God is a gentleman

So. Wading through the Graham Greene compilation, slowly-like; treated myself to a re-read of The Quiet American, read the Stamboul Train (that's one of his light books? Jesus, depressive fucker), and really enjoyed The Heart of the Matter. Well, enjoyed might be the wrong word. It struck a chord and locked me in, that's for damn sure - one of his Catholic books, and the most defensive, the most lapsed of them all . . . it seems he dedicated it to the very Catholic wife (and their children together) that he abandoned, the very same year as the abandonment. Charming fucker. Such a fucking selfish thing. How else is one supposed to see such a dedication as anything but 'I'm already under such mental and moral torment over my choices that I risk suicide, so don't try to make me feel any worse about leaving you for tail.'

Anyways, if artist's personalities mattered I wouldn't even want to make eye contact with a Michaelangelo, right? The heart of the matter is that it's a good book for Catholics, though not a good Catholic book. What's staying with me now in terms of the Catholicism of it all at this point is the George Orwell review I read soon afterwards. I found it very strange - very angry - very hostile, even offended. Full of little factual errors in his outline of the story, and so very literal in its sarcasm - 'he had gone to what he believed to be certain damnation out of pure gentlemanliness.' Ignoring the point that Scobie had not been a pure gentleman; that Greene had obviously not been trying to draw a portrait of a pure gentleman, but rather of a fatally weak man who could drive himself to suicide over a love affair. But then George Orwell was always so literal in his writing - sure, Animal Farm was an allegory, but have you ever read another allegory that was so laboured in making it clear who it was attacking?

Take this point: 'The central idea of the book is that it is better, spiritually higher, to be an erring Catholic than a virtuous pagan.' What an interesting reaction. As an ethnic Catholic reading the book, I have no idea how a non-Catholic could draw this conclusion. There's an idea that Scobie himself believed this perhaps - that Scobie believed his very Catholic pride and his pity for others distinguished him from the people around him. And yet Scobie, who hated the idea of suicide on an ideological level, drove himself to suicide through this pride and this pity. I couldn't think where you draw the idea of the book arguing a bad Catholic is better than a good non-Catholic unless a non-Catholic reader resents the degree of attention that Greene focuses on the process of a bad Catholic driving himself to destruction.

It seems like an offended review - Orwell suggests Greene is snobby, that he subscribes to the idea of hell being an exclusive nightclub; he sarcastically suggests that Greene's 'Catholics retain their superiority, since they alone know the meaning of good and evil.' (And he somehow maintains this defensiveness alongside an attack on Greene for making his underclass characters too thoughtful, too pre-occupied with notions of right and wrong!)

But what seems to offend Orwell is that which is the charm of the Catholic novel, and a sign not of the superiority of Catholicism (oh no, I won't way a word about their superiority, I did a runner to the Quakers and I'm glad) but a sign of what makes Catholics special: an obsession with guilt and redemption on a daily basis that other ethnic Christians have not managed (to their benefit no doubt) to hang on to. Catholics, if they're good Catholics, centre their faith around the notion of being imperfect and of apologizing adequately to God for their imperfection. The Catholic God is a forgiving and just God, but only if you can present your sins before Him, only if you can repent from the bottom of your heart for those sins; only if you want to be perfect.

And this is the tragedy of Catholics, and the tension at the heart of the Catholic novel: nobody is perfect. And believing you know what perfection is, or at least being faced with your own imperfections on a daily basis, becomes an intolerable burden. Because feeling guilty about knowing you're imperfect and pitying the victims of your imperfection isn't going to make you more noble - less tempted to lie, less tempted to fuck around, less tempted to accommodate the people you care about even if doing so is not quite kosher. It takes nobility and goodness to be a noble, good person - not guilt, not pity - and frankly I had thought it was obvious that was the point of the Heart of the Matter.

So it was interesting to read the Orwell review, which seemed to ignore that entirely. Is the tragedy of wanting to be perfect but usually managing no more than guilt and pity a particularly Catholic mental problem whose exploration would really be so offensive and alienating to other people? And how do other ethnic Christians manage to avoid this mental problem? Do all those American born-agains whose sins are washed away all of a sudden in a fucking fantastic baptism face this problem, or can such a powerful event when you're a grownup make you feel so close to God that you can ignore your imperfections in the glow of His glory? It would certainly explain the Bush presidency . . .

Well, I'll tell you

Last night I had a remarkably bad night's sleep, and I'll just share one of the markers of how bad it was. At about three in the morning, I half-woke-up from a doze utterly confused. The room was backwards. The window was where the door should have been and vice versa; there was an inexplicable drop between my side of the bed and the F-word's, and when I stretched the headboard had disappeared. I lay there wondering just how status quo this all was and didn't realize what had happened until I got up for a drink of water: I had occupied my boyfriend's side of the bed, and had been lying feet-to-the-headboard. I'm sure both that that hadn't been the case before falling into a doze, and that I have never. Ever. Done anything like that before.

It would be a lie to say I'm under more stress than ever before. Obviously that was the wrap-up of my thesis, or its actual defense, or the French oral exams, or something else to do with France. But one thing I can say is that I've never been with a man who I loved as much as I love this one while being under this much stress, and it adds a whole new dimension because I don't want to subject him to it, but we have a degree of intimacy that gives the illusion of giving me no choice. When I was single or indifferent I could come home and be a miserable asshole without thinking it a problem. But now I have to keep it inside, or express it differently, or walk it off, or something. I know I need to find some way to deal, because while I was lying there utterly confused about why the room was backwards and the headboard had disappeared, I obscurely but honestly blamed the F-word for it.

The truth is I like my job more than any other job I've had, but my brain is turning into a first-grader who's tired of math class and wants to go back to the craft table. Why go to all the trouble of educating me and giving me books and an imagination and some sort of aesthetic sense if at the end of it I was going to be the efficient cog in a corporate machine I know does more harm than good? And it throws me to the navel-gazing, middle-class, but thus far irrefuted conclusion - what the hell else did I think it was preparing me for? What else do I think the people who loved me and educated me wanted for me besides this sort of security and upward mobility? And what else do I expect unless I grow a pair and risk hurting them with my choices?

And these are my problems, my decisions, my rhetorical questions to answer; it's unfair to take any frustrations from it out on the F-word, or even on the people who loved me and educated me right into the situation I'm in today, and for whom my unconscious seems to be making the F-word the proxy. They were all doing their best, and the F-word didn't do any of it; in fact, he's the right partner for the woman I want to be.

Cheating death, deliciously

Following yesterday's themes of severe icky condiment aversion, I should mention there's one other that I object to with better reason; I'm one of those people who die when they eat peanuts, so my acquaintance with peanut butter has been, shall we say, brief and violent. But before the collapses into infirmity, which haven't happened with peanut butter since I was 6 or so, peanut butter being an easyish thing to avoid, I enjoyed the texture, the neat-o way it stuck to my teeth and the top of my mouth. I'm not saying a lifetime of not being able to eat peanut butter is as bad as the fact that I can only go to Thai restaurants when I want to play a delicious, delicious game of Russian roulette. But I am saying it's been a lingering sadness in the back of my mind - no peanut butter for me.

Until this week, that is. An old friend who works for one of the big international organizations here (who, by the way, provided me with the juicy tidbit that Sarkozy is only 5'5 - in lifts), and who suffers from the same infirmity as me - though it came later in life, so her attachment to peanut butter is rather stronger - told me about this.

To really appreciate this discovery, you need to understand that speculoos biscuits are the best thing Belgium has to offer. I'm serious. The beer in Germany is better than here; the fries at North American burger joints are better than here; the mussels in northern France are better than here - there is nothing, culinary-wise, to miss about this place besides speculoos biscuits, which I already know I'll miss like crazy when we move on. Rich but dry crispy little cinnamon things that soak up your coffee in an instant and taste like paradise . . . And now they've turned it into a spreadable paste. With the same consistency as peanut butter.

Gazpacho Soup Day

After almost three decades of avoiding gazpacho soup, yesterday I had it twice - first from the premium brand, and then from this recipe. Yeah, I know I linked to it yesterday, but I'm linking to it again today, damnit, because it was good. A taste sensation unlike any other I have ever experienced, and yes, it does add a whole new dimension to Almodovar movies. And I had the good fortune to have Gazpacho Soup Day on that rarest of all Bruxellois days - a hot one. Definitely hot weather food.

I confess I hesitated both at lunchtime and at dinner to raise the gazpacho to my lips. I've found a way to love most of my old bugabears - eggplant, beetroot, brussel sprout, spinach, cabbage, zucchini. But there's one bugabear that I have no plans to rid myself of - a lifelong hate, a pathological phobia of ketchup, or catsup, or whatever the fuck you call that shit is that looks like blended bloody diarrhoea. The last time I accidentally put it in my mouth was a couple of years ago in Toronto when we went to a fantastic Tamil place in my darling Cabbagetown, Rashnaa - highly recomended. They brought out French's mustard (can't eat that shit either) swirled together with ketchup to dip our appetizers in, but the lighting was romantic, so not noticing the gross I dipped one of my ulunthu vadals - yeeurgh. I still mourn having to spit out a mouthful of ulunthu vadal. Anyways, I don't know why I hate ketchup and French's mustard and (now that I think about it) relish so much. It's not the snotty guinea in me because my clan uses that crap at barbeques. Probably more to do with societal distrust issues - I can't eat anything with a texture that fucking gross and scatologic if some corner-cutting company made it. God knows what they'd have put into it. Ugh. Does. Not. Bear. Thinking. About.

So I hesitated to try the gazpacho both in the afternoon and evening yesterday because it was processed tomato served cold, reminding me vaguely of ketchup or Bloody Marys, which I've always considered a shocking waste of cold crisp vodka taste. But I got over it and I'm glad I did. I recommend the pants off gazpacho in terms of helping you get through the heat of the summer, if you're lucky enough to have any.

Gazpacho Soup Eve

Desperately domestic weekend. One of those weekends where carrying out onerous household tasks feels like spoiling yourself. Maybe it was sparked by getting the first washing machine of my independent life. Before, it's been trips to laundromats or friends' houses or to some sort of communal piece of shit in an apartment complex's basement, but now it's ours and that means I can do the laundry naked. It's used, because we're cheap, we don't need it for the rest of our lives, and I have no wish to add to the world total of lingering white goods, but lovely.

So. Did umpteen loads of laundry, baked bread, scrubbed down the kitchen and bathroom, fleshed out our library from the charity shop (big Graham Greene compilation - presently reading Heart of the Matter and loving it - as well as Little Dorritt and The General in His Labyrinth, as I haven't read any Gabriel Garcia Marquez in years and years.)

And then another bushel of tomatoes from the back-of-the-truck market, which had a three-fold destiny: first, a great sauce cook-off for freezing and consuming over the next week or two, second, a smaller sauce for pasta alla norma for a dinner party, and third, gazpacho.

The pasta alla norma was really good and I adjusted the recipe from the typical slightly, so I'll record it here so I don't forget:

tomato sauce for five people
3 small eggplants
lots of salted bread crumbs
lots of olive oil
3/4 cup ricotta salata
1/2 cup basil

Chop the eggplants into one inch cubes, salt, and leave to drain. Rinse them off after an hour, toss in the breadcrumbs, and roast in a very hot oven on a preheated, olive-oiled dish until the right shade of brown and crispy enough to snack on. Heat the sauce while boiling enough pasta for five people, drain, oil so it doesn't get sticky, and stir roasted eggplants, ricotta salata, and basil into the sauce. Serve.

It's pretty normal besides the roasting of the eggplant, which I liked - not only because it takes less supervision and work than the usual semi-deep-frying, but also because it added a sweetness to the dish that went well with the salty-sourness of ricotta salata. It was also the first time I'd made the dish with ricotta salata, or even tried ricotta salata. It's a strange but charming cheese - sourish, as I mentioned, and with dense, chalky, moist consistency - and it changes the whole character of the dish from your standard rich cheese-and-veg binge to something altogether more interesting. Still bingey though.

For the gazpacho, I used this recipe, because I love soups based on roasted vegetables. The great hurdle in me constructing a gazpacho is that I'd never had gazpacho before so I'm not sure what it's supposed to taste like. But then in a remarkable episode of serendipity, the guests brought a premium brand of gazpacho over for an appetizer this weekend, which should at least give me an idea of what people think it should taste like when I get around to trying it, which for some reason I didn't at the dinner itself.

The gazpacho was inspired, by the way, from the heavy frequency of its mention and consumption in Almodovar movies. We watched another this weekend, Matador, and that starred gazpacho too. I didn't like the movie very much - thought it was a silly excuse to string together some good performances (Antonio Banderas impressive, again, as a neurotic little twitch factory, and Assumpta Serna absolutely perfect as an absolute carnivore) and some really effective images of violence, sex, and death with a childish story and other, cringeworthy performances. But afterwards I decided I'm just not going to appreciate Almodovar as he should be appreciated if I don't eat some fucking gazpacho.

Also, I'm going to write down the process for the bread I made, which turned out better than the last few batches - these things are a process of experimentation and it will take awhile before I find a process that I can settle down with, but this went very well indeed:

700 grammes whole spelt flour
500 grammes white wheat flour + extra
2 packets dry yeast (about two tablespoons)
2 cups hot water
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 heaping tablespoon cane sugar
1 teaspoon chunky salt

Mix 700 spelt, 500 wheat flour, and yeast. Mix water, olive oil, and sugar. And then mix them together with a spoon. When practicable, dump on the counter and knead for 15 minutes on a white-flour covered counter, adding white flour if it seems too sticky - end product must be smooth and stretchy without being sticky. Mix in the salt at this point, as you knead. After 15 minutes put it back in the mixing bowl, cover it with a clean cloth, and let double in size; cut into four pieces, shape them into loaves, and let those double in size in the loafpans; then bake at medium heat until the right colour and the right sort of hollowish sound when you tap them.

For the first time - maybe because I'd used spelt for the first time, or maybe because I usually use fresh yeast instead of dry yeast - the consistency was just right. Next time I'll do largely the same thing but with a loafpan inverse on top of the loafpan with the bread in it, as someone told me that makes the bread get a lovely crispy crust. The F-word thinks we can get the same effect by spraying the oven with a little water before putting the bread in, which sounds like rather less of a balancing act. We'll see.

And as you can see, the recipe above is very, very simple, in terms of ingredients and process, and it made me realize that the only point of a bread machine (which I've never had, so I could be completely wrong about this) is that it saves you the 'trouble' of kneading. But the kneading is my favourite part! What the hell is the point of making bread if you're not going to knead it? It makes the muscles under my tits feel bloody fantastic, not to mention my shoulders and triceps. I suppose most people have busier lives than I do, of course, especially when children come. But my parents had four kids, and one of them always found time to bake bread once a week, and they think bread machines are the height of capitalist domestic corruption - well, they would if they were a half-baked Marxist like me - I think what they actually called them was more of a waste of money.

If we took a holiday, come on, come on . . . oh sorry, we can't.

Well, mes petites pommes de terre, the dream is over. France has jettisoned its 35 hour work week, at least for the white collared types, which they call cadres. I always enjoyed being called cadre when I was working there. Made me feel cool. Anyways, Sarkozy's government has reset the rules so that now businesses can negotiate working time directly with unions and employees from the European Union legal maximum of 282 working days a year. The mathematically astute among you may notice that 282 is rather more than 365 - 104, those 104 days representing the 52 x 2 of the year's Saturdays and Sundays. You see, the European Union maximum is calculated on the idea that you get every Sunday off (so much for the secular society) plus five weeks of holiday, plus May 1, or 365 - (52 + 30+1) = 282.

What relationship do the number of working days have with the 35 hour work week, you may ask? Well, as many of you have no doubt been told by francophobe loonies who don't want to admit that those assholes can do anything right (id est, every US and British news outlet), few white-collared types worth paying white collar wages to can get his or her full workload polished off in a mere 7 hours a day. The law in its old form addressed this by giving about 3 weeks of holiday for cadres on top of the normal five weeks (which, by the way, was calculated on the assumption that both Saturdays and Sundays are not working days), meaning cadres effectively got 8 weeks of vacation a year. Or it was addressed by a 4-day work week for some people, especially lady cadres, which was useful considering most French schools still pursue the stupidity of closing Wednesdays, on the ridiculous, fossilized presumption mothers can afford to stay home and take care of the kids.

So. The idea at the moment is that the 35 hour work week continues to be the 'norm', but that employers can 'negotiate' with individual employees how much more they'll work than that, as compensated overtime instead of as days off beyond the legal minimum of 30 days, Sundays, and May 1. And to rub salt in the wound, a further feature of the legislation passed this week is that now employees only get a 10% bonus instead of a 25% bonus for overtime, more than cancelling out the tax breaks that were introduced in France for overtime pay a couple of months ago.

Some people think that little will change in practice because white-collar types are so in demand and no one will want to lose them; I'd remind those people that the 35 hour work week was introduced 10 years ago because there were so few white-collar jobs around, and it was thought the short week would force employers to hire more people. Hmm. I don't think it will be pretty, and I know it will be double plus unpretty for young people just starting out in the workforce, for whom things are already damn ugly in France. And I know it's just cut the already-dwindling chance of me ever moving back there by about half.

But my favourite parts of the story are elsewhere.

First, in the fact that this first major labour reform that snide little cunt Sarkozy managed has targetted the very people who voted him into power - middle class people in the private sector. The douchebag has thus far had relatively little impact on the truly bloated class that the middle class people in the private sector voted him in to deal with - that is, the public sector. Let this be a lesson to you, French yuppies; someone being from Neuilly does not mean he's on your side.

Second, and the winner, is the fact that a motion this controversial, with this much of an impact on so many people's quality of life, went through without much of a struggle in terms of the massive strikes, demonstrations, et cetera that the French workforce is usually so good at, because Sarkozy, that cunning trolly bastard, timed the vote for the end of July. When everybody concerned was on holiday.

Periodic adventures

Whilst on vacation, got sick of the Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing on trains. Introduced me to some nice people but I don't like Richard Dawkins, and I started having a hard time stomaching his ubiquitous introductions to the authors, particularly the ones he disagreed with. Okay . . . a lot of them are loons, no doubt . . . but I don't need to be told that by the father of something as looney as the Memeplex. And I don't think it was quite the thing for Oxford to issue what's supposed to be a broad writing compilation that's been edited by a pompous goof whose core ideologies are increasingly being challenged but who's got no hesitation in letting his opinionation shine through unobstructed.

The really good thing about it is that it's convinced me I have to read The Periodic Table. That looks great. And the other really good thing about it is that it convinced me to buy a new book in Barcelona for the train ride back, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I haven't read very many things by Mark Twain, in fact nothing besides The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His writing gives me the same feeling as a friend of a friend back in Toronto who I always had a feeling I was meant to have an epic sexual encounter with, but something always came up to stop it, like J*Fish (the fucking master of the cockblock - maybe it's just as well he doesn't talk to me anymore) being there, or like me reuniting with my true love and forswearing all others. The feeling, in both cases, is just a sort of disbelief I haven't had that yet.

But while there is now basically zero chance of me ever having that friend of a friend, I can read all the Mark Twain I want . . . it's just that I keep forgetting. I mustn't, and this blog entry must stand to remind me of that. Tom Sawyer was totally charming and I think I have to move into Mark Twain very much big time. The writing is graceful and witty, which is a rare combination.

Remembering when Alcopop Lane was Gin Lane

I'm reading a book illustrating yesterday's conclusion – people ain't and ain't never been no good - England in the Age of Hogarth. England in the age of Hogarth was a shithole, and Derek Jarett explores why extremely engagingly and with the ghoulish, obscure primary-sourcing I'm a pig for, illustrating along the way why those people should not be allowed to purchase alcohol 24/7.

It's reminded me that Victorians were Victorian for good reasons, after seeing their parents and grandparents rot to death of syphilis or gin, and it's reminded me that 'women's liberation' wasn't a misnomer. Also convinced me that the adjective 'beshit' must be resurrected. 'Shitty' is great but it's interchangeable with 'bad' and doesn't express that something looks like it's been covered in literal or figurative shit. In the book, beshit came up in the context of Hogarth not liking the appearance of upper-crust French houses – 'all gilt and beshit'. I'm not fond of the French, but a blast of francophobia from a raving limey is enough to make me want us to all get along. Hogarth was as francophobic as they come.

Also, watched Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and liked it full as much as the F-word thought I would. What a nonsense story, like all his movies, but what great characters again, and what a fantastic female lead - Carmen Maura, who Almodovar used again as the mum in Volver. Actresses must cue up to work with him, although it's a true truism that European cinema has better roles for women with agelines than American cinema does. Angela Molina as Clara in Carne Tremula was great as well, as the battered flamenco dancer – forgot to mention that – she's got some damn good lines, and delivery too. He's using her again in Broken Hugs, it seems.

Funny in Women to see Antonio Banderas playing a stuttering nerd with charming subtlety. All the evidence points to him being a good actor, which is amazing after years of seeing him ham it up in execrable American movies. But while Almodovar is famous for the great way he films women, and while his films are littered with simple bad men who get real hurt if they hurt women, he's damn good at filming men too. The cutie who played Victor Plaza in Carne Tremula, Liberto Rabal - that scene while he was in jail staring at Bardem and Neri hugging on television with his chubby suckable lower lip glistening and his eyes smouldering to 'Sufre como yo' . . . oh, convinced tingle. And it would have been so easy to have Bardem's character movie-of-the-week it, what with the paraplegia, and instead we get cunnilingus and 'great, I'll just keep exploiting your guilt complex.'

But in Talk to Her, Marco (Dario Grandetti), the male lead who wasn't fucking the comatose girl, is probably my favourite male movie character ever. In fact, Talk to Her might be my favourite movie ever. It was just perfect. Women wasn't perfect, but it was lots of fun and I became very fond of most of the characters. And the bad simple man, Ivan, was a laugh - look out for the scene towards the beginning where he walks down a street being charming. But Marco is the absolute winner. So sad.

Tuesday morning mounting moral disappointment extravaganza

Hey, all my fellow guinea descendants who are tired of mobster-and-pasta stereotyping - tired of letting ol' Tony Soprano speak for us, especially now that the show's been (belatedly) cancelled - how about a new stereotype? I think we can call it INHUMAN FUCKING CUNTS.

What the fuck is the matter with us, anyways? Any Italian you meet will be able to explain some of the modern unpleasantnesses of our culture by telling you about the years of oppression in the countries they immigrate to and the centuries of oppression in Italy itself, but you know what, assholes? So could the Irish, Spanish, and everybody from Asia, and you don't hear about THEM fucking sunbathing next to children's corpses. Or voting for that grinning cunt-eyed motherfucker Berlusconi. Fuck me.

And while we're on the subject of vicious retardation, how the fuck is this shit legal, let alone vastly profitable? My last job in advertising brought home to me that the moral corruption of the entertainment industry is greater than any hysterical Biblesucker who doesn't like seeing gays kiss could imagine. And my present job is bringing home to me that the way we've been dealing with capital, at least over the last 100 years, is how a clever pan trog chimp would deal with a machine gun. Adam Smith's Invisible Hand does indeed exist; the Market is using it to wank its Invisible Penis, spilling its Invisible Jissom into your coffee, and using its other Invisible Hand to wipe Invisible Tears of laughter from its Invisible Eyes over what a fucking sucker you are.

Sometimes I feel like if there is a Satan, he'd be feeling really redundant these days. Silly to feel that way, of course. People have always found a way to be congratulated for doing bad things, and people have always sought to do bad things not out of naughtiness, but because they seemed the thing to do. People ain't no good. Sigh.

Paraplegic pussy nuzzling Sunday matinée spectacular

We took it real easy on Sunday after having drank rather more than we'd planned, and I'm not sure there's an easier fit-for-print way to take it real easy than to watch an Almodovar film during breakfast. In this case, Carne Tremula. The F-word wanted to see it again, and I was agreeable because I usually find his movies really soothing, and because I wanted to see Javier Bardem nuzzle pussy. I think he's got the face for it, and before I'd only seen him in that crappy Fargo brothers thing being a sexless asshole without enough screen time, and in Before Night Falls being gay, if picturesquely so.

The only problem with Carne Tremula is that it made me dislike Volver more, because it made it seem like even more of an anomaly. Talk to Her, All About My Mother, Bad Education, and Carne Tremula - I love them all because they take an utterly ridiculous story and do justice to the characters caught in that story, explore people who'd be one-dimensional if most directors took a crack at them. The F-word pointed out that Almodovar movies have something in common with Tarantino's last few movies, in that when you see a man hurt a woman you can be sure you'll see something awful happen to him soon. But while that seems to be an excuse for Tarantino to tug off over a one-dimensional dominatrix archetype, in an Almodovar film everybody keeps being human beings. Volver, though, was just an utterly ridiculous story with no justice to the characters. Sure, it looked really great - his movies always do. But I didn't give a good goddamn about any of the people in it, whereas in his other movies I've seen I give a good goddamn about the whole ensemble.

In Carne Tremula, that good goddamn went all the way from Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem's mum, who had a brief scene together at the opening of the film, through the two male leads and all the way to Francesca Neri, and not only because of the beautiful way Almoodovar shot her. There's one scene towards the beginning of the movie - the second, you feel, when she falls in love with Bardem's character - that makes her look absolutely unearthly in a beautiful way. And Javier Bardem is one of those ridiculous actors who are geniuses. He plays a paraplegic professional basketball player, and whilst pulling off this massively physical stunt still turns in a great emotional performance. There's a line he delivers at one of the painful emotional climaxes - 'Great, I'll just keep exploiting your guilt complex' - that was so good on his part, and so good from the writer too (who I think was also Almodovar) that I had to laugh.

Anyhow, we'll see the rest of Almodovar's films - the F-word thinks I'll like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and generally he's right about these things. I'm just hoping the new one he's working on, Broken Hugs, isn't as crappy as Volver.

Lying there with all the light in your hair

Artificial drama makes me impatient, but I try to keep that impatience tamped down because I'm often a little drama factory myself. At least, I am in my head - I try to not let it slip out my teeth or typing fingers. Also, I understand it's people's way to deal - in the same way that they'd rather look like a bastard than a patsy, even when the risk of being a patsy is small, they'll prefer to see themselves as some sort of wronged romantic heroine when the truth is that there was a big emotion that had nowhere to go.



Another thing that makes me impatient is a lack of imagination, and yet I have no imagination when it comes to other people's emotional existence. It can take me years to arrive at some sort of useful juncture when I'm trying to understand the people I love, or who I loved, and sometimes my subconscious needs to help, like it did last night in a 'Bluebeard' dream.

I was in the courtyard of La Pedrera, which had been moved to Paris, and he was there as well, bright-blue-eyed, happy, and rather scrawny as he had been when we first met, before I’d cooked and biked the heroin-chic modeling years out of him. He was acting in his sweet way, with the sweetness that made me want to stay with him long after it was evident I had to go.

‘It’s damp here,’ he observed.

‘Yes,’ I said, pointing to a half-basement apartment behind us. ‘We used to live there and I don’t think it was good for our lungs.’

And then his new girl was there. She looked slightly like me, but much better – that sort of stupendous, mid-size dark blonde you get in a stretch here from Denmark down to northern Italy, through Holland, Alsace, Luxembourg. I liked her instantly, and their rapport was adorable. They started frolicking around the courtyard, and as he scooped up a handful of rainwater to splash her she grabbed my arms and hid behind me. ‘Don’t let him get me!’ she cried, and they both fell about laughing.

Wondering if I’d be pressed into a ménage à trois I’d have to politely refuse, I consented to go to their apartment to pick up some stuff I’d left there. As soon as we entered they both went down for a nap. I gathered up some of the more important and portable things and made to leave.

On my way out, he woke and rolled over to face me, naked as a jaybird. ‘Don’t be a stranger,’ he said, and I told him I’d arrange to come back and pick up the other things later. I kissed him on the forehead and tucked him in next to her, where he fell back asleep almost immediately, a happy little smile on his face.

When I woke up I knew that boy can’t be my bogeyman anymore. I remember too much that I shouldn't forget. His sweetness was just as much a part of him as the batshit craziness. And although that brand of batshit craziness is unacceptable to me, I've been coming to realize for years it’s not really deviant in Central Europe, where their genocides are in living memory and those damnable Italian fuckwits are gearing up for another with their gypsy-hating and sheer fucking pig ignorance. All that fury, all that anger, those words and that way of acting - no wonder it confused him so much when I was revolted by it. It's normal here.

And after having gone through what he went through with me - being rejected because I couldn't accept that fury - how could I expect anything except that he'd get more conscious of it, and go into his next relationship with a greater desire to show more of his sweetness and less of his batshit craziness? Why would I choose to believe he could be some sort of lurking monster when - with his wealth, extreme good looks, generally sweet character and a level of fucking insanity which is merely typical by continental standards - some perfectly reasonable European woman would snap him up and perfectly reasonably love the shit out of him, and that woman - and the man himself - would probably benefit from what he learned through our relationship?

In short, how could I focus so hard on the 2% chance he's the revenge-obsessed monster he acted like when he realized I wasn't just play-acting breaking up with him, and the 98% chance he's happy with someone much better suited to him now? Sure, the 2% chance exists. But the other 98% chance is much, much bigger and rather more pleasant to dwell on . . . so much so, and so obviously, that I wonder if - no, I know I've been choosing to believe that getting over Mistress La Spliffe is impossible. Throwing a mean-spirited sop to my ego whilst throwing prime rib to my pride, my paranoid fear. Harming my mental health, my pleasant memories of the good times we'd shared, and some of the lessons I should've learnt through our relationship.

Because, of course, as my analyst was always at such pains to point out: everybody in the dream is you. As was that girl, his new girl, who was as pretty and happy as I felt myself to be when we first got together all those years ago; a girl who didn't utterly fuck things up, but who did what she felt was right at the time, and who had some joy with that man that made some unpleasantness worth it for a long time. And in the dream, he was me too; the 'big bogeyman' part of me, who is almost statistically certain to have hurt Mistress La Spliffe more than the man himself ever even wanted too. Happy now, playful, reasonable, and put to bed.

God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland

Amsterdam is the thinking grownup's Disneyland. We started our vacationing there because I had a conference to attend, so work paid for my transport and the first couple of nights in our lovely B&B on a houseboat. Yes. You read that right. Fuckin' houseboat. What's more, because this fuckin' houseboat was just outside the city limits on a lake next to the huge and beautiful Amsterdamse Bos, where trees race up to the soggy gentle sky, a kind man rents you lovely bikes at great daily rates, and Schilpol's aeroplanes fly so low in anticipation of landing that their cocks are in danger of hanging out (fun because you can race them along the bike paths), it was cheaper than that revolting partitioned boiler room we slept in last September.

If you're considering a trip to Amsterdam, email me by clicking through on my profile, and I'll send you the owner's contact information - I'd post it here but I don't want to give them that much publicity, or else it will always be booked when I want to stay there, which will be often. The owners are in situ and were kind, chatty, interested without prying. I think ever so slightly disappointed that we were Canadian and Australian and not American. They had a real love for the States I've noticed in a lot of Dutch people - not only an appreciation for the personal, hospitable warmth of the typical American which otherwise isn't common in Europe, but also a love of the notion that you can do whatever you want there, make all the money you want, don't have to fight against any regulations. But then in the next breath they'll tell you how great their Dutch regulations are. And Dutch regulations are great. God, I wish the Dutch ran the world.

The conference was frightful and professionally useless; the focus was much more on marketing and it was like a flashback to my days in advertising. I skipped out on some of the more obviously useless portions of it and at one point struck up a very long and interesting conversation with the lovely woman who runs the business centre at the Hotel Okura. During the course of it she explained why Dutch organization and regulation tends to be so successful, though also frustrating to Dutch people themselves: the Polder Model. She explained it rather more concisely than Wikipedia by saying it meant that all parties concerned in a debate accepted the fact at the outset that they wouldn't be able to get everything they wanted. Imagine that . . .

The Hotel Okura was otherwise uninspiring, besides the doorman and his cat. The hotel has its own cat, a black and white tom who sprawls on the ground close to where the doorman stands, lazily watching him haul people's bags around, lazily inspecting the rich and the businesslike who go through the doors. It's a five-star hotel, but I would not call the tom a five-star cat, although he was great. I'm quite sure he still had his balls; he was a huge monster of a thing - more than twice the size of my Lexie, and less of it fat. And while his comfort with people means he's well-loved, none of that lovin' has been done with a wire brush or a pair of scissors; his healthy coat had some wild-looking clumps in it. Obviously he was the most charming thing I saw at the conference.

Another great thing about the conference was that it gave me a chance to be an Amsterdam commuter, as I rode my rented bike from the Bos to the hotel. I could have wept with the pleasure of it, as hundreds of bikes rode silently around during 'rush hour' and the number of cars on the road hardly changed. Not a helmet in sight - not on the grown-ups, not on the buckets of children in front-mounted baskets that their mums or dads were biking to daycare. The wind, for once, in my hair - wind largely untainted by the mufflerless effluent of shitboxes which so plagues my lungs in Brussels. Oh, it was lovely. How jealous I was of the people who get to live and work in a place where commuting is like that.

No complaints about riding our bikes around for fun, either, on the succeeding two days, except shockingly there still seems to be a certain class of tourist who does not understand the concept of bike paths. What a great, fun city. In terms of our touristy things, we went to the Rijksmuseum, again for hours and hours and hours . . . I don't get museum exhaustion in Amsterdam, it seems. And no, it's not the reefer. I usually get stoned before going to galleries and museums no matter where I am in the world. I don't know what it is. Great museum - my favourite bit, though, was a painting currently mounted close to the entrance showing the Dutch and Spanish signing a treaty concluding the Dutch revolt, which seemed to show the Dutch participants solemnly delivering the two-finger salute to their former overlords. Classy.

Also touristy: we went walking around Java Island, where there have been beautiful modern residential architectural things installed over the past 30 years - pictures and exclamations to follow.

God. Dutch people. The F-word pointed out to me that they had to be that good about organizing their space - making it that livable and that congenial - because if not they'd have all eaten each other by now, what with that little land being so crowded and the weather being so shitty. All the same though. How have we not ripped some serious pages out of their books yet?

Further notes on my vacation

Despite Paris making me feel like a revolting little cockroach, obviously my feelings about it are mixed as you can tell by past posts. Our brief stay there Sunday/Monday, at Carmen's sans Carmen again, who was working nights, was unpleasant; I was riding the dragon, exhausted, sad to have left Barcelona, pissed off that I'd purchased the wrong Thalys ticket to get back to Brussels, and oh yes, experiencing constant false sightings of Bluebeard. That does not seem to have slowed down with age. The strength of the nervous paranoia inspired by the idea of him greatly exceeds any pain the man himself is likely to inflict on me, especially considering that we contrived to be something like civil in our last communiqués.

It seems I've managed to compress and squeeze a lot of my neuroses and guilt issues - because there is some me-guilt involved, and not just that ridiculous, conceited guilt of the Heartbreaker ('how oh how dared I be so very lovable!') - into the physical boundaries of the city that saw the worst years of my life to date. Is that a reasonable strategy to use to deal? Probably not. And certainly not, when I spend bits of my vacation there.

Luckily, however, it seems that the neuroses and the guilt issues are centre-ville-ers, and when we spent a few days with Mlle Pariyorker in her new digs in the swanky western suburbs in between time in Amsterdam and time in Barcelona, they did not get on the RER and follow me out. Mlle Pariyorker has stumbled onto a good pasture. Her new place is about four times the size of her abandoned marital apartment and half the price, for one; her professional prospects are singin' along, for two; she has her own substantial garden and barbeque now, for three; and her new man is a fucking brilliant cook, for four. And the important thing is that she seems much, much happier.

Do I think she dealt with her former situation with all the wisdom in the world? If I consider her actions, they were fine, even her only choice in the circumstances - it was her explanations that made me angry, and I don't know if she was being completely honest with herself in those explanations. Sometimes people'd rather look like a bastard than look like a patsy, and will take steps to do so even if the risk of looking like a patsy isn't that high. Oh, Pride, you naughty naughty Mortal Sin. Our capacity for it probably has some evolutionary advantages, but all the same I think the world would be a vastly better place if we chose just one day a year - say, Kwanzaa - when we strove to be humble. Or we could all take turns.

Anyhoo. We mostly stayed in the far west suburbs having a great time, and touristically we visited not only the Chateau's gardens and my absolute favourite thing, the Hameau de la Reine (god, that poor idiot Marie Antoinette - how women were the slaves of their circumstances back then, no matter what class they belonged to!), but also the vegetable garden of the King, which I think went up under Louis XIV. It's close to the Chateau and well worth a visit, as is the attached shop where the sell produce from said garden.

As far as agricultural techniques go, it's not anachronistic, or rather it is extremely anachronistic, in the sense that it looks like Louis XIV's garden but is pumped up like crazy on the modern plant 'roids. But it's very beautiful, particularly the clever way they get the pears and apples to grow on trellises, which the F-word and I resolved we'd try out when we become property owners. I liked the look of them but I think the F-word was more enchanted by how much easier it would be to pick the fruit than it had been in his early youth, when he had to scale ladders and reach under the heat of the southern Australia sun. Pictures to follow - though not of the F-word under the hot Australian sun - that's strictly for my fantasy file.

She's back, and this time, she's rested

It would be a big lie to say I'm happy to be back, but we had the good fortune to spend a night in Paris on the way home, so at least I'm happy to be in Brussels, which for all its imperfections is not and never will be Paris. Thank god. I'm not necessarily opposed to big cities, but I suppose because of my history there Paris makes me feel like a cockroach struggling through a pile of cockroaches. If we had gone straight from Barcelona to Brussels, it would have been torture. Like 90% of the adult population that's visited, I fell deeply in love with it - swallowed every one of its clichés hook, line and sinker and was hungry for more.

There were a lot of things I loved about it, but especially I fell in love with Gaudi, that beautiful batshit crazy man. Up at the Park Güell, I had a little cry as we gazed over the magic-mushroom-and-crucifix-ornamented houses to the city beyond. I think I was upset that the whole world couldn't live in Barcelona, or maybe that every city in the world didn't have an architect like Gaudi in it who could make such lovely spaces with such commonplace materials. There's just something so friendly about what he built - so welcoming and so sympathetic - that I couldn't believe it. Really called to mind that other batshit crazy man who I love, Hundertwasser. Though I suppose Hundertwasser didn't have Gaudi's sense of structure, and Gaudi didn't have Hundertwasser's sense of nonsense.

I know there's a cost factor involved, but it made me hate most modern designers and architects for their apparent inability to build things the people who use them find pleasant. Catalan modernists had an aesthetic humanity, or humility - they didn't seem to want to seem clever so much as massage your tired eyeballs, and cater to your need for something beautiful to look at. Domenech too - we couldn't believe our happy eyes when we saw the Saint Pau hospital. And as Robert Hughes wrote, unlike Sagrada Familia, that was finished in the architect's lifetime, and has done and will do far more good for the people of Barcelona than Sagrada Familia is ever likely to. Sagrada Familia is a can't miss, though . . . it's fascinating to see the work being carried out before you, and a real bafflement to try to figure out how the fuck it has been permitted to install some of the things that have been installed since Gaudi's death.

By the way, I sincerely recommend the Robert Hughes book I was going on about before I left, whether you intend to go to Barcelona or not - it's a great read. But if you do intend to go to Barcelona it's indispensable - like having a clever, sarcastic, enthusiastic friend whispering in your ear as you go from place to place. And he goes on about Gaudi better than I could. But there was one thing I wanted to mention that Gaudi did, to help him get those strange angles that make his arches and elements look weirdly alive - catenary string models. He would hang weighted arcs of string, appropriately connected to each other, photograph the intricate result and turn the photo upside down to get an approximation of what he could do to a roof that would allow it to bear its own weight. Fucking - fucking - genius. Pictures to follow.

Uninterrupted barrage of awesomeness

So Barcelona is one of his non-shitty books! That having been said, he devotes a section to the Catalan scatological obsessions. Apparently both of Barcelona's rivers are named after the turds that used to float down them, rendering them undrinkable even 500 years ago. And in their Christmas Bethlehem créches, Catalans always include a figure of a peasant taking a big dump - the caganer.

This is the Robert Hughes I love - the one whose books read like a smooth, literate compilation of decades' worth of semi-naughty bar quizzes, with the occasional wordgasm over art and architecture. The timing is fantastic, too, because he devotes a big section to Barcelona's medieval history, which actually makes some contextual sense to me now thanks to the stoned wading through the Cantor book.

And besides getting me very, very excited for our rapidly approaching trip to Barcelona, the book has done a few of other useful things in just the first 120 pages:

1. Taught me two new words: labile and palimpsest.

2. Given me the Catalan-Aragonese oath of allegiance, which I'd heard and could never remember properly: 'We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws - but if not, not.'

3. Given some context to a story which has always stuck in my mind of a medieval Spanish playboy who stalks a beautiful lady; before he can accost her properly she turns to him and bares breasts that have been hideously disfigured by cancer.

That playboy was Ramon Llull, and the woman was one of his real attempted conquests or one of his hallucinations, depending on who you listen to. Llull was a cleverboots who had the revolutionary idea that efforts to convert Muslims and Jews to Christianity should be made through rational argument, rather than, you know, the other ways. Consequently he believed that missionaries should be educated about their philosophies, languages and religions.

4. Given me this sentence about an awful dance club in the city: 'Mariscal and Arribas set out to make your big night on the town an uninterrupted barrage of the clichés of PoMo irony - as though Philippe Starck at his most morbid teamed up with Peter Eisenman at his most hostile to do the sets for Pee-wees's Playhouse.' That sentence alone makes up for the uninterrupted barrage of crap which was Things I Didn't Know.

Wagon tumbling

So, as I mentioned, fell off the wagon a little while ago. I'm a cheap, cheap person and I'm quite resistant to blowing my money on anything, but I have a fucking hard time logging on to Amazon to buy someone else presents without deciding that I deserve a thing or two from my reserve lists, and if I do, well, so does the F-word, because he's such a great boyfriend, and then - well. Here we are.

1. Barcelona, Robert Hughes. I don't think I've ever had the love/hate thing going for any writer I have going for him. His autobiography was so fucking shitty, I mean, just monumentally shit. I may never have been more annoyed by a book than by that. And then, on about equal measure I enjoyed The Shock of the New and Goya. And then The Fatal Shore bored me so bad that I actually gave it up at the 3/4 mark - something I never do.

So I decided to work on the assumption that he's only good when he's writing about things he loves, which doesn't include himself or Australia. And so I plunged for Barcelona, as his shitty, shitty memoirs indicated he loves Barcelona. We're heading there for a week for our vacation this summer, and the F-word really wanted to read it, so it won't be wasted cash in any case. And I don't know a goddamn thing about the place, outside of all that Gaudi and the fact they speak some language that sounds a bit more like Italian than normal Spanish. And the first 20 pages have made me want to keep reading. He has an encyclopaedic sort of brain, or at least a great skill for regurgitating research.

2. The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, ed. Richard Dawkins. I've been explicit in very much disliking The God Delusion, for what I think are terrific reasons. Frankly I'm worried I may have blown £10 on a compilation put together by a man whose writing I've found dishonest and self-serving, in the sense of allowing crap to hide behind controversy. If he's willing to do that with his own writing, who knows what he'll cherry-pick from his colleagues?

But I couldn't resist the table of contents and the introduction it could give me to a wide range of possible new reads. It's like that point in networking where you find yourself being really nice to some guy, even to the point of not mocking him when he has a ten-minute tête-à-têtons with your chest instead of your face, who ordinarily you wouldn't even ask the time of day from, because maybe someday he can help get you a job in a much better country than Belgium.

3. The Great War for Civilization/The Conquest of the Middle East, Robert Fisk. This one was very much for the F-word, who enjoys Robert Fisk a lot. Me, sure. He's the Middle East correspondent for the Independent, my favourite British daily outside of its shitty 'science' editor, and writes in a very opinionated, angry, sarcastic way. So now we've got 1300 pages of sarcastic, angry, opinionation about the Middle East on our kitchen table. Slightly intimidated.

I'd build a million of you baby

I've written about this before, but I must again: I love Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!. And okay - fine - I haven't come across a Bad Seeds album I didn't love. Some individual songs, sure. Most of the slow ones, to be honest with you. 'The Ship Song' and 'Love Letter' and a bunch of other twee little songs with lazy rhymes. For God's sake, stop trying to horn in on Leonard Cohen's market - he writes better lyrics for slow songs and he needs the money. But there are no slow songs on Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!. Some creepy songs, which I like, and the final song is a wee bit lazy, but that's all fine, even great - I really like 'Jesus of the Moon', which isn't quite creepy - don't have the adjectives this morning.

And then the rest of the album just rocks out. Music and lyrics. I love the title track and love that little AC/DCish guitar that slaps you awake at the beginning, and nonetheless it's probably my least favourite track on the album.



Anyways, the whole album is really good, it makes me want to fuck. I wish I could just stay home and do that all day, but no. Today is a big day. I have to interview an important person this morning. I usually do my interviews by phone or by email and I couldn't get to sleep last night, thinking that the recorder wasn't going to work today. Luckily I have enough questions that he could just answer yes or no to each, and I'd still make regulation length. No problems. If the cunt of a recorder works.

Got a shipment of exciting books yesterday - fell off the wagon and bought the F-word 'presents' that I also wanted to read - more on that tomorrow.

Memoirizing

Not much news, I'm preoccupied with pleasant things. Just a quick warning: Clive James's memoirs are crap and will make you want to hit him. Memoirs are difficult. Something like Robert Hughes, who has a style I like when he's writing about things that aren't him, and once he writes about him it's so fucking lame it can hardly make it across the room when I throw it. With Clive James, I like the essays and whatnot he does for the BBC or whatever from time to time - but his memoirs = crap. Also, Clive is a retarded name.

In other book news, Ulysses is indeed proving too boy for me at the moment - may have to wait to plug on until I have a hormonal shift.

Tits? Seriously, America?

I'm sorry George Carlin died, even if the only thing I ever saw him in was Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, which I suppose I'll never watch again, since as an eleven year old it was the best movie ever and by now might not be.

But really . . . tits? You couldn't say tits?

Anyhoo . . . Mum is over to see her Mum and I'm heading back to work. Good visit. Learnt how to bake bread with the family's recipe - why didn't I before? And looking forward to my own trip home come October.

Ensorific

Living in Europe is great in a lot of ways. Even living in Belgium is great in a lot of ways. But you may have noticed by this point that Belgium also drives me apeshit. One way it drives me apeshit - a whole new way I discovered yesterday, during a trip to Oostende with Mum to get some fresh air - is its lack of appreciation for one of my favourites among its sons, James Ensor.

Oh sure. There's a bust up of him in the town there, and a twee little 'Ensorhuis' with reproductions of his work, and some of his paintings have been stuck into the Royal Gallery here in Brussels. But Oostende has not yet managed to pull its thumb out and re-establish its own modern art gallery - an idiocy that left us gawping at a post office in the downtown central square that my Crappy Planet had insisted was its new location as of 2007, and then gawping at a Tourist Information lady who said that since the plans for the new location had fell through there was no timetable or information about when those Ensors would be viewable again. They've been sold off to Russian oligarchs, I fucking know it. Bloody Belgians.

Anyways, here's 'Christ's Entry into Brussels', which the bloody Belgians sold off to some American twat who at least is showing it: