Oo-er, pu-erh!

Had always been violently pro-coffee, anti-tea, most of my caffeinated life, to the point of choosing bad coffee over good tea, but at a certain point things changed. I think when I was working in Paris all those years ago, at a Korean house, and one of the mothers brought me a cup of something special, and I realized it was like I was drinking flowers. Still it didn't cause any sort of revolution in my behaviour. I don't think I actually bought tea, unless I was expecting limey visitors, for a few years thereafter.

Maybe in practical terms the real turning point was the F-word moving in and bringing his minor obsession with tisanes with him. Or maybe it was me drinking a bunch of mint tea in magrebhin places. Maybe the last time I visited both my grandparents, when I consented to have a cup as I had got snotty enough, coffee-wise, to refuse instant, and I realized the reason I'd always hated tea was because they'd been the ones to introduce it to me - as the fruit of a thrice-brewed, lovingly preserved PG Tips bag - revolting, obviously, and not representative of the institution.

But still, I have remained vastly more pro-coffee than pro-tea. It was the mornings what done it. Unless the day was stinking hot, I needed to start it with a strong, strong latte, either iced or hot; on the very hottest days I could manage green tea, but only on the very hottest. If not, I would get headachey, cranky, and flirty with excessive violence. Nonetheless, we got to the point of drinking a few pots of either green tea or tisane a week. And then it felt like a reasonable investment to drop 50 euros on a tetsubin. Painfully trendy and heavy as fuck, but I had managed to break two china teapots in as many years so it seemed like the only thing to do.

I have found what could be a turning point now, though. In Shanghai we found a tea shop, where we sat for some time after having a long walk in the heat, and where we must have drank twelve different kinds of tea in samples . . . some were lovely and some were gross but my favourite was a six-year-old pu-erh tea which I bought and took home. It is ace. Not only can I drink it in the morning instead of coffee without getting a headache or punching anybody in the fucking face on the way to work, but it also tastes so rich. The sort of same deep, biting richness as coffee, though without coffee's salutary bitterness. Indeed without any bitterness, which despite my being a coffee-head is charming in itself.

In a bizarre, opposite-side-of-the-world echo of my grandparents, the young man working at the shop told me we could brew each bit of tea ten times before it wasn't good any more, which has turned out to be truer than it was for the PG Tips bag. And aside from these ten times, the tea needs to be washed twice before the first brew since it's all covered in weird bacterial shit and dirt from being fermented.

Anyways, this shit is magic. I paid about 20 euros for a great big brick, which I don't think was a round-eye upmark since the prices were posted, and it was twice that in the aeroport, so I imagine it would be ridiculous after being exported. But really, if you ever pass through China treat yourself to some. Will it replace coffee in my heart? Certainly not, especially as we're moving to a chunk of Australia where coffee is cultivated and I bet that it is going to rock like I've never tasted before. But as we prepare our move to a sub-tropical climate I'm damn happy to have found something caffeinated I can drink on hot mornings that will allow me to preserve the life and well-being of the people around me.

The invisible line between incompetence and fraud

In a reasonably foul mood this morning. Have been subject to a bout of incompetence or petty fraud (always hard to tell the difference in Belgium) from a local ASBL, the Partenariat Marconi, over our organic drop-offs. There is something unutterably repellent about grown-ups lying like naughty children who've been caught in the act, and something infuriating about them then using the fact that they're non-profit as some sort of excuse. Anyways, I've been having a hard time walking it off, probably because it was combined, yesterday, with a few other pieces of egregious Belgiousity, notably from my old bugabear Belgacom, the very first full day I'm back from vacation . . .

Goddamn it, am I ever sick of this place. My consolation up until now has been "at least you're not still in Paris," but ever since I lost my horror of Bluebird, and left the starving student class behind to take my place in the financially comfortable bourgeoisie (the class for which Paris was quite literally made), and started going back on visits and appreciating afresh its startling beauty, and realized that they have fruit and vegetables there that aren't grown in a hot-house and thus actually taste like what they're meant to be, and that constant low-level Parisian hostility is in many ways preferable to constant elevated levels of Walloon childish incompetence, no matter how many smiles the bollocks is couched in here versus there - well, that trick has lost its charm. I have reached the end of my tether. Have I said that before? Well, this time, I mean it more.

Luckily, the Mounties have shocked my pants off by, about a week after writing to tell me they hadn't yet received the criminal background check application I'd sent them in April so it was likely to take another four months, sending me my criminal background check. That means all the requisite papers for the Australian visa are together, and hopefully it will not be long before it clears. Thank god. We already have a pretty defined shelf-life in terms of Brussels - we already knew when we were going to leave. But now it is sorted for us to dash straight into the arms of another summer, not long after this one finishes. European Winter, you can shove yourself up your own ass.

Time and forgetting

Oh argh. Had a lovely fortnight of vacation with a niece and nephew, who had never seen Europe before and needed to while I was still here, and now I'm back - missing them, working, facing the mountains of tasks involved in leaving Brussels, and apparently coming down with a cold despite the two-week heatwave. Oh well. I still feel better for it. And have discovered something I didn't know or understand at all in the past: time works differently for children. I should have known that because I can actually remember time working differently for me back in the day. But it was not something I understood on a practical level until now. Two weeks would have been a ridiculously short time for them to do all the stuff we'd done even if they'd been adults . . . at their age I'm shocked we survived. Luckily they're good kids.

Whilst whizzing around the continents on trains, managed to read two books: Middlemarch and King Leopold's Ghost, both awfully good in their very different ways. Middlemarch was a hell of a tasty treat. I don't think I could have read it when I was any younger though . . . back to conceptions of time. It would have defeated me at the first chapter. George Eliot takes a special kind of patience, or a special kind of conception of time, which is basically the same thing as patience - not one that is encouraged by modern patterns of entertainment. It invites you in, and then she talks to you - George Eliot's narrative voice discusses the state of her characters, which could seem long-winded to the impatient, but to the patient, it's the smartest and most understanding person ever having an awesome conversation with you. And this is the case in Middlemarch like in no other book of hers that I've read, though I still consider Adam Bede as the finest piece of ass in literature.

King Leopold's Ghost was wonderfully well-written and interesting, though shocking how the blurb on the back had so little to do with the contents, somebody should tell the author. I recommend it absolutely, even if you know or care nothing about the Congo; it's a good way to start, and it's a fine piece of journalistic writing. What is staying with me the most about it this morning, though, is how it seems - while discussing a hideous episode and worldwide humanitarian movement that rolled out just over a century ago - like it's already a work of semi-archaeological history. I can't remember when I first heard about Leopold II and the Congo, but I think it was well after I should have - probably when I was at school for my masters in IR. And I can't remember when I realized the Congo was having a brutal, never-ending war - I think a couple of years before that, or maybe even around the same time.

How could someone like me - a reasonably informed person who read the papers and who minored in history in the undergrad, etc., have no fucking idea for so long? How is it possible that in cultural terms, Europeans and North Americans are better informed about the abuses of the Chinese government in Tibet than of past colonial abuses, present post-colonial economic dealings, and the jaw-droppingly brutal wars they feed and finance in Africa, where so much of our population has came from by hook or by crook? Why has Africa made our collective eyes glaze over? I really don't know the answer to these questions.

Men Who Stare at Boston

In a naughty world, I take perfection where I find it, and Boston's "More Than a Feeling" is perfect. Of all the genres of music I dislike yacht rock is probably close to the top, and of all the instrumental conceits I dislike big, jerk-off guitar solos are certainly on top, I honestly can't think of anything that annoys me more. Earlier this week I was trying to listen to Ritual de lo Habitual again and kept getting annoyed with the solos, and considering when it comes to Jane's Addiction you're either listening to the whiniest voice in rock or the guitar solos, that's fatal. But I actually really like the big jerk-off guitar solo in "More Than a Feeling" and I can't think of another that doesn't turn me off, although that probably has more to do with marijuana brain than another not existing.

Anyways. It is a fucking ace song. I can't think of another pre-1980 song that is so meticulous and tidy, up to true true yacht rock standards, while still having some sort of emotional effect and aesthetic beauty, outside of Motown properties. Or that window of time when the Beatles had figured out how to play their instruments and work with good producers but hadn't started taking all those sloppy lovely drugs yet. I've hitherto resisted loving it because of the horrible wankery of the yacht rock era, which I feel it paved the way for. But that's like hating on Van Gogh and Gauguin for all the art school dweebs who think just because those two weren't great technical painters they don't have to learn a damn thing about formal composition.

Also I have a weakness for dedicated autocratic fruitcakes and it looks like Tom Scholz fits the bill.

The song resurfaced on my consciousness due to watching Men Who Stare at Goats, one of about ten films I sat through on the way to Shanghai and back. Probably the best of the bunch. Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes was in there too and that was kind of dumb though Robert Downey Jr is a real testament to how the drugs keep some of us young, and, erm, what else? It's Complicated . . . that was pretty shitty . . . some kung fu movie about Wind and Rain and Old Uncle Pervert, or something . . . well anyways, it just goes to show you how memorable it all wasn't. Oh yeah, there was another George Clooney film, Up in the Air, that was also kind of shitty. Men Who Stare at Goats was at least cute . . but facile, I thought . . . begging for the Coen brothers really, and considering they've been begging for some decent material it's a pity they missed each other. Also, why does Ewen McGregor keep getting wasted by his directors? I'm not just talking about the schlong not being got out. I totally remember him being this super-good actor a decade or so ago and he keeps failing to convince, these days.

Red herrings, red rubber and a fucking Wallonian idiot

In between other things recently I re-read Heart of Darkness. I made myself read it more slowly than usual, really sinking my teeth into each sentence. As the F-word says, it's an epic book, an epic in less than a hundred pages. I'm not confident that I'd given it that sort of treatment sufficiently in the past. Of all the books where not a single word is wasted!

To me now of course it's a book about Belgium: I honestly believe that Conrad had in mind to write a book about how much Belgium sucks. But naturally after I've spent three years here that's how I read it, and I'm sure in another year or two I'll read it in a completely different way. And if I could travel back in time to me when I was 15, and read that book for the first time, and say, "Little Miss La Spliffe, this is a book about how Joseph Conrad thought Belgians blew, and you will understand that after you've spent three years with the fuckers," I think I would have given myself a very funny look indeed.

But the thing was, what Belgians did in the Congo was a hecatomb. As an achievement of debasement, the Congo Free State is right up there with the Holocaust - so many millions dead in such a short period of time. I'd even argue that in a sense it was a much greater acheivement of debasement than the Holocaust: first because it was all managed without gas chambers, railroads or massive race paranoia, and secondly because the world's collective response to its repurcussions has been an almighty shrug of the shoulders about how those Congolese can't manage to stop murdering each other, instead of the sort of enduring efforts at popular reparation that let the Israeli army shoot Americans in international waters with a minimum of popular fuss.

The way Antwerp has gone on being an international diamond trading centre for no good reason and the fact that small arms manufacture is the only productive industry left in Wallonia - those things just slip under the radar. It would be like if Germany managed to just slip under the radar as the world's leading producer of striped pyjamas and blue tattoo ink. It would be like they had lost the second world war, had to apologize, but were allowed - no - encouraged, ordered by the rest of the world to keep the Jews, Gypsies and gay people working at the labour camps for another half-century . . .

But yeah - one mustn't make that comparison, must one? Part of the reason I'm feeling Heart of Darkness is a work of classic literature about how Belgians suck is because Belgians are still sucking. Hard. A la Louis Michel, sadly not just some fucking crank on the street, but an ex-EU commissioner whose work focused on the Congo, and who remains significant in post-colonial affairs. I understand that the Nazis had a genocidal philosophy and that the Belgians didn't, as Michel insisted, but that is the red herring of all time. It's a common Belgian defence when the Congo comes up, and a feature of the African museum's only updated exhibit here - minimizing the slaughter by arguing successfully what no serious historians disputes - that the Congo Free State was not an effort at genocide.

However, the fact the Germans murdered millions of people with a plan and the Belgians did it because they didn't give any sort of fuck about whether black people lived or died whilst they were being brutally exploited doesn't incline me one way or the other in terms of who out-evils who. Really just encourages me once more to think of the Belgian history in the Congo as a truly supreme example of debasement: they committed or facilitated all those murders in a psychopathic, unthinking fashion, when you'd think that sort of damage would need to be carried out by calculating sociopaths.

All of which is a long way to say I hope this goes somewhere. There have been apologies; there was the almighty stink a century ago occasioned by Casement and Conrad and Mark Twain and a bunch of other people who worked out the horror of what was going on, maybe one of the first such stinks. But has there been any accountability? I saw Leopold II's sarcophagus the other week, he sleeps soundly with all the other dead kings in an empty white room, where a sarcophagus lies waiting for the present king, with no splash of colour except a security guard making sure visitors don't take a shit on anything. And the post-period - the entire Belgian Congo - the population here has no more idea on that one then what they get out of Tin-Fucking-Tin (though it's nice to know that eventually Herge felt bad about all the hunting scenes in that book).

I'd been wondering how I'm going to accept living in a country like Australia, where it's much easier to argue that genocide did take place with no repurcussions to the population that did the cleansing, and insufficient compensation to them as have been cleansed. Trust a nice spot of upper-class Wallonian idiotic surreality to persuade me it'll probably be an improvement on here. Thanks Louis Michel, you fucking twat.

Slick

Still not sure how, though I believe it had something to do with completely ignoring the World Cup*, but this weekend magically managed to pull some extra hours out of my ass and make some things - moisturizing lotion and kim chi.

The lotion was the easy part. I seem to be trying to extend my food ethics - the 'don't eat anything you wouldn't kill yourself' - into my cosmetics ethics - 'don't put anything on your skin you couldn't eat if you were starving'. And it's dead easy to make a really lovely light cream with all the special treats you want once you have an emulsifying wax you're happy with. It's also somewhat necessary in our household, as the F-word, despite looking butch as all hell, has slightly fussy skin.

What is problematic - the only problem - is the preservatives issue. I'd rather just do without, make small batches, refrigerate, and use fast, both because of the abstract extension of my food ethics into my cosmetics ethics and because of the F-word's fussy skin. Which is for the best. Do a quick Google of all the 'make-your-own' etc. sites and it gets heated when it comes to preservatives, I think because people try to sell their own products and feel shoe-horned into using them. And I have to admit, the possibility of selling has presented itself to me too, because what I make is so damn lovely and wholesome. But I don't suppose I could do it without adding preservatives, and suddenly it's not so edible anymore . . .

Anyways, so that was fun, I always like making cosmetics, it's an excuse for me to mess around with beakers if nothing else, and since I haven't done that since OAC science about 14 years ago that's a thrill. Also the fussy little kitchen scale, which makes me feel like a low-level drug dealer.

The kim chi was the more difficult part, since it was a first effort and since it's still a work in progress, as it needs to finish fermenting. Also I think I burnt my right hand blending in the chili pepper but if it works it will be utterly, utterly worth it. When I was in Shanghai I had a few lovely cabbage dishes which were either pickled or fermented, and coming back here, to this barren land of overcooked European dishes, I realized I can't just hold out until I get to Australia - I need some fucking kim chi now. Patience, tummy, patience, soon you'll be filled with delicious spicy beneficial bacteria. Mwa ha ha.



*On Sunday morning after our guests scarpered, while the sound of Aussie Rules football filled the apartment while we vegged, I was absurdly proud to be one of the maybe 3 households in Benelux watching a different sport . . .

USA Wins 1-1

After I spend a lot of time hanging out with Americans while in Europe, as this weekend, I feel simultaneously refreshed and slightly nauseous, like I've eaten too much watermelon. It just never ceases to amaze me how they can cut to the heart of some things and have a breadth of vision that baffle the locals here - mostly on the personal level - and are so infantile when it comes to other things, like the way anywhere else in the world works. I especially love to get them going about China. Not saying I understand China or anything but all of their imaginings based on sheer bloody panic over the possibility of getting replaced is really hilarious, and oddly cinematic, as if it hasn't even entered their head that the billion plus population there is made up of real people with aspirations to not get malnutrition and not the soulless Yellow Hordes.

Anyways, all that to say that contrary to so many non-Dutch Europeans (the Dutch seem to love Americans, who owe them a hell of a cultural debt), I really do enjoy their company and I don't find them annoying in the least. And part of that is because I really enjoy the way they make fun of other people. It's the really great thing about arrogance, you know, it's funny, a lot of the time on purpose.

This, for example:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
America's Strained Relationship With England
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

Gourmands of the world, unite!

The long silence has been due to a long spell of hard work and a long spell of China, where all of this sort of thing is not allowed - no Twitter, no Facebook, no Blogger. It was my first trip to Asia and a very low-impact one since 85% of it was spent in a five star hotel, but we did get out to see the more touristic, accessible parts of Shanghai, and I got to eat. A lot. I got to satisfy my wildest, most frustrated cravings - the stomach-grinding misery anyone used to living with a lot of Chinese-extraction-type people will know if they move to Europe, this goddamn culinary desert.

I think Canadians are so deeply unaware of the benefits of our sort of multiculturalism that it worries me because it is something worth fighting tooth and nail to preserve. I could go on for days about the dangers, inaccuracies and moral pitfalls of basing politics on ideas of nationality, and I have, on occasion. And I'm not saying the fractured but blanket snobbery of eurocentrism is any less awful than any other ethnocentrism - that the Han Chinese or American model of basically denying any differences at all exist (beyond the differences promoted by apparently recalcitrant, headstrong cultural perverts like Tibetans or Hispanic people who don't bother learning English) is better.

And I have to acknowledge that in Canada, it is very likely that what we have works as smoothly as it does because our immigration system is extremely aggressive in keeping out illegal migrants, refugees, and any other new residents who aren't already a part of the middle class in their home countries. In fact, if the EU started applying Canadian standards in terms of immigration or refugees, it would have to be after a violent swing to the right - which makes it rather amusing when Canadians seem concerned about European anti-immigrant right-wing movements which are actually a bit left relative to our mainstream.

Of course, there are certain qualifying factors there: in Canada, we're apparently content to hire each other to clean our toilets, strip in our strip clubs, have sex for money, and take care of our children and elderly people, so our present immigration policies are a continuation of older ones - whereas if they came in effect in the EU, it would mean reversing long-standing policies of importing millions of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the old Yalta countries to do all that stuff cheaper. And while Canadians can just check people's passports when they get off planes and then let Fortress America and the weather take care of the rest in terms of border control, the EU would have to bristle up into a little gun-turreted stronghold to keep people out. Europeans, in short, couldn't do what we manage to do so quietly without declaring war on the world.

Anyways, qualifying factors and moral provisos and everything else notwithstanding, the multicultural climate we've ended up with in Canada is really ace. The country is a sort of non-interfering, co-operative union of the international bourgeoisie, and being bourgeois is totally where it's at. There are a lot of reasons for that, which I didn't understand until I became middle class myself, and didn't understand until I met a lot of people of my father's background, in particular, who hadn't gone to the trouble that he'd gone to of getting into the middle class.

The acest thing I can think about it this morning is that the middle class is the foodie class. Sure, the working classes make awesome food - in fact, the awesome food, the food that is the basis of their countries' culinary heritage. Ruling class food is a series of fads and false traditions with no staying power and it should fuck off and die. But the middle class is the class that has the combination of the cultural memory of being working class combined with the leisure to explore and experiment that lets them try lots of new kinds of food.

And in Canada - and I'm hoping to fuck the same applies in Australia and New Zealand, as you might imagine - we, as a nation dominated by the urban bourgeoisie, we can eat at a different kind of restaurant every night of the week for two fucking months if we want to without repeating, at prices accessible to a middle-class wallet. Do you know what would happen if I tried to do that in Belgium, which is supposed to have one of the foodiest cultures in Europe? The fucking process would last two weeks, maybe, and if I wanted anything from outside of Europe that wasn't absolutely fuckingly vily blandified for sissy European palates, I'd go fucking broke. Oh my fuck, it is so annoying.

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!

I don't care that this is an attempt at viral marketing, it's one of the best things ever:



I really adore streakers. I love the way they get out there and run around and are all happy a whole stadium full of people get to see them do it. I love the juxtaposition between the happy dashing streaker and the very serious security people chasing them. I love that they're just doing it to be exhibitionist idiots, or whyever they're doing it, and that it's something uncontrolled, something very seriously edited out of the television broadcasts, something no-one's making money off.

When sport, games, the way we humans are supposed to relax and enjoy ourselves, has become such a passive experience to the vast majority (viewers) and a commercial experience to a tiny minority, including the ones actually 'playing', streakers are a really elegant and hilarious reminder that we're not all docilely swallowing the soma yet. Yep, I love streakers, me. They're this reminder of the indomitable blitheness, the blither side of the idiocy, of the human spirit.

Arrrrrgh, not feeling blithe myself this morning. Got drunk-dialled at 4 am and feel like arse. My friends are all grown-ups now, I can't believe this bullocks is still even possible. I understand there's a time difference involved but I've been in Europe for three fucking years now, time enough to figure out that when you're drunk on a patio in the late evening in Canada and the urge hits you to call me, you should do anything with your fucking cellphone, shoving it up your ass included, rather than following that urge.

The Red Dragon's snatch adventures

1. It really is amazing how Tasmania looks like a snatch, isn't it?

2. I'm still fundamentally happy with the reusable rags in terms of comfort and all the rest of it, but can't deny all the extra laundry is hugely inconvenient since we don't use a washing machine (yep, the hand-crank one is still doing for us, but the F-word has taken it over and quite honestly I don't feel right asking him to wash my rags. Ergo the 'huge inconvenience' comes from me actually having to do laundry), and it uses a vast amount of water and energy to keep them in good shape, stain free, and sterile, since we don't use bleach. Which is sorta fine now that I'm living in a temperate rainforest called Belgium, and may be less fine when I'm in Australia, living through drought/flood cycles.

So I bought a silicon menstrual cup. The only brand I could find here is the Divacup, retailing at a 105% markup from its Canadian price - and oh yes, it's made in Canada. Nice to have a little of the homeland up my twat. I paid the markup because the Red Dragon snuck up on me when I was away from home and unprepared, but anyone else buying in Europe, UK included, should order it from an NA Amazon site or iHerb, it's a fuckload cheaper even with the delivery. It's pretty ace, works a treat, comfy, and tidy. Also can't lie that the reusable rags are bulky: it all feels a bit more svelte walking around with my business tucked up inside. Still bleeding out into the rags o'nights, though. The idea of lying down for eight hours with all that blood trapped up there is as gross as imagining David Cameron's O face.

So seriously, and at the risk of sounding harsh: between resuable rags and the cup, as far as I can tell, at this point any chick still using disposables is a fucking idiot. After lots of usage, as should be clear above I understand some of the objections to rags. But the cup up the twat is actually tidier to use than disposables, and a hell of a lot more 'hygienic' if that's what makes you go ick, since you don't have biohazards hanging around your house for the dog to find and chew on. And it doesn't desiccate your twat like tampons do. And it's safer. And cheaper. And that's all not counting the environment and whatnot. So stop being a fucking idiot. That is all.

The Shoddyssey part II

It would be an exaggeration to say things are coming together, but at least they're starting to seem a little less entropic.

1. My X-ray has been found. It turns out the hospital - instead of sending it to my doctor on the other side of town, a task for which I gave'em five euros in postage, and doctor about whom we had a little gossip at the front desk - instead took the initiative to pay about fifty euros and send it to the department of immigration in Sydney or Canberra or some such.

Luckily somebody there noted the Belgiumness of it and all and contacted the Berlin embassy (Belgian visa requests go through Berlin, the embassy here in Brussels is teeny-tiny) and the Aussies sorted it out between themselves. Not until after, however, the hospital had told me they'd probably sent the X-ray to a bunch of other Belgian doctors with the same name as my doctor and I should call all of them to track it down - I did of course, including one very friendly and very confused dentist - fuckers.

Anyways, the upshot of it all is that I'm irritated and amused in equal measure, and thrilled that I'll be moving to a country where the civil servants are able to successfully complete "If . . . then . . . so" statements.

2. Now the only pending documentation for the visa is my Canadian criminal background check and the fuckers of Mounties don't even know if my request is in their building yet. Fuck me, in excess of four months in my homeland vs a week in Belgium and France, two of the stupidest countries in the developed world. Brava, Canada, atta play with the big dogs. Would like to go back to Canada for a week or so to just get the three-day electronic request one, but unless I do it, like, next week, there's no fricking time until the end of July, in between work, travel for work, and people coming here to visit. In fact we're so solidly booked until the end of July that I caught myself feeling a touch of relief one of our visitors got a staph infection and had to cancel her trip. What kind of monster am I turning into?

3. Lexie finally got her rabies test. I'm starting to hesitate about taking her again. We have got an offer now from a very dear friend in Canada to take her in, Sugarplum of yore, and it's hard to imagine a better home for her, especially if her family decamps to the country house they're moving to buy. And a 24 hour plane ride in the hold followed by a month of quarantine, versus nine hours in the hold, a car ride, and then a warm loving permanent home . . . But I'm her human, she's my cat, and I reckon she'd like Australia, where we can get a biggish house and a garden. Sigh. It's all very confusing. I think I will judge as the months wear on on the basis of her health.

If I have to I'm gonna die last

We watched Out of the Past the other day. I just wanted some Hero Robert Mitchum to wash Max Cady Robert Mitchum out of my mouth (we watched his Cape Fear a few days before Robert Deniro's Cape Fear; all in all I preferred the first one even though Gregory Peck interfered with my suspension of disbelief because I can't look at the man without thinking "he must shit ice cream") and oh my goodness it did. Out of the Past is the best movie I've seen since . . . hmm. Casablanca, I guess. In both cases it was the dialogue. Making Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum really quite attractive.



You know it's a fantasy of course, a fantasy that any hard-bitten man in a trenchcoat with shoulders that look like three axe-handles laid end-to-end can deliver lines like "you're going to find it very easy to take me anywhere", as much of a fantasy as that dumb young girls have about the epilated blue-eyed floppy haired personal-trainered pretty boys they poster their walls with being heterosexual or not so narcissistic as to be reproductively useless. But still, man, hawt.

Out of the Past also has the famous "Baby, I don't care" line, and like Casablanca with its catchphrases you can know the line is coming and even have played it in your head before, and it's still a fucking good line . . .

What was I thinking

Last week, I randomly picked up a copy of The French Lieutenant's Woman, a favourite book of mine in late adolescence, and found I had to read it from cover to cover once more. It's a smashing book in its way, and a real testament to the power of the narrative voice: hard to imagine a narrative voice more pompously aware of its own importance (which was intentional, I believe, considering the structure of the ending) and yet not over-the-top to the point where it was too annoying to read, for me anyways.

Anyways, I'd loved it when I was 17 or 18 or whatever, but realized pretty quickly I hadn't understood it all that well. I'm not capable of judging if this was because of my way of reading back then (speed) or just my almost complete inexperience of life in a challenging form. I should probably re-read more books. Like the fucking Name of the Rose. Teenage Mistress La Spliffe and Mistress La Spliffe in her early 30s probably have quite different brains.

But what distressed me a little bit as I read is the realization of how teenage Mistress La Spliffe had projected herself onto the fairly blank-slate character of Sarah Woodruff. I think Fowles created her as a 'projectable' character - made her the age his female readers in the 60's were likely to be, gave her just enough definition to make her acceptable as a character - but really only defined her by her frustrations, and completely unknown by the characters around her. A woman who should have been about in the late 20th century, dropped into 1876; a real invitation to his readers to think through what it would have been like.

The thing is, I loved that book and misunderstood it so badly when I was a teenager that I think it marked my interactions with the male of the species for a few years afterwards. One does sometimes wonder why one used to be a bit of a bitch, and while I'm not blaming the French Lieutenant's Woman because no doubt it only gave some sort of reinforcement to something pre-existing in my own personality that had already accepted men are manipulable and disposable, I have a strong suspicion that pathologically projecting myself onto Sarah Woodruff didn't help matters.

Well, thank goodness for small mercies, at least I never took The Magus to heart.

Dear oh dear

So I don't often post things that are frightfully personal (by which I mean penetrative) here, but I will write now that years and years ago I had a surprisingly enduring physical relationship with a man who looked like a youngish Robert Deniro, and it was awesome until it wasn't anymore; he was Italian, and in sexual terms they tend to start strong and slow down, so after two months I moved on to greener pastures.

But during those first heady (heh) weeks I have to admit that part of the charm, only a part, was realizing things like "I'm being .....(whatever was happening at the time).... by a guy who looks like a youngish Robert Deniro." And to cap it all off, he was a bad boy, who'd just finished doing time for armed robbery; he got in fights; he also claimed to be a gigolo. Now, I imagine if I was on the market now, that sort of thing would have me out the door even before my bra started chafing me, strong resemblance to YRD or not, but at the point I was with YRD I was 20 or 21 and as dumb as shit, so somehow it had the opposite effect. Fuck, I can't believe how dumb I was. I'm not the sort to regret her roundheel days - in fact I don't know any former roundheels who regret their roundheel days - but nonetheless I was really as dumb as shit sometimes. Something that helped me to realize I'd been as dumb as shit and to be rather smarter than shit afterwards was the knee-buckling relief I felt every time I tested negative for HIV for the next three years.

Nonetheless over the last decade or so I've occasionally thought back to YRD with a certain vestige of my 20-21 year old idiocy compounded by the fact that I didn't catch anything, a sort of "I got a lot of awesome.....(insert action here).... from a bad boy who looked like a YRD." Even a certain relief, not unmixed with smugness and probably not irrational, that I'd done something that retarded when I was young enough and stupid enough to really enjoy it, but not so young and so stupid that I couldn't figure out that this was not an appropriate thing to continue doing with my reproductive life.

And then last night we watched the 1991 version of Cape Fear. Holy fuck. Suddenly looking like a youngish Robert Deniro, even in my memories, became a real non-asset.

I didn't like the film, Jessica Lange and Nick Nolte annoyed the hell out of me and the PI always drinking the Pepto Bismol with bourbon got in the way of my suspension of disbelief too. Worst of all, though, you're not telling me that even in the American South in the early 90's a woman can get her cheek bit off in a sexual encounter, not to mention all the other injuries, and then not be capable of arguing that it was criminal battery, especially when it had been done by a man who'd just got out of prison the week before after a 14-year sentence for battery while the police and the public prosecutor are searching for ways to put him back in jail. An alienated roundheels getting punched in the face back in the Robert Mitchum version in the 60's made some sense, but in those terms the 1991 version made no sense: it was just stupid, insulting, and if it weighed on the mind of even one woman who had been raped and was considering whether or not to report it, fucking criminal. Spits.

But Robert Deniro's performances as a frightening, disgusting creepy and violent piece of murderous shit was phenomenal, really very excellent. Excellent enough that the fact he was playing a swamp redneck while having one of the woppiest faces in cinema was only occasionally funny. So excellent, in fact, that I think my days of smugness over YRD are out the window for good- any vestige of the smug is gone, replaced with straight relief over fact that, you know, I'm still fucking alive.

The Shoddyssey part I

Well, I miss M like crazy, and his advice is ringing in my ears: "Expect things to go wrong here, and you'll be fine." As I leave there is one final herculean task involving lots of Belgians that has the capacity to go wrong, and that is getting the cat and I authorization to leave to the country of my choice. And yes, it is going wrong.

1. I need a health check for the permanent visa, part of which involves a chest X-ray. The hospital lost mine. Okay, it's something that could have happened anywhere, but the intense fucking stupidity of the follow-up is what reminds me that I'm in Francophone Belgium and not in your run-of-the-mill sort of place. My examining doctor, to whom the results must be sent, is only available by phone from 13h to 13h30. The woman at the X-ray clinic who is responsible for the deliveries to the doctors only works in the morning. And yet somehow I'm being asked by these morons - me, the only person in the situation whose fault this definitely is not - to work out why the X-ray is lost, when the doctor insists it didn't arrive, and the clinic woman insists she sent it to him.

Fuck. Morons. Fucking Franco-Belgian morons.

Luckily time isn't exactly of the essence, due to the Canadian federal police's cack-handed inadequacy in terms of providing criminal background checks (normal countries can do it in a week; the Mounties take FOUR FUCKING MONTHS; they may always get their man but they have to wait until age slows the fucker down apparently). But I am annoyed. I'm annoyed as all hell. It's not just the prospect of a second exposure to an admittedly low level of radiation, it's not just the prospect of arguing with a bunch of brain-damaged hospital Neanderthals about how I will not pay for a repeat in my daily-worsening French (when I told my brain we were moving to Australia, it just started jettisoning my entire vocabulary, as if being lighter will get us out of this stupid, dirty surrealist shithole faster); it's an utter frustration with Franco-Belgian retardation.

Now I know retardation is not a Franco-Belgian monopoly. It's just the way they're retarded that I can't stand. It's in the way they can fuck up, fuck up royally, exposing the person they're fucking up to a world of expense and bother - so far, so averagely retarded - AND THEN strive like a fucking Bosnian fighting the Roman Empire to blame the person they've fucked over, when there is no stretch of the imagination besides a frighteningly 1984-ish doublethink by which the person who they've fucked over has anything to do with the mechanics of how they were fucked over. It is fucking unbearable. It puts me in the mood for face-punching, car-keying, and crotch-kicking, and I'm a fucking Quaker. It makes me quite adore the British for their mania for apologizing for everything, which used to annoy me.

By-the-by, in my experience, this brand of retardation is a Wallonian trait - not a Flemish trait - good enough reason besides all the others for the Flems to want to seperate, in my opinion. God knows I want to fucking seperate from it post-haste.

2. Somebody in my vet's family died and he won't be able to take the rabies blood test for another couple of weeks. The problem there is that I've cut things too close to the wire, since I was expecting to give her to a friend in Canada. She needs her blood test five months before her departure, and I desperately want the freedom to leave here at the end of September, and I desperately want her to spend the minimum time possible in quarantine on the other end of things. That's just something going wrong, of course. It's not Belgium. My vet's from the south of France and sadly people in families die. But it's adding to my stress level.

I've found a shipping company that can send her there, though, and they seem to know what they're doing and they're Flemish. So things are working out. Slowly. Churningly. Annoyingly.

ARRRRGH.

Anyways, it's time for me to go try to get a tourist visa for China and be exposed to a whole new nationality of bureaucracy.

The cat

Is coming with us to Australia. Nobody wants her. Fine. I do.

Thanks for all the sweet fuck all, world.

Screwed and screwed and screwed

After that trip to Istanbul last year I wrote about feeling some moral discomfort about getting naked and then getting a deliciously decadent rubdown from another woman, but committed to going to a hammam in case it was just the stale atmosphere of bourgeois decadence and entitlement at the five star where I was staying that was killing my buzz. It turns out it was. I've been going to Le Riad in the immigrant district next to the Gare de Nord regularly for a few months and I'll keep going at least once a month until I leave. It is ace, and nothing, NOTHING like the thing in Istanbul. Communal (kids get in free and were running around all over the place, having waterfights in the rubdown room), loud (when I was there Saturday a wedding party came in and ululated, which I'd never heard in the flesh before), friendly (helpful attendants running around telling me what to do, since my hammam etiquette isn't down yet, and slapping everybody's asses) and unintimidating.

Anyways. I was there on a busy Ladies' Saturday (most days of the week, women only get half the hours, with men the other half) and the steam room and rubdown slabs were over-capacity, so I was waiting in the nice warm, sunny lounging space upstairs, wrapped in a sarong, sipping a complimentary mint tea and reading Colin Tudge's charming The Secret Life of Birds, when a lady came in to start threading eyebrows. Mine were badly overgrown so when she started loudly complaining of a cancellation, I stuck my hand up to be trimmed. I'd never been threaded before, never even seen it until I started going to the hammam and seeing these women seemingly only having threads ran across their face and emerging hairless, so I was curious.

Which brings me to the point of this post, such as it is. The lady reduced my viciously rambunctious eyebrows to a state of civilization in two minutes. It didn't hurt nearly as much as waxing or plucking and the skin wasn't irritated. It cost six euros. I had no idea who she'd done it, so I came home and read this and watched this. I got a length of darning thread, practiced for ten minutes, and then did my upper lip, which I usually bleach, but in my paranoiac hippiedom I'm sick of smearing myself with chemicals so I've been looking for an alternative that doesn't involve accepting my manly side. It worked; it hurt a bit, but not much, and even with my unpractised hands it only took a few minutes to do the lot.

Now look. This is nice, but at the same time it is absolute BULLSHIT. Let me write it once again: I used a length of darning thread. I used about 50 centimetres of a 20 metre spool of darning thread that cost less than 2 euros to take care of the hair on my face that millions of women shit themselves over, spending a great deal of time and money on; that many women in my family (of whom I'm one of the less sasquatchy members and I'm still quite sasquatchy) have decided they would handle with electrolysis due to the time, mess, expense and trouble involved in waxing. I'm not saying I was ripped off by the lady at the hammam, absolutely not; despite how easy the incredibly beautiful girl in the instructional video above makes it look, I'm more than happy to have somebody else do precision work like eyebrow plucking for me (versus upper lip when you just want it ALL off, though I did give myself an amusing half-hour walking around the house with a Hitler moustache) and I would happily pay her more than six euros, even though her overhead costs for the work she did on me probably ran about 5 centimes. But I AM saying this shit makes me absolutely sick.

Women get screwed, man. They get screwed and screwed. When you can use 5 centimes worth of darning thread to get a result that's better than what you get with with something exponentially more expensive, like waxing or one of these fucking montrosities, that's all I can conclude: we are screwed and screwed and screwed. Not just screwed by notions of beauty involving hairlessness, which is such a common theme across so many cultures that I don't see any real point to objecting to it any more, but really, unforgivably screwed in terms of how bastards try to get our money off us for stupid shit that not only do we not need, but is worse for us than the exponentially cheaper alternatives. On a slightly smaller scale, it's like the flannelette rag towels versus the disposable ones all over again. Just so - fucking - ARGH. Fuck. I really don't think men have the experience to appreciate how structurally screwed women are, on things like this, these little day-to-day things - I mean, I don't blame men, because a lot of this screwing is being carried out by other women; I would just like to communicate to men how structurally screwed we are so they can understand where we're coming from. I love being a woman but my beloved history teacher who blew his brains out a few years back was right: in economic terms women in overdeveloped countries are the aborigines of the modern age, being exploited by cynical profiteers and trading our wealth for shit.

Paging Dr. Dolittle

I'm not the world's most enthusiastic or emotional person, I've noticed. Probably not even in the top ten. But one thing I do know is that I love my cat so damn much. I'd never had a pet with a personality before her, and that combined with me being the youngest child meant that until Lexie moved in with me there was a certain kind of love, the love of being relied upon, that I'd never known.

Sure I'd had men who thought they needed me, but when you're young and hearty that's not like being relied on, not like a child relies on its parents or the way I rely on my older brothers. Nothing had ever relied on me, not that I'd noticed anyways, not until Lexie, and I'd never loved anything the way you love something that relies on you. I'd always only felt the sort of selfish love of the youngest girl - a relying love, a love that didn't question whether or not it was loved back because it knew it was - and nothing had ever loved me like that. Until Lexie; I know she loves me like that, or the cat equivalent. And the love that responds to that - it's something very special.

Not to say Lexie's dependent. That's the thing about Lexie. I know that if I died tomorrow she'd be okay. She's a cat for god's sake, they've taken over Chernobyl. And not only is she a cat, she was a feral cat for years before she moved in, and was used to killing or foraging her own dinner. If I could just manage to break the window before I died, the thought has gone through my head on occasion, she would be just fine. She'd manage. I've seen her bat birds out of the sky, bash mices' brains out, nearly rip a raccoon's nose off once . . . And I'd look at friends' cats - noisy mewling clingy whorish things that would sit on laps and things like that, things Lexie wouldn't dream of doing, and I'd feel so proud of my cat, who wasn't a great big suck but who could still communicate affection as though she knew that you were both good and equal souls before the Lord, and you happen to be the one who brought home the kills for dinner. A little prance to meet you, a shivering tail, loving headbutts, company on the yoga mat and quiet staring until you brush her. That's all and it's plenty.

And now I'm moving to Australia, and have an awesome job and an awesome man and everything's awesome, and there's this horrible big fly shitting in my ointment, and that's that she can't come with me.

She could, though, and at this point it's even looking likely, despite the three months of quarantine that the vet warned me lots of animals don't survive. Because nobody wants her. Nobody wants this fucking awesome cat that I love. It hasn't been a worry up until now as a good friend in Canada was going to take her, but that fell through, and now the best offer I've got is a friend's father's farm, strictly as a working cat, with a bunch of other working cats - no more warm hearth, no more brushing - but maybe she'd like it? Maybe she'd like scrapping all day with other cats and kiling mice and hanging out in a barn? Would it be better or worse than three months in quarantine?

This is fucking brutal, you know, because she can't tell me which she'd rather do. I'm aware of how ridiculous that sounds, but you know, there it is, she's my cat. I basically swore I'd do the best I could to take care of her by adopting her, and here I am, considering which of two options is going to fuck her over less, and utterly unable to get her opinion on it, and incapable of knowing whether or not she is sufficiently attached to me to make it worthwhile to keep her in something as tortuous as quarantine for months.

And nobody wants her because she's not some crappy little cute kitten, she's an old fat cat who I love and think is the best fucking cat in the world. And people just want fucking ewok-faced cutey-pie Kylie Minogue type kittens who don't even know how to piss in a litterbox.

Ah fuck.

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's been bulldozed to facilitate a port expansion

I'm behind on my life when it comes to the blog. Even when I was being good and blogging every day, and even having made the executive decision (though not always well followed through on) to blog about things instead of states of mind, I was usually behind on the things, and now I'm super-behind.

So now, to blog about something that happened the weekend before last. It was the F-word's birthday so I took him on a weekender to Antwerp to eat sushi, which is both lousy and expensive in Brussels. Belgium has a reputation for being a lovely place to eat that I didn't fully understand until I realized that it was due to the Flemish region - you know, the one I don't live in. But enough complaining (besides, what other country could I have lived in for three years during which there have been seven governments without being worried about getting shot? BTW the government is falling again). Antwerp is a really charming city, and we had a fucking STUPENDOUS meal at Zaowang. Had the maki sashimi boat with an extra order of dragon eyes and were wildly satisfied, I very much recommend it, book ahead.

Otherwise we rented bikes and went all about the place, admiring the orthodox Jews out in their Saturday finery, getting sunburns (yes - sunburns - oh spring I fucking love you so much) and more and sundry, but the piéce de résistance of the weekend was cycling out to the abandoned village of Doel.

It was a 22 km ride along the river Schelde, past countless filthy, farting, belching petrochemical plants, and you know what, I rather enjoyed it. First I should point out that the 22km figure is utterly unimpressive as the flatness of the poldery countryside makes a pancake look like the Appalachians. Second I should point out that there's a part of me that loves looking at industrial rot. It's so interesting, such monstrous shapes, such a shocking and revolting abuse of existence in such a massive physical form. And I tell you I'm now just trying to enjoy all the industrial decrepitude while I can, since once we go to Australia I'll have to restrict my environmentalist horror to open pit coal mines and monoculture tree plantations, I'm assuming, anyways.

Anyways I've uploaded some pictures of Doel the F-word took, I think it was the awesomest place I've been to in ages. Full of graffiti. The Olympics logo one was my favourite I think . . . in the photo you can see the guy who's been painting it taking a little rest and talking to some tourists. The town was full of them - graffiti artists and tourists. I'd been a bit hesitant on the way, wondering if it was a good idea to bring rental bikes we'd had to put a deposit on to an "abandoned" village full of desperate, lawless squatters - that was reckoning without the endless bourgeoisity (lord love it because I sure do, without the bourgeois we'd all be eating chips and thinking U2 was the best band ever) of the Flemish people. Families with young kids, pensioners with sticks and in a couple of cases wheelchairs, everybody had turned out on the lovely sunny day to look around the village and oooo and ahhh over the nice graffiti. The desperate, lawless squatters were themselves largely families with young children who had re-opened a couple of businesses to cater to the tourists and who kept at least some of the houses in tip-top shape, and then we found many of them weren't squatters, but had been there since the government tried to shut everything down in 1978 - the year I was born.

As I wrote in one of my comments, I can't imagine wanting to live in Doel, or to repopulate it, not where it is in the midst of the stinking farting petrochemical plants, nor next to the nuclear plant. But at the same time it's wrong to force dispossession on people who have roots in a place. I've always admired roots, having none myself, but beyond that, it's a self-evident truth that you do not force people to leave their homes because you can make more money with that place if they're gone. And in any case Doel is a piece of art now. Human decency aside (where it is so often placed) it would be a criminal act to tear it down because somehow the spray artists have taken this crumbling little burg and made it into something really lovely.

Pyjamas with a fucking dragon on them

A little eeeeeeeeeee! today, readers, as I have just heard by phone (being at home nursing some brutal birch pollen misery) that my company would like to keep me on after the big move. I had persuaded myself it was win either way, and it was, to the degree that one part of my split self is mourning the things I already won't be able to do due to this fucking awesome win. But there's no doubt this is the winner win because now I can go be rich in Australia.

Not to mention work from home. Actually since Australia is just a vague concept to me I have to admit that in concrete terms mostly I'm excited about working from home, and being able to afford to buy a nice home to work in without shitting myself about the mortgage. I am going to make myself four or five sets of beautiful silk pyjamas to labour away at home in, oh, it's exciting. Paisley silk pyjamas. Or pyjamas with a fucking dragon on them! Yeah! And then there's the fact that the Asian aspect of what I'm doing journalistically at the moment is WAY more interesting than the European aspect.

And there's the fact that this way we get to go straight to the area we had in mind, which is semi-rural, without me shitting myself about finding a job somewhere without offices. Part of this big move is us being sick of cities, and respect to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane et al, but I'm fucked if I'd be excited about moving from one stinking sprawling city to another. I've been doing that all my adult life, and moving to the opposite side of the planet to do so doesn't float my boat.

And then there are all the other things. Things and possibilities too awesome that I don't dare blog about them here.

And as things rock, rock like crazy, and everything is win . . . as I type I feel the first nerves I've felt at the prospect. Not bad nerves though. Excited nerves, the sort of thing where it's not quite a frog in your throat, something rather more delicious, like, I don't know, some super hot guy's junk.

EEEEEEEEEEE!

is what I say.

Fucking awesome ending

You know last week's post about The Name of the Rose? Yeah. The ending was fucking magnificent. Sorry, Ian Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost may have been a better overall novel in objective terms - excellent character and character development/revelation, some pretty good plot twists, etc - but the ending of The Name of the Rose was out of this world, really impeccable; Aristotle trumps the Messiah, and I don't even like Aristotle.

Anyways that's all I can get into this morning, but tonnes to write about later this week, including recent travel to Munich and to a place I'd been wanting to go to since arriving in Belgium, almost - Doel. Neither disappointed.

Mental deterioration or otherwise

Oh argh. Stayed up all hours last night reading The Name of Rose. Re-reading it, actually - I think. I'm pretty sure I read it ten years ago or so and thought it was crap, and otherwise don't remember anything about it. I don't think it's crap now, obviously, I don't stay up on schoolnights reading what I think is crap, but I do have a sneaking suspicion The Instance of the Fingerpost is a lot better. But more on that after I've knocked off the last fifty pages of The Name of the Rose, because The Instance of the Fingerpost's weakest point was its ending (though it was still quite good, miles better than most of the dross we get told is good these days), so if Umberto Eco managed to pull something really splendid out of his ass I may have to change my mind.

And also I have a sneaking suspicion that The Instance of the Fingerpost would have been impossible without The Name of the Rose. But being a simple reader and not a historian of literature - thank Jeebus for small mercies and the post-grad decisions I managed not to get wrong - what enabled what is less important to me than what is awesomer than what.

Anyways, what is odd is that I thought The Name of the Rose was so crappy ten years ago and that I'm enjoying it now, enough to exhaust myself utterly going into a very demanding couple of work days. It makes me wonder what's happening to my brains as I age . . . if they're getting better or if they're getting worse.

Ten years ago, I was 21; I'd just finished my undergrad degree, so I was hitting a theoretically high level of abstract knowledge on one hand; and on the other I was doing lots of drugs, fucking whatever had a nice smile, and had managed to get such sparkling results over my early academic career not because of the knowledge I was able to keep and synthesize in my brains, but because my genius pedagogue mother had trained me to successfully interpret the academic instructions of professors and their teaching assistants (who sadly are not the world's most capable communicators or pegagogues, not even in the fucking top ten frankly); most of the other students knew a lot more things than I did but had a harder time deciphering the often contradictory or confusing accounts of what their professors wanted.

Now I'm 31, and my reading has gone all over the place in the intervening years in a way that pleases me, and I'm reasonably certain I know a hell of a lot more things than I did ten years ago; but I'm older and I'm exhausting myself on a daily basis at a fucking yuppie job that uses my brains up.

So am I dumber now, and that's why I'm enjoying The Name of the Rose, or was I dumber when I was 21, and that's why I thought it was crappy? Don't know. Oh well. Shut up brain, or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip.

Mistress La Spliffe comes out of the closet

We went on holiday in Munich and it was lovely. Germany is so fucking under-rated as a tourist destination, with all their awesome food and beer and relative niceness. And Munich itself was special. There were a few things that moved me to tears there:

The Barberini Faun: I couldn't believe it when I saw it, from its cuticles to its beginning-of-Jim-Morrison-bloat face. Such an excruciatingly beautiful thing. I've read commentary calling it homoerotic because of the vulnerability and beauty of its pose. Well, if that's the case, call the Westboro Baptists to picket me, because apparently I'm gay. I am totally gay for this statue. Oh wait, I'm a heterosexual woman and art history commentators haven't figured out women like looking at beautiful, vulnerable men. I mean holy fuck, we are 52% of the population and 90% of us like fucking men, just possibly a sculpture of a beautiful vulnerable man might possibly be hetero-erotic as well, especially considering the history of women involved in the worship of Dionysus. And I'm not the only woman who's geeked on this stature. Look at the Leni Reifenwhatever photo of it:



Raphael's Tempi Madonna: Look at that lovely cuddle she's giving him - that mother-nuzzle, those protective hands. Oh Mary, poor Mary. Having to see your baby on a cross. That super-blows. Mary - the Catholics have used the shit out of her. If the Protestants had said she was kosher (ie intercessionary), even if the saints weren't, we wouldn't have a sub-section of the international population who could go around kiddie-fiddling without anyone consulting the police now.

Pastiche ma biche

I've been a big fan of Benjamin Biolay, although haven't listened to him that often since the F-word moved in, because the music makes me very melancholy, which is all very good when I can hang around mopingly by myself getting high like a Curehead with Peter Pan syndrome, and not so hot when I'm trying to maintain an adult relationship. But one day I was PMSing and all pissed off anyways, so I was listening to Rose Kennedy, and the F-word pointed out that "Les cerfs-volants" was basically "My Way". I shrugged. Must be a tribute, right? Everybody knows "My Way" (even if French people like to pretend what they actually know is "Comme d'habitude"). That'd be like plagiarising "Happy" Fucking "Birthday", I mean Sid Vicious sang it for fuck's sake.





Then his new album La Superbe came out, got an avalanche of good reviews, and won a bunch of Césars or whatever the hell the French call their version of the Grammys, and I ignored it, because I'd made the mistake of reading some interviews with the man before listening to it and he came off as the worst kind of champagne socialist , of a kind that isn't even produced outside of France. Not even Guarniad readers come up to this standard. It's the sort of thing where you can arrange the strings on a Carla Bruni album while releasing a song about how you'd like to eject her husband from elected office (which Biolay has done).

And then yesterday I was hopping back on the PMS wagon and had a tonne of brainless administrative things to catch up on at the office, so I finally gave La Superbe a listen and sure enough it seemed pretty awesome. Typically lovely instrumental arrangements and typically broody lyrics, maybe a little too self-consciously melancholic for me at this point in my reasonably self-actualized psychological existence despite the PMS, but I was getting into it.

However, then it started sinking in:

"Prenons le large" - "Don't you forget about me"
"Tout ca me tourmente" - A bunch of Goldfrapp
"Padam" - "Wonderful Life"

And oh my fuck, the whole thing is Disintegration with instruments instead of synthesizers.

I could go on. The whole double album sounded like a beautifully arranged pastiche of my childhood and adolescence. Which was half good and half aspartame. Finally I had a quick google to see if anyone else was picking up on it. All I found was pissed off Morrissey fans who didn't like that "La Superbe" sampled the same bit of Shostakovich that "Teachers Are Afraid of Pupils" sampled, which didn't do much except confirm me in my belief that Morrissey fans need to stop drinking the fucking koolaid, it's Shostakovich for shit's sake, and at least Biolay gave it the dignity inherent in strings instead of bastardizing it with synthesizers. God, Morrissey's a fucking prick. "I know," he must have thought, "let's take some lovely Shostakovich and put it to synthesizers, because I'm not a big enough prick yet." Prick, man.

And on top of that, while I'm in a critical mood and bringing it back to Benjamin Biolay, may I just say now, any pop star who's going to have a hissy fit about how much it sucks when you love a girl and she loves you and you're having lots of great sex and it all rocks and then she gets pregnant and then everything goes to shit - just shut the fuck up, okay? Write a fucking instrumental instead. Nobody's interested. Except your poor fucking kid. God, Benjamin Biolay sucks.

But I'll give La Superbe a chance to grow on me. Maybe I've been spoiled with a heavy diet, when it comes to new music, of Nick Cave and Tom Waits (the only two white guys upon whom the F-word and I see eye to eye, and hence who are on heavy rotation) being middle aged monkeys who don't give a toss so they may as well try writing something no one else has written before. And while La Superbe may be a pastiche of the music of my childhood and adolescence, there's no doubt it's a beautifully arranged pastiche, and that's worth more than a little in this increasingly ugly world. However that feels rather exploitative at the moment too. At the point in his career where Biolay would have to count on aging Cureheads giving up their fascination with him as an attractive tubercular-Heathcliff-as-composer archetype, because we've all had adult relationships or psychoanalysis or both by now, he writes super-pretty pastiches of the songs of our childhood and adolescence and draws us back into the income-spending segment. Well, tough. It's nice but you'll get no money from me. I'm cheap as a teetotaller Scotsman and I've found Grooveshark.

Also - in all honesty, I think Owen Pallett has ruined me for other musically sensitive types with unexciting voices. His songs are all about more interesting things than that mopy gallic je-t'aime-moi-non-plus-who-to-kill-first-me-or-you shit and his arrangements, if often less pretty than Biolay's, are way more interesting and stay with me way longer. Here's the Final Fantasy song that's been stuck in my head for about a week:

Candidate

For awesomest animal ever: the blanket octopus. I'll let you read about it yourself if you like but there are five points that stand out:

1. They are immune to man'o war stings, so the immature ones will rip the tentacles off of the men'o war and carry them around to use themselves
2. They don't defend themselves with ink - instead the female has a great big blanket-y looking thing (hence the name) that she can unfurl to make herself look way bigger
3. The males are around 100 times smaller than the females
4. The males get the females pregant by drifting around until they manage to meet one; he fills up one of his tentacles with jissom, rips it off, hands it to her, and dies
5. They can out-weird Japanese television:

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses

So let's say you're the cardinals of the Catholic Church and you have a bunch of high-profile sex scandals in which several priests are revealed to be kiddie-fiddlers who you haven't adequately dissuaded or prevented from kiddie-fiddling. This makes a bunch of people hate you. Then your pope dies and you decide it's time to pick a new one. So then you pick the cardinal who oversaw - at best, at unrealistic best, at a best I'm only willing to admit might possibly exist because I understand there are no limits to human stupidity - the utter, jaw-dropping inadequacy of the reponse to hundreds of priests around the world being kiddie-fiddlers.

What does that make you? It makes that fucking stupid, that's what it makes you.

There are a lot of things that suggest that Catholicism is now, as it always has been, a sort of body corporate or a simple vehicle for the propogation and retention of wealth. You cannot have any familiarity with the history of the church without that being bleedingly obvious. Rather magically, the church has managed to create the illusion that is all a thing of the past, that people who rant and rave about church property and tax breaks and blah blah blah are a bunch of paranoiac nutters like that poor crazy fuck who flew his plane into the IRS building just recently.

But to me, counterintuitively but there you are, the bloody awful decision to put a charmless, cadaverous pitbull who oversaw decades of criminal, damnable institutional incompetence into the Popemobile is a superb demonstration of corporate behaviour, the sort of thing I see at work every day, the sort of thing that makes Carlo Cipolla's analysis of stupidity look less tongue-in-cheek and more simple observation.

Here's the thing. If you put a bunch of people together and employ them to promote the financial well-being of an institution which is not owned by any one person - and you would have to be as naive as a toddler to imagine that promoting the continued existence of a stagnating old leviathan like the Catholic church is in any way independent of promoting its financial well-being - you are grouping, and thus exponentially multiplying their stupidity.

In fact you are giving full rein to their stupidity, because their employment - ensuring the financial well-being of an institution - is an abstract concept involving principles that economists spend years trying and usually failing to learn in academic institutions. Hence they can be relied upon to do retarded things whose single obvious benefit, if they were intelligent, should not have outweighed multiple and equally obvious detriments - like outsourcing core business (which I don't object to in principle, but in reality usually means sacking competent, experienced people and hiring incompetent, inexperienced people whose contracts ensure they won't trouble themselves much to learn competence because it's not in their interest) or electing fucking Ratzinger to be pope because they think they need a tough guy to face down the competition (and maybe all the kids who had got fiddled by priests under his watch are either dead or had already come out about it, right?)

And surely the rest of your life will retain the full benefit of such intelligence as you possess - for the CEOs I deal with on a daily basis, ensuring the prosperity of themselves and their family; for a good priest, his and his parishioners relationship with the divine; for a bad priest, his access to kiddies to fiddle. And compounding the problem, benefits to the rest of your life from your employment supposedly ensuring the financial well-being of an institution (you personally accruing the maximum wealth possible, you personally having the time and the mental space to devote to your flock and the divine and trying not to get caught fucking children) are actually also demeritous to the goal of ensuring the financial well-being of the institution.

I still hate The Corporation for all those reasons I wrote about years ago, and another now. That film, from memory, presented corporations as scary, as a psychotic juggernaut that will destroy us all. One descriptor there is fatally wrong: they aren't psychotic, they are stupid. Massively stupid. They are juggernauts of pooled stupidity that will destroy us all if we fail to address the stupid. And the Catholic church is no exception.

Tears, many tears

as I watch this:

Plantentuin

Have discovered the botanical gardens here. It's not just that peice of shit downtown, they have something that'll really be world-beating out in Meise, just outside of Brussels, when it's properly established. Right now the greenhouses are just a cacaphony of young plants and the grounds are full of babies too . . . but also have a metasequoia . . . and when I went last weekend everything was juuuuust about to burst into leaf. By the time I get back it will have. Buds are pregnant with promise everywhere and I've started eating nettles again because the air is about to be full of plants having sex and making hay fever sufferers sneeze.

So it's very exciting, it means I've survived another damn winter, and now I'm moving to Australia so I've almost made it . . . Seriously, winter, fuck yourself.

Also love botanical gardens because they are the Mistress La Spliffe versions of five-star hotels, in that they keep out the riff-raff. You can pay several hundred euros for a night in an institution which keeps out poor and middle class assholes, which just leaves you with rich ones. Or you can go to a botanical garden, where nobody goes unless they're the sort of people who like botanical gardens, who are the sort of people who don't make me feel crowded, which keeps out rich assholes as well as poor and middle class ones. In Madrid, for example, when we came across some kids who were getting high in a greenhouse in the botanical gardens, they didn't just play loud annoying music or speak in awful high-pitched voices, they shared. Mind you that's probably just Spain. God, I love Spain.

Wrong side of the picket line

Finished the Colin Tudge book. It's the sort of thing that makes you want to rush out and plant a forest. Speaking of which, some environmentalist groups that like forests picketed us yesterday. Not us-us, as in our grunt work office, but shiny-happy-MBA-us, which at the time was congregating with hundreds of our shiny-happy-clients, including some whose companies are responsible for some ecological hecatombs. Shiny-happy-MBA-us is abuzz with annoyance that they would have dared.

Me, I think it's a great idea. Okay, maybe you can raise a nice stink having a dowtown demo about how great forests are and how it's shitty to cut them down. Maybe you can chain yourself to some excavators. Maybe you can even get on the fucking news. But I think it's a far better thing by far to show up at industry events like ours and make every effort possible to embarass the motherfuckers who are actually in the process of paying for the cutting down. I have to talk to these people on a daily basis and they are absolutely convinced of the rightness of what they're doing; maybe a little personal embarassment will force them to re-evaluate their morality. Probably not. But it's worth a shot. And the least they deserve is a little confrontation.

I was talking about this with the F-word last night - trying to work out how many lives your average Catholic paedophile priest can ruin over a career (my guess was 800) or a serial killer can put a full stop on (I don't know, lots?) and how many lives one of these companies at the industry event in particular has ruined or ended by this point (without even counting the orang-utans). I'm not saying anything in defence of Catholic paedophile priests, mind, or of serial killers. But I was just a touch overwhelmed that society is so unfond of them, and then are willing to pay executives of these life-ruining companies tonnes of money to keep up the good work - especially the people, there but for the grace of God go I, whose job is to paint environmental turds green. Okay, I know the wherefores. But last night the irony got to me.

Running out of fantasy fodder

You know - and I this is on my mind not merely because Corey Haim died, because I don't know him from Croesus, but because another guy at work died, and yes, you may have noticed that's been a disproportionate number (three in a year, if you count M, but this one worked in a different office and my interactions with him were limited, so I'm unnerved by the unexpectedness and sad for his circle but not at all fucked up as I was/am over M) - I really am not looking forward to how I'm going to feel when celebrities who I wanted to have sex with when I was pubescent start dying. Teenagers manage this ridiculous level of passion for total strangers and I have a feeling it echoes through the years, as I still can't pass over news reports about them in utter indifference.

David Bowie having a heart attack was worrying, as were those "Jeff Goldblum died in New Zealand" rumours. Mick Jagger is totally living on borrowed time and I have no idea what years of heroin use have done to Nick Cave's physiology. Tom Selleck and Robert Smith have both been worryingly quiet lately. Paul McCartney has those billions to keep his brain alive in a jar if all else fails so I'm not too bothered on that score. But every morning part of me fears reading that David Attenborough has given up the ghost. He just doesn't trek through the jungle on camera anymore so I have no way of knowing if he's still so - you know - vital or not.

Mind you when Michael Hutchence died I dealt with it quite well, and I'm quite sure that I wanted to have sex with him when I was pubescent, although now, not having kept a detailed enough diary, I don't know if he fell into the post-15 yr old "hey wait maybe sex isn't icky" catchment area that I'm still living in, or if he fell into the "maybe we can play with My Little Ponies together" pre-15 yr old catchment area. When did Kick come out? I don't even remember. Sunrise, sunset.

Anyways. Besides youthful obsessions echoing through the years, the thing is, in sexual fantasy terms, they're just not going to be replaced en masse with new celebrities. I like to think, fondly and foolishly I know, that part of the reason I don't get many new celebrity crushes anymore is because I'm in a satisfying adult relationship, though it's apples versus oranges really, or rather all of the exciting and nourishing fruits of the forest versus a well-marketed Twinkie. But I don't think it's just that, because now all the new young heart-throbs are so young. So obviously young. Which is gentle, woman-code for 'fucking moronic looking'. Plucked and poofed like fucking prize chickens. I fucking ask you. Can you point me towards a famous putatively attractive celebrity male of my own or the younger generation who doesn't look like Magnum PI's fey little doormat?

Losing my workigion

These days I have the feeling of clawing my life back a little bit. There was another brief firing orgy at the office recently which has reminded me - as it always does, and as I always forget due to this strange habit I have of anthopomorphizing everything to be cute, making it seem like my company is a nice, jolly old man who has some concern for his employees - that I work for a very typical sort of firm whose motive for existence is a short-term bottom line, and I could break my balls for a million years for them but that won't prevent them from getting rid of me the second I become inconvenient.

And the present fact of the matter is that I'm currently working two full-time jobs for them, have been since the middle of last year and will be until I leave, at the same pay I was getting in 2007, and they're still not ready to give me any commitments as to the mid-term future. I would like one - I'd like to stay with them - but in view of the utter fucking ball-breakage I'd also like not to. S0. Time to stop breaking my balls.

Part of that is that now I leave at the crack of five on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, or the commensurate hour based on when I arrive in the morning. The new CSA we've joined that I have to pick up from at 17h30 on Mondays provides an excuse, oh it's so much better than the last one, I just show up with money and leave with food, and no more fuss or muss involved than is inevitable in view of the fact that it's a Flemish organization whose local chapter is run by Francophones who can't even decipher the label "kleine groenten" on the small vegetable packet. Wednesdays and Fridays are obviously fucked, but I plan to leave at five on those days too on the days when I'm not the one putting out the magazines.

Mostly it's a frame of mind though. Understanding my company isn't, in fact, a kind jolly old man who will reward me for working insanely long hours and breaking my balls at my 2007 pay is very liberating, very stress-alleviating, something like becoming an atheist after being raised Mormon would be, I imagine.

And when you combine that with the fact that the recent firing orgy is a damn clear indication that not only do they not give much of a fuck about each of us as individuals, they also don't give a fuck about the quality of the product we're putting out - well, it obviously signals I can untwist my knickers a little about it too. I remember - heavens, this is so naive - feeling until quite recently that it was odd that I was very conscious of doing an absolutely crackerjack job in a lot of domains, and yet not getting any positive feedback at all from my boss boss - have never got any positive feedback from him, or indeed any feedback of any kind, though he said all the right things when M disappeared, which I appreciate.

I used to think that was because he was one of those types who was concerned that if he offered positive feedback his staff would get lazy, but now I'm pretty sure he actually honestly doesn't know or care - us doing a really ace job is not what his rewards or motivation is based on.

Fair enough.