Grandad

Now, my British grandparents haven't always been the easiest people for me to get along with, and part of the great blow to me in my grandfather's recent death was being aware we weren't as close as other girls sometimes are to their grandfathers. No fault of his, or even I think my own; he welcomed me with open arms into his home and I went to see them in Yorkshire whenever it was at all practicable. Nonetheless, it seemed talking across the barrier of generations, countries, cultures, attitudes to the boiling of vegetables, ethnic feuds and the sea was a thing that didn't always come naturally to us, and then in the last year or so his mind turned more inwards to deal with his body and its demise. I was fortunate to have visited them last March, after my thesis defence and before he started preparing himself in earnest.

Since he died I've appreciated more and more the bits of me that come from him - a certain not-incompetency with money, the ability to coldly analyse out of a hot situation, an abstract spiritual faith based on love and rational optimism - and while I'm not so sure we'd be any better at being close today if he was still alive than we were a year ago, I am sure that as much as I loved him then, I'd be more understanding of him now. I miss him.

This is on my mind in a poignant but cheerful way today, because the days I used to go to England - in my plans to see him, in reality to bury him - were, with the agreement of my manager, sick days, since I didn't think I had any vacation time left. It turns out I do; and in the almighty fucking wisdom of the Canadian labour establishment I have to use them before the Christmas break instead of cashing them in or carrying them over to next year. So next weekend will be four days long and the weekend after that will be threepointfive.

Now, much as I'd prefer to carry the days over to next year, I'm not complaining; I need a couple of days off to get shit done and organized, and as you all know I'm not crazy about being at work in the first place. But what I am doing is asking myself what I should do with these days, that feel like a gift-from-beyond-the-grave from Grandad, when by any stretch of the imagination I only need one long weekend to get shit done. I feel just as I did back in university, when they still sent me money for Christmas and I resisted, generally successfully, the natural inclination to spend it on reefer instead of something clever like mutual funds or panties.

Maybe I should go home and see my parents. I'm going to see them for five or six days at Christmas but of course that will be all crazy with people and parties. Grandad would no doubt approve. Maybe I should go to Vancouver and see Elvis, who I've never gone to visit out there. Grandad would approve of that too, though not the massive deficit spending it would entail. Also Elvis works in flowers so he's retardedly busy in December. Maybe I should go to Montreal to see the Virgin and Miss T, or Mrs. R I suppose she is now, but in all honesty I neither want to go to Montreal without Figaro (who gets no time off) nor do I want to drop in on friends last minute (for it would be this Friday) at this time of year. Also Grandad would approve less. Especially of the Virgin.

So unless I have some bright fucking ideas or remember suddenly that what Grandad always wanted from life but never did was to find a cheapish flight to Costa Rica and smoke reefer in the jungle for a few days with that nice Roumanian girl I used to work with who moved there six or seven months ago, I think I'll go up north this weekend. Any other ideas?

The Red Dragon Tries to Get Her Dander Up

If I don't miss my guess by a college mile and if my calendar with the twee archaic maps is right, it's the fourth of December, which means there are only 17 days left of the days dwindling and dwindling until any scrap of sunlight feels like a secret swig of bourbon downed behind a dumpster. And then they get longer. Joy. There's a reason we celebrate Christmas then, even though Jesus was probably a Leo or something. Capricorn Jesus? Suuuuuuuure, Catholic Church. And every sperm is sacred, too.

This weekend didn't see me at the top of my game. Thursday's flu shot made me ill in a really bizarre way that included my pointing fingers feeling broken and a bi-polar tummy, which was trying as other physical type aches and pains were on the cards too and I drank far too much on Friday night.

I dealt by smoking lots of reefer and sleeping when I got sleepy, which means not-fit-for-print fun and frolic aside I've got nothing to tell you about besides Robert Hughes' memoirs being bitter and unpleasant, a bit of a nasty slog, but since I was sent a free review copy I have to review it soon or I'll stop getting free reveiw copies of things, and since it doesn't look like it's going to be a glowing review I have to read it carefully too.

Also, the Ansel Adams exhibit at the AGO is really, really worth seeing. It's up until January 4th so there's lots of time to do it. Go. I like the AGO. The special exhibition prices are, I think, prohibitive at $15 (I can't shake the feeling that the whole fucking point of a museum should be that they're free - my inner Palace of the People-type pinko speaking, I suppose) to the degree that one is tempted to go watch the new Bond movie instead. But the Ansel Adams exhibit is just breathtaking, especially to anybody who wants to know stuff about photographing stuff.

Motherfuck, time to start the work week.

The Red Dragon Picks and Chooses

So, Casino Royale is better than any James Bond movie since, like, Octopussy. The theme music was crap, the credit sequence was crap, the bit where Daniel Craig was naked was crap because I couldn't bear to look because his testicles were getting whipped, the product placement was obtrusive and the lovey-dovey scenes were crap. But it really doesn't matter because the all the action sequences were good, especially for someone like me who usually thinks action scenes are retarded.

As for Daniel Craig, well . . . If our Lord held a gun to my head and commanded me to have a two-man threesome with the partners of my choice, they would be Daniel Craig and Benjamin Biolay. Which is really the point of good Bond, isn't it? Except if I walked into a bedroom where Benjamin Biolay and Daniel Craig were waiting, I think my knees would give out. Not that it would matter; I don't think the point of a two-man threesome would be me doing a lot of stuff.

No other news. No other news in particular from Belgium; perhaps that ship has sailed. I wonder how much that bothers me. Some. Some not. This weekend will be nice. I need to decompress because work has really been making me want to shoot myself lately. Maybe if I didn't have a job like the one I do now, I wouldn't notice product placements in Bond films. Maybe Dr. No was actually full of product placements in equal measure, and I never noticed because Ursula Andress was so pretty.

Oh god, I hate the advertising so. Yesterday I editted an article about a television advertising campaign in the States for stomach stapling or banding or something, that's going to go on air post-holidays when everyone is feeling extra fat. Merciful fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

The Red Dragon Gets Sentimental

Who says heartbreak is for babies?

This change of my tune hasn’t come about from a new round of my own heartbreak, as I cynically suggested it would in yesterday’s comments; all remains quiet on the Eastern front. It’s from that same track I was going on about yesterday, “Little Darlin.’” Yesterday I ate big slabs of the Midnight Madness cake for lunch, topped by a few chocolate chip cookies, and finally felt the full import of the song with the sweet rush of the lyrics “mon coeur, j’ai echoué” into the Carter Family tune, and damn near cried.

Eating retarded amounts of chocolately sugar and getting weepy over French pop at work. Yes. Sometimes I prefer the Red Dragon to come out sort of angry, but not when I have cake.

See, it reminded me of all the heartbreak that’s been before. I think I get tetchy about heartbreak as a general idea because mine hasn’t followed standard patterns too well; it’s too Catholic, too guilty, too confused. There’s always been the idea of failure in it – either mine or theirs - and failure, as we all know, is for losers, and losers are a bad thing to be or to have emotional intercourse with. Benjamin Biolay makes it beautiful, though.

Okay, I’ll try to move on from Benjamin Biolay tomorrow – going to see Casino Royale tonight and I have a feeling I’ll be distracted from Biolay’s melodic loveliness by Daniel Craig’s sweaty grunty muscley loveliness.

Sans dévoiler trop de mystère

I wish to continue to treat myself visually (and orally - oh yes - it's coming with me everywhere today) to this Baker Street 'Midnight Madness' cake, just as I continue to treat my ears to Benjamin Biolay. Track 7 of Négatif, "Little Darlin,'" is the prettiest thing I've heard in ages and the remix of the bluegrass track through it brings out what I've always liked about bluegrass while leaving out all the annoying buzzes and pointy things that never have enough bass to give them a context.

Anyways, it's so very good. Négatif is copy protected. I don't mind that - on principle one should buy rather than borrow an album this good. I'm just annoyed because I can't buy it. I guess I can pay to download it from somewhere, but in all honesty I, like Melbine, have my Luddite tendencies. I dearly like to have a CD to hold and put somewhere appropriate. Too many computers have crapped out on me for me to want to trust them with my music.

"Little Darlin'" is a song about offing oneself, which came up as a topic of conversation recently in the context of a person of my acquaintance who'd been more or less promising to, over a former relationship. Friends, initially supportive, are becoming alienated, feeling used and under-appreciated in their efforts to be there for him, which often end in "I hope you tell _____ what she's doing to me."

So when does one walk away? God, what a question, eh? As a general question it's ridiculous, of course, since every case is different.

But I think in this case some of the frustration of the people around him comes from confusion over being suicidal and being depressed. This person doesn't seem depressed in the medical sense. But in my experience depression and suicide don't have the direct causal link people think they do. The more the sad-ass stories about this person sink in, the more it seems like he's un-depressed enough to have the energy to actually do it. And at the same time, it's like he's furiously applying this energy to chase away the people who are there to support him.

Don't know why I'm going on about it, except it's disturbing me and I need to think about it in general terms to deal with it. Damn: I wish people paid less attention to relationships sometimes. North American society has got to a point where romance is the only really obligatory passion and that's pathetic. Not in the case of this person particularly, but in the broader scheme. Thinking of killing yourself over a peice of ass . . . I don't blame him for it or anything like that, he's suffering and he's sick right now, and not knowing him well enough to have ended up taking care of him in any way I can feel bad for him without feeling annoyed. But I do rather blame the world around him for making it seem like an okay idea.

Yesterday I heard from my favourite kid student from Paris. She's hitting puberty now and dealing with drama over her first boyfriend. It fucking begins so young . . . I told her not to take seriously anything anyone her age, including boys, says for the next ten years. I love that kid like a neice so I hope she listens. Love + drama + dissappointment = silly pigshit. God, it's awful to think of the kids in my family or old students getting sucked into these so-called adult romantic notions. Arts and crafts are so much more fun. Sigh.

Hooray for Biolay

The man you see before you, this musical child of Gainsbourg who, unlike his father, hurts neither eyes nor ears as he delivers gently beautiful melodies and soft but sharp lyrics backed by lovely arrangements, has struck deep into my brain.

I have a feeling this song, "Los Angeles", is ubiquitous because I've heard it more times than I can count. Nobody else around me seems to have heard it, though. I've realized that since the concept album it's from, Rose Kennedy, came out while I was living in Paris it's possible that it was only ubiquitous there as background to that most emotionally sloppy and difficult period, and it stuck with me because that repeated trumpet rise perfectly delineates the resigned melancholy with which I wandered through a bad dream life.

This would mean people in Canada might not know about Benjamin Biolay (as is evidenced by his stuff's non-availability on Amazon.ca - I had both Rose Kennedy and Négatif on order for assfucking months before I gave up and borrowed them from Mr. N, and his lady was complaining last week about how he'd made her go into every record shop in Montréal trying to find more) and that's just wrong, wrong, do you read me, wrong. This is a bilingual country. If we have to put up with French/English cereal boxes, we might as well listen to lovely French music too.

Anyways, treat yourself. It's really nice. I don't like him as much as I like Serge Gainsbourg because I like the perv and the bizarre (I mean, a concept album about Rose Kennedy isn't a bad idea, but a concept album about killing your lover and her coming back as a rabbit that eats your head which has turned into a cabbage - which would you rather listen to?) but he sure is prettier. Some trivia for you: his wife Chiara is the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and and Marcello Mastroianni. HAWT.

28 years of Spliffery

Another year older and still too lazy to look up how you wrap text around images using HTML. My birthday was pretty good. Red dragon started yowling on the afternoon of it, not from any sort of angst about aging; more about not having a reservation for a pre-opera restaurant on Saturday night in a badly underserved downtown core and the oppressive early darkness of the beginning of winter combined with the knowledge that it's just going to get worse until the 21st of December.

Mentioned it to Figaro and he said he always found it was more cold temperatures that got him down, and that when things got dark so early he found other ways to look at things as beautiful. Beauty isn't the problem as far as I'm concerned, though. Early dark is beautiful. Everything being night when people are still buzzing around on banal kinds of business, this sort of inky artificial blackness pressing down among the streetlights, lit-up shop windows fighting back our natural urge to go off and sleep or something - it's pretty cool. It also fills me with strange little flutters of panic and fury that it's dark when I still want sun.

Fitting, then, that my birthday opera was that funny old Masonic parable of the victory of sunny truth over starry coloratura, The Magic Flute, as produced by Opera Atelier. Made me cry. Penelope Randall Davis stuck in a few extra high notes during the Queen of the Night's big aria that got me going, as did Papageno's first song. Otherwise, I don't have much to say about it - Marshall Pynkoski didn't offer a pre-opera talk, which was refreshing; the orchestra was great, the singers okay, the dancers underused, and the stage directions occasionally baffling or annoying. It was sung in English as the Magic Flute often is because of all the spoken dialogue, I suppose. Gigi found that outright alienating; I found it annoying. I know librettos are usually stupid in any language but romance language rhyme with fewer struggles and German just sounds cool.

Got a lovely stack of music in presents this year: Rebirth of Cool, new K-os, Rimsky-Korsakov, mixed CDs from Mr. N - he does such a good fucking job - as well as the loan-to-copy of two Benjamin Biolay CDs, sexy yum - and of course KC and the Sunshine Band. I'm almost looking forward to work so that I have enough time sitting in one spot to listen. Almost.

End of week round-up

It's official. After having the bird-talk with my mother, managing to rein in my finances over the past month, working out a realistic yet generous Christmas budget and making a household decision to only smoke reefer on weekends (mostly), I'm getting the Panasonic Lumix TZ1 for my birthday, which seems easy to use while having a ten-times zoom. It's very exciting. In preparation Figaro has been letting me mess around with his camera, which is much more complicated, so hopefully at this point it just gets easier.

So I've started a flickr page so everyone can look at the gross, retarded or outside pictures I take. There's a lot I want to remember about Toronto too, after I leave . . . things to look at. Toronto has a funny cocktail of ugly, nice and busy. I think it will be fun to have a camera here.

Now for something completely different - last night we watched Fawlty Towers. I didn't like it much. Maybe it suffered because Figaro dug up some old Monty Python episodes a couple of weeks ago, and since I hadn't actually sat down and watched the Monty Python series while I was snaked - like, EVER, now that I think about it - I was amused to the point of peeing myself. I'd forgotten how absurd and unpredictable it was and all that collage animation is cute when I'm high. Anyways, the three episodes we happened to see didn't have John Cleese in them, and you know, they didn't suffer for it. And then Fawlty Towers; well, you know. Too much story. Too much humour based on discomfort. I like things that don't make sense and it made too much sense.

Anyways, here comes the weekend and my birthday. Yesterday a package arrived from Melbine, and I'm pretty sure I know what it is, but I won't open it until tomorrow. Even though I want to because I figure it will make my working day much more energetic. Bootywise. You're the best, lady!

Sexy Russians

We went to the symphony last night for a Russian-themed concert that inexplicably included a piano concerto from Schumann. I like Schumann, but not much. Despite the fucking brilliant pianist Anton Kuerti - like, he was as good as Chico Marx, even if he didn't actually shoot the keys - it was my least favourite of the night. Too smooth. Far, far, far and away the Russian pieces we were treated to were way, way better.

(Pardon me for not being able to think of words that can express 'way, way better' this morning - there was a car crash outside our bedroom window at four in the fucking morning and I'm dopey and sleepy today. By the way, what sort of expression is 'way, way better'? Way is a funny word.)

Anyways, one of them was the Canadian premiere of a peice by Sofia Gubaidulina, The Rider on the White Horse, and motherfuck. Every stop was pulled out. Organ (and Roy Thomson Hall has a BEAUTY), crazy percussion, tubular bells - wow. It was, in fact, very wildy horsey. Until I can afford to buy myself a pony I think I'll content myself be getting a copy of this. I really reccommend it to anyone prone to Byronesque fits of melancholy or frustration.

The second half was taken up with Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade which was a little more tempered in terms of loud, loud emotion - it had quiet emotion too. And a harp. Good god, it was beautiful. Sentimental, like the Schumann, but never once did it creep into treacle or surrender its balls. I want to buy that too. Figaro has it on vinyl in Australia, which is profoundly unhelpful.

I think I have a little crush on the conductor from last night, Gianandrea Noseda. He gave'er. I mean, he was practically conceptually dancing up there while he was directing difficult modern peices, and it came off as note perfect so I suppose it was working. There were several points where I noted he was off the floor altogether. I think that was his modus operandi because you could see his muscles flexing under his conductor suit. Heh.

But what it can't get I can't use

Yesterday was stupid and boring until I got out of work and discovered what a rather staggering rate of compound interest has already done to my retirement 'savings'. How funny that money is such a feel-good thing when it's there or there's the prospect of more!

Our almost imaginary economic system - so abstract, so based on things we usually neither know nor understand - has become so deeply ingrained into our very bones that we can associate numbers on a statement with our basic well-being and not even blink when the news media casually shits on the communist organization of goods as intrinsically flawed without considering we've never had a proper communist system - just a bunch of starving Russians and Chinese et cetera taking up arms and doing what they could with what they'd got. And that may well be the longest sentence I've ever written. Brontësque in its monstrosity.

My point is, I think England should go communist so the rest of us can watch what happens. Wasn't that supposed to happen before the gentle left co-opted the labour movement back whenever?

I'm getting excited for my birthday. Besides celebrations spread out over the weekend, of course I'm excited about presents. Like a camera. Oh boy. And then there's the opera. I love birthdays. Speaking of which, today is Miss G's birthday - she's in New York; does anyone have her address there?

I ain't no monkey

One of the Jungian institutes in Zurich (there are two - I discussed it with Monsieur, who studied there, and he told me there were two because the original one had a meltdown over some issues that seemed piffling. I think my mouth gaped at that and then he told me a strong background in Jungian analysis doesn't always mean you can resolve your own damn conflicts. I think I'll concentrate on tying it in to conflict resolution in my studies if I ever go that route) has started offering distance training by contracting out the requisite 300 hours of analysis to any IAAP-approved analyst you can find in your own nieghbourhood.

I suppose they had to, since these studies involve a pretty big practicum and there aren't quite enough crazy people in Switzerland to go around to all the trainees, or at least not enough crazy people who are poor enough to consent to work with a trainee analyst instead of a real one, or instead of doing lots and lots of drugs.

Anyways, I'm over the moon that if I go that route I won't nescessarily have to live somewhere dark or cold or Swiss while I do it. I would have to go there six weeks a year, but you know, six weeks a year in Switzerland sound okay. I liked Switzerland. Definitely not enough to live there, but certainly enough to listen to the pleasant cowbells and funny moon-man languages six weeks a year.

I'm still riding high over what I've heard from Belgium. We'll see if my defeciencies will be acceptable to them but in any case it's emboldened me to contact other schools. The future is very exciting now, as firmer shapes rise up in the grey mist of often-inscrutable Potential. I guess I'm no closer to knowing what will be happening this time next year but that seems much easier to take this week.

Well, this post is a silly navel gaze that's all about me, me, me. Here's another article I wrote about Turkey and the EU, maybe that will get the flavour of self-absorbed Spliffedom out of your mouth.

Oh frabjous day

My favourite-esque university prospect (in Belgium) has just responded, telling me things look good. And Figaro promised he'd call me "Doctor" when we're feeling amorous. Besides that, I feel like I don't have much to say today. The one thing getting me down is that Belgium might be as I-want-to-shoot-myself dark as Toronto is right now. Everything is fine and I still feel like removing part of my skull just so I can get some direct sunlight to the brain.

One question: how the fuck do you make a makeshift sub? I know some of you reading must know. Tell me. Inquiring minds, et cetera. This is interesting because I just read a 2002 book about how a member of the Russian military tried to sell the Medellin cartel a diesel submarine back in the 1990's - complete with crew - for something like $5 million. Looks like they saved a dollar to spend $90 million.

Here's to the Mens

Crazy as they are beautiful, no amount of simple or complex thought is ever enough to figure them out, and yet sometimes there's nothing more straightforward. When they're good they're very very good, and when they're bad they're horrid, but the good ones are good enough to redeem the whole gender and sometimes the horrid ones are delicious. Yerp. I'm on some different kind of mid-month dragon this weekend. A much nicer one, who still makes my brain do strange things.

Saw Little G last night and had the first frank sex talk I'd had with a girlf in awhile, which was different of course because there are ways one can be a little more frank and funny with a girl than with a boy, whose more tender sensibilities must always be protected.

I used to think sex talks were great fun, and then decided they were pretty inappropriate, but now I'm thinking they're mostly useful because they can point to common patterns - little clues about where such and such a thing might have come from, insights about some behaviour thing or other - extra dribs and drabs of information that help one, in the long run, to be an easier person to live with.

Not much other news as the weekend breaks over us - I decided yesterday should be Friday so today I'm pretending it's Saturday and I'm having to go to the office to clear up a backlog of work. I will commit myself accordingly, that is, hardly at all.

People these days (cinema edition)

Figaro, as an artistic type, has an affinity for older movies, particularly older schlock like the Godzilla series and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He gets a big kick out of seeing how scary or kerrrrr-azy effects were produced with minimum know-how and money - a huge kick. I sympathize but I don't care all that much unless I'm snaked, until it comes to the film noir, which, thankfully, he also gets a kick out of. Last night we saw The Third Man and I was suitably flabbergasted.

The producers really benefitted from having Vienna right there, in a state of what was for the forties quite artful destruction I suppose. Still a fucking beautiful city with just enough rubble to make the chase scenes scintillating and to illustrate a pre-Cold War tension Americans could only get an echo-y chill of (which was quite enough for them, I'm sure). And I suppose they also really benefitted from the caustic but very human wit of Graham Greene, who did the screenplay as well as the novel it was based on. And they were fortunate to have a really capable cast - a fucking lovely cast - though that was obviously more good management or good directing than good luck.

But damn, those huge advantages aside, the film was so fucking good that I really had to ask myself what the hell happened to mainstream American film. The effects of tension and things equally lovely - big fucking spotlights creating the most incredible shadows - low lights shining on Orson Welles' little white fingers poking through a grille. And the creation of conflicting sympathies for at least four characters with opposing interests - it was art, and it was exciting.

I suppose what I'm driving at is that if the American mainstream was producing films that good in 1949 with lousier cameras and low-tech lighting effects, there's no excuse for the rubbishy crap it produces presently, and now I'm even more determined that studios whining about declining profits and cinema attendance should just shove it up their asses and stop expecting us to pay $12 to watch their awful cocking rubbish.

A bird in the hand is worth you in my bush

Here's something none of you know about me, and I'm sure you don't because I forgot about it myself until last night when I was trying to explain to Figaro why I need a twelve times zoom on the digital camera I plan to get before long. Sorry for the long sentence - I was reading the chapter of Busman's Honeymoon last night that's in the form of the Dowager Wimsey's diary. Her sentences are mighty beasts.

I really like birds. I like watching them and photographing them, I used to do that in an organized fashion with my mum up North, and I decided I needed a ridiculous camera when J*Fish showed me a picture he'd taken of a sparrow wherein you could make out the individual little feathers on its chest. It makes me sad when there aren't enough birds around and disproportionately happy when there are - even if its just a bunch of fuckhead starlings roosting outside our bedroom window on a cold morning waking us the fuck up.

Toronto is hard in a sense because almost all the birds are pigeons. Even though it's so much warmer than where I grew up the grind of the city keeps them away and the lake is too out of my way to go admire the diving birds more than once every long while. So I get pigeons, and starlings and sparrows too, which Lexie occasionally attacks and - twice - has caught. But then when I wake up early enough and look out back - even in the mess of urban jungle where I live - I get to see cardinals, which we didn't have up in North Bay, and blue jays, which we did but I'm still fond of. And of course, the occasional turdus migratorius (pffffft!) which is unduly exciting to spot this late in the year since one expects them to have left this stupid shitty weather behind long ago.

And there maybe is the mystery of why I like these smelly, filthy little creatures so much, besides as a plaything for my cat. They don't really have to be where they don't want to be. Either they leave or they die. Pigeons aside (although I maintain a well-groomed wood pigeon would be one of the handsomest animals in creation if its head wasn't so tiny), they shun insalubrity and keel over when you bring them into a mine with too much carbon monoxide or whatever in it. But if they're happy, they sing, and what's more, fly stupidly huge distances to get to the places that make them happy or else find ways to adjust to ridiculous temperatures like in North Bay - by huddling or standing on a badly insulated roof or something - so they can be happy in retarded weather.

The times I was happiest in Paris - where, for all my complaints, I was often happy - was when I was walking home from parties at five or six in the morning. I'd always have to walk instead of take a cab or the metro because of the birds. During the day, Paris is just a pigeon's paradise with no sounds in earshot besides traffic and French people - but at dawn the whole town erupts into a symphony of beautiful birdsong . . . I've been to alot of beautiful places but I don't know if any of them were as beautiful as Paris when the birds are singing.

Anyways, my point is that I need a camera with high resolution and twelve times zoom. And that birds taste delicious.

A Room With a View

Last night I dreamt my office building was being moved from where it is now to some raised foundations on the river (which isn't there. On Sunday whilst photographing prettiness with Figaro, I realized how fucked it is there isn't a proper river in the city.) I thought the move was the height of idiocy, especially since it happened in the middle of the working day whilst we were all there. But as we approached the river and I realized the sweet fucking view I was going to get, I experienced a moment - just a moment - of pleasure.

Anyways, the building movers overshot the mark and released us in the middle of the river just past the foundations. It felt as though my skyscraper was rocking back and forth on a sandy riverbed, about to topple. Luckily I had broken my window in a fit of pique earlier that day, and gauged that I could use my chair to beat down my co-workers while I broke the windows on the opposite side of the building. The fact I was on the 16th floor didn't seem to bother me; the only thing that bothered me was waiting to see which way the building was going to fall so I could scramble out the other side.

It was sensible that it didn't bother me, because the building turned into a schoolbus floating in a huge pool. My broken window was just above the water level. My co-workers started acting like retards, talking about opening the doors and going out, forgetting the water would wash in and maybe break their necks. I was annoyed but couldn't get my tits up to climb out my own window without a sort of group acquiescense until I saw someone in a floating schoolbus ahead of us do just that. I scrambled out, clambered over the side of the pool, and went back to my apartment to search for the reefer a Basque terrorist had hid in my jewelry box.

The moral of the dream?

I need a new fucking job. But will it help? Since I gave up television, never liked magazines that weren't the Economist (though I am waiting for my first issue of the Utne Reader, that I bought from my neice while she was carrying out a subscription drive for her crazy-ass school) and don't watch MSN Video, I'm exposed to comparatively little aggressive advertising, but it's more than enough. I could quit my job ten times over, and the only result would be that I didn't have to study and write about methods of aggressive advertising - I'd still see them every day.

Sometimes I think the real reason I want to move back to France is that it's still socially acceptable for angry young men there to spray-paint obscene messages on billboard advertising about how much they fucking hate advertising.

Voyeurism and Intimacy in a Exhibitionistic Society: Ick

I was thinking of being lazy today and just posting an article I wrote elsewhere about Turkish accession to the European Union, but I decided most of my readers would rather see this:



Pretty fucking sweet, no?

Except there's something wrong. Hard to explain. Figaro remembered the clip above from his childhood and showed it to me while we were snaked to the gills, and then we looked for more. It looks like the man who was Piffy, based on the one video we saw of him as a grown-up, may have turned into (?) a nutter. Maybe he hasn't; maybe the video we saw was a weak part of an ongoing online YouTube joke, but he seems to be a nutter.

And then one asks oneself, poor kid, his parents were probably awful to him in my terms by making him practice that act ad nauseum, and who knows how that would ever not make you a nutter? I've been on extremely intimate terms with enough people whose parents could only show their love in difficult ways (which made them difficult people in the end) to feel sort of queasy at this prospect. Not queasy out of sympathy, but queasy that I have to think about these things in terms of complete strangers. It feels far too intimate. But maybe it's my fault for watching him on YouTube when I wanted to be further amused by his act. Maybe it's my fault for wanting other people to amuse me once in awhile.

But what the fuck is WITH people posting videos of themselves on YouTube? I only realized this weekend that there are THOUSANDS of people who do it. I sort of knew from having to cover that Loney Girl shit for my work magazine, but I didn't understand until just now.

What I don't understand is why it's such a mystery to me. With this blog I can pretend it's just a question of personal expression and I'm not just splashing my own brand of nutbarishness across the screen. I write for a living for a crappy industry-promotion magazine so this is a way to be allowed to write with my real opinions, swearwords and shitty grammar. But those seem like lousy excuses even to me, and I'm sure most people would say it's probably something like the same exhibitionism that makes people post emotional videos of themselves on YouTube.

The thing is, videos are different. Harder to just look away from. More raw than words. Stopping it feels like you're insulting the person who made it. And then being presented with the video feels like a hijack of my faculties for intimacy, and that makes my tummy feel funny. From what I remember of TV, that was part of the reason I had to stop watching it. Too many highly personal narratives. On reality television, even on fucking commercials. Too much for me.

I suppose what I'm saying is that the fact that a woman who likes porn and streetfights as much as I do has to make an effort to look away from alot of things these days shows we live in degenerate times.

I've been to Paradise AND to me. Hah.

Good Friday morning, doves. Not Good Friday in the sense of not eating meat today like the shining example of chaste Catholicism I am, but Good Friday in the sense of me not being able to fucking believe it's Friday when every day has felt like it should be Friday, all fucking week. I like Daylight Savings because it gives me more morning time, and I'm endlessly productive in the mornings, but it screws me blue when it comes to my perception of temporal reality.

Jiri, this is a shout-out to you. I just put on the mixed CD you gave me a few years back when we met up in Vienna and went off together. I miss you! The first track was that sort of theme from Velvet Goldmine, that Rhys Meyers lip-synchs and Thom Yorke tarts it all up on. And it's the strangest thing, but the opening chords brought me right back to leaving Prague on the bus and listening to the CD for the first time, and then back to second-year university when my mind was blown by the idea of Jonathon Rhys Meyers and Ewan McGregor getting it on while Thom Yorke sang.

I haven't had the most dramatic life ever, like, I haven't discovered a new country or ridden a camel or got nailed by two guys at once. But since I left home everything has been an exciting mess and I've never spent more than two years or so in any given city at a time (although it looks like I'll hit an even three in Toronto, or come close to it, by the time we leave. Or have I already? Fucking temporal distortions) and I've liked it that way. I think we'll look for a place to settle - but it'll be a place with alot of things around it.

However, it's left me feeling kind of schizo, having a hard time reconciling all these bits of life to each other. Friends help. It never feels unreal because I'm still close to people from all these bits of my life, and have got to know them in other bits of my life.

But without iconic music and, oddly enough, the occasional iconic smell - a waft of fabric softener that reminds me of an old sweetheart, high altitude snow, pastries being deep-fried, and of course reefer - I think there are parts of my life that would retreat into unreality. The risk is already there; it's why Jiri's CD can give my brain such a pleasant tug, re-acquaint it with lovely things that have happened before, and give it an appetite for more.

Sorry for the navel gaze. Next week I'll be rigorously reportive. Kisses.

Late fall blah humbugs

Figaro reads this blog sometimes. That’s fine by me, I haven’t had much to write about him that I haven’t said to his face, and if I did I wouldn’t write it here. In a general kind of way, when I started this blog I made the decision that anything I put in it could be read by anybody, except possibly my parents, though even them without inducing tears or deep, sinking feelings of dread in the pit of their stomachs. So I don’t mind that he reads it once in awhile.

Now I think one of my ex-boyfriends has found this blog. I don’t know how I feel about that, exactly. I’ve decided to not think about it any more. Besides mentioning it now, and saying I guess that I’m being as diplomatic as I care to these days. So read on, MacDuff. But I’m not absorbing any more anger from spectators when there’s so much else they could be looking at.

That said, not much else to say today. Lady's Big Bertha is just devastating. Pardon the ongoing whine but it's driving me crazy how little time I have to do what I really want to do instead of work, especially since if just a few key things changed at work (like the mandate of the company, the morality of my industry, or even the distribution of my hours), work'd be what I want to do. It's harder to take these days because of the uber-dark evenings, I guess; it's bloody sick to live in a country that's night when you leave your office at 5:30.

Visualisation

I feel sort of like the Sopranos jumped the shark when Steve Buscemi's character was introduced so we're taking a bit of a break. Instead - because moving pictures are great when you're high and for some reason I just have not been giving a shit about movies lately at all - we've watched most of a series called American Visions, narrated by Robert Hughes - a brief snapshot of American art history.

Figaro told me he'd heard a Barry Humpries (Dame Edna) interview about how, out of that whole "Push" group of Australian ex-pats wherever they were when they started getting famous, Robert Hughes was the one who fucked all the ladies because he was HAWT. Time is inexorable.

Anyways, the series was nice. I don't know anything about modern art except how to sit around in a Rothko room and calm down after whatever indignity life has lately subjected me to, so it was lovely and interesting to look at the evolution of American art into Jeff Coons or whatever that slick bastard is called. But really Hughes could have been saying anything coherently and I'd have believed it. It all sparked off some great mental masturbation that I'd write about here, but I have a stupid cocking conference now.

Tally ho, team players

I haven't been to the gym since my grandfather died. I have for classes and stuff, gentle ones like Pilates and tai chi (yes, Pilates is pretty gentle at my gym - lots of old bones), but not to work out properly. I forgot all my stuff there when I left for England and my locker was cleared, and I've felt too silly - and lazy - for weeks to do anything about it.

I have a fairly active lifestyle outside of gymmy shit, so I still look recognizably hourglassy, but it's always funny to see my body sort of shift around when the only muscles getting used are quite select. It means I have a pooch - a very oddly shaped one, but I like it - and I'm wondering if there's some way to keep it now that I've done something about the stuff that was cleared away and can start going to the gym again.

Sometimes I think fuck gyms. My grandfather played rugby and when that got to be too much transitioned to golfing and lawn bowling. He played some sort of sport until he was around 92 and kept watching it afterwards, though never football because he was a bank manager back in the day that still meant something. My dad is in his sixties and still playing football - his nose is twistier than a Roald Dahl short story - and transitioning into golf. All three of my brothers golf, Elvis also playing Ultimate and Magnum playing hockey.

I think what I'm trying to get at is that it's a good thing to get alot of pleasure from using your own body in a way that isn't all sexy or based on some sort of masochistic gymmy pain-gain factor, so I've put away any highschool dislike I may have had for jocks. There was a fair amount. Half the local OHL team went to my highschool and they were not nice to women. But who cares. That shouldn't chase the rest of us away from the institution.

Nonetheless in the city it's easier to just go to the gym or maintain an active-ish lifestyle (ie no car or public transport). It's all I can do to make it to one regular appointment with Monsieur, who's flexible about hours. Having some sort of a team expecting me to show up somewhere all the time fills me with the sort of suffocating dread I felt when I was single and imagined getting back into a long-term relationship.

No, actually, I don't like you

Went to some ROM exhibit about Italian design. Full of Italians, and I'm betting the half the attendees hadn't been to a museum since they'd been on a root-tracing trip to Italy. The exhibition was something nice, I guess. Left me with an overwhelming feeling that most of what was ugly and splashy about domestic decor was the bastard child of ooooo-look-what-I-can-do Italian design and discoveries in plastics and mass production.

One guy was dressed up as Borat and being followed by a bevy of people . . . the Borat movie was released here on Friday night so I wasn't sure if it was just some moron fanboy or a guerilla marketing technique. Either way I wasn't impressed. The Borat character isn't my favourite and I'm not excited about this movie.

With all of Baron-Cohen's characters, there's a real reliance on the person he's talking to either getting hilariously pissed off or else giving him the benefit of the doubt out of sheer politeness. Witness is borne to this by the unfunny, unmitigated crap that was Ali G Indahouse.

And with none of his characters is this more true than with Borat, who says the most shocking things to the plainest people. "Bruno" and "Ali G" I like alot better; it's directed at celebrities and fashion types who should know better because they court that kind of attention. But the humour around Borat's akin to running up to someone on the street, farting in their face, and filming their reaction.

It's lazy - makes us laugh because we're glad it's not us getting nad-palmed, glad that no confused, earnest foreigner is anxiously asking us to join a sing-a-long called 'Throw the Jew Down the Well," glad because it makes us look smarter than the people on camera. Whatever. I'm past the point of paying eight bucks to go to a movie on cheap night so that I can feel superior to my fellow man. I'll wait to see it on an aeroplane or a long-haul coach trip or something.

The Red Dragon is a vicious Mistress

But at least she's here. For the first couple of months co-habiting with Figaro I just ignored myself reproductively besides being pissed off when we had to be careful, but yesterday I reached the point of being madly delighted that the Red Dragon had finally attacked, even though it was followed within minutes with the feeling that I was a racehorse with terminal colic.

So that gave me a good reason to go home early, and in a burst of clarity and precious, precious fucking time (Is it a feature of being happy, that time seems like the dearest thing in the world? Or just of having a stupid full time job? Or a combination?) I put together the template of a letter for promoters, and most of the proposal itself. The letter should start going out today, but after some tweaking I'm going to send the proposal for vetting elsewhere - not as though it matters so much, since I can't send it out until someone agrees to promote me.

And if no one does, why, then I've got a great excuse to just be a normal whack job instead of an academic one. There's probably more money in it, after all. I want this opportunity quite a lot - but at the same time, I feel like either fork this thing takes can be appealing.

Going to work this morning is not.

Oh well.

Developing a tolerance

Most of last night's analysis was about internal problems, but Monsieur did make a point of general interest late in the session after I launched into a minor tirade about how annoyed I am people complain about being single when it's so easy - no worries about hurting feelings, no worries about over-reacting to minor annoyances, no questionable sense of dependency, et cetera. His answer could have gone straight on a Hallmark card: being in relationships helps secular Westerners improve their comprehension of the human condition. Okay, maybe it would need a little editting but nonetheless I found the idea cloyingly icky.

But then he pointed out that the annoyances to which our lovers subject us, which we can't walk away from because of our emotional attachment, force us to confront ourselves by witnessing our reactions, and force us to ask questions about our lovers because we care enough to want to understand. The difficulties of romantic or reproductive relationships translate into better comprehension of the self and the human condition. That means single people get to skip lots of annoyance but by so doing skip parts of the learning process, since the second they're annoyed they can withdraw from the situation instead of asking questions about how it came to be.

Other relationships that may have picked up the learning-through-annoyance slack, like with the church, extended family, or community groups, have eroded in modern secular society to the degree that people don't learn from them the way they used to, since it's so much easier (thank god!) to walk away from them now. And so, people who want to learn about themselves and their race want to be in relationships.

It makes sense, I guess. When I think back on being single, it seemed like a pleasant but fairly boring tropical holiday with too much lying down on the beach and not enough trekking through a savage jungle full of hallucinogenic plants, mysterious ziggurats, and silly monkeys. That's not bad, but it's not good either. So I'll try to stop complaining about people who complain about being single. No promises, though.

I can't even tell you

I'm so unsettled, it feels like I hardly have a stomach. Not in a bad way, I don't think. As of yesterday, I've had to face the very real possibility I have no nemesis. It may radically change my world view. If he isn't evil incarnate, maybe Hannah Arendt was even righter than I thought she was about that banality thing, and the evil comes facelessly in the social and institutional machine.

Next, I'm going to promote a specific brand. Harmony Milk. Probably only available in Ontario. It's organic, but since it comes in cute little bottles that you can return for a substantial refund it works out to be slightly cheaper than normal milk. It reminds me of the milk my grandparents used to get delivered to their door every morning - in the pint bottles, fresh and unpasteurized so the fatty creamy stuff floats to the top and makes your cereal or even a cunt of a Nescafe into a little piece of heaven. Mmmmm. Anyways, as long as Ontario retains its absurd pasteurization laws, Harmony is the tastiest cow milk out there and underprices goat milk by $1.57. After refund.

Figaro and I have been trying to eat organic food, which isn't the easiest thing to do because we're broke. I dropped out of the Food Share programme because our drop-off point, at least, was plagued by incompetence and only delivers every other week, if that. That made things harder because they're cheap. There are other organic food-share programmes but in all honesty I like food shopping too much to pay that little extra for them.

I love food shopping. I could do it professionally. And not just in chi-chi places full of pretty things like Pusateri's, either. I'll get a thrill from the lousiest, grimiest No Frills in the city, which is good because that's the one across the road from us. Probably because of my starving peasant background, it's so damn exciting to see all that food from all over the province and the world. And then deciding which bits of it I'm going to buy, prepare and eat - sheer joy. Not to mention the shelving choices that face you with surreal little surprises. I thought I had to go seven or eight blocks to buy Marmite, for example, but it turns out No Frills stocks it in the baking section next to the bread-yeast products.

Now that the organic farmer's market is gone for the winter (it was an exercise in country hippies ripping city hippes off, but I wanted to encourage the brand) organic food shopping is slightly more difficult than normal food shopping because the pricing patterns are absurd. At the organic shop just up the street, some food items are well cheaper than in the shop in Kensington that has other items well cheaper. Produce is especially expensive at the shop here, which sucks because we eat alot of it. And then Dominion underprices them both on organic bananas, which, however, tend to be too green for me. Not to mention they're almost the only organic stock that Dominion carries, besides a carrots-and-kale corner I visit more out of duty than love.

Wendell . . . I'm not content.

I've started assistant-editing the culture section of Blogcritics.org under a semi-sobriquet that looks more and more like a sobriquet for 'pussy' the more I look at it. It gives me something to do in the afternoons at work when I'm tired of emailing other bored office workers about how bored we are, and it teaches me things about editing, electronic publishing and how weird people think.

Also, my analyst told me ages ago, when I was voicing discontent with my company's mandate, that I should play little games to make it more fun for me until I was ready to quit. So for awhile, every day I'd put words into my articles no one in my industry could reasonably be expected to know, like 'pullulate' or 'pyroclastic,' and wait for my editor to bring it up with me. That stopped being fun when he never did. So now every week I'm looking at one of the nasty advertising things I have to write about for work and then writing something nasty about it on Blogcritics.

The truth is I want anything I can call preparation for a new job. I want a new job so bad, and I can't really leave this one yet, because I want to save some money and then look for work in an E.U. country Figaro's teaching license is recognized in and where I can get some good fucking baking, warmer fucking winters and prettiness, or save some money and start a doctoral programme in such a country if that's how the cookie crumbles. And because I want to have enough time in my present role to brag on a resume that I'm not a big fat quitter. Now you know the base discontent frying the ass of Mistress La Spliffe.

I've hated my company's mandate since I started working for it, but I liked the conditions and the substance of my work, which is researching and writing: two of my favourite non-putting-things-into-me activities. But hating the mandate has slowly extended to hating going to the office in the morning, and hating staying there.

Ah, it's a naughty world.

News flash from mon cerveau

When I lived in Paris, people called it a "déclic", and I have never found a word to satisfy in English. Revelation? Of course fucking not. I'm not St. Paul collapsing into Carravaggio-ey light and starting to think nasty things about women. Realization? No, what has happened is more fundamental than the sudden memory of having an extra chocolate chip cookie shoved into the back of the lunchbox. A jumbly welter of rubbish has been charging about my head, kaleidoscope-like, for months, and sometime last night the kaleidoscope clicked into a shape that I can read like a text. Those clever French call that a déclic, and it is a phenomenom so central to how I live that I do think there should be a word for it in my first language.

Anyways, it wasn't about anything really fit to print about here - it was regarding the doctoral proposal - I just wanted to whine for awhile about how we don't have a word for déclic. If I'm wrong, and we do have such a word, please tell me. And yes, "moment of clarity" is too long. And too, somehow, fey. I want something foxy, quick, and clean - like déclic.

Something which aided in my déclic was the writing of Hannah Arendt, which has the effect of pulling my brain flat and steam-ironing it. On Violence is so nice - probably not so known now because it seems dated, an appearance whose fault would lie at the doors of the people who'd think it was dated. If anything I find the appendices more interesting than the body, whose subject revolves around the self-evident if ignored fact that power and violence are two extremely different things and that violence becomes an extremely attractive tool to people who feel their power is slipping away (On Violence came out in the very late 60s or very early 70s; it seemed to be inspired by perceptions of violence in the various student and civil rights movements as well as the response to them.) In the appendices she's free to wander for a few paragraphs about whatever, and oof - the indirect conclusions she comes to about consumer culture. . . my point is, I wish she was alive and in charge of the universe.

Have a good week, suckers. . .

Mozart's Mass for the Fucking Bored

Saw Mozart's Mass in C Minor last night from the TSO and the MacMillan choir, with Gigi and Victor Emmanuelle. And you know what, I didn't like it. The Slovakian soprano, Simona Saturova, was absolutely divine and struck deep into my heart with the first note, but she was called on by the score to do things that simply weren't nice. Other things in the score also simply weren't nice. With starts and stops and galloping things out of nowhere.

And I don't blame Mozart for that. I never blame Mozart for anything, of course. I blame Robert Levin, the editor. I'm going to listen to an edition done by someone else before I get too judegemental, but, you know, last night I wasn't impressed. Levin did give a talk before the Mass about how he went about finishing an unfinished Mozart mass. It was interesting in a boring sort of way and could have been shorter - he has an undue fondness for simile.

Also, I didn't appreciate Lauren McNeese as the mezzo at all. Maybe it was where I was sitting but her volume seemed misjudged and intrusive so I kept wishing she would shut the fuck up - not my typical feeling for mezzos.

That's alot of complaining, but I'm pretty sure I mean it, as my hormonally induced desire to blow up the universe ended around eleven yesterday morning. It was especially helped by a wonton soup from Spring Roll's express restaurant. Goddamn, those were good wontons. If I had balls and wasn't deathly allergic to their dietary staples, like peanuts, I'd move to Thailand and try learn their whole. Other. HUGE. school of cuisine. As it stands I might move to Korea.

Otherwise, last night's miniscule baritone part featured Philip Carmichael, the guy who'd just owned Don Giovanni in the student-y production I saw awhile ago. That was cool - I love a decently good looking baritone, and even a fucking pig-ugly one, I might add - but his part was so. Small. Snooze.

Blindfolded and spinning

Honestly, I have nothing worthwhile to tell you today. Getting out of bed made me want to shoot myself and I find it deeply annoying and offensive that I even have to think at the moment. So I'm drinking some nice chai and thinking about having Indian food for lunch with my baby and essentially - well - blahhhhhh.

Since I've got nothing else to say, I'd like to send you all a heads-up about a new and aggressive round of product-placement you and the people you love are about to be subject to. GM is struggling to make a comeback in its automaking division, so it's paid to star in the new Transformers movie (a bunch of new model cars are the 'in-the-closet' versions of the robot heroes).

Personally and generally speaking, I don't give a good goddamn about product placement, since it's less obtrusive than commercial interruptions or outdoor advertising and it means entertainment projects get sponsored (though I swear, no woman in the Italian immigrant community I belong to would ever drink all the goddamn Diet Coke Carmela Soprano does and it's starting to piss me off).

But this Transformers effort is directed at children, and aggressive subliminal advertising to children is just wrong. These kids might think GM cars are cool when they're old enough to buy one, and unless the world changes radically in the next ten years they won't be, they'll be penguin crap like always. So before you take a young relative to see Transformers, ask yourself if you really want to be ferried back and forth from the old folks home in 50 years by a twat driving a GM.

I heart Hannah Arendt

I've come to a conclusion about PMSing based on my present mood, and that is PMSing women (and men - oh yes, you non-bleedy types go through monthly mood swings, you can give them some big tough name if you want but I call it PMS, bitches) don't become irrational beasts, but rather suddenly find it much harder to shake off the small ways in which they are offended. Maybe this is why it annoys us so much when people ask if we're PMSing after we visibly swallow the desire to snap their heads off. Because of course, in our minds the primary concern is what the hell is wrong with you that you're giving us the shits, not why it's easier, all of a sudden, to give us the shits.

Anyways. I've lost count so I don't know if I'm PMSing or in a pisser. But yesterday, in the midst of feeling deep self-pity about working 37.5 long hours a week while having to prepare a doctoral proposal, I decided to console myself by buying some Hannah Arendt books. One was Eichmann in Jerusalem, whose subtitle is On the Banality of Evil or something - I've read it before but I figured Figaro might like it - and the other is a smaller pamphlet called On Violence, that I'd never read before but is just enchanting me as it goes on about hippies and everything else. I really like Hannah Arendt's perspectives - so robust, so slappingly snarky at times without getting petty, so informed yet optimistic, so centred on the power of the individual in a non-macho way which is so much stronger than so many philosophers. Though I guess she's not a philosopher because she said she wasn't, even though booksellers put her books in that section.

It was funny - yesterday at the used bookstore I was looking for things by her, for George Fox's diaries, for anything that got turned in by Jung and maybe the I Ching for Figaro, So I was wondering up and down this one aisle, that had the categoried "Psychology", "Religion", "Philosophy" and some other "Mysticism" or "Occult" or whatever bullshit they had the I Ching stuck under.

And it made me think about why Hannah Arendt said she wasn't a philosopher. Though I find her work focusses so satisfyingly on the power of the individual in society, she thought that her work focussed on society too much to be philosophical - that philosophy looked inward into the person and what she wrote about was a person's participatory, involved and political role . . .

So I was thinking about that and looking at all these consecutive shelves of psychology, religion, et al . . . so many of the books had an intensely personal focus, through all those sections; all the sections looked like they were selling the sorts of things people would turn to to help develop their sense of selves. Like me. I've turned to such things for just such a purpose - preparation for new career training it may possibly be but so far this year I've spent hundreds of dollars on Jung. What I've found with analysis is that through the development of my sense of self, I understand better how other people relate to me and how to take care of them or get along with them - be a better social and political animal, in short - what a thing to have to learn! You'd think we'd just know that and that all of our childhood education would be leading up to that. And yet, there's more than one industry founded on the back of us being mongoloids in the realms of social and political understanding. Weird.

Here comes that fruity feeling

Well, thank sweet strawberry jissom for small mercies. My job may make me want to burn things, my future may look like a foggy labyrinth and some of my friends are in the midst of physical or emotional breakdowns, but at least it's persimmon season again. Or at least the season to start importing persimmon.

Makes me want to move to a place with fresh tropical-type fruit all year around – I love fruit, but don't do well with the sort of fruit that can be grown in cool temperate climates like here or Northern Europe – apples, pears, peaches, and plums make me pukey if they're not cooked. Sort of. Some persimmons do and some persimmons don't, too. The long ones make me pukey, as do some of the short ones, but then the others I can eat until there aren't any more in reach. Plums are weird too. An ex had some on his organic farm in Switzerland; the dark ones I ate like a dirty pig, the yellow ones made me puke, and generally speaking they always make me puke so maybe it was just that one tree of his.

Things get better in Southern Italy. I can eat almost all the fruit there besides the figs and cherries – the citrus, the prickly pear, the pomegranate, the weird orange squishy things that were like persimmon except they exploded wetly when you touched them, making them the sort of food you need to eat with your face. And yes, it's as much like oral sex as it sounds – except the person eating is the one who feels all the pleasure. No fucking clue what they're called but they're on heaven's menu. Maybe they were persimmons too, but ripe, and therefore nothing like the ones we get here.  

And then once you get to actual tropical imports, it's all good. No problems there at all. So somehow, a Cawasprian bitch living in Canada has ended up with a tropical tummy. One of God's own jokes, and a rather naughty one to play on an exemplar of his creatures who best likes stuffing her face. I think I need to move somewhere balmy.

Whiny lazy hoo-er

Connubial bliss is making me lazy, if this past extremely pleasant weekend is any indication. I can't really blame brokeness; that has nothing to do with the gym suddenly being anathema and me hardly being able to remember the proposed subject of a doctoral thesis. I'm going to be 28 in a little more than a month - keep expecting myself to grow some sort of work ethic and it keeps not happening.

Part of the problem is the Sopranos - we must have watched 10 episodes over the last two days. Thank god they only have until season four at the video store; ten more episodes and our lives will be our own again. And about time. Figaro pointed out that Ralphie doing poppers and getting done with a vibrator was digging a bit for audience share and on reflection I agree. I can imagine the Ralphie we've been getting to know is a big pervert, but not one who likes to get told he's mummy's little whore. And I should know.

The dress code at work has been adjusted. Our director wants us, from Tuesday to Thursday, to dress well enough that we could show up at an impromptu funeral if we had to, which is a big tighten. Monday goes casual, as well as Friday. To that I say, Jesus. My whole department could do their jobs from home anyways, and we do zero personal reception, and now you want me to wear uncomfortable shoes three days a week without paying me more? Up until recently I've been pretty happy at work, considering I think my company's mandate is evil. But the waves of Whine are rising up in me like tsunamis. Saints preserve the people who are forced to listen to them.

Make love like madwomen

Went to see Cosi fan tutte last night with Gigi. Lovely. I love the new opera house. I'll admit it though - where we were sitting made me a little dizzy - that place is like, you know, in that piece of shit Star Wars movie, when the Senate was meeting - the tall one. It's tall, in other words. I have a bad time with heights I can't fully explain. Some stupid vague adolescent poetry of self-destruction, I suppose, because it kept striking me how cute I would look in the dress I was wearing if I hopped over the railing.

And I'll also admit that the spartan-but-impressive aesthetic doesn't play to my tastes. What can I say? The Opera Garnier got a roof mural by Chagall . . . we have a five-story sanded glass staircase that makes me nervous. I'll take the Chagall any day - I know he's dead and honestly I've almost completely stopped paying attention to modern art that isn't Figaro's so besides him I don't know who they could have got for it, but they could have got someone, I'm sure. Had an international portfolio competition so some kid could make their name overnight.

By the way, did you hear the owner and attempted seller of Picasso's "The Dream" put his elbow through it? Bloody fool. I don't like Picasso on a day to day basis - looked like a brutal womanizing pinko who was bluffing his way through half the time - but I love "The Dream". I have a mounting of it over my bed to help inspire sexy dreams. It was going to go for USD$139 million, can you imagine? And when he was showing it to the agreed buyer he stumbled and put his elbow through it. Poor "The Dream".

Speaking of sexy, "Cosi fan tutte" was sexy. Lovely building and perfect acoustics aside. The COC pulled together a set that really worked for once, I mean really worked. I was shocked! And the singers were great - Despina (Shannon Mercer) staying stronger in the acting than the singing, but that served her well when she dressed up as the notary and stuff. The lady who sang Dorabella, this awesome buxom singer Krisztina Szabó who I think did a gypsy in Carmen last year singing that tarot card song, was just - so - engaging, so good.

Anyways, you know what the plot of "Cosi fan tutte" is, right? Three guys and the chambermaid trying to headfuck Dorabella and Fiordigli into being unfaithful? Mozart was such a clever little Masonic fuck. I had never fully appreciated the point of his libretto before - that hearts and emotions are unfaithful and that's where reason must step in - and I found it awfully interesting. I'm trying to get used to the idea that emotion is at the base of rationality, which my analyst won't let go. And while I can say that, and believe it, see it in my own behaviour and rationalizing, it has made me beg the question of where, therefore, rationality gets really useful. The answer of "Cosi fan tutte" seems to be that the role of rationality is to protect the emotions. That's an answer I can work with.

Lady Madonna, get that baby off your breast

Call me superficial, but I haven’t been so disgusted by anything in the media since Israeli warplanes bombed off the balconies of the woman I love in Beirut and mainstream newspapers blamed the victims en masse.

I suppose I could write about why I’m disgusted. About how the claims of abuse look so opportunistic that they’re horribly damaging to the women who are abused by their husbands; about how the ‘illegal drugs’ were obviously reefer and nobody but Americans gives a shit; about how I’ve instructed many people that their fun bits belong to me and I’ve never had to pony up alimony for it, blah blah blah.

But I’m much more interested in why I even care to speculate about the relationship and divorce of two people I’ve never met, and about the hearsay and media scandal surrounding it. I think it’s because I had a greaaaaaat biiiig pre-pubescent crush on Paul McCartney. Pre-pubescent crushes are psychologically formative, you know.

I started thinking he was dreamy when I started listening to the Beatles, after I was alienated from David Bowie by his Tin Machine projects and before I realized physically attractive people like Michael Hutchence (in 1990 – oh yes he was – oh yes – he was – shut up, you!) were in fact physically attractive. But until the age of 12 at least, Paul McCartney was one of the eight husbands I wanted to have on a Greek island. And even now I would let him visit, if he brought enough reefer, which he would. I still don't fully understand why I care now though.

Ah, whatever. Everyone knows May/December shit like that only works for Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester anyways. And only when he’s blind and a staircase falls on him.

Crying over split jizz

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I left my heart in San Marino

Last weekend my old roommate from Italy came to visit, and it was so nice to see her again. It got me thinking about Italy, as do all the episodes of the Sopranos Figaro and I are trying to get through (in a binge reminiscent of Deadwood all those months ago), as did the Piemontese Argentinian girl I met on Sunday, as does Figaro himself, as does my family.

People have asked me how realistic the Sopranos is as regards Italian families, and the answer is really that I've got no fucking idea. First because mamma mia is not Italian, which makes all the difference, and second because I have no experience of Italian families outside of Italian families who are actually in Italy or Italian families here in Canada. I don't know shit about Italians from the tri-state area.

What I can say is the integration process looks familiar-ish; most of the Italians in Canada who I know are off the boat or else first generation so it's not as far along, generally, as the families in the Sopranos. We've been crap at keeping the language, half-assed about keeping the religion, and pretty faithful about keeping the food, which I think is the standard immigrant pattern.

But then it's so different - what Figaro tells me about his Australian Italian family is so different from mine here, which is so different from the shit you hear about tri-state Italians. If I was an anthropologist I would love to sink into a study of how immigrants from the same shit-poor Italian regions shape themselves to suit their new surroundings. Think of the food alone. Fucking hell. I wonder if someone has done that yet.

Why can't everyone be like me, damnit

Things with Figaro are great. I could go on and on about how great they are, but that’s not a gentlemanly thing to do, so I won’t. What is disconcerting me enough that I want to write about it here is how this has changed my attitude to other people’s relationships in a very narcissistic way. The massive egoism, I see now, was always there; it’s just different now, and suddenly more obvious.

When I was in a miserable relationship, I looked at people around me and saw them only from that point of view – the single ones were unutterably fortunate to be single and the ones who seemed happy in relationships were living in a vale of tears that was due to flood any second. When I was single again afterwards, things were pretty much the same; other single people were simply insane to not like being single and to try to change that situation, and people in relationships who thought they were happy were just fooling themselves.

So I always just assumed, depending on my mood, that I was either overly cynical or wonderfully realistic about relationships. Now that things with Figaro are great, I realize I was in fact simply completely unempathetic and egotistical. Because now people keep breaking up around me who I had persuaded myself were in real love matches, and I’m like, “whaaaaaa? People don’t do that. People are happy together. Yeah? What? Where are my pants?” I still think single people have both sides of their bread buttered – being single is the second best thing to being with Figaro, as far as I’m concerned – but I guess I’ve deluded myself into figuring if I’m happy, everybody either is or should be – geez.

To be a Jungian analyst, which is still third or fourth on my list of professional ambitions, you need vast amounts of head shrinking both before and during the course – they describe the need for it as the capacity to distinguish between your own emotions and the patients’ . . . that’s hard. I thought it was hard before and now I think it’s really hard.

Clawing out of the paper bag

I think – think – I’ve emerged from my pisser, and about time, too. It’s really incredible, how hotly a person can defend their own depressive state – guard budding resentments jealously against resolution and reconciliation – cut off their nose to spite their face – anyways. Time to shake off, fight off or lick off the thick sludgy molasses of inert gloom. It’s being a very pretty autumn and I have a great deal to do that is both amusing and imperative.

Not much to say that’s fit for print, except it’s striking me afresh, as I listen to French protestations over not wanting to sanction Iran while seeing eye-to-eye with the United States, and American refusals to tolerate a nuclear North Korea which they are in the process of calmly tolerating, that it’s shocking people pay any attention to what comes out of individual politician’s mouths. It’s such an annoying and inescapable reality that most national decisions and platforms are shaped by overarching imperatives and entire political structures. Anything a government spokesperson says is usually just an effort to dress that up as something more than impotence. . .

Even so . . . I remember during coursework in Paris during the lead-up to the last presidentials in the United States having to do a blow-by-blow comparison of the candidates’ stated platforms – practically identical. It was a disheartening exercise. They can’t even talk the talk different from each other in that country. I really don’t understand how Americans tolerate their fucking horrible democracy. The only role of the Republicans as a party is reconciling the opposites of fiscal libertarianism and social conservatism; Democrats are just as sloppy . . . what the hell is even the point of holding elections there? Distraction? Advertising revenue for the news channels? If those people had any fucking gumption left at all, they’d be on the street right now insisting on electoral reform. Too many Twinkies and television channels, that’s their problem.

Ahhhhh. I love ranting my way out of a grump.

Scott really hates us, Phillip.

I need a slap, because I seem to be refusing to snap out of whatever big fat crank I’m in at the moment – really losing patience with myself because small problems are being unduly magnified and I’m getting tetchy with my best people. Fucking hate that . . . I think part of the problem is that I see no prospect of rest or change in front of me. And this weekend is already trés chargée, trop chargée, and with things I can’t or simply won’t drop. Especially after the Scissor Sisters cancellation, I need to Shake a Tail.

Of course there are other things preying on my mood, rather more serious. Cancer is one of them. Another friend has been diagnosed with it – no sooner is Carmen fully out of the woods than Miss B. tells me she’s about to start a course of radiotherapy after having gone through the chemo and the boob surgery. I hope everything goes as well for Miss B. as it did for Carmen. In both cases I blame France for their illness.

This also comes hot on the heels of news a much older friend of my family has decided to stop treatment for ovarian cancer – she’s in her late seventies and I suppose the physical toll the treatment wreaks is insupportable to her now, despite her prior good health. Cancer was also a contributing factor to my grandfather’s death – he was diagnosed with a couple different kinds earlier this year that had probably been present in his system for three or four years, but progressed so slowly because of his mighty age.

So cancer is something I’m thinking about a lot. Not so much cancer as a disease, but how people react to it, treat it, try to prevent it . . . it risks becoming a fixed idea. There’s something really barbaric about how cancer is treated. Like old military medicine or something, or the way they treated crazies when everyone was excited about electrocuting each other. I guess part of the puzzle comes in asking what my older friend’s ovaries have in common with Miss B’s young tits – seems to have nothing more in common than HIV and HPV do, so why is the treatment so very similar and why – more importantly from a layperson’s point of view – do we have the same sort of emotional reactions to hearing the name of their disease?

Yeah, so, weeeeeeeeeee! I’m in a pisser.

Bitcheroooooo!

Wah wah wah today. Right whiny, twitchy, annoyed mood. Part of the reason for which, outside of abstract frustration with my race and times, is that today I should be jizzing all over the screen about how awesome last night’s Scissor Sisters concert was.

Yeah, well, fuck you too.

Instead, besides seeing Lady, which was nice, I made vegetable broth and roasted a turkey as part of a successful bid to clean and regulate the fridge. I am not a well-regulated woman, but I’ve realized there’s nothing, when it comes to domestic order, that pisses me off worse than a badly regulated fridge.

I think that’s a double inheritance. First from my English grandparents, who lived through two world wars, the Great Depression and 35+ of retirement and came out of it with large amounts of money because they never threw out food. And second from the Calabrian side that violently objects to eating food that isn’t close to the peak of its flavour. This means a well-regulated fridge is absolutely essential to my peace of mind, or else things get pushed behind things and forgotten, superfluous produce is bought while their pre-bought co-nationalists wilt, veggies in opaque bags get lousy, small condiment jars are neglected behind big ones until one must throw them out - awful.

I can live with the fiercest, stupidest, most egregious messiness and even domestic filth – once in Italy I left a pat of lousy aeroplane dinner butter on my bedroom floor for weeks to see who would be the first person to step in it – but a badly regulated, smelly fridge where things get lost or lose their edible loveliness is an affront to affluence, the benefits of agrarian civilization and my own present poverty.

Another day, another fork in my eye

I'm pretty glad to be back in some ways - missed Figaro like crazy, missed talking to people who say 'fuck', missed my cat, et cetera. In other ways I'm not. I really do love Northern England, you see. It's pretty. Nature is pretty here, and the people are better looking. Otherwise, there's about 2/10 aesthetic value in my parts of Ontario.

Anyways. Tonight's Scissor Sisters concert was cancelled. Mr. N thinks it may be rescheduled at a bigger venue since they've exploded with that bloody cute single about not wanting to dance and there's been no mention of refunds yet. All I can say is fuck you, everybody whose fault this is. I wanted fucking Scissor Sisters tonight.

I need to do some of the work I didn't do last week now.

Sigh.

Why I Love Northern England, Part IV

My Romanian driving instructor, in between telling me that I was a public menace and that I shouldn’t hyperventilate on the freeway, once told me Calabrian women are known for tongues like knives and hearts like furnaces, or else like marshmallows, I don’t recall which. Since then I’ve assumed I inherited my bitchiness from the Italian side, but yesterday at the Café del Mar, while the high tide crashed into the barriers, while she drank her first latté and while I fantasized about eating all the delicious fish swimming around the North Sea, I realized it’s actually from Granny and hence a Yorkshire production.

The third or fourth time I told her I thought del Mar was Spanish and meant ‘of the sea’ (anybody who’s smoked hash oil will understand my Granny’s short term memory) some guys who had been sitting next to us got up and stretched, which made their t-shirts simultaneously pop up over their mighty flabby guts.

Not cute little potbellies, not even normal potbellies, I mean mighty, chip-gravy-and-lager-seven-times-a-week, hairy, flabby guts. The men didn’t resemble each other in their faces but their guts were like triplets. Huge, hairy triplets.

As they exited into the drizzly outdoors Granny and I turned to face each other.

‘What male beauty,’ she said.

‘The temptation,’ I bellowed. (She’s can’t hear much because her ears are 94 years old.)

We sniggered, and as I looked at her and she looked back, I think we both recognized a mirrored expression of pure bitch - pure laughing disdain - pure nasty complicity on each other’s faces. I saw her look as slightly shocked as I felt – and then, once more simultaneously, we smiled at what's bred in the bone.

Why I Love Northern England, Part III

I’ve been touched by how supportive friends and acquaintances have been lately, from my tai chi instructor to the well-groomed blue-eyed French-Canadian civil servant who got me my passport in three hours to the darling of my heart. I understand a little better helplessness in the face of people who have lost someone they love. But I also understand that sympathy works wonders, and that when all else fails you can just get pregnant – Little Bitch made me smile by reminding me she’s due to ‘even the score’ by popping an infant in the next week or so.

We can’t all pop babies at the drop of a hat, but I know many people may still want to do tangible things besides offering sympathy to make me feel better. Thanks. I’ve thought of something, inspired by an event yesterday during the cortége going to the crematorium.

The funeral finished around the same time school let out. We left the charming old Norman church where my grandfather had done so much conscientious Anglican good work (but all the way through, pretty hymns not withstanding, I couldn’t shake the feeling it was just a made-up religion for backwashed Catholics) and drove sedately behind the hearse, four veritable fountains of tears trailing after my endlessly curious ‘oh I say, what’s behind that big rock up there’ grandfather for the last time.

My aunt had her street-side window cracked a couple of inches to stop the windows from fogging, I suppose, which gave three of us (my grandmother, thankfully, hears nothing below the pitch of a shout) the benefit of listening to the editorials of passing schoolchildren; mostly limited to ‘ooooooooooeerrrrgh! A dead baw-deee!’

She closed the window.

So if you really want to make Mistress La Spliffe and her family feel better, please find a bratty schoolchild from Yorkshire, step on its face, have your photograph taken and submit the results to me. Each will make our hearts sing and the finest will be posted on this blog.

Why I love Northern England, Part II

Scarborough is littered with desperate yoof. Despite it being school time again, in the hour or two I spent shopping downtown I saw at least four scarcely pubescent spotty, spotty girls who either had conjunctivitis or an extremely inconsiderate sexual partner. And more yoof by the moment, it seems. You can tell Catholicism held on too long up here – so many young mothers, some of them obviously having no fucking clue.

I went into a store called Woolworth’s to look for a certain kind of baking dish for Figaro – Woolworth’s is budget but it isn’t like Walmart, it’s dirtier and stuff, like they have signs up about how it isn’t acceptable to beat on the staff. There’s a café in there where a young whale of a mother was eating, and her crying baby was sitting in a babyseat, pointing away from her and trying to crane his head around to catch sight of her. The mother was getting really pissed off and just kept yelling ‘Behave. Are you going to behave? Behave,’ at this poor fucking pre-verbal infant. Babies having babies. Awful.

Which reminds me of a story my grandmother told us yesterday of a nasty hospital trip she’d had with Grandad a few months ago. “We were in this crowded waiting room full of children. It was awful, awful. I asked one of them what they were there for, and for a moment there was complete silence in the room. And then it said ‘babies’, and they all started laughing and saying ‘babies’. Absolutely awful.’

Why I love Northern England

On the train leaving Manchester aeroport, a couple who sat in front of me grabbed my attention because they looked so ill-suited; a pretty, refined, Eastern European girl and big florid English bastard with thinning, spiky blond hair, looking for all the world fresh off the Danish Viking ship.

They were macking so wetly and loudly that I was on the verge of being annoyed until I remembered how shameless I am about grabbing Figaro's goodies in public, so I just ignored them as well as I could instead of rolling my eyes or yelling "If you want him to come quick you have to lick his balls!" (thank you, Margaret Cho).

The girl got out at Manchester Piccadilly and after kissing her off the big florid bastard sat back down. He started sniffling as the train gathered speed. Awww, I thought. They live in different cities and went on vacation together. I felt bad for them, then smug because I co-habit with my best boy, and then I started inventing all sorts of scenarios for these star-crossed lovers; extra-marital affairs, the woman giving the man the big adios during the vacation, et cetera.

As I was letting my fancy fly, my eye fell on the magazine the big bastard had started reading after he stopped sniffling over the lady. It was a skin mag. He was looking at porn. Really intently, too, like he was studying it to describe on a test later.

Sweet.

Well

It's not as though I have anything to say that the general public should read today. I will say this, though. My flight, after the hellish slap-dance that was getting an emergency passport (I'd be in jail right now if it wasn't for Figaro, let's put it like that)[and I'd like to send a huge fucking shout-out to the Canadian federal government, as once I got my shit together it took them THREE HOURS to issue the five year passport - you guys ROCK! Vote Liberal!], was one of the smoothest ever, I suppose due to the total lack of general interest in people going to Manchester on an autumn Saturday.

However, the movie they showed - Just My Luck, starring Lindsay Lohan - was maybe the worst thing I've ever looked at, ever. IT SUCKED SO BAD. At first I couldn't believe movies that bad still got made, and then I started fearing for the future of the human race if this sort of shit is what the kiddies are watching now. Dammit! Are we going through the fucking 80's again or something? Anyways.