God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland

Amsterdam is the thinking grownup's Disneyland. We started our vacationing there because I had a conference to attend, so work paid for my transport and the first couple of nights in our lovely B&B on a houseboat. Yes. You read that right. Fuckin' houseboat. What's more, because this fuckin' houseboat was just outside the city limits on a lake next to the huge and beautiful Amsterdamse Bos, where trees race up to the soggy gentle sky, a kind man rents you lovely bikes at great daily rates, and Schilpol's aeroplanes fly so low in anticipation of landing that their cocks are in danger of hanging out (fun because you can race them along the bike paths), it was cheaper than that revolting partitioned boiler room we slept in last September.

If you're considering a trip to Amsterdam, email me by clicking through on my profile, and I'll send you the owner's contact information - I'd post it here but I don't want to give them that much publicity, or else it will always be booked when I want to stay there, which will be often. The owners are in situ and were kind, chatty, interested without prying. I think ever so slightly disappointed that we were Canadian and Australian and not American. They had a real love for the States I've noticed in a lot of Dutch people - not only an appreciation for the personal, hospitable warmth of the typical American which otherwise isn't common in Europe, but also a love of the notion that you can do whatever you want there, make all the money you want, don't have to fight against any regulations. But then in the next breath they'll tell you how great their Dutch regulations are. And Dutch regulations are great. God, I wish the Dutch ran the world.

The conference was frightful and professionally useless; the focus was much more on marketing and it was like a flashback to my days in advertising. I skipped out on some of the more obviously useless portions of it and at one point struck up a very long and interesting conversation with the lovely woman who runs the business centre at the Hotel Okura. During the course of it she explained why Dutch organization and regulation tends to be so successful, though also frustrating to Dutch people themselves: the Polder Model. She explained it rather more concisely than Wikipedia by saying it meant that all parties concerned in a debate accepted the fact at the outset that they wouldn't be able to get everything they wanted. Imagine that . . .

The Hotel Okura was otherwise uninspiring, besides the doorman and his cat. The hotel has its own cat, a black and white tom who sprawls on the ground close to where the doorman stands, lazily watching him haul people's bags around, lazily inspecting the rich and the businesslike who go through the doors. It's a five-star hotel, but I would not call the tom a five-star cat, although he was great. I'm quite sure he still had his balls; he was a huge monster of a thing - more than twice the size of my Lexie, and less of it fat. And while his comfort with people means he's well-loved, none of that lovin' has been done with a wire brush or a pair of scissors; his healthy coat had some wild-looking clumps in it. Obviously he was the most charming thing I saw at the conference.

Another great thing about the conference was that it gave me a chance to be an Amsterdam commuter, as I rode my rented bike from the Bos to the hotel. I could have wept with the pleasure of it, as hundreds of bikes rode silently around during 'rush hour' and the number of cars on the road hardly changed. Not a helmet in sight - not on the grown-ups, not on the buckets of children in front-mounted baskets that their mums or dads were biking to daycare. The wind, for once, in my hair - wind largely untainted by the mufflerless effluent of shitboxes which so plagues my lungs in Brussels. Oh, it was lovely. How jealous I was of the people who get to live and work in a place where commuting is like that.

No complaints about riding our bikes around for fun, either, on the succeeding two days, except shockingly there still seems to be a certain class of tourist who does not understand the concept of bike paths. What a great, fun city. In terms of our touristy things, we went to the Rijksmuseum, again for hours and hours and hours . . . I don't get museum exhaustion in Amsterdam, it seems. And no, it's not the reefer. I usually get stoned before going to galleries and museums no matter where I am in the world. I don't know what it is. Great museum - my favourite bit, though, was a painting currently mounted close to the entrance showing the Dutch and Spanish signing a treaty concluding the Dutch revolt, which seemed to show the Dutch participants solemnly delivering the two-finger salute to their former overlords. Classy.

Also touristy: we went walking around Java Island, where there have been beautiful modern residential architectural things installed over the past 30 years - pictures and exclamations to follow.

God. Dutch people. The F-word pointed out to me that they had to be that good about organizing their space - making it that livable and that congenial - because if not they'd have all eaten each other by now, what with that little land being so crowded and the weather being so shitty. All the same though. How have we not ripped some serious pages out of their books yet?

Further notes on my vacation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uninterrupted barrage of awesomeness

So Barcelona is one of his non-shitty books! That having been said, he devotes a section to the Catalan scatological obsessions. Apparently both of Barcelona's rivers are named after the turds that used to float down them, rendering them undrinkable even 500 years ago. And in their Christmas Bethlehem créches, Catalans always include a figure of a peasant taking a big dump - the caganer.

This is the Robert Hughes I love - the one whose books read like a smooth, literate compilation of decades' worth of semi-naughty bar quizzes, with the occasional wordgasm over art and architecture. The timing is fantastic, too, because he devotes a big section to Barcelona's medieval history, which actually makes some contextual sense to me now thanks to the stoned wading through the Cantor book.

And besides getting me very, very excited for our rapidly approaching trip to Barcelona, the book has done a few of other useful things in just the first 120 pages:

1. Taught me two new words: labile and palimpsest.

2. Given me the Catalan-Aragonese oath of allegiance, which I'd heard and could never remember properly: 'We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws - but if not, not.'

3. Given some context to a story which has always stuck in my mind of a medieval Spanish playboy who stalks a beautiful lady; before he can accost her properly she turns to him and bares breasts that have been hideously disfigured by cancer.

That playboy was Ramon Llull, and the woman was one of his real attempted conquests or one of his hallucinations, depending on who you listen to. Llull was a cleverboots who had the revolutionary idea that efforts to convert Muslims and Jews to Christianity should be made through rational argument, rather than, you know, the other ways. Consequently he believed that missionaries should be educated about their philosophies, languages and religions.

4. Given me this sentence about an awful dance club in the city: 'Mariscal and Arribas set out to make your big night on the town an uninterrupted barrage of the clichés of PoMo irony - as though Philippe Starck at his most morbid teamed up with Peter Eisenman at his most hostile to do the sets for Pee-wees's Playhouse.' That sentence alone makes up for the uninterrupted barrage of crap which was Things I Didn't Know.

Wagon tumbling

So, as I mentioned, fell off the wagon a little while ago. I'm a cheap, cheap person and I'm quite resistant to blowing my money on anything, but I have a fucking hard time logging on to Amazon to buy someone else presents without deciding that I deserve a thing or two from my reserve lists, and if I do, well, so does the F-word, because he's such a great boyfriend, and then - well. Here we are.

1. Barcelona, Robert Hughes. I don't think I've ever had the love/hate thing going for any writer I have going for him. His autobiography was so fucking shitty, I mean, just monumentally shit. I may never have been more annoyed by a book than by that. And then, on about equal measure I enjoyed The Shock of the New and Goya. And then The Fatal Shore bored me so bad that I actually gave it up at the 3/4 mark - something I never do.

So I decided to work on the assumption that he's only good when he's writing about things he loves, which doesn't include himself or Australia. And so I plunged for Barcelona, as his shitty, shitty memoirs indicated he loves Barcelona. We're heading there for a week for our vacation this summer, and the F-word really wanted to read it, so it won't be wasted cash in any case. And I don't know a goddamn thing about the place, outside of all that Gaudi and the fact they speak some language that sounds a bit more like Italian than normal Spanish. And the first 20 pages have made me want to keep reading. He has an encyclopaedic sort of brain, or at least a great skill for regurgitating research.

2. The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, ed. Richard Dawkins. I've been explicit in very much disliking The God Delusion, for what I think are terrific reasons. Frankly I'm worried I may have blown £10 on a compilation put together by a man whose writing I've found dishonest and self-serving, in the sense of allowing crap to hide behind controversy. If he's willing to do that with his own writing, who knows what he'll cherry-pick from his colleagues?

But I couldn't resist the table of contents and the introduction it could give me to a wide range of possible new reads. It's like that point in networking where you find yourself being really nice to some guy, even to the point of not mocking him when he has a ten-minute tête-à-têtons with your chest instead of your face, who ordinarily you wouldn't even ask the time of day from, because maybe someday he can help get you a job in a much better country than Belgium.

3. The Great War for Civilization/The Conquest of the Middle East, Robert Fisk. This one was very much for the F-word, who enjoys Robert Fisk a lot. Me, sure. He's the Middle East correspondent for the Independent, my favourite British daily outside of its shitty 'science' editor, and writes in a very opinionated, angry, sarcastic way. So now we've got 1300 pages of sarcastic, angry, opinionation about the Middle East on our kitchen table. Slightly intimidated.

I'd build a million of you baby

I've written about this before, but I must again: I love Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!. And okay - fine - I haven't come across a Bad Seeds album I didn't love. Some individual songs, sure. Most of the slow ones, to be honest with you. 'The Ship Song' and 'Love Letter' and a bunch of other twee little songs with lazy rhymes. For God's sake, stop trying to horn in on Leonard Cohen's market - he writes better lyrics for slow songs and he needs the money. But there are no slow songs on Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!. Some creepy songs, which I like, and the final song is a wee bit lazy, but that's all fine, even great - I really like 'Jesus of the Moon', which isn't quite creepy - don't have the adjectives this morning.

And then the rest of the album just rocks out. Music and lyrics. I love the title track and love that little AC/DCish guitar that slaps you awake at the beginning, and nonetheless it's probably my least favourite track on the album.



Anyways, the whole album is really good, it makes me want to fuck. I wish I could just stay home and do that all day, but no. Today is a big day. I have to interview an important person this morning. I usually do my interviews by phone or by email and I couldn't get to sleep last night, thinking that the recorder wasn't going to work today. Luckily I have enough questions that he could just answer yes or no to each, and I'd still make regulation length. No problems. If the cunt of a recorder works.

Got a shipment of exciting books yesterday - fell off the wagon and bought the F-word 'presents' that I also wanted to read - more on that tomorrow.

Memoirizing

Not much news, I'm preoccupied with pleasant things. Just a quick warning: Clive James's memoirs are crap and will make you want to hit him. Memoirs are difficult. Something like Robert Hughes, who has a style I like when he's writing about things that aren't him, and once he writes about him it's so fucking lame it can hardly make it across the room when I throw it. With Clive James, I like the essays and whatnot he does for the BBC or whatever from time to time - but his memoirs = crap. Also, Clive is a retarded name.

In other book news, Ulysses is indeed proving too boy for me at the moment - may have to wait to plug on until I have a hormonal shift.

Tits? Seriously, America?

I'm sorry George Carlin died, even if the only thing I ever saw him in was Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, which I suppose I'll never watch again, since as an eleven year old it was the best movie ever and by now might not be.

But really . . . tits? You couldn't say tits?

Anyhoo . . . Mum is over to see her Mum and I'm heading back to work. Good visit. Learnt how to bake bread with the family's recipe - why didn't I before? And looking forward to my own trip home come October.

Ensorific

Living in Europe is great in a lot of ways. Even living in Belgium is great in a lot of ways. But you may have noticed by this point that Belgium also drives me apeshit. One way it drives me apeshit - a whole new way I discovered yesterday, during a trip to Oostende with Mum to get some fresh air - is its lack of appreciation for one of my favourites among its sons, James Ensor.

Oh sure. There's a bust up of him in the town there, and a twee little 'Ensorhuis' with reproductions of his work, and some of his paintings have been stuck into the Royal Gallery here in Brussels. But Oostende has not yet managed to pull its thumb out and re-establish its own modern art gallery - an idiocy that left us gawping at a post office in the downtown central square that my Crappy Planet had insisted was its new location as of 2007, and then gawping at a Tourist Information lady who said that since the plans for the new location had fell through there was no timetable or information about when those Ensors would be viewable again. They've been sold off to Russian oligarchs, I fucking know it. Bloody Belgians.

Anyways, here's 'Christ's Entry into Brussels', which the bloody Belgians sold off to some American twat who at least is showing it:

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

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

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

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

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



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

The ghost of Red Dragons past

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

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

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

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

The Red Dragon is educated by the internets

Thank you, BBC, for being good for more than keeping Dr. Who alive and trying to convince Britain and the World that the crappy ruling party isn't absolute crap. Their 'On This Day' feature yesterday informed me that on June 17 1961, Rudolf Nureyev made his break for the strong arms of capitalism, crying 'I want to be free!' Yes. Come to us, Rudolf. It also informed me that Rudolf Nureyev and Anthony Perkins had a thing, and what can I say except fuckin' A, Anthony - atta give hope to normal looking people everywhere. I mean, look at this:

And then this (and if you image google Rudolf Nureyev, by the way, even nakeder portraits from the 60's come up, and he was packing just the right amount of heat, I'd say):

Learning that Rudolf Nureyev and Anthony Perkins had a thing led me to learning that Victoria Principal was the one who turned Anthony Perkins on to women, and that Victoria Principal is sort of cool, and that Principal Victoria from South Park is named after her. Huh. And speaking of turn-on women: Cyd Charisse died, which is sad, though she had good long innings. She's one of the first women I can remember who made me think it might be nice to get intimate with a woman. She and Marlene Dietrich. To this day I understand, not merely as a sexual preference but as a fact, that women have incomparably better legs than men, both on average and in terms of the créme de la créme. Charisse, like Dietrich, was the créme. Look at those suckers:

You've got them as a point of comparison with Rudolf's, just above. And while Rudolf Nureyev may well have had the best legs a human male has ever had, honestly the only way you could pretend his legs were better than Cyd Charisse's legs is by pointing out that Rudolf's led to a fine package of heat at their junction, whilst Cyd's led up to something which I find about as entertaining and easy to solve as a Rubix cube, which isn't very, in case you were wondering.

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

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

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

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

The Red Dragon values family

I seem to have stumbled into some sort of temporal vortex on Friday night whilst pissed and high because all of a sudden it's Monday morning. God, five day weeks make me want to shoot myself. What an arbitrary fucking number anyways - five. How about four? How about some family values cunt of a politician jumps up and down on his stupid fucking holy roller bandwagon and says 'I care so much about the sancticity of the family that I'm going to give everybody a three day weekend so they can spend more time together'? How about that, family values cunts? But noooo, I suppose it's much easier to make a stink about stopping the gays from getting some goddamn lame license and to make speeches on Father's Day. That's like the family-values-defending equivalent of making a noodlecard. GIVE US A THIRTY HOUR WEEK IF YOU WANT US TO MAKE PROPER CHILDREN. Fuck.

It was a good weekend though, fundamentally. If so. Fucking. Brief. And speaking of family values, at some point we watched Billy Elliot, which I hadn't seen before, and I thought it was very good indeed. I really liked the way the story rolled out over the disenfranchisement of the miners, and I liked the nasty harshness of Billy's family - and the realism of Billy unwittingly managing to bring his father around by catching him through dance at a very, very drunk moment. Rather than being simply a feel-good film, it was a terrific advertisement for the utility of slapping, punching and piss-ups in domestic relationships. I also liked that Billy was not simply a nice boy with a penchant for self-expression through dance. You could really see him becoming a proper primo ballet dancer - a real Nureyev type; passionate, punchy and possibly not so pleasant all the time.

Another good thing was finding out Comedy Central's website is now streaming full episodes of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. That's nice. The F-word has a low tolerance for those shows, though. Too much shouting.

Magnum Carta

I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop but it's giving me a full-on frisson, a Looking at Naked Smiling Tom Selleck in 1983 frisson.

I don't want to speak too soon, but it totally looks like a British politician has actually done something that wasn't the political equivalent of a Stupid Pet Trick. Is it possible? That someone from their right-wing party is uncorrupted enough to make a big, career-destroying stink to defend habeas corpus because he believes it's worth defending? He has certainly forced the issue of 42-day detentions without charge in Britain to the national and international consciousness in a big way, which, if I assume his motives are good, is what his motives were - and if his motives weren't good I can't imagine what they were.

Really? Has an actual political ideologue managed to sprout his way out of the soulless mechanistic dehumanizing political latrine that has been British national politics ever since I can remember (1997 - before that I only cared about ponies and The Cure)? And he's rightwing? And why did the Labour Party time this vote so close to the anniversary of the Magna Carta anyways? That was so fucking stupid or cynical that it's reason enough in itself to vote for any other party. And how long can that country's media keep printing Labour press releases instead of doing some actual political coverage?

Well. If a British politician has actually taken a principled stand on civil liberties, no matter what party he's from, it makes my week, which so far has been good. And I can share some of the reasons it has been good on a public forum:

1. Mistress La Spliffe 1, Belgacom -46. After threats and public mockery and yelling and carrying on over a month, they've struck our fraudulent charges and knocked €46 off our normal bill to make up for being the biggest assholes in the world. Of course, while I won the battle I won't feel I've won the war until either I leave the country or Belgacom does, which as the national provider, 53% owned by the state, it will only do by going bankrupt, or by seeing the state disintegrate. But guess what! Both will probably happen soon.

2. Speaking of the fragile Belgian state, as of this week I am an official resident of it. This is a process which has taken, as you may have noticed, well over a year. Three trips to the commune, one to the police station, a kazillion forms filled out - and all this for someone who is an official citizen of the European Union, giving me under law the right to establish my residency here with a minimum of bother. Funny more than anything, because neither employers nor landlords give a good goddamn once they saw my passport. I only needed it to open a high-interest savings account.

3. I saw a German dentist this week. She spent one of our appointments gouging at a tooth that my last dentist had fucked up. That made me very, very nervous for the next appointment, at which she told me that my teeth are in terrific shape. Dentists have said that to me before, but never a German dentist, so I'd never taken it to heart. But now I'm as flattered as the only girl with cocaine at a male model party.

Why I love the Independent

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

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

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

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

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

What would Jesus stew?

It's difficult for me to share a sauce recipe as sauce is more of a process than a recipe. So I'll give you the process, with one of my favourite ways of doing it, and then it'll be like Jesus teaching a man to fish instead of giving him a fish. Was that Jesus? It sounds like something Jesus would do.

1. Skin, core, and quarter the fresh tomatoes. Easiest way to do this sans machinery is to rinse them, pop them into a pot of vigorously boiling water for 30 seconds, and then drop them into a large bowl of cold, clean water. Work in sets of ten.

Put each tomato on the chopping board and cut it in half, off-centre a bit so that the core (the hard green-ish white-ish bit) is all on one of the halves. As you do, you should see the skin start to slide off; finish the job with your fingers. Put the skin in a separate bowl, cut the tomato into four - again off-centre so that the core is all on one piece - and then chop the core out of that piece. Throw out the core, and put the quartered tomato into a large bowl.

Now, 30 seconds is a bit long to boil the tomatoes to get the skin off - some people only do it for 5 seconds or little more. The consequence of the 30 second boil is that the skin comes off very, very easily, but that it takes the thin outer layer of the fruit with it, and that thin outer layer is where lots of the flavour is concentrated. So once you've finished skinning, coring, and quartering all your tomatoes, take the skins you've collected in a seperate bowl, put them into a fine-mesh sieve or colander - a netty one rather than a hole-y one - hold that above the bowl with all your tomatoes in it, and rub the skins into the mesh. This will push through lots of thick, strongly flavoured juice.

(Hilts, at this point you've rinsed the tomatoes twice and boiled them for half a minute once, and now you're about to cook the fuckers for three or four hours, so you won't get salmonella).

2. Now that you've got all your tomatoes skinned, cored, and quartered in a big bowl - clean up your area. Just do it now. You'll thank yourself later.

3. Now that you've cleaned up your area, prepare your pre-fry. This is where you introduce your basic, tough, non-tomato flavours to the sauce, by frying a bunch of aromatic ingredients with a good deal of olive oil before introducing the tomatoes. There's a world of things you can include here: sliced onion (sweet), diced garlic (essentially obligatory), diced celery (if you're a caker), leek (but then absolutely no onions), cracked peppercorns (bold), dried red peppers (bolder), rosemary (fresh or dried, without the stalk) - remember, though, anything you put in at this stage has to be tough. You will have to play around with the proportions by yourself - I personally like lots of garlic, little-to-no onion, and very spicy.

Heat up the olive oil by itself, highly, and then drop in your pre-fry ingredients. Stir them around the pan until they brown up, or until the onions, if you're using them, get translucent. For a recent batch made with 3 kg of tomatoes, I just used two garlic cloves and a tablespoon and half of cracked peppercorns.

Notes:

-At this stage, and at all others, remember to KEEP IT SIMPLE. The simpler you keep your base sauce, the fancier you can get without crossing the line into muddiness at dinnertime. Limit yourself to three pre-fry ingredients.
-Remember that scene in Goodfellas when Paul Sorvino was slicing garlic in prison with a razor blade, so it was so thin that it 'melted' into the sauce? Remember that was a movie about wankers. Don't stress yourself over the thickness of your dice - just do what you can.

4. Once you've browned the pre-fry, put in the sliced, quartered, cored tomatoes by handfuls, stirring all the while, without lowering the heat. Get them all in there as you stir, and then add some salt, or (my preference) a shake of fish sauce - you know, that weird oily anchovy liquid that they sell in the 'international' section of grocery markets. On its own it smells like a dead leper, but introduced into a sauce at this point in the cooking, it will only add a bit of sodium and, in the long run, a good background flavour that will add richness without muddying the taste. Once the salty thing is added, cover them.

Note:
-When it comes to saltiness, BE SPARING. Saltiness is a very easy flavour to add later, either as you're preparing a meal or as you're at the dinner table, and a very hard one to take away if you overdo it. (If you do overdo it, add a whole, peeled potato to the sauce, and leave it there until it's cooked through; that should soak some of it up.) At this point, you're really just adding the salt to help the tomatoes release their juices so they can stew themselves, rather than adding another really important flavour.
-Also at this point, you have a judgement call to make. Are your tomatoes, like me, juicy enough to get themselves wet? (Sorry.) Does it seem like they are liquid enough to stew themselves? They almost always are, and in any case you will be able to tell about 5 minutes after getting them on the heat and adding some salt or fish sauce. If they look like the risk burning, add some white wine or some clear stock. I advise you to try to get the tomatoes to stew themselves. Stock or wine is best added when you're preparing the meal and can make informed decisions about the taste combinations you want. Again, you're running the risk of muddying the taste.

5. Once the tomatoes have reached a boil, turn them down to a low, low simmer. They're going to stay like that now for three or four hours, and you're going to give them a good stir every ten minutes, so make sure you have a good book. For the first hour, leave the lid on; from that point onward, leave the lid on but askew, so there is a small space from which the water vapour can escape.

If you must add cinnamon to combat the acidity, add it at the end of hour two. Be sparing, especially at first; a pinch should do it. Also at hour two, start tasting. This will give you an idea where the flavour is going and help you make an informed decision about which herbs you're going to add at the end of the process.

6. At the end of hour three, if you don't want a chunky sauce (which I never do), get an immersion blender, or as the Portuguese call it, 'magic wand', and blend. At this point, it's time for to decide if the sauce is about finished; it depends on the thickness you want. Remember that you may use this sauce to prepare a meal, and in any case you will certainly be reheating it, which means thickening it again, unless you use it on a pizza. Your call.

7. When you decide you have the right thickness, it is time to add the herbs and turn the heat off, not necessarily in that order. Remember yesterday's tips: the more delicate the herb, the less heat it needs. Rosemary aside there is no herb that should be on the hob for more than ten minutes, and lots that shouldn't go in until after the heat is off. And remember to keep it simple. For the sauce I made with the garlic and peppercorn pre-fry, I used half a handful of sage.

8. And, you're done. Clean up the kitchen NOW. There are few things worse in terms of householding than trying to clean up from making tomato sauce after all the little splashes have dried and hardened. Do it NOW.

Getting saucy

Hilts has asked for a tomato sauce recipe, and tomorrow I'll oblige, with instructions on how to transform the fresh fruit into a basic sauce en masse - a comparatively thin sauce that can either be used without further preparation, or used to quickly prepare meat, fish, and vegetable sauces shortly before mealtimes. I'll give you one large theme on which you can make variations, depending on your preferences. But in your experimentation, there are a few rules of thumb to bear in mind:

1. Onion will make a sauce sweet; particularly a sauce from fresh tomatoes, which already tends to be sweeter than sauce from canned tomatoes. My father never makes his sauces with onion for this reason, and I only do sometimes, as I find overly-sweet tomato sauces a bit gross. When I do, I use maybe one small onion for every three kilos of fresh fruit. Don't feel any obligation to include onion if you don't like sweeter sauces. However, if you plan to use the sauce to prepare salt cod, for example, or shellfish, or some other fish with a bit of texture, then consider it seriously; the sweetness brings out the best of the flesh.

2. Spare your herbs. The more delicate they are, the later they should go in; leafy, tender basil, for example, shouldn't go in until after you turn the heat off. Neither should coriander. More papery oregano doesn't need more than two minutes. Tougher sage can go in ten minutes before you turn the heat off. Herbs simply don't need to and shouldn't stew, except rosemary, which either needs to be muslin-bagged so you can take it out and spare your diners rosemary tongue splinters, or else it needs to be pre-fried and then viciously blended in after spending the whole three hours or so cooking with the sauce. Personally, I find rosemary more trouble than it's worth if I'm not making a meat sauce, and even then I'm not a fan. Save it for soups and roasts.

NB, I don't know what the fuck to do with dried herbs because I haven't used them in forevah and they weren't much used for sauce in my family while I was growing up. I'd guess they need a bit of stewing but I'm not sure.

3. Don't over complicate your flavours. In this vein, I advise against using more than one herb in each batch. Two reasons for this: first, when you can or freeze your basic sauce, you don't know exactly what you're going to serve it with, and there is a good chance that you'll need to work on the flavours again at the mealtime. For example, you probably need a stronger sauce for a bland ricotta-stuffed pasta than for a meat-stuffed pasta. Give yourself some leeway here. And second, over-complicated sauces come out with a muddy ditch taste.

4. Fresh-fruit tomato sauce is very acidic, which is the reason the crap you buy off the shelf is half 'stabilizer' or some such. There are a couple of ways to deal with this, most of them applicable when you're preparing the meal and not when you're making the basic sauce. A drop of cream when it comes off the heat for the meal will do. Using the sauce to prepare meat, a fatty whitefish, or the classy-but-broke student's dear friend, canned albacore tuna in olive oil, will also usually cancel out the acidity at the taste level.

In terms of the actual preparation of the sauce, unless it's meat-based (which I will not be telling you how to make, as that might involve blowing some of my daddy's secrets) there isn't much you can do besides ensuring you use enough oil in your pre-fry, ensuring you cook the sauce for the full three or four hours, and using the Famous Italian Secret That Isn't Italian or a Secret: a pinch of cinnamon halfway through the cooking process. Please note, however, that young wives' tales to the contrary, you will taste the cinnamon, unless you're preparing a sweeter sauce, in which case the cinnamon hides behind the onion. Of course, if you plan to use your basic sauce to wet down curried dishes or for eastern Mediterranean/North African dishes, a detectable pinch of cinnamon in the basic sauce is a good idea.

Also please note that in all these cases (long cooking aside), you're simply masking the sauce's acidity. Some of you, or your diners, will get heartburn if you eat too much of it. This is one of the simple inequities of existence and must be tolerated.

Monstrous vermin

Belgacom. It's not finished. We have a name for the person who made the ripoff order now, we have a receipt for all the unsolicited crap we brought back, and the incompetent, fraudulent fuckknuckles still haven't sorted out the €200 they're trying to charge us. But at this point, I mind a little less, or rather I'm a little less furious, as the situation has been illuminating. As the F-word pointed out, it's been the very definition of kafkaesque, and I'd always thought 'kafkaesque' was just an adjective pretentious jerks use to describe things they don't understand. But now I can reflect on The Trial and The Metamorphosis and see them as realistic allegories of dealing with European bureaucracies, rather than as the paranoid ramblings of a tubercular depressive living in an increasingly violently anti-semitic environment. On Saturday morning, for example, before going to the Belgacom shop, the F-word warned me I was breathing like an attack dog. That never happens.

Anyways, I've calmed down and refreshed myself over the weekend, thanks to Frisbee - pardon me, 'flying disc'- sleep, marijuana, three Mel Brooks movies from the 1970's that I'd never seen before because my parents never let me watch movies that had the word 'fuck' in them and after that it just never occurred to me they might possibly be good because Men in Tights and The Producers were so bloody stupid, the eventual appearance of the Belgian sun, a range of not-fit-to-print activities, and the conversion of a bushel of tomatoes from Sunday's fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck market into tomato sauce.

What really helped calm me down, from both my Belgacom fury and the range of other little annoyances cluttering up my life, was the tomato sauce. I can't wrap my head around childless people of liesure like me who think cooking is a waste of time, and making tomato-sauce is something that makes me extra baffled about them. Forget the fact that homemade sauce is a zillion times better than anything that comes pre-made, which I've been subject to at friends' and relatives' houses, and forget the fact that cooking it from the fresh fruit instead of the canned fruit yields such a cleaner flavour. The process of cooking it from the fresh fruit is lovely. Popping the tomatoes into boiling and then cold water and skinning them is fun in a slimy, Halloween sort of way. Getting two batches on the go at once and thinking of the subtle base flavours to give each lets you speculate on the delicious shape of meals to come. The knowledge that now your household is going to have something really delicious to eat because of your efforts - the prettiness of the smells - the sizzle of the pre-frying - the sight of all those full jars lined up afterwards - there's something deeply satisfying and calming about it, and I don't understand people who don't understand that satisfaction and calm.

If Belgium had one face, I'd punch it

Things have escalated with Belgacom. We know more or less who made the fraudulent order now and the question becomes: what can we make a big, incompetent, systemically rotten company that thinks it still has the monopoly it was stripped of due to its rottenness and incompetence do about it. It's times like this I miss Anglophony and the sycophancy of its large companies' customer service bureaus when they realize they've been caught in the wrong. There are a lot of bad things to say about litigious societies, but one good one is that their service companies rarely spin this sort of surreal shittitude out for so long . . .

Mind you, living in Belgium, I'm starting to miss every other country I've ever lived in, not only the Anglophone ones. At least in Italy when things weren't working, you could flash a smile or some cash. Nothing helps here. No wonder they're the fucking Newfies of Europe. Only unlike Newfies, these people deserve it. Fucking country full of morons. I mean, what kind of buggerwitted muttonbrain raises their family in the shitty wet muddy bit of Europe nobody wanted, turned into a buffer state between two actual countries so invading armies could trudge painfully through this lousy wasteland instead of disturbing the Swiss and Luxembourgers and their great banks and functioning civil services? But the truth is even Belgians don't want Belgium to exist anymore. They should just turn this shithole into Naples' garbage dump and solve five or six problems at once. Fucking. Shithole. Fuck.

Anyhoo. I'm handling it. And yesterday I also addressed my unfocused paranoia that the F-word wasn't sure of my fidelity. It felt like a frightfully artificial conversation but one of the benefits of psychoanalysis is that now I feel reasonably comfortable with frightfully artificial conversations. Everything was alright. He reminded me of a conversation we'd had years ago: we'd agreed that when people are unfaithful, it's their own problem, and only gets to be a problem for their lover if that lover spends all his time obsessing about whether it's happening or not.

The thing is, it hit home because when I managed to end things with Bluebeard all those years ago now, he made my jaw drop by telling me he'd been certain I'd been screwing as many other men as I could fit between my legs for the entire length of our relationship. Not only was I not doing that, but the action of me doing that is so distant from my idea of myself that it knocked my socks off that a man who I'd spent the previous two years with could believe it . . . I don't know what his motives were for saying it, and hopefully I never will, but I still sometimes wonder: what would Bluebeard have been like, and what would our relationship have been like, if he hadn't had that paranoia? The answer I always come up with is that if he hadn't had that paranoia, he wouldn't have been Bluebeard, and if a frog had wings, it wouldn't bump its ass a'hoppin'.

Duckfucking

Life feels like a shit sandwich buffet at the moment. The atmosphere of this fucking place is like Mexico City, with visibly yellow air; the fishermen are rioting; cocksucking shitwit Belgacom is still trying to defraud us; and the F-word has been being stalked by a black dog - painful to watch, and the corollary is that I feel absolutely alone in terms of organizing our vacations, disputing our fraudulent bills, grocery shopping, general household maintenance, etc, at a time when I'm absolutely exhausted from last week's junket and this week's deadline.

And then yesterday I grabbed his laptop to google 'Jews New York Jesse Jackson' ('Hymietown', he'd called it - I couldn't remember), and as I started to type the memory function called up a search phrase with my name in it that rather took me aback. I combed my porous memory for a time I could have used it myself for whatever vanitygoogle reasons and couldn't come up with one, which doesn't mean it didn't exist. Nonetheless, I was thrown on the possibility, which had never really crossed my mind before, that the F-word is not sure of my fidelity. I'd rather break my own nose than be unfaithful to him but I don't know how to bring that up in casual conversation. And then there's the possibility such worries are inevitable, no matter what assurances are given and received, because I travel for work a good deal. And when someone is absent for such lengths of time, especially to attend subsidized drinking events where the boy:girl ratio is 5:1, maybe it's hard not to wonder. That 5:1 ratio may be a more concrete bit of knowledge than the abstract fact that all those boys are unattractive. I've never met anybody at these functions who I'd have nailed even if I was on the prowl - there's something, as far as I'm concerned, fundamentally anti-sexy about business events, something just too groomed piggy.

But the bitch of it all is that there's probably some perfectly lighthearted explanation, and I'm just adding another section to an already overwhelmingly comprehensive shit sandwich buffet with this sort of double-edged paranoia. I'll sort it out. But fuck, fuck, fuck, am I ever tired of sorting things out. There's so much to sort out just living in this stupid fucking mentally feeble grinning cocksucker of a country, and while I know I need to put this central and most important relationship with the man I adore above and beyond concerns over our telephone service provider gouging us for hundreds of euros or how we're going to spend my all-too-short summer vacation, I feel like I'm trying to compose a symphony in a zoo while dodging all the shit cackling schizo monkeys are tossing at me.

I left my heart in Anjalakoski

I'm in love with Finland. It's hard to know where to start in terms of describing the place and all I loved about it, so I'll say this: having spent this past week there, I understand the desire to be rich. I would like to be rich and spend May, June, and July on an island in the Finnish archipelago close to Turku. I would sit in the sun for 22 hours a day, I would live in an outdoor hammock occasionally cursing the rain, chill, and mosquitoes, and I would never be sad again, because after those months were over I would follow the sunshine somewhere else.

It was a press tour so we drank and didn't sleep much, having to leave each town or area early each morning to go to the next facility. That was rendered easy by that sun, that perpetual sun . . . anti-drugs campaigners don't have much pull with me because they're never honest about the great things involved in smoking reefer, like fantastic sex and television being so much more interesting. In the same vein, all that struggling and neat-o sunlamp marketing at the SAD crowd always fails to mention that the other side of the coin is the fucking Scandinavian summer. I have slept about ten hours in the last seven days, had my tits bored off by what felt like hundreds of PowerPoint presentations and hours of conversation with men who were incapable of mentally handling any subject outside of their own mighty prowess as human beings, and drank roughly 10 times more than I drink in the course of a normal week. Yet I feel monumentally refreshed.

And it was beautiful, and the people were so kind, and their grim, unsmiling humour so bloody appealing. I have anecdotes about the random kindness from absolute strangers there that rival and surpass any anecdotes of mammoth stupidity and incompetent bad intentions here. I know I've got the rose-coloured glasses on: I needed a change of air, a break, and I got it over a sunny week courtesy of a flourishing industrial company that was happy to spend thousands and thousands of euros to impress me - and oh yes, I'm fully aware that being made to feel awfully important and clever by the organizers might have something to do with my brimming goodwill towards the place. Doesn't matter. I love the pants off it.

Also doesn't hurt that the food was fucking marvellous. They eat salmon the way Americans eat pork, except salmon is probably cheaper there than pork is anywhere. And so many wild mushrooms; it was morel season - and then the sturgeon, the fish eggs, the piles and piles of fresh lake perch - and then the berries - the strawberries, currants, blueberries, the sea buckthorn . . . Frankly, I'm pissed off to be back.

Jerusalem syndrome

"They attempt to reconcile Jews and Palestinians, speak to God and genuinely believe he answers them.” Hmm. Sounds like every American president for the last 50 years.

Joking, joking. I don't think they were really trying to reconcile the Jews and Palestinians at all. But seriously. Not to sound all Scientologist but sometimes I get a little freaked out when I reflect that if the Messiah did come, we'd certainly try to slap him or her (I'm banking on a her) in a mental ward. It's not crucifixion, certainly, but over-medication to the point of vegetation would be a rather more effective way to deal with her. No memorable martyrdom involved, no screaming at the sky about how her Dad should forgive her murderers because they don't fucking know what they're doing. Just some sort of firebrand transforming into a gently smiling lump. Gives me the willies . . . maybe I only think this because I'm slightly mad, but I think society needs a little madness to help people keep things in perspective.

Anyways, as far as Jerusalem Syndrome goes, I hope we can trust the doctors to tell the difference between faith-fuelled American yokel fatties who get too much sun and history and actual Messiah Candidates. It doesn't seem like such a difficult distinction to make, but who knows.

Speaking of madness, I am about to go all Al Pacino because tonight I am off to Stockholm to spend a little less than a week going around Sweden and Finland on a boozy press tour. The sun is out here in Brussels until after 10 and up ages before I am, even though my my internal clock wakes me at 6:30 every morning so I can make a nice café latte, blog, take care of my investments, stare out the window, think about funnies I want to Reclaim for the People (that is, rip off) from my business associates and conservative politicians (usually Boris Johnson; thank god the people of London were stupid enough to jettison that boring socialist mayor for a wise-cracking right-wing drunk), and generally ease myself into the day. So there I don't expect to see dark.

And with any luck at all I won't even have to look at a computer until next Wednesday, so I'll bid you all a happy week and leave you with Nick Cave's take on Messiah Wards.

Kiss my ass and call me in the morning

This weekend, in between me morphing back into a human being instead of twitchy stressball, and in between the much more resourceful F-word making pasta and pizza bases again, not to mention ice cream (my hero), we watched Sicko. I had really resisted watching it because I abhor Michael Moore. It wasn't bad, though.

His usual problematic relationship with the truth in an effort to prove his central idea was less annoying than usual - though present. I know he's trying to cram everything he has to say into feature-length, but surely we could have been spared the minutes he spent yelping into a megaphone and the story about how he rescued the wife of one of his detractors from cancer to give a more well-rounded overview of the health systems in the countries featured.

I don't think it would have harmed his argument, and it would have helped his credibility, if he'd mentioned there are some real problems with the Canadian system in terms of access to experimental drugs, for example, and some real problems with the French system in terms of massive over-prescription and a complete systemic inability to usefully treat chronic mental illness. That doesn't make universal health coverage in those countries any less desirable, and it doesn't make the American system any less shameful. The thing is, I think it would have worked better as an aspirational film - picking out the problems and the benefits of each system - rather than as a 'dang, us Americans is stupid health-wise compared to them furrners' film. Because frankly, anybody who's really thought about it knows that already.

But Sicko was much better than his other two big budget documentaries and I was quite sad that he only made it the time he'd alienated everybody except the choir he was preaching to. Because it's much more important. Too bad. San Francisca used to be an emergency medic, and yesterday we had a chat about it - she said she'd have to bellow into the faces of stab or gunshot victims and car crashees 'DO YOU HAVE INSURANCE?' to figure out which hospital to take them to - or go through their pockets and wallets looking for their insurance cards.

How can anybody possibly think that's a good idea? How can you bear the thought that if a member of your family gets hit by a car, the first-response medic team is going to have to spend some of the time they could spend treating them or even just holding their hand to reassure them yelling at them about their insurance or going through their pockets, and depending they may have to wait longer than necessary to get to hospital? Puke.

Medieval History 420

We have this phenomenal weed at the moment, and I have this phenomenal book to read whilst high: The Civilization of the Middle Ages, by Norman Cantor. I'm not sure where it came from, but at a guess it either belonged to Magnum or Luke Duke, who did history degrees, or to me, whose undergrad focus was on the Middle Ages in second year. Probably from the extra courses at the U of T that I took when I switched concentrations, since at our home college they didn't let us have secondary texts. It stands to reason I wouldn't remember it, because that year two was my year 'off', in the same way year three was my year abroad. Year two was when I figured out I could still pass if I was high all the time. I had fun and learnt alot on a human level but in retrospect, I regret it a little - we had some great professors who I apparently did my best to ignore. I'm glad I shaped up in fourth year.

But this is not the story of my particularly White Upper Middle Class regrets and rehabilitations. It's the story of this book, that's great to read whilst high. The author draws history in embracing, strong lines, demonstrating in a few vague but powerfully argued pages the unbroken chain of authority linking the Roman Empire with the Roman Papacy, or the wildness of Rhine Germans as one of the bases of the urge towards democracy in European culture. Drawing in one or two pages the emasculation of the Christian church as the notion of social dissent all but fell out the bottom of it in the interests of keeping the institution growing. Lovely, sweeping vaguenesses! I adore them when I'm high.

Apparently the author, Dr. Cantor, was quite anti-post-modernist. I'm sure he had great personal and intellectual reasons for that, but again at a guess I'm going to say it was because of the fact that he was happy to write such sweeping truthinesses, that are very strongly focussed whilst being too general to be wholly meaningful. Post-modernists dissect and pinpoint and agonize and can't conclude their way out of a paper bag, which to me is simultaneously a strength and a weakness - strength because a really clever person and a good arts academic should always have the consciousness that they might be wrong or that someone else's interpretation might be more apt - and weak because it's boring to read while I'm high. Not The Civilization of the Middle Ages. That's ace.

Notes from the land of staggering, badly-intentioned incompetence

The Red Dragon and that Peter Sellers sensation have both flitted away, leaving me in a good enough mood, though still rather furious about what a shittery Belgium is. The F-word and I have been subject to a scam by the leading internet/telephony/television provider here, Belgacom, that used to have a monopoly, and it pisses me off when companies try to scam me. Don't they know who I am? I'm Mistress La Fucking Spliffe, for god's sake. Anyhoo, it didn't work so far though I doubt we're out of the woods yet . . .

A few days ago a huge box arrived here by courier, full of accoutrements for a television cable set up, and accompanied by a letter in Dutch, which obviously neither of us speak - we registered with them as French speakers. Hmm. Outside of the Dutch, there were two problems with the delivery: we hadn't ordered it, and we don't have a fucking television. Triple hmmm.

The F-word had to spend a few days (seriously) getting an English speaker on the hotline, as I've been crashingly busy at the office and as their hotline is only open during business hours. Finally he reached one yesterday, who explained to him that someone at the company had illicitly 'ordered' the package for us. In the meantime, the F-word had spoken to a few of his Anglo colleagues, to whom the same mysterious wrong-language letter and box of accoutrements had arrived - to be followed by a bill for €200 three months later . . . so he was able to get suitably furious over the phone. Fine. Handled. Our complaint was registered and the order stricken off. AND THEN . . .

1. The cunt asked the F-word to bring the huge box of accoutrements back to the store himself
2. The cunt asked if we'd like to expand our package
3. The cunt asked if we'd like to renew our service contract, which is set to expire at the end of the month.

How fucking dimestore. Honestly, the whole episode, combined with a bunch of peripheral things that have been happening and I'm in too much of a rush to go into now, have left me convinced that Belgium is like Italy's younger uglier brother that got dropped on its head when it was a baby. That same intense laziness, incompetence, and graspingness at the organizational level, combined with the sort of shit-headed stupidity that's going to make you ask someone who your company has just tried to defraud to carry a big box of ripoff back to the store, and then to buy more of your shit.

The F-word very suitably refused to bring the box back, so now we wait for more shitcanery. There's something almost funny about it. Sweet motherfuck, I will not be sad to see the back of this country.

The Red Dragon and Kylie Minogue

Fuck, I'm depresseder than yesterday. Thank god Nick Cave made having a crush on Kylie Minogue socially acceptable, because I just can't fight it anymore. She gets to be the replacement for Nicolas Sarkozy as my retarded celebrity crush; I can't maintain now that he's crapped out so bad. And just like him, Kylie is so small - so perfectly wee - brings out the Reducto in me.

Also, her 'In My Arms' single makes me think of kinky sex every time I hear it, and it's huge in Belgium right now, so I'm thinking about kinky sex all the time, which is alright with me. There's something about the resignation of the lyrics, combined with all those whiplash sounds, and the narration of a sexual encounter in such an innocent, composed popgirl voice that makes me reflect on why I enjoyed and excelled at doing what I used to do for most of the time that I was doing it. And that can only be healthy manouevre on the road to arriving at my Integrated Self. Right? Right.

Now let me look at Kylie Minogue pretend to sing and dance. It's better than kittens.

The Red Dragon and Peter Sellers

I bet the BBC wouldn't have bothered covering this at all if they hadn't made the person on the card look so bitchy. Look at him. Hands on hips, big angry Charlie Brown mouth. Insisting on his right to die. The sort of person who'd join a demonstration in that spirit, except obviously once the card becomes relevant, he can't anymore. So he gets a bitchy-looking card to do it for him. Neat. I don't want one. I pay taxes and an inhumane amount of money for insurance; no health system, whether public or private, is going to cut corners on my interventionist resuscitation with my complicity. No matter how neat and bitchy the card looks.

I'm in a mood - worked myself into an exhausted stupor yesterday and today promises to be more of the same. Because of all the interviewing and the trying-to-make-people-tell-me-things-they-aren't-supposed-to-tell-me, my job is emotionally exhausting. Although I'm aware what a blessing it is that I'm not a 'real' journalist who has to try to interview the relatives of murder victims or Austrians who have been rescued from their batshit crazy father's basement prison. Nonetheless work exhaustion makes me feel like my life is being pulled out from under me. Which I think is combining with some elements of modern public discourse to contribute to my apocalyptic-ish angst. I really understand Christian Survivalist nutjobs a lot of the time. When your life is slipping away from you in an absolutely artificial societal contract where you need to do long hours of busy work to keep your families in the toys, when your politicians behave like monkeys and when human life is overtly not at a premium anymore, then the apocalypse really starts looking like an attractive direction for your life to take.

This is me in a room full of Peter Sellers in Bonn which somehow captures my mood at this particular moment. You can only just make out the Peter Sellerses on the wallpaper, holding a briefcase and sticking out an arm. At the moment, you could nicely encapsulate my angst by saying I feel like I'm living in a world full of Peter Sellerses, who aren't being funny.

The Red Dragon cooks around her nausea

I used to hate the very sight of mushrooms and would not eat them for the greater part of my life to date. Choked down a couple at the behest of my family as a child and then objected to it ever after; I didn't grow up in an indulgent household but I managed to put my foot down about not eating mushrooms, not eating zucchini, and not playing the bloody fucking violin anymore after puberty.

What changed all that was the F-word and not wanting to look like a pansy in front of him when he cooked mushrooms for dinner on our first 'date', I suppose you'd call it. So I ate them and they were good, and was the start of my love affair with non-magic mushrooms. The F-word and I have had rather more dramatic ups and downs than two fundamentally good hearted guinea kids deserve, but through all of the downs I nevertheless retained some tenderness for him by remembering he was the creature that had made mushrooms palatable to me.

The oyster mushrooms I picked this weekend, however, are all in the bin. I had got greedy and picked as many as I could carry, including some that were past their prime. So last night, when I was preparing about half of them for a Hungarian mushroom pie - a lovely-looking recipe from a book by wunderkind Arto der Haroutunian (fuck, Armenians have the coolest names) - I realized that there were some maggots in them. I'm not the sort of cool nature girl who can look at maggots and think 'ooo, extra protein, and anyways once it's all cooked up it'll be sterile.' No. I'm the sort of middle-class cold-climate girl who wants to puke when she even thinks about maggots. Maybe someday I won't be such a fucking pussy but last night was not that day.

So crash went my tummy and slop went the mushrooms into the bin. Lesson learned. Hunt and pick early, don't pick anything past its prime, and most of all DO NOT fucking go to church in the morning while insects reproduce in your fucking mushrooms and then come back in the fucking afternoon. Carpe diem. Carpe fungiem. Honour God by not being a bonehead.

My appetite was gone but I still needed to prepare dinner for the F-word, who was at French class, and myself, who bears too much responsibility on her stately shoulders to go as anorexic as she'd like to whenever she thinks about maggots. Also I had started preparations for the mushroom pie. I needed something that would use what I had prepared, that would tempt my appetite enough to overwhelm my nausea, and that didn't use mushrooms at all, as besides the maggoty oysters all we had in the house was a big bag of dehydrated Chinese I didn't have time to rehydrate. So I rolled myself a big fat joint, ignored my churning tummy, and did this:

1.
1 Splash milk
2 eggs
dollop olive oil

2.
2 tomatoes, seeded, cored and diced
1 cup baby spinach, minced
1 little can albacore tuna
10 anchovy-stuffed olives, halved
1 teaspoon minced basil
1 teaspoon minced oregano
1 teaspoon dried red chili
Touch of salt
Some black pepper

3.
3 slices of old multigrain bread
1/2 cup milk

3 tablespoons cornbread breadcrumbs

Leave the slices of bread to soak up the milk. In a large seperate container, beat the eggs with the splash of milk and dollop of olive oil. Add Group 2 ingredients to the eggs and mix. After, break up the slices of bread that have soaked up the milk. Mix the little peices into the egg mixture. Evenly spread out the mixture in a pie pan that you've lined with greaseproof paper, because of course you're a lazy fuck like me and don't want to do any scrubbing when you wash up. And cover it evenly with the breadcrumbs, then cook at high-ish heat for 20 minutes until it's lovely and golden brown on top. And then eat it.

It's not the most exciting dish in the world, but it was really tasty and I ate a fair amount of it despite having desperately wanted to vomit a mere half hour earlier. I reccommend it for those days when you or your general household is recovering from some sort of stomach complaint, with a world of variations possible in the Group 2 ingredients. Eschewing a crust in favour of milk-soaked bread gives the thing a really light, special texture that's somehow friendly. With the combination I used for Group 2, it came out as a delightful sort of savoury summer pudding, but I imagine by adding an extra egg or using heavier vegetables - or even, god forbid, meat - you could make it quite substantial.

The Red Dragon risks her life for gastronomical science

I have a feeling most of the northwest of Europe is actually meant to be a temperate rain forest. You know the longest Belgium has ever gone without rain was 36 days? The weather here is massively shitty, just massively shitty. Like, Vancouver-shitty. But in Vancouver it's much easier to take, because they have things like Stanley Park (a bit of rain forest right there in the city) and the sea and the mountains - most of all, they have trees. Massive amounts of trees. Here they only have a few trees, corraled into a few paltry reserves, like nomadic Great Plains natives all stuck in a shitty neighborhood of Regina. But give this city ten years without human attention - give it a Chernobyl, a Khmer Rouge - and just like Vancouver it would completely disappear under the weight of its own vegetation.

(Having quite a nice red dragon ride, as you can tell - not much personal angst, and only a touch of city-by-city apocalyptic ideation. In view of my job and the fact that I live in a shithole that should be a beautiful temperate rainforest, I'm feeling a bit indignant for the trees.)

But the area around Brussels has a few of the tree reserves. Yesterday, I was going for a little constitutional in one of them when I saw a huge tree that had come down onto the forest floor since the last time I'd been there. Something compelled me to walk up the trunk, checking out this massive fallen giant. It was still growing, still putting out leaves, I was shocked and enchanted to see. Then I saw it had fallen down crosswise on two other logs that had been there much longer. And one of them looked like this:

Now, you know what those are, right? I don't want to type it out in case some fuck googles 'o-ster m-shrooms Brussels' and manages to locate my secret stash. Initially I found it hard to believe, as in Ontario my father normally doesn't expect them until the autumn. But I've checked, and there are no poisonous lookalikes in the area as far as I can tell; also it's been autumnal, as we had that week-and-a-half of fucking gorgeous weather, followed by mighty buckets of rain. To make sure, I sent the photo above to Daddy, and this one of them picked and washed:

He was quite sure they were what we thought they were, but suggested I feed some to the F-word and see how he copes. Ever the gentleman, however, I've just eaten a few of them myself, prepared rather blandly in a breakfast dish. No ill effects so far, though now that I think about it if I do get any I'm liable to confuse them with the normal turbulence of my red dragon ride.

Anyhoo. The real point of this story is that I didn't pick the things above until I'd gone back home, tried to find out from the Internet if they were dangerous, went to a Quaker meeting, spent nearly the entire hour of worhsip wondering if some other fuck had came along and picked them, and then ran home as fast as I could, praying wildly and proprietarily that no one had taken my fucking o-ster m-shrooms. I don't know when the last time I cared about something that wasn't a person so much - my master's thesis, maybe? And for the first time, I really understood Daddy's absolute fury with Mummy when she told one of his brothers about one of his hotspots. Funny, I felt so close to him when I was panicking yesterday, even an ocean away. Even closer when we finally talked that night; one of my graduations aside, I'm not sure he's ever been so proud of me.

Bouncing around

I think the F-word's father really wants him to move back to Australia - he sent a bunch of tourist brochures and stuff from the area we're thinking about. It's rather sweet. I don't like being so far from my own parents, but they have three other kids and then the grandkids - the F-word's father only has the F-word.

But that is for the future. In the present, we're trying to work out our summer holiday, which now looks like it will be an Amsterdam/Hamburg/Copenhagen trifecta. We thought about the south of France, but I think work may send me to Lyon in August when the F-word can come, and I know work is sending me to Marseilles in September, when perhaps the F-word can come. Better to get the tourist destinations subsidized whenever possible, especially during their peak summer seasons. The Copenhagen thing is a bit strange because I'm going on a week-long work binge/tour through Sweden and Finland - fuck - really soon actually. I never expected to spend that much time in Scandinavia, certainly not all in one summer. And now it means I have a moral obligation to get my arse to Norway so that I will have seen them all.

But delving far, far back into the misty past of Mistress La Spliffe . . . call it hubris but I have to strip back a full eleven years to find a real regret, or at least one I can remember, and it has to do with turning down the chance to live in Copenhagen for awhile. When I first left home as a teenager, it was for London, for a live-in job I'd accepted from Canada so my parents wouldn't worry about me too much. It was crap, so I went to an agency for such things once I got there. They offered me two options on the spot: another live-in in London, or else a contract in Copenhagen, where my 'work' would consist of looking after two dogs in a downtown flat. At the time I thought I was allergic to dogs, and I wanted to stay in London, so I made what I now conclude was the wrong decision. London is just a big fun city that's more expensive than other big fun cities, and the year or so I spent there didn't teach me anything that spending a year or so in some other overpriced big fun city would have taught me. And Copenhagen . . . well . . . anyways, we're going there now, and I don't have to look after dogs to do it this time.

Less tangled-webbedly, I think it will be really great to go to Scandinavia in a couple of weeks and then again in early July so I can enjoy freakishly long days. I have SAD, so I can't wait to get fuckin' sun-bombed for 20 hours at a stretch. Wheeeeee! Bring on the amphetamines. And giving Brussels its due, I'm really enjoying the freakishly long days here too - we're farther north than my part of Canada, so in proportion to the degree I wanted to shoot myself all winter, I want to giggle and play outside now.