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.