Portugal was so great I nearly cried when we got on the plane out of there. And then I cried on the plane when the engine started making funny noises. Panic Attack! I kept it quiet though. Thank god I've finally got my driver's license. My lifestyle will always involve areoplane rides, and probably many more than the vast majority of the world's population, environmental direness notwithstanding, because that's simply the nature of love and of oceans - but I would like them to involve less than they currently do, because flying continues to scare the living shit out of me.
Moving on. Whilst on trains, planes, lying on the beach, et cetera, I read The Mill on the Floss, which put me into quite a poopy mood briefly, though it was very good, and now I can't wait to get to Middlemarch. Floss was rather uncanny in its depiction of a child's mind via Maggie, but even more uncanny in its depiction of the inevitability of destructive sexual love from bored women who don't believe in themselves enough to do anything else with their stagnating brains.
Maggie was suffering through societal constraints the likes of which my generation can't imagine, but we can recognize bits and peices in our own situation - and constraints from the outside aside, during my years of spreading it around it was evident to me even at the time that there were hundreds of better things for me to be doing than nailing a bunch of guys whose names I don't remember anymore. And now, I don't regret the sex, some of which was definitely beyond worthwhile, but I regret the attention I paid to it. Floss reminded me of that regret, and put me in a poopy mood because enduring societal constraints notwithstanding, it looks like there was something wilful about my propensities to orient my life, to a certain degree, around a generalized notion of cock, when the whole world is just bristling with cocks anyways, and with many other things besides.
Also reading more Stephen Jay Gould and adoring it more than before, it that's possible. But more on that later.
lunedì, agosto 10, 2009
giovedì, luglio 30, 2009
A word to cities considering bikeshare schemes
1. Congratulations for having such a great idea. Not only will it cut down on traffic and maybe even persuade your denizens to drop a few pounds, but it will help shut people up about transport strikes, high gas prices, and how you're doing fuck-all about environmental issues only regional and national governments are in a position to do anything about
2. Sadly, bikes are not enough. You need to sink a bit of money to the infrastructure for them at the same time, as has been done in Paris with the Velib scheme, and has not been done here with the Villo scheme, and has not been done in Amsterdam because they don't need to.
3. But most of all - and this is what I really came here to say - and it's bugging the hell out of me, because I can't find the Dutch site - don't go the Velib and Villo route, and set up your city with ten-speed monsters with squeeze brakes. Go the Amsterdam route and get the simplest possible city bikes - no speeds, and backpedal brakes. They'll be cheaper to buy, cheaper to maintain, and less annoying for the users overall. And it will be less expensive and provocative when brainless young trogladytes push them into the canals/traffic/rivers/up their own useless asses.
2. Sadly, bikes are not enough. You need to sink a bit of money to the infrastructure for them at the same time, as has been done in Paris with the Velib scheme, and has not been done here with the Villo scheme, and has not been done in Amsterdam because they don't need to.
3. But most of all - and this is what I really came here to say - and it's bugging the hell out of me, because I can't find the Dutch site - don't go the Velib and Villo route, and set up your city with ten-speed monsters with squeeze brakes. Go the Amsterdam route and get the simplest possible city bikes - no speeds, and backpedal brakes. They'll be cheaper to buy, cheaper to maintain, and less annoying for the users overall. And it will be less expensive and provocative when brainless young trogladytes push them into the canals/traffic/rivers/up their own useless asses.
mercoledì, luglio 29, 2009
Three rotten things happened last night
1. The Chaser's War on Everything ended forever. Australians apparently have the same habit of axing television programmes before they run out of ideas and turn into painful, undead farce (seasons 5-7 of the Sopranos, anyone?) that the British have. And that's one of the few things I admire about the British. But as a North American, that's foreign to me (every season following the first of Sex and the City, anyone?) and so I'm still so sad they're gone. They say they'll be back with something else, but who, oh who, will embarass themselves with Australian politicians in the meantime, giving me an indirect study of that country's political firmament?
Two fave moments - one from the first season, one from the last:
Sigh.
2. I finished Adam Bede. There's no more, it's over. Heartbreaking. But I'm still chuffed that I've got four more Eliot monsters to wade into, and after finishing the book I opened it again at random and all the words were still there, thankfully. It will be a good re-read, and a frequent one. Being a stoner I love re-reading books. On the second read, after a few pipes, it's like a fucking private cinema in my brain. And any cinema featuring my new crush Adam is going to be hot.
3. Lexie fell off some boxes. I think her leg is broken. Unutterably distressing, but she doesn't seem to be in distress, she's putting some weight on it, and I'll take her to the vet this afternoon. If she needs some focussed attention I'll have to put off my departure for Lisbon until Monday, and that will be on the fucking overnight coach - there are either no planes left, or they're prohibitively expensive. Oh well. I won't care if she'll be okay. I was absolutely distraught until she started purring, and I realized cats aren't horses, and we won't have to shoot her if it actually is busted. So all will be well, I hope.
Two fave moments - one from the first season, one from the last:
Sigh.
2. I finished Adam Bede. There's no more, it's over. Heartbreaking. But I'm still chuffed that I've got four more Eliot monsters to wade into, and after finishing the book I opened it again at random and all the words were still there, thankfully. It will be a good re-read, and a frequent one. Being a stoner I love re-reading books. On the second read, after a few pipes, it's like a fucking private cinema in my brain. And any cinema featuring my new crush Adam is going to be hot.
3. Lexie fell off some boxes. I think her leg is broken. Unutterably distressing, but she doesn't seem to be in distress, she's putting some weight on it, and I'll take her to the vet this afternoon. If she needs some focussed attention I'll have to put off my departure for Lisbon until Monday, and that will be on the fucking overnight coach - there are either no planes left, or they're prohibitively expensive. Oh well. I won't care if she'll be okay. I was absolutely distraught until she started purring, and I realized cats aren't horses, and we won't have to shoot her if it actually is busted. So all will be well, I hope.
In which I get a better hero
Almost done Adam Bede. I fear Eliot jumped the shark in part six, but Adam Bede has officially become my new literary wank-fantasy. What a man. Much better than that leering shitheel Rochester, or that conversationally-challenged Wentworth in Persuasion. In my brain, Adam Bede is like a guy in a less-murderous Bad Seeds song. Like celebrity wank-fantasy Nick Cave with a chin and muscles and no heroin - and instead of music, carpentry. Hehhehheh. Wood. Sweet.
Do I make sense? No, but I bet the Adam Bede miniseries currently playing in my brain is more amusing than the 1991 minseries, when Patsy Fucking Kensit, of all people, played Hetty. Yeah, that's it, get a fucking chiselled albino to play a blooming, round young brunette. Stupid fucking BBC.
Do I make sense? No, but I bet the Adam Bede miniseries currently playing in my brain is more amusing than the 1991 minseries, when Patsy Fucking Kensit, of all people, played Hetty. Yeah, that's it, get a fucking chiselled albino to play a blooming, round young brunette. Stupid fucking BBC.
martedì, luglio 28, 2009
Big wah
Working from home today. Sniffly, coughy, and fucking frightened of getting sick before going to Portugal. Mind you I was coughy and sniffly before going to Croatia, and the minute I stepped off the plane there everything seemed to clear up. Sometimes I wonder if the flu actually exists as a virus rather than our bodies demonstrating their misery at us making them live in a Neanderthal climate. And once in awhile it turns into a pandemic and a kajillion of us die. We're not Neanderthals, for fuck's sake, we're fucking savannah monkeys. What are we doing up here? What the fuck are we doing up here?
In other news, the sun is out for now, so at least I can write about the disintegration of western capitalism on my balcony. Yayyyy! Also last night we started watching Coast, and it's adorable. In a deeply public school way, though . . . had some discussions with Rodelina about that - about people from public schools in Britain, and people who are invisible, or football players, or people fucking football players. Sometimes I wonder why anybody stays in that country - why be sidelined like that?
In other news, the sun is out for now, so at least I can write about the disintegration of western capitalism on my balcony. Yayyyy! Also last night we started watching Coast, and it's adorable. In a deeply public school way, though . . . had some discussions with Rodelina about that - about people from public schools in Britain, and people who are invisible, or football players, or people fucking football players. Sometimes I wonder why anybody stays in that country - why be sidelined like that?
domenica, luglio 26, 2009
In which the biking, kayaking, fishing and boating goes some way to undoing all the smoke damage
Amsterdam has a bit of a reputation of being a tourist hole and I understand that on that basis some people have been disenchanted with it, as in fact I remember being after my first couple of stop'n'smoke visits. But the thing that never stops being so remarkable for me is how the deeper you dig, the more you uncover layers of charm and organization.
We spent the weekend doing stuff, and very little of it in downtown Amsterdam. Well. Hours of it in downtown Amsterdam, but not really, because the San Franciscas have bought a boat, and we tooled around on that for an afternoon, the F-word getting the opportunity to steer - wow. It was a beautiful way to see the city, and really cut down on the number of high Americans we had to listen say beastly things, like 'yeah, we can just walk on the street, you're allowed to do that in Amsterdam' or, worse, 'I feel so dirty'. It was awesome.
And then we went out to where they live, in Amstelveen, and went fishing, and biking, and kayaking - much of it in the Amsterdam Bos, which I've enthused about before. And I've enthused about the sheer Dutch genius for spacial organization, so I won't go on about that too much either. But I was amazed - flabbergasted, if flabbergaster fits in with a deep sense of peace and enjoyment - about how we could spend a couple of hours paddling through the park next to such a huge, densely populated capital on a rare sunny, warm day and feel x1000 times more alone and in the wild than the Lesse River in September . . . and I must also say that, as we cycled back to the San Francisca's home after the day in the park, I had to keep asking "are we still in the park?" because the entire suburb was green and quiet and full of birds. Lovely.
Of course, it helped that it was sunny. Amsterdam in the sun is, I verily believe, the loveliest place on earth. Even without the sun . . . wow. Good on you, Dutchies, that's some fucking good urban planning. Aside from that, read about half of Adam Bede on the slow train and whilst too twitchy to fall asleep Saturday. I've been dancing around George Eliot for as long as I can remember, and Silas Marner really made me decide I'd have to go for her wholesale, but this is my first big bite and it's yummy and plummy. She puts a suspicious number of similes in the mouths of her characters, but I'm getting over that because from memory northerners do have a certain facility of metaphor which their more repressed cousins in the south lack. Anyways, more when I'm done.
We spent the weekend doing stuff, and very little of it in downtown Amsterdam. Well. Hours of it in downtown Amsterdam, but not really, because the San Franciscas have bought a boat, and we tooled around on that for an afternoon, the F-word getting the opportunity to steer - wow. It was a beautiful way to see the city, and really cut down on the number of high Americans we had to listen say beastly things, like 'yeah, we can just walk on the street, you're allowed to do that in Amsterdam' or, worse, 'I feel so dirty'. It was awesome.
And then we went out to where they live, in Amstelveen, and went fishing, and biking, and kayaking - much of it in the Amsterdam Bos, which I've enthused about before. And I've enthused about the sheer Dutch genius for spacial organization, so I won't go on about that too much either. But I was amazed - flabbergasted, if flabbergaster fits in with a deep sense of peace and enjoyment - about how we could spend a couple of hours paddling through the park next to such a huge, densely populated capital on a rare sunny, warm day and feel x1000 times more alone and in the wild than the Lesse River in September . . . and I must also say that, as we cycled back to the San Francisca's home after the day in the park, I had to keep asking "are we still in the park?" because the entire suburb was green and quiet and full of birds. Lovely.
Of course, it helped that it was sunny. Amsterdam in the sun is, I verily believe, the loveliest place on earth. Even without the sun . . . wow. Good on you, Dutchies, that's some fucking good urban planning. Aside from that, read about half of Adam Bede on the slow train and whilst too twitchy to fall asleep Saturday. I've been dancing around George Eliot for as long as I can remember, and Silas Marner really made me decide I'd have to go for her wholesale, but this is my first big bite and it's yummy and plummy. She puts a suspicious number of similes in the mouths of her characters, but I'm getting over that because from memory northerners do have a certain facility of metaphor which their more repressed cousins in the south lack. Anyways, more when I'm done.
giovedì, luglio 23, 2009
I'll sing down that cucumber, baby
The lemon cucumber plant has been putting a lot out there. I'm not sure why I planted lemon cucumber instead of a normal kind, I think I'd been given to understand that they take up less room. But they're taking up a fuckload of room, and it's been a struggle to keep them from overwhelming the tomatoes; the fuckers grow so fast. They're growing only slightly less fast now as they fruit, and we ate the first one yesterday. Fucking awesome. It might be because it was fresh off the vine but it was way better than any of the cucumber varieties I've ever bought, and I'll even daresay better than the standard big green cukes Dad drew in the back garden, which were seedier. These lemon cucumbers are real fleshy motherfuckers, and picked young, not too seedy - just a lovely tennis-ball sized lump of cucumber flesh with a slightly richer taste than the long green ones.
(Incidentally, Paul Theroux wrote in the Pillars of Hercules that in Turkey, the word 'cucumber' has become inextricably linked to its idiomatic meaning, penis, in a way that makes me think of our word 'cock' - people avoid saying it in its literal meaning because it's so very suggestive. While we have some synonyms to choose from, like rooster or chanticleer, because heaven knows I fall all over myself to say 'chanticleer' when cock will do, in Turkey they'll make allusive references instead, like 'green salad things.' And when there's a fake bomb scare, the defusers will often open the suspicious package and find a cucumer with a note pinned to it: "This is what you are." I wonder if that's true, I can't find it on the Internets.)
Anyways, feeling quite smug about how yummy the lemon cucumbers are because apparently they need to be eaten fresh off the vine, going soggy and gross three days after picking, which is why they aren't commercially grown and sold, I've heard from somewhere. And we have a supply on our back balcony. Sweet. I always wonder about unsellable foods like that. I've heard there are a kajillion banana varieties, for example, most of them inexpressibly delicious, and we just get the one we get because it's the only one that tolerates being picked green, transported, and sold weeks and weeks after harvesting - I've heard pawpaw is fucking amazing, for example, and grows in temperate climates - even up close to where I was living in Toronto - but that it goes off so fast no one sells it. Someday I will have a big big garden and eat like a queen . . . but at the moment I'm thrilled with the one lemon cucumber we ate yesterday.
Generally speaking the back balcony garden is going stupendously, though I don't want to count my tomatoes and cucumbers before they're plucked. It's sheltered from the wind but gets quite good sunlight, as good as you can get in this fucking wet pig of a country, so I should count my blessings. But Croatia went a fair way to making me sicker of this place than I already was.
(Incidentally, Paul Theroux wrote in the Pillars of Hercules that in Turkey, the word 'cucumber' has become inextricably linked to its idiomatic meaning, penis, in a way that makes me think of our word 'cock' - people avoid saying it in its literal meaning because it's so very suggestive. While we have some synonyms to choose from, like rooster or chanticleer, because heaven knows I fall all over myself to say 'chanticleer' when cock will do, in Turkey they'll make allusive references instead, like 'green salad things.' And when there's a fake bomb scare, the defusers will often open the suspicious package and find a cucumer with a note pinned to it: "This is what you are." I wonder if that's true, I can't find it on the Internets.)
Anyways, feeling quite smug about how yummy the lemon cucumbers are because apparently they need to be eaten fresh off the vine, going soggy and gross three days after picking, which is why they aren't commercially grown and sold, I've heard from somewhere. And we have a supply on our back balcony. Sweet. I always wonder about unsellable foods like that. I've heard there are a kajillion banana varieties, for example, most of them inexpressibly delicious, and we just get the one we get because it's the only one that tolerates being picked green, transported, and sold weeks and weeks after harvesting - I've heard pawpaw is fucking amazing, for example, and grows in temperate climates - even up close to where I was living in Toronto - but that it goes off so fast no one sells it. Someday I will have a big big garden and eat like a queen . . . but at the moment I'm thrilled with the one lemon cucumber we ate yesterday.
Generally speaking the back balcony garden is going stupendously, though I don't want to count my tomatoes and cucumbers before they're plucked. It's sheltered from the wind but gets quite good sunlight, as good as you can get in this fucking wet pig of a country, so I should count my blessings. But Croatia went a fair way to making me sicker of this place than I already was.
mercoledì, luglio 22, 2009
In which Rupert mends my annoying morning
Very little to say today too. After my holiday, the maison communale's bridge holiday (because why should civil servants take the one publicly funded holiday everybody else gets when two is so much better), and the acquisition of a new set of passport photographs, which took visits to four booths, two studios closed for the summer break, and one excruciatingly stupid phone call to the booth-company (following their instructions to call a hotline to find out the closest machine when one was busted and instead having a conversation with a nincompoop), I'm actually going to go to the Belgium equivalent of the Ministry of Transort or DMV or whatever and get my actual license, which will involve queueing from 8 am until . . . I don't fucking know.
Except, Belgium being Belgium, I probably won't get a license today, despite a Belgian licence being nothing but a folded piece of printed salmon bristolboard with a photo attached to it, because these people are fucknards. My hope is to get it and an international license sometime within the next month before I go to Canada. You see how effectively I've lowered my expectations . . . it really helps me get through life here.
Let me just leave you with a quick reminder of what celebrity is good for: occasionally one of them will say awesome things. Like this:
"He (Michael Jackson) personified the pain and anxiety of a black man in a slave country. We all watched as he changed from black to white. He was living performance art."
Oh Rupert Everett. Don't ever change, no, don't you ever change, oh promise me you're always going to be as . . .you know . . . as you are.
After a mere two hours of queuing - lengthened by the desk workers 'forgetting' to hit the button inviting all ticket holders after 61 to advance for 15 minutes or so - I got both my Belgian and international license all in one shot. I am now indistinguishable from a grown-up. Yay!
Except, Belgium being Belgium, I probably won't get a license today, despite a Belgian licence being nothing but a folded piece of printed salmon bristolboard with a photo attached to it, because these people are fucknards. My hope is to get it and an international license sometime within the next month before I go to Canada. You see how effectively I've lowered my expectations . . . it really helps me get through life here.
Let me just leave you with a quick reminder of what celebrity is good for: occasionally one of them will say awesome things. Like this:
"He (Michael Jackson) personified the pain and anxiety of a black man in a slave country. We all watched as he changed from black to white. He was living performance art."
Oh Rupert Everett. Don't ever change, no, don't you ever change, oh promise me you're always going to be as . . .you know . . . as you are.
UPDATE
After a mere two hours of queuing - lengthened by the desk workers 'forgetting' to hit the button inviting all ticket holders after 61 to advance for 15 minutes or so - I got both my Belgian and international license all in one shot. I am now indistinguishable from a grown-up. Yay!
martedì, luglio 21, 2009
Happy Leopold Day
The minimum to say for myself this morning, as once more I've stopped up late and once more don't have time before work. This time it was staying up late for work, which I wouldn't ordinarily do, but then we watched the fireworks from my office skyscraper, which were in celebration of the crowning of Leopold I, who was, however I feel about monarchy, at least a fuck sight less worse than Leopold II, and gave some small thought to the plight of labour in his industrializing country.
I'd never seen fireworks from above before, and frankly I don't reccommend it, it's diminishing. Nonetheless as we smoked a pipe down by the pond with the crocodile in it, and I heard the explosions start to go off for more minor shows, I came to an important realization: I'd be one of those people shitting myself and losing my mind if I was in a war situation. There's no way I would be able to keep it together with a bunch of bombs going off. Hopefully that peice of knowledge will never be useful . . .
I'd never seen fireworks from above before, and frankly I don't reccommend it, it's diminishing. Nonetheless as we smoked a pipe down by the pond with the crocodile in it, and I heard the explosions start to go off for more minor shows, I came to an important realization: I'd be one of those people shitting myself and losing my mind if I was in a war situation. There's no way I would be able to keep it together with a bunch of bombs going off. Hopefully that peice of knowledge will never be useful . . .
lunedì, luglio 20, 2009
In which I strive to avoid spoilers
Finished Vanity Fair tonight, which is why this post will be so short, me having stayed up late to do so and then slept in. Smashing ending all around, nearly one of the best endings I've ever read, except I can't help but feel Thackeray really caved by having Amelia write to Dobbin before Becky showed her George's letter - that awful, wonderful Becky! What a great character. A perfect mix of Scarlett O'Hara, with her lonely good points, her odd spots of pity for those obviously weaker than her, and Machiavelli's ideal prince.
Anyways, the letter was the only part of it that didn't ring true to me - I suppose it wouldn't have been appropriate to have angelic Amelia really, unignorably, practically in debt to devilish Becky, although she was obviously in her emotional debt as it stood . . . if I have a problem with big flabby Regency/Fat King George/Victorian monster novels, that's it - that there's a realism-damaging hesitation to make all those lovely anti-heroes agents of good in a practical, plotty way, a way that could possibly alienate the ladies reading at home, or make them keep the serials away from their young ones. I should like to know if Thackeray had been planning to have Amelia write Dobbin before or after Becky showed her the letter.
The fact is evil people are almost never unremittingly harmful and literature has to reflect that to keep its humanity. Despite a millenium of schisms the most Calvinist, Protesting of us European descendants is Catholic enough to have a bit of faith, unconcious or not, in the notion of one good deed - a useful penance - expiating hundreds of wickednesses (to paraphrase that lying, fornicating, bigamist Rochester, who even romantic little Charlotte Brontë had to put in his place through mutilation, amputation and blinding before Jane Eyre could be permitted to marry him).
Anyways, the letter was the only part of it that didn't ring true to me - I suppose it wouldn't have been appropriate to have angelic Amelia really, unignorably, practically in debt to devilish Becky, although she was obviously in her emotional debt as it stood . . . if I have a problem with big flabby Regency/Fat King George/Victorian monster novels, that's it - that there's a realism-damaging hesitation to make all those lovely anti-heroes agents of good in a practical, plotty way, a way that could possibly alienate the ladies reading at home, or make them keep the serials away from their young ones. I should like to know if Thackeray had been planning to have Amelia write Dobbin before or after Becky showed her the letter.
The fact is evil people are almost never unremittingly harmful and literature has to reflect that to keep its humanity. Despite a millenium of schisms the most Calvinist, Protesting of us European descendants is Catholic enough to have a bit of faith, unconcious or not, in the notion of one good deed - a useful penance - expiating hundreds of wickednesses (to paraphrase that lying, fornicating, bigamist Rochester, who even romantic little Charlotte Brontë had to put in his place through mutilation, amputation and blinding before Jane Eyre could be permitted to marry him).
domenica, luglio 19, 2009
Vanity Eyre
Croatia was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Mostly it was the company - two of the brightest women in my life and lots of talking and arguing - the Mitford sisters without the money or Hitler. But I'm not into talking about my people so instead I'll just say Croatia was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
How the sun shone! How the delightful little coves of beaches sparkled blue and turquoise! How the air baked! How the kayak instructor's damp skin glistened over healthy young muscles in the sun! And how sweet it was to have myself to myself, neither of my companions being the sort who hijacks other people and our holiday having been nominally billed as a writing retreat. . . the Cultural Apocalypse Novel didn't get written, and after about 10 minutes of trying to do it on the first day I realized I was being a knob; it's going to need months of devotion just to work out and nail down the narrative voice, and sadly it will need to wait for semi-retirement, or else it'll drive me crazy. But lots of smaller writing, lots of poetry. And lots of sleep. All three of us arrived there stressed out to the point of practically exposed nerves - I think all three of us left as new women, partly because of being somewhere so beautiful, partly because of each other, partly because we could take it fucking easy.
That having been said, I utterly ruined my last two nights of sleep by buying Vanity Fair when I went into Dubrovnik looking for a present for the F-word. I'd brought Dicken's Pictures of Italy and was utterly disappointed, and Paul Theroux's Pillar of Hercules, which I'd swallowed whole on the trip to London and Gatwick (certainly the worst travel book of his I've ever read - very superficial, far more self-obsessed than his better work, much more "I said . . . my eyes danced . . . I was scared" than any of the others), and got Vanity Fair on a whim, mostly because of how much Thackeray showed up in Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. Vanity Fair definitely needs its own devoted post, and probably a great big one, and not today because I still have 100 pages or so to go.
And probably the impact of Jane Eyre on Vanity Fair needs its own devoted post too, or possibly an academic paper . . . surely there is such a paper, Charlotte Brontë dedicating Jane Eyre's second edition to Thackeray, who was partway through publishing Vanity Fair when it came out. But there might not be, because it's not apparent in a very obvious way - though it is. The thing is, Jane Eyre reads as though it's influenced by Vanity Fair, and not vice-versa, because Charlotte Brontë's great strengths weren't in satire, and Thackeray's definitely were. The facility of Thackeray's satire makes it almost hard to believe Jane Eyre was published first, as Jane Eyre certainly contains efforts at satire - and to me, they're the less successful parts of the book, that the author looks least comfortable with, that would be borrowed from elsewhere if anything was.
The charade scenes in each book, for example, are so similar, but Jane Eyre's charade is all about Jane geeking on the fucking unattainable hotness of Mr. Rochester, and Vanity Fair's charade is the rather gruelling presage of Rebecca gutting her husband while illustrating how she gives London society a collective boner. Unless you're into the romance of Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair's looks ten times better, because it's so much more effective as a cultural illustrator - unless you're getting swept up into Jane's hard-on for Rochester, Jane Eyre's looks derivative of the work that came after it. Luckily Charlotte Brontë was a stunningly competent romance writer, at least as far as Jane Eyre goes, so most of the audience that hasn't gotten alienated and stopped reading at that point has been swept up into Jane's big old hard-on.
Anyways. Back to work. Ew.
How the sun shone! How the delightful little coves of beaches sparkled blue and turquoise! How the air baked! How the kayak instructor's damp skin glistened over healthy young muscles in the sun! And how sweet it was to have myself to myself, neither of my companions being the sort who hijacks other people and our holiday having been nominally billed as a writing retreat. . . the Cultural Apocalypse Novel didn't get written, and after about 10 minutes of trying to do it on the first day I realized I was being a knob; it's going to need months of devotion just to work out and nail down the narrative voice, and sadly it will need to wait for semi-retirement, or else it'll drive me crazy. But lots of smaller writing, lots of poetry. And lots of sleep. All three of us arrived there stressed out to the point of practically exposed nerves - I think all three of us left as new women, partly because of being somewhere so beautiful, partly because of each other, partly because we could take it fucking easy.
That having been said, I utterly ruined my last two nights of sleep by buying Vanity Fair when I went into Dubrovnik looking for a present for the F-word. I'd brought Dicken's Pictures of Italy and was utterly disappointed, and Paul Theroux's Pillar of Hercules, which I'd swallowed whole on the trip to London and Gatwick (certainly the worst travel book of his I've ever read - very superficial, far more self-obsessed than his better work, much more "I said . . . my eyes danced . . . I was scared" than any of the others), and got Vanity Fair on a whim, mostly because of how much Thackeray showed up in Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. Vanity Fair definitely needs its own devoted post, and probably a great big one, and not today because I still have 100 pages or so to go.
And probably the impact of Jane Eyre on Vanity Fair needs its own devoted post too, or possibly an academic paper . . . surely there is such a paper, Charlotte Brontë dedicating Jane Eyre's second edition to Thackeray, who was partway through publishing Vanity Fair when it came out. But there might not be, because it's not apparent in a very obvious way - though it is. The thing is, Jane Eyre reads as though it's influenced by Vanity Fair, and not vice-versa, because Charlotte Brontë's great strengths weren't in satire, and Thackeray's definitely were. The facility of Thackeray's satire makes it almost hard to believe Jane Eyre was published first, as Jane Eyre certainly contains efforts at satire - and to me, they're the less successful parts of the book, that the author looks least comfortable with, that would be borrowed from elsewhere if anything was.
The charade scenes in each book, for example, are so similar, but Jane Eyre's charade is all about Jane geeking on the fucking unattainable hotness of Mr. Rochester, and Vanity Fair's charade is the rather gruelling presage of Rebecca gutting her husband while illustrating how she gives London society a collective boner. Unless you're into the romance of Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair's looks ten times better, because it's so much more effective as a cultural illustrator - unless you're getting swept up into Jane's hard-on for Rochester, Jane Eyre's looks derivative of the work that came after it. Luckily Charlotte Brontë was a stunningly competent romance writer, at least as far as Jane Eyre goes, so most of the audience that hasn't gotten alienated and stopped reading at that point has been swept up into Jane's big old hard-on.
Anyways. Back to work. Ew.
giovedì, luglio 09, 2009
Protestant liesure
It feels as though time is slowing down a bit as I get closer and closer to departing for the Med, where we're having a little writing retreat on the beach for a week. Still some hurdles to overleap at the office before I can leave it behind in good conscience, or else I'll be fucked when I get back. Dear oh dear. I may even have to write a to-do list. Blech.
It's rather provoking because I have to hot-foot it down there to deal with some angry-businessman crap this morning, a stressful enough situation that my eyelid was twitching by the end of the day yesterday, when all I want to do is go to the maison communale, submit my pass sheet and get my really-for-truly driver's licence. I like work - but it is seriously cramping my fucking style, man.
At the same time - beyond personal feelings of loyalty to my immediate management team, who I really like and who I would hate to screw over by being incompetent - I have a certain horror of joining the ranks of the unemployed. A totally irrational horror. I'm nowhere close to being sacked, and if I was, it would be awesome because of the big Belgian payout I would get and the 80%-of-my-wage pogey I'd receive for a two year period, or until we blew this fucking popsical stand of a country. But still that little horror is there, partly because it would definitely mean I couldn't move this job to Asia and then it would all be a big mystery, more exciting than intimidating but I'm a slave to the intimidation . . .
I think I have an uncomfortable combination of Protestant Work Ethic and Mezzogiorno Liesure-is-Success neurosisizing me up. That's right. Blame the parents.
It's rather provoking because I have to hot-foot it down there to deal with some angry-businessman crap this morning, a stressful enough situation that my eyelid was twitching by the end of the day yesterday, when all I want to do is go to the maison communale, submit my pass sheet and get my really-for-truly driver's licence. I like work - but it is seriously cramping my fucking style, man.
At the same time - beyond personal feelings of loyalty to my immediate management team, who I really like and who I would hate to screw over by being incompetent - I have a certain horror of joining the ranks of the unemployed. A totally irrational horror. I'm nowhere close to being sacked, and if I was, it would be awesome because of the big Belgian payout I would get and the 80%-of-my-wage pogey I'd receive for a two year period, or until we blew this fucking popsical stand of a country. But still that little horror is there, partly because it would definitely mean I couldn't move this job to Asia and then it would all be a big mystery, more exciting than intimidating but I'm a slave to the intimidation . . .
I think I have an uncomfortable combination of Protestant Work Ethic and Mezzogiorno Liesure-is-Success neurosisizing me up. That's right. Blame the parents.
I remember back in the dayz when I used to have to get my stroll on
Guess who passed her driving exam? Mistress La Spliffe, that's who! Oh sweet Jesus, the fucking relief of it all.
And you know what one of the best parts was? Riding to work afterwards in the urine-soaked, stinking, filthy subway with ugly bastards leering at me, and thinking 'from now on when I do this it's because I'm making an environmentally sound lifestyle decision, and not because I'm a fucking loser.' I think it'll help out with walking on rainy days, too.
And you know what one of the best parts was? Riding to work afterwards in the urine-soaked, stinking, filthy subway with ugly bastards leering at me, and thinking 'from now on when I do this it's because I'm making an environmentally sound lifestyle decision, and not because I'm a fucking loser.' I think it'll help out with walking on rainy days, too.
martedì, luglio 07, 2009
The lone woman's playlist
Currently the F-word is in Berlin and I'm here. Next week I'll be in Dubrovnik and he'll be here. Soon after that we'll go away to Portugal together. Occasional seperate vacations are rather nice for all sorts of reasons, mostly having to do with mutual appreciation and personal space, but probably what I enjoy the most about it is getting the run of music I feel like listening to - things that are either too poppy or too whiny to bother playing around him when we both like Nick Cave, Tom Waits, pre-synthesizer R&B, orchestral, operatic and a bunch of other crap enough to not rub each other the wrong way. He's got his own things he listens to when I'm away, including Frank Zappa - yikes.
Anyways, that means right now I'm listening to:
Tricky, Maxinquaye. Probably the constant and fucking inescapable Michael Jackson playing everyfuckingwhere over the last week or so was what reminded me how much I miss this album. He samples "Bad" on "Brand New You're Retro" and I'm quite fond of it. And while this urge is already morphing into a desire to listen to a bunch of Massive Attack and some other Tricky abums, Maxinquaye is very dear to my heart. It was on constant rotation during the wonderful months that I went chronic, and it's really part of who Mistress La Spliffe is . . . but personal descent into drug dependency aside, really I just think it's so pretty, one of the prettiest albums I've ever heard. That's the thing about trip-hop, and it's why I get confused when people hate it. It's so pretty. To hate trip-hop, you've got to hate pretty. And who hates pretty? Assholes, that's who.
Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. My feelings are split on this album and even if the F-word could tolerate the whiny quality of Jeff Tweedy's vocals (which one would think he could, Radiohead being okay apparently) I would have to keep it on low rotation anyways. I've written before about the fucking pain of getting a five-second blast of "I'm the Man Who Loves You" stuck in one's head on a repetitive loop, and even now I'm wary of getting it lodged back in there - last time it took about five fucking days to get it to stop playing. That doesn't change the fact that it's a damn good song and that the makes-the-Cure-look-like-the-Pizzicato-Five lyrics are not only not stupid, but accompanied by - once more - pretty. It's a marvellously pretty album. And who doesn't like pretty? Assholes, that's who.
The surprising thing about Wilco, though, was that when I saw them live it was still awfully pretty, despite the album feeling very engineered and very trippy in its own way.
Speaking of pretty and the Pizzicato Five - The Pizzicato Five, Made in the USA. No excuses or explanations here. I just love it. Maki Nomiya could be singing "twiggy fuck yourself up the ass, you aging nineties hipster" and I'd still love it.
And the last one is rather a cheat, because I'm sure the F-word would be okay with it, though he does laugh about how heroin-y it all is - but it didn't occur to me to put him back on until I realized I'd need a stand-in boyfriend for a few days, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is Chet Baker, Chet Baker Sings. I fucking love this album. And love his voice. This song makes me feel like I'm being cuddled.
Anyways, that means right now I'm listening to:
Tricky, Maxinquaye. Probably the constant and fucking inescapable Michael Jackson playing everyfuckingwhere over the last week or so was what reminded me how much I miss this album. He samples "Bad" on "Brand New You're Retro" and I'm quite fond of it. And while this urge is already morphing into a desire to listen to a bunch of Massive Attack and some other Tricky abums, Maxinquaye is very dear to my heart. It was on constant rotation during the wonderful months that I went chronic, and it's really part of who Mistress La Spliffe is . . . but personal descent into drug dependency aside, really I just think it's so pretty, one of the prettiest albums I've ever heard. That's the thing about trip-hop, and it's why I get confused when people hate it. It's so pretty. To hate trip-hop, you've got to hate pretty. And who hates pretty? Assholes, that's who.
Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. My feelings are split on this album and even if the F-word could tolerate the whiny quality of Jeff Tweedy's vocals (which one would think he could, Radiohead being okay apparently) I would have to keep it on low rotation anyways. I've written before about the fucking pain of getting a five-second blast of "I'm the Man Who Loves You" stuck in one's head on a repetitive loop, and even now I'm wary of getting it lodged back in there - last time it took about five fucking days to get it to stop playing. That doesn't change the fact that it's a damn good song and that the makes-the-Cure-look-like-the-Pizzicato-Five lyrics are not only not stupid, but accompanied by - once more - pretty. It's a marvellously pretty album. And who doesn't like pretty? Assholes, that's who.
The surprising thing about Wilco, though, was that when I saw them live it was still awfully pretty, despite the album feeling very engineered and very trippy in its own way.
Speaking of pretty and the Pizzicato Five - The Pizzicato Five, Made in the USA. No excuses or explanations here. I just love it. Maki Nomiya could be singing "twiggy fuck yourself up the ass, you aging nineties hipster" and I'd still love it.
And the last one is rather a cheat, because I'm sure the F-word would be okay with it, though he does laugh about how heroin-y it all is - but it didn't occur to me to put him back on until I realized I'd need a stand-in boyfriend for a few days, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is Chet Baker, Chet Baker Sings. I fucking love this album. And love his voice. This song makes me feel like I'm being cuddled.
lunedì, luglio 06, 2009
Hommages shmommages
So last weekend Melbine and her man were visiting from Canada on their way between Paris and the 'Dam. It was lovely though all the unwholesome food made her sick. Anyways, I don't like going on about people: mentioning it because when we met up with another couple downtown, we stumbled across a Michael Jackson memorial in the Parc de Cinquentenaire. Almost everybody dressed in white, or else like Michael Jackson himself, while one of his lesser contributions to the pop music genre, Dangerous, played in the background. 800 people, I read later. While we watched they made a big circle, held hands, and started swaying gently back and forth to some music that was absolutely inappropriate for swaying gently back and forth to. Some were visibly upset, some had brought poster collages. It was all very earnest and there were tonnes of little kids running around.
Our reactions were interesting. The F-word was angry - as far as I could decipher, angry at the flagrant waste of emotion in a world where emotion could be so usefully applied elsewhere. "He's not Nelson Fucking Mandela," I believe he said at one point, which is an awfully good point when you think about it. Even if you're fucking daft enough to reckon contributions to music are as important as contributions to the relatively peaceful liberation of millions of oppressed South Africans, what has been his legacy - honestly? And I ask that as someone who likes the Jackson 5 and Off the Wall, but really - legacy-wise? Contributing to the final emasculation of soul and R&B music? Making that fucking smurf-voiced Justin Timberlake's career possible? Making our pop music scene about 20 degrees more tedious and anodyne than it was before? Putting out absolute shit in the 90's that made J-Pop look awesome when I was a teenager? Providing an all-too-often ignored cautionary tale about the consequences of abusive, megolomaniac parents flogging their talented children into fame?
And then the couple who had joined us were pre-occupied with getting an ice-cream for their daughter, despite a hell of a line. I think Melbine was a little touched. Her husband looked amused. I was creeped the fuck out. This was a man who had spent something like $30 million to make child abuse allegations go away, whatever one thinks about the upshot of his criminal trials (John Niven made a fairly unique, at the moment, critical evaluation of them in the Independent a few days ago).
I do find his life melancholy, I felt an emotion that was something like pity, but not exactly, when he died (the other week, we were discussing the paucity of emotional words in English with a Brazilian Portuguese friend - they have a word for every gradation of feeling, apparently - but that's a blog post for another time). But these recent outpourings of unmitigated grief and adulation are really starting to fuck me off. Not just because it's a waste of emotion in a world that needs emotion, though that's part of it - I just feel like in a week or two people are going to blink a few times, realize 'I've made a collage for a man who spent $30 million on civil payouts to make child abuse allegations go away, I've held hands and swayed back and forth for a man who might have managed an O.J., I've been publicly weeping for a dodgy stranger who may have caused hands-on life-long damage to several young boys", and then feel like creepy idiots. And if they don't . . . maybe they should.
Our reactions were interesting. The F-word was angry - as far as I could decipher, angry at the flagrant waste of emotion in a world where emotion could be so usefully applied elsewhere. "He's not Nelson Fucking Mandela," I believe he said at one point, which is an awfully good point when you think about it. Even if you're fucking daft enough to reckon contributions to music are as important as contributions to the relatively peaceful liberation of millions of oppressed South Africans, what has been his legacy - honestly? And I ask that as someone who likes the Jackson 5 and Off the Wall, but really - legacy-wise? Contributing to the final emasculation of soul and R&B music? Making that fucking smurf-voiced Justin Timberlake's career possible? Making our pop music scene about 20 degrees more tedious and anodyne than it was before? Putting out absolute shit in the 90's that made J-Pop look awesome when I was a teenager? Providing an all-too-often ignored cautionary tale about the consequences of abusive, megolomaniac parents flogging their talented children into fame?
And then the couple who had joined us were pre-occupied with getting an ice-cream for their daughter, despite a hell of a line. I think Melbine was a little touched. Her husband looked amused. I was creeped the fuck out. This was a man who had spent something like $30 million to make child abuse allegations go away, whatever one thinks about the upshot of his criminal trials (John Niven made a fairly unique, at the moment, critical evaluation of them in the Independent a few days ago).
I do find his life melancholy, I felt an emotion that was something like pity, but not exactly, when he died (the other week, we were discussing the paucity of emotional words in English with a Brazilian Portuguese friend - they have a word for every gradation of feeling, apparently - but that's a blog post for another time). But these recent outpourings of unmitigated grief and adulation are really starting to fuck me off. Not just because it's a waste of emotion in a world that needs emotion, though that's part of it - I just feel like in a week or two people are going to blink a few times, realize 'I've made a collage for a man who spent $30 million on civil payouts to make child abuse allegations go away, I've held hands and swayed back and forth for a man who might have managed an O.J., I've been publicly weeping for a dodgy stranger who may have caused hands-on life-long damage to several young boys", and then feel like creepy idiots. And if they don't . . . maybe they should.
domenica, luglio 05, 2009
Riding the moronic road
Practicing waking up early in preparation for my upcoming second-go-round of the driver's exam, which is scheduled early in the morning later this week. I'm nervous, but it's not as bad as last time - different rather - thinking that I'd be a real asshole if I failed twice, rather than thinking it's going to be very hard to pass. I feel a great deal more ready than last time, and honestly think I'm better than most of the other drivers circulating around Belgium, which sadly is saying very little (and is far from a guarantee that I'll pass the exam, as they tightened up their giveaway policies a lot over the last 20 years). For example, I don't box intersections and if there's a t-junction immediately preceding an intersection I brake a little earlier so I don't block that either. As far as I can tell about 1 in 3 Bruxellois drivers are intellectually capable of such a feat. They are real shitheads on the road - oblivious motherfuckers - and haven't really kept up with the changes in their own driving laws.
Pedestrian crossings are the most obvious example to visitors and new arrivals, most visitors and new arrivals being obliged to cross streets quite early on in the process. It's only been within the last ten years that the rules have been changed and that drivers are obliged to stop when people are using them, and of course they don't. Why would they? There are no fucking consequences if they fail to stop. There are no traffic cops hanging around with cameras. They can even buzz a crossing whilst talking on a cellphone and kill a fucking pensioner without any jailtime or even substantial loss-of-license time. And judging from some of the really fuckwitted behaviour I've seen and heard of here, either many drivers are utterly unaware of the change in the law, or else become such self-involved sociopaths when they get behind the wheel that it loses all meaning.
Three examples:
1. Some asshole in an Audi cuts me off on the way to work. In my classy North American way, I flip him a bird. The cunt stops mid-intersection, blocking traffic of course, and starts to get out of his car. I'm far more bark than bite but I'm sick of nearly getting killed by these troglodytes, so I start walking over, determined to get in some beats even if it means getting the shit kicked out of me. Either the asshole in the Audi notices that I'm a girl, or that I'm spoiling for a fight, or that the early morning rush-hour traffic has been blocked by his stopping the middle of a busy intersection and everybody is honking at him; he closes the door and speeds off.
2. Next to the Porte de Hal, which cars go about quite fast despite a liberal sprinkling of pedestrian crossings, we saw some fat old red-faced fuck in an expensive grey convertible - I believe it was also an Audi, they're beautiful cars but they get driven by goddamn incompetents - slam on the brakes and narrowly avoid hitting a skinny little teenage boy who was halfway across the road. Embolism gets out of his paused car, blocking traffic of course, and walks up with his dicky chest out to have it out with the kid, ignoring the horns behind him and shouted abuse from the many pedestrians all around, who'd been freaked out by nearly seeing a minor's guts splattered all over the cobblestones. The big fat cunt takes a swing at the boy for daring to get in his way and lands two or three; as we go over to intervene, the boy cleverly retaliates by repeatedly kicking the front of the Audi. The man realizes he has rather more to lose in this situation, gets back in his car, and speeds off.
3. A friend of ours, another Canadian, who lives here with his family was partway across a crosswalk when another cunt - he doesn't remember if it was in an Audi or not - cuts him off. He's a temperate man but as he was holding his infant daughter in his right arm at the time, he angrily shook his left fist in the air as the car sped away. The goddamn jackass reverses, blocks the intersection (of course - it's just not an incident unless you're getting in everyone's fucking way), gets out of his car despite the imprecations of the woman sitting in the passenger seat, walks over to our friend, and punches him in the face - swinging over the head of the baby girl. Once more - and this was the same in all three examples - he pulls this shit in a very crowded location absolutely stuffed with onlookers, and in this case, according to our friend, about 20 people immediately descended from the nearby cafe and sidewalks, shouting at the asshole and explaining what sort of human being he was for taking a swing at a guy holding a baby over the head of the baby. Punchy mainly looks baffled.
I know that every nationality drives stupidly in its own way, though I don't really know it on a practical, experiential level about any other country like I do about this one. I've heard the French are congenitally incapable of signalling a turn or a lane change, for example, and Italians have the supremest disregard for the lives and limbs of cyclists that I've ever witnessed. But Belgians - honestly, the way they drive makes me hate their fucking guts. It makes me think all of the stupid Belgian jokes I've ever heard are soundly based in fact. I know they don't enjoy their Newfie-of-Europe stereotype, but when they get behind the wheel, they're not fighting it too hard.
Pedestrian crossings are the most obvious example to visitors and new arrivals, most visitors and new arrivals being obliged to cross streets quite early on in the process. It's only been within the last ten years that the rules have been changed and that drivers are obliged to stop when people are using them, and of course they don't. Why would they? There are no fucking consequences if they fail to stop. There are no traffic cops hanging around with cameras. They can even buzz a crossing whilst talking on a cellphone and kill a fucking pensioner without any jailtime or even substantial loss-of-license time. And judging from some of the really fuckwitted behaviour I've seen and heard of here, either many drivers are utterly unaware of the change in the law, or else become such self-involved sociopaths when they get behind the wheel that it loses all meaning.
Three examples:
1. Some asshole in an Audi cuts me off on the way to work. In my classy North American way, I flip him a bird. The cunt stops mid-intersection, blocking traffic of course, and starts to get out of his car. I'm far more bark than bite but I'm sick of nearly getting killed by these troglodytes, so I start walking over, determined to get in some beats even if it means getting the shit kicked out of me. Either the asshole in the Audi notices that I'm a girl, or that I'm spoiling for a fight, or that the early morning rush-hour traffic has been blocked by his stopping the middle of a busy intersection and everybody is honking at him; he closes the door and speeds off.
2. Next to the Porte de Hal, which cars go about quite fast despite a liberal sprinkling of pedestrian crossings, we saw some fat old red-faced fuck in an expensive grey convertible - I believe it was also an Audi, they're beautiful cars but they get driven by goddamn incompetents - slam on the brakes and narrowly avoid hitting a skinny little teenage boy who was halfway across the road. Embolism gets out of his paused car, blocking traffic of course, and walks up with his dicky chest out to have it out with the kid, ignoring the horns behind him and shouted abuse from the many pedestrians all around, who'd been freaked out by nearly seeing a minor's guts splattered all over the cobblestones. The big fat cunt takes a swing at the boy for daring to get in his way and lands two or three; as we go over to intervene, the boy cleverly retaliates by repeatedly kicking the front of the Audi. The man realizes he has rather more to lose in this situation, gets back in his car, and speeds off.
3. A friend of ours, another Canadian, who lives here with his family was partway across a crosswalk when another cunt - he doesn't remember if it was in an Audi or not - cuts him off. He's a temperate man but as he was holding his infant daughter in his right arm at the time, he angrily shook his left fist in the air as the car sped away. The goddamn jackass reverses, blocks the intersection (of course - it's just not an incident unless you're getting in everyone's fucking way), gets out of his car despite the imprecations of the woman sitting in the passenger seat, walks over to our friend, and punches him in the face - swinging over the head of the baby girl. Once more - and this was the same in all three examples - he pulls this shit in a very crowded location absolutely stuffed with onlookers, and in this case, according to our friend, about 20 people immediately descended from the nearby cafe and sidewalks, shouting at the asshole and explaining what sort of human being he was for taking a swing at a guy holding a baby over the head of the baby. Punchy mainly looks baffled.
I know that every nationality drives stupidly in its own way, though I don't really know it on a practical, experiential level about any other country like I do about this one. I've heard the French are congenitally incapable of signalling a turn or a lane change, for example, and Italians have the supremest disregard for the lives and limbs of cyclists that I've ever witnessed. But Belgians - honestly, the way they drive makes me hate their fucking guts. It makes me think all of the stupid Belgian jokes I've ever heard are soundly based in fact. I know they don't enjoy their Newfie-of-Europe stereotype, but when they get behind the wheel, they're not fighting it too hard.
giovedì, luglio 02, 2009
martedì, giugno 30, 2009
Headaches and making it better, better, better, AIIIIII!
No real post today. I have stress, and I have to go deal with it. Something that makes my stress less stressful is Korean two year olds singing "Hey Jude".
lunedì, giugno 29, 2009
The ex and the new are relative
Mmmm . . . my expectations are being bucked at the moment. That's nice. I do hope it's for real. What's been disturbing me about the Honduras coverage is the way the BBC jumped right into the coup - yesterday morning, they were calling Zelaya 'the former president' and Michiletti 'the new president'. Given what happened in Venezuala you'd think they'd be a little more careful to hedge their bets in cases like these - but this is the Internet age and all you have to do is change the text after Barack Obama bucks expectations and talks about terrible precedents. Which they have done.
The BBC has such great coverage in terms of having news gatherers everywhere, but it is highly politicised. Inevitable, I guess. Most state-owned media are, in a more or less but generally less way than private media, because taxpayers are so happy to cry foul. The interesting thing here is that it looks like a sort of inertia, rather than a particular agenda, just sort of drifted the BBC into saying the coup was an accomplished fact . . . and then they could just rewrite their language when they realize that no, the hegemons weren't supporting it this time. Inertia. Such a powerful social force.
The BBC has such great coverage in terms of having news gatherers everywhere, but it is highly politicised. Inevitable, I guess. Most state-owned media are, in a more or less but generally less way than private media, because taxpayers are so happy to cry foul. The interesting thing here is that it looks like a sort of inertia, rather than a particular agenda, just sort of drifted the BBC into saying the coup was an accomplished fact . . . and then they could just rewrite their language when they realize that no, the hegemons weren't supporting it this time. Inertia. Such a powerful social force.
giovedì, giugno 25, 2009
Death, monkeys, and dancing bears
Thinking about the meaning of death in different cultures these days. My study of non-European cultures has been either so academic or so pop, so Bhagavad Gita or else Monkey!, that I have no practical idea what death means to people outside Europe. There's something rather brutal about the dominant thread we have in Europe and North America now. Centuries of training by our religion to see life as a linear progression to death and to the subsequent judgement of our selves, as we now understand our selves, by God, who we comprehend as another self. I think we still have that pattern, if you can call something so simple a pattern, in our minds. But now, for so many of us, especially in Europe, who have been repelled by the church, we've lost even the small complication of the assumption of judgement at the end - just the simple linear sentence of our selves, growing and aging and dying, and then a sudden full stop.
But in early Christian theology (well, not REALLY early - really early, it was a death and apocalypse cult) there was a conception of the afterlife that was less deeply personal. An idea that on death, we came to understand the will of God, and being in heaven was the same thing as being part of God's will. The release of one's own will, which leads inexorably to the idea of the release of the self - of our consciousnesses in any way that we can understand consciousness. Though from what I remember that's an idea that was resisted by the people who wrote about heaven, and when I listen to Christians going on about God's will they're able to contort their mind into believing that surrendering yourself to God doesn't mean not being your self anymore. Too pagan? Too frightening? I don't know. But the release of the self. Imagine that. You could spend years trying to imagine it. A lifetime. And once you did - once you could imagine that - surely you're no longer your self . . .
I think being alive is the process of being able to release your self. I think I'm very excited to be moving close to Asia and to start taking my holidays in countries and societies I don't know a fucking thing about in any practical sense. My head was full of it last weekend when we were in Brussels Far East museum - Congo-era colonial visioning of the east extraordinaire, to the tackiest effect possible, and I was standing there in the middle of all the Chineuropean fantasization, thinking - I don't know shit. I don't know shit. No cleverer than that fat corrupt shitful bastard Leopold II. I've never gone outside of my cultural comfort zone whilst travelling so I'm really not used to thinking like that. I don't know shit. A bit like death, really.
Sorry if this post is coming off as morbid or (retch) "emo". I'm actually in top form. Rather in the grip of pity for Michael Jackson, though. I don't know about iconography but I think historians will look back on him as a sort of textbook figure about what obsessive fame in our era can do to a delicate person. I was going to post a video of a "Love You Save" performance from the late 70's - that song's in the running for my 'Best Song Ever' trophy - but having just looked at it again I couldn't help but feel, as I was watching him grin and dance around superbly, that I was geeking on a dancing bear with a ring through its nose and no more memory of the wild, no conception of the bad it might do, nothing except not fucking up, not fucking up and getting burned by its trainer . . . Couldn't do it. Poor dead dancing bear. Poor thing.
In testament to pity, here's the only joke about his death I've heard so far that had nothing to do with little boys (and I've heard at least a dozen already):
But in early Christian theology (well, not REALLY early - really early, it was a death and apocalypse cult) there was a conception of the afterlife that was less deeply personal. An idea that on death, we came to understand the will of God, and being in heaven was the same thing as being part of God's will. The release of one's own will, which leads inexorably to the idea of the release of the self - of our consciousnesses in any way that we can understand consciousness. Though from what I remember that's an idea that was resisted by the people who wrote about heaven, and when I listen to Christians going on about God's will they're able to contort their mind into believing that surrendering yourself to God doesn't mean not being your self anymore. Too pagan? Too frightening? I don't know. But the release of the self. Imagine that. You could spend years trying to imagine it. A lifetime. And once you did - once you could imagine that - surely you're no longer your self . . .
I think being alive is the process of being able to release your self. I think I'm very excited to be moving close to Asia and to start taking my holidays in countries and societies I don't know a fucking thing about in any practical sense. My head was full of it last weekend when we were in Brussels Far East museum - Congo-era colonial visioning of the east extraordinaire, to the tackiest effect possible, and I was standing there in the middle of all the Chineuropean fantasization, thinking - I don't know shit. I don't know shit. No cleverer than that fat corrupt shitful bastard Leopold II. I've never gone outside of my cultural comfort zone whilst travelling so I'm really not used to thinking like that. I don't know shit. A bit like death, really.
Sorry if this post is coming off as morbid or (retch) "emo". I'm actually in top form. Rather in the grip of pity for Michael Jackson, though. I don't know about iconography but I think historians will look back on him as a sort of textbook figure about what obsessive fame in our era can do to a delicate person. I was going to post a video of a "Love You Save" performance from the late 70's - that song's in the running for my 'Best Song Ever' trophy - but having just looked at it again I couldn't help but feel, as I was watching him grin and dance around superbly, that I was geeking on a dancing bear with a ring through its nose and no more memory of the wild, no conception of the bad it might do, nothing except not fucking up, not fucking up and getting burned by its trainer . . . Couldn't do it. Poor dead dancing bear. Poor thing.
In testament to pity, here's the only joke about his death I've heard so far that had nothing to do with little boys (and I've heard at least a dozen already):
A post-mortem will be held to determine which was the cause of death:
A) Sunshine
B) Moonlight
C) Good Times
D) Boogie
A) Sunshine
B) Moonlight
C) Good Times
D) Boogie
mercoledì, giugno 24, 2009
The Complainant Gardener
Another short one today as the weather continues to buck my negative expectations and made irresistible sitting on the salvaged bench on our balcony, surrounded by flourishing tomato, cucumber, pea and lots of other plants, including some from our upstairs neighbour. I'm taking care of her balcony while she's away but she asked me to bring these two to my own balcony, because they're perennials that will flower while she's gone, and she didn't want them to go to waste. I love Germans.
It's a pity my camera cable is still lost because this morning I found the first tomato (or it could be tomatillo, I don't know) flower turning into fruit - a little green lump of swelling fertility - and I have a powerful urge to share it with the world, which I'm sure will manage to keep turning even without a blow-by-blow photo account of My Second Garden* . I'm starting to understand my family's men and their garden-feelings - and the Italians and the English were equally enthusiastic. When I'm sitting on my balcony surrounded by things that are flourishing in my care, I feel as smug, proud, and happy as if I'd just invented photosynthesis.
Oh, you know what I was writing yesterday about the other shoe dropping? It dropped. The ABC stopped streaming The Chasers War on Everything outside of Australia. I guess the big flap over the dying children sketch gave them that little bit of publicity that had too many furrrrrriners tuning in and, I don't know, but I'm pissed off.
*My first was a 2mx2m patch in my father's massive garden in the house where I did most of my growing up - but I only grew root vegetables there. I was four, for fuck's sake. Man, would I ever love to have a 2mx2m patch now. But space is such a different concept in Europe, which is no doubt a huge part of why I've started to feel it's time to leave.
It's a pity my camera cable is still lost because this morning I found the first tomato (or it could be tomatillo, I don't know) flower turning into fruit - a little green lump of swelling fertility - and I have a powerful urge to share it with the world, which I'm sure will manage to keep turning even without a blow-by-blow photo account of My Second Garden* . I'm starting to understand my family's men and their garden-feelings - and the Italians and the English were equally enthusiastic. When I'm sitting on my balcony surrounded by things that are flourishing in my care, I feel as smug, proud, and happy as if I'd just invented photosynthesis.
Oh, you know what I was writing yesterday about the other shoe dropping? It dropped. The ABC stopped streaming The Chasers War on Everything outside of Australia. I guess the big flap over the dying children sketch gave them that little bit of publicity that had too many furrrrrriners tuning in and, I don't know, but I'm pissed off.
*My first was a 2mx2m patch in my father's massive garden in the house where I did most of my growing up - but I only grew root vegetables there. I was four, for fuck's sake. Man, would I ever love to have a 2mx2m patch now. But space is such a different concept in Europe, which is no doubt a huge part of why I've started to feel it's time to leave.
martedì, giugno 23, 2009
The happy side of SAD
A short one today because I had to sleep in this morning because of more driving and properly meeting my upstairs neighbour, a German who's pretty awesome and who, with any luck, I'll be swapping plant attendance duties in the future instead of relying on an increasingly unreliable friend with a chemically dwindling short-term memory who lives nearby.
50-odd hours of driving practice/lesson have had a startling effect, turning me from a non-driver to a novice-driver to a bad driver. I can drive - I know what I have to do - I just do it with a remarkable clumsiness and lack of aplomb. It's at the point where my instructor is laughing instead of hitting me though, and last night when I noticed a woman with enooooormous boobies waiting to cross the streets and said 'gosh, she's hot', he congratulated me for keeping my eyes on the road so well I'd failed to notice she was about 70 and 'completement refaite.'
So many good things have been happening lately that I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wish I didn't do that, it's unhelpful. I did ask myself if it's just that summer is actually here now - that the weather has actually been behaving since the solstice - and I'm on the upswing of SAD. Also Belgians are the SADdest motherfuckers on the planet, to the point of being five or six degrees nicer to you when the weather is good, which of course has an impact on the quality of one's life. Also the men are far hornier when the sun is out, and look at one so much more appreciatively, which is pleasant, as I'm trying to enjoy the last (at a guess, depending on how pregnancy ruins my body) five years in which I'll be sexually attractive to strangers. But no. Some seriously good shit has been happening.Yay for good shit.
50-odd hours of driving practice/lesson have had a startling effect, turning me from a non-driver to a novice-driver to a bad driver. I can drive - I know what I have to do - I just do it with a remarkable clumsiness and lack of aplomb. It's at the point where my instructor is laughing instead of hitting me though, and last night when I noticed a woman with enooooormous boobies waiting to cross the streets and said 'gosh, she's hot', he congratulated me for keeping my eyes on the road so well I'd failed to notice she was about 70 and 'completement refaite.'
So many good things have been happening lately that I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wish I didn't do that, it's unhelpful. I did ask myself if it's just that summer is actually here now - that the weather has actually been behaving since the solstice - and I'm on the upswing of SAD. Also Belgians are the SADdest motherfuckers on the planet, to the point of being five or six degrees nicer to you when the weather is good, which of course has an impact on the quality of one's life. Also the men are far hornier when the sun is out, and look at one so much more appreciatively, which is pleasant, as I'm trying to enjoy the last (at a guess, depending on how pregnancy ruins my body) five years in which I'll be sexually attractive to strangers. But no. Some seriously good shit has been happening.Yay for good shit.
lunedì, giugno 22, 2009
There are a lot of reasons to love this picture, redux
But one of them is that you can really see the kid visualizing the truck going over a landscape of strangely human, undulating hillsides. It's the sort of powerful imaginative visualization I remember from the long hours I endured being unsuccessfully catholicated as a child, which I spent pretending my hands were brontosauruses fighting a death match. That's why Italians talk with their hands, you know. It's because of all the time we spent pretending our hands were brontosauruses fighting a death match in church, while the priest blah blah blahs about crap we obviously pay the closest possible attention to, considering our 'perilously' low birth rate and the sort of revolting, hypocritical adulterous pigs we elect into highest office. And, of course, our ongoing Christlike attachment to the merciful and forgiving spirit of Fascism.
God, I love Picture Is Unrelated so much.
Speaking of Catholics, more Chaser:
domenica, giugno 21, 2009
The limits of the zoological approach, redux
Today's the anniversary of Dutroux being sentenced. It chills my blood, that case, that Nihoul is already back on the streets, that Dossier X was let slide the way it was . . . This country chills my blood. There's charm in surrealism, but the surrealism here is more late Goya than the Marvellous Adventures of Amelie Fucking Poulain, that's for sure. The Lie Gaenen thing tipped me over the edge, that demonstrated a little too aptly the tolerance in this legal establishment for recidivist paedophilia despite all that street-hitting over Dutroux. The king (himself accused of paedophilia in the 70's) has apparently rejected his demand for clemency, but nobody knows if the public prosecutor has actually done its job and got him into prison yet to serve the 2/3 of his sentence that recidivist paedophiles are obliged to serve here (he was already condemned for paedophilia in the 70's, and then went on to have a successful career as a children's author and television presenter).
Well, it's not just paedophilia, there's a lack of proportionate consequences for actions generally speaking that allows the proverbially stupid national spirit flourish. Everybody complains about the wild-boars-on-the-rampage traffic and everbody drives around drunk, but what can you expect when there are no traffic cops and no penalties for drunk driving? I've got an acquaintance here who got pissed, totalled his car in a busy downtown tunnel, waited for the cops to come, they didn't breathalyze him and the whole problem went away. Why not? Nobody got hurt, miraculously; he was insured, the insurance company paid, because in the official documents he wasn't drunk. Simpler for everyone.
Especially because anybody here who gets a prison sentence under three years doesn't have to go to prison, they're too crowded. The F-word mentioned the other day that he'd like to teach in a prison, rather than a private school, which is a sentiment I can understand but I got rather insistent he not do it here, where they're over-crowded in a hellish manner and apparently you have to be the bastard of all time to actually get sent there if it takes that long to get a recidivist paedophile in. But my guess is that if Gaenen'd been a Maghrebin paedophile they'd have scraped together some room. Jamioulx in Charleroi is 50% over capacity, more depending on the source, and apparently with the latest wave of inmates coming in they had to stick a bunch directly into the tank - 2.5mX4.5m rooms without a window and just a concrete slab for a bed . . .
And how are they dealing with the situation at the administrative level here? Paying the Netherlands Euro 30 million to take 500 prisoners off their hands. Because the Netherlands doesn't have enough crime so they've got all these jails sitting around empty. Fucking embarassing.
Well, it's not just paedophilia, there's a lack of proportionate consequences for actions generally speaking that allows the proverbially stupid national spirit flourish. Everybody complains about the wild-boars-on-the-rampage traffic and everbody drives around drunk, but what can you expect when there are no traffic cops and no penalties for drunk driving? I've got an acquaintance here who got pissed, totalled his car in a busy downtown tunnel, waited for the cops to come, they didn't breathalyze him and the whole problem went away. Why not? Nobody got hurt, miraculously; he was insured, the insurance company paid, because in the official documents he wasn't drunk. Simpler for everyone.
Especially because anybody here who gets a prison sentence under three years doesn't have to go to prison, they're too crowded. The F-word mentioned the other day that he'd like to teach in a prison, rather than a private school, which is a sentiment I can understand but I got rather insistent he not do it here, where they're over-crowded in a hellish manner and apparently you have to be the bastard of all time to actually get sent there if it takes that long to get a recidivist paedophile in. But my guess is that if Gaenen'd been a Maghrebin paedophile they'd have scraped together some room. Jamioulx in Charleroi is 50% over capacity, more depending on the source, and apparently with the latest wave of inmates coming in they had to stick a bunch directly into the tank - 2.5mX4.5m rooms without a window and just a concrete slab for a bed . . .
And how are they dealing with the situation at the administrative level here? Paying the Netherlands Euro 30 million to take 500 prisoners off their hands. Because the Netherlands doesn't have enough crime so they've got all these jails sitting around empty. Fucking embarassing.
venerdì, giugno 19, 2009
A word about elections, sour grapes, and conclusion-jumping
Robert Fisk knows rather more about Iran than I do, he's actually there and reporting at the moment, and has written about it extensively over the last few days, so instead of going on about it more than I'm already going to I'll link him and use a quote he quotes in one of his articles:
"The election figures are correct, Robert. Whatever you saw in Tehran, in the cities and in thousands of towns outside, they voted overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad. Tabriz voted 80 per cent for Ahmadinejad. It was he who opened university courses there for the Azeri people to learn and win degrees in Azeri. In Mashad, the second city of Iran, there was a huge majority for Ahmadinejad after the imam of the great mosque attacked Rafsanjani of the Expediency Council who had started to ally himself with Mousavi. They knew what that meant: they had to vote for Ahmadinejad. You know why so many poorer women voted for Ahmadinejad? There are three million of them who make carpets in their homes. They had no insurance. When Ahmadinejad realised this, he immediately brought in a law to give them full insurance. Ahmadinejad's supporters were very shrewd. They got the people out in huge numbers to vote – and then presented this into their vote for Ahmadinejad."
Arlopop wrote a point-by-point description of why we should question the Iranian results, and while I think he can find most of his answers in the Fisk or the Cockburn in the same paper, I'd like to go over them briefly here. Let's start with majority-Kurd provinces. How could they have swung so Ahmadinejady? Maybe because the comparison of the Kurdish areas to San Francisco-going-McCain is almost offensive. I've never been to either but I'm sure the Kurdish areas of Iran aren't San Fran-fucking-cisco, they're places where people are still operating at the subsistence level and a bad winter kills you, and one of the regions where billions of dollars of massively inflated oil revenues were, according to any proper economist, thrown around like some particularly irresponsible candy since the 2005 elections.
And 'curious election results on the day'? A bit of Voter's-News-Service-2000? I'm aware saying the same thing happened in the States in 2000 isn't likely to persuade 49 to 51% of Americans that the latest Iranian one wasn't a steal; I am saying that this isn't a particularly uncommon thing to have happen. In a similar vein, Arlopop listed other objections that aren't strictly anecdotal or likely to be the actions of a large, impassioned minority of people deeply unhappy about the way the wind was blowing. The thing is, "apart from the fact that the Ahmadi was declared the winner before the votes were counted. apart from the fact that by law Khameni is not to receive the certification from the election commission until the third day following the election and only then can he approve and announce the winner, yet he did so within 24 hrs, apart from the remarkable election result graph that shows a preposterously straight line rise in the votes counted for Ahmadi" - these aren't really bizarre things to have happen if the man was actually leading by around 30%.
If I seemed to 'concede' in a recent post that that Ahmadinejad was less popular in urban areas than rural ones, I didn't mean to. My understanding is that he's unpopular with middle-class urbanites, and Tehran isn't peopled exclusively with middle-class urbanites. Once more, we're not talking about San Fran-fucking-cisco. Ahmadinejad got his big start being the mayor of Tehran, and he's spent the last five years subsidizing people who were being priced out of the Tehranese real estate market (in part because of his own economic policies, but there you are, if most Iranians aren't capable of appreciating economic cause and effect, they can join a club that includes everybody else in the fucking world).
As for generational shifts, he's also spent the last five years subsidizing the young. Why would we assume - especially now, during an international economic crisis that most of the world believes was caused by excessive economic liberalism - why would we assume the generational shift would be away from his managed-economy, high-subsidy side of the spectrum? Especially while there's a 40% unemployment rate?
And if their pre-occupation was peace, why assume Ahmadinejad would be a repellent candidate? Sigh. I'm already trying to avoid offending my own feminist sensibilities by appearing to defend Ahmadinejad, who I think is a cunt; I don't want to start appearing to defend nuclear weapons in the same day. Nonetheless, here're eight little words the young Iranians I went to school with in Paris five or six years ago quoted at me when I asked why the idea of getting nuclear weapons was so popular with them: Iraq, North Korea, 2003, invasion and lack thereof. And then two more: Israeli arsenal. I don't know, but I expect the road to peace looks different when you're a defensive country that actually has a reason to be defensive.
And anybody who would imagine that Iranians would be feeling any less defensive now than they were in 2005, now that someone who made Sharon look like Bambi has his finger on the button, needs to look at a fucking map (not to mention to stop thinking about Obama as a bouquet of roses they can hand the world to apologize for decades of fuck-ups, and to start thinking about him as their own president - but more on that below.) The US is important, sure. It's not where the Iranians I knew were expecting the planes to come from and it's not a geographically small and militarily enormous enemy Iranian strategists would hope to be able to neutralize with the threat of four or five well-shot missiles. Not my cup of strategic tea, but again - if Iranian strategists aren't capable of appreciating the conflict between nuclear armaments and an honest desire for peace, they can join a club that includes just about all the other strategists in the fucking world.
Now, I don't think we're looking at anything in Iran in the protests that could be called sour grapes or sore losing. I think people who want Ahmadinejad gone have the right ideology. I don't like him. I like their right to protest. But look at these two pictures:
Half a million people turn out to protest America's involvement in Indochina, 1971. Then, in 1972, incumbent Nixon beats pacifist McGovern by an embarassing margin, even with the start of the Watergate scandal.
May and June 1968 - a huge chunk of France goes apeshit left, making American peacenik demonstrators look like the spineless bourgeois potheads they turned out to be. Later in June, in the French legislatives President De Gaulle calls to calm everybody down, the rightwing parties clean up nearly 58% of the vote.
Hundreds of thousands of people hitting the streets is evidence something is wrong. But mass demonstrations are not in themselves a sign that the majority isn't being represented.
But look - it's always questionable, right? Arlopop could just as easily ask, why shouldn't we question the Iranian results? They are questionable, even beyond questions of fixing after the fact. The tactics leading up to the election persuading people which way to vote were lousy, Ahmadinejad is a populist to an irresponsible degree, and it's a shame he won - legitimately or not - because if he hadn't won it would have been much simpler to deal with for the rest of the world. Questionable, on all sorts of levels. No less questionable for the questions being common to most democratic systems. And most questionable of all because it's impossible for us to know. We're not Iranian, we weren't there, we didn't count the votes, we didn't see what happened in the counting stations, we didn't have observers there.
Questioning is fine. But there's a difference between questioning and a wholesale leap to the conclusion that the demonstrators represent the Iranian majority and that Ahmadinejad's election was a steal. And let's not leap the other way - for the moment, let's forget similar massive demonstrations in 1953 and the CIA and Iranian government paranoia about how this is the first internet age Yankee-sponsored right-wing coup. Let's think about what we do know - ourselves, us Anglos, now.
Let's look at the fact that international Anglo opinion-leading media outlets like the Economist are already making absolutely unprovable, unqualified statements like "most Iranians believe electoral fraud has occurred on a massive scale", that Republicans are frothing at the mouth for some sort of intervention in favour of Moussavi, that in mainstream American media Moussavi supporters are demonstrating for a wholesale structural change from the Ayatollahs on down - and ask ourselves how this Anglo certainty, this transformation of we don't know into almost definitely, is going to do to the tightrope being trod in the region as Obama seeks to transform the US's fucking lamentable role there. The Financial Times actually has a rather smashing article about it.
Questioning is fine. Questioning is always fine. Anglos and westerners conclusion-jumping en masse in a way that is so illegitimizing is not. Unfortunately it's already been done, and done before we know shit about shit except that a few hundred thousand Iranians are monumentally pissed off and that they're being governed by the sort of murderous thugs governing most of the human population of the world, functioning democracies or not. And now Barack Obama is going to have an exponentially harder time engaging diplomatically with an Iranian regime who millions of his own electorate are being convinced is illegitimate. That's just fucking dandy, and I really have to ask: who is going to be happy about that?
"The election figures are correct, Robert. Whatever you saw in Tehran, in the cities and in thousands of towns outside, they voted overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad. Tabriz voted 80 per cent for Ahmadinejad. It was he who opened university courses there for the Azeri people to learn and win degrees in Azeri. In Mashad, the second city of Iran, there was a huge majority for Ahmadinejad after the imam of the great mosque attacked Rafsanjani of the Expediency Council who had started to ally himself with Mousavi. They knew what that meant: they had to vote for Ahmadinejad. You know why so many poorer women voted for Ahmadinejad? There are three million of them who make carpets in their homes. They had no insurance. When Ahmadinejad realised this, he immediately brought in a law to give them full insurance. Ahmadinejad's supporters were very shrewd. They got the people out in huge numbers to vote – and then presented this into their vote for Ahmadinejad."
Arlopop wrote a point-by-point description of why we should question the Iranian results, and while I think he can find most of his answers in the Fisk or the Cockburn in the same paper, I'd like to go over them briefly here. Let's start with majority-Kurd provinces. How could they have swung so Ahmadinejady? Maybe because the comparison of the Kurdish areas to San Francisco-going-McCain is almost offensive. I've never been to either but I'm sure the Kurdish areas of Iran aren't San Fran-fucking-cisco, they're places where people are still operating at the subsistence level and a bad winter kills you, and one of the regions where billions of dollars of massively inflated oil revenues were, according to any proper economist, thrown around like some particularly irresponsible candy since the 2005 elections.
And 'curious election results on the day'? A bit of Voter's-News-Service-2000? I'm aware saying the same thing happened in the States in 2000 isn't likely to persuade 49 to 51% of Americans that the latest Iranian one wasn't a steal; I am saying that this isn't a particularly uncommon thing to have happen. In a similar vein, Arlopop listed other objections that aren't strictly anecdotal or likely to be the actions of a large, impassioned minority of people deeply unhappy about the way the wind was blowing. The thing is, "apart from the fact that the Ahmadi was declared the winner before the votes were counted. apart from the fact that by law Khameni is not to receive the certification from the election commission until the third day following the election and only then can he approve and announce the winner, yet he did so within 24 hrs, apart from the remarkable election result graph that shows a preposterously straight line rise in the votes counted for Ahmadi" - these aren't really bizarre things to have happen if the man was actually leading by around 30%.
If I seemed to 'concede' in a recent post that that Ahmadinejad was less popular in urban areas than rural ones, I didn't mean to. My understanding is that he's unpopular with middle-class urbanites, and Tehran isn't peopled exclusively with middle-class urbanites. Once more, we're not talking about San Fran-fucking-cisco. Ahmadinejad got his big start being the mayor of Tehran, and he's spent the last five years subsidizing people who were being priced out of the Tehranese real estate market (in part because of his own economic policies, but there you are, if most Iranians aren't capable of appreciating economic cause and effect, they can join a club that includes everybody else in the fucking world).
As for generational shifts, he's also spent the last five years subsidizing the young. Why would we assume - especially now, during an international economic crisis that most of the world believes was caused by excessive economic liberalism - why would we assume the generational shift would be away from his managed-economy, high-subsidy side of the spectrum? Especially while there's a 40% unemployment rate?
And if their pre-occupation was peace, why assume Ahmadinejad would be a repellent candidate? Sigh. I'm already trying to avoid offending my own feminist sensibilities by appearing to defend Ahmadinejad, who I think is a cunt; I don't want to start appearing to defend nuclear weapons in the same day. Nonetheless, here're eight little words the young Iranians I went to school with in Paris five or six years ago quoted at me when I asked why the idea of getting nuclear weapons was so popular with them: Iraq, North Korea, 2003, invasion and lack thereof. And then two more: Israeli arsenal. I don't know, but I expect the road to peace looks different when you're a defensive country that actually has a reason to be defensive.
And anybody who would imagine that Iranians would be feeling any less defensive now than they were in 2005, now that someone who made Sharon look like Bambi has his finger on the button, needs to look at a fucking map (not to mention to stop thinking about Obama as a bouquet of roses they can hand the world to apologize for decades of fuck-ups, and to start thinking about him as their own president - but more on that below.) The US is important, sure. It's not where the Iranians I knew were expecting the planes to come from and it's not a geographically small and militarily enormous enemy Iranian strategists would hope to be able to neutralize with the threat of four or five well-shot missiles. Not my cup of strategic tea, but again - if Iranian strategists aren't capable of appreciating the conflict between nuclear armaments and an honest desire for peace, they can join a club that includes just about all the other strategists in the fucking world.
Now, I don't think we're looking at anything in Iran in the protests that could be called sour grapes or sore losing. I think people who want Ahmadinejad gone have the right ideology. I don't like him. I like their right to protest. But look at these two pictures:
Half a million people turn out to protest America's involvement in Indochina, 1971. Then, in 1972, incumbent Nixon beats pacifist McGovern by an embarassing margin, even with the start of the Watergate scandal.
May and June 1968 - a huge chunk of France goes apeshit left, making American peacenik demonstrators look like the spineless bourgeois potheads they turned out to be. Later in June, in the French legislatives President De Gaulle calls to calm everybody down, the rightwing parties clean up nearly 58% of the vote.Hundreds of thousands of people hitting the streets is evidence something is wrong. But mass demonstrations are not in themselves a sign that the majority isn't being represented.
But look - it's always questionable, right? Arlopop could just as easily ask, why shouldn't we question the Iranian results? They are questionable, even beyond questions of fixing after the fact. The tactics leading up to the election persuading people which way to vote were lousy, Ahmadinejad is a populist to an irresponsible degree, and it's a shame he won - legitimately or not - because if he hadn't won it would have been much simpler to deal with for the rest of the world. Questionable, on all sorts of levels. No less questionable for the questions being common to most democratic systems. And most questionable of all because it's impossible for us to know. We're not Iranian, we weren't there, we didn't count the votes, we didn't see what happened in the counting stations, we didn't have observers there.
Questioning is fine. But there's a difference between questioning and a wholesale leap to the conclusion that the demonstrators represent the Iranian majority and that Ahmadinejad's election was a steal. And let's not leap the other way - for the moment, let's forget similar massive demonstrations in 1953 and the CIA and Iranian government paranoia about how this is the first internet age Yankee-sponsored right-wing coup. Let's think about what we do know - ourselves, us Anglos, now.
Let's look at the fact that international Anglo opinion-leading media outlets like the Economist are already making absolutely unprovable, unqualified statements like "most Iranians believe electoral fraud has occurred on a massive scale", that Republicans are frothing at the mouth for some sort of intervention in favour of Moussavi, that in mainstream American media Moussavi supporters are demonstrating for a wholesale structural change from the Ayatollahs on down - and ask ourselves how this Anglo certainty, this transformation of we don't know into almost definitely, is going to do to the tightrope being trod in the region as Obama seeks to transform the US's fucking lamentable role there. The Financial Times actually has a rather smashing article about it.
Questioning is fine. Questioning is always fine. Anglos and westerners conclusion-jumping en masse in a way that is so illegitimizing is not. Unfortunately it's already been done, and done before we know shit about shit except that a few hundred thousand Iranians are monumentally pissed off and that they're being governed by the sort of murderous thugs governing most of the human population of the world, functioning democracies or not. And now Barack Obama is going to have an exponentially harder time engaging diplomatically with an Iranian regime who millions of his own electorate are being convinced is illegitimate. That's just fucking dandy, and I really have to ask: who is going to be happy about that?
mercoledì, giugno 17, 2009
There are a lot of things to love about this photograph
But one of them is certainly that Jayne Mansfield had an IQ topping out 160. Quantifiably measurable genius is what quantifiably measurable genius does and off the chart or not, based on this photograph alone I know I'd rather give Sophia Loren the keys, and I mean that with almost every permutation of significance and taste you can imagine. Still, I wish it was in colour.
Speaking of Sophia Loren, more Chaser:
martedì, giugno 16, 2009
Given the history of US and Iranian relations . . .
So considering what's happened with Iran, the US, and regime change over the last 40 years, I was rather relieved to read this this morning. It's really fantastic that people are demonstrating there for what they believe in, in the face of a repressive security apparatus. It's really awful that the repressive security apparatus is being repressive. And if there were irregularities or corruptions in the voting patterns, I really hope they're exposed and dealt with. But take a deep fucking breath.
The percentage Ahmadinejad's supposed to have got this time - low 60%'s - is about the same as he was supposed to have got in 2005 without raising eyebrows. That was in the second round, true - but his opponent in the second round wasn't a 'reformist', he was another conservative. A reformist candidate came third in 2005, just topping out 17% of the vote. 'Reformers' performed worse in the last election, without everybody screaming foul.
We've known for a long time that educated urbanites in Iran thought Ahmadinejad's a dangerous hick and that everybody else there rather liked him. And now he's spent the last five years offering politically popular subsidies to the bulk of the population against any rational economic advice. When they've caused piss-off, his domestic policies have mainly pissed off middle-class urbanites - not really the bulk of the electorate. And his posturing on Iran's nuclear programme hasn't resulted in the disasters people warn about yet, and indeed surely Iranians have remarked that without Ahmadinejad tempering his speech, the US has nonetheless voted for the man who didn't sing 'bomb bomb Iran', and whose administration has spent the last few months indicating it's interested in a better relationship.
Based on what we know - why would we assume that now, in 2009, it's impossible for Ahmadinejad to get the votes he got in 2005? Why would we assume there has been a 30% + shift in voting patterns that has been fraudulently covered up, just because the educated urbanites who are sick of the dangerous hick - and yeah, he's a dangerous hick - are bravely and efficiently hitting the streets? Why are we assuming so readily that democracy has failed, instead of asking if the demonstrators are just extremely disappointed about the way democracy has gone? Why are so many Americans assuming that just because they managed to vote for the least embarassing candidate for once last year, every other country is going to start doing the same?
I'm very, very sorry people are getting killed, and apparently getting disappeared into the bargain, and that it's a big fucking mess. Election or not, this government, like so many Iranian governments before it, bears the responsibility for murder. But look - this is a country where, 45 years ago, democracy was snuffed out - with a great deal of international help - under the guise of massive protests. This was followed by a quarter of a century of extremely repressive absolutist rule and massive international resource exploitation. The revolution that ended the situation in 1979 was attacked with both barrels by the international community, up to and including arming a thug like Saddam Hussein to the teeth to fight a brutal proxy war.
Morally revolting or not, it's not a surprise that the government is trigger-happy now. History and our common sense has to tell us there's a very real prospect that the election results were legitimate, and that it wouldn't take a paranoid schizophrenic government to imagine that the massive anti-government demonstrations represent yet another internationally-sponsored, anti-democratic coup attempt. Is murdering and disappearing the right way to deal with that? No. It's an awful way to deal with that. But - given the history of US and Iranian relations - I understand why it's being dealt with this way. Tragic. But there you are. You spend forty years fucking a country, and what have you got? A fucked country.
Obama knows what he's talking about, which I'm really not used to thinking about things American presidents say. I hope he means it.
The percentage Ahmadinejad's supposed to have got this time - low 60%'s - is about the same as he was supposed to have got in 2005 without raising eyebrows. That was in the second round, true - but his opponent in the second round wasn't a 'reformist', he was another conservative. A reformist candidate came third in 2005, just topping out 17% of the vote. 'Reformers' performed worse in the last election, without everybody screaming foul.
We've known for a long time that educated urbanites in Iran thought Ahmadinejad's a dangerous hick and that everybody else there rather liked him. And now he's spent the last five years offering politically popular subsidies to the bulk of the population against any rational economic advice. When they've caused piss-off, his domestic policies have mainly pissed off middle-class urbanites - not really the bulk of the electorate. And his posturing on Iran's nuclear programme hasn't resulted in the disasters people warn about yet, and indeed surely Iranians have remarked that without Ahmadinejad tempering his speech, the US has nonetheless voted for the man who didn't sing 'bomb bomb Iran', and whose administration has spent the last few months indicating it's interested in a better relationship.
Based on what we know - why would we assume that now, in 2009, it's impossible for Ahmadinejad to get the votes he got in 2005? Why would we assume there has been a 30% + shift in voting patterns that has been fraudulently covered up, just because the educated urbanites who are sick of the dangerous hick - and yeah, he's a dangerous hick - are bravely and efficiently hitting the streets? Why are we assuming so readily that democracy has failed, instead of asking if the demonstrators are just extremely disappointed about the way democracy has gone? Why are so many Americans assuming that just because they managed to vote for the least embarassing candidate for once last year, every other country is going to start doing the same?
I'm very, very sorry people are getting killed, and apparently getting disappeared into the bargain, and that it's a big fucking mess. Election or not, this government, like so many Iranian governments before it, bears the responsibility for murder. But look - this is a country where, 45 years ago, democracy was snuffed out - with a great deal of international help - under the guise of massive protests. This was followed by a quarter of a century of extremely repressive absolutist rule and massive international resource exploitation. The revolution that ended the situation in 1979 was attacked with both barrels by the international community, up to and including arming a thug like Saddam Hussein to the teeth to fight a brutal proxy war.
Morally revolting or not, it's not a surprise that the government is trigger-happy now. History and our common sense has to tell us there's a very real prospect that the election results were legitimate, and that it wouldn't take a paranoid schizophrenic government to imagine that the massive anti-government demonstrations represent yet another internationally-sponsored, anti-democratic coup attempt. Is murdering and disappearing the right way to deal with that? No. It's an awful way to deal with that. But - given the history of US and Iranian relations - I understand why it's being dealt with this way. Tragic. But there you are. You spend forty years fucking a country, and what have you got? A fucked country.
Obama knows what he's talking about, which I'm really not used to thinking about things American presidents say. I hope he means it.
lunedì, giugno 15, 2009
Talking shop
This post is a post of praise about my home and natal land. Oh yes . . . Canada. The national police may be taser-happy goons and the city police may be mind-bogglingly incompetent and the situation with the natives might be second in Anglo retardation and murderousness only to the fucking Australians (that charming little chestnut about driving natives out of town on extremely cold winter nights and dumping them on the side of the road to avoid dying of hypothermia as best they can comes up with monotonous and vomitous regularity), but nonetheless, when it comes to me, my job, and my relatively po-po free life - oh Canada, you big beautiful bastard.
Here's the thing. I'm putting together a feature about the Canada/EU free trade talks. Our focus is Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, so I don't talk to Canadians working for the national government much; this was the first time in more than a year. I'd forgotten how good it was. Generally, talking to national/continental government workers is my least favourite job when researching articles. Call a private company, industry organization, or local government body, and you can usually get a straight answer one way or another. But call a national government body, and sigh.
Here they are, listed by quality:
1. Sub-Saharan Africa. The best in my normal field. Everybody who picks up the phone speaks either French or English, everybody who picks up the phone is polite, helpful, and competent, and it takes a very brief time to get a cellphone number for the appropriate minister or minister's assistant or whatever. The main pitfall with calling African governments is that 3/4 of the time, the landlines just don't fucking work, and even once you get a cell number, 1/2 of the time the reception is so fucking bad the conversation sounds like a shouting match and you wrap it up understanding only about 50% of what's gone on. So the best, but still a massive pain in the ass.
And then a precipitous drop in quality as we head to:
2. Mainland Europe -national governments and EU institutions. A near impenetrable-wall of ringing phones without message services. Get past that and reach another imposing barrier of aggressive, monolingual secretaries or receptionists who have no demonstrated grasp of the fundamentals of the departments they work for, and whose mandate, very obviously, is to prevent you, as a member of the media, from speaking to anybody in their department with a title. As if that wasn't enough of a roadblock, call anytime between the hours of 11 and 15, and there's no chance of speaking to anybody whose lunches are subsidized. Call after 16, and the fuckers have all gone home.
3. The Middle East and north Africa. Complete gas factory. Combination of sub-Saharan African phone services and European monolingualism, which is a rather bigger problem for me as I don't speak Arabic but do speak a few European languages. The most frustrating port of call has been Iraq, to follow reconstruction projects wherein they were soliciting international funds with English press releases from departments where no-one willing to talk on the phone spoke English. More on that another time.
4. United Kingdom. Far and away the worst. In the case of mainland Europe and the Middle East I suspect part of the problem with getting in touch with anyone governmentally significant over the phone has to do with civil service sinecures and nepotism and the wrong jobs going to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. In the UK it's rather more surreal and much, much more fucking annoying than that.
You call the media contact at the pertinent organization. The media contact never has any idea what's going on; their function, seemingly, is to try to determine the right person for you to talk to. They get back to you with punctilious efficiency, generally about three hours later, with a name and number. You call that person; not quite the right one. Lather, rinse, repeat. You call a total of no less than five people. Each one takes down your details and enquiries, and each one refers you on to someone who would no doubt be helpful who isn't, but at least everybody answers their phone.
The next day, your phone starts ringing. Everybody who you've spoken to the day before, everybody who has referred you on to someone else - everybody gets back to you. And creepily, everyone tells you the same thing - a bland, anodyne message obviously dictated by some eerie centralized intelligence that answers absolutely no questions, no matter how innocent or factual. Call the HSE with a series of questions about a spate of employee deaths and get a five-paragraph answer about how the HSE would like fewer employees to die. Call Defra with specific questions about breakdowns in the recycling chain, and get a five paragraph response about how Defra would like more things to be recycled. And get the same responses from four or five different people. You've wasted your time calling them and now they're wasting your time calling you back, refusing to engage with facts that are already part of the public domain, as if they're all scared they'll be sacked if they deviate an inch from the party line.
Ugh.
But Canada however - darling Canada. Give the trade department a holler about free trade negotiations with the EU and the media contact has an in-depth understanding of subsidization issues. I didn't speak to a single secretary yesterday, or if I did, they understood their department enough to give out information on its nuts-and-bolts operations, like the base duty rate with Most Favoured Nations and prior difficulties and roadblocks with NAFTA. Oh god, it was so good to call back home. Everybody is so polite and so much less retarded and Kafkaesque and ghost-hacked there. It lit up my whole afternoon but I won't lie to you, it also made me as homesick as fuck. Oh well.
Here's the thing. I'm putting together a feature about the Canada/EU free trade talks. Our focus is Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, so I don't talk to Canadians working for the national government much; this was the first time in more than a year. I'd forgotten how good it was. Generally, talking to national/continental government workers is my least favourite job when researching articles. Call a private company, industry organization, or local government body, and you can usually get a straight answer one way or another. But call a national government body, and sigh.
Here they are, listed by quality:
1. Sub-Saharan Africa. The best in my normal field. Everybody who picks up the phone speaks either French or English, everybody who picks up the phone is polite, helpful, and competent, and it takes a very brief time to get a cellphone number for the appropriate minister or minister's assistant or whatever. The main pitfall with calling African governments is that 3/4 of the time, the landlines just don't fucking work, and even once you get a cell number, 1/2 of the time the reception is so fucking bad the conversation sounds like a shouting match and you wrap it up understanding only about 50% of what's gone on. So the best, but still a massive pain in the ass.
And then a precipitous drop in quality as we head to:
2. Mainland Europe -national governments and EU institutions. A near impenetrable-wall of ringing phones without message services. Get past that and reach another imposing barrier of aggressive, monolingual secretaries or receptionists who have no demonstrated grasp of the fundamentals of the departments they work for, and whose mandate, very obviously, is to prevent you, as a member of the media, from speaking to anybody in their department with a title. As if that wasn't enough of a roadblock, call anytime between the hours of 11 and 15, and there's no chance of speaking to anybody whose lunches are subsidized. Call after 16, and the fuckers have all gone home.
3. The Middle East and north Africa. Complete gas factory. Combination of sub-Saharan African phone services and European monolingualism, which is a rather bigger problem for me as I don't speak Arabic but do speak a few European languages. The most frustrating port of call has been Iraq, to follow reconstruction projects wherein they were soliciting international funds with English press releases from departments where no-one willing to talk on the phone spoke English. More on that another time.
4. United Kingdom. Far and away the worst. In the case of mainland Europe and the Middle East I suspect part of the problem with getting in touch with anyone governmentally significant over the phone has to do with civil service sinecures and nepotism and the wrong jobs going to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. In the UK it's rather more surreal and much, much more fucking annoying than that.
You call the media contact at the pertinent organization. The media contact never has any idea what's going on; their function, seemingly, is to try to determine the right person for you to talk to. They get back to you with punctilious efficiency, generally about three hours later, with a name and number. You call that person; not quite the right one. Lather, rinse, repeat. You call a total of no less than five people. Each one takes down your details and enquiries, and each one refers you on to someone who would no doubt be helpful who isn't, but at least everybody answers their phone.
The next day, your phone starts ringing. Everybody who you've spoken to the day before, everybody who has referred you on to someone else - everybody gets back to you. And creepily, everyone tells you the same thing - a bland, anodyne message obviously dictated by some eerie centralized intelligence that answers absolutely no questions, no matter how innocent or factual. Call the HSE with a series of questions about a spate of employee deaths and get a five-paragraph answer about how the HSE would like fewer employees to die. Call Defra with specific questions about breakdowns in the recycling chain, and get a five paragraph response about how Defra would like more things to be recycled. And get the same responses from four or five different people. You've wasted your time calling them and now they're wasting your time calling you back, refusing to engage with facts that are already part of the public domain, as if they're all scared they'll be sacked if they deviate an inch from the party line.
Ugh.
But Canada however - darling Canada. Give the trade department a holler about free trade negotiations with the EU and the media contact has an in-depth understanding of subsidization issues. I didn't speak to a single secretary yesterday, or if I did, they understood their department enough to give out information on its nuts-and-bolts operations, like the base duty rate with Most Favoured Nations and prior difficulties and roadblocks with NAFTA. Oh god, it was so good to call back home. Everybody is so polite and so much less retarded and Kafkaesque and ghost-hacked there. It lit up my whole afternoon but I won't lie to you, it also made me as homesick as fuck. Oh well.
domenica, giugno 14, 2009
Of gas factories and titties
Dreadfully domestic weekend. We were going to go to Lille and buy some fabric at Toto, the place where I'd dropped Euro 70 in ten minutes in Bordeaux, but there was a big cave of a shop I'd heard about here that I wanted to try before springing the Euro 10 or whatever it'd be for the train tickets, and it was the first Saturday of the organic co-op drop-off. Both the cave and the drop-off were gas factories.
While Le Berger looked like a treasure trove when I walked in, and may have been, nothing was labelled (except by price), and it's quite key that for all the projects I have in mind that we have zero polyester. I haven't been at this long enough to tell the difference by touch or sight; I tried a few burn tests on things I thought were cotton (on the sidewalk, of course, though it did strike me I could cause a jolly blaze with just a little carelessness), and they melted. And then I got sick of the whole thing. The women working there were mammoth sourpusses - too busy telling each other what a hard time they'd been having sleeping the night through recently to be able to do much more than bark single-word responses to my questions - so Toto it is. Lovely, organized, clean, labelled, cheap Toto.
The organic pick-up went rather better, and would have gone impeccably, but for, once more, half the body of the co-op being space cadets. By the time we arrived for our hamper, an insurrectionary movement was brewing, because AS WARNED REPEATEDLY some orders were missing some items that had turned out to not be available that week. The price was adjusted down, of course, in consequence, but that didn't stop ten rabble-rousers having a scene in a small basement. It took me a solid ten minutes to pay my bill instead of the three seconds it should have taken, mostly because it took that long to wade through a small lake of wounded Francophones who thought they had a right to their absent carrots. Fuck.
And - okay. I don't feel so great writing this next sentence, but here it goes. They had a blind woman on the cash till. I mean, an absolutely blind woman. Of course she was managing, because Euro-money is blind-friendly with its sizing and edges and everything, but she was managing slowly. At about the quarter of the speed of a sighted Belgian - which, you may have noticed if you've ever got change at a shop here, is about half the speed of a sighted anyone-the-fuck-else. I understand that it was more practical for her to make a contribution through money-processing than food-sorting, because of the blind-friendliness of Euro money, but she had already made a significant contribution through her organization of the electronic ordering system, so - well, I don't know. All I know is that added an extra four minutes to my time in a sweaty basement of Gallic indignation and it annoyed me.
The rest of the weekend was reasonably hitch-free. Notable was the sewing; sewed the F-word another pair of boxers because he'd liked the last pair so much, and sewed myself a dress. The dress is pretty awesome but not for me. It's shirred all around the bust, which I think is a much better look for someone who doesn't already have a big old heaving bosom; it makes me look like some sort of repellent, sexually professional child-impersonator. But I wanted to practice shirring, because it's so great for kid's clothes, so there you are. Discovered halfway through that shirring in a spiral after the garment is sewed up on the sides is definitely the way to go, much easier and much faster, though it made me a little dizzy. Next time I'll try giving shirring the titty area a miss and doing the waist instead, so as to look like a buxom pirate. Arrrr. The freedom of the unshirred boobies for me.
While Le Berger looked like a treasure trove when I walked in, and may have been, nothing was labelled (except by price), and it's quite key that for all the projects I have in mind that we have zero polyester. I haven't been at this long enough to tell the difference by touch or sight; I tried a few burn tests on things I thought were cotton (on the sidewalk, of course, though it did strike me I could cause a jolly blaze with just a little carelessness), and they melted. And then I got sick of the whole thing. The women working there were mammoth sourpusses - too busy telling each other what a hard time they'd been having sleeping the night through recently to be able to do much more than bark single-word responses to my questions - so Toto it is. Lovely, organized, clean, labelled, cheap Toto.
The organic pick-up went rather better, and would have gone impeccably, but for, once more, half the body of the co-op being space cadets. By the time we arrived for our hamper, an insurrectionary movement was brewing, because AS WARNED REPEATEDLY some orders were missing some items that had turned out to not be available that week. The price was adjusted down, of course, in consequence, but that didn't stop ten rabble-rousers having a scene in a small basement. It took me a solid ten minutes to pay my bill instead of the three seconds it should have taken, mostly because it took that long to wade through a small lake of wounded Francophones who thought they had a right to their absent carrots. Fuck.
And - okay. I don't feel so great writing this next sentence, but here it goes. They had a blind woman on the cash till. I mean, an absolutely blind woman. Of course she was managing, because Euro-money is blind-friendly with its sizing and edges and everything, but she was managing slowly. At about the quarter of the speed of a sighted Belgian - which, you may have noticed if you've ever got change at a shop here, is about half the speed of a sighted anyone-the-fuck-else. I understand that it was more practical for her to make a contribution through money-processing than food-sorting, because of the blind-friendliness of Euro money, but she had already made a significant contribution through her organization of the electronic ordering system, so - well, I don't know. All I know is that added an extra four minutes to my time in a sweaty basement of Gallic indignation and it annoyed me.
The rest of the weekend was reasonably hitch-free. Notable was the sewing; sewed the F-word another pair of boxers because he'd liked the last pair so much, and sewed myself a dress. The dress is pretty awesome but not for me. It's shirred all around the bust, which I think is a much better look for someone who doesn't already have a big old heaving bosom; it makes me look like some sort of repellent, sexually professional child-impersonator. But I wanted to practice shirring, because it's so great for kid's clothes, so there you are. Discovered halfway through that shirring in a spiral after the garment is sewed up on the sides is definitely the way to go, much easier and much faster, though it made me a little dizzy. Next time I'll try giving shirring the titty area a miss and doing the waist instead, so as to look like a buxom pirate. Arrrr. The freedom of the unshirred boobies for me.
giovedì, giugno 11, 2009
Crazy like a crazy person
Watched the final section of Berger's Ways of Seeing and then Robert Hughes's doc on Goya last night; just to make a week of comparative art documentaries, I suppose. The final section was on advertising, and it left me with the suspicion I like John Berger so much so far because he says things I already thought, in a much more coherent way than I could say them - notably the sheer contextual madness of paging through a magazine between pictures of dead and dying third-world types and the warm fuzziness of hard liquor ads.
That sort of thing first struck me in a big way back when I was working at the television commercial place, watching 50 or more commercials a day, one after another. Especially watching the PSAs next to the other ads - a woman with black eyes gazing imploringly at the camera in the rain, or something of the sort, when it was aiming to boost donations for shelters or encouraging men not to beat their wives - and then a beer ad suggesting all the marvellous social and sexual things that would happen to a man if he got plastered that night.
The side effect of my job - and this happened to my predecessor in the position too - was not being able to watch commercial television anymore; not only was it infuriating and awful to be inescapably confronted with the fact of audience-as-commodity, but it was like listening to the pushier kind of madman, or a cacaphony of opposing, fanatic voices. Without even changing the channel. Thank god for internet streaming sites.
Anyways, profoundly enjoyed the whole Berger series, and the Hughes Goya: Crazy Like a Genius documentary wasn't too bad either, though I vastly preferred the book. I think that's partly because when you read the book, you don't have to listen to the lecherous snide fuck speak, and can let your eyes skim over the gratuitous sentences about what he'd like to do to the Naked Maja. In his documentary about Caravaggio and in American Visions and in the Shock of the New, I swear he wasn't so consistent about forcing himself front and centre, and that they're vastly better television for it. Somehow in the book, the extended part about the visions of Goya-ghouls during the aftermath of his road injuries was less obtrusive. I think it made more sense in the broader context of a kabillion-page book rather than an hour-long or whatever it was documentary.
That sort of thing first struck me in a big way back when I was working at the television commercial place, watching 50 or more commercials a day, one after another. Especially watching the PSAs next to the other ads - a woman with black eyes gazing imploringly at the camera in the rain, or something of the sort, when it was aiming to boost donations for shelters or encouraging men not to beat their wives - and then a beer ad suggesting all the marvellous social and sexual things that would happen to a man if he got plastered that night.
The side effect of my job - and this happened to my predecessor in the position too - was not being able to watch commercial television anymore; not only was it infuriating and awful to be inescapably confronted with the fact of audience-as-commodity, but it was like listening to the pushier kind of madman, or a cacaphony of opposing, fanatic voices. Without even changing the channel. Thank god for internet streaming sites.
Anyways, profoundly enjoyed the whole Berger series, and the Hughes Goya: Crazy Like a Genius documentary wasn't too bad either, though I vastly preferred the book. I think that's partly because when you read the book, you don't have to listen to the lecherous snide fuck speak, and can let your eyes skim over the gratuitous sentences about what he'd like to do to the Naked Maja. In his documentary about Caravaggio and in American Visions and in the Shock of the New, I swear he wasn't so consistent about forcing himself front and centre, and that they're vastly better television for it. Somehow in the book, the extended part about the visions of Goya-ghouls during the aftermath of his road injuries was less obtrusive. I think it made more sense in the broader context of a kabillion-page book rather than an hour-long or whatever it was documentary.
mercoledì, giugno 10, 2009
Ways of Being, 2
To continue from yesterday.
Some think that so much of today's art mirrors and thus criticises decadence. Not so. It's just decadent. Full stop. It has no critical function, it is part of the problem.
As I wrote, it's a good point, and it's in the company of a few other good points, like how an overheated art market is transforming desired paintings into super-expensive commodities, and having a horrible impact on public galleries’ ability to collect and show. There's also a suggestion - poorly explored - of how it may be skewing instruction at art schools; something that hit my art-school alumnus boyf as extremely relevant.
BUT what we have building up to this point is an extremely personal, elitist and deeply unpleasant vision of decontextualized art and the response of masses of people to it. We have the messy, badly argued, and unlikely premise running through this documentary that the way working-class and middle-class Americans ‘experienced’ the Mona Lisa on its trip to New York in 1963 and the way they generally see gallery art is by its nature generally deeply inferior to the way Robert Hughes sees it in its proper context. Not just less educated, not just less loving, but by its nature deeply inferior - that the masses experience seeing art, and Robert Hughes looks at it. Or vice versa. Whatever verb makes Robert Hughes sound cleverer and the masses sound more insensible. I think this was a beastly, unfair, and erroneous generalization, and it’s what I hated most about the documentary.
Another thing I hated about it was the idea it presented to us that this perceived deep inferiority of the popular vision is tied to the present overheated, overpriced, and qualitatively poor state of the expensive end of the modern art market – a ridiculous, speculative art market with which only the tiniest percentage of the population has any engagement at all, and which mainly impacts them by baffling them when they go to public galleries to see something else . . .
Hughes’ perspective shows a complete unconsciousness of the importance of all the mighty piles of art vastly aesthetically and intellectually superior to shark-in-formaldehyde, that continue to be accessible and affordable in co-op or community galleries or other points of sale – points of sale that are burgeoning like mushrooms after the rain now that we have the internet. This is predictable, because the man seems incapable not only of appreciating the way the masses may or may not be impacted by art, but incapable of appreciating there may be an artistic world in existence beyond the top end he's covered in Time magazine and a series of admittedly delicious books and documentaries.
But both things I hated about the documentary can be summed up rather more simply in one phrase: Robert Hughes absolutely failed to think outside of himself.
He failed to consider that in all those thousands of people herded by the Mona Lisa in New York in the 60’s, there mightn’t have been a few hundred who saw something in it they deeply needed, making the whole exercise worthwhile; that even the frustration of being herded past something so small, so distant, so quickly could of itself be of huge importance in the artistic consciousness and education of many spectators. He failed to question if the re-contextualization of it could possibly have any value.
And by virtue of the contempt he felt for both, he was happy to put the popular experience of art in the same dependent chain of the events as Damien Fucking Hirst - when the two things are, quite obviously, only linked in antipathy. And he failed to consider that - in terms of what’s available out there in the reams of galleries and art schools and co-ops and communities - we could be living in a time that’s deeply exciting and important for the visual arts, with fine art creation de-centred and widespread as it's never been before in the western tradition. He could only see the expensive end of the market, that he's been involved with throughout his professional career.
Of these two documentaries, it’s only the raving pinko Berger who succeeded at all in exploring the recontextualization of art, not simply wailing over its decontextualization. It’s only Berger who made a real effort to go beyond himself, to leave himself behind, and engage with the perspective of the rest of people standing in front of art. So to answer yesterday's question to myself, this is why I’m left-wing. I think it’s only on this side of the political spectrum that you can think outside of yourself, that you have the framework available to help you think outside of yourself. In a sentence: I’m left-wing because I’m resisting the urge to live up my own asshole.
Anyways. We've gone on watching the rest of the Berger documentary. Episode two was about the female nude, and it was rather lovely to see an actual-real-life man engage in some feminist theorizing. But more on that later. Episode three, rather topically, was about the oil painting as a commodity or as an indicator of wealth. Plus ça change . . . what Berger's history of the oil painting illustrated was that as pissy as Hughes is with the hedge funds, diamond-encrusted skulls, and other fucking massive taste challenges currently buggering up the art world, this isn't the first time artistic time and talent has been wasted on expensive, market-driven curiosities.
Imagine if oil painters over the last 700 years had a real choice of subject, instead of languid women, Jeebus, and decadent still lives for rich clients. Imagine if all those technically superb and yet tediously repetitive academic painters had had the freedom to let their imaginations run riot. They were trained to believe they didn't, and they painted as though they didn't, and only madmen and geniuses, like the geniuses we remember and seek to look at now, managed to think beyond the spirit and market demands of their age, and create something new and eternal, even to the detriment of their pockets. Art endured and endures.
Anyways, worktime.
Some think that so much of today's art mirrors and thus criticises decadence. Not so. It's just decadent. Full stop. It has no critical function, it is part of the problem.
As I wrote, it's a good point, and it's in the company of a few other good points, like how an overheated art market is transforming desired paintings into super-expensive commodities, and having a horrible impact on public galleries’ ability to collect and show. There's also a suggestion - poorly explored - of how it may be skewing instruction at art schools; something that hit my art-school alumnus boyf as extremely relevant.
BUT what we have building up to this point is an extremely personal, elitist and deeply unpleasant vision of decontextualized art and the response of masses of people to it. We have the messy, badly argued, and unlikely premise running through this documentary that the way working-class and middle-class Americans ‘experienced’ the Mona Lisa on its trip to New York in 1963 and the way they generally see gallery art is by its nature generally deeply inferior to the way Robert Hughes sees it in its proper context. Not just less educated, not just less loving, but by its nature deeply inferior - that the masses experience seeing art, and Robert Hughes looks at it. Or vice versa. Whatever verb makes Robert Hughes sound cleverer and the masses sound more insensible. I think this was a beastly, unfair, and erroneous generalization, and it’s what I hated most about the documentary.
Another thing I hated about it was the idea it presented to us that this perceived deep inferiority of the popular vision is tied to the present overheated, overpriced, and qualitatively poor state of the expensive end of the modern art market – a ridiculous, speculative art market with which only the tiniest percentage of the population has any engagement at all, and which mainly impacts them by baffling them when they go to public galleries to see something else . . .
Hughes’ perspective shows a complete unconsciousness of the importance of all the mighty piles of art vastly aesthetically and intellectually superior to shark-in-formaldehyde, that continue to be accessible and affordable in co-op or community galleries or other points of sale – points of sale that are burgeoning like mushrooms after the rain now that we have the internet. This is predictable, because the man seems incapable not only of appreciating the way the masses may or may not be impacted by art, but incapable of appreciating there may be an artistic world in existence beyond the top end he's covered in Time magazine and a series of admittedly delicious books and documentaries.
But both things I hated about the documentary can be summed up rather more simply in one phrase: Robert Hughes absolutely failed to think outside of himself.
He failed to consider that in all those thousands of people herded by the Mona Lisa in New York in the 60’s, there mightn’t have been a few hundred who saw something in it they deeply needed, making the whole exercise worthwhile; that even the frustration of being herded past something so small, so distant, so quickly could of itself be of huge importance in the artistic consciousness and education of many spectators. He failed to question if the re-contextualization of it could possibly have any value.
And by virtue of the contempt he felt for both, he was happy to put the popular experience of art in the same dependent chain of the events as Damien Fucking Hirst - when the two things are, quite obviously, only linked in antipathy. And he failed to consider that - in terms of what’s available out there in the reams of galleries and art schools and co-ops and communities - we could be living in a time that’s deeply exciting and important for the visual arts, with fine art creation de-centred and widespread as it's never been before in the western tradition. He could only see the expensive end of the market, that he's been involved with throughout his professional career.
Of these two documentaries, it’s only the raving pinko Berger who succeeded at all in exploring the recontextualization of art, not simply wailing over its decontextualization. It’s only Berger who made a real effort to go beyond himself, to leave himself behind, and engage with the perspective of the rest of people standing in front of art. So to answer yesterday's question to myself, this is why I’m left-wing. I think it’s only on this side of the political spectrum that you can think outside of yourself, that you have the framework available to help you think outside of yourself. In a sentence: I’m left-wing because I’m resisting the urge to live up my own asshole.
Anyways. We've gone on watching the rest of the Berger documentary. Episode two was about the female nude, and it was rather lovely to see an actual-real-life man engage in some feminist theorizing. But more on that later. Episode three, rather topically, was about the oil painting as a commodity or as an indicator of wealth. Plus ça change . . . what Berger's history of the oil painting illustrated was that as pissy as Hughes is with the hedge funds, diamond-encrusted skulls, and other fucking massive taste challenges currently buggering up the art world, this isn't the first time artistic time and talent has been wasted on expensive, market-driven curiosities.
Imagine if oil painters over the last 700 years had a real choice of subject, instead of languid women, Jeebus, and decadent still lives for rich clients. Imagine if all those technically superb and yet tediously repetitive academic painters had had the freedom to let their imaginations run riot. They were trained to believe they didn't, and they painted as though they didn't, and only madmen and geniuses, like the geniuses we remember and seek to look at now, managed to think beyond the spirit and market demands of their age, and create something new and eternal, even to the detriment of their pockets. Art endured and endures.
Anyways, worktime.
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