Vous m'accorderez une derniere dance

I'm feeling like a cat in a small house where someone is vacuuming in another room. It's been a trying week and the next few weeks promise to be trying too - emotionally, physically, mentally. I don't anticipate even a bit of relaxation until I get on the plane for Vancouver. Today I will deal by pottering through the packing and perhaps organizing which books to take, which books to leave, and which books to ship. I've already organized which books to ditch:

1. Robert Hughes, Things I Didn't Know. Sometimes it doesn't pay to meet your heroes and it rarely pays to read their memoirs. Three words: wah fucking wah.

2. Retro Food Fiascos. Two hundred pages of graphic proof that office Kris Kringles are a bad idea. Looking at this book hurt me.

3. Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda. I have started reading this book three times, and never finished. It has defeated me, which is annoying, because by objective measures I bet it's good, and it reminds me of Ralph Fiennes looking vulnerable.

4. Irene Nemirovsky, David Golder. Promises great things from the writer but on its own doesn't call for a second read and wouldn't have called for a first one if it hadn't been a free advance copy, which I'm incapable of resisting, like being told a secret.

5. Bill Clinton, My Life - The Presidential Years. He talks so pretty; why couldn't he have got his speechwriters to ghostwrite? Tedious mess.

6. Max Lenderman, Experience the Message - Book given out at ad conferences by one of those faux-iconoclastic "guerrilla marketers" who talk too loud and swear not just gratuitously, but labouredly.

Among others. Not very many though. I tend to fetishize books and find it hard to part with them if I like them even a little bit, although I do enjoy giving my books to people I care about. I guess that comes from family expressing their love at Christmases and Bidets by giving books instead of toys.

In less navel-gazing news, go see the Overcoat while you can. I can't think of a dance production I've seen that I enjoyed for itself as much as this one - of course I get an umami-like warm feeling from the Nutcracker every Christmas, but that's more despite than because of the National Ballet's staging. Categorizations aside, this was the closest production I can think of to perfect that I've seen since I saw the Barber of Seville on mushrooms, which gave it an unfair edge.

The story is predictably Russian. That having been said, I went to the show depresses and though it touched me deeply it didn't make the depression worse. It's the story of a much put-upon civil servant in a gross, alienating, cruel (Russian) urban world who nonetheless has the inner equipment to be reasonably happy, and whose uneasy equilibrium is shattered by a beautiful new coat. Until he gets a new one, that is - the ballet is based on a delicious story by Gogol but has some twists of its own. I won't give them away, but I WILL say there are no corpse-ghosts in this one.

I can hardly start to say how great the production was. The dancing was completely evocative of the plot's reality and completely evocative of the fantasies and imaginations of the characters. And characters were perfectly established through their movement without the proceedings descending into mime. The whole cast was great, but . . . I'd been telling the F-word earlier that same day I couldn't think of anything more viscerally emotionally touching than the sight of crying Korean men; the lead character of this play, as danced by Peter Anderson, gave that a run for its money. The Man was not a completely sympathetic character, but I sympathized with him completely, if you'll allow that abuse of language.

And of course it was all set to Shostakovitch's music, which I love more and more. This is the third or fourth Shostakovitch event I've seen in Toronto in the past little while, which is nice. I wonder why he's suddenly everywhere, though. How about a Rimsky-Korsakov revival too?

I guess this has been as long as I can excuse not packing, so I am off.

Stupidafuckinweather.

Because of the miserable condition of the universe, my parents aren't coming this weekend, and propose to come next weekend instead, which is my last weekend in the city and already chock-a-block, thick, full, a real fatty strained Balkan yogurt of a weekend. So I might go to North Bay tomorrow with my brother and skip da work on Monday - that way if I don't spend every blessed minute with them next weekend I won't feel like the world's crappiest daughter. The only advantages to this plan are that I get to see the Shostakovitch dance spectacular tonight that Dale wrote about awhile ago, and that if I don't go back with my brother tomorrow I suppose I can pack a little bit.

I already finished (more or less) putting my papers in order last night, including a whole whack of journals and notes from my time in Piemonte and Paris, which was a little bit controversial until I settled into grad school. I couldn't help but enjoy the arrogance of the girl who wrote them, the pig-headed, angry arrogance of a girl who hadn't had such an opportunity to be pig-headedly arrogant before that, and enjoy reading such immediate accounts of such baffling behaviour. I think even at the time I was aware of saving up anecdotes and cautionary tales, and that eventually I was going to have to stop being a holy terror and start putting experiences in perspective and approach the world with authority instead of balls-out, snatch-first. There was such an element of exploration in those days that felt more dangerous than now.

Things are different now because I'm not quite so much of a bitch - I know how to protect myself from being a bitch better - and reading those notes wasn't quite like reading the notes of a stranger, but there was a divide, almost like I used to be a character I'd made up. The fun thing was I liked a lot of what I was reading - not necessarily the moral qualities of the character, but how I was writing. That was fun.

Feedback

There are some things I'm going to miss about Toronto, and the tsoundcheck is one of them. Symphony tickets for $12 for two just because I'm under 30 - anybody fitting that description in the city who even pretends to like classical music who isn't on tsoudcheck is a fucking sucker.

After "Knussen's Choice" last night, part of the New Creations Festival, I feel a little sad inside when I realize, besides next week's "Bold and Brassy," I'm pretty much done with Roy Thomson Hall besides serendipitous coincidences when I come back to visit. "The Composer is Dead," which Daniel Handler of Lemony Snicket fame both wrote and will narrate*, is playing Saturday, and I'd have gone to that except my parents will be visiting (that means I'm missing The Overcoat on Friday too, and the twats wouldn't let me exchange my ticket for one on a less crowded night - twats - anyways, does anybody want some $20 tickets to see that tomorrow?) and I'm not sure they'd be into that.

The only thing that comforts me about my intimacy with Roy Thomson Hall and its fucking perfect acoustics coming to an end is its relentless beigeness:

I don't understand why Canadians are so fond of making their cultural landmarks look like aeroports from the 1970's. I miss disco too, but this is missing the point completely.

So, "Knussen's Choice" - up and down. All the composers were in attendance, which was nice, because besides Kulesha they were all self-effacing Brits who gave a self-effacing explanation of where they'd been coming from with their compositions - enjoyable even when I didn't enjoy the compositions.

Gary Kulesha's Fireworks and Procession was the only thing I found flat-out beautiful. Simon Bainbridge's Scherzi were distinctly unjokey, even tediously so, so I think I'm missing the point of what an Englishman means when he calls a piece of music uno scherzo. Mark-Anthony Turnage's On Opened Ground for Viola and Orchestra didn't do much for me, although the lyrical viola phrasing he asked the audience to look out for at the beginning of the second movement was really worth looking out for - very enchanting.

Julian Anderson's Book of Hours was difficult. As it was putatively inspired by medieval tapestries, the sight of the harp, some electronic clavier-type thing and a couple of Powerbooks really got me excited - especially when Anderson came on stage and explained the sounds from the Powerbooks were meant to provide the aural equivalent of gold leaf on a medieval manuscript. What a great idea, and what an awful delivery of it. The Powerbooks provided lots of annoying sounds, including loud fake feedback and loud maddening buzzing, over an annoying orchestra and an intensely annoying clavier-type thing. All in all, I'm hard pressed to imagine how much farther it could have been removed from stark, unrealistic but symmetrically pleasing medieval tapestries.

Halfway through I got really sad and started having depressing thoughts about artists, musical or otherwise, who judge their success by their popular inaccessibility. How shit it was orchestral composers had the benefit of years of training in theory but had stopped trying to write transcendentally beautiful music, and were leaving that up to undertrained pop musicians with nasal voices, which was silly because earlier that same evening Gary Kulesha's peice had been transcendentally beautiful. But I got an intense jones on to listen to some Arcade Fire nonetheless.

*As an aside - I love the Series of Unfortunate Events series. Not enough to read more than the first one, obviously, I'm a busy woman and all that, but I'll still venture to say they kick Harry Potter's ass.

A Taste of Money

I wish I knew more about international economies in terms that would actually help me invest my money in a clever fashion, but I can still promise you the fantasies I have about it all are very amusing to me in a story-line kind of way. They involve some hot-ass trader who's golden on the inside, like Sébastien from Les invasions barbares, actually taking some interest in my piddly little nest egg and turning it into great baths of cash by taking merciless advantage of market fluctuations, whether brought on by cataclysmic events or no. The sort of hot-ass trader who'll invest in Thailand right after a royally-approved coup, for example, or who'll've been geopolitically realistic enough to get heavily into oil futures in the summer of 2001. At a given point, after treating me to multiple digit returns through my fertile years, he takes me away from all this, which usually involves moving to Italy and raising goats somewhere close to a good opera house where our children perform and get us free tickets.

If analysis has taught me anything, it's taught me other things, but now I understand that generally my fantasies are ways of understanding bits of myself, and that the hot-ass Sébastien character in my head is the way I understand the bit that cares about investing and accumulating money. I can tell this because since the death of my Grandpa, who made his money more with investments than with his job, Sébastien has been looking less and less like a scathingly hot buttoned-down Stéphane Rousseau and more and more like a post-war banker from Leicestershire who has a nose and chin like mine. He's also been getting quite a bit more strident, and you wouldn't believe how the big worldwide stock slump that started yesterday is making him whinge.

Not because we stand to lose money - I don't think we do at all - but because there has to be a way to take advantage of this, investorally speaking, and the Sébastien/Grandpa bit of me doesn't fucking know what it is, and doesn't know what it is just at the moment that it has become urgent to consolidate my tax-free investment portfolio with a new investor's group, since I'm leaving my job. I have a notion that now, or a week from now, or whenever the slump bottoms out, is a really great time to buy things. But what the hell does that mean, anyways? Buy what? Buy into funds? What funds? Would most mutual funds be diversified enough at the moment that they wouldn't be slumping? Would they be over-priced at this point because people are selling off their individual stocks and jumping into those? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. The real Sébastien and the real Grandpa would. So fucking frustrating.

Gossipology

Awhile ago I started a blog called Gossipology that was meant to give a timely criticism on the gossip industry, but I let it slide fast because it felt like a pretentious excuse to read gossip blogs, which I couldn't stomach anymore since I realized they made fun of little girls my niece's age. But the drift of the thought behind it was that, like all advertiser sponsored media, its crappy effects are things the audience bears the moral responsibility for.

We know the nasty effects of making private details of public life news items and lots of people excuse them - including most of the gossip mongers, I expect - by explaining some celebrities invite that sort of attention in an effort to remain in the public eye. But can we really excuse ourselves as an audience or perp by saying "lots of celebrities invite this sort of attention" when there are lots who DON'T, but because it's a lucrative thing to do paparazzi will still fucking follow their children to school and gossip rags will publish icky intimate accounts of sexual encounters from spurned former lovers that their kids or parents might come across?

I mean, ew. If I imagined the possibility of details of my sexual life being of sufficient interest to the public that even the men of no importance who've occasionally kept me company could get serious cash to publish, I'd lose my fucking mind. That poor gorgeous bastard Ralph Fiennes is hardly a tabloid darling but a few moments of shunting in an aeroplane bathroom with a gold digging stewardess had good enough market value to get into the IHT. Can you imagine the trust issues? The neurosis? The deep feeling of misgiving every time you want to surrender to the moment? It's inhuman.

Speaking of which, of course drunk driving may have had, in quantifiable terms, more to do with Dodi and Diana Whatser's death then anything else, but I can't believe the fact the poor bastards died like that hasn't made us as a society draw back a little and think 'paparazzi are fucking dangerous so maybe I'm going to devalue their product now, no matter how some celebrities might enjoy or invite that attention.' It killed people - real people, with children and parents and people who'll miss them. For what? A more interesting wait in line at the grocery store? A few hours of amused clock watching at our crappy office jobs? Why don't we just look away?

Kids these days

I suppose everyone feels like they were lucky in the education they got when it comes to matters of taste. But some eavesdropping I couldn't help but do yesterday, since it was carried out on a small gaggle young ladies who hadn't yet learned to modulate their post-pubescent voices in the grocery store queue, convinced me at least parts of my tasty superiority complex are founded on something.

Grocery store queues are the last-ditch effort, the final thrust, the veritable Little Bighorn of consumer temptation fighting back against budgets, diets, and common sense. So that's where they hawk the tabs and yesterday Britney Spears was on the cover of all of them. As far as I can tell (and I can tell pretty far despite having given up gossip pages, since even the BBC has been covering her lately), that's because she shaved her head. So these young ladies were treating themselves to a free read, looking at all the gross pictures and wondering with strident notes of betrayal in their voices what she's on, if Justin can help her, and when she's going to get better.

At first they just annoyed me like most young ladies do these days, with their cakey makeup, gouged pores and processed extensions yanked at a fraction of market cost from the scalp of desperate Moldavians, no doubt. But later I started thinking about the note of betrayal in their voices, and started feeling awfully sorry for them. They were a few years older than my niece, so they would have been impressionable right when Britney Spears was most popular. She was probably some sort of hero to them. In fact, their annoying aesthetic was pure 2003 Britney. What garden path had this woman led them down, they could have asked; what price will we pay for our respect?

So I felt sorry for them, and I felt lucky, because when I was their age it was different. Grunge had been a big force in music and fashion for awhile, and nineties Britpop was aesthetically interesting enough to go on posters and things. Those musicians were visibly and audibly full of heroin, cocaine, alcohol and Ecstasy, and it wasn't particularly surprising when one of them dropped out of the public eye for awhile or even - tragic though it was, and I remember crying for complete strangers back then - died in a more or less active fashion. So I grew up in a pop music environment that made clear pop music heroes were profoundly human; disreputable, angry, mentally unhealthy people who could have ended up dead in a ditch somewhere if they hadn't been musicians, and who sometimes did anyways. People who didn't promote a single fashion or physical aesthetic and who tended to look good despite themselves. It was because of this aesthetic that I could go through highschool wearing Docs and cotton nighties, without makeup and without brushing my head hair or removing my body hear, and fit right in. That was conforming back then. And that's how I'd be dressed right now if I didn't work in a business-casual office.

But more importantly, it meant that when, say, Kurt Cobain killed himself, I was sad but I didn't speculate about what other celebrity could have helped him. When Jarvis Cocker rushed Michael Jackson's twatty showpeice, I didn't wonder what he was on. And when Pearl Jam decided to hamstring their popular exposure by not doing music videos anymore and trying to duck Ticketmaster, I didn't ask myself when they were going to get better. I guess my point, if I have one, is that when I was those girls' age I didn't have to tweeze, diet and extend myself to participate in my heroes' aesthetic to the degree that when those heros had a breakdown, an overdose, or a scalp shave, I didn't feel betrayed or wonder at all what the implications of that event was for me.

It's hard for me to tell if I'm writing out of my ass or not, or if I've just turned into a curmudgeon who thinks pop music these days is hitting new lows because it used to be funny when one the Spice Girls popped out of her dress and now Janet Jackson's pastied nipple can cause legal showdowns. But I think it's a shame, what expectations young girls get stuck with these days.

Countdown

So I gave notice yesterday and mostly people at work are jealous, which wasn't the reaction I was expecting. I mean, it doesn't take an enviable effort of will to drive your 'career' in mainstream media advertising into a big brick wall at full tilt. It just takes, I don't know, not doing it anymore. I guess I'm luckier than I can really fathom with the F-word. Yesterday really gave me the feeling lots of people are just doing what they're doing, lots of people have slipped into that tender trap, to maintain the nice stable situation their life-partner type expects - or that they think their life partner expects.

Speaking of which, when I was speaking with my lovely manager about my departure, I alluded to the F-word as my 'partner' and when he sent my notice around the office he used the 'partner' word too. Two minutes later, I got a message from a colleague saying I'd always intrigued her. Do you think that means she thinks I'm gay? Or is it just me who assumes gaiety whenever she hears someone describe her lover as her partner? Not really believing in marriage and hoping this relationship lasts, I feel the need to think of a new epithet to replace partner - not that I have a problem with the events manager thinking I'm gay - it's just sort of a cold word. In France, where they don't have common-law marriage, they call people you live with without marrying 'la concubine' or 'le concubin', but English being useless we don't have a word for a boy concubine. So I'm looking for suggestions . . .

The Red Dragon Is Not Fond of the Guardian

The Guardian backpedalled furiously over the suggestion that Martin Amis may be Britain's greatest living author. Even the furious backpedalling infuriated me because it made clear there was some frontpedalling in terms of that perception the first place. I'd be interested in whatever argument people have that Amis is a good author, let alone better than a large quantity of others, let alone in a league anywhere close to Kazuo Fuckin' Ishiguro's, who fuckin' rocks, fuck, and who didn't even get mentioned in the Guardian's backpedalling, which re-enforces my feelings of hostility towards the fuckin' Guardian, fuck.

Anyways, there must be something in Amis's work that strikes a chord with a lot of people and I'm fucked if I can tell what it is. He does have a talent for painting pictures with descriptive language - a passable turn with an adjective. He should write non-fiction, maybe. Or possibly for the Guardian - it seems they have some perceptions in common.

Reading that article does make me wonder why someone would try to determine a best author, but it also, knee-jerk like, makes me start thinking about who my favourite living author is. Who's yours?

For me, Kazuo Ishiguro is a candidate. So is A.S. Byatt, though I found Possession a bit of a slog; I like her shorter stories and novellas better, as with Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. Patrick Süskind is so very, very good. If I had to choose a favourite, I guess it would be him, because everything I've read from him is perfect in my eyes. And yet I have this intense weakness for Fay Weldon; sometimes her style will annoy me at the halfway point of her books, but I still love them, and I've loved her since I was 13, so that's definitely the longest I've loved a living author.

Anyways. The two reigning sentiments I've got on the question are that at least I don't have to choose, and that it's annoying that there are so many authors whose books I haven't read yet, and shows I haven't used my time effectively.

The Red Dragon Enjoys Superlatives and Absolutes

Deciding enough was enough, I took yesterday off to sleep and start putting my papers in order. I'm trying to start with the worst parts of the moving task first, and the worst part of moving is putting papers in order. One of my putting-papers-in-order goals was to see if I paid first and last, or just first, on my ghetto apartment. Miraculously, I could find the bank statements for the month before and the month after the pertinent one, but not the pertinent one itself. Isn't that incredible? Sometimes I think my guardian angel, great as it generally is, has a Seinfeld-esque sense of humour and really gets a lot of pleasure at watching me stumble through semi-ironic, annoying situations that I myself would never dream of laughing at, having really disliked, even hated Seinfeld. I like my humour surreal, please and thank you. In fact, I think I'll go so far to say that the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life was the Olympic Hide and Seek final from the Monty Python series. Watching that was the closest I have come to peeing myself for a quantity of time I consider meritorious.

Other things I love are goat milk lattes and Marvin Gaye. I've spent a considerable amount of time jizzing about them in this blog already, but I'd like to reiterate by writing that if God held a gun to my head and told me I could only have one kind of stimulant and listen to one dead singer for the rest of my life, if would definitely be goat milk lattes and Marvin Gaye. The school where I'm going in Belgium is catered, except on the weekends, when we get turned loose in the kitchens - I hope I find a way to make myself lattes though. It's in the thick of eco-agro country, so maybe - let me visualize the best possible possibility - I'd even be able to find raw goat milk.

Not much else. Had some top-notch analysis last night that helped work out why I'm occasionally a disproportionate bitch, and I've been shortlisted for another position in Brussels, more exciting than the others so far. Also heard from the less exciting Brussels possibility that actually interviewed me in Montreal weeks ago - same old same old - "you'll hear from us soon." Argh.

The Red Dragon Is Judgemental

That conference was interminable, purgatorial, stultifying, and every other word you can think of that suggests length, pain, and shit. There were some good things about it, though. One of them was that the night before I went, the F-word finally succeeded in persuading me to watch Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist, which I'd heretofore avoided because I had to watch Stealing Beauty in a third year Italian cinema class and it had made me want to vomit, like aspartame. Although Bertolucci also did that nice film with Thandie Newton, right? Anyways, The Conformist was brilliant. It was about - wait for it - conforming.

I only had time to watch the first half before having to go to bed for an early morning start, and it played on my mind for the whole two days until I got back last night and watched the rest. Part of the reason it played on my mind, besides the strength of the images and structure, was that, obviously, it was a fucking advertising conference which I attended, full of people who really seem to enjoy the motivational speakers who encourage them to do the inhuman things they're doing. To use people the way they do. To reassure them their choices are the right ones and all they need to do to enjoy them more is to live through them better. The emotion was abstract because I had accepted the Belgium job, but it remained distressing and depressing that everyone there had to have known on some level, despite six or seven spazzy motivational speakers telling us how to get in touch with our authentic selves, how deeply we betray any sort of authentic self by treating perceptions of people's attention like commodities. Treating media users like idiots and treating their clients like idiots.

I've been thinking about it and I'm pretty sure I'm not just projecting a personal antipathy to the advertising industry on to the rest of the world; I'm pretty sure you can't treat thousands or millions of users and clients like that while remaining fully human. But I bet most of the attendees weren't deeply spiritually wounded or anything - just a bunch of arts grads who floated into the industry, more or less like me, except into the sales bits my company is trying to flip us into now. Because we live in a society that congratulates that sort of career enough to make it attractive. Mussolini's Italy? Not quite - Via always runs late.

So anyways, that was one good thing about the conference; the way it gave The Conformist a nice context. Another good thing was that we went to the racetrack on Monday, and I discovered I really like horse racing. Not that it matters because I'm not going back. I felt bad for the animals and I'm not stupid enough to believe with 100% of my head I can keep winning money because there really is a science or some such shit to this. But it was very, very exciting.

Stepping gingerly out of the frying pan

While it's not my usual form to post on weekends, I'll be busy in a bullshit, bullshit conference for the next couple of days that will only be redeemed by any L'Occitan samples I manage to gouge out of my room at the Four Seasons. And so I'm posting now, in part to publicize that the F-word and I got a provisional offer at the residential school in the south of Belgium I think I mentioned awhile ago. We're now pretty aware of leaving soonish. Varying between excitement, dread of the moving process, and in my case some frustration I'm going to a school instead of straight to a real (that is, high paying and something to do with my degrees and not with television or advertising) job.

Coming to terms with everything over the next five weeks or so will no doubt provide some fuel for a very, very boring blogging fire. But today I don't feel like getting into it all, so on to some things that are completely different.

1. For some reason, this story about Omar Sharif seems awfully funny to me. I don't know why . . . it's just so absurd. I guess there's something that is really stupid about someone who wouldn't take a $25 tip for being a shitty valet - so far so good - but then why punch him, or call him "Mexican" (which the way this story is reported is coming across as some awful ethnic slur)? Silly Omar! He just saved you 20 euros! I have to say I have a red hot pash for Omar Sharif - his eyes remind me of Figaro's and he looks good in a moustache, which is so rare. He was hideously miscast in Lawrence of Arabia because he was so much nicer to look at than Peter O'Toole.

2. We've been having a lovely weekend and one of the lovely things about it was a Caribbean hot sauce Luke Duke introduced me to a couple of weeks ago called Mado's - the House of Spice in Kensington sells it for six bucks. It's fucking delicious. I can't describe it otherwise - it's really really hot and it tastes really really good. And the main ingredient in it is paw paw, which I'd never heard of before but which, according to Wikipedia, is otherwise known as a Michigan Banana. Sometimes I'm disgusted by thinking about the sheer volume of edible things I haven't tried to eat or don't even know about. Like abalone. I've never even seen an abalone in the flesh, and I bet they're fucking delicious.

The Morious Glotherland is linning, I have to spie down for awhile

Martin Amis's new novel, which I don't like, has the general and eternal shittiness of Russia as a central theme. Since I have so little experience of things Russian, Shostakovich's opera Lady MacBeth of Mtensk also seems to me to be about the eternal shittiness of Russia, which might be why Stalin banned it though it seemed to be critical more of a pre-Revolutionary bourgeois uselessness than anything to do with anything Stalin seemed likely to have liked.

I like Shostakovich awfully because of the way he can make something upsetting and unsettling tuneful and engaging, and this opera follows. I think most commentators say it's about boredom. And I think those commentators are all men who can't bring themselves to admit it's about intense female sexual frustration. I mean, she's been married for years and she was a virgin, for god's sake. Yeah - "boredom." Wankers. Anyways - I caught myself suspending disbelief several times, thanks to the music and excellent ensemble singing bringing the squalid, squalid plot into painful believability. Fucking squalid, man.

But wonderful staging, wonderful cast, wonderful music. A little nudity, too. Just girly nudity - there were sex scenes and the tenor didn't get his pants off. I couldn't suspend my disbelief then, which just made it funny since they were sort of going at it to the music, which I find with Shostakovich always has a faint breath of polka rhythm to it. And if there's anything funnier than dry humping to polka, I haven't thought of it. I also thought it was highly condescending that the orchestral interlude was dubbed "The Psychological Heart of the Opera" in the surtitles when the curtain came down; that deserved the wave of laughter it generated from the audience. The music spoke for itself, and while Toronto audiences may be a bit troggy they're not going to get up and start having loud conversations about adenoids over their ringing cellphones while the orchestra continues to play. Jeebus, give us some credit.

Anyways, may I ask what the fuck is up with Russia? Some of the world's most beautiful music, film, literature and architecture; apparently the best ice cream in the world - but at what fucking price, man? That place is fucked up. Hecatomb after hecatomb. A series of iron fists to the face of its neighbours and its own population - always this rampaging territorial insecurity, at the governmental level at least - and drunk, drunk, drunk. I don't think they lost the Cold War; I think they just had to call a time out for a few decades while the governing class slept it off.

Toronto

Putting it into terms I could understand, my analyst has told me my Reader's Digest stress count was dangerously high. This means anything personal I have to say today would be a massive whine, so here are some photographs instead.

This is Toronto. 70 year old buildings next to 20 year old buildings and everything covered in snow. It's nice; I like the blend of the old and the new - it would be prettier if it was a little older and a little newer, but it doesn't matter. Everything is prettier when the snow gets dumped on it.

Until, that is . . .

It turns to motherfuckin' slush. Look at the sorry state of this footpath. The City of Toronto's a fucking beast in terms of which footpaths get cleared and which don't. The footpaths around my office, for example, on the quietest (and most expensive) side streets, are shovelled religiously, despite the car traffic the pedestrians have to brave being nothing more than a few Beamers and Benzes purring gently around. The Don Bridge, over which harried commuters speed (and drivers in Toronto, while not as insane as in other cities, are remarkably shit), has a footpath whose maintenance you see here.

Fuck you, City of Toronto. Moving on.

This is also a picture of the Don Bridge. Again you can see the cables barring the footpath from the void; this used to be Suicide Central. It still has suicide hotline numbers posted at each end next to phone boxes, although it would now take a great deal of doing to throw yourself off. Now, I've never been really tempted to throw myself off a bridge (although on frigid days I sometimes wonder if, in the event of me peeing off the side, it would freeze before it hit the ground - you've thought about it too, admit it) but I imagine that the graffiti scrawled on to the concrete in the background would put me off from doing it here. It lacks a certain gravitas.

Pissing in the snow

There’s a lovely big snowstorm in Toronto. I say lovely because the snow makes it warmer, and not out of any love for snow – just out of extreme hate of the cold. I’ll put up pictures later, though, because it does make the city look much prettier and more interesting. Prettier and more interesting is good because I’m at a dangerously low ebb. In a staring-at-the-ceiling sort of place, as I think about what life will be like if no one ever hires me for anything. And I had a horrible dream last night about what ‘Allo ‘Allo would have been like if Sergio Leone had filmed it spaghetti Western style. Suffice to say all those “ . . . or you will be shot” turned into, well, shooting.

Although circumstances are stressful at the moment I’m tempted to think my pisser is hormonal, seasonal or chemical. Whenever I remind myself that things are actually under my control and if what I do next turns out a bit shit I can just stop doing it and do something else instead, I feel better – then I carry on with whatever task is at hand, and my mood crowds back down on me (particularly if the task at hand is looking for a better job) until I remind myself again. It’s a little frustrating.

You make me feel so nasty

What a foul mood I was in yesterday. The funny thing about my foul moods is they're not particularly in my head, but in my mouth; that is, I feel okay but then release mighty streams of catty bitch when I speak, or else feel it a mighty effort of compression to not release a mighty stream of bitch. Maybe it's from having to be polite all day and then really engaging myself with my student in the most patient way possible. He's already being Herculean speaking as much as he does, considering how Korean schools in his time didn't let children speak in language classes. It isn't purgatorial - he's really sweet and pretty interesting, from a part of Korea I haven't had students from before. But it is an effort and I'm not used to making any efforts at 5:30 in the evening.

Anyways, last night he was asking how my plans to split are going, so I told him, and he gave that iconic Korean nod and said he thought living in Europe was better than Toronto. That piqued my interest, of course; I know how hard he finds the nasty fuckin' cold and the comparative filth, so I was curious to know why he came here rather than Australia or New Zealand (which would have been cheaper) or the U.K. or Ireland (which would have been warmer). Apparently, it was all about Major League Baseball and Toronto being the only non-United States city that had a team. He went on to point we also have the NBA team and are getting a lovely big soccer franchise and that David Beckham will make his league premiere here.

I guess this is a nice sports city in a way lots of European cities are not. What's left after you've poured your partisan soul into the local soccer team? In Italy and France, not much; there's the rugby and basketball there, but comparatively speaking nobody cares. And if you're from a country that wasn't a British possession, how much of a fuck can you possibly give about cricket and the other things those people get excited about? And if you are from an old American satellite, I guess you would care about a sport like baseball a good bit. I guess Toronto just ended up with the right mix of ethnic groups and demographics to have lots and lots of sport.

What a funny thing international sport is. I understand passion for soccer - I don't know why, but I do understand how you can identify a team's performance with your civic pride - but otherwise I can't understand how people watch sports without getting stupidly drunk enough to be fooled into finding it interesting.

And the Windmill Says "Wheeeeeeeee!"

Figaro and I are in the interview process for a residential school in some insanely environmentally cutting edge slice of Belgium - his visa is running out, my job is going to start sucking unbearably in eight days, and I've decided it's quixotic (I wonder if I'm using that adjective appropriately here - missed Don Quixote from third year when I was off in Italy absorbing the Renaissance and sort of figured I'd read that only when I'd learnt Spanish, which obviously I haven't done yet; two years in television media and I can hardly even speak English anymore) to apply for classy-type jobs when I'm not available for an interview in which my interlocutor can see my titties.

So I have a general feeling that soon things are going to get flustered, busy and painful any day now (especially considering I have to go to the West Coast for as long as possible before moving to Europe) which made it very easy to enjoy the relaxed pace of this weekend. Relaxed - hah, actually - I had a lot to do and I got an awful lot done, and drank an awful lot too. But it felt relaxing. I think I'm getting my ability to relax in the face of overwhelmingly stressful events back, and just in the nick of fucking time, I'll tell you that. No other fit-to-print news, besides that Figaro figured out eggplant slices dipped in ground oats instead of bread crumbs before being fried are PHENOMENAL. I recommend it.

Upwards and onwards.

L'air est si chaud

It being fucking retarded cold, it may be the wrong time to say it or feel it. But last night as I left the office at 5 fucking 30 as usual I felt a sense of heady triumph (that's right; not just triumph, but heady triumph) because it was unmistakably still light. Glorified twilight, to be sure; partly trickery from the nearby buildings reflecting gold sunset all over the place - but light all the same, and I felt heady triumph. Likely an instinctual sort of thing that humans get when they realize they're probably going to survive yet another long dark winter, some holdover from the days before we'd discovered central heating and long underwear. From most of our biological history, really.

Anyways, the greatest challenge I'm facing survival-wise this winter has been my over-heated, bone dry apartment that last night sent me gasping awake to the kitchen to try to drown the parch straight from the tap. It's also been wreaking flaky havoc on my skin, as has the amusing twenty minute walk to and from the office which I can't forgo. In part because the TTC makes me sick, in another part because I don't have time to go to the gym anymore so if I didn't have the foot commute there'd be a good chance of me blossoming out into a soft, yielding growth. Yesterday I decided desperate times call for desperate measures so I got a dedicated facial moisturizer. It's from Burt's Bees so it smells just like carrots, which stops me from feeling impossibly girly.

And you know what? That's my fucking news. I still haven't heard from Brussels, I'm still just applying for things as they come up. I don't have time for anything but blah-ing with Figaro because I fall asleep so soon after getting back from whatever I have to do evening-wise. But the good news is that it's the weekend, and also that I think I'm actually getting used to living in a state of nervous anticipation. It's starting to not bug me so much. That's nice. I think watching that Bollywood film last weekend really put things in perspective. I might not know what's happening in the next three weeks, but at least I'm not involved in a bizarre love triangle in which everyone has the utmost affection for each other and someone has an untreatable heart condition. Yay!

All You Have to Do Is Call

The NGO in Berlin has turned me down. I feel something I'm pretty sure is anger; let's hope that lasts so I have the energy to deal with the situation. Still no word from Sunday's interview, but I'm sure you can guess the excessively positive frame of mind I'm in right now. Especially as my present company's conference is coming up very soon and that's when things are going to sharply deteriorate here. But there's nothing I can do but keep trying to deal, and keep trying to remember that the longer I wait the higher the money stacks. Getting close to the 'fuck it' stage, though, which at this point seems to involve moving to Costa Rica or points south.

Last night I dreamt my favourite aunt was a pothead. She was loudly extolling the virtues of the big fat bud she was holding that she'd 'borrowed' from one of my cousins, and then talking about the fantastic plants she was planning to grow. This was happening as we walked through the Montreal aeroport, which made me uncomfortable - until I realized her attitude was paralyzing the security guards. They couldn't wrap their heads around a woman like her, so they froze.

I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere - something about being myself, no doubt. That I wouldn't be nearly as controversial as I think I'd be and that at any rate I wouldn't have to go to prison. That I'm setting way more limits on myself than the Man is, whoever he is. Because these days I feel not myself at all - just so busy with work and looking for work and looking for school, etc. There's been so little time for myself or expressions thereof. I suppose it's my big fantasy to find a job that expresses some part of myself, by which I mean I can engage in it without feeling compromised even if it isn't absorbing all my attention and energy. Because of the mandate, I can't do that with my present job, not even a little bit. I'm like a fish thrashing to death on the floor of a fucking Lexus dealership here.

Thank god for analysis. The opiate of the bourgeoisie? Maybe - but opiates are fucking delicious and useful in their place. And in that vein, I'd like to post a message from my dank, dark, scary but always reliable subconscious to my and your consciousnesses, via the immortal Vincent Price.

A Waste of Honey

I like to think, as everyone does, that I'm quite a one for living and let living. But I'll confess to my shackles shooting up when some vegans get prancy about honey products. Perhaps it's my disproportionate love of honey that makes me disproportionately angry over the issue, but I know for a fact - because I know a bunch of vegans who eat honey - that there's some debate over whether or not bee products can be part of a real vegan diet. Yet the most recent issue of Vegetarian Times, that I subscribe to for the great recipes and because I only like eating meat a couple times a week, seems to be pandering to certain elements of its vegan readership by unquestioningly banishing honey from vegan recipes or a vegan diet.

I'm reminded of those heady, exploratory days in highschool and beyond when gay friends would get prancy about the sexual and emotional practices of bisexuals. "Choose already, make up your mind," was a common snark, which never seemed to come from the lips of breeders, who were more apt to say things like "keeping your options open, are you?" - much more à propos in a free society.

So - do vegans have to "choose, to make up their mind" to avoid anything to do with animals altogether? What is, after all, being vegan? Does one of the 'vegan societies' get to decide? To be genuine, must a vegan opt out of the cycle of plant and animal life that would be impossible to sustain without pollinating insects like lovely, lovely honeybees, who when they live in apiaries may have the fruit of their labour stolen but who are also sustained by their human collaborators? Humans who build them houses, keep them alive through long winters with sugar-water baths and climate controls, protect them from the bears and rodents that would break their hive apart, and drive them around the region to the areas with the best flowers at that moment in time?

I don't think it fits in with any reasonable conception of ethical eating, supposedly central to the vegan movement, to choose to buy stevia or other sweeteners that were farmed and processed god knows where, god knows how by god knows who - to put naive levels of trust in 'fair-trade' labels that promise the labour and production methods behind sweeteners are okay by the standards of whatever country tonnes of carbon dioxide has been burned to import them from - instead of, I don't know, choosing to TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE HONEYBEE'S INARGUABLE AND INARGUABLY BEAUTIFUL INSTINCT TO MAKE TOO MUCH FUCKING HONEY FOR ITS OWN HIVE. See, I'm getting angry now.

I don't think I get angry about it only because I love honey so very, very much, and think it's such a great thing for everybody to eat in great, gulping, unpasteurized mouthfuls. I think part of the anger is over a huge fucking disconnect between people's diets and their knowledge of where the food in it comes from, which is really baffling in someone who chooses a vegan and supposedly ethical lifestyle. It seems to me such people can't consider man's special relationship with the bee and see the element of collaboration there because they're too fucking ignorant of how honey can be harvested. That such people, who go for other sweeteners on principal, are the prey (as much as all the people who flock to McDick's for mighty slabs of processed meat) of international food companies who want to sell imported, processed products with higher profit margins than honey, which goes quite directly from the local hive to my local tummy just about anywhere flowers bloom. There are apiaries in the middle of an urban shithole like Paris, for god's sake. There are apiaries dizzyingly high up north in Canada.

It's also part of the way Vegetarian Times and sites like Ideal Bite have been disturbing me in terms of their galloping commercialism. They sell ready-made veggie and vegan products hard. Instead of just featuring advertising, they plug specific products in the text of articles with the hyper-capitalist devotion of a magazine like Maxim. Over-priced, over-processed, over-travelled products. So tangentially I get infuriated by the idea that my honey-gorging habits can be frowned on by a group of people who sustain that sort of galloping commercialism. I do believe a vegan diet can be a sustainable, healthy one that takes full advantage of ethical, local, CO2 conscious, labour-conscious unprocessed food shopping, but saying honey can't possibly be part of a 'real' vegan diet is a fucking stupid way to do that.

Love me tender

I'm alternating sharply between a tiring, grinding pessimism and choosing out my ideal Brussels apartment on Immoweb - they have so many with slopes there - and wondering why no one else wants me, or at least wants me enough that they haven't already hired me or got me to this stage of interviewing. So last night we talked about our tensions and 'relaxed' over Wild at Heart, which I hadn't seen before. Not my favourite movie ever but Laura Dern was fantastic; not scared of being annoying or ugly, and being beautiful as she did it. And I admire David Lynch and whoever else for maintaining a vision of consistent weirdness throughout the whole two hours, even if I was kind of bored of it by the time the Good Witch appeared.

In response to the fuckin' cold, because it is fuckin' cold (the Korean student who I tutor most weeknights screamed in pain when we left the library for the metro station, and I sympathized enough to spontaneously and loudly teach him 'fucking' as a modifier for 'cold') Figaro made me salep, a Turkish drink made from (traditionally) ground orchid bulbs. It was delicious - like a really pleasant, thin hot custard. One of those tastes and consistencies which appeal to your eating/drinking instincts that get things into your belly. Highly reccommended.