I'm afraid of the television

We're watching Twin Peaks again. Well, I'm watching it again, ten years or so after the fact, and the F-word is watching it for the first time, which is a shame, because last night we got to the episode where Agent Cooper finds out Who Killed Laura Palmer, and I'm fine with not watching anymore, but we must keep going so the F-word feels like he'll understand Fire Walk With Me, which I haven't seen yet and he has. Oh well. I really like Twin Peaks, though I didn't give a rat's ass about it when it was actually on television, and so the second half of the second season really, really disgusts me. It's like poor fan fiction. Everybody just checked out. Like the last two seasons of the Sopranos. The fucking well ran dry, but it's American television so you've gotta keep the fucking oasis open until all the camels are dead. Gah.

It does remind me, though, that I really like David Lynch, and what I really like about him: there's something emotionally honest about his sort of surrealism. I've only seen two or three of his movies but Inland Empire was just the best thing since sliced bread and watching the first season and a half of Twin Peaks reminded me of what I loved so much about it. More than any other filmmaker I can think of, David Lynch manages to communicate what I reckon is really most people's actual surrealistic state of mind - this sort of in-between, 1/10th in the world, 9/10ths completely preoccupied with a more-or-less playful three-way wrestling match between the shadow and persona and animus, each of which pick up bits and pieces of the physical reality surrounding them and/or the collective unconscious to hit each other with, like professional wrestlers with metal chairs.

Most filmmakers and certainly most television writers are so procedural and observational, and that's fine so far as it goes but I don't think it reflects anybody's real relationship with the world. When you get dumped, you don't just sit there crying while mood-appropriate music plays until you feel better; a million things buzz around in your brain around the sort of central emotion of "aw shit", and it is very complex and very different from everyone else's experience of that emotion in the details while being the same in the broad design, and frankly I think it's impossible to communicate or illustrate that while maintaining any sort of 'realism' because our brains are not realistic. Nonetheless, when you watch a normal movie or television show and someone gets dumped, all that happens to communicate the emotion to you is some person sits there crying while mood appropriate music plays until they feel better.

All of which, again, is fine so far as it goes, but considering how much television-type media a Western person watches from cradle-to-the-grave - considering that unless you're off your fucking head, you have to admit that most Western people under 35 have almost certainly learnt as much or more from television than from their parents about how the world is supposed to work - well, it concerns me. It concerns me that that sort of media isn't letting people know that it's okay, probably even good, when your emotions are complex and conflicted; when it isn't letting people know that emotional procedures don't exist, and that words like 'joy', 'grief', 'guilt', 'pride', 'love' and 'hate' aren't ends in themselves or self-contained or tidy, but just very simplistic shorthand for very rich and confusing experiences.

I guess I have two real fears about this: first, that we're raising generations of perfectly normal people who are going to confuse the complex emotions that they're feeling with some sort of mental illness, and second, that eventually perfectly normal people will simply stop experiencing emotions in such a complex way. The second is probably very unlikely but it's my greatest fear that doesn't involve having my fingernails ripped off and points upward on the physical discomfort scale for me and mine. The first is probably currently rolling out in a household near you.

Promotional material

This mother of a mood indigo won't fuck off out of my head, although yesterday the sun broke through the clouds a few times, like at Exki (first bit of promotional material - it's quite nice. There. Quite is promotion, right?) one of the nice till ladies didn't charge me for a peice of lemon cake. I never, ever buy cake for myself because I'm a cheap bastard, but yesterday I fell for the consumer conviction that I deserve it, and I got it for free. Yay.

Second bit of promotional material: the BBC's How Earth Made Us. It's a backhanded promotion, because besides being something I'm enjoying whilst high, it's also a whole great load of almost laughable cackhanded cockwank, with this Scottish bastard with funny teeth showing up everywhere and ejaculating 'Amaaaaazing! Bloody briiiilliant! Thaaat's fantaaastic! ' instead of the time being properly filled up by just showing lots of awesome visuals and interesting facts about geology, one of my closeted obsessions.

I don't understand how the public television juggernaut that is the BBC, the mighty force behind the mighty Attenborough, has now figured that to make people sit still in front of educational programming for an hour at a time now they have to have some jerk-off taking up 40% of the screen time, jerking off. At a certain point I started feeling bad for the poor bastard, who I understand is a real-life academic and probably has a lot of hugely honest enthusiasm for his subject: surely it had to be ass-clenchingly embarassing for him to be made the Centre of the Thingummy like that?

But then again I'm not sure . . . there aren't going to be too many people who will hear the BBC say 'look, we're going to make a super-expensive and awesome documentary about >>>>, but you're going to take up 40% of the screentime jerking off over things, because our market studies have shown audiences like to have an emotional relationship with the narrator,' and say 'why no, I don't want to be the centre of fucking attention, please, please minimize me.' Anyways. All that notwithstanding, it's still worth watching if you're high or if you're the sort of geeky girl who likes Scottish geology professors who've still got all their hair. I complain but I know for a fact that in that case there are legions of girls who'd tap that. Diff'rent strokes.

Also helping me get through the mood indigo, besides free cake and weed and semi-crappy if beautiful-to-look at BBC documentaries, is lots of wine. But beautiful wine, because that way I'm not drinking too much; I'm enjoying my drink too much.

1. Macatela Tempranillo 2008, EHD (Spain)- a light aaaaaalmost fizzy wine, very new. It's sulfite free, or as sulfite free as commercial wine is allowed to be, so you can drink a lot of it without having a headache the next day. That's actually its main benefit - it's not really fantastic, not really exciting. But you can't argue with being able to sink half of it on a weeknight and show up at work without groaning the next morning.

2. Malbec Reserva 2007, Domaine Jean Bousquet (Argentina) - like the preceding, organic, but with the normal amount of sulphites as far as I know. But even though I get it at wholesale prices because I know a guy, the consciousness that it retails at about three times what I normally pay for a bottle keeps me from slamming it back like a self-aware advertising executive. Anyways it's probably worth the retail price. It's fucking yummy, with a rich, complex taste that doesn't linger any more than it should.

3. The Cork Grove Touriga Nacional 2005, Casa Branco (Portugal) - neither organic nor sulphite free nor, sadly, obtained at wholesale prices. But you know, out of the three I think this one's my favourite. It's like drinking really delicious water that gets you drunk, and in heaven there's almost certainly a stream where this lovely stuff runs and plays over the rocks.

Pathologilarity

Lately we have been enjoying John Safran's new ABC series, Race Relations. It's pretty fucking awesome, and for me roughly - errrr - x 1,000,000 better than anything Sacha Baron Cohen has done since the Ali G interview with Noam Chomsky, and even that was only at parity.

The really remarkable thing about John Safran relative to other comedians who use shock-and-awe interviewing techniques with unsuspecting subjects for sheer hilarity is that the sheer hilarity grows out of John Safran leaving you with a niggling suspicion that John Safran is a complete fucking mongoloid whose mental problems go well beyond the average comedian-neuroses. And gawking at that doesn't weigh on the conscience, because obviously he isn't, or at least not pathologically enough that he's missed out on having a thriving career. It's not as fucking funny as it is because of horrid mothers pimping out their babies for photoshoots, or because of baying white trash Americans getting pissed off by two guys making out - things which I would argue, whatever their merits as documentary, aren't fucking funny at all.

Here's the clip that convinced the F-word we should watch it:



And here's a clip of what I mean about the pathological mental problems :



And I promise you it only gets worse, or better, depending on your perspective.

Lots of television for somebody who doesn't watch television

The Simpsons and South Park are back, and this time they're funny. The Simpsons started off all crappy for the first two episodes of the season and then the third was great. And South Park spent all last year being lousy, to the point where I'd argue to watch something, anything else when the F-word got in a cartoon mood. But the two episodes that have came out most recently are just lovely, and thinking back I believe I wasn't even high whilst watching them.



It's hard to have any patience with situation comedies that aren't cartoons anymore. But 30 Rock is also back and also lovely. The season premiere gave a little sketch of a new class tension between Jack and Kenneth that I can't help but want them to exploit the hell out of over the season. But I'm guessing the odds are against the series creators having my sorts of Marxist agendas. Oh well, the dialogue is still sparkling.

Thar be monsters

This is a super-stressful week at work, the sort of week that makes me zone out on videos of kittens and unchallenging American sitcoms just so my brain can untense enough for me to be reasonable with the F-word and then fall asleep. But instead, last night, I watched Coast and then, from the same provider, a BBC documentary about lake monsters.

Coast is a cute show. I don't know if I'll watch the 2 to 4th series, though, as they get rid of the skinny geographer host whose endearing manner reminds me of Geoff the First Time Cottager and put pretty Scottish longhair Neil Oliver on the marqée instead. If I want hot, I'll go ogle the chef at my favourite pizzeria, thank you, when I go to the BBC I want pure fucking geek. Also my part of the coast gets covered in the first series, and now that it's behind me I find myself not caring as much anymore.



We'll see.

The monster one was great. I have a thing for people who spend loads of time and money hunting lake monsters. There's something really sweet about it, almost as sweet as it is silly, but I also find it annoying, as there are so many really phenomonally beautiful and interesting things in the world that actually exist, and why not gawk at those?

But since I started kayaking alone once in awhile, I understand the psychology of sightings a little better. When it's silent and the water is dark, and shapes loom out of it occasionally, and the sounds are odd and once in awhile the way the waves hit your boat sounds like a big solid thing brushing against it, all that shit could be anything. I nearly screamed once on the La Vase when I spotted some bizarre bladdery water weeds because I thought they were a corpse - it took seconds of frantic reasoning with myself to keep looking at them instead of paddling away like a madwoman, and realize they were bladdery water weeds. Also once in Scotland I saw a seal playing on the surface of Loch Lomond, and the way those wee animals swim around, weaving up and down on the surface of the water, looks like all the classic bumpy monster descriptions.

Anyways, here's the documentary, it's good for the evenings your brain hurts and you want to hear the funny way people from Vermont and upstate New York talk.

Filthy swine

I've got swine flu, the friendly house-call doctor reckons. House calls. They're awesome. I didn't even have to change out of my pyjamas. It's good to know I can drop out of wondering about commercial-ethical problems with conventional medicine and whether the vaccine race is a big circular scammy money maker or not now because, well, I've already got it, don't I? I fucking knew this would happen. What don't I get that's catchable through nose-picking? Fuck.

He also said that based on when my symptoms began I won't be infectious anymore by Wednesday, so I can still go to Istanbul . . . working on the assumption that the city is open for business after the floods. The rain has stopped and the conference organizers, who are no doubt shitting themselves, have sent out reassuring emails about how everything is still a go. Personally I want the food that will be attached to the conference so bad that I'll cry if it isn't a go. But I really, really don't want to go in for any disaster tourism.

We meant to get me some tree-time this weekend in one of the few national parks Belgium boasts but I was too sick, so instead we watched Bruno and 30 Rock. Bruno was pretty funny, I guess. I liked his assistant, who I can't find out anything about except that he's Swedish, which is probably why he consented to do such outrageous things that would be widely considered career killers outside of Scandinavia. You have to admire the balls of it all but I guess I'd been expecting too much and only got three or four belly-laughs out of the experience. 30 Rock, of course, I love. What a great show. I wrote before it's no Arrested Development and it's true, but it's as good in its own way. Such great characters. At least one belly-laugh per 20-minute episode. The last one that nearly made me die, as the swine flu is putting some fairly severe limits on my respiratory abilities, was:

Kenneth: Well, you know what they say: 'Money is the root of all evil.'
Tracey: I thought that was just a tag line for my movie, Death Bank.

It was actually sort of scary, I think the F-word was mere moments away from calling me an ambulance. . . .

Lusitanian English Television Bodice Ripping Craptacular

So a fun thing about Portugal is that almost everyone we bumped into, city and country, spoke at least a smattering - usually more - of French or English, so we weren't at a loss to communicate and indeed to have good fun. And as in Spain, in those situations where they didn't, an awkward but clear conversation could be had by speaking sloooooowly in Italian and listening to them respond sloooowly in Portuguese. But usually they were polyglots and while that has a lot to do with tonnes of them going off to France to work, I think at least on the English side (considering how much complaining I've heard about the Portuguese school system) that has a lot to do with their television being subtitled instead of dubbed (unlike France, Italy, and Spain, where people are absolutely crap at English in comparison).

And a fun thing about that is that we got to see television we'd never seen before. Not much of it because we were so excited about being somewhere it wasn't raining, and there were so many summer festivals, that we were outside most of the time. But a good bit. The upshot is that I saw three new shows I'd only heard of before, and liked one of them:

1. 30 Rock. This was the one I liked. It's no Arrested Development but worth the price of admission for revealing that Alec Baldwin, like Nick Cage, should never have ever pretended to be a dramatic actor, ever, and just concentrated on being funny. Good strong ensemble and Jane Krakowski used to much less annoying effect than in Ally McPuke; laughed out loud and made a conscious effort to watch it a second time (Portugal, like a sensible county, airs TV episodes on consecutive days rather than consecutive weeks so one doesn't stop caring in the interim) at which point I laughed out loud some more.

2. The Tudors. The worst thing in bodice-ripping historically tarty boring bullshit I have ever seen, and I've seen Elisa di Rivombroso. I can't think of a single excuse to watch this stinker except to marvel at how Jonathan Rhys-Myers' neck has ballooned out from the birdlike tininess of Velvet Goldmine, so that it looks like his head is sitting on top of an identically circumferenced tube. The kicker is - you know how I feel about Henry VIII. And I honestly believe there would be no better television than showing him for the monstrously fat, suppurating, revolting, ginger mess he was by the time Anne Boleyn started holding her nose and boffing him, and instead they've got the cute little brunet tart from Velvet Goldmine and inflated his neck. Snore. Snore. Snore.

3. Dexter. I had my doubts going in; it looked like a one-trick pony that had already collapsed in the saddle in the spate of copy-cat follow-ups to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It was far, far worse than I'd been expecting. The flat voice-over revealing everything going on in the protagonist's mind and the excessive use of flashbacks drained the events of the episode of any interest they might have had, and any incidental watchability went down the shitter through the excessively bad dialogue writing.

You know, I loved the first four seasons of The Sopranos, I loved the first season of Deadwood, I loved Oz flat-out, but those sorts of shows have a lot to answer for; after they took off as they did TV Land figured out that it didn't actually have to compete with that calibre of writing (indeed, the shows in question could rarely sustain it themselves); it could just show similar levels of titties and exceedingly macabre violence and filthy fucking language and neat camera angles, and people would still think it was cool. Okay. Scratch that. Those sorts of shows don't have a lot to answer for. Audiences have a lot to answer for. The Fucking Tudors, for fuck's sake. Just go download some fucking porn and see some actual penetration shots, and skip over the literary urination on the works of Shakespeare, Robert Bolt, and generations of engaging and competent historians. Fuck.

Three rotten things happened last night

1. The Chaser's War on Everything ended forever. Australians apparently have the same habit of axing television programmes before they run out of ideas and turn into painful, undead farce (seasons 5-7 of the Sopranos, anyone?) that the British have. And that's one of the few things I admire about the British. But as a North American, that's foreign to me (every season following the first of Sex and the City, anyone?) and so I'm still so sad they're gone. They say they'll be back with something else, but who, oh who, will embarass themselves with Australian politicians in the meantime, giving me an indirect study of that country's political firmament?

Two fave moments - one from the first season, one from the last:






Sigh.

2. I finished Adam Bede. There's no more, it's over. Heartbreaking. But I'm still chuffed that I've got four more Eliot monsters to wade into, and after finishing the book I opened it again at random and all the words were still there, thankfully. It will be a good re-read, and a frequent one. Being a stoner I love re-reading books. On the second read, after a few pipes, it's like a fucking private cinema in my brain. And any cinema featuring my new crush Adam is going to be hot.

3. Lexie fell off some boxes. I think her leg is broken. Unutterably distressing, but she doesn't seem to be in distress, she's putting some weight on it, and I'll take her to the vet this afternoon. If she needs some focussed attention I'll have to put off my departure for Lisbon until Monday, and that will be on the fucking overnight coach - there are either no planes left, or they're prohibitively expensive. Oh well. I won't care if she'll be okay. I was absolutely distraught until she started purring, and I realized cats aren't horses, and we won't have to shoot her if it actually is busted. So all will be well, I hope.

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

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.

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?

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:

Australia: not just good for exporting actors who can play a bit of rough

For someone who 'doesn't watch television', I am fucking excited about television. The Australian TV season has started again and those people do documentaries like nobody's business. And their national television streams internationally. I love you, ABC. Whilst sewing and cooking this weekend we sort-of watched The Howard Years in the background, about the prime ministry of a man his predecessor Paul Keating famously described as a 'little dessicated coconut', featuring all the sorts of lies and iniquities and quiet political perversions you'd expect in the post-mortem of any right wing government - but something I've never seen done on British, Canadian, or American television, or at least not so soon after the fall (end of 2007).

And then last night, when I needed something sort of short to fix my mind on - my throat is doing something very, very strange to me and is excruciatingly painful - we watched a series of shorts by a team called Clarke and Dawe, who make fun of politicians through mock interviews on the ABC's 7:30 report, the Clarke half of the team being the politician but not making any sort of effort to actually ape the politician - just talking. Again, compared to any sort of political humour I've seen on other Anglo-Saxon TV, it's unique - so stylistically subtle whilst being holleringly funny. My favourite by far is a bit they did about Philip Ruddock, an old attorney general, minister of immigration and multicultural et cetera who oversaw some very bad things, wherein for once Clarke actually changed his act to ape the man, and ended it bizarrely with a quote from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner that was funny and chilling to the bone - perfect - I mean, what the fuck? Quoting poetry? Even a poem 80% of the Anglo world's highschool students have been forced to read? That's not for us brainless noughties, is it? But it is.

So yes, I'm rather going on about things nobody reading this can be expected to be interested in, but I have to say I'm endlessly fascinated by Australian history and society at the moment. If we do move there, it'll be, hopefully, the last big move I make. The next place needs to be much more permanent so I can make babies and establish the lifestyle I want. So the more I know about Australia, the better - and aside from all that it's a fascinating and fucked-up country. Just finished reading A Secret Country, by John Pilger. Not the world's biggest fan of John Pilger. I find his documentaries hard to watch because the man's voice is like a bucket of clumpy cream thrown at a blackboard, scraped through over and over with a screwdriver. It's beastly. Luckily when you read his books you can't hear his voice and at least in the case of A Secret Country the result is good, although it seems to go all messy at the end in terms of its construction. He needed more of a martinet for an editor. But interesting enough to finish.

Eat your big fat fucking heart out, Michael Moore

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

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

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

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

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

Fun with ethnic stereotypes

1. 6 am, in a dark kitchen. 

Mistress La Spliffe: Want coffee?

F-word: Yeah. 

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

F-word: Yeah. 

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

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

Mistress La Spliffe: Hah!

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

(Ah, but no.) 

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

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

The Red Dragon has an appetite for development

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

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

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

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

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

You've got to think, oh geez, would I do that?

Got the papers for my provisional license yesterday. Took them to the maison communale so as to get my actual provisional license - this thing is a Byzantine complex of complexity. But the maison communale was closed. Not because yesterday was a holiday - because today is a holiday, and they do the 'bridge' here to get four day weekends. And you know what? It didn't piss me off one little bit. I shrugged and walked on. It's like my boss told me once upon a time: when something in Belgium goes right (qualifying for the provisional license), celebrate it; when something goes wrong (incompetent, bloated civil service not showing up for work because nobody feels like it) accept it as the status quo, and walk on . . .

Today isn't any old holiday, but Remembrance Day. Actually, Armistice Day is what they call it here. Commemorating the end of the first world war, rather than the war itself, which is reasonable. In German (which is an official language here, as well as French and Flemish/Dutch - little known fact to help you at your trivia nights), it's Waffenstillstand. Isn't that adorable? Waffenstillstand. Hee hee hee. Who knew people who talk a language that adorable could murder millions of ethnic types so soon after the waffenstillstand of the first world war. Waffenstillstand. Precious. I guess it didn't stand still for long.

Anyways, I'm not doing much to celebrate. I keep thinking, living in Belgium as I do, that I should visit some of the nearby killing fields, get devastatingly high, and spend an hour or so mourning those millions of young men who were maimed and slaughtered in the interests of their ruling classes. Today's certainly not the day for that, though. It's raining, I'm working, and the killing fields will be choked to the gills with visitors.

But last night, we did watch some more Australian television, Four Corners this time, doing a special on how the first world war has been used and abused by politicians and different kinds of historians. I recommend it if you have a spare hour or so. One thing I like a lot about Four Corners is that the documentaries have an arc . . . 20, 25 minutes of the proceedings, and then around minute 30 there's some sort of fucking punch to the gut that alters the entire philosophy of the thing at hand. In this case, it comes from Garth Patten, an Australian teacher at UK's Sandhurst military academy, who after more than half an hour of war historians making more or less wanky arses of themselves - acting like the scarier kind of nerdy child who gets really excited over toy soldiers - sketches out why the first world war continues to be important in the training of the officer class. And it's fucking devastating, what he says.

The whole extended interview with him was fascinating. It was interesting to hear what all the interviewees had to say in the context of a discussion about how the first world war has been used, wankers included, but I would have liked to just listen to Garth Patten talk for the full hour. Whenever anybody asks me from now on why I went into the military strategy concentration for my international relations degree, I'm going to send them to that interview. Military strategy and its history tell you the horrible secrets about humans' relationships with each other. My undergrad, with all that literature, music, philosophy, language and art, was about the romantic secrets of how people relate to each other; the grad degree was about the ghastly, ugly, irredeemable secrets. And you know, it's the grad degree that prepared me for business journalism. Sigh. Off to the wars now.

It's not bad, it's good tucker

Yesterday we were going to go to Antwerp, get high, and look at Russian dolls. You know, that sentence is the answer to a bunch of questions about female preferences right there, notably, 'how do struggling artistic types (in this case the F-word) manage to score women who you'd think would be going for rich types because they have more resources and we are ruled by our Selfish Genes?' Here's one answer: the artistic types' aesthetic sense is such that they are not only willing to, but propose getting high and looking at Russian dolls. Squeeeee! Dolls! But we didn't go. We started in the wrong order, getting high before going to Antwerp, and then it just didn't roll out - I wanted a woodland ramble in the nearby Dudenpark, as well as to catch up on my own life here by cleaning out our shithole of an apartment a bit, and go for a lovely long grocery shop on the Parvis and the big Delhaize next to the Porte de Hal, and then to bake some bread, and then to do a little light social visiting.

So I or we did all that, and the soda bread I made was a fucking winner - extremely good. The first time I've made a heavy multigrain bread that really worked instead of seeming like a murder weapon. It will be hard to go back to yeasty breads now, particularly as this only took 10 minutes to prepare and 20 to bake. I worked off of this recipe but made some changes:

- we don't have any buttermilk so I used normal milk with a squirt of white vinegar stirred into it
- instead of using only oats, I used mostly oats and some rye flakes
- I used maple syrup instead of sugar
- instead of sprinking sesame seeds on top, I sprinkled cumin seeds, thinking in my height that they were caraway seeds. But the cumin was actually really fucking good.

This weekend was also notable for the quantity of Australian television that we watched. Not sure why. I think the F-word is getting nostalgic as the fucking stupid northern European winter sets in, and I'm probably just looking for a replacement for the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, now that I don't care about the American election anymore. Three shows: Bush Mechanics, Bush Tucker Man, and The Chaser's War on Everything. Call me a stoner but I loved them all. Bush Tucker Man was probably my least favourite, not for the concept, but for the way the Steve-Irwinish Australianisms made the F-word cringe (one of them being the title of this post). He tried to tell me it would be like a Canadian television host using 'eh' at the end of every sentence and saying 'aboot' in an exagerrated fashion, but I'm hard pressed to see any problem with that.

Anyhoo. The Chaser's War on Everything is great. I can't compare it to much - it's a satirical show whose stunts are simultaneously cuter, edgier and, as the title suggests, more scattershot than one is used to from Canadian and American satirical shows. Here's their most famous stunt to date, and the one they only cleared up the legal trouble from earlier this year . . .

But the clear and absolute fucking winner was Bush Mechanics, which I'm tempted to call the best television show ever. I don't like using language enervating or prejudicial to our gay brethren and sethren, particularly after the brutality that's been done to them and their ability to swear their fucking lives away to their lovers in a bunch of American states, but what can I say, it seems my education has failed to provide me with an adequate simile beyond this one (yes, I'm blaming society): Bush Mechanics makes the protagonists of Pimp My Ride look like a bunch of fucking mincing fairy queens. Have a quick judge for yourself with this little teaser.

And on that note, I'm off for the final lesson before hopefully getting my provisional license . . .

Monday morning slap-a-wake

Nice weekend, though rather lazy as I recovered (mostly there, certainly there enough to show up at work today, which I'm a touch sad about). My last with the F-word for a few weeks as he won't be joining me in Canada-land. Looking forward to Canada like crazy but really at the moment sad about how he won't be there. That's the thing about the F-word. I don't just miss him when he's not there, I get homesick for him. But still very much looking forward to Canada.

Watched There Will Be Blood. Pretty damn good. Very actor-y; I bet they all got a nice kick out of that, particularly the Day-Lewis. 'I drink your milkshake' indeed. And great soundtrack. Still, not much more to say about that, it was just fine but, well, it wasn't Best in Show, which by the way we also watched, during a couple of hours of amused abstraction. What else? An episode of The Life of Birds. The whole first season of Monkeydust. I love it, though it does sometimes make me want to vomit. There's something so merciless about it, but so funny. Usually very focused on the misery of the UK but a running feature focused on the idiocy of American big budget cinema, of which the following is an example:



What else? After finishing Chain of Command (very nice), read a couple of excerpts from the John Pilger edition Tell Me No Lies to carry on in the investigative journalism stream. One from the pinko Mitford sister, Jessica - 'The American Way of Death'. How absolutely revolting and not much changed, I don't think. When my Grandpa died in England, his going-away rites were the right sort of thing, I think - no fucking makeup; viewing just by the family, and a nice speech from a preacher he'd liked. But then that was C of E, which hardly counts as a religion in comparative terms - I think Catholicism has a lot to do with Egyptian-style funerary ridiculousness. Anyhoo. It was all very revealing and gross, but it provided an opportunity to discuss our preferred way to have our bodies disposed of, which is an important talk for couples to have.