And how was your day, Mr. President?

So my friend from San Francisco might not move back for a variety of excellent reasons, one of which being the pile of money she was offered for the move is made out of dollars. We were talking about its plunging value, which is encouraging me to fly home via New York in October to buy a new, much lighter laptop for about half of what it would cost here or in Canada, even though it means some charm-deficient aeroport slavey will put their hands on my private areas because I look cranky and Mediterranean.

This segued into talking about this and that and the other and how fucked up everything is, including the Eliot Spitzer whoremongering. What I don't know about Eliot Spitzer could fill several volumes but I'm always fascinated with the idea of people who have so much credibility and status to lose nailing expensive prostitutes or putting cigars in interns' twats or snorting meth with their rent-boy. There's this element of perviness and exhibitionism about it that must be very exciting - knowing how much trouble you'd be in if you got caught - how much this one sexual act could completely transform your life. Sort of like losing your virginity over and over and over.

That was my perspective anyway. San Francisca thought that it was just a case of men not being able to help themselves sometimes. I can see where she's coming from, but firstly, several million men are able to help themselves so it's no excuse, and also none of the above-listed scandals were the spontaneous equivalent of having a few drinks too many and nailing someone you shouldn't because you can. Involving yourself in an established whoremongering ring, getting nasty with a cigar, finding meth and then hovering it up with your long-term boy . . . all of these have that pervy little air of thinking about the act being almost as important as the act itself. Which I, as a perv, congratulate and laugh at.

But the main reason I'd been at all intrigued by the john was that I'd just read a Washington Post article about his wife (I've been finding it hard to apply myself at work this week) which was just fucking glowing, and it made me wonder if there was already some sort of spin machine in operation about to launch her into her own national political career after she dumped her husband. San Francisca thought the political machine was possible but that the dumping wasn't; as a divorcée would never have a chance at making it far in national politics. Really? I asked, and really, she said. Really? Did divorcing really hurt Giuliani? I asked. Really, she said.

And if Hillary Clinton had dumped her husband for all his cheating, she really couldn't be where she is today? Really, she said.* This gave me something absolutely new to chew over, because I honestly don't think it's the case elsewhere in the western world that having had an unsuccessful marriage is going to fuck your political image beyond repair.

And then San Francisca shocked me further by saying she herself wouldn't support someone who had been divorced, because if they couldn't get their own lives together they couldn't be trusted to run a country. That totally blew my mind. A marriage, a presidency; it's a whole different skillset, surely. I mean, you have the qualities of honesty and communication that you'd want in both cases, so I guess I see where she's coming from. But when I get home from work I don't want the president to have a hot meal ready, to ask about my day and maybe fuck me if we're both in the mood. And I don't want my husband to have his finger on the nuclear button - I'm not Carla Bruni.

God, it's all so weird.

*Echoes of Ferraro. Her statement is more to be condemned for its utter pointlessness than its racism. None of us would be where we are if we weren't who we were. How has that not been pointed out by either campaign yet? Stupid Democrats.

My bosom buddies

In a monster of a grump today. Something is painfully wrong with my back. Combination of this damned cold wet climate, desk posture, hefting my six-year-old monster Dell laptop and as many tall cans of beer as I could carry across western Germany, and having tits that are way too big for my frame. Although I don't expect to age any more gracefully or willingly than the next person, there's at least one sense in which I look forward to menopause - the second I know they won't be required for reproductive/feeding purposes anymore, I can think about getting rid of them.

I guess I'm complaining but I shouldn't. I'm pretty sure having big tits changes everything and generally for the better. If I wasn't so cheap I could fix aching backiness by buying a computer that weighed less than a fucking full-grown mastiff - really I'm only blaming the tits because they're right in front of me and I'm in a grump. And as for other drawbacks - unwanted male attention? Who doesn't get that? Other men get unwanted male attention. And on the other side of the coin, I know that the tits have been an icebreaker when I've been getting to know men I turned out to really like - an asset whose absence I'd have had to make up for somehow, with a scintillating personality or a more convincing ability to laugh at their crappy jokes, or something. I don't know.

The truth is, I don't know much about men in some pretty key ways. While I don't feel like they're some weirdo alien species, and I prefer them to women in many ways both practical and impractical, and I have a sense that I'm a very mannish sort of woman - all that notwithstanding, I don't know anything about scoring with men or talking to them in a seductive way or flirting or dancing cooperatively with them or anything. As far as I can tell, my entire modus operandi as a seductive being has been having big tits and then saying no to the men I didn't like, and sometimes pining helplessly for the ones who weren't tit men.

My adoration of the F-word aside, sometimes I'm glad in a basic way that I'm not single anymore. I really liked being single and had lots of fun at it and wouldn't have stopped if not for someone as great as him, but I had no idea what the fuck I was doing and really, I still have no idea what the fuck I was thinking half the time. Thank Jeebus my tits were watching my back.

Today's lesson is all about the corruption of the religious class

So Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is a nice album even if the title is a little twee. But one of the things I like about Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds besides what I gushed about on Hipster's blog is their ability to communicate exclamation marks through music, so it's not so twee as all that. It's loud and lacking the cutesy prettiness of the last Bad Seeds album that had tinkly little tracks like 'Breathless' and 'Messiah Ward', but that's okay. It has its own, louder, prettiness. Especially the second track, which is still my favourite song.

Something I like to think about from time to time when I'm stuck on public transport without a book is old-time itinerant preachers and charismatics, who'd go around selling their particular version of God in barns and street corners and speaker's corners and whatnot, building up or failing to build up a following. Especially this guy, mostly because I can hardly wrap my head around the idea of German glossolalia. Can you imagine?

Since watching Jesus Camp I haven't been able to believe modern North American charismatic or pentecostal denominations have a relationship with the divine - that their religion isn't just a travesty that serves the lay people as a socially acceptable excuse to hate gays, gainfully employed women, and scientists, and serves the preachers as a way to make enough money to buy crystal meth for their favourite manwhores whilst maintaining a large family in the style to which they've become accustomed. At the time I found the movie annoying and unedifying, but what made the price of admission worth it was seeing those children educated in the art of faking glossolalia. Exactly the sort of thing that's going to make the rest of the world think they're loony, and make them feel a strong sense of community with each other. Seeing the camp director slipping in and out of glossolalia whilst pumping everybody up was pretty amazing.

I want to think that glossolalia is an actual spontaneous phenomenon - not literally that one starts spouting off in the tongue of angels, but that one manages to have an experience of such mysticism, such abandonment of the self . . . As it stands for me the Quaker way is best: shutting up for a solid hour and only speaking (with words) when you feel moved to - second last meeting I went to, one of the speakers recited from one of Leonard Cohen's more cheerful songs - maybe that's as angel-talky as it gets these days.

Anyways, I still like to imagine that my culture used to support real honest-to-goodness mystics and angel-talk and all the other fancypants pentecostal stuff in the past, when there was less money to be made off it and people didn't know enough about the wider world to be quite so scared shitless by it - that maybe there was a time when North American mystic religion was actually about religion, and not paranoia. I like to imagine it but I doubt it. A lot.

The point I was getting at is that Nick Cave and Tom Waits are two people I think would have made fantastic itinerant preachers or charismatics back in the day. If I had seen them proselytizing back in, say, 1850, and had been raised over the preceding 29 years, I probably would have joined their cults. It's a strange thought but I'm pretty sure that's what would have happened.

Grunge isn't dead, I just slept in

Last night, saw The Simpsons, season 19, 'That 90's Show'. It was so funny - even in the middle of a giant Simpsons binge that we've been going on almost since the selfsame hour we got back from Düsseldorf, it was so stand-out funny. And now that I've entered the ranks of the target-market bourgeoisie, with a credit card that has no upward limit, and a landline and a cellphone, and stress headaches and one grey hair, and all the rest of it, may I just say: if we must have decade-based nostalgia, it's time for nostalgia for the decade I parted with my virginity in.

So many firsts for me in the 90's - first time I got drunk, high, interested in music, out, away, abroad, put under, put into, surgically enhanced - you know - it's the decade I went from being a rather sweet little girl to being an unstable id-driven sex fiend. And if we have to commemorate decades I'd like to commemorate that one over the 80's or the 70's, when the fun things I was doing were less associated with the spirit of the age, 'Hungry Like The Wolf' consistently being my favourite song since it came out when I was four notwithstanding.

Of course I don't think we should have decade-based nostalgia at all. I think we should just keep liking the things we like from each decade and not try to institutionalize that with retarded theme nights where everybody waits around for the only song they still like from the decade in question to get played, wearing clothes and makeup that reminds them of the glory days of people who they were too young to score with back in the decade in question and who are now too old or married to be sexually interesting.

And no, 'Hungry Like The Wolf' isn't my favourite song - that's a big lie - it was just in that awesome episode about Ralph Wiggum winning the Democrat and Republican primaries:

At the moment, my favourite song is the second track from the new Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album that I bought last Saturday, but more on that later.

Driving points, you say knowingly

Home again home again. So much to write about - that was a lovely trip - but I'll restrain myself to writing about Catch 22, which the F-word bought for me to read on the train. Reading it contemporaneously with getting furious at the goddamn thugs in my industry who are willing to take complete advantage of our finest instincts for their own filthy rotten gain probably heightened how much I loved it, for love it I did. Lots of laugh out loud moments and a driving point. And find it hard to believe it was more relevant when it was written than it is now. It should be mandatory reading in highschool.

Speaking of driving points, though, it was a very boy book, and by boy book I'm not talking about all the raping and murdering and marching and moaning, but about the way it's written. Absolutely nothing left to the imagination, nothing for the reader to extrapolate - everything spelled out in detail, from the visuals to the theme. Not a beautiful woman sitting in the corner educating us through some sort of subtle Socratic dialogue, like a Jane Austen novel or something, no - about as subtle as a massive cock slammed down into a pile of mashed potatoes next to an 'Eat Me' sign.

I'm not complaining about it being an unsubtle boy book, though, because I'm a very boy girl, due to growing up in a house full of very boy boys and due to loving boys, and I like the occasional boy book. But I can't handle more than one such boy book a month or else I feel like I'm being nagged, even if I'm absolutely in tune and in agreement with the message. Maybe this is why a lot of boys don't read much. More subtle books are too girly for their poor boyish personas to bear, and then when they try to read the boy books they feel nagged. If I were them I'd probably just watch televised sport too.

I think there's also a problem with boy books usually being pretty fucking awful. You've got to be a fucking genius to nag people for 300 pages without it being a shitty book. So now we have naggy twats like Ian McEwan and Martin Amis dominating the boy book genre, both of whom compound their heavy handed crappiness by pretending they're also subtle, when they're totally totally not, and publishers keeping them in business just so boys can read a book every month or so without feeling girly.

Mistress La Spliffe is perturbed

This entire trip has been hovering between triumph and disaster. It hasn't, actually, but it feels that way right this moment, because I'm trying to navigate a German keyboard. I can handle all the other keyboards I've had to handle but I hate handling this one. But today is not officially a Day Off and the wireless wasn't working in my hotel, which means I've been handling German keyboards to do my job, which is fine. And you know, I'm not sure how I feel about caring about my job. . . but it's just as well I started caring about it yesterday, though, because today was the first day I found a grey hair on my head, attached to me even, and if I still had a job I didn't care about when I started going grey I'd feel like shit.

So I started caring about my job when it fully came home to me what kind of assholes industrialists I have access to are. The answer is massive. Absolute fucking sons and daughters of bitches. I always knew business types are often cunts, of course; I used to work in advertising. But I'm talking organized criminality here, not just fucking with people's heads to trz to make them buy stuff or screwing over whoever you can to bring home a paycheque. What these people want is to be gangsters and for the rest of us to either ignore it, abet it, or cease to exist.

I tell you it took an extra 45 seconds for me to fall asleep last night, I was so pissed off by the answer to the first question Mistress La Spliffe has ever asked at a press conference - oh yes - I waved my hand and interrupted rudely in a forum where it was appropriate. Just like in the movies. It felt good but the answer I got made me want to fire the first shots of the revolution. It was the cuntiest thing I've ever heard a person say out loud in front of me. Not ill-natured, not dismissive; rhetorically speaking it was a perfectly cordial and helpful response to what was evidently considered an appropriate question. But I tell you, motherfuck. I was so pissed off.

Here's the long and short of it: the next time some asshole tries to Adam Smith you with some bullshit about how the free market has an invisible hand that will sort everything out if we let it roam free, spit in his or her face for me. The invisible hand of the free market will punch you in the balls or fucking goose you in a dark alleyway.

The devil you know is a twat

America, you should start looking into what sort of bananas will thrive in your varied climates now. There's always the paw-paw, otherwise known as the prairie banana, which makes a fucking fantastic Jamaican hot sauce. Because if she wins, it won't just be the name of the overpriced sweatshop outlet anymore. Pardon my evident bitterness but I abhor that creature. Her husband was a cynical cunt who sold out what was left of Roosevelt's legacy to make nice with the very people he should have opposed, and she herself has made public statements of such staggering irresponsibility for populist purposes that I fear she'd be even worse. Not to mention participating in the murder of thousands in Iraq. Ugh. Gross.

I didn't think I'd fallen for the Obamania that has swept the universe; I've only heard him speaking once, and while it was delightful, so was listening to the creature's husband talk. I loved hearing Bill Clinton talk. He was so good at it. And from what I heard before I tore myself away from the screen, crying 'no! No more letting American politicians play with my heart,' Obama is even better at talking. Anyways. The point is I evidently have fallen for it, or at any rate have become absolutely persuaded that a half-unknown quantity who has at least put his votes where his mouth is over the short space of time he's been voting in his congressional house is a vastly better possibility for the future of our planet than four more fucking years of the Bush/Clinton combine.

Maybe that's not quite mania but it's sincere nonetheless. So this morning I actually switched on the computer in a state of hope that the evil charm has been broken and the Bush/Clinton combine has at last been consigned to the composter of history. Not yet, it seems. It's like Christmas has been postponed. But for how long? It better not be until McCain wins the presidency. He'd blow stuff up and then die and then that personable psychopath Huckabee would try to usher in the End Times. I don't want the End Times. I want to live to experience the adventure and excitement of menopause.

Anyways. My mate Kate has linked to a sometimes-funny blog called Stuff White People Like, which features my water bottle and my own life pattern in response to North American political degradation. I thought I moved to Europe for the extra four weeks of vacation, higher pay in a stronger currency, and richer desserts, but the writer makes a pretty good case. And if that Botoxed bit of criminal-insincerity-in-a-power-suit wins, I predict lots more Americans threatening to move to Canada and lots more Canadians threatening to move to Europe.

And anyways again. I'm going abroad for a conference this aft and won't be back until next week; unless my hotel has wireless (which I hope to fuck it does as I have another huge report due) I won't be posting until then. If you need anything keeping you busy, I suggest you check out the site for Viz magazine; easily the stupidest, grossest, most puerile thing I've ever been ashamed of enjoying. It's like a farting competition in an elevator that goes horribly wrong.

Hard, you say knowingly

The F-word found Good to Me by Otis Redding, who I love. And now I love him more. I ladore the Beatles, really I do, they're the whatevers of the universe, but Otis Redding's version of 'A Hard Day's Night' onto the original is like a big gorgeous black man offering to fuck your legs off onto two pallid lower-middle-class English boys whining for a blowjob. I can't find a video of it so I'll just post one of Otis Redding making Mick Jagger look like a twelve year old girl:



And just because it's awesome:



Ugh, it makes me want to cry that he's dead.

Anyhoo. The F-word also found The Big Sleep, which I hadn't seen yet, the one with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. She looks like Uma Thurman but hot. It was good, and I was interested to see how they'd departed from the book to avoid getting censored. Or not departed from the book.

For example, there's a bit in the movie where a handsome young guy shows up at Joe Brady's apartment, kills him, and then gets taken to Geiger's house by Marlowe, where Geiger's body is lying 'in state' on the bed. In the movie there's no explanation for all that, whereas in the book, where the same thing happens, Chandler was able to show that Geiger was gay and had had a sort of gigolo living with him who ended up shooting Brady, et cetera.

I was curious about what audiences must have thought about the sequence without knowing who the hell this handsome angry young guy was - if it made any sense, or if there were cues I missed in the movie suggesting what the relationship between Geiger and the gigolo was. Maybe people were more sensitive about suggestions of gayness back then because homophobia was common even though gay people usually kept it in the closet - you had to look out for things to get paranoid about . . . . Don't know.

The Red Dragon doesn't like American movies

Awhile ago I stopped watching American movies, which wasn't a conscious decision. In fact, I could only see I'd made it after realizing I hadn't watched an American movie in months. And while working in advertising made product placements veritably leap of the screen and pluck my disbelief down from where I'd suspended it, I don't think that's why I stopped; I think I stopped because I had turned into a bitch who was impossible to please. Witness a couple of the movies we watched this weekend after last week's stress and Friday night took us out of physical and mental commission:

No Country For Old Men. Not liking this movie pissed me off so bad because I was 100% expecting it to be good. But it was flat. It wasn't a landscape that I could enter and get lost in, like Barton Fink, Miller's Crossing, The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, even Raising Arizona . . . just felt like a bunch of gross, sad stuff happening and then it ended. Okay, maybe the Coen brothers didn't want to get hemmed in to a traditional sort of storytelling or pacing, but if I run out of characters to be interested in by the 2/3 point of the movie, then as an audience member I'm just marking time until the thing ends.

Javier Bardem was great but they didn't give him enough to do. And finally I didn't care what he was doing because he spent too much time doing boring stuff. I love the way the Coen brothers use little visual cues to tell a story, like having him check his shoes for blood at key moments, but that's not enough to carry a film, especially when they labour other points for visual impact even when the node has tapped out. It was cool the way he blew up the car in front of the pharmacy to go get stuff to fix his leg. It was lame that I had to sit there for five minutes watching him fix his leg.

Ah, that's the thing . . . the whole movie felt like a visual wank - trading in character development for a series of visual impacts and shocks and conceits. Fuck.

Anyways, we were left disappointed and then tried to fix the disappointment by watching I Am Legend. For all his arty-fartiness the F-word likes an event movie from time to time - witness the 300 debacle - and I didn't mind as I wanted something that was sure to have an ending, which this type of film also does. Also, he'd told me it was based on the Omega Man, and I figured watching it would give me a better background on the Simpsons Halloween episode parody without forcing me to watch Charlton Heston 'act'.

I liked it more than I thought I would, as the fact that there was lots to look at and not much of a story helped me over the plotholes, and wasn't even unduly annoyed by the Brazilian god talk. The thing is, Will Smith can't cry without making me cry. It's awful. There are a couple of actors like that, who, if they have any reputation for talent, probably get it from making people want to cry when they do. Tom Hanks is another. You know, actors who are always playing more or less the same person, maybe with different accents or in different weight ranges, but more or less the same character in every movie, who you know is flawed but also probably a really great father so they're always showing them holding kids, and who is basically normal but who would lay down his life in a reluctant but determined Jeebus-like fashion in the face of real danger or iniquity - a James Stewart-y sort of guy without the whininess.

So there was a point in the movie when Will Smith's dog had just died, and he was going nuts, and he was all alone and hadn't got laid in years, and his family was dead, and there were all these flesh eating zombies around, and he started crying, and then I started crying, and then I felt manipulated, and then other humans came into the movie and I didn't care because I was too busy feeling manipulated, and then they plugged the Shrek series for 45 UNBROKEN SECONDS, and the bungee cord of my disbelief snapped, sending it hurtling down to the bottom of the ravine below, which is not where you want your disbelief during the climax of a zombie movie.

Ugh.

Then I remembered we had reefer butter, so I ate a bunch of that and we watched Dracula: Prince of Darkness, and that was keen. But more on that later.

The Red Dragon is a rolling stone

Heh. Heh. Sarkozy tries to shake the guy's hand, and the guy says 'no, don't touch me', and Sarkozy says 'bugger off then', and the guy says 'you'd dirty me', and Sarkozy says 'bugger off then, you lousy dick'. Heh.

I'd love to go off on how lame the French are for electing this strangely compelling, emotionally unbalanced, foul-mouthed megalomaniac troll into their nation's highest office, or tell you about all the ass-licking ministers who rode to Sarkozy's defence in the media, or about how Sarkozy edited in a pseudo-apology to the 'town hall' interview rather than actually say it out loud, but I am just in too much of a shitter today.

Last night my best girlfriend here told me she'd just been offered a big pile of money to move back to San Francisco. She has quite compelling reasons to do it, aside from the money. Problem is, first, that I'm going to miss her like crazy, and second, that I have abandonment issues. Don't we all, you'd say, quite rightly, and I daresay mine are no worse than others, but they are byzantine enough in their complexity to fill ten pages of tightly-written double-sided foolscap (at a guess). And this is why for the last twelve years of my life I've devoted significant energies to being the abandonner. Ending relationships before the other has a chance. Moving into my own bachelor the second the lease expires. And of course, fucking off to different countries every couple of years.

Well. Brussels is not the town to have those sorts of issues in, because it's a what the yuppier among us call a 'starter town'. Take towns like Toronto, Los Angeles, London, Paris, New York. What they all have in common is that millions of people from smaller towns move there to make money, but the cost of living is so high relative to the salaries that you end up staying there once you're in - both because there's so much to enjoy spending your money on, and because you can't fucking save money, as your rent, et cetera, is so steep.

Brussels isn't like that. The salaries are high for corporate expatriates like me and my colleagues, and RETARDLY high for the international organizations. I have a friend seconded to one of them who's privy to the pay details, and Americans - I think I know where your tax dollars are going. These salaries are disbursed in Francophone Belgium, and don't let all the EU rigamarole and Beethoven's Ninth fool you; Art Nouveau buildings aside, Francophone Belgium is a post-industrial shithole where nobody has any money. I would never consider working in Belgium without an expatriate contract because of the tax burden (50% income tax as soon as you hit Euro 30,000). A tax burden, I might add, which is NOT justified by the level of public services Belgians enjoy. But I've given up ribbing on this country for Lent so I'll move on.

This means expats are making big piles of money in an impoverished country, paying a pittance for their rent and a fraction of what they would in a town like Paris or Amsterdam for amusement. So they make and save lots of money, but few stay on permanently (though the special expat contracts here are open-ended); either something is pulling them back home, or else they're repelled by the weather, angst over pulling in a pay cheque which is absolutely disproportionate to the incomes of the residents of the country they're crashing in, the feeling among those of us of breeding age that the place is crawling with paedophiles, et cetera.

So people stay between two and five years. More than enough time for me to get attached (I've only been here ten months or so), and then in plenty of time to break my little heart by fucking off. I tell you, this town has the conditions to drive me mentalist in a whole new way. It's so transient.

But it has made the F-word and I think a little bit more concretely about when we in turn will fuck off. It will be years, and not months. But that too will come.

Dear David Cronenberg:

You totally almost got me there. There were several points during Eastern Promises that I actually thought I was watching a good film. Like that naked fight scene in the steam room that catered to all my filthiest, sickening, buried, maenadic sado-masochistic tendencies, or when the camera lingered on Viggo Mortensen looking cynical and Slavic, or when you showed Vincent Cassel looking closeted-gay and vulnerable behind the alcohol-and-Oedipal-fuelled madness. Even Naomi Watts convinced me that she gave a shit over what was happening from time to time. I really liked her motorbike too. Good for you.

But it was really a bit of fluff, wasn't it? Besides the acting, the best thing I can say about it is that it took advantage of how crazy we all think the Russians are less pretentiously than Martin Amis's last novel. It wasn't pretentious at all, in fact; it was the most Hollywood thing you've ever done - Hollywood in the sense that we need to be swept up by our emotions (Russians are crazy! They can be crazy to nice people too! I could have ended up as a 14 year old prostitute! It's great when pretty people kiss! et cetera), to suspend our disbelief, so that we can be wafted up and over the massive, gaping plotholes.

And David Cronenberg, this is so disappointing for two reasons.

First of all, it's hard to suspend your disbelief when a heroin-addicted 14 year old Russian prostitute who doesn't speak English dictates her diary posthumously in English. And it's hard to suspend your disbelief when all the Russian characters carry out all of their key communication in English, and only switch into Russian for the 'atmospheric' bits we don't need to understand to follow the story, and which you've chosen not to subtitle.

David Cronenberg, have you seen a little movie called The Passion of the Christ? I haven't, because my filthiest, sickening, buried, maenadic sado-masochistic tendencies don't extend to watching snuff films about Jesus. But it did rather well at the box office - Wikipedia says it was the highest grossing R-rated film of all time - even though the whole thing was subtitled. Subtitles are allowed now, David Cronenberg. Why the fuck couldn't you use subtitles? Apparently all the actors could manage to pretend to talk Russian. Why not make them do that, and let us at home suspend our disbelief so that we could ignore all the plotholes better?

Is it because the film played so viciously on stereotypes of Russians that you couldn't get enough Russians involved in its production to pull that one off? Tell me, David Cronenberg. Because you need a fucking excuse.

The other reason that I'm disappointed, David Cronenberg, is because while I've always been a distant fan of your visual style in a revolted sort of way, I have to say I really fucking loved A History of Violence. I thought you'd done something, if not revolutionary, at least really fucking awesome in terms of using your sick visual style in exploring the violent undertones of men and women in a way that was also Hollywood-y, emotionally cathartic, and revelatory of Viggo Mortensen's bum. But Eastern Promises seemed to indicate that was a bit of a one-off. I won't give away the plot twist, since you've asked people not to, but as far as I'm concerned it siphoned off almost all the interest I had in the emotions of the main characters.

Anyways, I still like you better than Atom Egoyan.

All the best,

Mistress La Spliffe

All the serotonin was for nought

So, how about those SSRIs? What fucking gets me about this story, this bit of research, is that it's not really research, beakers-and-burners-speaking. It's a literature review - going over the results of existing clinical trials, either published ones or unpublished ones that had been obtained through that delightful Freedom of Information Act. In other words, the fact that SSRIs don't work except for the most depressed people should be old news. Doctors need to present their excuses for not being aware of this news and for massively overprescribing that shit.

It's nice that the UK health minister was quick on the uptake in terms of announcing injecting all those talky-therapists into the system over the next few years. Which boils down to how this is actually all about me. It's making me think again that Jung school might be viable for me, if public funding changes and the talky therapy starts being a right under a viable health system instead of being a bourgeois institution wherein I'd have to listen to bourgeois people like me talk about their bourgeois problems all day while there are children starving in Africa and women being marginalized in council flats.

Notice I linked to The Independent. It's finally happened. I've turned to reading the last pinko mainstream paper in the Anglophone world, and a kind of boring one at that, because The Guardian has just got too fucking stupid. And it was an article about this issue that tipped me over the annoyance edge. First suggesting the study was only about one brand in the headline (it's also about your old friend Effexor, Baywatch, among others), and then this retardment of a paragraph:

"The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, according to the authors - Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada. But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better."

Fuck, that's ugly. Ugly. If I wanted ugly, I'd go to work and write an industrial market report for a European ESL audience. In fact, I don't want ugly, but I have to do that now anyways. So the last thing I need is the fucking Guardian uglifying my life even more.

Why Ralph Nader is a fucking dick

You know what's hilarious, like, Russia-hilarious, about the United States? Even the Lebanese laugh at it and, you know, their country's been blown up. It's the absolutely unrepresentative nature of the national executive structure. And until this structure is changed, third parties in the presidentials are tools the two main parties welcome with open arms, and Ralph Nader is a fucking dick.

The reason third, fourth, fifth, sixth, et cetera parties count in normal, functioning democracies isn't simply because they exist; it's because of their ability to form coalition governments with larger parties and shape policy through these coalitions. This way they demonstrate their effectiveness, and then win or fail to win the trust of the electorate. But in the U.S. presidentials, you're voting for a president and a vice president - one winner. Votes that go to candidates from a third party are gone forever. Sometimes that works out for the Democrats (like when Ross Perot split the dingbat vote), and sometimes for the Republicans (when Ralph Nader being a fucking dick in 2000 helped them mask that the recounts weren't making sense).

Either way these marginal third parties are something that the two main ones welcome and incorporate into their electoral strategies, in terms of dealing with each other - not in terms of how it works in France, for example. France features multi-party presidential elections followed by a two-party run-off election, in which the smaller parties that don't make it into the run-off still manage to frame the debate there by endorsing the best of the front-runners, for example, or by forcing the front-runners to adopt part of their platform to capture new run-off voters. Ralph Nader does not frame the debate. Ross Perot did not frame the debate. When there is only one winner in an ideologically blah, one-run system, all a third party does is make the party least like it more likely to win. There is no scope for debate-framing for smaller parties in a one-off presidential run - the scope is limited to vote-splitting.

That's hilarious. It means that not only is voting for a third party a way of participating in the strategy of the two main parties, but also that voting for a third party is an utterly ineffective way of seeking electoral reform, which the United States is in such crazy need of, because it's participating so effectively in the strategy of the two main parties. And thus the absolutely unrepresentative nature of the national executive structure suffers zero challenge.

So far, so already covered by dozens of 'center-left' broadsheets. But surely calling Ralph Nader a fucking dick is slightly harsh? No. He's a fucking dick and I don't trust him as far as I can throw him.

The thing is, though the United States is one of the more fucked up of the major democratic systems, they do have some of the 'checks and balances' that they claim to have, or at least they have Congress. Theoretically, at least, voting blocks can be formed in those houses, and, say, the Green Party could have a major voice in terms of passing and funding legislation, or a large-ish independent party with even a few congressmen could make major electoral reform part of its platform and bargain aggressively for it through their coalition or voting agreements. That's how non-direct democracy works, when it works. Messy and sometimes effective.

So why does Nader silently hold his hose during the congressionals? Why not found or find a party he can run with or endorse, why not make some goddamn speeches or something during the congressionals, if not run? Why not give up trying to raise the cash to run for the president and devote that cash to running a viable party in the congressionals? Why not pursue a long-term plan to form a national party that the electorate will find credible instead of throwing in his own little hat every time the presidentials roll around? In short, why not make one of his vaunted bids for democratic reform when reform is actually possible, instead of during the presidentials, when it isn't?

I haven't met the man so I can only guess. None of the guesses do him credit. And all of them, at their fundament, boil down to him being a fucking dick.

Quirk you, buddy

Funny mood all weekend. I think I might be going mad, in part because there was a five second space on Sunday when the words donkey and monkey had exactly the same significance for me. Otherwise, cooked and wrote a lot, had some friends over, realized that the reefer butter works now, and spent the maximum time outside enjoying springtime, which it now indisputably is; I'll put up some pictures later to illustrate and annoy for those of you still living in snowbound frozen climes.

At some point in the weekend finished reading The Happy Islands of Oceania, the Paul Theroux book about paddling around in Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia until he gets over being divorced and finds a new life in Hawaii. The story may be a bit banal as far as narratives go but the anecdotes, as always with his travel books, are great. It's taken me a long time to get through it, having started in January, but it kept getting pre-empted by other books, including Theroux's The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro, which I finally gave up on. There is a way, which certainly isn't just Theroux's way, of writing about sex that annoys me - that by adding an element of ugliness or absurdity that amounts to quirkiness, even really hot and heavy sex can stop being pornography and can be taken more seriously. But it's no more real than pornography, no more descriptive, though to me much more annoying.

In this way of annoying writing about sex, besides the odd absurd or ugly detail, depending on the gender of the author the rest of the prose follows with such punctiliousness either the Great Male Fantasy (overwhelming female excitement over how great it is that they get to fuck the man in question) or the Great Female Fantasy (surrender of control to a competent lover) with such heat, such a lack of self-consciousnesses, and such utter respect for sexual convention that the absurd or ugly details feel absolutely tacked on; something to convince us that we're not just reading the transcription of the author whacking off.

The problem is that I've got no problems reading a hot whack-off fantasy, especially from a good writer. And I've got not problems reading an account of a perverse encounter, or a disappointing encounter, or a hilarious encounter. But what gets annoying is when authors try to make hot whack-off fantasies quirky. Hot sex isn't quirky. Jesus.

Things to put into your mouth

In our household we underspend, as we are saving money to pursue our dreams. One thing we don't underspend on is food because we are both filthy little piggies when it comes to things you can put in your mouth. At least it feels like we overspend on food, but when I sort out the bills at the end of the month the amounts are never staggering.

Part of this is probably because we live in a working-class neighborhood with a daily outdoor market that has a couple of 'fell off the back of a truck' sections, and another part is probably because we're both from a peasant background and have a taste for staples, like lovely cabbage, that eternal cheap-ass standby. Not cooked, though - sliced into teeny tiny strips, marinated in some sort of acid (heh) and made into a salad. It's gross cooked. Or so I thought . . .

When I grocery shop I operate on the principal that the prettier things are the better they are for you and the more delicious they will be. So last week I bought, for the first time, a Savoy cabbage. Savoy cabbages are the ones that look like this:

Pretty-wise, I prefer red cabbages. They look like this:

And when you cut them in half, they look like braaaaaaains. Delicious braaaaaaains. Num num num num. But we'd just eaten three of them in two weeks, which is a fuckload of red cabbage, and I felt like a bit of a change.

We tried the slice/marinate/saladify trick with the Savoy cabbage and it was fucking gross. The F-word had more luck wokking the strips in a black bean sauce with some garlic and mushrooms but it was still not so hot. So we had half a Savoy cabbage sitting in our fridge disgusting us for about a week until Epicurious came to the rescue with this recipe for bacon and cabbage soup:

-(1/3-pound) piece Irish bacon (available at specialty foods shops) or Canadian bacon
-3 tablespoons unsalted butter
-1 medium onion, finely chopped
-2 large Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch bits
-5 1/2 cups chicken stock or low-sodium chicken broth
-4 Turkish bay leaves
-2 teaspoons kosher salt
-1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
-1/2 small head Savoy cabbage, cored, thinly sliced, and cut into 1/2-inch pieces

In small saucepan, combine bacon and cold water to cover. Cover, bring to boil over moderate heat, and skim foam from surface. Reduce heat and simmer 7 minutes. Drain and cool, then cut into 1-inch chunks. Set aside.

In 6-quart heavy stock pot over moderate heat, melt butter. Add onion and sauté, stirring, until softened, about 3 minutes. Add potatoes and sauté 2 minutes. Add stock, bay leaves, salt, and pepper and bring to boil. Reduce heat to moderately low, cover, and simmer until potatoes are soft, about 8 to 10 minutes. Add cabbage and simmer 5 additional minutes. Discard bay leaves. Working in 3 batches, in blender purée soup until smooth (using caution when blending hot liquids). Return to pot, stir in bacon, and rewarm if necessary.

I made some alterations based on the necessities of our household. For example, the F-word doesn't eat meat, so no bacon. I didn't mind, as frankly the idea of boiling bacon makes every molecule of my Calabrian-ity recoil in fucking disgust. If God wanted us to prepare bacon with water, he'd have made pigs aquatic. Fucking Irish, man, I love them, but boiling pigmeat? Holy fuck. I know the British do it too but that's the opposite of an excuse.

So I replaced the bacon with one-inch chunks of oily sundried tomato. We use an immersion blender because they make all other blenders look like retards unless you want to crush ice or something. It worked a treat with this recipe. And no bay leaves, so I used herb bouillon instead of the chicken stock, and then only half the reccommend salt. It was still a little over-salty.

Aside from over-saltiness, it was fucking ace. Fucking delicious. And even with the peeling, dicing, clean-up and writing to my old roommate about how she and her unemployed husband might be able to find a job in Europe, it took about 30 minutes. So it turns out that you can cook cabbage and have it be not fucking gross, as long as it's only cooked for five minutes and then puréed into oblivion. And as you can notice from the ingredient list, it probably cost a cumulative Euro.

Nice. What's not nice is this morning; I'm eating quinoa for breakfast in a sweet, fruit-laden preparation that was reccommended by this site. Goddamn hippies. It's gross! This seed is too nutty, too savoury, to be anything but shitty in a sweet preparation. Maybe in a savoury, in some version of a risotto, for example, but sweet? Icky icky icky. Listen, hippies, just because something comes from the same place as cocaine does not make it good or cool, okay? Jesus.

Pomp and heroin

First, because it's awesome, more Bill Withers, and more of his drummer. I like his drummer because looks just like me the first time I took pills for fun, except black and a man.



I think I also like my job. It's letting me visit Scandinavia for the first week of June for something that sounds like even less effort than a conference. Scandinavia is one of those places that I always said I'd visit if someone else paid, and hey, here they are paying. Considering extending my stay a bit and going to Copenhagen to hang out in Christiania - I figure either the powers that be (politicians or gangs, the 'tax-free' version of Wal-Mart coming in and shitting all over a community's economy) will crush it, or it'll be the epicentre of Europe's next revolution. Either way worth visiting.

Speaking of places that should be the epicentre of Europe's next revolution but everybody's too busy getting fucked up. Last night I had a couple of drinks with a Welsh girl and fuck, do you know how cheap heroin is in Great Britain? It is so fucking cheap. And it's got cheaper since the 'liberation' of the Afghanistan. Nice one, free world. I wonder if that's been the case all over the place. It was super cheap in the south of Italy for as long as I've paid attention to these things but I figured that's because it was doing the black market version of 'falling off the back of a truck' whilst in transit to some other part of Europe. I wonder what colour market that would be. What's blacker than black? I think I'll call it the jet market. Jet's pretty.

God and jive broads reconciled

So today I was going to write about Bill Withers and how much I love him, and how great he was before he discovered synthesizers and singing about God. I like God and I like Bill Withers, but I don't like Bill Withers' songs about God. Funny, that. Maybe I would have if he hadn't discovered synthesizers at around the same time he discovered singing about God. Pop songs about God disagree with me deeply - I can't think of a single one at the moment that I like. As far as I'm concerned it's all been downhill since 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing'. That's a fucking awesome song.

But before he found God and synthesizers he released songs of stupendous lyrical simplicity that are nonetheless so very, very pretty, and that make me emotional or, you know, hot. And the simple lyrics are straightforward and nice and don't make me think that listening to the song is making me stupid. Probably owes a lot to his beautiful voice, certainly in this song, where he can make his third verse out of repeating the words 'I know' 30-ish times and still be awesome:



Hmm, I guess I did write about Bill Withers and how much I love him. Just as well. I had a check to see if I had already written about it and came across this little navel-gaze about being too evened-out, mood-wise, and how I didn't like that. But I wrote that back in the wilds of 2005 when I was still single and living alone. So today I was going to write about how the single most stressful thing about being in a relationship is feeling like you have to spare your partner your well-earned bad moods - at least for me. But Bill Withers is much, much more interesting. Autobiographically, too.

The rats of the conservatory

Went to da symphony last night, the Charlemagne Orchestra again, and while it was pretty I spent most of it sitting there wanting to scream. The F-word had brought his sketchbook and was scritch-scratching away next to me through the delicacies of the flutey Bach, and then half of the Rodrigo, which was a killer as it was a fucking classical guitar concerto so it was full of delicate passages. It was like sitting next to a walled-in rats' nest. I try not to be one to shit on my man's artistic aspirations but finally I had to tell him that I was finding the scritch-scratching distracting, to which he replied he thought it might be and closed up sketchbook shop.

You thought it might be? And you kept going, making me afraid I was going to shit on your artistic aspirations? I thought, my head close to explosion. But I stuffed all the anger deep inside, helped by the prettiness of the Rodrigo concerto. It felt so telegenic somehow - damn near Zorro-ish or something - but with such careful delicacy as well. Yummy.

And then in the second half, the stranger to my left started indulging in his own artistic aspirations by scritch-scratching his prose impressions of the Deimecke classical guitar concerto. Oh fuck me, I thought. It's one thing to risk shitting on my boyfriend's artistic aspirations as there's a world of ways to try to make it up to him, but quite another to shit on the artistic aspirations of a sensitive young Belgian whose cock I will almost certainly never touch. Luckily he was so into the music that he scritch-scratched in time, so it wasn't nearly so rat-nesty. And then when the jolly loud Mendelssohn came on he closed up shop too.

Things to do instead of getting pregnant

The most strenuous thing that I've done all weekend was open a stubbornly stuck jar of honey this morning. Oh yes, Monday morning counts as the weekend, I've decided. To keep earning my keep of free books, while the F-word slept off a little hangover I somehow managed to skip I wrote a review of Evolution for Everyone here, but it won't tell you anything I haven't written about it already. And getting through Gould's chapters about baseball and the death of the .400 batting average, which has been surprisingly interesting since I still only have the foggiest notion of what a batting average is. Outside of how to get shit-drunk before the second inning, my knowledge of the game hasn't changed since those golden pubescent years when the girls were always bigger than the boys.

Had dinner with a girl from my undergrad who ended up here with her family, working for one of the international organizations. Sounds too harsh to say we weren't friends back then but we weren't, really. She had lots of energy that looked a bit frenetic and abrasive to me in those years, maybe because I was so wrapped up in getting and keeping high, even in fourth year when I decided to get really good grades in case someday I decided to do more with my life than get high all the time. It was self-protection, in retrospect. Not knocking getting high, but I was so socially nervous back then, so scared of the possibility of rejection from anyone and everyone, that I couldn't deviate my favourite method of making friends and/or getting laid - smoking lots of reefer or putting things up my nose and seeing what would happen. Since she wasn't so into that we weren't close.

Well. I'm still socially nervous. At this point I'm running on the assumption that that's just the way I am and most of the rest of the world is coping with something similar with the same bad grace, if in different ways. What was my point? Don't know. It was a nice dinner, and I like this girl now. Dad called the next morning, whilst the F-word slept and I wrote the review, and I told him where we'd been the night before. Her family includes a two year old kid, which he used as a rather transparent excuse to imply I should make a baby pretty soon. I thought that was sort of funny because I was writing a review about evolution, and my Knight of Columbus dad had given up on the 'git married!' talk to cut to the chase: propagate the awesome genes I gave you, now.

Unfortunately, I have to go to the office instead.

Baseball porn

Double fisting books at the moment. First, carrying on with Gould's Full House, which is just lovely and gets better with every page. Last night I stopped reading just before the chapter where he starts talking about the death of the .400 batting average so we'll see if he can maintain my interest. I only like baseball if I'm at the game and if I'm fucking drunk. I'm not a big drinker ordinarily; they don't not call me Mistress La Tipple for nothing. But at a baseball game I like to swill down the liquor and scream at the diamond. God - makes me miss Canada. Once we got kicked out of the Skydome for having smuggled in harder stuff than the watered down beer they served exclusively, and it was awful because I hadn't fully got my drink on yet. But one of the guys in the group had just yelled at a player called Jermaine that the Jackson Five wanted their least popular member back, and I was still laughing.

Anyhoo, listen to this nice passage from Full House - comes in the chapter where Gould describes his own first, non-fatal but badly prognosised bout of cancer:

. . . we must stand resolutely against an unintended cruelty of the "positive attitude" movement - insidious slippage into a rhetoric of blame for those who cannot overcome thier personal despair and call up positivity from some internal depth . . . How dare we blame someone for the long-standing constitution of their tendencies and temperament if, in an uninvited and unwelcome episode of their life, another persona might have coped better? If a man dies of cancer in fear and despair, then cry for his pain and celebrate his life. The other man, who fought like hell and laughed to the end, but also died, may have had an easier time in his final months, but took his leave with no more humanity.

The whole thing so far is written with that much clarity and incision. Fuck, it's good.

Anyhoo, double-fisting that with a book of shorter fiction from the inescapable Paul Theroux, The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro. Bought it in all innocence without realizing it was going to be soft porn. Oh, Paul. Well, alright then. Very masculine soft porn, of course, with passages about well-preserved beauties licking jizz off their lace gloves after getting their jollies without even being touched down there, but soft porn nonetheless. I like porn so I'm enjoying it, but not my favourite Theroux so far. Still, I know there'll be some sort of thoughtful or creepy sting in the tail, whether it will be good or not, so I'm hoping that the quality will come half as hard as the Countess does.

What's striking at the moment though is how closely the central female character, besides her age, resembles the media image of Britney Spears. I have a feeling someone in Camp Britney read the book and told her it would be really cool to act crazy in public like the chick in the Paul Theroux porn. Or maybe Theroux is just better at describing a certain kind of crazy lady than I'm appreciating amid all the staged coercive sex. Time will tell.