were given legal status as humans. Anyways, in this case it really doesn't matter what I think. That's sort of my point.

In a torturous sort of way this all comes back to the Netherlands in my head, where gay marriage has been legal since 2001, and civil unions for some time before that, and adoption laws are more or less straightened out (all through the political process, necessary as they're still having a Napoleonic hangover - but whatever, it seems to work for them), and there are no political parties on either side of the spectrum even mentioning taking these rights away again, and you can have a character like Pim Fortuyn dominate the political landscape for awhile, and then get murdered, apparently partly because of the way he laid into Islam, and whose party can sort of win the election after he dies . . . Super-gay, and not marginalized. Not at all. The splits are different and there are no illusions about mutual support among minority groups.

What's my point? I don't have one. It's just so interesting how things get so different from one democracy to another, from one developed country to another. And now I have to go keep writing about the economic meltdown at work.

No plans to resuscitate the Dixie Lee

I know how to drive stickshift now, and it's even fun. Both phrases need qualifying. I know how to drive stickshift well enough to get you to the hospital whilst breaking several traffic laws, if you went into labour unexpectedly for example. And it's fun in the sense of I like making the car go but it's not fun when I keep stalling when I forget to go back to first gear after coming to a complete stop. But I have to say I'm enjoying it, and despite how fucking expensive the process is here I'm glad I'm going through the 20 hours of lessons. Learning stickshift in such a way that I'll know how not to roll back into people while stopped on hills or totally fuck up my transmission is a real life skill.

So my last lesson is Monday morning and then I'll have my provisional license. After that, it's a three month apprentissage until I can take the exam for the full license. And then, fun as it's all been, I probably won't drive again for a long fucking time. I can't rent cars or participate in car shares here until my full license is two years old, and we sure as shit aren't buying a car. I'm still opposed to their very existence and we're too cheap - I'm blowing enough cash now on the driving school, and will be blowing enough cash from special rental places during the three-month apprentissage, to make myself pretty determined to not spend money on this ridiculous 'driving' shit again until it's absolutely necessary. It is jolly fun though! I'm beginning to see why fatties all over the developed world insist on using cars instead of their feet to get to convenience stores a few blocks from their houses.

And I'm starting to understand that people who say they prefer stickshift to automatic might mean it, and not just be total wankers who like making things more complicated than they need to be. There's more control whilst driving and stopping, like they're always going on about. And then I really like the clutch. It lets you inch, and it makes parallel parking a breeze. Also I like the way the car bounces ever so slightly when you shift in the higher gears whilst going a bit fast. Makes me feel like Daisy Duke. I wonder how she voted in the last election.

For all the American people who want change

So this morning when I checked the news after a lovely night's sleep made visionarily tumultuous by some excellent new grass, I couldn't believe how relieved I felt. As the news page loaded I prepared for the worst, and told myself to enjoy these last few moments of not having to think Americans actively wanted the End Times, and even started wondering if I could persuade the F-word on New Zealand instead of Australia for our future home, because it's that much more isolated from a world I'd want to avoid if Americans did actively want the End Times. And then seeing the 'Historic Victory' headline was like taking a shit. A lovely big shit on a Sunday morning.

But in the spirit of me shitting on things: hey, people who voted Democrat, you won! And you won big. Congratulations! The senate probably won't be filibuster proof but otherwise, by winning 52% of the popular vote, you've precluded the 47% of voters who voted Republican from having any control of your legislative process. After what happened in 2004 and 2000 - you know, when the Democrats lost after getting 48.3% and 48.4% respectively, even winning the popular vote in 2004 - it must feel really good. But you also know that's bullshit, right? You know first hand that that's bullshit. I don't know what would have persuaded someone to vote for the McCain/Palin ticket, but millions did, and democracy should be about popular representation, not the nearly complete disenfranchisement of a HUGE (though in this case apparently apocalyptic) minority.

I'm not going to praise the Canadian system, though it's much more representative; it would be hard to be any less representative, so there's no great virtue in that. Any first-past-the-post system is going to end up crap. And as happened a few weeks ago, the Green Party can get 7% of the Canadian vote and lack any seats in Parliament, whereas a regional party like the Bloc Quebecois can get around 10% of the Canadian vote and 49 out of 308 seats. And we still have a fucking Queen, like a bunch of medieval thistle munchers. So no, I'm not going to praise it. But I am going to praise parliamentary systems in general, as something American decision makers should be forced to think about by you, the American People Who Want Change, and mention one that is set up quite well - Australia's. Seriously. Read about it and think about it. Manage that sort of thing without letting the motherfucking Queen step in and slap you down when you're getting too pinkoist, and you would be a proper beacon of democracy throughout the world.

And if you're feeling really ambitious, check out Switzerland. You won't believe your fucking eyes. Nobody ever knows, and then nobody can ever believe that Switzerland does this shit. And nobody can ever believe it works, but it does. You know when you're watching war documentaries, and all the battle lines just sort of stop at the Swiss border while ploughing through other neutral countries? That's why. You know why Swiss people are all fucking rich - even the poor ones? That's why. You know why that country can function as a multi-lingual (4, officially) republican entity, and has done so over centuries despite being located in the thick of the highest, shittiest mountain ranges in Europe with no marketable natural resources besides skihills? That's why. A fundamentally representative political system. And no fucking Queen. Though I bet she keeps a lot of her money there.

Don't get defensive, like this is some sort of commentary about Canada or Australia or Switzerland being better than the US. It's a commentary about their political systems being better than the US's. I've got no personal affinity for the Swiss - full disclosure - Bluebird was Swiss and you know how that went - and some of his more objectionable attitudes to the blacks and the gays were reflected by the other Swiss I met, leaving me with a bad impression overall. And Australians sometimes seem like a bunch of oiks who, like Canadians, still bizarrely tolerate the Queen (though the new leader of the opposition, silver spoon merchant Malcolm Turnbull, used to be the head of the Republican movement, and I believe the ruling Labor party still has republicanism listed as a basic platform, giving me a sliver of hope that by the time we move there that relic of an uglier time will be off the fucking money). And Canadians also shocked me last time I was home by the profligacies of their day-to-day lifestyle. I contemn pretty much everybody, in short. But everybody being contemptible in their own special way should not preclude an examination of that they do right politically, and then ripping off what they do right politically to use in your own country.

So. You want change you can believe in? How about change that's actually change?

Holy shit, am I ever sick of the American election

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Ralph Fiennes Day

Yesterday we went back to Brugge, which the F-word was anxious to do because of its fantastic art gallery with Flemish Primitives, and Bosch, and which I was happy to do because In Bruges had been one of about seven films I'd seen on planes in the past little while (and it was by far the best, though that's not much of a claim considering the other films were Iron Man, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, The Devil Wears Prada, two other completely forgettable ones, and the only other serious contender, Hallam Foe, which wasn't that serious a contender, despite demonstrating that little Billy Elliott has grown himself a really nice ass, because the dialogue was rubbish). And In Bruges, ridiculous though it got as soon as Ralph Fiennes started chewing up the celluloid, made Brugge in the winter (which it now is here, as the markets are selling clementines and it's impossible to venture outside without mulling over how easy a mulled wine would go down) look very, very sweet.

And indeed it is. I don't have much enthusiasm for winter - I've lived all over the place in my thirty years of life, but always all over the place in fucking cold countries, and now I really have had enough. But there's no doubt that a bit of weather is bracing if you wrap up properly, and Brugge braced me, with its fresh air and canals and twee little houses. And romanticization aside, going to an old city like that, a real time warp of a city like Venice or York as well, is such an interesting reminder of a time when people's identities were so much more wrapped up in their cities. It's a sensation that you still feel all over Europe, of course, particularly in southern France or in Italy - people really think of themselves as from a certain town, in a way that looks like patriotism or nationalism. But in a sweet old remainder like Brugge you can see how that would have worked, just a little bit. All the way from the delightful unified architecture to the network of religious sites to the guillotine.

And we went to the Basilica of the Holy Blood, which has got a bit of Jesus's blood apparently, which I found a little distressing for a couple of reasons. First, the night before we had watched The Baby of Macon (which featured Ralph Fiennes dying spectacularly, as did In Bruges, and In Bruges also featured Jesus's blood from the basilica - it's all a complex tapestry) which was about a Jesus-y type toddler who gets chopped up into little relics at the end. I had found it disturbing, more disturbing for Julia Ormond's ten minute rape than the dismembered toddler actually, and didn't like it in the least - seemed like the sort of film only a big asshole would make. But there's no doubt it disturbed me, and being invited to caress a flask of Jesus's blood by an automated voice in the Basilica while a priest smiled over it didn't help me stop being disturbed. Second, I'm in the middle of The First Crusade by Steven Runciman, which contains nasty historical details of all the people who murdered, cheated, schemed and died over religious relics, and here one was, a big one, and the automated voice was inviting us all to touch it and to give a little donation to the church accordingly . . .

The rake's lack of progress

Saw the COC's Don Giovanni whilst in Toronto and honestly, it was one of the low points of my vacation. You know the climax of that opera? When the rake is confronted by the stone statue of the man he killed, and the stone statue demands he repent, and the rake refuses, and then gets dragged off to hell? You're quite likely to know it, rather likelier to know it than the climax to most operas, both because Donny G is awfully famous and because it was featured in Amadeus, as the thing that showed Salieri how to get to Mozart.

Anyways. The COC staging was repellent. They'd obviously broken the bank on War and Peace, which my opera boyfriend told me had actual trench digging in it, so they staged the ending cheap, as a conspiracy to scare Donny G to death by the other characters. The timing was thoughtless; the character had just plowed through a massive dinner so it looked like he died of indigestion. Holy. Fuck. COC. People notice when you cut corners. You're not a businesswoman who can get away with picking up a new blazer at Winners from time to time. You're a fucking opera company staging fucking operas. If you can't show Donny G getting carried off to hell, don't show Donny G.

All that having been said, the actual singing was charming, Donny G looked like a peice of ass, and Zerlina and Masetto were delightful. I did enjoy it, after all. Obviously. It's a great opera. But the only thing I got out of it that I wouldn't have got out of listening to a CD at my opera boyfriend's swanky new condo on the Esplanade was a sense of vertigo from sitting at the fifth ring railing.

Dealing with the décalage: a Red Dragon story

Home again, or here again, anyways. I was pitching a bit of a sulk on the way back as there was nothing I was happy to be returning to after the lovely time with my family and with the great city of Toronto besides the F-word, who's mobile. But now that I'm actually here, where for the moment at least things are green (Toronto was still orange and red as well, but North Bay was in the grip of an early winter when I'd left), and my cat is happy to see me, and my coffee is made with unpasteurized milk, and people can walk places instead of taking cars without starting rumours about their financial ruin, and sex is even better than I'd remembered, and we have meals without animal flesh in them so maybe, possibly my weeklong intestinal bricks will soften somewhat, and my boss is so lovely and accomodating that when I blearily called from Paris at 8:30 in the morning moaning that I'd be late because I'd got stuck on the tarmac for three hours because of a security scare while I'd been sitting in the middle of a gaggle of Italian 14 year olds - yeeeeeurgh - he told me to not bother showing up until today.

Wise of him. I was barely functional yesterday - just happy to be back with the F-word. Didn't sleep a wink in between the time I woke up in my neice's bed at 8 in the morning on Sunday in Canada until I finally collapsed last night at 6:30 in the Belgian evening - kept myself awake all day yesterday after scraping my sorry self into the apartment around 11 in a desperate bid to cope with jet lag in one fell swoop, despite increasingly frequent and heartrending hallucinations about my neice, nephews, Luke Duke and consort still being present in the room/vicinity. The bid seems to be working so far; eyes popped open at 7:30, unbleared as two little daisies.

We'll see how things go as the day progresses, and tomorrow maybe I'll wake up in time to tell you about the seven movies I managed to watch on the Air France flights. I love that about Air France, those lovely screens in the back of the chairs. Too bad their stewardesses are such bitches. I got up to change my rag on the flight back during the constant fucking turbulence only to get a peremptory 'non!' from one of them, as the seatbelt light was on; not ready to start spitting out the cursed Gallic language once more after two glorious weeks of Anglo-Saxonia, I wordlessly flashed her my unwrapped menstrual pad in front of the aeroplane, and enjoyed watching her face turn red as staining panties while she shrugged and gestured me onwards towards the can.

Gross me out

So I haven't seen an anglo Canadian movie since the awesomeness that was FUBAR, and my mum was a bit keen on Due South, so we went to see Passchendaele last night. And my hat goes off to Paul Gross, who wrote, directed and starred in what's been billed as the most expensive domestically financed Canadian film ever. He is absolutely unique: the only man who has succeeded in exploiting the greatest mass slaughter of military-age innocents our naughty world has ever seen by turning it into a two hour wank fantasy about Paul Gross.

In general terms - holy shit, it was so bad. It trotted out every North American Great War Movie cliche, except for one (the Funny Native Guy didn't die first, or indeed at all - atta break new cinematic ground) and the story made no fucking sense, with plot holes that looked like they'd been blown through by German artillery. Honestly, that shit made Pearl Harbour's story look like a masterpiece of verisimilitude and art. There was some good gruesome bayoneting, stabbing, and slicing, a couple of rats coming out of corpses' mouths, lots of mud, some all-too-brief-relative-to-the-wank reminders of things we must never forget and never allow to happen again - some points where I was able to focus on the action long enough to stop cringing and to thank the Lord that my brothers are getting past military age, and no matter how apeshit the world goes the Man will never be able to conscript them. And the Funny Native Guy didn't die. Otherwise . . .

It's the Gross that's pissing me off though. How the hell he had the gall to make the battle of Passchendaele in particular and World War I in general into fan fiction about himself is absolutely fucking beyond me, and how the producers let him is even more so. Though maybe it will work, financially. He has some sort of built-in fan base from being the Mountie. But honestly, the movie offended me, even disgusted me, and I can't believe it wouldn't offend anybody, or rather I can't understand how it wouldn't. World War I was horrible and brutal, a nauseating example of what governments are willing to do to their own citizenry, and an infuriating example of what imperial powers were willing to do to their colonials; certainly the story of Canada during that war is tragic. It was not about Paul Gross.

Oh, there are stories to tell from all of us people who aren't yanks or limeys. And we have a prototype or an example of how such a story can be told: Winston Churchill, that big fat fucking hero, turned the citizens of Australia and New Zealand into hapless bayonet-catchers at Gallipolli and the kangaroonis managed to make a movie out of that that didn't really fucking suck. And the efforts to re-humanize all those men, colonial punching bags and imperial citizens alike, who were so utterly dehumanized by their leaders, should never stop. They should be told more than they are - has any memorable pop culture shit about it came out since Blackadder Goes Forth, whose ending made me cry like a baby?

They should be told more because of the horror and the heroism of the way the soldiers and the European civilians lived and died, and they should be told more because it's starting to seem like World War II is obsessing everybody's war movie budgets; we can convince ourselves with that one that it was Nazis bad, us good - but there are no such easy convictions with World War I. And if there are no easy convictions about World War I, and if World War II came out of World War I, what was World War II really? Seriously, if we'd like to think that the Nazis could have done what they did to Europe's Jews, gypsies, homos and commies without the collusion of its neighbours and putative enemies, we are lying to ourselves. And that is why war is evil and why we are obliged to think about it. It's always a possibility, always an option, and if the men in charge feel it's to their advantage to choose that option, they'll be happy to drag us all along - and we need to know why we shouldn't be.

But Paul Gross curing a hot nurse of morphia addiction, striking a Jesus pose, getting laid while bombs burst in air and while being the Fonz in flannel is not, for me, a step in the right direction. One thing I will say for World War II movies and such is that Band of Brothers and even Shaving Ryan's Privates and whatnot illustrated beautifully that you don't need to maudlin the hell out of stories about soldiers for them to be deeply emotionally effecting. What could be more emotionally effecting than watching a character risk death or die during the best of his youth, the best of his days, for no good fucking reason? How absurd and soppily romantic do you have to make his backstory to make your audience understand that they mustn't look away? How one-dimensional do all the other characters have to be to make us care? Not much. It's been proven. So, ugh. The whole thing pissed me off.