Holy shit . . . if this works, I'm about to have a dressmaker's dummy. Sweet. Sweet. Sweeeeet.
The Mater is coming to visit this afternoon for the weekend, on her way to good old Perfidious Albion. I'm pleased, but our apartment is absolutely filthy. You know, in recent weeks I've been thinking about my family and considering the possibility of blaming them more for my problems. This is something the F-word rides me for occasionally - thinking everything in the world is my fault, which he feels is unhelpful and a form of rampant, unfun egoism. I blame the Mater for that becase she does the same thing. Hah! Success. Also I'm going to blame them for my being a pig, and for the apartment not being clean enough for her visit. Hah! Double success.
I could get used to nothing being my fault . . .
In other news, my favourite Australian show, the Chaser's War on Everything, has been pulled off the air for two weeks due to a particularly tasteless sketch about dying children. I agree that it wasn't awfully funny or topical, rather amateurish actually - except for the Zac Efron part, which had me galumphing with laughter. Judge for yourself:
This is from the same men who showed me why I have to move to Australia: their nationally funded channel (their equivalent of the BBC) paid Craig Reucassel to say "Australia . . . it shits all over everywhere else" to tourists.
venerdì, giugno 05, 2009
mercoledì, giugno 03, 2009
Don't ask any questions
This is the best thing in the world. I feel sorry for children who didn't have Sesame Street.
I guess they had good shit in Britain too, but only Sesame Street is Sesame Street. Who else ever combined black marketeering and illustrating the difference between O's close-mid back rounded sound and the open back rounded sound? In one brief song, they teach you how to speak, spell, and traffic. Three of the most useful things in the world.
I think about that sometimes, you know. With the economic climate being what it is at the moment, with me living on a continent where organized crime has such massive economic dominance. How long before the black market becomes not only dominant, but indispensable? How long before credit problems cause production to slip below consumption, or seem to? My guess is that when taxes are hiked like crazy to pay off the extra-big deficits major governments are running up at the moment as they go a little bail-out crazy, it's going to blossom like a flower. Like in the post-war period here. My guess is that governments will make an effort - a more politically acceptable effort - to recoup their losses by taxing corporations more carefully, and well they should. And then the price of everything will go up - and people will realize they can run an economy more cheaply by themselves, selling things back and forth in cash - and manufacturers will tear a page out of the tobacco companies' books, and find clever and illegal ways to sell things off-book.
It will be a new golden age of crime. But instead of the golden age that just ended - where company management was able to persuade shareholders to pay them massive bribes for just not leaving or breaking confidentiality, when we lived in a blackmail economy; when products were unsafe, poorly regulated and irresponsibly flogged for the sake of share price and government complicity - it will be scroungy and dangerous in a different way, which is much more visibly annoying, especially to a population already rightly fed up to the teeth with manufacturers. And then when people get annoyed enough, the strong men will come, and after them - if there is an "after them" in the nuclear age - what? Perhaps a new, stupid, sickening version of freedom which is actually just a relaxation of any regulatory financial law - just a big corporate free-for-all that rewards utter incompetence as long as it has an MBA, like what has just imploded.
You read it here first. Now do you understand why I want to move to an isolated commune in Australia? Hopefully we can choose the right strong men.
Would you like to buy an O, round and neat . . . a nearly perfect circle, tidy and complete?
I guess they had good shit in Britain too, but only Sesame Street is Sesame Street. Who else ever combined black marketeering and illustrating the difference between O's close-mid back rounded sound and the open back rounded sound? In one brief song, they teach you how to speak, spell, and traffic. Three of the most useful things in the world.
I think about that sometimes, you know. With the economic climate being what it is at the moment, with me living on a continent where organized crime has such massive economic dominance. How long before the black market becomes not only dominant, but indispensable? How long before credit problems cause production to slip below consumption, or seem to? My guess is that when taxes are hiked like crazy to pay off the extra-big deficits major governments are running up at the moment as they go a little bail-out crazy, it's going to blossom like a flower. Like in the post-war period here. My guess is that governments will make an effort - a more politically acceptable effort - to recoup their losses by taxing corporations more carefully, and well they should. And then the price of everything will go up - and people will realize they can run an economy more cheaply by themselves, selling things back and forth in cash - and manufacturers will tear a page out of the tobacco companies' books, and find clever and illegal ways to sell things off-book.
It will be a new golden age of crime. But instead of the golden age that just ended - where company management was able to persuade shareholders to pay them massive bribes for just not leaving or breaking confidentiality, when we lived in a blackmail economy; when products were unsafe, poorly regulated and irresponsibly flogged for the sake of share price and government complicity - it will be scroungy and dangerous in a different way, which is much more visibly annoying, especially to a population already rightly fed up to the teeth with manufacturers. And then when people get annoyed enough, the strong men will come, and after them - if there is an "after them" in the nuclear age - what? Perhaps a new, stupid, sickening version of freedom which is actually just a relaxation of any regulatory financial law - just a big corporate free-for-all that rewards utter incompetence as long as it has an MBA, like what has just imploded.
You read it here first. Now do you understand why I want to move to an isolated commune in Australia? Hopefully we can choose the right strong men.
Would you like to buy an O, round and neat . . . a nearly perfect circle, tidy and complete?
martedì, giugno 02, 2009
It smokes, it drinks, it philosophizes . . .
Old impending-doomy feeling is back. I don't know if it was that Air France thing, which is basically an example of my worst or strongest nightmare, or all the film noir we've been watching or the fact that the weather has been encouraging the idea in me that it is summer, but I'm perpetually incapable of carpe dieming and thus am living in fear the sun will once more be snatched away from me and leave me as summerless as I've been since leaving Canada. The idea of Australia in the circumstances is a little like heaven; I don't know anything about it except that where we're thinking of is as warm in the winter as it is here now, and that's enough to make up my mind for me.
Summer. Could it really be summer?
Watched a really funny movie last night: Beat the Devil, that Truman Capote participated in writing. A few real laugh-out-loud moments. The bit where O'Hara offered a critique of Maria Dannreuther's portrait had us howling and quoting at each other all night, trying to get that creepy, crawly Ren-from-Ren-and-Stimpy voice down. Some great characters and performances, but I wonder how Truman Capote was with writing women. The lead blonde may as well have been Holly Golightly airdropped in from Manhattan. Maria Dannreuther was fine, though, and all of the men characters were great. Rather funny to see Humphrey Bogart being funny - funnier than in The African Queen.
Summer. Could it really be summer?
Watched a really funny movie last night: Beat the Devil, that Truman Capote participated in writing. A few real laugh-out-loud moments. The bit where O'Hara offered a critique of Maria Dannreuther's portrait had us howling and quoting at each other all night, trying to get that creepy, crawly Ren-from-Ren-and-Stimpy voice down. Some great characters and performances, but I wonder how Truman Capote was with writing women. The lead blonde may as well have been Holly Golightly airdropped in from Manhattan. Maria Dannreuther was fine, though, and all of the men characters were great. Rather funny to see Humphrey Bogart being funny - funnier than in The African Queen.
lunedì, giugno 01, 2009
They make it so easy
I won't lie to you. Another reason La New Yorkaise and I are such good buddies is that we both understand what it's like to live in Paris. The difference is I was out of that place in about 3.1 years, departing definitively (the thesis defense, the odd visit aside) roughly three hours after my final exam - drunk off my tits and weeping with relief in Canada about ten hours later. And she - she got married to a local. Now I'm as I am - you can make up your mind about the degree of sanity I'm in possession of - and that poor girl, who's got another year to go on top of her 7.5, is both auto and medically medicating like crazy to keep it together. I think she's coming through it all quite well, considering I'd have gone on a killing spree by now if I was her. But she'll be fixing the damage for years to come.
Now obviously, la New Yorkaise is a city mouse, and though I grew up in the middle of nowhere I made the transition to London and then a bunch of other great big cities when I was eighteen. She is not a yokel, and as hard as I try, I'm not either. We understand big cities. We understand people are stressed there, there to work, maybe thinking transitory thoughts; things are rarely as clean or safe as they should be, once you cross the European Teutonic lines, and all in all there are some challenges. But Paris is special. Paris is a city full of locals who are unremittingly negative, and have been since they were children. Paris is a city where the people who save their tears for their pillows are the cheerful ones. Paris is a place where locals get their jollies from shitting all over everything else. It is the European post-colonial city; the population has been frozen into pride by the glories of its past, to the degree it has to frown on cultural innovations from its former rivals and from its former colonies, but also cornered by the cold economic realities of its present, which in many ways are the bleakest I've ever seen - you could make a good argument for Italian cities having bleaker economic realities, but at least people give each other compliments there. What little joy going through that repellent school system leaves an individual is ground out of your typical Parisian by their dysfunctional gender relations. It is an unpleasant place.
A mere five years on from my departure and the only people I'm still in touch with from that 3.1 years of my life are other foreigners who are living or who still live there, and a few French from other parts of the country, and I'm glad. There are a few Parisians I feel, sometimes, that I should like to see and talk to again, but any time I think I may be starting to miss them, my mind clicks forward and shows me how suffocating, negative and depressing the conversations will go. It's sad.
I understand these days better than I ever have that France isn't Paris - that people in and from the south, especially, are beautifully warm and enthusiastic, while still maintaining a strong edge of bluntness. The problem is that the French government is absolutely centralized in Paris, and French politicians tend to be educated in Paris, every time those fucking cockwanks make goddamn assholes of themselves, it's classic Parisian bullshit. Toady up to whoever's most powerful like a fucking whore, and minimize or forget the contribution of everybody else.
You know, best of luck to Obama with that international nuclear disarmament initiative. But this morning, I'm sort of glad to know that if we ever do have another world war, the capital of France will be obliterated in a nuclear holocaust long before the young men from my country are even thinking about being called upon to descend on the country's northern beaches and die in their thousands. Those fucking grande ecole-educated masturbators are so far up their own stinking shit-chutes that they'd try once more to forget it within a generation. The willful ignorance of people educated so intensively and expensively is truly vomit-worthy. Fuck'em.
Now obviously, la New Yorkaise is a city mouse, and though I grew up in the middle of nowhere I made the transition to London and then a bunch of other great big cities when I was eighteen. She is not a yokel, and as hard as I try, I'm not either. We understand big cities. We understand people are stressed there, there to work, maybe thinking transitory thoughts; things are rarely as clean or safe as they should be, once you cross the European Teutonic lines, and all in all there are some challenges. But Paris is special. Paris is a city full of locals who are unremittingly negative, and have been since they were children. Paris is a city where the people who save their tears for their pillows are the cheerful ones. Paris is a place where locals get their jollies from shitting all over everything else. It is the European post-colonial city; the population has been frozen into pride by the glories of its past, to the degree it has to frown on cultural innovations from its former rivals and from its former colonies, but also cornered by the cold economic realities of its present, which in many ways are the bleakest I've ever seen - you could make a good argument for Italian cities having bleaker economic realities, but at least people give each other compliments there. What little joy going through that repellent school system leaves an individual is ground out of your typical Parisian by their dysfunctional gender relations. It is an unpleasant place.
A mere five years on from my departure and the only people I'm still in touch with from that 3.1 years of my life are other foreigners who are living or who still live there, and a few French from other parts of the country, and I'm glad. There are a few Parisians I feel, sometimes, that I should like to see and talk to again, but any time I think I may be starting to miss them, my mind clicks forward and shows me how suffocating, negative and depressing the conversations will go. It's sad.
I understand these days better than I ever have that France isn't Paris - that people in and from the south, especially, are beautifully warm and enthusiastic, while still maintaining a strong edge of bluntness. The problem is that the French government is absolutely centralized in Paris, and French politicians tend to be educated in Paris, every time those fucking cockwanks make goddamn assholes of themselves, it's classic Parisian bullshit. Toady up to whoever's most powerful like a fucking whore, and minimize or forget the contribution of everybody else.
You know, best of luck to Obama with that international nuclear disarmament initiative. But this morning, I'm sort of glad to know that if we ever do have another world war, the capital of France will be obliterated in a nuclear holocaust long before the young men from my country are even thinking about being called upon to descend on the country's northern beaches and die in their thousands. Those fucking grande ecole-educated masturbators are so far up their own stinking shit-chutes that they'd try once more to forget it within a generation. The willful ignorance of people educated so intensively and expensively is truly vomit-worthy. Fuck'em.
domenica, maggio 31, 2009
With a comical look on his face
I had a nice weekend with La New Yorkaise visiting, and truly buried the reefer wagon with a trip to warm, sunny Maastricht. The sun was shining and I was high and cheerful the whole time. We watched The Great Escape again early Sunday morning and I liked it even better the second time - and part of the reason La New Yorkaise and I are such close buddies is because of things like both understanding Charles Bronson was one of the most magnificent pieces of ass to walk the earth; a fact bizarrely lost on most women these days. In hot relief in The Great Escape; wifebeater, long underwear, emotional vulnerability and lots of dirt. Sweet. Throw me over your horsy's saddle and take me away from all this, you beautiful Tatar man. The rowboat also works for the fantasy file.
My point is that nice as a weekend as it was, now it all feels like it was leading up to last night, returning here after getting La New Yorkaise on the TGV back to Paris, curling up with the F-word, and watching Casablanca for the first time. I'd insisted we give it a watch, not because I expected it to be stupendous, but because it's such a big cultural reference point, and it was a hole in our education, that we'd seen dozens of things spoofing off it but never the it itself.
Holy shit. That's the best movie ever.
The storyline had me weeping like a tile, and you may put that down to my femininity if you like. But you'd be foolish, because aside from all the lovey-doveyness it was well evocative of a city full of desperate people, and absolutely absorbing - absolutely good. The writing was just jaw-dropping and those lines that people refer to ad nauseum are referred to ad nauseum for a reason. In context they're fucking brilliant. For me the best one was when Ilsa came back to the bar the first time when Rick was drunk and he got pissy with her. That has to be the greatest sequence of pissiness ever captured on celluloid. "Or aren't you the kind that tells?" Oh, sweet.
And the look, the noir and all those shadows and all those great shots, right from the pan into Sam leaning back and singing to everybody - it looked so good. The actors looked so good. Humphrey Bogart, that piece of battered driftwood, was perfect for Rick, and Ingrid Bergman was scrumptiously beautiful. The F-word pointed out what La New Yorkaise and I had been discussing that morning in reference to Charles Bronson - her face isn't vapid enough for her to be a famous beauty now. She had a big nose and strong features and a funny face shape, and while it all came together into this really remarkable and flawless beauty - that incredibly Scandinavian beauty - it would perhaps be much harder for her to get proper professional recognition for that perfect beauty now.
Scarlett Johansson, the Swede currently massaging the dreams of a generation of young men with that lovely rack, has such a docile little girly face, and even the notoriously beautiful Anglo actresses who aren't white and should be subject to different measurements of loveliness - Frieda Pinto, Halle Berry, for examples - all have butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth chewing gum commercial, boring boring girly faces. The only interestingly beautiful faces I can think of in American movies come from Spain or Latin America - Javier Bardem, Benecio del Toro or something, and Salma Hayek - now those are some real faces. I guess there's hope yet.
My point is that nice as a weekend as it was, now it all feels like it was leading up to last night, returning here after getting La New Yorkaise on the TGV back to Paris, curling up with the F-word, and watching Casablanca for the first time. I'd insisted we give it a watch, not because I expected it to be stupendous, but because it's such a big cultural reference point, and it was a hole in our education, that we'd seen dozens of things spoofing off it but never the it itself.
Holy shit. That's the best movie ever.
The storyline had me weeping like a tile, and you may put that down to my femininity if you like. But you'd be foolish, because aside from all the lovey-doveyness it was well evocative of a city full of desperate people, and absolutely absorbing - absolutely good. The writing was just jaw-dropping and those lines that people refer to ad nauseum are referred to ad nauseum for a reason. In context they're fucking brilliant. For me the best one was when Ilsa came back to the bar the first time when Rick was drunk and he got pissy with her. That has to be the greatest sequence of pissiness ever captured on celluloid. "Or aren't you the kind that tells?" Oh, sweet.
And the look, the noir and all those shadows and all those great shots, right from the pan into Sam leaning back and singing to everybody - it looked so good. The actors looked so good. Humphrey Bogart, that piece of battered driftwood, was perfect for Rick, and Ingrid Bergman was scrumptiously beautiful. The F-word pointed out what La New Yorkaise and I had been discussing that morning in reference to Charles Bronson - her face isn't vapid enough for her to be a famous beauty now. She had a big nose and strong features and a funny face shape, and while it all came together into this really remarkable and flawless beauty - that incredibly Scandinavian beauty - it would perhaps be much harder for her to get proper professional recognition for that perfect beauty now.
Scarlett Johansson, the Swede currently massaging the dreams of a generation of young men with that lovely rack, has such a docile little girly face, and even the notoriously beautiful Anglo actresses who aren't white and should be subject to different measurements of loveliness - Frieda Pinto, Halle Berry, for examples - all have butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth chewing gum commercial, boring boring girly faces. The only interestingly beautiful faces I can think of in American movies come from Spain or Latin America - Javier Bardem, Benecio del Toro or something, and Salma Hayek - now those are some real faces. I guess there's hope yet.
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