Benefit . . . or Else

Yesterday, Melbine had this to say:

Yes, your world, or my world, might be a lot more insulated than lots of other people in the world - but I don't think that it means that you can't feel an empathy towards the people in 'less' insulated situations. I think that people like yourself and the people who surround you have a strong capacity to understand and appreciate all of the complexities and horrors of the real world. Does this mean we should be doing more to make our world less insulated? I don't know. Is it something that we should feel guilty about or unhappy about? I don't know. I do know that I feel very blessed and fortunate in this life.

And it made me think, and my response ballooned, so here it is formatted:

I don't think feeling guilty should enter into it. Some of the things we insulate ourselves from - things that are undoubtedly real - from the genuine love of the junkie for the needle to the mass conviction of former enthusiasts that Britney Spears is fat (which helps them deal with the facts that she has always been nothing but a shitty performer doing naive burlesque to musically worthless accompaniment, and that the attractions of that act had a shelf life exactly as long as her first, semi-legal flush of youth - thereby revealing uncomfortable truths about America's sexual relationship with children) are really lousy things that everybody should be spared.

And therein, I think, lies the difference. The existence of safe, deferential and respectful cocoon in which my conference-mates were ensconced relies on the fact that they are the only group of people in it; indeed, that it feel as much as possible as though their personal success is valued above the success of the people who wait on them or the women around them. But a good person, which I'd love to be, would like everyone to benefit from the good things he or she benefits from - loving parents, a relationship that makes one's life better instead of worse, education, financial security, unpasteurized milk, non-addictive drugs, and an emotional and imaginative life rich enough that one doesn't need to have make-believe relationships with celebrities.

You know, all I'd need to do is add 'trains that run on time' to that list and I'd start wondering if I should start campaigning to be a fascist strongwoman. My slogan can be 'Benefit . . . Or Else!' Sweet.

Anyways - as promised -

Books I Read on Planes:

Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep, Lady in the Lake, and The Little Sister. He has fantastic similes. The stories don't always quite make sense and one gets the impression they were written for money in a hurry but they're tearing yarns with colourful language and great characterization anyways. The Big Sleep was my favourite.

Haruki Murakami: Underground. A collection of first-hand accounts of the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack carrired out by Aum Shinrikyo, followed by accounts of former and present Aum members and commentary from Murakami himself about how Aum represented a part, even an integrated part of Japanese culture, no matter how evil and bizarre it was - an inevitable response to the accepted violence of the Japanese way of life, which wears men down to nubs and isn't so easy on the ladies either. Fantastic, and not just Japanese, if you know what I mean.

Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory. Call me crazy, or ascribe it to my own prejudices rather than anyone else's, but whenever an Anglo man writes a novel set in a developing country, or even developed but dago-type country (Italy, Spain, etc.), it ends up looking less like a tearing good yarn about real people and more like a collection of archetypes forcefully combined to make a POINT. I see that as a running theme from the wops in Where Angels Fear to Tread (although not the Indians in A Passage to India - an absolutely marvellous book - I like E. M. Forster, including Angels, but I love A Passage to India - super good) through to the Old Man and the Sea. And now even to Graham Greene, whose realism I usually enjoy.

Explorations of the Vietnamese characters in The Quiet American was different because of the first person narration from an English opium addict who understood there were gaps in his understanding and bigger gaps in other people's understanding. But the Mexicans (that is, almost everyone) in The Power and the Glory are described by your standard God narrator. And to me this nudged The Power and the Glory towards being a Catholic parable rather than a proper novel - an almost opportunistic use of the upheavals of the Mexican state as a way to illustrate the supreme difficulties of morality AND of immorality - the search for reasons to remain Catholic when it's patently such a silly and unfair church . . .

That's not to say it wasn't good, though. It's a very atmospheric and engaging parable that makes you feel like you're wandering, too hot, around Mexico. But A Man for All Seasons it ain't.

Anyways, now I'm reading Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald to wash all the testosterone out of my aching-jawed mouth - the Murakami translation wasn't rough but a one-two of Chandler and Greene has left me feeling bruised and manhandled - and so far it's good. Very atmospheric in a creepy, visual way, but not too laboured. Has she written anything else since? No time to check, for I am off to work.

Coccooning

Guess what? Mircea Eliade used to live in the place my conference was. Here's where he stayed.

I stayed in a brand spanking new five star, and I know it was new because they were busily knocking down the old version right next to it. That means I got to look at some construction workers. I love construction workers in Mediterranean countries. Sometimes their skin is just the prettiest colour human skin can be and their muscles ripple. And it's too hot down there for them to get fat. Purr.

Now, this five star. It had deferential staff, as I wrote yesterday; while they weren't obsequious or anything like that, they were very attentive and very respectful to a degree I had really only seen in movies. And the five star was in a beautiful place both the attendees and their wives could enjoy. 95% of the attendees were male and the chairman closing each day's talk would mention 'our wives will join us at such and such a time and then we will be ferried to such and such a staggeringly beautiful location for a top notch dinner' or some such. Lots of jokes were made about shopping, etc., but I'd seen the 'social' programme that had been set up for the wives and it was lovely - tours and tastings and all the rest, oh my . . .

What I mean to say is that everything at this conference was taken care of, and that the experience was one of overwhelming comfort and safety. Reassurance. An atmosphere had been created that didn't allow for discomfort, disrespect, rejection or even marital discord since the wives were kept appropriately busy doing beautiful things. I suppose the safety and reassurance of it all came home to me on the last night at the formal dinner rounding off the conference, when I was on a dance floor full of beautiful women - or women who had invested a great deal in being beautiful - and, well, ugly men (and me, to whom none of the above categories applies). There were some attractive men at the conference but for the most part they didn't go to the formal, or else didn't dance once they were there.

They used the relative safety to pose, you see - lots of the men did. On the last night they flaunted their wives, as they'd been flaunting their BMWs, 39 foot boats, horses, Harleys, and knowledge of Michelin starred restaurants for the last few days. What it came down to in the end, for me, was that this was a group of men who had a safe environment full of deference and respect created for them which allowed them to be judged not by who they were, but by what they had done. I admit it disturbed me, probably because I got a couple of passes made at me which made me feel that these men who were making the passes - much older men than me, and not the George Clooney type of much older man - seemed to really expect me to go for it. And honestly, I was much less rude than usual about turning them down, so the environment of safety of deference and respect even extended over me.

And I know in a broader sense why the insulation disturbs me - that sort of world seems so insulated from reality, so removed from real things like love or disappointment or happiness or mercy or heartbreak or elation - all the most beautiful and staggering emotions that spontaneous life makes us feel and that we all have in common, that make us human. But that sort of insulated world seems to be the reward men get when they become successful and powerful in the normal sense of the words. These are the men, the insulated men, who run our world . . . it doesn't do to forget that . . .

But it's all very confusing to me because it has made me really think about how insulated my own world is, even within the framework of the prosperous West. I've surrounded myself with people who like books and don't like television, people who have the sophistication to analyze celebrity instead of having some bizarre emotional relationship with it, people who try to vote with their brains instead of their insecurities - that's not the real world either and periodically that comes home to me when I go to MSN and everything on the home page is about Britney Spears being fat on national TV, or when I'm in a Portuguese restaurant that had apparently been recommended in a French guide book listening to the asinine Gallic conversation of the people around me, or - you know, in any number of circumstances. We are all so far apart from each other.

Anyways. The morning after the conference, I walked a couple of kilometres down the coast the the Boca do Inferno and stared at the fishies you would see milling around in the clear blue water next to it, and felt pretty damn good in any case. Here is the mouth of hell, and the fishies:

Five days of summer

I've been in Portugal for work - first a conference and then a weekend basking in the Romanticism of Sintra. It was hot and lovely and I went to the beach and the mountains and didn't wear socks and got a tan and ate bacalhau and pasteis de nata until I felt like I would explode.

I wish I had more time this morning to get into the work part of it, which was fun and interesting - for example, it turns out I can indeed schmooze in my fashion and even find a way to enjoy it; if I remind myself it's my job, then I don't feel like such a goof for talking to people I'd never ordinarily talk to or want to talk to - though there were also people there I ended up genuinely liking, including my boss, which is awesome.

I'd like to tell you about the beautiful five star we stayed in that made Canadian five stars look like shit, and how that was tied to a dignified slavishness on the part of the staff which couldn't be managed in a richer country, and I'd like to explain to you that everything I've ever bothered thinking about rich men is more or less true - my prejudices have been beautifully reinforced by this trip. The conference was for a very traditional sort of industry, with traditional black tie dinners and music and gender roles. But there is no time. Maybe later.

The big news from this trip, according to how I feel this morning at least, is that after one year of studying its poetry and eight years of ignoring it completely I have finally discovered the essence of Romanticism after staying in Sintra, one of its capitals and a favourite of Byron and suchlike, and that is to twist your ankles in the most beautiful surroundings possible. Sintra is very, very, very beautiful and the hills around it are full of well-tended paths leading from one beauty spot to another. All of the well-tended paths, however, seem designed to snap the tendons of anyone who dares traverse them without Tevas. Luckily I was wearing my Tevas. Here are a couple of pictures:

This is a view from Sintra up to the Castelo dos Mouros. It is a very pretty castle. I knew because I walked and walked and walked up the snap-ankle paths to look at it.

See? Anyways, the whole thing was lovely. It was lovely to have some time to myself mooning around a beautiful, warm area and I loved the people and food. I nearly cried when I realized I had to come back here instead of being able to fetch Figaro there and living a Romantic, sore-ankled life in the sun. Oh well. Later, maybe. Tomorrow I will write about the conference, and the day after about all the books I read on aeroplanes or while I was waiting for them. You've been warned.

Ain't messing with no broke penguins

That feeling of impending catastrophe is back . . . could be because it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas here despite summer not having happened yet, could be because of the triangulation of MTV ignoring Kanye West again just as Nawaz Sharif gets deported from Pakistan and my parents leave town. But I can't help but get the feeling something big and ugly is going to happen. I get to feeling like this periodically . . . it usually comes to nothing . . . but, well, you know. Oh, and it's September 11 too. Riiiiiiight.

Anyways. Speaking of Kanye West, I mentioned I went to Antwerp with my parents. Antwerp is a diamond finishing and trading capital and it's still stuffed with tourists buying up rocks to get married with because they're slightly closer to wholesale prices there. However, it's been losing trade to Indian capitals because EU regulations are cracking down too hard on conflict diamonds. You get the full import of that phrase, right. Cracking down harder - which means they're still there. Losing trade to Indian capitals - because cracking down on conflict diamonds raises the price of the rocks unacceptably and regulations are slacker there.

Anyways, Kimberley Process diamonds, fuck that, et cetera. Just because income from the diamonds is going to government-approved agencies doesn't mean they're clean . . . Zimbabwe is part of the Kimberley Process, for fuck's sake, it's not UNICEF. Why are people still buying that shit, for god's sake? Can't we leave the pebble nonsense to the penguins? Cute cute penguins. Look, a cute penguin:

This post is a way of saying I love my father

Daddy is a man of fixed daily habits which can only suffer when he travels in foreign lands, like going to the gym, having naps, eating salads and lingering over the newspaper. So I was anxious to run damage - we went on long walks instead of going to the gym, we came back from field trips to make sure he could get a nap in most days, I made salads when my inclination was more towards eating some more canoli (magically, as soon as we went grocery shopping together canolis started appearing before me), and while we were in Antwerp I spied a newsagents in between the diamond stores and ushered him in to get something in English or the Gazzetto dello sporto or something.

There was nothing there I thought he'd be remotely interested in as there was nothing North American or Italian, and then I saw it.

'Look, Daddy, it's the Daily Telegraph. That's the newspaper Grandpa liked,' I said hopefully, as Daddy has a huge respect for his now defunct father-in-law, who liked the Daily Telegraph. My maternal grandfather was a good man so I can only excuse his fondness for the Daily Telegraph by saying his fine aesthetic sensibilities meant he preferred the knuckle-dragging piss mongers who produce it to the Guardian staff, who use too many commas. Like me.

Se he bought it and the next day he lingered over it, and he came across this article. It upset him a bit. Tenors only touch me when sopranos are drowning them out by shouting 'Di te, de ti scordarmi!' in 'Miserere', but Daddy had a soft spot for Pavarotti, and the fact that some cunt in a right wing snotrag saw fit to make fun of the man's fattidom and populist and money-grabbing tendencies when he wasn't even cold in his grave yet makes my blood fucking boil.

First of all, we all knew Pavarotti was fat and sort of lazy about learning his parts and a populist money grubber and that Cecilia Bartoli is way classier, please and thank you. You're not making some fantastic and original point by mapping his human shortcomings out five minutes after the poor fuck dies of cancer, you're being a cunt. A stupid opportunistic troggy cunt who comes off as wizened with disappointed bitterness as Germaine Greer crowing over the fresh corpse of that animal-provoking Australian incompetent, both revealing more than you intended about your own profound jealousy of your exponentially more successful contemporaries.

Not to mention the need to have some sort of nasty opposition in the press in lieu of news. Because it's not about journalistic integrity when you harp on about the shittiness of a dead celebrity. A celebrity is just a celebrity - they call them that because their fame is exponentially fame inducing, and not because they're Winston Fucking Churchill or something who has some overwhelming historical legacy which needs discussing whether they're alive or dead or something in between. And if you rip into them when they're fresh in the public minds because they died, why, you're just the scum of the fucking earth, aren't you? Just a repellent shitwad of an opportunistic parasite, willing to be a total fucking cunt just so that foul mouthed bloggers like me give a shit about you on their way to work in the morning.

Bravo, maestro.

As well as having been a celebrity, now Pavarotti is a legend, whether you or I like him, because his voice and his performing persona brought millions of people to opera and 50,000 people to his funeral. Cecilia Bartoli might be a million times classier, but some backwater girl growing up in the sticks like me might never have heard of her if it hadn't been for the amazing larger-than-life tenor of Old Eyebrows bellowing Nessun Dorma over one of Michael Bolton's bowel movements so that he could buy his 60th mistress a house or a mink coat and some blow or something.

What I mean to say is that some nonentity in the British right wing press has no right to ruin even a quarter of an hour of my father's vacation by ripping into a man who will be remembered as having been mourned by tens of thousands, when that nonentity's best chance of being remembered is as a parasitic fuck who raised the traffic to the Daily Telegraph one weekend by being a cunt.

A quickie while their backs are turned . . .

There are lots of things I love about the English and their humour is one of them. Actually I think their humour is at the root of lots of other things I love about them, but that gets into absolutely separate blog entries I may write someday when I have more time, about the relationships between humour and endurance, or about humour and giving fucked wicked good head.

Their humour means they got to watch this sort of thing on normal broadcast television:

I can't get no pre-op male transsexual reaction

Last night I dreamt of having my first threesome. I suppose it was on my mind because awhile ago, we went to a Latino festival and this Irish rub-a-dub friend of a friend tried to pick a fight with the F-word by dragging me off home with him and bellowing about how I had the best tits in the vicinity, though they were covered up in a cable-knit sweater and an ugly Italian puffy vest. First of all, at the time I got a love-triangley feeling that incident was more about the emotions the rub-a-dub was having for the F-word than for my tits. And then yesterday it popped into my head that the rub-a-dub looked very much like someone I almost did have a threesome with a few summers ago.

Anyways, I dreamt about having a threesome with a man and a lady, which I wasn't happy about, as I'd always promised myself any threesome with me in it would have two men. Then it turned out that the lady was a pre-op transsexual who'd been born a man. I still wasn't absolutely happy with the situation, but afterwards I felt a deep glow of satisfaction, like I'd done something really clever. You know, it's like the feeling you have in the adolescent stage of your life where you define yourself by your appetites, and when you go on a binge, you feel really good about it.

Waking up, I felt a strange sadness as I realized that time is over now and the window has shut on the possibility of making it with two people at once. Bingeing makes me feel stupid and having a threesome would just be a sexual binge that would make me feel stupid. I suppose the lesson of the dream is that I should have seized the day back in the first flush of my youth, when excess meant something besides just excess because there's still something new and exploratory about it.

Or maybe there's something deeper and more abstract there about how I need to look for new kinds of satisfaction - not necessarily the kind that involves making it with people - but that generally I need to be open to something new and exciting happening that I didn't think could. Too bad I work too fucking hard to notice anything except how exhausted I am when I'm not working. Ho. Hum.

I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me to see me worrying about you

My parents are coming to visit this afternoon and staying until Monday. Now that we've cleaned the apartment I'm happy about that. It's not as though I think they'll be particularly uncomfortable or condemnatory if it's at its normal level of filth when they get here, but if it was they would clean it, and then I would feel so bad.

Generally speaking, guilt is starting to play a strong role in our relationship. I feel guilty for being so far away from them, more and more as they get older, though they're in blooming good health so I don't know why I've started pre-mourning and pre-worrying. My brothers are also the world's best, really good people, and most of them are in shouting distance of my parents, and then there's the great big spread of my Italian clan all over Ontario. And my parents have a great social and civic life, better than almost anyone I know - good exercise regimen, nice diet. So maybe all that guilt and worry is my way of missing them.

Maybe it's also knowing that as much as I am enjoying my job now - and yes, pound for pound I enjoy it - I know someday I'm going to disappoint them by leaving the world of executive perks and 'stability' (writes she two months before her six month probationary period runs out) and do something they'll be much less proud of, like massaging people. I got the first interview call from the company I work for now on my cell while I was visiting them last year and I was excited, obviously - it was only the second nibble of interest I'd had for the cool European jobs I was feverishly applying for - but I think my parents were even more excited than I was. They want us all to be successful and well placed in the world. Who couldn't understand that?

Ahhhhh. I worry about them, they worry about me, I worry about them worrying about me, I tell Mum I'm in analysis and they worry about me worrying about them worrying about me. Still, that's love and I'm lucky that's the way it is. What a life.

I'm so hot for you

Saw Hard Times last night. I can admit it would have been shitty if James Coburn hadn't played an execrable waster in it so well. But he did, and then there was Charles Bronson being shirtless for the rest of it. God, he was hot. And I think he was around fifty when he filmed that too - certainly older than I usually torch for. When he stepped onto the screen and I registered his squishy Tatar eyes and crooked face, I had a moment before drifting off into Fangirl-La of understanding other people would be puzzled by the notion of him being an attractive man.

All this ties into my interest in evolutionary psychology, which to me is about as scientific as tarot cards (you know I hate the Guardian for its abuse of commas and general condescending tone, but this Bad Science feature is great and this one in particular about evolutionary psychology is really great) but it's fun nonetheless. Because it's all speculation about the history of sex and sexual attraction - or at least it is in my head. And what could be more fun that that, besides a gramme of reefer and a Marx Brothers movie, and even then I'm mentally undressing Chico with all my might?

I like to think, for example - let's take my torch for Chico - about why funny, musical men are attractive beyond their ability to kill fresh protein. I speculate it's because post-partum depression and seasonal affective disorder once plagued our ancestors too, perhaps even worse than it does us as they were fresh off the sunny African savanna or wherever. So unless the (potential) father of your brood could amuse you, make you laugh or otherwise cheer you up during the shitty winters and the beginning of motherhood you were liable to go crackers before getting pregnant, run away from your family before you'd finished nursing, or otherwise break off contributing to the gene pool or letting him contribute with you.

See - pure speculation. But it makes sense, doesn't it? Tell me I'm wrong. But you can't - that's evolutionary psychology, baby! I love the funny men because I should! Charles Bronson isn't funny, but it does look like he could pick me up, throw me over the saddle of his horse, and take me away from all this, which probably also ties into our European ancestresses suffering seasonal affective disorder - if Jung is right, and you know he is, changes of scene provide a fail safe but short-lived cure for depression.

Anyways, I think the rub-a-dub speculation of evolutionary psychology provides a great explanation for why people have such crazily varying tastes. And thank goodness we do.

Seasonal affective distaste

Today is back to school day for most Belgian kids and for the F-word. I feel sort of bad for them and the cold, dark, wet air has a general charge of desperation. I didn't mind back-to-school when I was a kid because I got sick of summer by the end of it, but this year is different as I haven't had a summer to get sick of, either in terms of time off or summery weather. It isn't elegant to whine, but let me tell you - the fact that it's September now and there were only four days this summer when I felt like I had enough sun and heat feels like an object I love very much has been taken away. Oh well. This weekend was nice and some friends gave me a little tutorial in survival and culinary Portuguese. Leaving in a little more than a week - a week Wednesday. They say it's 33° and sunny there right now . . .

One other thing I'll write about this morning. I am shameful prey to gossip pages - well, two of them, and I won't shill for them here. I really have to get over it. They bring me nothing but misery. One, for example, mentioned last week that Nicholas Cage is being courted to star in the film adaptation of Magnum P.I., which makes me want to vomit. They both go on about the tortured genius of Amy Winehouse, especially the tortured bit, so I tried to balance it out with the 'genius' part - listened to some tracks from Back to Black and felt stupid for not listening to Sarah Vaughn instead. She has a nice voice but so do thousands of other chicks who sing with instruments better and complain less.

Finally I actually got sucked in to listening to the new Britney Spears single on Youtube this morning because both sites had been fussing for weeks about all the exciting producers she was or wasn't working with, so I had to see if one of them managed to make a serviceable purse out of a sow's ear. I suppose I had forgotten she was execrable at the best of times and I paid for my forgetfulness. It's Shitney, bitch. What's more the production sounded dimestore. How easy is it these days to get a public reputation as a producer? Somebody buy that man a Mac and an instruction manual. Thin and gruely, and about as dancey as whale music.

Alice Munro Smacks Down

So last night I was torn between Raymond Chandler and Alice Munro, as the used place next to my office sold me The Chandler Collection Volume One (Amazon.ca doesn't have it but that one looks good too) and Open Secrets for 50 cents each last week. I almost feel guilty for paying so little for such good books. But I guess there's a steady stream of departing Anglo expats who let their apartments get cleared by the store, and if they're willing to spare the books for so little I'm willing to accept them for so little.

Alice Munro won, and that was nice. She's such a great storyteller. About what I was saying yesterday in terms of narrative voices - her narration may not be as punchy, convincing or unsettling as Graham Greene's or Ishiguro's; it's very apparently Alice Munro Narration from story to story - but it doesn't matter. The illusion she creates when she writes isn't just an illusion of reality. The stories are little worlds in themselves, even to the most uneventful. And her omniscient third person narration from the perspective of a non-omniscient character or even her omniscient first person narration - not a type I usually enjoy - is absolutely fine, even beautiful.

Because the stories are so good. Their structure is so good. And building on such a solid structure, she doesn't need to ponce about with every adjective in the dictionary and clumsy, clumsy, CLUMSY attempts to shock (I'm thinking very hard of Martin Amis and Zadie Smith) while she still describes things perfectly and occasionally shockingly. Even the stings in her tail feel gently right . . . what I'm saying is, her all-knowing narrative voice might sound contrived but that's not a bad thing because she's a good enough storyteller that I can unquestioningly accept her as the god of those worlds.

Guilty of too little guilt

The F-word is away on a work retreat with his future colleagues for a couple of days (no retreats at my office, boo hoo, just the occasional subsidized drunken binge and trips to Portugal to stay in five star hotels - I love Europe) and of course I jumped at the chance to be immediately and violently unfaithful to him with Graham Greene. I devoured The Quiet American without once leaving the chesterfield and it was soooooo good.

What makes me love books is the narration - seems obvious - they're narratives, for heaven's sake. But while I can enjoy a film for its aesthetic beauty, I can't enjoy a book solely on the basis of beautiful imagery. The example that springs to mind is Girl with a Pearl Earring - I couldn't stand the book, couldn't stand the narrative voice - I didn't believe it for a second and I got bored fuckless. But the film was beautiful, and reading the book I could see how the beauty of the film came from the descriptive passages therein - although the lingering shots of Scarlet Johannson and the fleeting shots of Cillian Murphy, whose uncanny looks evoke some very sweet and sour memories for me, probably helped too.

That's a long way of getting to the point that The Quiet American is some of the best narration I've ever read. Fowler, who tells the story while having the most invested in it, variously sees and fails to see the limits of his own understanding while managing to get us feeling like our understanding of him is greater than his understanding of himself - a feeling that pisses him off no end when Pyle, the Quiet American, expresses it. But Fowler's perspective is all we really understand, since it's clear his understanding of Pyle is unreliable, maybe even in his own eyes. So finally, the narrative leads us to a climax where two people seem to do what they think is right and are murderous in the process without being sure what they're doing exactly.

But Fowler has lots of delicious guilt about that, and that's neat too, in a narrative voice. There's just not enough guilt in the media these days and certainly very little convincing guilt. Redemption up the ying-yang, though - have you noticed? I think we live in the Golden Age of Redemption; it's hard to find and book or film that doesn't end up with some sort of redemption. If I have anything good to say about the way The Sopranos ended, it's that it gave redemption a miss - but then it'd been giving guilt a miss over seven seasons with less and less conviction, so it can fuck itself anyways.

So we have redemption coming out of our asses but no guilt, or if there is any guilt it's just a plot device leading up to the redemption. It's ridiculous. Always with the cathartic money shots of people bursting into tears and emerging above their problems in one fell swoop. Bah. Imagine life was like that and we were all a bunch of well-adjusted types walking around basking in our own guiltlessness. It would be another universe . . . But The Quiet American is convincingly lifelike, in that there's guilt, anger, conscience and uncertainty and all those things that make our universe often ugly, always our own, and occasionally very, very good reading.

In my day . . . well, actually 70 years before my day . . .

Saw A Night at the Opera last night and laughed until my face hurt. I'd heard their MGM movies weren't as funny as the older ones, of which I've only seen Animal Crackers, which was indeed funnier because it didn't have a story to distract from the funniness. The older I get the less I think movies, least of all comedies, are an appropriate medium for stories. Nonetheless, A Night at the Opera was very fucking funny, right until the last second.

We saw it in the cinema and although I was too busy laughing to think about it at the time, it was neat how everybody in the full salle was in pain laughing at 70 year old jokes. Though from time to time we'd be laughing at some Groucho gag the francophones hadn't got, and at other times the subtitles apparently aged better than the audio and they were laughing while we bemusedly awaited the next gag.

Not to sound like a codger so old I should be long dead by now after living out my four score and seven or whatever, but American comedy films have only suffered. I blame an industry-wide inability to work as ensembles. The funniest films I've seen out of there lately, like The 40 Year Old Virgin and Napoleon Dynamite, and, well, that's it because I hate American comedies so much that I avoid them altogether unless I'm on aeroplanes now, are so funny because people in them are funny together and not because there's a star. Because stars aren't funny. Like Ben Stiller, for example. He's not funny. An individualistic society with a celebrity fetish might be okay for standup but it sucks for funny movies. So does Ben Stiller.

Another thing about the Marx Brothers that has only suffered since in American comedy (although not so much in British comedy, for some reason, where you went on to see people like Dudley Moore or Hugh Laurie getting into it) is the musical moneyshot. When Harpo plays the harp and Chico plays the piano, and it's a little bit funny while being delightful. Imagine. A delightful comedy. Well, actually, don't imagine, just go rent a Marx Brothers movie. And enjoy this clip of Dudley Moore being slightly delightful.



BTW, Dudley Moore is much more delightful and also much more filthy with Peter Cook in Derek and Clive Get the Horn et al. But I'll leave off discussing the high (yet filthy) pinnacle of British humour until another day.

Honey rush

No time, no time at all, except to point out I had sage monofloral honey for breakfast and it's delish. We found a honey store here so I am once more a fetishizing pig in shit. Actually we found it awhile ago, but Saturday was the first day I got my shit together to go there. Wheee!

Also would like to quickly point out that John Lennon's album Rock N Roll is really great. I heard it at Miss P's wedding for the first time because she loves it and now I love it. The Stand By Me cover is everything that's awesome about pop music.

The Red Dragon takes a field trip

We went to Liège this weekend to see what we could see. It's a neat city which somehow made me think of a blend of Liverpool and Italy, by which I mean it was pretty, dirty, seedy and surprisingly cosmopolitan. We liked it. One super-neato thing was the Musée d'art religieux et d'art mosan, which contained all the paintings and sculptures from monasteries and churches that had shut down in the area of the Meuse valley. It's one of those really cluttered museums - they just have so much stuff in it. One standout was a Virgin and Child from 1070 that looked like a dreamworld archetype. The Christian fixation on the mother/child image must be confusing to everybody else in the world but I bet it really helps us proselytize.

One of the attendants showed us around a bit to give us more historical depth on stuff, that was nice. It left me with the impression Liège is a really fucked up place - a sort of heaving commie stew - very North and South, except it was like the North that happened to be the South instead. Belgium's Manchester, in a word. And of course I like that.

Another nice thing about Liège was its geography. It's on a very nice river, and it's also at the beginning of the Ardennes so it's refreshingly hilly. That was welcome yesterday because I was as crampy as a moron who'd eaten a turkey dinner just before swimming the Channel, and climbing stairs really helps with that. And Liège has the mother of all staircases:

Conscious and subconscious both come to heel

Last night I dreamt I had a dog as well as my cat. We had been travelling around the world, with the F-word as well and maybe some other people in the entourage, and ended up in some pretty warm place with lots of parks. We went out to a grocer's to get some beer and cheese, and the cat followed.

The dog was fine, he was trained to heel and didn't need a leash. Lexie, however, wasn't allowed to go if she didn't accept wearing a cumbersome collar that would let us track her down if she got lost. I was trepidatious about the whole thing - as I said, where we were was full of beautiful parks and I was concerned she'd shoot off and tree herself or get hit by a car or something. In my jet-lag dumbness I'd also forgotten to collar her before we left the executive suite where we were staying, so I'd have to do that on the street.

I was expecting a potentially dangerous struggle as I leaned over to put the tag around her neck, but she came over and accepted it with mild enthusiasm - as though wearing a bloody stupid collar for a little while was the price she had to pay to for some freedom. She trotted along with us, a little more curious and cautious about her surroundings than the amiable, loyal dog who trotted to heel without looking left or right, but she kept pace.

My subconscious doesn't make things opaque for me. Needless to say I am less angry than usual about going into work today. Also the sun has finally come out, and I've decided that if we go Plan Gold Coast I'll spend two months of each year in Canada. So there's no more problems for the moment.

At least I'm spoiled for options

Dale of the Passion Thereof interviewed me awhile back, and has now been interviewed by me in turn. He gave good answers to silly questions so check it out. Pay particular attention to his tags, generally speaking. He's an artist of taggotry. Anyways, Dale likes opera which reminds me to my sadness this morning that I'm very far away from my opera friends. The F-word falls asleep at the opera, like many people do, and the English people I work with don't listen to anything more 'retro' than Simply Red. At least I don't think they do, but I'm probably just being bitter because I miss people in Canada.

How much I miss them has been playing on me lately because a life plan B (or G or H - there are so many when you're a bourgeois Anglophone) has been presenting itself, namely to pack together a nest egg here over four years or so in my executive bourgeois role and then move to the Gold Coast of Australia. The Gold Coast is very, very far away and unattractive for that reason, and also unattractive because every time the F-word moves back to Australia he flips after about a year and moves back to Europe, and I have a feeling the next place I go will be where I want to really develop a good ass groove on the couch.

But it's the Gold Coast. It's the middle of winter there, and the sun is shining and it's 24°C; about 6°C higher than it is here in Brussels in the middle of the fucking, cocking terrible cunt of a summer. And I've always preferred the idea of raising children that come out of me in an Anglophone country because I'm a massive linguistic chauvinist. But England is a chilly sodden mess that's like here except with floods and unaffordable housing, Canada is either really cold or else British Columbia - well, that's a thought too - and the States is what it is. So there's Australia.

Hard to know what will happen. At the moment, I'm comfortable being €500 and ten hours of travel away from my friends and family in Canada. Let's see if, in three years, I'll be comfortable being €1200 and 28 hours of travel away. And let's see, in three years, if there hasn't been some global financial cataclysm that renders world travel out of the reach of all but the growing ranks of the super-rich, because if that's the case I'll have to engineer a bourgeois revolution before I think about moving anywhere. And let's see if I get through the rest of my probationary period at work without being tossed out on my ear.

Also at issue is that I'm considering becoming a part time shiatsu therapist to give me time to write and make babies under the auspices of Plan Gold Coast, and it remains to be seen if I can comfortably leave the ranks of the executive bourgeois to enter a manual industry, interesting and attractive as that industry is in so many ways that being an executive bourgeoise isn't.

Does that sound snotty? It should. It is snotty, and not the sort of attitude best calculated to increase my happiness. But something in my brain that sounds like my mother's voice, bless her, says that even thinking about the possibility of no longer being an Editor and being a Massoose instead is a silly step backwards socially speaking. And then something that sounds like Daddy's voice, bless him, says that's not why I went to school for so many years. And then a little five year old Missy La Spliffe pipes up, 'Hey! When you were my age you wanted to be a garbageman so you could jump on and off the back of the truck and throw shit! What the hell are you doing letting your spine curl into an S shape in an office all day! That's not me! That's not who I'm growing up into!'

Sigh. Only one thing is for sure, and that's that I'm starting to think I quit analysis too soon. I don't want to go back to my old analyst but I think I'll soon be ready to be analysed again. And this entry has been spellchecked, Dale, so I'm still saying a blog can only stand in for 15% of a talk therapy session.

Have you ever met that paralytic reefer man?

Saw the Simpsons movie last night. There was one bit where I almost died of laughter and I kept a fairly steady stream of chortles all the way through. Still, it was about the same as watching a good episode, except with a plot and visual effects that let it be long without being painful. People who like the Simpsons will like the movie - it's not like the South Park movie, that I think would appeal to millions who wouldn't have time for the show. Although I suspect that's more because the South Park movie was way, way better than the show, and not because it's better than the Simpsons movie.

It was good to be stoned in the cinema again, especially in front of a comedy since I don't usually like comedies and since our effort to see A Night at the Opera on Saturday backfired miserably. Frankly it's just plain nice to be stoned, even though it has a poor effect on my imaginative faculties. Obviously the reefer is nice here. We're right next to Netherlands and we're within the Schengen area - lord love Europe. Even the hash is good. Also, I believe both personal cultivation and possession is legal and I think that conspires to create a quality market.

That, combined with reading an entry from Baywatch getting upset about recreational drug marketing, pulled me into a line of thinking that bothers me from time to time. And that's that not-really-free markets have a distorting and dangerous effect on drugs. Their point becomes to get as fucked up as possible as fast as possible with as small a volume of the drug as possible.

Coca leaves become cocaine become crack. Dirty chunks of opium become candy. MDMA gets mixed up with all sorts of silly shit, 'hopefully' with little brown flecks in it. A yummy delightful sess becomes wheelchair weed. . . . and suddenly everybody is much more boring in the best case and much worse off in the worst case. I don't know how much that sort of concentration generally has to do with an addict needing to step up his dosage and how much it has to do with market restraints putting an emphasis on portability. But as reefer isn't addictive in the normal sense, only a market-conditioned idiot or someone in DIRE need of self-medication could think he needs to drop fun weed in favour of paralytic weed. So at least in reefer's case, I'm voting for portability, although I'm sure marijuana has more than its fair share of market-conditioned idiot fans, as well as those in dire need of self-medication.

I realized that to my sadness in Toronto, the day I realized I didn't know where to buy a nice gentle sess that would make me want to fuck and giggle anymore. What I was smoking there made me want to take a nap. At first I blamed age, but then when I went to Vancouver, where everybody and his mum represents an open market for all intents and purposes, or up north, which is too big to have rules, there was the nice fun sess again. It was probably in Toronto too, but the nasty weed was delivered right to my door, or to Lady's.

It made me realize paralysis isn't what I signed on for. I want things to be funny, and I don't want to medicate my mental problems into oblivion. I have a health plan that would let me do that for free in consultation with a professional. Anyways. Whine whine whine. I live in Europe now so my life is okay, and if I go back to Canada I'll move to the west coast, so my substance problems are over.

Brain hijack

Bad mood today. Red Dragon is flying in for a landing, and I'm pissed at the way the first day of smoking reefer again is light, lovely, fluffy and fun and the following days just create a big void in my brain and make me feel like I haven't slept. Life is unfair.

Also can't stop thinking about the Sopranos, which makes me feel like my time is being wasted. So he's dead. I'm still sure. The thing that's bothering me is that there is always a tip about the place where the guy is going to be, to lead up to the hit. Always. It's never about the person who's going to die getting followed, and it's not like the Sopranos created groundbreaking new mob plot devices, so I'm not believing it would start in the last five minutes.

In this case, though, since it was only a family dinner, who gave the tip about where Tony would be? Was there some indication Carmella figured out what happened to Adriana and Chris? Did that little moron AJ make a connection about how brutal the world was and how brutal his dad was? Did Meadow tell something to her fiancé, who was somehow a creep, or whose dad was somehow a creep? I seem to remember there was some story ages ago with the dad, but I don't remember it. I also wonder who would have ordered the hit since Phil Leotardo was dead. Did Paulie or someone get worried about Tony's relationship with the FBI just as he was about to be indited?

So the thing is, there must be something I've missed, but I won't watch the last episode again. That show has already stolen enough of my life, and the odds are good I'm not missing anything and that it was just all crap. Or maybe this is where the ambiguity for a movie comes in, but I hope to fuck it isn't, because I really want to be done with that show forever and if there's a movie I'll have to watch it.

The beauties of Maastricht

Went to Maastricht this weekend to enjoy some really nice reefer. At least that was our original reason for going, and it worked out well for us, but I have to say I fell in love with the city a bit. It was cute. There's an overwhelming cuteness to the nicer cities in the Benelux. Fairytale-ish medieval buildings and streets that are narrow without being oppressive; gives the impression that maybe life wasn't as bad as you know in your heart it was before the invention of penicillin and labour unions.

Being here, especially being stoned here, lets you understand where Bruegel and Bosch and all those sick motherfuckers were coming from with their fantastical monstrosities. It sounds a bit twee but I've never seen anything like the sky around here. They have the most incredible sunsets and sunrises, and cloudbanks are so imposing it's almost as good as flying above them in an aeroplane. Hallucinogenic. Like a Bosch, like a Bruegel. It's a strange place.

And Melbine, you may feel free to take this as a compliment: Dutch people are fucking gorgeous. I suppose it hadn't fully sank in as previously I'd only spent time in Amsterdam, which I can't imagine has too many Dutch people in the parts where I was. Anyways, in Maastricht there were lots of staggeringly beautiful people who were just like strapping, healthy corn-fed gods and goddesses.

And they seemed to keep looking really good at different ages, although the much older ones looked like they'd been living 'prosperously' for too long. The entire group of people there, and the city itself (though I understand Maastricht is a bijoux city, quite special) gave me a strong impression of prosperity and good income distribution, like Antwerp and Luxembourg. It's slightly creepy in a way, but probably only because I'm jealous. I think there's a really positive social contract here. Too bad the weather is shit and the Dutch language makes all these beautiful people look like they're spitting at each other. For shame.

More decadent times

Look what I found while I was trying to figure out what year . . . Baby One More Time came out:

1. Elton John - Candle In The Wind 1997
2. White Christmas - Bing Crosby
3. Rock Around The Clock - Bill Haley & His Comets
4. I Want To Hold Your Hand - Beatles
5. Hey Jude - Beatles

THE GREATEST TRACKS EVER, ACCORDING TO GLOBAL SALES FIGURES AND CHART-EVALUATIONS, AIRPLAY, VARIOUS INQUIRIES, AND THE PERSONAL INTENTION FROM EXPERTS AND REVIEWERS COMPILED AND PROVIDED BY MEDIA TRAFFIC. LAST UPDATE: MARCH 2007 COPYRIGHT (C) 2007 - MEDIA TRAFFIC

Candle in the Wind 1997. Sweet mother of fuck, we live in decadent times. Hopefully it's a badly compiled study. Candle in the Wind 1997 . . . ahead of the Beatles.

On the subject of decadence: last night we went to my favourite square in Brussels, a 'secret' square to all but those who live around it, at whose restaurants we're eating in turn. We went to the pizza place this time, and it was rather magnificent.

Eventually the people sitting next to us asked if we were American, and then sent us a little battery of questions about our respective countries upon being told we weren't. The gist of it was wanting to know if they were good places to make money. I told them they were better than Belgium in terms of being able to accrue wealth - taxation here is jaw-dropping. But as the two of them revealed they were artists (our neighborhood is rotten with artists of one kind or another), I told them not to think about it as while there are markets for art in Canada and Australia, there's nothing like the government support artists receive in most of Europe.

That got me thinking almost as soon as it came out of my mouth. Even in Italy, whose social system is crumbling under the weight of corruption, ineptitude and tax evasion, there's social support for professional artists ensuring that those who are capable of getting work in their field over something like three months, or 50 days have a regular income all year. It's a priority here - fine art, music, and generally spectacles that aren't self-supporting blockbusters are a priority. That sounds like common sense when you consider the degree to which attractive and useful bits of patriotism are shaped by national art. But when I think about that as a priority, as a Canadian, it's shocking, even revolutionary.

In Canada the arts do get funding at the provincial and federal level, and there are grants available to support artists. However, funding is awarded on a project-by-project basis and the grants for individual artists seem to amount to some sort of lottery - they aren't built into a system of employment or sales (in the case of artists producing commodities rather than spectacles) and demand an extremely involved application process. Completely different.

And I think it's much better here. Maybe if we had a system for supporting artists as recognized professionals in Canada, rather than having them enter lotteries and hope for the best while they wait tables or work temp jobs, we'd have the sort of stronger national identity that so many people, especially on the right, moan about far too much. And less of the commercial, sales-oriented pablum I moan about far too much, and have been able to avoid in most part since coming back to Europe.

Well, that's not wholly true. I have heard the new Vanessa Paradis single more time than I care to count, actually, but it's sort of catchy in a breathy crackwhore kind of way, and has decent instrumentation and a cute beat:

Philosophic misanthropic topic

Philosophy as an academic study is something that's been playing on my mind lately. We had to read an amount of it back in the undergrad, and some of it was enjoyable and some was not. Some ideas were beautiful while written impenetrably as far as I was concerned, some were silly and written with the clarity of a teenager who hated his parents scribbling on a binder, and some were beautiful and beautifully written.

So I guess if you consider the multi-disciplines we studied through that degree, philosophy was my least favourite because I liked the others more, but not because I disliked philosophy. And when people from that degree went on to study philosophy some more, I didn't think they were doing anything untoward. As I met more and more people from all sorts of backgrounds who were doing philosophy grad work, I always thought that they were doing a clever, nice thing.

Because it's about love of wisdom, right? A love of knowledge. The search for an adequate framework to consider our existence. A literate search for some sort of truth too universal to be abstract in the normal sense, a systematic search with an idea of proof and argument built into it so that it had more substance than tarot cards, virgin births or romantic daffodils. Something based on human understanding instead of faith. That's nice.

But maybe I'm wrong, especially about the last, because lots of the professional philosophers I've met (and once you get to master's level, it's a profession as far as I'm concerned) are misanthropes with a great deal of general disrespect for human understanding and a great deal of focused disrespect for the understanding of those with a religious or non-academic perception of the world. It's been striking me lately as we've been meeting some miserable, angry professional philosophers with miserable, angry outlooks - not just cold, but miserable - and it follows a pattern of some I knew in Canada. Not all, but some.

It seems so defensive. I guess if you start studies with the story of Socrates drinking the hemlock it makes sense, but it also seems a bit distortingly emotional for people whose love is supposed to be for knowledge. I have a hard time accepting too much emotion or nerves or defensiveness in someone when I think their love is supposed to be for knowledge. I guess it was a bit distorting for me to start what I know about philosophy with Socrates too, who was so good at accepting things. I don't know.

Adaptations of class conflict

Yesterday I went to a mill about an hour and a half outside of town. I'd watched the recent BBC adaptation of North and South while being sick last week so I was expecting a beehive of human activity, maybe some low-level class conflict, and possibly Richard Armitage brooding through the beautiful but deadly industrial fluff floating in the air:






Yep. Just like that.



But it didn't go that way - there was hardly anybody there - certainly no brooding owners with eyebrows that did his job for him, no attractive Charles Bronson-y blue collar types, no indentured children rushing about with brooms, and no consumptive coughing. There were three engineers who I might have slipped a business card to if I was still footloose and fancy free, but I'm not. Je suis sage comme une image, and anyways they weren't dressed in period costume.



When I realised there was hardly any staff at the mill, I stopped fantasizing about a pornographic mash-up of class-concerned classic novels - something like Lady La Spliffery's Lover from the North goes South - and thought instead about industrial labour and its changing nature in a north European context.


The man taking me on the tour bragged about how the mill was perpetually decreasing overheads by investing in clever machinery and hiring fewer and fewer blue collar workers. And the mill I was touring had merged operations a couple of years ago with a mill a few kilometres away, so they'd also managed to sack half the white-collar staff working at them. The workers that remained were kept in tip-top shape - their health system was excellent, even for here, and they were given full physicals every year to make sure any long and expensive diseases or illnesses were nipped in the bud. "Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency," he said with some satisfaction, and more than once.



In our industry, the satisfaction is merited; these sorts of mills can and do run anywhere, in conditions that continue to be Victorian-ish in the sense that you can pay workers in buttons and ignore their health and safety concerns. If this high-paid and labour-organized part of Europe can compete internationally, it has to be inhumanly efficient.



And this brought me back to North and South - more the book than the BBC series, which was 'faithful' in the sense that the last Pride and Prejudice book was 'faithful' to Jane Austen. That is, no Laurence-Olivier-Wuthering-Heights-type bastardization of plot lines or characterizations, but many annoying instances of dialogue or setting being changed in an effort to make it more accessible and in the effect of draining most of the humour or meaning from the author's work. The book North and South ended in a sort of funny, sweet way, albeit too quickly because Elizabeth Gaskell's publishers were sick of paying her by the word, and the series ended so fucking drippily. Making out in a train station and getting into your lover's cabin unattended before marriage for a three hour journey indeed - what nonsense. Margaret Hale may be a real drip of a heroine, but she's not that big a drip. It was almost as bad (and certainly as open-shirted, uncharacteristic and artificial) as the closing scene of that Pride and Prejudice when that drippy Mr. Darcy walked across the field to make out with Kiera Knightley's drippy Elizabeth Bennett, which was only worse because making Elizabeth Bennett a drip is a far worse crime than making Margaret Hale a drip, and because Richard Armitage looks really good. But the bungee cord of my disbelief was nonetheless well snapped.



Anyways, before I got onto that rant, I wanted to say that the mill yesterday made me think more of North and South as a prescient sort of book, sociologically speaking - raising suggestions of a soft, paternalistic but highly efficient owner-worker dynamic which is probably the only thing besides the CIA which stopped Europe from going commie. It was neat. It makes me recommend North and South, if you have the patience, bearing in mind as mentioned that Gaskell was paid by the word so it does rather go on a bit in some places.

Human geography

Slowly, slowly I'm getting to know Brussels, tiny bit by tiny bit. I'm used to Toronto - Toronto is a planned city that looks like this:

And words like "north, south, east, west" have a great deal of meaning there. Especially since 'south' also means 'down', as the whole city slants in one direction, towards the lake.

Brussels, conversely, is an organic city that looks like this.

Compass points mean nothing here, it's a magnetic jungle. To add insult to confusion, the south is hillier than the north, but meaninglessly. It makes Toronto's gentle grids look like a Tic-Tac-Toe game, and Florence, which at least had the decency to be built by Romans who understood straight lines, look like an SOS game.

And Paris, which was complicated enough for me to be lost for a month or two there, looks like a simple, pretty snailshell in comparison. Paris was all chopped down, you see, I think in the 19th century, and then rebuilt in a sort of enduring spiral motif that had townhouses for the rich, disease-breeding suburbs for the poor, and punctuations of long, wide avenues that would accommodate cannon shot being fired at rioting plebs:

As you see, it also has a river, as Toronto has the lake, that helps one orient oneself.

Brussels has a river too, but it's buried underground as that's where the townspeople continue to dump all their untreated sewage. In many ways this continues to be a medieval kind of place, you see; certainly it is in how the streets just sort of are there, natural growth sort of things from many, many different small villages which sort of grew into each other.

So it has been a long process but I am getting the gist of Brussels now, and almost never get lost anymore. It's a question of understanding how all the organic different small villages link up and the distinguishing features of each of them. The distinguishing feature of mine, Saint Gilles, is bourgeois Art Nouveau houses, lots of Portuguese people, the Parvis, and a ridiculously ostentatious city hall, considering that despite Art Nouveau efforts to the contrary this is a working class neighborhood:

Every Monday it has a market, at which some farmers show up - they don't have farmer's markets here per se. I get goat milk there, or failing that raw cow's milk, and then I feel sorry for the sterility of Canada - its straight lines and pasteurized everything - even if people there know better than to throw their shit straight into a river.

***SPOILING*** something that was already well off

So this weekend, the F-word and I watched the last episodes of the Sopranos, and the finale seemed like an utter damp squib to me. And I'm not talking about the eight seconds of black, which in a way was a nice touch, although a touch overdone. Ambiguity? HE'S DEAD, PEOPLE. Do you need a fucking black-trimmed letter? Not to mention they'd spent the whole seventh, pardon me, sixth season reminding us he was a giant asshole by shit like having him kill Chris on a whim and say 'poor you' all the fucking time like his mum so that the public would find his death easier to accept than J.R.'s off Dallas.

No, the damp squibbiness was in the fact that the last twenty minutes of the finale was fucking pointless - as soon as they managed to get in a final revolting death (complete with onlookers chucking up, touché) we were at the end of the visual jolts the series had to offer and had to put in twenty more minutes of ungarnished product placement and those awful children of his, who illustrate every dramatic danger involved in hiring child actors.

I have a lot of anger towards the Sopranos because it should have ended a long time ago. They should have pulled the plug at the end of season four if this show was going to be distinguished in its arty merit for an American broadcast production. The last three, pardon me, two seasons were utterly pointless and they'd only stepped up the product placement. My disbelief was long unsuspended by the end - it was sprawled on the floor, facefirst in its own sick. But because of the first four seasons, I was emotionally engaged enough in the characters to NEED to watch until the end, wasting hours and hours and hours of my precious time. D.V., for all my fine words, this is truly the end of me NEEDING to watch any television show, and I've been taken in by those cunts for the last time.

Oh, and while I'm in a spoiling mood - Harry sleeps with Ginny at least twice, and the chick in the Crying Game is a dude.

My gift to you

Too sick to blog today, so ladies and gentlemen, in one word: le Pétomane.

Invalidated

Horribly, devastedly sick . . . again. A girl I went to university with who already lives here warned me that people sicken here even more than we used to when there were fifty of us living on the same residence floor, breathing our cooties on each other. She's right. The weather is just so shit, and then the odd days it's not shit just weaken up your immune system for the inevitable moment 12 hours later when it's shit again.

It is a hostile environment weatherwise, and horribly polluted for its size. And while there are a million appealing things about Brussels, we're both dreaming about moving on. But then, of course, the question is how predictable will the weather ever be, anywhere, anymore . . . oh, what a hateful race we are, turning our planet into a hostile environment and fighting each other too much for us all to live in polyandrous peace around the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Can't we just stop fucking shit up?

Whatever is not forbidden is mandatory

When I was a teenager I had a little World War One obsession. My Italian grandfather had fought in it but by the time I was ready to ask him questions about things like that he couldn't speak English anymore and I hadn't learnt Italian yet. My British grandfather didn't remember WWI at all, but something he would occasionally obsess over in the last couple decades of his life was sitting with his mother as a little boy while she chatted with her friends about the aftermath of the war. She said she felt bad for all the young women, as all the young men were dead.

So after the Italian grandfather died and the British grandfather told me that chilling little vignette, I read everything I could get my hands on about that war. Part of the fascination I had was probably morbid, because that was a morbid war, with something like 10 million people dying over four years. But I think what was really keeping me in the books was realizing the degree to which even 'nice' governments didn't give a fuck about the lives or well-being of their people and would do anything, including slaughtering the cream of their youth, that they could get away with. And then, they got away with so much - you scurried over trenches and got shot, or if you tried like a sensible person to run away you were shot, and the only thing you were allowed to do was die or kill as many people as you could who were just like you - that I'm shocked we've allowed them to get away with anything since.

I think that's shaped the way I've felt about government ever since and made me admire the French, who boss their government around in and out of the democratic system, and not admire Americans, who seem to have had a supine relationship with a series of unrepresentative governments ever since they bossed Richard Nixon into getting rid of the draft. I've spoken to sensible people who have voted Bush/Cheney - I mean, if you have two fiscally irresponsible parties with nearly identical platforms, as the Kerry/Bush tickets were in 2004, why not vote for the one that promises to tax you least? But while there's something sensible in that, there's nothing to admire. Not if you're calling yourself a democracy and not if you care about keeping yourself safe from the people with the guns.

All of which is a long-winded way to say I'm really enjoying Blackadder Goes Forth, which I hadn't seen before and which is set in the trenches. People should show it to children in highschool when teaching about that time, but as I remember we didn't learn about it in highschool, and they say 'shit' too much to be okay with the Christian types who used to have to stand outside during the National Anthem. And look how good Hugh Laurie still looks in it:

Ranting mood

So the Banksy review is done, and you can look at it here. It turned out to only have a little to do with Banksy. I was in a ranting mood after reading that boneheaded article from Jonathon Jones. Nothing pisses me off as consistently as the Guardian's arts section, although this digested read of House of Meetings is pretty fucking funny. Anyways, it's too bad because the Banksy book could have borne more attention, it's neato. I love getting these things for free but it's probably worth the $30 or whatever it costs.

I should have pointed out something about how my favourite part of the book is the section where he smuggles his work into galleries and sees how long it takes security to take them down. There's something really appealing in that. A sort of invitation to everybody to keep on their toes, maybe, as we're not so good at keeping on our toes.

Good, rather, at collapsing after work and turning on one idiot box or another, or in my case a clunky three year old laptop, and pretending that's the sort of rest we deserve after working a whole 7.5 hours. Come on. You know how many hours people work in real countries? As you can see I'm a little dissatisfied with myself these days. I probably need more aerobic exercise or welding classes or something.

Time keeps on slipping into the future, and then furiously apologizing

Holy tittyfuck, how could the weekend have passed so quickly? It seems just five minutes ago I dragged my tired carcass home of a Friday night and proclaimed my intention of doing nothing for two days. I think the problem was we did do things, and that made time go faster. Also the weather has been awesome. Why does time go faster when the weather is awesome?

One of the things I did was write a review for Mediated, by Thomas de Zengotita. It's in the running for the worst book I've read this year, against Martin Amis's House of Meetings. HoM might avoid the title by virtue of being readable, but Mediated has the advantage of not being a nasty rehash of vastly superior works.

Anyways. We have some downtime at the magazine this week, as everybody in Europe except me is on holiday, so hopefully I'll have the time to get out reviews of To the Castle and Back by Vaclav Havel and Wall and Piece by Banksy - thank god, both good. Writing a damning review has its charms but it also means having to pay rapt attention to a book you'd rather use as kindling.

Another of the things we did this weekend was watch a couple of episodes of Blackadder, as a girl at work loaned me the complete series. Of course my favorite season, like everyone's, is the third - featuring Hugh Laurie as the Stupid Prince Regent delivering some of the best lines in the whole production, like 'I'm as happy as a Frenchman who's just invented a pair of self-removing trousers!'

I am a big admirer of Hugh Laurie and pleased for his sake to see that he's become a superstar sex symbol with the success of House. But I fucking hate House; it represents everything I despise about the 'lather-rinse-repeat' formula of broadcast television. And I can't fully wrap my head around him getting famous for a 'drama' when he's such a brilliant comedian; A Bit of Fry and Laurie and the Jeeves series have both turned me purple with laughter.

And I really can't wrap my head around him getting to be a sex symbol as a fucking cranky American doctor in a fucking 'drama'. What the fuck. When I was a spotty teenager one of the first naughty dreams I ever had was about Hugh Laurie in his full Stupid Prince Regent mode, and the idea of his audience finding him attractive in a completely different way baffles me at a deep psycho-sexual level. I mean, check this shit out:

Woof woof.

So much me in one little morning

Dale of the Passion came into this blog back in the winter by saying something nice about it, and then became a fixture in the links that I visit obsessively by making me laugh whenever he cares to and using punctuation in the economical yet expressive way I love. Yesterday he was kind enough to pay me attention on a Thursday with a series of searching questions, so now he's become a fixture in my heart.

Here's the result of the sit-down:

1. Your blog comes in a wide variety of flavours Mistress La Spliffe. Book and movie reviews, the general stuff of life, your dreams and so on. If all your favourite magazines started asking for writing contributions, where would we be reading you next?

The only magazine in my heart is the Economist. I love it to the bones even when it makes me angry with its heartless right-wingery. It has just the right amount of commas and adjectives, I don't feel targeted by its advertisements since they're for the rich, and its obituaries are astounding. On Thursday afternoons I'll check Economist.com again and again to see if they've posted the print version yet so I can skip straight to the obituary.

And that's something else I like about it: it's available in full online, and it has good web-only features. It hasn't run scared from the Internet like most of the print industry has.

2. You recently mentioned that you feel psychoanalysis (and health care) should be free and available to everyone as a basic human right. I agree but how much do you feel that having your blog helps negate the need for formalized therapy?

15%, because 85% of a blog, or at least this blog (despite the spelling mistakes and superfluous words), is much more edited than what a good analyst can drag out of people. And all that editing probably just backs up lots of one's neuroses, in the end.

Your blog is a little different, though, as it's the only one I've read that turns memories from your life and childhood into engaging stories that obviously go somewhere in your own head, so I'd imagine you're working something important out for yourself while you're making us laugh.

3. A while back, you gave me a recommendation on a book I really enjoyed: 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist'. What should I read next?

For you in particular I'd recommend When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro. I love everything I've read of his, and I'd recommend his whole body of work with few reservations (Never Let Me Go is too sad for some moods, for example, and The Unconsoled is probably only appropriate for people who like both David Lynch films and small print).

But I think you'd get a particular kick out of When We Were Orphans. As you know, Paul Auster has not floated my boat and I was particularly annoyed by City of Glass. But When We Were Orphans shares some themes with City of Glass and pulls off some of the stunts I think Auster was trying. There's a similar feeling, though When We Were Orphans reads like a lot more work and thought went into it.

For you, I'd also recommend a novella/short story called (I think) Maitre Muissard's Bequest by Patrick Süskind, the guy who wrote Perfume. I found MMB in a slim Penguin pocket book a couple of years ago but now I think you can only find it as part of the compilation Three Stories and a Reflection, if you can find it at all. Although it's different from the Reluctant Fundamentalist in every apparent way, it has a similar driving tension sort of spinning you down towards the ending - although MMB is way scarier. It's a real headfuck.

4. You're making your home far far away from Toronto now and I feel cheated only have stumbled across your blog just as you were leaving town. Was it something I said? Where have you enjoyed living most?

You made it too easy for me to leave by being available in blog form, which I can get here. If you were only available by mail order, for example, I might have stayed in Toronto to cut down on the postage bills.

I've found something to love about all the places I've lived in, so the one I'm in at the time is usually my favourite (and my least favourite, since I find lots of stuff to hate, too). The most paradisaical place, though, was a city called Pinerolo nestled in the foothills of the Alps in northern Italy. It was beautiful enough, but also ugly enough to be untouched by tourists. Wonderful food, nice people, low rent but well enough connected to major cities - just lovely.

Unfortunately I was young and foolish during my time there, and spent a mere half-year shitting where I lived with the dedication of an undiapered copraphiliac before I had to sneak out of town with all my possessions at first light on a February morning.

5. Do you have an expression that you find yourself overusing? I especially want to hear it if it's a swear word.

People say I use the word 'cunt' too much. That probably won't stop, because I enjoy the way it makes people flinch, like a tampon commercial. Also, last night the F-word and I were chatting about England, and he called the Duke and Duchess of Kent the Duke and Duchess of Cunt, and I called the Archbishop of Canterbury the Archbishop of Cunterbury, and oh, how we laughed.

I also say 'take it easy, portugeezy' too much.

Being interviewed is so much fun that now I'm determined to spread the joy. Anyone else who wants a series of questions has only to ask.

Well well well you're feeling fine

Last night I had a dream I was giving birth to my daughter late at night on November 24th, which the erudite among you know is the day before my birthday. It was a charming dream but in the same sort of soft focus infantile cast as my occasional 'I've just murdered someone, oh shit' dreams - me as a short, pale, glabrous (Germaine Greer taught me that word yesterday, I'm reading The Female Eunuch) streak, with hair like I had in grade five. Anyways, it was a telling dream full of symbolism and stuff, and it made me miss psychoanalysis some, but not enough to do it over the phone and at a higher hourly tariff, as my analyst suggested when I left Canada.

Also, I'm not sure finding someone here and continuing would be a wholly worthwhile investment, as, and I don't know if I've mentioned this, I think I've decided I don't want to be an analyst. Too hard, and the intrusion of the money factor into the dynamic is something I think I'd always have a difficult time with. Psychoanalysis feels like it should be a basic human right somehow, like health care should be, not a commodity you can sell for so much an hour. Like, in Switzerland, euthanasia is legal, which is fine and no doubt necessary for some people who go where for but the grace of God we don't. But it costs Euro 3,500, which is more than many cosmetic surgery procedures.

There's some sort of wrongness to all this I can't get over. But I think it comes down to the fact that I don't want people to make money off other people's sincere quests to end their own pain. It also comes down to the fact that, having rejected the poss of becoming an analyst, I'm now looking for a new post-corporate profession and am open to suggestions from the floor.

Started up in the Sally Ann

So at the wedding, the young bride was much more of a Rolling Stones type girl than a Beatles one, although we did almost an album's worth of John Lennon singing 50's standards in 1975 (loved it). And it really reminded me how great the Rolling Stones were in the 60's. Every one of those standards are the best songs to dance to ever. That's what I noticed night-of. You can even smoke reefer in time to "Satisfaction". It really made me miss Shake-a-Tail in Toronto and I think I'll time my next visit to that city to make sure I make it there, although I guess a more pro-active thing to do would be to find a night like that here.

Anyhoo, what I noticed yesterday when I was shopping in the Belgian version of Sally Ann was that "Let's Spend the Night Together", which was playing over the PA system, is a really horny song. Duh, yes, I know. But even today it remains a very, very horny song relative to the current industry climate which makes desperate efforts to produce very, very horny songs. "Let's Spend the Night Together" simply makes me want to fuck. Dance, and then fuck.

And as I was thinking about how I suddenly wanted to fuck in the middle of the Belgian Sally Ann, I reflected about what it must have been like in 1967 when young girls were hearing that for the first time - in a musical climate which wasn't all hyper-sexual and the pop charts certainly weren't saturated with singers shouting that they'd give you as much cunnilingus as you could handle (because you know the words 'I'll satisfy your every need' coming out of a big ugly mouth like Mick Jagger's only mean one thing). I don't have much seventies-born-pseudo-nostalgia for the sixties. But I have moments of wishing I had a time machine just to see the impact of little things like that.

Small and constant pleasures

So much to say, so little time. Suffice it to say: the sun is out and while I have to go to work, at least I get to go there on my faithful darling Specialized mountain bike which has just been tuned up. AND last night I found a new vendor for farm-fresh goat milk. So much joy in one little morning.

Cold reality

It was fucking brilliant in Carcassone - the wedding, the hot hot hot hot sunny weather, the everything. Fantabulous. It was hard to leave - not that I mind going back to my job so awfully much - more that I knew I'd be heading back into the fucking, fucking cold. I nearly burst into tears when I was shivering outside the train station for a taxi last night. I was giving myself three years here, but - you know - it's fucking cold. No more promises.

Anyways, tomorrow I'll pull out a story about one of the things that happened; today I must get back to looking like I'm paying attention.

My old flame, I can't even think of his name . . . oh wait . . . it's Gold Stone Noodle House.

There aren't many things I miss about Canada, friends and family aside, although even they are doing a relatively good job of visiting; it feels like there are people here more weekends than not, although that's probably my afore-mentioned lack of Me time speaking rather than reality. One thing I do miss is hot sunny summers, but I should suck that up because at least this way I don't get life-threatening winters (but oh, I miss the sun).

The other thing I miss is the Gold Stone Noodle House. I would say I miss Chinese food in general - I do - it sucks as much in Belgium as it sucked in France and Italy (actually Italy wasn't so bad, there was one place in Milan and one place in Turin I was pretty fond of). But emotionally, what I really, really miss is the Gold Stone.

I miss their chicken and chinese mushroom chow mein, to be specific. I miss it to madness. The noodles were so crispy around the dish and so tender in the middle, and it wasn't too greasy though it was absolutely unwholesome. Noodles here are always too limp or greasy, or else the restaurants are Thai and use peanut oil. And the chinese mushroom - I can still remember my first chinese mushroom, which coincidentally I had at the Gold Stone in a chicken and chinese mushroom chow mein. I can remember how springy and exciting it was, how rich the taste and texture . . .

I'd only started eating non-hallucinatory mushrooms at all about six months before that when I'd been doing my third year in Florence because I'd thought they were gross looking. I was such a fool. I knew that already before I had my first Chinese mushroom, and after I had my first Chinese mushroom I became even more devoted to making up for the first 20 years of my life I'd wasted not eating non-hallucinatory mushrooms. Fuck me, it was good. I could really work myself up into tears over how I don't have the Gold Stone a five minute bike ride away anymore, so time to go to work.

L'enfer, c'est les autres

Saw Gilda last night after a busy weekend. It was pretty good, in a French music kind of way. The key to liking French music is to ignore the shitty singing and concentrate on the nice lyrics, and the key to enjoying classic noir is to ignore the plotholes and concentrate on how they talked about sex when the Production Code tried to forbid them to. Rita Hayworth was fucking hot. Holy, as they say, shit.

Looking forward to the trip to Carcassonne on Wednesday like a madwoman. Not just to the possibility of enjoying their interminable heatwave after summer flits away from Belgium in favour of more shitty, shitty rain and cold, not just to the wedding and the attendant drinking and fun times, not just to not working for four days in a row.

Franky what's doing it for me this morning is the prospect of my solo journey itself. Something like 20 hours altogether on trains, all by myself. I know that sounds like lots, and it is, but it's cheaper and more environmentally nice than the plane, which would probably end up taking something close to the same amount time, what with getting out to Charleroi, waiting around in a fucking aeroport, baggage, blah blah blah.

And the prospect of all those hours ALL TO MYSELF (though I will be spending six or so of them trying to sleep on a couchette) is so nice. I have exciting books to read. Only two though. I need at least two more. Maybe four more, because I'm hoping to escape the wedding a bit there and go read on the beach for the Friday. Oh boy oh boy. Good lord. How did personal time get this sort of premium on it, that I'm waiting with trembling anticipation to a train trip by myself? How the fuck am I going to cope when I have children?