No, seriously, now we're taking Berlin

We watched Battleship Potemkin last night. Just that sort of mood. Sometimes I can't emotionally commit to a film but just want to watch some sort of cultural document. But it turned out it was actually a film, even though it was silent and from 1925. The end made me cry. Goebbels loved it, apparently. He thought it could turn anyone Bolshevik who wasn't already strongly something else. Unsurprisingly it was banned in Nazi Germany; rather more surprisingly, it was also banned in the UK until 1954, at which point it was released with an X rating. A few chocolate-syrup blood scenes aside there's no gore, and there wasn't any move to ban other propaganda films like Triumph of the Will even at the height of the war, or, you know, that American one by Griffiths about how if you fully enfranchised black people they'd uncontrollably rape white women, the poor helpless dears, so I guess we know what that's about.

I wonder how much the working class still scares policy makers and property owners in the UK. Probably not much. The Labour party, who theoretically represented the working class, managed to sweep to a huge electoral victory after publicly castrating itself in the mid-nineties, and the public snobbery about the working class is amazing. But I guess that's the thing. The workers there don't have any impact on the means of production anymore because there are no means of production - they've all been exported, and the working class has turned into the service class. Just insecure retail or service jobs that don't mean a damn thing if you go on strike. It's pretty gross.

According to the Open Veins of Latin America, which I'm hoping to knock off on the plane tonight, because I just got The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson to read in tandem with A Social History of England by Trevelyan just to blow my mind (yes, I'm the world's biggest geek who doesn't understand math or computers) exporting industry wasn't always the British way; their constant push for free trade applied to primary resources for many years while the means of transformation stayed, aggressively, in England. Which was noticed by Ulysses Grant (sweet name) when his country opted to follow the same model for awhile:

For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes, and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within two hundred years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.

But a point always comes where the workers just get too scary and where protection can no longer offer anything because you've managed to create a big enough consumer class, to the point that it's worth exporting production piecemeal to export-focused economies full of people who remember what it's like to be hungry. Leaving the UK a bit of a shell when it comes to production, and increasingly the US as well. People get so het up about European protectionism in the manufacturing industries, and there is a huge and easily mocked disconnect between what is legally committed to and what is actually done here in trade terms. But there's no doubt French people or people here get more say what their government and their employer do to their lives than do British people. Oh well. Time to get ready for Berlin.

A double-jointed stressball

Do you ever get the feeling that if these chicks ever chose to use their powers for good, or evil for that matter, or anything but a hilariously underappreciated sport that makes football look like retarded cavemen trying to rape each other, they could take over the planet?



My neice used to do that shit. I think it retarded her puberty. Uhm . . . good. I'm all for sexual maturity in a general sense but somehow when it comes to a younger generation of one's female relatives it doesn't seem like such a hot idea anymore, especially when they used to do competitive rhythmic gymnastics. I imagine it's a bit like my parents felt when I rolled around the house yelling 'look, I can put my feet behind my head!' and performing many other of my double-jointed tricks that could one day make me a lot of friends. And indeed did. Fuck. Oh well, there's still time for her to turn out gay.

Speaking of doing things with one's body, last night we started tai chi again. We needed something to relax and yoga and pilates, which I used to enjoy, feel too commoditized for me now. I was given a yoga shirt for Christmas with the pricetag left on it - holy shit - it threw me back to the one and only visit I made to that shithole cult Lululemon. I was going with a friend who needed me to tell her how nice her tits looked in each top she tried on but I wouldn't have otherwise. It's possible that if the clothes are not made in sweatshops (which, by-the-by, is not guaranteed by a made-in-Canada label; Vancouver, Lululemon's home base, is full of sweatshops, and they used a non-unionized facility to get going there), the ridiculously high prices could be warranted. But for doing yoga, for fuck's sake? I mean, do Asians ever look at us and laugh their fucking tits off?

Anyways, we started tai chi again. We had to. I go to the gym and commute by foot so I have some ways to get rid of nervous tension built into my life, but not enough, and the F-word has even less, and him as a teacher and me as a commie covering commodities build up a lot of nervous tension over the day. It feels great by the end. I don't know if it's the movements or deep breathing or both, but even though I lack the proper spatial understanding of my body to do anything right by the end it feels magnificent. And you can do it in your street clothes instead of some stretchy peice of artificial shit that costs Euro 50, minimum.

So this morning I feel better than I have in awhile, and yesterday also saw a spot of good news at work - I get to switch areas of market study into something much more interesting, and frankly, much dirtier, sometimes even more criminal. Hey, if I'm stuck in the corporate world, might as well be stuck in the underbelly, right? If this is education for me than might as well get a proper one.

In the meantime, the F-word has basically finished the cabinet, except the doors, but I'm not too fussed, I reckon it looks awesome:

First we take Manhattan . . .

Still hardly managing at the office. It's got a little better this week but not much. The mind does flash to a million other places one would rather be. But there are benefits: when I'm done my driving crap, which is hopefully May 4, I get to take Spanish lessons, but much more soon and tangibly, in a sense, I'm going to Berlin. I love Berlin. I'm going to the Altes Museum to look at Nefertiti's bust (heh heh heh . . . bust) and on the Sunday I'm going to go see this ballet at the Staatsoper and it will be awesome. I'd go to the Aida on the Saturday but instead I have to go out and eat lots of food with a friend of ours who lives there. And it will be sushi because you can't get good sushi in Brussels. And it will be wheeeeeeee! Going to Berlin is like Christmas for grownups.

Am I building it up? Yes. The thing is, obviously, I'm going to Berlin for work, for a conference, and I've come to hate conferences a bit. All the gladhanding and grinfucking and not saying what I think about how evil everyone is gets to me. I should enjoy it while I can, though. Once I hippy out I'll probably never stay in a hotel again whose gym is named after the place where the upper Greek pantheon of gods lived, and is described as as a 'temple of well-being', and which charges Euro 85 an hour for a fucking Tai Chi course . . . yeah, I'm starting to hate five star hotels too. They're annoying and for all the little extras they flog - and make you pay extra for after already charging your business a few hundred euro to let you sleep on their beds - they're nothing but a way to keep the smelly proles away. But I've blathered about that before.

Well wah wah, me. Conferences are sending me to five-star hotels in Istanbul and Vienna this year, and there are children starving in at least three continents, probably on all the fucking continents, even Antarctica in these naughty times, and I'm still complaining. Fuck, I annoy myself sometimes. I have to keep reminding myself that while things may be rather uninspiring, even nauseating when you combine them with reading Commielit about how evil all the evil people you engage with and therefore you are, it's teaching me a lot if I keep my mind open, and it's letting me travel to places for free that one day I won't travel to, either because we'll live in a very distant hemisphere or because I'll be an impoverished hippy or because, no matter how much money I have in the future, the five-star milieu I'm exploring now isn't one I would touch with a bargepole if there weren't professional obligations to do so.

So I should learn. I should be an anthropologist. I should connect with the Pampered Businessmen in the Mist . . . they are, after all, getting to be an endangered species. With any fucking luck at all.

My life-long lack of scurvy belongs to Daddy

When my parents were here my father cleaned up our balcony 'garden' and got our tomatoes going. They're the sort of visitors who need to be given tasks or else they'll take over the washing up and put everything away in the wrong place. It was a lovely visit, but I did feel as though I spent four days running interference to prevent them doing the washing up and putting everything away in the wrong place. Unsuccessfully. We're still finding things where they don't belong.

But the tomatoes weren't just busy work; I needed a very belated tutorial. My father is a helluva gardener. When we lived out in the sticks - the proper Canadian swampy tree-y deer-filled bear-roaming granite-strewn sticks, like, the proper Shania-Twain type sticks, the man had trucks of dirt brought in and constructed terraces in our rocky front yard over about half an acre. Single-handedly, as women were not encouraged to garden food in my household, and from memory my brothers tended to be too busy chasing pussy and dropping acid to help out.

His gardens out there were amazing and productive, despite the wild animals that raided them periodically. Same with our house before that, an unexpectedly large suburban corner lot he transformed into a minifundium that could get all six of us a huge chunk of our veg needs; and same, though on a smaller scale, with the house they have now, closer to the lake.

His latest stunt is growing grapes. Okay, they’re Concords, but it is fucking northern Ontario and there are only three fucking months of tolerable warmth a year. The man is a superstar. A superstar who scorns pre-made frames and trellises and paying for help. The visual memory of my childhood is of my father throwing up networks of climbing frames for the tomatoes and beans and peas, made out of big sticks held together with twist ties.

Anyways, I only had to wait until I was 30 to learn from him how to plant tomatoes. And they’re not even tomatoes, they’re tomatilloes, which I’ve never even tried before. But he planted them last Monday and now they’re starting to sprout nicely:

Money for nothing and your cabinets for free

I at least earned the awful back pain I'm enjoying at the moment. On Saturday night, or Sunday morning, around four in the morning, whilst stumbling home quite drunk and very smoked, we saw a cabinet somebody had dumped on the curb that, after refinishing and hinge replacement, would be perfect for putting the plants under our window. We carried it home, and it was either straining myself with that or apparently sleeping on my fucking head or something; now I'm in crashing pain. Oh well. Look (it's nice to be able to post photos again - thank you, beautiful new computer):


That's taken after the F-word did the initial sanding, and hinge replacement on these doors:


Okay, it's not the most beautiful piece of furniture in the world, and while the doors show some nice dovetailing and accents, parts of the body of the unit is made out of pressboard, and it's been chewed on, as far as we could tell while refinishing it. This is the colour we're refinishing it, by the way:

Yep. Pinky-orange. That's because my boyfriend rocks.

I was surprised somebody had dumped something that's cleaning up so nicely, and that in Canada would probably still fetch money. But not very surprised, because people dump nice things on the curb here all the time, especially furniture. We've walked past nicer furniture people had dumped that wasn't going to be appropriate for our flat before. You head to any of the flea markets here, which Brussels are known for, and you realize this place has an inexhaustible stream of pseudo-antiquarian crap. That's what you get for 30 years of wild Congo-raping prosperity at around the turn of the century.

And a couple of weeks ago, we found a curbed Deuter backpack, barely used, that the F-word had priced at north of Euro 90 a couple of months ago. I was sure it would have to be too disgusting to consider taking, like, someone must have died in it or something, or stored rotting food in it, or used it as a very impractical handkerchief. But from what we can tell it had been used to carry two clean pairs of socks and some sunscreen. I did bring it home, and washed the fuck out of it, and was baffled - absolutely no wear and tear or stinkiness or signs of life at all. Why the fuck had it been dumped? I couldn't think of a single reason - except that new models have been coming out in the shops here since January.

I'm happy to have the pretty new travel pack, obviously, especially since I ascribe some of my back grief to the one I've been using for the last 12 years, but to be honest I was sort of pissed off someone had dumped something so quality so quickly after purchasing it. At least they left it on the curb, and not in a pile of garbage where scavengers wouldn't take it. But if this is really the sort of consumption that the functioning of our economic system requires, I'll just happily warm my hands over the nice hot meltdown, please and thank you.

Also pissing me off this weekend was the F-word's computer. It's been dicky, as I mentioned, and we found out awhile ago he needed to replace the hard drive. We took it to the Mac shop in town to find out how much it would cost: Euro 69 for the part, Euro 180 for two hours labour. What? I'd looked at PowerBook Medic during a lull at work a few days previous and there was no way in hell it was going to take someone two hours to pop the fucker open and stick in a new hard drive. Let alone a professional worth Euro 90 a fucking hour.

Not only that, though: the Mac shop lady gave him the perfect sort of sell on a whole new computer: the PowerBook G4 is a million years old, Apple isn't making the other parts for it anymore, you can replace the hard drive but then the next time something breaks down you're fucked; just buy a new one, you know you want to anyways (and he does on a certain level; I mean, this beautiful purring machine I'm typing on now is enough to give the most anti-consumerist young man a hard-on, which is what Apple, that asshole, really flogs in its marketing; how can such a corporate institution manage to maintain this illusion of being above it all? Anyways.).

He was nearly persuaded, and rather down about it all, because he hates spending money as much as I do. But it pissed me off, because he'd gone to the fucking repair shop, not the new fucking computer shop. I persuaded him to just buy the part and see if he could change it himself - he'd only be Euro 69 out of pocket but he stood to save a kabillion times that - and if he can hold off on getting a new computer until the summer I could get one in Canada for about half the price it would run here. And guess what? It took about 10 minutes to change the fucker. And it's working perfectly now. What bullshit. Another illusion Apple has somehow managed to create is that you need to bring their machines to their own magical repair shops to be serviced by an army of experts, but it's coming clear that Apple can't afford an army of mental giants - nobody can - so maybe it's not so hard to do some things oneself.

Anyways. A little frustrating but the F-word is pleased as punch he took care of the problem himself and, for once, being all appreciative of the outcome of my nagging. Ahhhhh. Nothing like a good nag recognized.