giovedì, gennaio 15, 2009

Fun with ethnic stereotypes

1. 6 am, in a dark kitchen. 
Mistress La Spliffe: Want coffee?
F-word: Yeah. 
Mistress La Spliffe: AHH! (backs away from stove) The flame is freaky high!
F-word: Yeah. 
Mistress La Spliffe: Maybe the Russians turned the gas back on. Maybe people all over Europe are burning their eyebrows off this morning.
F-word: Yeah. The Russian practical joke of the decade. 
Mistress La Spliffe: Hah!
F-word: (Eastern Promises-ly) You want gas? We'll give you gas, imperialist swine. Hah. Hah. Hah. What a gas. 
(Ah, but no.

2. The Family Guy is a shitty daisy chain of a series. I don't like it. But when it's dubbed into Italian (I Griffin) it's actually really funny, because the guy they have doing Peter's voice sounds like a complete fucking retard instead of like an American voice actor pretending to a complete fucking retard and obviously doing a much worse job than Dan Castellaneta. My cousin told me that's because he has a Roman accent. 

3. Seven years ago, I asked one of my Korean students how I, a pie-eyed Westerner with no understanding of anything Asian, could tell Korean people from Japanese people at a glance. Credit to her, she took the stupid question seriously, and considered for a moment before she said, "if they're ugly, they're Japanese."

mercoledì, gennaio 14, 2009

The Red Dragon is perfectly rational

Yeah, and the thing is, probably no Locrian women tomorrow either because my mum and I are going to Amsterdam.

Two brief words of advice, though, on something that should be seen:

Goya's

Ghosts


As far as I can tell it got bad reviews because critics were confused by the story, which just goes to show you critics are fucking morons these days. What the movie got across, and what I really enjoyed, was the tension as the Spanish Inquisition was petering out and the modern age was hacking its way in. Less Catholic countries in Europe were in the thick of the Enlightenment at the time, intellectually speaking; even Russia's empress read Voltaire. And the Spanish Inquisition suddenly becomes unbelievably nasty in its death-throes, a wild stab at continuing relevancy through violence. A backwards, dreadful, beastly and unreconstructed Catholicism trying to piss in the waters of a new rational and internationalist culture.

The positive, artistic side of that new culture was, in the film, perfectly embodied by a low-key Goya from Stellan Starsgaard. Impeccable casting. You can imagine the character snorting a few lines of coke and doing every whore in a brothel, but the actor was disciplined enough to keep that all tamped down, nothing but a twinkle in the eye, while walking us through a story that was mostly about other people. But behind this rational and internationalist consciousness whose beautiful side was Goya was this massive, hungry, anal rapist of a country called France, flogging the new religion of Rationality, a new religion that men were too unevolved to admit was built on the foundation of their own subjective animal emotions, desires and fears, and thus didn't boast any more universal and perfect truths than any other religion.

The Enlightenment is a difficult thing to make a film about, or even to think about, because of the tension in Europe between the old tyrants and the new tyrants that it brought about. It's difficult because of the utter paucity of 'good guys' on an organized level at the time. And it's difficult to think about, most of all, because of the fact that we continue to be the new tyrants - people who worship Rationality without being able to admit our 'rational' perceptions are all built on the foundation of our personal flaws, excellences and prejudices - that the perceptions we call rational are not universal, and that they go far beyond empirical or scientific observation, all the way into the jungles of our own lonely Hearts of Darkness.

And it's difficult because the only ways out of the tension between the superstition that makes your enemies subhuman and the sort of rationality that makes your enemies subhuman is kindness or genius. And most of us have a hard time with the idea that we're not geniuses, and a very very hard time with the idea that we're not kind, or at least not any kinder than people who burnt women at the stake for being witches. Now we just pump the people we treat as subhuman full of chemicals in places like Bhopal and shrug our shoulders when they die en masse in agony because our retirement savings are wrapped up in mutual funds with interests in Dow Chemicals. And I think Goya's Ghosts did a really fantastic job of illustrating that tension, with its Goya being kind, being a genius, bearing witness forever to the atrocities the old and new tyrants threw in his path.

And, you know, Javier Bardem.

The Red Dragon enjoys pizza

Hey, guess what? No Locrians today either.

Here's a story though. Last night, we were relegated to the futon so Mum could have the cat-free bedroom. I always sleep well on the futon and last night had one of the most compelling dreams of my life. I knew it was a dream, which was sort of neat, and the dream was that I was flying, gently spinning and turning in an utter black void. It was great. And then I realized it wasn't a void, and that the blackness heaving below me was actually every man who had ever existed, in reality and imagination, and that I could now proceed to have an erotic dream about any of them.

My mind boggled, as it would, and I couldn't choose right away, until I realized that I could just have one after another, really, since I was dreaming and they were all obviously already somewhere in my subconscious, stowed away for later. Finally I chose the name of someone who I'd enjoyed several times in the past in the flesh, with the theory that I could see how the dream ---- compared to the real ----, to gauge exactly how realistic and top-notch this awesome situation was going to get.

He materialized himself out of the heaving black sea of men, smiling invitingly, and I realized as I floated through the ether that I wasn't that interested - been there, done him, and probably going for it was going to mean thrashing around in my sleep, and perhaps me screaming his name, waking up the F-word in a way that perhaps might make him sad. So I decided instead to peacably float in the fake black void, having a think about who exactly I'd do, perhaps while I was on a business trip. Ghengis Khan. The Neanderthal who invented cunnilingus. Simon Bolivar. Beau fuckin' Duke. Thomas More. Javier Bardem. The Marx brothers. David Attenborough. And then I woke up.

And then at lunchtime we went to my favourite pizza place, and for just a moment, I hated myself for not choosing the chef. Fuck, he's hot.

lunedì, gennaio 12, 2009

The Red Dragon autodomesticates

My mum is coming to visit this evening, which means - once more - fuck all about the Locrian women as I engage in a last minute struggle to ameliorate the state of the apartment. It's just a reflex at this point. I'm 30 years old. I've been living without parental supervision for 12 years, and been visited by them frequently, especially my globe-trotting mum, in that time. During some of that time I was occasionally much less functional than I flatter myself I am now, and Mum has seen some fucking dire things when visiting my apartments. I always get them spic and span in the parts they spend time in - their bedroom, kitchen, living room - but I could never bring myself, during my druggier years, to actually clean my own bedroom. Hangover adolescence, probably. 

I have a distinct memory - I don't think it's just a hallucination - of my mum walking across my bedroom in one of the apartments I had in northern Italy so she could look at its balcony, and casually kicking a used condom out of her path as she did so. Unbelievably disgusting, I know, but if it makes it any better, I'm pretty sure it was fresh.  Ho hum. Credit to her for never saying anything. And credit to my brothers for raising her tolerance so high. Why bother getting upset with your daughter for being a slutty drunk piggy stoner when your sons are . . . well. When your sons are my brothers: three of the greatest men on Earth.

Anyways, that's all, it's back to scrubbing for me. In the meantime, please enjoy some Buraka Som Sistema. Besides M.I.A. whining out the refrain so charmingly I have no idea what they're going on about, but it's good marching music and it will help you ask yourself some tough questions about how you've let your life get to where it is now instead of devoting all your time to learning how to dance that awesomely. 

domenica, gennaio 11, 2009

The Red Dragon is being more present with her menses

Yeah. No Locrian women today either. Resusable menstrual pads are great and everything - they work better, they feel better, and my suspicion is they make your twat smell better too- but what they are not, relative to disposables, is extremely convenient. They take a modicum of foresight and scrubbing, neither of which have ever been my strengths.

I don't mind, aside from now only having ten minutes to write now instead of the half hour I'd need for the Locrians. Lunapads, the very famous resuable rag company that charges a fucking arm and a leg for its wares - honestly, they better hold back the Hudson River and make your crotch look like the Naked Maja's if they're willing to charge that price when a spastic like me can whip up something perfectly acceptable in every way for pennies a pop without the benefit of wholesale - has a part in its FAQs that made me laugh out loud, extolling the virtues of washing your very own blood out of your very own rags. But now I can't deny I get a kick out of the sense of ritual. Hard to put my finger on. I guess it's much nicer than putting my blood in the garbage, and it's neat to think in a cyclical way about how things are going on with me down there.

Anyways, don't have time for much else this morning. We're both awfully sick. Brussels, always polluted, has been having a pic for the last week or so because the dry, cold Canadian temperatures don't keep the particles in the air down as well as the normal constant shitty drizzly lukewarm rain does. This has been contributing to how awfully our respiratory systems have been working. We have got to get the fuck out of here, but I'm probably getting a big fat raise this year, so we won't for another little while. That having been said I continue to be relieved that at least it's not fucking raining. Also the smog makes the sunsets and sunrises fucking marvellous. And as the cold strengthens, the days lengthen. It hasn't been this cold here in the last 15 or 20 years, apparently, but I know, and I believe, that it will get to be spring one day.