The bad news: I'm earning my salary at this fucker.
The good news: I'm earning a salary.
The best news: 14 hours to go.
giovedì, settembre 18, 2008
Seperate but equally fucking annoying
What little I can say about Marseille after 14 hours - the cab drivers are nice, the five star hotels don't offer enough freebies, the internet doesn't work well enough for me to check my Outlook (which is sweet), it does get cloudy from time to time, the sea is pretty, and Finns seem to find it a relief.
What I can say about first class travel in the TGV between Brussels and Marseille - it's less about sensual luxury and more about who's not in the car with you. And I don't approve. Rich people are just as annoying as economy class people. They have smelly little lapdogs and bitter marital strife that can be audibly explored over five fucking hours - just because they're not yelling doesn't mean it doesn't bug me, anyways I can deal with volume via my MP3 player. The rich older people smell like diapers. The rich younger people smell like perfume, which makes me sneeze. So come on. If I pay for first class travel, I want the neck massages, the dancing girls, the in-car wading pool, new releases, drink and song. I don't just want to be segregated from annoying working and middle class people with equally annoying middle and upper class people.
Same with this five star I'm in. What the fuck the point of this place is besides segregation is beyond me. At least last year in Lisbon there were some touches of real luxury and in the Scandinavian five stars they serve caviar. Not to mention, even in a Scandinavian three star they'll have a sort of neat-o shower bidet so you can bathe your bits after every evacuation. Here there's not even a fucking bidet. Conference rate Euro 220 for a double, normal rate more than a hundred north of that, and not even a fucking bidet. What a crock of shit. Let's admit the only point of this place is that the proles are all deferential and in uniform.
Got in late last night and watched BBC World make an arse of itself over Ukraine and Russia and the global credit crisis. Crisis my ass. Ever read Gone With the Wind? I recommend it. Seriously. Weirdo book but moments of clarity amid all the slavery apologias and nostalgia for a society worse than fascist. At one point Rhett Butler tells a whiny Scarlett O'Hara that there's slow money to be made in the building of an empire, and fast money to be made in taking it apart. All we're seeing now is fast money. Lloyds and HBOS merging in an absolutely uncompetitive and unethical way with the encouragement of the British government, whose job should be to prevent this sort of rubbish - their customers will pay for that and the executive class will walk away singin'. Vomit.
Now I'm going for a calming walk along the seaside.
What I can say about first class travel in the TGV between Brussels and Marseille - it's less about sensual luxury and more about who's not in the car with you. And I don't approve. Rich people are just as annoying as economy class people. They have smelly little lapdogs and bitter marital strife that can be audibly explored over five fucking hours - just because they're not yelling doesn't mean it doesn't bug me, anyways I can deal with volume via my MP3 player. The rich older people smell like diapers. The rich younger people smell like perfume, which makes me sneeze. So come on. If I pay for first class travel, I want the neck massages, the dancing girls, the in-car wading pool, new releases, drink and song. I don't just want to be segregated from annoying working and middle class people with equally annoying middle and upper class people.
Same with this five star I'm in. What the fuck the point of this place is besides segregation is beyond me. At least last year in Lisbon there were some touches of real luxury and in the Scandinavian five stars they serve caviar. Not to mention, even in a Scandinavian three star they'll have a sort of neat-o shower bidet so you can bathe your bits after every evacuation. Here there's not even a fucking bidet. Conference rate Euro 220 for a double, normal rate more than a hundred north of that, and not even a fucking bidet. What a crock of shit. Let's admit the only point of this place is that the proles are all deferential and in uniform.
Got in late last night and watched BBC World make an arse of itself over Ukraine and Russia and the global credit crisis. Crisis my ass. Ever read Gone With the Wind? I recommend it. Seriously. Weirdo book but moments of clarity amid all the slavery apologias and nostalgia for a society worse than fascist. At one point Rhett Butler tells a whiny Scarlett O'Hara that there's slow money to be made in the building of an empire, and fast money to be made in taking it apart. All we're seeing now is fast money. Lloyds and HBOS merging in an absolutely uncompetitive and unethical way with the encouragement of the British government, whose job should be to prevent this sort of rubbish - their customers will pay for that and the executive class will walk away singin'. Vomit.
Now I'm going for a calming walk along the seaside.
martedì, settembre 16, 2008
Evil under the sun
To paraphrase the proverbial Irishman's foreplay, brace yourself, Marseille, I'm coming! Two days of the same event I attended last year that gave me my first glimpse of the way the rich and powerful tick pleasantly along. Looking forward not to it, per se, but to Marseille. I won't have a vast amount of time to explore the city, aside from where our event will be shuttled to - another series of beauty spots, judging from the brochure - because though I'm staying in town afterwards, it will be on the water for my first foray into sea kayaking. Fuck, I'm excited!
Especially since if we move to Australia I think my hitherto-unstarted sea kayaking days will end, because yesterday I saw this shark attack/fatality chart in the Economist with its absolutely disproportionate-to-the-population numbers for Australia. I could probably imagine a worse way to die if I concentrated on it but there's something awfully unpleasant about the thought of having one of those things swimming around you and your last moments being caught up in the idea of 'will I bleed to death, or have my head bitten off, or will I just drown?' Australia is weird, man. You have the sharks that eat people, and then the crocodiles that eat people, while Canada is so much bigger and the only thing that eats people there are polar bears, and they're totally where I don't go.
Anyhoo. I'll be on the Mediterranean, which is so polluted that I doubt anything but the aquatic equivalent of cockroaches can survive, and so full of tourists thrashing around like injured seals and hapless Africans desperately making their way to unfriendly, racist post-colonial shores in flimsy leaking boats that even if a hungry shark does stumble through the straits of Gibraltar I doubt a kayak will be the first thing she sinks her teeth into. But we'll see. I'll try to update over the next couple of days to keep things in perspective but on that score as well, we'll see. The next two days of work, despite the luxury, will be difficult in more ways than one but I think I've thought up a couple of ways to deal - one of them so clever, so Machiavellian and yet so morally tidy, and so very Memento, that when I thought of it I yelled 'yeah dude, I rock!'
Thankfully at the time I was in the gym completing my rowing machine ordeal, so nobody noticed, as my gym is full of people shouting exclamations about how awesome they are. If we do move to Australia, I'll get my exercise kayaking on the crocodile-free rivers instead of at the gym - less onanistic screaming.
Especially since if we move to Australia I think my hitherto-unstarted sea kayaking days will end, because yesterday I saw this shark attack/fatality chart in the Economist with its absolutely disproportionate-to-the-population numbers for Australia. I could probably imagine a worse way to die if I concentrated on it but there's something awfully unpleasant about the thought of having one of those things swimming around you and your last moments being caught up in the idea of 'will I bleed to death, or have my head bitten off, or will I just drown?' Australia is weird, man. You have the sharks that eat people, and then the crocodiles that eat people, while Canada is so much bigger and the only thing that eats people there are polar bears, and they're totally where I don't go.
Anyhoo. I'll be on the Mediterranean, which is so polluted that I doubt anything but the aquatic equivalent of cockroaches can survive, and so full of tourists thrashing around like injured seals and hapless Africans desperately making their way to unfriendly, racist post-colonial shores in flimsy leaking boats that even if a hungry shark does stumble through the straits of Gibraltar I doubt a kayak will be the first thing she sinks her teeth into. But we'll see. I'll try to update over the next couple of days to keep things in perspective but on that score as well, we'll see. The next two days of work, despite the luxury, will be difficult in more ways than one but I think I've thought up a couple of ways to deal - one of them so clever, so Machiavellian and yet so morally tidy, and so very Memento, that when I thought of it I yelled 'yeah dude, I rock!'
Thankfully at the time I was in the gym completing my rowing machine ordeal, so nobody noticed, as my gym is full of people shouting exclamations about how awesome they are. If we do move to Australia, I'll get my exercise kayaking on the crocodile-free rivers instead of at the gym - less onanistic screaming.
lunedì, settembre 15, 2008
We're gonna have a real real cool time
So wrapped up with Hirst-hating and Hughes-loving yesterday that I neglected to point out what a chart-topping mood I'm in. As you know last week was the height of frustrating, as far as work is concerned. Now I'm not saying I'm so great at dealing and don't take my anger out on the people I love in an inappropriate fashion, but for some reason my troubles with the Yankee management have made me more than less aware of how super-great, uber-great, Mohammed-Ali-minus-sexism-and-brain-damage great the F-word is. Romance aside, that man rocks.
And that combined this past weekend, among other things, with a lovely trip back to Antwerp on the sort of crisp sunny autumn day that makes Europe seem worthwhile, and a wade through the art gallery there, with all its Ensors and oils and old things. The Ensors were the highlight of the gallery for me, besides the single sultry Modigliani, who was looking at the F-word that way, and of course that's great, because my reptile brain registered her as a threat as well as a beauty and I love it when tricks are played on my reptile brain.
Anyways, for much of the weekend, I was at that point of happiness where the only fly in the ointment is that not everybody is this happy. Even the trembling under-knowledge, the teenage paranoia of 'if you let yourself be this happy you stand to lose so much' was just the lime in the sorbet. And any troubles from work seemed part of a little part of a little something, like braces getting tightened, a nothing, a bagatelle that wasn't even a story yet, an unobtrusive skin rash.
Of course that set off its own worry for me Monday morning as I walked to work deafening myself with the Bad Seeds' last album and visualizing a violent burlesque routine (still love it but it sounds more and more like stripper music to me); I wondered, does ignoring work like that, thinking 'work is not real life, real life is real life, work is a task I do to fund my real life until I retire or get a job that counts as real life' lead into the kind of evil professional behaviours that allow people to do truly horrible things with no guilt at all, just because it's their job to do them? But that's not enough of a worry to ruin my mood. I don't do horrible things at work. I just write about other people doing them. And that may be a moral cop-out, but as Baywatch pointed out last week this only is a temporary nightmare.
Anyways, another good thing about Antwerp was the train reading, which was the rest of the Mosquito Coast. Eesh. That's a fucking great book, an epic of a lip-smacking good read. My favourite by Paul Theroux, possibly. Over the travel books, even, which I love. Adventure and Oedipus-complexes and adulthood and puberty and jungles and marital strife and racism and religion and murder, oh my. Speaking of Oedipal-complexes, how do you describe the father with a complex about his son, or a grown man with a general complex about young men? As having a Laius complex? The fact that there's no popular name for something so apparent when we're attributing formative murderous hate to all the little babies in the world makes me hate Freud more than I already did. Atta blame childhood, Herr Doktorb, obviously none of the shit in your brain is anything worth dealing with if it came up post-pubescently.
A lot of things going on there in the Mosquito Coast, in short, and yet never too busy, if you know what I mean, never hard to fix the mind on because of all the things and words going on, like books by that World According to Garp guy, which are just too magenta for me to get into. I recommend Mosquito Coast 100%.
And that combined this past weekend, among other things, with a lovely trip back to Antwerp on the sort of crisp sunny autumn day that makes Europe seem worthwhile, and a wade through the art gallery there, with all its Ensors and oils and old things. The Ensors were the highlight of the gallery for me, besides the single sultry Modigliani, who was looking at the F-word that way, and of course that's great, because my reptile brain registered her as a threat as well as a beauty and I love it when tricks are played on my reptile brain.
But Ensor wins. He combined absolutely inappropriate colours and a sort of shimmery pointillist-without-the-headache movement (his people - and his objects and corpses, for that matter - look ready to bounce off the surface of the painting) with a deep morbidity, or skepticism, or fatalism, or something to do with death and vanity in a way that really satisfies me. The Antwerp museum has tonnes, versus the fucking none in Ensor's home town of Oostende.
Anyways, for much of the weekend, I was at that point of happiness where the only fly in the ointment is that not everybody is this happy. Even the trembling under-knowledge, the teenage paranoia of 'if you let yourself be this happy you stand to lose so much' was just the lime in the sorbet. And any troubles from work seemed part of a little part of a little something, like braces getting tightened, a nothing, a bagatelle that wasn't even a story yet, an unobtrusive skin rash.
Of course that set off its own worry for me Monday morning as I walked to work deafening myself with the Bad Seeds' last album and visualizing a violent burlesque routine (still love it but it sounds more and more like stripper music to me); I wondered, does ignoring work like that, thinking 'work is not real life, real life is real life, work is a task I do to fund my real life until I retire or get a job that counts as real life' lead into the kind of evil professional behaviours that allow people to do truly horrible things with no guilt at all, just because it's their job to do them? But that's not enough of a worry to ruin my mood. I don't do horrible things at work. I just write about other people doing them. And that may be a moral cop-out, but as Baywatch pointed out last week this only is a temporary nightmare.
Anyways, another good thing about Antwerp was the train reading, which was the rest of the Mosquito Coast. Eesh. That's a fucking great book, an epic of a lip-smacking good read. My favourite by Paul Theroux, possibly. Over the travel books, even, which I love. Adventure and Oedipus-complexes and adulthood and puberty and jungles and marital strife and racism and religion and murder, oh my. Speaking of Oedipal-complexes, how do you describe the father with a complex about his son, or a grown man with a general complex about young men? As having a Laius complex? The fact that there's no popular name for something so apparent when we're attributing formative murderous hate to all the little babies in the world makes me hate Freud more than I already did. Atta blame childhood, Herr Doktorb, obviously none of the shit in your brain is anything worth dealing with if it came up post-pubescently.
A lot of things going on there in the Mosquito Coast, in short, and yet never too busy, if you know what I mean, never hard to fix the mind on because of all the things and words going on, like books by that World According to Garp guy, which are just too magenta for me to get into. I recommend Mosquito Coast 100%.
domenica, settembre 14, 2008
More like beautiful up your own ass forever, shitbird
Love-hate relationship with my prime loved, hated Robert Hughes coming down hard on the side of love following this little diatribe about the Hirst auction. Oh, those sentences of his! So damn sloppy and so fucking horrible in his stupid fucking autobiography and so damn tedious in The Fatal Shore, and yet so punchy in his art criticism, like a lighthouse beacon punching its way through the fog. Seriously, I get physical pleasure from beast sentences like this one:
The now famous diamond-encrusted skull, lately unveiled to a gawping art world amid deluges of hype, is a letdown unless you believe the unverifiable claims about its cash value, and are mesmerised by mere bling of rather secondary quality; as a spectacle of transformation and terror, the sugar skulls sold on any Mexican street corner on the Day of the Dead are 10 times as vivid and, as a bonus, raise real issues about death and its relation to religious belief in a way that is genuinely democratic, not just a vicarious spectacle for money groupies such as Hirst and his admirers.
Obviously I love it so much because I agree. And then, I've never seen a single work by Damien Hirst whose spirit couldn't be encapsulated in 30 words or less, and if you can do that, what the hell is the point of appreciating that it has been brought into existence as an object? Especially when it has no merit as a craft or technique. I can't stand the notion it, Koon's shit, or anything, for that matter, has some intrinsic value merely because it reflects the spirit of the age. You know what else does? Events. Beliefs. Conclusions. Traffic jams. Silicone spatulas. Words. The problem is you can't pretend those are art and sell them to fuckwits for 50 million a pop, though I'm sure some Hirst-esque cunt will have a go with the spatula, given enough time. Pack of parasitic whores.
The thing is with Hirst, I get the sense his brain doesn't work well enough to use words instead of uberobvious symbols he can hire people to create for him. He responded to Hughes' criticism by calling it Luddite, which actually made me laugh out loud. I know Luddite and Philistine both sound clever, but that doesn't make them mean the same thing. How exactly is it that Hughes would like to smash the industrial machinery of the modern world, you stupid bourgeios fucker? Unless, of course, you're pointing out that your own activities are not art, but industrial machinery - much like an HP printer that provides a clear but annoyingly useless metaphor for the modern rhythm of existence by jamming all the fucking time. Which begs the 50 million dollar question . . .
The now famous diamond-encrusted skull, lately unveiled to a gawping art world amid deluges of hype, is a letdown unless you believe the unverifiable claims about its cash value, and are mesmerised by mere bling of rather secondary quality; as a spectacle of transformation and terror, the sugar skulls sold on any Mexican street corner on the Day of the Dead are 10 times as vivid and, as a bonus, raise real issues about death and its relation to religious belief in a way that is genuinely democratic, not just a vicarious spectacle for money groupies such as Hirst and his admirers.
Obviously I love it so much because I agree. And then, I've never seen a single work by Damien Hirst whose spirit couldn't be encapsulated in 30 words or less, and if you can do that, what the hell is the point of appreciating that it has been brought into existence as an object? Especially when it has no merit as a craft or technique. I can't stand the notion it, Koon's shit, or anything, for that matter, has some intrinsic value merely because it reflects the spirit of the age. You know what else does? Events. Beliefs. Conclusions. Traffic jams. Silicone spatulas. Words. The problem is you can't pretend those are art and sell them to fuckwits for 50 million a pop, though I'm sure some Hirst-esque cunt will have a go with the spatula, given enough time. Pack of parasitic whores.
The thing is with Hirst, I get the sense his brain doesn't work well enough to use words instead of uberobvious symbols he can hire people to create for him. He responded to Hughes' criticism by calling it Luddite, which actually made me laugh out loud. I know Luddite and Philistine both sound clever, but that doesn't make them mean the same thing. How exactly is it that Hughes would like to smash the industrial machinery of the modern world, you stupid bourgeios fucker? Unless, of course, you're pointing out that your own activities are not art, but industrial machinery - much like an HP printer that provides a clear but annoyingly useless metaphor for the modern rhythm of existence by jamming all the fucking time. Which begs the 50 million dollar question . . .
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