The devil you know is a twat

America, you should start looking into what sort of bananas will thrive in your varied climates now. There's always the paw-paw, otherwise known as the prairie banana, which makes a fucking fantastic Jamaican hot sauce. Because if she wins, it won't just be the name of the overpriced sweatshop outlet anymore. Pardon my evident bitterness but I abhor that creature. Her husband was a cynical cunt who sold out what was left of Roosevelt's legacy to make nice with the very people he should have opposed, and she herself has made public statements of such staggering irresponsibility for populist purposes that I fear she'd be even worse. Not to mention participating in the murder of thousands in Iraq. Ugh. Gross.

I didn't think I'd fallen for the Obamania that has swept the universe; I've only heard him speaking once, and while it was delightful, so was listening to the creature's husband talk. I loved hearing Bill Clinton talk. He was so good at it. And from what I heard before I tore myself away from the screen, crying 'no! No more letting American politicians play with my heart,' Obama is even better at talking. Anyways. The point is I evidently have fallen for it, or at any rate have become absolutely persuaded that a half-unknown quantity who has at least put his votes where his mouth is over the short space of time he's been voting in his congressional house is a vastly better possibility for the future of our planet than four more fucking years of the Bush/Clinton combine.

Maybe that's not quite mania but it's sincere nonetheless. So this morning I actually switched on the computer in a state of hope that the evil charm has been broken and the Bush/Clinton combine has at last been consigned to the composter of history. Not yet, it seems. It's like Christmas has been postponed. But for how long? It better not be until McCain wins the presidency. He'd blow stuff up and then die and then that personable psychopath Huckabee would try to usher in the End Times. I don't want the End Times. I want to live to experience the adventure and excitement of menopause.

Anyways. My mate Kate has linked to a sometimes-funny blog called Stuff White People Like, which features my water bottle and my own life pattern in response to North American political degradation. I thought I moved to Europe for the extra four weeks of vacation, higher pay in a stronger currency, and richer desserts, but the writer makes a pretty good case. And if that Botoxed bit of criminal-insincerity-in-a-power-suit wins, I predict lots more Americans threatening to move to Canada and lots more Canadians threatening to move to Europe.

And anyways again. I'm going abroad for a conference this aft and won't be back until next week; unless my hotel has wireless (which I hope to fuck it does as I have another huge report due) I won't be posting until then. If you need anything keeping you busy, I suggest you check out the site for Viz magazine; easily the stupidest, grossest, most puerile thing I've ever been ashamed of enjoying. It's like a farting competition in an elevator that goes horribly wrong.

Hard, you say knowingly

The F-word found Good to Me by Otis Redding, who I love. And now I love him more. I ladore the Beatles, really I do, they're the whatevers of the universe, but Otis Redding's version of 'A Hard Day's Night' onto the original is like a big gorgeous black man offering to fuck your legs off onto two pallid lower-middle-class English boys whining for a blowjob. I can't find a video of it so I'll just post one of Otis Redding making Mick Jagger look like a twelve year old girl:



And just because it's awesome:



Ugh, it makes me want to cry that he's dead.

Anyhoo. The F-word also found The Big Sleep, which I hadn't seen yet, the one with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. She looks like Uma Thurman but hot. It was good, and I was interested to see how they'd departed from the book to avoid getting censored. Or not departed from the book.

For example, there's a bit in the movie where a handsome young guy shows up at Joe Brady's apartment, kills him, and then gets taken to Geiger's house by Marlowe, where Geiger's body is lying 'in state' on the bed. In the movie there's no explanation for all that, whereas in the book, where the same thing happens, Chandler was able to show that Geiger was gay and had had a sort of gigolo living with him who ended up shooting Brady, et cetera.

I was curious about what audiences must have thought about the sequence without knowing who the hell this handsome angry young guy was - if it made any sense, or if there were cues I missed in the movie suggesting what the relationship between Geiger and the gigolo was. Maybe people were more sensitive about suggestions of gayness back then because homophobia was common even though gay people usually kept it in the closet - you had to look out for things to get paranoid about . . . . Don't know.

The Red Dragon doesn't like American movies

Awhile ago I stopped watching American movies, which wasn't a conscious decision. In fact, I could only see I'd made it after realizing I hadn't watched an American movie in months. And while working in advertising made product placements veritably leap of the screen and pluck my disbelief down from where I'd suspended it, I don't think that's why I stopped; I think I stopped because I had turned into a bitch who was impossible to please. Witness a couple of the movies we watched this weekend after last week's stress and Friday night took us out of physical and mental commission:

No Country For Old Men. Not liking this movie pissed me off so bad because I was 100% expecting it to be good. But it was flat. It wasn't a landscape that I could enter and get lost in, like Barton Fink, Miller's Crossing, The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, even Raising Arizona . . . just felt like a bunch of gross, sad stuff happening and then it ended. Okay, maybe the Coen brothers didn't want to get hemmed in to a traditional sort of storytelling or pacing, but if I run out of characters to be interested in by the 2/3 point of the movie, then as an audience member I'm just marking time until the thing ends.

Javier Bardem was great but they didn't give him enough to do. And finally I didn't care what he was doing because he spent too much time doing boring stuff. I love the way the Coen brothers use little visual cues to tell a story, like having him check his shoes for blood at key moments, but that's not enough to carry a film, especially when they labour other points for visual impact even when the node has tapped out. It was cool the way he blew up the car in front of the pharmacy to go get stuff to fix his leg. It was lame that I had to sit there for five minutes watching him fix his leg.

Ah, that's the thing . . . the whole movie felt like a visual wank - trading in character development for a series of visual impacts and shocks and conceits. Fuck.

Anyways, we were left disappointed and then tried to fix the disappointment by watching I Am Legend. For all his arty-fartiness the F-word likes an event movie from time to time - witness the 300 debacle - and I didn't mind as I wanted something that was sure to have an ending, which this type of film also does. Also, he'd told me it was based on the Omega Man, and I figured watching it would give me a better background on the Simpsons Halloween episode parody without forcing me to watch Charlton Heston 'act'.

I liked it more than I thought I would, as the fact that there was lots to look at and not much of a story helped me over the plotholes, and wasn't even unduly annoyed by the Brazilian god talk. The thing is, Will Smith can't cry without making me cry. It's awful. There are a couple of actors like that, who, if they have any reputation for talent, probably get it from making people want to cry when they do. Tom Hanks is another. You know, actors who are always playing more or less the same person, maybe with different accents or in different weight ranges, but more or less the same character in every movie, who you know is flawed but also probably a really great father so they're always showing them holding kids, and who is basically normal but who would lay down his life in a reluctant but determined Jeebus-like fashion in the face of real danger or iniquity - a James Stewart-y sort of guy without the whininess.

So there was a point in the movie when Will Smith's dog had just died, and he was going nuts, and he was all alone and hadn't got laid in years, and his family was dead, and there were all these flesh eating zombies around, and he started crying, and then I started crying, and then I felt manipulated, and then other humans came into the movie and I didn't care because I was too busy feeling manipulated, and then they plugged the Shrek series for 45 UNBROKEN SECONDS, and the bungee cord of my disbelief snapped, sending it hurtling down to the bottom of the ravine below, which is not where you want your disbelief during the climax of a zombie movie.

Ugh.

Then I remembered we had reefer butter, so I ate a bunch of that and we watched Dracula: Prince of Darkness, and that was keen. But more on that later.

The Red Dragon is a rolling stone

Heh. Heh. Sarkozy tries to shake the guy's hand, and the guy says 'no, don't touch me', and Sarkozy says 'bugger off then', and the guy says 'you'd dirty me', and Sarkozy says 'bugger off then, you lousy dick'. Heh.

I'd love to go off on how lame the French are for electing this strangely compelling, emotionally unbalanced, foul-mouthed megalomaniac troll into their nation's highest office, or tell you about all the ass-licking ministers who rode to Sarkozy's defence in the media, or about how Sarkozy edited in a pseudo-apology to the 'town hall' interview rather than actually say it out loud, but I am just in too much of a shitter today.

Last night my best girlfriend here told me she'd just been offered a big pile of money to move back to San Francisco. She has quite compelling reasons to do it, aside from the money. Problem is, first, that I'm going to miss her like crazy, and second, that I have abandonment issues. Don't we all, you'd say, quite rightly, and I daresay mine are no worse than others, but they are byzantine enough in their complexity to fill ten pages of tightly-written double-sided foolscap (at a guess). And this is why for the last twelve years of my life I've devoted significant energies to being the abandonner. Ending relationships before the other has a chance. Moving into my own bachelor the second the lease expires. And of course, fucking off to different countries every couple of years.

Well. Brussels is not the town to have those sorts of issues in, because it's a what the yuppier among us call a 'starter town'. Take towns like Toronto, Los Angeles, London, Paris, New York. What they all have in common is that millions of people from smaller towns move there to make money, but the cost of living is so high relative to the salaries that you end up staying there once you're in - both because there's so much to enjoy spending your money on, and because you can't fucking save money, as your rent, et cetera, is so steep.

Brussels isn't like that. The salaries are high for corporate expatriates like me and my colleagues, and RETARDLY high for the international organizations. I have a friend seconded to one of them who's privy to the pay details, and Americans - I think I know where your tax dollars are going. These salaries are disbursed in Francophone Belgium, and don't let all the EU rigamarole and Beethoven's Ninth fool you; Art Nouveau buildings aside, Francophone Belgium is a post-industrial shithole where nobody has any money. I would never consider working in Belgium without an expatriate contract because of the tax burden (50% income tax as soon as you hit Euro 30,000). A tax burden, I might add, which is NOT justified by the level of public services Belgians enjoy. But I've given up ribbing on this country for Lent so I'll move on.

This means expats are making big piles of money in an impoverished country, paying a pittance for their rent and a fraction of what they would in a town like Paris or Amsterdam for amusement. So they make and save lots of money, but few stay on permanently (though the special expat contracts here are open-ended); either something is pulling them back home, or else they're repelled by the weather, angst over pulling in a pay cheque which is absolutely disproportionate to the incomes of the residents of the country they're crashing in, the feeling among those of us of breeding age that the place is crawling with paedophiles, et cetera.

So people stay between two and five years. More than enough time for me to get attached (I've only been here ten months or so), and then in plenty of time to break my little heart by fucking off. I tell you, this town has the conditions to drive me mentalist in a whole new way. It's so transient.

But it has made the F-word and I think a little bit more concretely about when we in turn will fuck off. It will be years, and not months. But that too will come.

Dear David Cronenberg:

You totally almost got me there. There were several points during Eastern Promises that I actually thought I was watching a good film. Like that naked fight scene in the steam room that catered to all my filthiest, sickening, buried, maenadic sado-masochistic tendencies, or when the camera lingered on Viggo Mortensen looking cynical and Slavic, or when you showed Vincent Cassel looking closeted-gay and vulnerable behind the alcohol-and-Oedipal-fuelled madness. Even Naomi Watts convinced me that she gave a shit over what was happening from time to time. I really liked her motorbike too. Good for you.

But it was really a bit of fluff, wasn't it? Besides the acting, the best thing I can say about it is that it took advantage of how crazy we all think the Russians are less pretentiously than Martin Amis's last novel. It wasn't pretentious at all, in fact; it was the most Hollywood thing you've ever done - Hollywood in the sense that we need to be swept up by our emotions (Russians are crazy! They can be crazy to nice people too! I could have ended up as a 14 year old prostitute! It's great when pretty people kiss! et cetera), to suspend our disbelief, so that we can be wafted up and over the massive, gaping plotholes.

And David Cronenberg, this is so disappointing for two reasons.

First of all, it's hard to suspend your disbelief when a heroin-addicted 14 year old Russian prostitute who doesn't speak English dictates her diary posthumously in English. And it's hard to suspend your disbelief when all the Russian characters carry out all of their key communication in English, and only switch into Russian for the 'atmospheric' bits we don't need to understand to follow the story, and which you've chosen not to subtitle.

David Cronenberg, have you seen a little movie called The Passion of the Christ? I haven't, because my filthiest, sickening, buried, maenadic sado-masochistic tendencies don't extend to watching snuff films about Jesus. But it did rather well at the box office - Wikipedia says it was the highest grossing R-rated film of all time - even though the whole thing was subtitled. Subtitles are allowed now, David Cronenberg. Why the fuck couldn't you use subtitles? Apparently all the actors could manage to pretend to talk Russian. Why not make them do that, and let us at home suspend our disbelief so that we could ignore all the plotholes better?

Is it because the film played so viciously on stereotypes of Russians that you couldn't get enough Russians involved in its production to pull that one off? Tell me, David Cronenberg. Because you need a fucking excuse.

The other reason that I'm disappointed, David Cronenberg, is because while I've always been a distant fan of your visual style in a revolted sort of way, I have to say I really fucking loved A History of Violence. I thought you'd done something, if not revolutionary, at least really fucking awesome in terms of using your sick visual style in exploring the violent undertones of men and women in a way that was also Hollywood-y, emotionally cathartic, and revelatory of Viggo Mortensen's bum. But Eastern Promises seemed to indicate that was a bit of a one-off. I won't give away the plot twist, since you've asked people not to, but as far as I'm concerned it siphoned off almost all the interest I had in the emotions of the main characters.

Anyways, I still like you better than Atom Egoyan.

All the best,

Mistress La Spliffe

All the serotonin was for nought

So, how about those SSRIs? What fucking gets me about this story, this bit of research, is that it's not really research, beakers-and-burners-speaking. It's a literature review - going over the results of existing clinical trials, either published ones or unpublished ones that had been obtained through that delightful Freedom of Information Act. In other words, the fact that SSRIs don't work except for the most depressed people should be old news. Doctors need to present their excuses for not being aware of this news and for massively overprescribing that shit.

It's nice that the UK health minister was quick on the uptake in terms of announcing injecting all those talky-therapists into the system over the next few years. Which boils down to how this is actually all about me. It's making me think again that Jung school might be viable for me, if public funding changes and the talky therapy starts being a right under a viable health system instead of being a bourgeois institution wherein I'd have to listen to bourgeois people like me talk about their bourgeois problems all day while there are children starving in Africa and women being marginalized in council flats.

Notice I linked to The Independent. It's finally happened. I've turned to reading the last pinko mainstream paper in the Anglophone world, and a kind of boring one at that, because The Guardian has just got too fucking stupid. And it was an article about this issue that tipped me over the annoyance edge. First suggesting the study was only about one brand in the headline (it's also about your old friend Effexor, Baywatch, among others), and then this retardment of a paragraph:

"The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, according to the authors - Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada. But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better."

Fuck, that's ugly. Ugly. If I wanted ugly, I'd go to work and write an industrial market report for a European ESL audience. In fact, I don't want ugly, but I have to do that now anyways. So the last thing I need is the fucking Guardian uglifying my life even more.

Why Ralph Nader is a fucking dick

You know what's hilarious, like, Russia-hilarious, about the United States? Even the Lebanese laugh at it and, you know, their country's been blown up. It's the absolutely unrepresentative nature of the national executive structure. And until this structure is changed, third parties in the presidentials are tools the two main parties welcome with open arms, and Ralph Nader is a fucking dick.

The reason third, fourth, fifth, sixth, et cetera parties count in normal, functioning democracies isn't simply because they exist; it's because of their ability to form coalition governments with larger parties and shape policy through these coalitions. This way they demonstrate their effectiveness, and then win or fail to win the trust of the electorate. But in the U.S. presidentials, you're voting for a president and a vice president - one winner. Votes that go to candidates from a third party are gone forever. Sometimes that works out for the Democrats (like when Ross Perot split the dingbat vote), and sometimes for the Republicans (when Ralph Nader being a fucking dick in 2000 helped them mask that the recounts weren't making sense).

Either way these marginal third parties are something that the two main ones welcome and incorporate into their electoral strategies, in terms of dealing with each other - not in terms of how it works in France, for example. France features multi-party presidential elections followed by a two-party run-off election, in which the smaller parties that don't make it into the run-off still manage to frame the debate there by endorsing the best of the front-runners, for example, or by forcing the front-runners to adopt part of their platform to capture new run-off voters. Ralph Nader does not frame the debate. Ross Perot did not frame the debate. When there is only one winner in an ideologically blah, one-run system, all a third party does is make the party least like it more likely to win. There is no scope for debate-framing for smaller parties in a one-off presidential run - the scope is limited to vote-splitting.

That's hilarious. It means that not only is voting for a third party a way of participating in the strategy of the two main parties, but also that voting for a third party is an utterly ineffective way of seeking electoral reform, which the United States is in such crazy need of, because it's participating so effectively in the strategy of the two main parties. And thus the absolutely unrepresentative nature of the national executive structure suffers zero challenge.

So far, so already covered by dozens of 'center-left' broadsheets. But surely calling Ralph Nader a fucking dick is slightly harsh? No. He's a fucking dick and I don't trust him as far as I can throw him.

The thing is, though the United States is one of the more fucked up of the major democratic systems, they do have some of the 'checks and balances' that they claim to have, or at least they have Congress. Theoretically, at least, voting blocks can be formed in those houses, and, say, the Green Party could have a major voice in terms of passing and funding legislation, or a large-ish independent party with even a few congressmen could make major electoral reform part of its platform and bargain aggressively for it through their coalition or voting agreements. That's how non-direct democracy works, when it works. Messy and sometimes effective.

So why does Nader silently hold his hose during the congressionals? Why not found or find a party he can run with or endorse, why not make some goddamn speeches or something during the congressionals, if not run? Why not give up trying to raise the cash to run for the president and devote that cash to running a viable party in the congressionals? Why not pursue a long-term plan to form a national party that the electorate will find credible instead of throwing in his own little hat every time the presidentials roll around? In short, why not make one of his vaunted bids for democratic reform when reform is actually possible, instead of during the presidentials, when it isn't?

I haven't met the man so I can only guess. None of the guesses do him credit. And all of them, at their fundament, boil down to him being a fucking dick.

Quirk you, buddy

Funny mood all weekend. I think I might be going mad, in part because there was a five second space on Sunday when the words donkey and monkey had exactly the same significance for me. Otherwise, cooked and wrote a lot, had some friends over, realized that the reefer butter works now, and spent the maximum time outside enjoying springtime, which it now indisputably is; I'll put up some pictures later to illustrate and annoy for those of you still living in snowbound frozen climes.

At some point in the weekend finished reading The Happy Islands of Oceania, the Paul Theroux book about paddling around in Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia until he gets over being divorced and finds a new life in Hawaii. The story may be a bit banal as far as narratives go but the anecdotes, as always with his travel books, are great. It's taken me a long time to get through it, having started in January, but it kept getting pre-empted by other books, including Theroux's The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro, which I finally gave up on. There is a way, which certainly isn't just Theroux's way, of writing about sex that annoys me - that by adding an element of ugliness or absurdity that amounts to quirkiness, even really hot and heavy sex can stop being pornography and can be taken more seriously. But it's no more real than pornography, no more descriptive, though to me much more annoying.

In this way of annoying writing about sex, besides the odd absurd or ugly detail, depending on the gender of the author the rest of the prose follows with such punctiliousness either the Great Male Fantasy (overwhelming female excitement over how great it is that they get to fuck the man in question) or the Great Female Fantasy (surrender of control to a competent lover) with such heat, such a lack of self-consciousnesses, and such utter respect for sexual convention that the absurd or ugly details feel absolutely tacked on; something to convince us that we're not just reading the transcription of the author whacking off.

The problem is that I've got no problems reading a hot whack-off fantasy, especially from a good writer. And I've got not problems reading an account of a perverse encounter, or a disappointing encounter, or a hilarious encounter. But what gets annoying is when authors try to make hot whack-off fantasies quirky. Hot sex isn't quirky. Jesus.

Things to put into your mouth

In our household we underspend, as we are saving money to pursue our dreams. One thing we don't underspend on is food because we are both filthy little piggies when it comes to things you can put in your mouth. At least it feels like we overspend on food, but when I sort out the bills at the end of the month the amounts are never staggering.

Part of this is probably because we live in a working-class neighborhood with a daily outdoor market that has a couple of 'fell off the back of a truck' sections, and another part is probably because we're both from a peasant background and have a taste for staples, like lovely cabbage, that eternal cheap-ass standby. Not cooked, though - sliced into teeny tiny strips, marinated in some sort of acid (heh) and made into a salad. It's gross cooked. Or so I thought . . .

When I grocery shop I operate on the principal that the prettier things are the better they are for you and the more delicious they will be. So last week I bought, for the first time, a Savoy cabbage. Savoy cabbages are the ones that look like this:

Pretty-wise, I prefer red cabbages. They look like this:

And when you cut them in half, they look like braaaaaaains. Delicious braaaaaaains. Num num num num. But we'd just eaten three of them in two weeks, which is a fuckload of red cabbage, and I felt like a bit of a change.

We tried the slice/marinate/saladify trick with the Savoy cabbage and it was fucking gross. The F-word had more luck wokking the strips in a black bean sauce with some garlic and mushrooms but it was still not so hot. So we had half a Savoy cabbage sitting in our fridge disgusting us for about a week until Epicurious came to the rescue with this recipe for bacon and cabbage soup:

-(1/3-pound) piece Irish bacon (available at specialty foods shops) or Canadian bacon
-3 tablespoons unsalted butter
-1 medium onion, finely chopped
-2 large Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch bits
-5 1/2 cups chicken stock or low-sodium chicken broth
-4 Turkish bay leaves
-2 teaspoons kosher salt
-1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
-1/2 small head Savoy cabbage, cored, thinly sliced, and cut into 1/2-inch pieces

In small saucepan, combine bacon and cold water to cover. Cover, bring to boil over moderate heat, and skim foam from surface. Reduce heat and simmer 7 minutes. Drain and cool, then cut into 1-inch chunks. Set aside.

In 6-quart heavy stock pot over moderate heat, melt butter. Add onion and sauté, stirring, until softened, about 3 minutes. Add potatoes and sauté 2 minutes. Add stock, bay leaves, salt, and pepper and bring to boil. Reduce heat to moderately low, cover, and simmer until potatoes are soft, about 8 to 10 minutes. Add cabbage and simmer 5 additional minutes. Discard bay leaves. Working in 3 batches, in blender purée soup until smooth (using caution when blending hot liquids). Return to pot, stir in bacon, and rewarm if necessary.

I made some alterations based on the necessities of our household. For example, the F-word doesn't eat meat, so no bacon. I didn't mind, as frankly the idea of boiling bacon makes every molecule of my Calabrian-ity recoil in fucking disgust. If God wanted us to prepare bacon with water, he'd have made pigs aquatic. Fucking Irish, man, I love them, but boiling pigmeat? Holy fuck. I know the British do it too but that's the opposite of an excuse.

So I replaced the bacon with one-inch chunks of oily sundried tomato. We use an immersion blender because they make all other blenders look like retards unless you want to crush ice or something. It worked a treat with this recipe. And no bay leaves, so I used herb bouillon instead of the chicken stock, and then only half the reccommend salt. It was still a little over-salty.

Aside from over-saltiness, it was fucking ace. Fucking delicious. And even with the peeling, dicing, clean-up and writing to my old roommate about how she and her unemployed husband might be able to find a job in Europe, it took about 30 minutes. So it turns out that you can cook cabbage and have it be not fucking gross, as long as it's only cooked for five minutes and then puréed into oblivion. And as you can notice from the ingredient list, it probably cost a cumulative Euro.

Nice. What's not nice is this morning; I'm eating quinoa for breakfast in a sweet, fruit-laden preparation that was reccommended by this site. Goddamn hippies. It's gross! This seed is too nutty, too savoury, to be anything but shitty in a sweet preparation. Maybe in a savoury, in some version of a risotto, for example, but sweet? Icky icky icky. Listen, hippies, just because something comes from the same place as cocaine does not make it good or cool, okay? Jesus.

Pomp and heroin

First, because it's awesome, more Bill Withers, and more of his drummer. I like his drummer because looks just like me the first time I took pills for fun, except black and a man.



I think I also like my job. It's letting me visit Scandinavia for the first week of June for something that sounds like even less effort than a conference. Scandinavia is one of those places that I always said I'd visit if someone else paid, and hey, here they are paying. Considering extending my stay a bit and going to Copenhagen to hang out in Christiania - I figure either the powers that be (politicians or gangs, the 'tax-free' version of Wal-Mart coming in and shitting all over a community's economy) will crush it, or it'll be the epicentre of Europe's next revolution. Either way worth visiting.

Speaking of places that should be the epicentre of Europe's next revolution but everybody's too busy getting fucked up. Last night I had a couple of drinks with a Welsh girl and fuck, do you know how cheap heroin is in Great Britain? It is so fucking cheap. And it's got cheaper since the 'liberation' of the Afghanistan. Nice one, free world. I wonder if that's been the case all over the place. It was super cheap in the south of Italy for as long as I've paid attention to these things but I figured that's because it was doing the black market version of 'falling off the back of a truck' whilst in transit to some other part of Europe. I wonder what colour market that would be. What's blacker than black? I think I'll call it the jet market. Jet's pretty.

God and jive broads reconciled

So today I was going to write about Bill Withers and how much I love him, and how great he was before he discovered synthesizers and singing about God. I like God and I like Bill Withers, but I don't like Bill Withers' songs about God. Funny, that. Maybe I would have if he hadn't discovered synthesizers at around the same time he discovered singing about God. Pop songs about God disagree with me deeply - I can't think of a single one at the moment that I like. As far as I'm concerned it's all been downhill since 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing'. That's a fucking awesome song.

But before he found God and synthesizers he released songs of stupendous lyrical simplicity that are nonetheless so very, very pretty, and that make me emotional or, you know, hot. And the simple lyrics are straightforward and nice and don't make me think that listening to the song is making me stupid. Probably owes a lot to his beautiful voice, certainly in this song, where he can make his third verse out of repeating the words 'I know' 30-ish times and still be awesome:



Hmm, I guess I did write about Bill Withers and how much I love him. Just as well. I had a check to see if I had already written about it and came across this little navel-gaze about being too evened-out, mood-wise, and how I didn't like that. But I wrote that back in the wilds of 2005 when I was still single and living alone. So today I was going to write about how the single most stressful thing about being in a relationship is feeling like you have to spare your partner your well-earned bad moods - at least for me. But Bill Withers is much, much more interesting. Autobiographically, too.

The rats of the conservatory

Went to da symphony last night, the Charlemagne Orchestra again, and while it was pretty I spent most of it sitting there wanting to scream. The F-word had brought his sketchbook and was scritch-scratching away next to me through the delicacies of the flutey Bach, and then half of the Rodrigo, which was a killer as it was a fucking classical guitar concerto so it was full of delicate passages. It was like sitting next to a walled-in rats' nest. I try not to be one to shit on my man's artistic aspirations but finally I had to tell him that I was finding the scritch-scratching distracting, to which he replied he thought it might be and closed up sketchbook shop.

You thought it might be? And you kept going, making me afraid I was going to shit on your artistic aspirations? I thought, my head close to explosion. But I stuffed all the anger deep inside, helped by the prettiness of the Rodrigo concerto. It felt so telegenic somehow - damn near Zorro-ish or something - but with such careful delicacy as well. Yummy.

And then in the second half, the stranger to my left started indulging in his own artistic aspirations by scritch-scratching his prose impressions of the Deimecke classical guitar concerto. Oh fuck me, I thought. It's one thing to risk shitting on my boyfriend's artistic aspirations as there's a world of ways to try to make it up to him, but quite another to shit on the artistic aspirations of a sensitive young Belgian whose cock I will almost certainly never touch. Luckily he was so into the music that he scritch-scratched in time, so it wasn't nearly so rat-nesty. And then when the jolly loud Mendelssohn came on he closed up shop too.

Things to do instead of getting pregnant

The most strenuous thing that I've done all weekend was open a stubbornly stuck jar of honey this morning. Oh yes, Monday morning counts as the weekend, I've decided. To keep earning my keep of free books, while the F-word slept off a little hangover I somehow managed to skip I wrote a review of Evolution for Everyone here, but it won't tell you anything I haven't written about it already. And getting through Gould's chapters about baseball and the death of the .400 batting average, which has been surprisingly interesting since I still only have the foggiest notion of what a batting average is. Outside of how to get shit-drunk before the second inning, my knowledge of the game hasn't changed since those golden pubescent years when the girls were always bigger than the boys.

Had dinner with a girl from my undergrad who ended up here with her family, working for one of the international organizations. Sounds too harsh to say we weren't friends back then but we weren't, really. She had lots of energy that looked a bit frenetic and abrasive to me in those years, maybe because I was so wrapped up in getting and keeping high, even in fourth year when I decided to get really good grades in case someday I decided to do more with my life than get high all the time. It was self-protection, in retrospect. Not knocking getting high, but I was so socially nervous back then, so scared of the possibility of rejection from anyone and everyone, that I couldn't deviate my favourite method of making friends and/or getting laid - smoking lots of reefer or putting things up my nose and seeing what would happen. Since she wasn't so into that we weren't close.

Well. I'm still socially nervous. At this point I'm running on the assumption that that's just the way I am and most of the rest of the world is coping with something similar with the same bad grace, if in different ways. What was my point? Don't know. It was a nice dinner, and I like this girl now. Dad called the next morning, whilst the F-word slept and I wrote the review, and I told him where we'd been the night before. Her family includes a two year old kid, which he used as a rather transparent excuse to imply I should make a baby pretty soon. I thought that was sort of funny because I was writing a review about evolution, and my Knight of Columbus dad had given up on the 'git married!' talk to cut to the chase: propagate the awesome genes I gave you, now.

Unfortunately, I have to go to the office instead.

Baseball porn

Double fisting books at the moment. First, carrying on with Gould's Full House, which is just lovely and gets better with every page. Last night I stopped reading just before the chapter where he starts talking about the death of the .400 batting average so we'll see if he can maintain my interest. I only like baseball if I'm at the game and if I'm fucking drunk. I'm not a big drinker ordinarily; they don't not call me Mistress La Tipple for nothing. But at a baseball game I like to swill down the liquor and scream at the diamond. God - makes me miss Canada. Once we got kicked out of the Skydome for having smuggled in harder stuff than the watered down beer they served exclusively, and it was awful because I hadn't fully got my drink on yet. But one of the guys in the group had just yelled at a player called Jermaine that the Jackson Five wanted their least popular member back, and I was still laughing.

Anyhoo, listen to this nice passage from Full House - comes in the chapter where Gould describes his own first, non-fatal but badly prognosised bout of cancer:

. . . we must stand resolutely against an unintended cruelty of the "positive attitude" movement - insidious slippage into a rhetoric of blame for those who cannot overcome thier personal despair and call up positivity from some internal depth . . . How dare we blame someone for the long-standing constitution of their tendencies and temperament if, in an uninvited and unwelcome episode of their life, another persona might have coped better? If a man dies of cancer in fear and despair, then cry for his pain and celebrate his life. The other man, who fought like hell and laughed to the end, but also died, may have had an easier time in his final months, but took his leave with no more humanity.

The whole thing so far is written with that much clarity and incision. Fuck, it's good.

Anyhoo, double-fisting that with a book of shorter fiction from the inescapable Paul Theroux, The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro. Bought it in all innocence without realizing it was going to be soft porn. Oh, Paul. Well, alright then. Very masculine soft porn, of course, with passages about well-preserved beauties licking jizz off their lace gloves after getting their jollies without even being touched down there, but soft porn nonetheless. I like porn so I'm enjoying it, but not my favourite Theroux so far. Still, I know there'll be some sort of thoughtful or creepy sting in the tail, whether it will be good or not, so I'm hoping that the quality will come half as hard as the Countess does.

What's striking at the moment though is how closely the central female character, besides her age, resembles the media image of Britney Spears. I have a feeling someone in Camp Britney read the book and told her it would be really cool to act crazy in public like the chick in the Paul Theroux porn. Or maybe Theroux is just better at describing a certain kind of crazy lady than I'm appreciating amid all the staged coercive sex. Time will tell.

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.

Full house, stinky city

Oh god oh god oh god. Today is going to be a hard working day. I'm only half Protestant so my work ethic is pretty damn capricious - it whines if I try to employ it on something I only do for the money, as it's listening to my Catholic half saying fatalistically that God'll provide if we just fucked off to the south of France now.

Not helped by the fact that Brussels is one filthy city. The air quality here is fucking rank and even on the clearest days there's a visible miasma of diesel and dust and fuck knows what else in the air. It was illegal levels of mercury the other week. I know one doesn't choose to live in any city for the air quality, but Brussels is not a large place and I don't understand why much larger cities in Germany, the next country over, don't make me feel like I'm being throttled when I go out for a little constitutional. But I am dangerously close to breaking my Lenten resolution to not rib on Belgians so I will now change the subject.

I've moved on to the next evolution-y book I'm reading for review, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, a reprint of a Stephen Jay Gould book from 1997. Only thirty pages in and I must say that those thirty pages were fucking excellent. I can't wait to read the rest. He had a lovely clean writing style, and it doesn't hurt that thus far his attack on the idea of evolution-as-progress is ringing all my ideological bells. But really, such a great style. So far none of the confusingly avuncular messiness of Wilson and none of the 'we're so clever, aren't we' wankery of Dawkins. Can't wait to keep going and considering putting my tongue in the mouth of the next ailing person I see so that I can take a couple of sick days this week to polish it off.

Record player

Ugh. Mess at work for me at the mo in terms of one of last week's stories, so at least one hour today will be devoted to unpleasantness. And the rumour mill says, for a shockingly confidential and sensitive reason, that this is the year we must turn a profit, which may mean some people being sacked. I'm pretty sure it won't be me, despite being the newest full time person in our office, due to other shockingly confidential info the rumour mill has loudly spat at me. But whenever a little flap over a story rears its head, which happens often enough and isn't really much of a problem, I get to thinking about what liiiiiiife would be liiiiiiike if they sacked me. The standard payout here is three months. Not riches, certainly, but enough that I could take my sacking as a sign from God that this little flower was not meant to bloom from nine to five in an office block, or for that matter in such a cold damp climate.

Anyways, it won't be much of a flap over last week's story because I kept good records of my sources, and in this case the man flapping at me was my source, so it should settle down today. Playing with my imagination a bit because of a little comparison in Evolution for Everyone about thinking and self-perception in literate and non-literate social groups (I've finished the book now and it's interesting but annoying. I hate that).

Also playing with my imagination because I seem to keep stumbling onto the importance of sources and records on our perception in our literate society. It sounds like a no-brainer when you put it like that, of course; how can we perceive anything that we didn't experience ourselves unless there's a record of it, literate or not? But let's think of two colonial tragedies from about a hundred years back: the Congo Free State and the German genocide in Namibia.

When the Congo Free State was turned from the Belgian king's great big fief into the property of the Belgian state - a result of its flagging profitability as much as of international disgust over the mass slaughter of the Congolese - he ordered all the administrative records of his rule destroyed. The Germans, those organizational maniacs, didn't destroy the record of what they did in Namibia. Now the German state admits that what happened in Namibia was genocide, and the debate has moved to the idea of reparations. Whereas when it comes to the Congo Free State - well. Numbers aren't everything, but the more modest estimates still see millions killed. A shocking, disgusting tragedy, and the 50 odd years of 'paternalistic' Belgian rule that followed on it could only count as any sort of compensation to the most hardened racist - or the most insane, if we look at what's happening in the Congo now. But from the Congo Free State, there's no record, or at least no record from the right people - the perpetrators - the only ones we can believe. I tell you it sends shivers up and down my spine.

Speaking of crazy record-keeping German perpetrators: wow.

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!

The Red Dragon likes a good dramedy

So despite my alienation from the Catholic church, I still usually like to give something up for Lent, and this year I think it will be ribbing on Belgians. It'd be necessary, anyways, as I keep meeting too many that I like, and they always seem to be into something arty or whatnot, a sort of sense of joy in being creative that most of us loose around 16. It's got to the point that I can't ascribe it to living in an 'arty' neighborhood anymore. But we're still leaving and I still think that if I was Flemish I'd want to break up.

That means it's back to ribbing on the French, which is easy at the moment as their president is an absolute monkey. Nicholas Sarkozy has married the aging supermodel Carla Bruni, who just had a naked photospread published in a Spanish men's mag, a couple of weeks after the Daily Mail published excerpts from an interview of her expressing her dislike for France and French people, and reportedly 8 days after he sent a text message to the aging model wife who'd dumped him mere months ago, saying 'if you come back, I'll call everything off.' God, this is awesome. Usually I feel too guilty about voyeuring the messy human angles to really revel wholeheartedly in famous people's soap operas, but this rocks because Nicholas Sarkozy is a nasty little proto-fascist and Carla Bruni is a professional exhibitionist who ascribes her need to monumentally notch her bedpost to being Italian.

Now we all go through our bedpost-notching periods, Italian or not, but please - if you're going to be the sort of attention-starved succubus who publicly bangs much more famous, or much less famous for that matter, married or otherwise inappropriate men in droves, then just fucking own it. There are literally millions of Italian women who either aren't sluts or are sluts quietly. Although I'm getting tonnes of laughs from Nicholas Sarkozy's midlife crisis, I think I'm enjoying Carla Bruni's even more. The naked pictures in the Spanish mag - naked but for her engagement ring (the same one that Sarkozy gave his ex-wife! Awesome!) and some whore boots were the winner for me. Her face has had so much work done it's like it's floating, disembodied, above the rest of her - a strange mask that has more an air of panic than an actual expression.

The Red Dragon is an arkeeyolojist

I don't think I mentioned that we went to Stonehenge this Christmas, did I? It was really fucking cool. It was also really fucking crowded despite being really fucking rainy and really fucking chilly, which I found impressive as it was also in the middle of fucking nowhere. Now I'm not a professional archaeologist, or even fully literate much of the time, but I think I discovered the site's purpose, which was to energize the regional economy by making tourists from untold miles 'round pay lots of money to travel there and then walk around it in a circle going 'ooooo' and 'ahhhhh' or, if you're Mistress La Spliffe, her sweetheart the F-word, or any North American who hasn't been raised with fudgey sugary Jeebus, 'holy fuck!'

Of course I didn't venture into the gift shop so it's possible that I didn't excavate sufficiently to really develop my theory, and I'm willing to consider the possibility the site also had the purpose of sell lots of money's worth of tea towels and novelty thimbles - either as a secondary or primary purpose - I'm not sure. I am sure the administrators also made a pretty penny from the rich types who decided to get buried there, which I'm guessing was Stone Age Britain's equivalent of a Niagara Falls honeymoon. But our minivan was leaving so I didn't have time to do my groundwork. My point is that I'm pretty sure it was designed as a tourist attraction, because it's a great one and it's been a great one for a long time. Ancient. Mystery. Solved.

All of which is a flip and shatteringly oblique way to say that I still think I'll go back to school and study something completely different from what I've ever studied before, and I'm still thinking about going to Jung school or shiatsu school and studying it there, which means I should start seeing an analyst again or looking for a shiatsu school, but the bourgeoisity of it all still gets to me, because I'm already bourgeois now and I don't like it. But then, is there anything more bourgeois than going back to school as a grownup who could be making lots of money instead? And I have no problem with that. I have a suspicion that I don't like being bourgeois because I'm bourgeois to nine to five, or thereabouts, and actually I wouldn't give a sleepy toss for class divisions if I was allowed to sleep late. That notwithstanding, I'm still so fucking confused about which direction my life is going, and although I trust myself more than I ever have I trust institutions less than I ever have.

Sometimes I think I'll go crazy from choice. All I know is, I have to go to work today - now, actually - and that doesn't help at all.

The Red Dragon confesses

So this weekend, or rather last weekend (I don't know where time went, but I want a refund), we watched Brain Dead, and all I can say is that the F-word doesn't get to choose the movies anymore. I spent the next 10 hours wanting to sick up, although that probably says more about alcohol than psychology. He knows I don't like that sort of thing but must have thought I might possibly be into it, since I liked Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness so much, and then was quite fond of American Werewolf in London. Yeah. Well, Brain Dead didn't have Bruce Fucking Campbell cutting off his own hand while yelling "who's laughing now?" or Jenny Agutter's tits and pretty blue eyes in it, and it wasn't funny.

My problem with films where people get chopped into little bits or get their heads ripped off or torn in half or whatever is that that sort of thing happens in real life, so if I'm not being distracted by Bruce Campbell being a comic genius or Jenny Agutter being fucking hot, I'm sitting there thinking about Rwanda or something, and thinking that the director is a big insensitive asshole; generally getting quite indignant. Didn't help that Brain Dead had an aggressively Freudian climax, which I guess was meant to be funny and I just found, you know, Freudian and stupid. Yes, blame Mother for the zombies. Heh. Snorrrrrrrre. And puke.

And then Peter Jackson made the Lord of the Ring trilogy, and here's the confession: I don't fucking like it. It would be an exaggeration to say I hate it, but not much of one, as they make me fall asleep and I'm not the falling-asleep-in-front-of-movies type. The books made me fall asleep too, at least The Hobbit and the first in the series did; don't know about the others, obviously, as I was asleep. But the films were harder to escape because people loved them and I've actually sat through the lot, though I was asleep for a good chunk of that time. Anyways, I still don't get it. Was it the attractive men? The fighting? The questing? The sense of purpose? Clear cut ideas about good and evil and good being a good thing to be? Liv Tyler? Ah, who cares.

The Red Dragon is in a constant state of evolution

There are lots of great things about marijuana, especially in a trying national context of Belgiumness. It's like living inside one of those couples who everybody knows is going to break up because the man is a lazy child molesting has-been and the woman has been attending some empowerment seminars, not letting herself get slapped around anymore, and making lots of money, and the man really doesn't want to break up but is too thick and nasty to apologize for all the awful things he's done, and the lady is being a great big bitch while she scrapes together the balls to actually up and pack bags.

Anyways, one of the things I like best about marijuana is not smoking it the odd evening and experiencing the crazy flood of bizarre and extended dreams that roil over from the suppressed unconscious. Last night was quite freakshow. Think it was a bit influenced by the book I fell asleep reading for review late last night, Evolution for Everyone, by David Sloan Wilson, a group evolutionist whose theories I feel were the de facto target of The God Delusion. I like his ideas a lot but I'm swinging back and forth between oooing and ahhing at them to feeling annoyance at his writing style in this book. Painstakingly avuncular, just this side of being condescending, but with the occasional grammatically impenetrable sentence at key points. Gah.

But yes, some of the ideas make one go ooo and ahh, and so far at the halfway point the thing is easy to reccommend, particularly for young people (18 to 25). One problem is I think it was misnamed, and could more accurately be called Evolution for Everything; Sloan is being bold, and applying evolutionary theory to lots of different realms, including and especially social realms - so far without being dangerously, stupidly anecdotal or retarded about it, which of course makes it more interesting. And the thing is I think we're getting into Jungian territory, here at the halfway point, whether Sloan knows it or not. Ooo and ahh.

The Red Dragon wants the Horta museum

I'm a happy little consumer these days because I bought the F-word an awesome birthday present, albeit two and a half months early, for an event three months away. And then I couldn't keep it a surprise because I was too excited about it to not tell him. It doesn't really count as I probably would have bought him the ticket even if he didn't like Nick Cave just so he'd come with me, so I'll have to find something else.

Busy weekend. Highlight was going to Horta's house. We'd been wanting to for awhile, but me having a pathological horror of queues, hadn't. It opens at 2 every afternoon and by 3 there's a line up to 20 people long stretching onto the street. But a friend who was visiting from Paris had a particular yen to go, so we showed up as the door opened, and it was lovely. Not a mansion tour, not a gawkfest; Horta's house was a perfect little model home, illustrating how to create an illusion of great space whilst maintaining a cosy sort of feeling - how to have luxury combined with friendliness. There was a fucking urinal next to the bed, for God's sake.

I love Art Nouveau and looking around the house gave me a bittersweet feeling. As a movement, there was something beautiful about it that wasn't just the beauty of the objects and the curves and everything. There was the notion that now that they had the cheap technology in terms of steel supports and concrete, everybody should be able to have a lovely, practical space to live in. It was the last time beauty mattered like that, I think, when people were excited by the idea that even poor types could enjoy pretty staircases and whatnot. I know that seems frivolous, considering the lives poor people were leading in Europe when Art Nouveau was a force, not to mention now. But to me it's not frivolous. There's the idea that people who aren't rich should have more than just the basic sustenance that will let them survive and reproduce to keep toiling along in the interests of the rich; that they deserve, by virtue of being human, the sort of aesthetic pleasure in their homes that only rich people got, before or since. To me, in Art Nouveau, there's the seed of a sort of commie idea I could really get behind - that everybody deserves more than survival, and that in an equal society beauty would be more evenly distributed, and not condemned as bourgeois.

Mind you, at the Horta house you couldn't see the kitchens and the servant's quarter's were off-limits, which makes me think they probably weren't departures from the deeply exploitative norm of those days. So Horta himself might have thought I was talking dangerous sedition out my ass.

What then?

Very hungover today - not one of those triumphant hangovers either - it's because of the Salaryman's Special, id est the marketing department's huge drinking expense account. It's difficult to appreciate how self-destructive behaviour is so often encouraged and rewarded by business, although I think I know why it is now.

You see, I always dread these work binges as I'm sure I'll have a miserable time or else blurt out something inappropriate, like 'I have a personal history of working in evil industries. Oh yeah, this one too' and 'when the revolution comes I'll be holding a clipboard and you'll all have your backs to the wall. How much sheer pleasure are you going to get out of your BMW then, buddy?'
But of course I don't have a miserable time or make silly threats (at this rate I'll have my back against the wall too), because I concentrate on asking questions and making inconsequential but slightly naughty remarks, like about how the cheapest way for couples to travel comfortably in Japan is to stay in the love hotels and how the phrase 'look at the sea' in Finnish is pronounced like one of the nastier Italian cusses*.

But mostly I ask questions, because people love to talk about themselves and I love to listen. Can't get too many layers down at a drunken corporate dinner, but you do pick up some good stories, and the odd joke about Soviet strippers that you try to remember so you can tell it to your sweetheart but then you can't because by the time you roll your drunk ass home he's asleep and by the morning you've forgotten.

Anyways, I think I understand why all the drinking goes on the expense accounts and HR thinks it's just marvellous. Not just about group bonding. It's also, I think, about the need to drink away your doubts. The company we were out with last night does a lot of business in China, and the 50-ish bloke from it who I was sitting across from chatted at length about the country. He loved it - he loved the cities, and he loved the countryside - he got this sort of soft look on his face businessmen don't know how to fake while he was talking about it, about how he felt so safe with the people, about how cosmopolitan Shanghai was, about being a one-man tourist attraction in the farming towns . . . he turned the talk to politics when explaining lots of his clients were party members - 'big communists, big millionaires'.

When it comes to these sorts of issues I always get a burning jones on to pick brains - hitting that sweet spot that indicates how the world is run! But that doesn't work - it's always dirty and businessmen go into their little shells if there's a breath of perceived accusation in the air, and then to re-engage them you have to talk about how cute puppies are. So instead I ask them the sort of questions my analyst used to ask me. "Why do you think that is?"

His soft look got all sad. "I think it's obvious," he said. Paused. "But it's a mercy too. It's not a good system but it's good it's there. With all the government's foreign investments and their closed books - who knows what would happen to the economy if it wasn't controlled? If they don't keep it rigid it could collapse anytime, and then what would happen to the world? And with those people it's easy to get things done." Another pause. "And the people aren't ready for freedom - they've had a dictatorship for so long one way or the other." Pause. "But you know, if you want to know about the students, there's nothing, no record there, absolutely nothing . . . the government is a juggernaut, fighting against it is like that kid who stood in front of the tank - you get squashed."

He looked so sad, and somehow a little baffled, that I didn't have the heart to tell him that Tank Man is probably okay, or as okay as you can get when you're a Chinese type who goes shopping, heads home weighed down with two grocery bags, runs into his own military mowing down its own people, and has the sort of fucking almighty balls that makes the rest of us believe that maybe the human race isn't on the road to perdition, the balls to stand in front of the tanks and say "What the fuck is this shit?!"

There are tough questions - even neo-conservative questions - but questions that need asking. That businessmen can avoid by drinking, by expense accounts, by the good things that they get in the commission of their work. Questions like, what if the status quo changed? What if people are ready to live in a free country? What would happen to the businessman's good things, what would happen to the economy, what would happen if making money wasn't based on predictability of the rule 'do what's easiest'? What then?

Maybe a hecatomb. Maybe not. Maybe now is a hecatomb. It's hard to know but worth wondering about. The Salaryman's Special is a good way to avoid wondering about it, or a good way to deal with wondering about it - a slow suicide. And on that happy note, I'm taking my atrocious hangover to the office.

*Cazzo merda! No, I'm not fucking joking.

Do remember the first time?

So we both have quite high pressure jobs; mine is the first that gives me pimples from time to time, and I'm the sort of pale olive specimen that just doesn't fucking get pimples, so that just goes to show you, it's a high pressure job. Sometimes, particularly towards the end of the week, our brains are a bit broken and in lieu of watching television we watch Internet crap - it's a sort of poultice for the brain - especially videos of cute kittens frolicking.



Or very very odd videos of cats dancing. Very very odd. Very. And very compelling. I don't know what it's brainwashing me into but . . . well . . . okay.



My brain has a particular tendency towards brokenness on Wednesday nights after I make deadline, so last night in lieu of dancing cats and cute kittens I watched a bunch of clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The primaries in the States are followed religiously here but no one laughs at them - everybody thinking too seriously about how they really hope someone who won't blow too much shit up, but who will stop the Russians from taking over the universe, will get into power.

But there's so much to laugh about and laugh I did, particularly when Steven Colbert said anything and when Jon Stewart ragged on Bill Clinton for being such a shithead lately. That was great, especially the bit pointing out how far up Barack's ass he'd try to crawl if his wife wasn't in the race. But what's sticking with me this morning is how fucking old Bill Clinton looks. He's younger than my mum and it looks like the devil already ate his soul. I hope he manages to shut up more in the future so that I can always remember him simply as a plump little sausage with awesome speechifying skills radically outstripping his political authenticity:

Oh, lookee the ittee wikky wikky wooo. There's the cute cute face of a man who won't send in the troops when he can just send in the bombs. And his wife promises to be exactly the same. Less of a problem for the States than for the rest of the world, which of course makes the rest of the world nervous, and in the mood to follow the primaries religiously.

Anyways, a lot of time has passed since then, apparently, judging from the way Bill Clinton looks like the devil has already eaten his soul, and we're all older than we used to be, Jarvis Cocker included (though he doesn't look like the devil ate his soul these days - just sort of stringier) - unsettling to me because I'm getting to the age where I do, indeed, remember the first times. Some were better than others.

The happy isles of nuclear test sites

Reading yet another Paul Theroux travel book, this time The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. Different from the other Paul Theroux books I've read in that the autobiography part is more clearly on display here - it's about a man whose marriage ends, who feels his family ends, and then he cracks and paddles around Oceania in a kayak for a long time, getting over his midlife crisis - the point where, as he puts it, his life broke in half. Also different as he's in a kayak instead of in a train. Even Doctor Slaughter had a getaway train scene. Result of the midlife crisis and the kayak is it's more macho than the train books - lots of facing down Melanesian/Polynesian punk kids and battling against the elements.

Anyways, it's pretty good, and fills me with rage at the French and makes me not want to go to Oceania. But I liked Riding the Iron Rooster better. I already have The Pillars of Hercules and we'll see how that goes - I know he writes about Calabria there and I'm preparing to be offended. So far I like his books less the more recent they get. I have a feeling he's like the Rolling Stones of travel writers and Bruce Chatwin was like the Beatles - dead before it was possible to get crappy.

The deep blue funk goes a pleasant fucksia

So, as I mentioned yesterday, I spent this weekend in a deep blue funk. I think the lowest point was standing in a huge, crawling queue at the neighborhood health food store to buy a teeny bag of sesame seeds, watching the hippies at the till bugger up the cash register and get confused about varieties of whole grain bread. I was overwhelmed with the idea that I'm spending my life tiring myself out working 9:30 to 6 and queueing in huge, crawling Belgian queues, surrounded by Belgians, everywhere fuckin' Belgians being slow and making surreally stupid mistakes, while I haven't replicated my beautiful, beautiful genes yet.

Speaking of, the F-word just got a DVD burner from the licensed Mac store closest to us. Despite it being the Mac store, we've been burned by surreal Belgian incompetence so many times that he asked two employees at the shop if it was Mac compatible. They both said it was and of course it wasn't. Not only that - it has a British plug. When I'm not suffering by them anymore, that's what I'm really going to miss about Belgian fuckups, I think. There's always a little surprise in them - always a bizarre extra, just to make you laugh in crazed frustration as your anger mounts. Any old country is full of fuckups, but Belgium fucks up Magritte-style - bourgeois and bizarre.

Anyhoo, I got over it because of various things on Sunday afternoon and evening, like watching the Ken Loach movie I wrote about yesterday and realizing that at least I'm not a Ukrainian economic migrant and at least I don't live in England. And then yesterday at work my boss told me I was going to a conference at a luxury hotel in Amsterdam in a few months. I can't help it, I love conferences in luxury hotels, and in Amsterdam! What's more during the school holidays, so the F-word can come and luxuriate with me - and luxuriate in Amsterdam, for god's sake; the last time we stayed there we got fleeced for a night in a fucking boiler room.

It's a lugubrious world on Monday mornings

Had a weekend and now it's over. Fuck. Last night we went to see the new Ken Loach film, It's A Free World, and found it rather chilling. Good, but chilling. The central character, Angie, was an awful girl; her back against a middle class wall, and therefore feeling a sort of desperation that would let her screw over people whose backs were against a real wall. It would have been nice to get more exposition on the other characters, like her roommate Rose, the graduate working in a call centre; would have been nice if Angie's dad had been more than a sole point of coherence in a cast of otherwise largely (and realistically) inarticulate characters - but then the film would have been less focused, I suppose, since as it stood Awful Angie was wonderfully explored, and there'd have been no easy way to bring up the historical commie theory subtext if her father hadn't strung words together like, well, Ken Loach would.

On Friday night we went to a concert called Babel which was quite fucked up and interesting, though I was in a blue funk so I was less appreciative than I might have been. 22 fused pieces by a range of composers, range of styles, range of instruments - gamut of chamber orchestra to mouth organ to MacBook. Only real commonality was the peacableness and Indo-Europeanness of it all - actually found it excessively lugubrious, and I don't think it was just because of my shitty mood that night. Practically an extended lullaby. That's fine, I guess. But I was hoping for more international range based on what I'd read on the linked flyer up there - for example ever since going to the Musical Instruments Museum I've had a thing for one-note west African horns and I can't figure out why anything billing itself as musically diverse wouldn't get those in too, because they're so awesome. But then it's hard to imagine them being lugubrious or lullaby-ish.

Anyways, that notwithstanding, I was a little enchanted to see that the show managed to fill such a big concert hall. Because it was at least half new compositions from people I'd never heard of before, and I tend to hear about people; because the instruments were so odd, et cetera. There are similar events in Toronto musically speaking, but they don't fill such big venues, especially with such a cross-hatch of ages, so many young-ish people. Pop culture hasn't quite drowned in the lights of cable television here.

Who will rid me of this turbulent wankery?

I don't like the Guardian website. Not just because of the commas; because it's crap, and more opinion than news. Opinions, for that matter, about things that don't belong in serious newspapers and can be settled in two words, like about Heath Ledger being dead now (he is) and Martin Amis being a dick (he is).

It's the rise of click-journalism at a tired old franchise, fitting in beautifully with the New-Labourish concept of reward-based administration. No point writing good articles, not if you can just write poorly edited pieces of shit with celebrities' names in them, not if you can measure the success of your articles by the number of people who open them. This sort of thing illustrates how clueless people are about internet marketing. You try to sell advertisers on your site based on the number of people who visit it, but any company that advertises on the sort of 'oooo-er I can't believe it' story which is relentlessly recycled for each celebrity death, that I open because I can't fucking believe the Guardian has got so very crap, is not a company I will want to deal with in the future.

Of course, based on who's advertising on the Guardian site, it doesn't seem to have been working. A tourism trade fair in Madrid and, uhm, a bunch of in-house products, from today's brief survey. Here's a link to their online advertising policies. Containing, of course, a HUGE photo of the lady in charge of online advertising, before giving some insubstantive, badly phrased information about advertising online. 'Zeitgeist'? Holy fuck. Heath Ledger being dead, Martin Amis being a twat, and the new James Bond title being crap counts as the 'spirit of the age'? Fuck you, buddy. You can't talk about my age that way. 'Spirit of the wank' is more like it.

All that notwithstanding, the sports section is pretty good.

What a concept

I have got wound up about Benjamin Biolay many, many, many times, and one of those times took a moment to write about how he's not like Serge Gainsbourg despite everybody saying he is. It shouldn't have taken a whole moment - should have only taken half a moment to describe the difference, which is that Benjamin Biolay's music has zero fucking sense of humour/absurdity in comparison. Let's compare concepts one more time:

L'homme au tête de chou
Concept: Having a relationship with a hairdresser who you murder in a fit of jealous rage in the snow, being institutionalized, your head turning into a cabbage and the murdered hairdresser coming back as a rabbit, who eats it
vs
Trash yé yé
Concept: The breakdown of a shitty relationship; culminates in a murder on the kitchen floor.

Hmm. Let's try another.

L'histoire de Melody Nelson
Concept: Hitting a young girl with your Rolls, deflowering her, and then mourning her death in a plane crash to the degree you found your own little cargo cult
vs.
Rose Kennedy
Concept: Rose Kennedy

Well. If I was Benjamin Biolay I'd have a hard time getting in touch with my absurd side too. French pop is all laboured irony and farting accordions these days, so he might be concerned that even a touch of humour or absurdity is going to get him lumped in with Bénabar-grade crap. Or he might be concerned about being compared even more inescapably to Serge Gainsbourg. I don't know. Maybe he just has no sense of humour or absurdity at all. A shocking number of people in France don't. They can be so literal-minded. I think that's because it's too easy to pun in French. You can trip over six or seven puns just walking to the office there so you don't have to get too absurd to play with your language.

Anyways, I hadn't given it much thought until I stumbled across this video and realized I could not imagine Benjamin Biolay ever, ever, ever doing something similar to what Serge Gainsbourg is doing here. Ever. Maybe that's a failure of my imagination but frankly it makes me think less of Benjamin Biolay.

(This video is safe for work but the audio is not, unless you work somewhere weird.)




Of course, when they broke the mold when they made Screamin' Jay Hawkins and he's dead now, so there wouldn't be anyone to do it with even if he wanted to.

I love you baby, but face it, she's shit

Madonna is an atrocious beast. That's on my mind today because in Ghent on Sunday they were piping her 'music' into the abandoned pedestrian precinct/shopping area, I think in the same spirit as the British pipe classical music into yobbo-congregation points. You've heard about this? It's done in other countries too. The theory runs that classical music grates on the nerves of juvenile delinquents so it will drive them away from public places like train stations, parking lots, street corners, etc., where they might be 'anti-social' - which in England, at least, doesn't mean shy; it means being English and drunk.

Maybe now is the time to voice some of my disgust with the state of the England - haven't been to Scotland or Wales in ages so I'll restrict myself to shooting my mouth off about England. We had a really smashing vacation there with smashing people who I'm very fond of - English people are great, funny, hospitable, helpful, generous, all the rest of it. But I can't figure out how they can tolerate the shithole they live in and it makes me impatient. There is a really unhelpful paternalism, bordering on soft totalitarianism, in their government's relationship with them. The endless 1984-ish CCTV cameras are only one symptom of it, or we can say part of a broader and defining trend.

And that is that the government, whichever party is in, consistently relinquishes control of national assets that are obviously best run by a proper 'paternalistic' government, competition in those sectors being problematic or impossible (like the rail service, civic public transport, and its own fucking monetary policy), while struggling more and more to control the behaviour of private individuals through the ubiquitous CCTV cameras, Asbos, extended chargeless detentions. . . The Asbos are especially funny in a soft totalitarian sort of way. The most hilarious thing about them is that they were tightened up in 2005 - the same year the UK government allowed 24 hour drinking.

I can't see how that pattern - a consistent, cross party trend of letting go of the control of public concerns it should be controlling, struggling for control of things that private individuals should be controlling themselves - can come off as anything except a nasty and apparently corrupt soft totalitarianism. And I can't figure out why the British people have allowed this to roll out over the last 20 years. Belgians put up with remarkable amounts of undemocratic shit from their adminstrations but just try throwing that combination of lousy services and incarceration-happy government at them; they'd bring this place to a standstill in 15 minutes.

Anyways, Madonna. Though she's an atrocious beast and though her music being piped onto the deserted Ghent pedestrian precinct hurt my ears, I think it was a good choice. Because in every single one of her songs, from the slowest to the danciest, her singing always, ALWAYS sounds like she's scolding the shit out of you and that the best thing to do to get her to stop would be to get far away from her. Such an awful, scoldy voice. I just don't get it, you know. You'd have to be a raving, self-loathing masochist to like that crap. 'Justify my love - now - NOW, you fucking piece of shit! God that's good' And so on.

The Bedside Book of Bitching

Read a very pretty book for review this weekend - The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany. Full of lovely Audubon-y type pictures and texts from a great splayed range of sources, from Ovid to Bruce Goddamn Chatwin. Man, do I love Bruce Chatwin. Judging by the sheer quantity of his books filling up my shelves I suppose I must like Paul Theroux better, but Bruce Chatwin - anyways, that's a blogasm for another day.

It was put together by a Canadian author called Graeme Gibson, who I've never read. As a rule I liked CanLit but I stopped reading it when I left for Europe the first time, back in 2001. I'd got so sick of Douglas Copeland and everything Margaret Atwood wrote that wasn't short stories (her short stories are very good) that I wasn't willing to extend myself to find or order new Canadian books. Stupid of me. Like rejecting BritLit just because Martin Amis is a fucking ponce. I'll dip my toes back in soon but I don't think it will be with Graeme Gibson's books. Apparently in 1996 he decided he wouldn't be writing any more novels and that makes me suspect he wasn't getting much out of the form.

And I don't like his sentences in the introductions he wrote for each section of the birdie book. He has this one pair of sentences - the violent dislike I have for it is so far up my ass that obviously this won't be anywhere near the real review, but I dislike it violently nonetheless, especially as it concludes a section and is therefore unignorable:

"It's we who have made the cages. It's we who must open them."

First of all, I'm nearly certain you need the object pronoun there and the singular form of 'have' - that is, 'It is us who has made the cages' - because the plural 'we' isn't the subject of the second clause: the singular first clause, 'it is us', is the subject of the second clause. I think that's the underlying, emotional reason for my dislike. I taught English for three and a half years and when Anglophones use sloppy grammar to create a needlessly complex construction it gets my fucking goat. There are millions of people struggling to learn the ridiculous intricacies of our ridiculous language, often for pressing economic reasons. Why fuck it up further in confusing ways? Grammar is a series of signposts and landmarks to the people learning the language so I react a little bit violently when our intelligentsia doesn't play by its rules.

In any case, why not just write "We made the cages. We must open them."?

Anyways, none of this nonsense will be in the real review, which will be glowing. It's really a very good book. Good selections - you run across some old friends and meet a bunch of new ones that you decide you'll have to meet up with in the future. I haven't looked at Casanova before but I will now, after his funny story about the loose woman and the parrot. I recommend it.

Sexy sedition

So we did indeed go to the Marriage of Figaro yesterday and Paolo Szot, as predicted, was sex on legs to a degree that's not fit even for pseudonymous print. I enjoyed it very much, but the Ghent opera house has horrible sightlines from the nosebleed section - really shitty compared to the Star Wars-y new Toronto opera house or the State Opera in Berlin, the last two places I sat in the nosebleed section. But different times, different priorities. The Ghent house seemed much older, and viciously, blowsily ornate in a way people in Toronto might recognize from the Winter Theatre, or the Elgin, or whatever the fuck corporate name they've slapped it with following its umpteenth buyout. I think it was the Kodak Theatre, or the Minolta, or some other C-grade photocopier company.

That was something that bothered me about Toronto - everything was getting slapped with a corporate name. The new opera house is the Four Seasons, I believe; the Skydome is now labelled the Rogers Centre after the evil incompetent media company that once pushed me into screaming at some poor fuck working for minimum wage at one of their call centres, and then all the big performance theatres are corporately renamed too. I know such institutions in Canada really need the money now that they can't take funding from cigarette companies anymore and our goddamn cheap government doesn't mind the idea of us satisfying our cultural needs by watching American network television. But that doesn't make me feel any fucking better. Canadians are struggling along with the same retardedly high tax burdens as most of Europe, and most of Europe doesn't have to fucking rename its cultural landmarks after the corporations that keep them afloat as an advertising tool. AND most of Europe has a public health service that functions a hell of a lot better. Anyhow. I live here now so I should get over it.

So, the Ghent opera house has horrible sightlines. The F-word got frustrated and left for the second half, which is too bad because the second half is where it gets all horny and one thinks of what a naughty little perv Mozart must have been. Also too bad because, like always, the second half is much emptier, as people realize they've over-estimated how much they like opera and can't face the last 1.5 hours.

The Marriage of Figaro is a very sexy and naughty opera, and the naughtiness has a real political tone, of course; it famously raised some eyebrows by mocking an aristocrat by showing the comparative cleverness of his servants - there's something deliciously seditious about the whole thing still. But what I like the most about it is the distribution of lead voices - baritone (and it's Paolo Szot, a hot Brazilian baritone who can act at that), bass baritone, some sopranos - no fucking tenors, who usually don't do anything good for me. Even Cherubino, the young horndog, is a cross-dressing mezzo. She (in this case, Angelique Noldus) really stood out for me, as did the Countess, Maria Bengtsson - a lovely, rich, velvety voice. Ainhoa Garmendia as Susanna was vocally unobjectionable and a better actress than the other two, though I only got to appreciate that in the second half when part of the audience had fucked off. Figaro, Tuomas Pursio, was frigging awesome. I must add him to my stalk list as he's worth weekend tripping to another city for.