Now is the winter of their discontent, but I figure we can still go to the Gap on rue de Rivoli

I've got no shame, or fairly little, in admitting I'm homesick. Probably all the birthday messages at once is what brought it on. Maybe knowing they get that extra hour or two of sunlight back home because it's a bit further south - maybe knowing that now the snow has fallen, what light there is will be doubled by reflecting off it. It could be because I know that whether I'm there or not, Time is, and I may not be approving of what he's doing behind my back, and perhaps the people back home will be shocked to see what he's done here. My job has given me acne, for example. Not lots of it, but some. I'm 20 fucking 9 now and I have more acne on my face at the moment than I had in my whole marvellously clear-skinned adolescence put together.

Anyways, enough complaining. We're planning Paris Take Two this weekend so the F-word was a little disconcerted to hear that the riots have started again after the cops killed those teenagers on the moped. In terms of the shopping/visiting/maybe a spot of opera sort of visit the darling and I have in mind, I don't think it'll have much impact. Last time the rioters only popped into the 20th and 18th arrondisements for a little visit and the disenfranchised seemed to be happy to fuck up their own neighborhoods instead of those of the dominant. No surprise there really. I remember watching reportage about Rodney King riots - I was very young at the time, twelve I should think - and wondering why all the black people were getting upset in their own neighborhoods instead of all those famous places in L.A. where surely everybody would pay more attention. One of my brothers helpfully pointed out that if they did that, they'd get fucking killed.

I've never been to L.A. and my knowledge of their police force is based on the Rodney King trial when I was twelve and then the novels of James Ellroy, but I'd imagine the same applies except much more so in France. I don't know if people fully appreciate how not-isolated and how precedented French police killing brown teenagers and getting away with it without even having to pretend to be sorry is (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961 - yes, still haven't updated the browser, fuck off, you). Having spent far too much time for my tastes in Parisian suburbs I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty I'd riot too if I was a brown French teenager living in one of them and the police killed another couple brown teenagers in broad daylight, but I wouldn't dream of doing so downtown unless I had a deathwish.

Oh Tony, they're beautiful

Had a good birthday. F-word broke the bank on a pair of beeeeeyoutiful hiking/mountaineering type boots and I had a bit of a Carmella Soprano moment when we went into the outdoor equpiment store and told me to choose whatever my little heart desired. It turns out inappropriately inexpensive presents really do make me feel more affectionate. Then we went to Maastricht and smoked away the lousy weather while munching canoli and drinking champagne with a couple friends. Nice.

Paolo Szot is coming to Belgium. Long, long, long term readers of my blog, of which I think there's, oh, none left now that people keep moving to Web 2.0 (spelling mistakes in real time!) know what I think of Paolo Szot, whose schedule is linked on the sidebar so that if I ever get the time and inclination to be a groupie I can do so easily. He was Escamillo in, and the only good thing about, "Carmen" when it went down at the Hummingbird Centre a couple of years ago - besides the orchestra and the chubby blonde who sang the higher part in 'Melons, coupons'.

Anyways, he was sex on legs, or rather sex projected by a booming rich baritone, and my standard forever about what an Escamillo should be. Sexy. Now he's going to be Count Almaviva in "Le nozze di Figaro" in Ghent and my guess is he'll be sexy in that too. Stay tuned.

Tell me that you want the kind of thing that money just can't buy

Soon I'll be 29. On Sunday, to be exact. From the way people go on you'd think it wasn't a birthday at all because it's not my 30th yet. 29 is plenty for the moment, thank you. As I get older I realize it's not getting older that bothers me, so much as feeling more and more unactualized as time passes. 'Unactualized' - I think I made that word up. It's a very late November sort of word. Long, ugly, and meaningless. What I mean when I say it is that I feel I've painted myself into a living corner that bars me from doing the things that I'm best at and enjoy the most, while at the same time confuses me as to whether what I really want is to contribute something that helps celebrate the beauty of existence (good!), have everybody love me for my contributions (weak!), or not get sent to hell when I die because I've squandered my God-given talents (craaaaazy!).

I think I stopped analysis too soon, but my lifestyle right now has no point besides accumulating money so I can change my lifestyle as soon as possible. Money is dominant at the moment; I can't look at money-on-analysis as an investment because it looks like a siphon on my investments. And just because I think I need analysis doesn't mean I'm not still racked with doubts as to whether it's a big global scam or not. But the fact is even the people who love me the most can't give me the sort of help and encouragement I need right now. I suppose loving someone makes you want the best for them - not necessarily the happiest for them - for my parents, the way things are going for me now is just about the best way possible because I'm making the big bucks in a white collar job that 'goes somewhere' and enjoying a stable relationship. For the F-word, I'm squirreling away the acorns for an as yet undefined future period when we can let our artsiness burst out once more and leave this rat race behind. But for me, well, things are a pisser today and I'm sick of living for the future when I might get hit by a bus or a terminal illness. It makes me nervous and cranky.

Anyways. Speaking of money, yesterday my financial advisor asked me out. I think his intentions were honourable because he told me to bring someone else along too if I wanted. I said no anyways, because the place he asked me out to had a dress code and I don't believe in that. But I invited him and some other people along tonight to a soiree a guy from work who promotes on the side has organized - should be good - the music looks fantastic and I figure I can dance all the tedious concerns about 'unactualization' out of my head for the weekend, which will see various celebrations of my success in not getting hit by a bus or a terminal disease over the past little while.

My body shall be crushed out of the very form of humanity ere it become the victim of thy brutality

Had a vampire dream the other night that turned out to be remarkable. The vampire in question was decadent looking young man, that real fainting feathery cynical romantic Baudelaire-Jude Law type who look like they express erotic affection by tying you up and kicking your ass. Not really my type anymore, and in the dream certainly not my type because I was half-conscious I bore a faint resemblance to that poor murdered British student in Perugia. She's been playing on my mind because there but for the grace of God, but I mustn't keep thinking this way or I'll deny my kids the chance to do all the stupid and educational things I did.

So. I was sitting in some school building studying industriously away. The vampire came along and decided he would drink all my blood, and set about seducing me to smooth his way to do so. While my interest was piqued, I smiled and said "I'm not that kind of a girl", which is a line I'd never use in real life, because let's face it, we're ALL that kind of girl and we're just not interested - shouldn't blame ourselves. But it had an odd effect on the vampire. It became very "Ivanhoe", very Rebecca-the-Jewess-and-Brian-Bois-de-Guilbert; my refusal of his advances inspired him with an adoration of my moral fibre et cetera, and he went from wanting to drain my heart dry to wanting to make me into a vampire too, so we could both traipse about an immortal existence in our feathery cynical romantic way, probably staring dully at waterfalls a lot and writing poetry about decay - you know how it is.

As the love blossomed on his face I realized something was wrong, much more wrong than a persistent young man bothering me, something even more wrong than the prospect of assault. I seemed to smell carrion, and I realized he was dead and would somehow make me dead forever, so I freaked. Got up and ran, which of course you're not supposed to do with a vampire because they can run faster. I realized that and started freaking more freakily. Ran up some flights of stairs with him gaining on my heels, saw an open french window on the fifth floor, and ran full tilt into the void with a grateful heart.

He screamed in despair. "That'll show him," I thought I as I plummeted. And then Batman saved me and took me away from all this.

True story.

They ain't heavy, they're just big-boned

Hilts went on beautifully on a blog entry I can't link because of the ancient nature of my Safari about how he came to love the Rolling Stones. It made me think, even made me a little misty. My brothers are separate but equal. I love them all. Like I love chocolate, marijuana, and coffee. Separate but equal, and non-carcinogenic into the mix; very different boys, men, brothers, but the best a human female could have.

Anyways, one thing they more or less agreed upon as I meandered my way through childhood and they erupted into oversized zitfarms is that music worked like this:

1. The Beatles
2. The Rolling Stones
3. Other bands

When I was ten I went through a antepubescent pseudoerotic obsession with the New Kids on the Block. It lasted five minutes because my brothers found out. They mocked me until I cried and then we went on vacation in the Laurentian Mountains for two weeks. They would not allow any music to join us except the White Album and Some Girls. The cassettes were on constant rotation as we drove and drove and drove and canoed and barbequed and swam and sailed and ate and dozed. I was cured, or brainwashed, or what have you.

Then my brothers all moved out at once what seemed like just a couple of weeks later, as they're all much older than me. Well, Elvis didn't move out right away but he did enter his acid years and as far as I was concerned all it did for him was make him either unbearably cranky or totally incomprehensible. He did bring home some better looking friends, though. Anyways, I was suddenly an isolated ten year old kid who only listened to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and I despised my peers for listening to tinkly synthesized crap and dressing like idiots.

It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with looking down my nose at people, today extending to Justin Timberlake fans and women who get cutesy tattoos. It's a fucking tattoo, for god's sake, get something cool instead of a twee little star or such bullshit. Someday you're going to be burning your way through menopause, and you'll look at your fancy girly wrist rosebud, and want to punch yourself in the face. And Justin Fucking Timberlake is a joke music producers are playing on the listening public. 'I know, let's buy some crap boyband dancer with a smurf voice and park him in front of some good beats. People will think he's not total shit and buy all his albums. It'll be hilarious!' And it is.

My point is that even now, nearly eighteen years after the trip to the Laurentians and with us all living as far apart as we can manage without moving to continents where we'd be an ethnic minority, I can't hear even the briefest excerpt from the White Album or Some Girls without feeling profoundly safe and loved.

What, am I here for your amusement?

Swingers on the brain, as we were wondering if a couple of new friends here are. It got me reminiscing about how stupidly people have approached me about group work in the past. One of my great regrets is that they were all offering absolutely unattractive situations, situations they really should have understood were absolutely unattractive, by which I mean they never involved two gorgeous men who were all about me, me, me, and often didn't involve any gorgeous men at all.

The two hardest ones to put off - not because they were tempting, but because of the men's insistence and my deferential manners - involved my best friends at the time, and as if I want to mess around with my best friends. Gross. One incident made me pretty mad at one of those friends, whose response to the situation - her boyf begging, me repeating negative platitudes I'd never have the patience to produce now when I could just do some slapping and storming out - was minutes of asinine wordless giggling. "My dream has always been to be with two beautiful women at once." Dream on, motherfucker. My dream at the time was to smoke a joint and fall asleep alone, which I believe I did that night. They're divorced now. Hah.

The other, while awkward, was much funnier, because the friend of mine involved also thought it was a stupid idea, and we passed a merry half hour making fun of her pleading hornbag ex-boyfriend. That was much less infuriating, because he was funny. Also because the nature of his begging made it seem like he wasn't so interested in having two women cater to his every whim, but more like he was interested in directing a grand sexual set piece. So less annoying, but still not tempting. Because the thing is, I'm not here for anybody's amusement or edification. I'm a herculean colossus of self-absorption. And the idea of sharing the set with that many people when I'm not the lead/writer/director/producer holds no charm at all.

My experience has been that lots of the men who have the balls to ask for weird sexual combinations don't understand the concept of me being all about me at all, and it makes me wonder if women are generally much more deferential and much less self-obsessed than I am. I was unimpressed when my friend's boyfriend used "it's always been my dream blah blah blah" as an argument that would make me more likely to go for them, but it's not like I hadn't heard it before and didn't hear it again. Do chicks go for that? I'm all for catering to partners and making dreams come true and all - but bringing in a new partner to help those dreams come true? What's wrong with good old fashioned adultery?

Let me save you and so doing save myself

We tried to go to Paris this weekend and didn't get close. Taking the coach in to circumnavigate the strike - clever, no? But because the traffic had been so built up around that city due to all the car commuters, the coaches were departing from Brussels about two hours late, and we got cranky, cold and drunk waiting. Finally I insisted on a refund and a retreat, which the F-word was fine with; his motives for wanting to go to Paris this weekend were ulterior and satisfied by the 1.5 hours we spent waiting at the Gare du Nord.

Paris during a strike was alright, if you lived downtown, weren't scared of biking, and knew the city well enough to be able to plan alternate routes every time a bunch of brat civil servants demonstrated in your path; even ideal, because it cuts down on some of the crowding. The real problem was the anger. The special regime types promote themselves as a bulwark against a slippery slope - we'll nip the reforms that are geared towards making you die in the saddle in the bud, they tell France, by boldly bringing the country to a standstill with our strikes - the problem being they're doing this as a fair proportion of the French are haemmorageing money because they can't make it to their jobs where they get paid by the hour because it's too hard to get a permanent contract because there have been no successful reforms of the permanent contracts that employers shy away from giving. A bunch of fuckwit Don Joses singing about saving her right before they stab ol' Carmen to death. The consequence, of course, is a reciprocal anger, an anger I remember well from back when I was an hourly worker, and if this round of strikes lasts much longer we shall see some blood on the streets. For an ethnic group that sings about fertilizing their fields with the impure blood of the enemy in their absolutely dreadful national anthem, they've always been quick enough on the draw when it comes to attacking each other, or at least each other's cars.

Anyways, this is a shitty time of the year for confrontation and everything else, it seems. Marriages ending, seniors dying - Grandpa died a bit more than a year ago - carping, endless carping, and eternal swinging between being too hot and too cold. Can't get over how pissy EVERYONE is and of course I'm keeping up nicely. Cannot believe, no doubt because of missing summer, that there will ever be summer again; gaping at my Tevas in the disbelief that they were ever practical. SAD is a bitch. Nonetheless we had a nice weekend here, getting high, trying to shake our eternal goddamn colds and watching Terry Jones' "Barbarian" series. That man could do a documentary about reading phonebooks and I'd be into it.

I'm also blowing through Paul Theroux's magical 'The Great Railway Bazaar'. I think I have a crush on him. He makes himself sound like a bit of a dick with 'modern' and, to me, unpleasant ideas about marital fidelity, though those stay in the elliptical realm; every encounter with prostitutes he writes about is always one where he doesn't go for it, and yet he takes the trouble to point out that he didn't experience the impotency associated with Indian tummy viruses during his journey through the sub-continent. In another sense, the way he notices,, complains and enthuses about things makes me imagine his son Louis Theroux with a harder edge and some nice alcoholic angles to his face instead of the air of good natured incomprehension that helped him build his career as a documentarian. That's, to coin a phrase, hot.

The Red Dragon ponders where she came from

Pardon me for the lack of links and italics in the following entry but the F-word hasn't updated his browser since Belgium had a goverment. We've been watching a neat-o documentary about dinosaurs. Dinosaurs haven't lost any of their fascination for me because I only watched the first Jurassic Park for the Jeff Goldblum, who I dug whilst pubescent, and also because I'm so into making up bullshit relative to evolutionary psychology. And because they're big. With great big teeth and spikes and shit. Fuckin' A!

So Thursday is the easy day at work, and having dinosaurs on the brain I decided on a little light wikireadiaing about the evolution of mammals, hoping I could find some distant, implausible but emotionally pleasing evolutionary explanation for my various perversions. And did I ever! I happened to be listening to my not-so-secret guilty pleasure, Chris Isaak, of course singing "Wicked Game", as I read that during the Triassic* "acute senses of hearing . . . became vital" for our insectivore ancestors, and "this accelerated the development of the mammalian middle ear, and therefore of the mammalian jaw since bones which had been part of the jaw joint became part of the middle ear."

At that point all of human voice-y things suddenly laid themselves out for me as one extended mating call, one complicated effort made in a billion different ways to get some appropriate person to make babies with you. And that all our various perversions are just a way of maintaining some sort of genetic diversity - if you like wearing socks whilst fucking**, for example, but no one else in your tribe likes fucking in socks, you'll look outside of your tribe and use your incredible talking abilities to work out who likes fucking in socks. And the better you are at talking about them the more you can make those perversions painstakingly precise or subtle, because the cleverer you are about investigating whether other people are into them, and the further afield you'll go to satisfy them. Which is why humans, the best talkers in the animal world, are also unquestionably the biggest pervs.

Not sure how Chris Isaak fits into all this. I reckon as an example, because someone who uses the word 'wicked' so many times in a sexy song must understand something precise about guilty sex that thousands of ex-Catholic chicks like me dig and he's communicating that subtly to all of us at once by having a moaning duet with his guitar. Does jazzing on an abstract emotional concept of sensual good and evil divorced from your partner in any sense except his sheer inappropriacy count as a perversion? I should say so. A wicked game indeed. Well spotted, Chris. But pretty much guaranteed to get you out & spreading your genetic material beyond your own little tribe of Madonna-worshipping Cathos who'd prefer to fuck you through a hole in the bedsheets or have a few glasses of wine and then treat you like a prozzy.

I love bullshit evolutionary psychology, it's my fave. The post-modern way of saying God is on your side . . .

*Why do they insist on such funny names for prehistoric eras? Reminds me of the three-assed monkey from South Park.

**One of the more revolting consensual perversions in existence. I'm pretty open minded but that shit is gross.

The Red Dragon works (kinda) hard for the money

The Bosswoman is taking us out for lunch today because our deadlines have been advanced for the past week or so and it's been hairy. But you know something - it hasn't been THAT hairy. I'm not saying my job's not hard, but it's not that bad and prrrrrobably it could get a good bit badder before I started really complaining . . . I thought it was important to write that this morning in case it does. I have a review coming up and I'm dreading being told I should be working harder or that since I've been working so beautifully they're going to give me more work to do beautifully - you can see how I might have a sensation of not being able to win, going into this thing.

Though it would be cool if they gave me more money. I just found out that there's no wealth or capital gains tax in this country, and since I have an expat contract that's already getting me more money than I've ever made in my life, even if it's not going to get me a pony anytime soon, and only gets slapped with a fraction of the AVERAGE 50% income tax 'normals' have to pay here*, and since my partner in crime is a master of frugal-but-delectable living, and since the weather is too shitty to spend much time wandering around looking for places to spend money, and since the reefer is fucking cheap, Brussels may be the place that I save enough to retire during my breeding years, or at least move somewhere climactically pleasing.

I also thought it was important to point out my job's not that bad because I have a habit of answering the question "How's it going?" at work in the morning with "Great", "Lovely" or "Fuckin' A!", particularly if I've just got laid, and yesterday, after seven months, I realized that never fails to surprise people. Of course they're mostly English people from the south who're used to displaying no emotion whilst sober besides a sort of frustrated tolerance for the circumstances in which they find themselves, but still, it makes me think there's some sort of value to accentuating the positive. What that is, I haven't quite worked out yet.

*Can you believe that shit? And their social system and infrastructure is no better than France and a good deal worse than the Netherlands - I've stopped blaming the Flemish for wanting to seperate, though that's the topic of another post.

The Red Dragon warms her chilly bones

Baby steps, baby steps. Everybody in Brussels has a cold except me. Maybe my immune system still exists. Maybe it's even getting stronger. Since I arrived I've been the office's early warning system for each new bug making the rounds but I feel fine and others are out of commission. Maybe some day I'll actually give a round of the common cold a miss.

Fell violently in lust with my tai yogilates instructor last night, which was the highlight of a lackadaisical class. When he was telling us to 'elevez vos hanches' and demonstrating, I certainly exercised my imagining muscles, even if my core muscles remained untouched. Tai yogilates is sexy in French. The gym I joined on Monday is the Easyjet of the health club world - no frills, not a single one, besides a propensity towards hiring attractive instructors. No soap in the showers, no water fountains, nothing. I like it though - all the machines are new and fantabulous, and it only costs 25 a month.

I joined the gym just in time. Though I'm in good shape at the mo from all the walking and healthy living, I need extra aerobic exercise to keep my bones hot because it's fucking COLD here. My apartment is COLD. Also my apartment is now too COLD to shower in so I need to do so at the gym - an excellent incentive to actually show up, as is the fact it's right next to the office.

You turn me right round baby

Dreamt about tornadoes last night. I was in Edmonton, or a place I thought was Edmonton because it was mostly skyscrapers and a few old houses that were being foreclosed on due to variable rate mortgages, and it was really flat. I don't think houses are actually being foreclosed on there due to variable rate mortgages but in my lizard-brain Edmonton and Cleveland are more or less flatter/hotter versions of each other with disenfranchised natives and disenfranchised black people standing in for each other - haven't been to either so I don't know why. In my dream I was in my lizard-brain version of Edmonton, sitting around on the verandah of one of the old houses with my mum and dad and someone else, I think Elvis but I'm not sure. Dad was giving me a haircut because I'm not happy with the one I got here before the Benjamin Biolay concert, and he was a bit nervous because he hadn't cut a bird's hair since he cut mine when I was eight and he hadn't yet banished me to the world of femme-y hairdressers.

We went to a run down old shopping centre and were poking around a chinoiserie shop ran by a middle-aged Asian couple around my parents' age, when I glanced out the door and saw eleven or twelve tornadoes on the horizon that looked big to my untrained eyes. 'There's a bunch of tornadoes,' I said, 'I reckon we'd better go to the basement.' The Asian couple had a look and decided indeed we should, so we did. It was quite a nice basement. I think they were running a childcare/school down there but the kids weren't around, just the desks and bright colours and whatnot. Dad wrapped up my haircut and then I got a little restless, so I told them I'd be back in a mo and went to explore the rest of the basement.

Turns out it was another little commercial complex down there with restaurants and bars and stores full of crap, which was tedious, but then I walked up a half-flight of stairs to where a small crowd of people were watching the progress of the tornadoes. It was pretty neat looking. They were wandering around the skyscrapers, occasionally pushing one to the side and blowing shit around. But suddenly one was RIGHT THERE. I had a little scream, as did everyone else, and then I ran back into the basement looking for my family and unable to remember in my panic which part of the basement they were in. I maintained a degree of calm by reminding myself they, and I, weren't getting any safer than we were in that collective basement, but I was desperate to be with them, and tearing around like a madwoman, backtracking, peering, trying to remember where I came from.

If my subconscious was a television show, it'd have a painfully intrusive laugh track.

Ticky tacky houses

Tried to be rigorously efficient this weekend and was only moderately so - still - that exceeded expectations. considering the White Widow that's been sitting around. Took a break to socialize, and as the evening was winding down, or the morning winding up, our hosts showed us the first three episodes of Weeds with Marie-Louise Parker, Kevin Nealon, et cetera . It was pretty funny. I liked it though I don't have time to go into that (time! How did it get so precious?).

What I thought was remarkable was even now, even in our post-Sopranos landscape that has raised the bar so high on specialty television and made the sitcom format seem quaint enough to be radicalized by the adventures of a pot-dealing mum, a 25-minute pilot episode still more or less has to stand alone AND get you hooked, like a trembling young stripper at his first hen party, surreptitiously praying his panties get stuffed with bills and that no one laughs at his willy.

If I was a television enthusiast - which many of you know I am NOT, unless the enthusiasm is for shit-canning them (even the 'high-quality' stuff is just an excuse to make us think cool rich people drink Coca Cola when they don't, they drink fucking pomegranate juice or whatnot, this is 2007 and we have ideas about anti-oxidants now, people), I would collect pilot episodes and study them with rapt attention, trying to see how the creators of the show created what's effectively a half or full hour ad for the show that in its turn will serve as bait to make us watch thousands of other ads.

Puke.

It's not November all year

What with having given the summer a miss, I'd forgotten all about it, but this is the premier cranky time of year. The Young American stormed out of work yesterday, Madame Pariyorker is in a state, I feel the world is cruelly indifferent to my potentialities and I make everyone around me pay for it, people keep going on stress leave and it's just so fucking dark.

Sigh. Time to join the gym. That'll cheer me up some - and I have to remember it's only going to keep on getting worse for less then a month and a half before it starts getting better.

The good news is the Young American's husband who works in catering keeps getting spare food, so the other day I brought home about 30 oranges that I've been juicing. I consider juicing an abomination because of all the associated wastage but when someone gives you 30 free oranges and you have a hand reamer, you'll make orange juice, even if it means feeling slightly decadent when there are starving people in the world, and even though you're trembling with laughter a bit because you're reaming something. Heh heh heh.

Roberto Esperanza

Saw a fucking hilarious film the other night with Adriano Celentano and Anthony Quinn, called Bluff: storia di truffe e di imbroglioni. I don't know Adriano Celentano from Santa - he's a very famous Italian singer but I avoid Italian music like the plague - apparently he's like the Italian Bob Hope, by which I mean he grabs women's tits on camera. Anyways, funny.

And that's about all I have to write this morning. There are other things to go on about but they mostly have to do with how suffocated I feel at the moment in terms of a lack of personal space and time because of work and also because I haven't quite figured out cohabitation yet, and with some guilt issues over how bad I've been at keeping in touch with people back home, and such issues deserve no more than the present sentence in this forum.

18 hours of travelling = 18 hours of reading

Whilst travelling I read some books to pass the time, and I continue to be amazed at how slowly The Waves goes - not in a bad way, though. Beautiful words, beautiful sounds, that you want to take your time with - like how you always have to slow down during a hurried morning commute when part of it takes you through a lovely park.

In between picking up and putting down The Waves, I read the rest of The Old Patagonian Express, and happily Paul Theroux found a bunch of things he liked. And wrote about it so engagingly that now I want to go to Patagonia, even though the bit about Patagonia was a tiny part of the book. The friend of the F-word that we stayed with in Berlin is Chilean so I could pick his brains a little about it. Maybe one day I'll move there. It just seems so beautifully quiet and I could go for weeks and weeks without seeing people. Of course I'd go utterly barking mad, but having seen what it's like growing old without madness that doesn't seem so bad. Anyways, yesterday by chance in the bookstore close to work I found The Great Railway Bazaar, a Theroux book about crossing Asia by train, so in a few days I might want to grow old and mad in Vietnam - we'll see what he has to say.

Also read The Conformist from Alberto Moravia, as I'd liked the Bertolucci film with Jean Louis Tritignant or however you spell his bloody name so much. The book was different; there was some surrealism to its unremitting narrative realism, to its dictation of Marcello's scared and ignoble thoughts, but not the same as in the film, not as colourful, not as sexy, not as violent - god, that murder scene in the film for example. Wasn't in the book, or rather was in the book, but third-hand, and altogether nobler, less like a messy, horrifying murder. The book read like a cautionary tale being told to you by a literary, well-meaning uncle, and while the narrative was 100% warning you about Marcello by taking his point of view, you learnt far more about the side characters, like his poor wife Giulia, than in the film, where the tangential characters are side more than fleshy effects. But then the film had some marvellous images. Both recommended.

I was made for loving you

So, Berlin. That city is like a dream. Not a huge Wim Winders fan but it's easier to take angels seriously in a place like that. Not pretty - not even the Museum Island is pretty - but very, very lovable. What made it more like a dream, besides the fine reefer and the early darkness, was the German language, which is like a dream language. When they look at me and natter on, the rhythms are so English that I can't understand why I don't understand. And then sometimes I do understand - the harder I listen the more I understand - and that was dreamlike too. The surreal is ante-ed up by the way that city makes so much goddamn sense and whenever I got confused, everything was sorted out before I got twitchy. It's like I've lived there before, but really it's just phenomenal urban planning.

Regret is futile because there wasn't anything more I could have done about it, but fuck, am I ever sad now Tr@nsparency Intern@tional didn't hire me after shortlisting me last year. Oh well. C'est la vie.

We did lots of fun stuff, of which the most recommendable in a public forum was the Pergamon museum, a staggering cultural rape show well worth the half-hour line and the 9 euros - they brought over the fucking Pergamon altar and Ishtar Gates bit by bit, for god's sake. Also the State Opera, where I saw Carmen - sold out except for the sight-obscured nosebleeders that were going for 8 euros, but great sound.

I'd seen Carmen in Toronto back when they were still using the Hummingbird Centre and frankly comparing the two productions was embarrassing - like comparing the Stratford Festival to a highschool production. Though Paolo Szot in Toronto made a better Escamillo, by which I mean sexier. I think the Berlin production meant to make Escamillo emblematic of death, and I'm sorry, Escamillo isn't emblematic of death, he's emblematic of a fucking sexy bullfighter. But there was just no comparison between Larissa Kostiuk as Carmen and Elisabeth Culman - not putting down Kostiuk but Culman had a lovely rich honey voice that made me think of Maria Callas doing it. A lower and more beautiful register for the part. Heavenly.

Listing dangerously

Berlin was awesome. Awesome awesome awesome. I feel like a new woman and my SAD is fought right back. Nonetheless I have no time this morning to tell you about how great everything is, so let's go on with the list of most weepable songs ever:

6. 'Lover, You Should’ve Come Over', Jeff Buckley. I think Jeff Buckley woke up one morning and decided to write a song that would make girls emotional, sort of like a cat that wakes up and decides it’s the day it waits by a mousehole until it catches a mouse. Well, consider me caught. There’s a demanding urgency in the high wailing and the ‘say it’s not too late’ that Jeff Buckley makes sound universal, as well as like a particularly artful orgasm.

7. 'Laisse aboyer les chiens', Benjamin Biolay This song showcases all the weaknesses of his weak voice, but in context. Theatrical lyrics about female opacity in the face of a man’s despairing love (“You’ve cut me by the roots, I’m pale like a bag of heroin, my angel, etc.”) that make you understand, perhaps by virtue of the cracking, unbeautiful voice that sings them or of the melancholy, beautiful backing instrumentation, that his heart really is irretrievably broken, and now he’s going to fucking kill you. Somehow that's sad instead of infuriating.

8. 'Little Darlin’', Benjamin Biolay. Gone on about it before. More cracking, unbeautiful Biolay-voice, complimented by samples of what’s lovely and melancholy about the Carter Family – he’s a genius for having found it. He found what’s melancholy and beautiful about Marylin Monroe’s voice for a track on Rose Kennedy, 'Les Cerfs-Volants', but I prefer this.

9. 'Crown of Love', Arcade Fire. Maybe our romantic lives get higher stakes as we age, but I know for a fact I shed more tears over one boy when I was 14 than I’ve shed over all the boys put together since. One would rather like to bookend and forget such a shitty, stupid, honest time, but this moaning, soaring, violining protest against one’s own obsession, taciturnity and incoherence is an effectively shmaltzy reminder emotional waltzes aren’t just for teenagers.

10. 'Homesick', the Cure. Speaking of, I owe it to my 14 year old self to have at least one Cure song on the list. I’ve never found the Cure depressing and in fact now I find it almost provokingly, vacuously cheerful. But there’s always this song and most of the Disintegration album to remind me why I spent those years in black. This pretty-little-wrist-slitting-ditty moans out everything about wanting to go home but knowing home’s not really there anymore, not how you’re wanting it anyways. I wonder what I thought it meant when I was 14.

Halloween comes sickeningly

So. Following my plan to embrace my navel-gazing seasonal misery, last night I went to a Benjamin Biolay concert despite a nasty headache from having my long and curlies viciously brushed and blowdried to Afghan-hound-straightness by a sadistic, perfumed, pretty hairdresser who made me feel inadequate in all respects as a woman except, of course, that I have a body like a shapely sack of bowling balls and she had tits like fried eggs. Hah. Now today I have a huge headache and an upset tummy and I'm taking the day off work because I don't get paid by the hour. Double hah.

I wasn't expecting much. I'd heard he wasn't touring with strings or horns, and that he was a wooden and uncertain performer who'd rather not perform - heard that after I'd bought the tickets, of course. But expectations be buggered, for it was a fucking good concert. A rich indie sound, though he's not, of course, he's EMI or Virgin or something. Great texture. Great rhythm. That three-and-a-half dimensional sound you get at a show carried out by people who understand fully how music works as a collaboration. And his voice - I didn't know this was possible with pop acts - is better live than on the albums, and him actually suggesting melody with it goes a long way to making up for the lack of all the recorded instruments.

The best songs to hear live were from A l'origine, an album I like but whose tracks sound much better - louder, angrier, faster, and in the case of 'Tant le ciel etait sombre'* scarier live than they do recorded. A l'origine was apparently a commercial disaster, Trash Yeye selling more in its first two weeks then A l'origine has ever sold, and I thought it was interesting that he played so many songs from an album that tanked. Except it wasn't interesting at all, because the songs seemed like they'd been written for live performance. Certainly more so than the pretty tinkliness of Rose Kennedy (though I'm a sucker for 'Les cerfs volants' and the MacBook Marylin singing 'The River of No Return' brought me close to tears) and the gloomy folk rants off Negatif, which both came before. Not to say the renditions of songs from those albums were lots worse than the songs from A l'origine, but they were different from the recorded versions. He'd arranged them in a way that was more appropriate for a live show and it was good.

As for him as a performer - maybe he got a bit more self-confidence since the last round of critiques. Because while he looked like a freestyle rapper who'd smoked a whole lotta spliffery, and while there was cynicism in his carriage and banter bespeaking an awareness of the absurdity of the audience/rock star dynamic, his musical delivery was fantastic, and not cynical. The right energy, the right pitch, the right emotion. And there were some honest to goodness rock star moments when I would have thrown my panties at the stage if I hadn't been wearing trousers, such as when he started playing the trumpet for 'Dans le Merco-Benz'.

It didn't hurt that he had a great four-piece backing him, of which the drummer was the most obviously great to me. It did hurt that the one backing voice he had was from a very breathy woman who was more sound effect than soprano. He used proper voices to great effect on Trash Yeye and there's no excuse for not ponying up a couple thousand extra dollars for a trained singer who can modulate her voice without sounding like she's just finished gagging on someone's dick. But then that sort of voice seems so popular in French music. I think it's part of their unhealthy gender dynamics, which one day I will write a series of extended angry blog entries about, because, you know, I can. Triple hah.

Also, while him playing the trumpet made me want to throw my panties at him, it also reminded me there wasn't enough trumpeting, that there weren't any strings. Okay, it was a good sound, but it would have been a sublime sound with them, particularly on 'Los Angeles', which was missing its lovely rise-and-fall line in the refrain. Finally, the show was hurt by 'Little Darlin'' not getting played so I could really indulge my SAD. It made me think maybe he needs a full time sampler. But he was a touch of a human sampler, trotting out the refrain to 'Clint Eastwood' while winding up 'Negatif' and making it sound like music to massacre to. And he sang 'As Time Goes By' and made it sound, and excuse me for the earthiness of it all, like music to make babies to. Another rock star moment, when I simultaneously congratulated and berated myself for wearing pants.

Verdict - buy all his shit and see him live.

*Which I think will be my theme tune for this round of seasonal affective disorder, because the ciel in this city is sombre - Jeebus fucking Murphy, Halloween and I already want to shoot myself - happy Halloween, by the way!

Daylight, save me!

Daylight Savings Time is fucking brutal. My seasonal affective disorder is kicking in like a soccer playing motherfucker. So I'm trying to be all farmery about it - getting going earlier, spending a bit more time outside despite the weather being execrable. This year, I'm trying something else that worked pretty well for me when I was a teenager; self-consciously embracing the depression. In that vein, here's the first few songs in a list of 15 songs that have a strong tendency to make me cry:

1. 'Parigi o cara', Giuseppe Verdi. I get the feeling people these days would really dislike the public persona of a celebrity like Violetta, to the degree of her illness starting up a morbid Britney-Spears-esque deathwatch. No matter. The mutually delusional swansong of Violetta and her man, whose name I don’t remember, is chilling, sad and beautiful, its little minor notes and slightly jarring end a failsafe way to get me to cry.

2. 'Grandma’s Hands', Bill Withers. Even thinking about the lines “she said ‘baby, Grandma understands that you really loved that man, put yourself in Jesus hands’” followed by the final verse and conclusion ‘when I get to Heaven I’ll look for Grandma’s hands’ sung by a man whose voice is maybe the most effecting in pop music always reduces me to a pile of snot. The musical equivalent of a bucket of water on the Wicked Witch of the West.

3. 'Stand By Me', John Lennon. Only the Rock and Roll version; I've heard him slaughter it elsewhere. This filthy, rich, pebbles-in-a-cheese-grater plea to let good love endure usually makes me shed a couple of unsad, cathartic tears. The backing, especially the percussion, is good enough to make me think Lennon was a selfish fucking twat for not listing the band members on the liner notes. But his vocals here are still the best thing any Beatle did after the Beatles stopped being the Beatles. Though we mustn't forget:

4. 'Starting Over', John Lennon. It’s the most stapley staple of post-Beatledom because even two legless drunkards can dance to it. In fact, this is the song Elvis taught me to couples-dance to and it remains the only song I’m fully comfortable couples-dancing to, besides the 'Stand By Me' above. The thought of Elvis, who made my childhood hell but who now lives too far away from me, a whole fucking planet away, combined with the trembly uncertain joy of love that keeps coming back from the dead without behaving like a zombie, usually gets me weepy.

5. 'Purple Avenue', Holly Cole. When she leans and dips on the line ‘I’ll sleep right here on the draaaaaaaaining board’, my heart remembers all the times it broke and curled up for a long, stunned rest. And I cry. That bell-like voice of hers yodeling out Tom Waits’ incisor words is as satisfying as successful plastic surgery. She followed this album up with an album completely made up of Waits covers and I’m itching to get my hands on it.

Anyways, that's enough for today. Tonight I'm going to a Benjamin Biolay concert, and two of his tracks feature elsewhere on the list, so that will be plenty depressive for me. In that vein here's the least depressing weepable song on the above list:

Not something to bring up at your next AA meeting

Went to a lovely exhibition yesterday in Ghent, or as the French call it "Gaw(n)" or as the Dutch atrociously call it, "Hxxxxhentt." You remember that scene in Splash when Tom Hanks asks the dewy and delicate Darryl Hannah what her name is in her own language, and she yelps out a shocking, painful series of unfiltered dolphin cries? That's the way I feel whenever a Dutch person says anything. Anyways, we went to Ghent to see an exhibit at their splendid gallery called British Visions - lured in by the promises of Lucian Freud, who the F-word loves, and Turner, who I love, and lots of others - David Hockney, who I never feel is faking it - Hogarth, who's just so heartbreakingly funny - and a bunch of Francis Bacons; poor Francis Bacon. I guess you can't tell much about a man from his work but when I look at anything he's painted I feel he's sure he's going to hell when he dies - an unsympathetic dread of his own future, an uncensored vision of his own futile present. It makes neat paintings but I would not have traded brains with him for anything. And then lots of Stanley Spencer, who was new to me but very appealing, even in the way his second wife's breast wrinkled in the painting of them together.

Anyhoo, we were mostly there for the newer stuff, but it did occur to me as we looked at the older stuff that we don't fully appreciate what Europeans have achieved, culturally. Oh sure. We put the past in museums and we traipse the schoolchildren through them, struggling to instill greater regard for our own narrative than the narratives of our historical enemies or underlings. We protest when newcomers don't slot into our molds, we watch absurd period piece movies, and we devote the economies of cities like Bayreuth, Florence and Stratford to celebrating the glories of the past. But we never consider all the hurdles that our European predecessors had to overcome to create our patrimony, principal among which in my mind today was that they were drunk from dawn until dusk, from being weaned to being shriven. They were drunk, drunk, drunk.

Everybody was full of something that had been fermented or distilled in an effort to kill all the bad bacteria that was swimming around the water in those days, everybody was tolerating sieges where the enemy would chuck corpses into your water supply, everybody was paranoid about Jews or heretics or witches poisoning wells, or whoever. So everybody was pissed out of their tree. They went from their mother's tit to the bottle and they stayed there until they died. And despite this, somehow we had the Renaissance, Goya, the Van Eyck brothers, opera, orchestras, Gothic architecture, the postal service, Yorkshire pudding, colonialism, Shakespeare, guns, the re-invention of the novel, and all the other things that make us go 'how did they do that!?!' when we ponder what our ancestors achieved without laptops, GPS, or a life expectancy much beyond 30. Who knows how they did it, but do it they did, and they did it all drunk.