Appetite for disaster

I got a huge bonus - about three times what I'd been expecting. Economic crisis? Moi? The only direct effect of the economic crisis so far, for me, has been to make our frugal lifestyle a little less ridiculous to some of my friends, and to close down the dirty grocery story around the corner. There was San Francisca getting sacked, but then she was about to quit anyways, and she got a massive payout - after talking to her these last few days I get the sense that maybe, maybe she'll have the sense not to squander it. 

It's been making me worry - well, no, it hasn't, it's been making me think, at most. Spoke to Rodelinda the other day. She and her young man have just become affianced - she's got tenure now and he's a fucking neuroscientist, he can always go work for the CIA or some bloody thing if he has to, you've never seen a neuroscientist asking for change for something to eat, have you, but then any of those poor hoarse men could have been anything. All this in the UK, whose economy and macroeconomic expectations are extra super ubershitty, according to my work research. So they're established enough that they've become affianced, but she's still a little concerned because she's starting to hear of people, even with tenure, getting downsized, but then she's so glad to have tenure, and she asked me if, in my cut-throatish and dwindling industry, if I was worried about getting sacked. 

'Fuck no, I'd be a pig for it,' was my knee-jerk gut response, which regaled her a bit, I don't know why. But I think it's because everybody is so worried, and hearing from someone who isn't extremely worried might seem funny or refreshing now. But last night, lying in bed and not being able to get to sleep, because the F-word is ill right now and like a person-sized furnace, which helped my aching back the other night no end if one needs a silver lining, I started doing sums in my head about my favourite subject - how early I can retire whilst doing the fewest hours of work possible in the interim. 

Somehow this got mixed up with Sugarplum, who you may remember and who has just announced she's got one in the oven, and who'd said to me 'we're thirty now, it's time to think about making babies', and to whom I'd said 'now is the time for me to make money', and it also got mixed up with thinking about how actually Peter Cook wasn't extremely young when he died, when you consider that Al Capone was already the boss of Chicago when he was 26, and if Peter Cook was still alive he'd be an oldish man now, and how strange that was, because how could someone so funny not be young, and wasn't time an awfully strange thing? Because now I'm not very young anymore. And really, what would I do if I was sacked, after taking a money bath in my payout? More realistically, considering the size of my raise, my bonus, and my promotion in quick succession, what will I do when I move on? How will I live my life better?

I'm very lucky because that's an interesting question instead of a scary one.  

Damn good cup of coffee

I used to think of Belgium as Italy's retarded little brother, but after having spent a couple of weeks in Calabria and Sicily I've been reminded of the fact that's not an apt comparison - that it's more a case of Italy being Belgium's attractive but sociopathic ex-con cousin. I'll explain. The F-word and I are rather fussbudgets when it comes to small comforts like coffee. We're so cheap that when it comes to the little luxuries we make them as good as we possibly can - just hold them down and fuck their brains out.  In Belgium that's been a bit hard. It's struck us whilst in Germany and in Italy that the coffee there is better than it is here, even within the same brand. Lavazza here is not nearly as good as Lavazza in either of those countries. I'm usually perfectly happy with Lavazza, but it tastes like steeped sand here, so we've been having the spring the double on Illy, which is painful when you're as fucking cheap as us, but there's no choice. 

I don't know why this is. Belgium could be a low-priority export market because it's so small relative to the German market, and hence could be getting the shitty end of the lollipop in terms of qualities.  Also, I've heard that this places maintains import customs, even within the EU, that involve impounding semi-perishables for a long time. I don't give that 100% credence because it's illegal, from what I understand of European law, but it would certainly explain why you have to pay 7 euros a pop to get espresso that doesn't taste stale, and also Belgium had a four year lag in terms of accepting EU passports as proof of the right of residency, which I believe was also illegal, but, well - I'm trying to be through complaining about this place as an abstract concept. 

That's not stopping me from complaining about the coffee here, but big fucking deal, it's not much of a problem, it just means that when we go to Germany, which we do with relative frequency, we stock up on coffee at the same time as we stock up on delicious, delectable German beer. What I'm getting it is that I've found the right coffee to stock up on, if they sell it in Germany, and if they don't sell it in Germany, I'll set up some sort of mailing scheme with my family in Calabria, as the processing plant for it is in Reggio, the nearest big city to their village.

It's called Mauro, and it's the coffee for me. Rich, fatty, hints of chocolate - not a slap in the face in the morning, more of a nice rousing cuddle - but strong. And one thing about Belgium - there's a shitload of farmers here, who sell unpasteurized cow and goat milk at the daily market down the road from us. All this week, I've been drinking the Mauro with goat milk, because I'm quite fond of goat milk, but today switched to the cow milk, and it was just perfect. Just so lovely. So complimentary. Almost like music, the coffee and the milk worked together so beautifully. 

So. Mauro is the coffee for me. But I understand why some people might like Illy better. Illy has a cleaner taste, and I think it's a little fattier, or at least it gets more of that creamy crema up top. And even if Illy refuses to participate in Fair Trade, it at least pretends to espouse some sort of social agenda in its bean sourcing, which Mauro doesn't even mention. But you know, I spent a lot of time in Reggio and the region around it this Christmas, and I can say without hesitation that supporting any business that provides employment there which doesn't involve processing garbage or killing people is supporting a very necessary social agenda. 

Which leads me to my final point. Which is fuck, Italy makes me sad. The article I wrote this week about the poor man who fell into the machine was about an Italian. Strangely enough, his name was Mauro too. I write about industrial accidents all the time, but this one is affecting me more because the liability has been written off - the parent company artificially outsourced the department Mauro was working in a couple of years back. From local accounts this was probably done because the machinery was antiquated and dangerous, and they needed to get themselves away from liability questions associated with it. And you know what, apparently the safety inspector had approved the machine for operation that same morning. And his co-workers didn't know what had happened to him. He was just gone. All minced up, in little peices in a truck. The machinery was so loud nobody would have been able to hear him screaming. Fuck, it's just such a nightmare, and the public relations woman I was talking to from the company whose premises it was on could say to me quite honestly, 'it's really not our problem.'  

Okay, things like that, much worse things, happen every day all over the world, but you know what? I'd have liked better from Italy. Call me a chauvinist - I absolutely am. But Italy is meant to be a developed country. And a man shouldn't be able to fall into a woodchipper and die in a developed country without it being someone's fucking problem. I think that should be one of the criteria for a country to be called developed. Oh fuck, now I'm crying. Perfect. Jolly good. Off to work. At least I've had a really good coffee to start the day. 

Eat your big fat fucking heart out, Michael Moore

Rather hurried this morning, so a quick list of Things That Should Be Seen:

1 and 2. Adam Curtis documentaries The Living Dead (3 episodes) and Pandora's Box (6 episodes). I fucking love Adam Curtis - I meant to point out how much I loved him months and months ago, but I got sidetracked. His documentaries make just about everybody else's except David Attenborough's look like shit. They're observational - they don't stretch points, they don't stretch the truth, they have talking heads observing from every perspective of the subjects they treat - but absolutely devastating in their exposure of how societies are manipulated in the pursuit of elite agendas, from the general (global neoconservatism) to the specific (post-independence dam project in Ghana). And they're jolly fun to look at too. You've never seen such excellent use of stock footage.

The upshot is I've never been able to choose a favourite from among his documentaries - they should all be watched - the ones that came out this decade are rather more topical, but they're all pretty topical. The Living Dead is my least favourite - too general, I'd heard it all before - and it was still excellent. You know, now I'm just gushing, so I'll shut up. Suffice it to say that his documentaries are a multi-part advertisement for why public television should operate more or less like the BBC.

3. Cane Toads: An Unnatural History. Absolutely adorable and beautifully organized as a film - hilarious on top of educational on top of unsettling. It runs the gamut of making you want to run over as many cane toads as you can to making you want to tickle their tummies, while succeeding in reminding you our scientific classes can be blithering, dangerous idiots when they get involved with agriculture and industry.

As animals, the cane toads are very cute, but then I have a thing for frogs and toads. Their legs remind me of mine. I know some people, indeed one of my favourite people, find the subgroup petrifying, and I've always been fascinated with that phobia. What's to fear? Is it like our snake phobia - do some of us have a deep, unquenchable disgust for the animals built into us instinctively because some of them are highly poisonous? And if so, how did the French shake it off enough as a nationality to eat the poor little fuckers?

Planarchism, because we need another 'ism'

It certainly is a shocking time to be young, working, and thinking about yourself as the future head of a family. Our household is like a little island of prosperity right at the moment - I just got a promotion and a 7% raise, the F-word is getting more for part-time work than most teachers get full-time in this country - in a sea of financial turmoil. Only a couple of months ago the world's economic problems were so abstract, and then in November and December, I guess in the lead-up to results season, stores started closing all over the place here and lots of people got fired, and I know it's really only a matter of time until the sea sweeps over our own personal Tahiti. And swamps us? I don't think so. We've been thinking too aggressively about our next move, and we're ready whenever it comes now, I think. And though Belgium isn't my favourite country in the world, I suppose, it's a helluva place to get fired. Hey. A girl can dream. Or start showing up at work naked and babbling.

This week the news pieces I'm following at work are all about shutdowns and bankruptcies, except for one rather overwhelming brief about a man who fell into some industrial machinery and was minced up so quickly and completely his colleagues had no idea where he'd got to. It's been that way for awhile at work. All doom and gloom. And the multinationals are the worst - the companies whose operations relied on high levels of credit and liquidity - those are the ones dwindling and shutting down and going bankrupt the fastest. It's broken. The financial and economic system is broken. That's been clear to me since I started writing about it, since I understood the frenetic and brainless rhythm at which decisions are made and administrators are rewarded by shareholders. Our way of doing things, financially, economically, is broken,and it was never a frightfully good idea, and frankly it's amazing it's worked in the chaotic, shaky way it has for so long, although it's worth remembering that bankruptcies and struggles were common enough at the so-called best of times.

And throwing public money at something broken so badly has no chance of fixing it, at least in the way it's been done, but that's not the point anyways. More situations like Belgium's - where I know I'll still be solvent if I lose my job, where I'm not scared of the future like an American, a Brit, a Canadian, or most non-European participants in our economy who'll get two weeks pay and a slap on the ass if they get fired, and who fucking well know it - might make more people less nervous about spending money and cashing up the gears of our economy. But the powers-that-be in America, Britain, and here in Europe too have decided reassuring consumers is ass-backwards, and it's best to reassure banks and business instead - bribing them, they suggest to the public, to not fire all us plebs out here; bribing them to keep the economy afloat.

But it's bullshit, isn't it? The banks and businesses can't keep our economy afloat, and they're the ones who torpedoed it in the first place, and they're the ones who'd like us plebs to cost rather less as employees, or who'd like us to stop being employees in favor of some nice cheap Asians. The fact is every major government initiative to deal with the crisis in the Western world has centered around bolstering institutions in such a way that inflation doesn't run wild (which would probably be the effect of directly reassuring us plebs by improving unemployment insurance or welfare programmes) and investors know they can get their money back. That is: every major government initiative to deal with the crisis in the Western world has centred around wealth protection. Which leaves us poor motherfuckers who aren't wealthy rather in the lurch.

But enough with the woe-is-us. Wealth protection has got to be such a big issue not just because of the super-rich, because of the more direct participants in the broken economic system, but because governments and large businesses too incompetent and short-term to do it themselves have successfully pushed us plebs to plan for our retirement by sinking our savings into the stock market, and not to rely on government pensions or work pensions. So if wealth isn't protected, a generation of baby boomers will have to suck straight from the tit of the public purse in their useless twilight years, and considering the shoddiness of the governments we're saddled with these days that's sure to be utterly cocked up in a way that will have dire social consequences.

Well, I'm not writing anything you don't already know. But I do lean on the point that it's time to think of alternative models, or at least supporting structures to the existing model that will ease us into something new. George Monbiot, otherwise known as the only reason not to use the Guarniad as toilet paper, has put together an interesting article about the possibilities of local currencies, for example, and negative interest, with references forward to Switzerland's WIR system* and to The Future of Money, a book that's been recommended to me before but which, despite its evident popularity, is fucking impossible to buy for less than a 100 euros, which is fascinating. The examples are worth looking at in detail. In a more general sense, anything groups of people can do independently to deal with the situation is worth looking at in detail. I'm not an anarchist by persuasion - I've never really thought of identifying myself that way. But increasingly I feel we're living in anarchic circumstances and we have to think of new, local, or at least small-scale methods or programmes to deal with that. Not bringing anarchy on or accelerating it - no need for that, apparently - but planning what to do with it. So I guess I'd like to promote planarchy. The word is already being used for blogging software but I think I can call dibs on it as a sociopolitical persuasion.

*Can somebody please tell me why most people don't know fuck-all about why Switzerland works? Talk to a Swiss person and they won't shut up about it. It's not like it's some big secret. And why, why, for fuck's sake, WHY do Americans defend their shitty two-party system, which is one of the principal tools perpetuating our untenable economic system by being so fucking static by design, by saying 'Oh, well if we had multiple parties we'd be a mess like Italy and that's no fucking good is it', when a) just north of Italy, Switzerland has been ticking along for ages with not only multiple parties, but a fucking rotating presidency, and b) the Americans, or at least their institutions, were the ones who fucked post-war Italy up in the first place? I tell you, shit like that is why I sometimes fucking hate those bastards for sewing Canadian flags onto their backpacks. No. No. Own your suck. We have our own suck already. Pretending to be us won't make it go away.

Novella crimes

Sean Penn looks like a penis. I know an awful lot of people like him, so I guess some directors are better at exploiting that than others, but one director who did a really crap job exploiting that was Philip Haas, he of the vastly superior but still not that great Angels and Insects. And one movie that was an honest to goodness sack of crap was Up at the Villa.  

Angels and Insects was, as I've gone on about before, the film version of A. S. Byatt's Morpho Eugenia, and much worse was it too. That's only to be expected because Morpho Eugenia was a very beautiful and complex novella. Not in the story - that's quite a direct stream of events and emotions that got transcribed accurately to the screen. Rather in the construction, with Byatt putting in layers of scientific and philosophical-scientific musings through epistolary devices, etc. It's a smashing novella, one of the best, and it would have been impossible to translate its smashingness to the screen, not without taking hours and millions of dollars, not without getting David Attenborough in to narrate. Angels and Insects was a good effort. 

But. Philip Haas utterly buggering Up at the Villa is beyond explanation or excuse. I liked the novella well enough, though relative to other Somerset Maugham books like The Moon and Sixpence and Of Human Bondage it's very fluffy. It's also very simple, in the sense of being a rather good yarn where people talk about all the emotions that they actually have, and translating it to film should have been a walk in the park. The casting was also really promising - Kristin Scott Thomas was perfect for that gold-skinned lead, and Sean Penn - okay, I don't get it, but I saw flashes of how with a decent script and a heavier-handed director, he could have been good as the male lead. 

But the scripting process buggered the whole thing up. It over-complicated, artificially extended and stretched a plot that was already a perfect, self-contained unit. It bizarrely airlifted Derek Jacobi in to play a disreputable queen without allowing him to be comic relief or in any way relevant to the events portrayed. It gave Anne Bancroft way too much time and too little to do with it. In short, it over-complicated a simple novella - a much greater sin than over-simplifying a complex novella, like Morpho Eugenia. And it didn't deal with the crisis/opportunity of Sean Penn looking like a penis. 

Anyways. What that peice of shit did do is remind me that I have the complete works of Somerset Maugham sitting around waiting to be read, so after my mum left I started dipping into Cosmopolitans, a bunch of short sketches he wrote for a magazine that would fit on to one or two pages. Hit and miss but much more hit, in that nice terse language that makes Ernest Hemingway seem like a gushing auntie. He's not fashionable anymore, I guess, but I'm getting quite fond of Somerset Maugham.