Crazy like a crazy person

Watched the final section of Berger's Ways of Seeing and then Robert Hughes's doc on Goya last night; just to make a week of comparative art documentaries, I suppose. The final section was on advertising, and it left me with the suspicion I like John Berger so much so far because he says things I already thought, in a much more coherent way than I could say them - notably the sheer contextual madness of paging through a magazine between pictures of dead and dying third-world types and the warm fuzziness of hard liquor ads.

That sort of thing first struck me in a big way back when I was working at the television commercial place, watching 50 or more commercials a day, one after another. Especially watching the PSAs next to the other ads - a woman with black eyes gazing imploringly at the camera in the rain, or something of the sort, when it was aiming to boost donations for shelters or encouraging men not to beat their wives - and then a beer ad suggesting all the marvellous social and sexual things that would happen to a man if he got plastered that night.

The side effect of my job - and this happened to my predecessor in the position too - was not being able to watch commercial television anymore; not only was it infuriating and awful to be inescapably confronted with the fact of audience-as-commodity, but it was like listening to the pushier kind of madman, or a cacaphony of opposing, fanatic voices. Without even changing the channel. Thank god for internet streaming sites.

Anyways, profoundly enjoyed the whole Berger series, and the Hughes Goya: Crazy Like a Genius documentary wasn't too bad either, though I vastly preferred the book. I think that's partly because when you read the book, you don't have to listen to the lecherous snide fuck speak, and can let your eyes skim over the gratuitous sentences about what he'd like to do to the Naked Maja. In his documentary about Caravaggio and in American Visions and in the Shock of the New, I swear he wasn't so consistent about forcing himself front and centre, and that they're vastly better television for it. Somehow in the book, the extended part about the visions of Goya-ghouls during the aftermath of his road injuries was less obtrusive. I think it made more sense in the broader context of a kabillion-page book rather than an hour-long or whatever it was documentary.

Ways of Being, 2

To continue from yesterday.

Some think that so much of today's art mirrors and thus criticises decadence. Not so. It's just decadent. Full stop. It has no critical function, it is part of the problem.

As I wrote, it's a good point, and it's in the company of a few other good points, like how an overheated art market is transforming desired paintings into super-expensive commodities, and having a horrible impact on public galleries’ ability to collect and show. There's also a suggestion - poorly explored - of how it may be skewing instruction at art schools; something that hit my art-school alumnus boyf as extremely relevant.

BUT what we have building up to this point is an extremely personal, elitist and deeply unpleasant vision of decontextualized art and the response of masses of people to it. We have the messy, badly argued, and unlikely premise running through this documentary that the way working-class and middle-class Americans ‘experienced’ the Mona Lisa on its trip to New York in 1963 and the way they generally see gallery art is by its nature generally deeply inferior to the way Robert Hughes sees it in its proper context. Not just less educated, not just less loving, but by its nature deeply inferior - that the masses experience seeing art, and Robert Hughes looks at it. Or vice versa. Whatever verb makes Robert Hughes sound cleverer and the masses sound more insensible. I think this was a beastly, unfair, and erroneous generalization, and it’s what I hated most about the documentary.

Another thing I hated about it was the idea it presented to us that this perceived deep inferiority of the popular vision is tied to the present overheated, overpriced, and qualitatively poor state of the expensive end of the modern art market – a ridiculous, speculative art market with which only the tiniest percentage of the population has any engagement at all, and which mainly impacts them by baffling them when they go to public galleries to see something else . . .

Hughes’ perspective shows a complete unconsciousness of the importance of all the mighty piles of art vastly aesthetically and intellectually superior to shark-in-formaldehyde, that continue to be accessible and affordable in co-op or community galleries or other points of sale – points of sale that are burgeoning like mushrooms after the rain now that we have the internet. This is predictable, because the man seems incapable not only of appreciating the way the masses may or may not be impacted by art, but incapable of appreciating there may be an artistic world in existence beyond the top end he's covered in Time magazine and a series of admittedly delicious books and documentaries.

But both things I hated about the documentary can be summed up rather more simply in one phrase: Robert Hughes absolutely failed to think outside of himself.

He failed to consider that in all those thousands of people herded by the Mona Lisa in New York in the 60’s, there mightn’t have been a few hundred who saw something in it they deeply needed, making the whole exercise worthwhile; that even the frustration of being herded past something so small, so distant, so quickly could of itself be of huge importance in the artistic consciousness and education of many spectators. He failed to question if the re-contextualization of it could possibly have any value.

And by virtue of the contempt he felt for both, he was happy to put the popular experience of art in the same dependent chain of the events as Damien Fucking Hirst - when the two things are, quite obviously, only linked in antipathy. And he failed to consider that - in terms of what’s available out there in the reams of galleries and art schools and co-ops and communities - we could be living in a time that’s deeply exciting and important for the visual arts, with fine art creation de-centred and widespread as it's never been before in the western tradition. He could only see the expensive end of the market, that he's been involved with throughout his professional career.

Of these two documentaries, it’s only the raving pinko Berger who succeeded at all in exploring the recontextualization of art, not simply wailing over its decontextualization. It’s only Berger who made a real effort to go beyond himself, to leave himself behind, and engage with the perspective of the rest of people standing in front of art. So to answer yesterday's question to myself, this is why I’m left-wing. I think it’s only on this side of the political spectrum that you can think outside of yourself, that you have the framework available to help you think outside of yourself. In a sentence: I’m left-wing because I’m resisting the urge to live up my own asshole.

Anyways. We've gone on watching the rest of the Berger documentary. Episode two was about the female nude, and it was rather lovely to see an actual-real-life man engage in some feminist theorizing. But more on that later. Episode three, rather topically, was about the oil painting as a commodity or as an indicator of wealth. Plus ça change . . . what Berger's history of the oil painting illustrated was that as pissy as Hughes is with the hedge funds, diamond-encrusted skulls, and other fucking massive taste challenges currently buggering up the art world, this isn't the first time artistic time and talent has been wasted on expensive, market-driven curiosities.

Imagine if oil painters over the last 700 years had a real choice of subject, instead of languid women, Jeebus, and decadent still lives for rich clients. Imagine if all those technically superb and yet tediously repetitive academic painters had had the freedom to let their imaginations run riot. They were trained to believe they didn't, and they painted as though they didn't, and only madmen and geniuses, like the geniuses we remember and seek to look at now, managed to think beyond the spirit and market demands of their age, and create something new and eternal, even to the detriment of their pockets. Art endured and endures.

Anyways, worktime.

Ways of Being

Why be left-wing? It's a question no-one has ever bothered to ask me, either because at this point in my life I've surrounded myself with unquestioningly left-wing people, or because my interlocutors simply assume I'm left-wing because I adore marijuana. But as the freshly returned Masonic Boom has remarked, drugs and deep, macho conservatism are hardly mutually exclusive. And it's not a given that I be left-wing; it's not something I can leave unquestioned. I spent some years of my life deeply emotionally involved with someone rather to the right of Hitler, and it's not enough for me to say I didn't know while I was falling into the silken snare and didn't notice until it was too late, because I did know for some time - I'd say for a solid year - before I finally split.

Emotionally speaking, part of the reason I'm this far left at this point in my life is probably that time with Bluebird, which taught me some plain and revolting truths about what my life would become if I failed to grow a set of ideological balls. In fact, there's probably a big, complex set of emotional reasons why I'm left-wing that come from the strange cocktail of upper-middle-class inselaffen and Mussolini-lovin' guinea in my family unit, and any number of other things.

But I think the quickest, best, and most blog-friendly answer to the question - "why be left-wing?" - is for me to post these two documentaries, both worth watching: John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Robert Hughes' Mona Lisa's Curse, which both deal with the de-contextualization of art.





John Berger himself is what we call a raving fucking pinko. His documentary is simply astounding, and really not to be missed. I can't do it anything approaching descriptive and commendatory justice in the tiny amount of time I have left before I have to go to work, so let me just put it like this: he leaves himself behind, fills us with his ideas, decontextualizes art, and then recontextualizes it. It's fascinating and thorough and engaged. And it's from 1972 and looks like it cost about GBP 200 to make.

Robert Hughes - well. I love Robert Hughes, when I don't hate him; I've mentioned before that I think that Barcelona and Goya and The Shock of the New were all astoundingly good, in about the same measure I think Things I Didn't Know was one of the shittiest things I've ever read, breakfast cereal boxes and Martin Amis novels included, and The Fatal Shore a superb effort in making the fascinating painfully boring and disorganized. The Mona Lisa's Curse, an expensive-looking, slick and supremely grumpy effort that came out last year, falls on the 'hate' end of my spectrum. My first big complaint about it is that he makes excellent points about the most notorious section of the modern art market:

Some think that so much of today's art mirrors and thus criticises decadence. Not so. It's just decadent. Full stop. It has no critical function, it is part of the problem.

That's marvellous, and in my estimation, true. The problem is it's a lonely little point, towards the end - it's in the company of some other good points - but the bridge to those points is rickety, weak, and deeply fucking annoying. And fuck. I'm out of time. More later.

The Green Dragon pouts, redux

I find it disquieting that the performance of the green political movement, which is now the fourth biggest block in the European parliament, has been the littlest story of this past European election in Anglo reporting here, particularly as the Anglo reporting here is British, and particularly as the Green party did remarkably well in Britain. But there it's all fuss over the BNP, BNP, BNP, who only managed to get two little measly European Parliament seats - same as the Greens - but rather more remarkably (since the two seats the Greens got were the same two seats they got in 2004), there's a fuss about the BNP getting three council seats, while the Greens got eighteen - eight up from last time. It was the fourth and fifth biggest party in the two respective elections - comfortably or far ahead of the BNP on both counts - and nobody is fucking talking about it in the papers. If you see any coverage of the green political movement in the limey press, it's about France, where the greens nearly knocked the Socialists into third place.

I was complaining about this to the F-word, and he thought it might have to do with the how headlines about all those people voting Green relative to the BNP might be a little too "Millions Of People Get On With Their Lives!" for the famously trite and sensationalistic British press to bother with. (Was it Alexei Sayle who made that gag? Rik Mayall? Hugh Laurie? Fucked if I can remember.) And he's probably right. But wading through The Making of the English Working Class as I am (thick into the Luddite bit), of course I see conspiracies everywhere, and the 'extremes' of the British press, that are quite open in their support for one or the other of the major parties, all had a little fuss about how not voting properly was going to make the BNP win - a revolting prospect, to be sure, but for fuck's sake, the BNP is just one of several small parties, and despite all the scare-mongering did worse than both the Greens and the single issue UKIP in the last elections . . .

My point is, this is Europe, not the United States, and a vote for the green party, or any other smaller party, isn't a vote flushed down the shitter. And that was clear enough to enough people that the green party did very well, including in Britain, where it gets so little airtime even relative to a bunch of raving racist loonies whose electorate seems to be made up mostly of truck drivers, skinheads, and doddering old brownshirts who can't even get girlfriends in their own ethnic group. What sort of vote could the green movement have got if it was treated seriously in the media; if there was some relationship between its degree of popularity and its degree of coverage? What if people who depend on the Telegraph and the Mirror and all that shit for their news had been informed that this party was a serious contender, that it was polling well enough that one's vote wouldn't be thrown away on it, that it was miles ahead of the BNfuckingP?

My personal hunch is that if they had been given serious coverage, we'd have seen a more seriously good result than we did. And I think the editorial boards of the papers in question probably had the same hunch. Furthermore, I think that means they're burrowing themselves a little deeper into the bin of irrelevance, because the green political movement is continuing to build strength and momentum with the motors of common sense and the new media. And people wonder why newspapers are in trouble . . .

The Green Dragon pouts through her civic duty

No big trips with my mother this weekend, because I had to vote in the Europeans on Sunday morning. It's obligatory here and I'd registered in a fit of civic duty a few weeks ago. I generally have some hesitation about voting in places that don't belong to me for whatever reason, but Jesus on His stick knows I spend enough time complaining about the special calvary that is living in Europe, and I pay a tidy chunk of taxes, though being a nom-dom not all that much, really . . . nonetheless, I voted.

Polls were open from 8h to 15h here, and on the understanding that Belgians are pathologically incapable of handling any sort of event that involves any sort of systematic processing of anything even with the benefit of five years' notice, I showed up at my local shortly after the doors opened. Well, not really my local. For some intensely annoying reason, my voting station was a twenty-minute walk from our flat, and I passed two other voting stations on the way . . . and later in the afternoon saw another up the road, rather than down, that was roughly a three-minute walk away . . . that early on a weekend morning, it makes a fucking difference. Trust me.

So grumbling I rolled up to the distant voting station at roughly 8h10 in the morning, and proceeded to wait for half an hour to vote for the green party. Actually in Francophone and Germanophone Belgium, it's called Ecolo, a rather lame name compared to the Flemish Belgian green party, the simple yet cheerful Groen!. Yes. The exclamation point is part of its name. And yes. There are two green parties in Belgium, just as there are essentially two of every party, because the Flems and the Loons will not speak each other's language, the Flems out of pride and frustration (most of them speak French reasonably well, but have an angry history with it) and the Loons out of sheer fucking pig ignorance. It is a nonsense, nonsense, stupid political and linguistic national system that makes Canada look like the Utopia of Bicultural Relations. Which it ain't.

But my point is that I waited in line for half an hour to vote for the green party. In the office itself there were five voting booths, and eight people manning the desk processing the electorate. In the half-hour that I waited, one person voted at a time. Absolute fucking gas factory. And of course it was because the desk of seven processing people (the eighth was supervising the line, making sure nobody was cutting or bribing, I suppose) only processed one person at a time.

The first person announced the electoral number of each voter. The second collected the voter's identification papers. The third and fourth crossed them off two lists, I assume one for the European and one for the civic elections, which were running concurrently and which I'm not allowed to vote in. The fifth handed the voter a magnetic card to use with the electronic voting machine. The sixth instructed the voter how to put the magnetic card into the collection box after voting, because the wrong sticker had been affixed to the slot, and the seventh handed back the voter's identification papers. But of course periodically an aged voter unused to the somewhat convoluted electronic voting process or someone who had never done it before ran into difficulties, and one of the processing people would have to rush to the booth and help them, which would jam up the works completely for the duration.

Sigh.

At least I got out of there in half an hour. Later in the day when Mum and I were out and about, we saw lines at the different voting stations stretching far out onto the streets, including in the Grande Place, which all the tourists were fascinated by. And that on one of the most wretchedly cold and wet June 7ths I've seen in my thirty years of existence. Geez, as they say, Louise. Nonetheless today I'm pleased about how it all went. The green political movement boosted its showing across Europe and here in Belgium. The continent is going a little too fascist and apathetic these days for the mighty greenwash I was hoping for, but considering everything else that wasn't right-wing went to pot I guess it's the best one can hope for in a bullocksy situation.

Duct tape me down

Holy shit . . . if this works, I'm about to have a dressmaker's dummy. Sweet. Sweet. Sweeeeet.

The Mater is coming to visit this afternoon for the weekend, on her way to good old Perfidious Albion. I'm pleased, but our apartment is absolutely filthy. You know, in recent weeks I've been thinking about my family and considering the possibility of blaming them more for my problems. This is something the F-word rides me for occasionally - thinking everything in the world is my fault, which he feels is unhelpful and a form of rampant, unfun egoism. I blame the Mater for that becase she does the same thing. Hah! Success. Also I'm going to blame them for my being a pig, and for the apartment not being clean enough for her visit. Hah! Double success.

I could get used to nothing being my fault . . .

In other news, my favourite Australian show, the Chaser's War on Everything, has been pulled off the air for two weeks due to a particularly tasteless sketch about dying children. I agree that it wasn't awfully funny or topical, rather amateurish actually - except for the Zac Efron part, which had me galumphing with laughter. Judge for yourself:



This is from the same men who showed me why I have to move to Australia: their nationally funded channel (their equivalent of the BBC) paid Craig Reucassel to say "Australia . . . it shits all over everywhere else" to tourists.

Don't ask any questions

This is the best thing in the world. I feel sorry for children who didn't have Sesame Street.



I guess they had good shit in Britain too, but only Sesame Street is Sesame Street. Who else ever combined black marketeering and illustrating the difference between O's close-mid back rounded sound and the open back rounded sound? In one brief song, they teach you how to speak, spell, and traffic. Three of the most useful things in the world.

I think about that sometimes, you know. With the economic climate being what it is at the moment, with me living on a continent where organized crime has such massive economic dominance. How long before the black market becomes not only dominant, but indispensable? How long before credit problems cause production to slip below consumption, or seem to? My guess is that when taxes are hiked like crazy to pay off the extra-big deficits major governments are running up at the moment as they go a little bail-out crazy, it's going to blossom like a flower. Like in the post-war period here. My guess is that governments will make an effort - a more politically acceptable effort - to recoup their losses by taxing corporations more carefully, and well they should. And then the price of everything will go up - and people will realize they can run an economy more cheaply by themselves, selling things back and forth in cash - and manufacturers will tear a page out of the tobacco companies' books, and find clever and illegal ways to sell things off-book.

It will be a new golden age of crime. But instead of the golden age that just ended - where company management was able to persuade shareholders to pay them massive bribes for just not leaving or breaking confidentiality, when we lived in a blackmail economy; when products were unsafe, poorly regulated and irresponsibly flogged for the sake of share price and government complicity - it will be scroungy and dangerous in a different way, which is much more visibly annoying, especially to a population already rightly fed up to the teeth with manufacturers. And then when people get annoyed enough, the strong men will come, and after them - if there is an "after them" in the nuclear age - what? Perhaps a new, stupid, sickening version of freedom which is actually just a relaxation of any regulatory financial law - just a big corporate free-for-all that rewards utter incompetence as long as it has an MBA, like what has just imploded.

You read it here first. Now do you understand why I want to move to an isolated commune in Australia? Hopefully we can choose the right strong men.

Would you like to buy an O, round and neat . . . a nearly perfect circle, tidy and complete?

It smokes, it drinks, it philosophizes . . .

Old impending-doomy feeling is back. I don't know if it was that Air France thing, which is basically an example of my worst or strongest nightmare, or all the film noir we've been watching or the fact that the weather has been encouraging the idea in me that it is summer, but I'm perpetually incapable of carpe dieming and thus am living in fear the sun will once more be snatched away from me and leave me as summerless as I've been since leaving Canada. The idea of Australia in the circumstances is a little like heaven; I don't know anything about it except that where we're thinking of is as warm in the winter as it is here now, and that's enough to make up my mind for me.

Summer. Could it really be summer?

Watched a really funny movie last night: Beat the Devil, that Truman Capote participated in writing. A few real laugh-out-loud moments. The bit where O'Hara offered a critique of Maria Dannreuther's portrait had us howling and quoting at each other all night, trying to get that creepy, crawly Ren-from-Ren-and-Stimpy voice down. Some great characters and performances, but I wonder how Truman Capote was with writing women. The lead blonde may as well have been Holly Golightly airdropped in from Manhattan. Maria Dannreuther was fine, though, and all of the men characters were great. Rather funny to see Humphrey Bogart being funny - funnier than in The African Queen.

They make it so easy

I won't lie to you. Another reason La New Yorkaise and I are such good buddies is that we both understand what it's like to live in Paris. The difference is I was out of that place in about 3.1 years, departing definitively (the thesis defense, the odd visit aside) roughly three hours after my final exam - drunk off my tits and weeping with relief in Canada about ten hours later. And she - she got married to a local. Now I'm as I am - you can make up your mind about the degree of sanity I'm in possession of - and that poor girl, who's got another year to go on top of her 7.5, is both auto and medically medicating like crazy to keep it together. I think she's coming through it all quite well, considering I'd have gone on a killing spree by now if I was her. But she'll be fixing the damage for years to come.

Now obviously, la New Yorkaise is a city mouse, and though I grew up in the middle of nowhere I made the transition to London and then a bunch of other great big cities when I was eighteen. She is not a yokel, and as hard as I try, I'm not either. We understand big cities. We understand people are stressed there, there to work, maybe thinking transitory thoughts; things are rarely as clean or safe as they should be, once you cross the European Teutonic lines, and all in all there are some challenges. But Paris is special. Paris is a city full of locals who are unremittingly negative, and have been since they were children. Paris is a city where the people who save their tears for their pillows are the cheerful ones. Paris is a place where locals get their jollies from shitting all over everything else. It is the European post-colonial city; the population has been frozen into pride by the glories of its past, to the degree it has to frown on cultural innovations from its former rivals and from its former colonies, but also cornered by the cold economic realities of its present, which in many ways are the bleakest I've ever seen - you could make a good argument for Italian cities having bleaker economic realities, but at least people give each other compliments there. What little joy going through that repellent school system leaves an individual is ground out of your typical Parisian by their dysfunctional gender relations. It is an unpleasant place.

A mere five years on from my departure and the only people I'm still in touch with from that 3.1 years of my life are other foreigners who are living or who still live there, and a few French from other parts of the country, and I'm glad. There are a few Parisians I feel, sometimes, that I should like to see and talk to again, but any time I think I may be starting to miss them, my mind clicks forward and shows me how suffocating, negative and depressing the conversations will go. It's sad.

I understand these days better than I ever have that France isn't Paris - that people in and from the south, especially, are beautifully warm and enthusiastic, while still maintaining a strong edge of bluntness. The problem is that the French government is absolutely centralized in Paris, and French politicians tend to be educated in Paris, every time those fucking cockwanks make goddamn assholes of themselves, it's classic Parisian bullshit. Toady up to whoever's most powerful like a fucking whore, and minimize or forget the contribution of everybody else.

You know, best of luck to Obama with that international nuclear disarmament initiative. But this morning, I'm sort of glad to know that if we ever do have another world war, the capital of France will be obliterated in a nuclear holocaust long before the young men from my country are even thinking about being called upon to descend on the country's northern beaches and die in their thousands. Those fucking grande ecole-educated masturbators are so far up their own stinking shit-chutes that they'd try once more to forget it within a generation. The willful ignorance of people educated so intensively and expensively is truly vomit-worthy. Fuck'em.

With a comical look on his face

I had a nice weekend with La New Yorkaise visiting, and truly buried the reefer wagon with a trip to warm, sunny Maastricht. The sun was shining and I was high and cheerful the whole time. We watched The Great Escape again early Sunday morning and I liked it even better the second time - and part of the reason La New Yorkaise and I are such close buddies is because of things like both understanding Charles Bronson was one of the most magnificent pieces of ass to walk the earth; a fact bizarrely lost on most women these days. In hot relief in The Great Escape; wifebeater, long underwear, emotional vulnerability and lots of dirt. Sweet. Throw me over your horsy's saddle and take me away from all this, you beautiful Tatar man. The rowboat also works for the fantasy file.

My point is that nice as a weekend as it was, now it all feels like it was leading up to last night, returning here after getting La New Yorkaise on the TGV back to Paris, curling up with the F-word, and watching Casablanca for the first time. I'd insisted we give it a watch, not because I expected it to be stupendous, but because it's such a big cultural reference point, and it was a hole in our education, that we'd seen dozens of things spoofing off it but never the it itself.

Holy shit. That's the best movie ever.

The storyline had me weeping like a tile, and you may put that down to my femininity if you like. But you'd be foolish, because aside from all the lovey-doveyness it was well evocative of a city full of desperate people, and absolutely absorbing - absolutely good. The writing was just jaw-dropping and those lines that people refer to ad nauseum are referred to ad nauseum for a reason. In context they're fucking brilliant. For me the best one was when Ilsa came back to the bar the first time when Rick was drunk and he got pissy with her. That has to be the greatest sequence of pissiness ever captured on celluloid. "Or aren't you the kind that tells?" Oh, sweet.

And the look, the noir and all those shadows and all those great shots, right from the pan into Sam leaning back and singing to everybody - it looked so good. The actors looked so good. Humphrey Bogart, that piece of battered driftwood, was perfect for Rick, and Ingrid Bergman was scrumptiously beautiful. The F-word pointed out what La New Yorkaise and I had been discussing that morning in reference to Charles Bronson - her face isn't vapid enough for her to be a famous beauty now. She had a big nose and strong features and a funny face shape, and while it all came together into this really remarkable and flawless beauty - that incredibly Scandinavian beauty - it would perhaps be much harder for her to get proper professional recognition for that perfect beauty now.

Scarlett Johansson, the Swede currently massaging the dreams of a generation of young men with that lovely rack, has such a docile little girly face, and even the notoriously beautiful Anglo actresses who aren't white and should be subject to different measurements of loveliness - Frieda Pinto, Halle Berry, for examples - all have butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth chewing gum commercial, boring boring girly faces. The only interestingly beautiful faces I can think of in American movies come from Spain or Latin America - Javier Bardem, Benecio del Toro or something, and Salma Hayek - now those are some real faces. I guess there's hope yet.

The Red Dragon is a travel agent

I go between being fucking pissed off we'll be here for more than another year, and thinking, shit, that ain't long - and the second especially when I encourage myself to carpe diem, and love Belgium for the things that are lovable about it, despite the iniquities and the gross. One thing I love about Belgium arrived in my account within the last few days, and that's that workers in my bracket or classification or what have you get 14 months salary, one of the extra months payable at the end of May - just cuz. Aside from any company bonuses, which we also get.

It's awesome. The Claeys formula, the indexed salaries, the unlimited sick days, the five weeks holiday, the nom-dom taxation status - my savings have never been so happy and sometimes I need to go through those things and remind myself I wasn't an absolute assbrain when I decided to move to this puddle. The money and the benefits don't even bear comparison to Canada. I don't think I'll look back in ten years and ask myself what I was thinking over these years. But we'll see. A lot of it depends on what sort of weather rolls out over the next 14 months, to be quite honest with you.

The further consequence of the shit, that ain't long line of thinking is how some of that money - a proportion I try to keep small, so I can walk away with most of it - will go to travelling over the next little while. Four of my five weeks of vacation are happening this summer and I'm trying to soak every work excursion I can out of the rest of the year. A great deal of this summer, however, is repeats - I'll be heading home for a couple of weeks, and back to Portugal (although a different part of it than the last two times) - so here's list of the places I haven't been yet that I dearly want to see within the next year or so:

- Croatian coast (already scheduled)
- Turkish coast (already scheduled)
- Alhambra and Madrid, Spain
- Rif Mountains, Morocco
- Egypt, desert and old thngs
- Copenhagen
- Greek islands, in the non-vomitous-limey season

And some returns:

- Vienna, for cheese strudel (already scheduled)
- Yorkshire, to spend some more time with family
- Florence, for tattoo pattern
- Calabria, to spend some more time with family
- Finland, for kayaking
- Barcelona, just because I really want to

The list is long but not impossible. If I don't get the transfer I want when I give notice, we can take a couple of months after I stop working to knock any incompletes off the list. Scandinavia, and that includes Yorkshire, we can do all in one two or three week go after the F-word finishes school next year, and benefit from some 24 hour days. Something we'll have to start planning now or it will be prohibitively expensive. Calabria we can get in with Greece - Rif Mountains and Spain . . . it will take juggling but we can do it. I'm hoping to get a day or two stopover in for Florence on my way to Vienna - it's just a matter of going up to San Miniato and eating some chocolate ice cream in Fiesole; not to sound like a philistine, but I was in Florence for about a year and it's not really fair for me to keep on taking up space in the Uffizi or what have you when so many others need a turn.

The Red Dragon has a closed mind re. covers

Nick Cave has spent the last thirty years exploring how us emotional retards get to enjoy life too and there are few songs better at it in my strange-o book than the Bad Seeds' 'Loverman'. That is a fucking horny song. It's one of my favourite songs, definitely. The lyrics go from very silly ("I am what I am what I am what I am") to fucking gold ("With a trembling heart, he's coming through your door with his straining sex in his jumping paw; there's a devil crawling along your floor") without ever sounding inconsistent - a general feature of Nick Cave's lyrics I find irresistable. It's a gem of a song and I love it. I can't really comprehend a reality in which I wouldn't love it.




And yet I've always promised myself that I'll studiously avoid listening to the Metallica cover. The idea makes me want to retch. There are emotional areas of my brains I'm happy to have prodded at in Nick Cave's voice where James Hetfield's voice has no place, even if it's dressed up in Nick Cave's words. Frankly, eww. The guy from Depeche Mode covered it too and that sounds about as appealing. More eww.

Another awfully horny song, in my book, is "Use Me", from Bill Withers. I've gone on about him before, so I won't repeat myself too much. When his songs are good, they're wonders of lyrical and melodic seemingly simple perfection, and he was only ruined by all of those damnable keyboards and synthesizers. And the voice! It's a lovely voice. A proper man's voice. A sexy, comfy duvet of a voice. "Use Me" is a marvellous example of his marvellousness and playing it is the easiest way to explain and understand fun and nasty love, and that voice is singing to its best effect in it; as far as I'm concerned only Bill Withers could pull off that mumbling at the end and still make it count when he sings "it ain't too bad the way you're using me because I sure am using you to do the things you do."



And another cover I'll studiously avoid is Mick Jagger's 1993 cover of "Use Me". Don't get me wrong. Mick Jagger was horny once upon a time too, and "Let's Spend the Night Together" has got me wet played over the loudspeakers in charity shops. But his is not the voice I want to hear singing "Use Me" to me. A fucking middle class limey knight? Don't we have better things to use?

The Red Dragon Will Devour Your Heart

So even though I've got nothing against seals and even though there are few things of which I'm more certain than that monarchy, even constitutional monarchy, even the representatives of a constitutional monarchy who aren't chosen by the monarchy itself, is a slap in the face of human dignity, I have to say this story warmed the cockles of my heart.

It pisses me off when Europeans, who'd rather drown in empty plastic bottles (or ship'em off to China for incineration in power plants) than drink from their taps, who can't even keep their fucking urban songbirds alive, who all seem to be convinced that conservation is something that ought to happen elsewhere (in one of the fucking colonies they're mostly done despoiling now, for instance) rather than right fucking here, where nature is already highly degraded and they're in a fucking race with themselves to fuck up what's left, and whose continental cuisine is largely based on what kind of sausage they process slaughtered pigs into - anyways, it pisses me off when they think they have a goddamn thing to say about who kills and eats what in Canada.

When these disgusting post-colonial troglodytes eat snails, frog legs, baby cows, foie gras, octopus, horse, and any of the remaining wild animals left scrounging around this fucking ecological wreck of a continent that they can get their hands on in the million-weight, I have no patience with the assholes going 'ooh-la-la' because our ceremonial head of state guts an animal whose conservation status is non-threatened, cuts off a piece of its heart, and eats it, in the tradition of a people who have been gutting seals and eating their hearts since before Europeans figured out how to wipe their own asses.

As repellent as I find it that Canada isn't yet a republic, and continues to put a portrait of that daughter of armed banditti on our coinage, her representative Michaelle Jean is the head of our nation in a sense, and that makes her the head of the Inuit as well, and if she's off visiting the Inuit and they hand her a knife and a fresh seal carcass, it is the fucking essence of class that the woman slits it open and eats its heart. I can understand why Europeans are incapable of recognizing class when they see it, though; not only are they too busy finding their way around the wealth of turds on sidewalks dog owners here are too cool to pick up, but European leaders these days seem incapable of anything classier than paying Germans to scrap perfectly good cars, fucking teenagers, and marrying washed-up supermodels or television presenters. And as for any sort of representation of minorities's interests, symbolic or otherwise . . . wrong fucking continent.

Also, I'm on the rag and haven't had a bit of meat in weeks, so the idea of gutting a polar marine mammal and eating its heart sounds really awesome right now.

Psychic masturbation and the end of the world

I skipped a meeting for the organic food co-op last night in favour of relaxing, making granola, and not subjecting myself to hours of Walloon inanities and conversational black holes. The first part of that phrase looks so deeply . . . what's the word? White? Granola? Birkenstock-and-socks? But homemade granola is magically delicious, and it's the only kind I can have, due to not being able to eat almonds and hazelnuts and such things - which rules out most decent pre-made granolas. And it's part of our household's eating philosophy that the closer you buy ingredients to their raw form, the fewer opportunities there are for vendors to adulterate them with some shit or other. It may sound paranoid to you, but we're Italian, so really it's just common sense for us. I'm also working on the assumption it's best to practice making things from scratch now so that when we have children, I can go on autopilot and hopefully not waste much time or energy putting things together. Anyways, here's the recipe:

4 cups whole grains - I suggest a mix but oats should probably make up around half
1 + 1/2 cup coconut flakes
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons flax seeds and/or 2 tablespoons sesame seeds (grind the flax seeds briefly)
Cinnamon and/or ginger and/or cacao and/or powdered clove to taste

Raw, diced starchy fruit, like apple or pear, if wanted
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons honey (or to taste)

Raisins, currants or other dried fruit to taste

Preheat the oven to gas mark 3. Stir together the first group of ingredients, and then stir in the oil and the honey. Mix until the moisture is evenly distributed. Spread the mixture thinly and evenly over a lightly greased cookie tray and leave in the oven for seven minute bursts; every seven minutes stir the mixture on the tray, turning it over to let a new part of it brown. Keep cooking it until it reaches the sort of light golden colour that looks pleasing - probably a little less than half an hour. Once out of the oven, add raisins or currants or whatever you've chosen. Let it cool, and then gently break it up if it has formed biggish chunks. Keep it in an airtight jar. For greater crispiness, greater honey + time.

It was delicious and much more fun to make than to listen to a room full of people be arses. And of course it doesn't take very much time so I could keep reading The Making of the English Working Class, finally getting to the chapter where he calls Methodism a ritualized form of psychic masturbation - three seperate people had told me he was going to do that and it was still shockingly well placed. Great book, greatly written, but more about it when I'm done.

It was so luxurious to not go to the meeting that I'm really thinking of dropping out. Switching to locally grown organic would be nice but I'm already trying to make other difficult lifestyle changes, like green tea instead of lattes in the morning (horrid) and sleeping on my back instead of in the fetal position (odd but better dreams), and I'm not sure I need the extra expense and the stress of dealing with 25 Wallonian families on top of that. So I went to bed mightily relaxed, and woke up to a mighty storm around three in the morning. At least I think it was a mighty storm, I didn't really go check it out. I just lay there with the strobe lights going off and listening to these big brooding rolls of thunder, wondering if that was what the end of the world would sound like, and if it was the end of the world, what I'd do. Cuddle, I imagine.

Jolly jolly jolliness

What a weekend. I got a sunburn and, I believe, a cure for hay fever (a combination of prayer, probiotics, and stinging nettle supplements). Yesterday we rode our bikes down the Rhine to a set of allotments - and German allotments rock, by the way, they're not just gardens; they have huts and roses and barbecues - they're right Lebensraum. Okay, I've got to stop writing things like that. For this morning at least. Anyways, we rode our bikes along the Rhine, and the trees were fucking like bunnies. There was so much pollen in the air that it looked like a flurry. I'm not exaggerating at all. It looked like a big flurry and it was all actually going up my nose, and I was basically okay. Thank god, because there were lots of lovely things to drink, making antihistamines quite out of the question.

Oh, and yeah. Back to Mistress La Spliffe again. I'm just not a one to not get high. Especially when my reason for not getting high is to punish myself for not joining the epically polluting car-driving class fast enough, on a continent where nobody needs a car unless they have children, and even then it's debatable. I'll push myself, of course, but it was already a moral compromise to start using one of those beastly (if fun) things, and I'm not going to not get high for a moral compromise. Particularly when I really, really want to get high.

Back to the money factory.

The Red Dragon will TGV on out

I have forsworn my rights to a long weekend, the long weekend most of Europe has at the moment in honour of a resurrected Jesus flying up to heaven after hanging around here for awhile, in favour of taking some four weeks of vacation this summer and still managing to have something like a Christmas holiday at the end of the year. And the F-word has been refused his 'bridge day' (a day off school and public sector workers are often given to make up a really substantial weekend when a stat holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday) so in any case it wouldn't have been a proper long weekend en couple. Nonetheless we're off to Düsseldorf again this aft. I'm very fond of his friends there. And oh, the beer, the beerhalls. Oh. And as you may have been able to tell from yesterday's post, I'm in quite desperate fucking need of a break from this place.

Speaking of, I've found a new blog I like attached to the local expat magazine, which I don't like. The great thing about Only in Belgium is it manages to find a stupid stat or story about this place more or less every day. And they're never a surprise. Just a "well, yeah."

Oh well. Accentuate the positive. The beer, the beerhalls. And the Rhine. Lovely big river, and we will sit next to it and drink beer if the weather holds. One of my problems with Brussels is there's no water, just the sewage river that's been buried. Initially that was distressing because of the gross sewage factor and because not having a river, lake or coast to the city made it difficult to orient myself; now that I'm oriented it's more a question of there being no relief to my mind; no water to stare at to relax a little bit. And somehow a city without water seems dirty to me. But having such a thought in relationship to thinking about the Rhine, however tenuously, calls up Coleridge's poem about a different, more 'romantic' time when Cologne (the city we'll TGV to before taking a local to the nearby Düsseldorf) and North Rhine Westphalia was not as clean as one notes these days:

In Kohln, a town of monks and bones,
And pavements fang'd with murderous stones
And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches;
I counted two and seventy stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks!
Ye Nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks,
The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?

I love me some Coleridge. It's personal, because his poems started plucking strong chords with me when I was very young, so I really do love him. Back in the days I used to vary my inebriations more I would wake up, lie in bed, and quite often the first line that presented itself to my pained consciousness was a thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I, and it was somehow as though Coleridge was chiding me. In my imagination, he's a chubbier Nick Cave. About 40 years old. And fucks like a beast.

Can you imagine, if there is an afterlife in which we retain our consciousnesses more or less as we understand our consciousnesses, how strange and ghostly it must be for the souls of the dead to see how the living create new imaginings of them? And not being able to clear up any public misunderstandings by going on Oprah. Not being able to clean up your image by starting an NGO. Not being offered career-resurrecting film roles by Quentin Tarantino. Not being able to grow old or fat or graceless or to make bad facial-hair-type decisions so that people stop being interested in you sexually. And still, everybody having all these strange ideas and emotions about you, these strange constructions of you. How weird.

The limits of the zoological approach

I am really having a hard time being here at the mo, especially since having the chat at work with my managers about when and how I'd like to leave next year - it means that now there is no chance they'll take the step of firing me (very expensive in Belgium), which means I'm almost definitely now here for another 14 to 16 months. It feels like a prison sentence today.

Of late, since I decided to take a more zoological approach to life with this nation of fuckwits, I've been having an easier time overall. As much as I'd like to slot entire nationalities into comprehensive stereotypes, you do find multiple intelligent and resourceful people here able to have an idea and take it to some sort of natural conclusion without accidentally suffocating themselves on it, and then when you find those people it's such a lovely surprise. And if you remind yourself that you're not here forever, some of the stupid things the Wallonians do, like name their dogs Caramel, or descend into utter blank-faced, lobotomized shrugging confusion when you scream profanities at them for nearly running you over on pedestrian crossings, or take 8 months to proceed through any bureaucratic process, get quite - well - 'cute' isn't the word. 'Zoologically interesting' probably works better.

The thing is, zoological approach or not, this is a bad, unhealthy place with the same endemic corruption as one finds in Italy, the same manipulations of power, the same culture of immunity and being above the law once you have a certain amount of money or a certain amount of fame. All the way from the child-rape-and-snuff-party-lovin' elite (multiple people claiming to have been victims came forward to identify and testify; no follow up) to TV presenter and children's author Gie Laenen (sentenced to four years in prison a year ago for sexually assaulting 25 boys over a 30 year period last year; has not yet been arrested to begin his prison sentence and, apparently, will not be) to an annoying 26-year-old TV presenter, David Antoine, who killed a pensioner with his Audi last year while she was using a pedestrian crosswalk and he was talking on his fucking cellphone (his license was suspended for two months and he has to do 100 hours of community work).

In all those cases and hundreds more, there's a pervasive, revolting tendency to fail to protect the most vulnerable in favour of protecting the ruling classes. And the ruling classes don't even use their immunity to develop any sort of competence. They just use it to give the world excellent basis for those persistent rumours Madeleine McCann is here - in the fucking paedophilia capital of the developed world. Retch. Tout court, this place is disgusting and hay fever isn't the only way it makes me fucking sick.

I guess it's been given an excellent example of victimizing the defenseless with impunity by its dominant religion. I love how the Catholic Church pretends to be falling all over itself to address instances of child abuse at its institutions in the past, and still goes through every arduous and expensive legal channel it can find to prevent its child abusers from being named or facing criminal prosecution. When Mum converted I tried hard to respect her decision and her revelation, but I had to ask eventually how she could stomach the very, very old corruption of the Church as an institution. She'd actually brought it up with her spiritual advisors, and they'd helped her draw a distinction between the spiritual and the political sides of Catholicism, which had reassured her. Which, I forebore from pointing out at the time and will struggle to continue to not point out, out of respect for her decision and her revelation, is marvellously fucking convenient for the political side of Catholicism.

Alternatively, of course . . .

Watching the odd episode of A Bit of Fry and Laurie these days. I don't know if those two have ever been funnier. Including in Blackadder, which I loved them in. Maybe it's just the state of mind I'm in these days . . . a state of mind which makes sketches like this seem like the funniest thing ever:



I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm glad Hugh Laurie has found a way to make bajillions of dollars and enter the self-loathing erotic dreams of millions of women on House. But I don't get it. I don't understand how he 'makes' it with something that crappy, with a fucking hospital drama, to a greater degree than the brilliant, brilliant things he's done in the past. It's one of the great mysteries of the capitalist age, as far as I'm concerned. Hospital dramas in a more general sense are a mystery to me. I've never really got them. Oh well. It's given me time to do other things, like watch A Bit of Fry and Laurie repeats.

One sketch was rather striking given the current expenses scandal agitating Britain:

If you aren't Dutch, you're not selling fast enough

Saw a Werner Herzog documentary last night, How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck . . . did I mention how much I miss weed? It was great but if I was high it would have been revelatory. As it was, by the end I was wondering what the fuck he was on in the 1970s. The film lingered on the auctioneering competition beyond the point that a straight person could be expected to be interested in. I think that's the great thing about the sort of drugs I like . . . they lengthen my attention span.

Anyways, there are no great twists or surprises in it, so though I recommend you watch it I have no hesitation in telling you it's coverage of the 1976 World Auctioneering Championships, and that the winner was Steve Liptay, who came from Bowmanville, Ontario, and who now runs an auction house for cars on the east coast. A great many of my intimates in Canada were from Bowmanville or its surrounds, and it did my heart so much good to hear that accent again - your standard Canadian accent but with a bit extra. Being away from Canada so long, working with a collection of Brits, and living with a man from a country where the word 'groin' is polysyllabic has made me very fond of my own accent, and the Canadian accent generally. There's a softness and gentleness about it. Like a sober, unprovoked Irish person.

But back to the movie. I liked it a good deal but I'm pretty convinced if Herzog wasn't high whilst putting it together he had been holding his breath and twirling. I have a certain distrust of it because in the English version, the subtitles saying what the people are saying in English whilst Herzog dubs them over in German are visibly not very similar to what the people are saying. It makes them seem rather more empty-headed than is probably quite fair. I also think it's rather odd he chooses the language of auctioneering as the new and perhaps final language of capitalism when - you know - it's awfully fucking old, isn't it? It's the oldest language of capitalism. The first language of capitalism. I think I either missed his point here, or his point wasn't very good.

Speaking of, have you ever heard of a Dutch auction? Flower wholesalers use it because flowers are time sensitive, and no matter how fucking fast an auctioneer goes, he can't be as fast as a Dutch auction. I went to a flower wholesalers with Elvis a couple of years back and I couldn't believe it, it was like a roomful of Jeopardy! contestants hitting buzzers. The idea is to start buying at a high level and then wind the price down; as soon as you see a price for the lot you're willing to pay, you hit the buzzer. Fast! Superfast.

I don't know why all auctions don't use it. I would love if there was some comparative study I could look at to see which style of auctioning fetched the highest bids - Dutch or English. My instinctive guess is that as a norm Dutch auction prices would be higher, but that possibly average English auction prices would be higher because occasionally you'll get buyers wrapped up in a bidding war pushing prices beyond projected levels. It would be very hard to imagine fine art sold in a Dutch auction, for example. It's interesting. There's a different idea in these types of auctions about how markets and competition work, though they're both capitalist, both competitive. It's just the Dutch auction appears 100x more efficient - if you're willing to do without occasionally hitting prices outstripping any reasonable expectation of what the price should be.

The Making of the English Sewing Jessica

I was in quite a bad mood all weekend. Couldn't tell you why, exactly, but feeling very misanthropic indeed. I think it's The Making of the English Working Class. That is a fucking downer of a book - very good, very engaging, but very bleak, and you look at that country now and you know it doesn't have a happy ending, right?

So I refused to see anybody or have civil conversations and instead sewed. A bag, some boxers, tailored some shirts. Read about the disenfranchisement of the weavers. Watched Irma Vep. Thought about all the different ways different nationalities suck. But mostly sewed. It's frustrating and calming at the same time, sewing, or at least it is for me because I don't grasp what I'm doing yet. Getting there, though. The boxers were most exciting because I had never sewn a fly before, and had had no idea how to. There are all these new concepts that are forcing their way into my spatial awareness, which is a bit odd because I haven't been using my spatial awareness much over the past few years.

Although if I think about it, I think the chanciness of my mood has to do with Friday's work meeting where we more or less went through the likelihood that I'll leave in a little more than a year if they're not able to transfer me to the Asian magazine. It was already true before the meeting but saying these things out loud makes them so much more real. And thinking back, that made Friday night sleepless. Well, for about an hour and a half, which counts as a sleepless night by my tree-sloth standards. For about an hour I lay there thinking 'it's lots of money, what are you doing thinking about leaving, you're going to be indigent some day' and then I spent half an hour thinking about all the ways in which I'll avoid being indigent, and then I fell asleep. It hasn't been bothering me since then in an out-loud kind of way, but I think it's been playing havoc with my mood.