Do you stop being you just to be how he wants you, oh yes I do, the stew is blue as the doves coo in the kangaroo zoo next to the emu, and how do you

There's no time to write adequately about last night's religious experience of a concert as we will dash off to Bonn the moment my darling covers his shame adequately for us to venture to the train station. Instead I'll leave you with Nick Cave's 2001 cover of Pulp's 'Disco 2000'.



What I find most interesting about the cover is how it makes it mercilessly clear that Different Class had very silly lyrics, no matter how charmingly Jarvis Cocker yelped them out over catchy rhythm and melodies. I still like it though. Different Class is Dr. Seuss for teenagers, and I was a teenager when it came out, which makes 'Disco 2000' my 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand', or my 'Bang a Gong', or my 'Come On Eileen', or my 'Can't Get You out of My Head', depending on how many decades older or younger than me you are.

But I don't like it as much as His'n'Hers. I heard that when I was 12 and hence it was very Dr. Seuss-y, in the sense of teaching me lessons as basic as that one must try green eggs and ham before deciding that one does not like them. It gave me my first clue that sex was messier than in the Harlequins under the chesterfield, and that one should never decide to fuck a boy based on how much one thought he wanted one, because there was a whole world of boring, depressing adult perversion to get trapped in out there. It made me a more sensible teenager, in terms of my twat at least. And to this day 'Pink Glove' sometimes vies with 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone' in the running to be my favourite song ever. Not often though.

Also, His'n'Hers has the song 'Babies', which has the pithiest couplet in the English language - the Tristan-und-Isolde tragedy as explored through each story-telling medium through the ages, culminating in a rehashing in every television series that ever got past the pilot episode, summed up in 20 Dr. Seussy syllables:

I know you won't believe it's true
I only went with her because she looked like you

Tweedle-dee, Tweedle-dum, and Tweedle-doesn't-eat-quite-as-much-shit

Having suggested Obama was vanilla yesterday, today I have to point out that he's still the least repulsive candidate by a long stretch. This was driven home to me last night when we watched the latest Four Corners (an Australian documentary series that I'm using to acclimatize myself to the culture of the country that may be my home someday, as I don't have access to a barbeque or a visible native underclass in Brussels - the Wallonians look just like me). It was quite a crap episode and didn't help me acclimatize to Australia at all as far as I can tell, but there was one moment in it that was fucking beautiful. Let me see if I can find it on YouTube because it was just so good:



What a little shit-eating fuck. What is it with the States that the politicians have to be such shit-eaters? Why can't a right-wing candidate say 'I didn't want any more national holidays because I think they're a waste of money, no matter how marvellous Such-and-Such was, and the black vote wasn't that important in my constituency at the time so, well, there you are', and either be congratulated or criticized for that decision? Why can't that awful creature Clinton say 'okay, that Bosnia thing was kind of a lie, but it sounded good, didn't it? By the way, my husband really fucked that Balkan shit up. He fucked a lot of shit up. Really, putting that cigar in the intern was the least of his fuck-ups. I won't be such a doofus if you vote for me' instead of mis-use words like 'mis-spoke'? Both of those moves might have been mistakes, but they were mistakes that the mistakers probably consulted their advisors about making - there were reasons those 'mistakes' were made - and eating shit in public will not help deal with those reasons.

And in the context of campaigning alongside two champion shit-eaters, Obama looks least worst. His speech after people first noticed his pastor was black and pissed off was not a shit-eating speech. And if his own pastor is now willing to sabotage his candidacy mid-campaign by stoking up the scandal over being black and pissed off - especially by saying he's pretty sure Obama secretly agrees with his thoughts on being black and pissed off, which is tantamount to calling him a liar - maybe I'd drop him too. But then, if I'm anything I'm a Quaker, and we don't have inconvenient, self-aggrandizing, book-selling, collection-plate passing, and in my experience insufferable creatures like pastors. There's a time and a place for mouthing off like a know-it-all madman, and it's called the Internet.

God damn America! God save the Queen!

As a born and bred Canada who has given up her residency and lives as an Official Expatriate in a ridiculous country she strives to ignore, it's not often I get sent a massive 'fuck you' from a government I can call my own. It is inevitable, however. For besides being Canadian I am also, thanks to the fine bloodlines of my mummy, Anglo-Saxon nationalism, and the bounty of Cold Queen Bess, officially one of the Inselaffen, who are told to fuck themselves by their government with a tedious regularity.

While I have a certain love for that green and pleasant land, I have an overwhelming disgust for its political system. Perhaps it's the most bullshitty one in the world - it's right up there, anyways. I still sort believe some people involved in the American one believe their own bullshit on some level. Though less and less so, particularly this morning. I don't understand how that country can be at a point where it has a serious black presidential candidate, but where the political system apparently requires him to be so deeply vanilla that he has to disown Jeremiah Wright because of some fairly mainstream pulpit-thumping.

And how can that pulpit-thumping be so deeply villified without being addressed? Forget about whether he was right or wrong about lots of the naughty things he said - the thing is, lots of people believe the naughty things he said. Saying them got more people into his church, I don't doubt. How can such ideas just be dismissed by a democratic political system in the height of the race for top office? How did those people get to be such pussies that the ones who disagree won't even calmly explain why they disagree instead of freaking the fuck out over the idea that some brown and black people at home and abroad are seriously fucked off by what the United States did and continues to do with them?

Though it was the height of temerity to tell God to damn America. That's the problem with these weirdo religious types - always telling their omnipotent lord what to do. I don't get that at all, you know. If he's omnipotent and perfect why the fuck are your prayers coming out as imperatives? Sit back and enjoy the ride, I say, and God will no doubt damn who He damn well pleases without being ordered around by one of His lesser creations.

Anyhoo, all I meant to do this morning was complain about the bullshitty tone of this response to a petition I signed a few months ago regarding the shutdown of the UK passport office in Brussels, but now I'm just happy I'm not American. A sentiment which the UK and Canadian political institutions have depended on for decades in terms of getting us to put up with their own brands of bullshit. "My eyeballs don't count under national health coverage anymore? Oh well, at least I'm not American." Et cetera.

Oh well, fuck you too, Cold Queen Bess.

The importance of importance

Sometimes the future frightens me. I think that started in the heatwave of 2003, when all those old people died while I was in Paris. Maybe that's why I chose military strategy instead of economy for my masters there - maybe I had some paranoid expectation that one day the overheating world would be so resource-poor and violent that I would have to protect my family through assymmetrical warfare and the deft use of international alliances. It was either because of that paranoia that I chose military strategy, or because I'd already figured out that it doesn't fucking matter what you study in university in terms of getting a job so I might as well do something interesting and with fewer numbers than economy. That's pretty likely.

What is probably the most likely reason that I studied military strategy (and do bear in mind this is all speculation - I couldn't swear to my reasons for doing anything I did between 2001 and 2005) is an understanding it was important. Not just the hows of people killing each other en masse, but the whys, and the way to get them to perhaps stop it or at least ways to get them to not do it elsewhere as part of the same conflict.

This is on my mind now because Iraq has turned into even more of a hecatomb in a way that will impact all our lives, yet all the papers in Europe are front-paging instead with the Austrian who spent 24 years raping and impregnating his daughter. I'm not saying that's something that should be taken lightly, but it's not very important to know all the details about it. Not unless you like feeling slightly sick, or unless you want tips on how to keep your own enslaved, abused, ever-growing incestuous family captive in your fucking basement. And honestly, looking at the headlines - "Images Emerge from the 'House of Horror'" and whatnot - it looks as though that's the way the coverage is leaning. A how-to guide in extreme and violent perversion. Fuck, we live in degenerate times.

It's something we talk about at work once in awhile, you know - relief we don't have to titillate our readers, or struggle like jackals in a pack to wring interviews out of impossibly emotionally vulnerable or pathetically evil people. And our industry is important in that it effects a bunch of people at once in ways the people effected don't understand. And our job in terms of reporting on the industry is a little more key to the operations of that industry than, say, the role of the mainstream media is in terms of rescuing a woman who'd been imprisoned by her father 24 years ago by reporting on it in obsessive detail after she'd been rescued. No investigation - just scandal written up through police reports and after-the-fact interviews . . . providing one more ordeal, the ordeal of scrutiny, that could finish off any victims who had survived.

My head is full of thinking about the role of the media at the moment, as you might be able to tell, and also of the importance of importance in the media. I watched the Frontline special about it last week when I was in my hayfever half-coma and I do reccommend it, if you have four hours of loose ends at your fingertips.

Sprung

Springtime has come to the willies of the men. This weekend was hot and sunny and lovely; all of Brussels hit the patio with an enthusiasm that rivals Canadians' on the first +0° sunny day of the season. And all the men are looking at all the women with hot, sultry eyes after a winter of resembling dead fish. I don't know if it's because of people wearing fewer clothes, or that they don't have to keep the animal part of their brain busy by bracing their poor bodies against the cold, or if it's just that the spring has made people more happy, the women walking around with little smiles instead of annoyed scowls, the men finally able to lounge outside on chairs at the right angle to appreciate the ledgey jut of tits in a t-shirt walking by.

And me, I haven't been able to stop thinking about riding face for more than ten minutes at a time since last Thursday. The thought pops into my head with a still-shocking regularity: when the more-appealing men are lounging back on their patio chairs, smiling up glowing-eyed at my tits and sandal-wearing swagger, I am only three steps away from stepping over and straddling their heads. Sometimes I wonder if I'd be able to keep a lid on myself if I wasn't in a satisfying relationship. Actually, I don't wonder, I know I wouldn't.

So it's a chicken-and-egg question at the moment: am I loving the horniness of Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! so much right now because I'm so horny, or am I so horny because I'm loving the horniness? I think the most rampant sexuality I've ever seen was from people who have just given up on the drugs, and since Nick Cave stopped with the heroin it's been horniness after horniness from him. I like it; I like it as much as his hallucinatory madness from the eighties and nineties - still just hallucinatory enough now to be poetry but - well - hell. Next time I hear somebody ask about what might have happened to Coleridge as a poet if he wasn't rotten with opium, I may have an answer. Though I suppose Coleridge couldn't have got so deep into the horniness, professional-writer-wise, seeing as that was an era when only prostitutes liked sex.

Anyways, it's really good. 'Midnight Man' has been stuck in my head ever since I crowbarred Amy Winehouse out by stealing her CD and then not liking it much, and I love having it stuck in my head. It's like my head is an iPod. And we're going to a Bad Seeds concert on Thursday before our trip to Bonn! Yay!