The Hormone Factor

Home again, thank goodness. It always shocks me how much I miss the F-word when I'm away. The last couple of days of this trip were rendered even more difficult by the onset of ovulation in a male-dominated environment - all these industrial conferences are just swarming man pits. High point of my estrogen-fuelled confusion was the mid-conference 'dinner-in-the-offsite-swanky-restaurant' event, when I was seated next to this attractive west-coast type I'd just met:

West-coast type: So what is it specifically that you do?
Mistress La Spliffe: I'm sorry, did you just ask me what it is I'd like to tell you to do?

Honestly, I totally thought that was what he'd said.

In the end it was a great event - I really enjoyed myself. The city was goddamn magical. And I think I have hit on a way of being social and networky at these events that doesn't make me feel like a massive corporate whore - using Elvis's old trick of being interested works really well; all these people are interesting, as long as I figure out how. Met some very nice people indeed. And had a little time to read, though the hotel's lovely spa seriously ate into my personal brain time. Also all the waiting around in aeroports was done with co-workers - a new and luckily pleasant experience for me. But on the plane ride there, I read Jamaica Inn; I played a bit of hooky during one of the sessions and read The Human Factor; and on the plane ride back, I read the first hundred pages or so of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Not as much time as I'd like to write about them this morning, but must say that The Human Factor is fucking awesome, as close to perfect as any novel I can think of offhand, from the first sentence to the last. I was very fond, as I wrote, of The Quiet American (fantastic narration) and less fond of The Power and the Glory (some good guilt but too much English-dagoishness); The Human Factor is quite different from those. It deals with duty and culpability in a more - adult? - way perhaps, in a less guilty, Catholic way. . . it's hard to say what I mean.

In all three books there's a sort of running thread of the inevitability of guilt and duty, but in The Human Factor it's as though the inevitability has overwhelmed the guilt almost completely. There's something more tired or resigned about it. When I have some downtime today I'll be interested to see when he wrote each. The Human Factor seems more like a book an old man would write and Maurice Castle seems more like an old man's hero. Top notch.

Briefly

I am a networking, gladhanding, business card throwing machine. It's worse for your brain than ecstacy.

Lisbon is a pretty great city. It makes me think of southern Italy without the utter hopelessness, stifling sexism, and filth. Before moving into to a hotel so swanky that the bathrooms in the double rooms have glass walls so you can watch your partner do their business (only the swanky are that pervy, I find), I was staying in a great non-swanky hotel in the Barrio Alto, where people offer you drugs and what feels like the whole city drinks and laughs and chats all night. Lovely. Good to get in that sort of quality time with a couple of my co-workers too, although I forebore to buy drugs in front of them. Must keep some mystique.

But this place is great - cheap, friendly, fun, and really really beautiful in a sun-baked way - and really full of the feeling that everything has been rough but is going to get better and better. Not like the south of Italy. This place feels both more cynical and more optimistic, somehow. Also very different are the women. Much, much more independent than in the south of Italy. Chicken-and-egg question - is that because the men are so much less insufferable? They smile and look up and down instead of catcalling and getting in your fucking way, as in Italy. God, Italian men. But that's a rant for another time. The important thing is it's been war menough for the construction workers here to not wear tps and that's awesome.

Tabula rasa

I've figured out one of the reasons I like Weeds so much - I have a bit of a jones for the actor who plays Nancy's dead husband. Possibly because his more extended appearances on the series to date are two emotionally affecting nooky scenes. Emotionally affecting nooky rocks.

Massively disliking medical drama for reasons I've never fully analyzed, Grey's Anatomy seems like everything I hate about television, but I have seen that actor appear on that show. Absolutely fucked if I can remember where or when. Possibly at the house of a friend who liked Grey's Anatomy, possibly just when flipping channels during a television binge whilst housesitting or visiting North Bay . . . who knows . . . but I remember seeing him, realizing from the Sandra Oh (who is Canadian and respectable because of that movie she did ages ago with Callum Keith Rennie that I liked) that I was watching Grey's Anatomy, and nonetheless forebearing to look away from the television because of how compelling this man was.

I didn't know his character's background, but it got clear fast that he was dying whilst striking up a love connection with the skinny blonde doctor. Puke. And yet I couldn't look away; I believe I watched until the end of the episode. This man is perfect for a certain kind of romantic pathos, which came home to me when I realized he also plays Nancy's dead husband. I think it's because he looks really good, but doesn't look so remarkable that you, or rather me, or rather one, can't transpose one's own emotional sympathies onto him by wondering exactly how shitty it would be if one fell in love with someone who was going to die in a few weeks, or what one would do if your hot husband suddenly expired whilst jogging, leaving you with a huge mortgage, no insurance, not enough batteries for the vibrator, and neighbours who liked weed.

And this sets me to wondering: is this the formula for Hollywood hotness? Looking really good, but not so remarkable, so that they can serve as a blank slate, in a sense, for all the ladies' fantasies and fears and whatnot, so that they can suspend their disbelief as you tell an emotionally devastating tale? Because if I think of the most remarkably gorgeous men who have ever seared my corneas, they have usually been men who I've seen in the flesh or else whose show business careers never quite translate from their stardom in their own country to stardom in the Anglophone world. Easily the most beautiful man I've ever borne witness to was Reinaldo de Souza, a Brazilian dancer I used to teach, who I've struggled to describe here. I haven't been to Brazil but in my dreams it's a place where one in fifty men looks almost that good - I mean, all indications do point to it being a country bursting at the seams with remarkable hotness. And I suppose the most remarkably beautiful man who I've ever seen on film that I can think of this morning is Olivier Martinez, who is only famous for Anglophones now because Kylie Minogue had the aesthetic good sense to date him.

But you take Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Matt Fucking Damon, for heaven's sake . . . if you saw them walking down the street and there were clothes covering those expensive, gym-sculpted bodies, would you look twice? Honestly? Unless you were ovulating and looking at everything twice? Or . . . unless they were 'acting' in a movie with a storyline that played to your most sensitive, archetypes, let's call them? Is this why I'm so into Nancy's dead husband? Or is it his laughing yet sad spaniel eyes? Don't know. Either way:

Puke. Internet television has drawn me in again.

Weeded

So the F-word has gone on vacation with some friends in Switzerland, which I couldn't join them on due to my approaching trip to Portugal, which means I have a couple of evenings to myself. And what did I do with my evening last night? Catch up on my reading? Corresponding? Calling? Cleaning? Anything? No. Got dangerously high and watched Weeds. As I wrote previously, it had made a good impression on me, but less so on the F-word, so we haven't been watching any more of it - I mean we have sites that stream the Simpsons now, and Four Corners, and stuff. I love the Internet.

Certainly can't argue with the F-word for not being crazy about Weeds. It is a bit silly - certainly in terms of storylines it's hard to maintain suspension of the old disbelief (which is why me smoking the reefer is essential) and every time Kevin Nealon opens his mouth I know I'm more likely to groan than giggle. And as always the product placement annoys me and blah blah blah. But I have a real attachment to the lead character, played by, uhm, that pale chick with the big eyes - you know, Nancy - and to her bitchy friend Celia.

Despite the reefer being essential for the watching, it isn't the reefery subject of the show that has hooked me; I just really like its exploration of suburban life in the States. The reefer in the show just sets up a nice contrast between public and 'secret' personalities that aren't secret. Obviously I don't know anything about suburbs in the States, and hardly know anything about suburbs in Canada, and the consequence of not knowing anything about it is that I can watch Weeds and go 'ooooo, PTA meetings? Range Rovers? Cookie-cutter houses and neighbours you don't like? You have all that money and you spend it on that?', and then get some explanation of it from throwaway lines. Like when Nancy's brother-in-law was trying to get into the pants of his nephew's friend's mum, and telling her he sympathized with her horrible plight living in that suburb where everybody was all emotionally isolated from each other, etc., and she dismissed it by saying 'you do it for the kids.'

I can understand that, I suppose. My own middle-class family used the 'ex. geographically isolated city w. <100,000 inhabitants' strategy to let us grow up in a place where we could run around without being hit by cars - besides Elvis, of course, it was like the poor guy was carrying around an industrial magnet in his pocket. I don't think my parents were so unwise to go for that formula. I was so fucking cripplingly bored in North Bay that I thought to myself I'd never do that to my own children - and I won't. But now the F-word and I are considering eventually moving to an even smaller, more isolated city, in fuckin' Australia. I figure that the sub-tropical weather should make a big difference to the boringness, though. We'll see.

Dreck in the City

I am slowly figuring out that some of my friends are a pain in my ass (if you're reading this, it's not you - I know who you are!). Friendship is an odd thing, and the love of friends is a lovely thing, but, well . . .

A brief story about Bluebeard. To the average observer Bluebeard was the perfect boyfriend. Gorgeous, rich, charming, attentive, affectionate . . . he was also Bluebeard. My friends loved him and, while I blame myself for everything, obviously, the fact that some of them advised me in very explicit language to keep my claws in there no matter what happened helped encourage me to keep my claws in there no matter what happened. Bluebeard was Bluebeard, but it could all have been done so much better on my end.

Since then I've had a hard time paying any attention at all to anything any of my friends say in terms of advice. Bad and opposite reaction but I do feel that finally one can't take emotional advice from friends. Even the sort of mental health care professionals that I go in for couch their emotional advice in non-advising and extremely personal terms.

Fine. Since coming to that conclusion, friends have no longer been pains in my ass, until recently, and recently only in selective situations. The fact is, being absolutely unwilling to take emotional advice, I'm very uncomfortable giving it. I have a few friends whose whole thing right now is asking for emotional advice. And you know how it feels? It feels like they're trying to vampire emotional advice or attention or something out of me. I'm not talking 'my job makes me stressed, what should I do?' sort of situations; I'm talking personal personal stuff, and not just for one evening over too many drinks, but over days, weeks, months.

I blame Sex and the City. Fuck, I hate that show.

Pizza and satanic pacts

Last night the F-word made pizza, in the sense that he made the crust and everything, and it was so good. God, he's awesome. And then we watched Faust from 1926. It was German so you could see naked tits and kissing in it. All that aside, and this is not just the reefer or pretentiousness talking, it's amazing how well it's stood up. The guy who plays Young Faust is not so much fun to look at, of course, and has had a few too many bratwurst to be as pretty as he should be, but otherwise it was jolly fun to look at. Mephisto was a right creep-o.

It might have been more annoying if it wasn't a silent movie; the actors were pouncing around like they were on stage, which turned out to be appropriate in a silent movie, but if I'd had to hear their great stagey shouts perhaps it would have been worse. I wonder. It must have been a whole, odd industry back then - writing the musical score for silent movies; something much more involved than now when the producers just rent a bunch of crap and it's so remarkable when they manage to get the music more or less right, as in Inland Empire.

Composers must be sad that scores are no longer so important. Now they have to be pretentious and get grants and things. Too bad. I probably would have quite liked Philip Glass if all he did with his unremitting repetitive rhythms was use them to do things like the Dracula score.

Daphne Du Maurier vs. the Red Dragon

This was a good weekend - put lots of things in perspective and refreshed my aching brain, made the future more welcoming. Next weekend will be in Portugal. Oh yay. Between times read My Cousin Rachel, another of the Daphne Du Maurier novels my boss loaned to me. I have a very naughty habit of always reading the last page of a novel before I finish the first chapter, and what I like about the stings in Rebecca's tail and this book's tail is that the last page doesn't give anything away. In any case, the twists are the right kind - what you're expecting to a degree, and then also what you're not expecting to a degree, and the reactions to the twist are completely surprising.

Generally, what I liked about Rebecca I liked in My Cousin Rachel too. Certainly not the best written books in the world - some parts needed more trimming than they got - but great pacing otherwise. And the narrative voices of both were great portraits in human weakness and paranoia. Rebecca was stronger in that respect, but the portrait in My Cousin Rachel was more interesting.

Very interesting portrayal of sexuality in both books. I've had a bit of enough of Daphne Du Maurier - I compared Rebecca to roast beef a couple of entries ago, and I'm starting to get leadbelly from all her stodginess; thank god I have those nice astringent Bruce Chatwins waiting in the wings to play the part of the watermelon. But the sexual content alone is enough to make the next book I hit up the last one loaned to me by my boss, Jamaica Inn. There was something that the narrators of Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel had in common - a sort of dismissal of sex and sexuality, a kind of obliviousness to it even when they were having it (very subtly) which is juxtaposed with comparatively extremely highly sexy characters who, in a sense, both cavort to their destruction. But then, the destiny of the two sexual retards is not so glowing either, quite the opposite in fact, so there's no suggestion of some sort of morality tale.

The Red Dragon complains about the classics

I think South Park might be dead. I watched 'Tonsil Trouble' and was shocked that the only funny bit was the 'Are you sure?' - 'Yes - I'm HIV positive' exchange, which was then played upon until it wasn't even stupid anymore - just a time-eater. . . I don't know what the writing relationship is between Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but from the things I've seen that were written by Trey Parker versus things that were written by both, I'm guessing it has something to do with Matt Stone saying 'okay, that was funny. Now do something else.' The F-word used half an hour of his valuable vacation time to watch the next episode, which was about Britney Spears, and said it was even worse. Sigh. Pretty topical there, guys. BTW, saw Cannibal! The Musical, their student film, awhile ago. Exactly two laughs in 90 or so minutes, but very good ones.

Saw the rest of Rebecca and it was still pretty good, but not as good as I'd hoped. Leaving Wife No° 2 at Manderley during the visit to Doctor Baker so you could end on a note of suspense and a relieved kiss, instead of closing with the much bleaker car ride, which Laurence Olivier would have done SO WELL - ah shit, it's a pity, is all. Worse, the fucking Hays Code fucked it up - if her death was an accident, half of the emotional interest in the leads goes away. The Hays Code - what a thing. I've always believed that the second recording on every new audiovisual technology is either the inventor saying a naughty word or getting in a visual of someone naked - just one of those things we do, like using a dictionary to look up naughty words as soon as we learn to read. And the Hays Code thrashed back against that instinct so violently for so many years, in the process ruining countless excellent movies. And people still went to see them. How funny! There was simply nothing else.

The Red Dragon doesn't like extended apologies

Last night an American asked me what part of the States I was from, and he was so embarrassed when I said I was from Canada. It was the embarrassment that made it hard to take. Otherwise, I would have forgotten all about it as I was very high; and let's face it, people from my part of Canada talk like they're from Fargo and Fargo is an American movie, so it's confusing, I understand. But because the poor guy couldn't let it go and was so profuse in his apologies, it rankled a bit as it gave me time to ask myself 'hey, yeah. What part of the States are you from? What kind of a fucking question is that? Not even French people so far up their own assholes that they'll ask what part of France francophones are from' before the whole episode could disappear into billowing clouds of too-strong marijuana. But this guy had just spent the last several months in the Congo and Uganda trying to bring peace to the region so I'll get over it, I'm sure.

Moving on. Got home from getting reefer last night and started watching Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, with Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson being awesome, and Laurence Olivier being stinking gorgeous. When he came out of his dressing room in his housecoat, I nearly fell out of my clothes. Had only watched about half the movie when the F-word arrived home - painful! Because didn't want to ruin it for him. It remains to be seen how it deal with the sensitive bits towards the end but so far this is my favourite Alfred Hitchcock movie. However, I haven't seen all that many, and my favourite had previously been Topaz (if I imagine it with the 'aeroplane' ending) which apparently I am 100% alone in enjoying so much, and certainly in preferring to Saboteur, Rear Window, Vertigo, and The Birds, all of which I thought were at least a little lame.

And now my boss has also lent me My Cousin Rachel and Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier, and I'm so happy. Okay - Rebecca wasn't the best book in the world - isn't even the best Jane Eyre spinoff in the world (Wide Sargasso Sea is better). But it was a fantastic book to just sink your teeth into and rip through - a real roast beef of a novel, filling and satisfying, so I can't wait for the next ones. Between those two books and the Bruce Chatwins I'm looking forward to all the miserable waiting around in aeroports next Friday - if they make it that long - I have a feeling at least one or two will have to be read before then.

I'm glad I came but just the same I must be going

Now that the last bit of retardation at work has been sorted out, I'm looking forward with baited breath to my trip to Lisbon. Only two of the five days I'm there will demand actual work and that work will mostly involve getting companionably drunk. I enjoyed being in Portugal so much last time - the sun, the frozen drinks, the delicious, delicious, delicious food . . .

I need a thing like this to help me relax; I've hit a point of tension. Luckily the F-word understands, as do several other people, but not everyone does - been getting pissy emails about why I don't call, why I don't email, and they make me want to hit the roof as they're always from people whose lifestyles have less stress built into them. Do they think I like being busy? Do they think I wouldn't rather be being a better friend, and then sitting in a park in a much warmer, sunnier country, smoking a spliff and reading the Bruce Chatwin novel that I've been slowly stumbling through every night before falling into a deep, deep slumber, punctuated only by dreams of bizarre sexual combinations, positions, and locations?

Last night, for example, I dreamt I was sitting in a park watching television with about 200 other people, mostly exchange students at the school I was attending. I thought there was something wrong with the hedges behind the set, so I got up, checked, and saw two Russian couples, one boy-on-boy, the other boy-on-boyish-but-female-little-person.

"Can you please go fuck over there?" I said, pointing to the forest behind where the 200 people were sitting to watch the television. "When you do it behind the TV it's distracting. Also, if you face it from the forest, that way you can fuck and watch TV."

"Liz Phair!" shouted the little person.

"I wanted to like her, but I didn't," I said glumly.

"That's what I like about Canadians," said the man who had been fucking the little person. "They always say what they mean."

"I wish," I said even more glumly. And everybody laughed.

It's times like this I miss my analyst.

Spoiling Rebecca

Woke up this morning at 6:30 and thought, 'good lord, how bright it is. The days are certainly getting longer. I love springtime. Springtime . . . springtime . . . springtime . . .' Got up to bask in my good mood and saw this:

I hate Belgium. I'm starting to not be sure I can stay here long enough to leave with all the tonnes of money I was planning on leaving with. At least the children and the F-word aren't working this week so they can enjoy the white fluffy bullshit. I know it's beautiful but you know what? It was a lot more beautiful in Canada and it was still one of the reasons I left.

Well, moving on with my fucking existence. This weekend I read Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, which my boss had lent me. I like her - she has good taste and our department functions better than most at our corporation, which I'm finding out to my unending stress these days. Anyhoo, I read Rebecca and now I'm going to spoil it. If you haven't read it, I suggest you stop reading this and do, because it's definitely worth reading for the suspense. Okay, you've been warned.

I've heard Rebecca was partly inspired by what could measurably be my favourite novel, Jane Eyre. I think 'partly' is putting it mildly. I can see Daphne Du Maurier sitting at her nice little pigeon-holey writing desk, like the one in Mandersley's morning room, asking herself a four part question: "What would Jane Eyre be like if

a) it was moved into the early 20th century
b) Mrs. Rochester was a slutty bitch instead of a slutty lunatic
c) Mr. Rochester was post-Victorian instead of pre-Victorian
d) Jane Eyre was spineless to the point of semi-idiocy?"

And the answer is essentially Rebecca. That's not to knock Rebecca - I liked it. But it is to testify a bit to the greatness of Jane Eyre - that it's rich enough to bear a spin-off like Rebecca, and also like the Wide Sargasso Sea (Mrs. Rochester's post-feminist backstory, a cracking good read as well).

I liked the pacing of Rebecca a lot - there were moments of real tension, real fear; certainly a different style from Jane Eyre, whose heroine-narrator was too strong to communicate panic to us. The nameless narrator of Rebecca was fluttery, ghostly by comparison, and finally, after she finds out about the murder of her predecessor, far less steely in her morality. Nothing bad can happen to Jane Eyre in the end, we think, she's too strong and conscious of her own mind - she knows how to beat back the pre-marital advances of her horndog fiancé without alienating him, and she has the wherewithal to walk away from love and happiness when it will pose to much of a challenge to her fundamental self.

Not Rebecca's narrator. The difference between them is that Jane Eyre breaks and tames her loving, nasty Bluebeard, while Rebecca's narrator is only grateful to be loved by him. So there is much more vulnerability to her, and we read in the anticipation that something fucking horrible is going to happen any second. Especially as the character of Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, and the equivalent of Jane Eyre's Mrs. Fairfax, is so venomous and great.

The first born is dead

Feeling Gothic at an almost 14-year-old clip for two reasons: crippling (though short-term)stupidity at work, and the fact that there was a hard nasty frost last night, nipping springtime in the bud. Thank fuck I don't have to go to work today. In the meantime, I'm gonna meme it. I know it's kinda disturbingly referential to ideas I hate about 'cultural evolution', but the Hipster Pit made me do it.

1. I can't believe I've never barbequed stuff.

2. Every time I think about the way I treated everybody during my three-year lost weekend I still cringe. Maybe there's a way to combine hedonism and kindness but I did not find it.

3. I wish I'd thanked Samia for being my personal apparition of the Virgin when I had the chance.

Samia was the woman who lived next to me several years ago, when I was young and tender, and when I had this shitty little mouse-ridden apartment in a shitty building in the second-shittiest neighborhood of the 20th arrondisement of Paris. My flat in its entirety was about 14 square metres. To contextualize that for the imperialists out there, that's the size of a standard entrance hall in a suburban North American home. My bed folded out from a mock chest of drawers. There were only two good things about that shitty place: knowing that there were hundreds of thousands of people in the Île-de-France who were living in shittier places, and the credibility that came with such a lousy address when I was flirting with bobos - 'you living in a neighborhood like that, it's not Betty from Manhattan letting Daddy pay for her flat in the Kart-year Latay. Ha ha ha ha.' Yes. Now give me your marijuana, you smug post-colonial shitheel. God, I hate the French sometimes.

So besides me and Samia, who I think was Algerian, everybody in the building was French blue-collar-to-unemployed, and they all thought Samia was crazy. Not sure why. She was pretty loud and when I was home I could hear her bellowing on the phone in a couple of different languages. She was a cleaner for the SNCF so she worked irregular hours and was liable to phone-bellowing in the wee hours, but I was hardly ever around, so she was fine as far as I was concerned.

One night that I was around, the building next to ours caught fire and we all had to evacuate because there was the risk of explosion and because there were flames shooting out the windows three feet away. While we were waiting for the firemen to say it was safe to return, I turned down an offer to go for a drink with the fat bipolar alcoholic who lived downstairs, who I suspected of beating his wife, and went for a drink with the girl who lived across the hall from him instead.

After that the fat bipolar alcoholic was my sworn enemy, which I found out about a week later when I left the front door of the building unlocked while picking something up from my flat. I heard him quietly cursing, so I called down from my landing that I was on my way right back out. He answered with a torrent of vile abuse - I can't remember what he said but nobody had ever spoken to me like that before, and certainly not at that volume. It was absolutely paralyzing. I stood there on the landing, frozen, trembling, not knowing what to do.

Samia suddenly opened her door and said to me calmly: 'you know he's crazy, right?' I trembled and nodded. 'Are you on your way out?' I continued to tremble and nod, and Samia said, 'I'm going to stand right here. I'm going to stand right here and watch and listen. Don't be afraid. Nothing's going to happen. I'll be right here.' I trembled and nodded some more, and then left, looking back up the stairs halfway down, to see her standing on the landing, saying 'I'm right here.'

So I continued on my way and although the fat bipolar alcoholic remained abusive after that, I didn't pay much attention. And since then generally speaking I've been rather tougher, which is all to the good, considering that I rounded off the 20th arrondisement experience by moving in with Bluebeard, in an equally shitty part of the 18th no less. But for the rest of the time I lived there I would snap at people if they called Samia crazy, and we stopped to talk more, and I gave her a big bunch of flowers that one of the men I really wished I could fuck that year had given me and that made me sneeze.

But in my fishbelly emotional retardation I never found a way to tell her how grateful I was at the way her calm, kind words had stopped me from pissing myself. I hope she knew. I hope she's a millionaire now. I hope only good things happened to her from that point on.

4. I've never felt so out of place as when I was at that last conference and realized that I was in a hall, and an industry, full of goddamn parasitic three-peice suited gangsters. It actually made me miss television execs for a moment.

5. Reading about Heather Mills and the Sarkozyland dramas is my guiltiest pleasure.
6. I hope my parents knows how grateful I am for everything.

7. In my darkest hours, I secretly blame no-account men for my dysfunction.

8. Literacy changed my life forever. As did the first time I clapped eyes on the F-word.

And as part of my personal quest to have the idea of 'memes' permanently abandon the 'memepool' or 'memeplex' or whatever bullshit bullshit social/cultural evolutionists are calling the collective consciousness now, I'm passing this on to no-one. Take that, Richard Dawkins.

The death of my favorite litigant-in-person

I was sorry to learn that Paul Scofield died yesterday, adding another item to my list of regretting-I-didn't-dos, namely, that I didn't get to see him act in person. Here follows the rest of the list of things I regret I didn't do:

-See Screamin' Jay Hawkins perform in person
-See Otis Redding perform in person
-Screw that blond guy in York
-Be Serge Gainsbourg's (well-paid) psychoanalyst
-Live in Copenhagen for the year between highschool and undergrad

I think that's about it, these days. The shortness of the list may reflect hubris but probably only reflects the fact that I'm young yet.

And seriously, Paul Scofield as Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons has to be one of the best things ever. The almost ridiculous comparison between that fucking tour de force and Charlton Heston's turn in the 1988 film actually does a latter a favour by making it seem like high comedy - Bright Eyes from Planet of the Apes travelling back in time to Tudor England - instead of just shitty. Also, the Paul Scofield version has one of those entertainment cues that make me cry automatically-like. The point where he tells Wendy Hiller that she must understand why he's doing what he's doing is guaranteed to sqeeze a few tears out of my steely macho eyes. So is:

-'Grandma's Hands' by Bill Withers
-The bit in the Iliad where Hector says bye to Andromache
-The sight of Tom Hanks crying
-The sight of Will Smith crying
-'Try a Little Tenderness' by Otis Redding

God Save the Queen (and Us from Ourselves, While You're In a Saving Mood)

Oh, fiddle-dee-dee. Do you mean that British youth didn't spring spontaneously as fully-formed drunken destructive nihilistic assholes from their mothers' wombs, like one of God's more capricious racial punishments in the Old Testament? That perhaps they had adult role models in terms of becoming drunken destructive nihilistic assholes? That perhaps their main fault is being drunken destructive nihilistic assholes in their own cities instead of travelling abroad and subjecting browner people to their charms, like their parents and grandparents?

Dear me. I was all set to buy a Mosquito for our stoop in case any English youths accidentally stumbled on to the Eurostar and blundered their drunken destructive nihilistic assoholic way to my neighborhood, but now it looks as though I'll have to get a gun.

I know I rib on Americans a lot, and the French, and Belgians when it's not Lent (four more days until Easter and I can start again! Wheeeeee!), but the British, that paler, richer half of my genetic and cultural heritage, never fail to fascinate me, nor most other Europeans. While Italians and French content themselves with typical linguistic uncreativity to calling them 'Roast Beefs', Germans have thought up the much more descriptive name 'Inselaffen', or 'Island Monkeys'. Although it only indirectly touches on notions of the British caste system that oppresses its own natives in a way other European countries only oppress browner people that they considered furriners, I feel it sums up to a tee the British notion that there is something subhuman and deeply unaccountable about themselves, as nicely written up in this rant by Philip Hensher.

I'm enjoying the Independent at the moment, by the way, and regretting I didn't switch from the Guardian long, long ago. And the round of being fascinated with the British that I'm currently in sprang from reading another rant in the Independent about how having CCTV cameras everywhere is actually okay. I feel there's something wrong with people being filmed, their movements being recorded, even if it is in public spaces, without certain guarantees about how that footage will be used and kept - deeply wrong. And yet Johann Hari makes a good point. Could he make a good point if he was writing in other countries? I don't know. And hence, the fascination with the British.

Reading television

Last night I finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, and then I watched most of it, after Hilts let me know it existed in television form. I know that points to an obsession with the book or with Jared Diamond, but nobody has replaced Steven Mithen in my pop-science affections. The thing is that the F-word is on a huge Russia kick at the moment and about to wade into the Gulag Archipelago, and he reads slowly so he'll be in there forever, but he was jealous that I was reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, so I figured if the documentary was halfway decent it'd get the points across to him without him having to break his Russia run.

Also, I was curious to see how it had been televised. The last documentary vs. pop science book thing I'd experienced was The Root of All Evil? vs. The God Delusion, and while I found a great deal to dislike about both it was interesting to see that the book looked like it had been lifted from the documentary. The book had all the same interviews and subjective Dawkinsian experiences, with a few absolutely unsatisfactory caveats inserted about how pantheistic and polytheistic religions were basically the same as Judeo-Christianity so it was alright that he ignored them - the documentary went to no such trouble. The book was just a tarted-up version of the documentary - a bit counter intuitive, but interesting.

Guns, Germs, and Steel was the more expected opposite; the documentary was certainly a dumbed-down version of the book, to the degree that even though I wasn't crazy about the book I'll still advise the F-word to read it when he gets out of the Gulag. The book was interesting and a little annoying, and the documentary was less interesting and more annoying. The thing is, I have a hard time with the concept of cultural evolution (I think I came to Guns, Germs, and Steel too fast after reading the way way better Full House, by Stephen Gould, a man who was convincingly hostile to applying evolutionary terms to culture) and I think Diamond equated technological advancement with cultural evolution. And I think his eagerness to make that equation made him make mistakes like unnecessarily glossing over things that weakened, though didn't contradict, his big picture, such as the fact that syphilis almost certainly spread from the Americas to Eurasia.

It just wasn't necessary for him to put his arguments in terms of cultural evolution, though I imagine it made the book easier to write, and probably read. It's a simpler, more graspable version of the world, simpler to structure an argument around the central pillar that we're all in a race towards one semi-inevitable destination that any given group of humans would have got to first giving the right tools, but it's also kind of bullshit. All post-modernism aside. It just doesn't make any sense unless you're somehow religious.

The second problem I had with Guns, Germs, and Steel is perhaps a personal failing, but the thing is no pop science writer has ever convinced me that modern hunter gatherers are so easily comparable to prehistoric hunter gatherers. Come on, they're honestly not going to think up any new stories in 60,000 years? Or a different, increasingly useful spirituality? Eat a wider range of foods as they build up social knowledge about what doesn't make you die? Treat each other differently? Can we really compare prehistoric hunter gatherers so unhesitatingly with modern-ish ones just because their technology was similar? I think about the Tasmanians a lot in this context because back in the mists of undergrad anthropology time I studied the tiny bit Europeans wrote down about their religious beliefs before their extinction. The religion was fascinating, and different from the other hunter-gathering populations I was comparing them to. And then there's the massive headfuck of Dreamtime in mainland Australia. I don't know. I just find it hard to believe that the people the Europeans found there were culturally similar to people 60,000 years ago. It just seems like a way to simplify matters and permit yourself to read waaaaay too much into the archaeological record.

Anyhoo. The most interesting thing about watching the documentary back to back with reading the book is the sudden realization that complaints about Jared Diamond and GG&S, as explained in this typically craptastic New York Times article Hilts drew my attention to, are in great part based on the documentary rather than book (that Eurocentricism thing especially), or indirectly based on the sort of notions of innate racial superiority whose debunking was the best part of GG&S - frankly, you can't imply that European choices, rather than geographic determinism, are what let Europeans be so internationally dominant without also implying that innate European superiority is what let Europeans be so dominant. Calling them assholes while you make that connection doesn't make it any less racist.

Also, I agree that he oversimplifies unnescessarily - see above. But at the same time, dude, it's pop science. Yuppies like me read it to relax in the evening, and maybe teenagers read it and it makes them interested enough in anthropology that they study it in university. Great - you've got another enrollment, more funding for your department, and now you can spend the next four years convincing the kid how boring and finicky real anthropology is. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth, for fuck's sake. But that touches on some future post about what I feel like the role of pop science is and now I have to go meet deadline for an industry magazine that is not pop or science-y at all.

Oh, and by the way:

"No one visits Stonehenge, she noted, and asks whatever happened to the English."

Yes they do, you stupid American fuck. Holy shit, what's wrong with these people? She's a fucking associate professor, for god's sake, and she trots out a fucking moronicity like that for an international newspaper. Jeebus. Fucking. Fuck.

Cry, the Beloved Penguin

So at the moment I'm reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, as I found it for Euro O.50 at the Oxfam bookshop here. God, I love that bookshop. They have no idea how much Anglos in Brussels would be prepared to pay for books. I should tell them, really, because it all goes to a good cause, but I'm having a hard time giving up the possibility of getting a new copy of Heart of Darkness every time I need one for a mere Euro 0.25.

As far as a book goes I'm not crazy about but it's full of facts that I didn't know and that are so neat. For example, did you know a key barrier to the domestication of the zebra was that, unlike horsies, they can follow the trajectory of a lasso as it sails through the air and then dodge it, so they were almost impossible to catch unharmed? Neat. And of course some of his ideas are also interesting. For example, he goes on a bit about the role of literacy as a way to monopolize rather than simply preserve knowledge - in that one small class is literate, and therefore has access to written information that the illiterate classes can't hope to access reliably or first hand.

That got me thinking about lawyers and about how the legal systems of most countries are so inaccessible to the defendants and accusers who use them. It's rather frightening, the degree to which a largely legally illiterate population trusts its fortunes to a small legal class who we believe has access to all this legal literature and jargon and history we can't possibly understand.

So today I'd like to say bravo to this crazy chick who managed to get £10 million more than her estranged husband was offering even though she sacked her lawyers mid-trial and represented her own fantasistic ass. The outcome probably says more about the clarity of UK divorce laws than about her competence, but nonetheless, what a gutsy move. Now she has £10 million more than she might have had, that she can devote to ruining the livelihood of our East Coast natives, because baby seals are cuter than the Canadian aboriginal population.

Just remember, beeyatch, those cute little pups grow up to eat the cutest animals of all:

For love or money money money money money money money money money money money

I'm sick. I blame stress; the past two weeks have been fucking busy and life in general busy. Last night I realized that I owe everybody a phone call, visit, or email - that I've been neglecting everything. I suppose I could stop blogging and instead devote that half-hour each morning to being better at keeping in touch, but blogging is a luxury that's become a necessity for me - a place to sneeze out all the crap in my head, that's more optional for other people to read than a communiqué addressed directly to them. It organizes me, brain-wise. And yet, since it's public it doesn't become a self-perpetuating self-examination circle about my relationships or the people I don't like or the things I hate about myself. Because frankly, I'm afraid of boring you all.

Of course there's not much to sneeze out today blog-wise, and there is a strong risk of boring you all, as my cold has crowded all the thoughts out of my brain. Consequently the most exciting thing I can write is that I bought a fantastic super snuggly bathrobe in Düsseldorf last week and this weekend I've been breaking it in, and today I will continue breaking it in - a tough job but it must be done. On the topic of shopping, I'm very excited about the catastrophic plunge of the dollar which looks set to continue as the Fed debates another Super Interest Rate Cut. If this keeps up, I'm buying a fucking MacBook Pro in New York in October! Finally! It means I'll have 'made it', as those things are what yuppies who are scared to drive buy instead of an Audi.

There's talk now about a European interest rate cut to make the euro a little cheaper, and I can definitely understand it. I know from work that the shitty dollar is really hurting some businesses here even as it helps others. The thing is, the European Central Bank is shit-scared of inflation for a reason. In the U.S., and Canada too, inflation hurts old people with savings the most, and nobody in the powerful classes cares about them except in the eight months before a general election. But in Europe, it'd hurt the state coffers the most, as they have social safety nets for the old people, the unemployed, university students, et cetera . . . there's a reason besides wanting to look more competent than those pesky Americans that governments here don't want life to get more expensive. So I think I may indeed get to have my MacBook Pro this fall. Except, of course, I work for a U.S.-based company, and our central accounting is in dollars. Eep. All I can say is thank Jeebus they'd have to fire me in a socialististic country where everybody gets a golden parachute.

You see what I meant in the first paragraph? I don't want to write about how crises in international fiscal policy may or may not lead to me getting a MacBook Pro without people feeling like they don't have to read what I write. Thank you for the airtime, Blogspot.

And how was your day, Mr. President?

So my friend from San Francisco might not move back for a variety of excellent reasons, one of which being the pile of money she was offered for the move is made out of dollars. We were talking about its plunging value, which is encouraging me to fly home via New York in October to buy a new, much lighter laptop for about half of what it would cost here or in Canada, even though it means some charm-deficient aeroport slavey will put their hands on my private areas because I look cranky and Mediterranean.

This segued into talking about this and that and the other and how fucked up everything is, including the Eliot Spitzer whoremongering. What I don't know about Eliot Spitzer could fill several volumes but I'm always fascinated with the idea of people who have so much credibility and status to lose nailing expensive prostitutes or putting cigars in interns' twats or snorting meth with their rent-boy. There's this element of perviness and exhibitionism about it that must be very exciting - knowing how much trouble you'd be in if you got caught - how much this one sexual act could completely transform your life. Sort of like losing your virginity over and over and over.

That was my perspective anyway. San Francisca thought that it was just a case of men not being able to help themselves sometimes. I can see where she's coming from, but firstly, several million men are able to help themselves so it's no excuse, and also none of the above-listed scandals were the spontaneous equivalent of having a few drinks too many and nailing someone you shouldn't because you can. Involving yourself in an established whoremongering ring, getting nasty with a cigar, finding meth and then hovering it up with your long-term boy . . . all of these have that pervy little air of thinking about the act being almost as important as the act itself. Which I, as a perv, congratulate and laugh at.

But the main reason I'd been at all intrigued by the john was that I'd just read a Washington Post article about his wife (I've been finding it hard to apply myself at work this week) which was just fucking glowing, and it made me wonder if there was already some sort of spin machine in operation about to launch her into her own national political career after she dumped her husband. San Francisca thought the political machine was possible but that the dumping wasn't; as a divorcée would never have a chance at making it far in national politics. Really? I asked, and really, she said. Really? Did divorcing really hurt Giuliani? I asked. Really, she said.

And if Hillary Clinton had dumped her husband for all his cheating, she really couldn't be where she is today? Really, she said.* This gave me something absolutely new to chew over, because I honestly don't think it's the case elsewhere in the western world that having had an unsuccessful marriage is going to fuck your political image beyond repair.

And then San Francisca shocked me further by saying she herself wouldn't support someone who had been divorced, because if they couldn't get their own lives together they couldn't be trusted to run a country. That totally blew my mind. A marriage, a presidency; it's a whole different skillset, surely. I mean, you have the qualities of honesty and communication that you'd want in both cases, so I guess I see where she's coming from. But when I get home from work I don't want the president to have a hot meal ready, to ask about my day and maybe fuck me if we're both in the mood. And I don't want my husband to have his finger on the nuclear button - I'm not Carla Bruni.

God, it's all so weird.

*Echoes of Ferraro. Her statement is more to be condemned for its utter pointlessness than its racism. None of us would be where we are if we weren't who we were. How has that not been pointed out by either campaign yet? Stupid Democrats.

My bosom buddies

In a monster of a grump today. Something is painfully wrong with my back. Combination of this damned cold wet climate, desk posture, hefting my six-year-old monster Dell laptop and as many tall cans of beer as I could carry across western Germany, and having tits that are way too big for my frame. Although I don't expect to age any more gracefully or willingly than the next person, there's at least one sense in which I look forward to menopause - the second I know they won't be required for reproductive/feeding purposes anymore, I can think about getting rid of them.

I guess I'm complaining but I shouldn't. I'm pretty sure having big tits changes everything and generally for the better. If I wasn't so cheap I could fix aching backiness by buying a computer that weighed less than a fucking full-grown mastiff - really I'm only blaming the tits because they're right in front of me and I'm in a grump. And as for other drawbacks - unwanted male attention? Who doesn't get that? Other men get unwanted male attention. And on the other side of the coin, I know that the tits have been an icebreaker when I've been getting to know men I turned out to really like - an asset whose absence I'd have had to make up for somehow, with a scintillating personality or a more convincing ability to laugh at their crappy jokes, or something. I don't know.

The truth is, I don't know much about men in some pretty key ways. While I don't feel like they're some weirdo alien species, and I prefer them to women in many ways both practical and impractical, and I have a sense that I'm a very mannish sort of woman - all that notwithstanding, I don't know anything about scoring with men or talking to them in a seductive way or flirting or dancing cooperatively with them or anything. As far as I can tell, my entire modus operandi as a seductive being has been having big tits and then saying no to the men I didn't like, and sometimes pining helplessly for the ones who weren't tit men.

My adoration of the F-word aside, sometimes I'm glad in a basic way that I'm not single anymore. I really liked being single and had lots of fun at it and wouldn't have stopped if not for someone as great as him, but I had no idea what the fuck I was doing and really, I still have no idea what the fuck I was thinking half the time. Thank Jeebus my tits were watching my back.

Today's lesson is all about the corruption of the religious class

So Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is a nice album even if the title is a little twee. But one of the things I like about Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds besides what I gushed about on Hipster's blog is their ability to communicate exclamation marks through music, so it's not so twee as all that. It's loud and lacking the cutesy prettiness of the last Bad Seeds album that had tinkly little tracks like 'Breathless' and 'Messiah Ward', but that's okay. It has its own, louder, prettiness. Especially the second track, which is still my favourite song.

Something I like to think about from time to time when I'm stuck on public transport without a book is old-time itinerant preachers and charismatics, who'd go around selling their particular version of God in barns and street corners and speaker's corners and whatnot, building up or failing to build up a following. Especially this guy, mostly because I can hardly wrap my head around the idea of German glossolalia. Can you imagine?

Since watching Jesus Camp I haven't been able to believe modern North American charismatic or pentecostal denominations have a relationship with the divine - that their religion isn't just a travesty that serves the lay people as a socially acceptable excuse to hate gays, gainfully employed women, and scientists, and serves the preachers as a way to make enough money to buy crystal meth for their favourite manwhores whilst maintaining a large family in the style to which they've become accustomed. At the time I found the movie annoying and unedifying, but what made the price of admission worth it was seeing those children educated in the art of faking glossolalia. Exactly the sort of thing that's going to make the rest of the world think they're loony, and make them feel a strong sense of community with each other. Seeing the camp director slipping in and out of glossolalia whilst pumping everybody up was pretty amazing.

I want to think that glossolalia is an actual spontaneous phenomenon - not literally that one starts spouting off in the tongue of angels, but that one manages to have an experience of such mysticism, such abandonment of the self . . . As it stands for me the Quaker way is best: shutting up for a solid hour and only speaking (with words) when you feel moved to - second last meeting I went to, one of the speakers recited from one of Leonard Cohen's more cheerful songs - maybe that's as angel-talky as it gets these days.

Anyways, I still like to imagine that my culture used to support real honest-to-goodness mystics and angel-talk and all the other fancypants pentecostal stuff in the past, when there was less money to be made off it and people didn't know enough about the wider world to be quite so scared shitless by it - that maybe there was a time when North American mystic religion was actually about religion, and not paranoia. I like to imagine it but I doubt it. A lot.

The point I was getting at is that Nick Cave and Tom Waits are two people I think would have made fantastic itinerant preachers or charismatics back in the day. If I had seen them proselytizing back in, say, 1850, and had been raised over the preceding 29 years, I probably would have joined their cults. It's a strange thought but I'm pretty sure that's what would have happened.

Grunge isn't dead, I just slept in

Last night, saw The Simpsons, season 19, 'That 90's Show'. It was so funny - even in the middle of a giant Simpsons binge that we've been going on almost since the selfsame hour we got back from Düsseldorf, it was so stand-out funny. And now that I've entered the ranks of the target-market bourgeoisie, with a credit card that has no upward limit, and a landline and a cellphone, and stress headaches and one grey hair, and all the rest of it, may I just say: if we must have decade-based nostalgia, it's time for nostalgia for the decade I parted with my virginity in.

So many firsts for me in the 90's - first time I got drunk, high, interested in music, out, away, abroad, put under, put into, surgically enhanced - you know - it's the decade I went from being a rather sweet little girl to being an unstable id-driven sex fiend. And if we have to commemorate decades I'd like to commemorate that one over the 80's or the 70's, when the fun things I was doing were less associated with the spirit of the age, 'Hungry Like The Wolf' consistently being my favourite song since it came out when I was four notwithstanding.

Of course I don't think we should have decade-based nostalgia at all. I think we should just keep liking the things we like from each decade and not try to institutionalize that with retarded theme nights where everybody waits around for the only song they still like from the decade in question to get played, wearing clothes and makeup that reminds them of the glory days of people who they were too young to score with back in the decade in question and who are now too old or married to be sexually interesting.

And no, 'Hungry Like The Wolf' isn't my favourite song - that's a big lie - it was just in that awesome episode about Ralph Wiggum winning the Democrat and Republican primaries:

At the moment, my favourite song is the second track from the new Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album that I bought last Saturday, but more on that later.

Driving points, you say knowingly

Home again home again. So much to write about - that was a lovely trip - but I'll restrain myself to writing about Catch 22, which the F-word bought for me to read on the train. Reading it contemporaneously with getting furious at the goddamn thugs in my industry who are willing to take complete advantage of our finest instincts for their own filthy rotten gain probably heightened how much I loved it, for love it I did. Lots of laugh out loud moments and a driving point. And find it hard to believe it was more relevant when it was written than it is now. It should be mandatory reading in highschool.

Speaking of driving points, though, it was a very boy book, and by boy book I'm not talking about all the raping and murdering and marching and moaning, but about the way it's written. Absolutely nothing left to the imagination, nothing for the reader to extrapolate - everything spelled out in detail, from the visuals to the theme. Not a beautiful woman sitting in the corner educating us through some sort of subtle Socratic dialogue, like a Jane Austen novel or something, no - about as subtle as a massive cock slammed down into a pile of mashed potatoes next to an 'Eat Me' sign.

I'm not complaining about it being an unsubtle boy book, though, because I'm a very boy girl, due to growing up in a house full of very boy boys and due to loving boys, and I like the occasional boy book. But I can't handle more than one such boy book a month or else I feel like I'm being nagged, even if I'm absolutely in tune and in agreement with the message. Maybe this is why a lot of boys don't read much. More subtle books are too girly for their poor boyish personas to bear, and then when they try to read the boy books they feel nagged. If I were them I'd probably just watch televised sport too.

I think there's also a problem with boy books usually being pretty fucking awful. You've got to be a fucking genius to nag people for 300 pages without it being a shitty book. So now we have naggy twats like Ian McEwan and Martin Amis dominating the boy book genre, both of whom compound their heavy handed crappiness by pretending they're also subtle, when they're totally totally not, and publishers keeping them in business just so boys can read a book every month or so without feeling girly.

Mistress La Spliffe is perturbed

This entire trip has been hovering between triumph and disaster. It hasn't, actually, but it feels that way right this moment, because I'm trying to navigate a German keyboard. I can handle all the other keyboards I've had to handle but I hate handling this one. But today is not officially a Day Off and the wireless wasn't working in my hotel, which means I've been handling German keyboards to do my job, which is fine. And you know, I'm not sure how I feel about caring about my job. . . but it's just as well I started caring about it yesterday, though, because today was the first day I found a grey hair on my head, attached to me even, and if I still had a job I didn't care about when I started going grey I'd feel like shit.

So I started caring about my job when it fully came home to me what kind of assholes industrialists I have access to are. The answer is massive. Absolute fucking sons and daughters of bitches. I always knew business types are often cunts, of course; I used to work in advertising. But I'm talking organized criminality here, not just fucking with people's heads to trz to make them buy stuff or screwing over whoever you can to bring home a paycheque. What these people want is to be gangsters and for the rest of us to either ignore it, abet it, or cease to exist.

I tell you it took an extra 45 seconds for me to fall asleep last night, I was so pissed off by the answer to the first question Mistress La Spliffe has ever asked at a press conference - oh yes - I waved my hand and interrupted rudely in a forum where it was appropriate. Just like in the movies. It felt good but the answer I got made me want to fire the first shots of the revolution. It was the cuntiest thing I've ever heard a person say out loud in front of me. Not ill-natured, not dismissive; rhetorically speaking it was a perfectly cordial and helpful response to what was evidently considered an appropriate question. But I tell you, motherfuck. I was so pissed off.

Here's the long and short of it: the next time some asshole tries to Adam Smith you with some bullshit about how the free market has an invisible hand that will sort everything out if we let it roam free, spit in his or her face for me. The invisible hand of the free market will punch you in the balls or fucking goose you in a dark alleyway.

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.