I think South Park might be dead. I watched 'Tonsil Trouble' and was shocked that the only funny bit was the 'Are you sure?' - 'Yes - I'm HIV positive' exchange, which was then played upon until it wasn't even stupid anymore - just a time-eater. . . I don't know what the writing relationship is between Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but from the things I've seen that were written by Trey Parker versus things that were written by both, I'm guessing it has something to do with Matt Stone saying 'okay, that was funny. Now do something else.' The F-word used half an hour of his valuable vacation time to watch the next episode, which was about Britney Spears, and said it was even worse. Sigh. Pretty topical there, guys. BTW, saw Cannibal! The Musical, their student film, awhile ago. Exactly two laughs in 90 or so minutes, but very good ones.
Saw the rest of Rebecca and it was still pretty good, but not as good as I'd hoped. Leaving Wife No° 2 at Manderley during the visit to Doctor Baker so you could end on a note of suspense and a relieved kiss, instead of closing with the much bleaker car ride, which Laurence Olivier would have done SO WELL - ah shit, it's a pity, is all. Worse, the fucking Hays Code fucked it up - if her death was an accident, half of the emotional interest in the leads goes away. The Hays Code - what a thing. I've always believed that the second recording on every new audiovisual technology is either the inventor saying a naughty word or getting in a visual of someone naked - just one of those things we do, like using a dictionary to look up naughty words as soon as we learn to read. And the Hays Code thrashed back against that instinct so violently for so many years, in the process ruining countless excellent movies. And people still went to see them. How funny! There was simply nothing else.
venerdì, marzo 28, 2008
mercoledì, marzo 26, 2008
The Red Dragon doesn't like extended apologies
Last night an American asked me what part of the States I was from, and he was so embarrassed when I said I was from Canada. It was the embarrassment that made it hard to take. Otherwise, I would have forgotten all about it as I was very high; and let's face it, people from my part of Canada talk like they're from Fargo and Fargo is an American movie, so it's confusing, I understand. But because the poor guy couldn't let it go and was so profuse in his apologies, it rankled a bit as it gave me time to ask myself 'hey, yeah. What part of the States are you from? What kind of a fucking question is that? Not even French people so far up their own assholes that they'll ask what part of France francophones are from' before the whole episode could disappear into billowing clouds of too-strong marijuana. But this guy had just spent the last several months in the Congo and Uganda trying to bring peace to the region so I'll get over it, I'm sure.
Moving on. Got home from getting reefer last night and started watching Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, with Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson being awesome, and Laurence Olivier being stinking gorgeous. When he came out of his dressing room in his housecoat, I nearly fell out of my clothes. Had only watched about half the movie when the F-word arrived home - painful! Because didn't want to ruin it for him. It remains to be seen how it deal with the sensitive bits towards the end but so far this is my favourite Alfred Hitchcock movie. However, I haven't seen all that many, and my favourite had previously been Topaz (if I imagine it with the 'aeroplane' ending) which apparently I am 100% alone in enjoying so much, and certainly in preferring to Saboteur, Rear Window, Vertigo, and The Birds, all of which I thought were at least a little lame.
And now my boss has also lent me My Cousin Rachel and Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier, and I'm so happy. Okay - Rebecca wasn't the best book in the world - isn't even the best Jane Eyre spinoff in the world (Wide Sargasso Sea is better). But it was a fantastic book to just sink your teeth into and rip through - a real roast beef of a novel, filling and satisfying, so I can't wait for the next ones. Between those two books and the Bruce Chatwins I'm looking forward to all the miserable waiting around in aeroports next Friday - if they make it that long - I have a feeling at least one or two will have to be read before then.
Moving on. Got home from getting reefer last night and started watching Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, with Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson being awesome, and Laurence Olivier being stinking gorgeous. When he came out of his dressing room in his housecoat, I nearly fell out of my clothes. Had only watched about half the movie when the F-word arrived home - painful! Because didn't want to ruin it for him. It remains to be seen how it deal with the sensitive bits towards the end but so far this is my favourite Alfred Hitchcock movie. However, I haven't seen all that many, and my favourite had previously been Topaz (if I imagine it with the 'aeroplane' ending) which apparently I am 100% alone in enjoying so much, and certainly in preferring to Saboteur, Rear Window, Vertigo, and The Birds, all of which I thought were at least a little lame.
And now my boss has also lent me My Cousin Rachel and Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier, and I'm so happy. Okay - Rebecca wasn't the best book in the world - isn't even the best Jane Eyre spinoff in the world (Wide Sargasso Sea is better). But it was a fantastic book to just sink your teeth into and rip through - a real roast beef of a novel, filling and satisfying, so I can't wait for the next ones. Between those two books and the Bruce Chatwins I'm looking forward to all the miserable waiting around in aeroports next Friday - if they make it that long - I have a feeling at least one or two will have to be read before then.
martedì, marzo 25, 2008
I'm glad I came but just the same I must be going
Now that the last bit of retardation at work has been sorted out, I'm looking forward with baited breath to my trip to Lisbon. Only two of the five days I'm there will demand actual work and that work will mostly involve getting companionably drunk. I enjoyed being in Portugal so much last time - the sun, the frozen drinks, the delicious, delicious, delicious food . . .
I need a thing like this to help me relax; I've hit a point of tension. Luckily the F-word understands, as do several other people, but not everyone does - been getting pissy emails about why I don't call, why I don't email, and they make me want to hit the roof as they're always from people whose lifestyles have less stress built into them. Do they think I like being busy? Do they think I wouldn't rather be being a better friend, and then sitting in a park in a much warmer, sunnier country, smoking a spliff and reading the Bruce Chatwin novel that I've been slowly stumbling through every night before falling into a deep, deep slumber, punctuated only by dreams of bizarre sexual combinations, positions, and locations?
Last night, for example, I dreamt I was sitting in a park watching television with about 200 other people, mostly exchange students at the school I was attending. I thought there was something wrong with the hedges behind the set, so I got up, checked, and saw two Russian couples, one boy-on-boy, the other boy-on-boyish-but-female-little-person.
"Can you please go fuck over there?" I said, pointing to the forest behind where the 200 people were sitting to watch the television. "When you do it behind the TV it's distracting. Also, if you face it from the forest, that way you can fuck and watch TV."
"Liz Phair!" shouted the little person.
"I wanted to like her, but I didn't," I said glumly.
"That's what I like about Canadians," said the man who had been fucking the little person. "They always say what they mean."
"I wish," I said even more glumly. And everybody laughed.
It's times like this I miss my analyst.
I need a thing like this to help me relax; I've hit a point of tension. Luckily the F-word understands, as do several other people, but not everyone does - been getting pissy emails about why I don't call, why I don't email, and they make me want to hit the roof as they're always from people whose lifestyles have less stress built into them. Do they think I like being busy? Do they think I wouldn't rather be being a better friend, and then sitting in a park in a much warmer, sunnier country, smoking a spliff and reading the Bruce Chatwin novel that I've been slowly stumbling through every night before falling into a deep, deep slumber, punctuated only by dreams of bizarre sexual combinations, positions, and locations?
Last night, for example, I dreamt I was sitting in a park watching television with about 200 other people, mostly exchange students at the school I was attending. I thought there was something wrong with the hedges behind the set, so I got up, checked, and saw two Russian couples, one boy-on-boy, the other boy-on-boyish-but-female-little-person.
"Can you please go fuck over there?" I said, pointing to the forest behind where the 200 people were sitting to watch the television. "When you do it behind the TV it's distracting. Also, if you face it from the forest, that way you can fuck and watch TV."
"Liz Phair!" shouted the little person.
"I wanted to like her, but I didn't," I said glumly.
"That's what I like about Canadians," said the man who had been fucking the little person. "They always say what they mean."
"I wish," I said even more glumly. And everybody laughed.
It's times like this I miss my analyst.
lunedì, marzo 24, 2008
Spoiling Rebecca
Woke up this morning at 6:30 and thought, 'good lord, how bright it is. The days are certainly getting longer. I love springtime. Springtime . . . springtime . . . springtime . . .' Got up to bask in my good mood and saw this:
I hate Belgium. I'm starting to not be sure I can stay here long enough to leave with all the tonnes of money I was planning on leaving with. At least the children and the F-word aren't working this week so they can enjoy the white fluffy bullshit. I know it's beautiful but you know what? It was a lot more beautiful in Canada and it was still one of the reasons I left.
Well, moving on with my fucking existence. This weekend I read Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, which my boss had lent me. I like her - she has good taste and our department functions better than most at our corporation, which I'm finding out to my unending stress these days. Anyhoo, I read Rebecca and now I'm going to spoil it. If you haven't read it, I suggest you stop reading this and do, because it's definitely worth reading for the suspense. Okay, you've been warned.
I've heard Rebecca was partly inspired by what could measurably be my favourite novel, Jane Eyre. I think 'partly' is putting it mildly. I can see Daphne Du Maurier sitting at her nice little pigeon-holey writing desk, like the one in Mandersley's morning room, asking herself a four part question: "What would Jane Eyre be like if
a) it was moved into the early 20th century
b) Mrs. Rochester was a slutty bitch instead of a slutty lunatic
c) Mr. Rochester was post-Victorian instead of pre-Victorian
d) Jane Eyre was spineless to the point of semi-idiocy?"
And the answer is essentially Rebecca. That's not to knock Rebecca - I liked it. But it is to testify a bit to the greatness of Jane Eyre - that it's rich enough to bear a spin-off like Rebecca, and also like the Wide Sargasso Sea (Mrs. Rochester's post-feminist backstory, a cracking good read as well).
I liked the pacing of Rebecca a lot - there were moments of real tension, real fear; certainly a different style from Jane Eyre, whose heroine-narrator was too strong to communicate panic to us. The nameless narrator of Rebecca was fluttery, ghostly by comparison, and finally, after she finds out about the murder of her predecessor, far less steely in her morality. Nothing bad can happen to Jane Eyre in the end, we think, she's too strong and conscious of her own mind - she knows how to beat back the pre-marital advances of her horndog fiancé without alienating him, and she has the wherewithal to walk away from love and happiness when it will pose to much of a challenge to her fundamental self.
Not Rebecca's narrator. The difference between them is that Jane Eyre breaks and tames her loving, nasty Bluebeard, while Rebecca's narrator is only grateful to be loved by him. So there is much more vulnerability to her, and we read in the anticipation that something fucking horrible is going to happen any second. Especially as the character of Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, and the equivalent of Jane Eyre's Mrs. Fairfax, is so venomous and great.
Well, moving on with my fucking existence. This weekend I read Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, which my boss had lent me. I like her - she has good taste and our department functions better than most at our corporation, which I'm finding out to my unending stress these days. Anyhoo, I read Rebecca and now I'm going to spoil it. If you haven't read it, I suggest you stop reading this and do, because it's definitely worth reading for the suspense. Okay, you've been warned.
I've heard Rebecca was partly inspired by what could measurably be my favourite novel, Jane Eyre. I think 'partly' is putting it mildly. I can see Daphne Du Maurier sitting at her nice little pigeon-holey writing desk, like the one in Mandersley's morning room, asking herself a four part question: "What would Jane Eyre be like if
a) it was moved into the early 20th century
b) Mrs. Rochester was a slutty bitch instead of a slutty lunatic
c) Mr. Rochester was post-Victorian instead of pre-Victorian
d) Jane Eyre was spineless to the point of semi-idiocy?"
And the answer is essentially Rebecca. That's not to knock Rebecca - I liked it. But it is to testify a bit to the greatness of Jane Eyre - that it's rich enough to bear a spin-off like Rebecca, and also like the Wide Sargasso Sea (Mrs. Rochester's post-feminist backstory, a cracking good read as well).
I liked the pacing of Rebecca a lot - there were moments of real tension, real fear; certainly a different style from Jane Eyre, whose heroine-narrator was too strong to communicate panic to us. The nameless narrator of Rebecca was fluttery, ghostly by comparison, and finally, after she finds out about the murder of her predecessor, far less steely in her morality. Nothing bad can happen to Jane Eyre in the end, we think, she's too strong and conscious of her own mind - she knows how to beat back the pre-marital advances of her horndog fiancé without alienating him, and she has the wherewithal to walk away from love and happiness when it will pose to much of a challenge to her fundamental self.
Not Rebecca's narrator. The difference between them is that Jane Eyre breaks and tames her loving, nasty Bluebeard, while Rebecca's narrator is only grateful to be loved by him. So there is much more vulnerability to her, and we read in the anticipation that something fucking horrible is going to happen any second. Especially as the character of Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, and the equivalent of Jane Eyre's Mrs. Fairfax, is so venomous and great.
The first born is dead
Feeling Gothic at an almost 14-year-old clip for two reasons: crippling (though short-term)stupidity at work, and the fact that there was a hard nasty frost last night, nipping springtime in the bud. Thank fuck I don't have to go to work today. In the meantime, I'm gonna meme it. I know it's kinda disturbingly referential to ideas I hate about 'cultural evolution', but the Hipster Pit made me do it.
1. I can't believe I've never barbequed stuff.
2. Every time I think about the way I treated everybody during my three-year lost weekend I still cringe. Maybe there's a way to combine hedonism and kindness but I did not find it.
3. I wish I'd thanked Samia for being my personal apparition of the Virgin when I had the chance.
Samia was the woman who lived next to me several years ago, when I was young and tender, and when I had this shitty little mouse-ridden apartment in a shitty building in the second-shittiest neighborhood of the 20th arrondisement of Paris. My flat in its entirety was about 14 square metres. To contextualize that for the imperialists out there, that's the size of a standard entrance hall in a suburban North American home. My bed folded out from a mock chest of drawers. There were only two good things about that shitty place: knowing that there were hundreds of thousands of people in the Île-de-France who were living in shittier places, and the credibility that came with such a lousy address when I was flirting with bobos - 'you living in a neighborhood like that, it's not Betty from Manhattan letting Daddy pay for her flat in the Kart-year Latay. Ha ha ha ha.' Yes. Now give me your marijuana, you smug post-colonial shitheel. God, I hate the French sometimes.
So besides me and Samia, who I think was Algerian, everybody in the building was French blue-collar-to-unemployed, and they all thought Samia was crazy. Not sure why. She was pretty loud and when I was home I could hear her bellowing on the phone in a couple of different languages. She was a cleaner for the SNCF so she worked irregular hours and was liable to phone-bellowing in the wee hours, but I was hardly ever around, so she was fine as far as I was concerned.
One night that I was around, the building next to ours caught fire and we all had to evacuate because there was the risk of explosion and because there were flames shooting out the windows three feet away. While we were waiting for the firemen to say it was safe to return, I turned down an offer to go for a drink with the fat bipolar alcoholic who lived downstairs, who I suspected of beating his wife, and went for a drink with the girl who lived across the hall from him instead.
After that the fat bipolar alcoholic was my sworn enemy, which I found out about a week later when I left the front door of the building unlocked while picking something up from my flat. I heard him quietly cursing, so I called down from my landing that I was on my way right back out. He answered with a torrent of vile abuse - I can't remember what he said but nobody had ever spoken to me like that before, and certainly not at that volume. It was absolutely paralyzing. I stood there on the landing, frozen, trembling, not knowing what to do.
Samia suddenly opened her door and said to me calmly: 'you know he's crazy, right?' I trembled and nodded. 'Are you on your way out?' I continued to tremble and nod, and Samia said, 'I'm going to stand right here. I'm going to stand right here and watch and listen. Don't be afraid. Nothing's going to happen. I'll be right here.' I trembled and nodded some more, and then left, looking back up the stairs halfway down, to see her standing on the landing, saying 'I'm right here.'
So I continued on my way and although the fat bipolar alcoholic remained abusive after that, I didn't pay much attention. And since then generally speaking I've been rather tougher, which is all to the good, considering that I rounded off the 20th arrondisement experience by moving in with Bluebeard, in an equally shitty part of the 18th no less. But for the rest of the time I lived there I would snap at people if they called Samia crazy, and we stopped to talk more, and I gave her a big bunch of flowers that one of the men I really wished I could fuck that year had given me and that made me sneeze.
But in my fishbelly emotional retardation I never found a way to tell her how grateful I was at the way her calm, kind words had stopped me from pissing myself. I hope she knew. I hope she's a millionaire now. I hope only good things happened to her from that point on.
4. I've never felt so out of place as when I was at that last conference and realized that I was in a hall, and an industry, full of goddamn parasitic three-peice suited gangsters. It actually made me miss television execs for a moment.
5. Reading about Heather Mills and the Sarkozyland dramas is my guiltiest pleasure.
6. I hope my parents knows how grateful I am for everything.
7. In my darkest hours, I secretly blame no-account men for my dysfunction.
8. Literacy changed my life forever. As did the first time I clapped eyes on the F-word.
And as part of my personal quest to have the idea of 'memes' permanently abandon the 'memepool' or 'memeplex' or whatever bullshit bullshit social/cultural evolutionists are calling the collective consciousness now, I'm passing this on to no-one. Take that, Richard Dawkins.
1. I can't believe I've never barbequed stuff.
2. Every time I think about the way I treated everybody during my three-year lost weekend I still cringe. Maybe there's a way to combine hedonism and kindness but I did not find it.
3. I wish I'd thanked Samia for being my personal apparition of the Virgin when I had the chance.
Samia was the woman who lived next to me several years ago, when I was young and tender, and when I had this shitty little mouse-ridden apartment in a shitty building in the second-shittiest neighborhood of the 20th arrondisement of Paris. My flat in its entirety was about 14 square metres. To contextualize that for the imperialists out there, that's the size of a standard entrance hall in a suburban North American home. My bed folded out from a mock chest of drawers. There were only two good things about that shitty place: knowing that there were hundreds of thousands of people in the Île-de-France who were living in shittier places, and the credibility that came with such a lousy address when I was flirting with bobos - 'you living in a neighborhood like that, it's not Betty from Manhattan letting Daddy pay for her flat in the Kart-year Latay. Ha ha ha ha.' Yes. Now give me your marijuana, you smug post-colonial shitheel. God, I hate the French sometimes.
So besides me and Samia, who I think was Algerian, everybody in the building was French blue-collar-to-unemployed, and they all thought Samia was crazy. Not sure why. She was pretty loud and when I was home I could hear her bellowing on the phone in a couple of different languages. She was a cleaner for the SNCF so she worked irregular hours and was liable to phone-bellowing in the wee hours, but I was hardly ever around, so she was fine as far as I was concerned.
One night that I was around, the building next to ours caught fire and we all had to evacuate because there was the risk of explosion and because there were flames shooting out the windows three feet away. While we were waiting for the firemen to say it was safe to return, I turned down an offer to go for a drink with the fat bipolar alcoholic who lived downstairs, who I suspected of beating his wife, and went for a drink with the girl who lived across the hall from him instead.
After that the fat bipolar alcoholic was my sworn enemy, which I found out about a week later when I left the front door of the building unlocked while picking something up from my flat. I heard him quietly cursing, so I called down from my landing that I was on my way right back out. He answered with a torrent of vile abuse - I can't remember what he said but nobody had ever spoken to me like that before, and certainly not at that volume. It was absolutely paralyzing. I stood there on the landing, frozen, trembling, not knowing what to do.
Samia suddenly opened her door and said to me calmly: 'you know he's crazy, right?' I trembled and nodded. 'Are you on your way out?' I continued to tremble and nod, and Samia said, 'I'm going to stand right here. I'm going to stand right here and watch and listen. Don't be afraid. Nothing's going to happen. I'll be right here.' I trembled and nodded some more, and then left, looking back up the stairs halfway down, to see her standing on the landing, saying 'I'm right here.'
So I continued on my way and although the fat bipolar alcoholic remained abusive after that, I didn't pay much attention. And since then generally speaking I've been rather tougher, which is all to the good, considering that I rounded off the 20th arrondisement experience by moving in with Bluebeard, in an equally shitty part of the 18th no less. But for the rest of the time I lived there I would snap at people if they called Samia crazy, and we stopped to talk more, and I gave her a big bunch of flowers that one of the men I really wished I could fuck that year had given me and that made me sneeze.
But in my fishbelly emotional retardation I never found a way to tell her how grateful I was at the way her calm, kind words had stopped me from pissing myself. I hope she knew. I hope she's a millionaire now. I hope only good things happened to her from that point on.
4. I've never felt so out of place as when I was at that last conference and realized that I was in a hall, and an industry, full of goddamn parasitic three-peice suited gangsters. It actually made me miss television execs for a moment.
5. Reading about Heather Mills and the Sarkozyland dramas is my guiltiest pleasure.
6. I hope my parents knows how grateful I am for everything.
7. In my darkest hours, I secretly blame no-account men for my dysfunction.
8. Literacy changed my life forever. As did the first time I clapped eyes on the F-word.
And as part of my personal quest to have the idea of 'memes' permanently abandon the 'memepool' or 'memeplex' or whatever bullshit bullshit social/cultural evolutionists are calling the collective consciousness now, I'm passing this on to no-one. Take that, Richard Dawkins.
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