Vancouver is the fucking awesomest. Valhalla, Canadian style. Definitely if the F-word ever dumps me, I'm moving here the next week. Just wrapping up a lovely visit with Elvis and his lady and sad to be leaving, though happy to be leaving through Vancouver's aeroport, which is also the fucking awesomest. They have a fucking jellyfish tank in the lounge area, how fantastic is that?
Anyways, I've loved this city ever since I first saw it but loving it in another way now; loving its ugliness, to be honest with you. Loving the simplicity and the boxiness of the houses and buildings - so strange! I used to hate that sort of refusal of gratuitous architectural prettiness in the New World, and its favoring of cheapness and function - because it's part of a living landscape. Things are still alive here, like in the other Canadian cities too, and I love that. I love it for what it is; I'm not claiming any sort of nationalistic environmentalist fanciness relative to poor, dead, shagged-out Europe; we're just emptier as a country and our cities really started taking off only after people understood people need parks, trees and gardens.
I cover a lot of Asian industry at work, environmentally destructive sorts, and lately it has really been striking me how justified the Asians are in getting pissed off with European environmental groups that complain about their activities. Europe got where it got (ergo est, no famines and functioning social services) by exploiting their continent to the point where it's become a complete environmental catastrophe, as close to a dead zone as a non-desert gets, for hundreds of years. And now it just looks like Europeans want to change the rules - and that without even giving up their economically ridiculous farming subsidies in favour of letting a decent quantity of land go fallow and making biodiversity some sort of policy priority.
Yeah, I'm done with Europe. In the meantime, rolling around in all the Canadiana like a pig in shit. God, we have the cutest accents in the world, I totally forget when I'm away.
Visualizzazione post con etichetta Oh Canada our home and oh wait if I finish that sentence you'll tax my Belgian income. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta Oh Canada our home and oh wait if I finish that sentence you'll tax my Belgian income. Mostra tutti i post
giovedì, settembre 02, 2010
lunedì, luglio 12, 2010
The invisible line between incompetence and fraud
In a reasonably foul mood this morning. Have been subject to a bout of incompetence or petty fraud (always hard to tell the difference in Belgium) from a local ASBL, the Partenariat Marconi, over our organic drop-offs. There is something unutterably repellent about grown-ups lying like naughty children who've been caught in the act, and something infuriating about them then using the fact that they're non-profit as some sort of excuse. Anyways, I've been having a hard time walking it off, probably because it was combined, yesterday, with a few other pieces of egregious Belgiousity, notably from my old bugabear Belgacom, the very first full day I'm back from vacation . . .
Goddamn it, am I ever sick of this place. My consolation up until now has been "at least you're not still in Paris," but ever since I lost my horror of Bluebird, and left the starving student class behind to take my place in the financially comfortable bourgeoisie (the class for which Paris was quite literally made), and started going back on visits and appreciating afresh its startling beauty, and realized that they have fruit and vegetables there that aren't grown in a hot-house and thus actually taste like what they're meant to be, and that constant low-level Parisian hostility is in many ways preferable to constant elevated levels of Walloon childish incompetence, no matter how many smiles the bollocks is couched in here versus there - well, that trick has lost its charm. I have reached the end of my tether. Have I said that before? Well, this time, I mean it more.
Luckily, the Mounties have shocked my pants off by, about a week after writing to tell me they hadn't yet received the criminal background check application I'd sent them in April so it was likely to take another four months, sending me my criminal background check. That means all the requisite papers for the Australian visa are together, and hopefully it will not be long before it clears. Thank god. We already have a pretty defined shelf-life in terms of Brussels - we already knew when we were going to leave. But now it is sorted for us to dash straight into the arms of another summer, not long after this one finishes. European Winter, you can shove yourself up your own ass.
Goddamn it, am I ever sick of this place. My consolation up until now has been "at least you're not still in Paris," but ever since I lost my horror of Bluebird, and left the starving student class behind to take my place in the financially comfortable bourgeoisie (the class for which Paris was quite literally made), and started going back on visits and appreciating afresh its startling beauty, and realized that they have fruit and vegetables there that aren't grown in a hot-house and thus actually taste like what they're meant to be, and that constant low-level Parisian hostility is in many ways preferable to constant elevated levels of Walloon childish incompetence, no matter how many smiles the bollocks is couched in here versus there - well, that trick has lost its charm. I have reached the end of my tether. Have I said that before? Well, this time, I mean it more.
Luckily, the Mounties have shocked my pants off by, about a week after writing to tell me they hadn't yet received the criminal background check application I'd sent them in April so it was likely to take another four months, sending me my criminal background check. That means all the requisite papers for the Australian visa are together, and hopefully it will not be long before it clears. Thank god. We already have a pretty defined shelf-life in terms of Brussels - we already knew when we were going to leave. But now it is sorted for us to dash straight into the arms of another summer, not long after this one finishes. European Winter, you can shove yourself up your own ass.
giovedì, giugno 10, 2010
Gourmands of the world, unite!
The long silence has been due to a long spell of hard work and a long spell of China, where all of this sort of thing is not allowed - no Twitter, no Facebook, no Blogger. It was my first trip to Asia and a very low-impact one since 85% of it was spent in a five star hotel, but we did get out to see the more touristic, accessible parts of Shanghai, and I got to eat. A lot. I got to satisfy my wildest, most frustrated cravings - the stomach-grinding misery anyone used to living with a lot of Chinese-extraction-type people will know if they move to Europe, this goddamn culinary desert.
I think Canadians are so deeply unaware of the benefits of our sort of multiculturalism that it worries me because it is something worth fighting tooth and nail to preserve. I could go on for days about the dangers, inaccuracies and moral pitfalls of basing politics on ideas of nationality, and I have, on occasion. And I'm not saying the fractured but blanket snobbery of eurocentrism is any less awful than any other ethnocentrism - that the Han Chinese or American model of basically denying any differences at all exist (beyond the differences promoted by apparently recalcitrant, headstrong cultural perverts like Tibetans or Hispanic people who don't bother learning English) is better.
And I have to acknowledge that in Canada, it is very likely that what we have works as smoothly as it does because our immigration system is extremely aggressive in keeping out illegal migrants, refugees, and any other new residents who aren't already a part of the middle class in their home countries. In fact, if the EU started applying Canadian standards in terms of immigration or refugees, it would have to be after a violent swing to the right - which makes it rather amusing when Canadians seem concerned about European anti-immigrant right-wing movements which are actually a bit left relative to our mainstream.
Of course, there are certain qualifying factors there: in Canada, we're apparently content to hire each other to clean our toilets, strip in our strip clubs, have sex for money, and take care of our children and elderly people, so our present immigration policies are a continuation of older ones - whereas if they came in effect in the EU, it would mean reversing long-standing policies of importing millions of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the old Yalta countries to do all that stuff cheaper. And while Canadians can just check people's passports when they get off planes and then let Fortress America and the weather take care of the rest in terms of border control, the EU would have to bristle up into a little gun-turreted stronghold to keep people out. Europeans, in short, couldn't do what we manage to do so quietly without declaring war on the world.
Anyways, qualifying factors and moral provisos and everything else notwithstanding, the multicultural climate we've ended up with in Canada is really ace. The country is a sort of non-interfering, co-operative union of the international bourgeoisie, and being bourgeois is totally where it's at. There are a lot of reasons for that, which I didn't understand until I became middle class myself, and didn't understand until I met a lot of people of my father's background, in particular, who hadn't gone to the trouble that he'd gone to of getting into the middle class.
The acest thing I can think about it this morning is that the middle class is the foodie class. Sure, the working classes make awesome food - in fact, the awesome food, the food that is the basis of their countries' culinary heritage. Ruling class food is a series of fads and false traditions with no staying power and it should fuck off and die. But the middle class is the class that has the combination of the cultural memory of being working class combined with the leisure to explore and experiment that lets them try lots of new kinds of food.
And in Canada - and I'm hoping to fuck the same applies in Australia and New Zealand, as you might imagine - we, as a nation dominated by the urban bourgeoisie, we can eat at a different kind of restaurant every night of the week for two fucking months if we want to without repeating, at prices accessible to a middle-class wallet. Do you know what would happen if I tried to do that in Belgium, which is supposed to have one of the foodiest cultures in Europe? The fucking process would last two weeks, maybe, and if I wanted anything from outside of Europe that wasn't absolutely fuckingly vily blandified for sissy European palates, I'd go fucking broke. Oh my fuck, it is so annoying.
I think Canadians are so deeply unaware of the benefits of our sort of multiculturalism that it worries me because it is something worth fighting tooth and nail to preserve. I could go on for days about the dangers, inaccuracies and moral pitfalls of basing politics on ideas of nationality, and I have, on occasion. And I'm not saying the fractured but blanket snobbery of eurocentrism is any less awful than any other ethnocentrism - that the Han Chinese or American model of basically denying any differences at all exist (beyond the differences promoted by apparently recalcitrant, headstrong cultural perverts like Tibetans or Hispanic people who don't bother learning English) is better.
And I have to acknowledge that in Canada, it is very likely that what we have works as smoothly as it does because our immigration system is extremely aggressive in keeping out illegal migrants, refugees, and any other new residents who aren't already a part of the middle class in their home countries. In fact, if the EU started applying Canadian standards in terms of immigration or refugees, it would have to be after a violent swing to the right - which makes it rather amusing when Canadians seem concerned about European anti-immigrant right-wing movements which are actually a bit left relative to our mainstream.
Of course, there are certain qualifying factors there: in Canada, we're apparently content to hire each other to clean our toilets, strip in our strip clubs, have sex for money, and take care of our children and elderly people, so our present immigration policies are a continuation of older ones - whereas if they came in effect in the EU, it would mean reversing long-standing policies of importing millions of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the old Yalta countries to do all that stuff cheaper. And while Canadians can just check people's passports when they get off planes and then let Fortress America and the weather take care of the rest in terms of border control, the EU would have to bristle up into a little gun-turreted stronghold to keep people out. Europeans, in short, couldn't do what we manage to do so quietly without declaring war on the world.
Anyways, qualifying factors and moral provisos and everything else notwithstanding, the multicultural climate we've ended up with in Canada is really ace. The country is a sort of non-interfering, co-operative union of the international bourgeoisie, and being bourgeois is totally where it's at. There are a lot of reasons for that, which I didn't understand until I became middle class myself, and didn't understand until I met a lot of people of my father's background, in particular, who hadn't gone to the trouble that he'd gone to of getting into the middle class.
The acest thing I can think about it this morning is that the middle class is the foodie class. Sure, the working classes make awesome food - in fact, the awesome food, the food that is the basis of their countries' culinary heritage. Ruling class food is a series of fads and false traditions with no staying power and it should fuck off and die. But the middle class is the class that has the combination of the cultural memory of being working class combined with the leisure to explore and experiment that lets them try lots of new kinds of food.
And in Canada - and I'm hoping to fuck the same applies in Australia and New Zealand, as you might imagine - we, as a nation dominated by the urban bourgeoisie, we can eat at a different kind of restaurant every night of the week for two fucking months if we want to without repeating, at prices accessible to a middle-class wallet. Do you know what would happen if I tried to do that in Belgium, which is supposed to have one of the foodiest cultures in Europe? The fucking process would last two weeks, maybe, and if I wanted anything from outside of Europe that wasn't absolutely fuckingly vily blandified for sissy European palates, I'd go fucking broke. Oh my fuck, it is so annoying.
venerdì, maggio 21, 2010
The Red Dragon's snatch adventures
1. It really is amazing how Tasmania looks like a snatch, isn't it?
2. I'm still fundamentally happy with the reusable rags in terms of comfort and all the rest of it, but can't deny all the extra laundry is hugely inconvenient since we don't use a washing machine (yep, the hand-crank one is still doing for us, but the F-word has taken it over and quite honestly I don't feel right asking him to wash my rags. Ergo the 'huge inconvenience' comes from me actually having to do laundry), and it uses a vast amount of water and energy to keep them in good shape, stain free, and sterile, since we don't use bleach. Which is sorta fine now that I'm living in a temperate rainforest called Belgium, and may be less fine when I'm in Australia, living through drought/flood cycles.
So I bought a silicon menstrual cup. The only brand I could find here is the Divacup, retailing at a 105% markup from its Canadian price - and oh yes, it's made in Canada. Nice to have a little of the homeland up my twat. I paid the markup because the Red Dragon snuck up on me when I was away from home and unprepared, but anyone else buying in Europe, UK included, should order it from an NA Amazon site or iHerb, it's a fuckload cheaper even with the delivery. It's pretty ace, works a treat, comfy, and tidy. Also can't lie that the reusable rags are bulky: it all feels a bit more svelte walking around with my business tucked up inside. Still bleeding out into the rags o'nights, though. The idea of lying down for eight hours with all that blood trapped up there is as gross as imagining David Cameron's O face.
So seriously, and at the risk of sounding harsh: between resuable rags and the cup, as far as I can tell, at this point any chick still using disposables is a fucking idiot. After lots of usage, as should be clear above I understand some of the objections to rags. But the cup up the twat is actually tidier to use than disposables, and a hell of a lot more 'hygienic' if that's what makes you go ick, since you don't have biohazards hanging around your house for the dog to find and chew on. And it doesn't desiccate your twat like tampons do. And it's safer. And cheaper. And that's all not counting the environment and whatnot. So stop being a fucking idiot. That is all.
2. I'm still fundamentally happy with the reusable rags in terms of comfort and all the rest of it, but can't deny all the extra laundry is hugely inconvenient since we don't use a washing machine (yep, the hand-crank one is still doing for us, but the F-word has taken it over and quite honestly I don't feel right asking him to wash my rags. Ergo the 'huge inconvenience' comes from me actually having to do laundry), and it uses a vast amount of water and energy to keep them in good shape, stain free, and sterile, since we don't use bleach. Which is sorta fine now that I'm living in a temperate rainforest called Belgium, and may be less fine when I'm in Australia, living through drought/flood cycles.
So I bought a silicon menstrual cup. The only brand I could find here is the Divacup, retailing at a 105% markup from its Canadian price - and oh yes, it's made in Canada. Nice to have a little of the homeland up my twat. I paid the markup because the Red Dragon snuck up on me when I was away from home and unprepared, but anyone else buying in Europe, UK included, should order it from an NA Amazon site or iHerb, it's a fuckload cheaper even with the delivery. It's pretty ace, works a treat, comfy, and tidy. Also can't lie that the reusable rags are bulky: it all feels a bit more svelte walking around with my business tucked up inside. Still bleeding out into the rags o'nights, though. The idea of lying down for eight hours with all that blood trapped up there is as gross as imagining David Cameron's O face.
So seriously, and at the risk of sounding harsh: between resuable rags and the cup, as far as I can tell, at this point any chick still using disposables is a fucking idiot. After lots of usage, as should be clear above I understand some of the objections to rags. But the cup up the twat is actually tidier to use than disposables, and a hell of a lot more 'hygienic' if that's what makes you go ick, since you don't have biohazards hanging around your house for the dog to find and chew on. And it doesn't desiccate your twat like tampons do. And it's safer. And cheaper. And that's all not counting the environment and whatnot. So stop being a fucking idiot. That is all.
martedì, maggio 18, 2010
The Shoddyssey part II
It would be an exaggeration to say things are coming together, but at least they're starting to seem a little less entropic.
1. My X-ray has been found. It turns out the hospital - instead of sending it to my doctor on the other side of town, a task for which I gave'em five euros in postage, and doctor about whom we had a little gossip at the front desk - instead took the initiative to pay about fifty euros and send it to the department of immigration in Sydney or Canberra or some such.
Luckily somebody there noted the Belgiumness of it and all and contacted the Berlin embassy (Belgian visa requests go through Berlin, the embassy here in Brussels is teeny-tiny) and the Aussies sorted it out between themselves. Not until after, however, the hospital had told me they'd probably sent the X-ray to a bunch of other Belgian doctors with the same name as my doctor and I should call all of them to track it down - I did of course, including one very friendly and very confused dentist - fuckers.
Anyways, the upshot of it all is that I'm irritated and amused in equal measure, and thrilled that I'll be moving to a country where the civil servants are able to successfully complete "If . . . then . . . so" statements.
2. Now the only pending documentation for the visa is my Canadian criminal background check and the fuckers of Mounties don't even know if my request is in their building yet. Fuck me, in excess of four months in my homeland vs a week in Belgium and France, two of the stupidest countries in the developed world. Brava, Canada, atta play with the big dogs. Would like to go back to Canada for a week or so to just get the three-day electronic request one, but unless I do it, like, next week, there's no fricking time until the end of July, in between work, travel for work, and people coming here to visit. In fact we're so solidly booked until the end of July that I caught myself feeling a touch of relief one of our visitors got a staph infection and had to cancel her trip. What kind of monster am I turning into?
3. Lexie finally got her rabies test. I'm starting to hesitate about taking her again. We have got an offer now from a very dear friend in Canada to take her in, Sugarplum of yore, and it's hard to imagine a better home for her, especially if her family decamps to the country house they're moving to buy. And a 24 hour plane ride in the hold followed by a month of quarantine, versus nine hours in the hold, a car ride, and then a warm loving permanent home . . . But I'm her human, she's my cat, and I reckon she'd like Australia, where we can get a biggish house and a garden. Sigh. It's all very confusing. I think I will judge as the months wear on on the basis of her health.
1. My X-ray has been found. It turns out the hospital - instead of sending it to my doctor on the other side of town, a task for which I gave'em five euros in postage, and doctor about whom we had a little gossip at the front desk - instead took the initiative to pay about fifty euros and send it to the department of immigration in Sydney or Canberra or some such.
Luckily somebody there noted the Belgiumness of it and all and contacted the Berlin embassy (Belgian visa requests go through Berlin, the embassy here in Brussels is teeny-tiny) and the Aussies sorted it out between themselves. Not until after, however, the hospital had told me they'd probably sent the X-ray to a bunch of other Belgian doctors with the same name as my doctor and I should call all of them to track it down - I did of course, including one very friendly and very confused dentist - fuckers.
Anyways, the upshot of it all is that I'm irritated and amused in equal measure, and thrilled that I'll be moving to a country where the civil servants are able to successfully complete "If . . . then . . . so" statements.
2. Now the only pending documentation for the visa is my Canadian criminal background check and the fuckers of Mounties don't even know if my request is in their building yet. Fuck me, in excess of four months in my homeland vs a week in Belgium and France, two of the stupidest countries in the developed world. Brava, Canada, atta play with the big dogs. Would like to go back to Canada for a week or so to just get the three-day electronic request one, but unless I do it, like, next week, there's no fricking time until the end of July, in between work, travel for work, and people coming here to visit. In fact we're so solidly booked until the end of July that I caught myself feeling a touch of relief one of our visitors got a staph infection and had to cancel her trip. What kind of monster am I turning into?
3. Lexie finally got her rabies test. I'm starting to hesitate about taking her again. We have got an offer now from a very dear friend in Canada to take her in, Sugarplum of yore, and it's hard to imagine a better home for her, especially if her family decamps to the country house they're moving to buy. And a 24 hour plane ride in the hold followed by a month of quarantine, versus nine hours in the hold, a car ride, and then a warm loving permanent home . . . But I'm her human, she's my cat, and I reckon she'd like Australia, where we can get a biggish house and a garden. Sigh. It's all very confusing. I think I will judge as the months wear on on the basis of her health.
martedì, novembre 10, 2009
World's cutest degenerates
There are lots of benefits to having an Australian boyfriend. One of them is the unfailing funniness of the way he says words like "beer" and "groin" and "shit" - despite his years and years of living abroad and modulating his accent to be comprehensible to Europeans and Canadians, some words, like the three just listed, are said with multiple syllables and vowel sounds that just don't exist in any other mouths I've ever experienced, and it's hilarious. "Beeeeeiiiyaah." Marvellous. (He laughs at the way I say "gazebo", "granola" and "coffee" so it's allowed.)
Another is that being excessively fond of him has made me more interested in the country he comes from, which is interesting in its own right due the bizarre flora and fauna. Take koalas. They're fucking adorable, right? Look at this fucking adorable koala:
Until the F-word started dominating my consciousness I was content to leave it at that - "aw, koalas, adorable" and move my brain along to the next task at hand. But do you know what else about koalas? They're the fucking dregs of society in the classic Daily Mail sense. They spend all day sleeping, getting stoned out of their minds on psychotropic leaves, once in awhile managing to lazily fuck each other without either protection or discretion, and spreading the clap across their population like wildfire. Lazy, venereal disease-ridden junkies. Marvellous. Except it's killing them. And the government isn't going to take it anymore. No special treatment for those nasty little things. Just because everyone adores them doesn't mean they can be filthy decadent hophead sluts and expect the rest of us to clean up after them.
Poor koalas. I still love them.
Well. A nasty little entry about the world's cutest animals dying of the clap was my attempt at an fluffy escape from blogging about how fucked up everything is. Some of you have been sweet enough to worry about me. I'm actually okay, I think - not to worry, at least. We're getting counselling at the office, I have fantastic support from my koala-loving partner, I've been super-touched to have your sweet messages, and this is Belgium, not North America; I can go on stress leave if I need to, and I will if I need to, but right now I don't.
I don't know if it's as morbid as all hell or not, but I worked out that around the time my colleague disappeared, I had this song in my head, and listening to it once every morning, as I'm blogging and getting ready for work, is somehow a massive comfort:
Soon I'll be ready to start thinking about things like the long-term philosophical view about souls over bodies, which gentle Rodelinda, with great emotional delicacy, suggested suggesting. Not yet though. Right now I'll just keep listening to the Final Fantasy song that was stuck in my head when he disappeared, morbid as hell or not.
Another is that being excessively fond of him has made me more interested in the country he comes from, which is interesting in its own right due the bizarre flora and fauna. Take koalas. They're fucking adorable, right? Look at this fucking adorable koala:
Until the F-word started dominating my consciousness I was content to leave it at that - "aw, koalas, adorable" and move my brain along to the next task at hand. But do you know what else about koalas? They're the fucking dregs of society in the classic Daily Mail sense. They spend all day sleeping, getting stoned out of their minds on psychotropic leaves, once in awhile managing to lazily fuck each other without either protection or discretion, and spreading the clap across their population like wildfire. Lazy, venereal disease-ridden junkies. Marvellous. Except it's killing them. And the government isn't going to take it anymore. No special treatment for those nasty little things. Just because everyone adores them doesn't mean they can be filthy decadent hophead sluts and expect the rest of us to clean up after them.Poor koalas. I still love them.
Well. A nasty little entry about the world's cutest animals dying of the clap was my attempt at an fluffy escape from blogging about how fucked up everything is. Some of you have been sweet enough to worry about me. I'm actually okay, I think - not to worry, at least. We're getting counselling at the office, I have fantastic support from my koala-loving partner, I've been super-touched to have your sweet messages, and this is Belgium, not North America; I can go on stress leave if I need to, and I will if I need to, but right now I don't.
I don't know if it's as morbid as all hell or not, but I worked out that around the time my colleague disappeared, I had this song in my head, and listening to it once every morning, as I'm blogging and getting ready for work, is somehow a massive comfort:
Soon I'll be ready to start thinking about things like the long-term philosophical view about souls over bodies, which gentle Rodelinda, with great emotional delicacy, suggested suggesting. Not yet though. Right now I'll just keep listening to the Final Fantasy song that was stuck in my head when he disappeared, morbid as hell or not.
martedì, ottobre 13, 2009
A statement of the obvious
The Arcade Fire is fucking ace. That's so obvious I feel a little silly typing it out. But I've forgotten about it for awhile as it's a bit too tinkly for the F-word so it doesn't get played at home, and for the past year or so my work has been so wordy that I don't think I've listened to music at the office for ages. But now that it's getting a little more spatial I can listen to music in a serious way at the same time, and it's been so nice to have Funeral and Neon Bible playing away.
Aside from the charm of the music, which I do find charming on its own merits, the Arcade Fire gives me pleasure by making me imagine a world where mainstream soul and R&B and fucking everything didn't suffer from a massive and indiscrimate uptake of electronic musical effects. Obviously I love electronic musical effects, but something went wrong somewhere. We're not in a situation where everybody is still touring with horn sections and that lots of big bands are soaking up all of those wandering lost uni music grads. Nope. Just Arcade Fire, and Final Fantasy, and a bunch of other Canadian and European weirdos who I never hear of until it's far too late - case in point:
Broke up ten fucking years ago . . .
Aside from the charm of the music, which I do find charming on its own merits, the Arcade Fire gives me pleasure by making me imagine a world where mainstream soul and R&B and fucking everything didn't suffer from a massive and indiscrimate uptake of electronic musical effects. Obviously I love electronic musical effects, but something went wrong somewhere. We're not in a situation where everybody is still touring with horn sections and that lots of big bands are soaking up all of those wandering lost uni music grads. Nope. Just Arcade Fire, and Final Fantasy, and a bunch of other Canadian and European weirdos who I never hear of until it's far too late - case in point:
Broke up ten fucking years ago . . .
lunedì, agosto 31, 2009
The ones I've loved the longest
Actual dialogue from this weekend:
Mistress La Spliffe: I'm pretty sure he's not gay.
High School Buddy: What are you basing that on?
MLF: Partly on him telling you he's not gay.
HSB: Well, he just came up to me spontaneously and said "I'm not gay," why would he have done that if he wasn't gay?
MLS: Maybe because you'd been saying that you're sure he's gay when he was sitting behind us at the wedding table.
HSB: No.
MLS: You were speaking really loud.
HSB: Oh.
The shocking thing about that exchange was that as far as I could tell I was way the drunkest.
Back in North Bay now, although in a way you could hardly tell; London (Ontario) and North Bay are sister cities in drabness, poor roads and squatty ugly buildings, London being the larger, obese sister and North Bay being the pregnant 16-year-old sister living in a little trailer. It was a pretty great wedding. Good to see my group from highschool again, and eerie to watch us be us - that group from highschool again - making each other risk pissing ourselves with laughter - even as life and our own wilfulness takes us into all sorts of weirdo directions.
Getting from London back to Toronto, where we dined with Luke Duke and co. before dropping off Elvis at the aeroport, was much less pleasant. Very fucking unpleasant, actually. But that's life, nothing's for free, or even at the price you think it is, and it's over now. Horrible to drop off Elvis at the aeroport, too. I wish we all arrived and left at the same time, all these goodbyes do my fucking head in. And while this blog is obviously all about me and how awesome I am, there was a touch of dialogue between Elvis and Luke Duke I don't want to forget:
Elvis: We've got a really tiny backyard, so we've started guerilla gardening in a vacant lot down the street.
Luke Duke: Careful, that's how Che started out.
And just so he won't feel left out on the blog he doesn't even know exists, and because he, like the other two, is the master of the throwaway line:
Magnum: That's totally gone to shit. You probably guessed how already but I'll tell you all about it after we start drinking.
Mistress La Spliffe: I'm pretty sure he's not gay.
High School Buddy: What are you basing that on?
MLF: Partly on him telling you he's not gay.
HSB: Well, he just came up to me spontaneously and said "I'm not gay," why would he have done that if he wasn't gay?
MLS: Maybe because you'd been saying that you're sure he's gay when he was sitting behind us at the wedding table.
HSB: No.
MLS: You were speaking really loud.
HSB: Oh.
The shocking thing about that exchange was that as far as I could tell I was way the drunkest.
Back in North Bay now, although in a way you could hardly tell; London (Ontario) and North Bay are sister cities in drabness, poor roads and squatty ugly buildings, London being the larger, obese sister and North Bay being the pregnant 16-year-old sister living in a little trailer. It was a pretty great wedding. Good to see my group from highschool again, and eerie to watch us be us - that group from highschool again - making each other risk pissing ourselves with laughter - even as life and our own wilfulness takes us into all sorts of weirdo directions.
Getting from London back to Toronto, where we dined with Luke Duke and co. before dropping off Elvis at the aeroport, was much less pleasant. Very fucking unpleasant, actually. But that's life, nothing's for free, or even at the price you think it is, and it's over now. Horrible to drop off Elvis at the aeroport, too. I wish we all arrived and left at the same time, all these goodbyes do my fucking head in. And while this blog is obviously all about me and how awesome I am, there was a touch of dialogue between Elvis and Luke Duke I don't want to forget:
Elvis: We've got a really tiny backyard, so we've started guerilla gardening in a vacant lot down the street.
Luke Duke: Careful, that's how Che started out.
And just so he won't feel left out on the blog he doesn't even know exists, and because he, like the other two, is the master of the throwaway line:
Magnum: That's totally gone to shit. You probably guessed how already but I'll tell you all about it after we start drinking.
lunedì, maggio 18, 2009
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.
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.
lunedì, marzo 23, 2009
My life-long lack of scurvy belongs to Daddy
When my parents were here my father cleaned up our balcony 'garden' and got our tomatoes going. They're the sort of visitors who need to be given tasks or else they'll take over the washing up and put everything away in the wrong place. It was a lovely visit, but I did feel as though I spent four days running interference to prevent them doing the washing up and putting everything away in the wrong place. Unsuccessfully. We're still finding things where they don't belong.
But the tomatoes weren't just busy work; I needed a very belated tutorial. My father is a helluva gardener. When we lived out in the sticks - the proper Canadian swampy tree-y deer-filled bear-roaming granite-strewn sticks, like, the proper Shania-Twain type sticks, the man had trucks of dirt brought in and constructed terraces in our rocky front yard over about half an acre. Single-handedly, as women were not encouraged to garden food in my household, and from memory my brothers tended to be too busy chasing pussy and dropping acid to help out.
His gardens out there were amazing and productive, despite the wild animals that raided them periodically. Same with our house before that, an unexpectedly large suburban corner lot he transformed into a minifundium that could get all six of us a huge chunk of our veg needs; and same, though on a smaller scale, with the house they have now, closer to the lake.
His latest stunt is growing grapes. Okay, they’re Concords, but it is fucking northern Ontario and there are only three fucking months of tolerable warmth a year. The man is a superstar. A superstar who scorns pre-made frames and trellises and paying for help. The visual memory of my childhood is of my father throwing up networks of climbing frames for the tomatoes and beans and peas, made out of big sticks held together with twist ties.
Anyways, I only had to wait until I was 30 to learn from him how to plant tomatoes. And they’re not even tomatoes, they’re tomatilloes, which I’ve never even tried before. But he planted them last Monday and now they’re starting to sprout nicely:
But the tomatoes weren't just busy work; I needed a very belated tutorial. My father is a helluva gardener. When we lived out in the sticks - the proper Canadian swampy tree-y deer-filled bear-roaming granite-strewn sticks, like, the proper Shania-Twain type sticks, the man had trucks of dirt brought in and constructed terraces in our rocky front yard over about half an acre. Single-handedly, as women were not encouraged to garden food in my household, and from memory my brothers tended to be too busy chasing pussy and dropping acid to help out.
His gardens out there were amazing and productive, despite the wild animals that raided them periodically. Same with our house before that, an unexpectedly large suburban corner lot he transformed into a minifundium that could get all six of us a huge chunk of our veg needs; and same, though on a smaller scale, with the house they have now, closer to the lake.
His latest stunt is growing grapes. Okay, they’re Concords, but it is fucking northern Ontario and there are only three fucking months of tolerable warmth a year. The man is a superstar. A superstar who scorns pre-made frames and trellises and paying for help. The visual memory of my childhood is of my father throwing up networks of climbing frames for the tomatoes and beans and peas, made out of big sticks held together with twist ties.
Anyways, I only had to wait until I was 30 to learn from him how to plant tomatoes. And they’re not even tomatoes, they’re tomatilloes, which I’ve never even tried before. But he planted them last Monday and now they’re starting to sprout nicely:
martedì, ottobre 21, 2008
Gross me out
So I haven't seen an anglo Canadian movie since the awesomeness that was FUBAR, and my mum was a bit keen on Due South, so we went to see Passchendaele last night. And my hat goes off to Paul Gross, who wrote, directed and starred in what's been billed as the most expensive domestically financed Canadian film ever. He is absolutely unique: the only man who has succeeded in exploiting the greatest mass slaughter of military-age innocents our naughty world has ever seen by turning it into a two hour wank fantasy about Paul Gross.
In general terms - holy shit, it was so bad. It trotted out every North American Great War Movie cliche, except for one (the Funny Native Guy didn't die first, or indeed at all - atta break new cinematic ground) and the story made no fucking sense, with plot holes that looked like they'd been blown through by German artillery. Honestly, that shit made Pearl Harbour's story look like a masterpiece of verisimilitude and art. There was some good gruesome bayoneting, stabbing, and slicing, a couple of rats coming out of corpses' mouths, lots of mud, some all-too-brief-relative-to-the-wank reminders of things we must never forget and never allow to happen again - some points where I was able to focus on the action long enough to stop cringing and to thank the Lord that my brothers are getting past military age, and no matter how apeshit the world goes the Man will never be able to conscript them. And the Funny Native Guy didn't die. Otherwise . . .
It's the Gross that's pissing me off though. How the hell he had the gall to make the battle of Passchendaele in particular and World War I in general into fan fiction about himself is absolutely fucking beyond me, and how the producers let him is even more so. Though maybe it will work, financially. He has some sort of built-in fan base from being the Mountie. But honestly, the movie offended me, even disgusted me, and I can't believe it wouldn't offend anybody, or rather I can't understand how it wouldn't. World War I was horrible and brutal, a nauseating example of what governments are willing to do to their own citizenry, and an infuriating example of what imperial powers were willing to do to their colonials; certainly the story of Canada during that war is tragic. It was not about Paul Gross.
Oh, there are stories to tell from all of us people who aren't yanks or limeys. And we have a prototype or an example of how such a story can be told: Winston Churchill, that big fat fucking hero, turned the citizens of Australia and New Zealand into hapless bayonet-catchers at Gallipolli and the kangaroonis managed to make a movie out of that that didn't really fucking suck. And the efforts to re-humanize all those men, colonial punching bags and imperial citizens alike, who were so utterly dehumanized by their leaders, should never stop. They should be told more than they are - has any memorable pop culture shit about it came out since Blackadder Goes Forth, whose ending made me cry like a baby?
They should be told more because of the horror and the heroism of the way the soldiers and the European civilians lived and died, and they should be told more because it's starting to seem like World War II is obsessing everybody's war movie budgets; we can convince ourselves with that one that it was Nazis bad, us good - but there are no such easy convictions with World War I. And if there are no easy convictions about World War I, and if World War II came out of World War I, what was World War II really? Seriously, if we'd like to think that the Nazis could have done what they did to Europe's Jews, gypsies, homos and commies without the collusion of its neighbours and putative enemies, we are lying to ourselves. And that is why war is evil and why we are obliged to think about it. It's always a possibility, always an option, and if the men in charge feel it's to their advantage to choose that option, they'll be happy to drag us all along - and we need to know why we shouldn't be.
But Paul Gross curing a hot nurse of morphia addiction, striking a Jesus pose, getting laid while bombs burst in air and while being the Fonz in flannel is not, for me, a step in the right direction. One thing I will say for World War II movies and such is that Band of Brothers and even Shaving Ryan's Privates and whatnot illustrated beautifully that you don't need to maudlin the hell out of stories about soldiers for them to be deeply emotionally effecting. What could be more emotionally effecting than watching a character risk death or die during the best of his youth, the best of his days, for no good fucking reason? How absurd and soppily romantic do you have to make his backstory to make your audience understand that they mustn't look away? How one-dimensional do all the other characters have to be to make us care? Not much. It's been proven. So, ugh. The whole thing pissed me off.
In general terms - holy shit, it was so bad. It trotted out every North American Great War Movie cliche, except for one (the Funny Native Guy didn't die first, or indeed at all - atta break new cinematic ground) and the story made no fucking sense, with plot holes that looked like they'd been blown through by German artillery. Honestly, that shit made Pearl Harbour's story look like a masterpiece of verisimilitude and art. There was some good gruesome bayoneting, stabbing, and slicing, a couple of rats coming out of corpses' mouths, lots of mud, some all-too-brief-relative-to-the-wank reminders of things we must never forget and never allow to happen again - some points where I was able to focus on the action long enough to stop cringing and to thank the Lord that my brothers are getting past military age, and no matter how apeshit the world goes the Man will never be able to conscript them. And the Funny Native Guy didn't die. Otherwise . . .
It's the Gross that's pissing me off though. How the hell he had the gall to make the battle of Passchendaele in particular and World War I in general into fan fiction about himself is absolutely fucking beyond me, and how the producers let him is even more so. Though maybe it will work, financially. He has some sort of built-in fan base from being the Mountie. But honestly, the movie offended me, even disgusted me, and I can't believe it wouldn't offend anybody, or rather I can't understand how it wouldn't. World War I was horrible and brutal, a nauseating example of what governments are willing to do to their own citizenry, and an infuriating example of what imperial powers were willing to do to their colonials; certainly the story of Canada during that war is tragic. It was not about Paul Gross.
Oh, there are stories to tell from all of us people who aren't yanks or limeys. And we have a prototype or an example of how such a story can be told: Winston Churchill, that big fat fucking hero, turned the citizens of Australia and New Zealand into hapless bayonet-catchers at Gallipolli and the kangaroonis managed to make a movie out of that that didn't really fucking suck. And the efforts to re-humanize all those men, colonial punching bags and imperial citizens alike, who were so utterly dehumanized by their leaders, should never stop. They should be told more than they are - has any memorable pop culture shit about it came out since Blackadder Goes Forth, whose ending made me cry like a baby?
They should be told more because of the horror and the heroism of the way the soldiers and the European civilians lived and died, and they should be told more because it's starting to seem like World War II is obsessing everybody's war movie budgets; we can convince ourselves with that one that it was Nazis bad, us good - but there are no such easy convictions with World War I. And if there are no easy convictions about World War I, and if World War II came out of World War I, what was World War II really? Seriously, if we'd like to think that the Nazis could have done what they did to Europe's Jews, gypsies, homos and commies without the collusion of its neighbours and putative enemies, we are lying to ourselves. And that is why war is evil and why we are obliged to think about it. It's always a possibility, always an option, and if the men in charge feel it's to their advantage to choose that option, they'll be happy to drag us all along - and we need to know why we shouldn't be.
But Paul Gross curing a hot nurse of morphia addiction, striking a Jesus pose, getting laid while bombs burst in air and while being the Fonz in flannel is not, for me, a step in the right direction. One thing I will say for World War II movies and such is that Band of Brothers and even Shaving Ryan's Privates and whatnot illustrated beautifully that you don't need to maudlin the hell out of stories about soldiers for them to be deeply emotionally effecting. What could be more emotionally effecting than watching a character risk death or die during the best of his youth, the best of his days, for no good fucking reason? How absurd and soppily romantic do you have to make his backstory to make your audience understand that they mustn't look away? How one-dimensional do all the other characters have to be to make us care? Not much. It's been proven. So, ugh. The whole thing pissed me off.
martedì, ottobre 14, 2008
Sometimes it's good to have an pseudonymous blog redux
As I happened to be at home during my homeland's snap election, and as my homeland is still dinging me for tax and as I don't believe in taxation without representation, and as my accountant may have fucked up the surrender of my residency in my homeland for tax purposes (so I might need increasing amounts of representation), I voted. And while my ballot is private, let's just say I exercised my rights and responsibilities as the citizen of a parliamentary democracy to vote for one of the weirdo parties who don't even have the possibility of winning built into their platform but whose views best represent my ideological convictions. Don't tell my parents. They're big movers and shakers in one of the non-loony parties.
Yankees, eat your hearts out. Or rather, do what you have to do to get rid of the Republicans, and then hit the streets and protest until you get a functioning parliamentary democracy, instead of the bullshit you have now that amounts to an expensive, well-spun form of fascism, which voting for a third-party candidate merely fucking bolsters.
Oh, and P.S., if I hear one more fucking American defend the nonsense that is their two party system by saying 'at least it's better than Italy', I'll fucking slap them. When it comes to politics, you know what else is better than Italy? The entire developed world. If that's the benchmark they're comparing yourself to, then I don't think they should be allowed to even hold pointy objects anymore, let alone atomic weaponry. One of my Yankee bosses was the latest one to poop out that little gem in front of me, and I think I nearly had an embolism, it was so hard to keep the scorn inside.
Yankees, eat your hearts out. Or rather, do what you have to do to get rid of the Republicans, and then hit the streets and protest until you get a functioning parliamentary democracy, instead of the bullshit you have now that amounts to an expensive, well-spun form of fascism, which voting for a third-party candidate merely fucking bolsters.
Oh, and P.S., if I hear one more fucking American defend the nonsense that is their two party system by saying 'at least it's better than Italy', I'll fucking slap them. When it comes to politics, you know what else is better than Italy? The entire developed world. If that's the benchmark they're comparing yourself to, then I don't think they should be allowed to even hold pointy objects anymore, let alone atomic weaponry. One of my Yankee bosses was the latest one to poop out that little gem in front of me, and I think I nearly had an embolism, it was so hard to keep the scorn inside.
Iscriviti a:
Commenti (Atom)