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:

Gazpacho Soup Day

After almost three decades of avoiding gazpacho soup, yesterday I had it twice - first from the premium brand, and then from this recipe. Yeah, I know I linked to it yesterday, but I'm linking to it again today, damnit, because it was good. A taste sensation unlike any other I have ever experienced, and yes, it does add a whole new dimension to Almodovar movies. And I had the good fortune to have Gazpacho Soup Day on that rarest of all Bruxellois days - a hot one. Definitely hot weather food.

I confess I hesitated both at lunchtime and at dinner to raise the gazpacho to my lips. I've found a way to love most of my old bugabears - eggplant, beetroot, brussel sprout, spinach, cabbage, zucchini. But there's one bugabear that I have no plans to rid myself of - a lifelong hate, a pathological phobia of ketchup, or catsup, or whatever the fuck you call that shit is that looks like blended bloody diarrhoea. The last time I accidentally put it in my mouth was a couple of years ago in Toronto when we went to a fantastic Tamil place in my darling Cabbagetown, Rashnaa - highly recomended. They brought out French's mustard (can't eat that shit either) swirled together with ketchup to dip our appetizers in, but the lighting was romantic, so not noticing the gross I dipped one of my ulunthu vadals - yeeurgh. I still mourn having to spit out a mouthful of ulunthu vadal. Anyways, I don't know why I hate ketchup and French's mustard and (now that I think about it) relish so much. It's not the snotty guinea in me because my clan uses that crap at barbeques. Probably more to do with societal distrust issues - I can't eat anything with a texture that fucking gross and scatologic if some corner-cutting company made it. God knows what they'd have put into it. Ugh. Does. Not. Bear. Thinking. About.

So I hesitated to try the gazpacho both in the afternoon and evening yesterday because it was processed tomato served cold, reminding me vaguely of ketchup or Bloody Marys, which I've always considered a shocking waste of cold crisp vodka taste. But I got over it and I'm glad I did. I recommend the pants off gazpacho in terms of helping you get through the heat of the summer, if you're lucky enough to have any.

Further notes on my vacation

Despite Paris making me feel like a revolting little cockroach, obviously my feelings about it are mixed as you can tell by past posts. Our brief stay there Sunday/Monday, at Carmen's sans Carmen again, who was working nights, was unpleasant; I was riding the dragon, exhausted, sad to have left Barcelona, pissed off that I'd purchased the wrong Thalys ticket to get back to Brussels, and oh yes, experiencing constant false sightings of Bluebeard. That does not seem to have slowed down with age. The strength of the nervous paranoia inspired by the idea of him greatly exceeds any pain the man himself is likely to inflict on me, especially considering that we contrived to be something like civil in our last communiqués.

It seems I've managed to compress and squeeze a lot of my neuroses and guilt issues - because there is some me-guilt involved, and not just that ridiculous, conceited guilt of the Heartbreaker ('how oh how dared I be so very lovable!') - into the physical boundaries of the city that saw the worst years of my life to date. Is that a reasonable strategy to use to deal? Probably not. And certainly not, when I spend bits of my vacation there.

Luckily, however, it seems that the neuroses and the guilt issues are centre-ville-ers, and when we spent a few days with Mlle Pariyorker in her new digs in the swanky western suburbs in between time in Amsterdam and time in Barcelona, they did not get on the RER and follow me out. Mlle Pariyorker has stumbled onto a good pasture. Her new place is about four times the size of her abandoned marital apartment and half the price, for one; her professional prospects are singin' along, for two; she has her own substantial garden and barbeque now, for three; and her new man is a fucking brilliant cook, for four. And the important thing is that she seems much, much happier.

Do I think she dealt with her former situation with all the wisdom in the world? If I consider her actions, they were fine, even her only choice in the circumstances - it was her explanations that made me angry, and I don't know if she was being completely honest with herself in those explanations. Sometimes people'd rather look like a bastard than look like a patsy, and will take steps to do so even if the risk of looking like a patsy isn't that high. Oh, Pride, you naughty naughty Mortal Sin. Our capacity for it probably has some evolutionary advantages, but all the same I think the world would be a vastly better place if we chose just one day a year - say, Kwanzaa - when we strove to be humble. Or we could all take turns.

Anyhoo. We mostly stayed in the far west suburbs having a great time, and touristically we visited not only the Chateau's gardens and my absolute favourite thing, the Hameau de la Reine (god, that poor idiot Marie Antoinette - how women were the slaves of their circumstances back then, no matter what class they belonged to!), but also the vegetable garden of the King, which I think went up under Louis XIV. It's close to the Chateau and well worth a visit, as is the attached shop where the sell produce from said garden.

As far as agricultural techniques go, it's not anachronistic, or rather it is extremely anachronistic, in the sense that it looks like Louis XIV's garden but is pumped up like crazy on the modern plant 'roids. But it's very beautiful, particularly the clever way they get the pears and apples to grow on trellises, which the F-word and I resolved we'd try out when we become property owners. I liked the look of them but I think the F-word was more enchanted by how much easier it would be to pick the fruit than it had been in his early youth, when he had to scale ladders and reach under the heat of the southern Australia sun. Pictures to follow - though not of the F-word under the hot Australian sun - that's strictly for my fantasy file.

She's back, and this time, she's rested

It would be a big lie to say I'm happy to be back, but we had the good fortune to spend a night in Paris on the way home, so at least I'm happy to be in Brussels, which for all its imperfections is not and never will be Paris. Thank god. I'm not necessarily opposed to big cities, but I suppose because of my history there Paris makes me feel like a cockroach struggling through a pile of cockroaches. If we had gone straight from Barcelona to Brussels, it would have been torture. Like 90% of the adult population that's visited, I fell deeply in love with it - swallowed every one of its clichés hook, line and sinker and was hungry for more.

There were a lot of things I loved about it, but especially I fell in love with Gaudi, that beautiful batshit crazy man. Up at the Park Güell, I had a little cry as we gazed over the magic-mushroom-and-crucifix-ornamented houses to the city beyond. I think I was upset that the whole world couldn't live in Barcelona, or maybe that every city in the world didn't have an architect like Gaudi in it who could make such lovely spaces with such commonplace materials. There's just something so friendly about what he built - so welcoming and so sympathetic - that I couldn't believe it. Really called to mind that other batshit crazy man who I love, Hundertwasser. Though I suppose Hundertwasser didn't have Gaudi's sense of structure, and Gaudi didn't have Hundertwasser's sense of nonsense.

I know there's a cost factor involved, but it made me hate most modern designers and architects for their apparent inability to build things the people who use them find pleasant. Catalan modernists had an aesthetic humanity, or humility - they didn't seem to want to seem clever so much as massage your tired eyeballs, and cater to your need for something beautiful to look at. Domenech too - we couldn't believe our happy eyes when we saw the Saint Pau hospital. And as Robert Hughes wrote, unlike Sagrada Familia, that was finished in the architect's lifetime, and has done and will do far more good for the people of Barcelona than Sagrada Familia is ever likely to. Sagrada Familia is a can't miss, though . . . it's fascinating to see the work being carried out before you, and a real bafflement to try to figure out how the fuck it has been permitted to install some of the things that have been installed since Gaudi's death.

By the way, I sincerely recommend the Robert Hughes book I was going on about before I left, whether you intend to go to Barcelona or not - it's a great read. But if you do intend to go to Barcelona it's indispensable - like having a clever, sarcastic, enthusiastic friend whispering in your ear as you go from place to place. And he goes on about Gaudi better than I could. But there was one thing I wanted to mention that Gaudi did, to help him get those strange angles that make his arches and elements look weirdly alive - catenary string models. He would hang weighted arcs of string, appropriately connected to each other, photograph the intricate result and turn the photo upside down to get an approximation of what he could do to a roof that would allow it to bear its own weight. Fucking - fucking - genius. Pictures to follow.

The ghost of Red Dragons past

Now that I'm free of the Cantor I have moved on to fiction again. Two new-to-me writers, which is exciting, especially since one of them has already been a revelation, that one being Charles Dickens. Found a copy of A Christmas Carol for 50 cents in the junk shop, so despite it being approximately the opposite of Christmas I snapped it up and read it. I'd been hesitant to dip my toes into the Charles because of my awareness he was one of those 'paid by the word' writers, and I'd feared getting bogged down in the wordiness of it all, but I'd meant to start reading his work for some time after I'd got bogged down by Gaskell's wordy, wordy North and South that meandered and meandered and finally wrapped up lickety-split - and still enjoyed it a lot.

I'll now find and read one of his monster novels without further procrastination because A Christmas Carol was absolutely delightful. And the wordiness, the meandering passages, were much more charming, illustrative and illuminating than anything in North and South or, for that matter, Gone With the Wind - another lovable monster. Also, A Christmas Carol made me weep like a baby - well, rather more quietly. Wikipedia says that my number one lady Virginia Woolf found his novels overly sentimental, but much as I love the Woolf I'm not going to take advice on what sort of sentiments I should be consuming from a lady who lined her pockets with rocks and chucked herself in a river, no matter how well-written her suicide note was.

Also I think it's a nasty way to do yourself in because of the state of your body when they find it. Someone who I cared very much about - one of those fulcrum people whose influence changed the entire course of my life - decided for reasons I can respect, if not understand (thank God), that his own life was no longer worth continuing. So he went out onto a large lake on a canoe, and shot himself in the head. He'd left a note but it still took awhile to find his remains. That plays on me - that it had a hole in its head, and that it took so long to find it. I can't imagine how it plays on his family. It's a horrible, merciless, confining thing, in a way, but I think we have a duty to each other, to try not to do things to ourselves that will play on the people who love us. In that sense, no one is free and no one should be free.

Anyways. Also reading Ulysses. Only got through the first 50 pages or so of roughly one million, so far too early to make any judgements, except I have, of course: it's an incredibly boy book. As mentioned I like the occasional boy book, but can I handle roughly one million pages of boy? Time will tell. So far I'm enjoying it enough to keep going.

Why I love the Independent

Though I still look at the Guardian when I'm trying to figure out how many massive piles of money I should be paid for taking my stunning professional self to Australia someday (their job site is the best around), I'm pleased to have switched to the Independent. The news is timely enough, and while the op-ed pieces are still pretty annoying, at least they're written above a third grade level and don't all have something to do with American actresses and celebutantes.

But what really pleased me about the Independent yesterday was an op-ed piece masquerading as an album review, or vice-versa: this vicious, delicious condemnation of Coldplay. Okay - not the hardest target in the world. But this is a message that needs to be put out there again and again until children stop getting hooked on that shit. And then reading the comments section - an activity I try to avoid, and one I chide the F-word for as he has a propensity to do it in the right-wing Australian press and then get upset about what the world is coming to - was hilarious. I know music critics must get a lot of hate for hating on what millions of people love, and I know half the comments were probably written by 12 year olds or people with the sort of hormonal disorders that will let them be:

A) Coldplay fans
B) masochistic enough to read an article entitled 'Why I Hate Coldplay'

but I could not stop giggling at them, imagining upset grown men furtively hunkered over their work computer in some grey British cubicle, writing that a professional music critic hated Coldplay because he was jealous of their success and insisting that 30 million people can't be wrong. (They can.)

So, as you can perhaps tell I hate Coldplay too. And I can't simply ignore that hate, as I ignore most of my hates, because years and years ago a guy put on their first album while I was being intimate with him and I was too polite in those days to ask him to turn that shit off. Talk about a fucking moodkiller. I felt like we were being voyeured by a mentally defective pervert who was moaning even louder than the guy I was intimatizing. A mentally defective moaning pervert who couldn't change key. It was awful. If dementia ever comes it will be bloody horrible, but with any luck at all that will be one of the first memories to go.