The Red Dragon ponders where she came from

Pardon me for the lack of links and italics in the following entry but the F-word hasn't updated his browser since Belgium had a goverment. We've been watching a neat-o documentary about dinosaurs. Dinosaurs haven't lost any of their fascination for me because I only watched the first Jurassic Park for the Jeff Goldblum, who I dug whilst pubescent, and also because I'm so into making up bullshit relative to evolutionary psychology. And because they're big. With great big teeth and spikes and shit. Fuckin' A!

So Thursday is the easy day at work, and having dinosaurs on the brain I decided on a little light wikireadiaing about the evolution of mammals, hoping I could find some distant, implausible but emotionally pleasing evolutionary explanation for my various perversions. And did I ever! I happened to be listening to my not-so-secret guilty pleasure, Chris Isaak, of course singing "Wicked Game", as I read that during the Triassic* "acute senses of hearing . . . became vital" for our insectivore ancestors, and "this accelerated the development of the mammalian middle ear, and therefore of the mammalian jaw since bones which had been part of the jaw joint became part of the middle ear."

At that point all of human voice-y things suddenly laid themselves out for me as one extended mating call, one complicated effort made in a billion different ways to get some appropriate person to make babies with you. And that all our various perversions are just a way of maintaining some sort of genetic diversity - if you like wearing socks whilst fucking**, for example, but no one else in your tribe likes fucking in socks, you'll look outside of your tribe and use your incredible talking abilities to work out who likes fucking in socks. And the better you are at talking about them the more you can make those perversions painstakingly precise or subtle, because the cleverer you are about investigating whether other people are into them, and the further afield you'll go to satisfy them. Which is why humans, the best talkers in the animal world, are also unquestionably the biggest pervs.

Not sure how Chris Isaak fits into all this. I reckon as an example, because someone who uses the word 'wicked' so many times in a sexy song must understand something precise about guilty sex that thousands of ex-Catholic chicks like me dig and he's communicating that subtly to all of us at once by having a moaning duet with his guitar. Does jazzing on an abstract emotional concept of sensual good and evil divorced from your partner in any sense except his sheer inappropriacy count as a perversion? I should say so. A wicked game indeed. Well spotted, Chris. But pretty much guaranteed to get you out & spreading your genetic material beyond your own little tribe of Madonna-worshipping Cathos who'd prefer to fuck you through a hole in the bedsheets or have a few glasses of wine and then treat you like a prozzy.

I love bullshit evolutionary psychology, it's my fave. The post-modern way of saying God is on your side . . .

*Why do they insist on such funny names for prehistoric eras? Reminds me of the three-assed monkey from South Park.

**One of the more revolting consensual perversions in existence. I'm pretty open minded but that shit is gross.

The Red Dragon works (kinda) hard for the money

The Bosswoman is taking us out for lunch today because our deadlines have been advanced for the past week or so and it's been hairy. But you know something - it hasn't been THAT hairy. I'm not saying my job's not hard, but it's not that bad and prrrrrobably it could get a good bit badder before I started really complaining . . . I thought it was important to write that this morning in case it does. I have a review coming up and I'm dreading being told I should be working harder or that since I've been working so beautifully they're going to give me more work to do beautifully - you can see how I might have a sensation of not being able to win, going into this thing.

Though it would be cool if they gave me more money. I just found out that there's no wealth or capital gains tax in this country, and since I have an expat contract that's already getting me more money than I've ever made in my life, even if it's not going to get me a pony anytime soon, and only gets slapped with a fraction of the AVERAGE 50% income tax 'normals' have to pay here*, and since my partner in crime is a master of frugal-but-delectable living, and since the weather is too shitty to spend much time wandering around looking for places to spend money, and since the reefer is fucking cheap, Brussels may be the place that I save enough to retire during my breeding years, or at least move somewhere climactically pleasing.

I also thought it was important to point out my job's not that bad because I have a habit of answering the question "How's it going?" at work in the morning with "Great", "Lovely" or "Fuckin' A!", particularly if I've just got laid, and yesterday, after seven months, I realized that never fails to surprise people. Of course they're mostly English people from the south who're used to displaying no emotion whilst sober besides a sort of frustrated tolerance for the circumstances in which they find themselves, but still, it makes me think there's some sort of value to accentuating the positive. What that is, I haven't quite worked out yet.

*Can you believe that shit? And their social system and infrastructure is no better than France and a good deal worse than the Netherlands - I've stopped blaming the Flemish for wanting to seperate, though that's the topic of another post.

The Red Dragon warms her chilly bones

Baby steps, baby steps. Everybody in Brussels has a cold except me. Maybe my immune system still exists. Maybe it's even getting stronger. Since I arrived I've been the office's early warning system for each new bug making the rounds but I feel fine and others are out of commission. Maybe some day I'll actually give a round of the common cold a miss.

Fell violently in lust with my tai yogilates instructor last night, which was the highlight of a lackadaisical class. When he was telling us to 'elevez vos hanches' and demonstrating, I certainly exercised my imagining muscles, even if my core muscles remained untouched. Tai yogilates is sexy in French. The gym I joined on Monday is the Easyjet of the health club world - no frills, not a single one, besides a propensity towards hiring attractive instructors. No soap in the showers, no water fountains, nothing. I like it though - all the machines are new and fantabulous, and it only costs 25 a month.

I joined the gym just in time. Though I'm in good shape at the mo from all the walking and healthy living, I need extra aerobic exercise to keep my bones hot because it's fucking COLD here. My apartment is COLD. Also my apartment is now too COLD to shower in so I need to do so at the gym - an excellent incentive to actually show up, as is the fact it's right next to the office.

You turn me right round baby

Dreamt about tornadoes last night. I was in Edmonton, or a place I thought was Edmonton because it was mostly skyscrapers and a few old houses that were being foreclosed on due to variable rate mortgages, and it was really flat. I don't think houses are actually being foreclosed on there due to variable rate mortgages but in my lizard-brain Edmonton and Cleveland are more or less flatter/hotter versions of each other with disenfranchised natives and disenfranchised black people standing in for each other - haven't been to either so I don't know why. In my dream I was in my lizard-brain version of Edmonton, sitting around on the verandah of one of the old houses with my mum and dad and someone else, I think Elvis but I'm not sure. Dad was giving me a haircut because I'm not happy with the one I got here before the Benjamin Biolay concert, and he was a bit nervous because he hadn't cut a bird's hair since he cut mine when I was eight and he hadn't yet banished me to the world of femme-y hairdressers.

We went to a run down old shopping centre and were poking around a chinoiserie shop ran by a middle-aged Asian couple around my parents' age, when I glanced out the door and saw eleven or twelve tornadoes on the horizon that looked big to my untrained eyes. 'There's a bunch of tornadoes,' I said, 'I reckon we'd better go to the basement.' The Asian couple had a look and decided indeed we should, so we did. It was quite a nice basement. I think they were running a childcare/school down there but the kids weren't around, just the desks and bright colours and whatnot. Dad wrapped up my haircut and then I got a little restless, so I told them I'd be back in a mo and went to explore the rest of the basement.

Turns out it was another little commercial complex down there with restaurants and bars and stores full of crap, which was tedious, but then I walked up a half-flight of stairs to where a small crowd of people were watching the progress of the tornadoes. It was pretty neat looking. They were wandering around the skyscrapers, occasionally pushing one to the side and blowing shit around. But suddenly one was RIGHT THERE. I had a little scream, as did everyone else, and then I ran back into the basement looking for my family and unable to remember in my panic which part of the basement they were in. I maintained a degree of calm by reminding myself they, and I, weren't getting any safer than we were in that collective basement, but I was desperate to be with them, and tearing around like a madwoman, backtracking, peering, trying to remember where I came from.

If my subconscious was a television show, it'd have a painfully intrusive laugh track.

Ticky tacky houses

Tried to be rigorously efficient this weekend and was only moderately so - still - that exceeded expectations. considering the White Widow that's been sitting around. Took a break to socialize, and as the evening was winding down, or the morning winding up, our hosts showed us the first three episodes of Weeds with Marie-Louise Parker, Kevin Nealon, et cetera . It was pretty funny. I liked it though I don't have time to go into that (time! How did it get so precious?).

What I thought was remarkable was even now, even in our post-Sopranos landscape that has raised the bar so high on specialty television and made the sitcom format seem quaint enough to be radicalized by the adventures of a pot-dealing mum, a 25-minute pilot episode still more or less has to stand alone AND get you hooked, like a trembling young stripper at his first hen party, surreptitiously praying his panties get stuffed with bills and that no one laughs at his willy.

If I was a television enthusiast - which many of you know I am NOT, unless the enthusiasm is for shit-canning them (even the 'high-quality' stuff is just an excuse to make us think cool rich people drink Coca Cola when they don't, they drink fucking pomegranate juice or whatnot, this is 2007 and we have ideas about anti-oxidants now, people), I would collect pilot episodes and study them with rapt attention, trying to see how the creators of the show created what's effectively a half or full hour ad for the show that in its turn will serve as bait to make us watch thousands of other ads.

Puke.

It's not November all year

What with having given the summer a miss, I'd forgotten all about it, but this is the premier cranky time of year. The Young American stormed out of work yesterday, Madame Pariyorker is in a state, I feel the world is cruelly indifferent to my potentialities and I make everyone around me pay for it, people keep going on stress leave and it's just so fucking dark.

Sigh. Time to join the gym. That'll cheer me up some - and I have to remember it's only going to keep on getting worse for less then a month and a half before it starts getting better.

The good news is the Young American's husband who works in catering keeps getting spare food, so the other day I brought home about 30 oranges that I've been juicing. I consider juicing an abomination because of all the associated wastage but when someone gives you 30 free oranges and you have a hand reamer, you'll make orange juice, even if it means feeling slightly decadent when there are starving people in the world, and even though you're trembling with laughter a bit because you're reaming something. Heh heh heh.

Roberto Esperanza

Saw a fucking hilarious film the other night with Adriano Celentano and Anthony Quinn, called Bluff: storia di truffe e di imbroglioni. I don't know Adriano Celentano from Santa - he's a very famous Italian singer but I avoid Italian music like the plague - apparently he's like the Italian Bob Hope, by which I mean he grabs women's tits on camera. Anyways, funny.

And that's about all I have to write this morning. There are other things to go on about but they mostly have to do with how suffocated I feel at the moment in terms of a lack of personal space and time because of work and also because I haven't quite figured out cohabitation yet, and with some guilt issues over how bad I've been at keeping in touch with people back home, and such issues deserve no more than the present sentence in this forum.

18 hours of travelling = 18 hours of reading

Whilst travelling I read some books to pass the time, and I continue to be amazed at how slowly The Waves goes - not in a bad way, though. Beautiful words, beautiful sounds, that you want to take your time with - like how you always have to slow down during a hurried morning commute when part of it takes you through a lovely park.

In between picking up and putting down The Waves, I read the rest of The Old Patagonian Express, and happily Paul Theroux found a bunch of things he liked. And wrote about it so engagingly that now I want to go to Patagonia, even though the bit about Patagonia was a tiny part of the book. The friend of the F-word that we stayed with in Berlin is Chilean so I could pick his brains a little about it. Maybe one day I'll move there. It just seems so beautifully quiet and I could go for weeks and weeks without seeing people. Of course I'd go utterly barking mad, but having seen what it's like growing old without madness that doesn't seem so bad. Anyways, yesterday by chance in the bookstore close to work I found The Great Railway Bazaar, a Theroux book about crossing Asia by train, so in a few days I might want to grow old and mad in Vietnam - we'll see what he has to say.

Also read The Conformist from Alberto Moravia, as I'd liked the Bertolucci film with Jean Louis Tritignant or however you spell his bloody name so much. The book was different; there was some surrealism to its unremitting narrative realism, to its dictation of Marcello's scared and ignoble thoughts, but not the same as in the film, not as colourful, not as sexy, not as violent - god, that murder scene in the film for example. Wasn't in the book, or rather was in the book, but third-hand, and altogether nobler, less like a messy, horrifying murder. The book read like a cautionary tale being told to you by a literary, well-meaning uncle, and while the narrative was 100% warning you about Marcello by taking his point of view, you learnt far more about the side characters, like his poor wife Giulia, than in the film, where the tangential characters are side more than fleshy effects. But then the film had some marvellous images. Both recommended.

I was made for loving you

So, Berlin. That city is like a dream. Not a huge Wim Winders fan but it's easier to take angels seriously in a place like that. Not pretty - not even the Museum Island is pretty - but very, very lovable. What made it more like a dream, besides the fine reefer and the early darkness, was the German language, which is like a dream language. When they look at me and natter on, the rhythms are so English that I can't understand why I don't understand. And then sometimes I do understand - the harder I listen the more I understand - and that was dreamlike too. The surreal is ante-ed up by the way that city makes so much goddamn sense and whenever I got confused, everything was sorted out before I got twitchy. It's like I've lived there before, but really it's just phenomenal urban planning.

Regret is futile because there wasn't anything more I could have done about it, but fuck, am I ever sad now Tr@nsparency Intern@tional didn't hire me after shortlisting me last year. Oh well. C'est la vie.

We did lots of fun stuff, of which the most recommendable in a public forum was the Pergamon museum, a staggering cultural rape show well worth the half-hour line and the 9 euros - they brought over the fucking Pergamon altar and Ishtar Gates bit by bit, for god's sake. Also the State Opera, where I saw Carmen - sold out except for the sight-obscured nosebleeders that were going for 8 euros, but great sound.

I'd seen Carmen in Toronto back when they were still using the Hummingbird Centre and frankly comparing the two productions was embarrassing - like comparing the Stratford Festival to a highschool production. Though Paolo Szot in Toronto made a better Escamillo, by which I mean sexier. I think the Berlin production meant to make Escamillo emblematic of death, and I'm sorry, Escamillo isn't emblematic of death, he's emblematic of a fucking sexy bullfighter. But there was just no comparison between Larissa Kostiuk as Carmen and Elisabeth Culman - not putting down Kostiuk but Culman had a lovely rich honey voice that made me think of Maria Callas doing it. A lower and more beautiful register for the part. Heavenly.

Listing dangerously

Berlin was awesome. Awesome awesome awesome. I feel like a new woman and my SAD is fought right back. Nonetheless I have no time this morning to tell you about how great everything is, so let's go on with the list of most weepable songs ever:

6. 'Lover, You Should’ve Come Over', Jeff Buckley. I think Jeff Buckley woke up one morning and decided to write a song that would make girls emotional, sort of like a cat that wakes up and decides it’s the day it waits by a mousehole until it catches a mouse. Well, consider me caught. There’s a demanding urgency in the high wailing and the ‘say it’s not too late’ that Jeff Buckley makes sound universal, as well as like a particularly artful orgasm.

7. 'Laisse aboyer les chiens', Benjamin Biolay This song showcases all the weaknesses of his weak voice, but in context. Theatrical lyrics about female opacity in the face of a man’s despairing love (“You’ve cut me by the roots, I’m pale like a bag of heroin, my angel, etc.”) that make you understand, perhaps by virtue of the cracking, unbeautiful voice that sings them or of the melancholy, beautiful backing instrumentation, that his heart really is irretrievably broken, and now he’s going to fucking kill you. Somehow that's sad instead of infuriating.

8. 'Little Darlin’', Benjamin Biolay. Gone on about it before. More cracking, unbeautiful Biolay-voice, complimented by samples of what’s lovely and melancholy about the Carter Family – he’s a genius for having found it. He found what’s melancholy and beautiful about Marylin Monroe’s voice for a track on Rose Kennedy, 'Les Cerfs-Volants', but I prefer this.

9. 'Crown of Love', Arcade Fire. Maybe our romantic lives get higher stakes as we age, but I know for a fact I shed more tears over one boy when I was 14 than I’ve shed over all the boys put together since. One would rather like to bookend and forget such a shitty, stupid, honest time, but this moaning, soaring, violining protest against one’s own obsession, taciturnity and incoherence is an effectively shmaltzy reminder emotional waltzes aren’t just for teenagers.

10. 'Homesick', the Cure. Speaking of, I owe it to my 14 year old self to have at least one Cure song on the list. I’ve never found the Cure depressing and in fact now I find it almost provokingly, vacuously cheerful. But there’s always this song and most of the Disintegration album to remind me why I spent those years in black. This pretty-little-wrist-slitting-ditty moans out everything about wanting to go home but knowing home’s not really there anymore, not how you’re wanting it anyways. I wonder what I thought it meant when I was 14.

Halloween comes sickeningly

So. Following my plan to embrace my navel-gazing seasonal misery, last night I went to a Benjamin Biolay concert despite a nasty headache from having my long and curlies viciously brushed and blowdried to Afghan-hound-straightness by a sadistic, perfumed, pretty hairdresser who made me feel inadequate in all respects as a woman except, of course, that I have a body like a shapely sack of bowling balls and she had tits like fried eggs. Hah. Now today I have a huge headache and an upset tummy and I'm taking the day off work because I don't get paid by the hour. Double hah.

I wasn't expecting much. I'd heard he wasn't touring with strings or horns, and that he was a wooden and uncertain performer who'd rather not perform - heard that after I'd bought the tickets, of course. But expectations be buggered, for it was a fucking good concert. A rich indie sound, though he's not, of course, he's EMI or Virgin or something. Great texture. Great rhythm. That three-and-a-half dimensional sound you get at a show carried out by people who understand fully how music works as a collaboration. And his voice - I didn't know this was possible with pop acts - is better live than on the albums, and him actually suggesting melody with it goes a long way to making up for the lack of all the recorded instruments.

The best songs to hear live were from A l'origine, an album I like but whose tracks sound much better - louder, angrier, faster, and in the case of 'Tant le ciel etait sombre'* scarier live than they do recorded. A l'origine was apparently a commercial disaster, Trash Yeye selling more in its first two weeks then A l'origine has ever sold, and I thought it was interesting that he played so many songs from an album that tanked. Except it wasn't interesting at all, because the songs seemed like they'd been written for live performance. Certainly more so than the pretty tinkliness of Rose Kennedy (though I'm a sucker for 'Les cerfs volants' and the MacBook Marylin singing 'The River of No Return' brought me close to tears) and the gloomy folk rants off Negatif, which both came before. Not to say the renditions of songs from those albums were lots worse than the songs from A l'origine, but they were different from the recorded versions. He'd arranged them in a way that was more appropriate for a live show and it was good.

As for him as a performer - maybe he got a bit more self-confidence since the last round of critiques. Because while he looked like a freestyle rapper who'd smoked a whole lotta spliffery, and while there was cynicism in his carriage and banter bespeaking an awareness of the absurdity of the audience/rock star dynamic, his musical delivery was fantastic, and not cynical. The right energy, the right pitch, the right emotion. And there were some honest to goodness rock star moments when I would have thrown my panties at the stage if I hadn't been wearing trousers, such as when he started playing the trumpet for 'Dans le Merco-Benz'.

It didn't hurt that he had a great four-piece backing him, of which the drummer was the most obviously great to me. It did hurt that the one backing voice he had was from a very breathy woman who was more sound effect than soprano. He used proper voices to great effect on Trash Yeye and there's no excuse for not ponying up a couple thousand extra dollars for a trained singer who can modulate her voice without sounding like she's just finished gagging on someone's dick. But then that sort of voice seems so popular in French music. I think it's part of their unhealthy gender dynamics, which one day I will write a series of extended angry blog entries about, because, you know, I can. Triple hah.

Also, while him playing the trumpet made me want to throw my panties at him, it also reminded me there wasn't enough trumpeting, that there weren't any strings. Okay, it was a good sound, but it would have been a sublime sound with them, particularly on 'Los Angeles', which was missing its lovely rise-and-fall line in the refrain. Finally, the show was hurt by 'Little Darlin'' not getting played so I could really indulge my SAD. It made me think maybe he needs a full time sampler. But he was a touch of a human sampler, trotting out the refrain to 'Clint Eastwood' while winding up 'Negatif' and making it sound like music to massacre to. And he sang 'As Time Goes By' and made it sound, and excuse me for the earthiness of it all, like music to make babies to. Another rock star moment, when I simultaneously congratulated and berated myself for wearing pants.

Verdict - buy all his shit and see him live.

*Which I think will be my theme tune for this round of seasonal affective disorder, because the ciel in this city is sombre - Jeebus fucking Murphy, Halloween and I already want to shoot myself - happy Halloween, by the way!

Daylight, save me!

Daylight Savings Time is fucking brutal. My seasonal affective disorder is kicking in like a soccer playing motherfucker. So I'm trying to be all farmery about it - getting going earlier, spending a bit more time outside despite the weather being execrable. This year, I'm trying something else that worked pretty well for me when I was a teenager; self-consciously embracing the depression. In that vein, here's the first few songs in a list of 15 songs that have a strong tendency to make me cry:

1. 'Parigi o cara', Giuseppe Verdi. I get the feeling people these days would really dislike the public persona of a celebrity like Violetta, to the degree of her illness starting up a morbid Britney-Spears-esque deathwatch. No matter. The mutually delusional swansong of Violetta and her man, whose name I don’t remember, is chilling, sad and beautiful, its little minor notes and slightly jarring end a failsafe way to get me to cry.

2. 'Grandma’s Hands', Bill Withers. Even thinking about the lines “she said ‘baby, Grandma understands that you really loved that man, put yourself in Jesus hands’” followed by the final verse and conclusion ‘when I get to Heaven I’ll look for Grandma’s hands’ sung by a man whose voice is maybe the most effecting in pop music always reduces me to a pile of snot. The musical equivalent of a bucket of water on the Wicked Witch of the West.

3. 'Stand By Me', John Lennon. Only the Rock and Roll version; I've heard him slaughter it elsewhere. This filthy, rich, pebbles-in-a-cheese-grater plea to let good love endure usually makes me shed a couple of unsad, cathartic tears. The backing, especially the percussion, is good enough to make me think Lennon was a selfish fucking twat for not listing the band members on the liner notes. But his vocals here are still the best thing any Beatle did after the Beatles stopped being the Beatles. Though we mustn't forget:

4. 'Starting Over', John Lennon. It’s the most stapley staple of post-Beatledom because even two legless drunkards can dance to it. In fact, this is the song Elvis taught me to couples-dance to and it remains the only song I’m fully comfortable couples-dancing to, besides the 'Stand By Me' above. The thought of Elvis, who made my childhood hell but who now lives too far away from me, a whole fucking planet away, combined with the trembly uncertain joy of love that keeps coming back from the dead without behaving like a zombie, usually gets me weepy.

5. 'Purple Avenue', Holly Cole. When she leans and dips on the line ‘I’ll sleep right here on the draaaaaaaaining board’, my heart remembers all the times it broke and curled up for a long, stunned rest. And I cry. That bell-like voice of hers yodeling out Tom Waits’ incisor words is as satisfying as successful plastic surgery. She followed this album up with an album completely made up of Waits covers and I’m itching to get my hands on it.

Anyways, that's enough for today. Tonight I'm going to a Benjamin Biolay concert, and two of his tracks feature elsewhere on the list, so that will be plenty depressive for me. In that vein here's the least depressing weepable song on the above list:

Not something to bring up at your next AA meeting

Went to a lovely exhibition yesterday in Ghent, or as the French call it "Gaw(n)" or as the Dutch atrociously call it, "Hxxxxhentt." You remember that scene in Splash when Tom Hanks asks the dewy and delicate Darryl Hannah what her name is in her own language, and she yelps out a shocking, painful series of unfiltered dolphin cries? That's the way I feel whenever a Dutch person says anything. Anyways, we went to Ghent to see an exhibit at their splendid gallery called British Visions - lured in by the promises of Lucian Freud, who the F-word loves, and Turner, who I love, and lots of others - David Hockney, who I never feel is faking it - Hogarth, who's just so heartbreakingly funny - and a bunch of Francis Bacons; poor Francis Bacon. I guess you can't tell much about a man from his work but when I look at anything he's painted I feel he's sure he's going to hell when he dies - an unsympathetic dread of his own future, an uncensored vision of his own futile present. It makes neat paintings but I would not have traded brains with him for anything. And then lots of Stanley Spencer, who was new to me but very appealing, even in the way his second wife's breast wrinkled in the painting of them together.

Anyhoo, we were mostly there for the newer stuff, but it did occur to me as we looked at the older stuff that we don't fully appreciate what Europeans have achieved, culturally. Oh sure. We put the past in museums and we traipse the schoolchildren through them, struggling to instill greater regard for our own narrative than the narratives of our historical enemies or underlings. We protest when newcomers don't slot into our molds, we watch absurd period piece movies, and we devote the economies of cities like Bayreuth, Florence and Stratford to celebrating the glories of the past. But we never consider all the hurdles that our European predecessors had to overcome to create our patrimony, principal among which in my mind today was that they were drunk from dawn until dusk, from being weaned to being shriven. They were drunk, drunk, drunk.

Everybody was full of something that had been fermented or distilled in an effort to kill all the bad bacteria that was swimming around the water in those days, everybody was tolerating sieges where the enemy would chuck corpses into your water supply, everybody was paranoid about Jews or heretics or witches poisoning wells, or whoever. So everybody was pissed out of their tree. They went from their mother's tit to the bottle and they stayed there until they died. And despite this, somehow we had the Renaissance, Goya, the Van Eyck brothers, opera, orchestras, Gothic architecture, the postal service, Yorkshire pudding, colonialism, Shakespeare, guns, the re-invention of the novel, and all the other things that make us go 'how did they do that!?!' when we ponder what our ancestors achieved without laptops, GPS, or a life expectancy much beyond 30. Who knows how they did it, but do it they did, and they did it all drunk.

The Querolous American

So I have a new friend, by which I mean someone who I'll buy birthday presents for or at least feel guilty over if I forget or am too broke to buy presents for. Beastly sentence. Anyways, she's American and I like her pretty much best of all the girls who I've met here, and I realized in Paris my dearest girlf is also American. I spend a fair amount of time bashing America. For example, last night at a certain degree of highness, the F-word gave a mini-lecture on German cinema in the 1920's, to which my response was an extended diatribe about how emotionally retarded American cinema remains because of the historically infantilizing effect of the Hay's Code - though obviously I was too high to remember it was the Hay's Code - I think I called it 'that 1930's Jesuit shit' and the F-word understood.

My point is I spend a fair amount of time bashing American market dynamics, political structures, foreign policy, social programs, income inequality, et cetera - maybe less time than I spend bashing France or Canada, but still a disproportionate amount of time considering I've never lived there - and yet the cultural and social reference points I have in common with my American girlfriends makes their company just superb when I'm living abroad. There are particularities to living in Europe which wouldn't be tolerated in Canada, the States, or Australia which I need to discuss with people from those places when they bug me, just so I know I'm not going insane when they piss me off.

For example: though the F-word and I are European citizens and hence have the automatic right to live and work here in Belgium, the mandatory process of acquiring an identity card is one that takes several weeks and a couple of visits to the local city hall and police station. We need the identity card - our passports won't do, because they need to have our address on file. However, when I say the word 'file', I mean a physical slip of paper kept in a physical file, which is copied and given to the cops and other institutional bodies - eventually. And if there is a mistake on that piece of paper, all the copies of that piece of paper must be hunted down and corrected or the mistake will remain for the length of your tenure in Belgium.

In the case of my American friend and her Dutch husband, such a mistake was made four years ago when they registered at the local city hall and the trog civil slave there registered them as living in separate apartments in the same building, though they were married. The consequence of this is that four years later, they're still taxed as individuals instead of as a family, because not all the pieces of paper have been corrected. Every year she complains to the taxation authorities, every year they refer her back to her local city hall so the trog civil slaves there can correct the mistake, every year the trogs fail to do so and every year she's taxed once more as an individual instead of as a family.

Of course, in Canada or the States (at least in California, where she's from), records would be sufficiently integrated and electrified that the mistake could be corrected over the phone, probably whilst talking to the tax people, and never worried about again. But making an effort towards that degree of integration and electrification here - taking away all those little physical slips of paper - would mean that half of the troggy civil slaves responsible for their upkeep, copying, and correcting would become even more redundant than they are now. Then the government would try to cut civil slavey jobs, and then there'd be strikes. The country would shut down for a few weeks, billions of euros pissed down the drain, and in the end the records would stay papery and shitty because it's fundamentally cheaper that way. If you think about it stupidly.

Dreams of permanency

Alright, I'm over the Wii. It was good while it lasted but it's not anything you couldn't have played with in a science centre back in the late 90's. We're not getting one and I'm getting a gym membership. Life here has kept me relatively hardbodied, as I'm walking and biking everywhere, and the shittacular elevators in my building even persuade me to do 16-flight stair hikes which I would normally never even consider. But I have She-Hulk fantasies that I'm nowhere close to realizing, and too much tension from the desk time, so the gym it must be.

Five days or so to go before probation is over and I'm waiting with baited breath - no talk of sacking me yet so I don't think it will happen - but you never know. Management is British and they may just be being polite in that absolutely unhelpful British way. I don't think so, though. I think it will probably be okay. And once I get permanency, the classes and gym memberships will start, and before you know it I'll be twice as hardbodied and clever as I am now. Hubris? Well, no, because we don't have a television, which means I have the time and energy for it. If we had a television of course I'd be fucked.

A little light dinner conversation

So there's actually a debate now in Great Britain about abortion. It's not the same debate as in the States, about its fundamental legality or illegality, but I suppose touches on the same emotional question of its murderousness or non-murderousness. 194,000 in a year, if you ignore the 6,000 from Ireland. That does seem like rather a lot and much of the debate seems to centre around whether women are using it as a form of birth control rather than as . . . well . . . birth control. I mean, what else is abortion? It's a considered decision that one doesn't want to give birth. You can hardly blame women for using it as birth control considering it's fucking birth control.

What takes me back about the numbers, though, is if there are 194,ooo unwanted pregnancies there's probably exponentially more than 194,ooo instances of unprotected sex with people who you don't want to make a baby with, which I must say doesn't go far towards rectifying the image of the British as reckless drunkard aidoiomaniacs whose vies intimes are based on some sort of dare. Most of the ladies I work with are English, and many of them complain about how the Continentals perceive them as tipsy floozies who might give it up on the hood of a car, no strings attached, if you tell them they have nice eyes. I figure figures about 200,000 abortions a year aren't likely to help them out of that perception; I've been through my own tipsy floozy years, and it's not that hard to insist on the contraception string.

Especially in the face of the fact emergency contraception is available there. I mean, are there seriously 194,000 women a year there who can't get it together during the three days after unprotected sex to get to a doctor or pharmacist? Or are there almost 2 million women who do, and the 194,000 just represents the 10% failure rate? It's rather nasty the pharmacists are allowed to choose whether or not they hand it out to women in need - I mean, come on buddy, if you wanted to indulge a God complex at work, you should have sprung for the eight years of extra education to become a surgeon. But are so many indulging that women can't get the pill over a three day span?

More whining

Saw Batman Begins last night and thought it was a fine little superhero movie. I could have done without the love interest, which seemed contrived and distracted me from adding some texture to the storyline by imagining a nice Mistress La Spliffe sandwich with slices of Christian Bale and Cillian Murphy, but all in all it made me want to sick up less than all the other superhero or Batman movies I can remember. In fairness, I cannot remember the one before the one Michelle Pfieffer dressed up as Catwoman.

Of course, the scale on which I measure my fondness for these types of movies can be gauged along how much they make me want to sick up, with their Bruce Campbell-ian dialogue which is never delivered by Bruce Campbell unless it's an Evil Dead movie so what's the fucking point of talking like that. So I had a little think about superhero movies generally, which of course goes beyond the people in the silly costumes to the army-of-one cops that Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson built their careers on, whose brains would obviously be smeared across the pavement in the first ten minutes of any of the situations they deal with onscreen.

The conclusion was that they're the boy's own equivalent of rom-coms. I feel exactly the same way about rom-coms that I do about superhero movies and they're probably produced by exactly the same people. And then boys make fun of girls for liking rom-coms and girls make fun of boys for liking fetishistic hero movies. What a bloody world.

The Red Dragon Channels Eeyore

Deep depression this weekend, half biology, half weather. Watched a Neil LaBute play on Saturday about murdering children, gays, etc., which actually cheered me up on the basis of how annoying it was, which proved a distraction to my

deep

deep

pisser.

Watched the 'Cash' episode of the Young Ones and fell in love with the Mad Naked Bloke, which just made the depression worse. Because if I met a Mad Naked Bloke like that in real life, it'd be repellent. Isn't that depressing? Sigh.

Evolution Revolution Love, Red Dragon Style

Fucking International Herald Tribune. Put together a potentially awesome article about the evolution of sight and lunar triggers for coral orgies and then throw in an absolutely twat-faced paragraph like this:

'People have known about the moon's romantic possibilities for a long time. Shakespeare in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" relies on moonlight to set the mood. The 1987 movie "Moonstruck" features a love story centered on "La Bella Luna."'

It better have been an intern or a daughter on a Daddy/Daughter Day that put that shit together. I mean, if it was in the Metro or something, fine, but the IHT? Do you ever get the feeling everybody is dumbing down everything? And bringing up Moonstruck, indeed. Moonstruck was the rape of a culture. Did anybody buy those people as Italian besides fat bone-white troglodytes who pronounce it 'Eye-talian' and 'lazag-nee'? And they bring it up in the same sentence as Shakespeare. What a joke. What a fucking world.

You must excuse me - the first news item I saw today wasn't that, but the news 126 people were just blown up in Pakistan. So I have the feeling the world is going to hell in a handbasket. I feel like that more and more these days. I can give myself pause, think about world wars, colonialism, concentration camps, Inquisitions, sown epidemics, potato famines, and lots of things like that, and try to convince myself the world is no closer to getting to hell than it's ever been, but I find that technique works less and less at abating my feelings of impending doom.

I guess as people get older they tend to stop thinking things like "the Tudor period was hard, the Second World War was awful, Colonialism was a massive international disaster that benefited a tiny fraction of the people involved - why, things are quite good now in comparison!", because they realize that you can Capitalize and categorize historical events or periods of time in a textbook, but in real life history has a sloppy way of leading up to the present. And all the shit in the world gets to feeling cumulative instead of episodic. Or maybe they don't realize that and that's why people are so shitty at understanding each other when it counts. I don't know.

Anyways, that sort of culmination might only be on my mind because we watched 2001: A Space Odyssey last night. Stanley Kubrick obviously had a thing for sandy blue-eyed blondes who look like The Ex. Besides noticing that I have to say I lost most of my interest once there were no more monkeys.

The monkey bit, however, was awesome. I totally bought it. That was a great discovery of how to bash things, and it was one hundred percent believable to me that the monkey was inspired to bash by looking at the pretty smooth alien thing. Hollywood should make more caveman movies, that's a genre they've left pretty fallow since the 70's, which means it's due as God forbid they should think up something original. It'd be so cheap too - just dress a bunch of actors up in rags, get them to grunt, carry on, and invent the adjective or something. Get some big trained cats and some bears in to add tension, and film all the love scenes doggy-style. There. Done.

Mistress La Spliffe is shrewish

You know, the bloody Economist. I've said it before and I'll say it again - it's my favourite magazine ever, and if I was stuck on a desert island with a reliable subscription I'd only wail and gnash my teeth half as much as I would have otherwise. But only they could do something as egg-headedly chauvinistic as comparing hidden female oestrus to an 'evolutionary arms race between the sexes'. No, scratch that. Only they would find such a snarky huge metaphor to elaborate on what the mainstream attitude to evolutionary biology amounts to: a five-million year version of Taming of the Shrew. Fuck me, people are tedious.

(Just to go off course for a moment on how tedious people are - have you noticed? Complaining endlessly about how fucked up, complicated, baffling, infuriating, evil, inferior and all the rest of it the opposite sex are, and yet still devoting thousands of hours of brain power and billions of dollars to being noticed, accepted and loved by that same opposite sex when they could be painting or reading a book or something. Fucking tedious. Like a poisonous spiny fish that desperately wants to be cuddled by a grizzly bear. Make up your mind, you pack of twats, or just shut the fuck up and go home and jerk off. Bleeding Jeebus, it gives me the shits. Okay, digression done.)

Anyways, it's this sort of mainstream opinion that gives mainstream opinions a bad name, because it starts from an assumption about our nature which I think is assuming too much. And that is that the fundamental nature of human sexual relations is that a woman tricks a man into staying with her and sharing his resources with her, which a man will only do if he's convinced her children are also his. And hidden oestrus helps with this by only letting a man be sure her children are his if he stays with her nearly constantly and fucks her all the time. And this is why today we all get married and only nail other people on the down-low. It seems like all evolutionary theories in the Western world start from this point, to either reinforce or modify it but never to reject it and admit that maybe marriage is just a construct.

There are countless indications to tell us stay-and-fuck-constantly marriage model is flawed - societies where marital-type situations are of no importance compared to avuncular or matrilineal blood ties, societies where women select their mates out of line-ups, polyandrous societies. But perhaps most damningly for the the stay-and-fuck-constantly model, there's the fact that men never stay and fuck their women constantly, even in the most monogamous of monogamous societies, because it's their job to chase and kill animals and each other. Marriage is just one breeding model of dozens and dozens, and there's no evidence at all it was some sort of original, instinctual or 'right' model. It just happens to be ours so that's what everybody works with.

But oh wait - come back to it - because now we have a really important indication of how the stay-and-nail-constantly theory needs adjusting to make it right. Dr. Wilson has announced the results of his Albuquerque study: strippers make more money when they're ovulating and less when they're infertile, which means men must be able to perceive fertility on some level, which turns all this back into a slightly more complicated evolutionary Taming of the Shrew instead of the glorious and varied pageant that human sexuality is. This means the men can fuck their women when they're fertile and go off killing animals and each other when they're not, and still be pretty sure any kids popped are theirs. Huzzah! Marriage makes perfect evolutionary sense again! We're right! Africa, etc., is wrong!

Never mind that if he had actually spoken to the strippers, his sister, mother, wife, granny, or, like, any chick ever, he could have found out that women have more energy and sexual interest in men when they're ovulating and less when they're on the pill or on the rag. And possibly, possibly that might make strippers dance a little bit more energetically and engagedly, and possibly that might result in the punters giving them more money. But noooooo. That's far too simple. It must be about an evolutionary arms race between the sexes and the marriage model must be just plain simply fucking right.

Holy fucking tittyfuck. I can't believe people get funding to make this shit up when I have to work for a living. Did I mention people were tedious?