Sigh. A week today is the last time I went kayaking, with my awesome nephew, on Lake Ontario. I miss my family incredibly and I miss kayaking too, not quite as much as my family but pretty bad, and I miss my kayak. According to all that market profiling I used to have to follow, I have a real masculine streak when it comes to toys - I don't buy a lot of them, but when I do I research the hell out of them and then just love love love them when I get them. And I love Jemima. She was money well spent just for the use I got out of her over two weeks, and now Mum is taking her out, and the kids and my brothers will too, hopefully, and I will too when I go home - I don't regret the purchase at all but I was not expecting this horrible sensation of missing her so bad.
And so futilely. What would I do if she was here? In this fucking waterless city. This fuck-all of a city. This fucking pavé jungle of a city. I could have every kayak in the world here and I'd still be fucked. Except I could sell them and use the money to move to a better fucking city with some fucking water in it. Sigh.
All this whining just to get to a point that actually is of fairly universal interest: a couple of weeks of kayaking for a couple of hours every morning totally made my tits way more perky, and I was already pretty happy with my tits. I've had to revise my plan to get them chopped off when I turn 50 and they're no longer good for much besides hindering me when I run for trains: instead I'm just going to move to a place with some water in it and kayak for a few hours every day. And hopefully, so doing, the ladies will accompany me into a ripe old age, standing proud until the end.
mercoledì, settembre 09, 2009
Maybe the songbirds needed universal healthcare
Canada was a little funny. Missing it in a fierce and generalized sense at the moment because everybody was just a little polite to each other - a sort of generalized, unconscious consent to not be absolute bastards to everyone around you in the unvocalized understanding that it would help stop everyone, including you, from losing their shit. Not an understanding that's penetrated too far into the Belgian unconsciousness, I'll fucking tell you that. Also it was cleaner, the air even in Toronto was roughly 50 times more breathable than here, and there were lots of birds and crickets, again even in Toronto. I was a little unnerved this morning when I listened to how quiet it was - just the screeching invasive parrots and the magpies - though I did miss the magpies. Just birds left here, essentially, who have good enough reasoning skills to change their eating habits to be eating our shit instead of all the native insects and vegetation millenia of too many fucking Europeans has killed off.
Anyways, that was a bit tangential, when what I wanted to write was that Canada is a little weird because nobody there called it 'swine flu' anymore, they all called it H1N1, and there were hand sanitizers fuckin' everywhere. I guess a bunch of people there died of SARS so the caution is a little excessive; either that or we've been living next to those paranoiacs in the States for too long.
Speaking of paranoiacs in the States, and health, my boss sent me this clip:
I've been doing my level best to just ignore what's happening in the States now because it just drives me batshit. I can have a higher level of discourse with my used menstrual pads and as far as anyone has been able to figure out my only diagnosable mental disorder is SAD. It did feel nice to see some old Jewish guy (he is Jewish, right? I have this game I like playing here in Europe called "gay or French", and when it comes to Americans I'm thinking of starting one called "eloquent or Jewish") respond to the healthcare/Nazi thing as it deserved to be responded to - which is, not.
But the very fact that question gets asked in a public forum - how ass-clenchingly embarassing. I'm starting to feel guilty that the US is going high comedy as it turns in on itself - that like Italy, it's just turning into a place you can laugh at until you cry. But I guess the big difference is in the States the electorate handed out such a clear whine for change and if they don't get it they won't deserve not getting it. I don't know, man. It's like watching a car crash that can either end in absolute fucking carnage (likely) or a perfect triple-axle spin and triumphant landing on the opposite lane, speeding off in the other direction (less likely, judging from the historical record).
Anyways, that was a bit tangential, when what I wanted to write was that Canada is a little weird because nobody there called it 'swine flu' anymore, they all called it H1N1, and there were hand sanitizers fuckin' everywhere. I guess a bunch of people there died of SARS so the caution is a little excessive; either that or we've been living next to those paranoiacs in the States for too long.
Speaking of paranoiacs in the States, and health, my boss sent me this clip:
I've been doing my level best to just ignore what's happening in the States now because it just drives me batshit. I can have a higher level of discourse with my used menstrual pads and as far as anyone has been able to figure out my only diagnosable mental disorder is SAD. It did feel nice to see some old Jewish guy (he is Jewish, right? I have this game I like playing here in Europe called "gay or French", and when it comes to Americans I'm thinking of starting one called "eloquent or Jewish") respond to the healthcare/Nazi thing as it deserved to be responded to - which is, not.
But the very fact that question gets asked in a public forum - how ass-clenchingly embarassing. I'm starting to feel guilty that the US is going high comedy as it turns in on itself - that like Italy, it's just turning into a place you can laugh at until you cry. But I guess the big difference is in the States the electorate handed out such a clear whine for change and if they don't get it they won't deserve not getting it. I don't know, man. It's like watching a car crash that can either end in absolute fucking carnage (likely) or a perfect triple-axle spin and triumphant landing on the opposite lane, speeding off in the other direction (less likely, judging from the historical record).
lunedì, settembre 07, 2009
And this little piggy cried "waaaaaaah" all the way home
Back to work today - yesterday worked from home, which is completely different. Gah. This little time coming up won't be days of wine and roses but at least I get to go to Turkey next week. Extra painful because the F-word is back at school now, and I hadn't fully realized how much I like him being on vacation (ie, more present, less stressed)- combined with not having quite realizing how much I'd missed him. In a healthy world I'd be able to cuddle him all day today, getting it out of my system. In this unhealthy world, we'll both work ridiculous hours, come home cranky, and I'll snap at him when he treads in my cat's puke and fails to clean it up and he'll snap at me when I do whatever revolting, inconsiderate thing it is I do, and the cuddles will be under-realized.
Fuck you, work.
At the moment, also missing my family and my kayak like crazy. My family rather more. Especially the kids. It does my head in to be so far away from the kids. And Luke Duke too - I don't have favourites but he's the one who's always been most present whilst having the excuses to be the least present, so it's usually rather more of a tear to go away from him. God, they're so great. And while there was no hesitation in my heart about rushing back to my lover, I am FUCKING PISSED to be in this stupid shithole of a country if I must be away from my awesome family. Oh my god, what a nasty, soulless crappery Francophone Europe is.
I knew I was fucking home when I went to the TGV platform at Charles de Gaulle aeroport, put up my feet, waited for my 7:45 train, and got told off by some cunt of an SNCF worker for waiting on the platform when my train had just been cancelled, and to get up to the main concourse immediately to find out what I'd have to do to move my exhausted self and my fucking 70 kilos of luggage to Brussels instead. That's this fucking place, man. That's Francophone Europe. When some absolute bullocks happens to someone, like their train from one shitty European city they don't want to be in to another they don't want to go to getting cancelled when they've just been on a fucking overnight transatlantic flight and shed a kajillion tears saying goodbye to their awesome, awesome family, the institutional reaction is aggression to the victim.
And the thing that really fucking pisses me off about that is that it's not because of an unfocussed aggression or film-y frenchy existentialist angst or anything that fucking picturesque; it's pure fucking laziness, because minute-for-minute it saves time to pre-emptively aggress someone who might get justifiably angry into going away from where you are instead of just presenting the situation to them like a fucking grown-up and possibly having to listen to them get upset about their fucking, fucking train to Brussels getting cancelled.
One more year, one more year, one more year. I can do it. If the past two weeks flew by so unbearably fast, I can do it.
Fuck you, work.
At the moment, also missing my family and my kayak like crazy. My family rather more. Especially the kids. It does my head in to be so far away from the kids. And Luke Duke too - I don't have favourites but he's the one who's always been most present whilst having the excuses to be the least present, so it's usually rather more of a tear to go away from him. God, they're so great. And while there was no hesitation in my heart about rushing back to my lover, I am FUCKING PISSED to be in this stupid shithole of a country if I must be away from my awesome family. Oh my god, what a nasty, soulless crappery Francophone Europe is.
I knew I was fucking home when I went to the TGV platform at Charles de Gaulle aeroport, put up my feet, waited for my 7:45 train, and got told off by some cunt of an SNCF worker for waiting on the platform when my train had just been cancelled, and to get up to the main concourse immediately to find out what I'd have to do to move my exhausted self and my fucking 70 kilos of luggage to Brussels instead. That's this fucking place, man. That's Francophone Europe. When some absolute bullocks happens to someone, like their train from one shitty European city they don't want to be in to another they don't want to go to getting cancelled when they've just been on a fucking overnight transatlantic flight and shed a kajillion tears saying goodbye to their awesome, awesome family, the institutional reaction is aggression to the victim.
And the thing that really fucking pisses me off about that is that it's not because of an unfocussed aggression or film-y frenchy existentialist angst or anything that fucking picturesque; it's pure fucking laziness, because minute-for-minute it saves time to pre-emptively aggress someone who might get justifiably angry into going away from where you are instead of just presenting the situation to them like a fucking grown-up and possibly having to listen to them get upset about their fucking, fucking train to Brussels getting cancelled.
One more year, one more year, one more year. I can do it. If the past two weeks flew by so unbearably fast, I can do it.
Wet rolls and dry panties
Alright, I don't know if it's not getting laid for a near-record (in the context of this living arrangement) of three weeks (my time in Canada plus the F-word's dad's time here - I'm a bit of a screamer and it's a smallish apartment) but Ken Whiting has suddenly become the sexiest thing on legs. Or on the water. Whatever. Damn. I watched his sea kayaking video with other people in my family who like kayaking the other day and liked it fine, but didn't realize until halfway through the plane ride back across the Atlantic more than 24 hours later that he's filthy hot. Those preternatural hips and that cute Ottawa valley accent. Is it just me? Possibly.
Anyways, after I realized Ken Whiting is filthy hot, I sat there watching Air France's marginally less-shitty-than-last-time cinematic offering, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past - oh, I don't know actually, it may have been as shitty as 17 Again - it'd be quite a shitfight between the two of those.
But I digress. I was sitting there watching Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and thinking about how some Hollywood producer type somewhere was obviously expecting girls like me to wet their panties over Matthew McConnauwhatever, but my panties stayed dry, not only because I think it was intended to be a romantic comedy and romantic comedies don't get me there, but because Matthew McConnauwhatever doesn't demonstrate sea kayak rolls in swimming pools topless like Ken Whiting does. Also I'm pretty sure Matthew McConnauwhatever waxes, and I don't believe in men waxing. Even though I've seen plenty of them do it. It's just gross and it makes me wonder what sort of bizarro natural body-hair patterns they're trying to hide.
Anyways, after I realized Ken Whiting is filthy hot, I sat there watching Air France's marginally less-shitty-than-last-time cinematic offering, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past - oh, I don't know actually, it may have been as shitty as 17 Again - it'd be quite a shitfight between the two of those.
But I digress. I was sitting there watching Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and thinking about how some Hollywood producer type somewhere was obviously expecting girls like me to wet their panties over Matthew McConnauwhatever, but my panties stayed dry, not only because I think it was intended to be a romantic comedy and romantic comedies don't get me there, but because Matthew McConnauwhatever doesn't demonstrate sea kayak rolls in swimming pools topless like Ken Whiting does. Also I'm pretty sure Matthew McConnauwhatever waxes, and I don't believe in men waxing. Even though I've seen plenty of them do it. It's just gross and it makes me wonder what sort of bizarro natural body-hair patterns they're trying to hide.
venerdì, settembre 04, 2009
Cabbage soul
Kayaking on Lake Ontario was pretty nice. No wind but some interesting waves from all the big boats. Lots of birds. Passing right under the landing path for the abomination of the island aeroport, which was neat. And of course it's such an incredibly beautiful view of Toronto coming back from the Islands. The CN Tower may be a big awful eyesore, but the Toronto skyline taken as a whole is better for it. More depth.
Got some lovely time with Gigi and Lady and Gigi's fiancé last night. Walked from his condo to Luke Duke's place this morning, going past my old place through Cabbagetown on the way. Cabbagetown is probably the first neighborhood I've ever really loved and it's changing; I'm not frightfully comfortable with it. It's next to Regent Park and has a lot of crackheads wandering around, and that used to keep out the wrong class of people - you know, young urban professionals who move into a cool neighborhood because it's cool and then spend the next ten years writing angry letters to drive all the coolness out - kept out the Starbucks, in short; Cabbagetown sort of maintained this sense of cool and community since time immemorial, balanced between sketch and class, resisting anodyne gentrification in a way no other Toronto neighborhood I'm aware of, besides maybe the Junction, ever managed.
Well. There's a Starbucks there now, because Regent Park is being overhauled into a mixed income development, the crackheads are being slowly pushed out and the yuppies are moving in in droves. But the Starbucks is standing completely empty. Instead the yuppies are cluttering up Jet Fuel, where the bike couriers still go and where I had to wait ten minutes for my coffee, and the Tamil bakery up the street that does the strange cheese pastries, which I had a horrible 30 seconds thinking has closed until I saw in my desperation it had expanded into much nicer premises three doors down.
I'm hoping against hope the spirit of Cabbagetown will prevail.
Got some lovely time with Gigi and Lady and Gigi's fiancé last night. Walked from his condo to Luke Duke's place this morning, going past my old place through Cabbagetown on the way. Cabbagetown is probably the first neighborhood I've ever really loved and it's changing; I'm not frightfully comfortable with it. It's next to Regent Park and has a lot of crackheads wandering around, and that used to keep out the wrong class of people - you know, young urban professionals who move into a cool neighborhood because it's cool and then spend the next ten years writing angry letters to drive all the coolness out - kept out the Starbucks, in short; Cabbagetown sort of maintained this sense of cool and community since time immemorial, balanced between sketch and class, resisting anodyne gentrification in a way no other Toronto neighborhood I'm aware of, besides maybe the Junction, ever managed.
Well. There's a Starbucks there now, because Regent Park is being overhauled into a mixed income development, the crackheads are being slowly pushed out and the yuppies are moving in in droves. But the Starbucks is standing completely empty. Instead the yuppies are cluttering up Jet Fuel, where the bike couriers still go and where I had to wait ten minutes for my coffee, and the Tamil bakery up the street that does the strange cheese pastries, which I had a horrible 30 seconds thinking has closed until I saw in my desperation it had expanded into much nicer premises three doors down.
I'm hoping against hope the spirit of Cabbagetown will prevail.
giovedì, settembre 03, 2009
Thoroughly terribly contemptible
Nice to be back in Toronto, up to a point. Heaven knows I don't consider Brussels a paragon of civic awesomeness and it's great to be back where there are so many Asians with their delicious, delicious restaurants, but this city has its own elements of shitholery that instinctively perhaps, because I'm my grandmother's granddaughter, I'm finding it pretty easy to be judgemental about. Case in point: you want me to pay $2.75 a ride for that piece of shit public transportation system? What? $2.fuckin75? Are you serious? You pay half that to be wafted around any major European capital, on much less circuitous, crippled and crowded routes, London excepted of course but then London is a bit of an exception to everything decent, that fucking shopping mall.
Kayaking with my nephew on Lake Ontario though - Brussels doesn't offer anything like that. I've already made the F-word promise we'd go on a kayaking holiday as soon as we can after I get back, which might be awhile because I'm going to Turkey almost immediately for work. Tough life.
Kayaking with my nephew on Lake Ontario though - Brussels doesn't offer anything like that. I've already made the F-word promise we'd go on a kayaking holiday as soon as we can after I get back, which might be awhile because I'm going to Turkey almost immediately for work. Tough life.
martedì, settembre 01, 2009
Catharsis
So it's a lovely day and I'm off to go kayaking again, this time to see how far up the La Vase river I can get in Jemima, the boat I bought last week, which was not designed for seeing how far one can get up a river, being 14.5 feet long. And in terms of following the historical trade route portage, which I have no intention of doing this year, and little interest in doing next, I'm not really heading in the right direction, going upstream from the end, Champlain Park at Lake Nipissing, instead of starting from the beginning, Trout Lake (home of the monster, which had the good manners not to eat me on countless daytime and moonlit dips).
But it doesn't matter; in its lower reaches at the moment, the river has no current at all, especially as the lake is so high right now, the highest I've ever seen - the lower river is just some lazy loops through startlingly beautiful countryside, where yesterday I saw a grebe, a muskrat, some weirdo non-diving duck with a red head, and loveliest of all a very pretty doe, who I surprised drinking from the river just a couple of meters away from me, and who stared me down in evident shock and bewilderment with impossibly big black eyes until I passed her, at which moment she booted soundlessly away.
First, though, I have to sit here and finish this blog entry, because I have to have a morning shit before I leave, so I don't have to hurry back at any point. It's a bit odd but I'm absolutely uncomfortable taking a shit in the wilderness. I wonder if that's just me or if everyone is like that, and I wonder if the revulsion to the prospect has any evolutionary remnants mixed up in it from a time when we weren't at the top of the food chain and were afraid of being tracked by predators.
Anyways. Kayaking is lovable for a lot of reasons, and I could go on about them ad nauseum, and no doubt will some other time. But probably the most lovable thing about it is the degree to which it's literally and figuratively cathartic. My bad moods can never stand up to the first twenty minutes of paddling, particularly in such a lovely place as this (damn, my childhood in this fucking arse-end of the world would have been nicer if I'd had a boat!), and I do some really great thinking, accepting, and moving on whilst on the water. And I don't know if it's because of the nature of the physical exercise or because of the mental relaxingness of it all, but the body becomes pretty content, after half an hour or so, to start signalling it's ready to get rid of anything superfluous in there (hence the necessity of taking the morning shit before starting out).
This manifests itself most obviously, in me, with great rupturing belches that echo through the calm of the tranquil northern Ontario morning, blending in seamless harmony with the crickets, frogs, and birdsong - the tranquil northern Ontario morning being full of the jay family, particularly a bumper crop of blue jays this year, whose raucous loud calls are about as pleasant, objectively speaking, as a young woman belching.
But it doesn't matter; in its lower reaches at the moment, the river has no current at all, especially as the lake is so high right now, the highest I've ever seen - the lower river is just some lazy loops through startlingly beautiful countryside, where yesterday I saw a grebe, a muskrat, some weirdo non-diving duck with a red head, and loveliest of all a very pretty doe, who I surprised drinking from the river just a couple of meters away from me, and who stared me down in evident shock and bewilderment with impossibly big black eyes until I passed her, at which moment she booted soundlessly away.
First, though, I have to sit here and finish this blog entry, because I have to have a morning shit before I leave, so I don't have to hurry back at any point. It's a bit odd but I'm absolutely uncomfortable taking a shit in the wilderness. I wonder if that's just me or if everyone is like that, and I wonder if the revulsion to the prospect has any evolutionary remnants mixed up in it from a time when we weren't at the top of the food chain and were afraid of being tracked by predators.
Anyways. Kayaking is lovable for a lot of reasons, and I could go on about them ad nauseum, and no doubt will some other time. But probably the most lovable thing about it is the degree to which it's literally and figuratively cathartic. My bad moods can never stand up to the first twenty minutes of paddling, particularly in such a lovely place as this (damn, my childhood in this fucking arse-end of the world would have been nicer if I'd had a boat!), and I do some really great thinking, accepting, and moving on whilst on the water. And I don't know if it's because of the nature of the physical exercise or because of the mental relaxingness of it all, but the body becomes pretty content, after half an hour or so, to start signalling it's ready to get rid of anything superfluous in there (hence the necessity of taking the morning shit before starting out).
This manifests itself most obviously, in me, with great rupturing belches that echo through the calm of the tranquil northern Ontario morning, blending in seamless harmony with the crickets, frogs, and birdsong - the tranquil northern Ontario morning being full of the jay family, particularly a bumper crop of blue jays this year, whose raucous loud calls are about as pleasant, objectively speaking, as a young woman belching.
lunedì, agosto 31, 2009
The ones I've loved the longest
Actual dialogue from this weekend:
Mistress La Spliffe: I'm pretty sure he's not gay.
High School Buddy: What are you basing that on?
MLF: Partly on him telling you he's not gay.
HSB: Well, he just came up to me spontaneously and said "I'm not gay," why would he have done that if he wasn't gay?
MLS: Maybe because you'd been saying that you're sure he's gay when he was sitting behind us at the wedding table.
HSB: No.
MLS: You were speaking really loud.
HSB: Oh.
The shocking thing about that exchange was that as far as I could tell I was way the drunkest.
Back in North Bay now, although in a way you could hardly tell; London (Ontario) and North Bay are sister cities in drabness, poor roads and squatty ugly buildings, London being the larger, obese sister and North Bay being the pregnant 16-year-old sister living in a little trailer. It was a pretty great wedding. Good to see my group from highschool again, and eerie to watch us be us - that group from highschool again - making each other risk pissing ourselves with laughter - even as life and our own wilfulness takes us into all sorts of weirdo directions.
Getting from London back to Toronto, where we dined with Luke Duke and co. before dropping off Elvis at the aeroport, was much less pleasant. Very fucking unpleasant, actually. But that's life, nothing's for free, or even at the price you think it is, and it's over now. Horrible to drop off Elvis at the aeroport, too. I wish we all arrived and left at the same time, all these goodbyes do my fucking head in. And while this blog is obviously all about me and how awesome I am, there was a touch of dialogue between Elvis and Luke Duke I don't want to forget:
Elvis: We've got a really tiny backyard, so we've started guerilla gardening in a vacant lot down the street.
Luke Duke: Careful, that's how Che started out.
And just so he won't feel left out on the blog he doesn't even know exists, and because he, like the other two, is the master of the throwaway line:
Magnum: That's totally gone to shit. You probably guessed how already but I'll tell you all about it after we start drinking.
Mistress La Spliffe: I'm pretty sure he's not gay.
High School Buddy: What are you basing that on?
MLF: Partly on him telling you he's not gay.
HSB: Well, he just came up to me spontaneously and said "I'm not gay," why would he have done that if he wasn't gay?
MLS: Maybe because you'd been saying that you're sure he's gay when he was sitting behind us at the wedding table.
HSB: No.
MLS: You were speaking really loud.
HSB: Oh.
The shocking thing about that exchange was that as far as I could tell I was way the drunkest.
Back in North Bay now, although in a way you could hardly tell; London (Ontario) and North Bay are sister cities in drabness, poor roads and squatty ugly buildings, London being the larger, obese sister and North Bay being the pregnant 16-year-old sister living in a little trailer. It was a pretty great wedding. Good to see my group from highschool again, and eerie to watch us be us - that group from highschool again - making each other risk pissing ourselves with laughter - even as life and our own wilfulness takes us into all sorts of weirdo directions.
Getting from London back to Toronto, where we dined with Luke Duke and co. before dropping off Elvis at the aeroport, was much less pleasant. Very fucking unpleasant, actually. But that's life, nothing's for free, or even at the price you think it is, and it's over now. Horrible to drop off Elvis at the aeroport, too. I wish we all arrived and left at the same time, all these goodbyes do my fucking head in. And while this blog is obviously all about me and how awesome I am, there was a touch of dialogue between Elvis and Luke Duke I don't want to forget:
Elvis: We've got a really tiny backyard, so we've started guerilla gardening in a vacant lot down the street.
Luke Duke: Careful, that's how Che started out.
And just so he won't feel left out on the blog he doesn't even know exists, and because he, like the other two, is the master of the throwaway line:
Magnum: That's totally gone to shit. You probably guessed how already but I'll tell you all about it after we start drinking.
mercoledì, agosto 26, 2009
I am become She-Bogan, Destroyer of Taste
Yesterday was my first solo drive ever. And it was to the beer store to pick up a plank of 50, in my brother's pickup, wearing a home-made Wonder Woman singlet, Uggs, 30 visible blackfly bites, unwashed hair, and a miniskirt. I considered it a beautiful synthesis of hoser and bogan; indeed, possibly the creation of a new subspecies of easy livers: the Great Northern Ontario She-Bogan.
I'll let you know how my classy new lifestyle goes.
I'll let you know how my classy new lifestyle goes.
martedì, agosto 25, 2009
Air Canada next time, perhaps
I've been kayaking rather than blogging since getting to North Bay, but this morning I'm respecting my aching muscles and taking a little break. I could chill your blood with photos of my legs and the revolting farm of mosquito and blackfly bites bursting out of the skin there but tonnes of other disgusting things are happening in the world, so why subject you to mine . . . and I'm trying to be stoic and take it as preparation for moving to a country where everything bites.
Just to say that on the plane ride over, the only movies on offer were Hannah Montana: The Movie and Seventeen Again. I watched both. And Air France, you fucking cunt, you have sooooo lost this customer. The only reason I flew on your craptacular aeroplanes that keep crashing and put up with your stewardesses' shitful behaviour and consistently and obligingly changed seats on every flight I've flown with you in the last five years as your agents are too fucking retarded to book families seats together is because you have seatback movie screens with a wide selection, not so that I can fucking sit there and watch a generation of young girls educated to have the most fuckwitted and unrealistic priorities in the history of society by an underaged, overprivileged celebrity daughter lipsynching, poncing around on a horse and 'scoring' with sexless blond adolescent cowboys who don't try to get into her fucking pants, or by an unthreatening, dancing, selectively waxed male model educating a highschool using his 'hotness' into believing that sex is only for making baby daughters and yet a boy getting onto the basketball team is a sign that you should nail him.
What fucking element of my painstakingly compiled customer profile, the one that makes you spam me up the douchehole, encouraged you to think this was a good fucking idea? Fuck you, you fucking fuckers. Air Fucking France indeed. It's all in the name, isn't it? God I hate the French. BTW, I used to, uhm, "try to make baby daughters" with a guy who looked like Zac Efron and he was the filthiest pervert I've ever given an opportunity to express himself. A propos of nothing. Just good memories.
Just to say that on the plane ride over, the only movies on offer were Hannah Montana: The Movie and Seventeen Again. I watched both. And Air France, you fucking cunt, you have sooooo lost this customer. The only reason I flew on your craptacular aeroplanes that keep crashing and put up with your stewardesses' shitful behaviour and consistently and obligingly changed seats on every flight I've flown with you in the last five years as your agents are too fucking retarded to book families seats together is because you have seatback movie screens with a wide selection, not so that I can fucking sit there and watch a generation of young girls educated to have the most fuckwitted and unrealistic priorities in the history of society by an underaged, overprivileged celebrity daughter lipsynching, poncing around on a horse and 'scoring' with sexless blond adolescent cowboys who don't try to get into her fucking pants, or by an unthreatening, dancing, selectively waxed male model educating a highschool using his 'hotness' into believing that sex is only for making baby daughters and yet a boy getting onto the basketball team is a sign that you should nail him.
What fucking element of my painstakingly compiled customer profile, the one that makes you spam me up the douchehole, encouraged you to think this was a good fucking idea? Fuck you, you fucking fuckers. Air Fucking France indeed. It's all in the name, isn't it? God I hate the French. BTW, I used to, uhm, "try to make baby daughters" with a guy who looked like Zac Efron and he was the filthiest pervert I've ever given an opportunity to express himself. A propos of nothing. Just good memories.
mercoledì, agosto 19, 2009
I also believe in communication
Our company, I may have suggested some posts back, is having some issues, whose seriousness or lack thereof I’ll decline to comment on specifically; it’s way outside of my knowledge. But what has been interesting is the flurry of communications and meetings and reassurances and invitations for questioning from management, which yesterday annoyed me a little more than they ordinarily would because of our mag’s deadline and my squandering of time this past little while, when I’ve been dreaming of cottages and family and rural outdoor living and any number of things, actually, that aren’t the dramatically listing and tanking industries I’m being paid to study.
So as I was sitting there being annoyed in a (lunchtime, with no food) please-don't-do-what-all-those-guys-just-did meeting, I suddenly hit on a cure for being annoyed in such situations; playing mental spin the bottle for all the other people in the room. Randomly choosing two meeting participants and imagining what they’d look and sound like getting ridiculously into each other – erupting across the table holding raging boners or erupting out of their clothes. It was so awesome I had to keep struggling not to burst into hoots of uncontrollable laughter - no judgement on my colleagues’ humour value as sexual beings but you do get some frightfully unlikely combinations in there – and before I knew it the meeting was finished and I was in a good mood. The only lingering annoyance is not having thought of the measure years before to make conferences, lectures, and church services move along faster.
And if you hadn’t thought of it either, dear reader, there it is – my gift to you.
martedì, agosto 18, 2009
Whaaaaaa?tsing Matilda
Strange to have two Daddy-age Australian men who have never been to Europe before staying with us.
They're both terrific, much to my relief; that nervousness I wrote about just got nervouser as yesterday wore on, evolving into stomach-churning at the aeroport. But they're quite disarming and the F-word's dad has already touched my heart by reminding me of my dad, which is a touch incestuous in its implications, though nowhere near as bad as a friend's girlfriend who keeps insisting the F-word looks like Adriano Celentano, and he doesn't, right, because Elvis looks like Adriano Celentano, and I'm not boinking my brother. Stupid woman.
Anyways, it's strange to have the Australians staying with us because it's strange to be imagining what Europe looks like in their eyes - it's an experience of Europe that's completely outside of my experience, since my parents did most of their growing up here. It's also strange to realize how far the F-word is compensating for his natural accent when he speaks to me and most other people; I've already noticed he sounds different when he's phoning home, but now that I'm listening to non-expat Australians talk I realize I only understand 85% of what they're talking about.
There will be a learning curve even in moving back to Anglophonia, it seems.
They're both terrific, much to my relief; that nervousness I wrote about just got nervouser as yesterday wore on, evolving into stomach-churning at the aeroport. But they're quite disarming and the F-word's dad has already touched my heart by reminding me of my dad, which is a touch incestuous in its implications, though nowhere near as bad as a friend's girlfriend who keeps insisting the F-word looks like Adriano Celentano, and he doesn't, right, because Elvis looks like Adriano Celentano, and I'm not boinking my brother. Stupid woman.
Anyways, it's strange to have the Australians staying with us because it's strange to be imagining what Europe looks like in their eyes - it's an experience of Europe that's completely outside of my experience, since my parents did most of their growing up here. It's also strange to realize how far the F-word is compensating for his natural accent when he speaks to me and most other people; I've already noticed he sounds different when he's phoning home, but now that I'm listening to non-expat Australians talk I realize I only understand 85% of what they're talking about.
There will be a learning curve even in moving back to Anglophonia, it seems.
lunedì, agosto 17, 2009
That pasta gave me herpes
So the F-word’s dad is arriving this evening, and I believe I mentioned on Friday I was a bit nervous. Last night I was boiling some pasta, some darling little witches’ hats the F-word constructed that are so good at scooping up a light brothy sauce, and forgot their efficient cupping action whilst trying to eat one to see if it was cooked. The boiling water therein dinged my lower lip, hurting like hell and now – well, it doesn’t hurt anymore, but there’s a small blister, which makes me look like I’ve got a herpes sore.
There are a few achievements in my life that I’m really proud of. One is grad school, another is functional polyglottism, and the third is having made it through three decades and vast tracts of men without getting herpes. And now the F-word’s father is visiting, and he’s going to see this little blister on my lip, and he’s not going to know who awesomely, incredibly herpes-free I am.
C’est la vie.
There are a few achievements in my life that I’m really proud of. One is grad school, another is functional polyglottism, and the third is having made it through three decades and vast tracts of men without getting herpes. And now the F-word’s father is visiting, and he’s going to see this little blister on my lip, and he’s not going to know who awesomely, incredibly herpes-free I am.
C’est la vie.
giovedì, agosto 13, 2009
The Red Dragon is incapacitated
Ugh. Drunk too much crappy wine last night, headachey this morning, and going to Canada in a week, exactly. Awesome, but shit. I have to . . . do . . . stuff. I haven't even thought through what I fucking need to do yet . . . let people there know, I guess . . . and the F-word's dad gets here Monday, and I haven't met a boyf's parents since 2002, and I'm not quite sure - possibly I'm nervous.
The good news is that the F-word has found my camera cable and I can put pictures on this blog again. Since I'm in a touch of a panic - no, I'd say more a touch of an anxiety - by testament of feeling like having a headache this morning is throwing some massive wrench into the delicate process of getting me safely to Canada next Friday, let's put up something lovely and calm - the Michaelangelo that makes going to Bruges the way I do everytime anyone comes to visit (thank god, I'll have left for Canada before the F-word takes his dad there, because I think I've been there six fucking times in two fucking years) fairly worthwhile:
I could stare at her for ages, and have . . . it's my favourite representation of Mary, and while I've read commentaries saying it's compositionally remarkable for how sad Mary looks, how 'distant' from her son, and how Jeebus is about to rush out to his cruel but heroic destiny in the world, for me the remarkable thing about this statue (and the Pieta, bizarrely) is how infant-motherly Mary looks - that sort of pre-occupied, hasn't-slept-enough-for-months look, but at the same time, how tender, how protective, and still how nurturing - one arm steadying her kid, the other poised at the ready in case he tumbles, but letting him move around; you have to, and anyways, you can tell looking at the kid he'll be a whiner if he isn't allowed to.
I've seen this woman and her kid hundreds of times in waiting rooms. Which is what makes Christianity Christian, I suppose.
The good news is that the F-word has found my camera cable and I can put pictures on this blog again. Since I'm in a touch of a panic - no, I'd say more a touch of an anxiety - by testament of feeling like having a headache this morning is throwing some massive wrench into the delicate process of getting me safely to Canada next Friday, let's put up something lovely and calm - the Michaelangelo that makes going to Bruges the way I do everytime anyone comes to visit (thank god, I'll have left for Canada before the F-word takes his dad there, because I think I've been there six fucking times in two fucking years) fairly worthwhile:
I could stare at her for ages, and have . . . it's my favourite representation of Mary, and while I've read commentaries saying it's compositionally remarkable for how sad Mary looks, how 'distant' from her son, and how Jeebus is about to rush out to his cruel but heroic destiny in the world, for me the remarkable thing about this statue (and the Pieta, bizarrely) is how infant-motherly Mary looks - that sort of pre-occupied, hasn't-slept-enough-for-months look, but at the same time, how tender, how protective, and still how nurturing - one arm steadying her kid, the other poised at the ready in case he tumbles, but letting him move around; you have to, and anyways, you can tell looking at the kid he'll be a whiner if he isn't allowed to.
I've seen this woman and her kid hundreds of times in waiting rooms. Which is what makes Christianity Christian, I suppose.
Say what to who, buddy?
This post is about work, so it will be brief, and vague.
With the past 12 months, a couple of dozen people have been sacked. Unimportant people. Single mums and all that. And then within the past week, half a dozen more have quit. Important dudes. All of a sudden. Together. If you know what I mean. Not completely important people, in fact the sector they were working on is not exactly our money-tree and I’ll be shocked if it is for them in the present economic climate. But there you are.
Now our CEO is sending us angry daily emails about how this doesn’t mean the company is going under. Fair enough. He has also sent an email to all of our clients, including the ones who are in no way involved with the non-money-tree that has just walked off the job, assuring them of the same thing.
I don’t know what the case is and I wasn’t thinking at all (or not much) about our company going under until he started sending daily emails about it. But what is pissing me off so badly now is that I’m SURE that very few of the clients purchasing my products would give a flying fuck about the non-money-tree on a different continent that has just walked off the job, and nonetheless they’ve got a strange message from our CEO in their inbox about how my company isn’t going under, when maybe they weren’t thinking about it at all.
So I’m not sure about some of what’s going on, and I’m pissed off about what I know is going on. This is what happens when you let men out of the battery farm and into the CEO seat, it’s like constrant pre-menstrual syndrome with a fucking megaphone.
Keeping this online as testament to my wrongness. I approached the CEO to ask him to clarify what exactly he'd done, and he explained he'd only sent the external letter to staff and the clients using this particular money-tree - not everybody, as I'd assumed when it showed up in my inbox without explanation. Obviously I still think he needs to calm down in terms of his staff emails but he's definitely not ready to be sent back to the battery farm yet. My abstract apologies for the abstract criticism he will never, ever read. One hopes.
With the past 12 months, a couple of dozen people have been sacked. Unimportant people. Single mums and all that. And then within the past week, half a dozen more have quit. Important dudes. All of a sudden. Together. If you know what I mean. Not completely important people, in fact the sector they were working on is not exactly our money-tree and I’ll be shocked if it is for them in the present economic climate. But there you are.
Now our CEO is sending us angry daily emails about how this doesn’t mean the company is going under. Fair enough. He has also sent an email to all of our clients, including the ones who are in no way involved with the non-money-tree that has just walked off the job, assuring them of the same thing.
I don’t know what the case is and I wasn’t thinking at all (or not much) about our company going under until he started sending daily emails about it. But what is pissing me off so badly now is that I’m SURE that very few of the clients purchasing my products would give a flying fuck about the non-money-tree on a different continent that has just walked off the job, and nonetheless they’ve got a strange message from our CEO in their inbox about how my company isn’t going under, when maybe they weren’t thinking about it at all.
So I’m not sure about some of what’s going on, and I’m pissed off about what I know is going on. This is what happens when you let men out of the battery farm and into the CEO seat, it’s like constrant pre-menstrual syndrome with a fucking megaphone.
UPDATE
Keeping this online as testament to my wrongness. I approached the CEO to ask him to clarify what exactly he'd done, and he explained he'd only sent the external letter to staff and the clients using this particular money-tree - not everybody, as I'd assumed when it showed up in my inbox without explanation. Obviously I still think he needs to calm down in terms of his staff emails but he's definitely not ready to be sent back to the battery farm yet. My abstract apologies for the abstract criticism he will never, ever read. One hopes.
martedì, agosto 11, 2009
Lusitanian English Television Bodice Ripping Craptacular
So a fun thing about Portugal is that almost everyone we bumped into, city and country, spoke at least a smattering - usually more - of French or English, so we weren't at a loss to communicate and indeed to have good fun. And as in Spain, in those situations where they didn't, an awkward but clear conversation could be had by speaking sloooooowly in Italian and listening to them respond sloooowly in Portuguese. But usually they were polyglots and while that has a lot to do with tonnes of them going off to France to work, I think at least on the English side (considering how much complaining I've heard about the Portuguese school system) that has a lot to do with their television being subtitled instead of dubbed (unlike France, Italy, and Spain, where people are absolutely crap at English in comparison).
And a fun thing about that is that we got to see television we'd never seen before. Not much of it because we were so excited about being somewhere it wasn't raining, and there were so many summer festivals, that we were outside most of the time. But a good bit. The upshot is that I saw three new shows I'd only heard of before, and liked one of them:
1. 30 Rock. This was the one I liked. It's no Arrested Development but worth the price of admission for revealing that Alec Baldwin, like Nick Cage, should never have ever pretended to be a dramatic actor, ever, and just concentrated on being funny. Good strong ensemble and Jane Krakowski used to much less annoying effect than in Ally McPuke; laughed out loud and made a conscious effort to watch it a second time (Portugal, like a sensible county, airs TV episodes on consecutive days rather than consecutive weeks so one doesn't stop caring in the interim) at which point I laughed out loud some more.
2. The Tudors. The worst thing in bodice-ripping historically tarty boring bullshit I have ever seen, and I've seen Elisa di Rivombroso. I can't think of a single excuse to watch this stinker except to marvel at how Jonathan Rhys-Myers' neck has ballooned out from the birdlike tininess of Velvet Goldmine, so that it looks like his head is sitting on top of an identically circumferenced tube. The kicker is - you know how I feel about Henry VIII. And I honestly believe there would be no better television than showing him for the monstrously fat, suppurating, revolting, ginger mess he was by the time Anne Boleyn started holding her nose and boffing him, and instead they've got the cute little brunet tart from Velvet Goldmine and inflated his neck. Snore. Snore. Snore.
3. Dexter. I had my doubts going in; it looked like a one-trick pony that had already collapsed in the saddle in the spate of copy-cat follow-ups to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It was far, far worse than I'd been expecting. The flat voice-over revealing everything going on in the protagonist's mind and the excessive use of flashbacks drained the events of the episode of any interest they might have had, and any incidental watchability went down the shitter through the excessively bad dialogue writing.
You know, I loved the first four seasons of The Sopranos, I loved the first season of Deadwood, I loved Oz flat-out, but those sorts of shows have a lot to answer for; after they took off as they did TV Land figured out that it didn't actually have to compete with that calibre of writing (indeed, the shows in question could rarely sustain it themselves); it could just show similar levels of titties and exceedingly macabre violence and filthy fucking language and neat camera angles, and people would still think it was cool. Okay. Scratch that. Those sorts of shows don't have a lot to answer for. Audiences have a lot to answer for. The Fucking Tudors, for fuck's sake. Just go download some fucking porn and see some actual penetration shots, and skip over the literary urination on the works of Shakespeare, Robert Bolt, and generations of engaging and competent historians. Fuck.
And a fun thing about that is that we got to see television we'd never seen before. Not much of it because we were so excited about being somewhere it wasn't raining, and there were so many summer festivals, that we were outside most of the time. But a good bit. The upshot is that I saw three new shows I'd only heard of before, and liked one of them:
1. 30 Rock. This was the one I liked. It's no Arrested Development but worth the price of admission for revealing that Alec Baldwin, like Nick Cage, should never have ever pretended to be a dramatic actor, ever, and just concentrated on being funny. Good strong ensemble and Jane Krakowski used to much less annoying effect than in Ally McPuke; laughed out loud and made a conscious effort to watch it a second time (Portugal, like a sensible county, airs TV episodes on consecutive days rather than consecutive weeks so one doesn't stop caring in the interim) at which point I laughed out loud some more.
2. The Tudors. The worst thing in bodice-ripping historically tarty boring bullshit I have ever seen, and I've seen Elisa di Rivombroso. I can't think of a single excuse to watch this stinker except to marvel at how Jonathan Rhys-Myers' neck has ballooned out from the birdlike tininess of Velvet Goldmine, so that it looks like his head is sitting on top of an identically circumferenced tube. The kicker is - you know how I feel about Henry VIII. And I honestly believe there would be no better television than showing him for the monstrously fat, suppurating, revolting, ginger mess he was by the time Anne Boleyn started holding her nose and boffing him, and instead they've got the cute little brunet tart from Velvet Goldmine and inflated his neck. Snore. Snore. Snore.
3. Dexter. I had my doubts going in; it looked like a one-trick pony that had already collapsed in the saddle in the spate of copy-cat follow-ups to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It was far, far worse than I'd been expecting. The flat voice-over revealing everything going on in the protagonist's mind and the excessive use of flashbacks drained the events of the episode of any interest they might have had, and any incidental watchability went down the shitter through the excessively bad dialogue writing.
You know, I loved the first four seasons of The Sopranos, I loved the first season of Deadwood, I loved Oz flat-out, but those sorts of shows have a lot to answer for; after they took off as they did TV Land figured out that it didn't actually have to compete with that calibre of writing (indeed, the shows in question could rarely sustain it themselves); it could just show similar levels of titties and exceedingly macabre violence and filthy fucking language and neat camera angles, and people would still think it was cool. Okay. Scratch that. Those sorts of shows don't have a lot to answer for. Audiences have a lot to answer for. The Fucking Tudors, for fuck's sake. Just go download some fucking porn and see some actual penetration shots, and skip over the literary urination on the works of Shakespeare, Robert Bolt, and generations of engaging and competent historians. Fuck.
lunedì, agosto 10, 2009
Houses built on sand
Amie had her baby a few days ago, Lady (who was married a few weeks ago in Benin) has got one in the oven, and I remain a fallow money-making machine. After Lady told me she's incubating, I had a biological moment wherein I was convinced I was the only one of my girlfriends who remained unreproduced, which was bizarre because after my brains snatched the reins back from my cunt, I realized that's not true at all - most of my girlfriends, the vast majority in fact, haven't. But it was a dizzy five minutes. A dizzy five minutes wherein, if our birth control apparati had been in front of me, I would have felt morally justified sabotaging it. Yeesh. Gross.
We've got a timeframe in mind - we've got an amount of money we need first in mind - and the bastard of it all is that 80% of me is convinced that all the money flooding in to bolster up the pillars of our ubiquitous decadent economic temple will result in the thousands of euros I'm so painfully socking away devaluing completely by the time I want to spend them. I'll tell you one thing, though - I'm glad they're euros. When you're sharing your currency with economic shitteries like Italy and Spain there are some major worries attached, but I'm 70% reassured by the fact that fiscal stability is basically written into the genes of the EU . . . the only way the euro will go to shit any faster than all the various dollars I care about is if the EU itself goes to shit. Of course it's a possibility but the awesome thing about Europe is the governing structures are too scared of their citizens to bugger their money. I hope.
I remain a worried, fallow money-making machine.
We've got a timeframe in mind - we've got an amount of money we need first in mind - and the bastard of it all is that 80% of me is convinced that all the money flooding in to bolster up the pillars of our ubiquitous decadent economic temple will result in the thousands of euros I'm so painfully socking away devaluing completely by the time I want to spend them. I'll tell you one thing, though - I'm glad they're euros. When you're sharing your currency with economic shitteries like Italy and Spain there are some major worries attached, but I'm 70% reassured by the fact that fiscal stability is basically written into the genes of the EU . . . the only way the euro will go to shit any faster than all the various dollars I care about is if the EU itself goes to shit. Of course it's a possibility but the awesome thing about Europe is the governing structures are too scared of their citizens to bugger their money. I hope.
I remain a worried, fallow money-making machine.
On no longer being in Portugal
Portugal was so great I nearly cried when we got on the plane out of there. And then I cried on the plane when the engine started making funny noises. Panic Attack! I kept it quiet though. Thank god I've finally got my driver's license. My lifestyle will always involve areoplane rides, and probably many more than the vast majority of the world's population, environmental direness notwithstanding, because that's simply the nature of love and of oceans - but I would like them to involve less than they currently do, because flying continues to scare the living shit out of me.
Moving on. Whilst on trains, planes, lying on the beach, et cetera, I read The Mill on the Floss, which put me into quite a poopy mood briefly, though it was very good, and now I can't wait to get to Middlemarch. Floss was rather uncanny in its depiction of a child's mind via Maggie, but even more uncanny in its depiction of the inevitability of destructive sexual love from bored women who don't believe in themselves enough to do anything else with their stagnating brains.
Maggie was suffering through societal constraints the likes of which my generation can't imagine, but we can recognize bits and peices in our own situation - and constraints from the outside aside, during my years of spreading it around it was evident to me even at the time that there were hundreds of better things for me to be doing than nailing a bunch of guys whose names I don't remember anymore. And now, I don't regret the sex, some of which was definitely beyond worthwhile, but I regret the attention I paid to it. Floss reminded me of that regret, and put me in a poopy mood because enduring societal constraints notwithstanding, it looks like there was something wilful about my propensities to orient my life, to a certain degree, around a generalized notion of cock, when the whole world is just bristling with cocks anyways, and with many other things besides.
Also reading more Stephen Jay Gould and adoring it more than before, it that's possible. But more on that later.
Moving on. Whilst on trains, planes, lying on the beach, et cetera, I read The Mill on the Floss, which put me into quite a poopy mood briefly, though it was very good, and now I can't wait to get to Middlemarch. Floss was rather uncanny in its depiction of a child's mind via Maggie, but even more uncanny in its depiction of the inevitability of destructive sexual love from bored women who don't believe in themselves enough to do anything else with their stagnating brains.
Maggie was suffering through societal constraints the likes of which my generation can't imagine, but we can recognize bits and peices in our own situation - and constraints from the outside aside, during my years of spreading it around it was evident to me even at the time that there were hundreds of better things for me to be doing than nailing a bunch of guys whose names I don't remember anymore. And now, I don't regret the sex, some of which was definitely beyond worthwhile, but I regret the attention I paid to it. Floss reminded me of that regret, and put me in a poopy mood because enduring societal constraints notwithstanding, it looks like there was something wilful about my propensities to orient my life, to a certain degree, around a generalized notion of cock, when the whole world is just bristling with cocks anyways, and with many other things besides.
Also reading more Stephen Jay Gould and adoring it more than before, it that's possible. But more on that later.
giovedì, luglio 30, 2009
A word to cities considering bikeshare schemes
1. Congratulations for having such a great idea. Not only will it cut down on traffic and maybe even persuade your denizens to drop a few pounds, but it will help shut people up about transport strikes, high gas prices, and how you're doing fuck-all about environmental issues only regional and national governments are in a position to do anything about
2. Sadly, bikes are not enough. You need to sink a bit of money to the infrastructure for them at the same time, as has been done in Paris with the Velib scheme, and has not been done here with the Villo scheme, and has not been done in Amsterdam because they don't need to.
3. But most of all - and this is what I really came here to say - and it's bugging the hell out of me, because I can't find the Dutch site - don't go the Velib and Villo route, and set up your city with ten-speed monsters with squeeze brakes. Go the Amsterdam route and get the simplest possible city bikes - no speeds, and backpedal brakes. They'll be cheaper to buy, cheaper to maintain, and less annoying for the users overall. And it will be less expensive and provocative when brainless young trogladytes push them into the canals/traffic/rivers/up their own useless asses.
2. Sadly, bikes are not enough. You need to sink a bit of money to the infrastructure for them at the same time, as has been done in Paris with the Velib scheme, and has not been done here with the Villo scheme, and has not been done in Amsterdam because they don't need to.
3. But most of all - and this is what I really came here to say - and it's bugging the hell out of me, because I can't find the Dutch site - don't go the Velib and Villo route, and set up your city with ten-speed monsters with squeeze brakes. Go the Amsterdam route and get the simplest possible city bikes - no speeds, and backpedal brakes. They'll be cheaper to buy, cheaper to maintain, and less annoying for the users overall. And it will be less expensive and provocative when brainless young trogladytes push them into the canals/traffic/rivers/up their own useless asses.
mercoledì, luglio 29, 2009
Three rotten things happened last night
1. The Chaser's War on Everything ended forever. Australians apparently have the same habit of axing television programmes before they run out of ideas and turn into painful, undead farce (seasons 5-7 of the Sopranos, anyone?) that the British have. And that's one of the few things I admire about the British. But as a North American, that's foreign to me (every season following the first of Sex and the City, anyone?) and so I'm still so sad they're gone. They say they'll be back with something else, but who, oh who, will embarass themselves with Australian politicians in the meantime, giving me an indirect study of that country's political firmament?
Two fave moments - one from the first season, one from the last:
Sigh.
2. I finished Adam Bede. There's no more, it's over. Heartbreaking. But I'm still chuffed that I've got four more Eliot monsters to wade into, and after finishing the book I opened it again at random and all the words were still there, thankfully. It will be a good re-read, and a frequent one. Being a stoner I love re-reading books. On the second read, after a few pipes, it's like a fucking private cinema in my brain. And any cinema featuring my new crush Adam is going to be hot.
3. Lexie fell off some boxes. I think her leg is broken. Unutterably distressing, but she doesn't seem to be in distress, she's putting some weight on it, and I'll take her to the vet this afternoon. If she needs some focussed attention I'll have to put off my departure for Lisbon until Monday, and that will be on the fucking overnight coach - there are either no planes left, or they're prohibitively expensive. Oh well. I won't care if she'll be okay. I was absolutely distraught until she started purring, and I realized cats aren't horses, and we won't have to shoot her if it actually is busted. So all will be well, I hope.
Two fave moments - one from the first season, one from the last:
Sigh.
2. I finished Adam Bede. There's no more, it's over. Heartbreaking. But I'm still chuffed that I've got four more Eliot monsters to wade into, and after finishing the book I opened it again at random and all the words were still there, thankfully. It will be a good re-read, and a frequent one. Being a stoner I love re-reading books. On the second read, after a few pipes, it's like a fucking private cinema in my brain. And any cinema featuring my new crush Adam is going to be hot.
3. Lexie fell off some boxes. I think her leg is broken. Unutterably distressing, but she doesn't seem to be in distress, she's putting some weight on it, and I'll take her to the vet this afternoon. If she needs some focussed attention I'll have to put off my departure for Lisbon until Monday, and that will be on the fucking overnight coach - there are either no planes left, or they're prohibitively expensive. Oh well. I won't care if she'll be okay. I was absolutely distraught until she started purring, and I realized cats aren't horses, and we won't have to shoot her if it actually is busted. So all will be well, I hope.
In which I get a better hero
Almost done Adam Bede. I fear Eliot jumped the shark in part six, but Adam Bede has officially become my new literary wank-fantasy. What a man. Much better than that leering shitheel Rochester, or that conversationally-challenged Wentworth in Persuasion. In my brain, Adam Bede is like a guy in a less-murderous Bad Seeds song. Like celebrity wank-fantasy Nick Cave with a chin and muscles and no heroin - and instead of music, carpentry. Hehhehheh. Wood. Sweet.
Do I make sense? No, but I bet the Adam Bede miniseries currently playing in my brain is more amusing than the 1991 minseries, when Patsy Fucking Kensit, of all people, played Hetty. Yeah, that's it, get a fucking chiselled albino to play a blooming, round young brunette. Stupid fucking BBC.
Do I make sense? No, but I bet the Adam Bede miniseries currently playing in my brain is more amusing than the 1991 minseries, when Patsy Fucking Kensit, of all people, played Hetty. Yeah, that's it, get a fucking chiselled albino to play a blooming, round young brunette. Stupid fucking BBC.
martedì, luglio 28, 2009
Big wah
Working from home today. Sniffly, coughy, and fucking frightened of getting sick before going to Portugal. Mind you I was coughy and sniffly before going to Croatia, and the minute I stepped off the plane there everything seemed to clear up. Sometimes I wonder if the flu actually exists as a virus rather than our bodies demonstrating their misery at us making them live in a Neanderthal climate. And once in awhile it turns into a pandemic and a kajillion of us die. We're not Neanderthals, for fuck's sake, we're fucking savannah monkeys. What are we doing up here? What the fuck are we doing up here?
In other news, the sun is out for now, so at least I can write about the disintegration of western capitalism on my balcony. Yayyyy! Also last night we started watching Coast, and it's adorable. In a deeply public school way, though . . . had some discussions with Rodelina about that - about people from public schools in Britain, and people who are invisible, or football players, or people fucking football players. Sometimes I wonder why anybody stays in that country - why be sidelined like that?
In other news, the sun is out for now, so at least I can write about the disintegration of western capitalism on my balcony. Yayyyy! Also last night we started watching Coast, and it's adorable. In a deeply public school way, though . . . had some discussions with Rodelina about that - about people from public schools in Britain, and people who are invisible, or football players, or people fucking football players. Sometimes I wonder why anybody stays in that country - why be sidelined like that?
domenica, luglio 26, 2009
In which the biking, kayaking, fishing and boating goes some way to undoing all the smoke damage
Amsterdam has a bit of a reputation of being a tourist hole and I understand that on that basis some people have been disenchanted with it, as in fact I remember being after my first couple of stop'n'smoke visits. But the thing that never stops being so remarkable for me is how the deeper you dig, the more you uncover layers of charm and organization.
We spent the weekend doing stuff, and very little of it in downtown Amsterdam. Well. Hours of it in downtown Amsterdam, but not really, because the San Franciscas have bought a boat, and we tooled around on that for an afternoon, the F-word getting the opportunity to steer - wow. It was a beautiful way to see the city, and really cut down on the number of high Americans we had to listen say beastly things, like 'yeah, we can just walk on the street, you're allowed to do that in Amsterdam' or, worse, 'I feel so dirty'. It was awesome.
And then we went out to where they live, in Amstelveen, and went fishing, and biking, and kayaking - much of it in the Amsterdam Bos, which I've enthused about before. And I've enthused about the sheer Dutch genius for spacial organization, so I won't go on about that too much either. But I was amazed - flabbergasted, if flabbergaster fits in with a deep sense of peace and enjoyment - about how we could spend a couple of hours paddling through the park next to such a huge, densely populated capital on a rare sunny, warm day and feel x1000 times more alone and in the wild than the Lesse River in September . . . and I must also say that, as we cycled back to the San Francisca's home after the day in the park, I had to keep asking "are we still in the park?" because the entire suburb was green and quiet and full of birds. Lovely.
Of course, it helped that it was sunny. Amsterdam in the sun is, I verily believe, the loveliest place on earth. Even without the sun . . . wow. Good on you, Dutchies, that's some fucking good urban planning. Aside from that, read about half of Adam Bede on the slow train and whilst too twitchy to fall asleep Saturday. I've been dancing around George Eliot for as long as I can remember, and Silas Marner really made me decide I'd have to go for her wholesale, but this is my first big bite and it's yummy and plummy. She puts a suspicious number of similes in the mouths of her characters, but I'm getting over that because from memory northerners do have a certain facility of metaphor which their more repressed cousins in the south lack. Anyways, more when I'm done.
We spent the weekend doing stuff, and very little of it in downtown Amsterdam. Well. Hours of it in downtown Amsterdam, but not really, because the San Franciscas have bought a boat, and we tooled around on that for an afternoon, the F-word getting the opportunity to steer - wow. It was a beautiful way to see the city, and really cut down on the number of high Americans we had to listen say beastly things, like 'yeah, we can just walk on the street, you're allowed to do that in Amsterdam' or, worse, 'I feel so dirty'. It was awesome.
And then we went out to where they live, in Amstelveen, and went fishing, and biking, and kayaking - much of it in the Amsterdam Bos, which I've enthused about before. And I've enthused about the sheer Dutch genius for spacial organization, so I won't go on about that too much either. But I was amazed - flabbergasted, if flabbergaster fits in with a deep sense of peace and enjoyment - about how we could spend a couple of hours paddling through the park next to such a huge, densely populated capital on a rare sunny, warm day and feel x1000 times more alone and in the wild than the Lesse River in September . . . and I must also say that, as we cycled back to the San Francisca's home after the day in the park, I had to keep asking "are we still in the park?" because the entire suburb was green and quiet and full of birds. Lovely.
Of course, it helped that it was sunny. Amsterdam in the sun is, I verily believe, the loveliest place on earth. Even without the sun . . . wow. Good on you, Dutchies, that's some fucking good urban planning. Aside from that, read about half of Adam Bede on the slow train and whilst too twitchy to fall asleep Saturday. I've been dancing around George Eliot for as long as I can remember, and Silas Marner really made me decide I'd have to go for her wholesale, but this is my first big bite and it's yummy and plummy. She puts a suspicious number of similes in the mouths of her characters, but I'm getting over that because from memory northerners do have a certain facility of metaphor which their more repressed cousins in the south lack. Anyways, more when I'm done.
giovedì, luglio 23, 2009
I'll sing down that cucumber, baby
The lemon cucumber plant has been putting a lot out there. I'm not sure why I planted lemon cucumber instead of a normal kind, I think I'd been given to understand that they take up less room. But they're taking up a fuckload of room, and it's been a struggle to keep them from overwhelming the tomatoes; the fuckers grow so fast. They're growing only slightly less fast now as they fruit, and we ate the first one yesterday. Fucking awesome. It might be because it was fresh off the vine but it was way better than any of the cucumber varieties I've ever bought, and I'll even daresay better than the standard big green cukes Dad drew in the back garden, which were seedier. These lemon cucumbers are real fleshy motherfuckers, and picked young, not too seedy - just a lovely tennis-ball sized lump of cucumber flesh with a slightly richer taste than the long green ones.
(Incidentally, Paul Theroux wrote in the Pillars of Hercules that in Turkey, the word 'cucumber' has become inextricably linked to its idiomatic meaning, penis, in a way that makes me think of our word 'cock' - people avoid saying it in its literal meaning because it's so very suggestive. While we have some synonyms to choose from, like rooster or chanticleer, because heaven knows I fall all over myself to say 'chanticleer' when cock will do, in Turkey they'll make allusive references instead, like 'green salad things.' And when there's a fake bomb scare, the defusers will often open the suspicious package and find a cucumer with a note pinned to it: "This is what you are." I wonder if that's true, I can't find it on the Internets.)
Anyways, feeling quite smug about how yummy the lemon cucumbers are because apparently they need to be eaten fresh off the vine, going soggy and gross three days after picking, which is why they aren't commercially grown and sold, I've heard from somewhere. And we have a supply on our back balcony. Sweet. I always wonder about unsellable foods like that. I've heard there are a kajillion banana varieties, for example, most of them inexpressibly delicious, and we just get the one we get because it's the only one that tolerates being picked green, transported, and sold weeks and weeks after harvesting - I've heard pawpaw is fucking amazing, for example, and grows in temperate climates - even up close to where I was living in Toronto - but that it goes off so fast no one sells it. Someday I will have a big big garden and eat like a queen . . . but at the moment I'm thrilled with the one lemon cucumber we ate yesterday.
Generally speaking the back balcony garden is going stupendously, though I don't want to count my tomatoes and cucumbers before they're plucked. It's sheltered from the wind but gets quite good sunlight, as good as you can get in this fucking wet pig of a country, so I should count my blessings. But Croatia went a fair way to making me sicker of this place than I already was.
(Incidentally, Paul Theroux wrote in the Pillars of Hercules that in Turkey, the word 'cucumber' has become inextricably linked to its idiomatic meaning, penis, in a way that makes me think of our word 'cock' - people avoid saying it in its literal meaning because it's so very suggestive. While we have some synonyms to choose from, like rooster or chanticleer, because heaven knows I fall all over myself to say 'chanticleer' when cock will do, in Turkey they'll make allusive references instead, like 'green salad things.' And when there's a fake bomb scare, the defusers will often open the suspicious package and find a cucumer with a note pinned to it: "This is what you are." I wonder if that's true, I can't find it on the Internets.)
Anyways, feeling quite smug about how yummy the lemon cucumbers are because apparently they need to be eaten fresh off the vine, going soggy and gross three days after picking, which is why they aren't commercially grown and sold, I've heard from somewhere. And we have a supply on our back balcony. Sweet. I always wonder about unsellable foods like that. I've heard there are a kajillion banana varieties, for example, most of them inexpressibly delicious, and we just get the one we get because it's the only one that tolerates being picked green, transported, and sold weeks and weeks after harvesting - I've heard pawpaw is fucking amazing, for example, and grows in temperate climates - even up close to where I was living in Toronto - but that it goes off so fast no one sells it. Someday I will have a big big garden and eat like a queen . . . but at the moment I'm thrilled with the one lemon cucumber we ate yesterday.
Generally speaking the back balcony garden is going stupendously, though I don't want to count my tomatoes and cucumbers before they're plucked. It's sheltered from the wind but gets quite good sunlight, as good as you can get in this fucking wet pig of a country, so I should count my blessings. But Croatia went a fair way to making me sicker of this place than I already was.
mercoledì, luglio 22, 2009
In which Rupert mends my annoying morning
Very little to say today too. After my holiday, the maison communale's bridge holiday (because why should civil servants take the one publicly funded holiday everybody else gets when two is so much better), and the acquisition of a new set of passport photographs, which took visits to four booths, two studios closed for the summer break, and one excruciatingly stupid phone call to the booth-company (following their instructions to call a hotline to find out the closest machine when one was busted and instead having a conversation with a nincompoop), I'm actually going to go to the Belgium equivalent of the Ministry of Transort or DMV or whatever and get my actual license, which will involve queueing from 8 am until . . . I don't fucking know.
Except, Belgium being Belgium, I probably won't get a license today, despite a Belgian licence being nothing but a folded piece of printed salmon bristolboard with a photo attached to it, because these people are fucknards. My hope is to get it and an international license sometime within the next month before I go to Canada. You see how effectively I've lowered my expectations . . . it really helps me get through life here.
Let me just leave you with a quick reminder of what celebrity is good for: occasionally one of them will say awesome things. Like this:
"He (Michael Jackson) personified the pain and anxiety of a black man in a slave country. We all watched as he changed from black to white. He was living performance art."
Oh Rupert Everett. Don't ever change, no, don't you ever change, oh promise me you're always going to be as . . .you know . . . as you are.
After a mere two hours of queuing - lengthened by the desk workers 'forgetting' to hit the button inviting all ticket holders after 61 to advance for 15 minutes or so - I got both my Belgian and international license all in one shot. I am now indistinguishable from a grown-up. Yay!
Except, Belgium being Belgium, I probably won't get a license today, despite a Belgian licence being nothing but a folded piece of printed salmon bristolboard with a photo attached to it, because these people are fucknards. My hope is to get it and an international license sometime within the next month before I go to Canada. You see how effectively I've lowered my expectations . . . it really helps me get through life here.
Let me just leave you with a quick reminder of what celebrity is good for: occasionally one of them will say awesome things. Like this:
"He (Michael Jackson) personified the pain and anxiety of a black man in a slave country. We all watched as he changed from black to white. He was living performance art."
Oh Rupert Everett. Don't ever change, no, don't you ever change, oh promise me you're always going to be as . . .you know . . . as you are.
UPDATE
After a mere two hours of queuing - lengthened by the desk workers 'forgetting' to hit the button inviting all ticket holders after 61 to advance for 15 minutes or so - I got both my Belgian and international license all in one shot. I am now indistinguishable from a grown-up. Yay!
martedì, luglio 21, 2009
Happy Leopold Day
The minimum to say for myself this morning, as once more I've stopped up late and once more don't have time before work. This time it was staying up late for work, which I wouldn't ordinarily do, but then we watched the fireworks from my office skyscraper, which were in celebration of the crowning of Leopold I, who was, however I feel about monarchy, at least a fuck sight less worse than Leopold II, and gave some small thought to the plight of labour in his industrializing country.
I'd never seen fireworks from above before, and frankly I don't reccommend it, it's diminishing. Nonetheless as we smoked a pipe down by the pond with the crocodile in it, and I heard the explosions start to go off for more minor shows, I came to an important realization: I'd be one of those people shitting myself and losing my mind if I was in a war situation. There's no way I would be able to keep it together with a bunch of bombs going off. Hopefully that peice of knowledge will never be useful . . .
I'd never seen fireworks from above before, and frankly I don't reccommend it, it's diminishing. Nonetheless as we smoked a pipe down by the pond with the crocodile in it, and I heard the explosions start to go off for more minor shows, I came to an important realization: I'd be one of those people shitting myself and losing my mind if I was in a war situation. There's no way I would be able to keep it together with a bunch of bombs going off. Hopefully that peice of knowledge will never be useful . . .
lunedì, luglio 20, 2009
In which I strive to avoid spoilers
Finished Vanity Fair tonight, which is why this post will be so short, me having stayed up late to do so and then slept in. Smashing ending all around, nearly one of the best endings I've ever read, except I can't help but feel Thackeray really caved by having Amelia write to Dobbin before Becky showed her George's letter - that awful, wonderful Becky! What a great character. A perfect mix of Scarlett O'Hara, with her lonely good points, her odd spots of pity for those obviously weaker than her, and Machiavelli's ideal prince.
Anyways, the letter was the only part of it that didn't ring true to me - I suppose it wouldn't have been appropriate to have angelic Amelia really, unignorably, practically in debt to devilish Becky, although she was obviously in her emotional debt as it stood . . . if I have a problem with big flabby Regency/Fat King George/Victorian monster novels, that's it - that there's a realism-damaging hesitation to make all those lovely anti-heroes agents of good in a practical, plotty way, a way that could possibly alienate the ladies reading at home, or make them keep the serials away from their young ones. I should like to know if Thackeray had been planning to have Amelia write Dobbin before or after Becky showed her the letter.
The fact is evil people are almost never unremittingly harmful and literature has to reflect that to keep its humanity. Despite a millenium of schisms the most Calvinist, Protesting of us European descendants is Catholic enough to have a bit of faith, unconcious or not, in the notion of one good deed - a useful penance - expiating hundreds of wickednesses (to paraphrase that lying, fornicating, bigamist Rochester, who even romantic little Charlotte Brontë had to put in his place through mutilation, amputation and blinding before Jane Eyre could be permitted to marry him).
Anyways, the letter was the only part of it that didn't ring true to me - I suppose it wouldn't have been appropriate to have angelic Amelia really, unignorably, practically in debt to devilish Becky, although she was obviously in her emotional debt as it stood . . . if I have a problem with big flabby Regency/Fat King George/Victorian monster novels, that's it - that there's a realism-damaging hesitation to make all those lovely anti-heroes agents of good in a practical, plotty way, a way that could possibly alienate the ladies reading at home, or make them keep the serials away from their young ones. I should like to know if Thackeray had been planning to have Amelia write Dobbin before or after Becky showed her the letter.
The fact is evil people are almost never unremittingly harmful and literature has to reflect that to keep its humanity. Despite a millenium of schisms the most Calvinist, Protesting of us European descendants is Catholic enough to have a bit of faith, unconcious or not, in the notion of one good deed - a useful penance - expiating hundreds of wickednesses (to paraphrase that lying, fornicating, bigamist Rochester, who even romantic little Charlotte Brontë had to put in his place through mutilation, amputation and blinding before Jane Eyre could be permitted to marry him).
domenica, luglio 19, 2009
Vanity Eyre
Croatia was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Mostly it was the company - two of the brightest women in my life and lots of talking and arguing - the Mitford sisters without the money or Hitler. But I'm not into talking about my people so instead I'll just say Croatia was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
How the sun shone! How the delightful little coves of beaches sparkled blue and turquoise! How the air baked! How the kayak instructor's damp skin glistened over healthy young muscles in the sun! And how sweet it was to have myself to myself, neither of my companions being the sort who hijacks other people and our holiday having been nominally billed as a writing retreat. . . the Cultural Apocalypse Novel didn't get written, and after about 10 minutes of trying to do it on the first day I realized I was being a knob; it's going to need months of devotion just to work out and nail down the narrative voice, and sadly it will need to wait for semi-retirement, or else it'll drive me crazy. But lots of smaller writing, lots of poetry. And lots of sleep. All three of us arrived there stressed out to the point of practically exposed nerves - I think all three of us left as new women, partly because of being somewhere so beautiful, partly because of each other, partly because we could take it fucking easy.
That having been said, I utterly ruined my last two nights of sleep by buying Vanity Fair when I went into Dubrovnik looking for a present for the F-word. I'd brought Dicken's Pictures of Italy and was utterly disappointed, and Paul Theroux's Pillar of Hercules, which I'd swallowed whole on the trip to London and Gatwick (certainly the worst travel book of his I've ever read - very superficial, far more self-obsessed than his better work, much more "I said . . . my eyes danced . . . I was scared" than any of the others), and got Vanity Fair on a whim, mostly because of how much Thackeray showed up in Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. Vanity Fair definitely needs its own devoted post, and probably a great big one, and not today because I still have 100 pages or so to go.
And probably the impact of Jane Eyre on Vanity Fair needs its own devoted post too, or possibly an academic paper . . . surely there is such a paper, Charlotte Brontë dedicating Jane Eyre's second edition to Thackeray, who was partway through publishing Vanity Fair when it came out. But there might not be, because it's not apparent in a very obvious way - though it is. The thing is, Jane Eyre reads as though it's influenced by Vanity Fair, and not vice-versa, because Charlotte Brontë's great strengths weren't in satire, and Thackeray's definitely were. The facility of Thackeray's satire makes it almost hard to believe Jane Eyre was published first, as Jane Eyre certainly contains efforts at satire - and to me, they're the less successful parts of the book, that the author looks least comfortable with, that would be borrowed from elsewhere if anything was.
The charade scenes in each book, for example, are so similar, but Jane Eyre's charade is all about Jane geeking on the fucking unattainable hotness of Mr. Rochester, and Vanity Fair's charade is the rather gruelling presage of Rebecca gutting her husband while illustrating how she gives London society a collective boner. Unless you're into the romance of Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair's looks ten times better, because it's so much more effective as a cultural illustrator - unless you're getting swept up into Jane's hard-on for Rochester, Jane Eyre's looks derivative of the work that came after it. Luckily Charlotte Brontë was a stunningly competent romance writer, at least as far as Jane Eyre goes, so most of the audience that hasn't gotten alienated and stopped reading at that point has been swept up into Jane's big old hard-on.
Anyways. Back to work. Ew.
How the sun shone! How the delightful little coves of beaches sparkled blue and turquoise! How the air baked! How the kayak instructor's damp skin glistened over healthy young muscles in the sun! And how sweet it was to have myself to myself, neither of my companions being the sort who hijacks other people and our holiday having been nominally billed as a writing retreat. . . the Cultural Apocalypse Novel didn't get written, and after about 10 minutes of trying to do it on the first day I realized I was being a knob; it's going to need months of devotion just to work out and nail down the narrative voice, and sadly it will need to wait for semi-retirement, or else it'll drive me crazy. But lots of smaller writing, lots of poetry. And lots of sleep. All three of us arrived there stressed out to the point of practically exposed nerves - I think all three of us left as new women, partly because of being somewhere so beautiful, partly because of each other, partly because we could take it fucking easy.
That having been said, I utterly ruined my last two nights of sleep by buying Vanity Fair when I went into Dubrovnik looking for a present for the F-word. I'd brought Dicken's Pictures of Italy and was utterly disappointed, and Paul Theroux's Pillar of Hercules, which I'd swallowed whole on the trip to London and Gatwick (certainly the worst travel book of his I've ever read - very superficial, far more self-obsessed than his better work, much more "I said . . . my eyes danced . . . I was scared" than any of the others), and got Vanity Fair on a whim, mostly because of how much Thackeray showed up in Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. Vanity Fair definitely needs its own devoted post, and probably a great big one, and not today because I still have 100 pages or so to go.
And probably the impact of Jane Eyre on Vanity Fair needs its own devoted post too, or possibly an academic paper . . . surely there is such a paper, Charlotte Brontë dedicating Jane Eyre's second edition to Thackeray, who was partway through publishing Vanity Fair when it came out. But there might not be, because it's not apparent in a very obvious way - though it is. The thing is, Jane Eyre reads as though it's influenced by Vanity Fair, and not vice-versa, because Charlotte Brontë's great strengths weren't in satire, and Thackeray's definitely were. The facility of Thackeray's satire makes it almost hard to believe Jane Eyre was published first, as Jane Eyre certainly contains efforts at satire - and to me, they're the less successful parts of the book, that the author looks least comfortable with, that would be borrowed from elsewhere if anything was.
The charade scenes in each book, for example, are so similar, but Jane Eyre's charade is all about Jane geeking on the fucking unattainable hotness of Mr. Rochester, and Vanity Fair's charade is the rather gruelling presage of Rebecca gutting her husband while illustrating how she gives London society a collective boner. Unless you're into the romance of Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair's looks ten times better, because it's so much more effective as a cultural illustrator - unless you're getting swept up into Jane's hard-on for Rochester, Jane Eyre's looks derivative of the work that came after it. Luckily Charlotte Brontë was a stunningly competent romance writer, at least as far as Jane Eyre goes, so most of the audience that hasn't gotten alienated and stopped reading at that point has been swept up into Jane's big old hard-on.
Anyways. Back to work. Ew.
giovedì, luglio 09, 2009
Protestant liesure
It feels as though time is slowing down a bit as I get closer and closer to departing for the Med, where we're having a little writing retreat on the beach for a week. Still some hurdles to overleap at the office before I can leave it behind in good conscience, or else I'll be fucked when I get back. Dear oh dear. I may even have to write a to-do list. Blech.
It's rather provoking because I have to hot-foot it down there to deal with some angry-businessman crap this morning, a stressful enough situation that my eyelid was twitching by the end of the day yesterday, when all I want to do is go to the maison communale, submit my pass sheet and get my really-for-truly driver's licence. I like work - but it is seriously cramping my fucking style, man.
At the same time - beyond personal feelings of loyalty to my immediate management team, who I really like and who I would hate to screw over by being incompetent - I have a certain horror of joining the ranks of the unemployed. A totally irrational horror. I'm nowhere close to being sacked, and if I was, it would be awesome because of the big Belgian payout I would get and the 80%-of-my-wage pogey I'd receive for a two year period, or until we blew this fucking popsical stand of a country. But still that little horror is there, partly because it would definitely mean I couldn't move this job to Asia and then it would all be a big mystery, more exciting than intimidating but I'm a slave to the intimidation . . .
I think I have an uncomfortable combination of Protestant Work Ethic and Mezzogiorno Liesure-is-Success neurosisizing me up. That's right. Blame the parents.
It's rather provoking because I have to hot-foot it down there to deal with some angry-businessman crap this morning, a stressful enough situation that my eyelid was twitching by the end of the day yesterday, when all I want to do is go to the maison communale, submit my pass sheet and get my really-for-truly driver's licence. I like work - but it is seriously cramping my fucking style, man.
At the same time - beyond personal feelings of loyalty to my immediate management team, who I really like and who I would hate to screw over by being incompetent - I have a certain horror of joining the ranks of the unemployed. A totally irrational horror. I'm nowhere close to being sacked, and if I was, it would be awesome because of the big Belgian payout I would get and the 80%-of-my-wage pogey I'd receive for a two year period, or until we blew this fucking popsical stand of a country. But still that little horror is there, partly because it would definitely mean I couldn't move this job to Asia and then it would all be a big mystery, more exciting than intimidating but I'm a slave to the intimidation . . .
I think I have an uncomfortable combination of Protestant Work Ethic and Mezzogiorno Liesure-is-Success neurosisizing me up. That's right. Blame the parents.
I remember back in the dayz when I used to have to get my stroll on
Guess who passed her driving exam? Mistress La Spliffe, that's who! Oh sweet Jesus, the fucking relief of it all.
And you know what one of the best parts was? Riding to work afterwards in the urine-soaked, stinking, filthy subway with ugly bastards leering at me, and thinking 'from now on when I do this it's because I'm making an environmentally sound lifestyle decision, and not because I'm a fucking loser.' I think it'll help out with walking on rainy days, too.
And you know what one of the best parts was? Riding to work afterwards in the urine-soaked, stinking, filthy subway with ugly bastards leering at me, and thinking 'from now on when I do this it's because I'm making an environmentally sound lifestyle decision, and not because I'm a fucking loser.' I think it'll help out with walking on rainy days, too.
martedì, luglio 07, 2009
The lone woman's playlist
Currently the F-word is in Berlin and I'm here. Next week I'll be in Dubrovnik and he'll be here. Soon after that we'll go away to Portugal together. Occasional seperate vacations are rather nice for all sorts of reasons, mostly having to do with mutual appreciation and personal space, but probably what I enjoy the most about it is getting the run of music I feel like listening to - things that are either too poppy or too whiny to bother playing around him when we both like Nick Cave, Tom Waits, pre-synthesizer R&B, orchestral, operatic and a bunch of other crap enough to not rub each other the wrong way. He's got his own things he listens to when I'm away, including Frank Zappa - yikes.
Anyways, that means right now I'm listening to:
Tricky, Maxinquaye. Probably the constant and fucking inescapable Michael Jackson playing everyfuckingwhere over the last week or so was what reminded me how much I miss this album. He samples "Bad" on "Brand New You're Retro" and I'm quite fond of it. And while this urge is already morphing into a desire to listen to a bunch of Massive Attack and some other Tricky abums, Maxinquaye is very dear to my heart. It was on constant rotation during the wonderful months that I went chronic, and it's really part of who Mistress La Spliffe is . . . but personal descent into drug dependency aside, really I just think it's so pretty, one of the prettiest albums I've ever heard. That's the thing about trip-hop, and it's why I get confused when people hate it. It's so pretty. To hate trip-hop, you've got to hate pretty. And who hates pretty? Assholes, that's who.
Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. My feelings are split on this album and even if the F-word could tolerate the whiny quality of Jeff Tweedy's vocals (which one would think he could, Radiohead being okay apparently) I would have to keep it on low rotation anyways. I've written before about the fucking pain of getting a five-second blast of "I'm the Man Who Loves You" stuck in one's head on a repetitive loop, and even now I'm wary of getting it lodged back in there - last time it took about five fucking days to get it to stop playing. That doesn't change the fact that it's a damn good song and that the makes-the-Cure-look-like-the-Pizzicato-Five lyrics are not only not stupid, but accompanied by - once more - pretty. It's a marvellously pretty album. And who doesn't like pretty? Assholes, that's who.
The surprising thing about Wilco, though, was that when I saw them live it was still awfully pretty, despite the album feeling very engineered and very trippy in its own way.
Speaking of pretty and the Pizzicato Five - The Pizzicato Five, Made in the USA. No excuses or explanations here. I just love it. Maki Nomiya could be singing "twiggy fuck yourself up the ass, you aging nineties hipster" and I'd still love it.
And the last one is rather a cheat, because I'm sure the F-word would be okay with it, though he does laugh about how heroin-y it all is - but it didn't occur to me to put him back on until I realized I'd need a stand-in boyfriend for a few days, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is Chet Baker, Chet Baker Sings. I fucking love this album. And love his voice. This song makes me feel like I'm being cuddled.
Anyways, that means right now I'm listening to:
Tricky, Maxinquaye. Probably the constant and fucking inescapable Michael Jackson playing everyfuckingwhere over the last week or so was what reminded me how much I miss this album. He samples "Bad" on "Brand New You're Retro" and I'm quite fond of it. And while this urge is already morphing into a desire to listen to a bunch of Massive Attack and some other Tricky abums, Maxinquaye is very dear to my heart. It was on constant rotation during the wonderful months that I went chronic, and it's really part of who Mistress La Spliffe is . . . but personal descent into drug dependency aside, really I just think it's so pretty, one of the prettiest albums I've ever heard. That's the thing about trip-hop, and it's why I get confused when people hate it. It's so pretty. To hate trip-hop, you've got to hate pretty. And who hates pretty? Assholes, that's who.
Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. My feelings are split on this album and even if the F-word could tolerate the whiny quality of Jeff Tweedy's vocals (which one would think he could, Radiohead being okay apparently) I would have to keep it on low rotation anyways. I've written before about the fucking pain of getting a five-second blast of "I'm the Man Who Loves You" stuck in one's head on a repetitive loop, and even now I'm wary of getting it lodged back in there - last time it took about five fucking days to get it to stop playing. That doesn't change the fact that it's a damn good song and that the makes-the-Cure-look-like-the-Pizzicato-Five lyrics are not only not stupid, but accompanied by - once more - pretty. It's a marvellously pretty album. And who doesn't like pretty? Assholes, that's who.
The surprising thing about Wilco, though, was that when I saw them live it was still awfully pretty, despite the album feeling very engineered and very trippy in its own way.
Speaking of pretty and the Pizzicato Five - The Pizzicato Five, Made in the USA. No excuses or explanations here. I just love it. Maki Nomiya could be singing "twiggy fuck yourself up the ass, you aging nineties hipster" and I'd still love it.
And the last one is rather a cheat, because I'm sure the F-word would be okay with it, though he does laugh about how heroin-y it all is - but it didn't occur to me to put him back on until I realized I'd need a stand-in boyfriend for a few days, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is Chet Baker, Chet Baker Sings. I fucking love this album. And love his voice. This song makes me feel like I'm being cuddled.
lunedì, luglio 06, 2009
Hommages shmommages
So last weekend Melbine and her man were visiting from Canada on their way between Paris and the 'Dam. It was lovely though all the unwholesome food made her sick. Anyways, I don't like going on about people: mentioning it because when we met up with another couple downtown, we stumbled across a Michael Jackson memorial in the Parc de Cinquentenaire. Almost everybody dressed in white, or else like Michael Jackson himself, while one of his lesser contributions to the pop music genre, Dangerous, played in the background. 800 people, I read later. While we watched they made a big circle, held hands, and started swaying gently back and forth to some music that was absolutely inappropriate for swaying gently back and forth to. Some were visibly upset, some had brought poster collages. It was all very earnest and there were tonnes of little kids running around.
Our reactions were interesting. The F-word was angry - as far as I could decipher, angry at the flagrant waste of emotion in a world where emotion could be so usefully applied elsewhere. "He's not Nelson Fucking Mandela," I believe he said at one point, which is an awfully good point when you think about it. Even if you're fucking daft enough to reckon contributions to music are as important as contributions to the relatively peaceful liberation of millions of oppressed South Africans, what has been his legacy - honestly? And I ask that as someone who likes the Jackson 5 and Off the Wall, but really - legacy-wise? Contributing to the final emasculation of soul and R&B music? Making that fucking smurf-voiced Justin Timberlake's career possible? Making our pop music scene about 20 degrees more tedious and anodyne than it was before? Putting out absolute shit in the 90's that made J-Pop look awesome when I was a teenager? Providing an all-too-often ignored cautionary tale about the consequences of abusive, megolomaniac parents flogging their talented children into fame?
And then the couple who had joined us were pre-occupied with getting an ice-cream for their daughter, despite a hell of a line. I think Melbine was a little touched. Her husband looked amused. I was creeped the fuck out. This was a man who had spent something like $30 million to make child abuse allegations go away, whatever one thinks about the upshot of his criminal trials (John Niven made a fairly unique, at the moment, critical evaluation of them in the Independent a few days ago).
I do find his life melancholy, I felt an emotion that was something like pity, but not exactly, when he died (the other week, we were discussing the paucity of emotional words in English with a Brazilian Portuguese friend - they have a word for every gradation of feeling, apparently - but that's a blog post for another time). But these recent outpourings of unmitigated grief and adulation are really starting to fuck me off. Not just because it's a waste of emotion in a world that needs emotion, though that's part of it - I just feel like in a week or two people are going to blink a few times, realize 'I've made a collage for a man who spent $30 million on civil payouts to make child abuse allegations go away, I've held hands and swayed back and forth for a man who might have managed an O.J., I've been publicly weeping for a dodgy stranger who may have caused hands-on life-long damage to several young boys", and then feel like creepy idiots. And if they don't . . . maybe they should.
Our reactions were interesting. The F-word was angry - as far as I could decipher, angry at the flagrant waste of emotion in a world where emotion could be so usefully applied elsewhere. "He's not Nelson Fucking Mandela," I believe he said at one point, which is an awfully good point when you think about it. Even if you're fucking daft enough to reckon contributions to music are as important as contributions to the relatively peaceful liberation of millions of oppressed South Africans, what has been his legacy - honestly? And I ask that as someone who likes the Jackson 5 and Off the Wall, but really - legacy-wise? Contributing to the final emasculation of soul and R&B music? Making that fucking smurf-voiced Justin Timberlake's career possible? Making our pop music scene about 20 degrees more tedious and anodyne than it was before? Putting out absolute shit in the 90's that made J-Pop look awesome when I was a teenager? Providing an all-too-often ignored cautionary tale about the consequences of abusive, megolomaniac parents flogging their talented children into fame?
And then the couple who had joined us were pre-occupied with getting an ice-cream for their daughter, despite a hell of a line. I think Melbine was a little touched. Her husband looked amused. I was creeped the fuck out. This was a man who had spent something like $30 million to make child abuse allegations go away, whatever one thinks about the upshot of his criminal trials (John Niven made a fairly unique, at the moment, critical evaluation of them in the Independent a few days ago).
I do find his life melancholy, I felt an emotion that was something like pity, but not exactly, when he died (the other week, we were discussing the paucity of emotional words in English with a Brazilian Portuguese friend - they have a word for every gradation of feeling, apparently - but that's a blog post for another time). But these recent outpourings of unmitigated grief and adulation are really starting to fuck me off. Not just because it's a waste of emotion in a world that needs emotion, though that's part of it - I just feel like in a week or two people are going to blink a few times, realize 'I've made a collage for a man who spent $30 million on civil payouts to make child abuse allegations go away, I've held hands and swayed back and forth for a man who might have managed an O.J., I've been publicly weeping for a dodgy stranger who may have caused hands-on life-long damage to several young boys", and then feel like creepy idiots. And if they don't . . . maybe they should.
domenica, luglio 05, 2009
Riding the moronic road
Practicing waking up early in preparation for my upcoming second-go-round of the driver's exam, which is scheduled early in the morning later this week. I'm nervous, but it's not as bad as last time - different rather - thinking that I'd be a real asshole if I failed twice, rather than thinking it's going to be very hard to pass. I feel a great deal more ready than last time, and honestly think I'm better than most of the other drivers circulating around Belgium, which sadly is saying very little (and is far from a guarantee that I'll pass the exam, as they tightened up their giveaway policies a lot over the last 20 years). For example, I don't box intersections and if there's a t-junction immediately preceding an intersection I brake a little earlier so I don't block that either. As far as I can tell about 1 in 3 Bruxellois drivers are intellectually capable of such a feat. They are real shitheads on the road - oblivious motherfuckers - and haven't really kept up with the changes in their own driving laws.
Pedestrian crossings are the most obvious example to visitors and new arrivals, most visitors and new arrivals being obliged to cross streets quite early on in the process. It's only been within the last ten years that the rules have been changed and that drivers are obliged to stop when people are using them, and of course they don't. Why would they? There are no fucking consequences if they fail to stop. There are no traffic cops hanging around with cameras. They can even buzz a crossing whilst talking on a cellphone and kill a fucking pensioner without any jailtime or even substantial loss-of-license time. And judging from some of the really fuckwitted behaviour I've seen and heard of here, either many drivers are utterly unaware of the change in the law, or else become such self-involved sociopaths when they get behind the wheel that it loses all meaning.
Three examples:
1. Some asshole in an Audi cuts me off on the way to work. In my classy North American way, I flip him a bird. The cunt stops mid-intersection, blocking traffic of course, and starts to get out of his car. I'm far more bark than bite but I'm sick of nearly getting killed by these troglodytes, so I start walking over, determined to get in some beats even if it means getting the shit kicked out of me. Either the asshole in the Audi notices that I'm a girl, or that I'm spoiling for a fight, or that the early morning rush-hour traffic has been blocked by his stopping the middle of a busy intersection and everybody is honking at him; he closes the door and speeds off.
2. Next to the Porte de Hal, which cars go about quite fast despite a liberal sprinkling of pedestrian crossings, we saw some fat old red-faced fuck in an expensive grey convertible - I believe it was also an Audi, they're beautiful cars but they get driven by goddamn incompetents - slam on the brakes and narrowly avoid hitting a skinny little teenage boy who was halfway across the road. Embolism gets out of his paused car, blocking traffic of course, and walks up with his dicky chest out to have it out with the kid, ignoring the horns behind him and shouted abuse from the many pedestrians all around, who'd been freaked out by nearly seeing a minor's guts splattered all over the cobblestones. The big fat cunt takes a swing at the boy for daring to get in his way and lands two or three; as we go over to intervene, the boy cleverly retaliates by repeatedly kicking the front of the Audi. The man realizes he has rather more to lose in this situation, gets back in his car, and speeds off.
3. A friend of ours, another Canadian, who lives here with his family was partway across a crosswalk when another cunt - he doesn't remember if it was in an Audi or not - cuts him off. He's a temperate man but as he was holding his infant daughter in his right arm at the time, he angrily shook his left fist in the air as the car sped away. The goddamn jackass reverses, blocks the intersection (of course - it's just not an incident unless you're getting in everyone's fucking way), gets out of his car despite the imprecations of the woman sitting in the passenger seat, walks over to our friend, and punches him in the face - swinging over the head of the baby girl. Once more - and this was the same in all three examples - he pulls this shit in a very crowded location absolutely stuffed with onlookers, and in this case, according to our friend, about 20 people immediately descended from the nearby cafe and sidewalks, shouting at the asshole and explaining what sort of human being he was for taking a swing at a guy holding a baby over the head of the baby. Punchy mainly looks baffled.
I know that every nationality drives stupidly in its own way, though I don't really know it on a practical, experiential level about any other country like I do about this one. I've heard the French are congenitally incapable of signalling a turn or a lane change, for example, and Italians have the supremest disregard for the lives and limbs of cyclists that I've ever witnessed. But Belgians - honestly, the way they drive makes me hate their fucking guts. It makes me think all of the stupid Belgian jokes I've ever heard are soundly based in fact. I know they don't enjoy their Newfie-of-Europe stereotype, but when they get behind the wheel, they're not fighting it too hard.
Pedestrian crossings are the most obvious example to visitors and new arrivals, most visitors and new arrivals being obliged to cross streets quite early on in the process. It's only been within the last ten years that the rules have been changed and that drivers are obliged to stop when people are using them, and of course they don't. Why would they? There are no fucking consequences if they fail to stop. There are no traffic cops hanging around with cameras. They can even buzz a crossing whilst talking on a cellphone and kill a fucking pensioner without any jailtime or even substantial loss-of-license time. And judging from some of the really fuckwitted behaviour I've seen and heard of here, either many drivers are utterly unaware of the change in the law, or else become such self-involved sociopaths when they get behind the wheel that it loses all meaning.
Three examples:
1. Some asshole in an Audi cuts me off on the way to work. In my classy North American way, I flip him a bird. The cunt stops mid-intersection, blocking traffic of course, and starts to get out of his car. I'm far more bark than bite but I'm sick of nearly getting killed by these troglodytes, so I start walking over, determined to get in some beats even if it means getting the shit kicked out of me. Either the asshole in the Audi notices that I'm a girl, or that I'm spoiling for a fight, or that the early morning rush-hour traffic has been blocked by his stopping the middle of a busy intersection and everybody is honking at him; he closes the door and speeds off.
2. Next to the Porte de Hal, which cars go about quite fast despite a liberal sprinkling of pedestrian crossings, we saw some fat old red-faced fuck in an expensive grey convertible - I believe it was also an Audi, they're beautiful cars but they get driven by goddamn incompetents - slam on the brakes and narrowly avoid hitting a skinny little teenage boy who was halfway across the road. Embolism gets out of his paused car, blocking traffic of course, and walks up with his dicky chest out to have it out with the kid, ignoring the horns behind him and shouted abuse from the many pedestrians all around, who'd been freaked out by nearly seeing a minor's guts splattered all over the cobblestones. The big fat cunt takes a swing at the boy for daring to get in his way and lands two or three; as we go over to intervene, the boy cleverly retaliates by repeatedly kicking the front of the Audi. The man realizes he has rather more to lose in this situation, gets back in his car, and speeds off.
3. A friend of ours, another Canadian, who lives here with his family was partway across a crosswalk when another cunt - he doesn't remember if it was in an Audi or not - cuts him off. He's a temperate man but as he was holding his infant daughter in his right arm at the time, he angrily shook his left fist in the air as the car sped away. The goddamn jackass reverses, blocks the intersection (of course - it's just not an incident unless you're getting in everyone's fucking way), gets out of his car despite the imprecations of the woman sitting in the passenger seat, walks over to our friend, and punches him in the face - swinging over the head of the baby girl. Once more - and this was the same in all three examples - he pulls this shit in a very crowded location absolutely stuffed with onlookers, and in this case, according to our friend, about 20 people immediately descended from the nearby cafe and sidewalks, shouting at the asshole and explaining what sort of human being he was for taking a swing at a guy holding a baby over the head of the baby. Punchy mainly looks baffled.
I know that every nationality drives stupidly in its own way, though I don't really know it on a practical, experiential level about any other country like I do about this one. I've heard the French are congenitally incapable of signalling a turn or a lane change, for example, and Italians have the supremest disregard for the lives and limbs of cyclists that I've ever witnessed. But Belgians - honestly, the way they drive makes me hate their fucking guts. It makes me think all of the stupid Belgian jokes I've ever heard are soundly based in fact. I know they don't enjoy their Newfie-of-Europe stereotype, but when they get behind the wheel, they're not fighting it too hard.
giovedì, luglio 02, 2009
martedì, giugno 30, 2009
Headaches and making it better, better, better, AIIIIII!
No real post today. I have stress, and I have to go deal with it. Something that makes my stress less stressful is Korean two year olds singing "Hey Jude".
lunedì, giugno 29, 2009
The ex and the new are relative
Mmmm . . . my expectations are being bucked at the moment. That's nice. I do hope it's for real. What's been disturbing me about the Honduras coverage is the way the BBC jumped right into the coup - yesterday morning, they were calling Zelaya 'the former president' and Michiletti 'the new president'. Given what happened in Venezuala you'd think they'd be a little more careful to hedge their bets in cases like these - but this is the Internet age and all you have to do is change the text after Barack Obama bucks expectations and talks about terrible precedents. Which they have done.
The BBC has such great coverage in terms of having news gatherers everywhere, but it is highly politicised. Inevitable, I guess. Most state-owned media are, in a more or less but generally less way than private media, because taxpayers are so happy to cry foul. The interesting thing here is that it looks like a sort of inertia, rather than a particular agenda, just sort of drifted the BBC into saying the coup was an accomplished fact . . . and then they could just rewrite their language when they realize that no, the hegemons weren't supporting it this time. Inertia. Such a powerful social force.
The BBC has such great coverage in terms of having news gatherers everywhere, but it is highly politicised. Inevitable, I guess. Most state-owned media are, in a more or less but generally less way than private media, because taxpayers are so happy to cry foul. The interesting thing here is that it looks like a sort of inertia, rather than a particular agenda, just sort of drifted the BBC into saying the coup was an accomplished fact . . . and then they could just rewrite their language when they realize that no, the hegemons weren't supporting it this time. Inertia. Such a powerful social force.
giovedì, giugno 25, 2009
Death, monkeys, and dancing bears
Thinking about the meaning of death in different cultures these days. My study of non-European cultures has been either so academic or so pop, so Bhagavad Gita or else Monkey!, that I have no practical idea what death means to people outside Europe. There's something rather brutal about the dominant thread we have in Europe and North America now. Centuries of training by our religion to see life as a linear progression to death and to the subsequent judgement of our selves, as we now understand our selves, by God, who we comprehend as another self. I think we still have that pattern, if you can call something so simple a pattern, in our minds. But now, for so many of us, especially in Europe, who have been repelled by the church, we've lost even the small complication of the assumption of judgement at the end - just the simple linear sentence of our selves, growing and aging and dying, and then a sudden full stop.
But in early Christian theology (well, not REALLY early - really early, it was a death and apocalypse cult) there was a conception of the afterlife that was less deeply personal. An idea that on death, we came to understand the will of God, and being in heaven was the same thing as being part of God's will. The release of one's own will, which leads inexorably to the idea of the release of the self - of our consciousnesses in any way that we can understand consciousness. Though from what I remember that's an idea that was resisted by the people who wrote about heaven, and when I listen to Christians going on about God's will they're able to contort their mind into believing that surrendering yourself to God doesn't mean not being your self anymore. Too pagan? Too frightening? I don't know. But the release of the self. Imagine that. You could spend years trying to imagine it. A lifetime. And once you did - once you could imagine that - surely you're no longer your self . . .
I think being alive is the process of being able to release your self. I think I'm very excited to be moving close to Asia and to start taking my holidays in countries and societies I don't know a fucking thing about in any practical sense. My head was full of it last weekend when we were in Brussels Far East museum - Congo-era colonial visioning of the east extraordinaire, to the tackiest effect possible, and I was standing there in the middle of all the Chineuropean fantasization, thinking - I don't know shit. I don't know shit. No cleverer than that fat corrupt shitful bastard Leopold II. I've never gone outside of my cultural comfort zone whilst travelling so I'm really not used to thinking like that. I don't know shit. A bit like death, really.
Sorry if this post is coming off as morbid or (retch) "emo". I'm actually in top form. Rather in the grip of pity for Michael Jackson, though. I don't know about iconography but I think historians will look back on him as a sort of textbook figure about what obsessive fame in our era can do to a delicate person. I was going to post a video of a "Love You Save" performance from the late 70's - that song's in the running for my 'Best Song Ever' trophy - but having just looked at it again I couldn't help but feel, as I was watching him grin and dance around superbly, that I was geeking on a dancing bear with a ring through its nose and no more memory of the wild, no conception of the bad it might do, nothing except not fucking up, not fucking up and getting burned by its trainer . . . Couldn't do it. Poor dead dancing bear. Poor thing.
In testament to pity, here's the only joke about his death I've heard so far that had nothing to do with little boys (and I've heard at least a dozen already):
But in early Christian theology (well, not REALLY early - really early, it was a death and apocalypse cult) there was a conception of the afterlife that was less deeply personal. An idea that on death, we came to understand the will of God, and being in heaven was the same thing as being part of God's will. The release of one's own will, which leads inexorably to the idea of the release of the self - of our consciousnesses in any way that we can understand consciousness. Though from what I remember that's an idea that was resisted by the people who wrote about heaven, and when I listen to Christians going on about God's will they're able to contort their mind into believing that surrendering yourself to God doesn't mean not being your self anymore. Too pagan? Too frightening? I don't know. But the release of the self. Imagine that. You could spend years trying to imagine it. A lifetime. And once you did - once you could imagine that - surely you're no longer your self . . .
I think being alive is the process of being able to release your self. I think I'm very excited to be moving close to Asia and to start taking my holidays in countries and societies I don't know a fucking thing about in any practical sense. My head was full of it last weekend when we were in Brussels Far East museum - Congo-era colonial visioning of the east extraordinaire, to the tackiest effect possible, and I was standing there in the middle of all the Chineuropean fantasization, thinking - I don't know shit. I don't know shit. No cleverer than that fat corrupt shitful bastard Leopold II. I've never gone outside of my cultural comfort zone whilst travelling so I'm really not used to thinking like that. I don't know shit. A bit like death, really.
Sorry if this post is coming off as morbid or (retch) "emo". I'm actually in top form. Rather in the grip of pity for Michael Jackson, though. I don't know about iconography but I think historians will look back on him as a sort of textbook figure about what obsessive fame in our era can do to a delicate person. I was going to post a video of a "Love You Save" performance from the late 70's - that song's in the running for my 'Best Song Ever' trophy - but having just looked at it again I couldn't help but feel, as I was watching him grin and dance around superbly, that I was geeking on a dancing bear with a ring through its nose and no more memory of the wild, no conception of the bad it might do, nothing except not fucking up, not fucking up and getting burned by its trainer . . . Couldn't do it. Poor dead dancing bear. Poor thing.
In testament to pity, here's the only joke about his death I've heard so far that had nothing to do with little boys (and I've heard at least a dozen already):
A post-mortem will be held to determine which was the cause of death:
A) Sunshine
B) Moonlight
C) Good Times
D) Boogie
A) Sunshine
B) Moonlight
C) Good Times
D) Boogie
mercoledì, giugno 24, 2009
The Complainant Gardener
Another short one today as the weather continues to buck my negative expectations and made irresistible sitting on the salvaged bench on our balcony, surrounded by flourishing tomato, cucumber, pea and lots of other plants, including some from our upstairs neighbour. I'm taking care of her balcony while she's away but she asked me to bring these two to my own balcony, because they're perennials that will flower while she's gone, and she didn't want them to go to waste. I love Germans.
It's a pity my camera cable is still lost because this morning I found the first tomato (or it could be tomatillo, I don't know) flower turning into fruit - a little green lump of swelling fertility - and I have a powerful urge to share it with the world, which I'm sure will manage to keep turning even without a blow-by-blow photo account of My Second Garden* . I'm starting to understand my family's men and their garden-feelings - and the Italians and the English were equally enthusiastic. When I'm sitting on my balcony surrounded by things that are flourishing in my care, I feel as smug, proud, and happy as if I'd just invented photosynthesis.
Oh, you know what I was writing yesterday about the other shoe dropping? It dropped. The ABC stopped streaming The Chasers War on Everything outside of Australia. I guess the big flap over the dying children sketch gave them that little bit of publicity that had too many furrrrrriners tuning in and, I don't know, but I'm pissed off.
*My first was a 2mx2m patch in my father's massive garden in the house where I did most of my growing up - but I only grew root vegetables there. I was four, for fuck's sake. Man, would I ever love to have a 2mx2m patch now. But space is such a different concept in Europe, which is no doubt a huge part of why I've started to feel it's time to leave.
It's a pity my camera cable is still lost because this morning I found the first tomato (or it could be tomatillo, I don't know) flower turning into fruit - a little green lump of swelling fertility - and I have a powerful urge to share it with the world, which I'm sure will manage to keep turning even without a blow-by-blow photo account of My Second Garden* . I'm starting to understand my family's men and their garden-feelings - and the Italians and the English were equally enthusiastic. When I'm sitting on my balcony surrounded by things that are flourishing in my care, I feel as smug, proud, and happy as if I'd just invented photosynthesis.
Oh, you know what I was writing yesterday about the other shoe dropping? It dropped. The ABC stopped streaming The Chasers War on Everything outside of Australia. I guess the big flap over the dying children sketch gave them that little bit of publicity that had too many furrrrrriners tuning in and, I don't know, but I'm pissed off.
*My first was a 2mx2m patch in my father's massive garden in the house where I did most of my growing up - but I only grew root vegetables there. I was four, for fuck's sake. Man, would I ever love to have a 2mx2m patch now. But space is such a different concept in Europe, which is no doubt a huge part of why I've started to feel it's time to leave.
martedì, giugno 23, 2009
The happy side of SAD
A short one today because I had to sleep in this morning because of more driving and properly meeting my upstairs neighbour, a German who's pretty awesome and who, with any luck, I'll be swapping plant attendance duties in the future instead of relying on an increasingly unreliable friend with a chemically dwindling short-term memory who lives nearby.
50-odd hours of driving practice/lesson have had a startling effect, turning me from a non-driver to a novice-driver to a bad driver. I can drive - I know what I have to do - I just do it with a remarkable clumsiness and lack of aplomb. It's at the point where my instructor is laughing instead of hitting me though, and last night when I noticed a woman with enooooormous boobies waiting to cross the streets and said 'gosh, she's hot', he congratulated me for keeping my eyes on the road so well I'd failed to notice she was about 70 and 'completement refaite.'
So many good things have been happening lately that I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wish I didn't do that, it's unhelpful. I did ask myself if it's just that summer is actually here now - that the weather has actually been behaving since the solstice - and I'm on the upswing of SAD. Also Belgians are the SADdest motherfuckers on the planet, to the point of being five or six degrees nicer to you when the weather is good, which of course has an impact on the quality of one's life. Also the men are far hornier when the sun is out, and look at one so much more appreciatively, which is pleasant, as I'm trying to enjoy the last (at a guess, depending on how pregnancy ruins my body) five years in which I'll be sexually attractive to strangers. But no. Some seriously good shit has been happening.Yay for good shit.
50-odd hours of driving practice/lesson have had a startling effect, turning me from a non-driver to a novice-driver to a bad driver. I can drive - I know what I have to do - I just do it with a remarkable clumsiness and lack of aplomb. It's at the point where my instructor is laughing instead of hitting me though, and last night when I noticed a woman with enooooormous boobies waiting to cross the streets and said 'gosh, she's hot', he congratulated me for keeping my eyes on the road so well I'd failed to notice she was about 70 and 'completement refaite.'
So many good things have been happening lately that I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wish I didn't do that, it's unhelpful. I did ask myself if it's just that summer is actually here now - that the weather has actually been behaving since the solstice - and I'm on the upswing of SAD. Also Belgians are the SADdest motherfuckers on the planet, to the point of being five or six degrees nicer to you when the weather is good, which of course has an impact on the quality of one's life. Also the men are far hornier when the sun is out, and look at one so much more appreciatively, which is pleasant, as I'm trying to enjoy the last (at a guess, depending on how pregnancy ruins my body) five years in which I'll be sexually attractive to strangers. But no. Some seriously good shit has been happening.Yay for good shit.
lunedì, giugno 22, 2009
There are a lot of reasons to love this picture, redux
But one of them is that you can really see the kid visualizing the truck going over a landscape of strangely human, undulating hillsides. It's the sort of powerful imaginative visualization I remember from the long hours I endured being unsuccessfully catholicated as a child, which I spent pretending my hands were brontosauruses fighting a death match. That's why Italians talk with their hands, you know. It's because of all the time we spent pretending our hands were brontosauruses fighting a death match in church, while the priest blah blah blahs about crap we obviously pay the closest possible attention to, considering our 'perilously' low birth rate and the sort of revolting, hypocritical adulterous pigs we elect into highest office. And, of course, our ongoing Christlike attachment to the merciful and forgiving spirit of Fascism.
God, I love Picture Is Unrelated so much.
Speaking of Catholics, more Chaser:
domenica, giugno 21, 2009
The limits of the zoological approach, redux
Today's the anniversary of Dutroux being sentenced. It chills my blood, that case, that Nihoul is already back on the streets, that Dossier X was let slide the way it was . . . This country chills my blood. There's charm in surrealism, but the surrealism here is more late Goya than the Marvellous Adventures of Amelie Fucking Poulain, that's for sure. The Lie Gaenen thing tipped me over the edge, that demonstrated a little too aptly the tolerance in this legal establishment for recidivist paedophilia despite all that street-hitting over Dutroux. The king (himself accused of paedophilia in the 70's) has apparently rejected his demand for clemency, but nobody knows if the public prosecutor has actually done its job and got him into prison yet to serve the 2/3 of his sentence that recidivist paedophiles are obliged to serve here (he was already condemned for paedophilia in the 70's, and then went on to have a successful career as a children's author and television presenter).
Well, it's not just paedophilia, there's a lack of proportionate consequences for actions generally speaking that allows the proverbially stupid national spirit flourish. Everybody complains about the wild-boars-on-the-rampage traffic and everbody drives around drunk, but what can you expect when there are no traffic cops and no penalties for drunk driving? I've got an acquaintance here who got pissed, totalled his car in a busy downtown tunnel, waited for the cops to come, they didn't breathalyze him and the whole problem went away. Why not? Nobody got hurt, miraculously; he was insured, the insurance company paid, because in the official documents he wasn't drunk. Simpler for everyone.
Especially because anybody here who gets a prison sentence under three years doesn't have to go to prison, they're too crowded. The F-word mentioned the other day that he'd like to teach in a prison, rather than a private school, which is a sentiment I can understand but I got rather insistent he not do it here, where they're over-crowded in a hellish manner and apparently you have to be the bastard of all time to actually get sent there if it takes that long to get a recidivist paedophile in. But my guess is that if Gaenen'd been a Maghrebin paedophile they'd have scraped together some room. Jamioulx in Charleroi is 50% over capacity, more depending on the source, and apparently with the latest wave of inmates coming in they had to stick a bunch directly into the tank - 2.5mX4.5m rooms without a window and just a concrete slab for a bed . . .
And how are they dealing with the situation at the administrative level here? Paying the Netherlands Euro 30 million to take 500 prisoners off their hands. Because the Netherlands doesn't have enough crime so they've got all these jails sitting around empty. Fucking embarassing.
Well, it's not just paedophilia, there's a lack of proportionate consequences for actions generally speaking that allows the proverbially stupid national spirit flourish. Everybody complains about the wild-boars-on-the-rampage traffic and everbody drives around drunk, but what can you expect when there are no traffic cops and no penalties for drunk driving? I've got an acquaintance here who got pissed, totalled his car in a busy downtown tunnel, waited for the cops to come, they didn't breathalyze him and the whole problem went away. Why not? Nobody got hurt, miraculously; he was insured, the insurance company paid, because in the official documents he wasn't drunk. Simpler for everyone.
Especially because anybody here who gets a prison sentence under three years doesn't have to go to prison, they're too crowded. The F-word mentioned the other day that he'd like to teach in a prison, rather than a private school, which is a sentiment I can understand but I got rather insistent he not do it here, where they're over-crowded in a hellish manner and apparently you have to be the bastard of all time to actually get sent there if it takes that long to get a recidivist paedophile in. But my guess is that if Gaenen'd been a Maghrebin paedophile they'd have scraped together some room. Jamioulx in Charleroi is 50% over capacity, more depending on the source, and apparently with the latest wave of inmates coming in they had to stick a bunch directly into the tank - 2.5mX4.5m rooms without a window and just a concrete slab for a bed . . .
And how are they dealing with the situation at the administrative level here? Paying the Netherlands Euro 30 million to take 500 prisoners off their hands. Because the Netherlands doesn't have enough crime so they've got all these jails sitting around empty. Fucking embarassing.
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