Who will rid me of this turbulent wankery?

I don't like the Guardian website. Not just because of the commas; because it's crap, and more opinion than news. Opinions, for that matter, about things that don't belong in serious newspapers and can be settled in two words, like about Heath Ledger being dead now (he is) and Martin Amis being a dick (he is).

It's the rise of click-journalism at a tired old franchise, fitting in beautifully with the New-Labourish concept of reward-based administration. No point writing good articles, not if you can just write poorly edited pieces of shit with celebrities' names in them, not if you can measure the success of your articles by the number of people who open them. This sort of thing illustrates how clueless people are about internet marketing. You try to sell advertisers on your site based on the number of people who visit it, but any company that advertises on the sort of 'oooo-er I can't believe it' story which is relentlessly recycled for each celebrity death, that I open because I can't fucking believe the Guardian has got so very crap, is not a company I will want to deal with in the future.

Of course, based on who's advertising on the Guardian site, it doesn't seem to have been working. A tourism trade fair in Madrid and, uhm, a bunch of in-house products, from today's brief survey. Here's a link to their online advertising policies. Containing, of course, a HUGE photo of the lady in charge of online advertising, before giving some insubstantive, badly phrased information about advertising online. 'Zeitgeist'? Holy fuck. Heath Ledger being dead, Martin Amis being a twat, and the new James Bond title being crap counts as the 'spirit of the age'? Fuck you, buddy. You can't talk about my age that way. 'Spirit of the wank' is more like it.

All that notwithstanding, the sports section is pretty good.

What a concept

I have got wound up about Benjamin Biolay many, many, many times, and one of those times took a moment to write about how he's not like Serge Gainsbourg despite everybody saying he is. It shouldn't have taken a whole moment - should have only taken half a moment to describe the difference, which is that Benjamin Biolay's music has zero fucking sense of humour/absurdity in comparison. Let's compare concepts one more time:

L'homme au tête de chou
Concept: Having a relationship with a hairdresser who you murder in a fit of jealous rage in the snow, being institutionalized, your head turning into a cabbage and the murdered hairdresser coming back as a rabbit, who eats it
vs
Trash yé yé
Concept: The breakdown of a shitty relationship; culminates in a murder on the kitchen floor.

Hmm. Let's try another.

L'histoire de Melody Nelson
Concept: Hitting a young girl with your Rolls, deflowering her, and then mourning her death in a plane crash to the degree you found your own little cargo cult
vs.
Rose Kennedy
Concept: Rose Kennedy

Well. If I was Benjamin Biolay I'd have a hard time getting in touch with my absurd side too. French pop is all laboured irony and farting accordions these days, so he might be concerned that even a touch of humour or absurdity is going to get him lumped in with Bénabar-grade crap. Or he might be concerned about being compared even more inescapably to Serge Gainsbourg. I don't know. Maybe he just has no sense of humour or absurdity at all. A shocking number of people in France don't. They can be so literal-minded. I think that's because it's too easy to pun in French. You can trip over six or seven puns just walking to the office there so you don't have to get too absurd to play with your language.

Anyways, I hadn't given it much thought until I stumbled across this video and realized I could not imagine Benjamin Biolay ever, ever, ever doing something similar to what Serge Gainsbourg is doing here. Ever. Maybe that's a failure of my imagination but frankly it makes me think less of Benjamin Biolay.

(This video is safe for work but the audio is not, unless you work somewhere weird.)




Of course, when they broke the mold when they made Screamin' Jay Hawkins and he's dead now, so there wouldn't be anyone to do it with even if he wanted to.

I love you baby, but face it, she's shit

Madonna is an atrocious beast. That's on my mind today because in Ghent on Sunday they were piping her 'music' into the abandoned pedestrian precinct/shopping area, I think in the same spirit as the British pipe classical music into yobbo-congregation points. You've heard about this? It's done in other countries too. The theory runs that classical music grates on the nerves of juvenile delinquents so it will drive them away from public places like train stations, parking lots, street corners, etc., where they might be 'anti-social' - which in England, at least, doesn't mean shy; it means being English and drunk.

Maybe now is the time to voice some of my disgust with the state of the England - haven't been to Scotland or Wales in ages so I'll restrict myself to shooting my mouth off about England. We had a really smashing vacation there with smashing people who I'm very fond of - English people are great, funny, hospitable, helpful, generous, all the rest of it. But I can't figure out how they can tolerate the shithole they live in and it makes me impatient. There is a really unhelpful paternalism, bordering on soft totalitarianism, in their government's relationship with them. The endless 1984-ish CCTV cameras are only one symptom of it, or we can say part of a broader and defining trend.

And that is that the government, whichever party is in, consistently relinquishes control of national assets that are obviously best run by a proper 'paternalistic' government, competition in those sectors being problematic or impossible (like the rail service, civic public transport, and its own fucking monetary policy), while struggling more and more to control the behaviour of private individuals through the ubiquitous CCTV cameras, Asbos, extended chargeless detentions. . . The Asbos are especially funny in a soft totalitarian sort of way. The most hilarious thing about them is that they were tightened up in 2005 - the same year the UK government allowed 24 hour drinking.

I can't see how that pattern - a consistent, cross party trend of letting go of the control of public concerns it should be controlling, struggling for control of things that private individuals should be controlling themselves - can come off as anything except a nasty and apparently corrupt soft totalitarianism. And I can't figure out why the British people have allowed this to roll out over the last 20 years. Belgians put up with remarkable amounts of undemocratic shit from their adminstrations but just try throwing that combination of lousy services and incarceration-happy government at them; they'd bring this place to a standstill in 15 minutes.

Anyways, Madonna. Though she's an atrocious beast and though her music being piped onto the deserted Ghent pedestrian precinct hurt my ears, I think it was a good choice. Because in every single one of her songs, from the slowest to the danciest, her singing always, ALWAYS sounds like she's scolding the shit out of you and that the best thing to do to get her to stop would be to get far away from her. Such an awful, scoldy voice. I just don't get it, you know. You'd have to be a raving, self-loathing masochist to like that crap. 'Justify my love - now - NOW, you fucking piece of shit! God that's good' And so on.

The Bedside Book of Bitching

Read a very pretty book for review this weekend - The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany. Full of lovely Audubon-y type pictures and texts from a great splayed range of sources, from Ovid to Bruce Goddamn Chatwin. Man, do I love Bruce Chatwin. Judging by the sheer quantity of his books filling up my shelves I suppose I must like Paul Theroux better, but Bruce Chatwin - anyways, that's a blogasm for another day.

It was put together by a Canadian author called Graeme Gibson, who I've never read. As a rule I liked CanLit but I stopped reading it when I left for Europe the first time, back in 2001. I'd got so sick of Douglas Copeland and everything Margaret Atwood wrote that wasn't short stories (her short stories are very good) that I wasn't willing to extend myself to find or order new Canadian books. Stupid of me. Like rejecting BritLit just because Martin Amis is a fucking ponce. I'll dip my toes back in soon but I don't think it will be with Graeme Gibson's books. Apparently in 1996 he decided he wouldn't be writing any more novels and that makes me suspect he wasn't getting much out of the form.

And I don't like his sentences in the introductions he wrote for each section of the birdie book. He has this one pair of sentences - the violent dislike I have for it is so far up my ass that obviously this won't be anywhere near the real review, but I dislike it violently nonetheless, especially as it concludes a section and is therefore unignorable:

"It's we who have made the cages. It's we who must open them."

First of all, I'm nearly certain you need the object pronoun there and the singular form of 'have' - that is, 'It is us who has made the cages' - because the plural 'we' isn't the subject of the second clause: the singular first clause, 'it is us', is the subject of the second clause. I think that's the underlying, emotional reason for my dislike. I taught English for three and a half years and when Anglophones use sloppy grammar to create a needlessly complex construction it gets my fucking goat. There are millions of people struggling to learn the ridiculous intricacies of our ridiculous language, often for pressing economic reasons. Why fuck it up further in confusing ways? Grammar is a series of signposts and landmarks to the people learning the language so I react a little bit violently when our intelligentsia doesn't play by its rules.

In any case, why not just write "We made the cages. We must open them."?

Anyways, none of this nonsense will be in the real review, which will be glowing. It's really a very good book. Good selections - you run across some old friends and meet a bunch of new ones that you decide you'll have to meet up with in the future. I haven't looked at Casanova before but I will now, after his funny story about the loose woman and the parrot. I recommend it.

Sexy sedition

So we did indeed go to the Marriage of Figaro yesterday and Paolo Szot, as predicted, was sex on legs to a degree that's not fit even for pseudonymous print. I enjoyed it very much, but the Ghent opera house has horrible sightlines from the nosebleed section - really shitty compared to the Star Wars-y new Toronto opera house or the State Opera in Berlin, the last two places I sat in the nosebleed section. But different times, different priorities. The Ghent house seemed much older, and viciously, blowsily ornate in a way people in Toronto might recognize from the Winter Theatre, or the Elgin, or whatever the fuck corporate name they've slapped it with following its umpteenth buyout. I think it was the Kodak Theatre, or the Minolta, or some other C-grade photocopier company.

That was something that bothered me about Toronto - everything was getting slapped with a corporate name. The new opera house is the Four Seasons, I believe; the Skydome is now labelled the Rogers Centre after the evil incompetent media company that once pushed me into screaming at some poor fuck working for minimum wage at one of their call centres, and then all the big performance theatres are corporately renamed too. I know such institutions in Canada really need the money now that they can't take funding from cigarette companies anymore and our goddamn cheap government doesn't mind the idea of us satisfying our cultural needs by watching American network television. But that doesn't make me feel any fucking better. Canadians are struggling along with the same retardedly high tax burdens as most of Europe, and most of Europe doesn't have to fucking rename its cultural landmarks after the corporations that keep them afloat as an advertising tool. AND most of Europe has a public health service that functions a hell of a lot better. Anyhow. I live here now so I should get over it.

So, the Ghent opera house has horrible sightlines. The F-word got frustrated and left for the second half, which is too bad because the second half is where it gets all horny and one thinks of what a naughty little perv Mozart must have been. Also too bad because, like always, the second half is much emptier, as people realize they've over-estimated how much they like opera and can't face the last 1.5 hours.

The Marriage of Figaro is a very sexy and naughty opera, and the naughtiness has a real political tone, of course; it famously raised some eyebrows by mocking an aristocrat by showing the comparative cleverness of his servants - there's something deliciously seditious about the whole thing still. But what I like the most about it is the distribution of lead voices - baritone (and it's Paolo Szot, a hot Brazilian baritone who can act at that), bass baritone, some sopranos - no fucking tenors, who usually don't do anything good for me. Even Cherubino, the young horndog, is a cross-dressing mezzo. She (in this case, Angelique Noldus) really stood out for me, as did the Countess, Maria Bengtsson - a lovely, rich, velvety voice. Ainhoa Garmendia as Susanna was vocally unobjectionable and a better actress than the other two, though I only got to appreciate that in the second half when part of the audience had fucked off. Figaro, Tuomas Pursio, was frigging awesome. I must add him to my stalk list as he's worth weekend tripping to another city for.