I once had some kitchens, or should I say, they once had me

Fucking finally, the new kitchen is going in. The cabinet guy, plumber and electrician were all here today, but now we're in limbo for awhile since we ordered stone counters - which means now the stonemason gets to come in, measure, cut the stone, bring it back, install it along with the built-in stovetop and the enormous new sink. Who knows when it'll be done. But you know what, this fucking thing looks like it's going to be AWESOME. All I'd really been looking forward to was a kitchen that wasn't a shitty little crumbling roachhole where I had to use a pair of pliers every time I wanted to turn on the cold water. But now that the cabinets are in, I'm looking forward to having a fucking awesome kitchen. For the first time in a long, long time. And that is after this house's kitchen being the first really atrocious kitchen I'd had in years.

Here are the kitchens I have had - I'm not including ones that belonged to my parents, or that I had to share with the sort of roommates who I didn't cook in symbiosis with, or that amounted to no more than coin cuisines (I'm looking at you, Bronson Street and Avron):

1. Our rental down by the river, after we left R's house. It was big and had a view of a palm tree where a bright green python lived, which was nice. It also had a gas range and enough cupboard space, which was great. But it also had a paucity of counter space, and a rat. We boarded up its egress and then the maintenance guys killed it, but as far as I was concerned it was the kitchen with a rat in it, no matter how decent it was in other respects.

2. Our kitchen in Brussels. It was a decent kitchen. When we moved in a sort of cabinet, there was enough storage in it, and almost enough counterspace. And of course it had a gas range. However, it was fundamentally an American kitchen, separated from the rest of the apartment by a bar and nothing else, with only incidental light and fairly difficult ventilation.
Also, the can, which lacked a door, was at one end of it. The F-word and I both spend a lot of time cooking, which means that it was hard to invariably time taking a dump when your lover wasn't cooking. Comfortable as the F-word and I are over each other's physicality neither of us are fond of the idea of taking a dump within earshot of each other. Especially whilst cooking.
Call us Victorian. Except I guess Victorians were always crapping in front of each other, really.

3. My kitchen in Cabbagetown. Now, I loved that fucking kitchen. In fact, I think it's my favourite kitchen to date, though my feeling is that when the present one is complete, it might win. Part of that is no doubt due to the Cabbagetown kitchen being the first kitchen that was definitely mine, not something I had to share with one or multiple roommates, or one that was my parent's, or something of the sort. MINE.
It was a bit of a dive, that place, but the kitchen exactly suited me, as a young, single stoned cosmopolitan woman, with a cat and friends and occasional casual men, and eventually the very uncasual F-word. I used it for baking all sorts of delicious and exciting things, some of them laced with drrrrrrruurggs. It had a gas range (are you noticing a certain pattern here?) and adequate cupboard and working space for ONE PERSON.
I dig that. I dig galley kitchens. When I'm in the kitchen, I'm in the kitchen; when I'm cooking, I'M cooking. I don't understand these bloody voluminous kitchens they build in new houses these days. Who the fuck needs a kitchen that size? Do you think Iron Chef is suddenly going to do a location shoot in your house? Are you that FAT? Jeebus. That having been said I do like eat-in kitchens.
Another good thing about the Cabbagetown kitchen was that, while it lacked a window, it had a door that led onto a roof terrace. It was a sketchy roof terrace, but it was mine, and the halfway house's next door, and Lexie could go out there and catch birds and kill raccoons while I cooked, and watched.
I fucking loved that kitchen. I loved that apartment. It makes me a little misty to remember it, actually. Life with the F-word is good, but if I had to live life without him, I'd probably do it alone, and I'd probably try to do it in a cozy little comfy shithole like that Cabbagetown apartment.

4. The kitchens in Pinerolo I shared with the Angry Drunk, the best roommate I've ever had, though you wouldn't have known that from my subsequent treatment of her, but enough of that. We co-habited in two places, the first in the old part of town, the second in the new. Both were ace. Both had gas ranges, adequate counter and storage space, and were a reasonable size - eat-in but not retarded. Italian kitchens are full of design genius and these were no exception; they both had the in-cupboard draining boards, which let you put your dishes away without having to dry them (or, more commonly in my case, waiting for them to dry).
The old kitchen had a window which overlooked the construction site next door where Young Robert DeNiro worked, which was pretty ace. And of course the medieval buildings were lovely to look at too. The new kitchen - well. That apartment was in the only skyscraper in town, a fucking revolting building-code busting monstrosity that was worth living in just so you didn't have to look at it from your apartment elsewhere.
It was terrific for living in though - for us, anyways, as it was on the third floor, which means we had a massive roof terrace over the ground-level shops - the size of half a football field - with a view of the Alps in the middle-distance. Shared, but the other tenants didn't seem to use it. We had some good times there. Lots.

5. The kitchen I shared with a roommate I was very fond of at the time - again, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell from my subsequent behaviour - on Cooper street, in Ottawa. Not a gas range, which is a shame, but it was the first place I smoked knives, which is hard to do without a coil element. Now, with the fullness of time and after, apparently, having given up weed, I think smoking knives was my favourite way to do it.
It was my first kitchen - my actual first kitchen, me having been in residence, broadly shared accommodation, with my parents, or in other people's homes up until then. So it was the first place I cooked practically. It was poorly painted yellow and red, which has left me with a permanent fondness for yellow and red kitchens. It had a fire escape leading from its window, so we could sit "outside", and a few feet away from that, an unrelieved brick wall, which we used when we were emotionally or chemically upset for smashing glass jars against.
That was a good kitchen, but sometimes I wonder if I ever could have moved on from that phase in my life if that kitchen had been kicked into the "awesome" category by having a gas range. From all reports, the girl who I lived with, who is no longer a friend, didn't, at least not before I lost all track of her.

Vam Dammaged

I'm really not much of a one for movies. The odds of finding a story that can be competently told in visuals over two hours or so, or simply of visuals that are engaging for two hours in a row, isn't too high as far as I'm concerned. It's enough time that I feel like I wasted it if it's a shit movie, and not enough time for me to commit to the alternate universe if it's not a seamlessly great film. So most of the time I'd rather just not watch movies. It's too irritating.

So when I watch a movie that I love, it's even rarer than it should be, because I don't watch enough movies, and it brightens up my whole week. And the other night, I saw a movie I absolutely loved - JCVD. Holy shit. I asked the F-word (who loves movies, and is always bothering me to watch more of them) to procure it for us because I thought it might be a little funny, and it had made some reasonably big waves in Belgium when it came out in 2008, and - honestly - I've reached the point of culture shock (Australia is so fucking white sliced bread) that I miss both the French language and Brussels.

But the nostalgia value of seeing bank machines and boulevards I used to use and the freak value of seeing Jean-Claude Van Damme acting like a human being were outweighed within 15 minutes by the film I was watching, though both the first two contributed a lot to the overall experience. There were points I was at tears. I was so engaged that it was only as the film was ending that the thought occurred to me - holy shit - Van Damme is fucking magnificent in this role.

As the F-word, who was similarly enthralled, pointed out, it probably helped he was playing himself, in a very direct and apparently very improvisational way. And I'm sure it also helped he was doing it in French. He isn't from a rich family, he's from Francophone Belgium, and he's middle-aged, so the odds of him having anything like an education in the English language as a kid are non-existent to laughably non-existent, which means that in just about any film you're likely to have seen him in (and besides the fact of the script being a very secondary consideration in them) he was probably learning a lot of his lines phonetically. In any case it was fucking magnificent. The director really got something fucking fantastic out of him.

Anyhoo, I really recommend watching it, I really recommend learning French so that you can listen to the dialogue (the subtitles are inadequate), and I'm not going to say anything about the content of the movie, not wanting to spoil it for you. Just two things:

1. Van Damme's timeless contribution to linguistics, and something he's been laughed at extensively for in the Francophone world, is a coke-fuelled, egomaniacal gem of a patois called Zen Franglais, which is pretty much what it sounds like.

Knowing about this will help you enjoy the movie. But the Anglophone world has never really noticed it, probably because the Anglophone world is incapable of understanding how someone trying to speak English could be funny, and incapable of speaking enough French to understand the hilarity of the context, and much less likely than the Francophone world to disdain coked-up celebrity egomania - witness the enduring Charlie Sheen industry, where the ranting is a hell of a lot more mean-spirited and egomaniacal than Zen Franglais. Here's the most notorious sample:



2. This is the most fucking Belgian movie I've ever seen. As the credits rolled, even though my nostalgia had really been fluffed, I'd been well reminded of why we left in disgust. Let's just say - it's fucking realistic.

I am become Woman, the Comforter of Worlds

Today I am WOMAN. Numerically. There are some womanly milestones I hit years ago, like giving up faked orgasms, and others I've yet to reach, like being able to keep mittens in my possession without running a string between them and threading them through the sleeves of my coat. But today I'm 30 years old, and I've lost any excuses for bad behaviour on the basis of immaturity, and I've gained status in society for making it this far without poking one of my own eyes out or getting addicted to crystal. I'm mature. I'm robust. I'm drinkable and my Beaujolais days are behind me though I'm still quite fruity.

And yet thinking about it - which I do, as 30 is an important birthday - despite the two degrees and the international travel and the reams and reams of material for my biographers veering from the salacious to the pornographic to the administrative over my 20's, I don't feel there's much difference between the Me now and the Me yesterday, brain-wise. 30 is a marker for the rest of the world, and the day I ditched girlhood for womanhood in my brain was the day I realized the prospect of fucking only one man until I died was more attractive than tragic. But as a generality, the last decade, which happens to have been my twenties, did teach me five valuable lessons that I didn't even dream were on the curriculum when I was nineteen:

1. Play nice.
2. The 'nice' is more important than the 'play'.
3. The 'play' remains imperative.
4. The 'play' is not the same as 'act'.
5. The 'nice' is not the same as 'likable'.

Those were occasionally hard-learned lessons, and I'm trembling with anticipation and a degree of nervousness over what my 30's will teach me. Hopefully how to sew, and perhaps how to grow my own. Happy Mistress La Spliffe's birthday, everyone!

Grunge isn't dead, I just slept in

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

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

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

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

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