Daylight Savings Time is fucking brutal. My seasonal affective disorder is kicking in like a soccer playing motherfucker. So I'm trying to be all farmery about it - getting going earlier, spending a bit more time outside despite the weather being execrable. This year, I'm trying something else that worked pretty well for me when I was a teenager; self-consciously embracing the depression. In that vein, here's the first few songs in a list of 15 songs that have a strong tendency to make me cry:
1. 'Parigi o cara', Giuseppe Verdi. I get the feeling people these days would really dislike the public persona of a celebrity like Violetta, to the degree of her illness starting up a morbid Britney-Spears-esque deathwatch. No matter. The mutually delusional swansong of Violetta and her man, whose name I don’t remember, is chilling, sad and beautiful, its little minor notes and slightly jarring end a failsafe way to get me to cry.
2. 'Grandma’s Hands', Bill Withers. Even thinking about the lines “she said ‘baby, Grandma understands that you really loved that man, put yourself in Jesus hands’” followed by the final verse and conclusion ‘when I get to Heaven I’ll look for Grandma’s hands’ sung by a man whose voice is maybe the most effecting in pop music always reduces me to a pile of snot. The musical equivalent of a bucket of water on the Wicked Witch of the West.
3. 'Stand By Me', John Lennon. Only the Rock and Roll version; I've heard him slaughter it elsewhere. This filthy, rich, pebbles-in-a-cheese-grater plea to let good love endure usually makes me shed a couple of unsad, cathartic tears. The backing, especially the percussion, is good enough to make me think Lennon was a selfish fucking twat for not listing the band members on the liner notes. But his vocals here are still the best thing any Beatle did after the Beatles stopped being the Beatles. Though we mustn't forget:
4. 'Starting Over', John Lennon. It’s the most stapley staple of post-Beatledom because even two legless drunkards can dance to it. In fact, this is the song Elvis taught me to couples-dance to and it remains the only song I’m fully comfortable couples-dancing to, besides the 'Stand By Me' above. The thought of Elvis, who made my childhood hell but who now lives too far away from me, a whole fucking planet away, combined with the trembly uncertain joy of love that keeps coming back from the dead without behaving like a zombie, usually gets me weepy.
5. 'Purple Avenue', Holly Cole. When she leans and dips on the line ‘I’ll sleep right here on the draaaaaaaaining board’, my heart remembers all the times it broke and curled up for a long, stunned rest. And I cry. That bell-like voice of hers yodeling out Tom Waits’ incisor words is as satisfying as successful plastic surgery. She followed this album up with an album completely made up of Waits covers and I’m itching to get my hands on it.
Anyways, that's enough for today. Tonight I'm going to a Benjamin Biolay concert, and two of his tracks feature elsewhere on the list, so that will be plenty depressive for me. In that vein here's the least depressing weepable song on the above list:
lunedì, ottobre 29, 2007
Not something to bring up at your next AA meeting
Went to a lovely exhibition yesterday in Ghent, or as the French call it "Gaw(n)" or as the Dutch atrociously call it, "Hxxxxhentt." You remember that scene in Splash when Tom Hanks asks the dewy and delicate Darryl Hannah what her name is in her own language, and she yelps out a shocking, painful series of unfiltered dolphin cries? That's the way I feel whenever a Dutch person says anything. Anyways, we went to Ghent to see an exhibit at their splendid gallery called British Visions - lured in by the promises of Lucian Freud, who the F-word loves, and Turner, who I love, and lots of others - David Hockney, who I never feel is faking it - Hogarth, who's just so heartbreakingly funny - and a bunch of Francis Bacons; poor Francis Bacon. I guess you can't tell much about a man from his work but when I look at anything he's painted I feel he's sure he's going to hell when he dies - an unsympathetic dread of his own future, an uncensored vision of his own futile present. It makes neat paintings but I would not have traded brains with him for anything. And then lots of Stanley Spencer, who was new to me but very appealing, even in the way his second wife's breast wrinkled in the painting of them together.
Anyhoo, we were mostly there for the newer stuff, but it did occur to me as we looked at the older stuff that we don't fully appreciate what Europeans have achieved, culturally. Oh sure. We put the past in museums and we traipse the schoolchildren through them, struggling to instill greater regard for our own narrative than the narratives of our historical enemies or underlings. We protest when newcomers don't slot into our molds, we watch absurd period piece movies, and we devote the economies of cities like Bayreuth, Florence and Stratford to celebrating the glories of the past. But we never consider all the hurdles that our European predecessors had to overcome to create our patrimony, principal among which in my mind today was that they were drunk from dawn until dusk, from being weaned to being shriven. They were drunk, drunk, drunk.
Everybody was full of something that had been fermented or distilled in an effort to kill all the bad bacteria that was swimming around the water in those days, everybody was tolerating sieges where the enemy would chuck corpses into your water supply, everybody was paranoid about Jews or heretics or witches poisoning wells, or whoever. So everybody was pissed out of their tree. They went from their mother's tit to the bottle and they stayed there until they died. And despite this, somehow we had the Renaissance, Goya, the Van Eyck brothers, opera, orchestras, Gothic architecture, the postal service, Yorkshire pudding, colonialism, Shakespeare, guns, the re-invention of the novel, and all the other things that make us go 'how did they do that!?!' when we ponder what our ancestors achieved without laptops, GPS, or a life expectancy much beyond 30. Who knows how they did it, but do it they did, and they did it all drunk.
Anyhoo, we were mostly there for the newer stuff, but it did occur to me as we looked at the older stuff that we don't fully appreciate what Europeans have achieved, culturally. Oh sure. We put the past in museums and we traipse the schoolchildren through them, struggling to instill greater regard for our own narrative than the narratives of our historical enemies or underlings. We protest when newcomers don't slot into our molds, we watch absurd period piece movies, and we devote the economies of cities like Bayreuth, Florence and Stratford to celebrating the glories of the past. But we never consider all the hurdles that our European predecessors had to overcome to create our patrimony, principal among which in my mind today was that they were drunk from dawn until dusk, from being weaned to being shriven. They were drunk, drunk, drunk.
Everybody was full of something that had been fermented or distilled in an effort to kill all the bad bacteria that was swimming around the water in those days, everybody was tolerating sieges where the enemy would chuck corpses into your water supply, everybody was paranoid about Jews or heretics or witches poisoning wells, or whoever. So everybody was pissed out of their tree. They went from their mother's tit to the bottle and they stayed there until they died. And despite this, somehow we had the Renaissance, Goya, the Van Eyck brothers, opera, orchestras, Gothic architecture, the postal service, Yorkshire pudding, colonialism, Shakespeare, guns, the re-invention of the novel, and all the other things that make us go 'how did they do that!?!' when we ponder what our ancestors achieved without laptops, GPS, or a life expectancy much beyond 30. Who knows how they did it, but do it they did, and they did it all drunk.
giovedì, ottobre 25, 2007
The Querolous American
So I have a new friend, by which I mean someone who I'll buy birthday presents for or at least feel guilty over if I forget or am too broke to buy presents for. Beastly sentence. Anyways, she's American and I like her pretty much best of all the girls who I've met here, and I realized in Paris my dearest girlf is also American. I spend a fair amount of time bashing America. For example, last night at a certain degree of highness, the F-word gave a mini-lecture on German cinema in the 1920's, to which my response was an extended diatribe about how emotionally retarded American cinema remains because of the historically infantilizing effect of the Hay's Code - though obviously I was too high to remember it was the Hay's Code - I think I called it 'that 1930's Jesuit shit' and the F-word understood.
My point is I spend a fair amount of time bashing American market dynamics, political structures, foreign policy, social programs, income inequality, et cetera - maybe less time than I spend bashing France or Canada, but still a disproportionate amount of time considering I've never lived there - and yet the cultural and social reference points I have in common with my American girlfriends makes their company just superb when I'm living abroad. There are particularities to living in Europe which wouldn't be tolerated in Canada, the States, or Australia which I need to discuss with people from those places when they bug me, just so I know I'm not going insane when they piss me off.
For example: though the F-word and I are European citizens and hence have the automatic right to live and work here in Belgium, the mandatory process of acquiring an identity card is one that takes several weeks and a couple of visits to the local city hall and police station. We need the identity card - our passports won't do, because they need to have our address on file. However, when I say the word 'file', I mean a physical slip of paper kept in a physical file, which is copied and given to the cops and other institutional bodies - eventually. And if there is a mistake on that piece of paper, all the copies of that piece of paper must be hunted down and corrected or the mistake will remain for the length of your tenure in Belgium.
In the case of my American friend and her Dutch husband, such a mistake was made four years ago when they registered at the local city hall and the trog civil slave there registered them as living in separate apartments in the same building, though they were married. The consequence of this is that four years later, they're still taxed as individuals instead of as a family, because not all the pieces of paper have been corrected. Every year she complains to the taxation authorities, every year they refer her back to her local city hall so the trog civil slaves there can correct the mistake, every year the trogs fail to do so and every year she's taxed once more as an individual instead of as a family.
Of course, in Canada or the States (at least in California, where she's from), records would be sufficiently integrated and electrified that the mistake could be corrected over the phone, probably whilst talking to the tax people, and never worried about again. But making an effort towards that degree of integration and electrification here - taking away all those little physical slips of paper - would mean that half of the troggy civil slaves responsible for their upkeep, copying, and correcting would become even more redundant than they are now. Then the government would try to cut civil slavey jobs, and then there'd be strikes. The country would shut down for a few weeks, billions of euros pissed down the drain, and in the end the records would stay papery and shitty because it's fundamentally cheaper that way. If you think about it stupidly.
My point is I spend a fair amount of time bashing American market dynamics, political structures, foreign policy, social programs, income inequality, et cetera - maybe less time than I spend bashing France or Canada, but still a disproportionate amount of time considering I've never lived there - and yet the cultural and social reference points I have in common with my American girlfriends makes their company just superb when I'm living abroad. There are particularities to living in Europe which wouldn't be tolerated in Canada, the States, or Australia which I need to discuss with people from those places when they bug me, just so I know I'm not going insane when they piss me off.
For example: though the F-word and I are European citizens and hence have the automatic right to live and work here in Belgium, the mandatory process of acquiring an identity card is one that takes several weeks and a couple of visits to the local city hall and police station. We need the identity card - our passports won't do, because they need to have our address on file. However, when I say the word 'file', I mean a physical slip of paper kept in a physical file, which is copied and given to the cops and other institutional bodies - eventually. And if there is a mistake on that piece of paper, all the copies of that piece of paper must be hunted down and corrected or the mistake will remain for the length of your tenure in Belgium.
In the case of my American friend and her Dutch husband, such a mistake was made four years ago when they registered at the local city hall and the trog civil slave there registered them as living in separate apartments in the same building, though they were married. The consequence of this is that four years later, they're still taxed as individuals instead of as a family, because not all the pieces of paper have been corrected. Every year she complains to the taxation authorities, every year they refer her back to her local city hall so the trog civil slaves there can correct the mistake, every year the trogs fail to do so and every year she's taxed once more as an individual instead of as a family.
Of course, in Canada or the States (at least in California, where she's from), records would be sufficiently integrated and electrified that the mistake could be corrected over the phone, probably whilst talking to the tax people, and never worried about again. But making an effort towards that degree of integration and electrification here - taking away all those little physical slips of paper - would mean that half of the troggy civil slaves responsible for their upkeep, copying, and correcting would become even more redundant than they are now. Then the government would try to cut civil slavey jobs, and then there'd be strikes. The country would shut down for a few weeks, billions of euros pissed down the drain, and in the end the records would stay papery and shitty because it's fundamentally cheaper that way. If you think about it stupidly.
mercoledì, ottobre 24, 2007
Dreams of permanency
Alright, I'm over the Wii. It was good while it lasted but it's not anything you couldn't have played with in a science centre back in the late 90's. We're not getting one and I'm getting a gym membership. Life here has kept me relatively hardbodied, as I'm walking and biking everywhere, and the shittacular elevators in my building even persuade me to do 16-flight stair hikes which I would normally never even consider. But I have She-Hulk fantasies that I'm nowhere close to realizing, and too much tension from the desk time, so the gym it must be.
Five days or so to go before probation is over and I'm waiting with baited breath - no talk of sacking me yet so I don't think it will happen - but you never know. Management is British and they may just be being polite in that absolutely unhelpful British way. I don't think so, though. I think it will probably be okay. And once I get permanency, the classes and gym memberships will start, and before you know it I'll be twice as hardbodied and clever as I am now. Hubris? Well, no, because we don't have a television, which means I have the time and energy for it. If we had a television of course I'd be fucked.
Five days or so to go before probation is over and I'm waiting with baited breath - no talk of sacking me yet so I don't think it will happen - but you never know. Management is British and they may just be being polite in that absolutely unhelpful British way. I don't think so, though. I think it will probably be okay. And once I get permanency, the classes and gym memberships will start, and before you know it I'll be twice as hardbodied and clever as I am now. Hubris? Well, no, because we don't have a television, which means I have the time and energy for it. If we had a television of course I'd be fucked.
martedì, ottobre 23, 2007
A little light dinner conversation
So there's actually a debate now in Great Britain about abortion. It's not the same debate as in the States, about its fundamental legality or illegality, but I suppose touches on the same emotional question of its murderousness or non-murderousness. 194,000 in a year, if you ignore the 6,000 from Ireland. That does seem like rather a lot and much of the debate seems to centre around whether women are using it as a form of birth control rather than as . . . well . . . birth control. I mean, what else is abortion? It's a considered decision that one doesn't want to give birth. You can hardly blame women for using it as birth control considering it's fucking birth control.
What takes me back about the numbers, though, is if there are 194,ooo unwanted pregnancies there's probably exponentially more than 194,ooo instances of unprotected sex with people who you don't want to make a baby with, which I must say doesn't go far towards rectifying the image of the British as reckless drunkard aidoiomaniacs whose vies intimes are based on some sort of dare. Most of the ladies I work with are English, and many of them complain about how the Continentals perceive them as tipsy floozies who might give it up on the hood of a car, no strings attached, if you tell them they have nice eyes. I figure figures about 200,000 abortions a year aren't likely to help them out of that perception; I've been through my own tipsy floozy years, and it's not that hard to insist on the contraception string.
Especially in the face of the fact emergency contraception is available there. I mean, are there seriously 194,000 women a year there who can't get it together during the three days after unprotected sex to get to a doctor or pharmacist? Or are there almost 2 million women who do, and the 194,000 just represents the 10% failure rate? It's rather nasty the pharmacists are allowed to choose whether or not they hand it out to women in need - I mean, come on buddy, if you wanted to indulge a God complex at work, you should have sprung for the eight years of extra education to become a surgeon. But are so many indulging that women can't get the pill over a three day span?
What takes me back about the numbers, though, is if there are 194,ooo unwanted pregnancies there's probably exponentially more than 194,ooo instances of unprotected sex with people who you don't want to make a baby with, which I must say doesn't go far towards rectifying the image of the British as reckless drunkard aidoiomaniacs whose vies intimes are based on some sort of dare. Most of the ladies I work with are English, and many of them complain about how the Continentals perceive them as tipsy floozies who might give it up on the hood of a car, no strings attached, if you tell them they have nice eyes. I figure figures about 200,000 abortions a year aren't likely to help them out of that perception; I've been through my own tipsy floozy years, and it's not that hard to insist on the contraception string.
Especially in the face of the fact emergency contraception is available there. I mean, are there seriously 194,000 women a year there who can't get it together during the three days after unprotected sex to get to a doctor or pharmacist? Or are there almost 2 million women who do, and the 194,000 just represents the 10% failure rate? It's rather nasty the pharmacists are allowed to choose whether or not they hand it out to women in need - I mean, come on buddy, if you wanted to indulge a God complex at work, you should have sprung for the eight years of extra education to become a surgeon. But are so many indulging that women can't get the pill over a three day span?
lunedì, ottobre 22, 2007
More whining
Saw Batman Begins last night and thought it was a fine little superhero movie. I could have done without the love interest, which seemed contrived and distracted me from adding some texture to the storyline by imagining a nice Mistress La Spliffe sandwich with slices of Christian Bale and Cillian Murphy, but all in all it made me want to sick up less than all the other superhero or Batman movies I can remember. In fairness, I cannot remember the one before the one Michelle Pfieffer dressed up as Catwoman.
Of course, the scale on which I measure my fondness for these types of movies can be gauged along how much they make me want to sick up, with their Bruce Campbell-ian dialogue which is never delivered by Bruce Campbell unless it's an Evil Dead movie so what's the fucking point of talking like that. So I had a little think about superhero movies generally, which of course goes beyond the people in the silly costumes to the army-of-one cops that Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson built their careers on, whose brains would obviously be smeared across the pavement in the first ten minutes of any of the situations they deal with onscreen.
The conclusion was that they're the boy's own equivalent of rom-coms. I feel exactly the same way about rom-coms that I do about superhero movies and they're probably produced by exactly the same people. And then boys make fun of girls for liking rom-coms and girls make fun of boys for liking fetishistic hero movies. What a bloody world.
Of course, the scale on which I measure my fondness for these types of movies can be gauged along how much they make me want to sick up, with their Bruce Campbell-ian dialogue which is never delivered by Bruce Campbell unless it's an Evil Dead movie so what's the fucking point of talking like that. So I had a little think about superhero movies generally, which of course goes beyond the people in the silly costumes to the army-of-one cops that Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson built their careers on, whose brains would obviously be smeared across the pavement in the first ten minutes of any of the situations they deal with onscreen.
The conclusion was that they're the boy's own equivalent of rom-coms. I feel exactly the same way about rom-coms that I do about superhero movies and they're probably produced by exactly the same people. And then boys make fun of girls for liking rom-coms and girls make fun of boys for liking fetishistic hero movies. What a bloody world.
domenica, ottobre 21, 2007
The Red Dragon Channels Eeyore
Deep depression this weekend, half biology, half weather. Watched a Neil LaBute play on Saturday about murdering children, gays, etc., which actually cheered me up on the basis of how annoying it was, which proved a distraction to my
deep
deep
pisser.
Watched the 'Cash' episode of the Young Ones and fell in love with the Mad Naked Bloke, which just made the depression worse. Because if I met a Mad Naked Bloke like that in real life, it'd be repellent. Isn't that depressing? Sigh.
deep
deep
pisser.
Watched the 'Cash' episode of the Young Ones and fell in love with the Mad Naked Bloke, which just made the depression worse. Because if I met a Mad Naked Bloke like that in real life, it'd be repellent. Isn't that depressing? Sigh.
giovedì, ottobre 18, 2007
Evolution Revolution Love, Red Dragon Style
Fucking International Herald Tribune. Put together a potentially awesome article about the evolution of sight and lunar triggers for coral orgies and then throw in an absolutely twat-faced paragraph like this:
'People have known about the moon's romantic possibilities for a long time. Shakespeare in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" relies on moonlight to set the mood. The 1987 movie "Moonstruck" features a love story centered on "La Bella Luna."'
It better have been an intern or a daughter on a Daddy/Daughter Day that put that shit together. I mean, if it was in the Metro or something, fine, but the IHT? Do you ever get the feeling everybody is dumbing down everything? And bringing up Moonstruck, indeed. Moonstruck was the rape of a culture. Did anybody buy those people as Italian besides fat bone-white troglodytes who pronounce it 'Eye-talian' and 'lazag-nee'? And they bring it up in the same sentence as Shakespeare. What a joke. What a fucking world.
You must excuse me - the first news item I saw today wasn't that, but the news 126 people were just blown up in Pakistan. So I have the feeling the world is going to hell in a handbasket. I feel like that more and more these days. I can give myself pause, think about world wars, colonialism, concentration camps, Inquisitions, sown epidemics, potato famines, and lots of things like that, and try to convince myself the world is no closer to getting to hell than it's ever been, but I find that technique works less and less at abating my feelings of impending doom.
I guess as people get older they tend to stop thinking things like "the Tudor period was hard, the Second World War was awful, Colonialism was a massive international disaster that benefited a tiny fraction of the people involved - why, things are quite good now in comparison!", because they realize that you can Capitalize and categorize historical events or periods of time in a textbook, but in real life history has a sloppy way of leading up to the present. And all the shit in the world gets to feeling cumulative instead of episodic. Or maybe they don't realize that and that's why people are so shitty at understanding each other when it counts. I don't know.
Anyways, that sort of culmination might only be on my mind because we watched 2001: A Space Odyssey last night. Stanley Kubrick obviously had a thing for sandy blue-eyed blondes who look like The Ex. Besides noticing that I have to say I lost most of my interest once there were no more monkeys.
The monkey bit, however, was awesome. I totally bought it. That was a great discovery of how to bash things, and it was one hundred percent believable to me that the monkey was inspired to bash by looking at the pretty smooth alien thing. Hollywood should make more caveman movies, that's a genre they've left pretty fallow since the 70's, which means it's due as God forbid they should think up something original. It'd be so cheap too - just dress a bunch of actors up in rags, get them to grunt, carry on, and invent the adjective or something. Get some big trained cats and some bears in to add tension, and film all the love scenes doggy-style. There. Done.
'People have known about the moon's romantic possibilities for a long time. Shakespeare in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" relies on moonlight to set the mood. The 1987 movie "Moonstruck" features a love story centered on "La Bella Luna."'
It better have been an intern or a daughter on a Daddy/Daughter Day that put that shit together. I mean, if it was in the Metro or something, fine, but the IHT? Do you ever get the feeling everybody is dumbing down everything? And bringing up Moonstruck, indeed. Moonstruck was the rape of a culture. Did anybody buy those people as Italian besides fat bone-white troglodytes who pronounce it 'Eye-talian' and 'lazag-nee'? And they bring it up in the same sentence as Shakespeare. What a joke. What a fucking world.
You must excuse me - the first news item I saw today wasn't that, but the news 126 people were just blown up in Pakistan. So I have the feeling the world is going to hell in a handbasket. I feel like that more and more these days. I can give myself pause, think about world wars, colonialism, concentration camps, Inquisitions, sown epidemics, potato famines, and lots of things like that, and try to convince myself the world is no closer to getting to hell than it's ever been, but I find that technique works less and less at abating my feelings of impending doom.
I guess as people get older they tend to stop thinking things like "the Tudor period was hard, the Second World War was awful, Colonialism was a massive international disaster that benefited a tiny fraction of the people involved - why, things are quite good now in comparison!", because they realize that you can Capitalize and categorize historical events or periods of time in a textbook, but in real life history has a sloppy way of leading up to the present. And all the shit in the world gets to feeling cumulative instead of episodic. Or maybe they don't realize that and that's why people are so shitty at understanding each other when it counts. I don't know.
Anyways, that sort of culmination might only be on my mind because we watched 2001: A Space Odyssey last night. Stanley Kubrick obviously had a thing for sandy blue-eyed blondes who look like The Ex. Besides noticing that I have to say I lost most of my interest once there were no more monkeys.
The monkey bit, however, was awesome. I totally bought it. That was a great discovery of how to bash things, and it was one hundred percent believable to me that the monkey was inspired to bash by looking at the pretty smooth alien thing. Hollywood should make more caveman movies, that's a genre they've left pretty fallow since the 70's, which means it's due as God forbid they should think up something original. It'd be so cheap too - just dress a bunch of actors up in rags, get them to grunt, carry on, and invent the adjective or something. Get some big trained cats and some bears in to add tension, and film all the love scenes doggy-style. There. Done.
mercoledì, ottobre 17, 2007
Mistress La Spliffe is shrewish
You know, the bloody Economist. I've said it before and I'll say it again - it's my favourite magazine ever, and if I was stuck on a desert island with a reliable subscription I'd only wail and gnash my teeth half as much as I would have otherwise. But only they could do something as egg-headedly chauvinistic as comparing hidden female oestrus to an 'evolutionary arms race between the sexes'. No, scratch that. Only they would find such a snarky huge metaphor to elaborate on what the mainstream attitude to evolutionary biology amounts to: a five-million year version of Taming of the Shrew. Fuck me, people are tedious.
(Just to go off course for a moment on how tedious people are - have you noticed? Complaining endlessly about how fucked up, complicated, baffling, infuriating, evil, inferior and all the rest of it the opposite sex are, and yet still devoting thousands of hours of brain power and billions of dollars to being noticed, accepted and loved by that same opposite sex when they could be painting or reading a book or something. Fucking tedious. Like a poisonous spiny fish that desperately wants to be cuddled by a grizzly bear. Make up your mind, you pack of twats, or just shut the fuck up and go home and jerk off. Bleeding Jeebus, it gives me the shits. Okay, digression done.)
Anyways, it's this sort of mainstream opinion that gives mainstream opinions a bad name, because it starts from an assumption about our nature which I think is assuming too much. And that is that the fundamental nature of human sexual relations is that a woman tricks a man into staying with her and sharing his resources with her, which a man will only do if he's convinced her children are also his. And hidden oestrus helps with this by only letting a man be sure her children are his if he stays with her nearly constantly and fucks her all the time. And this is why today we all get married and only nail other people on the down-low. It seems like all evolutionary theories in the Western world start from this point, to either reinforce or modify it but never to reject it and admit that maybe marriage is just a construct.
There are countless indications to tell us stay-and-fuck-constantly marriage model is flawed - societies where marital-type situations are of no importance compared to avuncular or matrilineal blood ties, societies where women select their mates out of line-ups, polyandrous societies. But perhaps most damningly for the the stay-and-fuck-constantly model, there's the fact that men never stay and fuck their women constantly, even in the most monogamous of monogamous societies, because it's their job to chase and kill animals and each other. Marriage is just one breeding model of dozens and dozens, and there's no evidence at all it was some sort of original, instinctual or 'right' model. It just happens to be ours so that's what everybody works with.
But oh wait - come back to it - because now we have a really important indication of how the stay-and-nail-constantly theory needs adjusting to make it right. Dr. Wilson has announced the results of his Albuquerque study: strippers make more money when they're ovulating and less when they're infertile, which means men must be able to perceive fertility on some level, which turns all this back into a slightly more complicated evolutionary Taming of the Shrew instead of the glorious and varied pageant that human sexuality is. This means the men can fuck their women when they're fertile and go off killing animals and each other when they're not, and still be pretty sure any kids popped are theirs. Huzzah! Marriage makes perfect evolutionary sense again! We're right! Africa, etc., is wrong!
Never mind that if he had actually spoken to the strippers, his sister, mother, wife, granny, or, like, any chick ever, he could have found out that women have more energy and sexual interest in men when they're ovulating and less when they're on the pill or on the rag. And possibly, possibly that might make strippers dance a little bit more energetically and engagedly, and possibly that might result in the punters giving them more money. But noooooo. That's far too simple. It must be about an evolutionary arms race between the sexes and the marriage model must be just plain simply fucking right.
Holy fucking tittyfuck. I can't believe people get funding to make this shit up when I have to work for a living. Did I mention people were tedious?
(Just to go off course for a moment on how tedious people are - have you noticed? Complaining endlessly about how fucked up, complicated, baffling, infuriating, evil, inferior and all the rest of it the opposite sex are, and yet still devoting thousands of hours of brain power and billions of dollars to being noticed, accepted and loved by that same opposite sex when they could be painting or reading a book or something. Fucking tedious. Like a poisonous spiny fish that desperately wants to be cuddled by a grizzly bear. Make up your mind, you pack of twats, or just shut the fuck up and go home and jerk off. Bleeding Jeebus, it gives me the shits. Okay, digression done.)
Anyways, it's this sort of mainstream opinion that gives mainstream opinions a bad name, because it starts from an assumption about our nature which I think is assuming too much. And that is that the fundamental nature of human sexual relations is that a woman tricks a man into staying with her and sharing his resources with her, which a man will only do if he's convinced her children are also his. And hidden oestrus helps with this by only letting a man be sure her children are his if he stays with her nearly constantly and fucks her all the time. And this is why today we all get married and only nail other people on the down-low. It seems like all evolutionary theories in the Western world start from this point, to either reinforce or modify it but never to reject it and admit that maybe marriage is just a construct.
There are countless indications to tell us stay-and-fuck-constantly marriage model is flawed - societies where marital-type situations are of no importance compared to avuncular or matrilineal blood ties, societies where women select their mates out of line-ups, polyandrous societies. But perhaps most damningly for the the stay-and-fuck-constantly model, there's the fact that men never stay and fuck their women constantly, even in the most monogamous of monogamous societies, because it's their job to chase and kill animals and each other. Marriage is just one breeding model of dozens and dozens, and there's no evidence at all it was some sort of original, instinctual or 'right' model. It just happens to be ours so that's what everybody works with.
But oh wait - come back to it - because now we have a really important indication of how the stay-and-nail-constantly theory needs adjusting to make it right. Dr. Wilson has announced the results of his Albuquerque study: strippers make more money when they're ovulating and less when they're infertile, which means men must be able to perceive fertility on some level, which turns all this back into a slightly more complicated evolutionary Taming of the Shrew instead of the glorious and varied pageant that human sexuality is. This means the men can fuck their women when they're fertile and go off killing animals and each other when they're not, and still be pretty sure any kids popped are theirs. Huzzah! Marriage makes perfect evolutionary sense again! We're right! Africa, etc., is wrong!
Never mind that if he had actually spoken to the strippers, his sister, mother, wife, granny, or, like, any chick ever, he could have found out that women have more energy and sexual interest in men when they're ovulating and less when they're on the pill or on the rag. And possibly, possibly that might make strippers dance a little bit more energetically and engagedly, and possibly that might result in the punters giving them more money. But noooooo. That's far too simple. It must be about an evolutionary arms race between the sexes and the marriage model must be just plain simply fucking right.
Holy fucking tittyfuck. I can't believe people get funding to make this shit up when I have to work for a living. Did I mention people were tedious?
martedì, ottobre 16, 2007
I'm only blogging because I haven't got a Wii yet
I'm eating polenta for breakfast and it's slightly less gaggable than the porridge I generally choke down to stop me from getting hungry before one. Yep, my life has devolved to blogging about my breakfast. That's what happens when you have a nine-to-five job, or in my case a nine-thirty-to-six job. I can't complain. Other people work more, other people work harder. But someday I'll only work when I want to. Someday . . . Not today.
Still reading The Old Patagonian Express and starting to get sick of it. The bastard has got all the way to Guatemala and doesn't seem to have found a place or person he likes yet, unless you count the highly erotic silhouette of a girl or woman in a backlit doorway he passes on the train, and even that seemed to make him more uncomfortable than happy. But it's still beautifully written and still engaging enough to keep going, at the least to see if he does find a place he doesn't grumble about before getting to the tip of the continent. And it makes me want to read Pudd'nhead Wilson.
One way it's beautifully written is its evocation of a more civilized time on trains. Being back in Europe, I'm back on trains in a way that wasn't really possible in Canada, as without fail driving is more reliable there and adjusting travel plans by a couple of weeks means someone can give you a ride between cities. Here it's cheap and fast, cheap and fast enough to generally compete with low-cost airlines or the coach (though we're coaching it to Berlin - booooo - but the night train is more than twice as expensive, a really absurd price, and there's no other direct option from Belgium) and certainly cheaper and faster than driving over longish distances.
But it's not as I remember it. Every year the trains get faster and more efficient, and they get less and less comfortable. When I was living in Italy just a few years ago, the oldish espresso trains had compartments in all the classes where, if you were alone, you could lock the door, pull down the six passenger seats into one double bed, and make sweet love with your sweetheart. ALL classes. Now making love sitting plum upright on these horrible open trains with nothing shielding you but the seatbacks, even if you spring for first class, is liable to net you an obscenity charge.
One day speed and efficiency will get a little less fashionable and people will realize we're refined creatures and that we have aesthetic needs, and that a 12 hour train journey without at least a little head is contrary to our higher nature. In the meantime, I'll still take trains because at least they're not aeroplanes, which scare the lust straight out of me.
Still reading The Old Patagonian Express and starting to get sick of it. The bastard has got all the way to Guatemala and doesn't seem to have found a place or person he likes yet, unless you count the highly erotic silhouette of a girl or woman in a backlit doorway he passes on the train, and even that seemed to make him more uncomfortable than happy. But it's still beautifully written and still engaging enough to keep going, at the least to see if he does find a place he doesn't grumble about before getting to the tip of the continent. And it makes me want to read Pudd'nhead Wilson.
One way it's beautifully written is its evocation of a more civilized time on trains. Being back in Europe, I'm back on trains in a way that wasn't really possible in Canada, as without fail driving is more reliable there and adjusting travel plans by a couple of weeks means someone can give you a ride between cities. Here it's cheap and fast, cheap and fast enough to generally compete with low-cost airlines or the coach (though we're coaching it to Berlin - booooo - but the night train is more than twice as expensive, a really absurd price, and there's no other direct option from Belgium) and certainly cheaper and faster than driving over longish distances.
But it's not as I remember it. Every year the trains get faster and more efficient, and they get less and less comfortable. When I was living in Italy just a few years ago, the oldish espresso trains had compartments in all the classes where, if you were alone, you could lock the door, pull down the six passenger seats into one double bed, and make sweet love with your sweetheart. ALL classes. Now making love sitting plum upright on these horrible open trains with nothing shielding you but the seatbacks, even if you spring for first class, is liable to net you an obscenity charge.
One day speed and efficiency will get a little less fashionable and people will realize we're refined creatures and that we have aesthetic needs, and that a 12 hour train journey without at least a little head is contrary to our higher nature. In the meantime, I'll still take trains because at least they're not aeroplanes, which scare the lust straight out of me.
lunedì, ottobre 15, 2007
I found Jesus; he switched his cellphone back on
So. Jesus Camp. You can pretty much imagine how it went. The ongoing indoctrination of a bunch of devoted Pentecostal kids of the non-compassionate type - you know, the sort that's more about glossolia performance art, how demonically wrong everyone else has it, and not being stuck on this iniquitous floating rock when God decides it's curtains than it is about taking Jesus's life as some sort of example and struggling to alleviate the burdens of your fellow man in a very practical feeding-the-crowds sort of way or healing-the-blind sort of way. Christianity as unmitigated self-centredness.
And that's all. I didn't feel good watching the movie. It didn't add anything to what I know about Pentecostals or do anything else useful. There was an amusing five minute cameo by Ted Haggard - probably one of his last before the meth'n'manwhore bust - and a strong feeling that adults who involve themselves with children's ministry are prrrrrrobably perverts - one pro-life rally organizer took the time to tell a little girl she looked good with the "life" duct tape over her mouth as he pressed it on. . . uhm . . . yeah.
I think the film caused some talk when it came out because all this was done without commentary from the documentarians - it's mostly just footage of the Pentecostals. But then there were five or so insertions of blathering from some Air America guy who didn't serve any purpose except to remind us what we were watching was INSANE. Fine. But I went out with the same conviction I had going in - children love to perform the way adults congratulate them for. Until they hit puberty, which of course the documentarians couldn't show us, because teenage rebellion against Christian fundamentalism wouldn't be INSANE enough. Bah. Skip it. No thumbs up. Just go to a zoo and watch the monkeys jerk off, it's about as edifying.
And that's all. I didn't feel good watching the movie. It didn't add anything to what I know about Pentecostals or do anything else useful. There was an amusing five minute cameo by Ted Haggard - probably one of his last before the meth'n'manwhore bust - and a strong feeling that adults who involve themselves with children's ministry are prrrrrrobably perverts - one pro-life rally organizer took the time to tell a little girl she looked good with the "life" duct tape over her mouth as he pressed it on. . . uhm . . . yeah.
I think the film caused some talk when it came out because all this was done without commentary from the documentarians - it's mostly just footage of the Pentecostals. But then there were five or so insertions of blathering from some Air America guy who didn't serve any purpose except to remind us what we were watching was INSANE. Fine. But I went out with the same conviction I had going in - children love to perform the way adults congratulate them for. Until they hit puberty, which of course the documentarians couldn't show us, because teenage rebellion against Christian fundamentalism wouldn't be INSANE enough. Bah. Skip it. No thumbs up. Just go to a zoo and watch the monkeys jerk off, it's about as edifying.
domenica, ottobre 14, 2007
Ranking the weekend
Fucking awesome: the Wii. Oh god it's so good. A work couple who I'm going to have to find a pseudonym for if I keep liking them as much as I do got one last week and invited us over to play with it. We played until five in the morning and it was only overwhelming physical exhaustion that could persuade me to put down the console . . . I spent hours the next day trying to rationalize buying one for our household (cheaper than a gym membership! More likely to be used than a gym membership!) and did a great job, though I always ran up against the hurdle of knowing it would be the end of my intellectual life, until I got sick of it at least, which just might not happen.
God, Nintendo wins. They get the console out underpricing the new PlayStation and whatever that Microsoft Shitbox is called, and they make it fucking awesome. They make it so that everyone will love it - children, chicks, and people over fifty - it's just so . . . so . . . Well. So evil. For the first time, and obviously this is a sign of advancing age, I understand why Christian types usually think fun things are evil - dancing, gambling, drinking, and the Wii (yes, I'm suggesting it's right up there on the Fun-o-meter, though fornication still leaves it behind). It's so distracting. It precludes doing almost anything else if you have one around . . . and it's also interactive, something you can do in a big screaming hearty group, so you don't get the funny feeling that you're turning into a spotty World of Warcraft island of one - there'd be nothing to stop you just playing that shit forever . . . there'd be nothing to stop everybody from playing that shit forever, and then what would happen to the human race? It'd have a fuckload of fun, that's what.
Anyways. The Wii was a nice thing about the weekend. Another nice thing about the weekend was that the weather was lovely and we spent Sunday sitting around the park in the sun, while the F-word painted and I read The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux. It's a non-fiction narrative about the author's attempt to travel from Massachusetts to the southernmost tip of South America by train, and so far it's fucking awesome. The opposite of Bruce Chatwin's wide-eyed, stripped-down prose, but very good in its opposition - a touch mean-spirited, but readable with it. I'll write more when I read more.
Also had a go at Enduring Love by Ian McEwan over the last little while and found the first 38 pages to be interminable shit. I think it's defeated me because just thinking about continuing to read it makes me think "awwwwwwww, fuck, let's just buy a Wii". I just get so fucking annoyed with these modern Big Men of Literature who seem to be absolutely incapable of writing a book that isn't a film treatment in disguise. Okay, maybe that's where the money is - fine. Chase the money. But I'll still think you're jerks who history will forget, or else vilify for trying to bastardize one form of art for another. Go get a contract with Time-Warner, you whores.
Also saw Jesus Camp, of which more later.
God, Nintendo wins. They get the console out underpricing the new PlayStation and whatever that Microsoft Shitbox is called, and they make it fucking awesome. They make it so that everyone will love it - children, chicks, and people over fifty - it's just so . . . so . . . Well. So evil. For the first time, and obviously this is a sign of advancing age, I understand why Christian types usually think fun things are evil - dancing, gambling, drinking, and the Wii (yes, I'm suggesting it's right up there on the Fun-o-meter, though fornication still leaves it behind). It's so distracting. It precludes doing almost anything else if you have one around . . . and it's also interactive, something you can do in a big screaming hearty group, so you don't get the funny feeling that you're turning into a spotty World of Warcraft island of one - there'd be nothing to stop you just playing that shit forever . . . there'd be nothing to stop everybody from playing that shit forever, and then what would happen to the human race? It'd have a fuckload of fun, that's what.
Anyways. The Wii was a nice thing about the weekend. Another nice thing about the weekend was that the weather was lovely and we spent Sunday sitting around the park in the sun, while the F-word painted and I read The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux. It's a non-fiction narrative about the author's attempt to travel from Massachusetts to the southernmost tip of South America by train, and so far it's fucking awesome. The opposite of Bruce Chatwin's wide-eyed, stripped-down prose, but very good in its opposition - a touch mean-spirited, but readable with it. I'll write more when I read more.
Also had a go at Enduring Love by Ian McEwan over the last little while and found the first 38 pages to be interminable shit. I think it's defeated me because just thinking about continuing to read it makes me think "awwwwwwww, fuck, let's just buy a Wii". I just get so fucking annoyed with these modern Big Men of Literature who seem to be absolutely incapable of writing a book that isn't a film treatment in disguise. Okay, maybe that's where the money is - fine. Chase the money. But I'll still think you're jerks who history will forget, or else vilify for trying to bastardize one form of art for another. Go get a contract with Time-Warner, you whores.
Also saw Jesus Camp, of which more later.
giovedì, ottobre 11, 2007
What would Jesus do?
So I think I understand what Hilts is saying to a point, and I think his attitude towards the Church resembles lots of Catholics', and that that's great. I'd like to point out that when I blather on about the Catholic Church, I'm not trying to turn anybody away from it just because I turned away from it, but deep down that might not be true because in my heart of hearts I'm still pissed Mum just converted. But in my conscious head at least, I'm not trying to turn anyone away from it.
Sugar may disagree, and so may millions of others, but I feel like religious faith is a beautiful thing - that most spiritual disciplines, except the very stupidest, offer some sort of helpful framework for approaching your relationship with the world and your fellow man, and that for children especially it can be really helpful - a sort of series of parables instructing you on how to love when your raging id just wants to slash and burn. I'm glad I grew up Catholic for what Hilts talked about - the way it taught me to love people for their humanity if nothing else, to figuratively speaking turn the other cheek (though I usually didn't), and a sort of beautiful pantheism teaching me that anything I hurt is all of us, or God, or whatever, so it's best not to hurt things.
So I spent my childhood thinking Catholics should act in love and tumbled out of Catholicism when that thought smacked up against the reality of the Church. The love of women that could be communicated through ministry is devalued completely with no good excuse. The love between a man and a woman is treated as a distraction from God rather than as a reminder of Her superpowers. And that's ignoring the distinct lack of love present in so many of the Church's actions and policies over the last 1000 years. Coincidentally since they stopped letting priests get married, to make sure there weren't any disputes over the inheritance of 'Church' property. Men have always told me not having sex for awhile makes them lose their minds a little bit and I think the history of Catholic ministry is a good way for them to argue that case. 'Babeeeeee . . . I'm hurtin' . . . . you're going to make me set up an anti-papacy in Avignon. . . '
And so much of it for crass, worldly political expedience. Liberation Theology was shot down by the Vatican when the people who needed it the most, needed it the most. The choice of an old-fashioned (if pretty fucking hot when he was young) Pole to lead the Church during turbulent times because he was an anti-Communist from a Communist country. The assassination of John Paul I, who would have let us all wear condoms even if it meant cutting down on the growth rate of the flock . . . not that all those impoverished people aren't going Evangelical these days anyways because it's so much more fun with the singing and the dancing and the babysitting and the useful social assistance and whatnot - okay, I'm getting a bit anti-Mel-Gibson here, but ten bucks says it was an assassination. Come on, it's the Catholic Church we're talking about here, not Mohatma Fucking Ghandi.
Hilts isn't quite sure if he believes in God as such - I do - I can't explain it, beyond saying that I always feel that there's a great warm beautiful overarching thing in the universe that desperately, desperately wants us all to not fuck up. And my relationship with that thing will always be more or less Christian because I was raised with a great bloody loving Jesus as a daily figure. It will also always be more or less Catholic because the Church has so many ways to help us approach that figure that are part of my brain forever and that I wouldn't part with, like the saints and his mum and meditation and mysticism and all the rest of it.
But Daddy is right - the Church is rotten - and the people who love the Church need to struggle to reform it so it really is about love again, even if it's just one parish at a time, even if it results in Colonel Ratzinger and his Flying Monkeys excommunicating them. I bet that's what Jesus would do.
Sugar may disagree, and so may millions of others, but I feel like religious faith is a beautiful thing - that most spiritual disciplines, except the very stupidest, offer some sort of helpful framework for approaching your relationship with the world and your fellow man, and that for children especially it can be really helpful - a sort of series of parables instructing you on how to love when your raging id just wants to slash and burn. I'm glad I grew up Catholic for what Hilts talked about - the way it taught me to love people for their humanity if nothing else, to figuratively speaking turn the other cheek (though I usually didn't), and a sort of beautiful pantheism teaching me that anything I hurt is all of us, or God, or whatever, so it's best not to hurt things.
So I spent my childhood thinking Catholics should act in love and tumbled out of Catholicism when that thought smacked up against the reality of the Church. The love of women that could be communicated through ministry is devalued completely with no good excuse. The love between a man and a woman is treated as a distraction from God rather than as a reminder of Her superpowers. And that's ignoring the distinct lack of love present in so many of the Church's actions and policies over the last 1000 years. Coincidentally since they stopped letting priests get married, to make sure there weren't any disputes over the inheritance of 'Church' property. Men have always told me not having sex for awhile makes them lose their minds a little bit and I think the history of Catholic ministry is a good way for them to argue that case. 'Babeeeeee . . . I'm hurtin' . . . . you're going to make me set up an anti-papacy in Avignon. . . '
And so much of it for crass, worldly political expedience. Liberation Theology was shot down by the Vatican when the people who needed it the most, needed it the most. The choice of an old-fashioned (if pretty fucking hot when he was young) Pole to lead the Church during turbulent times because he was an anti-Communist from a Communist country. The assassination of John Paul I, who would have let us all wear condoms even if it meant cutting down on the growth rate of the flock . . . not that all those impoverished people aren't going Evangelical these days anyways because it's so much more fun with the singing and the dancing and the babysitting and the useful social assistance and whatnot - okay, I'm getting a bit anti-Mel-Gibson here, but ten bucks says it was an assassination. Come on, it's the Catholic Church we're talking about here, not Mohatma Fucking Ghandi.
Hilts isn't quite sure if he believes in God as such - I do - I can't explain it, beyond saying that I always feel that there's a great warm beautiful overarching thing in the universe that desperately, desperately wants us all to not fuck up. And my relationship with that thing will always be more or less Christian because I was raised with a great bloody loving Jesus as a daily figure. It will also always be more or less Catholic because the Church has so many ways to help us approach that figure that are part of my brain forever and that I wouldn't part with, like the saints and his mum and meditation and mysticism and all the rest of it.
But Daddy is right - the Church is rotten - and the people who love the Church need to struggle to reform it so it really is about love again, even if it's just one parish at a time, even if it results in Colonel Ratzinger and his Flying Monkeys excommunicating them. I bet that's what Jesus would do.
mercoledì, ottobre 10, 2007
Defrock me, mariachi
Heaven knows why it is, but I have always loved the term 'defrocked nuns'. I used to want to be a nun, you know. Sister Maria Splifferia Consuela or whatever. That ambition ended with puberty, but it wasn't just about the way Antonio Banderas went from greasy to suddenly very in-ter-es-ting - it was about that teenage condition which is common to us all, even those of us who didn't wonder what Antonio Banderas looked like naked - a sudden and violent mistrust of hierarchy.
In terms of my ongoing rupture with the church, the most important facets of that are the moral and the spiritual. Can a person take moral instruction from a hierarchical structure and remain moral, and hence pleasing in the eyes of God herself? Can a person be a spiritual if they are taking their spirituality in measured doses from a several-degrees-removed arbiter who dictates what's spiritual and what isn't? And can a Christian sect be anything but naughty when it suggests that struggles towards personal spirituality and morality are acts of pride, and if we don't want to go to hell we should surrender these personal struggles - surrender the possibility of personal revelation, in short - in favour of obedience to a hierarchical structure that has a repellent history of using the money it gouges out of its members to promote torture, bloodshed and suffering?
This is the big old question, and in my case one that was put often to the Catholic Church when my poor Daddy called in the priests to talk me down all those years ago. It was never really answered for me, certainly not by the priests, and it precludes me ever becoming Catholic again, or joining any Christian sect that doesn't abandon both human hierarchies and the idea that revelation is selective. But Daddy and I had a religious talk when he was last here, and 15 or so years into my rather self-consciously loud departure from the church, I finally got the balls to ask him how he could put up with all its iniquities. He explained that the Church was rotten, damaged, and corrupt, but that Catholics loved it and it was their job to fight the iniquities within the hierarchy to reform it. That satisfied me.
In terms of my ongoing rupture with the church, the most important facets of that are the moral and the spiritual. Can a person take moral instruction from a hierarchical structure and remain moral, and hence pleasing in the eyes of God herself? Can a person be a spiritual if they are taking their spirituality in measured doses from a several-degrees-removed arbiter who dictates what's spiritual and what isn't? And can a Christian sect be anything but naughty when it suggests that struggles towards personal spirituality and morality are acts of pride, and if we don't want to go to hell we should surrender these personal struggles - surrender the possibility of personal revelation, in short - in favour of obedience to a hierarchical structure that has a repellent history of using the money it gouges out of its members to promote torture, bloodshed and suffering?
This is the big old question, and in my case one that was put often to the Catholic Church when my poor Daddy called in the priests to talk me down all those years ago. It was never really answered for me, certainly not by the priests, and it precludes me ever becoming Catholic again, or joining any Christian sect that doesn't abandon both human hierarchies and the idea that revelation is selective. But Daddy and I had a religious talk when he was last here, and 15 or so years into my rather self-consciously loud departure from the church, I finally got the balls to ask him how he could put up with all its iniquities. He explained that the Church was rotten, damaged, and corrupt, but that Catholics loved it and it was their job to fight the iniquities within the hierarchy to reform it. That satisfied me.
martedì, ottobre 09, 2007
The Probation of Mistress La Spliffe
Read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and all I can say is that Dorothy Sayers is way, way better than Agatha Christie. But then Dorothy Sayers is way better than everybody. Nice twist there, Agatha. You could tell she was pretty proud of it. In fact, it was way too easy to tell how proud she was. Still. I suppose it was a big innovation at the time. Blah.
Getting into a bit of a funk. I wish my probation was over; I wish I'd been getting any sort of feedback besides a periodic 'oh, great market report' or 'oh, good story.' Yabbut . . . are enough of the market reports good? Are enough of the stories good? Are you going to sack me, or are you going to keep giving me lots of money every month so I can get my eyes operated on and have a comfortable old age? Today being October 10, I believe, we're down to the wire. 20 more physical days - October 30, it ends. The normal probationary period in Belgiumland is three months, not six, which means I could have started really emotionally settling down here three months ago. But I do see that wouldn't have been realistic. I wasn't doing all my job yet three months ago.
They'd better not sack me. One of the girls there just bought a Wii and I want to be able to go to her place after work to get high and play with it. And I'm starting to like it there, too. Oh well. We'll see.
Getting into a bit of a funk. I wish my probation was over; I wish I'd been getting any sort of feedback besides a periodic 'oh, great market report' or 'oh, good story.' Yabbut . . . are enough of the market reports good? Are enough of the stories good? Are you going to sack me, or are you going to keep giving me lots of money every month so I can get my eyes operated on and have a comfortable old age? Today being October 10, I believe, we're down to the wire. 20 more physical days - October 30, it ends. The normal probationary period in Belgiumland is three months, not six, which means I could have started really emotionally settling down here three months ago. But I do see that wouldn't have been realistic. I wasn't doing all my job yet three months ago.
They'd better not sack me. One of the girls there just bought a Wii and I want to be able to go to her place after work to get high and play with it. And I'm starting to like it there, too. Oh well. We'll see.
lunedì, ottobre 08, 2007
Orson Welles smacks down
Magnum has proposed to his lady friend, a good one, and I hope they get married soon so I can go home for a bit. I'm a touch homesick these days. Belgium has beautiful spots of colour but there is nowhere, absolutely nowhere like northern Ontario in the fall - chilly enough to make the mosquitoes die, good crisp sun, and miles and miles of continuous and startling orange and red hues across the landscape. When I think about climate change, I think about that - how awful it would be if that landscape were to change - since I somehow refuse to wrap my head around island nations sinking and Australian-type drought.
Watched Orson Welles' Macbeth last night - it ran a little roughshod over some of my favorite scenes, but I really liked it in terms of the acting and and loved it in terms of the interpretation, and so I thought about how much I hate Kenneth Branagh. Well, hate is a strong word. How little I like Kenneth Branagh. He didn't really add anything to filmed Shakespeare besides lots of shouting and millions of dollars.
What I liked best from him was Henry V, which had the least shouting and as far as I can tell the fewest millions of dollars, despite some fighting sequences. But even that was a bit shit compared to Orson Welles' Macbeth, and I'm not sure if that's down to direction (though the use of a set more suggestive than representative worked really well in Macbeth) or if it's just down to Orson Welles being motherfucking Orson Welles and Kenneth Branagh not being Orson Welles. Probably a bit of column A, a bit of column B.
Watched Orson Welles' Macbeth last night - it ran a little roughshod over some of my favorite scenes, but I really liked it in terms of the acting and and loved it in terms of the interpretation, and so I thought about how much I hate Kenneth Branagh. Well, hate is a strong word. How little I like Kenneth Branagh. He didn't really add anything to filmed Shakespeare besides lots of shouting and millions of dollars.
What I liked best from him was Henry V, which had the least shouting and as far as I can tell the fewest millions of dollars, despite some fighting sequences. But even that was a bit shit compared to Orson Welles' Macbeth, and I'm not sure if that's down to direction (though the use of a set more suggestive than representative worked really well in Macbeth) or if it's just down to Orson Welles being motherfucking Orson Welles and Kenneth Branagh not being Orson Welles. Probably a bit of column A, a bit of column B.
domenica, ottobre 07, 2007
PETA sucks.
I've always felt that way - could never bear the preoccupation with attacking/using celebrities in their promotions and could never bear their cock-eyed perspectives on the rights and wrongs of a human being's relationship with animals; it all comes off as such superficial trash when organizations like Greenpeace actually do stuff instead of contenting themselves with getting Pamela Anderson to shoot her mouth off about the battery farming of chickens by KFC. I mean, the very name - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - when the ethics of a person's relationship with animals is far too variable a thing to base the foundation of an organization on - it's fucking lame.
But I might never have bothered to think that out if I hadn't heard about this. Puke. The foundation sinks to the level of an intrusive gossip blog run by a moronic 19 year old who thinks he has a good enough grasp of the personalities of the famous to decide he knows what's best for their pet dogs, or else who is just desperate, desperate for any kind of media mention and isn't afraid of sounding like a fucking incompetent to get it.
Try going out and saving some whales, you gaggle of parasites. That's be a fuck site more 'ethical' than being pathetic twats. I don't really eat meat anymore but I'm so disgusted I think I'm going to search out some foie-gras covered veal for lunch.
But I might never have bothered to think that out if I hadn't heard about this. Puke. The foundation sinks to the level of an intrusive gossip blog run by a moronic 19 year old who thinks he has a good enough grasp of the personalities of the famous to decide he knows what's best for their pet dogs, or else who is just desperate, desperate for any kind of media mention and isn't afraid of sounding like a fucking incompetent to get it.
Try going out and saving some whales, you gaggle of parasites. That's be a fuck site more 'ethical' than being pathetic twats. I don't really eat meat anymore but I'm so disgusted I think I'm going to search out some foie-gras covered veal for lunch.
giovedì, ottobre 04, 2007
It's not TMI if you use fancy words
The F-word is back, and indeed it wasn't a second too soon, because I'm in oestrus. Have been for a couple of days. For the first time in more than a year I've had nowhere to channel my state of oestrus, so I've been observing it carefully. And I don't just say this because I myself am endlessly fascinating: women are endlessly fascinating creatures.
One of the remarkable things is the staring. The way a pert ass walking by makes the head swivel. The irresistible up-down sweep taking in the goods, that my middle-class manners can barely keep subtle when a nice piece of something passes on the street. It's very mannish, and it backs up my theory that men are just women who live in a perpetual state of simultaneous oestrus and pre-menstrual tension, so we should all try to understand each other a little better than we do.
Another of the remarkable things is the sense of smell, which suddenly goes from a sense to a superpower. I can smell perfectly clean people from ten paces on a windy day, and perfectly clean men from farther. It's the oddest thing when smelling can inform you who's walked in the room, or that the fecking gorgeous blue-eyed Sicilian pizza guy is just around the corner as you walk to the falafel shop. We don't pay enough attention to our sense of smell generally. If you haven't read the massive Swiss blockbuster Perfume yet, get to it - I think it's one of the best novels of our generation.
And finally, there's the way that sex with almost everybody becomes a realistic possibility - not an attractive one, mind you, indeed usually exactly the opposite. But nonetheless a visualizable option that a conscious part of your brain has to reject, instead of a hypothetical one that doesn't even bother swimming up from the subconscious. I have a feeling that's also fairly mannish.
And all of this, as well as a couple of subtle physiological things, within the framework of concealed ovulation, so that outside of the fact that maybe women stare a bit more and know who you are without looking up from her desk, the rest of the world has no idea.
God, human beings are so strange! So beautifully and oddly adapted! For me, this sort of thing is what really separates us from the other animals - not our opposable thumbs, our big brains, or our porcine ability to eat almost any old rubbish - but things like concealed ovulation, the female orgasm, minimal but key sexual dimorphism, and the way willies hang out of gentlemen's bodies on display for the ladies instead of getting tucked up inside them until they're in use. Our sexual organization in general.
It is so gloriously fucked up compared to all the other animals - the most poetic sexuality out there - except maybe for the bonobos', but I don't like them that hairy. So hurrah for sex, ladies and gentlemen: it's more than a replacement for television. In my book, it brings us closer to that Big Bonobo in the Sky.
Nick Cave has an opinion on this too:
One of the remarkable things is the staring. The way a pert ass walking by makes the head swivel. The irresistible up-down sweep taking in the goods, that my middle-class manners can barely keep subtle when a nice piece of something passes on the street. It's very mannish, and it backs up my theory that men are just women who live in a perpetual state of simultaneous oestrus and pre-menstrual tension, so we should all try to understand each other a little better than we do.
Another of the remarkable things is the sense of smell, which suddenly goes from a sense to a superpower. I can smell perfectly clean people from ten paces on a windy day, and perfectly clean men from farther. It's the oddest thing when smelling can inform you who's walked in the room, or that the fecking gorgeous blue-eyed Sicilian pizza guy is just around the corner as you walk to the falafel shop. We don't pay enough attention to our sense of smell generally. If you haven't read the massive Swiss blockbuster Perfume yet, get to it - I think it's one of the best novels of our generation.
And finally, there's the way that sex with almost everybody becomes a realistic possibility - not an attractive one, mind you, indeed usually exactly the opposite. But nonetheless a visualizable option that a conscious part of your brain has to reject, instead of a hypothetical one that doesn't even bother swimming up from the subconscious. I have a feeling that's also fairly mannish.
And all of this, as well as a couple of subtle physiological things, within the framework of concealed ovulation, so that outside of the fact that maybe women stare a bit more and know who you are without looking up from her desk, the rest of the world has no idea.
God, human beings are so strange! So beautifully and oddly adapted! For me, this sort of thing is what really separates us from the other animals - not our opposable thumbs, our big brains, or our porcine ability to eat almost any old rubbish - but things like concealed ovulation, the female orgasm, minimal but key sexual dimorphism, and the way willies hang out of gentlemen's bodies on display for the ladies instead of getting tucked up inside them until they're in use. Our sexual organization in general.
It is so gloriously fucked up compared to all the other animals - the most poetic sexuality out there - except maybe for the bonobos', but I don't like them that hairy. So hurrah for sex, ladies and gentlemen: it's more than a replacement for television. In my book, it brings us closer to that Big Bonobo in the Sky.
Nick Cave has an opinion on this too:
mercoledì, ottobre 03, 2007
What a wicked thing to say
The F-word is coming back sometime today and it won’t be a moment too soon. I miss him something awful. Gross, isn’t it? But I’m feeling a little fragile as winter has set in here. Last night I came home around 8 – the night before that, 2 in the morning – and there was absolutely no difference in the quality of the inky, damp, chilly darkness. I live in goddamn Scandinavia, except it was too goddamn cloudy all goddamn summer to get any of that Land of the Midnight Sun shit.
So I’m going through my last month of probation at work and obviously I’m on tenterhooks, because after five months I’ve really got used to being given money. Had a bit of hair of the dog last night with an IT-er from work who explained to me that the high turnover in my department was down to people quitting and/or losing their fucking minds, and that getting the sack should be the least of my worries. Do I feel better? Sure.
Speaking of. This week, whilst the F-word has been painfully absent from my life, I've been distracting myself by taking an interest in my surroundings at work and whoa, nelly. These people talk. You know, about each other. At one point, a girl who'd been telling me lots of juicy shit, like about the annoyingly naïve young thing that sits across from me nailing the assembly-line hotty in sales and my predecessor stalking my boss, paused in her conversation when the name of another girl at the office came up. She looked at me straight in the eye and said, "I'm telling you. Look out. Look out. Watch what you say to her because it will spread around."
Alright. I'm not complaining. I love hearing gossip, particularly gossip that adds some dimension to the annoying girl who sits across from me or to the reason my boss is a bit abrupt until you get to know her. And that's what it's all about, isn't it? Adding interest to our relationships. Making people seem complicated and engaging somehow. Livening up our workdays. But I better let go of the illusion my words have any kind of privacy in there, and accept that they'll probably have legs that will take them to meanings I never even dreamed of.
You know what it amounts to, don't you? My next piece of investigative journalism; you give a a music video 12 years and it turns funny. I mean, it's a pretty song and reminds me of Wild at Heart and all, but when he stares at the camera singing I can't suspend my sexy disbelief anymore:
So I’m going through my last month of probation at work and obviously I’m on tenterhooks, because after five months I’ve really got used to being given money. Had a bit of hair of the dog last night with an IT-er from work who explained to me that the high turnover in my department was down to people quitting and/or losing their fucking minds, and that getting the sack should be the least of my worries. Do I feel better? Sure.
Speaking of. This week, whilst the F-word has been painfully absent from my life, I've been distracting myself by taking an interest in my surroundings at work and whoa, nelly. These people talk. You know, about each other. At one point, a girl who'd been telling me lots of juicy shit, like about the annoyingly naïve young thing that sits across from me nailing the assembly-line hotty in sales and my predecessor stalking my boss, paused in her conversation when the name of another girl at the office came up. She looked at me straight in the eye and said, "I'm telling you. Look out. Look out. Watch what you say to her because it will spread around."
Alright. I'm not complaining. I love hearing gossip, particularly gossip that adds some dimension to the annoying girl who sits across from me or to the reason my boss is a bit abrupt until you get to know her. And that's what it's all about, isn't it? Adding interest to our relationships. Making people seem complicated and engaging somehow. Livening up our workdays. But I better let go of the illusion my words have any kind of privacy in there, and accept that they'll probably have legs that will take them to meanings I never even dreamed of.
You know what it amounts to, don't you? My next piece of investigative journalism; you give a a music video 12 years and it turns funny. I mean, it's a pretty song and reminds me of Wild at Heart and all, but when he stares at the camera singing I can't suspend my sexy disbelief anymore:
martedì, ottobre 02, 2007
Lesson One in becoming a Muckraking Journalist:
Journalists drink a lot. You don't drink a lot. Don't go drinking with journalists the night before deadline. Gah gah gah gah gah.
Muck raked this morning (briefly - excuse me - efforts to be human call) - when Madonna collaborates with young performers, she sucks away what modest soul they may have in a way that reminds me of Elizabeth Bathory, and when David Bowie does the same, it makes me want to cry in a nice way.
I'm missing the Arcade Fire at the beginning of November. We're going to Berlin instead. That will be sweet - I love Berlin - but still, fuck. I think I'll try to see them elsewhere on the tour on a weekend away. After all, I'm middle class now; I can do that sort of shit.
Muck raked this morning (briefly - excuse me - efforts to be human call) - when Madonna collaborates with young performers, she sucks away what modest soul they may have in a way that reminds me of Elizabeth Bathory, and when David Bowie does the same, it makes me want to cry in a nice way.
I'm missing the Arcade Fire at the beginning of November. We're going to Berlin instead. That will be sweet - I love Berlin - but still, fuck. I think I'll try to see them elsewhere on the tour on a weekend away. After all, I'm middle class now; I can do that sort of shit.
lunedì, ottobre 01, 2007
Breaking the Whaaaaaaa?
So at the moment I’m reading The Waves and taking a long time to do it. I’m the sort of reader who throws words back like lemon filling at a pie-eating contest, but that’s not a book you can do that with. It’s poetry. Reading it slooooowly is a joy – letting each character sink in – each clearly delineated person with their little motifs and their loves and their patterns of seeing, and then thinking about it during the day, letting it recur.
And such rich, fine language. You know, fuck Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene. I don’t really mean that, mind you, at least in Graham Greene’s case as I really do love him, but just to make a point for a second, fuck them. You want balls in your writing, you look at Virginia Woolf. She was willing to stretch language to the breaking point to get across the images and emotions she wanted to get across, and she did, AND she never quite broke the language. None of that pared-down choose-your-own-adventure shit for her.
I love her something fierce. There’s this one section in Orlando when she writes about how frustrating it is to have too many s’s on the page when you’re composing something, and since reading that I've loved her like she was some person I knew. She seems to have had such a conscious relationship with language, and a healthy one - one that had been psychoanalyzed by a competent professional. Pity that such a degree of consciousness wasn't the right kind to stop her drowning herself, but illness is illness and illness has got rid of lots of my favourite writers before their time. I'd punch myself in the face for another Emily Brontë novel, for example. Even if it was crap. Imagine. One novel from Emily Brontë, twelve and counting from Martin Spewbag Amis. What a vomitous world it is at times.
Last night, when I was taking a break from The Waves, I watched Barton Fink, and for the first time in a long time, a movie made me honestly think ‘what the fuck?’ Just to keep it simple for myself, I’m going to pretend the whole thing was an autobiographical movie script Fink imagined when writer’s block first set in and he looked at the picture of the lady on the beach while pondering the creative process in a commercialized context. I don’t fully believe that, but it’s tidy, and in any case as a plot device it’s better than anything they’ve done since they started using the A-list. I reccommend it, but I reccommend it with reefer, which I didn't have last night.
And such rich, fine language. You know, fuck Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene. I don’t really mean that, mind you, at least in Graham Greene’s case as I really do love him, but just to make a point for a second, fuck them. You want balls in your writing, you look at Virginia Woolf. She was willing to stretch language to the breaking point to get across the images and emotions she wanted to get across, and she did, AND she never quite broke the language. None of that pared-down choose-your-own-adventure shit for her.
I love her something fierce. There’s this one section in Orlando when she writes about how frustrating it is to have too many s’s on the page when you’re composing something, and since reading that I've loved her like she was some person I knew. She seems to have had such a conscious relationship with language, and a healthy one - one that had been psychoanalyzed by a competent professional. Pity that such a degree of consciousness wasn't the right kind to stop her drowning herself, but illness is illness and illness has got rid of lots of my favourite writers before their time. I'd punch myself in the face for another Emily Brontë novel, for example. Even if it was crap. Imagine. One novel from Emily Brontë, twelve and counting from Martin Spewbag Amis. What a vomitous world it is at times.
Last night, when I was taking a break from The Waves, I watched Barton Fink, and for the first time in a long time, a movie made me honestly think ‘what the fuck?’ Just to keep it simple for myself, I’m going to pretend the whole thing was an autobiographical movie script Fink imagined when writer’s block first set in and he looked at the picture of the lady on the beach while pondering the creative process in a commercialized context. I don’t fully believe that, but it’s tidy, and in any case as a plot device it’s better than anything they’ve done since they started using the A-list. I reccommend it, but I reccommend it with reefer, which I didn't have last night.
domenica, settembre 30, 2007
All the world loves a lover
The F-word is off on a school trip and I miss him pretty bad, but I’m also enjoying a bit of girly time with girl friends, and having some girly time to myself, listening to girly music like the Grinderman album and writing girly poetry about how I’d like to turn into an elephant so that it would take 500 bullets to bring me down. The conviction is there, but it’s not writing itself. Not angry enough these days.
Last night, I got high and watched a documentary about making gays stop being gay. You can find it on this page, under the title Gay Conversion. What a money spinner that looks to be. It’s times like this that I know I have principles, because if I didn’t that’s a bandwagon I’d jump onto faster than a young, naked, beckoning Charles Bronson. Invent a therapist qualification, move to the States and get my business card into the hands of broken-hearted parents. I could have lovely foamy money baths while having a money fight with my expensive ponies as they galloped past through my money fields, but I won’t.
Couple of reasons. One: I still remember the day I first had a chance to get a gay man to stop being gay - a gay man I’d been finding very hot to boot. And while this was back in my most undiscriminating days, I put his drunk ass in a cab for Boystown without a second thought. Even then, when I'd make bets with myself in the morning over what bed I'd end up in that night, I couldn’t stand the sudden conviction in the air that one hole was as good as another, which is all I think gay conversion programmes, no matter how expensive, can convince somebody of.
Which leads to the second reason: the God angle driving the thing is false advertising. I’m sure the loving, all-powerful God who I invoke whenever some Belgian twat opens a car door in my bicycle’s path doesn’t care about holes as long as we’re kind to the people they belong to. But when one pretends He does, money becomes no object – do you want to keep your money, or do you want an eternity of hellfire for you and your child? And if you start on children young enough, you don’t even have to restrict the financial bonanza to gays and their families – you could extend it to the families of millions of poor little kids who play doctor with their friends or stare quizzically at each other in the shower, trying to work out what’s normal.
I’m in awe at the way the corollaries of American Christianity bleed the flock dry. Tithing I get – it’s like taxation, if your ministry has an admirable social agenda. But convincing the flock that gayness is wrong enough to spend $2000 a week ‘curing’. . . can’t you imagine God calling these people to account and asking, if they had the power to extract that much money from their flock, why they didn’t use it to relieve the suffering of the truly desperate instead of to try to convince their clients that one hole was as good as another? What fun.
No, gentle readers, I fear God too much to become an ungayist, and you have spoken, or at least 11 of you have, and 72% of that 11 suggested that I become a muckraking journalist. So instead I will ferret out the iniquitous and unexpected in our nasty, naughty world, and throw it at your feet. But I’m not going to Russia; that place is fucked up. And I also reserve the right to be 13% novelistic and 8% ornamental. So here’re the results of my first investigation – what an early-70’s Japanese commercial for a product called Mandom, advertised by Charles Bronson, looks like.
Answer: I want to say NSFW, but I think I’m the only person who’d see it as pornographic instead of just fucking hilarious:
Last night, I got high and watched a documentary about making gays stop being gay. You can find it on this page, under the title Gay Conversion. What a money spinner that looks to be. It’s times like this that I know I have principles, because if I didn’t that’s a bandwagon I’d jump onto faster than a young, naked, beckoning Charles Bronson. Invent a therapist qualification, move to the States and get my business card into the hands of broken-hearted parents. I could have lovely foamy money baths while having a money fight with my expensive ponies as they galloped past through my money fields, but I won’t.
Couple of reasons. One: I still remember the day I first had a chance to get a gay man to stop being gay - a gay man I’d been finding very hot to boot. And while this was back in my most undiscriminating days, I put his drunk ass in a cab for Boystown without a second thought. Even then, when I'd make bets with myself in the morning over what bed I'd end up in that night, I couldn’t stand the sudden conviction in the air that one hole was as good as another, which is all I think gay conversion programmes, no matter how expensive, can convince somebody of.
Which leads to the second reason: the God angle driving the thing is false advertising. I’m sure the loving, all-powerful God who I invoke whenever some Belgian twat opens a car door in my bicycle’s path doesn’t care about holes as long as we’re kind to the people they belong to. But when one pretends He does, money becomes no object – do you want to keep your money, or do you want an eternity of hellfire for you and your child? And if you start on children young enough, you don’t even have to restrict the financial bonanza to gays and their families – you could extend it to the families of millions of poor little kids who play doctor with their friends or stare quizzically at each other in the shower, trying to work out what’s normal.
I’m in awe at the way the corollaries of American Christianity bleed the flock dry. Tithing I get – it’s like taxation, if your ministry has an admirable social agenda. But convincing the flock that gayness is wrong enough to spend $2000 a week ‘curing’. . . can’t you imagine God calling these people to account and asking, if they had the power to extract that much money from their flock, why they didn’t use it to relieve the suffering of the truly desperate instead of to try to convince their clients that one hole was as good as another? What fun.
No, gentle readers, I fear God too much to become an ungayist, and you have spoken, or at least 11 of you have, and 72% of that 11 suggested that I become a muckraking journalist. So instead I will ferret out the iniquitous and unexpected in our nasty, naughty world, and throw it at your feet. But I’m not going to Russia; that place is fucked up. And I also reserve the right to be 13% novelistic and 8% ornamental. So here’re the results of my first investigation – what an early-70’s Japanese commercial for a product called Mandom, advertised by Charles Bronson, looks like.
Answer: I want to say NSFW, but I think I’m the only person who’d see it as pornographic instead of just fucking hilarious:
giovedì, settembre 27, 2007
You're playing with the rifle, my angel
Alright - Trash yéyé is brilliant. Maybe I like it better than Négatif. But goddamnit, what's wrong with French people? Or at least, what's wrong with innovative French boy singer/songwriters? Rose Kennedy and Négatif were both concept albums, after a fashion, in the Serge Gainsbourg Melody Nelson fashion but, you know, about Rose Kennedy and some misanthropic outlaw called Billy Bob, and not about deflowering a 14 year old girl called Melody Nelson who dies in a plane crash a few days later.
Call it cathartic paranoia because of a combination of my historical circumstances and the classy reefer we got in Amsterdam (which the F-word methodically smoked through during his two days off - we're already out and I'll be back to smoking crappy hash while he goes on a school trip for the next five days - I've had a busy week so I think I got a grand total of 20 tokes off 3 grammes - fuck, am I pissed!) but I think Trash yéyé is also a concept album in more of a L'Homme à tête de chou way.
By which I mean more of a murderous way. I think it's a concept album about a relationship ending after a drawn out process involving a certain degree of mutual infidelity, the rejected man eventually cracking, killing the woman, and then daydreaming about her until he manages to loose his identity in upstate New York. Sounds farfetched, I know, but the thing that makes me doubt it the most is that it doesn't sound farfetched enough - she doesn't come back as a rabbit that eats his cabbage head - you know how it is.
Anyways, I'm going to see him in concert at the end of the next month, which is great - can't wait. I wonder how many people he'll be playing with, the arrangements for REAL instruments and voices on his albums are so good - though I still prefer the Arcade Fire in terms of instrumentation- which coincidentally I'm going to go see three days after I see Benjamin Biolay, at the beginning of November. The timing is perfect, because listening to Benjamin Biolay puts me back in teenage Curehead mode and listening to the Arcade Fire turns me back into a real person again.
Call it cathartic paranoia because of a combination of my historical circumstances and the classy reefer we got in Amsterdam (which the F-word methodically smoked through during his two days off - we're already out and I'll be back to smoking crappy hash while he goes on a school trip for the next five days - I've had a busy week so I think I got a grand total of 20 tokes off 3 grammes - fuck, am I pissed!) but I think Trash yéyé is also a concept album in more of a L'Homme à tête de chou way.
By which I mean more of a murderous way. I think it's a concept album about a relationship ending after a drawn out process involving a certain degree of mutual infidelity, the rejected man eventually cracking, killing the woman, and then daydreaming about her until he manages to loose his identity in upstate New York. Sounds farfetched, I know, but the thing that makes me doubt it the most is that it doesn't sound farfetched enough - she doesn't come back as a rabbit that eats his cabbage head - you know how it is.
Anyways, I'm going to see him in concert at the end of the next month, which is great - can't wait. I wonder how many people he'll be playing with, the arrangements for REAL instruments and voices on his albums are so good - though I still prefer the Arcade Fire in terms of instrumentation- which coincidentally I'm going to go see three days after I see Benjamin Biolay, at the beginning of November. The timing is perfect, because listening to Benjamin Biolay puts me back in teenage Curehead mode and listening to the Arcade Fire turns me back into a real person again.
mercoledì, settembre 26, 2007
Flick of the Red Dragon's tail
More evolutionary psychology or reproductive pyschology coming out from the BBC these days, and when I read this sort of thing at my present stage of red dragon riding (jumping off the tail, in case you were wondering) it always niggles at me some. Not this article so much, which was interesting and about an interesting study. (But considering the subjects don't use birth control I wonder if they could possibly get useful results without paternity testing and possibly causing strife in the community . . .)
No, it niggles at me mostly by virtue of reminding me of this article from a year back that keeps popping up in the 'most emailed' section, probably because James Blunt has just released a new album. Because I hate James Blunt. I hate his voice, I hate his songs, I hate that he outsells people with nice voices and nice songs, I hate every headline about him I ever accidentally read about what a great personality he thinks he has, and I hate that he's always on the fucking radio when I go about my business in the shops.
I hate James Blunt, and I honestly believe that any woman who prefers his sort of voice to Barry White's sort of voice has deep emotional problems that are subconsciously forcing her to try to select herself out by going after whiny big-girls'-blouses instead of rich-voiced men who could actually do her rather than sit in a corner whining about their last girlfriend/their mother/how beautiful, beautiful, beautiful the chick in front of them is.
So you'd think I'd actually appreciate this study, but I don't. Or maybe the study is great but the assumptions made in the article really grind my gears.
Example:
"However, the researchers found that when not fertile, women were more likely to be attracted to a more feminine voice signalling a more caring man, more likely to invest in a long-term relationship."
How does having a more feminine voice signal a more caring man? It doesn't to me and I'm surprised it does to anyone.
Takes James Blunt and Barry White again - and I'm so sorry if I make anything stick in your head like a splintery wooden stake - and consider 'You're Beautiful.' It's all about what some great ululating pansy thinks about a lady's attractions. It gazes up its own ass and doesn't get the lady anywhere, certainly not into a relationship, unless she also enjoys looking up asses and constant reassurance about her looks, in which case child-rearing hopefully isn't a priority.
And then take 'I'm gonna love you (just a little more).' It's all about what wanting to do stuff with you, enthusiastically, for a long, long time. Caring. Far better relationship material, surely.
See, there's an assumption here about how deep voiced, attractive men are more likely to do you wrong than a great whiny frog of a man who whines at you and sticks you on unnatural pedestals from which you can do nought but fall so that he feels forced to replace you with some other woman who will also fall, because he doesn't understand the first thing about women while thinking he does because he's feminine, whatever the hell that means. And I don't get that. It looks like a steaming heap of bullshit to me. It's the namby pamby ones you can't turn your back on, the ones who try to appeal to the entire female races' mothering instincts while projecting their animas on everything in their sights like a Blackwater employee projecting bullets in Iraq.
And on that tasteful note I am off to work. Here's Barry White to clean your head out:
No, it niggles at me mostly by virtue of reminding me of this article from a year back that keeps popping up in the 'most emailed' section, probably because James Blunt has just released a new album. Because I hate James Blunt. I hate his voice, I hate his songs, I hate that he outsells people with nice voices and nice songs, I hate every headline about him I ever accidentally read about what a great personality he thinks he has, and I hate that he's always on the fucking radio when I go about my business in the shops.
I hate James Blunt, and I honestly believe that any woman who prefers his sort of voice to Barry White's sort of voice has deep emotional problems that are subconsciously forcing her to try to select herself out by going after whiny big-girls'-blouses instead of rich-voiced men who could actually do her rather than sit in a corner whining about their last girlfriend/their mother/how beautiful, beautiful, beautiful the chick in front of them is.
So you'd think I'd actually appreciate this study, but I don't. Or maybe the study is great but the assumptions made in the article really grind my gears.
Example:
"However, the researchers found that when not fertile, women were more likely to be attracted to a more feminine voice signalling a more caring man, more likely to invest in a long-term relationship."
How does having a more feminine voice signal a more caring man? It doesn't to me and I'm surprised it does to anyone.
Takes James Blunt and Barry White again - and I'm so sorry if I make anything stick in your head like a splintery wooden stake - and consider 'You're Beautiful.' It's all about what some great ululating pansy thinks about a lady's attractions. It gazes up its own ass and doesn't get the lady anywhere, certainly not into a relationship, unless she also enjoys looking up asses and constant reassurance about her looks, in which case child-rearing hopefully isn't a priority.
And then take 'I'm gonna love you (just a little more).' It's all about what wanting to do stuff with you, enthusiastically, for a long, long time. Caring. Far better relationship material, surely.
See, there's an assumption here about how deep voiced, attractive men are more likely to do you wrong than a great whiny frog of a man who whines at you and sticks you on unnatural pedestals from which you can do nought but fall so that he feels forced to replace you with some other woman who will also fall, because he doesn't understand the first thing about women while thinking he does because he's feminine, whatever the hell that means. And I don't get that. It looks like a steaming heap of bullshit to me. It's the namby pamby ones you can't turn your back on, the ones who try to appeal to the entire female races' mothering instincts while projecting their animas on everything in their sights like a Blackwater employee projecting bullets in Iraq.
And on that tasteful note I am off to work. Here's Barry White to clean your head out:
martedì, settembre 25, 2007
Evil Amsterdam II
So last night we got high and watched Evil Dead II as the F-word had sworn I'd needed to do for a long time; it was so very Bruce Campbell. Wow. I sat there intermittently being impressed by what was being done with such a tiny budget, telling the F-word to stop distracting me by telling me what was being done with such a tiny budget, and being enchanted with what Bruce Campbell was doing. Nobody else could have done that, I reckon.
Such a boy movie, to be sexist about it - porn grade dialogue and one visual spectacle after another - shameless! But great. It explains why the Spiderman movies suck - Sam Raimi can't direct dialogue. I don't see why he should have to, when he can direct wonderful shameless visual spectacles with rubber-faced actors who don't care about looking like a crazy jerk. Of course, that's not the Spidermans, or at least it hasn't been and I don't suppose it will be as the series seems to be using some sort of winning formula that brings in the girls as well as the boys because there's a romantic subplot and words. But you know, if I wanted words in my movies, I'd go to the fucking theatre, wouldn't I?
Anyways, Amsterdam. We didn't do much. The weather was unseasonably wonderful so we spent a lot of time exploring. Found some nice places to eat and drink, which I'd love to write about here because finding nice places to eat there hasn't been so easy in my experience, but frankly it's gone. Stayed in a hotel room that cost €80 and was roughly the size of the bed, not to mention right next to the boiler room - felt fleeced, so I slept like a lamb.
Went to the Van Gogh gallery for, I was shocked to learn on departing from it, six hours. Usually I get museum exhaustion in two. That's a hell of a gallery - not every day that you find a gallery that has enough work by one artist that you can follow it through their life in a fully engaging way. The Picasso gallery in Paris is like that, but this was better because I like Van Gogh better than I like Picasso, and because it wasn't run indifferently by French people, but brilliantly by Dutch people, who I think should run everything in the world, except food.
Don't tell them that though; their heads are already swollen enough. I remember going to a flower show with my brother last March that was full of Dutch people, one of whom said to me, "If you're not Dutch, you're not much."
"Much of a what?" I asked, and smiled.
Such a boy movie, to be sexist about it - porn grade dialogue and one visual spectacle after another - shameless! But great. It explains why the Spiderman movies suck - Sam Raimi can't direct dialogue. I don't see why he should have to, when he can direct wonderful shameless visual spectacles with rubber-faced actors who don't care about looking like a crazy jerk. Of course, that's not the Spidermans, or at least it hasn't been and I don't suppose it will be as the series seems to be using some sort of winning formula that brings in the girls as well as the boys because there's a romantic subplot and words. But you know, if I wanted words in my movies, I'd go to the fucking theatre, wouldn't I?
Anyways, Amsterdam. We didn't do much. The weather was unseasonably wonderful so we spent a lot of time exploring. Found some nice places to eat and drink, which I'd love to write about here because finding nice places to eat there hasn't been so easy in my experience, but frankly it's gone. Stayed in a hotel room that cost €80 and was roughly the size of the bed, not to mention right next to the boiler room - felt fleeced, so I slept like a lamb.
Went to the Van Gogh gallery for, I was shocked to learn on departing from it, six hours. Usually I get museum exhaustion in two. That's a hell of a gallery - not every day that you find a gallery that has enough work by one artist that you can follow it through their life in a fully engaging way. The Picasso gallery in Paris is like that, but this was better because I like Van Gogh better than I like Picasso, and because it wasn't run indifferently by French people, but brilliantly by Dutch people, who I think should run everything in the world, except food.
Don't tell them that though; their heads are already swollen enough. I remember going to a flower show with my brother last March that was full of Dutch people, one of whom said to me, "If you're not Dutch, you're not much."
"Much of a what?" I asked, and smiled.
lunedì, settembre 24, 2007
@.
My favourite French word is 'arobase.' It's very pretty - it sounds pretty when they say it and calls something pretty to mind, maybe because it sounds like 'arabesque.' The thing it describes is not very exciting, but it turns out to have beautiful names in other languages too. The Dutch and Germans call it, respectively, "apestaartje" (little ape-tail) and "affenschwanz" (ape tail). In Italian, it's called a "chiocciola," or snail. In English, it's just 'at'. Boooo-ring.
This leads me to mention that a song from Benjamin Biolay's new album Trash yéyé, 'Dans ta bouche,' is the prettiest song I've ever heard about oral sex and I like it even better than 'Put the South in Your Mouth (Little Lady)' by White Cowbell Oklahoma. (Oh, NXNE. I wonder how you were this year. I need more music here, being bourgeious has made me remiss.)
Prettiest - except maybe 'Sugar Honey Iced Tea' by Kelis. That's an awfully pretty song too. And 'I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More' by Barry White. Okay, I'll qualify it and say 'Dans ta bouche' is the prettiest song I've ever heard a man sing about getting blown.
Oral sex is such a weird thing when you stop and think about it, isn't it? What a pack of naughty monkeys we are. I remember when I first found out people actually did that to each other and thinking it was the goofiest thing ever - not gross, just irretrievably goofy. And now remembering that is like looking back on not knowing how to read, but there's still something pretty goofy about it, in a nice way of course.
All a way of saying that Trash yéyé is growing on me, even the first half. It's not like Négatif, where one listen shocked me with the goodness of it all, but it's better and better in my ears. So deeply depressing, though! He makes me so sad. It's like when I was a teenage Curehead, except with fewer moments of fleeting humour. At least Trash yéyé is angry too. Helps me broaden my vicarious emotional range.
Anyways, tomorrow, Mel, I'll write about Amsterdam and stop nattering on about melancholy French wasters and vicarious fellatio. Except tonight we're getting high and watching Evil Dead, and I have a feeling I'll be enthusiastic about that . . . I'll see what I can do. In the meantime, here's a little Benjamin Biolay so you can see a bit of what I'm nattering on about.
This one is from the new album:
This one is from Négatif - it's one of my favourites, I suppose, but it's hard for me to pick and choose with that album:
This one is from A l'origine and while it's good the main thing I like about it is the title, which I'd translate as 'My Love Fucked Me (Over)':
This leads me to mention that a song from Benjamin Biolay's new album Trash yéyé, 'Dans ta bouche,' is the prettiest song I've ever heard about oral sex and I like it even better than 'Put the South in Your Mouth (Little Lady)' by White Cowbell Oklahoma. (Oh, NXNE. I wonder how you were this year. I need more music here, being bourgeious has made me remiss.)
Prettiest - except maybe 'Sugar Honey Iced Tea' by Kelis. That's an awfully pretty song too. And 'I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More' by Barry White. Okay, I'll qualify it and say 'Dans ta bouche' is the prettiest song I've ever heard a man sing about getting blown.
Oral sex is such a weird thing when you stop and think about it, isn't it? What a pack of naughty monkeys we are. I remember when I first found out people actually did that to each other and thinking it was the goofiest thing ever - not gross, just irretrievably goofy. And now remembering that is like looking back on not knowing how to read, but there's still something pretty goofy about it, in a nice way of course.
All a way of saying that Trash yéyé is growing on me, even the first half. It's not like Négatif, where one listen shocked me with the goodness of it all, but it's better and better in my ears. So deeply depressing, though! He makes me so sad. It's like when I was a teenage Curehead, except with fewer moments of fleeting humour. At least Trash yéyé is angry too. Helps me broaden my vicarious emotional range.
Anyways, tomorrow, Mel, I'll write about Amsterdam and stop nattering on about melancholy French wasters and vicarious fellatio. Except tonight we're getting high and watching Evil Dead, and I have a feeling I'll be enthusiastic about that . . . I'll see what I can do. In the meantime, here's a little Benjamin Biolay so you can see a bit of what I'm nattering on about.
This one is from the new album:
This one is from Négatif - it's one of my favourites, I suppose, but it's hard for me to pick and choose with that album:
This one is from A l'origine and while it's good the main thing I like about it is the title, which I'd translate as 'My Love Fucked Me (Over)':
domenica, settembre 23, 2007
The Amsterdam readfest
Finished Fall on Your Knees on the way to Amsterdam. The commentary was right - I did like it better as it wore on - but still felt that it was wearing on and that I'd got gigged into reading something I wouldn't ordinarily read. But then what was gigging me was the quality of the writing, I suppose, or the book's reputation as a modern Canadian classic, or, I don't know. Perverse voyeurism, maybe? It was gruesome, and I'm sorry, very V.C. Andrews.
The thought occurred to me, when Kathleen's father interrupted her with Rose, that any social conservative readers would have a field day with the fact the main characters' heterosexuality and nuclear famility were so dysfunctional and the girl-on-girl action was so hot. But then social conservatives don't read long novels, besides Gone With the Wind, I suppose, which for what it's worth was way, way better than Fall on Your Knees.
But Dale was right a couple comments back - Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliette) is a fucking awesome play. And the dialogue through Fall on Your Knees is really top-notch, too. That's so hard. Good dialogue.
Anyways, on the way back from Amsterdam I read In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin. Bruce Chatwin is certainly my favourite travel writer and maybe one of my favourite writers altogether. This book is different from the other ones I've read by him - it has more of the same feeling throughout instead of being a bunch of snippets - somehow there's something more personal about the feeling, if not the stories. That's probably just in my head because I didn't know anything about his life when I read his other books.
But there's something exhausted about the person who listens and writes In Patagonia - something beyond anger, frustration, beyond anything but looking and listening. And that makes the perfect narrator to tell us about a place like Patagonia in the 70's, after the end of the Allende government and in the thick of Isabel Peron's government, yet so far from it all. Big big recommendation.
The thought occurred to me, when Kathleen's father interrupted her with Rose, that any social conservative readers would have a field day with the fact the main characters' heterosexuality and nuclear famility were so dysfunctional and the girl-on-girl action was so hot. But then social conservatives don't read long novels, besides Gone With the Wind, I suppose, which for what it's worth was way, way better than Fall on Your Knees.
But Dale was right a couple comments back - Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliette) is a fucking awesome play. And the dialogue through Fall on Your Knees is really top-notch, too. That's so hard. Good dialogue.
Anyways, on the way back from Amsterdam I read In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin. Bruce Chatwin is certainly my favourite travel writer and maybe one of my favourite writers altogether. This book is different from the other ones I've read by him - it has more of the same feeling throughout instead of being a bunch of snippets - somehow there's something more personal about the feeling, if not the stories. That's probably just in my head because I didn't know anything about his life when I read his other books.
But there's something exhausted about the person who listens and writes In Patagonia - something beyond anger, frustration, beyond anything but looking and listening. And that makes the perfect narrator to tell us about a place like Patagonia in the 70's, after the end of the Allende government and in the thick of Isabel Peron's government, yet so far from it all. Big big recommendation.
giovedì, settembre 20, 2007
Eyeing the enchanted duck
So I'm about halfway through Fall on Your Knees and it's better. Looks like we'll make it to the end. I would have read farther but my boss lent me a copy of Private Eye, an English satirical magazine focusing on politics large and small and on the media - it used to be partly owned by Peter Cook. It was neat. There's a similar thing in France - le Canard enchaîné - half the price and twice as frequent, though electronically incompetent, ho hum, isn't that the continent versus the Green and Pleasant Isle for you. Anyways. Both of them get sued for libel a lot and it doesn't stick and I like that.
I can't think of any other finger-poking mags of their circulation and at the moment that's a problem because of how tame and shitty mainstream media is. What's happened to muckraking journalism anyways? I mean real, dirty, filthy muckraking journalism. Going around and nosing out a problem or a situation and crying foul. Maybe I'm just reading the wrong papers.
Although to be honest with you since I started reading fiction again I haven't wanted to read anything real, even the Economist. Maybe that's why I had to stop school - for the kajillion years it took on my masters I don't think I read or had the desire to read one single work of fiction, and now that I've found a cheap and lovely used bookstore my desire to understand the political world around me has gone on holiday, satirical muckraking rags notwithstanding. Of course I'm still dealing with that feeling of impending doom I mentioned last week and that always steers me away from the papers a bit.
BTW, the F-word thinks I should become a muck-raking journalist. I'm still thinking massage therapist, but less so now, since that's only practical if we move to Australia and after last week I'd rather move to Portugal. Any votes?
Anyways. Switching gears completely.
Work is very, very busy right now because I have two market reports in the next week and a half. The research for them is 80% done so that means I spend lots of time typing and listening to music. And the 2004 Nick Cave double CD which I just got, finally - okay, listening to it while you work isn't the best way to appreciate it because he's so wordy, but The Lyre of Orpheus half of it is really good, at least. Abattoir Blues has been harder to listen to with half a mind but that sounds good as well. Now I will beat a path to buy the Grinderman album. I love being financially solvent.
And yesterday I got the new Benjamin Biolay CD, Trash yéyé, to see if overall I like the man enough to go to his show here at the end of October. The first few tracks were shitty. And the last half was great. I've come to accept that singing talent is not a feature of this genre of French music, and Biolay is so good at using instruments to make very pretty combinations of sounds - I wish he'd let his voice fade into the background more . . . okay, he's wordy too, and they're poetic words, sure, but I wish he'd listen to the Arcade Fire and let his raspy immelodious voice out of the limelight. We'll read the lyrics, for heaven's sake, don't be so pushy. Anyways, I'll just mess around with my speakers until I can't hear him much anymore.
Off to work and then Dusseldorf for the weekend.
I
love
Europe
I can't think of any other finger-poking mags of their circulation and at the moment that's a problem because of how tame and shitty mainstream media is. What's happened to muckraking journalism anyways? I mean real, dirty, filthy muckraking journalism. Going around and nosing out a problem or a situation and crying foul. Maybe I'm just reading the wrong papers.
Although to be honest with you since I started reading fiction again I haven't wanted to read anything real, even the Economist. Maybe that's why I had to stop school - for the kajillion years it took on my masters I don't think I read or had the desire to read one single work of fiction, and now that I've found a cheap and lovely used bookstore my desire to understand the political world around me has gone on holiday, satirical muckraking rags notwithstanding. Of course I'm still dealing with that feeling of impending doom I mentioned last week and that always steers me away from the papers a bit.
BTW, the F-word thinks I should become a muck-raking journalist. I'm still thinking massage therapist, but less so now, since that's only practical if we move to Australia and after last week I'd rather move to Portugal. Any votes?
Anyways. Switching gears completely.
Work is very, very busy right now because I have two market reports in the next week and a half. The research for them is 80% done so that means I spend lots of time typing and listening to music. And the 2004 Nick Cave double CD which I just got, finally - okay, listening to it while you work isn't the best way to appreciate it because he's so wordy, but The Lyre of Orpheus half of it is really good, at least. Abattoir Blues has been harder to listen to with half a mind but that sounds good as well. Now I will beat a path to buy the Grinderman album. I love being financially solvent.
And yesterday I got the new Benjamin Biolay CD, Trash yéyé, to see if overall I like the man enough to go to his show here at the end of October. The first few tracks were shitty. And the last half was great. I've come to accept that singing talent is not a feature of this genre of French music, and Biolay is so good at using instruments to make very pretty combinations of sounds - I wish he'd let his voice fade into the background more . . . okay, he's wordy too, and they're poetic words, sure, but I wish he'd listen to the Arcade Fire and let his raspy immelodious voice out of the limelight. We'll read the lyrics, for heaven's sake, don't be so pushy. Anyways, I'll just mess around with my speakers until I can't hear him much anymore.
Off to work and then Dusseldorf for the weekend.
I
love
Europe
mercoledì, settembre 19, 2007
If I make it to tomorrow I'll be surprised
Losing patience with Fall on Your Knees at the 1/4 point of 500-some pages, which is a really yeeeeergghy place to lose patience as I already have a bit of a commitment to it. Sort of like breaking up after you've met their really nice parents. There has just been an orgy of violence, death, and incest that has left me disgusted, dislocated, and disgruntled.
Disgusted, because it was gross, and the casual approach to the incest was the grossest of all. Dislocated, because it was such a sudden shift from the style of the book to date that I feel like my relationship with all the characters snapped. Okay, all the events that happened were the natural conclusion of events that had happened previously, including a very non-casual build up to the casual incest. The story hasn't betrayed me. But this sudden jump from linear narration to record-skipping between revolting and disturbing scene upon revolting and disturbing scene just feels wrong and I don't know who I'm reading about anymore. Not least because character's characters have slipped by the waysides. The final days of Materia especially left me totally unconvinced that MacDonald wasn't just using her cast cynically and unfaithfully as a way to deliver us a steaming platter of blood and guts.
Finally, disgruntled, because as I was going through the gross bit my mind flashed back to the balls MacDonald had had in bringing in Wuthering Heights in the opening aphorism or whatever you call it when people quote someone else's book or a poem right before starting a chapter (five shiny new Euros to anyone who can tell me the name for that device - Americans, that can buy you a house, so I really want to you try on this one). Because Wuthering Heights also had a mid-point orgy of violence as Cathy died of brain fever - or was it from her child? - as Hindley died of a rotten liver - or was it at Heathcliff's hand? - as a pregnant Isabella Linton ran for her life across the moor with a headwound, and as all the other icky, creepy suggestions stayed with us from earlier in the book (Cathy and Heathcliff were raised brother and sister! and what is this Heathcliff anyways?)
But you know what? In that whole sequence, the only blood we saw was Isabella's, which she was remarkably light-hearted about. The only account we had of Cathy's death was a comforting second-hand narrative within a second-hand narrative. And Hindley - his death is practically reported to us as hearsay. What's more the whole nasty episode came out seemingly in a linear fashion, though not really, since we heard about events as Nelly learned about them or told them, and not as they happened. Good god, that book is well-told. Maybe the best ever.
My point is - little blood, no guts. And roughly one million times more effective than the blood and guts in Fall on Your Knees. Okay, fine, we can't all be Emily Brontë. But you know, don't evoke Emily Brontë and then give me V.C. Andrews with better sentence structure.
Anyways, Melbine and Dale, I know you've both read the book already, so advise me about whether or not I should continue and if it gets better. After an unbearably twee two page chapter with italic fonts and little flowery decorations and declarations about the things we mutter while we're fucking our first love, MacDonald has just switched gears to Frances, Mercedes and Lily, and I have to say so far I'm really not caring. Does it pick up if you stick with it?
Disgusted, because it was gross, and the casual approach to the incest was the grossest of all. Dislocated, because it was such a sudden shift from the style of the book to date that I feel like my relationship with all the characters snapped. Okay, all the events that happened were the natural conclusion of events that had happened previously, including a very non-casual build up to the casual incest. The story hasn't betrayed me. But this sudden jump from linear narration to record-skipping between revolting and disturbing scene upon revolting and disturbing scene just feels wrong and I don't know who I'm reading about anymore. Not least because character's characters have slipped by the waysides. The final days of Materia especially left me totally unconvinced that MacDonald wasn't just using her cast cynically and unfaithfully as a way to deliver us a steaming platter of blood and guts.
Finally, disgruntled, because as I was going through the gross bit my mind flashed back to the balls MacDonald had had in bringing in Wuthering Heights in the opening aphorism or whatever you call it when people quote someone else's book or a poem right before starting a chapter (five shiny new Euros to anyone who can tell me the name for that device - Americans, that can buy you a house, so I really want to you try on this one). Because Wuthering Heights also had a mid-point orgy of violence as Cathy died of brain fever - or was it from her child? - as Hindley died of a rotten liver - or was it at Heathcliff's hand? - as a pregnant Isabella Linton ran for her life across the moor with a headwound, and as all the other icky, creepy suggestions stayed with us from earlier in the book (Cathy and Heathcliff were raised brother and sister! and what is this Heathcliff anyways?)
But you know what? In that whole sequence, the only blood we saw was Isabella's, which she was remarkably light-hearted about. The only account we had of Cathy's death was a comforting second-hand narrative within a second-hand narrative. And Hindley - his death is practically reported to us as hearsay. What's more the whole nasty episode came out seemingly in a linear fashion, though not really, since we heard about events as Nelly learned about them or told them, and not as they happened. Good god, that book is well-told. Maybe the best ever.
My point is - little blood, no guts. And roughly one million times more effective than the blood and guts in Fall on Your Knees. Okay, fine, we can't all be Emily Brontë. But you know, don't evoke Emily Brontë and then give me V.C. Andrews with better sentence structure.
Anyways, Melbine and Dale, I know you've both read the book already, so advise me about whether or not I should continue and if it gets better. After an unbearably twee two page chapter with italic fonts and little flowery decorations and declarations about the things we mutter while we're fucking our first love, MacDonald has just switched gears to Frances, Mercedes and Lily, and I have to say so far I'm really not caring. Does it pick up if you stick with it?
martedì, settembre 18, 2007
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.
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.
lunedì, settembre 17, 2007
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:
domenica, settembre 16, 2007
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:
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.
lunedì, settembre 10, 2007
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:
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:
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