Weeded out

Goddamn it, got up to Episode 10 of Season 3 of Weeds, and it's just gotten too fucking silly, even for me and my post-nine-to-five need for pap. Thank god for Television Without Pity. Although at the moment I don't even care enough to read about what happened. Nancy has turned into a complete idiot and all the other characters are no fun anymore.

I hate this about 'quality' American television. Take a neat premise, a good cast, some tangled skeins and developed characters - go through them and then once they're all sorted out, just keep on truckin' until nobody's watching anymore and you get cancelled. Endless trucking is alright for low-concept television because formulas are endlessly variable through tiny shifts and changes. But with high-concept television with realistic characters it doesn't work at all. Not just because of plotholes. Also because it's obvious that no real person is going to be as stupid as high-concept, 'realistic' television characters need to be to sustain highly dramatic plotlines for years and years at a time. And if they were going to be that stupid, they aren't the sort of people I feel like looking at for 27 minutes a pop.

Just quit, goddamnit. Quit after two seasons and recycle the set and actors. The English do it, and they still turn some sort of profit, I think. Sell more merchandise, for god's sake. Bongs with the characters' faces on them. Sex toys modelled after cast members. Members. Hah. Anything but this ridiculous, extended, intrusive-life-support system in place now where the shows last fucking forever until I can't even remember the good times anymore.

Summer days

Neat.

In other news, feeling really gross this morning about Omar Khadr. It's a nasty precedent for two countries to set. As someone who wants to make babies when she gets a spare moment, I don't want them going to prison until they're old enough to know what they're doing to put themselves there. And I'd like to think the country I'm usually proud of coming from would support me in that ambition. Oh well, at least my hero Dallaire is on the case. When did he get to be a senator? When did I stop reading Canadian news?

Last night I got high chez San Francisca and decided to take a 'shortcut' home that I thought would have fewer cars on it, not having cycled high in some time. Fuck, it's nice to be high and on a bike on a summer evening. Which is lucky, because I got reeeeeeal lost. And fuck, it's nice to be high and on a bike on a summer evening, reeeeal lost. I felt like a sailor navigating an unknown Art Deco sea - knew which direction to go in more or less, but a little less than more. Brussels is really a beautiful city in the sunshine and in the warm, which the F-word and I are experiencing for the first time now. I could - well, I couldn't stay here forever if the weather was better. Or could I. Let's face it: we'll never know. But I could love this place a lot more if it was summer a lot more.

Thrillers are like life

Oh, puke. I cannot stand the way this show makes women act like retards with a guru. "Women feel like they're watching themselves"? Do you live like that? Do you fucking want to live like that? I can't even begin to think about it without wanting to explode in a torrent of pseudo-Marxist ranting that would touch on the shoddy purchasing power of 80% of British women, the way credit enslaves the middle and lower classes, the idiocy of vastly overpriced ready-to-wear brands, and the nauseating fact that this story is in the same paper giving us news about 10,000 dead Chinese and a kajillion dead Burmese. And that would be unseemly because I quite liked the first season.

So moving on. The Ministry of Fear was great. The transparent plot twists were not the point, and the story wrapped up with something that wasn't a plot twist so much as a natural evolution of the story that nonetheless kneecapped me. It was very, very good, and seemed to be not so much a spy story as a study of pity, like The Human Factor was a study of loyalty and The Power and the Glory was a study of duty and The Quiet American was a study of prejudice or innocence or something.

The thing is, as far as a spy novel or thriller, it's not great at all - not just because of the transparency of the plot twists (perhaps they were opaque in those days, like how Agatha Christie could surprise people back then). Also there are big gaping holes in the plot, holes that make Weeds look like tightest-wound skein of television you can imagine. Why such a likely pass-phrase for the cake? Why stage a death to frighten Rowe away? Why put him in the loony bin instead of finish the job the bomb started? Tonnes of holes. But it's still a great book, because it's such a great and believable study of the inescapability of pity and moral - what's the word? - you know - when something isn't black or white. Moral Mediterranean-ness.

And what I wonder is - a 'thriller' with that many holes, that transparent a plot - would it find a publisher today? I doubt it. Or if it did, not the sort of publisher who would promote it as a work of genius. How many Graham Greenes are there floating around out there with all sorts of important things to say about our human factors, but who can't express them in the sort of tight perfect-plot writing we expect now?

My hero

Nice, restful weekend, much of it spent outside in the creepily wonderful weather. This is like last year, which saw a beautiful, beautiful, creepily warm and sunny April, followed by 12 months of mushy shitty weather. I guess the summer weather is moving surely but surely back towards the summer? We'll see. The prognosis is good for the rest of May so though it's creepy that it's summer so early I'm going to enjoy the fuck out of it while it lasts. Sleeping naked and no sleeves at the office! Wheeeeeee! Fuck clothes.

In terms of productivity the F-word outstripped me by far this weekend. While I ran around outside learning to use the boomerang he got for his birthday, watched most of the rest of Weeds, fell in and out of a doze during The Fog of War (though I have a feeling it was pretty good), read the first half of The Ministry of Fear (finger lickin' good so far, though it's one of the more unlikely of Graham Greene's books - the plot twists are not the point in his writing but these ones are a little too transparent) and came to understand the massive but enlightening mindfuck that is my Japanese abacus and the idea of complementary arithmetic (why, oh why didn't someone show me this shit when I was a child?), he achieved much of the same (book titles changed and he's leaving the abacus to me) BUT ALSO figured out how to make pasta.

I try not to be a food snob. I believe the small amount of time most Westerners spend on food is overall a good thing rather than a bad thing, because you can't escape the fact that when we spent a lot of time on food, it was actually women who were spending a lot of time on food. I love good food, but women have minds that are too flexible and fertile to be confined to the kitchen while men's monorail brains run the rest of the world. That's why, while I'm no fan of McDonald's or any other fast food chain, I thought Super Size Me was reactionary, gimmicky shit whose subtext, if not surtext, was all about how women should fuck off back to the kitchen and rescue their families from obesity.

That being the case, I nonetheless have to say: when someone else is making it, home-made pasta is totally worth the trouble. It shouldn't be. What the F-word learnt to make was just the straight, Southern Italian semolina and water pasta - just a special kind of flour and some water - exactly the same ingredients as in packaged pasta. But, I think because homemade pasta is just hung to dry for an hour or so whereas packaged pasta is industrially dried until it's very brittle, the homemade pasta is a much, much nicer consistency and soaks up the sauce so much more effectively. It is so fucking good. I'm the luckiest girlfriend in the world.

Hourglasses

Creeping towards the weekend like a parched man dragging himself to a well. Starting to get a disconnected feeling. No time for my own brain. Mighty force of will to give the F-word some of the attention he deserves. Bad dreams about being trapped in a library with the fear Bluebeard will pop up behind me and we'll have to try to have a conversation, or else a duel to the death - either would suck. Still can't believe my aunt is gone.

And on top of all that, I really don't like Bruce Chatwin's Songlines, or at least the first 72 pages of it. I love Bruce Chatwin as a travel writer, and I really liked On the Black Hill, his weirdo Welsh epic I read a couple of months ago. Songlines is crappily smug and tedious in comparison. That hurts, as it's the first thing of his I haven't liked, and I like liking all of what a person publishes. Like Jane Austen or Nick Cave or Patrick Süskind or Bach. Knowing that I can grab whatever of theirs and get into it without worrying that I'll be wasting my time with crap. Time . . . can't waste it.

I have a feeling Emily Brontë would be another person who would have written stuff I'd have loved consistently. You know, they reckon she did write another book before she died besides Wuthering Heights. Her sister Charlotte burnt it, after Emily died. If that's true, Charlotte should be remembered as much for that as for Jane Eyre. But I suppose time has tamped down the possibility of knowing that for sure. Time - always a question of fucking time! It's why I would have liked to be a professional historian - cheating time a bit and finding out its secrets before it buries itself in itself forever. And it's also why I chose not to be a professional historian despite the exhortations of my professors - I was afraid I'd bury myself in time before my own personal time buried me itself.

Slippery time

No time, it's the story of my fucking life right now because it's report season. Even less time as I've finally given into addiction and started watching the rest of Weeds. Co-opting my time, just like the Sopranos did, except Weeds has even more plotholes, like why didn't the Armenians rat out Nancy's operation when they were arrested? But it's funny and feeds my taste for brainless quirk. It's either that or Jackass repeats - I find when work is too hard I need the sort of pablum I'm usually all judgemental about when I get home. The F-word told me a statistic about how something like 90% of America's Funniest Home Videos viewers were college-educated professionals in executive jobs. I can believe it.

Today I have no time because I have to get to work early so I can leave work early and go see les flics about my permanent residency card. And then I will do so, and wait, and get home and get high and eat a nice dinner and watch Weeds. And life will whizz past until it is Friday and one of my aunties back home has her funeral. The parents told me yesterday that she'd died all of a sudden-like on Monday and I can't believe it - it hasn't registered that I'm not going to see her anymore. She was sick the last time I saw her, but no sicker than she'd been for the last twenty years, as far as I could tell.

And now she's gone, and life is whizzing past, and time will roughly peel away the people I love like a drunk chef tackling an artichoke. And I too will be roughly peeled off, leaving the people who I love that are left artichoke-naked and tender, and what the hell is the point of all that?

We have ways of pissing you off

I didn't read much while on holiday because I was too busy being on holiday. Coming back from holiday, however, was a different story. The Thalys high-speed train track went down somewhere between Aachen and Belgium, and though fuckin' Douche Bahn knew about the problem for at least two hours before our arrival in Aachen, we still had to wait there for a further two hours for a coach to come pick us up. Apparently German organizational skills don't extend to counting the number of the people on a train and then ordering a corresponding number of coaches to take them to their final destinations, no; it's better to wait until they get to a transit point, watch them mill around in an open square angrily, and then order coaches individually until, after about four hours, everybody has stopped complaining at you. The F-word, who worked there for a few years, explained that in his experience it was the most organized country ever until something went wrong, and that when it come to making contingency plans they are among the most inept people in Europe. I suppose that's how the Nazis got in.

Anyhoo, now we're having a cat emergency so I have to go deal with that instead of writing about Spike Milligan and Bruce Chatwin.

In the weeping Forest of Le Vulva

So. Whilst waiting for the Bad Seeds concert to start the F-word and I sat in a nearby park, eating chips with samurai mayonnaise and talking about Roswell and Scientology. And I was wondering what possesses people to believe the most far-fetched things, to become absolutely credulous and devout later in life - not as a malleable, impressionable child with your parents forever dragging you to church and carefully indoctrinating you, but as a mature person who surely knows better, and who has money and a standing in civil society, and who gives it up for creepy strangers who appear to be absolutely fucking insane.

A half hour later in Forest National (shitty venue - only bother with it if you know you're going to like the act), I sat in the audience, waiting for the show to start and thinking about how fucking rich Nick Cave must be. Rich as a rich Scientologist. I had paid about Euro 40 for the tickets, and there were roughly a kabillion people there, which means he was making 40 x 1 kabillion, minus costs, which according to my new Japanese abacus is still north of a kabillion. I had a moment of cursing myself for not having been a rock star; I could have retired by now.

And an hour later in Forest National, I sat in the audience, watching the show and wondering if there was a way to throw my entire cunt on to the stage - forget the underwear. So I suppose I got an answer to my earlier question.

I've said before there's a risk that if I'd been me 150 years ago, I might've have tossed everything to docilely tail around Nick Cave or Tom Waits, if they'd have been itinerant preachers. Now I reckon I know why, and it's all in the term 'charismatics'. It's fascination, a chance to forget yourself; a good charismatic is charismatic because he sets the example and makes it safe. Even when Nick Cave was younger his persona had lots of crazy old man in it. Now it's vastly crazy old man. Screaming. Writhing. With a boner. And you don't know where to look, so you look at him, and before you know it, you're wondering if there's a way to throw your cunt on the stage, and you've already gone over April's disposable income budget to even be there.

So it was lovely and semi-religious. But of course it wouldn't have worked if the music hadn't been very good and if the band wasn't picking up the melodic and rhythmic slack whilst Nick Cave was moaning at the audience and abridging some of my favourite verses. (Time constraints? Dotty memory? Wanting to wrap up sooner and go to bed early, and thinking the non-Anglo audience probably wouldn't notice?) Two drummers! It was loud, and that was good, though Forest's sound isn't so good.

They played most of the last album, which was also good as I like the last album a lot, and then a few old favourites. Audience were dead fish during the loud songs, except for 'Papa Won't Leave You, Henry', which I guess not even dead fish can resist. They waved lighters for the tinkly ones. I was happy about the 'Stagger Lee' and the 'Tupelo' - the latter of which I hadn't liked much before hearing it live and very loud. I wished they played 'No Pussy Blues', but they didn't, and 'The Curse of Millhaven', but I knew they wouldn't as they were keeping every rendition to five minutes or less. The whole thing was just too fucking short. But sweet.

Bonntastic

No time to write as I'd like to, but I'll try to gradually get everything I would like to get out over the week, including a little blogasm over the May Day Bad Seeds concert, whose imperfections only rendered it more lovable. We went to Bonn and had a lovely time over the long weekend - I relaxed muscles that I thought had turned into bone by this point, I've been so tense, and I feel like I got a bit of perspective on my high-pressure yuppie life and how to end it without physically destroying myself.

It's hard to pick out a high point for a quick Monday morning bloggery, as so much of it was so damn nice. It's a lovely little tourist city, absolutely built for geeks like me; lots of spacious, pretty parks to smoke joints in without feeling like you're setting a bad example for the children, interspersed with some of the best museums and galleries ever. We went to three, which were all awfully good one way or another: the Arithmeum, the Kunstmuseum Bonn (full of wierdo modern art), and the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the post-Nazi German history museum. Of the three, the history museum was certainly the most impressive - it really must be seen. From the archive footage of little kids who were looking for their parents after getting seperated from them in air raids to the deliciously dry, informative accounts about each successive federal election, it was all so much better than PBS and the BBC rolled into one. All the signage is in German, so either bring some Germans with you or buy the English guidebook at the beginning.

However, I must say I enjoyed the Arithmeum the most. This is despite the fact that numbers are my enemy and I wish we, as a race, could drop Indo/Arabic numerals altogether and just go back to 'one, two, lots'. It was full of cunning machines and devices from the last three or four millenia for calculating things - originals under glass, and then reconstructed models with instructions that you could fool around with until you understood. It was so fucking awesome, and we went there first thing in the morning so I wasn't even high yet. I learnt how to use a Japanese abacus! They look like this:





The counters on the bottom are units of one (so there are four), and the counter on top is a unit of five. Starting from the right, you stick numbers in, first rod for the ones, second for the tens, third for the hundreds, etc. - so for 84, you'd stick up four bottom counters on the farthest-right rod, and then three bottom counters and one top counter on second-farthest right rod - then you do things to add and subtract. You can use them to vastly simplify multiplication and division, too, if you know your multiplication tables, which is essentially all I know when it comes to math.

Anyhoo, the beautiful, lovely, kind F-word bought me my very own abacus, and while I was fooling around with it on the train back to Brussels I suddenly realized what my Korean students in Paris had been doing every time I'd asked them to reckon a number, and they'd done it in record time by counting in some way absolutely impenetrable fashion to me on their hands - they were using their hands as little Japanese abaci. They'd tried to explain it to me at the time, but between their difficulties with English (which is why they were seeing me) and my utter incompetence with figures, I hadn't understood a fucking scintilla of a notion of what they were doing. Until I got my own Japanese abacus. I have to say, I'm fucking pissed off I wasn't given one of these as a child. They're so fucking smart, and they re-contextualize arithmetic as a physical, visual thing instead of an ever-lengthening and ever more wrong series of numbers stretching down a page in a slow, desperate rightwards diagonal.

Do you stop being you just to be how he wants you, oh yes I do, the stew is blue as the doves coo in the kangaroo zoo next to the emu, and how do you

There's no time to write adequately about last night's religious experience of a concert as we will dash off to Bonn the moment my darling covers his shame adequately for us to venture to the train station. Instead I'll leave you with Nick Cave's 2001 cover of Pulp's 'Disco 2000'.



What I find most interesting about the cover is how it makes it mercilessly clear that Different Class had very silly lyrics, no matter how charmingly Jarvis Cocker yelped them out over catchy rhythm and melodies. I still like it though. Different Class is Dr. Seuss for teenagers, and I was a teenager when it came out, which makes 'Disco 2000' my 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand', or my 'Bang a Gong', or my 'Come On Eileen', or my 'Can't Get You out of My Head', depending on how many decades older or younger than me you are.

But I don't like it as much as His'n'Hers. I heard that when I was 12 and hence it was very Dr. Seuss-y, in the sense of teaching me lessons as basic as that one must try green eggs and ham before deciding that one does not like them. It gave me my first clue that sex was messier than in the Harlequins under the chesterfield, and that one should never decide to fuck a boy based on how much one thought he wanted one, because there was a whole world of boring, depressing adult perversion to get trapped in out there. It made me a more sensible teenager, in terms of my twat at least. And to this day 'Pink Glove' sometimes vies with 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone' in the running to be my favourite song ever. Not often though.

Also, His'n'Hers has the song 'Babies', which has the pithiest couplet in the English language - the Tristan-und-Isolde tragedy as explored through each story-telling medium through the ages, culminating in a rehashing in every television series that ever got past the pilot episode, summed up in 20 Dr. Seussy syllables:

I know you won't believe it's true
I only went with her because she looked like you

Tweedle-dee, Tweedle-dum, and Tweedle-doesn't-eat-quite-as-much-shit

Having suggested Obama was vanilla yesterday, today I have to point out that he's still the least repulsive candidate by a long stretch. This was driven home to me last night when we watched the latest Four Corners (an Australian documentary series that I'm using to acclimatize myself to the culture of the country that may be my home someday, as I don't have access to a barbeque or a visible native underclass in Brussels - the Wallonians look just like me). It was quite a crap episode and didn't help me acclimatize to Australia at all as far as I can tell, but there was one moment in it that was fucking beautiful. Let me see if I can find it on YouTube because it was just so good:



What a little shit-eating fuck. What is it with the States that the politicians have to be such shit-eaters? Why can't a right-wing candidate say 'I didn't want any more national holidays because I think they're a waste of money, no matter how marvellous Such-and-Such was, and the black vote wasn't that important in my constituency at the time so, well, there you are', and either be congratulated or criticized for that decision? Why can't that awful creature Clinton say 'okay, that Bosnia thing was kind of a lie, but it sounded good, didn't it? By the way, my husband really fucked that Balkan shit up. He fucked a lot of shit up. Really, putting that cigar in the intern was the least of his fuck-ups. I won't be such a doofus if you vote for me' instead of mis-use words like 'mis-spoke'? Both of those moves might have been mistakes, but they were mistakes that the mistakers probably consulted their advisors about making - there were reasons those 'mistakes' were made - and eating shit in public will not help deal with those reasons.

And in the context of campaigning alongside two champion shit-eaters, Obama looks least worst. His speech after people first noticed his pastor was black and pissed off was not a shit-eating speech. And if his own pastor is now willing to sabotage his candidacy mid-campaign by stoking up the scandal over being black and pissed off - especially by saying he's pretty sure Obama secretly agrees with his thoughts on being black and pissed off, which is tantamount to calling him a liar - maybe I'd drop him too. But then, if I'm anything I'm a Quaker, and we don't have inconvenient, self-aggrandizing, book-selling, collection-plate passing, and in my experience insufferable creatures like pastors. There's a time and a place for mouthing off like a know-it-all madman, and it's called the Internet.

God damn America! God save the Queen!

As a born and bred Canada who has given up her residency and lives as an Official Expatriate in a ridiculous country she strives to ignore, it's not often I get sent a massive 'fuck you' from a government I can call my own. It is inevitable, however. For besides being Canadian I am also, thanks to the fine bloodlines of my mummy, Anglo-Saxon nationalism, and the bounty of Cold Queen Bess, officially one of the Inselaffen, who are told to fuck themselves by their government with a tedious regularity.

While I have a certain love for that green and pleasant land, I have an overwhelming disgust for its political system. Perhaps it's the most bullshitty one in the world - it's right up there, anyways. I still sort believe some people involved in the American one believe their own bullshit on some level. Though less and less so, particularly this morning. I don't understand how that country can be at a point where it has a serious black presidential candidate, but where the political system apparently requires him to be so deeply vanilla that he has to disown Jeremiah Wright because of some fairly mainstream pulpit-thumping.

And how can that pulpit-thumping be so deeply villified without being addressed? Forget about whether he was right or wrong about lots of the naughty things he said - the thing is, lots of people believe the naughty things he said. Saying them got more people into his church, I don't doubt. How can such ideas just be dismissed by a democratic political system in the height of the race for top office? How did those people get to be such pussies that the ones who disagree won't even calmly explain why they disagree instead of freaking the fuck out over the idea that some brown and black people at home and abroad are seriously fucked off by what the United States did and continues to do with them?

Though it was the height of temerity to tell God to damn America. That's the problem with these weirdo religious types - always telling their omnipotent lord what to do. I don't get that at all, you know. If he's omnipotent and perfect why the fuck are your prayers coming out as imperatives? Sit back and enjoy the ride, I say, and God will no doubt damn who He damn well pleases without being ordered around by one of His lesser creations.

Anyhoo, all I meant to do this morning was complain about the bullshitty tone of this response to a petition I signed a few months ago regarding the shutdown of the UK passport office in Brussels, but now I'm just happy I'm not American. A sentiment which the UK and Canadian political institutions have depended on for decades in terms of getting us to put up with their own brands of bullshit. "My eyeballs don't count under national health coverage anymore? Oh well, at least I'm not American." Et cetera.

Oh well, fuck you too, Cold Queen Bess.

The importance of importance

Sometimes the future frightens me. I think that started in the heatwave of 2003, when all those old people died while I was in Paris. Maybe that's why I chose military strategy instead of economy for my masters there - maybe I had some paranoid expectation that one day the overheating world would be so resource-poor and violent that I would have to protect my family through assymmetrical warfare and the deft use of international alliances. It was either because of that paranoia that I chose military strategy, or because I'd already figured out that it doesn't fucking matter what you study in university in terms of getting a job so I might as well do something interesting and with fewer numbers than economy. That's pretty likely.

What is probably the most likely reason that I studied military strategy (and do bear in mind this is all speculation - I couldn't swear to my reasons for doing anything I did between 2001 and 2005) is an understanding it was important. Not just the hows of people killing each other en masse, but the whys, and the way to get them to perhaps stop it or at least ways to get them to not do it elsewhere as part of the same conflict.

This is on my mind now because Iraq has turned into even more of a hecatomb in a way that will impact all our lives, yet all the papers in Europe are front-paging instead with the Austrian who spent 24 years raping and impregnating his daughter. I'm not saying that's something that should be taken lightly, but it's not very important to know all the details about it. Not unless you like feeling slightly sick, or unless you want tips on how to keep your own enslaved, abused, ever-growing incestuous family captive in your fucking basement. And honestly, looking at the headlines - "Images Emerge from the 'House of Horror'" and whatnot - it looks as though that's the way the coverage is leaning. A how-to guide in extreme and violent perversion. Fuck, we live in degenerate times.

It's something we talk about at work once in awhile, you know - relief we don't have to titillate our readers, or struggle like jackals in a pack to wring interviews out of impossibly emotionally vulnerable or pathetically evil people. And our industry is important in that it effects a bunch of people at once in ways the people effected don't understand. And our job in terms of reporting on the industry is a little more key to the operations of that industry than, say, the role of the mainstream media is in terms of rescuing a woman who'd been imprisoned by her father 24 years ago by reporting on it in obsessive detail after she'd been rescued. No investigation - just scandal written up through police reports and after-the-fact interviews . . . providing one more ordeal, the ordeal of scrutiny, that could finish off any victims who had survived.

My head is full of thinking about the role of the media at the moment, as you might be able to tell, and also of the importance of importance in the media. I watched the Frontline special about it last week when I was in my hayfever half-coma and I do reccommend it, if you have four hours of loose ends at your fingertips.

Sprung

Springtime has come to the willies of the men. This weekend was hot and sunny and lovely; all of Brussels hit the patio with an enthusiasm that rivals Canadians' on the first +0° sunny day of the season. And all the men are looking at all the women with hot, sultry eyes after a winter of resembling dead fish. I don't know if it's because of people wearing fewer clothes, or that they don't have to keep the animal part of their brain busy by bracing their poor bodies against the cold, or if it's just that the spring has made people more happy, the women walking around with little smiles instead of annoyed scowls, the men finally able to lounge outside on chairs at the right angle to appreciate the ledgey jut of tits in a t-shirt walking by.

And me, I haven't been able to stop thinking about riding face for more than ten minutes at a time since last Thursday. The thought pops into my head with a still-shocking regularity: when the more-appealing men are lounging back on their patio chairs, smiling up glowing-eyed at my tits and sandal-wearing swagger, I am only three steps away from stepping over and straddling their heads. Sometimes I wonder if I'd be able to keep a lid on myself if I wasn't in a satisfying relationship. Actually, I don't wonder, I know I wouldn't.

So it's a chicken-and-egg question at the moment: am I loving the horniness of Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! so much right now because I'm so horny, or am I so horny because I'm loving the horniness? I think the most rampant sexuality I've ever seen was from people who have just given up on the drugs, and since Nick Cave stopped with the heroin it's been horniness after horniness from him. I like it; I like it as much as his hallucinatory madness from the eighties and nineties - still just hallucinatory enough now to be poetry but - well - hell. Next time I hear somebody ask about what might have happened to Coleridge as a poet if he wasn't rotten with opium, I may have an answer. Though I suppose Coleridge couldn't have got so deep into the horniness, professional-writer-wise, seeing as that was an era when only prostitutes liked sex.

Anyways, it's really good. 'Midnight Man' has been stuck in my head ever since I crowbarred Amy Winehouse out by stealing her CD and then not liking it much, and I love having it stuck in my head. It's like my head is an iPod. And we're going to a Bad Seeds concert on Thursday before our trip to Bonn! Yay!

Have you seen the little piggies?

I reckon I'm a closeted fur-monger, because despite being a pinko I totally do not get people fussing over other people wearing cute animals. And I write this as a cat lover who would enthusiastically disembowel any Swiss fuck who tried to get my Lexie for a blanket. The thing is, if Lexie was a piggie, I'd be just as enthusiastic about eviscerating any Italian fuck who tried to turn her into salame, because I'd love her no matter how big and fat and delicious she was. I feel there's something much worse about habitually eating meat twice a day than having a couple of fur coats in the cupboard. And hence, there's something proportionately more retarded about getting knickers in a twist over stray cats being strangled for their pelt or baby seals getting their heads bashed in than over kabillions of piggies being slaughtered in revolting abattoirs after consuming far too many primary food resources that could have gone to stopping Haitians and such from rioting over their hunger.

I'm not saying I'm going to rush out and buy a fur coat after I make my first €100,000, because unless you live in a cold country they're Bad Taste, and baby, I taste like fucking candy bars. But I'm so fucking sick of animal rights activists basing their compassion on cuteness. They need to face it: the cuter an animal is, the cuter it's going to look as a coat. Maybe they think it'd be easier to whip the world up into a big orgy of caring about general animal welfare if they concentrate on the cute ones, but can anybody except another cute-lovin' animal rights activist take that sort of thing seriously when piggies - a much brighter, more sensitive, more affectionate, more intelligent, AND more unclean animal than baby seals or cats - are getting killed in their billions in slaughterhouse conditions that make getting your brains clubbed out on a chunk of ice or getting throttled in the Swiss countryside look like a sojourn in a thalasso spa?

I suspect it's also a question of money. I don't think anybody ever got rich clubbing baby seals or choking Swiss cats, but I think a lot of people have got rich from being assholes to pigs. And I don't think the shriller animal rights activists have the guts, brains, or resources to focus their sights on that sort of industry, no matter how engaging pigs are (really, they have lovely personalities, and they're sooooo cute when they're babies) and no matter how popular Charlotte's Web was. So PETA does fucking wet, retarded, alienating, things like get shirty with famous people over their dogs, a bully like Heather Mills tries to tackle a cottage industry in an economically depressed shithole by posing with seals, and a fucking flake like Brigitte Bardot does a number on Swiss entrepreneurs. Good god, what a bunch of attention-grabbing wets.

Sumer is icumen in, lude sneeze cuckoo!

Absolutely clotheslined by hay fever. Nature has punched me hard in the back of the knees, and just when I was trying to love on her too - it's so lovely and green and flowery out there. If I was a normal person I'd be among the blossoms, humming Terrell/Gaye standards and composing Springtime poetry, but unfortunately I am not. Hay fever this bad makes me think I'd have been selected out if I lived even two hundred years ago, and as it stands I ask for your prayers and good wishes as I try to walk the sociopathic streets of Brussels without wandering in front of a speeding car because I stupidly assume, in the haze of medication and plummeting blood pressure, having the right of way will keep me safe.

Always hard to predict where I'll be clotheslined by hay fever and where I won't be. Ontario was pretty decent this way, I reckon because springtime was so short. Italy was okay too, the centre of it anyways, despite springtime there being an extended, lovely affair stretching liesurely from late January to May. Oh Italy. Still not over the Berlusconi thing. Thinking about Italy now, especially while I'm living in Belgium, its uglier and equally incompetent cousin, is like remembering a really hot lover who gave fantastic head and fucked like an avenging archangel, but robbed liquor stores. Which more or less describes my second-most memorable Italian lover (the current one has the passport, and I can still recall his last name, so there you are), but I was blogging about hay fever today.

The F-word wondered yesterday, as I lay very still on the couch staring dully at online episodes of Frontline, getting indignant about over-medicated children being fed microwaved pogo sticks and the Bush administration getting away with everything, how I will do in Australia in this respect, his daddy being laid flat by hay fever each spring in the fruit-growing part of Victoria. But we are looking at a sub-tropical, rain-foresty bit of New South Wales, and I figure daily rains will keep the air clear. Sub-tropics. I cannot imagine. Green all the time? What? How? We will visit in their springtime to see how I do - not this year though - this year Magnum is getting married so I get to see Ontario wearing her incomparably beautiful autumn colours instead.

What a world, what a varied, crazy world, with opposite seasons and weird plants and singing cuckoos and Italian stallions and all the rest of it.

The Chemical Dragon is competent

I was all set to be indignant this morning about how Hillary Clinton isn't a bad memory yet, but I've decided that I don't care who wins the primary or the presidency or anything in the US as long as my stocks keep going up and as long as their economy stays on course for deep into the shitter so that the world can force it to abide by some sort of industrial environmentalist framework, in the interests of protectionism if nothing else. When I choose a country to live in, I will care desperately about who wins what there. In the meantime, I will simply laugh as the so-called 'left wing' in the US ties itself into insoluble knots; as Italians make themselves the monkeys of the world by electing an offensive tapeworm like Berlusconi; and as Belgium continues to be Belgium. Hah. Hah.

I dislike people who tell other people not to care so much, and yet I am at a point in my existence where I must tell myself not to care so much. The chemical rages of the past week or so which are finally, slowly abating served their purpose, as the monthly hormonal rages each month do in a less traumatic manner. Namely, to put things in perspective. Three lessons:

1. Other people's fuck ups cannot be controlled by the power of my mind. This came clear to me last night as we watched an amateur theatre group. A young kid was doing a solo routine and sort of losing the audience, and it was making me miserably uncomfortable.

"But wait," I thought. "That's not you up there. That's some boy with chutzpah who knew what he was letting himself in for. Why are you uncomfortable? Just try not to look bored in case he glances at the audience and you've done all you can; this is his show."

So I stopped being uncomfortable and he managed to pick the thread back up, and I learnt a lesson that most people probably learn in their early teens: I'm not the fucking omphalos of the universe. Not rocket science, but I'm happy to have learnt it, as now I'll be able to watch figure skating, ballroom dancing, and ridiculously extended Democratic primaries without using far too much of my energy crossing mental fingers and repeating "don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up" on someone else's behalf, with more emphasis, I must say, than I ever use on myself.

2. Memory can be a burden. Again, hardly rocket science, and you'd think all that psychoanalysis would have helped me to that conclusion a long fucking time ago. But it did not. Suffice to say, there are still people and events in my head that are no longer in my life, and in each case there is an excellent reason why they are in my head and not in my life. Some of them have no further use outside of cautionary tales, character inspiration, or occasional archetypal reference in dreams. And many of them used up their concern credits years ago.

And yet I have a tendency to relive people and events periodically. Fine. Everybody does. But it has been compromising the present - perhaps inevitably, as I'm in a sort of long-term, rootless transition state, living in a country where I don't plan to settle - nonetheless, excessively. The present may be transitory, but it always is, and it deserves more of my energy than it's been getting. And there should be a sort of freedom to leading an existence as transitory as mine is at the moment that I have not been enjoying as much as I could.

3. In the grown-up world, competence is all you need to impress people. Maybe I spent too much time in higher education to appreciate that while university professors will grade you anywhere between A+ and E, the professional world is Pass or Fail, and all you have to do to Pass is make sure you know what you're doing and then doing it. And then fundamentally, the only way to get extra credit is to Pass more things.

Yes, that A+ used to feel so good. And the fact that I miss how good it felt points to the fact that I should, at some point, turn away from the grown-up world and start working on projects where perfection is a beautiful dream rather than something I can manage by making sure my feature covers all the right industrial issues with all the right sources, in accordance with our in-house styleguide. In the meantime, I'm getting money and I shouldn't get into a tizzy too much over something that has much more economic than emotional significance. Care yes, ulcer no.

I knew she was trouble

I've been holding out, because if there's anything more alienating to my halfbaked Marxist perspective than a rich chucklehead singing a catchy anthem about how she can't be bothered to go to rehab in a country where underpriced Afghan heroin and social desperation have made opiates the opiates of proletarians who can't afford the sort of lovely rehabs she could drag her bourgeois ass to but probably need them far more, it could only be Jennifer Lopez singing about how she's still from the block.

And then yesterday, one of the gym attendants turned off the top-40 shit and put on Back to Black. Maybe it was relief that I wasn't listening to Britney Ciccone Aguilera carrying on over some 'borrowed' backing rhythm & melody that was crappy even before it was bastardized, or maybe it's that I'm an absolute sucker for anything doo-woppy, but I was really enjoying it. Then "You Know I'm No Good" came on. I'd heard it before and had ignored it due to the Marxist thing, but stuck on the rowing machine I had ample opportunity to actually listen to what she was singing - and singing, no less, in that strong voice.

Okay. It's not Shakespeare. It's not even Lennon/McCartney. But it makes sense, scans, and it's evocative, and I can't remember the last time I heard pop that did that. Unless you count the Bad Seeds, and that's something else altogether. For one thing, Nick Cave isn't a 24 year old who sings about banal-but-deadly girl things in a rich girl voice. And sadly enough, all those girl bands from the 50's and 60's who Amy Winehouse and her producers are ripping off never managed to do that because producers then never cottoned on to the fact that the style of music did not necessitate singing charming repetitive inanities about loving, loving, loving and following, following, following, giving the whole delicious phenomenon a bafflingly short shelf life.

Anyways, my halfbaked Marxist objections to everything about Amy Winehouse stand, but I really like Back to Black, so I shall steal it. Problem solved.

The chemical dragon rides again

An encounter a little while ago saw more slap than tickle, with the consequence that we had a latex wardrobe malfunction and I was forced to seek out emergency contraception. But Belgium isn't France; it's much more Catholic, and consequently they don't throw around la pillule de lendemain in such a confetti-like fashion here. After an hour of fevered searching on Sunday morning I was left with the unfocused impression that I'd need to go to a family planning clinic that wouldn't be open until Monday to get it; after another ten minutes of even more fevered searching I got the impression I could get what I needed from a special Sunday pharmacy, and I did. The experience leaves me with three things that really must be said:

1. I try to be open to the message of the pro-life movement, as I know that for many of them it's from the heart, but any campaigner of any category who is campaigning against access to the morning-after pill is a twat. The action of the morning-after pill is a contraceptive action, not an abortive action. It jellifies the works up there so that wee sperms cannot go anywhere or so that a fertilized egg cannot fix itself in the walls of the uterus and start sucking sustenance from the mother's body.

I understand that there's a big group of people who feel life starts once a wee tadpole from the daddy swims into a big beachball from the mummy. Well, they're fucking wrong. Life starts ages before that. The wee tadpole is alive and the big beachball is alive, and the action of the tadpole swimming into the beachball is a part of both their lifecycles. Things really get interesting when the beachball that got swum into by a tadpole lodges itself in the uterine wall of the mummy and starts sucking sustenance from her. Up until that point, however, it's just another short-lived cell in a body full of short-lived cells.

And I understand there's also a big group of people who are against contraception, and to half of them, I say: Catholics, let it go. You might be able to get your adherents to have big families, but you're just going to lose them to the Pentecostals anyways. They have childcare and singing, and all you have is guilt and gloomy rituals.

2. The morning after pill is a fucking bitch. I've heard that you can get the same effect, in a pinch, by swallowing 20 birth control pills at once, and it fucking feels like it. I hate the pill because it turns me into a raging, weeping mess, and I hate the morning-after pill even more because it turns me into a raging, weeping mess days after the fact, when it's not a reflex to make a connection between the sensation that the world is a torture chamber and the fact that six or seven days ago you ingested an elephant's dose of sex hormones. I didn't notice the effect so much before, because the last time I needed the morning after pill was when I was with Bluebeard, when I was a raging, weeping mess all the time. But now that life is fundamentally good and I'm generally in a chirpy mood, it's been nigh-on unbearable.

3. Belgium is a fucking pain in my ass. It's the national equivalent of a teenage boy's bedroom. Getting anything done here takes so long, like, Italy-long, without Italy-weather or Italy-food or Italy-beauty. Having a panic as I thought I was due for an ectopic pregnancy through waiting too long to take the morning after pill because the centralization of information is an absolutely unknown concept here isn't even the most recent example of Belgium pissing me off. There has also been the fun of trying to get my residency card, trying to change debit accounts for my fuckin' useless health insurance, trying to go outside without choking on the visibly unhealthy air, trying to cross streets without getting hit by cars, and trying to stroll down pavements in a country where apparently people don't know how to walk.

The 12-month programme

Good news from work - my boss has decided that our jobs will be a lot more interesting. It will be harder work but that's cool. I was already showing up and that's 90% of the pain in my ass already. Showing up, unlike today, or at least this morning, when I get to "work from home" in anticipation of my trip to the maison communale to finally get my residency card. It will be long and annoying and full of civil servants, but it has to be done if I want to get a high-yield savings account - otherwise I can't imagine why I'd bother, I've been living in this country for more than a year now and nobody else has demanded more than a smile in the way of papers.

More than a year, and it's been a year since I got this job, I reckon. For the first time in awhile, I seem to be more or less where I imagined I'd be 12 months from then. It's okay. And I'm getting fonder and fonder of Belgium as the weather slooooowly warms up. If we get a real summer this year I may forebear from cursing blue at the uselessness of the place. We have committed, between ourselves, to stay here for awhile, but who knows what will happen? We could go apeshit and take off. But San Francisca and her man had been looking at two or so years, and here it is seven years later . . . And others at my office, especially the British, no longer show any inclination at all to leave. The quality of life here versus English cities is not to be compared. Sometimes I wonder that anyone lives in England anymore, though I miss Yorkshire from time to time.

Still, we're both having some mental problems in terms of putting down roots. Easier for me maybe as I'm a bit younger and care rather less, though it does give me a floaty schizoid feeling from time to time, and no doubt alters my behaviour as, practically speaking, I don't give a fuck as long as the money keeps rolling in. Worse for the F-word, probably, as he needs roots. You know what 'roots' means in Australian? Third person singular of 'to fuck'. Hah!

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

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

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






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

Small mercies

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



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



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

Third time fucky

To my father's people:

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

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

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

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

Holy titfuck, three times,

Mistress La Spliffe

The age of vacillation

We are stepping up discussions on where we are going to live one day, partly because more and more I have babies on the brain. My partner in the economist department came to work the other day, taking a break from her mat leave - she's been nursing and hence dropped all her weight and then some, and has stopped dyeing the grey out of her hair because that's meant to be bad for the babe or something. So compared to how she looked last time I saw her, it's like she has a really, really exhausting tapeworm. Her face was happier though.

And the question in my brain is, do we make babies here or somewhere else? The mat leave here is crap compared to Canada but pretty damn good compared to Australia, which is complete crap. But Canada is too cold, and if I have a baby here it will be Belgian. Yeeurgh. Then let's complicate the issue by wondering where to raise the babies. If it's Canada they'll pay through the nose for university and if it's here they'll get free university but it will be crap; in Australia it will be pricey but they have a genius repayment scheme. In Canada, whatever I spawn will have easier access to my people, but in Australia they'd have access to the F-word's people, and my people are so spread out over Canada anyways that they'd only have access to a few of them at a time.

At the moment the F-word and I are both leaning towards Australia to the point of looking at the real estate there but we have years in which to vacillate. No plans to leave Brussels for a good long time, especially now that spring is here, and no plans to get pregnant, as the idea continues to scare me shitless.

Shades of grey

Post-modernism is a talking point in our household because the F-word is an artist. To an artist post-modernism means something different from what it meant to me as an academic woman, and what it means to me now as a cultural participant. I think post-modernism is a uselessly, broadly accurate (not to mention ugly) term for a kind of relativism whose absence these days renders any academic or cultural inquiry worthless, and whose presence renders art wankerish.

But when it comes to cultural documents I sit around and read, keep your doubtless clever-ish post-war reinterpretations of everything, and give me a raging Oxbridge maso-queen who thought of women as 'raddled meat' and of Arabs as a society of lazy gorgeous dreaming males whose limbs quivered when they sexlessly, hygienically fucked each other in the sand.

Long way about of saying that so far The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an absolute lark. I don't know how long I'll continue with it though. 600 more pages to go, when there are so many other books in the world. . . And the bulk of my fascination with it is of the sort I feel when I'm listening to a sauced Englishman blathering about ethnic groups without any restraint borne of modesty or cultural relativism - I can enjoy it for an evening, and after that he's just another liquor-soaked twat who might as well be talking about football teams, and who thinks, if he thinks at all, that post-modernism is a communist tool to rob him of all credibility.

In that blathery sense The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is even better than my old favourite Wilfrid Thesinger - another of those hygienic, 'sexless' types who dug young Arabs and who had an enjoyably terse, funny writing style - because Thesinger seemed to have tried his best to become one of them (living for a long time with the Marsh Arabs in Iraq, who did badly under Saddam Hussein). Whereas, in his writing at least, Lawrence is so awfully English and the Arabs - not to mention the Turks and Jews - are so awfully not. I don't know if he loved them - he's certainly rather crueler than Thesinger about them - and so far he gives the impression that everything good they did was more or less an accident until he came along.

The thing is, books like Seven Pillars are the story of me, of us, as western Anglophones (nobody else reads this blog, do they?) - our identity documents. Post-modernist or not, I can't understand being impatient with or dismissive of these texts or the general Dead White Male canon, or primary sources in general. Incomplete, maybe; but meaningless? Certainly not! We can't invent a post-modernist past when we have such a profoundly pre-modernist history; we can't be revisionists; that's the only thing that's worse than being an asshole in the first place, and it stops us from knowing ourselves. When Lawrence writes that Arabs are incapable of seeing shades of grey, only being capable of seeing black and white, thus 'despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns', it tells us so little about Arabs but so much about us.

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.