A few points of business

1. Later That Day by Lyrics Born is the best thing I've heard in ages. Back, back, BACK in the day I thought Quannum's Spectrum was the best thing I'd heard in ages, and 'I Changed My Mind' off that was the anthem for every major decision I made about anything. But other things came up and I didn't hear anything else from Quannum artists until J*Fish gave me Blackalicious's Blazing Arrow. Blackalicious is great, but, you know, I think I love Lyrics Born.

2. I'm so not ready for my defense.

3. What're poppers, anyways? Because all they did for me was make me want to dance to 'Like a Prayer' and hit someone. Alkyl nitrites, hmm? That continues to mean nothing to me. They seem to be some kind of sex drug. Kaaaaaaaaay . . . that's fucked up. People want to take drugs to relax the muscles around their special bits? I'm sorry, isn't that, you know, suppposed to be what arousal is for?

Method in the madness

Last night was odd. First watching the Notorious C.H.O. with J*Fish was odd, since I'd listened to it in Paris with people who I'm having dinner with in Paris on Friday. Then J*Fish's roommate, you know, Lady, Whatisname, explained the mechanics of flight to me when I voiced how freaked I am by flying. That used to be the Madman's job (people around me are acquainted with my phobia to the point of tedium and find ways to deal with it as quickly as possible. Sometimes it's with drugs; sometimes it's by explaining flight.) Whatsisname looks a lot like the Madman. And I was pleasantly fucked out of my skull on reefer and codeine, which added to the exchange.

I've been realizing for awhile I had a major victim complex coming out of that relationship and last night drove it home. I can admit now there were reasons I was there besides engaging in some bizarre sado-masochistic self-mutilating experiment. There were alot of things about the Madman that were really nice, like the explaining of the mechanics of flight when I was sure my aeroplanes would drop out of the sky like rocks unless I furiously concentrated on keeping them up with the power of my mind. When he went crazy it was hard to accept, since he'd been great before that.

So why is this important? It's not as if he's any less crazy or I'm going to have any less of a fight-or-flight mechanism kick in whenever I think I see him. It's important, though, because I'd forgotten that relationships can be nice. That maybe I've been concentrating on the horrible times with the Madman to help me not feel any regret about the good ones being toast, and that may have warped my outlook. That the key thing is knowing when to walk away, and not automatically assuming that's RIGHT AWAY because if they're hot and nice they must also be crazy.

I'd apologize for writing such a personal post and promise not to do it again, but I probably will, so, you know, there you are.

Déja vu

Are you getting used to my Friday morning posts starting 'last night's analysis session was great'?

Last night's session was great - we had the best 'what do you want to do with your life' discussion I've ever had with anybody and dicussed this mad dream I'd had that involved, among other things, a tropical paradise, a dynastic marriage, throwing myself off a skyscraper and having sex in a furniture store. The transferrence period has started - he was the man I'd been making love to in the furniture store. I'd been expecting it and I'll deal with it, but I wish it had manifested itself differently, like the insane hero-worship crushes I had on a couple of university professors back in the day.

Still, I see the benefits. I could hardly even bear to look on, let alone talk to, the godliness of those particular profs when they were teaching me, which was a distraction from the subject at hand and which would make analysis more or less impossible. So this hasn't really changed the talking dynamic we have, as hero-worship would have. But you try telling your analyst you'd dreamt about him doing you on the floor of a furniture store. NOT EASY.

Anyways, I didn't; we just discussed other parts of the dream. We also discussed the upcoming trip. I think it's fair to say that if I survive it (fucking aeroplanes, fucking murderous ex-boyfriends, fucking maghrebin hash), I'll be coming home with a different sort of brain. It's funny to know that about the next three weeks - to know at the end of that time you'll be, you know, different.

Well, onwards and upwards.

The sexiest man in Jamaica

The title of this post is apropos of nothing, except it's severely stuck in my head. I think my brain had been starving for music featuring a man yelling something happily, confidently, and aggressively after a steady KEXP work diet of lyrics about missing old highschool sweethearts and being somehow emotionally delicate. That sort of thing seems to have taken over indie as well as pop these days. Speaking of which: look! Nickelback got twice as many Juno nominations as the Arcade Fire. Let that sink in for a moment. Sometimes there are no words. Only dry heaves.

Yesterday I covered the Canadian Auto Summit. The theme of the Canadian Auto Summit was “It Really Is About the Car.” I shit you not. Redundancy has been turned into an MBA course, apparently. Advertising was only mentioned in dismissive terms so for the purposes of my magazine it was a waste of a dining subsidy to send me there. And admittedly I spent a lot of time thinking about boys and wondering how many people in the auditorium were flying the dragon. I did pay some attention, though, and all I can say is the new Camaro concept looks really sexy, and I’m glad I’m not an American with a manufacturing job.

Because redundancy, in its metaphorical sense, figured large in the agenda. It was set up as a question and answer period between some Globe journalists and a bunch of car type big wigs, and of course, especially in the case of the GM man, the journalists wanted to know how many jobs were going to be lost to outsourcing or imports, or gained from low property prices and increasing technological acumen among Canadian workers . . . the president of Toyota Motor got fêted for having created a couple of thousand jobs in Canada . . . all Strong Canadian Dollar this, Exploiting Asian Markets that . . .

You know how it’s easy to laugh at Western Communists because you usually know that they’re figuring themselves dressed in a Party uniform and directing the grunt workers of the Revolutionary Paradise and not lifting anything heavy themselves? That’s one thing I thought about these capitalist barons, last night, even as they chilled my blood talking about the massive migration of jobs that’ll probably end up causing environmental catastrophe in China and social crisis – well, maybe not here, but definitely in the United States. They know, or should know, their own jobs are likely enough to be made redundant eventually – they run the same sort of employment risks as the people whose lives they were messing around with. I know the REAL risks are nothing like the same because of their offshore accounts and property investments and all. But the world they promote is just a straight dog-eat-dog one, with no nationalistic alignments except for whichever ones would be effective in terms of marketing to a national population.

Because it seems lthey know we, as consumers, cling on to such quaint old-fashioned ideas, about a corporation and its country of provenance having much in common. A couple of days ago I wrote for work about the marketing impact of the cartoon chaos in the Middle East. What’s happening is a little hilarious. A lot of the European companies doing business there were in a rush to exploit the hole left by the boycott of all things Danish. The best example was Carrefour, a French retailer, which withdrew all the Danish products from its shelves and posted notes in their place expressing solidarity with the Islamic population. Then, of course, a series of French papers re-published the cartoons.

People, fuck. They don't make any sense.

Coax me, cajole me

Last night after Italian class we had a spirited discussion about the finer points of seduction, as it was Valentine’s Day and as both Lady and J*Fish are in the mood to seduce. What a mood to be in. I had a lot to say, considering I still can’t talk and I haven’t really seduced anybody for – how long? Six years? When I say 'really seduce', I don’t mean realizing you’re going to be sleepy in two hours so you move a situation you've already been sensing along a little faster by taking off your pants or something. When I say 'really seduce', I mean creating the situation out of nothing. Moving from zero to 70 in three seconds or less, or, to refer you to Johannes again, jumping from the Friend ladder to the Fuckable ladder without falling into – ah, that theory’s a bit too half-baked for me to get into.

It's true as Lady mentioned last night that sort of action is really sticking your neck out and letting the object of your affections know they have a carte-blanche to kick you in the head – but more than that, it’s an emotion or an urge or whatever that’s powerful and arrogant (in the best sense) enough to let you over-ride all the inhibitions standard people walk around with. There was only once I fell for a near-complete stranger to the degree that I had to chase that beautiful butterfly down the country road. I’m not a cocky person at all, but when I approached him and he told me had plans to meet another girl for lunch, I remember instructing him with complete self-assurance to blow her off and have lunch with me instead. When he and I discussed that conversation years later, he said I’d been telegraphing the message ‘Be nice to me, and I’ll sleep with you’ throughout the exchange – I suppose that’s why it was so effective. I think using the word 'blow' helped too.

I think in a way it's harder for girls. Or do I mean easier? Maybe both. But I do think girls get antsier than boys about dealing with strongly preferring one person, and trying to balance out some perfect cocktail of cool and gush in their approach to letting that person know just how lucky he is if that person doesn't immediately suss out the situation. You know what I mean? Because legions of books have been written and sold about Rules and gender dynamics and shit like that and I don't think it's men buying them. But in the end, since penting things up makes them gross, I think the most important part of seduction for boys and girls is having emotions and urges, being comfy with them, and responding to them as honestly as they can.

That and taking off your shirt, drawing an arrow on your tummy pointing to your crotch and miming “I love you” across a crowded room.

Throw me a bone

Work is fun. I base most of my research on right-wing magazines and papers. Anything you've ever wanted to know about corporate naughtiness and market insidiousness is laid out in the Wall Street Journal in fine detail, sourced and stamped. They have lots of other good shit too. One source this week tells of doctors' favourite way to commit suicide - a compund that stops the heart right away. Just like that. Stop! Try finding shit like that in Le Monde Diplo.

Yesterday I decided that I'm going to want peripheral vision to better see France, Italy, and England once more. I also remembered it doesn't matter that I'm broke because I have insurance. So I got my contact lense watchum refilled after so long I don't remember the last time I had them. I put them in right away to enjoy that slightly dizzy feeling you get for the first hour - and the only comments I got all afternoon and evening were along the lines of

"Geez, Spliffe, you look sooooooo tired."

I'm not tired. My eyes always look like this. It's called cannabis. Fuck.

FAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK.

YOU LOOK UGLY.

I'm in a mood . . . never mind me . . . I'm just pissy because I can't talk. I feel fine, I feel dandy, but I can't say a word without coughing up a lung. I'm starting to think it's psychological - that I've got some major hang-up about the viva for the thesis and all the big talks that have to happen during this trip generally, so my body is taking away my voice. Either that, or, you know, I'm actually sick. Whichever. It's grinding my fucking gears.

So before Lady tells me to 'suck it up' and I have to kick her ass, let me change the subject to something pretty. Something pretty named Bob Blumer, otherwise known as the Surreal Gourmet. Go to the sidebar in the food section and bask. Bask in the Blumerness. What an adorable creature he is. If everybody in the world was a little bit more like Bob Blumer . . . oh, let me lose myself in the beauty of that thought for a moment.

Weeeeeeeeeeee . . .

Okay, I feel better. Now, a question. Has the Canadian media not fucking watched Guys and Dolls? Does it not understanding that betting, gambling, and gaming are part of the natural cycle of life; indeed, sometimes even a young Marlon Brando needs to gamble his way into the heart of Jean Simmons? Why does it matter that Wayne Gretzky's wife gambled 500 Gs? OF COURSE she gambled 500 Gs! If you had 500 Gs to gamble and a husband who was so good at sports he was a character on ProStars, wouldn't you? What's the problem? There isn't even a suggestion of game chucking or rigging right now. So is it that she used an illegal gambling ring? When you drive a car, do you ask the dealer if the poor bastards in the steelworks hurt their backs processing that materials for it? People need to grow the fuck up.

Minor crisis

I'm having a hard time facing the day, because I left my Shuffle and headphones at J*Fish's house. What will my working day be like without KEXP or 3wk?

Eep.

EEP.

You know, I like my co-workers, but they spend their downtime playing Seinfeld trivia games with each other. I always hated Seinfeld, and smoke too many drugs to remember anything that I can't place in a historical context, so it annoys me way more than it should.

Maybe I can buy some headphones at lunch. I'm sick of those buds anyways. They don't keep my ears warm at all.

UPDATE

To all the fuckwits who have challenged the rightness of using the word 'reckon': The Economist uses it. And if you're the sort of snotty jerk who doesn't think words like 'reckon' are real because the likes of the Dukes of Hazzard county use it, I reckon the staff of the Economist are a whole fuckload smarter than you.

Now, if only they'd start using 'youse' . . .

Housebound

Going out last night was a mistake. Not that it wasn't nice; much better music than the last time, much better decor, and got to see Gigi and Lady win Sexiest Couple award. But I should know by now that if I can't even speak without swigging from the Buckley's bottle, no matter how absolutely fine I feel, I shouldn't be going out. I left at 2, went to bed, and woke up an hour later incapable of breathing in without exhaling a coughing fit. When I woke up definitively, starlings were huddled for warmth outside my bedroom window. So I'm not going out at all today - going to cook something with reefer in it, play with the keyboard, but mostly continue the ongoing French immersion project, courtesy of a few loans, gifts, and purchases seperate from my thesis advisor's increasingly interesting books:

1. Food. Tortiére, to be specific. Gigi went vegetarian and gave me a tortiére someone had given him, which had been sitting in my freezer until now, since I haven't had the fucking time to stay in my apartment long enough to defrost it and make it yummy. It looks sooooooooooooo good.

2. Music. Karina Gauvin singing French songs arranged or something by Canteloube. They're traditionals from Auvergne in a pretty heady dialect, so fucked if I have any idea what she's singing about, but my oh my it's pretty. Gigi had also copied Carla Bruni's first album onto my Shuffle - lost when I decided on a soul soundtrack for last night's commuting. I'll get it again because I liked it, which surprised me. I'd thought the hugely popular title track, Quelqu'un m'a dit, was cute - she has an adorable raspy little voice - but sappy; wasn't interested in getting the album. Turns out as a whole it doesn't feel sappy. It recalls those bizarre half-hours when you're right chemically fucked up, and crawl into bed only to have an unexpected burst of clarity, creativity and emotion that usually gets murmured into your pillow or the ear of someone even more fucked up than you are because you're too physically exhausted to get up and find a pen. And considering Carla Bruni is a retired supermodel, that's probably more or less what happened. Except she was clever enough to keep a pen in arm's reach.

Anyways, I like her lyrics a lot, but maybe someone more used to French lyricism wouldn't. Who knows. The more I listen to French music the more I get the impression the lyrics dominate, but that might just be the nature of the stuff that's crossed my path or the fact that I haven't been really struck by English lyrics lately. Yesterday Mr. N told me to expect some Benjamin Biolay, which he thinks I'll like. Mr. N is usually right about me liking things.

3. Screen. Les Dangereux - I watched the first 15 minutes and it looks like complete shit. But, you know, it has Stéphane Rousseau in it. Lady also lent me a Québec series called Grande Ourse - I've watched the first of 10 episodes. It's a difficult format, going for the twee-small-town creepy, you know? Twin Peaks didn't manage it consistently and it looks like this doesn't either. But it has some nice visual gags and whatevs, it's practice.

UPDATE

Would someone please give Silvio Berlusconi something to eat? His blood sugar levels are way off again . . . the man is just fucking monumental. I'd love to set up a timeline of the dumbest things he's ever said and work out if they're conscious efforts to distract the world from some really contentious but essentially forgettable issue, like the cartoon fiasco; you know, get everybody to throw down their arms just to smack themselves exasperatedly on the forehead and mutter, 'Well, that's Silvio.' One way or the other, the man is a living joke.

She wail and she moan

Yesterday at work one of the pieces I wrote made me feel like the devil because it was about a study on how to get women to binge on chocolate. That article wasn't one of my sources, but if you look at the professor's credentials carefully enough you'll see that despite his 'niceness' in terms of publishing his findings in the International Journal of Obesity, he's essentially a highly trained market researcher.

Sigh.

Anyways, I can't take the study seriously, because if someone left 30 chocolates in my office everyday (even rubbishy Hershey's Kisses) and replaced them every night I would just eat all thirty, or eat as much as I could and pocket the rest. Those test subjects were obviously idiots.

After, Gigi and I conducted an experiment of our own by having dinner and hanging out without getting snaked. It went well. We came to some very interesting conclusions about Viking heritage, Danish people's off-camera activities, and what happens in Greenland; and Gigi pointed out that one of the great tragedies of the recent cartoon blow-up is people pervasively quoting the 'there's something rotten in the state of Denmark' line from Hamlet. One hopes that will be the farthest-reaching aspect of this affair. I'm not so sure. Johannes wrote interestingly about it. The only two things I seem to be able to think are if a series of cartoons was enough to unleash this anger, and if officially apologizing for the offence it'd caused and not re-publishing it was enough to calm the anger but that wasn't done, maybe we're due for some serious international communication. That, and that Lebanese guys, when they're hot, are just smoking fucking hot.

Then we watched Ma vie en rose and I thanked my lucky stars I'm not a pre-pubescent child anymore. Day-um. Great movie, though. And when I woke up this morning the first Verve Remixed album was waiting for me; no sooner found than on. Nina Simone's See-line Woman gets a beautiful treatment.

I'M STILL SICK. HOLY SHIT. I feel fine but sound like hell; hope it's just over-tiredness. Anyways, at my opera lesson I sang maybe three scales before my teacher asked what the hell I was doing singing when my voice was so fucked, so we did theory for the rest of the hour. I studied music formally when I was much younger, but %100 against my gré; it was shocking how fun and interesting it was to focus on theory, because I used to find it just mind-numbing. Of course, this time it was in aid of the voice, and the voice is the voice. These days I'm walking around with a snotty conviction everything is just an accompaniment to the voice or an attempt to copy it, from the bleep-bleep-bloops of dancey things to the guitar. Except percussion. I don't know what's been changing in the past year, but music is starting to feel like a world in itself where things exist in their own ways, where communication is much more easy and beautiful and everything has something to say to something else. I never felt like that before. Ah, I don't know how to write what I mean.

Notes from Suffragette City

Last night’s session with my analyst was great. He’s really helping me focus my anger. Turns out I have a lot of it; all a question of how it gets used . . . man, I can’t sing the praises of this Jungian shit loud enough. The conditions we live in try to focus our anger into cynicism, from the left wing media as much as all those naughty corporations and nasty politicians – it’s all part of the same dynamic, keeping our demands as consumers and political participants simple and easily addressed. So dramatically that it makes me think of the C word.

We need to take responsibility for social conditions through our appetites, our ballots, our entertainment; all those things that are so easy to object to are there because they serve us and we don’t ask for anything better even while we gripe and carp and turn in on ourselves. So, you know, ask for something better. Create a market for it, or it’ll never be there. It’s all about the markets, bitch. God, I want to hook up with a commodities trader. When I get back from Europe, I’m going to start going to their crappy bars. I’ll bite the fucking bullet.

Anyhoo, as soon as I got home, my entire thesis defense erupted onto the page as easily as 7 pints of Old Peculier from the stomach of the 13 year old girl on a walking tour of the Yorkshire Dales that I once was.

Yeeeeeeeeeah, bitch. I DOMINATE! I DOMINATE!

Whatevs, I’m tired. Need to kick out the jams this weekend.

The red Dragon Flits Away

My hair looks good. So I'm cheered up. Fuck everybody anyways though. Hah! I rock. Still mentally constipated. I'm reading books by my thesis advisor to help me kiss his ass when he judges the defense, and I have to say he's a smart cookie, as far as a French pundit goes. When I'm finished the defense and it doesn't matter anymore what he learns in this blog by Googling himself - for example, how I made a considered decision to murderize him back in November - I'll tell you all about him. Because God forbid a French pundit should have an opinion that isn't passed on to as many people as possible. Seriously though, France is coming from somewhere - albeit a paranoid, nasty, dank place - in terms of foreign policy. And one thing I'll say for the claustrophobic, smelly little hole their strategy comes from - it's a place which is at least a little more conscious of the common good of the French people than whatever Boschian nightmare American foreign policy is of the common good of the American people. I think that's the thing that really gets me about American foreign policy - so much pain, so much terror, yet the equilibrium it fights for tooth and nail might not be what its citizens need. I'm thinking of economic needs, of course. Militarily, obviously they've done a bang-up job of preserving the people ever since the Civil War. But I reckon military concerns are just symptoms of economic problems so I'm afraid that will change, that it is changing now in front of our eyes, and if I had a little more imagination I'd be shitting myself over that instead of one lousy little thesis defense.

Anyways, my advisor is clever, and his writing is witty and cynical enough that even I and my crap Moon-Man skills can appreciate it. The thing is, he was a lousy classroom manager and I was a lousy student, so I didn't appreciate his class. See? This is the AWESOME thing about knowing how to read. You can catch up on all the things you should have learned when you were smoking too much hash and living through a laughably unhealthy relationship during your master's coursework. God, I was weird, fuck. While chatting about boys in Moon-Man with a very patient Lady yesterday evening, I realized how little aggravation I have in my life now compared to Moon-Man Land. What was my problem? Was it arrogance, an addictively maternal belief that dude couldn't fasten all his clothes, tie his laces, blow his nose if I left him? Or was it a massive insecurity; honestly believing that was what I deserved? Probably both. I hope I actually learnt stuff from that about how not to be an idiot. On verra.

Post-conference lassitude

I’m grumpy. I’m FUCKING grumpy, and I’ve been grumpy for as long as I remember (four days). Luckily for the world at large, my grumpiness has been confined to the city’s finest hotel for two days, listening to my non-profit company remain in its non-profit tax bracket by spending its profits on a series of talks from motivational speakers who would have been the sort of preacher men, 70 years ago, whose sons I would have let teach me; fucking dead boring corporate reps explaining what they want from our industry; and financial analysts. Wow. When financial analysts talk, all I want to do is listen. And nail them. The way they can break the world down, it’s beautiful. Anyways, this experience has either taught me or cemented me in the conviction of three things that I’d like to share with y’all.

1. Television only exists as a medium to deliver advertising. That’s it. Unless it’s PBS or TVO or something, and when’s the last time you watched that? All those ‘can’t miss’ hours – they’re there to make you watch commercials. The networks are not altruists sharing art and ideas with you. They aren’t even merchants in the sense that they're trying to sell you something. They are selling your eyes to their advertisers. If you’re comfortable with that – if you feel what you’re getting from the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, or whatever crap you watch compensates you, well, you just keep on givin’er, cowboy. If you're watching television to pass the time and aren't engaged, then you're being ripped off, you fucking sucker. Wake the fuck up and go do something. It's a fucking beautiful world out there, shithead.

2. I can chat, amuse, humour, ass-kiss, inquire, inform, tease, cuss, abuse, persuade, argue, request, shock, assure, reassure, deep-throat my entire foot, blaspheme; I can even – once in awhile – titillate. But I can’t shmooze. It makes me choke. I think I used to be able to shmooze, but all the drugs I’ve smoked have robbed me of the ability to speak dishonestly, which is what separates shmoozing from all other verbal acrobatics. Thank you, drug-induced intellectual honesty. Even if it’s your fault I don’t get regular sex anymore.

3. If you keep putting food in front of me, I will keep eating it. Especially if I’m eating at the nicest hotel in the city, and I keep thinking I should eat the food there while the eating’s good because I don’t know the next time I’ll be in the nicest hotel inthe city. Even if the food is kind of heavy, bland, and caker-y, I will eat it and eat it and eat it. In the same spirit, if you keep putting L’Occitane products in the bathroom, I will keep on stealing them. Stealing them and stealing them and stealing them.

Oh, fuck everybody in the world. One more day on the Dragon. My hair is being cut tonight. Maybe that'll fix me.

The Red Dragon frets

So I'm in Davisville listening to Handel again, but not feeling the panicky flushes of exhausted accomplishment that accompanied my last stint up here. I'm finding it ferociously hard to buckle down on my defence. Part of it is too many other things to think about. Yesterday I must have spent four hours trying to wrestle my travel intinerary into line. It's so people-dependant - I need feedback on school hours, on if they still smoke reefer, if they have a dealer or if I have to mail some on ahead. One friend who will be away on an anti-winter holiday when I arrive is leaving her apartment for me - that's nice. Staying with Mlle B would have been nice too, but this way I can have some peace of mind as I prepare for the defence.

Defence. It's going slow. I'm having a hard time - I think because the actual defence is still weeks away, which is not much time but feels like alot to my stupid brain. Also because I'm nervous. Miss C pointed out, however - god, she's been so good through all of this - that I know more about this subject than any of the professors at the school, which is indisputably true. No reflection on their quality, but the Canadian cannabis industry will never be at the top of the need-to-know pile for French academia. She also says my thesis is good, and I'm inclined to agree with her. First, now that it's polished and controlled I like it. Second, I have the sort of friends who won't hesitate to tell me if I need a haircut, if I look like a walking corpse, if I've committed a reprehensible sexual faux pas or if I've crossed the line from eccentricity to barking madness; a lot of them have read the thesis and the feedback has been universally good.

Here's the thing - I know who my jury members are now. One of them is my advisor. As my advisor, he's not supposed to let me defend until he feels the thesis is good. Thing is, I know he hasn't read the introduction or conclusion; I'm not fully persuaded he's read two out of three parts; and though he's given me straight positive feedback about part 1, the 'positive' feedback on the second and third parts has been a short-lived accusation of plagiarism. Also, at the end of my coursework my oral exam with him was the most brutal. The year was marked by averages so I don't know what he gave me, but I think it was a fail. I had a feeling he was trying to demonstrate my stupid American-ness. Now that he knows I'm Canadian maybe it will be better. But I'm going to make damn sure I go into this defence knowing everything pertaining to the drug-export trade in Latin America, which the conversation will probably turn to, since he's a bit of a Latin Americanist.

Thank god for the Economist. I love you, Economist.

There's only one other man on my jury, who I don't know. The girl I know who's defended didn't have him on hers, so for him - I guess I'll have to Google him and see what his angle is.

Okay, I'm just going to say this once. I'M TIRED OF SCHOOL. I WANT TO SPEND ALL THE TIME I'VE SPENT ON BOOK-LEARNING THESE PAST TWO YEARS MAKING SWEET LOVE. MAKING SWEET LOVE IS MORE FUN THAN BOOK-LEARNING. AND I MEAN IT. TODAY.

So where do bears shit?

Yesterday I wrote a news brief about luxury and telecommunications products for bathrooms. In-shower tanning, a full-length towel warmer with a built-in flat screen, LCD television/bathroom mirror/touchscreen computer combos, a new line of ‘chromatherapy’ Jacuzzis, toilets with a three-setting bidet and an air-dryer incorporated. Are people fucking lame enough to spend their money on this shit? It’s all shit! Besides the fucking awesome toilet, of course. Bidets are great. But I can still think of thousands of better ways to blow 5 Gs. If we get a situation wherein ‘bathrooms become the new kitchen’ and people race to turn their erstwhile Fortresses of Solitude into a satellite office/wealth showcase, I’ll be disappointed. Not in the marketers, but in the consumers. Mass insecurity makes them race to spend their money on what they’re told is needed to demonstrate their status. And of course that proclivity brings out the marketing ‘wolves’, in the same way someone will always come up to bring a needy hooch home. In that situation, who gets the censure? The hooch or the opportunist who nails her? So yeah, disappointed . . . I always thought I’d wait until menopause or a major health-scare before becoming a recluse somewhere, but I’m starting to wonder.

On fleeing civilization . . . I watched Grizzly Man yesterday. It aired on the Discovery Channel, I suppose after the Oscars told it to fuck itself, completely ruining my plans to get my defence done in one sacrificed Friday night (though I’m very audibly sick, so it wasn’t much of a privation) because I’d also rented the Aristocrats (yeah, it was funneeeeeee) and decided a double-bill of Oscar-snubbed documentaries deserved getting really snaked. Werner Herzog danced a genius line by pointing out the follies of a laughable man without making us laugh at him. The only time I really guffawed was when a friend of Treadwell’s from California described how Treadwell had pretended he was Australian ‘but his accent was more Kennedy-esque’, and, upon Herzog asking if he wasn’t hurt by the lie, answered: “If it doesn’t scare the cows, who cares?”

It was a great movie, I recommend it . . . thing is, I still don’t get where Treadwell's head was at. Okay, he had abused alot of substances, maybe he was dim to begin with, sexually insecure - seems a little too familiar to me, but there’s still a massive disconnect I’m not getting. I love bears - they’re beautiful, cute, anthropomorphic and porcine at once, great attitude. When I lived in the middle of nowhere up north, especially when I was care-taking on the old bishop’s estate, there were often bears around, and I loved them being around. As long as ‘around’ meant quite far away, and the mommies and cubs not being separated by me. Though they weren’t at all scary if I felt they were sufficiently far away, I had absolutely no temptation to get closer. And these were black bears - grizzly bears are bigger and have more of a history of eating people, I think. So where I stop understanding altogether is how he could initially decide to close the safety space which seems so natural and instinctive. No matter how dim you are. Although I’ve heard from people who worked in provincial parks out west Americans can be really fucking dumb about bears, the favourite example being the parents who put honey on their kids’s hands so they can get really cute photos.

If we’ve got to a point where people can’t take a shit without turning off the TV and can’t think a massive indiscriminate omnivore is cute without going up and petting its nose, what have we come to as a species? We’re going to stupid ourselves extinct.

Gotterdammerung was beautiful. Mats Almgren as Hagen and Frances Ginzer as Brunnhilde were especially fabulous; the Norns and Rhinemaidens were both beyond fantastic. The Rhinemaidens especially – their little theme-y funny-keyed bits, when I shut my eyes, were transporting. But there's the problem with this show. It was really boring to look at, besides a glitch that stopped the curtain from opening before Siegfried and Brunnhilde’s love scene in the Prologue. Though the singers took it in stride, that glitch just added to an overall dime store feel. And you can’t have dime store feel with a fucking 5.5-hour opera, certainly not Wagner.

Here’s what I mean – here's Wagner’s stage directions for the final scene of the opera after Brunnhilde sends Wotan’s ravens to Loge to tell him to burn down Valhalla, decides to immolate herself and her horse in Siegfried’s funeral pyre, and tells the Rhinemaidens to regain the Ring by plucking it from her ashes (oh, yeah, spoiler alert):

“With a single bound she urges the horse into the blazing pyre. The flames immediately flare up so that the fire fills the entire space front of the hall and appears to seize on the building itself . . . At the same time the Rhine overflows its banks in a mighty flood, surging over the conflagration . . . the hall of Valhalla comes into view, with the gods and heroes assembled . . . bright flames seem to flare up in the hall of the gods, finally hiding them from sight completely. The curtain falls.”

The COC had the nerve to quote that in their programme so I was expecting some serious fucking sweetness. You know how they did it? Brunnhilde sang a final song to her invisible horse and calmly got into a bed with Siegfried’s corpse, the Rhinemaidens took the ring off her finger and offstage red light was used to show Valhalla burning. WHAT THE FUCK. No, no, no. The whole point of Wagner is that he was about the whole package – the music, the words, and the STAGING. The STAGING.

And you know what counted as a Valkyrie costume in this production? A black Victorian dress with a bustle. NOT COOL. Valkyries are killing machines who ride around battlefields on flying horses. Why would they wear a black Victorian dress with a bustle? And all the warriors were wearing business suits. And the Norns had crappy secretary black skirt suits going on, and the Rhinemaidens had three different costumes, two of which were stupid (Norn-ish secretaries and blue-haired pseudo-raver chicks messing around in very substantial underwear) and one of which was boring. And the power-line set was lame and didn’t make sense most of the time. And . . . and . . . fuck you.

The idea of a minimalist Wagnerian production is as just plain wrong as a quiet riot or an aggressive marketing campaign for Steal This Book. Wagner knew when he put his stuff together that it was more than an opera; it was a complete artistic event. INCLUDING THE FUCKING STAGING. Have I written that already? Anyways, this idea was probably why it was cool to make his operas five point fucking five hours long. And why I feel cheated by last night.

For once I’m not blaming television, I’m blaming tobacco advertising laws#. Gotterdammerung was damn near sold out on a Thursday so I doubt the COC is hurting for ticket revenues, but I understand you need more to mount the sort of production that has highly paid sopranos galloping into funeral pyres. Tobacco advertising gave Canadian arts organizations that more. But noo, gotta protect the poor brainless consumers from a product you don’t even have the balls to criminalize, even if that means subjecting them to fucking minimalist Wagner. The feds really should have thought of a strategy to get the slack that the cut-off in tobacco ad revenue caused in the arts community. Maybe not direct funding, but a better system of tax-breaks or something.

I don’t know.

To accentuate the positive, musically it was thrilling. The thing that shocked me the most is how happy and triumphant it was at the end – echoes of the 1812 Overture. As though the twilight of the Gods was something to be celebrated. Not only natural, but desirable. So I don’t feel like I wasted 5.5 hours, but I think the COC should have spent its budget on something it could afford to mount properly, like Der Rosenkavalier or something. Also, a lot of the people around me spent the last act profoundly asleep.



#I think the site was put together by Du Maurier, so grain of salt, please.

Brain stuck at work

Yesterday I wrote my inaugural article for work about Product Red, a group brand being launched through AMEX, The Gap, Nike's Converse, and Giorgio Armani. The three clothiers are going to market product lines, some made with African materials or labour, whose revenues will go in part to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. AMEX is launching a Red Card (oh, AMEX, you so funny!) in the United Kingdom. One percent of every purchase made with the card will go to that same fund. Now there's some talk of Apple issuing a Product Red iPod. Yesterday I wrote about it in terms of branding and marketing, but I still feel a little rant inside . . .

I'm not sure how seriously the idea is being taken, since the clothiers haven't universally disclosed the exact slice of the revenue from the Product Red lines that will go to the Fund. In my exhaustive hour of research, the idea was getting the most flack in the right wing press (that is, the National Post), which is silly. It's an excellent marketing idea and a neat intersection of corporate irresponsibility and consumer conscience - the invisible hand of capitalism visibly at work, really.

You know, sometimes I wonder, in the eternal struggle between Left and Right, if the winner might be the side that doesn't contrary itself out of existence . . . oppse things because they sound righty or lefty, and not out of a real conviction they're good or bad.

People is dumb.

Anyways, invisible hand, capitalism, yeah. I, for example, only shop at the Gap under extreme duress because I find their shit boring and I've still got a bad taste in my mouth from all the sweatshop reporting. But if I need some t-shirts and I have a choice between something made in a sweatshop from H&M (a store that only came to Canada after people stopped bothering to make a deal about sweatshops in the media, so I don't have negative emotional associations with it) and something made in a sweatshop from the Gap that will offer some small benefit to Africa, I reckon I'd go to the Gap. So there you are. I reckon I'd get the card too. Half the country is already paying stupid interest rates for cards with features they don't really understand how to use (or is that just me again? Fucking Air Miles. What the fuck?). For the companies involved in the brand it's excellent marketing, and for consumers a way to feel nice without having to think about their giving strategy too hard.

The other reason it was silly that the right-wing press was laying into it so is that Bono (yeah, I know, he fucking bugs me too with his girl voice and snowboarder sunglasses - don't you wish Johnny Cash had lived long enough to re-record the whole U2 library? I might actually listen to it then. Not to mention he calls everything 'sexy'. NOT EVERYTHING IS SEXY, BONO, THINK OF A NEW FUCKING ADJECTIVE, FUCK), the 'face' of the brand, basically issued an invitation at the Davos summit for any corporation to jump on the Product Red bandwagon. He even said out loud he expected a few naughty companies to get in on the action and embarrass the fund a bit. This is free marketeering, for heaven's sake - even the face of the Product is open about how corporate participation in the brand is for the sweet press that'd result, not about being nice or going to heaven or something.

Yeah, so, I think it's a great idea. Even though Bono called it sexy. It's not sexy, fuck. Vincent Cassel is sexy. Monica Bellucci (see above) is sexy. Product Red is a fucking brand. Sexy. What the fuck. Anyways, there'll never be such a thing as a corporate conscience because it isn't in people's natures to have a collective conscience. The only way to make corporations nice is to ensure they appeal to individual consumer consciences, and this seems like a cute way of doing it. I hope it catches on, and that it's transparent enough for people to trust.

Yeep.

Shitting myself. I just got a date for the defence - a date I want - and now panicking AGAIN, fuck. On top of that, I can feel a nasty depressive paralysis creeping up on me, and this is not a good time for it. In part because of the defense preparations, in part because of the new job which starts as soon as I finish my latté and walk to work, in part because depressive paralysis leads to impulse shopping and I’m trying to save for Europe, and in part because depressive paralysis bites.

But sometimes people seem so scared by the world – much older people, who I’d prefer to think have things much better figured out than I do. So when I see them scared, it unsettles me. I want to think some day life will be an un-intimidating piece of piss. But the natural follow-up to that is that I’m full of shit, because if life was an un-intimidating piece of piss I might not be so interested in it. Fuck. I hate when I think myself on to hamster wheels. And I’m going to Gotterdammerung, so I’m missing analysis, so Mr. B can’t help me analyze my way off it. Is it possible I’ve become dependent on analysis so fast? That in itself could be depressing. But if one’s in the mood to be dependant, it’s either dependent on that or dependent on something else, I suppose. Anyways, opera usually cheers me up. Don’t know about five and a half hours of German opera, though. On verra.

Maybe this mood is just some early roaring from the Red Dragon. I did have an uncontrollable jones on yesterday for a Cadbury Cream Egg, and did make little orgasmic noises while I ate it which made my office-mates promptly go out and buy their own.

L’hiver me fait chier. When I took my little sick-girl constitutional Monday I wore my spring jacket – not foolhardiness – I would have been miserably overheated in my winter coat. Maybe it was the contrast that made me realize my winter coat makes me look like a Spanish galleon in full mourning sail. Especially when I wear a skirt. I do not have bandy legs – I have fucking awesome legs – but that bloody coat makes them look like two straws stuck into a volcanic boulder. Gawwwd, I’m pissed off today. And listing all the wonderful things in my life, of which there is a seemingly ever-growing list, isn’t helping. I wish I knew what I needed. I have a clear idea of so many things I need and can work for and fight for, but there’s something else I can’t put my finger on, and it’s that fucking inability to put my finger on it that gets me into this stupid box.

Hee hee hee . . . box.

UPDATE

Statcounter tells me I have a reader in Finland who has come back to the page several times by searching the keywords Elisa di Rivombroso in Suomi Google.

Gentle Finn:

The first series ended with Elisa dressing as King Emmanuele's murdered cousin so she could intercede with him on the very scaffold by showing him the list of traitors before the Duke was executed. The naughty man whose name escapes me was busted by both the list and the fact that, as he had had the King's cousin killed, he expressed horror and shock when she was 'ressurrected' in Elisa. The King was happy, the Duke was happy, Elisa was happy, the Duke and Elisa got married, the naughty man got his just deserts, and that redhead aristocrat whose booty you could see in a few episodes fled before all this went down, mortified at her inability to save the man she loved - for he scorned her! Oh, and I think Elisa was pregnant, which is cool, because they were all thinking she couldn't conceive again after getting pushed down the stairs, right? Oh again, and the doctor hooked up with the Duke's sister after her husband died of whatever VD he had, and . . . uhm . . . you know that little guy Elisa was going to marry when she was trying to forget the Duke - it turned out he was nice. That's everybody, right? I think the Duke's bastard son was re-united with the happy couple at the end. Anyways, he wasn't dead.

There is a sequel in the works, my cousin Giuseppe informs me. All I can tell you, because it's all I know, is that the grapevine is saying the Duke gets killed off pretty fast. So I hope you were tuning in for the naked ladies, not the naked Duke. There. I hope you can stop Googling that show now.

I, by the way, was tuning in to help with my conversational Italian. And the naked Duke. Shut up, you.

Recharged

Wow, chilling was everything I thought it would be. Back to work today. Ho-hum. When will I get to chill again? Probably not until my vacation after my defence. Oh well. I figure I can make it until then.

So Freakonomics was good enough to swallow in three hours. The sort of book you can lie in bed and guzzle. When it came out it caused a little furore because it talked up a correlation between the Roe vs. Wade decision from the United States Supreme Court and the dramatic drop in violent crime there in the mid-90's. That was sort of interesting; I found the discussion of crack's impact rather more interesting, and most interesting of all the crooked sumo wrestlers. One got a CSI-y feeling with this book - that it was designed to make economics seem as fascinating as possible to persuade people to go into it, like CSI wildly romanticizes crime scene investigation. But maybe I'm full of shit because I'd already found economics fascinating. If I don't go to Jung school, maybe I'll get an economics degree instead.

Fuck, Spliffe, one degree at a time, please.

Anyways, Jean de Florette wasn't as great as I remembered. That having been said, I'll need to watch Manon des Sources soon to see Emmanuelle Beart wreak her revenge on all those smug French bastards. And March of the Penguins was cute - the birds were, anyways, but thier lifestyle seemed like a vision of hell. One must suffer to be beautiful, I suppose.

Otherwise, the day was spectacular. Just spectacular. Lung-coughing notwithstanding. I braved the 'elements' - whatevs, it was fucking lovely and warm and sunny - and took my revolting lungs for a walk. I love Toronto. Today's entry on DDOI sums up some of our sweet-ass urban decay - thumbing our noses at every pretty-boy city that's been turned into an amusement park for grown-ups. That we aren't. Things grow and fill up and empty out and fall down here. Like a proper jungle. And then we have the Riverdale Farm a three minutes' walk from the roughest downtown projects. And my apartment. Fucking sweet.

I need a job with a three day weekend. My actual weekend was very nice and the people filling it were among the world's best, but it was all running around, you know? Even with the thesis handed in, at any given point I had somewhere else I needed to be as soon as what I was doing was done. It didn't help that I had to spend some time at work. I'd really like to have a Fuck-Everyone-But-Me Day like yesterday at least once a fortnight. In the context of a relationship, such days always seemed like the clearest indicator of love (being able to have such a day with M. Whoever that was even more satisfying than an alone one) as well as the clearest symptom of something fundamental being fucked (NEEDING that alone-day and seperation from M. Whoever because he was a net contributor to your stress and misanthropy). Not to re-hash old shit, but I'm still confused when I remember the unhappiness and bitterness I seemed quite content to be feeling for long periods in the context of some relationships. You know, Lady, like that thing Margaret Cho said - it's morning, the sun is shining on the angelic, sleeping face of your lover, you lift yourself onto your elbow, gaze on him, and scream inside,

"I HATE YOU SO MUCH! I WISH YOU'D NEVER WAKE UP!"

Or something like that. No more of that, please and thank you.

UPDATE

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! SCHOOL JUST CALLED! DEFENCE TENTATIVELY SCHEDULED!

Maybe I can see Stéphane Rousseau and then double back for the Go! Team on the 9th . . . Fuck, I'm nervous now, I have to get my defence ready.

UPDATE BIS

I've hated the Oscars as much as any institution for as long as I can remember. Every year they do something totally fucking retarded that makes me think if the Academy had one head, I'd kick it in. And I just can't seem to get used to it! It's like an older brother who always manages to find a way to make you go apoplectic, no matter who cool you think you are. They manage to find a new way to piss me off every year. This time, it's the near shut-out of Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Dear Oscars:

Fuck you, fuck your shitty costume design award, and fuck Memoirs of a Fucking Geisha and its fucking six nominations. The night you air I'm getting royally snaked, watching three Johnny Depp movies in a row, and then boycotting every product that advertises during your broadcast. And if that covers every feminine hygiene product on the North American market, I'll start ordering them from abroad.

Until next year,

Fuck you.

Languor

I feel like raspy snakeshit. But I’m chilling. You know the last time I chilled? I don't. So I also feel great. Funny how physical problems bring us down less than stress-y or emotional ones. I suppose because 80% of the time our physical problems are reasonably transient shit like broken legs, nasty colds, torn ligaments, headaches, papercuts, menstrual cramps, food poisoning, alchohol poisoning and such, and we can always understand with problems like those that eventually they'll be okay - the knowledge the pain is temporary helps us ignore it while it's there. I wonder if it's possible or healthy to do that with our emotional problems. Maybe the point of a strong emotion is how it consumes all your attention and all your thoughts of the future – your unconscious more or less throwing down and saying ‘Sort me out, bitch! We’re not moving until you do!’

Hmmm. I wonder if I have any objectivity left about mental health after falling for Jung like a tonne of bricks. It’s become hard to believe, for example, that there are people who think about their minds without splitting them up into a conscious, unconscious, shadow, persona, et cetera, et cetera. Yet it looks quite arcane when I write it down. This must be what it’s like to be religious – a complete lack of comprehension about why people don’t believe the same things you do when they seem like big self-evident truth. I should be careful, but I don’t want to be. So there.

And so, I’m chilling. Reading Jung and Freakonomics, watching March of the Penguins and Jean de Florette, sleeping, smoking little hits, and occasionally hacking up a lung. Yes, I see a problem there. I think I’ll go make some brownies. After a little nap. Happy Monday, everyone.

The triumph of the will

Last night I didn’t make it to the Orbit Room to see the A-Team, which means the most culturally significant time of the evening was Mr. N’s Romeo y Julieta. Like smoking a palm tree and a Mojito, bitch. He liked his late birthday presents. My burner is all fuck-y so I couldn’t record the playlists I’d made for him – gave him a loaded cigarette case with the print instead – he seemed happy. I try not to be selfish but I think I’d rather get a mix from Mr. N than make one for him. He does such a good job – surprising choices that work as a whole – when I’m Queen of the World, he can take care of the soundtrack. And it was good to see everyone at J*Fish’s. Nice to get quite fucked up for the first time since the thesis went nuts. Which is only two weeks, but somehow that feels like a lot. I think I’m ovulating, or else really relieved at handing in the thesis. Yeah. I don’t know the difference anymore.

Evidently, I need some vacation time. I also need to prepare the defence. But not today. Today I’ll work for a few hours and then chill. Chill like God wants me to.

It was warm and sunny yesterday – fucking lovely, and now we’re all happier, but a lot of us over-reacted too. I expect every country has a way in which the most of the population denies the fucking blatantly apparent – in England I found it was how one can’t anticipate winter after winter one's pipes will freeze and break, in Italy it was how one can’t stop speeding blind around hairpin turns, in France how one can’t resist having long vacations from elderly relatives during a heat wave and expecting the government to take care of them in the interim. Here, it’s ‘Oh! The moisture isn’t freezing in my sinuses when I inhale through my nose! I'm stripping down, man, because this shit is summer!’

I may have found someone to go to Gotterdammerung with me, but I doubt he'll go for it after he's had time to reflect on the 5.5 hours. However, I think he's got a line on some mushrooms. Shrooms and opera go together like reefer and cartoons, or crystal and jungle, or brownies and loving. I remember the first opera I saw after munching. Barber of Seville, Opera Lyra, Ottawa 1998. When Figaro launched into 'Largo al factotum' I started crying, it was so beautiful. Couldn't stop until the end. Opera gets the shitty end of the lollipop these days - as usual I blame television. Particularly Hanna-Barbera cartoons - 'Largo al factotum' being the 'Fiiiiiiiii-ga-ro, fiiiii-ga-ro, figaro figaro figaro' shit Bugs Bunny was always fucking around. Well, mushrooms fixed the damage that wascally wabbit wrought.

It's Tom Selleck's birthday. This will probably be a national holiday for our children's generation, so I suggest we all take tomorrow off to celebrate. Or, you know, because we're sick after over-exposing ourselves whilst drunk and spring-fevered.