Marchons, marchons qu'un programme economique impur abreuve nos sillons

Longtime readers of this blog know that I'm a bit of a francophobe. I challenge anyone to spend three years working and studying in Paris without following suit. Since I moved away and started visiting France bit by bit - especially Marseille, where people were beautifully kind - on a rational level I know that Paris is not France, and France in general is a lovely country full of lovely people. On an emotional level - because of that time in Paris, France is a just a big rat-infested city full of snotty assholes who think they're clever because they know a lot but who can't analyze or synthesize their way out of a stubby paper bag. I'm trying to get over that. A few more trips to Marseille would help.

Anyways, emotionally revolted as I am by the French, one thing I will say about them: at least they're not a bunch of snivelling baby pansy-ass motherfuckers who are content to be swept into pauper's graves by the overwhelming tides of history, modern Anglo-Saxon style. "€36bn for the bankers and we get screwed" indeed. Yesterday as I read up on the strike I was sort of passingly impressed by the demands of the unions and bodies staging the strikes and demonstrations - in that it wasn't just a demand for social support, but for business support, in a real concerted effort to make sure labourers, who hadn't contributed to the economic crisis (not even indirectly through their retirement funds in France, as pensions still function as pensions there - they haven't been basculated into throwing all their scrimpings and savings into the stock market through mutual funds, like Ango-Saxons have), aren't the ones who pay for it.

But this morning I was extra-impressed by way of comparison when I read this in the Independent, a 'leftish' British paper, which treated the demonstrators, and the other much more serious and desperate demonstrators in southern Europe and the new EU entrant countries, as recalcitrant, incoherent children complicating an already complicated situation. Honestly, it makes me want to vomit. Let me put it like this: there's a reason that I, a British citizen, chose to work in Belgium, and looked for jobs in France, Germany, anywhere in northern Europe, basically, besides Britain. And it wasn't because I was anxious to fight with banks and utility companies in a language that isn't my first - that was just a fringe benefit. It was because the standard of life in Britain is absolute shit compared to the rest of northern Europe. Job security sucks, benefits suck, public services suck, the cost of living and average salaries are wildly unbalanced, and only rich people can afford to live close to their offices if they work in London; it has execrable wealth distribution even among normalish people.

And there's one reason for this: northern European governments get kept on their toes by their people. Elections don't come frequently enough to communicate effectively with them that way, and northern Europeans know you have to hit the streets when they do something that's not in the people's interest between-times. It's not rocket science - it's the purpose of public sector strike, the purpose of a demonstration: to act against the government in a way that isn't illegal when the government is acting against you in a way that isn't prosecutable. But not in Britain anymore, it seems, and hence their awful quality of life. I wonder why. I think it's because the Thatcher years saw the media managed so well during the strikes in the early 80's - really managed to present the strikers as Britain's problem, rather than the symptom of Britain's problem - and the media is still playing the game even today. That's what happens with you let Rupert Murdoch in. A national assfucking.

Dreams of sheds and projectors

Home again today. My lungs are just too disgusting. The F-word says I smoked too many joints this weekend; I say I'm a victim of society; the reality is that my co-workers look queasy when I come close to coughing up my lungs. Fair enough.

Reading Samuel Pepys's diaries, from the final couple of years. What a slut that man was. But then, what a slutty time he lived in. It's small wonder melancholia used to be known as the English Disease considering the centuries they spent wildly complicating their lives by trying to bang everything, and small wonder that finally the Victorians had to be, well, Victorian. Sheer exhaustion, I guess, but now they seem all rested up. I love the way the Brits of my acquaintance rail against their reputation as loose, and then take my breath away by marathon scores anywhere from business functions to subway rides. Their cultural legacy, I suppose - hangover guilt not letting them just own how awesome it is that they have so much sex with so many people. I think it's awesome, anyways. I can't do it myself because I don't like most men and because I don't understand how to work other people's vulvas, but I'm glad some people do. Reminds you people are people so why should it be, that you and I et cetera.

My boss lent me Planet Earth, too. David Attenborough narrated but did not write it. Still, I expect his voice will soothe me sufficiently and it looks awfully beautiful. His documentaries always make me wish I had a projector. Oh well. Someday. Perhaps when we live somewhere less narrow. Our Art Deco flat is big, but it's one of the ones en enfilade - three rooms in a row, with the kitchen off to one side - so it's long but skinny. Is it over-domesticated of me to want a real house? I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want - I want a back yard with a shed in it. Fuck a house. If I could have a flat like this, and then a nice yard where I could grow things with a nice shed where I could make things, I'd be happy as a freshly jigggajiggaed Spice Girl.

Our Woman Wishes She Was in Havana

Really not well yet, but will trundle off to work to make deadline, it being Wednesday. Caker work ethic, me, but then I have a sneaking suspicion I'd take more sickdays if my apartment was heated better relative to my office. Brussels is dry and freezing again - pleasant in terms of the sun, difficult in terms of keeping this Art Nouveau den of vice and iniquity properly heated, bloody horrible in terms of how the abscence of precipation makes the heavy particles of pollution hang visibly in the air.

So John Updike is dead. I always hated his books. Couldn't write a believable female character if you held a gun to his head, and yet he tried so hard, like that bit in the Witches of Eastwick about Sukie taking a piss. Well, lots of people liked him. And he gave Cher a pretty good role. Poor old Cher. And the thing is, he tried. All that generation of manly manly men writers, Americans trying to live up or live down or live something post-Hemingway and just looking dangerously Freudian instead, are dying out, and as a rule I don't care at all, but John Updike tried to write the woman believably instead of as a succubus or an obstacle or whatever. And now what do we have to replace that sort of effort? A generation of Anglophone writers whose books are a trial to read because they're thinking like scriptwriters instead of novelists, with the consequence that neither the men nor the women are believable. Oh well. At least we have the Europeans, Japanese and post-colonials. Very sorry the poor man is dead, in short.

Finished Our Man in Havana yesterday whilst trying to keep still and let my lungs heal. Pretty adorable but not my favourite - that's still The Quiet American, or possibly The Heart of the Matter. Yeah, probably The Heart of the Matter. In Our Man I think there was a little slap-out at Orwell's blistering 1948 review of The Heart of the Matter - uber-Catholic Milly suddenly reconciling herself to her father's romance by saying he's a pagan, so he's allowed to do whatever he wants, lucky him. But who knows. Anyways, I've enjoyed it but I'm getting sick of Graham Greene. Pattern is too dominant. Stagnation, intrique, woman, and then ambiguous ending that isn't really ambiguous. I'll give it a rest for awhile, I guess.

Pleasant to read about Havana. Cuba has a special meaning for Canadians because it's so cheap for us to go and to stay there, what with the Americans not being allowed, and obviously it's quite a bit warmer. Elvis invited us over to holiday with them, but it's extremely expensive to get there from Europe, so no can do, we'll have to get our bakingly hot vacations in North Africa this year. And Cuba's not just important for Canadian holidays. I think the first time international trade politics ever blew my mind was when I was nine or so, and I realized that Lake Ontario - downtown Toronto, actually - had a massive new Redpath sugar refinery, as well as an artfully decaying old one that had been abandonned long before.

'What the fuck?' I asked Magnum, I think it was. 'How the fuck is there a sugar refinery here? This is Canada. It's cold.' At that time of my life, I thought sugar only came from canes - wasn't familiar with beets - but in any case, a great deal of Canadian sugar comes from canes. And he told me, I think it was him, that evaporated cane juice or canes were brought in bulk from Cuba to the Toronto deepwater port, processed there, and sold to the Americans, because the Americans couldn't buy it directly for refining there, because of the embargo. And for Canadians, that was great, because it was cheap, because the American buyers were kept out of the market by their embargo, and that if the embargo ever ends it will be a problem for people who work for Redpath in Canada. I tell you my jaw dropped. It just seemed so silly. But interesting. And my attitude to our society's economic organization has not changed much since.

The private life of plague carriers

I don't think there's a limit to the number of sickdays you can take in Belgium; at our office there certainly isn't. Just as well because in this city everybody is a little sick all the time. Today I actually feel quite good, mood-wise and everything, but I'm hacking like an autistic Englishman, those clever influenza germs agitating my respiratory system in a quest to become airborne as I cough all over potential new colonies, ergo est my colleagues. Well, fuck you, germs. I went to work yesterday and you had your chance.

Besides being a plague carrier I have too much to do today - bully the banks, write to young family members about the Netherland's land reclamation strategies, sew some diapers for the legions of friends who've started breeding, and basically be better at keeping in touch. I don't understand how I can love my friends and family so much and be so crap about keeping in touch.

Wanted to point out something though: David Attenborough's Private Life of Plants might be one of the most exquisite things I've ever seen. Even more exquisite than the Life of Birds. And better suited to drrrrrurrgs. There aren't many people who I don't know personally that I love, but I reckon I love David Attenborough. Imagine if he was your uncle or something, and read to you. Wow. That would be the best uncle ever. Even now I like to watch his documentaries last thing before bed - brush and floss before they start and go to sleep with his enthusiast-calm voice still in my ears. Watched P2 of the Private Life of Plants last night and what he said about the conifers, carbon dioxide and light gave me the same soothed, sleepy feeling as The Paper Bag Princess did when I was little.

Appetite for disaster

I got a huge bonus - about three times what I'd been expecting. Economic crisis? Moi? The only direct effect of the economic crisis so far, for me, has been to make our frugal lifestyle a little less ridiculous to some of my friends, and to close down the dirty grocery story around the corner. There was San Francisca getting sacked, but then she was about to quit anyways, and she got a massive payout - after talking to her these last few days I get the sense that maybe, maybe she'll have the sense not to squander it. 

It's been making me worry - well, no, it hasn't, it's been making me think, at most. Spoke to Rodelinda the other day. She and her young man have just become affianced - she's got tenure now and he's a fucking neuroscientist, he can always go work for the CIA or some bloody thing if he has to, you've never seen a neuroscientist asking for change for something to eat, have you, but then any of those poor hoarse men could have been anything. All this in the UK, whose economy and macroeconomic expectations are extra super ubershitty, according to my work research. So they're established enough that they've become affianced, but she's still a little concerned because she's starting to hear of people, even with tenure, getting downsized, but then she's so glad to have tenure, and she asked me if, in my cut-throatish and dwindling industry, if I was worried about getting sacked. 

'Fuck no, I'd be a pig for it,' was my knee-jerk gut response, which regaled her a bit, I don't know why. But I think it's because everybody is so worried, and hearing from someone who isn't extremely worried might seem funny or refreshing now. But last night, lying in bed and not being able to get to sleep, because the F-word is ill right now and like a person-sized furnace, which helped my aching back the other night no end if one needs a silver lining, I started doing sums in my head about my favourite subject - how early I can retire whilst doing the fewest hours of work possible in the interim. 

Somehow this got mixed up with Sugarplum, who you may remember and who has just announced she's got one in the oven, and who'd said to me 'we're thirty now, it's time to think about making babies', and to whom I'd said 'now is the time for me to make money', and it also got mixed up with thinking about how actually Peter Cook wasn't extremely young when he died, when you consider that Al Capone was already the boss of Chicago when he was 26, and if Peter Cook was still alive he'd be an oldish man now, and how strange that was, because how could someone so funny not be young, and wasn't time an awfully strange thing? Because now I'm not very young anymore. And really, what would I do if I was sacked, after taking a money bath in my payout? More realistically, considering the size of my raise, my bonus, and my promotion in quick succession, what will I do when I move on? How will I live my life better?

I'm very lucky because that's an interesting question instead of a scary one.  

Damn good cup of coffee

I used to think of Belgium as Italy's retarded little brother, but after having spent a couple of weeks in Calabria and Sicily I've been reminded of the fact that's not an apt comparison - that it's more a case of Italy being Belgium's attractive but sociopathic ex-con cousin. I'll explain. The F-word and I are rather fussbudgets when it comes to small comforts like coffee. We're so cheap that when it comes to the little luxuries we make them as good as we possibly can - just hold them down and fuck their brains out.  In Belgium that's been a bit hard. It's struck us whilst in Germany and in Italy that the coffee there is better than it is here, even within the same brand. Lavazza here is not nearly as good as Lavazza in either of those countries. I'm usually perfectly happy with Lavazza, but it tastes like steeped sand here, so we've been having the spring the double on Illy, which is painful when you're as fucking cheap as us, but there's no choice. 

I don't know why this is. Belgium could be a low-priority export market because it's so small relative to the German market, and hence could be getting the shitty end of the lollipop in terms of qualities.  Also, I've heard that this places maintains import customs, even within the EU, that involve impounding semi-perishables for a long time. I don't give that 100% credence because it's illegal, from what I understand of European law, but it would certainly explain why you have to pay 7 euros a pop to get espresso that doesn't taste stale, and also Belgium had a four year lag in terms of accepting EU passports as proof of the right of residency, which I believe was also illegal, but, well - I'm trying to be through complaining about this place as an abstract concept. 

That's not stopping me from complaining about the coffee here, but big fucking deal, it's not much of a problem, it just means that when we go to Germany, which we do with relative frequency, we stock up on coffee at the same time as we stock up on delicious, delectable German beer. What I'm getting it is that I've found the right coffee to stock up on, if they sell it in Germany, and if they don't sell it in Germany, I'll set up some sort of mailing scheme with my family in Calabria, as the processing plant for it is in Reggio, the nearest big city to their village.

It's called Mauro, and it's the coffee for me. Rich, fatty, hints of chocolate - not a slap in the face in the morning, more of a nice rousing cuddle - but strong. And one thing about Belgium - there's a shitload of farmers here, who sell unpasteurized cow and goat milk at the daily market down the road from us. All this week, I've been drinking the Mauro with goat milk, because I'm quite fond of goat milk, but today switched to the cow milk, and it was just perfect. Just so lovely. So complimentary. Almost like music, the coffee and the milk worked together so beautifully. 

So. Mauro is the coffee for me. But I understand why some people might like Illy better. Illy has a cleaner taste, and I think it's a little fattier, or at least it gets more of that creamy crema up top. And even if Illy refuses to participate in Fair Trade, it at least pretends to espouse some sort of social agenda in its bean sourcing, which Mauro doesn't even mention. But you know, I spent a lot of time in Reggio and the region around it this Christmas, and I can say without hesitation that supporting any business that provides employment there which doesn't involve processing garbage or killing people is supporting a very necessary social agenda. 

Which leads me to my final point. Which is fuck, Italy makes me sad. The article I wrote this week about the poor man who fell into the machine was about an Italian. Strangely enough, his name was Mauro too. I write about industrial accidents all the time, but this one is affecting me more because the liability has been written off - the parent company artificially outsourced the department Mauro was working in a couple of years back. From local accounts this was probably done because the machinery was antiquated and dangerous, and they needed to get themselves away from liability questions associated with it. And you know what, apparently the safety inspector had approved the machine for operation that same morning. And his co-workers didn't know what had happened to him. He was just gone. All minced up, in little peices in a truck. The machinery was so loud nobody would have been able to hear him screaming. Fuck, it's just such a nightmare, and the public relations woman I was talking to from the company whose premises it was on could say to me quite honestly, 'it's really not our problem.'  

Okay, things like that, much worse things, happen every day all over the world, but you know what? I'd have liked better from Italy. Call me a chauvinist - I absolutely am. But Italy is meant to be a developed country. And a man shouldn't be able to fall into a woodchipper and die in a developed country without it being someone's fucking problem. I think that should be one of the criteria for a country to be called developed. Oh fuck, now I'm crying. Perfect. Jolly good. Off to work. At least I've had a really good coffee to start the day. 

Eat your big fat fucking heart out, Michael Moore

Rather hurried this morning, so a quick list of Things That Should Be Seen:

1 and 2. Adam Curtis documentaries The Living Dead (3 episodes) and Pandora's Box (6 episodes). I fucking love Adam Curtis - I meant to point out how much I loved him months and months ago, but I got sidetracked. His documentaries make just about everybody else's except David Attenborough's look like shit. They're observational - they don't stretch points, they don't stretch the truth, they have talking heads observing from every perspective of the subjects they treat - but absolutely devastating in their exposure of how societies are manipulated in the pursuit of elite agendas, from the general (global neoconservatism) to the specific (post-independence dam project in Ghana). And they're jolly fun to look at too. You've never seen such excellent use of stock footage.

The upshot is I've never been able to choose a favourite from among his documentaries - they should all be watched - the ones that came out this decade are rather more topical, but they're all pretty topical. The Living Dead is my least favourite - too general, I'd heard it all before - and it was still excellent. You know, now I'm just gushing, so I'll shut up. Suffice it to say that his documentaries are a multi-part advertisement for why public television should operate more or less like the BBC.

3. Cane Toads: An Unnatural History. Absolutely adorable and beautifully organized as a film - hilarious on top of educational on top of unsettling. It runs the gamut of making you want to run over as many cane toads as you can to making you want to tickle their tummies, while succeeding in reminding you our scientific classes can be blithering, dangerous idiots when they get involved with agriculture and industry.

As animals, the cane toads are very cute, but then I have a thing for frogs and toads. Their legs remind me of mine. I know some people, indeed one of my favourite people, find the subgroup petrifying, and I've always been fascinated with that phobia. What's to fear? Is it like our snake phobia - do some of us have a deep, unquenchable disgust for the animals built into us instinctively because some of them are highly poisonous? And if so, how did the French shake it off enough as a nationality to eat the poor little fuckers?

Planarchism, because we need another 'ism'

It certainly is a shocking time to be young, working, and thinking about yourself as the future head of a family. Our household is like a little island of prosperity right at the moment - I just got a promotion and a 7% raise, the F-word is getting more for part-time work than most teachers get full-time in this country - in a sea of financial turmoil. Only a couple of months ago the world's economic problems were so abstract, and then in November and December, I guess in the lead-up to results season, stores started closing all over the place here and lots of people got fired, and I know it's really only a matter of time until the sea sweeps over our own personal Tahiti. And swamps us? I don't think so. We've been thinking too aggressively about our next move, and we're ready whenever it comes now, I think. And though Belgium isn't my favourite country in the world, I suppose, it's a helluva place to get fired. Hey. A girl can dream. Or start showing up at work naked and babbling.

This week the news pieces I'm following at work are all about shutdowns and bankruptcies, except for one rather overwhelming brief about a man who fell into some industrial machinery and was minced up so quickly and completely his colleagues had no idea where he'd got to. It's been that way for awhile at work. All doom and gloom. And the multinationals are the worst - the companies whose operations relied on high levels of credit and liquidity - those are the ones dwindling and shutting down and going bankrupt the fastest. It's broken. The financial and economic system is broken. That's been clear to me since I started writing about it, since I understood the frenetic and brainless rhythm at which decisions are made and administrators are rewarded by shareholders. Our way of doing things, financially, economically, is broken,and it was never a frightfully good idea, and frankly it's amazing it's worked in the chaotic, shaky way it has for so long, although it's worth remembering that bankruptcies and struggles were common enough at the so-called best of times.

And throwing public money at something broken so badly has no chance of fixing it, at least in the way it's been done, but that's not the point anyways. More situations like Belgium's - where I know I'll still be solvent if I lose my job, where I'm not scared of the future like an American, a Brit, a Canadian, or most non-European participants in our economy who'll get two weeks pay and a slap on the ass if they get fired, and who fucking well know it - might make more people less nervous about spending money and cashing up the gears of our economy. But the powers-that-be in America, Britain, and here in Europe too have decided reassuring consumers is ass-backwards, and it's best to reassure banks and business instead - bribing them, they suggest to the public, to not fire all us plebs out here; bribing them to keep the economy afloat.

But it's bullshit, isn't it? The banks and businesses can't keep our economy afloat, and they're the ones who torpedoed it in the first place, and they're the ones who'd like us plebs to cost rather less as employees, or who'd like us to stop being employees in favor of some nice cheap Asians. The fact is every major government initiative to deal with the crisis in the Western world has centered around bolstering institutions in such a way that inflation doesn't run wild (which would probably be the effect of directly reassuring us plebs by improving unemployment insurance or welfare programmes) and investors know they can get their money back. That is: every major government initiative to deal with the crisis in the Western world has centred around wealth protection. Which leaves us poor motherfuckers who aren't wealthy rather in the lurch.

But enough with the woe-is-us. Wealth protection has got to be such a big issue not just because of the super-rich, because of the more direct participants in the broken economic system, but because governments and large businesses too incompetent and short-term to do it themselves have successfully pushed us plebs to plan for our retirement by sinking our savings into the stock market, and not to rely on government pensions or work pensions. So if wealth isn't protected, a generation of baby boomers will have to suck straight from the tit of the public purse in their useless twilight years, and considering the shoddiness of the governments we're saddled with these days that's sure to be utterly cocked up in a way that will have dire social consequences.

Well, I'm not writing anything you don't already know. But I do lean on the point that it's time to think of alternative models, or at least supporting structures to the existing model that will ease us into something new. George Monbiot, otherwise known as the only reason not to use the Guarniad as toilet paper, has put together an interesting article about the possibilities of local currencies, for example, and negative interest, with references forward to Switzerland's WIR system* and to The Future of Money, a book that's been recommended to me before but which, despite its evident popularity, is fucking impossible to buy for less than a 100 euros, which is fascinating. The examples are worth looking at in detail. In a more general sense, anything groups of people can do independently to deal with the situation is worth looking at in detail. I'm not an anarchist by persuasion - I've never really thought of identifying myself that way. But increasingly I feel we're living in anarchic circumstances and we have to think of new, local, or at least small-scale methods or programmes to deal with that. Not bringing anarchy on or accelerating it - no need for that, apparently - but planning what to do with it. So I guess I'd like to promote planarchy. The word is already being used for blogging software but I think I can call dibs on it as a sociopolitical persuasion.

*Can somebody please tell me why most people don't know fuck-all about why Switzerland works? Talk to a Swiss person and they won't shut up about it. It's not like it's some big secret. And why, why, for fuck's sake, WHY do Americans defend their shitty two-party system, which is one of the principal tools perpetuating our untenable economic system by being so fucking static by design, by saying 'Oh, well if we had multiple parties we'd be a mess like Italy and that's no fucking good is it', when a) just north of Italy, Switzerland has been ticking along for ages with not only multiple parties, but a fucking rotating presidency, and b) the Americans, or at least their institutions, were the ones who fucked post-war Italy up in the first place? I tell you, shit like that is why I sometimes fucking hate those bastards for sewing Canadian flags onto their backpacks. No. No. Own your suck. We have our own suck already. Pretending to be us won't make it go away.

Novella crimes

Sean Penn looks like a penis. I know an awful lot of people like him, so I guess some directors are better at exploiting that than others, but one director who did a really crap job exploiting that was Philip Haas, he of the vastly superior but still not that great Angels and Insects. And one movie that was an honest to goodness sack of crap was Up at the Villa.  

Angels and Insects was, as I've gone on about before, the film version of A. S. Byatt's Morpho Eugenia, and much worse was it too. That's only to be expected because Morpho Eugenia was a very beautiful and complex novella. Not in the story - that's quite a direct stream of events and emotions that got transcribed accurately to the screen. Rather in the construction, with Byatt putting in layers of scientific and philosophical-scientific musings through epistolary devices, etc. It's a smashing novella, one of the best, and it would have been impossible to translate its smashingness to the screen, not without taking hours and millions of dollars, not without getting David Attenborough in to narrate. Angels and Insects was a good effort. 

But. Philip Haas utterly buggering Up at the Villa is beyond explanation or excuse. I liked the novella well enough, though relative to other Somerset Maugham books like The Moon and Sixpence and Of Human Bondage it's very fluffy. It's also very simple, in the sense of being a rather good yarn where people talk about all the emotions that they actually have, and translating it to film should have been a walk in the park. The casting was also really promising - Kristin Scott Thomas was perfect for that gold-skinned lead, and Sean Penn - okay, I don't get it, but I saw flashes of how with a decent script and a heavier-handed director, he could have been good as the male lead. 

But the scripting process buggered the whole thing up. It over-complicated, artificially extended and stretched a plot that was already a perfect, self-contained unit. It bizarrely airlifted Derek Jacobi in to play a disreputable queen without allowing him to be comic relief or in any way relevant to the events portrayed. It gave Anne Bancroft way too much time and too little to do with it. In short, it over-complicated a simple novella - a much greater sin than over-simplifying a complex novella, like Morpho Eugenia. And it didn't deal with the crisis/opportunity of Sean Penn looking like a penis. 

Anyways. What that peice of shit did do is remind me that I have the complete works of Somerset Maugham sitting around waiting to be read, so after my mum left I started dipping into Cosmopolitans, a bunch of short sketches he wrote for a magazine that would fit on to one or two pages. Hit and miss but much more hit, in that nice terse language that makes Ernest Hemingway seem like a gushing auntie. He's not fashionable anymore, I guess, but I'm getting quite fond of Somerset Maugham.  

Fun with ethnic stereotypes

1. 6 am, in a dark kitchen. 

Mistress La Spliffe: Want coffee?

F-word: Yeah. 

Mistress La Spliffe: AHH! (backs away from stove) The flame is freaky high!

F-word: Yeah. 

Mistress La Spliffe: Maybe the Russians turned the gas back on. Maybe people all over Europe are burning their eyebrows off this morning.

F-word: Yeah. The Russian practical joke of the decade. 

Mistress La Spliffe: Hah!

F-word: (Eastern Promises-ly) You want gas? We'll give you gas, imperialist swine. Hah. Hah. Hah. What a gas. 

(Ah, but no.) 

2. The Family Guy is a shitty daisy chain of a series. I don't like it. But when it's dubbed into Italian (I Griffin) it's actually really funny, because the guy they have doing Peter's voice sounds like a complete fucking retard instead of like an American voice actor pretending to a complete fucking retard and obviously doing a much worse job than Dan Castellaneta. My cousin told me that's because he has a Roman accent. 

3. Seven years ago, I asked one of my Korean students how I, a pie-eyed Westerner with no understanding of anything Asian, could tell Korean people from Japanese people at a glance. Credit to her, she took the stupid question seriously, and considered for a moment before she said, "if they're ugly, they're Japanese."

The Red Dragon is perfectly rational

Yeah, and the thing is, probably no Locrian women tomorrow either because my mum and I are going to Amsterdam.

Two brief words of advice, though, on something that should be seen:

Goya's

Ghosts

As far as I can tell it got bad reviews because critics were confused by the story, which just goes to show you critics are fucking morons these days. What the movie got across, and what I really enjoyed, was the tension as the Spanish Inquisition was petering out and the modern age was hacking its way in. Less Catholic countries in Europe were in the thick of the Enlightenment at the time, intellectually speaking; even Russia's empress read Voltaire. And the Spanish Inquisition suddenly becomes unbelievably nasty in its death-throes, a wild stab at continuing relevancy through violence. A backwards, dreadful, beastly and unreconstructed Catholicism trying to piss in the waters of a new rational and internationalist culture.

The positive, artistic side of that new culture was, in the film, perfectly embodied by a low-key Goya from Stellan Starsgaard. Impeccable casting. You can imagine the character snorting a few lines of coke and doing every whore in a brothel, but the actor was disciplined enough to keep that all tamped down, nothing but a twinkle in the eye, while walking us through a story that was mostly about other people. But behind this rational and internationalist consciousness whose beautiful side was Goya was this massive, hungry, anal rapist of a country called France, flogging the new religion of Rationality, a new religion that men were too unevolved to admit was built on the foundation of their own subjective animal emotions, desires and fears, and thus didn't boast any more universal and perfect truths than any other religion.

The Enlightenment is a difficult thing to make a film about, or even to think about, because of the tension in Europe between the old tyrants and the new tyrants that it brought about. It's difficult because of the utter paucity of 'good guys' on an organized level at the time. And it's difficult to think about, most of all, because of the fact that we continue to be the new tyrants - people who worship Rationality without being able to admit our 'rational' perceptions are all built on the foundation of our personal flaws, excellences and prejudices - that the perceptions we call rational are not universal, and that they go far beyond empirical or scientific observation, all the way into the jungles of our own lonely Hearts of Darkness.

And it's difficult because the only ways out of the tension between the superstition that makes your enemies subhuman and the sort of rationality that makes your enemies subhuman is kindness or genius. And most of us have a hard time with the idea that we're not geniuses, and a very very hard time with the idea that we're not kind, or at least not any kinder than people who burnt women at the stake for being witches. Now we just pump the people we treat as subhuman full of chemicals in places like Bhopal and shrug our shoulders when they die en masse in agony because our retirement savings are wrapped up in mutual funds with interests in Dow Chemicals. And I think Goya's Ghosts did a really fantastic job of illustrating that tension, with its Goya being kind, being a genius, bearing witness forever to the atrocities the old and new tyrants threw in his path.

And, you know, Javier Bardem.

The Red Dragon enjoys pizza

Hey, guess what? No Locrians today either.

Here's a story though. Last night, we were relegated to the futon so Mum could have the cat-free bedroom. I always sleep well on the futon and last night had one of the most compelling dreams of my life. I knew it was a dream, which was sort of neat, and the dream was that I was flying, gently spinning and turning in an utter black void. It was great. And then I realized it wasn't a void, and that the blackness heaving below me was actually every man who had ever existed, in reality and imagination, and that I could now proceed to have an erotic dream about any of them.

My mind boggled, as it would, and I couldn't choose right away, until I realized that I could just have one after another, really, since I was dreaming and they were all obviously already somewhere in my subconscious, stowed away for later. Finally I chose the name of someone who I'd enjoyed several times in the past in the flesh, with the theory that I could see how the dream ---- compared to the real ----, to gauge exactly how realistic and top-notch this awesome situation was going to get.

He materialized himself out of the heaving black sea of men, smiling invitingly, and I realized as I floated through the ether that I wasn't that interested - been there, done him, and probably going for it was going to mean thrashing around in my sleep, and perhaps me screaming his name, waking up the F-word in a way that perhaps might make him sad. So I decided instead to peacably float in the fake black void, having a think about who exactly I'd do, perhaps while I was on a business trip. Ghengis Khan. The Neanderthal who invented cunnilingus. Simon Bolivar. Beau fuckin' Duke. Thomas More. Javier Bardem. The Marx brothers. David Attenborough. And then I woke up.

And then at lunchtime we went to my favourite pizza place, and for just a moment, I hated myself for not choosing the chef. Fuck, he's hot.

The Red Dragon autodomesticates

My mum is coming to visit this evening, which means - once more - fuck all about the Locrian women as I engage in a last minute struggle to ameliorate the state of the apartment. It's just a reflex at this point. I'm 30 years old. I've been living without parental supervision for 12 years, and been visited by them frequently, especially my globe-trotting mum, in that time. During some of that time I was occasionally much less functional than I flatter myself I am now, and Mum has seen some fucking dire things when visiting my apartments. I always get them spic and span in the parts they spend time in - their bedroom, kitchen, living room - but I could never bring myself, during my druggier years, to actually clean my own bedroom. Hangover adolescence, probably. 

I have a distinct memory - I don't think it's just a hallucination - of my mum walking across my bedroom in one of the apartments I had in northern Italy so she could look at its balcony, and casually kicking a used condom out of her path as she did so. Unbelievably disgusting, I know, but if it makes it any better, I'm pretty sure it was fresh.  Ho hum. Credit to her for never saying anything. And credit to my brothers for raising her tolerance so high. Why bother getting upset with your daughter for being a slutty drunk piggy stoner when your sons are . . . well. When your sons are my brothers: three of the greatest men on Earth.

Anyways, that's all, it's back to scrubbing for me. In the meantime, please enjoy some Buraka Som Sistema. Besides M.I.A. whining out the refrain so charmingly I have no idea what they're going on about, but it's good marching music and it will help you ask yourself some tough questions about how you've let your life get to where it is now instead of devoting all your time to learning how to dance that awesomely. 

The Red Dragon is being more present with her menses

Yeah. No Locrian women today either. Resusable menstrual pads are great and everything - they work better, they feel better, and my suspicion is they make your twat smell better too- but what they are not, relative to disposables, is extremely convenient. They take a modicum of foresight and scrubbing, neither of which have ever been my strengths.

I don't mind, aside from now only having ten minutes to write now instead of the half hour I'd need for the Locrians. Lunapads, the very famous resuable rag company that charges a fucking arm and a leg for its wares - honestly, they better hold back the Hudson River and make your crotch look like the Naked Maja's if they're willing to charge that price when a spastic like me can whip up something perfectly acceptable in every way for pennies a pop without the benefit of wholesale - has a part in its FAQs that made me laugh out loud, extolling the virtues of washing your very own blood out of your very own rags. But now I can't deny I get a kick out of the sense of ritual. Hard to put my finger on. I guess it's much nicer than putting my blood in the garbage, and it's neat to think in a cyclical way about how things are going on with me down there.

Anyways, don't have time for much else this morning. We're both awfully sick. Brussels, always polluted, has been having a pic for the last week or so because the dry, cold Canadian temperatures don't keep the particles in the air down as well as the normal constant shitty drizzly lukewarm rain does. This has been contributing to how awfully our respiratory systems have been working. We have got to get the fuck out of here, but I'm probably getting a big fat raise this year, so we won't for another little while. That having been said I continue to be relieved that at least it's not fucking raining. Also the smog makes the sunsets and sunrises fucking marvellous. And as the cold strengthens, the days lengthen. It hasn't been this cold here in the last 15 or 20 years, apparently, but I know, and I believe, that it will get to be spring one day.

The Lemnian women and international fuckery

So to recap from yesterday: every change of civilisation, nationality, or whatever it is that we watch as separate episodes on the History Channel now, was actually military age men going to new places, killing or displacing the military age men already there, and being incorporated well or less well into the pre-existing society of women and children.

Men knew, in a warlike society, they were always going to be in danger of being displaced. They couldn't guarantee a woman's chastity by actually being around and sharing their resources all the time - by following the marriage contract, in short - because they couldn't guarantee they would win or survive their military encounters. So they told a bunch of folk stories about how awesome women who were raped and then killed themselves were, and how fucking dreadful women who wanted to fuck invaders were. It worked fantastically, as now we have this legacy of helpless guilt and weirdo sexuality on both sides of the gender split, but not fantastically enough to keep history from marching on.

Men being displaced by new men because of a failure to live up to the marriage contract didn't always work by the displacers winning a military encounter and the displaced dying or running away, though, and there are two interesting examples of this from Greek history or story-telling. The more famous and less convincing one is of the pre-Hellenic Lemnian women, who murdered all of the Lemnian men as they slept, in retaliation for being displaced by Thracian slave-girls. The women then managed to bear the next generation, and make their appearance on what would be an episode of something on the History Channel about the Myceneans, by fucking Jason and the Argonauts.

It's an interesting story, but just a story. Robert Graves* reckons that Lemnos was a gynocracy supported by an armed female religious class that visiting Myceneans - rather violent and male chauvinist - could only understand in terms of the men all having been murdered. What is rather more than just a story are the stories about the Epizephyrian Locrians, which I promised you yesterday but unfortunately you're not going to get today, as I have to go to work now. But I will say that in their case, the Locrian men broke the marriage contract not by being killed or defeated in battle, and not by rejecting their wives for slave girls, but by being rather too good at battle. It's a ripping yarn. Stay tuned.

* Who I adore but whose POV on the pre-classical and classical world was strongly influenced by hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Womania

Conversation with my boss yesterday whilst waiting for printout of press release about the bankruptcy of yet another company I cover:

Me: Fuck, this printer stinks.
Boss: Stinks of what? Not like it's going to blow up?
Me: No, it stinks . . . (sniffs freshly printed sheet) . . . it stinks of printer, you know, except more than most printers do.
Boss: (shrugs) Just try not to breathe when you're printing things out.

Economic crashes make my olfaction more sensitive. I think it's an evolutionary survival mechanism women developed. Men developed a good one for icy sidewalks useful at present here in Scandinavia Sud where the Belges haven't yet figures out how to spread sand or clear pavement ice, which is to walk with a low centre of gravity, ie to lumber, ie to carry all your weight in your bum. That's why they don't slip around as much as women, who are top-heavy. Also women wear much stupider shoes.

Which brings me to the subject of today's, and probably tomorrow's post, which is women and their history. This past vacation in Aspromonte and Syracuse has been a hell of an eye-opener on two things, in a not absolutely unrelated way - the history of women, and the history of the Christian church. But women are by far more important, representing 54% or so of our race, so let's start there, in part in atonement for my rather sneery 'humanities' undergrad programme, which gave them/women's studies minimal airtime.

Actually let's start with the F-word, who I'd love even if he were a woman, but thank heaven he's not, because I don't understand how to bring women to orgasm. The F-word was on a Viking kick in December and for some reason this nudged him into seeing geographical and ethnical history from a women's perspective - a perspective he pointed out was much more continuous, much less choppy, and much more, shall we say, true than the typical Rise and Fall of the Babylonians Egyptians Greeks Romans Goths Celts Saxons Vikings Franks blah blah blah, which is how men have historically presented history, because, well, that sort of choppy, discontinuous minority perspective is an accurately male perspective of history.

Let's consider what generally happens, as the F-word spelled it out, when a bunch of men, say, Vikings, successfully invade, say, Britain:

Celtic military age husband (to wife and children): Well, we're fucked and you're too heavy to carry while I run, so I'm off. This represents the fall of the Celtic et cetera. Bye.
(Wife watches him go, watches Viking bash through front door)
Celtic wife: Oh, thank god you're here, that coward ran off and left us all alone. My, what big muscles you have. If you don't hurt the children I'll blow you.
Viking: Jeg liker du veldig godt!

Of course sometimes the women and children were sold abroad into slavery. And Europeans carrying out Crusades, for example, had a nasty habit of slaughtering every Christian, Moslem, and Jewish thing in the cities they invaded, because we Europeans are utter barbarians, morbid barbarians at that, and always have been, but that's something for when I write about the Christianity of Southern Italy. But generally speaking, women took what they could get - took care of their children, and muddled on with the changes in skin tone and language of their men as best they could. The Jews knew this. That's probably why they measured descent through the matrilineal line, even if their religion doesn't exactly traditionally empower women otherwise, and that's certainly why the Jews are so lonely in their ability to tell you where they came from over the millenia.

Tracing descent matrilineally, however, isn't an exclusively Jewish phenomenom. Someone else who traditionally traced their descent that way was the Epizephyrian Locrians, an offshoot of the Spartans who went to my father's region of Calabria about 2700 years ago. There are some interesting theories as to why they went there, and why they traced descent matrilineally, that I'll look at tomorrow when I have that little bit more time.

Waxing days

Today I know what I'd like to write for you, and I can't, because of the penury of time I've got now that I'm back at work, and though there was time enough whilst on holiday I was too busy being, shall we say, happy, to park myself anywhere to write that wasn't off on some mountain or train or beach or ruin, and one doesn't take a computer to such places, thank God.

So instead, I'll briefly lament the difficulties involved at this time of year with getting along. It was good to head to the Med for the solstice and the recovery from it, and the days are now already so much longer up here in Scandinavia Sud than they were when we left. It was good for us - for me and the F-word. No particular troubles in paradise but yesterday I was reminded what a shitty time of the year this is for couples, with our closest friends here informing us they'd broken up over the break, and other crack-ups being widely reported. This is really the attrition time - the cold, dark morbid time when the cycling of the seasons gets too obviously painful, and mortality too painfully evident; if 2008 can die, why not you? And if you're going to die someday, why are you with person A anyways? Is this the person you want to miss you after you're dead? Is this the person you want to hold you as you go? Is this the person you're willing to mourn for? And if the year can be born again, well, why can't you?

Maybe if the F-word and I moved to a place that was always summer, I would never lose him, I thought as the girl tearfully told me she's ended it, maybe if we lived in a place that was always summer, I could always be nice to him. Rather too pat as the formula for a neverending love, but even as I tried to get her to stop crying my mind ran through the possibilities, comparing a couple aging with these lousy, shitty seasons turning over and over, rubbing their faces in the passage of the years and the deterioration of their bodies and patience, versus the same couple cheerfully and obliviously aging under a semi-tropical sun.

I don't know, I don't know. I just know that even though it's being Canadian-esque here with the cold, after the two weeks in the mezzogiorno with its irises and flowers and third season of citrus fruits, I do understand that someday it'll be spring again, by hook or by crook.

Reflections on a European voyage

Travelling in this over-ripened cheese of a continent at Christmastime is fucking penitential. We had this intensely beautiful and amusing holiday in Sicily and Calabria - more Milos Foreman than Sergio Corbucci it may have all been, and I did have the exquisite pleasure of losing my keys on the first day, but by Sunday, when we were due to fly back to Germany, I was feeling excellent. Well rested, well fed, well fucked, well et cetera. Some of the more family-friendly aspects of the fortnight will no doubt get exposed here in the coming days.

And then, Stefanito got mixed up about when I needed to be at the aeroport - two hours away on dreadful mountain roads - and decided for a marathon session in the bathroom. The entire household took turns begging him to hurry but if there is an Irresistible Force in this world, it's an Italian man occupying a fucking toilet. Anyways, eventually he popped out, responded to the situation, and fucking gunned us across some of the worst winter roads in Aspromonte. That little Fiat was going so fast I thought it would disintegrate. Intensely beautiful region we were burning through, but an absolute shithole - our (Reggio) side of the mountain is okay, or at least as okay as Aspromonte gets, but the Santa Eufemia side is where they took the northern kidnap victims back in the day and no doubt where all sorts of bad shit is got up to now, up to and including some cockless guinea motherfucker taking a bead on us with a handgun as we whizzed by.

We got to the aeroport twenty minutes late, but it turned out that was only bad for my nerves, because Italy being Italy the check-in was crawling at a retarded snail's pace. In fact, we checked in ten minutes before the fucking plane took off, and security was a breeze - all the women setting off the metal detectors with their belt buckles, et cetera, all the security men gaily , or rather heterosexually, waving them through. Not such a breeze, however, that the F-word didn't have confiscated from his hand luggage my bottle of Burt's Bees skin creme Elvis and the Vermeer Lady had mailed me from Vancouver for Christmas (not available in Belgium) which for some inexplicable reason he a) had, and b) had in his fucking hand luggage. I was pissed. I still am.

Luckily for him, Europe was about to overshadow his inexplicability by losing my checked baggage. Not much more to say about that. If it doesn't arrive I'll be fucking pissed. Aside from all the stuff typically in luggage that one doesn't want to lose, there was some olive oil soap in it my family makes from their farm, and little things for the neice, and a couple of packets of Caffe Mauro, roasted in Reggio and, once more, not available in motherfucking Belgium. Not to mention another bottle of Burt's Bees moisturizer that my mum bought me last time I was in Canada. Fuck. Uberfuck. The F-word's luggage got through, but the jar of expensive and exquisite thyme honey we'd bought in Syracusa had got broken despite careful bubble wrapping. Fucking hurrah. Three cheers for European luggage handlers, the fucking trogladyte cunts.

So speaking of Canada, northern Europe is in the grip of a rather refreshing Canadian-esque cold snap, with reasonable quantities of snow on the ground and temperatures bottoming out around -7 C. Pleasant to me, utterly chaos-producing to these incompetents. Let's face a fundamental fucking fact here: Germany and Belgium are northern countries. The last couple of years have been warm, but the winters here traditionally involve cold, snow, and, you know, fucking winter. And then in the last three days, five fucking inches of the shit falls from the sky and has the temerity to remain on the ground, and suddenly it's fucking Armageddon here. Getting from Dusseldorf to Brussels last night had me in tears. Tears of fury rather than despair, yes, but tears nonetheless.

And then, to cap the whole motherfucker off, when we ground into town around 22h in no mood to cook, I bought us some falafel from my favourite kebab shop, and they've changed the fucking recipe or supplier or something, and now it tastes like deep-fried sand. Fuck. Titfuck. Fistfuck. Truckfuck. Et cetera. And as if all that wasn't enough, now I have to go to work, because I haven't been fired yet. Call this a fucking recession? Porca troia. And fuck.

The Red Dragon has an appetite for development

Wow. I'm in a very dragony mood indeed today. Better think pleasant thoughts.

1. Appetite for Destruction. Had the F-word acquire it after having a dream that I'd heard the first single from Chinese Democracy (which I haven't) and that it was surprisingly, enchantingly good (which I doubt). Remembered what a good song 'Mr. Brownstone' was and demanded the whole thing. I'm glad I did, except for some of the lovey-dovey crap in those whiny grating vocals, ugh, but mostly glad to have 'Mr. Brownstone' again. That must be one of the best songs ever. Add it to the list, I guess. I always think I would have liked that sort of '80s grock music better if the composers had limited themselves to writing about drugs. Once they start singing about sex or violence I start figuring I should either be listening to soul or the Bad Seeds. Anyways. 'Mr. Brownstone'. Awesome.

2. Arrested Development. Finally MSN is streaming the full episodes to markets outside of the US and we're trying to watch it all before we leave for Italy on vacation, after having seen and lurved the first season. Almost there now. Well into the third. I can't find ways to praise that show enough, besides to say I don't think I've ever seen such a successful American television comedy, besides maybe the first season of the Sopranos. And that makes it the funniest situation comedy ever, as far as I can figure out. Don't believe me? Watch the fucker and try to argue. Or at least read this exchange:

Gob: My God. What is this feeling?
Michael: You know, the feeling that you're feeling is just what many of us call... a "feeling".
Gob: It's not like envy, or even hungry.
Michael: Could it be love?
Gob: I know what an erection feels like, Michael. No, it's the opposite - it's like my heart is getting hard.

That's all I can list at the moment. Very hard to look for bright sides today. Tomorrow will be better, when deadline is past and I can really appreciate we're about to go somewhere warmer and sunnier for a couple of weeks. It's just so dark here - so cold and dark - half a week away from the darkest day of the year. I fucking detest living this far noth. A full seven fucking degrees north of Toronto. It may be easier to die of exposure or get frostbite in a Canadian city than it is here, but at least there's some light. At least you don't get fucking rickets there. I could cry. But I won't. Instead I'll drink a coffee and work.

The Red Dragon is on the rag

It's early days yet, but in my capacity as a budding investigative journalist and as a creature who, in the immortal words of Mr. Garrison, bleeds for five days and doesn't die, I think I may have discovered the biggest scam since a bunch of technocrats in the late Roman Empire turned Jesus from a revolutionary to a patsy. And I'm not talking about come cunt called Madoff and thousands of pansies who thought they could get something for nothing. Small change, frankly. Men, look away if period talk makes you queasy, because there's about to be rather a lot of it.

I'm talking about how awesome this is relative to disposables. Not the brand itself, which obviously I'm too cheap to buy, but the idea, which I executed at home with a minumum of ingenuity, a sewing machine, a square metre of super-soft cotton flannelette, and the enforced domesticity that comes with a hangover. Now, I was pretty sure it was going to be more comfortable. Well, duh. Barring some weirdo masochistic perversion, what's going to feel nicer on the most sensitive part of your body: super soft cotton flannelette or a sticky bandage made of wood pulp and plastic? And otherwise, I decided to do it because I'm too cheap to pay for disposables every month, and because I don't like all the non-biodegradable waste associated with them. So three benefits I was expecting. Great.

A benefit I was not expecting was that the set-up would work so much better than disposables. That came as a complete fucking surprise. The first day I was checking on them every ten minutes in mortal fear of making a complete mess of myself, and each time I couldn't believe it. I'll spare you the gory details and let the numbers speak: on the peak day, I usually run through nine disposables. On the peak day this time, I ran through three inserts, and the second two were for freshness.

Hence the scam. It turns out that women don't actually bleed that much - within a range of 10 to 80 millilitres - something like half a cup. I've been amazed at that figure before, because whilst bleeding onto the finest disposables money can buy sometimes it feels like a fucking deluge, an unstoppable flood of gore, like when the fucking Tsarevich got a nosebleed. But like an idiot, I didn't figure out the implications of that until peak day this red dragon ride, when I actually bled into something besides a sticky bandage made of wood pulp and plastic. And realized - 'hey. This doesn't need changing every three hours.' Synapses fired . . . slowly (I've been drinking a lot lately). 'Hey. Hey. Erm . . . hey.'

Finally it came home to me: disposables are designed to be shitty. They're designed to be about as absorbent as soggy crackers, they're designed to be changed frequently, they're designed to cost five euros a month for a packet, they're designed, in short, to help a bunch of cunts at Procter & Gamble, et cetera, stick their fucking hands into my wallet. Motherfuckers. Sisterfuckers. Cuntwipes. The industry has always pissed me off, with its retarded commercials and exploitation of feminine insecurities and non-biodegradability and the way the products get taxed as cosmetics, like you're wearing them to look good instead of to not stain your furniture. But I'll admit, it had never crossed my mind that they were doing a half-ass design job on purpose to move more product. What fucking bullshit. I'm thirty years old now. That means I've given those fucks, those opportunistic, parasitic, exploitative shitheels, about $1200 they really, really don't fucking deserve, and helped them fill the planet with non-biodegradable biowaste to boot. Holy fuck.