Mon amour l'intertoile

Internet, I love you. Without you . . . I'd be a fuck sight poorer. I think in my whole life I've had a cumulative 8 months of employment that I didn't somehow owe to the internet, and now it lets me work from my rainforest home, and on top of that, a five-minute Google told me how to break my lease yet keep my deposit despite NSW's rather harsh tenancy laws. It is so awesome, what the internet lets me do. Lovely, lovely internet.

Reading Montaigne's essays and remembering why I stopped reading them in the past. There is a lot to enjoy if you ignore the 80% of it that's repellent, which is true of metropolitan French bourgeois culture in general. Coinciding nicely with all of the holy-shit-it's-a-setup hue-and-cry out of France about DSK trying to rape that hotel maid - the sort of hue-and-cry that reminds you why French champagne socialists have become politically redundant to the point where I can understand how it makes far more sense for normal people to be voting either for Europe Ecologie or the Le Pen dynasty (hurrah! and whah? respectively as far as I'm concerned) instead. Besides the trauma of that poor woman, bring the shitstorm on, I say - I can't wait to see the right and left establishment both get their out-of-touch asses kicked in the next election - I just hope that the Le Pen dynasty doesn't come out where I expect it (on top).

I was a hotel maid for about two weeks once. If somebody had tried that on me I'd have killed him. I'd have had all the cleaning supplies necessary to conceal the crime . . .

Pastiche ma biche

I've been a big fan of Benjamin Biolay, although haven't listened to him that often since the F-word moved in, because the music makes me very melancholy, which is all very good when I can hang around mopingly by myself getting high like a Curehead with Peter Pan syndrome, and not so hot when I'm trying to maintain an adult relationship. But one day I was PMSing and all pissed off anyways, so I was listening to Rose Kennedy, and the F-word pointed out that "Les cerfs-volants" was basically "My Way". I shrugged. Must be a tribute, right? Everybody knows "My Way" (even if French people like to pretend what they actually know is "Comme d'habitude"). That'd be like plagiarising "Happy" Fucking "Birthday", I mean Sid Vicious sang it for fuck's sake.





Then his new album La Superbe came out, got an avalanche of good reviews, and won a bunch of Césars or whatever the hell the French call their version of the Grammys, and I ignored it, because I'd made the mistake of reading some interviews with the man before listening to it and he came off as the worst kind of champagne socialist , of a kind that isn't even produced outside of France. Not even Guarniad readers come up to this standard. It's the sort of thing where you can arrange the strings on a Carla Bruni album while releasing a song about how you'd like to eject her husband from elected office (which Biolay has done).

And then yesterday I was hopping back on the PMS wagon and had a tonne of brainless administrative things to catch up on at the office, so I finally gave La Superbe a listen and sure enough it seemed pretty awesome. Typically lovely instrumental arrangements and typically broody lyrics, maybe a little too self-consciously melancholic for me at this point in my reasonably self-actualized psychological existence despite the PMS, but I was getting into it.

However, then it started sinking in:

"Prenons le large" - "Don't you forget about me"
"Tout ca me tourmente" - A bunch of Goldfrapp
"Padam" - "Wonderful Life"

And oh my fuck, the whole thing is Disintegration with instruments instead of synthesizers.

I could go on. The whole double album sounded like a beautifully arranged pastiche of my childhood and adolescence. Which was half good and half aspartame. Finally I had a quick google to see if anyone else was picking up on it. All I found was pissed off Morrissey fans who didn't like that "La Superbe" sampled the same bit of Shostakovich that "Teachers Are Afraid of Pupils" sampled, which didn't do much except confirm me in my belief that Morrissey fans need to stop drinking the fucking koolaid, it's Shostakovich for shit's sake, and at least Biolay gave it the dignity inherent in strings instead of bastardizing it with synthesizers. God, Morrissey's a fucking prick. "I know," he must have thought, "let's take some lovely Shostakovich and put it to synthesizers, because I'm not a big enough prick yet." Prick, man.

And on top of that, while I'm in a critical mood and bringing it back to Benjamin Biolay, may I just say now, any pop star who's going to have a hissy fit about how much it sucks when you love a girl and she loves you and you're having lots of great sex and it all rocks and then she gets pregnant and then everything goes to shit - just shut the fuck up, okay? Write a fucking instrumental instead. Nobody's interested. Except your poor fucking kid. God, Benjamin Biolay sucks.

But I'll give La Superbe a chance to grow on me. Maybe I've been spoiled with a heavy diet, when it comes to new music, of Nick Cave and Tom Waits (the only two white guys upon whom the F-word and I see eye to eye, and hence who are on heavy rotation) being middle aged monkeys who don't give a toss so they may as well try writing something no one else has written before. And while La Superbe may be a pastiche of the music of my childhood and adolescence, there's no doubt it's a beautifully arranged pastiche, and that's worth more than a little in this increasingly ugly world. However that feels rather exploitative at the moment too. At the point in his career where Biolay would have to count on aging Cureheads giving up their fascination with him as an attractive tubercular-Heathcliff-as-composer archetype, because we've all had adult relationships or psychoanalysis or both by now, he writes super-pretty pastiches of the songs of our childhood and adolescence and draws us back into the income-spending segment. Well, tough. It's nice but you'll get no money from me. I'm cheap as a teetotaller Scotsman and I've found Grooveshark.

Also - in all honesty, I think Owen Pallett has ruined me for other musically sensitive types with unexciting voices. His songs are all about more interesting things than that mopy gallic je-t'aime-moi-non-plus-who-to-kill-first-me-or-you shit and his arrangements, if often less pretty than Biolay's, are way more interesting and stay with me way longer. Here's the Final Fantasy song that's been stuck in my head for about a week:

The director maintained that Geimer was sexually experienced and consented

I wonder if I'd have more sympathy for that kiddy fiddling frog if I liked his shitty movies any better, but even Chinatown left me cold. I'm pretty fond of Charlie Chaplin, after all, who also ditched the States for Europe after banging teenagers. Somehow it doesn't seem like the same thing though. Call me naive but I believe Chaplin's kiddy-fiddling ways never ran to acting like he was the victim of a Lolita and a puritan conspiracy when he got into trouble for giving a thirteen year old Qualudes, stuffing his cock into all of her orifices while she told him not to, and then running off to Europe because he didn't know what the big fucking deal was after he'd told the law, yeah, sure, he'd done it, and what's more the girl hadn't been unresponsive. Damn those Yankee prudes!

But it's alright, Hollywood types are flocking to his defence, using big words like "philistine collusion" that I'm pretty sure they're not aware of the actual literal meaning of, because let's face it - actors aren't paid to not be absolute fucking morons who don't know when to shut up, which is part of what makes the US's cultural and political dialogue so fucking simple-minded. And the French government is leaping in too; why should one of their more successful citizens be thrown to the lions because of ancient history? Sadly the cinematic tastes of the French cultural elite don't outweigh the 'scary' way California doesn't have a statute of limitations on skipping the country when you've pled guilty to drugging and raping a 13-year-old. God, I hate the French political class. Fucking chinless misogynistic dysfunctional emasculated elitist losers.

Have these semi-literate fucktards actually sat through Bitter Moon? The mediocre little turd should have been locked up for that moronic waste of the time/space continuum alone. Only in a culturally impotent vaccuum like western Europe could a man who managed to make sado-masochism gloomy, stupid AND boring get any cultural traction, certainly enough for national ministers to have a little hissy fit when he gets arrested for kiddy-fiddling. Hyperbole aside, just tell me what other culture he could have managed that in. You can't because there fucking isn't one. Fucking hell.

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.

Everything's gonna be alright

Buttermilk is awesome. I love the pants off it and it has given me back my love of baking, previously just for girls. A cup and a half of buttermilk makes things taste as yummy as a cup and a half of cream with a quarter of the fat, three times the digestibility, and an extra lovely piquancy - a sort of tamed sourness. To us woppy types, good food is all about digestibility. We talk about the progress of various dishes through our innards and bowels the way the British talk about the weather. To me that seems quite natural. Sure, something can taste like Heaven-on-a-stick, but if a few hours later you're bloated like a beached whale in the sun and wondering if you'll ever take a shit again, it's got to play in to your opinion towards that dish, the same way texture or taste or appearance does. Because blockages, as Screamin' Jay says, are real pain.



If Iron Chef was serious about quality, they'd do a time lapse and get the judges' opinions next day, after they'd attempted their morning evacuations. And the digestibility issue is yet another reason I despise those French people who insult Italian cuisine, which they sneer is 'too simple'. Northern French cuisine is certainly much more complicated, and indigestible into the bargain. Their desserts are indigestible. Their sauces are indigestible. Their pastries are indigestible. Their breads are indigestible. I really don't like it, and while it may seem crude to point out that their cuisine makes taking a shit more difficult, I think it's fundamentally less crude than half the city of Paris walking around in a constipated rage, which I think explains why Parisians are so famous for being such fundamentally unpleasant people.

Anyways, buttermilk products progress through the innards and bowels beautifully. Top marks. And using it has helped me arrive at what I feel is the perfect clafouti recipe, in that it's easy, delicious and digestible. A real woppy bastardization of a French cream-laden intestine-blocking classic.

3 eggs
pinch salt
3 tablespoons honey
1 1/4 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup flour
1 to 2 cups fruit

Grease a 10 inch or thereabouts deepish pie plate, and pre-heat oven to gas mark 3 (or, you know, just low heat). Prepare fruit by peeling it, coring it, etc. The traditional clafouti fruit is cherries, but really you can use whatever fruit you like here - I've used bananas, mangos, apples, nectarines, basically any starchy fruit - and dicing it into smallish chunks. My favourites are with blueberries or blackberries or cherries, and that's even easier because they don't need dicing, besides the stoning of the cherries, though purists say you shouldn't. Weirdos. Anyhoo. This isn't a purist recipe. This is a digestible recipe. Once the fruit is prepared cover the bottom of the greased baking dish with it.

Beat eggs, then beat in salt, honey, buttermilk, and flour progressively. At this point you can also add a touch of extra flavour you feel compliments the fruit you've chosen; cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla - consult your taste. Pour the batter over the fruit in the baking pan, and pop it into the pre-warmed oven, leaving it there for half an hour or so, or until it isn't runny in the middle when you poke it with a fork - you want moist but not runny - a firm custardy sort of texture. And then it's done. Easy peasy.

Initials, initials, initials wtf????

You know something about girls from the north of France? They're fucking insane. I still have good friends from those years in Paris I was writing about last week. Only one of them, recently, has been a real live northern French girl. Maybe I was phenomenally unlucky in who I got to know, but they're so high maintenance – they give new fucking meaning to the term. Even the hippies, even the career women, even the academics. Jealous, obsessive, bitter, needy – and that's to other women.

When it comes to men, it's that times infinity, and I've seen them note what sort of credit cards their prospective mates use in the same the way mentally healthy women note how pert his ass is or how kind he is. There's a reason even fucking ugly men from the north of France manage to pull beautiful tourists so consistently; they're trained to be so browbeaten and miserable by their women that when a halfway normal chick comes into their lives it's like they're born again. And being the cause of someone's renaissance is irresistible, of course. I have no doubt that's why they fuck around like sparrows - must be a perpetual, desperate instinct that there's a relationship less soul-crushing out there. It's an unhealthy societal gender dynamic altogether, like so many societal gender dynamics are, but northern France is the only society wherein I blame the women.

Anyways, the worst thing about chicks from northern France is that when you have a quarrel, they accept your apology when you haven't made one. I hate that. There's nothing better calculated to get my goat that doesn't involve stabbing me or otherwise threatening my life. That's on my mind today because the last northern France girlfriend just bit the dust, because she just accepted an apology I didn't make.

This one is still a bit raw, and stupid into the bargain, so instead I'll tell you the story of the end of the affair with the second last one, which is old enough now to feel more anecdotal than personal. This was years ago, when I was still with Bluebird. One night in Paris she and I went to a club alone, because Bluebird wasn't into dancing but I was, in those days. She'd told me it was jungle-y, but it wasn't, it was a fucking top 40 meatmarket. I hadn't been totally unsuspecting it because she was a bit of a cougar, so fine. She found a pair of men who claimed to be a professional tennis player and his trainer or coach or whatever you call them, and tossed me the player while she ground up against the trainer. So I danced with him, and when he started rubbing his cock against me I stopped, and when he followed me off the floor, kept rubbing his cock against me and stuck his tongue into my mouth, I told him to leave me alone, I was going home alone that night.

Fine, right? Or at least I thought so. That's the nature of a top 40 meatmarket. That's why I don't go to top 40 meatmarkets except when my cougar friends need moral support. The men there are gross and horny, and you have to be brusque to make them leave you alone from time to time. But Tennis flipped out and rushed over to his trainer or coach or whatever bullshit they'd invented and wanted to leave. Carried on a bit, apparently. I didn't notice, because the club started up a Jackson 5 half-hour and I was dancing my arse off with the first real live black man from Virginia I'd ever met; a big thrill for a young girl from northern Canada. My cougar friend came over, shook me, and asked what I'd said to make Tennis freak out. I told her, and she got pissed and told me to apologize to him; I thought she'd lost her mind, so I shrugged and kept dancing with the real live black man from Virginia. A few minutes later she plucked me away whilst he was telling me exciting tales of his business dealings in Japan in that beautiful accent, maybe the most beautiful accent in English. 'Come on,' she said, 'I got us a drive home.' It was Tennis and his trainer. Uncomfortable. But I was British about it and made them drop me off close to my flat.

So the next day she called and started yelling about my bad manners in being so rude to poor Tennis, and I hung up on her. Mature? No. But it seemed like the best thing to do at the time as anything I would have had to say would have been nasty. The incident was the last straw, as far as I was concerned, after a bunch of other episodes like calling me at four in the morning from her ex-boyfriend's driveway and telling me to get over there so I could confront him with her about what an asshole he was (a call I could have accepted much more easily if she hadn't been sober as a fucking judge at the time) and repeatedly trying to get me to fuck other people behind Bluebird's back whilst talking shit about him - okay, since then I've talked my share of shit about Bluebird, but I still think she was unfair to him, and I didn't get why she was so anxious to start me cheating on him, it seemed creepy - so I didn't call back. And I didn't take her calls, either. Mature? No. But again, it seemed like a better option than explaining to her what a big loser I thought she was.

Anyways, after a few days I'd cooled down, and she invited me over for dinner, and I went, and she said lots of lovely things about what great friends we were, and we were having a jolly time, and then she said she'd accepted my apology for all that had happened because she understood I was from a different social class and hadn't had the same education she'd had. That sewed it up, of course. I left and never talked to her again. Although the bizarre thing is that she told mutual friends I had. And not in an angry way, either. She'd tell them about whole friendly conversations we'd been having about absolutely random subjects. It was strange.

So that's the story of the second-last one. I've often felt sort of bad I just got real quiet on her. And she's not the only one I got real quiet on. There's a small trail of women from the north of France who I got real quiet on. If northern French women are dastardly bitches courtesy of the horrible things they say, caker women like me are dastardly bitches courtesy of our way of going real quiet.

It's a difficult bad feeling, because I'm not exactly sorry. I didn't want to spend any more time with them, I didn't want to talk to them anymore, I don't miss them, and I don't know if it's my pride or my fondness for order in the time/space continuum of the universe or both that would make it difficult for me to apologize to them for going all quiet when they've already accepted my apologies that I hadn't made yet, especially when all I'm sorry for is going real quiet, and not when I'm sorry that I don't talk to them anymore; and I wouldn't really like to talk to them anymore, except for a brief conversation about how I'm sorry for having gone real quiet. You see? The implication of all this being, with this final northern French girlfriend, I will not go real quiet. I'll tell her what the problem is. As bleedingly obvious as it seems. And then I'll go real quiet.

His name is Barack Obama, for fuck's sake

Madame Pariyorker weekend, and I am walking into Monday as exhausted as I was Friday night. Oh well. Madame Pariyorker inevitably has spent some time being my token American friend, because part of the reason we hit it off so well in Paris all those years ago, despite having very different brains, is that it was 2002 when we met. And all the French people around me were giving full fucking rein to how much they detested and despised Americans for their dreadful imperial foriegn policy and their consumptive lifestyle, supposing I'd be interested, I suppose, because they had mistaken me for an American and were rushing to assure me that despite their incapacity to tell the difference they could assure me 100, 1000, infinity%, by using highly objectionable language, that not only did they understand that I was not American, but that I was as 1000% better than Americans as they themselves were.

This was also the time I was choosing my academic path in international relations, however, and when it was coming home to me how corrupt, murderous, anti-democratic and repellent French foreign policy was and continues to be, and the only reason it's not talked about there as currently as American murderousness is is because they're a nation of cultural chauvinists with a media as supine in its own way as that of America. Ask your typical French person about Africa or Oceania and you'll wait through days of ejaculations about the charms of the beaches of Senegal and Tahiti before you even get a fucking word in edgewise to ask about 'defense agreements' - the nice term for arms sales to kleptocratic maniacs intent on murdering their own people in old African colonies or the nuclear bombing of Polynesian atolls. Ugh. Make me fucking vomit. I mean, the fuckers still have colonies, and they think they have anything to say about anything?

Anyways. I met Madame Pariyorker in 2002 when French people were informing me about what a big asshole I wasn't by explaining how they knew I wasn't American, and Madame Pariyorker was constantly receiving instruction about what a big asshole she was . . . and now it's 2008, and maybe she's not quite such a big asshole because possibly her nation will vote for un Noir, and mark my fucking words, by the time they let a black man run for president in France - well, look, it's just not going to happen. Even so, they're having no problem going up to her and saying, with the sort of supreme Gallic shitbrained confidence that let the Germans kick their asses irreperably twice in a row using the same technique within 25 years and the supreme Gallic chauvinistic inability to attach a human name to a brownish face that made the wars of liberation in their colonies some of the most brutal of the post WWII period, 'le Noir ne peut pas gagner. Pas dans une telle societé'.

Ugh. If I was American I'd vote for Barack Obama just to piss in France's eye. Well, there are a lot of other reasons I'd vote for Barack Obama, ranging from his reasonable positions on the issues to the fact that that's the sort of peice of ass I'd rather see on newspaper covers than a septagenarian warmonger. But that would be one of them, and anyways, I reckon the reason he'll win is that the economy has gone to shit and I can't imagine the most raving lunatic racist in the most atmospheric movie about the south of the States that I've ever seen voting Republican when the economy is this shitty. But then I have no imagination about some things. And this post was going to have some sort of point, but now it's time for work.

If we took a holiday, come on, come on . . . oh sorry, we can't.

Well, mes petites pommes de terre, the dream is over. France has jettisoned its 35 hour work week, at least for the white collared types, which they call cadres. I always enjoyed being called cadre when I was working there. Made me feel cool. Anyways, Sarkozy's government has reset the rules so that now businesses can negotiate working time directly with unions and employees from the European Union legal maximum of 282 working days a year. The mathematically astute among you may notice that 282 is rather more than 365 - 104, those 104 days representing the 52 x 2 of the year's Saturdays and Sundays. You see, the European Union maximum is calculated on the idea that you get every Sunday off (so much for the secular society) plus five weeks of holiday, plus May 1, or 365 - (52 + 30+1) = 282.

What relationship do the number of working days have with the 35 hour work week, you may ask? Well, as many of you have no doubt been told by francophobe loonies who don't want to admit that those assholes can do anything right (id est, every US and British news outlet), few white-collared types worth paying white collar wages to can get his or her full workload polished off in a mere 7 hours a day. The law in its old form addressed this by giving about 3 weeks of holiday for cadres on top of the normal five weeks (which, by the way, was calculated on the assumption that both Saturdays and Sundays are not working days), meaning cadres effectively got 8 weeks of vacation a year. Or it was addressed by a 4-day work week for some people, especially lady cadres, which was useful considering most French schools still pursue the stupidity of closing Wednesdays, on the ridiculous, fossilized presumption mothers can afford to stay home and take care of the kids.

So. The idea at the moment is that the 35 hour work week continues to be the 'norm', but that employers can 'negotiate' with individual employees how much more they'll work than that, as compensated overtime instead of as days off beyond the legal minimum of 30 days, Sundays, and May 1. And to rub salt in the wound, a further feature of the legislation passed this week is that now employees only get a 10% bonus instead of a 25% bonus for overtime, more than cancelling out the tax breaks that were introduced in France for overtime pay a couple of months ago.

Some people think that little will change in practice because white-collar types are so in demand and no one will want to lose them; I'd remind those people that the 35 hour work week was introduced 10 years ago because there were so few white-collar jobs around, and it was thought the short week would force employers to hire more people. Hmm. I don't think it will be pretty, and I know it will be double plus unpretty for young people just starting out in the workforce, for whom things are already damn ugly in France. And I know it's just cut the already-dwindling chance of me ever moving back there by about half.

But my favourite parts of the story are elsewhere.

First, in the fact that this first major labour reform that snide little cunt Sarkozy managed has targetted the very people who voted him into power - middle class people in the private sector. The douchebag has thus far had relatively little impact on the truly bloated class that the middle class people in the private sector voted him in to deal with - that is, the public sector. Let this be a lesson to you, French yuppies; someone being from Neuilly does not mean he's on your side.

Second, and the winner, is the fact that a motion this controversial, with this much of an impact on so many people's quality of life, went through without much of a struggle in terms of the massive strikes, demonstrations, et cetera that the French workforce is usually so good at, because Sarkozy, that cunning trolly bastard, timed the vote for the end of July. When everybody concerned was on holiday.

Your love is like false premises, false premises I don't wanna read

I'll send a nice new shiny 2 euro coin to every newspaper in Britain if they'll only stop writing about evolutionary psychology. Women don't love self-obsessed, lying psychopaths better than they love any other sort of man. Obviously, painfully obviously, self-obsessed, lying psychopaths seduce more women because they devote more time than normal men to seducing women, in an effort to re-enforce their insecure or unclear sense of self. And they'll lie about their circumstances and their intentions in aid of said seduction, over and over again with an indefinite series of patsy ladies because, as psychopaths, they feel no guilt about any hearts broken in this desperate quest to re-enforce their insecure, unclear sense of self.

Maybe Steve Connor, the writer, was trying to be jokey, which goes to show English people shouldn't try to be funny when they're sober. But what it comes off as is Steve Connor being one of those shitheads who think they're really, really nice, and don't understand why women reject them in favour of men who aren't really, really nice, when actually the problem is that Steve Connor is probably not really, really nice at all, and is in fact the sort of cunt who hates women for being more attracted to other men than to him. I've known a lot of really, really nice men, and they've had no problem getting chicks, often including me. I've written about this before and before and my feelings have not changed. God, I'm tired of unattractive men blaming their unattractiveness on women. Why can't they just blame themselves, like unattractive women do?

Speaking of unattractive women, what the fuck's the matter with French feminists? Do the indignantes protesting the outcome of a court case that was satisfactory to both parties really think that French women have it so good in terms of domestic non-violence (they don't), pay equity (they don't), political and professional glass ceilings (they don't), and the social right to leave their homes without spending a retarded amount of time and money dolling themselves up (they don't) that now the country's feminist class can relax and concentrate on informing private citizens what is and isn't an 'essential quality' in their now-undesirable marital contract? Motherfuck, those people piss me off. 'Fatwa against women's liberty' indeed. Go to my old working-class neighborhood and see if all the white women with white husbands and black eyes were the target of a fucking fatwa. Go get a fucking job, punks, and then tell me if the people paying you less and promoting you less than your male colleagues are Muslim. Holy fuck.

Excuse the pottymouth but my Mum is coming to visit for a few days, which is fantastic. But until Tuesday morning, I cannot pop a nasty word unless I accidentally hurt myself. I may explode. It may also mean no post Monday. To tide you over, here's an excerpt from Rudolf Nureyev's appearance on the Muppet Show which I first saw, in reruns I suppose, when I was a young, young thing and which may have impacted my sexual persona more than I'm wholly comfortable with:



I remember how curious I was about the consequence of that towel slipping. If only I'd had Google Image search then - no, actually, I'm very pleased I didn't. Best to let the surprise build up awhile longer, until I could get my hands on one. Man, cock is awesome.

The Red Dragon does not feel the new Carla Bruni is the most anticipated French album in decades

You know one of the things that's hilarious about the French? Any jerk on the street there can spend a good 15 minutes telling you everything that's wrong with American media in terms of 24 hour 'news' channels and Rupert Murdoch and Paris Hilton all the rest of it, but then one of their best selling broadsheets publishes this. The Figaro, never much of a paper to rock the boat as far as Sarkozy's Elysée goes, kisses its winsome way so far up Carla Bruni's ass it must look like she has four lips on her face. And that more than a month before her album comes out, and on the front page, just at the time preparations start up for yet another general strike, which I'll tell you had fucking better be over by our vacation time. So pathetic, it's emetic.

Finally finished that Cantor book and not recommending it. It got sloppier towards the end until his opinionation and sweeping statements didn't sync up with each other anymore, let alone with his source material. Even with marijuana, the final chapter about the Rinascimento was painful. It's all very well for traditionalists to whine about post-modernism, but they need to react, not just reject. Whatever else it is, a post-modernist approach to history is a valid criticism of the traditionalist approach. A traditionalist is subjective, horribly so, in that he approaches historical subjects with an obvious personal theory or agenda. Name me one traditionalist who hasn't. And it's usually a fairly sentimentalist theory or agenda at that, explaining or excusing things happening in the present day via the vagaries of a bunch of Roman assholes or something. And then all sources are interpreted, sometimes clumsily and labouredly, through the lens of that theory or agenda, and yet with the language of absolute certainty.

Not that such subjectivity, sentimentalism and pulpit-bashing isn't the case with post-modernist approaches but there is an effort to strip that tendency bare, or at least acknowledge it. And if that means less certainty - well, who needs to be sure of everything all the time? I'd rather get closer to a faraway truth than get well convinced by the hot illusion living next door.

Anything Sarkozy can do Putin can do better, he can do anything better than him

You know how I thought that the marriage of my eeeeurgh-I'm-gross-crush Nicholas Sarkozy, to the aging professional-slut Terminator was the joke of the year? Well, it just got a little funnier. The Russian press is reporting that Vladimir Putin, an evil, evil man who's got more sex appeal than the entire French cabinet in his index finger (which, by-the-by, can be used to push a much better nuclear button than Sarkozy's - eat your heart out, Carla), has been divorced from his wife from some time, and that when he leaves the presidential office in June he will marry this woman.

That's right. A young, unethical, world champion gymnast. She can put her feet behind her head and then walk to the fridge to fetch you a beer like that. Anytime I need to enter an empathetic mental state to help myself understand the heterosexual men in my life, I will ponder her. And she looks like this:






It's too good. The morning just got a little better as I imagined Sarkozy crying himself to sleep. Every. Night. "Why did you settle, Nicholas? Why did you settle?" All I'm waiting for now is for Silvio Berlusconi to hook up with Paris Hilton, and Angela Merkel to dump that out-of-the-spotlight scientist for Nancy's hot dead husband from Weeds, or possibly Viggo Mortensen, and the circle will finally be squared.

Small mercies

Bit of a funk today. In lieu of whining, I'll post a video from Bulgaria's hottest export since Vladislav the Grammarian. You've all seen it, no? Most popular video on the web, et cetera?



Well, I've never been a fan of Mariah Carey, and I figure the above version makes about as much sense as the original, but watch the classy way she shuts down this wizened French bitch who wants help making fun of the contestant:



Even at my lowest moments - and I am not over Silvio Berlusconi's victory - I can still thank heaven I'm not French.

Third time fucky

To my father's people:

Congratulations! You're now the joke of the universe, and you've really done something for my relationship with the French by making me resolve to never mock them again without adding "but at least they're not ass-clenchingly moronic enough to vote Silvio Berlusconi into office three fucking times." Thank you for illustrating so beautifully that this goddamn sexist, racist, kleptocratic knucklefucker is the governor you deserve, so I can stop feeling sorry for you. Thank you for giving me a warm fuzzy feeling about my family and all the other people of Italian descent who live outside of Italy, by convincing me that the useful ones have all left.

So have you simply accepted that sponging off your parents until they die of some cancer triggered by the foul miasma of toxins with which your industrial and waste disposal practices have flooded the country is an adequate response to your long-term economic shambles? Have you decided that the enslavement of the south to politically connected organized crime is an august tradition that must not be interfered with? Have you decided that the enslavement of your political system to the industrial class (not such a seperate issue from the last) is the best way to approach the challenges of the new millenium? Or have you just stopped caring?

Well, this year, not caring was the same as participating. Motherfuck, even the Economist was recomending that Roman communist over the fucking thieving filthy monkey you've chosen for the third time. You can't blame the CIA anymore. This was your fault. I cannot wait until he finishes running your institutions into the ground and you get kicked out of the Eurozone because of your incredibly huge national debt, so that I can go on holiday in your country and take advantage of your laughably weak currency (remember that?) to buy up your physical patrimony and ship it to a country that works. That is my hope for Italy now.

Oh, and if you, who benefit from a functioning multi-party system, ever lay into Americans for voting George Bush into office whilst they were stuck with their shitty two party system in my hearing again, I will vomit on you. Do you understand? I will tilt my head back, aim carefully, and vomit all over your overpriced, ill-fitting brand name clothes that make your legs look like sausages and your heads look like pins.

Holy titfuck, three times,

Mistress La Spliffe

In which I give vent to a mean spirit

So the 'Nicholas Sarkoy-"come back"-SMS-to-ex-Cécila Albéniz-eight-days-before-his-marriage-to-Carla Bruni' story hasn't gone away yet - not because anything new has happened in terms of the president's criminal case against the journalist who broke the story, but because Carla Bruni gave her first First Lady interview and said that such tabloid-y press would have denounced Jews if it had existed during the Second World War. It provoked the appropriate storm of complaints, with the editor of the Nouvel Observateur (the SMS-breaking paper and website) describing the complaint as 'perfectly imbecilic'.

Awesome. Too awesome. Easily the stupidest statement I've heard all week, both in its timing and substance. Belgians? Fucking geniuses. What a monumental victim complex in someone so rich and privileged. I love that shit. So much more adorable than hypocrisy because you can tell she really believes it. Obviously tabloids, if they'd existed the same way then that they do now, would have done the same thing then that they do now - for example, report on a president's (attempted) infidelities. And maybe if there'd been that popular element aggressively presenting the public with the weakness of its leaders, the totalitarian regimes that oversaw some of the worst genocides in history might not have been able to get the support of the masses that they did, indeed, get.

But I suppose if a massive insecurity is making you wedge your head firmly up your own ass, being internationally humiliated through the revelation that your husband is still trying to get his ex-wife back and might even have used your quickie marriage as some sort of attempted emotional blackmail against her could feel like you were a Jew being packed off to the death camps . . . nah, actually, I just don't see it. All I see is a pretty lady whose fame is based principally on having been The Other Woman and who has lost all fucking sense of proportion when faced with the possiblity that the public now sees her as, at best, a consolation prize.

Whoa, that is quite a mean-spirited entry. Rien de grave must have made more of an impression on me than I'd thought.

In which the French continue to make it easy for me to laugh at them instead of at Belgians

Sorry if this entry seems a little crabby but I am in one shit mood this morning. This weekend was just so good and now work is an unwelcoming prospect. And I just got an email with a picture of my impending bridesmaid dress. 3 C-notes, destined to be traded in for a sack of empire-waist polyester I won't even be able to use as a cleaning rag afterwards. I have a good mind to propose to the F-word so I'll never have to do this again. And clothe my bridesmaids in linen.

On a happier note, Nicholas Sarkozy is pressing criminal libel charges against the Nouvel Observateur, the French newspaper/website that broke the news of his 'if you come back, I'll call everything off' SMS to the wife who'd dumped him last autumn, which he's purported to have sent eight days before marrying Carla Bruni. This is the first time either ever or else in yonks a French president has initiated criminal proceedings against a media outlet so it's very exciting, especially as the Nouvel Observateur is not backing down; indeed, the reporter concerned has elaborated that Sarkozy has been continuing to message his ex constantly.

The question for many people is why he would have done something as drastic as criminal proceedings (the reporter is looking at a possible three year prison sentence) instead of a civil suit, and the answers that come up again and again are, first, that in a criminal suit of this sort, you can force a journalist to reveal his sources (Cécilia?), and second, that Sarkozy is counting on the case being dismissed before it can progress too far but after everybody has forgotten everything about it besides the fact that he pressed charges; criminal cases advance much more slowly and require much more evidence than civil ones in France.

Can you tell how awesome I think all of this is? It's fucking awesome. All he had to do was ignore the story, which didn't even show up in the print version of the newspaper and was couched in conditional language; or have his press office deny it and say, oh, I don't know, that he was too busy being the fucking president of a G-7 country to bother pursuing such a shitty little falsehood in court. But no - he had to turn it into a face-off between the national media and the presidency, to the degree that now all the papers have a great excuse to turn on him just as his popularity is plummeting in all their polls (he's had no balls with the reforms he'd promised, alienating his supporters, and he's a proto-fascist, alienating everyone else). Now he's got Reporters Without Borders bitching him out.

Fucking awesome. Awesome! Because of course there's a third reason he'd have initiated such a drastic action, and such a stupid one in a climate of his crashing popularity ratings, and that's that the man who the French have chosen to lead their country, the man whose finger is on the nuclear button, is so pussywhipped by an aging Italian supermodel who's jealous of his ex-wife that he's lost his fucking mind. Fucking awesome!